Thirty Years’ War: Battle of Breitenfeld

 | Military History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

It took three days for Magdeburg to burn itself out, leaving only a blistered, blackened wasteland where the city had stood. To make way for Tilly’s grand entrance, 6,000 bodies were dumped into the Elbe; it took two more weeks to clear the rest of the city of corpses, which choked the river for miles downstream. By then, Tilly had ceremoniously renamed the newly Catholicized city Marienburg, but he knew its destruction would haunt him. ‘Our danger has no end, for the Protestant Estates will without doubt be only strengthened in their hatred by this,’ he stated. He also realized that Magdeburg’s destruction deprived him of the strategic base — his ulterior reason for trying to take the city in the first place.

For Johann Georg, pinned between Tilly’s rapacious mercenaries and Gustavus’ invaders, the time had come to choose sides. With his source of provisions gone up in smoke, Tilly now had little option but to turn east, into Saxony. At the end of August, he invaded with 36,000 men. On September 11, Johann Georg signed a treaty of alliance with Gustavus. The new allies got off to an inauspicious start. Facing the same harsh fate suffered by Magdeburg, Leipzig surrendered to Tilly on September 15. Barely had the Imperial troops begun to loot the city, however, when word came that as many as 45,000 men of the combined Swedish-Saxon army were advancing down the road from Dben.

The cautious Tilly, with reinforcements gathering in the south and nothing to gain by battle, probably would have settled for a siege. Pappenheim, however, rode out seeking contact. Late on the evening of September 16, word came back that he had found it — that he was, in fact, unable to safely withdraw. Gustavus’ dispatches make no mention of action that night; whether Tilly believed Pappenheim or not, he was obliged to support him.

September 17 dawned misty and muggy. ‘In the gray of morning,’ wrote Gustavus, ‘I ordered the bugles to sound the march, and as between us and Leipsic [sic] there were no woods, I deployed the army into battle order and marched toward that city. After an hour and a half’s march, we saw the enemy’s vanguard with artillery on a hill in our front, and behind it the bulk of his army.’

It was about 9 a.m. The Swedes and their Saxon allies had reached the Lober River, today an inconsequential brook but then an obstacle of some import, running east-west across the vast Leipzig plain. A little more than a mile away, on a brow of slightly rising ground between the villages of Seehausen and Breitenfeld (’wide field’), the morning sun rose over the 36,000 men of the Imperial army: a wall of pikes, muskets, cannons and horseflesh fully 2 1/4 miles from end to end.

Fronted with cannons and flanked with heavy cavalry, the Imperial forces stood in the Spanish fashion, in 17 enormous battalions of up to 2,000 men each — each a bristling battle square of pikemen protected by small detachments of musketeers at the corners. These squares were Macedonian phalanxes for the gunpowder age, mobile fortresses of flesh and steel that had lumbered roughshod over Europe and made the Hapsburgs masters of half the known world. They fully expected to crush the Swedes by the sheer weight of their forces, as they had all enemies before them. Cheers of ‘Father Tilly!’ and ‘Jesu-Maria!’ followed the Imperial general as he rode down the line on his famous white charger.

The Swedes and Saxons formed columns to ford the Lober. Pappenheim’s horsemen did what they could to disrupt the crossing, but soon fell back to the Imperial army’s left flank, out of the way of the Imperial cannons. Tilly had artillery pieces, the lighter ones in front center and the heaviest on the center right, where they covered the allied advance. The Swedes and Saxons emerged from the Lober onto the Breitenfeld plain under a pall of black powder smoke and dust, out of which poured a slow but steady rain of heavy cannon balls.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 17th - 18th Century, Historical Conflicts

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.