Introduction
Of all of the events in the Thirty Years' War, save the Defenestration that started it, the things that get the most attention are the ones surrounding the King of Sweden, Gustav II Adolf ("Gustavus Adolphus") and his brief but revolutionary entry into the German war. West Point teaches about Gustav's operational and tactical acumen, military historians have accorded him a ranking as a Great Captain of History, and he is widely regarded as having jump-started the Swedish Stormaktstid, the "era of great power".
Historiographically, the entry of Sweden into the Thirty Years' War has frequently been treated as one of the few episodes of action in an otherwise dreary and dreadfully boring repetitive war in which nothing was decided. While this is far from true, and an oversimplification, the dramatic Gustavian intervention deserves notice all the same. It saw European warfare fought on the largest scale up to that point, and had a decisive impact on the resolution of confessional politics in the Holy Roman Empire. The entry of Sweden into northern Germany drastically altered the nature of the eternal struggle for dominium maris Baltici, control of the Baltic Sea. And the events of 1630-2 changed Sweden from a relatively minor power, second banana to Denmark-Norway, into a Great Power with interests all over Europe.
Besides, if I wrote about anything else in the Thirty Years' War, nobody'd read the damned thing.
So: here is the first part, the story of the war, especially of the Swedish intervention, to 1631. The titanic struggles of 1632 shall be left for another article.
The Outbreak of War in the Empire
In 1618, fallout from the Habsburg "Brothers' War" inheritance conflict and from the perceived hardline Counter-Reformation policies of Ferdinand of Austria flared into open revolt. At about nine in the morning on the 23rd of May, a group of Protestant Bohemian nobles and city councilors, led by the count of Thurn, broke into the Hradschin castle in Prague, where several Habsburg governing officials, the Regents, were meeting. After a short confrontation, Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Borita von Martinitz of the Regents and their secretary Philipp Fabricius were tossed out the high windows of the palace. The defenestratees survived, contrary to plan, but the Protestant nobles' rebellion against the Habsburgs continued anyway.
The whole thing probably would not have broken out into war had it not been for the actions of the Calvinist Elector Palatine, Friedrich V, who had been carrying out a policy of radicalizing the ongoing debate over confessional politics in the Empire. After shopping around for a non-Habsburg who could be made king, the Bohemian rebels settled on Friedrich, whose policy in the years before the defenestration can only be described as radical. He, spurred on in large part by his counsellor Christian von Anhalt-Bernburg, continued his father's attempts to create a wide "Evangelical Union" ("evangelical" here referring to the Protestants' self-description back in the day), an alliance of Calvinist and Lutheran princes that would be able to throw their weight around in the Reichstag and resist any popish aggression. Yet before 1618 the majority of Protestants in the Empire supported resolving confessional disputes through the imperial court system, the Reichskammergericht, and Friedrich's efforts to create a militant Protestant bloc met largely with failure. His allies were restricted to southern Germany, and based on family and commercial ties. Neither Calvinist Brandenburg nor Lutheran Saxony, the other powerful secular Electorates, sided with the Palatinate in its disputes. And the formation of the Union partially backfired by inducing the duke of Bavaria, Maximilian I, to create his own Catholic "Liga", to oppose the Union - a similarly limited organization of Catholic princes.
During the course of 1619, though, the Bohemian rebels continued to hold out, and with the alliance of the Transylvanian prince Bethlen Gabor even gave the Habsburgs a hot time. At the elections in Frankfurt for the imperial crown, they scored another victory when Ferdinand was ruled ineligible to use the Bohemian vote. Yet at the elections, every one of the Electors agreed to crown Ferdinand as Holy Roman Emperor - even the Palatine one. A few months later, Friedrich V was offered the Bohemian crown by the rebels, and he accepted. His term as king was short. The Bohemian Confederates, the Transylvanians, and the Protestant Union were indeed a formidable array of opponents for the Habsburgs, but they were divided geographically and failed to harness their resources effectively. At the Battle of White Mountain in the late fall of 1620, Habsburg troops, aided by the Liga army, decisively defeated the Bohemians and the Union. Friedrich's precipitate flight from Prague earned him the nickname of the "Winter King", for that had been the length of his reign.
The Extension of the Crisis
Yet the remainder of the Union continued to resist the Habsburgs. This was in part because they could not pay their troops to disband. The major Union army, led by the count of Mansfeld, spent the next few years ping-ponging northwards, from Franconia into the Netherlands (where it played a critical role in the renewed Dutch Revolt) and then into Frisia. Ferdinand and his Liga and Spanish allies occupied the Palatinate and forced much of the rest of the Union out of the war by 1624. Yet von Mansfeld's army remained intact, frequently beaten (by the forces of Johan t'Serclaes, count of Tilly, the general-in-chief of the Liga) but not destroyed.
The movement of the war northward, combined with Ferdinand's policy in Bohemia and southern Germany, widened the fighting even further. Christian IV, king of Denmark-Norway, had extensive interests in northern Germany, particularly in Lower Saxony, where he was vying to place his younger sons in charge of some bishoprics. That ability was seriously jeopardized by Ferdinand's forced re-Catholicization of ecclesiastical territories in Franconia. Now that the war was in the north, Danish influence in Lower Saxony, considered the backyard of the monarchy, was threatened. Further, Denmark-Norway's position as the de facto leader of the Lutheran states made it more difficult to ignore confessional politics, especially so close to home. Danish riches (acquired in large part from the monarchy's monopoly on the Sound Toll, the dues levied on trade passing into and out of the Baltic) and the relative independence of the king from his noble Estates gave Christian the freedom of action to intervene on his own initiative. In 1625, he gave the war new fire by allying with von Mansfeld and moving troops into Lower Saxony.
Christian's entry into the fighting showed just how dependent Emperor Ferdinand was on the Liga army and on Duke Maximilian (now Elector, having claimed the Palatine title for himself). The Emperor decided to acquire his own commander to balance von Tilly, and enlarge his own army. By the summer of 1625, he was in negotiations with one of his major generals, Albrecht von Wallenstein, to contract for the raising of an army of 24,000 men, to be expanded as necessary. Von Wallenstein - called "the Friedländer" by contemporaries, because of his possession of the Duchy of Friedland - duly raised the troops, and promptly defeated von Mansfeld in 1626 at the Dessau Bridge. He joined with von Tilly, and attacked Christian IV's Danes at Lutter in the summer of the same year, winning a decisive victory. In 1627 and 1628, the Catholic armies occupied nearly all of the Danish possessions on Jutland and Holstein, and next year Christian sued for peace, duly agreed at Lübeck in 1629.
The Baltic Hijinks
The Danish-Norwegian collapse and the final defeat and death of von Mansfeld in 1626 while on his way to join the Transylvanians nearly ended the state of war within the Empire. But there were still loose ends, and more problems were caused by the intervention of other, extra-Imperial factors. During the campaigning against the Danes, von Wallenstein had occupied the duchy of Pomerania, signing the Capitulation of Franzberg with its duke, Bogislav XIV, in 1627. This Pomeranian acquisition spurred planning in Spain, which was beginning to run into problems in its Dutch war. The count-duke of Olivares, in charge of Spanish policy, believed that Pomerania would serve as an excellent base for operations against the critical Dutch trade links to Scandinavia. He wished to expand his almirantazago, his "Admiralty of the North", a system to try to weaken the Dutch hold on north European seaborne trade. Now that the Imperials held Pomerania, they had a base from which to force the cities of the Hansa to join the almirantazago scheme. Combined with von Wallenstein's desire to secure additional naval bases for his fledgling Baltic Fleet, the result was an expansion of conflict. Stralsund, a Hansa city in Pomerania with a long tradition of ignoring the duke, was seen as the ideal target.
Stralsund's city council was encouraged to reject the Imperial demands for troop billeting, accession to the almirantazago, and naval construction by not only the desperate Danes, but the Swedes as well. Gustav Adolf, having concluded a short truce in his current Polish war, had opened talks with von Wallenstein for an alliance in 1627. Sweden was to invade Norway in conjunction with allied operations on the sea against the Danish islands. Von Wallenstein, unwilling to pledge his support to Sweden and already acting too much on his own initiative, let the discussion fall off. Gustav promptly broke off the talks and moved towards a temporary rapprochement with Denmark-Norway, the ancestral foe, meeting with Christian himself on the border of Skåne at Ulvsbäck, and signing an agreement to help the Stralsunders. Gustav had already had his eye on Stralsund, which as the closest German port to Sweden had a unique strategic value as a trading partner and entryway into the Empire.
Swedish and Danish troops arrived throughout 1628, as von Wallenstein's troops besieged the city, reaching the port in the nick of time. Repeated Imperial assaults were blunted and von Wallenstein's troops were forced to withdraw. But at the same time, von Wallenstein, eager to strike back at his new foe, contracted with the Polish-Lithuanian king, Zygmunt III, to provide troops to fight the Swedes in the Vistula delta. In the summer of 1629, fighting in the east heated up again, and the Swedes were worsted in a skirmish near Honigfeldt by the allies despite mutual distrust and tensions. But after Honigfeldt, the Imperial commander, von Arnim, fell out with Zygmunt and resigned in protest; the Poles and Swedes both felt incapable of continuing the war, and with Anglo-French mediation concluded the Truce of Altmark in September 1629. Sweden retained conquered Livonia and several Prussian ports, though it returned Courland and part of its Vistula delta conquests to the Polish. At the same time, the Dutch fighting admiral Piet Hein captured most of the Spanish annual silver fleet, a tremendous morale-boosting victory for the Dutch that totally destroyed confidence in de Olivares' almirantazago scheme. Spanish support dried up for von Wallenstein's Baltic plans, his Polish ally left the war, and his fleet was trapped by a Swedish flotilla in Wismar, where it rotted away uselessly. The conclusion of the Danish war allowed Ferdinand to remove von Wallenstein (who had continuously gathered more troops, accruing too much personal power, and who had rubbed a lot of people the wrong way) and force him to disband his armies.
The Stupendous Political Blunder
The final element left to set the stage was Ferdinand's political solution to the end of military operations in the Empire. As part of his "peace package" to accompany the Lübeck treaty, he promulgated the Edict of Restitution in March 1629. This was what Ferdinand believed was the "true" interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which had created a framework for confessional politics. The key issue at stake was the restitution of secularized territories of and Catholic Church temporal bishoprics that had been taken over by Protestant clergy. Ferdinand's Edict held that all lands that had fallen under Protestant control since 1552 were illegally occupied and must be restored to the Catholic clergy from before. This had already been policy, as mentioned, in Franconia and the Rhineland from the early 1620s, and was a key factor in driving Christian IV into war.
Ferdinand and many of the more radical Catholics believed that the restitutions were justified even further by the unbroken Imperial victories scored since White Mountain a decade prior. And even many Protestants would concede that the Catholic military victories would justify some territorial and ecclesiastical gains. But the Edict of Restitution threw this out the window by first formalizing the exclusion of Calvinists (who had not been mentioned in the Augsburg formula) from the settlement, and by totally bypassing the imperial constitution and court system in favor of a unilateral and total restitution program. Not only were all Protestant princes and prince-bishops now at risk, they had good reason to fear further efforts at re-Catholicization. The prominence of the Jesuit confessors of the Elector of Bavaria and the Emperor in crafting the Edict played a role in terrifying many Protestants with the specter of a popish plot, spearheaded by the Society of Jesus. Even the Swiss Protestants believed they were at risk.
Ferdinand was, however, willing to give way on some key points, badgered by the suddenly-contrite Elector Maximilian of Bavaria. Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, formed a united front with Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg in claiming that the Augsburg peace had been a treaty - only mutual consent by all signatories could alter it. He, like most Protestants, retained his faith in the imperial courts, and suggested that the restitution cases be judged only on their individual merits, not blanket restitution back to 1552. Anselm von Umstadt, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, proposed a formula for accepting blanket restitution, with a change for the secularization start date to 1621 - to which all of the Electors agreed. But Maximilian of Bavaria wavered, due to the concurrent political battle over von Wallenstein's dismissal - he claimed after the fact that his Jesuit confessor had talked him into it - and Ferdinand rejected the compromise settlement. Lutherans and Calvinists alike felt cornered by the Imperial failure to revise the Edict.
The door was thus wide open for the Swedish Army when Gustav Adolf disembarked at Usedom in Pomerania on the sixth of July, 1630. He was thirty-six years old.
The Northern Adventurer
Gustav's landing on the north German coast did not immediately revolutionize the situation. His performance in war and domestic politics before 1630 had been spotty at best. At the beginning of his reign, while he was still a minor, Sweden had been worsted in the Kalmar War with Denmark-Norway, which had gained a significant indemnity - a million riksdalers - out of the deal. The concurrent war with Muscovy, a Swedish intervention during the famous "Time of Troubles", had petered out after Jakob de la Gardie conquered Novgorod in 1611 - Gustav's troops were forced to abandon the siege of Pskov in 1615, and two years later signed the Peace of Stolbovo with the Muscovites. At Stolbovo, Swedish gains (Gustav secured Ingria, rounding off his control of the eastern Baltic coast and blocking the Muscovites off from the same) were probably more due to Muscovy's financial and military exhaustion than any Swedish military victories. In the 1620s, Gustav had fought two wars with Poland-Lithuania, which had started out well, with Swedish gains in Livonia, but by the end of the decade the Poles had caught up to the Swedes militarily. Gustav's first encounter with Imperial troops at Honigfeldt had ended badly. The few Swedish military victories Gustav had scored thus far had only been won against badly outnumbered opponents.
Yet despite these unpromising results, Sweden was arguably forced to remain at war constantly. The Kalmar War showed what the wars of Johan III and Karl IX in the preceding decades had already indicated: Sweden did not have the capacity to fight a war on her own soil, and if it was to be a power at all, it needed to maintain its army and fight its wars elsewhere. The end of war with Denmark-Norway allowed the army to be moved to Russia; the end of war with Muscovy allowed it to shift to Livonia and Prussia; the end of war with Poland-Lithuania precipitated the landing at Usedom. Gustav's constant wars, and those of his Vasa predecessors, had helped precipitate the growth of something somewhat unlike other systems in Europe, a large native officer pool among nobility who fought in service to the monarchy because it was service to the monarchy - and because it was more profitable than eking out a hardscrabble existence on a farm in the cold North - instead of as a social obligation. These officers, too, helped precipitate wars, for they comprised a significant part of the Riksdag, the Swedish Estates, who unlike so many other Estates in Europe were willing to support and finance war measures.
Gustav justified his war to the Protestant Germans at large by a large-scale propaganda war. Adler Salvius, his PR man, was already in Germany by the time he landed, trying to rouse the Protestant Electorates to the defense of their liberties against the vile Edict - in alliance with Sweden, of course. The King himself, upon arrival in Pomerania, issued manifestos of a similar tenor. But what were Sweden's war aims anyway? Neither Gustav nor his genial chancellor and political mastermind Axel Oxenstierna was clear on that. Their justifications to contemporaries contradicted one another. To France, a probable ally, the Swedes floated the idea (almost certainly joking) that Louis XIII could be elected Emperor - and Cardinal Richelieu, the French counterpart to Oxenstierna, would be the Pope! To many Protestants, the Swedish claimed to be the saviors of the evangelical cause - yet Gustav admitted later that if he were fighting a war of religion he would have declared war on the Pope. To all Europe, Sweden claimed to be fighting a war for her security - yet with von Wallenstein's fleet in ruins and his army disbanded, what threats were there? Some historians have cited economic reasons, and surely these played a role in Swedish calculations, but Gustav made no attempt to integrate northern Germany into the Swedish regional market. More sound goals - though of course we cannot be sure, considering Gustav's and Oxenstierna's reticence about committing themselves - include weakening the power of the Emperor, especially in northern Germany, and simple conquest of outposts along the coast. Later on, war aims would shift dramatically, of course.
At the same time as Gustav's landing at Usedom, the Reichstag was meeting in Regensburg. Discussion of the Edict had been removed from the agenda. But there was no consternation over the Swedish landing, either. Ferdinand had no good reason to be terrified of yet another northern adventurer, with seemingly fewer resources than the last one. Gustav had about 18,000 men with him in Pomerania - but surrounding him in northern Germany were some 50,000 Imperial troops, with 30,000 more close by. Gustav managed to capture Stettin before their approach, but that was about it in terms of conquests. Pomerania, after the last few years of maintaining von Wallenstein's army, didn't have the resources to sustain a very large Swedish one as well. Gustav was limited to his coastal enclave. He tightened his position by forcing Stralsund into a formal protectorate and bludgeoning the hapless duke of Pomerania into submitting to Swedish suzerainty, with Pomerania falling to the Swedish crown after the duke's death. But more than this could not be done without the aid of the Protestants of the Empire.
Of all of the events in the Thirty Years' War, save the Defenestration that started it, the things that get the most attention are the ones surrounding the King of Sweden, Gustav II Adolf ("Gustavus Adolphus") and his brief but revolutionary entry into the German war. West Point teaches about Gustav's operational and tactical acumen, military historians have accorded him a ranking as a Great Captain of History, and he is widely regarded as having jump-started the Swedish Stormaktstid, the "era of great power".
Historiographically, the entry of Sweden into the Thirty Years' War has frequently been treated as one of the few episodes of action in an otherwise dreary and dreadfully boring repetitive war in which nothing was decided. While this is far from true, and an oversimplification, the dramatic Gustavian intervention deserves notice all the same. It saw European warfare fought on the largest scale up to that point, and had a decisive impact on the resolution of confessional politics in the Holy Roman Empire. The entry of Sweden into northern Germany drastically altered the nature of the eternal struggle for dominium maris Baltici, control of the Baltic Sea. And the events of 1630-2 changed Sweden from a relatively minor power, second banana to Denmark-Norway, into a Great Power with interests all over Europe.
Besides, if I wrote about anything else in the Thirty Years' War, nobody'd read the damned thing.
So: here is the first part, the story of the war, especially of the Swedish intervention, to 1631. The titanic struggles of 1632 shall be left for another article.
The Outbreak of War in the Empire
In 1618, fallout from the Habsburg "Brothers' War" inheritance conflict and from the perceived hardline Counter-Reformation policies of Ferdinand of Austria flared into open revolt. At about nine in the morning on the 23rd of May, a group of Protestant Bohemian nobles and city councilors, led by the count of Thurn, broke into the Hradschin castle in Prague, where several Habsburg governing officials, the Regents, were meeting. After a short confrontation, Vilém Slavata and Jaroslav Borita von Martinitz of the Regents and their secretary Philipp Fabricius were tossed out the high windows of the palace. The defenestratees survived, contrary to plan, but the Protestant nobles' rebellion against the Habsburgs continued anyway.
The whole thing probably would not have broken out into war had it not been for the actions of the Calvinist Elector Palatine, Friedrich V, who had been carrying out a policy of radicalizing the ongoing debate over confessional politics in the Empire. After shopping around for a non-Habsburg who could be made king, the Bohemian rebels settled on Friedrich, whose policy in the years before the defenestration can only be described as radical. He, spurred on in large part by his counsellor Christian von Anhalt-Bernburg, continued his father's attempts to create a wide "Evangelical Union" ("evangelical" here referring to the Protestants' self-description back in the day), an alliance of Calvinist and Lutheran princes that would be able to throw their weight around in the Reichstag and resist any popish aggression. Yet before 1618 the majority of Protestants in the Empire supported resolving confessional disputes through the imperial court system, the Reichskammergericht, and Friedrich's efforts to create a militant Protestant bloc met largely with failure. His allies were restricted to southern Germany, and based on family and commercial ties. Neither Calvinist Brandenburg nor Lutheran Saxony, the other powerful secular Electorates, sided with the Palatinate in its disputes. And the formation of the Union partially backfired by inducing the duke of Bavaria, Maximilian I, to create his own Catholic "Liga", to oppose the Union - a similarly limited organization of Catholic princes.
During the course of 1619, though, the Bohemian rebels continued to hold out, and with the alliance of the Transylvanian prince Bethlen Gabor even gave the Habsburgs a hot time. At the elections in Frankfurt for the imperial crown, they scored another victory when Ferdinand was ruled ineligible to use the Bohemian vote. Yet at the elections, every one of the Electors agreed to crown Ferdinand as Holy Roman Emperor - even the Palatine one. A few months later, Friedrich V was offered the Bohemian crown by the rebels, and he accepted. His term as king was short. The Bohemian Confederates, the Transylvanians, and the Protestant Union were indeed a formidable array of opponents for the Habsburgs, but they were divided geographically and failed to harness their resources effectively. At the Battle of White Mountain in the late fall of 1620, Habsburg troops, aided by the Liga army, decisively defeated the Bohemians and the Union. Friedrich's precipitate flight from Prague earned him the nickname of the "Winter King", for that had been the length of his reign.
The Extension of the Crisis
Yet the remainder of the Union continued to resist the Habsburgs. This was in part because they could not pay their troops to disband. The major Union army, led by the count of Mansfeld, spent the next few years ping-ponging northwards, from Franconia into the Netherlands (where it played a critical role in the renewed Dutch Revolt) and then into Frisia. Ferdinand and his Liga and Spanish allies occupied the Palatinate and forced much of the rest of the Union out of the war by 1624. Yet von Mansfeld's army remained intact, frequently beaten (by the forces of Johan t'Serclaes, count of Tilly, the general-in-chief of the Liga) but not destroyed.
The movement of the war northward, combined with Ferdinand's policy in Bohemia and southern Germany, widened the fighting even further. Christian IV, king of Denmark-Norway, had extensive interests in northern Germany, particularly in Lower Saxony, where he was vying to place his younger sons in charge of some bishoprics. That ability was seriously jeopardized by Ferdinand's forced re-Catholicization of ecclesiastical territories in Franconia. Now that the war was in the north, Danish influence in Lower Saxony, considered the backyard of the monarchy, was threatened. Further, Denmark-Norway's position as the de facto leader of the Lutheran states made it more difficult to ignore confessional politics, especially so close to home. Danish riches (acquired in large part from the monarchy's monopoly on the Sound Toll, the dues levied on trade passing into and out of the Baltic) and the relative independence of the king from his noble Estates gave Christian the freedom of action to intervene on his own initiative. In 1625, he gave the war new fire by allying with von Mansfeld and moving troops into Lower Saxony.
Christian's entry into the fighting showed just how dependent Emperor Ferdinand was on the Liga army and on Duke Maximilian (now Elector, having claimed the Palatine title for himself). The Emperor decided to acquire his own commander to balance von Tilly, and enlarge his own army. By the summer of 1625, he was in negotiations with one of his major generals, Albrecht von Wallenstein, to contract for the raising of an army of 24,000 men, to be expanded as necessary. Von Wallenstein - called "the Friedländer" by contemporaries, because of his possession of the Duchy of Friedland - duly raised the troops, and promptly defeated von Mansfeld in 1626 at the Dessau Bridge. He joined with von Tilly, and attacked Christian IV's Danes at Lutter in the summer of the same year, winning a decisive victory. In 1627 and 1628, the Catholic armies occupied nearly all of the Danish possessions on Jutland and Holstein, and next year Christian sued for peace, duly agreed at Lübeck in 1629.
The Baltic Hijinks
The Danish-Norwegian collapse and the final defeat and death of von Mansfeld in 1626 while on his way to join the Transylvanians nearly ended the state of war within the Empire. But there were still loose ends, and more problems were caused by the intervention of other, extra-Imperial factors. During the campaigning against the Danes, von Wallenstein had occupied the duchy of Pomerania, signing the Capitulation of Franzberg with its duke, Bogislav XIV, in 1627. This Pomeranian acquisition spurred planning in Spain, which was beginning to run into problems in its Dutch war. The count-duke of Olivares, in charge of Spanish policy, believed that Pomerania would serve as an excellent base for operations against the critical Dutch trade links to Scandinavia. He wished to expand his almirantazago, his "Admiralty of the North", a system to try to weaken the Dutch hold on north European seaborne trade. Now that the Imperials held Pomerania, they had a base from which to force the cities of the Hansa to join the almirantazago scheme. Combined with von Wallenstein's desire to secure additional naval bases for his fledgling Baltic Fleet, the result was an expansion of conflict. Stralsund, a Hansa city in Pomerania with a long tradition of ignoring the duke, was seen as the ideal target.
Stralsund's city council was encouraged to reject the Imperial demands for troop billeting, accession to the almirantazago, and naval construction by not only the desperate Danes, but the Swedes as well. Gustav Adolf, having concluded a short truce in his current Polish war, had opened talks with von Wallenstein for an alliance in 1627. Sweden was to invade Norway in conjunction with allied operations on the sea against the Danish islands. Von Wallenstein, unwilling to pledge his support to Sweden and already acting too much on his own initiative, let the discussion fall off. Gustav promptly broke off the talks and moved towards a temporary rapprochement with Denmark-Norway, the ancestral foe, meeting with Christian himself on the border of Skåne at Ulvsbäck, and signing an agreement to help the Stralsunders. Gustav had already had his eye on Stralsund, which as the closest German port to Sweden had a unique strategic value as a trading partner and entryway into the Empire.
Swedish and Danish troops arrived throughout 1628, as von Wallenstein's troops besieged the city, reaching the port in the nick of time. Repeated Imperial assaults were blunted and von Wallenstein's troops were forced to withdraw. But at the same time, von Wallenstein, eager to strike back at his new foe, contracted with the Polish-Lithuanian king, Zygmunt III, to provide troops to fight the Swedes in the Vistula delta. In the summer of 1629, fighting in the east heated up again, and the Swedes were worsted in a skirmish near Honigfeldt by the allies despite mutual distrust and tensions. But after Honigfeldt, the Imperial commander, von Arnim, fell out with Zygmunt and resigned in protest; the Poles and Swedes both felt incapable of continuing the war, and with Anglo-French mediation concluded the Truce of Altmark in September 1629. Sweden retained conquered Livonia and several Prussian ports, though it returned Courland and part of its Vistula delta conquests to the Polish. At the same time, the Dutch fighting admiral Piet Hein captured most of the Spanish annual silver fleet, a tremendous morale-boosting victory for the Dutch that totally destroyed confidence in de Olivares' almirantazago scheme. Spanish support dried up for von Wallenstein's Baltic plans, his Polish ally left the war, and his fleet was trapped by a Swedish flotilla in Wismar, where it rotted away uselessly. The conclusion of the Danish war allowed Ferdinand to remove von Wallenstein (who had continuously gathered more troops, accruing too much personal power, and who had rubbed a lot of people the wrong way) and force him to disband his armies.
The Stupendous Political Blunder
The final element left to set the stage was Ferdinand's political solution to the end of military operations in the Empire. As part of his "peace package" to accompany the Lübeck treaty, he promulgated the Edict of Restitution in March 1629. This was what Ferdinand believed was the "true" interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which had created a framework for confessional politics. The key issue at stake was the restitution of secularized territories of and Catholic Church temporal bishoprics that had been taken over by Protestant clergy. Ferdinand's Edict held that all lands that had fallen under Protestant control since 1552 were illegally occupied and must be restored to the Catholic clergy from before. This had already been policy, as mentioned, in Franconia and the Rhineland from the early 1620s, and was a key factor in driving Christian IV into war.
Ferdinand and many of the more radical Catholics believed that the restitutions were justified even further by the unbroken Imperial victories scored since White Mountain a decade prior. And even many Protestants would concede that the Catholic military victories would justify some territorial and ecclesiastical gains. But the Edict of Restitution threw this out the window by first formalizing the exclusion of Calvinists (who had not been mentioned in the Augsburg formula) from the settlement, and by totally bypassing the imperial constitution and court system in favor of a unilateral and total restitution program. Not only were all Protestant princes and prince-bishops now at risk, they had good reason to fear further efforts at re-Catholicization. The prominence of the Jesuit confessors of the Elector of Bavaria and the Emperor in crafting the Edict played a role in terrifying many Protestants with the specter of a popish plot, spearheaded by the Society of Jesus. Even the Swiss Protestants believed they were at risk.
Ferdinand was, however, willing to give way on some key points, badgered by the suddenly-contrite Elector Maximilian of Bavaria. Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, formed a united front with Georg Wilhelm of Brandenburg in claiming that the Augsburg peace had been a treaty - only mutual consent by all signatories could alter it. He, like most Protestants, retained his faith in the imperial courts, and suggested that the restitution cases be judged only on their individual merits, not blanket restitution back to 1552. Anselm von Umstadt, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, proposed a formula for accepting blanket restitution, with a change for the secularization start date to 1621 - to which all of the Electors agreed. But Maximilian of Bavaria wavered, due to the concurrent political battle over von Wallenstein's dismissal - he claimed after the fact that his Jesuit confessor had talked him into it - and Ferdinand rejected the compromise settlement. Lutherans and Calvinists alike felt cornered by the Imperial failure to revise the Edict.
The door was thus wide open for the Swedish Army when Gustav Adolf disembarked at Usedom in Pomerania on the sixth of July, 1630. He was thirty-six years old.
The Northern Adventurer
Gustav's landing on the north German coast did not immediately revolutionize the situation. His performance in war and domestic politics before 1630 had been spotty at best. At the beginning of his reign, while he was still a minor, Sweden had been worsted in the Kalmar War with Denmark-Norway, which had gained a significant indemnity - a million riksdalers - out of the deal. The concurrent war with Muscovy, a Swedish intervention during the famous "Time of Troubles", had petered out after Jakob de la Gardie conquered Novgorod in 1611 - Gustav's troops were forced to abandon the siege of Pskov in 1615, and two years later signed the Peace of Stolbovo with the Muscovites. At Stolbovo, Swedish gains (Gustav secured Ingria, rounding off his control of the eastern Baltic coast and blocking the Muscovites off from the same) were probably more due to Muscovy's financial and military exhaustion than any Swedish military victories. In the 1620s, Gustav had fought two wars with Poland-Lithuania, which had started out well, with Swedish gains in Livonia, but by the end of the decade the Poles had caught up to the Swedes militarily. Gustav's first encounter with Imperial troops at Honigfeldt had ended badly. The few Swedish military victories Gustav had scored thus far had only been won against badly outnumbered opponents.
Yet despite these unpromising results, Sweden was arguably forced to remain at war constantly. The Kalmar War showed what the wars of Johan III and Karl IX in the preceding decades had already indicated: Sweden did not have the capacity to fight a war on her own soil, and if it was to be a power at all, it needed to maintain its army and fight its wars elsewhere. The end of war with Denmark-Norway allowed the army to be moved to Russia; the end of war with Muscovy allowed it to shift to Livonia and Prussia; the end of war with Poland-Lithuania precipitated the landing at Usedom. Gustav's constant wars, and those of his Vasa predecessors, had helped precipitate the growth of something somewhat unlike other systems in Europe, a large native officer pool among nobility who fought in service to the monarchy because it was service to the monarchy - and because it was more profitable than eking out a hardscrabble existence on a farm in the cold North - instead of as a social obligation. These officers, too, helped precipitate wars, for they comprised a significant part of the Riksdag, the Swedish Estates, who unlike so many other Estates in Europe were willing to support and finance war measures.
Gustav justified his war to the Protestant Germans at large by a large-scale propaganda war. Adler Salvius, his PR man, was already in Germany by the time he landed, trying to rouse the Protestant Electorates to the defense of their liberties against the vile Edict - in alliance with Sweden, of course. The King himself, upon arrival in Pomerania, issued manifestos of a similar tenor. But what were Sweden's war aims anyway? Neither Gustav nor his genial chancellor and political mastermind Axel Oxenstierna was clear on that. Their justifications to contemporaries contradicted one another. To France, a probable ally, the Swedes floated the idea (almost certainly joking) that Louis XIII could be elected Emperor - and Cardinal Richelieu, the French counterpart to Oxenstierna, would be the Pope! To many Protestants, the Swedish claimed to be the saviors of the evangelical cause - yet Gustav admitted later that if he were fighting a war of religion he would have declared war on the Pope. To all Europe, Sweden claimed to be fighting a war for her security - yet with von Wallenstein's fleet in ruins and his army disbanded, what threats were there? Some historians have cited economic reasons, and surely these played a role in Swedish calculations, but Gustav made no attempt to integrate northern Germany into the Swedish regional market. More sound goals - though of course we cannot be sure, considering Gustav's and Oxenstierna's reticence about committing themselves - include weakening the power of the Emperor, especially in northern Germany, and simple conquest of outposts along the coast. Later on, war aims would shift dramatically, of course.
At the same time as Gustav's landing at Usedom, the Reichstag was meeting in Regensburg. Discussion of the Edict had been removed from the agenda. But there was no consternation over the Swedish landing, either. Ferdinand had no good reason to be terrified of yet another northern adventurer, with seemingly fewer resources than the last one. Gustav had about 18,000 men with him in Pomerania - but surrounding him in northern Germany were some 50,000 Imperial troops, with 30,000 more close by. Gustav managed to capture Stettin before their approach, but that was about it in terms of conquests. Pomerania, after the last few years of maintaining von Wallenstein's army, didn't have the resources to sustain a very large Swedish one as well. Gustav was limited to his coastal enclave. He tightened his position by forcing Stralsund into a formal protectorate and bludgeoning the hapless duke of Pomerania into submitting to Swedish suzerainty, with Pomerania falling to the Swedish crown after the duke's death. But more than this could not be done without the aid of the Protestants of the Empire.
That's why Oxenstierna and the internal Swedish stuff hasn't really entered into the article - we haven't got to 1634 yet. But there's also the fact that I'm total rot on Swedish domestic history with the possible sole exception of the indelning.
