Battle of Breitenfeld, 1631: Gustavus Adolphus breaks Tilly

As his heavy cavalry rode out to attack without orders, the old general is said to have thrown up his arms and cried that his officers had robbed him of his honor and his glory. Count Tilly, past seventy and never yet beaten in a great battle, would leave the field that night carried by his last few hundred Walloons.²

Background: a war almost won

By the summer of 1631 the Thirty Years' War seemed won for the Catholic side. The emperor was determined to enforce his Edict of Restitution, which demanded the return of church lands to Catholic hands, and Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, the commander of the Catholic League and now of the imperial army too, had made its execution, in Wittich's words, his life's task. In July 1630 King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had landed on the Baltic coast near Usedom, but the Protestant princes of Germany were slow to join him.³ › Battle of White Mountain, 1620

On 20 May 1631 Tilly's army stormed Magdeburg, and the city was almost totally destroyed. Michael Kaiser, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, calls the result militarily counterproductive even for Tilly; Britannica notes how badly it dashed Protestant hopes. Tilly then turned on Electoral Saxony, whose ruler, John George, had tried to stay neutral. His troops plundered as they came, and the elector gave up his neutrality.⁴

Historians weigh that turn differently. Kaiser writes that Tilly's invasion drove the elector to Gustavus; Karl Wittich, in the older Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, argues that the alliance was already coming together before the invasion and was not caused by it. Either way the treaty was signed in mid-September: on 11 September by the modern calendar, 1 September in the Julian calendar that Protestant Germany and Sweden still used, which is how Fletcher dates it.⁵

Armies and commanders

Hunger drove Tilly forward, and the imperial army appeared before Leipzig, the second capital of Saxony. After a bombardment and threats that pointed to the fate of Magdeburg, the city surrendered on terms on 16 September. Tilly meant to wait there for reinforcements, but his younger officers, above all Pappenheim, were eager for battle.⁶

The allies were coming to him. The Swedes crossed the Elbe at Wittenberg and met the Saxon army near Düben, where Gustavus rode along the Saxon ranks with the elector. At the council of war that followed, the king, by his own account, argued for wearing Tilly down by maneuver; it was John George, desperate to free his land from plunder, who wanted an immediate battle. They agreed to march together on Leipzig and offer it.⁷

The two sides counted very differently, and the sources still do. By a muster list in the Stockholm archives, cited by both Dodge and Fletcher, 26,800 Swedes were present; Britannica gives 23,000. The newly raised Saxons numbered 16,000 to 20,000. Tilly had perhaps 32,000 men by Fletcher's reckoning, 35,000 by Britannica's and 36,000 by Rickard's. In guns, though, the allies were far stronger: Britannica counts 51 Swedish pieces against 27, and Fletcher nearly a hundred with the Saxon guns included.⁸

The difference that mattered was in method. Tilly drew up his infantry in great Spanish-style squares, the tercios, massed many ranks deep, with his cavalry in heavy columns on the wings. Gustavus fought in smaller, flexible brigades, with musketeers firing in only a few ranks, light regimental guns that could keep up with the infantry, and small detachments of musketeers posted between his cavalry squadrons. Dodge compares the two armies to a rigid cast-iron bar and an elastic steel sword blade.⁹

The battle in phases

The cannonade

Early on 17 September the allies advanced across the flat plain from the north. Gustavus himself later wrote that they marched an hour and a half before they saw the enemy's vanguard and guns on a rise, with the whole mass of his army behind. Tilly had the sun and the wind at his back, blowing dust in the faces of the Swedes. The Swedes wore green branches in their hats and took “God with us” as their field word; the imperialists answered with “Jesus Maria.”¹⁰

From about noon the two artilleries pounded each other for some two and a half hours, the Swedish guns, by the king's own account, firing three shots for one.¹¹

Pappenheim's charge

Pappenheim could wait no longer. Without orders, he led some 5,000 cuirassiers around the Swedish right to take it in flank. The musketeers posted among the Swedish horse met him with volleys, and Johan Banér's cavalry charged out between them. Seven times Pappenheim rallied and came on again; seven times he was thrown back, and his horsemen finally fled toward Halle. An infantry regiment that Tilly sent to help him was cut to pieces.¹²

The Saxons run

On the other wing it went the other way. Count Fürstenberg's imperial cavalry fell on the Saxons, and after their best gunners were shot the whole Saxon army broke and ran. The elector himself galloped away with his lifeguard and did not stop until Eilenburg, and the Swedish baggage train fled with them.¹³

Turning point: the Swedish left turns

Tilly saw his chance. With his great squares he marched obliquely to his right, to roll up the now naked Swedish left. But Gustav Horn, commanding there, wheeled his wing round to face the new threat, lining the ditches of the Düben road with musketeers, and the king sent him two brigades from the second line, Vitzthum's Germans and Hepburn's Scots. The Swedish units could turn and redeploy far faster than the tercios could march, and when the imperial infantry arrived they found a new Swedish front waiting for them.¹⁴

Then the king struck. Leading the cavalry of his right wing, the Smålanders, East Goths and Finns, he charged across the field into the flank and rear of Tilly's line, rode up the slope where the imperial guns stood, took them and turned them on their owners. Lennart Torstensson swung the Swedish artillery round to fire into the squares as well, and the Saxon guns were retaken.¹⁵

Caught between two fronts and torn by gunfire, Tilly's veterans held for hours. Toward nightfall they broke. Four Walloon regiments made a last stand at the edge of a small wood, and, by Fletcher's account, some 600 survivors carried their wounded general off the field. Dodge and Fletcher have Tilly hit three times; Wittich says he was only lightly wounded.¹⁶

Aftermath

The imperial army was shattered. The usual figures are some 7,000 dead and 6,000 prisoners; Fletcher gives 7,000 to 10,000 dead and Kampmann 12,000. All of Tilly's artillery and his whole camp were lost. The Swedes lost about 2,100 men. Many of the prisoners, most of them mercenaries, promptly enlisted in the Swedish army.¹⁷

Gustavus had not expected so great a victory, least of all over Tilly, whom he had greatly respected. In a letter written a few days later, quoted by Fletcher, he called it so decisive that everything had turned on it. Wittich records that he ranked it the most important of all his victories, judged that Tilly had been “gar confus” that day and faulted him for putting his whole army in a single front with no reserve; Dodge, too, notes that the old pictures of the battle show Tilly's army in one line.¹⁸

At a council of war at Halle, Horn urged an immediate march on Vienna. The king refused. He meant to secure what he had won and to bind Saxony irrevocably to his cause, and he turned instead toward the rich lands of central and southern Germany. Tilly never recovered his old standing. He won once more, at Bamberg in March 1632, but was mortally wounded in April at the crossing of the Lech near Rain and died at Ingolstadt.¹⁹ › Battle of Lützen, 1632

Legacy and memory

Breitenfeld made Gustavus the hero of Protestant Europe overnight. Pamphlets, pictures and medals spread his fame across Germany, and Britannica notes that he was hailed as the Lion of the North. Kampmann describes the commemorative coins and medals struck for the victory. For Britannica the battle marked the emergence of Sweden as a great power.²⁰

Military historians have long treated it as a turning point in tactics. Dodge called it the first great battle of the modern era, the first in which the new Swedish tactics of mobility met the old Spanish tactics of weight; Fletcher, an epoch in war and in history. Wittich saw in it the answer to the Catholic victory at White Mountain in 1620, the revenge for Magdeburg and the grave of the Edict of Restitution.²¹ › Battle of Rocroi, 1643

The date and the dating

Contemporaries did not agree even on the day. The Catholic side used the new Gregorian calendar, in which the battle fell on 17 September. Sweden and Protestant Germany still kept the Julian calendar, ten days behind, so for them it was 7 September: the king's own letter speaks of marching out “on the 7th,” and Merian's great engraving is titled for VII September 1631.²²

Visiting the battlefield today

The battlefield lies on the northern edge of Leipzig, where a monument to the battle still stands. Its inscription, the motto of nineteenth-century admirers of the Swedish king, praises Gustavus Adolphus as the man who saved “freedom of belief for the world” at Breitenfeld. A second Swedish victory was won on the same ground in 1642.²³ › 17 September in military history