Battle of Lützen, 1632: the victory that cost Sweden its king

Lützen was the battle the Protestant side won and could not afford. By the evening of 16 November 1632 Wallenstein's Imperial army had left the field and abandoned its artillery, and the Swedes held the ditched road it had defended all day. But Gustavus Adolphus, the king who had carried the Protestant cause across Germany for two years, lay dead somewhere in the smoke and fog. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org writes that his death took the gloss off what was otherwise a victory for the Protestant cause.²

Background: the road to Lützen

Gustavus landed in Germany in 1630 and won a run of battles on behalf of the Protestant princes, above all at Breitenfeld in 1631. In 1632 he crossed the Lech into Bavaria and occupied Munich, and the Emperor Ferdinand II, his armies broken, recalled the general he had dismissed two years earlier: Albrecht von Wallenstein.³ › Battle of Breitenfeld, 1631

Wallenstein threatened Nuremberg and drew the king out of Bavaria. Gustavus's assault on his entrenched camp at the Alte Veste failed, and after that undecided clash, as the authors of a 2017 study of the battlefield put it, he lost his reputation for invincibility. Wallenstein then turned north into Saxony, whose Elector the king had promised to protect, and took Leipzig. Rickard puts his army at about 30,000; Fletcher, writing in 1890, at 20,000 when it crossed the Saxon frontier.⁴

Gustavus came north at speed. Both Dodge and Fletcher reckon that his army covered the road from Bavaria to Saxony in eighteen days. The Elector of Saxony, John George, whom he had come to save, offered only two regiments, some 1,500 horsemen, and they never arrived in time.⁵

Armies and commanders

Wallenstein did not expect a battle that late in the year. He began to spread his army into winter quarters and let his best cavalry general, Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim, march off toward Halle and the Rhineland with a detachment that the sources put at about a third of the army, some 8,000 men. When Gustavus learned that the Imperial army was divided, he resolved to attack at once. At a council of war Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar urged battle and the veteran Kniphausen counseled waiting for the Saxons; the king sided with Bernhard.⁶

Neither army's strength is known exactly. Dodge and Fletcher both give the king about 18,000 men against some 25,000 Imperialists, with another 8,000 to 10,000 expected with Pappenheim; Brockington's EBSCO account has about 18,000 Swedes against about 28,000. The king's army was not purely Swedish: Swedes and Finns fought beside German regiments.⁷

Wallenstein, tormented by gout, commanded his center from a litter. His left was led by Heinrich Holk and Ottavio Piccolomini until Pappenheim should return; Colloredo held the right by the town. On the Swedish side Bernhard took the left, Nils Brahe and Kniphausen the center, and the king the right, with Stålhandske and his Finnish horsemen beside him.⁸

The two armies also fought in two different ways. Wallenstein massed his foot in the center in a few great, deep blocks in the Spanish manner, with cavalry on the wings: an order built for weight and solidity. Gustavus drew up in two lighter lines with a reserve, mixing detachments of musketeers among his cavalry squadrons, as he had at Breitenfeld. In front of his center stood some 20 to 26 heavy guns, and about 40 light regimental pieces were spread along the line.⁹

The battle in phases

The night before

On the morning of 15 November the Swedes marched on Weissenfels. Colloredo, watching from its castle, fired three guns, the agreed signal, and Wallenstein sent an urgent summons to Pappenheim to drop everything and come back with all his forces. Croatian light horse held the crossing of the Rippach stream long enough for darkness to fall before the Swedes could close, and both armies spent the night in battle order.¹⁰

Wallenstein drew up north of the road from Lützen to Leipzig. It ran slightly raised across a flat plain between two ditches, and through the night his men deepened the ditches and lined them with musketeers. His right rested on Lützen and a rise with windmills where heavy guns stood; his left reached toward a shallow canal, the Flossgraben.¹¹

Fog and the first assault

The Swedish drums beat before dawn. The chaplains held prayers, and the army sang Luther's hymn "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott." The king rode out without armor. Thick fog covered the plain and robbed him of surprise. The sources disagree on the hour: Brockington has the Swedes attacking at 8 a.m., while Rickard and Fletcher put the first charges at about eleven, after an hour of cannon fire.¹²

On the right the king's horse and musketeers cleared the ditches, crossed the road and drove the Croats from the field, then broke into the heavy Imperial cuirassiers under Piccolomini, who was wounded several times and would not leave the field. In the center the Swedish brigades also crossed the road and took a battery. Wallenstein had set Lützen on fire to keep the Swedes out of it.¹³

The death of the king

Then Imperial cavalry fell on the flank of the Swedish center and drove it back across the road, with the loss of the guns it had taken; in one regiment every captain was down. The king heard of it and rode for the center at the head of the Småland cavalry regiment, far ahead of his men. In a patch of fog he met a party of Imperial cuirassiers. He was shot in the arm, then in the body, and fell. His horse, riderless and covered in blood, galloped back to the Swedish lines.¹⁴

The accounts of his last minutes differ in detail. Brockington's EBSCO account places his death on the Swedish left, where he had ridden forward to encourage his troops; Dodge and Fletcher have him riding from the right wing toward the hard-pressed center. Britannica's biography says only that he became separated from his men and perished in the melee.¹⁵

Pappenheim's charge

Around midday Pappenheim reached the field with the first of his cavalry, asking where the king was fighting, and threw his squadrons into the fight. For a while Wallenstein's army came close to winning. Pappenheim was mortally wounded in the charge. Dodge and Fletcher both warn that the sources cannot say for certain whether he fell before or after Gustavus.¹⁶

Turning point

Command passed to Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Kniphausen, looking at the wreck of the first line of foot, is said to have proposed an orderly retreat. Bernhard refused, merged the two lines into one and sent the whole army forward again. In the first rush the Swedes recovered the king's body, and Imperial ammunition wagons blew up behind the enemy line.¹⁷

At about four in the afternoon the rest of Pappenheim's cavalry came up and drove the Swedes back over the road once more. Bernhard would not give up. In the dusk and fog the Swedes came on a last time and swept the Imperial line back beyond the road, taking all of Wallenstein's artillery. Pappenheim's infantry arrived only after dark, in time to cover an orderly retreat.¹⁸

Aftermath

Wallenstein withdrew in the night and in the end fell back to Bohemia, where he quartered his army. The figures are rough and the sources disagree. Both Brockington and Rickard give about 10,000 Swedish and 12,000 Imperial casualties, and Dodge puts the Imperial loss at ten to twelve thousand killed, wounded and taken. The 2017 battlefield study counts between 6,000 and 9,000 dead in all, and Archaeology magazine uses about 9,000.¹⁹

Even the verdict is disputed. Dodge called Lützen unequivocally a Swedish victory, and Britannica says the Swedes had won an important one. The authors of the battlefield study note that Wallenstein ordered the retreat first, which argues for a Swedish victory, but that the Imperial army had taken more Swedish standards and the Swedes had lost their king; seen from outside, they conclude, there was no victor.²⁰

The king's death changed the war. His chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, took over the direction of Sweden's policy for the young queen Christina, and Bernhard the command in the field. For Wallenstein, Britannica writes, Lützen was the final turning point of his career: with Gustavus dead he was no longer indispensable to the Emperor, and on 25 February 1634 he was murdered at Eger by his own officers. Brockington argues that without a strategic vision the Protestant side lost ground to the Imperialists, until in 1635 France openly entered the war against the Habsburgs.²¹ › Battle of Wittstock, 1636

Legacy and memory

Michael Roberts, the king's biographer in Britannica, judges that Gustavus had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history: his intervention ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the Counter-Reformation. Dodge, writing in 1895, called him the father of the modern art of war. The Swedish dating of his death is itself a memorial: Sweden still kept the Julian calendar in 1632, and the battle and the king's death are remembered there on 6 November rather than 16 November.²²

In 2011 archaeologists found a mass grave on the battlefield and lifted it out in large blocks of soil for study at the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle. It held 47 men aged between 15 and 50. More than half had been shot, by the pistols, carbines and muskets of cavalry fighting at close range. The researchers link the grave to the spot where, according to the records, an elite Swedish unit known as the Blue Brigade was cut down by a surprise attack of Imperial cavalry. Dodge and Fletcher both name the Blue brigade among the units thrown back in the crisis of the Swedish center that drew the king to his death.²³ › Battle of Rheinfelden, 1638