Gustavus Adolphus Lands at Peenemünde

JUL 06 1630 · 12:00

Gustavus Adolphus meets Duke Bogislaw XIV of Pomerania after landing his army on the Baltic coast. Place: Peenemünde, isle of Usedom, Pomeranian coast Figures: Gustavus II Adolphus, King of Sweden · Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish Chancellor · Cardinal Richelieu, First Minister of France · Bogislaw XIV, Duke of Pomerania Thirteen Thousand at Peenemünde Gustavus Adolphus comes ashore on 6 July 1630 at the head of roughly 13,000 troops, with Chancellor Oxenstierna's logistics behind him and the Baltic at his back. He kneels on the sand and prays in front of his army, a gesture the Swedish chroniclers will not allow anyone to forget. His stated cause is the defense of German Protestantism against the Edict of Restitution of 1629, by which Ferdinand II proposed to reclaim every ecclesiastical territory secularized since 1552. His actual financing is more interesting. The Treaty of Bärwalde, signed the following January, commits Catholic France to subsidize the Swedish army at one million livres a year. The First Minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu, has decided that the strategic problem of a Habsburg-dominated Empire outweighs the theological problem of funding Lutherans to fight Catholics. He is right, and the war will run another eighteen years on the logic he has just made explicit. Confession Becomes Pretext Before Peenemünde the Thirty Years' War can still be narrated as a war of religion: Protestant Bohemia against Catholic Emperor, the Catholic League against the Protestant Union. After Peenemünde the narration falls apart. A Catholic cardinal is paying a Lutheran king to fight a Catholic emperor, in order to prevent a Catholic dynasty consolidating power that would threaten a Catholic kingdom on the Atlantic. The principle is not yet named, but it is now operational. What matters in European politics is not the confession of the sovereign but the balance among sovereigns. The war's remaining eighteen years are a tutorial in this principle, conducted at a cost of roughly six million further dead. The Westphalian settlement of 1648 will be the codification of what Peenemünde already demonstrated in 1630. Video: Gustavus Adolphus debarks at Usedom in July 1630. The Lion of the North enters Germany.