The Battle of Lützen

NOV 16 1632 · 12:00

The Battle of Lützen, 16 November 1632, where Gustavus Adolphus was killed in the fog. Place: Lützen, Saxony, southwest of Leipzig Figures: Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden (killed) · Albrecht von Wallenstein, Imperial generalissimo · Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, Swedish second · Axel Oxenstierna, Swedish Chancellor (assumes direction after) Fog at Lützen Wallenstein, recalled to Imperial command after Magdeburg and Breitenfeld, has spent 1632 maneuvering Gustavus across Saxony. On 15 November he detaches Pappenheim's corps north to Halle, judging that the campaigning season is closed. Gustavus, learning of the dispersion that night, marches at dawn through fog so thick that the two armies cannot see each other across a sunken road. The battle opens around eleven. Pappenheim races back at the gallop and is killed by a falconet ball mid-charge. Gustavus, leading the Swedish right cavalry through smoke that has mixed with the fog, becomes separated from his escort, takes a pistol ball through the arm, then a musket ball through the back, and finally a coup de grâce while lying in the mud. His riderless horse, returning to the Swedish lines smeared with the king's blood, becomes one of the war's most reproduced images. Victory and Subtraction Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar holds the army together through the afternoon, takes the Imperial guns, and forces Wallenstein from the field. The Swedes have technically won. They have also lost their king and roughly a third of the army that he made. The Lion of the North is dead at 37, of wounds inflicted at close range in conditions where neither commander could see his own line. Oxenstierna, in Mainz when the news reaches him, takes effective command of the Swedish war effort and will hold it for the next sixteen years. The war loses its presiding personality. Without Gustavus the Protestant cause has no figure who can be both a king and a general; without the king the German Protestant princes drift back toward separate negotiations with the Emperor. The war becomes longer, grimmer, more attritional. The political shape of the Westphalian settlement is being prepared, in negative, by everything Lützen subtracts. Video: Sweden wins the field and loses its king. Gustavus Adolphus falls in the November fog.