Battle of Breitenfeld, 1631: Gustavus Adolphus breaks Tilly

By the summer of 1631 the Thirty Years' War seemed won for the Catholic side. The emperor's Edict of Restitution demanded the return of church lands to Catholic hands, and Count Johann Tserclaes of Tilly, the veteran commander of the Catholic League, was enforcing it. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had landed in Pomerania the year before, but the Protestant princes of Germany were slow to join him.²

On 20 May 1631 Tilly's army stormed Magdeburg, and the city was almost totally destroyed. The Neue Deutsche Biographie calls the result militarily counterproductive even for Tilly: the ruined city could no longer feed or shelter his army, and its fate turned Protestant opinion against him. Tilly then made the mistake that brought on the battle. He invaded Electoral Saxony, whose ruler, John George, had tried to stay neutral, and drove him into the Swedish camp. The alliance between Saxony and Sweden was signed on 11 September.³

Leipzig and the road to battle

Hunger drove Tilly forward. On 5 September Pappenheim occupied Merseburg; then the imperial army appeared before Leipzig, the second capital of Saxony. After a short bombardment, and threats that pointed to the fate of Magdeburg, the city surrendered on terms. Tilly meant to wait there for reinforcements. Instead, early on 17 September, the Swedish and Saxon armies approached together, and he drew up his troops on the open ground at Breitenfeld, a village a few miles north of the city. He had not sought the fight that day, according to Karl Wittich's biography in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, but he accepted it with confidence.⁴

The numbers favored the allies. HistoryOfWar.org puts Tilly's army at 36,000 and the joint Swedish and Saxon army at 42,000, of whom 26,000 were Swedes. Quality was another matter. The Saxons were newly raised, while the Swedes had been drilled into a new system: small, flexible units of infantry and cavalry that could turn to meet an attack from any side, and musketeers trained to fire in turn so that, as the historian Ursula Kampmann puts it, a Swede could fire about three times in the time it took his opponent to fire once.⁵

The Saxons break

The battle began on the imperial left. Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim, Tilly's impetuous cavalry commander, swung out to turn the Swedish flank and fell on the Swedish reserve. The Swedish cavalry wheeled to meet him, and Pappenheim, caught between them, was driven off. On the other wing the imperial right struck the Saxons, who broke and fled the field with their elector, leaving the Swedes to fight alone.⁶

For a while it seemed that Tilly had won. But his men, sure of victory, plunged too far after the fleeing Saxons, and Wittich argues that this gave the king the opening for a decisive stroke. When Tilly tried to roll up the now exposed Swedish left, the Swedish brigades simply turned to face him.⁷

Horn and the king

Gustavus then counterattacked on the imperial left, retook the guns the Saxons had abandoned and captured Tilly's own artillery, which was turned on his army. Tilly's cavalry was largely thrown back. His infantry, the old tercios, rallied and fought on with great courage, but Field Marshal Gustav Horn broke them. Pappenheim's horsemen covered the retreat and prevented a massacre. Tilly, lightly wounded, fell back towards Halle.⁸

The losses are given differently. HistoryOfWar.org counts 7,000 dead and 6,000 prisoners on Tilly's side. Kampmann gives 12,000 killed and 7,000 captured, writes that only four regiments escaped, and says Tilly lost all his artillery.⁹

Why Breitenfeld mattered

Gustavus himself had not expected so great a victory, least of all against Tilly, whom he had respected highly; he afterwards called it the most important of his victories, judged that Tilly had been "gar confus" that day, and faulted him for putting his whole army in one line with no reserve. Wittich sees the battle as the triumph of a new tactic of combined arms over the heavy formations of the old Spanish school, the answer to the Catholic victory at White Mountain in 1620, the revenge for Magdeburg and the grave of the Edict of Restitution. Tilly's aura of invincibility was gone.¹⁰

Gustavus became the champion of Protestant Europe overnight, and the victory was celebrated in silver: Kampmann describes a medal by Sebastian Dadler and commemorative thalers struck for it. She also notes that the Protestant hero was being paid by a Catholic cardinal, Richelieu, whose subsidy of 20,000 reichsthaler twice a year had made the campaign possible. Instead of marching on Vienna, the king turned into the rich lands of central and southern Germany.¹¹

Tilly never recovered. He won once more, at Bamberg in March 1632, but was mortally wounded at the crossing of the Lech at Rain in April and died at Ingolstadt; command passed back to Wallenstein, whom the emperor had recalled. Seven months later Gustavus Adolphus himself was killed at Lützen.¹² › Battle of Lützen, 1632