What happened at the Battle of Lutter?
On 27 August 1626, at Lutter am Barenberge in Lower Saxony, the Catholic League army of Count Tilly, reinforced by imperial troops sent by Wallenstein, caught up with the retreating army of King Christian IV of Denmark. Tilly attacked first, the Danes counterattacked, and when their infantry failed to break the League's center, Tilly's counterattack routed them. Christian fled, and his army fell back to the Elbe with heavy losses.1
When the Thirty Years' War broke out in 1618, the Catholic emperor Ferdinand II set out to roll back the Reformation in his lands, and in 1620 his forces crushed the Protestant revolt in Bohemia. Fear of the emperor spread through Protestant Europe, as the National Museum of Denmark tells it, and old prophecies of a lion from the north who would defeat the eagle came back into circulation. Many saw the lion in Christian IV, king of Denmark and Norway.2
The Danish council of the realm would not back a war against the emperor. Christian used his position as Duke of Holstein instead, and in 1625 he was elected war leader of the Lower Saxon Circle, a group of north German Protestant states. He raised a large army and marched against the army of the Catholic League under Count Johann Tserclaes of Tilly. The emperor's own general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, was also in the field, and the two Catholic commanders did not always cooperate.3
The campaign of 1626
Tilly began 1626 in a difficult position, according to Karl Wittich in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie: short of food and ammunition, with an army thinned by a hard winter and outnumbered by its enemies. Christian's plan was plainly to draw him as far west as possible, away from Wallenstein. While Wallenstein went east in pursuit of Mansfeld, Tilly laid siege to Göttingen, which surrendered on 11 August.4
John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org describes how Christian moved into the gap between the two Catholic armies, hoping to exploit it. The move was discovered in time. Tilly drew in imperial troops left behind by Wallenstein, some 8,000 men in Rickard's count, and went after the king. Christian turned back toward his fortress of Wolfenbüttel. From 25 August Tilly pressed his rear guard hard, and on 27 August he brought the main Danish army to a stand at Lutter am Barenberge.5
The battle
The National Museum of Denmark puts each army at a little over 20,000 men. Both drew up in order of battle. Tilly, although his ground was the worse, attacked first. The Danes threw back the attack and counterattacked with determination, Wittich writes, but the League's troops held. In the summary of the Danish historian Gunner Lind, the battle was decided when the king's infantry failed to break through the enemy center.6
After some wavering, the League gained the upper hand and threw the Danish infantry into disorder. Tilly's counterattack drove the king's army from the field with heavy losses. The Danish foot was destroyed, the rest of the army fled, and about 2,000 fugitives were taken prisoner. Christian himself had to flee, and Rickard writes that he left the field with fewer than half the troops he had started with. A broadsheet printed that year, shown above, dates the fighting from 24/14 to 27/17 August, giving both the new calendar used by the Catholic side and the old one still used in Denmark.7
After Lutter
Luckily for the king, the National Museum notes, the enemy was too exhausted to follow up the victory. Christian fell back to a line along the Elbe. For Tilly, Wittich judges, Lutter was the most important of his victories so far, more for its political and moral effect than for its military result, since he could not stop the king from holding both banks of the Elbe.8
For Christian, things only got worse. Over the winter several of his German allies abandoned him, Rickard writes, leaving him a spent force for the moment. In the autumn of 1627 imperial troops invaded Jutland, and only the Danish-Norwegian fleet kept the islands and Scania safe. In 1629 Christian signed the Peace of Lübeck. It was surprisingly mild: he kept Jutland and lost only his influence over some German lands, but he had to promise not to interfere in the affairs of the empire. The next year the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, landed in Pomerania and was hailed by Lutherans as the real lion from the north.9
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”; Gunner E. Lind, “Lutter am Barenberge”; National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”. ↩
- National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”. ↩
- National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”; Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”; John Rickard, “Battle of Lutter (am Barenberge), 27 August 1626”. ↩
- Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”. ↩
- Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”; John Rickard, “Battle of Lutter (am Barenberge), 27 August 1626”. ↩
- National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”; Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”; Gunner E. Lind, “Lutter am Barenberge”. ↩
- Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”; Gunner E. Lind, “Lutter am Barenberge”; National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”; John Rickard, “Battle of Lutter (am Barenberge), 27 August 1626”. ↩
- National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”; Gunner E. Lind, “Lutter am Barenberge”; Karl Wittich, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”. ↩
- National Museum of Denmark, “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”; John Rickard, “Battle of Lutter (am Barenberge), 27 August 1626”. ↩
Sources
- Karl Wittich, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 38 (1894), Deutsche Biographie, “Tilly, Johann Tserclaes Graf von”
- Gunner E. Lind, Lex (Den Store Danske), “Lutter am Barenberge”
- National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet), “Kejserkrigen 1625 - 1629”
- John Rickard, HistoryOfWar.org, “Battle of Lutter (am Barenberge), 27 August 1626”
