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, abandoning its artillery and baggage, 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. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org writes that his death took the gloss off what was otherwise a victory.²

The road to Lützen

Gustavus landed in Germany in 1630 and won a run of battles on behalf of the Protestant princes. In the autumn of 1632 his luck faltered: after an undecided clash near Nuremberg he lost his reputation for invincibility, as the authors of a 2017 study of the battlefield put it. Then Wallenstein, the Emperor's general, invaded Saxony with about 30,000 men and threatened the king's lines of communication, and Gustavus had to turn north to meet him.³

Wallenstein expected no battle that late in the year. He had begun to send his army into winter quarters and had split off about a third of it. When Gustavus heard that the Imperial army was divided, he hurried to attack. On 15 November Wallenstein learned that the Swedes were coming, recalled his scattered regiments, and drew up behind a road lined with ditches, his right anchored on the town of Lützen. The two armies spent the night facing each other in battle order.⁴

Fog, fire and a cavalry melee

The morning of 16 November brought thick fog. Accounts differ on the hour the Swedes went in: EBSCO's account says they attacked at 8 a.m. in almost no visibility, while Rickard writes that the mist held them back until about 11. On the Swedish right, cavalry led by the king drove the Imperial musketeers out of the ditch and pushed back the horsemen behind them.⁵

Wallenstein set Lützen on fire. The smoke blew across the Swedish center, and under its cover Imperial cavalry struck the Swedish infantry. The line held, and Gustavus led his horsemen back to support it. In the cavalry fight that followed he was killed. EBSCO's account has him riding forward to encourage his troops and straight into an enemy formation. Command passed to Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar.⁶ › Battle of Rheinfelden, 1638

Then the troops Wallenstein had recalled the day before reached the field and for a while pushed the Swedes back across the road. Bernhard rallied the army, and the Swedish brigades came on again. In EBSCO's telling, word of the king's death turned the attack into a savage onslaught. By nightfall the Imperial troops had fallen back into Lützen, leaving their guns and baggage, and Wallenstein retreated, in the end all the way to Bohemia.⁷

Counting the cost

The figures are rough and the sources disagree. EBSCO puts the armies at about 18,000 Swedes and 28,000 Imperialists, and both EBSCO and HistoryOfWar.org give about 10,000 Swedish and 12,000 Imperial casualties. The 2017 battlefield study counts between 6,000 and 9,000 dead in all, and Archaeology magazine uses about 9,000.⁸

Even the verdict is disputed. Wallenstein ordered the retreat first, which argues for a Swedish victory; but the Imperial army had taken more Swedish standards, and the Swedes had lost their king. The authors of the battlefield study conclude that, seen from outside, there was no victor, and the war went on for another 16 years.⁹

The grave of the 47

In 2011 archaeologists found a mass grave on the battlefield and lifted it out in two large blocks of soil, each weighing about 25 metric tons by the study's account, and took them to the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle for study. It held 47 men aged between 15 and 50, most of them in their twenties; the average age at death was about 28. Many had healed wounds from earlier fighting, a sign of veteran soldiers, and some showed the strains of long marches and digging.¹⁰

More than half of them had been shot, mostly in the head, from the front and the side. The lead balls in the grave came mainly from carbines and pistols, the weapons of cavalry at close range. The researchers link the grave to a 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. The bodies had been thrown in from several sides, two to four days after the battle at the earliest, which fits a town entry recording that outside help was sought to bury the dead.¹¹

What Lützen changed

Sweden kept fighting. The army survived the loss of its king, but, as EBSCO's account puts it, the Protestant forces were left without dynamic leadership, and the lack of a strategic vision led to Imperial success and in time to direct French intervention in the war. In Sweden the battle is still dated by the old calendar, to 6 November, the date of the king's death.¹² › Battle of Wittstock, 1636