Battle of Lützen (1632)

Near the small Saxon town of Lützen, south-west of Leipzig, a Swedish-led Protestant army met the Imperial forces of Albrecht von Wallenstein on 16 November 1632, during the Thirty Years' War. The Swedes held the field at nightfall, but at a terrible price: their king, Gustavus Adolphus, was killed in the fighting. His death changed the leadership of the Protestant cause and left Sweden to fight on under a regency.

Gustavus had landed in Pomerania in June 1630 with roughly 18,000 men. Funded by France and backed by Saxony and Brandenburg, he beat Imperial armies at Breitenfeld in September 1631 and at Rain in April 1632, pushing deep into southern Germany. Wallenstein threatened his communications from a fortified camp near Fürth, and a Swedish assault on it in early September failed with heavy losses.

Wallenstein then moved into Saxony with Heinrich Holk, hoping to knock the Saxon elector out of the war. He took Leipzig in early November and planned to winter there. When the Swedes learned on 15 November that Wallenstein had sent Pappenheim and about 5,800 men away to Halle, Gustavus, with some 19,000 troops including Saxon and Hessian contingents, marched to attack. Warned by his scouts, Wallenstein recalled Pappenheim and had his men dig in overnight along the Lützen–Leipzig road, with his main battery on a low rise by three windmills.

Fog and the need to cross a canal, the Flossgraben, delayed the Swedish advance until about 11 in the morning, which gave Pappenheim time to arrive. Gustavus's right wing cleared the musketeers lining the roadside ditch and began turning the Imperial left. Around midday Pappenheim reached the field with 2,300 horsemen and charged at once, throwing the Swedish infantry back across the road. Some elite Swedish units lost as much as 65 per cent of their strength. Pappenheim himself was mortally wounded and died while being carried away.

By early afternoon both armies were disordered, and smoke from burning houses in Lützen drifted across the field. Riding to rally his infantry, Gustavus became separated, ran into Imperial cavalry and was shot three times. His body was only found after dark, lying under other dead on the Imperial side of the ditch. The Swedish reserve under Knyphausen steadied the line, and fighting slackened around three o'clock.

Accounts of the later fighting are sparse. Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar pressed the attack again, the Swedes recrossed the road, took a central battery and turned its guns on the Imperial left, and around four o'clock stormed Lützen and the windmill battery. Meanwhile many of Pappenheim's cavalry had fled, and some Imperial units plundered their own baggage. As dusk fell, Wallenstein ordered a withdrawal, leaving guns and wagons behind. Pappenheim's infantry, about 2,900 men, arrived after nightfall and covered the retreat.

Each side lost heavily: about 5,160 Imperial and around 6,000 Swedish casualties. Wallenstein abandoned Leipzig and retreated into Bohemia, leaving over 1,200 wounded as prisoners, which allowed Sweden to claim the victory, though some see the result as nearly a draw. Gustavus's six-year-old daughter Christina succeeded him, and the chancellor Axel Oxenstierna took charge of policy. With Cardinal Richelieu resuming French subsidies, Sweden and its German allies formed the Heilbronn League in April 1633. Wallenstein, suspected of planning to change sides, was murdered by Imperial agents in February 1634.

A boulder, the Schwedenstein, was set up near where the king fell the day after the battle. Because Sweden then used the Julian calendar, in which the battle fell on 6 November, Swedes still mark Gustavus Adolphus Day on that date. In 2011 archaeologists found a mass grave of 47 soldiers; healed old injuries marked many as veterans, and more than half had been struck by gunfire.

Our 1600 and 1650 maps show the Holy Roman Empire before and after the war, and the growth of Sweden around the Baltic.