Gustavus Adolphus

Gustavus Adolphus, Gustav II Adolf in Swedish, was king of Sweden from 1611 until his death in battle in 1632. With his chancellor Axel Oxenstierna he turned a poor, thinly populated northern kingdom into the leading power of the Baltic, and his intervention in the Thirty Years' War in 1630 rescued the Protestant cause in Germany. Celebrated as a military innovator, he was killed at Lützen at the height of his success, and is the only Swedish monarch officially called "the Great".

Gustavus Adolphus was born in Stockholm on 9 December 1594 (Old Style), the eldest son of Duke Charles of the Vasa family and Christina of Holstein-Gottorp. Sweden was then caught in a dynastic and religious struggle. Its king, Charles's nephew Sigismund, was a Catholic who also ruled the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Lutheran Charles overthrew him and reigned as Charles IX from 1604. The prince was carefully educated by the scholar Johan Skytte, learned several languages, and from his teens accompanied his father to war and to meetings of the council.

Charles IX died in October 1611, and Gustavus Adolphus, not yet seventeen, came to the throne. The nobility made him sign a charter guaranteeing their privileges, and he appointed the young nobleman Axel Oxenstierna as chancellor in 1612. The two worked together closely for the rest of the reign.

The king inherited three wars. The Kalmar War with Denmark-Norway went badly, and the Peace of Knäred in 1613 obliged Sweden to pay a huge ransom for the fortress of Älvsborg, its only outlet to the North Sea. The war with Russia, which Sweden had entered during the Russian Time of Troubles, ended better: by the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617 the Tsardom of Russia ceded Ingria and Kexholm, shutting it off from the Baltic. Against Sigismund and Poland the fighting continued on and off for most of the reign. Gustavus took Riga in 1621 and most of Livonia, then moved the war to Polish Prussia, where he was badly wounded in the neck in 1627. The Truce of Altmark in 1629 left Livonia and the Prussian ports in Swedish hands.

Behind the wars lay a reorganisation of the Swedish state, much of it Oxenstierna's work. The council and the central offices were given fixed functions, a supreme court was set up in 1614, and the Riksdag of the four estates acquired a regular procedure. Conscription based on parish registers supplied a national army, supplemented by foreign mercenaries, and copper and iron exports helped pay for it. The king endowed Uppsala University generously, founded the port of Gothenburg in 1621, and in 1632 approved the founding of a university at Dorpat (Tartu) in Swedish-ruled Estonia. In 1620 he married Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg; their only surviving child, Christina, was born in 1626.

Gustavus Adolphus built on the reforms of the Dutch commander Maurice of Nassau. He deployed his infantry in shallow lines, mixed musketeers and pikemen in flexible brigades, trained cavalry to charge rather than stop to fire, and gave each regiment light field guns that could be moved during battle. Discipline was strict and regular pay was attempted, though the army in Germany soon lived off occupied land like every other. Later commanders, Napoleon among them, ranked him with the great generals of history. Some modern historians think his originality has been exaggerated, but there is general agreement that he combined existing ideas with unusual skill.

By the late 1620s the Catholic forces of Emperor Ferdinand II and his general Albrecht von Wallenstein had overrun northern Germany and reached the Baltic coast, threatening Sweden's position. In June 1630 Gustavus Adolphus landed in Pomerania with a small army. Swedish propaganda presented the campaign as a rescue of German Protestants, while his own manifesto stressed security and Swedish interests; historians see a mixture of religious, strategic and economic motives. In January 1631 France under Cardinal Richelieu agreed to subsidise him by the Treaty of Bärwalde.

The German Protestant princes hesitated to join him, and in May 1631 the imperial army under Tilly stormed and burned Magdeburg, killing most of its inhabitants. Saxony then allied with Sweden, and on 17 September 1631 Gustavus Adolphus crushed Tilly at Breitenfeld near Leipzig, the first great Protestant victory of the Thirty Years' War. He marched across Germany to the Rhine, spent the winter at Mainz, and in spring 1632 forced the crossing of the Lech, where Tilly was mortally wounded. In May he entered Munich. He now dominated much of the Holy Roman Empire, and seems to have planned a permanent Protestant league in Germany under Swedish leadership.

The emperor recalled Wallenstein, who blocked the Swedes outside Nuremberg in the summer of 1632 and repulsed their assault on his camp at the Alte Veste. In November the two armies met again at Lützen, south-west of Leipzig. On 6 November 1632 (16 November in the modern calendar), leading a cavalry charge in fog and gunsmoke, the king was separated from his escort, shot several times and killed. The Swedes held the field, but the loss of their leader was a severe blow.

His body was brought home and buried in the Riddarholm Church in Stockholm. Christina, aged six, succeeded him under a regency led by Oxenstierna, who kept Sweden in the war. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 gave Sweden western Pomerania, Wismar and Bremen-Verden, confirming the Baltic empire that Gustavus Adolphus had begun. In 1634 the estates honoured him with the title "the Great".

In Sweden he became a national hero, and 6 November is still marked as Gustavus Adolphus Day. Protestant Germany long remembered him as a deliverer, though the war he joined also brought devastation and plunder to the regions his armies crossed. Historians today see him as a brilliant commander and capable king whose ambitions, cut short at 37, laid the foundations of Sweden's age as a great power, as described in the History of Sweden.