The battle of Lützen between the imperial and Swedish armies was fought about 19km southwest of Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, on Tuesday 16 November 1632. It was neither the largest nor the bloodiest battle of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), Europe’s most destructive conflict prior to the twentieth-century world wars, but it is certainly the best remembered today.
The Thirty Years War has been remembered primarily as a bloody religious war which began in the Holy Roman Empire before allegedly spiralling out of control and engulfing most of Europe. Supposedly, it finally burnt itself out through mutual exhaustion, paving the way for the Peace of Westphalia which is widely regarded as the birth of a new secular international order. English-speaking historians have generally followed the lead established by contemporary British observers who saw the war as a struggle between an evil Austrian Habsburg emperor seeking to impose Catholicism, and valiant Protestant Germans fighting for their religious ‘freedom.’ Aided by the ‘mercenary’ general, Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, the Habsburgs finally had complete victory in their grasp when the German Protestants were ‘saved’ by the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, who invaded the Empire in June 1630. Over the next two years, Gustavus won a string of spectacular victories which convinced later generations of military historians not only that he was one of the world’s greatest generals, but that Sweden had ‘revolutionised’ war-making.
