Gustavus Adolphus
Gustavus Adolphus inherited a poor northern kingdom at war with three neighbours at sixteen, rebuilt its army into the instrument every general in Europe then copied, landed in Germany in 1630 to save the Protestant cause and the Baltic trade, won the two battles that turned the Thirty Years' War, and was killed in the second at thirty-seven. He was born in Stockholm in December 1594, the son of Charles IX, who had taken the crown from his Catholic nephew, and became king in October 1611 with Denmark in Kalmar, Russia in chaos and the Polish Vasas claiming his throne. With his chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, who ran the state while he ran the war for twenty years, he bought peace from Denmark, took Ingria and Karelia from Russia at Stolbovo in 1617, which closed Russia off from the Baltic for a century, and took Riga and Livonia from Poland. The army he took to Germany was the reform: conscription by parish, regiments of one province, brigades of six ranks that could fire by salvo and move, light three-pounder guns with the infantry, cavalry that charged with the sword instead of pistolling at a walk, and pay. He landed at Peenemünde in July 1630 with thirteen thousand men and a French subsidy, and the Protestant princes held back until Tilly sacked Magdeburg in May 1631. At Breitenfeld outside Leipzig that September his second line held when the Saxons ran and the Swedes destroyed the Catholic army in an afternoon. He wintered on the Rhine, crossed the Lech in April 1632 under cover of his guns and Tilly died of the wound, and took Munich. Wallenstein was recalled against him. At Lützen on 16 November 1632, in fog, leading a cavalry charge to steady his right, he was shot in the arm, the back and the head and stripped by the time his body was found. The Swedes won the field. The estates gave him the title Great in 1634 and his six-year-old daughter Christina the crown, and Oxenstierna kept Sweden in the war for sixteen more years, which is why Westphalia gave it a German coast.
- Lived: 1594 CE – 1632 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: king, monarch, general
