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1G32,]
Efforts to relieve
Magdaburg frustrated. GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. GERMAN WAR. Its capture. Cruelties
of the Imperialists. 267
The lieutenant Andrew Auer, who first mounted
the wall, received 1000 rix-dollars and a captaincy
in the regiment of life-sfuards. The king having
pursued tlie enemy, turned thereafter against
Landsberg, took it on the 16th of April ’’,
and now
demanded Custrin and Spandau from the elector
of Brandenburg, in order to be able to relieve
Magdeburg.
Tills request was of a nature to make an armed
A’isitation of Berlin inevitable. " I cannnot take
it ill," said tlie king on thi.s occasion,
" that the
elector my brother-in-law is sorrowful ;
for that I
ask perilous and critical matters is inconte.stable ;
but I desii’e them not for my good, but that of the
elector, his country, and the whole of Christendom.
My way leads to Magdeburg *." Of what he thus
requested, a refusal was not hazarded. But to be
able to make head against Tilly, the co-operation
of Saxony was likewise necessary. Magdeburg,
so important to the Protestant cause (it had resisted
the whole force of Wallenstein), was to no one
more valuable than to the elector of Saxony.
This imperial city, witli its diocese, was to be in
North Gei’many the first great victim of the empe-
ror’s edict of restitution, which restored to the
Catholic Church all that it had lost for seventy years,
from the religious peace of Augsburg ;
and against
this edict, the diet of Protestant princes lately con-
voked by the elector in Leipsic, had declared its
willingness to take up arms. The loss of Magde-
bui-g would touch most nearly the elector’s son ^,
and it required only the taking of Magdeburg to
make Tilly at once formidable to the electorate
itself. Nevertheless, Gustavus Adolphus in vain
requested aid from Saxony ;
even the passage of
the Elbe was refused him ;
and the terrilile news
was soon spread throughout Germany, that Mag-
deburg, plundered and burned by the soldiers of
Tilly, was lying in ruins. The Swedish commandant
Falkenberg had fallen among the first at the
storming.
"
Magdeburg," writes Salvius *,
" was
taken, alas ! on the 10th of May by storm, and
your leathern cannon for hunger?" Swedish Intelligencer,
i. 89. The king, on the 9th of April, gives the chancellor the
following account of the taking of Frankfort :
" As we knew
not wliither Tilly intended totakehis way from New Branden-
burg, we marched to Swedt, to procure intelligence. Mean-
while we heard that he had turned towards Magdeburg.
With that we broke up for Frankfort on the Oder, both to be
nearer to our convention in Leipsic, as also to divert Tilly,
and f.irce him to an engagement ; committing to field-marshal
Horn the Oder and Hinder Pomerania, with orders to be-
leaguer Gripswald, and, if possible, make a diversion in
Mecklenburg. We came to Frankfort on the 2d April,
where the enemy set the suburbs on fire. On the 3d, we
caused batteries to be erected, and commanded some troops,
under cover of the cannon, to run up to the town gate, never
once thinking in this way to win the place. But our men
presently not only drove the enemy fiom the outworks and
walls, but followed with like fury at their heels to beneath
the town gate ; and a part of them, flying as it were over the
wall with some few storming ladders, came into the town,
and fought until the others had blown open the gates with
petards. Now our men put the foe to flight, and cut down
many, even the superior othcers ; others of them were taken.
The rest sought refuge over the bridges beyond the Oder
/never recollecting the redoubt at the bridge-end which they
had well garrisoned), and stood not before they had gone
some way into Silesia. All the enemy’s ammunition and
twenty standards are ours. Notwithstanding Ti!ly, when
he had information of our expedition, returned in haste, he
yet came no farther than to Old Brandenburg. We liave
now is the whole of the great city lying in ashes,
so that nothing is
standing save the cathedral,
with four or five houses near, and some fisliers’
huts on the Elbe. During this siege, the deceased
Falkenberg first disputed the outworks so long as
he could with the enemy, where before the re-
doubts they lost many assaults and numbers of
men. He had little more than two thousand
soldiers, and the enemy is estimated at twenty-four
thousand men. I have spoken with a trooper who
was present during the siege. He relates that
Falkenberg was oftered quarter, but would not
accept it, any more than his soldiers ;
for the
enemy’s principal condition is said to have been
that they should become Papists. About three
hundred of the burgesses of the town were of the
Imperialist party. When the enemy first entered,
these rushed to their side, thinking to be welcome ;
l)ut they were mostly cut down. A great portion
of the remaining burghers saved themselves in the
cathedra], and bolted tlie doors so fast that no one
came to them the first day ; the next, quarter was
sounded, and then they obtained mercy ^. Those
who endeavoured to save themselves in the other
churches all perished. With none did they deal
worse than with the clergy ; they first slaughtered
them among their books, and then set fire to both
together; wives and daughters, bound at the horses’
tails, they dragged and haled into the camp, where
they outraged and used them pitiably. St. John’s
Church was full of women ;
on these, it is said,
they nailed the doors from the outside, and so
burned them. Crabats^ and Walloons tyrannized
miserably, threw children into the fire, tied the
most eminent and beautiful women of the burgher
class to their stirrups, making them run along, and
so follow them out of the town ;
stuck their lances
through the bodies of little children, whom then,
lifting on high and swinging several times round
at the spear’s point, they cast into the fire. Some
malevolent persons inculpate his majesty, as having
slain the greatest portion of this hostile army, and every
where beaten their crabats (hussars). With the cavalry and
some musketeers we have now repaired to Landsberg, and
likewise sent for the field-marshal hither on the other side.
We are now about to throw bridges over the Warta, to con-
join ourselves with the field-marshal, and so hotly take up
the siege of Landsberg." Reg.
7 The commandant was shot. The garrison, according to
the Swedish statement, was 5000 men. On their outmarch
there were found to be almost half as many women of plea-
sure as soldiers, with an endless train of baggage. Never-
theless, Pappenheim remarks in a letter to the elector of
Bavaria, that in Frankfort and Landsberg lay the kernel of
the imperial army. After the capture of the latter place the
king permitted Baner, Baudissin, and others of his officers
to make themselves merry over a glass of wine in his pre-
sence, hut himself drank nothing; "for his custom was
never to drink much, but very seldom." Monro, 1. c. ii. 40.
f Khevenhiiller, xi. 1786.
9 The chapter had elected prince Augustus of Saxony,
second son of the elector John George, to the archbishopric.
The emperor, in virtue of the Edict of Restitution, declared
tlie election invalid, and procured the nomination of one of
his own sons, Leopold William.
1
To the Council of State, Hamburg, May IS, IfiSI.
2 Other accounts agree in stating that this did not take
place till the fourth day, for so long the pillage lasted, when
Tilly made his entry into the town. The administrator was
wounded and taken ; he afterwards embraced the Catholic
religion.
3 Cioats.
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