He had to force his way into Mecklenburg, whose ruling princes were his kinsmen. He had given them shelter and kindness when they had been pressed by the Imperial forces. Indeed, his entering the Thirty Years' War was partly on their behalf, but the Emperor had his Jesuits everywhere, and when Gustavus landed in Pomerania he found the Dukes of Mecklenburg more friendly to the Imperialists than to him. He needed that State to secure his rear and to keep open communications with Sweden.
In the meantime, while Gustavus was conquering small towns and restoring order to Pomerania (to which the frightened inhabitants were returning), and was being harassed, worried and annoyed beyond human words to express by these two Protestant electors, let us recall what was happening to Magdeburg.
Gustavus had despatched General Falkenberg, an experienced officer, to Magdeburg. He had entered the city disguised as a boatman. He found the people discouraged and disheartened, but this intrepid soldier so revived them that, with three thousand militia, two thousand of the regular infantry and one hundred and fifty horsemen, they determined to resist the Imperialists, consisting of thirty-three thousand infantry and nine thousand cavalry.
There are pages of pathos in every history, but nothing exceeds the pathetic picture of that heroic, devoted soldier refusing quarter because the condition of surrender was that they should become Papists. There were traitors within the walls. Three hundred of them rushed with great joy to the invaders as they entered the city, but were mostly cut down.
Magdeburg was taken May 10th by storm. Their first vengeance was on the Protestant clergy. They killed them in their homes, and burned them and their books together. They bound the wives and daughters of the clergy to the tails of their horses. They dragged them into camp, where they were outraged and murdered. St. John's Lutheran Church was filled with women, the Imperialists nailed the doors, shut and burned the church. They tied the most beautiful women of the city to the stirrups of their horses and raced each other, with their victims, out of town. They carried screaming children aloft on their bloody pikes; of the entire city only the cathedral, the cloister and four or five houses were left. General Falkenberg perished with his men. When called to surrender, he replied, "I hold out while I live."
The Imperialists were in momentary fear that Gustavus would arrive, so that they filled every hour of three days and nights in robbery, rape and murder, unequaled in all the annals of history. Babes were speared at their mothers' breasts. One miscreant boasted that he had burned twenty infants. Fifty-three women were beheaded at one time, while at prayers. Probably forty thousand perished in this holocaust. In this manner the ban of the Holy Roman Empire was executed on a German city for defending the gospel.
Tilly wrote his Emperor: "Not since Troy and Jerusalem has there been such a victory." On Falkenberg's house a tablet was placed, "Remember May 10th, 1631," and all Protestants who know history from that day to this do, with bitterness of heart, remember that dreadful day.
Tilly was born in Brabant in 1559. He had been educated in a college of Jesuits and well represented their principles. He had distinguished himself in the Turkish war, and in the war of the Netherlands, under the Duke of Alva, whom he took for his model. In his private life he was moral, and like Paul before his conversion, he really thought to kill heretics was doing God's service. But Magdeburg ruined his reputation, he became tormented with remorse; the hatred later shown to him and his retreating forces embittered his later years, and, possibly, may have caused that remorse.
But where was Gustavus Adolphus during this woeful time? He was held back by Duke John George of Saxony, and by his own brother-in-law, Duke George William of Brandenburg. The latter was a weak creature, perfectly under the influence of his minister, Schwarzenberg, an employé of the Emperor of Austria.
Neither of these princes dreamed that Magdeburg would be destroyed, they only expected it to change hands. There was something of hatred among the princes against the Hanseatic towns, which was a factor in their detention of Gustavus Adolphus.