Pomerania

He also hoped to make territorial gains in continental Europe.

On the 4th of July 1630, Gustavus Adolphus landed at Penemunde in Pomerania at the head of an army of 13,000 men.

He was facing a much larger army commanded by one of the Emperor's best generals, Johann Tserclaes, the Count of Tilly.

Tilly was an experienced and feared commander with many victories over Protestant armies.

Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking.

That's claude.ai/spotify.

The Swedish army was stuck in their little corner of Pomerania, surrounded by Imperial-held garrisons.

The Catholics saw Gustavus Adolphus as nothing more than a minor annoyance, so they left him alone while the main Imperial armies fought in Italy.

So when you look at a city like Szczecin, Stettin in German.

It's the capital of Pomerania.

It's Polish.

Of course it's Polish.

But it's functioning and it's working as the capital of Pomerania, reaching from Greifswald to Gdańsk.

And this is a good example that of course, being a big Polish town, the Pomerania region has a lot in common with German Pomerania, much more than with some other more distant regions of the national state of Poland.

Yes.

And this is something we have achieved.

This hymn holds a historic position as the first evangelical Catholic hymn written by a woman.

Krusiger was a former pre-Monstrantian nun from Pomerania who embraced the Reformation.

She left her convent, moved to Wittenberg, where she married Luther's colleague, Caspar Krusiger.

The hymn was originally published in the Erfurt and Carinian in 1524, making it one of the oldest hymns in the Lutheran tradition.

They were, for the most part, poor inhabitants from the north of the town Berlin, the workman's quarter.

About this very time a violent epidemic, though limited in its extent, prevailed in Vorpommern, Pomerania.

It took first the roadside labourers, but afterwards spread further.

At present the spotted fever is in Vienna.

It was next to impossible that they should not contract a taste for the stateliness when we consider that they had almost always before them the most exquisite type of gravity of manner in the followers of Islam, whose qualities they appreciated and appropriated even while engaged in repelling their invasions.

Like the infidel, they knew how to preface their acts by an intelligent deliberation, so that the device of Prince Boleslas of Pomerania was always present to them.

First weigh it, then dare.

Ester wags, dann wags.

This limited action was forced on him not only by the need to secure his communications with Sweden and build up his strength, but even more by the failure of the German Protestant states to rally to the support of the man who had come to save them.

Even the Duke of Pomerania, the province where he landed, and one that had suffered grievously from the exactions of the imperial troops, had to be forced into alliance by the appearance of the Swedish army at the gates of Stettin, his capital.

As for the two chief Protestant princes, the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, they held aloof until late in the summer of 1631.

If Gustavus appears overcautious during this first stage, this lack of support and the smallness of his own forces are ample justification, while apart from its limited scope, his strategy has method behind it, a feature new to the warfare of the age, and perhaps better conceived in this phase than in his own subsequent campaigns.

As the strongest Protestant prince, Gustavus could not afford to antagonize one whom he wanted as an ally, and ere negotiations were completed, Magdeburg had fallen.

The horrors of its sack are engraved deeply in history.

Falling back on Pomerania for a while, in July, Gustavus again advanced up the Elbe towards Tilly.

After more maneuvering came the decisive act which forced John George of Saxony, having sat so long on the fence, to jump down on the Swedish side.