The Pietist Schoolman

November 16, 1632 – Gustavus Adolphus is killed at the Battle of Lützen

It’s a strange thing as a 21st century American (and a trained historian who should really know better) to feel any stirring of pride in the military and political exploits of a 17th century king who aggrandized his own kingdom at the expense of frequent warfare that went hand-in-hand with a modernizing state best known for more effectively collecting taxes from its people. And yet…

When I went through the Thirty Years War with my Western Civ students last week, once again I found myself swelling with just a hint of pride as I explained that Sweden, for a significant chunk of the early modern period, was one of the most powerful countries in the Western world. (Keep in mind that this is a country that hasn’t fought a war since the days of Napoleon.)

As I’ve discussed before on this blog, my mom’s side of the family tree is 100% Swedish, and I inherited quite a bit of pride in that heritage growing up. So while I can’t remember just when I first encountered the Thirty Years War in adolescent study of European history, I do recall quite clearly being happy to learn that Sweden emerged from the conflict as the greatest power in northern Europe, and that its most famous king (also known as Gustav II Adolf) was the chief defender of the Protestant cause.

(Ironically, Gustavus’ second name shows up on both sides of my family tree. On the Swedish side, I think it’s simply viewed as a quaint antiquity, unlikely to repeated in the same way that no one is likely to recycle my grandmother’s name, Hildur. Whereas on my dad’s mostly German side… well, there’s another reason that Adolf won’t soon be showing up on a Gehrz birth certificate. Suffice it to say that I was not imbued with any pride in that heritage, and can talk about German history without ever feeling patriotic.)

I’m certainly not alone among Swedes or Swedish-Americans in taking pride in Gustavus Adolphus. So far as I can tell, he’s the only Swedish king to be given the honorific “the Great,” and he’s the namesake of several churches and Bethel’s Swedish Lutheran cousin in St. Peter, Minnesota: Gustavus Adolphus College.

Interestingly, that school was previously known as St. Ansgar’s Academy, so named in 1865 on the 1000th anniversary of the death of that saint, a German bishop given credit for bringing Christianity to Scandinavia. But the name shifted from honoring the “Apostle of the North” to the “Lion of the North” when the academy moved to St. Peter in 1876. I’ve done a tiny bit of research without uncovering exactly why the name was changed, while the Norwegians of Northfield kept St. Olaf as their college’s namesake… But he was named “Gustie of the Week” last Friday by The Gustavian Weekly blog.

It’s not the only connection this king has to higher education. The year he died Gustavus also chartered the University of Tartu in what’s now Estonia and what was then the Swedish province of Livonia.

Now, as to how much admiration he deserves… Well, that depends on your point of view. His entry in the Reader’s Companion to Military History calls him “the father of modern warfare,” owing to his creative combinations of infantry, cavalry, and artillery and his pioneering work in military organization and training. The great military historian Geoffrey Parker is highly admiring of Gustavus in his classic The military revolution, taking note, for example, of the Swedish monarch’s development of the first effective system of compulsory military service.

German Protestants at the time regarded him as a near-messianic figure, a providential arrival from the north sent by God to rescue them from recatholicization. This, of course, was partly due to Swedish propaganda; in his recent book on the Thirty Years War, Peter Wilson notes that Gustavus’ government “liberally paid” German writers like Bogislav Chemnitz to promote its version of that the war was about. And so part of Gustavus’ image was that of a devout Christian monarch, said to have proclaimed  “The Lord God is my armor!” in refusing to wear any protection before the battle in which he was shot to death leading a cavalry charge. Historians like Wilson are more likely to emphasize Swedish security concerns than any religious fervor in explaining Gustavus’ decision to intervene in the war.

All of which makes Gustavus’ already fascinating successor all the more interesting. He had arranged that his six year old daughter Christina would succeed him; after a period of regency during which she studied politics, theology, philosophy, and numerous languages, she ascended to the throne in her own right in 1644, at age eighteen. She not only helped end the Thirty Years War, but helped promote the burgeoning movement now known as the Enlightenment. (She invited René Descartes to Sweden, where he died of pneumonia after an early morning conversation with the queen.) Christina is probably best known now for her preference for male clothing (even in the 1933 biopic starring Greta Garbo, Christina not only cross-dresses but is briefly shown kissing another woman), but she ended up abdicating in 1654 for another remarkable reason: the daughter of the great defender of Protestantism had decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. She spent much of the rest of her life in Italy, and is buried at St. Peter’s in Rome.