agnificence exceeding that of any court in Germany. His table was
always set for a hundred guests. He had sixty pages of the noblest
families to wait on him. For chamberlains and other household officials,
he had men who came from similar places under the Emperor.

Meanwhile a new defender had sprung up for exhausted Protestantism.
Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, invaded Germany in 1630 and called on
the Protestants to help him in the fight to save their faith. All Europe
had grown afraid of the tremendous and increasing power of the Hapsburg
Emperor. Not only was Protestant England in league with the Swedes, but
Catholic France, under its shrewd minister, Richelieu, also upheld them.
Still the burden of actual fighting fell upon Gustavus Adolphus, who
proved himself the greatest military leader of the age, and, in the eyes
of Protestant Europe, the noblest and sublimest man since Luther.

It is not our province to analyze the motives of the Swedish King, the
"Lion of the North," as he is called. How much he was actuated by
ambition, how much by religion, perhaps he himself might have found it
hard to say. His coming marks the turning-point of the contest; his
brilliant achievements constitute the fourth period of the war.

Tilly opposed him with the army of the Catholic League--Tilly, the
victor of thirty desperate battles. The Emperor and his court laughed,
and, thinking of the Bohemian King and the Dane, said: "Another of these
snow kings has come against us. He, too, will melt in our southern sun."

The Protestant princes hesitated, fearing to join Gustavus; he was
hampered on every side. Tilly in his very face stormed the great
Protestant city of Magdeburg, and sacked it with such merciless
brutalities as raised a cry of horrified disgust, even in that age of
atrocities. "Never was such a victory," wrote Tilly to the Emperor,
"since the storming of Troy or of Jerusalem. I am sorry you and the
ladies of the court were not there to enjoy the spectacle." A heap of
blackened ruins, hiding a few hundred famished and broken outcasts, was
all that remained of a splendid and prosperous city of forty thousand
souls.

Tilly's object in this bloody deed seems to have been to terrify the
rest of Protestant Germany into submission. If so, he failed of his
purpose. Gustavus promptly abandoned gentle measures, and by a threat of
force compelled the Saxon elector to join him. He then met Tilly in a
fierce battle near Leipsi