ny, the two Protestant Electors of the
empire, were rather disposed to hinder him, if they might, though
Brandenburg was his brother-in-law. Only when the King threatened to
burn the city of Berlin over his head did he listen. While he was
yet laboring with them, recruiting his army and keeping it in
practice by driving the enemy out of Pommerania, news reached him of
the fall of Magdeburg, the strongest city in northern Germany, that
had of its own free will joined his cause.

The sacking of Magdeburg is one of the black deeds of history. In a
night the populous city was reduced to a heap of smoking ruins under
which twenty thousand men, women, and children lay buried. Not since
the fall of Jerusalem, said Pappenheim, Tilly's famous cavalry
leader to whom looting and burning were things of every day, had so
awful a visitation befallen a town. Only the great cathedral and a
few houses near it were left standing. The history of warfare of the
Christian peoples of that day reads like a horrid nightmare. The
fighting armies left a trail of black desolation where they passed.
"They are not made up of birds that feed on air," sneered Tilly.
Peaceful husbandmen were murdered, the young women dragged away to
worse than slavery, and helpless children spitted upon the lances
of the wild landsknechts and tossed with a laugh into the blazing
ruins of their homes. But no such foul blot cleaves to the memory of
Gustav Adolf. While he lived his men were soldiers, not demons. In
his tent the work of Hugo Grotius on the rights of the nations in
war and peace lay beside the Bible and he knew them both by heart.
When he was gone, the fame of some of his greatest generals was
smirched by as vile orgies as Tilly's worst days had witnessed. It
is told of John Baner, one of the most brilliant of them, that he
demanded ransom of the city of Prix, past which his way led. The
city fathers permitted themselves an untimely jest: "Prix giebt
nichts--Prix gives nothing," they said. Baner was as brief: "Prix
wird zu nichts--Prix comes to nothing," and his army wiped it out.

Grief and anger almost choked the King when he heard of Magdeburg's
fate. "I will avenge that on the Old Corporal (Tilly's nickname),"
he cried, "if it costs my life." Without further ado he forced the
two Electors to terms and joined the Saxon army to his own. On
September 7, 1631, fifteen months after he had landed in Germany, he
met Tilly face to face at Breitenfeld, a vill