Saxony, while the increasing coldness between Gustavus and the Saxon Court gave him little reason to apprehend any extraordinary zeal for the deliverance of John George.  Thus a second time abandoned by his artful protector, the Elector separated from Wallenstein at Bamberg, to protect his defenceless territory with the small remains of his troops, while the imperial army, under Wallenstein, directed its march through Bayreuth and Coburg toward the Thuringian Forest.

An imperial general, Holk, had previously been sent into Vogtland with 6,000 men, to waste this defenceless province with fire and sword; he was soon followed by Gallas, another of the Duke’s generals, and an equally faithful instrument of his inhuman orders.  Finally, Pappenheim, too, was recalled from Lower Saxony, to reinforce the diminished army of the duke and to complete the miseries of the devoted country.  Ruined churches, villages in ashes, harvests wilfully destroyed, families plundered, and murdered peasants, marked the progress of these barbarians, under whose scourge the whole of Thuringia, Vogtland, and Meissen, lay defenceless.  Yet this was but the prelude to greater sufferings with which Wallenstein himself, at the head of the main army, threatened Saxony.  After having left behind him fearful monuments of his fury, in his march through Franconia and Thuringia, he arrived with his whole army in the Circle of Leipzic, and compelled the city, after a short resistance, to surrender.  His design was to push on to Dresden, and by the conquest of the whole country to prescribe laws to the Elector.  He had already approached the Mulda, threatening to overpower the Saxon army which had advanced as far as Torgau to meet him, when the King of Sweden’s arrival at Erfurt gave an unexpected check to his operations.  Placed between the Saxon and Swedish armies, which were likely to be further reinforced by the troops of George, Duke of Lueneburg, from Lower Saxony, he hastily retired upon Meresberg, to form a junction there with Count Pappenheim and to repel the further advance of the Swedes.

Gustavus Adolphus had witnessed, with great uneasiness, the arts employed by Spain and Austria to detach his allies from him.  The more important his alliance with Saxony, the more anxiety the inconstant temper of John George caused him.  Between himself and the Elector a sincere friendship could never subsist.  A prince, proud of his political importance and accustomed to consider himself as the head of his party, could not see without annoyance the interference of a foreign power in the affairs of the Empire; and nothing but the extreme danger of his dominions could overcome the aversion with which he had long witnessed the progress of this unwelcome intruder.  The increasing influence of the king in Germany, his authority with the Protestant states, the unambiguous proofs which he gave of his ambitious views, which were of a character calculated to excite the jealousies of all the states