He was not exactly hospitably received.  The old Duke of Pommerania would have none of him, begged him to go away, and only when the King pointed to his guns and hinted that he had keys well able to open the gates of Stettin, his capital, did he give in and promise help.  The other German princes, with one or two exceptions, were as cravenly short-sighted.  They held meetings and denounced the Emperor and his lawless doings, but Gustav they would not help.  The princes of Brandenburg and of Saxony, 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 village