The King's Last Field, Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, and the Battle That Broke the Thirty Years' War

The King's Last Field, Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, and the Battle That Broke the Thirty Years' War 

At noon on the sixteenth of November 1632, a Swedish king rode into fog and gunsmoke to save his faltering center, and never rode out again. Gustavus II Adolphus, the soldier-king whose battlefield reforms had shattered imperial armies at Breitenfeld and carried Swedish arms to the gates of Munich, met his death among Habsburg cuirassiers on a plain outside a minor Saxon town, cut down within sight of victory. This is the full story of the campaign that produced that single catastrophic afternoon: the confessional fractures opened at Prague in 1618, the astrologer-guided general who tried to out-wait a king, and the fog-shrouded hours of fire and cavalry that followed. Drawing on contemporary battle accounts and the forensic evidence recovered from the 2011 discovery of a mass grave beneath a modern German highway, this book reconstructs both the grand strategy of empire and the bones-and-gunpowder reality of the men who fought for it. From Wallenstein's fortified ditches to the isotopic signatures locked in soldiers' teeth, here is a Thirty Years' War history that moves between the council chamber and the killing ground, and never lets you forget that both were the same war.