Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600–1750 123practice and handed his business to his heirs, whereas DeWitte left
nothing but the tangled accounts of a bankrupt speculator when he
committed suicide in 1630. Likewise, Gustav Adolf was legal
sovereign and king, and suffered from none of the moral-legal dubi
ousness that surrounded Wallenstein’s entire career. As a result, the
political and economic empires that De Geer and Gustav Adolf were
able to create lasted for centuries, whereas Wallenstein’s collapsed
with his assassination.
The Swedish king also owed part of his success in battle to the fact
that he enthusiastically imported the latest Dutch methods of waging
war and training troops. But he added some touches of his own, de
rived from his early experience with Russian and Polish cavalry tactics
(war with Russia until 1617, with Poland 1621–29). As a result, when he
intervened in the German wars by landing in Pomerania in 1630, the
Swedish king brought into action a battle-hardened army. It proved its
formidability at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 when the Swedes
first exhibited their improved tactics.
Swedish tactical innovations aimed at more effective offensive action
on the battlefield. Small field artillery pieces that could be maneu
vered by hand added weight to volleyed small arms fire; and the shock
effect of such massed fire was swiftly followed up by pike and cavalry
charges. But Wallenstein adjusted his own tactics in imitation of the
Swedes very promptly, as he demonstrated the very next year at the
Battle of Lützen, where Gustav Adolf lost his life in winning a second
victory over the imperial forces.
The rapidity with which one side reacted to any effective innovation
from the other was convincingly illustrated by this episode. European
kings and captains had clearly accepted the idea that improvements
were always possible. An efficient information network utilizing
printed texts as well as word of mouth, espionage, and commercial
intelligence, spread data about enemy intentions and capabilities, new
technologies, and new tactics across the length and breadth of western
Europe. As a result, by the end of the Thirty Years War, European
armies were no longer a mere collection of individually well-trained
and bellicose persons, as early medieval armies had been, nor a mass of
men acting in unison with plenty of brute ferocity but no effective
control once battle had been joined, as had been true of the Swiss
pikemen of the fifteenth century. Instead, a consciously cultivated and
painstakingly perfected art of war allowed a commanding general, at
least in principle, to control the actions of as many as 30,000 men in
battle. Troops equipped in different ways and trained for different