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.
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