Abstract

The Pressure and Print of an Event. Contemporary Accounts of the Battle of Luetzen 1632 and their Media Dynamic

The Battle that took place near the small town of Luetzen in the vicinity of Leipzig in Saxony on 6 November 1632 has often been described as one of the main battles of the Thirty Years War. It pitted a Protestant Swedish Army commanded by King Gustavus Adolphus against the Catholic Imperial forces led by Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland. Considering its immediate and its long-term military-political consequences this battle may not have been one of the decisive events of the Thirty Years War. But it can, nonetheless, be considered as one of the key events in this war. It was the resonance, which it found in the contemporary media and the symbolic-political importance accorded to it by contemporaries, that made the battle of Luetzen of special importance. This extraordinary resonance was to a great extent due to a dramatic personal moment, the death of the Swedish king on the battlefield and the public echo which the death of this leading figure of the protestant cause found in the media. But this media echo deserves attention beyond the personal factor. It was the pressure of time which the event exerted on its printed reporting in the news media, some of which were in the stage of first formation, which gave it its special and long-lasting historical significance. The post-event publicity in many different kinds of media, from personal accounts, avisos and newssheets to sermons, pamphlets, printed images and first works of contemporary history and the interrelationships between them is investigated in this essay. One of the central figures emerging in this media dynamic is the Francfort copper etcher, publisher and entrepreneur Matthaeus Merian the Elder and the persons working for him or competing with him on the market for public attention in difficult times. A close reading of the description of the battle in Merian’s new serial publication “Theatrum Europaeum”, which started publication a few months after the battle, and a close inspection of the panoramic copper etching provided by this master artist (cum entrepreneur) for the first publication of his serial afford some micro-historical insights into the media dynamic unleashed by this event.