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The Battle of Lemgo, 17 October 1638: An Empirical Re-evaluation
Swedish Defence University, Department of War Studies and Military History, Military History Division. (Early Modern)ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3866-8658
Oavlönade Docent, MHA, Försvarshögskolan, (SWE).
2023 (English)In: Militärhistorisk Tidskrift, ISSN 0283-8400Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The Battle of Lemgo (1638) is traditionally viewed as a complete route of the Swedish forces under Lt General James King (an Orcadian) and an allied army led by Prince Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate. In this presentation, Dr Kathrin Zickermann and Prof Steve Murdoch have reassessed the battlefield reports following the battle and the subsequent actions of the Swedish-Palatine Army. In so doing a number of flaws in the conventional orthodoxy have been exposed. Missing from all previous mentions of this event has been any attention to the Swedish accounts of the battle, or even objective scrutiny of the available German and English ones. This paper returns to the basic principles of the study of history by reviewing the battle objectively and from all sides equally. In so doing we overturn the orthodoxy surrounding the battle and its aftermath. We can conclusively show that far from being a route which saw King and Karl Ludwig return to base with only five survivors (the myth), the battle witnessed an orderly retreat and was followed up by subsequent actions previously overlooked in any Swedish, German or English language accounts. This placed the Swedish army in a stronger position than prior to the battle, albeit the Palatine force was denuded of some of its most senior commanders. We address the mythologizing of these (such as Prince Rupert of the Rhine) and contemplate why the obsession with romantic figures has helped obscure the historical reality of the day.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: Försvarshögskolan , 2023.
Keywords [en]
military history, history, Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Empirical History
National Category
History
Research subject
Military History
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:fhs:diva-12001OAI: oai:DiVA.org:fhs-12001DiVA, id: diva2:1817178
Available from: 2023-12-05 Created: 2023-12-05 Last updated: 2023-12-21Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
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  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf