⌂ Atlas The question: did Gustavus go where strategy pointed — or only where the rivers could float his bread? And did leaving the water kill him?
1630—
Sweden — army & control Imperial / Catholic League Catholic (vertical) Protestant (horizontal) Catholic + Protestant (crosshatch) fill colour = the state on a river — supplied off the rivers — no river supply his catchment ↑ drains to his seas Danube basin → drains away (Black Sea) navigable river river port battle / atrocity

Sources & method

  1. Sweden landed at Peenemünde (Usedom), 6 July 1630, with ~13,000 men and secured the Oder mouths rather than striking inland — Swedish intervention. Error bar: muster figures are soft; "≈13,000" is a round figure, and the army swelled with German recruits and Saxon allies thereafter.
  2. Frankfurt-an-der-Oder stormed April 1631; Magdeburg sacked 20 May 1631 (~20–25,000 dead); Breitenfeld 17 Sept 1631 broke Tilly and opened the south — Breitenfeld. The Saxon contingent (~18,000) fought alongside Sweden; the strength chips show the Swedish field army only.
  3. Würzburg (Oct), Frankfurt-am-Main (Nov), winter quarters at Mainz on the Rhine 11 Dec 1631. Then the turn south: the Lech forced at Rain 15 April 1632 (Tilly mortally wounded, d. 30 Apr), Munich entered 17 May 1632 — Gustavus Adolphus.
  4. Alte Veste (3 Sept 1632) repulsed the Swedish assault; Lützen (16 Nov 1632) — Sweden held the field but Gustavus was killed; Nördlingen (6 Sept 1634) — an Imperial-Spanish army crushed the Swedes and rolled the deep-south overreach back — Nördlingen.
  5. Period armies clung to navigable rivers for bulk supply — campaigns stayed "close to rivers" because grain moved by water, not cart — Britannica, military logistics. This is why the gold arrow hugs the Oder, Elbe, Main and Rhine, and why the Lech leg into Bavaria reads as overreach.
Schematic footnote. Relief base — Esri World Physical Map; labels — OpenFreeMap glyphs. Every route, river, front and control wash is drawn schematic: the correct features in roughly the correct places, hand-authored inline as coordinate arrays, not surveyed cartography. Strength numbers are round period estimates with wide error bars.
Art-direction grade: desaturated documentary relief + paper-grain + warm radial + vignette; Sweden-blue vs Imperial-red over the muted base; Sweden's gold drive-arrow is the genre signature. The whole episode is one deterministic render(T) — scroll or play, reversible end to end.
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ATLAS v2 · CAMPAIGN ENGINE — FLAGSHIP

Gustavus Adolphus, 1630–32

Did the offensive go where grand strategy pointed — or only where navigable water could float its bread? And when it finally cut loose from the rivers, did that kill it?
One playhead. Scroll to drive it, or press begin for the narrated film. Everything is a pure function of the playhead — scrub backward and it all un-draws.