Venceslaus Clemens's Gustavis and the Thirty Years' War as a religious conflict

Venceslaus Clemens (d. 1637) was a Reformed Bohemian humanist who served in the household of Axel Oxenstierna during the 1620s and 1630s. His Gustavis, printed in Leiden in 1632, was a Latin epic commemorating the deeds of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, up to the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. We excerpt the section in which the personification of true religion complains to God of the sufferings of Protestants in the German lands, to be told by God that Gustavus Adolphus will be their saviour. The epic evidences the dualism of elite intellectual culture in early modern Europe: on the one hand, this poetry is strongly modelled on pagan sources (especially Venus’s address to Jupiter in Vergil’s Aeneid); on the other hand, Clemens clearly envisages the war in Germany as a holy war and the king of Sweden as God’s instrument on earth.