What Brandenburg suffered in the terrible decade 1630–1640, between the landing of Gustavus Adolphus in Germany and the accession of the Great Elector, can never be fully calculated. The State was rudderless, defenceless, and poor; the combatants on both sides brigands, whom years of license had habituated to every kind of cruelty. What passed could be described by no more patently truthful eye-witness than Andreas Rittner, the cheery burgomaster of Tangermünde, a little town on the Elbe with a royal history of its own. In his pages may be traced the swift descent of the afflicted people through every depth of misery down to despair or even annihilation. The invaders—it mattered little whether Swedes or Imperialists—exacted in endless sequence contributions, lodging, forage, and loot, drove off the cattle, broke up the coffins of the dead, laid waste the land, and hunted down the inhabitants. The mischief was only increased by the feeble efforts of the home government to call out and support a militia. The maddened peasants turned guerilla. Food failed, for who could sow or reap? Men fed on carrion, even, it was whispered, on human flesh, and soon pestilence seized on persecutors and persecuted alike. Anarchy and degradation brought forth torture. The name of the Swedish Drink attests the cruelty of the degenerate deliverers of Germany. “They laid men awhile upon the fire,” writes Rittner, “baked them in ovens, flung them into wells, hung them up by the feet, fastened thumb-screws upon them, drove sharp spikes under their nails, bound round their heads so tight that their eyes started out, gagged them and sealed their mouths. Matrons and virgins were oft-times put to shame. Husbands must often leave their wives and wives their husbands, parents their children and children their parents, even on the bed of sickness, for they were powerless to save them from abuse, and sometimes when they came back they found nought of them save some few bones, for all else had the dogs mangled and eaten up.” Not less graphic is the story told in stone in some of the tormented cities. Round the giant church, spared by the Swedes to uphold the Lutheran faith of which it was then the temple and by the Imperialists for the sake of the Roman faith which they hoped to establish anew within its walls, there may be seen the tombs of many generations of citizens. Those of the sixteenth century are covered with quaint adornment and graven with artistic skill. Then, as war sweeps over the land, the series is broken, to be resumed after many decades with a rude clumsiness which shows that wealth and art had fled from Brandenburg together.