And Gustavus was not even more than half a German by birth; politically he was not a German at all. In his own mind he could not help thinking first of Sweden. In the minds of others the suspicion that he was so thinking was certain to arise. He clung firmly to his demand for Pomerania as a bulwark for Sweden's interests in the Baltic. Next to that came the _Corpus Evangelicorum_, the league of German Protestant cities and princes to stand up against the renewal of the overpowering tyranny of the Emperor. If his scheme had been carried out Gustavus would have been a nobler Napoleon, with a confederation, not of the Rhine, but of the Baltic, around him. For, stranger as he was, he was bound by his religious sympathies to his Protestant brethren in Germany. The words which he spoke at Nüremberg to the princes, telling them how well off he might be at home, were conceived in the very spirit of the Homeric Achilles, when the hardness of the work he had undertaken and the ingratitude of men revealed itself to him. Like Achilles, he dearly loved war, with its excitement and danger, for its own sake. But he desired more than the glory of a conqueror. The establishment of Protestantism in Europe as a power safe from attack by reason of its own strength was the cause for which he found it worth while to live, and for which, besides and beyond the greatness of his own Swedish nation, he was ready to die. It may be that, after all, he was "happy in the opportunity of his death." CHAPTER IX. THE DEATH OF WALLENSTEIN AND THE TREATY OF PRAGUE. SECTION I.--_French Influence in Germany._ [Sidenote: 1631. § 1. Bernhard of Saxe Weimar.]