Such a man was certain not to be a mere enthusiast embarking heedlessly in a Protestant crusade. Neither would he be careful for mere temporal or political power, regardless of the higher interests of his time. His first duty, and he never forgot it, was to his country. When he came to the throne, in 1611, Sweden was overrun by Danish armies, and in an almost desperate condition. In two years he had wrested a peace from the invaders, under conditions hard indeed, but which at least secured the independence of Sweden. His next effort, an effort which to the day of his death he never relaxed, was to bring into his own hands the dominion of the Baltic. He drove the Russians from its coasts. 'Now,' he said triumphantly in 1617, 'this enemy cannot, without our permission launch a single boat upon the Baltic.' He had another enemy more dangerous than Russia. Sigismund, King of Poland, was his cousin, the son of his father's elder brother, who had been driven from the throne of Sweden for his attachment to the Catholic belief. And so Gustavus was involved in the great question which was agitating Europe. The bare legal right which gave the whole of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands to Spain, which gave Bohemia to Ferdinand, and the Protestant bishoprics and the secularized lands to the Catholic clergy, gave also Sweden to Sigismund. Was it strange if Gustavus stood forth to combat this doctrine to the death, or if in his mind the growth of the two branches of the House of Austria, by whom this doctrine was maintained, became inextricably blended with the creed which that doctrine was to favour? Was it strange, too, if Protestantism and the national right of each separate country to go its own way untrammelled by such a doctrine appeared in his eyes, as in his days for the most part they really were, but two forms of the same spirit? [Sidenote: § 6. His visit to Germany.]