1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Christian of Brunswick

CHRISTIAN OF BRUNSWICK (1590–1626), bishop of Halberstadt and a general during the earlier part of the Thirty Years’ War, a younger son of Henry Julius, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was born at Gröningen on the 20th of September 1599. Having succeeded his father as “bishop” of Halberstadt in 1616, he obtained some experience of warfare under Maurice, prince of Orange, in the Netherlands. Raising an army he entered the service of Frederick V., elector palatine of the Rhine, just after that prince had been driven from Bohemia; glorying in his chivalrous devotion to Frederick’s wife Elizabeth, he attacked the lands of the elector of Mainz and the bishoprics of Westphalia. After some successes he was defeated by Tilly at Höchst in June 1622; then, dismissed from Frederick’s service, he entered that of the United Provinces, losing an arm at the battle of Fleurus, a victory he did much to win. In 1623 he gathered an army and broke into lower Saxony, but was beaten by Tilly at Stadtlohn and driven back to the Netherlands. When in 1625 Christian IV., king of Denmark, entered the arena of the war, he took the field again in the Protestant interest, but after some successes he died at Wolfenbüttel on the 16th of June 1626. Christian, who loved to figure as “the friend of God, the enemy of the priests,” is sometimes called “the mad bishop,” and was a merciless, coarse, and blasphemous man.