Gustavus Adolphus the Great

[Watchman]

AKA "posthumous brownnosing". Doesn't mean much. The sobriquet "the Great" is one of those that only sticks by sufficiently widely and lastingly recognised, sufficient merit.

Put this way, when was the last time a historian worth something called the guy by that title ?

[KarlXII]

I don't see what the big deal is anyway. A lot of rulers have been referred to, and known for, their title "The Great".

[Alexanderofmacedon]

I don't see what the big deal is anyway. A lot of rulers have been referred to, and known for, their title "The Great".

Well I think Watchman is stating that Gustavus Adolphus, was not known for the title "The great". And according to the book I have it's not stated either.

Now it's simply a technicality, but nonetheless...

[Watchman]

Call it "insistence on proper forms" if you will. (Also, it's Gustavus II Adolphus... There's a reason monarchs' names have those numbers.) I'm wont to get itchy when people toss grandiose monikers where such have no recognised business in.
Allergia to buzzwords perhaps ?

Something to mull over, though: the French-funded Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years' War, which had until then been really something of a domestic disturbance in the Holy Roman Empire not unlike the French Wars of Religion had been in the previous century, may well have been what escalated the conlict into somehting of a "First European World War" (seeing as how just about everybody who was something at the time eventually got involved in some fashion) and dragged it out by well over another bloody, agonising decade. After all, when Gustavus landed in Peenemünde in 1630 the the German war was starting to look something like a done deal, the Imperial forces being more or less in the slow process of mopping up the remaining centres of resistance.

In other words, the Swedish participation may well have been the direct cause of not only stretching the war out for nearly two more brutal decades, but also down the road escalating it very considerably in scale and scope. The price of pretty much breaking the back of both Catholic and Imperial power in the HRE and laying the groundwork for a rather surprising number of modern state institutions; whether it was "worth it" or not is a question I for one find irrelevant and absurd, but it's something worth keeping in mind for the sake of perspective.