offers, which were refused, to induce him to enter the service of France. Somewhat later he left the Spanish service for that of Austria to fight against the Turks. In 1602 he became colonel in the imperial army, and raised a regiment of Walloon infantry, which he commanded in the assault on Budapest, receiving a severe wound. In 1604 he was made general of artillery, and handled his new force with conspicuous success; the campaign of this year showed Tilly as a soldier of great capacity, and in 1605 he was made a field-marshal. His part in the dissensions in Austria, which preluded the Thirty Years War, was marked by unswerving loyalty and devotion to the emperor and the Catholic religion. In 1610 he left the service of the emperor to enter that of Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League. It was not, however, until 1620 that he became lieutenant-general to Maximilian and commander-in-chief of the field forces.
With the great victory of the Weisser Berg near Prague (1620) the new army and its leader became celebrated throughout Germany, and the long and weary campaigns against Christian, Mansfeld and the Protestant princes of the north-west established their reputation. The chief battles were Wimpfen (1622), Stadtlohn (1623), Wiesloch (1622), Höchst (1622), the last being a great victory for the Catholic forces, and winning for Tilly the title of count, which was given by the emperor himself (1622). The military operations of the Thirty Years' War will be found described under that heading. With the intervention of the king of Denmark, the struggle entered upon a new phase, and on the imperial side a new army, that of Wallenstein, appeared on the scene, though it was the army of the League which won the great success of the war at Lutter-am-Barenberge (1626). Throughout these arduous campaigns Tilly had other than military difficulties with which to contend. The military superiority of his veterans, trained as they were to his own ideal of “a ragged soldier and a bright musket,” may be held to explain his victories over superior numbers, but the energy which he displayed in the midst of political difficulties was not less conspicuous than his leadership and strategy. On two occasions, at least, he was thwarted by orders from the League; once the Protestants were allowed to escape into Holland, once the army of Wallenstein was left to its own resources in the presence of the enemy. That the League achieved the successes which it actually did, was to the credit of Tilly and his men rather than to any action of the allied princes. It may be that Tilly cannot be considered as great a soldier as Wallenstein; it should, however, be borne in mind that the League army never possessed the prestige of an imperial force: that Tilly was repeatedly thwarted by political considerations, and that, even so, the hardest part of the task was achieved by the League army.
The defeat of King Christian was soon followed by the intervention of Gustavus Adolphus, a great captain at the head of the finest troops in Europe. But Tilly was the best general of the old school; the League troops were trained after the Spanish model, and the opening stages of the campaign did not display any marked superiority of the Swedes. At this time Tilly was commander of the imperial forces as well as of his own army. The first great contest was for the possession of Magdeburg (1631). After one of the fiercest struggles of the war the town was taken by storm on the 20th of May, and the sack which followed was accompanied with every sort of atrocity. For this the old general has been held responsible, yet it was rather the magnitude of the catastrophe than its special cruelties which made it the most striking example of military barbarity in modern history. Tilly's personal exertions saved the cathedral and other religious buildings from pillage and fire. Four months later Tilly and Gustavus, the representatives of the old and the new art of war, met in the battle of Breitenfeld (q.v.). The victory of Gustavus was complete, though the imperial general, severely wounded as he was, managed to draw off his men in good order. A few more months of campaigning brought the two armies to the Lech, where Gustavus was again victorious, and Tilly received a mortal wound. He died on the 30th of April 1632, in Ingolstadt, and was buried in the church at Altenötting in Bavaria.
See O. Klopp, Tilly im 30-jährigen Krieg (Stuttgart, 1861); K. Wittich, Magdeburg, Gustav Adolf und Tilly; also memoir of Tilly in Allg. deutsche Biographie; Keym-Marcour, Johann Tzerclaes, Graf v. Tilly; Count Villermont, Tilly, ou La Guerre de trente ans (Tournay, 1859).
TILSIT, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of East Prussia, situated on the left bank of the Memel or Niemen, here crossed by an iron railway bridge, 57 m. S.E. of Memel and 72 N.E. of Königsberg by rail. Pop. (1905), 37,148. The town has a number of handsome modern buildings, including a town hall, a post office, law courts, and a large hospital. It contains four Protestant churches, among them the German church, with a handsome steeple, and the curious circular Lithuanian church, a Roman Catholic church, a Jewish synagogue and a classical school (Gymnasium). The manufactures include machinery, chemicals, soap, leather, shoes, glass and other articles, and there are iron-foundries, breweries, and, steam flour and saw-mills. Tilsit carries on trade in timber, grain, hemp, flax, herrings and coal; but its trade with Russia, at one time considerable, has fallen off since the construction of the railway from Königsberg to Kovno. The river is navigable above the town, and there is a steamboat communication with Königsberg, Memel and Kovno.
Tilsit, which received civic rights in 1552, grew up around a castle of the Teutonic order, known as the “Schalauner Haus,” founded in 1288. It owes most of its interest to the peace signed here in July 1807, the preliminaries of which were settled by the emperors Alexander and Napoleon on a raft moored in the Memel. This treaty, which constituted the kingdom of Westphalia and the duchy of Warsaw, registers the nadir of Prussia's humiliation under Napoleon. The poet Max von Schenkendorf (1784-1817) was born at Tilsit.
See Aus Tilsits Vergangenheit (5 vols., Tilsit, 1888-1892); and R. Thimm, Beiträge zur Geschichte von Tilsit (Tilsit, 1893).
TIMAEUS (c. 345-c. 250 B.C.),[1] Greek historian, was born at Tauromenium in Sicily. Driven out by Agathocles, he migrated to Athens, where he studied rhetoric under a pupil of Isocrates and lived for fifty years. During the reign of Hiero II. he returned to Sicily (probably to Syracuse), where he died. While at Athens he completed his great historical work. The Histories, in at least 38 (Bury says 33) books, was divided into unequal sections, containing the history of Italy and Sicily in early times; of Sicily alone; of Sicily and Greece; of the cities and kings of Syria (unless the text of Suidas is corrupt); the lives of Agathocles and Pyrrhus, king of Epirus. The chronological sketch (Ὀλυμπιονῖκαι, the victors at Olympia) perhaps formed an appendix to the larger work. Timaeus was bitterly attacked by other historians, especially by Polybius, and indeed his unfairness towards his predecessors, which gained, him the nickname of Epitimaeus (fault-finder), laid him open to retaliation. Polybius was a practical soldier and statesman, Timaeus a bookworm without military experience or personal knowledge of the places he described. The most serious charge against Timaeus is that he wilfully distorted the truth, when influenced by personal considerations: thus, he was less than fair to Dionysius and Agathocles, while loud in praise of his favourite Timoleon. On the other hand, as even Polybius admits, Timaeus consulted all available authorities and records. His attitude towards the myths, which he claims to have preserved in their simple form (hence probably his nickname γραοσυλλεκτρία, “collector of old wives' tales,” though some authorities render this “old rag-woman,” in allusion to his fondness for trivial details), is preferable to the rationalistic interpretation under which it had, become the fashion to disguise them. Timaeus also devoted much attention to chronology, and introduced the system of reckoning by Olympiads, with which he compared the years of the Attic archons, the Spartan ephors, and the priestesses of Argos. This system, although not adopted in everyday life, was afterwards generally used by the Greek historians. Although a pupil of Philiscus of Miletus, a disciple of Isocrates, Timaeus is a representative of the Asiatic style of Hegesias of
- ↑ J. E. Sandys, c. 350-c. 260; J. B. Bury, 340-256.
