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Stockholm, Sweden, 1610

It had been a long road for the man standing on the docks, still dressed in the clothes of a Swedish military officer, waiting to board a ship to Stralsund. Having been plucked, a few short weeks before, from the marshes of northern Lithuania, he would soon be back at the Wettin court in Dresden. Albert Frederick wondered which place would be more taxing.

Life could sometimes be boring for third sons of nobility, and Albert Frederick, son of Elector Christian I of Saxony and Elisabeth of Palatinate*, had long thirsted for adventure. Furthermore, he often disagreed with his father, something he'd perhaps inherited from his mother. For the first 14 years of Elisabeth's life, the Palatinate had been Calvinist, a religion the deeply pious Elisabeth had soaked up. But, when her grandfather Frederick died and her father Louis, a Lutheran, became Elector, he'd revealed his Lutheranism and forced his daughter to follow along, something she did outwardly but not inwardly. Like most daughters of princes, Elisabeth had been married off to another noble family, in this case the Wettins of Saxony. But her new husband, Christian I, was strongly Lutheran too, and pursued a policy of cooperation with the Hapsburgs**-two things that greatly displeased Elisabeth. She was unable to bring her husband around though, nor her first two sons, but a teenage Albert Frederick struggled to reconcile the piety of his mother with that of the rest of his (Lutheran) friends and family. Despite their differences, didn't all Protestants have a common opposition to Rome? Instead of squabbling amongst themselves, shouldn't they, perhaps, unite to deal with a common foe?

Such points of view had found no support in Dresden, however. Growing up, Albert Frederick had excelled at his studies, especially the martial ones, and had avidly read all the books on military strategy he could get his hands on-both from classical writers, and more recent works on the Italian and Dutch wars and the advances made by the Spanish and men like Maurice of Nassau. But Saxony was not involved in any wars, and as a third son, it seemed unlikely that Albert Frederick might come to be the ruler of anything. So, at 19, he set off in 1606 to join Charles IX's armies in Sweden. And, among the marshes and fields of northern Lithuania and Livonia, the young man finally found himself. He led men into combat, singing Lutheran hyms, against the armies of Catholic Poland. All the skills he had learned from books were tested on the battlefield, and Albert Frederick's fellow officers often praised his superb tactical mind. The four years spent on Polish battlefields proved liberating to the young man, so used to the stultifying confines of Dresden's court.

But, events in Saxony weren't standing still. Albert Frederick's second brother, John George, got the worst of a run-in with smallpox in 1609, and five months later, Christian, the eldest child, died in a hunting accident. At 49, Elector Christian was getting on in his years, and now he needed his only surviving son in Dresden. It was time Albert Frederick came home, and Christian wrote to Charles IX, asking that his son be recalled from the front. Soon, with a heavy heart, Albert Frederick said goodbye to all his subordinates and took a ship to Stockholm, and went from their to Stralsund, to take a journey home through Pommerania and Brandenburg. Christian and Albert Frederick didn't get along any better than they had when the latter had left, but now, Albert was the heir, and everyone knew Christian only had a few years to live. And once those years were done, a lot of things were going to change in Saxony.

*Who was born in 1562, and IOTL died that year. This is the POD.
**IOTL, Saxony was pro-Hapsburg during the early stages of the Thirty Years War, before the growing intolerance of Emperor Ferdinand II forced him to change sides.
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