A few minutes later Marshal Horn, surrounded on all sides by the enemy, and feeling the impossibility of further resistance with his weakened and diminished force, was forced to surrender with all his command.
Duke Bernhard narrowly escaped the same fate; but in the end he managed to rally some nine thousand men and retreated towards the Maine.

The defeat was a terrible one; ten thousand men were killed and wounded, and four thousand under Horn taken prisoners; all the guns, equipage, and baggage fell into the hands of the enemy.
Nordlingen was the most decisive battle of the war; its effect was to change a war which had hitherto been really only a civil war--a war of religion--into one with a foreign enemy.

Hitherto France had contented herself with subsidizing Sweden, who had played the principal part.
Henceforward Sweden was to occupy but a secondary position.

Cardinal Richelieu saw the danger of allowing Austria to aggrandize itself at the expense of all Germany, and now took the field in earnest.
Upon the other hand Nordlingen dissolved the confederacy of the Protestant German princes against Ferdinand the Second.

The Elector of Saxony, who had ever been vacillating and irresolute in his policy, was the first to set the example by making peace with the emperor.