cousin the landgravine of Hesse-Cassel. But at this point the
army, headed by Bernhard’s old colonels, demanded to be put
into rest-quarters, and Turenne allowing them to disperse as they
wished, was surprised by Mercy and Weert—who brought his
courage, if nothing else, back from the field of Jankau—and lost
two-thirds of his forces. But Turenne instead of retreating to
Turenne’s Army.
the Rhine installed himself in the landgravine’s country,
where he collected reinforcements of Hessians and Swedes,
while Enghien hurried up from the Moselle and crossed
the Rhine to repair the disaster. The “Army of Weimar” and
the “Army of France” joined forces, as in 1644, almost under
the eyes of the enemy. Enghien at once pushed forward from
Ladenburg, by Heidelberg, Wimpfen, Rottenburg and Dinkelsbühl.
But from day to day the balance leaned more and more on the
Bavarian side, for Torstensson, after threatening Vienna (April),
had drawn off into Moravia without waiting for the dilatory Rakóczy,
and the emperor was able to give Maximilian an Austrian corps
to be added to Mercy’s army. Mercy therefore, after manoeuvring
for a time on Enghien’s left flank, placed himself in a strong position
at Allerheim near Nördlingen, directly barring the way to the
Danube. The second battle of Nördlingen (August 3, 1645) was
Second battle of Nördlingen.
as desperately fought as the first, and had not Mercy
been killed at the crisis of the day Enghien would probably
have been disastrously defeated. As it was, the
young duke was victorious, but he had only 1500 infantry
left in rank and file out of 7000 at the end. Soon afterwards
Enghien fell ill, and his army returned to France. Turenne,
left with a few thousand men only, attempted in vain to hold his
ground in Germany and had to make a hasty retreat before the
archduke Leopold William, who had meantime made peace with
Rakóczy, and, leaving Torstensson’s[1] successor Wrangel
undisturbed in his Silesian cantonments, brought Gallas’s and
Hatzfeldt’s troops to aid Weert’s. Turenne wintered around Philippsburg,
almost the only remaining conquest of these two brilliant
but costly campaigns. But before he settled down into winter
quarters he sent a corps to the Moselle, which dislodged the
imperialist garrison of Trier and restored the elector in his
archbishopric. In Flanders Gaston of Orleans conquered a number of
fortresses, and his army united with that of the Dutch. But the
allies separated again almost at once, each to undertake the sieges
which suited its own purposes best.
From Silesia Wrangel passed into Bohemia, where he remained until the forces employed against Rakóczy and Turenne could send help to the imperialists opposed to him. He then drew away into Hesse[2] to support the landgravine of Cassel against the landgrave of Darmstadt, the archduke Leopold William and the Bavarians following suit.
The campaign of 1646 in Hesse up to August was as usual uneventful, each army being chiefly concerned with its food. But at last the archduke retired a little, leaving Turenne and Wrangel free to join their forces. Turenne had no intention of repeating the experiences of Freiburg and Nördlingen. War Turenne’s strategy. had by now settled down into the groove whence it did not issue till 1793. It was more profitable to attain the small objects that were sought by manoeuvre than by battle, and the choice of means practically lay between manoeuvring the enemy’s army into poor districts and so breaking it up by starvation, and pushing one’s own army into rich districts regardless of the enemy’s army. The usual practice was the first method. Turenne chose the second.
Delayed at the opening of the year by orders from Mazarin to stand still—the elector of Bavaria had opened negotiations in order to gain time for the archduke Leopold William to march into the west—Turenne found it impossible to reach Hesse by the short and direct route, and he therefore made a rapid and secret march down the Rhine as far as Wesel, whence, crossing unopposed, he joined Wrangel on the upper Lahn (August 10th). The united armies were only 19,000 strong. Then the imperialists, fearing to be hemmed in and starved between Turenne and the Rhine, fell back to Fulda, leaving the Munich road clear. The interior of Bavaria had not been fought over for eleven years, and was thus almost the only prosperous land in desolated Germany. Turenne and Wrangel marched straight forward on a broad front. On the 22nd of September, far ahead of the pursuers, for whom they left nothing to eat, they reached Augsburg, and for the rest of the year they devastated the country about Munich in order to force Maximilian to make terms. An armistice was concluded in the winter, Maximilian having been finally brought to consent by an ill-judged attempt of the emperor (who feared that Bavaria would go the way of Brandenburg and Saxony) to seduce his army. The French and Swedes wintered in southern Württemberg.
In Flanders, Gaston of Orleans and Enghien took Dunkirk and other fortresses. In Italy, where the Tuscan fortresses were attacked, the French and Prince Thomas their ally were completely checked at first, until Mazarin sent a fresh corps thither and restored the balance. In Catalonia Last months of the war. Harcourt underwent a serious reverse in front of Lerida at the hands of his old opponent Leganez, and Mazarin sent Enghien, now Prince of Condé, to replace him.
1647 was a barren year. The Low Countries Spaniards, concluding a truce with the Dutch, threw their whole force upon France, but this attack dissipated itself in sieges. In Italy Plessis-Praslin won an unprofitable victory over the viceroy of the Milanese on the Oglio (July 4th). In Spain Condé, resuming the siege of Lerida, was repulsed with even more loss than Harcourt had been the year before, and had to retire upon the mere appearance of a relieving army. In Germany Turenne and Wrangel parted company. The latter returned to Hesse, whence he raided into Bohemia, but was driven back by the imperialists under their new general, Melander-Holzapfel. As the few obtainable supply areas gave out one by one, the Swedes gradually retired almost to the coast, but the imperialists did not follow, swerving into Hesse instead to finish the quarrel of the landgravine and the landgrave. Turenne meanwhile had had to send all the French troops to Luxemburg to help in the defence of northern France against the Spaniard. The Weimar Army had refused to follow him to the Meuse, and mutinied for its arrears of pay. Turenne however, promptly seized the ringleaders and after a sharp fight disarmed the rest. Thus ignominiously Bernhard’s old army vanished from the scene.
In the autumn the elector of Bavaria was reconciled to the emperor and his army re-entered the field. Turenne was therefore sent back to Germany to assist the Swedes. But winter came on before any further inroads could be made into south Germany.
The campaign of 1648 brought the decision at last. Turenne and Wrangel, having refitted their forces and united in Hesse as in 1646, steadily drove back the imperialists and Bavarians, whose 30,000 combatants were accompanied by a horde of nearly 130,000 hangers-on—men, women and children—to the Danube. For a moment, at Nördlingen, the French and the Swedes separated, but they soon reunited, moved on to and beyond the Danube, and at Zusmarshausen (May 17th) catching the enemy in the act of manoeuvring, they destroyed his Battle of Zusmarshausen. rear-guard, Melander being amongst the dead. The victors advanced as far as the Inn, but Piccolomini, reorganizing the debris of the Austro-Bavarian army, checked their further progress and even drove them back to the line of the Isar. Meantime, however, the Swedish general Königsmarck, gathering all the scattered forces of his side in Saxony and Silesia, had entered Bohemia and was besieging Prague. This caused the recall of Piccolomini’s army, and Turenne and Wrangel invested Munich. But Mazarin ordered the French to retire into Suabia so as not to compromise the peace negotiations at the critical moment, and Wrangel followed suit. Before Königsmarck was in a position to assault Prague news came of peace.
Meanwhile in Artois Condé had repulsed the Spanish invasion by his brilliant victory of Lens (August 5th), which was a second Rocroi. After the thanksgiving service for the victory at Nôtre Dame, Mazarin arrested the leaders of the Parlement of Paris, and in a few hours the streets were barricaded and a civil war in progress. This was the Fronde (q.v.), which went on for another eleven years.
Authorities.—S. R. Gardiner, Thirty Years’ War; A. Gindely, Gesch. des 30jähr. Krieges; Chemnitz, Gesch. des Schwedischen Krieges; v. Pufendorf, 26 Bücher der Schwedish-deutschen Kriegsgeschichte (1688); Hon. E. Noel, Gustaf Adolf; Hardÿ de Périni, Batailles Françaises, iii. and iv.; lives of Turenne, Condé, Wallenstein, Gustavus, &c.; vols. ix. and x. of Clausewitz’s works; Lorentzen, Schwedens Armee im 30jähr. Kriege; Loewe, Organisation der Wallensteinschen Heere; Précis des Campagnes de Gustave Adolphe (Brussels, 1887). (C. F. A.)
- ↑ Torstensson, suffering from gout and worn out by the campaign, retired after the unsuccessful Vienna raid.
- ↑ John George of Saxony, seeing that his country was faring worse in a state of open war against Sweden than it would even in the most impotent neutrality, had made a truce with Wrangel on what terms he could obtain.
