Wars of the Age of Louis XIV, 1650-1715: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization

WARS OF THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV, 1650 –1715

Recent Titles in Greenwood Encyclopedias of the Modern World Wars The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization Cathal J. Nolan

WARS OF THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV, 1650–1715 AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL WARFARE AND CIVILIZATION Cathal J. Nolan

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nolan, Cathal J. Wars of the age of Louis XIV, 1650–1715 : an encyclopedia of global warfare and civilization / Cathal J. Nolan. p. cm. — (Greenwood encyclopedias of modern world wars, ISSN 1941–4080) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–33046–9 (alk. paper) 1. Military history, Modern—17th century—Encyclopedias. 2. Military history, Modern—18th century—Encyclopedias. 3. Military art and science—History—17th century—Encyclopedias. 4. Military art and science—History—18th century—Encyclopedias. I. Title. D273.6.N65 2008 355.0094'09032—dc22 2008016569 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Cathal J. Nolan All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008016569 ISBN: 978–0–313–33046–9 ISSN: 1941–4080 First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Behold then the true form and worth of foreign trade, which is the great revenue of the king, the honor of the kingdom, the noble profession of the merchant, the school of our arts, the supply of our wants, the employment of our poor, the improvement of our lands, the nursery of our mariners, the walls of our kingdom, the means of our treasure, the sinews of our wars, the terror of our enemies. —Thomas Mann In winter, the poor starve, thieve, or turn soldier. —Daniel Defoe It is your military genius that has inspired my sword. —Peter the Great, in flattery of William III How could God do this to me after all I have done for him? —Louis XIV, on hearing news from Blenheim, August 13, 1704 Try to remain at peace with your neighbors. I loved war too much. —Louis XIV, on his deathbed, to his great-grandson, Louis XV

CONTENTS List of Entries Preface

ix

xix

Introduction

xxv

Note on Dates Maps

xxxi

xxxv

The Encyclopedia

1

Chronology of Major Events, 1648–1721 Select Bibliography Index

569

559

545

LIST OF ENTRIES abatis absolutism Acadia Act of Succession (1701) Act of Union (March 4/15, 1707) Admiralty Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (May 2, 1668) Alexis (1629–1676) Algiers Almanza, Battle of (April 14/25, 1707) Alsace alti bölük sipahileri Altona, Treaty of (July 10/20, 1689) amphibious warfare Andrussovo, Treaty of (January 30/February 9, 1667) Angelets rebellion (1669–1672) Anglo-Dutch Brigade Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement (1689) Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654) Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667) Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674) Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660)

Anjou, Philip, duc d’ (1683–1746) Anne of Austria (1601–1666) Anne of Great Britain (1665–1714) anoblis Anti-Habsburg War (1703–1711) approach Apraxin, Fedor Mateyevitch (1661–1728) armateurs army of observation army of relief arrière-ban arsenal Articles of War artillery artillery fortress artillery park artillery train asiento askeri assault Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of (1644–1703) attack Audijos rebellion (1663) auget Augusta, Battle of (April 22, 1676)

Augustus II of Poland (1670–1733) Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Austrian Empire Austrian Netherlands Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699) Autorament Cudzoziemski Autorament Narodowy Ayscue, George (1616–1671) Azaps Baden, Treaty of (August 27/September 7, 1714) bahziz ballast Banat krajina Banner system banquette Bantry Bay, Battle of (May 1/11, 1689) Barbary corsairs Barbets barbette Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of (May 19–24/May 29–June 4, 1692) barge bark barracks barrier fortresses

List of Entries Barrier Treaty, First (October 18/29, 1709) Barrier Treaty, Second (January 18/29, 1713) Barrier Treaty, Third (November 4/15, 1715) Bart, Jean (1650–1702) bastion batardeau Batoh, Battle of (June 2–3, 1652) battalion batter battery battle battle cries bayonet Beachy Head, Battle of (February 21/March 2, 1653) Beachy Head, Battle of (June 30/July 10, 1690) beat the chamade bedel-i nüzul before the mast belaying pin beldar Belize Belle Île, raid on (June–August 1674) Berestczko, Battle of (June 28–31, 1651) berm Berwick, James, 1st Duke of (1670–1734) Bévézieres, Battle of (1690) bey Beyliks billets/billeting Blake, Robert (1599–1657) Blenheim (Blindheim), Battle of (August 2/13, 1704) blockship blunderbuss boarding boarding axe boarding pike bomb bombardment bomb ketch x

bonnet Bonnets Rouges rebellion (1675) Boufflers, Louis François, duc de (1644–1711) bounty Bourbon dynasty Bournonville, Duke of (1616–1690) bow(ing) bowman boyar boyau Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690) branch Brandenburg Brazil breach breastwork Breda, Treaty of (July 11/21, 1667) bricole brigade brigantine British Army British establishment broadside buccaneers Buda, siege of (June 17–September 2, 1686) Bulavin, Kondratay (c. 1660–1708) bullionism cabotage Cadogan, William (1675–1726) caltrop Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705) camouflet camp volant Candia, siege of (1666–1669) cannelure cutting cannon cannon of seven cannon shot rule capital capitulation caponnière captaincy-general

Carbisdale, Battle of (April 27, 1650) carcass Carlos II of Spain (r. 1665–1700) Carpi, Battle of (July 9, 1701) carronade Cartagena, Battle of (November 5, 1650) casemate Casimir, John II (r. 1648–1668) Cassano, Battle of (August 16, 1705) Cassel, Battle of (April 11, 1677) catamaran Catinat, Nicholas (1637–1712) cauldron cavalier (cavalry) cavalier (fortification) cavalier de tranche Cavaliers cavalry cebelu cebici bazi Cebicis (cebicilar) Ceylon chamade chamber Charles II of England (1630–1685) Charles VI of Austria chase gun Château-Renault, François Louis (1637–1716) chavush cheesemongers chemin des rondes chevaux de frise Chiari, Battle of (September 1/12, 1701) China Chinese armies choragiew Cimarrones citadel çit palankasi close-fights close range

List of Entries Coehoorn, Menno, Baron van (1641–1704) Coehoorn mortar cofferdam Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–1683) Cologne (Köln) commissaire ordinaire de l’artillerie commissaires commissaires au classes commissioned officers communications Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO) Compagnie du Nord company complement Concert of the Hague (1658) conduct money Conseil d’en Haut contributions convoy Çorbasi cordon cornet corvée corvette Cossacks counter-approach counter-battery counterfort counterguard countermine counterscarp countersinking course (on land) couvreface generale covered way crémaillère Cremona, Battle of (February 1, 1702) Créqui, François, Chevalier de (1625–1687) crest Crete crimp crochet

Croissy, marquis de (1625–1696) Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658) crownwork cruiser culverin culverin-drake curtain (curtain wall) cutlass cuvette Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson, Count (1625–1703) Danish Army déblai decks Deerfield raid (February 29, 1704) defilade defilement demi-cannon (half cannon) demi-culverin (half-culverin) Denain, Battle of (July 13/24, 1712) Denmark depot deputies in the field Derbençi descent descent of the ditch desertion Deshima detached works dey directieschepen disease dismantle (a ship) disrate (a ship) ditch division Dominum Maris Baltici Donauwörth, Battle of (July 2/13, 1704) double on Dover, Treaty of (May 12/22, 1670) Downs, The Downs, Battle of The (June 1–4/11–14, 1666)

drabants dragonnades dragoons drill Dugay-Trouin, Réné (1673–1736) Dunbar, Battle of (September 3, 1650) Dunes, Battle of the (June 4/14, 1658) Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de (c. 1610–1688) Dutch Army Dutch Gift (1660–1661) Dutch Navy Dutch War (1672–1678) East India Company (English) East Indiaman écoute Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685) Edict of Potsdam (November 8, 1685) Eight Banner Army embargo embrasure enceinte enfilade England English Civil Wars (1639–1651) enlightened despotism Enzheim (Ensheim), Battle of (October 4, 1674) epaulement escalade esplanade Espolla, Battle of (July 4, 1677) establishment Estrées, Jean compte (duc) d’ (1624–1707) étapes Eternal Peace (May 1686) Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663–1736) evolutions exchange execution expense magazine xi

List of Entries Eyâlet Askerleri eyâlet-i Budin face falcon falconete fascine fathom fausse-braye (or braie) Fehrbellin, Battle of (June 18/28, 1675) fighting instructions fighting tariff file closers filibuster firemaster fireships firing on the roll fitna flags flagship flank (in battle) flank (in fortification) flank company flatboat fleet fleet in being Fleurus, Battle of (June 21/July 1, 1690) flintlock firearms flotilla flute fodder forecastle forests fort d’arret fortification forts fougasse fouling foul the range fournisseurs fraises France Franche-Comté Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659) Fraustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706) xii

Fredrik III of Denmark (r. 1648–1670) free company free evacuation free ships, free goods French and Indian Wars (1689–1763) French Army French Navy Friedlingen, Battle of (October 14, 1702) Friedrich I in Prussia (1657–1713) Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688) frigate Fronde (1648–1653) front frontières fugelman fusiliers Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653) gabion gachupines galeones galleon gallery galleys galliot Galway, Earl of (1648–1720) ganimet garde-fou Gardes du Corps Gardes marine garrison carriage garrisons gate Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710) gendarmerie General at Sea Generality Generalkriegskommissariat Genoa Georg, Johan ghazi

Ghent, siege of (March 1–12, 1678) ghulams Gibraltar Ginkel, Godard van glacis globe of compression Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) gorge governor grand vezier (vezir-i azam) Grave, siege of (July–October 1674) Great Britain Great Condé (1621–1686) great gun Great Northern War (1700–1721) Great Powers great ship Great Storm (November 26–27/ December 7–8, 1703) Green Standard Army grenades grenadiers Grenzer grog guérite guerre de cabinet guerre de course guerre d’escadre guerre guerroyante guinea gunner gunner’s quadrant gunner’s rule gun port gun tackle Habsburgs Haiduks half-pay handy hanger Hanover haul close haul wind heave to hetman (otaman)

List of Entries

jack Jacobites Jamaica James II (1633–1701) Janissary Corps Japan Juel, Niels (1629–1697) Jumano

Kaiserlichs kale Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722) Kapikulu Askerleri Kara Mustafa Pasha (1634–1683) Karlowitz, Peace of (January 26, 1699) Karlstadt border Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660) Karl XI of Sweden (1655–1697) Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718) Kazan Kentish Knock, Battle of the (September 28/October 8, 1652) ketch Khmelnitsky, Bohdan (c. 1595–1657) Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) Kiejdany, Treaty of (August 17, 1655) Kingdom of the Two Sicilies King Philip’s War (1675–1676) King William’s War (1689–1697) Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702) Kockersberg, Battle of (October 7, 1677) Köge Bay (July 1, 1677) Konotop, Battle of (July 8, 1659) köprücu Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (1635–1676) Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1702) Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (1583–1661) Köprülü Mustafa Pasha (1637–1691) kuls Kuruc

kahya bey kaim mekam

labanc laboratory

Höchstädt I, Battle of (September 20, 1703) Höchstädt II, Battle of (August 13, 1704) Hofkriegsrat Holmes, Robert (1622–1692) Holy Roman Empire horns hornwork hostages hoy Hudson Bay Company Huguenots hussars idler Ijssel line Ilbersheim, Treaty of (November 7, 1704) Île des Faisans Imperial Army impressment Impress Service independent company Indian Wars infantry infernal machine insult intendants intendants des armées interloper investment Ireland Irish establishment Iroquois Confederacy ishan Italy

laPimci Landgrafs landman land regiment latrines Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea (1652) leeward and windward gauges Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705) Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747) Leslie, David (1601–1682) Le Tellier, Michel (1603–1685) letters of marque (and reprisal) letters of service levend/levendat lieutenant du roi Lille, siege of (August 28– September 26, 1667) Lille, siege of (August 14– December 10, 1708) limber Limerick, Treaty of (October 3/13, 1691) limites line abreast line ahead line ahead and astern line astern line of battle (at sea) line of defense lines Lines of Brabant lines of circumvallation lines of contravallation lines of investment Lines of Lauterbourg Lines of Stollhofen Lines of the Var Lionne, Hugues de (1611–1671) listner list of headings livres logistics London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) longboat xiii

List of Entries loopholes Lorraine Lorraine, Charles IV, duc de (1604–1675) Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690) Louis XIV (1638–1715) Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) Lowestoft, Battle of (June 3/13, 1665) Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676) lunette Lustucru rebellion (1662) Luxembourg Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695) Luzzara, Battle of (August 4/15, 1702) Maastricht, siege of (June 11–30, 1673) Madrid lock magazines magistral line Maison du Roi make sail Malmö, Battle of (July 5/15, 1678) Malplaquet, Battle of (August 31/ September 11, 1709) Mamluks Manchuria Manchus mandate of heaven mansabdari mantlet maps Marathas Marbella, Battle of (March 10, 1705) marching regiments Marie Thérèse (1638–1683) marines Maritime Powers Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) xiv

Marsaglia, Battle of (October 4, 1693) Martinet, Jean (d. 1672) masking Master-General of the Ordnance masts matchlock Mauerscheisser Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726) Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661) Mazepa-Koledinsky, Ivan Stepanovich (1644?–1709) Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688) mercantilism merlon Messinian rebellion (1674–1678) Methuen Treaties Milan, Convention of (March 13, 1707) milice gardes-côtes Militargrenze (Vojna krajina) military confederations military discipline military engineers military labor military medicine military music mines/mining miquelet miquelets misl Mohács, Battle of (August 12, 1687) Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) Monmouth, Duke of (1649–1685) Montecuccoli, Raimondo (1609–1680) Morocco mortar Mughal Empire mulkgiri munitionnaires Münster

musketoon musket shot muster Mutiny Act (1689) Namur, siege of (May 25– June 30, 1692) Namur, siege of (July 2– September 1, 1695) Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700) natural frontiers naval tactics Navigation Act (1651) Navigation Act (1660) necessaries Neerwinden, Battle of (July 19/29, 1693) nefir-i am Ne Plus Ultra lines Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689) New Amsterdam New England Newfoundland New France New Model Army New Spain Nijmegen, Treaty of (August 10, 1678) Nijmegen, Treaty of (September 17, 1678) Nijmegen, Treaty of (February 6, 1679) Nikan Nikon (1605–1681) Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) Noailles, Ann-Jules, duc de (1650–1708) Northern War, Second (1655–1660) North Quarter nouveaux convertis Nystad, Peace of (August 30/ September 10, 1721) Obrona Potoczna officers off reckonings Old Believers (Raskolniki)

List of Entries Olkieniki, Battle of (November 9/19, 1700) opening of the trenches Oran Orange, Principality of Orangists Ordinary ordu bazar orillon Ormonde, Duke of (1665–1745) Orta Ortenbach, Battle of (July 23, 1678) Ottoman Empire Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669) Ottoman warfare Oudenarde, Battle of (June 30/ July 11, 1708) pacholeks Pagan, Blaise François, compte de (1604–1665) Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689) Palermo, Battle of (June 2, 1676) palisade Pancerna cavalry Papier Timbré rebellion (1675) parados parallels parapet parley pas de charge pas des souris passe volant pell-mell Penn, William (1621–1670) Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703) perrier petard Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) petite guerre petty officer Petyhorcy cavalry Philippsburg

pièces ambulantes pike pinnace pioneers pirates pistol shot Piyadeg˘an militia places of arms poczet Poland Polish Army Poltava, Battle of (June 27/ July 8, 1709) pomest’ia cavalry Pondicherry Pontchartrains, comptes de Portland, Battle of (February 18–20/February 28– March 2, 1653) Portugal porucznik postern poundage powder magazine pré carré priming powder privateers prize prize agent prize court prize money prize victualler Prussian Army Pueblo Indians Puigcerda, siege of (April 29–May 28, 1678) pulk Pultusk, Battle of (April 10/21, 1703) Pyrenees, Treaty of the (October 28/November 7, 1659) quadrant Quarter Army quarter cannon quartering quartiers de rafraichissement Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713)

quoin Raad van State raiding Rajputs rake Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735) rameau Ramillies, Battle of (May 12/23, 1706) rampart ramrods ranker ranks (at sea) ranks (on land) rapparees Rastadt (Rastatt), Treaty of (February 24/March 7, 1714) Rates rating rations Ratisbon, Truce of (August 15, 1684) ravelin Raya razing the works Razin, Stenka (c. 1630–1671) rebuild redan redoubt reduce re-entrant Regencies Regents regiment regimental guns Rehnsköld, Karl Gustaf (1651–1722) remblai retrenchment revetment Rheinbund (1658) Rheinfeld, Battle of (July 6, 1678) ricochet fire (“tir à ricochet”) rig rigging Rites controversy roads xv

List of Entries Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/March 8, 1658) rotmistrz roturiers Roure rebellion (1670) Royal Hungary Royal Navy running footmen Rupert, Prince (1619–1682) Russia Russian Army Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de (1607–1676) Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697) Sacra Ligua sail sail cloth sails Saka salient sally point sandbags Sandwich, Earl of (1625–1672) sap Sapiehas sapper sap roller Sardinia sarica Sarsfield, Patrick (1660?–1693) saucisson Scanian War (1674–1679) scarp Schnapphahns Schomberg, Friedrich, Graf von (1615–1690) schooner Schooneveld, First Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1673) Schooneveld, Second Battle of (June 4/14, 1673) Scilly Isles Scottish lock seaman sea officer sefer bahzizi xvi

Seigneley, Marquis de (1651–1690) Sejm sejmiki sekban Seneffe, Battle of (August 11, 1674) sentries serdar Serdengeçti (serden-geçtiler) servitor classes sextant shallop ship-of-the-line ships ship-smashers shorten sail shot Shovel, Cloudesley (1650–1707) sich siege money siege park siege warfare signaling Sikhs silahdars silladars Sinzheim, Battle of (June 16, 1674) sipahis Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680) skulking way of war sloop-of-war slopship Smyrna convoy (June 17–18, 1693) snaphance Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696) Solebay, Battle of (May 28/ June 7, 1672) Songhay sortie Sound Tolls sovereignty of the sea soyughal Spain Spanish Army Spanish Navy

Spanish Netherlands Spanish riders spar Sperrfort spike the guns spill squadron (cavalry) squadron (naval) St. Denis, Battle of (August 4/14, 1678) St. Gotthard, Battle of (August 1, 1664) St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/ August 4, 1666) St. Malo Stadholderate Staffarda, Battle of (August 8/18, 1690) standing army standing officers Stanislaw I (1677–1766) Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger, Graf von (1638–1701) States General States’ Navy station Steenkerke, Battle of (July 24/August 3, 1692) stockfish Stockholm, Peace of (February 1, 1720) stoppages Stormakstid storm bells Strasbourg strel’sty Stromboli, Battle of (January 8, 1676) Stuart, James Edward (1688–1776) subject troops subsistence money surrender Sweden Swedish Army Swedish Navy Sweinfedder swivel gun szlachta

List of Entries tablette tackle tail taking the shilling Tallard, Camille, compte de (1652–1728) talus tambour Tangier targe tarpaulin Tatars tenaille tenaille fortification tenaille of the place tenaillon terakki terrae dominum finitur, ubi finitur armorum vis terreplein Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653) Texel, Battle of (August 11/21, 1673) third-man regiments Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) three-decker Three Kingdoms timariots tonnage top Top Arabacs (top arabacilar) Topçu (Topçuar) Tophane-i Amire Torrington, Earl of (1689–1716) tour bastionée Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de (1642–1701) towarzysz trace trail tranchée général tranchée major traverse Trier Triple Alliance (January 23, 1668)

Tromp, Cornelius van (1629–1691) Tromp, Maarten van (1598–1653) troop troupes de la marine truck türedi askeri Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de (1611–1675) Turin, Battle of (September 7, 1706) Turin, Peace of (August 29, 1696) Türkenglocken Türkheim, Battle of (January 5, 1675) two-decker Tyrconnel, Earl of (1630–1691) uniforms United Provinces useless mouths uti possidetis Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713) Vallacker cavalry van Vasvár, Peace of (August 10, 1664) Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre, sieur de (1633–1707) Vaudois Velez-Málaga, Battle of (August 13/24, 1704) Vendôme, Louis Joseph, duc de (1654–1712) Venice Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732) Vienna, siege of (July 14– September 12, 1683) Vigo Bay, Battle of (October 12/23, 1702) Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734)

Villeroi, François de Neufville, duc de (1644–1730) voivodes volley fire volunteer per order Voynuqs (Voynuks) Waldeck, Georg Friedrich, Prince of (1620–1692) wall-piece war chest ward room war finance War of Devolution (1667–1668) War of the Reunions (1683–1684) War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) warrant officer Warsaw, Battle of (July 28–30, 1656) watches water line water maneuvers wear weather gauge weatherly Western Design West Indies Company (WIC) Westminster, Treaty of (April 12/22, 1654) Westminster, Treaty of (February 9/19, 1674) wheel lock Wild Geese William III (1650–1702) Williamite War (1689–1691) windage Windische border winter quarters Witt, Jan de (1625–1672) women Worcester, Battle of (August 2, 1651) Wrangel, Karl Gustaf (1613–1676) Wu Sangui (1612–1678) xvii

List of Entries yacht yard yaw yawl Yaya infantry Yellow Waters, Battle of (February 1648)

xviii

Yeniçeri AOasi zarbzens Zenta, Battle of (September 1/11, 1697) zig-zags zone of servitude

Zunghar Mongols Zuravno (Zurawno), Treaty of (October 1676)

PREFACE Specialization is properly prized and admired in historians and is the fundamental basis of all advances in historical knowledge. But excessive specialization can lead to distortion, in which one decade’s or even century’s political or cultural or military evolution is misunderstood by a different set of specialists as revolution, because change is always more exciting and impressive than underlying continuities. Historical tribes comprising period specialists are nearly as territorial as actual tribes. General studies and encyclopedias have their weaknesses as well, but at the end of the day a broad understanding of history is the goal of all who study it, or should be. For this work, I have delved into sources ranging from remarkably in-depth studies of the geometry of fortification, the changing face of 18th-century battle, and the evolution of warship design. I have also spent much time with works on the nature of late-17th-century absolutism, biographies of powerful personages, and the global interplay of commerce, imperialism, and war. It all has been an intriguing scholarly experience that has revived and deepened my enthusiasm for historical studies, although the ubiquity of death and the frailty of peace in face of the vanity of kings recalled to mind that a base human condition of violent conflict persisted even in an age that considered itself “enlightened.” War is endlessly confusing. What does it really mean that this or that border was crossed by an army, that fleets were sunk, castle walls toppled, or great cities sacked? In studying war, there is a natural temptation to focus on the spectacular, to recount the great battle upon which history seemed to turn, and to tell tales of great commanders who supposedly turned it. But war is a far deeper phenomenon than battle, with much more elusive causes and effects. Its meaning is entwined in symbiotic relation to changes in religion, culture, politics, and economics. In and of itself, war is usually morally agnostic; it has upheld governing elites whether they were just or despotic, or overthrown them in favor of some other set of masters who had advantages in weapons or tactics, but not better manners or morals. Yet war has moral significance, even if it is often

Preface

unclear as to moral meaning. Somehow, we know that it matters whether civilians are massacred or protected, whether prisoners of war have their throats cut or are ransomed or paroled. It is important that some men and women of conscience over the centuries have tried to limit or end war, even as others with refined consciences supported some wars as necessary (if nonetheless evil) means to longer-term or wider moral goods. It is significant that some artists and poets have celebrated war while others have lamented it, but that mothers only ever fear it. War undresses humanity. Soldiers know better than anyone the murky moral arena in which they live and work. The Duke of Wellington, walking the field of his great victory at Waterloo, mumbled to an aide: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Half a century later and a continent away, Confederate General Robert E. Lee spoke a different truth, one far less acceptable in polite modern company but an abiding fact of war nonetheless. It has its own aesthetic, powerful and alluring. On the spectacle and lure of war he said, after repelling a Union charge at Fredericksburg: “It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.” On the other side of the lines, William T. Sherman recalled the carnage of the American Civil War this way: “War is at best barbarism. . . . Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more destruction. War is hell.” It is also the most expensive, technically complex, and physically, emotionally, and morally demanding enterprise that humans undertake. No art, no music, no cathedral or mosque, no great city, no space program or research into the cure for AIDS or cancer has ever received a fraction of the money, time, and effort that people and societies have regularly put into preparing for and waging war. Those hard truths have shaped my approach to this work and the tone in which it is written. In discussing so vast a range of issues and events, I have relied heavily on hundreds of specialist works by historians of enormously impressive erudition and deep regional historical knowledge. I am immensely grateful to these specialists, upon whose books and articles I have relied in such measure. I have not hesitated to add interpretations of my own in areas I know well, or where it seemed to me that larger patterns in history were readily apparent and broad lessons might be fairly drawn. Yet, writing a reference work of history such as this is primarily an exercise in synthesis. It is simply not possible for one author to master all the primary sources that are the raw ore from which the purer metals of historical truth are smelted. My challenge has been to gain sufficient command of the specialty literature to provide enough detailed narrative that past events become comprehensible, while also communicating the differing interpretations to which those events may be subject. In that, I cleave to the wisdom of G. M. Trevelyan, that in assessing historical actors and events “the really indispensable qualities [are] accuracy and good faith.” Reconstructions of past events and motivations are as accurate as I have been able to make them. I ask readers to accept that I have presented what I believe to be the facts of history and drawn conclusions about the meaning of those facts in scholarly good faith, without conscious bias or preference for the claims of any one party over xx

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another. I have, in sum, tried to the limits of my ability as a scholar to present war in the age of Louis XIV as it really was: naked and brutal and raw, as well as complex in motivation and effects. I am content to leave it to readers and critics to determine how well I performed that task. Concerning the comparative length of one entry as against another, it is generally true that the more distantly great events recede from the present the more the history of those events, and the historians who write about them, compress their description. Ideally, that is done because more of the original dross that always conceals the meaning of human affairs has been burned away, and the right conclusions have been drawn about what place in the larger human story a given historical event or person holds. In reality, it probably more closely reflects a common tendency and need to fix all stars in relation to one’s own time and point of view. I have made what effort I can to correct for this baleful habit. As to the length of the overall work, I may only plead in the spirit of Blaise Pascal that I would have written far less, but I did not have the time. Logic of the Work In Wars of the Age of Louis XIV, 1650–1715: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization, I have addressed the complexity of war in this period by including over 1,000 entries that span questions of military technology, war finance, social and class relations, and the evolution of professional standards for the new armies and navies of the post-1650 world. Included are biographies of key military and political figures, from kings, generals, and admirals to designers of fortifications and combat theorists. Of course, as befits a work of military history, most entries are concerned with a narrative recounting of major wars and descriptions of key battles and sieges. This includes explanations of their significance to the wars in which they occurred, and discussion of tactics and weapons employed. Longer battle entries concern fights that revealed an important changing of the guard among disputing powers, or were a turning point in a given war, or have been generally regarded as notable military events by generations of military historians. Some battle or siege entries concern fights from relatively minor wars or fights that were not in themselves decisive, but which nonetheless warranted extended treatment because they exposed some key change in military technology or use of new tactics. Many entries illustrate an opposite but arguably more important truth: that battles were seldom decisive in this period, and that changes in military technology did not usually constitute “revolutions in military affairs.” This work contains entries that explain minutely technical matters, such as the velocity and effect of drag on the range and accuracy of spherical shot or a musket ball, the evolution of drill and advances in military medicine, the adoption of uniforms, and the display and use of flags on land and at sea. There are entries that translate or define specialized period military terminology, others that describe weapons and technical terms and features of fortification, and more which explain naval construction techniques and describe the conduct of operations and new fleet tactics of war at sea. There is extensive discussion of the burden of logistics that so often determined the composition of opposing xxi

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forces and decided the strategies pursued. Closely related to logistics were problems of pay and morale, so there are entries here on contributions, mutiny, military discipline, and different systems of war finance and their effects on institutional support for armies and navies. The regional emphasis is heavily European, but not because the author has a personal bias that tugs in this direction. Focusing on European military events and developments is justified by the developing domination of European armies and navies over those of most— though by no means all—other societies and civilizations with which they came into contact. Any global military history must perforce concentrate on European military history in this era because changes and continuities there had a lasting influence nearly everywhere else, whereas the reverse was not true. Also, major areas of world military historical interest during this period became less dynamic. For instance, other than early fighting along coastal Brazil between Portuguese settlers and Dutch invaders, most of South America was quiescent under the “Pax Hispanica.” After China emerged from the chaos of the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), it mostly settled into relative peace and internal stability under a consolidated Qing dynasty, with only occasional forays against much weaker enemies populating most of Inner Asia than was the case in prior centuries. Japan was deeply into its famous “Tokugawa peace” for the years covered in this work, and hence events there hardly appear in these pages. Nevertheless, a concerted effort has been made to cover non-European military history commensurate with its relative importance. Wars and rebellions in India are covered. Extensive material is provided on the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman military. Native American military responses to penetration of the northeast forest and lakes region by competing European empires are treated in their own right, recording their many successes in this era, and not merely the victim-like reactions to inevitable migratory invasions of the continental interior. Analytically, this study starts from the straightforward observation that large states, empires, and civilizations have dominated world affairs for most of recorded history. Even so, smaller states and marginal societies sometimes have been quite influential in the larger course of world history, even if mainly as objects of aggression or imperial competition. Such societies can be interesting and important in their own right, in addition to being of regional significance. Thus, a number of smaller kingdoms are covered, in addition to all major kingdoms and empires. Each is treated in an entry that at the least summarizes the main features of its military position and development, and that tries to situate it in the larger contexts of time and region. It remains true, however, that it was the most powerful kingdoms and empires, the major civilizations from which they arose, and the wars in which they were involved that were the prime movers of world history in this period. Even small changes within certain key societies had a more important and long-term impact on world affairs than signal events within or among smaller countries. Comprehensive coverage is thus given to the policies and interactions of the most powerful kingdoms and empires, and to the dynamics which drove them, including economic, intellectual, political, and social innovation or decay. xxii

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Likewise, it is true that lesser—whether in character or talent—individuals in charge of the affairs of major states had a broad influence on world history. Often, their influence was weightier than that of a moral or intellectual titan, if the latter was confined by chance or birth to a Lilliputian land. Therefore, individuals who might be reasonably judged as of little personal consequence are sometimes given their day in this work, owing to the indisputable public consequences of their choices, actions, or omissions while in command of the public affairs of some major power. More than one otherwise-insignificant pope or prince, king or emperor, or some effete aristocratic general or admiral, has slipped into significant history via this back door, held ajar for them by the pervasive importance of raw power as a motive and moving force in the affairs of the world. Structure of the Work Wars of the Age of Louis XIV is organized alphabetically. Single-word entries are easy and straightforward to locate. It is not always obvious, however, where a compound term should be listed. For ease of use by readers, compound entries are listed as they are employed in normal speech and writing; that is, in the form in which they are most likely to be first encountered by the average reader. If readers are unable to find an entry they seek under one part of a compound term, they should have little difficulty finding it under another component of the term or phrase. Additionally, the book is heavily cross-referenced—all crossreferenced words or terms appear in italics the first time they appear in a given entry. Some license has been taken when cross-referencing adjectives or adverbs to entries that are actually listed as nouns. Readers are advised to make use of this feature, since cross-references almost always provide additional information or insight not contained in the original entry. Rather than clutter the text unduly with italics, common references such as “battle,” or specific weapons or country names, have been left in normal font. Yet, all such commonly used military terms are discussed in discrete entries. In rare cases, some common terms have been highlighted to indicate that they contain additional information that is highly relevant to the entry being perused. To avoid confusion or sending the reader on a fruitless cross-reference search, foreign words and phrases have not been italicized in the text of the main entries (they are, however, italicized in the entry heads, where no such confusion should arise). With only one exception—some rare in-text references to book titles, which are made clear by the context in which they appear—all in-text terms or phrases rendered in italics in an entry indicate a cross-reference. Some technical points: In areas where place names of battles or sieges differ significantly in spelling in several regional languages, I have provided each alternative place name and its language of origin at the start of the main entry. In many cases, blind entries were also added, directing readers to the main entry. This is especially the case concerning Hungarian, Turkish, Greek, and other competing place names in the Balkans. Where battles traditionally have different names for English-language readers as compared to their continental counterparts, I have provided a main entry in the common English form and a blind xxiii

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entry for the continental counterpart. Thus, “Blenheim” is the main entry for that battle in this book, with a blind entry under “Höchstädt II” to guide readers to the main entry. To avoid confusion as to which Emperor Charles or which King John is the one being referenced in a given instance, I have left Dutch, German, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and most Balkan-language names in their original forms, with blind cross-references provided if it is likely that English-language readers might look elsewhere in the first instance. Thus, in this work, Charles XII of Sweden is rendered as Karl XII, Frederick-William is given as Friedrich-Wilhelm, and so forth. There are rare exceptions to this: Charles VI of Austria is so well known by that name to English-language readers that I have listed his entry under its English spelling, rather than in German as Karl or in Spanish as Carlos III (his claimed title in Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession). For the same reason—familiarity to English-language students of military history—I have listed Ottoman emperors under generally accepted English spellings of Arabic or Turkish personal names. Besides an Introduction that places the military history of the period 1650–1715 into context, Wars of the Age of Louis XIV offers its readers a chronology of major events of the period, a detailed bibliography of important articles and books supplying additional information, and a note on dates that explains clearly the use of and difference between Old Style and New Style dates, the dual usage of which is a feature of this period. Finally, thirteen maps are provided to help put various wars, battles, and types of military fortification into better visual context.

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INTRODUCTION The conflicts covered in this encyclopedia, Wars of the Age of Louis XIV, 1650–1715, were more complex in forms of military and social organization than the European Wars of Religion that preceded them, the conditions of which are discussed and detailed in my earlier two-volume work, The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650 (Greenwood, 2006). The wars of the era of France’s Louis XIV, the “Sun King,” were also different in key ways from conflicts that followed, which will be dealt with in subsequent volumes in the Greenwood Encyclopedias of Modern World War series. Battles and sieges during the exceptionally long reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) were marked mostly by indecision, notwithstanding the reputation subsequently accruing to John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, for reintroducing the desire for decisive battle to early 18th-century European warfare. The wars of this age were, like nearly all wars fought since early modern times, decided mainly by attrition leading to economic, political, fiscal, and, in some cases, even moral exhaustion. With few exceptions, military operations were carried out by armies at a pedestrian pace, with clashes occurring at highly predictable locations along well-trodden and heavily fortified frontiers. Initially, armies were unguided by grand strategy or attempts at strategic or operational turning movements. They focused instead on gaining or defending control of key river crossings guarded by great lines of fortresses and garrisoned towns. Military roads, magazines, and other supply systems improved markedly in some countries but remained rudimentary to nonexistent beyond most frontiers, where the majority of fighting actually occurred. That meant, as it had in prior eras and despite strenuous efforts at modernizing reform by absolutist monarchs during this period, that military supply, along with war finance, was not that far advanced beyond the debilitating 16th-century practice of enforcing “contributions” from occupied territories. The success or failure of a campaign also still depended to a high degree on vagaries of weather, while far more casualties resulted from disease than from combat. That was especially the case for unfortunate garrisons in tropical

Introduction

overseas stations, but it was also true within disease-ridden siege camps and crowded and embattled towns in Europe. None of these severe limitations on capability stopped ambitious rulers from seeking strategic direction of military conflicts on a continental and, eventually, a global scale. The expanding scale of operations was a feature that emerged progressively over this period to become something genuinely new, compared to earlier Wars of Religion. Worldwide trade and naval wars strained to maximum degrees the scanty resources and organizational capabilities of still-limited states and overtaxed societies. Grand strategy, once it appeared, also faltered under the strain of battlefield command-and-control limitations that bordered on the merely illusory, in spite of a new and ultimately universal emphasis on hard drill of professional troops. Campaigns and battles seldom decided longterm, worldwide conflicts. As a result, wars among the major powers were most often inconclusive, as well as almost always protracted. As one war named and numbered by later historians ended in a transient treaty marking little more than an exhausted pause, another would begin. Often, only minor shuffling altered the membership of large opposing alliances, as warfare resumed after a mutually agreed break used by each side mainly to recover and rearm. These wars were decided, insofar as they ever were decided, mainly by political and military attrition attended by fiscal and moral exhaustion—or they were interrupted by an accident of royal birth or death leading to a renewed outbreak of diplomacy. The opposite was also true: sustaining peace depended to a high degree on continuing royal health or the survival of some sickly prince or king, most famously—but not uniquely—Carlos II of Spain (r. 1665–1700). Complex issues of succession of Bourbon or Habsburg were the daily stuff of high European politics at all times, and the bane of the lives of masses of peasants swept away by ebbing and waning tides of peace and the maelstrom of war. The first several decades of this period were dominated by three Anglo-Dutch wars and several limited French conflicts provoked by Louis XIV’s dynastic and territorial quarrels with his immediate neighbors. After three decades of commercial competition and active naval warfare, the Dutch and English shifted to a permanent defensive alliance against a wider emerging threat to both from France. A series of Franco-Dutch wars lasting to 1713 thus merged with later, but also serial, Anglo-French wars. Finally, an emerging continental balance of power drew in all the major powers and most minor powers in two great, climactic conflicts that submerged local conflicts even as they marked the outer limits of French power, Louis’ ambitions, and the Grand Alliance’s cohesion: the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Although discrete causes may be identified and distinct truces spaced out these many wars, there was real continuity of struggle in Europe, ultimately centered on the ambitions and capabilities of France. The closing decades of the period thus witnessed a generation of war that swirled around the dynastic ambitions and personal convictions of Louis XIV. Great and hostile coalitions drew in every power in western Europe, embroiling overseas colonies of the Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well. Wars in other regions of Europe had separate causes, but even distant conflicts accounted for xxvi

Introduction

the interests of the Sun King at some level, and how these affected local arrangements or alliances. Thus, the Great Northern War (1700–1721) was fought in eastern and northern Europe in tandem with the War of the Spanish Succession, which dominated the affairs of the western half of Europe, but with campaigns, causes, and leading personalities sometimes overlapping. The Great Northern War brought a crashing end to Sweden’s “Stormakstid” century of Great Power ambition and influence, which collapsed in fire and blood as Sweden was forcibly expelled from the Great Power ranks by its decisive defeat, and whole provinces of its empire in Germany and the Baltic were ripped away by rival powers. Sweden sank thereafter to the second tier, a mere Baltic power akin to Denmark. The Polish Commonwealth also ended the period much diminished in power, prestige, and territorial possessions. A high price was paid even by some of the victorious states upon the return of peace. Much of the strength of the United Provinces was drained by the long effort to defend against Louis and the loss of preeminence in global trade to its ally, Great Britain. The United Provinces entered a slow decline from Great Power status into a protracted period of self-doubt and, in later decades, of chronic fear and consequent appeasement of its larger neighbors. Spain, already markedly in decline by 1650, at the close of the 17th century was invaded, occupied, and fought over by several foreign armies. Its once-extensive European empire was divided among the other powers at the end of the great war over the Spanish succession. Madrid’s precipitous decline from being the preeminent Great Power in Europe and the world’s first global empire would continue during the 18th century under the Bourbons. Spain would yet see periods of real recovery and even brief strength outside Europe, but overall Spain moved under the wing of France and remained there for 100 years. On the other hand, Austria emerged from the French wars, and even more so from a protracted war with the Ottoman Empire, with a greatly expanded territorial empire of its own along the Danube, although in Germany its reach still far exceeded its actual grasp. The effort to remain important, if no longer dominant, deep into Germany and across the Holy Roman Empire strained Austrian resources and prestige for decades to come. Outside Europe, the Ottomans—in striking contrast to the Austrian Habsburgs—reached the limits of imperial ambition before the walls of Vienna in 1683. They then entered a long period of slow, but also unrelieved, relative military decline. The Mughals faced growing Hindu and Sikh resistance to their overlordship in northern India, with violence and rebellion provoked in good measure by a foolhardy new policy of radical religious intolerance under the Muslim zealot Aurangzeb. By the end of the period, the Mughal Empire faced revolt and civil war, even as European powers began to penetrate deeper into the Indian subcontinent from their various enclaves on the coast. China went through the final conquest of Ming resistance to a Qing invasion dating to the first half of the 17th century, and then suffered a vast civil and dynastic conflict known as the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681). However, once that war ended, China enjoyed relative peace under the powerful protection of its Banner system armies. Qing emperors fought isolated campaigns to consolidate xxvii

Introduction

internal control and secure the frontiers, including genocidally against the Zunghar Mongols during the 18th century, but otherwise settled down to enjoy the ripe fruit of their historic conquest of one of the truly great civilizations of world history. Throughout this period, Japan ceased to be militarily active. Coming after a millennium of samurai wars and a full century of utter chaos from 1467 to 1568, known as the “Sengoku jidai,” or “Country at War” or “Warring States” era, and then a decade of murderous aggression against Korea and violent internal repression of the Kirishitan, the change was one of the most remarkable in all recorded history. Thus, during this period Japan was in the first century of what would be 250 years of peace and radical isolationism under the Tokugawa shoguns. But as intrinsically interesting as these varied developments in India, China, and Japan were, none left a lasting mark on world military history. Instead, smaller European powers emerged in this period and would later be ascendant militarily in ways that deeply affected global history, although in contemporary comparison to the Mughal or Qing Empires in India and China, they were still bit players on the world stage. Brandenburg-Prussia gained much territory and more prestige from a fairly judicious and limited military involvement, and more because its regional enemies—Denmark, Poland, and Sweden—were all significant losers of land and prestige by 1715. Meanwhile, England and Scotland emerged from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) and another four decades of civil and constitutional conflict to finally complete the union of their shared island in 1707. As the new United Kingdom of Great Britain, an increasingly confident and aggressive British nation was fully engaged in the great war under way on the continent, even as it embarked on what would become a century of overseas colonial settlement and expansion, and the successful protection of its monopoly global trades. Great Britain thus emerged as one of the major victors of the wars of the Age of Louis XIV. It enjoyed rising wealth and power over the following decades, during which it would further indulge the vast geopolitical and commercial ambitions of its new governing classes by deploying self-conscious national naval power in support of exclusionary trade policies that were to its great economic benefit. The most important permanent geopolitical change occurring over this period was that Russia left the isolationist traditions of old Muscovy behind and joined the European state system. And it did so not merely as a newly active member, but as one of the vital Great Powers. Russia self-consciously and formally took the place of Sweden, which it had crushed by the end of the Great Northern War in 1721. And what of France? In 1713, the continental ambitions of Louis XIV were contained by a clear European balance of power. In a series of treaties, the longcontentious frontiers of France were henceforth defined as internationally acknowledged and delimited borders. France closed the “grand siècle” with Louis XIV on his deathbed, a chastened and perhaps repentant warlord. Domestically, the ancient contest of wills between the monarchy and nobility, with the latter seeking a revival of ancient rights of regional parlements to participate in governance, remained unresolved through the 18th century, despite the lifelong xxviii

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effort of Louis XIV to concentrate all power in the hands of the monarch at Versailles. In foreign affairs, the 18th century would see French power slip further within Europe vis-á-vis Russia, Prussia, and even Austria. Overseas, real losses would come with a parade of defeats that saw France lose the maritime contest with Great Britain by 1763, along with its possessions in North America and nearly all of India, and control of key trade routes to Southeast Asia and North Asia. Yet even after those substantial losses of a once-mighty overseas empire, France was still primus inter pares among the Great Powers of Europe, new and old alike. It would remain so through more decades of global war and a quarter-century of revolution and extraordinarily aggressive expansion that in retrospect might make decades of warmongering by Louis XIV look pale, to some, in comparison.

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NOTE ON DATES During the late 16th century, a number of countries in Europe shifted to the “Gregorian” calendar proclaimed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. By that year, the old “Julian” calendar (named for Julius Caesar) was fourteen days out of time with the solar year, using the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. as the benchmark. Gregory made a ten-day correction using the Vernal Equinox as marker. Thus, the day following October 4, 1582, in the Papal States was not October 5 but October 15, 1582. Gregory also declared the New Year as commencing on January 1. Despite not fully correcting the errors of the Julian system, Gregory’s calendar promised much greater accuracy. Even so, no self-respecting Protestant would take guidance from a pope on a matter (time) that rightfully belonged to God. Hence, only Catholic countries shifted to the Gregorian, or “New Style” (NS) calendar. Austria and most Catholic states in Germany, along with France, Portugal, and Spain, adopted New Style. Protestant powers cleaved to the Julian, or “Old Style” (OS) method. That meant that dates in Protestant countries and histories were ten days behind Catholic dates until 1700, and eleven days behind after that. Orthodox Russia declined to concede that anyone in the Latin world might have a point about how best to keep God’s time. Russians remained staunchly committed to the increasingly inaccurate Julian calendar to the end of the Tsarist regime in the early 20th century, falling further behind NS with each passing century. Once the fires of religious conflict in western Europe burned out by the end of the 17th century, some Protestants were prepared to admit the greater logic and accuracy of the Gregorian calendar. Saxony shifted to NS Style in 1697. Other Protestant states in Germany followed suit in 1699. Sweden adopted NS from 1700, but reverted to OS in 1712. That meant that the same events involving Sweden during a twelve-year period were recorded in different sources as taking place on three separate dates. Thus, the Battle of Poltava in 1709 took place on June 27 (OS) for Protestant contemporaries, but on June 28 (Swedish-style) for Swedes, and on July 8 (NS) for nearly all Catholics, German Protestants, and

Note on Dates

most historians. Great Britain made the change to NS only in 1752. Thus, while the Battle of the Boyne is today commemorated in Northern Ireland on July 12, immediately after 1753 it was dated to July 11, while in OS it was fought on July 1. A further complication is that in Great Britain and its colonies, the New Year was dated to March 25 through 1751, meaning that many events were recorded as taking place not just on different days, but in different years. For instance, a treaty’s date might be recorded by a more fastidious English historian as “February 24, 1713/March 7, 1714.” A last complication arises from the independence of mind—and of all things English—that is still typical of Scots; histories of Scotland date the New Year in that northern country from January 1, 1600. In 1753, Sweden decided that the Catholic world had been right all along and relapsed into NS. Western European empires imposed NS, and European and Christian dating systems more generally, on the vast and various peoples of the colonial world they conquered over the course of the 16th–19th centuries. Orthodox Russia stayed true to OS until the Bolsheviks—rough reformers of everything they could conceive of or lay hands on—forced Russians and other subjects of the Orthodox tsars not only to shift to NS in 1918, but to apply the calendar retroactively. Thus January 31, 1918, became February 14, 1918, forever confusing casual students of history as to whether the Russian Revolutions of the previous year took place in February and October or March and November. Orthodox peoples elsewhere, such as in Greece or within the Ottoman Empire, resisted changing to New Style until 1923. As part of a hurried, imitative modernization under the restored Meiji Emperor, the Japanese enthusiastically adopted NS in 1873. Imperial Chinese bureaucrats insisted on retaining Confucian ways of recording time, just as they clung conservatively to all things traditional in the face of sweeping changes then being forced upon China by the outside world. The successors to China’s emperors and scholar-bureaucrats were more impatient of the old ways. Modernizing republicans looked to the West for new models of national development and symbols of progress, and thus imposed NS on the Chinese in 1912. Muslim societies followed the Islamic (lunar) calendar established in 639 by Caliph Umar I. This dated “Year One” to the start of the Hegira (flight of the Prophet) in 622, and set the Muslim New Year as the equivalent of July 16 in the Latin calendar. Western scholars designated this Muslim system “Anno Hegirae” (A.H.) for “In the year of the Hegira.” Further complicating matters, the Muslim year is only 354 days long. An eleven-day difference from the Western year comes about because the Muslim calendar is divided into twelve lunar cycles of equal length, beginning with each crescent moon (which thereafter became the main symbol that celebrated and proclaimed Islam). While this system removes the need to add leap days or leap years, it means that the Hegira calendar moves through the solar year, and that it takes 34 solar years for a lunar month to repeat exactly in the same season. As contact with the West rather than other Muslim powers became the major political concern of the Ottoman Empire, it introduced an Islamicized solar calendar, but one which still ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar. After their defeat in World War I, as part of a radical postwar modernization program, the Turks adopted the Western calendar (just xxxii

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as they later shifted from Arabic to Latin script). While some stricter Muslim societies refused to make the change, most Islamic countries eventually adopted what had become a common international calendar through colonial inheritance, for appearances of modernization, or just for commercial convenience. Everywhere in the Muslim world, however, the Hegira system remains in use to determine holy days of special religious obligation and observance. Wherever possible in this encyclopedia—and unless otherwise indicated— Hegira, Orthodox, and Ottoman dates have been translated into NS, starting the new year on January 1. However, in a number of cases where the wider and older historical literature is inconsistent and might be confusing to readers, this work provides both OS and NS dates.

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Trarbach

Bingen

Mainz

Kreuznach ah e

e Sur

Trier

N

Worms

Luxembourg

Sarrebourg

Mannheim Frankental Kaisersloutern Neustadt

le

os

el

Herdelberg c Ne

M

Speyer

ka

Sinzheim

Sarrelouis Saarbrücken

Philippsburg Gemersheim ute La

Heilbrom

r

Metz

r

Sa

Wissenbourg

rre

Ettlingen Lauterbourg

Mo

der

Haguenau

Rastatt Louis

Stuttgart Stollhofen

Nancy Altenheim Kehl Salzbach Willstätt Offenburg

Strasbourg Molsheim

cka Ne

r

Rh

in

e

Ensheim

Rottweil

Turkheim Breisach

Villingen e

Colmar

Danub

Tuttlingen

N

Lake Constance

Mulhouse Belfort

Constance Huningue Basle

Turenne’s German Campaigns, 1674–75

Rheinfeld

Turenne’s First campaign, 1674 Turenne’s Second campaign, 1674 Turenne’s Third campaign, 1674 Turenne’s Fourth (Winter) campaign, 1674–75

0

0

50 km

50 miles

xxxv

30°

20°

10°

KINGDOM OF SWEDE N

40°

FINLAND

NORWAY

Helsingfors Gulf

Stockholm Frederikshald 1718

St Petersburg

land INGRIA

of Fin

Narva 1700

ESTONIA

1700 1701 1700

DENMARK

Riga

1716– 1718

R U S S I A

LIVONIA

1702 Balt ic Sea

Copenhagen 1700

Smolensk 1708 1708

SWEDISH POMERANIA

PRUSSIA Grodno 1708 P

HOLSTEIN

1703

O LAND

Stettin

1715

BRANDENBURG

Warsaw

UKRAINE

1706

1705 1707 1704

SAXONY

Poltava 1709 Karl’ s flig ht 17 0

Cracow

40°

9

1702 Lemberg

ube

Dan

Vienna AUSTRIA

1714

HUNGARY Kar l’s s ecr et r

CRIMEA out

e, 1

714

N

ube

Dan

OTTO M AN EM P IRE Campaigns of Karl XII of Sweden

30°

Campaign of 1700

Campaign of 1707

Campaigns of 1701–02

Campaign of 1708

Campaign of 1703

Karl’s route 1714–15

Campaign of 1704

Campaigns of 1716–18

1709– 1714 Demotika

0

B lac k Se a

Constantinople

50 km

Campaigns of 1705–06 0

xxxvi

50 miles

0

France vs. the United Provinces French invasion of the United Provinces, 1672

250 km

0

250 miles

DENMARK

William’s invasion of England, 1688 Territory annexed by Louis XIV, 1648–84

No r th S ea

Territory claimed by France, 1684–97

UNITED PROVINCES

E NGL A ND

Amsterdam

London

The Hague FLANDERS u

Torbay

Me

l

Cologne

Captured from Spain 1659

ROMAN

e

LUXEMBOURG Occupied 1684

EMPIRE

LORRAINE

Seine

Paris

Nantes

Strasbourg Occupied 1681

ALS

ire

Occupied 1684–70

ACE

Metz

BU RG UN DY

Lo

H O LY

in

C

ne

se

Rh

En

ATLANTIC OCEAN

h glis

n ha

SPANISH NETH. ARTOIS Liége

FRANCHE COMTÉ

Captured from Spain 1674

F R A N C E

SWISS CONFEDERATION

Geneva N

SAVOY

VENICE

Rh

öne

Bordeaux

MILAN

MODENA

GENOA AVIGNON

NAVARRE

S PA I N

PROVENCE Marseilles

ROUSSILON Captured from Spain 1659

Med i ter r a n ea n S ea

xxxvii

Austro – Ottoman Wars, 1683 – 1718

BRANDENBURG

Battle

Warsaw SAXONY Dresden

SI

LE

Mustafa’s retreat 1683

SI

A

PRINCIPALITY OF THÖKOLY in revolt against Habsburg rule

Prague B O H E M IA

Cracow

R

MO

BAVARIA

A AV I

Neuhäusel 1685

Vienna 1683

G

N

AUSTRIA

Y R ) a A Roy l (

H

U

(O

M O L D AV I A

Gran 1683 Buda 1686

U

H

VENICE

Kara Mustafa’s campaign of 1683

P O L A N D

TRANSYLVANIA

A R N G

tt

oman) Zenta1697

Esseg1687 Peterwardein 1716

Venice

O

Belgrade1688, 1690, 1717

T

V

E

N

E

SAN MARINO

PAPAL STATES

A

T

IA

dr

N

T

ia

ti

E

c

R

R

IT

Se

O

T

WALLA

IA CH B l a ck S ea

Danube

O

M

RY

A

N

E

a

NAPLES

N

M

Constantinople

P

I R E

A e ge an Se a

Asia Minor

Athens MOREA

S i c ily

Mediterranean Sea 0

Ottoman–Venetian War 1645–1669 Candia

500 km CRETE

0

xxxviii

500 miles

Siege of Candia (Iraklion) 1666–69

0

N

100 km

0

West European Wars 1688–1713

100 miles

Battles

N O RWAY

Marlborough’s campaign 1704

Scotland SW E D E N North Sea

G R E AT

Boyne 1690

I re l a n d

DENMARK

B R I TA I N

B al t i c Se a

Bantry Bay 1689

E n g la n d Plymouth

UNITED PROVINCES

London

HANOVER

PR U SSI A

Beachy Head 1690

SAXONY

Vigo Bay 1689

F R A N C E

ALS

LORRAINE

AC

E

ATLAN TIC O CEA N

Dunkirk Engli Oudenarde sh Channel 1708 Lille Cologne Ramillies ARTOIS 1706 Fleurus Malplaquet 1690 1709 Mainz Paris

BAVARIA Blenheim 1704

SWISS CONFEDERATION

Vienna

AUSTRIA

TYROL

Milan Turin 1706

S P A I N Madrid

Cremona 1702

Lo m b ar d y

Toulon Barcelona 1705

I TA LY A dr i at i c Se a

Rome Minorca 1708 Almanza 1707

Sardinia

Naples

M e d it e r r a n e a n Sea

xxxix

Holy Roman Empire boundary in 1648

Acquired by 1688

Brandenburg possessions in 1640

BREISGAU

Venice

TYROL

Vienna STYRIA

A driatic Sea

CROATIA

CARNIOLA

SILESIA de

Buda

r

Pest

la tu Vis

DALMATIA

SLAVONIA

Mohács

at

hi

an

0

0

300 km

E M P I R E

O T T O M A N

Karlowitz

Zenta

rp

T R A N S Y LVA N I A

Ca

PODOLIA

P O L I S H C O M M O N W E A L T H

H U N G A R Y

MORAVIA

A UST R IA

CARINTHIA

BAVARIA Munich

Prague B OHEMIA

SAXONY

PRUSSIA

Königsberg

N

300 miles

be nu Da

s

Acquired by 1699

Austrian possessions in 1648

in

Cologne

MARK

BRANDENBURG Berlin

MAGDEBURG

RAVENSBURG CLEVE

be

EASTERN POMERANIA

B altic Sea

O

ou in

Rise of Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia

F R A N C E

No r th Sea

e

xl Rh

El

M a nt

Third Parallel

h ac pro es Ap rench t

Ap tre proa nch ch es

Fortress under siege

Second Parallel Approach trenches

Approach trenches (zig–zags)

Vauban’s Parallels

(zig–zags)

First Parallel

Lines of Circumvallation

Battery

Bastioned Fortification

Covered Way

Crest of Glasis

Counter scarp Glasis

Parapet

Bastion Glasis Revetment

Wall Main Ditch

xli

Allied flight to Nivelles

Battle of Fleurus 1 July 1690

St Brice Ligny

Waldeck’s original line St Amant

Luxembourg splits his army

Fleurus

0

Or

me

Heppignies

N

Velaine

3 km

0

3 miles

Froidmont

bre

French baggage train

Châtelet

Sam

Charleroi French line of march

Wolpertstetten

EUGENE MARLBOROUGH h

ört

MA X I M I L I A N EM M A N U E L

t Nebel

Lutzingen

uw

na

a oD

Unterglau

Oberglau

N

TALLARD Blenheim

Sondenheim

Launsheim

Höchstädt

Dilingen Ulm

D

an

ube

Danauwörth Danube

Blenheim

dt

stâ

Battle of Blenheim 13 August 1704

h

to

c Hö

Marlborough’s attacks

Augsburg

Infantry 0 0 0

xlii

1 km

Cavalry

30 km 30 miles

0

1 mile

Artillery

N

Battle of Ramillies 23 May 1706

Geete

0

VILLEROI

Artillery

ORKNEY

Foix les Caves

ee

te

2000 yards

ttle

Cavalry

Autre Église

Li

Infantry

2000 m

0

tG ea Gr

Foule Offus

Mont St André

Jandrenouille

Allied troops shift to center

Plateau of St André

Plateau of Jandrenouille

MARLBOROUGH Ramillies

to Merdorp

MAXIMILIAN EMMANUEL

Branchon

Boneffe Franquenée

to Charleroi

aign Méh

Taviers

e

to Namur

0

Battle of Malplaquet 11 September 1709

N

1 km

0

1 mile

Entrenchments Defensive positions Infantry

Cavalry

Artillery British Dutch and Imperial

Sart

French and Bavarians

Forest of Blangies

Orkney

Schu

lemb

S a rt

Taisnières

urg Lott

um Eugene

ugh

Marlboro

Orange

hers Wit

Vi lla

rs

Laignières

Boufflers

La Folie

Taisnières

Malplaquet

on River H

xliii

N

L

f

r

i

c

a

Mediterranean Sea

N

ic

I

C

SICILY to Savoy 1714 to Austria 1720

E

Se NAPLES to Austria 1714

t

Gibraltar

ia

to Great Britain 1713

MINORCA to Great Britain SARDINIA 1713 to Austria 1714 to Savoy 1720

PAPAL STATES E

Rome

Vienna

a

T

M A egean Sea MOREA to Ottoman Empire 1718

O

to Austria 1718

T O

A N

P O L A N D

Warsaw

PRUSSIA

AUSTRIA H U N G A R Y

A

dr

to Philip V, 1714

MILAN SAVOY to Austria 1714 Venice

SWITZERLAND

BAVARIA

A

SI

LE

SI

BOHEMIA

SAXONY

A

BR

G UR

Baltic Sea

LIVONIA to Russia 1721

to Russia ESTONIA 1721

INGRIA

St Petersburg

FINLAND

S W E D E N Stockholm

NB

E ND

DENMARK Copenhagen

AUSTRIAN NETHLANDS to Austria 1714

Brussels

LORRAINE

Paris

Dunkirk razed 1714

Amsterdam

UNITED PROVINCES

North Sea

F R A N C E

London

BRITAIN

Edinburgh

NORWAY

V

A

Madrid

Dublin

GREAT

500 miles

IRELAND

500 km

F

S P A I N

ATLANTI C O CEAN

0

0

P.

GA

E

PO RT U

CE SA AL

xliv R O

E M P I R E

Constantinople

Black Sea

Sea of Azov

Azov

to Ottoman Empire 1711

R U S S I A

Smolensk

Moscow

Habsburg territories

Holy Roman Empire

Peace Agreements, 1713 – 1721

A abatis. A field obstacle made from a felled tree laid lengthwise, with sharpened branches facing the enemy. Iron spikes were sometimes used as well. During siege operations abatis protected miners and sappers, as well as musketeers and siege cannon and their crews. Defenders sometimes used abatis as an interior line of defense or to reinforce a breach in a fortified position. See also chevaux des frise; Spanish riders; Sweinfedder. absolutism. A political condition in which all power theoretically rested in the hands of the monarch, acting in the interest of an arbitrary and absolute state. Although some 17th–18th century kings claimed broad powers, all were constrained to some degree by traditional systems of governance and hereditary rights of the aristocracy and clergy. This was more true of Louis XIV and his successors in France than earlier scholarship sometimes understood. The trend also clearly marked the governing system of the Habsburgs and was true even for the supreme autocrat in Russia, Peter I. Absolutism was the political support of semifeudal agrarian societies where a king’s revenues and armies alike relied mainly on taxation of, and forced recruitment among, a servile peasantry. Absolutism should not be confused with a more general European trend toward greater centralization of military, financial, and political power, including co-opting nobilities through compulsory state service (as in Prussia and Russia) or by issuing various offices, titles, and bribes to once proudly independent aristocrats or rising members of the bourgeoisie eager for acceptance into a higher social class (as in France). It also should be recalled that in England and the United Provinces the trend was in the opposite direction, toward expanding powers of representative assemblies at the expense of increasingly limited monarchs, or even deposition of monarchs in favor of erection of republics. In England, the Stuarts were twice thrown from power, Parliament gained sovereign authority, and religious toleration was extended during this period to all but Catholics. See also Aurangzeb (1618–1707); Brandenburg; Charles II of England

Acadia

(1630–1685); Denmark; Friedrich I in Prussia (1657–1713); Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688); James II (1633–1701); mandate of heaven; mercantilism. Acadia. A former French colony spanning much of the maritimes of eastern Canada and parts of Maine. The first French colonists arrived in 1604. Its capital was the small fortified town of Port Royal. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) the British mounted an expedition against Port Royal. The fort and town fell on September 14/25, 1710. Great Britain was awarded permanent control of the colony of Acadia in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Act of Succession (1701). When it became clear that neither William III nor Queen Anne would leave behind a Protestant Stuart heir upon their respective deaths, and with descendants of the deposed Catholic sovereign James II already fomenting Jacobite plots and unrest, Great Britain might have faced another violent succession crisis upon Queen Anne’s eventual death. Anticipating this, Parliament pre-empted any crisis by passing an Act of Succession naming the Elector of Hanover as rightful heir. He subsequently ascended the throne as George I (r. 1714–1727). The Act of Succession signified the permanent end of the religious civil wars on the island and confirmed the Glorious Revolution, by ensuring that a falling crown landed on the head of a Protestant monarch already approved by Parliament. Act of Union (March 4/15, 1707). This Act of Parliament joined Scotland to England in a “United Kingdom,” also abolishing the Scottish parliament and naming the combined country Great Britain. This completed a constitutional process begun with union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603. The 1707 Act provided for England to pay Scotland’s large debt, while also establishing free trade within Great Britain. admiral. See ranks (at sea). Admiral of France (Amiral de France). See ranks (at sea). Admiralty. The key naval institution exercising oversight of the Royal Navy, especially following passage of the “Admiralty Act” in 1690. The Dutch Navy had five admiralties, one each for Amsterdam, Holland, Friesland, the Maze (Rotterdam), and Zeeland. See impressment. Adrianople, Peace of (July 1713). See Great Northern War (1700-1721). affaires des poudres. See Lille, siege of (August 14–December 10, 1708). aides-majors. See ranks (on land). Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (May 2, 1668). A peace treaty between France and Spain ending the War of Devolution (1667–1668). It was directly prompted by 2

Almanza, Battle of

formation of the anti-French Triple Alliance of England, Sweden, and the United Provinces. It permitted Louis XIV to begin preparations for a war of revenge against the United Provinces: the Dutch War (1672–1678). The treaty compelled Louis to give up Franche-Comté, while permitting him to dismantle its lines and fortifications, laying the province open to easy reoccupation at a future time of his choosing. Madrid conceded several key towns in the Spanish Netherlands which had fallen to French sieges in the opening campaign of 1667: Oudenarde, Tournai, and Lille. The status of this settlement and all the territories it governed was challenged within four years by renewed fighting, when Louis launched the Dutch War (1672–1678) by attacking the United Provinces. Albemarle, Duke of. See Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670). Alexis (1629–1676). Tsar of Russia (r. 1645–1676). Alexis was the second Romanov to occupy the throne, succeeding his father Michael. He was a moderate “Westernizer” rather than a “Slavophile.” He thus encouraged trade with, and some cultural opening toward, the West. But this initiative had little success beyond his immediate court. His efforts to modernize the state bureaucracy and Army saw even less success. His military reforms faced stiff opposition from the strel’sty, while royal patronage of religious reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681) riled larger segments of the population, again including the strel’sty. Compounding his perceived assault on peasant (and some boyar) religious belief, Alexis oversaw enserfment of additional numbers of peasants. This tension culminated in his suppression of the great rebellion led by Stenka Razin in 1670–1671. In foreign policy, most of his reign was preoccupied with the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) and Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667), and attendant negotiations with the Polish Commonwealth. Algiers. Algiers and its hinterland were ruled by local deys in the name of the Ottoman Empire. The city was bombarded by French bomb ketches twice in 1682 and again in 1683 and 1688. The first attempt failed because the French anchored too far from shore during night operations, then were forced to retreat with daylight. The second effort was savagely successful, as was the third. See Barbary corsairs. Almanza, Battle of (April 14/25, 1707). The decisive battle in Iberia fought during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). A Franco-Spanish army of 21,000 under Berwick faced just 16,000 Allied troops (mainly British and Portuguese, but also French Huguenots) under the Earl of Galway. There is some disagreement about those numbers, but none about the outcome of the fight: it was short and sharp, lasting barely two hours, and was won by the French cavalry. While a Spanish cavalry assault faltered on the Allied left, French cavalry broke Galway’s line on the Portuguese right, then rolled it up so that the Redcoats started to run as well. French cavalry then joined Spanish horse in cutting down thousands of enemy infantry during a hot and bloody pursuit. The Bourbon allies together killed or wounded 4,000 Allied troops and took 3,000 more 3

Almenara, Battle of

prisoner, while widely scattering the survivors from wholly shattered enemy formations. The decisive victory allowed French forces to retake Valencia (May 8th) and effectively secured the Spanish throne for Philip V. Almenara, Battle of (July 27, 1710). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Alsace. Alsace was partially annexed to France in 1648 as part of the spoils of victory in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). However, many towns in Alsace continued to regard themselves as subjects of the Holy Roman Emperor. During the Dutch War (1672–1678), Louis XIV personally led an occupying force to repress this lingering Imperial sentiment in Alsace, which had emerged strongly once Louis took France to war with the German emperor, Leopold I of Austria. Alsatians lent material and moral aid to Imperial troops against the French throughout the Dutch War. Important Alsatian towns were intimidated by French military occupation and rough billeting, until they declared loyalty to Louis XIV, in the run-up to the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). Religious liberty in Alsace was guaranteed under the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and thus was not overridden by Louis’ Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685). alti bölük sipahileri. Six richly paid regiments of sipahis who served as the standing cavalry of the Ottoman sultans. They were resident at the Porte. Many held noncombat posts in the military administration (“divanî hizmet”). Altona, Treaty of (July 10/20, 1689). This agreement between Denmark and Sweden was mediated by England and Brandenburg. It compelled Denmark to surrender Schleswig to Sweden. It was the basis for early support by the Maritime Powers for Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), in exchange for which Sweden promised to uphold the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697). Altranstädt, First Treaty of (September 13/24, 1706). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Altranstädt, Second Treaty of (August 31/September 11, 1707). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Amiral de France. See ranks (at sea). ammunition. See artillery; bomb; military medicine; mortar; shot. amphibious warfare. The Dutch conducted or threatened amphibious operations along the French Atlantic coast during the Dutch War (1672–1678), including at Bayonne, Belle Île, Dieppe, Harfleur, and Poitou. Stretched by campaigns in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, and the Mediterranean, the French responded by calling a local arrière-ban in Brittany and Normandy. See also Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Apraxin, Fedor Mateyevitch 4

Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement

(1661–1728); Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Barbary corsairs; buccaneers; Cossacks; cruiser; descent; Dunes, Battle of the (June 4/14, 1658); Dutch War (1672–1678); flatboat; galleys; Great Britain; Great Northern War (1700–1721); guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722); Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Pondicherry; Portugal; Spain; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC); Vigo Bay, Battle of (October 12/23, 1702); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Andrussovo, Treaty of (January 30/February 9, 1667). After a prolonged conflict between Russia and Poland for possession of the Ukraine in the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667), this treaty was born of mutual exhaustion. By its terms, Russia obtained Smolensk and its hinterland and eastern Ukraine, including Kiev, for an initially agreed period of two years. Muscovite Russia took that part of Ukraine lying along the left bank of the Dnieper, while Poland retained all Ukrainian territory on the right bank. Andrussovo was of strategic importance not merely for its contribution to containment of Sweden and further reduction of Polish power relative to its neighbors, but because the deal pushed a growing and progressively more aggressive Russian state a little closer to conflict with the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus and Balkans. The Andrussovo settlement was disputed by Poland for another 20 years but was ratified in a second treaty, the “Eternal Peace” of 1686, that made the terms of settlement permanent. Andrussovo thereby helped keep peace in the region until the start of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). One area of mutual concern which Andrussovo did not resolve, though Poles and Russians alike thought it had, was the “Cossack problem.” This was mainly because the Cossacks were in great social, religious, and political ferment and a 30-year-long civil war. In addition, after Andrussovo the Polish Commonwealth was too internally weak to restore control over its portion of partitioned Ukraine. See also Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Cossacks. Angelets rebellion (1669–1672). A tax revolt by French peasants in the eastern Pyrenees provoked by the reforms and policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, especially enforcement of the salt tax (“gabelle”). Guerilla warfare lasted four years. The fighting convinced Louis XIV to build extensive defenses around Villefranche, which oversaw the key pass leading to the plain of Roussillon. Anglo-Dutch Brigade. Three English and Scots regiments served with the Dutch in defense of the United Provinces and Protestantism on the continent since 1585. From 1674 these regiments were amalgamated in the “Anglo-Dutch Brigade.” They were subsumed into William III’s unified Army in 1689. See also British Army; Dutch War (1672–1678); officers. Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement (1689). Signed as part of the diplomatic revolution and shift in the European balance of power that accompanied the Glorious Revolution, this treaty stipulated that in future allied naval actions the ratio 5

Anglo-Dutch Treaty

of ships provided would be five British men-of-war for every three Dutch battleships. This codified what was already a growing gap in naval power between England and the United Provinces, with the latter finally accepting second-tier status after a half-century of naval and commercial competition. Anglo-Dutch Treaty (October 1709). See Barrier Treaty, First (October 18/29, 1709) Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654). The underlying economic cause of the Anglo-Dutch wars that lasted from 1652 until 1674 was long-term decline, dating to 1621, of English trade in the Baltic with northern Germany, Russia, and Sweden. Dutch trade with these regions had grown commensurately. On the other hand, English merchants had cut deeply into Dutch maritime commerce with southern Europe and the Levant after 1630, partly under the influence of a Spanish wartime embargo of trade with the United Provinces. As the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) with Spain drew to a close, during the 1640s the Dutch began to recover southern trade because of their larger merchant marine, lower transport rates, and better and more trustworthy finances. They were further aided in recovery by the fact that England’s commercial and naval shipping was drawn into the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). This shift in the commercial balance severely affected the interests of the great merchants of London, principal beneficiaries of the English revolution of the late 1640s and the newly dominant political power on the island of Great Britain. By 1651 the economic slump in England was so deep that radical legislation was introduced to correct the trade imbalance. Passage by the English Parliament of the first Navigation Act (1651) was a major irritant in Anglo-Dutch relations, but did not of itself threaten the Dutch trading system, in which English trade was but a small part. The proximate cause of the war was English insistence on visit and search, and most often also seizure, of Dutch merchantmen in the Channel and Baltic Sea to enforce the new maritime law passed by Parliament. More provocative still was the scale of the chronic assault on Dutch commerce by English privateers, exacerbated by a common practice of these brutal men of torturing captured crews. During 1651, over 140 Dutch merchantmen were seized by English warships or privateers, with 30 more taken during the month of January 1652. Given the position of the Channel as a natural choke point for Dutch world commerce, nothing less than world trade primacy and the core prosperity of the United Provinces was at stake. Conflict over diverging economic interests was inflamed by religious and political factors, especially the fanatically self-righteous assumptions of the most millenarian supporters of Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan government. English radicals wanted to join with the United Provinces in a single Republic devoted to the “one true faith” so that their combined militaries might oppose France and any other country devoted to the other one. This was anomalous, given that the rest of Europe had just exited the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the long era of wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants more generally. Dutch rejection of any joint crusade against Catholic Europe was nevertheless seen by 6

Anglo-Dutch War, First

the new religious power and personages in England as impious, not just impolitic. In essence, England was demanding political subordination by the United Provinces, an improbable request given that the Dutch had waged war for over eight decades to free themselves of the “Spanish yoke.” The States’ Navy (as the once-and-future Royal Navy was called by the Puritan Republic) and the Dutch Navy were thus destined to clash in the first of three naval and trade wars. These conflicts altered the politics of northern Europe and reshaped the policies of England and the Netherlands toward each other in ways that affected much of the world for the next century. Reacting to English provocations at sea, in 1651 the States General of the United Provinces finally moved to reverse years of naval neglect and voted funds to raise the number of Dutch warships to 226, including many larger types, from an extant complement of just 76 smaller vessels. England’s governing power interpreted this as Dutch provocation and formal war broke out, declared by England on July 8, 1652. It had started before then, in fact, when traditional English insistence on being saluted by all ships traveling through “British seas” (based on the vague and unenforceable medieval claim of “sovereignty of the sea”) was defied by a Dutch fleet on May 2/12, 1652. Maarten van Tromp was sent into the Narrow Seas to back up Dutch defiance. He also refused to give the salute demanded by English captains when, with 42 Dutch warships, he encountered Robert Blake at the head of just 12 English sail. The unequal sides exchanged mostly harmless fire in the so-called “Battle of Dover,” a minor scuffle off Folkestone on May 19/29, 1652. Nevertheless, this skirmish provoked the wider Anglo-Dutch war that each side had long expected. In mid-July Tromp reappeared off The Downs with 100 warships. After losing half this fleet to a great gale (damaged ships repaired for their home ports), he took several large East Indiamen as prizes, cutting them out of a passing convoy. Then he sailed for home. In August there was a fight off Plymouth between de Ruyter and Ayscue: the opposing fleets passing in uncouth order through each other’s lines, thereafter dissolving into a mêlée that led to some loss of life but no lost ships. The first significant fight came at Kentish Knock (September 28/ October 8, 1652). It demonstrated that English ships and crews were markedly superior in fighting ability and morale to the Dutch. Tromp with 80 warships escorted a large convoy down the Channel in late November, but was intercepted by Blake with 52 sail. The fleets fought off Dungeness (November 30/ December 10, 1652). Tromp prevailed, clearing the Channel for the convoy. Parliament was dismayed and it, rather than Tromp as legend has it, used a new broom to sweep away defeated English captains. Parliament voted new money for the Navy, but tied this to a code of discipline to supposedly discourage the “cowardice” displayed hitherto. When Tromp returned to the Channel in escort of a new convoy he was met by Blake. The battlefleets fought the “Three Days’ Battle” off Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653); Blake was wounded in the fighting off Beachy Head. Meanwhile, the United Provinces and Denmark agreed to a treaty closing most Baltic trade to English merchants and blocking English importation of key naval stores (masts, hemp) available only from the Baltic. After a lull in contact, the battlefleets met again at the Gabbard Shoal (June 2–3/12–13, 1653), where the Dutch were routed. The English 7

Anglo-Dutch War, First

followed up their victory with a blockade of the coast of the United Provinces, but they did not have the ships or logistical capabilities to sustain it long enough to be fully effective. In late July, Tromp evaded a second attempt at blockade, this time conducted by George Monk, and instead successfully joined the divided halves of the Dutch fleet. The two opposing battlefleets met and fought at the Texel (July 31/August 10, 1653). The Dutch partly made up for fleet action losses in the Channel and North sea by effective cruiser warfare further afield, by their own Zeeland privateers cutting out English merchantmen, and by outright defeat of an isolated English squadron which was inadvisedly sent to the Mediterranean earlier in the war. Clearing that southern sea of English warships was trumped by a northern combination with Denmark to totally close the Baltic Sea to English trade—not one English ship made it through the Sound in 1653. More important even than lost trade was the Danish-Dutch denial of English access to critical naval supplies obtainable only from Baltic exporters, especially hemp. There were also sharp naval successes won by VOC ships in far distant waters, from the Persian Gulf to the China Sea. English privateers also enjoyed successes against the Dutch, taking over 1,000 prizes over the course of the war. These losses went some way to matching damage done to English sea power and to providing mounting commercial pressure on the Dutch. In combination with growing naval losses on either side, domestic events in both republics conspired to end the war. A coup d’état on April 20/30, 1653, by Oliver Cromwell and the Army in England initially brought naval crusaders against the Dutch to power in London. But a naval mutiny by unpaid seamen at Chatham that October forced Cromwell to broaden his political base by reining in the most fanatic of his Puritan supporters. He established himself as “Lord Protector” in December 1653, and looked to make peace with the United Provinces. This chain of events was matched by general republican, and by specific Regents of Holland, opposition to wartime political advances by the House of Orange within the United Provinces, and to riots in many Dutch cities provoked by ship and crew losses, and rising unemployment among seamen and in the fisheries. The United Provinces had lost dozens of warships and hundreds of merchantmen (up to 1,200 total ships lost, if large sea-going fishing vessels are included). The economy thus went into a deep and protracted slump, with the herring fishery especially badly damaged and overseas trade and profits sharply reduced. Dutch shipping was so limited by the war with England that in 1654, in far away “Netherlands Brazil,” local Portuguese militia finally were able to expel Dutch invaders-cum-settlers, now cut off from their homeland. Survivors were driven into Surinam. Nationalist sentiment in the United Provinces increasingly coalesced around the political hopes of the House of Orange, as De Witt and the other Regents were blamed for great naval defeats suffered in the Channel and North Sea, but not wholly credited with less spectacular—but strategically more crucial—Dutch gains in the Mediterranean, Baltic, and East Indies: gains so great that only with Portugal did England hold onto its prewar levels of trade. The war thus ended without victory or victor, a condition of merely suspended hostility that was quickly codified in the Treaty of Westminster (April 12/22, 1654). 8

Anglo-Dutch War, Second

Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667). The United Provinces emerged from the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) still the dominant naval power in the Baltic and Mediterranean, but badly damaged in the North Sea, and with its fish trade and fisheries in near-ruin. Further afield the Dutch had successfully fended off England’s bid for commercial primacy, including making inroads in the Atlantic slave trade with Spanish America and the spice trades from Ceylon, India, and the Far East. Events in England following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 initially looked to favor the United Provinces. An Anglo-Dutch alliance was signed in September 1662, but there was much opposition to ratification in both signing countries. Fighting in the Second Anglo-Dutch War actually began in early 1664, a year before the “official” start date. The trigger was an English expedition to West Africa in late 1663, during which Admiral Robert Holmes took the opportunity to smash Dutch slave shipping and pound Dutch defenses. The underlying cause of the war was continuing global competition for trade in multiple commodities, from slaves and gold taken to the West Indies and Spanish America from West Africa, to the rich fishing trade of the Baltic and North Atlantic, to the carriage trade from the Levant and Spain, to the spices and fabrics of India and beyond. Once again, the predations of English privateers further provoked the Dutch to war. Before the formal declaration of war issued by Charles II on February 22/March 4, 1665, over 200 Dutch ships had already been taken by the English, and several Dutch colonies had also fallen, including Essequebo, New Netherland (Nieuw Nederland, including Nieuw Amsterdam), Pomeroon, Saba, and St. Eustatius. The Second Anglo-Dutch War was more farranging than the First, with raids and naval engagements carried out along the coasts of Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America, and South Asia. There were small land battles fought far afield as well, in the eastern Netherlands and in India. All the while, danger of war with France loomed over England and the United Provinces alike, as Louis XIV maneuvered diplomatic pawns and readied for combat his powerful military rooks. In May 1664, Dutch troops attacked Münsterland. Defects in the Dutch Army caused by mismanagement by the States of Holland quickly showed: the princebishop of Münster, Christoph Bernhard, counterattacked with 20,000 men, driving the Dutch out in great disarray and occupying several eastern Dutch towns. Parts of the United Provinces neared panic that was not allayed until French auxiliaries arrived and English subsidies to the prince-bishop evaporated, causing the Münsterite army to withdraw. The Dutch Navy was more ready for war than it had been in 1652, but once more it suffered great structural disadvantages vis-à-vis the Royal Navy in its windward location, lower ship numbers, lighter and fewer ship-borne guns, and deeply politically divided officer corps and crews. The opening fleet action took place at Lowestoft (June 3/13, 1665), where a large Dutch fleet was predictably overmatched by English ships superior in draft and design and sporting heavier guns. Dutch naval morale fell along with plunging prices on the Amsterdam Exchange. Neither recovered until great ships of the East India fleet arrived in home waters after sailing around Ireland to evade the Royal Navy. The United Provinces grew more genuinely unified, even while discovering the latent fighting capacity of the Dutch 9

Anglo-Dutch War, Second

republic, which proved superior to all monarchies of the day. This power was notably revealed by improved recruitment and morale, which rose in all the provinces and not just in Holland as military wages improved and outlays of state money and mercantile commitments far exceeded anything possible in the other states of Europe, or indeed anywhere in the world. By early 1666 the strategic situation of the United Provinces dramatically improved: Münster had been repulsed, and France now intervened in a limited fashion on the Dutch side, declaring war on England on January 16/26, 1666. Neutral opinion also was decidedly pro-Dutch. Denmark helped repel English squadrons from Bergen, and Danish and Dutch squadrons joined to close the Sound to all English shipping. In the East Indies the warships of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) destroyed nearly all English ships, and VOC ground forces captured several English forts and entrepôts (factories). In the Mediterranean the fight was more equal, with each side damaging the others’ merchant marine and curtailing trade. Zeeland privateer syndicates were also better organized than before, and did real damage to English shipping right from the start of the campaign. During two years of war, the Dutch Navy and privateers took over 500 English prizes, many of them and their cargos sold off in various neutral ports. The Dutch also finally began building larger warships, First Rates of 70 guns or more. The English battlefleet was fatefully divided by sending Prince Rupert with 20 ships down the Channel, while George Monk (Albemarle) with 56 sail remained in The Downs. As a result, the Royal Navy lost the “Four Days’ Battle,” or The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666), to a Dutch fleet of 86 sail under de Ruyter. Two months later the English savaged the Dutch at the St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666). And so the war at sea proceeded, seesawing back and forth in advantage without either side accruing a decisive victory. A notable English coup was achieved when Admiral Holmes took a fleet to the North Holland island of Terschelling. There, on August 9/19, 1666, he trapped and burned 160 Dutch merchantmen at anchor in an action sometimes called “Holmes’ Bonfire” by English naval historians. Despite this success, the overall English naval effort was increasingly undermined by cumulative ship losses. It was further damaged by outbreak of the “Great Plague,” and by the “Great Fire” of London (September 2–6, 1666), each event vividly recorded in the diary of naval administrator and eyewitness Samuel Pepys. The misery index climbed still higher as Dutch warships burned or barred colliers from making deliveries to London during the hard winter of 1666–1667. On June 12, 1667, de Ruyter retaliated for Terschelling by boldly sailing up the Thames to catch an English fleet unawares at anchor at the Medway, forcing the boom and brushing past several blockships to burn with fireship the three biggest warships of the Royal Navy and three other rated ships, plus several smaller ones, then to insolently tow away the flagship “Royal Charles.” In the West Indies the Dutch also enjoyed fresh success, recovering Essequebo and Pomeroon. An amphibious expedition took Paramaribo in Surinam from the English in 1667; another took Tobago. All this conflict did not prevent some pragmatic and humanitarian practices. For instance, by 1667 the two sides had 10

Anglo-Dutch War, Third

agreed on a system of mutually agreeable ransoming of each other’s prisoners of war. The war ended with agreement on the Treaty of Breda (July 11/21, 1667). Spurring the United Provinces to make peace with England was a renewed French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands, a deed which announced the start of Louis XIV’s latest act of aggression: the War of Devolution (1667–1668). That attack against an area of vital interest to the security of the United Provinces, along with a fundamental change of regime and outlook in England, did not simply encourage peacemaking. It allowed these two maritime enemies to join with Sweden in an anti-French diplomatic pact, the Triple Alliance, formed in January 1668. Still, underlying maritime competition and continuing national enmity would lead England and the United Provinces back into war within five years. Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674). Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France agreed to the secret Treaty of Dover in late May 1670. This granted a French subsidy to Charles, who was having grave difficulty obtaining financing from Parliament, in exchange for diplomatic support for France against the United Provinces and a promise of support for reestablishment of Catholicism in England. This was part of Louis’ wider diplomatic effort to break apart the Triple Alliance formed during the War of Devolution (1667–1668), and thereby to clear a path to launching the Dutch War (1672–1678). On the English side, it was part of the scheme of Charles II and his brother, the future James II, to restore Catholicism in the Three Kingdoms and secure a more “absolutist” regime for themselves. This is precisely what many in Parliament suspected, which meant the Dover treaty was under pressure from the day it was agreed. Admiral Robert Holmes attacked a Dutch convoy without provocation. Three days later the English again used supposed Dutch failure to acknowledge sovereignty of the sea in the Channel as a pretext for a larger naval war of predation against Dutch trade and shipping. The first major fight came at Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672), where de Ruyter inflicted a sharp defeat on the English battlefleet. The two battlefleets fought again at First Schooneveld (May 28/June 7, 1673) and again a week later at Second Schooneveld (June 4/14, 1673). In both battles, de Ruyter skillfully outmaneuvered and outfought a vastly superior Allied battlefleet in waters familiar to him from boyhood, but alien to the English and French. On July 30/August 9, 1673 a Dutch expedition recaptured New York. The next big sea fight came at the Texel (August 11/21, 1673). Halfway around the world a Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) war fleet defeated an East India Company (EIC) squadron off Masulipatam on September 1/11, 1673. Early the next year a VOC expedition from the Cape of Good Hope captured St. Helena from the English, though that isolated outpost was retaken a few months later. In the interim, both powers employed privateers and cruisers to conduct guerre de course against merchant shipping and maritime trade. The Dutch were more concerned with the grave threat on land from France than with continuing their protracted naval and commercial war with England, and thus negotiated a settlement. Peace arrived with agreement on the Treaty of Westminster (February 9/19, 1674). This pact 11

Anglo-Spanish War

did not disengage English regiments already fighting alongside the French against the Dutch on the continent, but it freed Dutch naval resources for the war against France and limited fresh English participation in the French king’s “Dutch War.” Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660). Spain had emerged from the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) with the United Provinces in 1648, but was still fighting the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). England had only recently won the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), passed through the Puritan Revolution, suppressed guerilla fighters in Ireland, and seen Oliver Cromwell established as military dictator of the Three Kingdoms. It had then plunged into the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), which despite some naval victories and major privateer successes in the North Sea was hugely disruptive of vital English trade with the Baltic and Mediterranean. The English had made great progress at sea in the first years of the Commonwealth, not least signature of a 1654 treaty with Portugal that permitted English warships to resupply and refit in Lisbon in return for assistance in the Portuguese struggle for independence from Spain. In 1655 an English squadron intercepted a Spanish treasure fleet, and a new naval war got underway. From a radical Puritan perspective, Cromwell had agreed to a pact with the devil and his legions, in the personage of Jules Mazarin and the Catholic armies of France. The early success of the Western Design secured Barbados and Jamaica as West Indies bases for English privateer and pirate allies, but otherwise the expedition was a spectacular failure that damaged the reputation for invincibility of the New Model Army. In 1657 and again in 1658 Spanish expeditions against Jamaica were repulsed by local pirates, while in 1656 a Spanish treasure fleet was captured. The next year an English fleet newly based in Lisbon sank a second treasure fleet in the Canaries. Redcoat infantry allied with the French fought the Spanish at the Dunes (June 4/14, 1658) in Flanders, while the Navy blockaded nearby Dunkirk. The battle and blockade together forced surrender of privateers based in Dunkirk. Other significant naval actions included forcing Tuscany and the pope each to pay indemnities for having supported royalist privateers against the Puritan Commonwealth, and burning of the Barbary corsair fleet of the dey of Tunis. English sea power also opened up naval bases in Tetuan and Tangier. During the final stage of this war English naval power also penetrated the Baltic, where Sweden was warned against efforts to seize Norway from Denmark (which would have given Stockholm a total monopoly on vital Baltic naval exports). Peace between France and Spain was encoded in the Treaty of the Pyrenees (October 28/November 7, 1559). With the death of Cromwell in 1658, an English constitutional crisis ensued that culminated in the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. That meant England, too, was ready to make peace with Madrid, much to the relief of many of the same London merchants who had pushed vigorously for war five years earlier. The main effect of the war was to disrupt what remained of English commerce with Spain and allow the Dutch to better recover from shipping and commercial losses suffered at English hands from 1652–1654. Dutch commercial gains were especially great concerning Spain itself, but were also 12

approach

made at English expense in trade with Spanish America, Italy, and the Levant (eastern Mediterranean). See also free ships, free goods. Anjou, Philip, duc d’ (1683–1746). “Philip (Philippe) V of Spain (r. 1700–1746).” Grandson of Louis XIV and ultimately, though narrowly, the winning French candidate for the throne of Spain against the Habsburg candidate, Carlos III, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Anne of Austria (1601–1666). Queen of France, daughter of Philip III of Spain, wife of Louis XIII, mother of Louis XIV. She was suspect in Catholic France for her Spanish origins and among France’s Protestant allies for her Catholic faith. She served as regent after the death of Louis XIII in 1643, despite his opposition to that idea, though Jules Mazarin governed in fact. She supported Mazarin during the Fronde. Upon his death in 1661 she was pushed aside by her 22-year-old son, who thereafter ruled alone. Anne of Great Britain (1665–1714). Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1702–1707; of Great Britain and Ireland, 1707–1714. The last Stuart on the throne, she was the solidly Protestant daughter of the Catholic James II. She did not object to the Glorious Revolution, which made her Protestant sister, Mary, queen alongside a Dutch husband, William III. Anne’s reign was largely taken up with the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) in Europe and Queen Anne’s War in the Americas. Her key role was to support the rise of Marlborough, not least because of her close friendship with his wife, Sarah Churchill. Anne was sympathetic to the Tories, who opposed the war, but supported the Whigs, who eagerly embraced it. Why? Partly under the influence of Sarah but also because in place of her dynastic rights Louis XIV insisted on recognizing her half-brother, James Stuart, “the Old Pretender,” as the rightful monarch of Great Britain. When the Whigs lost power to the Tories in 1710 the personal tie with Sarah was broken. Marlborough quickly fell from Anne’s grace and was dismissed from command. Like William before her, Anne left no surviving children. That contributed to recurring Jacobite intrigues after her death. However, a real crisis was avoided by implementing the foresightful Act of Succession (1701). See also Cadogan, William; Great Britain; Malplaquet, Battle of (August 31/September 11, 1709). anoblis. French officers, usually in the Navy, who were recently ennobled. During the wars of Louis XIV nearly 25 percent of French naval officers or their sons were anobilis. See officers; roturiers. Anti-Habsburg War (1703–1711). “Kuruc.” The Hungarian term for the great rebellion led by Ferenc Rákóczi. Antwerp, Treaty of (1715). See Austrian Netherlands. approach. An attack trench dug by a besieging army. See parallels; siege warfare; zig-zags. 13

Apraxin, Fedor Mateyevitch

Apraxin, Fedor Mateyevitch (1661–1728). Russian admiral. Along with Peter I, Apraxin was the founder of the modern Russian Navy. In 1700 Peter appointed Apraxin governor of Azov, where he was ordered to build and sustain a Black Sea fleet for operations against the Ottoman Empire. He built blue-water ships and river boats and barges, based in large part on information Peter gathered in the West. Apraxin also built and oversaw new dockyards, warehouses, and repair facilities—in short, the full apparatus of a permanent navy—and roughly gathered related ship-building crafts and industries and workers under his control. In 1707 he moved north and was named “Admiral of the Baltic Fleet,” tasked with defending the new capital of St. Petersburg while Peter and the Army were away fighting Karl XII in Poland and Ukraine, as the Great Northern War (1700–1721) crested in the east and south. Apraxin drove away a small Swedish column and fleet sent toward St. Petersburg as a double feint to draw Peter back north. In 1714 he commanded a Russian fleet of 30 sail and 180 galleys which defeated a much diminished Swedish fleet at Hangö, or Gangut (July 27/August 7, 1714). Before the war was over, Apraxin drove the Swedish Navy from Karelian and Finnish waters and conducted amphibious raids and bombardments of coastal Sweden itself, even threatening Stockholm. Apraxin and the new Navy both declined in influence after Peter’s death, but even a number of years of neglect could not wholly erase the permanent changes wrought in the Black Sea and the Baltic. armateurs. French contractors who specialized in outfitting privateers. From 1695 they were leased royal warships which were no longer needed once guerre d’escadre was abandoned in favor of guerre de course. Leases were extended at excellent rates and ships were fully provisioned at state expense. Armateurs were not held accountable for a royal ship’s loss or for damage, and were allowed to keep fully 80% of any profit gained from taking prizes. Materials for new warships were also provided to armateurs at royal expense. Ships were kept in privateer military service until all outlays for labor and fittings were recovered. Some individual armateurs sent whole squadrons to sea, as many as seven shipsof-the-line, with supporting frigates, schooners, and bomb ketches. army of observation. A large outlying army protecting a friendly force engaged in active siege of an enemy city or fortress. See lines of circumvallation; siege warfare. army of relief. A field army sent to threaten, and sometimes to fight, an enemy besieging a friendly city or fortress. Such an army might try to break through the lines of circumvallation, possibly supported by sorties on the other side by the friendly garrison. Or it might try to draw the attacker off by besieging one of his fortresses. If the enemy lines were porous, cavalry could bring in extra supplies (black powder was most needed, then food). If none of those operations worked the relief army departed. The garrison was left to decide its own fate and the final outcome of the siege. See Lille, siege of (August 14–December 10, 1708); siege warfare. 14

Articles of War

arrière-ban. The fading, yet lingering, feudal levy of French noble cavalry. Nobles most often paid to avoid military service, making the arrière-ban essentially a military tax on an otherwise untaxed class. It was called in Brittany and Normandy during the Dutch War (1672–1678) to provide some coastal security against amphibious raids. Louis also called out 500 nobles in Bayonne in June 1674 and almost 6,000 later in Alsace, following the fight at Enzheim (October 4, 1674). These men were to reinforce Turenne in defense of that province. However, Turenne found arrière-ban troops to be disorderly and militarily useless, and disgustedly sent them off to Lorraine to be disbanded. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) the ban was called to provide local forces to watch over resentful Huguenots, a task of local repression for which its cohorts were more suited. arsenal. There were several advanced arsenal systems outside Europe in this period. In China the Palace Armory—as well as much military production— was located in the Forbidden City and controlled by court eunuchs. The Ottomans carefully monitored weapons production and storage. They maintained numerous powder mills and stockpiles of charcoal, saltpeter, and sulphur, as well as of copper, lead, iron, and tin. The Ottomans produced siege guns and other artillery at central foundries at the Imperial Arsenal (“Tophane-i Amire”), the main state cannon foundry set up by Muhammad II at Pera in the late 15th century. In Europe, in addition to older state arsenals and armories such as the Kremlin, the Tower of London, or the Arsenal of Venice, sovereigns and states had long stockpiled arms and related supplies in castles and fortified towns. This changed with development of the artillery fortress, whose specialized interior spaces housed forges and repair shops as well as weapons. Internal arsenals were needed to store basic materials and larger accouterments needed by the big guns of the forts, from tons of shot to spare carriages and dismounted barrels in peacetime, to cordage and tools needed by crews to work the guns during an active siege. Such arsenals were usually constructed as separate buildings within the larger fortresses (main enceinte). Articles of War. First issued in 1663, this was a code of military discipline for the English Army. It initially had no direct force since a standing army had no legal basis in English law, and hence there was no way to enforce its provisions. This flaw was corrected with passage of the Mutiny Act in 1689. The Articles of War pertaining to the Royal Navy, the preferred service for the monarchy, Parliament, and mercantile classes alike after 1660, were more ad hoc and haphazard in origin, form, and enforcement. For instance, there were many capital offenses listed in the Articles but the penalty was hardly ever enforced. In any case, they chiefly concerned court martial offenses by officers, not the ship’s ratings. Courts-martial were highly cumbersome and elaborate affairs carried out on land. Judged by at least five ships’ captains, they were difficult to arrange. Ordinary seamen and other members of a ship’s crew, including landmen and some idlers, were instead subject to a “private council of war.” This was a form of shipboard or petty court-martial overseen by the given ship’s officers. Contrary to 15

artillery

popular public misperception, the naval code of discipline was relatively mild in its rules, and far milder in application, than either the Army code or the severe civilian punishments common to the day. The Articles of War for the Navy were importantly revised only after this period (in 1749). The revised code provided for courts-martial for offenses committed by seamen on land as well as at sea. The Articles of War remained the main governing body of English naval law until the Naval Discipline Act was passed in 1860. artillery. The main artillery pieces of this era were cannons, mortars, and howitzers, each cast to more-or-less standardized calibers. The latter were strictly siege guns. Both light and heavy cannons were used in field operations, as they had been since the early 17th century innovations of Maurits of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus. The Swedish system of small-caliber, highly mobile horse artillery was directly imitated by Oliver Cromwell and Parliamentary and other English, Scottish, and Irish armies during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). There was even some experimentation with revival of the failed Swedish attempt to fabricate “leather guns.” French artillery followed the main Swedish example of standardization of types and calibers dating to Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Significant innovations in use were introduced by Vauban. Other advances were made in metallurgy and design during the period, but these were incremental at best. In European warfare the main improvements in artillery were not in firepower but in mobility proportionate to the weight of guns taken into the field, as well as the growing capacity of early modern states to assemble, deploy, and finally monopolize the use of heavy cannon. Louis XIV captured the fact that big guns were no longer allowed in private hands, along with his own sense of diplomacy and what really underlay the French Enlightenment, when he inscribed on royal cannon the motto: “Ultima Ratio Regis” (“Final Argument of the King”). Vauban summed up the base attitude of the Age toward artillery this way: “There is no judge more equitable than cannons. They go directly to the goal and they are not corruptible.” Peter I was not as singularly responsible for improving Russian artillery as is sometimes made out. In 1705 he established a state foundry at Tula to make domestic copies of western-pattern guns, overseen by master gunsmiths from Germany and Sweden. But big guns had been made at state foundries at Tula and Kashira for decades before that. In fact, by 1690 Russian casting methods were actually more advanced than those in France, including using iron rather than clay molds to cast guns. Like so many other inflated stories about the supposed genius of Peter I, this tale about his oversight of Russian artillery has roots in his pronounced self-promoting propaganda. Among Peter’s major enemies, Karl XII significantly reformed Swedish artillery in 1717–1718, but too late to save his cause in the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Contrary to what is often stated, recent research shows that the Ottomans were still proficient at gun-casting well into the 1730s. They made many calibers measured by weight of shot (in units of “okka”). Their preferred caliber for fortress defense was an 11-okka gun, which fired a 30-pound iron ball. Most Ottoman calibers fit within an 11- to 22-okka (30- to 60-pounder) range. Heavier guns were used 16

artillery

in sieges, including 25-okka (70-pounders) or greater. In Europe the heaviest siege guns commonly in use during the early 18th century were 24-pounders. These could penetrate up to 12-foot thickness of lightly-packed earth and 15 feet of dense pack, which resulted in most parapets in fixed fortifications being built 18–20 feet in thickness. A standard 24-pounder firing in defense of a fortress required 14 feet of mounting space plus 12 feet more for recoil and servicing. These facts had to be taken into account in securing or leveling ground on which to site batteries and in designing the terreplein. In addition to 24-pounders on the terreplein, fortresses mounted 16- and 18-pounders in their bastions. These cannon took much less black powder than a 24-pounder, but had nearly as much range. They were used in counter-battery fire and to smash a besieging enemy, particularly the thin parapets of his trenches. Smaller calibers were also used by defenders: 6-, 8-, and 12-pounders were mounted in detached works, while 1-, 3-, or 4-pounders might be sited in the places of arms or towed out on sorties. A 24-pounder could safely fire up to 40 times per day. The agreed amount of shot needed for these heavy guns during one siege was about 1,200 apiece. Smaller cannon required much more shot in base number, if not in weight. That was because guns in a close-in breaching battery might fire up to 20–30 times per hour, or 120–150 times per day. At sea, a very small warship, such as a sloop-of-war, might carry only 2-, 3-, or 4-pounders. Armed merchantmen carried anything up to 12-pounders, but generally only large warships mounted 16-, 18-, 20-, 24-pounders, or carronades. Shore batteries often mounted 32-pounders, being able to take advantage of the natural stability of their land-based platform to deploy armament superior in range and weight of shot to bobbing enemy ships. The most significant change in artillery practice of this period was the invention of ricochet fire (“tir à ricochet”) by Vauban at the siege of Philippsburg in 1688. This used a reduced charge fired from long-range to allow an iron shot or shell to ricochet about the masonry, creating capital hazard inside the fortress. Vauban perfected this method at the siege of Ath in 1697. A few years later, bagged charges of gunpowder were introduced to the loading sequence of big guns, which greatly speeded reloading and rates of fire, while reducing dangers of accidental discharge due to loose powder or smoldering wadding still in the barrel after the previous discharge. Artillery tactics varied to some degree, as did expert agreement on observed effective range. Many commanders and gunners believed the maximum range of heavy artillery was limited to 500–600 meters. Vauban agreed with that estimate for bombardment by siege guns, but argued for ranges up to 2,500 meters when attempting unaimed ricochet fire. Among other changes, there was modest improvement in understanding of the effects of winds on flying projectiles. Hollowed-out shells had been in use for decades but were deployed more often by the early 18th century and to modestly greater effect. Grapeshot was made more regular and accurate. For larger pieces, shot was preloaded on a wooden sabot, thus eliminating the ladle as a gunner’s tool. Lighter field pieces such as the 1- to 3-pounder falconete and falcon and other “regimental guns” were in wide use. Still, the most important changes in artillery evolution came after this period. During the 1780s major changes were 17

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introduced, principally under the guidance of the French inspector general of artillery, Jean Baptiste de Gribeauval (1715–1789), just in time for the Napoleonic Wars. See also barbette; battery; bricole; cannelure cutting; cavalier (fortification); counter-battery; garrison carriage; gunner’s rule; limber; masking; military medicine; mortar; officers; perrier; pièces ambulantes; pioneers; powder magazine; quarter cannon; siege warfare; spike the guns; trail; truck; zarbzens. artillery fortress. Historian John Lynn’s excellent term for fortifications that employed “trace italienne” bastions and other new features that eliminated “dead zones” in crossing fields of fire. Lynn also referred to these fortresses as “engineered battlefields.” They evolved in stages in reaction to improvements in 16th century siege artillery. The final form is generally conceded to have been perfected by Vauban from 1687. The evolution began with simple addition of cutaway ports and guns to existing, late medieval stone fortifications. This permitted counter-battery fire against siege engines and cannon. Next came a series of adjustments that both lowered the walls (“countersinking”) and reinforced them with earthen banks, ditches, and dry (or more rarely, wet) moats. That gave the whole fortress a crenellated appearance of alternating low walls and hard salients that were difficult to knock down with cannon and took longer still to approach with labor-intensive siege works. The new structures also allowed defensive cannon to be mounted on strong walls or inside squat towers and roundels. In addition, infantry defenders commanded fields of enfilading musket fire that daunted any brash assault by attackers. Finally, geometric bastions were built into the curtain, with more added later beyond the curtain as separate outworks. Bastions were the key innovation, maximizing the effect of sweeping fields of cross fire while defending against enfilade. These principles and design innovations led to grand efforts at complete fortification by a number of Italian towns during the late Italian Renaissance, but the expense proved so vast few were completed. The style spread outside Italy, once nearby locales such as Monferrat and Geneva built single, impressive, massive works. Other fortresses were soon built in Hungary and Dalmatia, though not as densely or as well, as the artillery threat in those theaters was not as great. The real breakthrough came along the southern border of the United Provinces, where dozens of smaller artillery fortresses were erected to provide a layered defense-in-depth that proved unbeatable by the Spanish, or later by the French. France took the lead in fortress design and construction in the late 17th century, establishing a new French school that was dominant internationally for over a century or more thereafter. Most fortresses built in northwest Europe from this time were five- or six-bastioned works mounting up to sixty cannon and perhaps 30 mortars and perriers. A major debate has taken place among military historians as to whether or not the new artillery fortress constituted a “revolution in military affairs” that resulted in vast expansion of European armies as necessary to overcome the revolutionary effects of the new fortifications. In the 16th century the new bastions certainly restored a balance between offense and defense that had been broken by siege cannon in the 15th century. This restored balance lasted into the late 18

artillery train

18th century. Yet, even a long-term shift in favor of defense should not be exaggerated: the Ottomans were able to overwhelm “alla moderna” (as the “trace italienne” style was known in Italy) fortresses on several occasions, using new types of cannon along with old techniques of mining and starvation. In addition the new bastions were hugely expensive: more than one petty ruler went bankrupt and lost his small state out of an effort to defend it too well. It is important to note that fortresses served an offensive as well as defensive function: they provided a base for forward operations by advancing armies. Thus, the French advanced into the Netherlands and Rhineland in the 1670s–1680s, building or securing fortresses as they moved. Similarly, the Prussians marched south into Silesia and against Austria in the 1740s, utilizing fortress bases along the way. Trace italienne-style fortresses traveled overseas along with European trade expansion and colonial conquest. New model forts were built by the Spanish in the Caribbean, the Portuguese in Africa and India, and the Dutch, French, and English in Southeast Asia. Yet these were limited applications. In most colonies and other scattered enclaves where Europeans built artillery fortresses overseas, they did so mainly to ward off other Europeans who had modern artillery. Otherwise, old styles of fortification without full bastions usually sufficed against extant native firepower and tactics. Outside the Ottoman Empire, nonEuropean armies during this period almost never possessed the heavy artillery needed for successful siege warfare against even older, more primitive European military architecture. See also escalade; fortification; insult; pré carré. artillery park. All artillery belonging to a king or state, whether on the move or parked over the winter months or during years of peacetime. These were usually under royal control, separate from the regular regiments. The French royal artillery park was the model during this period. It contained, in addition to the big guns, over 1 million pounds of black powder. It was divided among three sites: Douai, Valenciennes, and Tournai. See siege park. artillery train. Guns, carriages, ammunition wagons, gunners and assistants, engineers and laborers, and others associated with an army’s artillery when on the move. French and other advanced armies maintained a fairly steady ratio of roughly 1 artillery piece per thousand men in a field army. A “siege train” was a variant, holding or moving the largest siege guns to their place of use. The French Army sought to rationalize its train, settling on a recommended ideal figure of five artillery brigades for an army of 50,000 men. The train itself was to number 1,000 men tending to four 24-pounders, six 12-pounders, twenty 8-pounders, and twenty 4-pounders. Ideally, both guns and supplies were to be moved by 20 river barges, 220 wagons, and 1,200 horses. This was much reduced from the needs for carts and animals in the 16th century when guns were heavier and larger caliber, including some Austrian 96-pounders. Because of advances in metallurgy and casting technology, those older calibers were less powerful than smaller 18th-century cannon. In practice, a siege train varied greatly from this ideal even for the French. Normally, a siege train might number anywhere from 30–60 guns, with fewer than one-quarter or one-fifth mortars or howitzers. The 19

asiento rest were 24-pounders crucial to smashing ramparts. The weight of powder alone that had to be moved into place for an average siege was on the order of 400 tons. Shot weighed three times that—the normal ratio of weight of powder to shot was 1:3 for cannon not firing to ricochet, and 1:5 for mortars. asiento. A legal monopoly over the slave trade with all Spanish colonies in the Americas. At the onset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Louis XIV transferred the asiento to French merchants from its long-standing British holders. This deeply aggravated anti-French opinion in London and helped propel England into the war. The asiento was granted by the government of Spain to British merchants in the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of Utrecht signed on April 11, 1713. askeri. The servitor military class of the Ottoman Empire, mainly the sipahis and timariots who formed part of the Kapikulu Askerleri. They were exempt from taxation, unlike the “Raya” (taxpayers, most of whom were peasants). Jealous protection of legal privileges led the askeri to accept an obligation to perform military labor rather than see civilians do the work and supplant them. This was very different from the attitude of comparable warrior classes elsewhere, notably in Europe, where military labor was eschewed with disdain. assault. To rush or “storm” a breach in a wall or other fortification en masse. This was almost always done at first light to take advantage of the sleepiness or drunken state of defenders. Carried out by infantry, assault was a costly and risky tactic if the defenses were not already smashed and battered by mortars and artillery. In formal siege warfare, the breach was made by cannelure cutting or mining. Prior to the assault, all offensive artillery concentrated on the breach and surrounding area, breaking the crumbled masonry into even smaller pieces that the infantry could cross and deterring the garrison from making a retrenchment behind the breach. The Ottomans had special units of volunteer commandos (Serdengeçti) who were the first through any breach and always fought wildly. In Europe leading the storm or assault was originally the task of grenadiers, closely followed by regular infantry and military engineers with gabions for enlarging and protecting the lodgement. A continuous assault into a town was rarely tried and even less frequently successful. Insult was a far easier way to gain entry, along with bribery, intimidation, or generous negotiated terms. The immediate aim of most assaults was to secure a defensible lodgement from which new saps might be started, if necessary. Usually, a good lodgement was enough to persuade the survivors of the garrison to beat the chamade. Most often, just making the breach occasioned talks leading to formal surrender. See also fougasse; siege warfare; storm bells; zone of servitude. Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of (1644–1703). Dutch general. Having served in the several wars of the United Provinces against Louis XIV, including the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), Athlone sailed with William III for England during the Glorious Revolution. He was most effective fighting Jacobites and the 20

Augusta, Battle of

French expeditionary force in Ireland after the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690). In 1691 he captured the town of Athlone, in whose name he was later ennobled. He commanded well and won at Aughrim (July 12/22, 1691), where he inflicted enemy casualties at a rate ten times his own (7,000 to just 700). That forced the remnants of the Irish and French armies to retreat to Limerick. He took the fortress city in October 1692, after a lengthy siege. Athlone then left for the Netherlands and the war against France. He fought at Steenkerke (July 24/ August 3, 1692) and the siege of Namur (July 2–September 1, 1695). He might have commanded the Dutch Army during the first years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), but instead magnanimously deferred to Marlborough, whom he served as loyal lieutenant. atrocities. See bomb ketch; Cossacks; Cromwell, Oliver; Deerfield raid (February 29, 1704); East India Company (English); Fraustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706); Genoa; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Ireland; Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); King Philip’s War (1675–1676); Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Old Believers; pirates; Poltava; privateers; Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); Rajputs; Sapiehas; skulking way of war; Spain; strel’sty; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Treaty of Westminster (April 12/22, 1654); Zunghar Mongols. attaching the miner. See mines/mining. attack. (1) A network of siege trenches and approaches opposing a front of an enemy fortress. (2) An operation of siege warfare aiming at reduction through bombardment or other forced surrender of an enemy fortress. See parallels; tranchée major. Audijos rebellion (1663). A tax revolt by French peasants in the western Pyrenees provoked by the reforms and policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. A guerilla campaign lasted several years, ending only when Audijos, its local noble leader and a former officer, accepted a French Army commission from Louis XIV. auget. A square-sided wooden “pipe” protecting the fuse leading to a mine. Aughrim, Battle of (July 12/22, 1691). See Athlone, Godard; Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690); Ireland; William III. Augsburg, League of. See Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705); Louis XIV (1638–1715); Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726); Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); William III (1650–1702). Augusta, Battle of (April 22, 1676). A naval fight off Sicily related to the Messinian rebellion, during the second half of the Dutch War (1672–1678). A French fleet of 30 sail and 7 fireships under the marquis de Duquesne put out of Messina 21

Augustus II of Poland

in an effort to break the Dutch blockade of Sicily. They were met three days later by a Dutch fleet of 29 sail and 9 galleys under Admiral de Ruyter. The French won the fight, during which de Ruyter was mortally wounded (he died a week later). Augustus II of Poland (1670–1733). “Friedrich Augustus. Elector of Saxony (1694–1733); king of Poland (1697–1704; 1709–1733).” A member of the Wettin dynasty and an elector of the Holy Roman Empire (Saxony), Augustus was elected king of Poland in 1697, after deeming that Warsaw was worth a Mass, converting to Catholicism, and agreeing to permit extraordinary privileges to the szlachta, even beyond the broad powers the nobility already enjoyed. In time this deal fatally weakened the monarchy within Poland. In foreign policy, however, Augustus enjoyed an independence his Vasa predecessors never had. This was facilitated by his personal control of a separate Saxon Army of 26,000 excellent troops, along with a discrete diplomatic service and bureaucracy. Together, these resources permitted him to conduct diplomacy and even war without consulting the szlachta in Poland or the Sapiehas in Lithuania. In 1699 Augustus forged an aggressive alliance with Peter I of Russia and Fredrik IV of Denmark that aimed to take advantage of the immaturity and inexperience of the new Swedish king, Karl XII. He immediately besieged Riga, launching the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Like the other members of this rapacious anti-Swedish alliance, Augustus greatly underestimated Karl XII. He and they all paid a heavy price for that mistake: Augustus’ Polish territories were invaded by Swedish armies. He lost and fled Warsaw in early 1702. Augustus subsequently was soundly defeated and lost most of his army at Kliszów (July 8/19, 1702). After recruiting over the winter, he took to the field with a new but undertrained and poorly equipped force, only to be smashed again by the Swedes at Pultusk (April 10/21, 1703). Augustus was expelled from Poland in favor of Stanislaw I in 1704, when the “Warsaw Confederation” that opposed him was supported by armed Swedish intervention. Civil war ensued in Poland, in which Augustus had support from the “Sandomierz Confederacy” of anti-Stanislaw nobles. This drew Karl back into Poland, where he completely defeated Augustus and his Polish allies in two small but sharp battles. Early in the new year Augustus lost again at Fraustadt (February 2/13, 1706). That opened the door to a Swedish invasion of Saxony and the fall of Dresden and Leipzig. Their fall compelled Augustus to agree to the Treaty of Altranstädt (September 13/24, 1706), renouncing his claim to the Polish throne. What saved Augustus was no effort of his own but the disastrous decision by Karl to invade Russia, which resulted in decisive defeat of the Swedish army at Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709). That catastrophe, along with Karl’s wasted years spent in Ottoman exile, permitted Augustus to reopen the Polish war with Stanislaw I. With help from Tsar Peter, Augustus was restored to the Polish throne in 1709. He held onto it through the remaining years of the Great Northern War and afterward, until his death in 1733. Aurangzeb (1618–1707). “Alamgir” (“World Conqueror”) Emperor. The most bloody and zealous of Mughal emperors. He reigned from 1658, after defeating 22

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his brother (Shuja) in a war of succession to Shah Jahan (1592–1666), whom he overthrew and imprisoned. Aurangzeb ruled until his death in 1707. He ended the practice of tolerance of Hindus and Sikhs, enforced puritanical social and legal codes (“sharia”), blocked construction of new Hindu or Sikh temples, restored a tax on temple pilgrims, reintroduced the hated “jizya” poll tax on all non-Muslims (dhimmîs), and brutally squeezed ever more revenues for his vainglorious reign out of a stagnating agrarian economy. Revolt was inevitable. It first broke out in the Punjab, where Sikhism took a newly martial defensive form. In Maharashtra, Hindus led by Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680) rebelled over the course of the 1660s–1670s, adopting highly effective guerrilla tactics. They fortified the Deccan and occasionally came out of the mountains to raid Mughal cities. In 1674 they proclaimed an independent Maratha state. While Aurangzeb was tied down by war in Afghanistan, Rajputs also rose against his rule. Finally, his son rebelled in 1680. Then Aurangzeb reasserted Mughal power, eventually chasing his son to exile in Iran. Over the next quarter century his Mughal armies crushed resistance in Punjab, and invaded and overran Maharashtra and the Deccan. However, they never completely overcame Maratha resistance. The cost in lives and treasure of his imperial overreach was enormous. A swollen capital moved with the emperor on campaign, stripping India of its surplus grain to feed his elephants, armies, and tens of thousands of camp followers. As he neared his nineties, famine and plague broke out across his domain, adding greatly to the overall misery of his endless wars. His death was followed by another succession struggle, which finally broke the back of Mughal power in India, opening the subcontinent to deep European penetration and piecemeal conquest. Austrian Empire. Habsburg control of northern Italy and Flanders and domination of the Holy Roman Empire were alike successfully challenged by France and Sweden by the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Austria emerged from that titanic contest a lessened and chastened power. Its Habsburg rulers were still at daggers drawn with France over dynastic and interstate rivalries which lasted into the mid-18th century. Things also looked grim for Austria in the east, where a still apparently ascendant Ottoman Empire marched on Vienna itself in 1683. Yet, by the end of the 17th century the Habsburgs had built a new Danubian empire around core hereditary lands in Austria, and expanded eastward and to the south at the expense of the Ottomans. How did this happen? The adjustment to blunted Austrian influence within Germany had been resisted by the Catholic fanatic, Ferdinand II (r. 1619–1637), but was effected by his more moderate son, Ferdinand III (r. 1637–1657). Expansion to the south and east, along with renewed war with France, then marked the long reign of Leopold I of Austria (r. 1658–1705). Along with chronic border skirmishing, Austria fought wars with the Ottoman Empire in 1663–1664, 1683–1699, 1716–1718, and again after this period from 1737–1739. At St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664) in Hungary, a Habsburg army led by Montecuccoli defeated the Ottomans. Nevertheless, the balance of forces in the east was still such that Leopold I agreed to pay tribute to Constantinople. This gave him a twenty-year truce 23

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with the Ottoman Empire, even if the period was punctuated by chronic frontier tension and skirmishing but no major battles or expensive sieges. This truce deflected Ottoman attention for a time away from the Habsburg lands into Ukraine, Poland, and southern Russia. In the interim breathing space, Leopold tried but failed to suppress a rebellion in Hungary led by Imre Thökoly, who established there a pro-Ottoman breakaway state called the “Middle Hungarian Principality.” The rebellion helped Grand Vezier Kara Mustafa Pasha persuade the sultan that Austria was weaker than it was in fact. In 1683 the Ottomans invaded Hungary and then Austria itself, bombarding the Habsburg capital during the dramatic siege of Vienna. In a final paroxysm of Christian political unity against the old Muslim foe, armies of relief from Bavaria, Franconia, Poland, Saxony, Swabia, and Venice lifted the siege and relieved the Habsburg capital, throwing the Ottomans back in great disorder and confusion, then into complete military disaster. No aid had come from Brandenburg or France, however, clearly signaling that the old religious impulses in European warfare were fast giving way to the new rationalism of the balance of power and the narrow interests of monarchs. Louis XIV had, in fact, secretly encouraged the Ottoman invasion of Austria and took advantage to make territorial gains in Germany by launching his War of the Reunions (1683–1684). For his part, Friedrich-Wilhelm was happy to see any reduction of Habsburg power in Germany and Europe more generally. The allied counterattack against the Ottomans drove them far from Vienna and cleared the path to Habsburg reconquest of Hungary in the years that followed. The “Long War,” or Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699), with the Ottoman Empire that followed lasted until the Ottomans accepted codification of their strategic defeat in the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. That settlement nearly doubled in size the lands of the Austrian Empire, which acquired vast new territories in the east and south to add to its hereditary home provinces: the Habsburgs regained control of Hungary and Transylvania, and added Croatia and Slavonia to their claims. That was a remarkable accomplishment, given that Austria had to fight on multiple fronts in the 1690s, against the Ottomans in the east and Louis XIV in Italy and Germany. It did so even though at its military peak it was able to raise only about 100,000 troops. On the other hand, it benefitted from the service of several excellent generals, most notably Prince Eugene of Savoy, and from deep buffer zones and defensible terrain along its several frontiers. Throughout the Long War with the Ottomans, Austria was also part of multiple anti-French coalitions in the west. It joined the anti-French alliance that waged the Dutch War (1672–1678). It then led in formation of the League of Augsburg and the Grand Alliance, which fought France during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), respectively. Austria emerged from those struggles much changed, but with a contiguous Danubian empire that was also more centrally managed than before, though still not equivalent in its centralization to other early modern states. This was partly a result of Habsburg design, which sought to play one province against another rather than to homogenize the empire. During the rest of the 18th century, Austria would 24

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further consolidate against the Ottomans in the east, even as it faced a new antagonist in the game of seeking influence in Germany at Habsburg expense: Prussia. But that great contest, lasting past the mid-19th century, lies beyond the scope of this work. See also Grenzer; Karlstadt border; Rákócz, Ferenc; Windische border. Suggested reading: R. Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (1974); V. S. Matmatey, Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1815 (1978); Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy (2000); A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy (1948).

Austrian Netherlands. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Rastadt (1714) gave the Spanish Netherlands to Austria. Relations with the United Provinces were regulated under the Austro-Dutch Treaty of Antwerp in 1715. The first governor-general was Prince Eugene of Savoy. In later wars of the 18th century it was always the case that these detached territories could not be retained by Austria whenever France moved to seize them. See also Baden, Treaty of (August 27/September 7, 1714); Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713). Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). “War of the Holy League (Sacra Ligua),” “Long War.” The Ottoman Empire launched war against Austria in 1683, probably in good measure to employ in foreign fighting a huge but restless Army that had grown corrupt and mutinous at home, and hence was a real political threat to Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1646–1687). Grand Vezier Kara Mustafa Pasha determined on an invasion of Hungary and central Austria, planning audaciously to take Vienna itself. In secret, he was encouraged to invade the Habsburg lands by Louis XIV, and by the prospect of rebellious Magyar magnates joining him as allies as he moved through Royal Hungary. Moving out of barracks by midsummer, Kara Mustafa led 100,000 troops along the Danube to the Habsburg capital, where they commenced the siege of Vienna on July 14, 1683. The Austrians had insufficient field forces to engage this host. Leopold I of Austria had thus fled Vienna, while sending out desperate appeals for a new “crusade” against the old Muslim enemy. Several east European monarchs and smaller German and Italian states rallied to this cause. Jan Sobieski personally led a Polish relief army of 16,000 toward Vienna, 400 miles and six weeks of hard march away, even for the famed Polish cavalry, the “winged hussars,” who formed the bulk of his speedy force. Elector John George of Saxony headed south with 10,000 excellent Saxon troops. Maximilian Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, took the field with another 10,000 Germans, while Waldeck brought 8,000 to join the campaign. Notably absent from this assembling relief army of “Christian” troops were any Brandenburger or French forces: Friedrich-Wilhelm had no interest in propping up his southern rival for influence within the Holy Roman Empire, and in any case was distracted by Louis XIV taking advantage of the siege of Vienna to launch the War of the Reunions (1683–1684) in the north. The Allies combined and caught the Ottoman cavalry badly deployed outside Vienna, unsupported by infantry. In the clash of arms that followed northwest of the city at Kahlenberg on September 12, 1683, the Ottomans were crushed and fled the field. The siege was lifted. 25

Austro-Ottoman War, First

After the disaster outside the walls of Vienna, Mustafa’s army fell back in disarray, abandoning its guns and baggage, quickly turning a retreat into a rout in the mountain snows. When Mustafa at last returned to his base camp at Belgrade he was executed by strangulation, on his master’s order. Not even that act saved the sultan, however: he was deposed four years later by unruly troops from barracks within his own capital. In the interim, Sobieski was joined by Venetian, Polish, and a handful of Papal troops in what became known in the West as another “War of the Holy League”—a propaganda term derived from the usual rubric of any alliance war engaged in by a pope: “Sancta Ligua.” Sobieski failed, however, in a concerted effort to overrun Moldavia and secure a port on the Black Sea for Poland. Venice recovered a number of small islands previously lost to the Ottomans as the price of its participation. But the days of Venetian power in the eastern Mediterranean had long passed, even if Ottoman naval power was also receding. The Austrians conquered parts of eastern Hungary that had been held by the Ottomans since the 1520s. Along with the Venetians, Austrian armies also expelled Ottoman forces from the Morea. Leopold wanted still more, however, and this greatly prolonged the war. During the eastern campaigns of the 1680s Prince Eugene of Savoy first made his mark as an Imperial general, fighting in 10 campaigns against the Ottomans. Habsburg and Sacra Ligua armies, including large numbers of mercenaries, launched a sustained offensive from 1684–1688, in which they besieged and took a sequence of Ottoman forts on the middle Danube: Gran (1683), Neuhäusel (1685), Buda (1686), Esseg (1687), and Belgrade (1688). The Ottomans were able to maintain riverine supply to their forces in southern Hungary as long as they controlled other fortresses at Titel and Ösek, guarding the confluence of the Drava and Danube rivers. The loss of Belgrade broke the logistical chain, cutting off forward Ottoman armies from river supply and reducing them to the same limitations of oxcarts and packhorses suffered in the region by their enemies. This proved a key prelude to defeat, followed thereafter by Ottoman withdrawal from all Croatia, the rest of Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia. Russia joined the Sacra Ligua after the Treaty of Andrussovo with Poland was confirmed in 1686, permanently recognizing Russian claims to Ukraine east of the Dnieper (“east bank Ukraine”). Russia’s calculated participation introduced more increased competition over the coming division of Ottoman spoils than any weighty addition to League forces in the field. Eugene and the Habsburgs were forced to fight in Italy and Germany after 1688, with the onset of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) with France. Shifting Austrian armies to western theaters permitted the new sultan to retake Belgrade in 1690. Yet, the Habsburgs were still able to garrison and defend Hungary and Transylvania and hold onto their larger gains in the Balkans, with the Ottomans at the end of their overland logistical reach after loss of much of the rest of their old Danubian barge route. Grand Vezier Köprülü Mustafa Pasha was killed during the fighting at Slankamen (August 19/29, 1691), further confusing leadership questions on the Ottoman side. In the war at sea, in 1692 Venice failed in an attempted invasion of Crete. Two years later the Venetians took Chios by amphibious assault, but lost that island back to the Ottomans in 1695. On land, the war devolved into smallish 26

Ayscue, George

campaigns through the mid-1690s, during which the sultan endeavored unsuccessfully to recover lost territories. The Austrians and Sacra Ligua blunted this effort, then moved to offense in 1695 as war with France wound down in the west. Only Peter I of Russia remained enthused about the southern war, hoping and planning to extend his empire instead along the Black Sea and the shores of the Caspian. War weariness in the Polish Commonwealth forced Jan Sobieski to exit the Sacra Ligua in 1696. The Imperial Army in Flanders was then redeployed east. The Ottomans were forced to mobilize nearly 100,000 men at Belgrade for the coming campaign. But their hopes were extinguished over the course of a summer of war capped by a decisive Allied victory at Zenta (September 11, 1697). Temporarily persuaded of the futility of further military action, the sultan agreed to cession of vast territories to Austria in the Peace of Karlowitz (1699). Austro-Ottoman War, Second (1715–1718). See Austrian Empire; Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663–1736); Ottoman Empire; Venice. autocracy. See absolutism; Charles II of England (1630–1685); China; France; James II (1633–1701); Karl XI of Sweden (1655–1697); Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718); Louis XIV (1638–1715); Manchus; mandate of heaven; Ottoman Empire; Peter I of Russia (1672–1725); Russia. Autorament Cudzoziemski. “Foreign Contingent.” See Polish Army. Autorament Narodowy. “National Contingent.” See Polish Army; towarzysz. auxiliaries. See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Azaps; bahziz; Derbençi; ganimet; Janissary Corps; levend/levendat; magazines; nefir-i am; Poltava, Battle of (June 27/July 8, 1709); Raya; Russian Army; sarica sekban; sipahis; standing army; Tatars; Vallacker cavalry; Voynuks; war finance. Ayscue, George (1616–1671). “Admiral of the Irish Seas.” He fought for the Parliamentary Navy during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), during which he fought against Royalist forces in the Caribbean as well as in the Irish Sea and other home waters. He was fortunate to avoid meeting Maarten van Tromp in the Thames estuary in midsummer of 1652, at the start of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Tromp instead sailed north to fight Robert Blake. Ayscue fought de Ruyter off Plymouth on August 6/16, 1652, but was beaten off. That allowed a large Dutch convoy to escape. From 1658–1660 he served as an adviser with the Swedish Navy. Returning to command, he ran aground on the Galloper shoal in the middle of the fight at The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666) during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). He was forced to surrender by his men, who were terrified by the approach of several Dutch fireships. Ayscue spent a period as a prisoner of the United Provinces, but was released upon the agreement of peace in 1667. Upon his repatriation, he retired from naval affairs. He remains the most senior British naval officer ever to have been taken prisoner by enemy action. 27

Azaps

Azaps. “Azabs” or “bachelors.” Originally, infantry archers drawn from volunteer Turkic or Kurdish hunters and tribesmen from Anatolia, serving as Ottoman auxiliaries. During the 14th century Azaps also served as marines with Beylik or Ottoman fleets. Although some adapted to firearms, by the early 16th century most were employed in support roles as ammunition carriers, runners, guards, or sappers. By 1700, however, their combat role was revived as the expense of the Kapikulu Askerleri shrank the number of household troops and fresh volunteers along the Empire’s reduced frontiers joined Azap units.

28

B Baden, Treaty of (August 27/September 7, 1714). A capstone treaty completing the settlement achieved in the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713) and repeating the clauses added to the Utrecht peace by the Treaty of Rastadt (February 24/March 7, 1714). Together, these treaties ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), with Baden formally settling the war between France and the Holy Roman Empire where Rastadt ended the war between France and the Austrian Habsburgs. The terms of Baden returned physical possession of French-occupied territory on the right bank of the Rhine to the Empire, essentially restoring the status quo ante of 1701 in the Rhineland. It conferred recognition by France of Habsburg title to the Spanish (henceforth, Austrian) Netherlands, and to Milan and Naples. bahs¸is¸. The Ottoman pay system of cash bonuses given to members of the regular Army. This was less a reward than a permanent salary increase (terakki). It was unrelated to payment from spoils (ganimet), the pay system used by sultans to reward irregulars and auxiliaries. ballast. Dead weight placed low in a ship’s hold to sink it deeper into the water to increase stability. It was usually formed of gravel, sand, stones, iron, or lead. Banat krajina. The Banatian border of the Austrian Empire. It comprised frontier fortresses, watchtowers, guard posts, and fortified Grenzer villages. Banner system. Chinese: “baqi,” Manchu: “jaku-n gu-sa.” A highly effective military organization established among the Manchus (Jürchen) by Nurgaci (1559–1626). While there is evidence of Banner organization as early as 1595, it is conventionally recorded by area specialist historians that Nurgaci arranged his 150,000-strong Manchu army into Banners in 1601. Originally, all Manchu troops were mobilized under four “plain” Banners, each commanded by one of

Banner system

Nurgaci’s kinsmen: Blue, Red, Yellow, and White. From 1615 Nurgaci organized four additional “bordered” Manchu Banners, whose flags used the same basic field colors but with added trimming: Blue bordered, Red bordered, and so forth. Banners were more administrative devices than combat organizations per se, with each Manchu family assigned to one or another of the Banners. In battle, Banner troops fought in smaller units called “niru” by Manchus and “zuoling” by Chinese. About 300 “households” made up a niru or company, with 25 such companies comprising a Banner. At first, niru commanders inherited their offices. From early in the 18th century, however, Manchu officer ranks were assigned only through appointment by Nurgaci and his heirs. Later, this right was assumed by Qing emperors and generals. Such careful organization of Manchu troops into Banners allowed coordinated, sophisticated, and flexible tactical maneuvers to be learned and practiced in battle. Probably most importantly, the system developed a new discipline and tight unit organization among troops whose historic fighting patterns were wilder, more clannish, and who had hitherto expressed far less hierarchical loyalty. The Banners also built unit solidarity among linked families and clans and helped sustain the morale of their fighting fathers and sons. One drawback was that Banner troops developed as much or more loyalty to their given Banners’ generals as to Nurgaci or later, to his eighth son and immediate successor, Hong Taiji (1592–1643). Still, this was a significant advance on frontier clannishness and local feuding, and as long as the generals remained loyal (or at least content with their share of the spoils), so too did the troops. Allied or conquered Mongols were organized into eight Mongol banners starting in the 1620s–1630s. Over the course of the protracted series of campaigns against the northern Ming, which occurred over the period 1618–1644, Han Chinese Banners were also progressively formed within the Qing Army, as Manchu-controlled forces became known from 1636. In fact, the first nonManchu unit to fight alongside the original Banners had been comprised of “Old Han” (“fe Nikan i cooha”) Chinese troops, or Nikan (the Manchu word for Han Chinese). These were later designated “ujen cooha.” The exact meaning of the term remains disputed. Some translate it as “cherished soldiers.” Alternately, it is rendered as “heavy troops,” but there is dispute as to whether “heavy” meant “armored” or “burdened” (as by hauling cannon to battle). In any case, incorporation of Han soldiers into the Banner system was certainly encouraged by their superior knowledge of artillery, which they dragged to battle and to sieges. Yet, it took a long time for the conquering Manchu to accept the idea of rearming defeated Chinese. Thus, Han troops at first fought under their old, distinctive black (or black and green) flag, which was not officially a “Banner.” In 1637 the Han division was reorganized on the niru model of the Manchus. Two years later it was subdivided into four units. It was not until 1642, however, that Han troops were separated into eight new, formally designated Banners. The single most important innovation in the Manchu military system was this slow evolution of eight Chinese or “Han-Martial” Banners during the 1630s and 1640s. Many Han soldiers in the new Banners were experienced professionals, either released prisoners of war from the Ming or other Chinese armies who 30

Banner system

swore allegiance to the Qing or men who read correctly the shifting winds of Ming military and political fortunes. More than a few knew how to cast cannon and were skilled in siegecraft, which was important when facing Chinese fortified cities. In 1631 a discrete Han artillery corps was formed to support the Qing Army. In 1637 Han troops were divided into two corps, but not yet assigned Banners of their own. Two years later, as the Ming Empire began its final crumbling under the twin pressures of civil war and Qing assault, Han prisoners and volunteers became so numerous that four Han Banners were formally established. Three years after that there were enough to warrant reorganization into eight Chinese martial Banners. Along with eight Mongol Banners, Han-Martial Banners were now officially incorporated into the Qing Army. That raised the number of formal Qing Banners to twenty-four: eight Manchu, eight Mongol, and eight Chinese, with additional companies or niru of specialized engineer and artillery troops. At the top of each non-Manchu Banner was a Manchu official appointed directly by the Manchu leadership and responsible for administration, control, and espionage concerning loyalty of the troops. The non-Manchu Banners proved perfectly loyal, and participated in the final Qing campaigns in China, as well as in the Qing conquests of Inner Mongolia and Korea. In part, loyalty was purchased through more equitable distribution of war booty. Once the rich cities and provinces of northern China fell, the booty system was replaced with regular wages. At a political and social level, this military process advanced a degree of cultural, political, and administrative assimilation of traditional local elites with the thin overlying population of the conquering Manchu regime. Han Banner troops were not drawn from nomadic communities but from settled populations. This posed a new organizational and logistical challenge to Qing rulers. Han soldiers did not tend herds in the winter like their Manchu and Mongol brethren in arms. Han Banner troops needed to be maintained year round, unlike non-Han nomads who were used to life as seasonal campaigners and spent the rest of their time on horseback tending to cattle and pony herds. This core logistical fact forced the Qing to modernize their empire to take account of a new kind of subject population, and added incentive to acquire richer lands in China from which to support their new troops. Still more nonManchu Banners were added for so-called “New Manchus” as further conquests brought fresh areas and sources of recruits under Qing control. These included Sibo tribesmen from Siberia and Muslims from Turkmenistan. After 1644 an elite guard drawn from the Banners was positioned around Beijing, displacing the armed eunuchs who previously guarded the Forbidden City. A few Russian captives also served in Qing Banners. During the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681) the young Kangxi emperor undertook critical military reforms, without which it may be doubted the Qing would have survived in China. He promoted officers based on merit rather than ethnicity and raised vast numbers of Han Chinese troops, perhaps as many as 900,000 at peak force levels. These new formations overwhelmed in importance, as well as in fighting effectiveness in the south of China, the older Manchu and Mongol Banners. Kangxi’s abandonment of Qing reliance on Manchurian and Mongol Banner troops, other 31

banquette

than as a central strike force, came after the final campaign of the War of the Three Feudatories in 1681. That was closely followed by conquest of the last Ming holdouts on Taiwan two years later. Kangxi made even more fundamental reforms of the Chinese military system. Unimpressed by the poor military performance of the Banner troops during the great rebellion, Kangxi stripped mid- and lower-level Banner commanders of all civil and governance functions and administratively separated the Eight Banners (actually, twenty-four) from the rest of the Army. Banner troops were henceforth to serve as an almost exclusively military elite whose garrisons provided a key defense force of the dynasty, rather than the country. The Eight Banner Army therefore continued as it had begun, as a hereditary military force that was family based and organized, but with senior officers appointed by the emperor. Reflecting their regime-defending role, the Eight Banners were run by an administrative office headquartered inside the Imperial Palace, and more than half the troops were kept in garrisons around the Forbidden City and in the Qing home base of Manchuria. The remainder were sited along key transportation routes from the main grain-producing provinces, such as the Grand Canal. This accepted and incorporated into policy the ancient lesson of Chinese history, that regular food supply from the grain- and rice-producing center and south to the more arid north was crucial to a dynasty’s stability and survival. Troops were rotated through the capital and provincial garrisons to prevent a build-up of local loyalties, though over time family ties and evasions of the regulation corrupted the system and ensured that at least some Banner troops put down deep local roots. Meanwhile, the main defense force of Chinese troops was reorganized as the Green Standard Army, into which Chinese and Mongol Banner troops and even whole units were transferred from time to time. This meant that although the majority of Bannermen were still ethnic Chinese during Kangxi’s reign, over the following century his successors used transfers of Han troops to the Green Standard Army to ensure that the troops on which the dynasty depended for its political survival were mostly ethnic Manchus. The Eight Banners survived in this highly modified form to the end of the dynasty during the Chinese Revolution of 1911. They were formally eliminated by the dictator Yuan Shikai in 1914. See also China. Suggested Reading: David Graff and Robin Higham, A Military History of China (2002).

banquette. A firing step built into a rampart or trench. In fixed fortifications it separated the terreplein, where the big guns were positioned, from the parapet. It formed the main fighting station for defensive infantry, both on the main rampart and along the covered way. By Vauban’s influential instructions, in the 18th century it settled at 4.5 feet below the parapet. At about four feet wide, the banquette could fit two firing ranks of musketeers. However, men more commonly fired from the banquette as individual snipers, not by ranks or in volley. After discharging his musket, a soldier stepped down to the protected terreplein to reload while another might step up to fire in his turn. Here and there, small ramps permitted cannon to trundle forward to brick- or stone-lined embrasures 32

Barbary corsairs

and so fire directly through the parapet. The banquette was patrolled by sentries in quieter times, some of whom were positioned in guérites. A palisade was sometimes embedded along the outer banquette of the covered way. Bantry Bay, Battle of (May 1/11, 1689). An inconclusive, four-hour naval battle off the Irish coast. It occurred so early in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) that Louis XIV had yet to declare war on William III. The marquis de ChâteauRenault led to Ireland a French escort fleet of 24, mostly Third- and FourthRates. In their care were military transports carrying men and supplies to support the army in Ireland of the deposed king, James II. Admiral Tourville and the French warfleet lay at anchor inside Bantry Bay during unloading of the transports. On May 1/11, nineteen English ships-of-the-line under Admiral Arthur Herbert broke into the bay. The ensuing fight took both fleets outside the bay and into a sharp, snarling action off Sheep Head Peninsula. When the English fleet broke contact, the French failed properly to pursue, seemingly as a result of a fierce argument between the marquis and his lieutenants. The transports completed unloading money, guns, supplies, and volunteer reinforcements for James’ Catholic army, then departed for Brest. This successful landing had the operational effect of forcing William to divide his land and naval resources between Ireland and the bigger fight against France on the Continent. Herbert’s squadron was badly damaged during the fight and spent the next two months refitting and under repair in the yards at Portsmouth. Barbary corsairs. “The Regencies.” The “corsairs” were the navies and cruising warships of several small Muslim principalities—Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis— in the Maghreb. They were so called in the West from their traditional form of naval warfare, the “corso.” This practice was directly comparable to privateer war as practiced by Europeans, wherein public wars were carried out by private naval interests on license from the monarch. These North African cities and their hinterlands were termini of the major overland gold, salt, leather, and slave trades, whose great caravans crossed the Sahara out of West Africa. For centuries corsair navies harassed and plundered commerce in the western Mediterranean, as did the navies and private warships of virtually every other trading power across that nearly enclosed sea. The Regencies also joined in Ottoman naval wars against Venice, Genoa, and Spain—most notably before and at Lepanto in 1571. All those Christian states were rivals and competitors with the small African emirates that controlled the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Barbary galleys and galliots raided widely along the coasts of western and southern Europe, patrolling for Christian slaves. Their main areas of attack were coastal Iberia, Sicily, and Italy, but some raids took them as far as the Atlantic coasts of France, England, and Ireland. Raids attenuated from the 16th century as European naval power, and the fighting power of ships of sail, increased relative to the galley navies of Africa. Treated as pirates in European propaganda, the corsairs were bitterly opposed by Spanish monarchs during the late medieval Reconquista. In the early 16th century they loosened—though they did not formally break—longstanding ties to the declining naval power of the Sublime 33

Barbets

Porte. That shift encouraged Spain to become de facto protector of the corsair states against efforts by the Ottomans to reassert full control. As a result, the corsairs sometimes allied with Spanish kings against shared enemies during the 16th–17th centuries. From 1610–1633 the corsairs captured over 2,500 French ships, until Cardinal Armand Richelieu and Louis XIII sent punitive expeditions against them. Other European states acted against the corsairs out of religious or commercial antagonism. For example, in the 1650s Oliver Cromwell sent an English expedition against the corsairs, led by Robert Blake. This type of one-off action was always very difficult, because Barbary cities were well fortified and occupied a lee shore that was highly dangerous for attacking warships. Louis XIV acted against the corsairs principally for commercial reasons, ordering a naval raid in 1664 against Djidjelli on the Algiers coast. It failed. In the 1680s he sent more raiding fleets. Algiers struck back at French ships and trade. Louis retaliated by sending Admiral Duquesne with a fleet that included a number of early bomb ketches, or “galiotes à bomb,” each mounting two mortars. This fleet bombarded corsair safe harbors in the Aegean and then attacked the main corsair bases in North Africa. Duquesne bombarded Algiers in August–September 1682. He returned the following summer to bombard the city once again. These actions badly damaged the port and city and inflicted high civilian casualties. Facing another bombardment in 1684, Algiers quickly asked for terms. The next year, the French galiotes à bomb and other warships bombarded Tripoli and Tunis, which accepted terms that included paying a large indemnity and releasing many Christian slaves. England (later Great Britain) developed a unique relationship with the corsairs only after the radical Christian prejudices of Cromwell and the Restoration alike were set aside in favor of more rational calculations of commercial and even “national” interests. From the later 17th century through the early 19th century, it was English policy to hammer the corsairs on occasion, enough to make them wary, but also to deal with them fairly in terms of trade so that they tended to leave British ships unmolested and preyed instead on the Mediterranean shipping and trade of England’s enemies. Suggested Reading: Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (1970).

Barbets. “Water-dogs.” A derisory French term for the Vaudois (Waldensians) of Piedmont, used also in reference to the Camisards, peasants of Cévennes who revolted against the religious persecutions of Louis XIV from 1702–1705. barbette. A cannon position (“en barbette”) where the barrel was not projected through an embrasure, but instead peered over the lip of the parapet. Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of (May 19–24/May 29–June 4, 1692). The decisive fleet action of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), fought off the Cherbourg peninsula and secondarily off the Côtentin peninsula. English historians consider this prolonged sea fight to be one battle: La Hogue. French naval historians tend to separate the main actions into two battles, the first of which the French won (Barfleur), and the second of which they lost decisively (La Hogue). 34

Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of

The events which ensued when two great battle fleets met are treated here as a single continuous action because they essentially were, starting on May 29th and ending on June 4th, 1692 (NS). The Allied fleet that sailed to meet the French fleet in battle had 99 rated ships. They would face a French fleet of 44 sail, or ships-of-the-line, plus another 30 or more small warships. All were to escort troop transports for an invasion fleet that was to topple William III from his perch atop the thrones of the Three Kingdoms. By one estimate, the Allied fleet outgunned the French by nearly 9,000 cannon (all weights) to just 3,142. Why did the French undertake to engage, given such uneven odds and weight of firepower? One view is that Louis XIV, though perhaps not his great admiral the compte de Tourville, believed that some English captains were Jacobites who would desert William to support restoration of James II. This was a gross miscalculation. The French also may have hoped to concentrate before the Allies could gather their scattered squadrons. In this, too, they failed. The fleets met off Point de Barfleur, maneuvering for about five hours before Tourville held the wind gauge and drove his ships with characteristic aggression and verve toward the Allied line of battle. The French van anchored at once, to prevent the Allies from doubling back. But a differential in weight of guns told the tale as heavy Allied broadsides tore into the poorly gunned—and thus, quickly overmatched—French line. The action at Barfleur lasted over 11 hours, well into the dark of night. Gun flashes and burning vessels illuminated the sea wherever it was not hidden by voluminous smoke from shipboard artillery and the burning ships themselves. Thousands of men fought desperately for their lives; hundreds died, on and below blood-slicked and badly splintered decks. Tourville only escaped due to a fortunate fog and the fall of night, his ships intact but all heavily damaged, including his flagship, the “Soleil Royal.” Under cover of dark, Tourville ordered ships to cut cables and tried to withdraw the fleet with the turn of the night tide. Around midnight, however, he lost the weather gauge. In an almost complete calm, French ships slowly pulled away. The Allies did not at first notice this movement, but once alerted followed in equally sedate pursuit. Each ragged battle line moved at no more than a slow walking pace. (A similar deadly calm would mark the opening pursuit of the Franco-Spanish fleet by Horatio Nelson at Cape Trafalgar 112 years later.) During this stately but tense retreat from Barfleur, the French lost formation as each ship’s captain looked for some safe harbor along the coast, just ahead of a determined, albeit slow-motion, Allied pursuit. Twenty-two French sail escaped toward St. Malo on the 21st, but many laggards were trapped as they drifted on the tide. The largest French ships-of-the-line were too big to enter the shallow French ports they found; three of the largest beached and were burned by fireships sent after them by English pursuers. Other French ships either grounded or sailed on, some making it safely to Brest. Those that were most heavily damaged were scuttled by their crews, who then swam or rowed ashore in ships’ boats. After abandoning the “Soleil Royal” to fireships and twice transferring his flag from badly damaged or sinking ships, Tourville led 12 surviving battleships to La Hogue. When the Allies caught him there, his French 35

barge

crews fought heroically, but ultimately futilely, from their longboats. Allied seamen and marines also took to longboats, perhaps as many as 200. This flotilla of boats fought off French defenders. Using fireships and incendiaries launched directly from the longboats, the Allies burned to the waterline all 12 French capital ships over two days of fighting (May 23–24). Other French ships were rooted out of individual hiding places in small inlets or shallow harbors the next day, or were caught aground and destroyed by a relentless enemy. French infantry and cavalry joined the fight along the shore, sometimes at just boat hook distance from English sailors firing back from longboats rowed along the beaches. The total of ships lost to France was 15 of her largest sail and many hundreds of crew. This devastating defeat severely reduced the number of menof-war available for French naval operations in the Atlantic. As importantly, it utterly demoralized French naval officers and crews. Lastly, the defeat blocked Louis’ intended invasion of England. After the battle the surviving French warfleet and naval strategy alike shifted from an effort at guerre d’escadre to acceptance of, then insistence upon, guerre de course. barge. In the 17th–18th centuries, a small river or ocean-going ship confined to coastal waters; alternately, one type of ship’s boat. See also bomb ketch. bargirs. See mansabdari. bark. A small sailing ship. barracks. Until the late 17th century, the Janissary Corps was among the few standing forces housed in barracks. From the 1670s, European states and sovereigns began to build permanent housing for newly professional, year-round soldiers. Troops were moved out of billets in private homes, almost always a deeply unpopular system with the “host,” or in public inns, a practice whose popularity varied with actual payment of bills by soldiers or serving of bad food and watery ale by publicans. In newly built fixed fortifications on the continent, barracks were located parallel to the ramparts, leaving space under the ramparts for drill and assembly for parade. Vauban purpose-built three-story barracks that housed officers at either end. The number of beds was rather less than the number of troops, taking into account that even in peacetime about one-third would man the ramparts or walk the chemin des rondes at any given hour. Although barracks were always overcrowded, they were often better accommodations than the damp cellars or freezing garrets huddled in by men of this social class who were civilians. During fighting, barracks were not wellprotected buildings. In a siege they were too vulnerable to mortars and incendiaries to be used by off-watch soldiers, so that those needing sleep took shelter in cellars in the town or in hollowed-out enclaves within the main works. The British establishment in England was peculiar in having almost no purpose-built barracks before 1721. Those which did exist were located within older fortresses at Berwick, Dover, Hull, Portsmouth, and Plymouth, clearly protecting important naval towns as the first priority. Inland barracks were 36

Barrier Treaty, Third

more common in Scotland, where they were heavily fortified as forces of the Crown and Parliament carried out pacification of the Highlands. There were over 100 lesser barracks scattered across Ireland, both coastal and inland, as early as 1698. These housed troops of the Irish establishment. As might be expected of another restive peripheral kingdom requiring significant occupying forces, or at least a rough constabulary, Irish barracks kept troops at the ready call of civil authority, nearby to locations of potential rebellion. See also quartering; quartiers de rafraichissement; subsistence money; winter quarters. barrier fortresses. A line of major fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, manned by the Dutch and hence guarding the southern frontier of the United Provinces from French encroachment. They were returned to the United Provinces at the end of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) under terms of the Peace of Ryswick (September 20, 1697). Louis XIV reoccupied them at the outset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), provoking William III and the United Provinces to fight. In the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1709 the States of Holland exacted additional British guarantees of new postwar fortresses to be “a rampart and Barrier to separate France from the provinces of the States General.” Louis offered to accept the barrier fortresses during the Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710) and agreed to surrender all barrier fortresses still in his possession in the London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711). In 1715 the Dutch did not obtain as many additional barrier fortress towns as they had hoped or might have secured had the peace been agreed instead in 1709. See also Texel (1673). Barrier Treaty, First (October 18/29, 1709). “Anglo-Dutch Treaty,” “Treaty of the Hague.” In exchange for guaranteeing the Protestant succession in Great Britain and recommitting resources to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) against France, the States of Holland within the United Provinces wanted British acquiescence in permanent Dutch control and exploitation of the Spanish Netherlands. This idea was presented as creating a new and better “barrier” against France in the form of additional Dutch fortresses in the southern province. In the final treaty the British agreed to a significant number of Dutch barrier fortresses. The Whigs, who had agreed to the barrier-fortress idea, fell from power in 1710. In subsequent treaties agreed in 1713 and 1715, in concert with former wartime allies, this provision was renegotiated by the Tories, reducing the number of barrier fortresses awarded to the Dutch. Barrier Treaty, Second (January 18/29, 1713). The second in a series of three “Barrier Treaties,” this amended the treaty of 1709 by reducing the number of fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands the Dutch were to be allowed to garrison and fortify as a “barrier” against the French. Barrier Treaty, Third (November 4/15, 1715). Agreed by Austria and the United Provinces, this was a follow-on to the general settlement achieved in the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713) and the Treaty of Rastadt (March 14, 1714). In 37

Bart, Jean

addition to accepting the terms of the earlier Barrier Treaties, it agreed to a new and favorable tariff and established a trade system between hitherto closed economies of the United Provinces and the newly renamed Austrian (formerly Spanish) Netherlands. Bart, Jean (1650–1702). French privateer. Bart grew up to the sea, sailing out of Dunkirk from the days of his boyhood. He first studied naval tactics under the tutelage of the great Dutch Admiral de Ruyter, in the halcyon days of FrancoDutch alliance before Louis XIV embarked on serial wars of aggression against the Spanish Netherlands and United Provinces. During the Dutch War (1672–1678), Bart provided one of the few French naval successes, fighting several sharp ship-to-ship actions and taking 81 enemy merchants as prizes in other engagements. During the opening naval campaign of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), his ship was badly damaged, and he was taken captive by an English man-of-war. Bart soon escaped, adding greatly to his personal legend. With a fellow escapee, he managed to row a ship’s boat across dangerous currents and swells, all the way back to France. This brought him to the attention of the king, who appointed him a captain in the French Navy in spite of his low birth and social status. Bart participated in several fleet actions early in that war, while France still pursued a strategy of guerre d’escadre. He rose quickly and was soon put in command not just of a single royal battleship but of an entire squadron of royal warships. He fought under Tourville at Bévézieres, the sea fight English naval historians call Beachy Head (June 30/July 10, 1690). So great was Bart’s reputation by that time, no less a personage than Vauban consulted Bart on how to build coastal defenses at Dunkirk (Dunkerque) and other Atlantic seaports. In 1694 Bart smashed the escorts of a Dutch grain convoy and took the entire complement of ships in the grain fleet as prizes. After the French Navy moved to a strategy of guerre de course starting in 1695, Bart came truly into his own as a warrior at sea, excelling as a commerce raider. He became far and away the most successful of all French raiders during the Nine Years’ War. In 1696 he slipped past a British blockade of Dunkirk with his royal squadron and conducted a guerre de course so ferociously effective that over 50 English and Dutch warships were occupied with searching specifically for him, or with protecting Allied convoys it was thought he might plunder. Even so, Bart was able to intercept a second grain convoy, whereupon he burned or sank 45 Dutch merchantmen before escorting dozens more back to France as prizes. The next year Bart captured an intact convoy for the second time, taking all its ships as prizes. By the end of the war, Bart was credited with destruction of 30 or more English or Dutch warships (of various tonnage) and capture of over 200 Allied prizes. bar shot. See shot. bastion. A bastion was a defensive work that projected outward from the rampart. In its classic form the bastion was a four-sided, angular defensive work that presented two faces and two accompanying flanks toward attackers. Pairs of 38

batter

bastions framed straight sections of wall known as curtain. The configuration of bastions formed a salient angle which eliminated any “dead ground” before the bastions and curtain. Bastioned defenses thereby exposed the whole frontage of the defended position to sweeping fire that raked across any enemy infantry who moved onto ground now transformed into unimpeded kill zones. Some bastions were fully detached to form a counterguard. Others had interior retrenchments. The bastion was the key innovation of military architecture leading to evolution and ultimate dominance by the new artillery fortress of nearly all strategically important locations, from river fords and bridges to mountain passes, to town and city defenses. See also cavalier (in fortification); crownwork; escalade; garrison; hornwork; latrines; revetment; trace italienne; tour bastionée. bastion tower. See bastion; tour bastionée. batardeau. A miniature cofferdam or wall to hold back water in an otherwise dry ditch, or in a moat. It could be broken, or flushed by opening sluices, to drown enemy sappers or troops and smash or flood their trenches and other works. Batoh, Battle of (June 2–3, 1652). During the closing phase of the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) Cossacks and Tatars rode into Poland for the third time, burning widely and killing indiscriminately in brutal retaliation for earlier Catholic Polish-Lithuanian atrocities against Orthodox peasants in Ukraine. The clash of armies came at Batoh, where the Poles were routed. All prisoners taken by the Cossacks were savagely slaughtered. However, rather than press home their victory in the field, the strategically ill-led Cossacks and Tatar army returned to Ukraine. Nevertheless, this major defeat of the old Polish Quarter Army was the final straw that provoked John II Casimir and the nobility to undertake a wholesale reform of recruitment and war finance of the Polish Army. battalion. European infantry of this period were raised, organized, and officered in regiments. The main tactical unit into which they broke to fight was the battalion. Each regiment over time evolved several battalions, which most often fought independently when committed to action. Battalions were often reorganized into brigades. The main model derived from the French Army, wherein a late 17th-century battalion had a paper strength of about 800 infantry divided among 12 to 16 companies. At the turn of the 18th century, the British kept 9 companies per battalion, including a grenadier company and a “light” company of raiders and skirmishers. The Ottoman equivalent of a battalion was an “Orta” of Janissaries. See also flank company. batter. In artillery: a heavy bombardment of a fortress. In fortification: a measure of the slope accorded the external face of a revetment. The French style established by Vauban set the batter-to-height ratio at 1:5. This actually led to increased erosion, so that the slope was later reduced to 1:6 or less. The batter was determined with a specialized plumb line called a “batter-rule.” 39

battery

battery. At sea: the broadside guns of a single deck on one side of a ship. A “floating battery” was a raft or hulk fitted with guns that were fired from a stationary position, not while the ship was moving. On land: in this period, a unit of artillery varying in number and caliber of guns, according to availability and tactical preferences of a given commander. The term slowly evolved to mean the smallest tactical unit of guns. A minor or small battery numbered 4 to 6 guns, while a “heavy battery” might have 20 or more. Two gunners were assigned to service each gun, along with 6 to 8 soldiers needed to haul the piece back into position after every firing. A related meaning referred to the position or emplacement of the guns rather than to guns per se. For a siege, attacking gun platforms were built from timber to prevent sinking. Guns and crews were protected by breastwork and full parapets up to 18 feet thick and over 100 feet long. Long-range batteries of the first parallel mostly concentrated on dismounting enemy guns. Close-in breaching batteries along the second and third parallels battered the bastions and ramparts. Each battery or pair had an expense magazine nearby and still smaller depots about a dozen meters to the rear. Guns were hauled and emplaced in siege batteries only under cover of night, with embrasures remaining masked by wicker or wood until all batteries were completed and ready to commence bombardment. Siege batteries tended to fire at a single defensive bastion or gun position all together, to concentrate fire and systematically smash and reduce the defenses. Guns were fired in sequence rather than volley, starting at the downwind position to minimize blinding by smoke of other gun crews. battle. The search for decisive battle in this era grew progressively more urgent, but its achievement remained most rare. European battle culture changed significantly during the period, shifting away from mostly combat-free maneuvers such as characterized the long wars of religion in France and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in Germany, toward a new willingness to fight set-piece battles and battles of encounter. Secular rationalism became the new ethic of battle. Once-absolute kings deployed armies and made war for “raison d’état” and “realpolitik” rather than to prove on whose side (if any) God stood. The aesthetic of the burgeoning Enlightenment also began to reshape the face of battle. Among officers and even rankers, “good order” and holding the line under fire while withholding return fire became the supreme test of courage, character, and will. Stoicism and forbearance in the face of heavy casualties were newly valued even by ordinary soldiers (though never universally so). This new way of fighting required intense training and discipline: endless, rigorous drill of mostly peasant recruits and the flotsam and jetsam of town society, carried out by barking middle-class and lesser-noble officers who generally despised and distrusted their men. Collective courage under fire was not merely a military myth purveyed through contemporary propaganda, though it achieved legendary status in the elite imagination of the Enlightenment. Nor was it merely a false memory created later in historical novels and in modern films. Rather, it reflected the new physical realities of the battlefield, notably the greater power and range of field artillery and far greater rates and volume of fire by opposing 40

battle cries

infantry armed with “fusils” (see flintlock firearms). Against enemy artillery an attacker had no choice but to march into the teeth of the guns and take them directly with a close-range volley followed by a bayonet or saber charge, or die trying. Against enemy infantry armed with the same weapons as one’s own, the best infantry tactic devised was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder inside killing range and exchange volleys until one side broke, often when faced with a bayonet charge upon the opposing ranks reaching intimate range. An alert commander—and these were rare—might hope to use his mobile arm, or massed cavalry, to penetrate the gaps made in the enemy’s infantry line and widen and confirm a victory by ruthless pursuit. In fact, this seldom happened. More often, both sides were exhausted and dispirited after hours of mutual slaughter. During the ever-lengthening wars of Louis XIV, armies formed for battle in a basic array: they stood opposite one another with each side two lines deep, separated laterally into blocks formed by battalions and brigades. Intervals between infantry units in the line were still maintained, but became progressively smaller than in earlier wars. After 1715 true, or uninterrupted, infantry lines were more common. Cavalry was usually set on either wing or held in a strong central reserve. Artillery batteries were sited on high ground whenever possible. Preliminary bombardment usually opened the fight, quickly followed by a cavalry action or feint on the flanks. Equality of weapons and training within Europe ensured that opposing armies used similar tactics and inflicted heavy casualties, as no side had a technological superiority. This generally limited command imagination as well, though on occasion minds of rare brilliance could maximize tactical possibilities. Such were Marlborough and Villars, and during part of his career perhaps also Karl XII. The first two commanders suffered from the limits on tactics imposed by shared military technologies, and from political and diplomatic constraints imposed by their respective parliaments and kings. Karl was under no such political restraints, but he faced sharp limits of logistics, recruitment, and Army size that compelled him to seek battle. That had always been the basis for Swedish domination, dating to Gustavus Adolphus at the start of Sweden’s “Great Power Period.” Highly aggressive battle, not fortresses and garrisons, had won Sweden’s empire. In general, the search by some commanders for decisive outcomes through battle was moderately on the rise during this period, but its achievement remained nearly as rare as ever. See also Eugene, Prince of Savoy; guerre d’escadre; guerre de course; Montecuccoli; petite guerre. battle cries. Nearly all battle cries in all armies are intended to inspire fear in the enemy and confidence in one’s fellows. Shouting battle cries also started adrenalin flowing, heightened physical senses, and for some helped repress morbid thoughts of coming wounds or death. Some cries had added political motivation. During this era, Spanish armies comprised as many, or more, Germans and Italians as native Spanish, who were themselves subdivided among mutually quarrelsome Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, and Andalusians. To provide a modicum of unity among at least the Iberians, the official battle cry “Santiago, España!” was adopted, often simplified by soldiers to “España! España!” This war cry was not normally used in civil conflicts or rebellions fought within 41

Bavaria

Spain. Ottoman soldiers employed a war chant before fighting, usually timed to amplify the first volley of musket or cannon fire and frighten their enemies. After the first cry, prolonged drumming kept the mood going and one’s blood hot. The famous Swedish cry, matching their reckless but successful tactic of the charge, was “gå på” (“At them!”). Various other armies, or individual units, adopted battle cries that similarly arose from local custom, or religion, or bravado. See also Wild Geese. Bavaria. See Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699); Blenheim (1704); Donauwörth (1704); Dutch War (1672–1678); Maximilian Emanuel; Höchstädt I (1703); Hofkriegsrat; Holy Roman Empire; Ilbersheim, Treaty of (1704); Malplaquet (1709); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Ferenc Rákóczi; Ramillies (1706); Treaty of Rastadt (1714); uniforms; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); Vienna, siege of (1683); Claude Louis Villars; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); Karl Gustaf Wrangel. bayonet. A steel stabbing weapon, originally attached by a plug or ring to the end of a musket or rifle or other firearm, and later attached with a socket and lug. Bayonets probably originated as adjuncts to civilian hunting rifles, used to save powder and shot when finishing off wounded animals. The first military bayonets were just daggers jammed into musket muzzles, with the first confirmed usage of bayonets by an infantry unit occurring at Ypres in 1647. These crude forms were soon replaced by steel spikes attached to a wooden plug that was stuck in the barrel of a musket (“plug bayonet”). This gave rise to the term “bayonet,” derived from the French “bayonette,” which meant to jam a spigot in a wine cask (although it is often asserted, not least by the citizens of the town, that the term arose from a short dagger identified peculiarly with Bayonne). Attaching the bayonet was done after the musket was discharged, as a plug bayonet made it impossible to load and fire again and could lead to a deadly accident if jammed into a loaded musket. By the 1650s some muskets were made with hinged or folding bayonets permanently attached to the barrel. This folding type was retained for use with the blunderbuss and even some pistols. The Dutch War (1672–1678) saw the first-ever bayonet charges in military history, with companies of French attacking Allied troops with the plug form of the new weapon. Colonel Jean Martinet was an early advocate of plug bayonets replacing pikes on the battlefield, but his suggestions were not uniformly adopted. Once plug bayonets became obsolete, many thousands of surplus spikes or blades were converted into crude daggers. “Ring bayonets” were the next innovation. They tried to keep the musket ready for firing by replacing the plug with a ring or set of rings that circled the barrel. This was an advance, but it introduced wholly new problems, to wit: ring bayonets tended to slide further down the barrel than wanted and lose purchase for thrusting; or they fell off the end of the musket barrel. The socket bayonet, a revolutionary new type, was introduced in France in 1687. Credit for inventing the new bayonet is usually given to Vauban. Its blade was fitted with a short metal tube that click-locked an L-shaped slot over a small 42

Beachy Head, Battle of

stud or lug on the outside of the barrel, firmly securing the blade. This was a major advance on both plug and ring types. Unlike the plug variety, the blade of a socket bayonet hung below the barrel and thus did not hamper loading or firing—aiming was still a rudimentary and even tertiary concern, and was not much affected as a result. And unlike the ring version, a socket bayonet stayed reliably in place when thrusting and stabbing. A variation on the simple socket bayonet was a “sword bayonet.” This had a sword handle on the back end of the blade, which itself was shaped more like a sword blade than a spike. It thus could be detached from the barrel and wielded like a hanger or other short sword. Socket bayonets were mandated for the French Army by royal ordinance in 1692. English and German armies quickly followed suit by adopting the new weapon. Although not widely known beyond histories of the several Northern wars of the period, Swedish bayonets were actually superior earlier than the French type, locking more securely to the barrel. Still, it was the French-style socket bayonet that permanently changed the battlefield, not the earlier Swedish weapon. How? When attached to the new “fusil,” or flintlock firearm, the socket bayonet eliminated pikemen, who had traditionally defended reloading musketeers against cavalry. Henceforth, each infantryman had a reaching and stabbing weapon of his own, making pikers for defense redundant. It quickly became possible for infantry to fire into charging cavalry, then defend themselves by extending their muskets and proffering a steel blade, in a combined 8 to 9 feet of steel reach. Pikemen disappeared entirely from French formations by 1703 and from most major militaries shortly thereafter. Bayonet drill was soon evolved to employ the new weapon in an offensive role against similarly armed infantry, in addition to its defensive function. These changes increased the percentage of infantry bearing firearms into battle without increasing the number of infantrymen in any given unit, and hence enhanced the offensive firepower of infantry units on European battlefields. Eliminating pikes also tightened the frontage of infantry formations by removing huge, unwieldy spears and permitting a shortening of spaces between fusiliers. It also simplified infantry drill and tactics by conforming all infantrymen to a single class of weapons. Military historian Jeremy Black has argued that the adoption of the socket bayonet by the new standing armies, along with the fusil they surmounted, dates the infantry “military revolution” to the second half of the 17th century. Beachy Head, Battle of (February 21/March 2, 1653). The third day and closing action of the three-day fight at Portland (February 18–21/February 28–March 2, 1653). See also Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Blake, Robert. Beachy Head, Battle of (June 30/July 10, 1690). “Bévézieres.” An early sea fight of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Amiral Tourville sailed from Brest with 77 ships-of-the-line and 23 fireships on June 23rd (NS). He was off the Lizard by June 30. He passed the Isle of Wight on July 5, where he encountered an AngloDutch fleet of 57 ships-of-the-line under the Earl of Torrington. The two fleets moved up the Channel in tandem before joining to fight off Beachy Head on 43

beat the chamade

July 10, 1690. The Dutch squadron sailed right past the French van, under François Louis Château-Renault, and immediately embarked on close fighting with the next division in the French line of battle. This division doubled back on the Dutch so that French ships were able to close on all sides and hammer the isolated Dutch ships. The French captured one major Dutch warship, sank two more, and severely or somewhat damaged the rest. Torrington anchored what was left of the Dutch squadron, using his own ships to screen those of his wounded ally. The French wasted a grand opportunity to close in for a decisive kill, instead drifting away on the tide as the battered Allies sought sanctuary in retreat up the Channel. The Allies lost the service of perhaps 11 ships-of-theline, either sunk or badly damaged in the combat. Some French ships were also damaged, but none were lost or even mortally endangered. Technically, the result was the single greatest French victory in a fleet action in the 17th century. Strategically, the victory made little difference to the outcome of the larger war at sea with the Anglo-Dutch navies. Once the Allied ships withdrew, Tourville turned about and made for safe harbor at Le Havre. The French, especially Louis XIV but including even his senior admirals, did not seem to properly understand the nature of sea power. They thus did not try to exploit this hard-won tactical victory to seek imposition of a strategic defeat on William III. In contrast, Torrington was later court-martialed for pulling out of the fight and retreating up the Thames, despite the severely battered condition of most of his ships. He was acquitted upon making a sound argument that although he lost the fight, his actions had prevented a French invasion of the English homeland. In fact, no invasion was ever contemplated or prepared, but most in the audience at his trial thought that one had been averted. The trial and acquittal reflected a broader political panic inside England that was part of a still larger French invasion scare, during which the militia were called out and Marlborough deployed regulars in anticipation of a French descent somewhere along the coast. The ugly mood in England after the naval defeat at Beachy Head was aggravated by terrible news which arrived shortly thereafter from the bloody battlefield at Fleurus (June 21/July 1, 1690), where the Allied cause had suffered another hard defeat. See also Bart, Jean; Ireland. beat the chamade. A drum or trumpet signal made by a besieged force informing the besieging force of a willingness to parley about terms of surrender. In this era, surrendering troops were often allowed to depart with arms and colors intact. See also assault; parole. bedel-i nüzul. An exceptional surtax used to provide grain to the Ottoman Army. See also war finance. before the mast. In the Royal Navy, a term for common seamen who normally berthed in the forecastle of a merchantman. belaying pin. A large, hardwood pin up to three feet long and weighing from 3-5 pounds, around which nautical ropes were turned, coiled, and secured. Belaying 44

Berwick, James, 1st Duke of

pins were a normal part of a ship’s rigging and resided in large numbers on every ship of sail. In intense boarding actions, belaying pins doubled as clubs. beldar. Ottoman military laborers. Employed mainly in trench digging during sieges, they were civilians recruited in Anatolia (one from every 20 households) and used solely for military labor, not fighting. Belize. English pirates set up a base at Roatán Island in the Gulf of Honduras in 1642, to harass shipping along the Spanish Main and to supply forest workers harvesting rich jungle timbers. In the 1660s a small group of foresters established a permanent colony at the mouth of the Belize River. Spain acknowledged English claims in the Caribbean, excepting Belize, in 1670. Belle Île, raid on (June–August 1674). A failed expedition to take this island, located off the coast of Brittany, was led by Admiral Cornelius Tromp during the Dutch War (1672–1678). The Dutch landed 10,000 men on June 27, but failed to take the island from the French after some two months of desultory fighting. Bénauge rebellion (1661–1662). See Louis XIV; Lustucru rebellion. Berestczko, Battle of (June 28–31 1651). This major battle between huge cavalry armies followed a short truce during the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). As many as 100,000 Cossacks and Tatars crossed into Poland in a massive raid-cum-invasion. At Berestczko their numbers were down to about 60,000 when they met a Polish-Lithuanian army of 50,000 (Polish nationalist accounts frequently inflate Cossack numbers at Berestczko, even to an absurdly high level of 200,000). Jan Sobieski was present at the battle, but John Casimir (r. 1648–1668) was in command of Polish forces. The fighting lasted three days. The better-armed, better-led, and more disciplined Poles and Lithuanians prevailed, driving their enemies back across the Dnieper. The Polish victory had the long-term consequence of pushing the defeated Cossacks into the arms of the Tsar. This so changed the balance of power in the east that Poland was ultimately compelled to cede eastern Ukraine and Smolensk to Russia in 1667. berm. The rubble-filled gap between a trench or ditch and the foot of a rampart. Its purpose was to collect debris as subsidence settled the rampart. Bernhard, Christoph. See Münster. Berwick, James, 1st Duke of (1670–1734). Maréchal de France. Bastard son of James II of England and Arabella Churchill, which made him nephew to the Duke of Marlborough. He first saw action as a young soldier against the Ottomans, fighting under the tutelage of Charles of Lorraine. He saw action in Hungary at the siege of Buda (1668) and Mohács (1687). He fought for his father at the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690) and in the Jacobite campaign that followed in Ireland. With the defeat of his father’s Catholic supporters in Ireland, Berwick 45

Bévézieres, Battle of

left for France to fight in the service of Louis XIV during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), taking up arms against Dutch and English armies led by William III, his father’s dethroner. Berwick fought at Steenkerke (July 23/August 3, 1692) and Neerwinden (July 19/29, 1693), where he was taken prisoner by troops commanded by his English uncle, Marlborough. Berwick was exchanged and returned to French service. After fighting in Flanders for the first two years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), he was dispatched to Spain to reinforce the sagging military and political fortunes of Philip V. At first he enjoyed little success and was recalled to France. He fought against Protestant guerrillas in France in 1704–1705, helping to put down the revolt of the Camisards. Berwick led a French expedition against Nice in 1706. He was sent back to Spain later that year to counter English intervention there. He proved himself a master of the difficult logistical requirements of fighting in the tough Iberian climate. He completely outmaneuvered his British opponent, Galway, and won a decisive victory over an Allied army at Almanza (April 14/25, 1707). That effectively secured Spain for Philip V and the Bourbons. Berwick was then brought north to face the greater threat to French interests posed by Anglo-Dutch troops led by his uncle. These related great captains of war fought against one another at the siege of Lille (August 14–December 10, 1708). Berwick returned south to hold, but only precariously, French alpine positions in northern Italy. In 1714 he returned to Iberia. His men stormed Barcelona, driving the Allies from their last significant foothold in Spain. He fought again in Spain five years later, this time against Philip V. During the War of the Polish Succession (1733) he was killed by a stray cannonball, which was almost certainly fired from his own lines. Bévézieres, Battle of (1690). The French name for what the Royal Navy and English historians call the fight at Beachy Head (June 30/July 10, 1690). bey. Turkish: “beg” (“lord”). A title of later Mamluk or other provincial governors in the Ottoman Empire ruling a territory called a Beylik. The “sanjak bey” governed a sanjak, the main administrative unit of the Empire. A “kahya bey” acted as the field agent of the Grand Vezier in military and political affairs. The title was also used by rulers of independent Muslim principalities, such as those of the Maghreb. In Tunis the local bey was technically subordinate to the dey. The latter office was abolished early in the 18th century, when a powerful bey decided he should rule in name as well as fact. Almost the opposite occurred in Algiers, where the local dey overthrew the bey. Beyliks. Originally, minor Muslim principalities in Anatolia dating to the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate and defeat and retreat of the Mongols. During the 16th–18th centuries a Beylik was a province of the Ottoman Empire governed by an autonomous official called a bey. See also PiyadeOan militia; Yaya infantry. billets/billeting. The British Army was peculiar in having almost no purposebuilt barracks before 1721. Those barracks that did exist were located within older fortresses at Berwick, Dover, Hull, Portsmouth, and Plymouth, mainly 46

Blake, Robert

protecting important naval towns. Instead, troops were scattered over Great Britain in billets. This was much opposed in popular opinion and in law. It was illegal from 1628 to billet troops without consent, a rule reinforced in the 1679 “Disbanding Act.” Troops were supposed to be billeted in public houses at four or five men per billet, but this rule was impractical and as often breached as observed. Given this wide distribution of billeted troops, discipline in English home regiments was correspondingly hard. An additional impediment was that men dispersed to towns and farms often supplemented their meager military wages with part-time farm or other labor. See also Alsace; barracks; contributions; dragonnades; drill; Northern War, Second (1655–1660); quartering; quartiers de rafraichissement; Scanian War (1674–1679); subsistence money; war finance; winter quarters. “bite the bullet.” See military medicine. Blake, Robert (1599–1657). English admiral and general. A leading Parliamentary soldier and loyal supporter of Oliver Cromwell during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), Blake was a talented tactician and excellent regimental leader. He won several early defensive battles against superior Royalist forces after first losing at Bristol (1643). He did better at Lyme Regis (1644) and Taunton (1644). In 1649 Parliament appointed Blake General at Sea. He subsequently proved as adept in naval warfare against Prince Rupert and the Royalist navy as he had shown himself to be in land battle against Cavaliers. He chased Rupert to the Tagus in Portugal in early 1649, then cruised successfully off Brazil. Blake escorted Cromwell’s army to Ireland in 1649. He engaged the Royalist fleet off Cartagena and destroyed a privateer base on the Scilly Iles in a series of landings carried out during 1650 and 1651. He found his true sea legs during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) against the United Provinces, a conflict he helped provoke by insisting on Dutch acknowledgment of the English claim of sovereignty of the sea. This led to the so-called “Battle of Dover,” a minor scuffle off Folkestone on May 19/29, 1652, which nevertheless provided the pretext for the first of three major naval wars with the Dutch. He fought Maarten van Tromp at Kentish Knock (September 28/October 8, 1652). He fought Tromp again at Dungeness (November 30/December 10, 1652), losing and retreating up the Thames. He was severely wounded off Beachy Head during the last day of the “Three Days’ Battle,” or Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653). He spent the first day of the fight at Gabbard Shoal (June 2–3/June 12–13, 1653) sick on shore, but joined the action on the second day, intervening decisively with his squadron. He was dispatched to the Mediterranean by Cromwell, in charge of a squadron of 20 sail. He fought a series of small actions against ships of the Barbary corsairs. He assaulted Tunis in 1655, destroying nine small ships he mistakenly believed belonged to the Dey of Tunis, but which were actually in service to the Ottoman sultan, with whom the English Levant Company did much business. He ransomed a few English captives from Algiers, but otherwise accomplished no good for English interests, having done considerable harm by attacking the sultan’s interests. He then 47

Blenheim (Blindheim), Battle of

missed an opportunity to attack a Spanish fleet on his voyage home. In April 1657, late in the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659), Blake caught the annual Spanish silver fleet sheltering in Tenerife. Sailing his ships in with the tide and with all guns blazing, he destroyed every ship in Santa Cruz harbor, inflicting a terrible blow against Spain’s effort to finance the war. He grew ill on the return journey and died before touching English soil. During his career Blake was a major influence on sound development of the States’ Navy (renamed the Royal Navy during the Restoration). During his time as one of the top naval administrators and as a member of the Council of State for the Commonwealth, he oversaw a naval building program that laid down many new hulls, improved warship designs, and issued the first fighting instructions. Blake was the first English naval commander to lead fleets of warships in several bloody battles. Although he was actually a poor tactician, and arguably a worse representative of betrayed duty and sold-out idealism, his courage in battle meant that his name became synonymous with evolving English naval traditions. Blenheim (Blindheim), Battle of (August 2/13, 1704). The major battle of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), where an Allied army under Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy routed a Franco-Bavarian army led by maréchal Camille de Tallard, supported in command by maréchal Ferdinand de Marsin and the exiled Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian Emanuel. Marlborough arrived in Bavaria after a spectacular five-week march from Cologne, during which he fooled enemies and allies alike about his destination and final intentions, which were to prevent Austria being forced from the war against France by intervening directly in the southern theater of operations. After a sharp but bloody victory at the fortified camp of Donauwörth (July 2/13, 1704), he devastated Bavaria in an effort to force Maximilian to give battle. But the Elector waited for the arrival of French reinforcements before emerging from his trenches. As Tallard approached, exhausting his men along the way while suffering local attacks by German peasants exasperated by French thievery and contributions, he was followed closely by Eugene with a fast force comprising mainly cavalry and dragoons. Marlborough and Eugene joined on August 11, forming an Allied concentration of 56,000 men. Tallard arrived at Höchstädt on the 10th and set up camp on the 12th behind Nebel brook, near the villages of Blenheim (Blindheim) and Oberglau. He and the Elector had a combined force of some 60,000 Franco-Bavarian troops. That evening, Marlborough and Eugene climbed a church tower to observe the French camp five miles away. They saw that the enemy had a great advantage of terrain, his camp sited behind a marsh and a stream with a high bank. In addition, one of Tallard’s flanks rested on the Danube, while the other was guarded by heavily wooded hills. They concluded that their only chance for victory was to surprise the French. The commanders therefore ordered camp to be broken at midnight and commenced a night march. This brought them into contact with the enemy at first light. Early on the 13th, as dawn broke, Marlborough and Eugene deployed for battle. Their British and Dutch regiments were arrayed along with more regiments of Austrians, Danes, Hessians, Hanoverians, and Prussians. The Allied armies 48

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moved into battle line and advanced to attack while the enemy was still breakfasting. Tallard’s 62,000 French and Bavarians were slow to respond, even given the surprise achieved by the Allies. Perhaps they believed the approaching enemy were merely demonstrating; it might be that Tallard had not posted sufficient pickets. In either case, French foragers were carelessly left out even once the enemy was recognized, and were not recalled to the firing lines until they heard the sound of heavy gunfire and raced to find their home regiments. Tallard’s major mistake, in a day of repeated command errors and smoke-obscured confusion, was to leave his cavalry unsupported by infantry where the Bavarian and French firing lines met to form the center of the battle line. His larger position was anchored on two villages, Blenheim and Oberglau. The Allies attacked these around noon in an effort to draw off troops from the French center before landing their main blow there. The plan worked, though not without concern and only after a bloody series of fights. An Allied feint toward Oberglau was repulsed by a counterattack headed by “Wild Geese” of the famed “brigade Royal Irlandais,” in service to France. Marlborough called for reinforcements. Eugene sent cavalry to plug the hole that opened in the Allied line. Meanwhile, Tallard continued to bleed thousands of men in white Bourbon coats into the fight for the villages. Within two hours he committed his entire infantry reserve, even though too many French troops were already crammed into the villages. Many could not bring weapons to bear on an enemy they could not see through choking black-powder smoke and swirling ash from burning buildings. Meanwhile, Marlborough was massing his reserve at the center, where he brought to bear a grand battery of 40 big guns, while waiting to strike with 90 battalions of hitherto uncommitted infantry and 23 squadrons of fresh horse soldiers. At the decisive moment, he smashed into the French line. The initial Allied cavalry attack was repulsed, but infantry and artillery support added weight to the attackers and blocked French cavalry from counterattacking. The French fought desperately and bravely under heavy bombardment, infantry volleys, and cavalry assaults as Tallard also committed his last reserves of cavalry. The final minutes of fighting saw a cavalry-on-cavalry mêlée, with artillery and infantry pouring in fire wherever French horse appeared amidst or out of the smoke. The French line broke around 5:30 P.M. Most French and Bavarian batteries were overrun and captured by advancing, cheering Allied troops. This cracking and rapid folding of Tallard’s thinned-out center isolated large numbers of French and Bavarians still fighting hard in the two congested villages, each now cut off on an isolated wing of a broken line. More heavy fighting over the smoking ruins was mercifully followed by mass surrender of French infantry: over 14,000 prisoners fell into the hands of Marlborough’s and Eugene’s troops, as the Allied advance through the center cut off any avenue of retreat by the remnants of the French right. Tallard himself was captured. Maximilian had already retired in haste from the field. He eventually made his way to the Spanish Netherlands. His only real success that day had been to withdraw his regiments from the left wing without suffering the destruction experienced by cavalry at the French center and by infantry on the right. About 20,000 French and Bavarians had been killed and wounded, against 13,000 Allied casualties—all between sunrise and sunset of a 49

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single day. Some 108,000 soldiers took part in the fight at Blenheim, of whom 33,000 became casualties. That made Blenheim one of the bloodiest days in European history, prior to the still greater carnage that would later mark the Napoleonic Wars. Marlborough won, with more-than-able assistance from Eugene, because he understood the lay of the battlefield, pinned down the majority of enemy troops in heavy defensive fighting, managed his reserves so well that he created local superiority at a point of his choosing within the larger battle, then released his reserves at the critical moment against the center of a French line badly weakened by his earlier attacks on the flanks. It was the first time in the memory or experience of most military men that a French army had been so badly defeated, and the first true battle of annihilation in many decades. The Allied victory spared Vienna from possible capture by the French and Bavarians and therefore kept Austria in the war. Blenheim also weakened the great anti-Habsburg rebellion in Hungary led by Ferenc Rákóczi. After Blenheim, Louis lost the means to interfere in south German or Austrian affairs, reduced his aid to Rákóczi, and then quickly lost interest in faraway Hungarian rebels and events. Blenheim thus not only preserved the Grand Alliance of England, the United Provinces, Austria, Brandenburg, and the princes of the Holy Roman Empire; it emboldened the Allies to take the strategic offensive. Bavaria was forced out of the war while its Elector stayed in personal exile in the Spanish Netherlands and later in the halls of Versailles. France was driven onto the permanent defensive for the rest of the war. Blenheim was not decisive in the usual “Napoleonic” sense of that term employed from the 1790s and still today, because the long war over the Spanish succession lasted another decade after the dead of Blenheim were buried. On the other hand, few if any early modern or modern battles were decisive in the Napoleonic sense—not even many of those fought by Napoleon. Instead, the War of the Spanish Succession was ultimately decided, as have been almost all modern wars, by sustained attrition of forces and the attending moral and matériel exhaustion of all participants. Within that context, Blenheim went a long way toward blunting the French war effort and turning the tide of eventual victory in favor of the Allies. Blenheim was the first truly strategic defeat of the French Army in half a century. It was also one of the last major battles in which Dutch troops played a significant role. Finally, for all the qualifications that must be made, it was also the most conclusive British land battle in Europe prior to the 20th century. See also Cadogan, William. Suggested Reading: David Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander (1973); “Blenheim,” in Edward Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851; 1994).

blockade, at sea. See Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Anglo-Dutch War, Second, (1665–1667); Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660); Augusta (1676); Bart, Jean; Candia, siege of (1666–1669); Cartagena (1650); convoy; Downs, Battle of The (1666); Luxembourg; Messinian rebellion (1674–1678); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669); Portugal; privateers; Roskilde, Treaty of (1658); Royal Navy; 50

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Scanian War (1674–1679); Sound, Battle of (1658); Tangier; Texel (1653); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); United Provinces; War of the Reunions (1683–1684); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). blockade, on land. See siege warfare. blockship. Any ship or hulk deliberately sunk to block entrance to a harbor or channel. blunderbuss. From the Dutch “dondrebus,” or “thunder gun.” Originating in the 14th century, by the mid-17th century this term was reserved for shortbarreled, large-bore guns with a flared muzzle (round or oval). This permitted fast reloading, as well as loading of several balls or jagged metal pieces at once. Blunderbusses came in musket and pistol types, either of which could fire for a powerful shotgun effect at close ranges. Some were additionally fitted with folding bayonets. This made the blunderbuss an ideal weapon for close defense against densely packed infantry on land or in the tight confines of a boarding action at sea, where fighting was always intimate. Some armies and navies built large blunderbusses that approached artillery calibers. Smaller versions were commonly used by couriers, customs and toll road officials, and the first mailcoach drivers and guards. boarding. Rushing aboard an enemy ship to which one’s own was grappled, lashed, or bound, to engage in hand-to-hand fighting in an effort to subdue the opposing crew and gain control of the enemy’s ship. Boarding actions on official warships were usually carried out by shipboard infantry (marines), with assistance from crewmen. Boarding was a costly and risky tactic and, given advances in stand-off ships’ artillery, much less common in this era than in earlier periods. Nevertheless, boarding was a necessary action for pirates and privateers, or for cruising warships seeking captures or prizes, unless the ship surrendered without offering resistance to boarders. On land, the same tactic of rushing a breach in a defended position was called assault or storming. See also belaying pin; blunderbuss; boarding axe; boarding pike; caltrop; flags; grenades; musketoon. boarding axe. As the appellation suggests, a 3- to 5-pound axe used in boarding actions in war at sea. In this era it was a weapon favored by pirates, who had more need of it than even marines serving on a broadside artillery man-of-war. More adventurous boarders would use it as a mountaineer might use a pickaxe to scale an ice sheet, shallowly embedding it in the high wooden walls of the ship to climb them. Once its wielder was on deck, the boarding axe became a close-fighting weapon. It was also used to cut rigging and other gear to further slow a still-resisting ship. Axes were frequently issued to naval crews as fighting weapons in preference to hangers or cutlasses. When not employed in sea fights, boarding axes were kept ready for use in fire fighting. 51

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boarding pike. A shorter, naval version of the standard pike. It had a hefty shaft and metal “langets” at the business end to prevent the spear-tip being chopped off by the enemy. Boarding pikes were stored in circular racks around the masts. boatswain. See ranks (at sea). bog-house. See latrines. bomb. In this era, an explosive shell fired from a mortar. The powder charge needed to hurl an average mortar bomb over a parapet was minimal, at about 11⁄2 pounds. However, the bomb itself was charged with as much as 16 pounds of black powder, depending on its caliber. Massive bombs weighing as much as 200–300 pounds were seldom used, but were capable of destroying several buildings at once. On even rarer occasions, empty bombs packed with messages were fired to and from fortresses under siege to coordinate sorties with an army of relief. The bomb case was a hollow cast-iron sphere with side handles to aid its lifting into the stubby mortar barrel. It was thicker at the bottom so that it might land with the burning fuse upright. The fuse was a wooden plug with a fine powder core. It could be shaved to adjust time to explosion. The bomb was assembled in the laboratory, where the fuse was measured and cut, then sealed with wax before being hammered flat to the casing. Just prior to firing, the wax was peeled back and the fuse lighted. See also bombardment; bomb ketch. bombardment. A new method of attacking a dug-in enemy or resisting civilian population that fell short of full siege warfare but did even more damage to fortress towns. It involved heavy shelling of the town with all available cannon, mortars, and howitzers to kill and terrorize civilians and reduce morale of the garrison. It did not require breaching walls, reduction of the works or citadel, or expensive and bloody assaults. It was pioneered by the Spanish in 1588. The French bombarded towns from land and sea starting in the Dutch War (1672–1678). Bombardment was essentially a terror weapon that aimed at civilian morale as much as or more than enemy defenses. Louvois was a champion of bombardment, but Vauban was strongly opposed to the practice as inhumane, wasteful of lives and property, and for the most part militarily useless. The French heavily bombarded Luxembourg in 1683 and did even more damage to Brussels in 1695. The French Navy also bombarded the north African cities of the Barbary corsairs. As with most cruel innovations in war, this practice was emulated by other armies and navies in fairly short order. The English took up bombardment against French Atlantic ports with special enthusiasm, smashing and burning some harbor towns several times. See also artillery; bomb ketch; Genoa; military medicine; mortar; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). bomb ketch. “galiotes à bomb.” A ketch-rigged barge or other small warship used as a platform for bombardment mortars. The type was introduced by the French Navy, with the first six small galliots approved by Louis XIV’s minister of finance and secretary of state for the navy, Colbert. They put to sea in 1682, deploying a 52

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long-barreled mortar type first cast in 1680 and fixed at 45 degrees of elevation. Their use in fleet actions was problematic at best and entirely ineffective. They were only truly useful in shore bombardment of large targets, though this was also dangerous work as shore batteries easily outranged less stable mortar ships. Before a bombardment commenced, ketches often came under fire as they were being slowly maneuvered and anchored at close-in ranges. Anchoring was necessary to stabilize the ketch as a firing platform within its effective range. The need for concealment conduced mostly to night actions in which crews fixed the firing position, bombarded the target, then departed before dawn. While deploying at night did not always guarantee that mortar ships were actually in range of their land targets, this error would be corrected on subsequent nights. Early French methods involved anchoring the mortar platform in front while chaining it to a support ship anchored aft, about 100 meters off shore. This was done at Algiers twice in 1682 and again in 1683. In May 1685, a destructive naval bombardment was made by the French against Genoa. Tripoli was also bombarded by the French in 1685, and Algiers was hit a third time in 1688. The first English bomb ketch was launched in 1687. English ships bombarded St. Malo in 1693 and several Atlantic ports in 1694 (Calais, Dieppe, and Le Havre). Within 50 years of launching these first ships, English design evolved into a two-masted (ketchrigged) coasting ship from 100 to 250 tons burden and bearing two 13-inch mortars. These were much sturdier vessels, even capable of independent cruising. Thus, notable English bombardments from ketches included the shelling of Cartagena in 1741 and of Antibes in 1747. Bondetal. See Swedish Army. bonnet. In nautical usage: originally a topsail; later, a small canvas attached to the foot of a larger sail. In fixed fortifications: a small (three feet high) triangular redan placed in front of any salient angle, but usually that of a ravelin or the glacis, between the guns. It protected guns and crews from enfilade and ricochet fire. Bonnets Rouges rebellion (1675). “Red caps.” The name given in Brittany to the Papier Timbré rebellion (1675). It recalled the revolt of 1593 in Burgundy, when peasants took arms to prevent troops crossing their lands during the climactic period of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1629). The revolt was something of a jacquerie as well as a tax rebellion, with nobles and revenue men alike attacked. Louis XIV responded with overwhelming force, then quartered over 10,000 troops on the province. Boufflers, Louis François, duc de (1644–1711). Maréchal de France. He spent most of his adult life in the French Army, joining as a young officer in 1662. He fought especially well in command of a regiment of royal dragoons in the Dutch War (1672–1678), which brought him to the notice of his superiors and of the king, Louis XIV. Boufflers rose in rank over the course of Louis’ subsequent wars, including the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). He was promoted to “maréchal de France” in 1693. He fought in 53

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the Netherlands, the main theater for most of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). He was in charge of the defenses during the second siege of Namur (1695), inflicting high casualties on the Allies while also suffering many losses among his own men. During the first phase of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Boufflers fought in the Spanish Netherlands, winning over the Dutch at Nijmegen in 1702. He was then pushed out of the province by Marlborough’s motley crew of English, Dutch, and German troops, with Boufflers succumbing in bewilderment to a brilliant campaign of maneuver conducted by the English captain-general. In 1704 Boufflers was named to command the Gardes du Corps. He again organized a tough defense during the fierce and extremely bloody siege of Lille in 1708, one of the greatest examples of the art of positional warfare of the entire era. After Villars was wounded and removed from the field during heavy fighting at Malplaquet (1709), Boufflers set aside numerous personal infirmities to conduct a critical and well-ordered retreat and thereby preserve the core of the French Army in front of Paris. Too old and infirm to stay in the saddle for long, he retired at the end of the 1709 campaign. He died two years later, from natural causes. bounty. Money given to new recruits in the British Army, and some others. It was payable in part in the form of “taking the shilling,” with the rest given out as a ticket or cash upon swearing the oath of loyalty and thus becoming subject to military law. This gave rise to a semi-professional class of “bounty jumpers,” cagey men who enlisted, took the bounty, and immediately deserted. Bourbon dynasty. The European dynasty which for centuries was the main rival to the Habsburgs. Bourbon kings ruled France upon the accession to the throne of Henri IV in 1589. They held the French throne until declaration of the First Republic in 1792, during the French Revolution. Bourbon rule resumed in France for a few months during 1814–1815, then again later in 1815 following the second abdication of Napoleon and second restoration of Louis XVIII. The Bourbons were overthrown in 1830 in favor of the July Monarchy. Bourbons ruled in Naples from 1735–1806 and again from 1815–1860. The status of their rule in Spain, where Bourbons occupied the throne from 1700 to 1931, was a principal cause of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The French Bourbons were noted for rigid conservatism in political and social affairs. Talleyrand famously said of that branch of the family: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” See also Louis XIV; Marie Thérèse (of Spain). Bournonville, Duke of (1616–1690). Imperial general. He fought Turenne in the devastated Palatinate in 1674, capturing Strasbourg without a fight. This led to the Battle of Enzheim (October 4, 1674), which Bournonville lost. The next year, he replaced Montecuccoli upon the latter’s retirement. bow(ing). Handling and angling a ship’s gun through a gun port so that a cannon normally mounted and fired broadside could track and fire forward, in the direction of the bow. 54

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bowlines. See rigging; sails. bowsprit. See sails. bowman. A crew member who pulled the foremost oar in a ship’s boat. boyar. A Russian noble servitor class, below the rank of prince. The term referred especially to those minor gentry residing in and around Moscow. The boyars perennially contested the power of the early tsars, until they were tamed by Peter I in 1698. The term had a much different meaning in Lithuania, where boyars were petty gentry and other minor servitors whose interests often clashed violently with those of the great magnates of the Sapiehas faction. boyau. Plural: boyaux. A communications trench connecting to the parallels and zig-zags. Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690). Following the Glorious Revolution in England, James II sailed out of exile in France and landed in Ireland with a small army and French advisors, arms, and munitions in March 1689. Around him rallied Catholic Irish already organized into rough infantry formations by the Earl of Tyrconnel. These were the first of several generations of Irish Jacobites to support James and his heirs in rebellion and hope for a Stuart restoration. William III at first sent the old (perhaps the oldest) mercenary of Europe, Graf Friedrich von Schomberg, to lead his army in the Williamite War in Ireland. But Schomberg’s dilatory command and failure to fight caused William to personally assume command in Ireland in 1690. Louis XIV sent a fleet from Brest, escorting transports carrying military supplies and 6,600 French, German, and Walloon troops in support of James’ soon-to-be-lost cause. A French fleet of 24 sail repulsed a smaller English fleet of 19 warships in a fight off Bantry Bay on May 11, 1689, a sea battle that occurred before either France or England formally declared hostility in the wider Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Including these French and foreign mercenary reinforcements, James assembled a mostly Irish army of 25,000. Most of his Irish levies were highly enthusiastic, but other than his cavalry they were ill-trained and underequipped, and had poor artillery support. James determined to hold a defensive line along the River Boyne rather than abandon and burn Dublin and fight along the line of the Shannon, as his French military advisers strongly urged. That choice of location was a mistake in defensive disposition that helped decide the outcome of the fight. Nor did the Jacobites have time to prepare proper field fortifications; William’s disciplined and well-trained international and English army of 36,000 was just a day’s march away when James finally decided to hold and fight at a highly fordable bend in the River Boyne. William sent a third of his army in a westward flanking march around the Jacobite position on his right. James thought this was the main body of the Williamite army, which was in fact being held in reserve to cross the Boyne near the village of Oldbridge. James and his subordinate commanders thus sent their 55

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main body to the left to counter the observed movement. That vastly increased the numerical advantage accruing to William’s main body when it struck a reduced Jacobite line near Oldbridge. As the infantry clashed hard in the center, William led another force of infantry and cavalry across a nearby ford in the Boyne on his left. This threatened to enclose the Jacobites within the line marked by the bend of the Boyne, and even to cut them off from the rear. A necessary tactical withdrawal by the Jacobites ensued, with the French infantry retreating in calm and disciplined formations. A French Huguenot exile, the Earl of Galway, commanded William’s Protestant cavalry in the pursuit that followed the battle, running down French stragglers. James only lost about 1,000 men that day—barely a defeat, and not a rout by any normal measure. However, his personal prestige and consequent political fortunes suffered a near-fatal blow in face of William’s direct command and victory, and then his own unseemly flight from Dublin and departure from Ireland on a French man-ofwar. On the Williamite side, Schomberg was killed along with some 500 men. William occupied Dublin soon after the battle. The defeat of the main Jacobite army at the Boyne, and the subsequent campaign that ended Jacobite resistance in Ireland over the course of 1691, closed down the threat of a Catholic restoration in England and Scotland. Ulster Protestants remember the Boyne still as a victory for their religious and civil liberties against royal and Catholic absolutism. Catholics remember it as the death-knell for their own civil and religious liberties at the hands of an English army of occupation and local Protestant ascendancy. The Boyne is celebrated by Orangists on July 12th, despite 17thcentury New Style (NS) requiring the addition of just 10 days to the Old Style (OS), or Julian calendar, so that the battle actually occurred on July 1/11. Confusion over the date actually appears to result from the original practice of celebrating on July 12th the Protestant victory at the Boyne together with the later fight at Aughrim (July 12/22, 1691). See also Ireland. branch. A long, straight, subordinate segment of a fortification that “branched” from the main works. Often, this referred to a wing of some hornwork. Alternately, a small gallery carved out during mining operations. Lastly, “branch” was sometimes used to describe a boyau, or communications trench. Brandenburg. “Brandenburg-Prussia.” This north German state was commonly known as Brandenburg or Brandenburg-Prussia after acquisition of Brandenburg and East Prussia by Albert of Hohenzollern in 1618. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) the population and economy of Brandenburg were severely dislocated. At the end of the war, Brandenburg was a rising, but still very minor German and Baltic power. During the extended period of its rise and expansion Friedrich-Wilhelm, the Great Elector, managed to raise the resourcepoor northern state of Brandenburg-Prussia slowly from economic, dynastic, strategic, and military obscurity. The major stepping-stone on this path to prominence was formal recognition of his break with Poland-Lithuania and of his claim to Ducal Prussia, both achieved over the course of the Second Northern War (1655–1660). Though Brandenburg armies did not always win during 56

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the Dutch War (1672–1678), their contribution was significant and was noticed, causing them to be henceforth always in demand as hires or allies, and always factored into the power calculations of all other powers. Friedrich-Wilhelm achieved this based largely on development of a highly professional standing army, careful husbandry of scarce funds, and ruthless centralization of state power in his own hands. At the beginning of the 18th century, the population of all the Hohenzollern lands was only about 1.5 million, mostly serfs utterly oppressed by the Junker nobility and more heavily burdened with military taxes than any other population in Europe. Friedrich I was granted the title of “King in Prussia” in 1701. He was much less effective than his father, the Great Elector, but managed not to suffer too much damage from the major wars that swirled around his territories and dragged his superb armed forces into combat: the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and the Great Northern War (1700–1721). One of his innovations was to restore the traditional territorial militia in 1701, which Friedrich-Wilhelm had disbanded a half-century earlier. Onto its rolls Friedrich I forced both burghers and peasants not already in the Army. In 1714 his successor, Friedrich-Wilhelm I (father of Friedrich II), issued an edict which some historians consider the basis for evolution of general—if not yet universal—military conscription of all young males and the epitome of absolutism. Prussia’s rapid rise after 1700 was greatly facilitated by joining the Grand Alliance against France and by the geopolitical eclipse of its long-time Baltic rival, Sweden, by more distant Russia under Peter I. Indeed, by the end of Friedrich’s reign in 1713, the Prussian Army had expanded to 40,000 men and was already highly regarded as one of the finest in Europe, and BrandenburgPrussia was seen by all as a potentially valuable ally, or a dangerous enemy, in any future war. Yet, despite battlefield successes and territorial expansion as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession, Prussia was still only about the size of Connecticut, with a small and impoverished population of just 2.5 million, in 1715. Prussia thereafter gained from its late entry into the regional alliance that formed in the Baltic to feast off the carcass of the Swedish empire, once it became clear that Karl XII’s earlier misadventure in Ukraine foretold a catastrophic defeat for Sweden in the Great Northern War. Prussia’s subsequent spectacular ascent to the status of Great Power during the 18th century resulted from the return by the immediate successors of Friedrich I to the most markedly successful policy of economic centralization in history, along with its accompanying severe system of war finance and state management of related industries through the Generalkriegskommissariat. Prussia’s leaders between 1714 and 1740 returned to the values of the Great Elector by concentrating on developing a centralized administration, strictly collected taxes, fiscal prudence, and avoiding war. They devoted most state resources to cultivation and care of the Prussian Army, even while committing it to battle as seldom as possible, and never outside a protective alliance. That would not be the case from 1740, when Friedrich II, also called “the Great,” plunged Prussia into a generation of wars of aggression and then defense of freshly stolen territory. See also war finance. 57

Brandenburg Army Suggested Reading: F. Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (1954); K. Friedrich, The Other Prussia: Poland, Prussia and Liberty, 1559–1772 (2000); H. Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy (1958).

Brandenburg Army. See Prussian Army. Brazil. The main military conflict along coastal Brazil in this period was between the Portuguese and Dutch. In 1624 Dutch marines of the West Indies Company (WIC) invaded northern Brazil, but were quickly repulsed by local Portuguese settler militia. A WIC fleet returned in force and captured Recife after a bloody battle in 1630. Dutch settlers then arrived, skirmishing constantly with the local Portuguese but otherwise prospering, not least by cutting into the asiento monopoly on slave trading. At one point the Dutch controlled 2,000 miles of Brazilian coastline. When Portugal reasserted its independence from Spain in 1640, it and the United Provinces became uneasy allies during the last phase of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). This new alliance in Europe abated fighting in Brazil, but did not end it. The Dutch settlers were not finally defeated (driven into Surinam from “Netherland Brazil”) until 1654, and then mainly by Brazilian militia rather than Portuguese soldiers—and primarily as a result of their naval losses suffered during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). In the interior, “bandeiras” (thieves and slavers akin to the brutal men who ran Portugal’s slave-raiding parties and slave markets in Angola and Mozambique) pressed against Jesuit missions that tried to protect refugee Indians who had fled from the slavers supplying Portuguese coastal settlements. There was also a succession of newly encountered Amazonian tribes. These encounters led to a series of “small wars” between armies of “bandeiras” and refugee or interior Indians, with some Indians armed and trained by Jesuits. Brazilian natives fought hard against further expansion by white settlers in 1661, and again in 1680. Most settlers hated the Jesuit-run Indian refuges and feared that progress was being made by representatives of the Society in Lisbon, where the Order was seeking to persuade the monarchy to place all Indians in Brazil under Jesuit protection. Defense of Indians saw lessening success as time passed, until the Jesuit Order was itself expelled from Brazil in 1759. Suggested Reading: John Hemming, Red Gold (1978).

breach. A gap in defensive fortifications made by enemy mines or artillery. This was not a hole per se, unless a petard was used against the curtain or the gate demolished. It was enough to smash the masonry facade with cannelure cutting over a span of about 50 feet, so that the earth behind spilled into the ditch, leaving a sloped opening (breach) which infantry could overcome. “Scarping the breach” was a tactic by defenders facing assault through a breach in their works. By making a steep slope on the inward side of the breach they slowed and exposed attackers to intense fire. See also assault; globe of compression; mines/mining. 58

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breastwork. In field work: a short (and often hastily thrown-up) earthen parapet erected to protect against enfilade enemy fire. The more common French term was epaulement. In fixed fortification: simple breastwork might be used to make retrenchments inside a bastion. Breda, Treaty of (July 11/21, 1667). The settlement that closed the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–1667). It was occasioned by the urgent Dutch need to oppose Louis XIV, who had marched a large army into the Spanish Netherlands in May to initiate the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Breda adjusted the balance of trade in favor of the Dutch, making it more even-handed than English victory in the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) had left it. The English also agreed to abandon the Spice Islands and concentrate their East Indies trades in India. There were also swaps of overseas colonies. England gained Delaware and New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam), which they renamed New York. The Dutch retained Surinam, while England ceded the West African entrepôt of Cormantine (renamed Fort Amsterdam). This settlement, along with fresh French aggression into the Spanish Netherlands, cleared the path for the United Provinces and England to join Sweden in the Triple Alliance in January 1668. bricole. French: “en bricole.” When shot from cannon was encouraged to fall on a near-flat target. brig. See brigantine. brigade. A temporary unit formed for battle and constituting the main component of a European line of battle in this era. Brigades were the mainstay battlefield unit in French armies during the wars of Louis XIV. French infantry brigades were formed by 4 to 6 battalions; a brigade of cavalry comprised 8 to 12 squadrons of horse. Brigades were in turn organized into divisions, but this level lacked any consistency. brigantine. A two-masted warship of the age of sail, square-rigged on the foremast. Brihuega, Battle of (December 8–9/19–20, 1710). See Vendôme, Louis Joseph, duc de; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). British Army. More properly, the “English Army” prior to the Act of Union (1707). English military power was divided between Parliamentary and Royalist forces during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), as the “English Civil Wars” are more generally known among historians, with several separate and antagonistic armies operating in Scotland and Ireland as well. For ease of reference, the main English military force that evolved into the British Army once it merged with Scottish forces is described here. In contrast to the Royal Navy, during this era the British (English) Army was singularly unpopular at home. Bitter memories of the civil wars divided opinion about the Army and 59

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took much longer than a single generation to fade into folk memory. The twinned specters of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution supported by the New Model Army on one hand, and royalist absolutism, Cavaliers, and secret alliance with continental Catholic powers on the other, did not dissipate until after the Glorious Revolution. There followed more years of divisive fighting against Jacobites in Ireland and Scotland, although the events of the first years of the 1690s settled military affairs permanently within the main island power of England. Even when those wars cooled, the British Army maintained separate “establishments” in Britain and Ireland. Marlborough’s victories did much to restore a British reputation for fighting ability on land, which improved further in wars at mid-century as a result of spectacular fortitude and discipline displayed at battles such as Fontenoy (1745). Later propaganda, especially that of American revolutionaries during the last quarter of the 18th century, has been widely repeated, often whole and uncritically, in modern literature, films, and some American historians’ caricatures of Redcoat behavior in the colonies. This created widespread but largely erroneous views about the supposed brutal and bad character of the British Army that survive, even thrive, into the present day. Great Britain was one of the last major countries in Europe to deploy a standing army. In the late 1650s, it still numbered around 40,000 men, many of whom were employed as occupation forces in Ireland and parts of Scotland, and scattered as an effective rural constabulary in England. Numbers dropped dramatically upon the Restoration, as Parliament did not trust a large standing army to Charles II, and the king did not trust Army men who had deposed and executed his father. From 1661–1665, as numbers shrank, the process of professionalization nevertheless picked up speed, with new regiments of horse guards and foot guards established (the latter evolving into the Grenadier Guards from 1815). By 1663 regimental troops in England numbered only 3,600, and garrison troops just another 4,900. Even during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–1667) and Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), the focus on land was a failed effort to return to the days of reliance on militia, around a core professional force of Redcoats. In May 1660, the New Model Army had its main force billeted around London to intimidate Parliament and control that city, and a separate occupation force in Ireland. There was also a Royalist-Irish army living in exile in Dunkirk that was loyal to Charles II. The New Model Army was disbanded by Charles later that year, except for those regiments loyal to George Monk, which had played a crucial role in Charles’ restoration. A brigade of New Model Army men stationed in Dunkirk was merged with the Royalist-Irish army, forming a single unit of 6,600 men. Two years later Charles sold Dunkirk to Louis XIV, whereupon the infantry from this unit returned to England, while most of the cavalry went into French service as mercenaries. The main purpose of these changes was to form a single Army loyal to the king and under firm control of the monarchy. The “Restoration Army” then grew only modestly as a standing force, swelling several-fold during wartime but always subsiding again. At Charles’ death in 1685, there was a standing force of 1,400 men in the king’s Household Guard in various garrisons and another 7,500 regulars billeted in 60

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“marching regiments” (line regiments). There were another 8,000 troops occupying Ireland through the mid-1680s. The attempted rebellion by the Duke of Monmouth allowed James II to raise the Army to just under 20,000 men. Right before the Glorious Revolution the total reached a nominal 34,000. From the end of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms until the 1690s, English, Scottish, and Irish troops fought on all sides in other people’s wars as individual mercenaries or as whole regiments in foreign service. An English brigade fought in Portugal in the 1660s, and a regiment served in the French Army during the Dutch War (1672–1678). From 1674 three regiments of Anglo-Scots served in the “Anglo-Dutch Brigade.” James II officered his enlarged Army mostly with plebeian Catholics, including foreigners, regardless of military competence. He did so at a cost of intense political opposition from the aristocracy and Anglican gentry, which focused on his supposed military despotism and ties to France. This opposition ultimately cost him the throne during the Glorious Revolution. Separate establishments in Scotland (which was very small) and Ireland (which was substantial) were merged with the English establishment upon defeat of the Jacobites during the 1690s, though with most Catholic troops disbanded rather than assimilated. The English and Scots regiments of the Anglo-Dutch Brigade that served in the United Provinces from 1674 were also amalgamated into William III’s unified Army in 1689. In 1697 the combined peacetime force was fixed at just 12,000. It was fundamentally the extended fighting experience of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) that transformed an inexperienced provincial force into a tough and widelyrespected professional Army. For most of the rest of the 18th century the British Army (as it may be properly called from 1707) was far and away the smallest Army in Europe proportionate to national population. Military administration in Great Britain was nearly incoherent for most of the period. Regiments were still mostly organized by their colonels, while the most senior levels of control were divided among several office-holders, only some of whom were in the Cabinet and directly advised the king. There were separate heads of the “Northern Department” and “Southern Department,” charged with devising strategy and running major operations on a geographical basis. The “Lord High Treasurer” determined all Army finance, against a backdrop of deep political and cultural suspicion of standing armies and established Parliamentary supremacy. The “Secretary of the Forces” was military adviser to the king. A “Master-General of the Ordnance” was responsible for the royal artillery and most other war matériel (excluding naval). A “Captain-General” was nominally commander-in-chief of all armed forces on land. This system starkly contrasted with the French trend toward greater centralization of supply, administration, and command in the hands of the monarch and his closest military advisers. Instead, in 1694 Parliament stripped William III of authority over the armed forces, making itself the supreme authority. Despite this dispute, the expeditionary force sent to fight on the Continent numbered 40,000 in 1692 and reached 56,000 by 1697. With agreement on the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697), Parliament allowed the Mutiny Act to lapse and cut the Army down to just 10,000 men at the end of the Nine Years’ War, then 61

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reduced it to 7,000 (all based in England, with 17,000 more permitted in Ireland and various overseas stations). During the War of the Spanish Succession, the Army assumed a major continental role and was again greatly expanded. In addition, up to half of all troops in British service in wartime were foreign mercenaries who fought in “British” regiments either “in pay” (Danes, Hanoverians, Hessians) or “in subsidy” (Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and others). There were also foreign regiments in English pay, formed of Huguenots or other exiles, turncoat prisoners of war, and deserters from other armies. This gave the British Army a peak field strength of 150,000 in 1709. Many recruits were poor young men who were thrown out of work by the broadening eclipse of traditional craft industries such as weaving, were unable or unwilling to work for little to nothing as farm laborers, or were looking to escape dull lives and burdensome family responsibilities. Others were moved by the same reasons that for centuries have moved some young men to volunteer: a lust for imagined glory and distant adventure. They were picked up at rural hiring fairs or off city streets by cagey recruiting sergeants offering fast money with quick talk, and with papers offered and willing signatures made following lubrication of the potential recruit with free beer. Not a few fresh recruits were criminals or cripples, whom towns and counties were eager to see sent off to foreign lands in lieu of a more popular or healthy youth. In English law and military theory the tubercular and lame, apprentices, indentured servants, and Catholics were not supposed to serve under the king’s colors. In practice, some recruits were accepted from each of those forbidden categories, as long as they reached a minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches, were not obviously mentally deficient, and would publicly swear that they were in fact Protestants. Almost all were single young men. Marriage was discouraged, but the natural course of events forced accommodation of an official six “wives” per company. These women were carried on the ration roll in return for work as nurses or seamstresses and cooks. Unknown numbers of non-official wives lived off the books. They were seldom able to travel to foreign stations (berths were provided only for six women per company). Men who married overseas often chose to remain there as volunteers or settlers rather than ship out for home and leave their colonial wives behind—troop ships normally would not accommodate extra women on return voyages. Others did abandon women, who turned out to be merely wives of convenience for some men stationed abroad. Sometimes, those men wishing to remain were given land grants to assist their stay, where they both swelled and could help defend the colonial population. Men wounded in action or crippled by disease while in the monarch’s service could expect to continue receiving pay in an invalid company. Pensions were also available to such men. However, before the 1750s pensions were not paid to regulars discharged in good health; healthy men, of however many years’ service, were expected to find a gainful occupation on their own, and not unduly burden the state. The British Army almost always fought during this period, and indeed throughout all major wars of the next two centuries, within the context of larger and politically complex coalitions. It was numerically one of the smaller 62

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armies engaged in European campaigns. The British Army of the 1690s had three roles: serving as a domestic constabulary and coastal watch; acting as a continental force in support of larger allied armies against still larger enemy armies; and manning overseas stations and fighting in colonial wars. Its domestic role involved troops in considerable fighting against Jacobites and other rebels in Scotland and Ireland. On the continent, like other European armies, the British Army developed a ritualized formal siegecraft that emphasized artillery and rationality of the approach. Unlike other armies, it dressed in distinctive “Redcoat” uniforms and evolved a culture of command and combat discipline, especially in volley fire and with bayonets, that was seldom matched or exceeded. Under Marlborough it achieved a peak of readiness and fighting success that would not be replicated, or rather rediscovered, until late in the Napoleonic Wars. It integrated cavalry and infantry in combat perhaps better than any other Army of the period, with British cavalry trained in shock tactics and heavy charges rather than pistol firing, as in the reformed caracole sometimes still employed by French or Polish horse. Field artillery was also coming into its own, playing a significant role in bombardment of enemy lines and positions in several battles, notably at Blenheim (1704). It learned these skills during the 1690s the same way all fighting men and armies do: by fighting. By the time the Spanish war began in 1701, the badly wounded were already the most experienced in battle of any British force since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1640s. In Ireland and in overseas colonies, the British Army had to fight quite differently and slowly learned to do so. Regiments long deployed in Ireland or overseas assumed a predominant style of raiding and ambuscades. British forces overseas could conduct formal sieges when necessary, and did so on occasion in India and North America. Many regiments went into colonial fights right off the boat from Great Britain or Ireland, with unreformed tactics and military culture intact. But over time, combat tactics were slowly, then heavily influenced by the skulking way of war of native Irish, Indian warriors, American rangers, and Canadian militia. See also Articles of War; barracks; billeting; bounty; Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690); British establishment; drill; Dunes, the (1658); England; establishment; garrisons; impressment; Irish establishment; letters of service; Malplaquet (1709); marching regiments; MasterGeneral of the Ordnance; Mutiny Act (1689); necessaries; officers; off reckonings; Oudenarde (1708); pike; poundage; Ramillies (1706); ranks (on land); rations; stoppages; subject troops; subsistence money; taking the shilling; Tangier; volley fire; war finance; women. Suggested Reading: David Chandler, ed., Oxford History of the British Army (1994); Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (2001); Stuart Ried, Redcoat (1996).

British establishment. The 18th-century British Army, excluding regiments based in Ireland, which were organized and funded as the Irish establishment. British establishment regiments were maintained at full strength compared to half-strength Irish establishment units. The two branches were harmonized in 1771–1772. See also barracks; infantry; military medicine. 63

broadside

broadside. The broad side of a ship, as opposed to the prow or stern. From this, “broadside” referred to an array of guns along the broad side of a ship. And from that, in turn, the term could mean firing all guns along the broad side of a ship at the same time. Naval historians consider mature development of broadside artillery and attendant new naval tactics to have constituted an effective revolution in war at sea. A notable shift produced by this revolution was the virtual disappearance of galleys from all but nearly-closed bodies of water, and their relegation to a support role even there. Warships of sail in this period would sometimes steer in a figure-eight evolution so that guns along one side could be reloaded while firing from the other side, but it was generally preferred to sail in more linear formations. A more important restriction was the inability of a broadside ship to bring guns to bear while advancing directly against an enemy vessel. This compelled adoption of complex tactics and a stately approach that might last hours or days. See also close range; fighting instructions; line of battle; musket shot; pistol shot. buccaneers. “Boucaniers.” French and other non-Spanish pirates of the Caribbean, probably named for the habit of French hunters on St. Domingo of drying and smoking meat on a “boucan,” in the style of native Indians. Their main island home was Tortuga. They were actually more amphibious warriors than pirates, using ships to transport raiding parties to briefly occupy, terrify, and steal from small coastal settlements. They traveled in small ships and rarely dared attack other ships at sea. They principally raided Spanish and Portuguese towns, and preyed on less well-armed Iberian shipping throughout the Caribbean and partway down the Atlantic coast of South America. The boucaniers operated from secret and secure bases nestled in coastal Honduras and elsewhere in Central America and the islands and islets of the Caribbean. Cruel and sordid raids by “buccaneers” (as French boucaniers became known to English seamen who faced them) caused the Spanish to evacuate all settlements on the north coast of Hispaniola in 1603. The offending pirates settled there themselves, surviving into the early- to mid-1700s. By the mid-century mark, many Englishmen had joined the buccaneers or established their own pirate colonies. After the conquest of Jamaica in 1655, which came about as part of the Western Design of Oliver Cromwell, buccaneers and English settlers and pirates struck up mutual trade in booty and imported goods. Several governors of the small colony granted privateer licenses to English buccaneers who agreed to operate only against Spanish shipping. The booty from such attacks and raids kept Jamaica’s spartan agricultural economy going. During the later 18th century, buccaneers concentrated more on English shipping in the Caribbean, as that nation’s trade increased dramatically. They enjoyed passive support from several other island governments, which benefited from the economic boom caused by such filibusterers spending booty in local ports. Colonies also made deals with buccaneers because they wished to deflect them to other targets, and because everyone began to suffer from a sharp loss of legitimate trade due to all the piracy in the Caribbean. In times of war between England and France—which constituted most of the later 17th century and nearly all of the 18th century—buccaneer vessels and 64

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captains were often commissioned as privateers by the French monarchy. Henry Morgan (1635–1688) led a buccaneer expedition that attacked Spanish interests in the Yucatan peninsula in 1663. He ransomed the city of Porto Bello in 1668. On these adventures the buccaneers had as many as a dozen small ships, but the largest sported no more than 8–10 guns. When England sent a Fifth Rate warship, the “Oxford,” to deal with Morgan, he took it captive and made it his flagship. He wanted to use it to lead a buccaneer squadron in an assault on Cartagena, but the ship blew apart en route. (Morgan was one of the few survivors.) He sailed instead aboard the French privateer “Le Cerf Volant.” Spain declared war on Morgan and the buccaneers in 1669. With a month, Morgan destroyed the Spanish Caribbean squadron. In the most spectacular buccaneer venture, Morgan and buccaneer crews aboard over 30 small ships carrying 1,500 buccaneers sacked Panama in January 1671. After that the Spanish beefed up their local naval forces, and the government, such as it was, on Jamaica made some efforts to limit activities of the buccaneers. This compelled some to cross the Panamanian isthmus and launch attacks on the less well-defended Pacific coast of Spanish America during the 1680s. Charles II decided to make virtuous the cruel necessity of the buccaneers: he knighted Morgan (who was born into a minor gentry family in Wales) and appointed him to several high public offices in Jamaica. Buda, siege of (June 17–September 2, 1686). The city of Buda was besieged by the Austrians under the Duke of Lorraine, but was defended well and with spirit by its Ottoman garrison, led by Amduhrraham Pasha. In addition, the besiegers felt threatened by an Ottoman field army led personally by Grand Vezier Suleiman. That army was active in southern Hungary and might have lifted the siege. It appeared near the city on August 13, but did not try to lift the siege by attacking the besiegers. The final assault was agreed only after a three-day, rancorous council of war (August 30–September 1). On September 2nd, the final assault was launched and carried the city. The siege had lasted 77 days. Bulavin, Kondratay (c. 1660–1708). Cossack and rebel leader. See also Cossacks; Old Believers. bullionism. A crude mercantilist economic practice in which sovereigns desperate to maintain the full war chests thought necessary to military strength totally restricted the export of monetary metals. The practice arose from the quite literal need for bullion and coin to finance a nation’s wars, and from a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the underlying value of monetary metals. Butler, James. See Ormonde, Duke of.

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C cabotage. Coastal sea trade. By the late 17th century in Europe, coastal shipping frequently had to pass under hostile guns from detached batteries and small forts, especially in the North Atlantic and Baltic. Cadiz, raid on (August–September 1702). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Cadogan, William (1675–1726). British quartermaster and general. He rose rapidly in rank under the patronage of Marlborough, who made him a staff officer and confidant from 1701. His regiment, “Cadogan’s Horse” (later, the 5th Dragoon Guards), became famous in British military history. He was enormously effective as quartermaster during Marlborough’s famous march to the Danube in 1704, a feat notable above all for its logistical accomplishment. Cadogan was wounded during the fight at the Schellenberg (Donauwörth). He served directly under Marlborough at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). In 1705 he led his regiment in forcing a section of the Lines of Brabant for Marlborough, which changed the whole structure of the northern theater during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He fought at Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706) and took Antwerp after a hard fight, for which he was promoted to majorgeneral. Still leading from the front, he was captured while on a foraging expedition in 1707. As a high-quality prisoner of war, he was quickly freed by exchange. Cadogan led the advance guard of cavalry that brushed into the French cavalry rearguard of Vendôme’s army, precipitating a rare battle of encounter at Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708). Cadogan was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1709, and held that rank during the fight at Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709). He was severely wounded at the siege of Mons later that year. He stayed loyal to Marlborough after the Duke’s dismissal in January 1712, thereby losing his own ranks and offices to the wrath of the Tories. He was reinstated by George I in 1715, in time to participate in the fight

caltrop

against the Jacobite rising that year. In 1722 he became chief of the Army and Master-General of the Ordnance. He also carried out many diplomatic missions from 1701–1712. He later served a number of terms in Parliament. See also Ne Plus Ultra lines. caltrop. “crow’s foot.” A simple but effective passive weapon in which metal spikes were arranged around a core so that, like a child’s “jumping jack,” no matter how the caltrop landed, one spike pointed upward. They were scattered by the hundreds in front of infantry or artillery positions to hobble advancing enemy. In boarding actions in sea fights, attackers might throw caltrops onto the opposing deck, or defenders might do the same in front of their own close-fighting positions. See also chevaux de frise. Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705). Huguenot peasants from mountainous Cévennes revolted against persecution of their Protestant faith by Louis XIV, especially dragonnades and sentencing of observant Protestants to the oars on prison galleys. The name of the revolt derived from an Old French term for night attack (“camisade”), in turn derived from the white “nightshirts” worn by the rebels. The peasants were stirred by fervent local prophets against chronic abuse of power and persecution by Catholic authorities. The Camisards drove priests and royal officials from their region, killing some. They raised a guerilla force of some 4,000 men, who were opposed by 60,000 French regulars, including the Irish Brigade. The Camisard guerillas divided into two groups, one in the mountains and the other on the plain, each led by a charismatic fighting leader. Quickly crushed and driven from the plain around Nîmes, and with only a few holdouts hiding in mountain caves in the Cévennes, the Camisards still carried out ambushes and night raids against French convoys, supplies, and scattered garrisons. While it lasted, the revolt haunted Louis with visions of the region as France’s Ireland, a strategic back door through which foreign powers might drive support and interfere in the internal affairs of his realm. In fact, the Allies did almost nothing to aid the Camisards beyond supplying a little money and vague promises of military assistance and alliance. The main tool used to crush the rising was construction of roads through the once-isolated Cévennes, allowing the French to devastate and depopulate the area. Along with issuance in 1704 of a local decree of amnesty by a new French commander, maréchal Villars, and de facto but still highly restrictive religious toleration, the rebellion came to a close. The last fanatic holdouts fought until they were hunted down and killed. Most fighting was over by early 1705, but some bitter-enders were not finished off for several years after that. Suggested Reading: André Ducasse, La Guerre des camisardes (1946).

camouflet. A mine with a reduced charge. When detonated, the smaller charge meant that the mine collapsed, rather than exploded, an enemy tunnel or gallery. The effect of a camouflet was to halt work on enemy saps or to bury, or cut off and expose to other fire, enemy soldiers and engineers. In English military slang a camouflet was called a “stifler.” 68

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campagne du large. See Tourville. camp volant. “flying encampment.” A detached force of cavalry or other fastmoving troops, such as a mix of cavalry and dragoons, deployed as raiders or for rapid field maneuvers in support of the main armies. The French and Allies alike resorted to camp volant of about 10,000 men each in Flanders in 1695. The next year, the French set up four camps volants in support of a main force of 125,000 men operating in Flanders. Canada. See Acadia; Deerfield raid (1704); forests; Hudson Bay Company; Indian Wars; Iroquois Confederacy; King William’s War (1689–1697); masts; New France; skulking way of war; troupes de la marine; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713). Candia, siege of (1666–1669). An Ottoman siege of Candia, on Crete, was conducted from 1646–1649. Ottoman troops then remained on the island during the duration of the Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669). A second, formal siege, including a naval blockade of the island, began in 1666. Venetian admiral Fancisco Morosini (1618–1694) broke through the Ottoman blockade in 1667 to take command of the defenses. The final phase of the attack on Candia in 1669 was conducted personally by Grand Vezier Köprülü Ahmed Fazil. The Ottomans slowly established a naval stranglehold on the island, blocking most reinforcements and supplies. During the final phase of the siege, Venetian defenders spent six months devising and laying out a massive countermine, but they were unable to make it detonate. After that failure and the withdrawal of a French contingent by Louis XIV, and given the renewed effort by a highly aggressive grand vezier, the garrison surrendered. The fall of Candia gave all Crete to the Ottomans, except for three small and nearby islands, and marked the permanent decline of Venice as a major sea power in the eastern Mediterranean. canister. See shot. cannelure cutting. A method of cannon fire that breached masonry- or brickcovered works by blasting the base with fully charged solid shot, then by cutting vertical grooves (“cannelures”) at either end of a targeted section. The whole segment of wall was brought crashing down with volleys of solid shot that employed reduced charges. This lessened penetration but enhanced shock waves, crumbling the stone. Gravity tumbled the earth behind into the ditch, leaving a manageable slope for infantry to cross. cannon. Cannon in this era were generally cast from brass or iron, and by the mid-17th century were mostly standardized at six calibers (4-, 8-, 12-, 16-, 24-, and 32-pounder), though with national variations and mixed or odd calibers extant for decades beyond that. Bore diameter, even in supposedly standard calibers, could vary by place of manufacture and the skill of a given gunsmith. Even small-caliber guns were generally cast with long barrels, so that they 69

cannon of seven extended far enough for use on ships or in forts, as well as serving as field guns. The distinguishing difference was thus the carriage, rather than the gun barrel. See also artillery; mortar. cannon of seven. An English naval term for a heavy, 7-inch bore gun that fired 42-pound shot. cannon shot rule. “Terrae dominum finitur, ubi finitur armorum vis” (“dominion over the land ends where the cannon’s fire stops”). A practical measurement of enforceable sovereignty off coastal waters, originally measured by the effective range of cannon fired from a shore battery. It later evolved into an agreed three-mile limit that remained the international standard into the mid-20th century. capital. In fortification and siege warfare, the center line of the salient angle of any defensive work. capital ships. See Rates. capitulation. Formal surrender of a fortress on terms negotiated in advance. caponnière. A communications trench or descended road that was covered and screened from view with parapets, or at least had raised-earth, protective sides. A secondary reference was to a casemated barrier that permitted musketeers to rake fire across a ditch. captain. See ranks (at sea); ranks (on land). captaincy-general. The office of the commander-in-chief of the Dutch Army. All Orangists wanted this title and office granted to William III (then still Prince of Orange) for life. This effort was opposed by Jan de Witt and the States’ Party faction in Holland. However, upon the outbreak of the Dutch War (1672–1678) and the quick descent of Dutch military fortunes, William was indeed appointed captain-general, as well as admiral-general for life (February 24, 1672). Prior to that date, a committee of the States General always accompanied a captain-general to war. After William’s appointment the Generality’s active role in command ended. Marlborough succeeded to the title and office after William’s death, though not for life and not without a resumption of the practice of assigning Dutch sub-commanders and placing limits on the English captain-general’s right to commit to battle. See also Stadholderate; Westminster, Treaty of (1654). caracole. See cavalry. Carbisdale, Battle of (April 27, 1650). After five years in exile the Marquis of Montrose (1612–1650) returned to Scotland with 1,500 men, including 500 Swedish mercenaries. He hoped to raise Scots and Royalists in sufficient numbers to take the war to Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army. Some Scots rallied 70

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to Montrose, but most did not. He was taken by surprise at Carbisdale by Puritan cavalry, which quickly and thoroughly routed his infantry. He fled, but was betrayed out of hiding and hanged at Edinburgh (May 21, 1650) on orders of his old personal enemy, the Marquise of Argyll (1607–1661). carcass. A form of iron incendiary shell, usually fired from a mortar. It was invented in Münster in 1672. Its oval casing was packed with powder and pitch, and sometimes also grenades or loaded pistol barrels, and banded all around with iron hoops. The burning pitch was supposed to enhance its incendiary effect. After decades of failure in battle, it was widely agreed that the carcass was inaccurate and inferior to a bomb as a weapon. Carlos II of Spain (r. 1665–1700). King of Spain. Son of Philip IV. He was physically deformed and mentally impaired by generations of Habsburg inbreeding; he was so backward as a child that he still could not walk or talk by age four. His protrudent lower Habsburg jaw did not permit him to chew food. Louis XIV’s disputation of the succession by the sickly infant Carlos led to the War of Devolution (1667–1668), but Louis was turned back, and the boy quite unexpectedly survived. He then lived much longer than most observers expected. Even so, infertile as well as infirm, his death on October 22/November 1, 1700 had been anticipated (and feared) for decades by the powers of Europe. Just prior to his death, probably not understanding what he was doing, Carlos left his whole and undivided inheritance to the infant grandson of Louis XIV, the future Philip V. Should the Bourbons decline the offer (an unlikely chance), he willed that Spain and its entire empire and possessions would devolve instead to Archduke Charles of Austria. This vainglorious deathbed wish of a mentally deficient monarch thus helped ensure that Bourbon and Habsburg, and then all of Europe, would dispute his inheritance. When diplomacy failed to avert a crisis, fighting commenced over partition of his territories. The costly outcome of his unfortunate life was the bloody and exhausting War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Carlos III of Spain. See Charles VI of Austria. Carpi, Battle of (July 9, 1701). Fought at the outset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Maréchal Catinat commanded 30,000 French and Savoyard troops in an invasion of Piedmont and capture of Milan. He was met at Carpi by Prince Eugene of Savoy, in command of an Imperial army. Eugene handily defeated Catinat, effectively ending his career. carronade. A stubby, powerful ship’s gun. It had a heavy caliber bore and mortarlike chamber. It fired very heavy shot over short ranges, and hence was used as a ship-smasher. In the English/British system of Rates, carronades were not counted among the great guns and so did not affect the “Rate” of a ship. This meant that many Royal Navy ships, most notably frigates, were actually more heavily gunned than their official Rate stated. 71

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Cartagena, Battle of (November 5, 1650). A Royalist naval squadron under Prince Rupert was blockaded in the Tagus from March 10, 1650. It tried, but failed to break out on July 16th. It finally sailed from the Tagus on October 12th. Three weeks later it was caught, driven ashore, and most of its ships destroyed at Cartagena. Cartagena, raid on (May 2, 1697). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). casemate. A covered, sometimes vaulted, chamber made most often of masonry. They were usually cut with loopholes for musketeers and embrasures for big guns. A “haxo casemate” was a casemate set on the terreplein. A secondary sense of “casemate” was a vaulted stone chamber well inside a fortress, and used as a barrack or storehouse. case shot. See shot. Casimir, John II (r. 1648–1668). Elected king of Poland. See also Berestczko (1651); Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Warsaw (1656). Cassano, Battle of (August 16, 1705). Prince Eugene of Savoy led an Allied army of 24,000 men against a French army of 22,000 led by Vendôme. The latter had advanced steadily across northern Italy in the wake of the 1704 capture of much of the Savoyard Army. They met at Cassano, west of Milan, along the River Adda. The fight lasted half a day and inflicted several thousand casualties. It was a minor tactical victory for the French, but otherwise was inconclusive. Cassel, Battle of (April 11, 1677). A French army of 30,000 under Philippe of Orléans faced a Dutch-Allied army of the same number under William III (then still William of Orange), with each side aligned in classical manner. Infantry on the French right, led by the Duke of Humières, drove back the Dutch left. At the same time, an attack by the Dutch launched from their own right was fended off by the French left, where troops were commanded by maréchal Luxembourg. The Dutch were thoroughly beaten, but the French missed a real chance for a rout by delaying the pursuit in order to plunder William’s abandoned baggage. Even so, the victory was near complete: the Dutch lost upward of 8,000 killed and wounded, with 3,000 more made prisoner. casualties. See specific battles and sieges for numbers of dead and wounded; see military medicine concerning treatment of wounded. catamaran. A coastal raft used primarily off the coasts of India. Catinat, Nicholas (1637–1712). Maréchal de France. He rose from humble origins to top command by distinguished work at school and then notable command 72

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ability displayed as a young officer on the battlefield, notably at the siege of Lille in 1667. He served with distinction during the Dutch War (1672–1678). He was present at the siege of Philippsburg. He showed a brutal instinct in waging war without quarter at the king’s behest against the civilian Vaudois population of Piedmont. He was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1688. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) he held the top command of French armies in Italy. He defeated Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, at Staffarda (August 8/18, 1690), and conquered Savoy for France. The next year he took Nice. He was promoted to maréchal in 1693. He beat the duke of Savoy again at Marsaglia (October 4, 1693). Catinat was instrumental in forcing a French alliance on Savoy in 1696. In command of 30,000 French and Savoyard troops in north Italy at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Catinat took Milan for Louis, though ostensibly for Spain. When opposed by an Imperial army under Prince Eugene of Savoy, Catinat did not fare as well. This was partly due to court intrigue and in part because of a lack of matériel support and insufficient numbers of troops, who were needed by Louis on other fronts. Catinat also more than met his match in the highly skilled commander, Eugene. He was thus easily defeated at Carpi (July 9, 1701). He was reduced to second-in-command and fought one last campaign, then retired. cat-of-nine-tails. See military discipline. cauldron. A large mortar pit, protected by breastwork. Its distinguishing feature was that it lacked any embrasure. cavalier (cavalry). “Horseman.” A trooper in any cavalry unit. cavalier (fortification). In field works: a small tower (10–12 feet high at most) made of earth and stones, for use as an observation platform. In fixed fortifications: a platform within a bastion for mounting cannon. Most often raised to the middle of the bastion, or about 15 feet, it had lines of sight and fire to far enemy siege works. Cavaliers were normally reserved for fortifications facing the problem of high ground outside the enceinte that would naturally be occupied by enemy batteries during a siege. cavalier de tranche. An extra-tall parapet protecting sappers attempting to reach the covered way. Cavaliers. Originally a term of contempt for gentlemen horse soldiers supporting Charles I in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). It referenced a supposed penchant for playing at war in the same gay and courtly manner with which they hunted game or women. It soon came to refer to all Royalist cavalry. Many were English Catholics, who made up 40% of all Royalist officers. cavalry. Cavalry weapons and tactics developed less during this period than did infantry weapons and tactics. The trend to discarding armor which began with Swedish cavalry during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) continued, 73

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with only decorative breastplates and simple, open-faced steel helmets surviving from the era of knights. Swords—either straight or curved—were retained as a principal cavalry weapon, while some units still used lances. Pistols became increasingly popular when fitted with wheel locks, and universal for cavalry once the flintlock was introduced. Some units also adopted flintlock carbines, or short rifles. By the end of the 17th century much of Europe’s cavalry had adopted the Swedish style of training to fight in three ranks. Sickness and casualties during battle often forced thinning to just two ranks. The most skilled and courageous troopers and officers usually formed the first rank and took position on the flanks of the formation, herding less experienced troopers in the center. English horse soldiers under Marlborough were restricted to just three bullets, to encourage shock action by cavalry charge. French cavalry varied this, advancing at the trot to 50 yards before charging. But French cavalry also sometimes employed a modified “caracole,” in which three ranks at a time approached the enemy to fire at short range before drawing sabers and seeking a mêlée with enemy infantry. This was only slightly more successful than the late medieval, full caracole. The Danes also learned the hard way during the Scanian War (1674–1679) to abandon the sterile tactic of caracole. With experience, most cavalry instead learned to approach the enemy at a steady pace that permitted keeping a tight formation and which did not exhaust the horses. They spurred their chargers and broke into a full gallop only to close the final gap of 50 to 100 yards. In striking contrast, the Swedish Army evolved away from the Western cavalry style of fighting from the time of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He had taught cavalry to charge home with sabers drawn, but only after first firing off their pistols. Karl XI decided that this wasted too much time, and ordered charge with naked steel alone in the Swedish Military Regulations he issued. He proved the efficacy of this more aggressive method during the extraordinary and bloody fight at Lund (December 4/14, 1676). On the other hand, that fight also showed—as did impetuous English horse repeatedly, from Naseby to Waterloo—that charging cavalry tended to forget their larger role in battle and overpursue a fleeing enemy, often thereby inadvertently removing themselves from the field and their commander’s control during the most critical moments of a fight. If properly timed and executed, however, a cavalry charge remained the decisive instrument of horse soldier tactics and battlefield success during this period. In most cases, cavalry alone was able to exploit a break that appeared in enemy lines as a result of infantry or artillery attack, and only cavalry could destroy running enemy infantry or gunners with saber and lance during hot pursuit. Friendly infantry simply lacked the speed, and usually also the stamina, to do the same. This was well understood at the time, so that throughout the wars of this period cavalry regularly comprised a large proportion of field armies. For instance, cavalry formed about 30% of most French field armies and was the superior arm compared to French infantry. Cavalry was more numerous in French campaigns along the Rhine than in the waterlogged terrain of the Spanish Netherlands and United Provinces, which was inhospitable to the cavalry arm. In battles in eastern Europe and the Baltic, as well as in Cossack and Tatar warfare, cavalry was most often 74

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overwhelmingly superior in numbers to infantry. In steppe battles, cavalry was sometimes the only arm in the field on either side. Mounted infantry units that grew in use and importance from the last quarter of the 17th century nearly everywhere included dragoons and hussars. These troops took on some of the cavalry’s old roles by specializing in scouting, foraging, and harassment. See also camp volant; Danish Army; Marathas; Pancerna cavalry; pomest’ia cavalry; silladars; Vallacker cavalry. cebelu. An armed cavalry retainer in service to a timariot or sipahi. cebici bas¸i. An Ottoman officer in charge of an arsenal. Cebicis (cebicilar). “Armorers.” A specialized unit of support within the Janissary Corps responsible for making and repairing armor and weapons. They also formed a small fighting unit, separate from their duties as sword-makers and gunsmiths. In the mid-16th century they numbered fewer than 1,000 men and were directly attached to the Janissary artillery. During the 17th century their numbers expanded many times, and they worked inside permanent garrisons as well as in huge bazaar tents on the march. Ceylon. The Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) completed the Dutch conquest of the island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the late 1650s. This gave it a monopoly of the valuable cinnamon trade and reinforced the strong position of the Dutch in India. chain shot. See shot. chamade. A special drum signal calling for a parley with the enemy. The chamade was most often beaten by the side contemplating surrender or seeking terms. See also beat the chamade. chamber. A hollowed-space at the end of a mine where the explosive charges were laid and detonated. In French: “fourneau.” In Italian: “fornello.” See also gallery. Charles II of Spain. See Carlos II. Charles II of England (1630–1685). King of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1660–1685. Charles was forced to flee to France in 1646 during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). After his father, Charles I, was executed by Oliver Cromwell and Parliament, and the Puritan Republic was established in England, Charles went to Scotland. There he was crowed by the Scottish Covenanters upon agreeing to established Presbyterianism in England, as well as in Scotland. In 1651 he invaded England with a Scots and Royalist army, but was beaten by Cromwell at Worcester (August 2, 1651). He managed to escape and returned to France. In 1654 he was compelled to leave for Germany. Thereafter he relocated to the Spanish Netherlands, from where he plotted and hoped to return to secure his crowns in 75

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the Three Kingdoms. Upon the death of Cromwell in 1658 and the failure of his son to govern well, in 1660 George Monk secured the “Restoration” of Charles. Only a handful of accused regicides were executed, and the fundamental changes of the Puritan Revolution—especially primacy of Parliament, firm establishment of Protestantism, and a new national role for the Royal Navy—were left in place, despite objections from the king. Charles was keen for war against the republican Dutch, a view that coincided with that of London merchants. His aggressive policies led to the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), brought to an end partly because of the damage done by the Great Plague and Great Fire of London. Charles secretly conspired with Louis XIV in the Treaty of Dover (1670) to reestablish Catholicism in Great Britain. This contributed to the outbreak of the Dutch War (1672–1678), by which time Charles had also started the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). From 1681 to his death Charles ruled without recourse to Parliament. It is unclear if he actually intended to govern though the Army, but he certainly made this strong impression on many contemporaries. He ruled and died without leaving a legitimate heir, thereby reopening old issues of political supremacy and religious confessionalism that once again threatened civil war. Fear of a French-style absolute monarch and the private Catholicism of Charles made succession of his openly Catholic brother, James II, deeply problematic. James then governed so openly as a Catholic that within three years he provoked his opposition to invite a foreign army and prince, William III, to take the throne in the Glorious Revolution. See also Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674); British Army; Dover (1670); England; Limerick (1693); Monmouth; Navigation Act (1660); New Model Army; Triple Alliance. Suggested Reading: J. R. Jones, Charles II (1987).

Charles IV of Lorraine. See Lorraine, Charles IV, duc de. Charles V of Lorraine. See Lorraine, Charles V, duc de. Charles VI of Austria. Archduke Charles of Habsburg, subsequently Charles VI of Austria upon the death of his brother, Emperor Joseph I. Charles was the Habsburg claimant to the disputed throne of Spain, leading into the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He was crowned “Carlos III” in Vienna on September 12, 1703. He arrived in Portugal on March 4, 1704, to lead a Habsburg army in defense of his claim to the crown and undivided inheritance of Carlos II. The eventual failure of Allied arms in the great war that followed ensured that the lion’s share of the succession went instead to Philip V, formerly duc d’Anjou, the Bourbon candidate and grandson of Louis XIV. After Charles lost the war to Philip and Louis, which he plotted to continue long after he ascended the throne in Vienna, he clung to his empty title as “King of Spain” until 1725. Charles XI of Sweden. See Karl XI. Charles XII of Sweden. See Karl XII. 76

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chase gun. A cannon mounted in the rear of sailing vessels, used to fire upon pursuers or to give a “parting shot” as the ship turned to run, or to move out of range to reload its broadside guns. See also weather gauge. Château-Renault, François Louis (1637–1716). French vice admiral (from 1701) and also maréchal de France (from 1703). He served for many years without distinction, cruising in the Caribbean and fighting various pirates. His main chance came when he commanded the escort fleet that accompanied James II to Ireland, mainly because he was already in command at Brest. He led the fleet into action at Bantry Bay (1689), a fight that ended inconclusively. He next fought, in command of a squadron, an Anglo-Dutch fleet at Beachy Head (1690) and at the Smyrna convoy in 1693. He succeeded Tourville as vice admiral in 1701. He was in command of the French battlefleet that was badly defeated and surrendered half its ships at Vigo Bay (1702). Louis XIV held him blameless and promoted him to maréchal the next year. He never saw action again. chavush. Messengers and indirect aides to Ottoman sultans. Their main military task was to recommend promotions and redistributions of “timars” to surviving cavalry (timariots) after battle. cheesemongers. English epithet for the Dutch, against whom they fought three naval wars from 1652 to 1674. It reflected in particular the Royalist and aristocratic biases of the “gentlemen captains” of the Restoration Navy when faced in battle by the sons of merchants. The Dutch took perverse pleasure in naming three of their privateers “Getergde Kassboer” (“The Provoked Cheesemonger”). chemin couvert. See covered way. chemin des rondes. A path for sentries to travel atop a wide rampart or on the masonry of a revetment. In addition to sentries, it was used to quickly reinforce weak or threatened parts of a fortification under attack. It was protected on the outer rim by the garde-fou. See also terreplein. chevaux de frise. French: “Frisian (or Friesland) horses.” The Dutch variant was “Vriesse ruyters” (“Frisian riders”). Germans called the same devices “spanische Reiter” (“Spanish riders”). Armies often carted or carried iron stakes or pike points with them to make chevaux de frise on the spot from felled trees. A cheval de frise was a simple field obstacle made from a log or precut timber axle about ten feet long, which was driven through in three directions with iron spikes or lances. This made a six-point hedgehog that stood on its own, like a giant caltrop, opposing a row of lethal stakes to the enemy. In field fights they were used chiefly to check cavalry assaults, acting as substitute pikemen guarding the vulnerable flanks of infantry. While highly effective against cavalry, they seldom held up infantry and were vulnerable to artillery fire. Alternately, chevaux 77

Chiari, Battle of

de frise were set to block access through a breach in a fortress wall. In addition to such field and siege defense, they were used as roadblocks. On occasion, very large chevaux de frise were sunk in a shallow river or harbor to block passage by enemy ships, by threatening to rip open their hulls. See also abattis; Sweinfedder. Chiari, Battle of (September 1/12 1701). Villeroi was defeated by an Imperial army led by Prince Eugene in this battle in north Italy at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Eugene had dug in and fortified, but Villeroi assaulted anyway. The fight lasted many hours. It was notable mainly for the innovation made by Eugene of deploying his men in prone positions behind their field works. Eugene pursued and captured Villeroi at a second battle, at Cremona (February 1, 1702). China. Despite the brilliance of its scholar-elite and imperial civilization, Ming China collapsed into warlordism and civil war lasting for most of the first half of the 17th century. As the Ming descended into internal chaos, along the northern frontier at the start of the 17th century the great Manchu military leader Nurgaci (1559–1626), who laid the basis for the Manchu Empire, began to erode Ming control of the frontier with large-scale raids. In 1618 Nurgaci invaded China proper. The next year the Ming counter-invaded Manchuria. Nurgaci’s Banner system troops inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ming Army during the Sarhu campaign of 1619, forcing the Ming to ask Portuguese traders in Macau for aid. They received only a few late-model European bronze and cast iron cannon (“red barbarian cannon”), recovered from a sunken English or Dutch ship. Ming gunsmiths copied the guns with help from several Jesuit master smiths. They bought more powerful cannon cast in a Portuguese foundry set up in the south of China in 1623. With these cannon and firearms they held back the Manchu assault in 1626, rebuffing Nurgaci. However, the Ming faced active threats on too many fronts. In the south and west two Ming generals, Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, emerged as powerful warlords in full rebellion by 1630. Each general commanded a huge army and controlled large parts of the south, cutting off the Ming in Beijing from tax revenues and sources of recruitment. China was additionally ravaged and destabilized by outbreaks of epidemic disease and famine during these years. Continuing internal political divisions—especially between the scholar-elite and out-of-control imperial eunuchs—and desertions to various enemies by several key Ming generals contributed to more political fragmentation and a fatal decline in military effectiveness. After the death of Nurgaci the Manchu mobilized under his eighth son, Hong Taiji (1592–1643), and readied to finish the conquest of China. This involved dozens of campaigns and hundreds of battles under father and son over 30 years. As more and more Han prisoners joined Qing armies, they brought with them knowledge of firearms, cannon, and siegecraft, otherwise unknown to Manchu cavalry generals. In 1631 the Qing had 40 Portuguese-cast and quality cannon manned by a special all-Han gunnery unit. This closed the technological gap with Chinese armies and fortified cities, as the Qing learned to decide fights 78

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with guns marshaled by their Chinese artillery corps and “Han-Martial” Banners. The Ming also faced a massive rebellion by the regional warlord Li Zicheng. On April 24, 1644, Li took Beijing. The last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, hanged himself the next day from a tree on Coal Hill, outside the Forbidden City. Li Zicheng proclaimed himself emperor and prepared to crush the last Ming armies in the north. In desperation, a Ming “traitor,” General Wu Sangui, who was caught between the Qing and the rebels, allied with the Qing. Into the chaos of rebellion and civil war there thus rode the huge Qing army, a massive force born of a frontier horse culture bred and organized for nothing but war, now heavily supplemented with skilled Chinese Banner troops who knew how to take down a fortified city. As a result, the last strongholds of the Ming in the north fell to General Wu and the Qing. When Wu marched on Beijing to take the capital for the Qing he drove off, but did not destroy, a rebel Ming army under Li Zicheng. He then buried the last Ming ruler, the Chongzhen emperor, who had committed suicide within the Imperial Palace before Wu arrived. The year was 1644. The overthrow of the Ming occurred only marginally according to plans laid out by Hong Taiji. Hong had already conquered Inner Mongolia (1632) and made Korea a tributary state (1638) before he entered into the last Ming civil war to try to overthrow the emperor and establish Manchu rule over northern China. He died just months before this was achieved, more by rebel Ming armies than by any conquering effort by the Qing. His siblings and heirs extended the Manchurian imperial name “Qing” (“Pure”) to the combined Chinese-Manchurian Empire. That was a title and moral claim which Hong had first assigned to the Manchus for propaganda reasons in 1636, to contrast with the widespread view of the Ming as fatally corrupt. The Qing now claimed that the traditional Chinese “mandate of heaven” fell to them, specifically to the first Qing ruler of China, the Shunzhi Emperor (d.1661). The boy-emperor’s regent, Dorgon (1612–1650), 14th of 16 sons of Nurgaci, ordered Wu and other submissive Chinese generals and troops to smash all remaining Ming resistance in China. The end had come swiftly for the Ming in the north, but in the south there was a more protracted death struggle. General Wu’s Chinese units and many Qing troops rode or marched south, the latter in ethnically cohesive Banner formations of Manchu, Mongol, and Han troops. For 17 years, from 1644–1661, fighting occurred in southern China against various “Ming princes,” an admixture of pretenders and actual heirs, supported by Ming diehards and bitter-enders. From 1659 Wu was the principal Qing commander operating in southern China, where most of the troops on both sides were ethnic Han. The Qing Manchu and Mongol Banners were too heavily cavalry formations to be very effective in the different terrain of the south. As ever more territory was conquered, it was divided and handed over to Wu and other former Ming generals to govern as “feudatories,” or vassals of the Qing. When the last of the Ming princes fled to Burma in 1661 his retainers were slaughtered by the Burmese upon arrival, and he and his family were made prisoner by the Burmese king, long a tributary of China. The royal family were handed over to Wu Sangui in 1662, who had followed the last Ming family and military units into Burma at the behest of the Qing. Wu had them all 79

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strangled to death. The Ming cause was forever lost. The last minor pretender died on Taiwan in 1681. Qing conquest of that island followed two years later, upon an invasion conducted by Admiral Shi Ling, himself a former Ming loyalist who once served the pretender kingdom on Taiwan. In southern China, in place of war against Ming pretenders there was renewed war against Chinese rebels, as Wu Sangui and other non-Qing generals launched the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681). The young Kangxi emperor had moved decisively in 1673 to end Qing subsidies to the southern feudatories. He also ordered an end to regional administrative autonomy from the Imperial Court in Beijing. Furious, Wu persuaded two southern feudatory generals to join him in rebellion, with the goal of proclaiming his own regional dynasty. He advanced into central China with an army of 100,000 men, at first enjoying considerable military success against ill-organized and poorly commanded Qing defenders. Within two years he conquered large new territories. He then paused to consolidate his political hold over the new areas, while proposing a settlement to the Qing whereby they would simply quit China and return to Manchuria. There is also some evidence that he offered to divide northern China with the Qing, while he ruled a new empire in the south and center. In retrospect, this pause in his military campaign was probably an error. While disorder grew in vital grain-producing provinces of China which Wu occupied, the Qing reformed and recovered. Dislocation of the food supply and general social order in Wu’s area encouraged a number of his experienced officers to defect to the Qing, while even more Chinese remained loyal to the new regime and spurned Wu’s invitations to join the rebellion. Meanwhile, Kangxi ruthlessly reorganized the Qing Army, a crucially important turn in determining the outcome of the war. He promoted officers based on merit and raised vast numbers of Chinese troops (nearly one million by some accounts). These new formations, or Green Standard Army, overwhelmed in importance and effectiveness the older and smaller Eight Banner Army, and permanently Sinified the outer Qing military system. In the end, Wu and the other rebel generals could not sustain their rebellion without the very subsidies whose removal provoked it in the first place. Nor could Wu, regarded by many Chinese as a traitor who had betrayed the Ming to the foreign Qing 30 years earlier, command loyalty too far beyond the reach of the swords, muskets, and cannon of his armies. He died in 1678, before he could finish the war he started. For all the accusations of treason by Wu, then and since, many more Chinese stayed loyal to the Qing than joined the rebellion. Most of the fighting was over by 1680, with some smaller campaigns waged the following year in the south. The main influences on Chinese military history in the decades, even two centuries, that followed flowed from reforms introduced by Kangxi at the end of the Three Feudatories revolt, which was the last time for 200 years that China would be so roiled by internal upheaval or threatened by foreign armies. The Chinese military that emerged from these reforms was professional and disciplined, with most recruitment, logistics, and military administration brought under central control from the Forbidden City. Kangxi also pushed back Russian incursions in fierce frontier fighting with Russian settlers and military forces along the north80

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ern borders of China, then resolved the dispute in the landmark Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689). In his most important post-revolt reform the Qing Army was divided in two, with the Eight Banner Army rendered increasingly ethnic Manchu in composition and reserved as an elite force, directed from inside the Imperial Palace, whose purpose was to defend the dynasty rather than the country. The Mongol Banners remained principally cavalry, while the Manchu Banners evolved as firearms infantry during the 18th century. The main defense force of Chinese troops remained the Green Standard Army, which was maintained as a standing force of about 600,000 men during most of the 18th century—making it the largest standing army in the world. Only the extraordinary wealth of China in the 17th–18th centuries made maintenance of such a huge force possible. The first significant contacts between China and early modern states in the West, as represented by Dutch and Portuguese ships uneasily touching Chinese shores, had come under the Ming. However, the most enduring and influential contacts occurred during the first decades of rule by the Qing, continuing and expanding into the early 18th century. Even so, these initial brush strokes of trade and military exchange between East and West had little immediate impact or real effect on China or the Chinese military in the period covered in this work. Nor did Chinese military developments much influence military affairs in the West, beyond a mutual exchange of knowledge about ballistics and gun casting and design that accelerated, and then continued a circular diffusion of such technical knowledge dating almost to the origins of gunpowder weapons. See also Mongols; Rites controversy; Zunghar Mongols. Suggested Reading: David Graff and Robin Higham, eds., A Military History of China (2002); Immanuel Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 4th ed. (1990); Charles Hucker, China’s Imperial Past (1975); Lawrence Kessler, K’ang hsi and the Consolidation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661–1684 (1978); Ann Paludan, Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors (1998); Evelyn Rawski, The Last Emperors (1999); Jonathon Spence and John Wills, From Ming to Ch’ing (1979).

Chinese armies. China had a highly sophisticated recruitment system well before any in Europe. Under the Hongwu emperor the Ming maintained parts of the older Mongol military system which involved registration of all households according to types of service owed to the state, including military service. Beyond commoners, hereditary military households were most numerous. These were exempted from taxes, but were expected to maintain themselves in colonies located on lands granted by the regime and scattered across the country. The Ming system was utterly overturned by Qing innovation and reforms after 1644, and again after 1683. On performance in war and other aspects of Chinese arms and armies, see also Banner system; China; Green Standard Army; Kangxi emperor; logistics; Manchus; Mongols; Wu Sangui. Chocim, Battle of (November 11, 1673). See Köprülü Ahmed Fazil; OttomanPolish War (1672–1676); Sobieski, Jan. choragiew. Polish: “troop,” or “company.” The choragiew was the smallest tactical unit in a Polish army. It was recruited and led by a rotmistrz, who contracted

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for pay (and dead-pays) and appointed junior officers (porucznik). There was, as a result, no uniform size to these units, which could number as few as 60 men or exceed 150. Multiple choragiew were grouped into a larger tactical unit called the pulk. Chudnovo, Battle of (1660). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Cimarrones. French: “cimarónes.” Former black slaves and their descendants who escaped into the mountains and forests of Central America and the Caribbean, where they established free communities in hiding. The first was started by survivors of a slave ship that wrecked off Panama in 1513. Communities of Cimarrones existed in the mountains of Hispaniola from the 1520s, numbering about 7,000 by 1545. Other communities were set up in the wake of failed slave rebellions in Cuba (1538), Hispaniola (1546), Venezuela (1552), and Panama (1555). In 1609 a successful slave rebellion led to Spanish recognition, in 1618, of “San Lorenzo of the Blacks,” an independent village near Veracruz. Later that century a Cimarrone community prospered in Venezuela. During the protracted Anglo-FrenchSpanish contest for dominance in the Caribbean, from the 16th through 18th centuries, Cimarrones sometimes formed alliances with English privateers and expeditions to jointly raid Spanish settlements. circumvallation. See lines of circumvallation. citadel. A separate stronghold inside or detached from a castle or other fortification. This discrete fortress had a twofold purpose: to damp down internal unrest and to defend against external threats. They were most common and earliest seen in the Middle East, where many cities had strong inner forts and only thin outer walls. This reflected the fact that the main danger to the original garrisons of the Arab conquest was the local civic population. The Ottomans retained these Arab citadels. Later, they built new ones on European models dating to the wars of religion and the unsettled urban politics and civic life of the Italian Renaissance. During the 17th–18th centuries citadels in Europe were extremely powerful works of five full bastions, built within the main enceinte or beside it. Pentagonal in design, a citadel of the new artillery fortress design could house a garrison of 5,000 or more and put up a ferocious defense, as during the siege of Lille in 1708. A citadel served the garrison as a place of last refuge and active defense, compelling a second or separate siege after the town fell or capitulated by negotiation. Terms of surrender often specified a right for the garrison to retreat from the town to the citadel, with the besieger agreeing not to attack from the direction of the surrendered town. Once the move was completed, tunneling and fighting recommenced. See also esplanade. çit palankasi. Simple reed-palisade forts constructed by the Ottomans in areas where stone forts (kale) were not needed or were too expensive to build. Often, they were also poorly garrisoned and hence easily overpowered or forced to surrender. 82

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civilians. See Articles of War; askeri; Barbary corsairs; barracks; beldar; bombardment; Catinat; citadel; corvée; Cromwell; Deerfield raid (1704); Derbençi; esplanade; fascine; fusiliers; King Philip’s War (1675–1676); Le Tellier; logistics; military discipline; military labor; mines/mining; mortar; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); officers; parley; prize agent; rations; Raya; Rupert, Prince; siege warfare; slopship; standing army; useless mouths; Vauban; Vaudois; war finance; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); zone of servitude. close-fights. Bulkheads built at the fore and aft ends of a warship for defense against boarders. They gave cover and compartmentalized a ship to prevent it being overrun all at once. They were made from heavy wooden slats and fitted with loopholes for firing guns and bayonet work. From this came the synonym and additional meaning of fighting an enemy hand-to-hand and face-to-face, at “close quarters.” close-haul. See haul close. close order. See drill. close quarters. See close-fights. close range. Not an exact term, but in this period in war at sea it probably meant no more than one-quarter mile. See also musket shot; pistol shot. Coehoorn, Menno, Baron van (1641–1704). Dutch military engineer. Born into a professional military family, Coehoorn accepted commission as a minor officer in service to the United Provinces during the Dutch War (1672–1678) with France. At the siege of Grave (1674) he introduced small attack mortars that later became known universally as “Coehoorn mortars.” He published several important works on siegecraft, specializing in fortification of the flat and watery terrain that dominated the Netherlands. His principal employer from the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) through the first years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), was William III. William and other Dutch paymasters were more niggardly in spending on elaborate siege works than was Louis XIV in supporting fortifications by Coehoorn’s great rival, Vauban. That may partly explain why Coehoorn’s defensive suggestions were more active and even aggressive than those of most other military engineers. He placed an unusual emphasis on sorties and other means of disruption of besiegers by members of the garrison, not trusting solely to the passive strength of defensive works. Coehoorn saw extensive action at Fleurus (1690). He became most famous for designing the fortifications at Namur and then resisting Vauban directly during the first siege of Namur (May 25–June 30, 1692), where he suffered a wound to the head in defense of the inner redoubt of Fort William. When at last the fort fell, Vauban visited and personally consoled Coehoorn. In 1695 Coehoorn was on the other side of the walls conducting the second siege of Namur (July 2–September 1, 1695) against his own original works, but which had been redesigned and rebuilt by 83

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Vauban. The difference in tactics and style between the two men was widely noted. Coehoorn’s methods of attack were far more aggressive, countenancing more direct assaults, and hence were also much bloodier than Vauban’s careful approaches, which consciously husbanded the lives of the king’s men. Vauban was personally and especially scornful of Coehoorn’s extremely bloody assault on the works of Namur in 1695. Coehoorn’s contemporaries vaunted his so-called “three systems” of fortification. However, his “three systems” have been identified by later historians of siege warfare as differing emphases on separate aspects of fortified defense. The “first system” employed combinations of bastions and fausse-braye, while the “second system” deployed a continuous fausse-braye. His “third system” employed large ravelins and multiple lunettes. The terminology of fortification systems, and hence the confusion over the degree of variation in design, had more to do with a fetish for classification and “systematization” common to the Enlightenment than with any truly revolutionary breaks in the evolution of Coehoorn’s thinking and designs. Coehoorn mortar. A three-inch caliber, two-man crewed brass mortar made famous and popular by Menno van Coehoorn, master-general of Dutch artillery. It threw small bombs and grenades accurately from 160–180 meters. Dozens were fired at or by defenders from close ranges during sieges. cofferdam. A watertight compartment affixed to a ship’s hull to permit work on repairs below the waterline when the ship was not in drydock. Starting in the 1730s the term was sometimes used in English to refer to batardeau. Colbert, Charles (1625–1696). See Croissy, marquis de. Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–1683). Louis XIV’s key minister for the first 20 years of his personal reign. Colbert was secretary of state for the French Navy as well as the royal household; most importantly, he was controller of finances (1669–1683). Colbert’s first responsibility was to restore France’s tattered finances. He improved collections after learning that only 25% of taxes owed were actually reaching the king, with most of the rest siphoned off by corrupt tax farmers and local officials. He raised the treasury’s collection rate to 80%. He solved the problem of large revenues lost to debt service by simply renouncing one-third of the royal debt. Colbert saw commerce as the servant and instrument of state power, in line with what Adam Smith and others would later call “mercantilism.” Self-sufficiency would be a more apt description of Colbert’s central goal. He sought creation of a vast overseas French empire, sponsoring spice trade colonies in India and sugar plantations in the West Indies supported by new slave stations in Africa, while paying less attention to the fish and fur trades of New France. To that same end, he set up joint-stock companies to compete with the Dutch and English East India Companies, along with similar French trading houses for the West Indies, Africa, and the Americas. This commercial competition he offered to the king as an alternative form of conflict and supremacy to actual war. Since French merchants most often would not willingly 84

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invest in these royal schemes, over time they proved more a drain on the treasury than a benefit to the crown. Colbert’s proposal for war by commercial means was also out of joint with the temper of the Age, and most certainly that of his master. Colbert spent his last years overseeing construction of a large French battlefleet to advance and protect the new overseas colonies, serving formally as secretary for the Navy from 1669. He paid bounties to private shipbuilders while using royal funds to build drydocks and warehouses, and maintain harbors. However, he failed to interest the king sufficiently to build a merchant marine that could compete with the Dutch and English fleets. Nor was he able to much trammel the inflow of foreign goods desired by the French. His warfleet, on the other hand, seriously challenged the English and Dutch to the end of Louis’ reign. Colbert was among the first ministers in Europe to attempt centralized regulation of industry, along with state sponsorship of light industry. He sought to replace imported luxury goods such as silk, lace, tapestries, and glass with domestic manufactures. This policy helped elevate the social respect accorded to internal commerce, even if Colbert badly neglected heavier industries and wholly ignored agriculture. In 1664 he set up comprehensive protective tariffs. He raised these in 1667, provoking retaliatory tariffs by the United Provinces. That conflict contributed to the hot war which broke out over trade in 1672. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes occurred after Colbert’s death, and largely undid his commercial policies by denuding France of many members of its trading class who were Huguenots. Along with several and increasingly protracted wars launched by Louis XIV, such reckless policies on the part of a king unrestrained by Colbert’s prudent counsel squandered much of France’s national treasure on increasingly expensive serial wars. Where Colbert was once credited with extraordinary skill, specialists now argue that he failed to fundamentally change the French system. His successful reforms are seen as having at least as much to do with a fortuitous decade of peace than with any special or personal genius. Colbert ran budget surpluses from 1662, but only until the king’s wars ate these, and thereafter drove the state into massive deficits, taxes, and spending. Although Colbert also modestly improved French roads and built several new canals, he was unable to overcome high internal barriers to trade and extraordinary tolls and other transport costs for moving goods within France. The main effect of Colbert’s policies was to marginally better prepare France to make the wars the king wished to wage, but this was not an effect that much outlasted the War of Devolution (1667–1668), did not survive the Dutch War (1672–1678), and was unnoticeable in the long wars waged after his death. Because Colbert failed to reform the basic system of credit, once the costs of protracted wars exhausted available revenues Louis resorted to unsustainable borrowing, along with older methods of currency debasement and loan defaults— ancient policies which ultimately led to fiscal and then military ruin. See also war finance. Cologne (Köln). An Electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, Cologne was located at a strategic crossroads that was vital to France, Germany, and the 85

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United Provinces, as it controlled much of the lower Rhine. Until 1688 Louis XIV maintained an alliance with Elector Max Heinrich that amounted to a protectorate. In return, Cologne supported him in the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and the Dutch War (1672–1678), attacking the United Provinces in cohort with Münster. When the Elector died in June 1688, Louis sought to secure election of a favored candidate. When this ploy was thwarted by the Emperor and the Pope, Louis threatened force. That mobilized the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, and the United Provinces against him and helped William III persuade the States of Holland to support his invasion of England and the Glorious Revolution. Cologne was then swept into the great conflicts of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also Rastadt (1714). commander. See ranks (at sea). commissaire ordinaire de l’artillerie. An officer in the French service who oversaw security of the arsenal, artillery, and powder magazine of a fortress. commissaires. French bureaucrats serving under the more important intendants, within a broad patronage system. See also logistics. commissaires au classes. French naval impress officials. See also navies; France. commissariat. See logistics; ordu bazar. commissioned officers. All officers who held rank by state or royal commission, as opposed to warrant officers who held status and command by warrant, rather than commission. The distinction was more or less a result of administrative happenstance, but as with most differentiations in human affairs it evolved to have meaningful social and professional significance later on. Commissioned officers eventually assumed the status—and the airs—of a natural governing class, of gentlemen born to command and to whom authority seemingly came naturally. They thus consciously made a clear contrast with lowerborn breeds who needed to make their living at sea or under arms. See also officers. commodore. See ranks (at sea). communications. At sea, flags were commonly used to signal between ships where communication by ships’ boats was not possible. On land, flag signals were also in common use by armies. Rocket signals were sometimes attempted when coordinating sorties between a garrison and an army of relief. Carrier pigeons were risky, but plucky couriers used over longer distances. Rarely, but surprisingly successfully, empty bombs were filled with messages and fired over enemy lines. Communications trenches, or boyau or caponnière, coursed among the parallels and zig-zags of a formal siege. They were used by runners. 86

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Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO). The French “East India Company.” Arriving late to the game of commercial empire and entrepôts in India, the Compagnie des Indies Orientales was founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1664 to pursue direct competitive trade with the Dutch and English in the East Indies (India and Ceylon). It was ordered by Louis XIV to take over trade in the east, using force if necessary. In the face of strenuous opposition from English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC), it founded a fortified factory at Surat in 1668. In 1674 the CIO established a base at Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast. In 1690 it built a factory (entrepôt) near Calcutta. It took control of Mauritius in 1721. The CIO enjoyed considerable martial and commercial success in India later in the 18th century under François Dupliex (1697–1763), before being driven from all but a rump of “French India” as a result of losses in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Compagnie du Nord. A maritime trading company supported by the French crown. It was established by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1669 to penetrate the Baltic trade, partly as a reflection of his and Louis XIV’s commercial policies. In part, it was intended as a strategic instrument support to squeeze the United Provinces, against which the king was already planning his Dutch War (1672–1678). company. A basic infantry unit of varying size according to specific army and combat conditions, but on average in this period ranging from 80–120 men. It was a subdivision of a regiment and was officered by a captain. It roughly equated to a troop of horse or a battery of guns. The Qing Empire had subdivisions (“niru”) comparable to European companies within the Banner system, but these infantry units were of significantly different sizes than companies in Europe. Moreover, they were recruited and organized, as were all original Qing units, on a household or ethnic, rather than a regional or national basis. See also battalion; choragiew; drill; file closers; flank company; garrison; infantry. complement. A Royal Navy ship’s crew, up to the number allowed for its particular Rate. Others might be present on a ship as midshipmen or passengers, but such men were not considered part of its official complement. See also Rates. Concert of the Hague (1658). A diplomatic alliance of France, England, and the United Provinces that sought to persuade Karl X of Sweden to make peace with Denmark during the last two years of the Second Northern War (1655–1660). Condé, Louis II, de Bourbon (1621–1686). See Great Condé. conduct money. Funds given a ship’s officers or crew for travel expenses. conscription. See various national armies, and impressment; military labor; pioneers; standing army. 87

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Conseil d’en Haut. “Council of State.” The compact, personal, and main governing council of the regime of Louis XIV. It was closely overseen by the king, as it dealt in strict secrecy with his wars and the plots and secret bribes that constituted much of his diplomacy. The Dutch War (1672–1678) enhanced its role as a drafter of strategic plans and even operations in the field. Marlborough appears to have had a spy within the Council who provided him regular, invaluable information. contravallation. See lines of contravallation. contributions. The old system of forced money “contributions” common to all armies of the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) survived into the 18th century, though on a reduced scale. During the reign of Louis XIV, foreign contributions in support of French armies approximated regular taxes. In occupied enemy territory this relationship was so explicit that rates were sometimes based on the prior tax burden of a town or region. One estimate is that French armies derived as much as 25% of their needs from contributions. When towns failed to pay, they were subjected to execution. On occasion, campaigns were conducted for no better reason than to force contributions needed to sustain the army collecting them. Similarly, territories might be taken solely for reasons of exacting contributions, when rulers always intended to return that territory after peace resumed. This practice was especially common in parts of the rich Spanish Netherlands. In contrast, Ottoman armies seldom derived more than a small share of their needs from local exactions. Instead, sultans more often agreed to purchase grain at local market prices. That known fact made Ottoman garrisons attractive rather than repulsive to folks living in frontier zones, and encouraged suppliers to bring their grain to market rather than try to hide it from the garrison or until the army had passed on to some other unfortunates’ area. See also Grave, siege of (1674); hostages; military discipline; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Palatinate, devastation of (1688–1689); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); war finance; War of the Reunions (1683–1684); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). convoy. The most famous convoys of the period were great treasure fleets that sailed from the New World to Spain, starting in 1562. Spanish convoys sailed from Seville. Merchants were forced into these by royal decree. They sailed annually to the Spanish Main in two convoys—the “flota” and the “galeones.” The flota sailed in April for Veracruz in New Spain, while the galeones sailed in August for Panama. After wintering and taking on cargos of treasure and other New World goods, all ships rendezvoused in Havana to return as a single fleet numbering some 80–100 vessels. From the late 16th century these treasure fleets were escorted by warships until they made landfall at Seville, which they did successfully almost every autumn until 1717. The New World convoy system worked well, but convoys were harder to organize in the Indian Ocean and across the vast Pacific, and hence were rarer in those waters. This was due to the far greater distances involved and a lack 88

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of ships and men—whether hunted or hunters—to cover the vast expanses of sea involved. In preference to convoys, English and Dutch merchants often took their chances on the high seas in armed merchantmen that fought as they ran from enemy cruisers or from pirates and privateers. Profit margins were so high that if a single ship made it safely back to Europe with a New World or Chinese or Indian cargo aboard it proved cost-effective. This encouraged investors to chance losing several other ships and cargos while running a gauntlet of pirates, privateers, commerce raiders, and the occasional formal, but usually ineffective naval blockade. The east coast coal trade of England was also convoyed. Since coastal Great Britain was a readily available source of good seamen, it was also a target for Impress officers coming out of English ports. That made collier crews nervous about threats from enemies foreign and domestic. Collier captains frequently slipped away from their convoy and British escorts, in response to their crews’ preference to face Dutch warships while unescorted rather than chance being impressed to serve on an English warship. English and Dutch merchants plying the Atlantic before the late 17th century were almost all private ships. Nevertheless, they used convoys as well. Only a few captains chanced capture by pirates or privateers by sailing alone and unescorted to the sugar isles of the West Indies, though some did it for the same profit motive that moved Spanish captains and crews to cross the wild and storm-tossed Pacific (a most ill-named ocean). Most English captains preferred to sail together to afford mutual protection from bad weather and accident, as much as from enemy action. Ships headed for the rich fisheries off Newfoundland (nearly 200 per year) or Cape Cod, or plying the Chesapeake trade, most often traveled together, but without the protection of the king’s (or queen’s or States’ Navy) warships. In 1650 Parliament imposed a surcharge on all customs duties to pay for convoy escorts. This was the first time any English government accepted a naval obligation to protect private shipping, other than in home waters. Later in the 17th century, English merchants formed armed convoys of up to 100 ships to the Caribbean. These sailed at regular times of the year to avoid winter weather and arrive in time to collect and transport highly perishable tropical crops. They were seldom molested. Mediterranean convoys were a regular feature of life for several navies, especially the Dutch Navy and Royal Navy. Over the course of the last few decades of the 17th century the Royal Navy in particular learned the essential tasks and routines of escort duty, and its captains and crews came to accept convoying merchantman as one of its essential roles. However, French warships and squadrons enjoyed success against these convoys during their sustained guerre de course that began in the mid-1690s. The Royal Navy maintained formal cruiser squadrons as escorts (“convoys and cruisers”) during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), one each off the Channel Isles, The Downs, the East Coast, the Scilly Isles, and the Western Approaches. In 1708 the British Parliament became so upset with shipping losses to French privateers it passed the “Cruisers and Convoys Act,” removing half of all Fourth and Fifth Rates (some 43 ships-of-the-line) from the fighting 89

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squadrons and control of the Admiralty and assigning them to convoy duty. See also Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); directieschepen; guerre de course; Smyrna convoy. Conzerbruke, Battle of (August 11, 1675). See Dutch War (1672–1678); Lorraine, Charles IV, duc de (1604–1675). Copenhagen, Peace of (June 6, 1660). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Copenhagen, siege of (1658–1659). See Dahlberg, Count; Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Çorbasi. “Soup maker.” An officer in the Janissary Corps in command of an Orta (company) of 100 men. The title was roughly comparable to “colonel” in European armies of the day. It derived from the commander’s original role as the man who fed the sultan’s slave soldiers. He was assisted by other officers with titles similarly derived from historic kitchen functions, which in later years bore no relation whatever to their military roles: the “master cook,” “cook,” “head scullion,” and “scullion.” This culinary motif of the Janissaries was best represented by the Kazan—the prized cooking pot that was the center of Janissary camp life and part of every battle order. cordon. In fortification: a prolonged row (or course) of brick or stone aligned along the junction of a rampart and parapet, to serve as the coping of a revetment. In an encampment: a chain of sentries or military posts guarding a military camp or blocking access to a defended area. See also razing the works; tablette. cornet. (1) A junior officer in an English cavalry troop charged with protection of the standard of the troop, which was also called a cornet. (2) A troop of cavalry. corsairs. See Barbary corsairs. corvée. Forced military labor in France. The labor owed was based upon a feudal tradition of required work days per annum owed by peasants to their lord or to the sovereign. Corvée laborers were commonly employed on fortification work at minimal or no expense to the state, for which they usually returned effort commensurate with the financial reward and risk. The corvée was not abolished in France until the French Revolution of 1789. corvette. A French ship type corresponding to an English brig or sloop. It was a small, brig-rigged vessel with a single gun deck. Corvettes were prolific around French Atlantic ports. Cossacks. Turkish: “kazak,” or “outlaw.” The term is often used in reference to Turkic and Slavic horsemen from southern Russia who were descended from runaway serfs, nomadic invaders, and members of local tribes that were still 90

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beyond the reach of the tsars. More generally, it referred to a blended people comprising masterless Turkic and Slavic horsemen from southern Russia, Poland, and Ukraine who occupied the great grassland frontiers separating Christian and Muslim civilizations, as well as Orthodox and Catholic empires. In the 1480s, predominantly Slavic Cossack hosts began to form. Recruits came mostly in the form of runaway slaves or serfs, but some were down-and-out burghers, penurious nobles, or defrocked priests. They readily joined Cossacks descended from nomadic invaders who had passed through in prior centuries, and local tribes still independent of the tsars of Muscovy or the khans of Central Asia. During the 15th and 16th centuries there was an explosion in Cossack numbers as military burdens increased in surrounding societies, making private warfare, hunting, and farming far more attractive than staying at home to be enserfed or conscripted. Cossacks enjoyed broad autonomy for several reasons: they were too ferocious to conquer without great cost; their land was not deemed valuable enough to warrant full-scale invasion and conquest; and their scattered grassland fortresses and superb natural cavalry set up effective buffer zones between Poland and Muscovy, to the north and west, and the Ottoman Empire and its Tatar allies to the south. Cossacks were at first little more than self-defense bands (“vatahy”) living off the steppe. These grew into fortified camps (“sich”) as Cossackdom evolved from seasonal hunting and grazing on the wild grassland into a year-round livelihood. In 1553–1554 the “Zaporozhian Cossacks” built a sich south of Kiev on the island of Mala Khortytsia, “below the rapids” (“za porohamy”) on the Dnieper. The “Zaporozhian Sich” then became the center of Ukrainian Cossackdom. Indifferent to Christian confessionalism, but reserving a violent hatred of Jews, they accepted any Christian male who applied (women and children were barred, along with all Jewish males). Ordinary Cossacks (“chern”) lived in wooden barracks (“kurin”) and elected their officer corps (“starshnya”). This rough, democratic, propertyless, military brotherhood was led by an “otaman” or “hetman.” He was assisted by “osavuly” (lieutenants). Cossacks were divided by wealth and ethnicity, by town and rural dwelling places, and by which contending outside power they faced at the nearest grassy frontier. The majority in the Dnieper basin were Ukrainian (insofar as that designation meant anything at the time), while Russians settled further south along the Don. Cossacks were without any uniform religious leaning during this period, beyond a general Christianity. The major hosts, especially the “Little Russian Cossack Host,” were hard pressed to determine if their interest lined up best with expanding Orthodox Muscovy, contracting Catholic Poland, or the sprawling Muslim empire of the Ottomans. Rather than choose, they raided ecumenically and deep into all three empires at one time or another. From 1572 Poland registered “town Cossacks,” recognizing them as a distinct social class and even employing them as salaried frontier guards and as a buffer against unregistered, rural, and more violent Cossacks. By 1589 there were 3,000 registered Cossacks, compared to 50,000 unregistered, with both groups distinct from the Zaporozhians. In the early 17th century, the Zaporozhians conducted deep amphibious raids against the Ottomans along the Crimean and Black Sea 91

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coasts. In 1615 they slipped into Constantinople harbor and burned it. The next year they broke the pens of the slave market in Kaffa, freeing thousands. They burned the harbor again in 1620, then joined the Poles to fend off an Ottoman-Tatar punitive invasion of Ukraine in 1620–1621. The main development of these years, however, was social abandonment of the Cossacks by the Russian servitor classes after the election of Michael Romanov as tsar of Muscovy in 1613. Cossack bands caused much trouble for surrounding states. But once Russia’s internal situation stabilized they were not again a major political threat to the tsars in Moscow, as they had been during the extraordinary “Time of Troubles” (“Smutnoe Vremia”) after 1605, when aspirants to the throne and other rebellious nobles and servitors recruited Cossack allies and armies. The Zaporozhians instead fought the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1637–1638, joined in rebellion against the ruling class in Poland by many peasants. Polish nobility responded to the loss of peasant servile labor, which bled away through attraction to a free life-style in the south, by making it a capital offense to travel to any Cossack sich and by severely reducing the autonomy of all registered Cossacks. Given the rather poor state of readiness and the limited numbers of the amateur Polish Army, and the chronic inability of a weak tax system to actually pay wages owed to registered Cossacks, serious trouble was the nearly inevitable result of this new policy. It arrived full-blown and with great violence and consequence when Cossacks found a charismatic leader who led them into rebellion in Ukraine and then in an invasion of Poland during the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). In the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654) at the end of the great rebellion, some Cossacks accepted protection and pay from Muscovy. Cossacks thus fought on both sides of the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) and Second Northern War (1655–1660), with the Zaporozhians supporting Khmelnitsky’s pro-Moscow policy while thousands of registered or Commonwealth Cossacks fought alongside the Poles. Cossacks divided even more deeply upon the sudden and unexpected death of Khmelnitsky in 1657, with some following his headstrong 16-year-old son and others seeking a new and more antiMuscovite hetman. An agreement was reached at Hadiach (September 1658) between some Cossack leaders and the Polish Commonwealth that envisioned a tripartite, confederal, autonomous Cossack state (“grand duchy”) of Ruthenia. This new entity was to be formed from the Palatinates of Bratslav, Cherihiv, and Kiev. The Uniate Church was to be abolished within the confederacy, and Orthodoxy established and protected by a Cossack host of 30,000. However, by this time most ordinary Cossacks had become ferociously Orthodox by confession and regarded even this limited agreement with Catholic Poles as sacrilege. Large numbers rejected it. Thus began a bitter civil war among Cossacks and an attendant period of deep unrest lasting three decades, which Ukrainian national historians today call the “Ruina.” This protracted conflict permanently ended Cossack unity; rival hetmen from different factions looked alternately to Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire for military and political support. One result of the Ruina was that from 1660 onward Russian armies in Ukraine faced both an aroused Polish Commonwealth military and enjoyed lessened Cossack assistance. In the north, Russia retained most of its Cossack allies in Lithuania, 92

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led by Khmelnitsky’s son and his advisors. Poles and Russians finally resolved their 13-year-long war by partitioning Ukraine in the Treaty of Andrussovo (1667), assigning “Left Bank Cossacks” and “Left Bank Ukraine” to Russia. The two governments thought the treaty solved their mutual “Cossack problem” by partition of Ukraine along the Dnieper and over the heads of wilder inhabitants, but it did not. Instead, there ensued a series of wars along the southern frontier of the Polish Commonwealth as Cossacks looked deeper to the south for a new protector of their autonomy, now against Poland and Russia alike: the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. In 1669 Hetman Peter Doroshenko acknowledged Ottoman suzerainty in return for military support. The Don Cossacks rebelled against the tsars in 1670–1671, under Stenka Razin. This quickly turned into a huge peasant uprising that saw extraordinary levels of violence on both sides, including a campaign of landlord-killing and destruction from the lower Volga to the Caspian Sea, then reactionary violence by frightened nobles and tsarist troops on an even more massive scale. The uprising provided a spreading example for more distant outbreaks of Cossack and peasant violence, reaching as far north as Moscow and beyond. After its suppression, Cossacks reverted to alternating loyalty and hostility toward the tsars. In the 17th–18th centuries, hetmans of the “Little Russian Cossack Host” in Ukraine were repeatedly torn between accepting protection from the tsars or making profitable alliances with anti-Russian armies of Poles and Ottomans. Peter I made extensive use of the “Little Russian” Cossacks as his main cavalry, but they were capricious troops and could be bought by other sovereigns, too. The Don Cossacks rebelled against Peter in 1707–1708, under ataman Kondratay Bulavin (c.1660–1708). This time they championed the cause of Old Believers against a reformist and openly irreligious tsar. The Cossacks also were stimulated by the slow-motion Swedish invasion of the Russias, north to south, in 1709. Some sided with the Swedes in a secret deal made between the Little Russian Cossack hetman and an invading Swedish army under Karl XII in the months before Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709). Others were pummeled into submission and alliance by Peter. By the first decade of the 18th century Cossack military strength was no longer determinative of the outcome of wars between external powers, even when these were fought in Ukraine. Their traditional irregular tactics no longer prevailed against increasingly professional Polish, Swedish, and Russian armies, each with much greater discipline and firepower. Cossacks remained useful to these powers principally as light cavalry, scouts, sharpshooters, and especially as harassers of enemy supply columns. But they were hardly able even to defend themselves if attacked by a modern army. Thus, Russian troops massacred 6,000 of Mazepa’s Cossacks, including their families, when Peter sacked Baturin on November 2/13, 1708. The Russians also destroyed the Zaporozhian sich in May 1709. The greatest of all Cossack risings, the Pugachev rebellion, came during the reign of Catherine II, after the period covered in this work. Following incorporation of Ukraine and Crimea into the Russian Empire, the Little Russian and Don Cossacks alike formed core units of the tsarist cavalry and became a mainstay of the regime and a terror to Jews into the early 20th century. See also Berestczko (1651); Great Northern War (1700–1721); Konotop (July 8, 1659); Pancerna cavalry; Poltava (1709). 93

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Cossack cavalry. “jazda kozacka.” See Polish Army. counter-approach. A trench dug by defenders against a siege, moving away from the fortress through the glacis toward the trenches (approaches) and siege works of the advancing enemy, to oppose close-in saps at the covered way or origination of the third parallel. This was done at Philippsburg (1676), Ypres (1678), and Landau (1704), among other sieges. counter-battery. An artillery position whose guns concentrated on knocking out the enemy’s batteries, rather than pounding his works or infantry. counterfort. An inside buttress supporting external defensive works. See also mines/mining; revetment. counterguard. “couvreface.” A fully detached work formed of a smaller bastion sited in the ditch in front of the main bastion. See also couvreface general; lunette. countermine. Setting an explosive mine or digging an underground chamber beneath the mine tunnel of an enemy besieging one’s position, to collapse it. Permanent excavations or countermines were devised for some fixed fortifications, although this was very expensive. Complex systems of galleries, rameaux, and listners were favored by Italian and other military architects, but none were built by the French. Most fortifications were defended by ad hoc countermining, usually assayed once the attackers moved past the third parallel and approached the covered way. See also Candia, siege of (1666–1669). counterscarp. A sloped retaining wall about 15 feet high running along the far (external) side of the ditch. It was constructed to follow the angular shifts of the ditch, which in turn was dug at right angles to the parapet and any detached works. The height was calculated to prevent enemy infantry from jumping easily into the ditch. Instead, besiegers were forced to mine the counterscarp. The term is sometimes used to incorporate the covered way that traversed the rim of the counterscarp, and even the glacis that sloped away toward open country. See also gallery; mines/mining; siege warfare. counterscarp gallery. See gallery. countersinking. Lowering the walls of a fortification to protect against improved bombardment capability of artillery. The stone facades were further protected by earthen walls and various other features of the evolving artillery fortress. course (at sea). See guerre de course; sails. course (on land). To raid, whether as a means of foraging for supplies or as a punitive expedition. See partisan war. 94

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couvreface. See counterguard. couvreface generale. The “envelope” of a fortification formed by the continuous perimeter of the whole works (the enceinte). It was a type of extended counterguard or even a second, outer enceinte. covered way. French: “chemin couverte.” Italian: “via coperta.” A sheltered path behind the parapet of a fortress, forming a sheltered firing position for defending infantry. It was not roofed. Instead, it “covered” (protected) the defending troops by virtue of its being a sunken position. Traversing the outer edge of the counterscarp on the far rim of the ditch, it marked the most forward infantry position of an artillery fortress. The covered way enclosed all detached works. A narrow terreplein allowed defenders to move and reinforce, but did not permit attackers who reached the position enough room to mount or fire heavy guns (24-pounders) inward at the fortress. The “via coperta” dated to the mid-16th century as a fixture of the Italian Renaissance school of fortification. During the 17th–18th centuries the style migrated to all Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Attacking the covered way after reaching the third parallel brought besiegers under the most murderous fire defenders could offer, and frequently incurred casualties as large as or larger than major field battles. coxswain. See ranks (at sea). crémaillère. A defensive work with alternating blocks and firing positions arranged in a saw-tooth pattern, or “en crémaillère.” Cremona, Battle of (February 1, 1702). After losing a bloody four-hour battle at Chiari (September 1/12, 1701), Villeroi fell back to Cremona with the FrenchPiedmontese army. Prince Eugene led an Imperial army in leisurely pursuit of Villeroi, conquering most of Mantua along the way. In the dawn mists of February 1, 1702, Eugene ordered an audacious and risky assault directly into the town, initially taking the French and Savoyards by surprise, with some found sleeping. The defenders rallied and recovered, driving the Imperial troops back out of town. However, while rousing his men, Villeroi was captured. Créqui, François, Chevalier de (1625–1687). Maréchal de France. He first fought for France in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). During the Fronde he stayed loyal to the young king. He commanded armies for Louis XIV during the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and led an army into Lorraine in 1670, an act that helped stir a grand coalition against Louis during the Dutch War (1672–1678). Créqui quarreled with Turenne and briefly went into disgrace and exile. He returned to favor and command, but lost badly to Charles IV of Lorraine at Conzerbruke in 1675. He defended Trier until his troops mutinied and handed him to the enemy. He fought several more campaigns, mainly of clever maneuver without ever offering or accepting battle, most notably in Alsace and Lorraine in 1677. He was forced into a small cavalry fight at Kockersberg 95

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(October 7, 1677) by the close pursuit of Charles V of Lorraine. Créqui won. He won the next year at Rheinfeld (July 6, 1678) and Ortenbach (July 23, 1678). He won again in Alsace by boldly taking and holding the bridge at Strasbourg. During the War of the Reunions (1683–1684) he bombarded the fortress town of Luxembourg with 4,000 mortar shells, but failed to take it. crest. The inner ridge of the glacis, or of a parapet. Crete. Control of Crete was the main object of the Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669). The Porte secured control of Crete from Venice by treaty at the end of the war. Venice tried but failed to retake the island during the first AustroOttoman War (1683–1699). Its leaders contemplated an invasion during the second Austro-Ottoman War (1715–1718), but settled for retaking the Morea instead. Crete stayed under Ottoman rule until the early 20th century. crimp. A duplicitous gatherer of soldiers or seamen; a trickster employed in recruiting men by guile, bribery, or entrapment. Some operated in gangs. This practice was not officially banned in Great Britain until passage of the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854. See also impressment. crochet. A bantam parallel trench, positioned among the besieger’s approach trenches. Croissy, marquis de (1625–1696). French diplomat, né Charles Colbert. Younger brother of Jean Baptiste Colbert. He served as French secretary of state for foreign affairs. Appointed by Louis XIV in 1679, at the end of the Dutch War (1672–1678), Croissy was a personal rival of Louvois—as were all Colberts. He came to the king’s notice as an administrator in Alsace, doing the bidding of Louvois, who was his patron. In 1668 he represented Louis at peace talks aimed at ending the War of Devolution (1667–1668). The next year he started negotiations that led to the Treaty of Dover with Charles II in 1670. He was also instrumental in negotiating the Treaty of Nijmegen (August 10, 1678), which concluded Louis’ Dutch War. That prompted Louis to appoint Croissy secretary of state for foreign affairs, a position into which he gathered all French diplomacy by ending the independence of ambassadors. Croissy was instrumental in persuading Louis to use the device of “reunions” to annex further territories, leading directly to the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). He started, but did not complete before his death, the negotiations that ended the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658). Puritan general, revolutionary, military dictator. Cromwell converted to Puritanism after his marriage in 1620, and like many converts embraced his new faith with zeal. A minor country squire of rough manners and tight morals, he was first elected to Parliament in 1628. He rose to political prominence during the struggle of the “Long Parliament” (1640–1653) with the king, Charles I (1600–1649). At the start of the Wars of the Three 96

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Kingdoms (1639–1651), he served as colonel of a cavalry regiment in Parliament’s “Eastern Association Army.” Having spent the winter in training, he led 400 of his Ironsides troopers (“honest, godly men”) in a small but sharp action against 800 Cavalier cavalry at Grantham (May 13, 1643), in Lincolnshire. He served under Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671) in the fight at Winceby (October 11, 1643), and thereafter helped secure the eastern counties for Parliament. On July 27, 1643, Cromwell led 1,800 Ironsides in scattering 2,000 Cavaliers at Gainsborough. Still under Fairfax and the Earl of Manchester (1602–1671), Cromwell led his Ironsides and dragoons well at Marston Moor (July 2, 1644), shattering Prince Rupert’s force of Cavaliers. Cromwell broke with Manchester after Second Newbury (October 22, 1644), bringing charges that forced the latter to resign. He strongly supported Fairfax’s creation of the New Model Army and served as second-in-command. On June 10, 1645, Cromwell was appointed Lieutenant General of Horse, with Henry Ireton (1611–1651), his future son-in-law, as his subordinate. At Naseby (June 14, 1645), Cromwell began the fight in command of the right wing. He then dramatically and critically rallied the left and thus played the crucial role in a key victory over Charles I. Cromwell led the radical faction in the Army and Parliament that insisted on taming the king, whom he fundamentally distrusted, against the “peace party” that he feared might accept a compromise with an unworthy sovereign. Charles conspired endlessly while in exile on the Isle of Wight and then from Holdenby House, encouraging the Scots to break with Parliament and intriguing with Catholic ambassadors to bring about foreign intervention. All the while, the king dragged out negotiations with Parliament over settlement of issues that caused the war. Cromwell finally lost all patience. On June 2, 1647, he had the king seized and brought under the Army’s control and “protection” at Newmarket. Parliament voted to disband part of the New Model Army and send the rest away to fight the Confederates in Ireland. It began to raise trained bands and brought “reformadoes” and deserters into regiments loyal to its leaders, as a rival force to the Army. Cromwell and Fairfax chose the Army over Parliament; they occupied London on August 6th and chased their opponents from Westminster. After putting down a mutiny by social Levellers (May–July 1648), Cromwell pacified Wales. Then he quickly moved north and won a brilliant and decisive victory over the Scots at Preston (August 17–20, 1648). Determined to settle with the king for once and all, he pressured Charles to come to terms with the military and constitutional results of the civil wars, but he could not convince Charles to do so. Cromwell pressured the Rump Parliament to charge the king with treason, a remarkable and truly revolutionary sentiment for the day. Charles was tried in December 1648 and executed on January 30, 1649. This was “a cruel necessity,” Cromwell said. He was right. He had tried far more honestly and faithfully than many, including an utterly irreconcilable and scheming king, to achieve a peaceful settlement. When that failed, Cromwell judged correctly that he could not safely leave Charles in prison or send him into exile. This refusal to turn back, and the need for symbolic political killing to signal and confirm that will, is the logic of all successful revolutions. 97

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Back in the saddle, Cromwell led a punitive expedition to Ireland in 1649–1650. His campaign is remembered to the present day by Irish Catholics for its reputed special savagery, including massacres of the civilian population along with the captured garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford. Fighting continued against sub-commanders whom he left behind to finish the job, as the Irish reverted to guerrilla warfare that lasted to 1653. That same year, Cromwell dismissed the Long Parliament thusly: “You have sat long enough. Let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!” The “Little” or “Barebones” Parliament was too zealous in its Puritan outlook and social reforms even for Cromwell, so he dissolved it too before the year was out. He instituted a military dictatorship by the New Model Army and was named “Lord Protector” of the Puritan Commonwealth, though he personally never joined any Puritan church. A little more than a year later, on January 22, 1655, he established a system of regional military government with power shared among his most trusted subordinates in the Army. Cromwell ruled the Three Kingdoms for the next five years, the unchallenged military dictator of that strangest of all constitutional constructs: an English republic. At home, he sought but failed to sustain a godly republic through its main support, a godly army. In foreign policy, after defeating the Scots Cromwell passed a tough Navigation Act (1651), which aimed to undercut the maritime predominance of the United Provinces and therefore sparked the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Throughout the war, Cromwell also tangled with Parliamentarians in an ongoing power struggle at home. In the wide and spreading wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), from which the civil wars had kept most British apart, Cromwell was seen by some Protestants on the continent as the most likely and powerful protector of the cause of Protestantism in Europe. That was a misapprehension, for although he made peace with the Dutch, he also allied with Catholic France against Spain in a war against Madrid in 1656. He recalled Parliament to raise taxes to pay for this new war, even as he spurned an offer made by some to crown him as the new English king. Cromwell proved a hard master, but he also set England squarely on the path to becoming a Great Power. He modernized its Army, expanded its Navy, and added several strategic overseas holdings to its expanding empire, though his Western Design in the Caribbean was less than an unqualified success. Despite his own devout Puritanism, he was less radical than many, and in some ways he actually liberalized England’s religious life, permitting some toleration of Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews. Finally, Scotland and Ireland were tied more closely to England by his rule. All those long-term consequences had import, despite the fact that Cromwell failed in the short run as a constitutional revolutionary: Charles II (1630–1685) was restored to the English throne three years after Cromwell’s death, displacing the Protector’s son who had sought to carry forward his father’s personal dictatorship. See also Dunbar (1650); Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). Suggested Reading: Frank Kitson, Old Ironsides (2004). John Morrill, Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990); James Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (1999). 98

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crownwork. “couronnement.” An even more elaborate form of hornwork, of which it was a subset. It was used to enclose very large areas external to the enceinte that were valued for some special reason or especially dangerous to the main defenses. It repeated the form and purposes of hornwork, only with a double-bastioned front (or head) made of two half-bastions straddling a full bastion and presenting two curtains, all closed to the rear by intersection of two branches. “Double crownwork” referred to baroque works of dubious additional utility, sporting two half-bastions, three curtain walls, and two full bastions. crow’s foot. See caltrop. cruiser. Any warship, regardless of its Rate, sent on a detached and solitary mission. They usually operated against enemy merchantmen, but sometimes engaged in amphibious operations. Prince Rupert went on a three-year cruise during and after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). Privateers were one of two main forms of cruiser warfare. The other was formal cruiser squadrons made up of royal warships, such as the French deployed to great effect during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also Bart, Jean; frigate; pinnace; scurvy; sloop-of-war. culverin. In this period, an 18-pounder cannon. culverin-drake. A unique, mid-sized iron cannon cast for the Roundheads late in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). Oliver Cromwell gave the order to use iron, building on a longstanding English strength in iron cannon casting. This saved money compared to casting in much more expensive bronze or brass, and thereby increased the number of cannon available. Culverindrakes had a unique feature: the bore tapered at the breech to form a smaller powder chamber than in a normal gun with a cylindrical bore. This had the twin effect of lessening the powder charge required in the chamber and leaving a gap between the powder and the wadding and ball, which instead rested on the “shoulders” of a tapered tube. “Drakes” fired 5-pound cannonballs. Their casting predated the later (c.1680) scientific confirmation that a tapered powder chamber deploying a smaller charge at reduced risk imparted the same propellant force as the larger charge necessary in a cylindrical-bore weapon firing comparable weight of shot. cunette. See cuvette. curtain (curtain wall). The straight section of a rampart standing between a pair of bastions. At varying intervals, sally points were built into sections of curtain to permit egress for sorties by the garrison. During the later 17th century and all through the 18th, the bastion became the main focus of attack in preference to the older concentration on the curtain, which was henceforth too wellswept by enfilade fire from the companion bastions to be taken by direct assault. 99

cutlass

The main gate of a fortress was centered in one curtain, also protected by crossfire from adjacent bastions and other defensive features. cutlass. A short naval sword with a flat and wide blade, usually curved and with a single cutting edge. It was used to slash, rather than thrust. Its shortness was important for fighting at close quarters and in the confines of wooden ships cluttered with nets and rigging and, in the middle of a fight, broken yards and loose sailcloth. See also hanger. cuvette. In fortification: a small drainage ditch running along the floor of the ditch, to disperse runoff. See also batardeau.

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D Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson, Count (1625–1703). Swedish military engineer and general. Dahlberg was an innovative engineer in the mold of Vauban and Coehoorn, to the point that he is sometimes called the “Swedish Vauban.” Like all top military engineers of the era, he both built fortifications and helped attack and defend them. Among his important sieges were Copenhagen and Kronborg. He also carried out two successful defenses of Riga. In 1658 he conducted a Swedish army over several frozen rivers en route to Denmark. His most famous feat was to cross the frozen Great and Little Belts of the Denmark Strait. This enabled an attack on Copenhagen, before which he famously entered the city alone and explored its defenses for several days as a guest of Danish officers he knew. With remarkable foolishness, they gave him a tour of the city’s defensive works. Dahlberg also commanded Swedish engineers during several wars in Poland, the Scanian War (1674–1679), and the first years of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). His influence was perpetuated through his life example, skill at map-making, fortresses he designed, and widely published writings on military architecture. See also Denmark. Danby, Earl of (1631–1712). See England. Danish Army. Despite strictures on the ability of Fredrik III to raise military forces imposed by the Rigsdag, the Danish Army rose from 20,000 in 1655 to 50,000 (530 companies) by late 1657. Denmark was required to disarm under provisions of the Treaty of Roskilde (February 26/March 8, 1658), which reduced its forces to 20,000 men (229 companies) until Karl X returned to besiege Copenhagen. Even with Jutland and Zealand occupied by Swedish forces, the Army was raised to 30,000. At the end of the Second Northern War (1655–1660), the Army was again demobilized, its numbers strictly limited by nobles and clergy who clung to their traditional exemptions from taxation and by burghers and merchants who protested loudly as well. The crisis was

dead reckoning

resolved only by a radical constitutional break, confirmed on January 20/30, 1661, by an Act establishing a hereditary and “absolute” monarchy. This stripped the small Danish nobility of their tax exemption and their military obligation alike, opening the way to a progressively more merit-based officer corps and professional Army. As for tactics, Danish cavalry learned the hard way during the Scanian War (1674–1679), especially the bloody catastrophe at Lund in 1676, to abandon the sterile tactic of the caracole. That experience also taught the Danes to avoid battle in preference for siege warfare, as was also the taste in the rest of western Europe. That left Sweden almost alone in its strong commitment to always seek decisive battle. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Ireland; Malmö, Battle of (July 5/15, 1678). dead reckoning. See maps. déblai. In fortification: earth and stone spill removed in the course of digging a ditch. See also remblai. decks. A warship’s decks served as rooves protecting a ship’s hold, cargo, and complement from inclement weather and enemy small arms fire, and as floors or platforms for mounting broadside artillery and for seamen working and fighting the ship. A “weather deck” was any deck exposed to the elements. The “main deck” was the highest deck that ran the entire length of the ship. A “half-deck” covered half the length of a ship, either fore or aft of the mainmast. The “quarter-deck” was a partial deck, originally above the half-deck and covering about one-quarter of the ship; later it was the partial deck above the main deck. An “upper deck” was a weather deck that ran from the quarterdeck to the ship’s forecastle. The “spar deck” was also a connecting deck running to the forecastle. The “poop deck” was a short deck in the aft of the ship located above the spar deck. Some ships had a similar short deck, the “forecastle deck,” in the fore of the ship. The “gun deck” was whichever deck of a warship supported the main battery of its heaviest guns. In a multi-decked ship-of-the-line, this was the lowest deck, and hence was also called the “lower deck.” Most “lower decks” in multi-decked ships were also gun decks, except for the “orlop deck” located (confusingly) below the lower deck. Deerfield raid (February 29, 1704). A Canadian militia force of 48 men, supported by 200 Indian allies drawn from the Abenaki, Caughnawagas (“mission Indians”), and Huron trekked across the deep snows of the Green Mountains in the middle of winter to totally catch by surprise the inhabitants of Deerfield, Massachusetts. They killed close to 50, took away 109 prisoners (20 of whom died or were killed on the hike back to Canada), and razed the town. This raid in the Indian style, or skulking way of war, covered 600 miles round-trip. It was made possible only with the Canadian militia’s adoption of Indian technology—snowshoes and sledges—and tactics. That included refusal to acknowledge the new European legal distinction between combatants and civilians and acceptance of the ethics of Indian braves (and modern special forces) when it came to killing prisoners who could not keep up. 102

Denmark

defilade. In fortification, defilade was the art and science of calculating the necessary height and position of parapets and ramparts required to screen defenders from hostile enfilade fire. A grander meaning referenced the first thinking through and drafting of a scheme of fortification (trace) necessary to provide protective cover across the ground and proposed works of an entire fortress complex. defilement. Unlike normal defilade, which concerned works that afforded protection against flanking fire, “defilement” was a late 18th-century attempt to provide “vertical” protection. It sought alignment of the upper works of a fortified place to protect against hostile projectiles, including plunging fire, from batteries sited on hills or other high points outside the fortress. It was usually accomplished by elevating the rampart above the height of the opposing ground. Many doubt its efficacy. demi-cannon (half cannon). A 24-pounder widely used in land warfare. See also artillery; artillery fortress. demi-culverin (half-culverin). An 18-pounder widely used on 17th-century warships. See also artillery. demi-lune (half moon). See ravelin. demi-revêtement. See revetment. Denain, Battle of (July 13/24, 1712). Villars commanded a French army that marched out to meet Prince Eugene’s coalition army, the bulk of which was engaged in a siege of Landrecies. Eugene had already lost most British troops under his command, as Ormonde ordered over 20 battalions back to barracks in Brussels as a separate peace between Paris and London neared. Villars threw pontoons across the Scheldt and descended on a Dutch encampment of about 10,000 men near Denain. A second French force left its garrison at Valenciennes and moved toward the coming fight. Villars attacked after noon with 30,000 men. French infantry advanced into the teeth of volleys of muskets and canister shot leveled at them, to overrun the Dutch lines through weight of numbers and with supreme discipline under fire. French casualties exceeded 2,000 killed and wounded, but the Dutch lost over 6,500 men that day. Many drowned as panicking troops overburdened the bridges at Denain until they collapsed under foot and hoove. Eugene arrived on the south bank too late to save the routed garrison at Denain. The fight proved to be the last major field action of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Denmark. After decades of failed, costly, and aggressive war leading to humiliating defeat under Christian IV (1588–1648), Danes were left without a taste for war at the mid-17th-century mark. This mood placed severe restraints on Fredrik III when he succeeded his father in 1648 at the close of the Thirty Years’ 103

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War (1618–1648). Denmark had been excluded from talks leading to the Peace of Westphalia, as a result of which it lost Bremen to Sweden and Swedish ships no longer were forced to pay Sound Tolls. The Rigsdag would not vote funds to give the new king an Army large enough to tempt him to make aggressive war, in the process also ensuring that he did not have forces capable of national defense. Even so, when Swedish fortunes under Karl X looked to be at ebb tide, Fredrik declared war on Sweden. He thereby recklessly took a wholly unprepared Denmark into the Second Northern War (1655–1660) against a battletested foe whose state was organized for war. This proved to be a catastrophe. Guided by Count Dahlberg, Karl made a spectacular crossing of the frozen Belts with 5,000 Swedish troops, appearing suddenly in the suburbs of Copenhagen and compelling Fredrik to sign the Treaty of Roskilde (February 26/March 8, 1658). Karl then returned in August and besieged Copenhagen. Only aid from the United Provinces, and later from Brandenburg and Austria, saved the Danish capital from ruin. In 1660 Denmark experienced what amounted to a constitutional coup d’état. Facing noble opposition to taxation, the non-noble Estates introduced a fundamental restructuring of the elective monarchy and state. In this move against the entrenched nobility they were supported by Fredrik III. Under threat of martial law in Copenhagen, the Rigsdag crumbled (October 23/November 2, 1660), voting to make the monarchy hereditary and to abolish noble privilege. The revolution was confirmed the following January. In less than a dozen years, and in face of several severe military defeats brought about primarily by reckless monarchs, the Danes nevertheless shifted from radical limitation of royal power to the new-style “absolute and hereditary monarchy.” This began a process of integrating the old noble elite of birth with a new, non-class-based elite of national service that would continue into the mid-19th century. The Danish 1660s were consumed by a search for anti-Swedish allies and formation of a series of alliances that bore little fruit, and most of that bitter: with England in 1661, France in 1663, and the United Provinces in 1666. In September 1672, Denmark joined several small north German states, Leopold I of Austria, and Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg in a defensive alliance. The next year Denmark signed a naval alliance with the United Provinces, which agreed to subsidize a Danish fleet of 20 sail and an army of 12,000 men. This set the stage for the Scanian War (1674–1679), during which the Danes were once again highly aggressive, invading Scania and seeking its annexation. The young Swedish king Karl XI conducted a highly spirited and effective defense against the Danish invaders. The Danes lost at Halmstadt (a.k.a. “Fyllebro”) in August 1676 and suffered through an astoundingly bloody fight at Lund that December, proportionately the bloodiest battle in military history, with 50% of all participants killed. In 1677 the Danes twice tried, but failed to capture Helsingborg. They lost again at Malmö (July 5/15, 1678), and yet again at Landskröna (July 14, 1678). The Danes proved unable to advance beyond their holdings of Helsingborg and Landskröna, despite significant numerical advantages over the defending Swedes in cavalry, infantry, and artillery. The war also brought France against Denmark, in defense of Louis XIV’s Swedish alliance. The French 104

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penetrated Oldenburg, leading the Danes to quickly agree to the Peace of Fontainebleau (August 23/September 2, 1679). That ended the war between Denmark and France by forcing the Danes to promise to restore all their conquests to Sweden in exchange for a paltry indemnity to be paid to Denmark. The Peace of Lund (September 16/26, 1679) formally ended the war between Denmark and Sweden on the terms of Fontainebleau, and with confirmation that Swedish shipping remained exempt from paying the Sound Tolls. Denmark remained unreconciled to the loss of Scania and the Swedish exemption from the Sound Tolls. With the Maritime Powers and Brandenburg neutral at best, and far more concerned with the threat from France, Fredrik IV (1671–1730) was forced to seek allies in the east for any war he hoped to wage against Sweden. He found a willing partner in Augustus II of Poland and, in 1699, Peter I of Russia. The three monarchs framed a secret alliance declaring a joint intention to wage a war of aggression leading to partition of the Swedish empire, all three hoping to take advantage of the passing of the more formidable Karl XI and the youthful inexperience of the new Swedish king, Karl XII. That proved to be a foolish wager, as the boy-king of Sweden swiftly emerged as a formidable opponent of all three attackers during the first half of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Denmark paid first. Sweden quickly knocked Denmark out of the war with a bold amphibious operation: the Swedish fleet navigated the “Flinterend,” a dangerous passage between Sweden and Sjælland (or Zealand), to enable landing an army near Copenhagen on July 13–14/July 25–August 4, 1700. The frightened Danish king agreed to exit the aggressive alliance with Poland and Russia and left the war upon signing the Peace of Travendal (August 7/18, 1700). After Karl overreached by invading Russia, only to suffer disaster at Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709), Denmark sought to take advantage by pouncing yet again on Scania. The Danes landed a large amphibious force there, while Peter personally opened a new siege of Riga. However, the Danes were soundly defeated at Hälsingborg (February 28/March 10, 1710), even in Karl’s prolonged absence at the Sublime Porte. That fight finally decided the issue of Sweden’s permanent possession of Scania. More fighting, the premature death of Karl XII, and Russia’s decisive victory over Sweden opened the door for Denmark to seek gains at the edges of the crumbling Swedish empire. Sweden agreed to the Peace of Frederiksborg (June 14, 1720) with Denmark (which signed on July 8th), accepting the loss of some territory and agreeing to pay the Sound Tolls after a hiatus of 70 years. Yet, the treaty was actually something of a defeat for the Danes, who lost Wismar and Rügen and gained, after ten years of war, only minor territory in Gottorpian Schleswig and a small indemnity of just 600,000 crowns. See also Danish Army; Köge Bay (July 1, 1677). depot. A small storage site for ready bombs, cartridges, and grenades located at the tail (entrance) of a siege trench. See also logistics; magazines. deputies in the field. The official rank of generals appointed by the States General of the United Provinces to accompany Dutch troops on maneuvers and 105

Derbençi

into battle. William III (then still Prince of Orange) had dispensed with the office following the Orangist revolution of 1672. It was reintroduced in 1702 so that the Dutch could observe and constrain Marlborough, whose command over Dutch troops was otherwise accepted. Derbençi. “Pass guards.” Ottoman auxiliaries specializing in mountain warfare in protection of key passes. They were recruited starting in the 15th century among subject Greek, Kurdish, and Tatar populations. They were civilians given a semi-military function, and hence also the same tax-exempt status as askeri. By the 17th century they formed semi-regular mountain units, protecting the passes more from bandits than from threat of invasion. descent. “hostile descent.” An amphibious raid along a hostile coast, including raids, landings, bombardment, or local invasions. French descents were conducted against English interests in Ireland and Scotland, and threatened against England. English (later, British) descents were carried out against the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain, and by both sides in Italy and Sicily during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See bombardment. descent of the ditch. The prolonged and deadly process of bringing a siege forward, to the bottom of the ditch, descending the slope of the glacis. Engineers dug sloped tunnels through the glacis until they holed the masonry at the base, near the floor of the ditch. Once breastwork was built up around the hole, saps were passed across the ditch (if dry). These were subject to water maneuvers, and the sappers to drowning. A wet ditch compelled engineers to build a causeway or bridge across it, which took time and attracted intense defensive fire. All this was done preparatory to attacking infantry rushing a breach on the far side of the ditch after the breach was opened by cannelure cutting or by the mines of the engineers. desertion. Common soldiers in Europe were not patriotic during this period. Terms of service were often harsh, pay and food usually inadequate. As a result, desertion continuously eroded the ranks. Harsh laws and harsher discipline kept rankers in place, perhaps supported among veterans by local loyalty to one’s regiment, or at least to old comrades. On the other hand, strict discipline and the rigors of garrison duty and camp life made homesick farm boys run away in large numbers. Seamen, too, were notorious for deserting the king’s or state’s service to find better pay and prospects in some privateer or merchantman. This was true for both the Royal Navy and the Dutch Navy. In the 1690s desertion rates under French naval impressment laws, the three-class system, reached 50% in coastal recruitment areas. See also Indian Wars; Militargrenze; skulking way of war. Deshima. This artificial island in Nagasaki harbor was reserved to the Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) from 1641 until the monopoly was 106

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broken during the Napoleonic Wars. Only the factor could leave Deshima, and then solely on a required annual ceremonial visit to Edo. Nearby was the larger “Chinese Quarter,” where Qing traders resided. For the Tokugawa shoguns, trade with the Dutch was relatively unimportant, but the station provided them key intelligence on the outside world and facilitated a far greater and more important China trade. Shipping into Deshima was restricted in 1715 to reduce exports of bullion paid to purchase Dutch goods. detached works. Parts of a fortification built outside the main enceinte, but enclosed by the covered way. They were built in low profile and often in demirevetment. They were closely matched to zig-zag angles of the ditch and counterscarp, though some were built entirely separate from the main works. See also artillery; bonnet; counterguard; couvreface generale; crownwork; ditch; forts; front; hornwork; lunette; ravelin; siege warfare; tenaille. Devastation of the Palatinate (1688–1689). See Palatinate, devastation of. dey. Ottoman commanders in Algiers and Tunis. It was an electoral rather than a hereditary office, chosen from among the Barbary corsairs. It was abolished in Tunis early in the 18th century, from which point the beys—who had long ruled in fact—also ruled in name. In Algiers, the reverse happened: in 1711 the dey, military commander of the corsairs, overthrew the bey. directieschepen. Small municipal fleets of escort warships maintained by certain Dutch cities in support of their own convoys. They were not formally counted as part of the Dutch Navy, but in practice added to its reserve. Disbanding Act (1699). See Irish establishment. discretion. See surrender. disease. Siege warfare, with its wet trenches and urban spaces crowded with people and animals and salted with offal, was a natural breeder of pestilence of all sorts, from plague to smallpox and syphilis. Some permanent fortresses were deliberately sited in or near disease-ridden swamps, such as Coevorden, Mantua, Philippsburg, and Rochefort. Although the stagnant waters provided a natural barrier to saps, they contributed to often well-deserved evil reputations among garrisons for disease and death (from dysentery, malaria, and other waterinfluenced illnesses). Peter I similarly built his new capital of St. Petersburg in a squalid marsh, and many thousands paid the ultimate price. Other fortresses suffered the same fate by virtue of utilization of a wet ditch. Irregular outbreaks of plague and other epidemics had direct as well as indirect effects on battles and wars. For example, England departed the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) in part because it was shaken by the “Great Plague” that struck it. Habsburg defenses during the siege of Vienna (1683) were weakened because only two years had passed since a devastating outbreak of plague, which earlier 107

dismantle (a ship)

spread from Hungary through the Balkans, and thence to southern and western Europe. See also China; Dunbar (1650); Indian Wars; Iroquois Confederacy; military medicine; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). dismantle (a ship). To remove a warship’s masts, spars, and rigging. disrate (a ship). To reduce a man-of-war to a lower official Rate. ditch. A deep excavation forming an essential part of an artillery fortress. It ran from the bottom of the parapet out to the covered way, with déblai (spoil) from the ditch used to build the ramparts. It was dug in zig-zag fashion at right-angles to the entrant and reentrant angles of the parapet. This brought enemy troops and sappers under enfilade fire from snipers on the parapet. A ditch might be wide and wet (many feet deep of stagnant water) or frozen, depending on location and time of year. Wet ditches were spanned by small bridges or crossed by boats serviced by miniature harbors located in the detached works. Narrow dry ditches, drained by a cuvette, were preferred. They formed a more effective protection of the rampart from enemy cannon fire than a wide ditch, and let friendly troops assemble for sorties beyond the enceinte. Yet, even dry ditches might be flooded when convenient by breaking a batardeau or sluicing water held back by it. In peacetime, domestic herds grazed on lush grass growing in the ditch. See also cannelure cutting; counterscarp; descent of the ditch; disease; mining; remblai. division. A smaller component of a squadron of warships. Divisions in land warfare were not yet an accepted or adopted troop unit. Instead, soldiers were organized into regiments, battalions, and brigades. Dobry, Battle of (August 29/September 9, 1708). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Dominum Maris Baltici. “Dominion over the Baltic Sea.” This was the claimed right and status of the Danish monarchy, which demanded Sound Tolls of all shipping passing through the Baltic Sound. The Netherlands and England were content to pay for access to the rich Baltic trade with Sweden, Muscovy, and the cities of the Hanse early in the 17th century. As Sweden developed a serious navy and entered its “Great Power Period,” it moved to challenge Danish hegemony over the Sound. Denmark and Sweden fought two major wars over this issue before the period dealt with here, from 1563–1570 and 1611–1613. The defeat of Christian IV in 1629 and the intervention in Germany by Gustavus Adolphus the next year eventually secured dominion over the Baltic for Sweden, which did not pay Sound Tolls from 1648 until 1720. Dispute over who really exercised “Dominum Maris Baltici,” in the more general sense of the term, was a major issue during the Second Northern War (1655–1660), Scanian War (1674–1679), and Great Northern War (1700–1721). 108

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Donauwörth, Battle of (July 2/13, 1704). “Battle of the Schellenberg.” On his march to the Danube to relieve pressure on England’s Habsburg ally, Marlborough paused to assault a Franco-Bavarian armed camp of about 10,000 men at Donauwörth. The camp was protected by fortified positions on the 200–300foot hills of the nearby Schellenberg. Marlborough could not attack an adjoining reinforced medieval fortress because he lacked siege artillery, which he had left behind to move south with all due speed. But neither could he afford to leave so large an enemy garrison in his rear, straddling and strangling his lines of communication as he advanced into Bavaria. So he chose to attack. The fight began in the early evening, with a direct assault on the camp designed to draw men out of the French entrenchments. This worked. A second charge into the weakened works broke the French line and cut off the camp from the fortress. Each side lost about 5,000 casualties in a sharp and extremely bloody affair, especially given the relatively low numbers involved in fighting. The quick victory permitted Marlborough to continue his famous march south, until he later reached the Danube and together with Prince Eugene of Savoy won an enormous battlefield victory at Blenheim. See also Cadogan, William. double crownwork. See crownwork. double fire. See bomb; mortar. double on. A naval tactic whereby an enemy division or squadron was attacked from both sides at once, permitting double broadsides into the enemy line. There was dispute about whether it was preferable to double the van or the rear of the enemy line. Doubling the lead division would disorder the van and perhaps cause disorder to spread to other divisions and squadrons, but equally might permit those follow-on units to catch up and prevent cutting out and finishing off damaged stragglers. Doubling the rear made relief much harder and permitted pursuit and capture of wounded vessels. It was probably the best tactic, but doubling of either sort was hard to achieve in practice unless one had overwhelming superiority of numbers. double palisade. See palisade. Dover, Battle of (May 19/29, 1652). See Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654). Dover, Treaty of (May 12/22, 1670). A secret treaty between Louis XIV and Charles II, intended to break apart the Triple Alliance formed during the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and thereby clear a path to the Dutch War (1672–1678). It gave Charles II a subsidy of 2 million livres and 6,000 French troops, should the latter be needed to suppress anti-Stuart forces in England. It promised an additional 3 million livres per annum should Charles take England to war against the United Provinces in alliance with France, along with parts of Zeeland and States Flanders. It had a secret codicil that suggested Charles would receive French support for reestablishing Catholicism in England. That ideological 109

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component—along with the promise to send into England a foreign, Catholic army—was already out of step with the increasingly secular spirit of the new age beyond England and post-Peace of Westphalia (1648). It could only serve to stir English Protestants to greater effort and action without moving many Catholics to render assistance to Charles. See also Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674). Downs, The. A wide anchorage off the Kentish coast of England. In this era, a huge amount of European and world commerce traversed The Downs, as English ships came out from London, joining Dutch merchantmen and those of other northern powers as they moved from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and beyond, or back again. The Downs was a Mecca for privateers, as unusual wind patterns often forced individual ships and sometimes whole convoys to wait for a favorable turn. The Downs saw a great Dutch victory over the Spanish in October 1639, when Maarten van Tromp caught a Spanish fleet without wind in its sails and destroyed most of it, ending Spain’s hope for victory in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). Lessons were learned from that fight by both English and Dutch captains and salted away for use on another day. Dutch and English fleets then fought several times at The Downs in the course of their naval wars of the 1650s–1670s, with a great four-day fight occurring in June 1666. See also Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674); Downs, Battle of The (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). Downs, Battle of The (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). “Four Days’ Battle.” Fought in The Downs, it began with an English squadron of 20 sail under Prince Rupert detached from the main battle fleet of 56 sail under George Monk. Rupert’s squadron sailed down the Channel while Monk remained in The Downs. The Dutch battlefleet of 86 sail that bore down on him was commanded by Admiral de Ruyter, and boasted a number of big, new, and purpose-built warships of 70 guns or more. Monk attacked the Dutch van on June 1/11, initiating four days of onand-off fighting contact in which greater Dutch numbers and de Ruyter’s tactical and navigational skills overmatched superior English gunnery. On the 2nd/12th, de Ruyter took his squadron through the English line of battle to rescue a cut-off squadron under Cornelius van Tromp. However, by the end of the day it was the English who were battered and wavering, with just 28 ships still able to fight. Monk chose the better part of valor and retreated under fire on the morning of June 3/13. Ayscue ran aground on the Galloper shoal. He was forced to surrender his flagship “Royal Prince,” a 90-gun First Rate, by his crew, who were to a man terrified by the approach of Dutch fireships. De Ruyter burned the ship the next day. Rupert’s detached squadron and several more ships came down the Thames and rejoined Monk that evening, bringing the number of major warships engaged to 52 English versus 69 Dutch battleships. The union of squadrons saved the English from even worse losses than they had already suffered, as all squadrons became confused and the lines of battle ragged when fighting resumed. When it was all over, Monk had lost 10 ships-of-the-line and several other ships, along with anywhere from 4,200 to 6,000 men, including 110

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two admirals and ten captains. The Dutch also sustained significant losses, damage, and casualties, but clearly won the fight. Surviving English ships took shelter in the Thames estuary as de Ruyter blockaded the mouth of the Thames and made what repairs he could. A sally by Monk and Rupert on July 15/25 temporarily broke the blockade, but that was slim comfort after such a defeat in home waters. drabants. The personal bodyguards of the kings of Sweden. They were formed into a special corps, on the model of the French Gardes du Corps, in 1700. The reform was introduced by Karl XII, who also personally participated in the rigorous training he imposed on this elite unit. dragonnades. Quartering troops on towns or individuals without compensation. The term derived from the primary use of dragoons in this manner by Louis XIV, which incurred costs also for the horses. Louis XIV used dragonnades as a principal punishment and repressive device against the Huguenots. The worst were in 1685, starting in the traditional stronghold of the Huguenots in the south of France, but quickly moving to the north as well. Dragonnades also provoked the rebellion of the Camisards in 1702. The term and practice of quartering for political purposes, and to underwrite the military, spread from France to other lands and languages. Although the term was not applied in England, in 1685 James II similarly billeted dragoons on several Protestant towns, which raised objections to his “Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes.” Once again, such harsh and indiscriminate punishment by a monarch helped provoke rebellion: the Glorious Revolution. dragoons. Mounted infantry who rode to battle but dismounted to fight on foot, as opposed to traditional cavalry. Firearms encouraged dismounting because it was difficult to fire a gun with any accuracy, and impossible to reload one, while moving in the saddle. Firearms dragoons appeared in China by 1429. Within a hundred years, light cavalry units that dismounted to fight were found all over Asia, the Middle East, and Europe (though in certain areas such troops predated the arrival of the new dragoons). These troops specialized in scouting, raiding, foraging, devastation of the countryside, and convoying supply trains. In terms of accuracy and firepower they remained a poor match for horse archers until cartridge-using, breech-loading carbines made firing and reloading from horseback feasible. Louis XIV steadily increased the complement of dragoons accompanying traditional French cavalry. By 1700 all modern armies deployed dragoon-like units, whether or not they used the term, in fighting petite guerre. Dragoons were usually drawn from a better social class and were therefore better paid than ordinary infantry, but were less socially acceptable and less well paid than cavalry. See also dragonnades. drake. See culverin-drake. drill. A breakthrough in early modern field maneuvers and firearms use came with a new emphasis on drill inaugurated with the Dutch Army reforms of 111

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Maurits of Nassau, from the 1590s. The “Dutch system,” further advanced by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the 1620s–1630s, became the standard for all modern armies by the middle of the 17th century. So important was drill in the expansion and control of armies that Michael Roberts centered his theory of the “military revolution” on its adoption. By the middle of the 18th century, Dutch drill was surpassed by Prussian drill, which emerged as a more rigorous and even brutal new standard. The British evolved their own infantry drill, first established by Regulations issued in 1728. These were influenced by continental developments, but also reflected unique lessons learned in fighting in North America, notably about the use of light infantry as detached raiders with tactics suited to forest warfare. Beyond teaching necessary skills, drills—and indeed whole armies—were shaped by the dominant weapon of the period: the flintlock musket, topped with a ring or socket bayonet. One of Louvois’ most crucial reforms was to institute musketry drill, upon discovering that many French infantrymen, especially peasant conscripts, went into battle not knowing how to load or discharge their main weapon. The French emphasis on drill thereafter grew so fierce that the intendant responsible for drill in the French Army, Colonel Jean Martinet, original colonel of the Régiment du Roi, became so infamous for fussy, even merciless insistence on the smallest detail of uniform discipline and drill that his name entered the universal military lexicon as a pejorative for inflexible drill instructors. There was also a social reality reinforced by drill: most soldiers came from the lower orders, while officers were seen as, and considered themselves to be, “social betters” of the men. That and the accepted example of harsh physical punishment for minor offenses in civilian life during this period meant that corporal punishment of soldiers for parade-ground errors was common, even by boy-officers against older soldiers. Drill involved a number of discrete areas of training. The first thing taught raw recruits was to look soldierly, or be “master of his person,” as the British put it. Next came foot drill, or marching in step by platoon or company, followed by opening and closing files and ranks. Recruits learned and executed elaborate marches and countermarches, moving to drum signals and barked commands. This complex drill involved larger units practicing distance marching, proper spacing, and conversion of columns into line of battle and back again. Maneuver drill, or “evolutions,” included “wheeling,” in which men marching on the inner flank “marked time” by marching on the spot while the rest of the company pivoted or wheeled. Companies also practiced “doubling the ranks” so that rear echelons merged forward to form firing ranks. “Locking” a platoon or company in firing line was comparable. It entailed a movement by rank in which the normal deployed order of one half-pace between files and two paces between ranks was closed by rear rank(s) stepping up to fire a simulated volley. Men in rear rank(s) next stepped back to reload, then forward to simulate firing again. Open-order drill practiced loose formations. For cavalry this meant seeking spacing of one horse length (about six feet) between ranks in a troop, useful during battlefield positioning prior to combat. In the infantry, open order was a more widely spaced formation used mainly to facilitate marches and field “evolutions.” The British were unique in training their North American companies in the 1750s to 112

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march and fight in open order, essentially as light infantry. All troops practiced close-order drill (the term was used differently than in modern military parlance) in preparation for battle. In the cavalry this was tight spacing between horses side-by-side in a troop, generally about three feet apart but sometimes as close as 11⁄2 feet. This gave a heavy cavalry charge maximum shock. In the infantry, close-order drill exercised establishing firing lines, with the front rank kneeling and rear ranks standing with about 30 inches left between files, narrowing over time and by the Regulations to 24 inches. Double-time marching and counter-marching was practiced as well. Ideally, battle lines were supposed to advance with 30-inch steps at 75 paces per minute. Men looked to the center to match their own paces to the regimental colors, with file closers keeping the moving formation from becoming ragged along the flanks. Once platoon and company drill was more-or-less in hand, battalion or battle group drill might be practiced. This level was more rarely attempted by the British Army than by continental counterparts in the 18th century because the former’s scattering of men into billets rather than concentration in barracks meant sufficient troops and officers were seldom available in one place to practice large-scale maneuvers. Recruits last learned how to use their musket and bayonet. Small arms drill started with learning to name the parts, and disassembly and reassembly, of weapons. The next step was handling unloaded muskets, or manual drill. Once this was “mastered” to a reasonable proficiency, recruits practiced how to load (at first, only blank paper cartridges), present, and finally fire real bullets in volley. After c.1740, musket drill no longer included practicing with powder flasks. At some point, firearms drill mixed with marching evolutions to practice battlefield shifts of unit front and formation, combined with volley fire. Marksmanship was seldom taught and less frequently achieved outside ranger, grenadier, or light infantry companies who might better expect to conduct raids or serve as skirmishers than would more regular troops. This failure to teach hitting a mark was partly because of the basic inaccuracy of smoothbore muskets beyond 60–70 paces, and in part a result of government miserliness about “wasting” expensive powder and shot. Some soldiers practiced firing at marks anyway, or went hunting. But in general, unit live-fire drill was highly restricted beyond minimal practicing of volley fire. Bayonet drill until the 1740s proceeded from shoulder “rest position” to the command “charge bayonets breast high,” a two-motion order reminiscent of pikemen that ended with the butt resting against the right palm with the musket held shoulder-high at close to a 90-degree angle. The final command was “push bayonets,” which meant driving the musket and bayonet horizontally with both hands. The Prussians introduced a new bayonet drill in 1740. Later imitated by all armies, the Prussian system taught recruits to hold a bayonetedmusket with both hands at waist-height. This produced a revolutionary effect due to its more efficient thrusting motion and superior ability to parry. Most importantly, repositioning the bayonet out of the old pike position allowed lines of infantry to charge with bayonets fixed, creating a powerful effect of sheer psychological intimidation. Soldiers everywhere quickly grew to fear facing enemy infantry charging at point of “cold steel.” 113

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Once basic training, from appearance to evolutions to firearms and bayonet drill, was absorbed (or at least experienced), a recruit was—in the British phrase—“passed by the adjutant” and considered a trained soldier. It was generally agreed among military experts of the day that it took about one year of drill to turn a raw recruit into a competent soldier, a fact that remains more or less true today. As wars grew longer and casualties mounted, however, green troops and freshly-raised regiments were necessarily thrown into combat with only rudimentary training in field maneuvers or even weapons. This compounded a command problem that bedeviled the age: by the mid-18th century superior professional skill was necessary just to maneuver troops in battle, because far greater numbers had to be moved and fought by generals than in earlier centuries. Yet commanders were still in transition themselves from a primarily hereditary to a newly professional officer corps, with the highest commands often the last to be converted to the new “science” of war. Thus, even superbly drilled and disciplined troops might be wasted in combat inside an hour or an afternoon, by some incompetent dolt mounted in command over them solely by virtue of his noble rank and blueblood parentage, or because he was one of the bastard sons of the monarch. The warlords of this period most keenly devoted to tough drill were Oliver Cromwell and Louis XIV (as expressed through his military aides). Cromwell introduced such hard discipline to Parliament’s armies, notably his Roundhead cavalry, that they swept away less-disciplined Royalist forces during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). Louis drilled himself as a form of childhood play, and continued to play at war as a man, and then as king. He believed that discipline, rather than bloody mayhem, was what won battles and insisted on constant drill, at least twice per week, even for garrison units. His regiments drilled through the winter and during the rare summers when they were not in the field. Early in his reign, Michel Le Tellier and Louvois helped Louis found a special regiment, the Régiment du Roi (1663), to model and demonstrate proper drill to the rest of the French Army. This regiment, and then all French drill, was overseen from 1667 by inspectors-general. See also bayonet; fugelman; infantry; Swedish Army. Suggested Reading: J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service (1981).

driver. See sails. Ducal Prussia. See Brandenburg; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); war finance. Dugay-Trouin, Réné (1673–1736). French privateer. He was based at Brest. His commerce raiding during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), as far afield as the Caribbean and the coast of Brazil, was a great trial to the British. Dunbar, Battle of (September 3, 1650). To put down Scottish support for the exiled Charles II, Oliver Cromwell moved north with 16,000 veterans of the English and Irish wars, assisted by George Monk and John Lambert. The Puritans 114

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were met by a Scottish army of 25,000 under David Leslie. The Scottish general cleverly maneuvered Cromwell against the coast, even as the English army was reduced by 5,000 men through harassing attacks, disease, and desertion. Under pressure from Presbyterian fanatics and clerics to crush the English, Leslie gave up his advantage in the heights and moved downslope to attack. It was a mistake: Cromwell smashed Leslie’s right flank, then charged across the field to dismantle his center. Cromwell lost few men, but Scottish losses were staggering: 3,000 dead and 10,000 prisoners, most of whom were forcibly deported to the West Indies as indentured laborers. Dunes, Battle of the (June 4/14, 1658). “Dunkirk.” Ten years after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which finally ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), France and Spain were still fighting the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). Meanwhile, Great Britain and Spain were newly engaged in the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660). This confluence of animosities led to a strange alliance of Catholic France and the Puritan Republic in England. French and English armies thus joined to face a Spanish army on the sand dunes outside Dunkirk. Command was even more complicated than the confessional politics of participants: 6,000 Roundheads served alongside French regiments, under Turenne. These committed Protestant troops from England would bear the brunt of heavy fighting. With comparable confusion, Spanish and Habsburg forces, some 14,000 in number, were led by the principal war captain of France, the Great Condé, and his young cousin the duc de Luxembourg. Both men were still alienated from the French court by their participation in the Fronde rebellion against the young Louis XIV. Condé did not have full or final authority over the Spanish army at the Dunes. Instead, this was shared with Don Juan of Austria. Condé strongly advised against offering battle because the Spanish position was dire: the Army’s back was to the dunes, it lacked artillery to match the enemy’s guns, and it was exposed to heavy bombardment from the sea. The English landed a strong force of 6,000 Roundheads from their offshore fleet, and began the attack supported by about 8,000 French. The Spanish were quickly and decisively defeated, losing about 4,000 killed, wounded, and taken prisoner. Spain never recovered militarily. Ten days after the fight in the sand, Dunkirk fell to the Allies. That allowed the English fleet, which for months had blockaded Dunkirk without end or success, to force the surrender of the Dunkirk privateer fleet. In the wider wake of the battle, French armies retook Gravelines, Oudenarde, and Ypres. Those losses forced Philip IV to negotiate an end to the great war with France after 24 years of fighting. The culminating agreement was codified as the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). That settlement confirmed a permanent shift in the balance of power in western Europe, away from now-rapidly declining Spain and toward France, a newly preponderant and dangerously aggressive power under Louis XIV. See also Habsburgs. Dungeness, Battle of (November 30/December 10, 1652). See Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Blake, Robert; Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea; Tromp, Maarten van. 115

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Dunkirk. See Bart, Jean; British Army; Dunes, Battle of the (1658); London Preliminaries; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); privateers; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de (c. 1610–1688). French admiral. As a young man he sailed in the Swedish service. He saw the most action of his career when already of an advanced age, fighting off Sicily during the Dutch War (1672–1678). He was disheartened by the performance of the French Navy at Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672), but his quarrel with Admiral Jean d’Estrées and criticism of other officers was not taken well by the king, and he lost his command as a result. He was recalled to fight in the Mediterranean, where he encountered and defeated de Ruyter twice off the coast of Sicily, the second time at Augusta (April 22, 1676) in a fight that cost the great Dutchman his life. In the early 1680s Duquesne led several raids and punitive expeditions against the Barbary corsairs of North Africa. A fervent Huguenot, he refused to abjure his faith when Louis XIV demanded this of him in 1685. Most naval historians hold him in reasonably high regard. Dutch Army. Control of the Dutch Army, or “Army of the Generality” of the United Provinces, as it was formally known during this period, initially lay with the Regents of the States of Holland, most notably Jan de Witt. Later, this control shifted to William III, and still later to Marlborough, though the Regents never surrendered their power over the Army’s purse. This powerful lever gave the Regents of Holland effective control of wider Dutch politics and foreign and military policy. Command of the Army was an endless source of political conflict between dynasts and the merchant elite. Orangists sought always to secure command for sons of the House of Orange, while the republican, or States’ party, faction was equally determined to deny command to Princes of Orange, even if that meant granting it to a foreign general. French maréchal Turenne and General Wrangel of Sweden were both proposed, and Marlborough was ultimately accepted. The Army was woefully unprepared for the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678). In the actual fighting against French invaders, badly beaten Dutch troops had to be rescued by town militia, including many women, who stiffened the resistance. Within two years the Army recovered, and thereafter maintained a high level of professionalism and proficiency. The Dutch Army also increased greatly in size, reaching 100,000 men by 1675. Under William III (then still Prince of Orange), many of its officers were German nobles, as William found these easier to influence and control than Dutch officers. With the return of peace in the late 1680s the Army was temporarily reduced to 40,000 men. Its numbers rose commensurately with the threat from France from 1688 onward, swelling throughout the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). It formed the core of William’s force for the invasion of England in 1688 (though many mercenaries accompanied him as well). Some 17,000 Dutch regulars remained there, or fought in Ireland, until 1691. It reached its peak strength of 119,000 men in 1708, compared to just 70,000 British soldiers on the continent that year. This Dutch force was importantly supplemented by another 42,000 Germans and Swiss hired with Dutch taxes and acting under 116

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Dutch command. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Dutch forces agreed to serve under overall command of Marlborough, although he was not permitted to move or commit the Army to battle without prior consent of the States General, which was represented in the field by several Dutch sub-commanders. Troop numbers were reduced from 130,000 (including foreigners) in 1712 to 90,000 in 1713 and just 40,000 in 1715, with the latter force an admixture of Dutch, Swiss, and Scots. In 1717 the Army was reduced by another 6,000 men to a standing force of 34,000. For the Dutch Army’s field performance, see also Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Athlone, Godard van Reede; drill; Prince Eugene; War of Devolution (1667–1668); War of the Reunions (1683–1684). Dutch Gift (1660–1661). This was the largest bounty up to that time presented by the Dutch to a foreign ruler, Charles II of England. It was intended to cement an Anglo-Dutch alliance upon Restoration of the monarchy in England. It comprised funds, paintings, and even a yacht. Dutch Navy. Emerging from success after success won by fleets of “Sea Beggars” during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), the Navy of the “Generality” of the United Provinces should have been one of the strongest in the world entering into this period. In fact, it had been badly neglected by the States General in the final years of war with Spain. In 1650 it was still primarily a fleet of armed merchantmen rather than purpose-built warships, though it was by far the largest such fleet in the world. The merchant marine of Holland alone employed nearly 170,000 seamen, without counting tens of thousands more experienced seamen of the vast Dutch fishing fleets. The Dutch fleet had a major structural flaw beyond simple neglect and non-purpose-built ships: there was no “Dutch Navy” per se. Instead, there were five provincial admiralty colleges operating out of Amsterdam, Holland (“North Quarter”), Friesland, the Maze (Rotterdam), and Zeeland. Each admiralty supported a discrete fleet maintained by its own naval establishment. Ships of these five establishments were supplemented, but only ad hoc, by powerful armed merchant fleets owned by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), West Indies Company, and smaller joint stock companies. Some Netherlands cities maintained small navies (directieschepen), used to escort only their own municipal ships in convoy. All this represented the overall radical constitutional decentralization of Dutch national life and politics. This was in striking contrast to the centralized and centralizing naval administrations of the main sea rivals of the Dutch: England, and later, France. Worse still for the Dutch, in the late 1640s the five admiralty colleges sold off many of their ships in response to the end of the long war with Spain. As tensions rose with England, in 1651 the States General reversed course and voted funds to build a navy of 226 warships, up from the extant number of just 76. However, this measure produced only three additional warships by the start of hostilities with England in 1652. Moreover, the largest of existing Dutch ships mounted no more than 50 guns. That meant England had 14 ships as big as or larger than even the most heavily armed 117

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Dutch man-of-war. English guns were also heavier, in addition to being more numerous, with longer ranges and greater power as ship-smashers. One short-term result of the vote was the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), even though the Navy was then divided by mutinous crews and political quarrels between the Orangist Admiral Maarten van Tromp and the republican Regents of Holland. The weakness showed at Kentish Knock, where nine Dutch ships deserted and Admiral Witte Coneliszoon de With was refused boarding by other ships after losing his flagship and taking to the sea in a ship’s boat. The Dutch Navy suffered from other physical disadvantages in addition to having smaller and undergunned ships. Its harbors did not lie windward of the enemy, as did English ports, and it was forced to disperse to multiple harbors by the lay of the Atlantic coast of the United Provinces and by a strategic need to protect more important Baltic routes. The poor quality of Dutch ships was quickly revealed in the first of three Anglo-Dutch wars, as Dutch ships were dismasted and holed in large numbers by heavier English guns and superior tactics of the English fighting instructions. The States General ordered the fleet rebuilt after the war, laying hulls for 60 men-of-war by early 1654. However, complaints of admirals about the smallness and poor design of even these new ships were ignored. The Regents of Holland thus continued to build numerous small, undergunned warships, with the largest still mounting just 54 guns. This probably reflected the much higher interest of merchants in seeing construction of fast convoy escorts and in coastal defense, over creation of a true battlefleet. Crucial reform was finally introduced following the war. The States General proclaimed that new ships belonged to the Generality of the United Provinces, not to the five independent admiralty colleges. The latter were thus denied the usual temptation to sell off warships for short-term profit upon the end of the most recent conflict. Slowly, though unsurely, a national Dutch Navy began to take shape. The Dutch Navy was much better prepared to fight the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). By then it had launched much larger ships, though the largest still had just 70 guns. The Dutch also put to sea with many more professional officers and had adopted improved tactics: the Dutch Navy first fought in line of battle at The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). But the English had been busy building battleships, too. Their new designs mounted more and heavier guns than the largest Dutch warships. In April 1665 the English had eight First-Rates of 70 guns or more, where the Dutch had just four, and the largest English battleships had 90 and 100 guns. Moreover, Dutch crews were rife with political tension, with some refusing to sail or fight under certain officers or certain colors (that is, the State’s flag vs. the dynastic banner of the Prince of Orange). The Dutch Navy subsequently fought many worthy battles and escorted numerous convoys to and from the Baltic and Mediterranean. It was fully engaged against the English for a third time during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). Thereafter, the Dutch were more concerned with fighting the French Navy during a series of minor and major wars: the War of Devolution (1667–1668), the Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), and finally the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The last two conflicts 118

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were fought in alliance with the old foe of Dutch commercial and naval power, the Royal Navy. See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement (1689); Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); convoy; Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653); Glorious Revolution; guerre d’escadre; guerre de course; Kentish Knock, Battle of the (September 28/October 8, 1652); Köge Bay (July 1, 1677); Lowestoft, Battle of (June 3/13, 1665); Navigation Act(s); privateers; Portland, Battle of (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653); ranks (at sea); Rates; Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de; Scanian War (1674–1679); Schooneveld, First Battle of (1673); Schooneveld, Second Battle of (June 4/14, 1673); Solebay, Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1672); sovereignty of the sea; St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666); Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653); Texel, Battle of (August 11/21, 1673); Tromp, Cornelius van; Velez-Málaga, Battle of (August 13/24, 1704). Dutch War (1672–1678). The first of several great contests between the United Provinces and varying great coalitions on one side, and France and its minor allies on the other. It was forced by the engorged ambition of Louis XIV, though it also followed from a miscalculation by the “Grand Monarque” about the degree of opposition in Europe to his aggressive moves and plans. Its precondition was failure of the anti-French Triple Alliance. This alliance Louis first adroitly broke apart by secretly bribing the English king, Charles II, under terms of the Treaty of Dover (May 12/22, 1670). Louis also ringed the United Provinces with enmity by making aggressive alliances with Cologne and Münster. He beguiled the Dutch leader, Jan de Witt, into belief in his royal friendship for the Dutch. Louis further smoothed the path to war by isolating most of the minor states of Germany. He allied with Bavaria and Saxony and alternately frightened or rewarded Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg into remaining neutral. This outstanding diplomatic effort by France culminated in a secret subsidy treaty to Friedrich-Wilhelm in January 1670. Although the “Great Elector” would eventually join the Dutch-led coalition against France, the subsidy treaty delayed his entry into the war and therefore allowed Louis to march north at its outset without fear for his German flank. Finally, Louis neutralized Leopold I with promises of a joint partition of varied Spanish territories should the sickly Spanish king, Carlos II, die quickly, as was widely expected. When the spring rains ceased French armies struck hard at the Dutch republic. Louis had declared war on the United Provinces on April 6, 1672, issuing only the vaguest justifications at the last minute in behalf of a war motivated by a desire for vengeance and from raw aggression that even he could not conceal. He immediately sent three large armies northward. These made quick progress, well-supported by Louvois’ advanced system of forward magazines along their anticipated lines of march. The entire war effort was well-buttressed by an ample treasury enriched during prior years of peace by Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Conquest of the United Provinces was not Louis XIV’s original objective. He initially sought only to deal the Dutch such a heavy blow that they would be driven from the Great Power game and he would be left free of opposition to his deeper plan: to defeat Spain and annex the Spanish Netherlands, the true 119

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territorial prize along his northern frontier. He nearly succeeded. However, quick and spectacular military success enlarged his already ample arrogance and appetite for conquest. He now demanded far more than the Dutch could possibly concede. This guaranteed prolongation and expansion of the war by unifying the Dutch and frightening most of Louis’ other neighbors into forming an anti-French coalition. In turn, protracted war on multiple fronts against plural enemies led Louis to feel deeply insecure about his other borders. His characteristic response was to seek subjugation and annexation of bordering regions, including Alsace, Lorraine, Saarland, and Franche-Comté. In the end, Louis would wage war for six years and still be forced to accept far less at the end of the conflict than he might have secured at its beginning. Louis XIV on Offense, 1672–1673 Fighting began in early May 1672, as 118,000 French infantry and 12,000 cavalry crossed into the Netherlands in three armed columns. The main French force of 50,000 was led by Marshal Turenne, accompanied personally by the king and his full court. It advanced along the left bank of the Meuse toward Maastricht, crossing the Maas north of the city on May 22. A second army, under the Great Condé, moved along the right bank. Before reaching Maastricht, Turenne crossed the river and united with Condé. A third army of more than 20,000 troops from Cologne and Münster, Louis’ minor German allies, moved from Westphalia into the northern Dutch provinces starting on May 18. The Münsterites captured several border towns. Though they were finally blocked at Groningen, they destroyed much of value in their path, tied down badly-needed Dutch defenders, and spread fear and panic among the populace. The Dutch had available just 40,000 troops in all, and most of these were badly dispersed in scattered border and town garrisons. Only 14,000 were available to the young William III (then still Prince of Orange), the newly appointed captain-general who took personal charge of the armies of the United Provinces in July 1672. Turenne and Condé bypassed Maastricht, isolating its garrison, and continued their march. They invested and captured four Dutch fortresses on the lower Rhine, threatening to move beyond the river in short order. While this campaign was under way, the Dutch called out their warfleets to strike at the Royal Navy before the English could unite with the French warfleet of 36 ships-of-the-line. De Ruyter failed to stop the union of his enemies’ fleets, however, a fact that left him outgunned and overmatched. Converting necessity into advantage, he attacked and won narrowly at Solebay in early June. That forestalled a hostile Allied descent on the Dutch coast. Once the Dutch battlefleet returned to port, most ships’ crews were hurriedly converted into raw infantrymen and rushed to the front. While Anglo-French plans for an amphibious flanking move were blocked at sea, Maastricht still held out. Condé crossed the Rhine under fire on June 12, first fording the river to establish a beachhead, then throwing a pontoon bridge across it to quickly reinforce. Arnhem’s citizenry rioted and forced surrender of the garrison on June 15. This advance placed the interior ring of Dutch defenses at great risk, which forced William to fall back, despite receiving modest Spanish reinforcements. 120

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The States General ordered the lines of the outflanked IJssel abandoned and pulled its surviving troops back to defend Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The French next advanced on Utrecht, which surrendered without a fight on June 23 after its citizens, too, rioted and refused the garrison any ability to prepare for the coming siege. The French celebrated with the first Catholic Mass allowed in Utrecht cathedral since the 1570s. Turenne then invested Nijmegen for six days (July 3–9). Its quick surrender allowed the garrison of 4,500 to depart with their arms and honors, but further imperiled the inner lines of defense. The Dutch now resorted to traditional, but still desperate, measures. On June 22 they opened sluices and broke dikes in front of the advancing French along the water line, while also making a desperate appeal to Louis for immediate cessation of hostilities. The Regents of Holland offered land, border cities, and payment of a large indemnity to the French king. This was playing with domestic fire, as civic populations all over Holland and Zeeland rose in furious mobs to protest stories of neglect of duty and active betrayal. Across the battle lines, Louvois argued with Louis for more war, possibly from motives of personal greed for profits to be made from contracts to feed Mars. He successfully appealed to Louis’ personal hubris and strategic avarice for even more concessions and annexations. Thinking his military victory completed, Louis inadvisedly ransomed 20,000 Dutch prisoners, thereby reinforcing his enemy’s badly depleted defenses. He thus missed a main chance for victory. Additional reinforcements came in the form of civic militia whose members rallied in large numbers to town barricades and walls, including large numbers of women. This populist uprising raised William to Stadholder in July, and led to the street murder of Jan de Witt in August. Louis’ armies were then stopped short of Amsterdam and The Hague by defenders standing behind open sluices and across flooded plains. The defense was supported by an early winter that mired the Grande Monarque’s troops, and his German allies, in frozen blood and mud. The water line held, but just barely. It would not have without help from an unusually cold winter and hard resistance by an aroused population wellorganized into civic militias. By early spring, 1673, all routes into Holland were blocked to the French by ice, barricades, and brave resistance. Over the winter the Dutch had also raised important allies, as Brandenburg and the Austrians joined the fight. German troops advanced on Cologne. This relieved some of the military pressure on the Dutch by forcing Turenne and 40,000 French troops (including 18,000 horse) to relocate from the Netherlands to the new front in the Rhineland. In fighting along the Rhine frontier throughout the winter of 1672–1673, Turenne drove the Imperials and Brandenburgers back into north Germany. He later drove Brandenburg out of the fight, forcing FriedrichWilhelm to sign the Treaty of Vassem (June 6, 1673) by savaging and scorching his lands. The Dutch tried to take advantage of this dispersal of French forces by attacking toward Charleroi, but were repulsed. In May 1673, Louis personally returned to the campaign and the quest for “la gloire” that had driven him since his early years. He accompanied one army marching up the Meuse while two more French armies attacked the United Provinces from other directions, one led by Condé and the other by Turenne. Louis ordered Vauban to besiege 121

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Maastricht, rather than bypass it. The town and its key fortified bridge duly fell on July 1. Turenne spent the summer trying to interpose his troops between an Imperial army led by the nimble Montecuccoli and a Dutch army under William, but failed to prevent an Allied juncture at Bonn. The Dutch once more flooded their country in front of the enemy, bogging him down. And once again the war widened politically and militarily, as Louis’ intransigence and aggression allowed William to deftly assemble the first of several coalitions he would lead against France over the next three decades. Meanwhile, de Ruyter waged a brilliant defensive campaign at sea, winning twice at Zeeland in June. The United Provinces had allied by late summer 1673, with Austria, Charles IV (dispossessed Duke of Lorraine), and a number of smaller German states. For the French this shifted the balance of forces—and the major threat—to Germany, which became the main theater of operations. Employing interior lines, French troops were disengaged from the fight with the Dutch and sent to reinforce the king’s army in Germany. Condé observed the Spanish, who would soon align openly with the Dutch but had yet to formally join the Allies (Spain finally joined the coalition in August). Meanwhile, a French army of 18,000 ransacked the electorate of Trier, whose bishop had joined the Allied coalition. Louis led a third French army into Lorraine. There, he improved defenses at Nancy and repressed incipient popular disquiet over his new war with the Emperor. He next moved into Alsace, forcing contributions and enforcing his will. The new coalition was too powerful to allow him to do the same elsewhere, so Louis finally offered to accept more modest terms. But it was now too late to end the war, or even prevent its further expansion. William went on the offensive in the north, capturing whole a French garrison of 3,000 at Naarden and retaking Utrecht. Cologne also fell to Imperial and Dutch troops. Active fighting broke out between Spain and France in mid-October, and now Brandenburg rejoined the fight. Louis was severely isolated when the United Provinces wisely ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War, agreeing to the Treaty of Westminster (February 9/19, 1674) with England. The breakdown of Louis’ keystone alliance with England was a decisive diplomatic defeat for France. Münster was forced out of the war two months after England defected. On May 28 the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire declared war on France. The French abandoned their position on the IJssel that same month. As they withdrew from Arnhem and other towns, crowds of Orangists desecrated Catholic churches and hung out the colors of their prince and Stadholder. A pattern was now set that would repeat over the four decades that remained to Louis XIV. Royal hubris had prolonged a war of aggression that shifted into a defensive war as the king was faced by a grand coalition provoked into existence by his overbearing ambitions. Each coalition then transitioned from fear to its own hubris of power and diplomatic intransigence, delaying peace and prolonging the suffering and desolation of war. Louis XIV on Defense, 1674–1675 Facing an angry and encircling coalition, over the next two years Louis slowly withdrew from the outer towns of the United Provinces he had occupied in 122

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1672. As French troops departed in the spring of 1674 they stripped captured fortifications of all cannon and supplies. The French pulled back to a defensive line anchored by a large garrison at Rheinberg, with an engorged forward arsenal at Grave protected by a modest garrison. Military operations followed this movement of French troops, shifting first to Franche-Comté, then to the Spanish Netherlands, and finally to Alsace and the lower Rhineland. A new Mediterranean front opened with the addition of Spain to the Allied coalition, encompassing Roussillon and Catalonia. From there, fighting leapt over the water to Sicily. Louis was forced by strained finances, his new fronts against Spain, and threats along his land frontiers with Germany to cut back on naval expenditure in favor of expanding the French Army. He even confined existing ships of his Atlantic squadrons to port to save on crew costs, supplies, and refitting. He did this of necessity, despite the need for naval resupply of his armies in the Mediterranean and the effective abandonment of several of France’s overseas colonies that resulted from withdrawal of naval support. Confinement of the French Navy in the Atlantic conceded control of northern seas to the Dutch. They quickly used this advantage to conduct or to threaten hostile descents against the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. They also attacked, with mixed success up to 1675, French colonies and shipping in the Americas. A marked bright spot for France in the war at sea was Jean Bart, who fought Dutch warships on six occasions and took 81 merchantmen as prizes. But that was no compensation for larger losses on land and diplomatically. Louis invaded Franche-Comté in the spring of 1674. In a lightning campaign that lasted barely six weeks, the entire province was overrun and succumbed, this time permanently. Fighting then shifted to the Spanish Netherlands, where the Dutch took the offensive by besieging Grave and Maastricht while their Spanish allies moved against Charleroi. However, rapid success of the campaign in Franche-Comté allowed Louis to again make use of interior lines to shift armies northward to meet the Allies. To oppose the French, William assembled a field army of 65,000 Dutch, Imperial, and Spanish troops, even while the Allies laid siege to several towns—the balance of forces no longer favored France. William demonstrated with his army, threatening to invade French-held parts of Flanders. Condé responded with characteristic aggression, pouncing with a cavalry vanguard on the Allied rearguard, which William had left exposed. William quickly reinforced, as did Condé, so that the main armies met in an unusually close and bloody fray at Seneffe (August 11, 1674). That was one of only three battles of the entire war fought in the Netherlands, and the only true battle of encounter. Wounded badly by the clash, each army fenced and maneuvered in the aftermath. Both were extremely wary of another engagement, and as a result none occurred. William moved to Grave, completing the siege there by the end of October, and then sought winter quarters. A new front opened in the far south, along the frontier spine of the Pyrenees. Most troops on the French side were initially local militia, as regulars could not be spared from the northern campaigns. The Spanish also relied on their local militia, or miquelets. In several small engagements the French were bested. 123

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Further fighting between these traditional rival powers was limited by Spain’s holding back troops that might be required to suppress the Messinian rebellion, which broke out in Sicily. Over time, expansion of the war to Sicily drained men and supplies, and especially naval resources, from both sides. This sharply limited fighting in Roussillon and Catalonia, reducing the Pyrenees front to tertiary status until the last years of the war. Meanwhile, Turenne fought a series of four campaigns along the Rhine, which some historians regard as the finest of his career. He began with complex defensive maneuvers that vitiated the need for battle, though whenever he chose to fight he usually won handily. On the other hand, his exaction of contributions via executions of villages provoked a local uprising by peasant Schnapphahns in the Palatinate and decided that the Allies would move against him in force. An Imperial army of 30,000 under Bournonville moved toward Alsace in late summer. Turenne responded by placing his army of 25,000 in a blocking position, hemming the Imperials in the devastated Palatinate where they could not subsist on barren fields and stocks he had already burned. Logistics forced the Imperials back across the Rhine, then southward to Strasbourg. The city capitulated without a fight, allowing the Imperials to recross the Rhine via the Strasbourg bridge and invade Alsace, should they choose to do so. With Friedrich-Wilhelm marching to join the Imperials with 20,000 Brandenburgers, Turenne decided to attack before his enemies could unite. He force-marched over two days and nights to engage and defeat Bournonville at Enzheim (October 4, 1674). However, this tactical victory failed to prevent the Allies from joining later. Turenne therefore fell back and entrenched, reinforced by infantry regiments and cavalry squadrons stripped in haste from Condé, with an additional 6,000 far lessuseful “soldiers” raised from among the Alsace nobility via the arrière-ban. Rather than strike, the Allies went into winter quarters. Turenne then carried out a remarkable ruse, pretending to also seek quarters for the winter while secretly taking his freshest and most mobile troops into the field. He surprised and defeated an isolated Allied cavalry army at Mulhouse (December 29, 1674). Within a month he beat Friedrich-Wilhelm’s Brandenburgers at Türkheim (January 5, 1675). Louis attempted to recover from his several setbacks of 1674 by offering subsidies to entice Sweden into the war. Stockholm knew its north German empire was threatened by withdrawal of French forces from the lower Rhineland, as Brandenburg, Denmark, Münster, Savoy, and other minor German powers began to covet Swedish territory in Germany. Because 22,000 Swedish troops in Swedish-controlled northern Germany were sustaining Stockholm’s empire there only through French subsidies, which Louis now threatened to end, Sweden halfheartedly agreed to invade Brandenburg to repay the Grande Monarque. Karl Gustav Wrangel crossed the border with a small army in December 1674. That drew Friedrich-Wilhelm swiftly northward and helped launch the Scanian War (1674–1679) that soon engulfed the whole Baltic, as well as most of the powers already fighting the Dutch War. Also in 1674, an Anglo-Dutch Brigade was formed. It comprised three EnglishScots regiments newly created from much older English and Scottish units 124

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that had served with the Dutch since 1585. This brigade fought for the Dutch until 1689, when it was amalgamated into the new English army raised by William III. An English regiment also fought against the United Provinces during the Dutch War, in service to the king of France. Irish and Scots units likewise fought on both sides of the war. The martial and mercenary peoples of the “Three Kingdoms” thus met to kill and maim their own countrymen in fierce battles for foreign causes, in lands far distant from Galway, the Highlands, or Lancashire. The most active fronts in 1675 were still the Spanish Netherlands and the Rhineland. There was a smaller-scale, predominantly naval and amphibious war in the Mediterranean. Minor combat only took place along the Franco-Spanish border that year. In the north, bribery fed a civic plot that threatened to deliver neutral Liège to the Spanish, but before the blow was struck the French counter-bribed the garrison commander and occupied the city. Again utilizing forward magazines, French armies took the field with Allied troops still unaware and in winter quarters. The French marched and attacked along the course of the Meuse. While some garrisons resisted fiercely, slowing the advance, others succumbed in just days to intense bombardment and assaults. By the end of June a French army threatened Brussels. At the start of the campaign season in the Rhineland, Turenne moved on Strasbourg with an army of 25,000. Montecuccoli crossed the Rhine at Philippsburg to draw Turenne north, then doubled back with his own army, also of 25,000 men. Turenne was not fooled, and instead blocked the river within a few miles of Strasbourg to deny shipment of food or fodder to Montecuccoli’s Imperials. With both armies running out of food by mid-July, Turenne tried to force battle through hot pursuit of the retreating Imperials. At Sasbach (July 27, 1675), while reconnoitering the enemy’s positions, Turenne was killed by a cannonball. After inconclusive skirmishing, the armies disengaged that night. Turenne’s dispirited men withdrew all the way to Alsace, pursued in their turn by Montecuccoli’s eager Germans, who inflicted a sharp defeat on the French rearguard. Montecuccoli crossed the Rhine unopposed at Strasbourg and advanced to besiege Haguenau. When news arrived in Paris of Turenne’s death, Louis sent Condé and heavy reinforcements south, thinking the fighting in the north was done. In what turned out to be his final campaign, Condé advanced on the Imperials out of Alsace, forcing Montecuccoli to retreat to Strasbourg and then further, until reaching winter quarters. Condé and Montecuccoli both retired before year’s end. Meanwhile, the depleted French army in the Netherlands, now led by Créqui, was routed by Charles IV at Conzerbruke (August 11, 1675). That forced the French into an inglorious retreat to Trier, leading to a bloody siege of that city which ended in mutiny and a handover of Créqui to the enemy (and later, also in exaction of draconian military punishment of the mutineers). Charles died within a week of his victory. He was succeeded by his son, Charles V. The young duc also took over from Montecuccoli as Imperial supreme commander. At the end of 1675 the war thus saw a wholesale change of the guard among senior commanders: Turenne and Charles IV were dead, while Montecuccoli and Condé retired to 125

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lush estates to nurse the many infirmities incurred by old age and too many years in the saddle. Stalemate, 1676–1678 On both sides, the last years of the Dutch War saw minimal gains for great cost in blood and treasure spent. In the north, the still formidable weight of the French Army and the skill of Vauban in siege warfare told the tale as Louis added a town here or a riverine fortress there, in accord with his peculiar notion of France’s “natural frontiers.” Louis did not again threaten invasion of the Dutch homeland. Instead, he remained mostly defensive against his German enemies. There were expected spring-to-fall campaigns of maneuver and countermaneuver by opposing armies, numerous sieges, and much blood spilled, treasure wasted, and fields and property burned. But there were few significant and no decisive battles. This was true in spite of the fact that the total forces marshaled and engaged by all sides reached many hundreds of thousands. As a result of the king’s earlier aggressions, France now faced war on multiple fronts: in the Spanish Netherlands, in Alsace and Germany, in the Pyrenees, on Sicily, and at sea and in defense of its overseas colonies. An Imperial siege of Philippsburg was successful in 1676, forcing the French back from the Rhine into Lorraine. There and in Alsace, Créqui sparred in a renewed war of maneuver with Charles V, without offering battle. This pattern continued through 1677, with Créqui successfully blocking repeated Allied attempts to advance or join forces, while helping to raise sieges of French key points. The only fight he offered or accepted was a small cavalry action at Kockersberg (October 7, 1677). Along France’s mountainous border with Spain, small armies maneuvered or conducted local courses, to no lasting operational or strategic effect. The one field fight in the Pyrenees, at Espolla (July 4, 1677), was notable mainly for the extreme casualties suffered by a numerically superior Spanish army that was ineptly commanded and fought. In the waterlogged confines of Flanders the fighting was much heavier, but again descended into the usual boggy mess of sieges, forays, burnings, and boring garrison duty. The main action in the north came in yet another siege of Maastricht in 1676, this time by the main Dutch army under William. It lasted many weeks, but failed by the end of August. Each side then sought quarters for the winter. The armies of the north finally met in battle at Cassel (April 11, 1677), where William lost badly. As the Dutch retreated in disarray, the French captured several key fortresses and towns in the days and weeks that followed, including St. Omer and Cambrai. Naval and amphibious operations were carried out in Sicily, as each side sought to reinforce its isolated forces and to interfere with enemy reinforcement. The main struggle thus took place on the water, between opposing naval arms. A sharp fight at Augusta (April 22, 1676) was won by the French. It cost the Dutch more than a few ships, for they lost their great naval captain, Admiral de Ruyter. Two months later a French battlefleet, replete with over two dozen war galleys which continued to prove their usefulness in Mediterranean waters, caught the Allied fleet at anchor in Palermo and destroyed much of it. However, Louis never committed enough resources or troops to conquer Sicily. Desultory 126

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fighting and slow starvation of the population thus continued for years, as France’s hard-won local naval advantage was squandered by failure to either reinforce or to force a decision. Facing possible Royal Navy intervention in the war, with all that implied for tipping the naval balance of power to the Allied side, Louis withdrew all French naval and ground forces from Sicily in March 1678. Thus ended what always was a mere diversion for the French king. Less happy about the defeat was the Bourbon side in Spain, for whom control of Sicily was seen as a vital interest. Elsewhere at sea, Dutch raids on French outposts in the Caribbean in 1677 came to naught. Squadron-on-squadron actions cost lives and some ships without tipping the naval balance, which remained decidedly with the Dutch and their allies. By 1678, peace talks had been underway at Nijmegen for nearly two years. Louis XIV finally tailored his early territorial ambitions and was prepared to accept peace along trimmer frontiers. With characteristically aggressive logic, he concluded that to get peace he needed to attack Ghent. His intent was to force an end to the war by taking a major Flanders prize he could then trade for peace, before the Parliament at Westminster compelled Charles II to join the Allied coalition. An English expeditionary force finally arrived in Ostend later in the year, but it was far too small and far too late to affect the outcome of the war or peace talks. Nor did it have the full support of the English king; he remained enthralled with, and well bribed by his much more resplendent and powerful French counterpart. Ghent duly fell to a siege led by Vauban, capitulating on March 12. Louis immediately moved to invest Ypres, which succumbed on March 25. Upon taking Ghent and Ypres, Louis extended sweetened diplomatic terms to the Dutch, promising to forgo any new sieges and actually pulling back into France all but a blocking force at Mons. His departing troops stripped of cannon all fortresses and fortified towns he intended to give back at the peace table, and reduced their walls for good measure. Even as negotiations approached agreement, William decided to move against the French force holding out at Mons. This provoked a field battle at St. Denis (August 4/14, 1678), in which 8,000 casualties were suffered in a hard day of combat by two armies that did not find out until they disengaged, with the fall of night, that peace had been agreed four days earlier. The bloodshed at St. Denis embittered the peace with accusations of bad faith made by both sides. Even as his diplomats talked at Nijmegen, Louis reduced his army in the north to reinforce Créqui in Alsace. Even so, Créqui was placed under strict orders to remain on the defensive against Charles V. This ensured another campaign of feints and maneuver in the open terrain of Germany, punctuated in the last summer of war by several intense battles of encounter. The campaign began with Charles moving against Freiburg. As in prior campaigns, he was forced to withdraw by unresolved logistical problems. In the meantime, Créqui moved south. He was followed in great haste by Charles, who sent his cavalry ahead. This exposed Imperial vanguard was wiped out at Rheinfeld (July 6, 1678). Créqui then pivoted north and surprised the main Imperial army, which was still only half assembled, at Ortenbach (July 23, 1678). Following up these twinned victories, Créqui moved quickly to capture the bridge at Strasbourg 127

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and thereby block any invasion of Alsace. He accomplished this task by midAugust. Charles was also blocked from crossing the Rhine at Philippsburg. Short on supplies, demoralized, and beaten, Charles retired his army for the winter. In the Pyrenees, years of desultory fighting finally climaxed in a bloody French siege of the mountain fortress of Puigcerda (April 29–May 28, 1678). When it was over the French stripped and reduced the outpost, then abandoned its ruins. Peace The decisive terms of the peace settlement were agreed in the first Treaty of Nijmegen, signed by France and the United Provinces on August 10, 1678. This separate peace with the Dutch compelled the other Allies to seek terms from France as well, leaving William and the United Provinces with a reputation for diplomatic perfidy matched only by that of England. Spain agreed to a second Treaty of Nijmegen on September 17, 1678. Negotiations with the German Empire dragged on for months, until a third Treaty of Nijmegen was agreed on February 6, 1679. Louis XIV made real gains in the settlement, including key cities along his borders and all Franche-Comté. By the fault of Charles V, he also gained de facto possession of Lorraine. Some historians see this as a remarkable outcome that blended diplomatic skill with military prowess in ways Louis never achieved before or after, so that 1678 became the “annus mirabilis” of his reign. Yet the settlement was nowhere near what he might have gained by accepting terms the Dutch offered in 1672, when arrogant pride overcame him and led to his demands for more than could be conceded by even a defeated enemy. Still, by obtaining a separate peace with the United Provinces he shattered both the Dutch alliance with England and the Grand Alliance that fought the Dutch War, the first anti-French coalition to warrant that term. Spain was the main loser in 1678, both of territory and international respect. The United Provinces emerged with modest gains, or at least solid recovery from the initial disasters it had suffered. The central and lasting consequence of the war thus was to affirm, not least to Louis himself, that the United Provinces could not be dislodged from a prominent diplomatic role in northwest Europe or reduced to a mere minor power on his northern frontier. Not even the full weight of French military power had been able to crush the United Provinces, though that outcome had been nearer in mid-1672 than at any time over the next 40 years of Dutch wars with France. Louis XIV had reached out with a mailed fist to seize and hold his neighbors’ lands. But he had overreached, and the thrust was beaten back by an awakened coalition. The Alliance had groped to find common ground and was easily distracted by the latent aggressive designs of some of its members, but it had blunted France’s expansion. Louis would try again and again, starting with the War of the Reunions the very next year. His efforts would lead to ever greater wars with the Dutch and their allies, as new Grand Alliances formed, broke, and reformed. Ultimately, Louis’ campaigns would end in great personal and national failure, common recognition of the balance of power in Europe, and a generation of peace born of mutual exhaustion. Between the end of the Dutch War and that 128

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better outcome lay decades of blood and ruin. See also arrière-ban; Belle Île, raid on (1674); Lionne, Hughes de; Palatinate, devastation of. Suggested Reading: Carl Ekberg, The Failure of Louis XIV’s Dutch War (1979); John A. Lynn, Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999); Paul Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (1988).

dvorianstvo (landed gentry) cavalry. See Russian Army. Dzungars. See Zunghar Mongols.

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E East India Company (Dutch). See Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC). East India Company (English). Far and away the most successful of the various East India Companies was the East India Company (EIC), or “John Company.” It received a monopoly charter from Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600. In time it grew to dominate not just trade but the military and political affairs of the Indian subcontinent, much of southeast Asia, and coastal China. Its first expedition to India, threaded through Portuguese-controlled waters, was in 1608. It established its first “factory” (entrepôt) at Surat in Mughal India in 1619. Thereafter it employed a “factory system” of fortified trading/military posts as it competed with the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) to control the spice trade, and with the French Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO) to penetrate the interior and control the nawab states and allies. It seized Ormuz from Portugal in 1622 and broke violently with the Dutch in 1623, when ten of its officers were murdered in Amboina. In 1640 it received permission to build a fort and factory at a village which later grew into the metropolis of Madras. Under Oliver Cromwell, John Company received enhanced state support and permanently broke the Portuguese monopoly in India by 1654. It was recast in 1657 as a joint stock company. It moved its headquarters to Bombay in 1687. The great disruptions of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) eroded the VOC’s trade position and maritime power and forced that Dutch company into an uncomfortable alliance with the EIC, which took great advantage. While the VOC carried the burden of fighting the French in India and suffered enormously from buccaneer and French privateer attacks in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas, and also in the Indian Ocean, the EIC stole portions of its trade and penetrated its markets. On the other hand, the EIC was also ravaged by pirates and French privateers. The Mughals believed that most pirates were English and stopped John Company’s trade rights in 1690. Five years later a pilgrim ship owned by the Mughal

East India Company (French)

emperor Aurangzeb was captured by pirates, and all the pilgrims murdered. This forced the EIC to provide gratis escorts of pilgrims in order to have its trading rights with the Mughals restored. Several East Indiamen themselves mutinied and turned pirate, much to the embarrassment of and financial loss to the company. By the start of the Spanish war, the company was near bankruptcy. Only a shift in political fortunes away from the Whigs, who had encouraged the pirates, and toward the Tories saved John Company. The EIC’s commercial and territorial empire in India then grew at an accelerated rate, following much of India’s collapse into chaos with the ineptitude and chaos of the final years of Aurangzeb, and the wars of succession on the subcontinent that followed his death. East India Company (French). See Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO). East Indiaman. A merchant ship belonging to one of the various East India Companies. They were highly valued as potential prizes and were usually well guarded in convoy, and themselves well armed. écoute A small underground gallery for placing small charges. Alternately, a small listening gallery run out and under the glacis, to listen to progress being made by miners. See also mines/mining. Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685). An edict issued by Louis XIV revoking the Edict of Nantes, which had been issued by the great Henri IV in 1598. Thereby, Louis ended 87 years of toleration of French Protestants, the Huguenots. Fontainebleau banned Protestant worship in public, mandated Catholic baptism of all Protestant children, authorized burning of Huguenot churches, and condemned to slavery on French prison galleys any Protestant male who tried to flee France. It was almost immediately matched by opposing edicts issued outside France, notably the Edict of Potsdam issued by Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg. Fontainebleau’s strictures did not apply to Alsace or Strasbourg, which were Louis’ recent conquests but provinces where toleration was guaranteed by international treaty—the Peace of Westphalia that had ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). See also Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705); Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de; Galway, Earl of; Schomberg, Friedrich, Graf von. Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598). See Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de; Edict of Fontainebleau (1685); Galway, Earl of; Huguenots; Louis XIV. Edict of Potsdam (November 8, 1685). Issued by Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg as a counter to the Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685) of Louis XIV, it extended religious freedom and political and domestic refuge to French Protestants (Huguenots) fleeing persecution in France. Eeckeren, Battle of (June 30, 1703). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). 132

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Eight Banner Army. The core Manchu Banner formations of the Qing Army. They were subsequently reinforced with Mongol and Han (Chinese) Banners. See also Banner system; China; Kangxi emperor. embargo. In this period, a naval recruitment tactic by which a portion or even all merchantmen in port at the outbreak of a war were ordered not to sail, so that experienced seamen were subject to impressment. embrasure. A hole or opening cut into a defensive wall or parapet to permit cannon to fire toward enemy siege works, trenches, and batteries. It might be a brick- or masonry-lined firing position for cannons trundled to the parapet over the banquette. In this form, it was usually tapered outward (triangular in shape) so that the barrel could traverse a broad field of sweeping fire, while the narrow opening and merlons formed to either side in the parapet afforded protection to the crew. Mortar pits, or “cauldrons,” did not have or need embrasures. See also masking; mortar. en barbette. See barbette. en bricole. See bricole. enceinte. “body of the place” or “enclosure.” The complete circuit made by the whole and continuous works of a fortified position. The perimeter of the outermost enceinte—there might be additional enclosures inside the main body—marked the “envelope,” or “couvreface generale.” An enceinte might comprise any number or combination of bastions, ramparts, and curtain wall. An alternate, but uncommon meaning was that of a rampart forming part of a larger work. Some 17th- and 18th-century fortress towns used part of an old medieval enceinte as a retrenchment. Others incorporated parts of older walls within an otherwise wholly new trace, reinforcing them with ravelins and bastions. en crémaillère. See cremaillere. enfilade. Flanking fire along a line of soldiers or defensive works that rakes the men or position along the entire line. See also defilade; escalade; parapet; traverse. engineers. See military engineers. England. By 1650 the civil and religious wars that had wracked the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1639 were drawing to a bloody close. The last Royalist field army in England, just 1,500 men, was trapped and crushed at Stow-on-the-Wold (March 21, 1646). Royalists in Ireland were briefly ascendant after Owen Roe O’Neill (1583–1649) crushed the Covenanters at Benburb in 1646, but all was changed by political and 133

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constitutional affairs in England. Oliver Cromwell was suspicious that the “peace party” in the Long Parliament might surrender, via negotiations with the king, all the fruits of victory won by the Army in the field since 1642. That led him and other Army senior commanders to occupy London (August 6, 1647). Cromwell subsequently moved the rump in Parliament to condemn, try, and execute the king, Charles I (1600–1649), who had surrendered to a Scottish army under David Leslie and was then sold and transferred to English custody. Charles was beheaded on January 30, 1649. While events moved toward the king’s execution, Royalist and Irish Confederate fortunes deteriorated in Ireland. The Confederates lost their Leinster Army at Dungan’s Hill (August 8, 1647) and their Munster Army at Knocknanuss (November 13, 1647). Royalist uprisings in Wales, Essex, and Kent in 1648 were partly appeased or violently repressed. A Scots-Royalist army of 10,000 was beaten back later that year (“Third Anglo-Scots War”) at Preston (August 17–20, 1648). In Ireland, George Monk seized Belfast, Colerane, and Carrickfergus for Parliament. The next year, the Duke of Ormonde (1610–1688) was surprised and his Irish army routed at Rathmines (August 2, 1649). A month later Cromwell sacked Drogheda (September 11, 1649), butchering all Catholics, including women and children, who were still alive when the walls fell, except for 30 he sent as slaves to the West Indies. He repeated the deed at Wexford (October 11, 1649). In early 1650, the Marquise of Montrose (1612–1650) landed in Scotland with 1,500 men in a last, desperate Royalist effort. He was surprised and routed by Puritan cavalry at Carbisdale. Sporadic fighting continued in Ireland for several years more, but the key issues had been decided by 1649. Parliament was established as supreme in law, though the Army was superior to the Commons in fact and deed. England henceforth was overwhelmingly dominant over the other kingdoms. Scotland was warily and formally independent, but increasingly subservient in fact; Ireland was pressed under an iron heel of occupation garrisons and alien government, and seethed with potential for revolt and foreign collusion. The civil wars decided that Catholicism was not to be established in Ireland, that it was to be tolerated on the margin in England, and repressed in Scotland. Militarily, guerrilla fighting in Ireland and mopping-up operations by Roundheads in Scotland were all that remained, and were mostly completed by 1653. After an amateur start, the civil wars and Puritan Revolution meant that England developed one of the best land forces in Europe and emerged with a superior navy, as well. Its elites were prepared to use both against whatever dash of Gaelic romanticism or fatalistic royal resistance dwelled still within the British Isles. And for the first time, those elites were prepared to support with military force a burgeoning overseas territorial and commercial empire. By 1700 a new imperial administration had begun to cover the two dozen scattered English colonies in the Americas, and a new national willingness to defend these territories had emerged. England remained a Puritan republic to 1660. In that time it fought the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) and the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660), which saw the States’ Navy (Royal Navy) emerge as a true instrument of national 134

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purpose and global reach. Under Cromwell and the Puritans, England was at first governed as a revolutionary state, additionally flush with victory in bitter religious wars in Ireland and Scotland. At home, it was far more tyrannical over the daily lives of ordinary folk than the monarchy ever aspired to be. Various stripes of Puritans enjoyed religious liberty, but Anglicanism was persecuted and Catholicism suppressed. Blue laws were rigorously enforced by religious and military police, with popular and ancient folk traditions banned as heretical (including Christmas). England stumbled during the first 18 months after Cromwell’s passing in 1658, as his son’s effort to succeed him was cast aside. In 1660 George Monk arranged for election of a Restoration Parliament, which then invited Charles II to return from exile. Charles, clever and lazy all at once, concealed his deepest Catholic sentiments to avoid restoking the fires of religious civil war. He allowed the compliant, though Anglican, “Cavalier Parliament” to remain in session from 1661–1679. He wisely appointed from among erstwhile enemies, as well as returned Royalists. The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) occupied much English political energy during the latter 1660s. During the 1670s, the tensions of English politics produced two distinct factions: the Tories, guided by the Earl of Danby (1631–1712), who supported Anglicanism and royal absolutism, and the Whigs, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683), who upheld Parliamentary supremacy and toleration for Nonconformists. Despite similarities to the core factions of the 1640s, neither Tory nor Whig desired renewed civil war nor supported the king’s desire to reestablish Catholicism. Both factions joined in opposition to his pro-French leanings. Issues of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) and the Dutch War (1672–1678) framed the central arguments of English politics through the mid-1670s. While the great national debate between emerging Whig and Tory factions and polices played out at home, in foreign policy England and Parliament parried with France and Jean-Baptiste Colbert by waging a protracted tariff and trade war. Shaftesbury skillfully manipulated anti-Catholic sentiments and fears to discredit the Tories and gain successive Parliamentary majorities from 1679–1681. The anti-Catholicism of the governing classes in England was not mere bigotry, though it contained a good element of that. It was closely related to fear of France, where an aggressive, Catholic, and extraordinarily powerful monarch sat on the throne. That Charles circumvented Whig influence by governing without Parliament, helped by a secret subsidy from Louis XIV and rising customs revenues, was reminiscent of his father. That raised many of the same fears and divisions that had underlain Parliament’s war against the king in the 1640s. With the Tories restored to power, however, no effective opposition was offered to the ascension of an overtly Catholic monarch in 1685, once the childless Charles proposed that the succession fall to his brother, James II. Privately, even many Tories were opposed to the staunchly and openly Catholic James. It took just three years of misrule by James, from 1685–1688, to swell the entire country with a desire to be rid of him. In some ways, the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s was thus completed when William III mounted the throne as a result of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that overthrew James. The events surrounding 135

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this dynastic and constitutional upheaval and coup marked a definitive and permanent shift in power, from the monarchy and old landed aristocracy to rising commercial interests that now clearly dominated Parliament. It also meant a widening of civil and religious liberties in Great Britain (though not yet full toleration for Catholics). The political revolution of 1688 was later ratified in the Act of Succession (1701), ensuring that no Catholic would again ascend the throne. In the short run, however, William and Mary’s coronation drew England into the protracted wars of the United Provinces with France. The new dynastic tie helped end the long maritime contest between England and the United Provinces and forged instead a key Anglo-Dutch alliance, which Great Britain quickly grew to dominate. That alliance included a naval agreement from 1689 to oppose France at sea with a ratio of English to Dutch warships of 5:3. Unity in foreign policy was also encouraged by the fact that Louis XIV continued to support the deposed James and his Jacobite followers during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). England and Scotland were joined constitutionally, in addition to their older union of crowns of the previous century, by the Act of Union in 1707. For events post-1707, see Great Britain. See also British Army; Navigation Act(s). English Army. See British Army. English Civil Wars (1639–1651). “The Great Rebellion” or “Wars of the Three Kingdoms.” See Cromwell, Oliver; England. enlightened despotism. An 18th-century style of government in which “absolute” rulers refused to surrender their formal and unchallenged legal powers, but accepted to govern in practice less arbitrarily and with the welfare of their subjects—at least, the politically and socially influential classes—in mind. In a wider context, it may be seen as an unstable transition stage between absolutism and the idea of popular sovereignty that sprouted into reality in some countries, and eventually into the rhetoric of all countries, with the Glorious Revolution in England and, more clearly, the American and French Revolutions. ensign. See flags. envelope. See couvreface generale; enceinte. Enzheim (Ensheim), Battle of (October 4, 1674). A battle fought in the middle of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Strasbourg’s civic leaders capitulated when faced with an Imperial force of 30,000 under Bournonville. Marching to join them was Friedrich-Wilhelm, with 20,000 Brandenburgers. French forces defending Alsace were thus threatened by greatly superior numbers of enemy troops: Turenne had only 25,000 men (including allied English regiments, one led by John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough). Turenne decided to attack before his enemies could unite. He force-marched to the Imperial encampment at Enzheim, leaving Bournonville no choice but to accept battle. Turenne deployed his infantry 136

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in two lines with some cavalry support, but with most cavalry in a central reserve. Bournonville also placed his infantry in a classic formation of two firing lines, with his left anchored on a large copse. This flank was immediately attacked, and soon uprooted and unhinged by French dragoons infiltrated into the woods. Bournonville countered by advancing his second line and shifting units from his center to his left, and then he sent in his reserve. Turenne followed suit, sending infantry from his center and some of his cavalry reserve into the fight in the woods. Damp weather prevented artillery from playing a significant role in the fight, which played out with muskets and close-order weapons at intimate ranges. The Imperials fell back to prepared field fortifications, which halted any further French advance. As the fight on the flank petered out, Bournonville sent his cavalry to attack the weakened French center. The French infantry formed squares, mostly repulsing repeated Imperial charges. A cavalryon-cavalry fight ensued, with the Imperial horse finally faltering, then pulling back. That night, the Imperials abandoned their fortifications and encampment, leaving the field to the French. Turenne lost 3,500 men, compared to enemy casualties of about 3,000, but he had won a tactical victory. epaulement. An earthen fieldwork erected to protect besiegers or their guns from enfilade and raking fire. Essentially, it was a type of parapet. In some cases, it differed from a normal parapet in lacking a firing step, or banquette, for convenient return fire. See breastwork. Erastferon, Battle of (December 29, 1701/January 9, 1702). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). escalade. Scaling the walls of a fortification on ladders. This was a highly risky, and therefore nearly always wounding or deadly, form of assault. To counter the escalade, the revetment was often made 30 feet or more high, forcing assault ladders to become longer and hence too heavy to be raised, and the climb too long and slow for attackers to survive strong defensive fire. The practice survived invention and early diffusion of designs for the artillery fortress, but petered out over the second half of the 17th century in the face of repeated carnage inflicted on attackers by enfilade fire from bastions. In the 18th century, a few attempts at escalade were made in stealth at night, as a form of insult. One was successfully carried off by the maréchal de Saxe at Prague in 1741. See also flank; garde-fou; Serdengeçti; tenaille. escarpment. See scarp. esplanade. A ring or other open space left between a citadel and the town in which it resided. This preserved fields of fire for the garrison against disgruntled civilians, if necessary. It also protected the citadel against incendiaries. Espolla, Battle of (July 4, 1677). A small fight in the Pyrenees between a French army of 8,000 and a Spanish army of 11,000. The French were withdrawing after 137

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an extended course (raid) when they were attacked at last by a Spanish army that had taken weeks to assemble. Despite numerical advantage, the Spanish were savaged by disciplined French fire, losing up to 5,000 men—or over 45% casualties. establishment. A standing and organized military body maintained by the state. In England it originally referred to the Army, but by the late 17th century was extended to include the Navy, and even the civil service. From this, the “establishment” was the fixed quota of officers, men, guns, and dimensions and numbers of ships in the Navy, or of troops, squadrons, regiments, and batteries in the Army. This meaning was modified to reflect political conditions, as in “peace establishment” and “war establishment.” See also British Army; British establishment; Dutch Navy; Irish establishment; Royal Navy. Estrées, Jean compte (duc) d’ (1624–1707). Maréchal de France and French admiral. He rose beyond the level of his ability in military rank and affairs due mainly to the prominence of his father, who had been a maréchal de France under Louis XIII, and to his personal friendship with Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Louis XIV. He moved into the new French Navy with the assistance and encouragement of Colbert. He rose to the rank of Vice-Admiral in 1669, despite his lack of experience or skill at sea. He commanded during several actions in the Dutch War (1672–1678). He was in command of the French squadron that failed to engage at Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672). Afterward, he blamed this failure on the marquis de Duquesne, and with malice saw to it that Duquesne lost favor at court and later, also lost his command. The following year d’Estrées saw action at Schooneveld and the Texel, again without much success. His main area of operation and interest after that was the Caribbean, where he conducted raids against the Dutch in 1676–1677, capturing several small islands. However, the following year he led a fleet of 17 ships-of-the-line to disaster through a navigation error which shattered them on a coral reef. In the mid-1680s he led French fleets in the Mediterranean that bombarded the North African cities of the Barbary corsairs, using the new “galiotes à bomb,” or bomb ketches. His title was eventually elevated by Louis from compte to duc d’Estrées. His son Victor-Marie, also duc d’Estrées (1660–1737), was likewise an admiral in Louis XIV’s Navy. He saw action during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). étapes. A logistical system first developed along the Spanish Road from Italy to Flanders during the wars of religion. In any étapes system, towns were required to store food and fodder at preset rest stations for purchase by arriving troops. This was not quite a magazine system, but something close to it. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), villagers were replaced by sutlers under royal contract. The French tried to replicate this system for troops moving to the Rhineland or into Flanders. They were not as efficient as the Spanish, due to sabotage of the system by French officers who profited from the older method 138

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of regimental supply, corruption among sutlers, and lack of central royal funds. Marlborough and William Cadogan used a form of étapes in their logistically brilliant march to the Danube in 1704. Eternal Peace (May 1686). A treaty agreed between Poland-Lithuania and Russia. It confirmed the terms of the Treaty of Andrussovo (January 30/February 9, 1667): Russia kept Kiev and Ukraine from the left bank of the Dnieper, including sovereignty over all “Left Bank Cossacks.” Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663–1736). “Eugen.” Imperial Feldmarschall. Eugene was the son of a French count. His mother was a Roman niece of Mazarin, and also one of the mistresses of Louis XIV. An ill-made and physically unimpressive boy, Eugene was poorly regarded by the king. That was partly because of the influence of court enemies of his overly mystical and somewhat scheming mother, who was accused of poisoning her husband and was banished from court and from France. Eugene was accordingly refused admission to the French officer corps. Louis brusquely recommended the priesthood as a more suitable career, for which the 20-year-old Eugene was in fact being groomed. Eugene was determined to be a soldier, however. He left France in secret—disguised as a woman—to enlist with the Habsburgs at Passau, where Leopold I was in temporary exile from his capital while it was being visited by an Ottoman army. Eugene saw his first fighting as part of the relief sent to lift the siege of Vienna (1683) later that year. He made his mark as an Imperial officer at that fight. He so impressed Leopold personally and the Allied generals that he was immediately offered command of an Imperial regiment—the Kufstein Dragoons. Eugene flourished as a general in the eastern campaigns of the Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699) that followed. He fought 10 campaigns against the Ottomans during his career. He fought another 20 campaigns for Savoy and the Imperials against the armies of Louis XIV in Italy, Germany, and the Spanish Netherlands. He was by far the most capable Imperial general of the era, winning battles, sieges, and campaigns of maneuver far more often than he lost. He was promoted to “Feldmarschall” at the onset of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). He was given the top Imperial command in Italy in 1694. With 50,000 men transferred east upon conclusion of the war with France in the west, in 1697 Eugene destroyed an Ottoman army at Zenta (September 1/11, 1697), proceeding to capture Sarajevo the following month. At the outset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Eugene took command of an Imperial army of 30,000 and handily defeated Catinat at Carpi (July 9, 1701) in northern Italy. He then met and overmatched Villeroi at Chiari (September 1/12, 1701). After subjugating Mantua, Eugene pursued and captured Villeroi at Cremona (February 1, 1702). He was almost pushed out of Italy in 1702, but managed to hold on to a small toehold by attacking aggressively and sinning tactically, but successfully, at Luzzara (August 4/15, 1702). He was unable to reverse French gains in Italy during 1705, following the collapse of the Savoyard Army. He suffered a minor tactical reverse from the hand of Vendôme at Cassano (August 16, 139

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1705), but won a major victory at Turin (September 7, 1706). He enjoyed more success in Italy in 1708, to the point that many Habsburg troops were freed to meet and defeat the rebellious forces of Ferenc Rákóczi in Hungary. When not campaigning in Italy during those first years of the Spanish war, Eugene was busy reforming the Imperial Army in his capacity as president of the Hofkriegsrat. In the interim he struck a genuine command partnership with the great captain-general of England and the United Provinces, the Duke of Marlborough. Their first, spectacular success came at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704), where they joined to reconnoiter and then to rout a Franco-Bavarian army. In 1708 Eugene joined Marlborough again to catch and defeat Vendôme at Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708). He followed that success with more fighting in Italy. He moved to Flanders to continue the war against Louis XIV, conducting the siege of Lille (August 14–December 10, 1708), as bloody and dramatic a military affair as many a contemporary battle. Eugene and Marlborough together fought Villars and Boufflers on the field and in the woods of Malplaquet (September 11, 1709), the bloodiest battle of the modern age prior to the Napoleonic Wars. After Marlborough was dismissed in January 1712, Eugene traveled to London to try to persuade the Tory government to stay committed militarily on the Continent. He failed. Back in the field, he was astonished when 12,000 British troops were ordered out of the Allied camp and back to Brussels. Foreign troops who had been in British pay remained with Eugene, who led these men and Dutch troops on a rapid march to offer battle to Villars. However, he arrived too late to prevent the disaster for the Allies at Denain (July 13/24, 1712). At the end of the war, Eugene negotiated the Treaty of Rastadt (March 14, 1714) directly with Villars. Eugene’s career continued well after Marlborough’s came to an end. He was the first governor-general of the renamed Habsburg province in Flanders: the Austrian Netherlands. During the Second Austro-Ottoman War (1715–1718), he imposed a devastating defeat on the Ottomans at Peterwardein (August 5, 1717) and again at Belgrade (August 16, 1717). After that huge fight—one of the most desperate of his storied and long military career—Eugene returned to administrative reform of the Austrian military during the long period of peace that followed. Eugene was much admired by his contemporaries, by later “great captains” from Napoleon to George S. Patton, and by many military historians. Suggested Reading: Derek McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy (1977).

evolutions. Maneuvers at sea of fleets of ships. The larger the fleet, the harder it was to complete evolutions without losing order or losing station. During this period the first books of sailing instructions for fleet evolutions were drawn up. Some were highly elaborate to a degree that almost certainly surpassed the skills of actual crews and captains and the capabilities of rudimentary signaling systems prior to the 1690s. To prevent an enemy fleet from completing an evolution, long-range (beyond one-quarter mile) cannonading might be essayed. See also broadside; leeward and windward gauges. exchange. Swapping prisoners of war, usually according to comparable ranks and an agreed scale of ransoms to be paid. Of course, nobles and other officers 140

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were given highest priority. Among those exchanged in this era was the Duke of Berwick. Exclusion crisis. See United Provinces; Westminster, Treaty of (April 12/22, 1654). execution. Punishing a town that failed to pay contributions by setting it afire. Turenne carried out a deliberate and methodical campaign of executions in the Rhineland in 1674–1675. His treatment was so extreme, it worried both Louis XIV and even the naturally brutal Louvois that it might provoke additional minor German states to join the Allied coalition during the Dutch War (1672–1678). The Spanish and French alike conducted executions of towns in Flanders and Hainault during the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). expense magazine. A small powder magazine placed to the rear of an artillery battery or between a pair of batteries. They were connected to the batteries by a boyau (small trench), along which powder barrels were rolled to the immediate vicinity of the guns. Shipments of powder were delivered by cart to various expense magazines from the main powder magazine, which was sited well beyond enemy range. Eyâlet Askerleri. The “Provincial Army” of the Ottoman Empire, consisting of all troops not in the Sultan’s household service (Kapikulu Askerleri). It included cavalry and infantry divisions. Its infantry were local levies in no way comparable in quality, weapons, or political loyalty to the Janissaries. eyâlet-i Budin. The most strategically important of four provinces of Ottoman-occupied Hungary. It was garrisoned by about 8,000 Janissaries during the middle years of the 17th century, suggesting that a modest military commitment was all that was needed to hold Hungary prior to the rebellion in Transylvania led by Ferenc Rákóczi.

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F face. In troop formations: the four fronts presented by an infantry square—the left, right, front, and rear faces. In ordnance: the surface metal of the muzzle of a gun. In mining: the active end of a tunnel. In fortification: the exterior sides of any defensive work that formed a salient. A more general meaning was the aspect presented by fortified defenses between bastions, also called the tenaille of the place. falcon. French: “faucon,” Spanish “media falconeta.” A small-caliber cannon firing 3-pound shot. It was normally a regimental gun, or field piece. Some were used on the covered way of a fortification. falconete. French: “fauconneaux.” A one-pounder version of the falcon. famine. See China; France; Great Northern War (1700–1721); guerre de course; Namur, siege of (1695); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). fascine. A long faggot of brush or cordwood, collected and carried to a siege site by cavalry or in carts by civilian laborers, or culled from nearby woods. At 18–20 feet in length, they were choked tight with chains or ropes, then tied with withies (willow branches). They were used to fill in ditches or dry moats around fortifications, as well as to top off rows of gabions along saps or around the embrasures of gun batteries. Shorter fascines called “tracing fascines” were used to mark the way during the “opening of the trenches” that initiated a formal siege. See also sap. fathom. A naval measure of water depth equivalent to six feet. fausse-braye (or braie). Garbled by English-speaking military engineers into “false bray,” the French term was more widely used on the continent for an

Fehrbellin, Battle of

earthen mound or small rampart built low against the outer wall of the main enceinte. In the original late-medieval usage it may have referred to the covered way itself, or to some other protected passage. Later, it clearly referenced a small bank at the bottom of the rampart. In the early 18th century (1702), it was aptly described by one writer as an “under-bulwark.” Coehoorn was especially devoted to using fause-braye in his first two “systems.” Otherwise, they were hardly employed by the early decades of the 18th century. Fehrbellin, Battle of (June 18/28, 1675). A politically, but not militarily, important battle fought during the Scanian War (1674–1679). Louis XIV compelled Sweden to invade Brandenburg, under threat that otherwise he would end subsidies that sustained the Swedish Army in claimed parts of north Germany (“Swedish-Germany”). Louis’ strategic purpose was to draw the Prussian Army away from the Rhineland, where it was already engaged waging the Dutch War (1672–1678), to defend interest closer to home. In the prologue to Fehrbellin, a Swedish army of 13,000 moved slowly westward, seeking to link with a Hanoverian army of 12,000. Friedrich-Wilhelm returned from the Rhine front with a large Prussian army and caught the Swedes before their union with the Hanoverians could be effected. Karl Gustaf Wrangel was nominally in command of the Swedish force, but he was in fact too incapacitated by illness to take effective control of defense against the Prussian attack. His second-in-command was also ill. That left field command to another subordinate, Mardefelt, who was an expert in siege warfare but had no apparent skills in field maneuvers or open combat. Moreover, Brandenburg-Prussian resistance and scorched earth had earlier spread the Swedes thin by forcing them to forage widely. Finally, in early June Wrangel—or Mardefelt—had allowed the Swedish forces to divide. Friedrich-Wilhelm seized this opportunity to defeat his enemies in detail, decisively moving into a gap between detached Swedish forces. The bulk of the Swedish defenders—including most infantry—took up positions at AltBrandenburg on the Havel River, just west of Berlin. A smaller detachment was still at nearby Havelsburg. As the Swedes worked to repair a bridge across the Havel which had been destroyed earlier by retreating Brandenburg-Prussians, Friedrich-Wilhelm ordered his troops and guns to the high ground overlooking the bridgehead. They thus arrived in the Swedish gap undetected. This may have resulted from low Swedish morale and weariness contributing to exceptionally poor reconnaissance. As the fight commenced, a sustained attack by Brandenburgers on the bridgehead was held off by the Swedes, despite constant pounding from Friedrich-Wilhelm’s batteries. Although the Swedish right was considerably outnumbered by the Brandenburger left, it held until exposed infantry and the rest of the army were able to cross a repaired (and partly improvised) bridge later that night. Casualties were relatively light on both sides, with the Swedes losing fewer than 700 killed and wounded. Fehrbellin was thus, at best, a tactical Brandenburg victory. Nevertheless, the battle had immediate psychological and significant diplomatic effects far beyond its tactical or operational outcome. Leopold I of Austria and several other enemies of Sweden hastened to declare war 144

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on what they perceived to be an overrated army and an empire that was now also badly exposed and overstretched. This bandwagon effect was advanced by proclamations from Friedrich-Wilhelm that Fehrbellin had been a spectacular Brandenburg victory. That excited and highly politic claim was mostly propaganda. Yet, it was echoed by generations of German nationalist historians who just as excitedly recorded and recounted Fehrbellin as the first great event in Prussian (and by extension, modern German) military history. It was not that, but it certainly shattered a Swedish reputation for invincibility that dated to the intervention in Germany by Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Friedrich-Wilhelm followed up his victory by driving the Swedes from Pomerania, a feat for which he received Danish and Imperial funds and military aid. Yet almost all that territory would be returned to Sweden under French pressure at the end of the Scanian War in 1679. It would not be until the extreme imperial overreach of Karl XII was exposed by Peter I of Russia that Sweden entered permanent decline and had to accept loss of its German empire. Field Hetman. See hetman. field works. See abatis; chevaux des frise; fortification; redan; retrenchment; siege warfare; Spanish riders; Sweinfedder. fighting instructions. Naval tactics evolved sharply after the desultory English tactical victory at Portland (1653), where a strategic victory slipped away. In response, a new “fighting instruction” was developed that for the first time asked each division in a battlefleet to hold the line set by their leader, and each ship to maintain its place in line within its division. This formal order, or “Instructions for the better ordering of the Fleet in Fighting,” was issued on March 29, 1653. Its guiding influences were Robert Blake and especially George Monk. For the first time, the vice-admiral of the States’ Navy (renamed the Royal Navy upon the Restoration in 1660) was placed in command of the “right wing” of the fleet, and the rear-admiral was put in charge of the “left wing.” Most importantly, each division was ordered to “keep in a line” with the fleet commander in the flagship. This tactic was intended to take full advantage of clear English superiority over the Dutch in broadside gunnery, both ship-to-ship (in most cases), and certainly fleet-to-fleet. The English used their new line tactics to good effect in fights at Gabbard Shoal (1653) and the Texel (1653). A revised and more famous set of the “Duke of York’s Sailing and Fighting Instructions” issued later was not, in fact, penned by the Duke of York (later crowned as James II). It was actually written by Admiral William Penn (1621–1670). The French Navy also developed fighting instructions. The leading figure in this effort was Admiral Tourville. He likely was the first commander to issues books of detailed sailing and fighting instructions for a large fleet, as opposed to a squadron. He even kept a printing press on board his flagship to crank out copies of signal books and fighting instructions that were signed and issued over his name and circulated to the other admirals of the fleet, and to individual captains, by ships’ boats. From the mid-1690s, French instructions were 145

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markedly defensive in intent and outcome, as befitted a de-emphasis on guerre d’escadre. A breakthrough compilation by the mathematician Paul Hoste, who enjoyed Tourville’s patronage, was published in 1697 under the title L’Art des Armées Navales. fighting tariff. A high anti-Dutch import tariff, aimed to stifle the trade of the United Provinces. It was drafted by Jean-Baptiste Colbert and issued by Louis XIV in April 1667, and was a critical contribution to the start of the War of Devolution (1667–1668). It was Colbert’s second tariff list aimed at taking colonial and carry trade away from the United Provinces. The first had been issued in 1664, a time when the Dutch were preoccupied with the onset of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) and needed French military help against the incursion into their eastern provinces by the militantly Catholic prince-bishop of Münster. The “fighting tariff ” imposed severe and prohibitive increases in tariffs on Dutch imports of camlets, herring, high-quality cloth, tobacco, whale products, and many other goods that were the spine of the Dutch carry trades. It was rescinded under terms of the Treaty of Nijmegen (August 10, 1678) that ended the Dutch War (1672–1678). file closers. Men who stood behind the second rank in company formation, charged with ensuring the files maintained proper spacing. filibuster. “Freebooter.” A violent thief and criminal, usually organized into gangs in the Caribbean and living off raids and plunder. See also buccaneers; pirates. firearms. See bayonet; blunderbuss; cavalry; flintlock firearms; matchlock; miquelets; musketoon; pistol shot; snaphance; wheel lock. firemaster. At sea, in the Royal Navy, the official (not necessarily an officer) of the Ordinance Board responsible for the Navy’s stores of powder and other pyrotechnics. On land, an artillery officer in charge of the manufacture of explosives. fireships. Small vessels for use as fireships accompanied battlefleets as a routine of guerre d’escadre. They were a supplement to the normal broadside artillery duels at close range that characterized fleet actions. They were packed with explosives and their decks were covered with combustibles and pitch. They usually sailed on the lee side of the line of battle, often in the vicinity of the flagship of the admiral. This hid them from enemy view until they crossed the line to attack, sailing through the gap between two ships-of-the-line. The leeward position also kept them in view and signaling distance of the commander. They were sailed or towed toward an enemy ship that was disabled in some manner by cannonading, but was still holding its place in the line of battle. Once they were set alight—usually within range of the swivel guns and muskets of marines on the deck of the prospective victim—fireships were quickly abandoned by their 146

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skeleton crews. Men escaped in longboats, or simply dove into the water to be picked up by some friendly ship. Unmanned and adrift, a fireship might be sunk by heavy guns before it reached its target. If not, it was relatively easily defended against by frigates, sloops, or ships’ boats, which grappled and towed the fireship away from larger, stricken warships. A flotilla of small escorts from the attacking fleet—ketches, brigs, and longboats—usually accompanied fireships to engage defending ships’ boats. The result was a mêlée of many types of boats and small warships, a furious and bloody action fought out between opposing lines of the great ships-of-the-line. Fireships were most effective when sent into enemy harbors on a rising tide. The Dutch greatly favored their use also in defensive actions in the shallow home waters of the United Provinces. Yet they also proposed to England during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) that each side should abstain from using fireships; the English refused the offer. The French used fireships to great effect at Palermo (June 2, 1676), and regularly brought fireships with them into fleet actions, and even against the Smyrna convoy. Service on a fireship was exceptionally dangerous, even in non-combat settings, due to the huge stores of combustibles kept on board. It therefore commanded danger pay. Similarly, extra pay was given to men in the flotilla of little boats that fought off fireships and saved a ship-of-the-line. By 1700, fireships had fallen out of favor with all major navies. They were not revived until the Royal Navy grew interested once more, some 80 years later. See also Barfleur-La Hogue (1692); Beachy Head (1690); Downs, Battle of The (1666); infernal machine; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de; Schooneveld, Second Battle of (1673); Solebay (1672); St. James’ Day Fight (1666); tarpaulin; Tourville; Velez-Málaga (1704). fireshot. See shot. firing on the roll. Firing a ship’s guns accurately was highly problematic in any ship-to-ship action. In the absence of scientific aids or mechanical aiming devices, strict line-of-sight was all that was available. The best that most ship’s gunners could do was to fire at close range while timing ignition to the roll of the ship on the sea’s swells. Firing on the down-roll of one’s own ship was preferred, as it lessened the chance that the shot would overfly the target. Firing on the up-roll of the enemy’s ship, if achievable, improved the chance of holing it below its waterline. fitna. “rebellion.” There was a pronounced tendency for medieval Islamic military alliances to break down as loose clan allegiances shifted, usually when a captain was bought off by an enemy to prearrange a battlefield desertion or to attack his former master (a comparable problem of vassal disloyalty and battlefield shifts of troops marked Japanese warfare in the 16th century). Fitna spread to non-Arab troops and remained a problem for the Ottomans after they conquered the Middle East. The term was also used for rebellions of non-Arab, but still Muslim, troops in India. Under the Mughal Empire, military defectors were 147

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seldom harmed, but were instead brought into the mansabdari system. On occasion, military superiority of the Mughals had to be demonstrated by actually fighting, after which it was normal to revert to accommodation and assimilation of erstwhile rebels. flag of defiance. See flags. flag officer. See ranks (at sea). flag rank. See ranks (at sea). flags. Warships routinely flew dynastic or national flags during this period. A “jack” was a ship’s flag that was smaller than the main ensign and flown from the jack-staff at the bow. These were generally known and identifiable as the English (or later, British) jack, Dutch jack, French jack, and so on, for the major naval powers. In combat during the 17th century, English ships flew a St. George’s Cross ensign (or jack), but Scottish ships flew that of St. Andrew—with still further variations during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). After the 1707 Act of Union, British flagships more often flew the Union flag adopted by the Admiralty as their main ensign, as well as a “Union jack.” This design had existed in English and Scottish variants, alternating which cross overlaid the other, as early as 1606, but it was never popular during the 17th century. The current design was formally adopted in 1801. Merchant ships flew a main ensign that indicated nationality. This was especially important for neutrals. To distinguish warships from armed merchantmen, the former flew pendants (pennants) from the masthead. These were narrow, comet- or swallow-tailed streamers that were sometimes, but not always, made in the national colors. For instance, English warships flew white pendants with the St. George’s Cross embedded close to the hoist. Sometimes a squadron or fleet sailing into battle would also fly a red flag, or “flag of defiance,” just as garrisons did on land when they wished to signal refusal of offered surrender terms. Pirates flew the “Jolly Roger” as a means of intimidating merchantmen crews into surrendering without a fight, in the hope of at least keeping their lives by surrendering their cargos. The main pirate flag was a white skull-and-crossbones on a black background. An alternate form, with a white pattern skull-and-crossbones on a blood-red background, was far more deeply feared. It guaranteed that a ships’ crew would have to fight to the death if caught and boarded, as in this coloration the Jolly Roger was used cruelly by pirates to signal that no lives would be spared and the ship itself would be taken. Naval flags were usually made of linen, or what the English called “bewpers” (which may actually have been light wool bunting). On land, most flags of this period were highly elaborate and made of embroidered silk. Most regiments flew regimental colors and some, especially household troops, also sported the emblem of their monarch. This was the “fleurs de lis” for the French and the black double-eagle for Habsburg regiments (the Habsburg black-and-yellow flag was not introduced prior to 1749). English troops flew a regimental flag 148

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with the national flag in the upper corner, and flew the king’s colors as well as the St. George’s Cross. Scottish troops carried the St. Andrew’s Cross into battle. After 1707, British regiments and British warships carried into battle the new national, or Union, flag. See also communications; Dutch Navy; Navigation Act (1651 and 1660); sovereignty of the sea; wear. flagship. The warship of a squadron or fleet that carried the admiral or a commodore in command of the squadron and flew his distinctive pennant. See also fighting instructions; ranks (at sea). flank (in battle). In normal military parlance, battle orders, or narratives, the flank is the extreme left or right of a given position, such as the end of either wing of a battle line. Flanks of armies arrayed for combat or in opposing trenches mirror each other, with one side’s left flank facing the other’s right flank. flank (in fortification). In fortification, a flank was the side of a work, especially that part of a bastion which reached from the curtain to the face and provided opportunity for flanking (enfilade) fire in defense of an opposing face. By the 18th century each flank held two or more cannon, so that any attempt at escalade was met by sufficient and repeated fire. A “multiple flank” housed guns at different levels. A “retired flank” was a recessed part of a bastion, often screened by an orillon. It, too, could be built as a multiple flank. However, this conduced to back-showers of sparks and smoke from guns positioned too close to each other. More important drawbacks of a retired flank were limits to the arc of cannon fire, complication of the trace, and increased construction expense. Retired flanks accordingly went out of fashion in French and many other fortifications built after c. 1680, under the added influence of Vauban’s evolving preference for all-straight flanks and Louis XIV’s acute consciousness of rising costs. In the United Provinces, however, Coehoorn and other military architects remained committed to the retired flank. See also line of defense. flank company. A company of specialized and, often, also older and more experienced troops set to guard one flank of a battalion deployed for combat. They were most often grenadiers or light infantry. flatboat. A landing craft used in amphibious operations. fleet. In this period the term did not refer solely to combinations of warships, but also to merchant convoys or a company of merchantmen and warship escorts. fleet in being. Originally, the idea that an inferior fleet might hamper an enemy’s movement and intentions, even though not capable of defeating him in battle. Later, this evolved into a grand strategic concept, holding that the mere existence of such an inferior fleet might pose by its presence a strategic threat to a superior enemy, and that such a fleet “in being” would be as, or more, important than seeking or finding battle in a guerre d’escadre. The phrase likely 149

Fleurus, Battle of

was first used by the Earl of Torrington after the fight off Beachy Head in 1690. It became a staple of German naval strategy in the 20th century. Fleurus, Battle of (June 21/July 1, 1690). Prince Waldeck commanded the main Allied army in Flanders in 1690, while the French were generaled by maréchal Luxembourg. After much maneuvering, the French approached Fleurus at the end of June, where the Allies stood waiting. French dragoons swam the Sambre River, taking a key crossing from the rear. The rest of the army followed, guaranteeing a battle. Waldeck had positioned his Allied force of some 38,000 (or more) in traditional line of battle. Two long lines of infantry were protected by cavalry, with the center of his line braced against the gentle waters of the Orme. Luxembourg had just 35,000 men, but still chose to attack. The French were unable to make a frontal assault because of the strong Allied center position behind the River Orme. Luxembourg hence divided his army to advance simultaneously on both enemy flanks. He used the highly unorthodox and risky tactic of splitting his army and marching in columns nearly within range of the enemy line. He was able to carry this off because the maneuver was mostly blocked from enemy view by broken terrain, and because Waldeck could not imagine that Luxembourg would dare to do it. He crossed the Orme unobserved on pontoon bridges thrown up by French engineers, his infantry still in column formation but protected by a heavy screen of cavalry and the terrain. Fortuitous timing of this double march meant that Luxembourg’s columns arrived and deployed into line on both flanks at nearly at the same time, around midmorning. Luxembourg opened with his artillery, some 70 guns, then ordered the cavalry to charge, closely supported by infantry. The French left was bloodily repulsed, but the attack on the right made headway as shells and musket balls coming from multiple directions confused and demoralized the Dutch and their Allies. Heavy fighting lasted for nearly three hours, though the outcome was seldom in doubt. Waldeck’s lines broke and were rolled up, though he managed to re-form a firing line to the rear. This line was assaulted in turn by French cavalry and then by advancing infantry, and it broke around 2:00 P.M. The Allies suffered 20,000 total casualties, of whom over 6,000 were dead and nearly as many wounded, with 8,000 taken prisoner. Luxembourg lost 3,000 men and another 3,000 wounded, and no prisoners. That was a total loss of 20% of all effectives to death or wounds, from a total of 73,000 men engaged, after just a few hours of fighting. See also Beachy Head (1690). flintlock firearms. The first flintlocks date to mid-16th-century Sweden, where they were known as “snapplås” (snaphance, or snaplock). “Flintlock” was subsequently used (from about the last quarter of the 17th century) to refer to any firearm or gun in which the lock mechanism deployed a spring device that struck a piece of flint against a small iron or steel plate (the frizzen). This created sparks that ignited fine firing powder in a shallow pan, which in turn set off the main powder charge. The first experimental flintlock was made in Germany in the mid-15th century, but the design did not catch on for another 100 years. In the mid-16th 150

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century, primitive military flintlocks appeared in Sweden, and soon thereafter in Florence. More advanced models were made by French gunsmiths during the early 17th century, but these were not generally used outside France until the 1640s. One factor inhibiting adoption was the uncertainty of the ignition spark, as compared to a burning match. Early flintlocks also wore out the flint after about a dozen strikes, requiring new flints to be mounted during action. When loose holders were used to facilitate this need, flints often fell out of the gun. It was not possible to simply use a longer flint, because those were found to shatter more easily. The solution came with latter-day designs, which some would say were the first “true” flintlocks. These had the striker and pan cover made as a single piece and could be set as either “half-cocked” or “full-cocked.” The now widely accepted definition of a “true flintlock” was provided by Torsen Lenk in 1939. He insisted that the steel and pan cover must be one piece, and that the sear be vertical and capable of both full- and half-cock positioning, via notches cut in a tumbler. The earliest-known guns that met his standard date to around 1610 in France. They were not known outside France until after 1640, but by the 1660s technical knowledge about flintlocks had clearly diffused throughout Europe and beyond, to the Ottoman Empire. In its final form, the flintlock musket was widely known as the “fusil” (from the French for “frizzen”), and infantry who employed them as “fusiliers.” Fusils were more easily and quickly loaded and had fewer misfires, thus improving infantry rates of fire. Flintlocks were also far safer than matchlocks and cheaper and more rapid-firing than wheel lock firearms. Even the best matchlock firearms had suffered misfire rates of 50% or higher, and the presence of hundreds of burning match cords in infantry formations posed a constant deadly risk to soldiers handling loose powder in flasks or casks. Conversely, damp weather or rain made firing the weapon difficult to impossible. Matchlock musketeers also had difficulty reloading and maintaining steady fire, so that five or more ranks were usually needed and forced to work out complex systems of countermarching to keep just the front rank shooting. Matchlocks were so awkward to reload they forced men to stand farther apart in line of battle than did fusils, with up to a yard between men considered usual. Fusils cut this back to as little as 22 inches. The fusil thus improved both the rate of infantry fire and the frontage of weapons per company or battalion. Finally, the fusil could be preloaded and slung over a man’s shoulder on the march, or stacked and ready in horse-drawn carts. A standard flintlock musket received 30–40 charges from a pound of black powder and fired a 1- to 11⁄2-ounce lead ball. These were made by the musketeers themselves upon issuance to each man of several lead bars. An early 18th-century musket ball could penetrate about 30 inches of loose-packed earth, which made parapets sure defenses against infantry fire. In field battles, musket balls fired at point-blank range tore great holes in any men they hit. A wall-piece, a heavier musket used in fortress defense, used a pound of powder for just eight discharges, but had much greater range and more hitting power at closer ranges. The clear fighting advantages of the weapon eventually led to near-universal adoption, though gunsmiths clung to various older lock styles for several 151

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decades in Italy (miquelet), Scotland (Scottish lock), Spain (Madrid lock), and Sweden (snaphance). More importantly, delay in adoption was caused by kings and parliaments initially balking at the great expense of replacing all the old matchlocks. The new flintlock thus only slowly displaced the matchlock as the preferred firing mechanism for most infantry muskets during the 1680s, and then only in the most advanced and richest armies. It caught on much later among marginal peoples, or those technically or resource-impoverished, who were engaged in border and frontier warfare. What finally speeded adoption was when states assumed the high initial expense by supplying weapons directly to their troops. Once this occurred in the last quarter of the 17th century, fusils became the signature weapon of European infantry. When a royal decree wholly eliminated matchlocks in favor of fusils in the French Army in 1699, it was confirmation that the changeover was permanent. With wide adoption of the socket bayonet, infantry armed with fusils mounting bayonets wholly replaced the matchlock and pike formation in all modern armies, and both older weapons retired into military obsolescence and collections. English troops were given the “King William’s Musket” in the 1690s. The most famous model of the period was the “long land pattern” musket, with a 46-inch barrel, that was used by the British. It was not replaced by the “short land pattern” 42-inch version until 1768. The original pattern was still manufactured in some numbers as late as 1797. The more famous “Brown Bess” was not introduced until the late 1730s. Flintlock mechanisms also made pistols far more dependable, and thus more popular, in matters of private honor or defense, as well as in military life. They were taken up by most horse soldiers and by officers. See also bayonet; cavalry; drill; infantry; military medicine; ramrods. flotilla. A small fleet of warships. Alternately, one nation’s coastal warships, as distinct from its blue-water navy. See also fleet. flute. A naval supply ship. Flutes normally sailed with a fleet, but did not fight or count in its numbers. flying sap. See parallels; sap. fodder. Food supply for cavalry mounts and draught animals was a major constraint on military operations throughout this period. On average, even a small packhorse consumed 14 pounds of hay and 7 more of straw per day, along with 11⁄2 pecks of peas, oats, or other grains. This meant that a good portion of a pack animal’s burthen was taken up by its own food requirements. In addition, armies frequently moved for no better cause than the need to locate fresh pastures. Most importantly, fodder needs dictated the seasonal pace of fighting, limiting it to the summer and fall months (May through October in Western Europe) when fresh grass was plentiful. The French partly corrected for this problem by developing an advanced magazine system which allowed them to move sooner in the spring than other armies and initially to carry with them less food and fodder. French armies routinely burned all available fodder whenever they crossed to the right 152

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bank of the Rhine, mainly to protect their fortress at Philippsburg by denying fodder to pursuing enemy. The Ottomans and the Qing maintained extensive magazine systems, beyond anything then in Europe. See also siege warfare. Fontainebleau, Edict of (October 22, 1685). See Edict of Fontainebleau. Fontainebleau, Peace of (August 23/September 2, 1679). See Scanian War (1674–1679). food. See fodder; logistics; magazines; rations; siege warfare. foraging. See Blenheim (1704); cavalry; contributions; course (on land); dragoons; Fehrbellin (1675); Friedrich-Wilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Ireland; logistics; magazines; Ottoman warfare; petite guerre; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); raids; Rajputs; Scanian War (1674–1679); siege warfare; Tatars; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Vienna, siege of (1683); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). fore-and-aft. See rigging. forecastle. From the 12th to 15th centuries, “forecastle” referred to a fighting platform or tower in the forepart of a ship, built in the style and appearance of a tower. Its purpose was to gain height advantage over would-be boarders, to better shower them with lime, stones, crossbow bolts, arquebus shot, or other missiles. From the 16th to 18th centuries, “forecastle” referred to an upper deck built overtop the fore end of the main deck. See also close-fights; decks. foremast. See masts. forests. Forest management emerged during this period as a vital component of war-making ability. Vast amounts of wood were needed to make charcoal to fire the forges wherein great guns were cast. Shipbuilding also consumed huge amounts of specialty woods (about 3,100 oak trees for a First-Rate and over 2,400 for a Third-Rate), with extra care taken in culling trees suitable for making masts and spars. As European supplies were exhausted, the need for wood for masts and ships made certain areas strategically more valuable, especially the Baltic, but also parts of coastal Canada and New England. förläning system (of recruitment). See Swedish Army. fornello. See chamber. fort d’arret. An isolated, small fort guarding a pass as more of a guardhouse than a major fortification. Alternately, a small outwork in front of a larger fortification. See also Sperrfort. 153

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fortification. Stand-alone forts served as military garrisons and as a means of enforcing contributions in occupied territory. They provided bridgeheads across riverine frontiers or kept open traditional invasion routes, as a threat or in fact. They were positioned at the entrances to valleys, along land and river trade routes, blocking mountain passes, and across border rivers and canals. French armies simplified logistics by permitting the pre-positioning of rudimentary magazines along the line of advance or near the frontier, at jump-off points for invasions of Germany or Flanders. Under Louis XIV, the French constructed several fortified lines, including the lines of Brabant and the Ne Plus Ultra lines. Cities and major towns were also fortified, often walled or at least hosting a citadel, some from medieval times. These artillery fortresses doubled as defenses and police garrisons holding down rebellious populations. Fortresses and lines also denied or enabled collection of contributions. Smaller European fortresses did not always follow the elaborate style of 18th-century works. And even large fortifications outside Europe might not deploy the new bastions and other artillery-fortress techniques, as they did not generally face heavy cannon other than from European (or Ottoman) attackers. During the 17th century, the Militargrenze frontier between Austria and the Ottoman Empire was spotted with 90 fortresses, but most were of a rudimentary form of bastion additions to preexisting stone, or even wooden forts. As late as the 1670s, Ottoman armies fighting in Ukraine easily overcame primitive forts made of wood-framed earthen walls. By the mid-18th century, however, all advanced militaries were heavily and lastingly influenced by the elaborate innovations introduced in the late 17th century by the brilliant Vauban, as well as his near-peers Coehoorn and Dahlberg. This presented a stepped profile, so that detached works such as ravelins could be fired over by defenders manning the rear ramparts and bastions. There was a different attitude to fortification in the east, where the Polish Army, but especially the Russian Army and Swedish Army, emphasized mobility over fixed defenses. Karl XII and Peter I went so far as to tear down existing fortifications and remove garrisons, in favor of concentrating forces in larger field armies. The main business of constructing and reducing fortifications is dealt with under siege warfare. For technical and related fortification terms, see also abatis; arsenal; artillery fortress; auget; banquette; barbette; barracks; bastion; batardeau; batter; battery; berm; bonnet; branch; breach; breastwork; bricole; camouflet; capital; caponnière; casemate; cavalier; chemin des rondes; citadel; çit palankasi; cordon; counterfort; counterguard; counterscarp; cremaillere; crest; crochet; crownwork; cuvette; déblai; defilade; defilement; descent of the ditch; disease; ditch; embrasure; enceinte; epaulement; escalade; esplanade; expense magazine; face; fausse-braye; flank (in fortification); fort d’arret; fraises; front; gabion; gardefou; gate; glacis; gorge; guérite; hornwork; insult; investment; kale; latrines; line of defense; lines of circumvallation; lines of contravallation; lunette; merlon; military labor; mines/mining; orillon; palisade; parallels; parapet; pas des souris; places of arms; postern; powder magazine; pré carré; rameau; rampart; ravelin; razing the works; redan; redoubt; re-entrant; remblai; retrenchment; revetment; salient; 154

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scarp; sentries; Sperrfort; spill; storm bells; tablette; talus; tenaille; tenaille fortification; tour bastionée; trace; traverse; zig-zags; zone of servitude. fortresses. See arsenal; artillery; artillery fortress; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Banat krajina; barracks; barrier fortresses; batter; battle; billets/ billeting; bomb; bombardment; capitulation; chevaux de frise; citadel; Coehoorn; commissaire ordinaire de l’artillerie; Cossacks; defilade; defilement; disease; Donauwörth (1704); Dutch War (1672–1678); escalade; fortification; FrancoSpanish War (1635–1659); free evacuation; garrisons; Gibraltar; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Huguenots; insult; investment; kale; Karlstadt border; Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Lille (1708); line of defense; lines of circumvallation; lines of contravallation; Louis XIV; Luxembourg; Maastricht (1673); magazines; Marlborough; Militargrenze; military medicine; mines/mining; Mughal Empire; Namur, siege of (1692); Namur, siege of (1695); Nijmegen, Treaty of (August 10, 1678); Nijmegen, Treaty of (September 17, 1678); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Ottoman Empire; Palatinate, devastation of (1688–1689); parallels; Philippsburg; pré carré; Puigcerda (1678); Rheinfeld (1678); ricochet fire; Russian Army; sentries; siege warfare; Sperrfort; storm bells; Strasbourg; surrender; trace; Turin, Peace of (1696); Vauban; Vienna, siege of (1683); War of the Reunions (1683–1684); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); watches; Windische border; zone of servitude. forts. Small forts were frequently built outside larger fortresses or fortified towns in Europe. They served the same basic function as lunettes. In North America during this period, forts were more likely to be the sole defensive position for a small frontier garrison. They were usually simple palisade structures. See also fort d’arret; fortification; guerre guerroyante; lines; Sperrfort. fougasse. A small anti-personnel mine emplaced fairly shallowly underground, to be exploded directly beneath passing enemy troops making an assault. They were often laid out in dense explosive fields as part of a retrenchment behind a breach. fouling. Encrustation of a wooden ship’s exterior hull with barnacles, weeds, and sea rot. This required warships to be cleaned every several months, if they were not to lose vital combat speed. foul the range. To obstruct a friendly warship’s line of fire by crossing between that ship and its target. Four Days’ Battle (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1664–1667); Downs, Battle of The (1666). fourneau. See chamber. fournisseurs. French military suppliers, usually contract entrepreneurs. They were private contractors, not bureaucrats. 155

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fraises. A palisade placed at an outward-facing incline so that its points discouraged assaults. In English they were called “storm poles.” France. French military and diplomatic hegemony in Europe was achieved with victory in the last phase of the great German war, or Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). It was sealed in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which made France and Sweden co-guarantors of the German peace and tamed Habsburg and Imperial power within the Holy Roman Empire. At mid-century mark, France was dominant over its old rival Spain and master of a divided Germany. It had yet to quarrel with the United Provinces, its long-standing ally against the Habsburgs, and benefited from the fact that England was only just emerging from the throes of the Puritan Revolution and was still tangled in wars of pacification in Scotland and Ireland. The international situation allowed France to survive years of domestic turmoil during the Fronde without fracturing, as had Germany. Jules Mazarin oversaw France’s diplomatic and strategic recovery, in tandem with his own advancing prosperity, during the first years of the regency of Louis XIV. Mazarin confirmed France’s new primacy through the permanent demotion of Spain to second-rank status in the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). That provided peace for the first time in nearly 160 years on all four land frontiers of France: along the Pyrenees; across the Alps; on the heavily fortified border with the Spanish Netherlands; and down the great valleys of the Moselle and Rhine. Additionally securing the kingdom as Louis XIV attained his majority, France had by far the greatest revenues and largest Army in Europe. In earlier wars, France had fought most often on the southern frontier over claims in Italy, and to block Spanish power and armies from moving north along the “Spanish Road” through the Palatinate and Rhineland. Under Louis XIV it would fight more often in the heavily urban, fortified, riverine (and usually flooded) Netherlands and French-occupied Flanders. Louis also fought in the east, to anchor defense of one of his “natural frontiers” along the Rhine. Once Louis determined to use force to achieve these ends, France entered upon decades of war, starting with the War of Devolution (1667–1668). He invaded Lorraine in 1670, retaining de facto control of the province at the end of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Next came his War of the Reunions (1683–1684), followed by brutal naval campaigns against the Barbary corsairs in Algiers, from 1682–1684, and bombardment of Genoa in 1685. Louis had reached the apex of his reign. His subsequent wars were longer, bloodier, more expensive, but ultimately also more futile, especially his losing campaigns in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The end of those great wars barely preceded Louis XIV’s death in 1715, a marker generally cited as ending France’s “grand siècle.” Still debated among historians is the degree of modernization of France in the 17th and even 18th centuries. An older consensus of historians saw the country as still feudal in 1650. It also credited Louis XIV with hauling France boldly into modernity by successfully centralizing power in his own hands and by overwhelming old elites of robe and sword. More recent research questions the depth of change wrought by Louis, holding that he accommodated rather 156

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than overthrew the traditional social and economic order and that France remained essentially medieval, even after the Sun had set on Louis XIV. In military affairs, however, there is no question that Louis XIV oversaw a full modernization of the French Army and that he wielded it as a supreme instrument of unchallenged authority in war and diplomacy. France already had 16 million people in 1600. Under Louis XIV the population reached 20 million subjects, making France by far the most populous (excluding Russia) and prosperous (except for the smaller United Provinces) country in Europe. It was agriculturally rich, though like all early modern states it was still coursed by occasional famine. Crop failures and major famines struck France in 1693–1694, and again in 1709–1710. The famine of 1694 was the worst food crisis in France in the 17th century; at least 10% of the population died. The food crisis brought on a fiscal crisis so severe it compelled Louis XIV to limit military activities, most notably contributing to his decision to abandon guerre d’escadre and order the Navy to pursue only guerre de course. Crop failures recurred in 1708, worsened by a bitterly cold winter that killed spring wheat and vines and froze to death exposed farm animals and people. A calamitous famine thus struck France in 1709–1710 that was a significant factor in finally forcing peace on Louis. The deal was struck with his enemies at Utrecht (1713), Rastadt (1714), and Baden (1714). At home, the old contest between the French monarchy and nobility, with the latter seeking a revival of their ancient right of regional parlements to participate in governance, was unresolved through the 18th century despite the efforts of Louis XIV. In foreign affairs, the 18th century would see French power slip within Europe vis-á-vis Russia, Prussia, and even Austria. Overseas, a parade of defeats saw France lose its long maritime contest with Great Britain for control of North America, nearly all India, and the key trade routes to Southeast and North Asia—all by 1763. With defeat, France surrendered a once-impressive commercial and territorial empire. That shift in the global balance of power would flow from a series of world wars that began in Europe with the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and ended in France’s great overseas defeat in the Seven Year’s War (1756–1763). See also Alsace; Angelets rebellion (1669–1672); Audijos rebellion (1663); Bonnets Rouges rebellion (1675); Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705); Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Franche-Comté; frontières; Lorraine; Louvois; Lustucru rebellion (1662); Papier Timbré rebellion (1675); Roure rebellion (1670); Vaudois. Franche-Comté. Louis XIV regarded this vulnerable province—already surrounded on three sides by his realm—as part of his rightful inheritance of Spanish territory through the dynastic claims of his wife, Marie Thérèse. He invaded it repeatedly, beginning with the War of Devolution (1667–1668). He gained title to the area in the Treaty of Nijmegen (September 17, 1678), which ended the Spanish phase of his Dutch War (1672–1678). See also Great Condé; War of the Reunions (1683–1684). Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the involvement of Spain and France alike in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), 157

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which was fought over and within the Holy Roman Empire. But that great settlement did not end a parallel war between France and Spain that both preceded the German quarrel and continued well after it ended. The Franco-Spanish War continued for another 11 years, though at a reduced level, as each side stumbled through domestic turmoil and contended with years of fiscal and military overextension. Spain was especially burdened with war debts from its long Italian, Dutch, and German wars of the first half of the 17th century, but once again managed to deficit-finance its military effort through forced loans and by drawing upon the manpower and fiscal resources of north Italy and southern Flanders. Similarly, even as the German war ended, France suffered internal dislocations of the Fronde (1648–1653). These upheavals required pulling troops back from the frontier fight with Spain in order to defend Paris from French rebels. Moreover, the Fronde challenged the whole tax system devised to pay for the king’s foreign wars. But France, too, managed to keep armies in the field and fleets at sea throughout this period. In October 1652, Don Juan José of Austria recovered Barcelona for Spain. Later that year, Milanese troops retook the fortress of Casale. In Flanders, the Great Condé, who was in temporary exile from France and fighting against its armies in the so-called “Spanish Fronde,” took the fortress centers of Gravelines, Mardijk, and Dunkirk. In 1655, Philip IV informed the Cortes in Madrid that in the prior six years he had spent 67 million escudos on the war with France. He added that despite some Spanish victories, the French were not near to accepting his terms. Then England took up arms against Spain when it launched the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660). Oliver Cromwell embarked on his Western Design by sending a fleet to the West Indies to seize Hispaniola; it failed in that mission, occupying Jamaica instead. Philip IV only reluctantly declared war on England in February 1656. Nevertheless, Spain now had a second enemy in the north and, most dangerously, on the high seas. In March 1557, Puritan England signed an alliance treaty with Catholic France. The next month an English fleet under Robert Blake caught the annual Spanish silver convoy sheltering at Santa Cruz in Tenerife, sailed into the harbor, and sank every ship. The Spanish salvaged only a portion of the treasure, a blow to Philip’s war finances from which his cause never recovered. The annual convoys also failed to sail in 1658 and 1659. Matters grew even worse for Spain as English Roundheads allied with the French defeated the Army of Flanders in a sequence of battles, culminating in a decisive defeat at the Dunes (June 4/14, 1658). The subsequent loss of much of southern Flanders to Anglo-French occupation finally cracked Spanish will and forced Philip IV to seek terms. The war ended formally with the Treaty of the Pyrenees (October 28/November 7, 1659). Fraustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706). A bloody engagement of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). The Swedes under Karl Gustaf Rehnsköld were outnumbered at Fraustadt by more than two to one overall, with just 9,000 men opposed by 18,000 Saxons, mercenaries, and Russians. With an aggression characteristic of Swedish generals, Rehnsköld attacked this superior force, despite its well-entrenched position. He sent cavalry around each enemy flank, neither 158

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supporting it with infantry nor protecting his own infantry with a cavalry screen. Swedish cavalry charges drove off defending Saxon horse on either wing, leaving the enemy infantry exposed. Rather than attacking into the flanks as expected, the Swedes completed a double envelopment that enabled them to attack into the center rear of the enemy’s main line, while Swedish infantry charged from the other side with fusils, bayonets, and pikes. All resistance along the whole Saxon-Russian line crumbled. After the battle, Swedes ruthlessly and systematically massacred Russian prisoners. Some 8,000 Russians were killed during or after the battle. Another 5,000 Saxons and German mercenaries were spared when taken prisoner. See also pike. Frederick-William of Brandenburg (1620–1688). See Friedrich-Wilhelm. Frederick I of Prussia (1657–1713). See Friedrich I. Frederiksborg, Peace of (June 14, 1720). See Denmark; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Sound Tolls. Fredrik III of Denmark (r. 1648–1670). Prior decades of failed, costly, and humiliating aggressive war under Christian IV (1588–1648) had left most Danes without a taste for more war. This placed severe restraint on Fredrik III when he succeeded his father in 1648, at the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He was excluded from the talks leading to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), as a result of which he watched as Bremen was lost to Sweden and Stockholm was freed from paying the Sound Tolls—a condition that lasted until 1720. Nevertheless, when it looked like Karl X was facing catastrophic defeat in the Second Northern War (1655–1660), Fredrik declared war on Sweden. The immediate result was Karl’s spectacular crossing of the frozen Belts to Zealand and his stunning appearance with 5,000 men in the suburbs of Copenhagen. This compelled an instantly humbled Fredrik to sign the Treaty of Roskilde (February 26/March 8, 1658). Fredrik IV of Denmark (1671–1730). See Denmark; Great Northern War (1700–1721). free company. Austrian term for their permanent garrison troops. free evacuation. When a garrison was allowed to depart with its arms and colors intact after surrender of a fortress or citadel. It was required to take the shortest route to the nearest friendly place. free ships, free goods. Dutch: “Vrij schip, vrij goedt.” During the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660), English ships frequently stopped Dutch merchantmen on the high seas to search for and sequester Spanish or Spanish Netherlands cargo. From 1660, the principle of unrestricted trade became the chief goal of the United Provinces’ foreign policy toward England. That meant abrogation of the Navigation Act (1660). 159

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French and Indian Wars (1689–1763). A collective term sometimes used— especially by American historians—for the extended conflict spanning most of the 18th century between France and England, at the grand strategic level, and in a more complex way among American and Canadian settlers and various Indian nations in northeastern North America. Globally, it was a minor adjunct to much greater wars in Europe that were sparked initially by the ambitions of Louis XIV, who paid little attention to North America, and later by the worldwide competition between the French and British empires. To English colonists in North America, the local conflicts of this period were mainly wars of “defensive expansion.” The main issues were (1) where the frontier between settler and Indian lands was to be drawn; and (2) and whether the vast interior of North America would remain claimed by the French and their major Indian allies or would fall to England and become available to settlement by a restless white population already exerting demographic pressures against the Appalachian frontier. For most Indian nations, these wars were continuations of older struggles against other Indian nations, newly drawing upon European and settler alliances and weapons, or as wars of defense against the aggressive expansion of white settler communities. These were conflicts in which, for the most part, Indian peoples fared quite well until the middle of the 18th century. See also Deerfield raid (1704); Indian Wars; Iroquois Confederacy; King Philip’s War (1675–1676); King William’s War (1689–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); skulking way of war; troupes de la marine. French Army. From 1635, Louis XIII refused to accept privately raised regiments in his armies, other than garrison troops. He relied instead on a combination of foreign—usually Swiss and German—mercenary captains and troops, to which he added the first regiments raised by royal agents from the king’s own subjects. During the reign of Louis XIV and well after, the French Army—as with most things French in the era of the “Sun King”—became widely imitated as the model modern force in Europe. Under the Marquis de Louvois, recruitment innovation expanded into a true national, or rather royal, Army. From 1670, commissions were issued to officers from outside the noble classes, and pay was provided according to a standard scale. Uniforms and equipment were for the first time provided to troops by the crown. Recruits were enlisted for four years; they were supposed to be bachelors or widowers, and no older than forty. When voluntary enlistment failed to fill the muster rolls, varieties of fraud and violent impressment were employed, even though such coercion was forbidden by French law. Prisons and streets were swept of debtors, petty criminals, and vagrants or unemployed farm laborers who had relocated to the towns. But it would be an error to assume that all French soldiers were “scum of the earth,” as the Duke of Wellington later described the social scrapings of the British Isles that fought for him in Spain and at Waterloo. Louvois sought to improve the quality of French soldiery by enhancing the inspection powers of intendants, introducing rigorous new methods of drill, and adding draconian punishments to the military penal code. These measures eventually cut back the 160

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number of passe volants and reduced officer corruption, while increasing the skill and competence of French battalions. But Louis XIV’s wars chewed up men as a pod of whales consumes krill. For his last and longest wars, Louis introduced compulsory recruitment into a new provincial militia after 1688. At first these units fought discretely from regulars, as during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). But with large-scale French losses and the duration of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), provincial militia units were stripped of recruits to reinforce regular regiments. The size of the French Army increased dramatically from about 70,000 at the start of the 17th century to 125,000 in 1635. This force then shrank from attrition during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the protracted FrancoSpanish War (1635–1659) that ended in the Treaty of the Pyrenees (October 28/November 7, 1659). For the next decade, the French Army numbered only 50,000 men. Louis XIV greatly expanded it just before he embarked on the first of his serial wars of aggression, raising it to 80,000 by 1667 at the start of the War of Devolution (1667–1668). During that short war he continued expansion until the Army reached 135,000 troops. It shrank to 70,000 men with the return of peace in 1668. Louis raised new regiments once more starting in 1672, bringing the Army up to 120,000 just before the launch of his Dutch War (1672–1678). Expansion continued to a peak of 289,000 troops during that war. The French Army reached its peak paper strength of 420,000 in the mid1690s. However, its real, or operational strength was probably no more than 340,000 men. During the brief peace that followed the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), Louis maintained garrison strength at greatly expanded levels— upward of 50,000 troops—but he could not equal the numbers he had earlier raised. During his last and greatest conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the French Army fell to a paper strength of 373,000 and a real, operational base of only 255,000. The shortfall resulted from prior wars having drained fiscal resources to unrecoverable levels. Even so, Louis stuck to a pattern established at the start of each of his wars. In 1701 he commissioned over 100 new regiments, 7 of dragoons and 100 of infantry, as well as 120 companies of horse. He also called up the militia, adding 33,000 more men to the rolls. He was able to do this because wealthy nobles competed for royal commissions and the king’s favor by subsidizing whole regiments and seeking personal “la gloire” in combat. Despite this noble presence and noble ethic at the highest levels of the Army, officers—of whom there were about 20,000 in 1700—were increasingly merit-driven and professional. See also battalion; bayonet; fusiliers; Huguenots; officers; Wild Geese; women. Suggested Reading: John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715 (1997).

French Navy. The French Navy of this period was mostly a construct of the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the most important minister under Louis XIV, and Colbert’s son, the Marquis de Seigneley, to 1690. The young king began with just nine ships-of-the-line in 1661, but he was intent on construction of a battlefleet to rival that of England and the United Provinces. Incorporating the 161

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remnants of the fleet built by Richelieu for his father and maintained to some degree by Mazarin during his youth, Louis at first spent heavily on ships and naval facilities. He permitted Colbert to pursue an ambitious and expensive program until the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), after which the Navy declined sharply from neglect born of the prohibitive expense of prolonged land campaigns and greatly expanded armies. This shift affected strategy as well. Prior to 1690, the French Navy sought out fleet actions, even though Louis always regarded the Navy as essentially a coastal defense force rather than a blue water battlefleet engaged in a protracted global struggle with the British and Dutch for “command of the seas.” In this endeavor it had competent, rather than brilliant admirals, among them François Louis Château-Renault (1637–1716), Tourville, and the marquis de Duquesne. It also had wholly incompetent admirals, such as Jean d’Estrées. During this period, the last French war galleys were progressively replaced by sailing ships, even in the Mediterranean. Ports, dry docks, warehouses, and arsenals were all significantly expanded. By 1670 the French Navy was larger than either the Dutch or the English fleet in sheer numbers, at 120 battleships. In 1690 it sported 80 ships-of-the-line, equaling the Royal Navy’s numbers and superior to it in ship size and number of guns. In the judgment of a number of naval historians, however, it was still critically inferior in battle doctrine, experience, command, the quality of its ships’ guns, and most of all, the seamanship of individual captains and whole crews. Others dispute one or another of those contentions. There is no doubt that by the 1690s, the French were superior to the Dutch and English in signaling and had a sophisticated system of evolutions and fighting instructions. By 1697 the French Navy had a total of 137 major warships. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), it declined to fewer than 80 ships-of-the-line, as Louis ran out of funds to maintain the battlefleet that Colbert and his successors had built with great pain and care. Paralleling this decline and directly related to it, from 1695 the French Navy abandoned guerre d’escadre and instead adopted an exclusive strategy of guerre de course. Older histories maintain that this continued to be French policy through 1713, but some more recent work argues that the French only finally abandoned the idea of maintaining a battlefleet after the siege of Toulon in 1707. Scholars usually praise Louis and the Colberts for building a battleship fleet virtually from scratch inside 20 years, even as they criticize elements of French ship design, woefully inadequate shore facilities, ill-thought-out recruitment practices, and poor training. Louis’ ships tended to be much larger, but also heavier and slower, than their Dutch or English counterparts. Some designs were so deep-keeled that they were unable to use several shallow home harbors. By 1671, all French shipbuilding was under royal supervision. The major yards were at Rochefort, Toulon, and, later, Brest, but the king spent far less on yards than on the warships they turned out at record pace. To better refit and to save on wear, French fleets docked at these and other ports and often dismounted rigging and guns over each winter. From 1684, a royal appointee oversaw the entire complex process of building, fitting out, and maintaining the Navy. 162

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Recruiting skilled seamen was always more of a problem for France than for its maritime opponents. By 1690, the French fleet required 45,000 crewmen, while France’s seaman population barely topped 55,000. As a result, impressment was widely employed. In 1670, France established a three-class impressment system: one-third of registered seafarers (sailors were issued service record books, which they were required to carry) were compelled to serve in the Navy in any given year, during which time they were forbidden employment in the merchant marine. This early naval conscription was conducted under the supervision of “commissaires au classes.” During wartime, as merchant wages rose dramatically, the three-class impressment system invariably broke down. Desertion rates approached 50% in wartime, when French ships relied on pressed men for up to half their crews (from 1690). Officers were also hard to recruit, since the Army was regarded as the senior and more prestigious arm. Those were not the main reasons that the French Navy lost the war at sea, however. The decline of Louis’ Navy is often attributed to gross incompetence of the Pontchartrains, father and son, who succeeded the Colberts. But that charge ignores the more fundamental effects of France’s vast, but necessary, prior expenditure for armies and fortifications. It was that spending on land which more surely undercut naval preparedness. Also, France had to defend two long coastlines, a fact that constantly presented a problem of strategic concentration. Finally, its Atlantic ports were naturally and greatly inferior to England’s in weather gauge and position, especially between Brest and Dunkirk. See also Bantry Bay (1689); Barfleur-La Hogue (1692); Bart, Jean; Beachy Head (1690); bomb ketches; Gardes marine; Huguenots; infernal machines; naval tactics; privateers; Rates; Smyrna convoy; Vauban; Velez-Málaga (1704). Suggested Reading: Eugene Asher, Resistance to the Maritime Classes (1960); Daniel Dessert, La Royale (1996); Jan Glete, Navies and Nations, 2 vols. (1993); Geoffrey Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697 (1974).

Friedlingen, Battle of (October 14, 1702). An early and inconclusive battle of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Villars led 17,000 French against 14,000 Imperial troops under Louis of Baden. This small affair had most to do with securing the reputation of Villars, who celebrated himself overmuch in a flattering account of the battle that he ensured was widely circulated. Friedrich Augustus, Elector of Saxony. See Augustus II of Poland. Friedrich I in Prussia (1657–1713). Known as Friedrich III among the succession of Electors, but as Friedrich I (Frederick I), “King in Prussia,” from 1701 to his death in 1713. He was the son of Friedrich-Wilhelm and the grandfather of Friedrich II (“der Grosse”). He was more notable as a patron of universities and the arts, and a builder of palaces and other monuments to his vanity, than as a military figure. As Elector of Brandenburg, he backed the attempt of William III to claim the English throne. He modestly expanded Brandenburg-Prussia’s domains, principally through acquisitions by dynastic marriage and treaty. 163

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He was the first head of that resource-poor state, proclaimed “king” in (not of) Prussia, on January 7/18, 1701, as a reward for lending 8,000 troops to the hardpressed Emperor Leopold I for his war against Louis XIV. At Friedrich’s death, Prussia was still a minor, impoverished state. Even so, the course and pressure of events during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) forced him to enlarge the Prussian Army to 40,000 men by 1713, which greatly enhanced Prussian prestige. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721). Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688). “The Great Elector”; “Frederick-William.” He ascended to the Electorate in 1640, just as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was entering its final phase. A Calvinist governing a population largely of Lutherans, he promoted religious toleration among Protestants while opposing Catholic power in Germany. He led Brandenburg’s recovery from the great German war after finally making a compromise peace with Sweden. This helped Brandenburg benefit from participation in postwar resumption of the Baltic grain trade. In the Peace of Westphalia (1648), he recovered part of Pomerania and several small parcels of territory, and he secured higher recognition for the still poor, flat, and mostly insignificant Duchy of Prussia. This achievement was as much Mazarin’s as FriedrichWilhelm’s. France was interested in Brandenburg as a counterweight to Sweden in north Germany, and for this reason it agreed to the cession of Pomerania. The Hohenzollern lands in 1650 were still little more than a scattering of parcels of Baltic territory without “natural borders” or clean lines of defense. Brandenburg’s capital was Berlin, but Prussia lay far to the east, separated from the core Brandenburg territories by over 100 miles of Polish holdings, and Cleve-Mark and Ravensburg lay along the frontier with the United Provinces. Friedrich-Wilhelm built on this fragile base by instituting a stern policy that saw military, economic, political, and social affairs as a seamless subject of statecraft. He centered all efforts on building his military at the core of the state, with the treasury and nobility (Junkers) tied to the service of further aggrandizement. This led to a singular policy of building a first-rate standing army for his secondrate state. It was still called the Brandenburg Army at this point, but eventually was best-known as the Prussian Army. To that military end, all of his other concerns—and most of his subjects—were ruthlessly subordinated. Robert I. Frost argues that Friedrich-Wilhelm “displayed the first signs of what—until 1918—was to prove a Hohenzollern talent: the ability to end up on the right side at the end of wars, thereby securing rewards that were scarcely justified by [Brandenburg-Prussian] contribution to the common cause.” By the time of his death, consequently, Friedrich-Wilhelm had converted Brandenburg-Prussia from a collage of vulnerable statelets and disconnected cities that were united only in his person and dynasty into a still small, but rising and territorially coherent European power. Friedrich-Wilhelm was supremely calculating in his foreign policy. He broke the ties between Ducal Prussia and Poland to ally with Sweden against Poland during the Second Northern War (1655–1660) and its attendant great troubles and turmoil in the east. Then he sided with the Poles against the 164

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Swedes after Poland unexpectedly recovered militarily. He played the same double game on his western borders, switching sides three times between 1670 and 1690 in various conflicts involving France. He abjured the Triple Alliance, and in January 1670 signed a secret subsidy treaty with Louis XIV that kept him out of the first campaigns of the Dutch War (1672–1678). However, Louis’ seizure of Lorraine in August 1670 caused Friedrich-Wilhelm to reconsider his position vis-à-vis France, even though he was not yet inclined to forgo the French subsidy. He signed a treaty with the United Provinces in 1672, promising 20,000 troops should France attack the Dutch. When that happened, he, like the Dutch, was taken by surprise by the speed of the French spring offensive, and his troops did not arrive in time to alter the early contour of the Dutch War. His Brandenburgers and Prussians then had to contend in the field with the supreme skill of maréchal Turenne. That master of war of maneuver surprised them in Westphalia, drove them back to Brandenburg, and then desolated that land. This forced the Great Elector out of the war and compelled him to agree to the Treaty of Vassem (June 6, 1673). He rejoined the fight in 1674, marching to join the Imperials under Bournonville at Strasbourg. Before he could link with his allies, however, Turenne defeated Bournonville at Enzheim (October 4, 1674). Friedrich-Wilhelm then lost to Turenne at Türkheim (January 5, 1675). However, as Brandenburg was being invaded by a Swedish army under French paymasters at the start of the Scanian War (1674–1679), Friedrich-Wilhelm traveled rapidly north and smashed the Swedes at Fehrbellin (June 18/28, 1675). That victory was trumpeted in his own propaganda and that of later generations of German nationalist historians as far greater than what the facts supported. One of the keys to how Friedrich-Wilhelm made war against Sweden is less glorious than stories of dramatic battlefield victory, but was far more effective. He ordered peasants and other subjects to run ahead of advancing Swedish armies, taking everything of value they could herd or carry and hiding or burning the rest. This left Swedish lines of advance barren of people, food, and fodder. Swedish troops were left without shelter, and foragers were compelled to range far afield from the main body, thinning its ranks and even splitting it, as had happened before Fehrbellin. Having built the Prussian Army to a highly disciplined and admired force of 45,000 by 1678, and having established a remarkable system of war finance to sustain it, Friedrich-Wilhelm joined the new league of powers fighting Louis XIV. Brandenburg was still a minor power, however, and the reach of the “Grande Monarque” of France was long. As a result, Friedrich-Wilhelm was compelled to fight off a Swedish invasion of Brandenburg-Prussia that was encouraged and backed by France. Lacking support of the other German princes, he was compelled to accept hard terms. After that, he devoted himself once again to internal affairs. His reforms were so deep and well-laid that they formed a foundation that even his feckless son, Friedrich I, could not wholly waste, and they allowed him to become “King in Prussia.” His great-grandson was Friedrich II (“der Grosse”). See also Turenne; Türkheim (1675); War of Devolution (1667–1668). 165

frigate

frigate. From the 17th to the 19th century, a fast warship with rows of heavy guns at two levels, but smaller than a man-of-war. They were notable for fine lines and high speed. By the 18th century, the term was used especially for two-decker warships which mounted guns only on the main deck, with the lower deck left unarmed. They were widely used as cruisers, and were often more heavily armed than their official Rate suggested. A primary use of frigates was for reconnaissance, which required close sailing and placed a high emphasis on skilled and quality captains. It was not uncommon for frigate captains to be senior to captains of some ships-of-the-line. See also carronade. frizzen. See flintlock firearms. Fronde (1648–1653). The term derived from the favored weapons of Paris boys and rioters: slingshots used to hurl stones to break windows and the heads of opponents. Historians disagree as to whether any of the various Fronde were “revolutionary,” even in potential, though that is how they seemed to some contemporaries. These violent political and social upheavals were many things at once, including a rebellion by office-holders against administration reforms and increased fees levied on their bought offices by Mazarin, and before him by Cardinal Armand Richelieu. The increases were needed to pay for wars in Germany (the Thirty Years’ War, which for France lasted from 1635 to 1648) and with Spain (the Franco-Spanish War of 1635–1659). Political plots, street riots, and outright rebellion were also a delayed reaction against the centralizing policies of the monarchy under Mazarin’s great predecessor. The push back was retarded by the need to maintain national unity until the great war in Germany was finally settled in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Mazarin provoked rebellion when he ordered the arrest of all office-holders and others who refused to pay new fees and taxes, with violent discontent fueled by rumors that he was personally corrupt. Also in play were the ambitions of great princes and houses, “les grandes,” who were eager to regain class privileges stripped away earlier by the crown. Most notable among the noble rebels were Turenne, an early “Frondeur” who later rejoined the royals, and the Great Condé, who served Louis XIV at first, only later to lead foreign troops and armies against him. The reputations and military abilities of such great nobles, and the willingness of some to call upon Spanish aid in their civil war with the king and Mazarin, raised the stakes and scale of the Fronde from street fights to real battles. There was also an alliance, or at least an association, of several key Frondeurs with the mystical Jansenist movement then roiling the Gallic Church. The first of the upheavals was the “Fronde parlementaire,” starting in 1648. This was a bloodless movement within the French court system against recent reforms by Mazarin that cut into the privileges of officer-holders. The court Frondeurs turned on the royal tax collectors (intendants) who raised funds to pay for the king’s wars, as well as on the Jews of Paris. This was essentially a conservative, indeed reactionary, movement that wanted to reduce the powers of the Bourbon monarchy and restore traditional privileges, but not 166

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displace or overthrow the king. In 1650, the “Fronde princière” went further, folding into outright rebellion by parts of the nobility and officer corps, including a treacherous alliance with Spanish interests and troops in the border regions. Had it succeeded, the revolt of the princes might have reversed France’s centralization, fragmenting it into a patchwork of sovereign principalities rather like Germany. Mazarin was temporarily expelled from France, while the young Louis XIV and his mother also fled Paris after a mob of frondeurs burst into the royal bedchamber in 1651. It was a fright that the king would neither forget nor forgive when he later built Versailles outside the city and humbled the nobility by making them serve his body, person, and court. For three years, private princely armies fought the monarchy and each other. In 1652 Louis, age 14, proclaimed his majority and returned to Paris. Mazarin raised a royal army and put down the “revolt of the princes,” but he was effectively exiled for another year as part of the price the young king paid to restore civil peace. The princes finally agreed to retire to their country estates, or went into exile. During these revolts, control of Paris changed hands—from loyalists to rebels and back—more than once. In early 1652, the “Fronde du Bordeaux” spread beyond the nobility and hence was radicalized. Known as the “Ormée,” this Fronde reflected the class influence and issues of angry lawyers and merchants who met under the town’s elm trees (ormes). They declared for a new government that was founded essentially in popular sovereignty—under God, rather than the king. After Paris was recaptured by royalists for the third time in October 1652, the king’s army crushed the revolt in Bordeaux. The city fell to the king’s men in August 1653, ending the Fronde. The most lasting effect of these upheavals was to demonstrate that the alternative to a powerful monarchy under the Bourbons seemed to be civil war, foreign intrigue, and invasion. They thus confirmed the new consolidation of the monarchy and the centralization of power within France, processes which continued apace as Louis XIV entered his maturity. See also Luxembourg, François; ranks (on land); war finance. Suggested Reading: Hubert Méthivier, La Fronde (1984); Orest Ranum, The Fronde (1993).

front. The sides or aspects of a fortress, generally defined as a section of curtain flanked by two bastions and a protective ravelin. Attackers looked to assault the weakest front, ignoring or feinting at the others. Defenders sought to counteract any natural weakness of terrain by added detached works. Most commanders or engineers of a besieging army knew which front was weakest before they arrived, from fortification plans purchased in advance in careless towns, or even from personal tours of the works in peacetime (such as those conducted by Dahlberg at Copenhagen in 1658 and Vauban at Namur in 1691). Spies also gleaned information. Skill in selecting the weak front was essential, but not always available, even given these sources of information. For instance, Russian engineers so badly misjudged the works at Kolberg in 1758 that they actually assaulted the strongest front. See also siege warfare. 167

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Frontenac, comte de (1620–1698). See King William’s War (1689–1697). frontières. Broad zones of disputed, shared, overlapping, or unclear jurisdiction— the scene of traditional and ongoing military conflict—that lay between European states in the 17th–18th centuries. Essentially, these areas were a modified form of the medieval “March.” Examples included the Rhine, Flanders, and northern Italy throughout the period, and the Pyrenees prior to the Treaty of the Pyrenees, in 1659. These were well-known but still ill-defined zones of conflict, or frontiers, that contrasted with limites. The latter were rare, agreed-upon international borders of precise definition. See also natural frontiers; Ryswick, Treaty of (1697); Utrecht, Treaty of (1713). fugelman. An experienced older soldier who demonstrated drill and firearms techniques to recruits. fuses. See auget; bomb; grenades; mortar; saucisson. fusil. See flintlock firearms; fusiliers. fusiliers. The term derives from a new weapon, the “fusil” (from the French word for “frizzen”). This was a dependable flintlock firearm, rather than a matchlock musket. In 1670, the French Army incorporated four men carrying fusils into each infantry company. A year later, the first French “Régiment des Fusiliers” was created. French companies were ordered to arm eight fusiliers each in 1687. Five years later, the number rose to 21 per company (along with 21 matchlock musketeers and 10 pikers). Both matchlock weapons and pikes quickly disappeared from French armies within a few more years. The English term “fusiliers” dates to 1680, at first referring to specialized infantry assigned to protect the artillery. This task derived from the happy fact that, unlike their matchlock-bearing fellows, fusiliers did not trail burning matches after them while moving near or among the guns and huge stores of powder. Fusiliers were also tasked with preventing gunners, some of whom were still civilian contractors, from abandoning the cannons at the approach of enemy troops. The first dedicated English regiment of all fusil-bearing troops was known as “Our Royal Regiment of Fusiliers,” or “Our Ordnance Regiment.” Later renamed “Royal Fusiliers,” it was founded in 1689. Meanwhile, the Scots renamed an established regiment “Fusiliers” in 1685. It has been known as the “Royal Scots Fusiliers” since 1881. As the fusil became the universal infantry weapon, the term “fusiliers” lost its original meaning of “artillery guards.” Nevertheless, it was retained by these and other regiments, much as “Grenadiers” regiments no longer signaled their use of that assault weapon in any specialized capacity. Fyllebro, Battle of (August 18, 1676). “Halmstad.” See Scanian War (1674–1679). 168

G Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653). A sea fight of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). A Dutch fleet of 104 warships under Maarten van Tromp met an English fleet of 105 warships off the mouth of the Thames. The English followed the new fighting instructions and formed line ahead for battle. Superior guns and gunnery of the English ships pounded the Dutch. On the second day, Robert Blake reinforced the English fleet with 13 more ships. The Dutch were overwhelmed by greater English numbers and firepower, and the new line of battle tactics that maximized both. Tromp lost 20 ships, and nearly lost his badly damaged flagship. The English lost crewmen and marines, but no ships. gabion. A wicker cylinder usually 3–4 feet high and 2 feet in diameter. A sap roller (“gabion farci”) was much larger and heavier. Gabions were filled with earth and stones on site to make field fortifications for musketeers or artillery, or to reinforce permanent walls. Wicker was easily portable, and its shotabsorbing capacity when filled with earth gave gabions real protective strength. Two- or three-man crews of sappers and miners worked for up to three hours cutting each gabion from the turf. When completed, they were tied at the top with withies (willow or other flexible branches taken from nearby copses). See also fascines; sandbags; sap. gabion farci. See sap roller. gachupines. Settlers in Spanish overseas colonies who emigrated directly from Spain and retained strong attachments to the mother country, as distinct from Creoles, who were born in the colonies. Gadesbusch, Battle of (December 20, 1712). See Great Northern War (1700–1721).

gaff

gaff. See rigging; sails. galeones. The Spanish treasure fleet which sailed annually from Panama to Seville (until 1717, thence to Cadiz) and back. Its ships carried goods which were portaged across the Isthmus of Panama for reloading onto other ships and delivery to ports on the west coast of South America. See also convoy. galleon. An older ship type still used in this era by the Spanish as an armed merchantman, capable of long-distance runs to overseas colonies. galiotes à bomb. See bomb ketch. gallery. The largest type of chamber, which was used to house the biggest mines. The permanent countermining system of excavations that circumnavigated some fortresses behind and under the counterscarp was known as the “counterscarp gallery” or “magistral (master) gallery.” It was a 3- to 4-foot by 6- to 8-foot chamber which engineers entered through doors cut in the counterscarp. Sub-galleries underlay the glacis, with filaments of smaller rameaux and listners spiderwebbing in angled directions. Attacking miners dug out smaller galleries in the revetment, which they then blew apart with powerful mines. galleys. The galley, or oared warship, was an extraordinarily successful ancient ship design that lasted millennia rather than centuries. In one form or another, oared warships dominated all coastal waters up to the 15th century, and into the early 17th century in the Mediterranean and other shallow or enclosed seas. The last great galley fight in history was at Lepanto (October 7, 1571), after which the galley precipitously declined as a ship of war in favor of ships of sail mounting broadside artillery. By the period covered in this work, only relatively closed seas such as the Mediterranean and Caribbean still saw war galleys as part of battlefleets. More commonly, war galleys served in coastal patrol roles. Louis XIV maintained a warfleet of Mediterranean war galleys, along with coastal messenger and transport galleys in the Atlantic, replete with condemned prisoners or Protestants at the oars. Other powers countered the French galleys with small fleets of their own, or used galleys to supplement fleets of sail. During the Messinian rebellion, Spanish and French galleys fought alongside ships of sail in a vicious engagement in Messina harbor in 1675. Dutch galleys fought at Augusta (April 22, 1676), off the coast of Sicily. Louis XIV then sent his entire Mediterranean galley fleet to Sicily, where as many as 25 French galleys joined a fight off Palermo (June 2, 1676) that included nine Spanish galleys fighting on the other side. England’s Charles II acquired two galleys and the requisite galley slaves to protect the harbor at occupied Tangier, but they were not up to the task in such rough waters, and the project and the galleys alike were abandoned in 1683. The Russians deployed a large galley fleet in the Baltic during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). In 1712–1713 this fleet ferried troops to the coast of Finland to carry out a series of raids and attacks. They were far more effective for this type of operation than the opposing Swedish sail, which could not 170

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navigate close in and stood off helplessly while Russian amphibious operations were carried out along the coasts of Finland and Sweden itself. See also Apraxin, Fedor; Barbary corsairs; broadside; Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705); Edict of Fontainebleau (1685); Genoa; Huguenots; Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669); Palermo, Battle of (1676); Roure rebellion (1670). galliot. A small galley or oars-and-sails warship, primarily used in the Mediterranean. An alternate meaning was a small, single-masted and spritrigged Dutch cargo boat. Galway, Earl of (1648–1720). English general, né Henry de Massue. His first military schooling came while serving under maréchal Turenne. A Huguenot by birth, Henry de Massue went into exile in 1688, three years after Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau revoking the religious toleration clauses of old Edict of Nantes. Almost immediately, the Glorious Revolution opened career opportunities to enlist with William III and fight Louis XIV. Galway commanded the Protestant cavalry that pursued and broke the last French resistance in Ireland following the Battle of Boyne (July 1/11, 1690). During the middle years of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), he fought in Savoy and northern Italy against French armies led by Catinat. He received his title in 1697 for his military services to William, and was also made “Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.” Galway did not fare well as an occupier or colonial administrator. He was pleased to return to the field during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), leading Allied forces in Spain fighting against the Spanish succession of Louis’ grandson, Philip V. Galway captured Madrid in 1706, but could hold it for only a few months against stepped-up French military commitment to the Bourbon war in Iberia. He retreated by sea from Lisbon to Valencia, where he reassembled an army and marched to try to retake Madrid. He was outmaneuvered then decisively defeated by Berwick at Almanza (April 14/25, 1707), losing most of his panicking army. As he retreated to Barcelona with what was left of this force, he was saved from total destruction mainly by cover fire from the Allied fleet and by the difficulty his enemies faced in pursuit. He soon departed for England and retirement. Gangut, Battle of (July 27/August 7, 1714). “Hangö.” See Apraxin, Fedor; Great Northern War (1700–1721). ganimet. The Ottoman pay system for irregulars and auxiliaries (Voynuqs and Tatars) which offered a share in spoils of the campaign instead of regular pay. It was little more than the usual approved plunder, a feature of war finance common to all early modern armies. garde-fou. A tablette of flat coping stones circumscribing the top of the revetment to form an outer rim of the chemin des rondes. Its primary purpose was protecting the top of the revetment from erosion and to guide sentries patrolling in the dark. It also offered a minor obstacle to attackers attempting escalade. 171

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Gardes du Corps. The elite “Bodyguard” regiments of the kings of France. In England, the same function was performed by the “Life Guards.” See also drabants; Luxembourg, duc de; officers. Gardes marine. Three naval companies set up by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to train ensigns for the French Navy. They were commanded by experienced captains and were supposed to teach seacraft to aspirants to a naval commission. Lessons taught included navigation, seamanship, and rather more Cartesian mathematics than was needed. Some 2,000 graduates entered service in the 1680s, but the numbers declined, along with the strength and fortunes of the French Navy, during the 1690s. Gårdetal. See Swedish Army. garrison carriage. Invented by Vauban, this compact carriage had a reduced trail so that it took up less space than older carriages on the terreplein or in bastions. It was not superseded until an innovative gun carriage was introduced by Jean Baptiste de Gribeauval (1715–1789) in the 1770s. garrisons. The number of troops per fortress in time of war in this period was calculated at a rate of 500 infantry per bastion, plus an additional 500–800 cavalry for the entire garrison. In peacetime, before soldiers’ pensions existed for most troops, garrison companies often comprised an unusually high percentage of old, sick, lame, or once-wounded men. The British Army had special “invalid” companies of disabled soldiers assigned to garrisons, mainly for reasons of charity. Later, during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), one British invalid company resided at Bremen while a second served in America (similar to the Wehrmacht relegating one-armed and one-eyed troops to garrison divisions during World War II). Garrison troops in continental armies in this period were more poorly paid and less well regarded than regulars, and desertion rates were correspondingly high. This was especially true of the Prussian and Austrian armies. In times of siege, however, reinforcements brought in from sound field units ensured that garrisons often put up violent and effective resistance. The French uniquely garrisoned their fortresses by rotating field regiments through them. The Ottomans were unique in assigning crack troops, the best of the Janissary Corps, to frontier garrisons. See also army of relief; assault; Banner system; barracks; beat the chamade; bombardment; Cebicis; citadel; communications; contributions; desertion; disease; drill; Dutch War (1672–1678); flags; forts; fortification; free company; free evacuation; French Army; gorge, Great Britain; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Green Standard Army; independent company; investment; Ireland; Janissary Corps; land regiment; lines of contravallation; magazines; Mauerscheisser; Militargrenze; military medicine; mortar; Ottoman Empire; parallels; petite guerre; pièces ambulantes; pike; Polish Army; rations; Russian Army; Scanian War (1674–1679); siege warfare; sortie; Spanish Army; surrender; Swedish Army; Tangier; useless mouths; Vauban; wall-piece; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); watches. 172

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gate. The main gate of a fortress was centered in a curtain wall, protected by crossfire from adjacent bastions. It was broad enough to permit easy access by heavy carts and teams. Like its predecessors in medieval castles or ancient walled towns, even in this era the gate was potentially the weakest point of defense. Therefore, it presented various traps and obstacles to would-be stormers. It usually had heavy, iron-laced doors and an iron portcullis; murder holes in the arch; a sharp bend to turn and slow intruders, and perhaps a moat and drawbridge, or a fixed bridge that was easily burned at the start of a siege. See also insult; petard; siege warfare. Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710). In the waning years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Louis XIV tried to detach the United Provinces from the Grand Alliance in a series of secret talks that culminated in negotiations at Geertruidenberg, in the spring of 1710. Louis offered to accept Dutch barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, to revoke anti-Dutch tariffs, and to sever the single inheritance of both French and Spanish crowns. Agreement was very close, but never actually reached. The war continued until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713, but the Geertruidenberg negotiations had laid the groundwork necessary to that formal peace. gendarmerie. French armored cavalry. Though long-since outmoded, they fought in Germany during this period and at Marsaglia (October 4, 1693) during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). general. See ranks (on land). General at Sea. A naval rank established by the English Parliament at Westminster in 1649, replacing the powers and position of the once-and-future “Lord High Admiral.” There was only one true “General at Sea,” or commander-in-chief. Three regimental colonels from the New Model Army (Robert Blake, Richard Deane, and Edward Popham) were appointed to execute command at sea and are thus often identified as holding this rank. George Monk replaced Popham when the latter died in August 1651. Richard Deane was killed at Gabbard Shoal (June 2–3/12–13, 1653). Edward Montague (the Earl of Sandwich) was appointed to the position by his friend and patron, Oliver Cromwell. The real reason for appointing such New Model Army men to command the States’ Navy was to establish control of the sea service by the Army and Cromwell, as part of a larger consolidation of Army dictatorship then under way in the Three Kingdoms. Blake occasionally distinguished himself in naval command, though not always. Monk contributed a great deal to development of new naval tactics and the fighting instructions that were issued after Blake’s tactical failure at Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653). Montagu later served Charles II in the Restoration Navy (later renamed the Royal Navy). Generality. The corporate being formed by the constitutional union of the United Provinces. See also Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Raad van State; States General. 173

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Generalkriegskommissariat. “General War Commissariat.” A military bureaucracy set up by Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg to manage his system of direct military taxes. It was responsible for all disbursement of Prussian Army pay and provisions. To that end, it promoted divers state-sponsored industries and commerce. A major part of its operations was textiles for uniforms. general retrenchment. See retrenchment. Genoa. This independent Italian city-state was in loose alliance with Spain during and after the Dutch War (1672–1678). It allowed recruitment of mercenaries— a traditional Genoese occupation dating to before the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453)—and the building of war galleys for the Spanish. Louis XIV retaliated, in May 1685, with the new French method of naval bombardment by a fleet that included ten “galiotes à bomb” (bomb ketches). The French set the city aflame with over 13,000 mortar shells. Only a third of Genoa’s buildings survived the conflagration. This act of blatant terrorism went a long way toward isolating France within Europe and pushing other states into a grand alliance against Louis. gentlemen officers. See cheesemongers; officers; Royal Navy; tarpaulin. Germany. See Austrian Empire; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Blenheim (1704); Brandenburg; Cologne; Donauwörth (1704); Dutch War (1672–1678); Maximilian Emanuel; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Fehrbellin (1675); flintlock firearms; fortification; France; Friedrich I; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Fronde; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Höchstädt I, Battle of (1703); Hofkriegsrat; Holy Roman Empire; Huguenots; Ilbersheim, Treaty of (1704); Karl X; Karl XI; Karl XII; Lines of Stollhofen; Louis XIV; Malplaquet (1709); Mémoire des raisons; Montecuccoli; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Prussian Army; Rákóczi, Ferenc; Ramillies (1706); Rastadt, Treaty of (1714); Rheinbund; Ryswick, Treaty of (1697); Scanian War (1674–1679); siege warfare; Sweden; uniforms; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); Vienna, siege of (1683); Villars, Claude Louis, duc de; War of the Reunions (1683–1684); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); wheel lock; Wrangel, Karl Gustaf. Georg, Johan. Elector of Saxony. See also Vienna. siege of (1683). ghazi. “Warrior for the Faith.” A religious-military title of Muslim warriors embarked on “jihad” (“holy war”). On the controversial thesis that the 17thand 18th-century Ottoman Empire was still moved by a “ghazi state” in its expansionist motives, see Ottoman warfare. Elements of the ghazi tradition also found expression in Mughal armies at certain times, and in the armies of Safavid Iran. Ghent, siege of (March 1–12, 1678). The last great siege in the northern campaigns of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Louis XIV made elaborate ruses about attacking 174

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several other strongpoints to disguise the fact that Ghent was the target of the campaign. French forces thus invested Ypres, Namur, and Mons in late February. These ruse investments worked, draining part of the Ghent garrison to relieve Ypres just before Vauban arrived at Ghent with a huge siege army. Louis joined Vauban on March 4, with trench-digging already well under way. The defenders flooded the area, but this did not stop Vauban from opening siege trenches during the night of March 5–6. The outer defenses were assaulted on March 8–9, and the town surrendered the next day. Two days later, the last defenders in the citadel agreed to terms. ghulams. “Slaves (of the shah).” At the start of the 17th century, Abbas I dramatically reformed Iran’s military, replacing traditional reliance on tribal and feudal recruitment with professional soldiers drawn from communities of former Christian slaves, or from prisoners or their descendants. Most came from Armenia, Circassia, or Georgia. Upon conversion to Islam, these men could join the ranks of the “ghulams.” Although ghulam units started as infantry, over time they evolved into dragoons. As was the case with Janissaries in the regard of sultans of the Ottoman Empire, ghulams were more trustworthy soldiers in the eyes of successive shahs, because they lacked connection to any of Iran’s tribes or any social standing. Tribal leaders’ resentment at being displaced from the traditional cavalry was commensurate with their attendant loss of status and income at court, but the reforms held. Gibraltar. “The Rock.” This small, strategic island guarding the passage from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic was known to ancient Greeks, along with Jebel Musa in North Africa, as one of the “Pillars of Hercules” marking the edge of world beyond which few dared sail. It was captured by England from Spain on July 24/August 4, 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). A Spanish assault and siege the next year failed to retake the island. It was jointly occupied by the British and Dutch until 1713. Permanent British possession was then confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), codifying the new status of Great Britain as a Mediterranean sea power. After 1713 Gibraltar was held as a British colony and served as a key fortress and Royal Navy base, guarding the strait of the same name and impeding entry and egress from the Mediterranean by any naval foe of the British. See also Tangier. Ginkel, Godard van. Dutch general. See also Ireland. glacis. The long slope proceeding from the outer rim of an artillery fortress, extending from the far edge of the ditch crested by a parapet and covered way, and traversing unprepared ground until it expired in true open country. It completely surrounded a fortress, unless the position was sited astride a river or with its back against a mountain. The whole glacis came under sweeping fire from defenders, so that any attacker would be fatally exposed on it. The glacis forced attackers to dig saps and make ramparts and other earth works for their own protection. The glacis was generally kept clear of trees and brush to maintain 175

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open lines of sight. This changed in the later 18th century; some deliberate planting was done because tree roots helped maintain the glacis against the eroding effects of time and weather. All trees were felled to clear lines of sight and fire if a siege was anticipated, with the added benefit of providing firewood for the fortress. See also gallery; siege warfare; zone of servitude. globe of compression. “overcharged” or “supercharged” mine. A super-mine invented in the mid-18th century. It was so powerful that it not only blasted a wide breach in a revetment, it also sent out shock waves that collapsed any adjacent tunnel, gallery, and countermine. A single globe might contain 5,000 pounds or more of black powder and open a breach over 100 feet wide. Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). Dutch, English and British, and world history were all changed by the events of 1688–1691, which saw dethroning of the last male Stuart, James II, and enthroning of his daughter, Mary, and her Dutch husband, William III. The militantly pro-Catholic policies of James II were so unpopular in violently anti-Catholic England and Scotland that Tories, Whigs, Anglicans, and Nonconformists joined in opposition to his continued rule. The failure of the “Monmouth Rebellion” in 1685 had permitted James to raise a standing army of 40,000 men, largely officered by Catholics. But that did him little good three years later. The constitutional crisis that provoked the “Glorious Revolution” centered on two events in June 1688. Protestants were alarmed by the birth of a legitimate male heir to James, who was sure to be raised as a staunch Catholic and who superseded two Protestant daughters. There was also public outrage over the arrest of seven bishops who earlier refused James’ second order issued to Anglican clergy to read from the pulpit a decree of toleration (indulgence) for Catholics. James imprisoned the bishops in the Tower of London, further provoking his enemies. A jury acquitted them of charges of seditious libel that June, bringing widespread derision onto the king. An elite delegation of Whigs and Tories was sent to the United Provinces to invite William III (then William of Orange) to bring an army to England to “restore” Protestant liberties—that is, to protect the political, social, and economic privileges of Anglican gentry and aristocracy that were seen to be threatened by a Catholic king and succession. William was invited to mount the throne himself. He could never have accepted the offer or raised the necessary army without approval of the States of Holland, which dominated the United Provinces. In turn, Holland’s approval of such an adventure became possible only because of extraordinary events occurring in France. The Regents of Holland were instinctively opposed to the expense and risks to themselves, at home and in foreign policy, that flowed from promoting the fortunes of the House of Orange. But fresh aggression by Louis XIV forced the Regents to seek the overthrow of the pro-French James II and alliance with England by crowning William in his place. The key to the Regents’ acquiescence in William’s remarkable British adventure was a French threat delivered in mid-1688—with Louis XIV’s usual blunt 176

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disregard for sensitive timing—to use force to secure a favorable succession in Louis’ protectorate of Cologne. That mobilized Austria, the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Provinces against France and led to outbreak of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The opening act of that conflict was resumption of guerre de course and other economic warfare between France and the United Provinces, beginning with Louis imposing a general arrest of all Dutch ships in French ports and seizure of over 100 Dutch ships. With Amsterdam’s political and financial support, William signed troop-hire agreements with Brandenburg, Celle, Hesse-Cassel, and Württemberg, providing him with 14,000 German veterans to replace the Dutch troops he intended to take to England. With Germans holding the Dutch garrisons of the eastern provinces, William sailed to Great Britain. His invasion army comprised 14,352 Dutch regulars and some 5,000 Huguenot, English, and Scots volunteers. There was also a smattering of Danes, Germans, Finns (Laplanders), Poles, Swedes, Swiss, and even a few Greeks, for a total in excess of 21,000 soldiers. Another 19,000 miscellaneous courtiers, family members, adventurers, and sundry camp followers were also carried over the water. William brought over an artillery train of 50 heavy guns and many more light pieces. The admiralty colleges provided over 400 transports (including 90 for 5,000 horses of the artillery and cavalry). Troop carriers were escorted by 53 ships-of-the-line, for a grand total of 463 ships. This invasion fleet was four times the size of the “Invincible Armada” of the previous century, and it remained the greatest fleet seen anywhere in European waters until the D-Day operations of June 5–6, 1944. William sailed from Hellevoetsluis, near Rotterdam, just before the first November gales blew. He paraded the fleet in line past Dover, with his troops in drill formation on deck and ships’ guns on either side blasting a coincidental salute to England and a warning to the king of France. The invasion fleet sailed past the Thames estuary, then doubled back before attempting to disembark the army. It was seen twice by an English warfleet that could not get out to fight due to a powerful easterly wind, a breeze famously remembered as the “Protestant wind” that carried Orange to power. William landed at Torbay in Devon on November 5–7, 1688. He quickly fanned out his army to occupy Exeter. As his regiments advanced on London most of James II’s army, led by John Churchill (later and better-known as the Duke of Marlborough), either deserted or failed to muster. Fully 22,000 men from an original force of 26,000 deserted as James retreated up the Thames. Much disaffection among his officers had less to do with Orangism than with the Earl of Tyrconnel’s earlier purge of Protestant officers from the Irish establishment, an act viewed as an assault on the property rights of officers who had fairly purchased their commissions. Subsequently, 1,500 men brought over from the Irish establishment were held as prisoners on the Isle of Wight. Lacking support outside Ireland and parts of Scotland, James panicked and fled as William entered London unopposed on December 18th. William ordered all English regiments to be safely withdrawn to 20 miles distance. James was permitted to escape to France, because all parties feared that civil war might flow from another trial of a king, such as that of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell and Parliament in 1649. 177

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Parliament took the expedient of declaring that James’ flight constituted both de facto and de jure abdication. After the bloodless invasion, or “revolution,” James was succeeded by William and his wife Mary (daughter of Charles II) on February 2/12, 1689, in what admirers then and since called the “Glorious Revolution.” These events changed Great Britain and Ireland forever. William accepted the principle of Parliamentary supremacy and passage of a Bill of Rights listing the elementary and fundamental rights of Englishmen. That concluded a class, fiscal, policy, and political struggle centuries in the waging between Parliament and the monarchy. Whig principles had finally won the great constitutional contest, but only because Tories had agreed to support them in opposition to the loathed James. Parliament thenceforth was supreme in Great Britain. Nonconformists received toleration in the Toleration Act of 1689. London merchants and other propertied classes were now securely inside government and would soon greatly influence its colonial and naval policy. The new constitutional monarch was compelled to keep 17,000 Dutch troops in England and Ireland. These troops were paid for by English taxes, to the relief of the Regents of Holland. William secured Protestant ascendancy, and corresponding Irish Catholic desolation, the next year by winning decisively at the Battle of Boyne (July 1/11, 1690). By then he had already joined England and Scotland, separately, to the League of Augsburg and tied both kingdoms into formal alliance with his homeland of the United Provinces. These bold events brought the peoples and resources of the Three Kingdoms of the British Isles into the climactic wars of the reign of Louis XIV: the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Arguably, those conflicts were themselves but the opening phase of a “Second Hundred Years’ War” between Britain and France that did not end until Waterloo, in 1815. The Glorious Revolution also brought constitutional stability to what became a major world power—the dominant global empire— governed from Great Britain, as that island nation was known after the Act of Union in 1707. Principles of representation and consent became permanent touchstones of British civilization, and Parliament was ever after the supreme political power in the land. No more did Europe speak of “Little England” or dismiss Britain as a minor and vulnerable power preoccupied with the endless quarrels of divided, isolated, small peoples. Less widely marked, the Glorious Revolution saw an erosion of republican principles in the United Provinces, as William and his favored nobles operated more freely from the strictures of the Regents and States General. And as the high tide of republicanism ebbed it took with it a portion of Dutch power in Europe and the world. Thereafter, the United Provinces were eclipsed as a Great Power during the protracted global struggle between Great Britain and France. This shift was already evident by the mid-1690s, once English men-of-war operating against France came to outnumber Dutch warships five to three. By 1715 the Dutch were reduced to permanent maritime inferiority to the British, with whom they maintained an uneasy alliance of necessity. See also British Army; dragonnades; Monmouth, Duke of. 178

grand vezier (vezir-i azam) Suggested Reading: R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (1973); G. M. Trevelyan, The English Revolution (1967).

gorge. The “neck,” or open or rear part of a redan, bastion, or detached outwork, facing the fortress. It was accessed by the garrison via ramps or hidden stairs. governor. The de facto commandant of a fortress, whether a military man or not, unless specifically replaced by a higher appointee. In France he was assisted by a “lieutenant du roi.” Grand Alliance (1672–1678). See Dutch War (1672–1678); Friedrich-Wilhelm; Leopold I; Louis XIV; William III. Grand Alliance (1689–1697). See Austrian Empire; British Army; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; French Navy; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Imperial Army; Ireland; Louis XIV; Marlborough; Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Royal Navy; Ryswick, Treaty of (1697); United Provinces; William III. Grand Alliance (1701–1714). See Austrian Empire; Brandenburg; British Army; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; French Navy; Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710); Great Britain; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Imperial Army; Louis XIV; Marlborough; Prussian Army; Royal Navy; United Provinces; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III. Grand Alliance, War of (1689–1697). See Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705); Louis XIV (1638–1715); Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726); Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); William III (1650–1702). grand vezier (vezir-i azam). The direct deputy to an Ottoman sultan. They enjoyed extraordinary powers over other kuls and were the main recruiters, and dismissers, of the Ottoman household military, or Kapikulu Askerleri. Grand veziers used the power of dismissal or reinstatement to control the timariots, but even more the Janissary Corps and sipahis, especially the six elite sipahis regiments housed at the Porte. Some grand veziers took personal command of field armies in the absence of the sultan—after 1596, sultans seldom accompanied armies on campaign. The office of grand vezier was much sought after, and therefore it was held insecurely in the face of constant court intrigue, schemes, and betrayal. Deputies to the grand vezier were called “kaim mekam.” Some actively campaigned to unseat their master, whereas others coveted his position and tried to seize it upon his death. In field operations, grand veziers were served by deputies known as “kahya beys.” The most important grand veziers of this period—Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (r. 1656–1661), his eldest son Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (r. 1661–1676), and the latter’s brother-in law, Kara Mustafa Pasha 179

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(r. 1676–1683)—were related by blood or marriage. Köprülü Mustafa Pasha (1637–1691), brother of Köprülü Ahmed Fazil, became grand vezier in 1689 during the advance of “Holy League” armies deep into the territory of the Ottoman Empire. He eventually drove the Austrians out of Serbia and was killed in 1691, while fighting at Slankamen. His cousin, Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1702), succeeded him following the decisive Ottoman defeat at Zenta (1697). Hüseyin negotiated the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. He died three years later. Köprülü Mustafa Pasha’s son, Köprülü Numan Pasha (d. 1719), was grand vezier from 1710–1711. See also bey; Vienna, siege of (1683); Yeniçeri AOasi. grapeshot. See shot. Grave, siege of (July–October 1674). When the French withdrew from the United Provinces in 1674, Louvois ordered all Dutch forts and towns stripped of their cannons and powder supplies. He stored these in a single, massive, isolated arsenal at Grave, protected by a garrison of 4,000. Also gathered at Grave were hundreds of Dutch hostages, held in an effort to enforce contributions. These were moved on to Maastricht before the Dutch could liberate them. A siege followed, while the main campaign between William III (then William of Orange) and the Great Condé was underway in Germany. So much powder was stored in the town, posing great danger of a catastrophic explosion from Dutch bombardment, Le Tellier approved sale of half to the besieging enemy force. Baron Coehoorn put this to good use in his Coehoorn mortars and other siege guns. After the bloody fight at Seneffe, William arrived at Grave to command the siege. The town was destroyed by three months of bombardment and surrendered on October 26, with survivors granted full military honors and even transport for their cannons, which they hauled to Maastricht. Great Britain. The Act of Union (March 4/15, 1707) formed a new, United Kingdom of Great Britain (with Ireland added in 1801), where previously England and Scotland had shared only a union of crowns and an island with a complex and intertwined political, religious, and military history. The new kingdom was born in the midst of an ongoing international war, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), which hosted within it continuing threats of Jacobite invasion and possibly renewed civil war. In an uneasy foreign policy union with the United Provinces, Great Britain opposed schemes for the aggrandizement of France pursued by Louis XIV in Europe and waged the North American extension of the conflict, sometimes known as Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). England had only reluctantly fought in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), despite the urging of William III. It joined decisively in the new war of the Grand Alliance against France, its merchants enraged over loss of the asiento and French entry into the commerce of the Spanish empire in the Americas. The influence of the Whigs in favor of expensive continental engagement was exerted on Queen Anne through Marlborough’s wife, Sarah, in spite of Marlborough himself being a Tory by family history and connections. The Queen more naturally shared the Tory view, not least because Whig religious 180

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toleration suggested, at least to her, that some Whigs might be prepared to accept a return of the Catholic Stuarts (in fact, almost none would have done so). Meanwhile, Tory objections to the war slowly evolved into an alternative strategy, one of opposition to continental military commitments in favor of a naval war against the French periphery, while simultaneously expanding Britain’s maritime and commercial interests overseas. As a result, Marlborough and the few other continentalist Tories who shared his views grew evermore reliant on the Whigs to influence strategy and sustain their arguments with the Queen, who accepted them only with growing reluctance. Some historians have attributed far-sighted strategic thinking to one or the other of these “parties,” Tory and Whig. Others caution against that conclusion, suggesting that the differences of the day may have been more a reflection of a higher level of realism about the French threat on the part of Whigs and general discontent with the costs of the war among Tories, rather than clear geopolitical visions about Great Britain’s new world role in either case. By 1707 Queen Anne was engaged in intrigue with the Tories. The Whigs argued that Great Britain must stick with the war effort on the Continent until the Bourbons were denied the Spanish throne. After the failure at Almanza (April 14/25, 1707), Tories were prepared to accept defeat in Spain and seek peace with Louis XIV on almost any terms. Marlborough’s personal influence and that of his Whig allies waned further when the Dutch refused to allow him to lead their troops into any more bloody battles, following his costly victory at Malplaquet (1709). Sarah fell from royal favor in 1710, the same year the Whigs lost control of the House of Commons to the Tories. Marlborough held on through 1711, but was out of court favor and was dismissed early in 1712. The true nature of British politics in this period remains much disputed among historians, especially over the question of whether or not there was an effective “party system.” There is no gainsaying that the electorate was much expanded (to over 250,000) from earlier times. At the least, an incipient two-party system was slowly taking shape by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, confirmed in foreign affairs when the Tories made a peace at Utrecht in 1713 that left most Whigs greatly unhappy, as well as fixed in opposition. However much the Whigs complained about “wasted sacrifice” and lost opportunity, Great Britain actually gained much from the Spanish war and Tory peace. It was thereafter more unified and prosperous, possessed a much expanded overseas empire, and enjoyed thriving international commerce. It was, in fact, poised to experience a “grand siècle” of its own that would rival, and ultimately exceed, that of France. In addition, as an island power it could devote most of its martial energies and resources to the Royal Navy instead of the British Army. This built strength upon strength, while its financial resources meant it could readily hire foreign troops to fight for it on the continent. Nor did Great Britain have to build or maintain expensive lines of heavy fortifications. Overseas, British garrison armies outside the homeland could depend on the Royal Navy for transport, supply, reinforcement, and other support. The defense of overseas colonies and more aggressive expeditions against outposts of other empires were by definition operations requiring oceanic transport and 181

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amphibious capabilities. The Royal Navy also played a role in provisioning allied armies whenever Britain joined a larger land coalition. Underpinning and motivating British policy in these years, and for decades afterward, was an extraordinary growth in overseas trade and new economic diversification at home, as England became a major entrepôt for the colonial trades in sugar, tobacco, calicoes, and other goods. This was reflected in the growth of London as a rival to Amsterdam in banking and stocks. Among other changes, the old royal charter monopoly companies—the Royal African Company, the Merchant Adventurers, the Muscovy Company, and several others—lost their special privileges as Parliament opened trade to the entire merchant class of Great Britain. The diplomatic role once played by these corporations was replaced by appointed ministers (ambassadors) posted abroad by the state, while the Royal Navy escorted convoys where armed merchantmen and private warship escorts once ploughed the waves. The lone exception to this trend was the East India Company (EIC). Beyond all that, however, a more fundamental trend was toward political stability on the home islands. This was finally achieved in England, the most important of the Three Kingdoms, with agreement on a peaceful and permanent Protestant succession under effective Parliamentary fiscal and political supremacy. It would take several decades more to accomplish stability in Scotland, and a full century more in Ireland, but by 1715 a new global power known as Great Britain was essentially secure in its island homeland. For events of this period concerning the island kingdoms of England and Scotland prior to 1707, see England, Scotland, and related cross-references. Great Condé (1621–1686). “Le Grande Condé.” Louis II de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien. At age 22 he presided at a spectacular victory over the Spanish tercios at Rocroi (May 19, 1643), one of the decisive battles of the final phase of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He won another hard fight during the closing years of the German war at Freiburg (August 5, 1644), and again over the Imperials at Lens (August 29, 1648). He turned against the monarchy during the latter Fronde, though he held aloof from the first of those civil wars and rebellions. That turn cost him greatly, as he fell from favor with the young Louis XIV. A term of rough imprisonment by Mazarin turned Condé fully against the court and king. During the last Fronde, he fought alongside foreign enemies of the king and against maréchal Turenne. For this act of treason he was sentenced to death in absentia. He lost badly at the Battle of the Dunes (June 4/14, 1658), though he did not enjoy full command of Spanish forces there and was overruled in arguing against offering battle. Upon receiving a promise of royal pardon as part of a general amnesty, he returned to France after the failure of the last twitchings of the Fronde rebellion. He lived in semi-seclusion in Burgundy to avoid further public disgrace and because he was out of favor at court. However, his king recalled him to the royal colors for the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Condé led a secondary French army into Franche-Comté in February 1668, against little resistance. He was carefully monitored during the campaign by his suspicious and still resentful royal master. 182

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Condé nevertheless was respected enough as a military man to review the king’s complex plan for his Dutch War (1672–1678), and he significantly revised it. Condé then headed an army that advanced into the United Provinces in support of the main force under Turenne. Condé was slightly wounded crossing the Rhine. In the fighting that followed, he complied uncomplainingly with heavy interference by Louvois. Even in old age (as judged by the standards of that era), Condé maintained an edge of aggression and an eye for tactical opportunity to engage and defeat enemy field armies. These characteristics also extended to the personal level: when forbidden by gout to wear riding boots, he still led several cavalry charges against the Allied rearguard during the opening hours of the bloody fight at Seneffe (August 11, 1674). While sometimes praised for his audacity in this fight, he might be fairly criticized for failure to take full advantage of his initial position. He also suffered appallingly high casualties. In 1675, Condé was forced to retire at age 54 by a combination of physical ailments that forced him off his horse and into a carriage, which made field command impossible. That year also saw the retirement of Montecuccoli and the death of Turenne. Great Elector. See Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg. Great Fire of London (September 2–6, 1666). See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Charles II. great gun. A heavy-caliber gun. On a warship, a carriage gun. See also carronade; Rates. Great League of Peace and Power. See Iroquois Confederacy. Great Northern War (1700–1721). “Third Northern War.” This prolonged conflict in the Baltic began just as most of the Great Powers of western Europe were maneuvering to engage in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The war in the north was the climactic clash in a long struggle for regional supremacy between Sweden and Russia, waged over delimitation of frontiers, control of north Germany and Ukraine, and the balance of power in the Baltic. It proved to be the definitive test of the reforms and personal talents of Peter I, the beginning of the end of Polish power and independence, and the death knell for Sweden’s “Stormakstid,” or “Great Power Period.” By the late 1690s, numerous Baltic powers—some old and others just emerging—were growing increasingly uneasy with peace. Denmark had never reconciled to the loss of Scania or its monopoly on the Sound Tolls. The Polish Commonwealth and Russia were alike surfacing from decades of distraction by serial wars in the south against rebellious Cossacks, hostile Tatars, and the now-receding Ottoman Empire. Brandenburg and Russia were both increasingly interested in seizing their own ports on the Baltic to enter the rich trades of that sea. Farther afield, Carlos II of Spain (r. 1665–1700) died without issue in 1700, leaving the Spanish succession undecided and everyone expecting and preparing for war in the west. In the 183

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interim, several older kings in the east who had grown used to peace died within a few years of each other. Jan Sobieski passed in June 1696 to be replaced by Elector Augustus II of Saxony, who was elected king of Poland in 1697. Ivan V (1666–1696), co-tsar with Peter, died in February 1696, freeing Peter of the last fetters on his aggressive designs. Christian V (1646–1699) died in August 1699, succeeded by Fredrik IV (1671–1730). Into this tinderbox of change another royal death tossed a burning match: a mere youth ascended the Swedish throne in April 1697 upon the premature death of the prudent and respected Karl XI. This boy-king, Karl XII, was still two months shy of his 15th birthday when he mounted the throne. Within two years, the opportunity to feast on his military and political inexperience would prove too much to resist for several of Sweden’s restive and resentful neighbors. No one expected a long war, let alone one that would last for over two decades, but that is what everyone got. The United Provinces and England were already united against France on land. At sea, they acted in concert as the “Maritime Powers,” despite being hard rivals for trade in a world where English ships were making increasing inroads at the expense of the Dutch. In the lead-up to the Great Northern War, these maritime allies sought to maintain the Baltic balance of power principally because their own sea power was dependent on naval imports from the Baltic, most importantly of masts and hemp. They also hoped to bring armies from Denmark and Sweden into the Grand Alliance that was reforming against France. With the Maritime Powers and Brandenburg neutral at best, Denmark was forced to seek allies in the east for any war against Sweden. It found a willing partner in Augustus II of Poland. In 1699, Peter I agreed to an anti-Swedish alliance with Augustus II and Fredrik IV, newly installed in Copenhagen. The deal was engineered by Johann Reinhold Patkul (1660–1707), a Baltic German who had spent some time in Swedish service. By this secret alliance, the three sovereigns declared an intention to wage a war of aggression leading to partition of the Swedish empire, in order to take advantage of the passing of the more formidable Karl XI and the youthful inexperience of the new Swedish king. Karl XII was still barely 17 when an alliance of all his regional enemies launched an unprovoked, but long-contemplated invasion of the outer provinces of his kingdom. The Danes sent an army into Schleswig-Holstein in 1699 to await the opening attack by Poland. The Poles moved into Livonia, which was only just emerging from a terrible famine and which Augustus intended to recover for his kingdom, along with other territories such as Moldavia, Wallachia, and Ducal Prussia. A surprise Polish-Saxon assault on Riga was repulsed in December 1699. In February, Augustus sent a small Saxon army of 5,000 men to seize Dünamunde, which they did on March 23rd (altogether, Saxony boasted a good and experienced Army of 26,000 men). Meanwhile, the Danes attacked across ducal Schleswig and into Holstein-Gottorp, with the long-term goal of recovering Scania, which had been lost to Sweden in 1658. On August 9/20 Russia declared war, opening a third front against Sweden (although, unknown to Peter, the Danes had already been knocked out of the war five days earlier). 184

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Karl XII now showed precocious strategic and diplomatic skills. He and his advisers secured support of the Maritime Powers for the status quo in Schleswig by promising to uphold the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697). Then, keenly focusing on the weakest of its three enemies, Sweden proceeded to knock Denmark out of the war with a bold amphibious operation. Over the protests of his naval commanders, Karl ordered the Swedish fleet to navigate the “Flinterend,” a dangerous passage between Sweden and the island of Sjælland (or Zealand). This enabled a landing of his army near Copenhagen in late July, followed by a quick advance on the city. The frightened Danish king agreed to exit the alliance and war by signing the Peace of Travendal (August 7/18, 1700). That permitted Karl to turn his army east, where it met and routed a much larger Russian force initially led by Peter, who had invaded Ingria in late October and was bombarding and besieging Narva with 35,000 men. The fight that ensued at Narva (November 19/30, 1700) in the midst of a snowstorm ended in a complete rout that dashed Peter’s hopes of annexing Ingria and Estonia. The sharp, even annihilating, victory for Karl at Narva enabled the Swedish monarch to relieve Riga, then under siege by Polish forces who had returned after initially being repelled. The siege was an inept affair, laid in without naval support and without the proper shot to fit the bore of the siege guns. Augustus was forced to abandon the effort to take Riga on September 18/29, 1700. Karl was about to embark on six years of nearly uninterrupted victories. Many believe that he turned away from Moscow too soon. Clearly, he underestimated Russia’s latent strength and the speed with which Peter would direct its recovery and military reform. Instead of marching on Moscow, Karl turned around to invade Poland and punish Augustus, the third of his enemies, confident that he could deal with Peter and Russia at a later time of his own choosing. It was one of the key decisions of a long war. Was there any rationale for it? Yes. In Poland and Lithuania his army had allies, supplies, and garrisons from which to draw reinforcements, and also political support. In the meantime, Smolensk boyars were defeated by Lithuanian lesser gentry at Olkieniki (November 9/19, 1700). The gentry then fought against thousands of rebellious serfs cut loose from masterless great estates. This was a sign of the social and political turmoil yet to come throughout the Baltic region, as a long Russian-Swedish war ensued alongside a Polish-Swedish war, as well as protracted and complex civil wars within the Polish Commonwealth and in Lithuania. During 1701 Karl Gustaf Rehnsköld swept Livonia of enemy forces and overran Courland, converting it into a protectorate of the Swedish empire. Rehnsköld was one of Karl XII’s principal lieutenants and his best general, as he had been also to Karl XI. It was not until the next year that Karl XII for the first time materially and personally contributed to a Swedish military victory, when 12,000 Swedes under his command handily defeated a force of 16,000 Saxons and Poles that Augustus most helpfully led into disaster at Kliszów (July 8/19, 1702). This victory crowned a campaign in which Karl and his father’s generals drove Augustus from Warsaw, captured the ancient capital at Krakow, and systematically devastated Polish and Saxon lands and villages. Such destruction had not been the habit or history of the Swedish Army in previous wars under 185

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Vasa kings, but for Karl XII it was both politically purposeful and rewarding, in terms of enforcing contributions. Over the winter, Augustus raised a fresh, but poorer-quality Saxon army. This smaller force of about 3,500 men was smashed by the Swedes at Pultusk on April 10/21, 1703, where Karl lost just 20 men, compared to 1,000 lost by Augustus. Karl’s ruthlessness and military success against the Saxons ensured that his candidate, Stanislaw I (Stanislas Leszczyniski) was crowned king of Poland in 1705. This deepened an extant split among the Polish nobility, already divided between a “Warsaw Confederation,” which supported Stanislaw, and a “Sandomierz Confederation” that supported Augustus. Civil war broke out in Poland, with Saxon and Swedish armies also involved. The Sandomierz faction declared war on Sweden on May 27, 1704. At the same time, the situation in Karl’s strategic rear in Lithuania was turning against him. The local szlachta allied with Peter, who agreed to send troops and money into Lithuania and Poland. His aim was to keep war going in Poland in order to tie down a large share of the Swedish Army. The strategy worked: Karl would continue to dominate Poland and Saxony militarily for another five years. During this hiatus, Peter rebuilt the Russian Army and scratch-built a new navy to challenge Sweden on the waters of the Baltic. Civil war continued in Poland, spilling over into Lithuania and Saxony as well. Stanislaw and Karl invaded Saxony in chase of the fleeing Augustus. At Fraustadt (February 2/13, 1706), a Russian and Saxon force (the latter hastily and principally comprised of foreign mercenaries) twice as large as the Swedish force that faced it was soundly defeated by Karl Gustaf Rehnsköld. After the battle, the Swedes ruthlessly and systematically massacred all Russian prisoners. When Dresden and Leipzig fell, Augustus sued for terms. He ultimately agreed to the humiliating Treaty of Altranstädt (September 13/24, 1706), by which he surrendered his claim to the Polish throne. Karl had achieved what he wanted by invading Poland, but his ally Stanislaw sat precariously on the throne in Warsaw, propped up only by Swedish bayonets. Worse, after several years of uninterrupted success in war, Karl did not comprehend the larger strategic situation in the region, the gathering strength of his many enemies, and the peril posed by military overextension of the Swedish Empire. Still, he was at the height of his power that summer, admired across Europe (and perhaps by too many historians dazzled by his time in the saddle). It was widely feared in the capitals and palaces of the Grand Alliance that Karl XII might intervene on the side of France in the War of the Spanish Succession, which appeared to be climaxing. To try to avoid this outcome, the Allies sent the great personage of the Duke of Marlborough to dissuade Karl from joining forces with Louis XIV. The two “great captains” of the era met at Altranstädt Castle, near Leipzig. Over a table strewn with maps of Russia, on which Karl was planning a new invasion, they struck a diplomatic compromise on several outstanding, but minor issues of policy toward the Holy Roman Empire. This led to the Second Treaty of Altranstädt (September 13/24, 1706). By one clause of that treaty, the Allies callously handed Johann Patkul over to Karl, to be executed for sedition. He died only after suffering medieval torments and savage cruelty 186

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upon the direct order of the Swedish king. Karl dealt with popular opposition with comparable ruthlessness. Karl had suffered many provocations and irritations at the hand of Peter of Russia. In 1701 Russian forces in Estonia and Livonia won a series of small, but sharp actions against Swedish garrisons and militia. On December 29, 1701/ January 9, 1702, 3,800 Swedes were surprised and smashed at Erastferon, the first indication that what happened at Narva would not necessarily be a reliable guide to future events in the war in the east. More Swedish setbacks followed across Livonia and Estonia, until all that was left were the larger fortified towns. At Hummelshof (July 18–19, 1702), 16,000 Russians overwhelmed a Swedish force about half that size, capturing all the Swedish guns. Other fights took place in Ingria. In late 1702, Peter took Nöteborg on the Neva. By the following spring, he controlled the whole course of the Neva and felt secure enough to start construction of St. Petersburg. Dorpat fell to the Russians in June 1704, and in August Peter at last captured Narva, where it all began. All this time, Karl and his main army were distracted and occupied by fighting in Poland. To take advantage of this fact, Peter sent Tatar and Cossack raiders deep into Poland to harass, terrify, and undermine the hold on power of Karl’s political ally, Stanislaw II. The raiders then scorched the earth in front of any possible Swedish advance across the northern plain into western Russia. All these facts preyed on Karl’s thinking. Marlborough left the talks at Altranstädt Castle impressed that Karl remained utterly fixated on a war of vengeance against the last eastern power to invade Sweden six years earlier. The English captain-general later commented that the visage of the king bristled with rage each time the tsar’s name was invoked. The “Lion of the North” soon lived up to Marlborough’s expectations. Free of enemies to the west, Karl turned all his guns and battalions toward Russia, that long-slumbering empire which was about to emerge from a hibernation of gnawing discontent to replace Sweden as the Great Power of the north. He was not wholly unprovoked. Peter had started the war, not Karl. And Karl knew that his little country and the peculiarities of the Swedish recruitment system meant that he could not long sustain a defensive effort. Would offense perhaps prove to be the best defense for Sweden? It is the best argument one may marshal for the decision Karl took to invade Russia in 1708. Peter’s interference in Polish affairs engorged the Swedish king with rage, which mounted even as Peter was busy constructing his new capital, St. Petersburg, disconcertingly close to the border of Swedish Karelia. There were other reasons for Karl’s wanting to attack Russia rather than sit with the army in Poland. Sweden’s Army was small and could not afford to engage in repeated positional warfare. Experience had also taught Karl not to believe in fortifications, behind which too many Swedish troops remained inactive and useless to him. From 1703, he therefore began to shut down small garrisons to concentrate men and resources. Similarly, when he took enemy strongpoints he ordered them dismantled, instead of moving into these fine, fortified defenses. Among other locales, he did this at Lwów (Lvov) in 1704, where he ordered over 160 captured big guns spiked or blown apart. In 1706, Karl had feinted into Russian territory before turning back to invade Saxony, in order to force Augustus to void his 187

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alliance with Peter at Altranstädt. With Saxony forced out of the war, Karl judged the time for such feints to be over, and the time to begin a major offensive with a concentrated army had arrived. On December 21, 1707/January 1, 1708, he fatefully crossed the frozen Vistula. It is commonly said that he did so with 24,000 infantry and 20,000 horse, the largest army he had yet assembled or commanded. More recent research suggests that his army numbered closer to 36,000. In either case, although manfor-man this was among the best armies in Europe, its numbers would prove woefully inadequate against the vast expanses of Russia and the even more severe logistical problems posed by that country. Passing through the Masurian forest and lake region, Karl crossed into Lithuania. Peter advanced to meet him, settling in behind fortifications at Grodno. Karl himself led 1,000 horse in a dramatic seizure of the Grodno bridge across the Niemen, easily brushing aside a larger Russian cavalry force. Peter once again fled just hours before the arrival of a Swedish army. His own army was soon reeling from one small skirmish after another that was fought and lost to the Swedes. Peter not only withdrew his garrisons from forward Baltic positions at Dorpat and Pskov, but forced out whole civilian populations as well. This was a herald of wars to come in the east, of denial of human as well as matériel resources to an advancing enemy. The tactic involved the mass deportation of civilians to refugee and labor camps, thereby denying that enemy potential spies and collaborators while scorching everything of use in his path—food, fodder, shelter, and if necessary, also people. On the other side, the Swedes behaved toward the Russian population with the same ruthless disregard for decency with which they had treated Poles and Lithuanians earlier. Villages were burned, livestock was slaughtered, and protesting peasants or other resisters were executed on the spot. By mid-summer 1708, the Swedes were encamped outside Minsk, resting and restocking grain wagons before starting the final leg of their advance to Moscow. Karl crossed the Berezina in force at the end of June, then quickly broke though an improvised Russian line along the eastern bank of the Bibitch River. Now the great tyrant ruling all military operations in Russia took over, as Swedish logistics broke down. Peter’s scorched earth tactics left the Swedes at the point of starvation (and pushed many peasants past it). Karl might have considered retreating, but there is no evidence that he did. Instead, he arranged with a Cossack hetman, Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa-Koledinsky, to rendevous in Ukraine. Mazepa promised to have large stocks of food waiting for the Swedes, along with an allied host of Cossacks. On August 5/16 Karl turned southward to cross the Dnieper. Peter sent riders out to burn everything in front of the marching Swedes, while shadowing their movement with his own army. A small battle was fought at Dobry (August 29/September 9), which only slightly reduced the numbers available to each sovereign. Karl’s senior officers now advised him to pull out of Russia and into safe winter quarters, but he was full of hate and still deluded about what awaited in Ukraine. His reckless impatience for forcing battle did not permit him even to wait for a relief and supply column lumbering south from Livonia to catch up with his main body. The column was 188

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only a few days’ march away—about 60 miles—under command of Karl’s senior subordinate, General Loewenhaupt. Peter struck into the column at Lesnaia on September 28/October 9, with nearly 6,800 dragoons and 4,800 infantry also mounted on the way to the fight like dragoons. The troops of the Swedish column fought back desperately but were ultimately forced to bury their artillery, burn all the unhitched powder and supply wagons, and ride away in fear of their lives. Of 11,000 would-be reinforcements in the column, barely 6,000 escaped to join Karl’s main army. Farther north, a smaller Swedish force of just 3,000 feinted toward the Russian imperial capital. The maneuver failed to draw Peter toward it, and that army was instead destroyed. The Swedes in Ukraine were now on their own. Worse, their king’s virtue as an instinctive warrior, which had served him so well until 1706, was now severely eroding Swedish military professionalism. Impelled by the need for allies, food, and shelter, and by the will of their king, the Swedes staggered forward to what would prove their doom in Ukraine. Karl was unaware that Peter had already begun to smash the rebellious Cossacks and burn out their various sich. There would be few left to resupply and reinforce the Swedes once they arrived in the south. The main Cossack force controlled by Mazepa was destroyed in a great massacre of 6,000 Cossacks and their families by Peter’s men, when Prince Menshikov (1673–1729) overran and sacked the Cossack capital and sich of Baturin (November 2/13, 1708). Small groups of survivors scattered in desperate flight across the steppe, with only a few reaching the Swedes. The attackers destroyed or took with them a vast depot of supplies that had been readied for the Swedes. Peter bribed other Cossacks, so that when Mazepa finally joined Karl on October 28th/November 8th, he had with him just 2,000 to 3,000 men and no extra supplies. On November 4/15, the Swedes forced a crossing of the Desna against Russians firing from the far bank. In their operational rear, cutting them off physically and politically from hope of relief and reinforcements, a pro-Stanislaw army 10,000 strong was defeated by a comparable force of pro-Augustus troops in a bloody engagement at Koniecpol (November 21, 1708). As the Swedish southward march continued, Cossacks and Tatars—some loyal to the tsar’s purse and others fearful of his brutal threats—harassed the fair-haired columns of invaders as the first snows swirled about them. The Russians stayed so close along the flanks that the Swedes were compelled to forage in force, which is not an effective way to locate or requisition food and fodder. Outposts of Swedes sent to find food or looking for it on their own were cut off and killed to a man. On one occasion, Karl insisted on marching in force to rescue a Swedish detachment rather than ordering it to come to his camp at Romni, where the Swedes had carved out rough winter shelters. This effort cost him 3,000 men who died from the cold along the way, some freezing upright in their saddles overnight and discovered only in the morning. Survivors arrived at Gadiatz to discover that Russians had already routed the outpost and razed the town. While Karl was chasing this phantom across the snow, Peter attacked and overran the under-protected Swedish camp at Romni. Of the 40,000 men who 189

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went into winter quarters there, barely 20,000 survived the winter to see the spring thaw of 1709. Fully 10% of those were crippled from frostbite that had taken noses, ears, fingers, toes, hands, and feet. Still more were militarily useless from hunger and depression. Once again the Swedish generals urged Karl to withdraw, and once more he refused. He called instead for reinforcements to travel to him from his territories in the north. Couriers were sent to Poland especially, urgently calling for more men to join Karl in Ukraine. But Stanislaw II was unable to send help, because he was himself caught up in heavy fighting. The vulture armies of the other Baltic powers were already circling over what they believed was the ripening carcass of the Swedish Empire. Nor were many Cossack allies available, for the Zaporozhians had also defected to the Russians in May 1709. Upon hearing that news, Karl had no choice but to look even farther south, to the Sublime Porte and the hope of Ottoman intervention against Russia. But no help came from the south, either. True to his highly aggressive nature, and in the face of overwhelming odds against success, Karl decided to besiege a small Ukrainian fortress town. The climax of the campaign thus came in the fields and works in front of Poltava on July 8, 1709. That battle utterly destroyed the Swedish army in Ukraine and drove Karl personally into years of exile within the Ottoman Empire. Poltava thus decided the outcome of the Great Northern War and was a major turning point in Baltic and world history. Badly wounded even before the fight at Poltava, Karl escaped in ill health with about 1,500 men. He fled to Moldavia, inside the Ottoman Empire, where he encamped at Bender, along the Dniester. He spent almost five years there, not being allowed to depart until late 1714. He spent most of that time in futile encouragement of the sultan, calling for him to attack Russia in the south while Karl sent couriers north with instructions for fast-failing Swedish forces and allies in Poland and Swedish-Germany. Meanwhile, Peter finished the job of reducing Sweden to a minor Baltic power and compelling the Great Powers of Europe to accept Russia as its permanent replacement within the balance of power system that emerged in 1713–1714, upon the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. With Karl encamped at Bender his fragile alliances fell apart. Within a month of Poltava, Augustus re-entered Poland with 11,000 Saxons. Shortly thereafter, he forged a fresh alliance with Peter. Denmark pounced next, landing an amphibious force in Scania while Peter personally opened a renewed siege of Riga. The Danes were soundly defeated, even in Karl’s absence at Hälsingborg (February 28/March 10, 1710), a battle that finally decided the issue of permanent possession of Scania. In 1709, however, Peter signed treaties with Poland, Denmark, and Prussia, all of which recognized his territorial claims against Sweden. Peter then set out to secure these territories in fact, attacking into Livonia and Estonia. In 1710 he recaptured the Baltic forts he had been forced to abandon in 1708, during the first days of the Swedish invasion of Russia. He took Viborg in April and Riga, at last, in July. The remainder of Sweden’s provinces along the eastern Baltic shore succumbed by the end of September. Through all this, Karl continued to seek Ottoman intervention in the war. He was aided in this ambition by Peter’s earlier, unrelated attempt to seize Azov 190

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from the Ottomans and his evident and long-standing desire to establish the Russian Empire along the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas. The “RussoOttoman War” (1710–1713) resulted. Filled with hubris by his victory over Karl and in Estonia, Peter was overconfident in approaching this new theater of war in the south. Upon Karl’s vehement urging, the sultan declared war on Russia on October 29/November 9, 1710. For the first time, but by no means the last, a Russian tsar tried to play the “pan-Slavism” card by proclaiming that his intention was to liberate south Slavs from the “Ottoman yoke.” In 1711 Peter called upon Orthodox Slavs across the Balkans to revolt against Ottoman rule. The ruse did not work. Instead, the Ottomans trapped his army along the Prut River in early July 1711. Peter escaped a battle of annihilation only by surrendering Azov and Taganrog and razing his southern border fortresses, which he did in 1712. He did not keep his promise to evacuate Russian troops from Poland-Lithuania, however, which utterly frustrated Karl. War with the Ottomans sputtered along the frontier for another two years without significant military action, or political or diplomatic fallout. It was ended by agreement on a 25-year armistice in the “Peace of Adrianople” (July 1713). In the meantime, a Swedish army defeated a Danish-Saxon army at Gadesbusch (December 20/31, 1712). However, the Swedes were compelled to surrender after enduring a four-month siege at Tønning (May 1713). On January 21/February 1, 1713, the sultan tired of the royal interloper from the far north and his armed camp tucked inside the Ottoman Empire, and sent an army to expel the Swedes. After some small skirmishes in which barely more than a dozen Swedes and about three dozen Ottoman soldiers were killed, the dispirited camp surrendered. Karl had bent to a vastly superior force, for once. He was held in the most gentle captivity until allowed to leave the following year. He rode north across Germany in secret and in disguise, but eager as ever to continue his war in Germany and Poland, and against Russia. Peter spent that summer campaigning to take more territory from the Swedes, this time in Karelia and Finland. His troops took Helsingfors and Åbo and occupied Helsinki that May, subtracting another province from the tax and recruitment tallies formerly collected by Sweden. By 1714 Peter had captured and occupied all the Baltic territories of the Swedish Empire, from Livonia to Estonia and Karelia. His “Admiral of the Baltic Fleet,” Fedor Apraxin, also defeated the Swedish Navy at Hangö, or Gangut (July 27/August 7, 1714), off the southern tip of Finland. That victory established Russian naval domination of the Baltic and opened Finland, and indeed Sweden itself, to Russia’s amphibious raids and coastal bombardments. In 1716, Peter even assumed temporary command of British, Danish, Dutch, and Russian fleets allied against the hard-pressed Swedes. In 1717 he visited Paris, where he made clear his intention that Russia would displace Sweden within the European balance of power system and as the dominant Baltic power. This bold proposal reflected new facts on the ground in the east and atop the waters of the Baltic Sea. It was therefore readily accepted by the other Great Powers. With Karl absent for so long, Poland and Denmark made serious gains at Swedish expense, as did Hanover and Brandenburg-Prussia. All those states 191

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rejoined or first entered the Great Northern War by 1714. Sweden was reduced to holding Wismar and Straslund on the Baltic coast of Germany by the time Karl finally made his way back north, just in time to receive a Brandenburg declaration of war in May 1715. Hanover then attacked Bremen and Verden in October. Karl rushed to Straslund, where he managed to hold out until December 1715, occasionally fighting with his old brilliance. However, he was ultimately forced to abandon that fortress city. Returning to Sweden later that month for the first time since leaving for war in 1702, Karl started to implement military and administrative reforms he had planned while encamped at Bender. These concentrated on making the Swedish artillery arm more mobile. But his refusal to make a real peace, and the consequent press of military affairs, soon called him away from Sweden once more. Karl scraped together an army from a war-weary and disheartened kingdom, and moved to attack the Danes in Norway in 1717. He campaigned in Norway again during 1718. Seemingly not content with his extant enemies, Karl provoked Great Britain to declare war on Sweden by attempting to block British access to the Baltic trades vital to the Royal Navy and to prosperity, and by foolishly supporting the already hopeless Jacobite cause. Karl was shot and killed while fighting at the siege of Fredrikshald (Fredriksten) in Norway on November 30/December 11, 1718. The next year, a new, fully modern Russian battlefleet built by Peter over the course of the Great Northern War arrived off the Swedish coast. It bombarded several harbor towns, an affront to the national homeland that could not have been imagined in Stockholm 20 years earlier. The next year Peter’s northern navy won a significant victory at Grengham (July 16/27, 1720). That caused Sweden to finally sue for peace with at least the lesser of its carrion-eating neighbors. With western Europe already enjoying the peace that followed the settlement at Utrecht in 1713, eastern European powers were also finally ready to settle. The anti-Swedish coalition also began to break apart in face of the realization that Peter’s Russia had replaced Karl’s Sweden—not just as a member of the club of Great Powers, but also as the main predator of the north. Concern for the regional balance of power if Sweden were to be further reduced to Russia’s advantage began to tell against the urge to carve up and divide Sweden’s remaining provinces. Great Britain, in particular, was concerned about Russian naval plans in the Baltic. In this concern, royal interest in endowing Hanover with a greater Baltic naval presence was matched by perceived national interests. At the diplomatic table, Sweden thus regained some lands from Poland, which was a major loser in the Great Northern War. In the Treaty of Vienna (January 5, 1719), Austria, Great Britain, and Saxony formed a secret pact to try to hem Russia within its old borders. Sweden accepted and confirmed territorial losses to Hanover and Prussia in separate treaties known together as the Peace of Stockholm, agreed in 1719 and again in February 1720. The rich cities and bishoprics of Bremen and Verden were ceded to Hanover. In the second treaty, Sweden retained Wismar, Straslund, and a portion of Pomerania, largely thanks to French mediation. Western Pomerania was ceded to Prussia, along with Stettin. Sweden agreed to the Peace of Frederiksborg 192

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(June 14, 1720) with Denmark, accepting the loss of yet more territory and agreeing to pay the Sound Tolls after a hiatus of some 70 years. Yet the treaty was actually something of a defeat for the Danes, who lost Wismar and Rügen and gained only a minor indemnity after 10 years of fighting. Sweden intended to continue fighting to recover Livonia and Estonia, and even anticipated receiving military aid from the Treaty of Vienna powers to push back the Russian frontier, but no such aid was offered in the end. Sweden finally bent to superior force and agreed to the Peace of Nystad (August 30/September 10, 1721), which ended the Russian-Swedish portion of the Great Northern War. In this treaty, Karl XII’s successors—his sister and German brother-in-law—confirmed Peter’ possession of Ingermanland, Estonia, Livonia, and Kexholm. Sweden retained Finland, except for Viborg and part of the Karelian peninsula, and certain islands, from which Russia was required to evacuate its army of occupation. Russia’s victory in the Great Northern War was so complete that it was permanently established as Sweden’s replacement as a Great Power in the European system and as the dominant power in the Baltic. See also galley; pike. Suggested Reading: Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (2000); S. Oakley, War and Power in the Baltic, 1560–1790 (1992).

Great Plague (1666). See Charles II; Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667). Great Powers. The major powers of the period were Austria, China, France, Great Britain (as England until 1707), the Mughal Empire, the Ottoman Empire (to c. 1739), the United Provinces (to c. 1715), Sweden (to 1709), and Russia (from 1709). Brandenburg-Prussia was on the rise, but it was still a smallish power in 1715. Spain was in decline for most of the 17th century, succumbing to multiple foreign invasions and finally to the Bourbon interest in France during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). It enjoyed a significant military revival during the mid-18th century, but probably should not be numbered among the Great Powers after 1700. great ship. In the 17th century, the largest class of ships-of-the-line. Great Storm (November 26–27/December 7–8, 1703). A major storm that destroyed 12 English warships and killed nearly 1,500 Royal Navy crew. Other warships were scattered far and wide over the Atlantic, North Sea, and Baltic. Additionally, many dozens of large London merchantmen were destroyed, along with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of smaller fishing vessels. Hundreds of buildings were completely destroyed, and thousands more badly damaged. Altogether, as many as 12,000–15,000 may have been killed in Great Britain. Great Turkish War. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). Green Standard Army. Reform of the Qing military system by the Kangxi emperor during the last years of the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681)

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led to a fundamental division of military administration and function between two branches of the Qing Army. The Eight Banners of the old Banner system imported to China by the Manchus were retained as a guard force of the dynasty, out of which Chinese and Mongol troops were progressively transferred during the 18th century until most Banner troops were once again ethnic Manchus. The main Chinese defense force was the Green Standard Army, numbering about 600,000 troops for most of the 18th century. Its swollen ranks were housed in thousands of small garrisons and frontier outposts—some as tiny as a few dozen or fewer isolated and lonely men. The largest Green Standard Army units in peacetime numbered about 5,000 men. These facts of fragmentation and dispersal reflected the start of nearly 200 years of relative internal stability under the Qing, but they also indicate the dynasty’s distrust of concentrations of potential military rebels. The Green Standard Army was administered by a “Board of War” that dispensed resources from central revenues of the Qing Empire and was responsible for food, pay, housing, and related tasks, but not for operational command. This body was located inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, where it operated under close watch by emperors and their top military advisors. No military action could be taken by Green Standard Army troops without central authorization. The main role of this vast Army was to defend Imperial frontiers from external threats. Most internal threats to the regime were expected to be handled by companies of the Eight Banners, which were politically more reliable—in the eyes of successive Qing emperors. grenades. Hand-thrown gunpowder bombs, or grenades, were used in China from the earliest days of gunpowder weapons. In Europe, the first cast-iron hand bombs were used in the early 16th century, at the battle of Arles (1536). Half a century later, hand-held guns or mortars were used to launch grenades, giving rise to the military specialist known as a grenadier. The Spanish used over 35,000 hand-thrown grenades against the French in a single siege in 1656. Thereafter, the technology spread until it became universal. The stubby hand mortar remained a standard weapon in several European armies into the mid-17th century. In 1657 the Swedes introduced a grenade fired using a hollow rod filled with powder that fitted the barrel of a standard musket. Firing the gun lit the incendiary fuse inside the rod, though the small attached grenade did not always launch before it exploded. During the first decades of the 18th century the British and other armies used detachable cup launchers that fitted to the stud used to lock bayonets. At mid-century, however, the British reverted to a mid-16th century design which mounted the launcher on a distinct, stubby handgun. The French had a unique mid-17th century design that used a spiked butt to brace against the ground. An early 18th century grenade was a hollow glass or cast-iron bomb weighing close to two pounds when filled with black powder. They were used to kill, of course, but also as small incendiaries effective against gabions protecting closein saps. At the end of the 17th century the two-man, grenade-launching Coehoorn mortar rose in popularity. In all cases, musket-fired grenades fell from 194

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military favor after c.1750, probably due to too many deaths and injuries from misfires in the barrels. Hand-held grenade guns, as opposed to hand bombs per se, remained out of favor until the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). In war at sea, grenades tended to be of smaller size and less incendiary. Because fuse technology was not scientific in this era, and because fuses burned at different rates in humid than in dry conditions, grenades thrown onto the deck or into the hold of a ship could sometimes be retrieved and hurled back. Pirates especially liked to use grenades when boarding a ship whose crew continued to resist, and they developed specialized grenades unique to their profession. Rather than filling a globe with black powder, pirates sometimes used tarred rags as the filler in their grenades. When ignited, the grenade gave off an acrid black smoke that screened boarders from the defending crew. Pirate grenades were usually made from cheap ceramic globes rather than the hollow iron globes favored in military ordnance for their greater shrapnel effect. See also carcass; cavalier de tranche; mines/mining; pell-mell. grenadiers. Originally, troops specializing in use of grenades and making breach assaults. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) use of specialized grenade troops fell out of favor among European armies, but units of grenadiers were retained nevertheless as highly trained and resourceful elite soldiers. Before 1771 every British battalion had a grenadier company that was utilized as a flank company. Later, these companies were detached and assembled into all-grenadier battalions. See also assault. Grenzer. Austrian frontier troops. They were mostly Balkan in origin, irregulars who wore local costume rather than formal uniforms. They manned fortified villages, blockhouses, and watchtowers along the Karlstadt border and the Windische border. Most remained loyal to Austria during the great Hungarian rebellion led by Ferenc Rákóczi. Some Grenzer mutinied later, in 1735. See also petite guerre. grog. Diluted liquor, usually rum. “Seven-water” grog was a term of contempt among seamen for overly diluted liquor, or its metaphorical equivalent. guérite. In 17th-century fortification: a stone sentry box extending outward over a defensive ditch or moat, or sited on top of a rampart in angles formed by the bastion. These were necessary to compensate for views of outlying ground that were blocked by the thickness of the parapet from the eyes of sentries walking the banquette. Around the middle of the 18th century mobile wooden guérites began to replace stone boxes, so that attackers were not automatically guided to an understanding of the location of salients. guerre de cabinet. Running military affairs from a great distance, at the ministerial or even royal level. guerre de commerce. See guerre de course. 195

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guerre de course. “War of raids.” Commerce raiding by naval forces and privateers. Its characteristic form was targeting enemy and neutral merchants rather than seeking decisive battle in a fleet action, and as importantly, protecting friendly convoys and protecting the worldwide trade of the vast overseas French Empire. The French adopted guerre de course as their main strategy because of a naval and fiscal crisis they experienced during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). As later happened to the German Kriegsmarine after Jutland, and again from 1939–1945, battlefleet weakness in face of a superior enemy convinced the French Navy to abandon guerre d’escadre c. 1695 in favor of guerre de course in the North Sea and Atlantic. The French made an effort to retain a battlefleet in the Mediterranean, however, and based it at Toulon. Some attribute the switch to a failure of command imagination. Following the lead of famed naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, they maintain that the French effort was ineffective because no campaign of commerce raiding could have significant strategic or war-winning consequences. More likely, the shift resulted from the growing superiority of opposing English and Dutch allied navies and a French calculation, which in fact proved to be correct, that severe harm could be inflicted on the enemy via guerre de course. The change was actually triggered by crop failure and a famine in France in 1693–1694, which brought on a major fiscal and political crisis. Guerre de course took account of France’s extended coastlines on two oceans, the huge expense of war at sea, and the demonstrated superiority of ships and crew training and skill in Anglo-Dutch battlefleets. Most importantly, it recognized that French security depended far more on armies than navies, and put the most resources into the former, including using them as coastal defense forces against potential amphibious raids. Even Vauban endorsed the new policy. From 1695 France lent more direct and official support to privateers and leased royal warships—fully loaded with provisions, cannon, powder, and shot—to armateurs at favorable rates. By the end of the war this resulted in the astonishing outcome of French warships, royal and private, capturing or sinking over 4,000 British vessels, as well as many more Dutch and neutral ships. This significantly contributed to the British and Dutch mercantile classes pressing their respective governments to make peace. France resumed a naval strategy of guerre de course during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Once again, the Allies were forced to devote ever larger numbers of warships to convoy escort duty to counter French cruisers and cruiser squadrons. The date of assumption of this strategy is in dispute. Older histories say it took place after Barfleur-La Hogue, during the Nine Years’ War, and simply began again immediately upon the outbreak of the Spanish war. Some more recent works instead date abandonment of the idea of a main French battlefleet only to the siege of Toulon in 1707. In either case, from 1688 to 1713 French privateers, royal squadrons, and individual cruisers captured over 12,000 Allied prizes altogether. Despite these huge losses occasioned by French cruising warfare, naval historians remain divided over the efficacy of guerre de course as a potential war-winning strategy. It is noteworthy that Germany adopted a similar strategy of mercantile attrition against the Royal Navy and its 196

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allies in 1917, and again from 1939. The truth, at least for this period, probably lies somewhere in the middle. The French ultimately lost the protracted naval war fought from 1688 to 1713 (interrupted from 1698–1701), but the huge economic, political, and psychological costs they inflicted on their enemies significantly improved the shape of the final settlement achieved by France. guerre d’escadre. “war of squadrons” or “war of fleets.” Naval strategy and maneuvers that sought fleet engagements, as opposed to commerce raiding (guerre de course). Once it lost the ship-building race with its more skilled enemies, who generally also had superior ships, the French Navy after 1695 abandoned fleet actions in northern waters in favor of an exclusive preference for commerce raiding. French fleets still supported diversionary or secondary amphibious operations in Ireland (and in Sicily), and they operated in support of some land campaigns, as they would again a century later for Napoleon. Two centuries later, Alfred Thayer Mahan criticized the French for abandoning guerre d’escadre and thereby losing, in his view, the great and putatively decisive contest for “command of the sea.” However, given Louis XIV’s shrinking fiscal resources and prior and more consequential commitments along his land frontiers, this shift to guerre de course likely was more prudent and strategically sound than Mahan and many French nationalist historians later accepted. See also Barfleur-La Hogue (1692); Dutch Navy; fireships; fleet in being; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Royal Navy; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). guerre guerroyante. Small-scale, but intense raiding and ambushes waged by widely dispersed troops, usually within a border or frontier zone that neither side fully controlled. This style of warfare often revolved around control of local forts or other strongpoints. It did not involve large battles of encounter or other set-piece actions between concentrated armies. See also Sivaji Bhonsle; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). guerilla war. See partisans; Peter I; petite guerre. guinea. A gold coin minted from precious metals originally brought out of West Africa (“Guinea”) to the world market by the trans-Saharan slave trade, and later by ship-bound Portuguese explorers and traders. Guineas partly displaced silver coins in wide use. During the 17th and 18th centuries, they served as an effective international monetary standard. They were replaced in this role by a formal gold standard after the Napoleonic Wars. gun carriages. See arsenal; artillery; artillery train; cannon; garrison carriage; great gun; limber; mortar; quoin; sap; shot; siege park; Top Arabacs; trail; truck. gun deck. See decks. gunner. A skilled artillery man. Alternately, an assistant to the master gunner on a warship. 197

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Gunner’s Mark. See gunner’s rule. gunner’s quadrant. A right-angled instrument held in the mouth of a gun as it was raised, until a plumb line showed the correct muzzle elevation for the estimated range to target. gunner’s rule. Invented in England in the early 17th century, this slide rule aided gunners in finding the proper range, weight of shot, and size of charge. The 1146 mark on the rule became generally known as the “Gunner’s Mark.” gunnery. See artillery; broadside; drill; fortification; galley; gunner’s rule; gunner’s quadrant; flintlock firearms; siege warfare; shot. gun port. A small door cut in the side of a ship to permit firing of cannon closer to the waterline of an enemy vessel. They had outer doors that were shut against the sea when the gun was recessed. gun tackle. On a warship, the tackle rigged to a ship’s gun and used to run it out after firing.

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H Habsburgs. The great dynastic house founded in Swabia in 1153. The dynasty expanded—as often by marriage as by war—to rule large parts of Europe from 1282 to 1918, including much of the Balkans and Germany, as well as Italy and Spain. From their core empire in Austria and Spain, they fought the Valois and Bourbons of France, the Ottoman sultans, and Protestant princes in Germany and northern Europe. In 1555 the succession divided into Austrian and Spanish branches, representing the two great centers of Catholic power in Europe. For another 150 years, this family alliance—which did not always cooperate closely or well—faced a shifting core coalition that included German Protestant princes, the kings of France, the Ottomans, and (despite Habsburg championship of Catholicism) sometimes also popes, who recalled that an army under Charles V had sacked Rome in 1527 and that the Habsburgs had starved the Papal States into submission from 1556–1557. Little linked the vast Habsburg lands except a union of crowns: they shared no single army or navy; no common language, economy, or currency; no uniform code of law; and after 1517 and the success of the Protestant Reformation, no common faith. For those reasons and others, an anti-Habsburg coalition won the Thirty Years’ War, and the Dutch “Beggars” won the Eighty Years’ War; both concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Spain subsequently accepted defeat in the Franco-Spanish War of 1635–1659 with the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). Spain was lost by the Habsburgs to the Bourbons, a defeat confirmed at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also Anti-Habsburg War (1703–1711); artillery fortress; Austrian Empire; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Blenheim, Battle of (August 2/13, 1704); Buda, siege of (June 17–September 2, 1668); Hofkriegsrat; Imperial Army; Karlowitz, Peace of (January 26, 1699); Kuruc; Leopold I, of Austria (1640–1705); Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690); Louis XIV (1638–1715); Militargrenze; Mohács, Battle of (August 12, 1687); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735); Rastadt (Rastatt), Treaty of (February 24/March 7,

Hadiach, Treaty of

1714); Royal Hungary; St. Gotthard, Battle of (August 1, 1664); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683); war finance. Hadiach, Treaty of (September 1658). See Cossacks; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Hadjús. See Haiduks. Hague, Treaty of (1709). See Barrier Treaty, First. Haiduks. Hungarian “marauders,” or with more flattery, “emancipated peasants.” A style of infantry that originated in Hungary. They became famous in Poland, where they formed the core infantry of the Polish Army from 1569–1633. They were nearly exclusively musketeers, with a front of pikemen. In combat, Polish cavalry detached troopers to guard these infantry. Whenever this cavalry screen failed or fled, Haiduks were left utterly exposed on the eastern prairie to Cossack or Tatar vengeance. Military reforms that followed losses to Sweden in the early 17th century signaled terminal decline for the all-firearms Haiduks. They lingered as ceremonial troops at Polish courts into the 18th century. The last served as mere decorations in the palace guards of wealthy Polish nobles. half-moon (demi-lune). See ravelin. half-pay. A method of retaining naval officers in peacetime by providing them with limited income as a form of retainer. The Royal Navy introduced it for admirals only in 1668, at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). During the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), captains of First and Second Rates were added to the half-pay list. In 1675, First- and Second-Rate masters and commanders were included. Most officers remained excluded, forced to spend their peacetime years in merchantmen. Halmstadt, Battle of (August 18, 1676). “Fyllebro.” See Scanian War (1674–1679). Hälsingborg, Battle of (February 28/March 10, 1710). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). handy. A ship that was easily worked and maneuverable. “Unhandy” described a difficult, cantankerous ship that was clumsy and hard to maneuver. hanger. A short, curved sword, so named because it originally hung from a belt at the waist. Infantry retained hangers into the 1740s, when some began to abandon them in favor of carrying just a bayonet, employed in the new Prussian drill style. Hangers were formally abolished as an infantry weapon in the British Army in 1768. A naval version was hardly distinguishable from a cutlass. 200

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Hangö, Battle of (July 27/August 7, 1714). “Gangut.” See Apraxin, Fedor; Great Northern War (1700–1721). Han-Martial. See Banner system. Hanover. An important, but not dominant, north German state, nominated to be an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in 1692 and becoming one in fact in 1710. Its ruler became King George I of England following a union of crowns (though, importantly, not a pooling of sovereignty) in 1714. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Rastadt, Treaty of (1714); Scanian War (1674–1679); Stockholm, Peace of (February 1, 1720). hardtack. See rations. haul close. On a warship or other sailing vessel, or with regard to an entire fleet or convoy, to steer—tack and wear—as near the direction of the prevailing wind as the ship would go and sails would allow. The Royal Navy in this period generally close-hauled seven points to the wind. See also evolutions; station; weatherly. haul wind. On a warship or other sailing vessel, to change course into the prevailing wind. haxo casemate. See casemate. heave to. To stop a ship’s forward momentum by backing some or all of the sails. heavy infantry. See infantry. hetman (otaman). Polish Commonwealth armies were commanded by hetmans, a quasi-feudal military office held for life and enjoying wide powers. Given wide reliance on contributions, the office was highly lucrative. Hetmans participated in politics, usually as a potential rival to a weak monarch or as a rally man for the opposition. Poland and Lithuania (before their constitutional union) each had a Grand Hetman nominally in charge of all military operations. In fact, these senior officers were restricted to giving loose strategic direction. With a Polish army on the march or during a siege, a Field Hetman made all tactical and operational decisions. Höchstädt I, Battle of (September 20, 1703). Maximilian Emanuel joined his Bavarian army with a French army under Villars. The two quarreled so badly over command decisions and distribution of contributions that Villars was relieved and ordered back to Versailles. Before he could depart, the two commanders led a combined Franco-Bavarian force of 23,000 against 18,000 Imperial troops under Count Limburg Styrum. The battle was confused, especially on the Imperial side. French and Bavarian casualties were light, but masses of men were killed as the Imperial lines broke. Over 50% of Imperial 201

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troops present at the battle were killed or wounded. Höchstädt I thus ended as a massively bloody fight which cost over 12,000 total casualties, out of about 40,000 men engaged on all sides. Höchstädt II, Battle of (August 13, 1704). A common continental reference for the battle most British historians call Blenheim. Hofkriegsrat. Imperial or “Court War Council” of the Holy Roman Empire. It was established in 1556, but its role evolved over the next two centuries. At the maximum, it controlled 25,000 Imperial troops by the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). These were mostly called up from the “armed provinces” of the Empire, and thus were actually controlled by the major electoral princes of Bavaria, Brandenburg, and Saxony. After the war, the Hofkriegsrat in Vienna evolved as the central administrative body for military affairs in all Habsburg lands, however physically or culturally disconnected they might be. This made it a central institution of a very much decentralized Austrian Empire, overseeing war finance, officer appointments, and so forth. As with some other armies of this era, the practice of proprietary recruitment of regiments by their colonel limited Hofkriegsrat control over the quality of troops and training. Montecuccoli was appointed president in 1664. Ernst Starhemberg was named president in 1691, partly as a reward for successful defense of the capital during the siege of Vienna (1683). Prince Eugene of Savoy was the most important president of the Hofkriegsrat, introducing several major reforms of the Imperial Army early in the new century. These included an end to the purchase of officer commissions, establishment of a modest magazine system, and improvements in living conditions and pay for ordinary soldiers. There was a separate Austrian Hofkriegsrat at Graz, which oversaw Grenzer and other border troops along the Windische border and the Karlstadt border. Holmes’ Bonfire (August 9/19, 1666). See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); St. James’ Day Fight (1666). Holmes, Robert (1622–1692). English admiral. See also Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674); St. James’ Day Fight (1666). Holowczyn, Battle of (July 2/14, 1708). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Holy League (Sacra Ligua). See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). Holy Roman Empire. At the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the Holy Roman Empire was a respected and still-valued constitutional system governing parts of Germany. Yet it lacked the essential apparatus and authority of the new national states that had emerged, or were rapidly evolving, from older dynastic patchwork territories in Spain, France, England, and even Austria and Russia. Instead, in Germany some 300 major and minor princes—both secular and 202

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religious—or imperial towns and cities reigned as sovereign over petty domains. A few larger states such as Bavaria and Brandenburg were effectively wholly independent, and an emasculated emperor and imperial legal system retained only titles and fading prestige. Hundreds of small armies, or at least palace guards, weakened Germany’s defenses, threatened general stability, strained finances and the development of commerce with redundant tariffs and excise taxes, and choked internal trade with far too many road and river tolls. Along Germany’s borders with major powers such as Sweden and France, minor princes and free cities were subservient to foreign interests and masters out of fear of occupation or after accepting handsome bribes. In the 1670s, for example, six out of eight Imperial electors were in the pay and pocket of Louis XIV. Tens of thousands of ordinary Germans also exchanged military service for French gold. Within this rickety constitutional order and archaic military structure, Austria and Brandenburg increasingly competed for dominance over lesser German entities during the second half of the 17th century. Among the larger German states, Bavaria was so entirely hostile to Austria and so closely tied to France that it effectively became a vassal state of the court at Versailles. Saxony was drawn into dynastic wars in Poland and the east. Brandenburg was concerned with the Swedish occupation of parts of northern Germany, while Palatinate proved incapable of self-defense against French armies which repeatedly marauded over its territory, conducting executions of villages in search of contributions or methodically razing towns and fields, as was done most notably and destructively during the devastation of the Palatinate (1688–1689). The Palatinate also had to support Imperial and Allied armies arriving to fight the French. The great international wars that began in 1688, the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), also devastated other parts of Germany. Most of the Empire was involved at one time or another in heavy fighting as coalitions of armies coursed over its territory, alternatively living off the land or scorching the earth as they moved. Brandenburg was the major beneficiary of these protracted wars. In 1701, Friedrich I was named King “in” (but not “of”) Prussia. From the point of view of those intent on propping up the Holy Roman Empire, that was a mostly vain prepositional effort to preserve the old Imperial claim within Germany. In a further and related effort to bend constitutional order to the new geopolitical reality, Hanover was made an electorate of the Empire in 1710. The Holy Roman Empire, however, was already an increasingly irrelevant anachronism—and hence a latent international political problem, even in times of peace. It resided at the heart of a continent that was transforming its component kingdoms into territorially contiguous nations, as well as transitioning from loose and scattered dynastic associations to a new era of absolute monarchy and later, of national sovereignty. See also Dutch War (1672–1678); Hofkriegsrat; War of the Reunions (1683–1684). hôpital ambulant. See military medicine. horns. Either wing of an army. Alternately, fortified projections of an artillery fortress. 203

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hornwork. A type of detached work formed by a bastioned front (or head) of two demi-bastions and a curtain, with the whole complex joined at the rear by the intersection of its two long branches. It formed a detached defense that projected the “horns” of a fortress, sited in front of a bastion or a section of the main curtain. Hornworks forced the besieging army to conduct a discrete siege before it even approached the main bastioned defenses. And because time was crucial in any siege, this delay was the principal contribution of hornwork to the defense. Some hornworks were even sited beyond the main enceinte, so as to enclose a prized portion of the town or a particularly dangerous bit of high ground. See also crownwork. horses. See logistics. hospitals. See military medicine; women. hostages. Taking hostages was still an accepted practice of war in Europe in this era. Mainly, it was done to exact contributions or to forestall rebellion by promising bloody reprisal against the hostages. For instance, see War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). hostile descents. See descents. hot shot. See shot. hoy. A single-masted barge. Hudson Bay Company. The Hudson Bay Company was chartered in England in 1670 to exploit the fur trade of the still-unmapped interior of Canada, then defined as all territory whose rivers drained into Hudson Bay (or “Prince Rupert’s Land”). No less importantly, the Company was to endeavor to beat the French to new inland claims. It had to compete with well-established French-Canadian “voyageurs” (trapper-explorers) who controlled the fur trade out of northern New France, and with the Iroquois and Great Lakes Indian nations. Chronic warfare existed from the outset between Company agents and the French. The issue of control was not decided in the Canadian bush, however, but at the conference tables of Europe following each of several major wars for control of North America over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. In June and July 1686, Dutch and English fought an undeclared war in Hudson Bay. Its interests were frequently attacked by Canadian militia during King William’s War (1689–1697). Louis XIV conceded British title to the vast Hudson Bay region in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), as a result of France’s defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Huguenots. French Calvinists whose piety, popularity, and confessional independence presented a real threat to the French crown and patronage interests before and during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1629). A tentative peace was achieved, with limited toleration for Huguenots permitted, under the Edict of 204

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Nantes (April 13, 1598), issued upon the ascendancy to the throne of the onetime Huguenot and Catholic convert, Henri IV (1553–1610). The last Huguenot military stronghold, the pirate base and fortress at La Rochelle, was taken by force by Cardinal Armand Richelieu and Louis XIII in 1628. Most Huguenots were driven into exile by Louis XIV, following his ill-advised revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Louis’ motives were complex but certainly included an old-fashioned determination to make the political and religious communities of his realm one and the same. This was a more blameworthy ambition than it had been during the reign of his father or his 16th-century predecessors, because Huguenots no longer posed a political or security threat to the regime or to France. Their repression, which began five years before inauguration of Louis’ personal reign in 1661, was mainly an expression of his personal ill-will and religious prejudice, though his policy received wide support among French Catholics who had never reconciled to toleration. Over the next 20 years, nearly 100 edicts of official royal intolerance further shrank Protestantism’s zone of public practice in France. These edicts coerced conversion to Catholicism, prohibited marriage across religious lines, and punitively quartered troops on Huguenot towns and in individual Protestant homes. In 1682, only partly recognizing the damage that driving Huguenots into exile was doing to the realm, Louis forbade the sale of property by Protestants and their departure from France. This repressive trend was exacerbated by Louis’ anger over the course of several wars with Dutch Calvinists, the traditional allies of the Huguenots in earlier wars: the War of Devolution (1667–1668), the Dutch War (1672–1678), and to a lesser degree, the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). In the early 1680s, he introduced still more oppressive policies, notably dragonnades to force mass conversions. The Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685) capped his policy by ending all religious toleration after 87 years of mostly successful compromise. Louis not only banned public Protestantism within his realm, he authorized burning of Huguenot churches, ordered Catholic baptism of all Protestant children yet to be born, and forbade Protestant males from leaving France on pain of condemnation as galley slaves. Additional edicts forbade enlistment of Protestants in French regiments (foreign regiments in French service were not affected) or on French ships. Protestants who wished to remain in service were offered bounties for conversion. This blanket repression drove most Protestants to publicly convert, after which they were watched by local Catholic militias paid for with special taxes imposed on the “nouveaux convertis.” But other Huguenots refused to convert and instead fled Louis’ realm into lasting exile and enmity. Perhaps 200,000 fled abroad to England, Germany, and the United Provinces. As many as 20,000 Huguenot men joined the armies or navies of their adopted countries to continue their military careers—or just to fight Louis. Some 600 officers (including two Huguenot marshals and several generals) and 12,000 troopers are known to have enlisted in the armies of France’s enemies, while another 9,000 highly skilled and desperately needed sailors joined foreign navies. Still other French Protestants migrated to one of the Dutch or other overseas colonies. But Louis was not done. He next carried out a near-genocide against Huguenot 205

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refugees and sanctuary towns of the Vaudois (Waldensian) communities of northern Italy. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), Victor Amadeus II of Savoy recruited a regiment of Huguenots to fight against France, and in support of their coreligionists, the Vaudois, who returned from Swiss exile to fight to reclaim their Piedmontese valleys. English plans also involved coastal descents by Huguenots supported by English regulars, in hopes of raising rebellion among resentful “nouveaux convertis.” When these plans fell through, Huguenot and Irish troops were sent to fight in Flanders, instead. See also arrière-ban; Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705); Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de; Galway, Earl of; Glorious Revolution; Ireland; quartering; Regents; Schomberg, Friedrich, Graf von; United Provinces; Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC). Hummelshof, Battle of (July 18–19, 1702). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Hungary. See Anti-Habsburg War (1703–1711); artillery fortress; Austrian Empire; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Buda, siege of (1668); Blenheim (1704); disease; eyâlet-i Budin; Grenzer; Haiduks; hussars; Imperial Army; Janissary Corps; Karlowitz, Peace of (1699); Köprülü Mehmed Pasha; Köprülü Ahmed Fazil; Kuruc; labanc; Leopold I of Austria; Lorraine, Charles V, duc de; magazines; Militargrenze; Mohács, Battle of (1687); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Ottoman Empire; petite guerre; Polish Army; Rákóczi, Ferenc; Rastadt (Rastatt), Treaty of (1714); Royal Hungary; skulking way of war; Sobieski, Jan III; St. Gotthard (1664); Tatars; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); uniforms; Vienna, siege of (1683); voivodes; war finance; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Hung Taiji (1592–1643). See Banner system; China; Manchus. hussars. Light cavalry originating in the Balkans as a frontier force in late-15thcentury Hungary. Other armies later adopted lighter cavalry formations, using the term “hussar” and in many cases, also the famously elaborate dress and brilliant colors of the Hungarian horsemen. Polish hussars were modeled on Hungarian hussars, except that most Polish cavalrymen hailed from the szlachta, or higher nobility, and their retainers. Polish hussars comprised one “comrade” (“towarzysz”) and four retainers (“pacholeks”). This was reduced to two pacholeks in the late 17th century. Over time, Poland’s hussars grew heavier in horses and weapons and evolved into medium cavalry. Hungarian hussars remained true light cavalry, however. Louis XIV introduced some Hungarianstyle hussars to French service in the 1690s, but they were not numerous. Hussars were especially adept at fighting le petite guerre. See also “Pancerna” cavalry; Polish Army.

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I Iberville, Pierre le Moyne d’ (1661–1706). See King William’s War (1689–1697). idler. A specialist non-seaman who was not obliged to stand watches but who nonetheless was a member of an English warship’s complement or one of “the people,” or ship’s company. Idlers worked during the day but slept at night, while seamen kept all the watches. Idler positions included carpenter, chaplain, corporal, master-at-arms, purser, sailmaker, surgeon, and any respective “mates.” See also impressment; landman. IJssel line. A Dutch set of defensive lines based on the IJssel branch of the Rhine. They were in a state of disrepair when French forces quickly outflanked and subsequently overran them at the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Ilbersheim, Treaty of (November 7, 1704). Essentially a surrender agreement by which Bavaria left the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The treaty followed the crushing defeat of the Franco-Bavarian armies at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704) and subsequent occupation of Bavaria by armies of the Grand Alliance. Maximilian Emanuel fled to Flanders with his court, along the way losing contact with much of the royal family. His sons were held as prisoners by the Austrians for many years while he fought on in Flanders. Île des Faisans. “Isle of Pheasants.” A mini-state located on an island in the River Bidassoa, straddling the border of France and Spain. In 1658 it was formally neutralized to serve as the site of negotiations leading to the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). Imperial Army. The Army of the Habsburg emperors was a motley crew drawn from a great variety of geographical, ethnic, and linguistic sources. It contained units of Bohemians, Croats, Slovaks, Slovenes, Germans, Hungarians, Italians,

impressment

Swiss, and others. For its structure, command, and performance see Dutch War (1672–1678); Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Grenzer; Karlstadt border; Militargrenze; Montecuccoli, Raimondo; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Vienna, siege of (1683); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); Windische border; Zenta, Battle of (1697). impressment. In Great Britain in this period, the Impress Service was principally concerned with manning the Royal Navy. Because it was far more interested in impressing able and ordinary seamen than landmen, in addition to acting ashore in the main coastal towns and fishing communities it also acted afloat, maintaining a small fleet with which to patrol rivers and creeks. Pressing at sea was done by ships’ officers aboard warships, most often in the approaches to major harbors. Press officers sought to intercept returning merchantmen before they could land and pay off crews, who would then scatter to the four corners of the county or even the country. The ruse of putting off a crew before landing to escape the impress suited more than one unscrupulous merchant captain, because it meant that the men were sent ashore unpaid—sometimes after as much as a year or two at sea, as when coming home from a voyage to the East Indies. On shore, pressing was carried out by constables and “pressmasters” and their “press gangs.” Impressment was regarded by all concerned—its practitioners and its targets— as an evil practice. But authorities also saw it as necessary in time of war. The Navy had to compete for skilled seamen against more attractive berths on privateers or some rich merchantmen, raising sea wages in wartime beyond anything the state or king could afford to pay. For most countries impressment was the only practicable solution to the problem of manning navies. Unlike the Admiralty in England, the five admiralty colleges of the United Provinces were not allowed to use impressment to fill the warships of the Dutch Navy. This was a serious problem during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), after catastrophic ship and crew losses demoralized the seagoing population and made recruitment difficult, despite massive unemployment among able seamen caused by shutdown of the fishing industries by privateers. The solution— which was only available to the Dutch because of their still-rich economy and global commercial dominance at the time—was to draw upon internal revenues and customs duties to pay naval wages at extraordinary wartime levels to recruit volunteers. Compensation for battle wounds was also generous and became even more so from 1664 in anticipation of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). Press gangs—usually run by “regulating captains” in the case of the naval press in England, but there and elsewhere also sometimes including private contractors—generally tried to persuade men to join the service. Those gangs who instead tried to trick or take unwilling men by force often did so at cost of bodily harm to themselves, or even at the price of their lives, when aroused civilians turned on the gangs with murderous rage. Impressment for armies was a common practice but more heavily used in some countries than in others. Russia did not use impressment per se, because its conscription system rested on a levy of 208

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one peasant soldier per specified number of households. Force was used to fill quotas, of course, especially after peasants shrewdly reported larger but far fewer households in every new census carried out by the tsars. Press gangs were so heavily used to fill the ranks of the Brandenburg-Prussian Army that Junker landlords began to complain that too many young men were running away or had been taken away, so that there were not enough left to do necessary farm work. Friedrich-Wilhelm and his successors also freely impressed not just subjects but foreigners, especially from surrounding German principalities and from Switzerland. Impressment was often resisted by local authorities and courts, or, in the last resort, by mob violence. Men were not impressed only for service in warships or in land combat: highly skilled laborers were also impressed to work on state projects. Shipwrights, caulkers, sail-makers, rope-makers, and other craftsmen were all subject to the impress. This usually denied them opportunities to earn extremely inflated wartime wages working for privateers or merchant shipping companies, or as private contractors to various armies. See also British Army; convoy; desertion; embargo; French Army; navies; Prussian Army; standing army; taking the shilling; war finance. Impress Service. The English impressment service devoted to manning the Royal Navy. See impressment. incendiaries. See bomb; carcass; esplanade; fireships; grenades; infernal machine; mortar; shot; siege warfare; zone of servitude. Indelningswerk (Indeling). See Swedish Army. independent company. A British term for garrison troops. India. See Aurangzeb; Compagnie des Indies Orientales; East India Company; Marathas; Mughal Empire; Rajputs; Sikhs; Sivaji Bhonsle; Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie. Indian armies. See Aurangzeb; fitna; mansabdari; Marathas; misl; Mughal Empire; mulkgiri; Rajputs; Sikhs; silladars; Sivaji Bhonsle. Indian Wars. Conflict between North American native tribes (“Indians”) and various European settlers occurred over a period of 400 years, from the 16th through the late-19th centuries. In general, the French sent fewer settlers than did the British and so were able as well as compelled to ally with Indian nations such as the Huron, Algonquins, and Abenakis. Alongside those allies, under Samuel de Champlain, they fought the powerful Iroquois Confederacy in the “beaver wars” of the early 17th century. English settlers also had Indian allies, but pressure on Indian land from expanding colonial settlements and Indian weakness caused by epidemic diseases determined that English settlers and Indians were more often in real conflict, especially in New England, than was the case in 209

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more sparsely populated Canada. Europeans relied heavily on allied Indians for their woodcraft, scouting, superior marksmanship, and unique skirmishing abilities. To this end, New England colonial governors hired native mercenaries. Whether ally or mercenary, Indians for the most part quickly recognized that they possessed superior woodcraft and martial skills. They would not hesitate to abandon European officers and expeditions where their contribution was not appreciated, or their unique fighting style and loathing of casualties—including rational aversion to frontal assault on fortified positions—were not accepted. Militia captains were more apt than some European officer just off a ship from London or Brest to understand this, and not to regard Indian braves as deserters when they went home in mid-campaign after counting coup or having taken their desired quota of booty and prisoners. Among the few settlers to successfully imitate Indian tactics, prior to the colonial Rangers of the French and Indian Wars and American War of Independence, were Acadian and other Canadian militia. They had neither the numbers to form continental or colonialstyle infantry units nor the inclination or foolhardiness to fight in line of battle as did French and English regulars and many colonials. More Canadians understood that the Indian skulking way of war was perfectly adapted for North American conditions, and adopted it themselves. Until the mid-18th century, the main conflict in North America was an extension of the protracted global war between England and France. In the North American theater of operations, representatives of those Great Powers bartered for Indian support and allies. Indian nations and individual warriors were drawn into this wider global conflict as it brushed their shores and traveled inland via the great river and lake routes of North America. But most often Indians allied with Europeans for a host of reasons of their own, not directly related to the long war between France and England. Some Indian nations formed loose military and trade alliances with European colonists only after they became dependent on colonials for supplies of firearms, powder, and shot, which became a mainstay of their forest way of life and a prerequisite of defense of their home villages. That made it imperative for European powers to be ready and able to supply Indian nations with the tools of early modern war, especially the rifles with which Indian warriors quickly became more skilled than any other fighters in North America. Rifles were needed so that Indians could defend their villages from other predatory Indians and from Europeans of ill-will and intent, but also so that they, too, could become warrior-predators in the chronic small wars fought primarily to obtain booty, take prisoners, and accrue battle honors for braves. In fact, divisions among Indians in this period were frequently more profound than divisions between Indians and settlers. It was far more often the case that local Indian wars were the main source of conflicts into which Europeans were drawn, which they often then exploited, than the reverse. Huron chiefs sought a French alliance and war supplies not to fight the English or their colonists but for their own, decades-long war with the Iroquois over control of the fur trade, and other reasons that had little to do with any European player or interest. Similarly, Christian Indians sought protection from non-Christian 210

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Indian tribes. This was especially true of “mission Indians” in Canada and the Great Lakes region, who took the warpath with Jesuit (“Black Robe”) military and spiritual advisors alongside. What kept the whole volatile brew bubbling for decades was the obverse fact: that European disunity in North America also provided opportunity for utilitarian alliances and political exploitation by shrewd Indian leaders. It is also important to note that throughout this era, an Indian tradition of “private war” still existed, in which individual braves looking to “make their bones” in the tribe or take revenge for some prior personal slight attacked enemies without warning, and with no awareness or acceptance of the then only emerging European legal distinction between public war and private feuds or murder. Prior to 1660, European military interest in war in North America was minimal—with the exceptions of piracy (see pirates) and on-and-off war at sea in the Caribbean and raids along Spanish coastal possessions. The first regular unit to deploy to the continent was a French regiment sent to Canada in 1665. It immediately became engaged in two sustained campaigns of hard fighting against the Mohawks. The first campaign came to disaster in the snow over the winter of 1666. The second, carried out by 1,300 men and including light artillery, burned out abandoned Mohawk villages and fields and compelled some Mohawk chiefs to agree to terms. But the expedition did not impose the king’s will on the Mohawks, not least because many French troops again died horribly in the snowbound forests and proved otherwise incapable of adapting to Indian warfare and to the difficulties of North American terrain and the harsh climate. The remnants of this regiment returned to France in 1668, leaving the Mohawk to rebuild their wigwams and resume their affairs untroubled by regular troops. Large numbers of French and British regulars did not arrive in North America until 40 years after the period dealt with in this work, in 1755. Until then only a few troupes de la marine served alongside Canadian militia and their Indian allies (Huron and Algonquin) in fights against handfuls of English colonists and their Indian mercenaries and allies. Meanwhile, Indian nations fought each other with or without European aid beyond basic supplies of firearms and other munitions. Although the Wampanoag and Narragansett lost King Philip’s War (1675–1676) to New England colonists and the latter’s Pequot, Mohegan, and “Praying Indian” allies, the Indians’ defeat was more the exception than the rule during this period in northeastern North America. More often, until the large-scale arrival of European regulars in 1755 changed the nature of frontier warfare, forest Indian nations were almost always tactically superior to colonists and repeatedly defeated them in battles, raids, and ambushes. Indians attacked exposed towns and forts at times of their choosing, before melting back into the forest in tune with the traditions of the “skulking way of war.” They learned to track and ambush relief columns, ravaging them with superior marksmanship (employing rifles in preference to smooth-bore muskets). And they held their own in numerous small-scale battles with militia and with the few regulars available. On the other hand, demographic pressures caused by imported African and European diseases, and the ever-expanding and migrating frontier 211

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of European settlement (which some historians see as the cutting edge of successive “invasions of North America”), pushed against the broad boundaries of even as powerful an Indian nation as Iroquoia. The French thus moved up the St. Lawrence into the “pays d’en haut” of the Great Lakes country, building and holding onto new forts at Michilimackinac (1700), Pontchartrain du Détroit (1701), and Niagara (1720), sustaining their presence as much with cunning alliances and open access to desirable trade goods as by force or the threat of force. English settler migration was broader and did not penetrate as deeply into the interior, but in the long run it would prove more deadly to Indian independence. See also Deerfield raid (February 29, 1704); Hudson Bay Company; Jumano; King William’s War (1689–1697); New Spain; Pueblo Indians; Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). Suggested Reading: W. J. Eccles, The French in North America, 1500–1783 (1998); E. P. Hamilton, The French and Indian Wars (1962); R. Leckie, A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars (1999); Richard Morris, Indian Wars (1985); Ian Steele, Warpath: Invasions of North America (1994).

infantry. Infantry weapons and tactics evolved constantly during this period, somewhat more so than artillery and clearly more than cavalry. All regular infantry in field combat fired by ranks, with the number of ranks varying according to national tradition and the types of weapons used. The key change was a shift from the matchlock to the flintlock musket (fusil). The slow rate of fire—reloading took about one minute—of matchlock muskets meant that ten ranks could fire 6 volleys in a minute. Dutch troops under Maurits of Nassau and Swedish and German troops under Gustavus Adolphus introduced new formations and reduced the number of ranks to six by the 1620s. French companies switched to six ranks on the Swedish model in the 1630s, and held to this old-fashioned formation until the 1670s. By the 1690s French ranks were reduced to five and then to just four, reflecting the higher rate of fire of the new “fusil” with which more French troops were armed. After 1700 French companies fought in four ranks officially, but in actual combat more often formed just three due to passe volants or sick or wounded men leaving too many gaps in the fourth rank. By the mid-18th century three ranks was standard in the British Army. “Light infantry” companies in this period did not yet have the Napoleonic-era primary meaning of skirmishers. Instead, some British companies were designated as “light” by reason of their arms and equipment. They were used for deep-country raids, primarily in North America. An important cultural tension worthy of note is that for many in this era, unlike many military historians since, infantry was not the “democratic” arm that some argue it was in ancient Greece and the early Roman republic or among the medieval Swiss and Flemings. Rather, it was seen as the instrument of royal despotism. Similarly, artillery was trumpeted as the “last argument of the king” (“ultima ratio regis”). Cavalry was seen by everyone in Europe and the Ottoman Empire as the military basis for aristocratic rule in all its myriad manifestations, affectations, and lingering political aspirations. See also bayonet; drill; fusiliers; skulking way of war. 212

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inferior officers. See petty officer; ranks (at sea). infernal machine. A special form of fireship deployed by the English against the privateer port of St. Malo on November 27, 1693, and subsequently. This was most likely an adaptation of the special Dutch fireship called a “hellburner,” first used by the Sea Beggars on April 5, 1585, to blow up a Spanish bridge across the Scheldt. A hellburner, or infernal machine, as it came to be called by the English, was packed with the usual combustibles used in fireships. Additionally, it contained many kegs of black powder and scrap iron. The latter served as shrapnel and to start fires once heated and expelled by explosion of the powder. An infernal machine was used in 1693 against the pier at Dieppe. Neither English effort was successful. insult. Attacking a fortress or town or other military position without warning or overt preparation, usually by ruse or sudden assault. A common ploy was for disguised soldiers to jam a heavy cart inside the gate of a town or fortress so that the portcullis would not close. This seldom worked. Concealing one’s real uniform was sometimes tried on a mass scale, as when 4,000 Austrians tried to walk into Breisach disguised as French troops in 1702 (their ruse was uncovered by an alert officer). Two years earlier an Austrian force successfully made its way through an unguarded aqueduct to spring full-grown into the center of Cremona. In the mid-18th century, “insult” was achieved several times via surprise escalade, a tactic which otherwise had long since gone out of fashion. The best countermeasures against ruses and insult were alert sentries and cavalry scouting, storm bells, and maintaining a clear zone of servitude around a fortress. intendants. The main administrators of the royal French bureaucracy, overseeing the “généralités” or administrative and tax districts that sustained any military effort under Louis XIV. The French Army developed a military bureaucracy in which commanding generals oversaw tactics and dispositions while the intendant looked after logistics, wages for the troops, and military justice. Naval administration was reliant on intendants who oversaw ports, stores, dry docks, and other shore facilities, and who were responsible for refitting, manning, provisions, and all armaments. Louis XIV used this system to harass, arrest, and silence the parlements of France. It enabled him to never call the Estates-General. Also see commissaires; fournisseurs; Fronde; Mazarin, Jules; military discipline; military medicine; munitionnaires; uniforms; war finance. intendants des armées. Louis XIV’s deputies to his armies. These royal officials traveled with the armies on campaign to oversee military finances and the king’s interests. interior lines. See Dutch War (1672–1678). interloper. A merchantman trading outside the monopoly of a given chartered company, whether of its own nation or another. A smuggler, a lone ranger in the oceanic trade wars of the 17th–18th centuries. See asiento. 213

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investment. A preliminary investment of a fortress, its encirclement by cavalry or dragoons, marked the opening of a siege. Once the main body of the besieging army arrived the opening of the trenches was marked, as lines of contravallation and of circumvallation (or later, parallels) were started. During this pre-siege period, the garrison had its final opportunity to gather in resources and its first to make sorties. This time was also the best opportunity to pot cannonballs onto the enemy’s incomplete siege park, batteries, troops, and lines. This was important, as defenders were always outnumbered in big guns by besiegers, and stood to lose guns once the heavy enemy bombardment began. On the other hand, there was no agreement on when to use defensive artillery. No less an authority than Vauban advised defenders to hold fire during the investment phase, recommending instead concealment and preservation of as many guns as possible until the critical period before the final assault. See pièces ambulantes. Ireland. Following defeat of Catholic forces in Ireland by Oliver Cromwell and his generals during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), Ireland was occupied by garrison units of the New Model Army to assure Protestant ascendancy. The Restoration Army saw more Catholic officers promoted by Charles II and still more by James II, but this only raised the old fears of civil and religious war in England and Scotland. The main fear was of possible invasion in support of absolute monarchy by a royal and Catholic army from Ireland. Such fears were greatly exacerbated by England’s move away from conflict with the Calvinist United Provinces during the three Anglo-Dutch Wars toward sustained conflict with “His Catholic Majesty,” Louis XIV of France. The Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and so-called Glorious Revolution that deposed James and crowned William III ushered in a violent new phase of conflict in Irish history between Jacobites (supporters of James II) and Williamites (supporters of William III), with consequences that echo in Ireland to the present day. The Williamite War of 1689–1691, sometimes known as the Jacobite War, was a war of succession in England and an international war for or against France for most non-Irish participants. But it was a civil war in Ireland. James and William each brought regular regiments and heavily international armies to fight in Ireland. Each side was then reinforced by local Irish forces, mainly along sectarian lines. Several sizeable and wholly independent Irish armies also fought, for reasons entirely their own. And everywhere in the Irish countryside there operated rapparees, or guerillas and bandits. As in other peripheral theaters of the Nine Years’ War, the lack of more than a few large towns in Ireland and the absence of modern “trace italienne” fortifications and defensive artillery—which so dominated warfare in Flanders and the Rhineland—made the Irish war primarily one of raids and ambushes. Starting in January 1689, the Irish Jacobite and governor of Ireland, the Earl of Tyrconnel, raised 40,000 Irish troops by warrant. James II was carried by a fleet of 22 French sail to land in Kinsale, County Cork, on March 14/24, 1689. He was accompanied by troops of his small and inexperienced exile army, a contingent of French officers, and a good deal more French money and munitions. The exile force of English, Scots, and Irish loyalists was officered mainly by Catholics such as James’ bastard son, the Duke of Berwick, and Patrick Sarsfield. 214

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The Jacobite cause in Ireland enjoyed much popular support outside Dublin, even if James himself was only interested in Ireland as a base for retaking power in England. The initial landing was followed by French regular reinforcements and another 2,000–3,000 loyalist volunteers from France, all of whom landed during and after a naval battle fought off Bantry Bay (May 1/11, 1689). James’ exile regiments and Tyrconnel’s Irish troops were, for the most part, poorly equipped: some Irish units had only pikes instead of muskets, musketeers were chronically short of powder, and almost none had uniforms. Four French regiments that fought in Ireland for James in 1690 were professional and substantial units. They helped train Irish volunteers, but never to a fully professional level. Along with one German and another Walloon regiment paid for and provided by Louis XIV—in exchange for three Irish regiments sent to the Continent to fight for France—the foreign contingent of the Jacobite army in 1690 comprised over 6,600 well-trained professional soldiers. This core was surrounded by an additional 30,000 exiles and native Irish. Some exile units were reasonably professional. Most local recruits were enthusiastic but lacked modern weapons or proper training. These problems forced Jacobite generals to avoid set-piece battles where ill-trained infantry was at a great disadvantage when facing skilled and disciplined professionals. Instead, they moved to a policy of scorched earth as early as the autumn of 1689. Thereafter, they mostly conducted defensive sieges where poor but well-protected and highly motivated infantry stood a better chance of inflicting serious damage on a professional enemy. Jacobite cavalry was much better equipped, trained, and commanded than the infantry. The artillery was weak to non-existent in most cases, with most available big guns left and lost in isolated garrisons instead of being concentrated into a usable artillery train for the mobile forces. In addition to qualitative disadvantages among the infantry and artillery, the Jacobite army lost its initial numerical advantage to the large international army ultimately brought over by William during 1690. William had difficulty raising an English army to oppose James in Ireland. He was still reassembling the British establishment following James’ dissolution of the Army in November and December 1689. Moreover, Parliament had already agreed to send an English expeditionary force of 10,000 men to fight in Flanders. It would take many months for William to raise new levies and hire enough foreign mercenaries to both control England and invade Ireland. In the interim, Williamite loyalists in Ireland began to organize. Several regiments of cavalry, dragoon, and infantry militia were raised from the Ulster Protestant population, totaling about 9,000 men. These units attacked into and secured control of western Ulster, holing up at Londonderry and Enniskillen. After taking Dublin in March 1689, James moved quickly against these two Protestant garrisons holding out against Tyrconnel in Ulster. He invested Londonderry in July. The town had been abandoned earlier by two English battalions and most regular officers, who crossed the water back to England. But the Protestant militia formed a garrison of nearly 8,000 that decided to stay and fight. James had only 4,000 men with which to oppose them, so he settled down to starve the city into submission, counting on some 30,000 refugees who had swollen 215

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the population to quickly eat through the town’s food supply. The siege lasted 105 days, until a Williamite relief force of three battalions broke through a boom blocking access to the city. At Enniskillen the local Protestant garrison was more aggressive. Its members launched raids into Tyrconnel territory and resisted Sarsfield’s effort to dislodge them, inflicting over 1,500 casualties in an ambush effected in August. Meanwhile, Graf von Schomberg and a largely mercenary force of 6,600 had landed at Belfast. These men were primarily Huguenots and Dutch, with a smattering of English from William’s new levies. Another 16,000 followed over the rest of the year, raising the Williamite army to 30,000 men at the onset of winter. Schomberg moved out of Belfast to assault Carrickfergus, which resisted for a week. The fall of that town and of Newry opened the road to Dublin, which French officers advised James to burn and abandon in an escalation of Jacobite scorched-earth practices. Tyrconnel argued instead that James should stand and fight. James reluctantly agreed. The Jacobite army marched north, to where Schomberg had ineptly encamped over a bog near Dundalk. Over the next several months, the old German refused to fight, resisting any and all provocations made by James and Tyrconnel from their nearby lines. Instead, Schomberg stayed in the camp. Unfortunately, nearly 6,000 of his men died as a result before the end of November, not from skirmishes or battle—there was no significant field battle in Ireland during 1689—but from swamp-borne diseases, hunger, and cold. James had wisely withdrawn from the site in early October as his own troops began to grow ill. The Williamite dead were replaced over the winter months by fresh troops brought in from England, Denmark, and the United Provinces. Unhappy with Schomberg’s performance, William determined to lead his forces in Ireland personally, to quickly and decisively end the war of succession with James. He landed at Carrickfergus on June 14/24, 1690. He was accompanied by Marlborough, the Earl of Athlone and other Dutch generals, and 15,000 men borne across the Irish Sea by a fleet of 300 ships. This deployment included most available English troops from the newly raised levies, a sizeable contingent of Danish troops, and a hard core of experienced Dutch cavalry, dragoons, and infantry. For the campaign of 1690, William had 35,000 effectives, in addition to 15,000 Irish Protestant militia and thousands more support troops. He also had a Navy that swarmed around the Irish coasts looking for renegade privateers and attempting to block French reinforcements. James received reinforcements, too: French regulars, Germans, and Walloons, over 6,600 in all. However, to obtain even this small number of fine French troops, James was compelled to send 5,000 Irish to serve in France. With these adjustments to the numbers on either side, the table was set for the decisive battle of the Williamite War. That was fought at the Boyne on July 1/11, 1690. Following William’s victory and the withdrawal of the Jacobite army from the Boyne, James fled to Dublin and thence, on a French man-of-war, returned to exile in France. William arrived in Dublin on July 5/15th, a day after James fled. Surviving Jacobites and their French allies had in the meantime retreated to Limerick. William followed only slowly. By the time he arrived there five weeks later, the Jacobite army had partly recovered and was prepared to fight. The reason for 216

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his slow march appears to have been concern over the defeat suffered by the Allied navies at Beachy Head (June 30/July 10, 1690), which briefly threatened to isolate him in Ireland. Even worse news for William later arrived from the battlefield at Fleurus (July 1/11, 1690), where the Allies suffered a serious loss. But William decided to finish the bloody work he had started in Ireland, and initiated a siege of the 14,000 Jacobite troops crowded inside Limerick. The French had by that time withdrawn to Galway, preparatory to leaving Ireland entirely. Not everything went William’s way: on August 12/22, his siege train was intercepted by a force under Sarsfield, well before the guns reached the Williamite investment lines around Limerick. A direct assault assayed against the determined Jacobite garrison cost William about 2,000 casualties. Its failure, along with the shortage of powder and shot that resulted from Sarsfield’s capture of much of the Williamite artillery train, persuaded him to lift the siege in early September. While these events were underway, the French evacuated their regiments by sea from Galway, as the Grand Monarque correctly concluded that James’ cause was lost and there was no point wasting good troops pursuing it further. The Jacobites still held the ports of Cork and Kinsale, through which some private and French supplies of war matériel reached them. Marlborough devised a plan of attack to close these ports. He landed with 5,000 men near Cork on September 21/October 1, and took both ports from the land by the end of October. Each army went into winter quarters, though raids and small ambushes continued. A “dirty war” in the countryside between Catholic rapparees and Protestant militia ensued. This was one of the few examples remaining in Europe—outside the religious motivations of Orthodox Cossacks who so hated Catholic Poles that they would not accept autonomy or make peace from the 1640s to the 1670s, and the cruel dragonnades of Louis XIV—where the smoldering embers of the old wars of religion were still capable of being fanned into flames that burned out whole communities through atrocity and persecution. The presence of unpaid foreign mercenaries did not help. Danish troops, among others, earned a sordid reputation for thievery and atrocity. The main reason for continuation of fighting was William and his Ulster Protestants allies’ insistence on seizure of the estates of Jacobite rebels, lands then parceled out to reward Williamite fighters. A separate, private army of 10,000 “Ulster Gaels” also fought in the north without recognizing Jacobite command. Against Danish and other Williamite probes in force, Sarsfield held a line along the Shannon through the winter of 1690–1691. When Tyrconnel returned from a diplomatic and military mission to Paris, he insisted on assuming overall command. New French money and some matériel aid arrived in April and May, but Louis XIV would not again commit French troops to Ireland. Divisions at the top of the Jacobite command split the army into quarrelsome factions even as the Williamites advanced, under command of a trusted Dutch subordinate, Lieutenant-General Godard van Ginkel. The Williamite advance on Limerick was greatly frustrated by the operations of Irish irregulars, or rapparees. Of their actions, Ginkel bitterly complained in a dispatch: “The enemy are burning all before us, and the Rapparees are so great a number that we can find neither forage nor cover, which hinders much our march.” 217

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Hindered or not, his Williamite army of 20,000 hard, professional troops closed and took half of Athlone on June 20/30, 1691. The Jacobites still held the other half of the town, after burning the only bridge over the Shannon. Ginkel was able to cross the river via a ford and took the whole town ten days later. Some 21,000 Jacobite infantry, cavalry, and dragoons fell back from Athlone to Aughrim, where they dug in. Despite occupying good defensive positions, they were crushed in a sharp fight at Aughrim (July 12/22, 1691). The battle turned into a complete rout, during and after which Jacobite prisoners and stragglers were massacred. About some 7,000 Jacobite troops, along with their commander, St. Ruth, and 400 irreplaceable officers were killed. The independent army of Ulster Gaels saw what was coming for the Jacobites after Aughrim and itself quickly reached terms with Ginkel. Galway surrendered in a day, the fight gone out of its garrison and townsfolk. Sligo soon fell, leaving just Limerick holding out. Ginkel cautiously approached Limerick, finally investing it on August 25th/September 4th. Thus began a lethargic siege marked mainly by protracted negotiations about the fate of the defending Jacobite troops and their allies. Terms were at last agreed in Treaty of Limerick (October 3/13, 1691). Over the next several months, 19,000 Jacobites (the “Wild Geese”) were allowed to leave for France with their armaments and families. There, the men served James II until 1697, when they were absorbed into all-Irish regiments formally in service to Louis XIV. Those few who chose instead to remain in Ireland were nominally sworn into William’s service, then quickly disbanded. This military settlement in Ireland was followed by passage of punitive anti-Catholic laws that aimed to reduce Gaelic Irish to permanent servile status, more comparable to the serfs of Russia than to other peasant populations of western Europe. In 1691, the defeat of the last forces in Ireland openly loyal to James ensured an English military occupation under a remade Irish establishment army. It also guaranteed the political, economic, and social ascendancy of a Protestant master class across that island kingdom. The administrative headquarters of the new regime was located in Dublin Castle, but ultimate authority was exercised by Westminster. Lingering Jacobite ambitions, loyalties, and intrigue roiled Irish politics and national life throughout the first half of the 18th century, as they also did in Scotland, but large-scale warfare in Ireland was over. Suggested Reading: Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey, eds., A Military History of Ireland (1996); F. G. James, Ireland in the Empire: 1688–1770 (1973).

Irish Brigade. “Brigade Royal Irlandais.” See Wild Geese. Irish establishment. The British Army in Ireland, organized and funded separately from the British establishment. Irish regiments were usually maintained at reduced strength, mustering half the numbers of the British establishment unless shipped to foreign stations, and most were in fact “unregimented” prior to 1683. However, unlike British establishment counterparts, these troops were mostly housed in barracks. In 1661 the Restoration regime of Charles II made a reduction, to 2,500 cavalry and 5,000 infantry. The numbers fell further in later 218

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years, but they were still larger than the British establishment at about 7,000 men. Charles purged many supposed republican officers during his reign, which also helped him avoid paying their arrears. Upon completion of regimentation in 1683, the Irish establishment was divided into 10 regiments, three of them horse. The Earl of Tyrconnel purged Protestant officers from the force between 1685 and 1689, replacing them with Catholic officers brought back from exile and foreign military service. He even partially purged the ranks. Many of the Protestant officers who were purged subsequently joined or raised and trained Ulster militia units for the 1689–1691 Williamite War in Ireland, or returned to Ireland with William III himself in 1690. The Irish establishment counted 8,938 men in 1689 before the Williamite War broke out in Ireland; the majority of these men were Catholics. Nearly 3,000 Irish establishment troops were immediately sent to England to defend against the expected landing by William, which came at Torbay on November 5, 1688. In the breakdown of the Jacobite army that accompanied William’s march on London, about 1,500 Irish establishment troops were taken prisoner. They were held on the Isle of Wight. Some escaped to rejoin James II and fight in Ireland, and later served him again in France. Others were sold to the Imperial Army or signed up more or less voluntarily to serve as mercenaries in allIrish regiments in French service during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The British establishment was reformed by William after James disbanded the Army in 1688, in the face of large-scale desertion as he fled England. The Irish establishment was remade after the Williamite victory in Ireland in 1691. The reforms took explicit account of the new political fact of enforced Protestant ascendancy. The most critical reform year was 1699, when the Parliament at Westminster passed the Disbanding Act, limiting the Irish establishment to 12,000 men in peacetime. That number was carefully cleaved to until 1762, except during wartime emergencies. The men of the discrete Irish establishment were paid for with tax revenues raised in Ireland without real representation in the enfeebled Irish Parliament. For much of the next half-century, such was the lingering fear of “papist” and Jacobite rebellion and infiltration of standing military forces within the Three Kingdoms that the ranks of the Irish establishment were, by law, not just exclusively Protestant but English and Scots Protestant. Even Irish Protestants were legally excluded, along with all Irish Catholics. The means of exclusion was a nationality test enacted by Westminster in 1701. Irish establishment recruitment was supposed to take place annually in Scotland and England. In practice, local corruption and the normal laziness of administrators meant that Irish Protestant troops were enlisted on the sly. The legal restriction was also eased whenever English and Scots troops were transferred to service in British establishment regiments in time of war—and once the men were in barracks, it was hard to get them out again. The Irish and British establishments were not finally harmonized until 1771–1772, by which time Protestant Irish officers were already disproportionately represented among the British officer corps as a whole, not just in Ireland. Suggested Reading: Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey, eds., A Military History of Ireland (1996). See also infantry; military medicine; Mutiny Act. 219

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Iroquois Confederacy. “Haudenosaunee.” The “Great League of Peace and Power” was an alliance of autonomous Iroquois peoples first formed in the 15th century to keep peace among the Six Nations of the Iroquois: Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondagas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras. There were only about 25,000 Iroquois in northeastern North America in 1600. Despite a cultural practice of assimilating new members into the tribes from among selected war captives, imported African and European diseases and casualties in the many Iroquois wars fought with neighboring tribes over control of the fur trade ensured that numbers did not rise much over the next 200 years. By the 17th century, the Iroquois nations comprised significant numbers of adopted former prisoners of war or their descendants. Collectively, they faced new external pressures stemming from competition with the Huron over the fur trade and penetration of the interior of eastern North America by European explorers, trappers, traders, and finally settlers. In turn, the Iroquois were the major military power in the region, were at war with the Indian allies of France, and hence posed a major threat to New France throughout the 17th century. Iroquois chiefs responded to these new strategic facts by forming the Iroquois Confederacy, a parallel association to the Great League. The two associations shared broad membership but had different chiefs and purposes. During the first half of the 18th century, the Iroquois adopted a neutral stance toward France’s long contest with England, though the Indian tradition of “private war” by individual braves, looking to raise their status in the tribe or take blood revenge for some slight, continued unabated. In 1753 the “Covenant Chain,” which bound the Confederacy in alliance with the English colony of New York, was broken. The next year, the French and Indian War (1754–1760) broke out. See Indian Wars. ishan. Cash bonuses given to Janissaries and other Ottoman troops by the sultan or his serdar. They were usually distributed ritually, to mark important political milestones or to reward service in battle. Italy. The Italian peninsula was mainly divided and occupied by foreign powers during this period. Venice and Savoy still played important roles in regional wars and political and diplomatic affairs, but continual warfare (the last all-Italian conflict was the Castro War of 1642–1644) and repeated foreign invasions and occupations starting in 1594 left Italy as a whole fatally weak vis-à-vis France and Austria. See Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660); artillery fortress; Austrian Empire; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Barbary corsairs; Berwick, James; Cassano, Battle of (August 16, 1705); Catinat, Nicholas; Chiari, Battle of (September 1/12, 1701); citadel; descent; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; étapes; flintlock firearms; France; Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659); frontières; Galway, Earl of; Genoa; Huguenots; Imperial Army; Luzzara, Battle of (August 4/15, 1702); Marsaglia, Battle of (October 4, 1693); Messinian rebellion (1674–1678); Milan, Convention of (March 13, 1707); miquelets; Navigation Act (1651); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Rákóczi, Ferenc; Sardinia; siege warfare; Spain; Spanish Army; Turin, Peace of (August 29, 1696); uniforms; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713); Vaudois; Vendôme, duc de; Victor Amadeus II; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). 220

J jack. A small national flag flown by warships from the jack-staff. See flags. Jacobites. Supporters of the claims to legitimacy of the Catholic House of Stuart, onetime ruling house of Scotland and England. That dynasty was sent into exile by the deposition of “Jacobus,” or James II of England (James VII in Scotland) in favor of the ascension of the Protestant William III in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. James went into exile in Catholic France, which along with Catholic Spain lent the Jacobites diplomatic and military support as part of their own anti-English and anti-Dutch foreign policy. A Jacobite military effort in Ireland in favor of James’ restoration was crushed by William at the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690), though it took two more years of fighting to secure the conquest. The Jacobite army in Ireland had a paper strength of 36,000 in 1689 and 45,000 a year later, but just 30,000 by 1691. And its effective strength was far lower than any of those figures, probably less than half. The Treaty of Limerick permitted 19,000 of these men to leave with their arms and families for France, where they continued to serve James II. The remaining few were nominally sworn into William’s service, then disbanded. A French-Jacobite invasion of England was stymied at Barfleur-La Hogue (1692). In 1708 Louis XIV supported an invasion of Scotland by the “Old Pretender,” James Stuart. Louis provided the Jacobites with eight ships-of-the-line and 24 frigates, alongside various transports. Also included were 12 infantry battalions and nearly 14,000 flintlock muskets with powder and shot, and vast stores and cavalry weapons and riding gear for what was supposed would be a vast throng of eager Scots volunteers. The fleet left for Scotland in mid-May. Louis XIV again abandoned the Jacobites when his representatives agreed to the London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) with Queen Anne’s government. Jacobite political loyalties and emotional sentiments continued to roil the politics and national life of the Three Kingdoms during the first half of the 18th century as the Protestant ascendancy took firm root under enforcement by Ulster militia

jagir

and Irish establishment, but all serious fighting was over within Ireland. See also Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of; Berwick, James, 1st Duke of; Ireland; Ormonde, Duke of; Tyrconnel, Earl of. Suggested Reading: John Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708 (1988); Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey, eds., A Military History of Ireland (1996).

jagir. See mansabdari. Jamaica. The island was sighted by Columbus in 1494, but European settlement did not begin until 1509. Spanish rule was so harsh that, helped by disease, the native Taino population was completely wiped out. Spanish interest in the island waned in favor of more immediately valuable colonies. Jamaica was captured for England by an expedition sent by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 to attack Hispaniola. The expedition was repulsed from Hispaniola but took Jamaica on the return voyage. See buccaneers; Western Design.

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James II (1633–1701). Second son of Charles I of England, brother of Charles II; duke of York; king of England, Scotland (as James VII), and Ireland (1685–1688). As a young man James fought in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). He was surrendered to Parliament in 1646 but fortuitously escaped to France two years later and served in the Catholic armies of his French and Spanish allies. He saw combat in a subordinate role at the head of an English regiment at the Dunes (June 4/14, 1658), and performed well. He would never fare as well after assuming overall command of whole armies, a role in which he later demonstrated a lack of strategic vision and tactical skill. He returned to England upon the Restoration of his brother in 1660. He served formally as Lord High Admiral during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). He fought well at Lowestoft (June 3/13, 1665), but afterward was relieved of active command for failing to pursue and crush the remnants of the decimated Dutch fleet. During the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) he was once again given a sea command. He worked with Samuel Pepys to rebuild and reform the Royal Navy. Together, they laid down many new warship hulls, revised the fighting instructions, and introduced badly needed administrative and management reforms. James was forced out as Lord High Admiral in 1672. He covertly converted to Catholicism sometime in the late 1660s, probably 1669. He openly married a Catholic princess in 1673, the same year he opposed the Test Act barring Catholics from high office. His marriage accorded with the diplomatic ambitions and machinations of Louis XIV. James’ Protestant daughter, Mary, married William III in 1677. William was then still Prince of Orange, but the marriage potentially would make him a future king of England. The Whigs struggled fiercely to bar James from the succession to Charles II, and many Tories privately opposed him as well, but his brother supported him and dissolved Parliament before it could ban him from the throne. James succeeded Charles in 1685. Violent opposition was limited to a minor and incompetent Whig rebellion led by his nephew, the Duke of Monmouth. This “Monmouth Rebellion” was easily suppressed.

Janissary Corps

On the thrones of England and Scotland (as James II and James VII, respectively), he made no effort to hide an autocratic temperament or his favoritism for Catholic courtiers, openly expanding both Catholic rights and rites. After the failure of the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, he garrisoned a standing army of 40,000 men, the first ever maintained in England by the monarch. It was dominated by Catholic officers. Regiments were kept in barracks just outside London to intimidate Parliament, Protestants in general, and the city’s merchants in particular. His other appointments were often of inferior men and were seen as interference in local matters. All this made him deeply unpopular, bringing Tories and Whigs, Anglicans and Nonconformists together in opposition. He became even more detested when the birth of a son on June 10, 1688, promised to continue Catholic rule over an increasingly and self-consciously Protestant people for another generation. James was opposed by the high clergy, Parliament, and perhaps even most of the country, where a majority feared resumption of the religious civil wars. Leading London merchants and the anti-James majority of the nobility invited James’ son-in-law William to take the throne. Lacking real support in England beyond the north, though still popular in Ireland and Catholic parts of Scotland, James tried to rally the Army but quickly faced mass desertions, particularly of Protestant officers. He gave up his first idea of fighting William on the landing beaches and instead retreated along the Thames to London. As he did so, 26,000 men deserted his banner out of a force of 30,000. The deserters included the Duke of Marlborough. James tried to flee abroad but was captured. He was then permitted to escape by William, to the relief of most of England, whose informed population feared another royal trial like that of Charles I by Cromwell and Parliament. James was bloodlessly succeeded by William and Mary on February 2/12, 1689, in what admirers then and since called the Glorious Revolution. James was given refuge and then limited military aid by Louis XIV. He sailed for Ireland, landing on March 12/22, 1689, with a small Catholic exile army and 7,000 French troops who were to provide a nucleus for a larger Irish force. Irish Catholics did indeed rally to him, but he fared poorly as a commander and was ultimately defeated decisively by William at the Boyne (1690). Louis abandoned James in the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), but reasserted recognition of the Stuart line as rightful heirs to thrones of the Three Kingdoms at the outset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He died in exile in France, at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Jacobites throughout the British Isles supported his descendants in occasional armed rebellion well into the 1740s. See also British Army; dragonnades. Janissary Corps. Turkish: “jeniçeri” (“new militia” or “new army”) “Ocak” (“corps”). During the medieval period Janissaries were the heart of the Kapikulu Askerleri, the sultan’s personal troops and standing army. Sporting a white felt cap (“Börk”) that distinguished them from regular Ottoman troops wearing red, the Janissaries or “white caps” were the most professional and tactically disciplined troops of the late medieval and early modern period. As such, they 223

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formed the stable core of one of the first and finest standing armies before 1650 and still represented a significant force into the 18th century. The Devs¸irme system of recruitment among Christian slave boys was effectively phased out by 1648, to accommodate Muslim interest in joining the lucrative Corps; it was formally ended early in the reign of Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730). Ottoman lords made up a solid cavalry force known as sipahis that augmented Janissary infantry. This meant that the sultans could deploy a crack infantry corps—training of Janissary cadets lasted a full seven years—with servitor and auxiliary cavalry reserves of timariots and sarica capable of rapid mobilization during wartime. By 1475 there were 6,000 Janissaries compared to 40,000 sipahis and another 3,000 household cavalry. During the 16th century, barracks in Constantinople housed about 14,000 Janissary boys and men. At the 17th-century peak, the Constantinople (Istanbul) garrisons held about 40,000 Janissaries organized into 196 companies of about 200 men each. Another 14,000 served in garrisons in strategic provinces such as Hungary, for a total of 54,000. The total enrolled fell to 48,212 in 1670 (including 8,742 cadets). Of these, no more than 10,000 would see active duty in wartime, though more were redeployed from the central barracks to frontier posts. Starting in the second half of the 17th century, replacement levels were kept low, as the expense of the Corps no longer led to commensurate battlefield reward for the sultan. As individual Janissaries retired, they were replaced by contracted, untrained peasants (türedi askeri). Poorly motivated and at first next to useless in battle, these were hired due to financial necessity, even though the Empire lost the First Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). Thus, Janissary enrollment by 1660 was only about 18,000 actives (those available in the field to receive their pay), with 33,000 “white caps” in total on the payroll. In 1687 only 130 new recruits were inducted into the Corps. See also Cebicis; Çorbasi; Eyâlet Askerleri; ishan; Kazan; levend; Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669); rations; Saka; sekban; serdar; Serdengeçti; Top Arabacs; Topçu; uniforms; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683); war finance; Yeniçeri AOasi; Zenta, Battle of (September 1/11, 1697). Suggested Reading: Ahmed Djévad, Etat Militaire Ottoman, Vol I: Les Corps des Janissaires (1882); Geoffrey Goodwin, The Janissaries (1995).

Jao Modo, Battle of (1696). See Zunghar Mongols.

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Japan. The arrival of European firearms in Japan when several Portuguese shipwrecked at Tanegashima in 1543 almost overnight changed the nature of Japanese warfare and politics. This great shift occurred after eight centuries of military dominance by the samurai warrior classes and just at the crest of the “Sengoku jidai” (1467–1568), Japan’s century of “Country at War” or “Warring States” period. Samurai had known of rockets, bombs, and similar gunpowder weapons from the 13th century, but Chinese and Korean gunsmiths kept the secret of guns and cannon from the Japanese. Japan thus acquired its first true firearms, matchlock muskets, not from neighboring China but from Europe. Spanish traders arrived in 1581 with more handguns and cannon, by which time several

Japan

Japanese daimyo (local barons) were manufacturing copies of Portuguese firearms and employing them in new infantry formations to overwhelm more traditionally-minded neighbors. From this period, large infantry units appeared in daimyo armies, partly as firearms troops protected by pikemen and partly in response to the breakdown of samurai loyalty during Sengoku. The second half of the 16th century witnessed the unification of most of Japan by three great warlords, each effectively using guns in combination with older arms to wage and win the Unification Wars (1550–1615). The first was Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), who ended the Ashikaga shogunate and wrecked forever the old daimyo order. He conquered the most advanced and heavily populated third of Japan, crushing daimyo and Buddhist opposition. The second unifier was Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), who ruled much of Japan as the military power behind the imperial throne. Hideyoshi twice sent massive armies into Korea as part of a planned empire that was supposed to include Indochina, Siam, the Philippines, and China. But he was repulsed on both occasions. In 1588 he banned ownership of all military weapons by commoners. The year before, he had moved against European cultural influence by ordering Christian missionaries to leave Japan, and in 1697 he carried out mass executions of Japanese Christians (“Kirishitan”), whom he saw as adherents of a subversive foreign cult. The last of the unifiers, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) triumphed at the climactic Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603. His successors in a long series of Tokugawa shoguns (1603–1867) chose a path of near-complete isolation, especially from the West, lasting over 250 years. Having overcome a century of awful civil war to unify Japan, Tokugawa shoguns steadfastly resisted externally-induced change. This resistance included exclusion decrees banning European traders and missionaries, and violent and bloody repression of the existing Kirishitan population of converts. This hard policy was highly effective: the Tokugawa gave Japan political stability and domestic peace, however harshly enforced. Their policy of extreme isolationism drew in part upon the observed experience of Ming China, then being overrun by the Manchus and penetrated later along its Pacific coast by Europeans. The price of the “great peace” imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate was suppression of creative social forces and a self-imposed technological and military inferiority to the West that lasted until the mid-to-late 19th century. Isolation was not as extreme toward Korea and China. Trade relations continued with China, while Korea sent twelve major missions (tsu¯shinshi) to Japan, whereas westerners met harassment and were forbidden to take up permanent residence. After 1613 Buddhism—its once-powerful martial monks disarmed and thus mostly harmless—was re-established as the state religion, while all Kirishitan were sharply persecuted. In 1614 Catholic clergy were expelled. In 1618 other Christian missionaries were killed or forced to leave. A ferocious persecution of Christianity followed, including a series of “seclusion decrees” passed from 1633–1641. These really aimed at tightening control over the daimyo, among whom a handful were Kirishitan, but also at ending Christian subversion of Japan’s putatively homogenous and harmonious religious and social order. Under pressure from enforcement of anti-Christian edicts by the Tokugawa 225

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inquisition, the Kirishitan of Shimabara rebelled in 1637–1638. The rebels were mostly peasant converts, supported and led by a few rogue samurai. They also received minor aid from a few Europeans in the area. In short order, the rebellion was brutally crushed: 35,000 were butchered in the last Shimabara stronghold at Hara Castle. Survivors thereafter went underground as “Kakure Kirishitan” (“Hidden Christians”). Some hidden communities survived for 250 years through outward conformity with Buddhism and Shinto observance. Western trade also fell away: England’s East India Company quit Japan in 1623, the Spanish were expelled in 1624, and the Portuguese were thrown out in 1639. That left only the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC), and it was confined to the single entrepôt of Deshima. Chinese merchants were somewhat more welcome, but even they were controlled in all movements within Japan. Additional seclusion decrees by Shogun Tokugawa Iyemitsu forbade any Japanese from leaving the home islands and enforced execution of all who returned from abroad, even shipwreck survivors. Shipbuilders were ordered not to construct vessels capable of ocean travel, and trade with Europe was strictly limited to regulated and authorized goods through the artificial island of Deshima, while Korean and Chinese junks were directed and escorted to the port of Nagasaki proper. Korea retaliated by limiting Japanese traders to Pusan, while China banned official trade with Japan, though an extensive private commerce flourished nevertheless. These limited contacts were permitted by the shoguns as a source of intelligence on the wider world and were in any case unstoppable by distant Chinese emperors, whether Ming or Qing. A fierce argument has taken place among military historians as to whether or not the Japanese “gave up the gun” during the 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate. At one level, they clearly did not: firearms were still produced in Japan, and firearms militia were maintained under control of the shoguns and bakufu (originally, a military bureaucracy, but converted to a civilian bureaucracy under the Tokugawa). This reflected shogunal understanding of the power which low-born musketeers had given the great unifiers against the daimyo, and to themselves as governors of a pacified island empire. In addition to preserving social peace, the firearms ban surely displayed unwillingness by the Tokugawa shoguns to see their own monopoly on effective force challenged by wide diffusion of knowledge about guns. On the other hand, prohibitions on anyone other than samurai owning firearms—or for that matter any deadly weapon, including bows and swords—were enforced by gun and “sword hunts” unmatched in any other country. During the long Tokugawa peace, there were periods of real cultural achievement, notably the Genroku era (1688–1704) under the fifth Tokugawa shogun. Stable, but secluded and conformist, and still only loosely centralized, the nation was kept unaware of global historical currents until these built to a level where they burst upon its shores with more force than a great tsunami in the latter 19th century. Yet, some foreign ideas seeped into Japan through the Dutch outpost at Deshima well before that. In 1720 the shoguns lifted the ban on importing foreign books (except Christian texts, which remained under interdict). Some samurai were already worried about falling behind foreign powers militarily, while others grew concerned over Japan’s abil226

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ity to sustain its expanding population without foreign trade and overseas expansion. But the Tokugawa also actively encouraged the samurai to disdain firearms in favor of the identifying sword and a chivalric code suited to a dismounted cavalry elite. “Bushido¯” (“Way of the Warrior”) emphasized personal virtue and a martial cult of warriors, as opposed to the infantry values of more modern and lower-born musketeers. The main argument in favor of the thesis that Japan gave up the gun is that after the isolated rebellion of 1637–1638, the nation saw no more battles for 200 years, until 1837. Yet it would be more accurate to say that Japan gave up civil war rather than that it put aside firearms. Once the Japanese began to make war again in the second half of the 19th century, they took old guns out of storage, purchased modern models from the West and began to make their own, and took to battle once more with such enthusiasm that they acquired a ferocious reputation over the course of the first half of the 20th century. Suggested Reading: W. G. Beasley, The Japanese Experience (2000); R. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan (1984); Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (1993).

Jasmund, Battle of (May 25, 1676). See Cornelius van Tromp; Scanian War (1674–1679). jazda kozacka. “Cossack cavalry.” See Polish Army. jazda pancerna. See Pancerna cavalry; Polish Army. Jews. See Cossacks; Cromwell, Oliver; Fronde (1648–1653); Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Oran; Peter I; Razin, Stenka; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); war finance: Spain; William III. John Company. See East India Company (English). Juel, Niels (1629–1697). Danish admiral. Born in Norway, he learned his trade under the Dutch masters Maarten van Tromp and Michiel de Ruyter during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). He saw action at Dungeness (November 30/December 10, 1652), the Three Days’ Battle off Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653), at Gabbard Shoal (June 2–3/12–13, 1653) and at Texel (July 31/August 10, 1653). During 1656–1658 he made several cruises against the Barbary corsairs. His was the main hand on the tiller of Danish naval progress and the building of a modern fleet from the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), although he was passed over for supreme command. He commanded battlefleets in action during several key Danish-Dutch naval fights with the powerful Swedish Navy during the Second Northern War (1655–1660), including the siege of Copenhagen in 1659. During the Scanian War (1674–1679) he finally was promoted to supreme command. He fought alongside Cornelius van Tromp at Öland (June 1, 1676). He won a smashing victory at Köge Bay (July 1, 1677). He spent the last 20 years of his naval career laying in new warship hulls and training Danish crews in new fighting doctrines that looked to sever the enemy line of battle before killing each broken segment 227

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in detail. For all his talent, Niels could only delay the receding tide of Danish military power in the Baltic. Jumano. A Spanish term for the Plains Indian tribes of Texas. They collaborated closely with the Spanish, which made them a target of aggression by neighboring Apaches. By the early 18th century a distinct Jumano presence was eliminated by a combination of assimilation into Spanish society, drought and famine in their home territory, and chronic war with the Apaches. There is some evidence that the peoples the Spanish called Jumanos may have migrated to the Texas panhandle to escape the Apache wars, to later reemerge as the Kiowas. Junkers. See Brandenburg; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Landgrafs; officers; Prussian Army; szlachta.

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K Kahlenberg, Battle of (September 12, 1683). See Vienna, siege of (July 14– September 12, 1683). kahya bey. A secondary bey serving as deputy to an Ottoman grand vezier. He acted as field agent for the grand vezier in military and political affairs. kaim mekam. A deputy to an Ottoman grand vezier. Kaiserlichs. “Imperials.” Slang for Austrian soldiers, especially infantry. kale. Ottoman stone fortresses surrounded by several wide moats. They were built in more strategic locales where simple çit palankasi, or reed or timber palisades, were inadequate. Kalisz, Battle of (October 29, 1706). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). Kangxi was the reign name of Xuan Ye (1654–1722), second emperor of the Qing dynasty. He ruled China for 61 years and is widely considered by specialist scholars as the greatest of all Qing emperors, and among the most respected in China’s long history. He personally led successful campaigns in north China to complete the consolidation of Manchu (Qing) control. Kangxi exhibited an admirable mixture of stern retribution against rebels and traitors to his regime, but genuine and unusually broad mercy toward the many innocents, and even the somewhat guilty, caught up in rebellion and war. He thereby not only completed the Manchu conquest, but he also firmly consolidated it with a genuine claim to govern China under the “mandate of heaven.” His approach to governance proved critical to victory during the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), at the start of which the 19-year-old Kangxi took firm, personal control. His subordinates employed brutal tactics in

Kapikulu Askerleri

trying to subjugate the rebellion of the “Three Feudatories” of Shang, Geng, and Wu in southern China. This great revolt might have shattered China into another “warring states” period had Kangxi not kept his enemies divided and his troops united. He was aided greatly in this by the basic distrust of Ming loyalists in the armies of Wu Sangui, who had betrayed the last reigning Ming emperor, ordered the strangulation of the last of the “Ming princes” in southern China, and now declared a rival dynasty to the Qing in the south. A critical decision was made by Kangxi in the middle of the war to abandon the old Qing exclusive reliance on Manchurian and Mongol Banner troops and raise vast new Han Chinese armies—reportedly as large as 900,000 at the peak—to supplement his armies. In 1683 Kangxi added Taiwan to China’s empire through an amphibious invasion that took advantage of the death of the last Ming pretender on that island two years earlier. In the mid-1680s, he made a fierce war against Russian hunters and settlers on the northern border, and then in 1689, negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia. He also waged war against the Zunghar Mongols, personally leading a major campaign in 1696. In times of peace, he was a genuine supporter of Confucian values, issuing his famous “Sacred Edict” as a shorthand guide to Confucian moral teaching, as well as further restoring and deepening the use of the ancient examination system. He was deeply involved in the Rites controversy with the Catholic Church. Other than sending his generals to conquer Tibet (1720) and Outer Mongolia (1696 and again in 1720), and put down a brief rebellion in Taiwan (1721), Kangxi completed his reign by supporting law and the arts, and by overseeing relative peace in one of the most prosperous and successful civilizations of its day. Some historians criticize him for two major failures: not putting China’s fiscal house in order with basic tax system reform (land tax rolls were 150 years out of date), and not extending the rule of law or providing proper security from armed bandits in much of the countryside, which was where most Chinese lived. Kangxi died without naming an heir, which also led to discord and unrest. See also Banner system; Green Standard Army. Suggested Reading: Jonathon Spence, Emperor of China (1974).

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Kapikulu Askerleri. “The Sultan’s Army.” The permanent household troops of Ottoman sultans. They were salaried and comprised both infantry and cavalry, as distinct from provincial levies (Eyâlet Askerleri) of timariots. The sultan’s troops were comprised originally of Janissary corps musketeers and feudal heavy cavalry, or sipahis, as well as technologically obsolete silahdars, or sword troops. Beginning in the late 16th century, the Kapikulu Askerleri formed the core of Ottoman armies fighting on the frontiers even when the sultan was not present, which was most often the case. Kapikulu Askerleri troops were well trained and highly specialized. They were divided into various technical units (armorers, engineers, gunners, wagoners, training units), while retaining units of regular infantry and cavalry. Kapikulu Askerleri were paid quarterly and well, with active units receiving additional campaign bonuses (“sefer bahzizi”). This meant the sultan’s house-

Karlstadt border

hold troops and kuls rarely refused to fight for want of pay, although they were known to refuse long service in the harsh eastern deserts. Six richly paid regiments of sipahis (“alti bölük sipahileri”) held mainly non-combat, military administration posts (“divanî hizmet”) in residence at the Porte in the 17th century. It was the ambition of Serdengeçti Janissaries to receive elevation to the higher-paid and more prestigious ranks of these pampered regiments as a permanent reward and as a means of secure retirement. All Kapikulu Askerleri resisted efforts by anyone other than the sultan, including the grand vezier, to command them. Their numbers fell dramatically in the second half of the 17th century in response to shrinking revenues. In 1670 there were 39,470 active and retired Janissaries on the sultan’s payroll, as well as 8,742 Janissary cadets and 14,070 in the six regiments of the most expensive of these troops, the household sipahis. By the later 17th century, only about 20,000 effectives were drawn from the Kapikulu Askerleri, with most Ottoman troops coming from timariot and peasant ranks. Kara Mustafa Pasha (1634–1683). Grand vezier of the Ottoman Empire, 1676–1683. He deflected mutinous sentiment among Ottoman military units into a grand foreign distraction: an invasion of Hungary and Austria. He persuaded Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648–1687) to reactivate the dormant Ottoman conflict with the Habsburgs. In the summer of 1683, he personally led 100,000 troops in the siege of Vienna. The campaign turned into a disastrous defeat, then an utter rout. He left 10,000 dead outside the walls of Vienna, and thousands more frozen to death in high mountain passes during the retreat. Upon his return to Belgrade, without even his baggage train in tow, he was strangled to death by order of the sultan. Kardis, Peace of (June 21, 1661). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Karlowitz, Peace of (January 26, 1699). This treaty ended the long AustroOttoman War (1683–1697) between the Habsburgs of Austria (and all allied powers of the so-called Holy League, except Russia) and the Ottoman Empire. It followed the Ottoman defeat and humiliation at Zenta (September 1/11, 1697). Austria nearly doubled in expanse as the Ottomans formally ceded most of their holdings in Croatia, Hungary, Slavonia, and Transylvania. Although Peter I of Russia was greatly angered by this treaty, which he regarded as a personal and political betrayal, he was compelled by Karlowitz to negotiate a separate armistice with the Ottomans in 1700. Hungarian dissatisfaction with the settlement contributed to a decade-long rebellion led by Ferenc Rákóczi, which in turn played into the diplomatic maneuvers of Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The treaty was also notable for its call for humane treatment and exchanges of prisoners of war. Karlstadt border. “Karlovac border.” The Croatian border of the Austrian empire from 1558, lying predominantly south and west of the Drava. Anchored by the fortress at Karlstadt, it comprised a line of defense running from Karlstadt to Warasdin to Banal, with watchtowers, guard posts, and fortified Grenzer villages 231

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in between. From the 16th century, it was garrisoned by Balkan mercenaries, supplemented by land-grant militia and Grenzer. It had a discrete command, but shared a Hofkriegsrat with the Windische border that was located at Graz. Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660). King of Sweden, 1654–1660. He trained for war under the great Swedish artillery master Lennart Torstensson (1603–1651) and saw action at several battles of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), ending as commandant of all Swedish forces in Germany. Worried about the Russian invasion of Poland-Lithuania that began the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667), he tried to conquer large, new territory in Poland during the “Little” or Second Northern War (1655–1660), in a serious overreach of Swedish power. He captured Warsaw in 1655 but could not overcome Polish defense of the fortressmonastery of Czestochowa from 1655–1656. The next year he campaigned against Denmark, performing several virtuoso field maneuvers that brought him to the suburbs of Copenhagen. His success in the field forced Denmark to cede large swaths of territory to Sweden in the Treaty of Roskilde (February 26/March 8, 1658). But he fundamentally failed to improve Sweden’s geostrategic position in the Baltic. He startled all Europe by sailing away from Kiel only to turn around and attack Copenhagen a second time, in an effort to repress Denmark permanently and establish Sweden as the dominant Baltic and Scandinavian power. His attempt to exclude all foreign fleets from the Baltic provoked Dutch intervention, which forced him away from Denmark. He died unexpectedly on February 23, 1660, opening the door to a negotiated settlement with Denmark and its allies, and an end to the Second Northern War. His death at age 37 also left a four-year-old son, Karl XI, on the throne.. Karl XI of Sweden (1655–1697). King of Sweden, 1660–1697. Son of Karl X, whom he succeeded at the age of four. Although not well trained for war as a youth, as king and commander he showed a natural aptitude for strategic and combat command during the Scanian War (1674–1679). He fought off a Danish army of 14,000 troops that landed at Rå in Scania on June 29/July 8, 1676. At age 21, he soundly defeated the Danes in the extraordinarily bloody fight at Lund (December 4/14, 1676), preserving Scania from the Danes. He then conducted a spirited and effective defense of the Swedish homeland during the last years of the war. He won again at Malmö (July 5/15, 1678). He is often credited by nationalist historians with preserving the German territories of the Swedish Empire. In fact, his gains were modest, and the Swedish Empire in Germany was restored in 1679 more by French diplomatic intervention than any feat of arms. On the other hand, during the later years of his reign, Karl’s ruthless reforms and administration left the state budget and the Army and Navy in excellent condition. His premature death on March 24/April 5, 1697, also left the throne and empire to the impetuous 15-yearold Karl XII, who decisively lost the lion’s share of Sweden’s empire over the next 20 years. Longer term, reforms introduced by the Riksdag and presided over from 1680–1697 by Karl XI survived for over 200 years. See also cavalry. Suggested Reading: A. F. Upton, Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (1998). 232

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Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718). King of Sweden, 1697–1718. “Lion of the North.” He succeeded his father, Karl XI, two months shy of his 15th birthday. From his earliest boyhood, he was fascinated by all things military—in a manner reminiscent of his lifelong bête noir, Peter I. The early death of his warrior father encouraged Sweden’s enemies to underestimate the new boy-king, and seek to take political and military advantage of his inexperience. Impetuous and headstrong, Karl XII inherited a superbly professional Swedish Army, albeit one that had not fought a battle since its victory in the Scanian War (1674–1679). He led this force against a coordinated Danish, Polish, and Russian attack that launched the Great Northern War (1700–1721). He benefited greatly from wise choices to retain his father’s generals, most notably Karl Gustaf Rehnsköld, and to expand the Army from 65,000 to about 75,000 men. He quickly defeated the Danes in 1700 by braving a landing on the island of Zealand that threatened Copenhagen. He immediately turned and humbled the Russians and their tsar at Narva (November 19/30, 1700). Thereafter, he turned south into Poland, against the vehement counsel of his top advisors, most of whom said he should finish off Peter and Russia first and who also feared what they thought was the greater power of the Polish Commonwealth. Instead, Karl deposed the Polish king, Augustus II, and set his own candidate, Stanislaw I, on the throne. Throughout this early period, his instincts as a warrior in the grand tradition of the House of Vasa amplified the core professionalism of the Army he inherited. As good as the Army was, this was a youthful monarch who loved war far too much for a small state with an economy and population base unable to sustain conflict for as long as would be needed to fulfill his extreme ambitions. Karl was an unusually puritanical king, even for so Spartan a Protestant people as 18th-century Swedes. He disdained alcohol, for instance, in profound contrast to the regular and indeed perverse debauchery indulged by his great enemy Peter of Russia. Karl also refused to wear the compulsory gentleman’s wig, and preferred to dress in a plain blue uniform that abjured lace or other decoration. His dress was no affectation. It was a type of practical uniform born of a habit and preference that reflected his only real interest in adult life: making war. Karl XII was only happy in the saddle and on campaign to defend or expand the Swedish Empire. After leaving Stockholm at the start of the Great Northern War in 1700, he spent the next, and last, 18 years of his life on one campaign or another. He usually led from the front, a fact much praised for its courage and widely criticized as reckless. His compulsive warrior’s behavior seemed Alexandrian to admirers then and since, but it was unlike that of any other contemporary European monarch. Most of his sovereign peers and lesser kings and barons were busy constructing comfortable miniature Versailles palaces in baroque emulation of Louis XIV, or were at war themselves with the “Grande Monarque.” One explanation of his tactics is that they worked, at least until they no longer did. More fundamentally, they flowed from a long-standing, aggressive Swedish military culture of “gå på” (“At them!”). This approach to war permitted Swedish forces to repeatedly defeat 233

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much larger Russian, Polish, and Saxon armies. Swedish tactics emphasized astonishing cavalry and infantry charges. The latter were often made with Karl or his commanders exhorting men not to fire their muskets but instead use their bayonets, swords, and pikes. A major reason for Karl’s odd behavior at the operational and strategic levels is that he was fixated on the personalities of his enemies, first Augustus and later Peter, against whom he raged, plotted, and made war without due consideration of other important factors. He would have been well served, for instance, to study Polish and Lithuanian politics. Instead, utterly failing to comprehend the internal dynamics of his enemies, he intervened in Poland-Lithuania’s chaotic civil war and made the major error of supporting the detested Sapiehas faction. Had he studied geopolitics and grand strategy, he might not have waited to attack Peter in Moscow, providing that clever tsar the vital years he needed to recover from Narva, reform the Russian Army, and build up his Navy and new capital. But Karl would not make peace in Poland unless Augustus was driven forever from that land. This opened the door to Peter to make an alliance with the Lithuanian szlachta in Karl’s strategic rear once Augustus could no longer defend them from Swedish depredations and contributions. Nor could Karl bring himself to make peace with Russia while it was still governed by Peter, or deny himself the temptation to invade and punish the tsar. Engorged with a personal hatred for Peter that Marlborough noted when he met the Swedish king, Karl invaded Russia in 1708. He very nearly captured Peter, but then Karl turned south a second time, eventually marching all the way to Ukraine in pursuit of Cossack allies as well as food and forage for his starving men. In June 1709, he was wounded in the foot and was soon prostrate with high fever. Unable to mount or ride, he was carried about on a stretcher. Lacking guns, supplies, or enough men, he still chose to attack the Russian camp at Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709). As a result, he lost his entire army and, in time, his empire. He left behind on the fields of Poltava 10,000 dead and 14,000 more who were taken prisoner as he was carried into enforced exile by his personal guard. His initial acceptance by the Sublime Porte eventually turned into gentle imprisonment at Ottoman hands. While in his camp inside Ottoman borders, he was effectively a prisoner of Russo-Ottoman relations. He stayed there for several years, encamped along the Dniester River, begging the sultan to open a southern front against Russia, while Peter and Karl’s many enemies in the north picked at the increasingly exposed bones of the Swedish Empire. Despairing of any strategic hopes or gains from staying longer in the south, and swooped down upon and taken prisoner by the sultan in 1714, Karl was finally permitted to return north by an Ottoman court tired of his intrigues and more wary of Peter’s. He traveled overland through eastern Europe to finally arrive in Swedish Pomerania. To get there, he was forced to travel through Austria and Germany, disguised with a wig and false mustache. He was just in time to defend Straslund from assault, but only until he was forced to abandon the fortress in December 1715. Karl returned to Sweden in the new year, touching its soil for the first time since 1702. He raised a new army, which included many boys, from the 234

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scrapings of Swedish resources. This was not the same professional force with which he had invaded Poland, suppressed Saxony, and attacked Russia. Leaving those more powerful enemies aside, Karl resumed campaigning against the Danes in Norway. He was also tied down in fighting with Hanover, Prussia, and Saxony. He attacked into Norway in 1717 and again in 1718. His ambitions were undimmed by his earlier failures and years of exile. Something of a strategic as well as tactical berserker, he contemplated a scheme to displace the Stuarts from the Scottish throne as a roundabout means of getting at his enemies in Hanover, who now also reigned in Great Britain. Just 36 years old, he was killed on November 30/December 11, 1718, while peering over the ramparts to watch sappers dig zig-zags toward the Danish works at the siege of Fredrikshald (Fredriksten) in Norway. The mortal wound was caused by a musket ball passing through his head. It is uncertain if the fatal ball was fired by an enemy or fired ineptly by one of Karl’s own men. Karl XII’s wars, and especially his ill-advised and stubbornly pursued invasion of Russia and Ukraine, amounted to an extraordinary imperial overreach that crippled Sweden as a major power, and ensured that it lost its Baltic empire and suffered a permanent fall from the ranks of the Great Powers. None of those facts prevented a martial myth from growing up around Karl’s supposed battlefield virtuosity that in certain respects survives today. It is best to take a more balanced view, agreeing that, at times, Karl displayed real tactical brilliance, such as during his great offensive campaigns of 1702–1706, but equally recognizing that Karl lacked operational and strategic vision, and that his hubris and unquelled personal hatreds ultimately birthed military disaster. See also Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702); pike. Suggested Reading: R. Hatton, Charles XII (1968).

Kazan. A large, copper cauldron that was the prized possession of every Janissary unit. It was used to prepare the single meal per day promised by the sultan (“The Father Who Feeds Us”) to every Janissary. Ortas (companies) carried it in military parades and closely protected it during battle. An Orta that lost its Kazan in battle was disgraced before all. To tip over the Kazan was the signal to begin a mutiny. Kentish Knock, Battle of the (September 28/October 8, 1652). An early battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) fought near the mouth of the Thames River. An English fleet under Robert Blake attacked in three divisions. The attack quickly floundered when one division became separated and was itself placed under attack by the main Dutch body, and two of the largest English battleships were mishandled and ran aground. The English recovered, however, and the battle turned against the Dutch, who lost three ships-of-the-line while another nine deserted their comrades. ketch. A small, two-masted ship, with a small mizzen mast aft of the main mast. See also bomb ketch; rigging. 235

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Khmelnitsky, Bohdan (c. 1595–1657). “Chmielnicki.” Cossack leader. See also Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). A rebellion of the Cossacks of Ukraine against Poland-Lithuania’s attempt to subdue their traditional military and political independence, which erupted at the end of the longest period of peace known in Poland since 1558. At the time of the great rising, the Quarter Army numbered just 3,780, and the entire Polish Army, including registered Cossacks, numbered no more than 11,800. Recruiting was also difficult, as the rebels rather than the szlachta had a democratic military tradition that easily drew peasants and others into their cause and army. This problem was compounded in parts of the Commonwealth and Ukraine by the identification of the Polish governing elite and military with Catholicism, and of the rebels with the peasantry and defense of Orthodoxy. A further complication was an ugly strain of local anti-Semitism. Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a Polish-Ukrainian noble fiercely loyal to his Orthodox faith, led Cossack rebels against their long-standing military imitators and rivals, the famed Polish winged-hussars, at Yellow Waters (February 1648). The Cossacks next allied with the Tatars, securing their southern flank. Their ranks were swelled by the arrival of numerous Cossack deserters, former conscripts of the Polish Army. For 11 days at Zhovti Vody (May 5–16, 1648) the rebels harassed a small and badly demoralized Polish army of about 5,000 men, which melted and retreated in face of pressure applied under the personal direction of Bohdan Khmelnitsky. Ten days later, the remnant and core of the Polish Army was eliminated by the Tatars at Korsum, where 8,000 prisoners were lost in addition to the killed and wounded. That catastrophe led to the Ukrainian steppe erupting in an admixture of violent Cossack and peasant rebellions. Korsum allowed masses of Cossacks to cross into Poland as a large raiding force in September. Another victory was won over a badly trained and makeshift Polish army in October, which fell apart merely upon the rumor that the Tatars intended to join the Cossacks. That collapse opened the path to Lwów (Lvov), which Khmelnitsky reached before the end of the year. Without defenses, the garrison did the wise thing: it bought off Khmelnitsky, who agreed to retire for the winter to await election of a new Polish king, John II Casimir (r. 1648–1668). The Cossacks settled into winter quarters in Ukraine. What followed were several years of devastation as bands of Cossacks and Tatars raided far and wide, burning crops, murdering peasants, and seeking out and murdering Polish Catholics and members of the Ukrainian Uniate Church. They reserved a special ferocity for massacres of Jews. This suggests that the uprising was distinctly religious in inspiration and intent, aggravated by the cause of Ruthenian autonomy and the usual social injustices and injuries suffered by serfs and peasants. The tide began to turn with the return to Poland of John II Casimir, who had been caught up in the tail end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in Germany. In 1649 the Cossacks and Tatars again raided deep into Poland. During the summer, they besieged a Polish garrison in the fortress of Zabaraz, but as steppe 236

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cavalry, they lacked the discipline and artillery firepower needed to succeed. The siege was lifted by a relief army, which fought the Cossacks to a draw at Zborow on August 15, 1649. Following a brief truce, during which each side raised huge armies, war broke out again in 1651, culminating in the three-day fight at Berestczko (June 28–31, 1651). Another truce was agreed, until it too was broken the following year. At Batoh (June 2–3, 1652) the Quarter Army was routed, and all Polish prisoners subsequently were massacred. That led to fundamental military reform of the Polish Army by John II Casimir, who was a competent although not spectacular soldier. By the sixth year of the rebellion, it was no longer clear what principles or causes were being fought over, as factions formed and quarrels broke out among the szlachta and within Cossack ranks. Khmelnitsky appealed to Tsar Alexis (r. 1645–1676) for aid, but the Russian leader was suspicious of cooperation between Khmelnitsky’s horde and the Don Cossacks. An agreement was finally reached at Pereiaslav in January 1654, and Khmelnitsky and Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky called on all Cossacks to swear allegiance to the tsar as their Orthodox “Father.” This alliance remains a source of bitter dispute among Ukrainian and Russian historians, but at the least, it formed a Cossack-Russian alliance aimed against Poland. It also inaugurated an expansion of violence in what became known as the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Kidd, William (c. 1645–1701). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Kiejdany, Treaty of (August 17, 1655). Lithuanian prince and general Janusz Radziwill signed this separate peace with Karl X of Sweden just months into the Second Northern War (1655–1660). It effectively broke the old tie to the Polish Commonwealth. Such a deal was long-contemplated by Radziwill. It was put into effect under the rationale that Lithuania had not received sufficient aid from the Poles against the Russian invasion that launched the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. “Kingdom of Naples and Kingdom of Sicily.” See also Dutch War (1672–1678); Messinian rebellion (1674–1678). King Philip’s War (1675–1676). A war of “ethnic cleansing” against the Indians of southern New England, named after Pometacom (or Metacom), chief of the Wampanoag nation, whom the settlers called “King Philip.” It broke out essentially over a land dispute as the settler population steadily expanded, pressing against Wampanoag holdings. It was aggravated by religious bias on both sides, especially among Puritan settlers. In 1671 the colonists disarmed the Wampanoag, with whom they had never had a hostile relationship until then. In 1675 a Wampanoag convert to Christianity was murdered, possibly on the order of Philip, for which crime several Wampanoag were executed by the colonists. That interference in tribal affairs sparked deep anger among the Wampanoag. The war that followed began with skirmishing and killing of outlying settler families and village populations, which led to reprisals in kind by the colonists. 237

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The latter for once fought Indian style: in loose formation and open order, making use of forest cover, and moving well through thick woods and even into swamps. On the other side, this was the first North American war in which Indians were well equipped with flintlock firearms, weapons with which they rapidly demonstrated consistently superior marksmanship and fighting skill. Killing quickly became indiscriminate on both sides, just as it had in the fighting in Ireland in the 1640s–1650s, with neither warring community making traditional distinctions between enemy combatants and civilians. The Wampanoag gained allies among the Nipmuck and Narragansett, causing the war to spread throughout New England as other colonies and tribes joined in. The powerful Narragansett had recently undergone a revival of traditional spirituality, but the tribe was still formally neutral when the “United Colonies” invaded its territory with an army of over 1,000 colonial troops in search of vengeance, war booty, and slaves. A colonial expedition traversed a swamp to attack and burn a hidden Narragansett fortified village, murder many women and children, and drive the survivors into the marshes. But Narragansett warriors and women defending their children inflicted serious casualties on the attackers, too. More were lost in a costly retreat. Narragansett religious and martial enthusiasm now corresponded to deepening religious and racial hostility toward Indians among whites. Massachusetts had expelled and incarcerated many “Praying Indians” on Deer Island. These Christian converts were treated more as a potential Indian fifth column than as religious or military allies, despite the fact that, at the outset of the fighting, more than 50 Praying Indians had served with the Massachusetts militia. Unscouted by the colonists, and therefore undetected, Narragansett war parties successfully ambushed several colonial columns and attacked exposed towns. By 1676, however, Pometacom was desperately searching for more Indian allies as the Praying Indians stayed loyal to Massachusetts, and Pequots and Mohegans entered the war in alliance with Connecticut. Once Pometacom was rebuffed in his bid for alliance by the powerful Mohawk of New York, the end to fighting came into view. The colonists’ superior weight of firepower and manpower, and better organization, told the tale militarily. All Indians opposing the colonists were suppressed once native women and children grew weak from famine and surviving warriors lost the will to continue resistance. As the conflict drew to a close, “Praying Indians” were again recruited by Massachusetts. They served in the colony’s militia for the next quarter-century, alongside native mercenaries hired to protect New England, using the same skulking way of war which the colonists professed to despise but in fact feared and respected. King William’s War (1689–1697). Essentially, this was the North American theater of operations of the larger European conflict known as the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The largest military operations took place in 1690 when the French raided Schenectady, New York. English troops and colonial militia from Massachusetts captured Port Royal in Acadia that same year, at the urging of the governor of Massachusetts. But the expedition was unable to capture Montreal 238

Köge Bay

or Québec. Worn-out and badly demoralized militia quit the attempt in October, after a week of desultory, ineffective, and amateur attempts at siege. Every summer the French-Canadian fighter and explorer, and founder of the colony of Louisiana, Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville, conducted a highly effective war of raids and ambushes against the semi-private interests and outposts of the Hudson Bay Company. In November 1696, he burned English settlements on the island colony of Newfoundland. The French governor of Québec, the comte de Frontenac, was not able to implement grandiose plans to assault Boston and New York before his death in 1698. Total casualties for English settlers in this essentially frontier skirmish were just 650 dead and comparable numbers of wounded. The French lost fewer than half that number. The majority of casualties were probably incurred by Native American allies of each European side, but are not accurately known. Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702). A major battle of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Augustus II was in camp preparing for lunch, along with his army of 9,000 Saxon horse, 6,000 Polish horse, and 7,500 mercenary German infantry. He was surprised to see a Swedish army of 8,000 infantry and 4,000 horse under Karl XII approaching his headquarters at Kliszów. This was a classic battle of encounter: the Swedes were similarly surprised to discover the Saxons hurriedly deploying into line of battle across their line of march. The Saxon left flank was wholly protected from any envelopment by a deep swamp. Karl therefore ordered a wide envelopment and attack on Augustus’ right against the Poles. Swedish cavalry charged first but were beaten off. Swedish infantry then used heavy fusil fire to repel two counter-charges made by Polish cavalry, at great cost in killed and wounded. The surviving hussars thereafter retired. That exposed the Saxon infantry to a flank attack, supported by simultaneous advances by the Swedish center and left. The Swedes lost 300 killed and another 800 wounded. The Poles and Saxons lost 2,000 dead (mainly Saxons) and many more wounded, along with 1,000 prisoners. Kockersberg, Battle of (October 7, 1677). A small cavalry fight in Alsace that came after a long, complex, and successful campaign of maneuver—without offering battle—by François Créqui. Forced to fight by the pursuit of Charles V of Lorraine, Créqui bested the Imperial horse. Claude Louis Villars fought with distinction here. Köge Bay (July 1, 1677). A Danish-Dutch fleet commanded by Niels Juel and Cornelius van Tromp resoundingly defeated a Swedish fleet led by Admiral Evert Horn. Horn lost 10 ships-of-the-line and 12 smaller vessels out of the 36 Swedish warships that had participated in the fight. The Swedish fleet lost 1,200 dead and wounded, and another 3,000 were taken from burning decks or out of the water as prisoners. No ships were lost by the Allies, although many casualties were inflicted onboard Allied ships from Swedish broadsides. That result ended Swedish naval domination of the Baltic and permitted the Allies to roll up Swedish garrisons along the German coastline, until none were left by the end of 1678. 239

Kolhapur, Battle of

Kolhapur, Battle of (December 28, 1659). See Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680). komputowe army. See Polish Army. Koniecpol, Battle of (November 21, 1708). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Königsberg, Treaty of (January 7/17, 1656). See Second Northern War (1655–1660). Konotop, Battle of (July 8, 1659). Tsar Alexis sent a large Russian army into Ukraine in 1659, as the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) revived in the east and south. The Russian army was tempted into besieging a small Cossack garrison at Konotop. While the Russians invested the garrison, a small Cossack detachment attacked, drawing the Russians after them as they turned and rode away. Once out of their trenches, the Russians were surrounded and smashed by a large Cossack and Tatar army. Over 5,000 Russians, mostly cavalry and dragoons, surrendered in the face of heavy Cossack fire. More were killed and wounded. köprücu. Ottoman bridge and road repairers. They were commoners given a semi-military function, and hence were tax exempt like the askeri. Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (1635–1676). Grand vezier at 26, in direct succession following his father Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, holding office from 1661–1676. He was as ruthless as his father but far more debauched. Like his father, he began his term by exterminating in a bloody purge all political opposition he could identify, including some courtiers who had supported his father and his own succession. Köprülü Ahmed Fazil also continued his father’s policy of full-bore aggression into Hungary and other Habsburg lands. His offensive into Hungary was stopped by Montecuccoli at St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664), but nevertheless resulted in a treaty favorable to the Ottomans, the Peace of Vasvár, signed nine days later. Unlike his father, Köprülü Ahmed Fazil successfully completed the Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669), traveling personally to Crete to conduct the final phase of the siege of Candia (1666–1669). He then opened a new front and war against Poland, the Ottoman-Polish War (1672–1676). His ambitions were repeatedly frustrated by the superior generalship of Jan Sobieski: he lost badly at Chocim in November 1673, and again at Lwów (Lvov) in 1675, despite having superior numbers in each case. He died at the start of the 1676 campaign, and his plans and army were defeated yet again later in the year at Zuravno. Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1702). He succeeded Köprülü Mustafa Pasha following the decisive Ottoman defeat at Zenta (September1/11, 1697). Recognizing the Ottoman Empire’s need for breathing space, and facing a new war with Russia to the north, Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha negotiated the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. The treaty ended the long Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1697) by ceding to Austrian most of Croatia, Hungary, Slavonia, and Transylvania. Hüseyin remained grand vezier until his death in 1702. 240

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Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (1583–1661). Grand vezier of the Ottoman Empire, 1656–1661. Of Albanian extraction, he founded a line of ruthless Köprülü grand veziers, who oversaw a half-century of Ottoman expansion into neighboring Habsburg lands and Ukraine, although the last several grand veziers in the Köprülü line suffered catastrophic defeat after defeat. In opening and ongoing purges that secured his office and kept him in power, Köprülü Mehmed Pasha killed many tens of thousands of opponents and dissenters. He temporarily reversed relative Ottoman military decline by reestablishing a higher degree of central control over increasingly mutinous Kapikulu Askerleri. He continued the Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669) but could not finish it on Crete, despite making some small gains, and significantly rebuilding and modernizing the Ottoman Navy. He did win victories against Venice in the Adriatic. He also attacked into Hungary, securing Ottoman control of Transylvania. This effectively eliminated the old buffer between the Ottoman and Austrian empires, bringing renewal of their ancient enmity closer to the surface. He tried to hold new territory in Ukraine by fortifying the frontier. He was succeeded by his 26-year-old son, Köprülü Ahmed Fazil. Köprülü Mustafa Pasha (1637–1691). Brother of Köprülü Ahmed Fazil and son of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, he became grand vezier in 1689 during the advance of Holy League armies deep into the territory of the Ottoman Empire. He eventually drove the Austrians out of Serbia, introducing a relative toleration for the sultan’s Christian subjects in the Balkans. In his brief time in office, he continued much-needed administrative and military reforms. He was killed on August 19/29, 1691, fighting at Slankamen. His untimely death deeply confused leadership questions on the Ottoman side. His cousin, Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha, succeeded him as grand vezier—restoring the Köprülü family hold on that office—following the decisive Ottoman defeat at Zenta (September 1/11, 1697). Hüseyin negotiated the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 that finally ended the AustroOttoman War (1683–1697). Korsum, Battle of (May 26, 1648). See Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Quarter Army. Krabatische Gränitz. See Karlstadt border. kuls. “Slaves of the sultan.” Top servants of the Ottoman sultans, including the grand vezier. Competition for court favors and office was intense, and sometimes deadly, among senior kuls. Kuruc. Hungarian term for anti-Habsburg forces in the great rebellion (1703–1711) led by Ferenc Rákóczi. Pro-Habsburg Hungarians were known as “labanc.” Kwarta. See Polish Army; Quarter Army. 241

L labanc. Hungarian term for pro-Habsburg forces in the great rebellion (1703–1711) led by Ferenc Rákóczi. Anti-Habsburg Transylvanians and other Hungarians were known as “Kuruc.” laboratory. Timber and earthen structures of an attacking army at a siege site, located near but separate from the powder magazine. It was the place where gunners assembled grenades and bombs, and made up cartridges for the guns and musketeers. lagˇimci. Ottoman military engineers who specialized in sapping and mining. la gloire. See battle; French Army; Louis XIV; officers. Lagos, Battle of (June 27, 1693). See Smyrna convoy (June 17–18, 1693); Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de. La Hogue, Battle of (1692). See Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of (May 19–24/ May 29–June 4, 1692). Landen, Battle of (1693). See Neerwinden, Battle of (July 19/29, 1693). Landgrafs. The Austrian landed aristocracy. Like the Junkers of BrandenburgPrussia, they emerged from the 17th century in effective control of the military. They accepted service in the officer corps in return for great social and economic privileges, and exemption from severe new taxes needed to sustain expanded militaries. Both stood in sharp contrast to the szlachta of Poland, which still rejected the notion of a service nobility.

landman

landman. A non-seaman; an unskilled member of a warship’s complement. Landmen numbered among “the people” who comprised the crew of a ships’ company, often making up as much as one third of the complement. They performed basic labor and supported work done by able and ordinary seamen. See also idler. land regiment. Prussian Army term for their own permanently assigned garrison troops. Landskröna, Battle of (July 14, 1678). See Scanian War (1674–1679). Lanowa infantry. See Polish Army. latrines. In fixed fortifications, some latrines were simply hollows in a bastion, with drops directly into town drains. For sentries walking the chemin des rondes or troops manning the ramparts, latrines were masonry or wood sheds with drops (potentially exposed to enemy fire) overhanging the ditch. Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea (1652). A disciplinary code for the States’ Navy (the once-and-future Royal Navy) issued by the Puritan Parliament after a perceived failure of English ships to stop the Dutch at Dungeness (November 30/December 10, 1652). It was a combination of exhortation and threats against cowardice, neglect of duty, and treason—all broadly defined. At the same time, Parliament voted more money for the Navy to prosecute the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). League of the Rhine (1658). See Rheinbund (1658). leeward and windward gauges. Windward is the direction from which wind is blowing at any given moment. In the age of sail, havens and harbors were easier to defend if they lay windward in a region of prevailing winds. This fact of life under sail power enormously advantaged England, whose entire east coast was windward of prevailing westerlies of the Northern Hemisphere. Dutch and French harbors were comparably disadvantaged by lying leeward of the prevailing winds. Similar but less spectacular advantages accrued to Denmark, Scotland, and Sweden. Foes of those countries that did not lie windward, including Poland and Russia, were greatly handicapped in naval warfare for the same reason. When hostile fleets met in open waters, one was usually windward of the other. This conferred a significant advantage known as the weather gage, which was in turn a consideration in development and implementation of naval tactics in this period. Prior to battle, fleets might spend hours or days seeking the windward position. At the onset of battle, holding the windward gauge permitted a ship (or line of ships) to close most quickly with an enemy ship (or line). The windward approach was thus a favored position of most attacking ships, while ships more interested in defense or retreat preferred the leeward gauge. If winds were too high or an attacker’s seamanship wanting, a keeling effect of the 244

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windward gauge might deprive the attacker of use of his largest guns on the lower deck because he could not open gun ports for fear of taking on water. By the same token, lee ships in a high wind and heavy sea had the advantage of availability of their lowest guns. By the end of this period, English ships almost always sought the windward gauge, which favored their gunnery preference of firing at the hull and keel of the enemy. The leeward gauge recommended more caution in combat and was preferred by less-confident fleets, which felt a need to reserve a chance for escape. The French generally sought the leeward gauge in part because they usually faced faster, more weatherly, and often more skilled British and Dutch ships and crews. Also, fighting from the leeward gauge favored French gunnery preference for de-masting and de-rigging enemy ships. The tactical implications of trying to hold one gauge or another was theoretically well understood but highly limited if large fleets were involved. See also evolutions. leeway. See windage. Left Bank Ukraine. See Andrussovo, Treaty of (January 30/February 9, 1667); Cossacks. Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705). Holy Roman Emperor (1658–1705); Habsburg ruler of the Austrian Empire. Facing war on two fronts, against the Ottoman Empire and France, in 1668, Leopold encouraged Brandenburg and other German states to aid the United Provinces in the War of Devolution (1667–1668) against Louis XIV, but he declined to enter the conflict himself. In 1668 he signed an accord with Louis to partition Spanish territories upon the anticipated early death of Carlos II (the childless Spanish king did not die, however, for another 30 years). In 1671 Leopold agreed to remain neutral should France attack the United Provinces. But he found that he could not remain at peace with France, so aggressive was Louis on too many fronts. During the Dutch War (1672–1678), many loyal Imperial subjects resided in Alsace and lent aid to Imperial troops. This called down the wrath of the “Sun King” upon them, but also elicited Leopold’s aid and sympathy. During the Ottoman siege of Vienna (July 14–September 12, 1683), Leopold fled his capital. Saved by allied Polish and German armies, he took great advantage of Ottoman confusion and weakness in the aftermath of their defeat outside Vienna. Accepting papal and other money, he hired foreign armies to supplement his Imperials in a successful campaign to capture key Ottoman forts along the middle Danube: Gran (1683), Neuhäusel (1685), Buda (1686), Esseg (1687), and finally Belgrade (1688). This permitted conquest of Croatia, Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia. In 1687–1688, Leopold was recognized by the Hungarian and Transylvanian Diets as their king and emperor. Next, his attention turned westward as Louis XIV forced the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) on Europe. When Carlos II finally died, Leopold refused to countenance partition with France of Spain’s crown and many other territories, holding out instead for a full Habsburg succession. This hard stance made compromise difficult and 245

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contributed to the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Leopold did not survive the war, dying on May 5, 1705. He was succeeded by his son, Joseph I. See also Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747). “The Old Dessauer.” Prussian Feldmarschall. He saw his first action in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and was present at the first siege of Namur (May 25–June 30, 1692). He saw extensive campaigning during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), fighting at most of the major battles, including Blenheim (August 2/13,1704) and Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709). From 1714 he played a major role in the antiSwedish coalition that campaigned during the final years of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). He conducted the siege of Straslund that drove Karl XII from that fortress city at the end of 1715. His fame ensues from these battles, but more importantly from his key role after this period in reshaping the Prussian Army, most notably its famous system of drill. His hand lay heavily on the lore, tradition, and everyday barracks practices of the Prussian Army prior to the wars of aggression, followed by desperate wars of defense, waged by Friedrich II (“der Grosse”) in the 1740s–1760s. Lesczczyn´ski, Stanislaw. See Stanislaw I. Leslie, David (1601–1682). Scots general in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). He fought under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and as lieutenant-general under his uncle, the Earl of Leven. He fought beside Oliver Cromwell at Marston Moor (1644) and beat the Earl of Montrose at Philiphaugh (1645). Leslie took the surrender of Charles I at Newark on May 5, 1646. He joined the Whiggamore Rising in 1648. He took over command of the Covenanter army from his uncle, only to lead it to disaster at Dunbar against Cromwell in 1650. He was beaten again by Cromwell at Worcester in 1651, where he was taken prisoner. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London until the end of the Commonwealth period. Lesnaia, Battle of (September 28/October 9, 1708). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Le Tellier, François (1641–1691). “Marquis de Louvois.” See Louvois, marquis de. Le Tellier, Michel (1603–1685). Appointed “Intendant to the Army of Italy” by Louis XIII (September 6, 1640), Le Tellier developed a system of standardized supply that ultimately included extensive use of magazines. This innovation was further advanced and completed by his son and successor, the marquis de Louvois (François Le Tellier). The idea of maintaining reserves of food, cloth, and fodder for transport horses and cavalry mounts, and dry powder and shot, was an old one. But primitive levels of bureaucracy in early modern states meant that most armies through the end of the Thirty Years’ War were forced to rely on an admix246

letters of service

ture of plunder and plunder’s handmaiden, contribution, for supply. No European army had its own transport corps before the mid-century mark. Instead, leased civilian wagons and teamsters, or requisitioned wagons on the march—with or without compensation—were standard. Le Tellier changed much of this by imposing tight contracts on merchants, insisting that they actually maintain at the ready all wagons and draft animals leased to the Army, even during the winter months when little to no campaigning was underway. Appointed secretary of war a month before Louis XIII died, under Jules Mazarin Le Tellier set about fundamental reform of French military supply and transportation. For the first time, a systematic study of the matériel requirements of the French Army was made. This led to reforms that much reduced corruption by contracted sutlers and royal officials, who were long used to padding their accounts with bills for phantom supplies and services. Reform included standardization of food, armaments, uniforms, and equipment provided to the troops. Le Tellier even regulated the number of carts and teams allowed officers, strictly according to rank, of course. Le Tellier then drafted standardized contracts issued to sutlers, through which he could better estimate and control expenses. To further reduce wastage and corruption, contracted goods were no longer delivered directly to colonels of regiments. Instead, they were dropped at central depots under control of royal agents (“général de vivres”). Transport was arranged through major sutlers given special powers to draft wagons and teams, as well as laborers, millwrights, cooks, and bakers. Le Tellier set aside a reserve of government-owned wagons and horses, which carried the first few days’ worth of supplies whenever the Army moved into the field. Beginning in 1643, he set up a series of magazines along the usual routes used by the Army when it moved out of its base area toward the Rhine; that is, at Metz, Nancy, and Pont-à-Mousson. The next year he built a fodder magazine for the cavalry during the siege of Dunkirk. In 1648 he set up more magazines at Arras and Dunkirk for use whenever the Army besieged Ypres, which was often. Le Tellier thus ensured that soldiers received working equipment and regular pay, as well as food, clothing, and shelter. He improved the magazine system during Turenne’s 1658 campaign of sieges against Dunkirk, Brégues, Oudenaarde, and Ypres. These innovations altered the conduct of logistics in early modern warfare and set the standard for the next 150 years. Yet, in Le Tellier’s lifetime, these changes had but a modest effect on specific campaigns. Real progress toward a permanent magazine system was made by his son during the wars of Louis XIV. See also women. Suggested Reading: Louis André, Michel le Tellier et l’organisation de l’armée monarchique (1906).

letters of marque (and reprisal). A government license allowing an armed merchantman to attack enemy merchantmen for windfall profits while otherwise plying its normal trade. It was essentially a part-time form of privateering. See also Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). letters of service. In the British Army, papers granting the right to raise a new regiment. 247

levend/levendat

levend/levendat. “landless ones.” Ottoman peasant soldiers used as irregular infantry. First recruited among mountain bandits of Anatolia, they were later drawn from the Raya (general population). By the 16th century, the number of levendat auxiliaries had expanded greatly as the sultans looked for inexpensive musketeers to supplement the expensive, but much better trained, Janissary Corps. Unlike the latter, a levend unit was demobilized at the end of a campaign. This made them less reliable but far cheaper. By the end of the 17th century, their employment was more regular as Janissaries’ recruitment fell. lieutenant. See ranks (at sea); ranks (on land). lieutenant du roi. The second in command in a French fortress, ranking below the governor. lieutenant-general of the day. See tranchée général. light infantry. See infantry. lignes fichantes. See line of defense. Lille, siege of (August 28–September 26, 1667). Conducted by Vauban and attended by Louis XIV, this was the only protracted siege of the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Other cities in the Spanish Netherlands fell easily and quickly to an invading French army of 30,000 led by Turenne. But the garrison of 3,000 in Lille resisted. French cavalry invested the town while Vauban and his assistants saw to the digging of lines of circumvallation that extended for over 25 kilometers around Lille. Louis and his gilded courtiers arrived on September 10, before digging of approach and assault trenches commenced and in time to witness the dramatic conclusion of the siege. Before the French were in position to attack, elements of the Lille garrison sortied (September 19). The effort was beaten back, and on September 21 the main bombardment began. After two days of French infantry assaults on the outer works, the garrison surrendered on favorable terms. It was allowed to depart for Ypres with all honors and weapons in hand. Lille, siege of (August 14–December 10, 1708). The Grand Alliance was at an impasse in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The Allies had been unable to budge the French from Flanders, where they occupied Bruges and Ghent. Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy therefore launched a siege of Lille, a key fortress town in the pré carré lines on the northern border of France. They hoped to follow their massive victory at Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708) with a breach in the French lines behind the forward French position in Flanders. The defenders flooded the plain around Lille on the order of their commander, maréchal Boufflers. Meanwhile, Louis XIV mustered fully 100,000 men in a massive relief army sent forward under Vendôme. However, only a limited action ensued at Wyendael (September 27th), when 10,000 British convoy escort 248

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troops fought off twice as many French. In a famous “affaires des poudres,” some 2,000 French cavalry, disguised as Dutch troopers, tried to make their way through Allied siege lines carrying sacks of black powder in their saddle bags. About 200 were killed when Allied musketry exploded them and their mounts. Most of the rest got though, along with a crucial resupply of powder that helped prolong the defense. This endeavor repeated a feat performed by Allied troopers against the French at Turin two years earlier, when over six tons of powder was smuggled into the city through the siege lines. On September 7 the assault of the covered way at Lille began. Allied engineers had miscalculated the distance and the damage done by their artillery, however, so that troops making the assault were exposed in some places across nearly 200 meters of open ground. Men struggled to advance with weapons while also carrying heavy gabions needed to fortify the mistake. Instead of storming the works, at a price of 3,000 casualties, just four small lodgements were established after three bloody assaults. On October 22 the garrison abandoned the town, retreating into the citadel. A diversionary attack on Brussels by a French army of relief did not distract Allied attackers at Lille but did much damage to the other city. The garrison at Lille asked for terms on December 8. These were accepted, and the garrison marched out two days later. Perhaps 15,000 Allied troops were killed or wounded before the end of the fight, which ranks among the greatest of the entire war. The fall of Lille gave the Allies control of Flanders. See also Berwick, James, 1st Duke of. limber. The two-wheeled front part of a gun-carriage. It attached to the “trail” by means of a hook. To “unlimber the guns” meant detaching the limber in preparation for action. Limerick, siege of (1691). See Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of; Glorious Revolution; Ireland; Limerick, Treaty of (October 3/13, 1691); William III. Limerick, Treaty of (October 3/13, 1691). This treaty arranged surrender of the Jacobite army, abandoned by James II and holed up in Limerick, on terms that allowed most men to either leave for France or swear allegiance to the new regime. That left the forces of William III in full control of Ireland. Catholics were promised the limited religious freedoms they had previously been allowed under Charles II, but otherwise were thereafter politically and economically repressed by an ascendant Protestant governing class and military occupation. The treaty permitted 12,000 Wild Geese to leave for France, where they reformed a private army for James II and later served Louis XIV. limites. Legal, precisely-agreed international borders between certain European states in the 17th–18th centuries. “Limites” contrasted with frontières, which were zones of disputed legal jurisdiction and ongoing military conflict. Such borders were rudimentary at best at the start of this period, though they began to be defined in the great settlement that followed the wars of Louis XIV, in 1713–1714. Still, many borders remained in dispute even at the end of the 249

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18th century. See also Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697); Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713). line abreast. A naval formation in which all ships in a line sailed in parallel as they approached the enemy. This offered the narrow bow profile to the enemy’s guns while allowing the attacker to turn all ships in his line at once, either ahead or astern, and engage with broadside cannon as each ship sailed along the enemy line. These tactics were first used in the later 16th and early 17th centuries, but were not fully mature or formally adopted until the second half of the 17th century. line ahead. Any fighting formation in which warships formed a line and imitated movements of the lead ship or carried out uniform orders signaled by the flagship. The most important subset was line of battle. By the start of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), all major European navies evidenced a preference for line ahead tactics in which all ships hauled close (“au plus près du vent”). line ahead and astern. A naval formation in which the flagship occupied the center of the line of battle so that all other ships were either ahead or astern of it. line astern. A naval formation in which all ships in line of battle followed the flagship, pursuant to the same principles as line ahead, but in reverse order of battle. line of battle (at sea). The key concept in nearly all naval tactics of this period. It was developed during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the second half of the 17th century, and continued during the Anglo-French wars of the late 17th and full 18th century, until universally adopted by all major fleets. In turn, this tactic led to the concept, design, and construction of ships-of-the-line. The distant origins of the line of battle lay in the Elizabethan era. More immediate origins can be cited from the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), which began without any clear naval tactics employed on either side beyond the old system of crossing and re-crossing each others’ formations. The tactic of line of battle was partly developed by George Monk after the confused fight off Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653) and the opportunity wasted there by Robert Blake. In early “line of battle,” every ship in a fleet of warships sailed in single-file columns, or parallel columns, behind the flagship or the designated squadron captain, or vice- and rear-admiral of the right and left divisions. All ships mimicked maneuvers of the leader’s flagship (held to its “wake or grain”) as best they could given normal vagaries of wind, current, yaw, and poor visibility once the guns started. Any ship that fell out of station from one or more of these causes was under standing orders to rejoin the line with as much alacrity as its captain and crew could muster. This new tactic avoided a battle that deteriorated into a potentially damaging, because unpredictable, mêlée (pell-mell) dominated by individual ship-to-ship actions. It also maximized firepower of broadside gunnery by every ship in the fleet. A set of 250

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fighting instructions was subsequently issued that for the first time asked each squadron of the fleet and each ship in every division of each squadron to hold to a line set by the flagship. This was intended to maximize known English advantages in broadside gunnery. By the outset of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) the Royal Navy had adopted line of battle tactics. Other navies emulated the English tactic once the greater efficacy of broadside gunnery and practical sailing instructions that somewhat controlled a battlefleet were proven. This occurred even though the tactic limited initiative by individual captains and squadrons, and was later and ahistorically much criticized for tactical stagnation and for militating against strategic decision making in war at sea. The Dutch Navy fought in line of battle for the first time at the Battle of The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). The French Navy also adopted the tactics, and then developed signaling and fighting instructions of equal or greater sophistication to those of the Royal Navy. Important changes in the nature of line of battle tactics evolved from 1672 into the first decades of the 18th century. Not least of these was the development of aggressive English fighting instructions and improved ability to actually control fleets, and a French counterpart set of instructions from the 1690s advising principally defensive tactics that befit a shift to guerre de course from guerre d’escadre. Although the largest warship sizes did not increase much in the second half of the 17th century, fighting in line of battle seems to have led to increases in the number of guns per ship and of crew needed to man guns while absorbing casualties. See also fireships; Juel, Niels; line abreast; line ahead; line ahead and astern; line astern; three-decker; two-decker. line of battle (on land). See battle; drill. line of defense. A line in the mind’s eye of a military engineer or commander of a fortress. It ran from the salient angle of a bastion to the curtain or flank of the next bastion of the work. It aimed to permit clear lines of sight along the flank. This was a shift from the earlier style of “lignes fichantes,” whose overly acute angles proved defective in sight lines and conducive to defensive shot striking the opposite, friendly face. lines. Long, fortified lines were constructed in Europe during this period to connect forts and fortified cities, and enhance defenses for positional warfare. The most important crossed the United Provinces for 100 miles, from the Meuse to the Atlantic, in places connecting pre-existing canals and rivers as natural defenses against the French, supplemented by artificial barriers that included deepened ditches and high earthworks lined with firing steps and gun emplacements. Under Louis XIV the French built several new lines in Flanders. They built more in the Rhineland once Louis went on the defensive during the latter part of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Members of the Grand Alliance erected defensive lines facing the French lines in Flanders and again along the Rhine frontier. The forward lines constructed for Louis were the Lines of Brabant, built to protect older gains and his newly claimed northern frontier as ostensible 251

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protector of the Spanish Netherlands from Allied raids and crossings-inforce during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). In 1711 the French completed still more formidable inner defensive lines known as the Ne Plus Ultra. Like entrenchments of World War I, 18th-century lines were comprised of communications and support trenches as well as the main fighting trenches. They differed in that the armies that manned them seldom possessed enough troops to cover the whole system. This permitted breaching by surprise concentrations and forced marches, supported by good intelligence on where the defenders actually were. See also IJssel line; Lines of Lauterbourg; Lines of Stollhofen; Lines of the Var; pré carré. Lines of Brabant. The first of a series of French defensive lines covering the northern frontier with the Spanish Netherlands. The lines of Brabant stretched for 130 miles from the Channel, passing in front of Antwerp and ending on the Meuse just below Namur and the junction with the Sambre. The Lines of Brabant presented a series of linked canal and riverine barriers intended to slow if not stop enemy advances. These were linked in continuous line with deep entrenchments, palisades, and strongpoints. However, after 1701 the French did not have enough troops to defend the whole system. The Lines were attacked by the Allies in late 1702. They were attacked again and partially forced by William Cadogan for Marlborough on July 17–18, 1705. That September, Allied military engineers razed a 20-mile section of the Lines around Zoutleeuw. This was not repaired while the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) lasted. Another Allied army razed a smaller section of the Lines near Antwerp. In 1706 Louis sent maréchal Villeroi and a large army to retake the lost ground at Zoutleeuw. That led directly to an even greater disaster for the French at Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706). lines of circumvallation. Making an entrenchment around an enemy position was a preliminary move in siege warfare. The outward facing parapet and accompanying ditch formed around a besieged place, or around the besieging army, was called the line (or lines, as plural trenches were often dug by pioneers) of circumvallation. These were positioned beyond the effective range of defending cannon—Vauban initially recommended a distance equal to 1.5 miles. As the outer perimeter of a siege, they were longer than interior lines of contravallation. Because lines of circumvallation were meant to hold off a full army, they were also stouter than the interior lines. They were often studded with redans every 300 meters or so. This also made them more expensive than lines of contravallation. These facts did not prevent their sometimes being overcome, as during a Spanish siege of Arras in 1654 or by the Swedes at Narva in 1700. Vauban argued strenuously against lines of circumvallation as always too long to be properly defended. To replace them, he proposed, and then demonstrated at the siege of Maastricht (June 11–30, 1673), a new system of parallels. After that, lines of circumvallation became redundant. They eventually disappeared from the practice of siege warfare. 252

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lines of contravallation. The inward-facing lines formed by an entrenchment, comprised of redoubts, earthworks, and a ditch—with or without a connecting parapet. They were dug by pioneers under the direction of military engineers. From the time of Vauban, zig-zags (approach trenches) were dug toward the fortress from these lines, pausing at each of three parallels. Hasty construction from earth without brick or masonry facings meant that the ramparts of lines were more easily smashed by bombardment than were comparable defensive works. Still, lines of contravallation locked in the garrison while defending against sallies and supporting the first approaches. They could be long, stretching to a dozen or more miles around larger towns. See also Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700). lines of investment. Siege trenches dug toward the defending walls, until the terminus of the trench was close enough to serve as a sally point for storming. Lines of Lauterbourg. A set of defensive lines constructed on the Rhine frontier near Strasbourg. Lines of Stollhofen. Short Allied lines in Germany built in 1703 at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and greatly strengthened in following years. They were about 10 miles long, running from the Rhine at Stollhofen to an impenetrable wood in the hills east of Bühl. They were heavily entrenched and palisaded, well gunned, and well defended. Replicating a pattern familiar in Flanders, Dutch engineers who worked on them incorporated flooded zones to impede assault. Prince Eugene of Savoy remained in the Lines of Stollhofen while Marlborough marched on the Danube, forcing French troops to cover. Eugene then left the Lines with his cavalry and some infantry, joining Marlborough to fight at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). Villars assaulted the Lines of Stollenhofen in May 1707 with an army of 30,000. He drew out defenders by making multiple feints across one flank along the Rhine while his main force crossed on the other. He attacked and crossed at several points at once on the night of May 22–23, while preparing his main blow the next morning at Bühl. When he arrived at Bühl, he found the Lines abandoned. The Lines of Stollhofen thus fell without the French suffering any losses. Villars proceeded to occupy and hold them. Lines of the Var. These lines were constructed in 1708 in the Var Valley of Provence to hold back an anticipated Allied invasion of southern France. lines of supply. See logistics; magazines. Lionne, Hugues de (1611–1671). Secretary of state for war under Louis XIV. He was instrumental in formation of the Rheinbund, at Mazarin’s behest. He argued against the king’s Dutch War (1672–1678) but died without persuading his master to forgo that aggression. 253

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listner. The smallest mine or countermine chamber, helping form an underground web of galleries that branched away from the main gallery or from rameaux under the glacis, awaiting active countermining by defending engineers. list of headings. The terms agreed by a fortress governor in a formal surrender. livres. The French monetary unit during this period. It was silver based and subdivided into 20 sous (“sols”). Over most of the period, a loaf of bread, the true measure of life for working folk, averaged one sous in cost. This price rose, of course, when harvests were bad and famine broke out, as happened in France during much of the 1690s and again after 1709. locking. See drill. logistics. The core problems of logistics were greatly exacerbated by a tremendous expansion in the size of armies in the second half of the 17th century as Europe recovered from the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). No army in this period solved the core logistics problem by carrying all its needed supplies with it. Primitive transport, poor conditions of what few roads there were, and reliance on draught animals, whose fodder needs made up the larger share of whatever load they pulled or carried, all militated against solution. The basic method of supplying an army on the move thus remained buying or stealing needed food along the line of march, preferably through enemy lands that could be “eaten out” as a means of damaging interests far beyond battle. This dictated that most wars were fought in densely populated areas sufficient to produce the food and fodder needed by the armies. These facts were then compounded by too much rain (as in Flanders and Russia) or sun (as in Spain and Iraq), conditions that forced campaigns to adhere to strict timetables that straddled from late spring to early autumn in the northwest of Europe, but sought to avoid high heat times in the south or in desert regions. In eastern Europe, winter campaigns were much more common, even preferable. Logistics of fodder were a greater problem, but this was more than made up by the fact that winter froze rivers that were otherwise unfordable when swollen with spring and fall rains (the “rasputitsa”). The ice also allowed the vast cavalry armies that were maintained by all steppe powers to traverse frozen fields that in warmer weather were swollen and impassable bogs (some eastern armies also deployed ski troops to this end). Fodder was simply stolen along the march. By the end of the 17th century, winter campaigning occurred more often even in western Europe, though it remained more normal for opposing armies to go into winter quarters. The Ottoman and French empires enjoyed considerable victories during this period tied to their unmatched capabilities in military administration and logistics, as overseen by centralized bureaucracies. Their systems became models of logistics for other early modern states. Still, there were certain facts that even the best military bureaucrats could not overcome. A draught horse or cavalry mount on the march reached an average 254

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relaxed walking speed of about 3 miles per hour, and might be on the move for about four to five hours per day for a total of 15 miles (about 24 km). Rearguard animals as well as those in the baggage train moved at perhaps half that speed, and so walked for more hours per day to cover the same ground to the next day’s camp. Along the way, whether in the advance or rearguard, a single horse consumed upward of 20 pounds of dry fodder or 50 pounds of grass each day. Even a small packhorse consumed 14 pounds of hay and 7 more of straw per day, along with 11⁄2 pecks of peas, oats, or other grains. The ratio of total mounts and draft or pack horses to men in most early modern armies has been calculated by one scholar at an average of 1:2 in the late 17th century. The ratio could reach 2:3 or higher if an army was infantry-heavy or hauling a large siege train. That meant fodder requirements placed a huge strain on any logistics system even before the weight of food for the men, or equipment or powder and shot, was considered. This problem was only partly alleviated by the development of fodder depots and grain and ammunition magazines: even the Ottoman and French systems, the most advanced of the 17th century, ended somewhere in the frontier zones. An alternative was to send out large foraging parties of light cavalry that formed a driving wedge ahead of the infantry. These foraged and collected or enforced contributions in specie or in food. Foraging slowed the pace of any march while reducing the fighting force and devastating whole regions. In the case of Ottoman armies, these foragers were often Tatars numbering many tens of thousands. It was not unusual for large armies to be forced to break camp or end a siege to move into a new region that provided fodder or grain for the horses. This was still necessary because food supplies and the commissary (ordu bazar) were limited to a minority of troops, the elite units of the Kapikulu Askerleri. Other core logistic facts remained the same for all early modern armies. An average soldier consumed 3 pounds of food per day but could only carry about 65–80 pounds of equipment, weapons, and supplies. That irreducible fact limited soldiers to about 10 days’ food supply (30 pounds) at the start of a march, and less if some food spoiled. Each packhorse could carry about 250 pounds’ burden, of which 100 pounds were devoted to its fodder, as described above. If a man rode, even with additional packhorses in tow, cavalry could move only 10 or 12 days before exhausting its portable food supply. That gave cavalry a return range of just 5 to 6 days without foraging. Camels were hardier than packhorses and carried a greater burden of about 400 pounds. Still, as many as 50,000 were needed to support just their own food needs (barley) and those of a modest field army of about 40,000 men (wheat) over just three months of operations. The Ottomans sought as much as possible to purchase barley for their animals along the route from local suppliers so that ox- or horse-drawn carts, or camels, could carry more wheat for the men. Supply wagons improved ratios but quickly reached a maximum load dictated by fodder requirements. Calculations by modern scholars show that a Habsburg (or any other) army of 90,000 men and 40,000 horses (of all types) supplied by oxcart would need 11,000 cartloads for every 30 days of campaigning, of which about 70% or 7,600 cartloads would have to be fodder. Equivalent loads moved by camel would have 255

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required 30,000 dromedaries. Moreover, the larger and heavier a wagon was, the greater the number of draught animals needed to pull it, which meant devoting still more space in the wagon to fodder. Oxen and water buffalo could pull much heavier wagon loads of grain or the heavy guns (up to a cartload of 2,000 pounds per pair, or gun equivalent). But the heavy carts were limited to certain climates and to level terrain, and these animals had very high replacement costs. In any case, there were few wide and passable roads in most of Europe in this period. There were far better road systems within China than in Europe. The Ottoman Empire also enjoyed excellent and well-maintained highways dating to the Roman and Byzantine eras. Everywhere, however, there were places of military interest carefully sited by enemies on hard terrain that was inaccessible by wheeled transport. This placed severe limits on the strategic reach of armies beyond their base supply. It was also hard to maneuver far from navigable rivers, which meant that using supply barges limited lines of advances by large armies to riverine objectives and were not available at all in mountain regions. Still, barges were easily the most efficient means of transport of bulk food and fodder and heavy siege guns. They were heavily used by all sides in protracted wars along the rivers of the Netherlands and the Rhine, and by the Ottomans on the Danube as far as Belgrade. To protect their heavy Danubian traffic, the Ottomans maintained a fleet of over 50 war vessels on that river. The need to carry potable water for men and animals posed even greater problems of weight and limited range. Essential to man and beast but a terrible dead weight, pure drinking water was a major logistical worry. There was really no solution other than to drink from streams, ponds, and wells that one passed, all of which exposed troops to waterborne diseases and accidental poisoning. This was less of a problem in well-fought-over regions where sources were known. However, deliberate poisoning of water sources by a retreating enemy substituted as a real threat. Most non-Muslim soldiers preferred to drink small beer or wine, which was healthier than taking a chance on a local water source. Bedouin camels were famously capable of longer voyages in the desert but did not have a major impact on war in this period. Horse societies such as the Cossacks or Tatars did much better at water rationing than armies of settled peoples. Small steppe ponies of Central Asian armies drew moisture mainly from the grass they ate. Chinese and European cavalry, on the other hand, faced a nearly absolute logistics barrier when they reached the edge of the steppe because they were forced to cart in both water and feed for their grain-fed mounts. The key geographical determinant of Asian logistics in this period was proximity to the steppe: steppe nomads could survive and fight on the great ocean of grass because, to their enemies, it was closer to being a desert. Similarly, in fighting in Arabia, the edges of the Sahara, and other severely desiccated regions, nomad armies had a logistical advantage over neighboring settled populations. Given transportation problems compounded by weak state finances, the basic rule for all armies was essentially to purchase or steal (“requisition,” “forage for”) food and fodder along lines of march. Generals relied on, and were tied to, a huge “logistical tail” comprised of an extended baggage train and large 256

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numbers of sundry camp followers. Some belonged to necessary and valued crafts or possessed important skills as saddlers, teamsters, cooks, seamstresses, drovers, or nurses. Many were civilians following the army to beg and steal, or to sell small goods or themselves. A good number were wives and children accompanying their menfolk. They supplied valued services from laundry to cooking to nursing to sex. In Europe, women and children no longer dug entrenchments and gun pits in this era because, after about 1600, more soldiers agreed to do paid military labor. This had always been the case in Ottoman armies, while coerced peasant labor remained the standard in China. Elsewhere, local merchants were encouraged to bring goods for sale to what amounted to a traveling marketplace greater in population than most cities of the time. Wealthier merchants and sutlers were engaged where possible to supply bread and provide other necessities and services to the troops. The Ottomans formalized this in their traveling ordu bazar. In the French service, during the reign of Louis XIV, supplies were overseen by a sophisticated bureaucracy of intendants and commissaires, who contracted out to fournisseurs and munitionnaires. As in most wars, however, seizing supplies from local peasants still occurred with great regularity. In the 17th–18th centuries, this practice was more often disguised as requisition but remained essentially theft: promissory notes dutifully passed out almost always proved irredeemable later. In contrast to the earlier wars of religion in Europe, by the late 17th century, it was possible for states and armies to fix defensive lines. Courses and raids into enemy territory still marked certain frontiers to the end of the wars of the period, most notably in Rhineland campaigns and the devastation of the Palatinate. This could not bring about strategic victory but occurred year after year nevertheless, to the dismay and destruction of local cities and peasants. This situation was relieved on the Netherlands frontier by development of the French magazine system and the dominance of siege warfare along well-established lines of defense. This form of combat had a logistic characteristic all its own: supplies had to be gathered and stored by garrisons, useless mouths counted and expelled, trees on the glacis felled, flocks gathered, and munitions secured. The besieging army needed to transport big guns (24-pounders) and powder and shot, in addition to its food and fodder, tents, and large amounts of officers’ baggage. Another logistics problem concerned moving stone and brick in peacetime to sites of new or reworked fortifications. This was done by barge as much as possible. Vauban even purpose-built a canal to move brick and quarry stone while working on the citadel at Lille in the late 1660s. See also artillery; artillery train; Louvois; Marlborough; Ottoman warfare. Suggested Reading: John Childs, Warfare in the Seventeenth Century (2004); John A. Lynn, Feeding Mars (1993); Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War (1977).

locks, on firearms. See flintlock firearms; Madrid lock; matchlock; miquelet; Scottish lock; snaphance; wheel lock. Londonderry, siege of (1689). See Ireland. 257

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London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711). An agreement between Louis XIV and the Tory government of Great Britain (officially, Queen Anne) resolving most issues between Great Britain and France. It thereby cracked open the Grand Alliance fighting France in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The agreement required Louis to abandon support for the Jacobite cause and agree to separate permanently the Bourbon thrones of France and Spain. It promised to return the barrier fortresses and to make other frontier adjustments in the Netherlands and Germany. And it was agreed that Dunkirk should cease to be a base for French privateers. All this was reflected immediately in French construction of contracted frontier defenses, the Ne Plus Ultra lines. The separate peace made by Britain significantly contributed to the disaster for the Allies in the fight at Denain (July 13/24, 1712). Terms of the London Preliminaries were broadly confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713). longboat. In any group of ship’s boats, the longboat was largest one. Long War. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). loopholes. Holes cut into a casemate to permit firing outward by musketeers. Lord High Admiral. See ranks (at sea). Lorraine. This duchy bordering on the Champagne district of France lay across a strategic route leading from the center of French power at Paris and Louis XIV’s newly acquired territory of Alsace. In Louis’ mind, its independent existence thus threatened Paris. More objectively, it tempted Louis to aggression. He struck at Lorraine in August 1670, driving Charles IV into exile and alliance with the United Provinces. The refusal of Charles V to accept the terms of Lorraine’s return to him agreed to in the treaties of Nijmegen (1678) vitiated that part of the settlement and left Lorraine in the eager hands of the French king. Louis XIV kept the province until 1697, when it was returned to its dukes at the end of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). France invaded Lorraine again during the War of the Polish Succession (1733) but did not annex it outright until 1766. Lorraine, Charles IV, duc de (1604–1675). Hereditary ruler of Lorraine and Allied general. He was chased from his duchy when Louis XIV invaded, forcing Charles from neutrality into membership in the Allied coalition that prosecuted the Dutch War (1672–1678). He commanded well, winning a sharp victory at Conzerbruke (August 11, 1675). Within a week of that victory, he died (August 17). Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690). Habsburg general and Imperial supreme commander. He succeeded to the dukedom in 1675, in the midst of the Dutch War (1672–1678). He fought at Seneffe (August 11, 1674) and Rheinfeld (July 6, 1678). He refused terms returning Lorraine to him settled over his head by the Allies and France in the treaties of Nijmegen (1678). That action vitiated clauses concerning Lorraine and left the duchy de facto, though not de jure, in 258

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Louis’ hands. Charles led the Imperial Army in relief of the siege of Vienna in 1683 and later helped drive the Ottomans from Hungary. He again took supreme Imperial command against France in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), leading the main Allied army in the Rhineland campaign of 1689. He died somewhat prematurely the next year. Louis II, de Bourbon. See Great Condé. Louis XIV (1638–1715). “Sun King” and “Grande Monarque.” When Louis XIII died in May 1643, and Louis XIV mounted the throne as a child-king of just five years of age, France was still fighting wars in Germany and against Spain. Peace arrived in Germany in 1648, but France would not see peace with Spain for another 16 years. After Louis took full control in 1661 at the start of his “personal reign,” his repeated aggressions ensured France would see hardly one year of peace in every two that passed over the following five decades. Louis was deeply affected in his youth by the Fronde, a sequence of small riots, plots, rebellions, and civil wars lasting to 1653. In later life he reacted to resistance to his royal will with a characteristic verve born of an absolutist temperament but also the searing experiences of his vulnerable youth. He soon tamed parlements, nobles, and the clergy, excluding all three from his councils of war and state. After the death of Jules Mazarin in 1661, the 22-year-old Louis dismissed his mother-regent, Anne of Austria, from affairs of state. He acted thereafter as his own first minister during more than five decades of “personal rule,” lasting until his death in 1715: Louis reigned in France for a remarkable 72 years, ruling it personally and directly for 54. His insistence on acting as his own prime minister was a principal legacy of the Fronde. More revolts followed, principally of his own making: tax revolts in the 1660s, peasant revolts in the Pyrenees in the 1670s, more anti-tax rebellions in the 1680s, and peasant and religious revolts after the turn of the 18th century. While internal rebellion swirled around his youth, much of Louis’ adult life was spent in wars he began with his neighbors. For over half a century, his personal vanity and dynastic ambitions fed into malevolent plots for and against him, while his military and frontier obsessions dominated the affairs of Europe and much of the world beyond. In a justly famous later work, Voltaire captured this reality when he named the Age itself for Louis XIV. Although Louis probably never said “l’etat, c’est moi” (“I am the state”), the phrase is often attributed to him and might fairly stand as a summary of his attitude to governance and the centrality of the monarchy in the national life of France. France was initially prosperous under Louis XIV’s bracing despotism, which was captured in his personal motto: “un roi, une loi, une foi” (“one king, one law, one faith”). He built the extraordinary palace and gardens at Versailles not to escape court life, as Philip II had done when he built the Escorial, but to isolate and control it more closely. Louis reigned at Versailles in cultural splendor and grand pageantry, accompanied by an effete and parasitic aristocracy he effectively emasculated through bribes and flattery, required court attendance, and expected military service. The bourgeoisie was as yet small and unassertive, 259

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and was also easily bribed with newly created titles, offices, and reflected glory through the illusion of playing some small part in governance. The peasantry was distant and mostly ignorant of the king’s affairs, and usually far from his thoughts. With the leading classes neutered or domesticated, Louis was unchallenged in his personal ministry of French affairs. In the 1660s he faced multiple violent tax revolts, notably in Vivarais and the Pyrenees. A decade later, his new war taxes provoked significant revolts in western France, where he also faced the closely related Bonnets Rouges and Papier Timbré rebellions in 1675. He put down all dissent with a typical ruthless determination. Repression of the peasantry, but also rising aristocratic and bourgeois unity around his foreign wars and the growing authority of the monarch, ensured internal quiet for another 30 years: Louis did not again face a rebellion at home until the revolt of the Camisards (1702–1705). Nevertheless, he insisted that a rarified rational standard be applied throughout his realm and in all its affairs, from the arts to artillery, and from his gardens to his gendarmes. That demand for uniformity included matters of confessional affiliation, which in the prior century had ripped France apart during four decades of civil war widely known as the Wars of Religion (1562–1629). Louis sought to further compress the already militarily and politically tamed Huguenots with new administrative measures and tax pressures in the 1680s, backed by compression of the public space permitted Protestants. Ultimately, he would use sheer force. Determined on confessional cohesion, he refused to allow Huguenot subjects to live in religious peace even though the Catholic majority in France no longer insisted on this—though many welcomed it. In 1685 he ended religious toleration when he revoked the Edict of Nantes issued by the great Henri IV on April 13, 1598. Next, he ordered dragonnades to force mass conversions and drove resisting Protestants from his realm into lasting exile and enmity. He then carried out a near-genocide against Vaudois sanctuary towns in Piedmont that took in these wretched refugees, voicing utter indifference to mass deaths reported to him as occurring among women and children. Louis XIV had one great advantage over earlier despots who asserted an absolute right of kings: his military. Whereas would-be absolutists of earlier centuries were compelled to turn to mercenaries to counterbalance the hereditary military position of the nobility, Louis (and his imitators) relied instead on the services of the first true standing armies in Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The French Army was a body of professional troops unlike any seen in Europe prior to the mid-17th century. It was kept on a permanent war footing, garrisoned year round, uniformed, provisioned, and paid from the king’s revenues. It was available at the sovereign’s personal discretion and solely for his ends and use without prior consultation of the nobility. Indeed, the nobility was successfully co-opted into Louis’ war state by his insistence on court or military service. By the end of his reign, colonelcies of royal regiments had become the preferred pathway to social success as well as building or sustaining private client networks for leading French families. Louis thus largely left the nobility alone in its traditional role of running local affairs while binding most nobles tightly to state service at the national level. 260

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Ultimately, this included an obligation to attend his person, and in some cases his body, at Versailles. More than anything, the young Louis wanted “la gloire” for himself. This could be had only through war. Statecraft and war were what Louis most enjoyed all his life. He flattered himself that he was master of those arts; what he saw as the mere science of war he mainly left to men like Louvois and Vauban. In making war, Louis had a strong preference for sieges over battle. This flowed from his deep-seated desire for predictable and rational order, even in war. Even so, his main reliance on sieges most closely expressed the limits of logistics of the day, his concern for the cost of casualties (rather than for casualties as such), and the crenelated and river-bound terrain on which the armies fought most of his wars. He closely fixed attention on defending or expanding France’s four land borders. That was reasonable, but led to concomitant neglect of the French Navy, especially during the last two decades of his reign. An exceptional period of support for the Navy was the 1680s, when his most important minister, Jean Bapiste Colbert, put the country’s commercial and financial affairs in order and laid down numerous hulls for a battlefleet to challenge the English and Dutch. Colbert’s mercantilism led to acquisition of important new overseas colonies. To protect them from English and Dutch naval power he built a modern Navy, though he had trouble finding sufficient officers and skilled crew to man it. Louis subsequently wasted most of Colbert’s effort. Colbert was then compelled by higher need to redirect naval resources into the French Army and building frontier defenses from the mid-1690s to his final days. It is far less clear whether Louis ever wanted hegemony over Europe. The view of historian John A. Lynn that this was, at most, a “passing fancy” of Louis’ youth seems to underestimate the king’s lifelong dynastic ambitions and what these meant in practice for his war policy and for peace in Europe. In “rationalizing” his realm Louis pursued a policy of what might be termed, in the best possible light, “defensive aggression.” That is, he spent decades looking to expand marginally in the north, east, and south to better defend sizeable territorial acquisitions made early in his reign and already annexed to France. He regarded this policy as filling out France to its “natural frontiers,” then defending those frontiers. However, over the full course of his life, Louis was far more opportunistically aggressive than can be explained by seeking contentment with rationalized borders. On the other hand, historian Russell F. Weigley grossly overstates the case for Louis’ core aggressiveness in writing that “the objectives with which Louis XIV commenced his active reign were little less limited than those of Napoleon or Adolf Hitler.” Louis was no unrestrained conqueror, no would-be Alexander of the 17th century. The truth lies somewhere between the conclusions of Lynn and Weigley, though closer to Lynn: Louis was a dynastic traditionalist cast from the same mold as his great rivals, the Habsburgs of Austria. He was driven by a deep personal belief, which also served as convenient political and self-justification, that his territorial ambitions had a legitimate basis in the vast web of Bourbon family hereditary claims. He was especially obsessed with claims he thought had been rightfully acquired through his wife, the infanta Marie Thérèse, daughter 261

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of Philip IV of Spain: Artois, Franche-Comté, and Luxembourg. In 1685 he laid claim to the Palatinate as devolving to him though a sister-in-law. Many other claims were simply asserted to “rationalize” his internal communications and controls (such as seizure of Orange in 1680) or his expanded frontiers. He was determined to exploit to the fullest even the most obscure legal claims, historical precedents, and dynastic rights of the Bourbons, and to use war whenever necessary—and sometimes when it was not—to secure those ends. At first he pursued these dynastic ambitions with care: his desire for territorial expansion filtered through a succession of minor claims that brought him most of Alsace and parts of the Rhineland and Flanders. His subsequent efforts at expansion were tempered by the reality of the emerging balance of power, and his chronic bullying was countered by stiff and effective Dutch and coalition resistance that began in 1672 and lasted to the end of his reign. Yet, even in old age, Louis several times severely overreached, leading France into long, costly, and exhausting wars lasting from 1688 through 1714. To achieve “la gloire,” Louis embarked on a series of costly, expansionist wars. His first two wars were born of rank aggression: the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and the Dutch War (1672–1678). The first aimed at seizing exposed Spanish territories from Philip IV that were part of his wife’s family claims. The second sought to punish the United Provinces for opposing the aims of his first war and to defeat the Dutch so decisively the victory would clear a path to permanent French control of the Spanish Netherlands. In 1667 Louis rode to war in a gilded carriage. He was accompanied by his wife and two mistresses, and followed by a half-dozen golden coaches carrying the royal baggage. This parade in turn was trailed by more than half the grandees of his glittering court. Stymied by formation of the Triple Alliance under Dutch leadership, he ended the War of Devolution in 1668 and agreed to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle with Spain. Embittered by what he saw as Dutch betrayal, he plotted and schemed for years to isolate the United Provinces, preparatory to an overwhelming attack. Turning to guileful diplomacy to prepare the path back to war, he broke apart the Triple Alliance with secret subsidies to England under terms of the Treaty of Dover (May 12/22, 1670). He utterly bewildered Jan de Witte, successfully masking his true intention to attack the United Provinces. A characteristic error was to send François Créqui to seize Lorraine in August 1670, which alienated the German princes of the Rheinbund. Still, having isolated the Dutch, he struck with surprise and great force in the spring of 1672, compelling the hapless and reeling Dutch to offer extraordinary terms. Louis rejected the Dutch offer and instead demanded far more than ever could or would be conceded. With that act, he earned the lifelong enmity of the future William III, then still just Prince of Orange, and brought fear and suspicion of his ambitions into every court in Europe. Louis’ fight with the Dutch thus quickly expanded into a major war against a grand coalition that included Brandenburg, Spain, the German empire, numerous minor German princes, and even briefly, England. Louis made real gains in the settlement negotiated in three Treaties of Nijmegen in 1678–1679, notably securing Franche-Comté from Spain, “rationalized” 262

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borders through an exchange or cities and fortresses in the north, and de facto control of the Duchy of Lorraine (by default of the actions of its duc, Charles V, who rejected the treaties). Yet, this was nowhere near the gains Louis could have had by accepting the terms offered by the Dutch in 1673 when his military advantages were greatest. His arrogant pride had overcome his judgment then, prolonging the war until he lost most of his early advantages and holdings while raising a vast coalition to oppose him. This was to be the essential pattern of his reign. Louis’ motives during his later wars were complex, as his territorial ambitions mixed with a new sense of insecurity about his own realm. He still sought to annex territory along all his land borders, to “rationalize” them. However, the king sometimes accepted more conservative advice to simply hold off William while he consolidated established gains. The problem was that consolidation and defense often required further territorial expansion, to add this or that key fortress or town to his outer perimeter. The span of his ambition, his universally noted arrogance—enshrined for all Europe to gaze upon in massive murals at Versailles celebrating victory in the Dutch War—and the great natural and military advantages of France in wealth and population over whole combinations of enemies, all served to repeatedly tempt him to aggression. The same factors also brought grand coalitions against Louis. Thus evolved a classic example of the workings of the balance of power, by which Louis was weighed down in his middle reign and old age with burdens of finance and defense neither he nor France could sustain. Louis thus saw the outcome of the Dutch War not as marking the furthest French military power could safely support his statecraft, but as a personal and foreign policy success. He felt frustrated that he been forced to retreat in 1678 from his more expansive demands of 1672. And so he continued to use force to consolidate and expand frontiers in a series of “reunions” conducted from 1679 through 1684. He also meddled broadly in German, Polish, Austrian, and even distant Ottoman affairs. Only part of his “reunions” campaign is generally regarded by historians as an outright war, the War of the Reunions (1683–1684), which Louis prosecuted with special viciousness and unusual success. But it is arguable that the entire five-year period should be so construed, for before the war was officially declared in 1683, Louis had already sent troops on multiple missions to occupy and consolidate Alsace and Lorraine; enforce his claims to Metz, Toul, and Verdun; seize Strasbourg; and besiege Luxembourg. To distract Europe from his own aggression, Louis encouraged the Ottomans to invade Habsburg Austria. His secret intervention encouraged that faction within the Sublime Porte which embarked upon an invasion of Austria that led to the siege of Vienna in 1683, and then to the Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). During the great siege, he tried to dissuade the leaders of Poland and other European states from aiding the Austrian Habsburgs. And he refused to send a French relief army to aid in lifting the siege. Some historians believe this is the clearest evidence that Louis hoped to dominate Germany, if not indeed all of Europe, in the wake of a humiliating and debilitating Habsburg defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. But it is just as likely that he was animated by meaner and more personal hatred of the Habsburgs, and that he 263

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lacked any broader strategic vision or ambition. For similar reasons, and to comparable long-term baleful effect, in 1680 Louis had seized the enclave of Orange on the Rhône from his hated enemy, William. Combined with disdain for the traditional rights of the Imperial free cities Louis took by force, and his suppression of Protestantism within France while the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) were still in living memory across Europe, Louis so thoroughly frightened all his neighbors that he was never trusted by any of them again. Having crushed the Huguenots and won his brief War of the Reunions (1683–1684), Louis thought he had secured his frontiers. He expected to be dominant in Europe, and perhaps over it. This self-delusion of dominance was exaggerated by the international crisis and distraction of other powers at Vienna during and after 1683. Through intolerance at home and disrespect for religious and other treaty rights of annexed Imperial cities guaranteed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Louis produced renewed fear among Protestant states in Germany of a return to the religious wars of the first half of the 17th century. Would he and other Bourbons play the role of Ferdinand II (1578–1637) and the Habsburgs in the lead-in to a new Thirty Years’ War? By 1688 the apex of Louis’ reign was reached and then passed. Few noticed, however, the king least of all. Instead, there ensued the two longest, most destructive, vastly expensive, and futile of all Louis’ serial wars. During the second half of Louis XIV’s reign, his policies and William III’s opposition to them brought England into dynastic and then full military alliance with the United Provinces. There was no decisive victory for either side once each was fully engaged. First came the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), which John A. Lynn, who regards Louis as mostly satiated and defensive after 1675, has called the “great miscalculation.” Lynn suggests that Louis sought only a short war in 1688 to secure territorial gains made during the War of the Reunions, and that the king’s “fears, not his pride, best explain the onset of war in 1688.” He dismisses even the well-planned devastation of the Palatinate as simply an effort to create a strategic “firebreak” between France and irate German princes. This benign view of Louis’ motives was not shared by contemporaries or by many later historians. Louis self-justification that he was pursuing a defensive policy through war and expansion in 1688 presaged claims made by all aggressive imperial powers into the mid-20th century. No one believed him then, and it is not clear that anyone should today. Louis’ reputation was sealed by release of his arrogant Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688), which preceded his unprovoked attack into Germany and stimulated formation of the League of Augsburg and the Grand Alliance. So transparent were Louis’ public claims and intention to use force he did not even wait for his own ultimatum in the Mémoire to be delivered, let alone to expire in the allotted three months. Instead, he launched his invasion the next day. This new aggression led to a far wider war than he had anticipated, but which he should have foreseen. It ended in the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, only after heavy fighting across Europe and extensive French losses overseas, and after having severely overextended Louis’ naval and fiscal resources and reserves. Louis followed the grave error of the Nine Years’ War with an indisputably aggressive move, laying claim in behalf of the Bourbons to the vacant throne of 264

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Spain and all its vast empire. That led to the climactic conflict of his reign, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). John A. Lynn describes Louis’ last war as something of a triumph in that “he finally won the Spanish throne for his grandson, retained the territorial gains he had made in earlier wars, and reasserted French military prowess.” Yet, the succession in Spain was ultimately governed by a blood-soaked compromise reached in mutual martial and economic exhaustion. Louis’ final territorial gains secured in 1713–1714 were rolled back significantly from his claims of 1697. They were far from the grasp he had extended into the Spanish Netherlands and Germany or had attained in the War of the Reunions. Feats of French arms were also far less impressive during Louis’ last war, and hence French military power was in fact less feared after the war ended than when it began. Finally, by 1714 all Louis’ wars together left France constrained by the European balance of power, while the positions of Austria, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Great Britain had all improved at French expense. It is true that France was still preeminent within Europe, but that had more to do with its native wealth and population than the policies of Louis XIV. The end of Louis’ ambitions was the grandchild of long-established patterns of his decisions and thinking, in which he always met foreign weakness with unalloyed aggression and addressed his own weaknesses with more of the same. For example, in 1706 he attacked to recover a broken section of the Lines of Brabant, ostensibly to force peace on Europe. He explained this offensive move as a peace policy: “I see nothing that can better convince them [the Grand Alliance] to reach an accommodation that has become necessary than to make them see that I have sufficient forces to attack them everywhere.” In so doing, he surrendered a strong defensive position to come out to attack a superior foe in the field. He thereby walked his weaker army into a catastrophic defeat at Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706). Even Louis eventually grasped the limits of French military power: upon hearing of another battlefield defeat in 1709, near national bankruptcy and engorged with bitter personal and dynastic frustration, he reportedly exclaimed: “Has God forgotten all that I have done for him?” His martial and political ambitions alike ended not in a reassertion of “French military prowess” but in bilious futility and a peace of mutual exhaustion among the Great Powers framed at Utrecht (April 11, 1713), Rastadt (February 24/March 7, 1714), and Baden (August 27/September 7, 1714). Together, those great treaties rolled back many of the territorial gains made by Louis over the prior 30 years, though they allowed him to keep others made before that. Having seen the burial of several wives, children, grandchildren, and even two great-grandchildren, he died in 1715, full of woe and regret over a vain and bloody quest for martial conquest and “la gloire.” He is said to have exhaled on his deathbed this advice to the young Louis XV: “Try to remain at peace with your neighbors. I loved war too much.” Louis’ wars swelled the French population through annexation of Alsace and Franche-Comté, along with parts of Artois, Flanders, and Hainault, while his occupation of Lorraine whetted an appetite for more wars of expansion. He also killed many French in his half-century of foreign wars and domestic repressions of Protestants. His fight over the Spanish succession alone may have caused 265

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1.25 million deaths in Europe, while famines that attended his wars in the 1690s and after 1709 cost many more lives. France after Louis was still “primus inter pares” (“first among equals”) among the Great Powers. However, its treasury was drained, its people exhausted, and its enemies more legion, powerful, and determined than when Louis first mounted the throne. His personal despotism and destruction of local privileges within France was surely less thorough than was once thought by historians. In contrast, Fernand Braudel argued that two generations spent by hundreds of thousands of French in the common purpose of war with their king’s foreign enemies bred a sense of patriotism that looked beyond interests of the king to protection of the nation. That may be going too far, too soon. Nevertheless, Louis XIV’s wars even more than his reign reshaped France and its enemies around powerful new national institutions, starting with armies and navies, and the bureaucracies and tax systems built to support them. All his life Louis wanted to dictate terms to Europe. He was in the end forced to accept an unsatisfactory settlement because his own favored instrument of diplomacy, war, was wielded by skillful foreign hands. All the superficial brilliance of his court at Versailles melded with wasted blood and treasure of wars against other great Houses. It was Louis’ personal and dynastic ambitions—his vision was never national or strategic—that reshaped France and Europe. Yet when he died, his great Bourbon project, his most desired and proudest legacy, was left in the hands of a five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV. Worse, while the French monarchy and state enjoyed internal stability for the first time in many decades, all social classes chafed under the absolutist system Louis left them. The slowly rising bourgeoisie was especially discontent as it witnessed greater success by its counterparts in other lands. The future events of 1789 were certainly not inevitable, but perhaps the first halting steps toward them were taken already in France by 1715. See also drill; Namur, siege of (May 25–June 30, 1692); Scanian War (1674–1679); war finance. Suggested Reading: François Bluche, Louis XIV (1990); Joel Cornette, Le Roi de guerre (1993); R. Hatton, Louis XIV and Europe (1976); John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV: 1667–1714; Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (1994); John B. Wolfe, Louis XIV (1968).

Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691). Né François Le Tellier. Successor to his father, Michel Le Tellier, as principal military and strategic adviser to Louis XIV. He was the main transformer of the French Army into an instrument of royal authority and foreign policy. In part, he accomplished this by helping his father and Louis establish the Régiment du Roi in 1663 as a model for all French infantry regiments. He also founded the Royal-Artillerie in 1673 as a professional and concentrated artillery arm. These reforms had influence on military developments far beyond France. Following a pattern set by his father, with whom he understudied from 1662 to 1670, Louvois lobbied hard for bullying wars as the main basis of French foreign policy. He did so not least as a means of creating opportunities to concentrate more power and wealth in his own hands. He was centrally involved in reorganization of the French Army away from private regiments and mer266

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cenaries to a more professional officer corps and to regular units raised from the king’s subjects. He exercised such strict control over officers, however, that tactical and operational mediocrity was often the result. In logistics he found a calling, notably fully developing the magazine system left in rudimentary form by his father. Among Louvois’ more important innovations was to introduce portable ovens to bake bread during halt days while a French army was on the move. At the onset of the Dutch War (1672–1678), Louvois accumulated in forward magazines enough grain to provide the advancing armies with 200,000 rations per day for up to six months—an unheard of achievement in European warfare since the fall of Rome. This effort is widely regarded by historians as his finest. It ensured Louis XIV early military success that would not be replicated in later, longer wars fought without Louvois at his side. For this material accomplishment, regardless of Louvois’ many and deep moral flaws, he is properly regarded by historians as the first great civilian “minister of war.” As for his moral failings, they were many and great. For instance, during Turenne’s march through the Palatinate in 1674, Louvois demanded that the harshest methods be used against German villagers who resisted by any means, or who refused to pay contributions. During the War of the Reunions (1683–1684), he again displayed a penchant for personal cruelty and brutality in punishing villagers. He once ordered fully 20 villages be bombarded and burned in retaliation for the loss of two French barns. Although he was patron to Vauban, the two disagreed about whether to use bombardment as an alternative to siege warfare. John A. Lynn, the leading modern historian of the French Army, maintains that Louvois took a savage approach to war and that, for him, bombardment of towns with mortars during the 1680s “became something of a blood lust.” Nor did his none-too-gentle master in Versailles voice any objection. In 1688 Louvois began to raise new provincial militia to supplement the regular regiments. These were gainfully employed when Louis started the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) that fall. Louvois planned the 1688–1689 devastation of the Palatinate (1688–1689) on a map, reveling yet again in the destruction of German towns and cities, and even individual châteaux. His death on July 16, 1691, removed from inner policy circles a baleful and brutish influence on Louis XIV, a monarch who needed little encouragement to indulge his own vices and a pronounced preference for war over diplomacy. See also drill; military discipline; officers; ranks (on land). lower deck. See decks. Lowestoft, Battle of (June 3/13, 1665). The opening fight of the Second AngloDutch War (1665–1667). The Dutch assembled a grand fleet of 107 warships mounting 4,689 guns, crewed by over 21,000 men. Eighty-one of the Dutch vessels were new, purpose-built warship designs that had been built with the encouragement of Jan de Witt, and which remained unknown to the English. The Dutch also outfitted for combat 11 large East Indiamen. Of the 100 English warships present, 64 were battleships and 24 were refitted merchantman. Most 267

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of the English ships were superior in size and had heavier and more numerous guns, as well as more skilled seamen and gun crews. Upon first encounter, the fleets passed once at distant range, then turned and passed again. This time, they engaged by squadrons. The battle ended with close-in action in which superior English gunnery—so loud it was reportedly heard onshore in the United Provinces—cost the Dutch 17 men-of-war, including the flagship “Eendracht.” It blew up along with Admiral Obdam and over 500 men, leaving just 5 stunned survivors floundering in the water. At that, the Dutch fleet broke apart, its quarrelsome squadron commanders each taking his flotilla squadron along a different path of escape. The loss at Lowestoft struck the Dutch economy extremely hard, and pushed the Amsterdam Exchange into a deep and prolonged slump. After the fight, the Duke of York (later crowned as James II) was relieved of his naval command for failing to pursue and crush the remnants of the Dutch fleet, though the order was in fact given unasked by one of his courtiers after several of his fellows were killed by Dutch fire. Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676). A Swedish army led by the 21-year-old monarch Karl XI soundly defeated a Danish army at Lund. The Danes invaded Scania with 14,000 men on June 29/July 8, 1676. They were in fine fit before the battle, well equipped and confident, braced by large numbers of German mercenaries. The Danish invasion force was small even by standards of the day at just 5,000 cavalry, 1,300 dragoons, and 6,000 infantry, but it had an excellent artillery train. Even at just over 12,000 men, it was half again as large as the hungry and unpaid Swedish army of 4,700 cavalry and dragoons, and just 1,750 foot soldiers that moved to fight it. The battle began with a bold night attack ordered by Karl and made across the frozen waters of the Lödde River. The surprise assault failed, and fighting deteriorated into eight hours of carnage and bitter attrition, with men on both sides dying in frozen ditches while others fought on behind low stone farm and village walls. The Danish left broke early in the fight but—as with so many English cavalry charges before and after Lund—the Swedish horse grew overexcited at the sight of a running enemy and badly overpursued. This nearly cost Karl the battle and his life. With his cavalry preoccupied with looting the Danish camp, which they overran, the Swedish center and left had to hold against the brunt of superior Danish-German firepower for nearly two hours. Finally, at dusk (which came early at so northern a latitude), Karl returned with nine squadrons of cavalry to support his infantry, which was near its breaking point. The Danish cavalry were taken in the flank and rode away, leaving Danish and German infantry to be run down and slaughtered. The massacre was merciless until a Swedish sub-commander, but not Karl, ordered that quarter be given to all who ceased fire. In proportional terms, this was the deadliest fight in recorded military history, with almost 50% out of the total of nearly 19,000 men engaged killed, and many of the survivors wounded. Some of the dead were Danes who drowned when river ice cracked and broke apart beneath their feet as they sought to flee across the Lödde. About 6,000 on the Danish side died, including a 268

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number of Dutch Marine Infantry, who fought in alliance with the Danes. An additional 3,000 Swedes and Finns were killed or died afterward from severe wounds. Lund, Peace of (September 16/26, 1679). See Scanian War (1674–1679). lunette. “little moon” (satellite). A triangular, detached work, larger than the similar redan, of which the lunette was a subset. Lunettes were sited on or sometimes beyond the glacis, in orbit around the main artillery fortress. This type first appeared during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) when they were made popular by Vauban. He sprinkled 19 of them around his main works at Namur, which played Jupiter to his little moons. Many fortresses built or renovated over the course of the 18th century sported multiple lunettes and small forts. In the 1740s Friedrich II (“The Great”) based the entire defense of Schweidnitz on these small detachments. Alternately, “lunette” referred to a small outwork sited beside a ravelin. The term was also, but more rarely, used in the general sense of counterguard. Lustucru rebellion (1662). A tax revolt by French peasants in the Boulonnais district provoked by the reforms and tax policies of Colbert. It is also known by the name “Boulonnais rebellion.” Similar rebellions occurred elsewhere in France before and after the Lustucru rising, including the Bénauge rebellion in Guyenne from 1661–1662 and the Audijos rebellion in 1663. Luxembourg. This Spanish territory was progressively occupied by Louis XIV in the run-up to the War of the Reunions (1683–1684), until all that remained free of his control was the fortress town. This the French blockaded, then bombarded with mortars. The shelling was interrupted by the Ottoman invasion of Austria that ended in the siege of Vienna in 1683. For political reasons, Louis withdrew his troops from the environs of Luxembourg fortress in March 1682. The attack resumed in December 1683, when François Créqui bombarded Luxembourg with heavy mortars before again withdrawing. From April 29–June 3, 1684, a bloody siege was conducted that finally ended with surrender of the garrison. Luxembourg was delivered to ownership of France in the Truce of Ratisbon (August 15, 1684). Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695). Maréchal de France. Like his cousin the Great Condé, Luxembourg fought in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He saw action at Lens (August 10, 1648), one of the last fights of that long and dirty conflict. Also like Condé, during the Fronde, Luxembourg turned against the monarchy and entered the service of Spain. He was captured at Rethel (October 15, 1650) but was soon released. He spent the next eight years fighting Louis XIV. He fought reluctantly at the Dunes (June 4/14, 1658). He returned to France and relative favor, along with his then more famous cousin, following promulgation of a royal amnesty that accompanied the Treaty of the Pyrenees (October 28/November 7, 1659). He led a French army that occupied Franche-Comté in 1668 during the War of Devolution 269

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(1667–1668). He fought again during the Dutch War (1672–1678), so well at the beginning in the campaign around Cologne, and so well and often thereafter, that in reward, the “Grande Monarque” raised him to the rank of “maréchal de France” in 1675. Luxembourg fought at Seneffe (August 11, 1674) alongside the Great Condé, and later commanded in the Rhineland as the successor to Turenne. He saw more action at Cassel (April 11, 1677). He opposed William III (then still Prince of Orange) at the needless battle of St. Denis (August 4/14, 1678). Luxembourg fell from royal favor in 1679 over an odd court scandal concerning supposed use of black magic and performance of sacrilegious acts. He was confined for some months. He was back in favor at court within two years, following the intercession of Condé, and served as captain of the Gardes du Corps. One year into the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), he was restored to command of the main French army. He retained command in Flanders until his death in 1695, fighting and winning several minor and three major battles during those years. Most dramatically and daringly, he defeated Waldeck at Fleurus (June 21/July 1, 1690), after which he besieged and took Mons in March–April 1691. He commanded the French army of observation during the first siege of Namur (May 25–June 30, 1692). He beat William in the field at Steenkerke (July 24/ August 3, 1692) and again, and most bloodily, at Neerwinden (July 19/29, 1693). Yet, Luxembourg’s field victories changed little in the larger context of the war. His main tactical and operational preoccupation remained maneuvers and positional warfare, which always dominated the Flanders theater of operations. The noted reluctance or inability of Luxembourg to pursue a beaten enemy after each of his battlefield victories is sometimes attributed to restraints placed on his freedom of action by Louis XIV. However, a greater commander would have made the case for hard pursuit and insisted upon carrying it out. Luzzara, Battle of (August 4/15, 1702). Early in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Prince Eugene of Savoy was pushed out of Mantua by a FrancoSpanish army. He sought to avoid being expelled from Italy entirely by assaulting Luzzara. He attacked aggressively, inflicting twice as many enemy casualties (4,000) on the French under the duc de Vendôme as he suffered among his own troops. His tactical victory secured a toehold for the Allies in north Italy, which they clung to over a hard winter. Lwów (Lvov), Battle of (1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Lwów (Lvov), Battle of (1675). See Sobieski, Jan.

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M Maastricht, siege of (June 11–30, 1673). One of several sieges of Maastricht over the course of the 16th–18th centuries that came about because the city occupied a key geostrategic position between the northern frontier of France and the southern border of the United Provinces. Most importantly, Maastricht protected a fortified bridge across the Meuse. The walls and bastions of Maastricht were strong and well defended. Any siege would be especially tricky as Maastricht boasted, quite unusually, fortified defensive works on both sides of the river and bridge. Louis XIV was present at the 1673 siege, but it was directed by the emerging master of siegecraft, Sébastien de Vauban. Defending the fortress was a garrison of 6,000. After feinting up the Scheldt, Louis established a blockade of Maastricht with an army of 45,000 men, including 16,000 horse. Turenne led a second blocking force into position to the east of the city. The fortress was invested on June 11. Vauban directed 7,000 pioneers to dig the investment lines. For the first time, he approached the curtain and defending bastions through innovative parallels, a complex net of trenches designed to advance powerful batteries to bombard the defenses, breach the curtain, and protect the assault troops. He started his first parallel on the 18th. As rumors swirled of the arrival of a relief army, and Louis prodded Vauban to take the city in time to celebrate Mass on Sunday—which was at that time forbidden to Catholics in Maastricht under an edict of the Dutch Reform Church—the siege was speeded to a conclusion. Mines and bombardment breached the main walls. This persuaded the town’s commander to beat the chamade on June 30. The garrison agreed to terms and marched out with full colors and honors a day later. The new methods used by Vauban at Maastricht greatly improved on traditional techniques of assault and quickly became standard for the French and other armies. Alexandre Dumas later made famous one of Louis’ musketeers who died at Maastricht: Charles de Batz-Castelmore, captain-lieutenant of the first company of the king’s musketeers, better known in his fictional form as d’Artagnan, hero of Dumas’ Three Musketeers.

Maastricht, siege of

Maastricht, siege of (July 7–August 29, 1676). See Dutch War (1672–1678). Madrid lock. A unique variation of the miquelet lock persisted in Spain for nearly a century after the flintlock was widely adopted elsewhere. This style is known today as the “Madrid lock.” It abhorred the single vertical sear used in the “true flintlock” in preference for two horizontal sears. magazines. China’s sophisticated bureaucracy maintained for the Qing the magazine system deployed earlier by the Ming. This included supply depots, armories, and granaries within China’s borders, and well-supported garrisons along the distant frontiers. The Ottoman Empire maintained an older and superior logistics system, though Europe began to catch up during this period. The Ottomans had food depots filled with dried biscuit and grain, preset ammunition dumps, and pre-positioned pontoon bridges along their traditional invasion routes into Hungary. They also had magazines and ammunition dumps along routes of march to the east and south. Like other early modern states, the Ottoman Empire supported field armies through riparian resupply wherever possible. It was advanced in linking barge traffic to large imperial granaries. A sophisticated supply depot system (“nüzul”) within the Empire’s borders was stocked with food, fodder, and firewood as well as arms. This matériel was mainly for use by the sultan’s household troops (Kapikulu Askerleri). The larger depots had granaries, military bakeries, and fodder barns located along regular lines of march that followed an advanced highway system. This “menzil-hane” network stretched across the whole Empire, from Europe to Asia. It was unmatched in Europe until equaled in France from 1688. Ottoman armies relied on Tatar auxiliaries to forage ahead of their main body once they were inside enemy territory. They also used a sophisticated, and well-defended, river barge fleet to supply their main forward depots at Belgrade and Buda, until they lost those bases late in the Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). At the termini of the depot system, supplies were carried into the field from the menzil-hane stations. That was done by pack horse or bullock cart in the temperate west. In the parched east, dromedary caravans made up of “kiter,” or strings of five to six camels each, were used in preference to horses or oxen. Records show that on some campaigns as many as 50,000 dromedaries were needed just to carry barley to feed themselves and wheat to feed the men, excluding unburdened spare beasts taken along to rotate the load and provide occasional relief. Many tens of thousands more camels were needed to carry water, ammunition, and other necessities of life and war. Full development of magazines in western Europe awaited the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Permanent military supply depots for the French Army were experimented with by Michel Le Tellier. The magazine system was greatly improved by his son, Louvois (François Le Tellier), during the Dutch War (1672–1678). In 1675 the French magazine at Charleroi was so full some supplies were stored in the town cathedral. The system was perfected in time to give France an initial advantage in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). 272

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French depots were usually located in fortresses or loyal towns along lines of march taken each campaign season by French armies. By ensuring that food and fodder was pre-stored, French armies were able to gain several weeks’ head start on their enemies, who literally had to wait for grass to grow before leaving winter quarters. On several occasions, this gained a measure of real operational surprise for the French. The French enjoyed a major advantage during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the opening years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). In addition to edibles, French magazines stored heavy siege cannon, powder and shot, grenades and muskets, entrenching tools and timbers, and even 30 boats for river and canal crossings. France’s enemies emulated this system but faced greater difficulties of distance and coordination, especially in Germany. On an ad hoc basis, after Marlborough outran the reach of Allied magazines in the northwestern corner of Europe, he employed a type of étapes system for his famed 1704 campaign, during which he made a 350-mile march south to the Danube. The depots of this system supplied his Redcoat and Allied regiments with fresh food and fodder, and even with new boots. Yet, the limited bureaucratic capabilities of all early modern states sharply checked the scale, reach, and effectiveness of any magazine system. This was true even for France. And once the famine years of 1709–1710 arrived and fodder supplies failed, the French also had to await the growth of spring grasses before moving into the field. Villars commented on this in 1710: “Lacking magazines, we can only assemble our armies when the countryside can feed the horses.” See also contributions; depots; expense magazine; fodder; fortification; Hofkriegsrat; powder magazine; women. magistral gallery. See gallery. magistral line. In fortification, the master line used to determine the direction and sites of all other lines of approach or defense, the direction of faces and flanks, and all other works. mainmast. See masts. main sail. See sails. maintop. See top. Maison du Roi. Household troops of the kings of France. See officers. major. See ranks (on land). major-general of the day. See tranchée général. make sail. A command on a sailing ship to hoist and spread canvas to catch the wind. 273

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Malaga, Battle of (August 24, 1704). See Velez-Málaga Battle of (August 13/24, 1704). Malmö, Battle of (July 5/15, 1678). Karl XI led a Swedish army to victory over the Danes. However, this provoked Louis XIV to intervene diplomatically to protect Denmark as a buffer against Swedish power in the Baltic, drawing to a close the Scanian War (1674–1679). Malplaquet, Battle of (August 31/September 11, 1709). At the beginning of 1709, the military fortunes of Louis XIV in Flanders were at their lowest ebb of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The Allies had already overrun the Lines of Brabant and breached the pré carré at Lille. Villars commanded French armies in the north and wanted to attack before the Allies pressed to Paris. Louis resisted, but in a panic after the fall of Tournai that July, the king agreed to an autumn offensive. Villars concentrated all available troops, emptying forward French garrisons to fill out his field army. He allowed Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy to join their armies on September 10, a failing for which some historians later criticized him. Villars spent that same day entrenching behind extensive field fortifications on a battle line centered on the village of Malplaquet, anchored at either flank in dense woods. Villars knew Marlborough’s penchant for feinting against his enemy’s flanks, then attacking the center. To counter this now well-worn tactic, Villars set up his own infantry and cannon to bring fire on the center of his line from three sides. He distributed his cavalry behind the infantry line, but widely rather than concentrated at the center or along the flanks. The French and their minor allies numbered perhaps 75,000 to 80,000 (there is wide disagreement among military historians on the actual number). Most of these troops were drawn from garrisons or were raw recruits. In addition to French units there were Bavarian, Irish, and Swiss allies and mercenaries, organized into 121 battalions of understrength infantry (about 400 men each), 260 squadrons of cavalry, and field batteries totaling 80 guns. Across from the French lines, Marlborough and Eugene commanded 86,000 Allied troops (Danes, Dutch, English, Irish, Hanoverian, Hessian, Prussian, Saxon, Scots, and Swiss), formed into 128 infantry battalions and 253 cavalry squadrons. The Allies also had a larger artillery train of 100 guns. The Allies approached the fields and woods where the French and Bavarians waited, each man in every regiment, squadron, and battery readying in his own way to engage an enemy in combat. What no man that day knew was that they and their fellows were about to participate in the greatest and bloodiest battle in European history prior to the Napoleonic Wars. The attack began after breakfast with an infantry advance against the French left by Austrian and Prussian battalions. The attack slowed as ancient French regiments from Picardy and the Champagne region brought heavy musket and cannon fire to bear, inflicting numerous casualties on the Allies. On the right, predominantly Dutch and Scottish infantry regiments were repulsed with heavy losses as they assaulted well-prepared and dug-in defenses. At 10 A.M. the Allies 274

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reinforced each flank attack, where they continued to suffer heavy losses. The Wild Geese of the French regiment of “Royal Irlandais” were sent to counterattack the Allied right. They did so with their usual ferocity, until repulsed by countrymen from the “Royal Irish,” who were fighting at Malplaquet for Marlborough and Queen Anne. The French line began to sag, then finally gave way on the left. Around noon, Villars was forced to issue an order he was loathe to give his couriers and subcommanders: to reinforce his sagging flanks from the reserve, with troops until then waiting for Marlborough’s expected and signature heavy killing blow against the center. Villars was soon thereafter severely wounded while fighting on the left and had to be taken from the field. Marlborough now thrust his tactical sword through the center of the French line, sending nearly 30,000 Allied horse to charge the infantry-poor redoubts left at the weakened center. They were met initially by a brave countercharge of French cavalry. As Allied assaults continued all along the line, both French flanks and the center began to give way. What saved the French Army from total disaster in the absence of Villars was an orderly, fighting retreat organized by maréchal Boufflers, who masterfully disengaged from the Allied armies around 3 P.M. The field was left to the Allies. On it lay 12,000 French killed and wounded. But the Allies were in no condition to pursue or exploit their victory: their own butcher’s bill was an astonishing 21,000 to 24,000 killed and wounded, the latter group including Eugene. Stunned that such losses had been suffered in a single afternoon and might be yet again under Marlborough’s aggressive command style, governments in London and Amsterdam were henceforth leery of ever again allowing Marlborough to seek decision by meeting the French in open battle. The Dutch Army, in particular, never fully recovered from these losses, while in Great Britain, the heavy casualty lists from Malplaquet helped pave the way for the Tories to take control in the House of Commons and end participation in the war. Allied governments forced Marlborough and other commanders to resume more staid positional warfare during 1710 and 1711, while diplomats scurried across Europe conducting secret peace negotiations. See also military medicine. Malta. See officers. Mamluks. “Mamelukes.” The term meant “owned,” or “slave,” carrying especially the connotation “white male slave” because most were Central Asian-Turkic boys and men by origin. Starting in the 9th century, they were imported to Syria and Egypt by the Abbasid caliphs to reinforce failing Arab armies. A Mamluk slave dynasty ruled large parts of northern India for some decades after 1206. Children of Mamluks were originally forbidden to become knights, creating a need to continually draw fresh supplies of captured Circassians and Slavs. Numbering just 10,000–12,000 at their peak, they were among the most feared militaries of the Middle East. Cut off from new supplies of Turkish or Slavic slaves, they evolved into a hereditary caste in Egypt. They specialized in mounted archery and failed to adapt fully to the gunpowder revolution. They thus lost Syria and Egypt to the firearm-bearing troops of the Ottomans, the 275

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Janissaries, from 1516–1717. The Mamluks thereafter were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, governing Egypt under varying degrees of Ottoman interference until 1798. Manchuria. The historic homeland of the Manchus. The term has also been used in reference to the three northeastern provinces of Imperial China–Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin. Manchuria was the homeland of semi-nomadic Jürchen peoples, who repeatedly invaded China over the prior millennium. Part of Manchuria was briefly occupied by the Han Empire. From 1122–1234, Jürchen warriors ruled northern China (“Jin empire”). Bridging the 16th–17th centuries, Nurgaci (1559–1626), the dynamic military leader who united all Jürchen clans into a single martial culture and aggressive empire, laid the foundation for the later Manchu conquest of China. His descendants, the emperors of the Qing dynasty, forbade ethnic Chinese settlement in Manchuria. They marked the forbidden zone with a willow ditch that ran the whole length of the border. Manchus. An Inner Asian people originally known as Jürchen (“Jin Empire”) when they ruled north China in the 12th century. They were renamed “Manchu” by Nurgaci (1559–1626), a dynamic military leader who united the Jürchen clans of Manchuria into a single martial culture and confederal empire by means of marriage, bribery, trade, and tricks, as well as military action. Until then, the Ming dynasty in China had taken special care to ensure that the Manchu tribes remained divided. The Manchus numbered fewer than 2 million at the mid-17th-century mark. They became a major threat, however, as they learned advanced bureaucratic skills from the Chinese of Liaodong province. They also developed a superior military organization (the Banner system) that channeled the ferocity of clan society into successful external aggression. Nurgaci organized the tribes in the first quarter of the 17th century into a mass army and powerful empire. In 1601 he instituted the major military reforms that shaped the Banner system. At one time a formal Ming vassal and tributary, Nurgaci shook off that status in 1610. Six years later, he proclaimed himself “khan” and his Manchurian domains an empire in its own right, known as the “Later Jin.” That title deliberately echoed the “Jin” (“Golden”) Empire that had ruled northern China from a Manchurian power base in the 12th–13th centuries. In 1619 Nurgaci launched a protracted war against the Ming with an initial Manchu army of 60,000. China mobilized 100,000 men and moved them directly into Manchuria to oppose him. In the Sarhu campaign of 1619, Nurgaci devastated the ill-led and divided Ming infantry, defeating the Chinese in detail by isolating and attacking each of four columns in turn. By 1621 he conquered all of Liaodong and Shenyang provinces. In 1625 Nurgaci set his capital at Shenyang (Mukden). From this point on, Nurgaci made up for Manchuria’s small population by absorbing into his army many Chinese and Mongolian prisoners and volunteers under new Mongolian and Chinese Banners. These recruits were required to shave their foreheads and adopt the Manchu “queue” as an act of formal submission. They brought to the Manchu armies, which until then were essentially cavalry formations, crucial knowledge of artillery and 276

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siegecraft, and added a growing infantry arm. This enhanced Manchu military prowess once Nurgaci trained his cavalry to collaborate with artillery and infantry in an effective, early modern, combined arms system. Still, the Ming were not yet defeated. Nurgaci was beaten in 1626 by a Ming counterattack. The Qing proceeded to conquer Inner Mongolia (1632), make Korea a tributary state (1638), then finally overthrow the Ming and establish Qing rule over northern China (1644). Nurgaci’s eighth son (out of sixteen), Hong Taiji (1592–1643), renamed the Manchu empire “Qing” (“Pure”) in 1636. Planning for the final conquest of Ming China in 1644 was done by Hong, but the actual invasion was carried out by his siblings and generals as Hong died a few months before the last attack. In the end, it was actually rebel Ming armies, including that of Wu Sangui, rather than the Qing, which brought about the end of the Ming dynasty in northern China in 1644, and ended Ming resistance in southern China 17 years after that. Under the Qing dynasty name, Manchu emperors thereafter governed China until 1911. See also China; Manchuria; mandate of heaven. mandate of heaven. The central Chinese Imperial governing doctrine, probably originating during the Zhou dynasty (1040–256 B.C.E.), arguing from Confucian principles that even an autocrat is bound by moral forces and the social compact that guides an entire community. In turn, that idea sustained the core myth of Chinese political theory (that is, of autocracy), to wit, that notwithstanding the absence of representative institutions in China, the emperors governed from a mandate arising from the people which demanded of rulers exhibitions of personal virtue and practice of benevolent and effective administration. Dynasties maintained the mandate by having the emperor (“Son of Heaven”) ritually observe an imperial cult of ancestor worship and carry out other ceremonies on a daily basis, erect temples, maintain an effective and established state religion, keep domestic order and uphold the laws, and secure the frontier against barbarian raids and invasions. The mandate was claimed by each new dynasty and, in the 20th century, by secular regimes. Each claim was contested, but also accepted once “confirmed” by the fact that overt resistance was finally crushed. See also China; Manchus. mansabdari. The Mughal imperial and military system which employed extensive symbolism about traditional ideals of warrior honor while actually professionalizing the military by setting up complex ranks and salaries. A secondary usage was for semi-feudal Mughal cavalry sustained by the “jagir” system of land grants (comparable to the Arab “iqta¯”). The primary holders of a jagir or the income it produced were sometimes called “mansabdars.” Their retainers were referred to either as “silladars,” those who supplied their own horses and arms, or “bargirs,” many of whom were attendant slaves. mantlet. Light, roofed, wheeled, musket-proof wooden screens used by sappers for approaching fortifications during a siege or assault. Their operators and occupants fired back at defenders through loopholes. Alternately, a mantlet 277

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covering a gun firing from a fortress was a timber screen that helped keep smoke from the casemate. maps. Cartography that was useful for military purposes remained hugely inadequate in most of the world throughout this era. Chinese mapmaking skills still exceeded those of Europe in this period. In China, land maps were reasonably accurate as well as numerous. Coastal maps were detailed and accurate. Neither case held in Europe. Naval navigators still were without reliable coastal charts, in most cases even of their home waters. Experienced local pilots were the preferred solution, but they were not always available to friendly forces let alone the enemy. The United Provinces had a tradition of sound mapmaking dating to the 17th century, when several important mapmakers migrated north of the rivers to the rebel Netherlands to escape Spain and the Inquisition. Still, the magnetic compass and the portolan chart remained the stand-by methods of navigation, with most steering still done by dead reckoning—estimating position of a ship without benefit of instruments or astronomical observations by calculating how far it had drifted or sailed, and on what course, from a known port of departure. Even experienced navigators preferred to steer by dead reckoning and stayed close to known coastlines so that they could use direct sighting from point to point. For oceanic voyages, the Mercator projection with its false differences of meridian was the best map available. That and rough magnetic observation led many a ship or squadron to miss its land mark on the other side by 200 miles or more. The worst consequence of this problem was ships wrecking through map error. For example, British maps showed the Scilly Isles 15 miles north of their true position. On October 22, 1707, a British squadron ran into the shoals and reefs around the Scilly Isles and three ships-of-the-line were lost with all hands, including Admiral Cloudesley Shovel. See also Samuel Pepys. Suggested Reading: David Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps (1992).

Marathas. Originally, western Indian peasants who lived outside Mughal control, in Maharashtra. They founded their own state in the mid-17th century, utilizing firearms technology to eventually establish a powerful Marathan kingdom in the Deccan. Originally, Maratha armies were principally constituted of peasant infantry. However, later Maratha forces were predominantly light cavalry. These ranged widely in chronic frontier warfare of raids and ambushes. Under Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680), the Marathas tentatively, and then directly, challenged Mughal power. They plundered Surat in 1664, provoking Aurangzeb to a furious counterattack by Mughal forces and hired Rajput troops. After a temporary setback, in 1670 the Marathas again pillaged Surat, and faced and defeated a Mughal army. In 1674 Sivaji proclaimed Maratha an independent kingdom. Intermittent fighting with the Mughals continued to the end of his life. In 1688 Sivaji’s successor, Shambuji Bhonsle, was captured and taken before Aurangzeb to be publicly butchered. The emperor’s army stayed to restore Mughal authority over Maharashtra. However, the Marathas returned to 278

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guerilla warfare under their executed king’s brother, Rajaram Bhonsle, to 1700, and then under his warrior widow, Tara Bai (1675–1761). They harassed and harried Aurangzeb’s armies, or fortified multiple positions, and thereby forced the Mughals to lay in sieges. This protracted warfare lasted the remainder of Aurangzeb’s reign, tying his armies down in prolonged and costly campaigns. By 1700 the Marathas were also suffering great losses. In 1702 the young regent, Tara Bai, led 50,000 Marathas against Hyderabad, sacking the city and ruining Mughal trade. With Aurangzeb’s death, successive Mughal leaders wisely promoted civil war among the Marathas, dividing their enemies. This intrigue worked: the Marathas split into rival courts, with Tara Bai’s faction eventually losing to her dead husband’s nephew, Shahu (d. 1749). It was not until later in the 18th century that Maratha leaders tried to reestablish large infantry units trained by hired European instructors, this time to stand in battle facing European or European-trained Indian infantry armies. That abandonment of their primary strength and history as light cavalry was not an altogether successful tactic. Suggested Reading: Brij Kishore, Tara Bai and Her Times (1965).

Marbella, Battle of (March 10, 1705). A naval battle of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). An Allied fleet of 23 English, 4 Dutch, and 8 Portuguese sail caught a French fleet of just 5 ships-of-the-line and routed them in the Bay of Gibraltar. marching regiments. An alternate term for line regiments, or readily deployable British Army regulars not constituting any part of Household Guards regiments. Marienburg, Treaty of (June 25, 1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Marie Thérèse (1638–1683). Daughter of Philip IV of Spain; wife of Louis XIV. Under terms of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (October 28/November 7, 1659) that ended the long Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659), conditions of the dynasticcum-diplomatic marriage between Spain and France included renunciation of Marie Thérèse’s claim to the Spanish throne and an impossibly large dowry of 500,000 escudos. When Philip died in 1665, Louis asserted Marie Thérèse’s claim to the Spanish Netherlands on the slim basis that her dowry had not been paid, and hence her inheritance rights to that northern province remained intact and owed. This led to the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Three decades later, Louis deployed other claims based on his wife’s inheritance rights to try to seize Bourbon family control of the Spanish throne itself, leading to another and greater conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also Franche-Comté. marines. In this period, marines were usually regiments specifically raised during wartime to serve at sea, or regular army regiments temporarily assigned to 279

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serve on board warships. For example, the Royal Navy did not establish a permanent corps of marines under Admiralty control until 1755. Marines at this time did not wear uniforms at sea and were not subject to discipline by the ship’s officers. An exception to this was the French corps of troupes de la marine. See also Vigo Bay, Battle of (October 12/23, 1702); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); Western Design. Maritime Powers. England and the United Provinces. See also Altona, Treaty of (July 10/20, 1689); Great Northern War (1700–1721). Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722). British captain-general; commander of Allied armies 1701–1711. He saw his first minor actions on land and at sea against the Barbary corsairs while serving in the garrison at Tangier. He was onboard the Duke of York’s flagship during the sea fight at Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672). He then enlisted in the service of Louis XIV. For Louis and under maréchal Turenne, Churchill led an English regiment in action against an Imperial Army at Enzheim (October 4, 1674). He was in multiple actions during Louis’ Dutch War (1672–1678) with the United Provinces. Marlborough was initially loyal to James II, who significantly advanced his career and for whom he commanded the Royal Army that defeated the Duke of Monmouth’s larger but rag-tag army at Sedgemoor (July 5–6/15–16, 1685). That ended “Monmouth’s Rebellion” and secured Marlborough in the special favor of the king. He grew disillusioned with James, however, in direct proportion to the growing opposition to the king remaining on the throne. James declined his advice to advance against William III and fight him directly along the shore when James landed at Torbay in Devon on November 5/15, 1688, initiating the Glorious Revolution. Marlborough soon found it judicious to abandon his sovereign and patron, though he would remain in secret contact with James for years. Marlborough dwelled in the shadow of suspicion by the new regime for nearly two years, not without good reason. He emerged into the light of royal need, rather than favor, to help plan William’s campaign in Ireland which culminated in Protestant victory at the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690). He secured the southern half of Ireland, capturing Cork and Kinsale in October 1690. He also fought for William against Louis XIV during the early phase of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Marlborough remained in touch with leading Jacobites for several years, rebel inclinations or at least contacts for which he was briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1692. The direct cause of his temporary fall from royal grace was a wrongful accusation that he had supported a plot against the king. Restored to royal favor by 1700, he was appointed captain-general, and commanded the English and Dutch field armies in the United Provinces at the start of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). In his accounts of battle and the war, Marlborough unfairly belittled the overall contribution of Dutch arms, a prejudice also reflected in many British histories of the conflict. This habit likely was born of a lifelong penchant for self-promotion and intrigue, to the great benefit of his fortune and career. In fact, the Dutch war effort on land 280

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exceeded that of the British in terms of men, money, and matériel, though at sea the Royal Navy clearly pulled away from the Dutch Navy in the level of its contribution. In addition, Marlborough enjoyed a remarkable and effective partnership with Prince Eugene of Savoy, who fought at his side as co-commander during three of Marlborough’s four great battlefield victories. Marlborough’s star at court rose higher upon William III’s death. His wife, Sarah, was personally close to Queen Anne (r. 1702–1714), a fact that served Marlborough very well. He lost favor at court in 1710 when his wife fell out with the Queen, and the Tories replaced the Whigs, who had been Marlborough’s patrons, in control of Parliament. He was summarily recalled to England in early 1711 partly for this reason, but also to help clear an old warrior from the path leading to peace talks with France. As a commander, Marlborough used forced marches and operational concentration of forces to regularly breach French defensive lines in Flanders. However, his grander strategic plans were stymied by Dutch deputies more shy than he was of engaging in battle and suffering casualties. His “Grand Design” of 1703, in which he proposed to take Ostend and Huy and thereby break the first of the French lines, was vetoed by the Dutch, and he was forced to content himself with sieges and the capture of Huy alone. In 1704 Marlborough added his name to the list of “Great Captains” when, at the uncomfortable saddle age of 54, he moved his army 350 miles to the Danube to bring direct aid to Leopold I and thereby forestall Austria departing the war. He deceived allies and enemy alike along the way. His deputy commanders and their civilian masters in Amsterdam did not know of his Danubian plan. Like the French, the Dutch thought only that Marlborough intended to wage war along the Moselle. He left from near Cologne on May 19 with 30,000 troops in English pay, of whom about half were actually Redcoats. In the next five weeks, he marched these men over 350 miles without exhausting them or their mounts or draught animals. He displayed exceptional logistical and operational skill in doing so, notably by employing a type of étapes system where Allied magazines did not exist. He also liberally dispensed gold coin to encourage local peasants and merchants along his line of march to bring supplies to his troops, who then paused and encamped every four days to bake bread. This famous march of the “scarlet caterpillar” was far more a triumph of logistics than speed, in which latter regard it was less remarkable than is often stated: Jan Sobieski moved his army 400 miles in six weeks in relief of Vienna in 1683, in one stretch covering 220 miles in just 15 days. More remarkable is how, and how often, Marlborough fooled allies and enemies alike, leaving both in his wake. His first fast break came upon approaching the Moselle, when he turned instead to cross the Rhine over a floating bridge. To move fast through Germany, he left behind his big siege guns. Thereafter, he avoided assaulting fortresses he could not hope to batter or quickly overcome. Marlborough was helped by the fact that much larger French armies were positioned in the wrong places, guarding areas he did not intend to invade but which he threatened with feints and ruses. These movements badly confused the enemy about his final intentions and destination. On the march, Marlborough’s 281

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English troops were joined by many more Germans, greatly swelling his battalions. With this Allied army, he forced the French camp at Donauwörth on the Danube on July 2. He went on to devastate Bavaria to force its army to fight, deliberately allowing his troops to pillage and burn on a large scale. He linked with Eugene’s fast cavalry and dragoon force on August 11. The battle came two days later at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704), where Marlborough demonstrated what became his trademark tactic: attacking an enemy’s flanks to draw troops from the center, where he then landed the killing blow. The Imperials were so pleased they rewarded the victory by naming Marlborough a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire (Mindelheim). From 1705 Marlborough fought continuously in Flanders. He partially forced the Lines of Brabant on July 17–18, 1705, but was frustrated in his efforts to force battle by French cleverness and Dutch hesitancy. The next spring, however, Louis unwittingly accommodated Marlborough by ordering Villeroi out of his entrenchments and forward with 60,000 men to retake the broken Lines. Marlborough gathered 60,000 Allied troops at Maastricht and marched to meet the French. He smashed his enemies at Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706), his greatest victory in the field. Once again, he caught an enemy commander with infantry overly concentrated in flanking villages and with a correspondingly weak center. After pounding the flanks, Marlborough reinforced his center and drove home the decisive assault of the day. He proceeded to take town after town in the Spanish Netherlands from the demoralized and broken French, displaying an energy in exploitation of victory that was rare in its day, or ever. He also found time for an urgent diplomatic mission to see Karl XII of Sweden, to ensure he did not join the war on the side of France. While Marlborough was bested by Vendôme when the latter slipped past him to take Bruges and Ghent during the 1708 campaign, he and Eugene joined to defeat Vendôme at Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708). Marlborough followed that battlefield victory with a siege of Lille (August 14–December 10, 1708). Villars marched out to meet the Allied army after the fall of Tournai in July, leading to the bloody fight at Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709). Marlborough’s victory there came at such a high cost in lives that Allied governments were leery of again allowing him to use their armies in battle. Worse was to come: he lost his political position with Queen Anne, who fell out with Marlborough’s wife, and his Whig patrons lost out to the Tories as Great Britain reconsidered the cost of a continental war. Even so, in the campaign of 1711 Marlborough crossed the as yet incomplete Ne Plus Ultra lines near Vimy Ridge. He achieved this via a ruse and without suffering any casualties. He was not permitted to exploit this success, however. In January 1712, out of favor with his government and his queen, he was removed from command just as peace talks got underway in Utrecht. He was subsequently censured by Parliament for alleged corruption and went into exile. Marlborough is widely regarded as the greatest of English generals of the time, or even of all time. He professed to nearly always seek battles of encounter. Some historians, notably David Chandler, argue that Marlborough revolutionized war 282

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by almost single-handedly reviving a preference for decisive battle over positional warfare. They maintain that his peers and contemporaries were rigidly fixated on maneuvers and sieges, but that Marlborough saw through to development of the decisive battle. Yet, terrain and general limits on mobility of all 18th-century armies argued otherwise. In Marlborough’s whole career, he fought four great field battles and two smaller ones, while conducting 30 sieges and three major “passages of lines,” all over the course of ten campaigns. It is not plausible or persuasive to assign him sole credit for revival of a culture of battle, especially given the low number of battles he recorded as against sieges conducted. Moreover, not even his greatest battlefield victories were truly decisive, and his final great battles were so bloody that they significantly contributed to British and Dutch reluctance to engage in any more such encounters or entrust him any longer with their precious armies. Finally, even so traditional a warrior as Montecuccoli wrote decades before Marlborough’s advent that “whoever wins a battle wins not only the campaign but also a large piece of territory,” and Turenne told the Great Condé that it was always superior strategy to win multiple small battles than conduct sieges of fortresses or try to capture cities. However, there is no need to take the view of Marlborough’s harshest critics either. They suggest that he faced only inferior French maréchals, and that he would not have fared as well against Condé or Turenne or Luxembourg. It is most fair to say that Marlborough was far more daring than any of his allies and all his enemies with the exception of Villars, the one great French commander he faced in maneuver and battle. Marlborough’s preference for movement on the battlefield, and his habit of personal reconnaissance leading to exploitation of the smallest gains made in prior positional warfare or of weaknesses in an enemy’s deployments, made him a remarkable field commander who was well ahead of his time. Also advanced and innovative was his detailed attention to logistics, right down to hand mills he famously ordered issued to all British regiments. His use of spies among the enemy’s ranks and officers, and very likely also one he kept inside no less a body than the Conseil d’en Haut, was not innovative in the practice of war, but it was smart and effective. Marlborough was altogether an exceptional practitioner of the art of military operations within the limits imposed by the age, so much so that many regard him as the greatest soldier which England or Great Britain ever brought forth. See also Cadogan, William; Great Britain; Ireland; running footmen. Suggested Reading: David Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (1976); Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander (1973); J. Jones, Marlborough (1993).

Marsaglia, Battle of (October 4, 1693). Nicholas Catinat defeated Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in this north Italian battle fought during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Catinat had about 40,000 men against 38,000 Savoyard and Allied troops. The battle began with complex maneuvering as each side tried to flank the other. Fighting lasted along the lines for over four hours. The critical moment came on the French right when infantry led personally by Catinat 283

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made a bayonet charge. This was deadly, but began to stall. Meanwhile, on the French left, the Allies were making their most concerted try. The presence on that flank of gendarmerie, heavy cavalry newly arrived from Germany, turned back the heavy Allied infantry assault. A counter-charge broke the will and lines of the Allies. Total French losses were around 3,000. Victor Amadeus and the Allies lost perhaps 10,000 casualties and 2,000 prisoners, along with all initiative in the Italian theater and any martial confidence. Martinet, Jean (d. 1672). Early in his reign, Louis XIV accepted the advice of Michel Le Tellier and his son, Louvois, and established a special and hugely oversized regiment, the Régiment du Roi (1663), to model and demonstrate proper drill to the rest of the army. Jean Martinet, about whom almost nothing is known before this event, was lieutenant-colonel of the Régiment. Through his instruction of officers, new methods of drill spread through the French Army and from it into other armies as well. Martinet was an innovator in other areas besides drill and military discipline. Some attribute to him invention of the socket bayonet (others credit Vauban). More likely, Martinet was an early advocate of the plug bayonet and infantry bayonet charge, though he failed to persuade Louis or Louvois to adopt this tactic generally for French infantry. He is known to have developed portable bridging equipment and to have stressed the use of grenadiers as assault troops. His name later became synonymous with excessive attention to petty matters of military discipline and overly fussy attitudes among drill officers. masking. Concealing the embrasures of a breaching (siege) battery with gabions and fascines. Unmasking of batteries was done all at once, on command after all guns were in place. master and commander. See ranks (at sea). Master-General of the Ordnance. A high officer of state responsible for the Board of Ordnance for the British Army. During most of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), this office was combined with the command position of captain-general in the singular person of Marlborough. master. See ranks (at sea). master carpenter. See ranks (at sea). master gunner. See ranks (at sea). master’s mate. See ranks (at sea). masts. Any vertical spar on a ship whose purpose was to support yards, rigging, tackle, sails, and smaller vertical or horizontal spars. A “made mast” was built from sections, not a single piece of wood. Some were 3–4 feet or more in diameter at 284

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the base and 100–200 feet or more high. To hoist sail on such monsters was beyond human muscle power. Instead, it was done with a mechanical device: a ship’s windlass. Square sails were set on two forward masts with the spars of the main mast holding aloft most of the ship’s canvas. A lateen sail was usually rigged on the mizzen mast. This three-masted rigging system permitted easier tacking and more rapid course changes. Footropes permitted divided sails and divided masts that were lighter and cheaper than huge single masts. Multiple light-composite masts and spars made ships faster and more stable, which meant they performed even better as big gun platforms. By the mid-17th century, customary English terms for the main masts of a standard three- or four-masted warship were “bonaventure,” or aftermost mast (aft even of the mizzen) on a four-master; “foremast,” or foremost vertical spar; “main mast,” the tallest and thickest mast on any two-, three-, or four-masted ship; and “mizzen,” or the aftermost mast on a three-masted ship but the next to last (rigged to the fore of the bonaventure) on a four-masted ship. A “topmast” was a small mast used to extend vertical reach and add canvas. It could be fitted to any of the lower masts, and thereby earned the prosaic appellations “foretop,” “maintop,” and “mizzentop.” A “topgallant” was a small vertical mast fitted to, and extending upward from, any of the other cited topmasts. Most European masts came from the Baltic during the first half of the 17th century, though this trade—especially to England—was frequently interrupted by war. During the 1660s, the cost of large masts for the English rose by 50% while that of small masts rose over 100%. As European forests were already denuded of wood fit for masts and shipbuilding, or had been cut down to make charcoal to fuel Europe’s cannon forges, the forests of Canada and New England had assumed a new strategic importance for England. Interruption of Baltic supplies during the 1660s accelerated this shift by forcing Samuel Pepys and other administrators of the Royal Navy to look there for alternative sources of masts and yards. See also top. matchlock. A firing mechanism for early muskets and pistols that saw wide field adoption from 1450 to 1470. The matchlock permitted the gunman to fire while steadying the stock and barrel with both hands, instead of using a forked rest or a second man to apply slow match or a heated wire to the touch hole. The matchlock gripped several feet of slow match in a lock that descended into a pan of priming powder when a serpentine was lowered, at first by hand but later when a trigger released a spring-and-tumbler that moved the serpentine and match to the pan. The powder in the priming pan set off the main charge in the barrel, providing the signature, two-step ignition of early firearms. Infantry retained matchlocks in preference to the overly delicate and expensive wheel lock. Matchlocks served into the second half of the 17th century, when they began to be displaced beginning in the 1680s by a clearly superior flintlock musket or fusil. Matchlocks were used into the 18th century by poorer states and armies and in some less advanced frontier zones. See also infantry. mate. See ranks (at sea). 285

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Mauerscheisser. Austrian pejorative for garrison troops. It appears to have derived from a display at Forchheim during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), where the garrison defecated from the walls during a siege to demonstrate that they still had plenty to eat. Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726). Elector of Bavaria. Like many another Wittelsbach ruler of Bavaria, Maximilian Emanuel’s ambitions greatly exceeded his and his state’s capabilities. He took to war early, seeing his first action by the age of 20. He was present with the Allied relief army that lifted the siege of Vienna in 1683, and went on to fight in Hungary and the Balkans against the Ottomans. He was also present at the fall of Belgrade. He was constantly wooed and easily flattered by Louis XIV, who used Maximilian as a counterweight to the Austrian Habsburgs. However, he joined Bavaria to the League of Augsburg during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) against France. His ambitions to supplant the Habsburgs in south Germany caused him to change sides and ally with France during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He lost his army, contact with his family, and control of Bavaria in the great disaster for Bavarian arms suffered at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). After the battle and Allied occupation of Bavaria, Maximilian moved his court to the French-occupied Spanish Netherlands. He was sustained there by Louis XIV. Maximilian was again rousted and forced onto the road after Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706). He moved to Versailles, where he kept court in the shadow of the “Grande Monarque” until the end of the Spanish war. He returned to Bavaria under terms of the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713), much reduced politically and chastened personally. Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661). Né Giulio Mazarini. French statesman. Educated by Jesuits, Mazarin served in papal armies before rising to become papal nuncio (ambassador) at the French court, 1634–1636. He was naturalized as a French subject and joined the diplomatic corps under Cardinal Armand Richelieu. Mazarin’s foreign origins may have helped convince Vauban, whom he found a prisoner of war in Spanish service, to serve him and France. Mazarin was made cardinal, despite the fact he was not a priest, by the influence of Richelieu on Louis XIII. Richelieu also anointed him personal successor as principal advisor to Louis XIII. Events of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the long struggle with Spain had persuaded Richelieu to intervene with French arms in 1635, though the old “éminence rouge” did not live to see the war to a successful finish. After Richelieu died (December 4, 1642), followed shortly thereafter by the death of Louis XIII (May 14, 1643), Mazarin effectively ruled France during the early regency over Louis XIV. He likely was the queen-regent’s (Anne of Austria) lover, and possibly even her secret spouse. It was left to Mazarin to oversee the final battles of the great German war, and negotiation and implementation of Richelieu’s grand diplomatic design for French primacy in Europe. Mazarin oversaw the success of French arms in the final years of the war and successfully enshrined a triumph of French diplomacy in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). He did so with genuine respect for the interests of minor allies and a wise eye to the 286

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German and wider balance of power that helped secure a lasting peace within the German estates of the Holy Roman Empire. Domestically, from 1648 Mazarin was embroiled in the civic unrest of the Fronde, which he did much to provoke by cutting the salaries of officeholders who had bought their positions, and creating and selling rival offices. He also imposed control by intendants, a reform greatly resented and resisted by local nobles all over France. The various Fronde forced him into temporary exile on several occasions. Upon his return to court favor and to full power in 1653, he allied France with Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Republic in England, paying the price of surrendering Dunkirk to English control. That reflected his career-long and sober judgment that France needed anti-Habsburg allies, regardless of religion. That conclusion had led him earlier to forge alliances with Catholic and Protestant kings alike, from Bavaria to Sweden, and to position France as the unlikely guarantor of German princely liberties against the threat of a too powerful Holy Roman Emperor. Similarly, he negotiated the Rheinbund alliance in 1658. The next year, he ended the war with Spain in complete victory, dictating terms highly favorable to France in the Treaty of the Pyrenees, his single greatest diplomatic accomplishment. That conclusive victory over Spain should have left France at peace for many years, but the wisdom and moderation of Mazarin was too soon followed by impetuous arrogance and aggression in the form of the young king. In general, Mazarin solidified the policies of his great predecessor, Richelieu, whom Mazarin rivaled in power and surpassed in administrative efficiency and talent. Like Richelieu, he always elevated the interests of the crown above all else. That was his great achievement as well as the cause of most of his troubles. He pursued France’s interests with more subtlety and success even than Richelieu, and was far more respectful of the interests of other and lesser powers than was Louis XIV. During Mazarin’s last decade in power, France thus enjoyed unparalleled security. He died a hugely wealthy man, who bequeathed much to France, not least in form of the famous library he accumulated with his riches and the remarkable “Mazarin Bible.” See also Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de; Edict of Fontainebleau (1685); Galway, Earl of; Huguenots; Louis XIV. Mazepa-Koledinsky, Ivan Stepanovich (1644?–1709). Cossack hetman. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709). Medway, attack on (June 12, 1667). See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de. Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688). A memorandum amounting to an ultimatum presented by Louis XIV demanding confirmation of his prior territorial gains up to, and including, the War of the Reunions (1683–1684), as originally agreed at Ratisbon (August 15, 1684). It also sought to dictate succession to the bishopric of Cologne, thereby further interfering with Imperial prerogative in Germany, and treaty and other rights guaranteed in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). It arrogantly set a three-month time limit for acceptance. 287

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Even Louis ignored the time line, choosing to attack the very next day before the Mémoire and ultimatum were even delivered. Instead of securing French claims, the terms and tone of the Mémoire stimulated formation of the League of Augsburg and Grand Alliance which fought France to a standstill during the ensuing Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Menshikov, Mikhail Semenovich (1673–1729). See Great Northern War (1700–1721); Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709). menzil-hane. See magazines. mercantilism. Mercantilist theories were not systematic or even really theories. Instead, they were a loose 16th–18th century set of assumptions and practices which treated politics as superior to economics, and saw competition among states over limited sources of wealth as the main reality of international relations. Still, there were discernible general characteristics. At base, mercantilism was a continuation of war and statecraft by economic means. Its practitioners were concerned with concentration of military and financial power in the hands of a centrally managed state. They were concerned with building national institutions that enhanced the power of the sovereign over traditional elite classes of the aristocracy and clergy. That meant supporting newly professionalized armies and navies, along with enforcing a more efficient tax system, overseeing and regulating commerce, and maintening facilities (drydocks, warehouses, repair facilities) necessary to sustain large standing armies and permanent navies. While mercantilism is often identified with absolutism, the regimes that practiced mercantilism in fact varied from centralized monarchies such as France under Louis XIV to the United Provinces and England. In the late 18th century, the term acquired a lasting pejorative meaning from the influential writings of Adam Smith. In first describing established economic practices to criticize them, Smith systematized them into what he called “the mercantile system.” The impact and triumph of his own economic ideas about the virtues of free trade froze this pejorative sense in place, thereby falsely raising clumsy and ill-enforced mercantilist practices to the level of economic theory. Mercantilists assumed that a fixed amount of world trade and wealth existed, and therefore argued for a national policy of accumulating wealth by maintaining a favorable balance of trade through high tariffs, the hoarding of precious metals, and economic self-sufficiency through protection of home industry and agriculture. Why? Because they thought trade and hoarded bullion translated into enhanced national power, and imports eroded gold stocks and undercut domestic production. Accumulating bullion through trade was essential to the sovereign, with piracy resorted to as well by several states, most notably France and England. The idea that sovereign power correlated to a closed trading system that accumulated bullion and restricted foreign imports initially stimulated commercial growth. Over time, however, trade and growth were hampered by creation of excessive reliance on monopolies and export subsidies which were 288

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countered by other states maintaining highly protectionist tariffs. The “theory” to some degree supported creation of colonial empires as sources of rare metals, sugar, furs, or other goods; markets for exports (including slaves and all manufactures); and supports for political, economic, and military self-sufficiency. Mercantilist practices thus exacerbated international conflict during the latter 17th century while also encouraging low domestic consumption and leading to high inflation that undercut an ability to pay for war. See also Colbert, JeanBaptiste; Navigation Act (1651); Navigation Act (1660); Nijmegen, Treaty of (August 10, 1678). mercenaries. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690); British Army; Carbisdale, Battle of (April 27, 1650); Dutch Army; Dutch War (1672–1678); Fraustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706); French Army; Genoa; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Grenzer; Indian Wars; Ireland; Irish establishment; Karlstadt border; King Philip’s War (1675–1676); Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702); Louis XIV; Louvois; Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676); Malplaquet, Battle of (August 31/September 11, 1709); military engineers; military medicine; New England; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); officers; Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669); Peter I; Polish Army; Prussian Army; Rákóczi, Ferenc; rotmistrz; Russian Army; Schomberg, Friedrich, Graf von; sejmiki; Spanish Army; standing army; Swedish Army; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); war finance; Wild Geese; William III; Windische border. merham beha. See military medicine. merlon. Solid earth or masonry vertical protections of a crenelated parapet. Two merlons flanked an embrasure (or alternately, two embrasures created a merlon) through which cannon fired onto enemy siege lines, batteries, and assaulting troops. The term was also used for comparable firing arrangements where embrasures were cut into the rail and side of the upper deck of a warship. Messinian rebellion (1674–1678). Starting in 1672, peasants and townsfolk in Messina rioted against new Spanish tax demands designed to pay for Spain’s war with France. Two years later, in the middle of the Dutch War (1672–1678), riots became outright rebellion. The Spanish governor fled, and appeals went out to the French, who shipped in grain and eventually military supplies, and then marines and regular troops. The main military effect of the revolt was to force the Spanish to hold troops in reserve in Spain in case they were needed on Sicily. This limited fighting underway along the Pyrenees. Spain first reinforced Sicily in September 1674. France countered with grain and military supplies. The new year saw heavy French naval commitments, and then regiments of soldiers landed from Toulon. On February 11, a French fleet transporting 3,000 regulars fought its way through a Spanish blockade into Messina harbor, a fight in which galleys went into action on both sides. The Spanish reinforced again, including with allied German regiments. A Dutch fleet was defeated by the French off Sicily at Augusta (April 22, 1676), and an Allied fleet was mostly burned at 289

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anchor at Palermo (June 2, 1676). However, Louis XIV never committed enough troops to conquer the island. Friction grew between the French and the local population as food reserves ran out. Faced with possible English intervention in the war, Louis withdrew all French forces in March 1678, and Sicily reverted to Spain. Methuen Treaties. A set of Anglo-Portuguese agreements cementing a political, military, and commercial alliance directed against Spain and France for the duration of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The agreements were more important to British prosperity and global sea power after this period than during it. The immediate effect was to add English escorts to protect Portuguese convoys from Brazil, with commercial elements of the treaties supported by imports of Brazilian gold. Middle Hungarian Principality. See Austrian Empire. Milan. See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Milan, Convention of (March 13, 1707). Following the French defeat at Turin (September 7, 1706), which also ended the siege of that city, Louis XIV sought to reduce his military commitments in Italy. The next spring, the convention was agreed in Milan, ending fighting in the Po Valley while permitting French troops to evacuate Lombardy and Mantua without interference. Prisoners were also exchanged. However, the convention did not end the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) in Italy. milice gardes-côtes. French militia assigned to coastal watch and protection. Militargrenze. “Vojna krajina” (“military frontier”). In 1527 Ferdinand I of Austria established a frontier zone of land-based military obligations for Serbs and Bosnian Vlachs migrating northward, away from the territorial advance of the Ottoman Empire. These were not so much feudal ties as a form of frontier garrisoning using local troops that did not draw down the treasury while redirecting bandit energies back against the Ottomans. To that end, newcomers were left undisturbed to practice their Orthodox faith. Troops of the Militargrenze elected officers (“vojvode”), who led them on plundering expeditions. On the other side of the frontier, the Ottomans also employed local Christian troops, so that each empire fought the other for decades via Vlach and Serb proxies. The Militargrenze grew in time into a band of territory that ranged from 20–60 miles in width and over 1,000 miles in length. During the 17th century, it was measled with about 90 fortresses, most of a rudimentary form rather than full-bastioned defenses. See also skulking way of war. military confederations. In the second half of the 17th century, it became fashionable to draw up formal military charters that listed rules for election of officers, 290

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codes of military discipline, and so forth. This trend was especially pronounced in looser military formations or regional armies fighting in the greater chaos of wars in the east and Ukraine, notably the Polish Army. See also Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). military discipline. Corporal punishments were commonplace in general society in this period, and personal violence was far more common than today. It is not surprising, therefore, that punishments were routinely inflicted on largely peasant or other rural soldiers by their “social betters” should the former perform clumsily in drill or not hop to a command by the latter. This might involve some 16-year-old Junker beating an old soldier twice or thrice his age, as if boy and man were still working in the servile-master conditions of a Prussian estate. The beating might be done with fists or a knout or the flat of a sword, with the latter considered less dishonorable. According to a given Army and the seriousness of an offense, into the late 18th century, European soldiers were subject to traditional punishments that included running the gauntlet or being spun inside a whirligig. “Riding the horse” involved painfully straddling a broad wooden frame for a preset period, sometimes while loaded down with pack and musket or even with weights attached to the lower leg. Even in the late 18th century, some medieval torments and execution methods were still used, though more rarely, including racking or being “broken on the wheel.” The French added literal weight through punishment by “boulet,” attachment of a prisoner by chain to an iron roundshot during prolonged periods of detention. Other armies employed similar “ball and chain” punishments. Capital sentences were reserved for major offenses. They might be carried out, but only rarely, by firing squad. In European armies, the more usual method of execution was still hanging. At Trierin in 1675, badly shaken French troops mutinied in the middle of a bloody siege, handing over their commander to Charles V of Lorraine. Some were later executed “pour encourager les autres,” with the unlucky men chosen by lot to be hanged in front of their fellows in a 17th-century variation on the ancient Roman punishment of decimation of ranks. Beheading by axe or sword was still the preferred method of capital punishment in Ottoman and Chinese armies, though strangulation was also employed. In most navies of the period, desertion while in port, mutiny at sea, murder, and buggery were all capital offenses. For proper perspective on the relative fit of punishment to crime, it should be recalled that in 17th–18th century England, there were over 200 capital offenses for civilians listed in the common law. Flogging was a common military punishment of this period on land and at sea, just as it was widely used in ordinary criminal cases and privately against serfs, slaves, and children. In 1663 Louvois set out to curtail military corruption mainly by centralizing military administration. He also introduced stricter disciplines against common soldiers. He announced an official policy of flogging for any discovered passe volant, and the infamous lieutenant-colonel Jean Martinet set about enforcing it. Two years later, Louvois added branding as a 291

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punishment for taking the king’s coin without bearing the king’s arms beyond the parade ground. When war broke out, the problem of missing rankers not only continued, but deepened. As late as 1676, Louvois ordered the traditional punishment of having one’s nose cut off for this crime against the royal purse. The practice of passe volant continued mainly because it was lucrative for captains and colonels, who also did not take the risk of disfigurement. Louvois therefore ordered execution of passe volants and established a rewards scale for any French soldier denouncing a corrupt captain or other officer. The offending officer was not to be flogged, but was fined and might even lose his commission. This set of draconian orders attacking both ends of the problem finally discouraged most military impersonators. Contrary to widespread belief, and to a degree what came later in Prussian barracks, punishment and daily treatment of soldiers in the Prussian Army of Friedrich-Wilhelm was quite humane for the age. “Running the gauntlet” (“gantlope”) was a harsh physical punishment adopted by most German armies from Swedish practice introduced during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) by Gustavus Adolphus. An offending soldier was made to run between files of men, who beat him as he passed. It was always brutal and sometimes fatal. The old Landsknechte had a native German version of this penalty: the “pike court.” A pike court forced the accused to run between files of pikemen, who stabbed him as he passed. Almost no accused survived, as any man refusing to stab the offender would be sent to take his place. Both these punishments were abolished, along with employment of any Landsknechte infantry, by Friedrich-Wilhelm. The “Great Elector” also forbade officers and noncommissioned officers from beating their soldiers, a practice common in later German armies and in Japanese armies into the mid-20th century, when officers still routinely slapped men across the face. Brandenburger officers who attacked civilians could be stripped of their rank and made to serve as ordinary soldiers for one year. Similarly, the Great Elector threatened to hang any man he found guilty of plundering within his territories. The Prussian Army was small enough that Friedrich-Wilhelm insisted on personally confirming or denying every capital sentence by a court-martial. Similarly, Karl XII severely punished plunderers and marauders among his troops, not least because they undermined his efforts to extract contributions from occupied populations. Discipline of a ships’ crew was generally far easier than discipline of a regiment. That was because most seamen understood that obedience was crucial to survival in the far more dangerous environs of a warship at sea, as compared to a barracks or camp from which desertion was possible and common, albeit somewhat risky. Moreover, good naval officers understood that brutality against the crew corroded discipline and risked mutiny. Nevertheless, special punishments were needed at sea from time to time. Most were meted out and accepted as normal, even desirable, by officers and crews alike. The most common and unremarked form of discipline was an officer’s striking a rating, either with his fist or a cane or rattan carried for the purpose. This was almost never done unless the officer’s intent was to hurry a tardy 292

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man along in a task vital to the ship’s performance or even its survival, such as when wearing or tacking or otherwise maneuvering in chase or escape during battle, or in difficult waters. Most punishments for everyday offenses by crew were minor and traditional to life aboard ship, military or merchant. A difficult crewman might be punished with the dirty duty of keeping the ship’s heads clean—the Royal Navy called this making a man “lord of the head.” For more serious offenses, shore leave was denied, or a seaman might be “disrated” (demoted in pay and position). For more serious offenses, either against another crewman or the ship or its officers, the Royal Navy regularly flogged, including with the infamous “cat-ofnine-tails” (a whip with nine knotted fronds or “tails”). However, this was done only for the most serious crimes, partly from mercy and in part because flogging was time consuming and disruptive of routine, as it required assembly of the ship’s complement in witness. Shipboard discipline was becoming sharper on warships than in merchantmen during this period, but was still much less severe than it would be a century later. Being drunk, shirking work, fighting, neglecting duty, skulking below decks, or being mutinous—in the minor sense more common to that day than to the present, of striking an officer—might bring a man no more than a few hours clapped in irons, or at worst a quick dozen lashes. That standard and traditional number was often exceeded in practice, not out of cruelty but from mercy: captains understood that if formal charges were brought and proved in a shore court-martial, the number of lashes would rise dramatically, to 200, 300, 600 or more. Far better to ignore regulations and punish a man on the spot with 2 or 3 dozen lashes than go through the real bother of formal proceedings and later subject him to such severe and possibly fatal whipping. Royal Navy records show that only in cases of sodomy and thievery were such harsh punishments meted out onboard, and almost always with the approval of the crew. Sentences of several hundred lashings were usually carried out in installments, to avoid inflicting incidental death. Thievery, seen as a crime against all in an environment where no man could secure his belongings and many carried large amounts of cash as a result of infrequent pay periods, was always punished. Naval punishments included assignment to “go round the fleet” or “through the fleet,” which meant being put in a ship’s boat and flogged alongside each vessel present in a harbor or a fleet at sea, but usually receiving just 3 or 4 or 5 lashes beside each ship. On a single ship, a man might be made to “run the gauntlet” between two lines of his shipmates, each man striking him with a length of rope as he passed. Other traditional naval punishments included “ducking,” or dropping a man into the sea from an unnatural height. This was the traditional punishment for sailors who reported late to the ship after overstaying permitted shore leave. Sometimes this penalty could itself be ducked upon payment of a small fine. “Keel-hauling” was a rare and brutal punishment that entailed hauling a man by ropes beneath a ship from one side to the other. If done slowly this could lead to drowning. More often, it led to death or severe injury caused by scraping against the sharp encrustation of marine life that adhered to the hulls of all wooden ships before copper-bottoms were introduced. 293

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See also Articles of War; bounty; military confederations; military labor; Mutiny Act (1689); skulking way of war. military engineers. Until the mid-17th century, most military engineers were specialist mercenaries who sold their expertise, which varied greatly, to the highest bidder among cities or sovereigns. This began to change in the second half of the century, notably when Vauban trained a corps of nearly 300 professional French engineers. Along with the competing styles and influence of Coehoorn in Germany and the United Provinces and Dahlberg in the Baltic, Vauban especially set a standard for fortification and siege warfare that lasted from the 1670s to the 1790s, and was influential in some quarters into the 19th and 20th centuries. During a siege, the engineer corps was responsible for determining which front to attack; making gabions; and supervising digging lines, parallels, and saps. A chief engineer oversaw the overall operation. “Directors of approaches” supervised ordinary engineers, troops, and pioneers employed in digging trenches and laying saps. Engineers also placed petards against enemy works and oversaw hollowing-out and packing of chambers, galleries, and other parts of mines. Engineers were usually in conflict with the artillery over where to place the batteries and who had first call on laborers. military labor. The Ottoman Empire long depended on its askeri servitor classes and hired beldar in preference to conscription of ordinary civilians as military laborers. But this was highly unusual in Europe before the turn of the 17th century, when Dutch troops at last began to accept pay for spadework hitherto disdained by soldiers. Whereas in medieval and early modern European armies, most heavy military labor during a siege was done by women and children drawn from camp followers, during the 17th and the 18th centuries, new classes of labor developed. Troops themselves were now paid, with greater pay for the most dangerous tasks. Where available troops were insufficient or otherwise occupied, paid civilians still did the work (and were subjected to abbreviated military discipline). When this class, too, was exhausted, recourse was had to forced labor. In rural France and other areas where vestiges of feudalism lingered into the 18th century, the corvée system pulled sullen peasants into fortification work. Criminals were also routinely employed in military work, along with punishment details of caught deserters or malingerers. Occupation armies of all nations routinely imposed forced labor on enemy civilian populations. In the Americas, slaves sometimes performed military labor for European armies in addition to their enforced tasks in town or country. When regulars were employed in road work or other exceptional “fatigues,” they expected additional pay. In siege warfare, sappers and miners were well-paid specialists who received extra danger pay for making gabions and digging saps. Ordinary troops were also paid more for labor done while rotated into the trenches, usually for 24 hours at a time. With characteristic insight and humanity, Vauban recommended paying excellent wages on a piecework basis as the most efficient means of finishing a 294

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siege task in a timely fashion. All siege work was labor intensive: it took many thousands of pioneers and dozens of engineers to open the trenches. A skilled, three-man crew required about three hours to cut just one gabion. To build the timber platform for a single battery took upward of 80 men 48 hours, with more days of work to construct its parapet and mask the mouth of the battery to conceal the position before first firing. Gunners were therefore paid a premium for every artillery piece they moved into firing position in a battery, and more coin for each day a gun remained active. See also artillery; laPimci; Raya; war finance; women. military medicine. Among combat wounds of the period were the usual results of slashing and hacking weapons, crushed skulls, and broken bones. Puncture wounds from quarrels and arrows were rare outside distant colonial warfare: even overseas, the age of the musket had long since arrived and that of the bow was over. If a sword, lance, or musket-ball wound left behind bits of uniform or unburned powder or wadding smaller than the naked eye could detect, or deeper than fingers or steel probes could feel or remove, sepsis and death was highly probable from a sword or gunshot wound. Musket balls caused horrific wounds, shattering bones in limbs or splintering ribs as they tore into the chest to perforate organs and spray bone chips inside the cavity. Lead balls deformed on impact, ripping out still larger wounds, or they shattered into micro-shrapnel. Musket balls carried dirt, powder, and filthy bits of cloth from the injured man’s uniform into the wound to later cause sepsis, leading most often to a lingering and painful death. Men were frequently shot in the head or terribly burned about the face by powder flashes from a careless comrade in the rear ranks. Or they were blinded or stabbed by the bayonet of some other bungling comrade, or the enemy. Some were skewered by ramrods left in muzzles by men too frightened to remember to remove them after reloading, and hence fired along with the ball. A wound peculiar to artillerymen was the “split thumb.” This was incurred by placing one’s thumb over the vent during loading and ramming of big guns to stop premature ignition of wadding or the charge. If there was an untimely discharge nonetheless, explosive gasses sliced up the vent and through the gunner’s thumb like an acetylene torch. Gunners wore leather “thumbstalls” for protection from the vent, but these seldom sufficed. “Serving the vent” remained common practice into the 19th century. It did not stop until all armies converted to breech-loading guns, which did away with the vent. Gun crews were also subject to terrible injuries from burning powder forced under their skin when a cannon misfired, or a lighted match or fuse set off black powder stored too near the guns. Miners were similarly likely to suffer severe powder burns, as were infantrymen so unfortunate as to have a musket explode or backflash. Starting in the later 17th century mass casualties from various incendiaries and explosives, whether mines or bombs, became more frequent. Men whose limbs were torn off or vitals eviscerated by shrapnel from high explosives had no chance to be saved, and usually died in agony where they fell even if reached with aid. Bombardment or artillery duels during sieges often caused wounds from flying 295

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shards of masonry struck from the walls by solid shot. This method of injury was developed into an art form with the invention of ricochet fire. At sea, solid shot hitting the wooden wall of a ship at point-blank range and broadside angle produced huge splinters that exploded inward at high velocity from the inside, impaling and terribly wounding men so that they died quickly from loss of blood or slowly from sepsis. The States’ Navy of the Puritan Republic made significant innovations in treatment of sick and wounded seamen. A particular problem was ship-board typhus (“ship fever”), borne by ticks carried about in filthy clothing. During the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), the Navy commandeered on-shore hospital beds for its wounded and sick, though most were still lodged above pubs and in private lodgings This led to founding of the “Sick and Wounded Board.” Though it stopped operating in the later 1650s, a precedent was set for continuing care of ordinary seamen made ill or wounded in the nation’s service. The Restoration Navy and Samuel Pepys took this a step further, assigning one physician (a much higher professional status than surgeon) to each large squadron sent overseas. The medical man aboard a given ship usually was a warrant officer surgeon, who treated illness as well as wounds. On the largest warships, he was assisted by one or more surgeon’s mates. An infantryman cut about the head and shoulders by a cavalry saber or shot with a musket ball had more chance to survive in the first half of the 17th century than earlier because he was more likely to receive medical attention near where he incurred the wound: full field hospitals and forward aid stations appeared at nearly every siege. If blood loss was stanched in time and the wound properly cleaned, men might survive even in an era when the sources and causes of infection were not understood. By the end of the 16th century, ad hoc barbersurgeons were replaced in western European armies by regimental doctors serving on the Dutch model of one surgeon and two assistants per regiment. By the mid-17th century, adoption of a comparable system in England saw two surgeons assigned per regiment, in theory. High nobles and senior officers of course drew attention from the best doctors of the day, which may not be saying all that much. Regimental surgeons were less likely to come from the top of the profession. If wounded men did not die from blood loss before or during surgery, amputation was often essential to prevent sepsis spreading to more vital parts of the body. Often done in the absence of ether or dulling alcohol, more unfortunate patients simply bit down on a slab of wood or into the soft metal of a lead bullet or bar. There was finally insight into the problem of post-surgical infection, though the conclusions drawn were not the happiest: amputation remained the only way then known to prevent the deadly curse of gangrene. The pioneering and deeply humane reforms of 16th-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré at last found widespread acceptance in the 17th and 18th centuries, including in France where they had been strenuously resisted during Paré’s lifetime by the medical establishment and professors of the Sorbonne. Paré provided a model for slow and careful amputation and tying-off of severed arteries (vascular ligation). This supplanted older methods of chopping off the 296

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damaged limb with an axe, followed by cauterizing the arteries and stump. His work also set a new standard for treating gunshot wounds. Where burning of surrounding flesh was once the method for treating what were then called “poisoned” gunshot wounds, or those infected by infused black powder, Paré’s gentler and more correct method of treatment with ointments and bandaging became standard practice. He laid new emphasis on a regime of rest and nursing after surgery. Still, a germ theory of infection was not known or accepted before the late 19th century, which meant that battlefield surgeons did not wash their hands or instruments, and did not sterilize wounds or incisions. They thus almost certainly killed more men by transmitting lethal infections than they saved by even the most careful surgery. Surviving soldier amputees before 1650 were forced to turn to begging, as the vast majority were left without pensions. This began to change in England from 1643 in response to New Model Army agitation: Parliament began to disperse funds to support disabled veterans and provide a little for dead soldiers’ widows and orphans. Military hospitals were subsequently opened in Ireland at Kilmainham (1684) for troops of the Irish establishment and in England at Chelsea (1685–1686) to care for wounded and retired veterans of the British establishment. Spain and the United Provinces had long provided medical care for their sick and wounded soldiers in Flanders. The Spanish maintained a 330-bed military hospital in Mechelen and had a pensioners’ home for veterans at Hall. Before the mid-1670s, the best wounded French soldiers could hope for was to be warehoused in some monastery, where they were fed in return for petty labor. Many preferred to desert to Paris or some other city to beg. The problem grew so immense that giving alms to blind or amputee soldiers crowding into the cities was made a criminal act. In 1674 Louis IV and Louvois relented from this cruel indifference and commissioned the “Hôtel des Invalides.” It began accepting war wounded in 1674, during the Dutch War (1672–1678). Thereafter, it was a source of royal pride to Louis in his own “enlightened monarchy.” It served as the model for Christopher Wren’s main hospital building at Chelsea and for other state hospitals in Germany and elsewhere. Soldiers of the Janissary Corps had long been better off than their European counterparts in regard to medical treatment and post-wounded care. Their Ortas kept pensioner homes and cared for surviving wounded and even for families of the dead. Ottoman wounded, Janissary or not, were paid injury money (“merham beha”), which was staggered over five stages according to the severity of the wound. While on campaign, Janissaries had a specialized waterbearer corps, the Saka, who served as water troops in battle and as stretcher bearers and nurses afterwards. Surgeons were available to treat wounds in the traveling ordu bazar. Things began to improve in Europe by the turn of the 18th century, with small first-aid posts organized on site near the tail (entrance) of siege trenches. These had stretchers and bearers—often, the regiment’s musicians—stocks of slings and bandages, kegs of brandy for anesthetic, and unsprung carts to haul away the dead and most seriously wounded. If brandy was absent or already consumed, during emergency field surgery or even later, a wounded man would 297

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“bite the bullet,” or clamp his back teeth on a lead musket ball placed to prevent biting through his tongue from the agony of surgical probing or amputation. By 1700 the French maintained full field hospitals (“hôpital ambulant”) at siege sites, supervised by an intendant. The gravest injuries were treated there, greatly shortening the time between being wounded and receiving medical attention. Each French regiment had a field surgeon, and larger forces had effective field hospitals. Permanent military hospitals were established for sick or wounded troops by most states by the end of the 17th century or during the early 18th, many modeled on the Hôtel des Invalides. This was a major advance over the alms houses and beggary of wounded veterans of earlier wars. The British set up additional military hospitals to the ones at Chelsea and Kilmainham. The Dutch had an advanced field hospital system which William III copied for his English and foreign mercenary troops campaigning in Ireland in 1690. This comprised base hospitals and medical supply depots which supported field hospitals in the rear areas of the army. “Marching hospitals” actually moved with the field army. Each was overseen by a master physician and kept master-surgeons, surgeons, and surgical assistants “on staff.” Up to 40 male nurses worked in one or more of the facilities in the Dutch military hospital chain. There were additional workers who looked after washing bandages, linens, and wounds. The British and Dutch had such field hospitals supporting them at Nördlingen in 1704, and in all later sieges and battles in the north country. At Malplaquet the field medical system worked well enough that Allied field hospitals and extra supply wagons were provided to French prisoners and medics to transport their wounded across the lines back into French care. Despite all the suffering and death caused by battle wounds, the vast majority of soldiers in this era gave up the ghost to communicable disease, not enemy assault or fire. Siege camps or fortifications full of closely packed soldiers and animals were natural breeding grounds of epidemic diseases, including typhus (“camp fever”), dropsy, dysentery, cholera, deadly flu, and syphilis. This was even more true of life on board a warship, although the problem of scurvy was on its way to resolution. It has been calculated that early modern armies were forced to recruit perhaps double the numbers that a modern army would need to maintain a comparably sized force in the expectation of losing large numbers to disease. For this reason, even winning generals returned from campaign with badly diminished forces. Siege armies and garrisons were even harder to sustain. Fortresses under siege had medical staff, who oversaw surgery and nursing of the wounded. The better ones also kept a close watch on the still waters of a wet ditch and inspected wells and streams for quality. They also prevented butchers from selling putrid meat, a practice that grew more common as a siege was prolonged. See also prize money; rations; women. military music. Music and war are ancient companions, on the march, in camp, or on rig lines when hoisting sail on a wooden warship. The Janissary Corps marched to the beat of drums and fought with the sounds of “Mehterhane” bands playing during battle. This made the Ottomans the first to incorporate 298

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military bands into their permanent ranks, and the model that European armies imitated in the 18th century. In addition to large bands that played for the sultan and another for the Yeniçeri AOasi, each Janissary regiment (Orta) had its own small war drum and pipe band. The instruments included large and small kettle drums, with the largest played while slung from a camel. Many innovative Ottoman uses of instruments as a spur to morale and for battlefield communication were copied by European armies of the day. French drummers beating the pas de charge as infantry advanced at a quickstep became well known to many European armies. During combat in 18th-century Europe, regimental musicians set aside their instruments and served as stretcher bearers. Mughal emperors went on mulkgiri attended by their full court, including many artists, dancers, and musicians. Sailors worked and played to the near-constant accompaniment of song, whistle, or flute. See also military medicine. military ranks. See ranks (at sea); ranks (on land). military revolution. See artillery fortress; Banner system; bastion; battle; bayonet; drill; flintlock firearms; fortification; French Army; logistics; Louvois; magazines; military medicine; miquelets; parallels; Peter I; Prussian Army; Russian Army; siege warfare; standing army; Vauban. military units. See battalion; brigade; company; regiment; troop. militia. See Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Beachy Head, Battle of (February 21/March 2, 1690); Brandenburg; Brazil; British Army; Deerfield raid (February 19, 1704); Dutch Army; Dutch War (1672–1678); French Army; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Hudson’s Bay Company; Huguenots; Indian Wars; Ireland; Jacobites; Janissary Corps; Japan; Karlstadt border; King Philip’s War (1675–1676); King William’s War (1689–1697); Louvois; milice gardes-côtes; miquelets; New England; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); PiyadeOan militia; Polish Army; Prussian Army; Russian Army; siege warfare; skulking way of war; Spain; standing army; troupes de la marine; United Provinces; war finance. militum perpetuum. See standing army. mines/mining. An alternative to cannelure cutting to open a breach in masonryor brick-faced works in mines. Some mines began quite far out on the glacis. They began vertically, as civilians skilled in iron or coal mining dropped a deep shaft before cutting horizontally toward the fortress. The process imitated normal mineral mining, with timber-framed tunnels and air vents or clever use of bellows and hose. Mines laid at the end of this tunnel in a large hollowed-out gallery were truly massive, comparable to the mine used before the Battle of the Crater in the American Civil War or even some during World War I. Several thousand pounds of gunpowder in barrels or a mine-box discharged at once in a series of tight galleries blew a spectacular breach in the revetment, and threw broken men and masonry high in the air. 299

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“Attaching the miner” was a simpler process. It took place at the ditch after heavy cannon knocked a notch in the masonry façade of the revetment from point-blank range. A team of miners or engineers rushed to the gap and worked to widen it into a small gallery. Once past the masonry, miners dug rameaux laterally through the revetment and any counterforts, staving off collapse of tunnels and sub-galleries with strong timbers. At about 20–30 feet inside the revetment, large mines were laid inside chambers (small ones within écoutes). Once the fuse inside the auget (wooden pipe) or saucisson (canvas hose) was lighted, the miners scrambled to exit. With luck they made it out, and with skill the revetment was breached. Defenders worked against this result by listening and watching for signs of mining, then employing countermines and camouflets. Or they might roll grenades into the ditch or down murder holes cut in the floor of a superior gallery, or set off a fougasse beneath a tunnel to kill miners. Defenders could also suffocate or burn miners alive inside their gallery with fires of pitch-covered fascines on the surface or dropped into the mouth, or they could scald them with boiling oils or water. Sometimes miners and counterminers met, and face-to-face combat ensued with knives, grenades, fists, and teeth. See also globe of compression; sap; siege warfare. miquelet. This older lock mechanism was most commonly used in Spain and Italy after the flintlock was adopted nearly everywhere else; in the latter case, it remained in use for several additional decades. miquelets. From the peculiar lock mechanism, the miquelet, used by Spanish infantry (or Italian troops in Spanish service), this term became generally applied to Spanish troops, but was especially used about irregular bands of local militia fighting the French along the Pyrenees in various wars. Some miquelets also fought for the French. Their style of fighting encouraged atrocities by both sides. misl. A Sikh fighting unit formed of volunteers, who organized around a charismatic general or political leader. Multiple misl leaders would band their forces together in a working military alliance, and sometimes also a political confederacy, to fight the Mughals or other enemies of Sikh independence. Mohawk War (1665–1668). See Indian Wars. Mohács, Battle of (August 12, 1687). “Battle of Berg Harsen,” “Battle of Nagyharsány.” Fought near the site of a major Ottoman victory over Hungarian forces in 1526, this was a key battle of the Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). An Imperial army led by Charles V of Lorraine defeated an Ottoman army that included Ortas of the Janissary Corps as well as Mamluks and various other Ottoman troops. Prince Eugene of Savoy commanded a cavalry brigade during the fight at Mohács. The Habsburg victory further weakened the Ottoman position in Hungary, a process that began with the disaster of the siege of Vienna (July 14–September 12, 1683). Casualty figures are disputed but may have 300

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reached as many as 15,000 on the Ottoman side. See also Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Mongols. See Banner system; China; Zunghar Mongols. Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670). English general and admiral. He was an experienced soldier, fighting in Flanders and Germany from 1629–1638 during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He fought next and extensively during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). A pragmatist isolated among confessional fanatics, he started the war on the Royalist side but switched to fight for Parliament after being taken prisoner in 1644 and spending the next two years in the Tower of London. He fought in Ireland for Parliament from 1646–1649 and saw action in Scotland at Dunbar (September 3, 1650). During the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654) he was appointed General at Sea and saw his first ever sea fight at Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653). After that confused battle and greatly wasted opportunity, he helped devise new naval tactics that eventually evolved into the idea of line of battle formation and the fighting instructions. He used the new tactics to sound effect at Texel (July 31/August 10, 1653), where he passed his line through the disordered Dutch fleet four times. Monk fought on land again in the final campaign of the civil wars in Scotland in late 1653. He played a key role in the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, crossing the Tweed with his army in January 1660 to reach London in early February after brushing aside resistance. He parked the army outside London and thereafter was the singular influence over political events. He greeted Charles at Dover at the head of an escort on May 25. His regiment was subsequently incorporated into the Restoration Army as the Coldstream Guards. He fought at sea again at The Downs or “Four Days’ Battle” (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). A month later he brushed aside de Ruyter at North Foreland, or the St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666). He and Admiral Holmes then proceeded to destroy fully 160 Dutch merchantmen huddling at anchor behind a small islet along the Holland coast. That fit his view of a match between stakes and means in the Dutch wars, about which he once said: “The Dutch have too much trade, and the English are resolved to take it from them.” See also British Army; New Model Army. Monmouth, Duke of (1649–1685). Né James Scott. Bastard son of Charles II and nephew of James II, and hence pretender to the throne during the prolonged succession crisis in England and Scotland that ended only with the dramatic events of the Glorious Revolution. Monmouth was named captain of the royal bodyguard in 1668. He fought in the Netherlands during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), in command of a regiment. In 1678 he was elevated to captain-general of the Army, and fought and put down the Scottish Covenanters’ rebellion at Bothwell Bridge in 1679. Monmouth shared his uncle’s fierce and determined Catholicism but nevertheless joined the cabal opposed to his succession. This opposition culminated in the so-called Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. In the only real fight of this ill-organized 301

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rebellion, Monmouth was soundly defeated at Sedgemoor (July 5–6/15–16, 1685) by a smaller but far more professional force led by Marlborough. After the battle, Monmouth was found hiding in a ditch. He was removed to London and executed as a traitor, dying only after several inept axe strokes by his uncle’s royal executioner failed to completely sever his head from his body. See also British Army. Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685). See Glorious Revolution; Marlborough; Monmouth, Duke of. Mons, siege of (March 15–April 8, 1691). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Montecuccoli, Raimondo (1609–1680). Habsburg field marshal. An Italian, he entered Austrian and Imperial service in 1625. He saw extensive action during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), including at the Battles of Lutzen (1634), First Nördlingen (1634), and Wittstock (1636). He was captured by the Swedes at Wittstock and held for 30 months before being ransomed back to the emperor. He used the time to study all available literature on the “art of war,” ancient and contemporary. After his release he fought in Silesia and Lombardy. He fought against the Swedes in the last several years of the German war, notably at Zusmarshausen (1648). He fought Sweden again during the Second Northern War (1655–1660), alongside the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg, Friedrich-Wilhelm. Montecuccoli led Austrian armies against the Ottomans in the 1660s. He won at St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664), though more by Ottoman misfortune than any special skill on his part. Regardless, the victory brought him appointment as head of the Hofkriegsrat. He fought well against the French during the Dutch War (1672–1678). Feeling his age, he retired to write extensively on the subject of war and gained much influence thereby, deserved or not. Like many minds of the age, Montecuccoli sought perfect order even in the sheer chaos of combat, believing that there were immutable “laws of war” that might be discovered and codified. This approach to war was much approved by the salon set and in studies of the good professors of the Sorbonne and The Hague, but it bore no relation to actual warfare then or since. For instance, Montecuccoli proposed a law of war that established a perfectly-sized Imperial army of 28,000 foot and 22,000 horse to face any opposing Ottoman force, of whatever size or makeup. He was more right in famously declaring that the precondition of successful war making was having enough money. As for the problem of finding soldiers to feed into the Imperial war machine he was busy crafting in theory, Montecuccoli wrote that all “orphans, bastards, beggars, and paupers” cared for by charitable orders or in hospices should be swept into the Army. This was far from the later concept of the “nation in arms” or the ancient one of a natural nobility of warriors. Montecuccoli came out of retirement to fence with Turenne in a prolonged war of maneuver in Germany during the campaign of 1673. He joined the future William III to besiege Bonn that November. Montecuccoli lost a campaign of maneuver to Turenne during the summer of 1675. By July he was short 302

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on food and fodder, and in full retreat. Turenne tried to force battle at Sasbach on July 27, but before the fight got underway, he was killed by an Imperial cannonball. Montecuccoli retired for the final time a few months later, the same year as the Great Condé. Widely regarded and hailed by earlier historians as a brilliantly skillful practitioner of the art of 17th-century positional warfare, his reputation may exceed what is deserved. It has been downgraded in more recent studies of his campaigns and especially of his writings on war. Morea. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). Morgan, Henry (1635–1688). See buccaneers. Morocco. Under Mawlai Ismail (r. 1672–1727), Moroccan power in this period became increasingly based on black military slaves as Ismail built a slave army, the “Abid,” numbering up to 150,000 troops. Upon his death, as so often in medieval and other pre-modern states, the system fell apart without the charismatic leader who had assembled it. The Moroccan economy declined badly, and recourse was taken to the old trade: piracy. Morosini, Francisco (1618–1694). See Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669); Candia, siege of (1666–1669). mortar. A stubby, short-range artillery piece with thin barrel walls first introduced in the 1540s. The mortar was principally a siege and area weapon, without much accuracy. It consumed smaller amounts of powder to launch bombs than a cannon firing solid shot, but used vastly more powder to make the bomb. It made up for this profligacy by the terror bombs produced among civilians and garrisons, and their explosive and incendiary effects on a town and inner works. Mortars were first used as a terror weapon by the Spanish in 1588 at Wachtendonck. They were revived for their terror effect by the French during the Dutch War (1672–1678). From the 1680s, mortars became more popular in sieges, notably those carried out by Louvois for Louis XIV, starting at Mons (1683) and Geneva (1684). They were even more popular for bombardment purposes. Vauban disliked them on practical, technical, and moral grounds but he could not restrain their use by Louvois or the king. However, moral reasoning did not stop Vauban from introducing the anti-personnel perrier mortar to slaughter enemy defenders. Mortars deployed on bomb ketches were also used by the French, Dutch, and British for sea bombardment of shore positions or coastal towns. A mortar was designed to lob heavy solid shot or powder-filled explosive shells or bombs at high angles (45 degrees was standard) on a parabolic trajectory, hurling explosive fire over the parapets of fortified positions. Mortars varied in bore size, with 13–18 inches viewed as very large, even extreme, calibers. Larger mortars were used to penetrate fortified rooves of arsenals and powder magazines. A popular caliber was the three-inch “Coehoorn mortar.” There were many calibers in between that range. Mortars were braced against 303

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the ground or held upright to fire by a squat, wheelless carriage which often shook apart and had to be replaced after repeated firings. Batteries of mortars were sited in large pits, or “cauldrons,” without embrasures. Lacking sight lines to targets, mortar crews marked the crest of their protective earthwork with pegs used to trace the traverse of their shots. French and most other continental mortar crews packed sod or wadding around a bomb placed fuse-up inside the mortar barrel. The chief gunner then lit the wooden fuse of the bomb before touching off the powder in the vent. This method was called “double fire.” British gunners preferred to place the bomb directly on the main powder charge, without wadding or earth sealing the windage. In this “single fire” method, the master gunner simply touched fire to the vent; ignition of the main charge also ignited the fuse of the bomb. This used more powder per bomb due to some loss of propellant force, but was much safer for gun crews. See also carcass; grenade. mosquet a chevalet. See wall-piece. Ms´cislaw massacre (1654). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Mughal Empire. The Islamic empire of the Mughals (Timurids) was established by conquest in 1526. The founder was Babur (1483–1530) of Kabul, a direct descendant of two earlier Central Asian scourges of northern India, Tamerlane and Ghengis Khan. At Panipat (April 21, 1526), Babur and his Afghan army inflicted a decisive defeat on the existing Muslim power of the north Indian plains, the Delhi Sultanate, which had been in place for over 300 years (1200–1526). Delhi’s army included nearly 1,000 war elephants. Its 40,000 infantry and additional horse cavalry far outnumbered Babur’s 15,000 Afghans, Mongols, and Turks. But the Sultanate’s army was armed in the manner traditional to the subcontinent: swords, javelins, and bows. Babur’s troops also carried those weapons, but they had cannons and muskets as well. When the fight was over some 20,000 Delhi troops were dead, carpeting with corpses the path to power of a rising new empire in north India. After the battle, the sultan’s elephant drivers switched sides and swore allegiance to Babur. Within the week, he took Delhi and established the Mughal Empire. He defeated seven Rajput armies at Khanwa in northern India on March 16–17, 1527. He won still more victories and expanded further in the years left to him. Consolidation of this new “gunpowder empire,” which stretched from Delhi to Kabul and parts of Punjab, took several more decades. As often happens upon the death of a charismatic military leader and founder of empire, once Babur died in 1530, the Mughals divided over his succession. Sher Khan (or Sher Shah, c. 1486–1545) briefly established a rival empire based in Bengal, where he proclaimed himself Mughal emperor from 1540–1545. Sher Khan had been a leading general in Babur’s army during the 1526 invasion of north India that established the Mughal Empire. But he split from with Babur’s son and immediate successor, Humayun, to set up his rival state in Bengal. Civil war followed, with Sher Khan defeating Humayun in 1539 304

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and again in 1540, after which he gained control of the territory of the original Mughal empire, adding to it his holdings in Bengal. He was succeeded as Mughal emperor by Humayun’s son, Akbar (1542–1605). For a second time in 30 years, a key fight controlling the destiny of India took place at Panipat (November 5, 1556). There, troops loyal to the teenage grandson of Babur, the boy-emperor Akbar, defeated a rival army on the fields of Panipat north of Delhi. Once more, a vastly numerically superior (100,000) but traditionally armed and fought Indian army had been bested by a far smaller (20,000) Mughal force that triumphed because it had superior discipline as well as more and better gunpowder weapons. Akbar’s army used modern artillery obtained from the Portuguese to support mobile Mughal cavalry, and smashed the elephant and infantry corps of the forces trained and previously led by Sher Khan. After the battle, Akbar shrewdly incorporated many prisoners into the Mughal army, thus consolidating Mughal rule in north India. After Second Panipat, the Mughals ruled much of India for 200 years, and at least nominally continued to reign until the final British takeover in 1857. Akbar encouraged broad tolerance of Hindus, and thus ruled most effectively a state of perhaps 100 million souls that was fabulously and famously wealthy and powerful. While tolerant of other religions, by standards of the day, the Mughal Empire was harsh, inequitable, and cruel in its treatment of many individuals. One Mughal ruler, Shah Jahan (1592–1666), contracted for the Peacock Throne and built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal (d. 1631), taking 20 years and using 20,000 laborers to satisfy this pharaonic indulgence of absolute power and acutely exploited wealth. The main threat to Mughal power remained Iran (Persia), and intermittent warfare continued on the northwest frontier. Hindus of the Deccan staged repeated revolts against the Mughals, sometimes provoked to war by famine but drawing also on Hindu resistance to Muslim overlordship and a long tradition of petite guerre. The mature Mughal military system therefore laid great emphasis on fixed fortresses guarding strategic locations, manned by garrisons of loyal infantry. The field army consisted mostly of cavalry, with contingents of war elephants borrowed from the pre-Muslim Indian military tradition, along with mostly poor and unreliable supporting infantry. Akbar expanded the infantry component of the Army and added an artillery corps. He was a restless warrior king, but not himself a notable general. While he oversaw an unstable but still-expanding realm, it was co-opted Rajput generals and Mughal commanders who campaigned in his name. They conquered Gujarat in 1572 and Bengal in 1576. In 1581 they took Kabul, reversing an ageold pattern of invasion of India from Afghanistan. In 1592 Akbar conquered Orissa, and three years later added Baluchistan to the Empire. While he modernized the regime and Army, he never achieved internal stability. Worse, he did not escape the lure of further expansion that made the Mughal Empire still more unwieldy and prone to chronic rebellion. In his old age, even his son Salim rebelled (1601). In sum, for all their military and even social achievement, the first Mughal emperors suffered from a succession problem common to empires rooted in peripatetic Central Asian warrior and clan culture, but 305

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governed by latter-day absolutist and stationary dynasties. In time, this flaw would prove fatal. Akbar died in 1605, after 47 years on the Mughal throne. His son Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), who may have poisoned his father to speed the succession, continued the Mughal policy of toleration for Hindus and thus retained numerous Rajput vassals. He was a sound imperial administrator. His reign was mainly quiet and successful. Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), turned to building even as he also sought further conquests as an expression of Mughal preeminence. Among the most famous structures built during his reign were the Taj Mahal and Great Mosque (in Delhi). Expense on the twin vanities of architecture and war ruined the finances of even so wealthy a state as the Mughal Empire by the time Shah Jahan died in 1658. In 1646 Shah Jahan sent out an expensive, two-year expedition that failed to capture Samarkand, the onetime capital of Tamerlane and thus his own dynasty’s ancestral capital in Central Asia. A Mughal civil war broke out from 1657–1659. The cause was the usual problem: a power struggle at the top over the succession, brought on because Shah Jahan was taken mortally ill. Shah Jahan surrendered in 1658 and was imprisoned, and the last opposition crushed the next year. The winner, over his brother Shuja, was Aurangzeb (1618–1707). He was far and away the bloodiest and most zealous of all Mughal emperors. With Aurangzeb much changed. Instead of broad and pragmatic religious toleration of the majority Hindus, the Mughal state began to enforce narrow laws, insisting on Islamic domination and intolerance. Legal, economic, political, and social supremacy of Muslims became the order of the day during his long reign. He ordered the Mughal bureaucracy to enforce puritanical social and legal codes (“sharia”), blocked construction of any Hindu or Sikh temples, restored religious taxes on non-Muslim pilgrims, reintroduced the hated “jizya” poll tax on all non-Muslims (“dhimmîs”), and squeezed revenues out of a stagnant agrarian economy he did nothing to manage or improve. Aurangzeb’s imposition of tight persecution of Sikhs and Marathas over several decades forced him to campaign for many years to repress consequent, even inevitable, rebellions this policy provoked. Multiple revolts were the price paid for his miserable misrule. Rebellion first broke out in Punjab, where Sikhism took a newly martial form during this period. In Maharashtra, led by Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680), Hindus rebelled in the 1660s–1670s. They adopted highly effective guerrilla tactics, fortifying the Deccan, occasionally raiding Mughal cities, and in 1674 proclaiming the Maratha state. While Aurangzeb was tied down by war in Afghanistan, the Rajputs rose against his rule. Finally, his son rebelled against him in 1680. However, Aurangzeb reasserted Mughal power over the next quarter century. His armies methodically crushed resistance in Punjab, overran Maharashtra and the Deccan (though he never completely overcame Maratha resistance), and chased his son to exile in Iran. The cost in lives and treasure of his imperious rule and imperial overreach was enormous. A swollen, peripatetic capital moved with the emperor on campaign, year after year stripping India of its surplus grain to feed war elephants, marching armies, and tens of thousands of camp 306

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followers. As Aurangzeb approached his enfeebled nineties, famine and plague added to the misery index of his endless wars. Aurangzeb’s death was followed by yet another Mughal succession struggle which finally and permanently broke the back of Mughal power. The old tyrant left behind an empire tottering on the edge of disaster. It was internally divided north and south, its soldiers and its population were war weary, and its state ideology and false zealotry (always more Aurangzeb’s than the Empire’s) was slowly fading as underlings made treacherous alliances with Marathas and other non-Muslims, or with minor Muslim leaders and territorial rivals. The Empire additionally suffered from the usual suspects of unstable autocracies and military regimes: succession crises, rebellion, palace plots, and attempted coups d’état. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, a crisis over the succession led to four interrelated civil wars that lasted until 1720. That internal chaos was accompanied by a Sikh rebellion in Punjab which led to proclamation of an independent Sikh state there in 1710. Meanwhile, a discrete civil war broke out among the Marathas. From that point forward, the Mughal Empire faced increasing resistance by Rajput lords to restoration of Mughal authority in those territories where it had ceased to be effective. Into this volatile mix there poured various European interests, including military forces, as the 18th century got underway. The first Europeans (Portuguese) had arrived along the coast of south India just before the Mughals consolidated their empire in the north. In retrospect, that arrival initiated an era of slow but progressive commercial migration and penetration of the interior, with military alliances following in the wake of trade. That process would eventually lead to British domination of Mughal India. The main instruments of European penetration, which accelerated greatly after 1700, were the monopoly trading companies of France, England, and the United Provinces: the Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO), the East India Company (EIC), and the Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC). See also fitna; mansabdari; mulkgiri; silladars. Suggested Reading: John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (1995; 2001); J. L. Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500–1700 (2002).

Mulhouse, Battle of (December 29, 1674). See Dutch War (1672–1678). mulkgiri. A military expedition in India. They usually began in October, after the monsoon had passed and the fall harvest was collected, and ended in March or April before the onset of high heat. Mughal emperors conducted mulkgiri that were truly enormous affairs in which the entire court—including tens of thousands of servants, cooks, dancers, musicians, mistresses, and other, along with many thousands of animals—migrated slowly to war along with the army and all its usual accouterments. multiple flank. See flank (in fortification). munitionnaires. French private military contractors supplying armies in the field with food stuffs and sundry goods. Their role was to provide goods that

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intendants could not, though under inspection and at prices fixed by an intendant or his purchasing assistants, the commissaires. The main task responsibility of munitionnaires was to provide grain, ovens, and bakers to bake bread for French troops on the march. They also were contracted to supply wagons, horses, and teamsters. Contracts could be enormous, encompassing whole convoys of wagons, granaries, ovens and bakers. See also fournisseurs. Münster. During the 1650s, the United Provinces watched events in Münster with concern as the prince-bishop, Christoph Bernhard, struggled to impose an absolutist Catholicism. He was opposed, with force, by city burghers assisted by the States’ party of Holland. The United Provinces feared erection of an absolutist regime in Münster that might ally with England, and Dutch Calvinists feared any Catholic regime so near their border. In 1657 Jan de Witt came close to committing Dutch troops to intervention in Münster. In 1661 the princebishop besieged and took the city, overcoming militia and the burghers. The militantly Catholic Bernhard thereafter built up his Army. He became so famous for his siege train of 60 howitzers that he was widely called “Bombing Bernhard.” During 1665–1666, he invaded and occupied a strip of eastern Dutch territory. He was eventually forced out by French intervention and arms. The felt sense of Louis XIV that the United Provinces were insufficiently grateful for this friendly action to secure their territory fed into outbreak of the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Bernhard also allied with France at the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678). See also fighting tariff. musketoon. A short-barreled, large-bore naval musket used in close-fights and boarding actions at sea. Some were double-barreled, and most were loaded with multiple small shot. Crewmen or pirates might care a brace of musketoons and musketoon pistols into a fight. See also blunderbuss. muskets. See flintlock firearms; matchlock; military medicine; musketoon; musket shot. musket shot. A term used in the Royal Navy and the French Navy to indicate firing of broadside guns at a range also assayed by onboard marines, or from about 50 to 150 yards, with maximum effective range of 80 yards. See also close range; pistol shot. muster. Assembly and counting of sailors or soldiers in preparation for campaigning and war. mutiny. See Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); East India Company; military discipline; New Model Army. Mutiny Act (1689). An annual act specifying military law for the British Army. It corrected the basic legal flaw of the Articles of War issued in 1663 by recognizing a basis in law for punishment of mutiny and desertion though courts-martial. It 308

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lapsed from 1698–1701 but was still enforced. Although it did not sanction a standing army anywhere in Great Britain, it proved useful to Parliament in regulating military abuses in the Army. Arguably, this demonstrated yet again a certain British genius for flexible and pragmatic constitutionalism, rather than codified and rigid adherence to the letter of a law. In the same spirit, military regulations were enforced in Ireland although a separate Irish Mutiny Act for the Irish establishment was not passed until 1780.

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N Namur, siege of (May 25–June 30, 1692). Attended personally by Louis XIV and his court, this was one of the largest sieges of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). It witnessed a contest between the two greatest practitioners of positional warfare of the age: Vauban in the attack and Coehoorn (who was wounded) in defense of Namur, whose fortifications he had designed. On May 25 lead elements of an army of 60,000 French, with a large siege train of 151 cannon and mortars, rapidly invested a garrison of 6,000 Dutch and Allied troops (Spanish, English, and Germans). The French quickly occupied selected heights above the town, which was sited on the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse. Namur’s defenses presented a heavy fortification system resting against the merging rivers and along other adjoining heights. Another French army of 60,000, led by maréchal Luxembourg, waited nearby as an army of observation, facing an Allied force of potential relief led by William III. Despite much maneuvering by these armies, no battle ensued. Namur town fell to Vauban on June 5, but the citadel located to the west and its supporting fortifications continued to resist as the French saps approached assault distance, reaching that point on June 22. A gentlemen’s agreement had spared Allied shelling of Namur while the final saps were made, in return for a pledge that no French attack would be made against the citadel from the environs of the town. The agreement did not prevent vicious and bloody fighting over outlying redoubts and other detached works. An assault was made on Ft. William on the night of June 22, during which Coehoorn was wounded by a mortar round. He and his men gave up the next day. It took another week for Vauban to cross the counterscarp and compel surrender of the rest of the garrison. All told, 7,000 French and 4,000 Dutch and Allied soldiers became casualties. The fall of Namur gave the French temporary control of the key river defensive barrier from Namur to Maastricht. The siege is widely regarded as one of Vauban’s masterful achievements, if that term may be used about such a charnel house.

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Namur, siege of (July 2–September 1, 1695). A Grand Alliance army of 80,000 under William III invested Namur, occupied by the French since 1692. This focused and climaxed an otherwise quiet summer campaign in Flanders over the summer of 1695. The French garrison had been reinforced and was unusually large at over 13,000 men. Maréchal Boufflers was in overall command. On the other side, Coehoorn assisted William but was not initially in charge of this siege. The attack was made by a motley crew of Allied troops who brought with them, overland and by barge, a large siege train of 170 cannons and mortars. The Allies faced works at Namur that Coehoorn had designed but which had been significantly altered by Vauban after the town fell in 1692. The great French military architect had added 19 lunettes and other outworks, so that Namur was far more formidable than before. Coehoorn and the Allied commanders proceeded with vigor. The French defense was equally strenuous. As in 1693, the town capitulated quickly, while the detached works and citadel (donjon) held out. The lunettes in front of the town exacted a toll of many lives when stormed at first light on July 18. It took another eight days to cross the last of the lunettes. On July 26 William led a grenadier assault on the outer covered way. The inner covered way of the enceinte did not fall until August 2, which induced the French to pull back to the citadel. Finally given command, Coehoorn battered five breaches in the citadel. But lack of funds to pay his sappers slowed the advance of his approach trenches. On August 30, with some trenches far short of the desired point of assault, Coehoorn nevertheless ordered a general assault. With flags flying, music playing, and generals watching, Dutch and English troops died in bushels to kill Frenchmen and secure shallow lodgements on the covered way of the citadel. That night the surviving French agreed to submit. They marched out the next day. About 8,000 of the garrison were casualties, compared to almost 20,000 Allied troops. That carnage reflected unusually aggressive tactics employed by Coehoorn and William, and firm defiance and defense by the French. Although the French lost the fortress and town, by tying down the main Allied army while leaving most French regiments in garrisons or in lines, Namur’s prolonged defense suited Louis XIV’s needs in a year of fiscal crisis and famine. Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700). The major battle on the Russian front during the opening phase of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Having just knocked Denmark out of the war with a stunning amphibious operation into Zealand, the 18-year-old Swedish king, Karl XII, deployed his small but professional army of 9,000 men to face a massive but cumbersome Russian Army of 35,000-40,000, initially led in person by 28-year-old Tsar Peter I. The Russians had not yet fully benefited from military reforms introduced by Peter. There were available only remnants of the strel’sty regiments that Peter had disbanded and repressed with great brutality. His new regiments were as yet poorly drilled and badly led, most having been established in 1699 or later. The Russians also had inefficient and antiquated artillery at Narva, and were low on supplies of all kinds after conducting a month-long siege of the town. 312

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Karl landed at Pernau in late October and advanced toward Narva, easily dispatching small Russian blocking units along his path. As Karl approached, Peter abandoned his army and fled. Close to 30,000 Russians were left behind to line trenches that faced the oncoming Swedes in overly stretched lines of contravallation. With characteristic aggression and bravado, Karl determined to attack almost as soon as he arrived, despite the fact his army was outnumbered three or four to one. He knew his men were more competent and professional than their more numerous opponents. On November 19/30, Karl moved his battalions and squadrons forward under cover of an early snowstorm. About 5,000 Russian servitor cavalry panicked and galloped away at first sight of the approaching Swedes. Many fled right into a nearby river and drowned. The attacking Swedish infantry penetrated the lines in two places, breaking the Russian position into three uncoordinated and panicky divisions. Swedish cavalry rode through the gaps, breaking into rear areas and starting a hacking pursuit that turned the breakthrough into an utter rout. Russian battalions disintegrated as ill-motivated conscripts, and even better-trained Guards regiments, fled the trenches on foot, running after servitor nobles fleeing ahead on horseback. But there was almost no place to run: Russian siege lines now worked against flight, hemming men in them into a tight ring around Narva, which the attacking Swedes closing and sealed. When it was over, about 8,000–10,000 Russians lay dead and wounded upon the snow, and 145 Russian cannon were in Swedish hands. Another 20,000 bewildered and frightened souls were captured. Most were released after surrendering weapons which, it was learned, some Russians did not know how to fire. Swedish dead, wounded, and missing amounted to no more than 600 men. Fearing a continued Swedish advance to Moscow, Peter desperately sought an end to the war he had begun. Instead of advancing on Moscow, Karl chose to go into winter quarters. In the spring, perhaps feeling the oats of his annihilating victory at Narva and thinking Peter well defeated, Karl turned away from the east. Instead, he struck south into Germany and Poland. That was a strategic mistake since it left Peter to regroup, reform, and properly arm and train the new regiments of the Russian Army. For internal propaganda purposes and to spur reform, the tsar exaggerated how poorly Russians had fought at Narva. Even so, the defeat was so complete it must have prompted massive military change without this deceit. And so it did. The full effects of the changes would be felt at Poltava in 1709. national debt. See war finance. natural frontiers. Most recently, a term of art used by historian Albert Sorel to describe how Louis XIV was driven to aggression by the notion that the borders of his realm should be set according to France’s “natural frontiers,” as determined by distinct physical features such as major rivers, mountain ranges, and water basins. Later research modified Sorel’s view, suggesting that the king’s policy was more one of a search for defensible zones (frontières) along his borders. The term thus should be read as mainly implying a desire for “defensible 313

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frontiers” that took into account the effect of strongpoints on key river crossings such as those on the Rhine at Philippsburg and Strasbourg, or Casale on the Po, or the natural barriers of other river or mountain passes—rivers of themselves seldom provided an effective barrier to passage of armies, but their course did channel movement and set potential choke points. Yet, historians’ quarrels over definitions is less important than the effect of Louis’ policy, which was to seek expansion of military and political control over borderland regions in Flanders to the north, the Alps and Pyrenees in the south, and along the Rhine in the east. Extending military control to meet this concept of secure frontiers involved invading and occupying key territories and strongpoints in ways that were fiercely resisted by France’s neighbors, as just as obviously seen as unwanted and unnatural acts. The king’s early successes in securing improved frontier defenses, such as he achieved in the Dutch War (1672–1678) and the Treaty of Nijmegen (September 17, 1678), were largely reversed by the end of his long reign as he lost ground in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). This shift in fortune was implicitly accepted in French construction of the Ne Plus Ultra lines from 1711, and legally in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. That was the first international treaty to use the phrase “natural frontier,” in reference to the French border with Savoy. See also Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697); War of the Reunions (1683–1684). naval tactics. Tactics for fleets of warships evolved markedly during this period, from a starting point of virtual anarchy once battlefleets engaged. Every fleet or squadron-on-squadron action began with hours or days spent in seeking to gain the weather gauge, and thereafter to keeping it or disputing it. Fleets practiced, and some admirals theorized about, various evolutions. Theory did not get too far ahead of practice, however, because naval warfare was nearly constant even if decisive fleet actions were rarer. In addition to difficulties of managing a fleet under variable conditions of wind and water, the nature of broadside artillery meant that a ship-of-the-line could not bring its guns to bear by sailing directly at an enemy. This forced sailing and fighting tactics to devise complex ways in which to bring rows of cannon of each ship, and the fleet as a whole, to bear on the enemy’s vessels, while tacking and wearing and calculating how an enemy might do the same. Once the line of battle became standard formation for war fleets from the start of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), the usual solution for the problem of approach was to tack along an oblique angle to make a fighting approach at one end of the enemy line or the other. The fleets or divisions would then meet either end-on or tack into parallel columns. By the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), the English, Dutch, and French navies all were developing line ahead preferences. By the 1690s, they were all committed to a basic tactical form of line ahead, in which all ships hauled close (“au plus près du vent”). See also double on; fighting instructions; fireships; guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; leeward and windward gauges; line abreast; line ahead and astern; line astern; pell-mell; signaling. naval warfare. See naval tactics; war at sea. 314

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navies. See Apraxin, Fedor; Barbary corsairs; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; convoy; directieschepen; Dutch Navy; French Navy; galleys; guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; Peter I; pirates; privateers; Royal Navy; Spanish Navy; Swedish Navy. Navigation Act (1651). Passed by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Parliament, this Act aimed at breaking a Dutch monopoly on the Baltic and North Sea carriage trades, protecting English trade, raising customs revenues for the Puritan regime, and not least of all, at punishing the Dutch for refusing to join in a new crusade against Catholic powers in Europe. The Act (originally, “Ordinance”) required all ships carrying goods between English ports to sail under an English flag, with foreign imports also confined to English ships or ships of their home country. This made overseas English colonies subject to centralized Parliamentary control and proclaimed a mercantilist principle forbidding foreign ships from carting goods between English ports. Such ports were newly defined as including all those of England’s overseas colonies, even though England as yet lacked the numbers of merchantmen necessary to effect such a policy. The Navigation Act’s immediate object was mundane: to stop the Dutch from carrying fish and other colonial products to England, and to compel Italian merchants to ship their raw silk on English rather than Dutch ships. Other products targeted by the Act were Turkish weaves, Spanish wool, colonial wines, and Neapolitan olive oil. All carriage of goods to England from southern Europe, in short, was prohibited to the Dutch. For all these reasons, the 1651 Act was an important irritant contributing to outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Longer term and more fundamentally, the Navigation Act liberated internal trade within a previously closed English system, disallowing old royal monopolies and exclusive charter companies, and eroding patronage systems in favor of freer (but not yet free) trade and a wider commercial sense of the “national interest.” It also gave voice to a self-conscious idea of England as a world power which required a large, permanent Navy to prosecute aggressively its interests in overseas trade and colonial expansion. Historians continue to debate whether the Navigation Act resulted from promotion of private interests or reflected an emerging national and even grand strategic policy. In either case, by the 1660s, England effectively embarked on a national policy of centrally protected imperial shipping, shipbuilding, and trade that eventually led it to world naval mastery. By 1700 the English merchant marine doubled in size, customs revenues increased threefold, and the internal island economy and overseas trade was enormously expanded. See also free ships, free goods. Navigation Act (1660). Building on the Navigation Act tradition of 1651, the 1660 Act added lists of “enumerated articles” of high-value goods (including indigo and tobacco) forbidden to the carriage trade of any but English ships plying English waters or delivering to English ports. And it required ships heading to the Americas to first stop at British ports for inspection and payment of extra duties. Additional ordinances were passed in 1662, 1663, 1670, and 1673. These navigation ordinances were resented by shippers and the colonies 315

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as increasing costs and shipping times, but neither shippers nor feeble colonists could alter the mercantilist drive of English policy. necessaries. The clothing and equipment for which pay was deducted from a soldier’s enlistment bounty and pay, usually including his knapsack, shoes, polishes and buckles, shirts and stockings, and other bits of uniform clothing. Many regiments allowed men to buy their own “necessaries,” but insisted on it, too. Neerwinden, Battle of (July 19/29, 1693). “Landen.” A major battle of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), fought in Flanders. Maréchal Luxembourg brought 80,000 French to fight William III’s 50,000 Allied troops. Luxembourg lured William into battle with a series of feints with his cavalry, then surprised the Allied army in its camp. The fight began with both sides arrayed in battle line in an early morning mist made pungent by nearby marshy areas. The Allies were entrenched on high ground behind a shallow ravine at their center, with the flanks reaching two small villages. As he did at Fleurus (June 21/July 1, 1690), Luxembourg once again attacked both opposing flanks while French artillery pounded the enemy’s guns. After four hours of heavy fighting, Neerwinden village fell to a final assault by elite French and Swiss guards units. William withdrew, abandoning 84 of his 91 heavy guns along with 12,000 men left as casualties upon the field, with another 2,000 taken prisoner. The French also suffered heavy losses of about 8,000 men. Like most battles in Flanders in this era, even such high cost purchased little operational or strategic gain. An expensive and draining war of positions thus resumed. nefir-i am. Non-servitor, irregular, and auxiliary troops recruited mainly among the tribes of Anatolia by the Ottomans. They included sarica cavalry and sekban infantry. They were not numerous or a large proportion of Ottoman forces in this period, but by the last decades of the 18th century, they were both. The change was forced on sultans by financial strains, leading to reduction of the Kapikulu Askerleri. Ne Plus Ultra lines. An inner set of lines along France’s northern frontier. About 200 miles long, they were begun by maréchal Villars over the winter of 1710–1711 following the bloody fight at Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709). They were made to guard France itself from invasion, following repeated defeats in Flanders in the last years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). They were more substantial than the Lines of Brabant and reflected the fact that the Allies had already breached that forward line and the double lines of the old pré carré. Construction began after agreement to the London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711). The Lines were dubbed “ne plus ultra” (literally, “no more beyond”) by Villars to suggest that Allied armies would never advance beyond them. They ran from the coast past Arras and Cambrai to the Sambre River, then along it to Namur, incorporating some of the old Lines of Brabant. 316

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Marlborough crossed the Ne Plus Ultra lines in their first year of existence. He bluffed Villars out of Arleux by ordering General William Cadogan to dissemble in his defense of the causeway there, before doubling back to take it a second time. Marlborough used this screen and time gained to march between Arras and Vimy Ridge (of course, unaware of how those names and places would later haunt British military history). Now in front of the surprised Villars, Marlborough broke through the Ne Plus Ultra lines without resistance or casualties, and took Bouchain on September 13/24, 1711. This directly threatened Paris. Marlborough was unable to exploit this achievement, however, as he was removed from command by Queen Anne and the Tories in January 1712, to clear the path to peace. Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689). Negotiated by the Kangxi emperor. It set the border of China with Russia after a half decade of frontier warfare, and in the shadow of a common threat from Inner Asian tribes in what is today western China. It was signed as between two sovereigns, which was a huge departure from China’s usual insistence upon at least the fiction of involving all foreigners participating in the tribute system. It also differed from any arrangement made with other Western powers. It thus showed that the Qing understood Inner Asian and northern relations with other land powers were something apart from relations with what they still saw as upstart sea powers encountered along their coast. A supplementary treaty (Treaty of Kiakhta) was signed with Russia in 1727. It established a clear border, trading posts, and rights, and permitted the Orthodox Church to build and conduct worship in Beijing. Netherland Brazil. See Brazil; West Indies Company. Netherlands. See Austrian Netherlands; Spanish Netherlands; United Provinces. New Amsterdam. “Nieuw Amsterdam.” See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674). New England. British regulars were not deployed to New England prior to 1755, well after the period considered here. In the meantime, local defense (and offense) in New England was carried out by colonial militia recruited from the towns. These militia were much more impressive than their cousins from Virginia or any other English colonies beside South Carolina, mainly because the military mind of New Englanders was concentrated by sharing hostile borders with various Indian nations and the French. Members included some volunteers but a good many more Indian mercenaries, free Blacks, Irish or other white servile class members, and restless apprentice boys without enough work. See also Deerfield raid (February 29, 1704); Indian Wars; Iroquois Confederacy; King William’s War (1689–1697); masts; Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); skulking way of war. new formation troops. See officers; Russian Army. 317

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Newfoundland. Discovered by the Genoese John Cabot in 1497 while engaged by English commission, Newfoundland was England’s first colony in the Americas. For over two centuries, it was run almost exclusively as a fishing grounds to exploit the riches of the Grand Banks. The colony also served to train English seamen in the stormy ways of the North Atlantic. Settlement for other purposes was initially forbidden but occurred anyway, under awful conditions for most. Newfoundland’s native population was hunted down and exterminated, after which mainly Scots and Irish settlers eked out a rough existence from coastal fisheries tied to the European trade, as isolated from the mainstream of North American development as they were from Europe. During the 16th–17th centuries, “The Rock” played a part in the long, worldwide naval and colonial confrontation between England and France: the French established a base at Placentia from whence they raided English settlements. Newfoundland was only secured formally to Great Britain’s overseas empire by the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713). New France. The North American territories controlled or claimed by the kings of France: Acadia (Nova Scotia), Canada (Québec), much of what is today the American Midwest along the Ohio, and Louisiana. Acadia and the Hudson Bay region were surrendered to Great Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713). Québec and Louisiana remained French until conquered in 1759–1760 and surrendered to the British in the Treaty of Paris (1763). Louisiana was thereafter regained, but only temporarily. See Indian Wars; Iroquois Confederacy; King William’s War (1689–1697); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). new model armies. See British Army; Dutch Army; French Army; New Model Army; Prussian Army; Russian Army; Swedish Army. New Model Army. The Parliamentary Army founded on February 17, 1645, to wage the final phase of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). It was trained in Dutch and Swedish fashion and infused with Puritan zeal. It was principally the creation of Thomas Fairfax, its first commander. In place of the old “Regional Association” armies, the New Model Army formed a single command of 12 regiments of foot (1,200 men per regiment) and 10 troops of cavalry (of 600 troopers each). An additional cavalry troop was added later, so that the New Model Army fielded 15,000 foot and 7,000 cavalry and dragoons. Two extant Parliamentary armies, the Northern and Western Association armies, were later subordinated to Fairfax’s command. Oliver Cromwell was responsible for training and command of the “Ironsides” cavalry of the New Model Army, whose “Roundheads” excelled in battle against the “Cavaliers” of the king. The Army backed the execution of Charles I and later supported Cromwell’s coup against Parliament. It then sustained him in power as “Lord Protector” from 1653. Several factions opposed Cromwell until they were purged or intimidated into silence. “Levellers” wanted social as well as political revolution. Their 318

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program called for a secular republic with universal male suffrage, abolition of the House of Lords, genuine free speech, and toleration of religious dissent. Adding to Leveller unrest in the ranks were end-of-war issues of arrears of pay, impressment, and veterans’ relief. Continuation of the war in Ireland undercut Leveller influence. When some mutinied at Corkbush Field in November 1648, Fairfax and Cromwell had three ringleaders draw lots and shot one. Then they demobilized several regiments suspected of Leveller, Presbyterian, or Royalist infection. “Fifth Monarchists” within and without the Army thought Cromwell insufficiently moved by their own millenarian religious views in either his domestic governance or foreign policy. Fifth Monarchy men thought Cromwell had betrayed both them and prophecy by becoming Lord Protector. Several tried to assassinate him. A Fifth Monarchist coup against the restored monarchy failed in late 1660 and was put down by George Monk. Charles II disbanded the New Model Army over the course of 1660. The next year, Monk’s foot regiment was reconstituted as the Coldstream Guards. See also British Army; General at Sea; Western Design. New Netherland. “Nieuw Nederland.” See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674). New Spain. “New Spain” was nominally governed by a Viceroyalty established in Mexico City in 1535. Its southern border stopped short of modern Panama, then part of the composite Spanish colony of Gran Colombia. Along its northern frontier lived various Pueblo tribes of Native Americans, including the Hopi. In 1680 the Pueblos rebelled against Spanish control. Although they ultimately were compelled to accept reimposition of Spanish rule, after 1700, Hopi and other Pueblo Indians kept out all Catholic missions and enjoyed a cultural revival of their pre-Spanish beliefs and practices. Nijmegen, Treaty of (August 10, 1678). The peace that ended the Dutch War (1672–1678) between France and the United Provinces. This separate peace quickly forced the other Allies to terms as well. The first Treaty of Nijmegen returned all Dutch territory taken by France, including Maastricht. It modified trade relations with France in favor of the Dutch by ending the anti-Dutch “fighting tariff” of 1667 while admitting some Dutch goods into French markets at preferred rates. France also lost the right to garrison the important fortress and bridge across the Rhine at Philippsburg, but was compensated with a river crossing at Freiburg. Both parties thus emerged with real gains, though their fundamental conflict would drag them back into bigger and more costly wars in the three decades that lay ahead. Nijmegen, Treaty of (September 17, 1678). The peace that ended Louis XIV’s war with Spain, which was an extension of his Dutch War (1672–1678). Louis made gains along his borders with Spain in both north and south, and he kept Franche-Comté. He was compelled to abandon his claim to all the Spanish Netherlands, and surrendered numerous towns and fortresses he had already 319

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stripped of all defenses. But he kept several important captured towns, including Cambrai, St. Omer, and Ypres. In his mind, this exchange of towns and fortresses (others were exchanged in the south) “rationalized” his borders with Spain, thus bringing him closer to the ideal of France’s “natural frontiers.” However, trouble began immediately: although the Treaty established a joint commission to settle border issues in the Spanish Netherlands, Louis set up his own unilateral “courts of reunion” to legitimize claims he then backed with military action, leading eventually to the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). A clause agreeing to return Lorraine to Charles V was also vitiated when that prince refused the terms agreed by others, which left his province in French possession until 1697. It was not restored to the duc until the end of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Overall, by the terms of Nijmegen, Spain lost far more than it gained from years of costly warfare. Nijmegen, Treaty of (February 6, 1679). The peace that ended Louis XIV’s war with Austria that was an extension of his Dutch War (1672–1678). Negotiations with the German Empire had dragged on for months after the Dutch and Spanish made peace at Nijmegen in September 1678. The terms of this third treaty essentially confirmed those of the first two. Nikan. The Manchu term for Han Chinese. See also Banner system. Nikon (1605–1681). Patriarch of Moscow and Russia. His religious reforms of Orthodox tradition spurred a massive social and religious countermovement, whose followers became generally known as “Old Believers.” The reforms led to enormous unrest among Old Belief peasants and within the strel’sty during the latter years of the reign of Tsar Alexis and then under his immediate successors. The issue came to a head during the reform period of the reign of Peter I. Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Europe nursed bitter memories of the severe depredations carried out by French armies in the Spanish Netherlands and of the bombardment of Luxembourg during the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). Great and lesser powers alike did not accept as more than temporary the peace with Louis XIV agreed at Ratisbon in 1684. However, no plans were afoot to reverse these French gains. Austria and its south German allies were preoccupied with an ongoing war with the Ottoman Empire, while the Netherlands and north German states fixed their attention on a building succession crisis in England, where a new Catholic king, James II, was at odds with a restless Protestant people. In 1686 representatives of Austria, Spain, and Sweden met with those from several minor German powers, including Bavaria and the Palatinate, in the Imperial city of Augsburg. They agreed to a vague defensive alliance, the League of Augsburg, against further French aggression in Germany. The Germans were frightened by Louis’ longstanding policy of expansion along his Rhine frontier, and his disrespect for the legal and religious rights of free Imperial cities guaranteed by France in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). 320

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The Augsburg alliance was superseded in 1689 by the “Grand Alliance,” which added England, Savoy, Brandenburg, and the United Provinces to the coalition that fought against France from 1688 to 1697. The terms “War of the League of Augsburg” and “War of the Grand Alliance” are inaccurate for different reasons (membership in the first case, start date in the second). They are most usefully, and today more generally, subsumed under the rubric “Nine Years’ War (1688–1697).” King William’s War (1689–1697) is a local designation used mainly by American historians for the North American theater of operations that formed a lesser part of this larger European and imperial conflict. Origins John A. Lynn argues that Louis XIV was essentially satiated and defensive after 1675, fighting later and longer wars only or mainly to secure his frontiers rather than conquer new ones. Lynn calls the Nine Years’ War the “great miscalculation,” proposing that Louis wanted a short, defensive conflict, but that his reputation and rough diplomacy brought about a wider and longer war that he “neither desired nor expected.” This idea of a satisfied, defensive Louis was not a view held by most contemporaries or later historians. Louis feared that he might lose to aroused foreign revanchism some territorial gains made by his earlier aggressions, especially the War of the Reunions. That rightly caused worry that he might be attacked in his turn. A wise ruler interested in consolidating and defending extant gains would have pursued a moderate policy of conciliation. Louis instead chose to provoke a new crisis with an ultimatum (his “Mémoire des raisons,” issued on September 24, 1688) demanding, upon the threat of renewing war, that Europe accept as permanent all his prior gains. This was certainly a diplomatic and strategic miscalculation, but one that hardly seems benign or essentially defensive. Nor does the immediacy of Louis’ military actions, or the savage manner in which he conducted the war he started in Germany, accord with any putative defensive motivations. With a grave succession crisis underway in England and Leopold I away campaigning against the Ottomans, Louis thought he saw a main chance: he struck violently into Germany, thereby confirming the worst fears about his ambitions. Any notion that he launched this attack from defensive motives is vitiated by the fact the French moved into Germany on September 25, 1688. That was but a single day after issuing his ultimatum and three months less a day from its proposed expiration. The ink on his Mémoire of demands and conditions for keeping peace had barely dried, nor had the document even reached the foreign capitals to which it was sent! And most tellingly, Louis invaded Germany fully six weeks before William III landed in Devon. This was all in keeping with the main pattern of his long reign and many wars: Louis would accept moderate terms only when these were forced on him by a powerful enemy coalition. Before that occurred, in 1697, not only Germany would be savaged by war. France and its empire also would be wracked by battlefield losses and by a deep internal crisis brought on by unsustainable military spending, aggravated by repeated crop failure and widespread famine, and by a global naval war. 321

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When the immediate threat to the Habsburgs and south Germany passed upon defeat of the Ottomans at Mohács (August 12, 1687), Germans returned to consideration of the threat from France. This seemed imminent and manifest as Louis attempted to interfere in a succession crisis in the bishopric of Cologne. Even more worrisome, the crisis in England crested that summer. Louis supported James II in the latter’s feeble bid to retain the English throne, and issued threats of war against the United Provinces should William cross the Channel in arms. But Louis could not prevent conspirators behind the so-called Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) from snatching the crown from the head of a weak ally and offering to place it on William’s ambitious head. Neither French threats nor Louis’ actual invasion of Germany stopped James II’s daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William, succeeding to the thrones of England, Ireland, and Scotland once William landed with a small army at Torbay on November 5, 1688. France’s most determined enemy would expel Louis’ ally James from Ireland by the middle of 1690. In time, William would bring together Dutch and English power and resources in pursuit of the common aim of containing and defeating Louis and France. But in the short term, the new British king’s attention was focused on gaining full political and military control over his fractured realms. War at Sea, 1688–1697 At the start of the war, the Royal Navy and Dutch Navy were together twice as large in number of ships as the French Navy. However, they suffered from problems of joint command and coordination, from logistical weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and from political issues and questions about personnel that gave the initiative and operational superiority to the French during the initial phase of the war. Throughout the Nine Years’ War, all sides engaged in extensive privateering, which in turn forced supply and merchant ships into convoys. Coastal raids, or “hostile descents,” were common, as was the practice of using bomb ketches to bombard coastal cities. Fleet actions were rarer. A French fleet of 24 rated ships fought off a smaller English fleet at Bantry Bay (May 1/11, 1689), thereupon successfully landing military supplies for James II and his Irish Catholic allies. That naval fight, the first fleet action between France and England in over a century, occurred before the two countries were formally at war (June 23). After this minor tactical victory, the French united their Atlantic squadrons at Brest. However, they were unable to force battle with the English or Dutch, and subsequently disarmed two thirds of the fleet over the winter of 1689–1690, leaving crews and guns on just 20 rated ships. Several French frigates still sailed in Irish waters into 1690 in support of James II, but they did not prevent William from landing there with a sizeable army, and they withdrew after the disaster suffered by James at the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690). A month before that, Admiral Tourville had sailed from Brest with 77 ships-of-the-line and 23 fireships. He met an Anglo-Dutch fleet of 57 ships-of-the-line off Beachy Head on June 30/July 10, 1690, and soundly bested it. This tactical victory was not translated into operational or strategic advantage as new ships, superior 322

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crews, and Anglo-Dutch determination returned control of the Channel to the Allied navies by the end of the summer. The Allies planned to seize Brest in retaliation for Beachy Head over the course of 1691–1692, but abandoned the effort after it was learned (or rather, came to be believed) that Louis planned to invade England itself. A smaller descent at Cameret Bay in Brittany was easily repulsed by French defenders, leaving hundreds of Redcoats and sailors dead on the beach. Neither Louis nor his admirals really understood the uses and possibilities of sea power. They thus squandered impressive French naval capabilities built up in preceding decades and wasted rare naval victories won off Sicily and at Beachy Head. In 1691 Louis again sent military aid by sea to Jacobite forces in Ireland, but William trapped and crushed these in a series of fights that ended in surrender at Limerick. In accordance with terms agreed after the fall of Limerick (October 13, 1691), the French fleet left Irish waters for Brest, carrying all released French prisoners and some 14,000 Irish exiles (the Wild Geese). Tourville spent two months in the summer of 1691 playing a game of cat-andmouse maneuvering with the Allied battlefleet, but there was no fleet action in the Atlantic or Mediterranean that summer. The turn of the new year ushered in the most important phase of the war at sea. In 1692 Louis raised an invasion army intended for England. Before it could sail, his battle fleet was savaged by a stronger English and Dutch fleet at BarfleurLa Hogue (May 19–24/May 29–June 4, 1692). French naval morale was severely eroded by that catastrophic defeat, which cost 15 ships-of-the-line and many invasion barges. Louis spent lavishly to repair and restore the French battlefleet, sending Tourville out from Brest in May 1693 for what proved to be the last time the main French fleet sought battle. Simultaneously, a second fleet sailed from Toulon, replete with nearly three dozen galleys. This last large French battlefleet of the war missed seeing action against an Allied fleet, but it successfully attacked the Smyrna convoy at the end of June 1693. That same year at St. Malo, and the next year at Dieppe and Dunkirk, the English deployed infernal machines in attempts to blow up French ports. For the rest of the war, the English remained wary of any sortie by the Brest squadron but could not force it to fight, which compelled them to maintain a large countervailing battlefleet in constant readiness. A spectacular action occurred at Pondicherry, where the Dutch carried off an amphibious landing and took possession of that French entrepôt in India. In 1694 the French fleet in the Mediterranean was reinforced from the Atlantic. In May this combined fleet supported an overland advance into Catalonia lasting into July. Ships carried heavy cannon and supplies to siege sites and helped push the Spanish back by threatening to outflank them through amphibious actions. This highly successful coastal campaign halted only when a powerful Allied fleet was dispatched to the western Mediterranean. It remained there for two years, forcing the French fleet back to Toulon and preventing Louis’ army in Catalonia from besieging Barcelona. In the Atlantic, a reduced French fleet went over to the defensive but could not prevent coastal raids and Allied descents, which Louis greatly feared. 323

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A major Allied assault on Brest was planned for mid-June. The prospect of this attack and landing so frightened Louis he put Vauban in charge of all defenses around Brest. Vauban prepared coastal batteries and the guns of those ships of sail he still had in port, and sent his war galleys into the harbor to defend against enemy marines. Along the bay leading to the harbor, he emplaced dug-in marines and some local militia. The Allied fleet and landing parties thus ran into well-prepared and deadly French defenses when they attempted to storm ashore near Brest on June 17, 1694, suffering nearly 1,000 casualties for their effort while Vauban’s men suffered fewer than 50 killed or wounded. As the Allied ships departed, they bombarded ports along the French coast. This included use of additional infernal machines at Dieppe and Dunkirk, and heavy shelling of Le Havre and Calais. English raids continued in 1695 and 1696, with heavy but largely ineffective bombardments of St. Malo, Granville, St. Martin de Ré, Sables d’Olonne, and Calais. Otherwise, for three years after Barfleur-La Hogue, as happened again for two years before Jutland in 1916, neither side was able to bring to bear on the enemy’s fleet the great battlefleet it had built over several decades and which it had imagined to be a supreme instrument of victory at sea. Defeats at sea after 1695, along with unsustainably high naval costs, dissuaded Louis from pursuing guerre d’escadre, and there were no fleet engagements in northern waters after 1694. Instead, the war at sea in the Atlantic and Caribbean became mainly a guerre de course, a war of coastal raids and bombardments such as that assayed against Catalonia in 1693. There was also incessant commerce raiding along all major trade routes worldwide and amphibious operations against distant American and Indian colonies. Much of the guerre de course on both sides was conducted under letters of marque issued to brutal pirate captains, including the infamously cruel William Kidd (c. 1645–1701), or to privateers of great skill and daring, such as the Frenchman Jean Bart. Some French commerce-raiding squadrons were commanded by royal officers no longer needed for fleet actions. Others commanded marines and batteries in onshore coastal defense. The French guerre de course or “guerre de commerce” had actually begun against the merchant marine of the United Provinces as early as 1688. It proved to be the great turning point in the long-term history of Dutch maritime supremacy and the entire overseas trading system that helped sustain the United Provinces as a Great Power. For a century after 1590, Dutch maritime commerce had consistently expanded. From 1690, the basic trend in Dutch overseas commerce, continuing until 1806, was painful and persistent contraction. Over the course of the Nine Years’ War, the Allies lost more than 4,000 merchantmen destroyed or taken as prizes by the French. Losses on the French side were comparable. This prolonged war at sea brought much suffering and economic despair to overseas colonists and aggravated a food crisis that led to famine in France. By 1695 Louis was deeply frustrated by Allied shelling of his ports. Unable to defeat the Allies at sea, he tried to stop further naval bombardments by marching an army to Brussels to present a tit-for-tat ultimatum: cease shelling French ports or watch a great Flanders city burn. This demand was 324

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rejected, and there followed a savage bombardment of explosive shells and hot shot from August 13–16, 1695. Thereafter, the Allies continued to overmatch French shipyards in new building of fresh numbers of warships and in their quality. French fleets therefore, and for the most part, stayed in port at Brest and Toulon until the end of the war. Or they sallied in squadron strength only, to pursue guerre de course or make specific raids, but under orders to flee from possible fleet actions. The last notable French naval success of the war was capture of the Spanish treasure fleet in an assault on Cartagena in May 1697. While the Allies began to grope toward the idea of a “close blockade” during this war, their navies were not yet capable of the logistics necessary to carrying it out. As a result of that inadequacy and the fact that France was not greatly dependent on overseas trade and had a difficult coastline, most Allied blockades were of short duration and little consequence. Fire and Sword, 1688–1692 The opening land campaign of the war began with predictable sieges of key Rhine fortresses and punitive quartering of French troops that advanced against German lands and towns. The garrison defending Philippsburg resisted for a month, from September 27–October 30, in face of 30,000 enemy and the master of 17th-century siegecraft, Vauban. The fortress at Mainz fell thereafter. As had been done for the first time during the War of the Reunions, once again the French employed bombardment of fortified towns which would not yield as a tactic of terror and as a substitute for full siege. And yet again, French troops carried out the devastation of the Palatinate and scorched all other parts of Germany they reached. This aggression combined with atrocity brought most German states into the war by the end of 1688: Bavaria, Brandenburg, Hanover, Hess-Kassel, and Saxony joined Leopold I and smaller German states already allied in the League of Augsburg. The Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire formally declared war on France on January 24, 1689. The United Provinces joined the fight on November 26, 1688, despite William III’s personal preoccupation with English affairs, as the Grand Alliance took shape. In addition to razing cities and villages of the Palatinate, into midsummer French armies burned out parts of Baden and Württemburg, and stretched collection of contributions as far as Bavaria. Then the French retreated, still scorching villages and earth as they departed for fortresses along the Rhine. Allied armies followed, vastly outnumbering the French and sometimes pushing bayonets at the backsides of retreating enemy. The Electors of Bavaria and Brandenburg led separate armies in discrete sieges of French fortresses, with mixed success. Charles V, dispossessed Duke of Lorraine and Imperial general, brought the main Allied army before Mainz, which he took after a siege that lasted from July 17 to September 8. The defense of Mainz cost France the fortress and 2,000 casualties but used up most of the campaign season. There was a small clash at Walcourt (August 25, 1689) that decided nothing. There was also limited fighting in Flanders in 1689, while small-scale fighting occurred along the Pyrenees. James II landed in Ireland in March 1689, but the decisive fight there did not take place until 1690. 325

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The immediate impact of the start of the “Williamite War” or “Jacobite War” in Ireland was to convince the English Parliament to declare war on France, which it had been most reluctant to do until French troops accompanied James II in his landing at Kinsale in Cork. That May, a colonial expedition out of Massachusetts captured Port Royal in Acadia (modern Nova Scotia). A further effort to take Québec failed in October after a week of chaotic and ineffective siege. As the war expanded on the European continent, it settled into a pattern of sieges, fights over lines, and campaigns of maneuver. Only occasionally were there battles, and while some of these were bloody, all proved indecisive. Each side raised huge armies, and the taxes and contributions needed to pay for greatly expanded land and naval forces. As in prior wars waged by Louis XIV, the dense population and complex topography of Flanders, along with mutual proximity of enemy armies and well-stocked French magazines, dictated that the Netherlands became the main fighting theater. One of the largest battles in decades in Europe saw the French crush the Dutch at Fleurus (June 21/July 1, 1690), where maréchal Luxembourg employed brilliant and highly risky tactics quite unlike the standard fare of 17th-century generalship. But then Luxembourg failed to pursue a broken enemy, allowing Prince Waldeck to re-form at Brussels and reinforce from surrounding garrisons. Brandenburg and Spanish regiments and cavalry squadrons joined fresh Dutch troops and the survivors of Fleurus. In early August, this new Allied army of 55,000 took the field. The French also reinforced their several field armies. But facing superior numbers in both Flanders and Germany, Louis hesitated to undertake new sieges or offensives. A rare moment of prudence, or perhaps even fear, overcame the king, and he ordered his Flanders army into defensive lines. Assaults by Allied flying columns on these lines in late 1690 floundered. French cavalry and dragoon raids were also made into Dutch territory, in punishment and to raise contributions. The war spread to northern Italy in mid-1690 as Victor Amadeus II brought Savoy into the Grand Alliance. The provocation was Louis’ demand that the duke surrender to France the key fortress town of Turin. Victor Amadeus refused and took the field, expecting assistance from his new allies. Nicholas Catinat moved sharply into Piedmont and defeated the Savoyards near the monastery at Staffarda (August 8/18, 1690). The conquest of Savoy for France followed the usual French pattern of rapid sieges and bombardment or executions of towns and villages that held out or refused contributions. It also entailed vicious fighting against guerilla Vaudois who had returned to their Piedmontese valleys from exile in Switzerland to fight the French, this time allied with their old duke. In other secondary theaters, small French and Spanish armies contested various fortresses and valleys in Catalonia and Roussillon while William and James fought it out in Ireland, culminating in the decisive fight at the Boyne (July 1, 1690). Fighting continued in Ireland for another year, but James’ cause was already lost by mid-July 1690. William III returned to the United Provinces in February 1691. He immediately took charge of organizing a vast Dutch-German coalition for that year’s campaign in Flanders and the Rhineland, numbering in total over 220,000 men. The French also raised huge armies, but so many were France’s enemies in the 326

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Grand Alliance that Louis was compelled to deploy on five separate fronts— including along his Atlantic coastline—to prevent descents. The French magazine system in Flanders again allowed Louis’ northernmost army to literally steal a march on the enemy as the French invested and besieged Mons (March 15–April 8, 1691) before the Allies were ready to take the field. A huge force of 46,000 French encircled Mons, which was garrisoned by just 6,000 Dutch. William hurried into the field with 38,000 Allied troops but failed to relieve the city. Luxembourg opposed William in Flanders that summer. The two nearly fought at Anderlecht in early June, then resumed a campaign of attempted sieges and effective blocking maneuvers. There was a small fight at Leuze on September 19 when Luxembourg attacked the Allied rear guard, but no battle ensued. In the Rhineland, a similar campaign of march and countermarch, maneuver and blocking maneuver, ate up the summer and fall without leading to more than skirmishing between isolated units and foraging parties. Similarly, fighting in the Pyrenees was, as usual, limited and indecisive. But there was real fighting with real consequences in northern Italy. Catinat invaded and quickly took Nice (April 2), Avigliana (May 29), and Carmagnola (June 9). Reinforced with 15,000 Habsburg troops, Victor Amadeus besieged Carmagnola in turn and retook it on October 8. However, another French army completed the conquest of Savoy while its duke was fighting in Piedmont. The fighting season opened in 1692 much the same as it had in 1691: each side raised massive armies and deployed on multiple fronts, with the major armies and heaviest fighting taking place on the traditional battlefields of Flanders and the Rhineland, with lesser fights in Italy and along the Pyrenees. What was different was Louis’ plan to invade England, but this vain conceit was aborted when his battlefleet was destroyed at Barfleur-La Hogue in May. Louis attended the violent siege of Namur (May 25–July 1, 1692), accompanied by his full court of painters, musicians, writers, fops, and ladies. Namur fell, after which Luxembourg and William fought to a bloody draw at Steenkerke (July 24/August 3, 1692). In Germany, the usual summer and fall maneuvers, raising of contributions, and executions of villages exacted a great toll on civilians without producing any larger strategic effect. The French were paid back in kind along the Italian frontier, where superior Allied armies for the first time burned fortresses and scorched French lands in an incursion in force into Dauphiné and Roussillon. The French retaliated by laying waste parts of Catalonia, even as Louis sent out diplomatic signals that he desired peace with Spain and perhaps with all the Catholic powers of Europe. This effort to divide the Grand Alliance along religious lines came to naught: Louis might be motivated by religious hatred against Protestantism in France, but the age when European wars and alliances might be determined by confessional allegiance had already passed. It was one of many things the king did not understand about his own time. Talking while Starving, 1693–1697 By the mid-1690s, the cost of the Nine Years’ War weighed on all Europe, but was especially heavy in France. As diplomats talked, sovereigns schemed, and heavy fighting continued on an ever-larger scale. Positional warfare still dominated, but 327

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occasional bloody battles punctuated the suffering and costs of war, even as agrarian economies strained to feed starving civilians and soldiers as crops repeatedly failed. Louis personally took the field for the last time in 1693, leading another failed campaign in Flanders. There was heavy fighting along the French lines at Ypres, and a bloody but inconclusive battle between Luxembourg and William at Neerwinden (July 19/29, 1693). Siege warfare returned to the fore in the autumn: Vauban took Charleroi on October 10, 1693, in an unusually deadly siege, inflicting a much heavier blow to Dutch defenses and military fortunes than Luxembourg had won at Neerwinden. In these fights the Dutch at last received significant aid on land from England, which sent an expeditionary force of 17,000 to the Continent. In Germany the French took the offensive in 1693, quickly taking Heidelberg while ensuring that German contributions paid for French occupation of the Rhineland and Palatinate. But despite large armies (over 45,000 men each) often facing each other at close range in Germany, no battle resulted: foraging more than fighting preoccupied men and commanders alike. In northern Italy, the Allies initially badly outnumbered the French and took advantage of this fact to overrun the fortress at Casale. Delays in taking the field with all available troops allowed reinforcements from Germany and French-occupied Savoy to reach Catinat, who used them to defeat Victor Amadeus and the Savoyard Army in a bloody fight at Marsaglia (October 4, 1693). Yet, success in Flanders, Germany, at sea against the Smyrna convoy, and in the Pyrenees did not alleviate a fundamental domestic crisis for Louis XIV as crops failed and famine spread across France. By 1694 French overseas commerce was severely curtailed by losses of ships and cargos to Dutch or English fleets or to privateers. The country strained under the burden of Louis’ war taxes. It could not stock forward magazines even where money was available because most food and fodder had disappeared with failure of the harvest. This forced the king to keep the bulk of his Army in barracks, or even redeploy to the countryside to forage for what food or fodder there was. Armies still marched and countermarched in Flanders and Germany and several small sieges were carried out by the Allies, but no battles were fought. In Italy, too, exhaustion and caution prevailed over boldness. Casale was retaken by the Allies, but otherwise fighting was minimal. For once, Catalonia became the most active front. A French army of 26,000 was supported by elements of the Navy as Louis’ surrogates invaded Catalonia. A sharp fight near Verges on the River Ter (May 25, 1694) between the French and a Spanish force of 20,000 regulars and miquelets left nearly 4,000 Spanish dead. The French, under the duc de Noailles, continued their combined arms advance, taking the whole garrison at Palamos prisoner at the end of May and capturing Gerona in late June, after a long siege. This overland advance was discontinued once a reinforced Allied fleet appeared off Barcelona in early August. Another change of major commands occurred in 1695: Luxembourg died, leaving Louis without his most trusted and successful maréchal. He appointed Villeroi to command in Flanders, but while Villeroi wanted to seek out the enemy army and fight, the king forbade him to do so. Instead, Villeroi began to dig and entrench along a set of new lines. There were no major battles that summer, as 328

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the extremely bloody siege of Namur (July 2–September 1, 1695) tied up the main Allied army. In Germany, too, the French remained on the defensive. In Catalonia, an operational stand-off continued as the Allied fleet remained at Barcelona. There were some Spanish efforts to retake other parts of Catalonia. Although these failed, the French decided to destroy occupied Spanish fortifications and withdraw to Gerona, where they lived off Spanish contributions into the next year. Fighting in Italy again focused on control of the fortress at Casale even as French and Savoyard diplomats met in secret to discuss peace. These talks led to French agreement to return Casale to the Duchy of Mantua, but only after its works were razed. Demolition was completed by September, and the French garrison departed. The war in north Italy was over. As is always the case with diverse coalitions, with peace on the horizon, the Grand Alliance started to fracture. France was also ready for peace as its royal finances and agrarian economy were alike near collapse. Emboldened by Savoy leaving the war and anticipating the death of Carlos II of Spain, Louis XIV remained blind to his fiscal problems and the plight of the French peasantry and lower orders. Once more he prepared multiple armies to advance on several fronts simultaneously in the spring of 1696, even readying another invasion of England in behalf of James. This invasion plan came to naught, as had several others. Large armies of French and Allied (Dutch, German, and English) troops fenced, foraged, burned, and maneuvered to no decisive purpose in Flanders and the Rhineland. In Italy, the Peace of Turin (August 29, 1696) took Savoy out of the Grand Alliance and into an aggressive compact with France to jointly attack Milan. When this failed, all combatants agreed to the Convention of Vigevano (October 7, 1696), establishing a general armistice in Italy. As peace hove into view, fighting intensified as all parties jostled for last-minute gains to be preserved or traded away at peace talks that began in Ryswick in the Netherlands. The greatest gain for either side came when the French took Barcelona (August 10) after a bloody and destructive twomonth siege. That victory became possible with withdrawal of an Anglo-Dutch fleet that had protected the city for two years: Allied ships had abandoned local allies in anticipation of agreement on a general peace. Final terms of the general settlement were codified in the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697). The treaty was little more than an uninspired armed truce that merely gave all parties time to recover and prepare for the next, and longest, of Louis’ serial wars of aggression. In the short run, most satisfied with the end of the Nine Years’ War was William III—recognized in the peace by Louis as rightful king of England—and English Protestants. The latter secured the Glorious Revolution and succession, reconquered Ireland, and checked a French threat to the continental balance of power. Also more-or-less content were Orangists and leading merchants of the United Provinces, the former because of the triumph of their prince, and the latter because they retained the Dutch overseas trading empire and regained a line of barrier fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands to protect the homeland. Nothing was really settled on the Rhine frontier or in Italy, and especially not in Spain. Overseas, Ryswick simply restored all conquests to their prewar owners. That helped set the stage 329

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for more Anglo-Dutch and French fighting in the years and decades ahead. Most of all, the ambitions and arrogance of the “Grande Monarque” remained unchecked, even if they had already badly drained France of men, money, and happiness: Louis’ vanity and Bourbon pride would again take France to war with most of Europe within four years, in the climactic conflict of his reign, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also arrière-ban; Berwick, James, 1st Duke of; Ireland; Indian Wars; Schnapphahns. Suggested Reading: G. N. Clark, The Dutch Alliance and the War against French Trade, 1688–1697 (1923; 1971); John A. Lynn, Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999); Stewart Philip Oakley, William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years War, 1689–1697 (1987).

niru. See Banner system; company. Noailles, Ann-Jules, duc de (1650–1708). Maréchal de France. Among the second, and lesser, generation of maréchals to serve Louis XIV, Noailles fought mainly in Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He was elevated to maréchal in 1693. His greatest battlefield victory came the next year at the River Territory. Northern War, First (1558–1583). See the explanation of terminology given under Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Northern War, Second (1655–1660). This conflict is often misnumbered by international relations specialists as the “First Northern War.” That may be because so many contemporary political scientists are unused to the study of international events that occurred before the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which they regard as the formative conflict leading to the “Westphalian state system.” Also, modern military historians tend to focus far more on the later Great Northern War (1700–1721), and hence see the earlier conflict as the first of two northern wars that occurred after agreement on the Peace of Westphalia (1648). However, area specialists use the rubric “First Northern War” for the conflict lasting from 1558–1583 that began with a Muscovite invasion of Livonia. That war was several generations in the past when a new Baltic conflict broke out, which specialists enumerate as the Second Northern War (1655–1660). The roots of this second war in the north and east, which actually spanned territory stretching from Scandinavia to Ukraine and Transylvania, lay in the severely overextended military situation of Poland-Lithuania resulting from the ongoing Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). That more eastern conflict had badly overstretched Polish-Lithuanian forces from Smolensk to Ukraine during the campaign of 1654. While Karl X of Sweden feared the advent of a massive Russian army in northern Poland-Lithuania, he was even more tempted to settle scores with the Poles and seize Baltic territory at a time of apparent mortal weakness in Warsaw. He and his War Council met in late 1654 and began laying plans for an invasion of Poland in the spring of 1655. 330

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Karl sent his highly professional armies into Poland in two invading columns, one of 7,200 moving out of Livonia to block a Russian move into that region, and the other of 13,650 troops leaving from Western Pomerania to cross over Brandenburg territory on its way to Poland. A reinforcing column of 12,700 followed out of Pomerania under Karl himself. None of these troops met serious resistance, as most Polish troops were in Ukraine fighting Cossacks, or in Lithuania fighting Russians. By the end of August, Karl was in Wittenberg, and Swedish troops had taken Poznan. John II Casimir of Poland abandoned Warsaw, heading west with his few remaining men in a courageous but futile effort to block one of the advancing Swedish columns. With the Polish king’s flight from the capital, discrete Swedish armies already deep into the territory of the Commonwealth, and the main Polish army away fighting Cossacks in Ukraine, Janusz Radziwill signed the Treaty of Kiejdany (August 17, 1655) with Karl X. That effectively separated Lithuania from the Polish Commonwealth and took it out of the Northern War, leaving it to face the invading Russians. Poland then completely collapsed politically and militarily. John II Casimir was easily rebuffed in the north and retreated to Cracow. Karl entered Warsaw on September 8 and immediately proceeded south in pursuit of Casimir, who fled into Silesia. The crown was considered abandoned and was offered to the Habsburgs even as Zaporozhian Cossacks advanced on Lwów (Lvov). By the end of 1655, every city of the Commonwealth except Danzig and Lwów was under Cossack, Swedish, or Russian occupation. When Swedish troops reached the Polish border with Hungary, the Habsburgs and the rest of Europe took notice. Vienna feared that Swedish conquests would upset the great settlement achieved in Germany in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), rile the Tatars to fresh raids and depredations across the frontier, and spark a revolt in Hungary (which it did). The United Provinces and Denmark feared Swedish domination of the whole Baltic should the Gustav monarchs retain control of both the north and south shores. Within Swedish-occupied Poland-Lithuania, opinion began to turn against the invaders as massive contributions were enforced, Swedish garrisons were billeted on cites, and Catholic churches were looted by Lutheran Swedes and irreligious mercenaries alike. The tide turned first in Lithuania, where partisan bands of nobles and peasants conducted guerrilla operations in defiance of the terms of the Treaty of Kiejdany, in one incident even assassinating Karl X’s brother-in-law. Opinion also turned in favor of John II Casimir, who was increasingly viewed as leader of a national resistance that contrasted with collaboration by Radziwill and Polish civic leaders. Casimir returned to Poland on January 1, 1656. Polish Army units that had signed on with the Swedes now rallied to Casimir, who tapped into Catholic sentiments by cleverly declaring the Virgin Mary “Queen of Poland.” The szlachta of Royal Prussia tried to persuade Friedrich-Wilhelm to enter the war, but in the face of Swedish strength, he broke his word and instead signed the Treaty of Königsberg (January 7/17, 1656), breaking the tie between Ducal Prussia and Poland. Swedish troops were scattered over too many small garrisons, whose foragers and couriers increasingly came under savage attack by armed peasants or mixed noble-peasant guerrilla bands. 331

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Atrocity was met by slaughter, which was answered by reprisal, which provoked yet more atrocities. The campaign of 1656 was a mobile one, with Karl moving toward Lwów with a force of 11,000 cavalry and dragoons in pursuit of a small Polish army of 2,400 men. But Lwów had good fortified defenses, and Karl quickly discovered that his essentially cavalry army lacked proper siege equipment and the big guns needed to reduce the city, even after he was reinforced by 3,000 infantry and a small artillery train. Encircled himself outside Lwów, Karl was forced to fight his way through the Lithuanian lines, losing his artillery train in so doing. He also learned that a relief army of 4,500 cavalry and dragoons had been intercepted and was lost to him at Warka (April 7, 1656). Poles and Lithuanians rallied to Casimir by the tens of thousands, enabling him to storm and retake Warsaw on June 29, 1656. Four days earlier, Friedrich-Wilhelm had signed an alliance with Karl X at Marienburg. A month later, a colossal, three-day battle was fought at Warsaw (July 28–30, 1656). Karl defeated Casimir there, but the victory did not decide the outcome of the war. The perfidious Friedrich-Wilhelm changed sides yet again, withdrawing his garrisons and a contingent of 8,500 crack Brandenburg troops from Karl’s army. The whole geostrategic situation now began to shift, as Tsar Alexis made peace with the Commonwealth and declared war on Sweden. In the Swedes’ strategic rear, a Dutch fleet of 30 sail supported by a Danish flotilla broke through Karl’s blockade of Danzig and landed 1,300 Dutch reinforcements. Three Russian armies attacked Swedish holdings in Estonia, Ingria, and Kexholm in July and August. Riga held out until the Russians withdrew in October, but Dorpat fell. These multiple efforts on several fronts over several years exhausted Russian capabilities. The tsar was unable to resume a Baltic campaign during 1657. That front remained quiet except for a small battle in Livonia at Walk (June 18, 1657), which was won by the Swedes. Russian overstretch and Sweden’s newly precarious geopolitical situation opened the door to negotiations that led to a separate peace—or rather, armistice—in 1658. Recovering from defeat outside Warsaw, Polish-Lithuanian armies headed into Ducal Prussia to punish the Brandenburg-Prussians for siding with Sweden. Some 5,000 Prussian-Swedish casualties, or 50% of Allied forces present, were suffered at the hands of a Polish-Tatar army of 12,000 at Prosken (October 8, 1656). This was followed by a more modest Polish loss at Philipowo (October 22, 1656). Although the battle casualties were light on each side, the “Tatar” raid left lasting folk memories, as the withdrawing force burned 13 sizeable towns and over 250 villages. Into the early winter, Polish cavalry and dragoons raided into Brandenburg proper, punishing the Great Elector for his treachery. In December, Karl agreed to recognize George II Rákóczi of Transylvania as king of Poland. In January 1657, Rákóczi invaded from the south with 25,000 men. Karl moved to meet him with a Swedish-Brandenburger force, leading to a campaign of maneuver in the south but no battles. Warsaw fell to Rákóczi on June 17. Aroused by the Transylvanian threat, the Habsburgs now joined the fight when Emperor Ferdinand III agreed—in the Treaty of 332

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Vienna (December 11, 1656)—to support Casimir with 4,000 troops. A second Treaty of Vienna was signed on May 27, 1657, to take account of the death of Ferdinand and succession of Leopold I, who promised an additional 8,000 men. The Habsburg alliance with Poland brought Denmark openly and formally into the war against Sweden. Danish armies struck quickly, taking Bremen and advancing against several Swedish garrison towns along the south Baltic coast. Karl immediately abandoned all support for Rákóczi, who was forced from Warsaw into Ukraine, where he was compelled to surrender, and his army was wiped out by Tatars. Meanwhile, Karl had marched against Denmark with 12,750 men (of whom just 2,800 were infantry). As Karl moved, Friedrich-Wilhelm again took advantage of Swedish weakness to sign a separate peace with Poland. Karl did not look back. He sent his great general, Karl Gustaf Wrangel, to retake Bremen while he made for Zealand and Copenhagen with a separate force, supported by 40 sail of the Swedish Navy. On the night of February 9, 1658, Karl led his army across the frozen “Little Belt” where it was most narrow, overwhelmed an unprepared Danish guard, and quickly secured Fyn Island, the key to the whole position. Wrangel advised against trying to also cross the “Great Belt,” the much wider expanse of frozen water that divided Fyn Island from Zealand. But Karl advanced from islet to islet over the Great Belt, with 5,000 frightened but loyal men. These Swedish troops appeared with total surprise in the suburbs of the Danish capital on February 25/March 7, 1658. This led to immediate signature of the Treaty of Roskilde (February 26/March 8, 1658). Sweden was nearing a recruitment and war-financing crisis, and Karl was no longer able to hope for progress against a revived Poland: his Cossack ally Khmelnitsky was dead, his Transylvanian ally Rákóczi was soundly defeated, and Cracow and other towns were under Habsburg occupation. Yet, Karl remained unwilling to make a general peace. Instead, he returned to attack Copenhagen a second time, in a remarkably reckless effort to permanently repress Denmark and establish Sweden as the dominant Scandinavian power. This attack and attendant effort by the Swedish Navy to block entry into the Baltic by all foreign fleets instead provoked intervention by the United Provinces. A powerful Dutch battlefleet of 45 sail smashed through the Swedish blocking force at the entrance to the Sound, then broke the blockade of Copenhagen. Inside the city, a Danish garrison of 9,200 and another 2,000 Dutch held out against a protracted Swedish siege, well protected by Copenhagen’s high sea walls and modern fortifications. Meanwhile, Swedish forces occupied Jutland and the duchies. But greater help was on the way to the Danes than even the Dutch could provide: Montecuccoli led an anti-Swedish Allied army of 14,000 Austrians, 14,500 Brandenburgers, and 4,500 Poles northward. This force moved into Jutland in January 1659, preparatory to attacking the Swedes operating there and from Zealand. Although the Allied force actually exacted harder contributions on the Danes than did the Swedes, it alone posed a threat to the Swedish army hunkered around the capital. Karl desperately assaulted Copenhagen on the night of February 21–22, 1659, hoping to end the campaign before the superior weight of Allied land and sea power told against him. The night attack included 333

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innovative use of snow camouflage for sappers, but even that was of no avail. Now it was the Swedish Army that was trapped, scattered over several Danish islands and harried by Danish and Dutch warships. Fighting continued through 1659, when a Swedish cavalry force was defeated at Nyborg (November 24, 1659). After that setback, and knowing they faced an overwhelming Allied invasion of Zealand in the spring, the Swedes withdrew. Elsewhere, the Polish Army was busy fighting in Ukraine while Austrian troops fought only half-heartedly against Swedish garrisons in Poland during 1657–1658. It thus took until December 1658 to drive the Swedes from Thorn, and almost all of 1659 to expel them from their fortresses at Elbing and Marienburg. An Austrian-Brandenburg army also invaded Pomerania and besieged Stettin. But there was fear in the Allied camp that too aggressive a campaign against Sweden might provoke France to enter the war and thereby rekindle the old alliances and enmities of the Thirty Years’ War, to the distress of all. To the east, Tsar Alexis was growing impatient with the failure of the Polish Sejm to formally declare him successor to John II Casimir. Poles were also fast tiring of paying contributions to support Habsburg garrisons on their soil, while Friedrich-Wilhelm wanted to escape the war with his precious Army and solid gains intact. It was thus received as a blessing on all sides when Karl X died unexpectedly on February 23, 1660. That permitted an end to the war by agreement in the Treaty of Oliwa (May 3, 1660). The peace was signed by Austria, Brandenburg, the Polish Commonwealth, and Sweden. It stripped Sweden of all gains made after 1655 in return for recognition of its long-standing claim to Livonia and its claims and possessions within the Holy Roman Empire. John II Casimir was acknowledged by all signatories as king of Poland and allowed to retain the honorific title of “king of Sweden” to the end of his life, but not to pass it to his heirs. Otherwise, Poland gained nothing for five years of devastation, occupation, and scouring of its people and lands. Brandenburg’s claims to Ducal Prussia, first recognized in the twin Treaties of Wehlau (September 19, 1657) and Bromberg (November 6, 1657), were confirmed at Oliwa. That represented a major geopolitical gain and surge in wealth and prestige for that rising German and Baltic power. Sweden made a separate peace with Denmark in the follow-on Treaty of Copenhagen (June 6, 1660). A third settlement was reached at Kardis (June 21, 1661) between Sweden and Russia. That separate peace was made possible because Russia continued to fight Poland for another seven years in the continuing, and revived, Thirteen Years’ War. See also Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660); Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson, Count. Suggested Reading: R. C. Anderson, Naval Wars in the Baltic (1919); Robert I. Frost, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War (1993); Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (2000).

Northern War, Third (1700–1721). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). North Quarter. The Admiralty of Holland. See also Dutch Navy. 334

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nouveaux convertis. “New Converts.” Huguenots reconverted to Catholicism under pressure of severe persecution by Louis XIV. Nurgaci (1559–1626). See Banner system; China; Manchus. Nyborg, Battle of (November 24, 1659). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Nystad, Peace of (August 30/September 10, 1721). The settlement that ended the Russian-Swedish portion of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Sweden ceded and confirmed Peter I’s possession of Ingermanland, Livonia, Estonia, and Kexholm. Sweden retained Finland, except for Viborg and part of Karelia and certain islands, from which Russia was required to evacuate its army of occupation. Other clauses in the treaty concerned free trade, freedom of religion, extradition of criminals, diplomatic relations, and other more minor matters. Sweden did not fully accept this settlement’s territorial clauses until the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In fact, during the century between Nystad and Vienna, Sweden made several attempts to reverse the verdict of the Great Northern War. It was only with Great Power enforcement of the postNapoleonic order that Sweden accepted its permanent loss of Finland (de facto from 1809). It was partly compensated by receipt of Norway from Denmark.

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O Obrona Potoczna. “General Defense.” See Polish Army. officers. During this period—with the notable exceptions of England and the United Provinces—monarchs in Europe increasingly took direct control of military affairs away from powerful noble military families and mercenary captains. As they did, better-supervised and more-professional officer corps slowly took shape on land and at sea. The progress of professionalization displacing mere class origin in selection and advancement of officers varied in terminology employed and historical timing in different kingdoms. In general, however, by the mid-17th century, men holding a commission signed by a king were known as “commission-officers.” By the early 18th century, this terminology shifted slightly to commissioned officers. That referred to any officer appointed by the crown—or the Admiralty in the case of the Royal Navy or one of five states’ admiralties of the Dutch Navy. At sea, commissioned officers included captains, commanders, and lieutenants. On land, this status comprised all ranks of field marshal and general as well as colonels in command of regiments. Below commissioned officers were warrant officers, who held rank by virtue of a warrant rather than a royal commission. These were staff or administrative appointments made by a regiment’s colonel or a ship’s captain. An exception was the small Prussian Army, wherein the “Great Elector” Friedrich-Wilhelm insisted on a veto of all officer choices made by his colonels. Warrant officer rank was most frequently awarded to Army chaplains and surgeons, and sometimes also to corporals and sergeants. Naval warrant officers included the master, quartermaster, boatswain, purser, and master carpenter. Holders of these four offices were also known as standing officers. Royal Navy warrants were issued by one of the naval boards. The French Navy always found it difficult to recruit officers with seafaring skills. Service at sea was resisted by the aristocratic classes, who sought instead to serve in view of the king in the senior arm, the French Army. The Navy thus had only a small permanent officer corps, numbering fewer than 1,000 even if one

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counts the more than 600 ensigns. Most French sea officers in this period were either “roturiers” (of non-noble social origin) or “anoblis” (recently ennobled), or their sons. They learned seacraft in merchant ships or as privateers. Officers of more noble social origin acquired seamanship by serving on Mediterranean galleys of the Knights of Malta before commanding French galleys that remained part of the fleet based at Toulon. Some later rose to high rank and command of ships of sail. From the 1670s, French ensigns were trained in companies of Gardes marine set up by Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Many French sea officers switched over, or back, to privateering from 1695 as the Navy abandoned guerre d’escadre in favor of guerre de course. The Navy as a whole was nominally commanded by the “Admiral of France,” an ancient office that was revived in 1669 and given to a succession of the king’s illegitimate sons. Real operational command lay with activeduty admirals and two vice-admirals, one residing in Brest and the other based in Toulon. Below them were “lieutenants-general of the navy” and “chefs d’escadre,” roughly equivalent to the British rank of “commodore.” From the time of Friedrich-Wilhelm, serfs laboring on Hohenzollern lands were recruited equally into the Prussian Army, while socially and economically privileged Junkers formed the bulk of the officer corps. Rigid social order found expression in a Junker’s desire to serve as an officer, which marked him off as socially superior to all others, and thereby reinforced rather than eroded his noble status. For a half century before 1700, Russian officers were mostly foreigners. This began to change even before Peter I imposed intense and fundamental Army reforms after ruthlessly suppressing the strel’sty. By 1675 there were many experienced Russian officers already serving in the Army; by 1695 Russians served in large numbers at all levels in new-formation units. In 1708 the majority of officers in all the tsar’s regiments were ethnic Russians or came from other of his subjects. Peter insisted on this, but also that no fewer than one third of his officers during the Great Northern War (1700–1721) must be experienced foreigners. Russian officers, too, were by then experienced in war, and were well trained in modern weapons and the new methods of warfare which Peter imported from Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United Provinces. In contrast, 15% of all Polish officers in 1650 were foreign. This number was important, however, since most Polish officers in the “National Contingent” army served a maximum of 10 years, and many did fewer than that. The Austrian Hofkriegsrat faced a much different problem, that of inherited officer commissions. It made some progress in professionalizing the officer corps when it abolished the sale of officer commissions early in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), during the presidency of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Hereditary promotions and sales of at least some commissions were standard for many middle-ranking officers and for most senior positions in most European armies of this era. Commissions were treated, and traded, as military investments. Some British Army officer commissions remained for sale well into the 19th century, until after the Crimean War. This probably reflected the position and prolonged influence of the Duke of Wellington, a man both rich and talented, who purchased a commission as lieutenant-colonel at age 23. The other problem in England, resolved only by the Glorious Revolution and complete military triumph of 338

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Protestantism across all Three Kingdoms in 1691, was the tendency of Charles II and his brother James II to appoint officers from a narrow slice of the population solely on the basis of Catholic loyalties rather than military competence. By 1688 about 10% of English officers were Catholics. Virtually all officers in Ireland under James were Catholic, following a purge of the Irish establishment by the Earl of Tyrconnel. Many Protestant officers deeply resented this assault on the property rights of their purchased commissions and deserted to William III within hours or days of his landing in England. The new king did not readily trust such men, however, and for years afterward, continued to rely on fellow Dutchmen or on German and other mercenaries. He truly trusted only those English and Scots officers who had previously served him in the Anglo-Dutch Brigade. For instance, Marlborough came under deep suspicion of divided loyalty and was imprisoned for a time. This situation changed slowly during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). In 1706 a “Board of General Officers” was established to impose penalties or hear courts-martial of delinquent officers. This introduced a fresh element of professionalism to the British Army, even for gentlemen-officers. The process of professionalization of the officer corps was much further and earlier advanced in France under Louvois and Louis XIV than in any other country of the time. The traditional independence of noble officers in France was severely eroded after the failure of their effort to retain privileges of their class, and the active treason of several senior commanders during the rebellion of the Fronde. Fresh standards were then imposed on even the most senior officers. The most important reform was to partly open the French officer “corps” (the word did not actually yet apply in its modern sense) to entry by men of low birth but real ability, though an old refusal of French nobles to serve under or to obey men who were regarded as social inferiors, even if they were also of noble birth, was slowly overcome. In 1675 Louis issued an “ordre de tableau” setting up a seniority list for French maréchals (of whom 51 were created between 1643 and 1715) to eliminate conflicts of command authority based on social rather than military rank. This was part of a larger professionalization and reform undertaken by Louis and Louvois that established the modern system of ranks. Nobles still dominated the top commands: only 1 out of every 15 French generals who served under Louis XIV was of non-noble birth. The upper-class origin of most senior officers and many middle ranks was reflected in an aristocratic code of values and conduct that required displays of conspicuous courage under fire, and encouraged frequent dueling in peacetime, a practice that survived multiple royal bans. At its height, the French Army under Louis XIV had over 20,000 officers. Most were drawn from roughly 50,000 noble families of France. Others came from recently ennobled bourgeoisie, who eagerly served in the many new line regiments Louis raised during his long wars. These men paid to equip and support a new regiment in return for the privilege of its colonelcy. This led to extensive patronage networks organized around colonelcies. That trend was reinforced by the king’s insistence on state service by the old nobility, who built their own client networks in the regiments. Even among aristocratic officers, by the end of this period, an emerging professionalism ensured higher levels of 339

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political loyalty to the king than in past wars. Enhanced professionalism also cut back on otherwise endemic officer quarrels, dueling, and absenteeism. Louvois found a way around purchased commissions by introducing two new, non-purchasable appointments (officially, these were not yet considered ranks): major and lieutenant-colonel. Even so, independent wealth remained key to an officer’s rise in station since he was expected to partly equip and maintain his company or regiment. To recover these costs, a colonel or captain fully expected to milk his regiment through creative accounts. Commissions from royal agents were issued to raise, command, and supply troops, partly replacing the system of purchase of companies and regiments by noblemen, though success in this regard was largely confined to the elite Gardes du Corps. A young officer’s education also changed markedly in this era in France. Before the reforms made by Louvois, all training was received on-the-job, in active duty with one’s regiment. Louvois changed this in several ways. He designated certain musketeer units as training locales for young officers, especially for future staff officers. Thus, in 1679, when an artillery school was founded, it was attached to the “Fusiliers du Roi,” originally a musketeer regiment that was renamed the “Royal-Artillerie” in 1693. This change in the artillery was a vast improvement on civilian contractors hired by the French Army until 1672 to handle the big guns. Contractors had been paid for each cannon they brought into action on a battlefield or during a siege, which was no proper basis for sustaining a professional corps of cannoneers. In 1682 Louvois set up nine training companies for officer-cadets in various frontier towns. These trained young men in arms, drill, and riding, as well as in dancing, fencing, and other social skills deemed crucial (in most armies, into the early 20th century) to officer status. Cadets also studied mathematics, geography, and map reading, and those who chose to do so indulged art, music, and literature. The next year, officers in training for whom very high expectations were held were attached to the Régiment du Roi, and from 1684 to other regiments of Louis’ household (“Maison du Roi”) regiments. Similarly, a “Ritterakademie” was established for officers of the Prussian Army, though its curriculum was not as advanced in this era as in the French academies. See also Banner system; barracks; British establishment; Cebici bazi; chavush; commissaire ordinaire de l’artillerie; Çorbasi; firemaster; governor; half-pay; hetman; Janissary Corps; kuls; lieutenant du roi; Master-General of the Ordnance; military discipline; petty officers; quartermaster; ranks (at sea); ranks (on land); reduce; serdar; skulking way of war; tarpaulin; tranchée général; tranchée major; warrant officer; Yeniçeri AOasi. off reckonings. A fragment of a British soldier’s daily pay (about tuppence, or one-quarter) deducted from his account to provide for clothes, soldierly accouterments, and sword. Any surplus was kept by the colonel of the regiment unless the clothes or equipment were substandard or, like “short jackets” worn in the tropics, took less cloth than normal to make. What was left was subsistence money. Okhmativ, Battle of (January 29, 1655). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). 340

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Öland, Battle of (June 1, 1676). See Juel, Niels; Scanian War (1674–1679); Tromp, Cornelius van. Old Believers (Raskolniki). Russian Orthodox who refused to accept the reforms or rulings of the Council convened by Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681), symbolized for many by a change in the number of fingers used to make the sign of the cross. Old Belief clung to rituals that had been practiced for centuries. Some estimates suggest that Old Believers constituted 20% of the Russian population by the end of the 17th century. They were severely persecuted in tsarist Russia starting with the reign of Alexis, but especially once Peter I simultaneously introduced centralizing and secularizing reforms. In turn, Old Believers regarded Peter as an utterly repulsive figure for his vulgar and sacrilegious personal behavior. They were horrified by his overtly Western (that is, foreign) attitudes and dress, which alike flouted Orthodox traditions. All this was symbolized by Peter’s smashing of the strel’sty but even more by a 1705 decree commanding enforced shaving of the beards, which “God had given men,” as well as his ban on Orthodox costume. Also giving great offense were stories (mostly true) of his semi-private, drunken, mock “Synods,” adolescent Saturnalia which he continued well into his adult lifetime. These mocked and belittled the Church and all religious belief, old, new, Orthodox, and Catholic. Old Believers objected to Peter’s changing of the Russian calendar to the Julian form, and to his decree that marking of the New Year must move from September to January 1. In 1700 an Old Belief leader denounced Peter as the “anti-Christ.” From 1707–1709, Old Belief resistance helped feed a Cossack rebellion led by ataman Kondratay Bulavin (c. 1660–1708), which swept into arms perhaps 100,000 peasants. The cult-like character of the insurrection was revealed in bloody massacres but even more by several mass suicides. The rising was crushed by Peter’s better-trained and more-disciplined soldiers and ruthless generals. In 1716 Peter introduced double taxation of all Old Believers (“the beard tax”), and required them to wear distinctive markings intended to subject them to public ridicule. Those were more effective methods over time in driving Old Belief underground than earlier methods of burning priests at the stake or beating Old Belief peasants with knouts. Yet, they proved insufficient to wholly eradicate sincere and widespread, if ignorant and reactionary, peasant devotion. Many Old Believers left for Siberia to avoid the reach of an impious tsar. In 1724 Peter forbade that escape from his imperial will, too. Old Dessauer. See Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747). Old Pretender. See Stuart, James. Oliwa (Oliva), Peace of (May 3, 1660). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Olkieniki, Battle of (November 9/19, 1700). The Sapiehas faction (Smolensk boyars, or high nobility) was defeated by Lithuanian nobles in a battle signaling the start of great turmoil in the Baltic that was to accompany the Great 341

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Northern War (1700–1721). Some 12,000 minor gentry formed the “Confederacy of Olkieniki” that April, angry over an attack on two of their princes in Wilno. They were opposed by about 3,000 Sapiehas in battle, who were routed despite having the only cannon on the field. After the fight, the lesser nobles looted the estates of the Sapiehas, which led to fighting with thousands of serfs. opening of the trenches. The moment when digging commenced in a siege, and the formal date from which the duration of a siege was counted. It usually came a few days after the initial investment. See also parallels; siege warfare. open order. See drill. Oran. Although Muslims were barred by Spanish law from serving in the armed forces of Oran, the need for troops to defend this North African trade post and its hinterland was so great the provision was ignored in practice. Jews residing in Oran were also tolerated to the end of the 17th century, unlike in the Spanish homeland, where Jews were banished and severely persecuted by the Inquisition from the 15th century. In 1708 Oran was seized from Spain by an Ottoman army. Spain regained possession in 1732. Orange, Principality of. The hereditary lands of the dukes of Orange, forming a small enclave within France along the Rhône. Orange was seized by Louis XIV in 1680, an expansion that accompanied but was unconnected to his strategy of forced “reunions” that led to the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). It was formally ceded to France under terms of the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697). The transfer was confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713). See also William III. Orangists. The faction within the United Provinces that supported the claims of the House of Orange for supreme leadership in both the political and military spheres; their most fanatic adherents sought a kingship for William III (then still Prince of Orange). They were originally mostly religious in inspiration, Dutch Calvinists of the Voetian sect. By 1670 a newly secular, republican Orangism began to displace the religious faction. Orangists were consistently opposed by the Regents of Holland, especially Jan de Witt. That struggle was won by Orangists with eclipse of the States’ party faction as a result of de Witt’s failure to anticipate the Dutch War (1672–1678) and his consequent murder. See also Dutch Army; Westminster, Treaty of (April 12/22, 1654). Ordinary. In the Royal Navy in the 17th–19th centuries, this important revenue stream was part of the annual Navy Estimates which were supposed to provide sums to cover the costs of routine (peacetime) activities of the various fleets. A secondary meaning was the overall reserve of ships, along with the permanent staff, buildings, and facilities needed to keep them in good repair. See also standing officers. 342

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Ordnance Board. See Royal Navy. ordre de tableau. See officers. ordu bazar. An Ottoman commissariat or traveling army market where food was bought from local villages at fair prices, and craftsmen repaired boots, fixed weapons, cut hair, dressed wounds or nursed the sick, sewed uniforms, made or repaired saddles, and fixed muskets or sharpened swords. The representatives of as many as 28 crafts could be found at such bazaars, occupying dozens of large tents. They were required to present themselves and their trades to the Army while on campaign. They were well compensated for this trouble. See also logistics; military medicine. orillon. “ear work.” A masonry shoulder of a bastion that projected from its end to screen its flank (“retired flank”) and protect defenders from enfilade fire. Ormonde, Duke of (1665–1745). Né James Butler. Ormonde began life as an avowed Tory, fighting for William III in Ireland following the Glorious Revolution and subsequently serving Queen Anne. He took over command of British troops fighting on the Continent after Marlborough’s dismissal from command in 1711. But Ormonde was under orders to disengage from fighting, not to seek battle. It was Ormonde who pulled all British troops back to their camp near Brussels prior to Prince Eugene of Savoy’s failure to relieve at Denain (July 13/24, 1712). In the meantime, Ormonde’s politics evolved in a strange direction, away from the Tory fold into outright Jacobite loyalties. For this he was removed from command in 1714. The next year, he was impeached by the Whigs and fled into exile in France. Orta. A large unit within the Janissary Corps, roughly akin to a battalion. Ortenbach, Battle of (July 23, 1678). After his victory over the Imperial vanguard at Rheinfeld (July 6, 1678), François Créqui force-marched his army north and surprised the Imperial main force at Ortenbach, where it had been led by Charles V of Lorraine. The Imperials were not fully assembled when Créqui struck. The first Imperial infantry line broke. Supported by exhausted cavalry just back from days of chasing the French, a new Imperial line was formed by arriving infantry units and held firm against fresh assaults. The battle was therefore inconclusive. See also Dutch War (1672–1678). otaman: See hetman. Ottoman Army. See alti bölük sipahileri; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1697); Azaps; beldar; Candia, siege of (1666–1669); cebelu; cebici bazi; Cebicis; Derbençi; Eyâlet Askerleri; ghazi; grand vezier; Janissary corps; Kapikulu Askerleri; kuls; laPimci; military music; ordu bazar; Ottoman Empire; OttomanVenetian War (1645–1669); Ottoman warfare; rations; Raya; Saka; sarica; sekban; 343

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serdar; Serdengeçti; silahdars; sipahis; timariots; türedi askeri; uniforms; Vienna, siege of (July 14-September 12, 1683); Yeniçeri AOasi; Zenta, Battle of (September 1/11, 1697). Ottoman Empire. Following the Thirteen Years’ War (1593–1606) with Austria, over the first half of the 17th century, the Ottomans were mostly relieved of war along their western frontier by the agonizing descent of the Austrian Habsburgs into the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The Hungarian frontier thus remained at peace (without large-scale or declared war) from 1606–1660. Meanwhile, the Ottomans had to contend with chronic war or preparation for war with Safavid Iran on their eastern frontier. And they waged a hard naval conflict with Venice in the Mediterranean during the OttomanVenetian War (1645–1669). That fight was primarily over control of Crete and eastern Mediterranean trade, a tension that continued to engage the Sublime Porte in on-and-off war with Venice through 1718. By 1650 the Ottoman Empire had reached the outer logistical and administrative limits of its expansion, and was increasingly devoted to defense of the large territories it had previously conquered. The empire was one of the largest states in the world at 800,000 square miles and 20 million inhabitants. Unfortunately, for several generations more, the Empire came under the driving influence of a succession of ruthless and highly aggressive grand veziers from the Köprülü family. The first was Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (r. 1656–1661), who conducted bloody purges of his personal and political enemies at home and launched attacks against most neighboring powers. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (r. 1661–1676), and the latter’s brother-in-law, Kara Mustafa Pasha (r. 1676–1683). The policies of these men led Austria and much of Europe to view the Ottoman Empire as still a “ghazi” state intent on jihad into Europe. In fact, the causes of Ottoman aggression were more “normal” ones of internal insecurity and a desire to defect unrest outward toward traditional enemies. The impulse to aggressive war ended far sooner than the impression it created: much of Europe came to view the Ottomans as a lasting and direct security threat where previously it had been a distant and unknown country. Frontier war heated up in the Militargrenze and the Balkans from the 1660s. Ottoman armies overran Transylvania in 1660–1661, and attacked the Slovak fortresses of Uyvar and Nograd in late 1663. They next struck deep into southwest Hungary, but were turned back—as much or more by luck than skill—at St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664). Even so, the Sublime Porte secured a highly favorable regional settlement from the Habsburgs at Vasvár in 1664. This was followed by the Ottoman-Polish War (1672–1676). The impression of Ottoman aggression was solidified by the huge and, in retrospect, foolhardy gamble undertaken by Grand Vezier Kara Mustafa Pasha when he struck out for Vienna at the start of the Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). He did so in good measure to redirect the attention and energy of mutinous elements of a pampered military, the household troops of the Kapikulu Askerleri, toward a traditional external enemy. The conflict began 344

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spectacularly with the siege of Vienna (July 14–September 12, 1683), but ended in utter disaster for Kara Mustafa and the Ottoman army, routed outside Vienna and destroyed by a winter retreat through mountain snows. Upon returning to Belgrade, the grand vezier paid the ultimate price: he was executed by strangulation upon the sultan’s order. Not even that saved Sultan Mehemet IV (r. 1646–1687), who was himself deposed four years later. In just six years, Habsburg armies captured several key Ottoman forts guarding the middle Danube: Gran (1683), Neuhäusel (1685), Buda (1686), Esseg (1687), and finally Belgrade (1688). Loss of control of the Danube supply route, along with defeats in the field in the early 1690s, forced the Ottomans to abandon Croatia, Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia. Despite this deep military crisis, successive sultans were compelled by financial necessity to recruit fewer into the Janissary Corps and other household units. Instead, they made do with ill-trained but cheaper peasant levendat or türedi askeri. This was not such a hardship as once thought: through clever reallocation of fiscal resources and by raising military taxes, sultans were able to modernize and maintain an effective standing army well into the 18th century. Post facto views of so-called terminal Ottoman decline starting in the mid-17th century are no more accurate than later views about the supposed perpetual crisis of the 19th century Austrian Empire. Each imperial entity proved more resilient than is often thought and was more respected as a military power in its day than is now usually remembered. The Ottomans kept upward of 22,000 troops as an occupation force in Hungary from the mid-16th century. Most were garrisoned in key fortresses, especially the key area of the eyâlet-i Budin. This reflected an administrative aptitude for reallocating military resources to the most critical fronts, a talent also evident in contemporary France in use of strategic interior lines by Louis XIV. Once the Empire reached its maximum girth in the 17th century, sultans and grand veziers shifted resources from armies fitted out for expansion to a more defensive posture of larger frontier garrisons. Fewer troops were retained in the capital than in the 16th century. Military strength derived principally from the enormous resource base of the Empire, especially the rich province of Egypt. Another major advantage was Ottoman superiority in military administration—albeit, subject to the usual corruption and inefficiencies of any large-scale bureaucracy. That second advantage was overcome by European rivals by the end of the 17th century, but deep reserves and widespread Imperial resources permitted the Ottoman Empire to sustain its status as a Great Power well into the 18th century. It did so despite turmoil over control of the office of grand vezier, military discontent, and a succession of weak sultans. As military historian Rhoads Murphey put it, “It was precisely because it possessed such an efficient bureaucracy that the empire was capable of weathering the storms of dynastic crisis and ‘harem politics.’” This wise comment is worth remembering, given the fact that so much military history, even today, is littered with anti-Ottoman turns of phrase that reveal far more about narrow cultural and regional biases of a given writer than actual military history, including “the Turk,” “Muslim fanatics,” “oriental empire,” “Ottoman hordes,” and the like. One might imagine the reaction of an 345

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average Western reader if he or she were to encounter, in the normal course of reading military history, such comparable phrases as “infidel army,” “occidental empire,” “Christian hordes,” and so forth—equally unfortunate turns of phrase which are today found in writings by cruder historians who adopt a pro-Muslim and anti-Western viewpoint. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); war finance. Suggested Reading: Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (1999); Marshall Hodgson, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (1974); H. Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire (1978); Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (1999). Ottoman-Polish War (1672–1676). See Köprülü Ahmed Fazil; Ottoman Empire; Sobieski, Jan. Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669). An intermittent conflict spanning 24 years. It was sparked by a diplomatic row over interception of Ottoman high officials by Malta-based warships in late 1644. The Maltese were allowed to use Venetian facilities on Crete, which provoked the Sublime Porte to war with Venice (an ancient enemy). The more fundamental and persistent quarrel was over competition for control of the rich trades of the eastern Mediterranean. The conflict saw extensive fighting at sea, including several galley actions. Land combat occurred on various Mediterranean and Aegean islands, and along the coast of Dalmatia, where Venetian-hired mercenaries faced off against Ottoman regulars. The most important combined ground and naval fighting concerned control of Crete. An Ottoman invasion fleet arrived off the island in mid-1645. Janissaries and other crack Ottoman troops quickly secured several harbors and much of the country, taking Hanya (Xania) in August and Rethymnon in January 1646. There followed a three-year siege of the main Venetian garrison at Candia (Heraklion), prolonged by Venetian naval superiority and ability to resupply Crete via the water. During the siege, some Ortas of the Janissary Corps were foolishly left by their commander in the trenches while other units were given home leave. That inequity led to a predictable mutiny in late summer 1649, and to the end of the siege in September. The Ottoman Navy continued to intermittently blockade Crete after that. Venice sought to retaliate by bombardments and naval raids along the Greek and Anatolian coasts of the Ottoman Empire. Those actions led to victories by Admiral Francisco Morosini (1618–1694) over Ottoman galley fleets that sallied out in 1651 and 1656. However, the sultan’s rich war chest permitted his Navy to rebuild and modernize, whereas Venice’s limited financial resources as well as acute mercantile self-interest and awareness recommended a settlement. Another three-year siege of Candia ensued from 1666 to 1669, the last phase conducted personally by Grand Vezier Köprülü Ahmed Fazil. In a peace treaty agreed at Candia, Venice surrendered Crete to the Sublime Porte in exchange for concessions in Dalmatia. Just two small fortified islands, and a third unfortified island, remained in Venetian hands. The fight over Crete resumed 15 years later when Venice joined the anti-Ottoman “Sacra Liga” during the 346

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ongoing First Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). Given Venice’s continuing naval and financial decline, its last small islands in the eastern Mediterranean were lost to the Ottomans as a result of participation in the second Austro-Ottoman War (1715–1718). Ottoman warfare. The image of the early modern Ottoman soldier as motivated by fanatic Muslim (ghazi) belief and the Ottoman Empire as driven by a spirit of “jihad” is a caricature purveyed by generations of European historians following the siege of Vienna in 1683. More recent work has shown that Ottoman imperialism operated out of a complex web of secular as well as religious motivations and interests, with the former far more prominent than the latter after 1600. In addition, jihad was most often invoked in defense of Muslim lands from invasion, a situation that hardly presented to the Ottomans during this era. Ottoman armies were highly heterodox in terms of religious affiliation, while sultans were relatively tolerant in religious matters, as compared to most European monarchs until 1648 and to France under Louis XIV, or to Safavid Iran. Ottoman armies operating in the Balkans largely comprised local Christian soldiers, while professionals of the Janissary Corps were originally taken as boys from Christian families and raised to Islam. Crimean scouts and Tatar foragers of dubious or nominal Islamic belief were to be found in the vanguard of most Ottoman armies. Traditional sunni heavy cavalry from Anatolia formed a core part of the Army, but other Muslim troops were drawn from sufi or regional sects. It is difficult to see how such diverse armies could be driven by a supposed fanatic devotion to Islam. It seems far more likely that they were moved by more common early modern interests such as martial glory and imperial expansion, and mundane concerns of acquiring land and plunder. There is considerable evidence to suggest that, just like European sappers or miners who worked harder and longer the more coin they were paid, the prime motivator for most Ottoman soldiers was money rather than devotion to the teachings of Mohamed. By the end of the 16th century, the distance of the western frontier from Constantinople meant that local raiding and private wars in the Militargrenze prevailed, sometimes even against the wishes of the sultan. Large armies and prolonged campaigns were still fought into the mid-16th century, though during the first half of the 17th century, there was mostly peace along the frontier with Europe as the Ottomans dealt first and foremost with a revived, militarily reformed, and aggressive Safavid Iran. The pattern of Ottoman warfare was different in the east. There, greater distances from supply depots, harsher climate, and rougher terrain conditions, along with widespread public disapproval of making war on fellow Muslims, placed sharp limits not just on Ottoman generals but on the capacity of armies to sustain military operations. A second hoary myth—that the Ottomans progressively fell behind the West in military technology and capabilities after c. 1500—also has been exposed. Most historians of Ottoman warfare now agree that significant technological divergence did not begin until c. 1680. Moreover, before the 18th century, the Ottomans were more 347

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advanced than Europe in military organization, administration, logistics, and troop specialization. In addition to universal division of all early modern militaries into infantry, cavalry, and artillery, the Ottomans had a sophisticated commissariat and supply system (“menzil-hane” depots), a transportation service, and even special assault commandos (Serdengeçti). More Ottoman troops were well-trained professionals rather than last-minute seasonal conscripts or mercenaries, as was often the case in Europe until the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). While Tatar allies moved ahead in a light cavalry screen, the main Ottoman armies and siege trains followed at a ponderous rate. This meant that Ottoman campaigns seldom, if ever, achieved strategic surprise. Military historian Rhoads Murphey has identified several other important material and fiscal constraints on Ottoman warfare in this period. Materially, military technology was the least constraining factor as the Ottomans continued to import “renegade” military engineers from Europe and more generally kept pace with military developments in the West prior to the late 17th century. War finance was far more restrictive than technology. Yet, the Ottomans had major advantages over their enemies in the West and over Safavid Iran in this area, too. A greater constraint on Ottoman operations was climate, especially the heat of the eastern deserts of Iraq and Iran. Limited fodder for huge timariot cavalry armies along with difficult terrain restricted operations in the Balkans. Seasonal rains and the cycle of the growing season placed sharp logistical limits on military operations, as they did on all early modern armies, confining activity to the six months between May and November. All in all, the Ottoman military was more Habsburg than French in its military and ethnic diversity and internal divisions, its size and ineluctable clumsiness, and the costs and distractions of multiple fronts and wars. The Habsburgs, too, governed a successful cosmopolitan empire that was often underestimated in its military and organizational capabilities by foreign observers and later historians. All that suggests that relative military decline of the Ottoman Empire did not set in before 1739. Nor was it as great as suggested by earlier European historians. Suggested Reading: Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (1999). Oudenarde, Battle of (June 30/July 11, 1708). Marlborough and Prince Eugene linked their Anglo-Dutch (and German) armies in a single mass of 80,000 men in pursuit of Vendôme, with 85,000 French. The pursuit of Vendôme by the Allied generals led to a rare battle of encounter in which massive armies stumbled into each other, engaging piecemeal as each regiment of infantry or squadron of cavalry arrived on the field. As a result, probably no more than 60,000 men on either side actually made it into the battle. The fight began as the cavalry screens met. The Allied advance guard, under General William Cadogan, brushed into the French rear guard while the bulk of both armies was still strung out on the march. Troops from the main armies hurried to the sound of the guns coming from the cavalry fight of the advance and rear guard, which had become a mêlée. Caught by surprise by this chance 348

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encounter made while crossing their armies over the Scheldt, Marlborough and Eugene still reinforced and formed battle lines with greater alacrity than Vendôme and his subcommanders. With most artillery too far away from the fight to be deployed by either army, the battle was mostly an infantry and cavalry affair. By early evening, the French were forced back at the center and were near defeat on either flank. Eugene and Marlborough sought to envelop the entire French line and cut off all possible retreat. Only nightfall permitted a mass escape by survivors of Vendôme’s beaten army. Casualty estimates vary from 8,000–15,000 for the French and their Spanish allies, with a more reliable figure of 3,000 killed and wounded on the Allied side. outworks. See crownwork; front; hornwork; ravelins; redan.

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P pacholeks. Retainers attached to the “comrades” (towarzysz) who formed the core unit of a poczet of the Polish Army. Pagan, Blaise François, compte de (1604–1665). French military engineer. His elegant traces were hugely influential, not least on Vauban, and his designs thus provoked a minor revolution in fortification planning. Pagan’s ideas became the basis for most French military architecture of the late 17th century and early 18th century, with publication of his “Les fortifications du compte de Pagan.” Vauban’s so-called “first system” was essentially the method laid out by Pagan. palanka. See çit palankasi. Palatinate. See Holy Roman Empire; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689); War of the Reunions (1683–1684); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689). A precursor to the great devastation came in 1674, when maréchal Turenne and local French fortress commanders carried out a broad and severe campaign of executions of villages that would not pay contributions to French satisfaction. A secondary motive was to protect the fortress of Philippsburg by denying food and fodder to any Imperial army in the area. That destruction of the fruits of thirty years of rebuilding following the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) provoked bitter and cruel reprisals by dispossessed and desperate German peasants, known by the pejorative Schnapphahns (“highwaymen”). At the start of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), French troops again moved into the Palatinate to carry out their usual burning and executions in order to enforce contributions to their upkeep and deny the region to enemy armies.

Palermo, Battle of

Within two months, a new policy took shape in which the French tried, with explicit approval from Louis XIV, to methodically destroy (“faire bien ruiner”) whole cities and towns and effectively plow them under for good, starting with Mannheim. With his characteristic savagery, Louvois planned the devastation on a map, down to individual chateaux marked for burning. The major part of the devastation was delayed until the spring and summer campaigns of 1689, with forced laborers made to destroy their own homes and burn their own fields and towns. After Mannheim was gutted, it was Heidelberg’s time to burn, then Oppenheim, Worms, Speyer, and Bingen. All told, over 20 large towns and many hundreds of villages were destroyed. As before, dehoused German peasants and burned-out townsfolk formed bands of Schnapphahns to ambush French patrols and convoys. Each side committed the common atrocities and cruel reprisals of small war. But as these took place on German soil, all Europe was reminded of the appalling destruction of the wars of religion, and most observers were repelled and disgusted by French behavior. The devastation of the Palatinate, and parts of Baden and Württemberg, hence created antagonism to Louis so intense that it helped shape the great anti-French coalitions and wars that followed, to 1714. Beyond that, it left a Franco-German legacy so bitter it influenced certain regional conflicts into the 20th century. Still, John A. Lynn argues that even this was a defensive policy, a brutal necessity on the part of Louis who only “meant to make it as hard as possible for [Germans] to attack France by . . . clearing a firebreak to the north and east of the French fortress line.” That assertion strikes this author as carrying far too much water for the king, and taking too far the thesis that upholds Louis as essentially territorially satiated and strategically on the defensive after 1675. It seems fairer to say that Louis XIV never wanted peace except on terms that he set, and that nearly to the end of his reign he was prepared to make war and destroy entire regions of Europe to get those terms. If that was a peace policy, then Louis’ idea of peace was a humbug. Palermo, Battle of (June 2, 1676). A naval battle of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Following a victory by 30 French sail and 7 fireships at Augusta (April 22, 1676), off the coast of Sicily, Louis XIV also sent his main galley fleet to Sicily. As many as 25 galleys joined 28 French ships of sail to attack an Allied fleet in Palermo harbor. They found 29 Spanish and Dutch sail and 9 Allied galleys in the harbor, almost all still at anchor. The French pounded the Palermo docks and the Allied fleet, and then sent fireships into the harbor. Together, these actions destroyed a large number of enemy ships and accidentally set the town alight. This fight finished Spain as a Mediterranean naval power, at least until the end of the Dutch War. palisade. A timber fence made from triangular, sharpened stakes about 20 inches in diameter and 8–10 feet high. The perimeter formed by a palisade was called the “tambour.” Loopholes and embrasures were cut in the palisades of American timber forts, which were little more than palisades in their entirety. These openings let musketeers and cannon, respectively, return fire. In field fortification in Europe, a palisade was normally erected on a hilltop or artificial mound of 352

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earth formed from spill taken from a surrounding ditch. In fixed works, a palisade protected the far side of the covered way. If placed on the crest, as was common practice before the 18th century, it was easily bashed apart by enemy shot. For this reason, later palisades were embedded in the banquette, projecting slightly above the parapet so as to promise wounds or even capital injury to attacking infantry. Instead of loopholes, stakes were spaced several inches apart to allow musketeers standing on the banquette to fire between them. Additionally, iron spikes were interspersed between the stakes to discourage enemies from stepping onto the crossbeam of the upper palisade prior to jumping down to the banquette. Because of their wooden composition, palisades were easily corrupted by weather. Therefore, they were only erected pending the likely or known onset of a siege. Some “double palisades” were built by placing a second set of stakes facing rearward from near the foot of the forward-facing palisade. Pancerna cavalry. “Armored cavalry,” in Polish: “jazda pancerna.” Before 1648, they were known as “Cossack cavalry” (“jazda kozacka”) because they originated from Cossack hosts. The term “Cossack” later came to mean any horse soldier, registered or not, who was not a member of the szlachta. From 1648, “Pancerna” was used for Polish medium cavalry to distinguish them from Zaporozhian and other Cossack light cavalry. They used sabers in preference to lances, but still employed bows and short spears; many wore little or no armor. They were much cheaper to recruit than traditional and elaborate Polish hussars, whom the Pancerna replaced over the course of the 17th century until they constituted 80% of Polish cavalry. By 1650, the Pancerna were no longer principally Cossack in origin. Most were ethnic Poles who rode and fought in Cossack style. They sometimes employed the caracole in battle, long after that tactic was abandoned elsewhere. Generally, however, they rode on the flanks of the infantry in combat and in front of infantry columns on the move. The same style of cavalry in Lithuania was known as “Petyhorcy.” Papier Timbré rebellion (1675). A tax revolt by French peasants and towns in western France that was provoked by the wartime taxes imposed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Louis XIV—specifically, a stamped paper tax (“papier timbré”). This major peasant rebellion had the aura of a jacquerie, because noble houses and estates were attacked as well as revenue men. In Brittany, where Louis’ postrebellion retribution was the most severe, the Papier Timbré revolt was called the rising of the “Bonnets Rouges.” parados. A rearward-facing parapet. parallels. A singular innovation in trench work, first made by Vauban during the siege of Maastricht in 1673. Parallels were wide and deep transverse trenches forming great, parallel arcs in front of a fortress. From each parallel sprang communications and approach trenches. This method replaced traditional lines of circumvallation with an intricate web of transverses connected by 353

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shorter inner trenches, the whole system starting directly from the lines of contravallation. This greatly reduced time and labor while concentrating protecting troops in an army of observation, rather than scattering them too thinly over elongated exterior lines. The opening of the trenches was done at night by several thousand laborers and engineers, who fanned out and began to dig the first parallel, tentatively protected by darkness and “tracing fascines.” Trenches began at about 600–700 meters beyond the covered way. Engineers hurried to erect rudimentary redoubts before dawn, along with a banquette for friendly musketeers who took up position facing the fortress at first light. The first parallel was widened to 10 feet and deepened to a comfortable firing position of 4 1/2 feet, usually within a week. Once completed, the first parallel provided solid defensive lines against any sally by the garrison, while permitting attackers more protection while they sited the first of several rings of heavy and medium batteries. These first artillery positions were dug at a range of about 600 meters, or just in front of the first parallel. Meanwhile, work began on the first set of zig-zags, or approach trenches, that cut through the parapet in several places. These were the longest (at about 40 meters per zig and zag) of all zig-zag trenches. An initial bombardment began while this spade work was under way. Mortars shelled the town while cannon pounded the covered way, ramparts, and ravelins to clear those works of infantry and dismount any cannon. When the first zig-zags reached a point 250–300 meters from the fortress, laborers and engineers fanned out to build the second parallel. They often did this utilizing a “flying sap,” which afforded some extra protection as they started three zig-zags: one aimed at the targeted ravelin and one each at its flanking bastions. They next sited fresh batteries along the second parallel to add weight of shot and shell to the active batteries of the first parallel. This was the most dangerous time for sappers, as the garrison brought them under heavy and concentrated fire and sometimes made sorties against saps and batteries. The third set of zig-zags were the shortest, taking the most acute angles as they gained ground against threat of close enfilade. The third parallel was started close to the bastions and curtains, at just 30–50 meters from the fortress. New forward batteries were built, and heavy guns moved in to shatter the last cannons of the fortress and smash ramparts at point-blank range. Lighter pieces were used to clear the ramparts of infantry defenders—all preparatory to capturing the covered way. But as battered as the defenders might be, they were far from helpless. It was much easier to enfilade the approaching saps, to make sorties, and to dig countermines at this stage of a siege. Defenders would meet an assault by massed infantry on the covered way with volley fire and small-caliber cannon. The assault on the covered way was always the bloodiest part of any siege, by far. As many or more men might be killed and wounded as in all other phases of the siege combined. Casualties on both sides often equaled or surpassed those of a sizeable battle. The descent of the ditch and assault through the breach were the last acts of a bloody drama, if the survivors of the garrison refused to submit prior to this final attack. See also mortar; perrier. Suggested Reading: Christopher Duffy, Fire and Stone (2006). 354

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parapet. A strong, earthen wall marking the outer edge of defensive fortifications or siege works. In field works, a parapet was generally an earthen ridge erected to protect soldiers and saps from fire coming from the fortress. In fixed fortifications, the parapet surmounted a stout earthen rampart and was held in place by turf sodded over packed earth. Brick or masonry was shunned, because stone splinters from enemy shot would present a grave danger to a position normally tight with infantry standing on, and firing from, the banquette. By influential order of Vauban, 18th-century designs settled the rear of the parapet at a standard 4.5 feet above the banquette, to form a natural firing rest. The main purpose of the parapet was to screen and shelter defending musketeers and cannon (on the terreplein to the rear) and to absorb enemy shot, musket balls, and other missile fire. Thickness varied, but some parapets approached 20 feet of piled earth at the crest. Parapets were most often built at right angles to the rest of the work and to ditches that crossed in front of them. This facilitated musketeers easily sweeping the ditch and ground with enfilade fire. Cannon added to that fire when embrasures were cut through the parapet to accommodate trundling and arcing of big guns. A forward parapet and banquette marked the route of the covered way. See also artillery; cavalier de tranche; defilade; defilement; flintlock firearms; guérite; matchlock; military medicine; musketoon; musket shot; razing the works; siege warfare. parley. To discuss terms with an opposing army while under an agreed truce. Normally, this led to discussion of appropriate terms of surrender, including the agreed-upon time frame of any following armistice to follow, the status of prisoners and civilians (as during a siege), whether weapons and military honors might be kept by the defeated army or must be laid down, and so forth. A parley was usually beaten by drum, or called by trumpet. See also beat the chamade. partisan war. See petite guerre. Partition treaties (1698 and 1699). See Louis XIV; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III. pas de charge. The call beaten by French infantry drummers to instruct troops to advance at a quickstep. pas des souris. “Mouse steps.” A tight set of steps through the revetment of the counterscarp by which defenders passed through to reach the covered way. They were used by sentries and for communications with rearward works and defenders. passe volant. “Gap in the muster.” No-show soldiers hired as temporary rankers to fill in gaps in the muster of a company of regulars during inspection. Later, their names might be retained on the muster roll so that regimental officers could collect extra pay. See also military discipline.

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peasants. See absolutism; Alexis; Angelets rebellion (1669–1672); askeri; Audijos rebellion (1663); Barbets; Batoh (1652); Blenheim (1704); Bonnets Rouges rebellion (1675); Brandenburg; Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705); corvée; Cossacks; drill; Dutch War (1672–1678); Friedrich-Wilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Haiduks; Huguenots; impressment; Ireland; Japan; Kapikulu Askerleri; Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); levend/levendat; logistics; Louis XIV; Lustucru rebellion (1662); Marathas; Messinian rebellion; military discipline; military labor; Nikon; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Old Believers; Ottoman Empire; Palatinate, devastation of the; Papier Timbré rebellion (1675); Peter I; pioneers; Polish Army; Prussian Army; pulk; Rajputs; Rákócz, Ferenc; rapparees; Raya; Razin, Stenka; Roure rebellion (1670); Russia; Russian Army; Sapiehas; Schnapphahns; Sikhs; sipahis; Spanish Navy; standing army; strel’sty; Swedish Army; szlachta; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); türedi askeri; Turenne, Henri; war finance; Warsaw, Battle of (1656). pell-mell. A British term for a mêlée at sea. At root, this tactic—which was more often discussed than practiced—assumed that sea fights were decided by individual ships or squadrons. As the concept of line of battle matured and permanent fighting instructions were issued, the notion of seeking a pell-mell was actively discouraged. Nevertheless, they sometimes occurred in smaller actions. During a true mêlée, or pell-mell, all effort would be made to rake the enemy, while crews and marines engaged with every conceivable shortrange weapon and small arms, from swivel guns to grenades, muskets, and pistols. pendant. See flags. Penn, William (1621–1670). English admiral. See also fighting instructions. pennant. See flags; ranks (at sea). Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703). Clerk of the Acts of the King’s Ships. Pepys started as a Navy clerk in 1660, but he eventually rose to the top of the naval civil service due to the patronage of his cousin, Sir Edward Montagu (Earl of Sandwich). In 1672 he became Secretary of the Admiralty. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1679, but was soon accused of treason (betraying secrets to the French) and imprisoned in the Tower. He was cleared and freed the next year. Pepys rejoined the Admiralty in 1684, but he was forced out by the Glorious Revolution and the ascendancy of William III. While in the Admiralty he made a fortune from the usual graft, but also reshaped the Restoration Navy, not least by introducing examinations for aspirant naval officers and improving English cartography, victualing, and ship design. Pepys is most important for these and other naval reforms and for the warships he built, but more famous for his remarkable diary recounting such events as the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, along with the candid thoughts and lustful appetites of an ambitious and highly talented young man. The diary was written in cipher. It was not 356

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deciphered and published until a century after his death, and not in its entirety until after World War II. See also masts; military medicine. Pereiaslav, Treaty of (1654). See Cossacks. perrier. A stone-throwing mortar. It was a large-caliber (16–18 inches in bore diameter) mortar loaded with barrows of rocks. If caught beneath the shower of hundreds of fist-sized stones thrown by a perrier, there was no escaping injury or death. It was an anti-personnel weapon of medieval pedigree that was re-invented in a 17th-century version by Vauban, for use at close-quarters. His perriers were usually fired from batteries sited along the innermost, or third parallel. petard. A cone-shaped, hollow bomb dating to the late 16th-century French wars of religion. It was used to blow apart a fortified gate or blast a hole in the curtain wall. The petard was attached to a heavy beam and wheeled on a small barrow-like carriage, always at night, to abut the gate or curtain. After being screwed tight or hung against the gate, its fuse was lighted by a “petardier” who then ran away, not always with success. It was a weapon seldom used by the turn of the 18th century. Shakespeare famously wrote in 1604: “For tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar” (Hamlet III/iv). Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725). “The Great.” Peter was made co-tsar on June 25, 1682, along with his elder half-brother, Ivan (d. 1696). He was just ten, and therefore initially reigned under the regency of his sister, Sophia (r. 1682–1689). When the strel’sty—traditional palace guards of the tsars—revolted and killed dozens within the Kremlin walls and before Peter’s eyes, including one of his uncles, Peter fled Moscow (August 6–7, 1689). He was seventeen. The following month he returned to the Kremlin and seized full power from Sophia. He deposed his sister from the regency with the help of foreign officers in the Russian service, with whom, despite his youthfulness, he had already spent much time drinking and whoring in Moscow. Sophia was confined to a convent; she died there in 1704. Peter kept Ivan in place as a useful idiot, whom he forced to carry out the most numbing rituals of the court and church, sparing himself from both. The revolt of the old strel’sty preyed on Peter’s thinking about dynastic and personal security for the rest of his life, in much the same way a comparable revolt—the Fronde—and his subsequent flight in boyhood had affected Louis XIV. Peter made his first attempt at war in 1695, failing miserably in a first try to take Azov from the Ottomans. His setback in the south made him more serious about military reform and aggression, and a second expedition successfully seized Azov the next year. This victory was confirmed in treaties of alliance with Venice and the Austrian Empire. Secure in power, Peter traveled widely abroad. He left most administration to officials and all heavy rituals required by the Orthodox Church to the devout half-wit, Ivan. During his “Grand Embassy” of 1697–1698, he traveled—sometimes pseudo-incognito—to Latvia, Brandenburg, Hanover, and the United Provinces. Among the Dutch, he worked for a time as 357

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a shipwright in Amsterdam, learning the details of that trade and studying the Dutch Navy at close range. He spent four months in England, visiting factories and the Royal Navy yards at Plymouth. During this time he also sought Western allies for a war he planned to launch against the Ottoman Empire, but he found no takers for his offer. These voyages to the West confirmed Peter’s sympathies and instincts as a “westernizer” of Russia, a revolutionary from above who intended to remake his own country. Beyond fondness for things of the West, from a young age Peter had exhibited an active contempt for many things Russian. This attitude is best symbolized in his infamous “All-Drunken, All-Jesting Assembly,” which indulged ostentatiously pagan mockeries of himself, but also of the deepest religious values of Old Russia. He forced many to participate in these affairs, including Tsar Ivan, in full Orthodox regalia. Nor was this some passing adolescent pranksterism; Peter kept up these mock rituals all his adult life. He even instituted full mock offices, including a mock tsar whom he paraded around his court, and to whom he actually bent his own knee and paid homage. Peter tamed the real Orthodox Church, too. He left the office of patriarch vacant upon the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, and he abolished the office entirely in 1721. He replaced it with a church synod that was directly controlled by himself and his successors. Similarly, official imagery of the regime, as recorded on coins and in court portraits, changed from the tsar as Orthodox saint to the tsar as a new Roman emperor. This would prove to be a clear portent of foreign policy to follow. As a man of his times, Peter also did not much like Jews. As a man of his country, he distrusted Catholics, and especially despised Jesuits. Peter was physically and psychologically ill-made and full of restless tics, and his private habits were planted firmly in the bizarre. Beyond bowing to a mock tsar and hosting eccentric and often cruel bacchanalia, he was intrigued by odd genetic mutations and kept a menagerie of unfortunate physical “freaks.” He had a morbid fascination with stillbirths and details of executions, and he sometimes delayed funerals, retaining corpses to better observe corporeal decomposition. He carried instruments with him to take advantage of any opportunity he saw to pull bad teeth or operate on the wounds of living people. But for all his attention to detail, Peter failed badly in one area where most later Russian leaders excelled: he did not set up an effective police state. His autocracy was profoundly personal, rather than institutional. Indeed, much of Russia remained lawless under Peter, governed by the knout and whip hand of some landlord’s overseer and restrained only by temperament and personal conscience (if possessed). What few roads existed were not safe for unarmed travel. Russian provincial towns, internal commerce, and other elements of civilized life all suffered impoverishment accordingly. If anything, Peter’s Russia might have benefited from a few more police and from the cultivation of a climate of law. Instead, Peter was a supreme autocrat who governed in the Muscovite tradition. He merely bound the nobility and gentry tightly to his own will and person, while binding peasants and slaves to servitude under local masters. Yet, Peter was also devoted to the modernization of most aspects of Russian national life. He began with the military, building the Navy essentially from 358

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scratch to a force that at his death boasted fully 36 ships-of-the-line, 86 additional significant warships (frigates and galleys), and 280 support vessels. So dedicated was Peter to the Russian Navy that he made chopping down an oak tree a capital offense, and he also punished the collection of forest windfalls, reserving all hardwood for ship-building. He imported hundreds of foreign artisans, engineers, and mercenaries and sent Russian nobles abroad to study. He began several great factory, construction, and educational projects, founded a number of key schools and universities, launched medical institutes, and in general began the long-term modernization of Russia. In the process, he was ruthless toward any and all political opposition. He crushed the boyar gentry and strel’sty after they revolted again while he was abroad in 1698, and he cut short his travels to personally oversee a mass purge. With eager interest he attended sessions of torture and the executions of more than a thousand strel’sty, and he may have personally cut off the heads of several. He symbolically shaved the beards of all survivors of his purge to show that there was no going back to the old ways. The last strel’sty were banished from Moscow and forced to go clean-shaven and wear western dress, even in distant exile. Through all this upheaval Peter did not neglect foreign affairs. Indeed, expanding the empire and propelling Russia into the front rank of the Great Powers was his ultimate ambition as tsar. It drove all his diplomatic and domestic reforms and was his single greatest and most influential accomplishment. He was no visionary, however. He had no grand strategy of empire. Peter was more of a seat-of-the-pants opportunist. His hopes for a long-term alliance with Austria against the Ottomans were dashed by Austria’s “betrayal of Russia” at Karlowitz in 1699, when the Habsburgs and other members of the “Sacra Liga” made a separate peace with the Ottoman Empire to prepare for war with France. Instead of an expanded southern war, Peter signed a “Thirty-year Truce” with the Ottomans in 1700. Frustrated, but also temporarily secure to the south, he joined in a conspiracy with the sovereigns of Denmark and Poland to attack Sweden in the north. That started the Great Northern War (1700–1721) which fundamentally altered the balance of power in eastern Europe and forever changed Russia’s status within the European states system. Peter wanted to conquer Livonia, but his hastily assembled army of new and untrained regiments and old servitors and Cossacks was routed at Narva (November 19/30, 1700) by a far smaller force under Karl XII. In one of the least glorious moments of Peter’s reign, he fled the battlefield before the engagement even began. He then used defeat to discredit the old ways in the military and to reorganize and modernize the Russian Army. He did so on the Prussian Army model, importing military expertise and weapons from the West while building his own massive complexes of gun factories and foundries. He was allowed time to do this by Karl’s strategically unwise turn into Poland, and by outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) as a distraction to Sweden in the west. In 1702, Peter won several small battles against Swedish and Polish garrison forces in the Baltic, though his Army was mostly untrained and ill-equipped as yet. It is important to recognize Peter’s key role in the military transformation of Russia, but without falling into the trap of his own propaganda and that of later 359

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historians and nationalists. The poet Pushkin, as a notable example, froze Peter in history as the “bronze horseman,” looking fatefully westward. The process of military modernization and transformation to “new-formation” units actually began during the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) and continued for half a century before Petrine reforms were even conceived. What Peter did—and this was a critical change—was to establish a regimental and administrative structure for the Army that altered military culture and better employed the great latent military potential of the country. To secure territorial ambitions in the Baltic, Peter began construction of a second great capital, St. Petersburg, in 1703. The city cost many thousands of lives, but it served Peter’s desires to have a “window on the West” and to remove himself from claustrophobic political memories in Moscow. In this way he once more emulated Louis XIV, who escaped Paris by building Versailles. Peter finally captured Narva in 1704. Coupled with the tsar’s other ongoing aggressions and his chronic interference in Karl XII’s Polish affairs, the loss of Narva enraged the Swedish king toward Peter. Marlborough reported that this rage was mounting even as Peter was busy working out street plans and humiliating nobles in his new capital of St. Petersburg, which Karl saw as located threateningly close to the border of Swedish Karelia. His Polish affairs seemingly in order, Karl fatefully crossed the frozen Vistula on December 21, 1707/January 1, 1708, and began marching toward Moscow. Peter advanced to meet him, settling in behind fortifications at Grodno. Karl personally led 1,000 horse in a dramatic seizure of the Grodno bridge across the Niemen, easily brushing aside a Russian cavalry force. In stark personal contrast, Peter once again abandoned his men and fled, just hours before the arrival of a Swedish army. Russian forces were sent reeling in skirmish after skirmish. Peter withdrew garrisons from forward positions at Dorpat and Pskov, then forced out whole civilian populations as well. This was a portent of things to come: the tsar had made a decision to avoid battle, preferring to scorch the earth in front of the Swedes. Karl might have driven straight for Moscow, but did not. Instead, he arranged with a Cossack hetman, Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa-Koledinsky, to rendevous in Ukraine. Mazepa promised stocks of food to the Swedes and an alliance with a host of Cossacks. On August 5/16, 1708, Karl turned south to cross the Dnieper. Peter sent cavalry and dragoons ahead to burn everything in the path of the Swedes and harass them along the march, while he shadowed Karl with his main army. A brutal Russian winter also savaged the Swedes, while Peter harried their convoys and crushed would-be Cossack allies. Peter showed how much his Army’s training and fighting ability had improved by winning a dramatic and decisive victory over the starving and desperate Swedish invaders at Poltava, on June 27/July 8, 1709. Later that year, Peter returned north to personally fire the first bombs into Riga, a gesture made as punishment for a supposed slight he suffered there in 1697, during his “great embassy.” Over the next five years, Karl remained in Ottoman exile while Peter finished off Sweden’s allies in Poland and Lithuania, and then turned his guns and armies against the Ottomans. Peter was less 360

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successful in the south than in the north, however, losing Azov back to the sultan in 1711. Peter finally finished the job of reducing Riga in 1714, then went on to uproot and reduce the Swedish garrisons and take control of Livonia, Estonia, and Karelia. His victory was so complete it expelled Sweden from the ranks of the Great Powers and established Russia as its replacement in the Baltic, and in Europe as a whole. That reversal of relative power vis-à-vis Sweden was a reality on the ground by 1715, but was not confirmed by formal cession of those Baltic territories and the Karelian isthmus until Karl XII’s successors agreed to terms in the Peace of Nystad, in 1721. Restless with peace, Peter declared war on Iran the next year, seeking once more to expand his empire to the south. In 1723 his generals captured Baku, and Peter at last made peace. He spent his final years in more enlightened pursuits than war, likely owing to the security he enjoyed from his earlier ruthless destruction of enemies, rather than to his temperament or any mellowing with age. Domestically, Peter ruled with a mailed fist while maintaining a veneer of enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have approved of such an admixture of reform and repressive policies as “forcing men to be free.” In 1700 Peter was denounced as the “anti-Christ” by a leader of the Old Believers. Such an accusation was frequently made about unpopular tsars in Russian history, and it clung to Peter for the rest of his reign. In 1705 he forbade the wearing of beards by Old Believers, an edict they viewed as high sacrilege. In 1714 he made education for nobles compulsory and ordered 1,000 of them to move to St. Petersburg. Four years later he ordered double taxation of Old Believers. Over the course of his reign Peter taxed nearly everything imaginable, including beards and non-western dress. He had his own son, Alexis, who conspired against him, tried for treason—and probably ordered him to be murdered in his cell in 1718. In 1721 Peter banned the sale of individual serfs—an edict without real effect beyond his two capitals—but the next year he introduced a passport system that was required for any peasant to be able to travel. That bound the peasants even more tightly to the great estates. Under Peter’s bracing rule Russia thus remained a servile state and society with a small service nobility, a huge population of serfs and “state peasants,” and deep and brutal traditions of absolutism. Still, after Peter came decades of chaos, which always causes dead tyrants to be recalled more fondly. Historians continue to quarrel fiercely over his longterm legacy to Russia, not least because of the tension between his genuine reforms and autocratic personality and his failure to address the most fundamental inequities of early 18th-century Russian society. At the extreme, some view Peter as the progenitor of a system of centralized command administration which cast a mold for all subsequent Russian tyrants, including the Bolsheviks and Josef Stalin. Other historians see Peter as a heroic figure, the principal shaper of modern Russian nationalism, imperial greatness, military power, and international respect. He was, of course, both and neither. Peter left a large footprint on Russian history, in particular on its role as a Great Power for the first time fully engaged with the wider world. He opened relations with every country in Europe, and some in Asia. Those who came decades and centuries 361

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after him made decisions of their own, each conditioned by different times and a new set of circumstances. It is best to judge Peter in light of choices he made and the peculiar limits and possibilities of his times, and to judge his successors independently for decisions they made in their times. Suggested Reading: M. S. Anderson, Peter the Great (1978); Robert Massie, Peter the Great (1980); B. Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (1940).

petite guerre. “Little war.” A 17th-century term for what the mid-18th century called “partisan war,” which became known from the early 19th century as “guerrilla war.” This irregular form of warfare was actually more common in major European wars than were set-piece battles. Kingdoms as varied as Hungary and France kept several hundred to a few thousand partisans in border garrisons or armed villages, paying them a percentage of anything they looted. Partisans conducted wars of scouting and foraging, collecting contributions and taking hostages. They engaged in fast raids (courses), the burning of crops and villages, harassing garrisons, mountain ambushes, brutal punishments, and reprisals. The practitioners of petite guerre used multiple weapons and were often highly skilled at maneuver and deception. They almost always rode as dragoons, sometimes double-riding with light cavalry hussars. See also Grenzer; skulking way of war. petty officer. Those officers aboard a warship who did not hold either a commission or a warrant, but had responsibilities for some aspect of handling or fighting the ship that was more than that of the run-of-the-mill seaman or other members of “the people,” or general ships’ company. See also ranks (at sea). Petyhorcy cavalry. The Lithuanian equivalent of Polish Pancerna cavalry. Philip IV of Spain. See Dutch War (1672–1678); Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659); War of Devolution (1667–1668). Philip V of Spain (1683–1746, r. 1700–1746). See Carlos II; Charles VI; Louis XIV; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Philipowo, Battle of (October 22, 1656). See Second Northern War (1655–1660). Philippsburg. A key fortress guarding a bridge across a branch of the Rhine, behind soggy ground on the eastern bank. French armies routinely burned fodder on the right bank of the river to deny enemy movement against this fortress. France lost the right to garrison Philippsburg in the Treaty of Nijmegen (August 10, 1678) at the end of the Dutch War (1672–1678). At the outset of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), Philippsburg fell to 30,000 French troops led by Vauban and under the nominal command of the dauphin, Louis XIV’s son. See also Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689). 362

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pièces ambulantes. Mobile artillery pieces used by garrisons in the early days of a siege in lieu of their main cannon, which they wished to conceal and preserve until the crisis arrived. They would fire a few rounds and then displace. See also investment. pike. A long-shafted infantry spear that was once “queen of the battlefield,” as in the heyday of the Swiss square in the 14th and 15th centuries. Even the growing importance of musketeers did not immediately displace pikemen, who massed at the center of infantry formations with firearms troops on either wing, as in the Spanish tercio that dominated infantry combat during the 16th century. By the mid-17th century, the pike had been clearly displaced by the musket. It was progressively reduced to a supporting role in an evolving mix that centered on firearms troops deployed in complicated tactical formations. By 1600, the ratio of pikers to gunmen was roughly 3:2. By mid-century the ratio was only 1:2, and by 1670 there was just one piker to every three gunmen in the French Army. In 1653, Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg ordered that fully one-third of his garrison infantry should be pikers, but this actually was a clever means of converting garrisons into marching troops. The pike began to merge with the musket with the introduction of the plug bayonet from the 1640s. When the socket bayonet was invented by Vauban in 1687, the ratio of pikers to musketeers quickly dropped to 1:4, or even 1:5. In short order, pikemen were converted into additional firearms troops. Even as bayonets bristled in defense, infantry units also increased their offensive firepower by this addition of musketeers. The French Army eliminated all pikes in 1703. The British Army kept the weapon longer, deploying nine-foot half-pikes carried by company sergeants—a sign of rank more than as an active weapon. Karl XII of Sweden, often portrayed as a wholly Western military mind, insisted on retaining pikers in the Swedish Army, despite the fact that Swedish bayonets were at that time superior to any in the West. In a perversion of the tradition of his forebear, Gustavus Adolphus, Karl believed that infantry firepower was overrated. He preferred infantry charges with pikes. As late as 1708, Swedish infantry advanced without firing, arrayed in five ranks with pikers filling the second and third ranks. As they advanced, the king exhorted everyone to hold fire and use their swords, bayonets, and pikes instead. His men often ignored this command and hammered away with fusils. See also boarding pike; Ireland; rapparees. pinnace. A small warship—the largest were 60 tons—capable of serving in jagged coastal waters from which larger warships steered clear. The smallest of these auxiliary warships were not much more than a large ship’s boat. Some were towed to the Caribbean by galleons or frigates, to be used in shoreline actions and to pursue fast merchant prizes that might otherwise escape a slower mother ship. Some employed oars, as well as sails. pioneers. Unskilled laborers, usually peasants, conscripted to perform military labor at a siege site or to do the advance road work necessary to move heavy 363

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wagons and guns while on the march. Their main work was digging lines of contravallation and lines of circumvallation during a siege, followed by approach and parallel trenches. They were also employed to widen roads and carve out artillery parks. Tens of thousands were hired or conscripted for these tasks. By the late 18th century, some pioneer units achieved military status as “underminers,” or specialists in mining. pirates. English pirates operated out of the Mosquito Coast from the 1630s to the 1780s, when they were finally driven out by the Spanish. English pirates known as “filibusters” crossed the Central American isthmus to steal ships from Spanish ports and use them to harry other shipping from 1680–1681, and again from 1685–1689. Over 50 Spanish ships were lost to these pirates, who were not turned away until the local population raised funds to buy two frigates to combat them. Cimarrones in Central America also cooperated with English ships and crews against the Spanish. Other pirates operated from the coastline of the Spanish Main, or from various lightly inhabited islands in the Caribbean. This changed as island populations expanded and local economies became more stable and reliant on trade, rather than on a share of seaborne plunder brought back to port to be eaten, drunk, and whored away by pirate crews. In the second half of the century, Spain, France, England, and the United Provinces signed a series of treaties formally recognizing each other’s island possessions. A growing concentration of naval force in the hands of states and a commensurate decline in the number of private warships crippled piracy even further. In Asia, Japanese and Chinese wako¯ had terrorized Korea and China for much of the 15th and 16th centuries, sometimes mounting large-scale inland invasions. Chinese and Japanese rulers made various efforts to deal with the wako¯, or alternately accommodated them. The late Ming had undertaken major military expeditions against these pirate colonies. At the close of the 16th century, the problem was greatly eased by Chinese naval successes that pushed the last hard core pirates to the Philippines, where they attacked Manilla in 1574. Other wako¯ settled on Taiwan, which served as a major wako¯ base during the 17th century. In this period, European warships and armed merchantmen in Asian waters far more often added to the weight of piracy that preyed on local shipping. Pirates everywhere favored short-range weapons for close fighting: the blunderbuss, boarding axe, cutlass or hanger, grenade, musketoon, and pistol. Some combination of these weapons, often by the brace, was carried into boarding actions. Pirates were noted for securing multiple weapons to their bodies with silk ties or cords to prevent them falling overboard as a pirate climbed the wooden walls of some benighted ship. See also Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660); Barbary corsairs; buccaneers; flags; Tourville. pistols. See bayonet; blunderbuss; cavalry; flintlock firearms; matchlock; miquelets; musketoon; pistol shot; snaphance; wheel lock. pistol shot. A term used in the Royal Navy and the French Navy to indicate the firing of broadside guns at a range also assayed by the defending crew firing 364

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small arms. The distance was from under 25 yards to a maximum effective range of about 50 yards. See also close range; musket shot. Piyadeg˘an militia. Turkish urban militia, often run by associations of dervishes. Originally, they reinforced armies of minor Muslim states (Beyliks). Their more usual role was to keep order in larger cities and patrol and protect roads and caravan routes between major markets. places of arms. Enlarged parts of the terreplein of the covered way. Wellscreened spaces formed by salient angles in the counterscarp were called “salient places of arms.” Extra spaces formed by re-entrant angles of the counterscarp were called “re-entrant places of arms.” Places of arms were used by infantry assembling for close-fighting defense, or prior to attempting sorties in the early stages of a siege. If large enough, cavalry and lighter guns might also be protected and positioned there. The salient place of arms was normally abandoned first in the face of advancing siege works. The re-entrant place of arms might last a while longer, especially if a redoubt was improvised in its defense or heavy traverses protected it from enfilade. Artillery located in the places of arms was normally confined to small, 3- and 4-pounders. poczet. “Post.” The smallest unit in the Polish Army, equivalent to a “lance,” the medieval unit from which it evolved. It was centered on a knight, or “comrade” (towarzysz), supported by retainers (“pacholeks”) numbering anywhere from one to as many as 20 soldiers. Poland. At the mid-point of the 17th century, Poland was in great turmoil. The Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) terrified the Poles as huge armies of rebellious Cossacks ravaged large parts of the country, unstoppable by a small, poorly funded, ill-prepared, and unprofessional Polish Army. Fortunately, some Cossack leaders were bribed to remain in Ukraine. Even so, the conflict spread and deepened with the onset of the Second Northern War (1655–1660) and the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). The Polish Commonwealth was invaded from all directions during these wars: by Cossacks and Tatars from the south, several Russian armies from the east and north, and Swedes and Brandenburgers along the Baltic coast and from Livonia. It is a measure of the crisis that John II Casimir was twice forced to abandon Warsaw, the Cossacks were offered a fully autonomous Orthodox duchy, and Tsar Alexis was promised the Polish succession as a bribe to keep Russian armies from seizing the throne and country directly. Despite these desperate measures, the crisis was not resolved. John II Casimir’s effort in 1662 to take over elections though his control of the “foreign contingent” of the Polish Army, after his candidacy was rejected by the Sejm, ultimately led to civil war. At the ebb tide of Poland’s fortunes, opportunistic neighbors devised arrangements that would have partitioned the Commonwealth and erased it from the map, as would in fact happen 130 years later in three late-18th-century “partitions of Poland.” Even if 17th-century Poland never succeeded in fusing 365

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society, state, and a modern army the way other early modern sates did, it showed a military and social resilience which 18th-century Poland would not replicate. Socially, the recovery began when Casimir resorted to the expedient of proclaiming the Virgin Mary “Queen of Poland.” This act entered nationalist mythology as the rally point for Catholic Poles to rise against the Lutheran and Orthodox invaders. More important was the brutality of Cossacks, Tatars, and Russians in their occupation of Polish territory. Still, Casimir’s trick did help turn the tide of opinion in favor of a national effort to expel all foreigners. The mood included rejection of the burden of supporting “friendly” Habsburg troops with contributions. Instead, enough Poles decided that cooperation with each other was preferable to national dismemberment and occupation by foreign powers. The forced military collaboration of Poland’s noble classes and its elected king against a common set of foes held the country together. It kept Poland from following the baleful path that Germany trod during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648): falling into confessional and civil conflict, and harsh foreign occupation. Overall, constitutional stagnation and political wrangling, rather than military failure, continued to hamstring the Polish Commonwealth to the end of the 17th century. The Khmelnitsky Uprising exposed structural weaknesses of the Polish state and military. The state was still completely decentralized and dominated by provincial nobility, who were highly conscious of protecting traditional liberties against the monarch. The Army remained semi-professional at best, sustained by noble levies and a wholly archaic tax system. These problems were intensely felt as war finally came to Poland-Lithuania itself. This was a new experience after nearly a century, all of Poland’s wars having been fought outside the borders of the Commonwealth from 1558 to 1648. After the mid-17th century, Poland itself was riven by almost endless civil war, or war along its southern and eastern frontiers. Part of the problem were the Vasa dynasts, who maintained a destructive obsession with regaining their lost throne in Sweden. An attendant and aggravating problem was protracted Cossack civil war which spilled repeatedly into Polish territory and deeply affected Commonwealth affairs. Turmoil in Ukraine invited Russians and Ottomans to intervene in support of one Cossack faction or another and to take advantage of Poland’s political and military difficulties. Russians already had begun to tap into latent power resources over the second half of the 17th century, and Moscow was clearly set to emerge as a dangerous new threat to the east. Sweden remained a serious military power and threat in the north, while Brandenburg was slowly but perceptibly rising there as well. At least the Ottoman threat to Poland was pushed back, with the help of a Polish relief army led by Jan III Sobieski during the siege of Vienna (1683). On the other hand, Sobieski’s triumph in the hills at Kahlenberg, northwest of Vienna, proved to be Poland’s last great military victory. The grave danger of tolerating the Polish Commonwealth’s chronic military weakness and chaotic political and social condition was confirmed in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), which pulled Russia and Sweden deep into Polish affairs and again saw Polish lands overrun and burned by foreign armies. Polish 366

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kings were again elected and dethroned to serve foreign interests, as Poles sank into bitter civil war. Chaotic, decentralized Poland found itself entering the 18th century as so much loose barley caught between the great millstones of the neighboring powers: Sweden, Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Those states would conspire throughout the 18th century to suppress any Polish effort at military modernization or reform. These powers surrounding the Polish Commonwealth understood that their own rise or continued status as Great Powers was at least partly a consequence of Polish military weakness. Poland’s strategic and geopolitical dilemma of the 18th century—which would end in national extinction, rather than salvation—was in good measure a result of ignored warnings and squandered opportunities during the 17th century. But it also derived from an effort by the szlachta to preserve civic liberties against militarist threats from kings such as John Casimir and Augustus II, both of whom tried to use foreign troops to suppress domestic opposition. Weakened from within and threatened by predatory empires all around, Poland exited this period in an unenviable geopolitical and military condition of military, administrative, social, and national weakness. Suggested Reading: J. Fedorowicz, A Republic of Nobles (1982); K. Friedrich, The Other Prussia: Poland, Prussia, and Liberty, 1569–1772 (2000).

Polish Army. Polish infantry in the 14th and 15th centuries comprised conscripts—townsfolk and peasants—who were organized by clan or region. They were commanded by members of the szlachta, who were noblemen theoretically bound by hereditary service obligation to the king, but in fact independent and, indeed, domineering of Poland’s elective monarchy. In 1578, Stefan Báthory supplemented the country’s noble cavalry force with 2,000 permanent peasant levies know as “chosen infantry” (“Piechota wybraniecka”). These conscripts were freed from labor service demands to allow them to develop professional military skills. The wybraniecka were supplemented by ad hoc masses of peasant levies who were far less skilled. This hodgepodge infantry served until the mid-17th century, while the core of all Polish armies continued to be noble heavy cavalry and units of hussars. From the early 16th century, a force of 3,000 Polish cavalry and a few infantry served the “General Defense” (“Obrona Potoczna”) against Tatar raids into the south. This was not a true standing army, as its soldiers were part-timers who owed labor service to local lords or the king. From 1566–1652, it was known as the “Quarter Army” (“wojsko kwarciane”). Until 1648, Polish medium cavalry, regardless of origin or ethnicity, were known as “Cossack cavalry” (“jazda kozacka”). These units painted their horses with red dye, dressed in wildly irregular ways, and used many types of weapons. They liked sabers in preference to lances, but they also used bows and short spears. After 1648, they were known as “jazda pancerna,” or “Pancerna cavalry.” The predominance of cavalry in eastern European warfare spoke to greater requirements for mobility on the steppes and northeastern plains, especially compared to the confined and fortified frontier zones of France, the Rhineland, Italy, Hungary, or the Netherlands. Tension between cavalry and infantry was 367

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high in Polish armies. This reflected a unique strategic dilemma faced by the Commonwealth: the light cavalry it needed to deal with the Tatars in the south were mostly useless against Swedish or Russian infantry, artillery, and field fortifications in the north. Conversely, Polish infantry and artillery needed to fight Swedes and Russians were highly vulnerable when facing fast-moving Tatars and Cossacks. Starting in the 1630s, Poles divided their main forces into two detachments. There was a “National Contingent” (“autorament narodowy”), built around the traditional towarzysz heavy cavalry and retainers, and a “Foreign Contingent” (“autorament cudzoziemski”), made up of Tatars, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and German mercenaries. The “Foreign Contingent” later greatly reduced its percentage of non-Polish mercenaries, while retaining the old name. This force was tested and found wanting in the opening campaign of the huge Cossack rebellion and war known as the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). Most of the Quarter Army was lost before the end of 1648. A scratch force of 12,000 cavalry and 1,800 infantry and dragoons was hastily put together to fend off a vast Cossack host that next invaded the Commonwealth. The core problem was social and political: the szlachta did not like to arm peasants, some of whom had sympathy for the Cossack cause and few of whom naturally rallied to the cause of their local masters. Mercenaries were therefore hired to supplement the noble cavalry, which raised the Polish defending force to a total of 30,000. After 1652, a major military reform established the “komputowe” (“computable”) army, a more general and regional service that was, in theory, easily expandable in wartime. But nobles in control of the Sejm, who were always loathe to vote sufficient funds, set sharp limits to its size. Still, this system abolished the old Quarter Army cavalry and the “wybraniecka” infantry. The latter were replaced by rural “Lanowa” (“acreage”) infantry, whereby one soldier was recruited for a set area of land, and urban “Dymowe” (“chimney”) infantry, where the war tax to pay for a soldier was assessed according to the number of houses in a village or town. The new system retained the wybraniecka rule of one soldier supported by every 20 households, as counted in larger towns and villages on royal lands, but for the first time it applied this revenue requirement to church and noble lands as well, making for a much larger revenue base and force. In addition, the Poles maintained several permanent garrisons, militia were raised in larger towns, the king had a personal guard, and powerful magnates maintained sizeable private armies. This was still not enough, however, to cope with the hordes that invaded Poland when Russia signed a treaty with Khmelnitsky and thereby initiated the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). When 80,000 Russians and 20,000 Zaporozhian Cossacks crossed into Poland-Lithuania from several directions at once, the Sejm ordered a limited muster of 18,000 Lithuanians and 35,000 Poles. These raw troops were badly handled and handily defeated, especially after Sweden began the Second Northern War (1655–1660). By 1656, Polish-Lithuanian regular forces mustered a mere 13,500 men, and only by adding emergency noble and peasant levies were the ranks raised to 30,000. Some relief came after Karl X was defeated outside Lwów (Lvov), when tens of thousands of Polish and 368

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Lithuanian peasants rallied to John II Casimir. His army retook Warsaw on June 29, 1656. It numbered 28,500 regulars—20,000 from the noble levy and thousands more half-trained peasant infantry. These facts told badly against the Poles when this poorly-trained army went up against professional Swedes and mercenaries a month later, at Warsaw (July 28–30, 1656). After years of war, the Polish Army began to break down in tandem with the administrative inadequacies and fiscal weakness of the Commonwealth itself. Regional military confederations formed within the Polish and Lithuanian armies which refused to fight until paid. These groups survived until 1663, which meant that renewed fighting on a significant scale became possible in 1664. On the eve of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the Polish Army numbered about 24,000. There was a separate force of 4,000 in Lithuania, dominated by the Sapiehas. The Poles could also count on aid from 26,000 troops of their Saxon ally, with whom they shared a sovereign in Augustus II. By comparison, the Swedish Army in 1700 numbered 61,000, but well over half were tied down in garrison duty. The newly forming Russian Army of that year numbered barely 32,000 raw recruits in “new-formation” units, along with remnants of the old strel’sty and about 5,000 perfectly useless servitor cavalry. The Prussian Army (Brandenburg) had about 26,000 excellent troops at the start of the fresh round of European wars in 1700, as did the Danish Army. The French Army was the largest in Europe, with a paper strength of 420,000, but an effective deployment about 80,000 fewer than that. During the Great Northern War the “komputowe” contingent in Poland reached 40,000 men, while at the peak of what was as much a Polish civil war as an international and Russian-Swedish war, as many as 100,000 Polish and Lithuanian troops were mobilized to fight on all sides. Only with the return of relative peace by 1717 was the Polish Army finally established as a standing force numbering 24,000 men. See also Berestczko (1651); choragiew; Cossacks; Haiduks; hetman; officers; pacholeks; poczet; porucznik; pulk; rotmistrz; Sejm; sejmiki; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Vallacker cavalry; Vienna, siege of (1683). Suggested Reading: R. Brzezinski, Polish Armies, 1559–1696, 2 vols. (1987).

Polonka, Battle of (June 27, 1660). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Poltava, Battle of (June 27/July 8, 1709). This decisive battle of the Great Northern War (1700–1721) took place on June 27th by the “Old Style” Julian calendar, June 28th on the Swedish calendar, and July 8th on the “New Style,” or Gregorian calendar used today. A Swedish army of 36,000 led by Karl XII in person had invaded Russia the previous summer. It brushed back a Russian army in a sharp fight at Holowczyn, then turned south looking for food, fodder, and promised Cossack allies. It found little food, less fodder, and precious few Cossacks willing to brave the wrath of the terrible tsar, Peter I, who was marauding over their lands with an army of 80,000 men. The Swedes thus endured a hard winter in Ukraine, losing over half their complement to starvation and bitter cold. Among 20,000 survivors, fully 10% were too incapacitated by wounds or frostbite to be 369

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more than “useless mouths” in the coming campaign. The Swedes had just 34 operational cannon left, and were low on powder, shot, and draught animals (most of which were eaten over the winter) to pull those few guns. Staying true to his aggressive nature as a commander, and pushed by an operational need for a quick victory to encourage Cossacks, Tatars, and the Ottoman Empire to join his war against Russia, Karl chose to invest the minor fortress town of Poltava. Peter learned of that plan while campaigning against the Zaporozhian Cossacks to prevent their moving to aid the Swedes. On June 6/17, a small Russian force feinted an attack on the Swedish siege lines around Poltava. When Karl personally reconnoitered the situation he was shot, his left foot drilled through toe-to-heel by a musket ball. He lost a great deal of blood and needed surgery to close the wound, after which he fell into a feverous coma for a number of hours. Intelligence about his enemy’s physical condition and the weakened state of Karl’s men inspired Peter to offer battle to the Swedish king for the first time since the humiliating defeat inflicted at Narva (November 19/30, 1700). Tens of thousands of Russian troops and 5,000 auxiliaries crossed the Vorskla. They encamped close to Poltava, with their back against the west bank of the river. The Russians immediately dug in, building large field works in anticipation of a Swedish attack; Peter knew his enemy’s tendencies well. As expected, when Karl learned that the Russians were nearby, he sat up in his bloodstained litter and took Peter’s bait. He ordered an immediate attack on the fortified Russian camp, then compounded this error by dividing his already paltry force. To guard his own camp he left 1,800 cavalry south of Poltava, and to watch against sorties by the defenders of Poltava he positioned 1,100 infantry, 200 cavalry, and 2 cannon in the siege lines. To protect the right flank of his advance, Karl stationed 1,000 Polish cavalry in a copse near Poltava. Most of his artillery was left behind in the siege camp, guarded by another 2,000 Swedish horse and Karl’s few Cossack auxiliaries. These preparations meant that the Swedish king could send barely 18 battalions of infantry (8,200 men) and 109 squadrons of horse (7,500–7,800 troopers) forward in assault. These men advanced under the tactical command of Field Marshal Karl Gustav Rehnsköld (1651–1722), many of them woefully short of powder and shot. The Russian army that faced this ragged Swedish force was not the same ill-disciplined and undertrained rabble that had collapsed in panic and was routed by Karl at Narva—though the degree of Russian incompetence at the first battle and their new professionalism at the second fight are both exaggerated. The tsar’s regulars were now better trained, better armed, and more disciplined than before. They had good muskets and knew how to use them, and they had a modern artillery train—big cannon cast in the state foundry that Peter had established at Tula in 1705. The tsar himself was more confident and less cocky. His auxiliaries were ferocious horsemen of the steppe, eager to take on a foreign enemy already greatly reduced by winter storms and summer heat, forced marches, disease, and constant harrying and harassment. The Russians massed 51 infantry battalions (about 25,000 men) and over 70 guns inside their quadrangle. The big guns were mounted high on platforms 370

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that enabled them to bring fire down on the Swedes at good range, and the infantry were in protective trenches that still allowed them to fire volleys at any approaching enemy. To the west of the fortified camp, the right flank was guarded by the Budyschenski Wood, sheltering thousands of Cossack cavalry. To the east was the Yakovetski Wood, hiding 1,000 Russian infantry and another 1,000 Cossacks. South of the main position lay the defensive works of Poltava, guarded by 4,000 more Russians and 28 guns. There was only one possible avenue of attack open to the Swedes: through a narrow opening separating the Budyschenski and Yakovetski Woods. In this gap Peter built several strong earthen field redoubts in a thick T-shape, mounting a total of 16 guns. Behind the redoubts he placed 85 cavalry squadrons (9,000 troopers) and 16 mobile field pieces under the command of Prince Menshikov (1673–1729). Karl sent his understrength forces across level ground toward the rectangular Russian camp even before dawn broke, unaware of the strength of the position or the vitality of the enemy army that waited to receive him. As anticipated, the Swedes avoided the woods on either side and moved directly into the gap in between, where they were surprised to discover field redoubts constructed to break up their attack before it reached the Russian camp. The redoubts worked as planned: they split the Swedish assault in two, and then into three columns, tying up men and resources and wasting time. Encountering the redoubts blunted and divided the shock effect Karl and Rehnsköld had hoped to achieve with their already undersized assault force. Despite these difficulties, however, one Swedish column moved left of the outermost redoubt and penetrated the Russian line at point of bayonet. Hand-to-hand fighting began in the shallow trenches around that part of the camp. On the right, another advancing Swedish column received contradictory orders from Karl and his sub-commanders, and instead of bypassing the redoubts they directly assaulted them. Over 1,000 men were killed or wounded out of an attacking force of 2,600. Six surviving battalions that were left behind were cut off as the rest of the Swedish column pulled back. Menshikov counterattacked among the redoubts, but was beaten back. His broken squadrons regrouped on the far edge of the Russian right wing, in a gully later called the “Great Ouvrage.” They were joined by friendly Cossacks who had been chased from the Budyschenski Wood by Swedish cavalry. Meanwhile, Major General Roos led the surrounded Swedish battalions away from the redoubts, fighting a retreat into the Yakovetski Wood. There they were attacked by far greater numbers of Russian infantry and dragoons. After fierce fighting, some 1,600 survivors were forced to lay down their arms. It was 9:30 A.M., and the battle was six hours old. Reinforcing failure, Karl sent his reserve to assist the attack on the right, ignoring two successful assaults that penetrated the Russian center and left but were then blunted by confusing orders to halt, withdraw, and regroup. These mistakes allowed the Russians to recover, reinforce, and restore breaches in their lines. For over two hours the bulk of the Swedish force waited for Roos to reappear with his third of the infantry, but he was already lost in the Yakovetski Wood. In a final catastrophic decision, Karl massed his remaining troops and charged into the teeth of Russian strength at the center, just in front of the fortified 371

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camp where Peter had massed 22,000 infantry in two lines, waiting to stain with foreign red the green grass of the killing ground that lay before them. The news of Roos’ surrender raised morale as the Russians formed a dense infantry line of battle in front of their camp. Thousands more dragoons were on the flanks, with nearly 100 guns in support in the field, or firing over the camp’s parapets. Peter was in personal command of the defenses, reportedly displaying courage under fire that reversed the reputation he had earned by fleeing from Narva even before the fight began. Karl tried to direct the assault from his blood-soaked litter, and was so close to the action that 21 litter-bearers or aides were killed or wounded. The litter was even struck a glancing blow by a careering cannonball. Karl’s and Rehnsköld’s efforts were of no avail. The longer line of Russian troops enveloped the shorter Swedish line, until the infantry clad in blue were receiving murderous fire from the front and in double-enfilade. The Swedish infantry were left unsupported in their death agony by great disorder among the cavalry. The fight had gone out of nearly all the Swedes by mid-day, when Karl ordered a general withdrawal just as the Russians pushed forward. The infantry did not wait for the king’s order—they ran, pursued and hacked down by Cossack and Russian cavalry. Karl left nearly 7,000 dead or wounded soldiers in Swedish blue upon the field, with another 2,000 of his demoralized men taken prisoner that day. The Russians lost fewer than 1,400 killed and 3,300 wounded. Karl was hustled away from the scene of the carnage by his surviving aides, escaping thereafter with about 1,500 men to Moldavia, within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. The Swedish infantry was nearly wholly destroyed at Poltava. Peter wrote in a dispatch: “God in his great mercy has granted us a matchless victory over the enemy.” More prosaically, he concluded: “In short, their entire force has been defeated.” Within a few days of Poltava, the few surviving infantry and most of the Swedish cavalry—17,000 men in all—surrendered to the Russians at Perevolochna (July 2/13), where they had halted in despair and from physical inability to follow their king across the Dnieper. Stripped of weapons and clothing, the Swedish prisoners were made to watch systematic executions of their Cossack allies. In the days that followed, isolated remnants of the invading Swedish army surrendered to the Russians in small clusters of huddling, starving men who were all out of food, medical supplies, transportation, and ammunition. The loss at Poltava opened the Swedish empire in the north to invasion and annexations by multiple scavenging enemy states. It helped knock Sweden permanently from the ranks of the Great Powers, while at the same time confirming Russia as its replacement. The king of Sweden remained in southern exile, a pitiful supplicant of aid from the sultan. Even though the Great Northern War dragged on with additional battles and campaigns for another dozen years, Poltava had effectively decided that contest. In so doing, it ended forever the Swedish threat to Peter’s new capital at St. Petersburg, to the expansion of Russia’s northern frontier, and to the acquisition of a Baltic porch for the Russian Empire. It is notable that neither the Baltic territories that Peter secured, nor the bloody field of Poltava itself, remained attached to Russia after the breakup of 372

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the Soviet Union and the breaking away of the outer provinces of the old Russian Empire in 1991. Suggested Reading: “Pultowa,” in Edward Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851; 1994); P. Englund, The Battle of Poltava (1992).

pomest’ia cavalry. In the Muscovite servitor system, “pomeshchiki” (or “pomest’ia”) held land from the tsar in exchange for a lifetime of military obligation. Such feudal cavalry levies were phased out during the 17th century. Unlike Polish hussars, who were mainly medium cavalry, Russian pomest’ia remained a light cavalry force. Pondicherry. A French trading entrepôt (factory) on the Coromandel coast of India. Several years into the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), the Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) mounted an amphibious assault against this outpost, utilizing 19 rated ships and 1,500 troops (September 6, 1693). Pondicherry was returned to France in the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697), over the objections of the States General and the VOC. Pontchartrains, comptes de. Father and son, né Louis Phélypeaux (1643–1727) and Jérôme Phélypeaux (1674–1747). In 1690, Louis Phélypeaux succeeded the younger Colbert as Secretary for the Navy under Louis XIV. His son, Jérôme, succeeded the father in 1699. Both have been criticized by historians for overseeing a decline of the French Navy built by the Colbert father-and-son team. They are also accused of switching French strategy from guerre d’escadre to guerre de course by those who think fleet actions would have been preferable to commerce raiding, though this point is moot. They are similarly held responsible for the general weakening of naval administration. But the decline of the French Navy had far more to do with the prior and heavy demands for resources by the massively expensive and expanding French Army, and the cost of the lines systems built during Louis’ latter and longer wars: the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Portland, Battle of (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653). “Three Days’ Battle.” A sea fight of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Maarten van Tromp, with 75 warships, was escorting a Dutch convoy of 150 merchantmen up the Channel when he was met off Portland by Robert Blake. The latter was lying in wait with a picket line of ships from Portland to the Côtentin peninsula, but he had neglected to post any scouts. Accordingly, Tromp struck as soon as he came upon one end of the English line, attacking an exposed wing before the rest of Blake’s fleet could close. Poor Dutch gunnery and still poorer discipline allowed the rest of Blake’s ships to beat close toward the end of the first day. The next morning, superior English broadside gunnery inflicted serious damage on the Dutch, but the skillful Tromp re-formed his escorts into a defensive shield at the rear of the convoy and fought well as he retreated up the Channel. During the third day, English frigates broke in among the merchantmen and began to take prizes, like wolves cutting individual sheep from a flock. Dutch escorts 373

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began to lose heart, even as they also ran low on powder and shot. Many ships were pressed hard against the French coast to await surrender at dawn of the fourth day. Instead, Tromp brilliantly escaped on the tide and was gone before the English noticed. Over three days, the Dutch had lost nine warships and 24 merchantmen, but the English had again failed to close a trap that had been improperly set. See also fighting instructions; line of battle; George Monk. Port Royal. See Acadia. Portugal. Portugal was under direct Spanish control, from its annexation by Philip II in 1580 until it rebelled in 1640. A major grievance was the inability of Spain to protect Portugal’s overseas empire from the Dutch after 1621. Dutch ships ravaged Portuguese merchants, Dutch settlers occupied northern Brazil, and a large Dutch warfleet in Batavia blockaded Portuguese trade with Goa and Malacca from 1630. Yet, upon proclaiming independence in 1640 and anointing the Duc di Bragança as King João IV, Portugal turned to Dutch markets for ship’s guns to use against Spain. Direct naval and land support against Spain came from France. A Portuguese army fought the Spanish at Montijo in 1644. When war broke out with the United Provinces in 1656, Lisbon bought cannon in the international markets of Hamburg and Nuremberg, some of which they used to expel the Dutch from Brazil. After a sustained national effort, and with Spain exhausted by its parallel war with France that lasted to 1659, Spain recognized Portuguese independence in 1668. Prior to 1640, Portuguese banking houses had penetrated Spanish trading systems in Peru, New Spain, and the Philippines. They were driven from several Spanish possessions after the rebellion, and some in Portugal were executed for their Habsburg connections. At the start of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Portugal sided with Louis XIV and the Bourbons over the succession in Spain, mainly from fear of a joint Franco-Spanish invasion of its own territory if it did not. Portugal defected from Louis’ camp after a demonstration of ascendant Anglo-Dutch naval power at Cadiz and Vigo Bay (October 12/23, 1702). That persuaded Portugal to switch to the Grand Alliance on May 16, 1703. England permanently detached Portugal from the French cause by assuring a long-term market for Portuguese wines. This confirmed port as the drink of choice of British upper classes and opened Lisbon to the Royal Navy, thereby giving British warships a secure base from which they might cruise the Mediterranean in search of French prizes, or conduct amphibious operations along the coasts of Spain and France. The war expanded on the ground in Portugal during 1704, when Archduke Charles landed to claim the Spanish throne as Carlos III. He met resistance from a Franco-Spanish army and made little headway toward Madrid, halting not too far beyond Lisbon. The next year, Allied armies advanced out of Portugal into western Spain, while an amphibious operation enveloped and captured Barcelona (August 22–October 9, 1705) on the other coast. Thereafter, Portugal served as a major supply base for Allied armies fighting in Spain. See also Methuen Treaties; Tangier. 374

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porucznik. In the Polish Army, a junior officer (lieutenant) serving in a choragiew under the rotmistrz. positional warfare. See siege warfare. postern. A small gate in the revetment of the curtain of a fixed fortification. It was reached through a narrow tunnel. The postern was walled up by engineers until needed by the garrison for communication with outer works, or to assemble troops outside in preparation for a sortie (sally) against the enemy’s siege works or troops. Also called a sally-point. poundage. Funds that the paymaster deducted from a soldier’s pay as a perquisite of his office, generally one shilling per pound in the British Army. Other miscellaneous charges were sometimes subsumed under this term. powder magazine. The medieval practice of keeping “powder towers,” where black powder was stored inside the towers of the enceinte of a fixed fortification, was abandoned early in this period in favor of magazines built entirely free of the enceinte. The first of these were special two-story structures, with raised floors and high arches to keep the powder dry and the air moving. By the late 18th century, the standard powder magazine was a one-story blockhouse modeled on an original design by Vauban, which cleverly circulated air while minimizing the danger of sparks. None exploded over a half-century of war, even when bombarded with mortars. Subordinate powder magazines scattered among the works were called “expense magazines.” At a siege, the attackers’ powder magazine was sited beyond the perimeter of the siege lines and protected by earthen breastworks. See also laboratory. Pratapgarh, Battle of (November 30, 1659). See Sivaji Bhonsle. Praying Indians. See King Philip’s War (1675–1676). pré carré. The term meant “dueling field,” but became famous in reference to the open space formed between a double line of regular fortifications, part of an elaborate defense system that Vauban developed along the northern frontier of France after he broached the idea in a 1673 letter to Louis XIV. It imitated the two lines formed by infantry in battle. The pré carré on the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands linked artillery fortresses from Dunkirk through Ypres, Lille, Tournai, Valenciennes, Maubeuge, and Dinant. Among the main fortresses of the second, interior line were Gravelines, St. Omer, Aire, Arras, Douai, Cambrai, Landrecies, Rocroi, and Carleville. Its establishment involved Louis in a long-term strategy that aimed at rationalizing and straightening France’s frontiers, whether by diplomacy or, as Vauban put it, by “a good war.” The outer line was breached by the successful Allied siege of Lille (August 14–December 10, 1708). Taking the inner line was the main aim of Marlborough’ s campaign of 1710. After signing the London Preliminaries, the French began work on a new 375

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set of lines, the Ne Plus Ultra. In the last campaign of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), Villars retook the lines of the pré carré, thus helping to ensure the general peace later agreed at Utrecht. press/press gang. See recruitment. priming powder. Fine gunpowder used to prime, and thereby to fire or detonate, the main charge of a musket or great gun. Prince Rupert’s Land. See Hudson Bay Company. prisoners of war. See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1664–1667); Banner system; Batoh (1652); British Army; China; Deerfield raid (1704); Dunbar (1650); Dutch War (1672–1678); exchange; Fraustadt (1706); galleys; ghulams; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Indian Wars; Ireland; Iroquois Confederacy; Karlowitz, Peace of (1699); Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Manchus; military medicine; Mughal Empire; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); parley; Poltava (1709); Roure rebellion (1670); Schnapphahns; skulking way of war; Vaudois; Worcester (1651); Wu Sangui; Yellow Waters (1648). private council of war. See Articles of War. privateers. The main form of privateer was a privately owned warship that cruised full time to harass, capture, or destroy the shipping of an enemy designated by a given state. A secondary, part-time form of privateering was when armed merchantmen were issued letters of marque allowing them to attack enemy merchantmen in the normal course of their affairs. Merchantmen were reluctant to undertake full-time privateering, unless forced to do so by enemy actions that shut down normal trade and the income it sustained. In either case, the disposition of goods and captured ships from this war-for-profit adventurism was usually decided by a prize court. Dutch and English privateers raided incessantly against Spanish shipping throughout the 17th century. Privateer bases in the Scilly Isles hosted ships that preyed on merchantmen of all nations, until they were driven out by English landings and raids in mid-1651. Royalist privateers operated out of Jersey, the Isle of Man, and several Irish ports until their last base, at Galway, was overrun in early 1652. The common practice among English privateers of torturing captured Dutch and other crews was a key factor leading to the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Dutch privateers operated by sophisticated syndicates swarmed out of ports in Zeeland and elsewhere. English privateers, again, were instrumental in launching and waging the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), but Zeelanders were even more organized and effective. During the Third AngloDutch War (1672–1674), Zeeland privateers took 648 prizes, most of them English merchantmen, and shut down English trade in the Mediterranean. During the last several decades of the 17th century, including in times of major declared conflict, privateers were a mainstay of local naval forces in the Caribbean and 376

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Atlantic. A 1681 royal ordinance stipulated that French privateers carry minimum ordnance of six cannon. Many armateurs and captains ignored the order, because the preferred method of all privateers was boarding, not shelling enemy ships. Hundreds of English and Dutch privateers raided French shipping during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). France responded by supporting dozens of privateers against its enemies, from Channel bases such as Dunkirk and St. Malo. Privateering in support of guerre de course by remarkable sailors such as Jean Bart became the main French strategy in the Nine Years’ War, during which over 2,000 foreign prizes were registered in the prize court of St. Malo alone. Comparable numbers of prizes were registered at Dunkirk, the other major French privateer port, with lesser numbers at ports such as Calais and Brest. That war saw 15 privateer squadrons set out, though most actions were by single ships or pairs. Royal squadrons added to the haul as they moved to cruiser warfare, instead of being kept in port as a battlefleet reserve. Larger expeditions sometimes captured and held ransom whole towns, including Cartagena (1697) and Rio de Janeiro (1711). In the Caribbean, French buccaneers pillaged English and other seaborne commerce. Such predation, and an attendant privatization of France’s conduct of war at sea, continued through the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). During that conflict, French warships took over 4,500 prizes of all sorts, mainly in the Atlantic in the final years of the war. There are some estimates that 1,600 Allied prizes were taken by ships operating out of Dunkirk alone. The British tried to blockade or blow up the major French privateer ports to reduce the threat, but with very limited success. Only a wider peace ended French privateering. French agreement to the London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) provided for razing Dunkirk as a privateer port, and French engineers destroyed the facilities under English observation. See also Barbary corsairs; cheesemongers; Dunes, the (1658); impressment; Vauban. Suggested Reading: James G. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (1970).

prize. A captured enemy or neutral vessel, along with any and all cargo therein. It was usually taken or ordered into a friendly port, where disposition of the ship and its cargo was handed over to a prize agent, or decided by a prize court. See also guerre de course; privateers. prize agent. A civilian entrepreneur who undertook to handle the sale of a prize, for a percentage or fee. prize court. Prize courts were established to assess the competing claims of privateers and merchants, and to give the host state a stake in any goods seized during privateer naval warfare. They were also intended to mute interstate conflict, especially with neutrals, but they functioned far less effectively in that regard. Privateers operating out of Dunkirk and Brest were so successful, and their prizes so numerous, that French prize courts in 1689 authorized captains to ransom captured ships back to their owners while at sea, without having to escort or tow them back to France.

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prize money. All proceeds accrued from disposing of a prize. In the Royal Navy, one-tenth was reserved to the Admiralty. Funds from that share were used to partly care for sick and wounded seamen and give widows given a modest provision. prize victualler. A prize agent, essentially a private contractor who oversaw arrangements pertaining to captured prizes. Prosken, Battle of (October 8, 1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). provisions. See rations. Prussia. See Brandenburg; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Friedrich I; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second(1655–1660); Prussian Army; Tatars; war finance; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Prussian Army. The famous Army of Brandenburg-Prussia. It was assembled and carefully husbanded by Friedrich-Wilhelm over the course of his reign, then handed off to his successors. Toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the Brandenburg-Prussian Army was still a rag-tag collection of local militia and foreign mercenaries. Professional troops were raised by entrepreneurial mercenary colonels, who owned and commanded regiments comprising unreliable and highly undisciplined soldiers drawn from across Germany and around the Baltic. Friedrich-Wilhelm purged this mercenary force, reducing it to a core of 2,500 reliable officers and men. This gained him credit with the Estates of Brandenburg, whose Junker (see Brandenburg; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Landgrafs; officers; Prussian Army; szlachta) nobles were relieved to no longer have marauders scouring their lands and peasants. As a result, they agreed to finance his embryonic standing army, which slowly rose to about 8,000 men by the last year of the war. With peace, the Estates baulked at continuing to finance this force, and they cut it back to about 5,000. In 1653, Friedrich-Wilhelm made a remarkable bargain with the BrandenburgPrussian rural nobility—the Junker classes—which forever changed Prussian and German history. In an agreement known as the “Recess,” he agreed to allow Junkers to hold lands outright, not as medieval fiefs-for-military-service as they had done until that date. He freed the Junkers of most taxes and legal restrictions, gave them full control of all local affairs, and agreed to the enserfment of their peasants, who constituted the vast majority of the population. In exchange, they voted him funds for a standing army of 5,000 men. Friedrich-Wilhelm never called the Estates into session after that year, increasingly gathering power to, and governing autocratically from, the center. In 1655, the Great Elector essentially tricked the Junkers by announcing that extraordinary taxes were needed in order to fight in the Polish-Swedish war that had just broken out. With these new funds, he raised the Army from 8,000 to 27,000 men by 1660. These numbers shrank with the return of peace, as do the cohorts of all armies, so that about 10,000 soldiers on average were in barracks 378

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or on the borders prior to the outbreak of the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and the Dutch War (1672–1678). However, by then a critical reserve of trained men had been built up by retiring old soldiers (age 40 or more) to work on the personal estates of the Great Elector. In contrast to other Baltic powers such as Denmark and Sweden, where creation of state military establishments by 1660 led to the promotion of native officers and the emergence of rational systems of national recruitment, the Brandenburg-Prussian military remained reliant on mercenaries for much longer. But for its officers it drew upon the Junker class, bringing Junker boys into barracks life as young as age 12 and raising them to serve the state. By 1670, the Estates of Cleves, Mark, East Prussia, and Brandenburg were cowed and submissive. In addition to expanding the Army, Friedrich-Wilhelm introduced methods of drill and systems of organization copied from the French Army, which had in turn adapted them from Dutch and Swedish models devised by Maurits of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus earlier in the 17th century. As in France, recruiting was centralized under the monarch. But whereas French recruitment was increasingly handled by royal intendants and their anointed agents, in Brandenburg-Prussia the Great Elector took a personal interest in almost every man recruited for his much smaller Army. He was therefore able not only to avoid recruiting the social scrapings of villages or the great estates brought in by unscrupulous agents, but also to exempt skilled artisans and other workers he deemed essential to the task of developing the weak economy that still underlay his whole military and state-building effort. This meant, as was the case in most modernizing armies of the time, that reliance on entrepreneurial colonels to fill their own regiments steadily decreased. As in Russia, regiments of the Prussian Army thus became ever more closely associated with the state and crown. Contrary to pervasive belief about inherently ruthless Prussian military discipline, punishments and daily treatment of soldiers under Friedrich-Wilhelm were far more humane than previously and, to a degree, more humane than what came later in the Prussian Army. Indeed, they were even something of a model of enlightenment in this era. That reflected mainly the Great Elector’s awareness of the state’s investment in the troops. His son and successor, Friedrich I, was unequal to the challenge of maintaining his father’s high standards. But the foundation of a disciplined, skilled, professional force had been so well-laid by the 1680s that neither the incompetence of the son nor the prolonged wars that followed eroded the Prussian Army. Moreover, the pace of events and pressures of war from 1701 forced enlargement of the Army to 40,000 men by 1713. Recruitment for this bigger force was uneven until 1730, when Friedrich-Wilhelm I issued a famous “Cantonal Règlement.” This new regulation raised the Prussian Army to nearly 85,000 by 1740 by conscripting boys from the cantons, just in time for Friedrich II to launch a series of aggressive, expansionist wars. For the battlefield performance of the BrandenburgerPrussian Army in wars of this period, see also Dutch War (1672–1678); Great Northern War (1700–1721); Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); War of Devolution (1667–1668); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). 379

Prut River, Battle of

Prut River, Battle of (June 28/July 9, 1711). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Pueblo Indians. “Pueblo” (“village”) was a Spanish term for Indian tribes living along the northern border of Mexico, in the Rio Grande Valley. They were locally renowned for “pithouse” adobe dwellings organized into villages and towns, and for a prosperous agrarian economy. By the 1670s, Apache and Navajo raids had unsettled Pueblo villages and farms. Several small-scale revolts against Spanish rule also occurred prior to 1680, but the major explosion of anger and violence occurred in that year. Led by a Tewan chief, most Pueblo tribes rebelled. Over 400 Spanish were killed, including nearly two dozen missionaries. All missions in the Pueblo lands were destroyed in what was as much a revolt against an alien religion as against alien overlordship. The Spanish governor and garrison at Santa Fé were besieged until all surviving Spanish withdrew into Mexico. Some tribes moved away from the contested area to resettle in some isolated mountain fastness; others resisted Spanish efforts at reconquest that lasted over a decade. The Spanish were held at bay until the brutal success of a major military expedition under Diego de Varzas in 1692 to 1694, during which Santa Fé was retaken and its Indian population slaughtered or enslaved (December 29, 1693). In June 1696, several Pueblo tribes rose again, but were quickly crushed. The Spanish reimposed missions on all but the Hopi, who violently resisted. Small-scale uprisings were frequent throughout the first half of the 18th century. Pueblo Revolt (1680–1694). See Pueblo Indians. Puigcerda, siege of (April 29–May 28, 1678). The culminating contest of years of small-scale fighting in Roussillon and Catalonia during the Dutch War (1672–1678). A French army invested this Spanish mountain fortress, aided by Swiss troops who manhandled the heavy French guns through mountain passes. The fortress was reduced to rubble by prolonged French bombardment, finally surrendering after a month of suffering and death. It was immediately stripped of its cannon, had its surviving walls reduced, and was abandoned by the French under orders from Louis XIV, who intended to make peace with Spain. pulk. A large tactical unit of the Polish Army equivalent to a medieval “battle.” It was formed from combinations of up to 20 or more choragiew. The pulk was an ad hoc unit without permanent structure of command or staff. It differed from the medieval battle by combining several arms—from peasant levies, to professional infantry, to noble cavalry. Its advantage was independent maneuver and fighting ability. Pultusk, Battle of (April 10/21, 1703). An extraordinary victory for Karl XII over Augustus II during the opening phase of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). A re-formed Saxon Army, still recovering from its defeat at Kliszów (July 8/19, 1702), was destroyed in a day. The Saxons lost 1,000 men out 380

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of a total force of about 3,500, but the Swedes lost just 20 dead. The critical difference in the fight was the Swedish cavalry. Puritan Revolution. See England; Ireland; Oliver Cromwell. Pyrenees, Treaty of the (October 28/November 7, 1659). The settlement that mapped out the main border between France and Spain at the end of the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). It signified Spain’s defeat after nearly 160 years of struggle with France, and Madrid’s permanent reduction to the second rank of powers. No more would the major Spanish military effort be made in the Spanish Netherlands, previously considered the “bridle of France.” The peace also marked concomitant Habsburg acceptance of the primacy of Bourbon France within the European state system. In making peace, however, Mazarin planted the seeds of future wars by adding terms that elevated longterm French claims to Spanish territory and by taking Artois in Flanders and Roussillon in the south from Spain. To guarantee the treaty, Philip IV’s daughter, Marie Thérèse, was married to Louis XIV on the condition that she renounce her descendants’ claim to the Spanish throne. This was accompanied by a promised dowry of 500,000 escudos. Louis XIV later vitiated the renunciation of Bourbon dynastic rights in Spain by asserting that the dowry was not fully paid, leading to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) in behalf of his grandson, Philip V. See also Dunes, the (1658); Île des Faisans.

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Q Qing Empire. “Ch’ing Empire.” See Banner system; China; Kangxi emperor; Manchuria; mandate of heaven; Wu Sangui. quadrant. At sea, a navigational instrument used to plot a ship’s course by taking repeated sightings of up to 90 degrees. On land, see gunner’s quadrant. quarter. See flags; Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676); surrender. Quarter Army. “Wojsko kwarciane.” Polish: “Kwarta” (“Quarter”). The term referred to the share of rent from royal lands taken as tax to sustain these standing troops. This allowed Poland to maintain a small permanent cavalry force from 1566–1652. In practice, the sums raised were closer to one-fifth of royal revenues. Peak numbers for this light-to-medium cavalry force were about 5,000. After the catastrophic defeat at Korsum at the onset of the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654), only a single company of 50 registered Cossacks remained in the Quarter Army, with the rest either dead or gone over to the rebels. Lithuania did not have a Quarter Army. Instead, from 1652 it had a separate standing army that numbered 20,000 by 1659. See also Polish Army. quarter cannon. Artillery pieces of 12-pounder and 16-pounder calibers. quartering. Louis XIV used internal quartering without compensation (dragonnades) as a punishment and repressive device against the Huguenots. He even offered to exempt Huguenot families from quartering if they converted to Catholicism. More generally, freedom from quartering French troops in one’s home was a treasured privilege of the nobility, clergy, and favored individuals. Similarly, Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg imposed billeting of troops on Prussian towns until they agreed to pay direct military taxes to support the Prussian Army. See also Bonnets Rouges rebellion (1675); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697).

quartermaster

quartermaster. See officers. quartiers de rafraichissement. “Rest quarters.” Temporary quarters for an army recovering from a long campaign or a recent fight, but not yet ready to enter “winter quarters.” Québec. See Indian Wars; King William’s War (1689–1697); New France; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); troupes de la marine; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Queen Anne. See Anne of Great Britain. Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). The North American extension of a much larger and more important conflict in Europe and on the world’s oceans: the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). That wider war between Great Britain, France, and France’s minor ally, Spain, spilled into North America, where English colonists and British regulars fought against French regulars, Québec colonists, and France’s Spanish and Indian allies. The British were unable to expel Spanish troops from Florida in 1702, despite some success in burning out Spanish forts. Local colonists took advantage of the fighting to massacre and drive out neighboring Indian nations. The French raided deep into New England in 1704, an action notable mainly for a massacre of the citizens of Deerfield, Massachusetts. As happened earlier during King William’s War, British colonists from the northern tier of colonies responded with angry demands to invade Québec, while southerners wanted to attack south and west into French holdings in the Floridas and across the Mississippi. Acadia was taken in 1710, but a joint British-colonial invasion of Québec along the St. Lawrence in 1711 failed. In the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Great Britain gained permanent control of Acadia and the Hudson Bay territory, as well as French recognition of British control of Newfoundland. That loss of strategic territory so emasculated New France geostrategically that it was only a matter of time until French power in North America was extinguished by Great Britain and her colonial allies. Over the course of the 18th century, other wars followed that saw the final bloody acts in a hundred years’ conflict over control of New France. quoin. A wooden wedge, often with a handle at the thick end, inserted between the breech and the carriage bed of a cannon or other great gun to alter and fix a desired elevation of the barrel.

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R Raab (Raba), Battle of (1664). See Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (1661–1676); Montecuccoli; St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664). Raad van State. “Council of State.” The body that took control of government in the United Provinces following the death of William the Silent in the late 16th century. It oversaw military operations and the finance and administration of the Dutch Navy and Dutch Army during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). It later lost effective political power to the Holland Regents and to William III. Radziwill, Janusz (1612–1655). See Kiejdany, Treaty of; Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). raiding. Courses (raids) remained a common feature of war in this era. Types of raids included slave raids into Ukraine by the Ottomans; plundering raids by Cossacks into Poland and Russia; large-scale cavalry raids into the Palatinate or the Rhineland by French armies in search of contributions; foraging activities of Tatars and European light cavalry; and frontier raiding into China by the Mongols. See also guerre de course; Marathas; Rajputs; Sivaji Bhonsle. Rajputs. From “rajaputra” (“son of a chief ”). A martial caste of Hindu warriors who established themselves under local potentates, with a major concentration in northwestern India. Their precise origin is disputed. Some assert that they arose from original clan/communal formations—traditionally, there were 36 Rajput clans—that climbed to prominence through offering protection to peasants and later founded several small states. Friendly histories ascribe to the Rajputs a pedigree they claimed for themselves, clearly to inflate their prestige: a vedic origin as the “first kshatiyas” in the caste system. Others argue that the Rajputs descended from Hunas, early Central Asian invaders of India who were Indianized and Hinduized by Brahman scribes. In either case, it is clear that

rake

many harijan (“untouchables”) were drawn to join the Rajputs because military service enabled them to rise above their religiously assigned bottom station in the Hindu caste system. Whether home-grown or imported, Rajput chiefs strenuously resisted invasions of India from the 8th century onward. They fought Afghan, Turkic, Mongol, and various Muslim warrior tribes that poured into northern and western India from Afghanistan or out of the Arab lands through Iran. They held out successfully against invasions by Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Mamlu¯ks, and Khaljis. Sultan Ala-ud-din (r. 1296–1316) of the Delhi Sultanate overran several northern Rajput states for a time and thus was able to invade still more ancient Tamil states that the Rajputs effectively buffered in the deep south of India. The Rajputs acquired cannon sometime in the mid-14th century, and gunpowder weapons were in wide use in Rajput wars with each other by the time the Mughals took Delhi in 1526. At Khanwa in northern India on March 16–17, 1527, the Mughal founder Babur defeated a coalition of seven Rajput rulers. The Rajputs were nominally generaled by one of their greatest warrior heroes, Maharana Sangram Singhi, better known as “Rana Sanga.” His army enjoyed a huge numerical advantage, deploying 80,000 men and some 500 war elephants. Moreover, Babur’s army of just 20,000 Afghans, Mongols, and Turks was virtually surrounded, fighting in unfamiliar territory and unused to the oppressive Indian heat. Most of its men wanted to go home after more than a year of campaigning in India. Only the promise of more plunder of India’s wealth kept the men from returning to cooler homes around Kabul. At Khanwa, a marked superiority in the musketry and artillery of Babur’s army told the tale against vastly superior Indian numbers, as had happened to the army of the Delhi Sultanate at Panipat the year before. Babur established a relatively tolerant state, but later conflicts with the Mughals could be horrific. For instance, when Akbar (1542–1605) threatened to conquer the Rajput states in 1568, some Rajput chiefs responded with massacres of their own women and children, rather than allow them to fall into Mughal hands. Akbar went on to raze the Rajput city of Chitor and ordered the slaughter of 30,000 inhabitants. Thereafter, other Rajput chiefs allied with the Mughals, who had shown that anyone who resisted would be exterminated. Still others allied with the dominant Muslim power, because there were huge rewards available in the mansabdari system. In the early 18th century, Rajput military power revived in proportion to the decline of Mughal military fortunes. Suggested Reading: D. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy (1990); R. Saxena, Army of the Rajputs (1989).

rake. Firing along the length of a flanked position of enemy troops or line of ships, or down the length of a single ship from its ahead or astern. This avoided exposing oneself to a volley or broadside, while bringing maximum fire to bear on the enemy. In field battles, this full enfilade position was often sought after— but seldom achieved. Militating against infantry enfilade on more than a minor 386

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scale in fighting in Europe was basic equality of military technology and comparable battle tactics among European armies. See also epaulement; pell-mell; zig-zag. Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735). Prince of Transylvania and leader of a major Hungarian rebellion against the Habsburgs, 1703–1711. He met Villars in Vienna in 1697. Rákóczi was offered aid from Louis XIV at the outset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Instead, he was arrested by the Austrians on April 18, 1700. Facing a death sentence, he escaped from captivity into exile in Poland. He took up arms upon return to Hungary in 1703, joined by 600 Polish mercenaries and funded by France. He led several thousand “Kuruc,” or anti-Habsburg Hungarians, into battle, but these were mostly “emancipated peasants” (Hadjús). His early nationalist appeal to Magyar nobility was mostly ignored. Rákóczi’s intention was to link with Franco-Bavarian forces in support of an expected move against Vienna, which had begun negotiations to satisfy his demands. However, this plan was forestalled by the massive Allied victory over the French and Bavarians at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). Thereafter, French funds were reduced, and Rákóczi’s military prospects dimmed. Peace talks began again in 1705, but stalled over the key issue of sovereign independence for Transylvania. With Louis refusing further aid, Rákóczi looked to Russia but found little assistance there. Prince Eugene of Savoy’s success in Italy in 1708 freed experienced, disciplined Habsburg troops to fight the rebels in Hungary. At Trencsén (August 3, 1708), the Kuruc lost badly to a Habsburg army, despite the former outnumbering the latter by roughly 15,000 to 10,000. The Kuruc leadership subsequently broke with Rákóczi. Hemmed and harried, he left for Poland on February 21, 1711. On May 11th, under terms of the Peace of Szatmár, about 12,000 Kuruc rebels laid down their arms and pledged allegiance to the Habsburgs, in return for amnesty and guarantees of the rights of Magyar nobles. The same terms were offered to Rákóczi, but he spurned them. He similarly rejected two offers from Peter I to accept the crown of Poland. Rákóczi spent the next three years in exile in Danzig, England, and France. He was unsuccessful in petitioning Louis XIV to champion Transylvanian rights in the peace settlements of 1713–1714. He moved to Turkey because the Ottoman Empire remained at war with the Habsburgs and Sublime Porte refused to extradite Hungarians into the hands of mutual enemies in Vienna. A true irreconcilable, but also no fool, Rákóczi spent the last 22 years of his life in comfortable exile, an honored and protected guest of the Ottomans at Tekirda˘g (Rodosto) on the Sea of Marmara. See also Grenzer. Rákóczi, George II (1621–1660). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). rameau. A narrow mine or countermine chamber forming a major branch of an underground web of galleries. Complex webs of angled rameaux underlay the glacis of a number of fixed fortifications, awaiting active countermining by defending engineers. Still smaller chambers were called “listners.” 387

Ramillies, Battle of

Ramillies, Battle of (May 12/23, 1706). Louis XIV wanted to retake ground lost around at Zoutleeuw at the end of the campaign season in 1705, when Marlborough penetrated, and the Allies razed, a 20-mile stretch of the Lines of Brabant. Louis told maréchal Villeroi to leave his entrenchments around Louvain and move 62,000 men into an attack toward Zoutleeuw. With his usual blundering and misreading of enemy intentions and movements, Villeroi was surprised by Marlborough and 60,000 Allied troops who offered battle near the village of Ramillies, south of the Lines of Brabant. Villeroi established a battle line along a slight rise, seriously overextending his army in the process. His line stretched over three miles. It was two regiments deep, with the center anchored on Ramillies and parts of the frontage protected by marshy ground. The flanks were both slightly forward, curving the French line at either end. Villeroi had locked his position on several small villages he thought would strengthen his line, but as the coming fight demonstrated these were in fact too far apart to serve as the effective bastions he desired. As the fight began, Villeroi commanded the French right. Maximilian Emanuel and his exiled Bavarians were on the left, along the line of the Little Gheet river. There was also a scattering of Spanish troops holding part of Villeroi’s line. Marlborough formed a shorter, convex battle line from his mostly Dutch and English troops. He thus enjoyed the significant advantage of rapid interior reinforcement of either flank from the center. He deployed 120 field guns to pound the overmatched French, ordering the bombardment to commence around 1 P.M. At Ramillies, as he had done at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704), Marlborough caught a French commander seeking to defend a broad plain while overly concentrating his infantry in flanking villages and exposing a correspondingly weak center. During several hours of heavy fighting, Dutch troops took two small villages on the French right. This was actually a feint, but Villeroi misread the maneuver and counterattacked with both infantry and dragoons, whereupon allied cavalry ran those unfortunate troops down in the open field. English troops assaulted the other French flank for over three hours, but failed to break through. This also was a feint in force. For once, Villeroi did not completely swallow the bait; he reinforced, but not overly so. Both sides committed the bulk of their cavalry at the center of the battlefield, around Ramillies. Marlborough made effective use of his shorter line to shift reinforcing squadrons from his right, until nearly 25,000 horse soldiers from either side clashed in a grand and bloody mêlée— one of the largest cavalry fights of the century. Obscured by terrain and smoke, Marlborough’s reinforcement of the center went unobserved by Villeroi until its effects were felt in the weight of dead and wounded Frenchmen. Marlborough also made mistakes, but of a more personal sort. Leading squadrons of horse from the front, he was unhorsed and nearly killed by enemy fire. By 4 P.M., both French flanks were under heavy fire, and one was already isolated from further reinforcement. The fight was still in doubt at 6 P.M., however, when the whole right wing of the French line suddenly gave way. Marlborough seized the decisive moment. He moved additional infantry to the center, weakening his right, but a simple ruse of leaving battle flags in place on the right 388

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while the troops moved under concealment worked. Fully a third of the French army was kept facing flagpoles and color parties, unaware of the enemy’s true weakness in the line before them, or that the hinge of the battle was turning just out of their sight. Marlborough then orchestrated a combined arms assault at the center that shattered the French line. As Allied troops pursued and cut down the retreating French and Bavarians, Villeroi lost all control of his army. French and Bavarian and Spanish units broke and ran, abandoning guns and casting aside muskets and packs. When it was all over, the butcher’s bill for Marlborough and the Allies was 1,066 dead and 2,560 wounded, of whom the majority were Dutch. French and related casualties exceeded 13,000–15,000. Suggested Reading: David Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander (1973); George M. Trevelyan, England Under Queen Anne: Ramillies (1932).

rampart. An earthen wall supported by brick or masonry. It was capable of withstanding some level of bombardment, though its main purpose was not to impede cannon but to slow and expose enemy infantry to fire from the guns and muskets of the garrison. Ramparts formed the most solid defensive work of an artillery fortress. The main rampart of a fixed fortification was divided by bastions into straight sections of wall, or curtains. The exterior slope was called the scarp. The interior, rear-facing slope was known as the talus. The widest part of the upper rampart, which was recessed and screened by the parapet to form a fighting platform for the heaviest guns, was called the terreplein. The main rampart was topped by a chemin des rondes. See also banquette; barracks; defilade; defilement; revetment. ramrods. Artillery and muskets alike in this era required the charge and wadding to be rammed into the barrel with a ramrod. Into the early 18th century, most were wooden, with brass tips. Iron ramrods for muskets were introduced gradually from the 1720s. ranges. See close range; evolutions; musket shot; pistol shot. ranker. An ordinary soldier, not a non-commissioned or commissioned officer. He was roughly the equivalent of a rating in a ship’s company. See also ranks (on land). ranks (at sea). Navies of this period were still developing formal systems of ranks. There was much copying of terminology and systems, but also abiding national differences. The most senior officer commanding a squadron of ships was by this period generally known as an “admiral” (French: “amiral”), but there were several variants of this title. In England, the “Lord High Admiral” exercised jurisdiction over the Admiralty and all naval affairs. “Amiral de France” (Admiral of France) was an ancient office reestablished by Louis XIV in 1669 as an honorific, granted to several illegitimate sons in succession. Although nominally the senior command in the French Navy, the title carried little authority in either peacetime naval planning or wartime command. In active command of a fleet, 389

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the senior French officer was “vice-amiral.” The Dutch equivalent was “luitenantadmiraal,” while the Spanish was “almirante.” A 17th-century English “admiral-general” was commander-in-chief of a fleet, as was an “admiral of the fleet.” That rank, too, had non-English equivalents. In the 18th century, the latter title was held by the most senior flag officer. A “port admiral” was in charge of all ships in or near a port. In the 17th century, a “viceadmiral” was second in command of an English squadron of ships-of-the-line, or he was the officer commanding the van division of a fleet on the move. The French equivalent was “lieutenant-général des armées navales,” the Dutch used “vice-admiraal,” and the Spanish called this officer “teniente general.” Viceadmiral was also the title of colonial deputies to the Lord High Admiral in the Royal Navy. A “rear admiral” was third in command of a fleet or the officer in charge of the rear division of a fleet under way. The French title was “chef d’escadre,” while the Spanish was “jefe de escuadra.” A rough Dutch equivalent was “schout-bij-nacht” (literally, “night watchman”). “Flag rank” was admiral’s rank, with the right to fly a distinctive flag over the “flagship.” The flagship was any ship carrying an admiral at sea and displaying his distinctive flag. That designation would change if the admiral moved his flag to some other ship, for instance, because his original ship was too badly damaged. “Commander” was used for an officer in command of a squadron of ships. “Commodore” was also used in that sense to the end of the 17th century, but more usually in reference to the temporary commander of a squadron or a station. While holding such command, he was allowed to fly a broad pennant and to exercise most of the powers of an acting rear admiral. Once the pennant came down, however, his status and powers reverted to those of a captain. Commodore was also used to refer to the senior master of a convoy of merchantmen. For the same position, the Dutch Navy used “kommandeur” in the 17th– 18th centuries. Spain set rank for this officer as “brigadier” in 1773. The French Navy had no equivalent rank before 1786, when it introduced “chef de division.” Aboard a single ship, distinctions were made among three classes of officers. In the English system all commissioned officers were sea officers, as opposed to naval administrators who did not need to be sea officers but could also hold rank by state or royal commission. Warrant officers were sea officers holding status by warrant, rather than by commission. Petty officers, or inferior officers, were a vaguer category of officers with responsibilities for specific aspects of handling and fighting a ship. The rest of a ship’s company was comprised of those who qualified as “ratings,” a recognition of seamanship or other shipboard skills slightly above those of the general company, who were collectively known as “the people.” Over the 16th–19th centuries in most European navies, the commanding officer in charge of piloting and navigation of a “rated” or “post” warship (the largest ships) was a post-captain, who was simply called “captain.” This was not necessarily the same officer who fought the ship, or even the most senior sea officer on board, if flag officers were present in the fleet. A “captain of the fleet” assisted the commander-in-chief and might personally hold the rank of captain or rear admiral. A “first captain” was commander of a small fleet, but a “flag captain” was a captain in command only of an admiral’s flagship. 390

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An English “post-captain” held commission on a rated warship of 20 guns or more (the number of guns rising as the system of Rates changed with new and larger warship designs). The comparable French title was “capitaine de vaisseau.” For the republican and Calvinist Dutch it was the more spartan “kapitein,” while the Spanish used “capitán de navío.” A Royal Navy “commander” was matched by a French sea officer addressed as “capitaine de frégate.” The Dutch counterpart was “kapitein-luitenant,” and his Spanish equal was a “capitán de fragata.” An English naval lieutenant was a commissioned sea officer immediately inferior to the captain. In larger warships with multiple lieutenants, each was sub-ranked by seniority (first lieutenant, second lieutenant, and so on). A “lieutenant in command” was a commissioned lieutenant who was, in effect, the captain of a small warship, often a sloop-of-war. His French opposite number was a “lieutenant de vaisseau.” The Dutch rank was “luitenant ter zee,” while the Spanish called this junior commissioned officer “teniente de navío.” In the smallest English warships—those with fewer than 20 guns—the commanding officer was usually called “captain” by the crew, even though he was not a post-captain and his quasi-formal Royal Navy rank was “master,” or “master and commander” from 1674–1794. This was in keeping with common practice at sea, where even a merchant ship’s crew usually called the man in charge “captain.” The master was a warrant officer, using “officer” in the loose sense of someone with authority over certain aspects of life aboard a warship. He was in charge of piloting and navigation, but not necessarily responsible for fighting the ship. This designation placed him at an intermediate rank between postcaptain and lieutenant, whom he often helped train in the skills of pilotage. The master was assisted in handling the vessel by a petty officer or “quartermaster,” who was also a warrant officer. The quartermaster was tasked to help oversee the general handling of a warship. The “boatswain” was a warrant officer in charge of working the sails and rigging, ensuring the good condition of sails and ropes, and commanding men who actually worked the sails and rigging. He was closely identified with pipe calls or whistles, which he used to signal instructions to men working aloft. The “purser” was a warrant officer in the unenviable position of overseeing the provisioning of ship’s stores and a crew’s victuals and drink, a task incurring great personal financial risk in the Royal Navy. The “captain of the forecastle” was a petty officer who oversaw the operation of sails, rigging, and men in the forecastle. Similarly, a “captain of the foretop” was in charge of operations carried out by topmen. A “gun captain” was chief of a gun crew, responsible for all its workings in combat and its care while out of it. A “regulating captain” did not serve on board. He was an on-shore officer of the Impress Service. A “coxswain” was a petty officer placed in charge of the crew of a ship’s boat. On a wooden warship, a “master carpenter” was a highly skilled and experienced craftsman, though not a seaman, who was charged with repairs and maintenance of the hull, masts, and spars. By the mid-17th century, this crucially important member of the crew, who had not held officer rank before, was elevated to a rank of warrant officer. The position was thereafter filled only by 391

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carpenters who had years of experience as shipwrights in the Navy yards or aboard ship. The master carpenter had other carpenters, carpenter’s mates, support crew, and workers assigned to aid in his key tasks of keeping the ship weatherly and ready for action at all times, and in effecting tidy repairs during and immediately after combat. A “master gunner” was a warrant officer mainly responsible for the maintenance, loading, and firing of a ship’s guns. “Mate” was the title of a deck officer in a merchantman, but it was used for a series of petty officers junior to warrant officers in a warship. Hence, warrant officer positions in a large warship (boatswain, gunner, master, sailmaker, quartermaster, and so forth) had “mates,” or assistants, attached to them, each taking the warrant officer’s title as a prefix to their own, as in “gunner’s mate.” A “midshipman” could be either a petty officer or a ship’s boy studying to become a commissioned sea officer. He was thus a “superior petty officer,” who was appointed or “rated” by the ship’s captain. In 1676, the Royal Navy introduced sub-ranks of “midshipman ordinary” for officer candidates sponsored by the Admiralty and borne on the ship’s books in addition to the regular complement of officers and crew. Most of these were young protégés of senior sea officers, and hoped and expected to rise fast in the service. A “midshipman extraordinary” was a supernumerary rating category created around 1670 for unemployed officers. This was an imaginative way of caring for the Royal Navy’s own during peacetime, prior to the reform era that introduced the half-pay system. (The term as used in this era should not be confused with modern American naval usage for a class of cadet at the Naval Academy at Annapolis.) Below these ranks and positions were ordinary “ratings,” the seamen, landmen, and idlers who formed the majority of a ship’s complement. See also bowman; firemaster; General at Sea; military medicine; standing officers; ward room. ranks (on land). By the end of this period, the most senior rank in most armies was “field marshal” (“Feldmarschall” in the Imperial service; “Generalfeldmarschall” in Brandenburg; and “maréchal de France” for top commanders in the armies of Louis XIV). In some armies, particularly in Germany, “generalissimo” was used instead, and for a time after 1650 “lieutenant-general” and “general of the cavalry,” or “general of the artillery,” still outranked field marshal. Originally, a field marshal was both a command and an administrative position. In several armies by the end of this period, however, most administrative functions had been removed to a supporting staff, or even to a general council (such as the Prussian Generalkriegskommissariat). Citing the British example, below field marshal were three grades of general officer: “general,” “lieutenant-general,” and “major-general.” Modern confusion about the relative seniority of the lower two general ranks of this era derives from “lieutenant” being used as a qualifier for “second-in-command,” along with later historical shortening of the original usage “sergeant-major general” to just “major-general.” In addition, “brigadiergeneral” and “brigadier” were issued as temporary field ranks in the British Army. In 1668, the French launched a new rank of “brigadier” as the lowest rank of general officer. In the French Army, the “colonel général de l’infanterie” and 392

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“colonel général de la cavalerie” were the chief officers in command of those arms. In 1661, Louis XIV took the first of those ranks for himself, making him singularly responsible for many good, but also several bad, reforms affecting the principal arm of French military power over the following half-century. The Imperial Army also had the rank of “General der Cavallerie,” which fell between “Feldmarschall Leutnant” and a full “Feldmarschall.” In most European armies in this period, “colonels” held the first rank after the general ranks, though some regimental colonels also might be general officers with a proprietary interest in the unit. A regimental commander usually held his office by purchase. To help recover his fee, he sold regimental offices to still lower ranks. Louvois found a way around this problem by instituting two innovative ranks, so that French regiments from the 1670s increasingly relied on deputies to the colonel called “lieutenant-colonels,” and on still lower-ranking “majors.” These were actually appointments, rather than formal ranks. Their true importance lay in being non-purchasable, which meant that only professional military ability and not mere nobility cleared the path to promotion to these levels. The lieutenant-colonel quickly evolved in practice into the officer who administered, then later actually commanded, the regiment. A major was technically not in command of anything. He was, however, crucially responsible for overseeing drill, military discipline, and overall training of the soldiery. In this work he was assisted by one or two “aides-majors.” At the company level would be found “captains,” “lieutenants,” and “ensigns.” The “quartermaster” was a regimental officer in charge of food, supplies, and quarters (lodging). In the French Army his title was “maréchal des logis.” An “adjutant” did not hold a commissioned rank, though he might also be a captain or lieutenant. The adjutant was an administrative appointment in British and other regiments whose duties were to assist in drill and see to other regimental matters. “Cornets” served in cavalry squadrons. Non-commissioned officers (NCOs) started at “sergeant-major” in British armies. There was just one such rank per infantry battalion, but one for each troop of cavalry. “Staff sergeants” served in the regimental headquarters (HQ). “Color sergeant” was not a rank introduced to British units until 1813, nor was the rank of “lance-corporal.” The lowest-ranking NCOs in this era were “corporals” and their artillery equivalent, “bombardiers.” See also captaincy-general; deputies in the field; firemaster; grand vezier (vezir-i azam); intendants des armées; officers; warrant officer. rapparees. Irish irregulars, often simple pikemen, operating as guerillas or just as simple highwaymen feeding off the dislocation of a savage civil war in the period from 1689–1691. They were named after their principal weapon, the short Irish pike, or “rapaire.” They were particularly effective in frustrating Williamite army operations after the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690) and the departure of James II and William III from Ireland. Rastadt (Rastatt), Treaty of (February 24/March 7, 1714). The treaty was negotiated by Prince Eugene of Savoy for the Austrian Habsburgs and by Villars for the French, after the latter led an army against the Austrians when they failed to 393

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sign the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) that ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The only additional territorial change it made was to grant Landau, which Villars had just taken, to France. France surrendered Freiburg and other territory on the right bank of the Rhine, restoring traditional rights to the Imperial Electors of Cologne and Bavaria and extending original recognition to a new electorate of Hanover. The Austrians agreed to stop supporting anti-Bourbon groups in Spain, in exchange for France cutting ties to anti-Habsburg rebels in Hungary. See also Baden, Treaty of (1714); Barrier Treaty, Third (1715). Rates. The Royal Navy classified its major warships into six Rates from the 16th century, using a system in which ships were rated by the number of guns each brought to battle. Those powerful enough to hold a place in line of battle were called ships-of-the-line, or “battleships.” These had at least sixty ship’s guns (from 1756), which meant they were usually two- or three-deckers. Under a new, but short-lasting system introduced in 1653, ships were instead rated by the size of their complement. Other rate schemes, effected in 1677 and 1685, returned to the number of guns. In the 1690s, the English system finally settled on standard classifications that combined a ship’s complement and the number of guns it mounted under war establishment—ships dismounted most guns in peacetime. First Rates went to sea with 94–100 guns on three decks. Second Rates were also three-deckers, mounting 90–96 guns. Third Rates were two-deckers that carried 64–80 guns, and Fourth Rates were two-deckers with 44–64 guns. All four top ship classes were considered line of battle ships. Below the top rates were various warships with single gun decks that were not considered able to hold a place in a line of battle. Fifth Rates had anywhere from 26–44 guns. A variety of even smaller warships—from sloops to cutters, schooners, and barks—were classed as Sixth Rates and mounted just 10–24 guns each. The number of guns per rating changed over the course of the 18th century, as ship design shifted and more guns were mounted in each class. The figures given here are for ship classes up to 1714. Numbers for each class were readjusted several times during the 18th century, until by 1800 the minimum number of guns for a Sixth Rate was 20–28, while a First Rate might mount up to 120 guns. The Royal Navy maintained its Rates system until 1817. Naval ordinances issued in 1674 and revised in 1689 established a comparable French classification index, or rates system. A French First Rate was initially classed as carrying 80 guns topping out at 24-pounders. After 1689 this was changed to exceed 100 guns, with the heaviest weighing in as 36-pounders. The largest ships built for Louis XIV were the “Soleil Royal” and the “Royal Louis.” Each mounted 120 guns by design, though seldom carried that many in fact, and displaced 2,400 tons. They were slow and unweatherly, and neither enjoyed success in battle. On the lower end of the scale, a French ship classed as a Fifth Rate in the late 17th century officially carried no more than 36 guns. See also carronade; cruiser; forests. rating. A member of a ship’s company without rank; an ordinary seaman, landman, or idler, but not an officer. He was roughly the equivalent of a ranker in a regiment. See also military discipline; ranks (at sea). 394

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rations. During the early modern period, staple foodstuffs in Europe and Asia were few in number and difficult to preserve, but they were beginning to be importantly supplemented for Europeans by tropical and New World crops of great benefit and variety. This was especially a boon for warriors at sea. Various grains, generally wheat, were used to bake bread or hard biscuit (hardtack). Some historians think that biscuit formed 70% of a sailor’s diet, supplemented by cheese and beer, cider, or wine, according to the local custom. Horses also traveled by sea, often for great distances. They were generally fed oats or barley. Meat (cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep) sometimes traveled live, but more often it was butchered and salted in casks in a ship’s hold. Fish was always available, usually dried and salted (stockfish) rather than caught or bought fresh, unless a ship or squadron was in port. Fruit and vegetables, previously unheard of except for onions, were abundant in this era. Scurvy was finally solved during this period for ships making long-distance voyages, as ships sailing in the Caribbean or off South America gained access to fresh fruit (along with sugar and barrels of rum). On board warships and in overseas garrisons, some minor luxury items, notably tobacco, were distributed with normal rations as morale boosters. Food and drink supplied to soldiers varied greatly by national custom, diet, and locale. Ottoman Janissary Corps soldiers were guaranteed one meal per day—boiled cracked wheat and butter. It was cooked in their Orta’s large copper kettle, the Kazan, which also served as the unit icon. They had plentiful supplies of hardtack whenever bread was not available. They usually ate much better than that, however, owing to a sophisticated commissary system, the envy of Europe, through which Janissary victualing was organized and funds to buy meats and tastier items were dispersed. In addition to basic rations, each Orta received cash to buy bread and meat, and individual Janissaries contributed two gold pieces each to a common fund to buy food on the march. While on campaign, extra allowances were dispersed and tens of thousands of animals from imperial herds were slaughtered. More thousands of sheep accompanied the armies, to be butchered along the way. In peacetime, the pampered Ortas of the Kapikulu Askerleri had access to 300,000 sheep reserved for the “imperial kitchens” of the Porte. This emphasis on secure food supplies for elite troops was reflected in the culinary themes of Janissary badges, flags, and the great symbol of the Kazan. All this was done by central military administration, with a careful eye toward minimizing disruption of civilian life in the provinces, while also tamping down discontent among the troops. In one of the more remarkable Ottoman achievements, and a testament to their political acumen, at the end of campaigning surplus grain was sold back to local suppliers at the original price paid by the state. French and Dutch armies took field ovens and supplies of grain with them on the march, pausing every several days to bake thousands of loaves of fresh bread. Austrian armies were supplied with fish raised in well-tended ponds and lakes and sold to the Habsburgs by Austrian and Bohemian magnates. Danes, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish also expected large quantities of salt fish as part of their rations. All soldiers in all wars supplemented basic rations with opportunistically plundered food and drink. From the second half of the 17th century, this 395

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activity was systematized as contributions, but often it remained merely plunder or other rough foraging. English troops expected salt meat, butter, hard biscuit, cheese, and small beer, even if they had to steal it themselves. In fact, English seamen and the population in general drank water only when absolutely necessary. This was an effective remedy against water-borne diseases, whose causes were not known but whose effects were readily observable. Beer was important for far more than recreation, because water supplies in foreign lands as well as at home were often unmapped, and in any case they were probably unsafe and possibly poisoned. Wine, rather than small beer, was the preference of French and Germans for the same reasons, and they drank it in as large quantities as Englishmen consumed small beer. The sultan’s troops were (mostly) sober, at least officially, unlike many European or Asian soldiers. They relied on fresh water, tea, and coffee. The normal daily ration in the British Army was one pound of bread and another of beef (or nine ounces of pork), as well as additional “small rations” of butter, cheese, peas, or other vegetables on overseas stations. The Ottomans had access to, and drank, great quantities of coffee. That beverage became popular in Europe after large amounts were captured with the Ottoman baggage train following the siege of Vienna (1683). Tea was hardly known outside East Indies stations and was not part of normal rations in this period. During 18th-century sieges, the daily ration for a member of a French garrison was set by an official standard. Each man received the equivalent of 24 ounces of bread or 18 ounces of hardtack, five ounces of meat, several liters of water, and one-sixth of a bottle of wine. Officers received much more. Extra water rations were reserved for the wounded. Among soldiers it was agreed that a more appropriate share was closer to two pounds of bread, one of meat or salt fish, and 5–6 liters of drinking (or bathing) water, plus an allotment of wine or beer. Given the hot work of infantry positioned along ramparts and the still hotter and harder muscle work of gun crews, soldiers were surely more right than the bureaucrats. As a siege grew prolonged, the meat supply was consumed first. After slaughtering pigs, goats, and cows, the garrison would eat draught animals. In extreme cases, cavalry mounts were also eaten. However, sieges in this period tended to be much shorter than earlier so that starvation, while always a threat, was seldom faced before bombardment or assault induced a garrison to surrender, or relief arrived. See also off reckonings; stoppages; subsistence money. Ratisbon, Truce of (August 15, 1684). “Truce of Regensburg.” The settlement that ended the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). Louis XIV kept several Imperial free cities and other territories seized during his campaign of forced “reunions” from 1679–1684. Most notably, at the end of the war he held Strasbourg and all of Luxembourg, having taken the latter after a brutal bombardment of its fortress city. Louis thus made his greatest gains from his briefest war, benefiting from Europe’s distraction by the siege of Vienna (1683). That siege, which he had encouraged Constantinople to undertake, prevented formation of a grand coalition to oppose him. However, subsequent efforts to force Europe to confirm these terms as a permanent settlement in Louis’ infamous Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688) instead provoked the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). 396

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That expensive conflict forced Louis to accept humbler terms and even chastened him—though only briefly. ravelin. Initially, an earth and masonry mound sited outside the gate and curtain. In its developed form, it was a triangular outwork angled to form a salient angle, and close to 70 meters at its widest span. Many were supported by a redoubt. Ravelins encouraged forward defense of the whole of the fortified works and permitted deadly crossfire to sweep approaching enemy infantry. They were usually sited in or just beyond the ditch between two stout bastions, covering one shoulder of each and adding protection to the otherwise exposed curtain. In English, “demi-lune” (half moon) referred to a sub-type of ravelin sited before a bastion, rather than between two. In French usage of this period, however, “demi-lune” meant the main ravelin. Adding to the terminological confusion, ravelins were sometimes called “spurs” by English military engineers. By any name, the ravelin was the most important of all detached works. Raya. “Reaya.” The tax-paying civilian population of the Ottoman Empire. Sultans and the Janissary Corps tried to keep Raya disarmed by law—a policy comparable to Tokugawa laws concerning townsfolk and peasants in Japan that restricted weapons possession to samurai. As the Empire’s military needs grew in this period and infantry displaced traditional heavy cavalry and expensive Kapikulu Askerleri, segments of the Raya were allowed to own bows or guns, and some were recruited as auxiliary infantry. In exchange for paying taxes, Raya were usually exempt from military labor, except during emergencies. razing the works. When a besieging army successfully stormed a fortress or accepted its surrender, and the conquering monarch did not intend to keep the place, engineers and pioneers set about destroying the works. If they stopped at cutting the parapet back to the cordon, this was called “razing the works.” Razin, Stenka (c. 1630–1671). “Little Stephen.” A Cossack rebel leader. He led a massive Don Cossack revolt which swept along numerous serfs and free peasants with grievances against boyars and other landowners who sought to impose more discipline on the population of the Don region than Razin and other Cossacks were prepared to tolerate. Razin began his career as an outlaw, raiding the rich trade of the Caspian. His success attracted a growing following to his sich on the Don. By 1670, he relocated to Astrakhan, using that city as a base to send raiders by hoof and ship up the Volga and Don, into more settled regions of southern Russia. Later that year, he moved north himself. As he advanced, the local peasantry and even some townsfolk were roused into a violent repudiation of landlords and far-off tsars. Razin assembled a huge army of 200,000 souls—or perhaps more accurately, an ill-trained rabble of divers grievances and limited military ability. This vast rural mob exploded into a campaign of landlord-killing and destruction from the lower Volga to the Caspian Sea. It was a spreading example for more distant outbreaks, including to the north of Moscow, that terrified the landed classes. The rebels were joined by some runaway Russian troops 397

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and even a few disgruntled nobles, as Razin called for violence and vengeance against all officers of the Russian state, Orthodox clergy, Jews, and the rich. As usual in Russia, and as would be the case in the later Pugachev rebellion, Cossack and peasant grievance was not so much anti-tsarist as organized around the assertion that Tsar Alexis in Moscow was a “false tsar,” against whom the Cossacks proposed an alternate “true tsar,” or pretender. During the Razin rebellion, this “true tsar” was claimed to be the reigning tsar’s lost elder son, who was waiting to bring justice to all folk if only a little cleansing violence, or a lot, took place first. The rebellion ran its course as it ran out of victims, and then it was utterly crushed by troops loyal to Alexis, with all the usual and expected brutality of real class warfare. Many a Cossack and rebellious serf died on the execution block with surprise in their eyes and a prayer to the true tsar upon their lips. Razin was captured and publicly tortured to death in Moscow in June 1671. The Cossacks were thrown out of Astrakhan later that year. rear admiral. See ranks (at sea). rebuild. A warship that was partly or wholly rebuilt, usually to replace rotten hull timbers. This was less expensive than laying down new hulls. Recess agreement (1653). See Prussian Army; war finance. recruitment. See absolutism; Banner system; British Army; British establishment; cavalry; Cossacks; crimp; Danish Army; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; embargo; French Army; French Navy; impressment; Indian Wars; infantry; Irish establishment; Janissary Corps; military discipline; Montecuccoli; New England; New Model Army; officers; Polish Army; Prussian Army; Royal Navy; Russian Army; standing army; strel’sty; Swedish Army; taking the shilling; Tatars; third-man regiments; war finance. redan. A simple field work or outwork. It was V-shaped, with two faces forming a salient angle and each capable of supporting fire to the opposing face of the next redan. Redans were open at the rear. They were used to supplement and support more elaborate outworks, or sometimes in place of more expensive bastions. See also bonnet; lunette; redoubt. redoubt. An isolated, self-contained, self-supporting, enclosed fortification defending an important position beyond the glacis, but covered by defensive fire from the covered way. More usually, the term was used in reference to a strong defense point constructed as a redan within the larger works and sited as part of a layered defense, such as within a place of arms or ravelin. The innermost redoubt served as a sanctuary of final retreat and defense. redoubt of the place of arms. See places of arms. reduce. To break down the defensive walls of a fortified position. A meaning that is archaic in modern English but was still in wide use in the 18th century 398

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referred to the postwar practice of disbanding a regiment and putting its officers on half pay. See also bombardment; fortification; siege warfare. re-entrant. From “re-entrant angle.” That portion of defensive works forming an angle that faced toward the main defense. Its antonym was “salient angle.” re-entrant place of arms. See places of arms. Regencies. The Muslim principalities of Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis. See also Barbary corsairs. Regensburg, Truce of (August 15, 1684). See Ratisbon, Truce of. Regents. The leading merchants of Holland, who formed a republican oligarchy and States’ party which opposed consistent demands by Orangists to grant supreme political and military powers to William III (then still Prince of Orange) and opposed the dynastic ambitions of the princely house of Orange. The main leader of the Regents into the 1670s was Jan de Witt (1625–1672). Regents were anything but fervent Calvinists, which separated them from a fervently religious general population and a large influx of anti-French and antiCatholic Huguenot refugees. The Regents regularly opposed William’s proposed military expenditures in the 1680s and all efforts to engage in war with France to secure the Spanish Netherlands outside the control of Louis XIV. Fresh French aggressions leading into the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) forced them to support the Glorious Revolution and William’s coronation in England and Scotland. They agreed to continue a close alliance with Great Britain again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Upon William’s death in 1702, the Regents returned to full power, dominating politics in the United Provinces until 1747. Some historians refer to that period as the “Republic of the Regents.” regiment. The main organizational unit of infantry and cavalry in this era, but not the principal tactical unit, which was the battalion for infantry and the squadron for cavalry. A regiment was usually commanded by a lieutenantcolonel. French cavalry under Louis XIV was organized into regiments that subdivided into two or three squadrons in the 1670s, but into four squadrons from the 1690s. English regiments were also entrepreneurial proprietorships to the end of the 18th century, and even later. Still, a slow shift to professionalism was perhaps symbolized by the incomplete, but important change during the time of Marlborough to a number system for regiments. Previously, each regiment had simply taken the name of its colonel. Increased professionalism was the single greatest result of reorganizing early modern armies into regiments. With permanent regiments there also appeared regular uniforms, distinctive unit badges and pennants, and codes of collective behavior that increased the effectiveness of full-time troops compared to the remaining amateur forces. Regiments of cavalry had varying establishments. To give one example, under Marlborough a British horse regiment comprised six troops, totaling around 399

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300 men. Dragoon regiments had 8 troops and about 480 men. Infantry regiments also varied in size and organization. An average Austrian regiment of the day had a paper strength of 2,200 men organized into three large battalions. Under battle conditions, it was not unusual for battalions to be severely understrength, with as few as 350–400 men each. In such cases, the regiment usually regrouped into two fighting battalions. Régiment du Roi (1663). See drill; Louvois; Martinet, Jean. regimental guns. Light field pieces, including the falcon and falconete. See also artillery. regiment in pay. See British Army. regiment in subsidy. See British Army. Rehnsköld, Karl Gustaf (1651–1722). Swedish field marshal. See also Fraustadt (1706); Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Poltava (1709). relief army. See army of relief. remblai. In fortification, the spill or debris of earth and stones produced by digging the ditch. It was used to build up the rampart. restraining orders. See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). retired flank. See flank; orillon. retrenchment. In field works, a simple protected position comprising a trench and parapet, most often interior to a larger defensive position. It served as a fallback position in the event a battle line broke. In fixed fortification, retrenchment was a defensive position, interior to the major works, that was constructed in haste as the enemy breached the main defenses. Vauban wisely concluded that retrenchments needed to be built in quieter times than during sieges. He placed his retrenchments behind anticipated points of breaches in extant or new fortifications, usually in the bastion. A “general retrenchment” was a continuous line of defense within the larger enceinte. It presented a final, greatly determined line of resistance to assault. Reunions (1679–1684). See Croissy, marquis de; Louis XIV; Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); War of the Reunions (1683–1684). revetment. A stone or brick retaining wall covering the entire face of a rampart to support it and prevent earth and masonry of the parapet from falling into the ditch. It was not itself of sufficient strength to withstand bombardment for long. The slope, or batter, of the scarp revetment was crucial. An incline that was too 400

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shallow would vitiate the impeding effects of the rampart on attacking infantry, whereas too steep a slope would increase the erosion of brick or masonry during peacetime. This latter problem was addressed by adding counterforts to carry the revetment into the packed earth of the rampart. A tablette was sometimes set on top. A “full revetment” was the standard form, presenting an obstacle that was too tall to allow escalade and steep enough to expose attackers to devastating defensive fire. A “demi-revêtement” (half-revetment) protected only the lower half of the scarp revetment with brick or stone facing. Above the masonry line, the work rose sharply upward for a number of feet, then the angle eased more gently to the crest. This demi-form was more vulnerable to escalade, but saved greatly on masonry costs. It was most often used on outworks, rather than on the main enceinte. Fully earthen revetments became more fashionable later in western European fortification, but they always had been used in Baltic works. See also assault; mines/mining. revolution in military affairs (RMA). See artillery fortress; battle; bayonet; drill; flintlock firearms; fortification; line of battle; magazines; parallels; siege warfare; standing army; Vauban. Rheinbund (1658). Translated as “League of the Rhine” or “Rhine League,” an association formed by Mazarin between France and several small, neutral German states. Sweden was also a party because it was co-guarantor in Germany, along with France, of terms of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). For the French, the Rheinbund buffered Habsburg military aid and troops moving overland into the Spanish Netherlands. For German princes it forestalled imperial domination and similarly deterred the movement of Imperial troops across their lands. Louis XIV shattered the confidence of German princes in the intentions of France, and with it the Rheinbund, during the War of Devolution (1667–1668). German members refused to renew the association from 1666–1667. The newly anti-French attitude and fear of Louis among German princes was confirmed by the sun king’s occupation of Lorraine in 1670. Rheinfeld, Battle of (July 6, 1678). At this late day in the Dutch War (1672–1678), Louis XIV was satisfied with his hold on certain key frontier outposts and towns and wanted peace with the United Provinces. Attending the siege of Ghent, he ordered Créqui in Alsace to avoid battle with Charles V of Lorraine. Créqui moved south to Rheinfeld, near the Swiss border, but Charles sent his vanguard in pursuit. This force of 5,000 took position outside the fortress, but Créqui attacked with superior numbers. The Imperials were trapped and overwhelmed when the fortress commander closed his gates behind them, leaving them exposed to the French. Créqui then turned and surprised the Imperial main force at Ortenbach (July 23, 1678). ricochet fire (“tir à ricochet”). A technique invented by Vauban at the siege of Philippsburg in 1688 and perfected by him at the siege of Ath, in 1697. It employed a variety of reduced charges to fire solid shot from a normal cannon, 401

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not a mortar, with the barrel elevated from 3 to 15 degrees, depending on where its battery was located. That allowed the shot to fly over the parapet and ricochet within the interior, creating capital hazard to man and beast. The favorite targets of ricochet fire were defending guns and crews sited on the terreplein. On at least one occasion, defenders running out of solid shot were ordered by officers to resupply by collecting spent enemy shot that had been fired at them “tir à ricochet.” Some defenders were misled by the low velocity of undercharged cannonballs and tried to catch or block them bodily as they rolled, an error that resulted in much maiming and death. This new way of shelling a fortress rendered parapets almost useless against siege artillery. From the mid-18th century, mortars and howitzers were used to hurl undercharged explosive shells, in addition to solid shot, into fortified positions so that the ricochet effect was compounded by a follow-on explosion. rig. The style in which a ship’s mast and sails were laid out, as in “ketch-rigged.” See also rigging. Riga, siege of (1699). See Augustus II; Great Northern War (1700–1721). rigging. The complex system of ropes and pulleys (blocks), shrouds, braces, and stays that supported and controlled a sailing ship’s masts, spars, and yards. “Standing rigging” supported the erect masts, while “running rigging” worked the moving yards and sails. There were many rigging systems of varying complexity, roughly corresponding to the number of masts and spars involved. Smaller ships of one or two masts were “brig” or “ketch” rigged. “Fore-and-aft” rigging involved bending sails of different shapes and sizes to masts and spars so that they moved parallel to the centerline of the ship. “Gaff ” rigging was a subset of fore-and-aft rigging whereby quadrangular mainsails were supported by gaffs (short spars hinged to the mast). “Lateen rigging” attached large lateen (triangular) sails to yards secured to the deck, with the middle of the sail hoisted to the mast. To “climb the rigging” was English naval slang for losing one’s composure or temper, rather as a landman might “climb the wall.” See also masts; tackle. Rijswijk, Treaty of (1697). See Treaty of Ryswick (1697). Rites controversy. A dispute between the Catholic Church and Qing emperors over the allegiance owed to the state by Chinese converts. The Qing court maintained that ancient Confucian rites of ancestor worship were civil, not religious, matters, and hence lay outside the concern of foreign clerics. Therefore, Chinese converts could and would be ordered to continue observing these practices, which were vitally important to the cultural and political unity of the empire. That position was supported by Jesuits, but opposed by other Christian missionary orders. The controversy came to a head in 1705–1706 in a clash between the Kangxi emperor and a legate representing Pope Clement XI. As a result of the Rites controversy, Christian preaching was severely limited, and 402

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Catholic missionaries were expelled from China. Missions remained officially banned from 1724–1846. Rio de Janeiro, French occupation of (September 11–November 13, 1711). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). rivers. See logistics; natural frontiers; water maneuvers. roads. The Americas in this period were traversed by primitive roads that were at best no more than dirt trails. This was also true of most roads in Russia and Central Asia. The Ottoman Empire and China alone enjoyed good roads, amounting to broad highways along major routes. In Europe, most roads across open country—even by the mid-18th century—were dirt (or mud) tracks, or perhaps slightly better stony trails one cart wide. The main roads in western Europe in 1650 followed Roman tracks 1,500 years old or more, but did not otherwise compare to their ancient predecessors. A few metaled (paved) roads appeared near major cities and in significant theaters of war toward the end of this period. For instance, Austrians laid out the “Kaiserstrassen” highway, while the French built a metaled road running from Dunkirk to Lille, through Ypres. The paucity of roads affected diplomacy as well as war, slowing couriers and limiting transport. In 1708, a French envoy took over three weeks to reach Madrid from Versailles. Matters improved only slowly over the course of this period, but more rapidly after it. Whereas in 1700 it took a coach 50 hours to travel from Bath to London, a century later it took less than half that time. See also Camisards, revolt of (1702–1705); logistics; magazines; talus. Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/March 8, 1658). This humiliating peace was signed by Frederik III almost immediately after Karl X crossed the frozen Belts to Zealand with 5,000 men and appeared in the suburbs of Copenhagen on the morning of February 25/March 7, 1658. It stripped Denmark of numerous Norwegian and other Baltic territories, including Bornholm, Trondhiem, and Scania. This smashed traditional Danish control of the Sound, further undermining Danish claims to impose Sound Tolls (from which Sweden was already exempt), and it established a promontory of Swedish-controlled territory through the heart of Danish Norway. The Danes were required to disarm themselves, pay for a Swedish occupation army, and provide 2,000 troops to Karl at Danish expense. More than half of these men deserted when the time came. But even this formal and abject prostration did not preserve the Danes from further assault. Karl was unable to take on the growing strength of Poland, so he betrayed the Treaty, which he came much to regret signing. After embarking his army at Kiel, he turned around, re-embarked, and returned to attack Copenhagen in late August. But he had made a major strategic error: Roskilde included a clause requiring Denmark to close the Sound to all foreign fleets. While Karl was marching to and fro, this clause aroused the Dutch to defense of their rich Baltic trade and intervention in the war against Sweden. A Dutch warfleet smashed its way through the Swedish blockade at the Battle of 403

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the Sound (November 8, 1658), bringing fresh supplies and troops to help the Danes fend off Karl at Copenhagen. See also Northern War, Second (1655–1660). rotmistrz. “rotamaster.” A military contractor who raised and commanded small units of mercenaries, such as a choragiew. In the Polish Army, the poczet (“post,” or “lance”) of a rotmistrz was larger than other units because it usually included a fair number of “dead-pays,” used to pad the income of the unit and its officers. As many as 10% of names on the paper muster might be fictitious. roturiers. Officers of non-noble social origin, usually found in the French Navy. See also anoblis; officers. Roure rebellion (1670). A tax revolt by French peasants in the Vivarais region, provoked by the tax policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and aimed more at revenue men than at the king. Even so, the rebellion had about it at least a whiff of jacquerie, as peasant bands attacked local nobles. The revolt was named for Jean-Antoine du Roure, a local noble and former officer who sympathized with and led the rebels. Rather than wage a guerilla campaign, Roure made the fatal error of accepting a field fight with French troops. His own untrained band was soundly defeated. Nearly 600 prisoners were sent to prison galleys. Royal Hungary. A narrow strip of western Hungary that expressed allegiance to the Habsburgs of Austria at the middle of the 17th century. It was never conquered by the Ottomans. However, its Magyar magnates cleaved to their traditional right to elect kings, on the Polish model. They therefore despised Habsburg overlordship and cooperated with the Ottoman invasion leading to the siege of Vienna in 1683. Royal Navy. In popular memory and imagination, the pedigree of the Royal Navy is dated to the mixed public and private fleet assembled by Elizabeth I to ward off the “Invincible Armada” of 1588. That navy consisted of royal—or commissioned—ships, as well as privateers sailing under letters of marque. The Elizabethan Navy thereafter waged cruiser warfare against Spain and the commerce of its overseas empire. However, historians more usually identify the Royal Navy as a permanent instrument of English (or from 1707, British) power and national policy, with the victory of Parliament in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). Parliamentary supremacy in war and peace was achieved with active support of many Navy men in the 1640s. That fact, and the growing interest of prosperous London merchants in alternately protecting their own merchantmen and poaching the ships and trade of other nations, helped put English naval finance on a sound footing for the first time by 1652. This ensured support for a permanent or standing Navy, not merely to serve the whim of the monarch, but to pursue an agreed national policy. That policy still involved a great deal of privateering and even some piracy, but it also included convoy escort and home island defense. 404

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From the end of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), Navy finance was controlled by the Treasurer of the Navy (nominally under the Navy Board); logistics were organized by various contractors known as Victuallers; and naval guns, powder, and shot were managed by the Ordnance Board. Naval policy and strategy were determined by the Admiralty and Navy Board (or Commission), though the influence of these two bodies varied greatly with the enormous vagaries of internal politics that characterized the second half of the 17th century in England. By 1652, the “States’ Navy” of the Commonwealth was fiscally solvent and put to sea a “Summer Guard,” or standing force, that employed over 10,000 seamen. From that moment, the prototypical form of English sea power was recognizable: a policy that sought to secure national prosperity by predating on the trade and colonies of other peoples “to God’s glory and our comfort.” English, and later British, naval power thereafter aimed at both national security and great profit from waging war at sea. In N.A.M. Roger’s memorable phrase, true sea power henceforth was seen by Englishmen as “founded on the three elements of wealth, liberty and religion.” This shift was immediately felt in the conduct of three Anglo-Dutch naval wars fought over the next 20 years. Under the republican appellation “State’s Navy,” English squadrons more than held their own against a highly skilled Dutch opponent in the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). They next carried out the aggressive colonial policy of Oliver Cromwell’s so-called Western Design. With less success, English warships spent five years at war with Catholic Spain, fighting the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660). These conflicts elevated and made permanent a new national consensus on the critical role of sea power in sustaining English commercial interests. The Puritan Revolution had raised up social classes that were opposed to monopoly charter companies previously favored by monarchs. The new men wanted naval protection from Channel pirates and swarms of foreign privateers, which the Stuart kings had failed to provide and had then engaged in themselves during the long civil wars. These powerful men of the new classes were devoted to radical Protestantism, but even more to an active and aggressive colonial policy. From their interests and the success of the Navy against the Dutch, and later also the French, a self-conscious idea of England as a major sea power slowly took shape. As a result, there was bedrock political support for long-term financing of a permanent Navy that was tasked initially with blocking Catholic nations from overseas expansion, and then with protecting England’s growing commercial and colonial interests against all comers. With such men in power from 1649–1660, Parliament and the Commonwealth built or purchased 207 warships, a massive expansion from a fleet of just 39 ships-of-the-line. The expansion was financed initially and primarily from confiscated royalist lands, so that 41 major warships were added in 1649–1651 alone. Expansion also meant that the Navy was no longer essentially a force of armed merchants, but a fleet of warships owned and operated by the state. The Navy also played a key role in politics under the Commonwealth, blocking the New Model Army’s ambitions for political power in 1648 and again in 1659. The Navy’s support was critical to the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. 405

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The war with Spain left the Navy with a massive debt and ships full of unpaid crews, alienating its officers from Parliament and turning them toward the king. Reconstituted as the Royal Navy upon the Restoration, Navy support for the king was repaid with royal support for the Navy. The Royal Navy demonstrated a rising professionalism, superb seamanship, and a growing martial superiority against a fine, but overmatched and far more decentralized Dutch Navy during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), and yet again in the Third AngloDutch War (1672–1674). All three Anglo-Dutch Wars, but especially the last, importantly shifted perception of the Navy away from being an instrument of the king and a threat to Parliament and liberty, toward a more neutral sense that it served the nation. Sea power thus slowly, but progressively, took a special place in English national consciousness and policy, as it increasingly protected real mercantile interests in addition to “the king’s honor.” The Navy contributed directly to growing national wealth and prosperity by muscling out colonial and commercial rivals from domestic and overseas carriage trades, a change advanced by several Navigation Acts and confirmed by the outcome of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The new perception grew only slowly, however, because the Restoration Navy was closely identified with the royal family, especially the Duke of York (later, James II) and Prince Rupert. Pro-Navy sentiment increased as the monarchy, too, accepted a global role for English sea power, continued state support for colonial and commercial expansion, and a purposeful mercantile policy as framed in the Navigation Act of 1660. This advance toward national naval policy was partially countermanded by a return to royal appointments of “gentlemen officers” to the fleet, some entering as young “king’s letter boys” or direct patrons of the king. This patronage deeply offended “tarpaulins,” or professional sea officers of lower social origin. The degree of animosity between “gentlemen and tarpaulins” should not be overstated, however. English neutrality during the latter part of the Dutch War (1672–1678) allowed Samuel Pepys and other naval administrators to expand the Navy, with both classes of officers adjusting reasonably well. In the 1670s, James and Pepys laid down hulls for 30 new First and Second Rates for the Navy of Charles II. Progress ended with the brief imprisonment of Pepys during the Whig-induced scare known as the “Popish Plot” of 1678–1679. During the first half of the 1680s, many new ships were thus left unfinished, and others were so badly neglected that they literally rotted at anchor. The officer corps was also badly divided, as opinion about the king and about professional vs. gentlemen officer rivalries produced political factionalism that again undermined national unity and split elite views almost to the point of civil war. In the late 1680s, naval debt was paid off, all officers were subjected to at least some professional training, and more and bigger warships were completed. When James ascended the throne and Pepys returned to office, together they repaired the 30 warships left to rot in the reserve by their opponents, and then added new storehouses and dock facilities to the Navy’s ports and yards. In 1688, the Royal Navy had a commissioned fleet of 173 warships, many of them new First Rates and Second Rates that were unrivaled, other than in the French 406

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Navy. On the other hand, the officer corps of the Royal Navy progressively lost experience as it remained at peace from 1673–1688, with only a single operational squadron in the Mediterranean. The Glorious Revolution was not a complete solution to the Royal Navy’s problems either, though it went some way toward converting it into a true national force. It was the threat from a newly powerful—if not always well-fought—French Navy during the 1690s that had cleared and concentrated English naval and national imaginations by the time civil fighting ended in Ireland in 1691. William III thereupon turned his full attention to the war with France, including the naval war waged in conjunction with the Dutch. The Royal Navy was greatly tested by expansive French naval building and aggressive guerre d’escadre during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). By the mid-1690s, Royal Navy skill and size forced the French Navy into guerre de course. This proved a mixed blessing, as French squadrons and privateers were far more successful in the latter style of war at sea than they had been when seeking and fighting fleet actions. By 1697 the Royal Navy boasted no fewer than 323 warships, totaling more than 160,000 tons burthen. It fended off or deterred invasion plans by Louis XIV in 1692, and again in 1708. It was instrumental in the British war effort on several oceans, and in support of the Army fighting on the Continent during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). It also interceded in the Baltic during the last years of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). In good measure building on foundations laid before 1715, the Royal Navy was the principal expression of British power, the key to Britain’s global imperial reach and hugely successful overseas expansion, and the guarantor of homeland security for the next 200 years. As naval historian N.A.M. Rogers succinctly put it: “Naval dominance of European waters was the largest, longest, most complex and expensive project ever undertaken by the British state and society.” By the end of a generation of war with France in 1713, the Royal Navy was a true national Navy paid for by the state, with Parliament and the monarchy finally in agreement on funding, composition, and strategic purposes. The Royal Navy was the leading Navy in the world, without peer and for two decades after 1715, also without a serious rival or challenger. It had established tactical doctrine in its fighting instructions that would survive for another century, however problematic those instructions were from a war-winning perspective. It had excellent shipyards and dockyards at home and abroad, and several new overseas bases that permitted British warships to operate in the North and South Atlantic, as well as the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Indian Oceans. The Royal Navy also had increasingly professional sea officers, remarkable logistical support, and a superb naval administration from the Naval Boards and Admiralty. Its main failing was that it did not yet possess anything more than an incipient capacity to resupply ships on a blockade line, and thus it could not maintain genuine close blockades of enemy shores. That weakness would be revealed once more in the great naval and world wars of 1740–1763. See also Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement (1689); Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Articles of War; Ayscue, George; Bantry Bay (1689); Barfleur-La Hogue (1692); Beachy Head (1690); Blake, Robert; commissioned officers; convoy; Downs, The 407

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(1666); Gabbard Shoal (1653); General at Sea; Gibraltar; half-pay; idler; impressment; infernal machine; Kentish Knock (1652); landman; Lowestoft (1665); marines; Medway (1667); Methuen Treaties; Monk, George; Mutiny Act (1689); Ordinary; petty officers; Portland (1653); privateers; prize money; ranks (at sea); Rates; Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de; Sandwich, Earl of; seaman; Schooneveld, First (1673); Schooneveld, Second (1673); Solebay (1672); sovereignty of the sea; St. James’ Day Fight (1666); standing officers; Tangier; tarpaulin; Texel (1653); Texel (1673); Torrington, Earl of; Velez-Málaga (1704); warrant officers; watches. Suggested Reading: J. R. Hill, ed. Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (1995); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976; 1998); N.A.M. Roger, Command of the Ocean (2004).

Ruina. See Cossacks; Tatars; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). running footmen. Fit young men whom Marlborough used as battlefield couriers to maintain his command and control. They were issued gold, silver, and bronze-tipped staffs of their office. They were literally runners, rather than riders, apparently because Marlborough thought that couriers on horseback were more liable to be targeted and shot. run the gauntlet. See military discipline. Rupert, Prince (1619–1682). Cavalry general and Royalist admiral; nephew of Charles I, the beheaded king. His father was Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, a principal protagonist in the onset of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Friedrich lost the Palatinate, and with it Rupert’s inheritance. Rupert thus went to war as a teenager, fighting for the Dutch against the Spanish in the Netherlands. Captured by the Spanish in 1638, he was released to Charles I in 1641 upon the intervention of Walter Leslie. Rupert took command of the Cavalier cavalry immediately upon the start of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). He had trouble making professional soldiers in the European style out of the stubborn English noblemen he commanded, but in the early years they were still superior to any horsemen Parliament could raise. Consequently, he beat a small enemy force at Powick Bridge (1642), his first action. He could not restrain his own high spirits or those of his men, however, which often led him and them to disastrous overpursuit, as at Edgehill (1642). The next year, Rupert took Bristol, a major supply point for the Royalist cause. He behaved badly at First Newbury (1643), but the next spring he advanced north in a protracted chevauchée and lifted the siege of York. He then he sacked Bolton, massacring 1,600 soldiers and civilians. At Marston Moor (1644) he overpursued again, costing the Royalists a key battle. In the aftermath, Charles named Rupert overall commander; he was just 25 years old. He led Royalist forces at Naseby (1645), where yet again his Cavaliers overpursued and dispersed beyond hope of recall, while the Ironside (Parliamentary) horse stood firm and destroyed the Royalist army. Rupert retreated to Bristol, which he later surrendered to Thomas Fairfax. His enemies at court used the loss of Bristol to 408

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turn Charles against him. Rupert was stripped of command, humiliated, and exiled, without thanks given for his many acts of military service. Rupert next embarked on a remarkable career at sea. In 1651, he sailed from Toulon for the West Indies with a small squadron of cruisers. The cruise went from disaster to disaster, suffering hurricanes, ship losses, and the lack of any Royalist port left in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, Rupert fought on for two years, until forced to return to France in 1653 with just one ship. He went to sea again with the Restoration Navy, seeing action at the “Four Days’ Battle”—The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666). He fought at the First Battle of Schooneveld (May 28/ June 7, 1673), where he proved yet again that he was bold and decisive, however much he lacked good tactical sense. Admiral de Ruyter beat him again at the Second Battle of Schooneveld (June 4/14, 1673), where for the second time in a week Rupert proved incapable of bringing vastly superior firepower and numbers to bear against a more skillful enemy commander. ruse. See insult; Lille, siege of (1708); Ramillies (1706). Russia. Under Tsar Alexis, the mid-17th century saw further westward expansion at the expense of the old Polish empire, starting with the end of the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) and continuing through the Second Northern War (1655–1660) and the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). These conflicts brought about alliance with some Cossack bands, as well as acquisition of Kiev and its vast hinterland in Ukraine. In addition, more southerly territories—for instance, those below Kazan—were incorporated by a slow process of military colonization that proceeded in waves, in 1645, 1664, 1667, and 1684. Each wave took in more territory and protected earlier gains behind lines of simple palisade fortifications. The process was roughly comparable to settlement of the American west, in which cavalry forts secured lands desired by settlers or already taken from Indian nations on the Great Plains. A notable difference was that Orthodox monasteries played a significant role in the Russian expansion across the great grassland plains. Expansion by plantation continued under Tsar Theodore (1676–1682), and barrier forts were erected across the Volga in the 1680s. Pioneering settlers were followed by traders and by fugitive peasants, though the latter often found themselves enserfed by new masters of frontier servitor classes. Through this complex rhythm of war and settlement, the old Muscovite empire expanded south and east to become recognizable as the Russian Empire, stretching beyond the Dnieper, Don, and Volga rivers. The Cossacks of the Don Host, the “Little Russian Cossack Host,” and many peasants and serfs rebelled against spreading Russian authority. The most massive and bloody uprising was led by Stenka Razin from 1670–1671. Although it failed and was savagely repressed, many in the southlands remained outside Russian control for some decades longer. Vast Ukrainian territorial additions made to the Russian Empire at the end of the Thirteen Years’ War were confirmed under terms of the Treaty of Andurussovo (1667) that was signed with the Polish Commonwealth. That represented a lasting geopolitical result of surging Russian power and declining 409

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Polish military capabilities and internal instability. The deal was ratified in 1686, in the Eternal Peace. Fresh contact with Ukrainian Orthodoxy placed great strains on the Russian church and polity, as urges to reform spread among the elite but not the masses. Controversial reforms of Orthodox ritual that were introduced by Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681) led to lasting and bitter controversy, and ultimately also to extensive bloodshed over conflict with Old Believers. These strains would not break the link between Orthodox tsar and many of his subjects, however, until the reign of Peter I, when a mass Cossack and peasant rebellion broke out. It was met once again by ruthless repression and the further enserfment of once-free peasants. Crushing all internal opposition was not just a Russian pattern, but part of the centralizing tendencies of most monarchies in early modern states. The period closed for Russia with the spectacular reign of Peter I and concomitant ascent of Russia to formal acceptance as one of the Great Powers of the European states system. That status was conferred with Peter’s defeat of a Swedish invasion in 1709 and Russia’s ultimate and decisive victory in the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Even if the tsar, his heirs, and the Russian landed classes lived in latent fear of peasant violence and rebellion, they had gained grudging respect for Russian military capabilities among neighbors, and even distant powers. Suggested Reading: James Cracraft, ed., Peter the Great Transforms Russia (1991); Christopher Duffy, Russia’s Military Way to the West (1981); Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998).

Russian Army. Like other early modern states, in the 1630s Russia’s leaders set out to reform and modernize the Army. They did so to a significant degree based on Dutch and Swedish “new model army” examples set decades earlier by Maurits of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus. In Russia during this period, the more modern units were known as “new-formation” regiments (re-formed units trained and equipped in Western European fashion). They first fought alongside older strel’sty units in the Smolensk War (1632–1634) waged between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy. These early experimental units were disbanded at the end of that conflict, under social and economic pressure from traditional military interests. New-formation infantry, cavalry, and dragoon regiments were raised again in 1637 to fight the Tatars. Within a year, a core of 5,000 dragoons and 8,700 new infantry were recruited, then disbanded again. More experiments with new-formation troops took place in the 1640s, such as drafting peasants along the southern frontier with the Cossacks and Tatars to serve as part-time dragoons. Servitor or “dvorianstvo” (landed gentry) cavalry were also encouraged to resume their traditional role along the frontier, in exchange for avoiding further social debasement. By the early 1650s the Russian Army had over 133,000 men recorded on its rolls, of whom just 7 percent were new-formation troops. The outbreak of three interrelated conflicts that drew Russia into protracted fighting from 1654 proved to be the spur needed to reform almost the whole Army—the closing events and weakening of Poland caused by the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654), the Second Northern War (1654–1660), and the Thirteen Years’ 410

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War (1654–1667). By 1663, fully 79 percent of Russian troops were in newformation units. They were supplied with modern flintlock firearms, though some still used matchlocks longer than in western Europe. Both types of infantry weapon were eventually made in Russia at a factory built by Dutch experts at Tula in 1632, and expanded thereafter. Tens of thousands of additional muskets were imported from the United Provinces, Germany, and Sweden, as were many thousands of mercenaries. Through the last half of the 17th century, two famous Guards regiments, the Preobrazhenski Guards and Semenovskii Guards, formed the modern core of the Russian Army. They served alongside two bodyguard regiments, the strel’sty, and servitor cavalry. The fact that large Russian armies continued to be routinely dispatched and even routed by smaller Polish and Swedish forces surprised no one before 1709. But it should have, because military transformation in Russia was already under way before Peter I became tsar. The “military revolution” in Russia was well under way by the end of the Thirteen Years’ War in 1667, by which time new-formation infantry constituted nearly 80% of all Russian Army formations outside the strel’sty. Moreover, many new-formation regiments were officered by well-trained and experienced Russians, rather than by foreigners. Nevertheless, the final transformation of the Russian Army into a modern force did not begin until just before the start of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). In 1699, Peter began an earnest expansion of the Army, in addition to having earlier commenced construction of an entirely new Navy. By 1700, Peter had herded 32,000 recruits into two regiments of dragoons and 27 of infantry, along with some squadrons of cavalry. These men, mostly peasants, were supported by remnants of older strel’sty regiments and servitor and Cossack cavalry. They were still in training when routed by the Swedes at Narva (1700). Peter made much propaganda out of that defeat because it helped him discredit the old ways in favor of urgent reforms, which in turn swelled his reputation as a great modernizer, westernizer, and visionary. This should be borne in mind, even as it is noted that he was indeed the principal driving force behind radical change in Russian military culture and institutions, and that Narva was the pivot point of his reforms. In the years immediately following Narva, the Army was expanded to 47 infantry regiments. The servitor cavalry was sharply reshaped, with all eligible males age 15 and older registered for service in nine new-formation dragoon regiments founded in 1702. Peter also established five new grenadier regiments from existing companies. The changes were locked in place by a new recruitment system, established by decree in 1705, under which every 20 peasant households provided one recruit for the Army or Navy and supplied him with his food, uniform, and boots. The quota was filled by 1710, by which year the system was supplying up to 50,000 fresh recruits per annum. They were organized into two regiments of Guards, five of grenadiers, 35 of fusiliers, and 42 of ordinary infantry. Also by 1710, the cavalry arm reached 35,000 effectives, in addition to 45,000 Cossack and other auxiliaries. Army artillery had nearly 150 field guns and pulled a substantial siege train. These levels were more-or-less maintained to the end of the Great Northern War, despite heavy desertion rates among new conscripts. 411

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More than increased numbers, what fundamentally changed within the Russian Army in this period was an emphasis on professionalism among officers and a correspondingly greater battlefield discipline. As with all early modern armies, this was achieved through intensive drill. Swedish soldiers and commanders began to notice as early as 1704 that whereas Russian armies previously had tended to break and flee once the battle started to go against them,“new-formation” regiments exhibited a growing ability to suffer reverses and then to rally and stand, or even counterattack. Furthermore, the Russians did not just ape western tactics and styles of fighting. They learned their own methods and developed their own style, which was well adapted to conditions in the east. For instance, Russians showed an unusual willingness to emerge from entrenchments and fight before them in open combat, taking advantage of always-superior numbers. Similarly, Russian garrisons increasingly refused to sit inside fortresses, waiting for some Polish or Saxon army and siege train to arrive and blast them out. Instead, Russian defensive tactics emphasized mobility and harassment of enemy foraging parties and supply columns, relying on a natural advantage in cavalry numbers to carry out raids. Flexibility, using the terrain to advantage, and concealment in forest and swamp prior to seeking battle, rather than hunkering down inside fixed fortifications, became the hallmark of the Petrine military. This was nowhere in greater evidence than during the brilliant Russian defensive campaign of 1708–1709 that culminated in triumph at Poltava. By the time Peter died in 1725, he had modernized the Russian Army and raised its standing cohorts to 130,000 men. More importantly, he had also persuaded the noble service elite that, as had been the case for the Swedish service and military elite in the 17th century, the dawning 18th century presented Russia with opportunities to grow great and rich through aggressive war. See also officers; pomest’ia cavalry. Russian Navy. See Apraxin, Fedor; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Peter I. Russo-Ottoman War (1710–1713). See Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Peter I. Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de (1607–1676). Dutch admiral. De Ruyter first went to sea, as did most of his countrymen, in the merchant marine. By 1635, he was captain of his own armed merchantman. In 1641 he commanded a squadron of Dutch sail in aid of Portugal’s bid to regain its independence from Spain. He spent most of the 1640s fighting the Barbary corsairs. He fought under Maarten van Tromp during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), engaging Ayscue off Plymouth in August 1652. De Ruyter rose to vice-admiral following Tromp’s death. He next fought for the United Provinces against Sweden in the Baltic, during the Second Northern War (1655–1660). His skill was revealed while raiding English overseas colonies, then fighting English men-of-war during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). De Ruyter also possessed a real talent for cutting down naval, political, and personal rivals. For instance, he so severely undermined Cornelius van Tromp that the latter was dismissed from service in 1665. De Ruyter won the “Four 412

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Days’ Battle,” or The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666), but by a slight margin. He was defeated at the St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666), after which George Monk burned 160 unprotected merchantmen anchored off the Holland coast. The next year de Ruyter carried out his justly famous raid up the Thames, burning or otherwise putting out of action some 20 English warships. He landed a shore party at Sheerness on June 10/20, 1667, to plunder magazines and burn warehouses. The next day he proceeded farther upriver to burn with fireships the three largest English ships-of-the-line at anchor at the Medway, and to tow away the flagship “Prince of Wales.” At the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678) with France and the simultaneous Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), he failed to prevent the union of the English and French battlefleets. Nevertheless, he attacked a superior enemy fleet anyway and defeated it handily at Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672). He fought again at the First Battle of Schooneveld (May 28/June 7, 1673) and at the Second Schooneveld battle on June 4/14, 1673, on both occasions outmaneuvering and outfighting vastly superior Allied fleets. He next fought at the second Battle of Texel (August 11/21, 1673). In 1674 de Ruyter tried to capture Martinique, but was repelled with huge losses. His last fight took place at Augusta (April 22, 1676), off the coast of Sicily. A cannonball from a French broadside smashed his legs, and as he lay on the deck in his own blood and agony, the French defeated his trapped fleet. Spanish galleys managed to tow several damaged ships to Palermo, where De Ruyter died of his wounds on April 29, 1676. See also Bart, Jean. Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697). “Rijswijk,” or “Rijswick.” The general settlement that ended the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and King William’s War (1689–1697) in North America for England, France, and the United Provinces. The Holy Roman Empire adhered on October 30th. Ryswick significantly checked the claims of Louis XIV, though not his ambitions, and began to roll back earlier territorial gains essentially to the position held by France in 1679. The Ryswick settlement compelled Louis to surrender Luxembourg and Lorraine to their previous and traditional rulers, and to give up most other gains made just before, and as a result of the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). This left him still holding Strasbourg, but with no other territory on the right bank of the Rhine. Although rebuffed in his farthest claims and aggressions in Germany, Louis could still say that he had reached France’s natural frontier in the east. He recognized William III as King of England, thereby abandoning James II. Ryswick left the overseas balance of power between England and France unresolved, simply restoring all territorial gains and losses to their prewar status. This reflected the relative lack of importance of overseas empire and entrepôt at this time, to any but the Dutch. Louis was forced to make what turned out to be temporary concessions at Ryswick, since he had failed to prevail militarily. However, his longterm personal ambition, Bourbon vanity, and absolutist arrogance were unsatiated. The peace made at Ryswick thus turned out to be no more than an armed truce that broke down just four years later, leading into the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also Altona, Treaty of (1689); British Army; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Orange, Principality of. 413

S Sacra Ligua. “Holy League.” See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). sail. A count of ships, as in “eighty enemy sail were sighted.” sail cloth. Heavy canvas used to make sails. sails. By the 17th century, standard English terminology for sails was wellestablished, dividing them into two classes: square sails, set outside the rigging and hung across the ship; and “fore-and-aft” sails, set inside the rigging and lying along the centerline, so as to move side-to-side with the wind. The “foresail” was the lowest-rigged square sail, held aloft by the foremast; the “headsail” was set on a spar forward of the foremast; the “mainsail” (or “course”) was the lowest and largest square sail, rigged to the main mast; the “studding” was a lightweight sail rigged outside the mainsail, or the topsail, to take extra wind on light days; the “topsail” was a square canvas rigged to the topmast; the “topgallant” was a smaller square sail, rigged to the topgallant mast, above the topsail. A “gaff sail” was any sail supported by a gaff (short yard) at its peak. The “driver” was a gaff sail spread on the mizzenmast of a large warship, or on the mainmast of a brig or other smaller warship. “Stay sails” were rigged between masts. Most “square rig” sails were actually rectangular or quadrangular, with the broader sides fitted along yards running horizontal to the mast. Yards rotated on masts at right angles to the centerline of the ship, which allowed tacking into the wind. “Fore-and-aft” sails were subdivided into lateen sails, gaffsails, spritsails, and lugs. “Lateen” sails, which greatly improved handling, were large triangular canvases hoisted to mastheads by long yards (or by gaffs or sprits) secured to the deck with rope and tackle. They made already “weatherly” ships handle even better. The “jib” was a lateen sail hoisted on a jib-boom to the fore-topmast on big ships (which might have several jibs), or set between the bowsprit and the foretopmast on small ones. The “spritsail” was set below the bowsprit of a large

Saint-Denis, Battle of

ship, secured with ropes called bowlines. The spritsail-topsail was a signature rig of major warships in the 17th–18th centuries. Spritsails were deployed solo on river barges. Staysails were shaped like lateens or lugs, but fitted without yards beneath the stays. Lug-sails were square sails hung obliquely on their yard. In Europe, they were commonly used in ship’s boats. In China, lug sails were the main type on all junks. The most prized canvas in Europe for making sailcloth in this period came from Brittany. See also bonnet; masts; rigging; spar; tackle; yard. Suggested Reading: R. C. Anderson and R. Anderson, A Short History of the Sailing Ship (1926; 2003).

Saint-Denis, Battle of (August 14, 1678). See St. Denis (1678). Saint-Germain, Peace of (June 29, 1679). See Scanian War (1674–1679). Saka. “Water carriers.” A specialized support unit within the Janissary Corps that was responsible for bringing water to fighting men on the battlefield, and doubling as a hospital corps tending to wounded Janissaries. See also military medicine. salient. From “salient angle.” That portion of defensive works forming an angle that faced toward the enemy’s siege works. Its antonym was “re-entrant angle.” See also bastion; guérite; line of defense; places of arms; ravelin; redan. salient place of arms. See places of arms. sally. See sally point; sortie. sally point. A postern or small gate in the curtain of a fortification. It was used by members of the garrison leaving on a sortie (sally) against the enemy’s siege works or men. salute to the flag. See sovereignty of the sea. sandbags. Although sandbags were easier and cheaper to make than gabions or even fascines, and despite offering as much or more protection, they were not widely used in siege warfare in this period. Their deployment in siege warfare became more common with innovation by the French, starting in the 1740s. Sandomierz Confederation. See Great Northern War (1700–1721); Stanislaw I. Sandwich, Earl of (1625–1672). English admiral, né Edward Montagu. During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), he fought in the New Model Army at Marston Moor (July 2, 1644), Naseby (June 14, 1645), and the siege of Bristol (1645). Oliver Cromwell was a friend and political patron, appointing Montagu to the Commonwealth’s Council of State in 1653. In 1656, he was 416

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made general at sea. He subsequently escorted Charles II back to England and served in the Restoration Navy. Montagu supported the naval building program undertaken by the king and overseen by Samuel Pepys. He fell out of favor at court, but was recalled to duty during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). He was killed at Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672). sap. In siege warfare, a narrow tunnel and pit (siege trench) dug toward the defensive works of a fortified position. Saps were prepared by “sappers,” who dug and reinforced approach trenches that zig-zagged toward the enemy fortress from the lines of contravallation, and later from parallels. The work was so hard and taxing that sap teams were rotated out of a sap every hour. “Opening the sap” was always done at night, after which work was carried out around the clock. Close-in saps were prepared by four-man teams working at the head of each approach. This was far and away the most dangerous position in siege trenches. Pushed in front of each team leader was a mantlet or sap roller, providing some cover from musket fire but not from a cannonade. The first man knelt or crouched to dig a shallow trench, using the fill to build a gabion. He positioned the gabion, then started again. The second man stooped to widen and deepen the first section of trench and topped the gabion with a short, or “tracing” fascine. The third man was able to stand upright to dig deeper and pile the spill on top of the fascine, building the sap wall higher and sloping its far side. The last man was well-protected even from cannon fire as he hacked away, making a three-foot wide trench and finishing the sap at a combined depth and height of 8–10 feet. This was a continuous process, with all members of the team at work simultaneously after the first gabion section was completed. Less-skilled soldiers subsequently widened the trench to about 10 feet to accommodate supply carts, gun carriages, cavalry, and infantry. A sense of the vigor of sap teams may be gleaned from the fact that the head of a sap was expected to advance at a rate of 80–100 meters or more every 24 hours. As the distance from the targeted siege works diminished, the acute angles of the saps became ever more sharp to provide protection from close enfilade fire. Trenches also shortened as they approached a bastion or section of curtain. Some saps were “covered” by burrowing mole-like several feet beneath the surface rather than digging an open trench. This required cutting to the surface intermittently to peer out and ascertain position. Alternately, “double saps” were cut with gabion-fascine walls on either side of the trench. Each method provided modest protection from missiles, mortars, and enfilade, but even so, casualties among lead sappers and engineers were high to extreme. This was especially true of saps forward of the second parallel, which came under the heaviest defensive fire from every defensive weapon available. For this reason, sappers were well-paid, often death-denying volunteers. Pay rates increased for saps cut closest to the fortress, rising dramatically when the final approach to the covered way was attempted and the ditch reached. The final leg of the saps system advanced toward the enemy works from the third parallel, before branching into firing positions for artillery or jump-off trenches for the assault troops. Given the heavy defensive fire always encountered 417

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at this stage of a siege, a special double sap employing high cavalier de tranche walls was made. That left the head of the sap at grenade-tossing range, but close enough to deter countermines, since the defenders were fearful of severely damaging their own works. A “flying sap” might also be used at this stage, if the rate of defensive fire dropped. This was a speed technique that allowed an entire section of gabion wall to be erected at once, while the trench was dug behind it. See also sandbags; zig-zags. Sapiehas. Smolensk high nobility led by the Sapiehas family, and late in this period, specifically by Casimir Sapieha, Grand Hetman of Lithuania. They were longtime political and social hegemons within Lithuania and were widely, perhaps even universally, hated there. They were bitter opponents of any harmonization of law between Poland and Lithuania. Lesser nobles (or boyars, in the Ruthenian rather than the Russian sense of that word) proposed harmonized laws as a means of limiting the power of Sapiehas magnates. The Sapiehas also opposed the election of Augustus II in 1697. In 1700, other nobles aided by some Saxon troops rebelled against Sapiehas violence and their defiance of law. The Sapiehas and their private army of partisans fought the lesser gentry of Lithuania in the opening days of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), losing badly at Olkieniki (November 9/19, 1700). Afterward, their families were massacred, and peasants ran riot on the great Sapiehas estates. Karl XII of Sweden made a critical political error by supporting the return of the Sapiehas during his invasion of Lithuania in 1702. Sapiehas private infantry, dressed in green uniforms, accompanied the Swedes in their invasion of Poland. They supported Karl’s candidate, Stanislaw I, in preference to Augustus II. Their cause was so closely allied to Sweden’s by that point that they did not politically survive the military defeat of Sweden at Poltava in 1709. However, as a noble family with a military tradition of command, several Sapiehas remained prominent in Russian and Polish service in the decades that followed. sapper. A soldier, usually a military engineer or skilled military laborer, employed in highly dangerous but well-paid work such as digging saps and undermining trenches or fortifications. See also sap; siege warfare. sap roller. “gabion farci.” A heavy, strong gabion rolled ahead of the sap. It was about six feet long and four feet wide. Saragossa, Battle of (August 20, 1710). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Sardinia. This large Mediterranean island was transferred from Spain to the Austrian Empire under the Treaty of Rastadt (1714), following the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). sarica. Ottoman temporary cavalry that supplemented timariots and sipahis. They were the cavalry equivalent of infantry sekban, but never reached the same 418

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numbers. They were first recruited as auxiliaries among the tribes of Anatolia, but later they were assembled via conscription (“nefir-i am”). Their real heyday did not come until after this period, during wars in the Balkans against Russia from 1768–1792. Sarsfield, Patrick (1660?–1693). Irish Jacobite. He fought for Charles II in alliance with France, returning to England upon the restoration of James II. He fought at Sedgemoor (July 5–6/15–16, 1685), in opposition to the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, and he served James in Ireland before returning to England in command of Irish Jacobite troops. He left for France with James in 1688 during the Glorious Revolution, returning to Ireland with him the next year as a brigadier general. Sarsfield fought at the Boyne (1690) and the siege of Limerick (1691). He helped negotiate the Treaty of Limerick before leaving for France in December 1691 with the so-called “Wild Geese.” He was commissioned maréchal-de-camp by Louis XIV and fought for France and the Jacobite cause in Flanders. Sarsfield died in August 1693, of wounds inflicted at Neerwinden. See also Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of; Ireland; Tyrconnel, Earl of; William III. saucisson. A long black powder fuse for a mine, laid inside a canvas or leather hose, or pipe. Savoy. See Catinat, Nicholas; Dutch War (1672–1678); Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Galway, Earl of; Italy; natural frontiers; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Turin, Battle of (1706); Turin, Peace of (1696); Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); Vaudois; Victor Amadeus II; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Savoyard Army. See Carpi (1701); Cassano (1705); Cremona (1702); Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Marsaglia (1693); Staffarda (1690); standing army; Turin, Peace of (1696); Victor Amadeus II; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Saxon Army. See Augustus II; Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Fraustadt (1706); Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Kliszów (1702); Malplaquet (1709); Polish Army; Pultusk (1703); Russian Army; Sapiehas; Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger; Vienna, siege of (1683); Saxony. See Augustus II; Dutch War (1672–1678); Great Northern War (1700–1721); Hofkriegsrat; Holy Roman Empire; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Sweden. Scanian War (1674–1679). The pressing Swedish financial need to billet troops in formerly Danish Scania, as well as general Swedish occupation policies and administration, caused growing unrest there and in Halland. This fed into general resentment dating to Denmark’s defeat and humiliation in the Second Northern War (1655–1660). The Danes spent much of the 1660s searching for anti-Swedish allies. However, with the outbreak of the Dutch War (1672–1678), which started as a naked aggression against the neighboring United Provinces 419

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by Louis XIV, Denmark looked instead for anti-French allies. In September 1672, Denmark joined Leopold I of Austria, Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg, and several small, north German states in a defensive alliance aimed at France. The next year, Denmark agreed to a naval alliance with the United Provinces which called for Copenhagen to subsidize a Danish fleet of 20 sail and an army of 12,000 men. Denmark was secure to its south, and these moves helped inspire a mood favoring a new war over control of Scania and other Danish territory that had been lost between 1658 and 1660. Meanwhile, in Stockholm there was also a growing incentive to violence flowing from the ongoing Dutch War. France heavily subsidized Swedish troops based in north Germany, while any anti-French coalition that included Brandenburg and Denmark also posed a political and strategic dilemma for Sweden. The crisis came when Louis XIV threatened to end subsidies that sustained the Swedish Army in northern Germany if Sweden did not enter the war in alliance with France. Some 22,000 Swedish troops in Germany could sustain the Swedish Empire there only with French subsidies. Sweden therefore agreed—although only half-heartedly and with no enthusiasm—to invade Brandenburg and repay with blood the debt of gold owed to the “Grande Monarque.” Stockholm ordered Karl Gustav Wrangel onto the march in December 1674, launching what came to be called the Scanian War. Wrangel was given a paltry field army of 13,000 with which to strike into Brandenburg. It is no wonder that he moved cautiously westward, preparatory to linking with a Hanoverian army. He was also greatly slowed by a need to forage along the way. Friedrich-Wilhelm hurried back to Brandenburg, arriving in force before the linkage of his enemies could be effected. The Great Elector met and defeated one detachment of the Swedish army at Fehrbellin (June 18/28, 1675). While militarily insignificant (and often misremembered in later histories), the fight at Fehrbellin had immediate and widespread diplomatic consequences. Austrians, Dutch, and Danes all hastened to declare war on Sweden, whose military reputation lay in tatters on German soil for the first time since the 1630s. Swedish military morale began to collapse under the pressure of a multi-front war, and because wages for field armies and garrisons went unpaid. The Swedes had support from Hamburg, Hanover, and England, and subsidies from France, but all that was not enough. The Danes attacked garrisons at Wismar and Bremen, while Friedrich-Wilhelm completed his conquest of Swedish Pomerania by taking the last Swedish outpost in Germany in November 1678, when he occupied Griefswald. Sweden’s fundamental military weakness on land was now exposed for all enemies to see. It remained only to expose and harry the Swedes also at sea. Like the Swedish Army, the Swedish Navy had fallen behind its Baltic competitors in the build-up to the Scanian War. Even Denmark had outbuilt Sweden in capital warships before 1670, and the Danes were allied with the United Provinces, which was still a preeminent Baltic power and, indeed, a top world naval power. The Swedes lost the initial naval action in October 1675. The next year, Cornelius van Tromp led a Dutch squadron in aid of the Danes, who were led by Admiral Niels Juel. The joined Allied fleets defeated a Swedish fleet at Jasmund (May 25, 1676). 420

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That victory enabled an Allied landing on Gotland and the start of a blockade of the Swedish coastline. Tromp won again at Öland (June 1, 1676) over a Swedish fleet of 26 ships-of-the-line and additional frigates and smaller warships. The Swedes lost their three largest warships in the fight, including the flagship “Kronan.” Tromp and Juel next smashed a Swedish fleet at Köge Bay (July 1, 1677). It was a catastrophic defeat that ended Swedish naval domination of the Baltic forever and permitted unmolested Allied armies to roll up Swedish garrisons along the German coastline, until none was left by the end of 1678. Although the war at sea was lost, starting in 1676 the war on land took a new turn from the Swedish vantage point. The Danes had become highly aggressive, landing 14,000 troops at Rå in Scania on June 29/July 8, 1676. This force was initially opposed by a small Swedish army led personally by the very young Karl XI. Over the next several years the boy-king conducted a spirited and effective defense of the Swedish homeland as Allied attacks were pressed there as well. The middle years of the war thus saw a Swedish victory at Halmstadt (“Fyllebro”) on August 18, 1676, and another in a remarkably gory fight at Lund (December 4/14, 1676). Proportionately, Lund was the bloodiest battle in military history, with 50% of all participants killed. In 1677 the Danes twice tried and failed to capture Helsingborg. Another Swedish defensive victory came at Malmö on July 5/15, 1678, and yet another outside Landskröna on July 4/14, 1678. The Danes could not take territory beyond their holdings of Helsingborg and Landskröna, despite great advantage over the enemy in numbers of horse, foot, and guns. When the Dutch War ended in 1678, Louis XIV intervened diplomatically in the Scanian War to limit losses by his Swedish ally—although the situation had improved on land, the war at sea was still going badly for Sweden. The Grand Monarque wanted to preserve a buffer in Germany and an ally in the north to tie down the forces of his enemies. Intense French pressure on FriedrichWilhelm forced the Great Elector to agree to the Peace of Saint-Germain (June 29, 1679), ending fighting between Brandenburg and Sweden. Sweden was compelled to surrender a strip of Pomeranian territory on the right bank of the Oder to Brandenburg, but otherwise recovered all its German holdings—an outcome not in accordance with facts on the ground or borne out by any success of Swedish arms. Louis XIV then brought pressure to bear on Denmark, including by sending a French army into Oldenburg, which led to the Peace of Fontainebleau (August 23/September 2, 1679). That treaty ended the fighting between Denmark and France while promising to restore all conquests to Sweden, in exchange for a paltry indemnity paid to Denmark. Finally, the Peace of Lund (September 16/26, 1679) ended the war between Denmark and Sweden. The terms of Fontainebleau were confirmed at Lund, as was Sweden’s exemption from the Sound Tolls. In all, Sweden secured possession of Bremen, Estonia, Finland, Karelia, Ingria, Livonia, Verden, western Pomerania, Wismar, and a number of Baltic islands. That left Sweden in control of riverine traffic and trade on the Dvina, Elbe, Neva, Oder, and Weser Rivers. It is true that the Scanian War exposed Sweden’s core weakness, especially that of its overextended army along the south shore of the Baltic and its stretched recruitment and war 421

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finance systems. Still, those results should not be exaggerated. The Swedish Army and state would recover and do well during the first years of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Swedish military power was not destroyed until the Army was led to disaster in Ukraine by Karl XII, three decades after the Scanian War. scarp. The exterior slope formed by a rampart leading to the ditch. The opposite slope was the talus. See also revetment. scarping the breach. See breach. Schellenberg, Battle of (July 2/13, 1704). See Donauwörth (1704). Scheveningen, Battle of (August 11/21, 1653). See Texel, Battle of (1653). Schnapphahns. “Highwaymen.” German peasant guerrillas who rose against the French in the Rhineland during the Dutch War (1672–1678), and afterward. They set ambushes in response to marauding, executions, and depredations by French troops who dispossessed them of home and livelihood. Mutual hatred was extreme, leading to murders and mutilations of prisoners by both sides. See also devastation of the Palatinate. Schomberg, Friedrich, Graf von (1615–1690). German mercenary general. Over the course of his military career he fought for England, France, Portugal, and the United Provinces. He saw heavy fighting in French service against Spain during the final decade of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He saw additional fighting in Spain and Portugal in the 1660s, commanding and significantly reforming the Portuguese Army. During the Dutch War (1672–1678), he fought in Spain in service to Louis XIV. He subsequently moved to Flanders, where he fought against William III (then still Prince of Orange). Schomberg left French service after Louis promulgated the Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685) revoking the Edict of Nantes (1598). As a Protestant, he resented Louis’ repression of the Huguenots. He was immediately hired by William III, who would be his last paymaster. Schomberg fought for William in Ireland. His worst decision was to site his camp in a disease-ridden bog near Dundalk in the autumn of 1689. Over the next three months, one-fourth of his expeditionary force of 22,000 men died of “swamp fever” without even contacting the enemy. Having proved dilatory in seeking out the enemy and incompetent under Irish conditions, Schomberg was dismissed from overall command by William early the next year. He was killed at the Battle of Boyne (July 1/11, 1690). schooner. A small, two-masted warship or merchantman that was fore-and-aft rigged. Schooneveld, First Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1673). “First Zeeland.” A naval battle of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). Prince Rupert, in command of an English fleet of 76 ships-of-the-line and mounting 4,812 big guns, pursued 422

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de Ruyter and his Dutch fleet of just 52 sail and many fewer guns to the Zeeland coastal area called the Schooneveld, off Walcheren Island. De Ruyter was a native of the area and knew the waters well. He positioned his smaller fleet, whose ships were more flat-bottomed than English vessels, near shoals that were wholly unknown to English captains. Rupert divided the English fleet into a bynow traditional tripartite division of Blue, Red, and White Squadrons. He took command of the Red, or van, while allied French sail formed the White squadron in the center of his line of battle. Rupert engaged a Dutch squadron under Cornelius van Tromp. Meanwhile, de Ruyter was able to hold off, confuse, outmaneuver, and delay the English Blue and White Squadrons. The fight was indecisive, and Rupert withdrew at the close of daylight. The fleets fought again one week later. Schooneveld, Second Battle of (June 4/14, 1673). “Second Zeeland.” A naval battle of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). As he had done a week earlier at the First Battle of Schooneveld, Dutch Admiral de Ruyter once more fought off a vastly superior Anglo-French fleet led by Prince Rupert. Yet again he took advantage of the greater fleetness of his ships and their quick maneuvers to befuddle an enemy fighting in coastal waters he did not know. In the second battle, the Dutch immediately seized the initiative, attacking a disordered Allied line of battle of 89 men-of-war and supporting frigates and fireships. De Ruyter claimed the victory by virtue of warding off a vastly superior enemy fleet, which was not permitted to gain any tactical advantage or attain any operational goal. See also Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674). Scilly Isles. In the 1640s, privateers based in these small islands off the coast of Cornwall preyed indiscriminately on Dutch and English shipping. They were finally driven off by a series of costly English landings carried out initially by Robert Blake and completed by mid-1651. See also maps. scorched earth. See Fehrbellin (1675); Friedrich-Wilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Holy Roman Empire; Ireland; Jacobites; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Palatinate, devastation of the; Peter I; Poltava (1709); Scanian War (1674–1679); Tatars; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Scotland. See Act of Union (1707); barracks; British Army; British establishment; Charles II; Cromwell, Oliver; Glorious Revolution; Jacobites; James II; Scottish lock; William III. Scottish lock. A peculiar Scottish evolution of the snaphance, dating to the 1580s, if not earlier. Retaining a horizontal sear, it varied the mechanism by which the weapon was held in half-cock and full-cock positions. It did not influence wider weapon design. It evolved and persisted in use in Scotland for many decades after the flintlock was used elsewhere, including in England, until a few years after 1700. 423

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scurvy. See rations. seaman. A designation used in the Royal Navy for those members of a ship’s “private men” or “people” who stood watches and were experienced in the ways of the ocean and seamanship. “Able” (that is, skillful) seamen were those with at least two years experience at sea and who were capable of working at the helm or in the top, or on the yards. “Ordinary” seamen were those with less than two years experience, and they were paid less than able seamen. Landmen supplemented the crew and supported the work of able and ordinary seamen. See also embargo; impressment. sea officer. Any commissioned officer or warrant officer in the Royal Navy in the 17th–18th centuries. More generally, any naval officer of any Navy who actually served at sea, as opposed to serving in onshore defense, the Impress service, or in naval administration. Sedgemoor, Battle of (July 5–6/15–16, 1685). See Glorious Revolution; Marlborough; Monmouth, Duke of; Sarsfield, Patrick. sefer bahs¸is¸i. A campaign bonus customarily paid to active troops of the Kapikulu Askerleri. Seigneley, Marquis de (1651–1690). Son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. He succeeded his father as secretary of state for the French Navy in 1669. His great ordinance of 1689 advanced ship-building and support facilities so that, at least in raw numbers, the French Navy was the largest in Europe. He died just before the greatest of Louis XIV’s wars revealed the French Navy’s profound shortage of skilled officers and seamen. Sejm. The Diet (assembly) of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Passed in 1505, the statute “Nihil Novi” (“Nothing New”) forbade any legislation, taxation, or military action without consent of the Sejm. Through this law and institution, the szlachta (landed nobility) controlled Polish kings and decided the size, command, and financing of armies, much to the detriment of the security and military fortunes of the Polish Commonwealth. sejmiki. Professional troops, whether native Polish or foreign mercenaries, who were raised and sustained by provincial assemblies (“Sejmiki”). These bodies were modeled on the national Sejm of the Polish Commonwealth, and replicated on the local level its baronial autonomy and loose military organization. sekban. Ottoman infantry, with some mounted as dragoons to keep up with timariot cavalry. Sekban units were first drawn from frontier auxiliaries in the Balkans. Later, they were recruited via conscription (“nefer-i am”) in Anatolia. They were deployed as temporary auxiliaries to supplement the permanent forces of the Kapikulu Askerleri and timariots. They shared their name with the 424

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“Sekban” of the Janissary Corps, but otherwise they were unrelated to those elite professionals. It was sometimes hard to disband sekban infantry at the end of campaigns, because many wished to remain in pay of the sultan. By the middle of the 17th century, some observers considered them to be better troops than the Janissaries, as the Corps succumbed to fiscal tightening and technological and political decadence. Other contemporaries disagreed about the sekban’s quality as fighters. The cavalry equivalent of sekban were called sarica. Seneffe, Battle of (August 11, 1674). Fought during the second phase of the Dutch War (1672–1678), the battle began when the Great Condé pounced with unsupported French cavalry on the rear guard of an Allied army commanded by William III (then still Prince of Orange). Condé did not maximize his initial advantages of surprise and movement, which allowed William to massively reinforce. The two armies engaged from static firing lines for many hours, until well after sunset. This made Seneffe the bloodiest battle of the period prior to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The French lost perhaps 10,000 total casualties, to as many as 15,000 for the Allies. Villars saw his first action at Seneffe, and he gloried in it. A young duc de Luxembourg also saw action in this fight. Seneffe reaffirmed Vauban’s belief that all battles were best avoided, in preference for positional warfare (sieges). Voltaire upheld and disdained the outcome of the battle as mere useless carnage. Despite the bloodshed, Seneffe changed little other than to temporarily exhaust both sides materially and morally. Senta, Battle of (1697). See Zenta. sentries. Military encampments and fortresses were always patrolled or guarded by sentries, who challenged intruders and fired muskets in warning upon spotting an approaching enemy. Sentries walked the cordon or ramparts or chemin des rondes, stood watch inside guérites or church steeples, or walked rounds in town streets surrounding a citadel. Within a fortress, they guarded wells, powder magazines, and other critical parts of the defenses. See also barracks; garde-fou; insult; latrines; pas des souris; watches. serasker. See serdar. serdar. Also “serasker.” The personal command representative of an Ottoman sultan who was placed in full charge of an army, according to terms laid out in a diploma of office. Even when a sultan went on campaign, the serdar retained control of most deployment and tactical decisions and had full powers to punish troops. Because the post was so powerful, it was an object of intense and even deadly competition among kuls. That made holding it profitable, but highly risky. Serdengeçti (serden-geçtiler). “Head riskers.” Elite, all-volunteer, Ottoman commando and “special forces” assault units. They were recruited among the Janissary 425

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Corps and sipahis. They undertook the most dangerous assignments in return for promises of unusual material rewards, which were defined in advance in written contracts. Some led wild, frantic Janissary charges that intimidated and often overcame enemy infantry. Others were the first through a breach in the enemy’s wall, or over it on scaling ladders, as during the siege of Vienna in 1683. Their casualty rates frequently exceeded 70–90%. serving the vent. See military medicine. servitor classes. In several states, military service in lieu of taxation, or as a forced obligation in return for landholding rights, continued into this period. Ottoman servitors (kuls) occupied state administrative posts and served in the military as askeri, sipahis, and timariots. The Tatar servitor system was called soyughal. Servitors in the medieval Muscovite military and social system could be either patrimonial (“votchina”)—principally the boyars—or non-hereditary (pomest’e). Servitor cavalry (pomest’ia cavalry) was established in Muscovy in the late 15th century, recruited from a landholding class that was seeded over the countryside to control newly conquered lands, in exchange for several months per year of riding service. This might involve patrolling the semi-fortified southern frontier against raids by Tatars and Cossacks. Pomeshchiki horsemen provided their own mounts, weapons, and supplies. A household guard of servitors composed of infantry musketeers, the strel’sty, was founded in 1550. Their special privilege was exemption from taxation. Other servitor units included some artillery. Most of these Russian troops behaved badly in combat, infamously deserting during the disaster at Narva (November 19/30, 1700). That was because they were essentially amateurs who did not know how to fight in a modern, coordinated fashion. Servitors were progressively replaced after the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) exposed their inutility, with many joining “new-formation” units, including infantry. They were nearly all replaced under military reforms carried out by Peter I after the catastrophe at Narva. See also Cossacks; Polish Army; Prussian Army; Russian Army. sextant. A navigational instrument similar to a quadrant, but capable of surveying angles up to 120 degrees. Shaftesbury, Earl of (1621–1683). See England. shallop. A ship’s boat. Alternately, a small two-masted warship that was foreand-aft rigged. ship-of-the-line. Any warship powerful enough to join a line of battle formation alongside other major warships, without constituting a weak point in the line. Ships-of-the-line were the sail equivalent of early 20th-century battleships. See also fireship; frigate; man-of-war; Rates; sloop-of-war; three-decker; two-decker. 426

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ships. Wooden warships of this period had long-since surpassed all but the largest armed merchantmen of the British, Dutch, and French East Indies companies in terms of specialized fighting construction and power. The largest were slow, and after just a few weeks or months at sea they became more unweatherly and lost speed. Even aggressive attacking ships in a fleet action might achieve a battle speed of just 4 knots. Relative speed was what mattered when fleets engaged, which placed a premium on seamanship, but also on maintenance and the frequent scraping of hulls. All wooden warships were manned by sizeable floating garrisons employed as muscle power to work rigging and sails, and in battle to crew dozens of big guns arrayed over two or three decks. Warships were built from heavy timbers, whose strength was necessary to absorb solid shot at close ranges and withstand profound shaking of the entire vessel when its broadside artillery was fired. For information on various ship and ship’s boat types, see: barge; bark; blockship; bomb ketch; catamaran; corvette; cruiser; East Indiaman; fireship; flatboat; flute; frigate; galleys; galleon; galliot; hoy; ketch; longboat; pinnace; man-of-war; schooner; shallop; sloop-of-war; slopship; ship-of-the-line; yacht; yawl. For information on the major parts of a wooden warship and for terms pertaining to crews and tactics, see: ballast; before the mast; boarding; bowman; broadside; buccaneers; cabotage; carronade; chase gun; close-fights; close range; cofferdam; complement; conduct money; convoy; crimp; decks; demi-culverin; directieschepen; dismantle; disrate; double on; Dutch Navy; establishment; evolutions; fighting instructions; firemaster; fleet; fleet in being; flotilla; forecastle; forests; fouling; foul the range; French Navy; galeones; gunner; gun port; handy; haul close; haul wind; heave to; idler; interloper; landman; Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea; letters of marque; line abreast; line ahead; line ahead and astern; line astern; line of battle (at sea); make sail; masts; merlon; military discipline; musket shot; muster; naval tactics; officers; pistol shot; prize; prize agent; prize court; privateer; quadrant; ranks (at sea); Rates; rating; rebuild; rig; rigging; Royal Navy; sails; scurvy; seaman; sea officer; sextant; ship-smashers; shorten sail; shot; signaling; sovereignty of the sea; station; three-decker; tonnage; top; traverse; truck; two-decker; volunteer per order; ward room; weather gauge; weatherly; windage; yard; yaw. Suggested Reading: R. C. Anderson, English Ships, 1649–1702 (1966); Pierre Le Conte, French Ships, 1648–1700 (1935); N.A.M. Rogers, The Command of the Ocean (2004).

ship-smashers. “ship-killers.” Large-caliber ship’s guns cast from alloyed gun metals such as brass or bronze. They could severely damage or hole and sink an enemy ship. They reduced the need for boarding, thereby reducing crews over time as well as eliminating the fighting castle from ship designs of the 17th and 18th centuries. To accommodate their great weight, they were dropped to the lower decks and fired through gun ports with movable outer doors. See also carronade. Shivaji. See Sivaji Bhonsle. Shklov, Battle of (August 12, 1654). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). 427

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shorten sail. When a sailing ship dropped or reduced the number of sails aloft, or the area of canvas spread, in order to leave the wind and slow, or stop. shot. Shot, or ordnance for large-caliber guns, came in many forms. Normal ordnance was called “solid shot,” or just “shot.” This took the form of cast-iron cannonballs of varying calibers. The problem of balloting (loss of power and accuracy caused by shot rebounding inside the bore) greatly troubled pre-17thcentury artillery. Standardization of shot and bore sizes and improved gun metals solved much of the problem, though the normal inaccuracy of gravity-directed ordnance survived the period. Solid shot’s effect was to bore raw tunnels through enemy ranks, dismount guns, and smash carriages. It was used to batter bastions and ramparts and breach the curtain of a fortress. When fired to rake the enemy during war at sea, an iron cannonball could travel through the guts of a ship, killing or maiming dozens of men while dismounting guns. At point-blank ranges, solid shot might penetrate easily through open gun ports, or more forcefully through thick side beams. This would either kill and maim gun crews or possibly hole a ship “between wind and water.” A well placed or lucky deep shot might hit the powder room, while a higher shot might break the base of a mast at deck level and mask the deck guns with broken rigging, yards, and canvas, thereby cutting the ship’s speed. Even without penetration, a broadside hit with solid shot would produce huge splinters that exploded inward at high velocity, impaling or terribly wounding the men that they hit. It was not uncommon to fire undercharged shot at point-blank range to enhance this splintering effect. An additional effect of shot fired close in against the hulls, especially the hulls of crank ships, was to start leaks that occupied the enemy crew and weighed down and slowed their ship. Other naval ordnance included “chain shot,” “bar shot,” and “fireshot.” Chain shot was a hollowed cannonball containing a chain affixed to loops linking the half-spheres of the shell. When fired, the shell broke apart to the length of the chain, creating a whirling bola that tore through rigging and canvas and any sailor or marine unlucky enough to be standing in the way. Bar shot operated on the same principle, except that the rounded half-cannonballs were preseparated by a strong iron bar. It was loaded lengthwise into the gun. “Fireshot” was a shell filled with some incendiary material and used to set fire to enemy ships. “Hot shot” was solid shot heated to red-hot temperature and lobbed into towns or fortifications as an incendiary. It was less commonly used at sea, because its preparation was inherently highly dangerous to its employer. Even so, hot shot was assayed at times in sea fights to fire an enemy’s rigging and cordage or the exposed powder beside his guns. Ships bombarding coastal towns were more likely to have hot shot coming at them than delivered by them. Hot shot was most deadly if left undiscovered while embedded in the timbers of a building or ship, allowing it to silently burn out a burrow until it started a conflagration in some vital part. Other incendiary shot included the bomb and the carcass. Anti-personnel ammunition known as “case shot” took two basic forms: canister and grapeshot. Canister shot comprised a canvas sack full of jagged metal or musket balls that burst apart when fired, spraying shrapnel or lead balls in an 428

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expanding disk of wounds and death. At close ranges, a 24-pounder fired canister containing about 300 balls to devastating effect against massed infantry or cavalry. Grapeshot was made of larger iron balls (billiard ball-size) spaced around a wooden spindle and held together by netting or a cotton bag. The flame and force of the exploding powder in the gun consumed the net or bag and scattered the iron balls through the enemy’s ranks at greater ranges than canister. By itself, a battery firing case or grapeshot was capable of stopping an advance by an entire regiment. Case shot was also used to provide cover to a garrison making a sortie. Naval anti-personnel shot included case and grape, as well as “dice shot.” The latter produced a spray of small, jagged pieces of iron fired downward at point-blank range from a ship’s rail or swivel guns, onto the deck and crew of an enemy ship. Below the level of artillery and deck-gun ordnance, “small shot” was anything fired on land or at sea from a hand-held gun, such as a pistol or musket or blunderbuss. This included “hail shot,” comprising hundreds of small pellets akin to the size and type of shot used in a modern shotgun, and so called because it fell like hail upon the enemy. Shovel, Cloudesley (1650–1707). English admiral. As a young officer, he saw action against the Barbary corsairs in 1674. He was present for the fight against the French at Bantry Bay (1689) at the start of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The next year, he helped escort William III to England during the Glorious Revolution. He fought again at Beachy Head (1690) and at Barfleur-La Hogue (1692). During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), he was at the fight at Vigo Bay (1702), after failing to take Barcelona but helping to take Gibraltar. Shovel was promoted to rear-admiral in 1704, and the next year he succeeded in landing a party that captured Barcelona. In 1707, he was in command during the bombardment of the French Mediterranean squadron at Toulon. On the return voyage, his ship and two others struck rocks off the Scilly Isles and sank with all hands. See also maps. sich. A fortified Cossack settlement. See also Cossacks; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Razin, Stenka; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Sicily. See Dutch War (1672–1678); Messinian rebellion; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Sick and Wounded Board. See military medicine. siege money. Specially minted coin issued to soldiers during a siege. It was used to keep payments flowing and soldiers fighting, even if funds had in fact run out. siege park. A site flattened by pioneers or other military laborers of an attacking force. It was where siege guns were parked temporarily while military engineers completed the first approach saps, prior to the guns being set up in batteries to smash ramparts and other works. A siege park was not an artillery park in the 429

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older sense of central storage for royal ordinance. Generally sited up to two kilometers distant from the fortress, the siege park was preferably concealed from view and defensive fire. The guns were then assembled, with the barrels loaded onto carriages while forges and repair shops were set up. Powder was not stored in the siege park. It was kept in a separate powder magazine protected by heavy breastwork. siege train. See artillery train. siege warfare. “positional warfare.” Surrounding, isolating, and attacking a fortified position or city, including cutting lines of supply while extorting contributions from the surrounding country. This was most often accompanied by smashing defensive works with cannonfire and lobbing shells into the town with mortars, in a effort to pummel defenders and townsfolk into submission. Only in the final instance was resort had to bloody, direct assault. Starvation in this period was only a minor possibility, because sieges were much shorter, on average, than during the wars of religion in Europe, and the temper of the Age was less conducive to all-out war. The shortening of sieges over the years was principally a result of improved siege guns, better investment techniques, and the prohibitive expense of longer sieges or blockades. But it also was rooted in a newly humane attitude toward enemy troops and civilians that was exhibited in post-1650 European warfare. With the introduction and later maturation of the artillery fortress in Renaissance Italy, direct assaults proved to be ineffective. By the late 17th century, immediate assaults were avoided as unlikely to succeed, and secondarily as too costly in terms of the lives of attacking soldiers. Fortress design also changed importantly from the 1640s, with innovative traces introduced by Blaise François de Pagan (1604–1665). They improved further after 1687, under the masterful guidance of Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, whose offensive innovations more than offset even his own extraordinary defensive designs. Given this shifting balance in favor of offense vs. defense, most saw a siege as less risky than a field battle. It also seemed less likely to cost too much in coin, men’s lives, and war matériel, though that was often not the case. Thus, although Louis XIV inherited highly aggressive maréchals, such as Turenne and the Great Condé, who sought battles in preference to sieges, Louis preferred siege warfare. Sieges appealed to a sense of rational order and artful planning, even in war, and better fitted his strategic ambitions to take and hold territory along his frontiers. Siege warfare also suited the heavily fortified terrain of riverine frontiers to the north and east of Paris, as well as the prepared defenses of enemies. In Louis’ later wars, therefore, under the brilliant direction of Vauban, the French conducted far more sieges than they fought battles. On the other side, sieges also dominated operations in this period, with even the dauntless Marlborough— who is often credited by admirers with single-handedly restoring a cultural preference for battle—fighting far fewer battles than he conducted sieges. As John A. Lynn has pointed out, the prevalence of siege warfare over field battles in the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th varied 430

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with the theater of operations, as well as the availability of food and fodder. In mountainous regions, warfare most often took the form of raids and courses carried out by imported cavalry or local militia. Southern Germany offered opportunity for maneuvering and battles of encounter, and therefore saw more field actions and less positional warfare than did the Netherlands. In Flanders, an abundance of rivers, canals, and heavy fortification of towns, bridges, and other crossings meant sieges were the most common form of combat. In the Dutch War (1672–1678), just three field battles were fought in the Netherlands, and only one was a true battle of encounter—at Seneffe (August 11, 1674). Whether or not armies fought reflected as well the varying styles of their commanders, with some seeking battle and others preferring to win through blocking maneuvers, followed by withdrawal into winter quarters. A third choice, first tried by the French in the Rhineland, was bombardment of a fortified town. Although this did not guarantee submission and seldom led to capitulation, Louvois argued forcefully for this cruel, but cheaper alternative to a full-scale siege. In contrast, Vauban consistently opposed bombardment as inhumane and militarily useless. It was not until the wars of the mid-18th century that a real preference for battle over sieges returned, and even then it was not universal. That was partly due to French success in overrunning Spanish and Dutch fortresses in the Netherlands in successive campaigns from 1744–1747. That success reinforced a growing prejudice that siege warfare, as outlined by Vauban and others, had become an irresistible science. It was widely believed that once a stronghold was invested, it would be but a matter of days before it fell to the sophisticated approaches of the attacker’s engineers. Some commanders therefore surrendered without testing the strength of their defenses by fighting, or after a mere symbolic demonstration of resistance to salvage official pride and achieve some moral effect. It was common, for instance, to hold out until the first enemy batteries were sited, but to surrender before they opened fire. So deep was the grip of this late-18th-century belief that the new siegecraft could not be successfully resisted, that in 1781 Emperor Joseph II of Austria dismantled a line of barrier fortresses for which much blood had been shed decades before to save them from Louis XIV. Course of a Siege Until the middle of the 17th century, “trench attacks” were chaotic affairs. Without a master plan or governing style, sieges witnessed great variation in the layout of approach trenches. Many were so haphazardly conducted that they exposed thousands of soldiers, sappers, and military engineers to injury and death from defensive fire. Vauban changed all this, and the course of most early 18th-century sieges thereafter followed his masterful model. Preparations to defend against a siege began once news arrived that an approaching enemy army possessed an artillery train of big guns. Initial preparations by the fortress garrison included cutting down all trees on the glacis and parapet, clearing the casemates, gathering herds from outlying fields and timber from nearby copses, and increasing the number of sentries and troops assigned to the covered way and any redoubts. Food and fodder stocks were checked, and 431

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grain was ground into flour while mills still operated free of enemy interference. Any civilians deemed to be “useless mouths” were driven away. If the attackers assayed an insult, storm bells were rung to call every defender to the ramparts. If not, a preliminary investment by advance enemy forces took place out of range of defending guns. The advance units were always cavalry or dragoons who encircled the target fortress or town, intercepting foot and cart traffic. The main body of the besieging army usually arrived within a day or days, depending on distance. The commander or chief engineer then surveyed the works by walking around them (for a sizeable city, the walls and other works might extend for a dozen miles), observing and charting defenses. Few could do this well. Vauban was by far the best such surveyor, always circumnavigating the entire defense personally before deciding on the weakest front (or fronts) to attack. Only after completing this essential assessment did a chief engineer or general determine where to set his lines and make his first approaches. Engineers also consulted plans purchased before the war in local markets of careless towns (the French and Prussians were unusual in their determination to keep plans of their fortress works secret), or procured by payment to traitors or spies. Once the proper front and the extreme range of fortress guns were ascertained, thousands of pioneers “opened the trenches” by digging interior lines of contravallation to defend against sallies by the garrison. They also dug longer, exterior lines of circumvallation to defend against reinforcements or relief. Sappers next dug approaches (trenches) until they reached places suitable for digging gun pits, where the siege engineers sited the first batteries. Once the big guns were in position, initial bombardment of the ramparts commenced. Before Vauban, all of this work was done by men exposed to murderous defensive fire. After his invention of parallels and zig-zags, however, attackers were much better protected. Also, by starting his approach trenches directly from the inner lines of contravallation, Vauban eliminated any need (and the great expense in money and time required) for digging outer lines of circumvallation. These long lines of trenches and field works were replaced by a mobile army of observation assigned to protect the siege camp. This force watched for the approach of an army of relief, in order to deter or fight it. Once in artillery range, Vauban began his first parallel about 600 meters out and sited the heaviest longrange batteries along it. While engineers prepared sites for the guns, miners and sappers took more ground by zig-zagging the approaches forward until they reached a line where they began the second parallel, at 250–300 meters out. The batteries in the first two parallels now worked to dismount the defender’s guns and batter his infantry, driving both from the ramparts. Meanwhile, a third parallel was prepared at 30–50 meters out, ready to receive numerous light pieces, mortars, and some of the heavy 24-pounders relocated from the first parallel. Mines were also started from the third parallel. The forward batteries of 24-pounders were now in smashing proximity to the last defenses, and they started to tear apart ravelins and bastions with systematic shelling. Sometimes, perriers, Coehoorn mortars, and intense musketry combined to slaughter defenders, who retaliated in kind with defensive mortars, sorties, and countermines. 432

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Defensive fire was at its most murderous at this point, during the always bloody attack on the covered way and ditch. Shot, shells, and musket balls were fired at sappers from point-blank ranges, while countermines were detonated to move the earth itself beneath their feet. An attacker’s casualties in passing the covered way might match or exceed those he had incurred in all other phases of the siege thus far, and often compared to losses suffered in large battles. Once the largest guns were brought forward to intimate ranges (perhaps 20 feet from the crest of the covered way), the attackers made an effort to breach the revetment with heavy artillery. Some of their big guns were emplaced in counter-batteries and methodically worked so as to dismount all remaining fortress guns. The rest might continue to mortar and shell the inner fortress, while a massive battery of up to thirty 24-pounders was prepared. These guns worked together to open a breach, using the technique of cannelure cutting. Alternately, attackers might be able to make a breach through their efforts at mining. Engineers prepared for the infantry’s descent of the ditch by using 24pounders to cut and smash the masonry facing of the revetment, while miners hollowed out chambers and prepared galleries with vast amounts of powder that could tear a great breach all at once. Meanwhile, the assembled infantry readied to stage an assault as soon as the breach was made. Once a breach was achieved by cannonade or mining, the infantry rushed into and across the ditch and through the breach. During this period, the accepted tactic was for grenadiers to enter the crater first and climb the far rim, establishing a lodgement on the other side. They were followed by regulars and specialist engineers who reinforced the lodgement. Before the engineers erected gabion walls, the attacking grenadiers were exposed to direct counterattack—but counterattacks occurred only if the defenders who survived the mine blast recovered their wits and positions in time. Tough fighting also ensued if the defenders had established a retrenchment behind the expected point of breach prior to its being stormed. In the great majority of sieges, however, matters never came to this bloody, climactic pass. Fortress governors normally beat the chamade and surrendered once the attackers reached the covered way, let alone when they had crossed the ditch and effected a full breach of the scarp revetment. Christopher Duffy, the foremost contemporary expert on this form of positional warfare, explains this curious conclusion as a fact of military culture: “siege warfare in the western world nearly always assumed the form of a ritual, by which the operation progressed through a prescribed number of stages, and reached a dignified end when the parties arranged the delivery of the fortress on reasonable terms.” See also artillery; artillery fortress; artillery train; barbette; breach; bricole; caltrop; Candia (1666–1669); caponnière; Coehoorn; Dahlberg, Erik; expense magazine; fascine; fortification; gabion; Ireland; laboratory; line of defense; mantlet; Mauerscheisser; military medicine; petard; places of arms; razing the works; sandbags; sap roller; siege money; siege park; tranchée général; tranchée major; water maneuvers. In addition, see accounts of the sieges of Ghent (1678); Grave (1674); Lille (1667); Lille (1708); Maastricht (1673); and Puigcerda (1678), among others. Suggested Reading: Christopher Duffy, Fire and Stone (2006). 433

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Siegharding, Battle of (March 11, 1702). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). signaling. Naval signals developed significantly over this period, although significant problems remained. Methods varied from close-in devices such as speaking trumpets, bugling, drums, bells, small arms, and signal guns, to longerrange semaphore systems of varying uniformity and complexity. See also frigates. Sikhs. Sikhism was a syncretic admixture of Hinduism and Islam developed in Punjab. Over time, it became a distinct religious tradition. Its founding is generally attributed to Na¯nak (1469–1538), the first Sikh Guru. He unified a new religious community by embracing Islamic-style brotherhood and rejecting the Hindu caste system, combined with retention of other core Hindu beliefs that were spiritually attractive and not associated with an occupying imperial power. Sikhism was broadly tolerant, rejecting both religious extremes extant in India: the radical asceticism and self-abnegation found in Hinduism and Islam, along with a highly rigid caste system which engulfed millions of peasants. The Mughal emperor Akbar donated land in Amritsar to the Sikhs, who build the Golden Temple on it. Sikhism acquired a martial character under Guru Gobind Rai (1666–1708), as Sikhs responded to persecution by the Mughal emperor and Muslim zealot Aurangzeb. Gobind Rai formed an “Army of the Pure” to defend Sikhs, taking the surname “Singh (“Lion”), which all Sikhs used thereafter. He also instituted other distinguishing features of Sikh men, including beards, turbans, and the carrying of a comb and ceremonial dagger. As Mughal power waned, in 1710 the Sikhs proclaimed a kingdom in Punjab, “Land of the Five Rivers.” Sikhs fought in units called “misl,” in which volunteers organized around some popular general or baron. Most Sikh soldiers in this era were light cavalry, as was most Indian soldiery. A loose Sikh confederacy was established in 1716. silahdars. “Swordsmen.” Ottoman household infantry, part of the Kapikulu Askerleri. Like the sipahis, they were among the most expensive troops to maintain. During the 17th century, various emperors whittled away silahdar numbers and used the savings to hire cheaper, yet more modern, infantry and cavalry. silladars. In the mansabdari system of the Mughals, those retainers who supplied their own horses and arms were known as silladars. When confronting disciplined European troops or Indian infantry trained in European drill and arms, or when a battle started to go badly, they tended to scatter and ride away. Contemporary European observers assigned this behavior to racial or cultural explanations. In fact, a rational economic reluctance to lose one’s horse, equipment, and arms—which together formed the bulk of the silladar’s personal wealth and the basis of his marginally elevated social status—was the far more likely explanation. 434

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single fire. See bomb; mortar. Sinzheim, Battle of (June 16, 1674). Turenne commanded a small force of 6,000 cavalry and 2,000 infantry against an Imperial army of 7,000 cavalry and 2,000 infantry under Count Caprara. The Imperials held ground behind a small stream. While opposing infantry engaged in the town, Turenne personally led his French cavalry in an uphill charge against the Imperial cavalry. The French routed the Imperials from the field, but lost 1,500 casualties to the enemy’s 2,500. sipahis. “Horsemen.” Ottoman feudal heavy cavalry drawn from Anatolia and Rumelia. Along with timariot light cavalry, they were the mainstay of Ottoman armies into the 15th century, and they remained the keystone of Ottoman military power even past the advent of the Janissary Corps and other elite infantry and gunpowder weapons corps. The slowing expansion of the Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, however, limited lands available to support such an enfeoffed cavalry army. The growing importance of guns further encouraged a shift to infantry, including imperial garrisons and various auxiliaries. By the end of the 16th century, six regiments (about 2,400 horsemen) of highly privileged, richly rewarded sipahis (“alti bölük sipahileri”) were assigned to the sultan’s household troops, the Kapikulu Askerleri. Many of these were older troops who had served in prized and lucrative non-combat administrative roles (“divanî hizmet”) at the Porte. Because they were the most expensive of all standing troops to maintain, household sipahis were also more exposed to demotion or expulsion from the ranks. Sipahis were listed on a register, de-listing from which (usually by the grand vezier) was the ultimate punishment, since it entailed loss of revenue and prestige. Over the course of the 17th century, sipahis rolls were steadily and deliberately reduced by the sultans and their grand veziers in order to contain costs and shift military resources into the recruitment of cheaper peasant infantry. Sometimes the cuts were dramatic, as in 1658, when one quarter of all household sipahis were dismissed. The sums saved were so substantial that the Ottoman Empire, unlike most European states, was able to meet the great cost of raising more modern infantry and artillery formations with relative ease, even as it re-engaged in several long wars. Purges of sipahis rolls, sometimes involving thousands of names, were also tied to the ebb and flow of court intrigue and politics. Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680). “Shivaji.” Maratha general and leader. Sivaji was a lifelong opponent of Muslim power in Western India in general, and a military and political opponent of the Mughal Empire, specifically. He saw his first fighting at age 19. Sivaji developed sophisticated concepts of the style of warfare that from the early 19th century would be called “guerrilla warfare,” but such tactics were better known in this era as guerre guerroyante, or raids and ambushes. As the leader of a small group of Hindu rebels, he conducted several guerrilla campaigns against the Muslim sultanate of Bijapur, slowly expanding Maratha territory with repeated local victories. This provoked the sultan to send over 20,000 435

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troops against Sivaji and his Maratha band in 1657. Sivaji retreated into the highlands of the Deccan while pretending to offer to negotiate with the Bijapur general, Afzal Khan, who had been sent to rout him out. When Khan agreed to parley, Sivaji sprang a trap and had him assassinated. Leaderless, the Bijapuri army was quickly defeated by Marathas and thousands of new recruits who poured out of the mountains to fight for Shivaji at Pratapgarh (November 30, 1659), and again at Kolhapur (December 28, 1659). In the wake of these sharp victories, Sivaji’s cavalry overran additional territories. In 1664, he sacked the Mughal port city of Surat, which provoked a powerful Mughal assault on his home territories the next year. Emperor Aurangzeb began to pay more attention to events in the Deccan. He sent several armies against the charismatic Sivaji, whose movement was threatening to provoke a more general Hindu revolt against Mughal overlordship. Failure to combine approaching Mughal forces into a single strike was a major operational mistake that allowed Sivaji to defeat each detached army in detail. For several years, Shivaji fought losing defensive campaigns against the Mughals; Aurangzeb had sent a concentrated Mughal force at least 100,000 strong to deal with the Marathas. This was too much force even for Sivaji, who finally submitted to Mughal force majeure. Brought before Aurangzeb’s peripatetic court, Sivaji was compelled to bend the knee in a humiliating act of submission—which saved his life. While under house arrest in Agra, in 1666, Sivaji plotted escape and vengeance. He accomplished the first feat by sending out basins of sweets as alms for the poor, and then disguising himself as a bearer and leaving with the last delivery. Another version of what became a legendary tale of a Hindu hero is that Sivaji was smuggled out inside one of the basins of sweets. In either case, he spent the next years seeking a diplomatic settlement with Aurangzeb, rather than continuing to fight against overwhelming Muslim power. Lulled into a false sense of military superiority, the Mughal court agreed to recognize Sivaji as a local leader in a much-reduced Maratha state, and turned its attention elsewhere. That was another mistake. Early in 1670, Sivaji, who had been secretly gathering strength, suddenly attacked several isolated Mughal garrisons in Maharashtra. By the end of the year, he retook virtually all territory he held previously. As Hindus rallied to his banner, the Maratha army grew by many tens of thousands, though its main strength remained its cavalry arm. For the next four years, Sivaji harassed Mughal garrisons, cut off forts, captured new territories, and drove back the frontier at Aurangzeb’s expense, and to his lasting humiliation. In 1674, Shivaji proclaimed himself king of an independent Maratha state. This was no idle boast: the warrior state Shivaji constructed in the highly defensible highlands of the arid Deccan, along with a careful regional alliance system set up with smaller Muslim states that also feared domination by the Mughals, enabled Maharashtra to be the dominant power in central India for the next 100 years. Six Nations. See Iroquois Confederacy. skirmishers. See infantry; skulking way of war. 436

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skulking way of war. The stealthy native style of warfare practiced by Indians of the forest and lake country of northeastern North America. Skulking was essentially the mode of the natural guerilla and raider, with the cultural addition that forest Indians did not make a moral distinction between murder and “private war.” Thus, even in times that were otherwise peaceful, a young skulking brave might attack and kill personal enemies to hone his fighting skills and acquire honor and reputation. The “skulking way” as group combat was notable for avoiding direct assaults on heavy fortifications that would cost too many lives among attackers. Instead, it employed guile and ruses. It made effective use of ground and forest cover in making an approach, to spring ambushes, and for refuge in retreat or defeat. Skulking bewildered settlers, militia, and European regulars, at least until some of them—notably Canadian militia and, later, American rangers—learned its methods and began to use them in combat. Skulking enraged European officers, who viewed it as opposed to the “rules of war.” It should not have: Europeans themselves had for centuries “skulked” along wild frontiers in Ireland, Hungary, Scotland, and across the Militargrenze, waging petite guerre and guerre guerroyante from the borders of France and the Holy Roman Empire to Poland and Ukraine. Well adapted to its environment as a military approach, the skulking way of war also reflected native cultural and ritualized religious values—some admirable, but others less so. At its core was the Indian brave, who was a warrior rather than a soldier. A brave was usually very young—training began no later than age twelve—exceptionally fit, and capable of greater speed and physical endurance on the march than his European allies, enemies, or prisoners. He was an expert marksman, taking the white man’s firearms, powder, and shot in exchange for furs and excelling in use of the rifle in hunting and war. As Armstrong Starkey has shrewdly noted, the brave possessed “the skills and discipline of modern commandos and special forces.” He could move and survive in winter by using snowshoes and eating scraps from the forest floor, while white troops stayed huddled in wooden huts, awaiting the spring, or died starving and frozen in the deep snow. In summer, he moved over river and lake in stealthy birchbark canoes that gave his war party unparalleled mobility and tactical surprise. His officers were “elected” on the basis of demonstrated bravery, audacity, and cunning, not mounted stiffly in a saddle by accident of birth, or from a purchased commission. Indian military discipline was based on personal honor, rather than hard punishment. Indian tactics aimed at victory achieved with minimal loss of the lives of attackers. Tactical retreat, or refusing to fight in the face of superior numbers or fortified works, was thus commonplace. This infuriated European commanders, who misunderstood Indian battlefield prudence as cowardice or fecklessness toward the “cause,” further misreading the fact that Indians fought in white men’s wars for reasons of their own. A brave’s ethics were also akin to a modern commando’s, notably when it came to prisoners. They would take prisoners if chance permitted, or they would slaughter all their enemies because they could not move quickly with old men and women and children in tow. While contemptuous of enemy males who surrendered, 437

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a warrior could still treat a prisoner gently and adopt him (or her) into his nation. Or he might slowly torture or burn him (or her) to death. Unlike European or Asian soldiers for whom rape was a ubiquitous part of war, out of mystical taboo Indian warriors rarely molested captive women. In sum, braves could be as kind and humane or as callous and cruel as any other soldier, in any era. Most eastern Indians quickly adapted to firearms, exclusively matchlock weapons prior to 1660 and principally flintlock firearms after that. Starkey argues that they abandoned bows and arrows because the ability of most braves to dodge arrows became an impossible feat with bullets. In short, Indians appreciated the greater hitting power of firearms. They often loaded weapons with several balls or bullets to maximize a gun’s wounding or killing effect. Moreover, Indians much preferred rifles to muskets for hunting and in war, domains they did not always distinguish. Most became expert riflemen well beyond the skills exhibited by settlers, who were mainly farmers who occasionally supplemented their winter larder with wild game. European regulars sported smoothbore muskets and fired in volley, were not trained in marksmanship, and did not aim at individual targets. Braves fired, moved to new cover to reload, fired again, and then moved again. This emphasis on aimed fire did not mean that they fought merely as individuals. War parties made up of larger numbers of braves, each firing and seeking new cover, conducted skilled advances and retreats “blackbird fashion.” In that style of fighting, braves with loaded guns covered those reloading or moving, rather as a modern commando unit in urban warfare moves from cover to cover under suppressing fire. The skulking way of war also reduced casualties, a great concern of Indian societies once demographic decline set in after contact with virgin European and African diseases borne by settlers or slaves. See also Deerfield raid (1704); Indian Wars; King Philip’s War (1675–1676); King William’s War (1689–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). Suggested Reading: Patrick Malone, The Skulking Way of War (1991); A. Starkey, European and Native American Warfare (1998).

Slankamen (August 19/29, 1691). See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699); Köprülü Mustafa Pasha. slavery. See Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); asiento; Edict of Fontainebleau (1685); galleys; Peter I; Songhay; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); West Indies Company; Yellow Waters (1648). sloop-of-war. A mid-size cruising warship in the age of sail, with a single internal deck and mounting its cannon on the main or upper deck. They were widely used in the West Indies. slopship. A hulk kept by the Royal Navy as a place where recruits were initially washed and issued new clothing. This was a highly innovative and effective answer to poor civilian hygiene and, consequently, to the long-term health of crews. 438

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Slovinska krajina. See Windische border. small shot. See shot. Smyrna convoy (June 17–18, 1693). During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), regular convoys of Allied ships sailed from northern ports in the Baltic, the United Provinces, and England to Smyrna and other ports in the Mediterranean. A massive Smyrna convoy of 400 merchantmen was targeted by the French in June 1693. It was escorted by 22 English and Dutch warships, along with a number of additional fireships, ketches, and other smaller warships. The English reconnaissance was particularly bad, which allowed a French fleet of 70 sail and 25 fireships led by Tourville to intercept the convoy off Lagos, Portugal. An excess of caution by Tourville when he first spotted the convoy and mistook it for a battlefleet, and a successful decoy action by the Anglo-Dutch escort allowed three-fourths of the merchantmen to escape. A sharp battle ensued with the remaining escorts, in which the French enjoyed huge superiority in ships, guns, and weight of firepower. Tourville chased off the convoy’s 20 escorts. Over several days of subsequent chase, he destroyed or captured 92 merchants. Notwithstanding the escape of most ships, these losses to the Allies were huge, and the gain in prizes by the French was equal to the entire naval budget for that year. snaphance. From the Swedish “snapplås;” also known as “snaplock.” An early form of flintlock mechanism, in which the flint was released to strike a steel plate with a marked snapping motion. Because snaphance, or snaplock devices made concealable pistols (no burning fuse) possible, they became ubiquitous among thieves, for whom concealed weapons were preferred. The term therefore acquired a derivative meaning of “highwayman” in English. A unique evolution of the snaphance emerged as the Scottish lock. snaplock. See snaphance. Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696). “John III.” King of Poland (r. 1674–1696). Born into privilege and well educated at Cracow, he toured England, France, and the United Provinces from 1646–1648. He was present at Berestczko (June 28–30, 1651), where the Poles defeated a large Cossack army. He supported the Swedish invasion of 1656 that exiled John II Casimir. Sobieski switched sides a year later, driving the Swedes out of much of Poland. He next fought long and successful campaigns in Ukraine against the Cossacks, and for this he was promoted to grand field marshal. He was heavily, and not always honorably, involved in the 1672 election of the Polish monarch. His schemes and the general course of events were interrupted by a massive Ottoman invasion of Ukraine and southern Poland. Sobieski rallied Polish defenses to defeat the invaders the following spring at the Second Battle of Chocim (November 11, 1673). The victory gained for him widespread popular support. He converted this into election as king of Poland on June 12, 1674, also utilizing the army in his rise to power by marching 439

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it north so that a strong military presence intimidated the opposition among szlachta and in the Diet. Another Ottoman army invaded Ukraine in 1675. The campaign in the south was harder that year than the year before, because Polish nobles displayed their usual opposition to any strong and centralizing monarch raising a large army. Even so, Sobieski won at Lwów (Lvov) that summer, and again at Zurawno (1676). He returned to Cracow for his coronation during the pause between those battles. The moment Sobieski truly set his mark on European history came when he led an army of Polish cavalry and dragoons, including the famous “winged hussars,” on a historic march in relief of the Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683). In sheer distance traveled and rate of advance, Sobieski surpassed Marlborough’s more famous march to the Danube in 1704. Sobieski’s march covered 400 miles in six weeks, including one stretch of 220 miles in just 15 days. It is true that, unlike Marlborough, Sobieski did not have to outpace enemy armies or detour around unfriendly garrisons along the way. Still, in physical obstacles overcome, distance covered, and logistical accomplishment, his march at least equaled the later achievement of the great English captain-general. Each man also crowned his march with a major battlefield victory. Upon arrival northwest of Vienna, Sobieski assumed overall command of a multinational army that assembled to fight the Ottomans. The battle took place at Kahlenberg on September 12th. After succeeding brilliantly at Kahlenberg, Sobieski failed to take advantage of ensuing Ottoman weakness to overrun Moldavia and secure a port on the Black Sea for Poland. He spent the rest of his reign dealing with truculent nobles of the szlachta, intermittently fighting in Hungary and elsewhere during the First Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699) and fending off Cossack and other unrest along his frontiers. He tried, but failed to contend with the institutional and social inability in Poland to sustain a standing army of the modern type that was emerging across most of the rest of Europe and in Russia. socket bayonet. See bayonet; Vauban. Solebay, Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1672). “Sole Bay.” The opening sea fight of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), off Southwold Bay on the Sussex coast of England. De Ruyter, with just 62 ships-of-the-line, attacked an English fleet of 82 sail led by the Duke of York (later, James II) and the Earl of Sandwich. The English fleet was forewarned, but carelessly was still at anchor upon the first Dutch approach. The English quickly formed two divisions, the “Blue Squadron” (Sandwich) and the “Red Squadron” (York). An allied French battlefleet was nearby, and technically formed the “White Squadron.” It sailed in the opposite direction, without clear orders from English commanders, and was warily tracked by the van of the Dutch line. The French, under Admirals Jean d’Estrées and the marquis de Duquesne, ended by watching the ensuing fight without intervening. The English formed their usual line of battle, but because they were in two widely separate divisions the fight unfolded almost as two discrete battles. De Ruyter concentrated most of his fire on the northernmost English division, the 440

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Blue, breaking up the formation with fireships, sinking the Earl’s flagship “Royal James,” and killing the Earl and hundreds of crew. When the second English squadron, the Red, closed the gap toward the Dutch battle line, de Ruyter repelled it, inflicting significant English losses. He then withdrew as dusk arrived, having inflicted a sharp defeat on the enemy’s main battlefleet. The young Duke of Marlborough witnessed the fight from aboard the Duke of York’s flagship, which was in the thick of the action and suffered significant casualties to officers and men. Songhay. In the 1660s, a succession crisis in distant Morocco led the arma— firearms troops originally from Morocco, but long established as the ruling elite in Songhay—to repudiate the old Moroccan tie. Steeped in desert mysticism, the arma were intolerant of the older and alternate Muslim intellectual tradition of Timbuktu. For another 200 years, these “Moors of Timbuktu” ruled an area centered on the old Songhay cities of Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu, but not much else of what once had been the Mali Empire and its Songhay successor. The Moors taxed Saharan salt and gold mined by Mande slaves and sold other slaves into the Arab markets on the coast, but they built nothing—and blocked others from doing so as well—by occupying the great trade and cultural centers of the Niger Valley. A rump of old Songhai existed in Dendi, but overall the region that had always been part of someone else’s empire fell into disastrous decline. The old idea of a single sudanic empire thus expired with Songhay. The Moors themselves were later overrun by firearms technology married to a much harder will, that of al-Hajj Umar (c. 1795–1864), leader of the Fulbe’s third great jihad in the 19th century and founder of the unstable and short-lived, but spectacular, Tukolor Empire. sortie. A dashing attack by garrison troops against saps or the siege works of a besieging army. The term also refers to soldiers assembled in the ditch or place of arms to make sorties external to the enceinte, or at sally points behind the curtain or near a tenaille, for closer sorties. Most sorties were conducted at night, and they did not aim just at killing sappers. Behind the attackers, men worked to rip apart and burn out the line of gabions and fascines that marked the saps and to spike the guns of any captured forward batteries. In the attack, Vauban responded to the threat of garrison sorties with the full development of his system of parallels, which allowed attacking infantry to fire volleys into any approaching enemy troops and gave attackers a place to form a line of battle if the garrison still offered to fight toe-to-toe. A synonym for sortie was “sally.” See also army of relief; bomb; shot. Sound, Battle of the (November 8, 1658). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Roskilde, Treaty of (1658). Sound Tolls. The entrance to the Baltic Sea narrows to just a small lane of water known as “the Sound,” lying between Denmark and the southern tip of the Scandinavian peninsula. It was a principal interest of Danish foreign policy and 441

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a major financial support of the monarchy, both Navy and state, to compel all ships traversing the Sound to pay tolls for the privilege. This occasioned frequent disputes and naval wars, notably with Sweden and the United Provinces, whenever Denmark was weakened. The Danes levied tolls from the 1420s until 1857. Sweden was exempted from Danish tolls as a result of its victory over Denmark in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and in the closely related Torstensson’s War (1643–1645). This precedent of Swedish exemption broke Denmark’s ancient claim to Dominum Maris Baltici, a fact that weighed heavily in Danish strategic considerations. In the Peace of Frederiksborg (June 14, 1720) agrees between Denmark and Sweden upon the latter’s defeat in the Great Northern War (1700–1721), Denmark lost all prior conquests except for Royal Holstein. In turn, Sweden retained its late-war gains on the north Baltic shore, but agreed once more to pay Sound Tolls. sovereignty of the sea. An English naval and political doctrine proclaimed in 1293 by Edward I, after he was summoned by a Paris court to explain why he had permitted his Gascon subjects to attack their liege lord, the king of France (the Gascons had burned part of La Rochelle). The doctrine-cum-propaganda that he promulgated in reply was that English kings had “time out of mind . . . been in peaceable possession of the sovereign lordship of the English sea and the islands therein” (that is, the Channel or Narrow Seas). Edward’s successors upheld this doctrine, which was far beyond their capacity to enforce, by insisting that English captains demand that passing foreign ships lower their flag in “salute” to England’s sovereign control of the Narrow Sea and other waters. On the water, this was at best an idle boast. No one respected the English claim to jurisdiction, and England had no navy to enforce what, in Mahanian terms, would be called “command of the sea”—not even along its coasts. The claim remained important into this period because it was exploited by English privateers and pirates as an excuse to take prizes from neutral shipping that “failed to honor” the claim. On May 2/12, 1652, a refusal by Dutch ships to give the salute demanded by an English captain provoked both sides into the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). The same excuse was used to provoke the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). soyughal. A servitor system among Kazan Tatars. It granted provisional tenure of landed estates in return for military service. It is not known whether the Tatar servitor system directly influenced evolution of the Muscovite system of pomest’ia cavalry, which it closely resembled. spahis. See sipahis. Spain. By the mid-17th century, Spain’s economic, administrative, and military capabilities were badly strained by demands of a world-spanning empire that had always been beyond its ability to sustain or defend. Over the prior century, Spanish and Italian troops had marched north to fight in France, Germany, and the United Provinces, dying there in large numbers. Even at the height of its 442

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imperial power, Spain never adequately reformed or modernized its military. It had few gun foundries, no national militia, and no standing army beyond the tercios it gathered in Catalonia and Italy. Its forces were underequipped in landbased guns and naval artillery, most of its ports were ill-defended, and its cities were open to amphibious invasion. The military situation was even worse in its overseas colonies. By the mid-17th century, Spain was almost wholly reliant on foreign suppliers of war matériel, from artillery to gunpowder and shot, to armor and muskets. It naturally drew upon local food stocks and other basic supplies for its garrisons stationed abroad, but it was also reliant on imports of basic raw materials for its civilian economy. What Spain had in abundance was bullion from the Americas, which it used to buy military power as well as to import civilian goods. The multinational character of the Spanish Empire was reflected in languages spoken across its domains. Perhaps no more than ten percent of the population of overseas colonies spoke Castilian, although all elites did. In the Philippines, far more people spoke Chinese, the language of regional commerce, while in the Americas Quechua and other native tongues were far more common than Castilian. Even in Europe, Italian and French were nearly as widely spoken as Castilian within the scattered territories governed by the Spanish monarchy. Other subjects spoke Dutch or German. Spain hardly took a serious military interest in its overseas colonies during this period. Already, Creole elites and black and mulatto militia provided minimal protection, supported by more powerful allies of the moment with an interest in the balance of power and preservation of the Spanish Empire so that it did not fall into enemy hands. None of this prevented Spain from the belligerent assertion of far-flung imperial rights and claims. Spain’s declared policy remained “no peace behind the line,” meaning the line of demarcation mediated by a pope and agreed with Portugal in the 1490s, but never recognized by any Protestant power. It ran west of the Azores and south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Within this area declared protected and off-limits to interlopers, even (or especially) for purposes of trade, the Spanish attacked all intruders without warning, even in time of general peace. This produced a chronic situation of large-scale smuggling, privateering, piracy, ambushes, massacres of settlers, and winked-at unofficial trade. Within Europe, Spain entered this period chastened and reduced by its colossally expensive failure in the great German conflict, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and its concomitant and still more costly failure in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). Those conflicts concluded with the formal breaking away of half Spain’s former Flanders province, newly recognized even in Madrid as the United Provinces. The other half remained with Spain as the Spanish Netherlands. That change, along with opportunities seemingly posed by the Fronde and civil war inside France, meant that Spain remained locked in a quarter-century of war with France over the frontiers of its distant province. The conflict with Paris had deep roots in the Thirty Years’ War, but it lasted long past the settlement at Westphalia in 1648. Generally known the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659), its central theater of operations was Flanders, though there was also fighting along the frontier in the Pyrenees and at sea. In addition, Spain 443

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clashed briefly with the radical Puritan Republic in England during the AngloSpanish War (1655–1660), even as it also fought to reassert control over Portugal, which broke free of Spanish control beginning in 1640. These conflicts required a continuing commitment to garrison the Spanish Netherlands, even while fighting much closer to home, in Germany, and overseas. The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) that finally ended the long war with France permitted Madrid to switch into a reinvigorated effort to reconquer Portugal. It quickly transferred home the military and fiscal resources previously used to hold Flanders and to restrain France. In its northern province, from 1659 Madrid increasingly relied on the aid of allied armies to restrain French ambitions to annex the Spanish Netherlands, in which Spain showed declining interest after more than a century of war. With grand irony, the troops most often called upon to defend Spanish interests and claims in that northern territory over the next half-century were English and Dutch. The new reliance on Dutch alliance was quickly tested when Louis XIV took advantage of a succession crisis in Madrid to launch the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Spain joined the first of several anti-French coalitions, or “grand alliances,” at the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678), during which it was compelled to send troops to crush the discrete Messinian rebellion that broke out in Sicily, and to fight a French army that intervened there. Spain emerged from that war the major loser in the general peace settlement, and specifically in the Treaty of Nijmegen (September 17, 1678). War in the north broke out again when Louis started the War of the Reunions (1683–1684), while Spanish and other forces were preoccupied with sending relief armies to lift the siege of Vienna (1683). Membership in the League of Augsburg and Louis’ continuing aggressions drew Spain into the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Catalonia was laid waste by the French, and Spain saw much fighting and death, but the conflict settled nothing. A core problem was the unexpectedly extended lifespan of Carlos II. When he finally expired, leaving a confused will and no successor, Spain itself became a major battleground over the course of the largest and most destructive war of this period, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). During that conflict, Spain was repeatedly overrun and ravaged by multiple foreign armies, its coastal cities were bombarded and blockaded, and its economy fell to unprecedented levels of poverty and distress. Spain sank into partial, but lasting subservience to France upon the completion of the war. Louis XIV succeeded— though only just—in placing his Bourbon grandson on the Spanish throne as Philip V, which established a “family compact” between Bourbon Spain and France that would last for much of the 18th century. Spanish Army. Among the various peoples of Spain, Castilians most favored the Army (while disdaining service in the Navy). Over time, fewer noble families agreed to serve, leaving Spain with a chronic shortage of officers that it was forced to fill with foreigners. In the first half of the 17th century, the Spanish Army comprised an admixture of Iberian (principally Castilian), Italian (mainly Milanese and Neapolitan), and German (Imperial) troops, along with numerous Irish and other mercenaries. By the middle of the century, it was customary 444

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to enroll Protestant (“heretic”) troops, especially from Germany, for service outside Spain. By 1650, the Army of Flanders had just 6 tercios of Spanish troops, but 4 Italian, 11 Flemish, and 23 German. During the latter part of the 17th century, the majority of officers in Spanish armies in Europe were Italians or Flemings, while most soldiers were Italians, Germans, or foreign mercenaries. In Spain’s colonies throughout this period, Creole officers in charge of mostly black and mulatto troops were the mainstay of garrisons. The major change for the Spanish Army was in the location of its deployments. Following the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) that ended the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659), Spain shifted most of its troops out of the Spanish Netherlands to Iberia, where they engaged a failed effort to reconquer Portugal. The Army of Flanders was reduced from 70,000 in 1658 to only 20,000 by 1661. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), Madrid kept fewer than 15,000 troops in the Spanish Netherlands, relying mainly on the Dutch to make up the shortfall. In 1693, Spain relied on 75,000 Allied troops to hold its northern province against a French invasion army of 100,000. Madrid concentrated its own major military effort along the Spanish border with France. The Allied contribution rose to 120,000 in the Spanish Netherlands by 1695, with no commensurate rise in Spanish deployment. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the Spanish Army played only a minor role in defending the north; most efforts were expended in fending off the invasion of Spain itself. Loss of interest and ability to defend its northernmost province contributed greatly to the decision to surrender the Spanish Netherlands to Austria in 1714, as part of the larger European settlement. Spanish Fronde. See Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). Spanish Navy. Despite being a vast oceanic enterprise, the Spanish Empire was dependent on non-Spanish naval power for defense of its overseas possessions and trade. In the Mediterranean, a few royal Spanish ships were supplemented by Neapolitan and Genoese fleets and by a small private navy contracted out of Andalusia. From 1564, Spain organized its Atlantic shipping into two annual “flota,” or convoys, which sailed from Seville and returned together from Havana. Otherwise, most “Spanish” shipping was actually Basque, Flemish, or Portuguese. This apparent neglect of sea power by the Spanish government reflected the fact that most carriage trade was private, and merchants consequently looked to their own devices and armed ships for security. Like other sea powers, Spain resorted to impressment in coastal villages, notably in Asturias and Vizcaya. But coastal locals were adept at escaping into the mountains to avoid the press gangs. Many Spanish warships, consequently, went to sea with no more than half the crew they needed, or with impressed peasants from interior villages who had no experience of the sea at all. Skilled Basque and Flemish captains filled the void, along with captured Dutch seamen taken in Brazil, some Englishmen, and many Portuguese—prior to that country’s reassertion of independence from Spain in 1640. Bosnians and Slovenes also served on Spanish warships. 445

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Spanish Netherlands. The southern portion of medieval Burgundy (Flanders), which remained mostly Catholic during the Protestant Reformation. It was a central battlefield of the wars of religion that lasted into the mid-17th century, especially the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) between Spain and the northern half of Flanders. The latter ultimately was victorious in that war, and was recognized as the United Provinces. The Catholic religion and the strategic location of the Spanish Netherlands conduced to the province remaining under Spain’s control in the division of Flanders that had long existed on the ground, but was codified in the great settlement of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) known as the Peace of Westphalia (1648). However, the Spanish Netherlands remained the principal battleground between France and Spain until the Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659) ended in the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). Madrid finally accepted that it could no longer use the province as the anvil of the Spanish monarchy at home and the “bridle of France” in its foreign policy. Until then, Spain had maintained its largest armies in its detached northern province and poured money and men into its defenses. The last significant Spanish army in the north retired in 1660. Thereafter, the newly recognized United Provinces took the lead in opposing French expansion into the province. This led to serial wars between the Dutch Republic and Louis XIV, beginning with the War of Devolution (1667–1668), in which Spain allied with the United Provinces but played a decreasingly important military role in the north. A number of key towns (Oudenarde, Tournai, and Lille) were lost to France in the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle that ended that conflict. Next came the Dutch War (1672–1678), followed by the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). The province remained a battleground between France and the multiple powers of the Grand Alliance in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). The Treaty of Rastadt (1714) then delivered the Spanish Netherlands to Austria under the new appellation “Austrian Netherlands.” See also Barrier Treaty, First (October 18/29, 1709); Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713); William III; Witt, Jan de. Spanish riders. Sharp stakes driven into the ground at a forward angle by infantry anticipating a cavalry attack, but also useful as a defense to blunt advancing enemy infantry. In Sweden, these were known as “Sweinfedder.” spar. Any stout pole on a ship forming a mast when vertical or a boom, yard, or gaff when horizontal. Sperrfort. A small fortress built at a choke-point formed by the natural landscape, such as a river valley or mountain pass, to block (“sperren”) the advance of an enemy force. See also fort d’arret. Speyer, Battle of (November 4/15, 1703). See Tallard, Camille, compte de; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). spies. See front; Marlborough; siege warfare. 446

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spike the guns. When enemy guns were captured in the field or during a sortie by a garrison, but could not be hauled away, they were “spiked.” This was usually done with a spiking nail, a thin metal rod rammed into the vent. The nail was broken off flush with the vent, and its point was bent inside the barrel with the gun’s own rammer. If this was not possible, or no one present had a spiking nail, a simple technique for rendering guns inoperable was to wrap the enemy’s own solid shot in a piece of cloth (a hat was often used) and ram it hard into the barrel, jamming it. spill. The debris of earth and stones removed in the course of digging a ditch or trench. The more technical term of the day was “déblai.” split thumb. See military medicine. spur. See ravelin. squadron (cavalry). The principal tactical unit of 17th and 18th century cavalry, which was otherwise organized into regiments. By the 1690s, a French cavalry regiment comprised three squadrons of three companies each, with about 50 troopers per company, for a paper strength of 450. Strength was reduced to 35 men per squadron during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), but the number of squadrons per regiment rose to four, so that a cavalry regiment hosted 420 troopers. squadron (naval). A subdivision of a warfleet, usually forming one of three squadrons that were traditionally called the Red, the White, and the Blue. Depending on the overall size of the fleet and the number of ships per squadron, each squadron was itself subdivided into three divisions: the van, center, and rear divisions. St. Denis, Battle of (August 4/14, 1678). A battle fought four days after a peace was agreed that ended the Dutch War (1672–1678) between France and the United Provinces. The Dutch under William III (then still Prince of Orange) moved against Mons, where a French blocking army was positioned. Each side lost up to 4,000 casualties in a full day of heavy fighting. As the dead were buried and the dying and wounded comforted at the end of a useless and bloody day, news of the peace treaty arrived in both enemy camps. St. Gotthard, Battle of (August 1, 1664). A Habsburg army reinforced by French troops and Rhinelanders to a total of about 40,000 men fought to victory over the Ottomans and their Tatar allies at St. Gotthard, a small village in Hungary near the Styrian border. The Habsburgs were led by Montecuccoli, who commanded about one-quarter of the Allied troops. Before the Allies arrived, the Ottomans had thrown a rickety bridge over the Raba river, gaining a foothold on the far side. The bridge collapsed, however, forcing the Ottomans to abandon the bridgehead. Tatars helped extricate infantry from forward positions, mounting 447

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foot soldiers on the extra horses that always accompanied Tatar fighters into battle. Failure of the bridge was compounded by tactical errors that decided the outcome of the fight, rather than by any supposed or later-reported brilliance on the part of Montecuccoli, as was once widely thought among military historians. A young Charles V also saw action at St. Gotthard, leading a cavalry charge against the Ottoman left. The result contributed to negotiation of the Peace of Vasvár (August 10, 1664), which turned into a 20-year Habsburg-Ottoman truce. This conclusion was secured only in part by military action; Leopold I also bought peace by paying a tribute to the sultan of 200,000 florins. St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666). “North Foreland.” St. James’ Day was July 25 OS, August 4 NS. Coming after the Dutch victory at The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666), this sea fight of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) inflicted grave losses on the Dutch. George Monk, with 88 sail and a number of fireships, brushed aside a Dutch fleet of near-equal numbers under de Ruyter. There is no clear record of the fight itself, beyond the conclusion that the English gained ascendancy over the Dutch early in the battle and never surrendered the position. After the fight the English gave chase, taking several Dutch men-of-war. The pursuit continued the next day, but did not lead to another general action. The English fleet sailed on, proceeding to destroy 160 Dutch merchantmen lying at anchor off the Holland coast on August 8/18. That action is sometimes called “Holmes’ Bonfire,” after the English admiral in command of the attacking ships, Robert Holmes (1622–1692). St. Malo. A French privateer port. In November 1693, an English raid tried without success to blow up the harbor at St. Malo using an infernal machine. Stadholderate. Originally, the office of the representatives of the Habsburgs in the Spanish Netherlands, excepting Brabant and Mechelen. Stadholders were leading Flanders nobles, even under the Spanish. In the time of William the Silent, multiple offices were combined into one Stadholderate. The title survived in the United Provinces after the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), when it was most famously held by Maurits of Nassau. While often linked to the captaincy-general of the Army, the Stadholderate was a political, rather than a military office. See also Westminster, Treaty of (1654); William III. Staffarda, Battle of (August 8/18, 1690). Victor Amadeus II was defeated by a French army generaled by Nicholas Catinat. The Savoyards formed a battle line that seemingly was protected by marshland and brush. Catinat assaulted anyway and broke the enemy line. The Savoyards lost nearly 3,000 killed and wounded and another 1,200 prisoners. The French lost about 1,000 men. standing army. In Latin, “militum perpetuum” or “miles perpetuus” (permanent soldiery). The Ottoman Empire maintained a large standing army well in advance of European states, starting in the 14th century. This Kapikulu Askerleri comprised the Janissary Corps, six resident regiments of sipahis, and smaller 448

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numbers of salaried auxiliaries and support and administrative positions. Economies introduced during the 17th century significantly reduced these numbers. In 1670, there were 39,470 active and retired Janissaries on the sultan’s payroll, 8,742 Janissary cadets, 14,070 in the six regiments of household sipahis, and 8,014 auxiliaries. Far fewer than these totals were actually available for battle. Thus, out of 67,000 called to fight in the Second Austro-Ottoman War (1715–1718), fewer than 10,000 showed on the field in 1715. In their early magazine system and remarkably sophisticated military administration, the Ottomans were not surpassed by European rivals until the late 17th century. The sultans relied on large numbers of sutlers and grain suppliers, cooks, clothiers, and other supporters of any army in the field. Modern estimates place the Ottoman Army at a maximum of 70,000 effectives at the end of the 17th century, with 50,000 drawn from the timariot provincial cavalry reserve and 20,000 from the standing Kapikulu Askerleri. In Europe, the question of whether or not to maintain a permanent Army lay at the center of two centuries of political and social transformation from the late medieval to the early modern periods. Control of the Army, and its social makeup and financing, was a core matter of contention between monarchs and the Estates that represented landed interests. In some countries, the struggle remained centered on powerful princes or kings and a parliament or some other representative assembly that increasingly spoke for the rising mercantile classes, in addition to the traditional Estates. In Spain, France, and Muscovite Russia, monarchs overmatched or overcame traditional resistance and established standing armies. They closely controlled these armies, and with them they controlled their countries and tamed aristocracies, converting noble classes into servitors, or at least service nobilities. In the United Provinces and England most notably, it was instead the assemblies—the States General and Parliament— which set hard parameters for Armies and limited and controlled the size and financing of the military, out of fear of the absolutist ambitions of princes. Late in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the States General and Parliament even dictated deployments and tactics to commanders, refusing to permit bloody field battles while diplomatic negotiations got under way. Despite these political and even cultural restraints, the United Provinces maintained one of the most proficient and ready forces in Europe from 1590–1713. The British Army also came into its own in that time span. The Habsburg (Imperial) standing army numbered only 50,000 by the end of the 16th century. Louis XIII was a slow military reformer at best, yet a major step toward a modern standing army (or what John A. Lynn calls a “state commission army”) in France was confirmed during his reign. In the second half of the 17th century, as Europe recovered from the wars of religion, most major powers moved to adopt standing or permanent national armies in place of seasonal and foreign mercenary forces. In part, this was done to reduce reliance on untrustworthy mercenaries, but more to concentrate military power under the direct control of the sovereign and thereby emasculate contentious nobilities which had lingering military pretensions. It also guaranteed a minimal floor of trained troops and ready supply, so that the sovereign was able to launch a 449

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campaign as soon as good spring weather permitted. Voluntary enlistments were fleshed out with conscription of the king’s (or prince’s or emperor’s) subjects into new state militias, whether based on towns or regions. Thus Austria, Brandenburg, Denmark, France, Russia, Savoy, Spain, Sweden, and many of the small German states of the Holy Roman Empire all established or significantly expanded permanent armies (and in many cases, also navies) during this period. The tale of standing forces in the Three Kingdoms was more complex, both politically and legally, prior to the Glorious Revolution and the Mutiny Act. Even so, in all cases the growth of state armies also meant the growth of the general capabilities of the state to tax, organize, and govern. The Army, the state, and the bureaucracy that sustained both became essential—even defining— features of early modern life and history. The greater discipline of the new permanent armies compared to that of the older levies of aristocratic cavalry and town and peasant infantry—or worse, a rabble of mercenaries—along with improving logistics systems and increased professionalism, allowed for some limitation and humanization of warfare with respect to the treatment of civilians. This trend was reinforced in western Europe by the tormenting memory of the terrible depredations of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). In that war and others, armies had predated over great swaths of territory, not to fight each other, but to strip the land of food and wealth, while often deliberately avoiding each other. These practices continued in this period, of course, notably in the devastation of the Palatinate by the French from 1688–1689. But the larger fact influencing professionalism had to do with an earlier demographic shift. The significant depopulation of parts of Europe caused by famine, plague, and endemic warfare over the first half of the 17th century had reduced economic bases to rudimentary levels in some regions, and thus also had reduced the tax bases required for funding large conscript or peasant armies on a permanent footing. These facts rewarded an immediate post-Thirty Years’ War emphasis on deploying highly trained, professional standing forces which lived apart from the population and were severely restricted in their conduct in peace and war by the more tightly enforced will of absolutist sovereigns. Of course, this pattern took hold in different countries at different rates of speed. Where it was not adopted at all or only partially pursued, as in militarily and constitutionally awkward—and indeed, backward—Poland, a high price would be paid in loss of territory and, after this period, also in loss of sovereignty. See also Articles of War; Banner system; Brandenburg; Danish Army; Dutch Army; Friedrich-Wilhelm; French Army; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Green Standard Army; Imperial Army; James II; Junkers; Landgrafs; logistics; New Model Army; Polish Army; Prussian Army; Russian Army; Swedish Army; war finance. standing navy. See Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Dutch Navy; French Navy; guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; Habsburgs; Ordinary; Peter I; Pontchartrains, comptes de; Royal Navy; Spanish Navy; standing officers; Swedish Navy. standing officers. Those warrant officers or petty officers who lived aboard (“stood by”) their assigned ship, even when its crew was paid off after a cruise 450

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or war. They stayed on the ship’s register until the ship was lost, decommissioned, or lay at mooring in the Ordinary of the Royal Navy, stripped of sails and rigging. Standing officers were essentially part of the naval reserve. They were not eligible for half-pay, but were nevertheless fairly secure and could expect to be promoted from smaller to larger ships over time. Stanislaw I (1677–1766). Né Stanislaw Leszczyniski. He was elected king of Poland by a rump of the szlachta, against opposition from the “Sandomierz Confederation” of Polish gentry, who supported his rival, Augustus II. He was the candidate of the Swedish king Karl XII, who forced his election on June 21/July 2, 1704, and saw Stanislaw crowned on September 13/24, 1705, after the last resistance from partisans of Augustus was suppressed. This coronation was possible only by force of Swedish arms during the opening phase of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), especially a calculated devastation of Polish lands by the invading Swedes that cowed the country into accepting Stanislaw. He was purely the creature of Swedish military power ever after, playing the puppet to Karl XII’s puppetmaster. After the crushing defeat of Karl and smashing of a Swedish army at Poltava (June 27/July 8, 1709), Stanislaw could no longer hold onto the throne. He fled into exile as Augustus II returned to Warsaw. Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger, Graf von (1638–1701). Austrian Feldmarschall. He fought in the east against the Ottomans under Montecuccoli in the 1670s. In reward, he was promoted to military commander of the Habsburg capital, Vienna. During the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, he rallied an overmatched and underarmed garrison, and even town citizens and university students, in desperate fighting against a much larger besieging army led by Kara Mustafa Pasha. The city was finally relieved and the siege lifted by a coalition of ImperialPolish-Saxon-Bavarian troops. For these and other services to the Habsburgs, Starhemberg was promoted to “Feldmarschall.” In 1691 he was named president of the Hofkriegsrat. starvation. See famine; Mauerscheisser; siege warfare. States General. A governing body formed by the seven provinces that constituted the United Provinces. A special committee oversaw military operations. The States General was a key, but not exclusive, Netherlands decision-making body through the many Dutch wars of this period. In addition to normal governance, it met in a “Great Assembly” to review the Union in 1651, just before the first of the Dutch wars with England, and again from 1716–1717, after the long series of wars with France. See also captaincy-general; Raad van State; United Provinces; Witt, Jan de. States’ Navy. A republican appellation given the Royal Navy by the Puritan Republic, until 1660. States’ Party faction. See United Provinces. 451

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station. In navigation and evolutions of whole fleets, a given ship’s assigned place in a line of battle. Falling out of station usually happened to leeward when a fleet was hauled close to the wind. Allowances for this occurrence were made by steering six or seven points from the wind, which permitted ships to recover their station by working back up to the line. In a long-term duty assignment, a station was a region of ocean assigned for patrol and protection by a ship, or more often a squadron of ships. Accordingly, a “station ship” was a Royal Navy warship assigned to base or patrol in some overseas station, be it in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, or Mediterranean. Steenkerke, Battle of (July 24/August 3, 1692). “Steenkerque” and “Steenkirk.” As Vauban and Coehoorn dueled at the dramatic siege of Namur (May 25–June 30, 1692), maréchal Luxembourg led a 60,000-man French army of observation to shadow an Allied army of relief led by William III. Both commanders sought battle at the end of July, William as a prelude to retaking Namur and Luxembourg to block that ambition. William achieved a local superiority of numbers, despite an overall inferiority in the theater of operations. He then surprised the French right with an early morning attack, which he partly mismanaged. The pace of fighting was dictated by subsequent Allied moves, so that Luxembourg was compelled to rush unprepared regiments into whatever breach opened in his lines. Nevertheless, the French slowly overcame their surprise, while the Allies suffered growing command confusion. Entangled columns of reinforcements never arrived in time or sufficient concentration to decide the battle. The Allies thus failed to advance in good order at the center or left, or to bring all their infantry and cavalry into the fight. As a result, the Allied infantry at the center was subjected to heavy cannonading. Danish and English troopers, supported by cavalry, broke the first line on the French center-left and pushed back the second and third in heavy fighting. But stiff resistance allowed Luxembourg to mass his reserves and counterattack. After nine hours of fighting, William ordered a general retreat, but the French were too tired and mauled to pursue. Casualty estimates vary. They probably reached 7,000–8,000 on each side, though the Allies may have suffered as many as 10,000 killed, wounded, or missing. See also Athlone, Godard van Reede; Vendôme, Louis Joseph, duc de. Stekene, Battle of (June 27, 1703). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). stifler. See camouflet. stockfish. Dried cod. See also rations. Stockholm, Peace of (February 1, 1720). A multilateral treaty of peace, agreed among Great Britain, Prussia, and Sweden, that ended one important phase of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Within Sweden, it was widely considered that Sweden’s German-born king gave away too much to Great Britain, Hanover, and Brandenburg-Prussia in this agreement. The Swedes retained 452

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Wismar, Straslund, and a portion of Pomerania, largely as a result of French insistence and mediation. Western Pomerania was ceded to Prussia, as was Stettin. An earlier Treaty of Stockholm, with Hanover, had ceded Bremen and Verden, and that cession was now confirmed. stoppages. Deductions from a soldier’s or seaman’s wages for clothes, food, beer and spirits, and so on. See also off reckonings; subsistence money. storm. See assault. Stormakstid. “Great Power Period.” The “age of greatness” in Swedish historiography, usually dated by historians from 1621 to 1721. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl X; Karl XI; Karl XII; Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Scanian War (1674–1679). storm bells. Town or fortress bells rung in warning of a discovered insult or pending assault. storm poles. See fraises. Strasbourg. Strasbourg was one of the key crossings of the Rhine, and hence a routine target of campaigning and siege by French armies or by the enemies of France. The trace of Strasbourg’s fortifications was redone by Vauban after he entered this riverine fortress city with a conquering French army in September 1681. See also Dutch War (1672–1678); Edict of Fontainebleau (1685); natural frontiers; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Ratisbon, Truce of (August 15, 1684); War of the Reunions (1683–1684); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). strel’sty. “Musketeers.” A class of non-noble servicemen employed by the tsars as the traditional household guard of the Kremlin. They gave the tsar military service rather than paying taxes, and they were not allowed to own serfs. In wartime, they were organized into units that formed the core of all tsarist armies before Peter I. Otherwise, Russian forces comprised masses of ill-trained peasant conscripts. Many strel’sty were “Old Believers” who had been deeply alienated from the tsarist court after a schism within the Orthodox Church. That schism ensued from the reforms by Patriarch Nikon (1605–1681) that were introduced during the reign of Alexis (1629–1676). Four regiments of strel’sty revolted in 1682, butchering 40 of their own officers and government officials, whom they accused of exerting “German influence” on the court. The massacre occurred inside the walls of the Kremlin and deeply affected the young (10 years old) Peter I. One of his uncles was among those murdered, a fact he never forgot or forgave. In 1689, the teenage Peter thought the strel’sty were coming to kill him and fled Moscow. He returned the next month to depose his sister, Sophia, as regent and assume his duties as tsar. From 1698–1700 he conducted show trials, purges, and public executions of the strel’sty. Nearly 1,200 of them died, their bodies gibbeted on the outer walls of the Kremlin as a warning to others who 453

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might oppose the new ways of the reformer tsar. Hundreds more were flogged and deported to forced labor in Siberia, as Peter banished all strel’sty from Moscow. Before they left, he symbolically shaved their beards to show that there was no going back to their old, Slavophile ways, and he forbade them to wear traditional Russian dress. At the Kremlin, he replaced the strel’sty with a handpicked praetorian guard, an elite that evolved into two of Russia’s most famous regiments: the Preobrazhensky and the Semenovsky Guards. The banishment backfired, however, by spreading discontented strel’sty around the Russian empire. In 1705, Old Believer strel’sty in Astrakhan rebelled, massacring local troops and government officials. See also Russian Army; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Stromboli, Battle of (January 8, 1676). A small French fleet of 20 rated ships engaged a comparably sized Dutch fleet in this inconclusive naval battle of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Stuart, James Edward (1688–1776). The “Old Pretender.” See Jacobites; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). subject troops. Soldiers in the British Army who were recruited from among the subjects of the Three Kingdoms. Their numbers increased greatly during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), with most assigned to fight on the Continent. subsistence money. The money left in a British soldier’s pay packet after off reckonings, any stoppages, and the poundage taken by the paymaster as a perquisite of his office. It was used to pay for food and lodging in an era when British troops were far more often assigned to billets than to barracks. surrender. A fortress or citadel garrison surrendered “at discretion” when its governor agreed to lay down arms and open the fortress or citadel to the enemy, despite the latter’s refusing to offer or guarantee terms. This was, in effect, a desperate call for quarter that was made only when there was no hope of the garrison withstanding a final assault. It was much more common for a governor to beat the chamade and agree to formal, generous terms once the attacker had secured a lodgement on the glacis or had breached the covered way. Sometimes a governor merely waited for the attacker to expend a good effort on his first lines and batteries, or perhaps to receive a symbolic shot or two. In 1734, an Austrian governor refused an offer of terms with this reply: “It is too early. You have formed no batteries and planted no cannon.” When terms were finally agreed, a garrison might be permitted a free evacuation with its arms and colors, via the gate or breach. They marched out with muskets primed but bullets in their teeth or cheeks, a symbolic display that they were still fighting men. Survivors among the besiegers entered the fortress, repaired its defenses, and leveled all siege works they had dug and erected in preceding weeks, lest these be turned to hostile purposes. In field battles, the issue of surrender seldom 454

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arose in this era unless one side was completely surrounded. Most often, the more badly wounded army withdrew from the field overnight, while the other licked its wounds in camp. Or an army just broke and ran, regiment upon regiment, leaving no opportunity to discuss terms with a surprised and unprepared victor. Sweden. The long period or ferment, turmoil, and war extending from 1621 to 1721 has been recorded in Swedish history as the “Stormakstid,” the “Great Power Period,” or even the “Age of Greatness.” Sweden emerged from the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) still the dominant Great Power in the Baltic and northern Germany. It finally achieved peace with the Danes at Altmark in 1648 and was a major participant in the diplomacy leading to the Peace of Westphalia (1648). At the mid-century mark, Sweden remained one of the two principal powers in all Europe, serving along with France as a guarantor by treaty of the great German (Holy Roman Empire) settlement agreed at Westphalia in 1648. But that did not mean it rested in peace for the remainder of the 17th century, for the great strains of its effort in the German war began to tell on the Swedish Empire. The several peaces that Sweden thought it enjoyed with neighbors to the east and north were little more than armistices in the middle of protracted conflicts over bitter dynastic rivalries, or more broadly, over delimitation of vague frontiers into defined national borders. Moreover, in the last 20 years of the German war Sweden lost some territories in the north that it had gained by 1632, during the intervention in Germany of the great Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632), the “Lion of Midnight.” That loss almost ensured that more wars would follow, as the growth of the Swedish military state retained a powerful impetus for aggression into the first two decades of the 18th century. This impulsion arose out of the social underpinnings of the northern war state. All classes—even poor farmers-as-soldiers— benefited from war, and virtually all important Swedish institutions endorsed and had been adapted to a strategy of accruing national wealth for a scraggy and poor country by stealing it from more verdant, richer neighbors. Swedish wars of aggression, in sum, flowed essentially from a consensual project that had evolved a national conscription system, because the country was too poor to hire mercenaries to conquer or garrison foreign lands, as did other empires. The Swedish Army, the Riksdag and monarchy, and the complex management of crown lands from alienations to “reduktions,” were linked to improve Sweden’s opportunity to make aggressive war profitable. In 1654, Karl X renewed Sweden’s protracted conflicts with Poland and Denmark. He astonished Europe by effectively conquering Poland during the first year of the “Little” or Second Northern War (1655–1660), capturing Warsaw in 1655 and pressing as far south as the border with Hungary. He also beat back a Russian assault on Riga that began the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). In reality, however, Karl seriously overreached the real bases of Swedish power. He could not overcome Polish defense of the fortress-monastery of Czestochowa from 1655–1656, and he failed to forestall a religious and cultural revival of Polish national feeling that contributed to Poland’s military renewal and recovery. 455

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Thereafter, he saw his early gains eroded by the return of John II Casimir and somewhat improved Polish military capabilities. Karl also failed to account for intervention in Poland by several other powers, notably Habsburg Austria. They formed an anti-Swedish alliance to drive him back north. He renewed war with Denmark in 1656, after six years of fitful peace following the Swedish crushing of the Danes during Torstensson’s War (1643–1645). These several and serial wars, coming so soon after the enormous expense and effort of fighting the great German war and its related offshoots in the Baltic and Poland, stretched Swedish military recruitment, taxation, and royal political systems to their outer limits. Sweden thus proved, not for the first time, that it was easier to acquire an empire than to keep it. During its Stormakstid of the 17th century, Sweden changed much from its meager beginning as an impoverished and underpopulated country in 1600. It greatly profited from its “new model army” developed by the great Gustavus Adolphus. Sweden accrued an empire and vast new wealth in the form of looted Catholic goods during the German war, along with fresh prestige as a rising military and diplomatic Great Power. It established a permanent military presence on the south shore of the Baltic, occupying rich German Protestant territories which it carefully milked of resources to pay for more soldiers, mainly Germans and Scots, to wage additional campaigns of conquest and domination. Sweden joined the Rheinbund upon its founding by Mazarin in 1658, apparently solidifying its uneasy alliance with France that dated to 1635 and the Thirty Years’ War. In 1668, Sweden joined the Triple Alliance, ostensibly to oppose French expansion into the Spanish Netherlands, but more realistically as part of its desperate search for foreign subsidies that did not require it to make actual military commitments it could not afford. It had more success from 1672, when it sided with the French in exchange for large subsidies from Louis XIV. During the 1670s, Sweden relied on its French alliance for subsidies, without which it could not sustain garrisons in northern Germany. But the piper calls the tune: in 1674 Louis demanded that Sweden invade Brandenburg in support of his own effort in the Dutch War (1672–1678). The Scanian War (1674–1679) that resulted began with disaster in Brandenburg for a Swedish army, but ended less badly than is often recorded. The Scanian War revealed Sweden’s military to be weaker than most observers had thought, and the war finance system was exposed as incapable of supporting a protracted war or maintaining an extended empire. Yet at war’s end, Sweden remained a formidable military power, while the young Karl XI had led a partial recovery of lost territory. Moreover, French alliance paid the dividend of returning to Stockholm at the peace talks most of the rich German and Danish lands that had been lost in battle. Over the decades of his reign, Karl XI and the Riksdag imposed ruthless tax and land reforms and practiced sound fiscal administration that left the state budget and Army and Navy in excellent condition. He also pursued peace after 1680: he married a Danish princess and sought to keep Sweden out of the wars of Louis XIV. Swedish troops did participate in a limited way in fighting the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), but the population generally enjoyed the many benefits of sustained peace. However, Karl XI’s premature death on March 456

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24/April 5, 1697, left the Swedish throne and empire in the hands of an impetuous 15-year-old, Karl XII. He would progressively test the limits of Swedish military and fiscal endurance and then proceed to lose everything, including his life and the empire, in spectacular fashion. The outer reaches of Swedish power were touched when the boy-king Karl XII invaded Poland and placed his candidate on the throne, made successful war against Denmark, brushed aside Russia, and invaded and beat Saxony into submission during the opening years of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Europe was greatly impressed with Sweden’s revived military prowess and Karl’s apparent military genius, and it seemed to many observers that Sweden was still a Great Power to be reckoned with. But any sustainable limits of Swedish power were broached as Karl recklessly, and obsessively, decided to invade Russia. He led 40,000 Swedes to defeat, death, and disaster in the snows of Ukraine, and then at Poltava (1709). Wounded physically and politically, Karl was carried on a litter into five years of Ottoman exile. In his absence, Sweden was toppled from its century-old position as northern hegemon and Great Power by a newly powerful Russia, which was then being significantly reformed by Peter I (“The Great”). Sweden lost nearly all of its German and Polish territories in the various peace treaties of 1720 and 1721. It then sank back into relative Baltic obscurity—but also relative peace—as its violent and explosive period of Stormakstid—in which the Army sustained aggressive war and aggressive war sustained the Army—came to a hard and bitter close. Suggested Reading: Michael Roberts, ed., Sweden’s Age of Greatness: 1632–1718 (1973); A. Stiles, Sweden and the Baltic, 1523–1721 (1992).

Swedish Army. For nearly 30 years, the Swedish Army was the “new model army” of European warfare, from its advent under the great captain Gustavus Adolphus (1594–1632) through the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). In standards of drill and recruitment, it was nearly unmatched by the mid-point of the 17th century, except perhaps by the Parliamentary New Model Army that was a direct imitator. In the use of field artillery and the revival of the cavalry charge, the Swedish Army had changed the face of battle. However, while resource-poor and underpopulated Sweden maintained a “förläning” system of rural recruitment that allowed it to sustain a small native force, it could never sustain a large army for long. It was thus forced to rely heavily on mercenaries. Even in the great, early battles of the Swedish phase of the Thirty Years’ War, at Breitenfeld (1631) and Lützen (1632), Swedish nationals composed no more than one-fifth of the “Swedish Army” commanded by Gustavus Adolphus. Mercenaries were paid from the proceeds of conquest, as Sweden was simply too poor to pay them from its own resources. This pattern of making war pay for itself (“bellum se ipse alet”) had emerged quickly during the great German war in the form of French subsidies, promised and paid before Swedish boots touched German soil. Even so, the Swedish Army maintained a highly aggressive tradition of fighting bequeathed to it by Gustavus Adolphus, though learned originally from the Poles. In particular, it remained reliant on aggressive cavalry charges with sabers drawn. This tactic proved especially effective, even when the 457

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Swedes were badly outgunned and outnumbered, as they were at the extraordinarily sanguine field at Lund (December 4/14, 1676). The traditional Swedish recruitment system was known as “Gårdetal,” under which levies were raised from homesteads rather than by a strict head count of male peasants. This system was replaced by “Bondetal” (from “Bonde,” or peasant), wherein peasant levies were assessed by head count and not homestead. The overall system was known as “Utskrivning” (“Registration”). As with the Army of its rival and ofttime enemy Denmark, Swedish soldiers were assigned to farms according to “allotments” (“Indelningswerk”), where they lived and worked as tenant farmers in peacetime. This kept a ready reserve in place while shrewdly displacing the costs of military upkeep from the cash-poor crown to the productive countryside. Again paralleling the draft system in Denmark, if Sweden were attacked its kings could call up levies by exercising the “Uppbåd,” a constitutional right to raise emergency levies of one man out of every five. This royal right was strictly defensive, and could not be used to raise troops for aggressive wars beyond the agreed borders of Sweden. Besides peasant infantry, the nobility traditionally provided cavalry under the “Rustjianst,” a feudal military obligation to knightly service. If a noble wished to avoid personal riding service to the crown, he was required to pay for the upkeep and arming of a substitute. Much of this traditional system was changed by Gustavus Adolphus, who introduced the first national conscription in Europe—though it still exempted nobles. The wars of the mid-17th century strained and broke even his model system, however, exacerbating financial troubles and social cleavages within the kingdom. The Swedish military was facing a financial crisis already by 1650. Shifts in land ownership in favor of the nobles were placing an ever-greater burden on the förläning leaseholds. Also, recruitment and taxation alike were falling more heavily onto “tax and crown” peasants and town burghers, as more and more peasants became tax-exempt under their new noble masters. In 1655, an emergency measure taxed noble-peasants for three years and restored one-quarter of alienated land to the crown. But this half-measure still meant that it was better, from a financial point of view, for Sweden to make war than remain at peace. Thus, Sweden once more sought to “make war pay for itself ” at the start of the Second Northern War (1655–1660), which was initiated by Karl X. This time there were no French subsidies for a war of naked Swedish aggression. Hard exaction of ransoms and ongoing contributions from conquered German and Polish towns and rural estates were, at first, an adequate substitute. The Swedish Army that invaded Poland in 1655 comprised 14,000 cavalry (40%), 1,250 dragoons, and 20,000 infantry. Follow-on Swedish reinforcements and local recruitment of mercenaries focused on replenishing the cavalry squadrons, as befit a war in the flat country of Poland and Ukraine. During the war, an additional 14,000 cavalry and 3,200 dragoons were added, but just 6,000 infantry. Casualties were so high, however, that the flow of recruits quickly proved inadequate. A crisis developed when recruitment within Poland also fell away sharply with the revival of Polish military spirit and fortunes during 1656. The short-term answer was to raise conscription levels within Sweden and Finland to 458

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unprecedented quotas per household. As conscription accelerated, more landless peasants—those who lived outside the protection of noble estates and were not themselves yeoman farmers—were swept into the Army to make war for the king. This was the price paid by ordinary Swedes for the “Stormakstid” earlier launched by Gustavus Adolphus, for it was the great Gustav who began a process of alienating crown lands to the nobility. That practice now ensured that Swedish recruits were of poor quality and could not be properly equipped from domestic revenues. Sweden’s system of making foreigners pay for its wars aroused deep animosity among those who were forced to pay heavy contributions, stirring resentments in occupied areas that only made the political and diplomatic resolution of conflicts more difficult. The contributions system broke down quickly in Poland and soon enough in Ducal Prussia, with complete collapse of the system from 1658. Sweden, a classic war state, could not sustain its garrisons or conquests from foreign sources and was thrown back upon its own meager resources. Taxes within Sweden soared to levels not seen since the 1620s. It was against this backdrop that Sweden made a hasty peace immediately after the unexpected death of Karl X in 1660, and spent much of the next decade desperately seeking foreign subsidies that did not also require it to make military commitments. It finally achieved a modest success in this regard in 1672, when Louis XIV agreed to pay for 16,000 Swedish troops stationed in north Germany at the outset of the Dutch War (1672–1678). That number was raised to 22,000 by September 1674. But the underlying military system was still unrepaired and unsustainable, facts that became impossible to hide during the Scanian War (1674–1679). With large garrisons totaling 12,000 men hunkered down in Bremen, Pomerania, and Wismar, the Swedish Army that invaded Brandenburg at the end of 1674 numbered just 13,000. Defeated at Fehrbellin (June 18/28, 1675) and pushed from its last toehold on German soil by November 1678, the Swedish Army did not even manage to evacuate most of its troops back to Sweden. However, it fought exceptionally well at Lund (December 4/14, 1676) and in defense of the homeland in the last years of the war, under the able leadership of Karl XI. Years of solid reform and peace in the latter part of the reign of Karl XI left the Swedish Army in excellent condition by 1700. The process began in 1680 when the Riksdag introduced radical reforms in the wake of the Scanian War, as the assembly reinforced the monarchy at the expense of the aristocracy, but in favor of the other Estates. The key reform was a sharp reduction (“reduktion”) in the amount of alienated crown lands, with fully 75% of formerly alienated lands returned to the crown. This swelled royal revenues and greatly increased the number of peasants available for conscription. The reforms of 1680 thereby laid a sound basis for the exceptional military resurrection that occurred in the 1690s, which was made evident in the first years of the new century. However, reform also made possible the reckless and unrestrained warlordism of Karl XII by legally enhancing the position of the monarchy vis-à-vis the nobility. More land “reduktion” was decreed in 1682, and additional taxes were laid upon the nobility by a powerful monarch who seemed to be approaching the ideal of absolutism that was then being trumpeted by the best minds of the Age. In fact, 459

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the Swedish monarchy was more representative than the absolutism of its own rhetoric, and that of the Riksdag, indicated. In sum, a new service nobility effectively displaced the old hereditary elite in Sweden through a progressively negotiated social and fiscal revolution that focused on the monarchy, but did not make it absolute. Soldiers were now well cared for on special farms. Most had a cottage of their own, were well and promptly paid, and expected to serve only to age 40. They might even remain in their homes after that if they had married and produced a son to take their place in the Army. As hard a bargain as that seems to modern minds, it was an avenue of social advancement and personal security not open to the peasants of most other countries in this period. By 1697, the date of Karl XI’s premature death, the Swedish Army fielded 25,000 foreign mercenaries in its overseas garrisons and had a standing native force of 11,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry. Together, these troops formed one of the finest, best-trained, and most cohesive and professional armies in the world—though it must be remembered even within this context that Swedish soldiers in 1700 were still mostly part-time warriors who had never seen a day’s combat, and who spent most waking hours working on farms. Under the pressures of war, by 1708 Sweden had swelled the ranks of its armed forces to 110,000 men, or 10% of the military-age male population. Unlike the French Army, which was built to make aggressive war, the Swedish Army had become more like the Dutch Army by 1700. It was an instrument of deterrence and defense—albeit of an extended empire—whose main purpose was to deter war so as to preserve a peace from which Sweden greatly benefited. Unfortunately, all of the advantages and advances carefully accrued by Karl XI were thrown away by his son, Karl XII, in the snows and fields of Ukraine during the disastrous Great Northern War (1700–1721). Whereas Karl XI generally made war to secure prosperity and peace, Karl XII was adamant in his refusal ever to consider peace, even when he had already lost the war. See also cavalry; drabants; Malmö (1678); military discipline; Narva (1700); pike; Poltava (1709); third-man regiments; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Vallacker cavalry; Warsaw (1656). Suggested Reading: Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (2000).

Swedish Navy. By 1650, Sweden had a larger navy than Denmark, while Russian naval power in the Baltic was 50 years from being conceived, let alone constructed and deployed. So during the next half-century, the Swedish Navy contested for dominance in the Baltic with the navies of Denmark and the United Provinces. The fiscal reforms introduced during the reign of Karl XI benefited the Navy as well as the Swedish Army. By 1697, the Swedish fleet was 50% larger (in tonnage) than that of Denmark and was fully modern and well-trained, with 34 ships-of-the-line and 11 frigates. It was not until the Great Northern War (1700–1721) that Sweden faced the new naval power of Russia, which defeated the Swedish Navy and humiliated it, bombarding the coastal towns of Finland and Sweden itself, deploying amphibious operations, and cutting off Swedish trade and garrisons on the far shore of the Baltic. See also Köge Bay (July 1, 1677); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Roskilde, Treaty of (1658); Scanian War (1674–1679); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). 460

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Sweinfedder. “swine feathers.” Austrian term for sharp stakes, half-pikes, or boar spears carried by Kaiserlichs. They were to be driven into the ground at a forward incline when anticipating a cavalry attack. They were also useful in blunting advances by enemy infantry. Elsewhere in Europe, these simple but effective battlefield devices were known as “Spanish riders.” When made of iron, they could be used to quickly construct chevaux de frise. swivel gun. Small to mid-sized (1–3 pounder) cannon mounted on a ship’s rail and used to sweep an enemy’s deck before boarding. It fired canister. swords. See cavalry; cutlass; hanger; military medicine. systems of fortification. See artillery fortress; Coehoorn; Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson; siege warfare; tour bastionée; trace; Vauban. Szatmár, Peace of (May 1, 1711). See Rákóczi, Ferenc. szlachta. The noble classes of Poland-Lithuania, with minor parallel szlachta in such territories as Royal Prussia. Still feudal in essence and attitude, in this period they continued to repress Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian peasants and deprive towns of voting rights in the sejm (regional representative assemblies). Most critically, they clung to a right to elect the monarch that dated to 1573. This severely limited the ability of Polish kings to fund or wage war, while inviting foreign intervention and repeated succession crises over the claims of competing candidates. While this situation has been frequently criticized by Polish nationalist historians and other historians, who appear to believe that all positive modernity flows from centralization of states, the position of the szlachta may be understood another way. Because many members desired peace within the Commonwealth, they deprived the monarchy of the means to wage aggressive war, an opportunity that several Vasa kings obsessed with recovery of the Swedish throne for their family would otherwise almost certainly have pursued. In addition, szlachta opposition to the “foreign contingent” in the Polish Army rested at least in part on suspicion of the monarchy’s potential to use foreign troops, instead of the “national contingent” and noble levies, as an instrument of private foreign policy, war, and dynastic aggrandizement, rather than simply to pursue security. On the other hand, while this attitude might have worked out well if Poland were a peninsula or an island entire unto itself, in fact it occupied a broad plain open to foreign invasion from several directions—sometimes all at once, when its many enemies were allied. The failure of the szlachta to permit establishment of a large military force to serve as a deterrent to raids, invasion, and political intervention actually invited aggression against the Commonwealth, while encouraging Cossack and peasant rebellion in Ukraine. See also Augustus II; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Polish Army; Stanislaw I; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). 461

T tablette. A brick or masonry extension of a revetment above the cordon, in the form of a short wall. It provided minimal additional defense against erosion or escalade, and accordingly was eliminated in most late 18th-century works. tackle. Cable, rope, pulleys, blocks, stays, braces, and other equipment necessary to raise, lower, and work the sails. Gun tackle was a comparable assemblage used to run out heavy guns after each firing. tactics. See army of relief; artillery; assault; Banner system; battalion; battery; battle; bayonet; boarding; bombardment; breach; British Army; broadside; cavalry; Cossacks; Danish Army; double on; drill; escalade; fighting instructions; flintlock firearms; guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; guerre guerroyante; Indian Wars; infantry; insult; Karl XII; line abreast; line of battle; Marlborough; Martinet, Jean; mines/mining; naval tactics; Pancerna cavalry; parallels; pike; rake; ricochet fire; Royal Navy; Russian Army; siege warfare; skulking way of war; storm; Swedish Army; Vauban; volley fire. tail. A rearward opening (entrance) into a siege trench. See also depot. taking the shilling. Becoming an English (later, British) soldier by accepting a bounty to enlist. The size of the bounty was negotiable, but by the early 18th century it might be several pounds. Most was noted as paid into a soldier’s company or regimental account. Immediate up-front payment of the bounty to fresh recruits was traditionally just one shilling, which almost always disappeared that same day into the hand of the nearest publican. A deterrent against unscrupulous recruiters signing just anyone to fill their quota was the fact that if the recruit skipped out, the recruiting sergeant lost the shilling. If the new man proved to be lame or otherwise unfit, the regiment lost all funds used to recruit him. Other armies had equivalent phrases for comparable contracts.

Tallard, Camille, compte de

Tallard, Camille, compte de (1652–1728). Maréchal de France and diplomat. In 1697 he participated in negotiations with England, seeking a partition of the inheritance of Carlos II. He was unable in these talks to prevent the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He was expelled from England in 1701 when Louis XIV recognized James II instead of William III. Elevated to maréchal in 1703, Tallard was one of several exceptionally weak military appointments that Louis made before turning to Villars. He fought in the Rhineland in 1703, enjoying minor successes and taking several Allied fortresses. His most notable victory came at Speyer (November 4/15, 1703), where he emerged from his siege lines to set a line of battle before them and thence to defeat a superior Allied force. However, any martial success Tallard had in these years was vitiated by his catastrophic defeat and personal humiliation and capture at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). He was kept in genteel imprisonment until 1711. talus. In trenches: the rearward slope of the trench. In permanent fortifications: the interior, or rear-facing slope of a rampart. The opposite slope, facing the enemy, was the scarp. The talus was set—or eventually settled—at a 45-degree angle from the terreplein, facing toward the town. At its terminus ran a wide military road that could support troop reinforcements, including cavalry, and supplies and ammunition carted to any part of the enceinte. tambour. The perimeter formed by a palisade. Tangier. A Portuguese colony in the Straits of Gibraltar from 1471–1661. It was granted to England as a wedding dowry for Charles II, and was taken over by English troops in 1661. Naval engineers unsuccessfully sought to remake the harbor with a mole to create a safe and useful base for the Royal Navy. A garrison of 3,000 arrived in 1662. That number was reduced to about 800 effectives during the 1670s, but swelled to over 3,000 again in 1679–1680. These troops held the town, but they did not control the hinterland or a defensive line sufficiently distant and long to prevent bombardment of the city. The garrison suffered from poor officers and repeated attacks by Moorish troops loyal to the local sultan. The fortifications were breached in October 1680, but the garrison held the inner line. A truce was worked out the next year. When the English left in 1683, under pressure of a Moroccan blockade, they destroyed the town and unusable harbor before withdrawing, thereby discarding a huge royal investment and 22 years of work. Tangier was always a much-hated posting by troops. It was notorious among garrison troops for poor food, bad weather, nasty health conditions, and chronic hard fighting, and the garrison death rate was correspondingly high. What the English had sought from Tangier’s potential as a Mediterranean-guarding naval base was actually realized elsewhere, when the British took Gibraltar during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also galleys. targe. A small, round infantry shield peculiar to the Scots. It was generally used with a claymore or broadsword, in addition to dirk, pistols, and musket. 464

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tarpaulin. A socially low-born officer who entered the Royal Navy from the merchant service. They competed for position and promotion with “gentlemen officers” appointed by Charles II. During the Restoration, they were generally given commands of Fifth and Six Rates, or fireships and frigates, though some later began to fill the new position of “master and commander.” Tarpaulins’ upward mobility based on merit improved notably with a critical reform of 1677, which required all candidates for lieutenant to sit a formal examination, whether they were gentlemen or tarpaulins. There was further improvement with reforms made during and after the Glorious Revolution. Tatars. Into the 18th century, Tatars counted the Ottoman sultan alternately as overlord and ally in protracted wars with the failing Polish and expanding Russian empires. Tatars still raided deep into the “great wheat field” of Ukraine, PolandLithuania, and southern Russia during the 16th century, reaching as far north as Moscow twice—in 1571 and 1591. Farther south, they pillaged, killed, and kidnapped widely, dragging away thousands to the Ottoman slave markets at Kaffa in the Crimea, a city that Ukrainians called “vampire.” Before 1650, more than 160 large raids were recorded in Ukraine alone. Tatar mobility meant that their armies remained extremely dangerous and independent of Russia well into the 18th century. The distance to the Khanate from Moscow and its strategic location on the lower Dnieper, which was then unnavigable below the rapids, cancelled out Russian advantages in artillery and numbers. Even so, the Tatars sought protection by accepting to become vassals of the Ottoman sultans. Large complements of Tatars thus accompanied Ottoman armies in campaigns in the Balkans and Hungary during the 17th century. The smallest contingents numbered from 30,000–40,000, with Tatar numbers reaching from 70,000–100,000 if they were led personally by their “Han.” Even when the Han was not present, Tatars always fought under their own commanders. Tatar light cavalry was deployed forward of Ottoman infantry columns, each man customarily accompanied by several spare mounts to permit continuous riding. When serving in the vanguard as scouts and skirmishers, they moved scythe-like through enemy country, ahead of the main force. Tatars fought not for pay, but for a share in plunder. Still, plunder was not the main aim of their flying wedge of wild horsemen operating 10–15 kilometers ahead of an Ottoman army. Once the Ottomans moved beyond the boundaries of their Empire, and thus beyond the reach of “menzil-hane” magazines, the Tatars served as foragers as well as scouts, gathering food and fodder while denying the same to the enemy. For this they fanned out widely. A third function of Tatar cavalry was to make diversionary attacks, interfere with isolated enemy patrols and intelligence, and confuse enemy commanders as to the main object and line of march of the campaign. Fighting under separate commands and employing different tactical styles meant that Tatar-Ottoman armies and the troops’ relations with each other were usually marked by mutual distrust, and sometimes by active hostility. On the other hand, extra Tatar mounts were sometimes used to speed Ottoman infantry away during retreats and pursuits, as happened at St. Gotthard (1664). At the political level, Ottoman intervention 465

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in the Crimea several times deposed a reigning Han, but at the cost of setting back Ottoman-Tatar relations for years. Bands of Tatars were allies of rebellious Cossacks during the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). They also allied themselves with different Cossack hosts during the following three decades of turmoil and civil war within Cossackdom that is known to Ukrainian historians as the “Ruina.” Crimean Tatars thus raided across Ukraine and Polish Podolia and Volhynia, more often than not in alliance with one or another Cossack host. Ignoring or circumventing the wooden palisades of Polish forts and towns, they stole cattle, took slaves, then rode away, usually unmolested by terrified Polish subjects and their sparse defenders. Only in the spring and fall rainy seasons were Tatar raids and depredations limited. Various groups of Tatars also fought extensively on both sides during the Second Northern War (1655–1660) and the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Many rode against the Polish Commonwealth, while others rode alongside Polish troops at the Battle of Warsaw (July 28–30, 1656). Later, a Tatar army rode as far north and west as Brandenburg, where it burned hundreds of towns and villages under Polish direction and entered permanently into local folk memory and the nightmares of Prussian children. Fighting between Tatars and Poland broke out immediately when Warsaw and Moscow agreed on the Treaty of Andrussovo (1667). This frontier conflict merged with larger PolishOttoman wars that continued on-and-off until the end of the 17th century. See also soyughal. tenaille. A low, and often also small, V-shaped defensive work sited in the ditch between two bastions, and hence breaking up the space in front of the curtain. It might comprise one work (single tenaille) or two (double tenaille), each formed with re-entrant angles. It provided shelter for troops from the garrison who were preparing to make a sortie. It was well detached so as not to allow escalade onto the bastion or curtain. tenaille fortification. A set of defensive works framed in zig-zag order. tenaille of the place. The facade or front (face) presented to besiegers by a fortified place. tenaillon. A small, detached work sited alongside a ravelin, on either side of a bastion. It paralleled the ravelin before turning at a sharp angle toward the salient. terakki. The Ottoman system of providing regular rises in salary for professional troops, tied to their performance in battle. This was different from cash bonuses (“bahziz”) or spoils (“ganimet”). terrae dominum finitur, ubi finitur armorum vis. “Dominion over the earth ends where the cannon’s fire stops.” This “cannon-shot rule” was a practical measurement of enforceable sovereignty over territorial waters, as measured by 466

Texel, Battle of

a compromise agreement on the effective range of shore batteries. It was championed by the United Provinces in the mid-17th century, in rivalry to a Danish view that the territorial sea should have a standard, gauged width. A compromise set three nautical miles out from shore (measured from the low tide mark) as the universal boundary. terreplein. In field works: the reverse slope of any earthen rampart, behind the parapet. More specifically, a flat base (sometimes artificial, sometimes just clear ground) on which gun batteries were mounted. In fixed fortifications: the widest part (at nearly fifty feet) of the main rampart, starting from the top of the talus and extending to the rear of the banquette. The terreplein was built as the main platform for defensive cannon, and to accommodate heavy artillery it was wide and nearly flat, with only a gentle rearward slope to ease runoff. By the 18th century, its standard dimensions permitted 24-pounder cannon to be fired and to recoil, while still leaving a wide path behind for the passage of ammunition carts. The terreplein was accessed via ramps that ascended the talus. It was concealed from enemy sight and protected from all but plunging fire by its descended position, which Vauban ordered to be set at a standard seven feet below the rear lip of the parapet. It was earthen construction, rather than being covered with masonry or brick. Thus, a terreplein might host stately shade trees in peacetime. These were cut down for timber and firewood as soon as, or before, a siege began. A narrow terreplein (about 10–12 feet wide) ran along the covered way, and enlarged parts of it served as various places of arms. Vauban invented ricochet fire (“tir à ricochet”) to dismount guns and kill crews on the terreplein. Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653). “Scheveningen.” In mid-summer 1653, during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), Maarten van Tromp evaded a blockade of the coast of the United Provinces that was being conducted by George Monk, with 120 warships. Tromp skillfully and successfully united his fleet with a smaller Dutch fleet based on the island of Texel. The two opposing fleets then skirmished for two days before fighting a general action off Texel on July 31/August 10, 1653. Monk kept to the new fighting instructions, which called for holding all ships in line of battle. He thus passed through the Dutch fleet no fewer than four times, raking its lighter-gunned and disordered ships with each pass. On one pass, Tromp was killed by a musket ball. The Dutch fleet, discombobulated from the outset, scattered in loss and disorder. Eleven Dutch warships were sunk, many more were badly damaged, and 4,000 men were lost. De Ruyter formed a rearguard to protect those damaged ships still able to make sail, and the Dutch fleet withdrew. Texel, Battle of (August 11/21, 1673). A major sea fight of the Third AngloDutch War (1672–1674). Admiral de Ruyter engaged an Anglo-French fleet of 86 sail mounting 5,386 guns with his much smaller Dutch fleet mounting just 3,667 guns. His fleet was also under-crewed, owing to the desperate need to man Dutch barrier fortresses against the invading French, who well prepared and 467

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timed the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678) to coincide with a secret alliance with England. The fight off Texel island in the West Frisians lasted 11 hours. De Ruyter and the Dutch managed to inflict enough damage on their enemy’s ships that a long-planned Anglo-French invasion of Holland was denied. third-man regiments. Following the catastrophe and terrible losses suffered at Poltava (1709), Sweden’s traditional recruitment system broke down. Karl XII therefore ordered regrouping of the recruitment base to provide an extra “third man,” in addition to the two men traditionally supplied by the system of military farms (“indelningsverk”). These raw recruits were formed into new “third-man regiments.” Still more desperate measures later led to “fourth-man,” and even a few “fifth-man” Swedish regiments. See also Swedish Army. Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). At the close of the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654), a large host of Cossacks led by Bohdan Khmelnitsky, in rebellion against Poland, signed a treaty with Tsar Alexis (1629–1676). By this agreement, the tsar hoped to end unrest that was building among the Don Cossacks and elements of the strel’sty, rooted in grievances dating to the Moscow rebellion of 1648. He planned to attack Poland-Lithuania to take advantage of the great weakness in its defenses exposed by the Cossacks. And he intended to cement the tsar’s position as leader of Russian Orthodoxy by “liberating” Ruthenian Orthodox from rule by Catholic Poles. That meant the war had at least partial origin as an overt crusade. A Russian army 41,000 strong was sent south to invest Smolensk, guarded by a right flanking force of 15,000. Khmelnitsky sent 20,000 Zaporozhian Cossacks into Lithuania from the south, where Alexis supported him, but with only 4,000 Russians. Facing this pincer invasion were 18,000 Lithuanians and 35,000 Poles, few of them well trained. A small Lithuanian blocking force of about 6,000—of whom 2,000 were undisciplined noble levies—was defeated with heavy losses at Shklov (August 12, 1654), opening the road to Smolensk to the advancing Russians. Having learned from a prior failure to take the city during the Smolensk War (1632–1634), this time the Russian operational plan was to eliminate outer garrisons and towns, and only then to bombard and strangle Smolensk. Protected by crumbling fortifications that had been left in disrepair from the previous siege, the city was manned by a garrison of just 3,500 men under the command of Alexander Leslie, a famous but aging Scots mercenary. Smolensk fell in short order, though not without offering sharp resistance. Other towns suffered terribly from the Russian occupation. At Ms´cislaw, a massacre of Lithuanian nobles and their families in July 1654 took—even by apologetic Russian accounts—at least 15,000 lives. A month later, another 8,000 were butchered at Wilno. Uncounted numbers were killed in smaller villages and towns, in massacres that are no longer remembered. One of the vagaries of war in this era—an outbreak of plague—now sent the tsar scurrying back to Moscow. He did not return until spring. In the meantime, around various armed winter camps, small bands of Cossacks on either side sparred with each other and harassed any foragers who came out of winter 468

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quarters in search of food or fuel. Cossacks allied with Poland-Lithuania made limited progress in Ukraine. With some Tatar help, they won a fight at Okhmativ (January 29, 1655). However, the overall strategic situation remained desperate for the Poles. This fact was not unnoticed in Stockholm, where Karl X worried that so massive a Russian army operating in the north rather than in Ukraine gravely threatened Swedish interests in the Baltic. But he was even more tempted to settle ancient scores with the severely overstretched Poles, seeing their moment of grave difficulty as Sweden’s time of opportunity. He met with his War Council and began laying plans for an attack that would launch the Second Northern War in the spring of 1655. The Russians and Swedes started forward at almost the same time. The armies of the tsar advanced in three columns that vastly outnumbered the limited defending forces available in Lithuania. Wilno fell on August 8, an enormous symbolic victory for the Russians, who had long resented that city’s challenge to their supremacy in the east. Karl foreswore a risky amphibious assault and instead marched into Poland in two invading columns of highly professional Swedish troops and mercenaries. One column of 7,200 men moved out of Livonia to block a Russian move into that region, and the other column, with 13,650 troops, left from Western Pomerania, which crossed over Brandenburg territory on its way to Poland. A third column of 12,700 followed out of Pomerania under Karl himself. None of these columns met serious resistance, as most Polish troops were in Ukraine fighting Cossacks or in Lithuania fighting Russians. Towns and cities in northern Poland opened their gates in the face of inevitability, laid garlands, and swore allegiance to the conquering Swedish monarch. John II Casimir fled Warsaw in early August, and Lithuanian prince and general Janusz Radziwill used the occasion to make a separate peace with Sweden in the Treaty of Kiejdany (August 17, 1655). Karl entered Warsaw on September 8 and immediately proceeded south in pursuit of Casimir, who left his troops and headed into exile in Silesia. Poland now completely collapsed, politically and militarily. The crown was considered abandoned and was offered to the Habsburgs, even as Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks advanced on Lwów (Lvov). John Casimir was easily rebuffed in the north and retreated to Cracow. Swedish troops reached the Polish border with Hungary, while Russian armies advanced to the Vistula. Austrians, Danes, and Dutch greatly feared these Swedish conquests and entered the conflict, fighting the Second Northern War until 1660 in parallel to the first phase of the Thirteen Years’ War. Within Swedish-occupied Poland, opinion began to turn against the invaders as massive contributions were enforced and Catholic churches were looted by Lutheran Swedes or irreligious mercenaries. The tide turned first in Lithuania, where guerrilla groups of mixed nobles and peasants conducted a successful guerre guerroyante. Casimir returned to Poland on January 1, 1656, rallying the Polish Army and cleverly tapping into Catholic sentiments and anger toward invading Lutherans and Orthodox by declaring the Virgin Mary “Queen of Poland.” Nearly anticipating the disaster suffered in Ukraine a half-century later by his descendant, Karl XII, in 1656 Karl X took an essentially cavalry army south to Lwów. Instead of taking the city, he was encircled and nearly trapped. 469

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A second Swedish cavalry army was smashed at Warka on April 7, 1656. More Poles and Lithuanians rallied to Casimir, who retook Warsaw on June 29, 1656. A month later, Casimir lost a three-day battle at Warsaw (July 28–30, 1656) to a combined Swedish-Brandenburger army. Despite his defeat at Warsaw, the whole geostrategic situation had begun to turn in favor of Casimir. The perfidious Friedrich-Wilhelm changed sides yet again, withdrawing his 8,500 crack Brandenburg troops from Karl’s army. Tsar Alexis made peace with Poland and declared war on Sweden, in exchange for a promise that he would be elected to the Polish throne upon the death of Casimir. Finally, a Dutch fleet of 30 sail supported by a Danish flotilla broke through Karl’s blockade of Danzig and landed 1,300 Dutch reinforcements in the Swedes’ strategic rear. A Russian army of 35,000 invaded Estonia in July and besieged the Swedish garrison at Riga. Dorpat, in Livonia, was invested by another Russian army, while a third force raided deep into Ingria and Kexholm. Riga held out, but Dorpat fell. Fortunately for Sweden, such multiple efforts on several fronts over several years exhausted the Russians, who rested during 1657 instead of resuming their Baltic campaign. An armistice was agreed between Russia and Sweden in 1658, and Karl also signed a treaty with George II Rákóczi of Transylvania, promising to recognize him as king of Poland. In January 1657, Rákóczi invaded Poland with 25,000 men, and Warsaw fell to him on June 17. The Habsburgs now joined the fight, agreeing to support Casimir in two Treaties of Vienna signed in December 1656 and May 1657. The Habsburgs promised 12,000 troops, as long as their upkeep and wages were paid by PolandLithuania. Denmark took the opportunity to reenter the war against Sweden, quickly taking Bremen and advancing against Swedish garrison towns along the Baltic coast. Facing this new threat in the north from a much-hated enemy, Karl abandoned support for Rákóczi, who was forced away from Warsaw into Ukraine, where his army was annihilated by Tatars. Meanwhile, Karl marched north with 12,750 men. As the Swedish king moved to repel the Danes, Friedrich-Wilhelm took advantage of the respite to sign a separate peace with Poland. Karl performed several virtuoso field maneuvers that brought him to the suburbs of Copenhagen, from where he forced the Danes to cede large swaths of territory in Norway. But he failed to fundamentally improve Sweden’s geostrategic position in the Baltic or in Poland. Instead, his invasion and attempt to extort further concessions provoked a powerful naval intervention against his army on Zealand. The United Provinces broke through blockade lines set up by the Swedish Navy and landed a relief force at Copenhagen. Much more threatening to Karl’s position, Montecuccoli led an Allied army of Austrians, Brandenburgers, and Poles north against him. While Karl was busy winning battles but losing the wider war in Denmark, Tsar Alexis grew evermore impatient with the Sejm’s failure to formally declare him successor to John II Casimir as king of Poland. Polish opinion was also changing: Poles turned against the Habsburg garrisoning of southern Polish cities as Habsburg troops behaved more like occupiers than allies in their demands for greater levels of contributions. By this time, Friedrich-Wilhelm wanted only to escape from the war with his gains intact. Thus, nearly everyone— 470

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including not a few nearly exhausted Swedes—was greatly relieved at the prospect for peace when the highly aggressive Karl X died unexpectedly on February 23, 1660. Within three months, the major participants ended the Second Northern War that had extended fighting in Poland into Denmark and around the Baltic more generally. Sweden made a separate peace with Denmark one month after that, and a third settlement was reached at Kardis in 1661 that ended fighting between Sweden and Russia. In the east, war between Poland and Russia had revived during 1658, after a year of quiet during which tension had built up between those states and among contending factions of Cossacks. The trigger for renewed fighting was another unexpected death—the passing of Khmelnitsky in 1657. A long period of Cossack civil war followed, as tens of thousands of ordinary Cossacks rejected their leaders’ Hadiach treaty with Poland, which sought to make a Polish-Cossack peace in September 1658. The Thirteen Years’ War thus continued in the east. At first things went well for the Russians. Tsar Alexis sent an army of 30,000 into Lithuania, defeating the Poles at Werki in October 1658. There is abiding controversy among various national groups (and nationalist historians) over how Lithuania’s ethnically and religiously divided population reacted to this invasion. Nonpartisan studies indicate that there was some initial support for the Russians among a number of Lithuanian nobles and Orthodox, but that the Russian occupation and attendant atrocities and brutality quickly dissipated that mood. Unitate believers and some Catholics were openly discriminated against, while Jews were special targets of forcible baptism and massacres. (Several thousand Jews responded by joining the Polish Army or forest resistance, much as their descendants would do against German invaders and murderers in the 1940s.) So many peasants were forcibly deported to Russia that the price of slaves dropped significantly. Guerre guerroyante broke out afresh, with tens of thousands of nobles and peasants fighting back from the forests and swamps. When Alexis sent another large army into Ukraine in 1659 it was tricked, trapped, and destroyed at Konotop (July 8, 1659). As a result of the severe split among Cossacks, with one faction looking to Warsaw and the other to Moscow for support, from 1660 to the end of the war Russian armies also faced an aroused Commonwealth and much lessened Cossack assistance as they fought far from home. As soon as peace was agreed with Sweden at Oliwa in the spring of 1660, Casimir attacked into Lithuania. The Poles destroyed a large Russian army at Polonka on June 27, 1660. A Polish army nearly 30,000 strong, along with 15,000 Tatar allies, penetrated Ukraine at the same time. They trapped a large army of 34,000 Russians and another 20,000 Cossacks dug in at Chudnovo in mid-October. The Poles attacked the Cossacks separately, then reached an agreement to allow surviving Cossacks to abandon their ties to the Russians. Under constant Polish bombardment and running out of supplies as winter began, 20,000 Russians surrendered on November 2, 1660. Their commander, V. B. Sheremetev, was held prisoner in Poland for 20 years because the tsar was so angry about the defeat he would not pay any ransom. As the war dragged into its 12th year, the Commonwealth and Muscovite Russia alike sank into economic crisis and faced grave political danger, with the 471

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Russians also for the first time facing a direct military threat. Muscovy was undergoing massive inflation due to Tsar Alexis’ practice of minting large volumes of worthless copper coins to pay his war debts. Regional military confederations that formed in both the Polish and Lithuanian armies from 1659 refused to fight until they were paid. These confederations survived until 1663, which at last permitted renewed fighting in 1664. The renewed campaign saw Polish armies repel the Russians from Lithuania and then proceed into Russia itself, fighting on that country’s soil for the first time in the war. Polish columns attacked toward Novgorod, Pskov, and Voronezh but could not hold those gains, as civil war broke out inside Poland between John Casimir and one of his marshals. This conflict divided loyalties and inevitably drew troops back home, to a ravaged and exhausted land. In Ukraine, the ongoing Cossack civil war prevented both Poland and Russia from making secure gains. Under these conditions, peace talks finally began. The parties reached an agreement on January 30/February 9, 1667, at Andrussovo. Suggested Reading: Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (2000); C. Bickford O’Brien, Muscovy and the Ukraine (1963).

Thökoly, Imre. See Austrian Empire. Three Days’ Battle. See Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653). three-decker. Among the largest of all ships-of-the-line, a three-decker was a great warship with three full gun decks mounting anywhere from 64 to 120 broadside guns. In the Royal Navy system of Rates, ships classed as First and Second Rates were three-deckers, and were considered top line of battle ships. Three Feudatories. See Banner system; China; Green Standard Army; Kangxi emperor; Wu Sangui. Three Kingdoms. England, Ireland, and Scotland. See also barracks; British Army; British establishment; Glorious Revolution; Irish establishment; subject troops. three-mile limit. See terrae dominum finitur, ubi finitur armorum vis. timariots. Ottoman seasonal cavalry tied to revenues from a “timar,” or land holding, for which they owed military service. These essentially feudal light horse were complementary to heavy cavalry sipahis. The number of timars was limited by the availability of land, which provided a loose incentive for further Ottoman expansion. It also led to a system of post-battle redistribution of timars among surviving horsemen, upon recommendation of a chavush. Over the course of the 16th century, some feudal timariots were replaced by regular salaried light cavalry that were answerable directly to the sultans. Other units of tribal irregulars (sarica) operated along mountain frontiers to supplement allied light cavalry of Tatars and Kurds, or they were recruited from the Voynuqs. 472

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Timariots were expected to fend for themselves on campaign, and were not normally eligible to receive supplies or food or fodder from imperial depots. By the later 17th century, a call for mobilization of timariots and their retainers could theoretically muster 100,000 troops, counting on fear of losing one’s timar as a main motivation. In fact, no more than about 50,000 answered a given call-up. And since just showing up was usually enough to retain one’s lands, timariots were not always the most motivated of the sultan’s troops in combat. This problem was addressed by rewarding demonstrated bravery or special daring with the distribution of timars of dead comrades, usually immediately or shortly after a battle. Timariots formed the mainstay of the Ottoman Army at the close of the 17th century, forming a large provincial reserve. As a result, no more than 20,000 additional troops were drawn from the Kapikulu Askerleri for campaigns fought in the 1680s and 1690s, during the AustroOttoman War (1683–1699). Tisza River, Battle of (1697). See Zenta (September 1/11, 1697). tonnage. “burthen.” A measure of a ship’s carrying capacity by volume (not weight), originally determined by the number of wine casks it could carry. The lost space involved in carrying dry goods that were not in casks was called “deadweight stowage.” A “tun” was a measure of eight barrels (36 gallons), or four hogsheads. top. A platform located atop any lower mast (hence, “foretop,” “maintop,” “mizzentop”), serving as a foothold for men or boys spreading upper rigging and sail on the topmast. In battle, snipers were positioned in the top to fire down onto enemy decks and at enemy snipers. Top Arabacs (top arabacilar). “Gun-carriage drivers.” Muleteers and other teamsters of the Janissary Corps artillery arm. They were full Janissaries, not auxiliaries. Other specialists included Cebicis and Topçu. Topçu (Topçuar). “Gunners.” One of several groups of military specialists within the Janissary Corps. Others included Cebicis and Top Arabacs. Tophane-i Amire. The main Ottoman armory in Constantinople (Istanbul). topgallant. See masts; sails. Tories. See Barrier Treaty, First (1709); East India Company; England; James II; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Great Britain; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Queen Anne; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III. Torrington, Earl of (1689–1716). English admiral. After losing badly at Beachy Head (1690), he was brought before a court martial. He was acquitted, but the public shame ensured that he never again commanded an English squadron in action. 473

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torture. See Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Karl XII; military discipline; military medicine; Peter I; privateers; skulking way of war; strel’sty. Toulon, siege of (July 28–August 22, 1707). See guerre de course; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). tour bastionée. “bastion tower.” A casemated bastion embedded in the curtain, it protected the rear of the main bastion, which was open and detached. The tour bastionée had heavy guns at several levels and a large powder magazine at its base. Its invention is attributed to Vauban and usually assigned to his “second system.” Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de (1642–1701). Amiral du Levant; lieutenant général des armées navales. He is considered by some naval historians to be the greatest French admiral of the 17th and 18th centuries, but by others to have been overly timid in action and not one to make the most of opportunities won by early tactical victories. In either case, Tourville was one of the rare, true seamen to hold a top French command in this era. He learned his craft essentially as a pirate aboard a Maltese merchantman (of the Knights of St. John). He graduated into the French Navy in 1666. Tourville fought in actions spanning the War of Devolution (1667–1668) and the Dutch War (1672–1678). He aided Jean-Baptiste Colbert to build up the French fleet and its impressive shore facilities, and oversaw the establishment of officer schools and basic training in seamanship for landmen. At Bantry Bay (May 1/11, 1689), Tourville helped fight off an English attempt to interfere with landing supplies for James II. The fight was part of the Glorious Revolution, as well as the first phase of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The next year he won a major, but unexploited, victory at Beachy Head (June 30/July 10, 1690). His 1691 campaign became famous as the “campagne du large,” but he suffered a terrible defeat at Barfleur-La Hogue (May 19–24/May 29–June 4, 1692). In June 1693, Tourville intercepted the 400-ship Smyrna convoy, overwhelmed and chased off 20 escorts, and destroyed or captured 92 Allied merchants. From 1695, he and other French naval commanders eschewed guerre d’escadre in favor of guerre de course. Tourville retired in 1697. He died in 1701, before he could be recalled or see action in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also fighting instructions. towarzysz. Polish: “comrade.” Soldiers serving in the retinue of nobles in the “National Contingent” of the Polish Army, into which greater nobles brought with them a military retinue (poczet). Well into the 17th century, towarzysz still dressed extravagantly, wearing tall plumage and vibrant animal skins as decoration. trace. In fortification: a ground plan prepared by fortress designers. Before this period it had already evolved beyond the medieval square fortress with round towers to the early artillery fortress, based on angular bastions. During this period the trace changed further, becoming a baroque geometrical system of 474

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great complexity and self-conscious rationality. It was French practice to design by first “tracing” the exterior extent of the proposed works, then working inward from the main enceinte. It was also a common French practice to build scale models, which were held as vital state secrets under close guard in a plans gallery in Paris. Other designers were less careful; it was possible in peacetime to buy scale plans and maps that proved helpful in future operations. More than one military engineer freely toured likely enemy siege sites incognito, and a few were actually conducted around works by proud garrison commanders or boastful brother officers of the defending garrison. See also defilade; defilement. trace italienne. See artillery fortress; bastion. trail. The two-wheeled hind end of a gun carriage. When unlimbered, it rested on the ground. See also garrison carriage; limber. tranchée général. In a French army, the officer immediately in charge of infantry in the trenches during a siege. This was a temporary rank, usually held for just 24 hours at a time. It designated the commander of troops doing labor in the trenches. As these men rotated out, a new tranchée général rotated in with fresh men. Other armies had a similar position, called the “lieutenant-general of the day” or “major-general of the day.” tranchée major. In a given French army, the officer in charge of conducting an attack against a front during siege operations. Formally, he was deputy to the onsite commander. More than one might be appointed if simultaneous or diversionary attacks were made on other fronts. Travendal, Peace of (August 7/18, 1700). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). traverse. In nautical usage: the zig-zag track of a ship tacking into the wind. In field works: a perpendicular earthen bank protecting defenders from enfilade fire into their flank. A simple traverse for sappers presented with enfilade was effected by making right-angled bends in the approach trenches. In fixed fortifications, earthen traverses 12–15 feet thick were built across the terreplein to prevent hostile shot from an external enfilade from skipping along more of the parapet to dismount guns and kill or maim crews and musketeers. Once the covered way was abandoned by its defenders, this advantage redounded to attackers, who then faced internal enfilade. trenches. See approach; boyau; branch; caponnière; counter-approach; crochet; gabion; parallels; retrenchment; sap; siege warfare; tail; tranchée major; zig-zag. Trencsén, Battle of (August 3, 1708). See Rákóczi, Ferenc. Trier. One of the clerical electorates of the Holy Roman Empire. It abandoned neutrality under pressure during the Dutch War (1672–1678), joining the anti-French 475

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alliance. Louis XIV sent an army of 18,000 to punish Trier, occupying it and enforcing harsh contributions. Triple Alliance (January 23, 1668). The Treaty of Breda (1667) ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–1667). The settlement was stimulated by the felt urgency of the United Provinces to disengage from war with England in order to oppose French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands, which Louis XIV initiated in May 1667, starting the War of Devolution (1667–1668). The peace agreed at Breda cleared the path for the United Provinces and England to join Sweden in an anti-French alliance agreed in January 1668. This northern compact was formed to negotiate, rather than to fight. It accepted that Louis might take certain border towns in the southern Spanish Netherlands, but promised to oppose any greater ambitions for annexation he might have. The Alliance demanded immediate cessation of all hostilities in return for persuading Spain to accept minor territorial adjustments in favor of France. Louis regarded this as a betrayal by the Dutch of historic anti-Spanish ties between France and the United Provinces dating to the reign of Philip II and the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). Formation of the Triple Alliance nonetheless persuaded Louis to halt his armies and make a quick peace at Aix-la-Chapelle (1668). Even as the ink dried, he began planning for an expanded war with the United Provinces to be launched at some later date. The Alliance was broken apart by shrewd French diplomacy over the next few years. Most notably, the Treaty of Dover (May 12/22, 1670) granted a large secret subsidy to Charles II of England. Louis XIV also befuddled Jan de Witt by hiding his profound antipathy to the United Provinces, even as he prepared to invade them. The failure to perceive this threat cost de Witt his life. Tromp, Cornelius van (1629–1691). Dutch admiral of Orangist political persuasion. As the son of Maarten van Tromp, he learned seamanship and tactics at the highest level, though not always to the highest degree of competence, when he went to sea on his father’s ship. He enjoyed solid political connections and was promoted young and often. He fought as captain of his own man-of-war at the start of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). He rose quickly to squadron command, promoted to vice-admiral as a result of several successful sea actions. He fought Barbary corsairs off the coast of Africa while cruising the Mediterranean in 1654. During the Second Northern War (1655–1660), he sailed with the great Admiral de Ruyter to the Baltic to repel a Swedish invasion and siege of Copenhagen. He quarreled fiercely with the republican de Ruyter during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–1667), in which Tromp enjoyed no notable successes in cruising or fleet actions. At the Battle of The Downs (June 1–4/11–14, 1666), his squadron was rescued by de Ruyter’s decisive action. After the battle, de Ruyter so undermined him politically with the Regents of Holland that Tromp was nearly arrested and was dismissed from the sea service. Still quarreling, but reinstated, Tromp fought under de Ruyter at North Foreland, or the St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666), where his 476

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squadron was rudely defeated by George Monk. When Monk proceeded to destroy 160 Dutch merchantmen huddling at anchor behind a small islet along the Holland coast, de Ruyter and other republican admirals fixed the blame on Tromp, and he was forcibly retired. He did not return to the Dutch Navy until William III (then still Prince of Orange) reconciled Tromp and de Ruyter in 1673, in the midst of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). Tromp was again partly rescued by de Ruyter at the First Battle of Schooneveld (1673). Tromp then led an expedition to Belle Île from June to August 1674, a failure for which he was publicly and harshly rebuked. He fought next in the Baltic in support of the Danes during the Scanian War (1674–1679). He defeated a small Swedish fleet at Jasmund (May 25, 1676). He won again at Öland (June 1, 1676), where his squadron sank the three largest ships in the Swedish Navy. Tromp defeated the Swedes a third time at Köge Bay (July 1, 1677), a shattering victory won together with Danish Admiral Niels Juel. Tromp rose to the highest level of command after the death of de Ruyter. However, by the onset of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), he was too old to actually fight. Tromp, Maarten van (1598–1653). Dutch admiral. While at sea with his father on a Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) ship to India, he was taken prisoner by an English pirate and made to serve as a cabin boy for two years. He saw his first naval action in 1617 against the Barbary corsairs. He signed on to a Dutch armed merchantman two years later, and was captured by pirates a second time in 1621. In 1624, he took command of a Dutch frigate in the war against Spain. Within five years, he rose to captain of the admiral’s flagship. He rose to admiral himself by the mid-1630s, after overcoming personal and political rivalries. Over the rest of his career, Tromp emerged as one of the premier sea captains in any Navy during the 17th century. In 1639, he carried out a raid against Dunkirk pirates and privateers. That same year he led a squadron of 18 Dutch sail to victory over a huge Spanish invasion fleet off The Downs, capturing 13 galleons and 57 other prizes out of a convoy of 100 ships. It was an astonishing, decisive, crushing victory that helped decide the outcome of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). In 1646, Tromp aided an attack on the privateer base at Dunkirk. He exchanged fire with Robert Blake off Dover on May 19/29, 1652, in defiance of the English claim to “sovereignty of the sea.” That action led directly to the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Tromp lost half his fleet to a gale in July 1652, and was sacked upon his return to the Netherlands. He was restored after the disaster, for the Dutch suffered in his absence at Kentish Knock (September 28/October 8, 1652). He fought Blake twice in the Channel, driving him up the Thames at Dungeness (November 30/ December 10, 1652). He again fought Blake, but inconclusively, in a three-day battle off Portland (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653). Tromp fought next at Gabbard Shoal (June 2–3/12–13, 1653). He and the Dutch Navy failed to adjust to the new English tactic of line of battle, as ordered in the fighting instructions. As a result, Tromp led and lost badly at Texel (July 31/August 10, 1653), where he was killed by a musket ball. 477

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troop. A basic military unit, especially of cavalry, that varied in size according to specific Army and combat conditions. It roughly equated to a company of infantry or a battery of guns. troupes de la marine. The French marine corps, established in 1674 for service overseas. Three companies of French marines were stationed in New France (Canada and Acadia) from 1683, decades before the first French regulars deployed to North America in 1755. These original marine companies quickly evolved into a permanent force, increasingly manned and officered by Canadians as the decades passed. They fought alongside Canadian militia in the Indian Wars of the era, and against English colonies and settlers. Upon the surrender of Québec in 1760 and agreement to the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the troupes de la marine were disbanded. truck. The solid wooden wheel of a naval gun carriage. By the end of the 17th century, four-wheeled “truck carriages” were standard for almost all naval guns. Alternately, a disk or square of wood fixed to a mast to protect its top. True Freedom. See United Provinces; Witt, Jan de. türedi askeri. “overnight soldiers” Cheap, untrained, Ottoman peasants who served on a contract basis. During the second half of the 17th century, they were hired to replace retiring Janissaries, whose ranks were too expensive and politically unreliable to refill. Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de (1611–1675). Greatest of all 17th-century “maréchals de France.” He was born into a Protestant family, but converted to Catholicism in 1668. He began his career as a soldier in 1630 and saw action in numerous battles and sieges during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He was also an early “Frondeur,” but changed sides during the Fronde to serve the young Louis XIV. The king uncharacteristically, but prudently, overlooked Turenne’s Protestant faith and Frondeur sentiment in favor of his obvious military talent. This had been exhibited during the German war and in the final campaigns of the Fronde, when he fought for the king and Jules Mazarin against the Great Condé and other holdout Frondeurs. Turenne repeatedly fought and bested Condé and the Spanish during campaigns in 1653 and 1654, fought as part of the protracted Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659). However, he lost to Condé in several small battles waged in 1656 and 1657. Turenne besieged Dunkirk in the late spring of 1657, then bested Condé decisively at the Battle of the Dunes (June 4/14, 1658). He was granted the rank of “maréchal de France” in 1660. He led Louis’ main army into the Spanish Netherlands on May 24, 1667, initiating the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Turenne opposed the peace Louis made at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668. At the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678) he headed the main army that advanced deep into the United Provinces, along the Meuse. He won many successes in Flanders, despite his deep personal and political rivalry with the utterly ruthless Louvois. 478

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Turenne was transferred to the Rhineland to fend off German allies of the Dutch, skillfully fighting Brandenburgers and allied German and Imperial princes over the winter of 1672–1673. In a series of clever surprise maneuvers, he crossed Westphalia to desolate Brandenburg, forcing Friedrich-Wilhelm temporarily out of the war. In his last series of four campaigns, from mid-1674 into early 1675, Turenne displayed a mastery of maneuver based upon a deliberate reliance on mainly cavalry forces. He won a small but influential affair at Sinzheim (June 16, 1674). He then crossed to the right bank of the Rhine in July and proceeded to ravage the Palatinate. He exacted heavy contributions, burned fields and fodder to deny the enemy’s ability to move, and enforced harsh executions of villages that refused to pay. Depredation of the Palatinate by his troops was so extreme it provoked vicious reprisals by local German peasants, or Schnapphahns. Even Louis XIV worried that Turenne’s actions might drive more minor German states into the Allied coalition, though Louvois urged Turenne to still harsher measures. When Strasbourg capitulated to the Imperials, and with 20,000 Brandenburgers threatening to join the Imperial army of 30,000 there, Turenne decided to fight at Enzheim (October 4, 1674), where he won the day. During his fourth campaign of 1674–1675 he won a sharp action against Allied cavalry at Mulhouse (December 29, 1674) and defeated Friedrich-Wilhelm at Türkheim (January 5, 1675). For the next seven months, Turenne conducted another campaign of maneuver against Montecuccoli. Short on food and fodder, he tried to force battle at Sasbach on July 27, 1675. Before the fight really got under way, an Imperial cannonball crushed his chest, killing him instantly. His loss caused the army to fall back across the Rhine into Alsace. There it was reinforced by the Great Condé, just before that sickly and debilitated, although younger, rival to Turenne more voluntarily retired from military service. Napoleon later recorded Turenne as one of seven “great captains” of military history, and he is today generally regarded as such by most specialist military historians. See also Dutch Army. Suggested Reading: Jean Bérenger, Turenne (1987).

Turin, Battle of (September 7, 1706). During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the French laid Turin under siege from May through July of 1706. Prince Eugene arrived on August 29 with an Allied relief army that linked with Savoyard troops under command of his cousin, Duke Victor Amadeus II. The latter had finally slipped out of Turin after nearly two years spent trapped in the city. With a combined force of 30,000 Allied troops, Eugene and the Duke attacked a French army of about 40,000 entrenched outside Turin. They assaulted a weak point where the lines of circumvallation were not yet completed. The Allies were also aided by fire and sorties by troops inside Turin that tied down thousands of French. In the fight that ensued, the French suffered 3,800 killed and wounded and lost 6,000 prisoners and most of their cannon. The Allied victory in the field forced the French to lift their siege, which in any case had failed to overcome the garrison of the citadel. The French had made three desperate direct assaults in the preceding days, hoping for victory before 479

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Prince Eugene arrived. Turin brought about the Convention of Milan (March 13, 1707), which at least ended fighting in the Po Valley. Turin, siege of (May 27–September 7, 1706). See Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Turin, Battle of (1706); Victor Amadeus II; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Turin, Peace of (August 29, 1696). Agreed following secret negotiations between envoys of Louis XIV and Victor Amadeus II, this separate peace took Savoy out of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). By its terms, France surrendered the fortress of Pinerolo. The French and Savoyard armies in Piedmont then joined to attack Milan. This assault failed, and the war ended in Italy. Türkenglocken. A clarion traditionally rung by the Habsburgs to announce war with the Ottomans, or “Turks.” Türkheim, Battle of (January 5, 1675). “Colmar.” After surprising and defeating Allied cavalry at Mulhouse (December 29, 1674), Turenne led 30,000 men in an attack on Friedrich-Wilhelm at Türkheim (Colmar). The Great Elector opposed Turenne with a motley Allied crew of 35,000 men, most of whom were quite unused to fighting together. Turenne fixed the Allies at the center with feints and light attacks, while cleverly using the local terrain to conceal a flanking maneuver by infantry sent around the Allied left. The battle reduced to a fight for control of the town of Türkheim, with each side pouring in reinforcements until the Germans broke and ran. The Allies suffered around 3,000 total casualties and withdrew during the night, leaving their wounded to the French. French losses were lighter, and Turenne held the field. two-decker. A mid-sized to large ship-of-the-line, a two-decker warship had two complete gun decks mounting broadside guns. In the Royal Navy system of Rates, Third Rates and Fourth Rates were two-deckers and considered line-ofbattle ships. Tyrconnel, Earl of (1630–1691). A Jacobite general, né Richard Talbot. As a young Catholic royalist, he fled Ireland upon the arrival of Oliver Cromwell’s punitive expeditionary force in 1649. He joined the Duke of York (later James II) in exile in France. Upon the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Talbot returned to England. During the furor over the so-called “Popish Plot,” he was among those accused by Whigs of conspiracy to restore an absolutist, Catholic monarchy in England, and he was forced back into exile. He returned with the succession of James II in 1685. James elevated Talbot to Earl of Tyrconnel and granted him command of the Irish establishment, assigning him broad powers to govern Ireland. He used his position to insinuate Catholic officers into the Army prior to the Glorious Revolution, and even partially purged the rank and file. Some historians argue that his “purge” was not made to advance Catholics per se, but to reverse the Restoration land settlement in Ireland in favor of “Old English” Catholic landowners. 480

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James came to Ireland to seek recovery of the throne from William III. Waiting for him were 40,000 local troops raised by Tyrconnel. These men were woefully armed, and without uniforms or much training. Over the winter of 1688–1689, Tyrconnel disarmed Protestants in Dublin and physically occupied most of Ireland outside western Ulster, where Londonderry and Enniskillen sustained strong and fortified Protestant resistance. Tyrconnel joined James’s exiled Irish and French troops when the latter landed in Ireland. He fought at the Boyne (July 1/11, 1690), after which he was sent to Paris to plead for more French money and troops. He returned to Ireland in January 1691 and insisted on taking overall command away from Patrick Sarsfield. Although more French aid arrived in April and May, Tyrconnel’s rough manners bitterly divided top Jacobite officers and did disservice to the army. He died unexpectedly.

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U Ukraine. See Andrussovo, Treaty of (1667); Cossacks; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Peter I; Poland; Poltava (1709); Second Northern War (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). uniforms. Uniform military dress was more common outside Europe for several centuries before uniforms were adopted in Europe. Boys inducted into the Janissary Corps, for instance, dressed all in red, including red caps. Fully trained Janissaries wore an exclusive white felt cap called a “Börk” that distinguished them on the battlefield. The Börk had a wooden spoon attached, in line with nearly all unit symbolism in a Corps where even officer ranks and titles expressed a culinary motif rooted in ritual meal-sharing. Most uniform cloth was wool, though some officers might add fur trim and other decorations. The main way for Janissary officers to display rank was through distinctly colored belts or sashes of high quality. Winter uniforms for the Janissaries were woven in state mills in the provinces, notably in Greece. These mills were an important part of the local economy and helped bind outer provinces to the imperial administration. All Janissaries received a monthly clothing allowance, another for weapons, and still another for horses and grooms. There were additional uniform allowances in campaign years. Ottoman troops were therefore expected to dress well, and they did. Serdengeçti special assault troops decked out their uniforms with fur trim and feathers, and rare unit badges and devices. They replaced the white Börk with a red or white turban to signal their status as potential warrior-martyrs. Non-Janissaries in Ottoman armies wore a simple red fez. Similarly, red “zami” hats were worn by mamluks, who were known by this headgear across the Middle East. Hungarian military costume was directly influenced by prolonged contact with Ottoman troops. Hungarian fashions, in turn, influenced uniforms in Central Europe via Polish military contacts, especially hussar units. Other

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eastern armies were impressed by the wild appearance of Cossacks or Tatars, and emulated them in their own uniforms. Standardized uniforms were progressively adopted by European armies during this period, at first on a regimental basis, but later nationally. The way was led by the French Army, whose captains were provided a clothing allowance for their men, or who deducted pay to provide cloth for uniforms directly to the troops. Intendants or their local agents inspected purchases to reduce theft of funds or buying of shoddy goods by officers, although such practices were never eliminated. Provision of uniforms helped improve the health of troops, made desertion less easy, and raised morale. The 18th-century British soldier was entitled to a full set of uniform clothes annually, or a comparable cut of cloth. The cost of the cloth was deducted from his enlistment bounty and also became part of standard deductions—about one quarter of his daily pay—known as off reckonings. Royal regiments wore blue breeches. All other British regulars wore red. Until the 1740s, a belt was worn over a fastened coat, with a soldier’s hanger and bayonet hung from it. Grenadiers became identifiable everywhere by their tall, narrow hats, originally worn so as not to impede throwing motion. Later, a special shako denoted their elite status in all 18th-century European armies, with some sporting white pom-poms that remembered grenade smoke from years past. British officers were identified by gilt-handled swords, epaulets, and crimson sashes tied over their hips. Officer uniforms in France tended to be more gilded, Prussian uniforms more plain, while Italians and Austrians often displayed plumage. Uniforms for the ranks also evolved national colors over this period. The main purpose and advantage of introducing uniforms was that friendly troops would be more visible to each other and to their commanders in smoke-filled combat. Colors were chosen for a different reason: frugality. British red coats became red not least because red dyes were among the cheapest available. Blue was far more expensive, and anyway, it was reserved to royal guards and other favored regiments. Swedish troops wore blue, while Prussians wore a blue-black. Bavaria had pretensions to greater power and status than it enjoyed in fact, and perhaps partly for this reason dressed its infantry in sky-blue. Russians in Peter I’s re-formed army mostly wore green. In France, royal blue was the color of uniforms of the elite “Garde Français,” but other Bourbon troops were left in undyed cloth. Bourbon white uniforms were just as visible as British red coats, but were even cheaper to make because they involved no dye at all. Austrian, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish infantry wore variations of white or light grey uniforms, for the same reason. See also bounty; Generalkriegskommissariat; Grenzer; insult; Ireland; necessaries; women; Zenta (1697). United Provinces. The Dutch republic and its colonial and trade extensions, the West Indies Company (WIC) and the Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC), were almost constantly at war during this period. From the end of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) until 1674, the United Provinces was entangled with England over adjustments to the Dutch overseas trading system and rising 484

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competition over colonies and rich Baltic and Mediterranean carriage trades. Rivalry between the English East India Company, or “John Company,” and the VOC, and between the English and Dutch West Indies companies and other joint stock ventures, was intense and frequently violent. This trade tension formed the key backdrop to the larger naval and commercial rivalry between the merchant classes in England and the United Provinces, which otherwise shared geopolitical enemies and religious interests. Commercial rivalry led directly to three Anglo-Dutch naval and trade wars, starting in 1652 with the First AngloDutch War (1652–1654). Dutch settlers also fought Portuguese in Brazil. In 1657, the United Provinces sent a warfleet to blockade Lisbon, while privateers ravaged Portuguese shipping in the South Atlantic, Mediterranean, and as far afield as the Indian Ocean. Local Portuguese succeeded in expelling the Dutch from coastal Brazil, but did not recover their global trade losses. The Dutch then invaded and took Ceylon from Portugal, as partial compensation for the loss of “Netherlands Brazil.” Even before the naval wars with England ended, the United Provinces became enmeshed in the first of several serial wars with France which lasted over two generations. This severe threat to Dutch security and trade prosperity emerged just as the domestic economy of the United Provinces sank into a prolonged agricultural depression that lasted well into the 18th century. As late as the early 1660s, the Dutch had accepted French military aid and formal alliance, first as a means of defending against its most ancient enemy, Spain, then to repel local territorial ambitions of the prince-bishop of Münster. Much changed in FrancoDutch relations, starting with the Treaty of the Pyrenees between France and Spain in 1659, as Louis XIV looked to incorporate large parts of the Spanish Netherlands into his domain. Most of the 1660s were taken up within the United Provinces by a fierce ideological and political struggle between the States’ Party faction and the Regents of Holland on one hand, against more popular Orangist and Calvinist factions which supported the House of Orange and the ascendancy of William III, then still Prince of Orange. This conflict was so deep that the republican, or States’ Party faction was determined to deny command of the Army to William, even if that meant giving it to some foreign general. In foreign affairs, the Orangists had a connection to the Stuarts that waxed and waned before William’s landing at Torbay in 1690, while the States’ Party faction sought alliance with France as a counterweight to the Stuart connections of Orangists—at least until Louis XIV turned his aggressive sights on the Spanish Netherlands and then invaded the United Provinces themselves. In the meantime, war with Portugal continued until 1661, finally ending in a peace settlement that ratified Dutch loss of Netherlands Brazil and committed Portugal to provide bulk salt for Dutch fisheries. Conflict with the militantly Catholic prince-bishop of Münster led to heavy fighting in the eastern United Provinces during the opening phase of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). From then until 1713, there was almost endless war with France, regardless of whether republicans and Regents or rival Orangists held sway in the Netherlands. The end of the French war with Spain in 1659 involved the Dutch deeply in the affairs of the southern provinces of Flanders. As Spain withdrew troops and 485

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resources to Iberia, the core reason for Franco-Dutch concord—a shared enemy in their border country—eroded, then collapsed. Peace with Spain encouraged the aggressive instincts of Louis XIV toward the Spanish Netherlands. Jan de Witt proposed partition of that province with France, but the merchants of Amsterdam were concerned about competition from Antwerp, should that city join the Dutch republic. De Witt next proposed neutralization on the Swiss model, but Louis had other plans for the dangling Spanish province. A French assault on the Spanish Netherlands began in earnest with the War of Devolution (1667–1668). Louis’ annexationist plans pushed the Dutch out of their alliance with France and into a series of anti-French alliances with England and other powers, a fundamental shift in the balance of power that lasted several generations. The other major sources of contention with France were competition for overseas colonies and, more immediately, control of rich carry trades bringing both bulk and luxury goods into French ports. Until the 1660s, Dutch ships carried most French exports, especially wine, salt, and brandy. This changed with the massive ship-building program instituted by Jean Baptiste Colbert and, more generally, his policies of intense mercantilism pursued from the start of the period of Louis’ personal rule. Colbert introduced a high general tariff in 1664, which hit Amsterdam sugar refining interests especially hard. This was intended to protect sugar imports from French colonies in the West Indies and to promote a domestic refining industry. Louis and Colbert also set up French West Indies and East Indies trading companies to compete with the Dutch. Late in 1664, a French expedition seized Cayenne from the WIC. The permanent break over colonial trade came in 1667 with a fighting tariff levied by France on Dutch imports, which led to retaliatory anti-French tariffs passed by the Dutch in 1669, and again in 1671. From the late 1660s to the end of Louis XIV’s reign, the United Provinces played the leading role in frustrating the ambitions of the “Sun King.” The first anti-French coalition the Dutch joined was the Triple Alliance, formed in 1668 by England, Sweden, and the United Provinces. It tried to appease Louis with some territorial concessions in the Spanish Netherlands, seeing this as the best means to block even further claims and advances by France. Dutch opposition to Louis’ grand plans so angered him that he schemed and planned for four years to isolate the United Provinces diplomatically, in preparation for a new war of punishing aggression directly against them. He split off England with the Treaty of Dover in 1670. By late 1671 Louis completed encirclement of the United Provinces with fresh alliances with Münster and Cologne. When he suddenly attacked, starting the long and bloody Dutch War (1672–1678), the effect was nearly catastrophic for the Dutch. For the first two years, the United Provinces also had to fight its last trade war with England—the Third AngloDutch War (1672–1674). The new conflict brought about near-complete military collapse, political and civic panic, and a stock market crash. It also led to the most desperate defensive measures conceivable: the French advanced so far into the United Provinces that the Dutch reached the drastic decision to flood open country in front of several cities. Even with ferocious fighting joined in by militia spontaneously raised among the populace, the flooding barely stopped the 486

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French advance. The United Provinces became focused permanently on the threat from Paris, emerging as the leading state in a series of “Grand Alliances” that formed and re-formed over the next 30 years to maintain the balance of power against the aggressions of Louis XIV. The United Provinces became progressively more closely linked to their prior enemy, England, by coronation of William III, the most favored son of the Dutch, as king of England and separately as William I of Scotland. In alliance with England, Austria, and other anti-French powers in Germany and the Baltic, the United Provinces waged a costly, but ultimately winning effort in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). The Dutch finally saw off the excessive ambitions of the old French king in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), when the Republic mounted the greatest war effort in its history, from 1701–1713. However, this proved to be the last war in which the United Provinces fought as one of the Great Powers. Upon William’s death in March 1702, the Regents returned to controlling Dutch domestic and foreign affairs in the so-called “Republic of the Regents” that lasted until 1747. See also Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; fighting tariff; free goods; free ships; Navigation Act (1651 and 1660); Raad van State; Stadholderate; States General. useless mouths. Civilians who performed no task deemed essential to a garrison about to face a siege and would only more rapidly consume its food stocks. They were usually identified and expelled by the commander at the outset of a siege, even before preliminary investment by enemy cavalry. uti possidetis. An ancient principle of international law which calls for respect for inherited frontiers. It originated in efforts by the Roman Empire to settle outstanding border disputes and legally dispose of conquered territory. During the era of European overseas expansion, it was adapted to endorse de facto possession of territory as a legitimate basis for sovereign claims, so as to avoid or resolve disputes among competitive colonial powers. Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713). A general peace conference to end the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was convened in Utrecht on January 29, 1712. Talks followed an agenda for peace set by the London Preliminaries, which had been agreed to earlier by Great Britain and France. France and its enemies agreed to terms of two major treaties, the first signed on March 31/April 11, and the second two days later. That broke the ice-jam holding back a general peace. A supplementary series of treaties was signed by Spain starting on July 13, 1713. The process of bringing every belligerent to terms continued into 1714, taking over a year before all diplomatic ink was dry. The Austrian Habsburgs were compelled to agree to the general settlement in the Treaty of Rastadt (February 24/March 7, 1714), but only after Villars led a French army against them to enforce the peace made at Utrecht. Taken together, terms of these treaties were as follows: The Protestant succession in England was formalized, and Louis XIV foreswore support for the Jacobite cause, formally withdrawing recognition from James Stuart (the “Old Pretender”) 487

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and extending it to the House of Hanover. France and Britain granted each other preferred trade rights. Comparable preferential trade was agreed between France and the United Provinces. The privateer base at Dunkirk was to be razed (as already agreed to at London). In North America, France recognized that the territories of Acadia (Nova Scotia), the vast Hudson’s Bay region, and the islands of St. Kitts and Newfoundland were henceforth to be British. This gravely weakened and isolated New France, about whose settlements Louis cared not at all. France agreed to surrender into trust of the United Provinces those parts of the Spanish Netherlands it still occupied. In return, Louis was granted formal title to Orange, a territory he had long since incorporated into France, in fact. Agreement on the definition of a clear border between France and Savoy in the Alps ended decades of violent dispute over a contested frontier. Most of Spain’s non-Iberian possessions in Europe were divided. Victor Amadeus II was elevated to king of Savoy and granted possession of Sicily, while Sardinia was ceded to the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1720, Victor Amadeus traded Sicily to Austria for less-distant Sardinia. Gibraltar remained under British control, and Bourbon Spain agreed to grant the asiento to British merchants. At Utrecht, the Dutch gained a measure of real security with more southerly borders set for the Spanish Netherlands. The Dutch secured rights to their original Barrier fortresses, which they had already recovered on the ground. Philip V lost the rest of the Spanish Netherlands, which was granted to Austria the next year and renamed the Austrian Netherlands. Philip also lost Spanish territories in Italy, most importantly Naples, to the Habsburgs. Austria thus emerged with a more stable and defensible territorial empire in place of the vagaries of its prior claims within the now terminally ill Holy Roman Empire. Maximilian Emanuel returned to Bavaria under the terms of Utrecht, much reduced politically and militarily and profoundly chastened personally. In northern Germany, the hereditary rulers of Brandenburg were confirmed in the right to style themselves kings “in” (not “of ”) Prussia, and they gained a smattering of new lands linked with their core holdings. Most importantly, Louis XIV and his grandson, Philip V, accepted that the Bourbons in Spain must renounce the French throne in order for Philip to keep Spain. The question of permanent separation of the Spanish and French monarchies had been the original casus belli for both sides. The compromise of allowing Bourbons on both thrones but not permitting joint succession was not acceptable to anyone in 1701. But after a decade of the bloodiest and costliest war of the era and mutual exhaustion, this split decision was agreed to by all in 1713. Louis’ expansionist ambitions within Europe were mostly and finally frustrated, sending him to his grave in 1715 a bitter, and even somewhat repentant man. Longer-term, British naval and commercial power was henceforth ascendant overseas, and a balance of power operated on the continent that helped keep the peace for a generation. See also Baden, Treaty of (1714); Barrier Treaty, Third (1715); Geertruidenberg negotiations; natural frontiers; Orange, Principality of. Utskrivning. See Swedish Army. 488

V Vallacker cavalry. Polish auxiliary cavalry used as scouts and screening forces by Karl XII during Polish operations of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). They were principally Wallachians. The Swedes greatly valued these units, which comprised a full regiment by 1707. van. The lead division, usually of three, in a fleet of ships. The van was commanded by a vice-admiral. Vassem, Treaty of (June 6, 1673). See Dutch War (1672–1678); Friedrich-Wilhelm. Vasvár, Peace of (August 10, 1664). “Eisenburg.” The Peace of Vasvár followed the Ottoman defeat at St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664), but the peace was secured only in part by the outcome of that battle. Austrian Emperor Leopold I also bought peace along his eastern frontier by agreeing to pay a tribute of 200,000 florins to Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648–1687). Other than the usual frontier skirmishing and occasional cross-border raid, that agreement kept peace in the east for nearly 20 years, until the Ottomans invaded Hungary and Austria and laid siege to Vienna in 1683, beginning the Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre, sieur de (1633–1707). French military engineer; progenitor of many surviving theories and techniques of fortification. Born into a minor Burgundian noble family, Vauban was captured by the French while in Spanish service in 1653. He was convinced by Jules Mazarin to serve France instead. By 1658, Vauban rose to deputy chief military engineer in the French Army. He spent the better part of a decade fortifying Dunkirk and other key border towns and Atlantic seaports, a matter on which he sought advice from Jean Bart. Over the course of his career he built 154 major fortifications to defend France.

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He was good at knocking things down, too. In the War of Devolution (1667–1668), Vauban was noticed by Louvois when he quickly reduced multiple border and town fortifications in the Spanish Netherlands, then oversaw the siege at Lille (August 28–September 26, 1667). That siege was attended personally by Louis XIV, which further advanced Vauban’s prospects: he was made France’s top military engineer in reward for reducing Lille. During the Dutch War (1672–1678), Vauban took part in no fewer than 17 sieges of Dutch positions, and one defense of a French fortress. In his career, he directed 50 important sieges over 52 years—which exemplifies the nature of late-17th-century warfare in Europe. Vauban differed with Louis XIV and his close personal patron, Louvois, over the use of mortars in siegecraft and on matters concerning the use of brutal means in waging war, more generally. Vauban proclaimed a hated for war, yet he loved pubic office, royal titles, and royal favors more. He thus spent most of his adult life engaged in war, and received an abundance of reward for service to the French sovereign. In 1674, Vauban rose to a higher rank than any engineer officer before him: brigadier. Two years later, he was elevated to “maréchal du camp.” He became France’s “commissaire général des fortifications” in 1678, and in 1703 he was raised to the loftiest of all ranks: “maréchal de France.” Vauban’s real moral objection was not to war, but to battle as a rude instrument of deciding military outcomes. In part for this reason, he proposed an important “Mémoire sur la caprérie” (“Memorandum on Privateering”) in 1695. He argued therein that a guerre de course assault on the merchant marine of the Allies was the best strategy for winning the war, because the enemy’s war effort depended on revenues from seaborne trade. With greater moral clarity, he proposed to substitute for land battle highly ritualized contests of siege warfare, which he had nearly perfected, in terms of both defense and offense. A more humane ideal that wanted to limit even the deaths of soldiers in combat appealed to his own aesthetic of war and that of an Age which considered itself enlightened. In 1687 Vauban invented the socket bayonet (though some attribute the innovation to Colonel Jean Martinet), thereby revolutionizing the relationship of infantry to cavalry. The next year he invented “ricochet fire,” wherein a reduced charge allowed a cannonball to ricochet in multiple directions, creating a lethal hazard to man and beast along the terreplein, or inside a fortress town. This led to much slaughter of garrison infantry and some of civilians. In 1672 he essentially reinvented the perrier as a deadly anti-personnel weapon. While these tactics and weapons might seem to belie his general reputation for humane concern in warfare, in fact they were aimed at the garrison rather than civilians, and intended to speed the outcome of sieges. In the same vein, Vauban was scornful of Louvois’ preference for bloody bombardment of helpless towns. Vauban actively promoted military schools, including scientific training for officers in the artillery and engineering corps. He wrote two important works on siegecraft and fortress design. Vauban is justly most famous for his innovations in siegecraft, the dominant form of land warfare at the end of the 17th century in Europe. His early work in construction of defenses, his so-called “first system,” was largely or even wholly derivative of the style of the earlier 490

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fortress designer, Blaise de Pagan. In this system, the outlying bastions all stayed connected to the larger enceinte, which meant that the fall of a single bastion endangered the whole defense. Vauban’s “second system,” the true beginning of his innovative period that changed military architecture ever after, is usually dated from 1687–1697. It was marked by making the main bastion a fully detached counterguard, protected to its rear by a casemated bastion embedded in the curtain wall and itself supported by various combinations of additional detached works. His “third system,” which some date to 1698 and which was encased in a single fortress he designed for Neuf-Brisach, basically elaborated on changes introduced after 1687. In all his middle and later work, traces and constructions made exquisite use of natural terrain to enhance defenses. Much of Vauban’s thinking about defensive architecture reflected the central conceit of the “Age of Enlightenment”: application of new empirical methods to old military problems, while also reflecting an aesthetic of pure rationality of form. Vauban evinced a prejudice in favor of geometric regularity, mostly as dictated by mathematical science applied to war. This preference was reflected in his selection of the regular polygon as the keystone structure for all his fortification designs. He did this for the central and pragmatic reason that the sides of a polygonal fortress permitted covering crossfire from one face to the other. But he was also attracted to the shape because it was intellectually and visually artful. The culmination of Vauban’s techniques and defensive designs was perfection of the “artillery fortress.” He achieved a new design that was highly successful at resisting artillery and any attacking infantry, while projecting defensive cannon power of its own. The artillery fortress trace incorporated low, angled bastions (first developed in Italy, and hence widely known as “trace italienne”). These were protected in turn by an outer ditch and sloped glacis, along with deep earthworks that created deadly interlocking fields of fire resulting from the salient angles of the bastions. Siting a fortress was as critical to the system as any given trace. Vauban thus sought to locate supporting fortresses along strategically important road and riverine routes into France. To that end, he proposed the famous pré carré system of double lines of artillery fortresses, which he built along the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands. These great works were arrayed like infantry battalions in double line of battle. Vauban thus moved beyond reliance on a single enceinte to an early form of the strategy of defense-in-depth. Unlike his master, Louis XIV, Vauban would have been content for France to sit behind these stone lines and wage only defensive wars to protect and hold what some historians later called France’s natural frontiers. And yet, it was on offense that Vauban truly changed the face of early modern war. Even more impressive and influential than his defensive works were Vauban’s offensive schemes for reducing what he and other military engineers had built. At the siege of Maastricht in 1673, Vauban’s key innovation was introduction of a method of approach and reduction of a fortified position via parallels and zig-zag approach trenches. On the attack, he used temporary fortifications (usually earthworks) to protect saps, batteries, and assault troops. Vauban perfected this methodical technique into a finely detailed approach 491

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system that began with sappers digging a main trench toward the enemy fortress or town directly from the lines of circumvallation. From these lines, he deployed three parallels, interlocked by support trenches. He placed protected battery sites, assembly areas, and forward magazines in each of the first two parallels, from which more approach trenches zig-zagged toward the final parallel so that bombardment of the fortress works and digging closer saps proceeded together. This complex attack system protected sappers and gunners slowly working forward to final positions along the third parallel, from which offensive bombardment and reduction of the walls commenced. It was an expensive proposition, but if done right, Vauban’s siegecraft all but guaranteed success to the attacking force. It also significantly reduced military labor and casualties among the attackers. His methods encouraged quicker surrenders by creating a sense of impending doom and inevitable defeat, thereby reducing casualties among defenders as well. When pressed to be more aggressive, Vauban retorted: “Let us burn more gunpowder and spill less blood.” His was as civilized an approach to siege warfare as it was possible to take, then or since. Many of the essential fortification techniques and methods of attack perfected by Vauban were replicated again and again over the next 200 years of warfare. They were employed by all sides in the trench warfare of the Crimean War, American Civil War, and World War I. More generally, Vauban significantly advanced the deliberate, calculated application of science and technology to warfare that has marked it ever since. Yet Vauban’s career did not end well. He volunteered to lead a siege of Turin in 1706, but this offer was declined on grounds of advanced age. The next year, he made an unwelcome foray into the political economy of Louis XIV’s war finances. His analysis was not well received by the king, who banned it from publication. Vauban’s proposal for a tax on the nobility to pay for Louis’ increasingly insupportable military expenses assured a swift and complete political demise. Shortly after this final rebuff, he died. Had his works on finance been better read by the king, Louis might have learned that Vauban anticipated much of the financial crisis that was being aggravated by policies of heavy taxation to finance prolonged wars. That crisis would force Louis to the peace table by 1713 and help cost France the better part of its overseas empire to a better-managed British Empire over the rest of the 18th century. Ultimately, failure to address France’s fundamental problem of uneven taxation and shaky war finance did much to bring down the monarchy under Louis’ heirs. During the French Revolution, Vauban’s grave was desecrated and his remains scattered, although his heart was supposedly preserved. It, or some substitute, was enshrined in Les Invalides in Paris, by personal order of Napoleon I. See also artillery; banquette; batter; flank; garrison carriage; Ghent (1678); guerre de course; logistics; lunette; military engineers; military labor; mortar; Namur (1692); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); parapet; Philippsburg; pike; powder magazines; retrenchment; Seneffe (1674); Steenkerke (1692); Strasbourg; tour bastionée; War of Devolution (1667–1668); War of the Reunions (1683–1684). Suggested Reading: F. J. Hebbert and G. A. Rothrock, Soldier of France (1990); Pierre Lazard, Vauban, 1633–1707 (1934); Peter Paret, The Makers of Modern Strategy (1986). 492

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Vaudois. “Waldensians” and “Barbets.” Protestant alpine communities in Piedmont and the south of France, dating to the Middle Ages. In the 1680s, the Piedmontese Vaudois were ruled by the young Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732). Louis XIV ordered a near-genocidal punitive war against them in 1686, in an effort to deny sanctuary to Huguenots fleeing his domestic persecutions. Under intense French pressure and with French military assistance, the Duke reluctantly agreed to force the Vaudois to convert to Catholicism. The Vaudois fought back when a joint French-Piedmontese campaign to exterminate them began in April 1686, and a short, alpine guerilla fight ensued. Vaudois women and children left behind in the valleys were concentrated in prison camps, where they died in large numbers like Boer women and children herded into British camps some 300 years later. Within two months, the fighting was over. Refugee survivors settled mainly in Switzerland, with some finding refuge in Brandenburg. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), a Vaudois leader named Henri Arnaud led the Swiss band back to their alpine valleys to again fight a savage guerilla war. They were joined by Vaudois prisoners who had been released from jails when war broke out between Savoy and France in June 1690. The Vaudois thereafter fought the French alongside their old Duke. Savoy did not grant them full religious and civil liberty until 1848. Velez-Málaga, Battle of (August 13/24, 1704). The only fleet action of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). It was provoked by the Allied capture of Gibraltar (August 1–3, 1704). The French joined their Toulon and Brest squadrons, forming a battle fleet of 50 ships-of-the-line. These were joined by 24 war galleys, 9 frigates, and 9 fireships. The Allies mustered 53 ships-of-theline (41 were English), 6 frigates, and 7 fireships. The Allied ships formed a line of battle, while the French formed a parallel crescent. The two lines fired away in an all-day fight, inflicting many casualties on and below decks of most ships engaged. French galleys darted into the line every so often to tow away a damaged ship of sail. The Allies were short of ammunition because of their earlier bombardment of Gibraltar. They redistributed powder and shot around the fleet during the night, but were down to about ten rounds per gun by morning. This shortage forced them to withdraw when a favorable French wind gave the enemy the weather gage. French captains were reluctant to pursue, not realizing their fortuitous advantage in gunnery. French losses were about 1,500 killed and wounded. The Allies lost 3,000 men. Vendôme, Louis Joseph, duc de (1654–1712). Maréchal de France. Vendôme was one of Louis XIV’s late appointments to high command, a role in which he proved less able than he had previously shown himself to be as a subordinate to Luxembourg. Vendôme fought throughout the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), including service under Luxembourg at Steenkerke (July 24/August 3, 1692). He next went to Spain, where he campaigned in Catalonia from 1695. He took Barcelona in 1697, after a two-year Allied occupation. Vendôme was the main French commander in northern Italy during the opening years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He replaced the captured Villeroi in northern 493

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Italy and was immediately defeated at Luzzara (August 4/15, 1702) by an Imperial army led by Prince Eugene. Vendôme faced Eugene again at Cassano (August 16, 1705), this time beating him. That allowed Vendôme to add additional Italian territory to Louis’ conquests. Vendôme was recalled to Flanders to repair the damage done to French defenses when Marlborough partially broke the Lines of Brabant. He managed to slow Marlborough down over the rest of 1707. The next year, Vendôme bested Marlborough in a campaign of maneuver that allowed him to retake Bruges and Ghent. However, Marlborough and Eugene linked, caught up with Vendôme, and defeated him soundly at Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708). Worse lay ahead: Vendôme lost the siege of Lille (1708) and with it, Louis’ confidence. He was removed from command, and was not restored until 1710. Thereafter, he fought with more success against the British and other Allied forces in Spain, winning at Brihuega (December 8–9/19–20, 1710) and again at Villa Viciosa (December 10/21, 1710). He died two years later. By that time, the succession in Spain was essentially won for Louis’ grandson, Philip V, in part due to Vendôme’s efforts. Venice. The glory days of the Venetian Republic, during the Italian Renaissance, were long over by the start of the period covered in this work. During the first half of the 16th century, Venice was allied with France. But as foreign giants wrestled for control of Italy during the second half of the 16th century and most of the 17th century, Venice shrank from conflict. As Garrett Mattingly put it: “Venice renounced its ambitions and looked simply to its safety.” Conflict sought it out, regardless. Surrounded by Austrian and Spanish possessions, Venice was the natural, albeit minor, ally of successive anti-Habsburg alliances and wars. In addition, it fought a mostly losing campaign to fend off Ottoman encroachment on its once-rich trade with the Levant. Venice waged a hard naval conflict with the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669). That fight was primarily over control of Crete, which Venice lost to the Ottomans in 1669. Tension over trade and naval dominance in the eastern Mediterranean continued to engage Venice in war with the Ottomans, on and off, until 1718, although both powers otherwise declined relative to their neighbors. See also Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699). Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC). “East India Company.” From 1595–1601, Dutch traders moved into south India, Java, Sumatra, and the Spice Islands. The VOC was chartered in 1602 to maximize and consolidate these penetrations. It was far better capitalized than its English counterpart, the East India Company (EIC). In 1605, a Dutch fleet forcibly cleared the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean, and the VOC seized Portugal’s share of the Spice Islands at Amboina. In 1609, the VOC set up shop in Japan, at Hirado. Anglo-Dutch cooperation against the Portuguese and French ended in 1623, when the Dutch judicially murdered 10 English merchants in Amboina. From 1631 to 1641, in the latter part of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), the Dutch took from Portugal the colonies of Elmina (Ghana), Luanda (Mozambique), Pernambuco, six major 494

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Portuguese strongholds in Ceylon, and Malacca (from 1641), and they took control of the monopoly trade out of Deshima, in Japan. By 1650, VOC wealth and naval power helped make the United Provinces the world’s greatest trading nation and a foremost world power. The VOC completed its conquest of the island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the late 1650s. That gave it a monopoly of the valuable cinnamon trade and reinforced the strong military and commercial position of the Dutch in India. The VOC operated in Ceylon in cooperation with the king of Kandy, who controlled the mainly Sinhalese interior of the island. VOC expeditions captured the most important Portuguese fortified factories (entrepôts) on the southern tip of India from 1657–1661, namely Cannamore, Cranganore, Negapatnam, and Tuticorin. VOC officers established a colony at the southern tip of Africa in 1652, at the onset of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). This developed into the most important logistical and strategic station for supporting VOC ships making the run to India. Nearly 35 ships, on average, stopped there each year from 1652 to 1700. A small but constant stream of Dutch colonists, including Huguenots, made up for the absence of African slaves as the colony expanded inward from the Cape over the next several decades. Slaves from West Africa were brought in from the 1690s, as the colony’s agricultural exports increased markedly. The VOC operated from an entrepôt on Taiwan until 1662. It took control of most of the Indonesian archipelago with the conquest of Macassar in 1667. It swept most English shipping from the trading lanes of the east during the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). Though it was decided not to attempt to assault the EIC base at Bombay, a VOC war fleet defeated an EIC squadron off Masulipatam on September 1/11, 1673. Early the next year, a VOC expedition from the Cape of Good Hope captured St. Helena from the English. It did the same to French ships and interests during the parallel Dutch War (1672–1678). The VOC continued its territorial expansion with annexation of the sultanate of Bantam in 1682 and establishment of control over Sumatra. Its main base in what became the “Dutch East Indies” was at Batavia. Other VOC entrepôts were located on Amboina, the Banda Islands, Java, and Malacca. By 1688, the company had more than 20 fortified outposts scattered over Asia, each with a garrison of at least 100 men and some (Batavia and Ceylon) with as many as 2,500. The VOC started a colony on Surinam with quick conquest by Zeeland forces in 1667. It subsequently developed its base there into a prime locale for sugar plantations and sugar export. The great disruptions of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) eroded the VOC’s trade position and maritime power. Worse, it forced an uncomfortable alliance with the EIC. In 1693, VOC troops made up for this by seizing Pondicherry from the French Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO) in a sophisticated amphibious attack. However, the company was required to return the territory to the French in 1699. It also faced an even more damaging assault on its interests from American (that is, French buccaneer) piracy and French privateers. Even so, the VOC emerged from the French wars as the foremost European power in India into the early 1720s. By 495

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then, however, European tastes for Asian goods had already begun to change, starting even before the 1690s. The shift was away from the old spice trades controlled by the VOC toward cotton, silk, tea, and coffee from areas where the VOC was not present at all, or just barely so. The VOC thereafter concentrated on the more valuable “rich trades” of the East Indies, leaving the interior and northern coastal trade of subcontinental India to the French and English. In 1766 and 1791, administrative reforms virtually nationalized the company. After 1815, the remnant of the VOC was reconfigured as the Dutch Colonial Office. See also Japan; West Indies Company (WIC). Verges, Battle of (May 25, 1694). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). via coperta. See covered way. Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732). “Vittorio Amedeo II.” Duke of Savoy. He ruled a territory split between Nice, Savoy, and Piedmont, a highly vulnerable geostrategic location. As a main result, he was caught between clashing interests and animosities of the great houses of Bourbon and Habsburg. In 1686, the young duke was compelled by coarse and forceful threats from Louis XIV to repress his Protestant population in Piedmont, the Vaudois. Louis’ further encroachments on Piedmont greatly threatened Victor Amadeus. A year into the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), he sided with the Grand Alliance against France. In the field, he was defeated by Nicholas Catinat at Staffarda (August 8/18, 1690), and he lost Nice and Savoy to France the following year. He was again beaten by Catinat at Marsaglia (October 4, 1693). More generally, he chose to respond to his strategic dilemma with an aggressive diplomacy that alternately sought advantage from both sides. In 1696, Victor Amadeus broke with the Grand Alliance. He made a separate peace with France and realigned Savoy with Louis XIV. He tried to play this dangerous double game once again during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), fighting alongside the French, then switching to the Grand Alliance on November 8, 1703. This move promptly cost him most of the Savoyard Army, when the French learned of his secret talks and surrounded his men. Over the next two years, he lost most of Piedmont and Savoy to the French and was personally barricaded in Turin. He slipped out of the city in August 1706 to join Prince Eugene and an Allied relief army. He accompanied Prince Eugene back to the outskirts of Turin and was involved in the fight there on September 7, 1706. The duke’s making and breaking of alliances at will, and seemingly almost on whim, gained him little peace and Savoy even less security, while earning Victor Amadeus a deserved reputation for trickery and unreliability. Victuallers. See Royal Navy. Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683). Grand Vezier Kara Mustafa Pasha was determined to deflect latent mutinous sentiment among the Ottoman military into distracting foreign hostilities. He proposed to Sultan Mehmed IV 496

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(r. 1648–1687) that the Ottoman Empire reactivate its long conflict with the Austrian Habsburgs. The Ottoman-Habsburg frontier had settled into quietude for many decades after the original Thirteen Years’ War (1593–1606). The Ottomans enjoyed modest military successes against the Habsburgs in Hungary in the 1660s, against Venice on Crete by 1669, and against Poland in 1672. Yet these gains had not quieted mutinous rumblings among the troops. Kara Mustafa therefore settled on a grand military project, one that had eluded even the great Suleiman I (1494–1566), “the Magnificent,” 150 years earlier—the conquest of Vienna, capital of the Habsburgs. In the summer of 1683, Kara Mustafa and the sultan assembled 100,000 crack troops and Tatar allies near the Hungarian frontier. This was the largest single mobilization of Ottoman military manpower in the 17th century. Mehmed and his retinue and household troops departed Edirne, the old Ottoman capital, on April 1, 1683. The sultan and his grand vezier reached Belgrade in May. They were joined there by thousands of additional Janissaries and many more sipahi cavalry, and by an artillery train that had been sent ahead by river barge. The sultan decided to stay and enjoy the comforts of Belgrade and the delights of his traveling court, leaving command of the army and the campaign to Kara Mustafa. Strategy also deviated from the original plan at this juncture. Whereas the sultan and his grand vezier had initially intended to besiege Habsburg fortresses at Komorn and Raab (Györ), the decision was now taken to advance directly up the Danube to besiege Vienna itself. Part of the army, about 35,000 Ottoman and Tatar troops and a portion of the siege train, was left to invest Györ. The bulk of the Ottoman forces, some 90,000 men and most of the guns (130 field cannon and 19 medium-caliber guns), accompanied Kara Mustafa to Vienna, moving out of Györ on July 7. On the same day, Leopold I and his court departed Vienna for Linz, leaving the city’s defenses to Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. He had just 16,000 infantry and about 6,000 cavalry to hold the city, a meager force he supplemented by recruiting 8,000 local militia and some 1,000 university students. Neither emperor would be present at the blood-letting to come in this clash of empires: each monarch regarded command of their armies as the work of deputies, and saw killing and dying for their policies and persons as the duty of subjects and serfs. Kara Mustafa’s army included 60 companies of Janissaries (about 12,000 men), whom he spread equally across his center and flanks. Mustapha swept past border fortresses without besieging them, and was not impeded by the small field forces the Habsburgs had stationed in Hungary, a country simmering with animosity and rebellion against the Habsburgs. The Ottomans moved by road and river along the line of the Danube, with a forward screen of Tatar cavalry leading the way as foragers and scouts. The Austrians had no field army to oppose this host, except for a few thousand blocking troops under Charles V of Lorraine, who moved out to try to hold the left bank of the Danube. However, several minor German and eastern European monarchs rallied to Leopold. Jan Sobieski personally led a Polish relief army of 16,000 in a remarkable trek of over 400 miles to Vienna. As a logistical accomplishment, that easily matched, and much exceeded in distance, the more famous march to the Danube made by 497

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Marlborough’s Redcoats in 1704. The Poles were eventually joined west of Vienna by several tens of thousands of Saxons, Bavarians, Franconians, and Swabians, who also marched hurriedly south under the joint command of two electors of the Holy Roman Empire: Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria and Johan Georg of Saxony. Notably absent were any Brandenburger or French troops. Friedrich-Wilhelm was not unhappy to see the Habsburgs humiliated and Austria reduced and humbled by the Ottomans, and Louis XIV refused the urgent request of Pope Innocent XI (r. 1676–1689) to send a French army to help lift the siege of Vienna. The “Grande Monarque” was in fact secretly preparing to assault Luxembourg, the key objective of the War of the Reunions (1683–1684). He launched his assault under cover of panic in southern Europe and Germany over the Ottoman threat to Vienna. Moreover, Louis had for months sent ambassadors to secretly encourage Mehmed to attack Austria. He now sought to prevent other European leaders from sending military aid to the Habsburgs, while he readied French armies for fresh aggressions in the north. Kara Mustafa completed his investment of Vienna on July 15, 1683, and then commenced a heavy bombardment of the bastions, curtain, and town. The Ottoman bombardment continued for two months, which was longer than a comparable shelling by a European army would have taken because, after leading in siege artillery for generations, the Ottomans had finally fallen behind the European powers in the quality and hitting power of their siege guns. The Viennese replied with their more numerous wall and bastion cannon, but counter-battery and harassing fire against Ottoman sappers was severely limited by a shortage of powder and shot. Many batteries were ordered to fire only a few times per day, in order to conserve shot and conceal their location until the final assault by Janissaries and berserkers. Ottoman miners were highly skilled, and their saps steadily approached the town walls. On August 12th mines were detonated and Ottoman infantry broke through Vienna’s outer works. On September 2 they overcame several outer ravelins. Four days later engineers blew a huge mine beneath the “Burg bastion.” This cratered a section of wall, leaving a ten-meter gap. Into this Mustafa poured crack Janissaries. They were met by improvised barriers and lines of pikemen, behind which Austrian musketeers poured volley after volley into the Janissary ranks, driving them out of the breach. As these events were occurring, the Allied relief army approached and assembled northwest of Vienna. Some 40,000 assorted Germans joined 20,000 Imperials and 16,000 Poles, the latter led personally by their king. The Tatar light cavalry screen and other Ottoman scouts failed to detect this relief army or block it from transiting key mountain passes and river crossings. The fight that ensued marked the first time in history that a European army outnumbered an Ottoman army in a major field battle. On September 12, the German, Imperial, and Polish armies, jointly led by Sobieski, destroyed the Tatar and Ottoman cavalry at Kahlenberg, in front of Vienna’s walls. Mustafa made the critical error of leaving most of his infantry in the siege trenches, sending 28,000 unsupported horse and insufficient field artillery (just 60 light guns) to meet the enemy in the field. That is the number most often cited by historians of the Ottoman military, possibly underestimating 498

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the extent of the defeat suffered in the baking heat that day. Similarly exaggerating the scale of the “Christian victory,” some European sources claim that as many as 50,000 Ottoman cavalry fought at Kahlenberg. In either case, the fight began at dawn, with heavy action first on the Christian left, where Charles of Lorraine commanded the Imperials and Saxons. The Bavarians and Franconians soon joined this attack on the Ottoman right, which spread to the center as the two armies fully engaged. Sobieski’s Polish cavalry and dragoons needed until 1 P.M. to traverse broken countryside as they approached the Ottoman left. But when they emerged and charged into the Tatars, they pushed them back in hard cavalry-on-cavalry fighting. Around 3 P.M., a massed Allied infantry and cavalry assault began against the Ottoman center, behind which Kara Mustafa looked on in disbelief at his misfortune and the size of the enemy army he faced. Fighting continued until about 6 P.M., when the Ottoman lines were wholly shattered and all their positions overrun. Christian troops moved over the battlefield as the sun set, sabering and shooting wounded sipahis and Tatars while Allied cavalry hotly pursued fleeing survivors. When it was over, 10,000 Ottoman and Tatar dead lay in the fields, with more bodies strewn across abandoned siege lines around the city and in overrun camps. Kara Mustafa was forced into a desperate and disorderly retreat, following what had become a decisive rout. The Allies even captured part of the Ottoman baggage train that had been left behind in their haste to depart. Included in the booty was an abundance of coffee. The beverage thereafter became a favored luxury drink in Vienna and then in most of Europe, imported in better days from Ottoman suppliers. The grand vezier’s retreat took him and the remnants of the siege army across mountainous and river-crossed Hungary just as the weather turned truly nasty in mid-October. Heavy rains slowed the withdrawal and cost the lives of more men, along with most of the remaining siege guns, pack animals, and supplies. The worst episode came while crossing the Leitha River, widened and swollen with flash runoff from the mountain rains. During the night of October 19–20, hundreds of draught animals became mired in mud along the river’s banks and nearly all remaining baggage was lost, including all tents. Along the way, Mustafa executed officers who were openly critical of his leadership. It did not avail: when he arrived in Belgrade, news of the catastrophe had preceded him, and he was strangled to death by order of the sultan. Mehmed survived in power for four more years, until deposed as part of the wider political aftermath within the Ottoman Empire of the catastrophe outside the walls of Vienna and at Kahlenberg. Because the siege had seen a European-wide relief effort in which France pointedly did not participate, it became impolitic for Louis XIV to continue his brutal bombardment of Luxembourg. He called back his troops to wait for a more propitious time. Following the siege of Vienna, the Habsburgs took the offensive against the Ottomans, launching the so-called “War of the Holy League” or “Long War,” in which the Austrians quickly conquered parts of Hungary that had been held by the Ottomans since the 1520s, then expelled all Ottoman troops from the Morea. Sobieski failed in an effort to take advantage of Kahlenberg and Vienna to overrun Moldavia and secure a Polish port on the 499

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Black Sea. But in general, the Allied counterattack against the Ottomans during the “Long War,” or Austro-Ottoman War (1683–1699), continued until the Ottomans accepted codification of defeat in the hard Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. That settlement nearly doubled the size of the Austrian Empire, which acquired vast territories in the east and south, including Croatia, Hungary, Slavonia, and Transylvania. See also Ratisbon, Truce of (1684); Royal Hungary. Suggested Reading: Thomas M. Barker, Double Eagle and Crescent: Vienna’s Second Turkish Siege (1967); I. Parvev, Habsburgs and Ottomans between Vienna and Belgrade (1995); J. Stoye, The Siege of Vienna, 2nd edition (2000).

Vienna, Treaty of (December 11, 1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Vienna, Treaty of (May 27, 1657). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Vienna, Treaty of (January 5, 1719). See Great Northern War (1700–1721). Vigevano, Convention of (October 7, 1696). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Turin, Peace of (August 29, 1696). Vigo Bay, Battle of (October 12/23, 1702). A powerful Anglo-Dutch fleet returning from a failed amphibious campaign against Cadiz stumbled upon the Spanish silver fleet (12 galleons) and its French escort (15 French and 3 Spanish men-of-war) at Vigo Bay. The French and Spanish took refuge behind a boom protected by twin batteries. The Allies landed marines to take the forts covering the harbor, which they did after heavy fighting. Breaking through the boom that protected the inner harbor, an Anglo-Dutch fleet of 24 sail assaulted the French warships, which were still at anchor. The French surrendered six ships-ofthe-line and either burned or watched the Allies burn six more. However, most of the silver had already been spirited overland and was missed. The main significance of the battle was to persuade Portugal to abandon Louis XIV and join the Allies. Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734). Ambassador and maréchal de France. Villars was the finest of Louis XIV’s maréchals appointed by the king himself, not inherited from his father. Villars first saw combat and carried out his first diplomatic mission during the same campaign at the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678). He attended the siege of Maastricht with Louis XIV in 1673. The next year he fought at Seneffe. In 1675 he commanded a regiment of cavalry in Flanders and participated in multiple sieges to the end of the war. He fought with distinction at Kockersberg (October 7, 1677). In 1683, he served as emissary to the Austrian and Bavarian courts, and the following year saw action with the Bavarian Army against the Ottomans. In 1687 Villars was placed in command of all French cavalry. At the onset of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), he led a series of harsh cavalry raids to enforce contributions. He saw action in 500

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command of French cavalry at Walcourt (August 25, 1689). He finally received a full command in 1691, in Flanders. He saw more action in Germany from 1692, but did little to distinguish himself at first. He fought in Italy in 1696. He moved to Vienna as French ambassador upon agreement to the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). There he met his future adversary in battle, Prince Eugene. While in Vienna, Villars conspired with the Hungarian rebel Rákóczi, offering him French aid for any revolt against the Habsburgs. Villars set aside his diplomatic hat and resumed his military career with the onset of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He won at Friedlingen (October 14, 1702), for which he was promoted to the rank of maréchal de France. In the spring of 1703, he fought his way down the Danube, repeatedly defeating Imperial armies that opposed him. He collected massive contributions along the way and sustained his army far from base supplies by building fortified depots and magazines as he moved. Placed under Bavarian command after joining forces with Maximilian Emanuel, Villars quarreled with his superior when the latter invaded Tyrol instead of supporting Rákóczi by assaulting Vienna, as Villars had proposed. The two headstrong commanders argued so fiercely that Villars was recalled to France, and then was sent to repress the revolt of the Camisards. Villars first met Marlborough in the field in 1705, opposing the great English captain-general in a series of complex blocking maneuvers along the Moselle and in Flanders. In 1706, he was sent to fight in Germany once more. He enjoyed good success raising the contributions that Louis considered to be the main, even the sole campaign task in that country. In May 1707, Villars impressively assaulted and took over the Lines of Stollhofen, without suffering any casualties. He fought in southern France in 1708, holding the Lines of the Var against Allied attack. In 1709, Villars at last received command of the main French army, following the disgrace of Vendôme at the siege of Lille in 1708. Louis brought Villars north to retrieve a crumbling situation for the French and instructed him not to engage the enemy in battle. Villars waged a brilliant war of maneuver, but in the end he was left with no choice but to fight an aggressive enemy. He led an army into battle against Marlborough and Prince Eugene at Malplaquet, where he exhibited much personal bravery and was badly wounded by a musket ball that smashed his knee. Although he lost the field, he inflicted massive casualties upon the Allies and left them leery of engaging him in battle. Still suffering from his wound, Villars was tied to his saddle for his campaigns of 1710. In 1711–1712 he fought in the Rhineland. He won a small but strategically important battle at Denain (July 13/24, 1712), then rolled up several Allied garrisons, taking over 10,000 prisoners. The success of his last campaign helped pave the way for agreement on the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). He then led a French army against the Austrians, who declined to join the Utrecht settlement, in a final campaign that culminated in his participation in negotiation of the Treaty of Rastadt (1714). France enjoyed years of peace after Rastadt and the death of Louis XIV in 1715, a period in which Villars served on the Regency council for the young Louis XV. Villars did not see combat again until the War of the Polish Succession (1733), during which he fought in Italy and was promoted to the 501

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exalted rank of “maréchal général des Armées.” See also magazines; Ne Plus Ultra lines. Suggested Reading: François Ziegler, Villars: Le centurion de Louis XIV (1996).

Villa Viciosa, Battle of (December 10/21, 1710). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Villeroi, François de Neufville, duc de (1644–1730). Maréchal de France. Villeroi was appointed by Louis XIV to succeed the deceased maréchal Luxembourg as commander of the French army in Flanders. He rose to that high level of command more from family connections than from demonstrated merit. He was, in fact, a living contradiction of the more general trend in France during this period of promotion of officers by merit. Far less skilled or daring than Luxembourg, Villeroi was one of the clearly inferior field commanders of Louis’ late reign. He was defeated or outmaneuvered repeatedly during the final campaigns of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). At the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), he fought mostly in northern Italy, succeeding Nicholas Catinat. After a bloody four-hour battle and a sharp defeat at the hands of Prince Eugene at Chiari (September 1/12, 1701), Villeroi abandoned Mantua and continued to retreat. While rallying men to fight off a surprise Allied assault on his new base camp at Cremona (February 1, 1702), Villeroi was captured and held prisoner by the Austrians for six months. After his release, he returned to command French armies in Flanders. He was ordered out of entrenchments at Louvain by the still-aggressive king, but was again easily deceived by enemy feints and maneuvers. He was then routed by Marlborough at Ramillies (May 12/ 23, 1706). Villeroi fell into sharp disfavor at court in 1722 and was banished, under cover of a provincial governorship. Vittorio Amedeo II. See Victor Amadeus II. voivodes. Levies raised in the wilderness of Wallachia and Moldova by magnates of Hungary. Their quality reflected the vices and virtues of their origins: illdiscipline, but also ferocity and feral cunning. vojna krajina. See Militargrenze. volley fire. Firing by ranks on command. Volley fire was introduced to the age of horse and musket twice—in Japan, by Oda Nobunaga at Muraki Castle in 1554, and independently by the Dutch, around 1594. It was the Dutch system that was systematized and spread to have a lasting influence on world military history. In the original system invented by Willem Lodewijk, the front rank fired, then the second rank advanced through the front rank to fire, followed by the next rank, and so on. Initially, there were as many as ten ranks, but Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden reduced the number to six. Later , the number dropped to four, then three ranks for most of the 18th century. The British eventually advanced to a two-rank system. Volley fire had two fundamental purposes: 502

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shock effect and laying down as heavy a field of lead as possible. The latter was especially important, given the troops’ limited practice in shooting at marks and the general inaccuracy of their weapons past 50-60 meters. In striking contrast, Janissaries—uniquely among elite infantry of this period—emphasized individual marksmanship. See also drill; skulking way of war. volunteer per order. From 1661–1731, a boy serving in the Royal Navy under the king’s patronage while in training for his lieutenant’s examination. Voynuqs (Voynuks). “Horse soldiers.” Ottoman auxiliary cavalry recruited mainly among the Christian populations of the Balkans, but including some Muslims. The majority served in the Militargrenze as guides or raiders. Voynuqs registered for paid service, which meant that they served as an effective reserve that could be called up as need arose. They were not always reliable, however; more than once they defected to the other side during the Thirteen Years’ War (1554–1667).

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W Walcourt, Battle of (August 25, 1689). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Villars, Claude Louis, duc de; Waldeck, Georg Friedrich, Prince of. Waldeck, Georg Friedrich, Prince of (1620–1692). Imperial prince and Feldmarschall. As a young soldier seeking fortune and favor, he fought for the Dutch during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). He was clever and commanded respect from many north German princes, successfully bringing them into a defensive coalition with Brandenburg and Sweden, and later with the United Provinces. He fought for Brandenburg in the 1650s and for Sweden in the 1660s. That service helped secure his own scattered hereditary claims and assets within the Empire and, via his marriage into the Nassau-Siegen family, in the Netherlands. During the Dutch War (1672–1678), he fought for German princes and under Charles V of Lorraine. This again helped secure his lands from claims by avaricious neighbors, though it did not protect them from scorching. Waldeck was one of the closest military and strategic advisers to William III (then still Prince of Orange) in the 1680s. He took command of Dutch forces during the opening years of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). He defeated a French army at Walcourt (August 25, 1689). However, he lost badly at Fleurus (June 21/July 1, 1690). He died in 1692. Waldensians. See Vaudois. Walk, Battle of (June 18, 1657). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). wall-piece. “mosquet à chevalet.” A heavy musket supported on a tripod or defensive wall. It was a highly effective weapon in the hands of a garrison sniper, who used it to pick off engineers or sappers. Warasdin border. “Varaz˘din border.” See Windische border.

war at sea

war at sea. See Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement (1689); Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674); Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660); Apraxin, Fedor; Augusta, Battle of (April 22, 1676); Ayscue, Geoge; Bantry Bay, Battle of (May 1/11, 1689); Barbary corsairs; Bart, Jean; belaying pin; Blake, Robert; blunderbuss; boarding; boarding axe; boarding pike; buccaneers; cannon of seven; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; commissioned officers; convoy; cruiser; cutlass; descent; directieschepen; double on; Dutch Navy; embargo; fighting instructions; firing on the roll; flags; free ships, free goods; French Navy; frigate; Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653); galleys; grenades; guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; hanger; infernal machine; Juel, Niels; Kentish Knock, Battle of the (September 28/October 8, 1652); Köge Bay (July 1, 1677); leeward and windward gauges; line of battle; maps; marines; Messinian rebellion (1674–1678); Methuen Treaties; military discipline; Monk, George; musketoon; Mutiny Act (1689); naval tactics; Navigation Acts; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); officers; Ordinary; Palermo, Battle of (June 2, 1676); pell-mell; Pepys, Samuel; Peter I; petty officer; pirates; Portland, Battle of (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653); privateers; rake; ranks (at sea); Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/March 8, 1658); Royal Navy; Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de; Scanian War (1674–1679); Schooneveld, First Battle of (May 28/ June 7, 1673); Schooneveld, Second Battle of (June 4/14, 1673); ships; ships-of-the-line; Smyrna convoy (June 17–18, 1693); Solebay, Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1672); Sound Tolls; sovereignty of the sea; Spanish Navy; squadron (naval); standing officers; Swedish Navy; swivel gun; Tangier; Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de; Tromp, Cornelius van; Tromp, Maarten van; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); warrant officer; watches; Western Design. war chest. “Kriegskasse.” Prior to the development of modern economies, and systems of taxation and expenditure, national leaders literally kept chests of gold and other precious metals to finance their wars. This practice contributed to the ideas and policies of bullionism and mercantilism. ward room. A ship’s space reserved for berths and dining by commissioned officers and some warrant officers. “Ward room rank” was a derivative appellation for ship’s officers permitted in the ward room. war finance. The major west European antagonists of the second half of the 17th century benefited from the end of the “price revolution” that had bedeviled all war and state finance after 1500. Around 1630, silver imports from the New World declined substantially. Prices stabilized until real wages caught up in the vibrant commercial economies of England, France, and the United Provinces. This change in the general pattern of inflation permitted some states to levy new taxes and spend at higher levels on their military establishments, which in turn contributed to larger armies and navies in general. Even poor states such as Brandenburg-Prussia found ways to increase military spending, to defend against threatening neighbors or prey on weak ones. A shift from producer to consumer taxes additionally freed capital for investment and filled state coffers. 506

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Inflation in prices still occurred in this period, but tended to remain confined to periods of wartime shortage, after which prices and wages fell again. Thus, a British soldier’s pay remained constant for most of the 18th century at one shilling per day, about one third of what a skilled craftsman might make c. 1750. Sailors’ wages varied greatly, as navies competed poorly for skilled seamen with higher-paying privateers and the merchant marine fleet. Even so, most armies and navies remained financed from tax and economic bases of pre-industrial economies. This meant that the standing armies often doubled as the national security force. Cavalry and infantry were used in many countries to patrol rural roads, and protect travelers and commerce from highwaymen, who were themselves very often demobilized soldiers. Whenever a city or rural population rioted, kings seldom hesitated to call out troops, unless these were militia and likely to be sympathetic to the population. Foreign soldiers were especially valued for riot control. The British Army performed effectively as a rural constabulary within the Three Kingdoms while also serving in homeland defense in Britain and as an occupying army in Ireland. Similarly, soldiers and other military laborers were used as firefighters, prison guards, and road and bridge builders. England/Great Britain England entered this period in a state of civil war focused on a struggle between Parliament and the monarchy over the sources of royal revenue. Stuart kings had survived mainly on customs duties on international trade to free themselves from policy shackles imposed by country gentry and rising merchant classes who controlled Parliament. The outcome of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) decided the core issues in favor of Parliament. From the 1640s to the Restoration, naval monies especially were raised from three sources: customs (which suffered from activities of Royalist privateers), excise (from 1643), and the “Assessment” (from 1645). The latter was a land tax that, with not a little irony given the proximate causes of the earlier English Civil Wars, evolved from Charles I’s contentious practice of raising “ship money.” Nevertheless, the new taxes could not fully pay for the New Model Army or the expanded State’s Navy. A very large military debt from the Civil Wars was paid off by 1652 partly through demobilization of a number of regiments once they completed their work of subjugation of Ireland. Another source of temporary funding was sale of confiscated cathedral lands. That happy fiscal condition did not survive the next two decades of Commonwealth naval wars with the United Provinces and a briefer but similarly costly conflict with Spain. By the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), most ships in the State’s Navy were severely in arrears in pay, provisions, and basic upkeep. Disillusionment with the Republic on the part of seamen and naval officers was more than a small contributing faction in its overthrow in 1660. The Restoration government worked with mercantile interests represented in Parliament to shift the country’s military from depending on land and agricultural production taxes to expanding customs duties. This shift was made to take advantage of new commercial ventures and growing international trade centered 507

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in southern England. Also, assured revenue streams from customs, excise, and the Assessment permitted successive governments to borrow against secure future revenues. As the 17th century became the 18th and the three island kingdoms entered larger and vastly more expensive continental and naval wars, excise taxes moved to the center of the British system of war finance. The state was greatly assisted in this regard by the emergence of London as a major center for banking and stock exchange, and as a key entrepôt of a burgeoning world trading system, protected in turn by the Royal Navy, which was paid for by customs duties. During 1690, once the Glorious Revolution was firmly in place, Parliament began systematically to strip the monarchy of any independent means of raising funds for the military. In 1694 William III was forced to accept a “Statute of Rights” that removed the monarch’s authority over the standing army and placed the military directly under Parliament. That was the price of any vote for serious funding with which to make war against France. It was not until 1707 and the Act of Union that the “subject troops” of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were financed under a single system. That reform was completed under great pressures of financing and waging the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Until 1711 the British war effort expanded in all spheres, including underwriting several allied armies with large subsidies—though some British troops were paid for by the Dutch under an agreed “Augmentation.” This use of subsidies of foreign troops set a pattern for the 18th century, in which up to half of all troops in British service in wartime were foreign mercenaries who fought in “British” regiments either “in pay” or “in subsidy.” The ability of Great Britain to finance its own wars and those waged by other nations, and its singular and protracted successes at sea, marked its emergence as a world power. The single most effective instrument of English/British war finance was the new idea of running a “national debt.” The first ever national debt—distinct from the personal debt of the king or crown—was formally identified by England in 1693 during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). It was not a concept made from whole cloth. Separation of royal debt from the common or national debt was forced on the crown by Parliament only after a century of bloody civil war and then the political upheaval of the Glorious Revolution. The Puritan Commonwealth had introduced fiscal innovations that permitted it to borrow against future revenues. The Restoration governments of Charles II and James II both used “in course” payments to run a system of short-term national debt. The Navy Board used a similar system to finance the Navy during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) and Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). The success of this system of war finance helped prepare the nation for the more mature concept introduced in the 1690s, from which date William III and his successors no longer had sufficient income to fund the Navy without consulting Parliament. Working though a new national consensus, Great Britain became the money house supporting the Allied war effort against France. The ability to accumulate a national debt in wartime was a critical advantage England enjoyed over continental rivals. English governments could borrow in wartime, and then pay debt service and principal upon the return of trade and prosperity in peacetime. The 508

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concept took longer to catch on in countries where representative government had less hold, and absolute monarchs continued to reach into the public purse at will and from need. Other states and kings repeatedly faced the choice of either raising taxes to pay for wars while they were underway—which threatened to provoke domestic rebellion and always brought new demands from the nobility for representation and power sharing—or they were forced into bankruptcy or to the peace table on unfavorable terms. France In the early 1650s, France was in a state of domestic upheaval, the Fronde, directly related to high levels of taxation imposed to pay for the costly military effort of Louis XIII in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and the longer war that continued with Spain (1635–1659). Once Louis XIV came of age in 1661, he was determined to avoid such armed tax revolts when he made war. His solution was to pay for each war with short-term credit at high rates of interest, instead of with new taxes. Other than during his first war, the Dutch War (1672–1678), he succeeded to a point before the 1690s. He was ably assisted by the inspired Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Longer-term, however, Louis XIV never resolved the problem of marshaling the resources of France to pay for his serial wars. And new research confirms that not even Colbert’s reforms fundamentally changed the French finance system. When the fiscal system failed, Louis thus had no choice but to raise taxes. The old “taille” was maintained as the core of the system, but Louis was unable to convert this from a tax on peasants to a general property tax. Nor was he able to roll back other tax exemptions of the nobility and clerical classes (estates). Louis supplemented the taille with the “aides,” a broad liquor tax, but this was not a permanent fix. Colbert raised several taxes but with mixed results: he introduced a stamp tax that provoked several revolts within France in 1675, an echo of scattered tax revolts during the 1660s. Over the course of his reign, Louis XIV doubled taxes in France from 85 million livres in 1661 to 152 million livres in 1715. Yet, tax yields in France were never as high as those in Great Britain or the United Provinces, nor were collections as broad based. Neither Colbert nor later ministers solved this fundamental revenue problem. The military administration set up by Colbert was more successful than the tax regime. It rested on a secretary for war under whom intendants oversaw regular contracts by munitionnaires for supplies of food, transportation, and cloth for uniforms for the troops. Living off the land of one’s enemies by pillaging supplies remained part of trying to make war pay for itself, but to a much reduced degree than in the first half of the 17th century. In fact, Louis actively sought to repress pillaging by French troops as disruptive of discipline and fighting edge. He also left the Army in part dependent on the private wealth and credit of its aristocratic officer corps. Worsening the problem in the 1690s, repeated crop failures and an attendant famine in 1694 forced a fiscal crisis on Louis that hit his naval spending especially hard. French naval expenditures in 1695 were less than half those of 1692 (the French Army budget also fell, but only by 9%). This shortfall forced a shift at sea to guerre de course from guerre 509

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d’escadre. Royal ships were leased to armateurs for purposes of privateering, and new ships and provisions were provided by the state to encourage naval activity whose expense was borne largely by private interests. A more successful ploy employed extensively by Louis XIV to shore up the Army was to award colonelcies to rich bourgeois willing to pay to raise new regiments in return for a command. This scheme was always oversubscribed, as wealthy men from the commercial world sought to buy old-fashioned social status by purchasing commissions. Nevertheless, facing dire fiscal restraints halfway into the Nine Years’ War, Louis was forced to resort to schemes that had failed many monarchs before him. From 1692, he raised taxes on the peasantry, floated high-interest loans he could ill afford, and diluted office holding by creating new offices and selling these off to gullible bourgeois. Prussia Friedrich-Wilhelm instituted strict fiscal policies that sustained BrandenburgPrussian armies and built Prussia’s power over a number of decades. Given huge distaste among Germans for contributions, born of the experience of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), Friedrich-Wilhelm relied instead on direct taxes of Prussian estates. In a famous 1653 “Recess” agreement, he recognized Junker social and economic privileges—while curtailing their political rights—in return for commitment for 530,000 thalers to support a standing army and approval of a military tax from which Junkers were exempt. After legal authority for the tax expired, he collected it anyway. These sources of revenue were supplemented by taxes on towns and merchants, achieved without bothering to seek consent from the Brandenburg Estates or other Estates of his scattered domains. In the Rhineland, he exacted war taxes more brutally and directly, by threatening his own subjects with collection of forced contributions. In Ducal Prussia, where the local Estates looked to Poland for protection and refused to accept either the Polish cession of sovereignty during the Second Northern War (1655–1660) or Brandenburg authority, from 1660 he resorted to murdering opponents of his tax schemes and billeted troops on all resistant towns. For instance, in 1662 he imposed 2,000 troops on Königsberg, and arrested and imprisoned all political opposition, whether nobles or burghers. During the 1660s his tax revenue rose sharply. As a result of ruthless practices, the much poorer subjects of Friedrich-Wilhelm and his successors paid direct taxes twice as high as far richer subjects of Louis XIV and later French kings. This resulted because the wealthiest class—the Junkers—was entirely exempt from taxation. To oversee the system, Friedrich-Wilhelm instituted the Generalkriegskommissariat. In later decades, as industry and trade recovered, excise taxes became a larger component of Brandenburg-Prussian military finance. Ottoman Empire During the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire completed a transition from feudal levies of sipahis and timariots, supplemented by the paid Janissary Corps, to fully salaried troops. Initially, these were contracted peasant irregulars contemptuously referred to as “overnight soldiers” (türedi askeri). Untrained 510

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and poorly motivated, their cheapness and ready availability nevertheless meant that they replaced Janissaries as the latter retired. The Janissaries and standing cavalry, the alti bölük sipahileri housed at the Sublime Porte, were paid quarterly for necessities (“mevacib”) along with installments of fodder money (“ulufe”). These funds, the single greatest expenditure of the Ottoman state, came from the sultan’s regular revenues. As a result, recruitment into the Kapikulu Askerleri— especially the upper officers and the most expensive units, the sipahis—was strictly limited. Numbers began to fall steadily in the later 17th century, declining dramatically even during the Austro-Ottoman Wars from 1683 through 1718, as recruitment of the most expensive Ottoman troops was sharply curtailed. These reductions actually permitted the sultans to increase cheaper but more modern and useful troops such as non-Janissary infantry, along with artillery specialists and military engineers. The Ottomans benefited from being less involved in expensive naval warfare than their European or Iranian enemies. Their vast empire, with its productive and diversified economy and commerce, allowed them to avoid most special war taxes and debasement of currency until the late 17th century. They had selfsustaining allies (Tatars), who reduced the costs of campaigns by fighting for a share in plunder. The Ottomans also cut costs by employing freelance auxiliary cavalry (akinci) and unpaid frontier troops (Voynuqs). These auxiliaries also were financed mainly through a share in plunder. This was not always beneficial, as when Tatars and auxiliaries dispersed to look for plunder and thereby undercut Ottoman ability to defend against the relief army that raised the siege of Vienna (July 14–September 12, 1683). The Ottomans used regular troops as military laborers earlier than other armies. This reduced fortification and transport costs. European troops disdained spade work entirely before the 1590s, and then demanded considerable pay per foot of sap dug or road laid. Beyond the base salaries of the Kapikulu Askerleri, the Ottomans paid regular raises (terakki) to their full-time professional soldiers. For individual soldiers who excelled in battle, cash bonuses (bahziz) were granted. And for all Ottoman troops, shares in spoils (ganimet) were distributed whenever Ottoman armies enjoyed success. The mature Ottoman Empire had heavier garrison and other defensive burdens than in earlier periods, expenses that were ongoing rather than transitory. Long-term needs were generally met by shifting revenues raised in non-threatened regions such as Egypt to pay for military necessities in troublesome areas such as Hungary. The Ottoman military administration was adept at reallocating resources to meet regional defense or occupation needs. The resulting infusion of centralized revenue into local economies was so stimulative that frontier regions benefited more from military spending than did the center. All regular revenues were handled by the sultan’s Inner Treasury, which formed a reserve that drew upon provincial sources in Egypt, Iraq, Anatolia, and other provinces. Occasional transfers (“sefer filorisi”) were made to an Outer Treasury to cover current military expenses and to encourage the senior kuls to start campaigns on time. Historians long argued that the Ottomans the 16th century witnessed budget surpluses while from the 17th century onward, 511

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there was a chronic decline punctuated by fiscal crises, and that this weakness forced corresponding military reductions. Recent research has shown that 16th-century Inner Treasury reserves essentially continued through the 17th century. This allowed irregular transfers to the Outer Treasury on the order of 30 million akçes per year. Imperial reserves were supplemented by the “bedel-i nüzul,” an exceptional surtax used to pay for grain. The sultans increasingly relied on this tax in the 17th century as military expenditures rose and the akçe declined in value. Its burden was partly offset by compulsory state buying of grain at local market prices along an army’s line of march, so that this surtax often proved more a boon than a bane to the peasantry. Also, sultans widened the social base of their war-directed revenue stream (“avariz”) to include growing cities. A smaller revenue source came from non-Muslim subjects who paid a poll tax (“cizye”) dating to the founding of all Islamic states. Nevertheless, as with other early modern states the Ottoman Empire was compelled to borrow to pay for prolonged campaigns and protracted wars. In the Ottoman case, however, this meant dipping into religious endowments rather than borrowing at high interest from the international banking markets. Spain Madrid found it increasingly difficult to finance even basic defense needs during this period. In the Spanish Netherlands, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees (October 28/November 7, 1659), Spain cut its troop levels from 70,000 in 1658 to just 15,000 at the start of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), with the shortfall against the French made up by over 100,000 Allied troops. Antwerp money markets were reduced from their former prominence, further weakening Spanish military finance and attendant ability to wage war. From the 1660s, international banking loans to the crown were floated only with Dutch help and backing. Remarkably, given Spain’s long persecution of Jews, loans were also made to Spain by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam. In 1696 the Council of State in Madrid acknowledged that Sephardic loans alone saved the Spanish military efforts against France during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) from total collapse. But collapse could not be postponed forever: the end came while waging the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), during which only French financing kept Spanish armies in the field campaigning in most years, and heavy fighting coursed over Iberia itself. United Provinces The Dutch depended even more than England on international trade and were correspondingly reluctant to impose heavy excise taxes. As replacement, they taxed internal commerce and consumers. The United Provinces also benefited hugely from excellent credit, which permitted the Dutch to finance wars at loans floated at under 4% (the equivalent French rate was 8% or more). Dutch loans were highly subscribed, which put downward pressure on rates. During the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) and thereafter, the United Provinces revealed a latent fighting capacity that was superior to all monarchies of the day: recruitment rose in response to extraordinary military wages. The wartime 512

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financial resources of the States General exceeded that of every other state in Europe, proportionate to population. The Dutch still experienced occasional fiscal crises as their wars with France grew in length and deepened in expense. A critical period was 1675–1676, when the United Provinces reached unprecedented levels of debt due to military spending and the fact that half its territory was under French occupation. The Republic and its various constituent provinces achieved unprecedented levels of war finance from 1701–1713. And it received heavy subsidies from Great Britain. Even so, the huge effort made during the War of the Spanish Succession left the Republic with a massive debt of 128 million guilders in 1713. For that and other reasons, the Spanish war permanently broke the United Provinces as a Great Power. From 1715 until the 1750s, it managed to maintain military levels worthy only of the middle-sized power to which it was reduced. This change was commensurately reflected in meekness in its approach to foreign affairs, especially toward France. See also China; convoy; corvée; Green Standard Army; half-pay; Hofkriegsrat; impressment; mercantilism; necessaries; off reckonings; poundage; rations; stoppages; subsistence money; Swedish Army; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Suggested Reading: John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (1989); Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grande Siècle (1984). Warka, Battle of (April 7, 1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). War of Devolution (1667–1668). When Philip IV of Spain died in September 1665, he was succeeded by a sickly son from his second marriage, Carlos II. This fact was seized upon by Louis XIV, who asserted that the Bourbon succession in the Spanish Netherlands was legally governed by prior claims of (the province “devolved to”) Philip’s daughter by his first marriage, Marie Thérèse, queen of France and wife to Louis. During 1665–1666, the bishop of Münster occupied a strip of Dutch territory, only to be forced out by French arms. Along with past Franco-Dutch alliance against Spain during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), this action led Louis to believe that the United Provinces would support his claim to the Spanish Netherlands out of gratitude. He was wrong, and that infuriated him. For two years he expanded the French Army in preparation for war with Spain. His policies toward the United Provinces grew more openly hostile, especially in the areas of colonial trade. Mercantilist initiatives undertaken by Colbert were married to the fighting tariff introduced in 1667 to severely limit Dutch imports. Louis also drew minor enemies of the Dutch into his schemes, including the princes of Münster and Cologne. More importantly, he secretly arranged with England to make a joint land and sea attack on the United Provinces. On the Dutch side, the tide had turned in their favor during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) in the West Indies, in India, and in the naval war with England. The Regents of Holland and other leaders in the United Provinces no longer thought that English sea power would overwhelm all Dutch colonies, or push Dutch shipping and joint stock companies from pride of place in world 513

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maritime commerce. That left the United Provinces freer to contest French plans in their strategic backyard. Louis invaded the Spanish Netherlands on May 24, 1667. The Dutch countered by moving troops to garrison Ostend, Bruges, and other northern towns, partly as forward defense and in part as the first move in their own possible annexations at Spanish expense. Fighting was limited, as huge French armies brushed aside frontier garrisons and carried out a succession of sieges in the new, rapid style introduced and overseen by Vauban. Flanders towns and cities fell in quick order, although the siege conducted by Vauban at Lille (July 8– August 28, 1667) was drawn out. In the south, a second French army led by Turenne invaded and occupied Franche-Comté, meeting minimal resistance. The Dutch quickly ended their war with England to disengage naval forces and finances to better oppose Louis XIV’s designs to do more than make minor adjustments to France’s northern border, which would have been acceptable to Jan de Witt and the States’ Party faction. In January 1668, the United Provinces, England, and Sweden formed the Triple Alliance. They agreed to press the Spanish for territorial concessions to France but opposed radical territorial changes in the Spanish Netherlands in favor of Louis. This was the first effective formation of a balance of power against Louis’ grand design. As such, it permanently enraged him toward the Dutch, whom he determined to punish and humiliate for their “ingratitude, bad faith, and insupportable vanity.” Formation of the Triple Alliance prompted the Grande Monarque to call a short-term halt to annexationist plans and agree instead to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle with Spain and the secret Treaty of Dover with England. This freed him to concentrate military preparations for eventual all-out war with the United Provinces. The product of Louis’ anger was an even bigger war that broke out four years later: the Dutch War (1672–1678). War of the Grand Alliance (1688–1697). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). War of the Holy League. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699). War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). War of the Reunions (1683–1684). From 1679 to 1684, Louis XIV repeatedly resorted to force to consolidate and push forward his frontiers based on a series of quasi-legal claims derived from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the several Treaties of Nijmegen (1678–1679). He got the idea for this diplomaticcum-military offensive from the marquis de Croissy. These minor aggressions borne up by military action became known as the “reunions,” or annexations, of territories Louis claimed but which he did not control in the aftermath of the Dutch War (1672–1678). The main impulse behind this policy was an urge to “defensive aggression” that sought to better anchor defense of his frontières on natural barriers and key strongpoints, part of an at best vague search for France’s “natural frontiers.” 514

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Louis set up a unilateral “court of reunion” at Metz to back his claims, with lesser courts in Besançon and Breisach. Formal “reunions” with France decreed by these courts decided the fate of territories bordering Alsace, Franche-Comté, Lorraine, and along the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands. This transparent maneuver vitiated a joint commission on border issues agreed to with Spain in the Treaty of Nijmegen (September 17, 1678). Louis also demanded that towns in recently annexed lands, or disloyal territories such as Alsace, where sentiment for the old German Empire was high during the Dutch War, should publicly affirm accession to France and disown their prior allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. All large Alsatian towns bowed to Louis except the Imperial—and not coincidentally, Protestant—city of Strasbourg. French troops occupied that town in September 1681. Also occupied were the strategically key fortress towns and bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun. In actions unconnected to the legal semi-fiction of hereditary reunions purveyed by his unilateral courts, Louis also seized the enclave of Orange on the Rhône in 1680 and bought the fortress town of Casale on the Po from the Duke of Mantua in 1681. French troops also implemented Louis’ most spurious claim to Luxembourg. Bit by bit, they took the hinterland until they blockaded the only part of the territory still free of his control: the fortress town itself. Faced with starvation during the winter months, the garrison sallied to attack the French. Meanwhile, Louis again demonstrated his power, arrogance, and aggressive intentions by sending an army into the Spanish Netherlands to burn fields around Courtrai and take possession of Dinant and Charlemont, towns whose fate also was to have been decided by a joint commission. His sustained bombardment of Luxembourg was only called off for diplomatic reasons and appearances’ sake in March 1682, as the Ottomans readied to invade Austria in a campaign that culminated in the siege of Vienna (July 14–September 12, 1683). Louis could not restrain himself for long, however. In the fall of 1683, he threatened to subsist an army of 35,000 in the Spanish Netherlands and force additional massive contributions from the population. This provoked the Spanish and Dutch to revive their uneasy alliance and strike at French towns along the border. Louis was outraged that his enemies should emulate his tactics, and ordered that 50 enemy villages be burned for each one of his. Spain accordingly formally declared war on France on October 26. Louis tried to bribe the United Provinces by offering peace in exchange for a betrayal of the Dutch alliance with Spain, along with forced Spanish concession to him of various territories. But the Dutch sent a small army to aid Spain instead, and the fight was on. The Spanish were hard pressed to match the French militarily in their northern province. The Dutch contribution to defense of the Spanish Netherlands was less than 10,000 men, while no help came from Germany or Austria, from where the Ottoman siege of Vienna drew attention and resources. While Louis sent heavy forces into the Spanish Netherlands, he fought more symbolically on the Pyrenees front. The usual desultory and indecisive fighting occurred in the southern mountains. In the north, however, there was widespread destruction, executions of towns, and burning of fields by both sides. Créqui bombarded, and Vauban besieged, Luxembourg again in December 1683. The French failed to 515

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take the town, but it fell to another French siege the following summer, on June 3, 1684. With the real prize of the war now in his hands, Louis offered to make peace at the point of maximum gain—as he always did, persuading only himself, fawning courtiers, and admiring historians that such an imposed maximum peace was actually defensive and sustainable. This time, for once, the tactic worked: the Allies were divided by Louis’ offered terms as the Dutch sought a separate peace and early exit from a war waged mainly by France against Spain. Details were worked out in the Truce of Ratisbon (August 15, 1684). Louis benefited greatly from general distraction of other European powers by the Ottoman assault on Vienna. Characteristically, he had then overreached in his demands. His brutal seizures of Imperial free cities and subsequent denial of their traditional liberties and formal treaty rights to religious protection (under terms of the Peace of Westphalia, of which France was a formal guarantor), permanently frightened other German states. Even as the smoke of this brief war dissipated, therefore, Dutch and German fears joined Austrian and Spanish resentment to prepare ground for later and larger coalitions that would roll back nearly all Louis’ gains. The king himself triggered formation of an enemy coalition—the Grand Alliance—within four yeas, when he issued his infamous Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688), seeking to confirm gains made in the War of the Reunions. Instead, he provoked the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Suggested Reading: John A. Lynn, Wars of Louis XIV: 1667–1714 (1999).

War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Some historians call this conflict the first modern world war, but most reserve that appellation for the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) fought a half century later. Fighting broke out four years after the Treaty of Ryswick (September 20, 1697) ended the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697). Louis XIV was ageing in 1701 and even somewhat chastened by prior martial failures. But he still was vainglorious and aggressively ambitious for the claims of the House of Bourbon. The looming dynastic opportunity that attracted the old king’s unslaked lust was the pending death of the childless Carlos II of Spain, a demise that all Europe had waited upon for 30 years. There were three contestants to the Spanish succession. The Bourbon candidate was the future Philip V (then Philippe of Anjou), grandson of Louis and of Philip IV of Spain. His claim flowed from his mother, Marie Thérèse. The Habsburg candidate was Archduke Charles (later Charles VI of Austria), son of Emperor Leopold I. Charles also possessed strong Spanish bloodlines as another grandson of Philip IV of Spain. With less credibility, but standing as a potential compromise candidate should Louis and Leopold seek to avoid war, there waited and watched the six-year-old Bavarian elector, Joseph Ferdinand. Wary of war with France but determined not to allow swelling of Louis’ power and possessions, William III negotiated a partition treaty with Louis dividing Spanish holdings in Flanders, Italy, and overseas on behalf of England and the United Provinces. Vienna and Madrid were extremely hostile to this partition, but it might have been imposed and accepted as a solution short of war. Unfortunately for the general peace, Joseph Ferdinand died in 1699. His passing made any BourbonHabsburg compromise difficult to impossible. 516

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Louis agreed to a second partition treaty with William, this time proposing to grant control of Italy to Louis and France though his son, the dauphin. Immediate opposition was voiced in Madrid and Vienna. Carlos II was against the proposal because it divided his lands, but his voice hardly mattered. Leopold rejected it out of hand as fatally dividing Spain from Austria, and even more so because it surrendered Italy to France, when Italy was the most important of all Spanish territories in the view of the Habsburgs. Leopold refused to countenance this or any partition, again insisting that the succession could only go to his son, the archduke. The diplomatic situation was thus worsening when Carlos II at last died on November 1, 1700. Further complicating matters, in a final will signed on his deathbed, Carlos left his undivided inheritance to Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou. Pending an unlikely Bourbon refusal to accept the full Spanish inheritance, everything would go to Archduke Charles. That absurd will drafted by a congenitally weak-minded invalid made nearly inevitable what had been so far only a largely unavoidable war over the succession. Louis might be—and sometimes has been—defended as having no other choice in 1700 but to accept the whole Spanish inheritance. Yet, he might have insisted on the partition treaty with William and sold this to Europe as the only path to peace, while accepting a more limited war with irreconcilable Austria. Instead, Louis chose a wider war. Why? Because he thought fighting promised France and the Bourbons more spectacular territorial gains. The stance that finally converted a Bourbon-Habsburg war into a general European conflict was Louis’ arrogant insistence that Philip V must retain all rights to the French throne. That threatened every other European power with a unified FrancoSpanish-Bourbon monarchy. That prospect was strategically unacceptable to the members of the Grand Alliance, which now began to reform under the leadership of William III. Louis hurried French preparations for war, full of bravura about chances for success. Defense and Defections, 1701–1703 Anticipating but also provoking war, Louis sent French troops to occupy the barrier fortresses of the Spanish Netherlands, ostensibly to preserve and protect the claims and interests of his grandson and of Spain. His move not coincidentally was also an attempt to regain for France what the Dutch had just spent 20 bloody years of war to recover and retain. Oblivious to the consequence of likely war with England, Louis highhandedly transferred the asiento from English to French slave traders and, adding dynastic insult to national economic injury, recognized James II as the rightful English king. French merchants fanned over Spanish colonies, further provoking William and the London merchant houses. Such defiance of the settlement that ended the Nine Years’ War brought the United Provinces and England, already diplomatically and politically united through William III, into military alliance with Austria, Brandenburg, and various minor German princes against France. Bavaria and Savoy sided with Louis and his new vassal state, Spain. Portugal initially sided with Louis and Spain, mainly from fear of a joint invasion if it did not. 517

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The major Allied powers formally declared war on France on May 15, 1702, nearly a year after fighting broke out in northern Italy. There, French and Savoyard troops under maréchal Catinat had already taken Milan for Spain. Prince Eugene of Savoy was sent to contest this gain, taking command of Imperial forces in northern Italy. He quickly closed with and defeated Catinat at Carpi (July 9, 1701). He next overmatched Villeroi at Chiari (September 1/12, 1701). He failed in a risky attempt to take Cremona (February 1, 1702) by a surprise direct assault into the town, but managed to capture Villeroi. Fighting continued in Italy in 1702 with a Franco-Spanish counter assault that recovered Mantua and took Modena, driving Prince Eugene back to his starting point. The armies met at last at Luzzara (August 15, 1702). Meanwhile, the revolt of the Camisards (1702–1705) broke out in France just as the war widened and deepened in Flanders and Germany. During early 1702 Austria, England, the United Provinces, and BrandenburgPrussia formally allied against France, Spain, and Savoy. Bavaria subsequently sided with Louis, while the Holy Roman Empire formally declared war on France in the fall, with most Imperial princes already engaged by then. The French fielded about 255,000 effectives, including all garrisons. Louis could also call upon Spanish troops for fighting in Spain and Italy, and the small but proficient armies of his minor allies, Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria and Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. The Allies mustered an impressive counter array of 90,000 Imperials, 60,000 Dutch, 40,000 English, 20,000 Brandenburgers, and many thousands of other Germans. These forces lined up, as they had in prior wars, across multiple fronts from Flanders through Germany, to Italy and Spain, with the latter a deeper and more important front than in previous wars. The main theater of operations was once more the Spanish Netherlands, where the Allies immediately sought to retake the barrier fortresses from the French. However, they only managed to capture a smattering of small outer forts. Marlborough took Liège on October 14 against little resistance. Fighting next broke out along the Lines of Brabant, but the struggles there led to no great strategic consequences. There was also fighting in the Rhineland, notably around Cologne. Landau fell to an Allied army while Ulm fell to the Bavarians, who actively entered the war in September. A small battle was fought at Friedlingen (October 14, 1702), elevating Villars and earning him the rank of maréchal but deciding little else. An Allied attempt to take Cadiz from the sea fizzled out after two months. A war of fortresses, entrenched lines, and constricted maneuver continued in Flanders in 1703, where the liberated Villeroi was placed in overall French command. Marlborough proposed breaking the first set of French lines by taking Huy and Ostend, but as this was to be merely a prelude to a battle of encounter he much desired, the Dutch opposed the project. Instead, the Allies attacked the French lines near Antwerp. They defeated and pushed the French back in a fight at Stekene (June 27), but the French reinforced heavily, recovered, and defeated the Allies at Eeckeren (June 30). Marlborough besieged Huy, taking that key fortress on August 18. Meanwhile, Bonn was captured for the Allies and Cologne threatened. 518

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Elsewhere in Germany, matters broke for the French. Villars crossed the Rhine and took Kehl in early March. He then headed down the Danube, collecting heavy contributions and taking rich hostages as he moved. The Bavarians marched to meet him, led by Maximilian Emanuel. They captured several small fortresses along their route and defeated a small Allied army at Siegharding (March 11). After the Bavarians subjugated Ratisbon, Villars linked with Maximilian in early May. Some thought was given by these commanders to a move against Vienna in support of Ferenc Rákóczi’s spreading rebellion in Hungary, but Maximilian vetoed the plan. An angry and despondent Villars was forced to stay on defense on the Danube while the Bavarians invaded the Tyrol. Villars and Maximilian rejoined in time to quarrel even more fiercely, but also to win at Höchstädt I (September 20, 1703). After that battle, Villars was recalled to Versailles, then was sent to the south of France to fight Protestant rebels. In northern Germany a French army under Tallard took Breisach (September 7) and invested Landau. An Imperial relief army was met by Tallard, who came out of siege trenches to defeat a superior force at Speyer (November 15). These gains for France in Germany seemed offset when Victor Amadeus abandoned Louis to join the Grand Alliance on November 8, 1703. However, that led to a large part of the Savoyard Army in Piedmont being taken prisoner and disarmed. There ensued a second defection from Louis’ camp, as demonstration of ascendant Anglo-Dutch naval power at Cadiz and Vigo Bay (October 12/23, 1702) persuaded Portugal to switch to the Grand Alliance on May 16, 1703. Turning of the Tide, 1704–1706 The war expanded in Iberia during 1704 when Archduke Charles landed in Portugal to claim the Spanish throne as Carlos III. He met resistance from a Franco-Spanish army and made little headway beyond Lisbon. The main Allied effort regarding Spain came in amphibious operations, notably the seizure of Gibraltar on August 3. With the fighting in Flanders bogged down in heavy fortifications and entrenchments that dominated the region, and with French arms threatening to force Austria out of the coalition and the war, the main Allied military effort shifted into southern Germany in 1704. Marlborough stole several marches even on his allies by advancing to the Danube in a classic series of maneuvers. He sought to deliver direct assistance to Leopold, who faced continuing rebellion in Hungary as well as Franco-Bavarian armies threatening Vienna. The Dutch did not know about Marlborough’s Danubian plan, thinking only that he intended to wage war along the Moselle to relieve pressure on Austria. Marlborough instead feinted and employed multiple ruses, successfully confusing friend and foe about his final intentions until he left the Moselle behind with an English army of 20,000 men. He was soon joined by tens of thousands of Imperial and other German troops. Lacking siege artillery, Marlborough avoided most fortresses along the route. He paused only to attack and overwhelm a French-Bavarian camp of 10,000 men at Donauwörth on the Danube on July 2/13, 1704. He did so from fear of leaving such a large garrison in his rear. 519

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Once free to range over enemy lands, Marlborough devastated Bavaria in an effort to force battle. Maximilian huddled inside fortified defenses, awaiting arrival of French reinforcements under Tallard. Only when the French drew near Höchstädt did the Bavarians emerge from entrenchments. The main armies then clashed in one of the rare great battles of the age, at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). Tallard was captured and France suffered a catastrophic defeat. Those survivors who did not desert a broken army retreated to Ulm, but they could not hold that position either against an exuberant Allied pursuit. Bavaria was overrun and occupied by Imperial troops, then forced out of the war in the Treaty of Ilbersheim (November 7, 1704). Maximilian went into exile without his family, which was held prisoner by the Austrians. He continued to fight with French support in the Spanish Netherlands. Most of Germany was cleared of French troops in the months that followed: the fortresses of Ulm, Ingolstadt, and Landau all fell to triumphant Allies. Marlborough took Trier, again meeting no resistance. Together with defections from the French alliance by Portugal and Savoy, 1704 thus closed with a palpable gloom settling over Louis XIV and Versailles. Allied gains in Germany were only partly countered by French successes in Italy, where Victor Amadeus was being methodically stripped of his lands and was personally barricaded and trapped within the besieged fortress town of Turin. During 1705 Marlborough campaigned on the Moselle, seeking a battle to build on gains made after Blenheim. Facing the Allies was the clever Villars, who used his own skill in maneuvers to decline all efforts to lure him into a fight. That left Marlborough and the Dutch with the usual problem of assaulting welldefended French lines or dissipating their strength in sieges that hardly advanced the Allied war effort. The French were not wholly passive: Villeroi retook Huy while Maximilian, who had fled with his court to Flanders, approached Liège. That threat drew Marlborough back to Flanders, where he remained for the rest of the war. That left Villars free to retake Trier on the Moselle, which had been lost in the previous autumn panic but was abandoned by Imperial troops as Villars approached. The Allies forced a portion of the Lines of Brabant and threatened Louvain. The aggressive Marlborough continued to try to lure or trap the French into battle, and was repeatedly frustrated by Dutch hesitancy to frontally engage. In Iberia, Allied armies advanced out of Portugal into western Spain while an amphibious operation enveloped and captured Barcelona (August 22–October 9, 1705) on the other coast. Other Spanish cities fell to separate, small Allied armies: Salvatierra, Valencia de Alcántara, and Albuquerque. Meanwhile, the Spanish failed to retake Gibraltar after a long siege. They would fail to retake Barcelona in their major Iberian campaign of 1706, when Philip V would also be forced to flee Madrid. In Italy in 1705, Vendôme defeated Eugene at Cassano (August 16, 1705), then pushed the Imperials almost out of Italy. Nice fell to a second French army on January 4, 1706. It would be the last French victory for several years. Characteristically, Louis now sought to force peace on the Allies by attacking them. He hoped to produce a strategic fait accompli in the spring by sending an army of 60,000 French and Bavarians under Villeroi to recapture positions lost 520

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around Zoutleeuw, where the Allies broke through and razed 20 miles of the Lines of Brabant the previous autumn. At the head of 60,000 Anglo-Dutch troops, Marlborough marched out to meet Villeroi. He surprised the French and won a major victory at Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706). With rare energy, Marlborough advanced against French defenses in the immediate aftermath of the fight, taking towns and positions one after the other. Brussels fell within three days and Ghent inside a week, followed in early June by Oudenarde, Bruges, and Antwerp. That rolled up most of the Lines of Brabant. Louis recalled Vendôme from Italy to replace Villeroi in Flanders, but even Vendôme was unable to stabilize the king’s defenses until French armies fell back onto new lines running from Ypres through Mons to Namur. In the interim, Villars enjoyed modest success in Germany, overrunning the Palatinate before going into winter quarters in front of the Lines of Stollhofen. The departure of Vendôme from Italy permitted Prince Eugene to relieve Victor Amadeus and win a second major field battle of the year, at Turin (September 7, 1706). The loss outside Turin forced the French to lift their siege of that city, which had failed to overcome the citadel after three desperate direct assaults. The turn of events in Italy led to the Convention of Milan early the next year. The Grand Alliance Supreme, 1707–1709 Ascendant on all fronts at the end of 1707, the Grand Alliance rejected peace feelers sent out by Louis XIV. The sticking point for both sides was control of Spain itself, the grand prize which neither would concede to the other alliance with all possessions intact. Employing Louis’ favorite diplomatic technique— accepting peace only on terms imposed by successful military action—the Allies prepared to capture Toulon and invade Provence. This change of battle front to the south of France allowed Vendôme to work on preparation of new defensive lines in south Flanders and permitted Louis to shift badly needed troops southward. And it freed Villars to attack the Lines of Stollhofen as a diversion. He took the Lines by surprise and moved into them in late May, imposing heavy contributions on several minor German states and princes in the area. This move greatly relieved the financial burden on Louis by sustaining his army in Germany at local expense. The Allies assembled an invasion army by reinforcing troops already in Italy with fresh regiments brought to the Mediterranean by an Anglo-Dutch fleet. The French scrambled to build up their garrison at Toulon, pulling troops out of Flanders and some from Spain to try to block Allied armies from entering southern France. Led by Eugene, accompanied by Victor Amadeus, the Allies took Nice on July 10 and Cannes within the week. A siege of Toulon began on July 28, severely damaging French naval power in the Mediterranean. The French conducted an active defense of harassing sallies, forcing Eugene to break off the siege on August 22. Back in Spain, with Allied attention fixed on the looming assault on Toulon, the French won a sharp victory at Almanza (April 14/25, 1707) over an Allied army commanded by the Earl of Galway. That was quickly followed by reoccupation by French troops of most of Valencia. The loss of that province tipped the military and political balance in Spain permanently to Philip V, though it would take 521

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another six years and much more hard fighting before this fact was accepted by the Grand Alliance. At the start of 1708, Louis supported another effort at strategic distraction by financing an abortive invasion of Scotland by the “Old Pretender,” James Stuart. This Jacobite misadventure came to naught. Fighting was limited in the Rhineland, where the French stayed in their new entrenchments and Germans were loath to assault them there. Villars was reassigned to southern France, where he beat back a weak invasion attempt by Victor Amadeus. In Spain, Franco-Spanish armies made small advances on several local fronts. The heaviest and most important fighting of the year occurred in Flanders. The campaign began with Vendôme cleverly slipping past Marlborough to retake Bruges and Ghent. Marlborough and Eugene force marched to link their armies, then caught and defeated Vendôme in a massive but confused battle involving over 165,000 men at Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708). That led to reversal of all earlier French gains in Flanders and then to the prolonged siege of Lille (August 14–December 10, 1708). Lille was keystone of Vauban’s double set of frontier fortifications known as the pré carré line, which formed the northern defense perimeter of France itself. The bloody, determined fighting at Lille reflected common recognition of the importance of that fact. The fall of Lille cost Vendôme his command (he was replaced by Villars) and the Allies many thousands of lives. But it finally loosened Louis’ grip on southern Flanders, cracked his inner lines, and shook his resolve for making policy through war. Was peace at hand? The winter of 1708–1709 was one of the hardest in recorded history. The severe and prolonged cold froze crops, animals, and people, and opened France to famine in 1709. Troops were retained in-country to guard grain convoys, suppress bread riots, and put down tax rebellions. The Royal Navy sought to worsen the food crisis by ordering seizure of corn ships headed for French ports. At this moment of greatest weakness for Louis XIV, the Allies might have secured exceptionally favorable terms. Instead, they overreached by refusing to recognize the changed situation in Spain and their own military, economic, and political overextension. The Allies demanded that Louis turn on his grandson directly, attacking Philip’s forces if the latter refused to accept loss of the Spanish succession. This was the one clause of the proposal the old king would not accept, and so the war continued. A measure of how close peace was in 1709 came with withdrawal of most French troops and the French ambassador from Spain: Louis would not attack Philip, but he seemed prepared to watch him fall on his own. That was a finer point of honor on which the Allies might have capitalized. Louis appealed for support for the war directly to his people, a unique moment in his reign and one out of character with the man and the Age. Some have argued that Louis’ public appeal engendered an early nationalism that swelled French armies over the next five years, but evidence does not support that conclusion. It is more likely that, as John A. Lynn argues persuasively, privation and famine brought men to the colors because under the flag one also found wages, rations, and the participation in foraging parties. Regimental bakeries also passed out bread that 522

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might be shared with hungry wives and children trailing behind the army. The moment of true awakening of a sense of nationhood would not arrive until 1793 and the call to arms of the levée en masse during the French Revolution. In short, the War of the Spanish Succession remained for France and Europe essentially a set of dynastic quarrels, albeit with broad and awful human consequences. While Villars struggled to feed men and the swollen camp following that attended his command in Flanders, Marlborough and Eugene concentrated 100,000 troops and moved against Tournai. That fortress fell to the Allies on September 3, 1709. Louis was utterly disconcerted by its loss. He finally agreed to allow Villars and an army comprised mainly of garrison troops and raw recruits to offer battle. The Allies accepted, and blood flowed as never before at Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709). Although the Allies won a tactical victory, the fight was remarkably costly in lives, bruising for Allied morale, and disturbing to the British and Dutch governments. Its lasting outcome, therefore, was to make the Grand Alliance shy off any more such victories by Marlborough. The effect was especially strong in Great Britain, where the unpopularity of the war deepened to crisis point and brought the Tories control of the House of Commons in 1710. This political shift partially reversed French military and diplomatic fortunes just as Louis’ finances and resources were stretched to, then beyond, their limits. Malplaquet thus prolonged the war rather than hastened peace. Over the winter of 1709–1710, the major powers licked their considerable wounds in Flanders while holding to existing positions and attempting little by way of offense in Germany, Italy, or Iberia. New Realities, 1710–1714 In London, the Whigs lost to the Tories as merchant and governing elites in Great Britain reconsidered the cost of a continental war that showed no sign of an early end. The Dutch, too, were reconsidering and arguing about the terms on which they might make peace. Austria still feared a smoldering rebellion in Hungary, but Vienna was determined to secure all of Spain and its possessions for “Carlos III.” Louis XIV was also ready to end the war, but not yet ready to accept the excessive and humiliating Allied demand that he must use French troops to pull Philip V, his grandson, from the Spanish throne. For five months, diplomats gathered in the Netherlands conducted the Geertruidenberg negotiations. The Allies offered to throw Philip V the gnawed old bone of Sicily. Louis offered to pay a subsidy to support an Allied army in Spain, but again refused the demand that he send French troops to deny his grandson the Spanish succession. When the negotiations floundered against these rocklike positions, weary armies across Europe shuffled out of barracks and resumed desultory fighting in the summer of 1710. Resumption of the war in Flanders was focused by Marlborough’s intention to smash the key fortresses of the inner line of the pré carré. Marlborough understood that Villars could not afford to attack the investing Allied armies as he had done the year before. As a result, Douai and Béthune fell by the end of August, along with several lesser fortresses. Fresh political winds in London then 523

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opened a door to British talks with Louis. Neither the Rhineland nor Italy saw fighting of consequence. The armies in place in Germany desiccated surrounding lands as they foraged or raised contributions, adding to the growing food and fiscal crises of the warring European states. The most important fighting took place in Spain, where Philip V initially lost in bloody battles at Almenara (July 27, 1710) and Saragossa (August 20, 1710). Along with the fall of Toledo and Philip V’s forced flight from Madrid, where Archduke Charles took up brief station as Carlos III, it looked as though the Allies had triumphed in Spain as they had in Flanders and Germany. But during the summer, negotiations in Geertruidenberg broke down, and rather than topple his grandson, Louis sent him 25,000 French reinforcements. In the interim, the population of Madrid rose against the Habsburg occupiers, and by November forced them and Charles from the city. Philip V returned to the capital on December 3, acclaimed by at least some of the population as Spain’s rightful king. Spanish and French troops pursued the fleeing Allied army, smashing its English rearguard at Brihuega on December 9. The next day, the two main armies clashed inconclusively at Villa Viciosa. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of the campaign was to chase the Allies from Madrid and Castile, and permanently alter the Spanish political landscape. This trend continued in the new year as the French took Gerona and advanced on Barcelona. This left the Allies in such a tenuous position they decided to evacuate all forces from Spain by the end of 1711. Political change was in the air nearly everywhere during 1711. Archduke Charles succeeded to the Austrian throne as Charles VI. That made his claim to also succeed to the Spanish throne even more problematic for other Great Powers than Philip V’s, as such a unified Habsburg monarchy would stretch from the Balkans through Germany, and across Italy to Iberia. How was this not as great a threat to the balance of power as a future combination of France and Spain under a single Bourbon king? While this concern worried the edges of the Grand Alliance, the decisive change which cracked the alliance open came in London where the Tories were firmly in power and looking to end the war. On October 8, the new government of Great Britain agreed to the London Preliminaries with France, settling outstanding differences in Europe and laying the basis for eventual agreement on general peace. Along the Flanders front lines, British and French armies stood down. Some opposing regiments came out of entrenchments to trade and converse. Possessing something of the nature of the 1914 “Christmas Truce” along the Western Front two centuries later, such fraternization was a clear harbinger of peace to come in 1713. Confirming that a decade of losing war had blunted Louis’ ambitions on his northern frontier, the French began work on a new set of fortified lines. Villars dubbed these the Ne Plus Ultra lines. Marlborough was able to cross this barrier via a ruse, but could not exploit that advantage because he was removed from command in January 1712, partly to clear a path for a final peace settlement between Britain and France. General talks began in Utrecht that same month. The political shock was reinforced by orders from Louis to his marshals to desist from combat against the British. Queen Anne issued similar “restraining orders” to British troops. Other powers remained at war with France, however. The Austrians 524

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reinforced their army in Flanders early in 1712 and planned a great campaign against Louis’ last line of fortified defenses. At first they advanced with Dutch and British troops at their side, all led by Eugene. In July the British suddenly withdrew from the coalition. That left plenty of Dutch, Imperial, and other German battalions still ready to make war. Villars thus had no choice but to meet this threat head-on and blunt it. His advance led to the last major battle of the war at Denain (July 13/24, 1712) and thence to rapid restoration of the French lines. A formal armistice was agreed on August 21. A separate armistice was agreed in Spain that same week. There was nothing left to do except to make peace. The War at Sea, 1701–1714 Opposing navies had resumed their familiar game on the high seas as soon as war broke out. The French resumed the guerre de course their Navy had practiced during the second half of the Nine Years’ War, prosecuting it to great effect. The privateers of Dunkirk alone brought in nearly 1,000 Allied or neutral prizes. The French effort was so effective Parliament passed the “Cruisers and Convoys Act” in 1708, specifically assigning additional warship escorts to convoy duty along the Western Approaches and off major British ports. This forced French cruisers and privateers to hunt in the West Indies, off the coast of Africa, and in other less well-defended waters. The Allies also practiced cruiser warfare and privateering against French convoys and individual merchantman. This forced the French to use some warships to escort Spanish convoys across the Atlantic and led to squadron-on-squadron fighting in the Caribbean in August 1702. Unlike the French, who cleaved to a strategy of guerre de course throughout the war, the Allies also sought to utilize their clear advantage in battlefleets to outflank the French operationally and strategically. The Allies suffered early failures at sea, however, notably their inability to take Cadiz through amphibious assault during August–September 1702. The troops were put ashore too far from the city, the officers were inept and lost control, and most of the expedition got drunk and began looting and desecrating Catholic churches (perhaps consciously recalling the tradition of Francis Drake). On the return journey, English escorts surprised the Spanish silver fleet and their French escorts at Vigo Bay (October 12/23, 1702). The Allies missed most of the silver, but captured or destroyed 12 rated French warships and 19 Spanish vessels. The outcome of the fight and the prospect of more amphibious assaults into Iberia helped persuade Portugal to switch to the Grand Alliance. The next year, England formally detached Portugal from its French alliance, signed the Methuen Treaties, and secured at Lisbon a base of operations for the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. An Anglo-Dutch amphibious operation failed to take Barcelona in June 1704. On its return journey, it took Gibraltar instead. That led to the only fleet action of the war, off Velez-Málaga (August 13/24, 1704). Although the French won a tactical victory, operationally the battle blocked them from retaking Gibraltar, thereby inflicting a major wound. Afterward, the French Navy and privateers cleaved to an effective and lucrative guerre de course: in the last decade of the war, the French took over 4,500 Allied prizes on the high seas, and sank or burned hundreds more Allied or neutral ships. French squadrons, usually under 525

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private loan if not privateer command, also raided and extorted various overseas outposts from West Africa to the Caribbean (and later, against Rio de Janeiro in 1711). An English squadron attacked a Spanish treasure fleet in the West Indies in 1708, intercepting or sinking the equivalent of £15 million of bullion. Meanwhile, the Allies moved troops by sea into the Mediterranean from the north, as dominance at sea enabled them to sustain armies fighting in Spain. In 1704 an Anglo-Dutch fleet escorted 8,000 Redcoats and 4,000 Dutch to Spain, where they joined 30,000 Portuguese fighting Philip V ostensibly for the Grand Alliance. An Anglo-Dutch fleet parked off Barcelona for two years after an amphibious operation finally captured that city on September 28/October 9, 1705. The French Mediterranean squadron and fortified city of Toulon was bombarded, burned, and besieged from July 28–August 22, 1707. The French sank or burned 15 of their ships-of-the-line at anchor rather than see them captured or burned by Allied bombardment. However, the blockade had the principal effect of provoking an even large French commitment in Iberia. By 1708 Parliament authorized, and the Royal Navy transported, 29,395 men to campaign in Spain. That did not prevent a decisive defeat of the British at Almanza in April 1707. Sardinia fell to Allied marines in August, providing a potential naval base in the western Mediterranean close to France. Minorca was taken shortly thereafter, along with its superb harbor at Mahón. Once the Allied naval blockade of Barcelona was lifted at British behest, the end came into sight for Archduke Charles in Spain. Among the last significant actions involving sea power was a failed British expedition to take Québec mounted in 1711. It was a poorly planned disaster. Peace, 1713–1714 News of the start of Louis’ latest war had reached Moscow while Peter I was still scrambling to recover from the capital injury inflicted on a Russian army by Karl XII of Sweden at Narva (November 19/30, 1700). In desperate need of time and distraction to rebuild, the young tsar wrote excitedly to an adviser about the French war: “Long may it last! God willing.” And so it did. The last of Louis’ serial wars engulfed Europe for over a decade, engaging huge armies, requiring enormous expense, and ravaging many lands: deaths in battle, sieges, and in armies on the march may have exceed 1.25 million, with millions more dead or displaced by war-aggravated famine, economic dislocations, and what today would be called “ethnic cleansing.” And of course, the war witnessed most other usual and expected sufferings of civilians in wartime. The effort broke the French treasury, and the outcome spoiled more than a half century of personal and dynastic ambition by Louis XIV, rolling back nearly all his earlier territorial gains. It left France shrunken on all frontiers from the markers of Louis’ grandest expansions, though it did not much affect some territorial issues that already had been settled by the Nine Years’ War. The Grand Alliance was not in much better shape than France by the end of 1712. It was so divided that there was no chance for agreement on a single, allencompassing treaty. Instead, formal terms of peace were codified in a series of treaties beginning with two, generally referred to jointly as the Treaty of Utrecht (April 11, 1713), moving on to the Treaty of Rastadt (February 24/March 7, 1714), and closing with the Treaty of Baden (August 27/September 7, 1714). 526

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The overall settlement these effected approximated the terms of the partition treaties agreed by William III and Louis XIV in 1698 and 1699, with no party fully satisfied and all making major concessions, as befit a peace of mutual exhaustion. Philip V was confirmed as king of Spain, but the Bourbon thrones of France and Spain were formally separated. The rest of the Spanish succession was divided in the first real effort to consciously create a balance of power system in Europe. Catalan rebels in control of Barcelona ensured that was the last city in Europe at war, until it fell in September 1714. From the old French king’s perspective, Louis had succeeded in placing a grandson on the throne of Spain. Arguably, the war forestalled territorial encirclement of France by the Habsburgs, though that was always more a shared chimera in Paris and Vienna than a real strategic threat. On the other side of the scales, France was bankrupt and exhausted from war. Its northern frontier was breached, and its southern provinces had seen open rebellion. Overseas, it lost territory on several continents. Over the course of the coming decades, it would lose much more. Great Britain emerged as the major winner, expanding overseas holdings as a basis for a true commercial empire even as continental powers fought to strategic standstill. The British gained much in North American at the expense of the viability of New France, and secured vital naval bases in the Mediterranean and lesser ones in the West Indies. The Habsburgs gained much territory, taking control of the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, and Sardinia, even though for years Charles VI seethed on his throne in Vienna about the loss of a throne in Madrid. The United Provinces gained a measure of security vis-à-vis France that would last three more decades, cushioning a permanent decline from Great Power status they had clearly already entered by 1714. The major outcome of the war was to set a Bourbon on the Spanish throne by general agreement. That established a lasting dynastic tie between Spain and France that would keep those powers allied for most of the 18th century. It also signified, or rather confirmed, that Spain had fallen precipitously from the ranks of the Great Powers, into at best a position of middle rank. See also Barrier Treaty, Third (November 4/15, 1715); Berwick, Duke of; Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710); King William’s War (1689–1697); Marbella, Battle of (Mach 10, 1705); Methuen Treaties; Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). Suggested Reading: Steven Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650–1702 (1966); David Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander (1973); David Francis, The First Peninsular War, 1702–1713 (1975); John B. Hattendorf, England in the War of the Spanish Succession (1987); Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715 (1969); John A. Lynn, Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1992). War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681). See Banner system; China; Green Standard Army; Kangxi emperor; Wu Sangui; Zunghar Mongols. warrant officer. An Army or Navy officer who held his rank by virtue of a warrant rather than a royal commission. Most often, he was a staff officer or functional officer appointed by a regiment’s colonel or a ship’s captain. Warrant officer rank was most frequently awarded to chaplains and surgeons, but also to 527

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some corporals, sergeants, and most quartermasters. The distinction between a commission and a warrant was more or less a consequence of administrative happenstance, but it evolved later to have meaningful social and professional significance, with warrants coming to be identified with lower-born officers, who made their living in command at sea but who were not seen as “natural” in the role. See also ranks (at sea). Warsaw, Battle of (July 28–30, 1656). By the numbers involved, this was a colossal, three-day fight during the second campaign of the Second Northern War (1655–1660). Measured by casualties, it was a much smaller affair: Polish losses were about 1,000 cavalry and 600 infantry, while the Allies lost about 700 killed and wounded, though these numbers are often greatly swollen in various nationalist retellings of the battle. The Polish Army under John II Casimir numbered 25,000 regulars, from 10,000–13,000 noble levies, and 2,000 Tatar allies. Of these troops, barely 4,500 were infantry. Many of the peasants who rallied to Casimir were half trained at best, while his noble levies were as they always had been: ill disciplined and haughty. The Poles were also under-gunned. Nevertheless, Casimir ferried some troops across the Vistula to attack along the right bank of the river, while others were ordered to advance against the Swedes along the left bank. Karl X commanded an allied force of 18,000 men, about equally divided between Swedes and Brandenburgers. These troops were well-trained and well-armed professionals, and they had far more big guns. Interestingly, this army also was predominantly cavalry and dragoons: some 12,000 horse soldiers were divided into 60 squadrons, supported by only 5,500 infantry divided among 15 brigades. On the first day, Karl took the offensive by attacking Polish infantry entrenched along a narrow neck of land on the right bank. The attack failed to dislodge the Poles. On the 29th, he used cavalry to screen a risky maneuver by his own infantry, which he wheeled left through wooded terrain. He was established in a new position before the Poles could attack, but they did anyway, sending in 800 hussars while the weaker but more numerous Pancerna cavalry held back. The charge was brave but unsuccessful, as Karl deployed his SwedishBrandenburg horse in three lines. The hussars broke through the first two Allied lines, but were counter charged by the third. Casimir withdrew his forces, admitting defeat and abandoning Warsaw for the second time in 12 months. The Allies entered Warsaw the next day. The Battle of Warsaw was notable for a Swedish emphasis on deploying cavalry when fighting in Poland, something the Swedes had learned from earlier defeats at Polish hands. But it was not close to being a decisive battle and did not determine the outcome of the war. Warsaw Confederation. See Augustus II; Great Northern War (1700–1721). Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). See Act of Union (March 4/15, 1707); Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Anglo-Spanish War 1655–1660); artillery; Ayscue, George; barracks; Blake, Robert; British Army; British establishment; Cavaliers; Charles II; Cromwell, Oliver; cruiser; culverin-drake; drill; Dunbar, 528

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Battle of (September 3, 1650); England; flags; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Ireland; Jacobites; James II; Leslie, David; Monk, George; New Model Army; Royal Navy; Rupert, Prince; Sandwich, Earl of; Scottish lock; war finance; Wild Geese; William III. watches. On land: during a siege, a fortress commander greatly increased the number of sentries by dividing the garrison into three rotating watches: one manning the ramparts, one ready to repel a sudden assault, and one at rest or sleeping in deep shelters. Camp commanders also set sentries to watch for enemy scouts or probes and to warn against surprise attack. At sea: the Royal Navy established a system of seven ships’ watches, or divisions of the day and night (or nautical day), with each watch divided into various parts of the ship. Seamen and petty officers stood watches. Idlers were non-seamen, whether officers or crew, who worked in the day but slept at night and were not obliged to stand watches. water. See batardeau; ditch; logistics; military medicine; rations; water line; water maneuvers. water line. The line of terrain in the United Provinces running from Muiden on the Zuider Zee, through Bodegraven to Gorcum on the Waal. It was the last line of Dutch defense, including the capability of opening sluices and breaking dikes to flood the country in advance of any approaching enemy—invariably, the French. The key was Muiden, which was saved from the French in the desperate opening campaign of the Dutch War (1672–1678) by rushing in troops just two hours before the enemy arrived. water maneuvers. Flooding the ditch or other defended area by means of sluices to divert a river into the ditch, or breaking a batardeau to release a long pent-up stream. This was done to wash out saps and causeways built during the enemy’s descent of the ditch. On a grander scale, the Dutch broke dikes and flooded polders when facing French armies during the early Dutch War (1672–1678), and did so again in later conflicts. The French flooded parts of occupied Flanders as they withdrew during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). See also water line. weapons. See artillery; bayonets; belaying pin; boarding axe; boarding pike; bomb; caltrop; camouflet; cannon; cannon of seven; carcass; carronade; chase gun; Coehoorn mortar; countermine; culverin; culverin-drake; cutlass; demiculverin; flintlock firearms; fougasse; globe of compression; great gun; grenades; hanger; infernal machine; matchlock; mines/mining; miquelet; mortar; musketoon; perrier; petard; pike; pistol shot; priming powder; saucisson; Scottish lock; ship-smashers; shot; snaphance; swivel gun; truck; wall-piece; wheel lock. wear. To change course in a ship of sail by tacking one way, then another, before the wind. An alternate meaning was to fly or “wear” a distinctive ship’s flag. See also military discipline. 529

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weather, effects on military operations of. See Dutch War (1672–1678); flintlock firearms; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Great Northern War (1700–1721); logistics; Ottoman warfare; Tatars; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); winter quarters. weather gauge. Assuming the windward position in relation to another fleet or ship. Running on a following wind was critical in fighting among ships of sail as it permitted the attacker to bear down at speed on the enemy, fire broadside guns, then turn away to reload while firing rear-facing chase guns. As a result, hours or days might be spent before a fleet action in seeking to gain the weather gauge, and thereafter to keeping it or disputing it. See also leeward and windward gauges. weatherly. Said of a ship of sail that handled well; that is, tended to drift off course very little when hauled close. Wehlau-Bromberg, Treaties of (September 19/November 6, 1657). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660). Werki, Battle of (October 1658). See Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). Western Design. A strategy of Oliver Cromwell which was the first use of England’s naval power to support overseas (as opposed to Irish) colonization, though most immediately its purpose was to intercept Spanish treasure fleets as a means of solving England’s fiscal crisis. Cromwell dragooned thousands of Irish as forced laborers and transported them to the Bahamas, along with 3,600 English regulars sent to seize other Caribbean colonies. The troops landed off target and without potable water outside Santo Domingo, where they were ambushed and routed by hundreds of locals (“vaqueros”). The English ships cruelly bombarded the city, which fought back well, then re-embarked survivors of the New Model Army’s destroyed “sea regiment.” The most tangible success of the Western Design was the dubious acquisition of Jamaica for an expanding English empire. Cromwell wrongly believed New Englanders and other English colonists would relocate to Jamaica, with its superior climate and economic prospects. That delusion brought little return on the immediate investment, but helped shape long-term public opinion in favor of overseas settlements. The Western Design caused the United Provinces to fear Cromwell’s wider intentions—his threat to seize by force established colonies of other empires was something altogether new, but would soon grow familiar. That contributed to animosities leading to the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). When the expedition’s commanders returned to England, an angry Cromwell had them locked in the Tower of London. West Indies Company (WIC). A Dutch joint stock company devoted to trade and colonies in the West Indies. Its greatest, but fleeting, success came in Brazil, where for a time, it controlled 2,000 miles of coastline and settlements called 530

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“Netherland Brazil.” After the Portuguese retook that colony in 1654, shares of the WIC lost almost all value on the Amsterdam Exchange. The WIC recovered into the 1660s with a new overseas commercial empire, but abandoned forever its grander ambitions and strategy of colonization. It ceased to be a naval or military power and became strictly a commercial enterprise, unlike its sister corporation the Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC). The WIC maintained several small Caribbean island stations and outposts in West Africa. From the latter it conducted a profitable trade in slaves and gold. The WIC operated a monopoly of the Dutch transatlantic slave trade for several decades. Into the 1690s it dispatched three to four slave ships per year to Caribbean, and others to Guyana, Cartagena, and Panama. See also Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); asiento; United Provinces. Westminster, Treaty of (April 12/22, 1654). The peace that ended the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). Oliver Cromwell and the English negotiators insisted on a clause excluding the House of Orange from the Stadholderate or captaincy-general of the United Provinces. Jan de Witt agreed to repress publication of this demand in the text of the treaty, knowing it would not otherwise pass the provinces. The treaty was duly ratified with most Dutch towns and provinces unaware of the secret codicil. The States of Holland passed an Act of Exclusion on May 4. Sharp opposition led to an “exclusion crisis,” but de Witt survived that and a surge of Orangist sentiment, while blocking exaggerated English naval and commercial claims. Holland subsequently revoked the Act of Exclusion and undertook to educate the young William III (then still Prince of Orange) for the Stadholderate and other high offices. Other terms included United Provinces’ agreement to pay compensation for the Amboina massacre of 10 British East India Company (EIC) employees in 1623, and grudging acceptance of the Channel salute demanded by the English doctrine of sovereignty of the sea. The United Provinces acknowledged—but did not genuinely accept— the first Navigation Act (1651). Cromwell was criticized by some London merchants for being too lenient. His motives were principally nationalist but also at least partly religious: he wished to end the Dutch war so that he could launch an anti-Catholic war against Spain, the Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660). Westminster, Treaty of (February 9/19, 1674). The peace that ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674). The treaty permitted William III (then still Prince of Orange) and the United Provinces to concentrate on the bigger fight on land and at sea with Louis XIV, who was conducting ferocious aggression during the first phase of the Dutch War (1672–1678). The peace did not disengage English regiments then fighting alongside the French on the continent, but it freed Dutch naval resources for the war against France and limited further English participation in the Dutch War. Among other territorial concessions, New York was returned to English control. Westphalia, Peace of (1648). See Alsace; Austrian Empire; Denmark; Dover, Treaty of (May 12/22, 1670); Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685); France; 531

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Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659); Fredrik III; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Fronde (1648–1653); Holy Roman Empire; Louis XIV; Mazarin, Jules; Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Prussia; Rheinbund; Spain; Sweden; War of the Reunions (1683–1684). wheel lock. The expertise of clockmakers was drawn upon to replace the matchlock with the first non-match firing device: the wheel lock, in which a small wheel was wound and locked in place against a piece of pyrite. Release of a spring by the trigger spun the wheel so that friction raised sparks from the pyrite and ignited fine powder in the pan, which then set off the main charge in the breech. The main drawbacks were excessive delicacy and expense of skilled manufacture. Prototypes appeared by 1505, and wheel lock carbines and pistols saw field service by the 1520s. Wheel locks were extensively used by European cavalry from the mid-16th century (it never prospered beyond Europe). The wheel lock never achieved the rate of fire of the matchlock, despite several experiments with self-spanning and even repeating wheel lock rifles with multiple magazines. The latter saw some limited action with the Danish Army during the siege of Copenhagen in 1658–1659 and again during fighting with Sweden in the 1670s. The wheel lock was displaced around the middle of the 17th century in all Western militaries once the flintlock musket and pistol became reliably available. Only in Germany did wheel locks survive another century, and even there only as hunting and sports shooting weapons. Whigs. See Barrier Treaty, First (October 18/29, 1709); East India Company; England; James II; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Great Britain; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III. Wild Geese. Irish Catholic mercenaries served in various foreign armies from the 16th century, when English and Scottish Protestant armies devastated Ireland and drove many Gaelic Irish off their land. Disinherited and disenfranchised Irish soldiers, or just military adventurers, were popularly known as “Wild Geese” from the legend that Celtic souls returned to Ireland in that form after death on some foreign field. They served in several foreign armies during the 17th and 18th centuries. Irish units formed a small but permanent part of Spanish armies from the 1580s, their numbers swelling greatly following the “Flight of the Earls” and the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. The sons of Hugh O’Neill (Earl of Tyrone), served as captains in all-Irish units many years after the failure of their father’s rebellion. As many as 5,000 Irishmen on average each year fought the Dutch in Flanders for Spain during the latter part of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). A fresh wave of 22,500 Irish emigrated to Spain from 1641–1654, during the upheavals of the “Great Rebellion” and Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). Irish enlistment in French service dates to the mid-1630s, with 532

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recruitment swelling after defeat of most Catholic forces in Ireland by 1651. The Brigade Royal Irlandais was the most famous Irish unit in French service. During the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) some 30,000 Irish enlisted in the Spanish Army. Another 10,000 “Wild Geese” served in the French Army in the 1690s, commanded by General Patrick Sarsfield. These Royal Irlandais fought at Chiari (September 1/12, 1701), and spearheaded a counterattack into the English lines at Blenheim (August 2/13, 1704). The Austrians employed 10,000 Irish in the 1690s, mainly to fight the French. Irish troops also served in large numbers in British regiments in Marlborough’s armies. That meant Irish soldiers sometimes fought and killed their own countrymen, each regiment or brigade in service to a different foreign king. This happened at Cremona (February 1, 1702). It happened again when Prince Eugene’s Austrian and Prussian regiments and Marlborough’s Redcoats arrived at Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709). Men of the Royal Irlandais met and fought the British 18th Regiment of Foot, or Royal Irish, in the middle of the bloodiest field in European history prior to the Napoleonic Wars. The Wild Geese were employed to repress the Protestant Vaudois of Piedmont and again during the revolt of the Camisards (1702–1705). Forty years later 12,000 Irish “exiles of hope” fought for France in all-Irish units. Four thousand men, still organized as the Brigade Royal Irlandais, gained a gory day of revenge against Redcoats at Fontenoy (May 11, 1745). Ever after, including during the American Civil War, all-Irish units cried “Remember Fontenoy!” as well as “Erin go Braugh!” when charging into combat. William III (1650–1702). Prince of Orange; great-grandson of William the Silent; Stadholder of Holland, 1672–1702; king of England, 1689–1702; king of Scotland, 1689–1702. He led the United Provinces through decades of conflict with Louis XIV, starting with his appointment to the captaincy-general in July 1672 when an Orangist revolution ushered him into power and murdered his great opponent Jan de Witt by mob action. Though just 22 years old at the beginning of the Dutch War (1672–1678), William led the United Provinces militarily and politically from mid-1672, bringing them out of the catastrophe of French invasion and a three-year occupation to recovery by 1675, then to a qualified victory in 1678. Among many fights in that war, he saw action at Seneffe (August 11, 1674), the siege of Grave (July–October 1674), Cassel (April 11, 1677), and more balefully, at St. Denis (August 4/14, 1678). His popularity began to wane after three years of war and privation, and from 1675 he relied more on traditional Machiavellian tools of intrigue and bribery to stay in power and to influence policy than he did on raw Orangist sentiment. He generally preferred German noble officers to any Dutch serving in his Army, feeling better able to control foreigners than republicans. From 1676 he sought alliance with England, courting Mary, daughter of James II, to that end. When rebellion broke out against James II in 1688, and as Louis XIV again threatened Cologne and thereby also the peace of Europe, William led an invasion armada across the Channel to claim the thrones of England and Scotland. On November 5/15, 1688, he landed a Protestant army at Torbay in Devon as part of the Glorious Revolution that overthrew James II. 533

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He arrived in London in mid-December, and within two months, he and Mary were proclaimed king and queen of England, and separately also of Scotland. James fled to France, where he formed a Catholic army among exiles, supporters, and mercenaries, and re-crossed to Ireland with these men and 7,000 allied French troops on ships supplied by Louis XIV. That compelled William to go to Ireland himself at the head of an army of 30,000 Dutch, English, and mercenaries. James was decisively defeated by William at the Boyne on June 1/11, 1690. Jacobites held out against him in parts of Ireland for another two years, but were beaten everywhere else in the Three Kingdoms following the Battle of Aughrim (July 12/22, 1691) and the surrender of Limerick on October 3/13, 1692. William’s victory over Catholic power in the British Isles proved permanent, as he completed the great changes wrought by the Glorious Revolution that had brought him to power. Interestingly, within the United Provinces, he proved the principal defender of the religious liberties of Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews. Meanwhile, on the continent, Louis XIV had immediately struck into the Rhineland in the fall of 1688, thinking William and the Army of the United Provinces too distracted by the invasion of Great Britain to oppose him. Through the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), William was king of England and Scotland and commander-in-chief of the armies and navies of England, Scotland, and United Provinces. However, he was no absolutist monarch. He was constrained by the Regents of Holland to a high degree in where and how he could use Dutch troops, other than for defense of the United Provinces. He was also limited by lukewarm English support for his central foreign policy focus on wars with France and, from 1697, by antipathy to his rumored homosexual affairs with favored courtiers. Despite these political difficulties, William remained the principal and most effective opponent of Louis XIV until just before United Provinces entered the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). He initially sought to avoid renewal of war with France by working out treaties with Louis in 1698 and 1699 that would have partitioned the Spanish possessions, but compromise by other states ultimately proved impossible. William died at Hampton Court on March 8/19, 1702. See also British Army; Dutch Army; Ireland; officers. Suggested Reading: Steven Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650–1702 (1966); Baxter, William III (1976); R. Hatton and J. S. Bromley, eds. William III and Louis XIV (1968). Williamite War (1689–1691). The Irish phase of the war of succession in the Three Kingdoms that was occasioned by the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). See also England; Ireland; Jacobites; James II; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); William III. wind. See Dutch War (1672–1678); flintlock firearms; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Great Northern War (1700–1721); haul close; haul wind; heave to; logistics; make sail; Ottoman warfare; shorten sail; Tatars; Vienna, siege of (July 14– September 12, 1683); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); wear; weather gage; weatherly; winter quarters. 534

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windage. The degree to which a given ship drifted laterally (leeward) under the wind; the extent of deviation of a ship from its course caused by such lateral drift. Windische border. “Slovinska krajina.” The Slavonian border of the Austrian Empire. It was comprised of frontier fortresses, watchtowers, guard posts, and fortified Grenzer or mercenary villages. It was later and better known as the “Warasdin (Varazˇdin) border.” It had a discrete local command, but shared with the Karlstadt border a Hofkriegsrat located at Graz. windward gauge. See leeward and windward gauges. winter quarters. Temporary billets or permanent barracks used by armies to wait out the winter months, when fighting ceased in many theaters of operation. See also quartiers de rafraichissement. Witt, Jan de (1625–1672). Grand Pensionary of Holland and leader of the Regents and “True Freedom” faction in sustained opposition to the political ambitions of Orangists. He and the Regents were blamed by popular opinion for the massive ship and crew losses suffered during the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654). He negotiated the Treaty of Westminster (April 12/22, 1654) which ended the war, including in it an exclusion clause denying high office to the House of Orange. He also starved the Dutch Army of funds in favor of the Dutch Navy. His purpose was partly to keep the Army weak so that it could not serve as a springboard to power for William III, then still Prince of Orange. He also forced through a series of measures that improved Dutch warship design, of which the English were not fully aware until they encountered these ships in battle during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). Until 1668 de Witt sought accommodation with France, rejecting Spanish proposals for a joint defense of the Spanish Netherlands. Louis XIV offered the Dutch statesman the usual bribe of a generous pension, but de Witt declined. He tried without success to revitalize the Franco-Dutch treaty of 1635 by offering to partition the Spanish Netherlands. When Louis rejected that idea, de Witt proposed neutralization on the Swiss model, again without persuading Louis. Unknown to de Witt, the French king was intent on annexation. De Witt remained fixated on the threat to the United Provinces from England and was utterly befuddled by Louis. He was deeply concerned with avoiding heavy military spending, especially on the Army. That required keeping France happy diplomatically, even though such efforts failed to account for Louis’ growing hostility to the United Provinces following the War of Devolution (1667–1668). De Witt accepted Louis’ cynical assurances of friendship, while hoping to satisfy him by pressing the Spanish to agree to territorial concessions in the Spanish Netherlands. Neither strategy worked. This error by de Witt greatly contributed to surprise and unpreparedness in the United Provinces at the start of the Dutch War (1672–1678). De Witt was wounded in a knife attack on June 21, 1670. He recovered, but on August 20, an incensed Orangist mob caught him and his brother, Cornelius 535

wojsko kwarciane

de Witt, in the streets of The Hague. The two men were beaten, shot, and hacked to death. Their corpses were hung upside down and mutilated, much as happened to Benito Mussolini and his unfortunate mistress in Milan in 1945, though for much different reasons. De Witt and his brother suffered the additional ferocious indignity of having parts of their corpses severed, roasted, and eaten by the mob. After the murders, there was no effective challenge to the power of William for some time. wojsko kwarciane. See Polish Army; Quarter Army. women. One of the notable changes in this period was a significant reduction in the number of women who accompanied armies in the field or at sieges (other than those trapped by necessity with defenders inside a besieged town). A principal reason for this was the superior organization of early modern states as compared to late medieval and even early 17th-century counterparts. Development of standing armies, a new ethic of paid military labor, state-issued uniforms, and especially the magazine system and field hospitals which accompanied new style armies into the field eliminated many of the traditional roles—such as digging entrenchments and gun pits, food preparation, seamstress work, and nursing duties—previously performed by women and children camp followers. This made it possible to actually forbid women from following the army, which was in fact done by Michel Le Tellier for the French Army. To ensure the rule was carried out, Le Tellier forbade French soldiers to marry. Officers were largely exempted from enforcement of this rule, and the most senior—not least Louis XIV himself—traveled to war in gilded coaches with servants, entertainers, and their mistresses alongside. Not every Army in Europe went as far as the French in forbidding marriage, but many did. The British Army discouraged marriage of soldiers, but it did not forbid wedlock. In practice, it bent to natural realities by carrying a small number of women (officially, “wives”) on regimental ration rolls in return for some work as nurses, seamstresses, and cooks. Other non-official wives lived off the books with British regiments, but they seldom if ever were allowed to travel to foreign stations. British soldiers who married overseas might chose to remain there as volunteers or settlers, with some given land grants by the state to encourage colonization and, presumably, also procreation. Others simply shipped out for home, leaving behind what were thereby revealed to have been merely wives of temporary convenience. See also Anne of Austria; Anne of Great Britain; Dutch Army; Dutch War (1672–1678); King Philip’s War (1675–1676); Marathas; Marie Thérèse; Marlborough; military labor; military medicine; skulking way of war. Worcester, Battle of (August 2, 1651). Oliver Cromwell invaded Scotland with a Roundhead army in 1651, quickly advancing to take Edinburgh. To counter, David Leslie led a Scottish army of 16,000 south into England. He was accompanied by the young Charles II, who anticipated a Royalist uprising that would escort him back onto his father’s throne. Instead, Cromwell took Perth on 536

Wu Sangui

August 2, then turned to pursue Leslie with the intention of trapping him in England. He caught the Cavaliers, who turned to stand and fight, at Worcester. Cromwell’s 20,000 veteran Roundheads faced a Royalist force that was diminished as it moved south. After a hard fight and many casualties, the Royalists surrendered. Most Scottish prisoners were forcibly deported to the West Indies as indentured laborers. As for Charles, it took six weeks of furtive flight in humiliating disguise to escape his once-and-future realm. wounds. See British Army; garrisons; impressment; Janissary Corps; military medicine; shot. Wrangel, Karl Gustaf (1613–1676). Swedish general. He first fought the Danes in 1644. He replaced Lennart Torstensson (1603–1651) in 1646 and was active in the last two years of the Thirty Years’ War alongside Turenne. They fought to victory together at Zusmarshausen (May 17, 1648) and punished Bavaria severely with depredations for reentering the war. Wrangel fought many battles against Poland under Karl X during the Second Northern War (1655–1660), invading Denmark in 1657–1658. With the return of peace he served as regent for Karl XI. He was sent to invade Brandenburg at the start of the Scanian War (1674–1679), with an undersized army that was halfhearted in its animosity at best. His army was defeated at Fehrbellin (June 18/28, 1675) by Friedrich-Wilhelm, but he was at the time too incapacitated by illness to exercise effective command. He resumed active command after the battle. See also Dutch Army. Wu Sangui (1612–1678). Ming general. General Wu Sangui was caught along the northern frontier of Ming China between anti-Ming rebels and a potential Qing invasion army. He decided to side with the Qing against the more-distant Ming emperor. Into the chaos of rebellion and Ming civil war there thus rode the huge Qing army, allowed through the Great Wall and into China proper by Wu Sangui. This army was a massive force, born of a frontier horse culture bred and organized for nothing but war; in more recent decades and years, it had been supplemented with skilled Chinese Banner troops, renegades from the Ming, or Ming prisoners of war, who knew how to take down a city and had siege equipment to do so, which the Qing lacked. General Wu marched on Beijing to capture the capital for the Qing. He drove off a rebel Ming army under Li Zicheng and buried the Chongzhen emperor (who had committed suicide within the Imperial Palace). Wu then bent to serve a new set of foreign masters. The Qing claimed the “mandate of heaven” now fell to them, and ordered Wu and other Chinese troops who had sworn allegiance to smash all remaining rebel and Ming resistance in north China. Qing armies thereafter rode south in ethnically cohesive units of Manchu, Mongol, and Han Banners. For another 17 years, from 1644–1661, fighting continued in southern China against “Ming Princes,” who were an admixture of pretenders and actual diehards or bitter-enders. From 1659 Wu was the principal Qing commander in southern China. The last of the Ming princes fled to Burma. His retainers were 537

Wyendael, Battle of

slaughtered upon arrival, and he and his family were made prisoners by the Burmese king. They were then handed over to Wu Sangui, who invaded Burma for the Qing in 1661. He had them all strangled to death. Wu had served his Qing masters well, but now he served himself. He proclaimed a new dynasty established in the south and openly rebelled against Qing rule from distant Beijing. He even advanced into central China, but was restrained by the fact that his son was held hostage by the Qing. In the end, he could not sustain the rebellion or command loyalty beyond the reach of the swords, bows, and muskets of his armies. He was thus not able to finish the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), which he had started. See also Kangxi emperor. Wyendael, Battle of (September 27, 1708). See Lille, siege of (August 14–December 10, 1708).

538

Y yacht. A light, sleek, and fast naval ship used to ferry instructions and passengers, especially flag officers, between or among ships of a squadron. yard. A long horizontal spar secured at its center to any mast on a ship and rigged to bend the sail at top or bottom, thereby spreading the canvas before the wind. A “cross-jack” or “crojack” yard (known in French as the “vergue sèche” or “barren yard”) did not set canvas of its own; it spread the foot of a square mizzen topsail. yaw. Sideways deviation of a ship from the direct course it was attempting to steer, sometimes through lack of pilot skill but more often from the normal influences of wind and water. yawl. A ship’s boat resembling a pinnace in design but considerably smaller, with just four or six oars, and hence not capable of serving as a small coastal cruiser. Yaya infantry. Originally, Beylik infantry recruited equally among Muslim and Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans employed Yaya units from the 1330s onward, with some given land in the Balkans in exchange for military service there or in the Militargrenze. Yellow Waters, Battle of (February 1648). At the start of the Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) some 3,000 Polish hussars met 10,000 rebel Cossacks in a free-wheeling cavalry battle in Ukraine. The Cossacks repulsed several badly organized attacks by outnumbered but courageous Poles, then pressed home their own wild assaults. Many Polish nobles died, while others were taken prisoner. These were herded to the Crimea and held for ransom or sold into Ottoman slavery.

Yeniçeri Ag˘asi

Yeniçeri Ag˘asi. “Commander of the Janissaries.” He was appointed by the sultan, usually from among the top graduates of one of the Palace Schools. He had the power to defy even the orders and wishes of the grand vezier. His power was limited by two things: a strong-willed sultan and the collective will of the “Divan” (council) of the Janissary Corps. There was also a technical limit to his power: in theory he commanded the Corps only when the sultan was also present. Otherwise he was subordinate to whatever favorite the sultan chose to place over him as army commander. The Yeniçeri AOasi was responsible for policing Constantinople with part of his personal guard. See also military music. York, Duke of. See James II.

540

Z Zabaraz, siege of (1649). See Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). Zaporozhian Cossacks. See Cossacks; Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654); Poltava, Battle of (June 27/July 8, 1709); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667). zarbzens. Ottoman light field guns. Weighing in at just 125 pounds, they were easily transported by packhorse or camel. Zborow, Battle of (August 16, 1649). See Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). Zeeland, First Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1673). See Schooneveld, First Battle of (May 28/June 7, 1673). Zeeland, Second Battle of (June 4/14, 1673). See Schooneveld, Second Battle of (June 4/14, 1673). Zenta, Battle of (September 1/11, 1697). At the end of the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), some 50,000 Habsburg troops were transferred east under the command of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Their task was to finish the AustroOttoman War (1683–1699), then in its 14th year. After a 10-hour forced march, in the late afternoon of September 11, 1697, Eugene caught the enemy crossing the Tisza River on a pontoon bridge north of Belgrade, at Zenta. The sultan and his sipahis cavalry had already crossed to the far bank, but most of the Janissary Corps was still on the bridge or gathered along the near bank. Eugene attacked at once. Some sipahis tried to re-cross the river to engage the Imperials, but they became entangled with Janissaries already on the bridge. Those Janissaries still fighting on the near riverbank panicked. Many tried to swim the river, but drowned under the weight of baggy, waterlogged uniforms. Some turned on their officers, killing them. On the far bank, the sultan and his entourage fled,

Zhovti Vody, Battle of

abandoning the army, its cannons, and the baggage. This defeat contributed significantly to Ottoman acceptance of the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699. Zhovti Vody, Battle of (May 5–16, 1648). See Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654). zig-zags. Approach trenches. They were dug by sappers toward the besieged fortress or town, working inward from the lines of contravallation. Approaches were dug in zig-zag pattern through the sloping glacis, to protect sappers from enfilade fire by defenders. After the reforms introduced by Vauban, they became the standard for all approaches, starting with a breach of the parapet and radiating inward from the first parallel. Each zig and zag became sharper (more acute angles) and shorter as siege engineers neared the third parallel. Although fighting sometimes took place inside zig-zags when the garrison sortied, they were not constructed as fighting positions for attackers. See also Karl XII of Sweden; sap; siege warfare. zone of servitude. An area of a fortress or fortified town in which no civilian building was permitted and any and all that accumulated there anyway were knocked down in the event of a siege. This was done to preserve sight lines and lines of fire, and to reduce danger of insult or from incendiaries. It lay beyond the glacis. Zunghar Mongols. “Dzungar Mongols.” Zungharia was a vaguely defined territory located in the modern Chinese province of Xinjiang. Before the late 17th century, it was the land of nomadic Mongol bands who roved over what was then western Mongolia. As the Ming dynasty in China began to collapse, these bands came together as the Zunghars, a new military power that immediately began to expand territorially from the backs of their war camels. Like the Manchus and other Inner Asian neighbors of China, the Zunghars raided deeper into the rich lands of the Han and established non-tributary kingdoms, or “empires,” of their own within the frontier zones. The Zunghars were additionally aided in their expansion by the fact that the main Qing armies were tied down fighting in central and southern China during the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681). During the 1670s–1680s the Zunghars began to found permanent (non-peripatetic) settlements and declared one of these their imperial capital. This did not slow their urge to expansion, at the expense of China, other Mongol bands, and Tibet. In the mid-1680s, freed of fighting in China and on Taiwan, the Kangxi emperor launched the first of what turned into a protracted series of anti-Zunghar campaigns by the Qing that took place over more than half a century. In 1696 Kangxi personally led an army of 80,000 Eight Banner and Green Standard Army troops into western Mongolia, winning a major victory at Jao Modo, south of the modern city of Ulan Bator. The Zunghar army was bereft of artillery of its own and befuddled by Chinese field pieces and heavy musket fire. This victory pushed the Zunghars back from the frontier, but did not crush them completely. 542

Zuravno (Zurawno), Treaty of

The Qing thereafter used Mongol allies to fight the Zunghars along the frontier. The Zunghars responded by adopting muskets themselves. Heavy fighting resumed in 1718 when the Qing drove the Zunghars from Tibet. Punitive expeditions were sent into Zungharia in several different years. A major Qing expeditionary force was smashed by the Zunghars in 1730, whereupon the Qing pulled their forces back from the frontier and conceded the territory de facto to the Zunghars. The Qing allowed exports and trade with the Zunghars, which concealed tribute paid by China to the wild khans of the northwest. The Qing tried to invade Zungharia again in the mid-1750s. Once more, massive Qing armies achieved tactical victories and scattered their less numerous foes but could not achieve more than a strategic stalemate. It was the decimation of Zunghar communities by a smallpox epidemic that killed 50–60% of their people that permitted the Qing to finally smash resistance in the region by 1759. Qing armies then slaughtered the remnants of the Zunghar people. Zuravno (Zurawno), Battle of (1676). See Köprülü Ahmed Fazil; Ottoman Empire; Poland; Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696). Zuravno (Zurawno), Treaty of (October 1676). The treaty that ended the Ottoman-Polish War (1672–1676). It ceded Podolia and southern Ukraine to the Ottomans but left most of the frontier with Jan Sobieski’s Poland still undetermined and unresolved. See also Köprülü Ahmed Fazil; Ottoman Empire; Poland.

543

CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR EVENTS, 1648–1721 1648

June 2–3 1649 January January 17

Peace of Westphalia ends Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) Fronde revolts begin in France (to 1653) Khmelnitsky rebellion of Cossacks begins (to 1654) Battle of Batoh

August

Prince Rupert lands at Kinsale, campaigns in Ireland Treaty of Kilkenny: alliance between Royalists and Irish Catholic rebels Cromwell lands at Dublin, campaigns in Ireland

1650 April 27

Scots Royalists lose at Carbisdale

September 3 November 5

Scots invade England, lose to Cromwell at Dunbar Royalist squadron destroyed at Cartagena

1651 March May July September 3

Waterford surrenders to Parliamentary army Prince Rupert cruises in the West Indies (to March 1653) English amphibious operation crosses the Firth of Forth Charles II and Scots army invade England, defeated at Worcester Puritan army crushes last large-scale Catholic and Gaelic forces in Ireland Wars of the Three Kingdoms end; guerrilla fighting in Ireland continues to 1653 Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan

Chronology of Major Events 1652 April May 19 August 16 September September 28–29 November 30 1653 February 18–20 March 4/14 April 20 June 2–3 July 31 October December 1654 July

Galway surrenders to Parliament; Royalist navy without any port in Ireland Battle of Dover Battle of Plymouth First Anglo-Dutch War begins Dunkirk surrenders Battle of the Kentish Knock Battle of Dungeness Battle of Portland Dutch destroy English squadron off Leghorn Prince Rupert returns to France after three years of cruising Cromwell dismisses Rump Parliament Battle of the Gabbard Battle of the Texel English naval mutinies at Chatham Cromwell named Lord Protector Treaty of Pereiaslav; Cossack lands become Muscovite protectorate Sweden invades Poland Russia invades Lithuania, starting Thirteen Years’ War (to 1667) First Anglo-Dutch War ends

1655 April May October October 17 December 1656 May July 28–30

1657 January

546

Start of Second Northern War (to 1660) English fail to capture Hispaniola English land in Jamaica Cracow falls to Swedes Treaty of Kiejdany, Januz Radziwill surrenders to Sweden Guerrilla resistance to Swedes begins in Poland-Lithuania

Russian-Swedish war begins English blockade Cadiz Battle of Warsaw Cromwell declares war on Spain

Transylvanian army invades Poland-Lithuania English destroy Spanish squadron off Santa Cruz de Tenerife Second Treaty of Vienna, Austria pledges 12,000 troops to Poland-Lithuania

Chronology of Major Events June

1658 February March June 4/14 August September 3 1659 May October November November 7 1660 February May

Danish-Swedish war begins Treaties of Wehlau and Bromberg, Brandenburg acquires sovereignty over Ducal Prussia Karl X crosses frozen waters (“The Belts”), surprise attack on Copenhagen Treaty of Roskilde, Denmark cedes Scania to Sweden Battle of the Dunes, French defeat Spanish Army near Dunkirk Karl X breaks Roskilde treaty, again attacks Denmark Cromwell dies

English occupy St. Helena Restoration of Rump Parliament English army expels Rump Parliament English navy restores Rump Parliament Treaty of the Pyrenees sets border between France and Spain

May 3 June 6 June 27

Restoration of Long Parliament of 1640 Charles II restored in London Navigation Act regulates commerce with English colonies Peace of Oliwa ends war between Sweden and Allied powers Peace of Copenhagen ends war between Sweden and Denmark Battle of Polonka; Poles defeat Muscovites

1661 March 9 June June 21 July

Mazarin dies; Louis XIV begins personal reign Ottoman offensive into southwest Hungary; Zrinvar taken Peace of Kardis ends war between Russia and Poland Ottoman offensive against Transylvania; Varad taken

1662 October

England takes control of Bombay (from Portuguese) Charles II sells Dunkirk to France

1663 September November

Ottomans in Hungary take Uyvar Ottomans in Hungary take Nograd

1664 August 1 August 10

Battle of St. Gotthard Treaty of Vasvár ends fighting in the Balkans, cedes gains to Ottomans English claim New Netherlands 547

Chronology of Major Events September 8 September 24 October December

English capture Fort Amsterdam English capture Fort Orange De Ruyter cruises to West Africa English attack Dutch squadron off Cadiz

1665 March 14 May June August

Second Anglo-Dutch War formally begins Dutch capture English convoy off Dogger Bank Battle of Lowestoft Battle of Bergen

1666 January April June 1–4 July 25–26 September 2–6 September 5 November

France declares war on England French capture St. Kitts Four Days’ Battle St. James Day Fight Great Fire of London Sultan Suleiman I dies French capture Antigua

1667 January 30 February 9 May 10 May 24 June 9–14 July August 28– September 26

Peace of Andrussovo; Muscovy gains Kiev and “left bank Ukraine” Ottomans capture Crete Treaty of Andrussovo enlarges Russia at Poland’s expense Battle of Nevis War of Devolution begins Medway Raid French invade Flanders Siege of Lille Second Anglo-Dutch War ends

548

1668 January 23 May 2

Triple Alliance forms: England, Sweden, United Provinces Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle between France and Spain

1670 May 22

Treaty of Dover

1671

Henry Morgan and buccaneers sack Panama

1672 March 17 April 6

Third Anglo-Dutch War begins with English attack on Dutch convoy Louis XIV declares war on United Provinces; Dutch War begins

Chronology of Major Events May 28/June 7 June/July August August 21

1673 May 28 June 4 June 6–30 July/August September 1674 February 9/19 June 16 July August August 11 October 4

1675 January 5

June 28 July 27 August August 11 1676 January 8 April 22 July 7–August 29 September 11 October

Battle of Solebay William III restored in Netherlands De Witte murdered by mob Battle of the Texel Mehmed IV launches Ottoman-Polish War

First Battle of Schooneveld Second Battle of Schooneveld Second Polish offensive by Mehmed IV Maastricht besieged by French Dutch capture New York VOC defeats EIC fleet off Masulipatam

Treaty of Westminster ends Third Anglo-Dutch War Battle of Sondheim (Sinzheim); Turenne is victorious Messinian revolt begins Ottomans take Polish stronghold of Ladyzn Battle of Seneffe: Condé vs. William of Orange Battle of Enzheim; Turenne is victorious Sweden invades Brandenburg, starting Scanian War (to 1679)

Battle of Türkheim; Imperial Army defeated by Turenne French fleet arrives in Sicily Papier Timbré and Bonnets Rouges revolts in France Battle of Fehrbellin; Brandenburg defeats Sweden Turenne killed in battle Ottomans reach Lwów Battle of Conzerbruke

December 14

Battle of Stromboli Battle of Augusta Siege of Maastricht Philippsburg captured by Imperials Treaty of Zuravno cedes Podolia and southern Ukraine to Ottomans, ends Ottoman-Polish war Battle of Lund; Karl XI defeats the Danes

1677 April 11

Battle of Cassel 549

Chronology of Major Events 1678 July July 5/15 July 6 August August 10 August 14 September 17

Anglo-Dutch naval alliance Battle of Malmö Battle of Rheinfeld Ottomans take Chyhyryn on the Dniepr First Treaty of Nijmegen ends Louis XIV’s Dutch War Battle of Saint-Denis; William of Orange vs. Luxembourg Second Treaty of Nijmegen ends Louis XIV’s war with Spain

1679 February 6 June

The Reunions begin (to 1684) Third Treaty of Nijmegen ends Louis XIV’s war with Austria Peace of Saint-Germain ends war among Brandenburg, Denmark, and Sweden

1681 August 5– September 5

Dragonnades begin against Huguenots Duquesne bombards Algiers

1682 March April

Luxembourg bombarded by French English treaty with Algiers

1683 June 26–August 17 Duquesne bombards Algiers a second time Austro-Ottoman War begins (to 1699) July 16– Siege of Vienna by the Ottomans; disastrous retreat to Belgrade September 12 August 31 War of the Reunions begins September 12 Battle of the Kahlenberg October 26 Spain declares war on France 1684 April 29–June 3 May 17–28 July–November August 15 1685 February 6/16

550

French besiege and bombard Luxembourg French bombard Genoa Sacra Ligua alliance besieges Buda Truce of Ratisbon Sacra Ligua alliance takes offensive against the Ottomans

July July 6/16 October 22

Death of Charles II French bombard Tripoli Fresh dragonnades against the Huguenots Battle of Sedgemoor Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes, issues Edict of Fontainbleau

1686

Louis XIV begins violent suppression of the Vaudois

Chronology of Major Events May July September 2 1687 August 12 1688 September 6 September 27– October 30 October 19 November 5 November 26 December 1688– June 1689 December 25

“Eternal Peace” signed between Poland-Lithuania and Russia League of Augsburg alliance agreed Imperial Army and Sacra Ligua capture Buda

Second Battle of Mohács; Imperials and Sacra Ligua defeat Ottomans Nine Years’ War begins (to 1697) Imperials take Belgrade French besiege Philippsburg Dutch invasion fleet blown back to port Dutch invasion fleet lands William of Orange at Torbay United Provinces declare war on France Devastation of the Palatinate James II flees England Ottomans surrender at Belgrade

1689 February 2/12 March 12/22 May 1/11 August 22 August 25

William and Mary proclaimed to succession in England James II lands in Ireland Battle of Bantry Bay Anglo-Dutch army lands in Ireland Battle of Waldcourt

1690 February 8–9 May 9–30 June 30/July 9 July 1 July 1/11 August 18 October 6/16–8/18 October 8

French attach Schenectady, New York English attack and seize Port Royal, Acadia Battle of Beachy Head Battle of Fleurus; Waldeck defeats Luxembourg Battle of the Boyne; Jacobite army in Ireland defeated Battle of Staffarda English attempt assault on Québec Ottomans retake Belgrade

1691 March 15–April 10 March 24–April 2 May July 10–11 July 16 August 19

French besiege Mons Nice besieged by Catinat English give up attempt to take Guadeloupe Barcelona bombarded François Le Tellier dies Battle of Slankamen

551

Chronology of Major Events September 1– October 13 1692 February 11/21 May 19–20 May 22–24 May 25–July 1 August 3

Anglo-French naval action off Barbados Battle of Barfleur Battle of La Hogue Namur besieged by French Battle of Steenkerke; William III defeated by Luxembourg

1693 April April 21–May 2nd June 1–13 June 17/27 July 29 September 10– October 10 October 4 November 16–19

Battle of La Marsaglia: Catinat defeats Victor Amadeus II English bombard St. Malo

1694 May–June May 27 May 29–June 10 June June 8/18 June 17–29 July–September September 17–27 October December 28

Du Casse occupies Jamaica Noailles invades Catalonia Palamós besieged by Noailles Jean Bart captures Dutch grain convoy English landing at Brest fails Gerona besieged by Noailles Anglo-Dutch bombardment of Dieppe, Le Havre, and Dunkirk Huy is besieged by William III French under d’Iberville take Fort York, Hudson Bay Death of Queen Mary II of England

1695 June 25–July 29 July July 1–September 6 August 13–16

1696 March 15–17 April 552

Siege of Limerick

Famine year in Europe English amphibious raids on Martinique French besiege Heidelberg French besiege Rosas Smyrna Convoy intercepted by Tourville Battle of Neerwinden French besiege Charleroi

Victor Amadeus besieges Casale Allies bombard St. Malo, Dunkirk, and Calais William III besieges Namur Brussels is bombarded Peter I fails to take Azov

Givet raided by Coehoorn English bombard Calais

Chronology of Major Events July August 29 1697 April May May 2 May 15–June 5 June 12–August 10 September 11 September 20

Russians take Azov Treaty of Turin; Savoy switches sides in Nine Years’ War

October 30

Karl XI dies; Karl XII succeeds to Swedish throne, age 15 English-French naval maneuvers in West Indies Cartagena de Indies raided by the French French besiege Ath Siege of Barcelona Battle of Zenta; Eugene defeats Ottomans Treaty of Ryswick ends Nine Years’ War for England, France, and United Provinces; fighting briefly continues between France and Austria Holy Roman Empire adheres to Ryswick peace

1699 January 26

Peace of Karlowitz ends Austro-Ottoman War

1700 July August 18 November 1 November 19 November 30 1701 June 12

Great Northern War begins (to 1721) Anglo-Dutch fleet twice bombards Copenhagen Peace of Travendal ; Denmark quickly exits the war Carlos II of Spain dies; Spanish succession crisis deepens Battle of Olkieniki; Sapiehas faction defeated by Lithuanian gentry Battle of Narva; Karl XII defeats Peter I of Russia

July 9 August 19 September 1 September 6/17 September 7

Act of Settlement determines eventual succession in England War of the Spanish Succession begins (to 1714) Battle of Carpi; Catinat is defeated Swedes ford Dvina, enter Courland Battle of Chiari James II dies; Louis XIV recognizes Jacobite line of succession Grand Alliance re-forms

1702 January February 1 March 8/19 April/May July 19 July 24

Sweden invades Poland-Lithuania Battle of Cremona William III dies Grand Alliance declares war on France Battle of Kliszów; Swedes defeat Polish-Saxon allied armies Revolt of the Camisards begins 553

Chronology of Major Events August–September English amphibious expedition fails to capture Cadiz English expedition attacks French settlements in Newfoundland October 12/23 Battle of Vigo Bay October 14 Battle of Friedlingen 1703 March 11 May May 16 June 16 September 20 October 3 November 15 November 26–27 1704 May 27 July July 2 July 24/August 3 August 2/13 August 13/24 November 7 December 12 1705 May 5 August 16 August 22– October 9 1706 January 4 February February 2/13, 1706 May 23 May 26 May 30 June 6 June 27 554

Battle of Siegharding Peter I begins construction of new northern capital of St. Petersburg Portugal switches sides, joins Grand Alliance Rákóczi rebellion begins in Hungary Battle of Höchstädt Victor Amadeus of Savoy switches to Grand Alliance Battle of Speyer The Great Storm destroys 12 English warships, kills 1,500

Sandomierz Confederation declares war on Sweden French capture 13 ships from English convoy Battle of Donauwörth Gibraltar falls to English Battle of Blenheim Battle of Velez-Málaga Villars campaigns against Camisards Treaty of Ilbersheim; Bavaria forced to terms Stanislaw Leszczyn´ski elected king of Poland by supporters in Sweden

Leopold I dies battle of Cassano Siege of Barcelona

Nice falls to French French raids on St. Kitts and Nevis Battle of Fraustadt; Saxon-Russian army defeated by Rehnsköld Battle of Ramillies Brussels falls to Allies Ghent falls to Allies Antwerp falls to Allies Madrid falls to Allies

Chronology of Major Events August–September September 7 September 16 September 24 October 4 October 29 1707 March 13 April 14/25 May 1/12 July 28–August 22 1708 March 13/24 June 30/ July 11, 1708 July 14 August 3 August 13/24 August 14– December 8 September 18/29 October 9 November 2/ 13, 1708 November 21 1709 February April June 27– September 3 July 8, New System July 10, New System

English take Alicante, Ibiza, and Majorca Battle of Turin Karl XII invades Saxony Treaty of Altranstädt; Augustus II abdicates in Poland, Saxony quits war Philip V enters Madrid Battle of Kalisz; Saxon-Prussian armies under Augustus II defeat Swedes

Convention of Milan Battle of Almanza Act of Union of England and Scotland forms Great Britain Siege of Toulon; city holds, but French scuttle 15 ships of the line

Jacobite invasion of Scotland fails Battle of Oudenarde; Marlborough and Eugene defeat Vendôme Battle of Holowczyn; Swedes defeat Russians Battle of Trencsén; Kuruc under Ferenc Rákóczi lose to Habsburgs Sardinia taken by Allies Siege of Lille English take Minorca Battle of Lesnaia; Peter smashes Karl XII’s supplies and reinforcements Cossack capital of Baturin sacked; 6,000 massacred Battle of Koniecpol; Leszczyn´ski (Stanislaw I) defeated Famine year in Europe St. John’s, Newfoundland, taken by French Byng fails to relieve garrison at Alicante Siege of Tournai Battle of Poltava; Karl XII routed by Peter I Remnant of Swedish Army surrenders at Perevolochna Karl XII takes refuge inside Ottoman Empire, encamps at Bender Battle of Malplaquet

August 31/ September 11, 1709 October–December French capture several English ships-of-the-line November Danish army lands in Scania

555

Chronology of Major Events 1710 March 9–July 20 June July 27 August 20 September 21 October 1/12 December 9 December 10 1711 April 17/28 May–August August 5 September 11– November 13 October 8

1712 January 29

Joseph I dies; succeeded by Archduke Charles as Charles VI Walker expedition against Canada fails, with losses of ships and men Marlborough slips through Ne Plus Ultra Lines French occupy Rio de Janeiro London Preliminaries agreed between Great Britain and France Louis XIV orders end to fighting with British

July 24 August 21 November 7 December 20

Peace conference opens at Utrecht Queen Anne issues restraining orders to British troops on continent Battle of Denain Formal armistice agreed among France, Great Britain, and Spain Formal armistice agreed between France and Portugal Battle of Gadesbusch; Swedes defeat Danish-Saxon army

1713 March 14 April 11–13 May 26 June 11–August 19

Formal armistice agreed between France and Savoy Two Treaties of Utrecht agreed Swedes capitulate to Danes at Tønning Villars besieges Landau

1714 March 7 July 7– September 12 July 27 August 1/12 556

Preliminary negotiations at Geertruidenberg British defeat French assault on Sardinia Battle of Almenara Battle of Saragossa Grand Alliance retakes Madrid; Philip V arrives on December 3 British regulars and New England militia take Port Royal, Acadia Battle of Brihuega Battle of Villa Viciosa

Treaty of Rastadt Siege of Barcelona Battle of Hangö; Swedish fleet defeated by Russians under Fedor Apraxin Death of Queen Anne; succession of George I

Chronology of Major Events 1715

June 14–30 August 20/ September 1 September December

Karl XII travels through Germany in disguise Prussia declares war on Sweden Hanover declares war on Sweden Franco-Spanish amphibious force takes Minorca Louis XIV dies Second Austro-Ottoman War begins (to 1718) Jacobite rising in Scotland James II lands in Scotland Karl XII takes over defense of Straslund; city falls

1718

Great Britain declares war on Sweden Karl XII killed during siege of Fredrikshald (Fredriksten) in Norway

1719

Russian galley fleet raids Finnish and Swedish coasts First Treaty of Stockholm: Sweden and Hanover Treaty of Vienna: Austria and Great Britain form secret antiRussian pact

January 5 1720 June 14 July 16/27

Second Treaty of Stockholm: Sweden, Great Britain, and Brandenburg-Prussia Peace of Frederiksborg: Sweden and Denmark Battle of Grengham, Russian naval victory over Sweden

1721 August 30/ Treaty of Nystad ends Russian-Swedish phase of Great Northern September 10, 1721 War

557

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Contemporary Sources and Published Documents Alderfelt, G. Military History of Charles XII. 3 vols. (1740). Berwick, Duke of. Memoirs of the Duke of Berwick. 2 vols. (1779). Bland, Humphrey. Treatise of Military Discipline (1727). Corvoisier, André. Les Français et l’armée sous Louis XIV (1975). Coxe, W. C., ed. Memoirs of John, Duke of Marlborough. 3 vols. (1905). Dreyss, Charles, ed. Mémoires de Louis XIV pour l’instruction du dauphin. 2 vols. (1860). Frey, Linda, and Michael Frey, eds. The Treaties of the War of the Spanish Succession (1995). Gardiner, S., and C. T. Atkinson. The First Dutch War. 6 vols. Navy Records Society (1905–1930). Gordon, P. Passages from the Diary of General Patrick Gordon, 1635–1699 (1859). Hatton, Ragnhild, ed. Captain James Jeffreyes Letters to the Secretary of State, Whitehall, From the Swedish Army, 1707–1709 (1954). LeBlond, Guillaume. Eléments de la guerre des sièges (1970). ———. Treatise of Artillery (1746). Mallet, Alain M. Les Travaux de Mars. 3 vols. (1691–1696). Montecuccoli. Mémoires sur l’art militaire (1760). Rycaut, Paul. The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668). ———. History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the Year 1677 (1687). Shirley, John. The History of Wars in Hungary (1685). Snyder, Henry, ed. The Marlborough-Goldolphin Correspondence. 3 vols. (1975). Sonnino, Paul, ed. and trans. Mémoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin (1970). T’Foff, B. van, ed. Correspondence, 1701–1711, of John Churchill and Anthony Heinsius (1951). Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre de. Oeuvres Militaire du Maréchal de Vauban (1794). ———. Mémoires Inédite du Maréchal de Vauban (1841). ———. L’Intendance de Champagne à la fin du XVIIe siècle: édition critique des Mémoires (1983). ———. A Manual of Siegecraft and Fortification. G. A. Rothrock, trans. (1968). Villars, Claude Louis. Mémoires du maréchal de Villars. 5 vols. (1884–1895).

Select Bibliography Journals Archivum Ottomanicum English Historical Review International History Review International Journal of Turkish Studies Journal of Military History Mariner’s Mirror Mediterranean Historical Review Military Affairs Russian Review Scandinavian Journal of History Turcica War in History World History Bulletin XVIIIe siècle General Histories Cambridge History of Africa. 8 vols. J. D. Fage and Roland Oliver, gen. eds. (1975–1986). Cambridge History of Islam. 2 vols. P. M. Holt et al., eds. (1970). Cambridge History of Latin America. Leslie Bethell, ed. (1984–1995). Cambridge History of Modern France. 8 vols. (1983–1993). Cambridge History of the British Empire. 2nd edition (1963). Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary. J. O. Thorne, ed. New edition (1961, revised 1963). New Cambridge History of India. Gordon Johnson, gen. ed. (1987–). Oxford History of Britain. Kenneth O. Morgan, ed. Revised edition (2001). Oxford History of India. Percival Spear, ed. 4th edition (1981). Oxford History of Islam. John Esposito, ed. (1999). Oxford History of Italy. George Holmes, ed. (1997). Oxford History of the American People. Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (1965; 1994). Oxford History of the British Empire. 2 vols. William Roger Lewis, ed. (1998). Weapons, Sieges, and Land Battles Barker, Thomas M. Double Eagle and Crescent: Vienna’s Second Turkish Siege (1967). Blackmore, Howard. British Military Firearms, 1650–1850 (1994). Blanchard, Anne. Vauban (1996). Blomfield, Reginald. Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, 1633–1707 (1971). Chotard, K. Louis XIV, Louvois, Vauban, et les Fortifications du Nord de la France (1890). Creasy, Edward. Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851; 1994). Davis, Paul K. Besieged: 100 Great Sieges from Jericho to Sarajevo (2001). Duffy, Christopher. The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1660–1789 (1985). ———. Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare, 1660–1860 (1975). Englund, P. The Battle of Poltava: The Birth of the Russian Empire. P. Hale, trans. (1992). Fox, Frank. A Distant Storm: The Four Days’ Battle of 1666 (1996). Hebbert, F. J., and G. A. Rothrock. Soldier of France: Sèbastien LePrestre de Vauban, 1633–1707 (1990). Jackson, Melvin, and Carel de Beer. Eighteenth Century Gunfounding (1973). Lazard, Pierre. Vauban, 1633–1707 (1934). 560

Select Bibliography Melagari, Vezio. The Great Military Sieges (1972). Naulet, Frédéric. L’Artillerie Française (1665–1765): Naissance d’une Arme (2002). Noseworthy, Brent. Anatomy of Victory: Battle Tactics, 1689–1763 (1990). Ostwald, James. Vauban under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession (2007). Pratt, Fletcher. The Battles that Changed History (1956). Reid, William. The Lore of Arms: A Concise History of Weaponry (1984). Sautai, Maurice. La Bataille de Malpaquet (1910). Stoye, J. The Siege of Vienna. 2nd edition (2000). Weigley, Russell. The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (2004). War in Asia Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyan. The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (1998). Aziz, Abdul. The Mansabdari System and the Mughal Army (1950). Boxer, C. R., ed. Portuguese Commerce and Conquest in Southern Asia, 1500–1750 (1985). ———. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (1969). Early, Abraham. The Mughal Throne (2003). Gommans, J. L. Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500–1700 (2002). Graff, David, and Robin Higham, eds. A Military History of China (2002). Hsu, Immanuel. The Rise of Modern China. 4th edition. (1990). Hucker, Charles. China’s Imperial Past (1975). Gordon, S. Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in 18th-Century India (1994). Kessler, Lawrence. K’ang hsi and the Consolidation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661–1684 (1978). Kishore, Brij. Tara Bai and Her Times (1965). Kolff, Dirk. Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy (1990). Lawson, Philip. The East India Company (1993). Paludan, Ann. Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors (1998). Pinch, William. Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006). Rawski, Evelyn. The Last Emperors (1999). Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire (1995; 2001). Spence, Jonathon. Emperor of China (1974). ———. Treason by the Book (2001). ———. The Search for Modern China (1990). Spence, Jonathon, and John Wills. From Ming to Ch’ing (1979). Toby, R. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan (1984). Totman, Conrad. Early Modern Japan (1993). Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 6th edition. (2000). War in the Americas Aytoun, James. Redcoats in the Caribbean (1984). Chet, Guy. Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast (2003). Drake, James D. King Philip’s War (1999). Eccles, W. J. The French in North America, 1500–1783 (1998). Ellis, George William. King Philip’s War (1906; 1980). 561

Select Bibliography Elliot, J. H., ed. The Hispanic World: Civilization and Empire, Europe and the Americas, Past and Present (1991). ———. Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (1964; 1970). Gibson, Charles. Spain in America (1966). Hamilton, E. P. The French and Indian Wars (1962). Leckie, Robert. A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars (1999). Lepore, Jill. The Name of War (1998). Malone, Patrick. The Skulking Way of War (1991). Starkey, Armstrong. European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1815 (1998). White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991). War in the East Articles Inalcik, H. “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700.” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980). Ingo, C. W. “Guerrilla Warfare in Early Modern Europe: The Kuruc War, 1703–1711,” in B. Kiraly and G. Rothenberg, eds. War and Society in East Central Europe (1979). Levy, A. “Contribution of Zaporozhian Cossacks to Ottoman Military Reform.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6 (1982). Murphey, Rhoads. “Ottoman Resurgence in the 17th Century Mediterranean.” Mediterranean Historical Review 8 (1990). Perjés, G.“Army Provisioning, Logistics and Strategy in the Second Half of the 17th Century.” Acta Historica Acad. Scient. Hungaria 16 (1970). Books Bak, Janos, and R. Király, eds. From Hunyadi to Rákóczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary (1982). Christensen, S. Violence and the Absolutist State: Studies in European and Ottoman History (1990). Cook, M. A., ed. A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730 (1976). Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland (1981). Friedrich, K. The Other Prussia: Poland, Prussia, and Liberty, 1569–1772 (2000). Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (2002). Gordon, Linda. Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the 16th Century Ukraine (1983). Hochedlinger, Michael. Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797 (2003). Inalcik, H., and Quaterert, Donald, eds. An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (1994). Inalcik, H. The Ottoman Empire (1978). Ingrao, Charles. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1848 (1994). Majewski, Weislaw. The Polish Art of War in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1982). Manning, Clarence. Hetman of Ukraine: Ivan Mazeppa (1957). McNeill, William. Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (1964). Nouzille, J. Histoire de la Frontières: l’Autriche et l’empire Ottoman (1991). O’Brien, C. Bickford. Muscovy and the Ukraine (1963). Okey, Robin. The Habsburg Monarchy (2000). O’Rourke, Shane. Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (2000). 562

Select Bibliography Parvev, I. Habsburgs and Ottomans between Vienna and Belgrade (1995). Roider, Karl. Austria’s Eastern Question, 1700–1790 (1982). Rothenberg, G. The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (1960). Sugar, P., P. Hanack, and T. Frank, eds. A History of Hungary (1991). Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Ottomans (1993). War in the North Articles Hellie, R. “The Petrine Army: Continuity, Change and Impact.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 8 (1974). Jespersen, K. J. V. “Absolute Monarchy in Denmark.” Scandinavian Journal of History 12 (1987). ———. “The Rise and Fall of the Danish Nobility, 1600–1800,” in H. M. Scott, ed. The European Nobilities in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1995). ———. “The Machtstaat in 17th Century Denmark.” Scandinavian Journal of History 10 (1985). Lind, G. “Military and Absolutism: The Army Officers of Denmark-Norway as a Social Group and Political Factor, 1660–1848.” Scandinavian Journal of History 12 (1987). Lindegren, Jan. “The Swedish ‘Military State,’ 1560–1720.” Scandinavian Journal of History 10 (1985). ———. “The Swedish Nobility, 1600–1772,” in H. M. Scott, ed. The European Nobilities in the 17th and 18th Centuries (1995). Stevens, C. B. “Evaluating Peter’s Military Forces,” in A. Cross, ed. Russia in the Reign of Peter the Great (1998). Upton, A. F. “The Riksdag of 1680 and the Establishment of Royal Absolutism in Sweden,” English Historical Review 403 (1987). Books Andersson, Ingvar. A History of Sweden (1975). Alderfelt, G. Military History of Charles XII (1740). Anderson, Matthew S. Peter the Great (1978). Anisimov, E. V. The Reforms of Peter the Great (1993). Cracraft, James, ed. Peter the Great Transforms Russia (1991). Cross, A., ed. Russia in the Reign of Peter the Great (1998). Duffy, Christopher. Russia’s Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power, 1700–1800 (1981). Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998). Fedorowicz, J. A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864 (1982). Frost, Robert. The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (2000). ———. After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War (1993). Fuller, W. C. Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (1992). Keep, John L. H. Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (1985). Kirby, D. Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World, 1492–1772 (1990). Kirchner, W. The Rise of the Baltic Question (1954). LeDonne, John. Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (2004). Lieven, Dominic. Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (2001). Lisk, J. The Struggle for Supremacy in the Baltic, 1600–1725 (1967). 563

Select Bibliography Oakley, S. War and Power in the Baltic, 1560–1790 (1992). Roberts, Michael. From Oxenstierna to Charles XII (1991). Rystad, G., ed. Sweden’s Age of Greatness, 1632–1718 (1973). ———. The Swedish Imperial Experience, 1560–1718 (1979). ———. Sweden as a Great Power, 1611–1697 (1968). Rystad, G., et al., eds. In Quest of Trade and Security: The Baltic in Power Politics, 1500–1990 (1994). Stevens, C. B. Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (1995). Stiles, A. Sweden and the Baltic, 1523–1721 (1992). Stone, David R. A Military History of Russia from Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya (2006). Upton, A. F. Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (1998). War in the West Articles Corvisier, André. “Les Généraux de Louis XIV et leur origine sociale.” XVIIIe siècle, 42:3 (1959). Dickson, P., and John Sperling. “War Finance, 1689–1714.” New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 4 (1970). Ekberg, C. J. “The Great Captain’s Greatest Mistake: Turenne’s German Campaign of 1673.” Military Affairs 41:3 (1980). Lynn, John A. “Recalculating French Army Growth during the Grand Siècle, 1610–1715,” in C. Rogers, ed. The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (1995). ———. “The trace italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case.” Journal of Military History (1991). ———. “A Brutal Necessity? The Devastation of the Palatinate, 1688–1689,” in Mark Grimsley and Clifford Roger, eds. Civilians in the Path of War (2002). Morris, William O’Connor. “Villars.” English Historical Review 8:29 (January 1893). Perjés, Géza. “Army Provisioning, Logistics and Strategy in the Second Half of the 17th Century.” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 16 (1970). Roosen, William. “Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession,” in Jeremy Black, ed. Origins of War in Early Modern Europe (1987). Sahlins, Peter. “Natural Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the 17th Century.” American Historical Review 95:5 (1990). Storrs, C., and H. M. Scott. “The Military Revolution and the European Nobility, 1600–1800.” War in History 3 (1996). Thompson, Mark. “Louis XIV and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession,” in Ragnhild Hatton and J. S. Bromley, eds. William III and Louis XIV (1968). Books André, Louis. Michel Le Tellier et Louvois (1942). Anderson, Matthew S. War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1620–1789 (1988). Arni, Gruber von. Hospital Care and the British Standing Army, 1660–1714 (2006). Ashley, Maurice. Cromwell’s Generals (1954). Babeau, Albert. La Vie militaire sous l’ancien régime. 2 vols. (1890). 564

Select Bibliography Barker, Thomas M. The Military Intellectual and Battle: Raimondo Montecuccoli and the Thirty Years’ War (1974). ———. Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy: Essays on War and Society in Austria, 1618–1780 (1982). Barrie-Curien, V. Guerre et Pouvoir en Europe au XVIIe Siècle (1991). Bartlett, Thomas, and Keith Jeffrey, eds. A Military History of Ireland (1996). Baxter, Steven. William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650–1702 (1966). Bayard, François. Le Monde des financiers au XVIIe siècle (1988). Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in 17th Century France (1985). Belhomme, Victor. Histoire de l’infanterie en France. 5 vols. (1893–1902). Bérenger, Jean. Turenne (1987). Black, Jeremy. Europe and the World, 1650–1830 (2002). ———. War and the World (1998). ———. A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800 (1991). ———. European Warfare in a Global Context, 1660–1815 (1994). Bluche, François. Louis XIV (1990). Brewer, John. The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (1989). Bromley, J. S., ed. The Rise of Great Britain and Russia, 1688–1715/25 (1970). Carsten, F. The Origins of Prussia (1954). ———, ed. The Ascendancy of France, 1648–1688 (1961). Chandler, David. The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (1976). ———, ed. Marlborough as Military Commander (1973). ———. The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (1994). Childs, John. The Army, James II, and the Glorious Revolution (1980). ———. Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (1982). ———. The Army of Charles II (1976). ———. The Nine Years’ War and the British Army, 1688–1697 (1991). Churchill, Winston. Marlborough: His Life and Times. 4 vols. (1933–1938). Clark, George. The Dutch Alliance and the War against French Trade, 1688–1697 (1923; 1971). ———. War and Society in the 17th Century (1958). ———. The Later Stuarts, 1600–1714 (1955). Cobban, Alfred. History of Modern France. 3 vols. (1965; 1983). Cole, C. W. Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism. 2 vols. (1939). Collins, James. Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early 17th Century France (1988). Contamine, Philippe, ed. Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I (1992). Cornette, Joel. Le Roi de guerre: Essai sur la souveraineté dans la France du Grande Siècle (1993). Corvisier, André. Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789. Abigail Siddall, trans. (1979). ———. Les Français et l’armée sous Louis XIV (1975). ———. L’Armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère du Choiseul: Le Soldat. 2 vols. (1964). ———. Louvois (1983). Delbrück, Hans. History of the Art of War, Vol. 4: Dawn of Modern Warfare. Walter Renfroe, trans. (1920; 1990). Dessert, Daniel. Argent, pouvoir et société au Grande Siècle (1984). De Vries, Jan, and Ad Van Der Woude. The First Modern Economy (1997). 565

Select Bibliography Doolin, P. R. The Fronde (1935). Ducasse, André. La Guerre des camisardes: La Resistance huguenote sous Louis XIV (1946). Duffy, Christopher. Military Experience in the Age of Reason (1987). Duffy, M. The Military Revolution and the State, 1500–1800 (1980). Ekberg, Carl. The Failure of Louis XIV’s Dutch War (1979). Francis, David. The First Peninsular War, 1702–1713 (1975). Geyl, Peter. The Netherlands in the 17th Century. 2 vols. (1961–1964). Gibson, John. Playing the Scottish Card: The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708 (1988). Giraud, Georges. Le Service militaire en France a là fin du règne de Louis XIV (1915). Godley, Eveline. The Great Condé: A Life of Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (1915). Goubert, Pierre. The Ancien Régime (1969). ———. Louis XIV and 20 Million Frenchmen (1966). Guttman, Myron. War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (1980). Haley, K. The Dutch in the 17th Century (1972). Hughes, B. Firepower: Weapons Effectiveness on the Battlefield, 1630–1850 (1974). Hattendorf, John B. England in the War of the Spanish Succession (1987). Hatton, Ragnhild. Louis XIV and Europe (1976). ———. Charles XII (1968). Hatton, Ragnhild, and J. S. Bromley, eds. William III and Louis XIV (1968). Heckscher, Eli. Mercantilism (1965). Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (1961). ———. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970). Israel, Jonathon. Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries, and the Struggle for World Supremacy, 1585–1713 (1997). ———. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (1995). ———. The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (1982). James, F. G. Ireland in the Empire: 1688–1770 (1973). Jones, J. R. Marlborough (1993). ———. Charles II: Royal Politician (1987). ———. The Revolution of 1688 in England (1973). Kamen, Henry. The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715 (1969). Knecht, Robert. Fronde (1976). Livet, Georges. L’Equilibre européen de la fin du XVe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1976). Lossky, A. Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (1994). Lynn, J. A. Tools of War: Instruments, Ideas and Institutions of Warfare, 1445–1871 (1990). ———. Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715 (1997). ———. Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999). ———. Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (1993). ———. The French Wars, 1667–1714: The Sun King at War (2002). McCullogh, Roy L. Coercion, Conversion, and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV’s France (2007). McKay, Derek. Prince Eugene of Savoy (1977). Miller, John, ed. Absolutism in 17th Century Europe (1990). Monod, Paul. The Power of Kings (1999). Motley, John Lothrop. Rise of the Dutch Republic. 4 vols. (1856; 1973). Mousnier, Roland. Les Institutions de la France, 1598–1789 (1974). 566

Select Bibliography Oakley, Stewart. William III and the Northern Crowns during the Nine Years’ War, 1689–1697 (1987). Ogg, David. England in the Reigns of Charles II, James II, and William III. 3 vols. (1955). Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (1988; 1996). Parry, J. H. Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the 18th Century (1971). ———. The Spanish Seaborne Empire (1966). Quinn, Frederick. The French Overseas Empire (2000). Rousset, Camile. Histoire de Louvois. 4 vols. (1862–1864). Rowen, Herbert. John de Witt (1978). Rule, John, ed. Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship (1969). Sonnino, Paul. Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (1988). Spielman, John. Leopold I of Austria (1977). Stradling, R. A. The Spanish Monarchy and Irish Mercenaries: Wild Geese in Spain, 1618–1668 (1994). Sturgill, Claude. Marshal Villars and the War of the Spanish Succession (1965). Tallett, F. War and Society in Early Modern History, 1495–1715 (1992). Taylor, A.J.P. The Habsburg Monarchy (1948). Voltaire. Histoire de Charles XII, roi de Suède (1925). ———. Lion of the North: Charles XII of Sweden. M. Jenkins, trans. (1981). ———. Histoire du siècle de Louis XIV (1751). ———. Age of Louis XI. English edition (1779). Weygand, Maxine. Turenne (1930). Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire (1995). Williams, E. The Ancien Régime in Europe, 1648–1789 (1979). Wilson, Charles. The Dutch Republic (1969). ———. Profits and Power (1957). Wilson, Peter. German Armies: War and German Society, 1648–1806 (1998). Wolfe, John B. The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685–1715 (1951). ———. Louis XIV (1968). Zeller, Gaston. L’Organization défensive des frontières du nord et de l’est au XVIIe siècle (1928). Ziegler, François. Villars: Le centurion de Louis XIV (1996). War at Sea Anderson, R. C. “The First Dutch War in the Mediterranean.” Mariner’s Mirror 49 (1963). Anderson, R. C. Naval Wars in the Baltic (1919). ———. English Ships, 1649–1702 (1966). Asher, Eugene. Resistance to the Maritime Classes: Survival of Feudalism in the France of Colbert (1960). Bamford, Paul. Forests and French Sea Power, 1660–1789 (1956). ———. Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV (1973). Beardon, R. Robert Blake (1935). Bromley, J. S. Corsairs and Navies, 1660–1760 (1987). Buisseret, David, ed. Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps (1992). 567

Select Bibliography Clowes, William. The Royal Navy. 7 vols. (1897–1903; 1966). le Conte, Pierre. French Ships, 1648–1700 (1935). Curtiss, C. General-at-Sea (1934). Dessert, Daniel. La Royale: Vaisseaux et marins du Roi-Soleil (1996). Ehrman, John. The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–1697 (1953). Ferreiro, Larrie. Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600–1800 (2006). Fox, Frank. Great Ships: The Battlefleet of Charles II (1980). ———. A Distant Storm: The Four Days’ Battle of 1666 (1996). Glete, Jan. Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies, and State-Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860. 2 vols. (1993). Hill, C. E. The Danish Sound Tolls and the Command of the Baltic (1926). Hill, J. R., ed. Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy (1995). Jones, J. R. The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (1996). Lydon, James G. Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (1970). Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. 3 vols. (1890–1892). Ollard, Richard. Cromwell’s Earl: A Life of Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich (1994). Owen, J. H. The War at Sea under Queen Anne (1938). Palmer, Michael A. Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the 16th Century (2005). Pennell, C. R. Bandits at Sea: A Pirate’s Reader (2001). Reynolds, Clark. Navies in History (1998). ———. Command of the Sea (1974). Richmond, Herbert. The Navy as an Instrument of Policy, 1558–1727 (1953). ———. Amphibious Warfare in British History (1941). Roger, N.A.M. The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (2004). Symcox, Geoffrey. The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697 (1974). Vreugdenhil, A. Ships of the United Netherlands, 1648–1702 (1938). Wills, John, Pepper, Guns and Parlays: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1662–1681 (1974). Withey, L. Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific (1989).

568

INDEX Note: Bold page numbers indicate main entries. abatis, 1. See also fortifications Abbas I, 175 Abid, 303 absolutism, 1–2; battle and, 40; Brandenburg and, 57; Danish, 102, 104; England and, 60, 135, 136, 480, 534; French, 259, 260, 266, 413; Holy Roman Empire and, 203; in Ireland, 214; mercantilism and, 288; Mughal, 305, 306; Russian, 361; standing armies and, 449, 450; Swedish, 459–460; Three Kingdoms and, 11; United Provinces and, 308; war finance and, 509 Acadia, 2, 384, 488 Act of Exclusion (May 4, 1654), 531 Act of Succession (1701), 2, 13, 136 Act of Union (March 4/15, 1707), 2, 59, 136, 148, 178, 180, 508 adjutants, 393 admiral-general, 390

Admiral of France (Amiral de France), 2, 338 admiral of the fleet, 390 admirals, 389. See also individual admirals Admiralty, 2, 334, 389, 405 admiralty colleges, 177, 208 Adolphus, Gustavus, 112, 145, 212, 292, 502. See also Sweden; Swedish Army Adrianople, Peace of (July 1713), 191 affaires des poudres, 249 Afghanistan, 305 aides-majors, 393 Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (May 2, 1668), 2–3, 262, 446, 476, 478, 514 Akbar (1542–1605), 305, 306, 434 akinci, 511 Albemarle, Duke of. See Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) Alexis, Tsar (1629–1676), 3 Algiers, 3 Allied Armies: battles of, 3, 27, 46, 48–49, 50, 72, 150, 183, 274–275, 284, 316,

348–349, 387, 388, 389, 423, 425, 447, 464, 480, 494; bayonets and, 42; British establishment and, 63; commanders of, 63, 139–140, 171, 258–259, 282; Danube march of, 273, 281; military medicine and, 298; Palatinate and, 203; of relief, 452, 479; sieges and, 249, 311–312, 375; war finance and, 508; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 493, 518; wars of, 76, 122–127, 252, 253, 325–329, 332–334, 374, 445 Allied Navies: battles of, 35–36, 44, 239, 279, 289, 352, 413, 420, 474, 493; privateers and, 38, 196, 377; wars of, 11, 323–325, 421, 439 Almanza, Battle of (April 14/25, 1707), 3–4, 46, 171, 181, 521, 526 Almenara, Battle of (July 27, 1710), 524 almirante, 390

Index Alsace, 4; battles in, 239; cavalry, 15; Créqui, François, and, 95, 96; Fontainebleau, Edict of (October 22, 1685), and, 132; Leopold I of Austria and, 245; Lorraine and, 258; Louis XIV and, 120, 122, 262, 263, 265, 515. See also Dutch War (1672–1678) alti bölük sipahileri, 4, 231, 435, 511 Altona, Treaty of (July 10/20, 1689), 4 Altranstädt, Treaties of (1706, 1707), 22, 186, 187, 188 Amboina massacre, 531 Amirals de France (Admirals of France), 2, 389. See also individual amirals ammunition, 4 amphibious warfare, 4–5; boats for, 149; galleys and, 170–171; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 323; Royal Navy and, 374 amputation, 296–297, 298 Andrussovo, Treaty of (January 30/February 9, 1667), 5, 26, 93, 139, 409, 466, 472 Angelets rebellion, 5 Anglicans, 135 Anglo-Dutch Brigade, 5, 124–125 Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement (1689), 5–6 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, 6, 37 Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654), 6–8 Anglo-Dutch War, Second (1665–1667), 9–11 Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674), 11–12 Anglo-Spanish War (1655–1660), 12–13 animals, 152–153, 254–255, 256, 281, 304, 370, 395, 396, 499 570

Anjou, Philip, duc d’, 13. See also Philip V of Spain Anne of Austria, 13, 286 Anne of Great Britain, 13, 258, 281, 282, 317, 524 anoblis, 13, 338 Anti-Habsburg War, 13 Antwerp, Treaty of, 13 approach, 13 Apraxin, Fedor Mateyevitch, 14, 191 armateurs, 14, 196, 510 armies of observation, 14, 270, 311, 354, 432, 452 armies of relief, 14, 52, 86, 249, 432 Arnaud, Henri, 493 arrière-ban, 15 arsenals, 15, 86 L’Art des Armées Navale (Hoste), 146 Articles of War, 15–16 artillery, 16–18, 212, 276, 363, 389, 542 artillery fortresses: arsenals and, 15; bastions and, 39; citadels and, 82; components of, 108; construction and design of, 474; countersinking and, 94; covered ways and, 95; escalade and, 137; functions of, 154; glacis and, 175; lunettes and, 269; ramparts and, 389; siege warfare and, 430; Vauban and, 491 artillery park, 19 artillery train, 19–20 Artois, 262 Asia, 256. See also China; Japan asiento, 20, 58, 488, 517 askeri, 20, 106, 224, 294, 345, 478 assaults, 20; artillery fortress and, 18; boarding and, 51; breaches and, 58; discouraging, 156; fronts and, 167; Indians and, 210; mines and, 155; retrenchments

and, 400; siege warfare and, 430; Vauban and, 491 Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of, 20–21 atrocities, 21 attaching the miner, 299 attacks, 21, 475 Audijos rebellion, 21, 269 auget, 21, 300 Aughrim, Battle of (July 12/22, 1691), 21, 218, 534 Augsburg, League of (1686), 21, 264, 286, 288, 320–321, 444 Augusta, Battle of (April 22, 1676), 21–22, 116, 126, 170, 289–290, 352, 413 Augustus II of Poland, 22; ascent of, 184; Denmark and, 105; Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718) and, 233, 234; at Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702), 239; Sapiehas and, 418; Saxons and, 369; Stanislaw I (1677–1766) and, 451. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721) Aurangzeb, 22–23, 132, 278–279, 306–307, 434, 436 Austrian Army: leaders of, 302; mercenaries in, 533; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 333; organization of, 400; standing, 450; uniforms of, 484; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683) and, 497 Austrian Empire, xxvii, 23–25 Austrian Netherlands, 25, 140, 446 Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699), 25–27, 344; Austrian Empire and, 24; battles of, 300–301, 541; causes of, 489; Eugene of Savoy and, 139; Janissaries and, 224; logistics and,

Index 272; participants, 440; peace of, 231, 240; settlement of, 500 Austro-Ottoman War, Second (1715–1718), 27; Eugene of Savoy and, 140; Janissaries and, 449; Venice and, 347 autocracy, 27, 223, 277, 307, 358, 361, 378. See also absolutism Autorament Cudzoziemski, 27, 368 Autorament Narodowy, 27, 368 auxiliaries, 27 avariz, 512 Ayscue, George, 7, 27, 110, 412 Azaps, 28 Babur (1483–1530), 304, 386 Baden, Treaty of (August 27/September 7, 1714), 29, 157, 265, 526–527 bahziz, 29, 511 bai, Tara (1675–1761), 279 balance of power: Anglo-Dutch Naval Agreement and, 5; Charles VI of Austria and, 524; continental, and wars, xxvi–xxvii; Devolution, War of (1667–1668) and, 486; Dutch War (1672–1678) and, 127; in the east, 45, 183, 184; France and, 128, 157; Great Northern War (1700–1721) and, 359; Louis XIV and, 262, 263, 265; Poltava, Battle of (June 27/July 8, 1709) and, 372; Pyrenees treaty and, 115; religion and, 24; Russia and, 410; Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697) and, 329, 413; Sweden and, 455, 456; Triple Alliance (January 23, 1668) and, 514; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and,

488; Westphalia, Peace of (1648) and, 287 Balkans, 419, 465 “ball and chains,” 291 ballast, 29 Baltic, 403; naval powers in, 170, 420, 421; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 360, 361; Poltava, Battle of (June 27/July 8, 1709) and, 372; Sound Tolls and, 441–442; war and, 485 Banat krajina, 29 bands, 299 Banner system, 29–32, 78, 87, 194, 276, 537. See also specific armies banquettes, 32–33, 133, 195, 353, 354, 467 Bantry Bay, Battle of (May 1/11, 1689), 33, 55, 77, 322, 429, 474 Barbary corsairs, 33; adversaries of, 429; AngloSpanish War (1655–1660) and, 12; Blake, Robert and, 47; bombardments and, 52; deys and, 107; enemies of, 476, 477; Estrées and, 138; Juel, Niels (1629–1697) and, 227; Louis XIV and, 156; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 280; Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de (1607–1676) and, 412 Barbets, 34, 493 barbette, 34 Barcelona, 429, 493, 524, 526, 527 Barcelona, siege of (August 22–October 9, 1705), 329, 520 Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of (May 19–24/May 29–June 4, 1692), 34–36, 221, 323, 429, 474

barges, 36 bargirs, 277 bark, 36 barracks, 36–37, 111, 218, 535 barren yard, 539 barrier fortresses, 37, 173, 258, 488 Barrier Treaties, 37–38 bar shot, 428 Bart, Jean, 38, 324, 489 bastions, 38–39; artillery and, 17; artillery fortress and, 18; breastworks and, 59; cavaliers and, 73; citadels and, 82; Coehoorn’s, 84; construction and design of, 474, 491; counterguards, 94; crownwork and, 99; curtains and, 99; escalade and, 137; flanks and, 149; fronts and, 167; garrison carriages and, 172; garrisons and, 172; gates and, 173; guérites and, 195; hornwork and, 204; latrines and, 244; line of defense and, 251; orillons and, 343; other fortress components and, 133, 143; Ottomans, use against, 154; ramparts and, 389; ravelins and, 397; redans and, 398; retrenchments and, 400; saps and, 417; tenaillons and, 466 bastion towers, 474. See also bastions; tour bastionée batardeau, 39, 84, 529 Báthory, Stefan, 367 Batoh, Battle of (June 2–3, 1652), 39, 237 battalions, 39, 108, 399, 400 batteries, 17, 40, 491 batters, 39, 400 battle, 40–41, 430–431 battle cries, 41–42 battleships, 394 Baturin (November 2/13, 1708), 189 571

Index Bavaria, 42, 201, 286, 517; Holy Roman Empire and, 203; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; uniforms of, 484; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683) and, 499; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 207, 520. See also Maximillian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726) bayonets, 42–43, 111, 152, 284, 363, 484, 490 Beachy Head, Battle of (February 21/March 2, 1653), 43 Beachy Head, Battle of (June 30/July 10, 1690), 38, 43–44, 46, 77, 150, 217, 322, 429, 473, 474 beard tax, 341, 361 beatings, 292–293 beat the chamade, 20, 44, 272, 432, 454 bedel-i nüzul, 44, 512 beer, 396 before the mast, 44 beheading, 291 belaying pin, 44–45 beldar, 45, 294 Belgium, 282 Belgrade (August 16, 1717), 140 Belize, 45 Belle Île, raid on, 45, 477 bellum se ipse alet, 457 Bénauge rebellion, 269. See also Louis XIV; Lustucru rebellion Berestczko, Battle of (June 28–31, 1651), 45, 237, 439 Berg harsen, Battle of (August 12, 1668), 300–301 berm, 45 Bernhard, Christoph. See Münster Berwick, James, 1st Duke of, 3, 45–46, 141, 171, 214 Bévzieres, Battle of, 46 572

Beyliks, 27, 46, 539 beys, 46, 179 Bhonsle, Rajaram, 279 Bhonsle, Shambuji, 278 Bijapuri army, 436 billets/billeting, 46–47, 111, 383 Bill of Rights, 178 “bite the bullet,” 297 Blake, Robert, 47–48; Ayscue and, 27; Barbary corsairs and, 34; battles of, 7, 169, 235, 373–374; English Navy and, 173; fighting instructions and, 145; privateers and, 423; Spanish fleet and, 158; Tromp, Maarten van (1598–1653) and, 477 Blenheim (Blindheim), Battle of (August 2/13, 1704), 48–50; effects of, 207, 387; mercenaries at, 533; names for, 202; participants, 63, 67, 140, 246, 282, 286, 520; prisoners taken, 464 blockade at sea, 50–51 blockade, on land. See siege warfare blockades, 325 blockship, 51 blunderbusses, 42, 51 boarding actions, 45, 51, 52, 195, 308, 364, 461 boarding axe, 51 boarding pikes, 52 boatswains, 337, 391 bog-house. See latrines bombardiers, 393 bombardments, 52; attack and, 21; batter and, 39; French Navy and, 174; Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) and, 267, 431; mortars and, 303; of Tangier, 464; Vauban and, 490, 492 Bombing Bernhard, 308 bomb ketches (“galiotes à bomb”), 52–53; armateurs and, 14; French Navy and,

3, 34, 138, 174; mortars and, 303; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 322. See also bombs bombs, 52; communications and, 86; kinds of, 194, 357, 428; mortars and, 303, 304; storage of, 105; vs. carcasses, 71. See also bomb ketches (“galiotes à bomb”) bonaventures, 285 Bondetal, 458 bonnets, 53 Bonnets Rouges rebellion, 53, 260, 353 Bonn, siege of (November 1673), 302 bonuses, 466 Bordeaux, 167 borders, 249–250, 263, 535. See also frontières; natural frontiers börk, 223, 483 Boucaniers. See buccaneers Boufflers, Louis François, duc de, 53–54, 140, 248, 274, 275, 312 boulet, 291 Boulonnais rebellion, 269 bounties, 54, 484 Bourbon dynasty, 54, 516; London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) and, 258; Louis XIV and, 261–262, 264–265; in Spain, 444; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and, 488; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 527 bourgeoisie, 259–260, 266 Bournonville, Duke of, 54, 124, 136–137, 165 bow(ing), 54 bowlines, 416 bowman, 55 bowsprit, 415 boyar, 55

Index boyau, 55, 56, 86, 141, 475 Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690), 55–56, 322; Athlone and, 21; Berwick, James, 1st Duke of and, 45; deaths, 422; Jacobites and, 221; James II (1633–1701) and, 223; lead-up to, 216; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 280; participants, 481; Protestants and, 178; William III and, 534 branches (in fortifications), 56, 99, 169, 204, 254, 387, 417 branches (of trees), 1, 143 Brandenburg, xxviii, 56–58. See also Friedrich-Wilhelm Brandenburg Army: at Enzheim, Battle of, 136; Fehrbellin, Battle of (June 18/28, 1675) and, 144–145; FriedrichWilhelm and, 164; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 333; punishment and, 292; standing, 450; Thirteen Years’ War and, 470; Waldeck, Georg Friedrich, Prince of (1620–1692) and, 505. See also Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688); Prussian Army; ranks (on land) branding, 291–292 Braudel, Fernand, 266 Brazil, 58, 485, 530–531 breaches, 58, 155, 176 breastworks, 59 Breda, Treaty of (July 11/21, 1667), 11, 59, 476 Breisach (September 7, 1703), 519 Brest (June 17, 1694), 324 bricole, 59 Brigade Royal Irlandais. See Wild Geese brigades, 39, 59, 108 brigadier, 390 brigadier-general, 392

brigantines (brigs), 59 Brihuega, Battle of (December 8–9/19–20, 1710), 494, 524 Bristol, siege of, 416 British Army, 59–63. See also Irish establishment; ranks (on land) British establishment, 36, 63, 219, 296 British Navy: battles of, 500; British Army and, 173; organization of, 138; pay, 507; size of, 162 broadsides, 64, 250, 308; avoiding, 386; boarding axes and, 51; fighting instructions and, 145; galleys and, 170; line of battle (at sea) and, 250–251; naval tactics and, 314; pistol shot and, 364; weather gauges and, 530 “broken on the wheel,” 291 Brown Bess, 152 Brussels (August 13–16, 1695), 324–325 buccaneers (“boucaniers”), 64–65, 131, 377, 495. See also pirates; privateers Buda, siege of, 45, 65 Bulavin, Kondratay (c. 1660–1708), 65, 341 bullion, 443 bullionism, 65, 288, 506 bureaucracies: Manchurian, 276; Chinese, 272; French, 86, 266; Japanese, 226; Mughal, 306; Ottoman, 345; Polish, 22; Russian, 3; sieges and, 396; standing armies and, 450. See also intendants; logistics Burma, 537–538 burns, 295 burthen, 152, 407, 473 Butler, James, 343. See also Ormonde, Duke of Cabot, John, 318

cabotage, 67 Cadiz, raid on, 67, 519 Cadogan, William, 67–68, 139, 317, 348 calendars, xxxi-xxxiii, 341, 369 caltrop (“crow’s foot”), 68, 77 Calvinism, 164, 205, 308, 342, 485. See also Huguenots Camisards, 34, 111 Camisards, revolt of the (1702–1705), 46, 68, 260, 501, 518, 533 camouflet, 68 “camp fever,” 298 camp volant (flying encampment), 69 Canada, 69, 210, 211, 318, 326, 437. See also Newfoundland; Québec Candia, siege of (1666–1669), 69, 240, 346 canisters, 428, 429, 461 cannelure cutting, 20, 58, 69, 106, 432 cannon, 69–70, 384, 401–402, 428 cannon of seven, 70 cannon shot rule, 70, 466–467 Cantonal Règlement, 378 capital, 70 capital ships. See Rates capitáns. See ranks (at sea) capitulation, 70 caponnière, 70, 86 Caprara, Count, 435 captaincy-general, 70, 284, 448 captains, 393 captian. See ranks (at sea) caracole, 63, 74, 102, 353 Carbisdale, Battle of (April 27, 1650), 70–71, 134 carcasses, 71 Caribbean, 138, 170, 364, 407, 530, 531 Carlos II, 119, 444, 513–514 Carlos II of Spain, 71, 516, 517 Carlos III, 13, 76, 374, 519, 523, 524. See Charles VI of Austria 573

Index carpenters, 391–392 Carpi, Battle of (July 9, 1701), 71, 73, 139, 518 carronades, 17, 71 Cartagena, 47, 53, 65, 325, 377, 531 Cartagena, Battle of (November 5, 1650), 72 Casale, 329 casemate, 72 case shot, 428 Casimir, John II (r. 1648–1668), 72; battles of, 470; Berestczko, Battle of and, 45; Lithuania and, 471; peasants and, 369; Poland and, 366; Polish Army and, 365; Sweden and, 456; Thirteen Years’ War and, 469. See also Northern War, Second (1655–1660) Cassano, Battle of (August 16, 1705), 72, 139–140, 494, 520 Cassel, Battle of (April 11, 1677), 72, 126, 533 Castro War (1642–1644), 220 casualites, 72, 295–296 Catalonia, 328, 527 catamaran, 72 Catholics: China and, 230; in England, 1, 134, 176; England and, 135, 136, 214; Habsburgs and, 199; in Ireland, 249, 533; in Japan, 225; in Lithuania, 471; Münster and, 308; officers and, 339; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 358; in Poland, 366; Qing and, 402–403; Spanish Netherlands and, 446; Swedes and, 331; Thirteen Years’ War and, 468; Tyrconnel, Earl of (1630–1691) and, 480; United Provinces and, 485; William III and, 534. See 574

also Ireland; James II (1633–1701); Wild Geese; individual Catholics Catinat, Nicholas, 72–73; battles of, 448, 496; Eugene of Savoy and, 139; Galway, Earl of, and, 171; at Marsaglia, Battle of (October 4, 1693), 283–284; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 326; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 518 cat-of-nine-tails. See military discipline cauldrons, 73, 133, 304 cavalier de tranche, 73, 418 cavalier (fortification), 73 cavaliers (cavalry), 73; Blake, Robert and, 47; British Army and, 60; defenses against, 461; despotism and, 212; French, 173; functions of, 507; garrisons and, 172; logistics and, 256; Manchus and, 276; Mughal, 277; New Model Army and, 318; Ottoman, 348; regiments and, 447; role of, 381; units, 399; vs. dragoons, 111. See also hussars; Tatars; specific armies; specific battles cebelu, 75 cebicis (cebicilar), 75 center (of fleet), 447 centralization, 1, 166, 167, 410, 461 Ceylon, 75, 485, 495 chain shot. See shot chamade, 75 chambers, 75, 170 Chandler, David, 282–283 chaplains, 337, 527 Charles I of England, 318 Charles II of England (1630–1685), 75–76

Charles II of Spain. See Carlos II Charles IV of Lorraine. See Lorraine, Charles IV, duc de Charles V duc de Lorraine. See Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690) Charles VI of Austria, 76, 516, 524, 527 Charles IX of Sweden. See Karl XI Charles XII of Sweden. See Karl XI charts, naval, 278 chase gun, 77, 530 Château-Renault, François Louis, 77, 162 chavush, 77, 472 cheesemongers, 77 chef de divission, 390 chef d’escadre, 390 chemin couvert. See covered way chemin des rondes, 77; garde-fou and, 171; ramparts and, 389 chemmin des rondes, barracks and, 36 chevaux de frise (Friesland horses), 77 cheveaux de frise, 461 Chiari, Battle of (September 1/12, 1701), 78, 95, 139, 502, 518, 533 children: Cossacks and, 91; discipline of, 291; Fontainebleau, Edict of (October 22, 1685) and, 132, 205; as laborers, 294; Louis XIV and, 260; military labor and, 294, 536; Rajputs and, 386; war and, 134, 238, 257, 437, 493, 523 China, 78–81, 542; magazines and, 272; maps of, 278; Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689) and, 317; pirates of, 364; Qing emperors,

Index xxvii–xxviii; transportation in, 256. See also Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722); Manchus; mandate of heaven Chinese armies, 81, 230; labor for, 257; punishment in, 291 Chinese sails, 416 Ch’ing Empire (Qing Empire). See Banner System; China; Kangxi emperor; Manchuria; mandate of heaven; Wu Sangui Chmielnicki, 236 Chocim, Battle of (November 11, 1673), 81, 240, 439 choragiew, 81–82, 404 Christian IV of Denmark (1588–1648), 159 Christian V (1646–1699), 184 Chudnovo, Battle of (1660), 82, 471 Cimarrones (“cimarónes”), 82 circumvallation, 214. See lines of circumvallation citadel, 82 çit palankasi, 82 civilians, 83, 526, 542 civil war, Ming, 537–538 civil wars: Cossacks’, 366, 471; in Ireland, 214; Mughal Empire and, 279, 304–305, 306, 307; Poland-Lithuanian, 234; Polish, 186, 367, 472. See also Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658); Fronde (1648-1653) cizye, 512 class, 339 Clement XI, 402–403 climate, 348 close-fights, 83 close-haul. See haul close close order. See drill close quarters. See close-fights close range, 83 clothing, 316

coastlines: French Navy and, 163, 196; galleys and, 170–171; patrol of, 170. See also amphibious warfare Coehoorn, Menno, Baron van, 83–84; fausse-bray and, 144; flanks and, 149; fortifications and, 154; at Grave, siege of (July– October 1674), 180; at Namur, siege of (July 2–September 1, 1695), 312; at Namur, siege of (May 25–June 30, 1692), 311 Coehoorn mortars, 84, 303; at Grave, siege of (July– October 1674), 180; rise of, 194; siege warfare and, 432 coffee, 396, 499 cofferdam, 84 Colbert, Charles (Croissy, marquis de), 96, 514 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 5, 84–85; Audijos rebellion and, 21; brother of, 96; companies founded by, 87; Dutch War and, 119; England and, 135; Estrées and, 138; fighting tariffs and, 146; French Army and, 509; French Navy and, 161, 162, 172, 261; officers and, 338; rebellions and, 269, 353; Roure rebellionn (1670) and, 404; son of, 424; Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de (1642–1701) and, 474; United Provinces and, 486; weapons approval by, 52 Coldstream Guards, 319 Colmar, 480 Cologne (Köln), 85–86, 287, 486, 513; Dutch War and, 119; Glorious Revolution and, 177; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 518

colonelcies, 339 colonels, 392–393 colonialism, 289, 487, 530–531; Protestants and, 405; Russian, 409. See also individual colonies colonies: Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 324; Spanish, 443 color sergeant, 393 comissariat. See logistics; ordu bazar commanders. See ranks (at sea) commercial interests, 157; of Brandenburg, 164; Dutch, 146, 184, 324, 329, 486, 494–495; English, 134, 136, 182, 184, 301, 315, 318, 404, 405, 406, 507–508; French, 486; Mediterranean and, 494; in Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), 177; in North America, 204; Ottoman, 344; Portuguese, 307, 374; Qing, 543; rivalries of, 484–485; Spanish, 445; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and, 488. See also East India Company; guerre de course; Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie commissaire ordinaire de l’artillerie, 86 commissaires, 86, 257, 308 commissaires au classes, 86 commissary, 255 commissioned officers, 86, 337, 390, 391, 528; in Royal navy, 424; ward rooms and, 506. See also officers commodore, 338, 390 communications, 86–87, 299; lines and, 252; sentries, by, 355. See also signalling Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO), 87, 307, 495 Compagnie du Nord, 87 575

Index company, 87 complement, 87 Concert of the Hague, 87 Condé, Louis II, de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien. See Great Condé (1621–1686) conduct money, 87 Confederates, Irish, 134 conscription, 87; Ottoman Army and, 419. See also recruitment Conseil d’en Haut (“Council of State”), 88 constitutional crises, 176 contravallation, 214. See lines of contravallation contributions, 88; Blenheim, Battle of and, 48; during Dutch War, 122; Dutch War and, 124; fortifications and, 154; Grave, siege of (July–October 1674) and, 180; hetman and, 201; hostages and, 204; Karl XII and, 186; Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) and, 267; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 325; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 331, 333, 334; in Palatinate, 203; Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689) and, 351; petite guerre and, 362; quarrels over, 201; of rations, 396; siege warfare and, 430; from Spanish Netherlands, 515; Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, comte de (1611–1675) and, 479; Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734) and, 501, 521; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 519 convoys, 88–89; Cruisers and Convoys Act (1708), 525; directieschepen and, 107 Conzerbruke, Battle of (August 11, 1675), 90, 258 576

Copenhagen, 104, 105, 159, 403–404 Copenhagen, Peace of. See Northern War, Second Copenhagen, siege of, 90, 101, 227, 476, 532 Copenhagen, Treaty of (June 6, 1660), 334 Çorbasi, 90 cordon, 90 Corkbush Field (November 1648), 318 cornet, 90 cornets, 393 corporals, 337, 393 corvée, 90 corvette, 90 Cossacks, 90–93, 227; battles of, 439, 539; cavalry, 367, 368; civil war of, 471; Eternal Peace and, 139; Kmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) and, 236–237; logistics of, 256; Northern War, Second (1655–1660), 331; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 360; Poland and, 366; Polish, 353; Polish Army and, 365; rebellions of, 341, 397–398; Russia and, 409; settlements of, 429; Tatars and, 466; Thirteen Years’ War and, 468; uniforms of, 484. See also hetman (otaman); individual Cossacks counter-approach, 94 counter-battery, 94 counterforts, 94, 401 counterguards, 39, 94, 95, 269 countermines, 94, 354; at Candia, siege of, 69; galleries and, 170; listners and, 254; mines and, 176; rameaux and, 387; siege warfare and, 432 counterscarp gallery, 170 counterscarps, 94, 95, 107, 355, 365

countersinking, 94 courses (at sea), 385, 415, 539. See also guerre de course; sails courses (on land), 94 couvreface, 94, 95, 133 Covenant Chain, 220 covered ways, 95; assault of, 249; attacks and, 475; banquettes and, 32; cavaliers de tranche and, 73; counterapproach and, 94; countermines and, 94; counterscarps and, 94; detached works and, 107; fausse-bray and, 144; palisades and, 353; parapets and, 355; siege warfare and, 432; terrepleins and, 467 coxswains, 391 crémaillère, 95 Cremona, Battle of (February 1, 1702), 78, 95, 139, 213, 502, 518, 533 Creoles, 169, 445 Créqui, François, Chevalier de, 95–96; battles of, 401; Dutch War and, 126; at Kockersberg, Battle of (October 7, 1677), 239; Louis XIV and, 262; Luxembourg and, 269; Ortenbach (July 23, 1678) and, 343; Reunions, War of the (1683–1684) and, 515; vs. Charles V, 127–128 crest, 96 Crete, 96, 346, 494, 497 crimp, 96 crochet, 96 Croissy, marquis de (Charles Colbert), 96, 514 crojack, 539 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), 96–98; Anglo-Dutch Wars and, 6, 8; Anglo-Spanish War and, 12; artillery and, 15, 16; Barbary corsairs and,

Index 34; battles of, 536; Blake, Robert and, 47; British Army and, 60; Carbisdale, Battle of and, 70; Charles II and, 75; commercial interests of, 315; drills and, 112; Dunbar, Battle of and, 114–115; EIC and, 131; iron canon and, 99; Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661) and, 287; New Model Army and, 318, 319; New World and, 222; Orange, house of, and, 531; overviews, 134, 135; Sandwich, Earl of (1625–1672) and, 416. See also Western Design cross-jack, 539 crownwork (“couronnement”), 99 crow’s foot (caltrop), 68, 77 cruiser, 99 Cruisers and Convoys Act (1708), 525 culverin, 99 culverin-drake, 99 cunette. See cuvettes curtain; artillery fortress and, 18; parts of, 474 curtain (curtain wall), 99–100 curtains: bastions and, 39; crownwork and, 99; flanks and, 149; fronts and, 167; hornwork and, 204; line of defense and, 251; posterns and, 375; ramparts and, 389; ravelins and, 397; sally points and, 416; saps and, 417 curtain walls: gates and, 173; other fortress components and, 133; petards and, 357 cutlasses, 100, 200; vs. boarding axes, 51 cuvettes, 100 Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson, Count, 101, 104, 154, 167, 294 Dalmatia, 346

Danby Earl of, 135 Danish Army, 101–102; Great Northern War (1700–1721) and, 369; in Ireland, 216, 217; at Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676), 268; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 333; standing, 450; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) and, 470; uniforms of, 484 Danish Navy, admirals of, 227–228 dates and calendar changes, xxxi–xxxiii dead reckoning, 278. See maps Deane, Richard, 173 déblai, 102 debt, war and, 158 decks, 102 Deerfield raid, 102 defilade, 103 defilement, 103 Delhi Sultanate (1200–1526), 304 demi-cannon (half-cannon), 103 demi-culverin (half-culverin), 103 demi-lune (half moon). See ravelins demi-revêtement. See revetment Denain, Battle of (July 13/24, 1712), 103, 525; Eugene of Savoy and, 140; London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) and, 258; Ormonde, Duke of (1665–1745) and, 343; participants, 501 Denmark, 103–105; cannon-shot rule and, 467; Great Northern War (1700–1721) and, 183, 184, 185; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 333; Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/March 8, 1658) and, 403; Scanian War (1674–1679) and, 419–422. See also Sound Tolls depot, 105

depot systems, 272 deputies in the field, 105–106 Derbençi (“pass guards”), 106 descent of the ditch, 106, 354, 432, 529 descents (“hostile descents”), 106, 322, 323 desertion, 106; from French Navy, 163; of garrison troops, 172; in Glorious Revolution, 177; by Indians, 210; James II (1633–1701) and, 223; punishment for, 291, 292 Deshima, 106–107, 226 detached works, 107, 466; artillery and, 17; counterguards and, 94; fronts and, 167; hornwork, 204; ravelins and, 397 Devastation of the Palatinate. See Palatinate, devastation of Devolution, War of (1667–1668), 2–3, 11, 513–514; Boufflers and, 53; Breda, Treaty of and, 59; Calvinists and, 205; and Carlos II of Spain and, 71; causes of, 146, 279, 308, 476, 486; Colbert, J.-B. and, 85; Cologne and, 86; commanders of, 95; Dover, Treaty of and, 109; Dutch Navy in, 118; FrancheComté and, 157; French Army and, 161; Great Condé and, 182; Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705) and, 245; Louis XIV and, 156, 262; Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695) and, 269; participants, 474; peace talks, 96; Prussian Army and, 378; sieges, 248; Spain and, 444; Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de (1611–1675) and, 478; Vauban and, 490 577

Index devorianstvo (landed gentry) cavalry. See Russian Army deys, 3, 46, 107 dhimmîs, 306 Dieppe, 213 directieschepen, 107; Dutch Navy and, 117 Disbanding Act. See Irish establishment discretion. See surrender disease, 107–108; in China, 543; Indian Wars and, 209–210, 220; military medicine and, 298; New World and, 222 dismantle (a ship), 108 disrate (a ship), 108 disrated, 293 ditches, 108; batardeau and, 39; berm and, 45; construction of, 102; defense and, 529; descent of, 106; disease and, 107; glacis and, 175; latrines and, 244; lines of circumvallation and, 252; lines of contravallation and, 253; other fortress components and, 69, 94, 95, 107; parts of, 466; ravelins and, 397; remblai and, 400; revetments and, 400. See also trenches divanî hizmet, 4, 231, 435 divisions, 108 Dobry, Battle of. See Great Northern War “Dominion over the earth ends where the cannon’s fire stops,” 466–467 Dominum Maris Baltici (“Dominion over the Baltic Sea”), 108, 442 Donauwörth, Battle of (“Battle of the Schellenberg”) (July 2/13, 1704), 48, 67, 109, 282, 519 double crownwork. See crownwork (“couronnement”) 578

double fire, 304. See bomb; mortars double on, 109 double palisade. See palisade Dover, Battle of. See AngloDutch War, First Dover, Battle of (May 19, 29, 1652), 477 Dover, Treaty of (May 12/22, 1670), 11, 109–110, 476; Charles II of England and, 76; Dutch War and, 119; Louis XIV and, 262; negotiators, 96; United Provinces and, 486 The Downs, 7, 10, 27, 110 Downs, Battle of The (“Four Days’ Battle”) (June 1–4/11–14, 1666), 110–111, 118, 301, 413, 476 drabouts, 111 dragonnades, 111; introduction of, 205; vs. Huguenots, 68 dragoons, 111; cavalry and, 75; Iranian, 175; units of, 400. See also specific armies drake. See culverin-drake draught animals. See animals drills, 111–114; battle and, 40; fugelman and, 168; Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747) and, 246; Louvois and, 160; Martinet, Jean (D. 1672) and, 284; Prussian Army and, 378; ranks and, 393; Russian Army and, 412; silladars and, 434; Swedish Army and, 457 drinking water, 396 driver. See sails drivers, 415 dromedaries, 256 Ducal Prussia. See Brandenberg; FriedrichWilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); North-

ern War, Second; war finance ducking, 293 dueling fields, 375 Duffy, Christopher, 432 Dugay-Trouin, Réné, 114 Dumas, Alexandre, 272 Dunbar, Battle of (September 3, 1650), 114–115, 246, 301 the Dunes, 12 Dunes, Battle of the (June 4/14, 1658) (“Dunkirk”), 115, 158, 182, 222, 269, 478 Dungeness, Battle of (November 30/December 10, 1652), 7, 47, 227, 244, 477 Dunkirk, 287, 477, 478, 488, 489. See also Bart, Jean; British Army; Dunes, Battle of the (June 4/14, 1658) (“Dunkirk”); London Preliminaries; Nine Years’ War; privateers; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de (c. 1610–1688), 21–22, 34, 116, 138, 162, 440 Dutch Army, 116–117, 485. See also Dutch War (1672–1678); United Provinces Dutch East India Company. See Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie Dutch East Indies, 495 Dutch Gift, 117 Dutch Navy, 117–118. See also Dutch War (1672–1678); ranks (at sea); Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de (1607–1676); United Provinces Dutch War (1672–1678), 119–129; Louis XIV on defense, 1674–1675, 122–126; Louis XIV on

Index offense, 1672–1673, 120–122; overview, 119–120; stalemate, (1676–1678), 126–128; treaties and, 109, 128–129, 319–320 dvorianstvo, 410 Dymowe infantry, 368 Dzungars, 542. See Zunghar Mogols ear work, 343 East India Companies, 84, 87, 486. See also Compagnie des Indies Orientales (CIO); Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) East India Company (EIC) (English), 11, 131–132, 182, 226, 307, 485, 495, 531 East Indiamen, 7, 132 écoute, 132 Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685), 132 Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598), 132. See also Duquesne, Abraham, marquis de (c. 1610–1688); Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685); Galway, Earl of; Huguenots; Louis XIV Edict of Potsdam (November 8, 1685), 132 Edward I, 442 Eeckeren, Battle of (June 30, 1703), 518. See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) “Eendracht,” 268 Egypt, 275–276, 345 EIC, 307. See East India Company Eight Banner Army, 133, 542 Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), 443, 446, 476, 477, 494, 513, 532 Eisenburg, 489

electorates, 475 Electors, 163, 174, 201, 203, 286, 325, 394 elephants, 304, 305, 306 Elizabeth I, 404 Emanuel, Maximilian, 25, 48, 207, 388 embargoes, 133 embrasures, 133; banquettes and, 32–33; barbettes and, 34; cauldrons and, 73; fascines and, 143; masking of, 284; merlons and, 289; palisades and, 352; parapets and, 355 en barbette. See barbette en bricole. See bricole enceintes, 133; cavaliers and, 73; citadels and, 82; couvreface generale and, 95; crownwork and, 99; detached works and, 107; fausse-braye and, 144; hornwork and, 204; position of, 475; powder magazines and, 375; retrenchments and, 400; revetments and, 401; supplying, 464 en crémaillère. See cremaillere enfilades, 133; artillery fortress and, 18; breastworks and, 59; curtains and, 99; defilade and, 103; flanks and, 149; protections from, 137, 475; raking fire and, 386–387; saps and, 417 engineers, 106. See also Coehoorn, Menno, Baron van; Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson, Count; military engineers; Vauban England, 133–136. See also Great Britain; Indian Wars; war finance; individual leaders English Army, 59, 138, 215, 296. See also British Army; England

English Civil Wars (1639–1651). See Cromwell, Oliver English Navy, 138, 173, 296, 315. See also England; ranks (at sea); Royal Navy; sovereignty of the sea enlightened despotism, 136 ensign. See flags ensigns, 148, 338, 393 envelope. See couvreface generale; enceinte Enzheim (Ensheim), Battle of (October 4, 1674), 15, 54, 124, 136–137, 165, 280, 479 epaulement, breastworks and, 59 epaulement, 137 Erastferon, Battle of (December 29, 1701/January 9, 1702). See Great Northern War (1700–1721) escalades, 137, 149, 171, 401, 463, 466 escarpments (scarps), 389, 400, 422 esplanade, 137 Espolla, Battle of (July 4, 1677), 126, 137–138 establishment, 138 Estrées, Jean compte (duc) d’ (1624–1707), 116, 138, 440 étapes, 138–139, 281 Eternal Peace (May 1686), 139, 410 Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663–1736), 139–140. See also Imperial Army evolutions, 64, 140, 162 exchanges, 46, 67, 140–141 Exclusion crisis. See United Provinces; Westminster, Treaty of (April 12/22, 1654) executions, 88, 124, 141, 479, 515 expense magazines, 141, 375 579

Index Eyâlet Askerleri, 141, 230 eyâlet-i Budin, 141, 345 faces, 38, 143, 149, 273, 398 Fairfax, Thomas, 97, 318, 319, 408 falconetes, 17, 143 falcons, 17, 143 false bray, 143–144 famines: Aurangzeb and, 307; in France, 157, 273; Louis XIV and, 266; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 324, 328; Swedish Army and, 369; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 522–523, 524. See also China; France; Great Northern War (1700–1721); guerre de course; Namur, siege of (1695); Nine Years’ War (1688-1697); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) fascines, 143, 284, 417, 441 fathom, 143 fatigues, 294 fausse-braye (or braie), 84, 143–144 Faustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706), 158–159 Fehrbellin, Battle of (June 18/28, 1675), 144–145, 165, 420, 537 Feldmarschall, 392 Ferdinand I of Austria, 290 Ferdinand III, 332–333 feudalism, 156 feudatories, 31–32, 79–80, 193, 229–230, 538, 542 Field Hetman. See hetman field marshals, 392 field works. See abatis; chevaux des frise; fortifications; redan; retrenchments; siege warfare; Spanish riders; Sweinfedder 580

“Fifth Monarchists,” 319 fighting instructions, 145–146; Blake, Robert and, 48; Dutch Navy and, 118; French Navy and, 162; at Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653), 169; James II (1633–1701) and, 222; lifespan of, 407; line of battle (at sea) and, 251; Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) and, 173, 301; pell-mell and, 356; Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653) and, 467 fighting tariff (1667), 146, 319, 486, 513 file closers, 111, 146 filibuster, 146, 364 firearms. See bayonets; blunderbusses; cavaliers (cavalry); flintlock firearms; matchlock; miquelets; musketoon; pistol shot; snaphance; wheel locks firemaster, 146 fireships, 36, 146–147, 213, 352, 413, 441, 448 fireshot, 428 firewood, 176 firing on the roll, 147 firing squads, 291 first captain, 390 First Schooneveld, 11 fitna, 147–148 flag captain, 390 flag of defiance. See flags flag officer. See ranks (at sea) flag rank, 390. See ranks (at sea) flags, 148–149 flagship, 149, 250, 390 Flanders, 262, 316, 514; army of, 445; Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695), 270;

Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; siege warfare and, 431; Spain and, 443; Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, comte de (1611–1675) and, 478. See also Spanish Netherlands; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) flank companies, 149, 195 flanks (in battle), 149 flanks (in fortifications), 38, 149, 251, 343 flatboats, 149 fleet actions, 322 fleet in being, 149–150 fleets, 149, 152, 427, 447, 489. See also specific navies fleets, war of, 197 Fleurus, Battle of (June 21/July 1, 1690), 44, 83, 150, 217, 270, 316, 326 flintlock firearms, 150–152, 168, 212, 285; battle and, 41; bayonets and, 43; cavalry and, 74; drills and, 111; Indian Wars and, 238; Russian Army and, 411. See also snaphances flogging, 291, 293 flotilla, 152 flutes, 152 flying sap, 354. See parallels; sap fodder, 152–153; logistics and, 254, 255; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 328; Ottoman warfare and, 348; Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689) and, 351; at sea, 395; siege warfare and, 431–432 Fontainebleau, Edict of (October 22, 1685), 132, 205 Fontainebleau, Peace of (August 23/September 2, 1679), 421. See Scanian War

Index Fontenoy (May 11, 1745), 533 food, 255, 351, 391, 431–432. See also famines; logistics; magazines; rations; siege warfare food, animal, 152–153 foraging, 328, 331, 465, 509. See also Blenheim (1704); cavalry; contributions; course (on land); dragoons; Fehrbellin (1675); Friedrich-Wilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Ireland; Karl XII; logistics; magazines; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655-1660); Ottoman warfare; petite guerre; raids; Rajputs; Scanian War (1674–1679); siege warfare; Tartars; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667); Vienna, siege of (1683); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) forced military labor, 90 fore-and-aft sails, 415, 422. See also rigging forecastle, 153, 391 foremasts, 285. See also masts foresails, 415 forests, 153, 285, 359 foretop, 391 förläning system (of recruitment). See Swedish Army formations, 143, 146, 250–251 fornello. See chamber Forscheim, 286 fort d’arret, 153 fortifications, 154–155; branches and, 56; capital and, 70; cavaliers, 73; construction and design of, 474; engineers and, 294; fascines and, 143; flanks of,

149; magistral lines, 273; terminology, 143. See also military engineers; individual engineers; specific components of fortifications; specific structures fortresses, 155, 229, 251, 490–491, 518, 523 forts, 155 fougasses, 155, 300 fouling, 155 foul the range, 155 Four Days’ Battle (June 1–4/11–14, 1666), 10, 301, 409, 412–413. See also Downs, Battle of the (June 1–4/11–14, 1666) fourneau. See chamber fournisseurs, 155, 257 fraises, 156 France, xxviii–xxix, 156–157. See also French and Indian Wars (1689–1763); Fronde (1648–1653); Indian Wars; war finance; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); individual leaders Franche-Comté, 123, 157, 182, 262, 269, 319 Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659), 12, 48, 115, 157–158, 158, 161, 165, 381, 443, 478. See also Pyrenees, Treaty of (1659) Fraustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706), 158–159, 186 Frederick I of Prussia. See Friedrich I Frederick III, 403 Fredrik III of Denmark (r. 1648–1670), 101, 103–104, 159 Fredrik IV of Denmark (1671–1730), 22, 105, 184 Frederick-William of Brandenburg (1620–1688). See Friedrich-Wilhelm

Frederiksborg, Peace of (June 14, 1720), 105, 192–193, 442 Freebooter, 146 free company, 159 free evacuation, 159, 454 free ships, free goods, 159 Freiburg (August 5, 1644), 182 French and Indian Wars (1689–1763), 160 French Army, 160–161. See also Ireland French Navy, 161–163 French Wars of Religion (1562–1629), 204 Friedlingen, Battle of (October 14, 1702), 163, 501, 518 Friedrich I in Prussia (1657–1713), 163–164, 165, 203, 378 Friedrich II (“The Great”), 163, 165, 269 Friedrich III, 163 Friedrich Augustus, Elector of Saxony. See Augustus II of Poland Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688), 164–166. See also Brandenburg Army; Prussian Army frigates, 71, 165 frizzen, 150 Fronde, French (1648–1653), 165–166; Anne of Austria and, 13; Créqui and, 95; France and, 156, 158; Great Condé and, 115, 182; Louis XIV and, 259; Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695), 269; Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661) and, 287; officers and, 339; participants, 478; war finance and, 509 Fronde, Spanish. See FrancoSpanish War (1635–1659) front (in battle), 21, 167, 294, 432 581

Index Frontenac, comte de (1620–1698), 239 frontières, 168, 249, 313–314, 375, 487, 514 fronts (of fortifications), 466 Frost, Robert I., 164 fugelman, 168 Fulbe, 441 fuses. See auget; bombs; grenades; mortars; saucisson Fusiliers du Roi, 340 fusils/fusiliers, 43, 151, 152, 168, 212, 285 Fyllebro, Battle of (Halmstadt) (August 18, 1676), 104, 421 Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653), 7–8, 47, 145, 169, 173, 227, 477 gabion farci (sap roller), 417, 418 gabions, 169; attacks on, 194; construction and design, 143, 294, 295, 417, 418; disadvantages of, 249, 416; functions of, 20, 284, 433; sorties and, 441 gachupines, 169 Gadesbusch, Battle of (December 20, 1712), 191 gaff. See rigging; sails gaff sail, 415 galiotes à bomb. See bomb ketches galleons, 170 galleries, 94, 170, 176, 254, 387 galleys, 64, 170–171, 174, 289, 346, 352 galliots, 171 Galway, Earl of, 3, 56, 171, 521 gangrene, 296 Gangut, Battle of (Hangö) (July 27/August 7, 1714), 14, 191 ganimet, 29, 171, 466, 511 gantlope, 292 gap in the muster, 355 garde-fou, 77, 171 582

Garde Français, 484 Gardes du Corps, 54, 172, 270, 340 Gardes marine, 172, 338 garrison carriage, 172 garrisons, 154, 159, 172, 181 garrison troops, 286 Gascons, 442 gates, 100, 173, 357, 397 gauntlet, running, 291, 292, 293 Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710), 37, 173, 523, 524 gendarmerie, 173 general. See ranks (on land) General at Sea, 47, 173, 301 Generalfeldmarschall, 392 generalissimos, 392 Generality, 173 Generalkriegskommissariat, 57, 174, 510 general retrenchment. See retrenchments generals, 392 General War Commissariat, 174 Genoa, 52, 156, 174 gentlemen officers, 174, 339, 406, 465 George, Johan, 174 George I of England, 201 German Military, 150, 196–197, 212, 292 German states, 325 Germany, 174. See also Habsburgs; Holy Roman Empire; individual leaders ghazi, 174, 344, 347 Ghent, siege of (March 1–12, 1678), 127, 174–175, 401 ghulams, 175 Gibraltar, 175, 488, 493, 519, 525 Ginkel, Goddard van, 175, 217, 218 glacis, 175–176; counterapproach and, 94; counterscarps and, 94; descending,

106; écoutes and, 132; galleries and, 170; listners and, 254; lunettes and, 269; siege warfare and, 257, 299 globe of compression, 176 Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), 176–179 gold, 443, 531 gorges, 179 governors, 179 Grand Alliance (1689–1697). See Austrian Empire; British Army; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; French Navy; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Imperial Army; Ireland; Louis XIV; Marlborough; Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Royal Navy; Ryswick, Treaty of (1697); United Provinces; William III Grand Alliance (1701–1714). See Austrian Empire; British Army; Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; French Navy; Geertruidenberg negotiations; Great Britain; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Imperial Army; Louis XIV; Marlborough; Prussian Army; Royal Navy; United Provinces; Utrecht, Treaty of (1713); War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III Grand Alliances, 321, 325, 487, 521; Bavarian occupation by, 207; fracture of, 329; lines of, 251; London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) and, 258, 524; Louis XIV and, 264, 265; Nine

Index Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 327; Portugal and, 374; Prussia and, 57; Spanish Netherlands and, 446; Victor Amadeus II and, 496; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 517, 526. See also Allied Armies Grand Alliances (1672–1678). See Dutch War (1672–1678); FriedrichWilhelm; Leopold I; Louis XIV; William III Grand Alliance, War of (1689–1697). See Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705); Louis XIV (1638–1715); Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726); Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); William III (1650–1702) Grand Design, 281 “Le Grande Condé,” 182–183 grand veziers (vezir-i azam), 46, 179–180, 229, 344, 435. See also individual Grand veziers grapeshot, 17, 428, 429 Grave, siege of (July–October 1674), 83, 123, 180, 533 Great Britain, xxviii, 180–182, 192, 278, 523, 524, 527. See also England Great Captains, list of, 281 Great Condé (1621–1686), 115, 158, 166, 182–183, 478, 479. See also Dutch War (1672–1678) Great Elector, The. See Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688) Great Fire of London (September 2–6, 1666). See Anglo-

Dutch War, Second (1665–1667); Charles II great gun, 183 Great Lakes country, 212 Great League of Peace and Power, 220 Great Mosque, 306 Great Northern War (1700–1721), xxvii, 183–193 Great Plague, 10, 76, 107, 356 Great Powers, 193, 527 Great Rebellion, The. See Cromwell, Oliver great ships, 193 Great Storm (November 26–27/December 7–8, 1703), 193 Great Turkish War. See AustroOttoman War, First (1683–1681) Green Standard Army, 32, 80, 193–194, 542 grenades/grenadiers, 20, 105, 149, 168, 194–195, 284, 484 Grenzers, 29, 195, 231, 535 Grodno, 188 grog, 195 guerilla war. See partisans; Peter I; petite guerre; in France, 5; in Ireland, 214; Irish and, 393; Marathas’, 279, 435–436; Mughals and, 306; in Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), 326; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 331; Vaudois and, 493 guérites, 33, 195 guerre de cabinet, 195 guerre de commerce. See guerre de course guerre de course (guerre de commerce), 11, 196–197; armateurs and, 14; Bart and, 38; convoys and, 89; food and, 157; French Navy and, 162;

Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 177, 324, 325; officers and, 338; Pontchartrains, comptes de, and, 373; Royal Navy and, 407; tactics and, 251; Vauban and, 490; war finance and, 509–510; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 525 guerre de course, Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de (1642–1701) and, 474 guerre d’escadre, 197; armateurs and, 14; Bart and, 38; fighting instructions and, 146; fleets in being and, 149; food and, 157; French Navy and, 162; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 196; tactics and, 251; vessels of, 146 guerre guerroyante, 197, 469, 471 guinea, 197 gun captains, 391 gun carriages, 249, 473, 475. See arsenal; artillery; artillery train; cannon; garrison carriage; great gun; limber; mortar; quoin; sap; shor; siege park; Top Arabacs; trail; truck gun deck. See decks gunner, 197 Gunner’s Mark. See gunner’s rule gunner’s mates, 392 gunner’s quadrant, 198 gunner’s rule, 198 gunnery. See artillery; broadside; drill; flintlock firearms; fortifications; galleys; gunner’s quadrant; gunner’s rule; shot; siege warfare gun port, 198 583

Index gunpowder victories, 304, 305 gun tackle, 198, 463 Habsburgs, 199–200; flags of, 148; Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660) and, 456; Louis XIV and, 263; Madrid and, 524; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 332, 333; Ottoman Empire and, 345, 496–497; Poland and, 366; power of, 1; Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735) and, 387; rivals of, 54; tamed, 156; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) and, 470. See also Imperial Army; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Hadiach, Treaty of (September 1658), 92, 471 Hadjús, 200, 387 Hague, Treaty of (1709). See Barrier Treaty, First Haiduks, 200 half-moons (demi-lunes). See ravelins half-pay, 200 Halmstadt, Battle of (Fyllebro) (August 18, 1676), 104, 421 Hälsingborg, Battle of (February 28/March 10, 1710), 104, 105, 190, 421 handy, 200 hangers, 43, 51, 200, 364, 484 hanging, 291, 292 Hangö, Battle of (July 27/August 7, 1714), 14, 191 Han-Martial, 30, 31, 79 Hanover, 201 Hanover, House of, 488 Hans, 465, 466, 537, 542 hardtack, 395. See rations Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), 220 haul close, 201, 250, 314, 452, 530 haul wind, 201 584

haxo casemate, 72 head riskers, 425–426 headsails, 415 health. See disease; military medicine heave to, 201 heavy infantry. See infantry hellburner, 213 Henri IV (1553–1610), 132, 205 hetman (otaman), 201, 287 highwaymen, 507 highways, 256 Hindus, 305, 306, 386–386, 435. See also Sikhs Höchstädt, Battles of (September 20, 1703; August 13, 1704), 201–202, 519 Hofkriegsrat, 140, 202, 302, 338 Hohenzollern lands, 164 Holland, 176, 178, 262. See also Anglo-Dutch Wars; United Provinces Holland, Regents of, 485, 487 Holmes, Admiral, 301 Holmes’ Bonfire (August 9/19, 1666), 448. See AngloDutch War, Second (1665–1667); St. James Day Fight (1666) Holmes, Robert (1622–1692), 202 Holowczyn, Battle of (July 2/14, 1708). See Great Northern War (1700–1721) Holy League (Sacra Ligua), 499. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699) Holy Roman Empire, 202–203; standing armies and, 450; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 518. See also individual leaders holy war, 174 Hong, 277 hôpital ambulant, 298. See military medicine horns, 203 hornwork, 56, 99, 204

horses, 152–153, 254–255, 395. See also animals; draught animals; logistics “horses” (units), 399–400 hospitals, 296, 298, 536 hostages, 204 Host, Don, 409 Hoste, Paul, 146 hostile descents. See descents Hotêl des Invalides, 296 hot shot, 325, 428 House of Commons, English, 134 hoy, 204 Hudson Bay Company, 204, 239 Huguenots, 204–206; arrièreban and, 15; British Army and, 62; dragonnades and, 111; Edict of Fontainebleau (October 22, 1685) and, 132, 422; Edict of Nantes and, 85; in India, 495; in Ireland, 216; Louis XIV and, 260, 335; quartering and, 383; Regents and, 399; revolts of, 68; Vaudois and, 493. See also individual Huguenots Humayun, 304 Hummelshof, Battle of (July 18–19, 1702), 187 Hungarian army, 200, 206, 300, 387, 483–484, 502 Hungary, 206; Austria and, 499; Ottomans and, 141, 344, 345, 404, 497; revolts in, 331; Tatars and, 465. See also Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735) Hung Taiji (1592–1643). See Banner system; China; Manchus hussars, 75, 206, 353, 367, 483 Huy, 520 Iberville, Pierre le Moyne d’ (1661–1706), 239

Index ice, 254 idlers, 15, 207, 392 Ijssel line, 207 Ilbersheim, Treaty of (November 7, 1704), 207, 520 Île des Faisans, 207 Imperial Army, 207–208. See also Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663–1736) imperialism, 407, 443 Imperials, 229 impressment, 106, 133, 160, 161, 163, 208 Impress Service, 209 incendiaries. See bombs; carcasses; esplanades; fireships; grenades; infernal machines; mortars; shot; siege warfare; zone of servitude Indelningswerk (Indeling), 458, 468 independent company, 209 India, 157, 304–305, 307, 323, 373, 436, 495, 495. See Aurangzeb; Compagnie des Indies Orientales; East India Company; Hindus; Marathas, Mughal Empire; Rajputs; Sikhs; Sivaji Bhonsle; Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie Indian armies. See Aurangzeb; Fitna; mansabdari; Marathas; misl; Mughal Empire; mulkgiri; Rajputs; Sikhs; silladars; Sivaji bhonsle Indian Ocean, 407 Indians, North American: New England and, 317; in Newfoundland, 318; New Spain and, 319; Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713) and, 384; warfare of, 160, 437–438. See also specific tribes Indian Wars, 209–212. See also Iroquois Confederacy Indonesian archipelago, 495

infantry, 212; cavalry and, 368; defenses against, 461; defenses of, 446, 464; at Enzheim, Battle of, 136–137; formations, 143; functions of, 507; officers, 475; Ottoman, 539; units, 399; weapons, 363. See also specific armies inferior officers. See petty officer; ranks (at sea) infernal machines, 213, 323, 324, 448 Innocent XI, 498 insults, 20, 137, 213, 542 intendants, 213, 257, 509; drills and, 111; Fronde and, 165; Louvois and, 160; Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661) and, 287; underlings of, 86; uniforms and, 484 interior lines, 122, 123 interloper, 213 invalid companies, 172 investment, 214 Iran, 174, 175, 305, 344, 347, 348 Ireland, 214–218; Act of Union and, 180; Galway, Earl of, and, 171; Great Britain and, 182; “Levellers” and, 319; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 280; military medicine in, 298; Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) and, 301 Irish Brigade, 68. See also Wild Geese Irish establishment, 218–219; barracks and, 37; British Establishment and, 63; Glorious Revolution and, 177; military medicine of, 296; Tyrconnel, Earl of (1630–1691) and, 480 Irish mercenaries, 532–533 Irish Mutiny Act, 309 “Ironsides” cavalry, 318

Iroquoia nation, 212 Iroquois Confederacy, 209, 220 ishan, 220 Islam. See Mughal Empire; Sikhs Ismail, Mawlai, 303 Italy, 220, 246, 284, 290, 488, 516; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 329; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 518, 520, 521 Ivan V (1666–1696), 184, 357 jacks, 148, 221 Jacobites, 221–222; Anne of Great Britain and, 13; Athlone and, 20; BarfleurLa Hogue, Battle of and, 35; Berwick, James, 1st Duke of and, 45; British Army and, 60, 63; enemies of, 68; Louis XIV and, 136, 258, 323; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 280; Ormonde, Duke of (1665–1745), 343; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and, 487; William III and, 534. See also Ireland; individual Jacobites Jacobite War, 326 jagir, 222, 277 Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), 306 Jahan, Shah (1592–1666), 305, 306 Jamaica, 222, 530 James II (1633–1701), 222–223; Anglo-Dutch Wars and, 11; Anne of Great Britain and, 13; battles of, 33, 35, 55, 268; Berwick, James, 1st Duke of and, 45; British Army and, 61; Charles II of England and, 76; ChateâuRenault, François Louis and, 77; dragonnades and, 111; England and, 135; 585

Index James II (1633–1701) (continued) fighting instructions and, 145; finances of, 508; Glorious Revolution and, 176; Louis XIV and, 329; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 280; officers and, 339; Royal Navy and, 406; Tyrconnel, Earl of (1630–1691) and, 480–481; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 517; William III and, 533. See also Ireland; Jacobites; York, Duke of James VII of Scotland. See James II (1633–1701) Janissary Corps, 223–224; barracks and, 36; battalions and, 39; battles of, 541; bonuses, 220; commander of, 540; decline of, 425; military medicine of, 296; music of, 298–299; rations, 395; reduction of, 449; religion of, 347; replacements for, 478; sieges by, 497; special units of, 75, 425–426, 473; teamsters, 473; uniforms of, 483; units of, 343; war finance and, 510–511 Jansenists, 165 Jao Modo, Battle of (1696), 542 Japan, xxviii, 224–227, 292, 364, 494, 495, 502 Jasmund, Battle of (May 25, 1676), 420–421, 477 jazda kozacka, 227, 353, 367 jazda pancerna, 353, 367, 528 Jebel Musa, 175 jefe de escuadra, 390 jençeri Ocak, 223 Jews: in Africa, 342; Cossacks and, 91, 93, 236, 398; in England, 98; in France, 586

166; Russians and, 358, 471; Spain and, 512; United Provinces and, 534 jibs, 415 jihads, 174, 344, 347, 441 Jin Empire, 276 jizya, 306 Johan Georg of Saxony, 498 John Company. See East India Company (EIC) (English) John III, 439–440 Joseph Ferdinand, 516 Joseph II of Austria, 431 Juel, Niels (1629–1697), 227–228, 239, 420, 477 Jumano, 228 Junkers, 164. See Brandenburg; Friedrich-Wilhelm; Landgrafs; officers; PrussianArmy; szlachta; Friedrich-Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620–1688) and, 378; as officers, 338; Prussian Army and, 378; war finance and, 510 junks, 416 Jürchen. See Manchus Kahlenberg, Battle of (September 12, 1683), 440. See also Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683) kahya bey, 229 kaim mekam, 179, 229 Kaiserlichs, 229 kale, 229; çit palankasi and, 82 Kalisz, Battlel of (October 29, 1706). See Great Northern War (1700–1721) Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722), 229–230, 402–403, 542; Banner system and, 31; China and, 80; Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689) and, 317; reforms of, 193 Kapikulu Askerleri, 28, 223, 230–231; Austro-Ottoman

War, First (1683–1699) and, 472; bonuses of, 424; Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (1583–1661) and, 241; mutiny and, 344; rations, 395; reduction of, 316; sipahis and, 435 kapitein, 391 kapitein-luitenant, 391 Kara Mustafa Pasha (r. 1676–1683), 179–180, 231, 496–497; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683) and, 498 Kardis, Peace of (June 21, 1661), 334, 471. See Northern War, Second (1655–1660) Karlovac border, 231 Karlowitz, Peace of (1699), 180, 542; Austrian Empire and, 24; Austro-Ottoman Wars and, 27; Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1702) and, 240; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 359 Karlowitz, Peace of (January 26, 1699), 231 Karlstadt border, 195, 231 Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660), 232; alliances of, 87; Fredrik III and, 104; Kiejdany, Treaty of (August 17, 1655) and, 237; Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/March 8, 1658) and, 403; Thirteen Years’ War and, 469. See also Northern War, Second (1655–1660) Karl XI of Sweden (1655–1697), 184, 232, 456–457; battles of, 274, 421; in Denmark, 104; Denmark and, 105; at Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676), 268–269; regent for, 537; war finance and, 459

Index Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718), 145, 233–235; absolutism of, 459–460; Apraxin and, 14; artillery and, 16; ascent of, 184; Augustus II and, 22; battle and, 41; battles of, 359–372, 369, 380–381; Brandenburg and, 57; Cossacks and, 93; drabants and, 111; fortifications and, 154; at Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702), 239; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; at Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700), 312–313; overviews, 456–457; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 360; pikes and, 363; punishment and, 292; Sapiehas and, 418; Stanislaw I (1677–1766) and, 451; Ukraine and, 422. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721) Kazan, 235; Çorbasi and, 90 keel-hauling, 293 Kentish Knock, Battle of (September 18/October 8, 1652), 7, 235; Blake, Robert and, 47; Dutch Navy and, 118 ketch, 235 Khan, Afzal, 436 Khanwa (March 16–17, 1527), 304 Khmelnitsky, Bohdan (c. 1595–1657), 236; death of, 471; Thirteen Years’ War and, 468–472 Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654), 3, 236–237, 365, 366, 539; Batoh, Battle of and, 39; Berestczko, Battle of and, 45; Cossacks

and, 92, 383; effects of, 409; Polish Army and, 368; Russian Army and, 410; Tatars and, 466 Kiakhta, Treaty of (1727), 317 Kidd, William (c. 1645–1701), 324. See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) Kiejdany, Treaty of (August 17, 1655), 237, 331, 469 Kingdom of Naples and Kingdom of Siciliy. See Dutch War (1672–1678); Messinian rebellion (1674–1678) Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. See Dutch War (1672–1678); Messinian rebellion (1674–1678) King Philip’s War (1675–1676), 211, 237–238 King William’s Musket, 152 King William’s War (1689–1697), 204, 238–239; Indians, North American, and, 384; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 321; settlement of, 413 Kliszów, Battle of (July 8/19, 1702), 22, 185, 239 Kockersberg, Battle of (October 7, 1677), 239; commanders at, 95–96; effects of, 126; participants, 500 Köge Bay (July 1, 1677), 227, 239, 421, 477 Kolberg (1758), 167 Kolhapur, Battle of (December 28, 1659). See Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680) kommandeur, 390 komputowe army, 368. See Polish Army Koniecpol, Battle of (November 21, 1708). See Great Northern War (1700–1721) Königsberg, Treaty of (January 7/17, 1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660)

Konotop, Battle of (July 8, 1659), 240, 471 köprücu, 240 Köprülü, Ahmed Fazil (r. 1661–1676), 346 Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (r. 1661–1676), 179, 240, 344; Candia, siege of and, 69 Köprülü Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1702), 180, 240, 241 Köprülü Mustafa Pasha (r. 1656–1661), 179, 180, 241, 344, 345; Austrian Empire and, 24; Austro-Ottoman Wars and, 25, 26 Köprülü Numan Pasha (d. 1719), 180 Korsum, Battle of (May 26, 1648). See Khmelnitsky Uprising (1648–1654) Krabatische Gränitz. See Karlstadt border Kriegskasse, 506 Kufstein dragoons, 139 kuls, 241, 425, 426, 511 Kuruc, 241, 387 Kwarta, 383. See Polish; Quarter Army labanc, 243 laboratory, 243; bombs and, 52 labor, military, 363–364; forced, 530 ladders, 137 Laden, Battle of (1693). See Neerwinden, Battle of (July 19/29, 1693) la gloire. See battle; French Army; Louis XIV; officers Lagos, Battle of (June 27, 1693). See Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de; Smyrna convoy (June 17–18, 1693); Tourville La Hogue, Battle of (1692). See Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of (1692) laPimci, 243 587

Index lance-corporals, 393 Landen, 316 Landgrafs, 243 “landless ones,” 248 landmen, 244, 392, 424 Land regiment, 244 Landsknechte, 292 Landskröna, Battle of (July 14, 1678), 421. See Scanian War (1674–1679) landsmen, Articles of War and, 15 Lanowa infantry, 368. See Polish Army lashings, 293 lateen sails, 285, 415 Later Jin, 276 latrines, 244 laws of war, 302 Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea (1652), 244 League of the Rhine (1658). See Rheinbund (1658) leeward and windward gauges, 244, 530 leeway. See windage Left Bank Ukraine. See Andrussovo, Treaty of (January 30/February 9, 1667) Lenk, Torsen, 151 Lens (August 29, 1648), 182 Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705), 23, 25, 104, 119, 139, 144–145, 164, 245–246 Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747), 246, 281, 333, 420, 489, 516 Lepanto (October 7, 1571), 170 Leslie, Alexander, 468 Leslie, David (1601–1682), 246, 536–537 Lesnaia, Battle of (September 28/October 9, 1708), 189 Leszczyniski, Stanislaw (Stanislaw I) (1677–1766), 22, 186, 233, 418, 451 Le Tellier, François (1641–1691): logistics and, 588

272. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) Le Tellier, Michel (1603–1685), 246–247, 284 letters of marque (and reprisal), 247, 324, 376 letters of service, 247 Levant, amiral du, 474 “Levellers,” 318–319 levend/levendat, 248, 345 Liège (October 14, 1702), 518 lieutenant-colonel, rank of, 340 lieutenant du roi, 248 lieutenant-general of the day, 475 lieutenant-generals, 392 lieutenants, 393. See ranks (at sea); ranks (on land) Life Guards, 172 light infantry, 113, 149, 212 lignes fichantes, 251 Lille, siege of (August 28–September 26, 1667), 248 Lille, siege of (August 14–December 10, 1708), 248–249; Berwick, James, 1st Duke of and, 46; Boufflers and, 54; citadels and, 82; effects of, 501; Eugene of Savoy and, 140; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; participants, 494; pré carré and, 375; Vauban and, 490, 514, 522 limber, 249 Limerick, siege of (1691), 21, 217, 218. See Athlone, Godard van Reede, 1st Earl of; Glorious Revolution; Ireland; Limerick, Treaty of (October 3/13, 1691); William III Limerick, surrender of (October 3/13, 1692), 323, 534

Limerick, Treaty of (October 3/13, 1691), 221, 249 limites, 168, 249–250 line abreast, 250 line ahead, 169, 250, 314 line ahead and astern, 250 line of battle: Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of and, 35; Dutch Navy and, 477; at Gabbard Shoal, Battle of (June 2–3/12–13, 1653), 169; lee side of, 146; Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) and, 301; pell-mell and, 356; (at sea), 250–251, 314, 426; stations and, 452; Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653) and, 467 line of battle (on land). See drills line of defense, 251 line of demarcation (papal), 443 line regiments, 279 lines, 207, 251–252, 257 Lines of Brabant, 154, 251, 252, 518, 520, 521; Cadogan and, 67; Louis XIV and, 265; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; Ne Plus Ultra lines and, 316; Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706) and, 388 lines of circumvallation, 14, 248, 252, 353 lines of contravallation, 252, 253, 354, 417, 432 lines of investment, 253 Lines of Lauterbourg, 253 Lines of Stollhofen, 253, 501, 521 lines of supply. See logistics; magazines Lines of the Var, 253, 501 line tactics, 145 Lionne, Hugues de (1611–1671), 253

Index Lion of the North. See Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718) Lisbon, 525 listners, 94, 170, 254, 387 list of headings, 254 Lithuania, 237, 331, 332, 341, 383, 418 Lithuanian Army, 353, 368–369, 468, 471 Lithuania, Polish-occupied, 330, 424, 461, 468 little moon, 269 Little Stephen, 397–398 Little war, 362 livres, 254 Li Zicheng, 537 locking. See drills locks, on firearms. See flintlock firearms; Madrid lock; matchlock; miquelet; Scottish lock; snaphance; wheel locks Lodewijk, Willem, 502 logistics, 254–257; Le Tellier, Michel (1603–1685) and, 247; Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) and, 267; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 281–282, 283; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 325; Ottoman, 343, 347–348, 511; Royal Navy and, 405, 407; of Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696), 440. See also magazines London, 508 Londonderry, siege of (1689), 215, 257, 481 London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711), 37, 221, 258, 316, 377, 487 longboat, 258 Long War, 24, 499–500. See also Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699) loopholes, 258, 277, 352

Lord High Admiral, 389. See ranks (at sea) “lord of the head,” 293 “Lord Protector.” See Cromwell, Oliver Lorraine, 156, 258, 262, 263, 265, 413, 515 Lorraine, Charles IV, duc de (1604–1675), 45, 258 Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690), 95, 96, 122, 126, 127, 258–259; battles of, 300–301, 343, 401, 448; at Kockersberg, Battle of (October 7, 1677), 239; Louis XIV and, 263; Nijmegen, Treaty of (September 17, 1678) and, 320; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 325; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683) and, 497, 499 Louisiana, 318 Louis II de Bourbon, Duc d’Enghien, 182–183. See Great Condé Louis XIII, 13, 34, 160, 205, 449 Louis XIV, xxv, xxvi, 259–266. See also absolutism; France; French Army; French Navy; Marie Thérèse Louis XV, 501 Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691), 266–267; bombardments and, 52; drills and, 111, 112, 284; Dutch War and, 119, 121; French Army and, 160; Great Condé and, 183; logistics and, 272; mortars and, 303; officers and, 339, 340; Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689) and, 352; punishment and, 291–292; ranks and, 393; rivals of, 96; sieges by, 180;

Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, comte de (1611–1675) and, 478, 479; Vauban and, 490 lower decks. See decks Lowestoft, Battle of (June 3/13, 1665), 9, 267–268 lug-sails, 415, 416 luitenant ter zee, 391. See also ranks (at sea) Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676), 74, 104, 232, 268–269, 421, 458 Lund, Peace of (September 16/26, 1679), 105, 421 lunettes, 84, 269 Lustucru rebellion (1662), 269 Lutzen, Battle of (1634), 302 Luxembourg, 262, 263, 269, 413, 515–516 Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695), 269–270; battles of, 72, 115, 150, 316, 452; death of, 328; at sieges, 311; Vendôme, Louis Joseph, duc de (1654–1712) and, 493; wars of, 326, 327 Luzzara, Battle of (August 4/15, 1702), 139, 270, 494, 518 Lwów (Lvov), Battle of (1656), 332, 368–369, 440, 469 Lwów (Lvov), Battle of (1675), 440 Lynn, John A.: “artillery fortresses” and, 18; on Louis XIV, 261, 264, 265, 321, 352; on Louvois, 267; on nationalism, 522; on siege warfare, 430–431; on standing armies, 449 Maastrict, siege of (June 11–30, 1673), 122, 252, 271, 319, 353, 491, 500 made masts, 284 589

Index Madrid, 171, 524 Madrid locks, 152, 272 magazines, 272–273; in Dutch War, 119; étapes, 138; expense of, 141; food and, 152; fortifications and, 154; Le Tellier, Michel (1603–1685) and, 246; lines and, 257; Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) and, 267; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 326, 327; Ottoman, 449, 465; siege parks and, 430; women and, 536 magistral line, 273 magistral (master) galleries, 170. See also galleries Mahal, Mumtaz, 305 Maharashtra, 278, 279, 306 mainmast. See masts main sail, 415. See sails maintops, 285, 473 Mainz, siege of (July 17–September 8, 1689), 325 Maison du Roi regiments, 340 major-general of the day, 475 major-generals, 392 major, rank of, 340, 393 make sail, 273 Malacca, 495 Malaga (Velez-Málaga), Battle of (August 24, 1704), 493, 525 Malmö, Battle of (July 5/15, 1678), 104, 232, 274, 421 Malplaquet (August 31/September 11, 1709), 274–275; effects of, 181, 523; military medicine and, 298; participants, 54, 67, 140, 246, 282, 501, 533 Malta, 346. See officers Mamluks, 46, 275–276, 483 Manchuria, 276 Manchus (Jürchen), 276–277; Banner system and, 29–30, 31, 32, 133, 194; China 590

and, 78, 79, 81, 225, 229, 230, 320, 537 mandate of heaven, 79, 277, 537 mansabdari, 148, 277, 434 mantlets, 277–278, 417 Mantua, Duke of, 515 maps, 278, 356 Marathas, 23, 278–279, 306, 307, 436. See also individual leaders Marbella Battle of (March 10, 1705), 279 marching regiments, 279 Mardefelt (subordinate commander), 144 maréchals de France, 330, 339, 392, 393, 478, 500 Marienburg, Treaty of (June 25, 1656), 332, 334 Marie Thérèse, 157, 261, 279, 381, 513, 516 marines, 279–280 Maritime Powers, 280 marksmanship, 503 Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722), 280–283 Marsaglia, Battle of (October 4, 1693), 73, 173, 283–284, 328, 496 Marson Moor (July 2, 1644), 416 Martinet, Jean (d. 1672), 42, 111, 284, 291, 490 masking, 284, 295 Massue, Henry de (Earl of Galway), 171 master, 337, 391–393 master and commander, 391, 465 Master-General of the Ordnance, 284 master’s mate. See ranks (at sea) masts, 284–285, 446, 473 matchlocks, 151, 168, 212, 224, 285, 438 mates, 392 Mattingly, Garrett, 494

Mauerscheisser, 286 Maximillian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726), 201, 286, 488, 498, 501, 519, 520 Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661), 286; Anne of Austria and, 13; Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658) and, 12; Eugene of Savoy and, 139; France and, 156, 162, 165, 166; Great Condé and, 182; Prussia and, 164; Vauban and, 489 Mazepa-Koledinsky, Ivan Stepanovich (1644?–1709), 188, 287, 360 M´scislaw massacre (1654), 468 Mediterranean: Atlantic passage from, 175; commanders in, 138; convoys, 439; naval power in, 170, 407, 445; Tangier and, 464; war and, 485; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 526, 527 Medway, attack on (June 12, 1667), 413 Mehemet IV (r. 1646–1687), 345, 489, 496–497, 499 Mémoire des raisons (Louis XIV), 264, 287–288, 321, 396, 516 Mémoire sur la caprérie (Memorandum on Privateering) (Vauban), 490 Menonites, 534 Menshikov, Mikhail Semenovich (1673–1729), 189, 371 menzil-hane, 465. See magazines menzil-hane depots, 272, 348 mercantilism, 288–289; bullionism, 65; Colbert, J.B. and, 84, 261; Louis XIV and, 513; Navigation Acts (1651, 1660) and, 315, 316; Royal Navy and, 406; United Provinces and, 486; war finance and, 506, 507

Index Mercator projection, 278 mercenaries, 289; Aurangzeb’s, 278; in Austro-Ottoman Wars, 26; at Boyne, Battle of (July 1/11, 1690), 55; in British Army, 181, 508; at Carbisdale, Battle of (April 27, 1650), 70; in Dutch Army, 116; in Dutch War, 125; foreign, 60, 61, 160; at Fraustadt, Battle of (February 2/13, 1706), 158, 159; Genoese, 174; in Glorious Revolution, 177; in Ireland, 215, 216; Irish, 532–533; at Lund, Battle of (December 4/14, 1676), 268; Polish Army and, 404; Prussian Army and, 378; in Spanish Army, 444; standing armies and, 449, 450; in Swedish Army, 457; Thirteen Years’ War and, 469. See also military engineers; individual mercenaries merchant ships, 148, 149, 170, 213, 376, 439, 525 merham beha, 296. See military medicine merlons, 133, 289 Messinian rebellion (1674–1678), 21–22, 124, 170, 289–290, 444 Methuen Treaties, 290, 525 Metz, 263 mevacib, 511 Middle Hungarian Principality. See Austrian Empire midshipmen, 392 Milan, 29, 71, 72, 73, 158, 329, 444 Milan, Convention of (March 13, 1707), 290, 480, 521 miles perpetuus, 448 milice gardes-côtes, 290 Militargrenze (“Vojna krajina”), 154, 344, 290, 347 military confederations, 290–291, 369, 472

military discipline, 291–294, 378, 393, 437, 450. See also punishment, military military engineers, 294; lines of contravallation and, 253; Ottoman Army, in, 348, 511; siege warfare and, 431, 432. See also individual engineers military expenditures. See war finance military frontiers, 290 military labor, 294–295; commanders, 475; Raya and, 397; Vauban and, 492; women and, 536 military medicine, 295–298, 299, 438 military music, 298–299 military ranks. See ranks (at sea); ranks (on land) military revolutions. See artillery fortresses; Banner systems; bastions; battle; bayonets; drills; flintlock firearms; fortifications; French Army; logistics; Louvois; magazines; military medicine miquelets; parallels; Peter I; Prussion Army; Russian Army; siege warfare; standing armies; Vauban military schools, 490 militias, 299 militum perpetuum, 448. See standing armies military units. See battalions; brigades; companies; regiments; troops mines/mining, 299–300; antipersonnel, 155; assault and, 20; ditches and, 106; galleries and, 170; listners and, 254; rameaux and, 387; siege warfare and, 432; super, 176; terminology, 143 Ming dynasty, 276–277, 364, 537–538, 542

miquelet, 123, 152, 300 misl, 300, 434 missionaries, 403 mizzen masts, 285 mizzentops, 285 modernization of France, 156–157 modernization of military, 360, 367, 386, 410–411, 443 Mohács, 45, 322 Mohács, Battle of (August 12, 1687), 300–301 Mohawk Indians, 211, 220 Mohegan Indians, 211 monasteries, 409 Mongolia, 542 Mongolians, 276 Mongols, 537. See Banner system; China; Zunghar Mongols Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670), 8, 10, 301; battles of, 448, 477; British Army and, 60; Charles II of England and, 76; Battle of the Downs and, 110; Dunbar, Battle of and, 114; English Navy and, 173; “Fifth Monarchists” and, 319; fighting instructions and, 145; in Ireland, 134; line of battle (at sea) and, 250; Parliament, English and, 135; Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653), 467 Monmouth, Duke of (1649–1685), 301–302; British Army and, 61; James II (1633–1701) and, 222; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 280 Monmouth Rebellion, 176, 222, 301–302 Monmouth’s Rebellion (1685), 280. See also Glorious Revolution; Marlborough; Monmouth, Duke of 591

Index Mons, siege of (March 15–April 8, 1691), 327. See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) Montague, Edward (Earl of Sandwich), 173, 416–417 Montecuccoli, Raimondo (1609–1680), 283, 302–303, 470; Austrian Empire and, 23; battles of, 447–448; Bournonville, Duke of and, 54; Dutch War and, 122; and Köprülü Ahmed Fazil (r. 1661–1676), 240; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 333; retirement of, 183; Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, comte de (1611–1675) and, 479 Morea. See Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699) Morgan, Henry (1635–1688). See buccaneers (“boucaniers”) Morocco, 303, 441 Morosini, Francisco (1618–1694), 346. See Candia, siege of (1666–1669); Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669) mortars, 18, 19, 303–304; bombs and, 52; caldrons and, 73; shells for, 71; Vauban and, 490. See also artillery train; perriers Moselle campaign, 520 mosquet à chevalet, 505 Mosquito Coast, 364 mouse steps, 355 Mughals, 277, 304–307; army of, 434; decline of, xxvii; EIC and, 131–132; enemies of, 435; fitna and, 147–148; ghazi and, 174; Marathas and, 278; Rajputs and, 386; rebellions and, 147–148 Mulhouse, Battle of (December 29, 1674), 479. See Dutch War (1672–1678) 592

mulkgiri, 299, 307 multinationalism, 443 multiple flanks, 149 munitionnaires, 257, 307, 509 Münster, 86, 119, 146, 308, 485, 486, 513 Murphey, Rhoads, 345, 348 musketeers, 200, 453–454 musketoon, 308 muskets, 151, 295, 296, 438, 505, 543. See also flintlock firearms; matchlocks; military medicine; musketoon; musket shot musket shot, 308 Muslims, 174, 345–346, 347, 441, 503 mutiny, 291, 292, 293. See also Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); East India Company; military discipline; New Model Army; specific mutinies Mutiny Act (1689), 15, 61, 308–309 Nagyharsány, Battle of (August 12, 1668), 300–301 Namur, siege of (May 25–June 30, 1692), 21, 54, 83, 246, 270, 311–312 Namur, siege of (July 2–September 1, 1695), 312, 327, 329 Nantes, Edict of (April 13, 1598), 85, 132, 171, 204–205, 260, 422 Narragansett Indians, 211, 238 Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700), 312, 359, 411, 426 Naseby (June 14, 1645), 416 national debt, 508. See war finance nationalism, 266, 288, 315; British, 407; French, 522–523; Polish, 366, 455; Royal Navy and, 406; Russian, 360, 361

Native Americans. See Indians, North American; specific tribes natural frontiers, 126, 156, 261, 313–314, 320, 413, 514. See also frontières naval discipline, 292–293 naval tactics, 64, 314 naval warfare. See naval tactics; war at sea navies. See Apraxin, Fedor; Barbary corsairs; Colbert, Jean-Baptists; convoy; directieschepen; galleys; guerre de course; guerre d’escadre; Peter I; pirates; privateers; ranks (at sea); specific navies Navigation Acts (1651, 1660), 6, 98, 159, 315–316, 406, 531 Navy Board (Commission), 405, 508 necessaries, 316 Neerwinden, Battle of (July 19/29, 1693), 46, 270, 316, 328 nefir-i am, 316, 424 Ne Plus Ultra lines, 154, 252, 258, 282, 314, 316–317, 376, 524 Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689), 81, 230, 317 Netherland Brazil, 531. See Brazil; West Indies Company Netherlands. See Anglo-Dutch Wars; Austrian Netherlands; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Spanish Netherlands; United Provinces Neuf-brisach, 491 New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam), 9, 59, 317 New Converts, 335 New England, 317, 326 new-formation regiments, 410, 411 new formation troops. See officers; Russian Army

Index Newfoundland, 318, 384, 488 New France, 204, 220, 318, 384, 488 New Model Army, 12, 318–319; British Army and, 60; British Navy and, 173; Carbisdale, Battle of and, 70; Cromwell and, 97; in Ireland, 214; Royal Navy and, 405; Swedish, 456, 457. See also specific armies New Netherland. See AngloDutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674) New Spain, 319 New York, 531 Nice, 521 Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam), 9, 59, 317 Nieuw Nederland. See AngloDutch War, Second (1665–1667); Anglo-Dutch War, Third (1672–1674) Nihil Novi, 424 Nijmegen, Treaties of (1678, 1679), 319–320, 514, 515; effects of, 128; fighting tariffs and, 146; FrancheComté and, 157; frontières and, 314; Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690) and, 258–259; Louis XIV and, 127, 262; negotiations, 96; Philippsburg and, 362; Spain and, 444 Nikan, 320 Nikon, Patriarch (1605–1681), 3, 320, 341, 410, 453 Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), 320–330; origins, 320–322; starvation and, 325–330; war on land/at sea, 322–327 niru. See Banner system; company N7nak (1469–1538), 434 Noailles, Ann-Jules, duc de (1650–1708), 328, 330

non-commissioned officers (NCOs), 393 North America, 157, 160, 285, 527. See also Canada; Indians, North American; Indian Wars Northern Association, 318 Northern War, First (1558–1583), 330 Northern War, Second (1655–1660), 330–334; effects of, 409; Juel, Niels (1629–1697) and, 227; Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660) and, 232, 455, 471; Kiejdany, Treat of (August 17, 1655) and, 237; participants, 302, 412, 476, 537; Poland and, 365; Russian Army and, 410; Scanian War (1674-1679) and, 419 Northern War, Third (1700–1721). See Great Northern War (1700–1721) North Foreland (July 25/August 4, 1666), 448 North Quarter, 334 Norway, 470 Nothing New statute, 424 nouveau convertis, 335 Nurgaci (1559–1626), 29, 30, 78, 79, 276–277 nüzul, 272 Nyborg, Battle of (November 24, 1659), 334 Nystad, Peace of (August 30/September 10, 1721), 193, 335, 361 Obdam, Admiral, 268 Obrona Potoczna, 367 officers, 337–340, 375, 389, 396, 444. See also ranks (at sea); ranks (on land); specific ranks off reckonings, 340, 484 Okhmativ, Battle of (January 29, 1655), 469 Öland (June 1, 1676), 421, 477

Öland, Battle of (June 1, 1676). See Juel, Niels; Scanian War (1674–1679) Old Believers (Raskolniki), 93, 320, 341, 361, 410, 453, 454 Old Dessauer, 246. See also Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747) Old Pretender, 454. See Stuart, James Oliwa (Oliva), Peace of (May 3, 1660), 334, 471 Olkieniki, Battle of (November 9/19, 1700), 185, 341–342, 418 opening of the trenches, 214, 342, 354 open order. See drills Orange, enclave of, 515 Orange, House of, 264, 399, 531 Orange, Principality of, 342, 488 Orangists, 106, 116, 329, 342, 399, 485, 531, 535. See also William III; individual Orangists Ordinary, 342 ordnance, 143, 428, 429 Ordnance Board. See Royal Navy ordre de tableau, 339. See officers ordu bazar, 255, 257, 296, 343 orillons, 149, 343 Ormée, 167 Orme River, 150 Ormonde, Duke of (1665–1745), 103, 134, 343 Ortas, 90, 235, 296, 299, 300, 343, 346, 395 Ortenbach (July 23, 1678), 96, 127, 343, 401 otaman (hetman), 201 Ottoman Army, 343–344 Ottoman Empire, xxvii, 344–346. See also AustroOttoman Wars; Great Northern War (1700–1721); war finance; individual leaders 593

Index Ottoman Navy, 346 Ottoman-Polish War (1672–1676), 344, 543. See also Köprülü, Ahmed Fazil; Ottoman Empire, Soieski, Jan Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669), 69, 96, 240, 241, 344, 346–347, 494 Ottoman warfare, 347–348 Oudenarde (June 30/July 11, 1708), 67, 140, 282, 348–349, 494, 522 outworks, 18, 153, 179, 269, 312, 397, 398, 401 oxen, 256 pacholeks, 206, 351 Pagan, Blaise François, compte de (1604–1665), 351, 430, 491 palanka (çit palankasi), 82 Palatinate, 262, 479, 521 Palatinate, devastation of the (1688–1689), 54, 124, 203, 257, 264, 267, 325, 351–352, 450, 479 Palermo (June 2, 1676), 126, 147, 170, 290, 352 palisades, 33, 156, 352–353, 464 Panama, Isthmus of, 170 Pancerna cavalry, 353, 367 Panipat (April 21, 1526), 304 Panipat, Second (November 5, 1556), 305 Papier Timbré rebellion (1675), 53, 260, 353 parados, 353 parallels, 353–354; attacks from, 94, 95; communications and, 86; construction and design of, 214, 294, 417, 432; kinds of, 96; position of, 253; purpose of, 252, 271; Vauban and, 491–492; and zig-zags, 542 parapets, 355; attacks and, 475; construction and design of, 17, 90, 103, 295; functions 594

of, 70, 400; kinds of, 59, 73; position of, 94, 95, 252, 253, 289, 353, 400, 467; sentries and, 195; weapons and, 34, 52, 133, 389, 402 Parée, Ambroise, 296 Paris, Treaty of (1763), 318 parlements, French, 157, 166, 213, 259 parleys, 44, 75, 355 Parliamentary armies, 318 Parliament, English, 134, 135, 178, 222, 326, 508 partisan wars (petite guerres), 111, 206, 305, 362. See also petite guerres (partisan wars) Partition treaties (1698 and 1699). See Louis XIV; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III pas de charge, 299, 355 pas des souris, 355 passes, guarding, 153 passe volants, 161, 291, 292, 355 Patkul, Johann Reinhold (1660–1707), 184, 186–187 pay, military, 171, 340, 454, 507 peasants, 356 pell-mell, 356 pendants, 148 pennants, 148, 149, 390, 399 Penn, William (1621–1670), 145, 356 pensions, 296 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), 10, 222, 285, 296, 356–357, 406, 417 Pequot Indians, 211 Pereiaslav, Treaty of (1654). See Cossacks perriers, 18, 303, 357, 432, 490 petards, 58, 294, 357 Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725), 357–362 Peterwardein, 140 petite guerres (partisan wars), 111, 206, 305, 362 petty officers, 362, 390, 391, 392, 450–451

Petyhorcy cavalry, 353, 362 Philip d’Anjou (Philip V of Spain). See Carlos II; Charles VI; Louis XIV; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Philip II, 259 Philip IV of Spain, 71, 115, 158, 262, 279 Philip V of Spain (Philip d’Anjou). See Carlos II; Charles VI; Louis XIV; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Philippines, 364 Philippsburg, siege of (September 27–October 30, 1688), 73, 319, 325, 362 Philopowo, Battle of (October 22, 1656), 332 pièces ambulantes, 363 Piechota wybraniecka, 367 Piedmont, 493, 496, 519. See also Vaudois pike court, 292 pikes, 168, 363, 393 “Pillars of Hercules,” 175 pinnace, 363 pioneers, 252, 253, 363–364, 397, 429, 432 pipes, 391 pirates, 364; American (French), 495; boarding and, 51; EIC and, 131–132; flags of, 148; justification for, 442; mercantilism and, 288; Morocco and, 303; in New World, 211; Tromp, Maarten van (1598–1653) and, 477; weapons of, 195. See also buccaneers (“boucaniers”); privateers pistols, 152. See also bayonets; blunderbusses; cavaliers (cavalry); flintlock firearms; matchlocks; miquelets; musketoons, pistol shot; snaphance; wheel locks

Index pistol shot, 364–365 PiyadeOan militia, 365 places of arms, 17, 365, 398, 467 plague, 468 poczet, 365, 404 points of sail, 201 Poland, 365–367 Polish Army, 367–369. See also Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) Polish Succession, War of (1733), 258, 501 Polonka, Battle of (June 27, 1660), 369 Poltava, Battle of (June 27/July 8, 1709), 369–373; Augustus II and, 22; Cossacks and, 93; Denmark and, 105; effects of, 451; Karl XII of Sweden (1682–1718) and, 234; Narva, Battle of (November 19/30, 1700) and, 313; Russian Army and, 360, 412; Sapiehas and, 418; Sweden and, 457 pomeschchiki horsemen, 373, 426 pomest’ia cavalry, 373 Pometacom, 237–238 Pondicherry, 323, 373, 495 Pontchartrains, comptes de, 163, 373 popes, 443 Popham, Edward, 173 portable bridging, 284 port admiral, 390 Portland, Battle of (February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653), 373–374; Beachy Head Battles and, 43; Blake, Robert and, 47, 173; Juel, Niels (1629–1697) at, 227; Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) and, 301; participants, 7, 477 Port Royal. See Acadia

Portugal, 374; colonies of, 464; Dutch and, 485, 494–495; Grand Alliance and, 519, 525; Louis XIV and, 500; Spanish Army and, 445; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 517, 526 Portuguese, 307 Portuguese Army, 422 porucznik, 375 positional warfare, 327, 430–433. See also siege warfare post-captain, 390, 391 posterns, 375, 416 poundage, 375 powder, gun, 151 powder magazines, 86, 275 Prague, 137 Pratapgarh, Battle of (November 30, 1659), 375, 436 Praying Indians, 211, 238 pré carré, 375, 491, 522, 523 Preobrazhenski Guards, 411, 454 press/press gangs, 445. See also recruitment Prince Rupert, 99 Prince Rupert’s Land, 204 prisoners, 376; deported, 537; exchanges of, 140–141; in galleys, 170; Indian, North American, 438; as slaves, 175; Vaudois, 493 private council of war. See Articles of War privateers, 247, 376–377; armateurs and, 14; Barbary corsairs and, 33; boarding and, 51; cruisers and, 99; desertion and, 106; the Downs and, 110; Dutch and, 6; EIC and, 131–132; French, 495, 510; French Army and, 338; guerre de course of, 196; impressment and, 208; justification for, 442; Lon-

don Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) and, 258; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 322, 324, 328; pay, 507; ports of, 213, 448; Royal Navy and, 404; Scilly Isles and, 423; Spanish, 443; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and, 488; Vauban and, 490; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 525, 526. See also pirates; individual privateers private war, 437 prize agent, 377 prize courts, 376, 377 prize money, 378 prizes, 363, 376, 377; merchant ships, 132, 439; in War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), 196, 525 prize victualler, 378 professionalization of military, 337, 370, 399; Royal Navy and, 406, 407; Russian Army and, 412; standing armies and, 450; Swedish, 460 Prosken, Battle of (October 8, 1656). See Northern War, Second (1655–1660) Protestants: in England, 176; in France, 493, 519; in galleys, 170; Glorious Revolution and, 177; in Ireland, 481; Louis XIV and, 260, 264; officers, 339; in Piedmont, 496; Royal Navy and, 405; Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697) and, 329; Spanish Army and, 445; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and, 487. See also Huguenots; Ireland; Irish establishment; Jacobites provisions. See food; rations 595

Index Prussia. See Brandenburg; Friedrich I; Friedrich I in Prussia (1657–1713); Friedrich-Wilhelm; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Prussian Army; Tatars; war finance; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Prussian Army, 378–379; Brandenburg and, 57; Friedrich-Wilhelm and, 165; Great Northern War (1700–1721) and, 369; impressment and, 209; land regiments, 244; Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt Dessau (1676–1747) and, 246; Louis XIV and, 144; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 332; officers in, 340; punishment in, 292; uniforms of, 484. See also ranks (on land) Prut River, Battle of (June 28/July 9, 1711), 191 Pueblo Revolt (1680–1694). See Pueblo Indians Puigcerda, siege of (April 29–May 28, 1768), 380 Puigcerda (April 29–May 28, 1678), 128 pulk, 82, 380 Pultusk, Battle of (April 10/21, 1703), 380–381 punishment, military, 160, 383, 435. See also military discipline Punjab, 307, 434 Puritan Revolution. See England; Ireland; Oliver Cromwell Puritans, 135, 444. See also individual Puritans pursers, 337, 391 596

Pushkin, 360 Pyrenees, Treaty of (October 28/November 7, 1659), 12, 156, 158, 381; Dunes, Battle of and, 115; effects of, 444; Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695) and, 269; Marie Thérèse and, 279; negotiators of, 287; site of, 207; Spanish Netherlands and, 446, 485. See also Franco-Spanish War (1635–1659) Qing, 537–538, 542–543; army, 194, 277; Catholics and, 402–403; Nerchinsk, Treaty of (1689) and, 317. See also Banner System; China; Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722); Manchuria; mandate of heaven; Wu Sangui quadrant, 383 quarter. See flags; Lund (1676); surrender Quarter Army, 39, 383 quarter cannon, 383 quartering, 111, 383–384 quartermasters, 337, 391 quartiers de rafraichissement, 384 Québec, 318, 326, 384, 478, 526 Queen Anne. See Anne of Great Britain Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), 180–181, 384 quoin, 384 Raab, (Raba), Battle of (1664). See Köprülü, Ahmed Fazil (r. 1661–1676); Montecuccoli; St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664) Raad van State, 385 racking, 291 Radziwill, Janusz, 237, 331, 469. See also Kiejdany, Treaty of;

Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) raiding, 385; British Army and, 63 Rai, Gobind (1666–1708), 434 Rajputs, 306, 307, 386; Aurangzeb and, 23 raking fire, 133, 386–387; pellmell and, 356; protection from, 137; shot and, 428 Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735), 13, 387; Blenheim, Battle of and, 50; Eugene of Savoy and, 140; Karlowitz, Peace of (January 26, 1699) and, 231; in Translvania, 141; Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734) and, 501; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 519 Rákóczi, George II (1621–1660), 332, 333, 470. See Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) rameaux, 94, 170, 254, 387 Ramillies (May 12/23, 1706), 265, 388–389, 502, 521; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; Maximillian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726) and, 286; officers at, 67 ramparts, 389; artillery train and, 20; banquettes and, 32; barracks and, 36; bastions and, 38; berms and, 45; chemin des rondes and, 77; cordons and, 90; curtains and, 99; defilade and, 103; defilement and, 103; glacis and, 175; guérites, 195; lines of contravallation and, 253; other fortress

Index components and, 133; parapets and, 355; parts of, 464, 467; remblai and, 400; revetments and, 400 ramrods, 389 ranges. See close range; evolutions; musket shot; pistol shot rankers, 389 ranks. See officers ranks (at sea), 389–392 ranks (on land), 392–393 rapparees, 214, 217, 393 Raskolniki, 341 Raskolniki (Old Believers), 93, 320, 341, 361, 410, 453, 454 rasputitsa, 254 Rastadt, Treaty of (February 24/March 7, 1714), 393–394, 418, 487, 526–527; Barrier Treaties and, 37; Eugene of Savoy and, 140; famine and, 157; Louis XIV and, 265; Spanish Netherlands and, 446; Treaty of Baden and, 29; Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734) and, 501 Rates, 391, 394, 472; of cruisers, 99; determining, 71; pay and, 200; third and fourth, 480 ratings, 390, 392, 394 rations, 395–396 Ratisbon, Truce of (August 15, 1684), 287, 320, 396–397, 516 ravelins, 397; Coehoorn and, 84; firing over, 154; fronts and, 167; other fortress components and, 133; redoubts and, 398; tenaillons and, 466. See also other fortress components Raya, 397; askeri and, 20 razing the works, 397 Razin, Stenka (c. 1630–1671), 3, 397–398, 409

rear admiral, 390. See ranks (at sea) rear division (of fleet), 447 Reaya, 397 rebellion in military, 147–148 rebellions: in France, 259, 260; French, 269; Spanish, 289–290; war finance and, 509 rebuild, 398 Recess, 378 Recess agreement (1653). See Prussian Army; war finance reconnaissance, Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 283 recruitment, 398; British Army and, 463; Ottoman Army and, 511; Prussian Army and, 378; Royal Navy and, 438; Russian Army/Navy and, 411; Spanish Navy, and, 445; standing armies and, 450; Swedish Army, and, 457, 468; Swedish Army, for, 458; United Provinces and, 512. See also mercenaries redans, 398; bonnets and, 53; lines of circumvallation and, 252; redoubts and, 398 redoubt of the place of arms. See place of arms redoubts, 354, 398; lines of contravallation and, 253; ravelins and, 397 reduce, 398–399 re-entrant, 399 re-entrant angles, 466 Re-entrant place of arms. See place of arms Regencies, 399 Regensburg, Truce of (August 15, 1684), 396–397 Regents, 399 Regents of Holland, 534, 535 regimental guns, 400

regiment in pay. See British Army regiment in subsidy. See British Army Régiment du Roi (1663), 266, 284. See also drills; Louvois; Martinet, Jean regiment, 399–400; battalions and, 39; companies and, 87; divisions and, 108; New Model Army and, 318 regulating captains, 391 Rehnsköld, Karl Gustaf, 158, 185, 233, 370–371, 400 relief army. See army of relief religion: Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661) and, 287; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 327; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 357, 358; war and, 217, 237; wars of, 446 Religion, Wars of (1562–1629), 260 remblai, 400 representative assemblies vs. centralization, 1 republics vs. centralization, 1 Restoration Army, 301 Restoration Navy, 296, 406 Restoration, Royal Navy and, 405, 406 rest quarters, 384 restraining orders. See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) retired flank. See flanks; orillon retrenchment, 400; assault and, 20; bastions and, 39; breastworks and, 59; fortress components and, 133; fougasse and, 155; siege warfare and, 432 Reunions (1679–1684). See Croissy, marquis de; Louis XIV; Mémoire des raisons (September 24, 1688); War of the reunions (1683–1684) 597

Index revelins, lunettes and, 269 revetments, 400–401; batter and, 39; chemin des rondes and, 77; cordons and, 90; escalade and, 137; galleries and, 170; garde-fou and, 171; mines and, 176; posterns and, 375; stairs in, 355; tablettes and, 463 revolts, 260 revolution in military affairs (RMA), 401 Rheinbund, 253, 401; Louis XIV and, 262; negotiators of, 287 Rheinfeld (July 6, 1678), 401; Lorraine, Charles V, duc de (1643–1690) and, 258; losses at, 127; victor at, 96 Rhineland, 262; Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695) and, 270 Rhine League, 401 Richelieu, Armand, 162, 165; Huguenots and, 205; Mazarin, Jules (1602–1661) and, 286 ricochet fire (“tir à ricochet”), 17, 296, 401–402, 490 “riding the horse,” 291 rifles, 438 rig, 402 Riga, 185 Riga, siege of (1699). See Augustus II; Great Northern War (1700–1721) rigging, 284, 391, 402, 473. See also sails Rijswijk, Treaty of (1697). See Treaty of Ryswick (1697) Riksdag, 232 Rio de Janeiro, French occupation of (September 11–November 13, 1711). See War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Rites controversy, 230, 402–403 Ritterakadmie, 340 598

rivers. See logistics; natural frontiers; water maneuvers roads, 403; lack of, 256; Russian, 358 “The Rock” (Gibraltar), 175, The Rock (Newfoundland), 318 Rocroi (May 19, 1643), 182 Roger, N.A.M., 405, 407 Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/ March 8, 1658), 403; Danish Army and, 101; in Denmark, 104; Karl X and, 159, 232. See also Northern War, Second rotamaster, 404 rotmistrz, 404 roturiers, 338, 404 Roundheads, 318, 536–537 Roure rebellionn (1670), 404 Royal Hungary, 404; AustroOttoman Wars and, 25 Royal Irish, 274, 533 Royal Irlandais, 274, 533 Royal Navy, 404–408; AngloDutch Wars and, 7, 9; Articles of War and, 15; Bévzieres, Battle of and, 46; British Army and, 59–60, 181; Charles II of England and, 76; commissioned officers in, 337; convoys and, 89; Cossacks and, 91; desertion, 106; Dutch Navy and, 119; emergence of, 134–135; fighting instructions and, 145; finance of, 342, 507, 508; fireships and, 147; Gibraltar and, 175; impressment in, 208; James II (1633–1701) and, 222; marines and, 280; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 322; pay in, 200; Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) and, 358; ports of, 464; Portugal and, 374; positions in, 529; pyrotechnics of, 146; recruits, 503; seamen of,

424; States’ Navy and, 48; supplies, 285; upward mobility in, 465; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 281, 522. See also ranks (at sea); Rates; States’ Navy; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Ruina, 466 Rupert, Prince, 408–409; battles of, 72, 97, 422–423; Blake, Robert and, 47; cruises of, 99; Downs, Battle of the (“Four Days’ Battle”) (June 1–4/11–14, 1666) and, 10, 110, 111; Royal Navy and, 406 ruse. See insult; Lille, siege of (1708); Ramillies (1706) ruses, 437 Russia, 230, 366, 409–410, 457, 465. See also Alexis, Tsar (1629–1676); Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) Russian Army, 410–411; fortifications and, 154; impressment and, 208–209; modernization of, 358, 359; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 332; officers in, 338; professionalism of, 370; servitor system of, 426; standing, 449, 450; uniforms of, 484. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); strel’sty; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) Russian Navy, 170–171, 358–359. See also Apraxin, Fedor Mateyevitch; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) Russo-Ottoman War (1710–1713), 191. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII;

Index Peter (Pyotr) I of Russia (1672–1725) Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de (1607–1676), 412–413; Ayscue and, 27; Bart and, 38; battles of, 7, 22, 110, 423, 440–441, 448, 467–468; Duquesne and, 116; loss of, 126; Monk (Monck), George (1608–1670) and, 301; Tromp, Cornelius van (1629–1691) and, 476–477; wars of, 10, 11, 120, 122 Ryswick, Peace of, 37 Ryswick, Treaty of (September 20, 1697), 61, 223, 264, 329–330, 342, 373, 413 Sacra Liga, 346–347, 359 Sacra Ligua. See AustroOttoman War, First (1683–1699) Safavid Iran, 174, 344, 347, 348 sails, 53, 284, 391, 415–416, 463, 473, 539 Saint-Denis. See St. Denis (August 4/14, 1678) Saint-Germain, Peace of (June 29, 1679), 223, 421 Saka, 296, 416 salient angles, 39, 251, 398 salient place of arms. See place of arms salients, 143, 416 Salim (1601), 305 sallies (sorties), 111, 354, 375, 416, 432, 441, 466 sally points, 99, 253, 416 salute to the flag. See sovereignty of the sea sandbags, 416 Sandomierz Confederation, 186, 451. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Stanislaw I Sandwich, Earl of (1625–1672), 416–417, 440–441 Sanga, Rana, 386

Sangui, Wu, 277 sap, 107, 175, 294, 417–418, 441, 491–492, 529 Sapiehas, 22, 234, 341–342, 418 sappers, 277, 347, 417, 418, 431, 432, 475, 542 sap rollers, 417, 418 Saragossa, Battle of (August 20, 1710), 524 Sarah (wife of Marlborough), 281, 282 Sardinia, 418, 488, 526 sargeants, 337 Sarhu campaign, 276 sarica, 224, 316, 418–419, 472 Sarsfield, Patrick (1660?–1693), 214, 216, 217, 419, 481 Sasbach (July 27, 1675), 303, 479 saucisson, 300, 419 Savoy, 329, 480, 488, 493, 517. See also Catinat, Nicholas; Dutch War (1672–1678); Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Galway, Earl of; Italy; natural frontiers; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Turin, Battle of (1706); Turin, Peace of (1696); Utrech Treaty of (1713); Vaudois; Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Savoyard Army, 448, 450, 479–480, 519. See also Carpi (1701); Cassano (1705); Cremona (1702); Eugene, Prince of Savoy; Marsaglia (1693); Staffarda (1690); standing army; Turin, Peace of (1696); Victor Amadeus II; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) Saxe, maréchal de, 137 Saxon Army: battles of, 158–159, 184, 185, 186,

191, 239, 274, 369, 380–381; sieges and, 451, 498, 499; Swedish Army and, 234, 235; wars of, 25, 119, 190, 203, 325, 418, 457 Saxony, 22, 174, 187, 192, 202 scaling, wall, 137 Scania, 184 Scanian War (1674–1679), 419–422; battles of, 144, 274; beginnings of, 124; cavalry and, 74; Danish Army and, 102; in Denmark, 104; Dominum Maris Baltici and, 108; engineers, 101; Juel, Niels (1629–1697) and, 227; Karl XI of Sweden (1655–1697) and, 232; participants, 477, 537; results of, 145; Sweden and, 456 scarlet caterpillar, 281 scarps, 389, 400, 422 Schamberg, Graf Friedrich von, 55 Scheveningen, 467 Schleswig, 4 Schnapphahns, 124, 351, 352, 422, 479 Schomberg, Friedrich, Graf von (1615–1690), 216, 422 schooner, 422 Schooneveld, Battles of (May/June 1673), 11, 138, 413, 422–423, 477 schout-bij-nacht, 390 Scilly Isles, 423, 429 scorched earth, 423 Scotland, 136, 148, 149, 168, 182, 301, 423 Scots, 134 Scott, James, 301–302 Scottish locks, 152, 423, 439 scouts, 213 scurvy, 298, 395 seamen, 15, 163, 207, 244, 392, 424. See also impressment sea officers, 424 599

Index Second Northern War (1655–1660): and alliances, 87; Brandenburg and, 56; Cossacks and, 92; Danish Army and, 101; in Denmark, 104; Dominum Maris Baltici and, 108; Friedrich-Wilhelm and, 164; Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660) and, 159; Tatars and, 466; war finance and, 510 Sedgemoor, Battle of (July 5–6/ 15–16, 1685), 280, 302, 419 sefer bahzizi, 230, 424 sefer filorisi, 511 Seigneley, Marquis de (1651–1690), 161, 424 Sejm, 424 sejmiki, 424 sekban, 316, 424–425 Semenovskii Guards, 411 Semenovsky Guards, 454 Seneffe, Battle of (August 11, 1674), 123, 183, 258, 270, 425, 500, 533 Senta, Battle of. See Zenta, Battle of (September 1/11, 1697) sentries, 171, 213, 244, 425, 431, 529 sepsis, 295, 296 serdar (serasker), 425 Serdengeçti, 20, 231, 425–426, 483 serfs, 338 sergeant-major generals, 392 sergeant-majors, 393 sergeants, 393 serving the vent, 295 servitors, 20, 92, 410, 426, 442, 449 Seven Years’ War, 172, 516 sextant, 426 Shaftesbury, Ear of (1621–1683). See England Shahu (d. 1749), 279 shallops, 426 600

sharia, 306 Sheremetev, V.B., 471 Sher Kan (Sher Shah) (c. 1486–1545), 304 ship-of-the-line, 426–427; Barfleur-La Hogue, Battle of and, 35; decks of, 102; fireships and, 146–147; formations of, 250; largest, 193, 472, 480; Rates and, 394; tactics of, 314 ships, 427, 529. See also specific types of ships ship-smashers, 71, 118, 427 shipyards, 162 Shivaji. See Bhonsle, Sivaji Shklov, Battle of (August 12, 1654), 468 shorten sail, 428 shot, 59, 428–429 Shovel, Cloudesley, 278, 429 sich, 429 Sicily, 21–22, 126–127, 170, 289–290, 488, 523 Sick and Wounded Board, 296 siege money, 429 siege park, 429–430 siege train. See artillery train siege warfare, 430–433; assault/attack and, 20, 21; bombardments and, 52; capital and, 70; disease and, 107; engineers and, 294; fortifications and, 143, 154, 417; laborers in, 294–295; lines of circumvallation and, 252; logistics and, 257; Louis XIV and, 261; Manchus and, 277; military medicine of, 296–297, 298; Ming, 537; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 328; parleys and, 355; powder magazines at, 375; retrenchments and, 400; sandbags and, 416; in the Spanish Netherlands, 514;

stages of, 214, 342, 487, 498; starvation and, 396; surrender and, 454; trees and, 176; wounds from, 295–296. See also Vauban; specific sieges Siegharding, Battle of (March 11, 1702), 519 signaling, 140, 146, 162, 251, 391, 434 Sikhs, 300, 306, 307, 434 silahdars, 230, 434 silladars, 277, 434 silver, 506 Singhi, Maharana Sangram, 386 single fire, 304 Sinzheim, Battle of (June 16, 1674), 435, 479 sipahis, 4, 20, 224, 230, 426, 435, 497. See also alti bölük sipahileri Sivaji Bhonsle (1627–1680), 23, 278, 306, 435–436 Six Nations. See Iroquois Confederacy skirmishers. See infantry; skulking way of war skulking way of war, 63, 102, 210, 211, 437–438 Slankamen (August 19/29, 1691), 438 slaves: African, 241; in India, 495; in Iran, 175; Mamluks, 275–276; as military laborers, 294; Morocco and, 303; Ottoman, 539; religion and, 205; in Russia, 471; Tatars and, 465; West Indies Company and, 531 slingshots, 165 sloop-of-war, 438 slopes, 400 slopships, 438 Slovinska krajina, 535. See also Windische border small shot, 429

Index Smith, Adam, 288 Smolensk, 468 Smolensk War (1632–1634), 410 smugglers, 213 Smyrna convoy (June 17–18, 1693), 77, 147, 323, 439, 474 snaphances (snaplocks; snapplås), 150, 152, 423, 439 Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696), 25, 240, 281, 439–440, 497, 499–500 socket bayonet, 284. See also bayonets; Vauban Solebay (May 28/June 7, 1672), 11, 116, 120, 138, 280, 413, 417, 440–441 Songhay, 441 Sophia (r. 1682–1689), 357 Sorel, Albert, 313 sorties (sallies), 111, 354, 375, 416, 432, 441, 466 Sound, Battle of the (November 8, 1658), 403–404 Sound Tolls, 441–442; in Denmark, 104; Dominum Maris Baltici and, 108; Fredriksborg, Peace of and, 192–193; Great Northern War (1700–1721) and, 183; Roskilde, Treaty of (February 26/March 8, 1658) and, 403; Sweden and, 159, 421 South America, 170 sovereignty of the sea, 7, 11, 47, 442, 477, 531. See also cannon-shot rule soyughal, 426, 442 spahis. See sipahis Spain, xxvii, 442–444 Spanish Army, 296, 300, 444–445, 449, 450, 484, 533 Spanish Fleet, 158 Spanish Fronde, 158 Spanish Navy, 444, 445, 500. See also ranks (at sea)

Spanish Netherlands, 446 Spanish riders, 446, 461 spars, 284, 446 Sperrfort, 446 Speyer, Battle of (November 4/15, 1703), 464, 519 spice trade, 75, 495, 496 spies, 167, 188, 283, 432 spike the guns, 447 Spill, 447 split thumb, 295 spritsails, 415–416 spurs, 397. See ravelins squadrons, 399 squadrons, war of, 197 squadrons (cavalry), 447 squadrons (naval), 447 square rig sails, 415 Sri Lanka (Ceylon), 75, 485, 495 St. Denis, Battle of (August 4/14, 1678), 127, 270, 447, 533 St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664), 23, 240, 302, 344, 447–448, 465, 489 St. James’ Day Fight (July 25/August 4, 1666), 10, 301, 413, 448, 476–477 St. Malo, 448 St. Petersburg, 360 Stadholderate, 448, 531 Staffarda (August 8/18, 1690), 326, 448, 496 staff sergeants, 393 standing armies, 448–449; Articles of War and, 15; Brandenburg and, 57; British Army and, 60; English, 508; of James II (1633–1701), 223; Louis XIV and, 260; Mutiny Act (1689) and, 309; Ottoman, 345; Polish Army and, 367, 440; Spanish, 443; Turkish, 223–224; war finance and, 507; women and, 536 standing navies, 450

standing officers, 337, 450–451 Stanislaw I (Leszczyniski, Stanislaw) (1677–1766), 22, 186, 233, 418, 451 Stanislaw II, 187 Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger, Graf von (1638–1701), 451, 497 starvation, 430. See also famines States General, 70, 451 States’ Navy, 296, 405, 451. See also Royal Navy States’ Party faction, 485, 514 stations, 452 staysails, 415, 416 Steenkerke (July 24/August 3, 1692), 21, 46, 270, 327, 452, 493 Stekene, Battle of (June 27, 1703), 518 stifler. See camouflet stockfish, 452 Stockholm, Peace of (1719 and 1720), 192, 452 stoppages, 453 storm. See assaults Stormakstid, 183, 453, 455 storm bells, 213, 432, 453 storm poles, 156 strangulation, 291 Strasboug Strasbourg, 263, 453, 515 strel’sty, 3, 312, 320, 341, 357, 359, 426, 453–454 Stromboli, Battle of (January 8, 1676), 454 Stuart, House of, 1, 221, 223, 485 Stuart, James, 13, 221, 487, 522 Stuart, James Edward (1688–1776), 454 Stuart, Mary, 176, 222, 533–534 studdings, 415 Styrum, Limburg, 201 subject troops, 454 subsistence money, 340, 454 Sultan’s Army, 230–231 suppliers, 155, 307–308, 449 601

Index supplies. See logistics Surat (1664), 278 surgeons, 296, 337, 527 Surinam, 495 surrender, 159, 432, 454–455, 492 sutlers, 138–139 swamp fever, 422 Sweden, xxvii, 455–457. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Scanian War (1674–1679) Swedish Army, 457–460. See also Great Northern War (1700–1721); Northern War, Second (1655–1660) Swedish Navy, 333, 420–421, 460 Sweinfedder (swine feathers), 446, 461 swivel gun, 461 swords, 200, 230. See also cavaliers (cavalry); cutlasses; hangers; military medicine Syria, 275–276 systems of fortification. See artillery fortresses; Coehoorn; Dahlberg, Erik Jönsson; siege warfare; tour bastionée; traces; Vauban Szatmár, Peace of (May 1, 1711), 387. See Rákóczi, Ferenc szlachta, 461; Augustus II and, 22; Cossacks and, 353; nobility and, 243; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 331; Poland and, 367; Polish Army and, 367; Sejm and, 424; Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696) and, 440; Stanislaw I (1677–1766) and, 451 tablettes, 171, 401, 463 tackle, 198, 284, 463 tactics, 145, 250–251, 283, 301, 463 602

tails, 105, 463 Taiwan, 230, 364, 495 Taj Mahal, 305, 306 taking the shilling, 54, 463 Talbot, Richard, 480 Tallard, Camille de (1652–1728), 48, 49, 464, 519, 520 taluses, 389, 422, 464, 467 tambours, 352, 464 Tangier, 170, 280, 464 targe, 464 tariffs, 289, 486 tarpaulins, 406, 465 Tatars, 465–466; battles of, 348; as foragers, 255; logistics and, 272; Northern War, Second (1655–1660) and, 332; pay of, 171; Poland and, 365; Polish Army and, 368; religion of, 347; Russian Army and, 410; servitor system of, 426; Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) and, 470; uniforms of, 484; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683) and, 497; war finance and, 511 taxes, 509. See also war finance tea, 396 Tellier, François Le. See Louvois, marquis de (1641–1691) Tellier, Michel Le, 114, 180, 246–247, 272, 284, 536 tenaille fortification, 466 tenaille of the place, 143, 466 tenailles, 466 tenaillon, 466 tenientes, 391 tenientes general, 390 terakki, 29, 466 terrae dominum finiture, ubi finiturarmorum vis, 466–467 terrepleins, 467; artillery and, 17, 490; attacks and, 475;

banquettes and, 32; cannon and, 402; casemates and, 72; covered ways and, 95; parapets and, 355; ramparts and, 389 Texel, Battle of (August 11/21, 1673), 11, 467–468 Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653), 467; participants, 8, 138, 227, 301, 413, 477; tactics at, 145 Thames, raid up the, 413 Theodore, Tsar (1676–1682), 409 thievery, 293 third-man regiments, 468 Third Northern War. See Great Northern War (1700–1721) Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667), 468–472 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648): Adolphus, Gustavus and, 145; battles of, 182; depredations of, 450; effects of, 442; financing of, 165; France and, 156; Karl X of Sweden (1622–1660) and, 232; leaders of, 301; Leslie, David (1601–1682) in, 246; Luxembourg, François Henri de Montmorency, duc de (1628–1695) and, 269; magazine systems in, 138; participants, 302, 422, 478, 505, 537; settlement of, 132, 156; Spain and, 443. See also Westphalia, Peace of (1648) Thökoly, Imre, 24 Three Days’ Battle (Portland, Battle of [February 18–20/February 28–March 2, 1653]), 7, 373 three-decker, 472 Three Feudatories, 31, 32, 80, 193, 229, 538, 542

Index Three Kingdoms, 450, 472 Three Kingdoms, Wars of (1639–1651), 416, 507 three-mile limit (terrae dominum finiture, ubi finiturarmorum vis), 70, 466 Three Musketeers (Dumas), 272 thumbstalls, 295 timariots, 20, 75, 77, 224, 230, 472–473 Timbuktu, 441 Timurids, 304–307 tir á ricochet, 401 Tisza River, Battle of (1697) (Zenta [September 1/11, 1697]), 27, 139, 180, 231, 240, 241, 541 toleration: in England, 134, 135, 136, 176, 181; Ferdinand I and, 290; in France, 4, 132, 260, 264; Friedrich-Wilhelm and, 164; Jews, of, 342; Köprülü Mustafa Pasha (1637–1691) and, 241; “Levellers” and, 319; Mughals and, 305, 306, 386; Ottoman Army and, 347; Sikhs and, 434; Vaudois and, 493 Toleration Act (1689), 178 tonnage, 473 top Arabacs (top arabacilar), 473 Topçu (Topçuar), 473 topgallants, 285, 415. See also masts; sails Tophane-i Amire, 473 topmasts, 285 topmen, 391 tops, 473 topsails, 415 Tories, 180–181, 281, 282, 523. See also Barrier Treaties; East India Company; England; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Great Britain; James II; Nine

Years’ War (1688–1697); Queen Anne; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III Torrington, Earl of (1689–1716), 43, 44, 150, 473 Torstensson’s War (1643–1645), 442, 456 torture, 291, 359, 376, 438. See also Anglo-Dutch War, First (1652–1654); Karl II; military discipline; military medicine; privateers; skulking way of war; strel’sty Toul, 263, 515 Toulon, 289, 323, 325, 338, 409, 493, 521 Toulon, siege of (July 28–August 22, 1707), 162, 196, 429, 521, 526 tour bastionée, 474 Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Costentin de (1642–1701), 474; battles of, 33, 43, 44, 322, 323, 439; fighting instructions and, 145, 146 Tourville, compte de, 35 towarzysz, 206, 368, 474 trace italienne, 491. See also artillery fortresses; bastions traces (in fortifications), 103, 133, 149, 351, 430, 474–475, 491 trade. See commercial interests trails, 172, 475 training, 41, 111, 340, 360, 393, 474, 490, 503. See also drills tranchée général, 475 transportation, 308. See also logistics; roads Transylvania, 141. See also Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735) Travendal, Peace of (August 7/18, 1700), 105, 185 traverse, 475

Treaty of Westminster, 8 trees, 431. See also firewood trenches, 253, 417, 431, 463, 464, 542. See also approaches; boyau; branches; caponnières; counter-approaches; crochet; ditches; gabions; parallels; retrenchments; saps; siege warfare; tails; tranchée major; zig-zags Trencsén, Battle of (August 3, 1708), 387 Trier, 475–476, 520 Trierin (1675), 291 Triple Alliance (January 23, 1668), 476; Anglo-Dutch Wars and, 11; Breda, Treat of and, 59; Dover, Treaty of and, 109; Dutch War and, 119; effects of, 3, 514; Friedrich-Wilhelm and, 165; Louis XIV and, 262, 486 Tromp, Cornelius van (1629–1691), 476–477; battles of, 420, 421, 423; Battle of the Downs and, 110; Belle Île, raid on and, 45; Juel, Niels (1629–1697) and, 227; at Köge Bay (July 1, 1677), 239; Ruyter, Michiel Adriaanszoon de (1607–1676) and, 412; Texel, Battle of (July 31/August 10, 1653) and, 467 Tromp, Maarten van (1598–1653), 477; battles of, 7, 27, 47, 110, 169, 373–374, 467; Dutch Navy and, 118 troops, 478 troupes de la marine, 211, 478 trucks, 478 True Freedom, 535. See also United Provinces Tukolor Empire, 441 603

Index tuns, 473 türedi askeri, 224, 345, 478 Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, comte de (1611–1675), 478–479; arrière-ban and, 15; battles of, 54, 115, 136–137, 165, 435, 480, 537; campaigns of, 302–303, 351; death of, 183; Devolution, War of (1667–1668) and, 248; Dutch Army and, 116; Dutch War and, 120, 121, 124; Fronde and, 165, 182; sieges of, 272; tactics of, 283 Turin, Battle of (September 7, 1706), 140, 290, 479–480, 521 Turin, Peace of (August 29, 1696), 329, 480 Turin, Siege of (May 27–September 7, 1706), 249, 496, 521 Türkenglocken, 480 Türkheim, Battle of (January 5, 1675), 165, 479, 480 two-decker, 480 typhus, 296, 298 Tyrconnel, Earl of (1630–1691), 480–481; Boyne, Battle of and, 55; Glorious Revolution and, 177; in Ireland, 214–215, 216, 217; Irish establishment and, 219, 339 Ukraine, 419–410, 422; Russian Army and, 471; Sobieski, Jan III (1629–1696) and, 439; szlachta and, 461; Tatars and, 465, 466; Thirteen Years’ War and, 469. See also Andrussovo, Treaty of (1667); Cossacks; Great Northern War (1700–1721); Karl XII; Khmelnitsky Uprising 604

(1648–1654); Northern War, Second (1655–1660); Peter I; Poland; Poltava (1709); Thirteen Years’ War (1654–1667) Ulster Gaels, 217, 218 Ulster militia, 219, 221 ulufe, 511 Umar, al-Hajj (c. 1795–1864), 441 underminers, 364 uniforms, 483–484; Brandenbugers’, 174; British Army and, 63; as disguises, 213, 249; French Army, 160; marine, 280; Polish, 474; professionalism and, 399; women and, 536 Union jack, 148 United Kingdom of Great Britain. See Great Britain United Provinces, xxvii, 484–487. See also Coehoorn, Menno, Baron van; Dutch Army; Dutch Navy; Dutch War (1672–1678); Holland; Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie; war finance; William III useless mouths, 257, 370, 432, 487 uti possidetis, 487 Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11, 1713), 487–488, 524, 526–527; asiento and, 20; Baden, Treaty of and, 29; Barrier Treaties and, 37; effects of, 181, 394; famine and, 157; frontières and, 314; Geertruidenberg negotiations (1709–1710) and, 173; Gibraltar and, 175; Hudson Bay Company and, 204; London Preliminaries (October 8, 1711) and,

258; Louis XIV and, 265; Maximillian Emanuel of Bavaria (1662–1726) and, 286; Newfoundland and, 318; North America and, 384; Orange and, 342; Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734) and, 501 Utskrivning. See Swedish Army Valencia, 4, 521 Vallacker cavalry, 489 vans (of fleets), 447, 489 vaqueros, 530 Varaøin border (Warasdin border), 231, 535 Vasa dynasts, 366 Vassem, Treaty of (June 6, 1673), 121, 165 Vasvár, Peace of (August 10, 1664), 240, 344, 448, 489 Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre, sieur de (1633–1707), 489–492 Vaudois, 34, 73, 206, 260, 326, 493, 496, 533 Velez-Málaga, Battle of (August 13/24, 1704), 493, 525 Vendôme, Louis Joseph, duc de (1654–1712), 493–494; battles of, 72, 270, 348; Eugene of Savoy and, 139, 140; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 282; sieges of, 248; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 520, 521, 522 Venice, 344, 346, 494, 497 vents, 295 Verdun, 263, 515 Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie (VOC) (Dutch East India Company), 494–495; Anglo-Dutch Wars and, 11; battles of, 8, 10, 373; Ceylon and, 75;

Index Deshima and, 106–107; Dutch Navy and, 117; Japan and, 226; Mughals and, 307; rivals of, 87; Tromp, Maarten van (1598–1653) and, 477; wars of, 484. See also East India Company (EIC) (English) Verges, Battle of (May 25, 694), 328 vergue sèche, 539 Versailles, 259 vezir-i azam (grand vezier), 46, 179–180, 229, 344, 435. See also individual veziers via cperta. See covered ways vice-admirals, 390 Victor Amadeus II (1666–1732), 496; battles of, 73, 283–284, 448, 479–480; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 206, 283–284, 326, 326–327, 328; Utrecht, Treaty of (April 11/13, 1713) and, 488; Vaudois and, 493; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522 Victuallers, 378, 405 Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683), 496–500; Austro-Ottoman Wars and, 25; disease and, 107–108; effects of, 396, 516; Kara Mustafa Pasha (1634–1683) and, 231; Leopold I of Austria (1640–1705) and, 245; Louis XIV and, 263; Ottoman Army and, 345; relief of, 24, 139, 259, 286, 366, 440, 444; Serdengeçti and, 426; Tatars and, 511 Vienna, Treaties of (1656, 1657, 1719), 192, 193, 333, 470 Vigevano, Convention of (October 7, 1696), 329

Vigo Bay, Battle of (October 12/23, 1702), 77, 374, 429, 500, 519, 525 Villars, Claude Louis, duc de (1653–1734), 500–502; battle and, 41; battles of, 103, 163, 201, 239, 274, 518; Boufflers and, 54; Camisards and, 68; Eugene of Savoy and, 140; Habsburgs and, 487; Lines of Stollhofen and, 253; logistics and, 273; Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of (1650–1722) and, 283; Ne Plus Ultra lines and, 316; pré carré and, 376; Rákóczi, Ferenc (1676–1735) and, 387; Rastadt, Treaty of (March 14, 1714) and, 393; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 519, 520, 522, 523, 525 Villa Viciosa (December 10/21, 1720), 494, 524 Villeroi, François de Neufville, duc de (1644–1730), 502; battles of, 78, 95, 388–389, 518; Eugene of Savoy and, 139; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and, 328–329; War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and, 520–521 viovodes, 502 Vittorio Amedeo II, 496 VOC. See Vereenigde Oostindische Compaagnie Voetians, 342 vojna krajina (Militargrenze), 290 vojvode, 290 volley fire, 111, 502–503 volunteer per order, 503 Voynuqs (Voynuks), 171, 511, 503 Vrij schip, vrij goedt, 159

wages, 506–507 wako, 364 Walcourt, Battle of (August 25, 1689), 325, 501, 505 Waldeck, Georg Friedrich, Prince of (1620–1692), 25, 150, 270, 326, 505 Waldensians, 34, 206, 493 Walk, Battle of the (June 18, 1657), 332 wall-pieces, 151, 505 Wampanoag Indians, 211, 237 Warasdin border, 231, 535 war at sea, 506 war chest, 506 ward room, 506 war: Anglo-Dutch, xxvi; casualties, disease, and, xxv–xxvi; character of, during reign of Louis XIV, xxxv; expanding scale of operations under Louis XIV, xxvi; after Louis XIV, xxviii; overseas colonies and, xxvi–xxvii war finance, 506–513 Warka, Battle of (April 7, 1656), 332 War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), 157 War of the Grand Alliance (1688–1697). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) War of the Holy League, 499. See also Austro-Ottoman War, First (1683–1699) War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697). See Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) War of the Reunions (1683–1684), 514–516; causes of, 96, 320; Louis XIV and, 24, 25, 205, 263; Luxembourg and, 269; objectives of, 128, 498; participants, 53, 96, 267; settlement of, 396–397; Spanish Netherlands and, 446 605

Index War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), 516–527 War of the Three Feudatories, xxvii, 31–32, 79–80, 193, 229–230, 538, 542 warrant officers, 86, 337, 390, 391, 392, 450–451, 506, 527–528 Warrior for the Faith, 174 Warsaw, Battle of (July 28–30, 1656), 332, 369, 466, 470, 528 Warsaw Confederation, 22, 186 Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), 301, 318, 528–529, 532. See also Cromwell, Oliver watches (on ships), 207, 529 water. See batardeau; ditches; logistics; military medicine; rations; water line; water maneuvers water, drinking, 396, 416 water buffalo, 256 water line, 121, 529 Waterloo, 160 water maneuvers, 106, 529 weapons. See bayonets; blunderbusses; cavaliers (cavalry); flintlock firearms; matchlock; miquelets; musketoon; pistol shot; snaphance; wheel locks; specific weapons wear, 529 weather, 348, 360, 499 weather gauge, 314, 493, 530 weatherly, 530 Wehlau-Bromberg, Treaties of (September 19/November 6, 1657), 334 Weigley, Russell F., 261 Wellington, Duke of, 160, 338 Werki, Battle of (October 1658), 471 Western Association, 318 Western Design, 12, 64, 98, 158, 405, 530 West Indies, 438, 486, 527 606

West Indies Company (WIC), 484, 530–531 Westminster, Treaty of (April 12/22, 1654), 531, 535 Westminster, Treaty of (February 9/19, 1674), 11–12, 122, 531 Westphalian state system, 330 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 531–532; Denmark and, 159; France and, 156; Friedrich-Wilhelm and, 164; Germany and, 287; Louis XIV and, 264, 514; negotiators, 286–287; results of, 157–158; Reunions, War of the (1683–1684) and, 516; Rheinbund and, 401; Spanish Netherlands and, 446; Sweden and, 455; tolerance and, 132 wheel locks, 74, 151, 285, 532 Whigs, 180–181, 222, 281. See also Barrier Treaty, First (October 18/29, 1709); East India Company; England; Glorious Revolution (1688–1689); Great Britain; James II; Nine Years’ War (1688–1697); Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); William III whirligigs, 291 white caps, 223 WIC (West Indies Company), 484, 530–531 wicker, 169 Wild Geese, 49, 249, 274, 323, 532–533. See also Irish Brigade William III, 533–534 Williamites, 214 Williamite War of 1689–1691, 214, 326, 534 Wilno (August 1654), 468, 469 wind. See Dutch War (1672–1678); flintlock firearms; Glorious Revolu-

tion (1688–1689); Great Northern War (1700–1721); haul close; haul wind; heave to; logistics; make sail; Ottoman warfare; shorten sail; Tatars; Vienna, siege of (July 14–September 12, 1683); War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714); wear; weather gauge; weatherly; winter quarters windage, 535 Windische border, 195, 535 windlasses, 285 windward and leeward gauges, 244, 530 wine, 396 winter campaigns, 254 winter quarters, 535 withies, 169 Witt, Cornelius, 535–536 Witt, Jan de (1625–1672), 535–536; captaincy-general and, 70; Dutch Army and, 116; Louis XIV and, 119, 262, 476; Münster and, 308; Orangists and, 342, 531; Regents and, 399; Spanish Netherlands and, 486; William III and, 533. See also States’ Party faction Wittstock, Battle of (1636), 302 wojsko kwarciane, 367, 383 women, 257, 294, 536 wood, 153 Worcester, Battle of (August 2, 1651), 75, 246, 536–537 wounds, 295. See British Army; garrisons; impressment; Janissary corps; military medicine; shot Wrangel, Karl Gustav (1613–1676), 116, 124, 144, 333, 420, 537 Wren, Christopher, 296 Wu Sangui, 79, 80, 81, 230, 537–538

Index Wyendael, Battle of (September 27, 1708), 248 Xuan Ye (1654–1722), 229–230 yachts, 539 yards, 284, 539 yawls, 539 yaws, 539 Yaya infantry, 539 Yellow Waters, Battle of (February 1648), 236, 539 Yeniçeri AOasi, 540 York, Duke of, 440–441. See James II (1633–1701)

Zabaraz, siege of (1649), 236 Zaporozhians, 91, 92, 93, 190, 331, 353, 368, 370, 468 zarbaens, 541 Zborow, Battle of (August 16, 1649), 237 Zeeland (Zealand), 121, 122, 376 Zeeland (Zealand), Battles of (May/June 1673), 422, 422–423 Zenta, Battle of (September 1/11, 1697), 27, 139, 180, 231, 240, 241, 541–542 Zhou dynasty, 277

Zhovti Vody, Battle of (May 5–16, 1648), 236 zig-zags, 55, 86, 235, 253, 354, 418, 432, 491–492, 542 zone of servitude, 213, 542 Zumarshausen (May 17, 1648), 537 Zunghar Mongols, 230, 542–543 Zuravno (Zurawno), Battle of (1676), 240, 440 Zuravno (Zurawno), Treaty of (October 1676), 543 Zusmarshausen (1648), 302

607

About the Author CATHAL J. NOLAN is Executive Director of Boston University's International History Institute, and Associate Professor of History. He is the author of the multiple award-winning Greenwood Encyclopedia of International Relations (Greenwood, 2002) and the award-winning Notable U.S. Ambassadors since 1775: A Biographical Dictionary (Greenwood, 1997). Dr. Nolan has also authored, co-authored, or edited many books, including The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650 (Greenwood, 2006); Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimension of International Affairs (Praeger, 2004), and Power and Responsibility in World Affairs: Reformation versus Transformation (Praeger, 2004).