Happy St. Patricks day everyone! I had intended to write an article about that famous Irish holiday, but Im afraid I must disappoint you. Instead I offer you this, an important and interesting event that occurred on this day. 17 March, 1677, French forces under Vauban capture the fortress of Valenciennes in the Spanish Netherlands. This operation was part of the Franco-Dutch War. France in 1672 had invaded the Dutch Republic moving down the Rhine through the Rhenish Bishoprics and moving down the Meuse through the Bishopric of Liége. The Dutch were quickly overwhelmed by the French forces, but cut the sluices to flood their own country, as they had done to defend themselves against the Spanish under the Duke of Alba a century earlier. After this, the Emperor Leopold I of Austria entered the war on the side of the Dutch and sent his Italian-born general, Raimondo Montecuccoli, to the Upper Rhine. Soon after the Spanish entered the war against France too, opening their possessions to invasion. Monteccucolis masterful deception of French general Turenne compelled the French to retire to the west bank of the Rhine and to withdraw from the Dutch Republic. The attempts to invade France by Monteccucoli through Alsace met with failure for Turenne defeated him at Turckheim and Sasbach. Turenne was killed in the latter action. Meanwhile the Prince of Orange gathered a large army of Dutch, German, English, and Spanish troops, and attacked the Grand Condé at Seneffe, where the French were again victorious. In 1674 Besançon fell to Louis XIV himself, allowing France to seize the Franche-Comté. No longer able to strike at the Dutch, shielded as they were behind the powerful fortresses of the Spanish Netherlands, and with the Austrians in control of the bridges over the Rhine, Louis decided to make his main effort in the Spanish Netherlands to end the war in possession of as many Spanish forts as possible. One of the most important of these forts was Valenciennes, now in France, which commands the River Scheldt near its source. In November of 1676 Louis XIV arrived with his great engineer Vauban and over 50,000 men to open the lines of circumvallation around the city. Within was a Spanish garrison of barely 5,000 men. But the fortress was strong, and the garrison made a spirited defence. But as the French crept closer and closer to the walls with their trenches, Vauban advocated a surprise assault directly over the walls instead of waiting to starve the enemy out, given their small numbers. Louis XIV endorsed this project, and in the early morning of 17 March the Kings Musketeers (of Dumas fame) went over the main bastion and took the defenders entirely unexpectedly. They soon opened the gates and lowered the drawbridges to allow the French to enter the city in force. By the afternoon the Spanish commander had beaten the chamade and the fortress was surrendered to France. Its loss was a serious one for Spain, whose possessions in Flanders were now open to French attack, and Frances frontier was now further sheltered by another powerful fort which Vauban was to modernise in the following years. At the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1679 the Spanish were to pay dearly for their decision to enter the war. The Dutch, the original victims, got off lightly. But France exacted her vengeance upon Spain. Spain was made to surrender the Franche-Comté and many fortresses in Belgium, including Valenciennes. Frances considerable expansion, which would be further augmented by the Chambers of Reunion and the War of the Reunions, alarmed the powers of Europe to the might of France. William III, the Prince of Orange, now began to see himself as the champion of the anti-French coalition and spent the next decade seeking allies to curb the power of the Sun King, which was to lead to the Glorious Revolution in England and the great contest of the Nine Years War beginning in 1688. Pictured is the Musketeers entering the citadel of Valenciennes shortly before its surrender to the French. - Kaiser
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 01:00:01 +0000
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