What happened at the Battle of Cassano in 1799?
At Cassano, on 26 to 28 April 1799, a Russian and Austrian army under Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov forced its way across the Adda river east of Milan against the French Army of Italy, whose command had just passed to Jean Victor Moreau. The allies crossed at several points, drove the French back toward Milan and trapped Sérurier's division, and on 29 April they entered Milan.1
The Adda runs south from Lake Como to the Po, a deep, fast river with steep banks that formed a natural moat in front of Milan. In the last days of April 1799 the French Army of Italy dug in behind it, broke its bridges and lined its banks with guns. In three days an old Russian field marshal, recalled from retirement only that winter, tore that line apart, and with it the French hold on northern Italy.2
Background: the Second Coalition
In 1799 Austria and Russia joined Britain in a new coalition against revolutionary France, the second. Russia sent a corps under Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov toward Switzerland and, by the count of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, two corps of about 33,000 men to fight alongside the Austrians in northern Italy.3
To lead the allies in Italy the emperor Paul I turned to Alexander Suvorov, the victor of Rymnik and Ismail, who had been dismissed for opposing the new emperor's Prussian-style reforms. Fiercely hostile to the French Revolution, Suvorov was recalled in February 1799 and given command of the combined Russian and Austrian armies in northern Italy, which he took over in April.4 › Battle of Rymnik, 1789
The French were already in trouble. Their Army of Italy had been beaten on the Adige that spring and was falling back toward Milan, while a second French army under Jacques Macdonald was far to the south, around Naples. Its commander, Barthélemy Schérer, was replaced by Jean Victor Moreau, who took over, by the Soviet encyclopedia's date, only on 26 April, as the allies reached the river.5
Suvorov wasted no time. Leaving troops to besiege the French fortresses of Peschiera and Mantua, he marched west in the third week of April. On the way his columns took Brescia and Bergamo, and by 25 April the allied army stood on the banks of the Adda.6
Armies and commanders
The figures for the two armies differ by source. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia puts the allies at about 43,000 and the French at about 28,000. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org gives Moreau about 27,000 men against some 50,000 allies free to move west, and the French émigré biographer Laverne, writing in 1814, credits Suvorov with more than 80,000 men under his command in all, once the whole Russian contingent had arrived.7
Moreau set up his headquarters at Inzago, behind Cassano, and stretched his army along the river from Lecco, at the foot of Lake Como, to Pizzighettone near the Po. General Jean Sérurier's division guarded the upper Adda, and Cassano itself was fortified, with batteries and a bridgehead on the far bank.8
Suvorov's army was a mixed force: the Austrians of General Michael von Melas, the Russian corps of General Andrei Rosenberg and the advance guard of Prince Pyotr Bagration. Among the Austrian commanders who would decide the battle were the divisional generals Ott and Zopf and the quartermaster-general, the Marquis de Chasteler, and General Vukassovich on the northern wing.9
The battle in phases
The feint at Lecco, 26 April. Suvorov used the very length of the French line against it. On the allied right, Bagration's Russians attacked Lecco, between Lake Como and Lake Garlate, to draw the French eye to the north, while the main blow was prepared in the center. The Russians took the town.10
Brivio, the night of 26 to 27 April. Further south Vukassovich got his Austrians over the river near Brivio and took up a position on the far bank.11
The bridge at Trezzo. The main crossing came opposite Trezzo, where the divisions of Ott and Zopf had gathered at San Gervasio. The banks there were steep and the river at its fastest, and building a bridge seemed all but impossible. Chasteler took charge of the work himself, and in the early hours of 27 April a pontoon bridge was across. The French, who believed a crossing there could not be made, had not noticed.12
Pozzo and Vaprio. At dawn the allied infantry, Austrian hussars and Cossacks poured across and fell on General Grenier's French division around Pozzo. The fighting was hard, and General Victor came up with French reinforcements, but he could not stop the allies, and by the end of the day the French were falling back toward Milan.13
Cassano. In the south, Melas attacked the fortified bridgehead at Cassano itself. The French defenders fought stubbornly from their entrenchments, but the Austrians stormed the works, broke into Cassano and crossed the river.14
Turning point: Sérurier cut off
By the evening of 27 April the allies held the far bank from Brivio in the north to Cassano in the south. Most of Moreau's army escaped toward Milan, but Sérurier's division, on the upper river, had been left behind. On 28 April it was surrounded and, after a hard fight, surrendered to Vukassovich. Laverne judged that the two successes together gave the allies the whole course of the Adda and decided the fate of Lombardy.15
Both of the early biographers single out the crossing at Trezzo. Frederic Anthing, whose account was printed in English in 1800, credits Chasteler's skill and daring for making a passage the enemy thought impossible, and praises Suvorov's distribution of his divisions and the brevity and precision of his orders.16
Aftermath
The sources count the cost very differently. Rickard gives the allies 4,886 casualties, 761 dead, 2,913 wounded and 1,212 taken prisoner, and the French at least 5,000, with some estimates as high as 6,900. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia puts French losses at 2,500 killed and wounded and 5,000 prisoners, and allied losses at about 2,500. The contemporary accounts are further apart still: Laverne gives the French more than 2,000 killed and as many prisoners against 1,400 allied killed and wounded, Anthing 6,000 French killed and wounded and 5,400 prisoners against 3,000 allies.17
Moreau could not hold Milan. The allies entered the city on 28 and 29 April, and the French fell back to the west. The Soviet encyclopedia sees the Adda as the victory that made the allies' later successes in Italy possible.18
Suvorov's entry into Milan was staged as a triumph. Both of his early biographers describe the archbishop and his clergy and the city magistrates coming out to meet him at the head of cheering crowds. The government of the French-backed Cisalpine Republic fled with the French army. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, writing from a very different point of view, notes that many Italians saw the Russians as liberators, and that the counter-revolution then dismantled the republican institutions. Anthing, a fierce enemy of the Revolution, tells the same story with relish.19
Those successes came quickly. When Macdonald marched north in June to join Moreau, Suvorov turned on him and beat him on the Trebbia; in August he won again at Novi. In a few months of rapid victories the French were almost entirely driven out of Italy.20 › Battle of the Trebbia, 1799
Legacy and memory
The victories made Suvorov a hero to the enemies of the Revolution, but they also alarmed Russia's allies. Britannica notes Austrian misgivings about Russian ambitions in the west, and the Soviet encyclopedia that Britain and Austria, wary of growing Russian influence, ordered Suvorov to leave Italy and march into Switzerland. His crossing of the Alps that autumn, and his escape from encirclement with most of his army, became one of the most famous feats of his career.21
The tsar honored the conqueror of Lombardy with the title Italiysky, "of Italy", and made him generalissimo of the Russian armies, an unprecedented rank. He died in St. Petersburg in May 1800, a few months after his return.22
The Adda was also, in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia's reading, a lesson in Suvorov's method: fix the enemy with a feint on one flank and strike hard in the center of a line stretched too thin. Britannica's biographer Philip Longworth stresses the same qualities in Suvorov's teaching, with its emphasis on speed and mobility.23
