When was the Battle of Fleurus in 1622?

On 29 August 1622, near Fleurus in the Spanish Netherlands, today Belgium; Gardiner dates the armies' meeting to 28 August.

Who won the Battle of Fleurus in 1622?

It is disputed. Both sides claimed the victory: German biographers call it a Spanish defeat, Spanish sources a victory for Córdoba, but Mansfeld and Christian broke through and reached the Dutch.

Who commanded at Fleurus?

Ernst von Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick led the Protestant mercenary army; Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba led the Spanish army.

Why were Mansfeld and Christian marching through the Spanish Netherlands?

Frederick of the Palatinate had dismissed them, and they marched to join the Dutch and relieve the Spanish siege of Bergen op Zoom.

How did Christian of Brunswick lose his arm?

He was shot in the arm at Fleurus. The wound turned gangrenous, and the arm was amputated to the sound of drums and trumpets.

What happened to the siege of Bergen op Zoom?

Spinola raised the siege after Mansfeld and Christian reached the Dutch, and the town was saved.

Why was Christian of Brunswick called the mad Halberstadter?

His contemporaries gave him the name for his unruly disposition and his way of war; he was the Lutheran administrator of the bishopric of Halberstadt.

Battle of Fleurus, 1622: the mad Halberstadter breaks through

Peeter Snayers, The Battle of Fleurus, 1622, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Quick answer

What happened at the Battle of Fleurus in 1622?

On 29 August 1622, near Fleurus in the Spanish Netherlands, the Protestant mercenary army of Ernst von Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick, marching north to join the Dutch, fought its way past a Spanish army under Gonzalo de Córdoba that blocked its road. Both sides lost heavily and both claimed the victory, but Mansfeld and Christian got through, and the Spanish siege of Bergen op Zoom was raised soon after. Christian was shot in the arm, which had to be amputated.¹

In the summer of 1622 two Protestant commanders who had just lost their employer led a hungry, mutinous army across the Spanish Netherlands toward the Dutch. Near the village of Fleurus, south of Brussels, a Spanish army stood across their road. What happened next is still claimed as a victory by both sides.²

Background

Christian of Brunswick, a younger son of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel born in 1599, had been made Lutheran administrator of the bishopric of Halberstadt in 1616. Bishop only in name, he was by nature and talent a soldier; his contemporaries called him the mad Halberstadter.³

Full-length painted portrait of a young man with tousled dark hair in black cuirassier armor and a red sash with gold embroidery, holding a pistol, a plumed helmet on a table beside him against a red curtain — Christian of Brunswick in cuirassier armor, aged about twenty, painted by Paulus Moreelse in 1619, three years before Fleurus; the portrait belongs to the museums of Brunswick. Public domain. Paulus Moreelse, 1619, via Wikimedia Commons.

His cause was that of Frederick of the Palatinate, the deposed Protestant king of Bohemia, and above all of Frederick's wife Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England, to whom Christian declared a knightly devotion. In 1621 he raised an army and fell on the Catholic bishopric of Paderborn. He tore the silver shrine of the patron saint out of the cathedral and melted it into coins inscribed "God's friend, the priests' foe".⁴ › Battle of White Mountain, 1620

Count Ernst von Mansfeld, born about 1580 in Luxembourg as the illegitimate son of a Habsburg governor, had made a career of fighting for the Protestant cause. He had first served the Habsburgs, against the Turks in Hungary among other places, and in 1610 entered the service of the Protestant Union. When Bohemia rose against the Habsburgs in 1618 he took Pilsen for the rebels, and after their defeat at the White Mountain in 1620 he kept an army in being for the deposed King Frederick. In 1622 the two men joined forces in the Palatinate. On 20 June Christian tried to cross the Main at Höchst against Tilly and Córdoba, was beaten with the loss of much of his army, and escaped with the rest to join Mansfeld.⁵

Then their employer gave up. Hoping to make peace with the emperor, Frederick dismissed both commanders from his service in July. Their army had already stripped Alsace bare, and it moved on into Lorraine. France held talks with them that came to nothing, and at last the Dutch Republic invited them into its service. The Spanish general Ambrogio Spinola was besieging Bergen op Zoom, and Mansfeld and Christian set out across the Spanish Netherlands to relieve it.⁶ › Battle of Wimpfen, 1622

Dark locator map of western Europe with a gold star in a glowing circle marking Fleurus in today's Belgium, the coasts of the North Sea and the Channel, the main rivers, and a small world map inset with the area boxed — The Battle of Fleurus, 1622: the star marks the approximate site, in what was then the Spanish Netherlands and is now Belgium, and the inset shows the area on a world map. Drawn for this article from Natural Earth data, with no modern borders. Location map: © Echoes of Battle (data: Natural Earth, public domain)

Armies and commanders

Barring their road was Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, a Spanish commander who had come from Italy to the Palatinate in 1620 to serve under Spinola. In 1622 his troops had fought beside Tilly's at Wimpfen in May and at Höchst in June, against these same opponents.⁷

Etching of a mounted commander in armor and a ruff, holding a baton, on a rearing horse, with a battle and a coat of arms in the background and a Latin caption naming Don Gonçalo Fernandes de Cordua — Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, who commanded the Spanish army at Fleurus, in an equestrian etching by Wenceslaus Hollar. Public domain. Wenceslaus Hollar (1607 to 1677), University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Protestant army was in poor shape for a battle. Its pay was long in arrears, and Mansfeld's cavalry had mutinied over it more than once; on the eve of the fight, Gardiner writes, two of his regiments refused to fight unless they were paid. The sources used here give no reliable figures for the strength of either army.⁸

Engraved oval portrait of a bearded man in armor with a lace collar and a sash, holding a baton, framed by a Latin inscription with a Dutch dedication below — Ernst von Mansfeld in 1622, the year of Fleurus, in an engraving by Crispijn van den Queborn with a Latin border and a Dutch dedication. CC0. Crispijn van den Queborn, 1622, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1921-1461), via Wikimedia Commons.

The battle in phases

Mansfeld found Córdoba's army on his road near Fleurus. Gardiner places the meeting on 28 August; the battle itself is dated 29 August 1622 by the German biographers, by Anton Gindely and by the Spanish Royal Academy of History.⁹

With his mutineers refusing, Mansfeld attacked with the rest of his army. Christian led the cavalry and charged again and again. Three horses were killed under him, and a bullet struck him in the arm, the left arm according to Spehr, Gardiner and Gindely, the right according to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie's article on Mansfeld. He fought on.¹⁰

Painting of a Spanish general in armor and a plumed hat on a brown horse pointing across a wide battlefield where squares of pikemen and cavalry fight in smoke, with dead and wounded soldiers in the foreground — Vicente Carducho, *The Victory at Fleurus*, 1634: the Spanish view of the battle, with Gonzalo de Córdoba on horseback before the fighting. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain. Vicente Carducho, 1634, via Wikimedia Commons.

Turning point

The cavalry charges opened the road. The Spaniards, who had meant to cut the Protestants off from the Dutch, were thrown back, and Mansfeld's army marched on. Both sides lost heavily; Gardiner calls the loss enormous on both sides.¹¹

Who won is disputed to this day. Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, Christian's biographer in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, calls it a complete Spanish defeat. Anton Gindely records that both sides claimed the victory, while judging that it went in Mansfeld's favor because the enemy failed to stop him. The Spanish Royal Academy of History counts Fleurus among Córdoba's victories, and Geoffrey Parker, writing for Britannica, describes it as another defeat for Mansfeld, who nonetheless got through. Gardiner's verdict splits the difference: Mansfeld gained his object.¹²

Aftermath

Christian at first made light of his wound. It turned gangrenous, and the arm had to come off. He had it amputated to the sound of drums and trumpets, and his biographers record his defiance. In Gardiner's version he said that the arm that was left would give his enemies enough to do; in Spehr's he sent a trumpeter to Spinola to say that the mad duke had lost one arm but kept the other for revenge.¹³

The march achieved its aim. Spinola raised the siege of Bergen op Zoom, and the town was saved. But the Dutch had little use for the disorderly army they had hired. They paid the two commanders what they had promised and, before the year was out, sent them away.¹⁴

Neither man had long to live. In August 1623 Tilly destroyed Christian's new army at Stadtlohn, near the Dutch border. Christian entered Danish service in 1625 and died at Wolfenbüttel on 16 June 1626, aged twenty-six. Mansfeld died that November near Sarajevo.¹⁵ › Battle of Lutter, 1626

Legacy and memory

Christian's reputation has been argued over ever since. The Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that his way of making war, with levies and burnings, drew the condemnation of many historians, though it hardly differed from the usual practice of the time; Rickard suspects his name for cruelty was largely the work of hostile pamphlets. Gardiner, who thought him as brainless for all higher purposes as Murat, still saw in him a born cavalry officer who fought for the sheer love of it.¹⁶

Mansfeld comes off better in Gardiner's pages. At such a time, Gardiner writes of the crisis before Fleurus, Mansfeld was at his best, a man of cool courage and infinite resource. Parker, for his part, notes that for all his defeats Mansfeld showed a remarkable talent for keeping armies together.¹⁷

Notes

A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.

Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB). ↩
Berent Schwineköper, “Christian der Jüngere” (NDB); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Christian of Brunswick”; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; John Rickard, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”; Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB). ↩
Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”; Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB); Reinhard R. Heinisch, “Mansfeld, (Peter) Ernst II. Graf von” (NDB); Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; John Rickard, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”; Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB); Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”. ↩
Real Academia de la Historia, “Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona-Anglesola”; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. ↩
Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB); Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Real Academia de la Historia, “Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona-Anglesola”. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; John Rickard, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”; Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB). ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; John Rickard, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”; Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB). ↩
Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Real Academia de la Historia, “Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona-Anglesola”; Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. ↩
Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, vol. 1; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, “Christian der Jüngere” (ADB); Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”; Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB). ↩
John Rickard, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”; Berent Schwineköper, “Christian der Jüngere” (NDB); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Christian of Brunswick”; Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”; Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu” (ADB). ↩
Berent Schwineköper, “Christian der Jüngere” (NDB); John Rickard, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648. ↩
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648; Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”. ↩

Sources

Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 4 (1876), Deutsche Biographie, “Christian der Jüngere”
Anton Gindely, History of the Thirty Years’ War, translated by Andrew Ten Brook, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1892), pp. 341 to 342
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648 (London: Longmans, Green, 1874), Project Gutenberg
Geoffrey Parker, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ernst, count von Mansfeld”
Ludwig Graf Uetterodt zu Scharfenberg, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 20 (1884), Deutsche Biographie, “Mansfeld, Peter Ernst Graf zu”
Berent Schwineköper, Neue Deutsche Biographie 3 (1957), Deutsche Biographie, “Christian der Jüngere”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Christian of Brunswick”
John Rickard, HistoryOfWar.org, “Christian of Brunswick, administrator of Halberstadt (1598-1626)”
Reinhard R. Heinisch, Neue Deutsche Biographie 16 (1990), Deutsche Biographie, “Mansfeld, (Peter) Ernst II. Graf von”
Real Academia de la Historia, Diccionario Biográfico (Historia Hispánica), “Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba y Cardona-Anglesola”