What happened at the Battle of Freiburg?
In August 1644 the French armies of the young Duke of Enghien, the future Great Condé, and Marshal Turenne attacked the Bavarian and imperial army of Field Marshal Franz von Mercy, which had just taken Freiburg im Breisgau and dug in on the wooded hills south of the town. On 3 August the French stormed Mercy's first line on the Bohl near Ebringen; on 5 August they were thrown back with heavy losses from his second line by the town; and on 10 August Mercy slipped away through the Black Forest past the abbey of St. Peter. The French lost far more men, and Freiburg stayed in Bavarian hands, but Mercy left the Rhine open and the French went on to take Philippsburg.1
It was not one battle but a series of combats on three days, fought in rain, on vine terraces and among felled trees, between two of the best generals of the century and one of the best defenders of his age. The Duke of Aumale, Condé's descendant and historian, put it bluntly: there was no battle of Freiburg, only the combats before Freiburg. Britannica counts it among the bloodiest and longest battles of the Thirty Years' War.2
Background: the Rhine in 1644
In 1643 the Duke of Enghien had broken the Spanish army at Rocroi, and preliminary peace talks had begun, but the fighting went on. In southern Germany the most dangerous opponent of France was the Bavarian army, which in November 1643 had routed the French Army of Germany at Tuttlingen. The remnants, mostly German soldiers who had once followed Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, were given to Marshal Turenne to rebuild.3 › Battle of Rocroi, 1643
In the summer of 1644 the Bavarian and imperial army under Field Marshal Franz von Mercy went over to the offensive on the upper Rhine and laid siege to Freiburg im Breisgau, held for France. Mercy cut off the town's water on the first day of the siege, in the account of the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, and Turenne's attempts to relieve it failed. Freiburg capitulated at the end of July: on 27 July in the German biography, on 29 July in Britannica and in Aumale.4
Armies and commanders
Turenne was a grandson of William the Silent through his mother and had been a marshal of France since 1643. In Germany he had barely 10,000 men in Britannica's count, eight or nine thousand Weimar troops in Godley's, too few to face Mercy alone. He appealed for help, and Enghien came with a second army by forced marches. The two met at Breisach on 2 August.5
Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, was 22, ten years younger than Turenne, and as a prince of the blood he took command of both armies. Britannica and Godley both note that the two worked well together despite their very different characters. The younger man brought the prestige of Rocroi and a taste for attacking in person; the older one knew the country and the enemy.6
The numbers are uncertain. Britannica gives the French 20,000 men, about 3,500 more than Mercy, and its loss table 25,000 against 16,500. Aumale, working from the French archives, thought the joined French armies barely exceeded 16,000, half of them cavalry, with 35 to 40 guns, and put Mercy's army at about 17,000, including eight to nine thousand very good infantry in eleven regiments. Both describe the same choice: Mercy would fight from field works on the wooded heights, where the French numbers counted for less.7
Franz von Mercy commanded the Bavarian army, and his brother Kaspar, Gaspard to the French, served under him as a general, second in command of the cavalry under the famous Jan van Werth.8
The battle in phases
The plan, 2 August. Mercy's first position lay on the Bohl, a spur of the Schönberg near Ebringen, and in the valley of the mill stream near Merzhausen, with his camp at Uffhausen. At the council of war at Breisach, the Weimar general Erlach proposed to go around and cut Mercy off; Turenne instead offered to march his army through the hills around the Schönberg and strike Mercy's camp from the flank while Enghien attacked the entrenched spur from the front. Enghien chose the attack.9
3 August: the storm of the Bohl. At five in the afternoon the French infantry went up the vine terraces against the Bavarian redoubts and barricades of felled trees. The first battalions faltered under the musketry, and Enghien dismounted and led the regiment of Conti up the slope himself, sword in hand, with his officers on foot beside him. By nightfall the French held the line, at heavy cost. Turenne, delayed on bad mountain roads, ran into Bavarian infantry and Jan van Werth's cavalry in a defile and fought on into the night in pouring rain without breaking through.10
4 August: the new line. In the night Mercy pulled back to a second position on the heights right by the town, between the Wonnhalde and the hill where a chapel of Our Lady of Loreto now stands. The French were too exhausted to attack the next day. Britannica notes that this gave Mercy all of 4 August to dig in, and according to his German biographer the works raised in a single day looked like the work of months.11
5 August: the failed assault. The French plan called for three simultaneous attacks, but one of Enghien's generals, Espenan, opened fire too early on a small redoubt, and the troops waiting for his signal went in alone and were shot down. For the rest of the day the French infantry was thrown again and again against the abatis. Aumale and Godley both describe pistol shots exchanged through the branches. Kaspar von Mercy brought dismounted cavalry up the reverse slope and turned an attack that was going badly for the Bavarians, and fell doing it. At dusk Enghien called off the assault.12
Turning point: the price of the 5th
The 5th decided the campaign. The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, written from the Bavarian side, says the field was covered with 5,000 French and 1,500 Bavarian dead; Britannica counts 4,000 French killed or wounded that day. For three days neither army could move. Aumale counts eight to nine thousand men out of action after the 3rd and the 5th, the Bavarian losses heavier on the first day and the French on the second.13
The French had won the first day and lost the second. What ended the campaign was hunger: Mercy's horses had nothing to eat but leaves.
Mercy's army was hemmed into the little plain below the town, cut off from supplies; both Aumale and the German biography record that his horses were being fed on leaves. Enghien sent for reinforcements and, instead of attacking again, marched north to the Glotter valley to get round Mercy's line of retreat through the Black Forest.14
Aftermath: St. Peter and the Rhine
Mercy saw the move and left at once. On 10 August French cavalry under Reinhold von Rosen caught his rearguard near the abbey of St. Peter. The accounts differ. The German biography has Mercy throwing the French back three times with his infantry before withdrawing; Aumale and Godley describe a two-hour fight in which Rosen held on until the French infantry came up, and Mercy got away but left his wagons and several guns behind. Britannica notes that he retreated without great losses. Within a few days the Bavarians were back at Rothenburg on the Tauber.15
Freiburg itself stayed in Bavarian hands. Enghien did not try to retake it: he took the army north, down the Rhine, and with Turenne captured Philippsburg in September and gained control of the Rhine towns. Britannica sums up the result as inconclusive, a costly French tactical defeat in the eyes of modern historians, which nonetheless left France master of the middle Rhine. Its losses table gives 7,000 to 8,000 French against 2,500 Bavarian and imperial casualties.16
Legacy and memory
The two sides met again the next summer. In May 1645 Mercy surprised Turenne at Mergentheim and routed him; in August Enghien and Turenne attacked him at Allerheim near Nördlingen, and Mercy was killed in the fighting for the village. The French carried the day, though at a heavy price in infantry.17
Enghien never forgot his opponent. Godley records that both he and Turenne freely praised Mercy as the greatest of their adversaries. The German biography adds that the duke had a stone set where Mercy fell, with the words Sta viator, heroem calcas: stop, traveler, you tread on a hero. Aumale calls the stone a legend: he searched for it in vain, and found Mercy's real grave, with an unremarkable inscription, in the Church of Our Lady at Ingolstadt.18
For Enghien, Freiburg was the second of the victories that made him the Great Condé, after Rocroi and before Nördlingen and Lens; Britannica lists it among the battles he won with Turenne. It had not gone to plan. On the 3rd the frontal attack on the Bohl succeeded while Turenne's turning movement, which was meant to decide the day, stuck in the hills; on the 5th it was Mercy's infantry that held.19 › Turenne: marshal of France
Visiting the battlefield today
The fighting of 5 August took place on the hills at the southern edge of Freiburg, between the Wonnhalde and the hill the French called Loretto. A small chapel of Our Lady of Loreto stands on it, built, Aumale and Godley both record, in memory of the fighting of 1644, and the hill is known today as the Lorettoberg. The Bohl and the villages of Ebringen, Merzhausen and Uffhausen, where the first day was fought, lie a few kilometers to the southwest.20
