Battle of Héricourt, 1474: the first battle of the Burgundian Wars

Héricourt is the least famous of the battles the Swiss fought against Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. He was hundreds of kilometers away when it was fought, it won nothing larger than a small fortified town, and it is overshadowed by Grandson, Murten and Nancy. But it came first. On a November day in the gap between the Vosges and the Jura, Swiss pikemen met Burgundian knights for the first time in this war, and they swept them off the field. In little more than two years the war that began here destroyed the Burgundian state and made the Swiss Confederation a military power feared across Europe.²

Background: a duke on the Upper Rhine

The road to Héricourt began with a debt. Duke Sigismund of Austria, a Habsburg short of money and squeezed by the Swiss, looked for a powerful protector. By a treaty signed at Saint-Omer on 9 May 1469 he handed Charles the Bold his lands in Alsace and along the Upper Rhine as a pledge for a loan, keeping the right to buy them back. Britannica's historian Michel Mollat sees the deal as part of Charles's grand design: to join his scattered lands, from the Netherlands to Burgundy, into one state reaching the Rhine. Overnight Burgundy became a direct neighbor of the Swiss Confederation.³

Charles ruled the pledged lands through his bailiff, Peter von Hagenbach, whose harsh government soon turned the region against him. He leaned on the free city of Mulhouse, an ally of Bern, and the towns of the Upper Rhine, Basel and Strasbourg among them, began to look to the Swiss for help. In the spring of 1474 delegates of the Swiss, Austria, the Alsatian towns and France met at Constance, and out of their talks came a peace between the Habsburgs and the Confederates after generations of feuding, a defensive league of the Swiss with the Upper Rhine cities, and the Lower Union of Sigismund and the Alsatian towns. Sigismund then set about redeeming his pledge.⁴

The Alsatians did not wait for lawyers. At Easter 1474 a revolt broke out at Breisach and Hagenbach was thrown into prison in chains. A court that included delegates of the Alsatian towns and of Strasbourg, Basel and Bern tried him, and on 9 May 1474 he was beheaded at Breisach. Putnam calls the trial lynch law with a cloak of legality, since Hagenbach had acted for his duke. His brother took revenge in August by ravaging Upper Alsace with Burgundian and Lombard mercenaries. King Louis XI of France, Charles's great rival, poured money into the Swiss cantons, and on 25 October 1474, after concluding an alliance with the king, the Confederates sent Charles a formal declaration of war.⁵

Armies and commanders

Charles himself could not answer. Since the summer he had been camped before Neuss, a small town on the Lower Rhine that he meant to take from the citizens of Cologne, and the siege would hold him there for almost a year, until June 1475. The defense of the Franche-Comté, his County of Burgundy, fell to Henri de Neuchâtel, Count of Blamont.⁶

Blamont scraped together an army of about 12,000 men. Besides the local levies he took on a large body of Italian mercenaries, the soldiers the Swiss lumped together as Lombards, who happened to be passing through the province. Its pride was its armored cavalry, the gendarmes and mounted knights of the Burgundian nobility.⁷

Against them marched one of the strangest coalitions of the age. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland lists the Swiss Confederates, the Lower Union, the Austrian towns of Alsace and the imperial cities of Swabia, and both John Foster Kirk and de Weck put the whole army at about 18,000 men. Every man in it wore the white cross of the Confederation. The cities' propaganda, the historian Claudius Sieber-Lehmann writes, presented the campaign as a crusade against the “evil Turk of Burgundy”.⁸

The Swiss had no great general and needed none. Charles Oman, writing in 1885, described how they fought: in deep columns bristling with pikes, ashen shafts some 18 feet long with a steel head, with halberdiers in the middle ready to burst out into the melee. The Swiss military historian Hervé de Weck gives the pike as six meters long and deadly against cavalry. Both stress how the Swiss differed from knights and Italian condottieri: they did not trouble to take prisoners for ransom.⁹

The battle in phases

The siege. The allies marched at once, one army into Alsace by Basel and another by Porrentruy, and early in November they closed around Héricourt, a small castle town that commanded the road from the Sundgau into Burgundy. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland dates the start of the siege to 8 November; Kirk has the whole force assembled before the walls on the 7th.¹⁰

The relief army. Blamont did not intend a pitched battle. He camped a few leagues off, hoping to draw the besiegers away from the castle without risking his army against superior numbers. The plan failed. The allies spotted his army, left a small force to watch the town, broke camp and marched straight at him through the wooded hills between the two armies.¹¹

The clash. The day itself is disputed. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland gives 13 November; Kirk, following the letters from the camp, puts the attack early on the 14th; de Weck, on Herodote.net, writes of a surprise on 23 November. All agree on what happened. Coming out on open ground, the Swiss found the Burgundian cavalry drawn up in battle order, and the Bernese, on the left, charged without waiting for orders. The rest followed. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes two separate actions in which the Confederates, with the help of the Austrian cavalry, beat the Burgundian mounted knights.¹²

Turning point

The Burgundians were not ready for what came at them. Kirk, drawing on the Swiss reports, describes the Burgundian line breaking before the columns even reached it. Ruth Putnam, writing in 1908, sums it up in a line: the tables were turned, and it was the Burgundians who were fiercely attacked and who lost the day. The Austrian horsemen joined in once the Burgundian line was gone.¹³

It was a massacre more than a battle. Kirk records 1,617 bodies counted on the field the next day, with several hundred more burned in the village where fugitives had hidden; de Weck speaks of at least 4,000 Burgundian dead. Both, with the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, agree that the allies lost very few men. Few prisoners were taken, in keeping with the Swiss habit of giving no quarter in battle.¹⁴

Aftermath

The relief army gone, the siege went on. The walls held, and in the end the besiegers granted terms. The garrison marched out, and the castle was handed to Austrian troops; Putnam dates the change of garrison to 16 November.¹⁵

For Charles the defeat was a blow to his pride rather than his power. He stayed before Neuss. But the quarrel could no longer be patched up. In Bern the war party of Niklaus von Diesbach won the upper hand, and in 1475 Bernese and Fribourg bands overran much of Vaud, which belonged to Burgundy's ally Savoy. When Charles at last marched south, he took Grandson and put its garrison to death, and was routed outside the town on 2 March 1476. He was beaten again at Murten on 22 June 1476, and killed outside Nancy on 5 January 1477.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

The Burgundian Wars, in Sieber-Lehmann's judgment, were a turning point for Europe and for Switzerland: they removed the Burgundian state that sat between France and the Empire, strengthened both the French monarchy and the Habsburgs, and briefly made the Confederation a European military power. The Swiss won little land, but they won a reputation, and princes everywhere now wanted to hire them. Mercenary service became part of Swiss life for centuries.¹⁷

How the war began has itself been argued over. The older story, which goes back to the memoirs of Philippe de Commynes, made the Swiss naive tools of Louis XI. Sieber-Lehmann reports that the German historian Karl Bittmann, working from the documents, overturned it in 1964, showing that Bern under Niklaus von Diesbach and the Upper Rhine cities of Strasbourg and Basel pushed for the war themselves. Kirk had already reached a similar view a century earlier, describing a Bern far more eager to fight than the other cantons.¹⁸

The battle lived on in pictures. Diebold Schilling's Official Bern Chronicle, finished in the years after the war, gave Héricourt a full page, the one at the top of this article, and the Zurich chronicle shown above pictured it too. Héricourt itself has a place on the 13 November page of our calendar of battles.¹⁹

Visiting Héricourt today

Héricourt is now a small town in the French department of Haute-Saône. Of its castle one great tower survives, the last remnant of a fortress once ringed by walls and a moat. Known as the Tour du château or Tour d'Espagne and owned by the town, it has been protected as a historic monument since 1913; the French heritage register dates its present building to the 16th century, after the siege of 1474.²⁰