Battle of Rheinfelden, 1638: beaten on Sunday, victorious on Wednesday

Rheinfelden is really two battles a few days apart, as the title of a print of the time already spelled out: a hard clash between the Imperial, Bavarian and Weimar troops on Sunday the 28th, and again on Wednesday 3 March. The first went against Bernhard. The second opened the way to the great fortress of Breisach and, for the historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, made 1638 the turning point of the struggle between France and the House of Austria.²

Who won the Battle of Rheinfelden and why?

Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar won. He lost the first clash on 28 February, but his enemies took their success for the end of the campaign and spread their troops into distant quarters. On 3 March he marched back unseen, advanced firing his guns, broke the Imperial line in one charge and captured all four enemy generals.³

Background: a Protestant prince in French pay

Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar had fought on the Protestant side for most of the Thirty Years' War. He joined Gustavus Adolphus when the Swedish king landed in Germany and took command at Lützen in 1632 after Gustavus fell. In 1634 he shared in the great Swedish and Protestant defeat at Nördlingen.⁴

In 1635 he entered the service of France, which had now come openly into the war. By a treaty of 27 October 1635, France promised him the Austrian landgraviate of Alsace; Gustav Droysen notes that the grant came with all the rights the House of Austria had held there. The Royal Collection Trust's catalogue simply calls his force a French mercenary army.⁵

What was at stake was the Upper Rhine. Gardiner explains that Alsace and the Breisgau lay across the road by which Spain moved men and money to the Netherlands. Bernhard hoped to win the Austrian lands there as a principality of his own, in place of the Franconian duchy he had lost after Nördlingen.⁶

Across the Rhine in midwinter

Nobody on the Imperial side expected an attack at that season, and the river crossings were weakly held. Bernhard gathered his army around Zwingen in the bishopric of Basel: about 6,000 men in Bernhard Röse's count, about 8,000 in Droysen's, who has 1,000 foot and 1,000 horse leading and some 6,000 following behind.⁷

In bitter cold the advance guard marched out of Zwingen, crossed the bridge over the Birs between Basel and Münchenstein at midnight and slipped past Rheinfelden to Stein, on the left bank opposite Säckingen. Two small boats had been carried along on wagons. They ferried the first men over the river eight at a time, and the first to cross were paid a reward of fifty thalers.⁸

The rest followed quickly. The Weimar soldiers seized the ferries at Säckingen and took the town, then rushed Laufenburg, whose commander begged for mercy from the wall, and won its bridge over the Rhine intact. "I wish you a happy good day from Laufenburg," Bernhard wrote to his Swiss friend, Colonel Hans Ludwig von Erlach. "God has blessed me, so that all has gone happily and well." Waldshut fell soon after.⁹

The blow caused alarm on the other side. The Emperor reproached the Swiss for letting Bernhard's army cross their territory, and blamed Baron von Reinach, the commandant of Breisach, for failing to guard the river. Of the four Austrian "forest towns" on the Rhine, only Rheinfelden still held out.¹⁰

The siege of Rheinfelden

Rheinfelden was the strongest of them, ringed by a double ditch and a high, thick wall, and defended by a garrison and townspeople determined to resist. Bernhard closed it in on both banks of the Rhine at the end of January and opened the bombardment on 31 January, in the Old Style calendar that German writers of the time still used.¹¹

His miners blew up part of the outer works and buried many defenders under the rubble, and two towers were taken. Every attempt to bring powder and supplies into the town by land or water failed, and by mid-February the town was short of powder. Bernhard had prepared to storm the walls.¹²

Armies and commanders

The Emperor recalled Duke Federico Savelli, an Italian nobleman in Imperial service, to take command of all the troops gathering behind the Black Forest at Villingen, and the Elector of Bavaria sent his cavalry general Johann von Werth to serve under him. Ward, in the Cambridge Modern History, calls Savelli incompetent; Röse describes the two generals as at odds from the start.¹³

Werth was the most famous cavalry leader on the Imperial side. In 1636 his horsemen had ridden deep into Picardy, on the road to Paris. With the two came the generals Adrian von Enkevort and Claus Dietrich Sperreuter.¹⁴

On Bernhard's side, Major General Taupadel led the horse of the right wing in both battles. Two notable volunteers rode with the army: Henri, Duke of Rohan, the French commander of the Valtelline campaigns, who had joined Bernhard only a short time before, and Erlach himself.¹⁵

Neither Röse nor Droysen gives a number for the Imperial and Bavarian army, but both say it was larger than Bernhard's. A contemporary order of battle in the Hessian State Archives in Marburg shows Bernhard's army drawn up in two lines of horse and foot, with the Count of Nassau, Colonel Rosen and Taupadel among his commanders, and opposite them the regiments of Werth and of the "Duca di Savello".¹⁶

The first battle: Sunday, 28 February

The relief army crossed the Black Forest by hard marches and appeared before the Weimar lines early on 28 February. Bernhard had six cavalry regiments with him but little infantry, and much of his army stood on the far bank of the Rhine. He decided to fight anyway. While his outposts held up the enemy, he brought over a few hundred musketeers and some light guns and drew up on a rise by the monastery of Beuggen, barring the road to the town.¹⁷

Taupadel opened with a charge that threw back Werth's wing and chased it far across the fields. On the other flank Savelli and Sperreuter broke Bernhard's own regiments, pushed them back toward Beuggen and took his guns. What saved the Weimar army was plunder: the Imperial horsemen fell on Bernhard's baggage, which gave him time to rally his cavalry, recapture four guns and free a number of prisoners, among them the badly wounded Duke of Rohan.¹⁸

Night ended the fighting. Bernhard gave up the siege and led his troops back to Laufenburg in the dark, while the Imperial army marched into Rheinfelden with fresh men and supplies and claimed the victory. Gardiner, writing in 1875, dates this first clash to the 26th.¹⁹

The decisions between the battles

Bernhard did not take the defeat as the end. Droysen writes that he thought Rheinfelden worth two battles. On his way to Laufenburg he stormed the castle known as the Red House between Säckingen and Laufenburg, gathered the rest of his army and sent Taupadel's horse ranging into the hills of the Black Forest.²⁰

Savelli, meanwhile, sent reports of his victory far and wide, believed the Weimar army to be in full retreat and spread his troops over distant quarters. According to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, the victors gave themselves over to rest. Werth, by his own account given in captivity, had advised either falling back toward Rötteln and the Wiese valley or quartering the whole army close to the Rheinfelden bridge, where Bernhard could not reach it; the "old man", he said, would hear of neither.²¹

The second battle: Wednesday, 3 March

Early on 3 March, as soon as Taupadel was back, Bernhard advanced without warning. His troops drove in the Croat outposts. In haste the Imperial generals drew up their men before the town: musketeers in the bushes along the river and behind a deep ditch running down to the Rhine, the horse behind and beside them, and on the left the infantry regiment of Wahl in a wood.²²

Bernhard's musketeers first cleared the bushes by the river and took back the guns lost three days before. Then, under the watchword "God with us", the whole army moved forward, firing its heavy guns three times as it came. After the third salvo it stood barely a pistol shot from the enemy line.²³

The charge that followed decided the day at once. The musketeers in the ditch threw away their weapons and ran, and the Imperial cavalry turned and fled without firing their pistols. Only Wahl's regiment held out in the wood against Taupadel until it was surrounded, and Werth was captured soon after. Savelli, Enkevort and Sperreuter were captured too.²⁴

Bernhard himself, by his own account the next day, was astonished to see old regiments and officers thrown into disorder so quickly, and called it the work of heaven. Savelli, Droysen records, told him that nobody would believe the full extent of the victory.²⁵

The date of the second battle varies from source to source. The Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie and Gardiner give 3 March, as does the heading King George III's librarians wrote on the Royal Collection's copy of the print. Michael Kaiser's newer Neue Deutsche Biographie article dates Werth's capture to 2 March, and the Cambridge Modern History prints 9 March. Röse, Droysen and Schiller give the Old Style date, 21 February.²⁶

Counting the losses

The first battle cost both sides heavily, and Bernhard above all in officers. The Rhinegrave John Philip, one of his best commanders, was killed and the Duke of Rohan was mortally wounded. Erlach and the senior staff officer Schafalitzky were taken prisoner. The Imperial side lost senior officers too, and a number of standards.²⁷

The second battle destroyed the relief army. Röse counts 1,800 rank and file taken, besides the generals and a long list of officers, and Schiller 2,000 prisoners; Droysen and the Cambridge Modern History give 3,000. Most of them took service with Bernhard. For the Imperial dead, Röse gives 1,500, Droysen at least 500 or 600. Both list 38 standards and 18 flags among the trophies.²⁸

Bernhard's own losses on 3 March were light, though not without cost among his officers: Röse lists four colonels among them, and Droysen names Colonel Bodendorf, who fell at the head of his horsemen as they crossed the ditch.²⁹

Aftermath: from Rheinfelden to Breisach

The army gave thanks on the battlefield, and a victory feast followed at Laufenburg, where the captured generals, Röse writes, argued over dinner about who was to blame. Their quarrel continued in captivity: Droysen describes a record of Werth's and Enkevort's talk that is full of bitter charges against Savelli.³⁰

Rheinfelden itself held out a little longer. Its commander first refused to surrender and then asked for a three-day truce, but new siege guns arrived from Benfeld and the Hohentwiel and the breaching batteries opened. The town capitulated on 23 or 24 March, 13 or 14 March in the Old Style dating, as Droysen and Röse differ; the garrison marched off to Breisach, and the Weimar prisoners of the first battle, Schafalitzky among them, were set free.³¹

Savelli was held at Laufenburg on his word of honor, slipped away in disguise in March and rejoined his troops. Werth and Enkevort were taken to Benfeld in Alsace. Richelieu wanted the famous "Jean de Werth" in French hands, and Bernhard gave way; in May Werth was taken to the castle of Vincennes. He was exchanged for the Swedish field marshal Gustav Horn, a prisoner since Nördlingen, only early in 1642.³²

France celebrated the victory in Notre Dame in Paris, where the captured standards were hung with great ceremony.³³

The whole Rhine above Basel was now in Bernhard's hands, and the castle of Rötteln and the city of Freiburg fell in the following weeks. Bernhard turned on Breisach, the great fortress that dominated the valley of the Upper Rhine. That summer he routed Savelli and Götz at Wittenweier when they tried to bring supplies into the fortress; Fosi quotes the diary of Cardinal Harrach, which records that the disaster was blamed on Savelli, whose vanguard had been too exposed and too far from Götz's support. Breisach surrendered in December 1638.³⁴

Legacy and memory

Bernhard did not enjoy his conquest for long. He claimed the lands he had won for himself, and France was in no mind to accept a powerful German prince in Alsace. He fell ill early in his next campaign and died in July 1639. Breisach and the Alsatian fortresses passed to France.³⁵

Werth returned to the field in 1642 and fought on for Bavaria and the Emperor, leading the cavalry in the Imperial victory at Tuttlingen in 1643. Kaiser calls his capture in 1638 a break in his career.³⁶ › Battle of Freiburg, 1644

The battle lived on in print almost at once. The Landesarchiv in Karlsruhe holds a print dated to 1638 or later that shows both clashes, and the Royal Collection's copy of the same view comes from a history of the war published in 1648; Matthäus Merian's view followed in the Theatrum Europaeum.³⁷