Neerwinden was not the only French victory of the year. Catinat, advancing from Fenestrelle and Susa to the relief of Pinerolo (Pignerol), which the duke of Savoy was besieging, took up a position in formal order of battle Marsaglia. north of the village of Marsaglia. Here on the 4th of October the duke of Savoy attacked him with his whole army, front to front. But the greatly superior regimental efficiency of the French, and Catinat’s minute attention to details[4] in arraying them, gave the new marshal a victory that was a not unworthy pendant to Neerwinden. The Piedmontese and their allies lost, it is said, 10,000 killed, wounded and prisoners, as against Catinat’s 1800. But here, too, the results were trifling, and this year of victory is remembered chiefly as the year in which “people perished of want to the accompaniment of Te Deums.”
In 1694 (late in the season owing to the prevailing distress and famine) Louis opened a fresh campaign in the Netherlands. The armies were larger and more ineffective than ever, and William offered no further opportunities to his formidable opponent. In September, after inducing William to desist from his intention of besieging Dunkirk by appearing on his flank with a mass of cavalry,[5] which had ridden from the Meuse, 100 m., in 4 days, Luxemburg gave up his command. He died on the 4th of January following, and with him the tradition of the Condé school of warfare disappeared from Europe. In Catalonia the marshal de Noailles won a victory (27th May) over the Spaniards at the ford of the Ter (Torroella, 5 m. above the mouth of the river), and in consequence captured a number of walled towns.
In 1695 William found Marshal Villeroi a far less formidable opponent than Luxemburg had been, and easily succeeded in keeping him in Flanders while a corps of the Allies invested Namur. Coehoorn directed the siege-works, and Later campaigns of the war. Boufflers the defence. Gradually, as in 1692, the defenders were dislodged from the town, the citadel outworks and the citadel itself, the last being assaulted with success by the “British grenadiers,” as the song commemorates, on the 30th of August. Boufflers was rewarded for his sixty-seven days’ defence by the grade of marshal.
By 1696 necessity had compelled Louis to renounce his vague and indefinite offensive policy, and he now frankly restricted his efforts to the maintenance of what he had won in the preceding campaigns. In this new policy he met with much success. Boufflers, Lorge, Noailles and even the incompetent Villeroi held the field in their various spheres of operations without allowing the Allies to inflict any material injury, and also (by having recourse again to the policy of living by plunder) preserving French soil from the burden of their own maintenance. In this, as before, they were powerfully assisted by the disunion and divided counsels of their heterogeneous enemies. In Piedmont, Catinat crowned his work by making peace and alliance with the duke of Savoy, and the two late enemies having joined forces captured one of the fortresses of the Milanese. The last campaign was in 1697. Catinat and Vauban besieged Ath. This siege was perhaps the most regular and methodical of the great engineer’s career. It lasted 23 days and cost the assailants only 50 men. King William did not stir from his entrenched position at Brussels, nor did Villeroi dare to attack him there. Lastly, in August 1697 Vendôme, Noailles’ successor, captured Barcelona. The peace of Ryswijk, signed on the 30th of October, closed this war by practically restoring the status quo ante; but neither the ambitions of Louis nor the Grand Alliance that opposed them ceased to have force, and three years later the struggle began anew (see [Spanish Succession, War of the]).
Concurrently with these campaigns, the emperor had been engaged in a much more serious war on his eastern marches against the old enemy, the Turks. This war arose in 1682 out of internal disturbances in Hungary. The campaign of Austro-Turkish wars, 1682-1699. the following year is memorable for all time as the last great wave of Turkish invasion. Mahommed IV. advanced from Belgrade in May, with 200,000 men, drove back the small imperial army of Prince Charles of Lorraine, and early in July invested Vienna itself. The two months’ defence of Vienna by Count Rüdiger Starhemberg (1635-1701) and the brilliant victory of the relieving army led by John Sobieski, king of Poland, and Prince Charles on the 12th of September 1683, were events which, besides their intrinsic importance, possess the romantic interest of an old knightly crusade against the heathen.
But the course of the war, after the tide of invasion had ebbed, differed little from the wars of contemporary western Europe. Turkey figured rather as a factor in the balance of power than as the “infidel,” and although the battles and sieges in Hungary were characterized by the bitter personal hostility of Christian to Turk which had no counterpart in the West, the war as a whole was as methodical and tedious as any Rhine or Low Countries campaign. In 1684 Charles of Lorraine gained a victory at Waitzen on the 27th of June and another at Eperies on the 18th of September, and unsuccessfully besieged Budapest.
In 1685 the Germans were uniformly successful, though a victory at Gran (August 16th) and the storming of Neuhaüsel (August 19th) were the only outstanding incidents. In 1686 Charles, assisted by the elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria, besieged and stormed Budapest (Sept. 2nd). In 1687 they followed up their success by a great victory at Mohacz (Aug. 12th). In 1688 the Austrians advanced still further, took Belgrade, threatened Widin and entered Bosnia. The margrave Louis of Baden, who afterward became one of the most celebrated of the methodical generals of the day, won a victory at Derbent on the 5th of September 1688, and next year, in spite of the outbreak of a general European war, he managed to win another battle at Nisch (Sept. 24th), to capture Widin (Oct. 14th) and to advance to the Balkans, but in 1690, more troops having to be withdrawn for the European war, the imperialist generals lost Nisch, Widin and Belgrade one after the other. There was, however, no repetition of the scenes of 1683, for in 1691 Louis won the battle of Szlankamen (Aug. 19th). After two more desultory if successful campaigns he was called to serve in western Europe, and for three years more the war dragged on without result, until in 1697 the young Prince Eugene was appointed to command the imperialists and won a great and decisive victory at Zenta on the Theiss (Sept. 11th). This induced a last general advance of the Germans eastward, which was definitively successful and brought about the peace of Carlowitz (January 1699).
(C. F. A.)
Naval Operations
The naval side of the war waged by the powers of western Europe from 1689 to 1697, to reduce the predominance of King Louis XIV., was not marked by any very conspicuous exhibition of energy or capacity, but it was singularly decisive in its results. At the beginning of the struggle the French fleet kept the sea in face of the united fleets of Great Britain and Holland. It displayed even in 1690 a marked superiority over them. Before the struggle ended it had been fairly driven into port, and though its failure was to a great extent due to the exhaustion of the French finances, yet the inability of the French admirals to make a proper use of their fleets, and the incapacity of the king’s ministers to direct the efforts of his naval officers to the most effective aims, were largely responsible for the result.