First and foremost, Rest in Peace Magna Mundi the Game. I guess I'll never write that MMtG historybook AAR. In its place I dedicate this AAR to the game that could have been.
Now, without further a due, we return to your irregularly scheduled AAR.
The War of The Vendee League
The Situation and the Order of Battle
The 1470s began on a dark note for the Francois I government. Although she was (militarily) stronger than ever before, the Parisian Tax Riots both demolished France's international repute (
'Troubles in X', which forces you to choose between either 5-10K rebels or a 10 prestige malus, triggers a lot when you have provinces with 'high' or 'very high' taxes, occurred several times in the 1460s.) and took the better part of a year to put down. The continuing diplomatic campaign against Burgundian legitimacy seemed to be getting worse every day, as the Duchy announced that they had inherited the Duchy of Milan.
But the worst news of the year came in the winter of 1472: the English had declared war upon the Bretons.
English soldiers besieging Morbihan.
The Breton-English war was nominally over a claim to the County of Finistere. In reality, it was made as a domestic move (to retake England's place in the international scene and show the strength of English arms), as a way to drag Brittany's ally Scotland into another War, and as a way to undo the embarrassment of Treaty of London by reestablishing a base on the Continent.
This move violently startled the French government: if the English were to take Finistere--or worse, vassalize Brittany--then all of the gains made in the 1450s and 60s would be for naught. However, the war brought an opportunity: the Duchy of Burgundy and the Kingdom of Aragon (both previous Breton allies) had reneged on their alliance following the English declaration of War. This meant that the French could destroy one of the possible 'variables' in an imagined Franco-Burgundian War: the threat of a flanking by the Duchy of Brittany. Furthermore, the Duchy of Brittany had constructed what would have been an impressive anti-French League of Vendee, involving Burgundy, Savoy, Lorraine, and Aragon. Without Burgundy and Aragon though, a war against Brittany meant that France could possibly defeat 3 foes who, though unimportant in and of themselves, could possibly turn on France in critical moments.
But right now, because of wars afflicting Brittany and Savoy, the combined force of the League amounted to less than 20,000 men, separated my hundreds of miles. France had the advantage of interior lines, as well as the advantage of an army far larger than her opponents. She had every advantage besides one: she was going on the offensive, which put de Villenueve on edge. The cabinet meeting discussing possibilities of offensives into Savoy, Lorraine and Brittany thus led to a break in what had been a cross-generational alliance between de Villenueve and the King.
French Generals in 1472, and the Generals becoming an independent corporate force following their separation from the King.
The King argued that, although the Kingdom's objectives were far reaching (total conquest of Lorraine, Savoy, and Brittany), France's numeral advantage, technological advantage, and doctrinal advantage meant that victory would be assured. De Villenueve countered by saying that the doctrinal advantage given by
On Command wouldn't apply he applied here:
On Command very strongly suggested defensives over offensives. And victory wasn't what De Villenueve was worried about: what he was worried about was that thousands upon thousands of French soldiers would die, regardless of how good that tactics of the campaigns would be. It soon became clear to de Villenueve and the French Marshals that even though Francois I spoke about the strategies present in
On Command, he didn't truly understand them and his misunderstanding would lead to a huge mass of deaths. At the same time, however, controlling the French hinterland was immensely important because it would allow France to keep most of her armies posed against her true enemy, the Duchy of Burgundy.
However, the belligerent and aggressive style of Francois' war plans prompted a move towards independence by the Marshals. De Villenueve, acting as head of the army, designated Francois I as the Commander in Chief of the Lorainian Front, leaving the Breton front for himself and the first valedictorian of the French Army Academy, the Comte Crevecouer. Hailing from the north of France, de Crevecouer chose to leave his life of luxury as the heir to a massive estate after reading
On Command, and instead moved to Othe to study in the Academy, focusing on tactical applications to de Villenueve's strategic vision. The Savoyard front was given to the Auvergnian Marshal, Charles de Rochemaure, for reasons I will get into in the next section. The French order of battle was as follows:
The position of French armies at the beginning of the War of the Vendee League. Note that a new general would be promoted to lead the Armee de l'Est, which besieged Vendee, and 5,000 men were trained to supplement the Royal Army.
The Strategy
The objectives were, first, to engage and destroy the enemy armies, and secondly to subjugate the whole of each enemy's territory. In Brittany, a series of military governorships and local governments would be set up to prepare the Breton provinces for incorporation into the French country. In Savoy and Lorraine, problematic province governors would be replaced with more cooperative locals, but the goal for these duchies was vassalization and incorporation into the French kingdom, so more brutal strategies were ruled out. In Savoy in particular, Auvergnan and Provencal noble generals were told that any counties well governed by the French army would pass to them.
The Savoyard Theatre
The first army to engage was the Savoyard army. Knowing that the Army of Flandres was coming to them, they hoped to minimize political losses by having the battle occur as close to the French border as possible. Furthermore Duke Antonio of Savoy knew that supply wouldn't be a problem for France: unlike the Breton or Lorainian theatres, the French would be able to supply by sea via their naval dominance, and Antonio knew that the Francophone villages would side with the French, almost completely negating the necessity for supply lines.
However, de Rochemaure's (not Rochemause as the picture says) cavalry saw the Savoyard army advancing and were able to inform the French well ahead of time, and so the Army of Flandres maneuvered around the lumbering Army of Savoy and continued towards Turin, forcing the enemy back without a casualty. This continued for several days, with the French army outmaneuvering the Savoyard army again and again, while keeping her supply lines and attacking her enemies. The Battle of Turin ended up happening 2 weeks after the initial invasion into Piedmont, with a well rested French army fighting against an exhausted Savoyard force. The Army of Savoy collapsed, and the rest of the Savoyard campaign consisted of besieging of the remnants of the Savoyard army and buying over the Savoyard populace.
The Savoyard Campaign was effectively over within a month
The Lorainian Theatre
The Loranian Campaign took a little bit longer: though Lorraine's army was just as poorly trained, her army was larger and had positioned itself farther into the Loranian countryside, with spies and scouts ready to inform their army of the Royal Army's position. Unlike de Rochemaure, Francois attacked his enemy head on, leading to the Battle of Harville several miles west of the city of Metz, by the Riene Forrest. Although Lorraine had started to implement pikes into her infantry, the full consequences of pike tactics had been lost on the Lorainian generals, leading them to ask why the Royal Army had deployed without her 3,000 cavalrymen, and, foolishly thinking that the French army had lost several regiments in the march, ordered an en masse charge that led to the deaths of hundreds of Loranian infantry and many cavalry.
Francois' cavalry, then refreshed and unbattered by the battle, harried the Lorainian soldiers all the way back to Lothloringen, the capital. There, starved and beaten, the Army of Loraine surrendered to the cavalry captain Louis de la Motte d'Airan, whom I will call the Comte d'Airan. This decisive victory showed to all of Europe the superiority of French arms, and went a long way in undoing the damage dealt to French prestige by the excesses of the Cosmopolitaine Inquisition. Lastly, the victory at Lothloringen led to the promotion of the Comte d'Airan to the rank of General, and he was swiftly put in command of the Armee de l'Est, both as a way to fix the deficit of leadership there (although the Army de L'Est was acting admirably without a major general at the helm and was the first army to finish a siege during the war) and as a way to put a general who followed Francois' strategic vision into the ranks of the Marshals.
The Surrender at Lothloringen
The Breton Theatre
Brittany was an all together different situation than the other 2 theatres I've mentioned. Loraine was a small duchy, and French attacks in to it could use the Provencal county of Barrois as a base of operations. Savoy was similarly laid out to the French countryside and contained many communities who pledged their allegiance to France. Brittany, on the other hand, was an all together different matter. For decades, the Dukes of Brittany had been centralizing their rule and uniting their people against the specter of the French Kingdom meant that the Armees de l'Est et de Nord would be fighting on hostile ground, and the Paimpont Forest of Arthurian legend provided a perfect place for the Breton army to withdraw to in the possibility of defeat (
Or something: the Breton army disappeared for like a year and then reappeared. No clue how this happened.). Moreover, the Army of Brittany had been following advances made in France, and
On Command was widely read among the officer corps, and his lessons were deftly applied against the French army. Rather than face the far larger French and English armies head on, the Armee de Breton dispersed into the wilderness, attacking French supply lines, her hospitals, her camps.
This all angered de Villenueve to no end. After telling his King not to engage in an offensive campaign, after writing a book on the advantages on defensives, he was being faced with an enemy who knew, precisely, how to implement his strategies against him, and he had no clue how to beat them. During the winter of 1472, de Villenueve kept the Marshals up, night after night, reading military histories for a way to defeat an enemy as deeply entrenched as the Duke of Brittany. It ended up being Mancini, the widely hated and sadistic head of the French 1st Department (Covering Culture, Taxes, and the Inquisition), who had a solution, related to his own past in the Inquisition: the lands of Brittany would be forcefully Francofied via a colonization by French elites. Breton nobles would be demoted, relocated, or killed.
Unsurprisingly, the tactics used by both sides of the war in Brittany led to much bloodshed. The Breton front ended up taking the lives of 15,000 French soldiers, more than half of the total casualties. The effects on the Breton countryside were similarly disastrous: whole towns and estates were swallowed up, in fire and blood, and when confronted with the massive Painpont Forest, a massive deforestation campaign was implemented.
With all this said, the campaign to destroy the enemy army went well at first. The sneak attack that Francois I had arranged for was successful: the Armee de l'Est caught the army guarding Vendee by surprise, and was able to destroy them in a single blow.
The campaign of Vendee ended in a single battle, the rest of the troops scattered into the Painpont Forest
The campaign to destroy the Armee de Breton was far more difficult. Duke Jean II harried the Armee de Nord for weeks, until he was finally forced to fight with his back to the hills. Unlike his foolish allies, Jean II did not march directly into French pikes, instead he entrenched himself in a position and used his longbowmen to do as much damage as they could. What he did not anticipate was that the French light cavalry would march through the hills and attack his rear, which sent his army into a well organized withdrawal but cost the Breton Duke his life.
Jean II was but the first Duke to die to foreign steel during the 1470s
Jean's nephew, Pierre II was barely older than 17 when he was given the Crown in Morbihan at the news of his uncle's death. With a fire in his heart, he ordered an advance to attack the French army in the passes of the Painpont Forest. The battle was a disaster: the Armee de Nord, though spread over several roads, was able to keep its composure and place its pikes towards the enemy, and the Breton soldiers died in their thousands. For a short time, the battle of Painpont meant that the Breton army was inoperable.
The Battle of Painpont Forest
The War's End
This is good, because as time dragged on, the most deadly force for the French reared its ugly head: disease, starvation, and attacks by militas led to the deaths of thousands of Frenchmen in the Duchy of Brittany. For the next two years, the soldiers of France besieged fortresses, bought off local lords, fought against Breton partisans, and so forth. By 1475, critical enemy fortresses in Lorraine, Savoy, and Brittany were taken and the process of treaty making started. D'Ursine, who'd stayed by his King's side for the better part of the Lorainian campaign, had by 1475 convinced his King to vassalize Loraine and Savoy and add them to the ranks of the General Assembly. By doing so, he'd entrenched the General Assembly's power for multiple generations. However, by his diplomatic abilities he was also able to extract major concessions from the Vendee league, which essentially paid the cost for the war.
The Peace treaties with the Savoyard and Lorainian belligerents
Brittany was destined for a different fate: she was forced to give up most of her provinces, who were steadily colonized through the rest of the 1470s and 80s. In a single stroke, Francois I had eliminated every threat to him in the war and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
The First treaty of Vendee
I've been wondering about this AAR: although this section is mostly going over things present in EU3, should I have 'Beginners Corners' like Narwal AARs, to explain Magna Mundi mechanics? Would that make the AAR more accessible to non-MM players?