The invasion of the Rhineland
Tilly’s offensive into the Rhineland—defined as the Electorate of the Palatinate, the Duchy of Baden, the Bishoprics of Mainz and Alsace, the Imperial City of Frankfurt and the County of Franche-Comte (which was formally under the Archduke of Austria, a formal agreement which hadn’t stopped the Count of Franche-Comte from supporting Protestants in Switzerland, Italy, and France)—was not so much a war as it was a land grab. The 30,000 troops of the Rhenish League were poorly trained, many taken straight from the local militia or mobilized right after the declaration of war.
The Rhenish League, a group of minor states along the French border which conspired to support the Lorraine Pretender in the French War of Religion
The French Army, on the other hand, was battle-hardened and had gone through a process of extensive reform since the beginning of the French War of Religion. The necessity of having loyal recruits led to a reorganization of the Basic unit of the French army—the Regiment—into a more localized unit populated by people from the same village. In order to make sure that villages were loyal, a cantonments system was set up in areas loyal to the French crown, a system that was expanded as the government progressed in the War of Religion.
By 1601, the French Army had expended from 75,000 men to a fighting force of 125,000, and the 5 regular corps’ active in France (du Nord, d’Oest, d’Est, du Sud and des Flandres) were expanded to 20,000 men each (the other two armies were the Parisian Guard, a glorified militia force which never left the bounds of Ile de France, and the Canadian Expeditionary Force I detailed earlier). The 3 corps under Tilly’s command outnumbered the Rhenish Armies two to one, and while the Rhenish troops were untrained, Tilly’s men were battle hardened soldiers who embraced Tilly’s concept of total war and were ready to show it to the rulers who kept France in the midst of civil war for nearly a decade.
The French Regiments system
The Battle of Elsass, the single major battle of the war, lasted only two hours. The combined Rhenish armies met 40,000 Frenchmen in a village three miles from the city of Strassbourg early in the morning of the 6
th of March. Tilly, having foreseen this, had sent his cavalry ahead and had kept his artillery on guard through the night. When the Elector Palatine thought that he had caught Tilly off guard and sent his troops forward, Tilly met this advance with a blistering barrage from his artillery before sending his troops to meet the enemy.
While the Rhenish infantry was distracted, Tilly ordered his cavalry to attack the Rhenish rear, killing any they met (he apparently ordered that he wanted to see the heads of the lords of the Rhineland). The charge of 10,000 French cavalrymen at the back of the Rhinelander’s army did them in—when the Rhenish infantry commanders considered a withdrawal and turned back only to see the French flag flying over the commander’s mound, what would have been a withdrawal turned into a rout. The battle led to the death of most of the Rhenish military and all of the Rhenish heads of state, leaving the Rhineland open to complete conquest at the hands of Tilly.
The Battle of Elsass, 1605
Over the next three years, French troops won the sieges of Elsass, Freiburg, Chamberry, and Mainz, which led to the annexation of Franche-Comte and Alsace and the transformation of Baden and Mainz into French protectorates. The only attempt by the Emperor to end this war of aggression, a call by the citizens of the Holy Roman Empire in France to rise up, had gone right into the hands of Louis XII, who declared that the Emperor was interfering in France’s internal affairs, where “Only I am sovereign”. All French provinces were withdrawn from the Empire, and the French Crown dismantled all parliaments, estates, and congresses, making France the first Absolute Kingdom.
Only Frankfurt, the Palatinate, and the small, recently arrived force of pro-Imperial Protestants stood between Tilly and total conquest of the Southern Rhine. Frankfurt was unlike the other Rhenish states—while the Palatine and Baden had ignored building fortifications through the 40 Years War, Frankfurt’s City Elders knew that Frankfurt was at a strategic position on the Rhine, and that she couldn’t possibly raise a large enough mercenary force to defend herself if attacked. With this knowledge, the city elders built one of the strongest fortifications in Europe around Frankfurt.
The Fortress of Frankfurt included the innovations that Louis XII had come across during the War of Brabant, and would serve as the model for the fortifications France built on her Western borders
Tilly knew that it would take years to bring down Frankfurt fortress, and that without Frankfurt France would still be vulnerable to an attack from across the Rhine. So he decided to attack Frankfurt the only way he could—psychologically.
The city of Worms, the capital of the Palatine, wasn’t nearly as fortified. The city was of great religious importance—it had been the city that Calvin had left to after his exile from France, and was in many ways the capital of Calvinism--it had remained unoccupied mostly because it was a low-status target for the French Armies, and a citizen of Worms could be forgiven for thinking that the war would end with a white peace on the part of the Palatine. So the appearance of French banners on the horizon in the autumn of 1605 was met with horror. This horror was even worse when the French armies began burning the farms around the city right before the harvest and bombarded the city’s granaries (located, as was common in fortifications built in the early 1500s, within the city walls facing the river, an advantage destroyed by the fact that Tilly had completely surrounded the city).
The end of the siege of Worms
But after this, the bombardments stopped. Tilly simply waited for the city to starve out. Within two months, the new Elector Palatine left the city (on Sunday, December 15
th, 1605) to negotiate with Tilly (a risky endeavor, considering that Tilly had personally killed one sovereign and was responsible for the deaths of 4 others). He went so far as to say that Palatinate would convert to Catholicism, to which Tilly laughed. “Do you think I care about your religion? No. This is not about religion, it never has been. It is about fear. Your electorate attacked France, your electorate supported, with men and coin, a pretender to the French throne and created a civil war that lasted for years. I am here to make sure that this never happens again.” And with that, Tilly took the Elector Palatine hostage to see the fate of his city.
The artillery, placed around the city of Worms, all opened fire within a minute of each other. The combined barrage destroyed the city walls in two hours, and then the French infantry and cavalry charged in and set fire to every church, every marketplace, every major building in the city. The burnings of the churches was all the worse: as it was a Sunday, most of Worms’ children were attending Sunday School. In the course of one day, Worms, once one of the largest cities on the Rhine, was reduced to a village of less than 7,000 people. What was worse, Tilly escorted the refugees (including the Elector Palatine, who had gone mad from depression) to Frankfurt, to show the city what would happen to those who opposed the French Kingdom. The surrenders of Frankfurt and the Palatine came shortly after.
At the end of the war, the French government announced that it would financially support any Huguenot family who wished to move to the Rhineland (Huguenots still accounted for a fifth of France’s population). This allowed Tilly (who was appointed Governor General of the French Rhineland) to pursue the Frenchification policies that had been so horrifyingly successful in Flandres. Soon, Mainz became Mayence, Frankfurt became Francfort, Worms became Vormmes. Minor Huguenot gentry became lords in the Rhineland, such as the Orleans branch of the Bourbon family, who became the rulers of the new Electorate of the Rhineland (a combination of the Palatinate’s and Baden’s territories). French is still the first language in many parts of the Rhineland.
The French Rhineland
The Forty Years War was coming to a close at the end of the War of the Rhineland. Brandenburg, the most moderate member of the League of Stettin, had inherited the crown of Pommerania, and had formed a personal union over Prussia. Over the 40 Years War, Brandenburg had established Protestant dominance over northern Germany, a position that the Hohenzollerns were satisfied with. Everywhere else, Wars of Religion had concluded themselves with one side becoming triumphant*, and either killing or exiling the members of the losing side**. The Treaty of Mayence, which was written from 1610 to 1612, has been seen as the beginning of modern international relations, with supporters pointing to its proposition that no ruler could force their religion on another state as a sort of proto-sovereignty (in fact Thuringia would fight wars to spread her radical Reformism in central Germany for the next hundred years).
Europe in 1612
What should be seen, however, is that the creation of pseudo-sovereignty rested on the creation of a set of international laws, which forbade actions such as supporting pretenders in other countries and fighting wars to spread one’s ruling family. However, the recent actions of the French government were hardly mentioned, with the exception of its comment that “The Protectorate of the South Rhine will last under the protection of the Kingdom of France…for the next twenty years”.
One of the last images of Louis XII, likely made when he was in his late 90s
With this treaty signed and done away with, Louis XII was finally able to rest in peace. Over the nearly 70 years of his reign, he had brought France from being merely a part of the Hapsburg Empire to
the Great Power of continental Europe. He had defeated all of the would-be usurpers of his reign, and had helped create an international law which would protect France from future civil wars (he thought). For good or for bad, he had fought wars for the liberty of the Dutch, the Swiss, and the Neapolitans, and through those wars he had turned the French military into one of the largest and best trained in Europe. His reign ended in the summer of 1613, in his small summer cottage in Versailles, surrounded by his remaining family, including the child Henri Bourbon, who would be the King of France. It is said that he died smiling, thinking that after all that he had fought in his life, he would now know peace in the afterlife.
But the story of France is still not over.
*in Scandinavia, the Protestant Sweden had conquered the Catholic Denmark and the Reformist Norway in 1602, forming the Grand Kingdom of Scandinavia in 1616; in Poland, an alliance between the state, the churches, and the Catholic gentry had defeated the Protestant nobility in 1593, in Modena, a massive Reformist movement was crushed by the Di Machiavelli family, ending with the imposition of a semi-monarchical system of rule in Italy, and in England the Protestant State defeated parliamentarians in Ireland and Scotland.
**while France may have lost nearly a third of her population in the War of Religion, she was flooded by English, Dutch, and Italian immigrants, many of whom went to Paris)
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