All for Nothing
Emperor Joseph and his generals
The allied plan for the autumn campaign of 1786 had to be hastily modified because of the unmanageable breach which had opened between Berlin and Dresden. The disproportionate losses of the Saxon army at Polkowitz, the arrival of the presumably pro-Hohenzollern Russian Army of Observation, and the general umbrage of the Saxon elector Friedrich August III towards subjecting his army to the command of his old enemy Prince Heinrich combined to make the continued existence of the united “Electoral Army” untenable.
The solution formulated in London was to conduct the war with two armies on two fronts. The Brandenburgers and newly-arrived Russians would comprise the “eastern” army, under the command of Prince Heinrich of Brandenburg and general Alexander Suvorov, commander of the Russian Army of Observation. The “western” army would be composed of Saxons, Hanoverians, Hessians, and other German contingents under the command of the Saxon Field Marshal Ludwig Ernst von Benekendorf and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Prince of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. While the eastern force would continue its push into Silesia, the western army would invade northeastern Bohemia. The main imperial army, presently encamped near Liegnitz, would thus be threatened from both north and south in a grand pincer movement.
The Austrian forces had also undergone a leadership change. Emperor Joseph had opted to take personal command of the army at Liegnitz, but as he had no battlefield experience, practical command rested with Field Marshal Ernst Gideon von Laudon. Laudon, one of Marshal Browne’s most talented and aggressive corps commanders, had come out of retirement at the emperor’s request to replace his comrade Lacy.
[1] Laudon took the opportunity of the coalition’s reshuffle to drive Prince Heinrich off his high ground and place Glogau under siege, but the arrival of the Russians forced Laudon to back off and regroup. The Austrians very nearly suffered another disaster when Suvorov led his corps in an unexpectedly swift crossing of the Oder behind Laudon’s army and smashed a division on his right flank. It was now Laudon’s turn to be driven back until he was finally forced to make a stand before Liegnitz. At the Battle of Lüben, perhaps the finest tactical achievement of the war, Prince Heinrich and Suvorov managed to divide and defeat the larger Austrian army.
While this victory was hailed in the courts of the coalition, Suvorov was dissatisfied. He blamed Prince Heinrich for allowing the Austrians to escape with the bulk of their army at both Glogau and Lüben. Although the two men were both famously talented commanders, the prince’s cautious, deliberate style continually clashed with Suvorov’s audacious aggression. If Heinrich had been more like his late brother, Suvorov lamented, the autumn campaign would have ended with the complete destruction of the imperial army. But their situations were not the same: When Friedrich had invaded Silesia 45 years earlier, he had done so to seize the province for himself. In 1786, however, the ostensible goal of the war was to check Habsburg ambitions, not to regain Silesia for the Hohenzollerns. Prince Heinrich believed that this was a worthy goal, but because it was a
shared goal, there was no reason that Brandenburg ought to risk everything to achieve it. Suvorov, in contrast, was just a tourist; he had no other purpose than burnishing Russia’s glory, and risked nothing but his own reputation.
As the armies went into winter quarters at the end of 1786, there were fresh hopes that a diplomatic solution might finally be possible. France, still a neutral party, hosted secret talks between British and Austrian envoys at Lunéville, and the British were hopeful that the “lesson” of Lüben would be sufficient to make Joseph back down. This lesson, however, was undermined by Field Marshal András Hadik, the commander of a secondary imperial army defending Bohemia. The Saxon commander Benekendorf had insisted on wintering his army in Bohemia to avoid placing the burden of forage on his own country, prompting Hadik to plan a surprise counterattack. Hadik’s cavalry commander, Karl Borromäus von Liechtenstein, launched repeated raids to conceal the fact that Hadik’s army had broken out of winter quarters in the middle of January and was trudging through the snow straight for Benekendorf’s camp. At the ensuing Battle of Reichenberg, the “western” coalition army was caught entirely off-guard and driven back into Saxony in disarray.
[2]
While Austrian diplomats stalled at Lunéville after news of Reichenberg, other Austrian envoys traveled to Dresden to see if the weakest link of the coalition could be broken. Saxon suspicion towards their Russian and Brandenburger allies was well known, and they would bear the brunt of any Austrian counteroffensive. While Saxony’s army was not the most formidable part of the alliance, their territory was strategically critical, as the supply lines of all coalition forces ran through it. By April, as the armies began preparing to leave winter quarters, the British found themselves faced with wavering allies and declining domestic support. The signal victories at Polkowitz and Lüben seemed to mean nothing at all.
The British ministry, even as they declared their commitment to ending the war, seemed set on escalating it. The British ambassador in Turin sought to interest the King of Sardinia in joining the war, or at least
threatening to; the king declined. Britain urged the princes to commit more forces, and asked the same of Pyotr, but this latter request became irrelevant in June when the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. The Sultan had never resigned himself to the humiliating loss of the Crimean Khanate and his control over the Danubian Principalities, and now seemed as good a moment as ever to strike while Russia was committed elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the Austrian position remained difficult. Pyotr soon recalled Suvorov but maintained the expeditionary force, not only to preserve his reputation but to keep the British subsidy. The Saxons considered defecting, but the one thing that could have secured this - territorial concessions - Joseph was still unwilling to give, and Austria’s attempt to turn the screws on the elector with an incursion into Saxony led by FZM Michael Johann von Wallis was foiled by Prince Karl of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel at the Battle of Zittau in July. In Silesia, Laudon and Heinrich spent the whole summer maneuvering around each other. Increasingly outnumbered, Prince Heinrich was technically the loser of the Battle of Striegau in September - in terms of the overall troops committed, the largest battle of the war - but he withdrew in good order and Austrian casualties were much higher than his own. At the same time, a coalition corps invaded and occupied the Rhenish Palatinate and Austrian Luxembourg, and Wallis was forced back onto the defensive in Bohemia. Faced with a seemingly intractable and increasingly expensive war, with no indication that his enemies would be evicted from Austrian territory any time soon, Joseph finally consented to serious peace negotiations.
Joseph was not ready to abandon the “Bavarian Plan,” but it was clear that pursuing it without laying the proper diplomatic groundwork had been a blunder. Austria had been completely isolated; France, their actual ally, had remained neutral, while Russia, a longtime partner against the Ottomans, had turned against them. For now, the emperor had to swallow his pride and accept that the forces arrayed against him at the moment were too difficult and costly to overcome, but the affair permanently embittered him against the British and Russians, who in his view had intervened in a conflict not their own in order to humiliate the House of Habsburg. The King of Britain, at least, had an excuse in that he was also the Elector of Hanover and thus had a personal stake in imperial politics, but Russia’s intervention looked cynical and mercenary, an attempt to throw their weight around in Germany while Britain paid them to do it.
Although Britain’s coalition partners urged some sort of punitive peace against Austria, the British did not believe they were in a position to drive a hard bargain at the peace table. The coalition still occupied Austrian land, including Lower Silesia and Luxembourg, and the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg both hoped to gain something with it. The British, however, were only really interested in checking Austrian expansion - a goal which now seemed attainable - and were worried that the balance of power might shift against them if they were slow to act. The French had recently warned them that they would not be able to stand idly by if the coalition attempted to carve up their Austrian ally. This was surely a bluff given the state of French finances, and some British diplomats suspected as much, but it could not be entirely discounted. More seriously, the Ottoman advance into Russia had not yet been checked and the British feared that Pyotr might decide to withdraw his Army of Observation any day now. Prince Heinrich was already being forced to yield ground in the face of superior numbers, and stringing out the negotiations for weeks or months longer might only erode the coalition’s territorial leverage.
On November 30th of 1787, the principal belligerents signed the Treaty of Leipzig, which formally ended the War of the Bavarian Succession. The treaty represented a return to the status quo, with Austrian forces withdrawing from Lower Bavaria in exchange for the withdrawal of coalition forces from Silesia and the Netherlands. A few minor territorial adjustments and diplomatic concessions were made to make sure everyone - at least, everyone except the Elector of Bavaria
[3] - walked away with something. Saxony received rights to the “Schönburg lordships,” a number of Bohemian fiefdoms located within Saxon territory, and received monetary compensation in exchange for the elector renouncing his claims to Bavaria. Brandenburg received imperial consent for the union of the Hohenzollern principalities Ansbach and Bayreuth with Brandenburg. For all its efforts, Austria walked away with only Mindelheim, which Bavaria had acquired in 1714, as well as a promise from the electors that they would not follow through on their threat to deny the next imperial election to the Habsburgs.
Russia received nothing material from the war, but emerged with greater prestige and influence both within the Empire and beyond it. Despite being caught off-guard by the Turkish invasion and suffering a few initial setbacks, the Russians rallied and were able to chase the Ottoman armies back over the Danube. In 1790 the Sultan was forced to relinquish Budjak, including the fortresses of Izmail and Akkerman, and had to accept the formal independence of Dacia, which despite being unified under a Wettin prince had remained a notional vassal of the Porte. “Prince Xaveriu” subsequently declared himself King of Dacia, the latest addition since the Neuhoffs to the crowned heads of Europe. Regrettably, a royal crown did not make his state any more functional, and his newfound “independence” was burdened with considerable Russian influence. Some remarked that Franz Xaver had simply exchanged one master for another.
One final casualty of the war was the nascent Anglo-French rapprochement. Following the Treaty of Paris, British leaders had attempted to end the longstanding rivalry between their two countries on the basis of supposed mutual interest. With their colonial squabbles settled (in Britain’s favor), the British hoped that their two countries could bury the proverbial hatchet and turn their attention to the east in order to check the “imperial powers” of Austria and Russia. France’s response to these overtures was somewhat cool, but their refusal to take Austria’s side in the Bavarian war seemed to suggest that they shared Britain’s concern for Habsburg expansionism. Yet Britain’s outreach to the Russians had alarmed French leaders, who suspected that Britain’s declared interest in checking the “imperial powers” was not entirely genuine, while the British suspected that the French - who had considerable influence in Constantinople - were the puppet masters behind the Sultan’s inopportune intervention.
The final straw was the situation in the Netherlands, which had been sliding into disorder even as the Habsburg and coalition armies clashed in Silesia and Bohemia. A long-brewing conflict between the “Patriots” and the “Orangists” seemed to be on the verge of boiling over into outright civil war, and the British suspected - correctly, as it turned out - that the French were actively encouraging the Patriot movement against the pro-British
stadtholder Willem V. By 1787 the British cabinet had come to the conclusion that military intervention on Willem’s behalf might be necessary, which was impossible while the Bavarian War continued. Even after Leipzig, however, the British were unable to effect a military solution, as the Elector of Brandenburg refused to offer his assistance and the British could find no other suitable proxy. Soon Emperor Joseph was offering succor to the Patriots as well, if only to stick a finger in Britain’s eye after they had caused him such injury and humiliation over the matter of Bavaria. Nobody actually wanted a civil war, and France would eventually broker a deal between the factions that gave significant concessions to the Patriots. From Britain’s perspective, there was no other way to see this other than an attempt to erode British influence in the Netherlands while strengthening the Austro-French alliance. The ephemeral dream of Gaul and Albion joining forces to give the law to Europe was dead.
Europe in 1790 after the Russo-Turkish War
Footnotes
[1] At 69 years old Laudon was even older than Lacy, but central Europe had not seen war for a quarter-century and trotting out gray-haired veterans of the Prussian War was all anyone in Vienna could really think of.
[2] This was the last battle of Hadik, an acknowledged master of cavalry and irregular warfare. At 76 years old he was ancient even by the standards of Austrian commanders, and riding around in the snow at Reichenberg very nearly killed him. He became gravely ill after the battle and had to relinquish command to Wallis, who proved to be less effective. Astonishingly, Hadik eventually recovered and would live to see his 80th birthday, but he would never take the field again. In contrast, this was the
first major battle in the career of “Karl von Neuhoff, Herzog von Sartena.” As a close personal aide to Liechtenstein, Hadik’s chief cavalry commander, Sartena was in a position to witness the planning of Hadik’s winter offensive and saw action at Reichenberg. Indeed, the young adjutant got closer to the action than he meant to: while carrying orders to one of Liechtenstein’s brigade commanders, Sartena ran right into a Saxon picket in the woods. One of the soldiers shot a hole through Sartena’s coat, but the prince was not injured and managed to gallop away.
[3] Although Bavaria was the object of the war, it did not actually take part. Karl Theodor did nothing to oppose the Austrian occupation, and the Bavarian army was never mobilized. Most of the other imperial princes who took part in the war were on the side of the coalition, but some remained loyal to the emperor - most notably the Duke of Württemberg, whose policy was to do whatever pleased Vienna in the hopes that the emperor would reward him with an electoral title.
