Portrait of Prince Eugene of Savoy by Jan Kupecký. Shown here in late middle age.
Austria, Grenadier zu Pferde (Horse Grenadiers) 1730 by Rudolf von Ottenfeld
Eugene’s military
reforms and Austrian white
Eugene was keen to incorporate lessons learnt from his
campaigning next to Marlborough. In his role as President of the Imperial War
Council, he had initiated a number of reforms to the Imperial forces which
further emphasised the distinctive character of the army he had led to victory
in both eastern and western theatres of war.
His experience of all three infantry had led him to the firm
conviction that a greater degree of uniformity was necessary if efficiency was
to be maintained and even improved. He had been impressed by many aspects of
Marlborough’s war machine, not least the steadfastness of his infantry and its
fine drill. He had also seen at first hand the hardiness of the Prussians under
his command and their stoical ability to survive the fiercest of attacks. Above
all, Eugene’s experience of effective cavalry screens in his campaigns with
Marlborough and the great value of mounted scouts in his campaigns against the
Ottomans encouraged him to favour the development of light cavalry.
It is interesting to note that according to at least one
authority (Ottenfeld) the Austrian cavalry officers were deliberately chosen to
include a small but significant proportion of soldiers who had risen through
the ranks. Eugene, whose detestation of all things to do with Louis XIV’s
military machine was legendary, strongly believed that one of the defects of
the French military system was that its officer caste was too remote from its
other ranks. An officer cadre that was drawn too exclusively from one narrow level
of society bred complacency and inertia. It was important that the ‘best
families’ produced a great share of the officer corps but the social distance
between the French cavalry officer and his troopers was in Eugene’s view simply
too wide.
These views would have a long-term effect on the social
make-up of the Habsburg officer corps. Unlike that of France or, notably,
Prussia whose officer corps was exclusively drawn from the Junker families, it
would not be bound entirely by the hierarchy of social origins. Even the
British army was dominated well into the twentieth century in its upper
echelons by the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy: most of the field marshals
of the Second World War were from Ulster. The Austrian army at this stage in
its development embraced diversity and social mobility.
Eugene also addressed the issue of recruitment of all arms
with a reforming zeal. He consolidated the system whereby regiments recruited
in particular areas (Bezirk). He was convinced that local people who knew or
were related to each other would fight best together in the same regiment. The
regiment should recruit ‘the relatives and people who are known’ to men already
serving.
Eugene also insisted on the highest possible standards of
physical appearance. ‘Manly faces and a good figure’ were among his
requirements. Convicted criminals and deserters were banned from recruitment,
the latter on account of the inevitability that they ‘having deserted once will
certainly desert again’. Because an army had many requirements in its
day-to-day activities in peacetime, Eugene believed that priority should also
be given to craftsmen in the recruitment process. Above all, where possible the
men should be ‘good young people from good homes’.
The reforms bore fruit and accompanied a significant
expansion in the numbers of regiments in the Habsburg forces. Between 1697 and
1710 Infantry regiments increased from 29 to 40 in number. Each regiment was
composed of 12 companies, each of 150 men. Cavalry expanded too. By 1711 the
seven Cuirassier and one Dragoon regiment of the decade earlier had been
increased to 20 Cuirassier regiments, 12 Dragoon regiments and, notably, five
Hussar regiments.
This new establishment demanded a concomitant overhaul of
military expenditure. In 1699 Leopold I had initiated a system whereby part of
each soldier’s pay was retained for equipment and uniform costs. Officers
continued to pay for their own full dress and battle equipment and uniforms.
Pay was standardised between regiments, the normal daily rate for an
infantryman being two and two-thirds kreutzer and, for a cavalry soldier, 5
kreutzer. The pay was increased in the ranks as and if the soldiers received
promotion to non-commissioned rank (e.g. corporal: 4 kreutzer). The captain
detailed to oversee regimental payments was instructed to ensure each soldier
was given a receipt (Zettel) detailing all deductions from his pay for
equipment. This is an early example of the bureaucracy that became a hallmark
of all things military for the Habsburgs.
Alongside these financial innovations, Prince Eugene and the
Imperial War Council attempted to introduce more consistency in the regimental
uniforms, still largely at this stage in the hands of the regimental colonels.
As ‘pearl grey’ wool was the cheapest and easiest material to conserve, this
colour, which under the Danubian sun bleached easily to a lighter shade of
off-white, began to be more and more widely adopted. It was still not by any
means ubiquitous until in 1707, on 28 December, Eugene, as President of the War
Council, issued a decree allowing only three regiments (Osnabrück, Bayreuth and
Wetzel) to wear green or blue. Six months later, on Leopold’s death, the new
Emperor, Joseph I, approved an order insisting on ‘bleached grey’ for all
regiments with the exception of the garrisons of Prague and Gross-Glogau. By
the winter of 1708 most regiments had adhered to these regulations and the
traditional picture of the Austrian soldier in white with facings of various
shades of blue and red became more widespread.
Like Field Marshal Daun later, under Maria Theresa, Eugene
believed the soldier would look after his uniform better if he considered it to
be his own. But compared to the uniforms of England and France Austrian service
dress was not only less ornate but generally of cheaper quality. This economy
underlined the severe financial restraints that governed military outlay and in
which the remarkable career of Samuel Oppenheimer alluded to earlier during the
Siege of Vienna also played a role. On Oppenheimer’s death in 1703 the state
finances with which he had shored up Eugene’s campaigns against the Turks went
bust and drastic cuts had to be made to all areas of military expenditure.
The new Emperor Joseph I (crowned in 1705) strongly
supported Eugene’s policies. Joseph was very different from his father even in
appearance – he looks to have been one of the few pre-modern Habsburgs not to
have had the typical Habsburg lip. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, he was strikingly
handsome. An enthusiast for the arts, he was also fascinated by the science of
war. He supported religious toleration and coming to an understanding with the
Hungarians. But the Magyars could not trust a Habsburg and their predilection
for violent rebellion cast a constant shadow over Joseph’s reign. It was
manifested in the form of a peasant war in which a people’s army under the
leadership of Ferenc Rákóczi brought death and destruction to parts of Silesia
and Moravia. This rebel made it with his men virtually to the gates of Vienna
until he was defeated by the shock of trained troops. The Hungarian revolt,
though decisively put down by General Heuster, was followed – to the
Hungarians’ great surprise, by a peace of dazzling magnanimity.
Joseph was advised by brilliant men who had detested the
unwieldiness of his father’s administration, and his brief six-year reign, as
well as being marked by clemency and tolerance, was characterised by reforming
zeal and a proud indifference towards the Francophile Pope. When Clement XI
threatened to excommunicate Prince Eugene who was about to encamp on papal
territory, Joseph recalled that Comacchio on the Po delta had originally been
an Imperial domain and promptly ordered Eugene to occupy it without delay.
Joseph’s efforts to develop his and Eugene’s ideas for the
army came into constant conflict with financial realities. At one point in 1708
Eugene in exasperation wrote acidly to Count Zinzendorf, Joseph’s Foreign
Minister: ‘the troops have not been paid in August a single kreutzer. I leave
it to Your Excellency to imagine how the men can be saved from their inevitable
collapse.’ These constraints especially affected the recently expanded cavalry
regiments. Despite these problems, Eugene’s reforms were strongly supported by
Joseph. As an archduke, he had fought in Eugene’s army with some distinction.
Reform proceeded as fast as Imperial bureaucracy would permit. As well as
recruitment, uniform and organisation, the President of the Imperial War
Council also addressed the issue of tactics.
Although some historians have dwelt on the influence of the
Turkish wars on the Austrian army’s campaigns in western Europe, Eugene appears
always to have regarded the two spheres of war as separate. In fact he insisted
on a firm separation between the tactics to be used against the Ottomans and
those used against western European armies. For example he gave clear
instructions that against the Turks his cavalry should always form three lines
to protect against the shock surprise tactics of the Ottomans, whereas against
western European cavalry his horsemen were to be drawn up in only two lines. A
cavalry veteran himself, on becoming President of the Imperial War Council one
of the first steps Eugene took was to increase the establishment of the Dragoon
regiments from ten to twelve companies.
Noting the need in the western sphere for formal arrangement
of his cavalry, Eugene also set the exact distances between his units. The two
lines were to be no more than five paces apart and the horses similarly spaced
in the line. The positioning of the kettledrums, trumpeters and ‘lifeguard’ or
reserve squadron were all carefully considered.
In 1711, shortly before Joseph I died tragically young of
smallpox, he and Eugene had further agreed to strengthen the cavalry by the
incorporation of grenadier companies among the dragoons. These were, like the
infantry grenadiers, not formed into separate units but were elite companies of
existing regiments. At more or less the same time the Cuirassier regiments were
to be reinforced by the addition of carbine-equipped companies who were given
the short carbine with a socket bayonet.
Charles VI : The last
embers of Spanish inheritance
The new Emperor was Joseph’s brother, Charles VI, on whose
account the War of the Spanish Succession had been waged. The maritime powers,
having fought to prevent the crowns of Spain and France uniting, had no wish
for the crowns of Spain and Austria to be reunited by a single Habsburg, and
thus the new Tory government in London broke off the alliance with Vienna.
By the terms of The ‘Great Betrayal’, as the series of
treaties concluded in Utrecht in 1713 were called in Vienna, the Spanish crown
was awarded to a Bourbon after all, on condition that no individual could be
King both of France and Spain. France as a military power was humbled and
Austria gained suzerainty over the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan and
Sardinia, this last soon to be swapped for Tuscany. At the Habsburg Kaiser’s
request, the treaty confirmed a token of gratitude for Prussia’s support in the
war. Henceforth the Prussian Elector would be allowed to style himself ‘King in
Prussia’.
But, Spain or no Spain, Austria was great even though she
did not have in her new Kaiser, Charles, a great Emperor. Charles VI, in
appearance, resembled his father Leopold. In character, he was imbued with the
stiffness of the seventeenth-century Spanish Habsburgs. In 1703, after he had
been proclaimed King of Spain, he travelled as Charles III through Holland and
landed at Portsmouth where Marlborough conveyed him to an audience with Queen
Anne at Windsor. From this meeting we have the charming portrait of an
eyewitness, Rapin:
The court was very
splendid and much thronged; the queen’s behaviour towards him was very noble
and obliging. The young king charmed all present; he had a gravity beyond his
age, tempered with much modesty. His behaviour was in all points so exact that
there was not a circumstance in his whole deportment that was liable to censure.
But Rapin’s account also noted the outlines of a certain
Hispanic severity: ‘He paid an extraordinary respect to the queen and yet
maintained a due greatness in it. He had the art of seeming well pleased with
everything without so much as smiling once all the while he was at court, which
was three days. He spoke but little and all he said was judicious and
obliging.’
This demeanour though correct was not necessarily calculated
to impress. He felt all the aspects of Habsburg Spain’s greatness very keenly. Moreover,
he lacked his late brother’s open-minded tolerance of non-Catholics; hence his
scrupulously correct but cool behaviour at the English court described above.
So it was no surprise that the loss of Spain was traumatising for one who had
seemed destined to rule as King. In Vienna during the long fogs of the winter
months and their fierce biting winds, he thought of recreating the Spanish
Escorial in the great monastery of Klosterneuburg on the banks of the Danube.
To this day, Klosterneuburg’s domes show in the splendour of their decoration
the power of Charles’s dreams. This Hispanic mentality meant that Charles
rarely considered the army he had inherited. He placed more faith in diplomats
than in soldiers. His indifference towards the army was born of bitter
experience. After all, he had lost Spain even though Habsburg armies had fought
with success.
Moreover, his experience in Spain, a great seafaring nation,
stimulated Charles to seek compensation. Now north of the Alps and serving as
monarch of largely landlocked territories, he favoured the advice of Spanish
navigators and merchants rather than his Austrian generals. The great port of
Trieste was encouraged to be the entrepôt of the Habsburg lands and the
Imperial and Royal East India Company set about the foundation of a trading
empire which, within a generation, showed all the signs of being able to rival
that of the great maritime nations. At Britain’s request, for supporting the
Pragmatic Sanction the company was later disbanded.
Charles VI remained defined by the sudden loss of Spain and
his reign was overshadowed by the neurotic fear that his House would also lose
the empire in the west unless he took concrete steps to ensure that his
successor could inherit his realm without challenge. To this end he issued the
Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, the year of the Utrecht treaty. This domestic edict
was to ensure the succession for Charles’s children, as yet unborn, in
preference to the daughters of Joseph I. It established the right of sole
inheritance by the eldest son or, if no sons existed, by the eldest daughter.
By its terms, the Austrian Habsburg line was finally freed from the possibility
of a divided inheritance.
Once his eldest child, Maria Theresa, was born in 1717,
Charles began seeking the recognition of the European powers for the Sanction
but this process was not only unhappy in its constant genuflection to the
wishes of other nations but it involved Vienna in many harmful concessions.
Eugene’s final
triumph: boldly by battery besieges Belgrade
The birth of Maria Theresa coincided with Eugene’s arguably
most spectacular feat of arms. In the same year, Eugene crowned his military
career and retook Belgrade. In 1715, the Turks had broken the Treaty of
Karlowitz and declared war against the Venetians and besieged Corfu. When the
Venetians appealed to the Emperor, as a guarantor of the Karlowitz treaty, for
help, Charles brushed aside appeals from the Porte and dispatched Eugene to
Hungary at the head of a small army including many veterans of his campaigns
against the French. In addition, thanks to the settlement of Szatmár with the
Hungarians, many Hussar regiments were suddenly available, an indispensable
light cavalry arm which Eugene respected and admired. Well screened from an
Ottoman army of more than twice his size he camped at Peterwardein, whose
fortifications erected by him in an earlier campaign the Turks had not
destroyed. Without delaying, the following morning he deployed his cavalry to
attack. Eugene’s horsemen surrounded the wings of his enemy and after some
stubborn resistance initially by Janissaries began to encircle the Ottoman army
while Eugene personally led his infantry into the Turkish centre.
At the same time six gunboats on the Danube, deployed by
Eugene, opened fire and the Peterwardein garrison made up largely of Serbs
poured out to take part in the slaughter. The Grand Vizier who commanded the
Ottomans was killed and Eugene captured more than 250 artillery pieces, 50
standards and immense treasures. By three o’clock, more than 30,000 Turks lay
dead on the field near Karlowitz where the treaty had been signed seventeen
years earlier.
Eugene now proceeded to invest and capture Temesvár
(Timişoara), the key to the Banat and the last of the ancient dependencies of
Hungary retained by the Turks, before moving on to besiege Belgrade. Belgrade
was a formidable obstacle: the Belgrade garrison was 30,000 strong, it had
supplies for at least two months and its strategic importance meant that it
would receive assistance from other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, after
two months of fruitless investment, Eugene’s forces found themselves pinned by
a relief force into the marshy ground between the Danube and the Save where,
exposed daily to enemy fire and fever, their morale began to decline rapidly.
The Turkish relief force kept up the pressure and was soon threatening Eugene’s
main line of communication over the Save. At the same time their lines pressed
closer and closer. Eugene was in danger of becoming trapped in the feverish delta
of the confluence of the two great rivers below the Belgrade fortress of
Kalemegdan.
Calling a council of war Eugene urged a general attack under
cover of darkness as the only means of retrieving the situation. His commanders
supported him and the following night he personally inspected every outpost of
his forces to give refreshment and support to his weary men ahead of the
attack. His forces numbered 60,000 men but of these a third was on the other
side of the Save so that he had barely 40,000 men with whom to attack a force
reckoned at more than 200,000, the largest army the Sultan had sent west since
the Siege of Vienna. The attack was scheduled for the following midnight and
was to be preceded by a mortar bombardment.
The explosions caused chaos and many casualties but thick
fog disorientated the attackers and although they achieved a degree of
surprise, their opponents rallied, with the result that Eugene’s forces were in
danger of being thrown back in total confusion. A couple of hours later the sun
rose, dispelling the fog. Instantly Eugene saw the crisis as his right wing was
in danger of being outflanked by the Ottomans. Placing himself in front of his
second line of infantry, sword in hand, he summoned his cavalry and charged the
enemy and, though wounded, his example rallied his troops, who pressed forward
and drove the Ottomans back with wild cries of ‘We will conquer or die!’ This
infantry attack proved successful and Eugene’s men, seizing the enemy cannon,
turned and fired them into the disordered Ottomans. Once again imminent defeat
had been turned into victory and so precipitate was the Turkish retreat that
many were crushed to death in the stampede.
Belgrade thus once more fell to the Austrians and by the
Treaty of Passarowitz, the following year in 1718, a truce of twenty-five years
was signed and the Austrians secured much Balkan territory, including the
Banat, which comprised parts of Serbia, Bosnia and Romania.
But though the Treaty of Passarowitz cemented the reputation
of Austrian arms at its zenith, subsequent military commitments proceeded less
gloriously. Many of these were undertaken as a result of the demands of the
other powers in return for supporting the Pragmatic Sanction. The campaigning
to the west and the east proved less successful than a generation earlier and
it left the reputation of the Imperial forces much diminished.
First Saxony demanded participation in the ill-fated War of
Polish Succession. Then Russia demanded renewed hostilities against the Turks.
England needed no help in wars but simply insisted on the Ostend trading
company and the Imperial and Royal East India Company being disbanded. All of
these events had unhappy consequences for the Habsburg domains.
