~ Auflösung ~
The princes of the League of Fulda were not milksops by any means, but their experience and instinct on the battlefield paled in comparison to that of Charles V. With his bearded, jutting chin and his black Hungarian riding armor, Charles V already looked the part of a Nibelung warlord - perfectly representative of his many years governing the endlessly hostile Ottoman frontier (his wife Anne once remarked upon seeing him depart on horseback for the front with: “There goes the happiest man in the world.”) Charles V’s available military resources, however, were limited: at the outset of the war, Charles V was capable of mustering some 32,000 troops (20,000 of which were either Swiss or Italian), and although he might have been able to draw many more from the Crown of Hungary, given the climate of cultural antipathy amongst his German subjects he wisely decided to solely rely on the service of those in the Empire. The most useful facet of Charles V’s military acumen by far was his ability to recoup his numerical deficiencies by a careful choice of allies. Seeing past confessional differences, Charles V fervently sought the compliance of the Protestants Albrecht II, the margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, and Maurice, the duke of Saxony. Luckily for Charles V, Maurice, a Lutheran of the Albertine branch of the Wettin family, was very much an opportunist who saw a chance to take the electoral dignity from Johann Frederick (whom he personally hated) and the Ernestine Wettins, and consequently joined Charles V’s camp in late 1546. Maurice faced his kinsman Johann Frederick on the battlefield very soon after in May of 1547 near the Saxon town of Teuchern, wherein Maurice immediately proved his value as an ally by scattering Johann Frederick’s army to the wind. Johann Frederick would withdraw to Torgau, where he would be joined two weeks later by Joachim II Hector with reinforcements from Brandenburg. Maurice, conscious of his numbers and Charles V’s inability to reinforce him, left the bulk of his force to garrison Dresden and Chemnitz and employed a Fabian strategy, keeping his distance from the two electors for several months.
Meeting with Charles V in Karlsbad in early November, Maurice warned the emperor (in so many words) that he was the only prince in the northern half of the Empire - especially the only Protestant prince - capable of fielding a sufficiently sized army that was willing to fight on Charles V’s behalf, and that he would need recompensation both in the form of a hefty reward if victory was achieved and in the more pressing form of Imperial troops. Charles V relented and a decent contingent of cavalry and artillery from Lower Austria joined with Maurice in late February of 1548. However, such assistance was unneeded once news of Ravensburg reached Saxony, and Maurice sprang forward to catch a withdrawing Johann Frederick at unawares in late March at Gera (Joachim II Hector having returned to Brandenburg earlier that month over fears of hostilities breaking out between Denmark and Poland) where Maurice once again won the day and forced Johann Frederick to flee to Nordhausen and the safety of the Protestant camp with what remained of his now shattered (and practically useless) army. Maurice would quickly seize most of the major towns and castles of Electoral Saxony by July. With Charles V hesitating too long to grant assurances to Albrecht II and Maurice that he would meet their requests, the two princes withdrew their armies from the front in August and October, respectively, with Maurice simply staying put in Dresden and Albrecht II taking up his old feuds in Franconia again. Maurice and Albrecht’s withdrawal greatly weakened the Hapsburg front, with Ernst of Brunswick-Lüneburg and Johann Frederick advancing from Nordhausen and through Thuringia unopposed before laying siege to the Imperial-garrisoned fortress of Coburg in Franconia in March of 1549.
Meanwhile, the task of defending the Netherlands - still very much the Hapsburgs’ silk purse - fell to René of Châlon, the Prince of Orange, and Lamoral, the young Count of Egmont, who were the two leading nobles of the region and also two of Charles V’s most trusted vassals. However, the Netherlands were not blessed with highly defensible terrain, which forced Orange and Egmont to hunker down and rely on already established urban fortifications, there hoping to bleed the numerically superior French dry while waiting on inevitable English assistance. Such an approach had been adopted only after multiple mistakes, as their French counterpart, Claude d’Annebault, was quite competent on the field, almost succeeding in capturing the Prince of Orange at Le Rœulx in 1545. D’Annebault had also managed to crack open the Duchy of Luxembourg and bring the French some good news following the disastrous outcome at Ravensburg in 1547 by taking the well-fortified city of Thionville that same year.
After some tentative naval raids along the northern coast of Brittany and the Cotentin peninsula (possibly meant to distract the French and draw them westward), 12,000 Englishman under Edward Seymour, the duke of Suffolk, and John Dudley, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, were landed east of Calais in mid 1550 to defend the city (having been put to siege) and succor Hapsburg efforts in Flanders. The English were few enough to be crushed if put to battle by the full weight of the French, but numerous enough to make such a prospect extremely risky, so d’Annebault resorted to a strategy of containment, relying on an imposing network of trenches, artillery placements, and cavalry patrols ranging from the western Atlantic shore of Calais to the heavily fortified city of Bergues. While this accomplished its goal of holding down and withering away the English and Hapsburgs in the northwest, it weakened the French position to the southeast and forced d’Annebault to abandon his siege of Brussels, thus forfeiting the prodigious momentum he had built up in driving a spike between Egmont and Orange. French positions and supply lines along the Meuse were now gradually chipped away at by the Prince of Orange, who would frequently strike from his secure position at Namur. When news reached d’Annebault of the Duke of Suffolk’s departure from the safety of Calais, he resolved to force his enemy’s hand and engage him in a favorably positioned pitched battle.
This was a poorly thought out maneuver. Keeping the Anglo-Hapsburg forces in the area constantly harried had left the French soldiery seriously taxed - and they must have hid their exhaustion well, as they appeared to be in excellent formation when they arrived to corner the Duke of Suffolk at Hondschoote near Bergues, before falling apart when the Count of Egmont unexpectedly appeared alongside the English with his own contingent of heavy horse, ready to sweep away the overeager and unprotected French infantry. While the losses on both sides at Hondschoote were comparable, it was a setback that d’Annebault could not afford, especially with his king’s impatience building. D’Annebault was growing desperate in his need for a new direction in this theatre, and the towering expectations placed on him caused to make another inadmissible slip when he diverted 8,500 of the troops given him to assist in a possible invasion of the English mainland, so as to quickly force them out of the war and to allow naval pressure to be placed on the Hapsburgs. Such a plan unfolded as well as it could have for the level of distress it was organized under, and floundered within a week and a half of its miraculous landing on the Isle of Wight in early 1551. While his withdrawal from Wight salvaged most of the invasion force, D'Annebault's growing chain of mistakes had become intolerable to Charles IX, who dismissed his marshal, painfully aware that in doing so he had created a vacuum in leadership for his armies in the Netherlands. William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg likewise was unable to make much of his early success after capturing Maastricht, and as the French failed to make a significant push northwards the hopes for encircling the Hapsburgs in the Netherlands were gradually fading - that is, until public discontent reached its fever pitch.
As was the nature of Protestantism, the warfare that had begun in 1542 involved just as much a struggle of the classes as it did the grandiose aspirations of a few mutinous princes. The declaration of the League of Fulda had caused a parallel eruption of socio-religious tensions, with huge mobs wreaking havoc in both the cities and countryside of the Empire, principally in the north. Catholic and Protestant militias clashed in the streets and the fields, sectarian clerics and unpopular officials were targeted for expulsion, public humiliation, or even summary execution, and - most significantly - many statues, frescoes, or other religious art and symbols deemed too opulent or idolatrous were toppled, burned, or bashed. These outbreaks would be known as the "Bildersturm" (literally "image storm") amongst German speakers, although it formed a much more influential historical episode to the Dutch, to whom it was known as the "Beeldenstorm." By the beginning of 1550s, Protestantism still held only a minority following in the Netherlands, although inroads had been made in the coastal communities of the north and in the mercantile cities of Holland and Flanders. Set into motion by William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg's capture of Maastricht, the "Dutch Revolt" was essentially an extension of the same popular unrest that had overtaken the northwestern Empire, and would follow a pattern seen elsewhere during this period: a local nobility with an adherence to Protestantism disproportionately higher than the lower classes under them, whipping said lower classes into a quasi-Protestant frenzy by focusing their simmering resentment towards the upper echelons of society and on the Church in particular.
William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg became the de facto leader of this noble-led popular rebellion in the Netherlands by virtue of his claim to the duchy of Guelders. Karel II, the last duke of Guelders and count of Zutphen, had so resisted the Hapsburgs’ dominion over the Netherlands that, after years of warring with them (the conflicts of which chronically ended in his defeat at the hands of the Emperor Philip I), he declared the Protestant William his heir, with all his titles passing de jure to the German prince after his death in 1538. William had thus been instrumental in seeding Protestant teachings into the northern Netherlands in the years before he joined the war against his emperor, and he now came to reap what he had sown. The rebels were at first kept at bay by the quite elderly, but still ferocious former marshal of Guelders, Maarten van Rossum (who had simply switched sides after his liege Karel II’s final defeat in 1535), but his death in 1552 opened the gate for William - who had been unable to advance past Maastricht since 1544 - to rally his supporters and turn the Netherlands into a two-front theatre for the Prince of Orange and the Count of Egmont. While an uprising had been taking place in Guelders since 1548, 1552 would mark the point at which it became a serious threat to the continuation of Hapsburg rule west of the Ems.
The situation had improved for the French as well, as the dismissal of d’Annebault that same year had unexpectedly allowed for a not so distracted or oppressively singular vision to be employed, with Blaise de Lasseran-Massencôme, seigneur of Montluc, taking over as marshal of France and with Armand de Gontaut, baron of Biron, and Charles de Cossé, count of Brissac, given command over French forces in Flanders and Luxemburg, respectively. The new leadership played it safe (having little other choice given the situation) and successfully rebuffed the Prince of Orange at Rebecq, and again at Beauvechain, allowing Brussels to be put to siege once again and taken in October of 1554. The English general Edward Seymour had likewise been pushed back from the fortified city of Bergues, which was also besieged. The situation in the northwestern Empire now seemed unsure enough for the king of Denmark to declare his support for the League of Fulda (or what remained of it) that year with a compact signed at Cuxhaven.
However, the Protestant front would be undermined by four distinct developments that would leave it unable to capitalize on any of these gains. Firstly, Charles V had been aggressive in helping the organization of a league of Catholic imperial princes as a counterpart to the league which had been formed at Fulda and intended to build up a grassroots support for his imperial authority and to deprive his opponents’ of their princes-versus-emperor, anti-tyrannical image. A Catholic league had been founded at Dessau in response to the Bauernkrieg years prior, consisting of Albrecht, the archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, George, duke of Saxony, Joachim I Nestor, elector of Brandenburg, Eric, duke of Brunswick-Calenberg-Göttingen, and Henry, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, but the religious makeup of the leaders of these polities had changed dramatically since the League of Dessau’s inception in 1524, and by the 1540s consisted only of the archbishoprics of Mainz and Magdeburg and the duchies of Anhalt-Dessau and Anhalt-Zerbst, all largely toothless against the power and influence of the League of Fulda. After an abortive attempt to keep the Catholic league’s center of gravity in northern Germany by assembling a “League of Paderborn” in 1542, Charles V was forced to reassemble with the interested parties in friendlier territory, this time at Regensburg in 1544. Along with the remaining members of the League of Dessau, this League of Regensburg successfully united the prince-bishoprics of Cologne, Trier, Augsburg, Passau, Würzburg, Worms, Speyer, and Kempten, along with the duchies of Bavaria and Limburg - for whom Charles V granted the military and financial assets of the Swabian League. The League of Regensburg would have some difficulty getting up to speed with their Protestant opponents at first, with decisive defeats suffered at Wollbach in 1545 and at Löwenstein in 1548, but the playing field quickly leveled out with time and with the presence of Charles V himself at the head of their armies, with the League of Regensburg being responsible for overrunning Hesse beginning in 1551 (making a point to sack both Fulda and Nidda) and forcing the landgrave Philipp’s surrender at Florstadt in 1552.
Secondly, the League of Fulda was rife with internal divisions, and very little of its leadership was in agreement in terms of a definitive long or short term strategy. Likewise, inter-imperial quarrels quickly enveloped the Protestant leaders, even amidst their grand crusade against Charles V. Albrecht II of Brandenburg-Kulmbach’s decision to postpone his assistance to the emperor indefinitely and pursue his territorial claims in Franconia coincided almost exactly with the arrival of Johann Frederick and Ernst I at nearby Coburg, and, as Albrecht II’s pugnaciousness had earned him the hostility of both rulers prior to 1542, the resumption of such hostility was only a matter of time. Henry V, the duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and kinsman of Ernst I, had hitherto been unaligned in the war between Charles V and the League of Fulda, and had instead been engaged with protecting the free cities and bishoprics of Franconia from Albrecht II’s expansionist tendencies. When Albrecht II and Henry V finally met on the battlefield near the town of Hof, they were incredibly close to Coburg, and familial obligations required Ernst I to break from his his encampment to assist Henry V. With his numbers already seriously worn down by the unexpectedly difficult siege of Coburg, Ernst I contributed little to the battle of Hof other than the corpses of many of his much needed troops. While Albrecht II would be driven off in defeat, it was a pyrrhic victory for Ernst I and Henry V, and left the forward position at Coburg seriously undermanned, prompting the sige to be abandoned in late May. Unwilling to let such a valuable opportunity pass him by, Charles V gave in and reluctantly promised Maurice the entirety of Electoral Saxony if he would re-mobilize and strike at Johann Frederick and Ernst I as quickly as possible. Maurice took a moment to relish the emperor’s acquiescence before swinging forth alongside Charles V to catch the two retreating princes at Ichtershausen in mid June of 1549, where the exhausted and badly disorganized Protestant army of 7,500 was annihilated and Johann Frederick captured. The ease with which the League of Fulda took to the battlefield against a fellow Protestant prince was indicative of a very important difference in attitude between two sides of the Protestant camp. Those that had actively participated in open rebellion and joined the League of Fulda believed that the momentum of the Protestant movement was waning, and that if they did not strike as soon and as decisively as possible, their religious freedoms would suffer under the Hapsburgs and they would be deprived of their golden opportunity to unite the German nation. Conversely, Albrecht II believed, like so many other Protestants, that the conversion of the Emperor and the rest of the German people was simply inevitable, and that energy and resources should not be squandered in a foolishly impatient pursuit of immediate results.
Thirdly, Charles V’s sudden dearth of allies in late 1548 had sent him scrambling for other options. The increased urgency of his pleas for assistance bore fruit very quickly in England in early 1549 - thanks to both King Arthur’s Trastámara wife, Katherine, and his Hapsburg brother in law, Charles V’s brother Ferdinand - and in Poland in early 1550 - owed also primarily to King Sigismund II’s Hapsburg wife, Charles V’s second daughter Maria. Both kingdoms had motivations of their own as well: Arthur was eager to improve England’s standing on the continent and ensure the continued suppression of France, and Sigismund II was wary of the rebellious Protestant states on his western border and the implications their independence might have for Poland's rivals in Denmark and Pomerania-Prussia. The Tudors and Jagiellonians thus raised their banners against France and the League of Fulda, with Arthur committing his 12,000 Englishmen while Sigismund II sent 9,000 Poles to the electorate of Brandenburg, where they ended up joining with Maurice of Saxony and capturing Joachim II Hector at the battle of Bautzen in late October of 1550. The Poles would thereafter secure the rest of Brandenburg with the Saxons and further assist the Hapsburgs in stamping out the Protestant revolt that Joachim II Hector had fomented in Lusatia, capturing and imprisoning for life the troublesome Protestant reformer Zacharias Baer.
Fourthly, and lastly, was the inability of the once imposing French military to give its Protestant allies sufficient assistance against the Hapsburgs. The critical flaw in Charles IX’s approach to this war had been his lack of focus. His failure to take Besançon nearly 20 years prior had been acutely injurious to his pride, and he made sure that he would see the whole of the Franche-Comte taken before he fully diverted his attentions to anything else. It should be said, however, that such a strategy can not merely be chalked up to Charles IX’s personal grudges; the presence of the French king and his largest host outside the walls of Besançon was a good safeguard against an Imperial offensive following the collapse of the Swabian Revolt, and when the capture of Besançon was finally accomplished in early 1548, it was a powerful deterrent to any hopes the Hapsburgs had for taking full advantage after the battle of Ravensburg less than 9 months before. Nonetheless, Charles IX slipped back into his old indecisiveness as the war went on, and his earlier lapses in judgement had seeded the grounds for full fledged, crucial mistakes. For instance, there was no reason that the French could not have re-invaded Savoy, especially considering the instability there and the fact that the French still technically occupied the city of Cuneo and held the passes of Grand St-Bernard, Tende, Montgenèvre, and Larche. Threatening Genoa right away (possibly coupled with a clear expression of intent to Juan Pelayo that war between the French and Spanish would gain very little for either of them) might have kept Spain out of the war and prevented the miserable loss at Montauban. Apart from Italy, Charles IX failed to completely realize just how easily his troops could have broken the Hapsburg Netherlands if they had only been provided greater numbers and consistent leadership, and if coordination with William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and the nobles of the Dutch Revolt could have proceeded with more vigor.
And thus came the unraveling of the League of Fulda and the denouement of the German phase of the war. The old and childless Elector Palatine, Frederick II, died in mid 1552 - a most inopportune time for him to have done so, as it allowed Charles V and his brother Ferdinand to swoop in and take command of the succession, placing the Electorate in the hands of his distant relative, the Catholic Count Palatine of Zweibrücken, Wolfgang, and enlarging the Prince-Bishopric of Speyer. The Church of the Holy Spirit in Heidelberg would be restored to Catholic pastoral administration, and Kaspar Olevian and Viktorin Strigel, Frederick II's court reformers, would both be tried by a Church tribunal for heresy and were banished.
Yet Charles V's headlong push through Hesse and the Palatinate would not go without one more bout of serious resistance. The Protestant claimant to the Palatinate, Frederick of Simmern, contested the installation of Wolfgang as Elector and - with a hastily assembled army of his Palatine religious brethren and with aid sent by William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg - occupied the city of Mainz and forcefully expelled its Catholic populace as retaliation. Philipp of Hesse had meanwhile escaped his Imperial captors in February of 1553 with the assistance of a few sympathetic Protestants guards, and promptly raised the banner of rebellion once again alongside Frederick. This sudden change in fortune for the Protestant Rhineland forced William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg to consider which was the better course of action: to stick to his prudent course in keeping his distance from Charles V and securing his claim in Guelders, or to seize the moment to strike a decisive blow to the Hapsburgs and prevent the Rhineland from being lost entirely. The prick of William’s conscience must have won the day, as he decided to divert the greater share of what soldiery and funds he could muster to assist Frederick of Simmern, while he himself would remain in the Netherlands to further ingratiate himself with his fellow dissident nobles. This would be the last gasp of the League of Fulda.
Assembling near Darmstadt on May 15th of 1554, Frederick of Simmern and Philipp of Hesse were joined by a French contingent under François de Beauvais, the Seigneur of Briquemault, and found themselves at the head of an army 15,000 strong - the largest army assembled in any one place by the League of Fulda. Charles V arrived a week and a half later at the head of a panoply of imperial princes along with 17,000 troops of his own. Frederick and Philipp could not have anticipated that Charles V had not lost any steam over the last 12 years, and instead had greatly hardened his approach to this tiresome rebellion.
Charles V, alongside his brother Ferdinand and the duke of Bavaria, parleyed with Frederick, Philipp, and de Beauvais at Dieburg on May 30th, and - after a display of great imperial pomp - laid out his terms quite clearly, with his characteristic cadenced severity: Frederick of Simmern was to abandon in perpetuity for him and his heirs any claim to the Electoral Palatinate; he and Philipp were to renounce their rebellion and to entreat the other members of the League of Fulda to bring about said league’s abrogation; and any army raised against the Emperor, foreign or otherwise, was to disperse within 2 days’ time. Charles V swore to show clemency in the event - and only in the event - that all three demands were met satisfactorily. If not, the titles, the right to participation in the politics of the Empire, and even the very lives of Frederick and Philip might be considered forfeit according to the measure of their treason. Frederick and Philipp tread lightly in their response, declaring that they simply wished to press the matters of religious liberty and the succession to the Electoral Palatinate with utmost urgency and seriousness, and that violent rebellion against their emperor - while not explicitly ruled out - was certainly not the preferred means by which these matters could be
resolved. The Protestants withdrew back to their encampment outside Darmstadt, and waited.
When the allowance of two full days had come and gone, Charles V brought his army up to face his opponents in seemingly straightforward fashion - almost quaintly so, as if he had resolved to give his enemies a fair and decent fight. Such a strategy would have been disastrous - primed for, at best, a pyrrhic victory - had it not mostly been a ruse. After the two sides began to predictably cut one another to pieces, some 1,200 Hungarian horsemen burst in from the northeast - ruthless and heavily armed veterans of the border wars with the Turks, secretly ordered in before Charles V had himself begun his march. This was an alarming decision, a reneging of the earlier, more circumspect strategy of Charles V’s not to bring in his foreign subjects to extinguish rebellion - a strategy so trusted by the League of Fulda that ample reports of hundreds of Hungarian knights being mobilized did little to evoke their concern - but the emperor’s patience had worn truly thin. The consternated Protestants and French subsequently endured a breed of brutality seen before only on the lawless, hate-infused frontiers between Hungary and the Ottoman Balkans, with heinous results - 7,000 dead or wounded before the battle ended not with the horn of retreat, but with the flag of surrender. Charles V now had four of the original six princes of the League of Fulda either dead or in his custody.
The sheer duration of this conflict had been due to the intermittence of actual engagements between armies: despite their most resolute convictions, the princes of the League of Fulda had still betrayed a bit of hesitance in openly warring against their emperor, and each varied greatly in his respective willingness for aggressive action (Frederick II of the Palatinate, for instance, had dedicated very little to the League before his death). Ernst I of Brunswick-Lüneburg and (for most of the war) William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg had also been much less willing to act as the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, who were the emperor's more immediate enemies geographically speaking. Likewise, Charles IX of France was unable to see a decisive push deep into imperial territory due to the constant interruptions concerning his attempted reforms, his projects overseas, and, of course, the royal succession. The only actor in the whole mess who maintained a consistent focus and drive throughout had been Charles V, and now he was reaping the benefits of his many opponents' distractions and vacillations. Charles V was ready to see peace in the Empire, and the knockout blow he delivered at Darmstadt was coupled with embassies arriving at Blankenheim and Goslar to invite William of Jülich-Cleves-Berg and Ernst I of Brunswick-Lüneburg to discuss terms. The end to the greater part of the bloodshed (or at least the organized part) that had consumed the Empire for 12 years was almost dumbfoundingly sudden, with a Diet set to occur at Mühlhausen in November of 1554. But the war, unfortunately, was still far from over.