Battle of Blenheim

On 13 August 1704, beside the Danube in Bavaria, an allied army led by the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy crushed a Franco-Bavarian army around the village of Blindheim, known in English as Blenheim. The victory saved Vienna, kept the anti-French Grand Alliance together and turned the tide of the War of the Spanish Succession. It was a heavy blow to the ambitions of Louis XIV, and Marlborough returned to England to great acclaim.

By 1704 the war was in its fourth year and going well for France. Louis XIV hoped to take Vienna, the Habsburg capital, and so compel Emperor Leopold to make peace. A Franco-Bavarian army under Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria and Marshal Marsin threatened the city from the west, a French army in northern Italy might advance through the Alps, and a Hungarian revolt led by Rákóczi pressed from the east. The fall of Vienna would very likely have broken up the Grand Alliance.

Marlborough, whose army was then in the Low Countries, decided to take his army to the Danube, hiding his intentions even from most of his allies. Setting out from Bedburg, near Cologne, on 19 May, he marched about 400 kilometres in five weeks. By building bridges over the Rhine at Philippsburg he convinced the French that he meant to invade Alsace, delaying their response. His army grew on the way from about 21,000 to some 40,000 men. In the Danube valley he linked up with imperial forces, while Marshal Tallard brought French reinforcements through the Black Forest to join Maximilian and Marsin.

On 12 August the Franco-Bavarian army, about 56,000 men with 90 guns, camped behind the small River Nebel near Blenheim. Marlborough and Eugene, with about 52,000 men and 66 guns, chose to attack.

On the allied left, English and Scottish infantry advanced on Blenheim village. Their commander, Brigadier Rowe, was mortally wounded at the barricades, and the attacks were repulsed with heavy losses. But the assaults alarmed the French commander in the village, Clérambault, who without orders crammed his reserve battalions into it until the men were too packed to fight. Marlborough then simply kept them penned in with a smaller force. On the right, Eugene fought a hard, see-saw struggle against Maximilian and Marsin around Lutzingen.

In the late afternoon Marlborough massed his cavalry, with infantry in support, against the weakened French centre. Shortly after 17:00 the allies broke through. Tallard's cavalry fled, and more than 3,000 French horsemen drowned trying to escape across the Danube. Tallard himself was taken prisoner. Maximilian and Marsin retreated in better order, but the French troops trapped in Blenheim were now cut off, and by 21:00 some 10,000 of them had surrendered. Marlborough scribbled a note to his wife Sarah on the back of a tavern bill, telling her the Queen's army had won a glorious victory.

Franco-Bavarian losses exceeded 27,000 killed, wounded and captured; the allies lost about 4,500 killed and nearly 8,000 wounded. Bavaria was overrun and, under the Treaty of Ilbersheim of 7 November, placed under Austrian military rule. Before the year's end the allies had also taken Landau, Trier and Trarbach. Tallard was held in England until 1711.

The battle did not end the war, which went on for another decade until 1714, but it destroyed the reputation of French invincibility and ended the threat to Vienna. In gratitude, Queen Anne granted Marlborough the royal park at Woodstock and promised £240,000 towards a house, which became Blenheim Palace.

Our 1700 and 1715 maps show the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of France before and after the war.