Battle of Rocroi

On 19 May 1643, outside the small fortified town of Rocroi in the Ardennes of northern France, a French army commanded by the 21-year-old Duke of Enghien destroyed much of the Spanish Army of Flanders under Francisco de Melo. Fought during the Thirty Years' War, the battle broke the reputation of the Spanish tercios, the pike-and-musket infantry formations that had been the most feared on European battlefields for more than a century. It came to symbolise the passing of military leadership in Europe from Spain to France.

The war had begun in Germany in 1618. France, although Catholic, declared war on Spain in 1635, fearing that the Habsburg powers would emerge too strong from a string of victories over the Protestant states. Its first invasion of the Spanish Netherlands failed. By 1643 France was in a fragile position: Cardinal Richelieu had died in December 1642, and King Louis XIII died on 14 May 1643, leaving the throne to his four-year-old son, Louis XIV. The new chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, chose to keep fighting.

With the road towards Paris opened by the Battle of Honnecourt in 1642, the Spanish Army of Flanders pushed through the Ardennes into France with about 27,000 men, hoping to draw French pressure away from Catalonia and Franche-Comté, and besieged Rocroi. Enghien, commanding about 23,000 French troops from Amiens, learned of the king's death on 17 May but kept it from his soldiers. Hearing that some 6,000 Spanish reinforcements were coming, he resolved to fight at once, overruling more cautious senior officers. On 18 May his army passed unopposed through a narrow defile between woods and marshes and formed up on a ridge above the town. De Melo, confident in his stronger army, turned from the siege to meet him.

Fighting began early on 19 May across open fields. On the French right, cavalry under Jean de Gassion drove off the Spanish horse, and Enghien charged into the exposed Spanish flank. On the other wing the picture was reversed: French cavalry attacked against orders, were thrown back, and a Spanish counter-attack pressed the French left and centre hard until reserves halted it.

Rather than retreat, Enghien led his victorious cavalry in a wide sweep behind the Spanish army, striking the rear of its infantry centre and then of the cavalry on its right. The Spanish horse scattered and the gunners fled, leaving the infantry alone. German and Walloon units gave way, but the veteran Spanish tercios held their squares, beating off cavalry charges while French artillery, reinforced by captured Spanish guns, pounded them. Their elderly commander, Paul-Bernard de Fontaines, who was carried onto the field in a chair because of gout, was killed.

Enghien eventually offered the remaining Spanish infantry honourable terms. As he rode forward, some Spaniards apparently mistook his approach for a fresh charge and fired. The French renewed the attack without quarter, and the Spanish army was largely destroyed, although some Spanish accounts hold that two of the five Spanish infantry units were allowed to march away with their colours.

Casualty figures vary. French losses were about 4,000. De Melo reported 6,000 casualties and 4,000 prisoners, and estimates of the Spanish dead range from 4,000 to 8,000. All the Spanish guns were lost.

In the short term little changed: the French relieved Rocroi but could not carry the war into Flanders, and the Spanish soon steadied their lines. The battle's importance was largely symbolic. It made Enghien's name, and he would later be known as the Great Condé, and it showed that France remained formidable under a child king. Over the following years France gained the upper hand, defeating Spain at the Battle of the Dunes and taking Dunkirk in 1658; the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 confirmed the shift. The Spanish army itself gradually adapted its tercios towards the linear tactics used by the French.

Our 1650 map shows the Kingdom of France and the lands of the Spanish Empire a few years after the battle, with the Spanish Netherlands still lying just north of Rocroi.