Battle of Rossbach

On the afternoon of 5 November 1757, near the village of Rossbach in the Electorate of Saxony, south-west of Merseburg, Frederick the Great of Prussia routed a French and Imperial army roughly twice the size of his own in less than an hour and a half. Fought during the Seven Years' War, the battle cost the Prussians a few hundred men and their enemies many thousands. It saved Prussia at a desperate moment, persuaded Britain to increase its support, and became a model of fast, flexible battlefield command.

Frederick had won Silesia in the War of the Austrian Succession, and Maria Theresa of Austria was determined to recover it. In the realignment of alliances before the new war, France and Austria joined forces, while Britain sided with Prussia. After overrunning Saxony and winning at Prague in May 1757, Frederick saw his campaign go wrong after the Battle of Kolín, and by the summer he faced threats on several sides: a Russian invasion of East Prussia, Austrian advances in Saxony and Silesia, and a combined French and Reichsarmee force approaching from the west under the Prince de Soubise and Prince Joseph of Saxe-Hildburghausen.

To stop the western army from joining the Austrians, Frederick marched swiftly west, covering 274 kilometres in 13 days. For days the two sides manoeuvred along the river Saale without fighting. On 31 October the Prussians surprised the garrison of Weissenfels, whose defenders burned the bridge behind them as they withdrew, leaving some 630 men trapped and forced to surrender. Once his engineers had built new bridges, Frederick crossed the river on 3 November and camped at Rossbach the following day with about 22,000 men.

The allied commanders, with some 41,000 troops, decided to march around the Prussian left flank and cut Frederick off from the Saale. They did not set off until after eleven in the morning on 5 November, and they sent out no proper reconnaissance.

Watching from a rooftop in Rossbach, Frederick at first thought the enemy was retreating, but by about half past two he saw that their columns were swinging round to strike his flank. Within half an hour his whole army had broken camp. Hidden behind two low hills, the Janus and the Pölzen, General Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz led 38 cavalry squadrons east, while Colonel Karl Friedrich von Moller's battery of 18 guns took post on the Janus.

The allies, believing the Prussians were fleeing, hurried forward in disordered columns. Moller's guns opened fire around 3.15. At about 3.30, Seydlitz, by tradition signalling the charge by tossing his pipe into the air, swept over the Pölzen with his first 20 squadrons and then the remaining 18, scattering the allied cavalry. He then rallied his men in a copse instead of chasing the fugitives. The allied infantry, advancing in columns, ran into the volleys of Prince Henry's battalions and Moller's artillery, and Seydlitz charged again into their flank and rear. Imperial regiments threw down their muskets and the French fled with them. The pursuit lasted until dark.

Only seven Prussian battalions had fired a shot. Frederick boasted of negligible casualties; one count gives about 170 Prussian dead and 430 wounded, and some modern studies suggest even fewer dead. Allied losses totalled roughly 8,000 to 10,000 killed, wounded and captured, about 6,600 of them French, and the Prussians took 72 guns.

Rossbach transformed the war's diplomacy. Britain increased its subsidies to Prussia, and French enthusiasm for fighting in Germany faded; under a new agreement with Austria in 1759, France scaled back its contribution to the coalition. Frederick hurried east and soon afterwards won another victory against a much larger Austrian army at Leuthen in Silesia. The battle was long studied as proof of the value of well-trained cavalry and mobile artillery. Most of the battlefield was later destroyed by open-cast lignite mining and is now partly covered by a lake.

Our 1715 and 1783 maps show the Kingdom of Prussia and Saxony within the Holy Roman Empire, before and after Frederick's wars.