Battle of Fleurus, 1622: the mad Halberstadter breaks through

Christian of Brunswick, younger brother of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, had been elected Lutheran administrator of the bishopric of Halberstadt in 1616, without being given real power there, as Berent Schwineköper writes in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. A born soldier, he turned to war soon after the Thirty Years' War began. At the end of 1621 he was one of the few to rally to Frederick of the Palatinate, the deposed Protestant king of Bohemia, and his English wife Elizabeth, for whom he professed a knightly devotion, John Rickard notes. His campaigns of levies and burnings earned him the nickname the mad Halberstadter.²

By the end of 1621 he had raised 10,000 men and wintered in Westphalia, gathering a great treasure from the dioceses of Münster and Paderborn. That treasure, Rickard writes, drew the other armies toward him in the spring of 1622.³

Dismissed by their king

In June 1622 Christian fought his way across the Main at Höchst against Tilly's army, losing much of his force but escaping to join Count Ernst von Mansfeld. The combined army's plundering in Alsace was so extreme, Rickard notes, that Frederick turned away from it. Then their cause collapsed altogether: Frederick, hoping to make peace with the emperor, politely but clearly dismissed both commanders from his service. With no employer, they decided to fight their way through Hainaut and Brabant to Prince Maurice of Orange, who was trying to relieve the Spanish siege of Bergen op Zoom.⁴ › Battle of Sablat, 1619

The march was a hard one. According to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie entry on Mansfeld, the army crossed the Sambre and the Meuse under constant threat of ambush, in burning summer heat. Mansfeld's cavalry had mutinied again over unpaid wages, much of his artillery had been left in pledge at Sedan, and the baggage of 3,000 wagons was cut down so that its draft horses could mount the infantry.⁵

The Spanish block the road

At Fleurus, on the highroad past Fleurus and Quatre Bras that later wars would make famous, a Spanish army under Gonzalo de Córdoba barred the way. The ADB writer on Mansfeld describes it as far superior in numbers, a mixed corps of Spaniards, Walloons, Italians and Germans waiting in a strong, covered position. There was no way around it.⁶

The battle began at three in the morning on 29 August and lasted until two in the afternoon, Ludwig Ferdinand Spehr writes in the ADB entry on Christian. Christian led the cavalry. In Rickard's account it took five charges before he broke the Spanish line, opening the way for the rest of the army to march on. Three horses were shot from under him, and a bullet smashed his arm above the elbow. The biographers do not even agree on which arm: Spehr says the left, the Mansfeld entry the right.⁷

"The mad duke has lost one arm"

The Spanish were beaten. Spehr puts their losses at about 4,000 men and many officers, and notes that Christian's losses were not small either. Mansfeld paid off his mutinous cavalry on the battlefield out of captured Spanish war chests, then disbanded and reorganized the regiments.⁸

Christian at first made light of the wound. It turned gangrenous, and the arm had to be amputated. He had it done in front of the army to the sound of drums and trumpets, without a cry, Spehr writes, and sent a trumpeter to the Spanish commander Ambrogio Spinola with a message: the mad duke had lost one arm but kept the other to take his revenge. Rickard calls the public operation a characteristic display of courage.⁹

Bergen op Zoom saved

Spinola did not wait for that revenge. He lifted the siege of Bergen op Zoom and avoided any meeting with Christian. The relieving army reached the town just in time to save it, Rickard writes. The success did not last. The Dutch States General paid the two commanders what they had been promised but soon told them to leave Dutch soil. In 1623 Tilly destroyed Christian's army at Stadtlohn, near the Dutch border. Christian joined Christian IV of Denmark in 1625, was too ill to fight in the campaign that ended at Lutter, and died at Wolfenbüttel on 16 June 1626.¹⁰