When was the Battle of the Schellenberg?

It was fought on the evening of 2 July 1704 on the Schellenberg hill above Donauwörth, in Bavaria, during the War of the Spanish Succession.

Who won the Battle of the Schellenberg?

The allies of the Grand Alliance under the Duke of Marlborough and Margrave Louis William of Baden, who took the hill from the French and Bavarians of Count d'Arco.

How was the Schellenberg taken?

English and Dutch attacks on the northwest corner of the entrenchments failed, but around 7:30 in the evening Louis of Baden's column broke through an unfinished stretch of the lines near the town.

How many died at the Schellenberg?

The Geopark Ries, which manages the site, gives 16,000 dead on both sides in a single day. The imperial field marshal Limburg-Styrum was among those mortally wounded.

Why was the Schellenberg important?

It gave the allies Donauwörth and its bridge over the Danube, opening Bavaria to them six weeks before their great victory at Blenheim.

Battle of the Schellenberg, 1704: Marlborough storms the Danube crossing

Etching after Pieter Schenk (I), The fight at Donauwörth, 1704 (1704 to 1711), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Quick answer

What happened at the Battle of the Schellenberg?

On 2 July 1704 the allied army of the Duke of Marlborough and Margrave Louis William of Baden stormed the Schellenberg, a fortified hill above the Danube town of Donauwörth held by French and Bavarian troops under Count d'Arco. Marlborough's first assaults on the entrenchments were thrown back with heavy losses, but at about half past seven in the evening Louis of Baden's column broke through an unfinished stretch of the lines near the town. The defenders fled, Donauwörth was taken without a siege, and the allies were across the Danube and into Bavaria six weeks before Blenheim.¹

In 1704 Austria was under heavy French pressure. France had an ally in Bavaria, ruled by the Elector Maximilian II Emanuel, and a Franco-Bavarian army threatened Vienna itself. To prevent an Austrian collapse, as Britannica's account of the campaign puts it, the Duke of Marlborough marched his army from the Low Countries to the Danube.²

The imperial commander on the upper Rhine, Margrave Louis William of Baden, had spent the previous year holding off a stronger Franco-Bavarian army. Adolf Schinzl, in his article on the margrave in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, writes that at the start of the 1704 campaign Louis joined Marlborough on the Iller, and the two advanced together against Donauwörth.³

The hill above the crossing

Donauwörth mattered because of its bridge over the Danube. Above the town rises the Schellenberg, a hill that John Rickard of HistoryOfWar describes as some 200 to 300 feet high, commanding the crossing. The French and Bavarians had about 64,000 men in the area, in Rickard's count, and some 10,000 of them were on the hill under Count Jean-Baptiste d'Arco. On its town side stood an old star fort, the Sternschanze, built in the Schmalkaldic War of the 1540s, and from it new lines ran toward the town.⁴

Marlborough had about 35,000 men on the march. Much to the surprise of the French, Rickard writes, he chose to attack the hill.⁵

The evening assault

The map of the battle published by the House of Bavarian History, after the military historian Marcus Junkelmann, sets out the course of the fight. From six in the evening infantry of the Maritime Powers, the English and Dutch, under General Goor attacked the northwest corner of the entrenchments, north of the star fort, again and again, and were thrown back each time with heavy losses.⁶

At about half past seven the southern column, made up of imperial troops and troops of the Empire under Louis of Baden, broke through the unfinished and weakly held lines between the star fort and the town ditch of Donauwörth. A counterattack by French and Bavarian dragoons was beaten off. Outflanked in his main position, Arco had to pull back, and under hard pursuit the retreat turned into flight.⁷

The cost was high on both sides. The Geopark Ries, which looks after the battlefield today, says that 16,000 men died there in a single day, a figure it gives without a breakdown. Among the allied dead was the imperial field marshal Hermann Otto, Count of Limburg-Styrum. Carl von Duncker's article on him in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie records that he led the cavalry in the battle, was mortally wounded and died on 9 July. Louis of Baden himself was badly wounded, and Schinzl writes that the wound never fully healed.⁸

Whose victory?

Donauwörth fell without a siege, and the allies could cross the Danube unhindered. But the victory soured relations between the two commanders. In Schinzl's words, Marlborough was the author of the plan of battle and Louis of Baden the man who actually won it, and the ill feeling between them led Prince Eugene of Savoy to complain bitterly about the inactivity of Marlborough and the margrave after the Schellenberg. It was Eugene, Schinzl adds, who reconciled the two.⁹

With the Danube crossing in their hands, the allies were in Bavaria. Eugene brought an imperial army to join Marlborough, while Louis of Baden went off to besiege Ingolstadt. On 13 August, at Blenheim, about ten miles from Donauwörth, Marlborough and Eugene destroyed the Franco-Bavarian army and knocked Bavaria out of the war.¹⁰ › Battle of Blenheim, 1704

Louis of Baden, for his part, went on from Ingolstadt to besiege the fortress of Landau on the Rhine at Marlborough's request, and forced it to surrender after a stubborn defense on 25 November 1704, Schinzl writes.¹¹

The hill had seen people long before the battle: in 1901, the Geopark notes, more than sixty burial mounds of the Hallstatt period, from around 700 BC, were found on the Schellenberg. The ramparts of 1704 can still be traced there. A Calvary chapel, the Kalvarienberg, was built in memory of the battle, and the Geopark's trail leads to it from the town through the old Ochsentörl gate.¹²