EPISODE 67: THE BROTHERS’ WAR

Hello, and welcome to Relevant History! I’m Dan Toler. This is the fourth episode in a probable five-episode arc covering the unifications of Italy and Germany. If you want to start at the beginning of the story, I’d recommend going back to Episode 64 – The Reich and the Risorgimento, and starting from there. For everyone else, just a quick reminder that Patreon memberships are only $1 a month for the time being. This gets you access to all 27 episodes of my video series, Dan’s War College, where I discuss various historical units, battles, and, in my latest episode, I give a virtual tour of Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island. Link in the description. If a Patreon membership isn’t for you, you can still help out by subscribing or leaving a review. Sharing the show with your friends and on social media is especially helpful, since it helps to grow the audience. Let’s get started!

CHAPTER ONE: THE IRON CHANCELLOR

In most of my episodes, I try to stick to a single story. That’s kind of a foundational rule of storytelling. But in these last few episodes, I’ve been telling a pair of stories that are only loosely connected. The unification of Germany and the unification of Italy have been separate events, occurring at different paces. The stories have been united only by their genesis – the European crisis of 1848 – and by the fact that the same events in Austria have a bearing on both. As a result, I’ve spent the last few episodes flipping back and forth from Germany to Italy and telling what appear to be two separate stories. This is the episode where the timelines converge, and while they converge for several reasons, one reason stands out – the man known to history as the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.

        -Where we left off in the last episode, Otto von Bismarck’s meteoric rise to the zenith of Prussian politics had come to an abrupt end with the incapacitation of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The new King, Wilhelm I, had fired most of his predecessor’s senior officials, and Bismarck had gone from representing Prussia in the German Confederation, to serving as the ambassador to Russia in distant St. Petersburg. There he would remain for four years, in a position that put him far from the levers of Prussian power. Then, in 1862, he’s transferred to Paris to become the new ambassador to Napoleon III. In Paris, he’s able to rub elbows with many European elites, including Napoleon III, but he still yearns to return to Prussia. He’ll soon get his opportunity.

        -As you may remember, the newly-elected Prussian Parliament is less conservative than many on the right had hoped. While its aristocratic leaders are opposed to anything that smells like popular democracy, they’re equally leery of putting too much power in the hands of the King. Friedrich Wilhelm IV had been an active individual who kept tabs on what was going on in his government and frequently involved himself in political debates. Wilhelm I takes a more hands-off approach, and it comes back to bite him in September of 1862, when Parliament refuses to pass the government’s budget.

        -This is a major problem. The source of Prussian power – as well as the King’s power – is in the army, led by the East Prussian Junker class. Without a powerful, disciplined army, King Wilhelm might as well be the King of Bavaria or some other minor German state. He knows this, and has recently spent a small fortune modernizing the army’s equipment, as well as increasing its size by extending the standard two-year mandatory enlistment to three years. So when Parliament refuses to pass a new budget, and instead begins debating how much to cut from the military, Wilhelm I’s very authority is threatened. Rather than accept a diminished role in a diminished Prussia, he considers abdicating, but is talked out of it by his son, Crown Prince Friedrich, who convinces King Wilhelm to call on the one politician who might be savvy enough to get him out of this jam. On September 23rd, he appoints Bismarck as both Foreign Minister and Minister President, which is the Prussian equivalent of a Prime Minister.

        -A week later, Minister President Otto von Bismarck appears before the Budget Committee of the Prussian Parliament, where he is subjected to a long-winded speech by Progressive Party leader Max von Forckenbeck, who lectures him on Parliament’s power to control spending, as well as the popular demand for shorter mandatory conscriptions. Bismarck responds with one of the most famous speeches in German history, known as the Blood and Iron Speech. In it, he doesn’t just make the case for more military spending. He lays out a vision for Prussia’s future – a vision that’s worth examining since Bismarck will be running the show in Germany for the better part of the next three decades.

        -He begins:

        “I would like to go into the budget for 1862, though without making a prejudicial statement. An abuse of constitutional rights could be undertaken by any side; this would then lead to a reaction from the other side. The Crown, for example, could dissolve Parliament twelve times in a row – that would certainly be permitted according to the letter of the constitution – but it would be an abuse. It could just as easily reject cuts in the budget, immoderately; it would be hard to tell where to draw the line there; would it be at 6 million? At 16? Or at 60?

“There are members of the National Association – of this association that has achieved a reputation owing to the justness of its demands – highly esteemed members who have stated that all standing armies are superfluous. Well, what if a public assembly had this view! Would not a government have to reject this?!”

        -Under the Prussian constitution, Parliament and the King must agree on spending, and Forckenbeck has argued that the King is abusing his veto power by refusing to accept a reduced budget and demanding that Parliament give him more. Bismarck is pointing out that the Prussian constitution allows all kinds of wiggle room for abuses. He’s asking how much of a spending cut Parliament would have to make before it would be an abuse of power on their part? And if they can cut the army to the bone, why not just get rid of it altogether?

-Bismarck is saying that this whole system relies on both parties – the King and the Parliament – acting in good faith for Prussia’s interests. If they don’t, the system isn’t just open to abuse. Abuses become inevitable. He continues:

        “There was talk about the ‘sobriety’ of the Prussian people. Yes, the great independence of the individual makes it difficult in Prussia to govern within the constitution; in France things are different, there this individual independence is lacking. A constitutional crisis would not be disgraceful, but honorable instead.

“Furthermore, we are perhaps too ‘well-educated’ to support a constitution; we are too critical; the ability to assess government measures and records of the public assembly is too common; in the country there are a lot of conspiratorial characters who have a great interest in upheavals. This may sound paradoxical, but everything proves how hard constitutional life is in Prussia.”

-Bismarck is arguing that the Prussian people aren’t constitutionally suited to, well, a constitution. Everybody is well-educated and has their own opinions, and people will go out of their way to find loopholes to abuse their power. Only a less individualistic people, like the French, can be governed by such a system. He continues:

“Furthermore, one is too sensitive about the government's mistakes; as if it were enough to say ‘this and that cabinet minister made mistakes,’ as if one wasn't adversely affected oneself. Public opinion changes; the press is not the same as public opinion; one knows how the press is written. Members of Parliament have a higher duty – to lead opinion, to stand above it. We are too hot-blooded, we have a preference for putting on armor that is too big for our small body; and now we're actually supposed to utilize it.”

-This part is hard to follow, but what Bismarck is saying is that Parliament is too quick to criticize “the government,” by which he means the King, the Royal Ministers, and the whole executive branch. He blames this on weak politicians who only criticize because they are grandstanding, and who only grandstand so they can earn brownie points with the press and the public. Instead of offering empty criticism, he’s urging Parliament to lead.

-Now, Bismarck gets to the heart of the matter. Instead of appealing to liberal sensibilities, he appeals instead to German nationalism, and explains why Prussia not only should have a larger military, but must have one.

“Germany is not looking to Prussia's liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and yet no one will assign them Prussia's role; Prussia has to coalesce and concentrate its power for the opportune moment, which has already been missed several times; Prussia's borders according to the Vienna Treaties of 1814-15 are not favorable for a healthy, vital state; it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.”

-Prussia is not going to take its place as a world power because of speeches and majority resolutions – meaning democracy. It’s going to buy that power with iron and blood – Prussian iron, and many people’s blood. So fund the military, guys. Incidentally, Bismarck says “iron and blood” in his speech, but most people call it the “blood and iron” speech and that’s the phrase that has entered the popular lexicon.

-Bismarck concludes politely, but he includes a threat. If Parliament and the King cannot agree on a budget, Prussia will be in uncharted constitutional waters, since the constitution only says that the King and the Parliament will agree on a budget. It doesn’t specify what happens if they can’t agree. In that case, King Wilhelm will be forced to improvise, and will use the same budget they had agreed upon last year. Basically, Bismarck is saying “fund the military, or I’ll fund it anyway.” Parliament does not approve the new 1862 budget, and Bismarck’s government does take that as tacit approval to maintain last year’s level of funding. So as usual, he gets his way.

This is Otto von Bismarck, the man who will lead Prussia and then Germany throughout its unification. But before we move on, I want to talk about two other characters who will play major roles in our story going forward. As is appropriate for a story told in blood and iron, both of these characters are military men, beginning with Prussia’s top military commander, Albrecht von Roon.

        -Born in 1803, the now-59-year-old Roon is a career officer. Born near the city of Kolberg in modern-day Poland, Roon, like most Prussian officers, is a member of the East Prussian Junker class of landowners, and he was raised by his grandmother after his father, also a Prussian officer, was killed fighting Napoleon.

        -Like most young men of his class, Roon had attended military school and obtained his first commission in 1821, at only 18 years of age. A few years later he would return to Berlin to attend the General War School, and it’s around this time that he began writing about geography. In 1826, at 23 years old, the army had made Roon a teacher at Berlin’s army cadet school, and while in this role, he published the first in a long series of detailed works on European and world geography. As you might expect, Roon had a disproportionate interest in military geography, but he wrote a handful of general geographical texts as well, and he seems to have been well-respected not just among military commanders, but also in the geographical community.

        -Roon had bounced back and forth from the classroom to the field and back again before becoming a staff officer in 1844. From here, his career isn’t terribly interesting, although again, he seems to have been respected by his peers and had moved steadily up the ranks. In 1859, he had commanded an army division during the Second Italian War of Independence, and although the Prussians had never gotten involved in that war, you may remember they had been threatening to jump in on Austria’s side. Well, this saber-rattling had involved mobilizing a few divisions, and Roon had been given command of his particular division because it was slated to be mobilized.

        -See, Roon had a theory that the Prussian Army was becoming something of a paper tiger, and his superiors had wanted to give him the chance to test that theory. Without getting too far into the weeds, Prussia had long been relying on its reserve troops to fill out the ranks of the army in time of war. This had worked for them during the Napoleonic Wars, when Prussian reservists had formed the backbone of the army that rebelled against Napoleon and helped drive him out of Germany. But reservists take time to call up from their civilian lives, and depending on how long ago they had received their training, that training could be years out of date. Roon’s report on his division’s performance is dismal, which is pretty damning considering the division only has to mobilize and never actually goes to war. In his conclusion, Roon strongly suggests that the army should utilize fewer reservists and instead increase the standard mandatory enlistment from two to three years.

        -Roon’s report had impressed King Wilhelm I, who had made him Minister of War in December of 1859. In that role, Roon had enacted a number of expensive reforms, and it was Roon’s reforms, including his lengthening of the mandatory enlistment, that had led to Wilhelm I’s clash with Parliament. And when Parliament had refused to continue funding Roon’s army, it had been Roon that first suggested to the King that he should make Bismark his Minister President. Roon will continue to serve as Minister of War until 1873, when declining health will force him into retirement. Even so, his figure looms so large over Bismarck’s entire tenure that historians often refer to his government not as the “Bismarck administration” or as the “Bismarck Chancellorship,” but as the “Bismarck-Roon Cabinet.”

        -The other figure I want to touch on is Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, who unlike Roon and Bismarck isn’t originally Prussian. He was born in the year 1800 in Mecklenberg, another North German state, and his father had actually served in the Danish Army. As a young man, Moltke himself began his service in the military of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, another one of the smaller German states, but Moltke was an ambitious young man, and at 21 years old, he obtained a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Prussian army.

        -Moltke was more than ambitious – he was an honest-to-God genius. His superiors recognized his intellect, and by 1833 he was a staff officer, responsible for military planning. Around this time, he would serve under the command of the future King Wilhelm, who was impressed with his performance. Moltke would spend the next twenty-plus years working his way up the military ladder. Among other things, he would serve as an attaché to Ottoman military in Istanbul, publish several travel essays and a novel, and become personally wealthy by investing in railroads.

-Moltke’s interest in railroads was military as well as financial. He was one of the first army officers anywhere in the world to recognize the potential of railroads for moving troops. It’s this aptitude for logistics that ultimately gets him promoted all the way to the top of the Prussian army. In October of 1857, when Wilhelm I takes over in Prussia and purges most of Friedrich Wilhelm’s appointees, he needs a Chief of Staff. He remembers Moltke from his days as a young staff officer, knows of his later accomplishments, and lets him run the show. Along with Roon, Moltke then reforms the Prussian army, upgrading its weapons and establishing a special Railway Department in the Prussian Army staff. This new department is responsible solely for keeping tabs on the nation’s railroad capacity, and for planning scenarios for moving men to and from different parts of Prussia.

-Roon and Moltke are both career officers, products of a Prussian military establishment and tradition that goes back to Frederick the Great. However, this tradition, unlike many conservative traditions, encourages innovation, and when Bismarck takes over as Minister President and starts his saber-rattling, he won’t be rattling some old saber from the Napoleonic Wars. This is the new and improved Prussian army of Roon and Moltke. Better trained, better armed, and faster to transport. It won’t be long before that army is put to the test.

CHAPTER TWO: THE SECOND SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAR

Going back two episodes, you may remember the First Schleswig-Holstein War, when Friedrich Wilhelm had gone to war with the Kingdom of Denmark over the border territories of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg. That war had been settled by mediation, with Britain, France, and Russia all threatening to intervene if Prussian troops were not withdrawn. In the 1852 peace treaty, Danish King Frederick VII had agreed to maintain the pre-war status quo, with Schleswig and Holstein remaining in the hands of the King of Denmark, but as separate realms – not as an integral part of the Danish Kingdom. In the early 1860s, tensions have once again been rising between Denmark and the German Confederation. The issue of the border territories has never been fully resolved, and in late 1862, Frederick VII had already been making changes to their tax laws that are outside the scope of this story, but which had upset the Germans and the people of Holstein – which, remember, is one of those border territories. To recap, Schleswig is the northernmost border territory, is majority-Danish, and is outside the German Confederation. Holstein and Lauenburg are further south and are inside the German Confederation. And the people of Holstein have been protesting these tax changes, which they say are unconstitutional, and the German Confederation has threatened to send troops into Holstein to protect the natives from the Danish King. This is a big reason Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke had been pushing so hard for a large army, by the way. They want to be prepared for a war with Denmark.

-After Bismarck’s victory in Parliament, it seems as if war may be unavoidable. In December of 1862, he writes:

“It is certain that the Danish question can be settled in a way desirable for us only by war. An occasion for war can be found at any moment that our relation to the Great Powers is favorable for waging it.”

-Then again, Bismarck may be wrong. His victory in Parliament may be a good thing, because the Prussian army remains numerous, well-armed, and kind of scary. King Frederick VII would have to be a fool to provoke Prussia at this point, so he’s likely to behave himself, which means there should be no conflict. Except then, in March of 1863, Frederick VII does something to provoke Prussia. He signs a proclamation from the Danish Parliament announcing that the Danish constitution is to be changed, effective January 1st 1864. Basically, they’re going to abolish Schleswig’s Parliament, instead creating a joint Danish-Schleswig Parliament, although the two crowns would officially remain separate. At the same time, Holstein and Lauenburg are to remain separate from Denmark like they had been before. This compromise would put Schleswig firmly under Danish control and would ultimately result in its full integration into Denmark. However, it would leave the status of Holstein and Lauenburg open to future negotiation.

-It’s a bold move. On the one hand, it’s bound to antagonize the Prussians, who view Schleswig and Holstein as indivisible. On the other hand, the Danish have good reason to believe they could actually fight the Germans. Just before the Danish government announces the new constitution, Princess Alexandra, the daughter of Prince Christian, heir to the Danish throne, had married the Prince of Wales, solidifying the burgeoning Danish-British alliance. So those relations with the Great powers Bismarck had been talking about? Maybe not in his favor.

        -If Bismarck is phased, he doesn’t show it, and neither do his fellow German nationalists. On July 9th 1863, the German Confederation Diet, in Frankfurt, gives Denmark a six-month deadline to reverse their plans for Schleswig-Holstein, or they will face a “Federal Execution.” This means that troops of the German Confederation will occupy Holstein and, if necessary, Schleswig and Lauenburg, to protect the rights of German citizens. In a speech before the Prussian Parliament, Bismarck goes further, saying that Prussia should be willing to go to war over the issue even if they go it alone.

-Shortly afterwards, the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, announces that Denmark does not stand alone. Except, this turns out to be a bluff. There’s a whole rabbit-hole I could go down here, but the long and short of it is that the British Empire is currently overextended due to events in India and the Americas, the French and Russian armies are busy in Mexico and Poland respectively and they aren’t willing to intervene, and Denmark does indeed stand alone. Great Power relationships suddenly look great for an invasion of the border territories. The German Confederation Diet knows this, and moves ahead with plans for a Federal Execution. So not only is Denmark alone, but Prussia won’t be. In fact, the army the Diet prepares for the occupation is made almost entirely of Saxon and Hanoverian troops.

-At this point, a more moderate Danish regime might back down. But the Danish government is dominated by nationalists who see Schleswig as a core Danish territory that must be absorbed at all costs, and the Prime Minister/Foreign Minister, a guy named Carl Christian Hall, forces a vote on the new constitution on November 13th 1863, seven weeks before it will come into force. It passes with 75% of the vote.

-King Frederick VII is a more reasonable man, and rather than plunge his country into a war it cannot win, he refuses to sign the new constitution. But in one of those historical twists of fate that you just can’t make up, Frederick VII dies unexpectedly on November 15th, two days after the Danish Parliament had passed the constitution.

-The Danish crown now passes to Frederick’s second cousin Christian IX, who is already on thin ice with the Danish nationalists, since he’s of German origin. Under intense political pressure, he signs the constitution, which, again, is due to go into effect on January 1st 1864. Then he disbands his cabinet and tries to form a more moderate government, but just ends up with another Danish nationalist as his new prime minister. There’s simply no way for him to avoid a confrontation.

-With the support of the German Confederation Diet, German troops move into Holstein and Lauenburg on Christmas Eve, positioning themselves for a possible move into Schleswig. The Danish army forms a defensive line, and the forces square off. The German Confederation’s army at this point has grown from the Saxon-Hanoverian force of the summer. Now, the Prussian army has also mobilized, and the Austrians have also put a large army in the field.

-Why Austria? Well, the Germans are able to justify this war in part because an Austrian Duke, the Duke of Augustenborg, is a rival claimant to the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and the German Confederation is backing that claim. So not only are they going to defend German territory against unconstitutional Danish taxes and prevent Schleswig and Holstein from being divided, but they’re also going to put a German (Austrian) duke in charge of the territory instead of King Christian IX. The Germans are doing it this way because it satisfies both major German powers. By offering the Austrians land in Prussian-dominated Northern Germany, Bismarck is able to ensure their cooperation in expanding Prussian influence, rather than Austria siding with Denmark against Prussia. As for the Austrian Empire, they're fresh out of other options. You may remember that they’ve alienated the Russians, French, and British in recent years. If they don’t want to be diplomatically isolated, they need to build closer ties with Prussia and maintain a strong position in Germany.

-After the German troops move into Holstein and Lauenburg, there’s a political stalemate. So far, they haven’t left German Confederation territory, so their occupation of these territories is purely defensive – to keep Denmark from enforcing its new constitution. This puts Christian IX in a bind. On the one hand, the occupied territories are technically his. On the other hand, they’re not part of Denmark, and if the Danish army attacks into the German Confederation, other European powers may view Denmark as the aggressor. If it comes down to war, Denmark is going to need to get at least one of those powers – hopefully Britain – on its side. Otherwise, the Danish are simply no match for the combined might of the German Confederation.

-As it turns out, they may not have to face that combined might. See, the German Confederation Diet has authorized only the defensive occupation of Holstein and Lauenburg – not an invasion of Schleswig or of Denmark itself. When Austria and Prussia call for an invasion on December 28th, the measure is voted down. Ironically, the key votes against an invasion come from German ultra-nationalists, who are opposed to the wording in the bill that authorizes an invasion. The bill says specifically that German troops are to invade Schleswig to enforce the old peace settlement from the last war – meaning that Christian IX would get to keep the border territories, but not his new constitution, which would probably be just fine with Christian anyway. But the German nationalists want to absorb some if not all of the border territories, so they’re opposed to any invasion that isn’t aimed at annexation.

-This turns out to have been exactly what Bismarck wanted. Or at least he’s able to pull an Uno Reverse and flip it to his advantage. On January 16th 1864, he convinces the Austrians to sign an agreement for Austria and Prussia to invade Schleswig on their own, without the rest of the German Confederation. Moreover, the agreement states that the future status of the border territories is to be decided by Prussia and Austria together. So are they fighting to preserve the old peace treaty with Christian IX ruling separately as Duke of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg? Are they trying to enforce the Duke of Augustenborg’s claim and gain land for Austria? Or is Bismarck angling for something else? It’s all very murky.

-On January 30th, Austrian Field Marshal Friedrich von Wrangel sends the following letter to the Danish Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant-General Christian Julius de Meza:

“…the undersigned has been given orders to occupy the Duchy of Schleswig with the allied troops of Prussia and Austria, unified under his command, and also to take over its provisional administration. In notifying you of this, I ask you to inform me whether you have orders to leave Schleswig and withdraw the Royal Danish troops outside its borders.

“I herewith take the opportunity to ensure you of my highest regards.”

-In other words: “Withdraw now, or prepare for war.” Lieutenant-General de Meza responds on the next day, the 31st:

“The undersigned does not accept the right of Prussian and Austrian troops to occupy any part of Danish territory and does not accept the accuracy of the document included in Your Excellency’s letter of 30th January. My government has instructed me to oppose your moves and to respond to any acts of violence with armed force.”

-In other words: “Bring it on.”

-The Danish army is 39,000 strong, with 36,000 of them drawn up along a fortification called the Danevirke. This is an ancient earth fortification that dates back to at least the 500s AD and probably earlier, although it’s been upgraded and refortified many times over the centuries. Through all those years, the Danevirke’s purpose has remained the same – to protect Danes from German invasions. Unfortunately for Lieutenant-General de Meza, 36,000 men is still fewer than the 50,000 men who are supposed to defend the Danevirke. Moreover, the Danish army has just gone through a reorganization within the previous three months, including a total reshuffling of the officer corps, and they’ve also introduced new, modern tactics that rely more on small, mobile units and less on old-school massed bayonet charges. So de Meza is commanding a numerically insufficient force with a lot of green officers who are still trying to figure out new tactics. And now the Austrians are coming with 23,000 men, and the Prussians are bringing their 39,000 men to the party.

-The Danevirke – this ancient defensive wall – cuts across the narrowest part of Jutland, stretching from the Schlei Bay in the east on the Baltic Coast to impassable marshlands in the west near the Treene and Eider rivers. But there’s a problem. The winter of 1863-1864 is cold enough that Schlei Bay has frozen over, meaning that instead of this big body of water anchoring the east end of the Danevirke, there’s a big sheet of ice that an army can march across and simply go around the wall.

        -The invasion begins on February 1st. The Austrian army, under the command of Field Marshal Friedrich von Wrangel, heads straight for the Danevirke, forcing Lieutenant-General de Meza to concentrate his forces and prepare to face a frontal assault. At the same time, the Prussian army, under the command of General Ludwig von Gablenz, follows the Baltic coast to the north, in an attempt to cross Schlei Bay and outflank the Danish.

        -The first day consists of a series of minor skirmishes with advanced Austrian units clashing with Danish forward observers, and Prussian troops experiencing much of the same. There’s also a brief artillery duel between some Prussian field guns and a couple of Danish warships.

        -The real fighting begins on February 2nd, when the Prussian army attacks a Danish position at Mysunde. Mysunde is a fortified town just south of Schlei Bay, and sits on an easily defensible peninsula. The Prussian army outnumbers the Danish by more than five to one, but it’s a foggy day, which makes it hard for field commanders to coordinate, so it takes several hours for the Prussians just to deploy their troops, all while Prussian and Danish artillery fire blindly at each-other from long distance. By the time Prussian infantry units finally come within range of the Danish defenses, they find the Danes dug into fortified redoubts that are kind of like primitive pill boxes, with artillery that can open up with canister shot on anything that gets close. Realizing that any attempt to neutralize these redoubts will require taking massive casualties, Prussian commander Prince Friedrich Karl orders a withdrawal, intending to come up with a better plan and attack again later.

        -From his position a few miles west, Lieutenant-General Christian Julius de Meza can hear the artillery duel. A few miles to his own south and west, the Austrians are forming up for an advance on the Danevirke, although they haven’t advanced yet. De Meza won’t do any fighting himself on February 2nd, but already it’s becoming apparent that he’s at risk of getting surrounded.

        -The next day, February 3rd, the Austrians move into the village of Fahrdorf, which sits near a gate – really a narrow gap – in the Danevirke. Just as the Prussians are threatening the west end of the Danish line, the Austrians are now threatening the eastern end. As the Austrians occupy the village with around 4,500 men, the Danish prepare their defenses, deploying 1,000 riflemen throughout a series of hedgerows that lie between the village and the Danevirke. This screening force is meant to protect the most important part of the Danish defense network, the town of Königshügel, located on a hill that overlooks the entire battlefield.

        -A little after noon, Austrian Jägers – light, fast-moving infantry – begin their advance on the Danish positions. The Danish fall back, with most of the defensive action commanded by a Major named Peter Frederik Rist. Rather than attack the Jägers en masse, he leads a small body of men in a direct countercharge that quickly fails. Rist seems to be over his head, and runs around from one small Danish unit to another ordering one after another uncoordinated counterpunch against the advancing Austrians, instead of coordinating their actions together. To be fair, Rist is only a Major, and nobody had planned for him to be in charge of an important battle. He doesn’t have basic things like messengers who can run orders for him, which is a resource a general would have taken for granted. Rist is a mid-level officer who’s doing the best with the resources he has.

-Regardless, it’s not enough, and by 2:30 in the afternoon, not only have the Austrians taken complete control of the village of Fahrdorf, but they’re approaching Königshügel and its critical hilltop. Austrian commander Count Leopold Gondrecourt orders his Jägers to advance. They’re hampered by a series of knicks, or shallow trenches that are meant not to provide cover, but to provide an obstacle for an attacking enemy, and the Danish are putting up fierce resistance. The following quote is taken from one of these Jägers, a Cadet named Rudolf Pistecky:

        “Along such a knick, running head long at the enemy position, I advanced with part of my platoon, one man behind another, at the double. There, came a sound like a bursting bell and a bright flash of lightning flew past my eyes, and the man in front of me jerked back so suddenly that I almost hit my nose on the mess tin on the back of his pack. He shouted, ‘SAKRA!’ and with an old Bohemian curse, he threw his bayonet-less rifle to the ground, and continuing to run forward, took up the weapon of a fallen Jäger, making good the damage to his rifle by well-aimed shots into the next enemy position.

“What had happened? Very simple: an enemy bullet had blown the blade off his bayonet. This made the clear sound and the severed blade made the lightning across my eyes.

“Jäger Lukaschek (1st Company, 3rd Platoon) – such is the name of this hero – was awarded the Silver Medal for Bravery, 2nd Class, for his courage in the action.”

-In the face of the Austrian charge, the Danish units retreat. Gondrecourt orders his men to pursue, but they soon come under withering artillery fire from heavy Danish guns on the Danevirke itself, and Gondrecourt orders them to pull back, satisfied enough that the Danes have been forced to withdraw all the way to their wall.

For Lieutenant-General de Meza, the loss of Königshügel is a catastrophe. For all its cultural significance, the Danevirke is, at its heart, a medieval wall. You can make it taller. You can fortify it. You can put modern artillery on it. But at the end of the day, it’s not a modern trench system. It’s extremely vulnerable if you can shoot over it, for example, which is easy for the Austrians to do now that they control Königshügel. It also doesn’t have multiple layers like a trench system, which means there’s nowhere for de Meza’s men to fall back to if the wall is breached.

-The day after the Battle of Königshügel, February 4th, he holds a meeting with senior Danish officers, and they all agree that the Danevirke cannot be held. There aren’t enough men to do the job; the Austrians control the high ground in the west, and the Prussians are advancing across Schlei Bay again in the east. If the Austrians and Prussians both attack at once, the Danish army will get totally surrounded and the war will be lost. So, Liutenant-General de Meza does the only thing he can do. He abandons the Danevirke and retreats to more defensible positions further north in Jutland, where the Danish hope to stop the Austro-Prussian advance.

-Orders go out throughout February 5th, with each Danish brigade receiving its own set of instructions. The operation is complex, with some units needing to march as far as 30 miles northwest to the town of Flensburg, which is to be the new anchor point for the western end of the line. The troops in the east will have to march even further, 40 miles northeast to the fortress at Dybbøl on the Baltic coast. Troops in the Danish center will have a shorter line of retreat, in some cases as little as 20 miles. Liutenant-General de Meza staggers his brigades’ departure times, so that the men who have to march the furthest will leave the Danevirke first, while those with the shortest line of retreat will begin their march last. In theory, they should all get to their new positions on the new defensive line around the same time. So far, so good.

        -The retreat from the Danevirke will go down as one of, if not the worst disaster in Danish military history. For one thing, de Meza makes an unforgivable mistake and leaves his heavy artillery behind. This might have been necessary in the old days, when hauling big, heavy guns through the snow would have been impossible on the retreat. But in 1864, there’s a railroad from the Danevirke north to Flensburg. All the Danish have to do is load those big guns onto some train cars and the locomotive will do the rest. For reasons that have never been explained, de Meza does not do this. In fact, the Danish army doesn’t use their railroads at all. It’s like they’ve forgotten that they exist – a textbook case of a military establishment straight-up failing to adopt an important new technology.

        -On top of this, there’s a blizzard, so not only is it brutally cold, but snow is falling fast and blocking the roads and the retreating Danish soldiers have to push through all this on foot. A Danish Second Lieutenant named Lauritz Borberg writes:

        “For a moment we believed that the brigade was to take up a position to oppose the pursuing enemy and offer him battle, but no order came to halt, so with no break we continued marching under the cover of the night’s darkness. Due to the blizzard and the dark, we could not see one step on either side. As we left Wedelspang behind us, the men began showing signs of fatigue, though for a time, most kept up. Fear of falling into the hands of the enemy was a mighty inspiration, a much more powerful persuader than any order or threat from our own superiors.

“Many men were helped on the march by their stronger comrades, carrying their rifles and giving physical support. Personally, I walked on with an unwell man from Fehmarn on my arm for quite a while, until I gave him up to a supply wagon when he could march no more. The man had a weak chest. These aids did not last long as the road was very icy, and this held up the march. Soon whole groups threw themselves into ditches and could not be made to move, so in the end we gave up trying to get those worn out soldiers moving, and the march continued, broken only by two short breaks of 10 minutes each.”

-Second Liutenant Borberg and his brigade will arrive near Flensburg safe and sound at 6:30 in the morning on February 6th. Other units aren’t so lucky. As the Danish army retreats, the Austrians and Prussians chase after them. Overnight, the Prussians take the remaining Danish defensive positions at Schlei Bay, then continue to pursue the retreating Danes up the Baltic coast. The Austrians do the same thing in the west, first pursuing with cavalry and then actually managing to get their artillery into the fight. The blizzard seems to slow them down a little less than it slows down the Danish, probably because the Danish have had to clear the roads as they march, and now they’ve left a path for the Austrians and the Prussians.

-This retreat tests Danish discipline to the limit. The Austrians will send in cavalry to attack them, so the Danish will form up in tight squares to drive them off. But these tight squares make great targets for the Austrian artillery, so as soon as the cavalry are gone, the Danish infantry have to spread out again, and they keep having to clump up and spread out again, all the while slowly falling back to the north in a fighting retreat, and the whole thing is a debacle. All told, the Danish army loses more than 2,000 men in the battle and the subsequent fighting retreat, along with most of its artillery.

        -The next day, February 6th, King Christian IX prepares a letter to encourage his men. He tries to keep an upbeat tone, praising them for their courage and discipline, but it’s impossible to conceal that Denmark is in a dangerous situation. One paragraph reads:

        “Soldiers! – Receive for this the thanks of your King. The Danevirke has been abandoned. The guns which were to have curbed the arrogance of the enemy are in their hands. The country lies open to the enemy. I deeply feel with you that which we have thereby lost. But, my friends, I have but one army for the defense of the country, and your military leaders were of the opinion that I would no longer have had an army if I had not withdrawn you. They therefore came to the determination to retreat.”

Christian’s letter leaks to the press, and when it does, there are riots in Copenhagen, as well as the island of Als, a large island in the Baltic Sea where Christian and the Danish government had moved themselves to in order to be closer to the war front. The Danish army will continue to fight valiantly. 11,000 troops at the fortress of Dybbøl will hold out until April 18th against a Prussian army of more than 37,000, although they will eventually be forced to withdraw to Als. More than 1,500 of the Danish will be killed or wounded, along with over 3,500 captured.

        -Jutland, the part of Denmark that’s attached to mainland Europe, is about to be overrun by Prussian and Austrian troops, and there’s not much the Danish can do about it. But they do have a Plan B: evacuate their remaining troops to their Baltic islands, use their navy to keep the Prussian and Austrian armies trapped on the mainland, and wait for the British to help them out. Following an indecisive naval battle on May 9th, both sides agree to a ceasefire, which begins on May 12th, and puts the brakes on the occupation of mainland Denmark before the German armies have marched very far to the north.

        -The Danish don’t do themselves any favors. During diplomatic negotiations in London, which last from late April through late June, the government only offers to withdraw Schleswig’s new constitution, and refuses to give up any land. The Germans say that this is no longer enough. Christian IX is going to have to give up Holstein, and maybe all of Schleswig and even Lauenburg. When the Danish refuse to agree, the ceasefire breaks down and firing resumes on May 26th, although as I said both sides will continue to negotiate. Throughout the late spring and summer, Prussian and Austrian troops will advance up Jutland, finally occupying all of mainland Denmark on July 14th.

        -But what about the islands? Denmark might be a minor power, but it is a maritime country, while Prussia and Austria are both land-based powers with small navies compared to their size. Maybe the Danish can keep their government safe on Als, keep all the other little Baltic islands, and wait the Germans out.

        -The problem with this is the geography of Als itself. The island is separated from mainland Europe by a narrow body of water called the Als Sound, or Alssund, which is as little as 24 feet deep in some places and only 600 feet across at its widest point. The Danish navy’s large, seagoing vessels patrol most of the island’s perimeter, but they can’t patrol the Alssund. For that, they have to rely on a single ironclad schooner, the Rolf Krake, which is state of the art, but only sports a single pair of guns. Even so, you’d think they’d have an advantage, right? If the Prussians are going to attack, they have to do it across the Alssund, which is only about five miles long. In addition to their navy, the Danish have some coastal artillery specifically covering the Alssund, along with around 10,000 men ready to repel any crossing. All the Danish have to do is defend that five miles of coastline and shoot anything that floats their way.

        -The Prussian army prepares a bunch of rowboats, and because this part of the Baltic coast is heavily-wooded and the tree line comes within a few yards of the shore in some places, the Prussians are able to get their boats loaded and ready to go without Danish observers being able to see what’s going on. A small advance force rows across on the night of June 28th, a little after midnight, and by 2:15 in the morning on June 29th, less than two hours later, Prussian engineers have constructed a pontoon bridge across the north part of the Alssund. As the first troops get across, they march south along the coast, quickly demolishing one Danish coastal battery after another so more boats full of troops can get across. The Danish try to force them back, but can’t deploy men fast enough to form a defensive line, so the Prussians force them back instead. By four in the morning, the Prussians have established a proper beachhead where they can continually ferry men across. After a failed counterattack around 5 AM, Danish commanding officer Major-General Peter Steinmann gives the order for retreat. By two days later, July 1st, at three in the afternoon, the last Danish troops will sail away, and the Prussian army will be in total control of Als.

        -The loss of Als isn’t the end for Denmark. They have many islands, most notably the large island of Zealand, where the capital city of Copenhagen is located. But after yet another demoralizing defeat, the Danish nationalists are finally ready to call it quits. On August 1st 1864, King Christian IX signs a preliminary peace treaty in which he gives up all rights to the border territories. Almost three months later, on October 30th, Denmark, Prussia, and Austria will sign the final peace agreement.

        -In the settlement, the King of Denmark gives his rights to the border territories jointly to Austria and Prussia. Austria and Prussia, in turn, agree that Schleswig and Holstein will be ruled jointly by both of them until a more permanent solution can be worked out. In practice, this means that the occupying powers will remain where they were at the end of the fighting, with Austrian troops occupying most of Holstein, and Prussian troops occupying Schleswig and Lauenburg, although the occupation of Lauenburg is intended to be temporary. Furthermore, King Christian IX also has to give up a strip of land in Denmark itself, giving Austria and Prussia command over all land south of the new border at the Königsau River. If that’s not enough, Prussia also gets to keep the island of Als. Both Als and this stretch of land along the border will remain first in Prussian hands, then in German hands until after World War I, when they will be returned to Denmark following a popular referendum.

CHAPTER THREE: THE DIPLOMATIC CRISIS OF 1865-1866

The Second Schleswig War begins and ends in 1864, a year that sees close cooperation between Prussia and Austria. These Northern- and Southern-German rivals have worked together to expand not just their own territory, but the territory of the German Confederation, even against the will of the German Confederation Diet. This cooperation will not last. As early as February of 1865, there are severe disagreements over how to actually govern the new territories. For example, Austrian-occupied Holstein is surrounded by Prussian-controlled Lauenburg and Schleswig, and Prussia is now occupying Lauenburg and Schleswig but can’t move troops or even ship everyday trade goods from one territory to the other without crossing Austrian territory. So both sides have to make concessions to allow duty-free trade and even the movement of troops across each-other’s land, or this whole power-sharing arrangement is never going to work. There are some other disagreements to be worked out – and we’ll get to them in a minute because they’re important. But one major issue that I don’t think gets enough attention is the collapse of the Austro-German customs union.

        -You may remember that back in the 1850s, most German states had joined a free trade zone called the Zollverein, which eliminated most customs barriers between its members. The only German states who hadn’t joined were Austria and Liechtenstein, but Austria had worked out its own trade agreement with the Zollverein that had eliminated many tariffs and opened the door to future Austrian membership. The main sticking point had been Austrian currency, which was a weird mishmash of gold, silver, and paper money that made it difficult to value. Prussia had insisted that for Austria to join the Zollverein, they must first adopt a silver standard like the rest of Germany, which meant buying out their gold and paper currency. This was already a tall order, but since the trade agreement had been signed, the Austrian Empire has fought the Second Italian War for Independence and now this new war over the Danish border territories. The cost of these two wars had destroyed any small chance the Austrians had of buying out old currency. So in 1865, when the Zollverein treaty expires and is renewed, Austria’s bid for membership is rejected and the Habsburg Empire is once again on the outside looking in. I mention this because it further isolates Austria, and the fact that Austria isn’t part of this big, Prussian-led free trade organization reduces any incentive for the two powers to work together.

        -Anyway, you have the collapse of trade negotiations. You have the issues with territorial access between Prussian-occupied and Austrian-occupied duchies on the Danish border. Meanwhile, Otto von Bismarck is intentionally provoking not just the Austrians but the rest of the German Confederation.

        -Remember, it wasn’t just Austrian and Prussian troops who had secured Schleswig-Holstein. There were also troops from other countries in the German Confederation, and they’re part of the occupying army after the war. But in spring of 1865, Bismarck threatens those smaller powers – primarily Saxony and Hanover – hinting that if they don’t remove their troops from Schleswig, there might be a misunderstanding between their troops and the occupying Prussian troops, and pointing out that these kinds of misunderstandings often result in people getting shot. The smaller German powers take the hint, and remove their garrisons from Prussian-occupied Schleswig.

        -When the British Ambassador calls Bismarck out on this behavior, Bismarck tells him about how German dairy farmers take care of their bulls. If you’re not familiar with cattle, bulls tend to fight and cause a lot of trouble, so farmers will cull their herds – get rid of all but the strongest bull and keep that one to breed the next year’s round of calves. Most farmers slaughter the unwanted steers and keep the meat, but according to Bismarck, the German dairy farmers do things differently. In the spring, they just put all the animals out to pasture and let them fight things out. Then, Bismarck says:

        “The strongest bull will win and for the rest of the summer there is peace. That is what I have done now. I have fought it out and hope to have no more difficulties.”

        -This is wishful thinking. What actually happens is that the smaller German powers see Bismarck’s iron-fisted imperialism for what it is, and decide they’d rather align themselves with the velvet-gloved imperialism of the Habsburg monarchy. The chief minister of the Kingdom of Saxony, Ferdinand Graf von Beust, even warns the Austrian ambassador that Bismarck will not stop with taking over the border duchies. If he is successful, Bismarck will next come after the smaller German states. Beust predicts that Bismarck will call for a popularly-elected German Parliament that will be dominated by German nationalists, and will then convince that Parliament to authorize Prussia’s annexation of other countries. He even begs the Austrians to call a popular election first and beat Bismarck to the punch. Beust’s warnings go ignored.

        -As I’ve kept saying ad nauseum, Austria is diplomatically isolated and needs allies – even if those allies are bullies. So even as Bismarck tries to establish more control over the Duchy of Holstein, Austrian diplomats bend over backwards to reach a compromise. The most obvious solution would be for the border duchies to remain independent under the rule of the Duke of Augustenborg, as originally planned. Austria would be fine with this. Not only would the duchies remain theoretically neutral between Prussia and Austria, but Austria doesn’t want any part of them to begin with. These territories are way up in northwestern Europe, far from the rest of the Habsburg Empire, and would be very difficult to administer. On the other hand, Prussia is right there in the neighborhood, and Bismarck would just love to annex the duchies and extend Prussia’s influence all the way to the Danish border.

        -In February of 1865, after months of negotiation, Bismarck tells the Austrians that he will accept giving the border territories to the Duke of Augustenborg and letting them stay independent. However, he attaches a bunch of demands that would require the Duke to ask Prussia’s permission to make just about any changes to the duchies’ domestic policies. When he receives Bismarck’s demands, Austrian diplomat Maximilian Balthasar von Biegeleben says that he would rather be a humble potato farmer on his own land than become a Duke under such conditions.

        -Negotiations break down further over the status of the major port city of Kiel, which is located inside Austrian-occupied Holstein, but which the Prussian army had occupied during the war. Now, Bismarck is demanding that Prussia have the right to move its naval headquarters there. King Wilhelm I ups the ante on March 24th, formally moving the Prussian Navy’s Baltic Fleet from Danzig to Kiel, and Bismarck dares the Austrians to do anything about it.

        -In the face of this provocation, Austrian diplomats agree to almost all of Bismarck’s demands. On August 14th 1865, Prussia and Austria sign what comes to be known as the Gastein Convention, because it’s signed at an Austrian Alpine resort town called Bad Gastein. In the Gastein Convention, Bismarck and his Austrian counterpart, a man named Gustav von Blome agree to abandon the wartime plans for joint Prussian and Austrian rule of the border territories.

        -Instead, the zones of control are formalized, with Prussia taking full legal occupation of Schleswig and Lauenburg and Austria legally occupying Holstein. In exchange for getting to keep Lauenburg, Prussia pays Austria a large indemnity. Prussia also gets the right to transport troops and trade goods between Schleswig and Lauenburg, build a telegraph line between the two territories, and even keep its naval base at Kiel. A little over a decade later, in 1876, Prussia will just annex Lauenburg altogether, and by that time nobody will even care very much.

The Gastein Convention is meant to cool tensions between Austria and Prussia and give them time to work out a longer-term solution to the status of Schleswig-Holstein. And, to be fair, Bismarck is probably happy getting 90% of what he wants, and the Austrians are probably happy to accept that given the fact that most of Europe hates their guts right now and they kind of need Prussia. What neither party seems to account for is the opinion of the smaller German states, who see Austria giving all these concessions to Prussia and start panicking that Bismarck will take control of Germany while Austrian diplomats fiddle like Nero in his palace.

        -In the German Confederation Diet, the smaller states make multiple appeals for a long-term solution, and on January 26th 1866, Austria gives its approval for the meeting of a joint Schleswig-Holstein assembly to decide once and for all whether the Duke of Augustenborg, Austria, Prussia, or somebody else is going to rule the territories. In a letter sent to Vienna on January 30th, Bismarck protests the call for an assembly, saying that neither Austria nor Prussia has the right to make any changes to the government of Schleswig or Holstein without the other’s permission, and that to do so is a violation of the Gastein Convention.

        -The Austrian posture during this time is confusing. On the one hand, calling a united assembly is bound to escalate tensions over Schleswig-Holstein. Which might be fine if you’re a belligerent Austrian leader who’s ready to go to war to put Bismarck in his place. But Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph really seems focused on a diplomatic solution, working with the smaller German states to force Bismarck to accept the admission of Schleswig and Holstein into the German Confederation without also falling under Prussian domination. More hawkish members of the Austrian cabinet even say that if the Prussians want a war, Austria will win easily, keep Holstein for themselves, and force Prussia to accept Austria’s membership in the Zollverein. Any Austrian militarists have to deal with a hard reality: their army is falling behind the Prussians’ technologically. It’s a terrible time for Austria to be saber-rattling, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on in Franz Joseph’s head. In his book Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph, British author Alan Palmer writes:

        “War did not seem imminent when, on 20 January 1866, the Emperor met the British ambassador. He was in an optimistic mood: ‘There were no serious complications on the European horizon for the time being’, he told the ambassador, and ‘he was confident that the year would unfold quietly and peacefully and that Austria would therefore be able to devote itself almost entirely to its internal affairs’. Nine days later Francis Joseph and Elizabeth went into residence at Buda, remaining in Hungary until 5 March. But military affairs were rarely far from his mind: on the day he spoke so reassuringly to the British ambassador he also gave orders for the infantry to be equipped with the breech-loader needle guns he had seen tested in April. The Austrian ordnance system was, however, a cumbersome machine. Five weeks elapsed before the minister of war drew the Emperor’s attention to the regrettable fact that a cheese-paring budget provided funds for only 1,840 new rifles - not enough for a single regiment to begin training with the needle guns. By contrast, each ‘regular’ Prussian infantry regiment and many militia units were already armed with breech-loading rifles.”

        -This “needle gun” Palmer is talking about is a newer kind of firearm that uses a spring-loaded, needle-like firing pin to strike a primer that’s built into the base of a self-contained paper or metal cartridge with the bullet inside. Self-contained cartridges have been around for a while now, but prior to firing, soldiers have still needed to cock the gun’s hammer and apply a small explosive primer called a percussion cap. This makes the older-model guns harder to reload, and most percussion cap guns are still muzzle-loaded, like American Civil War rifles. The newer needle guns, on the other hand, are breech-loaded, don’t require percussion caps, and utilize a bolt-action loading mechanism that’s much faster to operate and – just as importantly – can be operated in the prone position. To be clear, these guns don’t have magazines that can carry multiple rounds. You have to manually insert a new cartridge each time you pull back the bolt, but a trained operator can still get off about six or seven rounds a minute, compared to two or three rounds for a similar muzzle-loaded rifle. Furthermore, a breech-loaded rifle is easy to reload in the prone position, meaning that if Prussian troops come under fire and have to lay down, they can still return fire from that position.

-And make no mistake, the Prussians are well aware of their advantage. As the Austrians are scrambling to get together enough needle guns for a single regiment, the Prussians have already deployed them at scale. In his book The Wars of Unification, the late University of Colorado military historian Dennis Showalter writes about a Prussian attack on the Danish city of Dybbøl, which the Germans called Dueppel:

“In the storming of Dueppel, the needle gun seemed to have demonstrated its significance as a shock weapon. While the reports might speak of works carried with the bayonet, direct observers saw little evidence of hand-to-hand fighting. Much of what there was involved not the relatively elaborate bayonet exercises of the parade ground, but close-quarter brawls featuring gun butts rather than cold steel. Asked why he had chosen to use his rifle as a clumsy club rather than a glorified pike, one private allegedly responded in broad dialect that ‘when you get mad enough, the thing just turns around in your hands by itself.’ As much to the point for anyone willing to spoil a good story, the Prussian infantry seemed to have shot its way forward most of the time, shooting from the hip and reloading on the move, halting more or less without orders in the face of opposition, then blasting the Danes out of their way with rapid rifle fire at close ranges.”

-But the needle gun is more than a shock weapon. It’s also a force multiplier for outnumbered troops. Dennis Showalter continues:

“Just how effective the needle gun could be on the defensive was indicated on July 1, 1864. A half company of the 50th Prussian infantry, 124 men strong, was surprised in bivouac around the village of Lundby, on the Jutland peninsula, by a Danish force of around 200 men. The Danes promptly launched a bayonet charge in column. The Prussian captain deployed his men, allowed the Danes to close the range, then ordered platoon volleys: one at 250 meters, one at 200, and the last at 150. When the Danes closed the range to 80 yards, the Prussians opened rapid fire, each man reloading on his own, four or five shots a minute. The charge collapsed. Twenty-two Danes were dead, sixty-six more were wounded. Some were hit as many as seven or eight times. Three Prussians were treated for light wounds. It was the work of twenty minutes.”

        -To be fair, senior Austrian generals don’t see the needle gun as a major problem. The Prussian guns have their own issues. They aren’t as powerful or accurate, giving them a shorter effective range than Austria’s old-school, muzzle-loaded rifles – about 300 yards for the Prussians compared to about 500 yards for the Austrians. Furthermore, the needle guns’ chambers don’t seal very well, and they let off a bright flash and a lot of smoke when they’re fired. Because nobody wants this happening mere inches from their eyes, Prussian soldiers tend to fire from the hip. So what do you do with an enemy who can shoot at you very quickly but isn’t all that accurate? The Austrians plan to stand off with Prussian troops at long range, fire at them with more accurate rifles and artillery, and force the weakened Prussians to either break off or attack them directly. Then, they plan to counter-charge aggressively with the bayonet. Denis Showalter writes:

        “Assaults in close columns at top speed were practiced from Italy to Galicia, and the expectation was that they would be implemented over virtually every kind of ground. This did not entirely reflect blind faith in the panacea of cold steel. Nor was it the product of indifference to anything beyond the drill field and the maneuver ground. Since Austrian regiments were regularly transferred around the empire, a common tactical doctrine was a matter of absolute necessity as a common denominator… Any modifications to suit local conditions had to be recognized as exceptions to a general rule. Since that general rule depended on shock, it only made sense to develop the infantry’s maximum potential as a shock force, cultivating the ability to advance in order and at speed even over unfavorable terrain against defenders armed with rapid-firing weapons. As much to the point, like any conscript force, the Austrian army was institutionally limited in how much training could be absorbed, and how much retained. An Austrian column was not understood as a clumsy, unarticulated mass… Its use required no less careful training than did instruction in marksmanship and skirmishing. As for the possibility that the entire army was on a wrong tactical road… the task of the system was to make the system work in spite of whatever tricks the Prussians had up their military sleeves.”

-All of this to say that Emperor Franz Joseph may not be misplaying his diplomatic hand by pushing for a united assembly in Schleswig-Holstein. He may simply be wrong about his army’s technological disadvantage against the Prussians. Either way, while Austria is trying to use democracy to gain some kind of control not just in Holstein but in Prussian-occupied Schleswig, Otto von Bismarck is preparing for some good old-fashioned blood and steel.

-On February 28th 1866, a meeting takes place in Berlin. Its purpose? To decide whether or not to go to war. Present at the meeting are not just Bismarck and the rest of the cabinet, including Minister of War Albrecht von Roon, but also King Wilhelm I himself, as well as his son, Crown Prince Frederick III. Also present at the meeting are Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, as well as the Governor of Schleswig, the Ambassador to France, and some junior staff.

-Bismarck argues that a war with Austria is inevitable. The disagreements between Prussia and the Habsburg Empire run too deep to be resolved by mere politics. As any wise diplomat does, Bismarck has been laying the groundwork for a year, sending out feelers to the British to make sure they would remain neutral in any inter-German spat. Now, he asks King Wilhelm for permission to send an emissary to the Italians and form an alliance. King Victor Emmanuel’s Italian government is no friend of the Austrians, and may be willing to join in the coming war, forcing Austria to fight on two fronts. Furthermore, Bismarck asks the King for permission to send out feelers to Napoleon III, to ensure that France would be willing to stay neutral should a broader German war erupt.

-This second suggestion upsets Crown Prince Frederick, who thinks Bismarck is aiming to overthrow the smaller German princes, which he says would be a Bruderkrieg, or a war between brothers. Frederick is an old-school monarchist who would never overthrow a fellow king on general principle, and it seems like when the Crown Prince gets upset, King Wilhelm asks for clarification, because Bismarck tells the group that “Foreign policy is an end in itself,” and agrees with the King and the Crown Prince that there must be no dethronement of other German monarchs. It seems that just as Bismarck believes the conflict with Austria can only be solved by war, the problem of Prussia’s relationship with the smaller German powers can only be solved by negotiation. Or at least, that’s what he seems to say.

-Regardless, Moltke, who remember is the army’s chief of staff, endorses the idea of an Italian alliance, going so far as to call it a necessary condition for victory. King Wilhelm agrees, and the course is set. Provided that France will remain neutral and the Italians are on board, Prussia is going to war.

-The French will indeed stay neutral in Prussia’s war. Napoleon III is still smarting from the recent failure of his invasion of Mexico – an invasion he may have been able to pull off had he not already been overextended, with 80,000 of France’s best troops tied down fighting a tribal uprising in Algeria, not to mention the garrisons in recently-acquired Cambodia and Cochin-China, a territory in modern-day Vietnam that includes the city of Saigon. Point being, Napoleon III has his hands full with his overseas empire and has no desire to get involved in what he views as a German civil war. Oh, and he’s also under obligation to maintain a garrison of 20,000 men to protect Rome, at least until his treaty with the Pope runs out in September – foreshadowing. French neutrality, though, is only half of the equation. The other half is the alliance with Italy.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TIMELINES CONVERGE

For the last few episodes, we’ve been following the unifications of Italy and Germany in parallel. Some familiar faces have popped up in both stories – Napoleon III, Emperor Franz Josef, and Metternich come to mind. Some of the same broader themes have played out in both stories – the potato famine, industrialization, and the era’s nationalist zeitgeist. But for the most part, these have been two distinct stories that are happening in the same time period. Well, there’s a reason I wanted to tell these stories together, and that’s because they share more than a geopolitical ecosystem. From here on out, the stories are one and the same. A pregnant Europe is going into labor, and it’s having twins: the nation-states of Italy and Germany.

        -For Otto von Bismarck, obtaining Italian cooperation in the war against Austria is so important that it can’t be left to any old diplomat. Instead, he plans to dispatch Helmuth von Moltke himself, with broad authority to negotiate, so long as Moltke gets the Italians to agree to one point: the treaty will oblige Italy to join Prussia if it begins a war, but must not oblige Prussia to get into a war if Italy starts it. So even at the last minute, Bismarck wants to keep his options open and maybe be able to cancel the war at the last minute, but also have the assurance that he can count on Italy moving forward.

        -Moltke doesn’t have to negotiate any of this, because before Bismarck can send him to Italy, an Italian envoy arrives in Berlin. This envoy, a respected general and member of Parliament named Giuseppe Govone, is, in my humble opinion, one of the few men ever to go toe-to-toe with Bismarck and not come out as the clear loser. Unlike Bismarck, Govone wants Prussia to commit to war or peace – one way or the other – and he doesn’t trust the Prussians. Remember, just a few years earlier, the Italians had cut short their last war against Austria in part because Prussia was about to get involved on Austria’s side. Alliances change all the time in international politics, but trust does take time to establish, and Bismarck isn’t acting trustworthy; not only that, but King Wilhelm keeps making excuses as to why he won’t meet with the Italian emissary personally. Govone thinks Wilhelm is hiding because he’s ashamed of his own government’s behavior – and he’s probably not wrong.

        -Regardless, Govone’s savvy instincts don’t avert war, because Italian King Victor Emmanuel steps in to make an alliance with Bismarck anyway. As it turns out, Victor Emmanuel had sent one of his friends to visit Napoleon III and get his opinion on the war, and Napoleon had told this guy behind closed doors that if he were Victor Emmanuel, he would make the Prussian alliance. So, Victor Emmanuel agrees to Bismarck’s terms, but he does it on one condition. Yes, Italy will join any Prussian war against Austria and yes, Prussia is under no obligation to start such a war or to join one if Italy starts it. But the treaty is to be totally secret, and will only last for three months, after which the alliance is over. So Bismarck can still back out, but he absolutely has to decide within three months, and the clock starts ticking on April 8th 1866, when the treaty with Italy is signed.

        -This alliance with Italy would be an aggressive move under any circumstances, especially from the Austrian perspective. It’s also an attack on the German Confederation itself. In his book Bismarck and the German Empire, 20th century German-Jewish historian Erich Eyck writes:

        “The constitution of the Confederation explicitly forbade any of its members to ally themselves with a foreign Power against any other member. An alliance of this kind was, indeed, incompatible with the very existence of the Confederation, the aim of which was the common protection of all its members… Never in the fifty years of the Confederation had any of its members done anything of this kind. No wonder that King [Wilhelm] hesitated to sign this treaty and that he never allowed the veil of secrecy which surrounded it to be lifted during the whole of his life. It was even worse that, when, some months later, war was imminent, he gave his word of honor to the Austrian Emperor, [Franz Josef], that no treaty of this kind existed...

“Bismarck, naturally, knew exactly what he had done. He said to Benedetti: ‘I have induced a King of Prussia to break off the intimate relations of his House with the House of Habsburg, to conclude an alliance with revolutionary Italy, possibly to accept arrangements with Imperial France, and to propose in Frankfurt the reform of the Confederation and a popular Parliament. That is a success of which I am proud.’ He indeed had every reason to be proud. It was the complete victory of his own policy.”

-Despite the supposed secrecy of the Prussian-Italian treaty, rumor gets out that the Prussian king has made an outside alliance. The smaller kingdoms, once again, are the most outraged, but Emperor Franz Josef does move to counter Bismarck. On June 5th 1866, nearly two months after the signing of the secret treaty, the Austrian Empire asks the German Confederation Diet to approve the meeting of the Diet of the Duchy of Holstein, which if you’ll remember is the thing Austria and Prussia had originally started arguing over to begin with.

-Bismarck, in turn, says that by making changes to the government in Holstein without Prussia’s authorization, Austria is violating the Gastein Convention, which if you’ll remember is the temporary peace agreement Austria and Prussia had signed back in August of 1865, less than a year earlier. On June 9th 1866, in response to Austria violating the treaty, Prussian troops invade the Duchy of Holstein.

From here, things move very quickly. Prussia and Austria have been on a slow march towards war pretty much since the end of the Second Schleswig War. But now that the gloves have come off, both sides want to bring the fight to as swift a conclusion as possible, because both sides are already thinking about the world after the war.

        -Remember, in the year 1866, there are five major powers in Europe – six if you include the Ottoman Empire, which is dealing with its own internal issues at the moment. These five European powers are France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. If you’re one of those powers, it’s important to have an alliance with at least one other major power, because if you’re diplomatically isolated, that’s basically a license for two or more of the other major powers to beat up on you. This is why the Austrians have, until very recently, been so desperate to keep their alliance with the Prussians. Because they managed to get the French, the British, and the Russians all angry at them during the Crimean War and became diplomatically isolated.

        -Well, the Prussians are at risk of being in a similar position, and Bismarck knows this. The British want to maintain a balance of power in Europe and prevent a new Napoleon. They might be willing to overlook a short, limited war, but if it looks like either Prussia or Austria is going to totally dominate the other, they’re liable to jump in on the losing side to prevent one power from controlling all of Central Europe. The same goes for the Russians, who have even more reason to fear the rise of a new Napoleon. And speaking of Napoleon, Emperor Napoleon III of France rules the most powerful and prosperous country in continental Europe. He may not want a war with Prussia, but he’s not going to ally himself with a rising rival. So just like the Austrians, the Prussians really only have one potential ally among the major powers, and that’s each-other.

        -For Bismarck, achieving a quick victory is critical. Not only will a short war be over before the other major powers have a chance to intervene, but a shorter war also means fewer casualties on both sides. A long, drawn-out war could kill so many Austrians that the Austrian people would hate the Prussians for a generation, and Bismarck doesn’t want that. He wants to dominate the German Confederation and keep the Habsburgs bottled up in the Austrian Empire where they can remain a Prussian ally.

        -Austrian war aims mirror this. Emperor Franz Josef doesn’t want to destroy Prussia. That would create a power vacuum in Northern Germany and France or Russia could rush in to fill the gap, which would be a far more serious threat to the Austrian Empire than Prussia alone ever could be. Austria wants to put the Duke of Augustenborg in charge of Schleswig-Holstein to put a buffer on Prussian influence in the North, they want to push Bismarck personally out of power, and they want to re-establish dominance over the German Confederation. Some Austrian strategists also talk about re-occupying the region of Silesia, which Frederick the Great had taken from the Austrians back in the 1740s, but even the most aggressive of these goals doesn’t involve the destruction of the Prussian state.

So far, the conflict has been bloodless – Prussian troops have moved into Holstein, and the Duke of Augustenborg has unceremoniously fled the territory. Things won’t stay bloodless for long. In a bid to get things over with as quickly as possible, Austria turns to its friends: the smaller German powers, who are worried about Prussian aggression. Since Prussia has violated the constitution by allying with an outside power and now invaded the Duchy of Holstein outright, their help comes easily. On June 11th 1866, two days after the invasion of Holstein, Austria calls an emergency meeting of the Diet of the German Confederation. At this meeting, Austrian diplomats propose the mobilization of the Army of the German Confederation, with the express purpose of containing the Prussian menace.

        -Bismarck offers a counter-proposal to radically reorganize the German Confederation without Austria. This proposal would, among other things, put the German navy completely under Prussian control and divide control over the army between the King of Prussia and the King of Bavaria. It’s such an obvious power grab that nobody seems to take it as a serious proposal, more as his way of daring the Austrians to come at him. On June 14th, three days after its introduction, the Austrian proposal is passed. On Austria’s side are all of the Southern German states as well as the middle-tier German powers of Bavaria, Hanover, Hesse, and Saxony. The only German states to vote “no” are the small states in Prussia’s immediate neighborhood, as well as a couple of states that are ruled by the King of the Netherlands, who understandably wants nothing to do with this whole mess.

        -The mobilization of the German Confederation’s army on June 14th 1866 represents the commonly-agreed beginning of what will come to be known, among several other names, as the Austro-Prussian War. The next day, June 15th, Otto von Bismarck declares that by Austria’s actions, the German Confederation has been abolished. After all, the German Confederation exists to ensure peace within Germany, and Austria has now moved to mobilize its army against another German power. The same day, Bismarck announces the foundation of a new Prussian Federation, and demands that three States that are near Prussia – Hanover, Hesse, and Saxony – leave the German Confederation and join this new confederation. Hanover, Hesse, and Saxony all refuse, so Prussia declares war on them. While Prussia and Austria never officially declare war on each-other, Austria sends a letter to Prussian military commanders on the 17th, notifying them that it attends to attack their troops. Prussia sends a similar letter to the Austrians on the next day, June 18th. So they’re totally not at war with each-other, but their troops reserve the right to attack each-other and do all the other things people do when they’re at war. Semantics.

        -Italy actually does declare war on Austria on June 20th, in fulfillment of its treaty obligations. And so, in less than a week, all of Central Europe has jumped from the frying pan of a political crisis and into the fire of a shooting war.

CHAPTER FIVE: VENETIA OR BUST

We’ll talk about the shooting war in a minute. I promise. But first, pacing be damned, we have to catch up on Italy, because believe it or not, Italy has not just been sitting in stasis since its foundation five years prior. Europe’s youngest nation-state has been as dynamic as any new country, although this dynamism cuts both ways. On the one hand, the newly-united Kingdom of Italy had become a nation almost overnight at the beginning of 1861, unifying what were already some of Europe’s wealthiest economies on a per-capita basis, and this economic power is protected by a modern, well-equipped military. I’m not saying that Italy is a world power; I’m saying that it’s strong enough to stand on its own two feet, maintain a functioning economy, and present a credible threat to any would-be invader. For a country that, five years ago, was a dream in the eye of Italian nationalists, this is pretty good! But Italy also has its problems.

        -To begin with, Italy’s wealth has never been evenly-distributed – ever. For as long as anyone can remember, the southern half of Italy has been poorer than the north, with the exception of a little area around Naples. Some historians date the disparity as far back as the 3rd century BC, when Hannibal’s armies rampaged around southern Italy for more than a decade, pillaging everything that wasn’t behind city walls. Southern Italy has seen more wars and conquests in general over the years, while northern Italy is more mountainous and has seen less actual conquest. As recently as the 1850s, Southern Italy had been under the Kingdom of Naples, basically a feudal system, while Piedmont-Sardinia had been building railroads and sending a modern expeditionary army to Crimea.

        -For the newly-unified Italy, this economic disparity between north and south presents real issues. In his book The Risorgimento: Italy 1815-71, British historian Tim Chapman writes:

        “The education system was centralized and ancient universities initially lost their autonomy. State schools were also set up so as to try and eradicate illiteracy but these meant high taxes and—although schools were built everywhere the southern peasants often kept their children at home as they were needed to work. Illiteracy fell from 75% to 69% 1861–71, but this was mostly due to progress in the north. For most of the Italian population, Italian nationalism was something alien to them. They still saw themselves as people who belonged to a local area such as Siena or Florence or Sicily.”

        -So you really have three Italies: Northern Italy, Southern Italy, and Sicily, all unified under one government and calling themselves the “Kingdom of Italy.” In some ways, it’s like the United States in the same time period, with a more populous, educated, and industrialized North, a poorer and more agrarian South, and this crazy area out west with all kinds of outlaw shenanigans. Oh, and also a civil war.

-Throughout the first half of the 1860s, various political groups take up arms against the new government. These groups are mostly based in Southern Italy, where people feel dominated by the more powerful North, but the problem is nationwide and cuts across the political spectrum. Armed groups dot the countryside, ranging from Southern agrarian separatists who want to get rid of their landlords to various regional anti-nationalist separatists, to radical nationalists prepping for a war against the Pope, to conservative Catholics who are upset by the government’s seizure of Church property and generally anti-Papal attitude. There are never any major battles – these groups are too dispersed and divided for anything like that. Instead, there are pockets of guerilla activity all over Italy, and with all that disorder, the Italians are also dealing with criminal gangs whose version of “guerilla activity” amounts to wide-scale armed robbery. The government takes advantage of these gangs to brand all the violence as what it calls the “Brigands’ War,” basically saying that its enemies are just a bunch of criminals. The ranks of both the actual guerillas and the gangs are swelled by deserters from Italy’s new conscript army, newly-unemployed members of the disbanded Neapolitan Army, angry peasants, and dispossessed priests. The fact that many rebel groups use Rome as a safe haven and base of operations only worsens relations between the Italian state and Pope Pius IX. Tim Chapman continues, talking about the widespread chaos during this period:

“The fighting was savage on both sides, with reports of men being crucified or burnt alive. Many of the brigands’ attacks consisted of men sweeping down on horseback to kill the new Italian national guardsmen and mayors, and to destroy tax records. Farming declined, unemployment spread and civilization receded as the violence escalated. Murders based on family feuds and the mafia accounted for one thousand deaths a year, which was partly brought on by the release of some 10,000 criminals from jails in 1860… The government might have alleviated the suffering in Sicily by passing agricultural reforms that might have won over the peasants. This did not happen. Land remained in the hands of the landlords[,] and their estates, the latifundia, actually got larger.”

-To manage this situation, Italy must rely on a series of leaders whose local or factional allegiances make it impossible for them to maintain power. Five years pass between the death of Italy’s founding Prime Minister, Camillo Cavour, in June 1861 to the declaration of war against Austria in June 1866, and in those five years, Italy goes through five Prime Ministers. I won’t go into the details because it would be unnecessarily confusing, but one of these men does do something important, and that’s Marco Minghetti, who had been Minister of Public Works for Pope Pius IX during the Papal States’ brief time under a constitutional government. As both a respected liberal and a man who personally knows the Pope, he’s able to work out a three-way arrangement called the September Convention, signed in 1864. We’ll talk about this more later on in the episode, but the September Convention basically exchanges responsibility for the security of the Papal States from French Emperor Napoleon III to King Victor Emmanuel II, effective in two years, or September of 1866. That’s a big deal, and again, we’ll circle back on it, but for now the most important part of the September Convention is that it requires the Italian government move its capital. In their book The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, British historian Derek Beales and Italian historian Eugenio Biagini write:

“The package involved the choice of a new national capital (Florence) and implicitly suggested the renunciation of Rome. What the liberals really wanted was a gradual, diplomatic solution to the 'Roman Question' on the basis of a renewal of Cavour's policy of separation between church and state. The Pope, however, was not appeased, as indicated by the publication of the Syllabus of Errors. Furthermore, the… [Convention] was very unpopular in Turin, which lost its capital status, and among the democrats, who rejected any compromise over Rome.”

-So the capital is moved to Florence, Italy gives up its claim to Rome, French troops are to be withdrawn, and tensions are supposed to be eased, but they aren’t, because even if the Italians can’t have Rome right now, they still want to get Venice from the Austrians. Anyway, when war breaks out with Austria in 1866, the sitting Prime Minister is a man named Alfonso la Marmora, who had been King Victor Emmanuel’s top military advisor during the last war and had basically run the army for him. But when war is declared on June 20th, Marmora resigns as Prime Minister and puts his general’s uniform back on, handing the position of Prime Minister to Bettino Ricasoli, a former mayor of Florence who had actually been the first guy to try his hand at the job after Cavour had died. Look, Italian politics are complicated, and I’ll try not to talk too much about this or that specific politician because these guys just seem to appear and disappear after five minutes, but my point is that Italy’s kind of a chaotic place, but its leaders aren’t totally inept, and the main Italian field army is led by General Marmora, the guy who had led it to success in the last war.

-Now, Italy is getting into this war for some very obvious reasons. Italian nationalists have always claimed the right to Venice, have tried to take Venice from Austria twice, and now they’re trying again. But Italy could have gotten Venice via diplomacy. As late as May 4th 1866, so about six weeks before the war, Austria had offered to sell Venetia – the region around Venice – to France, with the understanding that they would then sell it to Italy. This would have been contingent on Austria taking the region of Silesia from Prussia during the upcoming war. This isn’t a guarantee. Austria might not be able to conquer Silesia, in which case the Italians would get nothing. By contrast, the agreement with Prussia says that Prussia will not agree to any peace terms with Austria unless the Italians get Venetia. The Austrian deal would only have required Italy to stay out of the Austro-Prussian war, while the Prussian deal requires their involvement. So one might argue that the Italian government looks at the Prussian option as higher-risk, but higher-reward, and goes with that choice. On the other hand, one might argue that the government goes with the Prussian option precisely because it allows them to go to war, and there’s nothing like a little war to unify a divided country.

To that end, and despite its other issues, Italy is in a very good military situation. At the outbreak of war, the army is fielding 284,000 men, although 64,000 of these are on garrison duty in various Italian cities, so around 220,000 will be available for the war. That’s still a lot of men, and with France remaining neutral, all of those guys can be used to attack Austria along a single front in the northeast, near the city of Venice. That is, if they can get past the Quadrilateral, which is a group of four mutually-supporting fortress cities in what is now northern Italy, which the Austrians have been using to fight off foreign armies since Napoleon’s time, and which most of you guys are probably sick of me reminding you about by this point.

        -Helmuth von Moltke, who is planning the war for the Prussians, urges Alfonso la Marmora not to attack the Quadrilateral directly. He points out that one army after another has tried and failed to get through those fortresses – including two recent Italian armies. Instead, Moltke suggests leaving a defensive force near the Quadrilateral and taking the bulk of the Italian army past Venice by sea, landing them on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, and marching them towards Vienna. La Marmora refuses. For one thing, the logistics of deploying most of the Italian army by sea would be daunting. For another thing, bypassing Venice in favor of Vienna would be politically untenable. It would look to people back home as if he were fighting as a Prussian puppet, rather than for Italian interests. So for better or for worse, the Italians will once again spend a large part of a major war beating their heads against a metaphorical rock. The only plus side for them is that there’s only one rock against which to beat themselves.

        -The Austrian army, on the other hand, has to fight a war on two fronts, as well as maintain a strong military presence in Hungary, where there’s still a lot of unrest and what we would call guerilla war or partisan activity. Despite not being to rely on the Hungarians as much as it once could, the Austrian Empire still fields more than 400,000 men. Of these, the Austrians intend to put around 170,000 along the Italian frontier. Yes, that’s fewer men than the Italians have, but the Austrian plan is to fight a defensive war in Italy and use the Quadrilateral and the terrain to their advantage. The real threat to Austria comes not from Italy, but from Prussia in the north. If they crush the Italians and lose to the Prussians, they will win nothing. If they beat Prussia first, on the other hand, Austria will then be able to turn its full might against Italy.

        -For this to work, the remaining 200,000-or-so-strong Austrian field army will have to strike quickly into Prussian territory, force a decisive engagement, and knock the Prussians out of the fight. This military objective is right in line with Austria’s broader goal of a quick, decisive war. Such an aggressive war will require the proper commander, and Emperor Franz Josef makes what I think is uncontroversially a good decision, and decides not to command the army personally like he did last time. Instead, the Commander of the Army in the North will be a man named Ludwig von Benedek, who had served heroically in the last war, where his men had been the last Austrians to retreat at the bloody Battle of Solferino. This action exemplifies a long career of courage and aggression, making Ludwig von Benedek the perfect man for the job.

        -On the downside, Benedek’s military experience is all in Northern Italy, where he says himself that he knows “every tree on the road to Milan.” But Benedek knows next to nothing about Central Europe, which is where he’ll be fighting, so he has to rely on advice from another general named Gideon Krismanic. On paper, Krismanic is the perfect man for his job; he’d recently served as head of the army’s topographical bureau. Unfortunately, Krismanic is also a cautious, tentative planner, and is constantly advising General Benedek to slow down, which you can’t do when you’re prosecuting an aggressive war.

        -Austria actually borders Prussia in a single area – the region of Silesia that lies mostly in modern-day Poland. Long-time listeners will remember how Frederick the Great had made his reputation taking Silesia from the Austrians. Well, more than a hundred years later, the Austrians are trying to take it back. For some Austrian nationalists, this is pure revanchism – meaning the desire to reverse a historic loss. But for most, including Emperor Franz Josef, taking Silesia is a practical objective.

        -For one thing, Silesia is one of the most economically-developed parts of Prussia. Taking it will damage the Prussian economy, and ensure that any postwar Prussia has been trimmed down to size. But for another thing, like I said, it’s the only area where Austria actually borders Prussia directly. The rest of the area between the two countries is made up of smaller German states, all of whom are either neutral or on Austria’s side. The Austrian plans call for their smaller allies to also attack the Prussians, which will force the Prussians to spread out their forces, weaken their defenses in Silesia, and allow the massive Austrian army to slice directly into the throat of the Prussian economy. Not a bad plan, provided you can do it quickly before your smaller allies are overrun.

        -As for those smaller allies, the list of German states on both sides of the conflict is as confusing as everything else in the German Confederation. Fortunately for us, only a few of them are significant enough to be relevant, and none of those are fighting on the Prussian side. However, the Austrians have the Kingdoms of Saxony and Bavaria as allies, and these kingdoms, along with several others, form a big blob to Austria’s northwest, basically the entire southern half of modern-day Germany. These states are by no means major powers, but they do field significant enough armies that they’re not totally irrelevant. Bavaria’s about to put 36,000 men in the field. Saxony is fielding around 25,000, and Hesse-Darmstadt has around 11,000. The wild card in the bunch is the Kingdom of Hanover, located way up in Northwestern Germany on the Baltic coast. It’s isolated from Austria and the rest of her allies, but it does have more than 18,000 troops to defend itself, meaning the Prussians can’t totally ignore it.

        -Altogether, the Prussians expect to fight against more than 280,000 men, which is about how many Moltke can put into the field. Again, the Prussians have more soldiers than that, but some are on defensive duty so you can’t put them all into the field. Moltke’s plan is to pin down the Hanoverian army with a small detachment of troops and basically keep them busy in the northwest. Then he plans to use the rest of his army to take out the Austrians.

        -First, though, he’ll have to deal with the Saxon army. In his book The Road to Koniggratz: Helmuth von Moltke and the Austro-Prussian War 1866, British author Quintin Barry writes:

        “Moltke’s first imperative was to consider the situation of Berlin, only six days march from the Saxon border. He expected that [here quoting Moltke directly] ‘Austria’s goal will probably be not directly to conquer Silesia and afterwards to defend it, but to obtain the greatest possible advantages by the overthrow of the power of Prussia.’ [Barry continues] That meant an all-out offensive towards the Prussian capital, and an Austrian advance in this direction would encounter no fortresses nor any strong defensive position:

“[Now quoting Moltke again] ‘Our whole theatre of war as far as the sea is only about 140 miles in depth. The loss of Berlin cuts the state in two, cuts all communications from the Rhine to the Vistula, and would politically be infinitely more important than the loss of Breslau or of all Silesia, for the reconquest of which all our forces could be assembled.’”

-Moltke plans to use superior Prussian logistics against his enemy. He sends about a fifth of his army, 54,000 men, far out to the east, to cover that half of the Austrian border. This group becomes known as the Second Army. Then Moltke assembles the bulk of his army, 193,000 men, near the western end of the Austrian border and a little to the north, in an area called Lusatia where there are a bunch of railheads, literally twice as many incoming rail lines as the Austrian area on the other side of the border. So he just stacks the bulk of his army in this area as quickly as he can, trying to get there before the Austrians, and for the most part, that works. And this main concentration of Prussian troops is called the First Army.

-To the west of the First Army is a task force of only 16,000 men, called the Elbe Army, tasked with taking over Saxony before the Saxon army can even mobilize. As early as the night of June 15th 1866 – the night Prussia informally declares war on Austria and her allies – Prussian scouts are moving into Saxony, and Saxon military engineers are pulling up railway lines that run from their country up into Prussia. It’s not enough to slow the Prussian advance.

-The Saxons’ problem is that they had only just mobilized their army, and it takes them about a week to deploy all their troops, and they don’t have a week. They have “right now,” and within three days, the Elbe Army has rushed into the Saxon capital of Dresden before the Saxon army could even marshal more than a token defensive force, which retreats rather than face total annihilation, although it’s worth mentioning that many local units have also been mobilized, and they also get away and regroup, and the Saxons end up putting together something like 25,000 men on the Austrian side of the border. After two more days, on June 20th – the day Italy declares war on Austria - Prussia is in total control of Saxony, and more of that huge army has moved in to augment the invasion force and push closer to the Austrian border. The war – the real war – is just beginning.

CHAPTER SIX: THE WAR WITH MANY NAMES

The war that begins on June 20th 1866 is known by several names depending on where you’re from. In English-speaking countries, we call it the Austro-Prussian War or the Seven Weeks’ War. In Germany and Austria, it’s generally called the German Civil War, although the term Brothers War is often used as well, while Italians call it the Third Italian War of Independence. Whatever you call this war, it’s in Italy where we see the first real action between two of the major combatants.

        -The Italian army is divided into three groups, each under its own commander. In the north is the smallest force, 20,000 volunteers under the command of veteran revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi and his Hunters of the Alps had made their name in the north, so it makes sense for him to once again command an Alpine force. South of Garibaldi, squaring off against the Quadrilateral fortresses across the Mincio River, is the main Italian army, with 120,000 men under the command of Alfonso la Marmora. South of Marmora is another force, consisting of 80,000 men under the command of General Enrico Cialdini. These men are supposed to cross the Po River in the south and invade the plains around Venice at the same time as Marmora’s army attacks the Quadrilateral directly.

        -Unfortunately for the Italians, divisions in leadership ruin their war effort from the get go. Cialdini and Marmora don’t get along, and Cialdini, like Marmora, is a successful general from the last war, so they have a rivalry that goes back several years at this point, and Marmora doesn’t have the authority to overrule him. That’s because King Victor Emmanuel has once again made himself supreme commander of the Italian Military, which means he’s hanging out with the army and expects Marmora to take care of everything, but because Marmora isn’t supreme commander, he can only give orders to his own army group. He can try to coordinate with Cialdini, but he can’t actually order him to do anything.

        -With Cialdini refusing to coordinate a united offensive and Victor Emmanuel doing nothing at all, it’s up to General Marmora to take on the Austrian army with only his own army group. His men begin crossing the Mincio river on the morning of June 23rd, and on the 24th, he orders his entire army to execute a pivot to the left. This is an improvisation, and he’s probably turning his army to the left – north – in preparation to attack the fortress city of Peschiera, which is the northwestern corner of the quadrilateral. But Marmora is careless. Since he’s facing no opposition, he comes to the conclusion that the enemy must be further west. He doesn’t send out enough scouts or do proper reconnaissance, and he doesn’t realize he’s getting drawn into a trap.

        -In his book The Seven Weeks' War: the Austro-Prussian Conflict of 1866, 19th-century British author Henry Montague Hozier writes about the Austrian  side of this maneuver.

        “A light cavalry brigade, pushed forward towards the Mincio to watch the army of King Victor Emmanuel, received orders, in case the latter crossed that river, to fall back, without committing itself to any serious action, by way of Villafranca.

“This brigade of cavalry withdrew on the 22nd, as soon as the Italians seriously showed that they intended to cross the Mincio, to Villafranca. On the 23rd, when the Italians crossed it, they withdrew further, with no more resistance than the exchange of a few cannon shots near Dossobuono, and that evening took post under the forts of Verona.”

-So the Austrians are drawing back, letting Marmora’s army get just deep enough into their territory and just strung out enough along their line of march that they’re vulnerable. And in case you’re wondering, the Austrian commander in Italy is Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, who has appeared a couple times in our story – first as the Vienna military garrison commander in 1848, when his men fired on civilian protestors, and later as governor of Hungary. Well, here he is again.

        -In the past, I’ve talked about Albrecht’s incompetence, but he actually doesn’t do too badly here against the Italians. He just waits for Marmora to get too far inside the Quadrilateral for an easy retreat and then counterattacks when the time is right. The only significant Austrian mistake comes at the very beginning of the fight, at around seven in the morning on June 24th, when Austrian cavalry are surprised by some Italian cavalry and, rather than assess the situation, charge in recklessly, but there are more Italians than they had expected, and these Austrian cavalry brigades are forced to retreat, which tires them out and renders them useless for the main battle.

        -“Main battle” is a bit of a misnomer. The fight is centered on the town of Custoza, but the armies are spread out for miles to both sides, and what we end up with is a series of confusing encounters and one-off fights by individual brigades over individual villages. However, the Austrians have two major advantages. To begin with, they slightly outnumber the Italians. General Marmora has only managed to get 65,000 of his 120,000 men across the river so far, while Archduke Albrecht has 75,000 men with him at Custoza. Furthermore, the Austrian troops have gotten a good night’s sleep, while Marmora’s Italians were forced to march early without any breakfast.

        -Despite these disadvantages, the Italians occupy some key hilltops at the beginning of the fight, but Marmora is often slow to react when his men are in trouble or follow up attacks when they’re successful. Reading between the lines, it feels like he’s hampered by the presence of his boss, King Victor Emmanuel, and feels the need to run decisions past the king before taking every action, which slows everything down. Regardless, Archduke Albrecht is the more decisive general of the day, and by late afternoon, the last Italian troops are withdrawing from the battlefield. More than 3,800 are killed or wounded, with an additional 4,300 captured, for a total of more than 8,000 casualties. The Austrians take only around 5,600 casualties, although they actually suffer slightly more killed and wounded, with the main difference being that only 1,000 Austrians are captured in the battle.

        -Regardless, June 24th 1866 is an embarrassing day for the Italian Army, and it might have been even worse. Military doctrine of the time says to pursue a retreating enemy with cavalry, and if Archduke Albrecht’s cavalry hadn’t worn their horses out first thing in the morning, they may have been able to make an end run around the retreating Italians, capture the bridges over the Mincio River, and capture Marmora’s entire army. As it stands, Marmora is able to slink back across the river with his tail between his legs, and the disorganized Italian Army will bide its time and make a new plan.

Up north in Germany, the Prussians are making a bit more headway. After overrunning Saxony in the opening days of the war, their three armies are converging on Bohemia – the modern-day Czech Republic – from the north. They aim to surround and invade this northernmost part of the Austrian Empire before the Austrians attack into Silesia, and to get their army into the theatre as quickly as possible, they use an updated version of Napoleon’s system. Napoleon would divide his army into smaller groups when possible and march them along parallel roads, and these smaller groups can move faster than a larger, massed army, and then the army can just converge when you get to where you want to fight. Well, the Prussians are doing this not just with roads, but with railroads, and as I said earlier, they’ve shocked the Austrians with the speed of their advance.

        -Austrian commander Ludwig von Benedek concentrates his army near the Josephstadt, a strong defensive position about 70 miles northeast of Prague. This puts him in a good spot to block any Prussian incursions through the Silesian mountains to his northeast. To the northwest, he is more vulnerable. See, the area to Benedek’s south and west is well protected. The Elbe River flows from near Josephstadt south, then hooks west, creating a natural barrier between the Prussians and the Bohemian interior – including the vital city of Prague. To the east and northeast, it’s more mountainous. But the Prussians have overrun Saxony and are now coming in from the less mountainous area in the northwest. There, Benedek dispatches part of his men along another river, the Iser. If those troops can hold, the rest of his army should be able to beat back the Prussians near the mountain passes.

        -At first, this strategy seems to work. The Austrians are operating from a central position, whereas the Prussians are spread out all around them, so the Prussians have a harder time communicating. Once they start getting into the mountainous territory around the frontier, a lot of individual groups of soldiers get cut off from each-other. They lose access to telegraph lines, for example, and have to rely on horse-mounted messengers for long stretches of the campaign. As a result, Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke has an unclear picture of what is going on in the early phases of this war, and his field commanders are forced to make their own decisions based on their own incomplete pictures. For the Prussians, the fog of war lies so heavy on the battlefield that they can barely see the ground in front of them.

        -For example, remember the Elbe Army? The army group that had been sent far to the west to take over Saxony? Well, once those guys have secured Saxony, they just keep right on marching into Bohemia, making a beeline for the Iser River, and they make it there before the Austrians are able to put many men in place to block them. But there are only 16,000 Prussians in the Elbe Army, so they have to move carefully, although they do win a small engagement near Kuřívody castle on June 26th. In the first real fighting between Prussian and Austrian troops, a brigade of Hungarian and Slovakian troops attacks the Prussian-occupied town, and the Prussian infantry inflicts horrendous casualties at close range, where their needle guns’ rapid rate of fire proves decisive. The Austrians are forced to withdraw to their side of the Iser River, and the Elbe Army holds on to the west bank.

-Meanwhile, the much larger Prussian First Army, the 153,000 or so men in the center of the strategic battlefield, is supposed to support the Elbe Army, but they hadn’t started moving until much later due to poor communications. The night of the 26th, the same day that the Elbe Army wins its first battle, elements of the First Army clash with the Austrians near the village of Podol. The pattern repeats itself, with the Austrians forced to abandon the west bank of the Iser River. Despite their twin victories, the Prussians are unable to exploit the situation because of the First Army’s delay. By the time they link up with the Elbe Army, the Austrians have fortified the east bank of the Iser River, making it a much harder target.

-This fouls up Helmuth von Moltke’s plans. He had hoped for the two armies to cross the Iser River and link up at the town of Gitschen, a major road and railway hub that could serve as a logistical springboard deeper into Bohemia. For now, the army will have to come up with a better plan to get across the Iser.

-Incidentally, Benedek’s Austrians might actually have been able to hold on to the west bank of Iser and form an even harder defensive line if it hadn’t been for poor field command. The leader of the Austrian forces blocking the Iser River, Count Eduard Clam-Gallas, retreats towards Josephstadt after losing the initial fight against the Elbe Army, before Benedek orders him to hold the Iser at all costs. Clam-Gallas then turns back around. When his men get back to the village of Podol and encounter the Prussian First Army later that night, the Prussians have already occupied the village, making it a much harder fight than it would have been had the Austrians been the ones defending. Regardless, the Austrians hold the line at the River Iser, for now, securing their western flank.

To the northeast of the Austrian Army’s headquarters at Josephstadt, the Prussian Second Army begins its own incursion. But instead of crossing a river, they have to deal with mountain passes. Here, Benedek makes a critical mistake, because he doesn’t take into account the fact that the Prussians have divided up their forces. He’s expecting one major attack at a single point on the map – maybe two if the Prussians are feeling frisky. The point being, there are too many mountain passes for him to fortify all of them with enough men to withstand such an attack. Instead, he occupies the smaller number of railroad towns in the area. This will allow him to first, divide his army into a smaller number of larger groups, and second, use the local railroad network to quickly shuffle his men around as needed.

        -This is a reasonable defensive plan with a modern army, but it doesn’t take into account the way Helmuth von Moltke is moving his army. Instead of coming through one or two mountain passes with a huge column of men, the Prussians trickle through over several passes, after which these small groups link up on the Bohemian side of the border. On June 27th, the day after the fighting in the west, the Second Army attacks in the East, and it attacks in two places.

        -The first is the town of Trautenau, just north of Josephstadt. There, at around 10 in the morning, a column of Prussian troops marches into the edge of town. The men are already exhausted. It’s a hot day in a humid part of the country, and they’ve already been marching since 4 AM, winding down narrow roads through hills and marshes. They’re actually just passing through. Their real objective is Pilnikau, a few miles southeast, and Trautenau is on their way.

        -First they have to cross a bridge and break down a wooden barricade, then fight their way through a light urban area with lots of narrow streets where Austrian light infantrymen can snipe at them from the windows. They have to go from building to building, and while their needle guns give them an advantage, it’s not as much of an advantage as it would be on the open ground. But neither Prussian General Adolf von Bonin nor Austrian general Ludwig von Gablenz had been expecting a fight in this particular location. Like I said, Bonin’s Prussians are just passing through, and as for Gablenz’ light infantrymen, they had been stationed in Trautenau as a screening force ahead of his main army. Now it’s a matter of who can get their men into the fight the fastest. At first, the Prussians have the advantage, and they sweep the Austrians from the town of Trautenau itself.

        -However, the Austrian delaying action has bought time for Gablenz to get more men into the area to help, and the first to arrive are the dragoons, mounted infantry who also carry sabers and can fight on horseback. Henry Montague Hozier writes:

        “Beyond the town one of Austria’s most celebrated cavalry regiments, the Windischgrätz dragoons, stood waiting to sweep the Prussian battalions from the open ground if they issued from the shelter of the houses. These dragoons have long held a high reputation, and, for a record of brave deeds done by the regiment, alone in the Austrian Army wear no moustache. The Prussian infantry could not advance, and it seemed that the houses of Trautenau had been won in vain. But assistance was at hand.

“The 1st regiment of the Prussian Dragoons came trotting along the main street, deployed into line almost as they debouched from the town, and with their horses well in hand, and their sword-points low, bore in a steady canter straight down upon the Austrian cavalry; these did not wait inactive to receive the attack, but rushed forward to meet their foes; no shots were exchanged, not a saddle was emptied till the close. When within a few yards of each other, both sides raised a cheer, and, welcoming the hug of battle, the two lines rushed upon each other. Horse pressed against horse, knee against knee, swords went up quick and came down heavily on head-piece or on shoulder, points were given and received, blows quickly parried were returned with lightning speed; here an Austrian was borne to the ground, there a Prussian was sent reeling from his seat, and for a few minutes the mass of combatants swayed slowly backwards and forwards. But then, as if some mighty shell had burst among them, the Austrian soldiers flew scattered from the mêlée, and the Prussians riding hard after them drove them from the field, but themselves being under the fire of small arms suffered a heavy loss.”

-The Austrians have been driven back, for now, but Adolf von Bonin doesn’t press his advantage. He puts a few men on the hills to the south of town to keep an eye on the Austrians, and tries to march the rest of his men west towards his objective at Pilnikau. General Gablenz, meanwhile, brings more infantry into the battle, and following Austrian prewar doctrine, launches a series of bayonet charges against the Prussians on the hills. General Bonin orders his men to fall back and form a stronger defensive line, but when the first men begin to fall back, the officers lose control of the situation. In a rare breakdown of Prussian discipline, Bonin’s army falls back all the way north of Trautenau to where they had started at 4 in the morning.

-Despite this, Austrian casualties from charging into waves of Prussian gunfire are difficult to comprehend. Denis Showalter sheds some light on the situation:

“The nature of the casualties enhanced their trauma. In the American Civil War, most attacks were made in line, against fire relatively uncontrolled and opened at relatively long range. The usual result was more or less an even distribution of corpses. Post-battle accounts commonly speak of being able to cross a given piece of ground by stepping from body to body. The Prussian I Corps considered itself an elite force, its regiments heir to many of Frederick the Great’s victories, and took particular pride in its fire discipline. At Trautenau, particularly in the early hours of the fighting, Prussian platoons and companies held their fire to near point-blank range, then delivered rapid volleys against mass targets. The usual results were literal piles of dead and wounded marking the line of every Austrian advance, blending into impassable windrows as they approached the final Prussian positions. Such sights, often viewed for the first time, boded no good for the morale of men already over-marched and underfed—particularly given the primitive and limited nature of medical arrangements in no way prepared for such numbers.”

-The Battle of Trautenau is an absolute bloodbath for the victorious Austrians. Out of 25,000 men in his army, General Gablenz loses more than 1,300 killed and 3,000 wounded, along with approximately 4,000 missing, which, when you see that 16% of the army has just gone missing, usually means that a lot of guys just deserted. The dead and wounded alone represent a significant portion of his force, but we should also consider the Prussian losses, with more than 1,100 dead and 2,400 wounded out of a total of 15,000. That’s an even higher casualty rate, especially if you include the more than 800 Prussians who are captured.

-Unfortunately for the Austrians, the Battle of Trautenau is a wasted effort. The same day, a few miles to the southeast, a Prussian army wins a decisive victory over the Austrians at the town of Náchod. Here, the casualties are much more lobsided, with the Austrians losing more than 5,000 killed and wounded plus another 2,500 prisoners, while the Prussians lose only 1,100 killed and wounded and 14 missing. Most of the Prussian losses are among the King’s Grenadiers, who hold a wooded ridgeline against a series of Austrian bayonet charges, mowing down waves of Austrian infantry even as they themselves are coming under constant artillery fire, with trees splintering and exploding all around them.

-At the end of June 26th, the Prussians control Náchod, which is a local road and rail hub that will now serve as a rallying point for more troops. Just as importantly, the Prussian breakthrough in the east threatens to cut off the Austrian troops who just won the Battle of Trautenau in the north, so those guys have to fall back towards Josephstadt as well.

-The superiority of Prussian tactics and weaponry demonstrates itself again and again over the coming days, with the Prussians scoring three more small local victories on June 27th, and a fourth on June 29th. I won’t harp on the details of every small encounter, except to say that the Prussians keep moving forward and taking local road and railway hubs, and that General Benedek’s Austrians have taken heavy casualties in every encounter. To be fair, heavy casualties aren’t necessarily an indicator that the Austrians are losing. Their aggressive, bayonet-heavy plan almost guarantees a lot of dead soldiers. But we should remember that this is all based in the theory that the bayonet charges will be successful, the Prussians will lose a series of battles, and the Austrian Army will be outside Berlin within weeks. And, of course, in such a short war, there will be fewer casualties overall, because it will be over so quickly.

-If that’s going to work out, Benedek is going to have to turn things around, and he still has a chance to do that. The Prussians may be inside Bohemia, but the Austrians still have local numerical superiority. Just as importantly, they’re not surrounded. Benedek still has thousands of men, along with what’s left of the Saxon Army, defending his left flank, preventing the Prussian Elbe Army and First Army from surrounding him. All he needs is a little military jiu-jitsu, a single victory to inspire his men and spark an Austrian turnaround.

CHAPTER SEVEN: IRON AND BLOOD

General Ludwig von Benedek does not get his single victory. Not even one. And it’s a shame, because despite his unfamiliarity with the local geography, the broad strokes of his plan could be taken straight from any military textbook. He’s fighting multiple, smaller enemy armies, so he wants to take his own, more numerous army, and attack those smaller armies one by one before they can link up. They call this defeating the enemy “in detail.” But as the Prussian armies score one local victory after another, a sort of analysis paralysis sets in, and historians tend to blame that on the advisor the Emperor has given him, that guy named Krismanic.

        -Take, for example, General Benedek’s original plan for this whole fiasco. He had originally intended to march almost his entire army northeast to beat back the Prussian Second Army, while leaving a tiny screening force along with the Saxon Army to fight a delaying action in the west. After beating the Second Army, Benedek could then use a few men to fortify the border and march most of his men back west to fight the rest of the Prussians.

-Then Krismanic comes in on June 26th and convinces Benedek that the primary Prussian threat lies not in the northeast, with the Second Army, but in the west, with the much larger First Army. This is the thinking of a man who spends more time reading spreadsheets than he does military history. The main Prussian threat isn’t either one of the three invading armies – it’s all three of them linking together. But Krismanic convinces Benedek that the First Army must be the bigger threat because there are more guys in it. That’s literally what he says, at least according to General Benedek, who writes in a letter:

“…one should never think oneself stupider than those about one. At Josephstadt I thought the best plan for me was to attack the Crown Prince [meaning the Prussian Second Army] with my whole strength; but then came Krismanic and said something about primary and secondary force. A success over the primary force must needs bring about success over the secondary, but not the other way about. The primary force (he said) was to be sought beyond Gitschin.”

-Gitschin is a crucial highway junction located just inside the Austrians’ western defensive line at the Iser River. It’s also the place where two of the main Prussian armies – the Elbe Army and the First Army – are supposed to link up. Remember how when the Prussians originally attacked the Austrians had fallen back, only to be ordered back to the front? Well, that’s why. The original plan had been for a fighting retreat, and then Krismanic had convinced Benedek to turn west instead of northeast. So now the plan is to march west to this place called Gitschin before the Prussians do.

-Except then, back to the northeast, the Prussian Second Army had come pouring over the mountain passes sooner than expected, forcing Benedek to change plans yet again, turn back, and deal with them. But his attempts to deal with them are failing, so he now decides to turn back west to Gitschin and deal with the Prussian Elbe Army and First Army, which are converging on the town.

-The Saxon Army, which is retreating from another battle, is also sent to support Count Eduard Clam-Galla, who you may remember is leading the Austrian troops on the Iser River, and the two link up at Gitschin early in the morning on June 29th. Clam-Galla meets with Saxon Crown Prince Albert, who only has a few brigades of troops with him. Most of the Saxons are at camp a few miles away, resting from their long march, and won’t be ready to fight until at least the evening.

-That’s fine, Clam-Galla thinks. His men already hold Gitschin, and have some defenses set up. Then, in the early afternoon, a messenger arrives from General Benedek, saying that an entire army corps will arrive by the end of the day, and that Benedek himself will arrive with the rest of the main Austrian army on the next day, June 30th 1866. So Clam-Galla decides to wait and hold Gitschin against any Prussian attack.

-The Prussians show up, but Benedek’s army never does, because once again, he’s changed his mind, and decided that the Prussian Second Army is the greater threat after all, so now he’s pulling men back to the northeast. Without that extra army corps or most of the Saxons, Clam-Galla only has 40,000 of an expected 60,000 men available to fight off the Prussians, who show up with 26,000 men and their needle guns and once again, the casualties are absurdly lobsided, with over 5,000 Austrian and Saxon casualties compared to around 1,500 Prussians.

-At the end of the day, the Austro-Saxon force is forced to fall back east towards Josephstadt, where General Benedek’s worst nightmare has now come true. The Prussians nearly have him surrounded, they control the local road and rail networks everywhere but due south, and their separate armies are about to link up. In a bid to save his army, he retreats south towards the Elbe River, where he hopes to re-establish some kind of defensive line. Meanwhile, he writes to the Emperor, urging him to make peace, and calling the whole campaign a “debacle.”

Emperor Franz Josef does not make peace, probably because he’s looking at the bigger picture. Yes, the campaign in Bohemia is a fiasco, but things are going pretty well down in Italy, and some of the smaller German states, like Bavaria, are still getting their armies mobilized and will soon be in the fight on Austria’s side. The exception is Hanover, which was in the middle of routine annual military drills when the war was declared, and thus was already mobilized and uniquely well-equipped to act in the face of Prussian aggression. Hanover’s big problem, of course, is its location, all alone up in northwestern Germany, separated from Austria and the smaller allied states. So yes, it’s free to act, but it better act soon.

        -For Hanoverian King George V, all the political grandstanding leading up to the war has been just that – grandstanding, with no real threat behind it. The Austrians and the Prussians have been rattling their sabers at each-other for years, and it’s rarely come to anything more than armed diplomacy. So when the war begins, rather than do something drastic like attack the Prussians or even redeploy his troops, George V stands pat, believing he can make a separate deal with Bismarck. He’s wrong. Almost as soon as the war begins, 28,000 Prussian troops invade Hanover, threatening to surround the 19,000-man Hanoverian Army before it even has a chance to deploy.

        -Hanover’s plans for a war against Prussia do not include taking them on directly. Knowing full well that they have no chance in a one-on-one fight, Hanoverian generals have instead planned for an orderly withdrawal to the south, towards Austrian-allied territory, the thinking being that if their country is going to be overrun no matter what, they can at least salvage the army and fight Prussian troops elsewhere.

        -It’s a solid plan, but King George’s dithering has forced the generals to abandon the kingdom without proper logistical preparations. They leave a large portion of their ammunition and artillery back in the capital, although the army itself is able to make it as far as the Central German town of Langensalza before they have to halt and regroup. Once again, King George tries to negotiate, and appeals personally to Prussian King Wilhelm I to allow Hanover’s army to go join the Austrians in their war against Italy, in exchange for a promise not to fight anywhere in Germany for at least six months.

        -This is delightfully old-school, and it does earn him a temporary truce, but negotiations break down on the night of June 26th, and the Prussians attack him on the morning of June 27th. Amazingly, Hanover’s army wins the battle, but the delay has allowed more Prussian forces to totally surround them. Having won the battle but lost the war, the Kingdom of Hanover surrenders on June 29th, the same day as the Battle of Gitschin. One of Austria’s German allies has been totally eliminated.

Before we move on, I just want to paint a couple of pictures, because I feel like I’ve focused a lot on the Prussian use of the needle gun and how the Austrian bayonet tactics just aren’t a good counter-tactic. But I should also point out that the majority of casualties in this war are coming from the artillery, and here again we see a difference in philosophy. In theory, the Austrians have older, inferior artillery, but in practice, the Prussians have a handful of shiny new breech-loading guns created by Prussian industrialist Alfred Krupp, but most of their artillery is a mish-mash of equipment that’s even older than the Austrians’. The Austrian doctrine is to stand off at range with their artillery, which can shoot further than most of the Prussian guns, and force the Prussian artillery to advance under fire to get into range.

        -Prussian doctrine is to give them just what they asked for. In fact, the Prussian army is the only major European army of the time that does not mandate that its artillery officers protect their guns from capture at all costs. They don’t want those guys to be cautious. They want their artillery advancing right along with the infantry and the cavalry and bringing the fight to the enemy at as close a range as possible. The results are devastating.

        -The following accounts are from a book called Die Waffen nieder!, which translates to Lay Down Your Arms!, and it’s actually a novel, but the novel is a framing device for a number of purportedly true stories, written by late 19th century Austrian peace activist Bertha von Suttner. I struggled over whether to include these quotes because the source is historically dubious, but I decided to go ahead because this was an incredibly influential book with the generation of people who had served in this very war, so even if these specific incidents never happened exactly where and when they were described, something like them certainly resided deep enough in the public consciousness that this book resonated with millions. Suttner writes:

        “I see a horseman at some distance obliquely behind me, at whose side a shell burst. His horse swerved aside… then shot past me. The man sat still in the saddle, but a fragment of the shell had ripped his belly open, and torn all the intestines out. The upper part of his body was held on to the lower only by the spine. From the ribs to the thighs nothing but one great bleeding cavity. A short distance further he fell to the ground, with one foot still clinging in the stirrup, and the galloping horse dragging him on over the stony soil…”

        -Later on, Suttner describes a field hospital, which is set up in:

        “…a farmyard, into which a hundred wounded men had been carried, bandaged, and made comfortable — the poor wretches, glad and thankful that their rescue had been effected. Then a shell came and set the whole on fire. A minute afterwards the hospital was in flames. The shrieks, or rather the howls, which resounded from this abode of despair, and which in its wild agony drowned all the other noises, will remain forever in the memory of any one who heard it.”

        -While Helmuth von Moltke moves little army figurines around a giant map in Berlin, thousands of Prussian troops and even civilians are experiencing this kind of horror. The planners’ short, painless war may not be as painless as they had predicted, but Otto von Bismarck was right: the fate of Germany is being contested by iron and blood.

CHAPTER EIGHT: KONIGGRATZ

With the Prussian Army having secured the Austrian border, Helmuth von Moltke travels to the front. Actually he, Otto von Bismarck, and Kaiser Wilhelm all travel to the front. There, Moltke learns that his generals have become victims of their own success. The Austrians have retreated so quickly that the Prussian scouts have completely lost contact with the enemy. Meanwhile, the Prussians have had no choice but to slow down and regroup. For one thing, the men are tired, but for another, in crossing the frontier, they’ve marched away from that Prussian railway network which they rely on for logistics. Food, ammunition, medicine, and fresh troops now have to be offloaded at the railheads in Prussia, then marched south over a rural frontier road network that is in no way designed for this. So while Prussia’s initial attack was backed by industrial logistical might, it now has to supply its troops the old-fashioned way. Prussian commanders beg Moltke to slow the advance and allow them to resupply, but Moltke sees things the other way ‘round. The longer Prussian armies remain in Austria – and the further they get from Prussian railroads – the worse the supply situation will become. Now more than ever, it’s imperative that the Prussian army move quickly.

        -On the Austrian side, Ludwig von Benedek is a complete mess. As the Prussians had begun to surround his army, he’d gone into seclusion. This was the worst possible time for him to be inactive, because many of the Prussian units had moved ahead of their own supply lines, or had gotten themselves out of range of reinforcements. A more aggressive commander could have made them pay dearly for these kinds of mistakes, but Benedek does nothing except, like I said, write to the Emperor and ask him to make peace. Franz Josef’s response seems to shake him out of it, because the Emperor asks him “Has there been a battle?” – meaning a big battle between the main Austrian and Prussian armies – which hasn’t happened. Emperor Franz Josef is shaming Benedek for giving up during the opening phases of a war, and Benedek comes out of his seclusion and starts engaging with his officers again to plan the retreat to the Elbe River.

        -There’s one guy who Benedek stops talking with, though: that’s Krismanic, his official advisor. He seems to blame Krismanic’s advice for everything that’s happened. Obviously we can’t know for sure, but this seems pretty fair. The pre-war plan had called for an aggressive campaign, and Krismanic had kept advocating an elaborate, 4D-chess-style defense. The irony being that now that the Austrians have lost their initial advantage and need to fall back, an elaborate defensive campaign could actually work. As a matter of fact, there’s a series of fortifications on the other side of the Elbe that function a lot like the Quadrilateral does in Italy; they’re designed specifically to stop a Prussian invasion.

        -So does General Benedek fall back to those fortifications, establish a strong defense behind the Elbe River, and force the Prussians to beat their heads against a metaphorical rock? Well, sort of. But he takes his time doing it. On June 30th, the day after the defeat at Gitschin, Benedek orders a retreat, but not all the way back behind the Elbe. Instead, he marches his men just a few miles south to a position between the village of Saldowa and the city of Königgrätz.

        -The retreat takes two days. More than 200,000 men are crammed onto just a handful of back country roads, with a supply train that American military historian Geoffrey Wawro says is 100 kilometers long, covering a line of retreat that Google Maps tells me is about 28 kilometers long. So by the time the first supply wagons are arriving at Königgrätz, which straddles the Elbe River, almost three quarters of the wagons haven’t even left yet. And on both June 30th and July 1st, the days of the retreat, it’s pouring rain, so these rural dirt roads have all turned to mud, which makes everybody more miserable. Many of the men don’t sleep for the entire march, and many of those guys hadn’t slept the night before, either, because they’d been involved in the fighting, so when the last Austrian troops arrive near Königgrätz on the morning of July 2nd, a lot of them have gone three nights without any sleep.

-Their position is not ideal. They’ve been retreating south, following a narrow vertical gap between two rivers: the Bystrice to their west, and the Elbe to their east. Their rallying point is between Saldowa, which sits on the Bystrice River, and Königgrätz, which like I said is on the Elbe River. Cross the river, and they’ll be in a much safer position. But with so many men and supplies, simply crossing a bridge will take several hours. Keeping the men awake for a fourth consecutive night is not an option. They need to sleep, so they camp outside Königgrätz for the night.

-With no choice but to let his men rest, General Benedek calls his officers together for a meeting. In his book The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's war with Prussia and Italy in 1866, Geoffrey Wawro talks about this meeting. He’s going to throw a handful of names at us that I haven’t mentioned, but these are all generals who serve under Benedek. Wawro writes:

        “When Benedek’s generals arrived in army headquarters at 1:00 P.M. on July 2, most of them expected a thoroughgoing critique of Austria’s lackluster war effort and a debate on the wisdom of prolonging North Army’s stay in the exposed… position. What they got was something altogether different. ‘All [Benedek] asked us,’ General Gondrecourt recalled, ‘was whether or not we had sufficient drinking water in our campsites. Then he decided, unilaterally, without any discussion of strategic or tactical questions, that we would remain in the position before Koniggratz.’ Count Thun, commandant of II Corps, had the same recollection: ‘The possibility of a battle never came up. [Benedek] spoke only of disciplinary matters, nothing about operations.’ Ramming reported that although Benedek raised the issue of ‘timely and clear march dispositions,’ he refused to describe the new aim of Austrian operations now that the push to the Iser had been called off, or to consider the possibility that North Army might be attacked on the Bystrice. When, after the war, Benedek attempted to characterize this toothless conference as a full-blown ‘council of war,’ Gablenz and most of his colleagues angrily dissented. ‘That was no Kriegsrat,’ Gablenz protested. ‘At three o’clock on July 2nd, when we returned from headquarters to our bivouacs, it was plain that the army commandant still had no information on the enemy’s position, strength or movements and had no intention of fighting a battle on the 3rd.’ General Coudenhove agreed: ‘Do you really suppose,’ he wrote Archduke Albrecht after Königgrätz, ‘that a proper council of war would have resolved to make a stand with the Elbe behind us?’”

-To recap, the Austrians have lost their advantage, are on the retreat, have been forced to rest, and General Benedek doesn’t think it’s important to come up with any plan in case the Prussians catch up with them. It’s not as if the Prussians are far behind them, either. Helmuth von Moltke is driving his men hard, and Prussian cavalry scouts have already been skirmishing with some Austrian scouts. But there’s no plan, no effort to coordinate. Each of Benedek’s commanders is left to deal with the situation as he sees fit. Most order their men to dig trenches or construct some other kind of temporary fortifications. Some do not.

Benedek’s failure to lead will cost his army dearly on the following morning, July 3rd. Around 7:30 in the morning, the first Prussian troops come within range of Austrian artillery, and the Austrian gunners open fire. Benedek issues deployment orders, and sets up his command post on an elevated position called the Chlum Heights, with his army arranged on an arc of small hills in front of him, between Königgrätz and the Elbe River at his rear and the Bystrice River to the front. This position itself indicates poor planning, because the Chlum Heights aren’t actually taller than the hills the Austrian troops are positioned on, so while Benedek can mostly see his own men, he can’t see past them to the attacking Prussians, which makes it hard for him to coordinate.

        -For their part, the Prussian Army faces a daunting task. Due to logistical issues, only the Elbe Army and First Army are in position to attack. The larger Second Army has been delayed, and won’t arrive until later. The Elbe Army is on the Prussian right flank, and the First Army has to cover not just the center but also the left flank, until the Second Army comes in from the north (their left) to relieve them.

        -The angle of attack means that the Prussians are attacking across the Bystrice River, and their men take a lot of casualties getting across. Here, the Austrians are able to use their longer-range artillery to their advantage, and the Prussian guns on the other side of the river are too far away to support their men. So far, so good for Austria.

        -As for the Prussians, they just keep advancing, as per their doctrine, so they can get into a range where their needle guns can be effective. The leading Prussian soldiers make straight for the center of that arc of Austrian troops, and at the front of that arc, between the Prussians and the main Austrian line, is a small patch of woods called the Swiep Forest, or Swiepwald, and a bunch of Austrian light infantry have taken cover in the Swiepwald and are now sniping at the Prussians from behind the trees. The Prussians keep marching, and once they get into range, their needle guns do their work and they manage to take over this little bit of forest.

        -Now, I quoted Geoffrey Wawro a minute ago explicitly talking about how General Benedek hasn’t made any battle plans, and that’s true; he hasn’t. But over the first week of the war, Austrian generals have been watching their series of military failures and trying to figure out something new. And right now, their thinking is that pre-war Austrian tactics had been halfway correct. Charging in with the infantry is a disaster. No matter how good your guys are with a bayonet, cold steel is no match for rapid-firing rifles. But when the Austrians have been able to hold the Prussians off at range, their more accurate rifles and artillery have been very effective. So they’ve come to a consensus that they’ll rely less on aggressive charges and try to engage the enemy at long range, where their own weapons are far superior.

        -Well, Austrian Army 4th Corps commander Tassilo Festetics apparently hasn’t gotten the memo. The Swiepwald is in front of his portion of the Austrian line, and when he sees the Prussian troops occupying it, General Festetics decides it’s time for a good old fashioned counter-charge. This should never have happened to begin with. Festetics had been ordered to take up a position a few hundred yards back and hold that position, but engineers who had dug trenches for his men had dug them in a depression where it would be easy for the enemy to shoot down on them, negating the benefit of the trenches. So, without orders, Festetics had advanced forwards to the top of a hill, which had brought his men within range of the Prussian needle guns in the Swiepwald. This negates the Austrians’ range advantage, so Festetics decides to charge. So what happens here is a confluence of buffoonery that leads General Festetics to send one wave of bayonet charges after another against the Prussians in the trees. At 9:30 in the morning, in the middle of one of these attacks, Festetics has his foot blown off by a shell and has to be evacuated, so his deputy, Anton Mollinary, takes over, and Mollinary just keeps feeding men into the meat grinder.

        -The repeated attacks take their toll, and the Prussians, too, begin having to commit more men to the fight in the Swiepwald. Kaiser Wilhelm famously cries: “Moltke, Moltke, we are losing the battle,” and Moltke calmly tells him: “Your majesty will today win not only the battle but the campaign.” For the moment, Moltke seems overconfident. Yes, the Austrians are losing more men than the Prussians, but the Austrians have more men to lose. If they push the Elbe Army and the First Army back across the river, it would appear to be a disaster. Moltke doesn’t care that his men are losing ground in the Swiepwald, though. He has already explained to the Kaiser and Bismarck that his plan is for the Elbe Army and First Army to engage the Austrians and hold them locked in combat until the Second Army arrives and hits them from the side. As long as the Austrians stay engaged, Moltke sees himself winning, even if they push the Prussians back.

        -Worse yet, from the Austrian perspective, this constant series of attacks into the Swiepwald is using up a lot of the troops that are supposed to protect the army’s right flank when the Prussian Second Army shows up, and it’s making them vulnerable.

        -At 11:30 in the morning, it looks like the Austrians have, with heavy losses, pushed the Prussians out of the Swiepwald. And this is where things start to fall apart, because when the first Austrians penetrate through the woods to the other side, they don’t know what to do. Quintin Barry writes:

        “The advancing Austrians were themselves were confused and unsure of their direction; one entire battalion, having pushed through the wood to emerge on its northwestern side was charged by a squadron of Prussian hussars under Captain von Humbert, and promptly surrendered, the total haul being 16 officers and 665 men. They were followed by another detachment of riflemen and, seeing them, Fransecky dispatched two companies under Captain von Ploetz to round them up. 3 officers and 200 men were surrounded and taken prisoner.”

        -At this critical moment, General Benedek dithers again. His men have pushed the Prussians back, and an aggressive attack right now break them altogether, sending the Prussian First and Elbe armies into an unorganized retreat and allowing Benedek to turn the full might of the Austrian army against the incoming Prussian Second Army. Anton Mollinary, that commander who just took over at the Swiepwald, asks him to send in a cavalry charge and end this, but Benedek refuses. He’s just gotten word that the Prussian Second Army has almost arrived to attack him in the right flank. Instead of pressing the attack, he orders Mollinary to pull the 4th Corps back into line and prepare to face this new Prussian attack, but that’s easier said than done. Mollinary’s men are locked into combat, and when you’re actively engaging the enemy, it’s not always easy to pull out, so his men are totally disorganized, and worse yet, they’re way out of position, which means the entire Austrian right flank is disorganized when the Second Army shows up. And, like I said, they’ve also lost a bunch of their own guys in a fight over some woods that weren’t all that tactically important.

I’m simplifying one of history’s great battles here, and there’s a lot more to tell, but the truth is that it’s a lot of what we’ve already seen in this war, the only difference being that when the Prussian Second Army arrives at Königgrätz, the Austrians have nowhere to run. Their only way out is across the Elbe River, which means crossing that bridge, which as you’ll recall would require several hours for the entire army to get across. A desperate General Benedek leaves his artillery on the field, abandoning it to the enemy. The crews remain with their guns to hold off the Prussians as long as they can, while Benedek orders a series of aggressive cavalry charges to protect the artillery crews as well as possible while the rest of the army runs for safety. Over 2,000 Austrian cavalrymen are lost in the action, along with most of General Benedek’s artillery.

-This represents just a fraction of the total losses. Casualty estimates for the Battle of Königgrätz are different in every source, but Quintin Barry gives a number of 9,172 Prussians dead, wounded, and missing, compared to over 44,000 Austrian losses, including nearly 20,000 prisoners. Worse yet, the Austrians have lost that strong defensive position along the Elbe River, and the Prussian Army now has nothing standing between it and the interior of Bohemia. If nothing turns around, they’ll soon be at the outskirts of Vienna. Over the next several days, the Austrians abandon all of modern-day Czechia. The city of Prague itself is left wide open to Prussian attack, although that’s probably for the best. Undefended as it is, the Prussian Army occupies Prague without a fight, sparing many lives.

        -In the face of this total collapse, Emperor Franz Josef himself calls for a ceasefire on July 4th 1866, the day after the Battle of Königgrätz. Kaiser Wilhelm refuses, and the Prussian Army continues its inexorable advance towards Vienna, defeating the Austrians in a couple of small skirmishes along the way.

        -On July 10th, the Emperor fires General Benedek and appoints a new Commander-in-Chief: Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, the guy who has been so successful so far leading the war in Italy. And I kind of feel bad for Archduke Albrecht, because he’s finally worked his way up the ranks of the Austrian military to become Commander-in-Chief, but when he gets the job, he’s like the guy who gets to become CEO of a bankrupt company. Nobody in their right mind expects him to turn this thing around. He's just the unlucky guy who gets to oversee the inevitable implosion.

        -As if to put an exclamation mark on this, July 10th 1866 sees yet another defeat for the Austrian side of the war. The Bavarian army had finally finished mobilizing, and is marching to link up with the German Confederation’s 8th Federal Corps, which is a large combined force formed by the armies of some of the really tiny states. A Prussian army group intercepts the Bavarians near a town called Bad Kissingen and defeat them, forcing them back into Bavaria to regroup. This takes 15,000 more men off of Austria’s side of the playing field, and allows that Prussian army group to turn towards the 8th Federal Corps. The Austrians are running out of allies, and they’re running out of cards to play. It seems like the only thing going well for them is the war in Italy.

CHAPTER NINE: GARIBALDI SAVES THE DAY

While the Prussian Army rampages towards Vienna, the Italian Army is still licking its wounds. They’ve tried and failed at attacking the Quadrilateral directly, and they have nothing to show for it but embarrassment. This is a real problem, not just for the army, but for King Victor Emmanuel II and the new Prime Minister, Bettino Ricasoli. What do you do when your side is winning a war but your ally is doing all the work? How do you know you’re actually going to get what you want when the war ends?

        -The alliance between Prussia and Italy is a short-term arrangement by design. Remember, when Italy signed, they gave Prussia just three months to attack the Austrians or the treaty would be over. And not only is this an alliance of convenience, but Prussia and Italy don’t even have the same goals. Italian nationalists, the ones running the show right now, want Italy to take over Venetia. Otto von Bismarck wants to establish Prussian domination in Germany while still keeping Austria as an ally after the war. These goals have nothing to do with each-other.

        -This is one of those cases where I have to quibble with mainstream historiography. The mainstream view is that what happens in Italy from here on out doesn’t matter, because it’s the Prussian military drive into the heart of Austria that forces Emperor Franz Josef to surrender, and that the Italians are going to get Venetia no matter what because that’s what Bismarck had promised them. But I think this is misguided. We’ve already seen how Machiavellian Bismarck is. If Bismarck thinks the Austrians are going to draw a line over Venetia because the Italians haven’t won a single battle against them, why wouldn’t he just drop the issue, provided he gets everything he wants for Prussia? I think that the Italians need to score some kind of win here, to present some kind of threat to the security of the Austrian state, if the Austrians are going to just give up a wealthy region like Venetia.

        -It seems Italian leadership shares my perspective, because in July of 1866, while the Prussians are pursuing the fleeing Austrians south through Central Europe, the Italians launch a second offensive. This time, it’s going to be a three-pronged attack – well, three prongs plus a blocking force. The former-General-turned-Prime-Minister-turned-General-again, Alfonso la Marmora, will remain in charge of his army, but the army itself will be reduced to a smaller blocking force. His job this time is not to attack the Austrians directly, but to occupy the Alpine foothills to the west of the Quadrilateral and make it look like he’s going to attack again. This will force the Austrians to keep most of their forces inside the Quadrilateral, and prevent them from responding to the main Italian attack.

        -The main attack will be led by Marmora’s old rival, Enrico Cialdini. His job is to march east across the open plain that lies south of the Quadrilateral and north of the Adriatic sea and drive directly towards Venice. Not only can he threaten to capture it outright, but there’s a good chance that the presence of a large Italian army will provoke another Venetian revolt where the citizens kick out the Austrians on their own. Regardless, this main attack will be vulnerable to getting surrounded. If the Austrians were to sail a small army around behind them, Cialdini’s army could be cut off in Venetia. To prevent this, the Italian Navy operates the second prong of the attack. Their job is to keep the Austrian Navy busy in the Adriatic Sea and preferably annihilate them as a fighting force. The third prong of the Italian attack is the smallest, and it’s actually already been launched. Since the beginning of the war, our old friend Giuseppe Garibaldi has been leading a volunteer force in Northern Italy, including many of his old Hunters of the Alps. This small force, eventually numbering some 38,000 men, is trying to punch through the mountains and into the Trentino Valley, a fertile region surrounded by the limestone crags of the Dolomite Mountains. If Garibaldi can push the Austrians out of the Trentino Valley, he’ll be in position to surround their army in the Quadrilateral from the north.

        -The middle prong of the three-pronged attack advances more or less unopposed. Enrico Cialdini marches east across the Adriatic coast towards Venice, while most of the Austrian army is squaring off against Marmora at the Quadrilateral. So far, so good. But things don’t go quite as well at sea. I’ll let English historian Denis Mack Smith pick up the story here, which he does in his book The Making of Italy, 1796-1870:

        “The Italian navy in 1866 was stronger than the Austrian, with twelve ironclads against only seven; but the commander, Admiral Persano, held his position by nepotism and seniority. Despite several premonitory disasters in his early career, and despite the strongest hostility from the other senior officers, he was in command when the first occasion arose for the fleet to show its mettle.

        “The navy had been built solely for use against Austria, yet little attempt was made to have it ready when war had been decided, nor were maps prepared for an attack on the Austrian naval bases. The Austrian Admiral Tegetthoff arrived on June 27 outside Ancona harbor and challenged the Italian navy to emerge, but Persano was caught completely unawares, unable to reply with a single shot or even to get up steam. Early in July, when the Germans asked for urgent action, the government desperately sent orders that Persano was to seek out and destroy the enemy fleet. The admiral spent five days cruising around waiting to be attacked, and then returned to port.

“Ordered out again by the politicians, this time under threat of dismissal, suddenly Persano improvised a scheme to capture the island of Lissa off the Adriatic coast. But he was caught by the Austrian fleet while his own ships were scattered round the island and unable to see his signals. At the last moment he made confusion worse by transferring his flag to a different ship. This gave an excuse for what seems to have been a deliberate decision by the other admirals to ignore his orders and not to cover up his mistakes. The way that he and his colleagues later accused each other in public was among the other unfortunate episodes of his subsequent trial and condemnation.”

-The Battle of Lissa, which takes place on July 20th 1866, is a humiliation for an Italian Navy that everyone had predicted would be one of the nation’s greatest strengths. The Italian ironclads are bombarding the shore of the island and attempting to land troops when the Austrians show up with a fleet that includes not just early ironclads, but also some of the last wooden ships of the line ever to see battle. The Austrian admiral, Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, leads his own ships directly into the middle of the Italian formation and rams a handful of vessels. Admiral Persano is busy changing flagships, moving his entire staff from one ship to another, and then is slow to reorganize the rest of his fleet, which allows the Austrians to attack even more semi-isolated ships. At the end of the day, the Italian fleet is forced back west to the port of Ancona, having lost three of its nine ironclad warships. For his failure, Admiral Persano will be called before the Italian Senate and stripped of command.

-With the Austrians victorious at sea, Enrico Cialdini’s advance towards Venice is threatened, the army’s supply line now vulnerable to Austrian attack. If they’re to avoid a vicious counterattack, the Italians will need a victory in the north – something to put pressure on the Austrians in the Quadrilateral. It all comes down to Giuseppe Garibaldi and his little army of volunteers.

Since the beginning of the war, Garibaldi has been doing what he does best – fighting small battles in rugged terrain with a small army that punches well above its weight. What he hasn’t done yet is score any decisive victory that would force a real adjustment in Austrian strategy. See, his men have slowly been advancing north through the Alps towards the Austrian Alpine city of Trent – modern-day Trento. To get there, they’ve had to march past the long edge of a long, skinny lake called Lake Garda, where the Austrians have a naval flotilla that can shell them if they get too close. So the Italians have to stay far from the lake, taking all these narrow mountain roads, and because the local roads have such low capacity, Garibaldi has to constantly divide his army up into smaller groups, and the Austrians are fighting them the whole way, and it’s been a real headache. But the disastrous campaign in Germany has forced Austria to pull back a bunch of troops from Italy to strengthen the defenses of Vienna, and this presents an opportunity for Garibaldi.

-On July 20th 1866, part of his army occupies the village of Bezzecca, which sits in a mountain valley near the northern end of Lake Garda. Because the army is divided, his men have to wait for Garibaldi himself to arrive with the rest of his troops, so they stay in the village overnight, and this in turn presents an opportunity for local Austrian forces. They are weakened right now, but as long as Garibaldi’s army is divided, so is he. The Austrians don’t wait. The next morning, July 21st, local commander Franz von Kuhnenfeld attacks at dawn. The Italians wake up, find themselves surrounded, and retreat from Bezzecca towards Garibaldi’s main column, with the Austrians now in control of the village and in hot pursuit.

-Garibaldi himself is recovering from a wound he’d sustained the previous month, and is riding a carriage instead of a faster horse, but he brings his carriage to the fight as quickly as he can to rally his men. Soon, the main column of Italian troops begins to arrive, and they get there in time to occupy some hills in the vicinity of town. Garibaldi writes in his autobiography:

“We agreed to have the heights on the left occupied by the battalions of the ninth regiment, which were beginning to arrive. It was well we did so, for the first advantage gained during the day was derived from the occupation of these positions by the brave fellows of that regiment, led—I say it with pride—by my son Menotti. The two battalions of the ninth were commanded by Cossovich and Vico Pellizzari, both of the Thousand, and quite worthy of the distinction.”

-When Garibaldi mentions his commanders being “of the Thousand,” he means they were part of the Expedition of the Thousand, the invasion of Sicily that we talked about last episode. These men occupy the high ground near Bezzecca, where the Austrians could otherwise have moved out artillery to shell the incoming Italians. Not long after, Garibaldi’s own artillery arrives, and those guys link up with some other Italian artillerymen who had been retreating, and they go back and start shelling the Austrians, who are forced out of the town. By nightfall, the Italians once again occupy Bezzecca and, more importantly, Garibaldi is able to begin concentrating his army.

-Around 12,000 men had been involved in the battle on each side, and the Italians actually lose more men than the Austrians, with just under 600 killed and wounded compared to the Austrians’ 107 killed and wounded, not to mention the more than 1,000 Italians who had been captured in the initial Austrian attack.  However, this is a big morale victory for an Italian army that had needed a major win, and by bringing his army together near the north end of Lake Garda, Garibaldi is now able to threaten the city of Trent. A victory there would basically kick the Austrians out of the Trentino Valley.

-This never actually happens, because events elsewhere will force the war to a conclusion, but Garibaldi claims that by the middle of August, there are no Austrian troops remaining between him and Trent. He writes that on August 25th, he has 50,000 men ready to make an attack, but:

“Instead of this, here I am, soiling paper, in order that those to come may hear what we went through. An order from the chief command of the army intimated to me that I was to retreat and evacuate the Tyrol; my reply was, ‘I obey,’ a word which afterwards gave rise to the same cavillings and complaints as ever on the part of the Mazzinians, who, as usual, wanted me to proclaim the republic, and march either on Vienna or Florence.”

-After all that, Garibaldi will be withdrawn from the Trentino Valley, bringing an end to the campaign. The decision, as we’ll see, is a political one. With the words “I obey,” Garibaldi ends his service with the Italian government. The Italians had hoped to use Garibaldi instead to raise an insurgent army in Austrian Croatia and march from there to Vienna – an imitation of his campaign in Sicily a few years back. But the Italian naval defeat at the Battle of Lissa has now made it impossible for the Italians to safely get him across the Adriatic. Yet again, an Italian war of independence has not gone as far as Garibaldi would have liked, but rather than lead a republican revolt against King Victor Emanuel, he will once more ride off into the sunset. That said, this won’t be the last time we see Garibaldi in our story, or even in this episode.

CHAPTER TEN: AN AMICABLE PEACE

Rewinding a bit to late July, both the Prussian and Italian advances are starting to stall out, their supply lines becoming ever more stretched as they advance deeper into Austrian territory. Meanwhile, as they’ve lost ground on both fronts, the Austrians are paradoxically getting stronger, as their supply lines get shorter and shorter. In Germany, the Austrian Army under the command of Archduke Albrecht has built a formidable defensive line along the Danube River. On the Italian frontier, Austria has basically abandoned Venice, opting instead to prepare their defenses along the Isonzo River, which lies along the modern-day border between Italy and Slovenia.

        -Up north, Helmuth von Moltke is facing a major logistical issues. As I mentioned, the dense Prussian railroad network he had used to concentrate his troops so quickly simply does not extend to the Austrian side of the frontier, where there are fewer railroads. This creates a supply bottleneck, which only gets worse the further south the army marches. By the 22nd of July, the day after Garibaldi’s victory at Bezzecca, the Prussians are on the Danube, squaring off with the Austrians at the gates of Vienna. They’re also suffering from a cholera epidemic, which is only made worse by poor nutrition among the men.

        -That same day, the Prussians attack the nearby city of Bratislava, but the battle is called off at noon, when word arrives that Bismarck and Emperor Franz Josef have negotiated a cease fire. At least for a moment, it seems like the war in Germany is over. Both sides had wanted this to be quick, and now that the Prussians have their sword at Austria’s throat, neither side really wants to continue fighting. We talked about how horrific things have been for the men on the battlefield, but for the public at large as well as the politicians, the German name for this war, the Brothers’ War, is apt. This isn’t a war of national survival. It’s like two brothers who get into an argument and throw hands. They don’t really want to kill each-other, and both of them would prefer to be on good terms.

        -This ceasefire takes the Italians totally by surprise, and they see things a bit differently than the Prussians. The Italian view is that Bismarck has betrayed them by making a separate peace with a common enemy. The Prussian view is that this war was always supposed to be quick, and while they had been blitzing their way to Vienna, Italy had been fighting a far smaller Austrian army than Prussia, and it had still taken a month just for Enrico Cialdini’s troops to finally make it to Venice.

        -Regardless, as soon as it becomes clear that the cease fire with Prussia is going to stick, the Austrians start moving troops away from Vienna and the Danube, and marching them back south to the Isonzo River, where they’re preparing a counterattack. Realizing that things are only going to go downhill from here, Prime Minister Bettino Ricasoli signs his own cease fire with Austria on August 12th 1866. And this is why, on August 25th, Garibaldi is ordered to withdraw from the Alps. That region, called Tyrol, is politically sensitive for the Austrians, far more so than Venetia, and there’s no way they’re going to give it up under these conditions. So the Italian government does the smart thing and moves all their troops to Venetia during negotiations, which also makes sense because, remember, taking Venetia was the main Italian war goal in the first place. Italy is also dealing with its own internal issues. In September, before the final peace treaty is signed, the government will have to divert troops to deal with a revolt in Sicily, which is a whole different can of worms I’m not even going to get into.

        -The Italians aren’t the only ones caught off guard by the Austro-Prussian ceasefire. Some of Austria’s smaller German allies are still fighting – notably the German Confederation’s 8th Federal Corps, consisting of troops from Baden, Hesse, Nassau, and Württemberg. The Prussians attack this army on July 24th, in the last major battle of the war, the Battle of Tauberbischofsheim. The smaller German powers know they can’t win the war, but they hope to at least give the Prussians a bloody nose and secure a better position during peace negotiations. They fail. After this defeat, the armies of the small powers scatter, and the Prussian Army goes into mop-up mode. By the end of July, all of Germany has settled into an uneasy truce.

The Austro-Prussian War – or whatever you want to call it – ends with two peace treaties. The first, known as the Peace of Prague, is signed on August 23rd 1866 by Prussian and Austrian representatives meeting at Prague’s luxurious Blue Star Hotel. The terms are surprisingly generous, but this makes sense. Bismarck wants to secure Prussia’s position as a major power. He does not want to permanently alienate the Austrian Empire or leave it crippled.

        -To begin with, the treaty calls for the immediate release of all prisoners of war and the restoration of normal diplomatic relations between Prussia and Austria. Furthermore, remember the Duchy of Schleswig, up near Denmark, where all of this started? Control of Schleswig is transferred from Austria to Prussia, which annexes it along with Holstein and incorporates both duchies into the new Province of Schleswig-Holstein. This firmly establishes Prussian control over Northern Germany, pushes the Austrians out, and expands Prussia’s actual physical territory. In the process, the treaty grants amnesty to all citizens on both sides for any political positions they may have taken during the war. Basically, there are to be no reprisals against civilians. It’s worth noting that the treaty also calls for a referendum in the northern and central parts of Schleswig, where the people are to have the option of joining the Kingdom of Denmark instead. The Prussians go back on this and never hold a vote, but after the German defeat in World War I, the Treaty of Versailles will force the Weimar Republic to finally go ahead with a referendum. In February and March of 1920, Northern Schleswig will vote to leave Germany and become part of Denmark, while Central Schleswig will vote to remain in Germany, codifying the modern-day border between Germany and Denmark.

        -Returning to 1866, the most important part of the Peace of Prague is Article 4, which reads:

        “His Majesty the Emperor of Austria recognizes the dissolution of the late German Bund, and gives his consent to a new formation of Germany, in which the Imperial State of Austria shall take no part. Moreover, His Majesty promises to recognize the closer Federal relations which His Majesty the King of Prussia is about to establish north of the line of the Maine [River], and also agrees that the German States to the south of this line shall form a union, the national connection of which with the Northern Confederacy is reserved for a more defined agreement between both parties, and which is to maintain an international independent existence.”

        -In plain English, the German Confederation is abolished. Dead. Buried. Instead, all German states north of the Main River, which means most of Germany, are to become part of a new organization called the North German Confederation, and Austria is going to be excluded from this new North German Confederation. The only North German states who are not required to join are the Duchies of Limburg and Luxembourg in far western Germany, both of which are closely tied to the Netherlands. After further negotiations with the Dutch and the British, Limburg will ultimately become part of the Netherlands, while Luxembourg retains its independence into the 21st century.

        -Within the North German Confederation, there are to be significant changes of territory. If you’ll recall, King Wilhelm I is a true monarchist, and is hesitant to dethrone other monarchs, while Otto von Bismarck has no such compunctions. The Peace of Prague is something of a compromise between the two men. The countries of Frankfurt, Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, and Nassau – the ones who had fought hardest on the side of the Austrians – well, they get the Bismarck solution and are totally annexed to Prussia. Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt continue to exist, but are forced to give up some land, which is more in keeping with King Wilhelm’s philosophy. The rest of the North German countries – the ones who were neutral in the war or fought on Prussia’s side – remain untouched.

        -Countries south of the Main River are left out of the North German Confederation to start with, but most, with the exception of Liechtenstein, will join in the following year, 1867. The most important of these new members is Saxony, which remains totally intact following the war and joins the North German Confederation 100% voluntarily.

        -It’s not hard to understand why. Unlike the earlier variants of the German Confederation, the North German Confederation is starting to look more like a proper country. In 1867, a constitution is signed – mostly written by Bismarck, establishing a confederated state, similar to the United States or Canada. The Confederation is to have a common military, post office, passport, criminal code, and system of weights and measures. And, of course, the old Zollverein customs-free trade union is to remain in place. So if you’re a small German country like Saxony, joining is a no-brainer. With more than three quarters of the North German Confederation’s population and territory, Prussia dominates the new Parliament. King Wilhelm is elected President, while Otto von Bismarck is elected chancellor.

        -Inside the new Confederation, there’s a growing sense of pride and German unity. Nowhere is this pride felt more strongly than in the army, where Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke and Minister of War Albrecht von Roon have scored an unparalleled victory. Operating under their leadership and only loosely answerable to the civilian government, the Prussian General Staff has executed a lightning-fast war of maneuver that allowed a smaller army to wipe the floor with a larger one. Geoffrey Wawro writes:

        “In general, the ‘German method of strategy’ disclosed in 1866 spurned defensive positions and deep, interlocked formations. Instead, Moltke had cast his army like a net over the densely concentrated Austrian army. The obvious risk of this Prussian approach — that the deeply formed Austrians might have cut through the thin, widespread Prussian net at any point and folded it up from behind — had never materialized. Austrian units, mesmerized by the action on their front, had consistently permitted themselves to be enveloped from their flanks, first at Skalice, then at [Gitschen], and finally at Koniggratz. The lesson of the Austro-Prussian War seemed to be that well-armed, clever Prussian troops — able, as a French admirer observed, ‘to act promptly and confidently in all phases of battle’ — could be dispersed across very broad fronts with minimal risk in order to facilitate Koniggratz-style envelopments.”

        -In Austria, the response is far less jubilant. Humiliated generals go back to the drawing boards to come up with new plans, while humiliated politicians try to forge a way forward. Austrian nationalists argue that instead of remaining tied to Germany, the Empire should instead try to make an alliance with the French. But culturally speaking, Austria is German, and making friends with a historical rival like France is much easier said than done. Austria being a conservative type of monarchy, cooler heads prevail, and Emperor Franz Josef instead will ultimately settle for the only foreign policy that makes sense – continued alliance and cooperation with Prussia.

        -This isn’t to say that Austria comes out of the Austro-Prussian war totally defeated and without any solutions. In fact, Franz Josef is about to fix what he views as the source of all of Austria’s recent trouble, and that’s the constant unrest in Hungary. The Empire recently fought a war against the French and the Italians, and they lost. Now they fought against the Prussians and the Italians and they lost again, and a lot of it comes down to the fact that this entire time, the Austrians have been fighting with one hand tied behind their back, and Franz Josef is going to do something about that. We’ll get to his solution in a minute.

For now, I want to return once more to August of 1866 and the Peace of Prague, where the Austrians and Prussians agree that for reasons of national pride, Austria will hand over the region of Venetia to France, which will then hand it over to the Kingdom of Italy, provided the people of Venice actually vote to join Italy. This complicated arrangement allows the Austrians to save face by not giving land directly to an Italian Kingdom that had not defeated them in a single major battle.

        -The Italians hem and haw about this, and try to negotiate for some alpine territory as well as the Adriatic port city of Trieste. But with the Prussians having already signed their peace treaty, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy has no leverage, and on October 3rd 1866, Italy and Austria sign the Treaty of Vienna, officially closing the books on the Third Italian War of Independence… or whatever you want to call it.

-On October 21st through 22nd, a referendum is held in the Venetia region, and the people vote overwhelmingly to join the Kingdom of Italy. This is a lot like other Italian referendums of the era, with obvious intimidation and fraud, and a claimed result of more than 99% of citizens in favor. But no matter how you cut it, Venetia and the city of Venice are now a part of Italy. As part of this arrangement, Emperor Franz Josef sends King Victor Emmanuel the Iron Crown of Lombardy. This crown has been used to crown almost every Italian king since the 1300s, and, if you believe the legends, was the same crown used to crown Charlemagne, and even contains one of the nails that had pinned Christ to the cross. More to the point, the Iron Crown of Lombardy is a symbol of Habsburg rulership over Italy and, in their capacity as Kings of Lombardy and Venetia, this crown had been used for the coronation of almost every Holy Roman Emperor. By giving the crown to Victor Emmanuel, Franz Josef is acknowledging that he no longer contests any claim to the title of King of Italy.

-If you’re an Italian nationalist, you’d think you’d be thrilled with this arrangement. Garibaldi’s smallish victory at Bezzecca notwithstanding, your country just came close to disaster in a major war, and instead you came out having achieved 90% of your war goals. What’s not to love? Italy is now even more unified, with only small exceptions like the Trentino Valley and South Tyrol in the Alps and the city of Trieste on the Adriatic. Oh, and Rome. Pope Pius is still in charge there.

-But despite Italy’s success, most Italian nationalists are under no illusions. They came close to disaster, and were only saved by sheer Prussian dominance. Historian and nationalist Neapolitan politician Pasquale Villari publishes a scathing analysis almost as soon as the war is over, entitled “Whose fault is it?” He begins:

“The war is over and we possess Venice. After six years of preparation, it cost us less effort than we expected. Yet no one is content. Above all the war destroyed many illusions as well as destroying our unlimited self-confidence. The traditionally slow Germans were seen to move like lightning, while the fiery Italians crept like a tortoise. In one victory after another, Prussia annihilated the Austrian forces against whom we could do so little on land or sea. Never again can we look at ourselves quite as we used to do.”

-Pasquale Villari goes on to argue that the fault lies with the Italian people themselves, because they have an elected government and have chosen to be led by fools. He looks at Italy’s military failures and compares them to similar failures in private business, while the same problems that plague the national government – incompetence, corruption, and blind adherence to bureaucratic processes – also plague local governments. Villari blames all of this on shoddy education, saying:

“It was not the Austrian garrisons in Mantua, Verona and the rest of the ‘Quadrilateral’ which barred our path, so much as our seventeen million illiterates, nearly a third of whom still live in truly arcadian simplicity.

“Every man of good will must therefore set his hand to a new war of internal conquest. Italians are ready for any sacrifice so long as their best instincts are appealed to. Every party must examine its own failings and open a new page. Everywhere people are asking how we can reorganize the country, and this should be the dominant issue in politics. Woe to us if we and the government let this moment of truth go by without action. Woe to us if we go on trusting blindly to laws and decrees, for executed unintelligently they are depressive and not enlivening. Nothing will happen if we go on expecting manna from heaven, if the government still expects wonders from people who cannot even read, or if the country goes on thinking that they can leave everything to their rulers or that some mysterious new system will suddenly emerge to save us.”

-While Pasquale Villari takes his sense of wounded national pride and uses it to look inward, other Italian nationalists look outward. For many, there’s nothing wrong with Italy that can’t be fixed by a little more unification. And with Austria well and truly out of the picture, Rome is the next logical target.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE ROMAN QUESTION

Last episode, we talked about the “German Question,” the question of how – or even if – the German nation is to be unified into a single state, like the French. That question has now been at least partially answered by Bismarck. In Italy, there’s a similar issue that people are calling the “Roman Question.” Rome is part of Italy, after all. That’s a geographical fact, not a controversial political hot take. The Roman people are Italian. Again, pretty uncontroversial. King Victor Emmanuel claims to rule over all Italian people. So why does the Pope, not the King, rule Rome?

        -This nationalist framing might be new, but the issue of the balance of power between church and state on the Italian peninsula dates back to the Early Middle Ages. The Papal States themselves date back to 728 AD, when King Liutprand of the Lombards gave the fortress town of Sutri, along with some smaller towns in the vicinity of Rome, to Pope Gregory II. Prior to this, the Pope had already become one of Italy’s largest private landowners, but these fortress towns mark the first manifestation of direct Papal political rule. A generation later, in 756, King Pepin of the Franks would grant a much larger territory to Pope Stephen II, expanding the Pope’s territory from Rome in the west to Ravenna in the northeast. The Emperor Charlemagne would further extend that territory in 781.

        -This series of land grants came with an embedded controversy. If the Emperor could grant land, could he take it away? And where was the line between spiritual and worldly authority? The result was a seemingly endless series of disputes throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Much of Italian history, from the 12th through 15th centuries, is written in the blood of two rival political factions: the pro-Papal Guelphs and the pro-Imperial Ghibellines. In fact, in the 19th century, some writers refer to the Pope’s supporters as “neo-Guelphs” and the Italian nationalists as “neo-Ghibellines.”

        -If you remember from last episode, Pope Pius IX now only rules the city of Rome and a small territory around it, and he does so under French protection. If we look at France, Napoleon III may be an Emperor, but he’s the Emperor of a country with a recent history of beheading its leaders, and the people of France are upset that Napoleon III is supporting a Pope who many view as opposed to national self-determination. Ever sensitive to public opinion, Napoleon III had brokered an agreement between France, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Italy. Signed on September 15th 1864, the agreement stated that King Victor Emmanuel II was now responsible for the integrity of the Papal States and promised not to violate their frontiers. We actually talked about this agreement earlier in the episode; it’s called the September Convention, and we talked about it from the Italian perspective. A secret clause also required Italy to move their capital away from Turin to some other city. Italy moved its capital to Florence a few months after the treaty was signed, and, in exchange for all this, Napoleon III had promised to withdraw all French troops from Rome within two years.

-There are two ways to read this situation. The cynical way to read it is that Napoleon is washing his hands of the Pope and handing Rome over to Italy with a wink and a nod. But there’s also a more idealistic read on it. If the Roman Question is why King Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, does not rule over the Romans, the answer might just be that he’s their protector – that Rome is a semi-independent zone under the domestic rule of the Pope, but under the military aegis of the Kingdom of Italy.

-Well, here we are. It’s October of 1866, the Treaty of Vienna has just been signed, Italy now owns Venice, and would you look at that? All the French troops have just left Rome. Time to see if this compromise will hold.

-Officially, it does. The Italian government makes no aggressive moves towards Rome in 1866, and Prime Minister Bettino Ricasoli even tries to work out an agreement to restore confiscated Church property to the Pope. Pope Pius accepts his proposal, but nationalists in the Italian Parliament shoot it down. After a brief standoff with Parliament, Ricasoli resigns as Prime Minister in April of 1867, and is succeeded by another center-left liberal named Urbano Rattazzi, who also fails to come up with a compromise that will appease hardline nationalists.

-Before we move on, observant listeners may wonder why Pope Pius IX is so opposed to Italian unification. As we discussed last episode, after the first Italian revolutions, he becomes a deeply spiritual man and remains uninvolved in worldly affairs. Rome is basically being governed by a council of cardinals right now while Pius focuses on his primary role as head of the Universal Church. So why is this man, who voluntarily stepped back from politics and isn’t really governing Rome anyway, so opposed to handing secular authority to King Victor Emmanuel?

-There are a few plausible answers, and I don’t have time to discuss them all. However, one is provided by Odo Russell, Great Britain’s unofficial ambassador to the Holy See during this time. I think this theory is worth mentioning because Russell seems to have formed a friendship with Pope Pius, who Denis Mack Smith says is unusually frank and open with the young diplomat. In Smith’s book The Making of Italy, 1796-1870, he speculates that the Pope’s openness is probably due to the fact that Russell is a rare friendly face. Britain is a Protestant country with no official position on the Roman Question, so Russell is at least nominally neutral on issues of both church and state politics. Therefore, the Pope can speak with him more freely than he can with most people. Smith then goes on to quote a long letter from Odo Russell to his uncle Lord John Russell, who is the British Foreign Secretary at this time, and this letter recounts a long, frank conversation Russell had held with Pope Pius back in 1861, just before Piedmont-Sardinia’s original metamorphosis into Italy. I’m not going to read the whole letter, but after some diplomatic formalities, the Pope complains that Britain gives sanctuary to Italian revolutionaries and allows them to organize their activities from the safety of the British Isles.

-Russell denies this, but says that the British government does prefer a more liberal and unified Italy for the sake of European peace and stability. He reminds Pius that back in 1848, the revolutionaries had flown the Papal flag, put his statue on barricades, and begged him to become King, and that they only turned against the Pope when Pius turned against the revolution. Russell gives the examples of other countries like Greece and Belgium that have recently gained national independence, and asks why Britain shouldn’t give the Italian government at least some moral support. Russell then writes that a smile crosses Pius’ face, and that his “Italian heart” warms, and then the Pope answers:

“Do you know what Italian Unity means? It means a nation of five and twenty millions harboring more talent, mind and energy than any nation in the world, with an army of three hundred thousand men and a fleet of three hundred ships. History proves the eminence of Italian generals, and our admirals would soon command the seas. Italy left to herself would soon be the first of the Great Powers of the world, and therefore the Five Powers of Europe will ever prevent her unity.”

-After a little more diplomatic back-and-forth, Lord Odo Russell asks what Pope Pius would say if, hypothetically speaking, his uncle the Foreign Minister were to ask him his opinion on Italy, and the Pope answers:

“I would say that Italian unity and independence is a great and beautiful idea, but that it is impossible.”

-In Russell’s telling, Pope Pius is opposed to an Italian nation not because he objects to the idea per se, but because he believes that to engage in such a project will only invite greater violence and more suffering further down the road.

-Anyway, the second Italy takes over responsibility for Rome’s protection in fall of 1866, our old friend Giuseppe Garibaldi starts publicly campaigning for the Kingdom to annex the Papal States. Now, there was this whole incident I skipped, after the last war, in 1862, where Garibaldi tried to invade Rome with a handful of volunteers, got shot in the foot by Italian troops, and was arrested. But this time, he has real support, if only because of a power vacuum in Italian politics. Prime Minister Rattazzi barely has enough support to stay in power, nobody else in Parliament has any control over the situation, and as for the military, Garibaldi is the only significant Italian officer with a victory to his name. The guy is popular, and a lot of Italians are on board with the whole idea of Roman annexation.

-So is King Victor Emmanuel II. Although the King of Italy has less dictatorial power than, say, King Wilhelm I of Prussia, he’s still more independent than a more established constitutional monarch like Britain’s Queen Victoria. In his book Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento, Denis Mack Smith writes:

“The very day that the French troops withdrew, [Victor Emmanuel] authorized a secret plan to subvert the Papal States from within. An organizing committee was appointed which was in touch with Garibaldi and received subsidies from the Secret Service funds. The king’s intention was that, after a decent interval, a rising would be organized in Rome which would provide an excuse for him to intervene and ‘restore law and order’. Patriotic propaganda did not allow him to suspect that the Romans would not rise in rebellion to join the rest of Italy.”

-Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel broadly agree that taking the Papal States will require a combination of mob action and military intervention. The government even gives Garibaldi access to a Secret Service slush fund to finance an anti-Papal revolution. However, Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi have totally different opinions on how to proceed. To begin with, Denis Mack Smith uses the words “after a decent interval” to describe the king’s plans, meaning he wants to wait a little before doing anything against the Pope. Garibaldi has waited until about five minutes after the last French troops left Rome, and taking action this soon is just a bad look for Italy.

-Moreover, Victor Emmanuel wants the Roman mob to rise up first. When there’s rioting in the streets outside Saint Peter’s Basilica, Italian troops – or Garibaldian volunteers – can move in to “restore order” and then simply never leave. Italy would get to look like the good guys when the world is watching, and by the time it became apparent they were never leaving, the occupation of Rome would be old news. Garibaldi wants to attack first and hope the mob materializes afterwards. This would make Italy look like the aggressor, and it’s Garibaldi’s insistence on raising an army right now for an immediate attack that turns Victor Emmanuel off to the whole idea.

        -As Garibaldi tours the country raising an army of volunteers with Secret Service funds, the government now tries to stop him. On September 22nd 1867, Prime Minister Rattazzi has Garibaldi arrested, but he is almost immediately released by nationalists in the government. Rattazzi himself is forced out of office on October 27th, and replaced by another guy named Luigi Menabrea, who immediately issues a new arrest warrant for Garibaldi.

        -It’s too late. A day earlier, October 26th, Garibaldi and an army of 10,000 volunteers had already crossed the border into Lazio, the region surrounding Rome. The only thing standing between them and the Eternal City is a small mixed force of professional Papal soldiers and a band of volunteers known as the Legion of Antibes.

The Papal States owes its defensive plans to Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, the Papal Secretary of State who I introduced in the last episode. If you’ll recall, he’s a man who made his career in the secular branch of the Church, working as an administrator in both the State and Treasury ministries. He’s a sharp contrast to Pope Pius IX, and while the Pope is busy attending to spiritual affairs, Cardinal Antonelli has had to come up with some way to protect Rome in the absence of French soldiers. As it turns out, the answer is “other French soldiers.” No. Seriously. The core of the Papal Army consists of two elite light infantry units, and one of them is basically French.

        -See, Napoleon III isn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of the Italian government taking over Rome. In September of 1864, when he had originally agreed to withdraw French troops from the Papal States, it had been part of a broader French effort to forge a strategic alliance with Italy, in part to defend France against possible Prussian aggression. Since then, Italy has gone and made an alliance with Prussia to launch an aggressive war of its own, and the last thing Napoleon wants is a more powerful Italy teaming up with Prussia again in some hypothetical future war against France.

        -So Napoleon has allowed a small unit of French troops, about a thousand men, to remain secretly in Rome as members of the Papal Army, although the secret is very poorly-kept. The men’s uniforms are basically French Regular Army uniforms with Papal unit insignias stitched onto them, the officers retain their French commissions and salaries, and the unit’s commander, Colonel Charles D’Argy, is French. Even the enlisted men, who are on the Pope’s payroll, seem to have been released from their official French service specifically to serve in Rome. Eventually, this 1,000-man elite unit comes to be known as the Legion of Antibes, since a large number of its soldiers come from the French city of Antibes near the Italian border.

        -I said Cardinal Antonelli and the Papal States were relying on two elite military units, and the Legion of Antibes is the first. The second is a unit known to history as the Papal Zouaves. The Zouaves are descended from the 5,000-man international volunteer corps that had served in the Pope’s last war against the Italians. In general, the international volunteers had performed poorly, and most of them had been sent home after the war. But the Belgian Battalion had forged a reputation for courage and discipline, and some of these men had remained to form what would come to be known as the Papal Zouaves – “Zouave” being a French term for light infantry.

        -Like the Legion of Antibes, the Zouaves also have around 1,000 members, although pinning down the exact membership at any given time can be tough. That’s because they’re a volunteer unit, with men coming and going at irregular intervals. For most military units, this would be a problem, but for the Papal Zouaves, it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. They only want the best and most motivated light infantrymen, and nothing says “motivated” like guys who are willing to come fight for free. In fact, the Zouaves treat their service as a mission from God, with many referring to it as the “Ninth Crusade.” In that spirit, membership in the original Belgian unit is opened first to French volunteers, then to all French speakers, and eventually to all male Catholics, with at least one recruit coming from as far away as China. So while the Papal Zouaves will always be a French-speaking military unit, much like the Foreign Legion, it’s a truly international force. It’s worth noting here that one of the Zouaves’ unit commanders, Athanase de Charette, is the great-nephew of Francois de Charette, the leader of the Vendee Rebellion we talked about during my episodes on the French Revolution.

        -Anyway, along with the Legion of Antibes and the Papal Zouaves, the Papal Army of 1867 includes a small regiment of dragoons, plus the state’s Swiss carabinieri, who are basically a heavily-armed police force. In the event of an attack, the plan is for the entire Papal Army to march out and strike hard at the leading elements of an invading enemy. The goal isn’t for them to win an outright victory against any invading force. That’s not realistic; we’re talking about 3,000 guys here. Their goal is to punch the enemy in the face and hopefully delay his attack for long enough for foreign help to arrive, probably from France. By contrast, Garibaldi hopes to overwhelm the Pope with his rapid invasion and a simultaneous mob uprising in Rome, toppling the civil government before any foreign powers can intervene.

Here’s where things go off the rails. On October 22nd 1867, four days before Garibaldi’s volunteer army crosses into Lazio, a group of revolutionaries inside Rome launch a pre-planned occupation of two of the city’s seven hills, taking the Papal government completely by surprise. The same day, revolutionaries also set off a bomb at the main barracks of the Papal Zouaves, killing 27 men. The Zouaves quickly organize a response and arrest or chase off most of the revolutionaries with the help of the carabinieri. The next morning, 70 armed Redshirt volunteers arrive at the gates of the city. They were sent by Garibaldi to announce his support for the Roman revolution, but they do not receive the friendly welcome they had expected. They are instead arrested after a short skirmish. Small pockets of resistance hold out until October 25th, but the mob uprising is already totally suppressed by the time Garibaldi’s army actually invades the next day.

        -This early, abortive uprising gives the French four extra days to organize a response on Pope Pius’ behalf, and Napoleon III immediately authorizes the deployment of a 2,000-man relief force, which leaves the French port of Toulon on October 26th. So instead of having a delayed response, the French already have help on the way the same day Garibaldi attacks. That’s a big mistake on Garibaldi’s part. Over the next four days, he advances across the Roman countryside, recruiting local volunteers and occupying important road crossings and other strategic locations.

        -On October 30th, the French relief force arrives in Rome. These 2,000 crack troops are some of Napoleon III’s best men, armed with the latest Chassepot rifles. The Chassepot is similar to the Prussian needle gun, with a bolt-action chamber that has to be reloaded after each shot and standardized, mass-produced cartridges that allow for much faster reloading than older styles of gun. Better yet, the Chassepot is a later design than the needle gun, and it has a few upgrades, most importantly a rubber seal on the chamber that significantly reduces the amount of flash and smoke that’s released with each shot. It also uses a larger caliber round, so it has a much longer effective range than the needle gun. Now, the French are getting to test their new weapon in service to the Pope.

        -Garibaldi has occupied a few key towns around Rome, but hasn’t actually attacked the city. He seems to be waiting for something. See, the French aren’t the only army coming to help Pope Pius. When Napoleon III had dispatched his expeditionary force, Victor Emmanuel had demanded some kind of response from the Italian military. It would be one thing for the Italian Army to come in and evict Garibaldi from Rome. It would be a national humiliation to have the French do it just over a year after they’d handed over Papal security to the Italians. The same day the French had arrived at Rome, an Italian Army division had also entered the Papal States, and is now marching towards Rome. Garibaldi doesn’t know this army’s intentions. Is he waiting because he expects them to help him?

        -Cardinal Antonelli doesn’t know the Italian Army’s intentions, either, and he doesn’t want to find out. When French and Papal military leaders meet to decide whether to wait for the Italians or to march out and attack Garibaldi right now, they agree to attack.

        -On November 3rd 1867, the Papal Army attacks. Including the new French arrivals, they have around 5,000 men. When they march out to meet Garibaldi, he’s camped at a town called Mentana, which is centered around a medieval castle at the top of a tall hill. With his 10,000 men spread out all over the area, only about 5,000 are in the main camp, making the forces about equal.

        -Before they can attack the village, the Papal troops first have to get across some woods and a vineyard, and this whole area is scattered with Garibaldi’s volunteers. In his book The Pope’s Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican, American historian Charles A. Coulombe writes:

        “Shortly after noon, the papal scouts encountered the first Garibaldian outposts. Four companies of Zouaves, led by Captains d’Albiousse, Thomale, le Gonidec, and Alain de Charette (brother of the colonel), moved in light skirmishing order, and quickly cleared the Redshirts out of the woods. Then Colonel de Charette himself arrived. He led the Zouaves in a furious bayonet charge, driving the Garibaldians from their positions. At last they reached the walled and fortified Santucci Vineyard. The 1st and 4th companies of the Legion of Antibes along with the carabinieri soon arrived to act as reserves.

“The Santucci vineyard, with its wall and strongly built house, was a formidable obstacle. The Redshirts laid down a furious wall of fire, and the Zouave assault faltered. The balls flew like flies and opened holes in the papal ranks. But Charette rode up and shouted, ‘Advance, Zouaves, or I will be killed without you!’ Then, carrying on the point of his sword the red bonnet of a Garibaldian officer whom he had just killed, he charged the enemy.

“The Zouaves stormed the compound and fought a quick, furious skirmish with the Redshirts. Colonel de Charette’s horse was shot from under him, while Captain de Veaux died from a bullet that drove into his heart the cross of valor he had won at Castelfidardo. The surviving foes fled, leaving house and vineyard to the Zouaves.”

        -Despite being ordered to slow down and wait for artillery support, the Zouaves continue their advance into an occupied convent. Their momentum seems to be unstoppable. Unable to stop the Zouaves’ attack, Garibaldi instead launches his own counterattack on their flanks, striking at the Legion of Antibes and the Swiss carabinieri in an attempt to surround the Zouaves. The Legion holds its ground. The first line of carabinieri run away, but when more carabinieri are sent in to reinforce them, they also hold.

        -Meanwhile, a contingent of Zouaves makes its way around the rear of Garibaldi’s army, hoping to cut off the main road leading out of the town of Mentana. If they can cut off that road, Garibaldi and his volunteers will themselves be trapped. He personally leads a group of veteran Redshirts to push the Zouaves back, but his men retreat, and Garibaldi himself barely escapes without getting captured. The rest of his army is soon surrounded, and those who can’t sneak away in the middle of the night surrender the following morning.

        -Garibaldi retreats back to Italy with his 5,000 remaining volunteers, but his invasion is over. Without the Kingdom of Italy’s support, without the element of surprise, and without a successful uprising in Rome, there’s no chance of taking over the Papal States. His army vanishes within days, the men returning to their ordinary lives rather than stick it out with a hopeless cause. For their part, the Italian Army arrives near Rome shortly after the battle, announces that they’re there to help, and after congratulating Pope Pius on his victory, they march back to Italy. War between Italy and the Pope is averted, and thanks in no small part to the performance of some outstanding soldiers, Rome is safe for now, although those French troops are once again going to be maintaining a garrison to keep an eye on the Pope’s safety.

        -The Battle of Mentana marks Giuseppe Garibaldi’s last revolutionary action in Italy. The government will once again send him into exile, although that exile will be quietly lifted a few years later. Garibaldi forever remains an Italian nationalist, but he will never forgive King Victor Emmanuel for supporting his march on Rome and then pulling that support and turning against him and, when Victor Emmanuel asks him for help again a few years later, he flat out refuses, saying that the King is not to be trusted. Don’t worry, though. While he might be done fighting in Italy, Garibaldi still has a role to play in our story.

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE DUAL MONARCHY

These past four episodes, I’ve tried to stay focused on Italy and Germany, because we’re talking about the unifications of those countries. I hope by now it’s apparent why I chose to cover these national unifications together; they’re inextricably linked by ongoing conflict with Austria and, to a growing extent throughout the 1860s, conflict with France. This conflict with France will dominate the next episode, and we won’t be talking much about the Austrian Empire anymore. So before we wrap up this episode, I want to circle back to a country that’s been having its own national awakening in the mid-19th Century, and that’s the nation of Hungary.

        -To recap, back in 1848, the Hungarian Parliament had passed a set of 12 laws known as the April Laws, which had basically established Hungary as a quasi-independent country. When Austrian Emperor Ferdinand resigned and young Franz Josef took over, he sent troops into Hungary to restore the old order. The liberal Hungarian government, led first by Lajos Batthyány and later by Lajos Kossuth, raised its own army and went to war. The Austrians invaded, they got help from the Russians, and they overthrew the Hungarian republic and put all of Hungary under a military dictatorship. Reprisals against former rebels were brutal, and German was made the only language of government and education, pushing native Magyar speakers out of public employment. This process of so-called “Germanization” would fuel constant public anger against the Empire, making it necessary to continue with an expensive and divisive military occupation.

        -On the surface level, the Hungarian revolutionaries have much in common with their Italian brethren. They’re a people with a distinct language and culture who have long been politically dominated by a people with a different language and culture, and they want to have more say in their own affairs. But that’s where the similarity ends, because while Italy has always had an on-again, off-again relationship with Austria and the earlier Holy Roman Empire, Hungary and Austria have been much more closely united. The Habsburgs were hereditary rulers of Austria, but the Hungarians had an elective monarchy, and within this elective monarchy, the Hungarian nobles had spent most of the Age of Exploration voting for Habsburg kings, and in 1687, they had voted to grant hereditary rule of Hungary to male Habsburg heirs, and had extended this to female heirs in 1723, but only on the condition that the rights of Hungarian nobles were not to be infringed.

        -This might sound like some old aristocratic carve-out, but Hungarian nobility works differently from most European nobility. They make a lot of new Lords and Ladies, and it’s not that hard to become one. If you’re a farmer who owns his own land and serves in a war and has a good reputation in the community, you too may become a Lord. And in fact, by the mid-1800s, something like 10% of the Hungarian population holds some kind of noble title. So while the nobility are a minority of the population, it’s a significant number of people. It’s not like the old French Aristocracy, which was a true 1%. Most Hungarian nobles are at least upper middle-class, although some are not. The vast majority of them aren’t super-rich, and all these nobles still have the right, for example, to vote for Parliament. So getting back to the relationship between the Habsburg Emperors and the Hungarian people, the deal for the Hungarians had been that they would share Austria’s foreign policy, but that domestically, they could more or less run their own affairs.

        -What I’m getting at here is that in Italy, the revolution against Austria is most definitely against Austria. All the politicians are nationalists. The left and the right disagree on how that Italian nation should be run once it’s unified, but they agree on Italian national unification and independence, which are still new concepts in the 18th Century. In Hungary, on the other hand, both the liberals and the conservatives are rooted to some extent in the historical Austro-Hungarian relationship. The conservatives, obviously, can hearken back to hundreds of years of mostly-successful Habsburg rule, but the liberals can also invoke the tradition of Hungarian elective monarchy, partial democracy, and semi-independence. These aren’t revolutionary ideas that were invented in the 1800s or in the French Revolution or even in the Enlightenment; they go back at least as long as Hungary’s conservative traditions. And none of these traditions are in direct conflict with some kind of partnership with Austria.

        -As far back as 1860, Franz Josef had recognized the need for some kind of compromise with Hungary, and had privately sent out letters to a handful of Hungarian politicians. Among these is the former revolutionary Ferenc Deak, who had helped draft the original 12 demands of the Hungarian revolutionaries, as well as the April Laws. A lawyer by trade and a moderate by disposition, Deak had since disavowed radical revolution and moved to the political center, and he was open to any compromise that maintained both Hungarian national identity and national security.

        -The relationship between Deak and the Emperor grew, and in December of 1864, Franz Josef had sent a personal emissary to meet with him, and this kicked off a series of quiet, back-room talks between the Emperor’s personal representatives and a small cadre of Hungarian politicians. Deak’s reputation facilitated this, because as a thoroughly reformed revolutionary, he had some credibility with both Franz Josef and the Hungarian nationalists. So talks continued, and by the end of 1865, it seemed like a breakthrough was imminent. This explains a lot of Austria’s foreign policy in the run-up to the Austro-Prussian war. During most of the controversy over Schleswig-Holstein, Austria seems like it’s willing to do anything to have peace in Germany. Why? Because the Austrians think they only need another year or two to heal this rift in their empire, and if they can solve the Hungarian problem, they’ll once again be strong enough that the German problem will solve itself. Only when it becomes obvious that Bismark is hell-bent on war in 1866 does Austria become belligerent.

        -The talks between Franz Josef’s representatives and the Hungarian politicians center around the nature of the monarchy itself. The Emperor claims the divine right to rule Austria as his family’s ancestral lands, and if the Austrians want to have a hereditary monarchy, the Hungarians are fine with that. But in Hungary, they demand recognition that the monarch gets his sanction from the constitutional order and the consent of the Hungarian nobility. Ferenc Deak is constantly referencing the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723, which was that agreement that had allowed female rulers but had specifically protected Hungarian constitutional rule. For his part, Franz Josef doesn’t mind some level of Hungarian autonomy, particularly in matters of domestic policy. His concern is Hungarian cooperation with Austrian foreign policy. Without that, he doesn’t have an Empire.

Franz Josef is also heavily influenced by his wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria. The two had married young, when Elizabeth was just 17 and Franz Josef was only 24, and unlike most royal couples, they had married for love, in defiance of Franz Josef’s domineering mother, Archduchess Sophie. The Archduchess has no boundaries, and actually took the couple’s first two daughters away at birth, saying that Elizabeth is too immature to raise a child. Franz Josef, for his part, rarely defies his mother, and this contributes to a rift between the couple. By six years after their marriage, in 1860, the two are already living apart most of the time, and the Emperor is rumored to be having an affair with a popular actress.

        -Empress Elizabeth may be having an affair of her own, at least if the gossip is to be believed. According to rumor, she’s having an affair with a Hungarian politician, Count Gyula Andrássy. To be clear, this is only a rumor, and I haven’t seen any hard evidence to substantiate it. While Elizabeth and Andrássy do become close and while she advocates for him as a politician, the Empress seems to be far more infatuated with the country of Hungary itself.

        -Elizabeth’s relationship with her husband is complex, and while she and Franz Josef become closer much later in life, she’s always the yin to his yang. The Emperor is a conservative man who grew up in a conservative family. He adheres to conservative court traditions that go back for centuries, and that cause him to seem distant in both public and private life. Elizabeth is a Bavarian. She’s a warm person by nature, speaks her mind freely in all social situations, and even takes up cigarette smoking, a scandalous habit for any sophisticated lady, much less the wife of the Emperor.

        -When Elizabeth is spending time away from her husband for months on end, she’s escaping this formalized court life that she finds miserably restrictive, and she spends a lot of that time in Hungary. She and Franz Josef had traveled to Hungary early in their marriage, and the more relaxed culture of the local aristocrats was much more her style. Elizabeth also loves riding horses, and is enamored with Hungary’s deeply-rooted equine culture. She even goes so far as to learn Hungarian and, when a Hungarian deputation visits Vienna in January of 1866, the Empress greets them in full Hungarian regalia and speaks with them fluently in their own language.

        -When the Austro-Prussian War breaks out later that year, Elizabeth is 28 years old, and has become a competent Empress. While Franz Josef sees to the needs of the Army, she tours military hospitals and once again uses her language skills to her advantage, taking extra time to speak with wounded Hungarians, once again in their own language. In his book Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph, British author Alan Palmer writes:

        “A few days after Koniggratz Elizabeth travelled to Pest, ostensibly to see the hospitals within Hungary, too. She was met at the railway station by Deak and Andrassy who explained to her the dangers of allowing Bismarck to exploit the Kossuthite radicals and emphasized to her the need for Francis Joseph to give a gesture of re-assurance to the moderate Hungarians at this time. She then went back to Vienna, reported their remarks to her husband, urged him to send for Andrassy and collected Gisela and Rudolf before settling with them at the Villa Kochmeister, in the hills behind Buda. Her letters begged Francis Joseph to ‘do something’, consoling herself (as she told him) with the thought that even if nothing happened she would ‘be able to say to Rudolf one day, “I did everything in my power. Your misfortunes are not on my conscience”.’”

        -Gisela, by the way, is one of the couple’s daughters, and Rudolf is their son, Franz Josef’s heir. Palmer continues:

        “This appeal, backed by news that Andrassy was taking the night train to Vienna and would await a summons from the palace, was irresistible. Francis Joseph assured her by coded telegram that he was sending for Deak - who was in a remote region of Hungary - and asked her to be discreet in her contacts with the Count. But eventually, at five in the morning of 17 July, he sent his ‘beloved angel’ the message she confidently awaited: ‘Today I am expecting G. A. I shall listen to what he has to say quietly, letting him do the talking and then sounding him out to see if I can trust him ... The old man [Deak, aged 63] can be here tomorrow or the day after.’ After ninety minutes of discussion with Andrassy, the Emperor thought him ‘good, honorable and highly gifted’ but ‘wanting too much and offering too little’. Deak, whom he received on 20 July (the day of the battle of Lissa), showed greater consideration than Andrassy for the political needs of other regions of the Monarchy. Yet, though the Emperor believed Deak to be ‘honest and devoted to the dynasty’, he told Elizabeth that he felt he should talk again to Andrassy, with whom he hoped to take up ‘the threads of the negotiations’ once ‘this luckless war’ ended. Francis Joseph seems to have wished to draw up a settlement with Andrassy - politically more flexible than the legalistic Deak - which would, however, be based upon the ‘old man’s’ principle that Hungary should ask for no more after the war than before it.”

-The compromise is presented to the Hungarian Parliament in the spring of 1867, as the Empire is just beginning to recover from the shock of the war. Moderate nationalists like Ferenc Deak are its strongest supporters. In the thirteenth chapter of Peter F. Sugar’s book A History of Hungary, Hungarian historian Eva Somogyi writes:

“When Deak supported the compromise in his speech before the legislature, he answered, consciously or unconsciously, the arguments presented by Kossuth. He tried to prove that ‘common affairs’ had existed since the eighteenth century between Austria and Hungary, and that common defense had existed since the signing of the Pragmatic Sanction. In the laws establishing the compromise, the novelty was not the recognition of the existence of ‘common affairs’ but rather the manner in which they were to be administered. Deak refuted the argument that the compromise destroyed Hungary’s constitutional independence. ‘The compromise is a better guarantor of our survival than are speculations based on unforeseeable events,’ he said. Deak rejected not only the revolutionary solution to the country’s problems but also the argument that Hungarians should wait for favorable turns in international relations to gain their independence. Deak and most of those of his class believed that Hungary was not strong enough to exist as a fully independent state. The years that had passed since the revolution had convinced him that Hungary, situated between two great powers—Germany and Russia—and faced by the increasing demands of the nationalities, needed the protection offered by the Habsburg monarchy. Deak did not attempt to present the compromise as a victory. He only stated that a better solution could not be found.”

        -When the Hungarian Parliament votes on the compromise on May 29th 1867, the result isn’t even close. 209 representatives vote in favor, and only 89 are opposed, with 83 abstentions. So even if the abstentions had voted with the no’s, the compromise still would have passed. This vote in Parliament will be one of Deak’s last official acts as a public figure. He retires more or less immediately due to declining health, and Count Gyula Andrássy becomes the new Hungarian Prime Minister.

So, what is the Compromise of 1867, and how does it shape the future of Austria? To begin with, Emperor Franz Josef abandons the idea of fully integrating Hungary into the Austrian Empire, while the Hungarians agree to accept a partially unified government. What they create is the last historical example of something called a “real union,” which is kind of a misleading term, because it sounds like the two countries are becoming one. That’s not what it means. In this context, “real union” distinguishes the arrangement from a “personal union,” which had been the old arrangement. In a personal union, two countries are ruled by a single individual, but are otherwise separate, with their own governments, laws and institutions. In a real union, the two countries share some but not all government institutions. So, for example, the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary will have common military, customs, and trade policies, their domestic laws will be handled by their separate governments. Some government ministries, like the Ministry of War, will be shared by both countries, while others will not, and the unified state will have no joint Parliament. The Austrian and Hungarian legislatures will remain separate.

        -This real union creates a new world power, known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy, or simply as Austria-Hungary. These names are only mostly accurate, because a third country, the tiny Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, is added to the arrangement in 1868, in a nod to Croatian nationalists.

        -In the end, the old Hungarian nationalist revolutionaries of 1848 probably wouldn’t be disappointed. Of the 12 Points of the Hungarian Revolutionaries which had become the April Laws, the nationalists get their way on 10 issues. Hungary is to have freedom of the press. Hungary is to appoint its own government ministers and elect its own Parliament. The Hungarian state is to maintain its own national guard. There is to be a unified civil code for all Hungarians regardless of class and religion. All Hungarians will be subject to the same tax laws. Trial by jury is to be established. Mandatory feudal labor is to be abolished. The disputed territory of Transylvania is to be integrated into the Hungarian nation, and all Hungarian revolutionaries in Austrian prisons are to be released. That said, there are two issues on which the Hungarians are forced to concede. The first is the issue of an independent Hungarian Army, which the 1848 revolutionaries had demanded. Under the Dual Monarchy, there is to be only one army, with its soldiers taken from both Austria and Hungary. Along the same lines, Hungary is not going to receive its own national bank, and will instead share a common monetary policy with the rest of Austria-Hungary.

        -Following the Compromise of 1867, Emperor Franz Josef will take a softer line on minority rights within his empire. The Kingdom of Bohemia – the modern-day Czech Republic – has traditionally been like Hungary. It’s been under Habsburg rule, but it’s been a separate realm. At least, that was the case until Franz Josef had come to power. He had never been crowned, and has been governing Bohemia as part of the Austrian crownlands ever since. In 1870, Franz Josef tries to rectify this by negotiating a new arrangement with Bohemia, and even goes as far as to commission an entire opera for the long-anticipated coronation. But it’s not to be. A political earthquake in nearby Germany – something we’ll talk about in the next episode – complicates Czech politics to the point that the whole deal falls apart, and Emperor Franz Josef never is crowned as King of Bohemia. Nonetheless, he will spend the rest of his reign trying to find new ways to expand the rights of different nationalities within the empire. Being a conservative by nature, he refrains from making any more major reforms, but in the early 20th Century, he will allow his heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand to publicly discuss all kinds of major reform plans for his anticipated reign, which makes the young Archduke incredibly popular with Austria-Hungary’s minorities. It would be a shame if anything happened to that guy.

        -Meanwhile, in Hungary, President Gyula Andrássy’s government will pass the 1868 Nationality Act, a law that guarantees the equal political rights of all Hungarian citizens, regardless of their language or ethnicity. However, this cosmopolitan policy will not last. Later Hungarian governments will engage in a program known as Magyarization. Much like the earlier Germanization policies, Magyarization policies aim to force all citizens to speak a common language, in this case, Maygar, better known as Hungarian. Magyarization takes particular aim at the schools, where Magyar-language classrooms go from being one of many options to the only option in many regions. These policies have their strongest impact in the Balkans, which are relatively newly-acquired territories, and where the local minorities are therefore seen as more foreign. It would be a shame if this provoked any backlash somewhere like Serbia.

        -Meanwhile, nationalist movements in Germany and Italy continue their own efforts, sometimes defying their own governments in their push towards unification. In Italy, the Roman Question remains a ticking time bomb. How long will Napoleon III continue to support Pope Pius IX’s increasingly tenuous sovereignty? How long can he? In Germany, King Wilhelm of Prussia consolidates his Kingdom’s position as the only power that matters in the North German Confederation. But Wilhelm’s Prime Minister, Otto von Bismarck, is already looking west to the Rhine River, where he’s already plotting his next war, this time with France. We’ll talk about all that and more in the next episode of Relevant History.

SOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

Quintin Barry, Road to Koniggratz: Helmuth von Moltke and the Austro-Prussian War 1866

Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy

John Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871

Tim Chapman, The Risorgimento: Italy 1815-71

Charles A. Coulombe, The Pope’s Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican

Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945

Michael Embree, Bismarck’s First War: The Campaign of Schleswig and Jutland 1864

Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire

Giuseppe Garibaldi, Autobiography of Giuseppe Garibaldi (With Supplement by Jessie White Mario)

E.E.Y. Hales, Pio Nono: A Masterful Study of Pius IX and His Role in Nineteenth-Century European Politics and Religion

H.M. Hozier, The Seven Weeks' War: the Austro-Prussian Conflict of 1866

Denis Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796-1870

Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini

Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy, A Political History

Denis Mack Smith, Victor Emanuel, Cavour, and the Risorgimento

Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse

Alan Palmer, Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph 

Dennis Showalter, The Wars of German Unification

Peter F. Sugar, A History of Hungary

Bertha von Suttner, Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling

Geoffrey Wawro, The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's war with Prussia and Italy in 1866

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