Fighting the Thirty Years War - Battle of Wimpfen 1622

The Through the Square Window rules include a lot of useful additional information including some orders of battle.  One of those is The Battle of  Wimpfen 1622.  The orbat is in Guide 3 covering the forces of Margrave George Frederick of Baden Durlech (No, I hadn't heard of him before either).   What intrigued me was that it involves the use of "Battle Wagons".  I immediately thought of Hussite style war wagons and well, you know, the 'ooh shiney' complex kicked in and I found I really needed some war wagons.  The orbat only includes estimates for Baden Durlech's army so I started digging.  When I started to look a bit deeper into things I found the painting below (via Wikipedia).

The Battle of Wimpfen 1622 By Sebastiaen Vrancx (original in The Hermitage Museum)

This seems to show something more like a protected camp with a defence of wild west looking covered wagons rather than Hussite style armoured and garrisoned mobile forts.  What I did like was that the wagons are not all covered in boring off white canvas.  No, there are some boring brick red and black (or at least very dark grey) covers as well.  On the plus side the painting seems to show cannon muzzles pointing out of the rear of some of them. The orbat in the rules describes these as grape shooters and gives special rules for their use.  The period images I have found term it a 'wagonburg'.  As an aside, the Wikipedia image of the Vrancx painting is worth a good look as it can be magnified and there is a lot of interesting detail in there.  

Wood cut of the battle by the workshop of Eberhard Kieser  The 'Wagonburg' is at points D on the left side

Next up (above) is a woodcut image of the battle.  I'm not clear when this was created although Wikipedia says it was scanned from a 1960 tourist guide!  Keiser himself died in 1631 so it is likely to be near contemporary to the battle.  The nature of the wagons used in the wagonburg isn't incredibly clear in the woodcut but again it looks like covered wagons.  It does give a nice overview of the battlefield though along with some information on the number of units deployed by the two forces.

This version is by Matthäus Merian and shows the Catholic League formations clearly

Merian's engraving above lists the wagonburg in the key but I cannot actually find them in the image.  It is a view from the Catholic/Imperial side and clearly shows Tilly's Baggage train around Wimpfen itself.   My feeling is that the infantry formations depicted are more accurate than those shown in the Kieser woodcut.  Flags are inside the pike blocks and the catholic blocks look to be deployed in double battalia style which Tilly preferred to use.

Double battalions were a style of infantry formation where the usual practice of deploying twice the number of files as there were ranks (and using those pesky square root formulas to determine the formation depth and width) gave the theoretical layout for a single battalia of any given number of men.  A double battalion doubled the number of ranks arrived at using the square root model at the expense of the number of files.  The idea was that it gave more resilience and the pike block had more 'punch' as it had more weight when it came to 'push of pike' (no not a rugby scrum with sticks but the point at which the two blocks were in close combat.  I will discuss what this actually was compared to the modern re-enactors push in a future post). 

The Armies

Baden Durlech's force was a mainly mercenary force and included some cavalry from the army commanded by Ernst von Mansfeld who was campaigning alongside him.  They seem to have been well trained and to have had good morale. However Mansfeld had taken the bulk of his command to join up with Christian of Brunswick to carry out a siege leaving Baden-Durslech on his own. Opposing Baden Durlech was Tilly with Catholic League troops and allied Spanish troops under Don Gonzola Fernandez de Cordoba.  These were experienced well motivated troops and in the case of the Spanish Infantry probably veterans.  This wasn't known by Baden durslech who thought he was only facing Tilly's Catholic League forces.

The order of battle in the rules only gives the Protestant side's forces but I found Nazfiger's order of battle on line, which fills in that lack.   According to him we have the following:

I made some notes and some assumptions on the above that might help.  The number s are the headcounts for each unit as listed by Nazfiger.  For the Spanish the nationality listed is where the unit was originally raised this has an impact on their quality.  

For the Catholic League it looks like Herzog Holstein's and Wangler's foot were brigaded together under von Scharfenburg.  That would bring them up to roughly the same size as the other League units.  I'm assuming that a half Kartaune is similar to a demi-culverine.

Baden-Durlech's 20 x 8-3pdrs are probably the grape shooters in the wagons.  The wagons are not listed but the rules give 10 bases of wagons and the illustrations show a minimum of eight (in the Vrancx) and could be showing 20 -30 plus in the Keiser.

The style of the cavalry is a little more difficult (apart from where it is clearly described).  As a default I'd say treat them as Kuirassiers except from the baden Foot Guards who you might want to consider as Dragoons or Harquebusiers in keeping with the fact that they are infantry who have been mounted on horses.

I'm assuming the Spanish foot are well trained with good morale and the Spanish raised  tercios could be professional with the cavalry being lower rated than the foot.  Accounts say that Baden-Durlech's troops were well trained and had good morale and Tilly's would be at least as good.

The battlefield

The table divided into 305mm (1 foot) squares.  Ground scale is roughly 1mm to 2 paces

The table is shown with the right hand short edge being the North.  Red lines are roads although these are at best gravelled.  Wimpfen was walled and had 'modern' earth work defences.  Obereisheim seems to have had some sort of ramparts from the Keiser print.  Biberach also seems to have had some defensive works although it is hard to be sure from the period prints.  Biberach lies on a tributary of the River Neckar called the Bollinger Bach.  As there are bridges over this and the Neckar I'm assuming they cannot easily be crossed.  The brown line running through Wimpfen denotes an area of raised ground.  probably not more than 50 feet higher than the rest of the table at it's highest point.  Black blocks are villages and towns, Green 'splodges' are woods from the prints they seem to be medium density so I would treat them as passable but disordering for foot and not allow cavalry to fight within them.  Lastly the dark yellow curved line shows the rough position of the Protestant wagonburg.

The Protestant forces deploy to the north of the Bollinger Bach and above (west) of the River Neckar but no further forward than Obereisheim.  The Catholic League deploy in the squares containing Wimpfen and the village below Wimpfen on the Neckar.  The Spanish contingent must form a second reserve line.  Tilly's camp and baggage train was close by Wimpfen while the Protestant baggae was in and around Biberach (except those wagons used in the defensive line).

The events of the actual battle

The Battle commenced around 11.00am and was closely fought.  It seems that sheer luck played a large part in creating a Catholic victory.  This was from a random artillery shot detonating the Protestant magazine after around seven hours fighting.   This panicked the Protestant forces and allowed Tilly's men to force the Wagonburg line of defence.   How to create this as an event on the tabletop is a tricky one. Some kind of random event, but without knowing the chance of it happening it is hard to say how to do it. Perhaps draw a card from a standard playing card pack every time a League/Spanish artillery piece fires and if a specified card or cards are drawn we have a big Boom!  The number of trigger cards I leave up to you but I suggest this mechanism doesn't come into play before the equivalent of 2 game hours of fighting has elapsed.  Once the magazine explodes all Protestant foot should be penalised by reducing their morale state.  I'm not being very specific as you would have to tailor this for your rules of choice.

Easier to deal with was the fact that Tilly kept the Spanish in reserve in case Mansfeld's army returned to link up with Baden Durlech.  I would have a random number count down system to trigger Tilly releasing the reserve.  Probably rolling a dice each turn and counting the  cumulative total until a predetermined number is reached.  I would make the trigger number a multiple of 3.5 (average roll on 1D6) with the multiplier being determined by how many game turns (on average) I want Tilly to wait before releasing the Spanish.  I'd also suggest that they are automatically released if the protestant magazine explodes. 

Refighting the battle

I probably won't get to have a crack at this until after Christmas.   I need to obtain some wagons for Baden Durlech, a few more pike and shot units to represent the Catholic army's large battalions and some more Kuirassiers.  That's more lead  added to the unpainted mountain (sigh!).  If anyone gives this a try before I do please make a comment on how it went.                                                                                                         

Deploying foot battalia in the Thirty Years War

 At the point where I sat down to write this post I had two other posts part completed.  One about the various German and Imperial armies in the TYW and one about a particular battle.  Part way through the first drafts of these I realised that a key point in both was a need to understand how the Infantry formations of the period were drawn up.

As I'm interested in the various German and Imperial forces at the moment, lets start by looking at what we know about the major influence on Early Imperial and Catholic League infantry formations: the Spanish.  My main source here is Gerat Barry and his work 'A discourse on military discipline', published in 1634.  Barry goes into a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of detail on the use of square roots to determine how to draw up an infantry escuadron (aka a battalia).  Seeing that we can now work square roots out on a smart phone I will not bore you with the excruciating depth and detail of using the period square root tables.  If you are desperate to know there are facsimile copies of the work on a couple of free to use academic sites.  For our purposes lets just slim the process down.

Barry's basic formation starts with a square  of pikemen, by which I mean an equal number of ranks and files.  This is considered the core of the Escuadron  and it is a square so it can fight with equal ability to the front, rear or sides.  This body is then surrounded with musket or caliver armed men to an equal amount all around, for example it might be four files on each wing plus four ranks ahead and behind (of both the pike block and the shot wings.  He recommends that the depth of shot be no more than 5 ranks or files as that is the maximum number who can shelter under the pikes.  Barry uses square roots to determine how many ranks and files of shot are required to fully enclose the pike centre.  This formation is called a squadron square by Barry but it isn't one of the four tactical formations he states were most often used by Spanish Infantry (see this post for details Small but Perfectly Formed: 17th Century Armies - The Spanish part two  ). I'm assuming that it is the default starting formation that is adjusted to create the actual tactical formation desired.

Battle of the White Mountain 1619 by Snayers

You have seen this painting of the Battle of the White Mountain before, as it is used in the article I linked to above.  If you look at the infantry in the foreground they seem to be deployed in the formations Barry is describing as a Squadron Square, so perhaps it isn't a starting formation but one used in combat.

Barry then describes how to amend the basic squadron Square to create formations which are wider than their depth or alternatively deeper than their width.  Again this uses a set of tables (the man did like a complicated set of arithmetical tables) but we can ignore those and just accept that the Spanish could and did form bodies of various depths and widths and these were all encased in a ring of shot in Barry's time.  As an aside Barry also notes that excess soldiers who don't fit into the neat formations are to be used to guard the colours.  This suggests that officers and colour parties etc are additional to the men in his formulas and possibly they formed a rank in addition to those arrived at by his tables.

I have looked at two versions of Barry's work one is converted to a modern type face and lacks the images while the second is a scan of an original copy which includes them.  In neither version can I find  any evidence for the use of the four corner mangas of shot.  Plus he only touches on the four standard formations in passing.

Faced with all the tedious business of calculating all those square roots I can begin to see the appeal of a system with a fixed number of ranks as devised by the Dutch.  As these formations only had shot on the flanks of the pike block it was probably easier to devise tactics which focussed on fighting to the forward arc of the formations   This in turn means that you need a different way of defending in depth and this gives birth to brigade formations.  This may also go some way to explaining why Tilly drew up his large battalia in a single line rather than in a chequer board (but I digress, but I will return to that point later).  

One interesting formation is discussed this is the "Cross Battell".  Essentially the main body of the Escuadron's pike is divided into four bodies.  As shown below.  In the worked example given by Barry this consists of 512 pikemen and 904 musketeers.  The Pike being drawn up in blocks of eleven ranks and eleven files each, which gives 121 pike men in each of the four blocks.  The mathematically inclined amongst you will have worked out that 4 x 121 = 484 pikemen, which means 28 pikemen seem to be getting the day off!  I'm assuming they are being used to guard the colours somewhere within the formation.  Barry shows the four blocks in corner to corner contact as below, this gives problems when he discusses deploying the shot though.

Here is the text from Barry on dealing with the shot, complete with period spelling:

"Nowe for the divison of youre propounded number of shott.  Double the one flanke of eache one'of the 4 batteles of pikes, whiche double will by 88. this 88. = the double flanke of the 4. batteles of pikes divide by 904 youre propounded number of musketes, and the number in the quotient wilt by 10:.and 24. musketes remayninge, and say that the two flankes of eache of youre 4 batteles of pikes are to by lined withe 11; rankes of ten musketes in eache ranke as by the figure; deutiones folowenge yove may playnely ce, and withe the observation of this rule withe any other, number eyther greate or smale yove ſsall withe facility kno, we how to proportionably divide yovre shott for' to guarinsh the two flankes of yovre squadron of pikes."

I have highlighted the part which causes me to wonder how a cross battell was actually deployed.  Working through the above text it creates eight blocks of 110 shot deployed in blocks of 11 ranks by 10 files.  That leaves 24 musketeers joining the surplus pikemen guarding the colours .  Placing a block to each flank of the four pike blocks with the pike in corner to corner contact means we are trying to get two musket blocks into the central space, but there is only space for one of them, and Barry previously says that space is useful for holding baggage and injured men. So something has to give!

This seems to be what Barry means.  Red blocks are bodies of shot

The above is entirely my supposition so it could be complete spheroids!  It looks remarkably like a four squadron Swedish Brigade in layout but with smaller component parts as each pike and shot is only 220 shot and 121 pike.  Given that Barry was writing after Breitenfeld he may just be theorising on what the Swedes had done or he may be trying to claim the idea was a Spanish one, or perhaps it actually was their concept all along!

The one thing we can take from Barry (and the Snayers painting) is that Manga formations deployed on the corners of pike blocks were not a thing for the Spanish armies in the TYW. and formations were probably rectangular with shot all around the pike until at least 1633.  For me the Jury is definitely out on the existence of the cross battell. However, it does give a starting point on looking at the other combatants infantry deployments.

So lets move on a little.  The Catholic League forces under Tilly used what I have seen called a double battalion formation (Guthrie uses this term so spheroids may come into it again).  A double battalion had twice as many files as ranks which gave them more combat capability in the forward arc., so was wider than the basic Spanish Infantry formations.  

I have read that Guthrie (I can't afford to buy his works) states that Spanish Musket and by association Catholic League ones under Tilly didn't form in neat ranks and files but instead operated in a loose swarm around the formed pike centre.  This seems to be more spherical rubbish to me.  Barry goes on (and on, and on) about how to form shot in ranks and files and the duties of NCOs in keeping formations of shot in their proper ranks and files.  I'm comfortable in saying that Tilly was at least as obsessed with maintaining formations in good order as Barry was.  Tilly is also supposed to have said that the shot wings of an infantry should not exceed 20 files as more than that meant the outermost musketeers couldn't easily run for shelter under the pikes.

Steven's Balagan blog (William Guthrie on Tilly's Big Tercios - Steven's Balagan) has a useful comparison between Tilly's big battalia and the equivalent Imperial formation showing how he considers these two formations were drawn up at around the time of Breitenfeld in 1632.  I won't steal Steven's thunder by repeating all the detail of his analysis, I recommend following the link and reading it for yourselves.  In a nutshell Tilly deployed units that were double the size of the Imperial formations but as they were far deeper they had almost the same frontage as you can see from his illustrations below (Imperials at the top and Tilly's Catholic League at the bottom)

Here are Steven's rather nice images of how the two formations were deployed
Yellow area shows the pike block, red musketeers and the sand tone the arquebusiers

I'm still of the opinion that Tilly was slightly stuck in the past and after his death the Catholic German states moved to smaller battalia as had Wallenstein.  That doesn't mean he stuck with the Spanish formations detailed by Barry I think he did adapt but probably not fast enough.  But more about that when I discuss the Armies of Germany and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire in a future post.