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 mounted (sigh!).  If anyone gives this a try before I do please make a comment on how it went.