Nine Years' War (War of the League of Augsburg)
Louis XIV fought most of Europe from 1688 to 1697 and gave back nearly everything he had taken. The war came out of two decades in which France had absorbed territory by legal proceedings. Louis's chambers of reunion awarded him lands whose dependencies had once belonged to territories ceded at Westphalia, and Strasbourg was occupied on that basis in 1681. The other powers formed the League of Augsburg in 1686, and the trigger came in 1688 when Louis invaded the Palatinate over a disputed inheritance. His army devastated it deliberately — Heidelberg, Mannheim, Speyer and Worms burned, the countryside stripped, to create a barrier of ruin between France and the empire — which horrified European opinion and made the alliance against him general. The same autumn William of Orange landed in England and took the throne from James II, which converted England from a French client into the paymaster of the coalition. The war then ran for nine years in the Netherlands, on the Rhine, in Spain, in Ireland, at sea and in North America, where it is called King William's War. It was a war of sieges and attrition with few decisive battles, and it exhausted everyone; France suffered a famine in 1693 and 1694 that killed perhaps 1.3 million people. At Ryswick Louis returned almost all his gains except Strasbourg and recognised William as king of England. Nothing was settled, and the Spanish succession came due three years later. The devastation of the Palatinate entered German memory as a specific grievance and was still being cited in 1914 and 1940. Louis's own reputation in Europe never recovered from it, which was a considerable price for a barrier that did not hold.
- Year: 1688 CE
- Category: Military
