Second Schleswig War
The Schleswig-Holstein Question — the tangled dispute over two duchies bound to the Danish crown but largely German in population — reignited when Denmark's November Constitution of 1863 sought to incorporate Schleswig outright, breaching the 1852 London Protocol. Bismarck seized the pretext, persuading Austria to join Prussia in a joint ultimatum and then a joint invasion in February 1864 — deliberately keeping the war a great-power affair rather than a German-national one. The campaign was brief and one-sided: Danish forces abandoned the medieval Dannevirke line without a fight and made their stand at the entrenchments of Dybbøl, which fell to a Prussian assault on 18 April 1864 after weeks of bombardment. After the London Conference collapsed, fighting resumed and Prussian troops crossed to the island of Als. By the Treaty of Vienna in October 1864 Denmark ceded Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg. The war proved the Prussian reforms of Roon and Moltke's methods — railway mobilisation and the breech-loading needle gun — while the awkward Austro-Prussian condominium over the duchies, patched up at Gastein in 1865, became the very quarrel Bismarck would use to provoke Austria two years later.
- Year: 1864 CE
- Category: Military
