Prince Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld

Prince Frederick Josias of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was a field marshal in the army of the Holy Roman Empire whose reputation was made against the Ottomans and undone against revolutionary France. He entered a cavalry regiment at eighteen and served through the Seven Years' War, rising to colonel by 1759 and to general officer in the years that followed. Command of an army corps in the Austro-Turkish War of 1787 to 1791 gave him his best campaign: operating in Moldavia, often alongside Suvorov's Russians, he won at Focșani and then at Rymnik in 1789, victories that earned him a field marshal's baton and the capture of Bucharest. When Austria went to war with the French Republic he was made supreme commander of the Imperial army in the Austrian Netherlands. In 1793 he pushed the French out of Belgium, winning at Aldenhoven and then defeating Dumouriez at Neerwinden in March, and taking the fortresses of Condé and Valenciennes over the summer. That year was the high point. Coalition strategy fractured over competing territorial aims, and the French armies he faced grew faster than his own through mass conscription; his defeat at Wattignies in October 1793 undid much of what the spring had gained. In June 1794 he was beaten at Fleurus by Jourdan's Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, a battle in which the French used a tethered observation balloon to watch his dispositions from the air. The loss forced the Austrians out of the Netherlands for good and ended his career: he resigned his command within weeks and lived in retirement at Coburg for another twenty-one years. He was a competent commander of eighteenth-century armies who met a form of war that eighteenth-century armies were not built to fight.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history