Guerra dels Nou Anys

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La Guerra dels Nou Anys (també coneguda com la Guerra de la Lliga d'Augsburg, la Guerra de la Gran Aliança, la Guerra d'Orleans, la Guerra de Successió del Palatinat, o la Guerra de Successió Anglesa) va ser una guerra lliurada a Europa i Amèrica del 1688 al 1697, entre França i la Lliga d'Augsburg — que des del 1689 va ser coneguda com a la "Gran Aliança". La guerra es produí com a ressistència a l'expansionisme francès al llarg del Rin, així com també, per part d'Anglaterra, per salvaguardar els resultats de la Revolució Gloriosa d'una possible restauració de Jaume II d'Anglaterra auspiciada pels francesos. El teatre de guerra a Nord-Amèrica, representat per colons francesos i anglesos, va ser conegut a les colònies angleses com la Guerra del Rei Guillem.

Nota: La Guerra dels Nou anys també es pot referir a un conflicte a Irlanda, 1594–1603

Taula de continguts

[edita] La Lliga d'Augsburg

La Lliga d'Augsburg va ser formada al 1686 entre l'Emperador del Sacre Imperi Romà, Leopold I, i diversos principats alemanys (el Palatinat, Baviera, i Brandenburg) per tal de resistir l'agressió francesa. L'aliança fou secundada per Portugal, Espanya, Suècia, i les Províncies Unides.

França havia especulat amb una neutralitat benevolent per part de Jaume II d'Anglaterra, però després de la deposició i recanvi d'aquest pel seu gendre Guillem d'Orange, històric enemic de Lluís XIV de França, Anglaterra va declarar la guerra a França el maig del 1689, i d'ençà la Lliga d'Augsburg va ser coneguda con a la "Gran Aliança", amb Anglaterra, Espanya, Portugal, les Províncies Unides, i la majoria dels Estats Alemanys units en contra de França.

[edita] Inici de les campanyes

La guerra va començar amb la invasió francesa del Palatinat el 1688, aparentment per tal de donar suport a les reinvindicacions de la cunyada de Lluís XIV —la Duquesa d'Orelans— sobre aquest territori, després de la mort del seu nebot al 1685 i per fer valer els drets d'herència de la branca jove de la família Neuburg. La severitat i duresa en les accions empreses per rei francès van unir a tots els estats alemanys a les ordres de l'Emperador, que aleshores es trobava força enfeinat lluitant a Hongria contra l'Imperi Otomà.

D'acord amb aquesta nova política agressiva a Alemanya, Lluís hi va enviar més tropes a la tardor de 1688. Es van cometre abusos i saquejos a les parts meridionals del país, com a a Augsburg. D'ençà a llavors, nous membres es van unir a la Lliga d' Ausgsburg gràcies al Tractat de Viena wl maig de 1689, esdevenint així la Gran Aliança: Espanya, Holanda, Suècia, Savoia i alguns estats italians, Gran Bretanys, l'Emperador i Brandenburg.

El Marqués de Louvois havia enllestit la gran tasca d'organitzar un exèrcit francès regular i permanent, i l'havia convertit no només en el millor, sinó també - i de llarg- en el més nombrós d'Europa, amb no meny de de 375.000 soldats i 60.000 mariners pels vols de 1668. La infanteria estava uniformada i instruïda, i la baioneta i els moderns mosquetons havien estat introdüits. L'única relíquia era la pica, que encara era emprada aproximadament per una quarta part de l'exèrcit, tot i que començava a caure en desús. El primer regiment d'artilleria va ser creat al 1684.

El 1689 el rei de França disposava de sis exèrcits de terra. That in Germany, which had executed the raid of the previous autumn, was not in a position to resist the principal army of the coalition. Louvois therefore ordered it to lay waste the Palatinate, and the devastation of the country around Heidelberg, Mannheim, Speyer, Oppenheim and Worms was pitilessly and methodically carried into effect in January and February of 1689. There had been devastations in previous wars, even the high-minded Turenne had used the argument of fire and sword to terrify a population or a prince, while the whole story of the last ten years of the great war had been one of incendiary armies leaving traces of their passage that it took a century to remove. But here the devastation was a purely military measure, executed systematically over a given strategic front for no other purpose than to delay the advance of the enemys army. It differed from the method of Turenne or Cromwell in that the sufferers were not those people whom it was the purpose of the war to reduce to submission, but others who had no interest in the quarrel. The feudal theory that every subject of a prince at war was an armed vassal, and therefore an enemy of the prince's enemy, had in practice been obsolete for two centuries past; by 1690 the organization of war, its causes, its methods and its instruments had passed out of touch with the people at large, and it had become thoroughly understood that the army alone was concerned with the armys business. Thus it was that this devastation excited universal reprobation; and that, in the words of a modern French writer, the idea of Germany came to birth in the flames of the Palatinate.

As a military measure this action was, moreover, quite unprofitable; for it became impossible for Marshal Duras, the French commander, to hold out on the east side of the middle Rhine, and he could think of nothing better to do than to go farther south and to ravage Baden and Breisgau, which was not even a military necessity. The grand army of the Allies, coming farther north, was practically unopposed. Charles of Lorraine and Maximilian of Bavaria (lately comrades in the Turkish war) besieged Mainz, and the elector of Brandenburg besieged Bonn. The latter, following the evil precedent of his enemies, shelled the town uselessly instead of making a breach in its walls and overpowering its French garrison. Mainz had to surrender on the September 8, 1688. The governor of Bonn, not in the least intimidated by the bombardment, held out until the army that had taken Mainz reinforced the elector of Brandenburg, and then, rejecting the hard terms of surrender offered him by the latter, he fell in resisting a last assault on October 12, 1688. Only 850 men out of his 6000 were left to surrender on the 16th, and the Duke of Lorraine, less truculent than the Elector, escorted them safely to Thionville. Boufflers, with another of Louis's armies, operated from Luxembourg (captured by the French in 1684) and Trarbach towards the Rhine, but in spite of a minor victory at Kochheim on August 21, he was unable to relieve either Mainz or Bonn.

[edita] Campanya irlandesa de 1690-91

For the main article, see Williamite war in Ireland

To try to restore James II and knock England out of the Grand Alliance, Louis XIV supplied men, military and financial aid to James' Jacobite supporters in Ireland. William of Orange was forced to go to Ireland to fight the subsequent war - defeating James at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 and ending his hopes of regaining his throne. The war dragged on until July 1691, when William's general Ginkel inflicted a crushing defeat on the French and Irish forces at the battle of Aughrim.

[edita] Campanya als Països Baixos

In the war's principal theatre, in continental Europe, the early military campaigns, which mostly occurred in the Spanish Netherlands, were generally successful for France. After a setback at the Battle of Walcourt in August 1689, in which the French were defeated by an allied army under Prince Georg Friedrich of Waldeck, the French under Marshal Luxembourg were successful at the Battle of Fleurus in 1690, but Louis prevented Luxembourg from following up on his victory. The French were also successful in the Alps in 1690, with Marshal Catinat defeating the Duke of Savoy at the Battle of Staffarda and occupying Savoy. The Turkish recapture of Belgrade in October of the same year proved a boon to the French, preventing the Emperor from making peace with the Turks and sending his full forces west. The French were also successful at sea, defeating the Anglo-Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, but failed to follow up on the victory by sending aid to the Jacobite forces in Ireland or pursuing control of the Channel.

The French followed up on their success in 1691 with Luxembourg's capture of Mons and Halle and his defeat of Waldeck at the Battle of Leuze, while Marshal Catinat continued his advance into Italy, and another French army advanced into Catalonia, and in 1692 Namur was captured by a French army under the direct command of the King, and the French beat back an allied offensive under William of Orange at the Battle of Steinkeerke.

[edita] Batalles Navals

The naval side of the war was not marked by any very conspicuous exhibition of energy or capacity, but it was singularly decisive in its results. At the beginning of the struggle the French fleet kept the sea in face of the united fleets of Great Britain and Holland. It displayed even in 1690 a marked superiority over them. Before the struggle ended it had been fairly driven into port, and though its failure was to a great extent due to the exhaustion of the French finances, yet the inability of the French admirals to make a proper use of their fleets, and the incapacity of the kings ministers to direct the efforts of his naval officers to the most effective aims, were largely responsible for the result.

[edita] Domini francès inicial

When the war began in 1689, the British Admiralty was still suffering from the disorders of the reign of King Charles II, which had been only in part corrected during the short reign of James II. The first squadrons were sent out late and in insufficient strength. The Dutch, crushed by the obligation to maintain a great army, found an increasing difficulty in preparing their fleet for action early. Louis XIV, with as yet unexhausted resources, had it within his power to strike first. The opportunity offered him was a very tempting one. Ireland was still loyal to James II, and would therefore have afforded an admirable basis of operations to a French fleet, but no serious attempt was made to profit by the advantage thus presented. In March 1689, King James was landed and reinforcements were prepared for him at Brest. A British squadron under the command of Arthur Herbert, sent to intercept them, reached the French port too late, and on returning to the coast of Ireland sighted the convoy off the Old Head of Kinsale on May 10. The French admiral Chateaurenault held on to Bantry Bay, and an indecisive encounter took place on May 11. The troops and stores for King James were successfully landed. Then both admirals, the British and the French, returned home, and neither in that nor in the following year was any serious effort made by the French to gain command of the sea between Ireland and England.

[edita] Revifada anglesa i holandesa

A great French fleet entered the English Channel, and gained a success over the combined British and Dutch fleets on July 10, 1690 in the Battle of Beachy Head, which was not followed up by vigorous action. During the following year, while James's cause was finally ruined in Ireland, the main French fleet was cruising in the Bay of Biscay, principally for the purpose of avoiding battle. During the whole of 1689, 1690 and 1691, British squadrons were active on the Irish coast. One raised the siege of Londonderry in July 1689, and another convoyed the first British forces sent over under the Duke of Schomberg. Immediately after Beachy Head in 1690, a part of the Channel fleet carried out an expedition under the Earl of Marlborough, which took Cork and reduced a large part of the south of the island.

In 1691 the French did little more than help to carry away the wreckage of their allies and their own detachments. In 1692 a vigorous but tardy attempt was made to employ their fleet to cover an invasion of England at the Battle of La Hougue. It ended in defeat, and the allies remained masters of the Channel. The defeat of La Hougue did not do so much harm to Louis's naval power, and in the next year, 1693, he was able to strike a severe blow at the Allies.

In this instance, the arrangements of the allied governments and admirals were not good. They made no effort to blockade Brest, nor did they take effective steps to discover whether or not the French fleet had left the port. The convoy was seen beyond the Scilly Isles by the main fleet. But as the French admiral Tourville had left Brest for the Straits of Gibraltar with a powerful force and had been joined by a squadron from Toulon, the whole convoy was scattered or taken by him, in the latter days of June, near Lagos Bay. Although this success was a very fair equivalent for the defeat at La Hogue, it was the last serious effort made by the navy of Louis XIV in this war. Want of money compelled him to lay his fleet up.

The allies were now free to make full use of their own, to harass the French coast, to intercept French commerce, and to cooperate with the armies acting against France. Some of the operations undertaken by them were more remarkable for the violence of the effort than for the magnitude of the results. The numerous bombardments of French Channel ports, and the attempts to destroy St Malo, the great nursery of the active French privateers, by infernal machines, did little harm. A British attack on Brest in June 1694 was beaten off with heavy loss, the scheme having been betrayed by Jacobite correspondents. Yet the inability of the French king to avert these enterprises showed the weakness of his navy and the limitations of his power. The protection of British and Dutch commerce was never complete, for the French privateers were active to the end, but French commerce was wholly ruined.

[edita] Cooperació amb la Marina Espanyola

It was the misfortune of the allies that their co-operation with armies was largely with the forces of a power so languid and so bankrupt as Spain. Yet the series of operations directed by Russel in the Mediterranean throughout 1694 and 1695 demonstrated the superiority of the allied fleet, and checked the advance of the French in Catalonia.

Contemporary with the campaigns in Europe was a long series of cruises against the French in the West Indies, undertaken by the British navy, with more or less help from the Dutch and a little feeble assistance from the Spanish. They began with the cruise of Captain Lawrence Wright in 1690–1691, and ended with that of Admiral John Nevell in 1696–1697. It cannot be said that they attained to any very honorable achievement, or even did much to weaken the French hold on their possessions in the West Indies and North America. Some, and notably the attack made on Quebec by Sir William Phips in 1690, with a force raised in the British colonies, ended in defeat. None of them was so triumphant as the plunder of Cartagena in South America by the Frenchman Pointis, in 1697, at the head of a semi-piratical force. Too often there was absolute misconduct. In the buccaneering and piratical atmosphere of the West Indies, the naval officers of the day, who calculated on distance from home to secure them immunity, sank nearly to the level of pirates and buccaneers. The indifference of the age to the laws of health, and its ignorance of them, caused the ravages of disease to be frightful. In the case of Admiral Nevil's squadron, the admiral himself and all his captains except one died during the cruise, and the ships were unmanned. Yet it was their own vices which caused these expeditions to fail, and not the strength of the French defence. When the war ended, the navy of King Louis XIV had disappeared from the sea.

[edita] Continuació de la Campanaya a Holanda

The war continued, however, as did the French successes on land. 1693 saw another victory by Luxembourg over William at Landen, and the capture of Charleroi by the French. The French also continued their successes in Piedmont with a decisive victory at Marsaglia, while in 1694 the French advanced into Catalonia and besieged Barcelona until forced to withdraw by an English fleet.

The French cause was significantly handicapped by the death of Luxembourg in 1695. In the campaign that followed that summer, William was successful, capturing Namur in September. The Treaty of Turin in 1696 ended Savoy's part in the war, and the French were now free to send more troops to the northern front, where they repulsed further offensive efforts by William.

[edita] Pau

La guerra no tenia cap clar guanyador, i els acords del Tractat de Ryswick obligaren a retornar al status quo ante. Lluís va estar d'acord en restornar Mons, Luxemburg, i Kortrijk als espanyols, tot i que tothom ho va veure com un intent d'augmentar les seves possibilitats d'accedir al tron espanyol després de la mort de Carles II, que ja s'intiua que moriria sense fills.

El periode va restar marcat per la fam i la recessió.

[edita] Vegeu també