Battle of Turin

Besieged since 14 May 1706 by the Franco-Spanish army, Turin, capital of the Duchy of Savoy, endured bombardment and mine warfare, but its citadel held. The Imperial army of Prince Eugene of Savoy set out from the Adige, marched hard up the right bank of the Po, joined Victor Amadeus II’s cavalry at the end of August, then swung round the city to attack the French lines from the west, between the Dora Riparia and the Stura. On 7 September, caught between this assault and a sortie by the besieged, the French were broken and fell back in disorder towards Pinerolo. The encirclement collapsed within hours.

Having joined the Grand Alliance in 1703, Victor Amadeus II saw Louis XIV’s armies occupy most of his lands: by the end of 1705, Turin was his last major stronghold. France sought to subdue Savoy for good, the last obstacle to its control of northern Italy. The siege began on 14 May 1706 under La Feuillade, who brushed aside Vauban’s advice and attacked through the citadel, the best-defended front, protected by an extensive network of countermine galleries. On 17 June Victor Amadeus left the city with his cavalry, entrusting its defence to Count von Daun. After the defeat at Ramillies (23 May), Vendôme was recalled to Flanders and in July handed command of the army of Italy to the Duke of Orléans, the king’s nephew, with Marshal de Marsin at his side. Eugene slipped past their watch by manoeuvring rapidly from the Adige. On the night of 29–30 August, the miner Pietro Micca sacrificed himself by blowing up a gallery to stop the French from breaking into the citadel.

Eugene’s bold relief manoeuvre: a forced march of several hundred kilometres, cutting loose from his supply lines, then a long sweep around Turin to strike the western side of the French lines, their weak point. Stretched along some 25 km of circumvallation, the French waited in their entrenchments: Orléans wanted to march against the enemy, but Marsin produced an order from the king giving him the final say, and his advice was to stay in the lines. On 7 September Eugene attacked in eight columns; Charles Alexander of Württemberg broke through on the left, then the repeated assaults of Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau’s Prussians, backed by a coordinated sortie of the garrison led by Daun, carried the day. The French lines were taken from behind, the artillery abandoned, and many fugitives drowned in the Dora.

End of French control over Piedmont and the Milanese. A major strategic reverse: the French abandoned their siege artillery and baggage, and Victor Amadeus re-entered his capital the same day, where a Te Deum was sung. The Count of Médavy’s victory at Castiglione, in Lombardy, in the days that followed changed nothing: under the Convention of Milan (March 1707), Franco-Spanish troops evacuated northern Italy, and Milan and Mantua passed to Austria, which established its authority there and became the dominant power in the peninsula. Turin thus marked the beginning of the French withdrawal from Italy. At the treaties of Utrecht (1713), the Duke of Savoy recovered Savoy and Nice and became King of Sicily. In thanksgiving he had the Basilica of Superga built on the hill from which he and Eugene had planned the battle.