On this day, Louis XIV receives a report from Germany:
“The King received news this evening that M de Lorraine has crossed the Rhine at Coblentz with 15 or 16 thousand troops and is marching on Bonn, to which he will lay siege; the Elector of Brandenburg, for his part, will besiege Kaiserswerth. We have in Bonn 8 battalions, a cavalry regiment, a regiment of dragoons, and an artillery company; d’Asfeld, maréchal de camp, is commanding, and we have very good engineers there.”
Commentary:
M de Lorraine is Charles V, Duke of Lorraine and Bar. The Sun King drove his late father out of Lorraine; the son is now a general in service of the Holy Roman Emperor and married to an archduchess. For more on Lorraine in this period, please see Versailles Century Country: Lorraine.
Pictured: Charles V (1643-1690), Duke of Lorraine and Bar de jure, Field Marshal in the service of Leopold I. Credit — By Fabrizio Garrisi - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=177422374
The Nine Years War is in full swing by this date. Most of the hostilities so far have taken place in the Rhineland. Louis XIV had sent a French army across the Rhine in the autumn of 1688.
The Elector of Brandenburg is Frederick III, who is also Duke of Prussia. He has been on the electoral and ducal thrones for only a little over a year at this date, and is as yet untested as a military commander.
For more on Brandenburg-Prussia in this period, please see Versailles Century Country: Prussia. It’s free for all to read in line with my policy of not charging for access to articles that were previously available for free on other platforms.
The translation from the French is my own. Images that are not my own are in the public domain; I only explicitly credit them when the uploader has made it a condition of sharing his/her work via Wikimedia Commons. Words in italics in the body of the post or bold italics in verbatim translations and image captions are in the Glossary; the royal family and other Bourbons are in the Who’s Who guides; information about the sources is in the Bibliography; all of these are in the Resources section and freely available to paid subscribers and Grandes Entrées. If you have questions, please ask in the comments.