I Am Louis XIV

   Chapter 470 The Count of Barcelona (Part 1)

The Duke of Orleans quickly left Gemma, who had left, behind him. He had too many things to deal with. There were always different factions among the Catalans, even if there were very few people willing to take refuge in Spain, but the same, There are just as many people who are pro-French, neutral and even want to be independent. Like the princes in the Middle Ages, they reluctantly gathered to the monarch of money and offered their own knights and soldiers. Now the duke wants to integrate them, otherwise once they face the regular Spanish army, they will still be Only defeat.

The Spaniards were not left behind when the French kings began to improve, retrofit, and equip their hot weapons on a large scale - like other powerful nations, they collected war taxes, poll taxes, and more nominal taxes from the populace. , and then spend the money on muskets, cannons, and soldiers. This is the norm, and it must be done, and there is no need to be too harsh.

But for the Catalan rebels, with insufficient armament (even needing to use farm implements to offset it), chaotic discipline, and no plan and tactics, they are like Sisyphus in **** - the arrogant one. The king of the gods tried the gods in a cruel way, and the result was to push a huge stone ball up a long **** in **** forever, according to the judgment of the gods.

The **** is long and the stone ball is heavy, but this is not the most desperate, the most desperate is that whenever he pushes the stone ball to the top, the stone ball will roll down from the peak without a foothold, and he can only go back to the original point, The tedious labor begins again.

Catalan rebellion always seems to be the same, unbearable, riot, suppressed, intolerable, riot, suppressed... The cycle has always been so since the twin kings - the Duke of Orleans was able to leap from the hostages. It was also because he gave these people a glimmer of hope that his status was elevated to someone with a voice.

Open the map of the Roussillon region on the table with many small nails, each of which represents a rebel team echoing Roussillon, but as many nails are nailed, as many nails will be taken down in a few days , the duke listened carefully to those representatives, only to realize that they started the riot in a village, a town, or even several settlements, but there was not much connection between them, like the mistake that happened during the Roussillon riot In more than one place, there were also Catalans who attacked each other because of personal hatred - so separate, it was easy for the Spanish army to clean them up.

This situation also occurred in the duke's Catalan army, but the duke thought he could persuade them, at least at this time, to keep their guns in line with the outside world. The problem is that most of these so-called soldiers are farmers and craftsmen. , that is to say, they may have only taken up arms for a few months, and only a few of them have been mercenaries, but even if they have been mercenaries, they have no discipline and cannot understand complex orders.

  The Duke of Orleans took a chess piece as a model for a soldier, and the cat tilted his head and looked at it—since he was a king hundreds of years ago, he must also be a brave and good general, and he actually looked at it with gusto.

   "Are you going to use skirmishers?" Catboy asked. If he didn't look up, the sound it made was very consistent with the appearance of Fan Zhuo's parents, that is, a man between youth and prime.

The concept of skirmishers mentioned by Theoderic was proposed by the Grand Condé and Viscount Turenne at the Royal Military Academy of France in recent years. To put it simply, the so-called skirmish tactics in the past were not trained in formation. It is difficult to control and restrain, and the civilians who cannot grasp the results of the war often use tactics that cannot be called tactics, or to put it more bluntly, is to push a group of people without war literacy onto the battlefield and let them play freely.

Before Louis XIV, because muskets still needed to be ignited with arquebuses, in order to ensure firepower, soldiers needed to be arranged in neat rows of four to five, sometimes as many as seven or eight rows, and fired continuously in order. Forming the suppression of the enemy - when people of later generations see this scene of soldiers advancing, firing and falling in white smoke, they can't help but feel a bit bizarre and completely incomprehensible. Zhizhong, this tactic is really stupid, it is simply a collective suicide.

But people in this era highly respect this tactic, because the lethality of the musket is too small. If the bullets are not dense enough, and one or two people shoot separately, the damage caused to an army is negligible, only some of the most unfortunate. Only the unlucky ones are injured or killed in this type of attack.

  This is the problem the Catalans face. When the Spanish army is rolling over like an impregnable wall, the weak force that can be sent by a few skirmishers can't help.

It's not that they don't want to be trained like a real army - under the sharp eyes of officials and police, it is impossible for the Catalans to blatantly form such a team, and they can't support it - the Duke of Orleans just a few It takes tens of thousands of livres to maintain and implement his ideas.

After Louis XIV, because of the flintlock guns, with the attempts of the generals, the original horizontal and multi-column queues became linear queues. There is no need to equip too many columns to ensure firepower, so the previous multi-column has become the current three or four columns, but the artillery breaks through or defeats at the front, the musket queue is in the back, and the cavalry on both sides is mobile. changing.

  The Duke of Orleans has personally seen those Catalan soldiers. It is not surprising, and it is a pity that there are only a handful of them who have received military training, although when it comes to courage, there is no shortage of them.

   So he had an idea. This idea is not new. His brother has been consciously training some brave and capable soldiers in the past few years, and let them form a team alone. They can be said to be used as skirmishers on the battlefield, but not The kind of skirmishers who have no awareness or concept of combat, but are sharp and ingenious skirmishers who can catch fleeting fighter planes even when there is no clear order.

The duke planned to divide the Catalans into two groups: soldiers who had been trained as knights for a long time, like Gemma's former father and brother, and ordinary civilians, who would be strictly They were trained in the French way, that is, those soldiers in a linear queue, the former, the duke would let them out, like a pack of ferocious hounds, and let them find their prey by themselves.

   He wasn't sure whether to put the skirmishers on the sides or the front of the line.

"Front, sides," said Theoderic, who once attended the Military Academy in the form of a cat boy, "Anyway, you don't have cavalry, small artillery, and then skirmishers. You can also numb the eyes and ears of the opposing commander, and then It's the flintlock lineup."

   "You can try." The Duke said: "It's a pity that there are no cavalry."

"It would be great if we could choose the battlefield," Theodoric said. "Henry had given the Russians a big loss." He was talking about the Polish crown prince Henry who turned Karsama into an overnight Zeguo affairs. In places where the ground is soft or even bad, the cavalry is not an advantage but a disadvantage, but not to mention that there are too many battlefields here, and the Spaniards will not give them a choice.

   "By the way, when is your brother going to officially announce his second son's ownership of Spain?"

   "If nothing goes wrong, it will be soon," said the Duke, and pressed his forehead wearily.

  ————

Everyone knows that whether it was King Louis XIV of France who declared that his second son Charles had the first right to the Spanish throne, or Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, that his eldest son Philip had the first right to the Spanish throne, both It must be the beginning of a great war no less than the Hundred Years' War.

But the two sides wrestled in secret for a long time, and finally the Sun King Louis XIV officially opened the prelude to the battle for the Spanish throne. On the first day of Lent in 1680, Louis XIV called all officials, ministers and generals. , and the envoys of the various countries, in the Jupiter Hall in Versailles, he announced that his second son Charles will be the king of Spain, Carlos III!

   Even though people had expected this news, they couldn't help being shocked.

Immediately afterwards, Louis XIV issued a decree, requiring the ministers, officials and princes of the Madrid and Toledo courts of Spain to swear allegiance to their new king, and the young Carlos II will be escorted by his uncle. , to Madrid, where the coronation ceremony was held in the cathedral.

Such a public declaration must have aroused the loud opposition of the princes of the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian envoys, but how could the voice of opposition at this time be able to suppress the voice of cheers, the people of Paris and Versailles celebrated almost all night, and the fireworks illuminated The black sky and the embarrassed faces of the Spanish envoys, some of them pro-French and some anti-French, but no one cared what they thought.

Louis XIV's attitude is obvious. After all, the will of the Spanish court in Madrid and Toledo to bow to his second son is time-limited and extremely urgent, giving them almost no time to consider. The king of France only wants to get Answer: yes, or no!

   At the same time, the two fleets in the port of Marseille drove south under the cover of the night.

   Not far from Marseille is Pepilion, and below Pepilion is Barcelona. The key to these two most important cities in Catalonia is that they are port cities, and now it is the sea that brings the crisis - unlike when Louis XIV attacked the Netherlands, there are now more than 300 ships in France. Even though some of them have been borrowed by the Duke of Colonna to deal with the threat brought by the Ottoman Turks, and there are more ships in the Strait of Calais to deal with the British's edge, the remaining ships are still enough to become the killer of the Duke of Orleans. .

  The artillery on these ships is now able to bombard the walls of Pepilion and Barcelona directly from the sea.

Louis carried his young son, who was already tired and lethargic even though he only showed up for a small meeting at the banquet, and walked to his suite. Queen Teresa watched worriedly, "What is there to worry about?" Louis smiled and said, "Have I never hugged little Louis?" His sons have different biological mothers, but the king has always treated these children the same, even Mrs. Montespan's son August In this way, he has held them all, and he may be a little more skilled than these noble ladies.

   It was the little Louis who could not help scratching his face shyly. He still vaguely remembered the feeling of being held in his arms by his father, and his mood was complicated.

Sure enough, even though he was carried into the bedroom by his father, Ciel still did not wake up. The maid took the little prince, no, it should be said, the King of Spain crowded into the bathroom. In the small hall, there were only His Majesty the King, the Queen, the Crown Prince, and others. Bontang, who was inseparable for a moment - it was he who repelled the extra attendants and maids.

Louis first got rid of the heavy coat under the service of the queen. After adding layers of gold and silver embroidery, and inlaid with thousands of gems and diamonds, any coat will become a set of brilliant armor. Louis gestured to the king. The prince also took off his coat, and the queen went into the small room and changed into a more comfortable robe. The three of them were like ordinary families, sitting in front of the fireplace. At this time, Versailles was still a little cold at night, and Bontang brought hot tea. with chocolate.

  Louis pushed the chocolate towards Teresa, Teresa liked it, but everything she ate today tasted like chewing wax - after tonight, everything is like an arrow from the string, and there is no room for recovery.

"Don't worry, mother, my father won't send my brother to Spain right now." Little Louis comforted her that he was also a tall young man and was about to marry the Portuguese princess, but it seemed that their wedding might be accompanied by fireworks With gunpowder. But he didn't care, and was a little excited. He never doubted that his father would win again. He just remembered that his younger brother would soon leave France, leave his father and brother, and go to a strange and hostile place. Worried.

"I'm not worried about that," Teresa said. "Of course I will believe my majesty." She smiled: "Just a little emotional. She was the least favored of Philip IV's children. At the time, her father was so ruthless that he delayed or deliberately neglected her dowry. Although this could be said to be in Louis's arms, he never thought about how difficult it would be for a foreign queen without a dowry to be in the Louvre.

  The marriage of the king is also a political contract, and if the dowry is not always available, the French can use this as a reason to deny the legality of the marriage.

   But her father, Philip IV, probably did not expect that the half a million livres he thought he could perfunctory would eventually be repaid with the whole of Spain.

   (end of this chapter)