Johann Wilhelm von Hunolstein

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Johann Wilhelm von Hunolstein (1599–1664)

Johann Wilhelm Freiherr Vogt von Hunolstein zu Dürkastel (born April 24, 1599 in Château-Voué , † July 29, 1664 in Breslau ) was an officer in the Thirty Years' War in Lorraine, Bavarian and imperial services. In 1648 he was in command of the Bavarian army for a short time. In 1657 he became imperial military commander in Silesia during the Second Northern War .

Life

Hunolstein was born as the second son of Wilhelm von Hunolstein († 1607) and Anna Maria von Landsberg († 1636) in Château-Voué (German "Dürkastel") in Lorraine . His father was the owner of the rule over Dürkastel and had established the Dürkastell line of the Hunsrück knight dynasty von Hunolstein by dividing the inheritance . Initially intended for a spiritual career in his youth and appointed canon in Trier in 1614 , Johann Wilhelm resigned from this post on May 16, 1623 in order to concentrate on his military career. According to Lorraine inheritance law, the older brother Johann Marzolf would have had sole entitlement to Dürkastel Castle, but in 1623 ceded it to Johann Wilhelm for 8,000 guilders, who left part of the castle to his mother as a widow's residence.

In the early stages of the Thirty Years' War, Johann Wilhelm served in the army of the Catholic League . In 1623 he held the rank of captain and was presumably the commander of troops that were quartered in Ramsdorf in the western Münsterland. In 1624 he was appointed chamberlain to the Duke of Lorraine . In 1629 he was mentioned in the service of the Cronberg League Regiment, and from 1632 he had his own infantry regiment. In 1636, the expelled Duke Karl of Lorraine , who during this time recaptured parts of his country, appointed Hunolstein as governor of Bockenheim and Saar Werden . In 1637 he appeared as a constable sergeant in Bietigheim in Württemberg . On February 2, 1639, Hunolstein entered the service of the Bavarian Government as general sergeant, and his troops took part in the conquest of Höxter in the autumn of 1640 as part of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and Piccolomini's campaign against the Swedish general Banér . At the same time, Hunolstein continued to serve the Duke of Lorraine, who made him governor of Marsal on March 30, 1640 .

For a short time, on January 14, 1641, Hunolstein was called in command of Amberg in the Upper Palatinate , but was called back to the army on March 14, which was pursuing the Swedes under Banér through the Upper Palatinate. The Swedes failed at the end of January when the frozen Danube broke up in the attack on the city of Regensburg and the Reichstag that was meeting there, and were attacked in March by the united imperial-Bavarian army. Hunolstein's regiment took part in the siege of the city of Neunburg vorm Wald , which included the Swedish rearguard under Erik Slang , which surrendered on March 21. During this time, Hunolstein, as a confidante of Charles of Lorraine, gave the Emperor Ferdinand III. and the Bavarian Elector Maximilian announced that Charles had concluded negotiations with France at the beginning of April for the return of his duchy. On July 16, 1641, he was appointed governor of Bitsch by Karl, who had already broken with France at this point .

In 1642 Hunolstein switched from the Bavarian to the imperial army. In June 1643 he was promoted to Imperial General Field Sergeant and appointed to the general staff of the Imperial Commander-in-Chief Matthias Gallas alongside Adrian von Enkevort . Hunolstein accompanied Gallas on his Holstein campaign against Torstensson in 1644 as one of his sub-commanders alongside Georg Adam von Traudisch . When the imperial army was retreating due to a catastrophic supply situation, first locked in Bernburg and later in Magdeburg , Hunolstein and Traudisch thought at times of leaving the army. On January 7, 1645, however, Hunoldstein succeeded in replacing the sick Gallas, successfully breaking out of Magdeburg with the infantry that were still able to march and bringing 1400 soldiers and 12 field guns to Wittenberg within four days , where he left 280 sick people, to start with the rest in early February to be back in Bohemia . It is unclear whether Hunolstein was involved in the catastrophic Battle of Jankau on March 6th, as the exhausted foot soldiers of the Gallas Army stayed behind in Prague and did not take part in the battle. About a month after the battle on April 3, 1645, Hunolstein was promoted to Lieutenant Field Marshal .

After the defeat at Jankau, Hunolstein was largely responsible for the defense of Lower Austria against the invading Swedes in 1645 and the reconquest of the towns they had won and fortified by August 1646. On May 31, 1645 he took the Danube Island near Krems , which the Swedes ended March of the year to block traffic on the Danube and had entrenched. The subsequent attack on Krems, which was only sparsely occupied at the time, failed because the Swedish Commander-in-Chief Torstensson had sent 1,500 men to relieve the city in time. In January 1646, Hunolstein was across from Krems, which was still occupied by Sweden, in Mautern on the Danube . From the beginning of April to the beginning of May 1646, Hunolstein took part in the successful siege of Krems under the command of General Puchheim and together with him commanded the siege work. After the fall of Krems on May 5th, the imperial family began the siege of Korneuburg . Hunolstein was part of Puchheim's general staff. The fortress surrendered after stubborn defense by the Swedes on August 4th, Hunolstein's regiment was then placed in the city as a garrison.

In 1647 Hunolstein commanded the imperial infantry in the army of the new Commander in Chief Peter Melander von Holzappel on his campaign to Thuringia and Hesse . From October 1647, the Bavarian Elector Emperor Ferdinand asked him to leave Hunolstein for his army in order to take over the siege of Memmingen . The emperor agreed, but since Memmingen surrendered soon afterwards, he left Hunolstein to Melander's main army as long as it needed him. At the beginning of 1648 the imperial Bavarian army withdrew from Hesse. Hunolstein with the infantry and Montecuccoli with the imperial cavalry took up blocked positions behind the Franconian Saale in order to be able to repel the heads of the Swedish army. In March, Hunolstein finally joined the Bavarian Army and was promoted to General Feldzeugmeister. At the same time he became the teacher of Prince Elector Ferdinand Maria in the war sciences.

When the Bavarian commander Gronsfeld found himself unable to hold the Lech against the Swedes and French after the lost battle near Zusmarshausen at the end of May 1648 , he was raised from his command shortly afterwards and arrested. The Bavarian court marshal and privy councilor Georg Christoph von Haslang made Hunolstein the interim successor of Gronsfeld on his own initiative and gave him supreme command of the Bavarian army, which Elector Maximilian subsequently approved. Together with the new imperial commander Piccolomini and Johann von Reuschenberg , Hunolstein successfully defended the Inn line against the Swedes. Among other things, he stopped General Wrangel near Mühldorf . The Bavarian elector passed over Hunolstein when he succeeded Gronsfeld and made Adrian von Enkevort permanent commander in chief. On August 2nd, Enkevort was presented to the Bavarian army. The elector had tried in vain to take his "disgust" from Hunolstein, because he feared that it might even go over to the enemy because Hunolstein's Lorraine goods were within the direct sphere of influence of the French. However, Hunolstein abdicated and left the Bavarian military service again shortly before the end of the war.

After leaving the Bavarian army, Hunolstein returned to his Lorraine goods. In 1654, however, he and his family were expelled from Dürkastel by the French because of his courageous fight against the French and Swedes in the Thirty Years' War. He found refuge with his family near Koblenz , where he owned half of the Mühlenbach estate through his wife , and soon returned to the imperial service. On July 14, 1657, he was given military command in Silesia when the Imperialists on the side of Poland had entered the Second Northern War against Sweden. In 1661 he received permission from Emperor Leopold I to return to his property in Dürkastel. The reinstated Duke Karl of Lorraine confirmed Johann Wilhelm on December 13, 1663 the ownership of the villages of Virming and half of Conthil , which he had given him earlier out of gratitude for his services. He died on July 29, 1664 in Breslau .

family

Hunolstein was married to Maria Elisabeth von Steinkallenfels († 1669), with whom he had 16 children, five of them sons. Two sons and three daughters died in childhood; most of the children entered the clergy. Two sons became canons in Mainz and Würzburg , while three daughters entered the women's monastery in Épinal (Hunolstein's daughter Félicité became abbess there in 1699). The inheritance was taken over by the third son Franz Felix Karl († 1675), who was married to Elisabeth von Hatzfeld, a daughter of Hermann von Hatzfeld and thus niece of the imperial general Melchior von Hatzfeld .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c L. Jean pp. 90-91.
  2. ↑ a b Friedrich Toepfer (Ed.): Document book for the history of the count and baronial house of the bailiffs of Hunolstein (Bd. 3) . Campe & Son, 1872, p. 237-238 ( [1] ).
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Bernd Warlich: Hunolstein zu Dürrkastel, Johann Wilhelm Freiherr Vogt von. In: The Thirty Years' War in personal testimonies, chronicles and reports ; accessed on June 7, 2020
  4. ↑ a b c L. Jean pp. 96-97.
  5. ↑ a b c Bavarian War Archives : History of the Bavarian Army (Vol. 1): History of the Bavarian Army, especially under Elector Ferdinand Maria 1651–1679 . J. Lindauer, Munich 1901, p. 7 .
  6. ^ Lothar Höbelt: From Nördlingen to Jankau. Imperial strategy and warfare 1634-1645 . In: Republic of Austria, Federal Minister for National Defense (Hrsg.): Writings of the Army History Museum Vienna . tape 22 . Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-902551-73-3 , p. 416-419 .
  7. ^ Wilhelm Braumüller (Ed.): Sources and research on patriotic history, literature and art . Vienna 1849, p. 426-429 .
  8. ^ Wilhelm Braumüller (Ed.): Sources and research on patriotic history, literature and art . Vienna 1849, p. 462-473 .
  9. ↑ a b L. Jean pp. 103-106.
  10. ↑ L. Jean pp. 106-107.
personal data
SURNAME Hunolstein, Johann Wilhelm von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bavarian and Imperial General Feldzeugmeister
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1599
PLACE OF BIRTH Château-Voué
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 1664
Place of death Wroclaw