Austrian field marshal during the French Revolutionary Wars
1724 CE
to 1797 CE
Dagobert Sigismund, Count von Wurmser (May 7, 1724 – August 22, 1797) is an Austrian field marshal during the French Revolutionary Wars.
Although he fights in the Seven Years' War, the War of the Bavarian Succession, and mountsseveral successful campaigns in the Rhineland in the initial years of the French Revolutionary Wars, he is probably most remembered for his unsuccessful operations against Napoleon Bonaparte during the 1796 campaign in Italy.
Although initially in the Army of France during the Seven Years' War, Wurmser leaves France after Louis reaches a peace agreement with Britain, and joins the military of the House of Habsburg.
He later takes part in the short-lived War of the Bavarian Succession, also called the so-called Kartoffelkrieg (Potato War).
During the French Revolutionary Wars, Wurmser commands several imperial Habsburg armies on in the Rhine River valley between 1793 and 1795, and perhaps his most conspicuous achievement is the taking of the lines of Lauterburg and Weissenburg in October 1793.
In 1796, Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor sends him to northern Italy, where the Habsburg military defends Austria's southern territories.
In a series of well-fought battles with the French army, under the command of the up-and-coming general Napoleon Bonaparte, Wurmser is trapped with his army in Mantua; after a negotiated capitulation, Wurmser leaves the city with his honors and seven hundred men, and marched back to Vienna.
His defeat at Mantua doesnot diminish the luster of his service in imperial eyes—he is granted another appointment immediately—but he is an old man of seventy-two years who has spent most of his adult life in arduous campaigning.
His health fails him shortly after his appointment and he dies in 1797.
