The Siege of Turin 1706: How Prince Eugene Broke the Sun King's Army

The Siege of Turin in 1706 was the moment Louis XIV's army lost northern Italy in a single morning. When Charles II of Spain died childless, the War of the Spanish Succession set Bourbon France against the Grand Alliance. Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, changed sides in 1703, and by 1706 Turin was the last great Savoyard city still standing. For 117 days La Feuillade's army of up to 48,000 men bombarded the citadel, while Count Daun's garrison and Antonio Bertola's miners fought a hidden war in kilometres of tunnels beneath it, where Pietro Micca gave his life at a staircase underground. Meanwhile Prince Eugene of Savoy, the man Louis XIV once refused a commission, slipped across the Po and raced west along its southern bank. From the heights of Superga he looked at twenty-five kilometres of French siege lines and called the enemy "half beaten". Orléans, Marsin and La Feuillade could not agree on how to meet him. On 7 September 1706, Eugene, Victor Amadeus and Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau's Prussians struck the weakest point between the Dora and the Stura. 0:00 Turin, 1706 0:50 A Crown Without an Heir 2:43 The Prince Louis Rejected 4:32 A Fortress Above and Below 6:58 An Eclipse Over the Siege 10:38 Eugene's Race Along the Po 15:03 Pietro Micca's Last Fuse 16:34 "Half Beaten" from Superga 19:43 The Battle of Turin 22:13 Italy Lost in a Morning Sources: Kenneth P. Czech, "War of the Spanish Succession: Battle of Turin", Military History magazine / HistoryNet: https://historynet.com/war-of-the-spanish-... François Brizay, "La mémoire du siège et de la bataille de Turin (1706)", Tierce, Université de Poitiers, 2021: https://tierce.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/index... Saint-Simon, Mémoires, tome 5, chapter XIV (primary source): https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/M%C3%A9moir... Treccani, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, "Micca, Pietro": https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pietr... Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), "Spanish Succession, War of the": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encycl... Royal Collection Trust, Map of the siege of Turin, 1706 (RCIN 725063): https://militarymaps.rct.uk/war-of-the-spa... MuseoTorino, Museo Civico Pietro Micca e dell'Assedio di Torino del 1706: https://www.museotorino.it/view/s/6dd47de0... "La légende noire de l'ordre secret du maréchal de Marsin", Dix-septième siècle, 2012/2: https://shs.cairn.info/revue-dix-septieme-... Die Welt der Habsburger, "The battle for the Spanish inheritance": https://www.habsburger.net/en/chapter/batt... Giuseppe Maria Solaro della Margherita, Journal historique du siège de la ville et de la citadelle de Turin (1708); Giovanni Cerino Badone, Le Aquile e i Gigli (2007) Maps: drawn by Wars in Ink · base data Natural Earth (public domain) · terrain AWS Terrain Tiles · Illustrations: original artwork created for this channel (AI-assisted) · Archival art: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Frans van Stampart, Louis Bernard after François de Troy, Istituto Geografico Militare (Wikimedia Commons, public domain / CC0) · Music: YouTube Audio Library #history #documentary #militaryhistory