Descartes was not a Rosicrucian

Descartes still did not know how to pursue his life goals.

So he took up the musket again to do another campaign.

In the Bavarian camp the previous year, he heard of the troubles in Hungary.

This made him want to go to Hungary and join the Emperor’s army against the rebels.

He left the service of the Duke of Bavaria to go to Moravia, where Count de Bucquoy, immediately after the restoration of his health, had set about to reduce the cities that remained in the faction of the elector palatine.

He went to find him in Hradisch, a town on the Morava that this count had just taken, after a siege of a few days, and which had served until then as a place of communication between the rebels of Hungary, and those of Bohemia to mutually help each other against Emperor Ferdinand. He enlisted on the conditions of volunteers towards the end of March 1621 in the troops of this general, who was waiting for the outcome of the Hainburg conference, procured on January 25 by the ambassadors of France, between Gabor Bethlen and the states of Hungary on one hand, and the emperor who was the legitimate king of Hungary on the other.

The troubles in Hungary after the troubles in Bohemia.

Gabriel Bethlem was of Hungarian origin and Greek in religion.

With the help of the Turks, he had seized Transylvania from Báthory.

To be able to enjoy his usurpation with more assurance and rest,

He made peace with:

• Emperor Matthias in 1615 in exchange for Transylvania recognizing Emperor as the ruler of Hungary.
• Matthias’ sucessor Ferdinand in 1619

But he took the discontented Hungary for himself.

He secured the favor of the Grand Turk, of whom he was a vassal.

He entered at the end of August 1619 into upper Hungary with a large army.

He took the city of Košice on September 5.

The fright was so great that most of the cities brought him the keys.

The states of upper Hungary placed themselves under his power, on the condition that he would maintain them in their privileges.

In October, he advanced his army towards Pressburg, and sent 10,000 Transylvanians to Count de la Tour, general of the rebel troops of Bohemia.

He forced the city of Pressburg to surrender on October 20.

He had himself declared Prince of Hungary by the great men of the kingdom.

He allowed freedom of religion everywhere.

At the beginning of 1620, the articles of a confederation were drawn up between:

• him, the states of Hungary and Transylvania and
• the elector palatine, the states of Bohemia and the incorporated provinces

They were stopped on January 3 at Prague Castle, signed in Pressburg on January 15 and ratified in Prague on April 15 following.

At the same time the emperor who was trying to spare the blood of the Hungarians who had remained faithful to him, and who feared that the Turk might want to take advantage of these disorders, made a truce with Gabor Bethlen to stop all acts of hostility until Saint Michael’s day.

During the truce, the states of Hungary, under the pretext of considering the means of restoring the whole kingdom to the obedience of the emperor, held a general diet in Neuhausel at the beginning of July.

The deliberation was that the war would begin at the end of the truce, and that Prince Bethlen would be crowned King of Hungary in October.

The truce over, Bethlen carried the war to the confines of Austria, and laid siege before Hainburg, which he took after the death of Count de Dampierre, general of the imperial troops killed before Pressburg; where he had gone to lay siege to divert that of Hainburg.

Having learned that the ambassadors of France had left on October 16 to treat an accommodation between the emperor and him, he sent ahead of them 400 horsemen, then 200 gentlemen; received them magnificently, and gave them two audiences of which the result was never known.

But having returned to Vienna, they had a conference stopped between five deputies of the emperor and six of Prince Bethlen in Hainburg where they were also to be found, and had it assigned on January 25, 1621.

During the holding of this conference, the two armies did not fail to act against each other, and often fought with a lot of loss on both sides, when they met in detached bodies.

But Bethlen, seeing the great men of his party shaken by the sad news of the defeat of the prince palatine and the confederates of Bohemia, and not counting too much on the favorable outcome of the Hainburg conference, left Pressburg, and took the crown with him. He first withdrew to Tyrnau, and from there to Zólyom on the Gran river.

On April 7, the emperor sent his peace conditions to the conference to be offered to Prince Bethlen.

They bore that he would be left the title of Prince of Hungary, with an income of 100,000 florins and 100 marks of silver per year. Bethlen showed that he was content to accept these conditions, provided that he was given Košice, with a certain number of security cities.

He asked besides that the emperor generally pardon all the confederates of whatever province they were, and not make any search for the past.

The emperor rejected this proposal: on his refusal the Haimburg conference was broken with the truce that had been renewed and prolonged until then, so that nothing more prevented Count de Bucquoy from entering Hungary.

Descartes followed him to the passage of the Morava, which he made in April to go to invest Pressburg with an army of 22,000 men.

Prince Bethlen who had left a strong garrison in the castle of the city, having provided for the ammunition of Tyrnau, Neuhausel, and the other main places, withdrew to Košice, and took the crown of Hungary there.

The city of Pressburg surrendered on May 2, and the castle eight days later.

Count de Bucquoy after having had the Hungarians who were in the citadel led to Neuhausel, and the Germans to Moravia, put an imperial garrison in Pressburg, and made his army march before Tyrnau, which did not resist long, no more than the cities and places of St. George, Moder, Pösing, Rosendorf, Altenburg, and some others on the two banks of the Danube, which were reduced in a short time with the whole island of Schütt.

It is claimed that Descartes:

• distinguished himself in these expeditions
• acquired a reputation there.

But Descartes never wrote about it.

Count de Bucquoy, did not have such a good deal of the siege of Neuhausel, which almost ruined the party of the emperor in Hungary.

The imperials first had some advantages in their approaches: and the besieged received at the beginning a lot of damage from the batteries which were perfectly well arranged.

But besides that the latter lacked nothing in the place, having the free door on the side of the river, to bring in as many men and ammunition as they could wish for: they still had outside the city 10,000 men, come to their aid; namely, 4,000 sent from Košice by Prince Bethlen, and 6,000 brought from Bohemia and Moravia by Count de la Tour, and camped advantageously beyond the river. The besieged made frequent sorties, and the army of the auxiliary troops crossed the passages and avenues of the imperial army so much, that Count de Bucquoy was obliged to make an escort of several companies of cavalry and infantry to send to forage.

Despite these inconveniences, the siege advanced in very good order, when on July 10 a body of 1500 Hungarian horses, detached from the camp beyond the river and passed with the help of the cannon of the besieged, came to attack 1500 horsemen of the imperials returning from foraging.

At the first alarm that was given of it, Count de Bucquoy accompanied by some officers ran to put himself at the head of his people. Having considered the order of the assailants, he formed on the spot various squadrons, and made Count Torquati advance who valiantly broke the enemy vanguard, and found himself pell-mell in the middle of the Hungarians with his soldiers. The squadron that followed did not do its duty well, and its flight dragged the others who came after. So that Torquati and his men were enveloped and taken prisoners, and that Count de Bucquoy found himself alone in front of the enemy.

He ran in vain from squadron to squadron with the sword in one hand and the pistol in the other to reassure the fugitives and make them return.

They had no ears for him: and they abandoned him so generally that he was cut off and invested alone by fifteen Hungarians of the best mounted, who attacked him from all sides. He defended himself for a very long time against them with his ordinary courage, until he received a pistol shot through the body, then another lance blow that made him fall from his horse.

The Marquis of Gonzaga who saw him from afar, ran with some of his men to help him. He threw himself in the middle of the Hungarians, killed two, and gave Count de Bucquoy the leisure to get up, and to walk on foot about fifty steps towards the army despite the loss of his blood.

The Hungarians:

• came in greater number.
• made the Marquis of Gonzaga withdraw
• threw Count de Bucquoy to the ground with two other lance blows, and having made a discharge of all their pistols on him, he died under the hail of so many blows, of which thirteen were found to be mortal.

The shame and the courage retook the Marquis of Gonzaga, who came back to the charge with Sieur de Camargues, and some soldiers rallied from the fugitives. They bravely pierced to the place where their general was, whom they found dead. The marquis descended from his horse, on which he himself loaded the body to transport it to the camp.

The imperials, dismayed by the loss of their general, no longer thought of anything but the means of lifting the siege of Neuhausel. But to save appearances, they remained a few more days, during which they took measures to retreat in good order. This is what they did during the night of July 27, and Mr. Descartes returned to Pressburg with the French and the Walloons, who were in great number in the army of Count de Bucquoy.

An adventure as fatal as the one he had just been a witness to, finished by disgusting him with the profession of arms. We would be too easy if we let ourselves go to the opinion of those who have published that he still served against the Turks. When Mr. Descartes would have wanted to do it, it would be difficult to find an occasion that had presented itself at that time to favor this design.

The imperials had nothing to deal with the Turks then; and it would have been necessary for Mr. Descartes to satisfy himself, to have gone to Poland or Moldavia, which was the ordinary theater of the war between the Poles and the Turks. From the year 1620, the young Sultan Osman had made peace with Persia to declare war on Poland. The Turks and the Poles had fought each other in various encounters at the end of the same year, and at the beginning of the following one. The war lasted until November: and the Cossacks, sometimes alone, sometimes with the Poles, made more than a hundred thousand Turks perish by the sword there, until Osman saw himself obliged to ask for peace, which ended the campaign of that year. Mr. Descartes leaving the camp before Neuhausel at the end of July, would have perhaps arrived early enough in Moldavia to see the last battles. But the passages occupied by the Hungarians and Transylvanians of Gabor Bethlen’s party, could not allow him this trip. Also we see that those who made him go against the Turks, only supposed the thing on the error that had made them believe that the imperial army of Hungary was employed against the Turks.