Ernst Gideon von Laudon

Background

Laudon was the son of Otto Gerhard Ritter von Laudohn (1673–1732), a lieutenant-colonel, retired on a meagre pension from the Swedish service and his wife, Sophie Eleonore von Bornemann (1680–1734). The Laudohn family, of mixed German and Latgalian origin, belonged to the Baltic-German nobility, and had been settled in the estate of Tootzen, near Laudohn in Eastern Livonia (present-day Latvia) before 1432. He claimed a kinship with the Earls of Loudoun from Scotland, which could not be established. As upon the Great Northern War Livonia had been ceded to Russia according to the 1721 Treaty of Nystad, the boy was sent to the Imperial Russian Army as a cadet in 1732.

During the War of the Polish Succession he took part in the 1734 Siege of Danzig led by Feldmarschall Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, he marched against French troops up to the Rhine in 1735 and back to the Dnieper River into the Turkish campaign. After the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, he returned to the Russian court at Saint Petersburg. Dissatisfied with his prospects and the conditions in the Russian Army, he finally resigned in 1741 and sought military employment elsewhere. He applied first to King Frederick the Great, who however declined his services.

At Vienna he had better fortune, being made a captain in the Freikorps of Franz von der Trenck. During the War of the Austrian Succession, he took part in its forays and marches, though not in its atrocities, until wounded and taken prisoner in Alsace. He was shortly released by the advance of the main Austrian army. His next active service, still under Trenck, was in the Silesian mountains in 1745 (during the Second Silesian War against Prussia), in which campaign he greatly distinguished himself as a leader of light troops.

Silesian Wars

He was present also at the Battle of Soor. He retired shortly afterwards, owing to his distaste for the lawless habits of his comrades in the irregulars, and after long waiting in poverty for a regular commission he was at last made a captain in one of the frontier regiments, spending the next ten years in half-military, half-administrative work in the Karlovac district on the Military Frontier. At Bunić, where he was stationed, he built a church and planted an oak forest now called by his name. He had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel when the outbreak of the Seven Years' War called him again into the field.

Did You Know?

• He captured Belgrade in just three weeks in 1789.