This title explores and illustrates the armies of France, and six countries allied against Louis XIV, in a wide-ranging Continental conflict that ushered in more than a century of European warfare.
Formed in 1689, the 'Grand Alliance' or League of Augsburg was a military coalition of the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, Britain, Spain and the Duchy of Savoy, to resist Louis XIV's rich, powerful and expansionist France. The first stage of the nine year conflict that followed also coincided with the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' in Britain (1688-91), when the throne passed to the Dutch Protestant leader, William of Orange, the head of a multi-national Dutch, Danish and English army, which finally expelled James II's Jacobite and French forces from Ireland.