Siege of Cuneo
1691 CE.
Shown on the map at 44.389°, 7.548°.
The siege of Cuneo was fought on 28 June 1691 during the Nine Years' War in Piedmont-Savoy, modern-day northern Italy. The siege was part of French King Louis XIV’s campaign against Victor Amadeus, the Duke of Savoy, who had sided with the Grand Alliance the previous year. The siege was an attempt to gain a foothold on the Piedmont Plain, thus ensuring Marshal Catinat's army could winter east of the Alps. Yet due to the incompetence of the two French commanders (in fact, General Vivien de Bulonde, because of decoded messages from Louis XIV to Catinat authorizing his punishment, has been proposed by some to have been the Man in the Iron Mask) – and a timely arrival of Imperial reinforcements – the siege proved a disaster, resulting in the loss of between 700 and 800 men. Although French forces had taken Nice in the west, and Montmélian in the north, Catinat's small, ill-equipped army was forced onto the defensive. Louis XIV subsequently offered Amadeus generous peace terms but the Duke, who had by now received substantial Imperial reinforcements from the Empire, considered himself strong enough to continue hostilities.
Text from the Wikipedia article Siege of Cuneo (1691), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.