Louis XIV snubbed a scrawny young prince who later crushed his army at Blenheim
In 1683 a slight 19-year-old raised at Versailles asked Louis XIV for a company to command. The king refused, sneering at the young man's insolent stare. Prince Eugene went to fight for France's Habsburg rival instead, and two decades later helped wreck French power at Blenheim.
Paris was Eugene's birthplace, on 18 October 1663, at the family's Hôtel de Soissons. He was the youngest of five sons of a French count and Olympia Mancini, a niece of Cardinal Mazarin who had grown up alongside the young Louis XIV and was widely rumoured to be his lover. Neither parent paid the children much attention. Olympia's taste for intrigue drew her into the Affair of the Poisons, with suspicions that she had a hand in her husband's early death and even a plot against the king. She fled to Brussels in 1680, leaving Eugene with his grandmother and an aunt.
Groomed for the church from the age of ten, he shocked his family by choosing soldiering. Rejected by Louis, perhaps because of his frail build and his mother's disgrace, and barred from serving elsewhere, he slipped away to Emperor Leopold I, in whose army his older brother had just been killed. He made his name at 20 during the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, fought at Buda and Belgrade, and was a field marshal by 25.
His victory at Zenta in 1697 lifted the Ottoman threat for close to twenty years. In the War of the Spanish Succession he won in Italy, including at Turin in 1706, and teamed up with the Duke of Marlborough for Blenheim in 1704, Oudenaarde and Malplaquet. Blenheim checked French military supremacy, exactly the outcome Louis's refusal had made possible. Renewed war with the Turks brought more triumphs at Petrovaradin in 1716 and Belgrade the next year.
In all he served three emperors across six decades, rising to the top offices of the Vienna court and building alliances against the Bourbons in the 1720s. Old and frail by the War of the Polish Succession, which he opposed, he still mounted a defence that kept invaders out of Bavaria. He collected art and books, wrote to scientists and philosophers, and left an architectural mark with the Baroque Belvedere palace in Vienna. Death came on 21 April 1736, when he was 72.
Source: Prince Eugene of Savoy
