Ernst Gideon von Laudon, since 1759 Freiherr von Laudon (originally Laudohn or Loudon; 13 February 171714 July 1790), was a Baltic German-born Austrian military officer and one of the most successful opponents of the Prussian king Frederick the Great.
Background and early career
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, 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.
Silesian Wars
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. 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. From this point began his fame as a soldier. At first rejected by General Wilhelm Reinhard von Neipperg, he soon was promoted colonel at the behest of Chancellor Wenzel Anton Kaunitz and distinguished himself repeatedly. He drew attention at the small but much reported night raid on Ostritz on 1 January 1757 and during that year fought in Bohemia and Saxony under Feldmarschall Maximilian Ulysses Browne and became a Generalfeldwachtmeister (equivalent to major-general) of cavalry as well as a knight of the newly founded Maria Theresa Military Order.
In the Third Silesian War campaign of 1758 came his first opportunity for fighting an action as a commander-in-chief, and he used it so well that Frederick the Great was obliged to give up the siege of Olomouc and retire into Bohemia (Battle of Domstadtl, 30 June). He was rewarded with the grade of lieutenant-field-marshal and having again shown himself an active and daring commander in the campaign of Hochkirch, he was created a Freiherr in the Austrian nobility by Maria Theresa and in the peerage of the Holy Roman Empire by her husband the emperor Francis. Maria Theresa gave him, further, the grand cross of the order she had founded and an estate near Kutná Hora in Bohemia.