The Duke of Marlborough on the Moselle: the plan’s grandeur and the inability to execute it. The military campaign of 1705

The work aims to identify the features of European military art in the early 18th century. The article focuses on the hostilities between the French army of Marshal C.-L. Villars and the troops of the Grand Alliance under the command of J. Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden on the Moselle River in the spring-summer of 1705. The author pays particular attention to the diplomatic and material preparation of the campaign, troop management, as well as the role of logistics and rear support during the operation. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the article presents a separate period of European military history based on sources that have not yet been reflected in Russian historiography. As a result of the study, the author came to the conclusion that the military actions on the Moselle River in 1705 manifested both general and distinctive features of the military strategy of the era. The peculiarity of the military actions was their activity and decisive nature, persistence and purposefulness. The typical features of military art became: a constraining method of management, the dominance of logistics over operational actions, maneuver over field combat, and the positional nature of military operations.