At the time, I wrote to Dispatches and gained a good deal more information from the editor (all praise Him) waaay back in FE3, and from further information sent in by Tim Franklin for FE6. Thanks to them, and a desire to field small and colourful units in my own very modest Grande Armée, I have at last got around to writing up everything I have into one feature. Maybe this will persuade one or two of you to raise these rarely mentioned units yourself (and even better, write about a few more; at the very least it will keep me busy painting new units).
Napoleon terminated the ageing Holy Roman Empire in 1803, and set about rearranging and simplifying the German map. By 1806 many of the mid-German states, which were already nominal allies of Napoleon, joined his newly formed Confederation of the Rhine, or Rheinbund, and were required as part of the deal to provide troops to the French. The various holdings which formed the duchies of Nassau, Mecklenberg and Würzburg all raised units to contribute, but the smaller states, with comparatively tiny pop-ulations could only raise troops in company or modest battalion strengths. These smaller states were a fistful of minor duchies and territories spread out over an area of central Germany that bordered the Kingdom of Saxony on its western frontier. The troops they provided were banded together into the 4th, 5th and 6th Rheinbund-Regiments.
Confederation of the Rhine Continued
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
As most people with an interest in Napoleonics will know, there was a whole bundle of very small or short-lived units in existence at any one time throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Unfortunately, but few of them get a mention, and even fewer get a mention detailed enough for a wargamer to produce anything more than the wish to raise them in his or her collection. This is an article I have been intending to put together ever since I first discovered the existence of the three smallest regiments of the Confederation of the Rhine a couple of years ago.
Historical Background
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