Ottavio Piccolomini, 1st Duke of Amalfi was an Italian nobleman whose military career included service as a Spanish general and then as a field marshal of the Holy Roman Empire.
11 Facts About Ottavio Piccolomini
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The house of Ottavio Piccolomini was a Sienese family that had seen two of its members elected to the papal throne.
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Ottavio Piccolomini received a military education as a young boy and became a tercio pikeman for the Crown of Spain at the age of almost seventeen.
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Ottavio Piccolomini was appointed captain of a cavalry regiment in Bohemia, sent by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to the emperor's army.
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Ottavio Piccolomini fought with distinction under Count Charles Bucquoy at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 and later in Hungary.
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Ottavio Piccolomini did, though, play a pivotal role at the head of his cavalry regiment, leading numerous cavalry charges against the Swedish army, having five horses shot under him, and receiving six painful bruises from musket balls that deflected off his armour.
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Ottavio Piccolomini's reward was his marshal's baton, 100,000 gulden and the estate of Nachod in the Orlicke mountains in East Bohemia.
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From 1635 to 1639, Ottavio Piccolomini commanded an Imperial auxiliary corps supporting Spain in the Southern Netherlands and Northern France.
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Ottavio Piccolomini was rewarded with the status of Count of the Empire in 1638 and the elevation to the office of privy councillor and the dukedom of Amalfi from King Philip IV of Spain in 1639.
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Ottavio Piccolomini conducted the final campaign of the Thirty Years' War in which he and the Bavarians under Hunolstein stopped the Swedish and French advance at the rivers Inn and Danube and forced them to retreat out of Bavaria across the Lech.
11.
Ottavio Piccolomini had adopted his distant nephew Josef Silvio, most likely Schiller's inspiration for the fictional son Max Ottavio Piccolomini in Wallenstein.