On December 4th, 1676, the ferocious Battle of Lund raged immediately outside the town gate north of Lund.
The only 21-year-old King Charles XI personally took command of his newly-conscripted main army and marched down from the Swedish heartlnds to stop the Danish armies. The Danish expansion was stemmed in the battle of Fyllebro (situated in the province of Halland; the name "Fyllebro" is incredibly funny in Swedish, it means approximately "Bridge of Drunkards") on August 17th. However, the Danish resistance (together with the opposition of the local Scanian population) made it an overwhelming task to drive the Danes out of Skåne. The Danish army made its retreat skillfully across Skåne in order to keep in its possession what it had conquered and to destroy the possibilities for Charles to feed and to maintain his army. The Danes also tried to isolate the city of Malmö, which was the only Swedish fortress in Skåne that still held out (Christian already held the fortified towns of Helsingborg, Kristianstad, and Landskrona, together with the towns of Lund and Ystad).
As the Danish Navy was superior to the Swedish, Charles had to rely on a few passable roads for his communications with the capital of Stockholm and also all his supply transports had to go by wagon-trains. The Swedish situation was very bad: despite the bad communications with the other parts of Sweden, the army had to stay in Skåne at any price in order to keep the Danish army "busy" so that it wasn't able to encircle and starve out the city of Malmö. The autumn of 1676 was terrible: the fields were flooded by torrential rains and the bad roads transformed into boggy ditches. On November 20th, Christian finally decided to let his army go into well-selected winter quarters in the area north-east of Lund. Charles could not find equivalent quarters, but he decided to let his army rest about seven miles north-west of Lund (on the other side of the Kävlinge River). During the very last night of November, the weather suddenly changed and it was much colder. All small rivers froze at once, and Charles decided to wage a final battle during his 1676 campaign.
Want to try your hand at forcing a victory? The time is set for your forces to face the enemy on a cold morning in 1676. Download the free scenario in the in the RIDVAN subgroup's Free Scenarios folder and let the Gods of War decide!
