He slept in armor. The Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold - feared in courts from Paris to Naples, master of one of Europe's richest and most modern armies - bedded down each night for only a few hours, fully harnessed in steel, refusing to undress while Neuss held its gates against him. The town was supposed to fall in weeks. It would not fall at all. For eleven months, from the summer of 1474 to the summer of 1475, the most expensive military operation of fifteenth-century Europe ground itself to pieces against the walls of a single Rhineland city, and watching from across the river, the wider world began to suspect that the Duke of Burgundy might not be invincible after all.
The official cause was a quarrel about a bishop. Ruprecht of the Palatinate had been elected Archbishop of Cologne and promptly made himself loathed by his own clergy, citizens, and subject towns. Charles, inheriting his father's alliance with the Electorate, signed a treaty in 1474 to crush Ruprecht's rebels in exchange for two hundred thousand florins a year and a permanent foothold on the Rhine. The route from Burgundy toward Cologne ran past Neuss, a free imperial city of weavers and Rhine merchants that had thrown its lot in with the rebels. Charles could not leave it at his back. Contemporaries, watching him assemble Italian mercenaries, English archers, German gunners, and a fleet of river craft, suspected something larger than ecclesiastical politics. He wanted Alsace. He wanted Lorraine. He wanted a continuous Burgundian state running from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and Neuss was the first stone in the road.
The Neussers had barely time to bar their gates when, on 29 July 1474, the Burgundian siege lines began to creep around them. Hermann, Landgrave of Hesse, took command inside the walls. The townspeople had laid in food enough to last until Christmas, and the Krur and the Rhine guarded their flanks. Charles attacked the Rhine islands first, reasoning that if he held the river he held the city's water and supply lines both. His soldiers took the islands at heavy cost, then watched in horror as a bridge to one of them collapsed under their own weight, drowning a column of Italian troops. Hostile peasants harried the foraging parties. A 3,000-strong assault on a city gate in September - English archers and Italian infantry pressing forward together - was thrown back. That same night, the people of Cologne floated a fire-boat down the Rhine to burn the Burgundian pontoons; the river fleet swung it harmlessly aside.
Pay was always the weak seam in a mercenary army, and Charles's English archers, deep in arrears, finally snapped. When the Duke walked among them trying to calm the dispute, someone in the ranks opened fire. Charles was untouched, but the muzzle flash carried a rumor through camp that he had been killed, and the Burgundians turned on the English with murderous fury. Bodies were already falling when Charles strode back into the lanes between the tents, alive and visibly furious, and stopped the slaughter with his own presence. Meanwhile the people of Cologne were smuggling supplies into Neuss disguised as Italian camp followers, and a captured swimmer in the Rhine carried a message that Emperor Frederick III was on the march. Charles slept in armor and pressed harder. The walls did not move.
Frederick III was not a fast emperor. His relief army crawled across the Rhineland, slowed by drunken brawls between contingents from rival German regions and by the tedious business of recapturing other towns Burgundy had taken along the way. He did not reach Neuss until late May 1475. By then the Burgundians and the besieged had been locked in their dance for ten months, and a provisional treaty allowed Charles to dismantle his siege works without storming the city. For a few strange days, Imperials, Kölners, and Burgundians fraternized in the no-man's-land. Then the Cologne men stole five Burgundian ships loaded with cannon, the Germans began to harass the retreating army, and a sudden Burgundian counterattack tore through the unsuspecting Imperial camp. Only the papal legate, threatening to excommunicate both Charles and Frederick, talked the two sovereigns into stopping. The siege ended officially on 27 June 1475. The Neussers credited their survival to their patron, Saint Quirinus, whose relics had ridden out the war beneath the cathedral.
Neuss had cost Burgundy its momentum. Charles had burned through his treasury, exhausted his Italian and English contingents, and given his enemies time to organize. Within a year he was fighting the Swiss, who broke him at Grandson and Murten. In January 1477 he died in the snow outside Nancy, his body so disfigured that his servants could only identify him by the scars he had carried into a thousand fights. The Burgundian state - vast, glittering, the great unfinished project of the Valois dukes - dissolved within a generation, partitioned between France and the Habsburgs. From the towers of Neuss above the modern Rhine port, you can still see roughly where Charles's siege lines ran. The town that refused to fall now sits in the northern shadow of Düsseldorf, a quiet German city of textiles and shipping, carrying a memory it has never quite let go of: the year it broke the Duke of Burgundy.
Neuss sits at 51.20°N, 6.69°E on the west bank of the Rhine, immediately south-southwest of Düsseldorf. From cruising altitude, look for the great loop of the Rhine and the sprawling river port that occupies much of the historic riverfront; the old town clusters around the twin towers of St. Quirinus minster, the same patron the medieval defenders credited with their survival. Nearest major airports: Düsseldorf International (EDDL), about 12 km north-northeast, and Cologne/Bonn (EDDK), 35 km south.