Battle of Rocroi

May 19, 1643

A twenty-one-year-old French prince, the duc d'Enghien, led French forces to a crushing victory over the Spanish tercios in the Ardennes. The legendary Spanish infantry was finally broken, and with it the myth of Habsburg military invincibility. Spain's great-power century was ending in smoke, and the battlefield dominance of France that would define the next seventy years had announced itself.