Battle of Hemmingstedt
The Battle of Hemmingstedt took place on 17 February 1500 south of the village of Hemmingstedt, near the present village of Epenwöhrden, in the western part of present-day Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It was an attempt by King John of Denmark and his brother Duke Frederick, who were co-dukes of Schleswig and Holstein, to subdue the peasantry of Dithmarschen, who had established a peasants' republic on the coast of the North Sea. John was at the time also king of the Kalmar Union.
Forces
The ducal army consisted of the "Great Guard", 4,000 Landsknechts, commanded by a petty noble named Thomas Slentz, 2,000 armoured cavaliers, about 1,000 artillerymen, and 5,000 commoners. The defenders were at most 6,000 men, all peasants.Use of terrain
After seizing the village of Meldorf, the ducal army advanced, but was stopped at a barricade equipped with guns. The defenders opened at least one dike sluice in order to flood the land, which quickly turned into morass and shallow lakes. Crammed together on a narrow road with no solid ground on which to deploy, the ducal army was unable to make use of its numerical superiority. The lightly equipped peasants were familiar with the land and used poles to leap over the ditches. Most of the ducal soldiers were not killed by enemy arms, but drowned. The conquest attempt was thus repelled. The casualties among the Dithmarsians are not known, but the Danish and the Dutch lost together more than half of their army, making about 7,000 men killed and 1,500 men wounded.Following the battle, the Dithmarsians buried the bodies of the enemy's common soldiers, but in their contempt for the nobility, the bodies of the nobles were left to rot in the fields.