Strasburg was taken by a surprise.

This free city had several times violated neutrality during the war; Louvois had kept up communications inside the place; suddenly he had the approaches and the passage over the Rhine occupied by thirty-five thousand men on the night between the 16th and 17th of September, 1681; the burgesses sent up to ask aid from the emperor, but the messengers were arrested; on the 30th Strasburg capitulated, and Louis XIV.

made his triumphant entry there on the 24th of October.

"Nobody," says a letter of the day, "can recover from the consternation caused by the fact that the French have taken Strasburg without firing a single shot; everybody says it is one of the wheels of the chariot to be used for a drive into the empire, and that the door of Elsass is shut from this moment." The very day of the surrender of Strasburg (September 30, 1681), Catinat, with a corps of French troops, entered Casale, sold to Louis XIV.

by the Duke of Mantua.