Background and Early Career
The Laudohn family, of mixed German and Latgalian origin, had been settled in the estate of Tootzen, near Ļaudona in Eastern Livonia (present-day Latvia) before 1432. Laudon himself claimed a kinship with the Scottish Earls of Loudoun, which could not be established. His father Otto Gerhard von Laudohn was a lieutenant-colonel, retired on a meagre pension from the Swedish service. As upon the Great Northern War Livonia had been ceded to Russia according to the 1721 Treaty of Nystad, the boy was sent to the Imperial Russian Army as a cadet in 1732. During the War of the Polish Succession he took part in the 1734 Siege of Danzig led by Field Marshal Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, he marched against French troops up to the Rhine in 1735 and back to the Dnieper River into the Turkish campaign.
After the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade he returned to the Russian court at Saint Petersburg. Dissatisfied with his prospects and the conditions in the Russian Army, he finally resigned in 1741 and sought military employment elsewhere. He applied first to King Frederick the Great, who however declined his services. At Vienna he had better fortune, being made a captain in the Freikorps of Franz von der Trenck. During the War of the Austrian Succession, he took part in its forays and marches, though not in its atrocities, until wounded and taken prisoner in Alsace. He was shortly released by the advance of the main Austrian army.
Read more about this topic: Ernst Gideon Von Laudon
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