The Wild Geese of Carrickmines: An Irish Family's Rise Through the Habsburg Empire

The Wild Geese of Carrickmines: An Irish Family's Rise Through the Habsburg Empire 

In 1612, a dispossessed Irish Catholic gentleman took ship for the continent, carrying nothing but his name, his faith, and his sword. Four generations later, his descendant commanded fifty-six thousand men on the banks of the Danube, and lost an empire's Balkan legacy in a single catastrophic morning.

This is the story of the Wallis family: Wild Geese who fled Cromwellian Ireland to build a new destiny in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, rising through the ranks of the Habsburg military aristocracy across a century of continuous warfare. It follows Georg Olivier von Wallis from the Danubian battlefields of Prince Eugene of Savoy's golden age, through the mining trenches of Sicily and the winter campaigns of Lombardy, to his final, fatal command as Governor of the Habsburg Kingdom of Serbia, and the disastrous Battle of Grocka, where a lifetime of patient, methodical brilliance collided with political desperation and an underestimated enemy.

Part military history, part family saga, this book traces five generations of exile, ambition, and reinvention, asking what happens when a career built on caution and calculation is finally asked for daring, and finds it wanting. It is a story of empire, honor, and the terrible cost of a single morning's misjudgment.