Five Days Battle (1701)

**Insert synopsis here.**

At sea, the Liotainians proved even more disadvantaged.  Over the preceding century, the Royal Liotainian Navy remained focused very heavily on its traditional galley fleet, which was well-suited to combat on the shallow and constricted waters of the Gulf of Argent and Nestorian Sea.  The galleys were smaller, often less than three hundred tons, and armed with around four swivel-mounted cannon apiece.  The Firoccan Navy, by contrast, had fully-embraced the construction of larger wooden warships, building a number of ships-of-the-line (between twenty and twenty-five at various times), backed by large numbers of merchant ships which could be outfitted as warships in event of a war.

In March 1701, the Liotainian fleet, composed of one hundred and fifty galleys under the command of Admiral Andrius Liepa-Melis, gathered on the northern coast of Breizh, sailing for the Moirai Straits in early April.  Bad weather drove them back from the Straits, and they did not arrive at Cape Clotho until April 9th, where they encountered a Firoccan fleet under Carlos, the Count of Balefornia.  Carlos, with only six ships-of-the-line, ably defended himself against Liepa-Melis, who lost three galleys to the massive firepower of the ninety-gun flagship *Santo Henrique*.  Carlos withdrew using the superior sailing qualities of his much larger warships, taking very few casualties and little damage.

With many of his small galleys damaged in the Action of 9 April 1701, Liepa-Melis withdrew in turn to Breizh, where a month was lost in repairs.  He sailed again in mid May with the intent of raiding Grappa Bay, where the Count of Balefornia had anchored to observe the movements of the Liotainian fleet.  Ably informed by his sloops and his own galleys, Carlos was not surprised and sailed to meet Liepa-Melis in the Action of 14 May 1701.  Carlos now had seven ships-of-the-line, two frigates, and four corvettes, as well as ten of his own galleys.  Fighting in becalmed seas, the Liotainians overran the Firoccan galleys and captured one of the frigates, but the Firoccans severely mauled Liepa-Melis' galleys in return.  The two sides again withdrew, with both commanders claiming victory.

The heavy damage sustained by the Liotainian galleys, for relatively little result, was a source of severe anxiety for Admiral Liepa-Melis, who returned to Plougrescant in Breizh in order to refit his battered ships.  This process dragged on until August, when the Count of Balefornia, having received extensive reinforcements, launched his own attack on the anchored Liotainians, who were scattered across three different anchorages near Plougrescant.

*Adm. Andrius Liepa-Melis*
 141 galleys, totalling approx. 450 guns
*71 galleys sunk or captured*
*40 galleys run ashore*
*30 escaped*
*Santo Henrique* (90) - *flagship*
*Gloria* (70)
*Santo Timoteo* (70)
*Santo Desiderio* (70) - *scuttled*
*Tribunal* (64)
*Errante* (64)
*Guerrero* (62)
*Principe Armando* (56)
**Frigates**:
3 frigates, not named

In the Five Days Battle, Carlos first used fireships to drive out the Liotainian galleys, and then over the next five days, pursued them mercilessly with his own heavy ships-of-the-line.  His sole loss would be the seventy-gun ships-of-the-line *Santo Desiderio*, which ran aground on a sandbar west of Breizh, and could not be recovered.  The ship was burned to prevent the Liotainians from capturing it later.  In exchange, however, the Firoccan fleet sank or captured seventy-one Liotainian galleys, with another forty galleys driven ashore by their crews in order to prevent capture; only thirty galleys escaped intact.  Liepa-Melis himself was killed in action on the second day of the battle. This catastrophic loss halted all of the Liotainian plans to besiege Svyturys by land and sea; and the bad news kept coming.  In November of 1701, the Firoccans raided the coastal city of Telsai, landing four thousand Astyrian mercenaries who sacked, looted, and then burned the city, murdering much of the male population.  A second raid in December, aimed at the port of Rietavas, also caused significant damage.  At Rietavas, however, the Astyrian mercenaries once again got out of control while looting, and nearly a thousand of them were abandoned on shore when the Firoccan fleet sailed away.  Outraged at the attacks on their port cities and the massacre and rape of the civilian population, the Liotainians dealt quite harshly with the Astyrian mercenaries captured at Rietavas: they hanged and quartered the captured officers and castrated the remaining prisoners, promising to do the same for all future mercenaries they captured. In other conditions, this series of defeats and setbacks probably would have convinced the Liotainians to sue for peace, and the Firoccan government fully expected that Karolis would accept a new list of demands, including a new Treaty Port on the island of Breizh, reparations, and other demands.  Karolis, however, viewed the defeats in a different light; he vowed to rebuild the Navy and continue the fight.