April - May 1517

Catching the Hanseatic League on the back foot, Duke Heinrich III "The Middle" of Brunswick-Lüneburg galloped off from Gifhorn to Brunswick at top speed. Well, about as fast as one could go with an artillery train of his size, anyways. A mere twenty miles away, this took him less than a week before he arrived at the imposing walls of one of the namesake cities of his title. With neither a surrender nor help from the inside coming, Heinrich lined up his artillery battery and ordered them to fire on the city. Over the course of the next two months, a pattern would emerge. His cannons proved to be deadly accurate and dismantled Brunswick's vaunted walls in record time, however, his spears proved to continually run into enemy armor. Yes, shockingly to the cities of North Germany, the greatest defense that Brunswick would have to offer would not be the great walls, but it would be its people, who refused to surrender the city back to noble authority. The resistance continued even after the Duke, in his impatience and impetuousness at seeing the crumpled walls but no victory to follow, began firing upon the residences of the city. After two months of this fruitless act, he was relieved by his cousins of Calenberg and Wolfenbüttel, Erich and Heinrich V "The Younger" respectively. Horrified at the devastation of the city, they resolved to merely wait out the rest of the siege until starvation set in. This would, of course, allow them to take control of the city immediately and impose their own terms upon it.

June - July 1517

Where was Heinrich III heading? North, of course, to head off the army of mercenaries that the Hanseatic League were gathering in Hamburg. Said army had not made it very far before Heinrich had arrived to force them back over the Elbe. The Siege of Harburg had begun in earnest before the Duke had arrived to put a stop to the festivities.

Battle of Harburg, June 1517

"The common townsfolk of Brunswick have held out this long in the hopes that we may reach them and prevent the tyranny of the Welf from spreading once more over their fair city! Today Harburg, tomorrow Brunswick!"

"Drive them into the river, men! These greedy merchants and burghers would turn brother against brother as long as it makes them an extra pence!"

With their backs to the Elbe, the Hanseatic forces arrayed against the equal forces brought by Lüneburg. Initial combat had proved indecisive as the two sides were unable to push the advantage. This was until a Lüneburg levy cavalryman arranged an emergency decapitation of the Hanseatic mercenary captain commanding their right cavalry division. Pushed back by an inferior enemy soon after, the dominos began to fall as the Hanseatic troops around their infantry core began to melt away with this one imbalance. The artillerymen were chased away by the now free levy cavalry. The archers had great holes in their ranks from a ferocious artillery barrage. The mounted skirmishers meeting a hail of arrows point blank (Three 90 rolls in a row for Lüneburg). With no time to get on their boats back across the Elbe, the Hanseatic mercenaries surrender en masse to Duke Heinrich. Back in Brunswick, the city stubbornly refuses to surrender until starvation and plague breaks out in the city in early August.

Brunswick is annexed by Brunswick-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel, and is highly devastated.

The Hanseatic Relief Army of 1517 is disbanded.