Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne

Born in 1611 to a Huguenot family, the son of a Marshal of France, he learned war young as a volunteer in the Dutch States Army under his uncles Maurice of Nassau and Frederick Henry. He made his name capturing the fortress of Breisach in 1638 during the Thirty Years' War, became Marshal of France in 1643, then spent three years smashing Bavaria into submission. After initially backing the Fronde rebellion, he switched to the royal side in 1651 and crushed the Prince of Condé's forces outside Paris. Victories at Arras in 1654 and Dunkirk in 1658 broke Spanish power in the Low Countries; Louis XIV promoted him Marshal General of France in 1660. He took the Spanish Netherlands almost without a fight in 1667, swept through the Dutch Republic to Amsterdam in 1672, then turned east to drive Brandenburg out of the war. Facing superior Allied forces threatening Alsace, he won at Turckheim in early 1675 and executed a winter march through the Vosges that expelled the Imperials - then took an Imperial cannonball at Salzbach in July, five decades in.