Search Results for: Napoleonic Wars

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Biography France 19 Min Read

How Good Was Napoleon?

Surrender of Madrid (Gros), 1808. Napoleon enters Spain’s capital during the Peninsular War By Jonathon Riley | Published in History Today Volume: 57 Issue: 7 2007 Serving general and military historian Jonathon Riley uses his personal knowledge of command to assess Napoleon’s qualities as a strategist, operational commander and battlefield tactician.…

Battle British 16 Min Read

Consequences of the Battle of Fontenoy

The French and Allied armies confronting each other at Fontenoy. The blue-clad French in the foreground are Gardes Francaises. In 1745 British Captain General, the young Duke of Cumberland, adopted a more aggressive stance and sought to relieve Tournai, besieged by the French under Marshal Saxe. Cumberland’s infantry assailed the…

Battle British Sail 28 Min Read

Battle of Maida

Napoleon’s elite troops faced the opposition with contempt. But in three hours the Frenchmen were swept from the field. Sailing from Palermo, the British army was to land behind the French, inspire Calabrian insurrection and perhaps help besieged Gaeta. Maida allowed it a two-month stay in Italy. Gaeta fell on…

Naval History 15 Min Read

Rhodes as a Naval Power

Plan of the shipsheds of the military port of Rhodes: those to the west are the width suitable for larger triremes and quadriremes, but the eastern slips are narrower and presumably intended for lighter craft like tribemioliae with which Rhodes was closely associated. The ships rated higher than ‘ten’ seem…

Cossack Russia 3 Min Read

TSARIST RUSSIA

Petr Yakovlevich Chaadaev The repression was particularly tough in Russia, the second of Europe’s pre-eminent absolutist regimes. If Metternich cast Austria in the role of Central Europe’s policeman, then Tsar Nicholas I saw himself as gendarme for the entire continent. The Russian empire had been in his iron, autocratic grip…

Austria Medieval Ottoman 22 Min Read

HABSBURG MILITARY MEDIOCRITY – H-WAR

  Why was the Habsburg army slower and less brilliant than its European rivals between 1649 and 1918? I am certainly no expert on this topic, having read only very generally on Austrian history, but in the interest of providing a basis of discussion, I’ll posit the following general ideas:…