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The War of the Fifth Coalition was a military conflict in 1809 between an alliance of the Austrian Empire and the United Kingdom against Napoleon's French Empire and Bavaria. Major engagements between France and Austria, the main participants, unfolded over much of Central Europe from April to July, producing horrific casualty rates. After much campaigning in Bavaria and across the Danube valley, the war ended favorably for the French after the bloody struggle at the Battle of Wagram in early July.
The resulting Treaty of Schönbrunn was the harshest that France had imposed on Austria in recent memory. Austria lost over three million subjects, about 20% of her total population,[1] as a result of the territorial changes. While incessant fighting in the Iberian Peninsula would continue, the War of the Fifth Coalition was the last major conflict on the European continent until the French invasion of Russia in 1812 sparked the rise of the Sixth Coalition. (More...)
References
- ^ David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon. p. 732.
The Second Crusade was the second major crusade launched from Europe, called in 1145 in response to the fall of the County of Edessa the previous year. Edessa was the first of the Crusader states to have been founded during the First Crusade (1095–1099), and was the first to fall. The Second Crusade was announced by Pope Eugene III, and was the first of the crusades to be led by European kings, namely Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, with help from a number of other important European nobles.
The only success came outside of the Mediterranean, where English crusaders, on the way by ship to the Holy Land, fortuitously stopped and helped capture Lisbon in 1147. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the first of the Northern Crusades began with the intent of forcibly converting pagan tribes to Christianity, and these crusades would go on for centuries.
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The Battle of Bicocca, sometimes known as the Battle of La Bicocca, was fought on April 27, 1522, during the Italian War of 1521. A combined French and Venetian force under Odet de Foix, Vicomte de Lautrec, was decisively defeated by an Imperial, Spanish, and Papal army under the overall command of Prosper Colonna. Lautrec then withdrew from Lombardy, leaving the Duchy of Milan in Imperial hands.
Having been driven from Milan by an Imperial advance in late 1521, Lautrec had regrouped, attempting to strike at Colonna's lines of communication. When the Swiss mercenaries in French service did not receive their pay, however, they demanded an immediate battle, and Lautrec was forced to attack Colonna's fortified position in the park of Bicocca, north of Milan. The Swiss pikemen advanced over open fields under heavy artillery fire to assault the Imperial positions, but were halted at a sunken road backed by earthworks. Having suffered massive casualties from the fire of Spanish arquebusiers, the Swiss retreated. Meanwhile, an attempt by French cavalry to flank Colonna's position proved equally ineffective.
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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War and "The War to End All Wars" was a global military conflict that took place mostly in Europe between 1914 and 1918. It was a total war which left millions dead and shaped the modern world.
The Allied Powers, led by France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Italy, and later the United States, defeated the Central Powers: Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.
Much of the fighting in World War I took place along the Western Front, within a system of opposing manned trenches and fortifications (separated by a "no man's land") running from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. On the Eastern Front, the vast eastern plains and limited rail network prevented a trench warfare stalemate from developing, although the scale of the conflict was just as large. Hostilities also occurred on and under the sea and — for the first time — from the air. More than nine million soldiers died on the various battlefields, and millions more civilians suffered.
The war caused the disintegration of four empires: the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian. Germany lost its overseas empire, and states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created, or recreated, as was the case with Poland.
World War I created a decisive break with the old world order that had emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, which was modified by the mid-19th century’s nationalistic revolutions. The results of World War I would be important factors in the development of World War II 21 years later.
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The Ulm Campaign was a series of French and Bavarian military maneuvers and battles in 1805, during the War of the Third Coalition, designed to outflank an Austrian army. The French Grande Armée, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, comprised 210,000 troops organized into seven corps, and hoped to knock out the Austrian army in the Danube before Russian reinforcements could arrive. Through feverish marching, Napoleon conducted a large wheeling maneuver that captured an Austrian army of 23,000 under General Mack on October 20 at Ulm, bringing the total number of Austrian prisoners in the campaign to 60,000. The campaign is generally regarded as a strategic masterpiece and was influential in the development of the Schlieffen Plan in the late nineteenth century.
The victory at Ulm was not decisive enough to end the war. A large Russian army under Kutuzov near Vienna ensured that another major confrontation would be required to settle affairs. The Russians withdrew to the northeast to await reinforcements and to link up with surviving Austrian units. The French followed and captured Vienna on November 12. On December 2, the French prevailed decisively at the Battle of Austerlitz, which effectively removed Austria from the war.
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The Sino-French War or Franco-Chinese War was a war fought between the French Third Republic and Qing Empire that lasted from September 1884 to June 1885. Its underlying cause was the French desire for control of the Red River, which linked Hanoi to the resource-wealthy Yunnan province in China.
Although the 1874 Treaty of Saigon opened the river to navigation, in the early 1880s harassment by the Black Flag, a militia regiment raised by Liu Yung-fu (an ethnic Zhuang and former Taiping rebel in China) impeded French traders. Consequently, the French government dispatched a small expeditionary force to clear the Red River valley of Black Flags. The Qing court viewed the presence of a European army in Tonkin as a threat to its frontier security. It protested the French presence and began to prepare for war.
French forces under Captain Henri Rivière seized the citadel of Hanoi, the capital of Tonkin on April 25, 1882. Rivière was killed while clearing Black Flags from the Red River delta in the spring of 1883, provoking a groundswell of pro-war sentiment in France.
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In World War II, the Battle of France, also known as the Fall of France, was the German and Italian invasion of France and the Low Countries, executed 10 May 1940, which ended the Phony War. German armored units pushed through the Ardennes, outflanking the Maginot Line and unhinging the Allied defenders. Paris was occupied and the French government fled to Bordeaux on 14 June. France capitulated on 25 June after the French Second Army Group was forced to surrender on 22 June. For the Axis, the campaign was a spectacular victory.
France was divided into a German occupation zone in the north and west, a small Italian occupation zone in the southeast and a collaborationist government in the south, Vichy France. The British Expeditionary Force and many French soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. France remained under German occupation until after the Allies defeated the German forces in France following the Allied landings on D-Day in 1944.
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The First Battle of the Marne (also known as the Miracle of the Marne) was a World War I battle fought from September 5 to September 12, 1914. It was a Franco-British victory against the German army under German Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Younger.
The battle of the Marne was a major turning point of World War I. By the end of August 1914, the whole Allied army on the Western Front had been forced into a general retreat back towards Paris. Meanwhile the two main German armies continued through France. It seemed that Paris would be taken as both the French and the British fell back towards the Marne River.
Von Kluck, in turning to meet the French attack on his right flank, opened up a 50 km (30 mile) wide gap in the German lines between his First Army and the German Second Army, commanded by the cautious General Karl von Bulow, which was located to the left of the First Army. Allied observations planes discovered the gap and reported it to commanders on the ground.[1] The Allies were prompt in exploiting the break in the German lines, dispatching troops from the BEF to join the French Fifth Army in pouring through the gap between the two German armies, the right wing of the Fifth Army simultaneously attacking the German Second Army.
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The Battle of Ceresole (or Cerissoles) was fought on April 11, 1544, about a mile outside the village of Ceresole d'Alba in the Piedmont, during the Italian War of 1542. In a lengthy engagement that historian Bert Hall characterized as "marvelously confused", a French army under François de Vendôme, Count of Enghien, defeated the Spanish-Imperial army of Alfonso d'Avalos d'Aquino, Marquis del Vasto.[1] Despite inflicting massive casualties on the Imperial troops, the French failed to exploit the victory, as Enghien was unable to take Milan after much of his army was recalled to face an Anglo-Imperial invasion of France.
Enghien and Del Vasto had arranged their armies along two parallel ridges; due to the topography of the battlefield, many of the individual actions of the battle were uncoordinated with each other. The battle opened with several hours of skirmishing between opposing bands of arquebusiers and an ineffectual artillery exchange, after which Del Vasto ordered a general advance. In the center, Imperial landsknechts clashed with French and Swiss infantry, suffering enormous casualties. In the southern part of the battlefield, Italian infantry in Imperial service was harried by French cavalry attacks and withdrew after learning that the Imperial troops of the center had been defeated. In the north, meanwhile, the French infantry line crumbled, and Enghien led a series of ineffectual and costly cavalry charges against Spanish and German infantry before the latter were forced to surrender by the arrival of the victorious Swiss and French infantry from the center. (More...)
References
- ^ David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon. p. 732.
The Battle of Austerlitz (also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors), fought on December 2, 1805 about four miles (6.4 km) east of the modern Czech town of Brno, then part of the Austrian Empire, was a major engagement in the Napoleonic Wars during the War of the Third Coalition. The conflict involved forces of the recently formed First French Empire against the armies of the Russian Empire and the Austrian Empire. After nearly nine hours of fighting, the French troops, commanded by Emperor Napoleon I, managed to score a decisive victory over the Russo-Austrian army, commanded by Czar Alexander I. Despite difficult fighting in many sectors, the battle is often regarded as a tactical masterpiece.
Austerlitz effectively brought the Third Coalition to an end. On December 26, 1805, Austria and France signed the Treaty of Pressburg, which took the former out of the war, reinforced the earlier treaties of Campo Formio and Lunéville, made Austria cede land to Napoleon's German allies, and imposed an indemnity of 40 million francs on the defeated Habsburgs. Russian troops were allowed to head back to home soil. Victory at Austerlitz also permitted the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine, a collection of German states intended as a buffer zone between France and the rest of Europe. In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist when Holy Roman Emperor Francis II kept Francis I of Austria as his only official title. These achievements, however, did not establish a lasting peace on the continent. After Austerlitz, Prussian worries about growing French influence in Central Europe sparked the War of the Fourth Coalition in 1806.
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