Bøger om Napoleonic Empire

These beautiful watercolours demonstrate how difficult these operations often were. A Surgical Artist at War featuring the paintings and sketches of Sir Charles Bell is a fine tribute to outstanding and dedicated men.

Most of the great powers contested the lands around the Adriatic Sea during the Napoleonic Wars. While never a major theatre of operations, the Adriatic was part of the overall strategy of most of the combatants. It played an essential role by influencing alliances and diverting troops and ships, which all contributed to the defeat of Napoleon. The Napoleonic Wars was also a period of significant change, with the French and British intervening in a region that had long been a battleground reserved for the Austrian, Russian andOttoman empires.This book examines the Adriatic campaigns, including those rarely mentioned in the history of the period, and the armies, navies and personalities that fought in the region between 1797 and 1815. Austrian, French, Russian, British, and their foreign regiments fought up and down the coast, sometimes with or against local leaders like Peter I of Montenegro and Ali Pasha of Ioannina. Many commanders were far from home, with orders taking weeks to reach them. This meant even junior officers could take military and diplomatic decisions usually reserved for more senior officers.This is a story of strategy and small wars with many colourful personalities playing their part in a fascinating, if violent, tale against the backdrop of the frontier sea.

The Peninsular War has been extensively studied by British historians for decades, even centuries, but the Spanish contribution to the conflict, which was fundamental to the defeat of Napoleon's armies, has been largely relegated to minor role. This book is an attempt to rebalance our understanding of the campaign in Iberia, written by a Spanish historian and translated into English for the first time.The book does not attempt to minimize the problems the Spanish experienced nor the catastrophic defeats suffered by the Spanish Army, but the reasons for these setbacks are viewed and analyzed from the Spanish viewpoint.With the finest elements of the Spanish Army serving with the French forces in Denmark, Spain was virtually undefended when Napoleon's armies marched into the Iberian Peninsula. New armies had to be raised virtually from scratch to fight the invader in a country where, as the Duke of Wellington remarked, small armies were beaten and large armies starved. The logistical and political difficulties faced by the Spaniards are fully explored and explained.It is the big battles, nevertheless, which receive the most attention; both the great battles such as Tudela and Ocaña and the surprising victory at Bailén, and the smaller, lesser-known combats which took place across the Peninsula. The defeats, even destruction, of their armies, did not deter the Spaniards; in fact quite the contrary. Their cities, most notably Zaragoza, defied Napoleon's legions for months in some of the most savage fighting of any conflict as their streets were turned to rubble. Across the country, the ordinary citizens took up arms, attacking isolated French outposts and capturing enemy messengers and patrols - and the term guerrilla warfare came into being. Napoleon's marshals had never encountered such fanaticism and Spain became a posting dreaded by the French soldiers. As the war progressed, the Spanish armies became strong enough to win several battles, contributing decisively to the defeat of Napoleon in conjunction with the magnificent achievements of Sir Arthur Wellesley and his Anglo-Portuguese army.This unique book will help the reader understand the Spanish vision of the war, dismantling some false myths and exposing the reality of a country with an indomitable spirit that never accepted the new order that Napoleon tried to impose. It is the book that has been missing from the literature of the Peninsular War for far too long.

This book details the campaigns of Louis-Gabriel Suchet in the Peninsular War. The only one of Napoleon's marshals to earn his baton in Spain, Suchet conquered Aragon, Lower Catalonia, and Valencia in a string of brilliant sieges and battles against both Spanish regular and guerrilla forces.