Battle of Friedland
Napoleon destroyed the Russian army at Friedland on 14 June 1807 and had a peace treaty on a raft two weeks later. The campaign in Poland had been running since the previous autumn, and Eylau in February had been a bloody draw in a snowstorm — the first battle Napoleon did not win — which had encouraged everyone who thought he could be beaten. Bennigsen crossed the Alle in June to attack a French corps under Lannes and found himself committed with a river at his back and only pontoon bridges and the town's bridges behind him. He had 60,000 men in a position with a ravine cutting his own line in two. Lannes held him for nine hours with 26,000 while Napoleon brought up the rest of the army, and the attack went in at five in the afternoon on the Russian left, with Senarmont's artillery advancing by batteries to within a hundred metres and firing canister into the massed infantry. The Russian left was pushed back into the town and the bridges burned or jammed. Some 20,000 Russians were killed, wounded or drowned. Alexander I asked for an armistice within days, and the two emperors met on a raft moored in the middle of the Niemen at Tilsit on 25 June, with the kings of Prussia left on the bank. Prussia lost half its territory, Russia joined the continental blockade against Britain, and the two emperors divided Europe between them for five years. Tilsit is the high point of the empire and contains the reason it fell. The continental blockade required every European coast to be closed to British trade, which meant Spain, Portugal and eventually Russia had to be coerced, and each attempt cost more than the last.
- Year: 1807 CE
- Category: Military
