Italian Campaign
Napoleon Bonaparte took command of the Army of Italy in March 1796 at twenty-six and destroyed two armies in a year. The command was a consolation prize. The Directory's main effort was on the Rhine, and Italy was a secondary theatre with about 38,000 unpaid, ragged and half-starved men expected to tie down Austrian forces. He beat the Piedmontese and the Austrians separately within a fortnight by driving between them at Montenotte and Dego, and knocked Piedmont out of the war by armistice in April. The method was consistent throughout: move faster than the enemy expected, keep the corps within a day's march of each other, and concentrate everything at the point of contact so that a smaller army was locally the larger one. He crossed the Po, forced the bridge at Lodi in May, and entered Milan. Austria sent four separate armies to relieve Mantua and he destroyed each — at Castiglione, Bassano, Arcole in November, where the fighting on the causeway ran three days, and Rivoli in January 1797, which is the model of a central-position battle. Mantua surrendered in February with 30,000 men. He then marched on Vienna and, at Leoben, negotiated a preliminary peace himself, ignoring the government that had appointed him. He also extracted enormous sums from the Italian states, shipped paintings and manuscripts to Paris, created the Cisalpine and Ligurian Republics, and destroyed the thousand-year Republic of Venice to pay Austria at Campo Formio. He returned to France the most powerful man in it.
- Year: 1796 CE
- Category: Military
