Peninsular War Begins
Napoleon called Spain his ulcer, and it cost him some 300,000 men over six years. He had entered the country as an ally in 1807 to close Portugal to British trade, and in 1808 he removed the Spanish royal family to France by a piece of manipulation at Bayonne and put his brother Joseph on the throne. The rising of 2 May in Madrid and the massacres that followed it — painted by Goya — set off a national insurrection in a country that had no functioning government to organise it. The war then had three parts running at once. A British expeditionary force under Wellesley, later Wellington, held Portugal behind the lines of Torres Vedras and came out to fight when the odds suited — Talavera, Salamanca, Vitoria. Spanish regular armies were beaten repeatedly and kept forming again, and a junta at Cádiz, besieged for two and a half years, wrote a liberal constitution in 1812. And the guerrilla, which is where the word enters other languages, made the French position impossible: some 300,000 troops could hold the towns and the roads and nothing between them, couriers were killed, foragers ambushed, and reprisals produced more partisans. Goya's Disasters of War is the record. Wellington crossed the Pyrenees in 1813. Napoleon's own summary was that the Spanish business had ruined him, which is roughly what the arithmetic shows. The Spanish empire in America came apart while the metropolis was occupied, because the colonies were asked to obey a government that did not exist. Almost every South American independence movement dates its beginning to the juntas formed in 1808 and 1810 in the name of the captive king.
- Year: 1808 CE
- Category: Military
