French forces in Spain were severely overstretched, as Napoleon withdrew the best troops for his invasion of Russia.

Napoleon invaded Russia with the largest army Europe had ever seen, composed of troops from France as well as Poland, Germany, Italy and several other allied states. The campaign that followed saw the ...

The invasion of Russia began in June 1812 and lasted six months. The French army started to invade Russia at several different points. The army that gathered with Napoleon was a force of roughly ...

History has taught us that Napoleon, in his invasion of Russia in 1812, marched into Moscow with his army largely intact and retreated only because the citizens of Moscow burned three-fourths of ...

During Napoleon’s winter campaign of 1812, the Russians and the French experienced the same freezing cold. However, it wasn’t the low temperatures that destroyed Napoleon’s Grande Armee as ...

On June 24, 1812, ignoring the advice of his closest advisors, Napoleon invaded Russia. Never in living memory had so large an army been assembled — Italians, Poles, German, French — more than ...

Remains found in a mass grave outside Vilnius in Lithuania hold vital clues to the fate of Napoleon's Grand Army and the catastrophic retreat from Moscow in 1812. Paul Britten-Austin takes up the ...

In this article, we do not go into the military details of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign against Russia – you can read them here. Rather, this article is aimed at explaining the political and ...

fought in September 1812. In the 1880s, Russian pride still glowed at the warm memory of Tsar Alexander I’s troops thrashing Napoleon’s army, although there was a certain level of rose-tinted ...

If time machines existed and one were facing the prospect of deportation to the year 1812, any sensible person would choose Napoleon’s France over the Russia of Tsar Alexander I — especially ...

On June 24, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte, the master of continental Europe, led nearly half a million men into the depths of Russia to enforce his will upon Czar Alexander I. With greatly inferior ...