Battle of Austerlitz
1805 battle during the War of the Third Coalition
The Battle of Austerlitz was fought on Monday 2 December 1805, near Austerlitz (then in the Austrian Empire, now in the Czech Republic), being the decisive engagement of the War of the Third Coalition. The Grande Armée under the command of Emperor Napoleon I defeated a combined Russo-Austrian army. One force was an imperial Russian army under the command of Tsar Alexander I and General Mikhail Kutuzov, while the other comprised an imperial Austrian army under the command of Emperor Francis II. The battle was known contemporaneously as the Battle of the Three Emperors (after the three monarchs present on the field).
The battle is often cited by military historians as one of Napoleon's tactical masterpieces, in the same league as other historic engagements like Hannibal's Cannae (216 BC) or Alexander the Great's Gaugamela (331 BC). The military victory of Napoleon's Grande Armée at Austerlitz brought the War of the Third Coalition to an end, with the Peace of Pressburg signed by the French and Austrians later in the month. These achievements did not establish a lasting peace on the continent. Austerlitz had driven neither Russia nor Britain, whose armies protected Sicily from a French invasion, to settle.
After eliminating an Austrian army during the Ulm campaign, French forces seized Vienna in November 1805. The Austrians avoided further conflict until the arrival of the Russians, who helped increase the allied numbers. Napoleon sent his army north in pursuit of the Allies, but then ordered his forces to retreat so he could feign a grave weakness to lure the Allies into thinking that they were facing a weak army, while it was in fact formidable.
The public source identifies “Battle of Austerlitz” as 1805 battle during the War of the Third Coalition. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Battle, Austerlitz and battle.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Austerlitz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.