Vitoria

Vitoria-Gasteiz is the seat of government and the capital city of the Basque Autonomous Community and of the province of Araba/Álava in northern Spain. The Battle of Vitoria (21 June 1813) was fought in the basin of Vitoria—an area surrounded by mountains and protected to the north and west by the Zadorra River—between a combined English, Spanish, and Portuguese army under the Duke of Wellington, and a French army commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Coordinates

Latitude: 42.846263309186
Longitude: -2.672681808472

View on the COVE Master Map

Timeline of Events Associated with Vitoria

Date Event Manage
9 Nov 1799 to 18 Jun 1815

Napoleonic Wars

These are actually a set of individual wars that sometimes overlap, succeed, or run parallel to each other. Image: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800), Kunsthistorisches Museum. The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project (DVD-ROM, 2002). The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Historians do not agree on the exact beginning or end of the wars. November 9, 1799 is an early candidate since that is when Napoleon seized power in France. Hoping to ease the difficulty, historians date by isolated wars. They disarticulate the Napoleonic Wars in a linear series:

  • War of the Second Coalition 1798-1802
  • War of the Third Coalition 1805
  • War of the Fourth Coalition 1806-7
  • War of the Fifth Coalition 1809
  • War of the Sixth Coalition 1812-14
  • War of the Seventh Coalition 1815

The successive numerical coordinates for the Coalitions offer regularity, but that regularity is undercut by the shifting make-up of that Coalition (sometimes Prussia was in, sometimes not; sometimes Russia, sometimes not) and by the discontinuity and ambiguity of the dates.

Articles

Mary Favret, "The Napoleonic Wars"