Bratislava

Bratislava is the capital city of Slovakia, located in the southwest of the country on the borders with Austria and Hungary. The city is situated on the banks of the Danube and Morava rivers. Formerly known as Pressburg, the city had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary since the tenth century. In the eighteenth century, it became a focal location for the Slovak national movement. On 26 December 1805, it was the site of the signing of the Peace of Pressburg between France and Austria. Ferdinand V, Emperor of Austria, signed the April Laws in the city’s Primate’s Palace on 11 April 1848.

Coordinates

Latitude: 48.151665545909
Longitude: 17.109224798041

View on the COVE Master Map

Timeline of Events Associated with Bratislava

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"