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Concept
Peninsular War
Summary
The Peninsular War (1807–1814) was the military conflict fought in the Iberian Peninsula by Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom against the invading and occupying forces of the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. In Spain, it is considered to overlap with the Spanish War of Independence.
The war started when the French and Spanish armies invaded and occupied Portugal in 1807 by transiting through Spain, and it escalated in 1808 after Napoleonic France occupied Spain, which had been its ally. Napoleon Bonaparte forced the abdications of Ferdinand VII and his father Charles IV and then installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne and promulgated the Bayonne Constitution. Most Spaniards rejected French rule and fought a bloody war to oust them. The war on the peninsula lasted until the Sixth Coalition defeated Napoleon in 1814, and is regarded as one of the first wars of national liberation. It is also significant for the emergence of large-scale guerrilla warfare.
In 1808, the Spanish Army in Andalusia defeated the French in the Battle of Bailen, considered the first open-field defeat of the Napoleonic army in European battlefields. Besieged by 70,000 French troops, a reconstituted national government, the Cortes of Cádiz—in effect a government-in-exile—fortified itself in the secure port of Cádiz in 1810. The British army, under Arthur Wellesley, guarded Portugal and campaigned against the French alongside the reformed Portuguese army and provided whatever supplies they could get to the Spanish, while the Spanish armies and guerrillas tied down vast numbers of Napoleon's troops. In 1812, when Napoleon set out with a massive army on what proved to be a disastrous French invasion of Russia, a combined allied army defeated the French at Salamanca and took the capital Madrid. In the following year the Coalition scored a victory over King Joseph Bonaparte's army in the Battle of Vitoria paving the victory of the war in the Iberian Peninsula.
Official source
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