Battle of Friedland

The Battle of Friedland was fought on 14th June 1807 between the French army under Napoleon and the Russian army under Levin August von Bennigsen in East Prussia. Bennigsen crossed the Alle river and deployed with his back to it, a risky position Napoleon was quick to exploit. Concentrating artillery and infantry against the Russian left, the French broke through and drove the Russians back across the river, turning the crossing into a deadly bottleneck. Russian losses reached around twenty thousand killed, wounded and drowned, against roughly ten thousand French casualties. The scale of the defeat convinced Tsar Alexander I to seek peace. Within weeks the two emperors met on a raft at Tilsit, where Russia joined Napoleon's Continental System and Prussia was stripped of half its territory. Friedland closed the War of the Fourth Coalition and marked the peak of Napoleon's power in Europe. Bennigsen's army escaped across the river but was ruined as a fighting force, and the road to the peace table at Tilsit lay open.