Battle of Wagram

The battle of Wagram on 5th-6th July 1809 was the largest battle yet seen in Europe and Napoleon's answer to Aspern-Essling. Having spent six weeks massing a Franco-German-Italian army of over one hundred and fifty thousand on Lobau island, Napoleon crossed the Danube by night and attacked Archduke Charles, whose Austrian army numbered more than one hundred and thirty thousand. The first day brought only grinding, inconclusive fighting; on the second, a massive battery of about a hundred guns shattered the Austrian centre, Macdonald's infantry wedge broke through, and the exhausted Austrians retired in good order. Combined casualties approached eighty thousand in two days on a battlefield packed with some three hundred thousand men. Charles asked for an armistice days later; Austria lost the war, ceded significant territory, and Napoleon took an Austrian bride. The empire reached its widest extent that summer, but the marriage and the victories could not mend the strained alliances that followed.