Curated playlist
Frederick William III of Prussia
- Battle of Lützen (1813)On the 2nd of May 1813, near the town of Lützen in Saxony, Napoleon Bonaparte rode among disordered conscripts on a battlefield that was going badly wrong. His right flank had been hit without warning, his corps commanders were under…
- Battle of Bautzen (1813)The Battle of Bautzen, fought on the 20th and the 21st of May 1813, came down to a single question: could Napoleon finally destroy the Prusso-Russian army in the field? He had the numbers to do it. With 144,000 troops against a combined…
- Altes MuseumOn the 3rd of August 1830, a building unlike anything Berlin had seen before opened its doors to the public. The Altes Museum, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel by order of King Frederick William III of Prussia, stood at the northern…
- Treaties of TilsitThe Treaties of Tilsit were sealed on a raft in the middle of a river. On the 7th of July 1807, Napoleon met Russian Emperor Alexander I on that raft, moored in the Neman. No territory belonged to either empire there; that symmetry was the…
- Battle of DresdenThe Battle of Dresden began on the 26th of August, 1813, and within two days it had produced one of Napoleon's most tactically impressive victories. Yet it changed almost nothing. An enormous Coalition army, drawn from Russia, Prussia, and…
- Humboldt University of BerlinHumboldt University of Berlin stands on the Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic heart of a city that has witnessed more than two centuries of revolution, war, division, and reunion. On the 6th of October 1810, the first students…
- Frederick William III of PrussiaFrederick William III entered the world on the 3rd of August 1770 in Potsdam. His father Frederick William II of Prussia neglected him during his childhood years. A tutor named Johann Jakob Engel taught the young prince alongside other…
- Battle of Jena–AuerstedtOn the 14th of October 1806, two battles were fought simultaneously on the plateau west of the river Saale, in what is today Thuringia, Germany. At Jena, Napoleon himself commanded. At Auerstedt, roughly a day's march to the north, a…
- Battle of LeipzigThe Battle of Leipzig lasted four days in October 1813, and by its end roughly 133,000 soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing. On a single afternoon, a corporal who had not been told the correct time lit a fuse too early, detonating the…
- Battle of Paris (1814)On the morning of the 30th of March 1814, the city of Paris woke to the sound of artillery. For two decades, Napoleon had carried war to every corner of Europe. Now, for the first time in living memory, the armies of Russia, Austria,…