Tag Archives: Napoleon

Europe of Conflict and Personality

20 September 2026 By in Biography, Books Nonfiction, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Derek Wilson’s Charlemagne is a curious book. It is really two books joined by the author’s hope that a purpose he never explicitly states but implicitly imagines will somehow unite the parts thematically; more on that shortly.

The first half is a sparse, almost frugal biography of an emperor on a mission. A mission to spread and reinforce Christianity: Catholicism; a mission to bring to heel the disparate polities of the European mainland; a mission to respect local customs while imposing a common legal and administrative structure. All of this required constant war, diplomatic maneuvering, and court intrigue to keep the continent’s many fiefdoms off balance and unable to mount a coordinated resistance. It is the story of a competent, charismatic leader who, through sheer willpower, fused a fragmented Europe into a congealed, if chaotic and complicated whole.

Then, somewhere around the midpoint, the book undergoes a jarring metamorphosis. The biography dissolves, and Wilson begins speaking not about Charlemagne but about post-Charlemagne Europe itself: its failures, its divisions, its wars, its chronic inability to remain whole. By the end, the book has become less a study of an exceptional man than a lament for a disheveled and unruly continent. Wilson tries to justify this extended romp from the ninth century to the present by occasionally tying Louis XIV, Napoleon, Bismarck, and others back to Charlemagne with ad hoc references, but the connections never really hold. What emerges instead is an endless cycle of personalities and war.

From Charlemagne and the Saxon Wars, through Otto I, the Norman Conquests, and the Crusades of Richard the Lionheart, Philip II, and Saladin, Europe rolled into the Hundred Years’ War with Edward III, Henry V, and Joan of Arc, followed by the Hussite Wars and the rise of the Ottomans. The early modern world brought Martin Luther, Charles V, Philip II, the Eighty Years’ War, and the cataclysmic Thirty Years’ War with Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, alongside Louis XIV’s wars and the English Civil War. The 18th century marched through the War of Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, and Seven Years’ War, shaped by Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa, and Catherine the Great, before the French Revolution unleashed Napoleon, the Coalition Wars, and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. The 19th century followed with Metternich, Bismarck, Garibaldi, and Napoleon III, amid the Crimean War, Austro‑Prussian War, Franco‑Prussian War, and the Balkan Wars. The 20th century erupted with World War I under Wilhelm II, Franz Ferdinand, and Lenin, then World War II with Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and De Gaulle, followed by the Cold War, Greek Civil War, and Yugoslav Wars under figures like Tito and Gorbachev. The 21st century carried Europe into the Russo‑Georgian War, the Crimean crisis, and the ongoing Russo‑Ukrainian War, dominated by Putin, Zelenskyy, and the collective leadership of NATO and the EU, bringing the continent’s long arc of conflict from Charlemagne’s empire to the geopolitics of 2026. (With heartfelt apologies to Billy Joel and We Didn’t Start the Fire—but the fire never does go out; occasionally smoldering, but never out.)

Wilson heroically tries to connect all this to Charlemagne, but Europe’s never‑ending conflicts are far larger in scope than anything that can be laid at the feet of the medieval “Father of Europe.” And to be fair, Wilson does not explicitly claim that Charlemagne is somehow related to or causative of Europe’s later turmoil. But he does insist that it all rhymes, and that insistence, rather than any articulated evidence, ultimately drives the second half of the book.

What is striking is not that Wilson cares about European unity, but that he never asks the simplest question his own narrative demands. Charlemagne’s empire did not endure. It did not slowly fade, nor did it evolve into something recognizably European. It collapsed almost immediately upon his death. The Treaty of Verdun, signed less than thirty years later, shattered his achievement into three pieces that would become France, Germany, and the Low Countries. The unity Wilson mourns was never structural or natural. It was personal.

And this is a deeper truth Wilson never touches but should have. Charlemagne’s empire was not held together by institutions, laws, or shared identity. It was held together by Charlemagne. His personality: relentless, martial, commanding, and utterly convinced of his own mission, was the glue that bound dozens of cultures, languages, and belief systems into a single political organism. And that glue existed only as long as he did.

Charlemagne ruled through war. Not occasionally, not reluctantly, but continuously. His reign was a forty‑six‑year military campaign. Every year he rode out to fight Saxons, Lombards, Avars, Bretons, Slavs, or Moors. Every year he reminded his subjects that unity would be maintained through the sword. Charlemagne’s empire was not a nation; it was his fiefdom. Its cohesion was not cultural; it was maintained by the force of his arms and personality.

This is why the empire died with him. The moment the personality vanished, the centrifugal forces he had suppressed reasserted themselves. The Saxons remembered they were Saxons. The Aquitanians remembered they were Aquitanians. The Bavarians remembered they were Bavarians. The Franks themselves remembered they were not one people but many. Charlemagne had forced Europe into a single shape, but the shape depended entirely on his hand. When the hand was gone, the shape dissolved.

And this is not unique to Charlemagne. It is the fate of every empire built by a singular, overwhelming personality. Alexander held together Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and dozens of subject peoples through sheer charisma and military brilliance. When he died, his generals tore the world apart. Genghis Khan unified the steppe through terror, genius, and personal authority; his sons inherited territory, not loyalty. Napoleon imposed a continental system through force, reform, and personal magnetism; once he fell, Europe snapped back to its natural divisions. These empires did not die because their successors were incompetent. They died because their founders were irreplaceable. Those few who managed to maintain their empires: Lenin and Stalin, did so through terror, and even those structures eventually collapsed.

This loss of empire, loss of a truly united, pacified Europe, is a subject Wilson never confronts. He wants Europe to be one. He wants unity to be natural. He wants fragmentation to be pathological. And so, he reaches for the easiest villain available: nationalism. He treats nationalism as though it were a kind of moral contagion: irrational, destructive, hideous, without ever asking what nationalism actually is or why it exists.

But nationalism is not a pathology. Nationalism is the cultural substrate that makes political order possible. It is the shared language, shared memory, shared symbols, shared values, and shared experience that allow millions of people to imagine themselves as a people rather than a population. Without nationalism, there is no glue to hold anything together. Without nationalism, a “United States of Europe” is not a dream deferred; it is a dream impossible.

This is why the European Union became what it is: a vast bureaucracy and a managerial class holding together mounting societal cross‑currents without a shared experience. A market without a nation. A union without unity. A structure that cannot command loyalty because it never created it. A system that cannot inspire devotion because it never articulated what it was supposed to be. A project that imported every language and every culture without ever forging a common one.

Wilson’s frustration becomes more intelligible once you recognize what he wanted Europe to become. He is, unmistakably, a believer in the old dream of a United States of Europe: a continent bound together not by conquest but by shared purpose, shared institutions, and shared destiny. In the aftermath of the Second World War, that dream seemed almost within reach. The European Coal and Steel Community, the Treaty of Rome, and the early Common Market appeared to be the first cautious steps toward a new political organism, one that might finally escape the cycle of war and fragmentation that had defined Europe since Charlemagne’s death.

But the Europe Wilson hoped for never materialized. What emerged instead was technocracy. What emerged was administration. What emerged was a regulatory machine attempting to do what armies, churches, and charismatic rulers once did: hold Europe together. But systems cannot replace culture. Bureaucracy cannot replace identity. Markets cannot replace shared memory.

Charlemagne tried to unify Europe through religion. Napoleon tried through ideology. Hitler, monstrously, tried through racial mythology. Each failed for the same reason: the unity was never structural. It was personal. It was coercive. It was temporary. Europe has only ever been unified by a person: never by a system.

And this leads to the questions Wilson never asks, the questions his own narrative demands. How or why are empires built? How or why are empires lost? How or why are wars started?

How or why empires are won and lost was answered above. Throughout history empires were forged in the fires of an individual’s will to do so. But Wilson never really addresses this question. Charlemagne built an empire of disparate parts. Parts with different cultures and language. Parts with different experiences. It was destined to fall apart the second he no longer put his entire purpose in life behind his vision of a unified Europe.

The question of why wars are started he never explores. Just an ad hoc statement that the Franco-Prussian War was about “the hideous power of nationalism but they [France and Germany] tore open all the old half-healed wounds between the two parts of Charlemagne’s ancient empire.” Wilson slips this statement in and treats it as self-evident with no explanatory text needed. This statement though is just wrong on so many levels. The Franco-Prussian was all about leadership failures. Failure to understand Frances’s weaknesses militarily and politically. One that failed to understand the strength of Prussia’s armies and their leadership. Nowhere was the war about nationalism. Germany wanted a unified state, yes but they needed a unifying purpose to do so. France played right into Wilhelm’s and Bismarck’s hand.

The half-healed wounds of Charlemagne’s empire expired 1000 years previously. Wishful thinking is not the job of a historian. The wounds of Charlemagne’s Empire were still there because the empire was never united around culture, language, and shared experience, just held together by brute force of a strong man with a strong army.  Wilson’s mistake is believing that Europe’s unity was ever structural; when the truth is that it was always personal, and therefore always temporary. The EU today is politically fragmented and culturally thin.

The EU is Europe’s first attempt at unity without personality, without coercion, and without culture: and history suggests that such unity cannot endure unless external pressure forces it to.

Phalanx: Discipline in Geometry

11 August 2025 By in History, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Near the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, mid-way between present-day Bagdad and Kuwait City, stood a battle marker; the Stele of Vultures, now housed in the Louvre. It commemorates Lagash’s 3rd millennium BC victory over Umma. The stele derives its name from the monument’s carved vultures flying away with the heads of the dead.  It also depicts soldiers of Lagash marching in a dense, shield to shield formation, holding spears chest high and horizontal, led by their ruler: Eannatum, who commissioned the stele in 2460 BC. The importance of the stele, though, is that it is the first visual depiction of the use of a phalanx in a battle. It is believed that the phalanx as a military tactic is much older.

The phalanx was more than a combat formation, it was a battlefield philosophy enshrining discipline and courage over strength, unity of the team over the individual. A dense, rectangular wall of men, generally 8 deep stretching across the battlefield to protect against flanking maneuvers. Each man wore heavy armor of leather and bronze: helmet, cuirass, greaves, armed with a spear and a short sword. But the breakthrough that brought the phalanx great renown was the apsis, a round shield invented for the Greek hoplite in the 8th or 7th century BC. With its dual grip, a forearm strap and central handhold, it allowed the infantryman precise control of his shield, helping create an impenetrable barrier of bronze and bone against the oncoming enemy’s spears and swords. It transformed the phalanx from an offensive wall of attack to an added defensive engine of defiance.

The phalanx only succeeded in cohesion. When courage and discipline held, the formation with the apsis as its core defense was practically unbeatable on confined terrain. It overcame the enemy with a seamless, tight mass executing a relentless forward march into the belly of the opposing beast. But it was only as strong as its weakest link. Once discipline faltered and cohesion broke, the formation collapsed, and the opposing army ran it to ground. Victory belonged not to brute force, but to the combined strength of the military unit. Teams won, individuals lost.

From late 8th century BC onward, Greek phalanxes were manned by hoplites: citizen soldiers, generally landowners and farmers. Emerging in Sparta or Argos, possibly imported from Sumeria or born of parallel discovery in Greece, phalanx battles initially were confined, blunt, and deadly affairs. They devolved into fierce pushing masses of brawn, bone, and metal until one side broke. Heavy casualties occurred when the enemy lines broke and soldiers fled Helter skelter in shock and chaos, pursued by the victors for plunder, unless they were restrained by honor.

The phalanx became the standard that destroyed the mighty Persian armies at Marathon and Thermopylae early in the 5th century BC. At Marathon in 490 BC 10,000 Athenians and 1000 Plataeans stretched out their formation to match the breadth of 26,000 Persians, filling the Marathon plain and denying the armies any room for flanking movements.

The Greeks stacked their wings with additional rows of hoplites and thinned them progressively toward the center creating a convex crescent. The Greek wings advance faster than the center generating a pincer movement that collapsed on the Persian center. When the dust settled 192 Athenians and 11 Plataeans were lost while the Persian losses were approximated at 6400.

In the 19th century, Napoleon, possibly improvising on phalanx encircling tactics developed at Marathon, would invert his attacking army with a concave formation consisting of a strong center and weaker wings. His strategy being to split the enemies’ center with strength and attack their divided ranks on the flanks. The tactic worked until Wellington at Waterloo.

At Marathon, unity triumphed with geometric discipline. At Thermopylae the formation bought time and ended with a sacrifice that concluded Persian hubris.

During the second Persian invasion in 480 BC, Darius’s son Xerxes with 120,000-300,000 men attacked a contingent of 7000 Greeks at Thermopylae. The Greeks held back the Persian advance like a cork in a bottle, using a rotating phalanx of roughly 200 men to defend a narrow pass for two days, until betrayal by Ephialtes exposed their flank and they were destroyed in a inescapable Persian barrage of arrows. Greek losses were estimated at 4000 men including Leonidas’ 300 Spartans and 2000-4000 Persians (beginning and ending estimates for manpower strength vary widely).

The Greeks defiant stand at Thermopylae allowed the Greek navy to regroup at Salamis where they won a decisive victory against the Persian navy. A year later the Greeks at Plataea crushed the Persians quest for a Hellenic satrapy.

The Phalanx endured for another century, including use in the Peloponnesian War, where it remained lethal but of limited use. Then came Epaminondas at Leuctra in 371 BC, transforming the phalanx into a machine that erased Sparta’s mighty reputation. Typically, each army’s phalanx strength was concentrated on their right wing so that the strongest part of a force always faced off against the weaker wing of the opposition. What Epaminondas did was say nuts to that.

He reversed the order and created an oblique formation, more triangular than rectangular with his strongest troops on the left wing. His left wing was stacked 50 deep while keeping his center and right wings thin. His 50-deep was aimed directly at Sparta’s best under the command of King Cleombrotus (in those days officers and kings were in the front rows of the phalanx). As the phalanxes began to attack Epaminondas kept his right-wing stationery creating an asymmetrical front. The left wing easily broke through Sparta’s right wing, killing Cleombrotus and collapsing their superior flank. At that point Epaminondas’s wing pivoted inward creating an enveloping arc around the remaining parts of Sparta’s phalanx effectively ending the Spartan myth of invincibility.

Epaminondas tactics shortened battles with fewer casualties. His innovations proved that properly trained and equipped citizen soldiers could defeat professional warriors while instilling a new civic honor through restraint and discipline. His oblique formation allowed landowners and farmers to settle their disputes, usually in a few hours or less, with minimal loss, and return to their farms in time for the harvest. Epaminondas not only brought asymmetrical tactics to the battlefield but shattered claims of superiority by employing the unexpected.

As the Golden Age of Athens and western civilization’s Greek center waned and Roman hegemony rose, the phalanx evolved again. The Greek phalanx gave way to the Roman manipular system, a staggered checkerboard pattern, enabling units to rotate, reinforce, or retreat as needed. It was a needed refinement and improvement to the phalanx, more effectual on open plains and less susceptible to calvary and arrows.

Then came Hannibal to Cannae in 216 BC. During the 2nd Punic War, he upended the war cart of tactics once again and ruthlessly exploited Rome’s refinements.

Hannibal’s improvisations of the phalanx maneuvering tactics, but not the actual formation, showed that he had studied Marathon. Instead of a convex line with strong wings and a weak center he developed a concave line with strong wings and weak center. He allowed the center to fall back, which the Romans unwittingly obliged by surging into Hannibal’s weak center. With the Romans committed Hannibal’s deception encircled them with precision and brutal lethality. The Romans were annihilated on the field losing somewhere between 50,000-70,000 killed and another 10,000 captured. Hannibal lost 6000-8000 men (again estimates vary). Then came the 3rd Punic War.

The phalanx began as a wall of spears and shields, a bulwark of bronze and bone. Its stunning victories echo through history’s scholarly halls and hallowed plains of death and destruction. Yet its Achilles’ heel, vulnerable flanks, precise terrain requirements proved incompatible to horses and gunpowder.

Still its legacy of discipline and unity endure. Born of necessity, refined through rigor, and studied for centuries, the phalanx stands as a testament Aristotle’s enduring insight, slightly abridged but still profound, ‘The whole is greater than the parts.’ And perhaps the Roman’s said it best: ‘E pluribus unum’, ‘out of many, one.’

Source: A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson, 2005. Et al. Graphic: Stele of Vultures.

Hundred Days

26 February 2025 By in Biography, History, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Napoleon Bonaparte, reeling from his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 and suffering significant losses to the Sixth Coalition in 1813, faced a decisive defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in October of that year. With his options exhausted and his army depleted, Napoleon abdicated his throne on 11 April 1814, and was exiled to Elba, a small island off the coast of Tuscany.

After approximately ten months in captivity, Napoleon executed a daring escape on 26 February 1815, orchestrated by loyal supporters and a small contingent of soldiers. He landed in France and marched triumphantly into Paris on 20th of March, reclaiming his title as Emperor and ushering in his second reign. This brief resurgence, however, ended with his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, at the hands of the Duke of Wellington and Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. The victorious Anglo-Prussian forces entered Paris on 7th of July restoring King Louis XVIII to the French throne and effectively concluding Napoleon’s reign—later dubbed the “Hundred Days” (20 March to 8 July) in historical accounts.

Unable to flee to the United States as he had hoped, Napoleon surrendered to the British Navy and was transported to England. From there, he was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, arriving there on 15 October 1815. He spent his final years there, dying on 5 May 1821.

Source: Napoleon by André Castelot, 1991. Graphic: Battle of Waterloo by William Sadler, 1815 (Public Domain).

A Little Package of our Past

24 January 2018 By in Books Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

World History: 50 Key Milestones You Really Need to Know B 50 History

Written by:  Ian Crofton

Published by:  Quercus

Copyright:  © 2011

Attempting to describe 12-15,000 years, since the big ice fields melted, of human endeavors in 200 pages and 50 topics would seem presumptuous and futile, and you would be right, but one has to start somewhere and the first steps can and should be small but decisive.  One can quibble about the exact 50 topics, and I will do just that in a bit, but the author, Ian Crofton, performs the task with aplomb, and provides the maximum amount of useful information possible given the limiting format.

This book is a quick and fun read for both those without a broad or deep introduction to human history or those that just want to refresh their memory on once familiar, but long forgotten topics. Even if you are familiar with all the topics in the book there will be a sufficient amount of new informational tidbits to make it worth your time. For myself, as one example, I found the observation that our ancestral hunter-gather cousins versus the first cereal grain farmers, were healthier, due mainly to their higher protein intake from a meat rich diet, was new and interesting.

Each “idea” or event is developed, chronologically, over 4 printed pages that includes a short thesis, an expansion of that thesis, a timeline of notable events, a famous quote(s) and an ending synopsis of the discussion.  The publisher of this book, Quercus, has published at least 27 other books of a similar nature and format that explore the great topics of the human experience including: architecture, art, astronomy, big ideas, biology, chemistry, the digital world, earth, economics, ethics, the future, genetics, the human brain, literature, management, math, philosophy, philosophy of science, physics, politics, psychology, quantum physics, religion, science, universe, war, and world history. I believe they continue to add more topics as the years go by.  I have several of the topics, listed above on my already too fat reading list.

Not to detract from the topics that the author has chosen, his are all defendable, but for myself I probably would have included 5 different topics devoted to: the Iron Age, Israelites of the 12th century BC, 1st century Christianity, Sumerians development of an alphabet in 300 BC coupled with Guttenberg’s first printing press in the 15th century AD, 18th century BC Babylonian Hammurabi’s, and 7th century BC Greek Draco’s legal codifications, and finally the advent of computers in the 20th century and beyond.  Adding 5 topics requires that 5 be removed. I would likely leave out: Empires and Kingdoms of Africa, The Bubonic Plague, the Vietnam War, integral to the late 20th century US, but will likely be a footnote on communism in the future, and lastly, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the post 9-11 topics, at a minimum, combined into a topic on 21st century divisions in civilization and culture, as if that were something new. On further thought, maybe just leave those last two topics out completely, mainly because they are too fresh to decide their seminality to our future development as a species.

That leaves our list one shy of 50. What topic(s) would you add?