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This is Jeff Stein, the host of American Carnage,

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Welcome to the Age of Napoleon.

Episode 100 Age of Napoleon. Episode 118, the Hornets Nest.

Thanks for joining me.

As always, I'd like to start by thanking our Patreon supporters.

Your contributions keep the show going.

And I'd like to take the opportunity to invite the rest of you to join us on Patreon. The bonus episodes have been

getting better and better. There's now hours of content on a huge range of

Napoleonic history topics available to you for just $2 a month.

And as always, you'll also get access to add free versions of the regular episodes.

Anyway, we left off last time in late 1808. The French had just won a dramatic victory over an improvised Spanish Patriot army at the Battle of Somo Sierra, although perhaps it's more accurate to a In any case, after Somo Sierra, Napoleon's army was able to sweep down from the heights of the Sierra de Guadarama and take its primary objective, Madrid.

Napoleon had completed his plan for the second invasion of Spain in a matter of weeks.

Of course, the war in Iberia was far from over.

Although the Spanish capital had fallen, most of the country's territory was still free of French occupation.

Spain's new provisional central government, the Supreme Junta, had fled to Seville in the south of the country, where there were no French troops within 500 kilometers or about 300 miles.

There was also still one remaining coalition field army operating on Spanish soil that had been too far away to engage in any of the fighting in this phase of the war, a force of about 40,000 mostly British troops under 47-year-old General

...