Who won the Battle of Salamanca?
Wellington won. On 22 July 1812, near the village of Los Arapiles south of Salamanca, his British, Portuguese and Spanish army attacked Marshal Marmont’s French Army of Portugal while it was strung out on the march, broke its left wing within the hour and drove it from the field. Three weeks later Wellington entered Madrid.
For four years the British army in the Peninsula had been known for holding ridges. At Salamanca Wellington attacked. On the afternoon of 22 July 1812 he caught a French army of about his own size in the middle of a maneuver, and within a few hours the Army of Portugal was routed, its commander badly wounded and several of its generals dead or disabled. The National Army Museum notes that the battle proved Wellington could attack in the open field, and Charles Oman called it the most skillfully fought and the most decisive of all his victories. A saying of the battle, which Oman applies to the whole victory and the museum to Le Marchant’s cavalry, speaks of forty thousand men beaten in forty minutes.1
The French and the Spanish call it the battle of Los Arapiles, after two flat-topped hills that stood between the armies, and the Spanish historian Miguel Alonso Baquer notes that the name Salamanca is used by historians whose main source is Wellington’s despatches. This is the story of the battle from both sides: why Wellington marched into Spain, how the two armies shadowed each other for a week, why Marmont stretched his line, how Pakenham and Le Marchant broke it, what it cost and what it changed. It belongs to our guide to the Peninsular War. See also our life of the Duke of Wellington and our comparison Napoleon vs Wellington.2
Why was the Battle of Salamanca fought?
In 1812 France had about 230,000 soldiers in Spain, the National Army Museum notes, divided among five armies. Alonso Baquer sees the poor coordination of the French marshals as the defining feature of the campaign. Early in the year Wellington stormed the frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo, in January, and Badajoz, in April, and Hill’s troops captured the crossing at Almaraz on the Tagus, which made it harder for the French armies of the north and the south to help each other.3
In June, as Napoleon gathered his armies for the invasion of Russia, Wellington marched on Salamanca and reached the city in mid-June. Its French garrison held out for some days in fortified convents while Marmont drew back to gather his scattered divisions.4
His opponent was Marshal Auguste de Marmont, duke of Ragusa, who had commanded the Army of Portugal since May 1811, when he replaced Masséna. The French encyclopedia Universalis sums up what followed in Spain in a single phrase: heavily defeated at the Arapiles.5
How did Wellington and Marmont maneuver before the battle?
In mid-July Marmont took the initiative. He pushed troops across the Douro at Toro and, when Wellington moved to meet them, marched his army to Tordesillas, crossed there on 17 July and gathered it at Nava del Rey. After a sharp fight on the Guareña on 18 July the two armies marched south side by side on 20 July, often within cannon shot. Marmont wrote that it was a sight he enjoyed only once in his life, and that Wellington later told him the French army had marched like a single regiment.6
Neither general wanted to attack the other in a strong position. Wellington had decided that if no chance came on 22 July he would fall back toward Ciudad Rodrigo, especially once he learned that cavalry and horse artillery of the French Army of the North were about to join Marmont. On 21 July both armies crossed the Tormes, the French by the fords between Alba de Tormes and Huerta, the allies by the bridge of Salamanca and the nearby fords. That night a violent thunderstorm broke over the armies, and William Grattan of the 88th remembered terrified cavalry horses breaking loose and running between the regiments.7
One detail of that day mattered later. Wellington had asked the Spaniards of Carlos de España to hold the castle of Alba de Tormes, which guarded a bridge over the Tormes. España withdrew the garrison without telling him, and the French put troops of their own into the castle, so Wellington still believed the crossing was closed.8
How big were the armies at Salamanca?
The two armies were close to equal. The National Army Museum gives Wellington about 48,000 men, including Portuguese and Spanish contingents, with 60 guns, against 50,000 French with 78 guns. Oman, working from the returns, counted 51,939 allied officers and men, of whom 3,360 were Spaniards, and about 48,500 French.9
By Oman’s figures about a third of the allied army was Portuguese, including the independent brigades of Pack and Bradford and the cavalry of D’Urban. The Spanish contribution on the field was the division of Carlos de España, which Alonso Baquer puts at about 4,000 men. He notes that the Spanish role in the campaign lay mostly on its edges, with soldiers and guerrillas harassing the French around the main armies.10
What happened on the morning of 22 July?
At first light both sides raced for the two hills south of the village of Los Arapiles. The French under Bonnet won the higher and more distant one, the Arapil Grande, while the allies held the smaller Arapil Chico. The Spanish historian Count Toreno called it an unforgivable oversight that the allies had not occupied it first. Light troops skirmished all morning around the heights of Nuestra Señora de la Peña.11
Marmont expected Wellington to retreat. From the Arapil Grande he watched the allies move troops to their right and concluded that they were preparing to fall back toward Ciudad Rodrigo. He wrote that he looked forward not to a battle but to a good rearguard action. In the early afternoon he ordered his left, Thomières’ division, to extend westward. The French historian Adolphe Thiers blamed a fatal impatience, not to fight but to maneuver, and the wish to catch an enemy he thought was about to slip away.12
The movement went wrong. By Marmont’s own account Maucune’s division stretched to the left without reason, Thomières’ division came up level with it instead of behind it, and the reserves lagged. Napier describes the march as wide and loose, with a long space between Thomières and the divisions near the Arapiles.13
Marmont never saw the battle through. At about three o’clock, he wrote, as he folded his telescope on the Arapil Grande and set off to hold back Maucune, a shell fired from the two British guns on the other Arapil shattered his right arm and tore deep wounds in his side. Thiers has him struck just as he mounted his horse. Command passed to Bonnet, who was soon wounded too, and then to Clausel. Marmont complained that this rapid succession of commanders meant there was no command at all.14
How did Wellington win the Battle of Salamanca?
Wellington saw the gap. Marmont, he wrote to Graham, after maneuvering all morning “in the usual French style, nobody knew with what object,” pressed on his right in a way that “was not to be endured,” and so the allies fell on him. Oman notes that Wellington had sent his baggage down the Ciudad Rodrigo road at dawn, ready to retreat, and struck only when he saw his opportunity.15
He rode himself to the 3rd Division, under Major General Edward Pakenham, instead of sending an aide, Fortescue notes. Pakenham was Wellington’s brother-in-law. Grattan, who stood nearby, remembered Wellington tapping Pakenham on the shoulder and telling him to move on with the 3rd Division, take the heights in front of him and drive everything before him.16
The 3rd Division, with D’Urban’s Portuguese cavalry and two squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons, came on in four columns across the head of Thomières’ division and overthrew everything in its path. Napier describes the French caught half formed, their gunners firing to the last. Thomières was killed and his division broken. At the same time Leith’s 5th Division, Cole’s 4th Division and Bradford’s Portuguese advanced against the French front and drove it from one height to another.17
Then the heavy cavalry struck. Le Marchant’s brigade, with Anson’s light dragoons beside it, charged out of the dust between the 3rd and 5th Divisions and rode down one French infantry formation after another. Le Marchant was killed in the charge. Fortescue counts the brigade’s own losses at just one hundred.18
Le Marchant had founded the Royal Military College at High Wycombe and had designed the sabre adopted for the British light cavalry in 1796. The Royal Collection notes that the victory cost him his life.19
How did the French fight back at Salamanca?
The French were not finished. Pack’s Portuguese brigade attacked the Arapil Grande and was thrown back, and Thiers credits the French 120th Line with the defense. Clausel then counterattacked the allied center and drove back Cole’s 4th Division. Cole was wounded, and so was Marshal Beresford, who swung troops of the second line against the French flank. Wellington brought up Clinton’s 6th Division, which restored the line and forced the French off the Arapil Grande.20
As night fell, Clausel, wounded himself, ordered a retreat to the heights in the rear, where the divisions of Sarrut and Ferey held off the pursuers. General Foy’s division, which had hardly fought, then covered the retreat into the woods toward the Tormes, a task the Fondation Napoléon says he carried out with great skill.21
Why did the French army escape after Salamanca?
Wellington pursued toward Huerta and its fords, the way the French had come. They had gone by Alba de Tormes instead, where the Spanish garrison had left the castle. “If I had known there had been no garrison in Alba,” he wrote to Graham, “I should have marched there, and should probably have had the whole.” The National Army Museum notes his displeasure at the Spanish withdrawal.22
On 23 July the allied cavalry caught the French rearguard near García Hernández. The heavy dragoons of the King’s German Legion under Bock charged formed infantry. Wellington reported three battalions taken prisoner, and Toreno repeats that loss, while Marmont wrote that the rearguard, abandoned by its own cavalry, formed squares and that only the square of the 6th Light was broken. The Fondation Napoléon notes that Foy, so skillful the night before, was badly shaken there.23
How many died at the Battle of Salamanca?
French losses were disputed from the start. Marmont claimed that his killed, wounded and prisoners did not exceed 6,000, about the same as the allies, and Thiers repeated a figure of five to six thousand. Oman wrote that Marmont had the “effrontery” to report so low a figure and put the real loss at 14,000 to 15,000, and Fortescue too accepted 14,000 as the least number. An incomplete French return in the Paris archives counted 12,435 for Salamanca and the combats around it.24
The allies took two eagles and six other colors. Wellington reported 11 guns in the official returns but believed that 20 had been taken, the figure the National Army Museum gives, and he counted between 6,000 and 7,000 prisoners. Among the French generals Thomières was killed and Ferey mortally wounded.25
Wellington’s first return, as Oman gives it, counted 5,173 allied killed, wounded and missing: 3,129 British, 2,038 Portuguese and 6 Spaniards. Oman notes that the Portuguese return sent to Lisbon gave a smaller figure. Le Marchant was killed, and Beresford, Cotton, Leith and Cole were wounded.26
Why did Wellington win at Salamanca?
Marmont blamed General Maucune. The battle, he wrote, was engaged at the wrong moment and against his formal will by a brave but limited general who could not contain himself in front of the enemy. Fortescue rejected this attempt to shift the blame and quoted Foy’s journal: it was Marmont who began the battle, against Clausel’s advice, and his left was already being driven back when he was wounded. Foy, in Fortescue’s summary, thought the victory raised Wellington almost to the level of Marlborough.27
Marmont misjudged his opponent. He knew Wellington as a defensive general and, Fortescue argues, never imagined he could do more than hold a position. Wellington himself thought Marmont should have given him a golden bridge and let him go.28
French historians saw it differently. Thiers called Salamanca a fatal and involuntary battle, whose result was out of all proportion to the English commander’s merit and to the French general’s mistakes, and dated from it the ruin of French affairs in Spain. The Fondation Napoléon notes that the defeat opened the road to Madrid.29
The victory was not complete. Fortescue thought Wellington directed so many movements in person that he lacked the time to turn a great success into a decisive one, and the empty castle at Alba de Tormes let the beaten army cross the Tormes.30
What happened after the Battle of Salamanca?
King Joseph had left Madrid with some 12,000 to 14,000 men to join Marmont and turned back when he heard of the defeat. Wellington entered Madrid on 12 August, and on 24 August the French began to raise the siege of Cádiz.31
Not every gain lasted. Wellington besieged the castle of Burgos from 19 September, failed to take it, and by 19 November his exhausted army was back at Ciudad Rodrigo on the Portuguese border. Yet the National Army Museum notes that the battle undermined Joseph’s authority in Spain, encouraged the guerrillas and persuaded the British government that the war in the Peninsula was worth pursuing, and in June 1813 Wellington won again at Vitoria.32
Spanish historians see Salamanca as part of their own war of independence. Alonso Baquer calls Los Arapiles the most decisive battle of the war and the beginning of the end of Joseph Bonaparte’s rule, and sees the French defense of Burgos that autumn as the limit of what Wellington could draw from it. On 7 August 1812 the Gaceta of the Spanish Regency in Cádiz printed Wellington’s despatches in translation.33
Where was the Battle of Salamanca fought?
The battle was fought just south of Salamanca, on the south bank of the Tormes, around the village of Los Arapiles and its two hills, the Arapil Grande and the Arapil Chico, which overlook the city, the river crossings and the road to Ciudad Rodrigo.34
The field has long been treated as heritage. In 1992 the government of Castile and León opened the procedure to declare the Campo de los Arapiles a Bien de Interés Cultural, a site of cultural interest, in the category of historic site, recalling that a request to make the hills a national historic site had already been made in 1909. On 27 January 1994 part of the field was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in that category. In the village of Arapiles an interpretation center tells the story of the battle with models, panels and a diorama of more than 5,000 soldiers.35
