Peninsular War: Guerrillas, Torres Vedras and Napoleon's Spanish Ulcer

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France and Spain began the Peninsular War of 1807 to 1814 as allies, but the joint fleet's destruction at Trafalgar in 1805 cut Spain off from its American colonies, and the royal favorite Manuel Godoy began looking for a way out. Napoleon sent Spain's best troops, the Division of the North, to Denmark and Swedish Pomerania, then in 1807 marched an army through Spain to invade Portugal. French troops seized Spanish fortresses and stayed. Napoleon summoned Charles IV and Ferdinand VII to France, forced both to abdicate, and gave the crown to his brother Joseph Bonaparte, expecting to be welcomed as an enlightened reformer.

Spain rose in the spring of 1808, and that summer General Dupont surrendered about 18,000 men at Bailén, the first open field defeat of a Napoleonic army in Europe. Napoleon then crossed the Pyrenees and scattered the Spanish regulars, and the survivors turned to the little war, the guerrilla. In Portugal, Arthur Wellesley and engineer Richard Fletcher built the Lines of Torres Vedras, which starved Marshal Masséna's army into retreat. With veterans pulled out for Russia in 1812, Wellington advanced and routed King Joseph at Vitoria in 1813. Napoleon abdicated in the spring of 1814.

• In 1808 Juana Galán fought off French soldiers in her hometown with a cast iron stewpan.
• By 1813 guerrillas, some of them former bandits and smugglers, were tying down an estimated 75 percent of the French occupying force.
• Semaphore masts on the hilltops relayed messages along the Lines of Torres Vedras in minutes.
• About 200,000 Portuguese civilians were moved behind the lines while crops, mills and livestock outside were destroyed.
• At Vitoria, allied soldiers stopped to loot Joseph's baggage train, and Wellington called his men the scum of the earth.