But Napoleon didn't know that the Prussians were waiting in the wings with 72,000 more enemy troops. The British army, under the command of the formidable Duke of Wellington, numbered 68,000 troops at Waterloo, roughly the same size as Napoleon's force. He had some luck against the Prussians in a preliminary battle, but then he came up against the British outside the Belgian town of Waterloo.

With coalition forces amassing against him, Napoleon decided to strike first by invading Belgium. What followed is known as the Hundred Days Campaign, Napoleon's last desperate grasp at power. King Louis XVIII, who had been installed by the coalition allies in Napoleon's place, skipped town without a fight. Napoleon's soldiers, while digging to reinforce a fortress wall in 1799, made an accidental discovery in the Nile Delta - the Rosetta Stone.Īfter less than a year in exile, Napoleon sailed from Elba with 1,000 supporters and landed on the French mainland, where he was met by exultant crowds. The Egyptian campaign wasn't a total wash, though. Napoleon saw an opening for his triumphant return, so he abandoned his troops in Egypt and secretly made for France. But by 1798, morale was low and a civil war was raging back home. He took on the Turks in Syria and bombarded the centuries-old walls at the ancient city of Acre. Stranded in Egypt, Napoleon decided to pick more fights with the locals. But while Napoleon was daydreaming of conquest - 'I saw myself founding a new religion,' he later wrote, 'marching into Asia riding an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand the new Koran' - the British struck back, destroying the French fleet docked in the Mediterranean.

The French, following Napoleon's ingenious battlefield strategies, crushed the saber-wielding Mamelukes and took Cairo. 'Soldiers,' Napoleon shouted to his troops, 'from the height of these pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you.'

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