Respectively, these acquisitions were incorporated into the new Kingdom of Westphalia, led by his brother Jérôme Bonaparte and into the new Duchy of Warsaw, a Polish client state, ruled by his new ally the king of Saxony.

Following his triumph at the Battle of Austerlitz and the subsequent demise of the Third Coalition, Napoleon looked forward to achieving a general peace in Europe, especially with his two main remaining antagonists, Britain and Russia.

[citation needed] Despite the death of William Pitt in January 1806, Britain and the new Whig administration remained committed to checking the growing power of France.

Though nominally an ally in the coalition, Russia remained a dormant entity for much of the year (giving virtually no military aid to Prussia in the main battles that October, as Russian armies were still mobilising).

Anger by Prussia at this trespass was quickly tempered by the results of Austerlitz, and a convention of continued peace with France was signed two weeks after that battle at Schönbrunn.

This convention was modified in a formal treaty two months later, with one clause in effect promising to give Hanover to Prussia in exchange for Ansbach's being awarded to France's ally Bavaria.

Napoleon consolidated the various smaller states of the former Holy Roman Empire which had allied with France into larger electorates, duchies and kingdoms to make the governance of non-Prussian and Austrian Germany more efficient.

Napoleon had previously attempted to ameliorate Prussian anxieties by assuring Prussia he was not averse to its heading a North German Confederation, but his duplicity regarding Hanover dashed this.

A final spark leading to war was the summary arrest and execution of German nationalist Johann Philipp Palm in August 1806 for publishing a pamphlet which strongly attacked Napoleon and the conduct of his army occupying Germany.

In fact, the Tsar had visited the Prussian king and queen at the tomb of Frederick the Great in Potsdam that very autumn, and the monarchs secretly swore to make common cause against Napoleon.

Napoleon could scarcely believe Prussia would be so foolish to take him on in a straight fight with hardly any allies at hand on its side, especially since most of his Grande Armée was still in the heart of Germany close to the Prussian border.

He drummed up support from his soldiers by declaring that Prussia's bellicose actions had delayed their phased withdrawal back home to France to enjoy praise for the previous year's victories.

In a preemptive strike to catch the Prussians unaware, the Emperor had the Grande Armée march as a massive bataillon carré (battalion square) in three parallel columns through the Franconian Forest in southern Thuringia.

This strategy was adopted due to Napoleon's lack of intelligence regarding the Prussian main army's whereabouts and uncertainty over his enemy's puzzling manoeuvres in their march to face him.

The following day, Marshal Lannes, debouching from the passage of the forest, crushed a Prussian division at Battle of Saalfeld, where the popular Prince Louis Ferdinand was killed.

During the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte had marched from Naumburg to Dornburg and arrived at Apolda late in the day due to the poor state of the roads.

On 17 October, Bernadotte mauled Eugene Frederick Henry, Duke of Württemberg's previously untouched Reserve corps at the Battle of Halle and chased it across the Elbe river, this redeeming himself in Napoleon's eyes.

Some 160,000 French soldiers fought against Prussia increasing in number as the campaign went on, with reinforcements arriving across the Wesel bridgehead from the peripheral theatre surrounding the recently formed Kingdom of Holland, advancing with such speed that Napoleon was able to destroy as an effective military force the entire quarter of a million-strong Prussian army.

The Prussians sustained 65,000 casualties including the deaths of two members of the royal family lost a further 150,000 prisoners, over 4,000 artillery pieces, and over 100,000 muskets stockpiled in Berlin.

[12] In total, Napoleon and the Grande Armée had taken only 19 days from the commencement of the invasion of Prussia until essentially knocking it out of the war with the capture of Berlin and the destruction of its principal armies at Jena and Auerstedt.

Most of the shattered remnants of the Prussian army and the displaced royal family escaped to refuge in East Prussia near Königsberg, eventually to link up with the approaching Russians and continue the fight.

This would set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to him being elected heir to the Swedish throne, and later King Charles XIV John of Sweden.

Flush with triumph and deeming France free from any immediate obligations in Central and Eastern Europe, Napoleon decided to capture the Iberian ports of Britain's long-time ally Portugal.

Napoleon soon embroiled himself and France in Spain's internal power struggles within its royal family, eventually leading to the Spanish populace turning on the French occupiers and the beginning of the Peninsular War.