Emperor Napoleon's French Grande Armée defeats the Russian Army at the Battle of Friedland in Poland (modern Russian Kaliningrad Oblast) ending the War of the Fourth Coalition.

Napoleon Bonaparte, later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French general and statesman who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led a series of military campaigns across Europe during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1796 to 1815. He led the French Republic as First Consul from 1799 to 1804, then ruled the French Empire as Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814, and briefly again in 1815. He was King of Italy from 1805 to 1814 and Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine from 1806 to 1813.

The Grande Armée was the primary field army of the French Imperial Army during the Napoleonic Wars. Commanded by Napoleon, from 1804 to 1808 it won a series of military victories that allowed the First French Empire to exercise unprecedented control over most of Europe. Widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest fighting forces ever assembled, it suffered catastrophic losses during the disastrous French invasion of Russia, after which it never recovered its strategic superiority and ended its military career with a total defeat during the Hundred Days in 1815.

The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about 22,800,000 km² (8,800,000 sq mi), roughly one-sixth of the world's landmass, making it the third-largest empire in history, behind only the British and Mongol empires. It also colonized Alaska between 1799 and 1867. The empire's 1897 census, the only one it conducted, found a population of 125.6 million with considerable ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic diversity.

The Battle of Friedland was a major engagement of the Napoleonic Wars between the armies of the French Empire and the Russian Empire led by Napoleon I and General Levin August von Bennigsen respectively. Napoleon and the French obtained a decisive victory that routed much of the Russian army, which retreated chaotically over the Alle river by the end of the fighting. The battlefield is located in modern-day Kaliningrad Oblast, near the town of Pravdinsk, Russia.