Austerlitz

Town in southern Moravia, Czech Republic, 20 km/12 mi east of Brno; population (1994) 5,600. It was the site of the Battle of Austerlitz in which the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the armies of Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Emperor Francis II of Austria in 1805.

The town is dominated by the baroque castle (1731–53) designed by the Italian architect Domenico Martinelli, with gardens laid out in the style of an English park, and restored in the 1950s after heavy damage during World War II. It contains a museum of Napoleon and of the Battle of Austerlitz. There are a number of Renaissance houses, and a late 16th-century town hall. At the battlefield west of the town, there is an art nouveau memorial to the soldiers who died in the battle, the Cairn of Peace (1911), the world's first peace memorial. It is in the form of an ancient Slav tomb.

Austerlitz

Town in Columbia County, southeast New York, USA; population (1990) 1,500. Settled c. 1750 by New Englanders, it was named by Martin Van Buren, an admirer of Napoleon, after the site of the great Napoleonic victory. In rolling farm country, it is the site of Steepletop, the home (1925–50) of poet Edna St Vincent Millay, and now an artists' and writers' retreat.