Custoza, Battles of

Two attempts at Custoza, Italy, to end Austrian control over northern Italy.

In the first battle (July 24, 1848), an Austrian army under Joseph Radetzky defeated the Sardinians, led by Charles Albert. In the second battle (June 24, 1866), as part of an Italian effort to acquire Austrian-held Venetia, a disorganized Italian army of 120,000 men, led by Victor Emmanuel II, was defeated by an 80,000-man Austrian force. Despite its defeats, Italy subsequently obtained Venetia in the Treaty of Vienna (1866).

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▪ Austrian-Italian history

      (1848 and 1866), two Italian defeats in the attempt to end Austrian control over northern Italy (Risorgimento) during the Italian Wars of Independence, both occurring at Custoza, 11 miles southwest of Verona, in Lombardy.

      The first battle, on July 24, 1848, was a crushing defeat for the forces of Charles Albert, king of Sardinia-Piedmont, at the hands of the 82-year-old Austrian veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky (Radetzky, Joseph, Graf). An armistice was signed August 9.

      In the second battle at Custoza, on June 24, 1866, four days after the Sardinian-dominated Kingdom of Italy declared war, the 80,000-man Austrian army, under Archduke Albert, defeated a disorganized, demoralized, and poorly led 120,000-man Italian army, under Victor Emmanuel II. In this battle, repeated Italian assaults were broken by the vigorous action of the Austrian cavalry. Italian losses were 8,000 men killed, wounded, and missing; Austrian losses were about 5,600. The defeat so unsettled the Italian high command that, despite the Italian numerical superiority, they fell back and spent a month reorganizing the army. In the same year, Austria was compelled to retire permanently from Italy by combined Prussian and French pressure.

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