Battle of Lugdunum 197
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate. Wikidata lists more than one location for this battle; the first is shown.
About the battle
The Battle of Lugdunum, also called the Battle of Lyon, was fought on 19 February 197 at Lugdunum (modern Lyon, France), between the armies of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and of the Roman usurper Claudius Albinus. Severus' victory finally established him as the sole emperor of the Roman Empire following the Year of the Five Emperors and immediate aftermath.
This battle is said to have been the largest, most hard-fought, and bloodiest of all clashes between Roman forces. According to English historian Edward Gibbon, the Roman historian Cassius Dio placed the total number of Roman soldiers engaged for both sides combined at 150,000. Historian Michael Kulikowski states that Severus led the much larger force with the combined legions of Dacia and the Danubian provinces. Historian A. J. Graham supports Gibbon's number of 150,000 soldiers in total, rather than the sometimes cited number of 300,000 in total and therefore 150,000 on each side, which he states to be a commonly accepted mistranslation of Cassius Dio's original language. Graham also analyses the possible forces available to Albinus and states that the numbers on each side could have been roughly equal.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Battle of Lugdunum (revision 1377937017), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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