Two Irish Villages Claim the Skeleton of Napoleon's Horse

The skeleton of Merengo, a magnificent white stallion, will go on exhibit this spring at the National Army Museum in London. Mderengo's claim to fame is that he was Napoleon's charger that he rode in several campaigns, the one pictured in Jacques-Louis David’s painting “Napoleon Crossing the Alps." The official story from the time was that Merengo was captured from the Egyptians after the Battle of Abukir. But the Irish know that the horse was purchased in County Cork for the French army. That's where the horse is causing some argument. The small villages of Buttevant and Bartlemy both lay claim to Merengo.   

According to Bernard Moynihan, a local Councillor, the skeleton ought to be in Buttevant, where the horse that became Marengo was sold many mid-summers ago at the Cahirmee Horse Fair. He calls Cahirmee “the oldest horse fair in the world”; it continues to this day, held every July. “There’s a strong oral tradition in these parts, and the story of how the horse was sold to one of Napoleon’s officers – it’s well known,” he told me. Along with several other Councillors, Moynihan has sent a letter to the National Army Museum, elaborating their claim. “We’ve recently had a round of archaeological excavations in Buttevant, and found a huge amount of historical artifacts. We’re hoping they can all go into a new museum, with Marengo as the centerpiece.”
John Arnold, a farmer and a historian of Bartlemy, will have none of that. Marengo was sold, he’s convinced, at the Bartlemy Horse Fair. “When you talk of evidence, it all begins to sound like a court case,” Arnold told me, with a laugh. “But I do have a couple of things that strongly suggest this. Buttevant don’t have a leg to stand on.” As far back as the 1830s, a village pub named Fitzgerald’s displayed a lithograph. “It was of a white horse, and the caption read: ‘Marengo, Napoleon’s famous horse, Bartlemy Fair, Middleton, County Cork,’” Arnold says. “That pub closed down, but the lithograph is still here in the village. Now, it’s possible that an entrepreneurial printer ran this lithograph off for many local fairs. But so far no other town has claimed to own a copy of it.”

So they are fighting about where the young horse was sold 200 years ago. There is some question as to whether this was Napoleon's horse at all. We know he didn't ride him across the Alps; he just requested that the painting show he was riding a great horse instead of a mule. Read about the muddy history of Merengo at 1843 magazine.