Somebody decided Napoleon needed a website and then apparently refused to stop until the thing had more than 4,000 pages.
Edited by Richard Moore, The Napoleonic Guide describes itself as an independent reference to Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic era. Its copyright line runs from 1999 to 2017, and the surviving navigation shows what happens when a Web project grows by accumulation rather than by redesigning itself every eighteen months.
There are biographies, battle summaries, campaign material, timelines, maps, quotations, family history, letters, Napoleon’s will, assassination plots, marshals, generals, armies, weapons, uniforms, medicine, naval warfare, battlefields and a glossary. Then it keeps going into the French Revolution, Goya, historical fiction, Sharpe, Hornblower, miniatures, reenactors, quizzes and book reviews.
The chronology alone is broken into month-by-month material. This is not a landing page about Napoleon. It is a hand-built reference shelf.
The bibliography is part of the value
One useful feature is the source material behind the site. Its references point readers toward firsthand accounts and established histories rather than presenting thousands of pages as anonymous Web fact. Works associated with Rifleman Harris, Sergeant Bourgogne, Friedrich Schaumann, William Surtees and George Simmons sit alongside historians such as David Chandler, Philip Haythornthwaite and Charles Oman.
That matters because military history on the Web can become a swamp of repeated claims whose original source disappeared six copies ago. A site that exposes its reading list gives a researcher somewhere else to go.
The page structure is also a surviving example of how large specialist sites used to scale. Instead of turning everything into a database-backed feed, the Guide divides a huge subject into narrow human-readable indexes. You can enter through a battle, a person, a regiment, a weapon or a date and keep moving sideways.
Modern search engines often reward pages that answer one query and then attempt to sell something. The Napoleonic Guide feels like the opposite impulse: answer one question, notice seventeen adjacent questions, and make pages for those too.
That is exactly why specialist survivors are useful inside CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list. A domain may be old, but the real value is the dense vocabulary and structure accumulated by somebody who knew the subject well enough to keep subdividing it.
Four thousand pages later, Richard Moore had built less of a website than a small Napoleonic reference room.