Events

In August 1071 the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan met a large Byzantine field army near Manzikert, north of Lake Van, in what is now eastern Turkey. The emperor Romanos IV Diogenes had marched east to recover fortresses on the Armenian frontier and to check the raids that Turkmen bands had been pressing into Anatolia for two decades. Alp Arslan, who had been campaigning toward Fatimid Syria, turned back to meet him and offered terms; Romanos refused. The battle itself, fought on 26 August, ended in a Byzantine collapse. The Seljuk forces used feigned withdrawals to draw the imperial line forward over the course of the day, and when Romanos ordered a retreat at dusk the maneuver dissolved into confusion. The rearguard under Andronikos Doukas, a political rival of the emperor, withdrew from the field rather than cover the retreat, and the imperial center was enveloped. Romanos was wounded and captured, the first Roman emperor taken prisoner by a Muslim ruler in battle. Alp Arslan treated his captive with marked courtesy, concluded a treaty involving tribute and territorial concessions, and released him after about a week. The settlement never took effect: Romanos was overthrown, blinded, and dead within a year, and the treaty died with him. The decade of Byzantine civil war that followed mattered more than the battle's casualties. Rival claimants hired Turkmen war bands and brought them across Anatolia as auxiliaries, and these groups stayed, settled, and carved out lordships. Within twenty years most of the plateau had passed out of imperial control, and a Seljuk principality, the Sultanate of Rum, was established with its eventual seat at Nicaea and later Konya. Manzikert thus opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement less by conquest than by the political disintegration it triggered.

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Nicaea, a walled city on the shore of Lake Ascanius in northwestern Anatolia, served as the capital of Kilij Arslan I, sultan of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. In May 1097 the armies of the First Crusade, ferried across the Bosporus with Byzantine assistance, invested the city. It was the crusade's first major operation, undertaken in cooperation with the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, to whom the crusade's leaders had sworn oaths regarding former imperial territory. Kilij Arslan was absent when the siege began, campaigning in eastern Anatolia against the Danishmend Turks over the city of Melitene; his treasury and family remained inside Nicaea. Having underestimated the size and seriousness of the crusader host, he returned by forced marches and attacked the besiegers' southern positions on 21 May. The relief attempt failed against superior numbers, and the sultan withdrew into the interior, leaving the garrison to its own devices. The city's western wall fronted the lake, which kept it supplied and uncaptured until Alexios had boats hauled overland and launched on the water, closing the last route in mid-June. Cut off, the garrison negotiated with Byzantine representatives rather than with the crusader princes, and on 19 June 1097 the city surrendered directly to imperial officers. Crusaders were admitted only in small escorted groups, and the city was spared a sack, an arrangement that protected the inhabitants but fed lasting resentment between the Latin leadership and the emperor. A week later the crusade marched east; Kilij Arslan attacked the leading column at Dorylaeum on 1 July and was again defeated. He abandoned the western plateau, moving his capital inland to Konya, and the Byzantines recovered Nicaea and the Aegean coastlands after sixteen years of Seljuk rule.

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By the second decade of the twelfth century, David IV of Georgia had spent twenty years rebuilding his kingdom's army and clawing back territory from the Seljuk lordships that had dominated the Caucasus since the 1080s. He stopped paying tribute to the Seljuk sultanate, resettled tens of thousands of Kipchak nomad families from the north Caucasus steppe to serve as a standing military force, and pressed in on Tbilisi, which had been under Muslim rule for four centuries and was by then governed by its own urban elders under loose Seljuk protection. Appeals from Tbilisi and from neighboring Muslim rulers brought a response sanctioned by the Seljuk sultanate: a coalition army assembled under the Artuqid ruler Ilghazi of Mardin, a commander with a recent and considerable reputation, joined by forces from Shirvan and other regional powers. Medieval figures for its size are not credible, but it substantially outnumbered the Georgian army, which contemporary sources place at several tens of thousands, including the Kipchak corps and a small contingent of Western knights. On 12 August 1121 David met the coalition in the narrow valleys at Didgori, west of Tbilisi, where broken ground prevented the larger army from deploying its numbers. The Georgian attack broke the coalition's order early in the engagement, and the battle became a pursuit; Georgian tradition remembers it as the "miraculous victory." The strategic results were immediate and durable. David took Tbilisi the following year and moved his capital there, ending Seljuk power north of the Araxes, and the battle marks the opening of Georgia's golden age, in which the Bagrationi monarchy stood as the dominant power of the Caucasus for the next century.

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On 4 July 1187 Saladin destroyed the field army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, a double hill above the Sea of Galilee. The campaign began when Saladin, having spent a decade uniting Egypt and Muslim Syria under Ayyubid rule, crossed the Jordan with a large army and besieged Tiberias, whose citadel held out under the countess Eschiva of Galilee. The kingdom mustered nearly its full strength, around 1,200 knights and many thousands of foot soldiers and turcopoles, at the springs of Saffuriya. King Guy of Lusignan faced conflicting counsel: Raymond III of Tripoli, whose own wife was besieged in Tiberias, argued against marching across the waterless plateau in high summer, while others pressed for relief. Guy ordered the advance on 3 July. Harassed by mounted archers and cut off from water, the army halted short of the lake and spent the night surrounded; the Muslims fired the dry scrub upwind of the camp. On the following day the thirst-weakened infantry broke from the knights, repeated cavalry charges failed to open a path to the springs, and the army was destroyed where it stood. The relic of the True Cross, carried with the army, was captured. Guy was taken prisoner and treated honorably. Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, whose attacks on Muslim caravans in violation of truce had been a stated cause of the war, was executed by Saladin personally or on his order; some two hundred captured Templars and Hospitallers were also put to death, while the bulk of prisoners were sold or ransomed. With the kingdom's army gone, its cities and castles fell in rapid succession through the summer and autumn, leaving Jerusalem itself exposed and culminating in its surrender in October.

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After Hattin destroyed the field army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187, its fortresses and ports fell to Saladin through the summer with little resistance: Acre, Ascalon, and most of the coast were in Ayyubid hands by September. Jerusalem itself filled with refugees and was defended by almost no knights. Balian of Ibelin, one of the few senior barons not killed or captured at Hattin, had been allowed by Saladin to enter the city to evacuate his family; once inside he was pressed by the inhabitants to take charge of the defense, and Saladin released him from his oath to stay only one day. The siege began on 20 September 1187. After initial assaults against the western walls made no progress, Saladin shifted his camp to the north and his engineers brought down a section of wall near the point where the army of the First Crusade had broken in eighty-eight years earlier. With a storming of the city imminent, Balian came to terms. He is reported to have warned that, if denied terms, the defenders would destroy the Muslim holy places and kill their own families before dying in a final sortie. The capitulation, concluded on 2 October, set ransoms of ten dinars for a man, five for a woman, and one for a child; Balian and the city's treasuries bought out thousands of the poor, and Saladin and his brother al-Adil freed many more, though a substantial number who could not pay went into slavery. There was no massacre, a restraint contemporaries on both sides contrasted with the bloodshed of 1099. The Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa were restored to Muslim worship, while native Christians were permitted to remain. The loss of the city set off the call for the Third Crusade in the West.

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The destruction of the Latin army at Hattin and the surrender of Jerusalem in 1187 prompted the largest Western military response since the First Crusade. The papal call was answered by the three leading monarchs of Latin Europe: the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in Anatolia in June 1190, leaving his great army to disintegrate; Philip II of France; and Richard I of England, who had taken the cross as count of Poitou and inherited the Plantagenet dominions in 1189. Richard's journey east included the conquest of Cyprus from its Byzantine ruler in 1191, an acquisition that anchored Latin power in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. The two kings joined the long siege of Acre, which had been invested by Guy of Lusignan since 1189 while Saladin's army in turn surrounded the besiegers. The city fell in July 1191. Philip, ill and at odds with Richard, returned to France soon afterward, where his maneuvering against Plantagenet lands shaped the rest of the war. Richard marched south along the coast, defeating Saladin's attack at Arsuf in September 1191 and refortifying Jaffa and Ascalon, but twice advanced toward Jerusalem and twice withdrew, judging that the city could not be held even if taken while Saladin's field army survived. Negotiations ran alongside the fighting, conducted largely through Saladin's brother al-Adil, and included proposals, never realized, for a marriage settlement involving Richard's sister. After Richard's relief of Jaffa in August 1192, both exhausted sides concluded the Treaty of Jaffa in September: a three-year truce confirming Latin control of the coast from Tyre to Jaffa, with Ascalon demolished, and guaranteeing Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem, which remained under Ayyubid rule. Richard sailed for home and was captured in Austria; Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193.

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The decisive battle of medieval France. On 27 July 1214 Philip II Augustus crushed a coalition of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, Count Ferdinand of Flanders, and the English under John, ending the Plantagenet attempt to recover the continental holdings John had lost a decade earlier. Bouvines confirmed France as the dominant power of Latin Europe and broke John's standing at home — the Magna Carta crisis followed within a year.

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Louis IX of France took the cross after a grave illness in 1244, the year Jerusalem was lost to Khwarazmian raiders and the Ayyubid sultan as-Salih Ayyub crushed the Latin-Syrian coalition at La Forbie. The crusade he assembled was the best-financed and best-organized of the century, directed not at Palestine but at Egypt, the center of Ayyubid power. The army landed in June 1249 and took Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile, almost without resistance after its garrison fled. As-Salih Ayyub, already mortally ill, died in November 1249 as the crusaders advanced up the Delta. His widow, Shajar al-Durr, concealed the sultan's death with the cooperation of senior commanders, issuing orders under his name while the heir, Turanshah, traveled from the Jazira. In February 1250 the crusader vanguard under the king's brother Robert of Artois forced the channel at Mansurah and charged into the town, where it was annihilated in street fighting by the Bahriyya mamluk regiment; Robert was killed. The main army held its ground but could go no farther, and with its river supply line cut by Egyptian galleys, disease and hunger forced a retreat. In April 1250 the army was overwhelmed near Fariskur and Louis was taken prisoner. The king was ransomed for a vast sum and the return of Damietta, and sailed to Acre, where he spent four years fortifying the Latin coastal towns before returning to France in 1254. The crusade's deeper consequence unfolded in Cairo: in May 1250 the Bahriyya murdered Turanshah, weeks after his accession, and Shajar al-Durr was proclaimed sultana, soon yielding power to the mamluk commander Aybak whom she married. The coup ended Ayyubid rule in Egypt and founded the Mamluk sultanate that would dominate the region for over 250 years.

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After a twelve-day siege, the Mongol army of Hulagu Khan stormed Baghdad on 10 February 1258. They sacked the city for a week, butchering perhaps two hundred thousand inhabitants and throwing the books of the great libraries into the Tigris until, the chronicles say, the river ran black with ink. The last Abbasid caliph, al-Musta'sim, was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses, ending the caliphate that had ruled the Islamic east for half a millennium.

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The campaign that ended at Ain Jalut began with the westward offensive of Hulagu Khan, brother of the great khan Möngke, who had been charged with subduing the Islamic lands. In 1258 his army sacked Baghdad and put the last reigning Abbasid caliph, al-Musta'sim, to death, extinguishing a caliphate that had stood for five centuries. In early 1260 the Mongols took Aleppo by storm and received the surrender of Damascus. The Ayyubid ruler of Syria, an-Nasir Yusuf, abandoned his capital without a battle, fled south, and was captured; he was later killed in Mongol custody. Ayyubid Syria had ceased to exist as a power. Hulagu then withdrew the bulk of his army eastward, a movement usually connected to the death of Möngke in 1259 and the succession struggle that followed, though logistical limits on pasturing a large cavalry army in Syria may have weighed as heavily. He left a force of perhaps ten to twenty thousand under the Naiman commander Kitbuqa and sent envoys to Cairo demanding submission. The Mamluk sultan Qutuz executed the envoys and marched into Palestine, joined by the émigré commander Baybars. The armies met on 3 September 1260 at Ain Jalut, the "Spring of Goliath," in the Jezreel Valley of Galilee. The Mamluks, fielding numbers at least equal to the Mongol force, drew Kitbuqa's troops forward with a feigned retreat and enveloped them; Kitbuqa was captured and executed. The defeat was modest in scale but large in consequence: it was the first major battlefield reverse of the Mongol westward expansion not soon avenged, it fixed the Euphrates as the rough frontier between the Mamluk sultanate and Hulagu's Ilkhanate, and it delivered Muslim Syria to the Mamluks. Qutuz was assassinated on the homeward march, and Baybars took the throne.

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On 26 August 1346, Edward III's English army of roughly twelve thousand destroyed a French force perhaps three times its size at Crécy in Ponthieu. The Welsh and English longbowmen broke wave after wave of French knightly charges; the sixteen-year-old Black Prince commanded the vanguard. The battle announced English military supremacy of the early Hundred Years' War and dethroned the heavily armored knight as Europe's dominant battlefield weapon.

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On 25 October 1415, Henry V's exhausted and outnumbered English army won the most lopsided victory of the Hundred Years' War. Trapped between the woods of Agincourt and the marshy Tramecourt valley, the heavily armored French knights bogged in mud while English longbow arrows fell among them at a thousand-volley-per-minute rate. Casualty estimates vary wildly but the French lost much of their nobility; the English lost perhaps a hundred dead.

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By 1453 the Byzantine Empire consisted of little beyond Constantinople itself and the Morea, an enclave inside Ottoman territory whose emperors had long paid the sultans tribute. Mehmed II, who had taken the Ottoman throne definitively in 1451 at age nineteen, made the city's conquest his first great objective. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisari on the European shore of the Bosporus, closing the straits to relief from the Black Sea, and assembled a siege train that included very large bombards cast by the Hungarian gun-founder Orban, weapons on a scale not previously used against city walls. The siege opened on 6 April 1453. The defenders, a few thousand Greeks reinforced by Italian contingents under the Genoese captain Giovanni Giustiniani, held the Theodosian land walls against weeks of bombardment and assault, while a chain barred the Golden Horn. In late April Mehmed had ships hauled overland on greased timbers into the Horn, forcing the defense to stretch along the sea walls as well. Mining and counter-mining, naval skirmishes, and failed relief hopes filled May. The final assault came before dawn on 29 May. After successive waves were repulsed, the janissaries broke through near the gate of St. Romanus, where the bombardment had done its worst; Giustiniani was carried wounded from the walls, and the defense collapsed. The emperor Constantine XI died in the fighting, his body never reliably identified. The city endured the customary sack, limited by Mehmed to a shortened term, and the sultan entered Hagia Sophia, which was converted to a mosque. The conquest ended the Roman imperial state after more than a millennium at Constantinople, gave the Ottomans an imperial capital, and earned the twenty-one-year-old sultan the title by which history knows him, Fatih, the Conqueror.

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Thirty-two years of intermittent civil war between the Lancastrian and Yorkist branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, triggered by the recurring incapacity of Henry VI and the rival claim of Richard, Duke of York. The conflict produced six battles in the 1450s–1460s, the murderous reign of Edward IV, the disappearance of his sons in the Tower, and the final defeat of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485. Resolved by the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York the following year.

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On 22 August 1485, Henry Tudor's army of perhaps five thousand met Richard III's larger royal force on Ambion Hill in Leicestershire. The crucial defection of the Stanleys mid-battle, and Richard's reckless personal charge in an attempt to kill Henry himself, decided the outcome. Richard III became the last English king to die in battle; Henry VII was crowned on the field. The Plantagenet dynasty ended on the same hour the Tudor dynasty began.

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In 1513 Henry VIII of England joined the Holy League against France and crossed the Channel to campaign in Picardy. James IV of Scotland, bound to France by the renewed Auld Alliance and to England by the 1502 Treaty of Perpetual Peace and his marriage to Henry's sister Margaret Tudor, honored the French connection. In August he led the largest army a Scottish king had ever taken across the border, equipped with modern artillery and continental pike tactics, and took the Norham and Ford castles in Northumberland. The English response was commanded by Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, the veteran lieutenant left to guard the north. By a flanking march Surrey placed his army between the Scots and Scotland, and on 9 September 1513 the battle was fought near the village of Branxton. The Scottish pike columns advanced downhill across ground broken by a concealed marsh; their formations lost cohesion, and in the close fighting English bills outmatched the long pikes. James fought on foot in the leading division and was killed within reach of Surrey's standard. With him died a remarkable proportion of the Scottish leadership: contemporary accounts count an archbishop, bishops and abbots, around a dozen earls, and many lords and lairds, along with thousands of common soldiers. It remains the heaviest defeat in Scottish military history. The crown passed to James V, seventeen months old. Margaret Tudor, the widowed queen, became regent under the terms of her husband's will, the first of several unstable regencies of a long minority; she lost the office on her remarriage in 1514, and Scottish politics for the next generation turned on the contest between pro-French and pro-English factions. Henry VIII, for whom Flodden was won in absentia, gained security on his northern border but pressed no conquest of Scotland.

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A two-year campaign by Hernán Cortés and roughly six hundred Spaniards, aided by smallpox and tens of thousands of indigenous allies who hated Mexica rule, destroyed the Aztec Empire. Moctezuma II received Cortés peacefully in Tenochtitlan in November 1519 and was held captive there; he died in disputed circumstances during the Mexica uprising of 1520. The eighty-day Spanish siege ended on 13 August 1521 with the capture of the last tlatoani, Cuauhtémoc.

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On 29 August 1526 the Ottoman army under Süleyman I destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Hungary on the plain of Mohács, near the Danube in the country's south. Süleyman had opened the road in 1521 by taking Belgrade, the key fortress of Hungary's southern defenses, and marched north in 1526 with a large, artillery-rich force. The young king Louis II, who ruled both Hungary and Bohemia, met him with an army of roughly 25,000, assembled hastily and without the substantial contingents of Transylvania under John Zápolya and of Croatia, which had not arrived. The battle lasted only a few hours. Hungarian heavy cavalry charges achieved initial momentum but broke against the Ottoman center, where chained guns and janissary volleys shattered the attack, and the army disintegrated. Most of the Hungarian high command, including both archbishops and a large part of the episcopate and baronage, died on the field or in the rout. Louis II drowned in a swollen stream during the flight, leaving no legitimate heir. Süleyman occupied and burned Buda but withdrew that autumn without garrisoning central Hungary. The succession crisis proved as consequential as the battle. By treaties of 1515 between the Habsburgs and the Jagiellonians, and through his marriage to Louis's sister Anna, Ferdinand I of Habsburg, brother of the emperor Charles V, claimed the vacant crowns. He was elected king of Bohemia in October 1526, while in Hungary rival diets elected both Ferdinand and John Zápolya, beginning a civil war that ended with the country partitioned among Habsburg "Royal Hungary," the Ottoman-held center after 1541, and an Ottoman-vassal principality in Transylvania. The Habsburg acquisition of the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns in 1526 assembled the Danubian composite monarchy that the dynasty would rule until 1918.

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Philip II of Spain assembled the Grande y Felicísima Armada — 130 ships, 30,000 men — to invade Elizabethan England, depose its Protestant queen, and reclaim the English throne for Catholicism. English long-range gunnery, fireships at Calais, and the great Atlantic gales drove the fleet north around Scotland and Ireland; perhaps half the ships and most of the men never returned to Spain. The defeat ended Spain's century-long dominance of European warfare.

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