pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Philip II ran his empire from his desk in the Escorial, and his plan to invade England showed it. The Marquis of Santa Cruz wanted 90,000 men and 550 ships, at a cost of 1.5 billion maravedís, roughly the crown's entire annual revenue. Philip settled for a smaller Armada of about 130 ships that would sail up the Channel and ferry the Duke of Parma's army from the Spanish Netherlands, a coast with no deep water port where flat-bottomed boats would have to meet the galleons offshore. When Santa Cruz died, command passed to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who wrote begging to be excused because he got seasick and knew nothing of naval war. The fleet was sighted off Cornwall on July 29, 1588.

Bound by Philip's orders, Medina Sidonia sailed past an English fleet pinned in Plymouth by wind and tide. At Calais the Armada anchored to wait for Parma, who was not ready, and eight English fire ships sent it scattering into the night after crews cut their anchor cables. At Gravelines, English guns on four-wheeled carriages fired again and again. Then storms drove the fleet around Scotland and Ireland, where up to 44 ships were wrecked, and fewer than 10,000 of roughly 30,000 men got home.

• Pope Sixtus V pledged to fund the invasion, but only once Spanish troops actually landed in England.
• Francis Drake put out the lantern he was meant to lead with and captured the crippled Rosario, along with 50,000 gold ducats.
• Water casks made of unseasoned wood leaked or went foul on the voyage home.
• Survivors of El Gran Grifón, wrecked on Fair Isle, are said to have influenced the island's knitting patterns.
• The English counter Armada of 1589 lost between 11,000 and 15,000 men, and three later Spanish armadas were scattered by storms.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In July 751, near the modern border of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the armies of Tang China and the newly founded Abbasid Caliphate met at the Talas River in a contest for the oasis cities of the Silk Road. The war began with Tang general Gao Xianzhi, who accepted the surrender of the king of Shash, near modern Tashkent, then plundered the city anyway and had the king executed in Chang'an. The king's son fled to Samarkand and begged the Abbasid general Ziyad ibn Salih to intervene. Modern estimates put each side at around 30,000 men, far below the 200,000 and 100,000 claimed in Chinese and Arab records.

For five days, Tang crossbows with bronze trigger mechanisms struck at an Abbasid shield wall of interlocked, angled shields. Then 20,000 Karluk mercenaries, two thirds of the Tang army, switched sides and attacked from the rear. Only about 2,000 Chinese soldiers escaped. The episode then examines two big claims: that Talas ended Chinese power in Central Asia, when the An Lushan rebellion of 755 is what pulled the Tang garrisons home, and that captured artisans brought papermaking to the Islamic world.

• Retreating through a gorge in the Tian Shan blocked by their own Ferghana allies, Li Siye's cavalry cut a path through those allies so Gao could escape.
• Abu Muslim considered pushing further east but was recalled by the caliph to deal with threats at home.
• A few years later the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur sent Arab troops to help the Tang emperor fight the An Lushan rebels, and many stayed and settled in China.
• Sogdian letters on paper found around Turpan predate the battle, so the technology was already moving west along the trade routes.
• Captured artisans in Samarkand likely helped shift papermaking from mulberry bark to rag fibers from old linen and cotton.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On October 25, 1854, during the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War, Lord Raglan watched from a high ridge as Russian troops tried to haul away captured Turkish guns from redoubts on the Causeway Heights. He dictated an order, written down by Richard Airey, for the cavalry to advance rapidly and stop them, and sent it with Captain Louis Nolan plus a spoken instruction to attack immediately. Down in the valley, Lord Lucan could see none of it. When he asked which guns, Nolan swept his arm toward the entrenched Russian battery at the far end of a mile-long valley. Lucan passed the order to his hated brother-in-law, Lord Cardigan, who led about 670 light cavalrymen into fire from three sides.

Nolan was killed by a shell fragment in the opening minute, possibly while trying to redirect the charge. Cardigan reached the guns, fought briefly, then rode back alone and dined on his private yacht in Balaklava Harbor. Lucan held back the Heavy Brigade, and only the French Chasseurs d'Afrique silenced the guns on the Fedyukhin Heights. Nearly half the brigade was killed, wounded or captured. Raglan blamed Lucan, Lucan blamed Raglan and the dead Nolan, and Cardigan came home a hero, while Tennyson's poem turned a blunder into a legend of obedience.

• The Heavy Brigade had made a successful charge against a larger Russian cavalry force earlier that same morning.
• The battery at the end of the valley had an estimated 30 to 40 guns backed by 25,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry.
• At the first muster after the charge, only 195 men still had horses.
• French Marshal Pierre Bosquet called the charge magnificent but not war, and the Russians reportedly assumed the British riders were drunk.
• A modern combat model suggests Raglan's intended attack uphill on the Causeway Heights might have cost even more lives than the charge down the valley.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Mexico's Independence Day is September 16, marking the 1810 Cry of Dolores. Cinco de Mayo marks the Battle of Puebla in 1862. In 1861 President Benito Juárez froze payments on foreign debt for two years, and by January 1862 Spanish, British and French forces had occupied Veracruz. Talks at Orizaba produced a preliminary deal, but Britain and Spain withdrew once it was clear Napoleon III wanted a French puppet empire in Mexico. Conservatives defeated in the Reform War sided with the invaders, led by General Juan Almonte. In late April General Charles de Lorencez marched inland with 6,000 troops, including Zouaves and modern rifles, against defenders armed largely with old muskets.

Ignoring Almonte's advice to avoid the hill forts of Loreto and Guadalupe, Lorencez attacked them head on at noon on May 5 after a two hour bombardment. General Ignacio Zaragoza had reinforced the forts under General Miguel Negrete and hidden cavalry and infantry in fields of tall maguey, the agave used for tequila. Caught in crossfire, the French were thrown back three times, with Porfirio Díaz's brigade checking the second assault, and by May 8 they withdrew to Orizaba. The French lost 476 men and the Mexicans 351.

• French troops spent the morning on bugle calls and bayonet drills in plain view, expecting the defenders to break.
• Puebla was renamed Puebla de Zaragoza, and Zaragoza died of typhoid four months later.
• Napoleon III replaced Lorencez with Élie Frédéric Forey, whose larger army took Puebla in 1863 and installed Archduke Maximilian as emperor.
• Juárez declared the anniversary a national holiday on May 9, 1862, but today it is mainly celebrated in the state of Puebla.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy promoted the date in the United States, and Chicano activists in the 1960s adopted it as a symbol of resistance.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The future Duke of Wellington called Assaye, fought in central India in September 1803, his finest victory. In 1802 the Maratha leader Baji Rao II, ousted in a civil war, turned to the British East India Company, and Arthur Wellesley's brother Lord Mornington, Governor General of India, restored him in exchange for a subsidiary alliance and a permanent British garrison in his capital. Daulat Rao Scindia and the Raja of Berar formed a coalition against it. Wellesley, aged 34, took Ahmednagar and then split his army with Colonel James Stevenson to trap the fast moving Maratha cavalry, planning to reunite near Bokardan on September 24.

On September 23 Wellesley, with about 4,500 men and 17 guns, found the full Maratha camp of at least 50,000 men five miles away, including more than 10,000 European trained infantry under the Hanoverian Anthony Pohlmann and over 100 cannon. Rather than retreat under cavalry pursuit, he attacked. Guessing that two villages facing each other across the Kaitna River meant a ford, he crossed around the enemy flank, but Pohlmann wheeled his whole line 90 degrees to pin the British between two rivers. Bayonet charges and cavalry finally broke the Maratha infantry.

• The British pickets veered toward the fortified village of Assaye, were nearly destroyed, and left the 74th Foot exposed.
• Colonel Patrick Maxwell's dragoons rescued them, and Maxwell was killed.
• Maratha gunners played dead, then turned their cannon on the British from behind, and Wellesley led cavalry to retake the guns, losing two horses.
• The Marathas lost 98 guns and about 6,000 men, while the British suffered nearly 1,600 casualties, over a third of the force.
• Stevenson, misled by his guide, arrived a day late and had the guide hanged.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A fifth column is a clandestine group working inside a nation or organization to undermine it for an outside enemy, through sabotage, espionage or disinformation. An Austrian official in Belgrade used a version of the idea in 1906 about Serbian nationalists, but the phrase took hold during the 1936 siege of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War. A telegram from the German chargé d'affaires in Alicante, Hans Hermann Völckers, reported a claim that four Nationalist columns were advancing on the city while a fifth waited inside. The boast is usually attributed to General Emilio Mola, but its origin is murky, and the first major publication came from the communist Dolores Ibárruri in October 1936.

The fall of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and France in 1940 spread the term worldwide. French premier Paul Reynaud said the bridges over the Meuse had been betrayed, Britain passed the Treachery Act of 1940, and Vidkun Quisling's collaboration made his name a synonym for traitor. After Pearl Harbor, Navy Secretary Frank Knox blamed fifth column work in Hawaii without evidence, a claim that helped lead to Executive Order 9066 and the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. Later regimes used the label to justify purges and repression of minorities.

• Time magazine called fifth column talk a national phenomenon in 1940, and Life ran photo spreads on supposed Nazi agents in American towns.
• Postwar analysis found no organized Japanese fifth column in the Philippines before hostilities.
• In 1979 Saddam Hussein had Muhyi Abdul-Hussein Mashhadi read 68 names to a Ba'ath Party assembly, and 22 of them, including Mashhadi, were executed.
• Communist Bulgaria in the 1980s labeled its Turkish minority a fifth column while forcing name changes.
• After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian leaders branded antiwar protesters a fifth column acting for the West.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Armageddon comes from Har Megiddo, the Mount of Megiddo, a fortified city controlling the Via Maris trade road at the edge of the Jezreel Valley. Thutmose III spent about two decades as a sidelined co-ruler under his stepmother and aunt Hatshepsut. When he finally ruled alone, the king of Kadesh, backed by the Mitanni and Amurru, raised a coalition of 10,000 to 15,000 men at Megiddo. Thutmose gathered 10,000 to 20,000 infantry and chariots at the border fortress of Tjaru, marched 10 days across the Sinai to Gaza, rested one day, and pushed 11 more days to Yehem.

At Yehem, in one of the earliest recorded war councils, his generals urged the wide northern road via Zefti and Yokneam or the southern road via Taanach. Thutmose chose the narrow Aruna Pass, reasoning the enemy would also think it too dangerous, and led the column himself. The coalition had guarded the other routes. Around April 16, 1457 BC, he attacked in a concave formation that wrapped around both flanks, helped by composite bows of wood, horn and sinew, and the coalition broke. But his troops stopped to loot the enemy camp, and the fugitives escaped into Megiddo, forcing a seven month siege behind a trench and palisade.

• The defenders, having shut the gates, hauled fleeing soldiers and kings over the walls with ropes of knotted clothing.
• Egyptian records list 924 chariots and 200 suits of bronze armor captured in the camp.
• The king of Kadesh slipped away during the siege, but Megiddo surrendered and was spared.
• Thutmose took the sons of defeated kings to Egypt, educated them, and later sent them home to rule.
• The campaign is known from the military scribe Tjaneni's daily journal, later carved into the Temple of Amun at Karnak.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Before the crown, Richard III was the loyal lieutenant of his brother Edward IV. Slight where Edward stood around six foot four, he trained hard, dreamed of crusade, and served as Edward's enforcer in the north, leading a campaign in the 1480s that captured Edinburgh and retook Berwick-upon-Tweed for good. When Edward died suddenly and left a 12 year old heir, the Woodville relatives of the queen tried to dominate the council, and courtiers such as Lord Hastings urged Richard to act as Lord Protector. Richard instead seized the young king's escort, executed the queen's relatives without trial, and had Hastings dragged from a council meeting and beheaded.

Parliament then declared Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville invalid, and the two princes in the Tower were never seen again. Buckingham's rebellion failed only because storms flooded the River Severn, and rumors spread that Richard had poisoned his wife after his son died. In August 1485 he held Ambion Hill with the larger army against Henry Tudor, but Northumberland's men never moved and the Stanleys waited to see who would win. Richard led a charge at Henry, killing his standard bearer, before the Stanleys attacked and he died on foot in a marsh.

• Historians suggest Richard might have won a more lasting settlement had he negotiated harder while holding Edinburgh.
• Thomas Stanley was Henry Tudor's stepfather through his marriage to Margaret Beaufort, even as Richard held a Stanley son hostage.
• Richard was negotiating Portuguese marriages for himself and his niece Elizabeth of York while rumors claimed he planned to marry her.
• Survey work at Bosworth found early artillery shot and a small silver boar badge, Richard's emblem, near where he likely fell.
• His skeleton, found under a Leicester car park in 2012, showed scoliosis and head wounds, including a polearm blow to the base of the skull.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

At 7:18 in the morning on March 23, 1918, an explosion hit the quai de la Seine in Paris with no aircraft in sight, and 20 more followed at 15 minute intervals. That first day 15 people were killed and 36 wounded, and by March 27 crowds fleeing the city forced the Gare Montparnasse to suspend ticket sales. Theories ranged from silent zeppelins to a cannon hidden in the catacombs, until rifling marks on shell fragments proved the shots came from artillery near Crépy-en-Laon, 120 kilometers away. This was not Big Bertha, the shorter range howitzer used on the Belgian forts in 1914, but a new Krupp weapon built to frighten civilians rather than hit targets.

Engineers under Fritz Rausenberger fitted a 31 meter, 210 mm tube inside worn 38 cm naval gun barrels, producing a 256 ton gun with a 34 meter barrel and a smoothbore section at the muzzle to stop the shell's wobble. Shells left at 1,640 meters per second, rose 42.3 kilometers into the stratosphere and flew for 182 seconds, and Professor von Eberhard calculated for the Earth's rotation by hand. An 80 man naval crew under Vice Admiral Maximilian Rogge fired it while smaller guns masked its sound. The barrel was worn out after 65 shots.

• Each shell was slightly wider than the last, so they had to be fired in exact numerical order or the gun could explode.
• A 106 kilogram shell carried only about 7 kilograms of TNT, because thinner walls would have crumpled in the barrel.
• On Good Friday, March 29, 1918, a shell collapsed the vaulting of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais, killing 91 worshippers.
• Over its campaign the gun killed 250 people and wounded 620, and the Allies never captured one.
• Versailles limits on artillery pushed Germany toward rockets, and the shell's altitude record stood until the V-2 in October 1942.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The French classicist François Ollier called it the Spartan mirage: an idealized picture of Lacedaemon written almost entirely by outsiders, since no Spartan accounts of Sparta survive. Set in the Eurotas valley of Laconia between Mount Taygetus and Mount Parnon, Sparta had no city walls, and Thucydides noted that its ruins would never suggest a great power. Its society had three tiers: the Spartiates, full citizens barred from any productive work; the perioikoi, free non-citizens who handled trade and made weapons; and the helots, mostly conquered Messenians who farmed for the Spartiates and outnumbered them by as much as seven to one. After an earthquake in the 460s BC the helots revolted, and the Spartans spent years crushing it.

Fear of the helots shaped everything. Boys entered the agoge at seven, men ate in a mess of about 15, and husbands lived in barracks until 30. Spartan women were educated, ate the same rations as boys, married later and could inherit, eventually holding at least 35 percent of the land. Because citizens who could not pay their mess dues lost their status, numbers fell from about 9,000 to under 1,000. In 371 BC Epaminondas of Thebes won at Leuctra and freed the Messenian helots, and the system collapsed.

• Excavations of the Apothetae chasm have found adult remains but no infants.
• Each autumn the ephors declared war on the helots so young men of the krypteia could kill strong or capable ones without religious pollution.
• The come back with your shield or on it saying is probably an invention, since Spartans buried their dead near the battlefield.
• The princess Cynisca won the Olympic chariot race twice.
• Under Rome, Sparta built an amphitheater so tourists could watch boys flogged at the altar of Artemis Orthia.