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In June 1876, Sitting Bull saw a vision of soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers, while George Armstrong Custer drove the 7th Cavalry toward the Little Bighorn River on the Crow reservation in Montana Territory. Indian agents had counted about 800 hostiles, missing the thousands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho who had left the agencies for the buffalo hunt and Sun Dance. Custer turned down Gatling guns and extra troops to keep his pace near 30 miles a day. Many of his men had spent 18 months on Reconstruction duty in the South, and about a fifth were recent recruits. On June 25 his Crow and Arikara scouts saw the huge pony herd from the Crow's Nest.

Fearing the village would scatter, Custer split his regiment between Major Marcus Reno, Captain Frederick Benteen and himself, aiming to seize the women and children and force the warriors to surrender. Reno's attack stalled at the Hunkpapa camp, and his men broke in a disorderly retreat across the river. Benteen received the note "Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs," but joined Reno and dug in. North along the bluffs, Custer's command was overwhelmed in under an hour by warriors including a counterattack led by Crazy Horse.

• The Crow scout Half Yellow Face told Custer they would go home that day by a road they did not know.
• When Reno dismounted to form a skirmish line, every fourth man had to hold the horses, cutting his firepower by a quarter.
• Reno lost his composure after his Arikara scout Bloody Knife was shot in the head beside him; an 1879 court of inquiry cleared him.
• Native accounts said the fight lasted as long as it takes a hungry man to eat a meal.
• The cavalry horse Comanche survived and lived another 15 years, and in 1991 the site became the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

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The four bronze horses on St. Mark's Basilica in Venice were taken from Constantinople in April 1204. The Fourth Crusade contracted Venice to build a fleet, but only a fraction of the army arrived and the crusaders, stranded on the Lido, could not pay the blind, elderly doge Enrico Dandolo. The exiled prince Alexios Angelos offered 200,000 silver marks, 10,000 soldiers and the submission of the Orthodox Church to Rome if they restored his deposed father, Isaac II. Despite Pope Innocent III's ban on attacking Christians, they sailed to Constantinople and in August 1203 crowned him Alexios IV.

The treasury was empty. Alexios IV seized property and melted church silver, riots followed, and after Isaac died the anti-Latin Alexios V had him strangled and refused to pay. The crusaders and Venetians signed a treaty to divide the empire. An assault on the sea walls on April 9 failed, but on April 12 a north wind brought the ships close enough for flying bridges to reach the towers. Three days of sack followed, with about 2,000 civilians killed and a Latin Empire set up under Baldwin of Flanders.

• Simon de Montfort and a group of knights refused to attack a Christian city and left for the Holy Land on their own.
• Crusaders melted down a colossal bronze Hercules by Lysippos to mint coins and stripped the altar of the Hagia Sophia.
• Of about 900,000 marks in loot, some 500,000 never appeared in the official division.
• Niketas Choniates watched peasants jeer at fleeing Byzantine nobles, not yet knowing how harsh Latin rule would be.
• Pope John Paul II expressed sorrow for 1204 in 2001, and Patriarch Bartholomew I accepted in 2004.

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In the 1940 invasion of France, most of the German army walked and relied on 2.7 million horses to move its supplies. The word Blitzkrieg came from Time magazine in late 1939 and the British press, not from German field manuals, and Hitler called it an idiotic term coined by foreigners in a 1941 speech. The real roots lay in World War I stormtrooper infiltration tactics and the older German idea of maneuver war, sharpened by the 100,000 man limit imposed at Versailles, Auftragstaktik, which gave junior officers a goal but not a method, and secret tank and aircraft trials inside the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

In 1940 the Germans massed armor at a single Schwerpunkt, drove through, ignored their flanks and encircled whole armies in cauldron battles. Heinz Guderian insisted every tank carry a two way radio, while many French and British tanks relied on hand signals and flags. The method depended on speed and enemy panic. At Kursk in 1943 Soviet defense in depth absorbed the attack, fuel ran short, and by 1944 Allied fighter bombers made daylight movement deadly. After the war, B.H. Liddell Hart helped German generals publish their memoirs while pressing them to credit his prewar theories.

• The Germans themselves called the older tradition Bewegungskrieg, or war of movement.
• Stuka dive bombers carried sirens called Jericho trumpets for terror alone, later removed because of drag.
• Tank crews, pilots and drivers were issued the methamphetamine Pervitin by the millions to stay awake for days.
• Late in the war, Tiger tanks were abandoned by their crews with empty fuel tanks.
• Historians working in the archives in the 1970s and 1980s found the letters exposing Liddell Hart's bargain with the generals.

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The dictionary traces the bayonet to Bayonne, but the first recorded version appears in a Chinese military manual of 1606 that describes a 22 inch gun knife for breech loading muskets. In Europe, the French plug bayonet of the Thirty Years' War jammed a wooden handle into the muzzle, which meant a soldier could not fire once the blade was fitted. At Killiecrankie in 1689, Jacobite Highlanders fired one volley at 50 yards, dropped their muskets and charged while government troops fumbled to plug their barrels. The defeated commander, Hugh Mackay, is credited with the socket bayonet, an offset blade on a sleeve that locked around the muzzle and let soldiers fire and reload with the blade fixed, making pikemen obsolete.

Designers then loaded the blade with other jobs: sword bayonets for the short Baker rifle, German sawbacks dropped in 1917 after Allied propaganda, and the American trowel bayonet of 1870, retired in 1881. Before 1914 armies obsessed over reach, the French Lebel with its bayonet reaching six feet, until trench walls made long blades useless. Bayonets caused under 2 percent of casualties in the 18th and 19th centuries and under 1 percent in the Civil War; the charge worked mainly as psychological shock.

• The trowel bayonet was promoted as a weapon, entrenching tool and a tool for plastering log huts and stone chimneys.
• After Britain adopted the shorter SMLE in 1904, writers warned German soldiers had an eight inch better argument, and a longer bayonet followed in 1908.
• Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine, out of ammunition, broke the Confederate attack on Little Round Top with a downhill bayonet charge.
• The so called human wave attacks in Korea were often five man teams that crept up at night to open a small breach.
• Bayonet charges still occurred in the Falklands in 1982, at Sarajevo's Vrbanja Bridge in 1995 and in Iraq in 2004.

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In 1251 Möngke Khan gave his brother Hulegu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, a fifth of the Mongol Empire's manpower and orders to subdue the west, an army estimated at 138,000 to 300,000 men that included Armenian and Georgian troops and Chinese siege engineers. In Baghdad, a city of over a million and home of the House of Wisdom, the Abbasid caliph al-Musta'sim trusted his religious prestige more than his flood damaged walls. He refused Hulegu's request for troops against the Nizari Ismaili fortresses, sent low ranking envoys, threatened him in letters and let crowds mock the Mongol envoys. When his vizier Ibn al-Alqami urged paying tribute, a rival commander, the Dawatdar, called him a traitor, and the caliph kept his treasure.

In January 1258 the Mongols broke canal dikes and flooded the camp of the caliph's field army. They ringed the city with a palisade and trench in a single day, blocked the Tigris with pontoon bridges and bombarded the walls with stones and burning naphtha. The caliph surrendered on February 10, and a week of sack followed. Mongol custom forbade spilling royal blood, so he was rolled in a carpet and trampled by horses. The episode questions the idea that the sack ended the Islamic Golden Age.

• An astrologer warned Hulegu that attacking Baghdad would bring disaster, but Nasir al-Din al-Tusi told him he would simply rule in the caliph's place.
• Because his Christian wife Doquz Khatun interceded, Hulegu ordered Baghdad's Christians spared.
• Hulegu put the caliph's gold in front of him to eat and asked why he had not spent it on soldiers.
• Hulegu claimed about 200,000 dead, later sources claimed up to two million, and plague fleas in the Mongol grain supplies may have added to the toll.
• Within two years libraries and schools in Baghdad had reopened, and the Ilkhanate became a patron of scholars and astronomers.

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This episode traces the deliberate destruction of food, water, shelter and infrastructure to deny them to an enemy. The phrase scorched earth entered English only in 1937, from reports of Chinese forces burning their own crops ahead of the Japanese, and the Romans never actually salted Carthage. The practice itself is ancient: Scythian nomads burned supplies and poisoned wells as they retreated from Darius the Great, the Helvetii burned their own homes before migrating, and Vercingetorix stripped Gaul to starve Caesar's legions. In 1069 William the Conqueror's Harrying of the North destroyed villages and food stores from the Humber to the Tees, and up to 150,000 people died in the winter famine that followed.

Mass armies that lived off the land made the tactic decisive. Portugal emptied the country before the Lines of Torres Vedras in 1810, Russia burned its own land ahead of Napoleon in 1812, and Manuel Belgrano ordered the Jujuy Exodus the same year. Industrial war widened the targets: Sherman's March to the Sea, Kit Carson's campaign against the Navajo, Kitchener's camps in the Boer War, Soviet sabotage in 1941 and Hitler's Nero Decree in 1945. The 1977 Additional Protocol I, Article 54, finally banned destroying what civilians need to survive.

• In 1462 Vlad the Impaler left some 20,000 impaled bodies outside Târgoviște, and Mehmed II's army turned back.
• Belgrano ordered residents to burn their homes and fields and carry off anything made of iron, on pain of death.
• Union troops heated rails and twisted them around trees, the so called Sherman's neckties.
• Emily Hobhouse exposed conditions in the Boer War camps, where more than 26,000 Boer women and children died.
• The British first used herbicides in the Malayan Emergency, and the United States later sprayed Agent Orange and Agent Blue in Operation Ranch Hand.

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Alaric began as a Gothic officer fighting for Rome. At the Battle of the Frigidus in 394, Emperor Theodosius put his Visigoths in the front line and kept Roman troops in reserve, and the Goths took horrific losses. Alaric was then denied the command he had been promised. After Theodosius died, Alaric's people made him king, and for over a decade he sparred with Stilicho, the half Vandal general who ran the Western Empire for the weak emperor Honorius. In 408 Stilicho made the Senate pay Alaric 4,000 pounds of gold, and that payment helped hardliners at court convince Honorius to have him arrested and executed.

Roman troops then massacred the families of allied barbarian soldiers across Italy, and some 30,000 of those soldiers joined Alaric. He besieged Rome, telling its envoys a thick field of grass is easier to mow, and left with a vast ransom. For two years he asked only for land and a title, until a Gothic rival named Sarus ambushed him at peace talks. On August 24, 410, the Salarian Gate opened and Rome fell to a foreign enemy for the first time in 800 years. Alaric died soon after, and his people buried him beneath the diverted Busento River.

• The ransom included 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, silk, scarlet hides and 3,000 pounds of pepper.
• Asked what he would leave the Romans, Alaric answered: your lives.
• A Christian, Alaric spared the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul and let people shelter in them.
• According to Procopius, Honorius first thought the news meant his pet chicken named Rome had died.
• The enslaved workers who dug Alaric's riverbed grave were killed to keep its location secret.

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In 450, Honoria, sister of the Western Roman emperor Valentinian III, smuggled a ring and a letter to Attila the Hun while confined by her brother. Attila treated it as a marriage proposal and demanded half the Western Empire as a dowry. In 451 he crossed the Rhine into Gaul, reportedly sacked Metz, and laid siege to Orléans, where the Alans under King Sangiban held the walls through four days of rain that slackened bows and turned the ground to mud. The Roman general Flavius Aetius, who had lived as a hostage among both the Goths and the Huns, arrived with a coalition of Romans, Visigoths under Theodoric, Alans and Franks, held together by shared fear of Attila.

On June 20, 451, Attila delayed the battle until mid afternoon so darkness could cover a retreat. Theodoric was killed, his son Thorismund broke the Hunnic center, and by morning Attila sat in his wagon fort beside a pyre of horse saddles, ready to burn himself rather than be taken. Aetius then sent Thorismund home to secure his throne and let Attila go, keeping the Huns alive as a check on the Visigoths. Modern historians see the battle as an indecisive rearguard clash and the defense of Orléans as the real turning point.

• At this point the Western Empire took in about 40,000 pounds of gold a year and needed over 31,000 just for its army.
• The Great Hungarian Plain could support perhaps 15,000 mounted nomads, so Attila relied heavily on Germanic infantry.
• Aetius put the Alans in the center as his heavy cavalry anchor, not because he doubted their loyalty.
• In the night fighting Aetius was cut off from his own troops, and Thorismund wandered into the Hunnic camp and had to be rescued.
• Attila invaded Italy in 452 and was stopped by famine and disease, and Aetius was later killed by Valentinian III himself.

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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.

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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.