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In 1644 the Knights of Malta seized an Ottoman convoy sailing from Constantinople to Alexandria, carrying the chief black eunuch of the imperial harem, the chief judge of Cairo, and pilgrims bound for Mecca, then docked with their prize at Candia on Venetian Crete. In 1645 the Ottomans sent 60,000 troops under Yusuf Pasha, letting Europe believe the target was Malta, then struck Crete and took Chania and Rethymno within months. From 1648 they besieged Candia, modern Heraklion, cutting its water and land routes. Its trace italienne star fort of low, angled earthwork bastions absorbed cannon fire for 16 years, and Venice kept the city alive by sea while trying to blockade the Dardanelles.

Venetian victories in 1655 and 1656 cost commander Lorenzo Marcello his life, and in July 1657 the Ottomans broke the blockade. After the Peace of Vasvár in 1664 freed Ottoman troops, Venetian engineer Colonel Andrea Barozzi defected in 1667 and pointed the besiegers to the Sant'Andrea and Sabbionera bastions. Without the Senate's authorization, Captain General Francesco Morosini, left with 3,600 fit soldiers, surrendered to Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü on September 27, 1669.

• Venetian commander Lazzaro Mocenigo was crushed by a falling mast in the 1657 battle.
• In July 1669 a French relief expedition under François de Beaufort arrived, and its 900-ton, 58-gun vice flagship La Thérèse blew up during the bombardment.
• A 2015 National Defense University study of the Venetian archives found a plan to spread plague through infected wool garments and fezzes, approved but never carried out.
• Morosini's terms let Christians leave with their possessions, while Venice kept the island harbors of Gramvousa and Souda.
• Venetian reports counted more than 118,000 casualties on their side, including nearly 31,000 Venetians.

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In 1221 the King of Georgia wrote to the Pope that he could not send his knights to the Fifth Crusade because his army had been destroyed. The man responsible was Subutai, son of a blacksmith who had fed Temujin's camp when the future Genghis Khan was an outcast. His brother Jelme once sucked poison blood from Temujin's neck wound. Subutai joined the army at 14 as a guard at the door of the khan's yurt, and at 22 won his first command by riding alone into a Merkit camp posing as a deserter, assuring them the Mongol army was far away. He moved beyond steppe archery toward fluid maneuvers, heavy cavalry charges, and siege engines used on the open field like a creeping barrage.

With 20,000 riders he circled the Caspian Sea, crushing Georgia and drawing a Rus' and Cuman coalition about four times his size into a nine-day feigned retreat that ended at the Kalka River. Recalled by Ogedei to the stalled war against the Jin, he outflanked their fortresses through Song territory, starved a Jin army for three weeks at Sanfengshan, and took Kaifeng after eight months. In 1241 he planned a five-pronged invasion of Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania, halted when Ogedei died.

• Hunting the Merkits and Kipchaks, his vanguard dropped children's toys so enemy scouts would think they were tracking fleeing families.
• Before facing the Georgians, Subutai spread rumors that his troops were Christian wonder workers and paraded crosses.
• At Kaifeng he built an 87-kilometer wall around the city, and Ogedei overruled his call to execute the population.
• At Mohi, artillery pinned the Hungarians at the bridge while a pontoon bridge carried a flanking force downstream, and a deliberate gap in the ring led fleeing soldiers into a swamp.
• B. H. Liddell Hart revived interest in his campaigns, and Rommel, Patton, and Soviet deep battle theorists studied them.

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On September 7, 1812, about 250,000 men fought near the village of Borodino, roughly 70 miles west of Moscow, in the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars. Since the French crossed the Neman in June, General Barclay de Tolly had retreated in a Fabian, scorched-earth campaign that stretched Napoleon's supply lines. After the fall of Smolensk, Russian nobles distrustful of Barclay's Scottish ancestry, and his rival Prince Pyotr Bagration, demanded a battle, and General Mikhail Kutuzov took command to give them one. Kutuzov built three V-shaped earthworks on his left, the Bagration flèches, and the Raevsky Redoubt in the center, but expected the attack on his right and stacked his best troops there.

Napoleon, ill with a cold and dysuria and posted far behind the lines, rejected Marshal Davout's proposal to swing south around the weak Russian left and ordered frontal assaults. Bagration was hit in the leg by cannonball splinters around 11 a.m. In the afternoon Napoleon refused to commit the Imperial Guard, and the Russian army withdrew intact. He entered an abandoned Moscow a week later and watched it burn, as starving horses and typhus wrecked his army.

• The flèches were open at the back, so attackers who took them sat exposed to Russian artillery fire.
• About 300 Russian guns held in reserve for the right wing never fired because no one with authority ordered them moved.
• Some 8,000 Cossacks crossed a shallow ford and raided the French rear, forcing infantry into squares and halting the assault on the Raevsky Redoubt.
• British observer Sir Robert Wilson called it the Battle of the Generals, with about 80 generals killed or wounded.
• Napoleon reportedly told his marshals that at 800 leagues from Paris one does not risk one's last reserve.

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By 1890 the Lakota had lost treaty lands and the bison, the center of Plains life, and depended on delayed and short government rations. Out of that despair came the Ghost Dance, founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, a nonviolent circle dance that promised the return of the ancestors and the bison. Kicking Bear brought it to the Lakota along with painted ghost shirts, which rumor said were bulletproof. Agent D. F. Royer begged for troops against what settlers called the Messiah craze, and General Nelson Miles warned of a great Indian war. In mid-December, Sitting Bull was shot dead during a botched arrest, and some 200 of his followers fled to join Spotted Elk, known to the Army as Big Foot.

On December 28 the 7th Cavalry intercepted Spotted Elk, sick with pneumonia, and about 350 followers, roughly 120 men and 230 women and children, and camped them at Wounded Knee Creek under 500 troops and four Hotchkiss guns. Next morning, during disarmament, soldiers grabbed Black Coyote, a deaf man holding a new Winchester, and his rifle went off. Nearly 300 Lakota were killed or wounded; 25 soldiers died, many likely by friendly fire. Miles called it a deliberate massacre and relieved Colonel James Forsyth, but a court of inquiry cleared him.

• The Hotchkiss mountain guns fired up to 40 explosive shells a minute into the tipi camp.
• After a three-day blizzard, burial crews found four infants still alive under the shawls of their dead mothers.
• Days later, L. Frank Baum wrote an editorial calling for the extermination of Native Americans.
• The Army awarded 19 Medals of Honor for Wounded Knee, one citation partly for rounding up a stampeded pack mule.
• The Remove the Stain Act repeatedly failed in Congress, and in September 2025 Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the medals would stand.

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Yi Sun-sin was born in 1545 in Hanseong, modern Seoul, to a family blacklisted after his grandfather was impeached in a factional purge of the Joseon court. He failed his first military examination after breaking his leg in a fall from his horse, splinted it with willow branches, and finished anyway. He finally passed at 32, the oldest junior officer in his district. On the northern frontier he trapped and captured a Jurchen chieftain, only to be framed for desertion by his jealous superior Yi Il, tortured, and reduced to a common soldier. His childhood neighbor Ryu Seong-ryong, by then a powerful minister, secured him command of the Jeolla Left Naval District in the early 1590s, just before Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea in 1592.

Yi's fleet tore apart Japanese supply lines, and at Hansan Island a feigned retreat drew the enemy into his crane wing formation, where he destroyed 47 ships and captured 12. When a double agent baited King Seonjo into ordering an attack through a rocky channel, Yi refused, was dragged to the capital in chains and tortured again, and was replaced by Won Gyun, who lost the fleet at Chilcheollyang. Reinstated with 13 ships, Yi beat more than 330 Japanese warships at Myeongnyang. He was mortally wounded at Noryang in 1598.

• The roughly 65-foot turtle ships carried an iron-spiked roof, cannon on every side, and a dragon head that blew sulfurous smoke.
• Flat-bottomed Korean panokseon could pivot in place, while the V-hulled Japanese ships built for boarding had to turn in wide arcs.
• At Myeongnyang Yi timed the strait's three-hour tidal reversal, sinking 31 enemy ships without losing any of his 13.
• Dying at Noryang, Yi had his nephew cover him with a shield, wear his armor, and keep beating the war drum.
• Admiral Togo of Japan reportedly said that while Nelson was great, Yi Sun-sin had no equal in history.

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Born around 319 BC, a second cousin of Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus of Epirus was smuggled out of his kingdom at age two during a coup and raised by the Illyrian king Glaukias, who restored him to the throne at 11. He lost it again at 17 while attending a wedding, fought beside his brother-in-law Demetrius at Ipsus in 302 BC, and was sent to Alexandria as a hostage. There he won over Ptolemy, who gave him a stepdaughter in marriage and the troops to retake Epirus. Hannibal reportedly ranked him among the greatest generals in history. In 280 BC the Greek city of Tarentum invited him to fight Rome, and he crossed with about 20,000 heavy infantry, 3,000 cavalry, and 20 war elephants.

He beat the Romans at Heraclea and again at Asculum, where Rome lost about 6,000 men and Pyrrhus about 3,500 irreplaceable veterans, prompting his remark that one more such victory would ruin him. He left for Sicily in 278 BC, drove Carthage back, then turned the Sicilian Greeks against him with taxes, forced labor, and executions. Defeated at Beneventum, he invaded Macedon, failed at Sparta, and died in a night street fight inside Argos.

• Pyrrhus won a duel with one of Demetrius's generals, and his troops named him the Eagle.
• The Romans, who had never seen elephants, called them Lucanian cows.
• Leaving Sicily, Pyrrhus called the island a wrestling ring left for Rome and Carthage, a prediction the First Punic War fulfilled.
• His Gallic mercenaries plundered the tombs of the Macedonian kings, and his eldest son Ptolemy was killed commanding the rearguard after the repulse at Sparta.
• In Argos a soldier's mother dropped a roof tile on Pyrrhus, and Pliny the Elder later recorded a legend that his right big toe would not burn.

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When Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, the Witenagemot chose Harold Godwinson as king. Harold spent the summer guarding the south coast against William of Normandy, leaving the north exposed to his exiled brother Tostig, the ousted Earl of Northumbria, who allied with King Harald Hardrada of Norway. Their fleet of 200 to 300 ships landed 7,000 to 9,000 men, beat the northern earls Edwin and Morcar at Fulford on September 20, and took the surrender of York. Harold answered by riding his housecarls and thegns 185 miles from London to Yorkshire in about four days along the old Roman roads, using fresh horses and leaving his supply wagons behind.

On September 25 the Norwegians were waiting near Stamford Bridge for hostages and tribute, many having left their mail at the ships in the warm weather. A lone English rider offered Tostig his earldom back and promised Hardrada only enough English ground to bury him; Tostig then revealed the rider was Harold himself. After the bridge fell, Hardrada died with an arrow in the windpipe and Tostig was killed. Three days later, on September 28, the wind shifted and William landed at Pevensey, and on October 14 Harold met him at Hastings.

• A single Norwegian with a Dane axe held the narrow bridge over the Derwent and reportedly killed more than 40 Englishmen.
• An English soldier floated under the bridge in a small boat or barrel and speared the axeman up through the planks.
• Eystein Orre's reinforcements ran 16 miles from Riccall in mail, and some collapsed from heat and exhaustion during the counterattack known as Orre's Storm.
• Survivors, including Hardrada's son Olaf, swore never to attack England again and needed only 24 ships to sail home.
• Orderic Vitalis noted that the battlefield was still marked by piles of bleached bones some 50 years later.

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By 53 BC Julius Caesar, deep in debt after buying his consulship, had spent years carving up Gaul tribe by tribe as proconsul. When he declared Gaul a Roman province and threatened the sacred lands of the Carnutes, where the druids met each year, the tribes found a common cause and a leader in Vercingetorix, a young noble of the Arverni. Vercingetorix burned his own country to starve the legions. Caesar massacred some 40,000 people at Avaricum, by his own count, but then lost 700 men, including 46 centurions, at Gergovia. Vercingetorix next withdrew about 80,000 men into the hilltop oppidum of Alesia, planning to hold Caesar in place while a relief army arrived to crush him.

Caesar answered with an 11-mile inner contravallation and, on learning of the relief force, a 14-mile outer circumvallation, about 25 miles of works built in a month by roughly 50,000 legionaries. Caesar claimed a relief army of 250,000; modern estimates say 50,000 to 100,000. On the third day of fighting, 60,000 Gauls under Vercassivellaunus struck a camp on a downslope near Labienus. Caesar arrived in his red cloak and sent Germanic cavalry around the walls to hit the Gauls from behind. Vercingetorix surrendered, spent five years in the Tullianum, and was strangled after Caesar's triumph in 46 BC.

• The Romans planted sharpened trunks called tombstones, hidden stake pits called lilies in a quincunx pattern, and barbed iron spurs called stimuli.
• Facing outward, Caesar dug a 20-foot trench and flooded an inner moat by diverting local rivers.
• Vercingetorix expelled the Mandubii civilians, and Caesar refused to let them through, leaving them to starve between the lines.
• The Senate voted 20 days of thanksgiving but demanded Caesar disband his legions, leading to the Rubicon crossing in 49 BC.
• In the 1860s Napoleon III funded excavations at Alesia and raised a bronze statue of Vercingetorix on the site.

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From the age of seven, every boy who hoped to become a Spartiate citizen was removed from his family and placed in a pack called an agela, under a magistrate known as the paidonomos, or boy herder. The agoge was the non-negotiable prerequisite for citizenship. Boys went barefoot all year, received a single cloak from age 12, slept on reeds pulled by hand from the Eurotas River, and were deliberately underfed so they would steal. A boy caught stealing was beaten for being caught, not for the theft. Training stressed laconic speech and enduring peer mockery, which Aristotle tied to emotional control, while weapons drills were almost absent because the phalanx needed cohesion, not duelists.

Teenagers aged 15 to 19 competed for election to a syssition, the communal mess, guided by older sponsors whose relationships Plutarch called erotic and Xenophon, who sent his own sons through the system, said Lycurgus forbade. Young men of 20 to 29 could be chosen for the krypteia, a secret force that terrorized the helots. The agoge declined by the third century BC and was abolished in the 180s BC, then revived under Rome as a spectacle that fed the Spartan mirage, later praised by Prussian educators and Nazi scholars.

• Scholars split on the krypteia: David Dodd reads it as policing, while Pierre Vidal-Naquet sees an initiation through complicity in killing.
• Xenophon describes three commanders each publicly picking 100 men for the 300 hippeis, a draft designed to breed rivalry and mutual surveillance.
• Graduates at 30 received a plot of land farmed by helots and only then could live with a family.
• In Roman Sparta, boys were whipped at the altar of Artemis Orthia before tourists in a purpose-built theater.
• German professor Helmut Berve praised the agoge in the 1930s, and Hitler endorsed such readings for elite Nazi schools.

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On June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Allies signed the peace with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the room where the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871. The armistice had not ended Germany's suffering: the Allied naval blockade ran for eight more months, and between 424,000 and 763,000 German civilians died of hunger and disease. Germany refused to hand over its merchant fleet until March 1919, when 270,000 tons of food were finally let in. In Paris, Georges Clemenceau sought security after France lost 1.3 million soldiers, David Lloyd George wanted a solvent Germany and naval supremacy, and Woodrow Wilson pressed his Fourteen Points.

Italy's Vittorio Orlando walked out when self-determination clashed with the territory promised in a secret 1915 treaty. The final text was a patchwork: League of Nations mandates in place of outright annexation, and an occupied, demilitarized Rhineland in exchange for an Anglo-American guarantee that collapsed when the US Senate refused ratification. Marshal Ferdinand Foch called it an armistice for 20 years, and John Maynard Keynes resigned, calling it a Carthaginian peace. Historian Detlev Peukert argues that the perception of the treaty, shaped by wartime censorship and the stab-in-the-back myth, did more harm than its terms.

• Article 231, the war guilt clause, made Germany accept responsibility for all loss and damage of the war to ground reparations.
• Article 227 called for trying Kaiser Wilhelm II, but the Netherlands refused extradition and he died in exile in 1941.
• Lloyd George had campaigned on the slogan hang the Kaiser, while Wilson's advisers opposed a retroactive criminal charge.
• Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa won the right to sign the treaty separately.
• At Brest-Litovsk in 1918 Germany had stripped Russia of a third of its population, half its industry and nine-tenths of its coal mines.