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The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 pitted Russia against the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and the Kingdom of Sardinia, with fighting from the Balkans and Caucasus to the Baltic and the Pacific. Russia wanted warm water ports as the Ottoman state contracted, and Britain had a trade stake after the 1838 Treaty of Balta Liman nearly tripled its exports. Tsar Nicholas I demanded protection over Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, occupied the Danubian principalities in July 1853, and destroyed an Ottoman squadron at Sinop in November with explosive shells. Britain and France joined in March 1854 and landed in Crimea that September to take the naval base at Sevastopol, beginning an 11 month siege.

A French undersea cable across the Black Sea put generals under daily orders from London and Paris, while William Howard Russell, Roger Fenton and a young Leo Tolstoy reported the war's misery. In November 1854 a storm sank 30 transports off Balaclava, and disease killed far more allied soldiers than combat. After the French took the Malakoff in 1855, Russia signed the Treaty of Paris in March 1856, demilitarizing the Black Sea. Defeat pushed Alexander II to free about 23 million serfs in 1861 and to sell Alaska in 1867, while Ottoman war loans ended in default by 1875.

• Timothy, a tortoise who served aboard HMS Queen, lived until 2004 as the war's last surviving veteran.
• Rifled muskets let British and French infantry hit Russian formations at 300 to 400 yards.
• The Snowball Riot in Trafalgar Square in January 1855 fed the anger that brought down Lord Aberdeen's government.
• Florence Nightingale's polar area diagram showed that most deaths at Scutari came from preventable disease.
• In Sevastopol, surgeon Nikolai Pirogov used plaster casts, triage by wound rather than rank, and ether anesthesia.

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Between 1899 and 1901 a movement of teenagers and unemployed farmers in northern China, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, convinced the Empress Dowager Cixi to back them against eight foreign empires. Its roots lay in Shandong province after China's defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, as foreign powers carved out spheres of influence. Cheap imported cotton ruined hand spinners, a foreign railroad idled boatmen on the Grand Canal, Yellow River floods were followed by drought, and missionaries protected by extraterritoriality intervened in lawsuits for their converts. In November 1897 villagers killed two German missionaries in the Juye Incident, and Kaiser Wilhelm II used it to seize a Shandong bay.

Under the slogan support the Qing, destroy the foreigners, the Boxers marched on Beijing in 1900. After the German minister Clemens von Ketteler was assassinated by a Manchu captain and the powers seized the coastal forts, Cixi declared war. Diplomats, missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians held the Legation Quarter for 55 days. Admiral Seymour's 2,000-man relief force was stranded when the tracks were torn up, and 20,000 Eight Nation Alliance troops took Tianjin and broke the siege in August 1900. Cixi fled disguised as a peasant, and the 1901 Boxer Protocol helped bring down the dynasty in 1911.

• Initiates were shot with blank rounds at point blank range to prove that spirit soldiers made them bulletproof.
• Villagers blamed church spires and deep foundations for cutting the dragon veins of the land and causing the drought.
• Defenders built the International Gun from a British barrel, an Italian carriage and Russian shells, crewed by Americans.
• Supreme commander Ronglu withheld artillery from the Gansu Braves and reportedly had troops fire blanks and firecrackers.
• The indemnity of 450 million taels, one for each person in China, grew to nearly a billion with 39 years of interest.

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After Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan's ports open in 1854, the unequal treaties stripped tariff autonomy and let Western merchants exploit a gold to silver ratio of about 3 to 1 against a global 15 to 1, draining gold and wrecking samurai rice stipends. The Satsuma and Choshu domains rallied around sonno joi, revere the emperor and expel the barbarians, until British warships shelled Kagoshima after the 1862 Namamugi Incident and a multinational fleet hit Shimonoseki. In late 1867 the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, returned authority to Emperor Meiji, but Saigo Takamori pushed the court to seize his lands, and in January 1868 Yoshinobu marched on Kyoto with 15,000 men.

At Toba-Fushimi about 5,000 imperial troops with Snider breech-loaders held the narrow roads, and on the second day Prince Arisugawa presented a brocade banner, secretly forged by loyalists, that branded Yoshinobu an enemy of the court. He fled to Edo by steamship, and Edo later surrendered. The Northern Coalition fought on at Aizu, and the naval commander Enomoto Takeaki sailed eight warships to Hokkaido with the French officer Jules Brunet and founded the Republic of Ezo, electing himself president by samurai vote. Hakodate fell in 1869.

• Some outgunned domains built wooden cannons from rope-bound tree trunks that burst after a few shots.
• Imperial officers wore wigs of bear hair: red for Tosa, white for Choshu, black for Satsuma.
• Women of the Joshitai, led by Nakano Takeko, charged imperial guns at Aizu with naginata.
• Teenage members of the White Tiger Corps saw smoke over Aizu, wrongly believed the castle had fallen, and killed themselves.
• At Miyako Bay, a Gatling gun aboard the ironclad Kotetsu, built in France for the Confederacy, shredded a samurai boarding party.

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In 1355 Edward the Black Prince arrived in Bordeaux as his father's lieutenant, defending Gascony and its lucrative wine trade. With a force that grew from about 2,200 to 6,000 men, he rode a 675 mile chevauchée to Narbonne and back, burning crops, mills and towns to prove King John II could not protect his taxpayers. In 1356 he raided again across a 50 mile front and took 50 towns. John, facing rebellion from nobles such as Charles the Bad, dismissed his slower infantry, crossed the Vienne at Chauvigny and cut off the English route back to Bordeaux, trapping Edward near Poitiers without food or water for his horses.

Through the papal envoy Cardinal Talleyrand, Edward offered to return his prisoners and plunder and accept a seven year truce, using written permission from Edward III. John refused. On September 19, 1356, about 6,000 dismounted Anglo-Gascons faced 14,000 to 16,000 French in four waves. Archers shot horses in the flanks as French cavalry bogged in a marsh, and the Dauphin Charles fought for two hours on foot. When the king himself advanced, Edward ordered a charge and sent the Captal de Buch with 160 mounted men around a hill into the French rear. The French line collapsed and John II was captured with his son Philip.

• Edward's men dug disguised pits and used thick hedges to funnel and slow the French charges.
• The Duke of Orléans led about 3,200 fresh men off the field without fighting, spreading confusion through the French army.
• John II unfurled the Oriflamme, the red banner that signaled no quarter and no ransom.
• Out of arrows, English longbowmen threw down their bows and took up daggers and hand axes.
• The 1360 Treaty of Brétigny set John's ransom at three million gold écus, roughly equal to England's annual economy.

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John Joseph Pershing was born in rural Missouri in 1860 into a family hit hard by the post Civil War economy. He taught African American children at a local school, earned a degree in scientific didactics at a normal school, and sat the West Point entrance exam for one reason: the education was free. He became first captain, commanded the honor guard for Ulysses S. Grant's funeral train, and still considered studying law or starting an irrigation business in Oregon. Instead he served with the Sixth Cavalry against Apache and Sioux forces, then commanded Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and fought at Kettle and San Juan Hills in Cuba, where Theodore Roosevelt praised his calm under fire.

After the Philippines, where he learned enough of the Moro language to negotiate without an interpreter, Roosevelt promoted him to brigadier general over more than 800 senior officers, shortly after Pershing married the daughter of Senator Francis E. Warren, chairman of the Military Affairs and Appropriations committees. In 1915 a fire at the Presidio in San Francisco killed his wife and three daughters. He led the 1916 punitive expedition into Mexico after Pancho Villa, then commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in 1917 and refused British and French demands to amalgamate his troops into their units.

• The nickname Black Jack was a sanitized version of a racist slur that resentful West Point cadets used for him in 1897.
• In Mexico, trucks broke down without spare parts, airplanes crashed, and the Carranza government refused the army use of its railroads.
• Pershing handed the African American 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions to French command under pressure from a segregationist Wilson administration.
• He let attacks continue until the 11 a.m. armistice on November 11, 1918, and roughly 3,500 American casualties fell that final day.
• He secretly married the artist Micheline Resco at Walter Reed Hospital in 1946 and died in 1948 at 87.

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In May 1618 Protestant nobles at Prague Castle threw two Catholic imperial representatives and their secretary out of a window about 70 feet up, and all three survived. The Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork of roughly 300 states, and the 1555 Peace of Augsburg let each ruler choose his territory's religion but left Calvinism without legal protection, while converting rulers used the faith to seize church property. When the strict Catholic Habsburg Ferdinand II took the Bohemian throne in 1617, Bohemia's largely Protestant nobles deposed him and offered the crown to Frederick V. That threatened to flip the seven imperial electors from a four to three Catholic majority to a Protestant one. The financially exhausted Austrian Habsburgs, also watching the Ottomans, turned to their Spanish cousins, who needed the Spanish Road through Frederick's Palatinate to move silver and troops to the war against the Dutch.

Denmark under Christian IV and Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus entered the war, and Catholic France under Cardinal Richelieu funded Protestant Sweden on the principle of reason of state. Gustavus thinned infantry to six ranks, added more muskets and mobile field guns, and shattered imperial forces at Breitenfeld in 1631. Armies passed 100,000 men, and commanders such as Albrecht von Wallenstein raised them on credit and extracted payment from towns. Between 4.5 and 8 million people died, and some German regions lost over half their population. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, negotiated at Münster and Osnabrück, gave German states their own foreign policy, granted Sweden and France territory, and laid the basis of modern state sovereignty.

• Under the contribution system, armies demanded payments from towns in exchange for not burning them, then stripped the countryside once the silver ran out.
• Most deaths came from famine and from plague, typhus and dysentery spread by armies and refugees.
• Wallenstein grew so powerful that the emperor had him assassinated by his own officers.
• Catholic and Protestant delegations at the peace talks largely refused to sit in the same room.
• Westphalia ended Europe's continent-wide religious wars and tied each subject's primary allegiance to the sovereign state.

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After King Alfonso VIII of Castile was routed by the Almohads at Alarcos in 1195, the Christian kingdoms of León and Navarre allied with the Almohad Caliphate to take Castilian land, and a ten-year truce followed. When it expired, Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir brought a large army from Morocco and in 1211 took Salvatierra, headquarters of the Order of Calatrava. Pope Innocent III called a crusade, and Peter II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarre joined Alfonso at Toledo along with knights from France, Italy and Germany and Portuguese town militias and Templars, while Alfonso IX of León stayed home and invaded Portugal. Foreign crusaders attacked Toledo's Jewish quarter, and when Alfonso accepted the surrender of Muslim garrisons at Malagón and Calatrava la Vieja, many French knights went home in disgust.

In the July heat the coalition found al-Nasir's army holding the exits of the Sierra Morena passes near modern Santa Elena. A local shepherd, Martín Alhaja, led them through the unguarded pass of Despeñaperos onto the high plains, and on July 16, 1212, the armies met on rocky ground too cramped for massed archery. After hours of infantry deadlock, the Knights of Santiago opened a gap and Sancho VII charged through to the caliph's tent. Al-Nasir fled to Marrakesh and died within a year. Baeza and Úbeda fell, and Ferdinand III took Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246 and Seville in 1248, leaving only the Emirate of Granada, which paid tribute until 1492.

• Alfonso reportedly rewarded the shepherd with the noble name Cabeza de Vaca, after the cow skull said to have marked the hidden path.
• Chronicler Lucas of Tui wrote that the Portuguese militias rushed into combat as if to a feast.
• Gómez Ramírez, master of the Portuguese Templars, was killed in the fighting.
• The story of the caliph's guards being chained together likely comes from a mistranslation of Arabic describing a tightly packed formation.
• The caliph's captured standard was sent to Pope Innocent III as a trophy.

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In 1738 sea captain Robert Jenkins stood before the British Parliament holding a jar of pickling liquid with his own severed ear inside, claiming a Spanish coast guard captain had cut it off when his brig Rebecca was boarded for smuggling sugar in 1731. The real causes lay in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which gave Britain the Asiento, a monopoly to supply 5,000 enslaved people a year to Spanish colonies, and the Navío de Permiso, which allowed only two British ships a year to trade at ports such as Portobelo and Veracruz. Smugglers reloaded the legal ships at night to sell ten times the permitted cargo, and Spanish guardacostas boarded British vessels in response. Tory opponents of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who wanted peace, revived Jenkins' seven-year-old grievance alongside Spanish pressure on the new colony of Georgia, and Britain declared war in late 1739.

In November 1739 Admiral Edward Vernon took Portobelo with six ships of the line in 24 hours, a triumph celebrated with Rule, Britannia and more medals than any other 18th century event. In 1741 he brought 186 ships and over 27,000 men against Cartagena de Indias, defended by Blas de Lezo, who had lost his left eye and left leg and the use of his right arm. Vernon announced victory early, but the night assault on Castillo San Felipe de Barajas failed and yellow fever swept the fleet, leaving about 6,000 British dead against roughly 1,000 Spanish. Walpole resigned, the conflict merged into the War of the Austrian Succession, and the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored the prewar status quo.

• London struck medals showing Blas de Lezo kneeling before Vernon for a victory that never happened.
• British scaling ladders fell several feet short because the Spanish had dug deep trenches at the base of the walls.
• Colonial survivor Lawrence Washington named his Virginia estate Mount Vernon after the admiral, and it later passed to his half-brother George.
• Commodore George Anson lost over 90 percent of about 1,900 men, mostly to scurvy, but captured a Manila galleon in 1743 and returned a hero after circling the globe.
• In 1750 Britain gave up the Asiento it had fought over in exchange for a one-time payment of 100,000 pounds.

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Antonio López de Santa Anna presented himself as a federalist reformer, then on taking the presidency in 1833 turned centralist and overturned the Mexican Constitution of 1824, stripping local authority from Coahuila y Tejas. Stephen F. Austin was jailed for most of 1834 after proposing separate statehood, and in late 1835 the Tornel Decree declared foreigners joining the Texas rebellion to be pirates, subject to execution rather than capture. After the Alamo fell on March 6, 1836, following a 90-minute assault, Sam Houston began the Runaway Scrape: he burned Gonzales, sank his only two cannons in the Guadalupe River, and retreated east through flooded rivers and mud while interim President David G. Burnet accused him of cowardice. The retreat stretched Mexican supply lines, and Santa Anna raced ahead with a small column, missing Burnet's family by minutes as they escaped in a rowboat.

Scouts Deaf Smith and Henry Karnes captured a courier revealing Santa Anna's position, and Houston placed his men in oak groves along Buffalo Bayou. Santa Anna camped on an open plain backed by marsh and Peggy Lake. On April 21, General Martín Perfecto de Cos arrived with 540 exhausted recruits, and in the afternoon the troops rested and Santa Anna took a nap. Smith destroyed Vince's Bridge, and at 4:30 p.m. the Texians attacked with the Twin Sisters cannons, shouting Remember the Alamo and Remember Goliad. In 18 minutes about 650 Mexican soldiers were killed, 208 wounded and 300 captured, against 11 Texians killed or fatally wounded.

• Colonel Pedro Delgado wrote that the campsite violated all military rules and any youngster would have done better.
• Fleeing soldiers caught at the marsh cried me no Alamo as Texian riflemen kept firing.
• Santa Anna was caught in a private's jacket and exposed when fellow prisoners saluted him as El Presidente.
• He signed the Treaties of Velasco and ordered generals Urrea and Filisola south, and Filisola admitted his rain-soaked army could not have resisted pursuit.
• Landowner Peggy McCormick begged Houston to bury the dead on her property, and he told her she should be honored by the victory instead.

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Xerxes I invaded Greece to finish the grudge his father Darius I held over Athens' role in the Ionian revolt and the Persian defeat at Marathon in 490 BC. He bridged the Hellespont with pontoons and cut a canal through Mount Athos, but feeding hundreds of thousands of soldiers and camp followers meant he needed quick victories before winter. After the Spartan stand at Thermopylae and the naval stalemate at Artemisium, the Greek alliance formed at Corinth in 481 BC lost central Greece. Athens was evacuated to Troezen and Salamis, and its people watched the Persians burn the empty city. In the Greek war council the Peloponnesians wanted to fall back and wall off the Isthmus of Corinth, while the Athenian general Themistocles argued that a wall was useless if the Persian fleet could sail around it and that the narrow straits of Salamis were the place to fight.

Unable to win the argument, Themistocles sent his servant Sicinnus to Xerxes at night with word that the Greeks were about to flee. Xerxes had his fleet row all night to block the exits. At dawn the rested Greeks, about 371 to 378 triremes against perhaps 600 to 800 Persian ships, sang their paean, backed water to draw the enemy into the narrows, and turned the fight into a melee of rams and armored hoplite marines. Xerxes withdrew to Asia, fearing for his Hellespont bridges, and the army he left under Mardonius was beaten at Plataea the next year while the Greek navy finished the Persian fleet at Mycale.

• Xerxes watched from a golden throne on Mount Aegaleos with scribes ready to record his heroes.
• Persian crews favored the diekplous, rowing through gaps to shear off enemy oars, a move that needed open water.
• The Persian admiral Ariabignes, Xerxes' brother, was speared while boarding a Greek ship and thrown into the sea.
• Trapped by her own side, Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus rammed and sank an allied Calyndian ship, and her Athenian pursuer gave up the chase.
• Xerxes, thinking she had sunk a Greek ship, said his men had become women and his women men, though before the battle she had advised him not to fight at sea.