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In the early 1400s John Kastrioti, a regional lord in north central Albania caught between Venice, Serbian factions and the expanding Ottoman Empire, submitted as a vassal to the Sultan and handed over his son as a hostage. Gjergj Kastrioti was raised at the court in Edirne, trained in the elite Enderun school, and served Sultan Murad II so well that he became a sanjak bey commanding about 5,000 cavalry and earned the name Iskender Bey, Lord Alexander. In November 1443, during the chaos of the Battle of Niš against a crusader coalition, he deserted with 300 Albanian horsemen, rode to the fortress of Krujë, and took it in a single day with a forged letter of reassignment. In March 1444 he united rival clans in the League of Lezhë and at Torvioll used a feigned retreat and 3,000 hidden cavalry to shatter a 25,000-man Ottoman army.

Success made enemies on both sides. Venice, fearing a strong Albanian state, offered a lifetime pension to his assassin and coordinated with the Ottomans to force a two-front war, and in 1448 Svetigrad fell after Ottoman engineers cut its underground water lines. Skanderbeg turned to Alfonso V of Naples in the 1451 Treaty of Gaeta, then in 1461 crossed the Adriatic to save Alfonso's son Ferdinand I from a rebellion of Italian nobles. He held off Mehmed the Conqueror's generals until he died of illness, likely malaria, in 1468 at age 62.

• Venice offered 100 gold ducats a year for life to anyone who killed Skanderbeg.
• After taking Krujë he gave the Ottoman garrison a choice between conversion and execution and raised a red banner with a black double-headed eagle.
• Ferdinand's rivals offered bribes to keep him out of the Italian war, and he refused, citing virtue over fortune.
• Ferdinand repaid the debt by granting Skanderbeg's widow and heirs estates in Italy, where Albanian refugees founded the Arbëreshë communities.
• Ottoman soldiers later opened his tomb and wore pieces of his bones as amulets to absorb his courage.

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Gunpowder began in ninth century Tang China, where Daoist alchemists seeking an elixir of immortality heated sulfur, realgar and saltpeter with honey. A text of the period warns of burned hands and faces and houses burned to the ground. They called it huoyao, fire medicine, and used it for skin and digestive ailments before soldiers took notice. The mature recipe settled at about 75 percent saltpeter, 15 percent charcoal and 10 percent sulfur, with the saltpeter supplying its own oxygen. Black powder deflagrates at subsonic speed rather than detonating, so it pushes a projectile instead of shattering the barrel.

The 11th century Wujing Zongyao records formulas with only about 50 percent saltpeter, suited to fire arrows and incendiaries, but stronger mixes led to bombs and metal guns such as the Heilongjiang hand cannon of 1288. Mongol armies carried Chinese engineers west, and the Syrian Hasan al-Rammah soon listed 107 recipes, calling saltpeter Chinese snow. Early European serpentine powder separated in wagons, so in the 14th century makers began corning it into grains, up to 300 percent more powerful. Later, Mysore's iron-cased rockets under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan inspired William Congreve's rockets, the rockets' red glare of 1812.

• Hasan al-Rammah described an egg which moves itself and burns, an early torpedo design.
• Old words such as the Arabic naft and the Chinese pao make it hard to tell when texts mean gunpowder weapons.
• France's droit de fouille let saltpeter men dig up peasants' stables until Antoine Lavoisier built managed nitrate beds of manure and urine.
• Its gentle push made black powder ideal for quarrying slate and marble without shattering the stone.
• Sailors rubbed gunpowder into needle pricks for tattoos, and surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey seasoned horse meat broth with it.

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After the costly Battle of Gravelotte, Marshal Bazaine's Army of the Rhine, more than 154,000 men, was besieged in Metz by over 168,000 Prussians. Emperor Napoleon III and Marshal Patrice de MacMahon marched the 130,000-strong Army of Châlons along the Belgian border to relieve him. Helmuth von Moltke, coordinating his armies by telegraph, intercepted them, and after losing 7,500 men and 40 guns at Beaumont, MacMahon fell back to the old fortress town of Sedan to rest. He refused General Félix Douay's request to dig trenches, while the Germans crossed the Meuse and closed the ring.

On 1 September 1870 Bavarians under General von der Tann attacked Bazeilles at 4 a.m. and shelled French marines out of its stone houses. MacMahon was wounded at about 6 a.m. General Ducrot took over and ordered a retreat, but General de Wimpffen produced a secret government commission, took command and ordered a counterattack. Krupp breech-loading guns, 774 against 564 French pieces, poured fire into the valley. Napoleon III raised a white flag, and Wimpffen signed the surrender on 2 September. Over 104,000 French soldiers were captured, and in Paris the Second Empire fell in a bloodless revolution.

• Moltke said he had the French in a mousetrap, while Ducrot said they were in the chamber pot about to be shat upon.
• General Margueritte was mortally wounded leading the first cavalry charge at Floing, and the French lost 791 men in three charges.
• Napoleon III rode the field for hours under fire, likely hoping to be killed rather than captured.
• Prisoners were held for a week in pouring rain on a river peninsula with little food.
• Empress Eugénie reportedly asked why he did not kill himself, and Germans later marked 2 September as Sedantag.

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After Cannae, where about 67,500 Romans were killed or captured in one afternoon, Rome hid behind its walls while Hannibal roamed Italy. Publius Cornelius Scipio volunteered for Iberia and spent five years clearing it of Carthaginians, cutting off Hannibal's silver and recruits. Elected consul at 31, he proposed invading Africa to force Hannibal home, but the Senate refused him conscript legions and gave him Sicily, where the disgraced survivors of Cannae had been exiled. Scipio drilled them for about a year down to the 80-man century, gathered ships and grain, and landed near Utica in 204 BC.

Facing Hasdrubal Gisco and the Numidian king Syphax in two camps, Scipio opened peace talks and sent officers disguised as slaves to map them. Then he broke off talks, burned the Numidians' reed huts at night and cut down both armies as they fled. He backed the Numidian prince Masinissa, gaining Rome superior cavalry, and Carthage recalled Hannibal. At Zama in 202 BC Scipio's 29,000 to 30,000 men, with 10,000 Numidian horse, faced Hannibal's 40,000 and 80 war elephants. Scipio stretched his line to stop an envelopment, and the returning cavalry struck Hannibal's veterans from behind.

• Scipio arranged his maniples in straight columns, leaving lanes hidden by velites so charging elephants could pass through.
• Trumpets, horns and swords beaten on shields panicked the elephants, and some stampeded into Carthage's own cavalry.
• Hannibal had only about 4,000 cavalry after leaving his horses in Italy and losing Masinissa.
• About 20,000 Carthaginians were killed and another 20,000 captured.
• The peace cost Carthage 10,000 silver talents, its elephants and all but 10 warships, and Scipio took the name Africanus.

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Vimy Ridge, a seven kilometer escarpment rising about 60 meters over the Douai Plain, had been held by the Germans since October 1914 and fortified with deep dugouts, while French attacks in 1915 had cost some 150,000 casualties. For spring 1917, the Canadian Corps under Lieutenant General Julian Byng brought all four Canadian divisions together for the first time, about 170,000 men. They trained small units in fire and movement, handed 40,000 maps down to platoon level, and rehearsed on plasticine models and taped courses. British tunnelers dug 12 subways, some over a kilometer long and ten meters deep, with light rail, water and hospitals.

The artillery stockpiled more than a million shells, one heavy gun for every 20 meters of front. The new No. 106 fuse burst on contact, cutting wire without cratering the ground, while flash spotting and sound ranging, developed by scientists including William Lawrence Bragg, located hidden German batteries. At 5:30 a.m. on Easter Monday, 9 April, in sleet blowing into German faces, mines went off and the infantry followed a creeping barrage, leapfrogging fresh battalions through four objective lines. Three divisions kept to schedule, but the 4th Division stalled at Hill 145, and the Pimple did not fall until 12 April.

• Counter-battery fire neutralized an estimated 83 percent of German artillery positions.
• The creeping barrage typically advanced about 100 yards every three minutes, with infantry close behind.
• At Hill 145 a battalion commander had asked that a German trench be spared for later use, and its machine guns cut down the advance.
• The Canadians lost over 10,600 casualties, about 3,600 dead, and General von Falkenhausen was dismissed for holding reserves 24 kilometers back.
• France granted Canada 250 acres in 1922, where Walter Allward's memorial stands on Hill 145 amid fenced-off ground still full of unexploded shells.

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On the night of 21 to 22 September 1788, during the Austro-Turkish War, a Habsburg army of about 100,000 under Emperor Joseph II was camped near the Timiș River in what is now Romania, braced for an Ottoman attack. Hussars sent across the river to scout found no enemy, only local Romanians selling schnapps. When infantry crossed and demanded a share, the hussars stacked the barrels as a barricade. A shoving match turned into a brawl, someone fired a musket, and a cry of Turci, Turci went up. Both groups fled back toward the main camp in the dark.

The army was drawn from across a multi-ethnic empire, including Romanians, Croats, Lombard Italians and Serbs from the Military Frontier, and many did not speak German. Officers shouting Halt! were heard as the Ottoman cry Allah. General of Artillery Joseph Maria von Colloredo, waking to the noise, ordered his guns to fire on the shapes approaching, and Joseph II ordered a full withdrawal and became separated from his escort. Two days later the Ottoman army under Koca Yusuf Pasha found the camp abandoned and took Karánsebes. How many Austrians fell that night is still disputed.

• Cavalry looked down on infantry, and that rivalry fed the fight over the liquor.
• Joseph II was rumored captured and reached Karánsebes with a single companion.
• Contemporary reports mention about 150 rear guard casualties, around 1,000 wounded sent to Arad, and 538 men missing.
• Three cannon and the army's payroll chest were left behind for the Ottomans.
• The often repeated figure of 10,000 casualties traces to a 1968 biography of Joseph II that gave no source, while dysentery had already struck 20,000 men by July.

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In the eighth century, Japan's conscript peasant armies were useless against the Emishi, mounted archers of the north, so the court hired wealthy rural landowners who could afford horses and years of practice. The same families dodged imperial taxes by nominally donating land to tax-exempt temples and nobles under the shoen system. As revenue fell, they became the real power, and after the Genpei War the victorious Minamoto set up the first shogunate at Kamakura. The Sengoku period brought relentless civil war and wide social mobility, best shown by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a peasant sandal bearer who rose to rule Japan.

After the Portuguese brought matchlocks in 1543, the Japanese mass-produced them and drilled ashigaru in volley fire. Hideyoshi then ordered a sword hunt and froze the social order. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, samurai spent some 250 peaceful years as salaried administrators paid in rice, wearing the paired swords as a badge of rank and practicing the tea ceremony. Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival in 1853 ended isolation, and after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, former samurai abolished their own stipends, raised a conscript army and banned swords in public in 1876. Saigo Takamori's Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 was crushed.

• The katana, worn edge up for a fast draw, replaced the long curved tachi used by mounted warriors.
• A Japanese proverb says Oda Nobunaga made the rice cake, Hideyoshi shaped it, and Tokugawa Ieyasu ate it.
• The tiny nijiriguchi entrance of a tea room forced lords to bow and leave their long swords outside.
• Samurai women trained with the naginata and carried the kaiken dagger, and Yodo-dono came to command Osaka Castle.
• Yamada Nagamasa became a provincial governor in Thailand, and Hasekura Tsunenaga sailed to Mexico in 1612 and met the Pope in Rome.

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In February 1429 the English had besieged Orléans since October, and the countryside was stripped bare. Sir John Fastolf led about 300 carts and wagons from Paris carrying crossbow bolts, cannon, cannonballs and barrels of salted herring for the coming Lenten fast. On 12 February a French and Scottish force of 3,000 to 4,000 under Charles of Bourbon, Count of Clermont, and Sir John Stewart of Darnley caught Fastolf's roughly 1,600 men near Rouvray on an open plain. Fastolf circled his wagons into a fort and planted sharpened stakes around it, and the French guns began smashing the carts with real effect.

Clermont ordered his men to hold and let the artillery work, but Stewart charged with about 400 lightly armored Scots. The French guns had to stop firing, the Scots stuck on the stakes under English arrows, and the French cavalry stalled the same way. Fastolf counterattacked and the French broke. In Orléans, Clermont was blamed and soon left with 2,000 soldiers. That same day at Vaucouleurs, Joan of Arc told the skeptical commander Robert de Baudricourt that the Dauphin's forces had just suffered a great reverse near Orléans. When couriers confirmed it days later, he gave her an escort, and she set out on 23 February 1429.

• Salted fish was the durable protein that kept an army fed within the rules of Lent.
• The French bombardment was effective because the wagon fort was a stationary target.
• The Journal du siège d'Orléans says the rest of the French came on in a cowardly fashion and failed to support the vanguard.
• Between 400 and 600 French and Scots died, among them Sir John Stewart, while the English losses were light.
• Jean de Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans, was wounded in the battle and later became one of Joan's key commanders.

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Marcus Licinius Crassus was the richest man in the Roman Republic and one third of the First Triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Pompey. He had crushed Spartacus only to see Pompey take the credit, and by the 50s BC he watched both partners win military glory. After meetings at Luca and Ravenna around 56 BC, he took the governorship of Syria to launch an unprovoked war on Parthia, encouraged by Caesar and condemned by Cicero. As he left Rome in late 55 BC, the tribune Ateius Capito lit a brazier at the gate and cursed the expedition. Crassus brought his son Publius, a decorated cavalry officer from Gaul, with 1,000 Gallic horsemen.

Crassus wintered in Syria, turned down Artavasdes II of Armenia's offer of a mountain route and 40,000 troops, and trusted the guide Ariamnes, who was in Parthian pay. In spring 53 BC near Carrhae, his roughly 42,000 men met the general Surena's 10,000 horsemen. Cataphracts dropped their cloaks amid booming drums, the Romans formed a hollow square, and horse archers shot through shields while 1,000 camels kept them resupplied with arrows. Publius was lured away and died, and his head was paraded on a spear. Crassus was later killed at a parley his own mutinous men forced on him.

• Ancient legend says the Parthians poured molten gold down Crassus's throat to mock his greed.
• Historian Erich Gruen argues Crassus sought Parthian wealth for the Roman treasury rather than for himself.
• Fleeing at night, the Romans left about 4,000 wounded behind, and the Parthians killed them all the next morning.
• About 20,000 Romans died and 10,000 were captured, along with several legionary eagles.
• Crassus's head was reportedly used as a prop in a performance of Euripides' Bacchae at a royal banquet.

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Packed shield walls bristling with spears appear as early as the Sumerian Stele of the Vultures in the 25th century BC, but classical Greece perfected the form between about 800 and 350 BC. The hoplite carried a dory spear of seven to nine feet and a bowl-shaped aspis about three feet across and weighing 18 to 33 pounds, which covered his own left side and the right side of the man beside him. That overlap pulled whole armies to the right as they advanced, a drift the Spartans exploited at Nemea in 394 BC. Historians still argue whether the othismos, the pushing, was a literal mass shove, as Victor Davis Hanson holds, or something looser, as Adrian Goldsworthy argues.

The phalanx held together through dynamis, collective will, and the shame of being a rhipsaspis, a shield dropper. At Leuctra in 371 BC Epaminondas stacked his left wing 50 deep and broke the Spartans, while a young hostage in Thebes, Philip II of Macedon, took notes. Philip armed his men with the two-handed sarissa, 14 to 18 feet long with a counterweight, so that five rows of points projected ahead of the front rank. Used as an anvil for Alexander's cavalry it conquered Persia, but on rough ground it came apart, and Roman maniples slipped into the gaps at Cynoscephalae, Pydna and Magnesia.

• The man at the far right of the line had no neighbor's shield covering his exposed side.
• At Delium in 424 BC an Athenian section eight men deep held for a long time against a Theban column 25 deep.
• Neighbors, brothers and fathers stood together, making fear of shame stronger than fear of death.
• At Magnesia, panicking elephants opened gaps that Roman swordsmen exploited against the pike wall.
• Spear hedges returned in the Scottish schiltron and in the massed pike squares of the Renaissance.