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After Zama, Carthage owed Rome 10,000 silver talents over 50 years and could not wage war even in Africa without Roman permission. For half a century the Numidian king Masinissa seized Carthaginian land while Rome backed him. In 151 BC Carthage paid its last installment, and soon after it raised an army of at least 20,000 under Hasdrubal and fought the Numidians without leave, losing at Oroscopa. In Rome, Cato the Elder, who had seen Carthage booming around 153 BC, insisted that Carthage must be destroyed, while Scipio Nasica argued Rome needed a feared rival to stay united. In 149 BC an army of 40,000 to 50,000 landed at Utica.

Carthage handed over 200,000 sets of armor and 2,000 catapults and watched its warships burn, only to be told to abandon the city and move 16 kilometers inland. It refused, freed slaves willing to fight and forged new weapons day and night behind walls up to 70 feet high. Two years of Roman blundering ended when the 36 or 37 year old Scipio Aemilianus was made consul below the legal age. He blocked the harbor with a mole, met a secretly built fleet sailing from a newly dug channel, and broke in during spring 146 BC for six days of street fighting.

• Our main source, Polybius, was an eyewitness and a close friend of Scipio, which shapes how the siege is told.
• Hasdrubal tortured Roman prisoners to death on the walls in full view of the besieging army.
• About 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery, and 900 Roman deserters burned the Temple of Eshmun around themselves.
• Hasdrubal begged Scipio for his life while his wife cursed him and walked into the flames with their children.
• The story that Rome salted the earth is a later invention; the land became the province of Africa, and the Punic language survived into the 7th century AD.

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Robert the Bruce was born in 1274, likely at Turnberry Castle in Ayrshire, and raised between two worlds: Norman chivalric training on his father's side and, through his mother the Countess of Carrick, Gaelic fosterage, galley seamanship and hobelar raiding on hardy ponies. In 1292 Edward I of England used the Great Cause arbitration to place John Balliol on the Scottish throne over Bruce's grandfather, and the family saw it as a stolen inheritance. Holding estates in Yorkshire and Essex as well as Scotland, Robert changed sides repeatedly between 1296 and 1306, joining William Wallace's rising and then returning to Edward's peace.

In 1306 he stabbed his rival John Comyn before the high altar of the Greyfriars Church in Dumfries and was excommunicated. He had himself crowned at Scone that March, was quickly beaten, lost a brother to execution and saw his wife, daughter and sisters imprisoned. Returning in 1307, he waged a guerrilla war, burning Comyn country in the Harrying of Buchan. After Bannockburn in 1314 he opened a second front in Ireland under his brother Edward, appealing to shared Gaelic ancestry, but famine wrecked it. The Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 and the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328 secured his crown.

• Hobelar ponies could live on scrub grass and cross marshes, letting Bruce raid in winter when armies of heavy horse went home.
• Bruce razed captured castles so that neither the English nor the Comyns could garrison them again.
• Edward Bruce was killed in Ireland and his starving army collapsed during a great European famine.
• English propaganda said he had leprosy, but study of a casting of his skull found no bone damage associated with the disease.
• In 1329 Sir James Douglas carried Bruce's heart in a silver casket to Spain; when his body was found at Dunfermline in 1818, the sternum had been sawn open.

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By 1313 Robert the Bruce held a disputed crown and was still fighting Balliol loyalists as well as the English. When his brother Edward Bruce besieged Stirling Castle, its English commander agreed to surrender unless relieved by midsummer 1314, which forced Edward II to march. The English king brought up to 25,000 men from England, Wales and Ireland, including 2,000 heavy cavalry, pushing them 70 miles in a week. Bruce had perhaps 5,000 to 8,000 men, almost all infantry with axes, swords and long pikes, plus about 500 light horse. He chose the New Park woods above the carse of Balquhiderock, a tidal floodplain of clay and peat hemmed in by the River Forth and the Bannock Burn.

On 23 June, Sir Henry de Bohun charged the lightly armed Bruce on his pony and was killed by one axe blow, and Thomas Randolph's schiltron routed a second English detachment. That night the Scottish knight Alexander Seton defected from the English camp and reported its collapse in morale. On 24 June Bruce sent his four schiltrons forward on the attack, something even William Wallace had not managed at Falkirk. Hemmed in by the stream, English cavalry crushed itself, archers hit their own knights, and Sir Robert Keith's horse scattered the bowmen. Stirling surrendered, and in 1328 the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton recognized Bruce as king.

• An English source, the Vita Edwardi Secundi, describes the de Bohun encounter as a Scottish ambush rather than a duel.
• Seeing the Scots kneel to pray, Edward II supposedly said they prayed for mercy, and an attendant replied it was from God, not him.
• The Earl of Gloucester, called a coward by the king for urging delay, charged alone and was killed.
• Sir Giles d'Argentan escorted Edward off the field, then rode back into the Scottish spears and died.
• Some 11,000 English infantry and 700 knights were reported killed or drowned, and Bruce had Stirling Castle razed.

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Robert Clive made his name in 1751 at Arcot, capital of the Carnatic, where in his mid-twenties he seized the town with 280 Europeans and 300 sepoys to draw French-backed forces away from a besieged British ally. Trapped in a crumbling fort, he refused a bribe to surrender, and when the attackers drove iron-plated elephants at the gates, musket volleys panicked the animals into trampling their own infantry. In 1756 the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, took Calcutta, and Clive sailed north with Admiral Charles Watson. He retook the city in early 1757, then on his own authority attacked the French at Chandernagore and ignored orders from Madras to return south.

Clive plotted with the army paymaster Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seth bankers to replace the Nawab. When the merchant Omichund demanded three million rupees for silence, Clive drew up a fake red treaty promising the money and a real white treaty that left him out, and forged Watson's signature when the admiral refused to sign. At Plassey in June 1757, about 3,100 men behind mud walls in a mango grove faced some 50,000 troops, 40 cannon and war elephants. A downpour soaked the Nawab's powder while the British covered theirs, and Mir Jafar's troops held back. Clive became one of Europe's richest men and Baron Clive of Plassey.

• At a council of war at Katwa, Clive first voted against fighting, then changed his mind after an hour alone.
• Mir Madan, the Nawab's loyal general, assumed the British guns were wet, charged, and was mortally wounded by grapeshot.
• Major Kilpatrick advanced without orders; Clive rebuked him, then led the final push himself.
• The British lost about 22 men, and Clive extracted well over 2.75 million pounds from the Bengal treasury.
• Before Parliament in 1773, Clive defended the forgery as an act of true policy and justice.

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Rich Italian city-states such as Florence, Venice and Genoa had money but little appetite for fighting, so they bought their wars by contract. The condotta was that contract, and a condottiere was literally a contractor. Catalan troops appear in Italy around 1303, and the Great Company of Germans and Hungarians stripped Tuscany, Umbria and the Romagna until Montreal d'Albarno imposed discipline and pay schedules. The Englishman John Hawkwood arrived in the 1360s during a lull in the Hundred Years' War and led the White Company through three decades of northern Italian warfare. In 1339 Lodrisio Visconti formed the first Italian-led company, the Company of St. George, only to see it destroyed that April by his own uncle, Luchino Visconti of Milan.

From 1377 Alberico da Barbiano turned the trade into a science, training captains such as Braccio da Montone and Muzio Attendolo Sforza. Treating trained men and horses as capital, the condottieri avoided pitched battles and winter campaigns and won by maneuver, then began taking states for themselves. Francesco Sforza switched sides against Milan repeatedly, married Bianca Maria Visconti, besieged the city when it tried to become a republic, and was recognized as Duke of Milan in 1450. Niccolò Machiavelli condemned the whole system, arguing that only citizen soldiers would fight to the end.

• The Visconti, Gonzaga, Orsini, Colonna and even the Borgia families all produced condottieri captains.
• Federico da Montefeltro made himself lord of Urbino and turned it into a center of the Renaissance.
• For a condottiere, a bloodless victory was the ideal outcome because it fulfilled the contract without losing paid soldiers.
• Bartolomeo Colleoni defeated the French at Bosco Marengo in 1447, and Bartolomeo d'Alviano fought at the Garigliano.
• By the 17th century the word had become an honorific, and Ambrogio Spinola is counted among the last of the tradition.

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The red Flanders poppy, Papaver rhoeas, grows where soil has been violently disturbed. Its seeds can lie dormant for decades, and after the Battle of Landen in 1693, where William of Orange left some 20,000 dead, the field burst into scarlet the next summer. In 1915 the Canadian army physician John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields from the voice of the dead beneath the flowers. The American academic Moina Michael vowed in 1918 to wear a red silk poppy, and the French organizer Anna Guérin built the idea into an industry, using war widows to make silk flowers and pitching an Inter-Allied Poppy Day in 1921 to the American Legion, Canadian veterans and Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

A century later the poppy is a trademarked operation turning out 40 to 50 million flowers a year, with designs that differ between Canada, England and Scotland. Choosing not to wear one has become a public act. Broadcaster Jon Snow coined the phrase poppy fascism, Whole Foods reversed a 2020 ban on Canadian staff wearing poppies within days, and Don Cherry was fired in 2019 after using the flower to attack immigrants. Rival colors arose to tell other stories, from the pacifist white poppy to the khadi poppy, and in Palestinian culture the red anemone carries its own meaning of martyrdom and renewal tied to the myth of Adonis.

• Some UK poppy components were assembled by inmates at HM Prison Ford earning 10 pounds a week.
• In Ottawa, the public began leaving their poppies on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the official ceremony.
• FIFA fined UK teams for wearing the poppy, treating it as a banned political symbol.
• Footballer James McClean of Derry refuses the poppy because of Bloody Sunday, and Nemanja Matić because NATO bombed his village in 1999.
• The Co-operative Women's Guild introduced the white poppy in 1933, and Animal Aid's purple poppy honors animals killed in war.

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In May 1274 BC, in the fifth year of his reign, Pharaoh Ramesses II marched north to retake Kadesh and Amurru, territories his father Seti I had captured and lost to the Hittites. He led 16,000 infantry and at least 2,000 chariots in four divisions named for the gods Amun, Re, Set and Ptah, with Sherden mercenaries in the ranks. Near the Orontes River, two captured Shasu nomads told him the Hittite king Muwatalli II was cowering 200 kilometers away at Aleppo. The nomads were Hittite spies. Ramesses raced ahead with only the Amun division and camped beside Kadesh, where Muwatalli was waiting with a coalition the Egyptians later put at 40,000 infantry, 2,500 chariots and 19 allied nations.

Hittite three-man chariots smashed the Re division on the march and broke into the Egyptian camp. Ramesses, abandoned by his officers and shield bearers, led repeated counter charges in his light six-spoked chariots. The attackers stopped to loot, the Ne'arin troops and then the Ptah division arrived, and the Hittites were driven into the river. The battle ended in an exhausted stalemate, and Ramesses went home without Kadesh or Amurru. He then carved his own heroic version on temples across Egypt, while Hittite records at Hattusa told the opposite story. About 15 years later he made peace with Muwatalli's brother Hattusili III, who had fought against him at Kadesh.

• The battle is believed to be the largest chariot engagement in recorded history, with five to six thousand chariots on one field.
• Ramesses berated his princes and officials for failing to spot a coalition army hiding behind the old city of Kadesh.
• At least two of Muwatalli's own brothers were killed, and six further Hittite chariot charges failed to break the Egyptian line.
• Hittitologist Trevor Bryce calls it a tactical win for Egypt and a strategic win for the Hittites, who kept the disputed land.
• The treaty of around 1258 BC is often called the earliest written international peace agreement, and a replica hangs at the United Nations in New York.

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After the Ottomans crushed Hungary at Mohács in 1526 and King Louis II drowned when his horse slipped into a stream, the Hungarian crown was split between the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand I and the Transylvanian noble John Zápolya. Zápolya offered to become an Ottoman vassal, and in May 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent marched with up to 100,000 men to back him. Record spring rains turned the Balkan roads to mud, killing the thousands of camels hauling supplies and forcing Suleiman to abandon his heavy bronze siege cannon, while dysentery spread through the camps.

Ferdinand fled to Bohemia, leaving Vienna to Niklas, Count of Salm, a 70-year-old mercenary commander with about 21,000 peasants, militia, German Landsknechte, Serbian hussars and Spanish arquebusiers. He backed the old walls, in places only six feet thick, with earthen ramparts and blocked the four main gates. The war went underground, with Ottoman sappers tunneling under the walls and defenders countermining. A sortie of 8,000 men on 6 October ended in a deadly crush at the narrow sally ports. After a final assault failed on 14 October, snow fell the next day and Suleiman withdrew.

• Defenders set drums of water or dried peas near the walls to detect the vibrations of digging.
• When Suleiman sent three captured Austrians to demand surrender, Salm silently sent back three Muslim prisoners.
• Wet weather favored the Spanish arquebusiers firing from cover while Ottoman troops struggled to keep powder dry in the trenches.
• The retreating irregulars burned villages and enslaved an estimated 20,000 Austrian civilians.
• Salm died months later of injuries from falling debris, while Suleiman celebrated the campaign in Constantinople as a triumph.

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For about 90 years Magyar horse archers had raided Western Europe. In 953 King Otto I's son Liudolf, Duke of Swabia, and son-in-law Conrad, Duke of Lorraine, rebelled against him, and in 954 they invited the Hungarians in, who ravaged the Rhineland. In July 955, as Otto besieged the last rebels at Regensburg, Magyar envoys came claiming peace, in effect as scouts. Six weeks later a Hungarian army crossed into Bavaria and besieged Augsburg, held by Bishop Ulrich and his professional milites.

Ulrich rode out to the gate wearing only his stole, rallying his men with the 23rd Psalm, and the defenders killed a Magyar commander. When a traitor named Berthold warned the Magyars that Otto was coming, they lifted the siege. On 10 August Otto's eight legions met them. The Magyars swept behind his columns, destroyed the Bohemian legion guarding the baggage, then stopped to loot it, and Conrad the Red's heavy cavalry shattered them and returned with captured banners. Otto's own legion then broke the Magyar center in close combat. He refused to chase them, guarding against the feigned retreat, and instead held the river crossings.

• Otto's 7,000 to 9,000 men in mail and kite shields faced 8,000 to 10,000 light horse archers under Bulcsú, Lehel and Súr.
• The Magyar composite bow of horn, sinew and animal glue lost its tension when wet.
• Heavy rain and floods on 11 and 12 August ruined the bows and slowed the retreat, and Otto's men hunted the fugitives.
• Conrad loosened his armor at the neck in the heat and was killed by an arrow to the throat.
• The three chieftains were hanged at Regensburg; Otto was hailed emperor on the field and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962.

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King Pyrrhus of Epirus beat Rome at Heraclea and at Asculum in 279 BC, but the price was his elite troops and veteran commanders, who could not be replaced far from home. Rome, drawing on citizen levies and allies like a continually flowing fountain, simply raised new legions. Told he had won, Pyrrhus reportedly answered that one more such victory would destroy his army, and he withdrew to Sicily. His name became the term for a win that ruins the winner.

Empires fell into the same trap. In 1566 the Ottomans took Szigetvár after 33 days at such cost that the advance on Vienna was abandoned, and Sultan Suleiman died in his tent before the fall. Spain spent three years, 1601 to 1604, besieging the port of Ostend while the Dutch, resupplied by sea, founded the Dutch East India Company and took Sluis; Spain declared bankruptcy by 1607. Weaker sides have also inflicted Pyrrhic victories on purpose, and the deepest losses are often of quality rather than numbers, from Stonewall Jackson shot by his own sentries at Chancellorsville to the veteran Japanese aviators lost at Santa Cruz in 1942 though no Japanese ship was sunk.

• At Gangwana in 1741 about 1,000 Rathore horsemen of Marwar charged some 100,000 men, inflicted around 12,000 casualties, and won a favorable peace.
• At Bunker Hill in 1775 colonial fire targeted British officers, leaving the British cautious in later campaigns.
• At Vukovar in 1991 the Yugoslav army took the city after 87 days at a cost that drained its armor and morale.
• The 2021 Carolina Panthers beat Washington late in a lost season and hurt their own draft position.
• Dissenting in Beauharnais v. Illinois in 1952, Justice Hugo Black invoked Pyrrhus to warn minority groups against celebrating a group libel law.