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After six years of victories over Denmark, Norway and Poland-Lithuania in the Great Northern War, King Charles XII of Sweden rejected Tsar Peter I's offer to return Baltic lands in exchange for Ingria, where St. Petersburg was rising. In 1707 he invaded Russia with about 44,000 men. Peter answered with scorched earth, and the Great Frost of 1708 to 1709, the coldest winter in some 500 years, killed thousands. Charles turned south to Ukraine to join the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, but Lewenhaupt's supply column was lost at Lesnaya and Menshikov burned Mazepa's capital Baturyn.

With about 20,000 starving men and powder for 34 guns, Charles besieged Poltava, while Peter arrived with 75,000 to 80,000. On 20 June a stray bullet struck Charles in the foot, and Field Marshal Rehnskiöld took command. On 27 June a pre-dawn attack through Peter's T-shaped line of ten redoubts lost surprise when the cavalry got lost in the dark. General Roos was cut off and surrendered, and Rehnskiöld halted the advance for two hours waiting for him, while Peter deployed 42 battalions and 55 field guns. The Swedish charge broke the first Russian line but was enveloped.

• Russian infantry fired its volley at 50 meters; the Swedes held their fire until 30 meters and then charged.
• Russian hollow squares turned back the late Swedish cavalry charge.
• Charles and Mazepa fled across the Dnieper into the Ottoman Empire with 1,500 men, and Charles spent five years at Bender.
• Three days later the rest of the Swedish army surrendered at Perevolochna.
• Peter feasted the captured Swedish generals in tents on the battlefield and toasted them as his teachers in war before sending them to Siberia.

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The Polish winged hussars, active from about 1503 to 1702, began as Serbian exiles called Rascians who came from Hungary as light mercenary horsemen to fight Ottoman raiders on the frontier; the name traces to a Serbian word for brawler or wanderer. In the 1570s King Stephen Báthory turned them into heavy shock cavalry drawn from the szlachta nobility, betting that armor able to survive one volley from slow matchlock arquebuses would let them crash into infantry before it could reload.

Their kit was engineered for that charge: plate armor weighing only about 15 kilograms, lobster-tailed helmets, leopard, tiger or wolf pelts, and wooden wings of eagle or falcon feathers for a terrifying silhouette. Each companion, the towarzysz, paid for his own retinue of two to five armed retainers, and banners of 30 to 60 lances advanced from a walk to a knee-to-knee gallop. They won at Lubieszów in 1577, routed a Muscovite and Swedish army at Kłuszyn in 1610 while outnumbered five to one, and led the great charge at Vienna in 1683. Flintlocks and socket bayonets made them obsolete, and they were disbanded in 1776.

• The lance, 4.5 to 6.2 meters long, was hollowed fir glued back together so it shattered on impact like a crumple zone.
• After breaking their lances, riders wheeled back to wagons of spare lances and charged again in waves.
• Exporting a hussar horse outside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth carried the death penalty.
• At Vienna nearly 20,000 horsemen led by 3,000 hussars rode down from the Kahlenberg under John III Sobieski.
• In May 2024 Poland announced its F-35 fighters would be named in their honor.

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On 4 January 1642 King Charles I marched into the House of Commons with about 400 soldiers to arrest five members for treason and found that the birds had flown. The crisis had been building since 1625. Like his father James I, who called kings little gods on earth, Charles believed in the divine right of kings. Short of money after a failed expedition to relieve the French Huguenots, he dissolved Parliament and ruled alone from 1629 to 1640, raising cash through forced knighthood fines and ship money levied on inland counties, a tax John Hampden refused to pay.

Religion broke the system. Charles and Archbishop William Laud imposed a new prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637, sparking the Covenanter movement and the Bishops' Wars, which bankrupted the crown. The Long Parliament under John Pym passed the Triennial Act and condemned the Earl of Strafford by bill of attainder, and Charles signed his loyal servant's death warrant. After an Irish Catholic rebellion and the failed arrest, civil war followed. Cromwell's disciplined Ironsides and the New Model Army beat the Royalists at Marston Moor and Naseby, and Charles, defeated, secretly drew the Scots into a second war in 1648.

• In St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes threw a stool at the minister's head in protest at the new prayer book.
• Between 120,000 and 150,000 men were in the field in summer campaign seasons.
• Prince Rupert's cavaliers charged hard but scattered to chase fugitives or loot baggage, while Cromwell's horse regrouped on command.
• Charles laughed at his judges and asked by what lawful authority a king could be tried; prosecutors argued he held an office in trust for the people.
• He was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in January 1649, and the monarchy returned under Charles II in 1660.

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The Janissaries, from the Ottoman Turkish yeniçeri, new soldier, were created in the 14th century under Sultan Orhan and Murad I to give the sultan a standing force with no ties to the nobility. They were filled through the devshirme, the child levy: officials used parish baptismal registers to line up Christian boys aged 8 to 18 in Greek, Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Bosnian villages and carried the strongest away in baskets on horseback. Converted, sent to Turkish farm families to learn the language, then trained in barracks, they could not marry, wore mustaches but no beards, and ate the sultan's food from regimental soup cauldrons.

They were early masters of firearms, using rotating volley fire by 1605 and marching with field hospitals and engineers. But as the corps grew from about 1,000 men to some 40,000 by the early 1600s, freeborn Muslims were admitted, New World silver inflated away their pay, and they took up trades, married and passed on their places. They overturned their kettles to signal mutiny and dethroned sultans who tried reform. In June 1826 Mahmud II provoked a revolt, then had loyal artillery shell their barracks, killing over 4,000.

• Some Balkan fathers cut off a son's finger to make him ineligible, while poor families sometimes bribed officials to take theirs.
• Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a Bosnian Serb taken in the levy, served as Grand Vizier for over 14 years under three sultans.
• In 1622 the Janissaries strangled the teenage Osman II in the Seven Towers, and in 1807 they deposed Selim III over his Nizam-ı Cedid army.
• Survivors of the 1826 purge were executed at Thessalonica in what became known as the Tower of Blood.
• Janissary bands inspired Mozart's Alla Turca, and a Naousa carnival recalls townspeople who resisted the levy in 1705.

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When Julius Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, his 18-year-old adopted son Octavian inherited his fortune, his name and a target on his back. Mark Antony, Caesar's master of the horse, held the loyalty of the veterans, so Octavian sold his own estates to pay the bonuses Caesar had promised. The two formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus to hunt down Brutus and Cassius, renewed it at Tarentum in 37 BC, and sealed it with Antony's marriage to Octavian's sister Octavia. Then Antony moved to Alexandria with Cleopatra and, in the Donations of Alexandria, proclaimed the 13-year-old Caesarion King of Kings.

Octavian struck back with coins and rumor, then read aloud Antony's will, seized from the Vestal Virgins after Lucius Munatius Plancus defected. Rome declared war on Cleopatra, not Antony. In 31 BC Marcus Agrippa cut Antony's grain routes by taking ports such as Methone, and malaria and desertion gutted Antony's camp at Actium. On 2 September 31 BC Agrippa's nimble Liburnians kept clear of Antony's undermanned quinqueremes, Cleopatra's 60 ships broke through and fled, and Antony followed, leaving his fleet and legions to surrender.

• Reading a living man's will broke Roman religious and legal norms, but its contents silenced objections.
• Scholar J.M. Carter argues Antony deliberately opened the center so Cleopatra and the war chest could escape.
• Antony fell on his sword after a false report of Cleopatra's death, and she took her own life rather than walk in Octavian's triumph.
• Octavian executed Caesarion and Antony's eldest son Antyllus, yet gave Antony and Cleopatra an honorable public funeral.
• He founded Nicopolis near Actium, mounted Antony's bronze rams on a monument, and became Augustus in 27 BC.

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In the summer of 1798 a French armada carried Napoleon Bonaparte's army, along with 167 scientists and scholars, from Toulon toward Egypt, a strategic flank meant to threaten British India. On the way Napoleon seized Malta and its treasure. Horatio Nelson, already missing his right arm and blind in his right eye, gave chase, but a gale dismasted his flagship and scattered his frigates. On the night of 22 June he overtook the French unseen, reached an empty Alexandria and left days before Napoleon landed.

Vice Admiral Brueys anchored his 13 warships in Aboukir Bay, trusting the shoals to guard his landward side. He misjudged the shallows, used only bow anchors so the ships swung apart, and left the landward guns cluttered. Nelson attacked at sunset on 1 August. Captain Thomas Foley in Goliath slipped around the head of the French line and anchored inshore, and other ships followed, catching the van between two fires. Nelson was struck in the head and carried below, but his captains fought on. Around 10 p.m. the 120-gun flagship L'Orient exploded, and both sides stopped firing for 10 to 15 minutes.

• Nelson's dinners with his captains during the long hunt gave them a shared plan, the band of brothers.
• British crews hauled spring cables to swing their anchored ships and aim broadsides.
• Four lanterns hoisted on every British mast told friend from foe in the dark.
• Of 17 French ships engaged, only two ships of the line and two frigates escaped, stranding Napoleon's army in Egypt.
• Napoleon's letter permitting Brueys to move the fleet to Corfu never arrived; its courier was killed on the coast.

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The legend says General Winter beat Napoleon in Russia, but most of the Grande Armée was gone before the first snow. The roots lay in 1807, when Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I allied and Russia joined the Continental System, a blockade of British trade that strangled Russian exports of timber, hemp and grain. By 1810 Alexander had withdrawn, and in June 1812 Napoleon crossed the Niemen with an army estimated at 450,000 to 685,000 men, about 150,000 horses and 25,000 supply wagons, built for the paved roads of central Europe.

Summer thunderstorms turned Russian dirt tracks into mud, wagons sank to their axles and horses died, while Napoleon pushed forced marches to catch an army that would not stand. Barclay de Tolly and Kutuzov retreated, burning crops and villages. At Borodino on 7 September about 70,000 fell, yet Napoleon held back the Imperial Guard. He entered Moscow on 14 September, governor Fyodor Rostopchin had it set ablaze, and Napoleon waited five weeks for a peace offer that never came. Blocked at Maloyaroslavets, the army retreated along its own devastated road into the winter.

• Starving soldiers bled living horses and baked the blood with flour into a crude black pudding.
• Typhus spread by body lice, with starvation and desertion, cost Napoleon half his combat strength before any major battle.
• Farriers had brought no calked winter horseshoes, so horses fell on the ice and artillery and Moscow loot were abandoned.
• Swiss engineers died of hypothermia building pontoon bridges over the Berezina.
• After General Malet nearly seized Paris with forged news of his death, Napoleon left his army on 5 December and raced home by sled.

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In October 1813 more than half a million soldiers converged on Leipzig for the Battle of the Nations, the largest clash of the Napoleonic Wars. After losing his veteran army in Russia, Napoleon had rebuilt with young conscripts, while the Sixth Coalition of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden and Britain followed the Trachenberg Plan of the Swedish crown prince Charles John, formerly Marshal Bernadotte: avoid Napoleon himself and beat his marshals, as at Grossbeeren and Dennewitz. Pushed back on Leipzig, Napoleon tried to use interior lines with about 198,000 men against roughly 380,000.

On 16 October a grand battery of 150 guns opened the allied center, but Murat's 10,000 cavalry, packed in dense columns, broke against Russian Guard squares. On the 17th Napoleon released the captured Austrian general Merveldt with a peace offer that went unanswered. On the 18th Probstheida became a nine-hour meat grinder, Saxon and Württemberg troops changed sides mid-battle, and Captain Richard Bogue's Congreve rockets spread panic. Napoleon ordered a retreat across the Elster over a single stone bridge.

• An estimated 400,000 cannonballs were fired over the course of the battle.
• About 5,400 Saxons near Paunsdorf turned their guns on the French, who at first thought they were charging.
• The order to destroy the bridge passed from General Dulauloy to Colonel Montfort to an unnamed corporal, who lit the fuse while it was packed with troops.
• Some 30,000 French were trapped, and Prince Józef Poniatowski, made a Marshal hours earlier, drowned in the river.
• Casualties reached 80,000 to 110,000, and locals were still finding remains a year later.

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On 2 December 1805, near Austerlitz in modern Czechia, Napoleon's Grande Armée faced the Russian and Austrian armies of the Third Coalition in what became known as the Battle of the Three Emperors. The army had been built at the Boulogne camps to invade Britain, but after French naval defeats Napoleon swung it east, encircled the Austrian general Mack at Ulm, captured 23,000 men and took Vienna. Deep in hostile territory with winter coming and Prussia wavering, he needed a decisive battle, while Mikhail Kutuzov wanted only to keep retreating.

So Napoleon staged weakness. He begged for an armistice, played a frightened commander before the Tsar's aide Prince Dolgorukov, and abandoned the Pratzen Heights over his marshals' objections. Tsar Alexander I sidelined Kutuzov and let the Austrian Weyrother plan an attack on the thin French right. As allied columns left the heights for Telnitz and Sokolnitz, Davout's corps arrived after a forced march, and Soult's men, hidden in the valley and the morning fog, stormed the hollowed center.

• Davout's third corps marched about 110 kilometers from Vienna in 48 hours and went straight into the fight.
• Asked how long his men needed to reach the heights, Soult answered less than 20 minutes.
• The allies lost about 36,000 men and nearly 200 cannon; the French lost around 9,000.
• The Treaty of Pressburg imposed a 40 million franc indemnity, and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806.
• William Pitt, hearing the news, said to roll up the map of Europe, and Napoleon never granted anyone the title Duke of Austerlitz.

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On 31 May 1916 some 250 warships and roughly 100,000 men of the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet met in the North Sea off Jutland. Outnumbered 28 dreadnoughts to 16, German commander Reinhard Scheer planned to lure part of the British fleet into a trap. But British intelligence in Room 40, reading German signals with a codebook Russian divers had recovered from the wrecked cruiser Magdeburg, spotted the change in call signs, and Admiral John Jellicoe sailed on 30 May before the Germans left port.

In the opening run to the south, David Beatty's battlecruisers fought Franz Hipper's and the Fifth Battle Squadron missed his flag signals in the smoke. Indefatigable and Queen Mary blew up, prompting Beatty's remark that something seemed wrong with his ships. Jellicoe then deployed 24 dreadnoughts in a six-mile line and crossed Scheer's T twice; Scheer escaped behind a torpedo attack and the death ride of his battlecruisers. In the night the Germans slipped through the British rear while captains watched in silence. Britain lost more ships and over 6,000 men, but the German fleet never risked a major surface battle again.

• German gunners used a fast ladder method of ranging while the British used a slower bracket system.
• British crews left safety doors open between turrets and magazines to boost rate of fire, so flash fires reached the powder.
• At Windy Corner the jammed rudder of Warspite sent her circling, drawing fire away from the crippled cruiser Warrior.
• A duty officer at the Admiralty filed away the decrypted Horns Reef escape route instead of passing it to Jellicoe.
• Confined to port, Germany turned to unrestricted submarine warfare, which helped bring the United States into the war.