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On January 10, 49 BC, Julius Caesar led the Legio XIII Gemina south across the Rubicon, a shallow stream about 80 kilometers long between Cesena and Rimini, named for the reddish color its iron deposits gave the water. It mattered only as a legal line between his province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, where a general's right to command ended, so crossing it with an army meant civil war. Suetonius describes Caesar hesitating on the bank until a supernatural apparition urged him on, and gives the line alea iacta est; Plutarch says he quoted the Greek playwright Menander. Pompey, the consuls and much of the Senate fled Rome.

In 42 BC Octavian merged Cisalpine Gaul into Italy, the border vanished, and so did the name. Centuries of floods on the plain between Ravenna and Rimini moved river channels, and late medieval drainage works straightened them into canals. Renaissance humanists then argued over which stream was the Rubicon. In 1933 Italy named the Fiumicino at Savignano di Romagna as the river and renamed the town Savignano sul Rubicone. Today the Fiumicino is one of the most polluted waterways in Emilia-Romagna.

• The night after the crossing Caesar dined with Sallust, Hirtius, Gaius Oppius, Lucius Cornelius Balbus and Servius Sulpicius Rufus.
• Backers of the Pisciatello planted a fake Roman decree banning armies from crossing there, which fooled the humanist Flavio Biondo.
• That forged inscription is now in the Museo Archeologico in Cesena.
• The Tabula Peutingeriana marks a river labeled Rubicum 12 Roman miles north of Rimini near the road junction Ad Confluentes on the Via Emilia.
• A 1991 study identified San Giovanni in Compito as Ad Confluentes and found the Fiumicino exactly one Roman mile away, 200 miles from Rome.

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After defeats at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene, Rome tried Fabius Maximus's strategy of avoiding battle, then rejected it. In 216 BC the Senate raised eight legions, about 86,000 men with allies, under two consuls, Varro and Paulus, who alternated supreme command daily. Hannibal seized the Roman supply depot at Cannae on an open plain by the Aufidus River, harassed Roman water carriers the day Paulus held command, and fought on Varro's day. The main surviving account comes from Polybius, a friend of Paulus's grandson Scipio Aemilianus, which may explain why Varro takes most of the blame.

Hannibal placed his Gauls and Iberians in a forward-bulging crescent at the center, stood with them himself, and kept his veteran African infantry on the wings, with the Romans facing the morning sun and a dust-laden wind. The deep Roman column pushed the center back into a pocket and crushed itself, Hasdrubal's cavalry swept around to hit its rear, and the Africans turned inward. Up to 80,000 Romans and allies died, cut down at a rate of roughly 600 men a minute. Capua and Tarentum defected and Philip V of Macedon pledged support, but Rome refused to make peace and fought on for 14 years.

• When an officer named Gisco remarked on the Roman numbers, Hannibal replied that not one of them was called Gisco, and the ranks laughed.
• Livy wrote of trapped Romans found the next morning with their faces buried in pits they had dug themselves.
• The dead included Paulus, two quaestors, 29 military tribunes and 80 senators or men eligible for the Senate.
• Hannibal's brother poured a pile of gold signet rings taken from dead Roman aristocrats onto the floor of the Carthaginian Senate.
• His cavalry commander Maharbal told him he knew how to win a victory but not how to use it, after Hannibal declined to march on Rome.

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In the early summer of 1575 Takeda Katsuyori, son of the feared Takeda Shingen, besieged Nagashino Castle in Tokugawa Ieyasu's Mikawa province with about 15,000 men against some 500 defenders. Ieyasu called on Oda Nobunaga, who arrived with more than 30,000 men. Nobunaga camped at Shitaragahara in a hollow that hid his numbers, built staggered wooden stockades along the river, and sent a flying column of about 4,000 men on a night march that captured the fort guarding the Takeda rear. With his retreat cut off and the enemy apparently small, Katsuyori had little choice but to attack the fences. By 2 p.m. the Takeda had lost about 10,000 men, two-thirds of their force.

The famous story of 3,000 Oda gunners firing in three rotating ranks comes from the Edo-period Shinchōki of the Confucian scholar Oze Hoan and was made official doctrine by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff in 1903. The contemporary Shinchō Kōki mentions perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 guns spread among five commanders and no rotating volleys, and the Takeda had a similar number. The difference was supply: through the port of Sakai, Nobunaga controlled Portuguese trade in lead and saltpeter, while the landlocked Takeda were under blockade.

• The samurai Torii Sune'emon slipped out to find the relief army, was captured, and shouted to the garrison that help was coming before he was executed.
• Lead isotope analysis shows Oda bullets came from mines in Thailand, South China and Korea.
• Takeda bullets matched the composition of Chinese copper coins, melted down for want of lead.
• Historian Fujita Tatsuo has framed the battle as an early proxy conflict in which the Portuguese backed Nobunaga.
• Veteran Takeda generals Baba Nobuharu, Yamagata Masakage and Naito Masatoyo died, and the clan was destroyed in 1582.

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The Landsknechte were German mercenaries who fought across Europe from the late 15th to the early 17th century, recruited from dispossessed craftsmen, landless younger sons, runaway serfs and impoverished nobles. They were created by Archduke Maximilian I, later Holy Roman Emperor, who had watched Swiss pike squares wreck Burgundian armies but could not hire the Swiss because France had locked up their services by treaty. In 1486 he hired Swiss instructors to train a German unit at Bruges, the Black Guard. A colonel raised a regiment of about 4,000 men under a letter patent setting pay and articles of war, divided into ten companies of 400, with small squads that elected their own leaders.

On the field they carried pikes about 14 feet long and drew short Katzbalger swords when pike blocks locked together. They helped crush the French and capture Francis I at Pavia in 1525 and held Vienna against the Ottomans in 1529. When Charles V could not pay them in 1527, some 14,000 Landsknechte among 34,000 mutinous imperial troops marched on Rome; their commander Georg von Frundsberg suffered a stroke, and the city was sacked for months. Spanish tercios with massed musketeers and state-controlled imperial foot soldiers later replaced them.

• Each regiment traveled with a baggage train of women, children and craftsmen, policed by an officer bluntly titled the whore's sergeant.
• A provost marshal enforced discipline with his own jailer, bailiff and executioner.
• Double-pay veterans fought in the front ranks, some swinging two-handed swords to cut or knock aside enemy pike shafts.
• The snail formation rotated men from the front to the rear of the block so fresh fighters kept rotating forward.
• Maximilian encouraged court dancing and fencing to train the footwork the rotating formations required.

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In the spring of 1754 a 22-year-old Virginia militia officer, George Washington, ordered his men to fire on a small French patrol at Jumonville Glen in Pennsylvania. Britain and France both claimed the Ohio River Valley, and France had built forts such as Fort Duquesne, at the site of modern Pittsburgh, to block British settlers. The French retaliated and forced Washington to surrender at Fort Necessity, and the Royal Navy began seizing French ships before any declaration of war. France threatened Hanover, held by George II, and the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 followed: Britain allied with Prussia, and France joined its old rival Austria, whose Empress Maria Theresa wanted back the province of Silesia that Frederick the Great had taken.

William Pitt the Elder paid Prussia to keep French and Austrian armies tied down in Europe while the navy blockaded French ports and the army picked off France's overseas empire. Britain called 1759 its year of miracles. Frederick, nearly destroyed, survived because Russia could not feed its army. The 1763 Treaty of Paris removed France from North America, but it left Britain isolated, and the debts of the war fed both the American and French Revolutions.

• James Wolfe led about 5,000 men up a narrow path to the Plains of Abraham at night, and both Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm were mortally wounded.
• Wolfe's troops double-loaded their muskets and held fire until the French were about 40 paces away.
• Robert Clive's 1757 victory at Plassey secured Britain's foothold in India, and Britain also seized Senegal, Gorée and Guadeloupe.
• Frederick lost half his army at Kunersdorf in 1759 and wrote a letter handing over command while considering suicide.
• Russia's later logistical reforms, prompted by its failure to follow up Kunersdorf, helped it march on Paris against Napoleon in 1814.

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By late 1914 the Western Front had frozen and Russia needed a supply route through the Black Sea, which ran through the Ottoman-held Dardanelles. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed forcing the straits with older pre-dreadnought battleships. On March 18, 1915, an Anglo-French armada of 18 battleships went in and failed. Flat-firing naval guns could not reach mobile howitzers hidden in the hills, minesweepers fled under fire, and a fresh line of mines laid ten days earlier by the minelayer Nusret sank the French Bouvet in two minutes along with the British Irresistible and Ocean. Unwilling to accept defeat, the Allies decided to land an army under General Ian Hamilton.

The April 25 landings at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove met an enemy that had used a five-week delay to dig in. Mustafa Kemal had argued for reserves close to the beaches and rushed his division to the heights above the Anzac landing. Trench stalemate, heat, flies and dysentery followed. The August offensive at Suvla Bay, Lone Pine, the Nek and Chunuk Bair failed, Bulgaria's entry opened a rail link to Constantinople, and the Allies evacuated in December 1915 and January 1916. Each side suffered about 250,000 casualties.

• Allied planners relied on Baedeker travel guides, and ships packed in England had to be unloaded and repacked at Alexandria.
• Kemal told his 57th Regiment he did not order them to attack but to die, and the regiment was wiped out holding the Anzacs back.
• An older Ottoman soldier was allowed to hang laundry on the barbed wire, and the two sides traded dates and sweets for bully beef and cigarettes.
• Drip rifles fired by water slowly filling a tin tied to the trigger hid the evacuation from Ottoman sentries.
• Asquith had to form a coalition government, Churchill was demoted and went to the Western Front, and Kemal became Atatürk, first president of Turkey.

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Quintus Fabius Maximus, born around 280 BC into the Fabian family, was mocked as a child as slow and cautious and nicknamed Verrucosus, warty, for a wart on his lip. He still built a conventional career as an augur and as consul in 233 BC, winning a triumph over the Ligurians. In 218 BC he led the Roman embassy to Carthage demanding Hannibal's surrender; he gathered a fold of his toga, said it held peace and war, and when the Carthaginians told him to choose, let it fall for war. After the disasters at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene, the Senate named him dictator but forced on him a rival, Marcus Minucius, as master of the horse.

Fabius calmed the city with mass sacrifices and festivals, then shadowed Hannibal from high ground where Numidian cavalry could not charge, attacked foragers, and burned crops. Romans called him Cunctator, the Delayer, as an insult. After Minucius was given equal power and walked into Hannibal's trap at Geronium, Fabius rescued him, and Minucius submitted to his command again. Cannae in 216 BC proved Fabius right, and his strategy became Rome's policy in Italy. He later opposed Scipio's invasion of Africa and died in 203 BC, before Zama.

• As dictator he won an exemption to ride a horse and made a sitting consul dismiss his lictors and approach as a private citizen.
• He ordered every citizen to spend exactly 333 sesterces and 333 denarii as part of the religious campaign.
• The consul Paulus told Fabius he feared Roman voters more than Hannibal's army before Cannae.
• After Cannae, Fabius posted guards at the gates to stop flight and limited private mourning to 30 days.
• His strategy later earned George Washington the name American Fabius and Mikhail Kutuzov the name Russian Fabius.

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Edward the Confessor died on January 5, 1066, and the English nobles elected Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex. Two rivals claimed the throne: Harald Hardrada of Norway, through an old Scandinavian treaty, and William of Normandy, who said Edward had promised it to him and Harold had sworn an oath to uphold his claim. Harold massed his army on the south coast, but on September 8 he had to send the fyrd home, since its farmers owed about two months' service and the harvest could not wait. Almost at once Hardrada and Harold's exiled brother Tostig landed in the north with some 300 ships, won at Fulford and took York. Harold marched about 200 miles north and destroyed them at Stamford Bridge on September 25.

Northerly winds had held William's fleet in Normandy for weeks. They shifted on September 27, and William landed at Pevensey the next day, raised a prefabricated wooden castle at Hastings and ravaged the country. Harold marched south at about 27 miles a day, leaving his archers behind, and on October 14 formed a shield wall on Senlac Hill. The wall held through archery, infantry and cavalry attacks until parts of it broke ranks to pursue. Harold was killed, and William was crowned on Christmas Day 1066.

• Norwegian survivors of Stamford Bridge were allowed to sail home in just 24 of their 300 ships.
• William built an estimated 700 ships in nine months and recruited knights from Brittany and Flanders under a papal banner.
• When a rumor spread that William had died, he pushed back his helmet to show his face and stopped the rout of his Breton left flank.
• Norman cavalry repeatedly staged feigned flights, then wheeled on the English who chased them onto open ground.
• About 4,000 English and 2,000 Normans died, and William later had the ridge leveled to build Battle Abbey, its altar said to mark where Harold fell.

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The road to Adwa began with the 1889 Treaty of Wuchale. Its Amharic text said Ethiopia could use Italy's services in foreign relations; the Italian text said it must, which would have made Ethiopia a protectorate. Emperor Menelik II rejected the Italian reading and used the years of diplomatic stalling to import tens of thousands of French and Russian rifles and Hotchkiss artillery, while Italy's attempts to turn Tigrayan leaders against him failed: by 1894 Ras Mengesha and Ras Alula came to Addis Ababa to pay homage. After early Ethiopian victories such as Amba Alagi, both armies sat starving in Tigray in February 1896. General Oreste Baratieri wanted to wait, but Prime Minister Francesco Crispi demanded a victory.

On the night of February 29 Baratieri sent three columns to seize the heights near Adwa. General Albertone, using a crude map, marched to the wrong pass, and the Ethiopians, informed of every move, destroyed the separated brigades one by one on March 1. About 6,000 Italian and colonial troops died and nearly 4,000 were captured. Menelik halted at the Eritrean border rather than risk a wider war. Crispi resigned, and the Treaty of Addis Ababa recognized Ethiopian independence.

• The Italian journalist Adolfo Rossi warned that the command was hungry for medals and overstretched, and was expelled days before the battle.
• Awalem, an interpreter on Baratieri's payroll, passed Italian movements to Ras Alula.
• When Italian artillery shook Ethiopian morale, Empress Taytu Betul and Ras Mengesha urged Menelik to commit a 25,000-man reserve.
• General Dabormida's brigade wandered into a valley, opened a two-mile gap, and was pinned by forces under Ras Makonnen.
• About 800 captured Eritrean askari had their right hands and left feet amputated as traitors.

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In July 1346 Edward III landed in Normandy with about 15,000 men and launched a chevauchée, a destructive raid that cut a path roughly 20 miles wide, looted Caen and came within two miles of Paris. Philip VI issued the arrière-ban, raised a far larger army, and stripped the countryside ahead of the English to trap them against the Somme. On the night of August 24 the starving English forced the tidal ford of Blanchetaque, wading in water up to their necks, and slipped away. Edward then chose his ground at Crécy-en-Ponthieu, anchoring his flanks on Wadicourt and on Crécy and the River Maye, and spent the morning of August 26 digging pits to break cavalry charges.

The French arrived late in the afternoon after a 12-mile march, jostling for the honor of the first strike, and attacked despite advice to wait for dawn. A summer storm broke; the English unstrung their bows while the Genoese crossbowmen, without their pavises, could not span their weapons in the mud. When the Genoese fell back, French knights under the Count of Alençon rode them down, then charged uphill from a standstill into the arrows. The French charged again and again until near midnight.

• Some 5,000 to 7,000 English longbowmen, each issued 72 arrows, could loose up to 10 bodkin-tipped arrows a minute against a crossbow's two.
• English bombards and ribauldequins made Crécy one of the first European battles with field artillery.
• The blind King John of Bohemia had his knights tie their bridles to his, and they were found dead together the next day.
• Philip VI lost two horses under him and took an arrow to the jaw, and the Prince of Wales was beaten to his knees before being rescued.
• English heralds counted about 1,542 dead French nobles, and Edward went on to take Calais, held by England for over two centuries.