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Rifled artillery made old masonry star forts obsolete, so France and Belgium buried their defenses in reinforced concrete with low steel cupolas, including Belgium's National Redoubt. Germany's Schlieffen Plan depended on crossing Belgium fast, and its largest 21-centimeter howitzer could barely mark the new forts. Inspired by Japan's use of 28-centimeter coastal guns at Port Arthur in 1904, Krupp first built the Gamma-Gerät, which weighed 150 tons, ran on special rails and needed a concrete foundation. The answer by 1911 was the M-Gerät: a 42-centimeter howitzer of 42.6 tons, split into five loads, towed by tractors on wheels fitted with broad steel plates at about 4.3 miles per hour.

Its high explosive shells weighed over a ton and carried delay fuses that let them bore up to 12 meters into the earth before detonating. From August 12, 1914 the forts around Liège collapsed, and Namur, Maubeuge and Antwerp followed within days. At Fort de Loncin the 25th shot detonated the main magazine, and General Gérard Leman was pulled unconscious from the rubble. By Verdun in 1916 the French had added sand layers to forts such as Vaux and Douaumont, so shells exploded short. Faulty shells began bursting in the barrels, crews fired by lanyard from cover, and three of four Beta-M-Gerät conversions blew up.

• German troops named the gun Dicke Bertha after Bertha Krupp, heiress of the firm that built it.
• A base plate with a spade dug into the ground replaced the concrete foundation and let the gun traverse 360 degrees.
• The guns still worked on the Eastern Front, where older Russian forts at Kaunas shattered like the Belgian ones.
• The two surviving guns went to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland after the war and were scrapped.
• The Big Bertha name is often confused with the Paris Gun, a railway gun that shelled Paris from 75 miles away.

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Richard of Gloucester was born in October 1452 into an England run on bastard feudalism, where super-wealthy nobles paid retainers in cash and protected them in court through livery and maintenance. At eight he lost his father, the Duke of York, at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, and the victors set a paper crown on the duke's severed head above the gates of York. Under his brother Edward IV, Richard became a loyal enforcer in the north, married Anne Neville in 1472, and led a campaign into Scotland in 1482. When Edward died in April 1483, Richard became Lord Protector for 12-year-old Edward V as the queen's Woodville family moved to control the boy.

Edward V reigned 78 days. A sermon at St Paul's declared Edward IV's marriage bigamous, making his children illegitimate, and Richard took the throne on June 26, 1483, as his nephews vanished in the Tower of London. His chief ally the Duke of Buckingham rebelled within months, and southern Yorkists fled abroad as Richard handed their lands to northern loyalists. After Anne Neville died in March 1485, rumors that he poisoned her to marry his niece Elizabeth of York forced a public denial. Henry Tudor landed in Wales that August, and at Bosworth on August 22 the Stanleys watched from a hill before attacking Richard, who died after killing Henry's standard bearer.

• Edward III's great dukedoms for his sons created the class of super nobles with their own private armies.
• Under livery and maintenance a retainer wore his lord's badge, such as Richard's white boar, and was shielded from the courts.
• Margaret Beaufort, under house arrest, brokered the alliance that promised Henry Tudor's marriage to Elizabeth of York.
• Rhys ap Thomas, paid by Richard to guard the Welsh coast, joined Henry Tudor's army instead.
• Henry VII united the roses in the Tudor Rose and curbed livery and maintenance to strip lords of private armies.

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After the Civil War, settlers on the treeless Great Plains had no stone or timber for fences. In 1872 farmers near Fresno, California spent nearly $4,000 fencing a 2,500-acre wheat crop with shipped-in wood, and Osage orange hedges grew too slowly. At the 1873 DeKalb, Illinois county fair, Henry Rose showed a wooden strip with metal points to hang on wire. Watching were farmer Joseph Glidden, hardware dealer Isaac Ellwood and lumber merchant Jacob Haish. Glidden used parts of his wife's coffee mill to coil barbs and a grindstone to twist a second wire around them, locking the barbs in place. Despite Haish's interference challenge, he won his patent in November 1874 and named it The Winner.

In 1876 salesman John Warren Gates penned wild Texas cattle inside a barbed wire corral on San Antonio's Military Plaza, and the wire held. Enclosure set off the Texas fence cutting wars, which led the legislature in an 1884 special session to make fence cutting a felony. In the winter of 1885 drifting herds froze against Panhandle fences in the Big Die Up. The wire then went to war: Portuguese troops at Magul in 1895, British camps during the Boer War, and the trenches of the First World War. It later enclosed Manzanar, Nazi camps such as Auschwitz, and East Germany's border.

• Lucien B. Smith of Ohio had patented an early thorny fence idea in 1867.
• A properly built fence holds up to half a ton of tension, anchored by braced corner posts rather than the line posts.
• Installers tie the wire to corner posts with a hand-tied timber hitch because crimp sleeves fatigue and slip.
• Artillery blasts and shrapnel often passed through the open wire of First World War entanglements without cutting it.
• Wiring parties twisted corkscrew-shaped screw pickets silently into no man's land at night instead of hammering posts.

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Babur, a Timurid prince born in the Fergana Valley and descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, repeatedly won and lost Samarkand before the Uzbek ruler Muhammad Shaybani drove him from his homeland by 1504. From Kabul he turned southeast into the Punjab. The Delhi Sultanate under Ibrahim Lodi was fracturing, and Daulat Khan Lodi, governor of the Punjab, invited Babur to invade, expecting him to plunder and leave as Timur had in 1398. Babur instead took Sialkot and Dipalpur, installed Ibrahim's uncle Alam Khan as a proxy, regrouped in Kabul, and crossed the Indus again at the end of 1525 to march on Delhi.

At Panipat in April 1526, Babur had about 12,000 men, matchlock muskets and 15 to 20 cannon against a Lodi army of 50,000 to 70,000 with around 1,000 war elephants. He anchored his right on the town, dug a trench filled with trees on his left, and lashed 700 carts with rawhide ropes across his front, using the Ottoman araba system with breastworks for musketeers and gaps for cavalry sorties. On April 21 Lodi attacked into the funnel. The artillery, under the Ottoman master Ustad Ali Quli, panicked the elephants into trampling their own infantry while Babur's horse archers enveloped the army. Ibrahim Lodi died with at least 20,000 of his men, and Babur went on to win at Khanwa in 1527 and the Ghaghara in 1529, founding the Mughal Empire.

• By 1519 Babur's expeditions had reached as far as the Chenab River.
• Before Babur arrived in 1524, Ibrahim Lodi had already driven Daulat Khan out of the Punjab, voiding the alliance.
• The gaps in Babur's wagon line were measured to let 150 riders pass at a time.
• Babur waited behind his fortifications for more than a week before Lodi committed to attack.
• The encircling cavalry move was the Central Asian tactic known as the tulughma.

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About a decade before Marathon, Athens and Eretria sent 25 ships to support the Ionian revolt and helped burn the lower city of Sardis. Herodotus says Darius I shot an arrow skyward vowing vengeance and had a servant remind him at dinner three times: remember the Athenians. In midsummer 490 BC a Persian fleet of about 600 triremes carrying around 25,000 infantry and cavalry destroyed Eretria and landed at the Bay of Marathon, guided by Hippias, the tyrant Athens had expelled. Some 10,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plataeans blocked the exits, while the runner Pheidippides ran 140 miles to Sparta, which refused to march until the Carneia festival ended with the full moon.

After a five-day standoff, the Persian cavalry apparently re-embarked to sail for undefended Athens. The general Miltiades matched the wider Persian line by thinning his center, led by Themistocles and Aristides, to four ranks while keeping the wings eight deep. The Greeks sprinted the last 200 meters through arrow fire, the wings crushed the Persian flanks, and they wheeled in to envelop the center. About 6,400 Persians died against 192 Athenians, including the war archon Callimachus. The army then marched roughly 25 miles back to Athens the same day, and the Persian fleet sailed home. The Spartans arrived the next day.

• Herodotus wrote that the Persians thought the charging Greeks were possessed by a fatal madness.
• Cynegirus, brother of the playwright Aeschylus, seized a Persian ship's stern and died when his hand was cut off.
• Athens vowed a goat to Artemis for each Persian killed and paid it off at 500 goats a year for some 90 years.
• Legends told of the god Pan spreading panic among the Persians and the ghost of Theseus leading the charge.
• Michel Bréal pitched the marathon race to Pierre de Coubertin for the 1896 Athens Olympics, based on a myth Herodotus never recorded.

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Around 8 BCE a boy of about 10 from the Cherusci tribe was taken to Rome as a hostage after the general Drusus defeated his people. Rome gave Arminius a Roman education, Latin, law and military training, and enrolled him in the equestrian order. He commanded auxiliaries in the Balkans and returned to Germania around 4 CE as a trusted adviser to the governor Quinctilius Varus, whose heavy taxes and crucifixions bred resentment. Arminius secretly united rival tribes, including the Marsi, Chatti, Bructeri and Cherusci. His father-in-law Segestes warned Varus of the plot, but Varus dismissed it as family spite.

In September 9 CE Arminius reported a staged uprising and steered Varus's three legions, the 17th, 18th and 19th, off the military roads into the forested territory of the Angrivarii. The column, with its baggage train and camp followers, stretched 15 to 20 kilometers. After days of hit and run attacks, the tribes drove it into a gap barely 100 meters wide at Kalkriese, between a wooded slope and the Great Bog, where warriors fought from behind a hidden earthen wall in heavy rain. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Romans died, and Varus fell on his sword. Germanicus later led campaigns of revenge, but Tiberius ended them, and in 21 CE Arminius was poisoned by his own family.

• As a boy around 11 BCE, Arminius likely watched a Cherusci ambush nearly destroy Drusus's army in bad terrain.
• Rain soaked the Roman scutum shields and mud denied legionaries the footing and space their formations needed.
• Augustus reportedly beat his head against the palace walls crying for Varus to give back his legions, and the numbers 17, 18 and 19 were never used again.
• Arminius sent Varus's severed head to the king Maroboduus, who refused an alliance and returned it to Rome for burial.
• In the 1870s Germany built the Hermannsdenkmal, a monument whose raised sword points west toward France.

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For about 50 years King Hiero II kept Syracuse a loyal ally of Rome. After his death his grandson Hieronymus was manipulated by an anti-Roman faction and assassinated, and the brothers Epicydes and Hippocrates, who had served under Hannibal in Italy, took control. With the Second Punic War raging, Rome sent Marcus Claudius Marcellus in 213 BC to besiege the city by land and sea. Defending it was Archimedes, a mathematician close to 80 who turned his work on levers and compound pulleys into weapons against the Roman sambuca, a siege tower built on two lashed warships.

Calibrated torsion catapults and ballistas struck ships at range, and the claw, a hidden crane behind the sea wall, hooked galleys, lifted their prows from the water, and dropped them to capsize or smash on the rocks. The siege stalled until 212 BC, when Romans scaled the walls during a festival to Artemis and opened the outer city. Marcellus ordered Archimedes spared, but a soldier who did not recognize him killed him after the old man told him to leave his diagrams alone. The citadel of Achradina held out eight more months until the Iberian mercenary captain Moericus opened a gate near the fountain of Arethusa, and the city was sacked.

• Archimedes' torsion weapons stored energy in tightly twisted bundles of animal sinew or rope wound by winches.
• A block and tackle let a small team of men or oxen inside the walls lift the prow of a Roman galley into the air.
• Historians and scientists dismiss the story of burning mirrors, since a moving ship could not hold a focal point long enough to ignite.
• Carthaginian supply ships slipped through the Roman blockade in bad weather, keeping the city fed.
• By 210 BC Sicily was a Roman province and later became the staging ground for Rome's invasions of Africa.

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In 332 BC Alexander needed to deny the Persian navy its Phoenician bases, and the richest was Tyre, an island fortress about half a mile off the coast of modern Lebanon with walls reportedly 150 feet high. When he asked to sacrifice at the island temple of Melqart, a god he linked to his ancestor Heracles, the Tyrians told him to use the old temple on the mainland. They then killed his envoys and threw their bodies from the walls. Alexander answered by building a causeway roughly a kilometer long and 200 feet wide, tearing down mainland Old Tyre for rubble and driving cedar piles from Lebanon into the seabed.

Two 160-foot siege towers covered in wet hides shielded the workers until the Tyrians sent a fireship packed with pitch and sulfur, its stern weighted so the prow rode up onto the causeway and burned the towers. Alexander left to gather a navy, and with the fleets of Byblos, Arwad, Sidon and 120 galleys from the kings of Cyprus he returned with 223 ships and blockaded both harbors. Ship-mounted rams breached the south wall, and Arrian says Alexander led the assault personally. After seven months, 6,000 to 8,000 defenders were killed, 2,000 were crucified along the shore, and 13,000 to 30,000 were sold into slavery, while the king of Tyre and those sheltering in Melqart's temple were spared.

• Near the island the seabed dropped to depths of up to 18 feet, slowing the causeway as Tyrian ships attacked the workers.
• Catapults on the upper floors of the towers hit the walls while ballistas below kept Tyrian ships at a distance.
• Tyrian divers cut the anchor ropes of the Macedonian ram ships until Alexander replaced them with iron chains.
• A Tyrian breakout timed for Alexander's usual midday rest failed because he had skipped his nap that day.
• Polyaenus offers an alternative account in which Alexander used a feigned retreat to catch the Tyrians off guard.

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In 333 BC a 23-year-old Alexander was marching down the coast of Asia Minor, taking ports like Miletus and Halicarnassus to strip the superior Persian navy of its harbors. Waiting near Myriandus for Darius III to come through the Belen Pass, he was blindsided: Darius took the northern Amanic Gate, slipped behind the mountains, seized Issus, cut Alexander's supply lines, and mutilated the sick and wounded Macedonians left there. Alexander turned north to fight on ground he had not chosen, a coastal plain by the Pinarus River only about 2.6 kilometers wide between the Gulf of Issus and the mountains.

Modern estimates put Darius at about 100,000 men against Alexander's 40,000, but the narrow frontage cancelled most of that edge. Crossing the river and climbing staked banks, the phalanx lost cohesion, Darius's Greek mercenaries cut into the gaps, and 120 Macedonian officers fell. Alexander broke the Persian left with his hypaspists and then drove a Companion cavalry wedge at Darius, who fled in his chariot. With Parmenion's wing near collapse, Alexander turned back and struck the mercenaries from behind, and the Persian army routed. Darius left behind his mother Sisygambis, his wife Stateira and two daughters, whom Alexander treated with royal respect.

• Ptolemy, who rode in the pursuit, recorded that the victors crossed a ravine filled with the bodies of the dead.
• Ancient writers credited Darius with up to 600,000 men, a figure modern historians reject as impossible to supply.
• Curtius points to a theory that Alexander, advised by Parmenion, deliberately baited Darius into the coastal bottleneck.
• Darius fortified the Pinarus banks with stakes and earthworks and set his line in the shape of the Greek letter gamma.
• Alexander, educated by Aristotle, later married one of Darius's captured daughters.

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After his defeat at Issus in 333 BC, the Persian king Darius III sent Alexander three escalating peace offers. The last offered all land west of the Euphrates, co-rulership of the Achaemenid Empire, marriage to his daughter, and 30,000 talents of silver. When the general Parmenion said he would accept if he were Alexander, Alexander replied that so would he, if he were Parmenion. Alexander then left Egypt in 331 BC, crossed the Euphrates at Thapsacus, took a northern route, forded the Tigris, and endured a near total lunar eclipse before learning Darius was camped eight miles away at Gaugamela, flattening the plain for his chariots.

On October 1, 331 BC, roughly 47,000 Macedonians faced a Persian force modern estimates put at 50,000 to 100,000. Alexander marched his line sideways toward rough ground, forcing Darius to send cavalry wide and launch 200 scythed chariots, which skirmishers struck with javelins and the phalanx let through open lanes. When a gap tore open in the Persian center, Alexander drove a wedge at Darius, who fled. A desperate message from Parmenion's collapsing left wing made Alexander abandon the pursuit, and 60 Companion cavalry died in the fight back. Darius was later murdered by the satrap Bessus, whom Alexander executed before giving Darius a royal burial at Persepolis.

• Ancient writers inflated Darius's army to as many as a million infantry, a number no ancient supply system could have fed.
• Alexander's seers declared the eclipse meant the Persian moon would be eclipsed by the Macedonian sun.
• Alexander placed a second infantry line behind the phalanx with orders to face about if Persian cavalry got behind them.
• Persian and Indian cavalry broke through the Macedonian center but rode on to loot the baggage camp, where Darius's mother Sisygambis reportedly refused rescue.
• Court historians such as Callisthenes later portrayed Parmenion as a failure, though his wing held against superior numbers.