Quotes About Warfare

Sparta would become increasingly marginalised in Greek affairs from this time on.

not even this was enough to prevent a Persian expeditionary force from fighting its way through Anatolia towards the capital in 615.

Philip was ideally suited to lead the expedition against the Persian 'barbarians'.

In 260 CE, the emperor Valerian was taken prisoner, along with much of his army, while campaigning against them.

The campaign that cost Julian his life was part of a series of wars on the empire's eastern frontier

This had been the number of Spartans killed during the defence of the pass of Thermopylae in 480 BCE

remembered ever since as the most heroic act of self-sacrifice during the Persian Wars.

More Greeks actually fought on the Persian side against him than under his banner.

This meant there was nothing the Spartans could do to prevent their enemies from being supplied by sea.

episodes of the war

Of the Melian population the Athenians executed all the grown men

Now an empty shell, after its heart was blown out by a Venetian cannonball in 1687

Philip won the day. As many as half the Athenians and Thebans were either killed or taken prisoner.

539, great numbers of them, called 'Huns' by Procopius, crossed the Danube

and broke through the undefended Balkans to devastate all of mainland Greece north of the Peloponnese.

Should the main line of defence be drawn at the Isthmus of Corinth, as the Spartans proposed?

if the Persian fleet was left intact to sail round and take the infantrymen from the rear.

Según sus informes, más de cien mil personas fueron muertas por miembros del ejército guatemalteco entre 1960 y 1996, y unas diez mil por miembros de los varios grupos guerrilleros en el mismo periodo».

On the Doncella, Federico Venusta had his hand mutilated by the explosion of his own grenade. He demanded a galley slave cut it off. When the man refused, he performed the operation himself and then went to the cook's quarters, ordered them to tie the carcass of a chicken over the bleeding stump, and returned to battle, shouting at his right hand to avenge his left.

Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.

Perhaps no defensive structure summarized the truth of siege warfare in the ancient and medieval world as clearly as the walls of Constantinople. The city lived under siege for almost all its life; its defenses reflected the deepest character and history of the place, its mixture of confidence and fatalism, divine inspiration and practical skill, longevity and conservatism.

In early April, while the big guns were busy pounding the land walls, Mehmet began to deploy the fleet, his other new weapon, for the first time.

So rapid was the Ottoman assimilation of cannon technology that by the 1440s they had evidently acquired the unique ability, widely commented on by eyewitnesses, to cast medium-size barrels on the battlefield in makeshift foundries. Murat transported gunmetal to the Hexamilion and cast many of his long guns on the spot. This allowed extraordinary flexibility during siege warfare:

Mustapha then had some of the bodies of the knights and a Maltese priest—"some mutilated, some without heads, some with their bellies ripped open"—dressed in their distinctive red-and-white surcoats and nailed to wooden crosses in parody of the crucifixion. The bodies were launched into the water off Saint Elmo's point, where the current washed them across to Birgu.