Send us a text The Battle of Breitenfeld, fought on September 17, 1631, was one of the most important battles of the Thirty Years' War. It was the greatest victory of King Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion from the North, and marked the beginning of the Stormaktstiden, Sweden's Age of Empire.
Send us a text The Battle of Nagashino is one of the most famous battles in Japanese history. It was the climax of the Sengoku Jidai, the Age of Warring States, a century-long period of civil wars and social upheaval. It represented the culmination of a revolution that had transformed Japanese warfare. And it punctures many myths of the samurai, the warrior-heroes of Japan. This episode also ends a long hiatus for Great Battles in History. For the past couple of years, I've been working on a boo...
Send us a text Trailer for Episode Six, the Battle of Nagashio, coming soon.
Send us a text On October 7, 1571, the fleets of the Christian Holy League and the Ottoman Empire clashed near Lepanto off the west coast of Greece. Lepanto was the largest battle on land or sea in Europe in the sixteenth century. During it, over 130,000 combatants had crewed some 500 oared warships. At the battle’s end, at least 35,000 Ottomans and 8,000 Christians had lost their lives. Lepanto was also the climax of a ferocious fifty-year-long struggle waged by the greatest naval powers of the...
Send us a text Trailer for Episode Five, the Battle of Lepanto, coming in January 2022. The music is Havada Bulut Yok by Turku, Nomads of the Silk Road , licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .
Send us a text The complete episode of Agincourt, including parts one to ten.
Send us a text Agincourt was an overwhelming victory for Henry V and England. After it, the English went on to conquer Normandy. Then, in 1420, Henry forced the French to agree to the treaty of Troyes, which made him the heir to the French throne. But his premature death in 1422 turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War. The French recovered and pushed their enemies out of France. By 1453, only Calais remained in English hands. The Hundred Years ' War was over....
Send us a text On October 24, 1415, the feast day of the twin saints Crispin and Crispinian, the English and French armies arrayed for battle on the muddy field of Agincourt. The action began when the English advanced and the longbowmen loosed a storm of arrows. When the fighting ended three hours later, the English had won an unexpected and total victory.
Send us a text After landing in Normandy, Henry V and the English army besieged the key port of Harfleur. The city fell following a six-week siege. Henry then decided to carry out a swift dash across France to the English-held fortress-town of Calais. Along the way, the French sought to bring him to battle. On October 24, 1415, near the village of Agincourt, Henry found a massive French army blocking the route to Calais. The English army had no choice except to fight....
Send us a text In 1413, Henry V succeeded to the throne of England. An able statesman and experienced warrior, he was determined to restore the English lands in France and press the Plantagenet claim to the French throne. Meanwhile, France had plunged into a devastating civil war between two noble factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. Taking advantage of this crisis, Henry landed in Normandy with a powerful army in August 1415....
Send us a text After the Battle of Poitiers, France's fortunes were at their lowest. In the 1360s, the new French king, Charles the Wise, led a remarkable recovery in political, financial and military strength. An English intervention in Spain then offered an opportunity to renew the Hundred Years' War. The French king and his Constable, the Breton knight Bertrand du Guesclin, carried out a spectacular reconquest that reduced English possessions in France to a remnant of Aquitaine....
Send us a text After winning his spurs at the Battle of Crécy, the Black Prince emerged as the finest commander of the Hundred Years' War. In 1356, the outbreak of civil war in France encouraged King Edward III to mount another invasion. On September 9, at Poitiers, the Black Prince defeated the French and captured King John II of France. The French agreed to a peace treaty at Brétigny in 1360. The first phase of the Hundred Years' War ended in complete triumph for England....
Send us a text During the first phase of the Hundred Years' War, King Edward III of England launched multiple invasions of France. However, King Philip VI of France managed to frustrate him by avoiding battle. Edward finally achieved a breakthrough in 1346. A large-scale, highly destructive raid--a chevauchée--forced Philip and the French to fight at the battle of Crécy.
Send us a text The Hundred Years' War at first appeared to be an unequal contest. France was the largest, wealthiest and most populous kingdom in medieval Europe. By comparison, England appeared puny and weak. But during the first thirty years of the fourteenth century, a military revolution transformed the English armies into the most fearsome war machine in Christendom. A key aspect of this revolution was the rise to prominence of the yeoman archer armed with the longbow....
Send us a text Hostilities between the two greatest kingdoms in medieval Europe, England and France, had three causes: the English kings' possession of vast lands in France, an English claim to the French throne, and French support for Scotland. In 1337, hostilities escalated into open war. Neither kingdom expected the conflict to last until 1453.
Send us a text On October 25, 1415, the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, on a field near the village and castle of Agincourt, an English army under King Henry V defeated a much larger French host. Agincourt would be the last great English victory of the long series of conflicts that came to be called, collectively, the Hundred Years' War. Five years after it, Henry V would claim the throne of France itself. Agincourt is also, thanks to William Shakespeare, the medieval battle with the...
Send us a text When I published the original Complete Episode of Hattin, I made a mistake: I omitted Part Five from the episode. Here is the corrected version. The newly included part begins at 1:34:57. Profuse apologies, faithful listeners.
Send us a text Trailer for Episode Four, the Battle of Agincourt, coming in June. The music is L'Homme Armé (The Armed Man), a fifteenth-century French chanson (public domain) and Red by Scott Buckley (https://soundcloud.com/scottbuckley Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/mN5TUQsVGoQ)....
Send us a text The complete episode of the Battle of Hattin, combining parts one to eight. If you are enjoying this podcast, please rate it wherever you are listening. And I would love to hear from you! If you have any questions, or comments, please write to greatbattleshistory@gmail.com .
Send us a text After Hattin, the Crusader States lay at Saladin’s mercy. The Muslim warlord swept into the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cities and castles fell to his armies. On October 2, 1187, he entered Jerusalem. Yet Saladin was unable to seize all of the Franks' ports. The Third Crusade, led by the formidable King Richard the Lionheart of England, was able to enter the Middle East and save the Crusader States from complete conquest. In the century after Hattin, crusading reached its climax. The Cr...
Send us a text After the death of the Leper King Baldwin IV in 1185, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem fell into turmoil. Two years later, Saladin invaded with a massive army. To face him, Guy de Lusignan, newly crowned king of Jerusalem, mustered every man who could bear arms. On July 4, 1187, the two armies met beneath the Horns of Hattin. At the end of the day, the host of Jerusalem had been wiped out....
Send us a text An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub—better known in the West as Saladin—would emerge as the greatest of all the Muslim warlords of the Crusades. He began his career as a Kurdish officer in the service of Nur al-Din. In 1169, he seized power in Egypt and overthrew the Fatimid Caliphate. Then, following the fortuitous death of Nur al-Din in 1174, he began the conquest of Syria. In time, he would construct an empire that extended from North Africa to Mesopotamia. He would also beco...
Send us a text From the earliest days, the Crusader States fought to break out of the narrow confines of the Mediterranean coast and conquer the Muslim hinterlands of the Middle East. At first, they could exploit Muslim disunity. Beginning in the middle of the twelfth century, however, the powerful warlord Imad al-Din Zengi unified Syria under his rule. Zengi’s son, Nur al-Din, then became the champion of a holy war—a jihad—against the infidels....
Send us a text The armies of the Crusader States were the finest and most formidable western fighting forces of the Middle Ages. Their potency was based on their adaptation of European military techniques to the challenges and conditions of the Middle East.
Send us a text A crucial reason for the success of the First Crusade was Muslim disunity. In the 1090s, the Seljuk Empire that ruled the heart of the Islamic world fell into crisis and civil war. The Middle East fragmented into innumerable mini-states ruled by warlords. The power of these warlords was based on their command of armies of some of the finest fighting men of the premodern age: Turkic nomad horse archers....
Send us a text In 1095, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade. Four years later, the crusaders conquered Jerusalem. In this part of the episode, we will examine why Europeans took up the cross and how they succeeded in accomplishing their goal of capturing Jerusalem. We will also look at the states the Crusaders established in the lands they conquered.
Send us a text The Battle of Hattin is the most famous battle of the Crusades. On July 4, 1187, the army of the Muslim warlord Saladin destroyed the host of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin. In the battle’s aftermath, Saladin overran the Crusader States. On October 2, he entered Jerusalem. Yet Hattin was not a decisive battle that ended the Crusades. It ushered in a century of renewed and intensified holy war. This episode begins by examining the First Crusade and the est...
Send us a text Trailer for episode three of Great Battles in History , the Battle of Hattin, coming in February. The music is Prince of Persia by Zapac (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Zapac/62569
Send us a text After Cannae, Hannibal was at the zenith of his success. Yet in the years after the battle, he squandered all his opportunities for final victory over Rome. Meanwhile, the Romans recovered from their crushing defeat. More importantly, they formulated a strategy that countered Hannibal’s battlefield genius. At last, in Scipio Africanus, the Romans found a general who could match the Carthaginian warlord. In 202 BCE, Africanus defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama. Carthage had on...
Send us a text In 216 BCE, the Roman Republic made a maximum military effort. It raised the largest army in its history and sent it to destroy Hannibal Barca. The Carthaginian warlord also wanted to fight a decisive battle. On August 2, the Roman and Carthaginian armies clashed near the hill town of Cannae in southern Italy. At the end of the day, the Roman army had been completely wiped out.
