9 Factors That Caused The First Crusade – It Was Not As Simple As It Seems Today
On the surface, the First Crusade looks like something with a simple cause – the hatred of one religious group for another. In reality, the…
Fighting For Favor, Fighting For Fame – Recruiting Armies In The Unforgiving World Of Medieval England
Recruiting an army could be a difficult business in the Middle Ages. Most people’s lives consisted of farming small patches of land. When people didn’t…
7 Famous Medieval Knights – Warriors, Leaders, And Scholars
Medieval knights were among the celebrities of their day – warriors, leaders, and scholars. They became figures of romance and inspiration, giving them a special…
The Tide Turns On The Unstoppable Mongol Invasion
There are few military forces more infamous and renowned in history than the Mongolian armies of the 13th Century. They swept through Asia and into…
The Viking Mercenaries of the Byzantine Empire – The Varangian Guard
The Byzantines Hired Viking Mercenaries as Guards The relationship between the Byzantine Emperors and their Varangian Guard was a complex affair. The Byzantines were first…
AD 732, Battle of Tours: Charles Martel the ‘Hammer’ Holds The Line Of Battle
Few Empires emerged as quickly as that of the Muslim Caliphates. Bursting out from what is now Saudi Arabia in the mid-7th century, the Islamic…
The Battle of Arsuf – To Win the Day, One Man Must Defy His Own King
Beneath the relentless beating of the midday sun, under a seemingly endless rain of arrows, The Grand Master’s patience had all but run out. Garnier…
The Battle of Morgarten – Against All The Odds, One Small Army Changed the Course of European Military History
The supremacy of heavy cavalry and mounted knights on the battlefield came to an end one cold November morning in 1315, and it began with…
Four Men and One Woman – Five Mighty Leaders Whose Wars United Medieval England
In the late ninth century, England was not a united country. Viking raiders from Denmark controlled the north and east. Norwegian and Irish raids left…
The Janissaries – An Elite Ottoman Army Unit Who Became Public Enemy No1
The walls of Vienna trembled on 27th of September, 1529, as strange music echoed close by. The sound of hundreds of drums stopped the heartbeats…
Alone and In Disguise, Vlad the Impaler Walked Into His Enemy’s Camp to Prepare A Deadly Ambush
Mehmet II, known as Mehmet the Conqueror, was one of the greatest military commanders of his day. The Ottoman Empire under his rule was vast,…
Sappers and Siege engines – Ivan the Terrible Conquers The city of Kazan
The army had been in place under the city walls for weeks. Ivan the Fourth, Tsar of all the Russians, accompanied his force in the…