medieval warfare
The Saxon warriors worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk atop the mountain felling trees, cutting them into logs, and adding them to the field fort they were building on a flat spur of the Suntel Mountains in the heart of their homeland. Read more
medieval warfare
The Latin Crusaders manning the battlements were armed with spears, axes, and crossbows. They shared with each other a desire to fight and die for the Cross. Read more
medieval warfare
The christian crusaders that marched south into Ottoman Rumelia in 1444 bet heavily that the combined power of Poland, Hungary, and Wallachia would prove sufficient to break the iron grip the Ottoman Porte had on the southern Balkans. Read more
medieval warfare
In the late evening of March 29, 1432, Murad II, sultan of the Ottoman Turks, awaited the imminent birth of his child to one of his harem wives. Read more
medieval warfare
The tension between the king and his barons always seemed to be ready to explode into civil war during the reign of the three Angevin kings of England. Read more
medieval warfare
By William E. Welsh
The ambush of Duke King Leopold I’s army by Swiss foot soldiers on the mountain road at Morgarten in 1315 ushered in a roughly 200-year period where the hard-hitting Swiss maintained a reputation as elite foot soldiers. Read more
medieval warfare
Following English King Henry V’s decisive victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, the tide of the Hundred Years War in France remained in England’s favor until the Siege of Orleans. Read more
medieval warfare
The ambush of Duke King Leopold I’s army by Swiss foot soldiers on the mountain road at Morgarten in 1315 ushered in a roughly 200-year period where the hard-hitting Swiss maintained a reputation as elite foot soldiers. Read more
medieval warfare
The three contemporary narrative accounts of the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade are gripping, chilling, and enlightening. They offer rich insight into the period when the Languedoc region of modern-day southwestern France was tied more closely to the Kingdom of Aragon than the fledgling Kingdom of France. Read more
medieval warfare
In one of those ironies with which history abounds Polish Duke Conrad of Mazovia in 1226 invited the German Roman Catholic military order known as the Teutonic Knights to assist him in subjugating the unruly, pagan Prussians who were raiding his lands. Read more
medieval warfare
On December 25, 1065, King Edward the Confessor presided over a spectacular Christmas banquet at his palace on Thorney Island in the Thames River, just two miles upstream from London. Read more
medieval warfare
For the last eight centuries, the Chateau de Castelnaud has stood sentinel on a great limestone outcropping 525 feet above the Dordogne River in southwestern France. Read more
medieval warfare
The golden age of armor lasted from about 1400 to 1550. And what an age it was. Who can look at a fine suit of armor from this period and not feel a mixture of pity and awe? Read more
medieval warfare
At the height of their power, the Levantine military-religious orders were a political and military force to be reckoned with not only in the Latin East where they were founded, but also in the Latin West where they had vast estates that funneled manpower and supplies east for the fight against the foes of Christendom. Read more
medieval warfare
Flanking movements were long known to English military commanders, but traditionally they were limited to maneuvers by one wing around an enemy’s line—not by the entire army itself, which would have been considered highly unorthodox and far too risky. Read more
medieval warfare
The final defeat of the Saxon King Harold at the Battle of Hastings on October 14, 1066, meant that England became forever Norman. Read more
medieval warfare
Denis de Morbecque, an exiled French knight in the service of the English crown, thought the fighting in the hawthorn hedgerows near Poitiers would never end. Read more
