medieval warfare

medieval warfare

Hungary’s National Hero

Janos Hunyadi, Hungary’s national hero, was one of the great captains in the war between Europe and the Ottoman Turks. Read more

medieval warfare

Frankish Disaster in Saxony

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 Last Banner Falls at the Siege of Acre

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

Weighing the Odds of Crusader Success

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

Conquest of Constantinople

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

King John the Tyrant

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

The Swiss Pikemen

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

Three Key Battles Before the Siege of Orleans

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

Heavy infantry comes of age in the Swiss Confederacy.

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

Stirring Accounts of the Albigensian Crusade

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

Twilight of the Teutonic Order

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

King Harold and the Battle of Hastings

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

The Chateau de Castelnaud’s Museum of 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

Medieval Knight Armor: The Iron Plate Suit of Arms

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

Brother-Knights Held Vast Power

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

Turning the Flank at Flodden

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

William, Duke of Normandy

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

Stunning English Victory at Poitiers

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