Ottoman Empire

Naval Carnage at Navarino

By Victor Kamenir

At 2 PM on October 20, 1827, Allied squadrons sailed into the Bay of Navarino on the west coast of the Peloponnese peninsula. Read more

Ottoman Empire

Battle of Omdurman: The Last British Cavalry Charge

By Eric Niderost

It was the morning of September 1, 1898, the day before the Battle of Omdurman. Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the Queen’s 4th Hussars rode out with four squadrons of the 21st Lancers to scout the approaches to Omdurman, a Sudanese village on the west bank of the Nile opposite Khartoum, epicenter of a revolt that had rocked the very foundations of the British Empire. Read more

Ottoman Empire

The Bulgarian Legion

Anticipating the inevitable war with the Ottoman Empire, the Russian government approved creation of a military formation recruited from native Bulgarian volunteers. Read more

Ottoman Empire

The Siege of Shipka Pass

By Victor Kamenir

In the summer of 1875, the Christian Slavic populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina rose up in rebellion against their Muslim Ottoman Turkish rulers in response to high taxes and depredations by the local Turkish administration. Read more

Ottoman Empire

Napoleon’s Egyptian Adventure

By Jeremy E. Green

By the year 1798, the First Coalition was collapsing. Only Britain remained as France’s implacable foe. With the advent of relative peace, the governing body of France, the Directory, ever in need of cash, now sought new means of employment for the army and its general, Napoleon Bonaparte. Read more

Ottoman Empire

Turning Back the Turks

By Louis Ciotola

Peering out over the horizon, Austrian commander Prince Eugene of Savoy could see an army of Turks, the dreaded masters of southeastern Europe for the past three centuries, crossing the Tisza River near the town of Zenta on their way to pillage Transylvania. Read more

Ottoman Empire

Clash of the Tyrants

By Louis Ciotola

In the early 15th century, the strongest military powers in the world resided in Asia. Arguably, no two were more powerful than the Ottoman Empire of Bayezid I and the Tartar Empire of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame). Read more

A company of exhausted and wounded members of the English Coldstream Guards and 20th East Devonshire Regiment stagger down from the heights of Inkerman in this 1877 painting, The Return From Inkerman, by Lady Elizabeth Thompson Butler.

Ottoman Empire

Inkerman: The Soldiers’ Battle

By Victor Kamenir

When armed hostilities flared up between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in 1853 over control of holy places in Turkish-ruled Jerusalem, Great Britain was quick to throw its weight behind the Ottomans. Read more

Minamoto Yoshitsune shown riding up a slope to attack the Taira clan. The fighting between clans was ritualized and often called for prescribed combat between archers.

Ottoman Empire

Japanese Mounted Archery

By Brian Todd Carey

In the eyes of the West, the Japanese samurai warrior has traditionally been associated with the long sword that bears his name. Read more

The Triple Alliance brought Germany into World War I following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, an ally of Imperial Russia.

Ottoman Empire

Austria-Hungary and the Triple Alliance

by Michael Haskew

The emergence of Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe in the 1870s and the unification of Italy in the mid-19th century despite Austrian efforts to prevent it combined to quell the immediate territorial aspirations of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary on the Italian peninsula and in the Balkans. Read more

With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo, World War 1 rapidly engulfed the continent of Europe.

Ottoman Empire

How World War 1 Reshaped The Course of Europe

by Mike Haskew

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, visited the city of Sarajevo and were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a 20-year-old Yugoslav nationalist. Read more

Ottoman Empire

Plevna Under Seige

By Victor Kamenir

By the late 1870s, Turkey, the so-called “Sick Man of Europe,” was in terminal decline. While Sultan Abdul Hamid sequestered himself in his palatial compound through paranoid fear of an assassination, the Ottoman Empire was tearing itself apart. Read more