50 Battles That Changed the World

A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-68261-764-9

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-765-6

50 Battles that Changed the World

© 2018 by William Weir

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Christian Bentulan

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Permuted Press, LLC

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Published in the United States of America

For my favorite warrior, Major Alison M. Weir, USAF

Contents

Introduction

Marathon, 490 BC

The Nika Rebellion, 532 AD

Bunker Hill, 1775 AD

Arbela, 331 BC

Hattin, 1187 AD

Diu, 1509 AD

The Battle of Britain, 1940 AD

Constantinople, Part 1, 1203 AD

Tsushima, 1905 AD

Saratoga, 1777 AD

Valmy, 1792 AD

Adrianople, 378 AD

Midway, 1942 AD 

Hastings, 1066 AD

Tenochtitlan, 1520-21 AD

Stalingrad, 1942 AD

Busta Gallorum, 552 AD

Lechfeld, 955 AD

Dublin, 1916 AD

Emmaus, 166 BC

The Yarmuk Valley, 636 AD

Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-45 AD

Cannae, 216 BC

Malplaque, 1709 AD

Carrhae, 53 BC

Constantinople, Part II, 1453 AD

The Armada, 1588 AD

The Marne, 1914 AD

Rhodes and Malta, 1522 and 1565 AD

Tours, 732 AD

Tanga, 1914 AD

Chalons, 451 AD

Las Navas de Toloso, 1212 AD

Gupta, 1180 AD

Chickamauga, 1863 AD 

Lepanto,1571 AD

New Orleans, 1814 AD

Petrograd, 1917

France, 1918 AD

The Alamo and San Jacinto, 1836 AD

Wu-sung, 1862 AD

Waterloo, 1815 AD

Kadisiyah, 637 AD

Kazan, 1552 AD

Lutzen, 1632 AD

Mamla Bay, 1898 AD

The Tet Offensive, 1968 AD

Rome, 390 BO

Sedan, 1870 AD

Poltava, 1709 AD

Honorable Mentions: Other Battles, Other Lists

Biographical Glossary

Glossary of Military Terms

Timelines

Bibliography

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Any attempt to list the fifty most important battles in all history is necessarily subjective. To list them in order of importance is an even greater exercise of chutzpah. Nevertheless, people have been listing decisive battles since Sir Edward Creasy, a lawyer who taught history, a century-and-a-half ago. Other compilers include General J.F.C. Fuller, a professional soldier, Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, who was gassed and injured early in his career and had to leave the army—he then became a journalist—and Fletcher Pratt, who was a writer by trade. Each brings a distinctive flavor to the enterprise. Fuller is very strong on battles that were fought on land. He’s less interested in sea power and far less interested in air power. Liddell Hart emphasizes his strategic theory—the superiority of the indirect approach. He, and to some extent Fuller, preaches the gospel of small, highly trained armies rather than the mass armies we’ve had in every major war since those of the French Revolution. Pratt’s The Battles that Changed History has the distinct tang of salty air, although most of the early battles it covers were fought on land. Pratt also has the most openly Occidental orientation.

[O]ne of the most striking features of Western European culture, he writes, has been its ability to achieve decisive results by military means. It may even be the critical factor, the reason why that culture has encircled the world. Not that the Far East and Africa have been lacking in great battles or great victories, but their results have had less permanent effect on the stream of world history.

It might be hard to convince a Russian that the victories of Genghis Khan and the consequent subjugation and isolation of his country for three centuries didn’t have much effect on the stream of history. Considering that the Mongol conquests brought such Chinese innovations as cheap paper, movable type, the astrolabe, and gunpowder to Europe, it might be difficult to convince anyone else, either.

In this book, I’ve attempted to avoid this kind of bias. But it’s necessary to consider who we are and where we are. What’s important to this author—an American living at the juncture of the 20th and 21st centuries—and to his audience would probably not be important to a Chinese person in the 13th century.

It’s been fairly easy to avoid a bias in favor of any particular military approach. I’m the son of a career U.S. Navy officer and the father of a career U.S. Air Force officer, but I’m a dedicated civilian. Service as an army combat correspondent and regimental public information NCO in the Korean War gave me a slightly broader picture than most GIs get, but the main thing I learned was when to keep my head down. Some of the military in my upbringing may have rubbed off, though. Large proportions of the articles I’ve written have concerned military history and weapons. Of my four previous books, one, Fatal Victories, was entirely military history. Another, Written With Lead, was about legendary American gunfights, including such military events as the Battle of Saratoga and Custer’s last stand. Still another, A Well Regulated Militia, detailed the history of the American militia.

Every battle has some effect on history. How do you decide which had the most?

The basic criteria for picking the importance of the battles that changed the world are:

How big a change did the battle make, and how much does that change affect us?

One way is to decide what’s really important to us and how we got to enjoy it. Most people would put freedom and democracy high on any list of desirable things. Consequently, Marathon, which preserved the world’s first democracy, holds the number-one spot. Order, not anarchy, is also highly desirable. Justinian, Narses, and Belisarius, by crushing the Nika revolt, made the world’s most widely used code of law possible. Bunker Hill, and to a slightly less extent, Saratoga, ensured the independence of the United States. So, in a much less direct way, did Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. The Allied victories in World War II, particularly the Battle of Britain, were the latest battles to guarantee democracy.

Another approach is to look at the currents of history. The ancient Greeks saw history, to a large extent, as a record of the conflict between East and West. That is certainly a viable idea. There are, in a very general sense, two cultures in the world—Western and Eastern. The former would include everything from the Orthodox-influenced culture of Russia to the secular culture of the United States. The latter would include the Far Eastern culture of China and Japan, both deeply non-Western in spite of a Western veneer, and a wide variety of other cultures, many of them Islamic. Neither the East nor the West has managed to absorb the other, but it wasn’t for want of trying. This struggle, too, goes back to Marathon. It continues through Alexander, Crassus, and the seemingly interminable conflicts between Christianity and Islam.

The West has been unable to absorb the East, but it certainly was able to dominate it. There were a string of decisive battles that helped bring that about. At Diu on the Indian Ocean, Portuguese sailors destroyed a Muslim fleet in 1509. That crippled the thriving Arab trade with India and China. Dar es Islam began to shrink economically. Ten years later, Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico. Two years after that, he had conquered—for the first time since Alexander—a non-European empire, which opened a trade route to the Far East across the Pacific. Russia’s conquest of Kazan in 1552 initiated European expansion overland to the Far East. A generation later, the defeat of the Spanish Armada energized the English to push west across the Atlantic and conquer North America.

The latest trend in world history seems to be that the Western political domination of the world is ending. In 1940, there was only one independent country in Africa. Europeans owned the rest of the continent. Today, there are no colonies in Africa. Most of Asia and the Far Eastern islands, except China, Japan, and Japan’s colony, Korea, were also owned by Westerners. Today none of it is. In a way, the battles of the American Revolution started the trend. The United States became the first independent country in the New World. The rest of the Americas followed. In 1905, Togo’s Japanese showed that non-Caucasians equipped with modern tech­nology could beat Caucasians equipped with comparable technology. In 1914, von Lettow Vorbeck’s black African soldiers proved that, man for man, they were the equal of Caucasians. But none of the colonial countries could field the military equipment the Japanese could. It took a European country, Ireland, to demonstrate how a weak nation could win its independence from a strong one.

History is full of odd twists like that.

BATTLE 1

MARATHON, 490 BC

A View from the Mountains

Who fought: Greeks (Mitiades) vs. Persians (Datìs).

What was at stake: The survival of democracy.

Callimachus studied his Persian opponents from the heights above the plain of Marathon. As expected, there was a lot of cavalry—mostly horse archers. There were also foot archers and infantry spearmen. It was hard to estimate their number, spread out as they were. There had to be at least as many as the 10,000 Athenians and 1,000 Plateans he commanded. There were prob­ably many more. The Great King had unlimited resources. The Persian infantry were not as well armored as the Greeks, and their spears were shorter. But the Persian strength was always their cavalry, both lancers and horse archers. Plains like Marathon made it possible to use cavalry effectively, but plains were scarce in Greece. That was most likely why the Persians chose to land here, a two-days-march away from Athens. If only the Spartans would arrive soon. With Spartan reinforcements, the Greeks, although all infantry, might be able to drive the Barbarians into the sea. To the Greeks, all foreigners were barbarians who made sounds like bahbahbah instead of speaking Greek.

The Greeks had sent Pheidippides, a professional runner, to ask for Spartan assistance. The Spartans were willing, but they said that because of a local religious festival they’d have to delay their departure. Meanwhile, the Athenians and their Platean allies had been holding the mountain passes. The ten generals, each commanding an Athenian regiment, could not agree whether they should continue holding their ground or whether they should attack the Persians. Although Callimachus was polemarch, or titular commander, he had only one vote in the counsel of war. Field command, when it came to fighting, rotated among the generals, each one having a day to command the entire army. Miltiades, one of the generals, was rabidly anti-Persian. He had been badgering Callimachus to vote in favor of attacking. So far, the polemarch had not made up his mind.

Callimachus could think of no Athenian general who ever had to make such a momentous decision. It might determine the fate of an idea that was radically new in the civilized world—rule by the people: democracy. For as long as anyone could remember, kings, who claimed some sort of connection with the gods, ruled Greece. Then, most cities overthrew their kings and accepted rulers (strongmen called tyrants) who claimed no divine connection. Now, Athens had deposed its last tyrant, Hippias, and passed laws against tyrants.

The whole situation was very strange. The Great King, Darius, had ordered his son-in-law, Mardonius, to depose tyrants among the King’s Ionian Greek subjects. The tyrants had led the subject Greeks in an unsuccessful revolt. Darius replaced the tyrants with pseudo-democracies. The Ionian citizens could make their own laws, but all would have to be approved by the Great King. One of the tyrants deposed was Miltiades, the general who so ardently wanted to attack the Persians. Miltiades had a personal grudge. Born in Athens, he was an Athenian citizen. But he had become tyrant of the Cheronese (modern Gallipoli). When he fled back to Athens, he was tried under the anti-tyrant law. But while tyrant, Miltiades had conquered the island of Lemnos and given it to his home city. This earned Miltiades enough favor in Athens to win him not only acquittal, but election as one of the generals. There was still, however, a faction in Athens that despised the former tyrant.

Athens and Eretria had helped the Ionian rebels, which, the Persians said, was why they were there. They were going to punish Athens and Eretria for their meddling. But Callimachus knew that Darius wanted all of Greece, and many Greek cities had already submitted to him. The biggest holdouts were Athens and Sparta.

Suddenly Callimachus saw movement in the Persian army. The Barbarians had begun moving their horses toward the shore where their 600 ships were beached. Callimachus made up his mind. It was time to attack now, Spartans or no Spartans.

The Great King

The Greeks called Darius, the Emperor of Persia, the Great King. In Susa, his capital, he waited for word from the Aegean. The Greeks were a headache. As long as some were outside the empire, they would incite those who were inside to rebel. But conquest of Greece would not be easy. Mardonius had learned that. After putting down the Ionian revolt, he continued into mainland Greece. Thessaly had submitted, but the semi-nomadic Thracians had put up a stiff fight before they accepted Persian rule. Then the sea intervened. A tremendous storm wrecked the Persian fleet that had been supplying the Persian army. Mardonius had to withdraw.

Greece was mostly barren and mountainous. The Greek cities depended on commerce for food. No large army could live off the land in Greece. Such an army would have to be supplied by sea. But the sea was treacherous. And the Greeks were worse. Just forty-five years earlier, the warships of one small Greek city, Phocaea, had destroyed a Carthaginian fleet twice its size. The Carthaginians were colonists of the Phoenicians, who supplied Persian naval power. Greek sailors had colonized not only the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, but the Dardanelles, the Crimea, Cyrene in Africa, Mas-sillia (modern Marseille), and both the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Spain. If the Greek cities united, they could wipe out any fleet Darius could muster.

Fighting Greeks on land was not much easier. The Greeks had devised a military system that was ideal for their narrow mountain valleys. It was all infantry, based on heavy infantry protected from head to foot by heavy armor. The Greek hoplite wore a bronze helmet that covered everything but his eyes and mouth, an armor corselet, and greaves to protect the part of his legs visible from behind a huge bronze-faced shield. Arrows would not penetrate his armor except at close range. He carried a long spear, with a short sword as a secondary weapon. The Greek heavy infantry attacked in long, straight lines many ranks deep called a phalanx. They marched in step, keeping time with the music of flutes. Greek mercenary hoplites were in demand all over the civilized world. Man for man, they were the best infantry in the world.

Greece, then, could only be conquered with overwhelming numbers, which would have to be supplied by sea. But depending on ships, in the face of Greek naval power and the stormy Aegean, was risky in the extreme. The conquest of Greece would require subtlety.

But Darius had not gotten to where he was by being stupid. He had usurped the throne of Persia, restored Cyrus the Great’s crumbling empire, and extended its borders into India, across the Hellespont into Europe, up into the barren steppes of Turkestan, and down the Nile into the deserts of Sudan. Darius would not try to overwhelm the Greeks. He would wage war on their minds.

By posing as a patron of democracy, Darius had convinced many Greeks that Persian overlordship was no bad thing. They had given his envoys earth and water as tokens of submission. But the Spartans had thrown his envoy into a well to get water, and the Athenians dropped Darius’s representative into a pit to gather earth.

Psychological warfare against Sparta was almost impossible. The city-state was run like an army. Dissent was also impossible. But Athens had opposing factions. Darius sent agents to the Athenians who hated Miltiades. They pointed to flourishing democracies in Ionia and promised that if the Athenian out-party opened the city gates to Persian troops, they would be the in-party. The Athenian dissenters pointed out that there was no way they could do that while the in-party controlled the army. The Persian agents promised to lure the army out of the city. The Athenian traitors agreed to help.

Darius’s plan called for a swift strike directly across the Aegean. The expeditionary force would be comparatively small—only what could be transported on 600 ships. It would quickly take tiny Eretria, then lure the Athenian army away from the city. With their troops away, the Athenian traitors would let the Persians in, and Athens would be conquered before help arrived from Sparta or anywhere else.

Mardonius had been wounded on his expedition to Greece, and he hadn’t been notably successful. Darius gave the command to his nephew, Artaphernes, and a Median general named Datis. Datis, a brave and experienced soldier, would actually command.

The Military Mind

Datis was a good commander. He had to be to have achieved his rank without being an ethnic Persian. But he wasn’t subtle. When he attacked Eretria, on the island of Euboea, the Eretrians resisted for six days. Then, traitors opened the city gates to the Persians. It is not known whether or not Persian agents had approached them before the attack, but it seems likely. What is known is that Datis, once inside, followed standard operating procedure. He sacked the city, burned the temples, and carried the inhabitants off into slavery. Then, Datis embarked for the trip to Marathon.

He waited for the Athenian army to appear as expected. Then, he waited for the signal telling him the gates of Athens would be open. He waited and waited. He knew that if he didn’t get the signal soon the Spartans would arrive and there would be hell to pay.

If he had a bit more imagination, Datis would have known that sacking Eretria after traitors had opened the gates was not a good way to encourage the Athenian fifth column.

Finally, Persians and Greeks both saw someone signaling the Persian army by flashing sunlight from a polished bronze shield. Datis ordered his army to embark.

Dunkirk for Datis

The cavalry, Persia’s greatest strength, went first. Meanwhile, Callimachus had voted in favor of attack. As luck would have it, today was Miltiades’ day to command. Miltiades lined up his troops with the center only four ranks deep in order to make his line as long as the Persian line. He kept the wings eight ranks deep in order to repel flank attacks by any cavalry that hadn’t embarked. The flutes tootled, and the hoplites set out with their traditional slow march, keeping all ranks dressed, each man crowding behind the shield of the man on his right.

When the Greeks were about 200 yards away, the Persian archers began shooting at the bronze glacier approaching them. Their arrows bounced off the Greeks’ armor. And the glacier turned into an avalanche. The Greek array switched to double-time and swept down on the Persians.

Ethnic Persians and Sakas (Iranian nomads related to the Scythians) held the center of the Persian line. They fought desperately against the weakened Greek center, suffering appalling losses. The Greek spears were longer and their armor was heavier. The Persians actually climbed over the Greek shields to hack at the shield-bearers with axes and daggers. The Greek center bent back.

Meanwhile, the Greek wings, eight ranks deep instead of four, continued to advance. As the Greek line bowed in the center, the wings turned inward. The Per­sians were caught in a double envelopment, crowded into a dense mass where their bows were useless.

The Persians turned and fled back to their ships. The Greeks pursued. They only captured seven of the ships, which shows that a great majority of the Persian army got away. It was now headed for Athens, and sea travel was faster than marching over the mountains.

The Great Race

Miltiades, Callimachus, and the rest of the Greeks knew about the signal. It seemed that in spite of the fate of Eretria, traitors were ready to surrender Athens to the Persians. They called on Pheidippides, who had run to Sparta to ask for help, to inform Athens of the victory. Speed was absolutely essential, the generals empha­sized. The professional runner had never run so fast. He staggered into Athens crying, Nike, Nike! and dropped dead. The traitors knew now that the Athenian army had beaten the Persians and was on the way home. Any notion of welcoming Darius’ troops was forgotten.

The Athenian army made a forced march over the mountains in one day. The Persians found the city closed and their enemies ready for another fight. They went home.

Darius’ son, Xerxes, decided to have another go at the Greeks. This time, he sent an enormous army into Greece. The Persians swarmed down the peninsula, over­whelming opposition and burning Athens. Then, the disaster Darius had foreseen occurred. A Greek fleet, following the directions of Themistocles of Athens, lured the Persian navy into constricted waters near the island of Salamis and wiped it out. Xerxes had to withdraw the bulk of his army. He left Mardonius with a small force he believed could subsist on the countryside. The next year, the combined phalanxes of many Greek cities annihilated the Persian army. Democracy did not die.

BATTLE 2

THE NIKA REBELLION, 532 AD

Civilization on the Edge

Who fought: Imperial forces (Justinian) vs. Constantinople mob (Green and Blue leaders).

What was at stake: The rule of law.

The hangman was probably new. He certainly didn’t know his craft. And his ignorance almost killed Western civilization.

It wouldn’t have taken much to kill Western civilization in the year 532. In distant Britain, which had not seen a Roman soldier in more than a century, the Saxons had recovered from the defeat the man known as Arthur the Soldier had inflicted on them at Mt. Badon, sixteen years earlier. Their chiefs, Cynric and Ceawlin, were preparing new invasions. But Arthur had another project on his mind—he was preparing to battle his own son, Medraut (or Modred). The savage Franks owned Gaul and western Germany. The Visigoths, defeated by the Franks, ruled Spain. Across the Straits of Gibraltar, the Vandals controlled the province of Africa, the breadbasket of the Empire, and all of the Mediterranean. Italy, including Rome itself, was under the sway of the Ostrogoths.

The once-mighty Roman Empire consisted only of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. It was menaced not only by the barbarians in the west, but by the civilized and powerful kingdom of Persia in the East. To the north, the Huns, despite the destruction of Attila’s empire, were still the best cavalry in Europe. They and their allies, the Heruls, a Hunnicized German nation, remained a threat, and a new threat was joining them. The Slavs, a people savage enough to make the Huns look like exemplars of civilization, were massing on the Balkan boundaries.

But to the people of Constantinople, capital of the Empire, these external threats were not as serious as the internal troubles. The emperor, Justinian, had coped well with the external problems during the five years he wore the purple. Surprisingly well. When the Persians attacked, Justinian had put a young, unknown officer named Belisarius in charge of the Imperial forces. At Daras, Belisarius lured the Persians into a trap and scattered their army.

But another of the emperor’s appointments, John of Cappadocia, was bringing disaster at home. As praetorian prefect, or chief financial officer, John was balancing the budget by levying crushing taxes and curtailing essential services. John’s mea­sures were driving small farmers out of business. They began swarming into Constan­tinople, where they strained the city’s relief facilities and increased its crime rate.

Even more serious was religious dissension. Paganism among the Romans was defunct. The two principal Christian sects in Constantinople, however, showed no Christian charity toward each other. Quarreling between the Catholics and the Mono-physites was continuous and often violent. Three men to be hanged had committed their murders in one of those quarrels.

The factions

The men belonged to street gangs sponsored by two factions known as the Blues and the Greens. They took their names from the colors of the chariots they entered in the Hippodrome races. The government recognized the factions and established them as civilian militia divisions charged with defending the walls of the city. With official recognition came political affiliation, and, after Christianity became the reli­gion of the Empire, affiliation with either the Catholics or the Monophysites. The Blues were Catholic and supported Catholic emperors; the Greens were Monophysite and supported Monophysite emperors. The factions sponsored street gangs, called partisans. The partisans dressed like Huns. They shaved the front of their scalps and let their hair grow long in the back. They wore Hunnish trousers and boots and shirts with baggy sleeves. Inside the sleeves, they carried daggers.

A large crowd had assembled to watch the execution on January 10, 532. The three men were marched to the scaffold and nooses placed around their necks. When the floor gave way beneath them, the three bodies dropped.

But two of the bodies dropped all the way to the ground. The ropes had broken. After a moment of embarrassment, the hangman and his assistants hustled the two convicts—one a Green, the other a Blue—back up on the scaffold and tried to hang them again. The ropes broke again.

The executioners were stunned. The crowd murmured. Was God sending them a sign? A crowd of monks from a nearby monastery rushed up to the prisoners and carried them to a boat, rowed them across the Golden Horn and gave them sanctuary in a church. The city prefect, who had condemned the men to death, sent guards to the church to seize the men as soon as they stepped out.

Nika!

That pleased neither the Blues nor the Greens. Three days later was the Ides of Jan­uary, a traditional occasion for chariot races. As tradition demanded, the emperor appeared at the Hippodrome. Both the Blues and the Greens implored him to pardon the fugitives. He gave them no answer. As the twenty-second race began, a cry went up from all parts of the Hip­podrome, Long live the humane Greens and Blues. It must have shocked any neutral observ­ers (if there were any). The Greens and Blues had never agreed on anything before.

That night, a mob of Blues and Greens demanded that the prefect remove his guards. He refused. The mob burst into his headquar­ters, killed several officials, opened the jail, and released all the prisoners. Then the rioters set fire to a number of buildings. The fire spread, and many more buildings burned, including the huge church of Hagia Sophia.

Rioting went on and on. The mob was orga­nized. Officers of the Green and Blue factions—high-ranking Romans—provided the leadership. The partisans, the dispossessed farmers, and the armed retainers of the great magnates supplied muscle. To identify themselves, the rioters shouted the tra­ditional cheer of a winning faction at a chariot race, Nika! (Victory!). Historians later named this movement the Nika Rebellion.

The two regiments stationed in the city refused to move. Belisarius, who had returned triumphant from the Persian War, led his private army of retainers against the rioters, as did another general, Mundus, who had arrived leading a group of Herul auxiliaries. The mob, however, swarmed around the soldiers in the labyrinthine streets of the city and attacked them from all sides. The troops could accomplish nothing.

On January 18, a week after the failed hangings, Justinian, his empress Theodora, Belisarius, Mundus, their troops, and a few picked officials were huddled in the palace while the Blues and Greens assembled in the Hippodrome crowning a new emperor. John of Cappadocia urged the emperor to flee.

Although probably none of the participants realized it, the moment was a turn­ing point in history. If Justinian had fled, his dreamed-of project, the codification of Roman law, would probably never have happened. The civil and criminal law of most of Europe, Africa, and the Americas is based on Justinian’s code. The law in the United Kingdom, most of the United States, and the rest of the world, although not based directly on the Roman code, is strongly influenced by it.

The shape of civilization for the next two millennia depended on the actions of as unlikely a cast of characters as fate had ever brought together.

First, there was the emperor, Justinian, who had been born Peter Sabbatius on a small farm in Illyria, north of Greece. His uncle, Justin, years before had joined the army. Justin could barely read and write, but he learned enough about military tactics to become count of the Excubitors, commander of one of the elite units of the army.

Stationed in the capital, Justin sent for his nephew and arranged for his education. Peter became Justin’s secretary. To Justin, that meant confidential agent.

Succession to the throne in the Roman Empire did not depend on heredity. Theoretically, the senate, the army, and the populace proclaimed the emperor. Actu­ally, the army did most of the choosing, with the factions playing an important part in the process. When the old emperor died, Peter’s intrigues with military and religious officials resulted in Justin becoming emperor. Justin gave Peter the rank of patrician and promoted him to Master of Soldiers, or commander-in-chief of the armed forces. When Justin became ill, he made his nephew co-emperor. Peter Sabbatius changed his name to Justinian. When Justin died, Justinian became sole emperor. A tall, cadaver­ous, and humorless man, he shared the throne with his wife, Theodora, who had an even stranger background.

The empress, a pretty, dark-haired woman, was much younger than Justinian, who was now about fifty. She had once been an actress, which in those days was practi­cally synonymous with prostitute. Also, she was a Monophysite, and Justinian was a Catholic. But when Justinian met her, long before he became emperor, he fell madly in love. He wanted to marry Theodora, but the empress Euphemia—herself a former slave—forbade a wedding. The patrician and the former prostitute married after Euphemia died.

In spite of their differences, and in spite of her background, Theodora remained passionately loyal to Justinian all her life, and he to her. At this moment, her voice resolved a crisis.

If you wish, O Emperor, to save yourself, there is no difficulty, she said. We have ample funds. Yonder is the sea, and there are the ships. Yet reflect whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you will not prefer death to safety. I agree with an old saying ‘Purple makes a fair, winding sheet.’

Justinian agreed, too. He wasn’t ready to die, though. He had a plan. But the plan depended on two other unlikely people: Belisarius and the emperor’s private secretary, Narses.

Belisarius, not yet thirty, had also married an actress, a friend of Theodora. The wed­ding, in fact, had taken place shortly before the riot. Antonina’s affair with Belisarius may have had something to do with the young soldier’s rise in the world. In the war against Persia, he had fully justified the emperor’s faith in him. In Constantinople, though, his best efforts had been futile. His success in carrying out Justinian’s plan would depend on the performance of the man who had to play the hardest role: Narses. And Narses was the most unlikely of this entire unlikely group.

Justinian planned to make him grand chamberlain, the second most powerful civilian in the Empire. But Narses had once been a slave. He was also a eunuch, cas­trated as a boy in his native Persarmenia (the portion of Armenia occupied by Persia), so he could be a servant in Persian harems. Somehow, he ended up in the slave market of Constantinople, and somehow, he attracted the attention of Justinian.

Justinian was impressed with the slave’s intelligence, loyalty, and capacity for hard work. The emperor had no need for a harem guard, but he could always find a use for brains. Narses, about four years older than Justinian, became a free man and rose rapidly in the imperial service. He was not only smart, but also generous and gregari­ous. These characteristics made him one of the most popular of court officials. And he was also, as he was to prove at this time, utterly fearless.

Justinian told Belisarius and Mundus to take their troops to the two entrances of the Hippodrome. Once again, they would meet the rioters. But this time, Narses would prepare the way for them.

To Narses, he gave a bag of gold. The skinny little eunuch entered the Hippodrome alone and unarmed, walking through the howling mob that had already killed several hundred people. He circulated through the Blue section, waving to acquaintances and approaching important Blues. He reminded them that Justinian was a Catholic and had favored the Blues during Justin’s reign. He pointed out that Hypatius, the man they were now proclaiming emperor, was a Green. He asked how they could support a Green. And he passed out the gold. The Blue leaders conferred quietly with each other. Then they unobtrusively spoke to their followers. Suddenly, in the middle of the coro­nation, all of the Blues turned and streamed out of the Hippodrome. The Greens were stunned. Before they could recover from their surprise, the soldiers of Belisarius and Mundus attacked. The Greens had no chance to organize. The soldiers killed 30,000, and Justinian had no more trouble with the factions.

The emperor was now free to rebuild the fire-ravaged city and build a new Hagia Sophia, a church still considered one of the marvels of the world. He could now start the reconquest of Africa and Italy—a Herculean task actually performed by Belisarius and the incredible Narses. Finally, Justinian could commence his greatest accomplish­ment: the codification of the law. Thanks to that, the rule of law, not the changing whims of a succession of tyrants, became established in Western civilization.

BATTLE 3

BUNKER HILL, 1775 AD

A Fort on the Hill

Who fought: Americans (William Prescott) vs. British (William Howe).

What was at stake: American independence.

As the sun rose over Boston Harbor, an officer on the HMS Lively noticed something strange on the hill behind Charlestown. He trained his telescope on the hill. The damned rebels were building a fort. In fact, it was almost completed. The officer immediately informed his captain, who opened fire on the rebel position. But a few minutes later, the Lively received an order from Adm. Samuel Graves to cease fire.

In his headquarters in Boston, Lt. Gen. Thomas Gage, too, was aware of the fort. This was absolutely intolerable. Gage had spent most of his life in North America, fighting for the king. He had married a New Jersey woman and planned to retire to a country house he had purchased in New York. This ragtag band of peasants, led by the most improper young radicals, was trying to plunge his country into anarchy. Gage had already requested reinforcements to help him deal with the situation. He got 3,000 additional soldiers, bringing the British forces in Boston to 5,000. London felt that this number would be adequate to handle dissidents in a town of 20,000. Gage did not. He also got less welcome reinforcements—three new, major generals—Henry Clinton, John Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and William Howe, three of the most ambitious officers in the service. Each of them, Gage knew, coveted his command.

Through his efficient intelligence organization, which included spies in the high­est rebel councils, Gage knew that the dissidents had been hoarding ammunition and weapons, even cannons. He had sent a force composed of the flank companies—the grenadiers and the light infantry, the army’s elite—to confiscate those stores at Con­cord. But the rebels had spies, too. The stores were gone. What the troops found at Concord was a horde of armed farmers who drove them all the way back to Charles-town. The rebels fired at the troops from houses and from behind stone walls. There seemed to be thousands of them. The fight must have convinced them that they were the equals of British regulars. After the fight, they besieged Boston. Now, they were building a fort on Breed’s Hill, as if they were real soldiers. But they’d run like rabbits when they had to face attacking regulars, Gage thought.

Meanwhile, he wanted to give the rebels an immediate reaction to the fort they had built overnight. He called his new staff generals together. Burgoyne was a writer, a playwright. He told Gentleman Johnny to draft a message to Graves, asking the admiral to resume the cannonade of the rebel fort. It had to be persuasive. Graves, a senior member of Britain’s senior service, would never take orders from an army man, even though the task of obliterating the fort would be the army’s. Besides, Graves still bore a grudge against Gage because of a dispute he had had with the general’s father years before. After the note to Graves had been sent, Gage wanted to hear how his generals thought they should handle the fort.

Rabble in Arms

If Gage could have visited the rebel encampments, the numbers he saw would have troubled him. Militias from all over New England were there, as well as troops from the Middle Colonies and even from the South. But he would have been heart­ened by the confusion. Artemas Ward, commander of the Massachusetts militia, was nominally in command under the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. But militia officers were all throwing their weight around. Gen. Israel Putnam of Connecticut, who had commanded troops in the French and Indian War, was particularly pushy.

The Americans had fortified positions at the entrances to Boston and Charlestown. Those two towns occupied a pair of twin peninsulas, almost islands, project­ing like huge pollywogs into the harbor (in those days, the Back Bay section of Boston really was a bay). Each peninsula was linked to the mainland by a narrow, flat neck. There were no troops permanently in Charlestown. Putnam proposed fortifying Bunker Hill, the highest point on the Charlestown peninsula. This would prevent the British troops from using Charlestown as a staging area, as they had before the raid on Concord. It could also close most of Boston Harbor.

Other militia generals protested that the hill would be too easy to isolate, given the Royal Navy’s absolute control of the harbor. But nobody could stop Putnam from leading troops into the peninsula under cover of night. On the other hand, nobody made any arrangements for relief of the troops who would do the digging or even for supplying them with water, food, and ammunition. With Putnam went Col. Wil­liam Prescott of Massachusetts, Col. Richard Gridley, a trained military engineer, and 1,200 armed farmers, who would do the digging.

When they got to the top of Bunker Hill, they decided it would be better to fortify Breed’s Hill—lower, but steeper, and closer to the British. Gridley traced the outlines of a fort, and Putnam ordered his men to dig. The fort was to be an earth­work 130 feet square with twelve-foot walls rising from a dry moat.

Prescott, who would have the field command on Breed’s Hill, had his men start fortifying the flanks of the fort. They threw up breastworks down the Mystic River side of the hill and into woods bordered by a swamp. On the other side of the peninsula, the waters of Boston Harbor were too far away to permit building fortifications down to the beach. Prescott sent a detachment into the village of Charlestown. By sniping from the houses they might delay a British sweep. There was still a gap beyond the woods on the left. Prescott sent Capt. Thomas Knowlton with some Connecticut militia to plug it. They dug in behind a rail fence with a stone foundation. Below the bluffs above the Mystic shore, Col. John Stark and two regiments of New Hampshire militia took over the end of the fence and built a stone wall that ran across the beach into the river.

Work on the fortifications was briefly interrupted when the Lively began shooting, but it continued after the cease-fire. Then, the whole fleet opened fire, as well as army cannons across the bay. The naval guns were not designed to fire on hilltop forts at close range. Most of their shots were too low. The digging continued. A soldier named Asa Pollard went down the hill to get water. As he was returning, his head suddenly disappeared, and a geyser of blood erupted from his neck. A cannon ball had decapitated him. The Americans took cover. But Prescott got up on a parapet and walked up and down as he ordered the troops to continue digging.

Prescott noticed a nattily dressed young man coming up for the rear. As he came closer, the colonel recognized Dr. Joseph Warren, chairman of the Committee of Safety and president of the Provincial Congress. Warren had just been named a major general. Prescott offered him the command.

I shall take no command here, Warren said. I came as a volunteer with my musket to serve under you.

The Attack

At British headquarters, Henry Clinton had a suggestion. Clinton, born in Newfoundland, raised in New York, and bloodied on Europe’s battlefields, proposed landing on Charlestown Neck. It was a strip only thirty-five yards wide. Doing so would cut the rebels off.

Gage snorted that there was no need for subtlety. The rebels would run when face-to-face with real troops on the offensive. That would be a greater blow to their morale.

William Howe opposed both plans. Howe was the brother of Lord Augustus Howe, the inventor and master of light infantry tactics. James Wolfe, the conqueror of Quebec, considered William Howe the most daring and brilliant young officer in the army. Howe had led Wolfe’s assault on the Plains of Abraham.

Howe pointed out that troops landing on the swampy neck, where there was no cover, would be caught between rebels to the north and rebels to the south, both on high ground. The tides permitted landing and evacuation at limited times of the day, and then only at a spot a half-mile from the neck. Howe proposed landing at Moulton’s point, east of Charlestown, in front of Breed’s Hill. It would not be a simple frontal assault, however. One detachment, under Brig. Gen. Robert Pigot, would enter Charlestown Village and march on the fort. Pigot would not attack. He would just hold the rebels in place while the rest of the army delivered the knockout punch. Howe, leading the grenadiers—18th-century shock troops—and battalion companies, would attack the hastily dug fortifications on the Mystic River side of the fort. But the light infantry, Howe’s favorite arm, would deliver the keystroke. The light infantry, wiry men picked for their agility and trained to think for themselves, would jog up the Mystic River beach, hidden by the bluffs, and turn the rebels’ flank. They would then attack the rebels behind the breastworks just as the grenadiers and battalion companies were about to charge.

After landing, Pigot’s detachment came under sniper fire. Pigot asked for artillery support. The British ships responded by firing hot shots (cannon balls heated red hot) and carcasses (hollow shot filled with a flaming mixture of tow and tar), into the town. The village was soon a roaring furnace. Pigot led his troops around the town and up toward the fort. On the British right, Howe mustered his troops in three waves.

I shall not desire any one of you to go a step farther than where I go myself at your head, he told them. He meant it.

Behind the breastworks, the slowness of the British advance and the silence of the British field pieces puzzled the Americans. The advance was slow because the Redcoats were plowing through deep grass that hid stone walls and ditches. The field pieces were silent because they were six-pounders and they had been supplied with twelve-pound shot.

Hidden from both the Americans behind the breastworks and the British main body were the light infantrymen. There was nothing slow about their advance. They were double-timing up the beach four abreast toward what looked like a deserted stone wall. The light company of the Royal Welch Fusiliers led the column.

When the Welshmen were one-hundred feet from the wall, there was a deafening blast and a cloud of smoke. The light company of the Royal Welch Fusiliers ceased to exist. The King’s Own light infantry, behind the Royal Welch, slowed for a fraction of a second, then leveled their bayonets and charged before the rebels could reload. They leaped over the bodies of their comrades and were yelling in fury as a second volley blasted them. No soldiers could reload that fast.