Great Battles in History

Send us Fan Mail The battle of Breitenfeld was fought on September 17, 1631. It was one of the largest and most important battles of the Thirty Years' War. It was the most famous victory of Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden's hero-king. It was the beginning of the Stormaktstiden, Sweden's Age of Empire. If you're enjoying Great Battles in History, please follow it and rate it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. And if you'd like to give me more support, then please consider buyi...

Send us Fan Mail The Battle of Nagashino is one of the most famous battles in Japanese history. It was the climax of the Sengoku Jidai, the Age of Warring States, a century-long period of civil wars and social upheaval. It represented the culmination of a revolution that had transformed Japanese warfare. And it punctures many myths of the samurai, the warrior-heroes of Japan. This episode also ends a long hiatus for Great Battles in History. For the past couple of years, I've been working on ...

Send us Fan Mail On October 7, 1571, the fleets of the Christian Holy League and the Ottoman Empire clashed near Lepanto off the west coast of Greece. Lepanto was the largest battle on land or sea in Europe in the sixteenth century. During it, over 130,000 combatants had crewed some 500 oared warships. At the battle’s end, at least 35,000 Ottomans and 8,000 Christians had lost their lives. Lepanto was also the climax of a ferocious fifty-year-long struggle waged by the greatest naval powers o...

Send us Fan Mail The complete episode of Agincourt, including parts one to ten.

Send us Fan Mail On October 24, 1415, the feast day of the twin saints Crispin and Crispinian, the English and French armies arrayed for battle on the muddy field of Agincourt. The action began when the English advanced and the longbowmen loosed a storm of arrows. When the fighting ended three hours later, the English had won an unexpected and total victory.

Send us Fan Mail In 1413, Henry V succeeded to the throne of England. An able statesman and experienced warrior, he was determined to restore the English lands in France and press the Plantagenet claim to the French throne. Meanwhile, France had plunged into a devastating civil war between two noble factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. Taking advantage of this crisis, Henry landed in Normandy with a powerful army in August 1415.

Send us Fan Mail After winning his spurs at the Battle of Crécy, the Black Prince emerged as the finest commander of the Hundred Years' War. In 1356, the outbreak of civil war in France encouraged King Edward III to mount another invasion. On September 9, at Poitiers, the Black Prince defeated the French and captured King John II of France. The French agreed to a peace treaty at Brétigny in 1360. The first phase of the Hundred Years' War ended in complete triumph for England.

Send us Fan Mail The Hundred Years' War at first appeared to be an unequal contest. France was the largest, wealthiest and most populous kingdom in medieval Europe. By comparison, England appeared puny and weak. But during the first thirty years of the fourteenth century, a military revolution transformed the English armies into the most fearsome war machine in Christendom. A key aspect of this revolution was the rise to prominence of the yeoman archer armed with the longbow.

Send us Fan Mail On October 25, 1415, the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, on a field near the village and castle of Agincourt, an English army under King Henry V defeated a much larger French host. Agincourt would be the last great English victory of the long series of conflicts that came to be called, collectively, the Hundred Years' War. Five years after it, Henry V would claim the throne of France itself. Agincourt is also, thanks to William Shakespeare, the medieval batt...

Send us Fan Mail Trailer for Episode Four, the Battle of Agincourt, coming in June. The music is L'Homme Armé (The Armed Man), a fifteenth-century French chanson (public domain) and Red by Scott Buckley (https://soundcloud.com/scottbuckley Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/mN5TUQsVGoQ).

Send us Fan Mail After Hattin, the Crusader States lay at Saladin’s mercy. The Muslim warlord swept into the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cities and castles fell to his armies. On October 2, 1187, he entered Jerusalem. Yet Saladin was unable to seize all of the Franks' ports. The Third Crusade, led by the formidable King Richard the Lionheart of England, was able to enter the Middle East and save the Crusader States from complete conquest. In the century after Hattin, crusading reached its climax. T...

Send us Fan Mail An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub—better known in the West as Saladin—would emerge as the greatest of all the Muslim warlords of the Crusades. He began his career as a Kurdish officer in the service of Nur al-Din. In 1169, he seized power in Egypt and overthrew the Fatimid Caliphate. Then, following the fortuitous death of Nur al-Din in 1174, he began the conquest of Syria. In time, he would construct an empire that extended from North Africa to Mesopotamia. He would also...