Military

Among military adventurers who have served in India, Mildred Archer writes, none was more dashing than the half-Indian leader of the famous Irregular Cavalry Corps known as Skinner’s Horse.

Civil war was always the bane of the Italian city-states. E.R. Chamberlain describes how, at the end of the fourteenth century, it seemed that the whole peninsula might soon be re-united under a single man's control.

J.J. Saunders continues the story of the first, and perhaps the greatest, of Islam’s Commanders of the Faithful. The Caliph Omar, after triumphantly laying the foundations of the Arab Empire, fell to a Persian Christian assassin in the year 644.

J.J. Saunders describes how, under Muhammad's second successor, the Caliph Omar, the great era of Arab expansion began, that carried the faith of Islam westwards, to Spain, and eastwards, far into the Orient.

Was King Harold slain by a Norman arrow that pierced his eye? Charles H. Gibbs-Smith adduces a powerful argument for correcting the traditional story. 

Given the immense time, labour and costs involved in constructing defensive works, it is surprising that decisive action occurred so rarely around or about them. T.H. McGuffe looks at how the appeal of military fortifications faded with time.

In 1748 Sweden embarked on the construction of an elaborate island fortress. This was her last attempt, writes Anthony Wood, to check the Russian thrust westwards.

When Alexander assumed the despotic state of the Eastern monarchs he had overthrown, he aroused growing resentment among his loyal Macedonian followers. E. Badian carries the story on, to his early death in the year 323 B.C

In this article, a British military commentator attempts to sum up the force of events that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.

John Andrew Boyle describes how, for many years during the mid-thirteenth century, Mongol forces which had already driven deep into Central Europe, threatened to over-run and obliterate the Christian civilization of the West.