History of the World STOP By Telegram STOP Quiz

Answer: Ottoman Empire

According to military historian Michael Lee Manning, Austria and its allies took advantage of an unusually wet year to prepare Vienna for the advance of the Ottoman Turks under the sultan Suleiman II, and their success proved that Suleiman's famous Janissaries could be defeated. Slaves captured in childhood from Christian countries and trained to be fighting machines, Janissaries were feared as fierce, highly-disciplined warriors.

After his failure to take Vienna, Suleiman turned his attention elsewhere, and the threat to Western Europe from outside was eliminated, leaving its nations, in the words of Manning, "to fighting among themselves along Catholic and Protestant lines."

Answer: Leipzig

In the Battle of Leipzig, the armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Sweden teamed up to defeat France and its allies from Poland, Italy, and sixteen German states that were affiliated with the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. While Waterloo was Napoleon's final defeat and is more fixed in the popular imagination, it was the Battle of Leipzig that broke Napoleon's power and forced him into exile.

When he returned, unified opposition was in place, leading to his final defeat and changing the future of Europe.

The Battle of Leipzig came to be called "The Battle of Nations" because of the alliance of so many armies and the sheer number of combatants, unprecedented up to that point.

Answer: Marathon

The Battle of Marathon took place on a plain a little over 26 miles (40 kilometers) north of Athens, Greece. While the original plan was to wait for reinforcements to arrive from Sparta, when these did not arrive, Miltiades argued for immediate action to repel the Persian invasion force, made up of over 20,000 men. Athens and her ally Plataea were able to muster only around 10,000 men.

The Greeks attacked the Persian line with their hoplite warriors, running straight at the enemy forces, and were able to surround them on the sides by using a phalanx formation.

The number of dead were said to be 6,400 Persians and only 192 Greeks. The the run of Pheidippides from Marathon to Athens is probably more legendary than historical. Herodotus mentions a two-day run by Pheidippides from Athens to Sparta before the battle, a distance of 145 miles (233 km). Whatever the true story might be, the long-distance run called a "marathon" got its name from the famous battle.

Answer: Kadesh

While the propagandistic boasting of Egypt's Pharaoh Ramses II (the Great) was long the only version of the battle's results, most historians view the Battle of Kadesh as having no clear winner. The plain of Kadesh was a strategically important site located on the banks of the Orontes River in what is now Syria, in a place where trade routes converged, on the border between the Egyptian empire to the south and the Hittite empire to the north in what is now Turkey.

It is believed to have been the largest chariot battle in history. Tactics and many details of the battle are known from Egyptian inscriptions.

For example, we know that the Egyptian army had four divisions named for gods of Egypt: Amun, Re, Set, and Ptah. The Pharaoh himself led the Amun corps.

He also had an elite force composed of men from all the divisions. The Hittites got an early advantage through trickery and a bloody chariot ambush of the Re corps infantry, but the Hittites left their infantry behind, and Ramses was able to take advantage of this as his elite troops arrived.

A peace treaty between the Hittites and the Egyptians (now housed in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum with a copy displayed at the United Nations headquarters), the earliest such international agreement recorded in history, was set up sixteen years later, as a direct result of the Battle of Kadesh. It was carved in stone using both hieroglyphics and cuneiform scripts, and the text differs only in that the Hittites claim the Egyptians asked for a treaty and the Egyptians state that the Hittites did so. Thus the battle remained inconclusive to the end. Nevertheless, it has been pointed out that if Egypt had been conquered by the Hittites, much subsequent history of the lands between the two empires, including the events of the Bible, would have been dramatically different.

Answer: Hastings

Of course, the Battle of Hastings took place in October 1066, between Norman invaders under William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard, and the English defenders under the Anglo-Saxon King Harold, a member of the Godwin family. But these details would have been a dead giveaway.

In fact, the Battle of Hastings was fought about seven miles from Hastings at an East Sussex town actually named "Battle" and at Senlac Hill, a high spot on the road from the coast to London where King Harold took his stand. "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" calls it the battle "at the hoary apple tree" and the word "Senlac" seems to come from Norman French attempts to describe the sandy water of a nearby stream. Details of the battle, including what would later be dubbed Halley's comet and Harold's arrow in the eye, are embroidered onto the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230 foot (70 meter) long cloth showing the battle in fifty scenes with captions in Latin.

Answer: Hundred Years' War

The Battle of Agincourt was a decisive English victory during the Hundred Years' War between the royal houses of England and France, who were contending for lands in France once controlled by families that became English royalty. Henry V of England overcame a much larger French force under adverse conditions, personally engaging in combat.

The French king, Charles VI was nowhere to be seen. English and Welsh archers, strategically placed, were Henry's most effective weapons. The soft mud of the rain-saturated battlefield also worked to Henry's advantage against heavily armored French knights. Rather than taking prisoners in enemy territory, Henry had all but the most valuable survivors executed.

When Henry V died in 1422, he was in control of much of France, along with his on-and-off ally the Duke of Burgandy. Charles VI died the same year as Henry V.

Henry VI, then a young child, became king of England and (in the opinion of the English and their allies) also king of France, while the French Dauphin (the acting king in the eyes of the French) waited to be crowned because much of his land was occupied.

It was during this political stalemate that Joan of Arc heard voices telling her to lift the siege of Orleans and to overcome the English so that the Dauphin could be crowned. Joan succeeded in her mission, leading the French to free Orleans and win other battles, and kneeling at the feet of Charles VII when he was finally crowned. The English tried her for heresy and burned her as a witch in 1431. The dates of the Hundred Years' War are given as 1337-1453, actually 116 years. France prevailed, but the days of heavily armored cavalry were over, and both the French and the English began to identify themselves as separate nations.

Answer: Siege of Yorktown

British General Lord Charles Cornwallis had set up his encampment at Yorktown, Virginia, after moving north from his temporary southern campaign headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His Loyalist allies had been defeated at the Battle of King's Mountain in North Carolina and his own army had lost the Battle of Cowpens to American General Nathanael Greene's army in South Carolina and experienced the inconclusive Battle of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina. Cornwallis's position at Yorktown left him with little room to maneuver or retreat, with the York River to his back and a French navy commanded by Admiral Comte de Grasse off shore in Chesapeake Bay. General George Washington and his French ally General Rochambeau were able to move troops secretly from New York to mount a siege, surrounding and bombarding the British defenses. Cornwallis refused to offer surrender in person, claiming to be sick, and his proxy, Charles O'Hara, had to be forced to surrender the British general's sword to an American, Washington's second in command, rather than the French commander.

The British band played the song "The World Turned Upside Down" whose lyrics go in part: "If ponies rode men and grass ate cows,/ And cats were chased into holes by the mouse . . . / If summer were spring and the other way round, / Then all the world would be upside down." This may or may not be true, but several sources, including the French Marquis de Lafayette, state that another song was played by the French to ridicule the British and celebrate the victory of the American patriots: "Yankee Doodle"!

Answer: Battle of Dien Bien Phu

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu broke the colonial power of the French and led to the creation of North and South Vietnam, whose division kept in place the political dissonance that would drive the Vietnam War in the following decades. In an attempt to cut off the supply lines of the Viet Minh, the French set up a "hedgehog defense" - a tactic that their armies had used successfully in the past - digging in heavy fortifications to create a strongpoint that could be supplied by air.

However, at Dien Bien Phu, the hedgehog defense did not work, because the defense was not on high ground.

In a probably apocryphal story, Ho Chi Minh is supposed to have used a helmet to illustrate the French position in a depression with Viet Minh artillery and anti-aircraft guns along the edge.

As they would do in the Vietnam War, General Vo Nguyen Giap's forces made use of caves, many of them hand-dug, to set up artillery, and they were able to pinpoint targets while being hidden from the enemy. One French officer committed suicide during the battle, because of his inability to defend against the Vietnamese bombardment. Giap also had trenches dug that allowed the Vietnamese to get closer to the French redoubts. Monsoon rains turned the fortifications and trenches into mud.

The battle continued for 54 days, and led to the French surrender and agreement to dissolve French Indochina. The Geneva Conference coincided with the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, but the promised free elections did not happen and Vietnam remained divided until the end of a long and bloody conflict.

Answer: Antietam

Many historians consider the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, to be an important turning point in the American Civil War, in spite of its ending in a draw of sorts. While General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was outnumbered by General George McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac, McClellan famously failed to use his troops to their full effect, and fighting was brutal as the two sides struggled back and forth across the field of battle.

However, the retreat of Lee's army from Maryland back into the south allowed President Abraham Lincoln to claim Antietam as a victory, justifying the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared slaves in the Confederacy to be free.

The focus of the war thus changed from preservation of the Union as it was to a moral imperative to change the nation forever.

Historians also speculate that had Lee prevailed at Antietam, European governments would have recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign nation at that point, throwing more support their way. "Order Number 191" outlined General Lee's strategy for the Maryland Campaign, revealing his plan to split his forces so that Harper's Ferry could be captured, and detailing exact routes of troop movements. Copies were made for Confederate officers, and one was found by a Union soldier in a field, wrapped around three cigars.

Although this piece of military intelligence was helpful, most historians agree that General McClellan failed to make optimal use of it.

Answer: Battle of Stalingrad

Lying between the Volga and the Don rivers, Stalingrad was an important industrial city well located to be of strategic importance, and Hitler saw it as a gateway to the oil fields of the Caucasus. Stalingrad (later renamed Volgograd) was named for Josef Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union during World War II; for this reason, taking the city had special significance to Hitler, as it would have propaganda value to capture a city named for the enemy's leader. Hitler interfered with the deployment of troops in the Soviet Union, at first splitting the army and later insisting that his army stand their ground when it would have been more strategic to retreat. Both the German army and their allies and the Russian army and the civilian population of Stalingrad struggled bravely and suffered many losses.

However, the German advance on the Eastern Front was broken, and their attempts to capture the oil fields were thwarted.