The Fall of Constantinople

Five hundred and sixty-three years ago today, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks after an epic siege that lasted fifty-three days. It was one of the epochal events in world history and one in which I have always been deeply fascinated. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, it was one of those stories from history that is simply dying to be made into a well-produced cable mini-series. I thought I would take the opportunity to give the reader a quick account of this amazing story.

By the middle of the 15th Century, the once proud Byzantine Empire had faded into near-insignificance. It had persisted for more than a thousand years after emerging from the collapse of the Roman world in the 4th and 5th Centuries. Indeed, as far as the Byzantines themselves were concerned, they were the Romans. It is was they called themselves and they had every right to the title. After the Roman Empire had split permanently into western and eastern halves upon the death of Emperor Theodosius I in 395, the western half had collapsed under the weight of barbarian invasions in less than a hundred years, while the eastern half had survived and thrived. Eventually it developed its own character, rather more Greek than Roman and entirely Christian rather than pagan, morphing into the Byzantine Empire. But the Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, who had taken the Byzantine throne in 1449, saw himself as being of a line that went all the way back to Augustus Caesar.

The empire over which Constantine ruled, however, was but a shadow of its former self. In its heyday, the Byzantine Empire had ruled over Asia Minor, the Balkans, southern Italy, and many of the major islands in the Mediterranean. Its army had been respected, its navy feared, the brilliance of its artists admired and envied, the genius of its scholars and theologians held in awe, and the wealth of its capital city on the Bosporus positively the stuff of legends. The violence and upheaval of the Crusades fatally weakened the Byzantine state, however, culminating in the brutal sack of Constantinople by fellow Christians in 1204. Although the Byzantines recaptured their capital in 1261, their empire had been shattered by the experience like a fine china set cast down onto the floor. By the time Constantine XI came to the throne, the Byzantines controlled only the city of Constantinople itself, the Peloponnesian peninsula in southern Greece (then known as Morea) and a few scattered islands in the Aegean. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

Worse, a deadly threat to Byzantine survival had emerged from the Islamic lands to the east. Following the chaos of the disastrous Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 13th Century, a series of small Turkish states had set themselves up in Asia Minor, fighting one another for supremacy. Over the course of a century-and-a-half, beginning around 1300, the mighty Ottoman Empire had emerged as the winner of this Darwinian struggle, subjugating Asia Minor and crossing into the Balkans as it crushed a succession of Christian and Muslim enemies. When a young and dynamic Sultan, Mehmed II, came to the throne in 1451, he let it be known that the fabled city of Constantinople was first on his list of desired conquests.

The Ottoman army mobilized and arrived at the walls of Constantinople in early April of 1453. His army numbered upwards of one hundred thousand men, including thousands of ferocious Janissaries, perhaps the most feared warriors in the world. While the bulk of Ottoman infantry came from the tough hill tribes of Anatolia, many of Mehmed's troops were, ironically enough, Christians from the Balkans, lured to the force by pay or driven by compulsion. Most terrible of all was the artillery that Mehmed brought to the siege. Much of it created by an infamous Hungarian cannon maker named Orban, it was the most extensive and powerful collection of artillery yet assembled in world history.

The Byzantines, by contrast, had a mere seven thousand men to defend the city. Yet their cause was not seen as hopeless, for Constantinople was one of the most easily defended cities in the world. Roughly triangular in shape, it was faced on the south by the Sea of Marmara, the north by the wide bay known as the Golden Horn, and could only be approached by a land army from the west. Its walls had stood for ten centuries and had repelled enemies as diverse as the Persians, the Arabs, the Bulgarians, and the Vikings. Only the Crusaders had managed to break through the walls, and that had been from the sea. The Ottomans themselves had failed to take the city during two previous attempts, in 1411 and 1422.

Moreover, although the defenders were heavily outnumbered, no one could question the quality of their leadership. Emperor Constantine XI was himself quite a competent warrior, having fought against Muslim and Christian enemies in Greece during his time as Despot of the Morea before becoming Emperor. Nor did anyone question his courage, for he could easily had fled the city before the Turks encircled it. Instead, he choose to remain and defend it with his life. As the first Turkish troops appeared over the horizon, the Emperor had clearly already made the decision that the siege would end only when he was either victorious or dead.

Alongside him, Constantine XI had a remarkable assembly of Christian warriors. There was the Castilian nobleman Don Francisco de Toledo, who would serve bravely and faithfully. There was the Venetian sea captain Gabriele Trevisano and several other Venetian sailors. There was the mysterious military engineer alternately named Johannes Grant or John Grant, who was said to be a German but whom some historians (including Steven Runciman, one of my favorite historical writers) had speculated might have been a Scot, whose genius would prove pivotal in the fighting to come. Indeed, of the seven thousand defenders, fully two thousand were volunteers from overseas, willing to come and fight even as their own governments shamefully turned a blind eye to what was happening.

Of all the foreign fighters who came to the defense of Constantinople, however, none was as legendary as Giovanni Giustiniani. He was a Genoese soldier renowned throughout the Christian world for his military skill and daring. Having recruited hundreds of men at his own expense and sailed from Italy to Constantinople to protect the fabled city, the Emperor gave him the command of the land wall defenses. He would be the pillar around which the other defenders of Constantinople would rally in the difficult weeks to come.

The Turks quickly overran two forts that had long ago been built beyond the city walls. The prisoners, rather than receiving mercy from the Sultan, were impaled within full view of Constantinople. If Mehmed II thought that this would terrify the defenders, he was sorely mistaken. By seeing what their fate would be if they failed, Constantine and his men steeled themselves for the storm that was about to break upon them. They had to conquer or they would perish.

The siege artillery Mehmed had brought to the fight began a long, slow, but steady bombardment of the walls. It was unlike anything that had ever been seen before in warfare. Thought the Christians did everything they could to repair the damage at night, the walls that had withstood so many previous attackers were steadily worn down into rubble. Several infantry assaults were made against the walls as well, but these were repelled with heavy losses, Giustiniani knew his business well and led his troops with exceptional skill and courage.

A long chain drawn across the entrance to the Golden Horn had prevented the Turkish fleet from gaining access to that body of water, allowing the Byzantines and their allies to leave the sea walls on the north side of the city comparatively undefended. Numerous Turkish naval attacks on the chain had been repelled by Trevisano. Indeed, Turkish naval actions had been humiliating for Mehmed, for several Christian supply ships had managed to slip through his blockade, much to the delight of Constantinople's defenders. However, on April 22, the Turks put their effectively unlimited manpower advantage to good use and simply hauled their ships across land to a portion of the northern coast of the Golden Horn under their control, thereby establishing a Turkish naval presence in the bay. An attempt by the defenders on April 28 to attack the Turkish fleet with fireships turned into a fiasco. From that point on, the Turkish ships controlled the Golden Horn and the Christian defenders were stretched ever more thinly along the walls.

It was probably obvious by this point that the defenders had little chance of actually winning the battle. Their only hope was to hold out long enough for a relief force to arrive from the Christian powers to the west. The powerful city-states of Venice or Genoa, many of whose citizens were in the ranks of the men lining the walls, could each have dispatched a fleet laden with reinforcements and supplies, almost certainly securing the city from Turkish capture. Neither bothered. Pope Nicholas V pleaded with Christian rulers to send assistance to Constantinople, despite the theological quarrels between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Nobody bothered. The defenders of Constantinople were on their own.

As their artillery continued to steadily erode the strength of the walls, the Turks also sought to undermine them. Soldiers brought from the silver mines of Serbia were put to work digging tunnels underneath the walls in order to collapse them. It was at this point that the mysterious man Grant made his mark for the defense. He dug countermines and broke into the Turkish tunnels. Some were destroyed by flooding them with water. In others, there was nightmarish underground combat in the dark as Grant's men attacked and killed Mehmed's diggers. The thought of dying in such conditions raises a chill in me even as I type these words. But the undermining effort was defeated.

Mehmed, far from a patient man, had become increasingly angered and frustrated by the stubbornness of the defenders. Moreover, he was worried that a Christian relief force might arrive before he could take the city. He sent an offer to Emperor Constantine, telling him that the people of the city would be spared and could leave without hindrance if they gave up Constantinople. The Emperor sternly refused, having long since decided to fight to the end. On May 27, the cannonading stopped and Mehmed let his men rest for a day, telling them that they would soon unleash a final, overwhelming attack. The Christians huddled in their churches, including the majestic Hagia Sophia, built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th Century, praying earnestly for deliverance. Constantine, the last in the long line of Roman Emperors, met with his key commanders and swore to defend the city to the last.

The night of May 28 passed quietly. Shortly after midnight, however, there came a terrifying cacophony of sounds from the Turkish camp as trumpets blared, drums pounded, and cymbals clanged. Wave after wave of Turkish infantry stormed forward and hurled themselves on the weakened defensive walls. The Christian warriors met them in furious combat and the sounds of battle filled the air. Mehmed had planned his attack carefully, with the first wave being made up of irregular and loosely disciplined troops known as bashi-bazouks. The Christians repelled them in bitter fighting, but suffered casualties in doing so and became tired and worn out. A second wave, made up of tougher Anatolian infantry, was likewise repulsed, but it was a near run thing and the Christian defenders were weakened further.

Finally, Mehmed sent his third wave forward. It was made up of his Janissaries, his elite shock troops. Nothing was held back; Mehmed was committing all his resources to this final assault. The Christians fought on, however, and for a time it appeared that this wave, too, would be turned back. It was at this moment that two terrible pieces of ill fortune befell the Christians. First, some Turkish troops discovered that a small sally port in the wall was still open and scurried through it to the other side, raising their banner on the small portion of the wall they had captured. At almost the same moment, Giustiniani was badly wounded (the accounts differ on whether it was a crossbow bolt or a fragment of a cannonball) and carried from the wall in agonizing pain. The Christian defenders lost heart. Exhausted, massively outnumbered, and finally giving in to terror, the soldiers abandoned the wall and fled back into the city.

The Turkish soldiers swarmed over the wall, now emptying of defenders. Some were already pushing their way into the streets of the city, beginning the traditional three days of looting and rape that befell a captured city during this period of history. Constantine XI saw that all was lost. He drew his sword and charged into the Turkish horde, slashing away at them until he was inevitably cut down and killed. With him died the last remnant of the Roman Empire. As some of the Christians fled to their boats, the city was given over to sack. The victorious Turks ran wild through the city, looting churches and homes, raping women, rounding up men, women, and children to be sold into slavery, and wrecking havoc. Terrified Christians crowded into Hagia Sophia, praying for a miracle, but the doors were hacked open by Turkish axes and the people within suffered the same fate as their fellows. The priests refused to stop conducting their holy liturgy and were killed.

The siege was over and the Turks were victorious. Mehmed soon rode his white horse through the gates and into the city, restoring order. It was the first step in the process by which Constantinople would be reborn at the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, which would last into the 20th Century. It would regain its former glory and become again one of the chief cities of the world, filled with people from all over the world, a center of trade and diplomacy. But it would forever after be a self-consciously Islamic city, having been made so by the man who would forever after be known as Mehmed the Conqueror.

The body of Constantine XI was never found, but there was no suggestion that he survived the battle. At least, not in any normal state. There was, however, an oft-repeated legend that is still remembered in Greece today. According to some, Constantine XI was rescued by an angel and turned into a marble statue. He was then taken to a secret cave somewhere near Constantinople, where he remains to this day. He will remain in his frozen state, so it is said, until the time comes for him to come back to life, reclaim Constantinople for Christianity, and restore the Byzantine Empire.

Did Thomas Jefferson Father The Children Of Sally Hemings? Probably Not.

If I asked the average educated American to list three things about Thomas Jefferson, they would probably tell me that he was President of the United States, that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and that he fathered children with a slave woman named Sally Hemings. It's disappointing to me that so few would recognize his role in establishing freedom of religion and public education in America, as well as helping to enact judicial and currency reforms that impact us to this day. It bothers me that so many would overlook the fact that he was a brilliant architect, gardener, scientist, inventor, musician, wine connoisseur, pioneer archaeologist, and linguist as well as a statesman, More than anything else, though, it bothers me that the third "fact" most Americans would "know" about Thomas Jefferson is probably not true at all.

Here is the torrid Jefferson-Hemings story. It starts in 1802, with disreputable muckraker named James Callendar, who had previously been a Jefferson ally but had become deeply embittered when Jefferson had turned him down for a postmaster job in Richmond. He published a diatribe against Jefferson in which accused the President of having fathered a child with his slave Sally. This was the first public mention of the controversy. Although the Federalist press repeated the claims (journalism was no more polite then than it is today), no one seems to have taken it very seriously. Callendar was known to be an unstable alcoholic and it was clearly a case of personal retaliation by Callendar against Jefferson. Even fierce political enemies like Alexander Hamilton and Henry Lee, who were always willing to believe the worst about Jefferson, dismissed the charges as baseless. So did John Adams. Discussion of the Callendar accusations basically ceased after Jefferson retired from the Presidency.

Decades later, in 1873, a man named Madison Hemings gave an interview to an anti-slavery newspaperman named S. F. Wetmore in which he claimed to be the son of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. He told quite a story, alleging that when Sally was in France during Jefferson's tenure there as a diplomat in the 1780s (she had been brought as a companion for Jefferson's daughter Maria), Jefferson had initiated a sexual relationship with her and she had become pregnant. Madison Hemings claimed that, though she could have remained in France as a free woman, Sally choose to return to Virginia with the promise from Jefferson that her children would be freed at a later date. During this time, Sally would have been a teenager and Jefferson would have been in his forties. The story is frankly preposterous and is dismissed even by many who believe Jefferson to be the father of the Hemings children. Interestingly, much of the text in Wetmore story is lifted directly from Callendar's 1802 story, with many names incorrectly spelled in the same manner in both pieces, and much if not most of the Hemings testimony seems to have been written by Wetmore than quoted from Hemings. The story contains many obvious falsehoods, such as claiming that Dolly Madison was present at Madison Hemings's birth (the historical evidence conclusively shows that she was in Washington D.C. on the day in question). It's worth pointing out that Wetmore was abolitionist and Unionist who despised Jefferson for his connection to slavery and for advocating the states' rights positions that inspired the Confederacy. He had strong personal motives for wanting to chip away at Jefferson's reputation, rather in the same way that modern liberals like to chip away at Ronald Reagan and modern conservatives like to chip away at Franklin Roosevelt.

Throughout the 20th Century, few historians paid much attention to the Jefferson-Hemings story, deeming the evidence so slender as to not be worth bothering with. Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, perhaps the two greatest Jeffersonian scholars who ever lived, both dismissed the story as a myth akin to George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. It was only with the publication of Fawn Brodie's confusing and muddled "psychological biography" of Jefferson in the 1970s, in which she asserted that a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship did exist, that interest in the story revived. She provided no new evidence or, for that matter, any real evidence at all. Brodie, among other things, believed that Jefferson's comments of the color of dirt in the Rhine Valley, made while studying agricultural practices, revealed hidden details of his secret affair with Hemings. This is, to put it bluntly, so nonsensical that it's astonishing anyone might take it seriously. It should also be pointed out that Brodie wrote her book shortly after discovering that her husband was having an extramarital affair.

The biggest change in popular and academic perception of the Jefferson-Hemings story came in November of 1998, with the publication of a DNA study in the scientific journal Nature. It demonstrated a link through Y-chromosomal samples between a descendant of Field Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's uncle) and a descendant of Eston Hemings, one of Sally's children. This proved conclusively that Eston's father was a member of the Jefferson family. The media had a field day, partially because of the then-ongoing sensational story of President Bill Clinton's infidelity, but also because the press loves any hint of a sex scandal and it has become fashionable to diminish the stature of America's Founding Fathers. Newspapers and television news programs ran stories asserting that the DNA study settled the question for all time. The public, and much of academia, swallowed of all of this hook, line, and sinker. Today, it seems to be a commonly accepted truth that Thomas Jefferson was, indeed, the father of all the Hemings children.

I disagree. The "evidence" for Jefferson's paternity is persuasive only to those who, for whatever reason, are already inclined to believe the story. If one adopts a rigorously rational attitude in approaching this question, it quickly becomes clear that the issue is, at the very least, far from settled. Personally, I would argue that the weight of the evidence is actually against the idea of Thomas Jefferson being the father of any of the Hemings children.

All of the solid information historians can amass about Sally Hemings can be written down on a postcard. We know how old she was, we know that she went to France with Jefferson's daughter, and we know that she had six children and when they were born. Abigail Adams met her in England while she and Jefferson's daughter were on their way to Paris and thought she was good-natured but childish and irresponsible. Many books have been written about Sally, fiction and nonfiction alike, but next to nothing is actually known about her. We don't know if she was literate, we don't know where she was on any given date, or anything else. We have no idea whether all of her children had the same father. All this is very important to keep in mind as we go forward in examining the question of Jefferson's paternity of the Hemings children.

Thomas Jefferson himself never publicly responded to James Callendar's claim that he had fathered a child with Hemings. Some people assert that the absence of a public denial was a tacit admission of guilt. But it was always Jefferson's policy to meet gossipy slanders from his political opponents with silence, believing that any response would be beneath his dignity. Moreover, in private correspondence, as in a July 1, 1805, letter to his friend and colleague Robert Smith, he did deny the story. He spoke of the various gossip being spread about him over the past few years and admitted that one story (that he had attempted to seduce his friend's wife when he was a young man) was true but that all the other stories were lies. He didn't mention Sally Hemings specifically, perhaps because he felt that the story was so absurd as to not be worth mentioning. It is quite clear that Jefferson himself considered the story preposterous.

Jefferson's family members and friends strongly rejected the claims. Edmund Bacon, Jefferson's overseer at Monticello and probably the person best positioned to know the truth, strongly refuted the idea of Jefferson's paternity of the Hemings children; he said he knew who the father was and refused to divulge his identity, except to stress that it was not Thomas Jefferson. Several of Jefferson's grandchildren denied the charges and pointed out that it would have been impossible for such an affair to remain concealed in Monticello, which was usually crowded with people. With the single exception of Madison Hemings, none of the Hemings children themselves said a word about their father being Thomas Jefferson. The slave Isaac Jefferson, who is an invaluable source of information about slave life at Monticello, mentions the Hemings family in his memoirs but makes no suggestion at all that the father of the children was Thomas Jefferson.

Now, a person might immediately object to the credibility of the denials by Jefferson family members, as they would have had a vested interest in protecting the reputation of their distinguished patriarch. But an equally valid objection can be raised to the oral history testimony of Madison Hemings (even if we accept that Wetmore's account of the interview was an honest one). I myself have met several people over the course of my life who assert dubious claims to be descended from prominent historical figures. Even assuming that Madison Hemings was who he claimed to be, which is far from certain, how do we know that Madison Hemings didn't simply want to make people think he was the son of Thomas Jefferson, rather than an undistinguished former slave like any other?

Because of the white complexion of the Hemings children, most people close to Jefferson assumed that their father or fathers were white men. Sally herself seems to have been at least partly white (it is often asserted that she was the daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law, and therefore the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, but there is no conclusive evidence of this). We know that some of the Hemings children lived without difficulty as members of the white community in Virginia after Jefferson's death, so it certainly seems likely that their father (or fathers) was (or were) white. Most members of Jefferson's family suspected that one of Jefferson's nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr, was the culprit. Both had a reputation for inappropriate intimacy with slave women and both were frequently at Monticello throughout Jefferson's life. Written evidence solidly places them at Monticello approximately nine months before the birth of three of the six Hemings children. Most importantly, some of Jefferson's grandchildren related that the Carr brothers admitted sleeping with Sally Hemings.

This is where the 1998 DNA test comes in. The Carr nephews were the children of one of Jefferson's sisters, not a brother. They would not have the same y-chromosonal DNA a Jefferson, so there is no way that either of them could have been the father of Eston Hemings. There is no evidence which rules out either of the Carr nephews as being the father of the other five Hemings children, but the identify of the father of Eston Hemings has to be a Jefferson.

Not necessarily Thomas Jefferson, though. There were a great many men within close proximity to Monticello who were directly related to Thomas Jefferson and carried the same Y-chromosonal DNA. They include Thomas Jefferson's brother Randolph and his five sons, Thomas Jefferson's first cousin John and his six sons, the seven sons of Thomas Jefferson's first cousin Peter, and the five sons of Thomas Jefferson's first cousin George. That's twenty-two people other than Thomas Jefferson whose paternity of Eston Hemings would have been consistent with the 1998 DNA test. There may be others who are unknown to historians. But of them all, the most important is Randolph Jefferson.

Randolph lived within an easy day's ride of Monticello and visited his brother often. According to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote on August 12, 1807, Randolph was expected to arrive for a visit to Monticello at any moment. This was approximately nine months before the birth of Eston Hemings, the only Hemings child with a known DNA link to the Jefferson family. In other words, the available evidence places Randolph Jefferson at Monticello at precisely the time when the only Hemings child known to have been fathered by a Jefferson was conceived.

Why should we believe that Randolph Jefferson was more likely to be the father of Eston than Thomas Jefferson? Take a look at the two different personalities, as revealed by the comments of those who knew them. Randolph Jefferson had a reputation for excessive drinking and, according to the slave Isaac, liked to dance and play the fiddle in the slave quarters during his visits to Monticello. He was known to have fathered children with his own slaves on his own plantation. All this is in stark contrast to his brother Thomas, who rarely ventured into the slave quarters, never socialized with slaves with such familiarity, and whose writings express distaste at the blending of white and black races. Which of the two seems more likely to sleep with a slave?

Interestingly, the oral history of the descendants of Eston Hemings long asserted that Eston was not fathered by Thomas Jefferson but rather by one of Jefferson's relatives. In this, they were most likely correct. It was only with the publication of Fawn Brodie's book in the 1970s, and direct efforts at persuasion by Ms. Brodie herself, that the descendants of Eston Hemings began claiming that Eston's father was Thomas Jefferson.

There is something to be said about the dates of the births of all the Hemings children. All of Sally Hemings children were born between 1795 and 1808. This was between the death of Randolph's first wife Anne and his marriage to his second wife Mitchie, meaning that he was single when all of the Hemings children were conceived and born. This was also true of Thomas Jefferson, who lost his wife in 1782 and never remarried, but there is another element to that story. Two of the Hemings children, Madison and Eston, were conceived and born after Callendar had published the story and while Jefferson was serving as President. It is inconceivable to imagine that a man as emotionally controlled and careful of his reputation as Thomas Jefferson would have continued sleeping with Sally Hemings under such circumstances.

To me, it seems far more likely that Randolph Jefferson, and not Thomas Jefferson, was the father of Eston Hemings. As for the other children, who knows? Maybe Randolph was the father of them all. Perhaps the others were fathered by either of the Carr nephews. Perhaps they were fathered by a man historians have never heard of. Since we're talking about several different children, it could be some combination of all of the above. But the assertion that all of the Hemings children were fathered by Thomas Jefferson is not only dubious, but so unlikely as to be unthinkable.

In the popular media and in various reference sources, when the subject of Thomas Jefferson comes up, his paternity of the Hemings children is often stated as a confirmed fact, which it obviously is not. Alternatively, it is said that the Jefferson paternity of the Hemings children is the opinion of the majority of historians. I know of no poll of American historians undertaken to determine whether or not this is true. To date, there has only been one panel of genuine academic historians, the so-called Scholars Commission convened by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Foundation, who have systematically investigated the claims. It included such luminaries as Dr. Lance Banning of the University of Kentucky, Dr. Alf Mapp of Old Dominion University, and Dr. Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama, among many other distinguished historians. Its conclusion is that Randolph Jefferson is more likely to be the father of Eston Hemings than Thomas Jefferson, that there is no reason to believe Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of the Hemings children, and that "Sally Hemings appears to have been a very minor figure in Thomas Jefferson's life."

For further information, I would encourage all readers of this blog to study the Scholars Commission's report (the executive summary of the report can be found here). Other books I would recommend would be In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal by William Hyland, Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings by M. Andrew Holowchak, and Jefferson Vindicated: Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Geneological Search by Cynthia Burton. (Whatever you do, though, don't read the book on Jefferson by David Barton. Although he agrees that Jefferson was not the father of the Hemings children, the rest of the book is pseudohistorical nonsense. In fact, don't read any books by Barton at all, period.)

The idea that Thomas Jefferson was the father of the children of Sally Hemings is the product of two things, a media which loves a scandalous story and a cohort of misguided academics who are more interested in grinding their own cultural and political axes than they are in pursuing the truth. Such a conclusion cannot be reached through a dispassionate examination of the available evidence. Is it possible that Thomas Jefferson was the father of the Hemings children? From a purely logical point of view, obviously it is technically possible. But is it likely?

No, it's not.

Could Jubal Early Have Captured Washington D.C. in 1864?

One of the most fascinating episodes of the American Civil War was Jubal Early's Raid on Washington. It really should be made into a movie, as it has an amazing cast of characters and a plot of epic drama. It also has led generations of Civil War buffs to ask the question: could Jubal Early have captured Washington D.C. and won the war for the Confederacy?

A quick recounting the events is in order. In the summer of 1864, the Confederacy was desperately trying to hold back the massive Union offensives in both Virginia and Georgia. Its only hope was to hold out until the presidential elections in the North, which might see Abraham Lincoln removed from office and replaced with an administration willing to negotiate a peace. To achieve this, the South had to hold its major cities, inflict heavy Union casualties, and take any opportunities to embarrass or humiliate the Union armies, so as to persuade the Northern public that the continuation of the war would be a futile waste of life and treasure.

By early June, the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee and the Army of the Potomac under General Ulysses S. Grant had almost wrecked one another in the series of bloody engagements collectively known as the Overland Campaign. In the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania, the Battle of North Anna, and the Battle of Cold Harbor, the two armies had bled each other white. Lee had suffered around 30,000 casualties, while Grant had suffered somewhere around 55,000. It was slaughter on a scale never before seen on American soil. Grant, through attrition and sheer force of numbers, was slowly eroding the Confederacy's ability to continue military resistance. At the same time, Lee, with every Northern soldier who died at the hands of his men, was whittling away at the Union's willingness to continue the war.

With the battlelines momentarily stalemated outside of Cold Harbor, Lee faced a new threat when he learned that a small Union army under General David Hunter had defeated Confederate forces in the strategically important Shenandoah Valley. Though he needed every man to face Grant, Lee make the risky decision to detach his vaunted Second Corps, commanded by General Jubal Early, and dispatch it to the Shenandoah Valley. Early, a pugnacious and brilliant fighter (and, by all accounts, an accomplished master of profanity) was the perfect man for the assignment. Setting out on the morning of June 13, within a week Early had chased a frightened Hunter out of the Valley and recovered it for the Confederacy.

Early now put into operation the second phase of Lee's plan, which was daring in the extreme. In addition to clearing the Shenandoah Valley, Lee wanted Early to move rapidly north, cross the Potomac River into Maryland, and present a threat to Washington D.C. Lee well understood the nervousness of the Lincoln administration when it came to the security of the capital and he hoped that such a move would force Grant to detach significant forces from the Army of the Potomac in order to protect Washington.

Early had less than 15,000 men, who were tired, hungry and lacking shoes and proper clothing. Nevertheless, they were quite possibly the finest infantry in the world. They were mostly Virginians and North Carolinians, but also included Georgians, Alabamians, and Louisianans. Some Maryland cavalry came along for the expedition, too, and their knowledge of the land would prove useful. These were the survivors of those who had marched and fought with Stonewall Jackson in the 1862-63 campaigns. Moreover, they were led by some of the best division commanders of the Confederate Army: John C, Breckinridge, John B. Gordon, Robert Rodes, and Stephen Ramseur. As Robert Kean, an official in the Confederate War Department, observed, these were "men to dare and do almost anything."

By contrast, the Union forces tasked with defending Washington were weak, scattered, and disorganized. With David Hunter having retreated into the wilds of West Virginia, there was no major Union field force between Early and Washington. General Franz Sigel had about 5,000 men defending the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and some scattered units in Maryland were under the command of General Lew Wallace, but no one seemed to be in charge and no one seemed to have any clear idea of what was happening. Even worse, the Union high command took a mystifyingly long time to realize that anything was wrong. In Washington, President Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and Chief-of-Staff Halleck had no clear idea as to the location, intention, or size of Early's force. On July 3, just before the Confederates began crossing the Potomac, General Grant stated to Halleck his belief that Early's corps had returned to the Richmond area. It wasn't until July 5, the very day that Early began to cross into Maryland, that Grant decided to send reinforcements north towards Washington, and then only a single division under James Ricketts, which had a reputation for unreliability and had fought poorly at the Battle of the Wilderness.

As Early's men crossed the Potomac, scooping up Union supply depots at Martinsburg and Harper's Ferry as they did so, Sigel withdrew his smaller force onto the well-fortified high ground of Maryland Heights, just north of the river from Harper's Ferry, and awaited attack. Early spent two priceless days trying to pry Sigel out of these fortifications, but did not risk a direct assault, which he knew might fail and which would bring heavy casualties even if it succeeded. On July 7, Early decided to cut his losses, ignore Sigel and move on towards Washington. The lost time would soon be sorely regretted.

While this had been going on, Lew Wallace had suddenly emerged as the only Union man doing anything decisive or constructive. Without waiting for orders from his superiors, he began to assemble every soldier he could find at Monocacy Junction, on the direct route between Harper's Ferry and Washington. But his force was pathetically weak, made up of only of a few regiments of cavalry and a hobbled-together infantry brigade made up largely of inexperienced Ohio militiamen. In the pre-dawn darkness of July 8, salvation arrived in the form of Ricketts's infantry division.

Wallace technically had no authority to issue orders to Ricketts, who was not under his command. In a sign of the confusion that still infected the Union high command, Ricketts was under orders to proceed to Maryland Heights to reinforce Sigel. Had they marched on, the 3,000 Union troops of the division would have run directly into Early's 15,000 oncoming Confederates and been wiped out. Despite the uncertain command situation, Ricketts decided to disobey his orders and remain at Monocacy under Wallace's direction. This courageous decision very likely saved Washington City from Confederate capture.

On July 9, the Battle of Monocacy was fought. Early's 15,000 Confederates attacked Wallace's ad hoc force of less than 6,000. Early not only outnumbered Wallace nearly three-to-one, but his troops were of a much higher quality. But Wallace had selected an excellent defensive position behind Monocacy Creek and his troops fought with a surprising stubbornness. Early feinted on the left and launched his main attack on the right, spearheaded by Gordon's division. Ricketts's men dispelled rumors of their lack of fighting spirit and resisted stoutly, before superior numbers finally compelled them to give way. By the afternoon, Wallace's men had been soundly beaten and were retreating in disorder towards Baltimore. Yet, though undoubtedly a defeat, the Battle of Monocacy delayed Early's advance on Washington for a crucial day.

While fighting raged at Monocacy, confused Union authorities were making frantic efforts to prepare to the defend the capital. At first glance, it would seem to be an easy task. Three years of strenuous and expensive construction work had ringed Washington City with a vast chain of forts, trenches, and heavy artillery batteries. By the summer of 1864, it was the most heavily fortified city on the planet. Yet General Grant, in a display of overconfidence for which he has strangely escaped censure by historians, had ordered most of the garrison to join the Army of the Potomac for the spring campaign, leaving the immense defenses without the soldiers to make them worth anything. As Early approached the city, it was weakly defended.

No one appeared to be in charge in the city. Chief-of-Staff Halleck and Secretary of War Stanton seemed to be issuing orders almost at random to any officer they encountered. Stanton ordered General Alexander McCook to take command, while Halleck ordered General Quincy Gilmore to do the same and, for good measure, Grant at Petersburg sent word that he wanted General Edward Ord to be in charge. The whole thing was an enormous, confused mess.

The very muddle that was the Union command structure at Washington has made it difficult for historians to piece together exactly how many Union soldiers there were in Washington as Early approached. It might have been around eight or nine thousand men, but they were of distinctly low quality. Many were nothing more than government clerks hastily mustered into military service, who had received no training and who had never fired their weapons. The rest were members of the so-called Veteran Reserve Corps, known up until March as the Invalid Corps, men so disabled by sickness or wounds as to be unfit for active service and given jobs such as guarding prisoners and working as provost marshals. Against the men who had fought under Stonewall Jackson, these men could not be expected to put up much of a fight.

The strength of the Washington defenses lay primarily in its heavy artillery. But Grant had ordered all of the skilled artillerymen out of the capital's forts and into the ranks of the Army of the Potomac when he had embarked upon the spring campaign. Inspections rapidly undertaken during Early's approach at the orders of Halleck and Stanton revealed that many batteries were manned only by men who had no idea how to fire the cannon.

Washington City was there for the taking, if only Early could get to it in time.

But help was on the way to the beleaguered city. Down at Petersburg, Grant had finally woken up to the truth that Jubal Early and a significant chunk of the Army of Northern Virginia were in Maryland and posed a terrifying threat to Washington City, a threat that Grant himself had made possible by stripping the capital of its garrison. On the night of July 9, as Wallace's defeated troops streamed away from the battlefield at Monocacy, Grant gave orders for the VI Corps to depart by ship for Washington City without delay, as well as a division of the XIX Corps. These were seasoned veterans, led by an experienced officer in the form of General Horatio Wright. Behind the formidable Washington City defenses, these troops would easily hold even against Early's men. The question was whether or not they would arrive in time.

When the Battle of Monocacy ended on the night of July 9, Early and his small army were exhausted. They had marched hundreds of miles through the summer heat, fought innumerable skirmishes with the enemy, and capped it all off with a sharp and brutal battle along Monocacy Creek. Yet the prospect of capturing Washington City and perhaps carting Lincoln and his cabinet off to Libby Prison was so alluring that they were more than willing to continue. Early's men were on the road again on July 10, bearing down on the nearly defenseless city of Washington, while cavalry ranged across Maryland to burn bridges, tear down telegraph wires, and generally raise mayhem. Baltimore was in a panic and Washington City seemed almost cut off from the rest of the Union.

The road to Washington was hot in the extreme. There was much straggling along the way as exhausted men fell by the wayside, unable to keep up with their comrades. There had been no rain for some time and the dust was suffocating. Even for Stonewall Jackson's old "foot cavalry", there were limits to human endurance. July 10 would be remembered as one of the most difficult marches that these men had ever undertaken. When it was over, Early's troops were just north of Rockville, Maryland, within twenty miles of the Capitol Building and White House. But they were weak, thirsty, and exhausted, with many soldiers having become separated from their units along the way.

The march on July 11 started well before dawn. As exhausted as his men were, Early knew he had to push them. Though he could not have known that the ships carrying the men of the VI and XIX Corps were already on their way, he had to assume that Union reinforcements were rushing to protect Washington. He knew it was a race against time. But, as with the day before, it also turned into a contest with nature, as it was again unspeakably hot and dry on the road. Confederate cavalry under General John McCausland were the first to arrive in front of the Washington defenses. Though impressed by the formidable fortifications, he sent back word to Early that the works appeared only lightly manned. One can imagine how Early's pulse quickened when he heard the news and how his legendary cursing was put to use hurrying his men along, no matter how hot and tired they were.

As the day wore on, more and more Confederate troops marched up to the ramparts of Fort Stevens, one of the chief defensive points on the northern side of the city's defenses. It took time to get the men in position and they would need rest before being able to launch an attack. Brisk skirmishing took place out in front of the fortified line, while Confederate sharpshooters took positions from which they could snipe at Yankees within the fort. Artillery banged out. Unfortunately for Early, simply getting his main force to close up on Fort Stevens took most of the day. His men were in no shape for fighting. By the time enough men had assembled for a serious attack, darkness was already beginning to fall. A night's rest would be enough for his men to recover their strength and they would attack in the morning. Early could only hope that Union reinforcements were still more than a day away.

Yet even as Early and his commanders met at the mansion at Silver Spring, raided its wine cellar, and made jokes about returning Breckinridge to his old chair in the Senate chamber, the ships carrying the VI and XIX Corps were arriving on the Potomac River wharves. One can imagine the relief felt by Lincoln, Halleck and Stanton, to say nothing of the citizenry of Washington (aside from the pro-Southern element) as thousands of tough veteran infantrymen marched north from the boats to take up positions in the forts and trenches.

When the sun rose on July 12, Early saw a sight that must have made his heart sink. Fort Stevens and the adjacent trenches were filled with blue-coated soldiers. The heavy guns were manned by experienced artillery crews. Even with his whole force, notwithstanding the unmatched quality of his infantry, any attack on the Washington defenses would accomplish nothing but the slaughter of his own men. Moreover, he knew that his small army was now in great danger itself. The Union forces previously hemmed in at Harper's Ferry were possibly approaching from that direction and Hunter's force was finally emerging from the mountains of West Virginia. Combined with the two corps of the Army of the Potomac now in Washington, there was a risk of being caught between two fires. It was time to get away while the getting was good.

After a day of fruitless skirmishing in front of Fort Stevens, during which President Lincoln famously if foolishly came up to watch the fighting, Early and his men quietly stole away during the night. Laden with supplies they had gathered during their liberal foraging in Maryland, as well as a large amount of livestock and horses they had collected, they withdrew across the Potomac River and, a few days later, were safe in their lair of the northern Shenandoah Valley. The Union had not seen the last of Jubal Early.

Early's Washington Raid was over. It's one of the great dramas of the American Civil War and, ever since, historians have asked themselves whether he might have actually captured Washington D.C. The answer seems to be an emphatic yes. Had Jubal Early's force arrived at Washington D.C. a mere twenty-four hours before it actually did, it could have punched its way past the untried clerks and invalids without much trouble. The most obvious point of divergence that would have allowed this to happen would have been for Early not to have wasted the crucial two days trying to pry Sigel off of Maryland Heights by Harper's Ferry. Had he immediately decided to do what he eventually did - ignore Sigel and march on towards Washington - he would have had plenty of time to get there before reinforcements arrived.

Moreover, on two occasions, Grant ordered reinforcements to the north that made the difference at a critical moment, on July 5 when he ordered Ricketts's division to Baltimore and on July 9 when he ordered the VI and XIX Corps men to Washington. Had he delayed in either instance, the consequences for the Union would have been disastrous. Had Grant waited even one more day before sending Ricketts, Wallace would not have been able to delay Early at the Battle of Monocacy, Early would have arrived in front of Washington on July 10 rather than July 11 and would have been able to capture it. Had Grant waited even one more day before sending the VI and XIX Corps, Early would have been able to take the city on July 12, for the defenses would have still been feebly manned.

The consequences of a capture of Washington City by the Confederates in July of 1864 can scarcely be overstated. There would have been no way for Early to have held the city for very long after capturing it, but Grant would have had little choice but to send additional heavy reinforcements away from Petersburg to deal assist with the recapture and this might have forced the termination of the Siege of Petersburg altogether. It might even have allowed Lee to go onto the offensive. What seems almost certain is that Grant's campaign to capture Richmond would have been completely derailed.

Almost as important would have been the impact of Union war logistics. Washington City was not just the political capital, but the greatest military supply depot in the world. Warehouses were jam-packed with rifles, artillery, ammunition, blankets, uniforms, saddlery for cavalry and artillery horses, camp equipment and every other conceivable kind of military supply. Whatever Early's men would not have been able to carry off with them would have been put to the torch. The Washington Arsenal on the peninsula between the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers was the largest such facility in the United States and Early's men would have surely destroyed it, just as they would surely have burned down the Navy Yard. The War Department, the Navy Department and the Treasury Department (after being looted of its greenbacks) would have just as surely been burned. Conceivably, Early's men might have left the Capitol Building and the White House nothing but charred bits of rubble. The Southerners, having marched through the towns and farms of the Shenandoah Valley that had been left in ruins by the Yankees, were not going to be in any mood for leniency against their Northern enemies, as was historically shown by their destruction of the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The destruction of military facilities in Washington City would have inflicted a mortal blow on the Union efforts to win the war in Virginia before the end of 1864.

Yet catastrophic as they would have been, the military consequences would have paled against the political ones. Historically, the summer of 1864 was a disastrous time for the Union war effort, with fiascoes at Cold Harbor, Kennesaw Mountain, and Brice's Cross Roads. Historically, the near-capture of Washington by Early was humiliating for the Lincoln administration. Imagine how more humiliating its actual capture would have been. The Democratic Party would have had a field day with political cartoons featuring Lincoln as he escaped down the Potomac River on a boar while Early's men ransacked the capital. All possibility of Lincoln winning that year's presidential election would have been finished. Even worse for the Union cause, the pro-peace wing of the Democratic Party would have seen its hand immensely strengthened. Combined with the fact that the Confederates would certainly have been in a stronger military position when the new president would have taken office in March of 1865, it seems virtually certain that a negotiated peace with the Confederacy would have followed, perhaps along the same lines as those which I outlined in my novel Shattered Nation.

The outcome of momentous historical events is often balanced on the edge of a knife. There is no better example of this in American history than the story of Jubal Early's Raid on Washington.

The Second Hundred Years War and the Power of the Bond Market

In a few recent blog posts, I put forward my ideas as to which battles deserve a place on a list of the fifteen most decisive battles in world history. If any one of these battles had gone differently, the entire course of history would have been changed. However, it's important to remember that while history can sometimes be changed in a day, or even an hour, by the seemingly insignificant actions of a single individual, there are also very long arcs in history that have even more power. This is especially true when we try to comprehend the historically misunderstood subject of money. To illustrate this, consider the following story.

Between the ascension of King William III in 1688 until the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Britain and France went to war with one another with grim regularity. They fought against one another in the War of the Grand Alliance from 1689 until 1697, in the War of the Spanish Succession from 1701 until 1714, the War of Austrian Succession from 1742 until 1748, the Seven Years War from 1756 until 1763, the American Revolutionary War from 1778 until 1783, the French Revolutionary Wars from 1792 until 1802, and the Napoleonic Wars from 1803 until 1815. The wars were waged not only in Europe, but on the high seas, in the Americas, in India, and among assorted islands and colonies across the globe. War between Britain and France during this time period was so common that some historians have taken to calling it the "Second Hundred Years War" and have compared the Franco-British rivalry to that of Rome and Carthage in ancient times.

The Second Hundred Years War began as a conflict over religion, with Catholic France pitted against Protestant Britain, and a struggle to contain the personal ambitions of King Louis XIV, the Sun King. Before too long, however, the struggle had morphed into a larger conflict over trade, empire, and which nation was to emerge as the global superpower. Britain and France fought each other during this time period basically because they were the two toughest kids on the block. Only one could be left standing in the end.

At the beginning of the struggle, intelligent observers probably would have given the more favorable odds to France. It had a larger population, superior resources, and a much more stable government. The mighty French army had been feared across Europe for centuries and it seemed posed to ensure French hegemony over the whole continent. The power of the French king was unchallenged when the Second Hundred Years War began. In the conflict's latter stages, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French army and state would be led by one of history's most brilliant generals and most effective rulers. Britain, by contrast, was emerging in 1688 from a period of social, religious, and political chaos and a bitter civil war between King and Parliament. It was only in 1707 that England and Scotland united, under dubious circumstances, into the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Subversion by Scottish Jacobites opposed to the Union would continue to be a problem for years, until finally crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

Nevertheless, when the end came in 1815, it was Britain that had emerged victorious from the Second Hundred Years War and France that lay prostrate in defeat. Britain became the undisputed global superpower for the next century, with an empire on which the sun never set. Today, English rather than French is the global language of business and diplomacy, and innumerable countries use political, economic, and legal systems derived from British rather than French models.

How did Britain do it? How did the weak and divided English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish triumph over the united power of France?

The valor of Britain's soldiers and sailors, as demonstrated in battles such as Blenheim, Quebec, Trafalgar, and Waterloo, certainly had something to do with it. So did the brilliance of statesmen like William Pitt and military leaders like the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington. But if you really want to know the answer, the place to look is the London establishment known as Jonathan's Coffee House. It had opened in 1680 and, very soon and without any planning, became England's de facto stock market.

When William III became King of England in 1688, he maintained his other position as Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, simultaneously ruling both nations. The close relationship between Britain and the Netherlands during the early years of the Second Hundred Years War exposed the British to the revolutionary economic concepts and new financial institutions then emerging among the Dutch. In the 17th Century, the Netherlands had become the first nation to establish a central bank, the first nation to establish a stock market, and one of the first nations to establish a national lottery. The money raised, borrowed, and loaned out by these institutions helped propel tiny little Holland into the ranks of the great powers of Europe.

Britain followed the Dutch example. The Bank of England was established in 1694. By then, scores of companies were trading stock issues at Jonathan's Coffee House and, soon enough, other establishments. Chartered companies enabled an enormous boom in trade with the colonies in North America and the Caribbean, as well as with India and the Far East. Economic development throughout Britain and Ireland became possible on a scale never before imagined and such inventions as James Watt's steam engine and James Hargreaves's spinning wheel came into being due to an extensive system of financing.

This unprecedented economic boom, made possible by the financial institutions the British adapted from the Dutch model, allowed the British government to raise enormous amounts of money through the issuance of government bonds. The Royal Navy grew from a pathetically small force in the late 17th Century into a vast fleet of warships that dominated the globe by the early 19th Century, shattering French naval power at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The British were not only able to field armies on the plains of Germany, in the mountains of Spain, and throughout the overseas colonies, but to subsidize continental allies like Prussia, Austria, and Russia to do their fighting for them. Without the revolutionary financial system that took hold during the 18th Century, none of this would have been possible.

The British did not so much outfight the French as out-finance them.

The French might have matched their British adversaries in financial innovation. The brilliant if roughish Scottish economic John Law immigrated to Paris in the early 18th Century and found himself appointed Controller General of Finances by the French government. He began to implement many of the financial practices which had been developed by the Dutch and were even then being put into practice by the British. But like a figure in a Greek tragedy, Law became arrogant and eventually went too far. In 1720, a Ponzi scheme he had set up surrounding the largely fictitious Mississippi Company came crashing down, instantly ruining the lives of thousands of Frenchmen. Law fled France and died in exile, while the French turned their backs on newfangled financial schemes for nearly a century. One wonders how different history might have been had Law been able to keep his head and bring about the creation of a sound financial infrastructure in France to match that of Britain.

The lesson of the British victory over the French in the Second Hundred Years War is that wars are won on the floors of the bond market no less than they are won on the battlefield. The power of a nation is to be measured not merely by the number of aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons they possess, but by the flexibility and reliability of their financial institutions. In an increasingly globalized and interdependent world, this lesson is one we forget at our peril.

What If Julius Caesar Had Not Been Assassinated?

The most famous assassination in world history took place on March 15, 44 BC, when a group of senators fatally stabbed Julius Caesar to death. It was an event of world-shaking importance, so fixed in the Western consciousness that it has been the subject of countless plays (including one of Shakespeare's finest productions), operas, paintings, movies, and, for good measure, a highly entertaining HBO mini-series. All educated people know the sinister implications behind the words, "Beware the Ides of March."

Caesar was one of the most fascinating and dramatic personalities in all of history. At the time of his death, he was the most powerful man in the known world. In earlier years, he had steadily worked his way up the cursus honorum, the ladder of public offices of the Roman Republic that all ambitious Romans sought to climb. He had successively been a military tribune, quaestor, praetor, propraetor, and finally, in 59 BC, was elected consul, the highest office in the Republic. Through all of this, Caesar had spent lavishly on bribes and pushed populist policies to win support among the plebian class, despite the fact that he himself came from a patrician (though not especially distinguished) family.

As he had worked his way up the cursus honorum, Caesar had made many enemies among the old aristocracy, largely because he proposed land reform legislation that would have confiscated land from the wealth and distributed it to the poor. To protect himself from them, he formed an unlikely alliance with Marcus Licinius Crassus, the wealthiest and perhaps most unscrupulous man in Rome, and Pompey Magnus, Rome's outstanding military hero and as politically ambitious as Caesar himself. These three men became known as the First Triumvirate, linked together out of pure self-interest rather than any mutually held political ideals. Among the three, Caesar was decidedly the most junior member.

It was customary to grant a consul a "proconsulship" after their single year as a consul was over. Despite the efforts of his enemies to grant him an inconsequential proconsul office, Caesar was made the governor of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy). Using this territory as a staging point, he embarked upon an unauthorized campaign conquest of Gaul, which is today roughly the territory covered by France. Though he had not previously had much military experience, he very quickly demonstrated extraordinary skills as a military commander, which he would continue to exhibit for the remainder of his life. Indeed, whenever I am asked the name the man I consider the greatest military genius of all time, I unhesitatingly name Julius Caesar.

In ten years of tough, ruthless and brilliant campaigning, Caesar completely subjugated the tribes of Gaul, winning battle after battle. He launched expeditions into Britain and across the Rhine into Germany as well, sternly warning those tribes that they would face the full brunt of Roman power if they dared to interfere with the Republic. A final uprising of the Gauls in 52 BC, led by the gallant Vercingetorix, was crushed by Caesar at the Battle of Alesia, after which Gaul was incorporated into the Roman Republic as a conquered province. Through it all, Caesar kept the people of Rome informed of his achievements through writing what amounted to long and lucid press releases, compiled together into Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic Wars), which make for fantastic reading even today.

Caesar's conquest of Gaul unsettled many of the prominent leaders of the Roman Senate. He had become enormously popular with the people and so rich that he could bribe enough voters to be elected to whatever office he wanted. In the meantime, though, the First Triumvirate had collapsed, with Crassus dying in a misguided campaign against the Parthians in the distant east and Pompey now aligning himself with Caesar's enemies. The moment that Caesar's term as proconsul ended, his legal immunity would be stripped and his enemies would be able to haul him before the courts for crimes going back to the days of his consulship. Caesar was determined not to let that happen.

In 49 BC, in the face of demands from Rome that he lay down his consulship and disband his legions, Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy, thus launching a civil war. For the next four years, war would rage throughout the Mediterranean world, as Roman fought against Roman in Italy, Spain, Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere. When the fighting ended, Caesar had crushed Pompey at the decisive Battle of Pharsalus and destroyed remaining opposition at the Battle of Thapsus in North Africa and the Battle of Munda in Spain, As an added bonus, Caesar had conquered Egypt for the Roman Republic, though by this point it could be fairly asked how much of a "republic" Rome still was.

Caesar returned to Rome in triumph. Now declared dictator for life, he immediately embarked upon a massive system of reform. He conducted a famous reform of the calendar, turning it essentially into the calendar we use today (where do you think "July" comes from?). He reformed the system of grain distribution, while expanding Roman citizenship to new groups of people. He brought in many of his own supporters to replenish the depleted ranks of the Senate, many of whose members had died in the civil war. He laid plans for a fabulous new center of learning in Rome, perhaps in emulation of the Library of Alexandria. He also passed laws restricting excessive luxury in clothing and foodm though he had no intention of obeying these rules himself. He also initiated a colonization program for his veterans, which included the resettlement of Carthage in North Africa.

These reforms were clearly intended to reshape Roman society and government from bottom to top. Fears increased among Caesar's enemies, whom he had pardoned rather than punished, that Caesar intended to declare himself King of Rome. The last king had been expelled from Rome in 509 BC, nearly five centuries before. In the eyes of Caesar's enemies, the survival of the Republic was at stake.

And so it came to pass that dozens of senators conspired to murder Caesar, finally doing him in on March 15, 44 BC, in the chamber of the Senate. Caesar had arrogantly dispensed with any guards, apparently feeling invincible and perhaps believing that his gracious pardons had eliminated any resentment towards his increasingly authoritarian rule. His killers, most famously Brutus and Cassius, left him writhing on the floor with twenty-three stab wounds. The aftermath of the story, told and retold by Shakespeare and others, is well-known. More disorder and civil war followed, until Caesar's grand-nephew and heir Octovian defeated all his rivals and became the first Emperor of Rome under the name Augustus.

But what if Caesar had not been assassinated?

As with the question of what would have happened had Alexander the Great lived to old age, this is one of the most fascinating alternate history scenarios that comes to us from ancient history. There are any number of ways that Caesar could have escaped his fate. He was apparently warned of the conspiracy several times, but foolishly discounted these reports. According to the accounts of Plutarch and Suetonius, some of his murderers seemed fearful in the moments before the assassination; perhaps if Caesar had had armed guards with him, the attempt would not have been made. More importantly, Caesar was due to depart from Rome a few days after March 15, to begin a military campaign to the east. Had the conspirators failed to kill him on the day that they did, their chance would have been gone.

If Caesar had escaped death, then his dream of a great campaign to the east would have come to pass. According to the ancient historians, Caesar wished first to conquer the kingdom of Dacia (modern day Romania), then attack the mighty Parthian Empire to avenge the defeat the Parthians had inflicted on the Romans a few years earlier. It was to be an enormous undertaking, the likes of which had never been seen before in Roman history. No less than sixteen legions, a much larger force than Caesar had used to conquer Gaul, were being mobilized in the eastern provinces. For the first time, Caesar would have the resources of the entire Roman world at his disposal.

Dacia would probably have been no pushover. Its ruler, King Burebista, was said to be a talented military leader who had already led several successful campaigns. Unlike Gaul, Dacia was not a divided land but was united and well-organized, When the Emperor Trajan launched his campaign against Dacia a hundred-and-fifty years after Caesar, the Dacians proved to be excellent fighters. Still, this is Caesar we're talking about. With so much military might in the hands of such a brilliant strategic mind, it is hard to see the campaign of Dacia turning out as anything other than a victory for Caesar and the incorporation of Dacia into the Roman world a century-and-a-half before this actually happened.

Parthia would be a different matter, though. Excepting only the Carthaginians, the Parthians were the most formidable enemies the Romans ever encountered. Their strength lay in their unconventional maneuver tactics and their use of armored heavy cavalry troops called cataphracts, which were far superior to Roman horsemen. In 53 BC, they had utterly destroyed a Roman army at the Battle of Carrhae, in which Marcus Licinius Crassus had been killed and several legionary standards been carried away as trophies.  After Caesar's assassination, Mark Antony led a war against the Parthians and suffered a humiliating defeat for his pains. Yet the Parthians were far from invincible, as proved by Trajan a century-and-a-half later.

Caesar would have carefully studied the failed campaign of Crassus before embarking on his own invasion of Parthia. Crassus had been overconfident and had not bothered to do much in the way of intelligence gathering. Caesar, by contrast, was a master of military intelligence who also strove to learn everything he could about the enemies he was to fight. Long before the invasion, his mind would have swirled with ideas for how to counter the Parthian cataphracts and maneuver tactics. While nothing in history is inevitable, if I had had to place a bet on such a conflict, I would have put my money on Caesar.

Yet assuming that Caesar defeated the Parthians, what then? Trajan successfully defeated them in the early 2nd Century and so did Septimius Severus almost a hundred years later, but in neither case was Rome able to fully incorporate the conquered territories into its empire. The distances were so great and the desert so unforgiving that creating any kind of provincial administration was basically a logistical impossibility. The most that Caesar could have hoped for was to reduce the Parthian Empire to the level of a client state of Rome, perhaps taking Mesopotamia from it and reducing that portion of Parthia to a Roman province. But a complete conquest of the Iranian plateau is probably beyond Caesar's power.

Fantastic stories are told that Caesar intended to follow up a conquest of Parthia by marching his armies around the Caspian Sea and conquer what is today southern Russia and Germany before returning to Rome. This seems highly unlikely. Caesar always balanced his twin ambitions of wishing to win military glory and to hold supreme power in Rome. Taking himself and his army so far away from Rome, in which any meaningful communications would take several months at least, would allow political foes in the capital to regain control of the city long before he could do anything about it. Besides which, the whole idea of such a campaign is outlandish. No general could have succeeded in such an effort, not even Caesar himself. Caesar certainly had hubris, but he never was a megalomaniac like Alexander the Great.

In 44 BC, Caesar was 55-years-old and in reasonable health. The ancient historians indicated that he planned on being away from Rome for the campaigns against Dacia and Parthia for three years. Perhaps it would have taken a few years more, but most likely Caesar would have been successful and returned to Rome with Dacia conquered and Parthia stripped of its western territories and reduced to the status of a client state. Of course, it's entirely possible that Caesar would have been struck down by an enemy arrow or sword in either campaign, for he was not the kind of general to command from the rear. When one reads the story of Caesar's life, one never gets the feeling that this is a man who is supposed to die peacefully in his bed of old age.

And what of Rome itself? In the aftermath of Caesar's assassination, his adopted son Octavian and his chief lieutenant Mark Antony joined forces to defeat Brutus and Cassius, the chief leaders of the conspirators, and then divided the territory of Rome between themselves. Inevitably, war broke out between the two men and Octavian emerged supreme following the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. With that victory, Octavian brought an end to the long cycle of civil wars and, in doing so, brought an end to the Roman Republic itself. In 27 BC, he was granted the title of Augustus and became the first Emperor of the Roman Empire. The Republic was sadly cast into the ash heap of history.

Had Caesar lived, would the outcome have been any different? Some would say no, thinking that had the assassins not killed Caesar, he would have eventually full and formal power for himself. Perhaps he would even have assumed the hated title of King, which Augustus was wise enough to avoid. In that case, history might not have been all that different, except that we'd refer to Caesar as the first emperor rather than Augustus and Shakespeare would have had to write a somewhat different play (not that Shakespeare would have ever been born thanks to the butterfly effect, but that's another topic).

It is possible that the conspirators were horribly wrong and that Caesar, rather than seize power for himself, intended only to put the Republic in order and then retire, rather like Sulla had tried to do three decades earlier? Caesar was undoubtedly a man of enormous ambition and obsessed with his own dignitas, but was he a seeker of glory alone, or glory and power both? At the distance of more than two thousand years, it's impossible to know. On the one hand, he was constantly striving to increase his own control over Rome. On the other, he was always reaching out towards his enemies in the spirit of conciliation, asking for their help in governing the Republic. We will never know what really went through the man's mind and perhaps he himself did not ever flesh out his full intentions even to himself.

There is another thing to consider. Caesar was a brilliant politician, to be sure. But even his brilliance utterly pales before the sheer political genius of his grand-nephew and adopted son Octavian, who was, simply put, the most successful politician in the history of the human race. Octavian completely outwitted all his enemies, deftly transformed potential enemies into friends and (having learned from his great-uncle's mistakes) ruthlessly slaughtering those who remained obstinately opposed, and took a disorderly Republic that had been torn by a century of civil strife and recreated it as an Empire. He left a unified state that would see general peace for more than two centuries and would last, in some form or other, until 1453. Could Caesar have achieved a similar feat? For all his undoubted gifts, one seriously doubts it. Today, only serious students of history know much about the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Sulla, and other men who momentarily gained power in the Republic. Had Caesar not been assassinated, perhaps his efforts would have faltered anyway and he would be no better known than those men. What would have happened in the aftermath of his death or, more likely, his fall from power, is anyone's guess.

On the other hand, it can't be denied that the manner of Caesar's death set the stage for the rise of his grand-nephew. Had Caesar not been killed in such a public manner, Octavian would never have been able to rally his followers around his banner and adroitly used that support to defeat his rivals. Put simply, had Caesar not been killed, Octavian could never have become Augustus. Ironically, then, Brutus and Cassius might have simply made certain the very thing that they were trying to prevent: the consolidation of the Roman state under one-man rule.

The story of the fall of the Roman Republic in the 1st Century BC is one of the most fascinating and enthralling dramas in history and one that has some disturbing warnings for our own time. How different would the story have been had Caesar not fallen under the daggers of his assassins? While we will never know, there can be little doubt that the future history of the world would have born very little resemblance to that with which we are familiar.

Fifteen Decisive Battles of History, Part Three

Welcome to the third and final installment in our series of the fifteen decisive battles of history. The first ten, as we've discussed in the two earlier posts, were as follows: the Battle of Salamis, the Battle of Gaugamela, the Qin conquest of the Chu, the Battle of Zama, the Battle of Yarmouk, the Arab Siege of Constantinople, the Battle of Hattin, the Conquest of Goa, the Siege of Tenochtitlan, and the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. So, here we go with our final five: Poltava, Saratoga, Valmy, Atlanta, and Dunkirk.

Poltava, 1709
Before the reign of Czar Peter the Great, Russia was an enormous yet backward country, far behind the intellectual and technical development of the Western nations. In one of the clearest proofs that the Great Man Theory of History is no fiction, Peter the Great essentially hauled Russia into the modern world through sheer force of will. Having toured Western Europe early in his reign and learning how far behind other countries Russia was, he resolved to modernize his realm.

He also set his sights on expanding Russian power and territory. The result was the Great Northern War, in which Russia under Peter the Great was matched against Sweden, then at the height of its power and under the rule of the dynamic, ambitious, and brilliant King Charles XII. In the early years of the war, Russia suffered one defeat after another at the hands of the Swedes. Most notably, at the Battle of Narva in 1700, a Swedish army of only 10,000 men utterly destroyed a Russian force roughly four times its strength.

Rather than give in, however, Peter the Great became determined to gain revenge. While Charles XII, in one of the great miscalculations of history, turned toward Poland and ignored Russia for the next few years, Peter the Great worked to modernize and train his army, establishing war industries, and slowly retaking territory back from the Swedes. Finally turning his attention to Russia again in 1708, Charles XII invaded Russia in the hopes of smashing its army and forcing Peter to surrender. The following year, the two opposing armies met at Poltava.

The battle was a brutal and bloody slugfest. Despite having superior numbers, Peter was wary of the tactical skill of Charles and carefully choose a defensive position. Charles, overconfident, attacked with gusto. Yet the Russian army was not the same force that had been defeated at Narva years earlier. They stood up to the Swedish attack, held it, and then counterattacked. By the end of the day, the Swedish army had been effectively destroyed as a fighting force. Only Charles and a handful of soldiers escaped.

Poltava marked the emergence of Russia as a major power upon the world stage, a position it has held ever since. Had Russia lost the battle, it might have continued its unenlightened slumber and remained a backward state. Instead, having crushed its most dangerous enemy, Russia developed a confidence and awareness with which it marched forward to play a major role in Europe and throughout the world right down to the present day.

Saratoga, 1777
In 1761, the British Empire appeared well on its way to becoming the dominant world power, having defeated its great rival France in the globe-spanning Seven Years War, taken control of India and North America, and having no rival when it came to sea power. Yet a series of unforgivable political blunders by British politicians alienated their subjects in the American colonies and led to the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, with the Americans declaring themselves independent the following year.

At first, it looked like the military might of the British Empire would crush the rebels. The British easily took New York and, though they suffered some setbacks in the winter of 1776, went on to win the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown in 1777, capturing the rebel capital at Philadelphia. At the same time, a large army of British regular and German mercenaries under the command of the bombastic General John Burgoyne was pushing down the Hudson Valley from Canada, on the way to cutting the colonies in two.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the tide turned in favor of the Americans. Burgoyne's advance was slowed by Continental soldiers as American militia rapidly mobilized and swarmed around the enemy force like white blood cells attacking a bacteria. Although the Americans were technically under the command of General Horatio Gates, the real leadership was exercised by Daniel Morgan and Benedict Arnold (later the great traitor). The engineering genius of Polish volunteer Thaddeus Kosciuszko also proved pivotal. Fighting with unconventional tactics, making use of the cover of the woods, the army of citizen-soldiers brought the army of Burgoyne to a halt. In a series of battles, the strength of the British was worn down and they were caught in a position from which they could not retreat. On October 17, Burgoyne surrendered.

This proved the decisive battle of the American Revolution. France, sensing that an American victory was possible and wanting revenge on their British enemies, joined the war as an ally of the United States. French troops, French ships, French money, and French arms and munitions would now play their part in the conflict. Although the war would go on for four more years and see many more battles, it was the American victory at Saratoga that proved decisive in the end. Had America lost at Saratoga, our national anthem would today be God Save the Queen rather than the Star Spangled Banner.

Valmy, 1792
In truth, the Battle of Valmy was not much of a battle. Yet its effects were so profound that all of subsequent history was fundamentally different. In a sense, it divided history into two great ages. Before Valmy, history was largely the story of kings and emperors; after Valmy, history was mostly the story of nations.

The French Revolution had broken out in 1789. By 1792, it had gone farther than anyone had ever imagined. The power of the king and the nobility was gradually whittled away, feudalism was abolished, the Church was disestablished, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen were proclaimed. French society had been turned upside down and the rulers of the other European nations were understandably fearful that the contagion of revolution would spread to their countries as well. In the summer of 1792, the revolutionaries stormed the royal palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guard, and took Louis XVI prisoner. All of this was too much for the other European monarchs, who invaded France in order to restore the king and destroy the Revolution.

The feared Prussian Army spearheaded the invasion, sweeping aside disorganized resistance until it came upon the French force at Valmy. Heavy rains had turned the ground very muddy, limiting the maneuver options. The resulting battle scarcely deserves the name; "engagement" might be a better term. The two sides exchanged ineffectual artillery fire for a little while. The Prussian infantry advanced towards the French lines, then concluded that an assault over the muddy ground probably wasn't a good idea. The battle then simply sputtered out. Total casualties were only a few hundred killed or wounded. Tired and at the end of their supply lines, the Prussians fell back to the east.

The battle might have been anticlimactic, but the Prussian withdrawal following the engagement at Valmy marked an epochal moment in world history. The reactionary forces of the European royal courts had lost their chance to strangle the French Revolution while it was still in its cradle. In subsequent years, French armies would rampage across Europe, bringing their revolutionary ideas with them. Not until Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 would peace return to Europe and by then it bore little resemblance to what it had been before 1789.

Atlanta, 1864
Conventional wisdom about the American Civil War tells us that the decisive turning point took place in early July of 1863, when Robert E. Lee's army was defeated at Gettysburg and, just a day later, the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union complete control of the Mississippi River. I respectfully disagree with the conventional wisdom, however. The South could still have won the war after the twin disasters of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, whose importance (particularly in the case of the former) has been generally overrated. Indeed, the Confederacy has a much greater chance of winning its independence in 1864 than in 1863, due to that year's presidential election in the North. Had the South simply hung on and caused sufficient Northern casualties in 1864, Northern political will to continue the war could have collapsed, Lincoln could have been voted out of office, and a negotiated settlement could have been negotiated by a new administration. The fighting in the first half of 1864 went the Confederacy's way, with multiple Union disasters at Cold Harbor, Kennesaw Mountain, the Crater sapping Northern public morale to the breaking point.

Confederate hopes for victory collapsed when William Tecumseh Sherman captured the city of Atlanta on September 2, scarcely two months before the election. It was the end result of a series of bloody battles around the city - Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro - between July and August. On July 17, President Jefferson Davis had replaced the careful and cautious Joseph Johnston with the aggressive John Bell Hood, who proceeded to lose every battle he fought against Sherman despite the courage of his men, thereby fatally weakening the Army of Tennessee in the process. The victory at Atlanta, combined with other Union successes in the summer and fall, restored Northern popular will to go on with the war and brought a landslide victory for Lincoln in the fall elections.

If the Confederates had held Atlanta, perhaps by keeping Johnston in command of the defending army (the plot of my novel Shattered Nation) it's entirely possible that Lincoln would have lost the election and a Democratic administration would have been willing to negotiate a peace. The consequences of this are hard to overestimate. If the United States had fractured into two and possibly more nations, the subsequent course of the 20th Century would have been so different as to be unrecognizable.

The last hundred years have been "The American Century" in more ways than one. It was the power of the United States that allowed the Western Allies to destroy Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, then face down the threat of Soviet communism during the Cold War. American popular culture today sets the tone for the rest of the world, American education and economic practices are copied in almost every country, and the military power of the United States remains paramount (though perhaps not forever). All of this essentially dictated the course of the 20th Century. Had the country been fractured by an independent Confederacy, everything certainly would have been changed.

Dunkirk, 1940
The story of the 20th Century is largely the story of the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. At no point were the forces of democracy closer to total defeat than in the spring of 1940. In late May, Nazi Germany was in the process of crushing France, had gained both the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan as de facto allies, and would soon be joined in the war by Fascist Italy. The United States remained stubbornly neutral, with large majorities of the population expressing a strong desire to stay out of the war. The only force holding the line for freedom was Britain, under the determined leadership of Winston Churchill.

Yet in the last days of May, the British army was trapped on the French shore in and around the port city of Dunkirk, along with thousands of isolated French and Belgian troops. The German panzers, heretofore invincible, inexplicably halted on Hitler's orders (the reasons for this order remain the subject of historical dispute to this day). It seemed that the trapped Allied forces would be forced to surrender, which would effectively mean the end of Britain's ability to continue the war. On May 28, Churchill darkly warned the House of Commons to prepare for "hard and heavy tidings".

It was at this critical moment, when the forces of totalitarianism appeared on the brink of triumph, that the Miracle of Dunkirk occurred. The Royal Navy, aided by an amazing fleet of civilian vessels that included fishing boats and pleasure yachts, swept to the rescue in what was called Operation Dynamo. As the gallant First French Army fought a desperate rearguard action at Lille and the Royal Air Force sortied to blunt air attacks by the Luftwaffe, the ships began picking the men up on May 27. Planners had initially thought they'd be lucky to rescue 40,000 men. By the time the evacuation ended on June 4, however, no less than 338,000 men had been rescued and all of Britain rejoiced at the deliverance of their army.

Dunkirk, as Churchill was careful to point out, was an evacuation and no battlefield triumph. But having rescued its trapped army at a moment when all seemed lost, the morale of the British people survived the catastrophic fall of France and remained strong enough to weather the storm that was to come. More practically, the thousands of troops saved at Dunkirk formed the core of the rebuilt British Army that would go on to fight the Germans and Italians for the rest of the war.

Ultimately, though, the most important consequence of Dunkirk probably occurred in the meeting rooms of the British War Cabinet. While the evacuation was ongoing, Churchill was challenged by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who argued that the war was a lost cause and that approaches should be made to Hitler for a negotiated peace. Halifax had already opened some back channel communications through the Italians. After days of deliberations, Churchill firmly rejected the idea of peace talks, saying, "If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."

If the Dunkirk evacuation had failed, however, and the British Expeditionary Force had been either wiped out of forced to surrender, it is likely that Churchill would have been forced out as Prime Minister and Halifax or some other person put in his place. The collapse of morale and the lack of troops would have made the situation appear hopeless. The new British leader would have faced irresistible pressure to make the very sort of peace approaches to Germany that Halifax proposed and some sort of armistice would almost certainly have resulted. In that event, Hitler would have solidified his position on the Continent of Europe, with France and many other nations under his heel, Italy as a dutiful ally, and now Britain disarmed and powerless. Hitler would have been free to turn against the Soviet Union with all his strength, against which the Russians could not have prevailed. The history of the rest of the 20th Century would have been very, very dark, indeed.

Fifteen Decisive Battles of History, Part Two

Time to continue our series on the fifteen decisive battles of history. In the first installment, we discussed Salamis, Gaugamela, the Qin conquest of Chu, Zama, and Yarmouk. This time, we shall discuss the great Arab Siege of Constantinople, the Battle of Hattin, the conquest of Goa, the fall of Tenochtitlan, and the epic of the Spanish Armada.

Arab Siege of Constantinople, 717-718
As briefly described when we discussed the Battle of Yarmouk last week, history was forever changed in the 7th Century when, without warning, the mighty armies of Islam exploded out of the Arabian peninsula and embarked upon an astonishingly successful campaign of conquest. Less than a century after the death of Mohammed, the followers of Islam had subjugated the Byzantine territories in what is now Israel, Jordan, and Syria, destroyed Persia and incorporated it into the Islamic fold, taken control of Egypt and moved out across the vastness of North Africa. In the early 8th Century, Muslim armies even crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. This wave of Islamic conquest came crashing to a halt, however, against the legendary walls of Constantinople.

In the summer of 717 AD, an immense army of more than one hundred thousand Arab Muslims and more than two thousand ships laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire and the greatest city of the Christian world. They had not reckoned on two things, however. First, the massive walls which protected Constantinople (called the "Theodosian Walls" after the emperor who built them) were without question the strongest fortifications in the medieval world. Against them, the armies of Islam crashed in vain. Second, the Byzantines had a secret weapon, a mysterious substance known as "Greek Fire", a flammable liquid something like napalm which the Christian naval forces used to set aflame the Arab ships (the exact composition of Greek Fire remains unknown to this day). With their armies stymied and their navy wrecked, the Arabs were forced to abandon the siege in the summer of 718.

18th and 19th Century historians, including the great Edward Gibbon, have often pointed to the Battle of Tours in the year 732 as the event that halted the great Islamic advance into Europe. Notwithstanding its importance, the Byzantine victory at Constantinople in 717-718 was the true turning point. By turning back the heretofore irresistible Muslim tide, the Byzantines ensured that Southern and Eastern Europe would be safe from Islamic conquest until the advent of the Ottoman Turks, more than half a millennium later. By that time, the development of strong kingdoms and nation-states in Europe meant that Western Civilization was able to defend itself. Had the Arabs conquered Constantinople in the 8th Century, while Europe slumbered through the Dark Ages, there would have been nothing to prevent them from taking over the whole continent.

Hattin, 1187
What the 8th Century Siege of Constantinople was for the Christian world, the Battle of Hattin in 1187 was for the Islamic world.  In the late 11th Century, the Christian forces of the First Crusade had stormed into the Middle East and captured Jerusalem, subjecting its Muslim and Jewish population to a brutal massacre. In the wake of their victory, they had set up several Crusader states, carving out their own petty kingdoms along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in the heart of what had long been Muslim territory.

The First Crusade had succeeded largely because the Islamic world was divided between the Shia Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo and the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. By the late 12th Century, however, the great Muslim leader Saladin had united the two halves of the Muslim world under the new Ayyubid dynasty and set his sites on the reconquest of Jerusalem.

The decisive battle between Saladin and the Christian armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, led by its inept king, Guy of Lusignan, took place on July 4, 1187, at a place with the sinister-sounding name of the Horns of Hattin. Saladin's military brilliance combined with an extraordinary amount of stupidity on the part of Guy produced an overwhelming victory for the Muslim forces. Saladin tricked Guy into halting his army in a position where water could not be obtained, then subjected in to concentrated attacks by mounted archers. The Crusader army fell apart, most of its men were massacred, and Guy of Lusignan himself was taken prisoner.

The Battle of Hattin effectively snuffed out the military strength of the Crusader states. In the months that followed, Saladin surged forward into Crusader territory, retaking city after city. On October 2, the Christian defenders of Jerusalem surrendered to Saladin. In contrast to the Christian capture of the city nearly a century before, there was no slaughter of innocent people; the Christian population was allowed to depart in peace, taking their property with them. Although more Crusades would follow, including the epic drama that was the Third Crusade, never again would the powers of Christian Europe threaten Muslim domination of the Middle East.

Goa, 1510
The European domination of Asia, which began during the Age of Exploration and arguably only came to a final end with the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, began with the Portuguese conquest of the Indian city of Goa in 1510.

Portugal was a poor country at the fringe of Europe in the early 16th Century. Compared to the giants of Spain, England, or France, it was a pigmy. Yet it had something that no one else had: knowledge of the sea route from Europe to Asia. The 1497 voyage of Vasco de Gama, following in the wake of many other daring Portuguese explorers, had demonstrated the feasibility of sailing all the way around the southern tip of Africa from Europe to Asia, thereby opening up untold opportunities for trade. . . or conquest.

Knowing that they needed a sizable port city to serve as a base for their imperial ambitions in the East, the Portuguese turned to their great admiral Afonso de Albuquerque, known to his contemporaries as "The Lion of the Seas". In a series of battles, a tiny Portuguese army and a small but highly effective fleet defeated the Muslim rulers of Goa and secured it as a fortress. Portugal would continue to rule Goa until 1961.

The Portuguese conquest of the Indian port city of Goa in 1510 solidified the European presence in Asia. In their wake would come the Spanish, then the Dutch, then the English and French, and finally (very late in the game) the Germans. Over the next few centuries, almost all of Asia would be chopped up by the European powers into colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. This would have enormous long-term impact on Asia. The Philippines is a Catholic nation, the economic system of Hong Kong and the legal system of India are based on British models, cricket is the most popular sport in Pakistan, and the most popular beer in China is made in the German style. More fundamentally, of course, is the fact that, for centuries, the political destinies of millions of Asians would be decided in faraway places by people they would never see.

Tenochtitlan, 1521
If the Portuguese capture of Goa in 1510 solidified the European hold on Asia for the ensuing centuries, the Spanish destruction of the Aztec Empire at Tenochtitlan in 1521 did the same for the European domination of the Americas.

The story of how Hernan Cortez conquered the mighty Aztec Empire with a pitifully small number of Spanish soldiers is well-known. Thanks to gunpowder and steel weapons, the frightening use of their horses, the deadly spread of smallpox, and the recruitment of Indian allies, Cortez was able to capture Tenochtitlan and destroy the Aztec Empire, replacing it with a Spanish dominion that would last for three centuries. Pizarro's conquest of the Inca followed upon the success Cortez had in Mexico, as did almost all colonial ventures in which the Spanish engaged in the New World.

But while history marvels at Cortez's victory, it often overlooks the fact that the Aztecs came close to crushing Cortez on more than one occasion. And having taken the measure of the Spanish, a victorious Aztec Empire might have been able to reorganize itself in order to present an effective defense against any future encroachments upon its territory. The Spanish victory over the Aztecs was not foreordained, for nothing in history is. Had events gone differently, the Aztec Empire might still be with us in the 21st Century and the course of history would have been very different.

As it was, though, the fall of Aztecs made it almost certain that the destiny of the New World would forever be determined by European peoples rather than native ones. Unlike Asia, the Europeans were never driven out.

Spanish Armada, 1588
Historians today tend to play down the importance of the Spanish Armada, denying that it was nearly as important as generations of British historians imagined it to be. These modern revisionists are wrong. The defeat of the Spanish Armada was a decisive turning point in world history and fully deserves a place among the fifteen decisive battles of the world. Along with Gaugamela and Poltava, it is one of three battles from Sir Edward Creasy's list that I think actually deserve a spot.

By the 1580s, the Reformation had swept over Europe, dividing the Continent between Protestant and Catholic. Religious disputes quickly morphed into political and military conflict. France descended into civil war, Germany plunged into chaos, and the Protestant Netherlands exploded in rebellion against Catholic Spanish rule. England, under the rule of Queen Elizabeth, had come firmly into the Protestant camp (despite much opposition from English Catholics) and made it a policy to assist Protestants fighting against Catholics on the Continent of Europe. This was especially true of the Netherlands, where a small English force played a major role in the fighting.

King Philip II of Spain determined to crush England and restore it to Catholicism. To achieve this, he assembled a powerful fleet, the titular "Armada". The plan was to take control of the English Channel, then transport a Spanish army from the Netherlands, under the command of the fearsome Duke of Parma, across the Channel to southern England. Once landed, the army would conquer the country. England's land army was weak and Philip II expected English Catholics to rise in rebellion against Elizabeth's rule the moment his men set foot on English soil.

It never happened. A combination of English pluck, outstanding seamanship, and incredible good fortune prevented the Spanish Armada from taking control of the Channel. Famous English sailors like Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and Martin Frobisher led their outnumbered but technically advanced and more agile ships against the Spanish. In a series of opening battles, the English sniped at the Spanish but were not able to inflict much damage. Then, an attempt to attack the Spanish with fireships, though it inflicted no real damage, disrupted the Spanish formation and caused many of the Spanish ships to cut their anchor chains. At the Battle of Gravelines on August 6, the English were finally able to attack effectively and the Spanish lost five ships. This was not a significant portion of the Armada, but its commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, lost heart and decided that his only recourse was to return to Spain by circumnavigating the whole of Britain. Much of the fleet was wrecked in storms on the coast of Ireland during the return voyage and thousands of Spanish sailors were drowned.

England had weathered the threat of invasion without the loss of a single ship. In retrospect, the defeat of the Spanish Armada would be recognized as a watershed of English history. It can be fairly said to date the birth of the British Empire, which had a greater impact on the history of the world than any other political entity. For all its mistakes and even crimes, the British Empire spread the concepts of representative democracy, free market economics, legal systems based on the common law, the philosophical concepts of the English empiricists and the Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment and, as an added bonus, association football.

There would be many other battles that marked the rise of the British to their preeminent position: Blenheim, Plassey, Quebec, Trafalgar, Waterloo, and many others. But it all began with the glorious defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Had England lost, the British Empire would have been snuffed out of history before it had properly been born and the subsequent course of history would have been unimaginably different.