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Member Article: Apocalypse Then: The
Battle of the Three Kings
by Comer Plummer
Don Sebastian, the twenty-four-year-old King of Portugal, rose early on the
morning of August 4, 1578. He was restless as they dressed him under the silken
tent in new armor, over which was applied a leather tunic to guard against the
heat of the Sun. Outside, the din of the camp was building as the army too
girded for battle. On the hills facing them, the Moroccan army was also
stirring.
Member Article: The Emergence of Seapower in the Yuan Dynasty
by John J. Trombetta and Steven C. Ippolito
John Keegan views the Mongolian war-making polity[1] as a fusion of the "horse
and human ruthlessness[.]" The great khans, Chinggis, Ogodei, Mongke, and
Khublai Khan, gathered the martial energies of the steppe nomad in the quest
for Empire, and released them like so many dogs of war upon Asia, Europe,
China, Korea, the Middle East of Persians and Arabs, and Japan. Results were
startling: extraordinary political changes that reworked the map of the
thirteenth century Asia, and a transformation of war in the Asian steppe
"making it for the first time," in the view of Keegan, "'a thing in
itself.'"[2]
Member Article: The Hundred Years War: An Analysis of the Causes and Conduct of the Longest
European War
by Patrick J. Shrier
The Hundred Years War between England and France from 1337-1453 is best viewed
as a series of interconnected wars with the same basic objective instead of as
one long war. There was not continuous fighting during the period nor did
England and France keep armies constantly in the field, rather it was almost a
game between the two countries with clearly defined rules as to when to fight
and when to rest. The period was marked by many truces some for just a season
and some lasting years. The most striking thing when one studies the wars of
the period is how the English army was almost invariably superior to the French
in capabilities yet somehow the English managed to lose the war.
Member Article: The Muslim Horde's Easy Invasion of Iberia
by Robert C. Daniels
After a short foray in July of 710 AD, Muslim forces from North Africa invaded
the Christian Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) in the spring
of 711, and within two years, with the exception of the extreme northwestern
portion of the peninsula, had successfully overpowered and conquered the
Visigothic Christian realms of Iberia.[1] Not only did it take the Frankish
forces under Charles Martel to stop the Muslim horde at the battle of Poitiers
in 732 from further intrusions into Western Europe, it would take nearly eight
centuries for the Iberian Christians to re-take the peninsula from the Muslims.
Member Article: The Orin War
by Joshua Gilbert
The Onin War, (so called because it occurred in the regnal year Onin 1), was
the catalyst that sparked the century long period of Japanese history known as
the Sengoku Jidai, the "Age of the Country at War". What began originally as a
dispute between a father and his son-in-law, became an eleven year war that
trashed the once great city of Kyoto and sparked an era of bloodshed that
remains famous to this day.
The Onin War began because of the weakness of one Shogun. In 1464, Ashikaga
Yoshimasa, the 8th member of the Ashikaga clan to hold the title
Seii-Taishogun, and a man renowned for his focus on tea parties and poetry,
wanted to retire but had no son. He decided to instead make his younger
brother, Yoshimi, his heir. However Yoshimi was a Buddhist monk, so the Shogun
had to first drag his brother out of the monastery in order to make him his
heir.
Member Article: The Battle of Shrewsbury
by John Barratt
By the beginning of the 15th century, the English longbowman was one of the
most effective killing machines in Western Europe. For over half a century he
had dominated the battlefields of France and Northern Spain, winning for
England’s Plantagenet monarchy an extensive continental domain. The battle of
Shrewsbury, described by a contemporary writer as “the sorry bataille of
Schrvesbury between Englysshmen and Englysshmen”, witnessed the dawn of a new
and more terrible era in English warfare, when, for the first time in a major
engagement, the English longbowman turned their deadly power against each
other. It was a foretaste of the bloodbath which would follow half a century
later in the Wars of the Roses, and would also provide William Shakespeare with
the inspiration for one of his greatest plays - King Henry IV Part One.
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