The archive

Every battle, in order

21 battles kept, 1274 BC to 1863

Ancient

9 battles
  1. 1274 BC The Battle of Kadesh The Egyptian and Hittite wars in Syria Inconclusive. Both kings went home and carved the day as a victory on their own monuments
  2. 479 BC The Battle of Plataea The second Persian invasion of Greece Decisive Greek victory. Mardonius was killed, the Persian army broke and the second invasion of Greece ended
  3. 457 BC The Battle of Tanagra The First Peloponnesian War Spartan victory, costly enough that the road home was the whole of what it bought
  4. 457 BC The Battle of Tanagra The First Peloponnesian War Spartan victory, costly enough that the road home was the whole of what it bought
  5. 457 BC The Battle of Tanagra The First Peloponnesian War Spartan victory, costly enough that the road home was the whole of what it bought
  6. 331 BC The Battle of Gaugamela Alexander's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire Decisive Macedonian victory. Darius left the field alive and the Achaemenid Empire never recovered
  7. 326 BC The Battle of the Hydaspes Alexander's Indian campaign Macedonian victory, and Alexander's last major battle. Porus was reinstated as a satrap, and within months the army refused to march further east
  8. 216 BC The Battle of Cannae Second Punic War Decisive Carthaginian victory: the classic double envelopment
  9. 451 The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains Attila's invasion of Gaul Attila was checked and withdrew from Gaul. He invaded Italy the following year and died in 453

Medieval

6 battles
  1. 886 The Siege of Paris The Viking invasions of West Francia Paris held for eleven months and was never stormed; the Emperor then paid the fleet to leave and let it up the Seine past the city
  2. 1098 The Battle of Antioch The First Crusade The city taken by betrayal on 3 June, then held: the crusaders broke Kerbogha's siege on 28 June and the relief army came apart
  3. 1415 The Battle of Agincourt The Hundred Years' War English victory, and one of the most lopsided of the age: the French nobility was gutted in an afternoon
  4. 1453 The Fall of Constantinople The Byzantine-Ottoman wars The city stormed after fifty-three days: the end of the Roman Empire, 1,480 years after Augustus
  5. 1565 The Great Siege of Malta The Ottoman-Habsburg wars The siege broken after nearly four months: the Ottomans withdrew on 8 September and never again threatened the central Mediterranean
  6. 1683 The Battle of Vienna The Great Turkish War The siege broken in an afternoon by the largest cavalry charge in European history, and the high-water mark of Ottoman power in the West

Gunpowder

6 battles
  1. 1709 The Battle of Malplaquet War of the Spanish Succession Allied victory at a cost that ended the campaign for it: the French army withdrew unbroken and in good order
  2. 1775 The Battle of Bunker Hill The American Revolutionary War A British victory that took the ground and settled nothing: the costliest single engagement the British fought in the entire war
  3. 1812 Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow The French invasion of Russia The destruction of the largest army Europe had ever assembled, mostly without a battle: about 112,000 of 612,000 recrossed the frontier
  4. 1836 The Battle of the Alamo The Texas Revolution The mission stormed before dawn on the thirteenth day; the garrison killed almost to the last man
  5. 1862 The Battle of Fredericksburg The American Civil War One of the most one-sided Union defeats of the war; no assault on the stone wall ever reached it
  6. 1863 The Battle of Gettysburg The American Civil War The assault reached the wall at one point and was destroyed there: the high-water mark of the Confederacy, and the end of the invasion of the North