The archive · Volume II
Medieval
From the Siege of Paris in 886 to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, each battle with its documented history, its record and the full lyric.
Eight hundred years in this volume, and most of it is siege work. Paris, Antioch, Constantinople, Malta, Vienna. Walls, and the men who spent their lives getting over them or keeping them standing.
Agincourt is the exception. A field, a rainstorm, and an army too heavy to move.
I was at all of them, on both sides of the stone.
Battles, oldest first
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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