Saratoga, 1777 AD - Gentleman Johnny's Plan

Who fought I Americans (Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold) vs. British (John Burgoyne).

What was at stake: The survival of the United States.

The King's army was marching down from Canada to end the rebellion, General Burgoyne proclaimed, and it was the duty of all loyal colonists to help it. Those who refused and sided with the rebels would suffer "devastation, famine, and every concomitant horror that a reluctant but indispensable prosecution of military duty must entail." More specifically, he said, "I have but to give stretch to the Indians under my direction (and they amount to thousands) to overtake the hardened enemies of Great Britain and America."To be fair, Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne was bluffing. 

"Gentleman Johnny" had earned his nickname not by his flamboyant lifestyle but by his humanity. He had abolished flogging in his command, although it was practiced in every army, including the Continental. Burgoyne had forbidden his Indian scouts to kill civilians. He told them he'd pay only for live captives. He wasn't being totally altruistic, of course: Only live captives could provide information.

Burgoyne had witnessed the bloodbath on Breed's Hill two years before. He knew that the war could not be won without the cooperation of at least some of the colonists. As far as he could see, the center of the rebellion was New England, where the radicals had gained control of the militia and what remained of the colonial assemblies. New England was also the portion of the colonies closest to Canada. If New England could be isolated and subdued, the other colonies might abandon their ridiculous Declaration of Independence.Gentleman Johnny had a plan, and, as a member of Parliament, he had the political connections to get it approved. He was going to move, by land and water, down Lake Champlain and the Hudson River, to cut off New England. Howe would move up the river from New York City and take the rebels in the rear. 

The British armies would meet at Albany. Barry St. Leger, leading an army of American Tories and Indians, would march down the Mohawk to Albany. And Tories from all over backwoods New York and New England would reinforce the King's forces. Col. Philip Skene, one of Burgoyne's Tory officers, had convinced him that the backwoods were full of Tories.Actually, there were many loyalists in the backwoods. Sir William Johnson, who founded a fur-trading empire in western New York and Pennsylvania, had imported hundreds of them from Ireland and Scotland. Johnson, born William McShane in Ireland, was also the Mohawk chief Warraghiyagey. He had secured the loyalty of the Iroquois tribes. 

Johnson was dead, but his son, Sir John Johnson, and his second-in-command, John Butler, had formed Tory regiments. St. Leger was to lead them and 1,000 Mohawks under William Johnson's brother-in-law, Joseph Brant. Brant was an Indian chief educated in Connecticut and welcomed in London society.Fair proportions of Burgoyne's army were American loyalists. One was a lieuten-ant named David Jones, serving in the corps led by Acting Brig. Gen. Simon Fraser. Jones had an extra incentive. 

His sweetheart, Jane McCrae, was waiting for him in Albany. Pretty "Jenny" McCrae, in fact, couldn't stand the waiting. She moved in with a Mrs. McNeill, a relative who had a cabin in the woods north of Albany, to be closer to her David. Mrs. McNeill, of course, was also a Tory. One of her cousins was Simon Fraser, the daring Scot who led Burgoyne's vanguard.

Jenny McCrae 

The fortress of Ticonderoga, overlooking the narrow waters of Lake Champlain, was considered the Gibraltar of America. Burgoyne had Fraser circle the fort and scout out the territory. The Scot reported that a mountain overlooking Ticonderoga was not occupied. Burgoyne had cannons hauled up the mountain. When the Americans saw the guns, they abandoned Ticonderoga and fled into the woods. Burgoyne decided to pursue them instead of sailing to the end of the lake and following the road that led from there to the Hudson River.That was his first mistake.

The English general had 7,500 men, 42 cannons, and a supply train consisting of hundreds of carts. The Americans felled huge trees across every possible trail and skirmished with his vanguard. They slowed Burgoyne's progress to about a mile a day. The British were inching through a jungle-like forest, advancing on an unseen enemy. Burgoyne had to know what was ahead of him. He sent out his Indian scouts.

One of the first things the Indians saw was the cabin of Mrs. McNeill. Two of them burst into the cabin, grabbed Mrs. McNeill and Jenny McCrae, stripped them and started back to the British camp. On the way back, they quarreled over which would receive the reward for Jenny McCrae; apparently believing the British would pay more for a beautiful young woman than for an aged widow. The Indian who lost the argument shot Jenny McCrae and scalped her.

When she got to the British camp, Mrs. McNeill told her cousin the general what happened. Fraser, beside himself with fury, went to Burgoyne. Burgoyne, too, was outraged. He ordered that the Indians be hanged. But St. Luc de la Corne, leader of Burgoyne's Indians, said that if anything happened to the murderers, he'd take all his men and go home. Burgoyne pardoned the Indians.That was his second—and biggest—mistake.

Word of what happened spread all through New England and New York. Burgoyne had unleashed his Indians, and they were killing everyone, whether Patriot or Tory. Men picked up their muskets and rifles and set out for the American camp. The American army, which was only about half the size of Burgoyne's at the start of the campaign, grew rapidly.Burgoyne's army, on the other hand, was shrinking. The British suffered short-ages of everything, especially food. Philip Schuyler, the American commander, had ordered all the farmers in the area to destroy their crops and drive off their livestock to prevent the British from living off the land. Characteristically, Schuyler, a Hudson Valley patroon despised by the democratic New Englanders, left his own vast estate intact.

Disasters on all sides 

To gather food and recruit Tories, Burgoyne sent Lt. Col. Friedrich Baum and 700 soldiers toward Lake Champlain. Baum's force consisted of British, American Tories, German mercenaries, and Indians. The Germans included 170 dismounted dragoons, encumbered by huge broadswords and bayonet-proof jackboots, which covered the knees. Baum spoke no English, but he had Philip Skene as an interpreter. Slogging through the woods, Baum heard that Patriot militia were planning to attack. He asked for reinforcements. Burgoyne sent 700 more Germans under Lt. Col. Heinrich Breymann after Baum.

Both the colony of New York and the colony of New Hampshire claimed the territory they approached. But its inhabitants called it the independent Republic of Vermont.In New Hampshire, John Stark, who had foiled Howe's flanking movement at Bunker Hill, took 1,500 militiamen and headed west. Five hundred more militia from Massachusetts soon joined him. The Jenny McCrae story was having an effect.

Baum at first thought these armed backwoodsmen were coming to join him. They practically surrounded his force without opposition, then hit both flanks. Baum's Indians fled at the first shot. The whites were driven together in the center, and Stark launched his main attack. An American shot blew up one of Baum's ammunition carts. Baum ordered his dragoons to cut their way out with swords, but seconds later, an American bullet killed him. Baum's force disintegrated.

Just then, Breymann and his 700 Germans appeared. They were just in time to meet the Green Mountain Boys, Vermont's own army, which had arrived to help the Massachusetts and New Hampshire militia. The Germans tried to form a line and fire volleys, while the New England rustics fired from behind trees. Breymann was losing men fast; his troops were shaken. He told a drummer to beat a slow roll, the international request for a truce. To the Americans, a slow roll was just so much noise. They continued firing. The Germans stampeded from the field. By day's end, Burgoyne had lost 207 killed and 700 captured, along with four cannons. The Americans had 30 killed and 40 wounded.

While this was happening in the East, another disaster was taking place in the West. St. Leger's Tories were unpopular enough in the Mohawk Valley, but his Mohawks were hated and feared. Patriot militia reactivated old Fort Stanwix to block St. Leger. St. Leger besieged the fort. A Patriot militia force tried to break the siege, but was led into an ambush by Joseph Brant. The result was bloody and indecisive. The British abandoned the field, but the Americans were too cut up to go on.At this juncture, Benedict Arnold, recently reassigned to the north by George Washington, appeared. He found a mentally disabled man named Hon Yost Schuyler and convinced him to tell the Indians that Arnold, who had proved his brilliance as a general in this area the year before, was coming with a huge army. The Indians believed that the mentally deficient were incapable of lying. They quickly decamped. When the Tories saw that the Mohawks were gone, they followed.

But for Burgoyne the worst news of all was that Howe was not coming. Howe had his own plan for ending the war: Capture Philadelphia, the rebel capital. Aided by the inefficiency of the British cabinet, Howe got his plan approved while Burgoyne was on the high seas. He left Henry Clinton with 4,000 men in New York City. Clinton was not about to try driving through to Albany. If he moved many men out of the city, Washington would snap it up.While all this was going on, it occurred to Washington that something important might be happening in the north. So, along with Arnold, he sent Daniel Morgan and 1,000 riflemen. Horatio Gates, a genial Englishman who was anything but a fiery leader, had replaced the unpopular Schuyler.

Johnny rolls the dice 

The American army was growing daily as armed citizens, individuals as well as militia units, arrived at Gates's camp. Gates said he was afraid to expose these raw recruits to Burgoyne's Indians, although by this time, the Indians had deserted the British. Gates put his new men to work digging earthworks a little south of Saratoga. At this point, the numerical odds had been reversed. Gates had two men for every man of Burgoyne's. Gentleman Johnny, though, never shrank from risking everything on the draw of a card. He attacked.

Simon Fraser led 2,000 men around the American left, seeking to seize a hill over-looking the rebel trenches. At Gates's headquarters, Arnold begged the commanding general to hit the British while they were in the open. Gates preferred to wait for them in his trenches. Finally, he let Arnold, commanding the left wing, send Morgan to counterattack. Morgan's riflemen drove back Fraser's scouts. Then the British light infantry appeared and pushed Morgan's men back with a bayonet charge. Arnold sent in two Continental regiments in order to stop the British. But after a hard fight, those troops, too, were driven back. Burgoyne ordered a general advance all along the line.

Arnold noticed that a gap had opened between the Fraser's corps and the main British body, led by Burgoyne. He led more troops into the gap. The British closed up, and Arnold's entire corps was engaged. Arnold rode back to ask for reinforcements, but Gates, with a horde of reserves, refused to send any. And he confined Arnold to headquarters. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Adolph von Riedesel, who commanded the British left, took his German mercenaries toward the sound of the guns. He hit the Americans in the flank and drove them back before darkness ended the fighting. Burgoyne had won a Pyrrhic victory. He had 600 killed, wounded, or captured. The Americans suffered 65 killed and 218 wounded. Of the troops engaged, 33 percent of the British and 10 percent of the Americans were casualties. Gates should have counterattacked, but he stayed in his trenches.

Burgoyne now heard that the rebels had cut his communications and captured most of his supply ships. And Clinton wrote that he had been reinforced and was going to move north. Gentleman Johnny had no choice but to attack.

Once again, Simon Fraser led the attack. Once again, Gates moved most reluctantly. He had already deprived Arnold of his command for being too aggressive. He allowed Morgan to take his brigade and Enoch Poor's to meet Fraser.Morgan's riflemen performed their customary long-range carnage, and Poor's brigade, its numbers swollen to 800 by recent additions, pushed the British back with a bayonet charge. Gates allowed one more brigade to engage Riedesel's Germans, who were again moving up to support Fraser. Then Arnold, unable to contain him-self, mounted his horse and led the charge against Riedesel's corps. The Germans fell back to their own trenches.

Fraser, on his big gray horse, dashed frantically up and down the line, rallying his men. The British stopped retreating and began to advance. Morgan called a rifleman named Tim Murphy, one of the best shots in the army, and told him to kill Fraser. Murphy fired twice with his double-barrel rifle, reloaded, and fired again. Fraser fell from the saddle at the third shot, and his aides carried the dying general to the rear. The British line broke. Arnold led the Americans right into the British right wing redoubt, where he was shot in the leg.

Burgoyne had to retreat, but there was nowhere to retreat to. And there was no way Clinton could reach him. He surrendered his army. Surrendered to a mob of peasants. It was unthinkable. London was shocked.In Paris it was considered a miracle. To take advantage of the miracle, France declared war on England, and brought Spain and Holland into the fight with her. Britain, bogged down in a land war that could not be won in America, now had to face the three strongest sea powers after herself. The Revolutionary War would drag on for more than five more years, but the result was inevitable.

A new nation was created, and a rabble of peasants proved that they could successfully rule themselves without a king. A few years later, that inspired the ancient kingdom of France, and the new colonies of Latin America to do the same. The world had been changed most decisively.

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Tsushima, 1905 AD - "Russian prestige will do the rest"

Who Fought: Russians (Zinovi P. Rozhestvensky) vs. Japanese (Togo Heihachiro).
What was at stake: Narrowly, control of Manchuria; broadly, unquestioned 

Western domination of the Far East.Russia, in the time-honored fashion of European colonial powers, was taking over the Chinese territory of Manchuria. First, it got a concession to run the Trans Siberian Railway through a strip of Chinese territory. Then she got a long-term lease on the Liao Tung Peninsula, where it planned to build a naval base, and then permission to build and operate a branch railroad from the Trans Siberian to the peninsula. Russia was establishing what was then called a "sphere of influence" in Manchuria.

That concerned Japan, which was trying to establish its own sphere of influence in Korea. Russia and Japan entered negotiations, but Russia was always finding reasons why no conclusion could be reached. While the diplomats talked, Russia secured China's permission to send troops to the Yalu River, the border between Manchuria and Korea. Japan broke off diplomatic relations with Russia.

Then, on February 8,1904, the Japanese Navy, under Admiral Togo Heihachiro, attacked the Russian ships at Port Arthur. Two days later, Japan declared war on Russia. In his sneak attack, Togo hit three Russian ships. The next day he had a brief fight with Russian ships off Chemulpo (modern Inch'on) in Korea, sinking a cruiser and a gunboat. Neither action had much effect on either navy. On paper, Russia was a major naval power. It had more battleships than any country except for Britain or France. In the Far East alone, Russia had seven first-class battleships to Japan's six, nine first-class cruisers to Japan's eight, and 25 destroyers to Japan's 19. 

And the Far East fleet was by no means the bulk of Russia's navy. It had equally powerful fleets in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea.On land, the apparent discrepancy was even greater. Russia had some 4,500,000 trained soldiers; Japan had 283,000. The catch was that the Russian troops in the Far East had to be supplied by the Trans Siberian Railway. The railroad, for most of its length, was a single track. It was laid across tundra that turned into shifting morass every spring. And at Lake Baikal, in central Siberia, there was a gap in the line. In winter, goods could be hauled 30 miles across the frozen lake, but in warm weather shipments had to move over 100 miles of miserable roads. It took a full month to move a battalion to the Far East. In the whole area between Lake Baikal and the Pacific, there were only 138,000 Russian troops.

That might have aroused the traditional fear of "Asiatic hordes" (although Russia had three times the population of Japan), but Russian authorities weren't worried. Asked if his procrastination during negotiations might not provoke a war, the Russian foreign minister said there would be no war. All Russia needed in Manchuria was "one flag and one sentry. Russian prestige will do the rest." And if it really did come to a crunch, Russian naval power would be decisive. Japan, after all, was a group of islands. And while numbers might be decisive in land fighting, it was different at sea. Navies depended on science and mechanics. 

The "little yellow monkeys" just couldn't match Europeans there."Our plan of operations should be based on the assumption that it is impossible for our fleet to be beaten," the Russian Naval Staff reported.The Russian naval commanders in Manchuria weren't so sure. Although they had more heavy warships than Togo, they let the Japanese land at Chemulpo on February 17 and move through Manchuria toward their base, Port Arthur. On August 10, to escape the Japanese troops ringing Port Arthur, the Russian fleet put to sea. It was trounced by a smaller Japanese fleet and driven back to the harbor. So far, all that the Russian Navy had demonstrated was its incompetence. Worse was to come.

The voyage of the damned 

The Russian Black Sea fleet was bound by treaty not to pass through the Dardanelles, but there was no such restriction on the Baltic Sea fleet. That fleet, under Admiral Zinovi Petrovitch Rozhestvensky, had seven battleships and a number of cruisers and destroyers. On October 15, it was dubbed the Second Pacific Squadron and ordered to relieve Port Arthur. It almost never got there.Togo's sneak attack had unnerved the Russian high command. Russian intelligence agents in Denmark reported Japanese torpedo boats in the North Sea. 

In the North Sea mist, Rozhestvensky's men thought they saw those torpedo boats and opened fire. They hit some other Russian warships and sank one British trawler. The "torpedo boats" had been English fishing boats. The British Royal Navy prepared to intercept Rozhestvensky. The Russian government hastily apologized.

After firing (without effect) on some Swedish, French, and German ships they mistook for Japanese, the Russians reached Tangier. 

Pulling out of that harbor on their way to round the Cape of Good Hope, they snagged the underwater telegraph cable, cutting off communications with Europe for four days. At Dakar, they met the first of 60 German colliers the Russian government had contracted to refuel the fleet. The Russian Navy, unlike the navies of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, had no overseas coaling stations.At Dakar and at Cape Town, the Russian sailors, to break the monotony, had adopted exotic pets, including monkeys, apes, and crocodiles, and brought them aboard. One pet, a poisonous snake, nearly killed a crewmember. 

By the time they reached Madagascar, the tropical heat and humidity had felled many Russians, including Rozhestvensky. They stayed two weeks at Madagascar, waiting for a supply ship that was to replenish the shells they had fired at inoffensive neutrals. When the supply ship arrived, the Russian sailors discovered that instead of shells, it contained 12,000 pairs of fur-lined boots and 12,000 winter coats. At French Indochina, Rozhestvensky's fleet met reinforcements. The new fleet included some coastal monitors and some decrepit warships the Russian sailors themselves called "self-sinkers."Long before the Russian fleet got that far, Port Arthur, which it was to relieve, had surrendered on January 2. 

The fleet was still at Madagascar when, on March 10, Japanese troops decisively defeated the Russians at Mukden. For all intents and pur-poses, the war was over. But Rozhetvensky received no orders to change course. He pushed on.

Crossing the T 

Togo was waiting. The Japanese ships, most of them built in Britain, were newer and faster. Their guns fired heavier shells. The Russian ships, however, carried better armor-piercing shells and the Russian armor was of better steel. The Russians entered the Straits of Tsushima, between Japan and Korea. Rozhestvensky knew the enemy was near. He ordered his heavy ships to form a line abreast instead of a column. That way, if they encountered a column of Japanese ships, they could all turn and fire broadsides at the enemy.The maneuver was a classic naval tactic called "crossing the T." The approaching enemy fleet, one ship behind another, could fire only the guns facing forward on the first ship. 

The ships behind the first could not fire at all. Meanwhile the fleet that had crossed the T could fire most of the guns on each ship.The Russian navigators, however, were not able to form a line abreast. The best they could do was two parallel columns. The Japanese approached them from the side, instead of from directly ahead. At 1:40 p.m. on May 27, the main battle fleets made contact and opened fire. The Japanese had four battleships and eight armored cruisers to the Russians' seven battleships and nine armored cruisers. It was misty, and the Russian ships, painted black with yellow funnels, were easier to see. The Japanese, ahead of most of the world in this respect, had painted their ships slate gray.

Togo took advantage of his superior speed and crossed the Russian T Ten Jap-anese ships concentrated their fire on the two lead Russian battleships. One was knocked out almost immediately, the second was crippled 20 minutes later. Fire broke out on a third Russian battleship. Mikasa, Togo's flagship, was hit several times, and one of his cruisers was forced to drop out of the battle. The Russians tried to turn away from the T-crossing Japanese, but Togo's fleet turned with them. A half-circle of Japanese ships laid down a devastating crossfire on the Russians. Rozhestvensky was seriously wounded and transferred, unconscious, to a destroyer. 

When he regained consciousness, he was in a Japanese hospital. Five of the seven Russian battleships, including his flagship, Suvarov, had been sunk. Three cruis-ers escaped to the Philippines, where their crews were interned. A cruiser and two destroyers reached Vladivostok. All together, the Russians had lost 34 of their 37 warships. Killed were 4,830 Russian crewmen, while 5,917 were captured and 1,862 were interned. The number of Japanese killed totaled 110, with three cruisers dam-aged and three torpedo boats sunk.

Tsushima was, except for the two battles in 1898 in which the Americans destroyed virtually the whole Spanish navy with the loss of only one seaman, the most lopsided naval battle of modern times. The Tsar had to sue for peace. Theodore Roosevelt mediated the peace. The terms, of course, were favorable to Japan. Roosevelt would have preferred that the Japanese victory had not been quite so crushing. He'd hoped the Russian and Japanese navies would balance each other. The Spanish American War, which had boosted Roosevelt to power, had made the United States a Far Eastern power. 

From 1905 on, Japanese and American naval men eyed each other warily. Whatever happened in the rest of the world, each knew that the other was the ultimate enemy.Even more important, Togo and his men had shattered the notion of Caucasian superiority. That, like the long-simmering American-Japanese naval rivalry, would not come to a head for another generation or two. But it takes only a glance at a globe to see how it has changed the world.

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Constantinople, Part 1,1203 AD - An Inconvenient Contract

Who fought: I Crusaders and Venetians (Enrico Dandolo) vs. East Romans (Alexius III and Alexius IV).
What was at stake: Constantinople's role as a bulwark against the Turks.

On the face of it, the contract looked like a windfall. A group of French knights wanted transportation to Egypt to begin a new crusade. The five-year truce Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin signed had ended, and both Saladin and Rchard were dead. The leader of the knights, Boniface of Montferrat,was willing to pay the Venetians well for carrying his army across the Mediterranean. Egypt, Boniface told the Doge of Venice, was the most vulnerable part of Islam, and the key to the Holy Land.But to the Doge, Enrico Dandolo, Egypt was something else: It was Venice's leading trading partner.

A lesser man would have resigned himself to losing either the ferry contract or the lucrative trade with Egypt. Dandolo did neither. He sent a message to Saphadin, Saladin's brother, who was now Sultan of Egypt, telling him not to worry. Then he spoke with his council.

Dandolo cared nothing for crusades. His only concern was Venice. Now 80, he had fought the Pisans, the Genoese, and the Byzantines for control of the eastern Mediterranean. His city was now the greatest power on the inland sea. In one of his battles with the Byzantine Greeks, he had suffered a blow on the head that killed his eyesight. Though his eyes were useless, there was nothing wrong with Dandolo's hindsight or foresight. 

He could look back at the years of strife between Venice and Constantinople, including a massacre of all Italian merchants in the Byzantine capital. He remembered, too, that when Saladin had captured Jerusalem, Isaac Angelus, the Greek emperor, had sent his congratulations. He could also look forward to a Venetian thalassocracy based on Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, and the Greek islands. The Great Council, the ruling body of the Venetian Republic, endorsed the Doge's plan.

An army held hostage 

Dandolo agreed with the Crusaders to transport 4,500 knights, 4,500 horses, 9,000 squires, and 20,000 heavily armed soldiers called sergeants to Egypt. He would also supply 50 warships and their crews and furnish the army with nine months' rations. In return, the Crusaders would pay Venice 85,000 silver marks—four marks for each horse and two for each man—and give the Venetians half of the booty they captured. The contract would last for one year from the day the fleet sailed. The Crusaders bor-rowed 5,000 marks from Venetian bankers as a down payment. 

Dandolo put them up on the island of Lido, several miles from Venice, and began building a fleet. When the fleet was ready, Dandolo asked for his money but the Crusaders didn't have it."You shall not depart from the island until we are paid," he said. Then he made them a proposal. The King of Hungary had stolen the city of Zara from Venice, Dandolo said. (Actually, Venice never held Zara, but the North European rustics didn't know that.) If the Crusaders would take back the city, Dandolo would forgive their debt.The Crusaders besieged Zara. Some of them deserted and went to the Holy Land alone, but most remained. They took Zara and asked for their passage to Egypt.

Dandolo's crusade 

It was too late, the Doge told them. The winter storms would make passage to Egypt impossible—they'd have to wait until spring. It was, after all, their fault, because they were so late in paying their debt. Meanwhile, Pope Innocent III had excommunicated all the Crusaders who attacked Zara for having shed Christian blood after talcing the cross. A little later, realizing that his wily Italian compatriots had taken in this crowd of northern bumpkins, he revoked the excommunication but warned them not to do it again.

Then a young man named Alexius Angelus appeared at the Crusader camp. Alexius was the son of the Greek emperor, recently deposed by a usurper who was also named Alexius. The crusaders didn't know it, but Prince Alexius was part of a scheme hatched by the blind Doge. If Dandolo could use the Crusaders to restore him to power, Prince Alexius would become a Venetian puppet.

Putting young Alexius on the throne would not be an easy task. Constantinople was the strongest city in the world. For centuries, it had defeated Goths, Huns, Avars, Slavs, Magyars, Russians, and Arabs trying to take it. On the other hand, Dandolo controlled the world's most powerful navy, and now he had the world's most powerful army under his thumb.Prince Alexius was persuasive. Geoffroi de Villehardoin, one of the crusader leaders, recalled that Alexius offered: 

Firstly, if God permits you to restore his inheritance to him, he will place his whole empire under the authority of Rome, from which he has long been estranged. Secondly, since he is well aware that you have spent all your money and now have nothing, he will give you 200,000 silver marks and provisions for every man in your army, officers and men alike. Moreover, he himself will go in your company to Egypt with 10,000 men, or, if you prefer it, send the same number of men with you; and further-more, so long as he lives, he will maintain, at his expense, 5,000 knights to keep guard in the land overseas.The Crusaders sailed to Constantinople.

Assault 

The Crusaders sent an envoy to the usurper, Alexius III, to tell him they had come to restore Prince Alexius to his throne. If the current emperor would step down, he could live as a wealthy man. If not, he would not live at all. Alexius III did not abdicate. Then the invaders took Prince Alexius up to the city walls in a small boat."Here is your natural lord," they told the crowds on the walls. "Rally to his side and no harm will come to you." The crowds gave no sign that they recognized young Alexius.

The next day, Dandolo's host launched the assault. The Byzantine army lined up on shore to meet them. The Crusaders hesitated, but the Doge said his ships would clear the way. Catapults and ballistas on the fore and stern castles of the warships hurled boulders and spears at the Greek soldiers. Crossbowmen in the fighting tops and decks shot clouds of bolts. The Greeks fell back. The Crusader assault boats scraped ashore and dropped their drawbridges. Armored knights rode ashore with lowered lances. 

The Greeks turned and ran back into the city, breaking down the bridge that led to the entrance. The Greeks still held the harbor, a narrow arm of the sea called the Golden Horn. They had stretched a chain across it from the city to the fort of Galata on the other side. The Crusaders besieged the fort. The Greeks sallied out but were beaten back. The Crusaders followed so closely the Greeks couldn't close the gate of the fort. While the French were taking the fort, the Venetians attacked the chain. They sent galley after galley crashing into the chain. The chain snapped.

Dandolo wanted to attack the city's sea wall. It was only one wall, whereas the land side had a double wall, with the space between the two ramparts so constricted that getting over the second wall would be most difficult. The French, however, pro-tested that they were landsmen. They needed terra firma beneath them when they fought. The crusaders lined up their siege engines and crossbows, opened fire, and attacked a gate tower with scaling ladders. The Varangian Guard, English and Scandinavian mercenaries who had been in imperial service since Viking times, held the tower. The Varangians used the big Danish battleaxe, which chopped through the Crusaders' armor with frightening facility. The French failed.

Dandolo, meanwhile, launched his own forces against the sea wall. He had built scaling towers, equipped with drawbridges, on the decks of his ships. Again, the Vene-tian catapults banged and crossbows snapped. The warships closed in. This time, the Greeks shot back with their own engines and archers. The Venetian crews moved back.The old Doge told a sailor to bring him the banner of St. Mark, the flag of his city-state. Holding it before him, Dandolo screamed at the sailors he could not see, "Put me ashore, you craven dogs!" 

The ship pulled up to the bottom of the wall. A dozen men leaped out to shield their Doge, who jumped off the ship. Up on the ship's tower, the drawbridge thumped down, and Venetian soldiers charged over it to the wall. The other warships now joined them, and Venetians and Greeks were soon battling all along the sea wall. Dandolo's men cap-tured 25 towers on the wall and moved into the city. The Emperor called his men, who were fighting the French, to stop the Venetians. The Italians retreated before the assault, but they set fire to the houses between them and the Greeks. The wind from the sea blew the fire back toward the imperial troops, and the Venetians fortified their captured towers. The emperor then led his army out of the city to attack the French.

"We had no more than six divisions while the Greeks had close on 60, and not one of them but was larger than ours," Villehardoin recalled. "However our troops were drawn up in such a way that they could not be attacked except from the front."The Crusaders "took all the horse-boys and cooks who could bear arms and had them fitted out with quilts and saddle cloths [for armor] and copper pots [for helmets]," wrote Robert de Clari, one of the Crusaders. The Crusaders could not advance, for fear of being outflanked, and the Greeks had no desire to fight on a narrow front where their numbers would mean little. The Emperor slowly withdrew into the city.

That night, Alexius III and his household sneaked out of Constantinople. The people of the city let old Isaac out of his dungeon and opened the city gates. Invincible Constantinople had fallen.

The second siege 

Isaac was broken in spirit and blind, so Prince Alexius joined him as co-emperor. The real power in Constantinople, however, belonged to Enrico Dandolo, a man just as blind as Isaac and far older. The Crusaders asked Prince Alexius, now Alexius IV, for the money and men that he had promised. Alexius and Dandolo pointed out that the usurper still held most of the empire. When that was recovered, Alexius could pay his debt. But both Alexius and Dandolo knew that there were not 200,000 silver marks in the treasury. Nor was there money in the treasury to pay the 10,000 mercenaries Alexius had promised.

Some of the Crusaders asked Dandolo to take them to Egypt without the money or mercenaries. Dandolo said he could, but there were only two months left on the contract. He would not be able to supply them after those two months. He pointed out that Alexius had already given them 100,000 marks (half of which, under the agreement, went to Venice). If the new Emperor could settle his empire, he'd surely pay the rest. The Crusaders might want to help him do that. If they did, he'd make his fleet available for another year free of charge. The Crusaders agreed to help.Meanwhile, the Pope heard about the attack on Constantinople. He was furious, but he learned that his own papal legate had blessed the enterprise, so he couldn't excommunicate the Crusaders. He decided to make the best of it and take advantage of Alexius's offer to bring the Orthodox Church back to Rome.In Constantinople, there was rioting between the French and the Greeks. Finally, the Crusaders got tired of the Emperor's stalling. 

They said they'd take their payment by force. The Emperor called up his troops and drove them out of the city. Then the son-in-law of the usurping Alexius III, Alexius Ducas, nicknamed Murzuphlus, led a coup and deposed both Isaac and Alexius IV. The first died of natural causes and the second was strangled.The Venetians and Crusaders again attacked the sea wall, but they were beaten back with heavy losses. The Greeks had always been able to outnumber the soldiers crossing the drawbridges from the towers. 

Dandolo had the ships tied together so he could land twice as many men at each point. Still the Westerners could make no headway until a gust of wind drove two ships against the wall, and soldiers from them immediately got on the wall. The Greeks had not seen that attack coming, so the Crusaders and Venetians were able to establish a foothold. As the Greeks moved against them, other Venetian ships hit undefended battlements. By the day's end, the West-erners held three towers. They opened some city gates, and armored knights charged the Greek troops on the streets. When night fell, Murzuphlus and his army fled.

The bitter fruits of victory 

The French and Venetians split the spoils, and French knights established fiefs in Greece and forgot about crusading. Venice took over the Aegean Islands, achieving Dandolo's dream. Relations between the Greeks and the Latins, as the French and Venetians were called, had never been good. Now they were as bad as they could be. The Pope never realized his dream of Christian unity.Constantinople had been the bulwark of Christendom against the forces of Islam for centuries. Dandolo's crusade had wrecked the Empire's infrastructure and set it up for conquest by the Ottoman Turks a couple of centuries later (see Constantinople, Part II, pg. 145). 

Even worse, it set a deadly precedent. The Pope had not approved the conquest of Constantinople, but he had recognized the new Latin Empire. The precedent of crusading against Christians was set. Later in Innocent's reign, he authorized a crusade against the Albigensian heretics in France. Instead of relying on moral suasion, the church had turned to naked force. Soon all Christian groups, both sup-porters and enemies of the papacy, adopted the idea. That culminated in the terrible religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries—collectively, the most disastrous event in the history of Western civilization.

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The Battle of Britain, 1940 AD - Hitler's Delusion

Who Fought: British (Winston Churchill) vs. Germans (Adolf Hitler).

What was at stake: The survival of democracy.

The mighty French army, touted as the best in the world, had collapsed like a punctured balloon. The British expeditionary force had dashed back to Britain, leaving almost all of its equipment and not a few of its men. France was finished; Britain was on the ropes. Adolf Hitler was so confident the Britishwould make peace that he had no plans for continuing the war against them."The British have lost the war, but they don't know it," Hitler told General Alfred Jodl. "One must give them time, and they will come around."

Hitler thought the British Empire was a stabilizing force in the world. As historian A.J.P. Taylor points out, Hitler believed that if Britain were conquered, the Americans and the Japanese—the other two of the world's three great naval powers—would divide its empire. Britain's huge navy would certainly go to the United States. Hitler wanted Britain to be a junior partner in his crusade against Bolshevism. He didn't want it to be a former power, like France. 

The British hesitated. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Ms foreign minister, Lord Halifax,said on May 27, 1940, that they might discuss terms if "matters vital to the independence of this country were unaffected." Even Winston Churchill said he might be willing to make peace if Hitler wanted only the over lordship of Central Europe and the return of former German colonies. But the next day, he rejected the notion.In July, Hitler decided that the  British  had  had  enough time. He ordered preparations of "Operation Sea Lion," the invasion of Britain. To most of the world, Britain looked like another pushover. Germany's enormous army and air force had conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France.

Hitler and his generals knew better. The English Channel might look like a wide river on a map, but it was 20 miles wide at its narrowest—plenty of room for the Royal Navy to operate. The Luftwaffe would have to prepare the way. Although the Luftwaffe was easily the world's most powerful air force, it, unlike the air forces of most other major powers, had not been designed for strategic bombing. Italy's Giulio Douhet and America's Billy Mitchell had preached that in the next war, air power was the only force that would count. 

Air forces would destroy the enemy's surface forces, his means of production, and even his cities before he could mobilize. Britain's Royal Air Force had been established to fight just such a war. The Luftwaffe, on the other hand, had been created to provide close support for the army. Hitler's friend, Hermann Goring, the Luftwaffe chief, had been an ace fighter pilot in "von Richtofen's Circus," with 22 confirmed kills over the World War I Western Front. Goring scorned the heavy bomber pilots as "truck drivers" and considered fighter pilots modern knights.On July 16, Hitler issued Fuhrer Directive No. 16, "Preparations for a landing operation against England." 

The Luftwaffe was to destroy naval vessels and coastal defenses, prevent air attacks, and "break the initial resistance of enemy land forces and annihilate reserves behind the front." Goring viewed this rather large order with a cocky fighter pilot's optimism."The Fuhrer has ordered me to crush Britain with my Luftwaffe," he told his generals on August 1. "By means of hard blows, I plan to have this enemy, who has already suffered a crushing moral defeat, down on his knees in the nearest future, so that an occupation of the island by our troops can proceed without any risk." With German planes hitting Britain from Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France, Goring believed, four days would be all he'd need.

The tight little island 

As a fighting force, the British Army was almost defunct. Britain's navy might be strong, but its air force looked almost as hopeless as its army. Goring could concen-trate 800 Bf 109 fighters, 300 Bf 110 long-range fighters, 400 Ju 87 dive-bombers (the dreaded Stukas), and 1,500 Dornier, Junkers, and Heinkel bombers. In 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, only six of 30 RAF fighter squadrons had modern Hurricane or Spitfire fighters. And between May 10 and June 4, the RAF had lost 430 front line fighters over France.One of the things Goring did not know, though, was that the British had greatly increased their fighter production. In 1940, Messerschmidt was producing only 140 Bf 109s and 90 Bf 110s a month. Vickers and Hawker were producing 500 Spitfires and Hurricanes a month. 

The Bf 109 was a superb fighter, but no better than the Spitfire, and it had a range of only 125 miles. The German bases closest to England were more than 20 miles away; most were more than 50 miles away. The bases in Scandinavia were much farther. Operating from the closest bases, the 109s could spend no more than 25 minutes over England.British pilots shot down would land in England; if they were extremely unlucky, they'd land in the Channel, which was controlled by British ships. Lucky German pilots would also land in England, and unlucky ones would land in the Channel. In either case, they'd be out of the war. Fighting on home ground also made maintenance of British planes easier. 

The RAF was able to keep more than 600 Spitfires and Hurricanes operational at all times. The Germans never had more than 800 Bf 109s ready for combat.Even more important, a British team under Robert Watson-Watt had invented radar, and British radar stations covered all of the island's eastern and southern coasts. The Ger-mans had a primitive form of radar, but they had no idea that their enemies had a far more sophisticated system. Their radar systems let the British pinpoint German attackers and concentrate fighters to meet them.

Air war 

In spite of Goring's bombast, the initial Luftwaffe attack didn't look like much. It started July 10 with raids on England's south coast and ships in the channel. The Germans sent 20 or 30 aircraft on each raid. They sank a number of merchant ships but didn't touch the Royal Navy. By July 31, the Germans had lost 180 planes; the British, 70.

The operation established two facts:

1.The Bf 110, later to become a great night fighter, was totally outclassed by both the Spitfires and the Hurricanes.

2.The Stuka was a flying coffin in aerial combat.

On August 1, Hitler officially issued Fuhrer Directive No. 17, ordering the Luftwaffe to "overpower the English air force with all the forces at its command in the shortest possible time." That prompted Goring's "hard blows" announcement, but "Operation Eagle" didn't get under way for a week, and even then it was so disorganized that Goring didn't proclaim "Eagle Day" until August 13.The "Eagle" raiders attacked British air bases, but only once the radar stations. 

A raid on the Spitfire factory on August 13 cost the Germans 45 planes to the British 13.On August 15, the Luftwaffe lost 75 planes to the RAF's 35. That day Goring withdrew all the Stukas from the battle and reorganized the Luftwaffe command. From now on, Goring ordered his generals, concentrate on RAF fighter bases. The new strategy began to pay off. On August 24, the Luftwaffe flew 1,000 sorties and destroyed 22 RAF fighters. It lost 38 of its own planes, but not all were fighters. Between August 24 and September 10, the RAF lost 290 fighters. The Luftwaffe lost380planes, but only half were fighters. The German raiders were coming in waves. After the British intercepters had dealt with one wave, they landed to refuel. Then a second Luftwaffe wave bombed them on the ground.

It looked as if the Germans were going to win the Battle of Britain. But time was running out. The autumn gales would rule out any chance for a seaborne invasion. Hitler had set the date for a channel crossing at September 15.

The birth of the Blitz...

The night of August 24-25, 10 German bombers, sent to bomb a fuel storage area, panicked and dropped their bombs on the heart of London. The British retaliated with a raid on Berlin. It was totally ineffective—not the city-crushing stroke envisioned by Douhet—but it made Hitler furious. He would punish the evil English by bombing London. Goring had told him the Luftwaffe had wiped out most of the RAF. Now, Hitler thought, he could break the spirit of his enemies and make invasion easy. On September 7, the Luftwaffe concentrated all its forces on London. And the British began to rebuild their air bases and increase their production of fighter planes.

What followed was a British epic. The Luftwaffe sent hundreds of planes against a city defended by masses of barrage balloons, 2,000 anti-aircraft guns, and 750 fighter planes. The German planes did a considerable amount of damage to London, but they never broke the spirit of British civilians. And the British armed forces got stronger.

....And the death of "Sea Lion"

The bombing of London, what the British called "the Blitz," continued through most of the war. But the Germans lost the Battle of Britain. If they had begun the battle with massive raids on British air bases and airplane factories, it may have been different. But they did not. Just when Germany seemed to be making progress, they switched to bombing cities. The storms began at the end of the summer, and, by that time, Britain was far stronger than it was in June. Hitler postponed Sea Lion, then cancelled it on September 17. It would never be resumed.

The Battle of Britain did not guarantee that Hitler would lose the war, but it was a long step, perhaps the longest step, toward that end. From now on, he would conduct his operations in the East with an increasingly powerful enemy at his back. That unconquered enemy was as close to the lands he occupied as Santa Catalina Island is to Los Angeles or Long Island is to New Haven, Connecticut. It not only had one of the world's largest navies, but it was developing an air force that would surpass the Luftwaffe in every way. And it provided a base for millions of new enemy troops from across the seas.

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DiU, 1509 AD - Franks on the Water

Who Fought: Portuguese (Francico de Almeida) vs. Turks and Egyptians (Husain Kurdi).

What was at stake: Trade with the Far East and India, and the rise or fall of Christendom or Dar es Islam.

Wansuhal-Ghawri came to power [as Sultan of Egypt]," wrote the Arab chronicler Ba Fakhi al-Shihri. "He dispatched a mighty fleet to fight the Frank, its commander being Husain Kurdi. Entering India he stopped at Diu."The expedition fell in the year 13 (1507-8 AD). It had an engagement with the Frank, but was defeated and returned to the Arabian coast.

"This was the first appearance of the Franks, may God curse them, in the (Indian) Ocean seizing (Muslim shipping). "Thus al-Shihri passed over what turned out to be not only the worst defeat yet suffered by the forces of Islam, but a turning point in the centuries-long conflict between the Cross and the Crescent. Shanbal, another contemporary Arab chronicler, gives only a bit more detail: "In this year [1508-9 AD] the Frank took Dabul, looting and burning it. In this year also, the Frank made an expedition against Gujerat and attacked Diu. 

The Emir Husain, who was at that time in Diu fighting the Holy War, went forth to meet him, and they fought an engagement at sea beyond the port. Many on the Frankish side were slain, but eventually the Franks prevailed over the Muslims, and there befell a great slaughter among the Emir Husain's soldiers, about 600 men, while the survivors fled to Diu. Nor did he [the Frank] depart until they had paid him much money."

The "Franks" were really Portuguese. In the battle at Diu where "many on the Frankish side were slain," Portuguese casualties came to 32 dead and 300 wounded. The Muslim death toll rose to at least 1,500. But the loss to Islam was too great to be measured in mere casualties. To understand what happened, we have to go back several centuries.

The world of Islam 

A millennium and a half after the birth of Christ, Christianity was almost totally confined to Europe. But in half that time, Islam had spread from Arabia over the whole eastern shore of the Mediterranean, then east through Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, northern India and into Indonesia and the Philippines. It had traveled west to Egypt and across North Africa and into Spain. Muslims crossed the Sahara and converted the Negro empires of West Africa. The religion of the Prophet had spread south along the east coast of Africa, where Arabs had established colonies long before Mohammed. 

Muslim muezzins called the faithful to prayer in Central Asia where Turkish and Mongol tribes had once practiced shamanism.The Crusades, troublesome as they were at the time, had ultimately benefited Dar es Islam. The Christians had acquired a taste for the goods of the East. They craved the silk of China and the pearls of Persia, the spices of Indonesia and the gold of India. And all of the trade routes were in Muslim hands. Occasionally Europeans like the Poles might travel overland to China, but such ventures were rare. The caravans that trudged along the old Silk Road were all Turkish Muslims.The sea routes from the east, which handled much more trade, were also a Muslim monopoly. Arab dhows from Arabia and Africa crossed the Indian ocean. 

The round trip was slow, because the dhows depended on seasonal winds, but the volume of trade was immense—and immensely valuable. Goods from China, India, and Persia ended up in Egypt, where they were shipped to Europe in Venetian bottoms. The Indian Ocean route was safe from the Europeans. To reach that ocean, the Christians would have to cross Muslim lands. The only other way would be to go around the whole continent of Africa—an unthinkable trip.Muslim rulers grew rich from the trade—especially the mamluk rulers of Egypt. Egyptian wealth aroused the envy of the Ottomans, a more recent influx of Turkish nomads who had founded an empire based on Anatolia.

The Ottoman Empire was expanding in all directions. In the east, it fought the Per-sians, and in the west, it sacked that bastion of Christianity, Constantinople, and flowed into the Balkans. In the north, it drove through the Caucuses and into Russia. In the south, it claimed Syria and Mesopotamia. The Ottomans seemed to be invincible. The heart of the empire's army was its light cavalry bowmen, the service that had proven so effective in the Crusades. As in all Middle Eastern and Central Asian lands, the light cavalry were the nobility. Infantry were serfs or slaves. The Ottoman sultans, though, had developed a new land of slave infantry. 

Their Janissaries had been taken from Christian parents in infancy, raised as Muslims and trained in the military arts until they were old enough to be soldiers. Most of them were archers, but a few had been given guns. Unlike most Muslims, the Ottomans saw a use for gunpowder. The Janissaries' muzzle-loading matchlocks had neither the range nor the accuracy of the Turkish bow, but the Turks found that in some cases, firing from ships or fortresses, they were handier. The Turks had big guns, too, huge cannons that could shatter most stone walls with one shot. 

The Turks saw that cannons had value in naval warfare as well as sieges. They mounted cannons in the bows of their galleys to supplement the galleys' rams. And as the 16th century dawned, they got a chance to learn the value of ship-borne guns.

The land of war 

The Ottomans referred to Europe as "the land of war"—the place where they would go only to fight. The name was appropriate in more ways than one. For five centuries before the First Crusade, invaders had overrun Europe. Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Vikings, and Moors had attacked the Christian kingdoms from all sides. Under these barbarian attacks, the civilization of Rome had disappeared. Urban life was almost extinguished and Europe had become semi-barbaric. The First Cru-sade was launched in 1096. 

Just 82 years before that, Brian Boru smashed the last great Viking expedition outside Dublin, and the Byzantine emperor Basil the Bulgar-cide wiped out the last attack on civilization by Central Asian nomads. Muslims still held most of Spain and Portugal.About the only arts that developed in Europe during this period were the mili-tary arts. The Europeans were busily practicing them on each other when Pope UrbanIIincited them against the Muslims. The techniques developed for war in Europe, however, did not work in the deserts of the Near East.

In spite of their failure, the Crusades were not a total disaster for Europe. They brought the semi-barbaric Westerners in contact with the Eastern Roman Empire as well as with the civilization of the Islamic lands. Learning got a jump-start. Universi-ties were founded and grew. Ancient philosophers, who were almost forgotten, were studied again. So were ancient mathematicians and engineers. The mechanical ingenu-ity that had produced the crossbow (which so amazed Anna Comnena) was turned to peaceful arts. Millers began grinding grain with water or windmills. Miners dug deep for coal, iron, copper, and precious metals. Masons built towering Gothic cathedrals. Metal founders learned how to cast enormous bronze bells for those cathedrals.Society began to change, too. 

The armored knight was no longer supreme. Scottish pikemen had defeated English knights, Flemish infantry, French knights; and Swiss halbardiers, Burgundian knights. At Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt English archers had mowed down French chivalry by the thousands. As the power of the nobility declined, the power of the merchants and artisans grew.Commerce increased by land and sea. Food production increased. Farmers adopted better plows, and fishermen went even farther abroad. Sailors from the Mediterranean met sailors from the Atlantic, and each group learned from the other. The design of ships and maritime rigging advanced farther in the 14th and 15 th centuries than it had in the previous two millennia.

The two biggest Atlantic powers, England and France, became enmeshed in the Hundred Years War. France won the war, but it was ravaged and took a long time to recover. The war had hardly ended when England plunged into the Wars of the Roses. So the smaller Atlantic powers took the lead in exploring the ocean. Spaniards and Portuguese discovered the Azores and the Canary Islands. These voyages of discovery were not made in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The Ottoman Turks were still advancing in Europe. 

There was a legend that off in Central Asia or Africa was Prester John, a Christian priest-Icing, who might be induced to attack the Muslims from the rear. Prester John was not pure myth. Coptic Christian monks from Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) had visited Portugal. And the Pope had sent envoys to see the Great Khan, some of whose subjects were Christian. Perhaps ships could find a sea route to the land of Prester John. To Iberian Christians, skirmishing with Iberian Muslims, the Crusades were not some long-ago wars. "Here we are always on crusade," a Spanish knight told an English visitor.

The Venetians, the Genoese, and the Turks controlled the Mediterranean, but they could never go far into the Atlantic. The principal Mediterranean warship was the galley. Galleys had sails, but in combat they used only oars for propulsion. Gal-leys were long, narrow, low, fast, and maneuverable in calm water but unmanageable and dangerous in rough seas. Because rowers propelled them, galleys had enormous crews. No galley could carry enough food for a long trip. 

Thousands of years before this, Phoenician mariners in the pay of Egypt had sailed around Africa. But it took them three years to do it. They had to land every autumn to plant wheat. They stayed until the grain was ready to harvest, then pushed on.The sailors of Europe's Atlantic seaboard developed ships that could make long trips on the high seas. They were much wider and higher than galleys, and only sails propelled them. They could sail against the wind. Their crews were small. One of them would stand no chance against a galley that boarded it.

For protection, they relied on guns. Not three or four forward-facing guns like those of a galley, but rows of guns along the side. They had two, sometimes three, gun decks, with cannons poking through gun ports that could be closed in high seas.

The Ottoman Turks had guns, but their artillery technology was far behind that of the Europeans. Centuries of casting bronze church bells had made Europeans the world's best makers of large castings. Then the bronze casters found it was not too hard to adapt their skills to making cast iron guns. European shock warfare, between masses of heavily armored men, also promoted the development of hand-held guns that could penetrate heavy armor.

Passage to India 

To the Portuguese, the trip around Africa was another part of their endless cru-sade. In 1415, they captured the Moorish port of Ceuta. Ceuta was a terminus of the trans-Sahara caravans that brought gold and ivory up from Central Africa. The Portuguese learned that there were riches to be had all the way to India. Their exploration was methodical. They explored 100 leagues a year, establishing trading posts and making treaties with native rulers as they moved south. The farther south they got, the farther they got from civilization, culminating in the Bushmen at the southern tip of Africa.

"The inhabitants of this country are brown," wrote a sailor known as Old Alvaro, who accompanied Bartomeu Dias on the first Portuguese expedition to round the Cape and continue on to India. "All they eat is the flesh of seals, whales and gazelles and the roots of herbs. They are dressed in skins and wear sheaths over their private parts."

But the eastern coast of Africa proved to be completely different from the western coast. Here the Portuguese saw no impoverished tribesmen living in grass huts. They found port cities, with stone piers and many-storied buildings. In the cities were people of many races: blacks, Indians, Persians, and Arabs. Most of the inhabitants of the ports were of mixed race. Almost all were Muslims except for a few Hindus. They had never seen Christians. They at first took the white Portuguese for Turks or Arabs. 

Dias had skirmishes with the emirs of Mozambique and Mombassa, but he made an ally of the emir of Malindi. Then he crossed the Indian Ocean and landed at Calicut. Muslim merchants in Calicut induced its Hindu ruler to turn against the Portu-guese, and Dias was lucky to escape and sail back to Portugal.Pedro Alvares Cabral led a second Portuguese expedition to Calicut. On the way to India, Cabral accidentally discovered Brazil. 

In Calicut, the Portuguese had more trouble with its ruler, and after helping the Rajah of Cochin, who was at war with Calicut, they returned to Portugal. King Manoel then sent Vasco da Gama, who had first reached the Cape of Good Hope, against Calicut. The troops of Calicut were besieging Cochin when da Gama arrived. The firepower of the Portuguese fleet routed the besiegers. The Portuguese followed up this success by seizing key points on the Indian Ocean shores and destroying all Muslim shipping they could find.

Conquest of the sea

In 1505, the king and council of Portugal decided to consolidate all their enter-prises in "the Indies." Manoel appointed Francisco de Almeida viceroy and gave him command of the greatest fleet ever sent out from Portugal.Meanwhile, Muslim rulers in East Africa, South Arabia, and India had been com-plaining to the Sultan of Egypt about the attacks of "the Frank." The Venetians, too, urged their Egyptian ally to do something. The Sultan needed no persuasion: Egypt was already feeling the pinch. The Egyptian sultan sent a message to his rival, the Ottoman sultan, and the two Muslim powers agreed to cooperate. 

They concentrated an enormous fleet at Jeddah on the west coast of Arabia and sailed down the Red Sea. The Muslim admiral, Husain Kurdi, headed for Diu, a Muslim port.Almeida's fleet had arrived at Cochin. Hearing that there was a concentration of Muslim ships at Diu, he sent his son, Lorenco, with a few light ships to scout the area. The Turco-Egyptian fleet trapped Lorenco, and he was killed. The Turks skinned his body, stuffed it with straw, and sent it to the Sultan in Constantinople. Before Almeida could concentrate his forces, the Muslims had sailed back to Arabia.

Two years later, Husain returned with even more ships. The great majority were galleys, mounting three cannons in the bow over the big bronze beak used for ramming. There were 200 ships, thousands of rowers, and 1,500 soldiers for boarding enemy craft. Besides swords and spears, the soldiers carried bows or matchlocks. They had grappling irons for seizing ships and fire pots for dropping on their decks. Husain was going to settle the "Franks" once and for all.When the Muslims returned, Almeida was ready. 

Burning with a desire for revenge, he led his ships up to Diu. He had 17 ships, but all were larger and far better armed than Husain's galleys. As soon as the Muslim scout ships reported seeing Portuguese sails, the Muslims left the port and rowed toward them. The ocean was rougher than the Red Sea or the Mediterranean. The galleys couldn't make as much speed as they expected, and it was harder to keep in line.Instead of charging straight ahead, as usual in combat between galleys, the Portu-guese turned broadside. Then they opened fire. They fired thundering salvos, drowning out the sound of the comparatively few Muslim guns. 

Few Muslim ships got close enough to ram or board. Portuguese fire shattered the galleys. Cannon balls plowed through the banks of oarsmen, leaving masses of gore and mangled bodies. As an Indian writer put it, "Courage availed nothing against artillery, and their fragile craft were sunk in batches." By nightfall, the Muslim flagship had been sunk, along with most of the other galleys. The surviving Egyptians and Turks ran their ships aground and fled into the city. 

The Egyptian mamluks, weakened by the loss of the Oriental trade, were the first A -i to suffer. The Ottomans conquered them eight years after Diu. In the following cen-tury, the Turks made three more attempts to dispute mastery of the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese. All ended the same way. The Portuguese eventually lost control of the ocean, but they lost it to the Dutch, who were followed by the English and French. The Indies trade, that great source of wealth, was lost to Islam forever. 

A Genoese sailor, Christoforo Columbo, inspired by da Gama's feat in reaching the  Cape, began trying to sell his plan of sailing west to reach the East. The Portuguese saidhis plan was based on faulty mathematics. (It was.) But the Spanish bought the idea.Columbo sailed in 1492, right after the Spanish drove the last Muslims out of Spain.When the 15th century began, Islam seemed about ready to dominate the world.That prospect sank in the Indian Ocean off Diu.

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