The Thirty Years' War

Date: 1618 - 1648
Location: Germany

The Battle of Lützen by Carl Wahlbom shows the death of King Gustavus Adolphus on 16 November 1632.

The Protestant Reformation, that was established by Martin Luther, a German Monk, led to several wars in Europe the following two centuries. Amongst the first of these wars was the Thirty Years' War that commenced in 1618. Several German States allied with Gustvus Adolphus of Sweden against the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire. The army of Gustavus, that grew larger and larger through the surrender of several German States until it reached some 170000 men spread throughout Germany, had clashed with the Catholic army for the first time decisively at Lutzen on November 6, 1632. Although Gustavus Adolphus was killed in battle, his army won a glorious and triumphal victory, which, in 1648, led to the surrender of Albrecht von Wallenstein, end of the war, and the considerable spread of protestantism throughout Germany.

The Roman Emperor: Augustus Caesar

Date: 44 BC - 14 CE
Location: Italy, the Mediterranean

The statue known as Augustus of Prima Porta, 1st century

        After Julius Caesar died in 44 BC, his cheif lieutenant Mark Antony, attempting to manipulate public opinion allied himself with Octavian - Caesar's 18-year-old adoptive son - in order to exploit his family connections and gain political support. Antony miscalculated, for Octavian, although young, was even shrewder than Caesar. He remained in alliance with Antony and Lepidus - who played the role of financier in this "Second Triumvirate" - for only as long as it took to defeat the armies that had been raised by Brutus and Cassius, Caesar's murderers.
        In 32 BC, war broke out among the Second Triumvirate. At Actium the following year, Antony was defeated, and both he and his mistress, the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra, commited suicide. Octavian did seek immediate revenge against Antony's partisans. Nor did he have himself made Dictator, as Caesar had done. Instead, he manipulated Republican politics to acquire supreme power without seeming to usurp the Senate's authority.

        In 27 BC, Octavian was granted a special form of authority, known as proconsular imperium, for 10 years, which in effect allowed him to act as he chose in all provinces where the army was currently based. In the same year, he took the title "Augustus". In 23 BC, Augustus acquired the permanent power of a tribune of the plebians, making him invulnerable to legal action. Although he did not refer to himself as an emperor, this was the position he now held.
        Augustus secured the empire's borders along the Danube river and sent armies into Germany, which he was about to conquer when a disastarous defeat in 9 CE caused a retreat from the Elbe river back to the Rhine. His last years saw a defensive stance along existing frontiers.

The War of the Spanish Succession

Date: 1701 - 1714
Location: France, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Italy

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

The War of the Spanish Succession was a conflict that arose when the previous King of Spain, Charles II, died and several European nations disagreed with the idea of coronating Philip V. Perhaps the most well-known of military tacticians at the time of the war was Sir John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, who defeated his enemies several times in France, Spain, and Germany. Marlborough's most decisive victory was at Blenheim on August 13, 1704 in Bavaria, where the allied forces of the Kingdom of England, the Dutch Republic, the Austrian Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire crushed an opposing army of France and Bavaria. with 52000 troops and 60 guns, Marlbororough managed to defeat the Franco-Bavarian army by attacking their right flank, which was protected by the Danube River, while pursuing the main body of the army. 20000 of his enemies were drowned in the Danube as a result of charging cavalry, were killed, or wounded; 14000 were captured. Duc de Villard, Marlborough's opponent, suffered a crushing defeat that day, also having defeated only 7000 of Marlborogh's troops and wounded 4000. Seven years later, Marlborough won another tremendous victory at Maplequet, which gave England the upper hand in the war and led to surrender of the Franco-Bavarian alliance in 1714.

The Ancient Civilizations of Mesopotamia

Date: 4000 BC - 500 BC
Location: The Fertile Crescent

Since all the ice from the previous Ice Age melted, fertile lands allowed people to stop travelling everywhere, hunting and gathering, and start settling near rivers to farm.
By 4000 BC, many Mesopotamian cities emerged and began trading across the fertile lands and Egypt. They were the Sumerians... the first people ever to build a civilization to stand the test of time. The Sumerians invented the first wheel to be utilized in horse-driven carriages and so. In addition to the Sumerian Cuneiform in about 3500 BC, which was their writing system, the Sumerians also invented the sail. Although Sumer was not one empire but actually a number of city-states, the city-states shared the same type of government, theocracy. In a theocracy, religious leaders have full control over the government and are probably elected every certain length of time.
Around 2500 BC, groups of warring peoples from a region called Akkad conquered Sumer and became the top nation for about 700 to 1000 years.
During the 21st century BC, the city of Babylon began to flourish and gave way to an empire that would last for more than 400 years. At the empire's height under Hammurabi around 1700 BC, present-day Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon were united under one emperor.
A couple of hundred years later, the Hittites from Anatolia arrived at Mesopotamia with their new metal for making weapons, iron. The Hittite iron swords sliced right through the Babylonian bronze. After years of war, the Hittite Empire stretched from Anatolia, through Babylonia, and into Canaan.
The fierce fighters of the lands of Assyria soon built a huge Empire won by conquest. Primarily famous for their adroit war chariots and siege equipment, the Assyrians built an empire that covered all of southern Turkey, the entire Fertile Crescent, and Egypt by 666 BC.
Meanwhile, traders from today's Lebanon were travelling all over the Mediterannean and founding colonies. The Phoenicians, as they were called, build such a huge colonial empire such that the city of Cordoba in Spain was once a Phoenician colony. The Phoenicians also completed an imposiible mission; departing from the Sinai Peninsula, Phoenician sailors crossed the Red Sea, circled all of Africa, and sailed right back into the Mediterannean through the Strait of Gibraltar!
The very last of civilizations in Mesopotamia before the Persian invasions was the new Empire of Babylon that arose under the Emperor Nebuchadnezzar after he rebuilt the city of Babylon. But by the 6th century BC, Persia had annexed all of the Fertile Crescent.

The Arab Revolt

Date: June 1916 - October 1918
Location: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Syria

Part of the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I

Flag of the Arab Revolt

        After the disastrous surrender of a British Army at Kut (in Iraq) in April 1916, the focus shifted to a wider area. The British attempted to instigate an Arab uprising againist Ottoman rule in northern Arabia and Transjordan, and to link this with a more conventional military campaign to take control of Palestine. Persuaded by T.E Lawrence, Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca raised a revolt againist the Ottomans in June 1916, causing enormous disruption in Sinai and Palestine. General Allenby's British army entered Jerusalem in December 1917, and inflicted a devastating defeat on the Ottoman army at Megiddo in September 1918, ending the war in the region.

The 1848 Revolutions

Date: 23rd February 1848 - Early 1849
Location: Western and Central Europe

Cheering revolutionaries in Berlin after fighting in March 1848

      

        In central and western Europe, poor harvests in 1846-1847 had resulted in appalling hardship for peasantry. Combined with nationalist frustrations at the seeming impossibility of political change, this produced an astonishing outbreak of revolutionary movements in 1848 that touched almost all parts of Europe. In France, it led to the overthrow of the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and the establishment of the Second Republic.

        In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a more obviously nationalist series of uprisings almost overthrew Habsburg power to set up a number of new, ethnically based states. In the end the existing regime won out by offering concessions to the Hungarians, the most significant non-German component of the empire. They established the "Dual Monarchy", in which the ruler was emperor in Austria, but king of a theoretically separate Hungarian state. Popular uprisings in Italy and Germany, which seemed to promise statehood, were similarly premature, and ended in brutal suppressions.

The Unification of Germany

Date: 1864 - 1871
Location: Germany

18 January 1871: The proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. Bismarck appears in white. The Grand Duke of Baden stands beside Wilhelm, leading the cheers. Crown Prince Friedrich, later Friedrich III, stands on his father's right. Painting by Anton Von Werner.

        At the time of the 1848 Revolutions, Germany was a loose confederation of states, the most powerful among them being Prussia. From 1862, Prussia's Minister-President, Otto Von Bismarck, sought to secure the supremacy of Prussia withing central Europe by encouraging the other German states to unify under its leadership. The process began in earnest in 1864, when Prussia joined forces with Austria to annex the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark. Two years later, war broke out between Prussia and Austria, and a Prussian victory at Koniggratz in 1867 allowed Bismarck to exclude Austria from the German Confederation, and from any say in the constitutional course of the German principalities.

The German Empire

Date: 1871 - 1918

Location: Germany

Flag of the German Empire

        Bismarck was well aware that Napoleon III of France would never willingly accept a unified German state on his borders. He attempted to place a German Hohenzollern prince on the throne of Spain to encircle the French. As a result, Napoleon III declared war on Prussia and its German allies. Napoleon was captured after the battle of Sedan in September 1870, and though the French continued to resist under a new Republic, Bismarck soon had the victory he desired.

The German Reich
1871-1918

        In a humiliation of the French, the German empire was proclaimed at the Palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris on 18th of January 1871, with the Prussian ruler Wilhelm as its first emperor. The new Germany was in principle a federation of 25 states but there was no doubt that Prussia and Bismarck - champion of the unification - were very firmly in charge.