A record
Every Battle Ever
Commanders
Warriors and generals
37 of 37
General · Europe
Alexander III of Macedon356–323 BCE
Alexander inherited the Macedonian army his father Philip had built and led it out of the Balkans into the Persian Empire. He fought in person at the head of the companion cavalry. The campaigns usually listed under his name run from the Granicus through Issus, the siege of Tyre, Gaugamela, and on to the Hydaspes in India.
General · Africa
Hannibal Barca247–183/181 BCE
Hannibal was a Carthaginian commander of the Second Punic War. He crossed the Alps into Italy and kept an army in the peninsula for more than a decade, living off the country and off allied Italian cities. Cannae is the field action most often attached to his name. He later faced Scipio in Africa at Zama.
General · Europe
Scipio Africanus236–183 BCE
Publius Cornelius Scipio took command of the Roman war in Spain while still young, then carried the fighting to North Africa so that Carthage would recall Hannibal from Italy. Roman writers credit him with training a legion that could answer Hannibal’s cavalry and with the African campaign that ended at Zama.
General · Europe
Julius Caesar100–44 BCE
Caesar made his name in the Gallic Wars, a series of campaigns that ended with the siege of Alesia and the surrender of Vercingetorix. In the civil war that followed he pursued Pompey to Greece and met him at Pharsalus. He wrote his own commentaries on both wars, which are a main source for the campaigns and also a political argument.
Warrior · Europe
Vercingetorixdied 46 BCE
Vercingetorix was an Arvernian noble who drew several Gallic peoples into a coalition against Caesar in 52 BCE. He favoured a strategy of denying the Romans supplies, then shut himself in the hill town of Alesia. After the siege he was taken to Rome and later executed.
Warrior · Europe
Leonidas Idied 480 BCE
Leonidas was one of the two kings of Sparta. In 480 BCE he took a small advance force, including three hundred Spartiates, to hold the pass at Thermopylae while the Greek cities gathered a larger fleet and army. He died in the pass. Later Greek memory treated the stand as a model of obedience to a city’s order.
Admiral · Europe
Themistoclesc. 524–459 BCE
Themistocles was an Athenian politician who argued for spending a silver strike on a fleet. In 480 BCE he is the figure ancient writers associate with the decision to fight in the straits of Salamis rather than in open water. After the Persian Wars he was ostracised and ended his life in the Persian Empire.
General · Africa
Ramesses IIreigned c. 1279–1213 BCE
Ramesses II was a king of Egypt’s Nineteenth Dynasty who campaigned in the Levant and Nubia. At Kadesh on the Orontes his army met the Hittites in a chariot action that both courts described in their own monuments. The later treaty between Egypt and Hatti is one of the oldest surviving peace agreements.
Warrior · Europe
Arminiusc. 18 BCE–21 CE
Arminius was a Cheruscan noble who had served in the Roman auxiliary and held Roman citizenship. In 9 CE he drew Varus’s three legions into wooded country beyond the Rhine and destroyed them. Roman writers present him as the man who stopped the province of Germany at the river.
General · Asia
Khalid ibn al-Waliddied 642
Khalid ibn al-Walid was an early Muslim commander who fought first against Muhammad’s community and then for it. He led cavalry in the campaigns that took Syria from the eastern Roman Empire. Muslim tradition attaches his name especially to the long action in the Yarmuk valley.
General · Europe
Charles Martelc. 688–741
Charles was mayor of the palace in Frankish Austrasia and the effective ruler of the Frankish kingdoms. In 732 he met an Umayyad raiding army between Tours and Poitiers. Later medieval and modern writers treated that meeting as a defence of Gaul; the campaign itself was one raid among several.
General · Asia
Saladin1137–1193
Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub united Egypt and Syria and turned that combined power against the crusader states. In 1187 he caught the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin and then received the surrender of Jerusalem. The Third Crusade, including Richard I’s march along the coast, was the answer to those two campaigns.
Warrior · Europe
Richard I of England1157–1199
Richard spent most of his reign on campaign, first on the Third Crusade and then in the wars over his French lands. On the coast of Palestine he kept a marching column in order under harassment and fought at Arsuf on the road south from Acre. He left Jerusalem itself unsieged.
Warrior · Europe
Joan of Arcc. 1412–1431
Joan was a farmer’s daughter from Domrémy who persuaded the Dauphin’s court to send her with a relief army to Orléans, then enclosed by the English. She was present at the raising of that siege and at the Dauphin’s coronation at Reims. Captured the next year, she was tried at Rouen and burned.
General · Asia
Mehmed II1432–1481
Mehmed II became Ottoman sultan for a second time determined to take Constantinople. In 1453 he brought a large train of cannon against the Theodosian walls and moved ships overland into the Golden Horn. The fall of the city made it the Ottoman capital.
General · Europe
William I of Englandc. 1028–1087
William was duke of Normandy and claimed the English crown after Edward the Confessor’s death. In 1066 he landed at Pevensey, built a castle at Hastings, and met Harold Godwinson’s army on the ridge inland. He spent the rest of his reign holding both England and Normandy.
Warrior · Europe
Harold Godwinsonc. 1022–1066
Harold, Earl of Wessex, was crowned king of England in January 1066. That autumn he marched north, met Harald Hardrada’s invasion, and then force-marched south to face William of Normandy. He died in the fighting near Hastings. The Bayeux Tapestry, a later Norman embroidery, is the famous picture of that campaign.
General · Europe
Henry V of England1386–1422
Henry revived the English claim to the French crown and campaigned in Normandy. In 1415, short of food on the march from Harfleur to Calais, he fought at Agincourt. The later treaty of Troyes named him heir to the French king, a settlement that did not outlive him by long.
Warrior · Europe
Robert the Bruce1274–1329
Robert Bruce took the Scottish kingship in 1306 during the war against Edward I and spent years recovering castles. In 1314 he met Edward II’s army at Bannockburn when it came to relieve Stirling. He is the king under whom Scotland’s independence was confirmed in the field and, later, in diplomacy.
General · Asia
Babur1483–1530
Babur was a Timurid prince from Fergana who lost and regained Samarkand, then turned south into India. At Panipat in 1526 he met Ibrahim Lodi with a wagon fort and field artillery. His memoir, the Baburnama, is the main first-person account of that campaign.
General · Asia
Oda Nobunaga1534–1582
Nobunaga was a daimyo of Owari who broke the military balance of the Sengoku period. At Nagashino in 1575 he and Tokugawa Ieyasu met the Takeda cavalry with massed arquebusiers behind palisades. He was killed at Honno-ji before the country was unified.
General · Asia
Tokugawa Ieyasu1543–1616
Ieyasu was Nobunaga’s ally and, after Hideyoshi’s death, the leading eastern daimyo. At Sekigahara in 1600 his coalition met the western lords who claimed to defend the Toyotomi heir. The shogunate he founded in 1603 lasted until the nineteenth century.
Admiral · Asia
Yi Sun-sin1545–1598
Yi was a Joseon naval commander during the Japanese invasions of Korea. He is associated with the turtle ship and with a series of coastal actions that broke Japanese supply by sea. At Myeongnyang in 1597 he fought in a tidal strait with a very small squadron. He was killed at Noryang the following year.
General · Europe
John III Sobieski1629–1696
John Sobieski was king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, and a commander against the Ottoman Empire. In 1683 he led the Polish contingent of the army that marched to relieve Vienna. The cavalry charge from the Kahlenberg is the episode attached to his name.
General · Europe
Frederick II of Prussia1712–1786
Frederick inherited a drilled Prussian army and spent most of his reign using it. In the Seven Years’ War he fought at Rossbach and Leuthen within a month of each other, each time against a larger coalition army. His own writings on war sat alongside a court that cultivated French letters.
General · Europe
Napoleon Bonaparte1769–1821
Napoleon rose from an artillery officer of the Revolution to emperor of the French. He made his reputation with rapid marches and concentrated artillery, and he commanded in person at Austerlitz, in the Russian campaign that passed through Borodino, and at Waterloo after the return from Elba. He died in exile on St Helena.
General · Europe
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington1769–1852
Wellesley learned his trade with the East India Company and then commanded the British army in Portugal and Spain against Napoleon’s marshals. In 1815 he held the ridge at Waterloo until the Prussian army reached the field. He later served as prime minister.
Admiral · Europe
Horatio Nelson1758–1805
Nelson was a British naval officer who lost an arm and the sight of an eye in earlier actions and still went to sea. At the Nile in 1798 he attacked the French fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay. At Trafalgar in 1805 he was killed on his own quarterdeck as the fleets engaged.
General · North America
George Washington1732–1799
Washington commanded the Continental Army through the American Revolutionary War, holding it together through winters when it could not fight. In 1781 he and Rochambeau moved the army from the Hudson to the Chesapeake and enclosed Cornwallis at Yorktown. He later served as the first president of the United States.
General · North America
Ulysses S. Grant1822–1885
Grant commanded in the western theatre of the American Civil War before Lincoln brought him east. His Vicksburg campaign combined a river crossing, a march inland, and a siege that closed the Mississippi to the Confederacy. He later served as president.
General · North America
Robert E. Lee1807–1870
Lee resigned a United States commission to command Virginia’s forces and then the Army of Northern Virginia. He invaded Maryland in 1862 and met the Army of the Potomac at Antietam, and invaded Pennsylvania in 1863 and met it at Gettysburg. He surrendered the army at Appomattox in 1865.
Warrior · North America
Crazy Horsec. 1840–1877
Crazy Horse was an Oglala Lakota war leader during the wars over the northern plains. He was among the Lakota and Cheyenne fighters who met Custer’s battalion on the Little Bighorn in 1876. He surrendered the next year and was killed at Camp Robinson while in custody.
General · South America
Simón Bolívar1783–1830
Bolívar was a Caracas-born commander of the wars that ended Spanish rule in northern South America. He crossed the Andes into New Granada and fought at Boyacá, and he later campaigned in Venezuela, where Carabobo opened the road to Caracas. The republics that followed argued over the union he wanted.
Warrior · Europe
Boudicadied c. 60/61 CE
Boudica was queen of the Iceni in eastern Britain. After Roman officials flogged her and assaulted her daughters, she led a revolt that burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium. Roman writers say a later field action broke the revolt.
General · Africa
Erwin Rommel1891–1944
Rommel commanded German armour in France in 1940 and then the Afrika Korps in Libya and Egypt. His name is attached to the desert campaigns that ran up to the two battles at El Alamein. He was later given a command in France and was forced to take poison after the July 1944 plot against Hitler.
General · Europe
Georgy Zhukov1896–1974
Zhukov was a Soviet staff officer who became one of Stalin’s principal field commanders. He is associated with the defence of Leningrad and Moscow, with the Stalingrad counter-offensive, with Kursk, and with the assault on Berlin. After the war he was alternately promoted and pushed aside.
General · Asia
Võ Nguyên Giáp1911–2013
Giáp built the Viet Minh’s army from guerrilla columns into a force that could besiege a fortified camp. At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 he hauled artillery into the hills around a French garrison and took the valley in stages. He remained a senior commander into the later war with the United States.