Ottoman
The Turkish Soldier at the Crimea I
Ferik Ismail Pasha, commander of the Egyptian troops in the Crimea. Photo by Roger Fenton, 1855. The Naval bombardment continued until 25 October and achieved nothing, although Admiral Kornilov died on the first day of the bombardment. Thus began the 349 days of siege and trench warfare at Sevastopol. Menshikov, with his army reinforced to 65,000, decided to attack the…
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Wagon Fortress
Under Janos Hunyadi the Hungarians began to use warwagons, not surprising given the large numbers of ex-Hussites employed as mercenaries. These wagons appear to have differed little from their original Hussite counterparts and fulfilled a very similar role. The wagon fortress or wagon camp was a defensive arrangement of war…
Louis Alexander Andrault Langeron
(1763-1831) Russian general and corps commander. He was born Louis Alexander Andrault, chevalier comte de LangĂ©ron (to mention but one of many other aristocratic titles) and enlisted at the age of fifteen as a sous-lieutenant in the French Guards (Gardes Français). He later served at Caracas and St. Domingue in…
Zho Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t’ang)
(1812-1885) Chinese military leader and statesman Zho Zongtang was from a scholarly family of moderate means in Hunan Province. He obtained the juren (chu-jen) degree, the second highest in the examination system, then studied geography, agriculture and military strategy and experimented in farming, specializing in sericulture. Between 1852 until his…
Russian Naval Operations WWI Part I
The Russian flagship TSAREVITCH passing HMS VICTORY, ca. 1915. Russian Battleship Slava In 1914 and 1915, the British navy contained the German navy on the North Sea. The story was similar in the Mediterranean. The British, working with the French, exercised a somewhat loose control in the fall of 1914…
The Greek War of Independence, 1821-1832
The revolutionary shock waves set off by the American and French revolutions did not dissipate with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Liberal and national revolts continued to occur. Most, however, failed. Typical was the Irish rebellion against Britain in 1798. It was organized by the Society of United Irishman, an underground…
Pandours
The Pandurs (Croatian: Panduri, German: Panduren, French pandour) were a skirmisher unit of the Habsburg Monarchy. The term pandur made its way into military use via the Hungarian language-being used in Hungarian as a loanword, in turn originating from the Croatian term pudar, though the nasal in place of the…