Ottoman
The Sea Battles for the Dardanelles I
Fort Seddulbahr before the bombardment on 19 February 1915. Reconstructed Turkish heavy gun site at the Dardanelles Straits before the bombardment by the British and French fleets Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers did not bring about the strategic advantage for which Germany had hoped. Bulgaria and Romania did not join the alliance with…
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16TH TO 18TH CENTURY CHEBEC
The name “Chebec” comes for the Arabian and means “runner”. All the other spellings mean the same; they are phonetically transcriptions in various languages (for example the “x” was the old Spanish equivalent of the modern “jota”). Chebecs originated in North Africa, in the late 16th or 17th century they…
‘Greek Fire’
While the Europeans were fighting wars in ways that would not have astonished Archimedes or Julius Caesar, a brief, sudden flash of science many miles to the east managed to save the last vestige of the Roman Empire—for a while, anyway. It happened in Byzantium, the state created by Emperor…
Malta Knights
If in 1523 Charles V already looked towards the Turkish menace in offering Malta to the knights, within a few years the need for their presence there had been redoubled in urgency. The area of mounting danger was North Africa, whose political division at that time was very different from…
VENETIANS, GENOESE AND TURKS: THE MEDITERRANEAN 1300–1500
galia grosse late Fourteenth Century By Susan Rose In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the sources of evidence for naval warfare in the Mediterranean are both more copious and more reliable than those for the earlier period. Not only are there chronicle sources but also two of the major players…
H-NET REVIEW PUBLICATION: ‘MALTA: A SMALL NATION WITH A HUGE HISTORY’
Ayse Devrim Atauz. Eight Thousand Years of Maltese Maritime History: Trade, Piracy, and Naval Warfare in the Central Mediterranean. Gainseville University Press of Florida, 2008. xiv + 379 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-3179-8. Reviewed by Thomas Scheben Published on H-War (December, 2008) Commissioned by Brian Ditcham Malta: A Small Nation…
Rewriting history
ROA Armour cheered by citizens of Prague Prague’s World War II commemorations, as usual, all but left out a band of heroes who saved the city By Stephen WeeksFor The Prague PostMay 19, 2005 “Good progress, this year” said a colleague at Czech TV who had been monitoring the Czech…