This chapter studies the history of European expansion in the oceans and the seas stretching east from the Cape of Good Hope. It aims to look at European violent activity here within the broader context of the history of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South Chinese Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. In this short chapter, only a few major developments can be traced. Roughly three phases can be distinguished: first, armed vessels – sea power – opened the door for later European success. Then overseas bases – factories – were consolidated by the construction of fortresses. Finally, the Europeans – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French – became drawn into military enterprises inland. This chapter, though, focuses on the naval aspects of European expansion, more specifically on the use of warfare to support overseas trade or to prevent competitors from trading.

This chapter explores Byzantine military architecture between 400 and 600, concentrating on the design, function and strategic significance of fortifications. It examines various defensive structures, including urban walls, military forts, civilian refuges and large-scale linear barriers. The chapter argues that fortifications were not merely passive defensive measures but played an active role in military strategy. It challenges the idea that increased fortification indicated imperial weakness, instead asserting that these defensive networks provided greater operational flexibility. Fortifications allowed armies to delay enemy advances, launch counterattacks and protect key urban centres. Additionally, the chapter highlights the evolution of fortification techniques, such as outward-projecting towers, deep ditches, reinforced gate structures and expanded urban wall circuits, demonstrating how these innovations responded to changing military threats. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that Byzantine military architecture was as much about psychological warfare as it was about physical defence. Well-designed fortifications not only deterred invasions but also reinforced imperial authority and boosted the morale of defenders, serving as both strategic and symbolic bulwarks of the empire.

The chapter explains why the balance of power was defined in territorial terms, rather than economically or based on military arsenals. Territory was not the source of rulers’ material capabilities. In fact rulers obtained full control over their territory only much later, but during the eighteenth century it appeared to them that they had to balance territory. Available representants made territory easily measurable, and therefore comparable, whereas economic representants, such as GDP, did not yet exist. The chapter elaborates how the representants of territory emerged: A search for a visual expression of infinity to express God’s unlimited power led to the discovery of single-point perspective in painting in the course of the fourteenth century. Over time, linear perspectival paintings decorated palace walls, and served as diplomatic gifts. Through the intermediary of geometry, the discovery of linear perspective had multiple knock-on effects on a series of representants. In particular, there were intertwined effects between single-point perspective in painting, Cartesian mapping, fortification design, practices of warfare, and garden and palace architecture. These interconnected and largely unintentional changes in their accumulation brought about the conception of territory as a measurable power resource.

The Shephelah (Judean lowlands) was only sparsely inhabited in the Iron I, with just a string of small Canaanite villages surviving the upheavals of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BCE, forming a tiny enclave between the Philistines in the coastal plain and the Israelites of the highlands. And yet, in the Iron IIA this same area became packed with towns. The chapter investigates this drastic change, taking place in the tenth century BCE, in tandem with many other changes addressed in other chapters. It shows that the resettlement of the Shephelah was a long process, and that about a generation after the failed attempt to settle Khirbet Qeiyafa, the settlers of Canaanite villages suddenly got off the fence and joined forces with the emerging Israelite polity. This phase is evident by the growth in size experienced by the small Canaanite villages in the first half of the tenth century, when some of them were even fortified, and the finds in them show clear connections with the nascent highland kingdom. Shortly afterward, as part of the colonization of the Shephelah by the United Monarchy, new sites were settled and fortified, exhibiting the growing power of the highland polity.

The walls of Antioch are the only visible memento of the ancient city. Continuously repaired and reconfigured, they encompass at least eight different phases. How these defenses document the transformation of the city through the ages is the core issue.

Siege warfare followed most of the practice established before, but a larger use of guns, the improvement of gunpowder and sometimes orders to fight to the last stand led to an escalation in violence. This was enhanced too by the growing involvement of civilians, especially in Spain, which gave a more exacerbated dimension to the fights

This chapter spans the history of European siege warfare across the long eighteenth century, from the age of Louis XIV to the Napoleonic Wars. It lays out the key thematic groundwork and siege case studies explored in later chapters. The first half outlines the nature of ‘the siege’ as the classic form of old-regime positional warfare – its operational forms, temporal and spatial dimensions, and rituals and customary laws of war – and charts the relative historic decline of breach assaults and siege related massacres of garrisons and civilians in the eighteenth century. The second half shifts to the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era. It identifies the continuing importance of siege operations beyond their earlier high point in European military affairs; the regional and chronological shifts in sieges across the Napoleonic Wars; the nature of British siege operations in Continental Europe and the colonial sphere (India and South America); and ends with an overview of British and French sieges in the Peninsular War – the epicentre of Napoleonic siege warfare and of the storming and sack of besieged towns.

Chapter 7, “The Defence of Constantinople,” examines the factors at play in the defense of Constantinople – geography, fortifications, land and naval forces, adequate supply of water and provisions, and, most importantly in the eyes of its inhabitants, the miraculous tutelary powers resident in the God-guarded city.

City streets, fortification walls, and gates were key elements of Athenian topography that structured urban space throughout the history of the city, directing circulation both under urgent circumstances and in everyday life. With their continuous repairs and modifications, they remained a fixed point and the backbone of the urban fabric.

The ages of humankind are designated by the material with which they made tools and weapons: stone, bronze, and iron. Remnants of these tools and weapons, found in archaeological excavations, are often the earliest evidence of existence in a place, especially before humans were able to express (and depict) themselves in words or art. Artistic depictions would follow, and then written ones, but both several thousands of years later. A wood, stone, or metal club, a stone or metal spearhead or arrowhead, a metal dagger or sword – and this appears to have been the progression – all could be used for hunting, likely their main function in pre-agricultural societies.

The years around 1200 ce mark a significant turning point in the history of warfare in India, due to the decisive campaigns waged in northern India by the Ghurids of Afghanistan and the concomitant introduction of new forms of military culture from the eastern Islamic world. While limited parts of India’s periphery had been under Islamic rule long before this time, it was only under the Ghurids that Islamic control was established in the core region along the Ganga and Yamuna rivers (the “Ganga-Yamuna Doab”). A series of decisive battles was carried out here between 1192 and 1206, under the direction of Quṭb al-Dīn Aybeg, a Turkish slave commander (ghulām) in the service of the Ghurid sultan Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Sām. Even after Mu‘izz al-Dīn’s death in 1206, Aybeg remained in India controlling the newly acquired Ghurid territories from his base in Lahore in the Punjab.

The defining feature of Western warfare in this period was knighthood. This was not because horseback warfare was in any way new in the Frankish lands, or even because the technology of the equipment and use of cavalry had changed in any radical sense, though it is generally assumed that the stirrup appeared as a feature of cavalry equipment at some time in the ninth or tenth century, thus allowing the saddle to become a more effective fighting platform. But the stirrup did not by any means create the knight. What the knight represented was a new social phenomenon which grew progressively more important as generations passed and read new meanings into the status and potential of knighthood.

In popular perceptions, the later Middle Ages loom large as the apogee of medieval chivalry, epitomised by the foundation of chivalric orders, such as the Order of the Garter, by instructional texts such as the Livre de Chevalerie of Geoffroi de Charny, and by the chronicles of Jean Froissart (c.1337–c.1405), written

The Crusades have always been a focus of historical attention. William of Tyre (c.1130–86) wrote a great history of the crusades in Latin which was so well received that in the early thirteenth century it was translated into French and extended in many versions to cover the period after 1186. The French version was so popular that the Renaissance scholar, Francesco Pipino, unaware of the original, translated it back into Latin, while Caxton produced an English version in the fifteenth century.1 Many of the earlier crusader chronicles, notably Robert the Monk’s account of the First Crusade, were also very popular in the Middle Ages and were edited very early in the age of print, notably in the great collection by Jacques Bongars in 1611.2 In modern times the crusades have always been a contentious subject, as President George Bush discovered when he referred to a ‘crusade against terrorism’ shortly after 9/11.