5. Battle
of Tours, 732
Chances are you never heard of this battle, but had the
Franks lost it, we might all be bowing towards Mecca five times a day and
studying our Koran each night. The battle near the city of Tours pitted about
20,000 Carolingian Franks under Charles Martel against a Muslim force of up to
50,000 soldiers under Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi intent on bringing Islam to
Europe. Though outnumbered, Martel proved to be an especially able commander
and routed the invaders, driving them back into Spain and, ultimately (through
his son, Pippin the Great) off the continent. Had Martel lost, Islam would
probably have become the predominant faith of Europe and, eventually, the main
religion around the world today. How this would have impacted western
civilization can only be guessed at, but chances are it would have taken a
dramatically different tact than it did.
4. Battle
of Vienna, 1683
In something of a remake of the earlier Battle of Tours (see
no. 5) the Muslims were again on the march in an effort to claim all of Europe
for Allah. This time, riding under the banner of the Ottoman Empire, somewhere
between 150,000 to 300,000 troops under Kara Mustafa Pasha met a mixed force of
some 80,000 troops under the Polish King John Sobrieski near Vienna one fine
September in 1683 and somehow lost. The battle proved to be the end of Islamic
expansion into Europe and resulted in their commander, Mustafa Pasha, being
executed by the Turks for his mishandling of the siege and battles for Vienna.
How close were things? Had Pasha attacked when he first arrived at the city
earlier that July, Vienna probably would have fallen; in waiting until
September, however, he gave time for the Polish Army and their allies to arrive
to break the siege and provide the forces necessary to send the Turks packing.
Still, you’d think that with a 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1 advantage, they should
have something to show for their efforts.
3.
Yorktown, 1781
In terms of numbers, this was a pretty puny battle (8,000
American troops, supported by 8,000 French troops, against some 9,000 British
troops) but by the time it ended on October 19, 1781, it changed the world
forever. The indomitable British Empire, the super power of its day, should
have easily defeated the rag-tag colonists under George Washington, and for most
of the war, they generally had the upper hand. By 1781, however, the upstart
Americans had learned how to fight and, having acquired the assistance of
England’s arch enemy, France, had become a small but professional fighting
force. As a result, the British under Cornwallis found themselves trapped on a
peninsula between the determined Americans on the one side and a French fleet
on the other that made escape impossible and so, after a couple of weeks of
fighting, they surrendered. In doing so, the Americans defeated the world’s
premier military power and gained independence for some backwoods country in
the new world called the United States of America.
2. Battle
of Salamis, 480 BCE
Imagine a sea battle today that involved over a thousand
ships and one can begin to appreciate the magnitude of this single engagement
between the outnumbered Greek Navy under Themistocles and the massive navy of
King Xerxes of Persia. The Greeks had used guile to get the Persian fleet to
sail into the narrow Straits of Salamis, where they were able to deprive them
of taking advantage of their superior numbers, and dealt the Persians a
humiliating defeat. As a result, Xerxes was forced to withdraw most of his army
back to Persia, thereby leaving Greece to the Greeks and preserving western
civilization in the process. A number of historians believe that a Persian
victory would have stilted the development of Ancient Greece, and by extension
‘western civilization’ per se, making Salamis one of the most significant
battles in human history.
1.
Adrianople, 718
What The Battle of Tours (see No. 5) was for western Europe,
and the Battle of Vienna (No. 4) was for central Europe, the battle of
Adrianople was for eastern Europe in that once again, the armies of Islam were
stopped in their tracks just as they were prepared to take all of Europe. Had
this battle been lost and Constantinople—at the time the largest city in
Christendom—fallen to the Muslims, it would have allowed the armies of Islam to
move practically unimpeded throughout the Balkans and into central Europe and
Italy. As it was, Constantinople was to act like the cork in a bottle, keeping
the armies of Allah from crossing the Bosporus and taking Europe in force—a
role it was to play for the next 700 years until the city finally fell in 1453.
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