Cees Steendijk

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his mother Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna in Empress Alexandra’s sitting room at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Photograph taken by Empress Alexandra in 1899. Maria Feodorovna became Dowager Empress after her husband, Tsar Alexander III, died in 1894. The title identified her as the emperor’s widow.

Hattusa is an ancient city, the capital of the Hittite Empire, located in the Boğazkale district of Çorum province. Used as a settlement by the Hittites around 1650 BC, the site reached the peak of the empire during the reign of Suppiluliuma I in the 13th century BC, and is famous for its massive walls, temples (such as the Great Temple), royal palaces, and underground cisterns. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the city was abandoned with the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BC and partially used by the Assyrians and Phrygians. Archaeological excavations have been carried out by German teams since 1906, and cuneiform tablets have shed light on Hittite mythology and history.

September 23, 1459. The first real battle of the Wars of the Roses was won by an old man pretending to run away, and covered by a friar firing a cannon into an empty field all night. The Wars of the Roses did not begin with two armies meeting in a field. They began with a failing king, Henry VI, who suffered periods of complete catatonic breakdown, a court run in his absence by his wife Margaret of Anjou, and a rival claimant in Richard, Duke of York, who insisted he was perfectly loyal right up until he wasn't. By 1459 Margaret was working openly to destroy the Yorkist lords. She was personally recruiting in Cheshire and handing out a livery badge of a silver swan to knights and squires who took her service. York was gathering at Ludlow. The Earl of Salisbury, a Neville and one of the most powerful men in the north, set out from Middleham in Yorkshire with about 5,000 men to join him. Margaret sent Lord Audley to intercept him with roughly 10,000. Audley caught him at Blore Heath in Staffordshire, and he chose the ground well. Open heath, his army drawn up behind a great hedge, and between the two armies a brook with steep banks, wide and running fast. Salisbury was outnumbered two to one with a stream in front of him. He was also about fifty nine years old and had been soldiering most of his life. So he cheated. He drew his line up, made a show of it, and then began to withdraw. Wagons pulling away, men turning, the whole picture of a smaller force deciding it did not want this fight after all. The Lancastrian cavalry came after him across the brook. And Salisbury's line turned around and was waiting for them. Cavalry crossing a steep sided watercourse cannot arrive in order. They come over in ones and twos, disordered, on bad footing, and what met them was formed infantry and archers. They were slaughtered at the water. They tried again and it went the same way. Audley led a third attack himself and was killed in it. Lord Dudley took over, attacked on foot, and failed. Then about 500 Lancastrians changed sides in the middle of the battle and began fighting their own army, at which point it stopped being a battle. The Yorkists lost nearly 1,000 men. The Lancastrians lost at least 2,000 and their commander. Salisbury's problem now was that he had won, there were still Lancastrian forces nearby, and he had to get to Ludlow. So, according to the story, he hired an Augustinian friar and left him behind with a cannon and instructions to fire it at intervals all night into an empty field, so the enemy would believe the Yorkist army was still sitting there. The friar did it. Salisbury marched. It worked. That story comes from a later chronicle and may well be embroidered, but it has been attached to this battle for centuries and it is too good to leave out without at least the warning label. The victory did the Yorkists almost no good at all. Three weeks later at Ludford Bridge the Yorkist army looked across and saw the royal banner, understood they would be fighting the anointed king in person, and melted away overnight. York fled to Ireland. Salisbury and his son Warwick fled to Calais. They came back the following year, and the war ran another twenty six. Salisbury was captured at Wakefield in December 1460 and beheaded. His head was set on the gates of York beside the Duke of York's, which had been fitted with a paper crown. His son, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, went on to depose two kings and is remembered as the Kingmaker. Blore Heath is still open ground, and there is a stone cross on it said to mark the place where Audley fell.

September 23, 1338. The first naval battle of the Hundred Years War, and the first sea fight in European history in which anybody fired a gun. Edward III had claimed the French throne and needed money, and the money came from wool. English wool went to Flanders, was woven into cloth there, and that trade was the largest source of wealth in the kingdom. Edward was spending it buying alliances among the princes of the Low Countries. In September 1338 five great English cogs sailed for Antwerp carrying a wool cargo meant to pay for those alliances. A cog is a fat, high sided merchant ship. Slow, tough, built to carry cargo rather than fight. The flagship was the Christopher, and aboard her were three cannon and a handgun. Nobody is certain what they looked like. Guns at this date were small, short ranged, fired stone or iron shot or bolts, and were about as likely to injure their own crew as the enemy. They were not a weapon system. They were a novelty an English king had bought because he liked new things. But that is the first recorded use of artillery at sea, and it happened at the very opening of a war that ran, on and off, for 116 years. The escort did not do its job. The commander, John Kingston, was caught off Arnemuiden on Walcheren with a good part of his crews ashore. Against him came a French and Genoese force under the admirals Hugues Quiéret and Nicolas Béhuchet. Forty eight galleys against five cogs. A galley is everything a cog is not. Fast, oar driven, manoeuvrable, independent of the wind, and packed with fighting men instead of cargo. In confined water, against half crewed merchantmen, that is not a battle. The English held out for most of a day and Kingston surrendered. And then the part worth knowing about how this war was going to go. The French killed the prisoners. All of them. That was not normal practice between Christian kingdoms in 1338. Knights were ransomed and sailors were usually put ashore. It set a tone at the very beginning that both sides remembered. All five ships were taken, wool and all. The Christopher was put into French service. Two years later at Sluys the French fleet was annihilated by Edward III, and the Christopher was recaptured, having spent the interval fighting for France. Both French admirals were at Sluys. Quiéret was killed. Béhuchet was captured, and Edward had him hanged from a yardarm, which is what you do to a pirate rather than to an admiral. Whether that was specifically for Arnemuiden is argued. Béhuchet had also burned Southampton later in 1338, and Edward loathed him. Sluys is the famous one. Arnemuiden is the battle before it, where the English lost badly, a wool convoy was destroyed, a crew was murdered, and three small guns went off on the deck of a merchant ship and began something that ended with battleships.