History of the World

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I'm sure we all heard of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, El Cid, etc. But I'm gonna write something about the great battles in my country's history. And maybe you could write about great leaders and battles in your history.
So here goes.

In the 10th and 11th century the Croatians were a nation of mercenarys. King Trpimir had the best archers in Europe and was hired by the Pope to fight for him. Eventually, Pope's protection faded and Croatia found herself in a federation with Hungary.

At the begining of the 16th century the Turks started reaching their military peak. So they tried to conquer Croatia and move on to Austria. They attacked the fortress of Siget, which was defended by 2,500 soldiers in the command of Nikola Subic Zrinski. He was an experienced warrior and managed to stall the tens of thousands ot turkish soldiers until the rest of the Ungaro-croat army got ready to fight. At the end, he rode out of the fortress and all of the Croats died, but they gave enough time to the emperor to prepare his defences. As it turned out they weren't at all needed, because the turkish sultan got ill, and the Turks turned back to Istanbul.

Thirty years later the Turks began again the quest to conquer Europe. They occupied Vienna, in what was one of the greatest battles in the history of the world. The great numbers of troops and fanatism gave the Turks an advantage over the allied army. Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the unoccupied part of Slovenia stood under Vienna awaiting them. Still, the Turks would have had the advantage. So the allies sent parts of Croatian and Hungarian troops to slow the Turks down, to give enough time to the ruler of Poland, Jan Sobjeski, to arrive. He arrived in time with his horsemen, and gave a legendary speach in Latin in front of the 6 nations. If the Turks had won, that would have surely been the end of Europe, for Vienna was the greatest and the most important city in Europe, and only Istanbul was bigger at that time. However, in this legendary battle, in which some sources say a million soldiers fought, the allies won. Amd the polish leader Jan Sobjeski became one of the great heroes of that time.
Again, thirty years after that, the Turks struck again. But this time, they bulid the fortress of Petrinja in 1592. A year later the went over the bulging river of Sava to attack the city of Sisak, which was under the command of Toma Erdody, a warrior of croatian and hungarian heritage. He took a group of fighters and went behind the backs of the Turks. After the Turks crossed the river, he attacked the remaining guards and burned all the bridges. The Sisak army, though vastly outnumbered, then pushed the Turks towards the river of Sava. More than 50,000 turkish soldiers drowned in all the comotion and chaos. The Turks lost the battle, and went back to Istanbul, where the sultan had hid generals executed.

Anyway, that's a bit of Croatian and eastern Europe history. Now, you can write about your country greatest leaders and battles.

[ September 14, 2002, 10:29: Message edited by: Corr Raven ]

 

Whee...here goes:

A evil fat guy called Dong Zhao took over the country by controlling the King who was very young. Some warriors arn't so happy about this so they started this rebellion. They later smashed the fat guy to pieces. Then, three heroes, Liu Bei, Cao Cao and Sun Jian, went and formed their own countries. Sun Jian passed the throne to his sons (he had 2). Later, they kept on fighting and fighting and fighting and eventually Cao Cao smashed Sun Quan (Sun Jian's son) to pieces and then conquered China. Whee.

That was a very, very short sample...I'll write a longer one later if I feel like it.

 

deathmage,

i didn't know you're chinese?
that's from "romance of the three kingdoms", one of china's greatest epic (probably "the greatest chinese epic"). and have been adapted for several computer games, one of these is "the fate of the dragon" an rts.

as for our history.
just one of the humble stories, one of our chieftains, named Lapu-Lapu wielding bolo and bamboo spear lead his men and just managed to kill a sabre and musket wielding spaniards. one of the most famous spaniards of all time... Ferdinand Magellan (aka. Magallanes).

btw, the spaniards also had with them their galleons with cannons with them.

any spaniards out there? i'm just sharing our history with some smiles, no offense.

 

Of course you didn't know, I didn't tell anyone .

Well, yeah, since I'm reading that book now I thought I ought to write a little of it...perhaps I'll just write out the more famous Generals.

WEI (Cao Cao):
-Sima Yi (he appears later, he's the strategist)
-Xu Huang (he was found in a slave place and Cao decided to make good use of him)
-Zhang Liao (was an enemy but...same as above)
-Xu Zhu (the ultimate warrior! He was so "brave" he didn't want to wear any armor and he got plummaged by arrows)
-Xiahou Dun (one of those tag-alongs)
-Xiahou Yuan (tag-along's brother)

SHU (Liu Bei):

-Guan Yu (LB's Oath Brother)
-Zhang Fei (the other oath brother)
-Zhuge Liang (the strategyman)
-Zhao Yun (the tuff bandit turncoat guy)
-Huang Zhong (the old supa archer)
-Ma Chao (the...young tuff guy)
-Jiang Wei (the...um...I don't know actually)

WU (Suns)

-Sun Jian and Ce and Quan (the rulers)
-Zhao Yu (the strategyman AND General)
-Lu Su (the OTHER strategyman)
-Lu Meng (tuff guy)
-Lu Xun (the strategyman after Zhao Yu died)

That's all for now...

 

This is not the most important battle in greek history, but the thing, which is making me proud about it, is the fact that the enemy after the end of the battle has regognized the bravery of the Greek soldiers. It took place in spring of 1941 during the German invasion in Greece. The main force of the greek army was in the Albanian front driving the Italians to the sea and the Germans attacked from the Yugoslavian borders. One of the fortifications, which was attacked by Germans was Fort Rupel. It was defended by a battalion and the attacking force was consisted of two divisions. The defenders repeled all german attacks for a week and they surrendered when they run out of ammunition. When they came out of the fort, Germans presented arms to them honoring their bravery.

 

No, the best archers had English (Longbows),,,(Battle of Hastings...etc),

Turks did not occupied Vienna !!! there was no siege.

Tal schould tell a tale of Slovenia

btw...nior: whats bolo and bamboo spear?

[ September 13, 2002, 23:25: Message edited by: vonGriffin ]

 

A bunch of backward peasant militias united to gain freedom from one of the mightiest nations on Earth at that time. They got lucky, were at the right place at the right time, had good leadership, and later got a few powerful allies.

 

There was once a bunch of thieves, and when England couldn't take them anymore and America got sick of them they were sent over here.

 

Vongriffin, you're right, the Turks did not occupy Vienna. But that gigantic battle took place at Vienna, and had the Turks won, that would have been the end of eastern Europe, and later, probably the western. The battle occurred in 1683, and I'm surprised that you don't know all about it, I thought they teach you that in school in Slovenia. Every school book in Croatia had a picture of the gigantic battle saying "Jan Sobjeski saving Vienna". Oh, and I read the book too, by a hungarian author.
And the battle of Siget took place in 1566, where Nikola Subic Zrinski held the fort for a month in front of an army of 100,000 Turks. When the Turks broke down the walls, Zrinski charged out with 2,500 horsemen, and they all died, killing 25,000 Turks.
And Trpimir did have the best archers, and their biggest advantage was that they could fight good in melee as well. I'm gonna get back to you on that one, but I think their greatest battle was in Lombardy, on the pope's request.
In 1415. in the battle of Azincourt, the English did have the best archers. But I'm talking aabout the 9th and 10th century. And in that time the English were beaten to the ground by Vilim The Conqueror in the battle of Hastings, in 1066. And then he crowned himself as Vilim I., and was succeded BY Henrik I.
Thrust me, I know my history.

[ September 14, 2002, 10:36: Message edited by: Corr Raven ]

 

No, they don`t, because my former history teacher thinks: great battles are not a sign of countrys advance, more a feilure of diplomatic means.

My country was never (more than less) a place of great battles . For me, this is not a negative fact.
We developed quite fast (compered to other Balkan states) and cultural advance was impressive

Corr your country was a mayor defence line against Turks.

 

The Irish fought each other in various small battles, occasionally allying against the Vikings, who built a few towns in the extreme north.

Then the British came. The majority of Ireland gained independence in the 1920s, but Ulster, an area the British encouraged immigration to from Britain, remains part of the United Kingdom.

The large Catholic minority and the Protestant majority discover the wonders of persecution, followed by the wonders of explosives. Without noting a few atrocities, that brings us up to the present day.

 

Ok, Iam gonna make it real short

Iceage - People came, stoneage - bronzeage - ironage - Yeah, now the vikings begun to plunder other countries, the swedish Vikings often went east by rivers to russia and constantinople...
Many years later we were a great nation controlling a large area. Even later we were pretty poor, and at ww2 we were rich, and now we are really rich.

I told ye it was going to be short...
I know much more but I dont have much time.

 

A history of my land and our people (condensed version):
We left (or were thrown out) of England for complaining that we were not free to practice our weird little religious and sexual beliefs. We'd heard about this great big land across the sea with no one living there (except for some savages). It was discovered by a man who was so stoned he didn't even realize he was thousands of miles away from where he was supposed to be.
So we came here, where we could revel in the deviant practices that made us different. Unfortunately, there were these nastly little savages everywhere. They didn't beleive in God, didn't speak english, and they used EVERY part of the cow (even the nasty bits, which they wore around thier necks on strings). So we killed a lot of them and gave them disease infested blankets to finish off most of the rest. Whoever was left we drove into the most undesirable parts of the country and eventually put in big cages called "reservations".

We founded a new government, and despite some harsh times, maganged to survive, and multiply. But then our former homeland said uh-unh, you got to pay us taxes. Just because we let you flee the country that doesn't mean we can't continue to rob you of your money. Now, we were not going to stand for this, so we took all of thier soft drinks and dumped them in the lake. This pissed them off to no end, and they sent a bunch of soldiers here to punish the upstarts. We managed to beat them due to thier unfamiliarity with the land.

Life was good. But, life was also a lot of work, since we didn't have farm tractors and washing machines yet. So we then enslaved a bunch of people and dragged them here to do most of our menial work. Eventually they rebelled on the grounds that they were human beings and shouldn't have to put up with that kind of thing. Seeing the loss of all this great free labor, we fought back. Families became divided and brother turned against brother as free labor fought against human rights. Eventually human rights won, and in a fit of drunken revelry, we passed a law saying these folks are equal to us. But, when the hangover wore of we said wait a minute, ok, we know we SAID they're equal but we didn't really mean it. So they can't vote, own property, or express themselves in any way. And if we want to kick them in the face once in a while and they dare fight back, we string them up from the nearest tree.

With that settled, we started to multiply like rabbits, because most people were still really poor, and the average wage was only a few pennies an hour. So people compensated for this by having enormous amounts of children. Families of 15 or 20 people were not uncommon.

A few bright wits, realizing that most of these people, being inbred and stupid, could be easily exploited, began building factories and cranking out goods. Wages were still really low, and the rich greedy rulers, seeing that they had a good thing going, conspired among themselves to keep everyone else down. A few of them voluntarily committed themselves to government service, so that they could control the laws and keep the general population under control.

Eventually, these factory and business owners managed to gain control of pretty much the entire country. They created movies and professional sports teams to keep the dim-witted population occupied, and thier minds off of thier problems but it wasn't enough. So television was born.

Moving along, the corporate heads realized that television had the additional benefit of being able to carry messages to thier workers, namely, buy our products. They then began experimenting, and are even now realizing thier dream of making television almost all advertising.

But they had to keep the populace stupid and keep them in line. After all, if they raised themselves up, people would demand a share of the wealth that was being squeezed out of thier blood and sweat. Any sign of creativity or intelligence was looked down upon. Corporations gained control of the musicians by teaming up and refusing to release anything original. There were sparodic outbreaks of creativity during the early and mid 70's, but eventually it was suppressed, and the threat was ended.

Today, we are a mass of mindless sheep, too busy and too focused on bettering ourselves so we can buy more electronic gadgets. We are blind to almost everything that goes on around us. Our school system has been dismantled, our movie, television and music industries are moving towards George Orwell's "1984". The desire to read books has been eredicated from much of the population, keeping them dumb and easy to control. Sports have caught on faster than anyone would have dared hope, producing entire generations of people consumed by meaningless obsessions about Barry Bond's batting average, and whether the Giants can win the Super Bowl. We are selfish, rude, and lazy, and we all think the rules apply to everyone except us. We can now devastate entire countries under the guise of freeing them from thier oppressors.

We can also destroy the cultral heritage of other countries by introducing them to our tasteless fashion trends, our uninspired mainstream music and bland restaraunts where everything tastes the same, everything looks the same, and the food clogs the arteries and eventually causes heart attacks. The appeal is, it is "fast" and easy to order, especially with the appealing pictures on the menus (which bear no relation to the products actually being sold).

We have destroyed much of our lands and the creature that inhabit them. We have built suburbs that all look the same (good luck finding your house if you come home drunk) with names that evoke memories of the raped land, like Woodland Hills, and where everyone acts and thinks the same. Unfortunately we have also consumed much of our natural resources. But hey, someone else will fix it at some point in the future, right? We can make a profit NOW.
We pride ourselves on being "the greatest country in the world", and become outraged whenever anyone attempts to say otherwise.
Our motto is "Freedom" (chanted in a robotic voice). We are better than all you third world beggars, and you unenlightened idiots in all the other countries.

[ September 15, 2002, 05:21: Message edited by: Nutrimat ]

 

Wow man, what hole in the world are you from?

 

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms Rule!

Thanks to the company KOEI for bringing that great Chinese Epic to the rest of the world. Made go and buy the book, at least, the English version.

Kong Ming rules.

My favorite warriors would be the Five Tiger Generals of Shu: Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yuan (Zilong), Ma Chao and Liu Yong (?)

Though pound for pound, I'd go with Lu Bu and his steed, the Red Hare. (Which Cao Cao gave to Guan Yu if my memory serves me right)

nior: You're not gonna tell about Bataan and Corregidor, or the bloodless revolution in EDSA known as People Power?

vonGriffin: The "bolo" was our primitive version of the shortsword, though I think noir got a little mixed up, because through the years, the "term" bolo was used to describe most any bladed implement. The real "bolo" or "tabak" are farmer's tools, used as an all around axe and crop gathering blade.

Bamboo spears are exactly what they are, bamboo wood sharpened at the end, hardened by fire, and used as spears. Don't think of the huge bamboo trees, they would be impossible to wield since the diameter is to big.

 

Yeah, Cao Cao gave the Red Hare to Guan Yu, who, been the evil dude he was, stole the horse and pretended to be real nice and gave everything else back to Cao Cao and ran away and never returned (Hmm, Lion King...).

 

deathmage,

Zhuge Liang is Kung Ming right? it's been more than a decade since i read that book.

as requested by eveningdrive,

The Death March (Bataan and Corregidor)
=======================================

SLEEP MY SONS, YOUR DUTY DONE... FOR FREEDOM'S LIGHT HAS COME.
SLEEP IN THE SILENT DEPTHS OF THE SEA OR IN YOUR BED OF HALLOWED SOD.
UNTIL YOUR HEART AT DAWN THE LOW CLEAR REVEILLE OF GOD.

The poet is unknown. This poem was inscribed on the monument to the Pacific War Dead, in Corregidor, Philippines.

On Dec. 7, 1941, Dec. 8, 1941 on our side of the world, the Japanese bomded Pearl Harbour. The attack ushered in a new era in the American history, it was the day US officially entered the WWII. But little did we know that it would pave the way to some of the most horrible events in our own history. The Japanese was all over Asia, and despite having several American military bases, the Filipino and their American allies have suffered great loses. And one of these resulted in the "Bataan Death March".

Mariveles, Bataan, was the setting of the ill-fated defense by the Filipino and American soldiers. They were fighting for days in the jungles with just a third of their ration, many were also stricken with malaria. Until they were forced to surrender to the Japanese. On April 9, 1942, 76,000 Filipino and American POW bound and beaten started to march from Bataan to Pampanga under the watchful eyes of the Japanese soldiers. 90 miles and it took them 6 days.

Under the scorching heat of the sun the POW marched, those who fell of exhaustion where executed. They were met with the bayonet or are simply decapitad. The POW were forced to marched by streams but were not allowed to drink from it. Those who were not able to resist the thirst, rushed into the stream never tasted water again. They were simply killed in some of the most gruesome ways. Some POW have witness their comrades being run over by tanks. Due to lack of food for the prisoners, the Japanese order the POW's to dig their own graves and were simply buried alive. Others even share the same grave, 30 to 50 POWs in a single grave. 20,000 of them didn't reach the Japanese prison camp in Pampanga. Those who made it to the camp where didn't find comfort either. Thousands died of deseases or malnutrition.

60 years have past, but the memory is still kept alive. There are thousands of writtings by the survivors telling of their experiences. Hundreds of pictures to prove their tales. And hundreds of websites that you can visit, just type "Death March" and "Bataan" to find them.

eveningdrive, i leave the EDSA Revolution to you.

 

Let me see if I get that straight. 20,000 soldiers died when they were caught by Japanese.
After World War II, 300,000 Croatian civilians and soldiers were led to Bleiburg. The English turned them over to the Serbs and they were all executed.
But there's nothing heroic about it. Yes, those people are remembered. But not as heroes; as victims.

 

Um... Corr, what exactly is the point you're trying to make regarding the 76,000 Filipino and American POW's that were caught by the Japanese?

I will not pretend to know about the Croatians that were killed by the Serbs. But what do you want to get across by beginning with the statement:

[ September 16, 2002, 14:40: Message edited by: eveningdrive ]

 

Corr:

I didn't know that and I am sorry. Please provide some links for us to read.

On the other hand, what I DO know is that the coratians were Axis allies. On top of that, the Ustazi (I think this is the way it is spelled) commited various attrocities in yugoslavia, during the occipations (they were gestapo-like wannabes, which made them sometmes worse). The serbs (and others) suffered a lot in their hands. And I believe the hatred that exists even to this day is partially based on that period.

Also, IIRC, Tito was a Croatian. And he was the leader after the war. Why didn't he stop that killing?

On a different topic, yugoslavia and greece were two of the most ravaged countries that were on the winning side. We (greece) lost 400.000 people during the war (more than the americans; the only difference being that the total population was 4.5 million). Most of them died in mass executions by Germans (and their collaborators) as a sweeping response to some resistance acts (i.e. you killed a german patrol, we burn a village).

After the war, the yugos had (some sort of) communism for 50 years (and that ended in a disaster). We NARROWLY avoided communism, but had to fight a civil war up until 1948 in doing so.

-thanos