The five most important battles of all times.

[nestdan]

Here is my list. Its hard to pinpoint just 5. Overall I would say Kadesh, Salamis, Badr, Saratoga, and Hastings.



Kadesh 1274bc---had the Hittites won, the Holy Land wouldn't have ever been filled with Jews. All 3 great monotheistic religions trace their past back to the ancient Jewish people.

Salamis 480bc--saved the future of Western Civilization. Greek thought would have perished.

Pydna 148bc--forever made Greece a subordinate in the Mediterranean

Actium 31bc--forever made Rome an Empire and not a Republic

Teutoburg Forest 9ad--Had Rome conquered Germania and expanded its boundaries to the Elbe or the Oder, there may not have been a dark ages as the 'barbarians' would have become civilized.

Adrianople 379ad--beginning of the end for the Empire

Badr 624ad--probably the smallest great battle in terms of numbers but had Muhammed lost, he may not have been recognized as a prophet and may not have been able to unite the Arabian peninsula.

Yarmuk 636ad--The Eastern Roman Empire lost Syria for ever. Had they won at Yarmouk the Holy Land would have remained Christian.

Hastings 1054ad--brought England into the Continental fold. Before that it had been part of the Norse world. Without the Normanization of England, it never would have been the great power it was destined to become.

Manzikert 1070ad--destroyed the Byzantines in Anatolia and from then on, Asia Minor and eastern Europe would be conquered by the Turks.

Tenochtitlan 1521ad--had the Aztecs wiped the Spaniards out they could have reformed their empire using Spanish weapons and potentially made Mexico completely different than what we know today.

Saratoga 1777ad--turning point in the American revolution. The USA probably wouldn't be here had it not been for this battle

Waterloo 1815ad--doomed Napoleon and remade Europe

Stalingrad 1942ad--turning point in Russia. The USSR probably would not survived had it not been for the bungling of Paulus.

 

[Dachs]

Pydna 148bc--forever made Greece a subordinate in the Mediterranean

Date is wrong here, it's 168 BC(E). And I think that Roman victory over Makedonia after Kynoskephalai was pretty much preordained, unless Antiochos III intervened; as it happened, his army was broken at Magnesia, in a rather close-run thing; hence I'd rate that battle higher than Pydna. Realistically, Perseus did about as well as he can have expected during the Third War; a victory at Pydna would not have changed things much in the long run. Makedonia was still unable to take the fight to Italia, much less the Roman Western Mediterranean empire.

Adrianople 379ad--beginning of the end for the Empire

378. And here, the victory was rather minor. It is rather difficult to claim that a defeat of the Eastern Roman military can have made the destruction of the Western Roman empire inevitable, hein?

Hastings 1054ad

1066 (and All That).

Waterloo 1815ad--doomed Napoleon and remade Europe

Leipzig was of greater import. The Hundred Days was a fluke, and there were more Allied armies on the way even if Wellington and Blücher had been defeated.

 

[Steph]

Leipzig was of greater import. The Hundred Days was a fluke, and there were more Allied armies on the way even if Wellington and Blücher had been defeated.

I agree, Leipzig was the real doom of Napoleon.
After that, everything was only the singing of the swan.

 

[Dachs]

Apparently I never posted my own most important engagements. Hmm, that's a pretty glaring error. Time to rectify it. No, there is no order.

Battle of Magnesia, 190 BC(E) - The epic clash between the Seleukid dynasty, last of the powerful Hellenistic states, and the Roman republic and its allies, the Roman victory at Magnesia paved the way for the Roman assumption of dominance as arbiters of their Mare Nostrum. The third Antiochos, who was called Megas, held all the advantages going into battle; his soldiers were battle-hardened from campaigns that had seen them battle in Asia Mikra, Hellas, Syria, and even on Antiochos' great anabasis into Persia that saw him subdue and vassalize the Pahlavan and Baktria, as well as a treaty of concord with the Indian dynast Subhagasena. He had fearsome chariots, elephants, the cavalry advantage, and twenty thousand more men than his opponent. But he made a mistake in even fighting the battle at all, and a few critical errors in deployment - failing to keep his cavalry on a tight leash, as at Ipsos and Raphia, and misplacing his chariots - secured the Romani the victory and pushed his frontiers back to the Taurus Mountains.

Battle of Issos, 333 BC(E) - The first, and probably more decisive, engagement between Darayavahus III and the armies of the Korinthian koinon, led by the hegemon and Makedonian king Alexandros Megas. Having crushed the armies of the western satraps at the Granikos the previous year, Alexandros had liberated both the coast and the interior of Asia Mikra and was advancing towards the Levant when the Great King cut across his line of communications and forced him to engage in battle. Despite having a strategical disadvantage, and not doing so great in his tactical position, Alexandros, by a combination of his father's brilliant tactical system in the reorganization of the phalanx and his own daring cavalry maneuvers, won the day anyway, ensured the conquest of half the Persian empire, and ruined the cream of the royal Persian army. By comparison, his later victory of Gaugamela, fought against last-second levies and the cast-offs of the previous army, was nearly easy.

Battle of Salamis, 480 BC(E) - The last classical battle on the list (I promise!), featuring a great naval fight between the last fleet of the allied Hellenic poleis and the armada of the Persian Great King Xsayarsa. Crushing the last hope that the Eastern monarch had of subjugating Hellas, and probably by extension of quashing the first sparks of Western civilization (though that effect may be somewhat overrated: meh), Salamis also provided the springboard for Athenai to establish her great naval empire, which would last until the defeat of Syrakousai in 413 BC(E) ruined her naval supremacy and allowed Sparte to initiate the great Aigion revolts. The outnumbered Hellenic ships ably sprung a trap, by first inducing the Persians to dispatch some of their best squadrons off the battlefield by a ruse, and then drew the remainder into the straits between Salamis and Attika, whereupon the combination of a flank attack and the superb Hellenic hoplitai marines secured victory. So yeah: sparking the Hellenic Golden Age, and turning back the greatest land empire of the time - a pretty impressive fight.

Battle of Yarmuk, 636 - The fight by the Rashidun Caliphate to hold onto Syria from the Eastern Roman Empire, which obviously wanted it back, turned into a sign of much more than that; after the Arab victory at Yarmuuk, it was impossible to hold back the tide of Muslim conquest in the Middle East and North Africa. Despite being outnumbered, Khalid ibn al-Walid's superior generalship and then a Clausewitzian transit from defense to blistering offense on the final day of the battle, in which the exhausted Roman kataphraktoi were outmaneuvered by the lighter Arab shock cavalry, proved decisive in securing the victory. One of the largest and greatest empires in world history was ensured by the Rashidun victory here, though it would not prove to be the end of the defeated, either; the Romans began clawing their way back from the brink to reemerge fully following the great victory of Leon Isaurios in 717.

Battle of Chaldiran, 1514 - One of the largest-scale battles of its time (by its demographic impact alone it would be worthy of inclusion; I jest, but only partly), Chaldiran, fought between Selim the Grim's modern Ottoman army, and the Iranian levies of the Safavid shah Ismail I, proved the defining moment in Iran's perpetual westward struggles. Though the Safavids' qizilbash cavalry (which unlike the janissaries the Ottomans commanded, refused to use firearms) were shredded, and the battle was mostly not in doubt, it had tremendous implications both religiously and geopolitically. Iran, outside of a transitory greatness under the shahs Abbas I and later Nadr Qoli Beg, would not expand beyond the frontier delineated by Chaldiran; it remains, more or less, the boundary today. Too, Ismail, disheartened by the defeat and unable to seriously claim the mantle of Mahdi, put greater emphasis on Twelver Shi'ism, which gained even more ground in Iran, until it became the dominant ranch of Islam in the country as can be seen today.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

God dammit. I just lost about an hours' worth of writing. Here are my five battles, maybe I'll come back and explain them when I cool down some more.

Battle of Kursk, 1943 AD.

Abbasid Civil War/Siege of Baghdad, 865 AD

Battle of Petrovaradin, 1716 AD

Sulla's First March on Rome, 88-87 BC

Battle of Chaeronea, 338 BC

 

[Dachs]

Good list. I would be interested to see why Peterwardein is rated so highly.

 

[Russian Soviet]

1. Battle of Stalingrad (you must know everything about it if you live in Russia)
Comments: The Battle of Stalingrad was the Bloodiest Battle in history with a total of over 1 million lives lost. The Soviets Won and if it had been a loss Hitler Would Have Marched all over The World

Well Thats the only one that i think is Important

 

[Birdjaguar]

I agree, Leipzig was the real doom of Napoleon.
After that, everything was only the singing of the swan.

Well the loss at Leipzig was heavily determined by the terrible loss in Russia. Had Borodino been more decisive or had Napoleon stopped at Smolensk, or, better yet, had he never invaded history would have been very different.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Good list. I would be interested to see why Peterwardein is rated so highly.

I haven't the foggiest why I picked it actually. Let's swap it out for

Well the loss at Leipzig was heavily determined by the terrible loss in Russia. Had Borodino been more decisive or had Napoleon stopped at Smolensk, or, better yet, had he never invaded history would have been very different.

It's funny, really, because it was something as simple as the placement of the Russian guns; they were put at an odd place where they were only about to participate for about half the battle; after the French advanced past the first redoubt, they lost contact; for all the hell they gave the French (it was reported that they made entire batallions "simply disappear" by their fine gunnery), they could have done so much more had they been somewhere else.

 

[Taras Bulba]

D-Day
Gettysburg
capture of Yanjing
Tours (aka-Poitiers)
Poltava (important enough to get mentioned, IMO)

EDIT:

how could I forget

Warsaw-Poland stopped the Reds from invading Europe in the 20s

 

[Loki130]

-Stalingrad- Nazi advance definitively pushed back, started the long retreat to Berlin

-Marne-Brought about the long and bloody WWI, influencing pretty much everything untill then

-Hastings-English kings, etc.

-Spanish Armada-began English naval supremacy

-Napoleon's march to Moscow-army shattered, big defeat, russia remains defiant to fight back (kind of tying with Trafalgar, with similar ramifications for Britain)

-honorable mention:Gettysburg, Lexington, El Alamein, whatever battle Alexander was injured (and eventually killed) in, Battle of Britain, Midway, Tenochlitan)
Unfortunately I'm not particularly familiar with ancient history, and I'm sure I'm missing something there.

 

[Dachs]

-Spanish Armada-began English naval supremacy

That 'English naval supremacy' is highly overrated. Besides, the fleet of Elizabeth I was nowhere to be seen during the reigns of the Stuart kings, and had to be resurrected by the Commonwealth.

-Napoleon's march to Moscow-army shattered, big defeat, russia remains defiant to fight back (kind of tying with Trafalgar, with similar ramifications for Britain)

Any one single battle in that campaign you were thinking of? Borodino? The battles of Polotsk? The Berezina?

 

[Birdjaguar]

It's funny, really, because it was something as simple as the placement of the Russian guns; they were put at an odd place where they were only about to participate for about half the battle; after the French advanced past the first redoubt, they lost contact; for all the hell they gave the French (it was reported that they made entire batallions "simply disappear" by their fine gunnery), they could have done so much more had they been somewhere else.

Borodino was "won" by the Russians through tenacious defense and a less than effective offensive by the French. The battlefield was a rather "cramped" one by typical standards of the day and favored the defense given the large armies on the field. The Russian artillery reserve, which was a huge collection of guns, was never properly deployed during the battle because its commander, Kutaisov, was killed early in the day leading a counter attack around the redoubt.

 

[Steph]

Well the loss at Leipzig was heavily determined by the terrible loss in Russia. Had Borodino been more decisive or had Napoleon stopped at Smolensk, or, better yet, had he never invaded history would have been very different.

I consider Leipzig more important, because of some events like the betrayal of Saxony right in the middle of the battle.

Russia was a great loss, that paved the way to Leipzig, the turning point.

 

[silver 2039]

India:

1. The First and Second Battles of Tararin
2. The three battles of Panipat
3. The Battle of Plassey
4. The Battle of Tailkota
5. The Seige of Delhi

 

[7ronin]

Everyone seems to be listing only western battles. How about:

1. Sekigahara (1600) - effectively unified Japan under Tokugawa Ieyasu (although minor fighting would continue for another three years) and marked the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

2. The Long March Campaign (1934-35) - Basically a retreat, it saved the Chinese Red Army from destruction by the Kuomintang under Chang Kai Shek and marked the emergence of Mao Zedong as a major Chinese Communist leader.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I haven't the foggiest why I picked it actually. Let's swap it out for

I will amend this statement by substituting the 751 Battle of Talas, between the Abbasid and Tang Empires.

 

[Hasdrubal Barca]

1.Termopyle - Greek stoping of Persian empire and western civilization beginning.
2.Battle of Zama - Roman turn point from a Republic to an empire
3.Battle of Tours - Stoping of Moor expansion by the Franks
4.Battle of Aljubarrota - Defeat of invading Spanish and beginning of the portuguese empire
5. Battle of the Chesapeake - French naval victory over British forces ensuring the end of The American Independance War and enabling the growth of a new world power.

 

[Dachs]

I will amend this statement by substituting the 751 Battle of Talas, between the Abbasid and Tang Empires.

I was thinking about including that one instead of Chaldiran, but outside of the introduction of paper (admittedly a huge and rather important thing), I always heard that the situation in Turkestan didn't change all that much, politically; Ferghana sent troops to fight against An Lushan only a few years later, after all, so the Arabs failed to break the vassalization.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

People keep mentioning the Battle of Tours as if it were somehow important. This is not the case. The Umayyad forces met there were a raiding party that was out to plunder parts of southern France and steal what they could, then hightail it back to Al-Andalus. They never had any intention of invading France or the rest of Europe; the first Muslims to do this were the Ottomans, nearly a millenia later.

Dachs, I seem to remember the Abbasids facing a revolt in the Hejaz early on (751 was only one year after Abu Muslim stormed Demashq), so that might explain why the subsequent operations in the Transoxiana-Altai area didn't get the attention they did before.