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5 Ancient Acts of War That Changed the
Face of the EarthBy Jacopo della Quercia April 15, 2010 2,177,110 views
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Nothing motivates people like war. That's how the Great Wall of China got built--they were
protecting themselves against enemies who lived to the north.
But that wall is hardly the only time we've changed the face of the planet in the name of
winning a war. Some of the ass kickings unleashed with ancient empires on the line were so
mind-boggling, the Earth still hasn't recovered.
#5.
Alexander the Great Turns an Island Into a Peninsula
You need a lot of impressive things on your resume to earn a title like "The Great," but Alexander
the Great's most awesome accomplishment has to be when he conquered theunconquerable city of Tyre.
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Minas Tirith can suck it.
Located off the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon, Tyre was pretty much an ancient
Phoenician Azkaban Prison. The city was an island whose walls extended directly into the water,
which meant that even if Alexander had a navy with him (which he didn't), his entire army
would splash as helplessly against Tyre's defenses as piss off a flagpole.
Alexander's solution to this dilemma: Simply change the map forever by making the island not
be an island any more.
It sounds like something that would only work in a cartoon, since it would require them to
spontaneously construct a kilometer-long land bridge to link Tyre back up with Eurasia, by hand.
They did it anyway.
Slowly, and while being pelted with arrows and bombarded by Tyre's navy, Alexander's men
built their new land mass, one stone at a time.
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It's still there.
Once the new land mass was in place, he was able to wheel his siege towers right up to the
fortress. Ships belonging to his allies eventually came to help out, possibly because they heard
what they thought was a ridiculous rumor and wanted to come see if it was true.
With Tyre now checkmated, Alexander personally led the final charge against the city from the
top of his tallest siege-tower. The city fell to Alexander, and with it its status as an island. You
might be asking the obvious question, which is why he didn't have his men keep throwing down
rocks until they'd formed a huge "ALEXANDER WAS HERE" in the Mediterranean sea--and of
course the answer is that he could not have known that aerial photography would one day be
invented.
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#4.
Legio X Fretensis Ramps It Up
During the final battle of the epic-sounding First Jewish-Roman War of the first Century, the
Roman legion Legio X Fretensis laid siege to a massive end boss in southern Israel
called Masada. It was pretty much the Judean equivalent to Helm's Deep, except instead of
being situated in the ass-crack of a mountain, Masada was located on top of one. It was
basically the most awesome game of King of the Mountain in history, and Team Israel was off to
a solid head-start.
However, the Romans knew the fortress had a fatal flaw: It was situated on Earth, and with the
exception for Germany and Scotland, there was nothing on Earth that Legio X Fretensis could
not conquer.
All they had to do was fix the whole "higher ground" thing. Taking a page from Alexander the
Great's "ideas so ridiculous they have to work" playbook, they went to work on a gigantic ramp.
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Like this, but in the desert and surrounded by corpses.
It sounds like a ridiculously simple albeit labor-intensive solution, but try selling it to the legionaries
getting pelted with rocks and human waste the whole time. Although they were subjected to a
barrage of unholy hell from above, teamwork eventually won the day for Legio X Fretensis. The
ramp freaking worked.
But there is one more twist in this tale. Once this Rocky-esque army of Italians finally finished their
incredibly tedious earth-moving job and were ready to start the cool part of the battle, they
found there was no enemy to fight.
In a turn of events that had to be both creepy and incredibly infuriating to the people who had
to build part of a fucking mountain to get there, they found the entire city had committed
suicide, thus bringing the siege, the battle and the entire First Jewish-Roman War to an abrupt
end.
Rome 1: Earth 0.
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#3.
The Mongols Erase Baghdad
We have previously mentioned how one heart attack stopped the Mongols from taking over the
Western world. If you would like to know what that would have looked like, let's take a look at
what happened to Baghdad.
The city of Baghdad was once a pretty big deal. Like, the biggest deal on the planet for at least
500 years. This is because it was situated at the crossroads of three continents; an intellectual
cantina for most of the planet's merchants, smugglers and wookiee co-pilots. It was home to
some of history's oldest buildings and civilizations dating back to Babylon. Naturally, this all
sounded really "Chinese" to the Mongols, which is why the Mongols resolved to destroy it. (The
Mongols really didn't like the Chinese.)
Under the command of Genghis Khan's grandson Hulagu, the Mongols went to war with the
Persians and the first stop was Baghdad. They captured the city in less than two weeks, looted its
mosques and massacred anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 civilians.
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Tragic, yes, but it does make for excellent paintings.
Sounds like a dime-a-dozen Mongolian conquest, right? Well, this was just the pregame, since
Hulagu Khan didn't schlep all the way to a city like Baghdad just to kill people.
All of its prized schools and libraries like the Grand Library of Baghdad? The contents dumped
into the Tigris until the river ran black. Its magnificent works of architecture, some of them taking
generations to build? Leveled. Its prized irrigation system, the breadbasket of Mesopotamia for
thousands of years? Filled in.
What used to be fertile farmland dried up and turned to desert. The city sat as an abandoned
ruin for centuries. Baghdad wasn't just destroyed. The Mongols hit the reset button on everything
that made it possible.
To get a sense of the sheer scale of the destruction, realize that to this day, Baghdad has yet to
recover these losses from--checking our calendar--760 years ago.
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#2.
The Dutch Put Themselves on an Island
Remember that little maneuver Alexander pulled during the Siege of Tyre? Well, picture a severe
case of the exact opposite: Someone turning an entire country into an island at the drop of a
hat.
There was a time in history that the Dutch were this close to being the most powerful country on
the planet today. The only thing standing between the Dutch and Imperial British-level world
dominance was the sorry fact that they were stuck on the European continent with a load of
bad neighbors. Suffering from severe island-envy, the Dutch were desperate to get the hell off of
the landmass, and their solution to this dilemma was the Dutch Water Line.
"That thing's operational!"
The Dutch Water Line was the brainchild of stadtholder Maurice of Nassau, who was a pretty
important guy even though his job looked like a typo. The idea was to use Holland's natural
water-bodies and low sea level to deliberately inundate the country, creating a natural sea-
barrier whenever it was needed.
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Nassau's successor put the people to work with shovels and pickaxes and by god, before long
they had put Holland on a freaking island surrounded by shallow water. Then they planted a
generous garden of mines, barbed wire and even animal traps that disappeared underwater
once the floodgates were opened.
The Dutch Deflector Shield.
It worked, too. The Dutch won the Franco-Dutch War specifically because their little
superweapon successfully stopped the armies of Louis XIV, thus forcing them to go home to their
non-superweapon state, thumbs planted firmly up their own asses.
The French finished their own super-weapon just in time for the Germans to blow it up.
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#1.
The Mongols Weaponize the Bubonic Plague (Killing Half of Europe)
If there is one thing movies and real-time strategy games have taught us about warfare, it's that
superweapons are pretty much the Konami code of combat. The Americans had the A-Bomb,
the good guys in Red Alert had the Chronosphere and the Karen in Burma had a John Rambo
so pumped with HGH he sweat steroids and crapped jawbones.
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left...
With that said, you can really tell a lot about a people by their superweapons, and when it
came to the Mongols, it's safe to say they didn't pull any punches. Hell, even
their conventional weapons were pretty damn sick. For example, when they finally won their
long war with the Jin, the roads of Beijing were "greasy from human fat," and the air was
saturated with a poisonous fume like Mordor.
During the Siege of Caffa in 1346, the Mongol armies of the Golden Horde unleashed a weapon
of war utterly unmatched in terms of its consequence: Yersinia pestis. You might know it better as
the bubonic plague. Or, by its much cooler name: Black Death.
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The disease had been enjoying a nice retirement in Middle of Nowhere, Central Asia, until the
advancing Mongols had to mess up the migration routes of small rodents. By the time the Horde
reached the city of Caffa situated in the Black Sea, their own soldiers were already dropping
dead from the illness.
But of course that wasn't their fault. Their people picked up some microbes as they were
stomping across the countryside. It's not like they intentionally spread the dis-
Oh wait. They did. When they saw how effectively the disease took out their own people, they
reportedly started loading their diseased corpses into catapults and launching them over the
walls of their enemies.
The enemy in this case, the city of Caffa, was a major shipping port serving the entire region.
People fleeing the invasion and raining corpses jumped in their boats and sailed off in every
direction. By the time they drifted back to their ports throughout Europe with news from Caffa,
their boats were true ghost-ships with Y.pestis patients literally bursting "like pinatas."
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The world's population at the time the Mongols started flinging infected corpses was around 450
million. By the time the Black Death got through with them a few decades later, it was as low as
350 million. Their little biological weapon campaign killed one out of every four or five people on
planet Earth, utterly changing the face of human civilization and creating the modern world as
we know it.
Take a moment to reflect on that. In a way, everything you see around you is indirectly the result
of one particular group of assholes.
Do you have something funny to say about a random topic? You could be on the front page of
Cracked.com tomorrow. Go here and find out how to create a Topic Page.