Cutting Room Floor

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

The Great Siege of Malta in 1565 was not the first time that the Knight’s Hospitaller clashed with the Ottoman Empire, nor even the first time they had fought against the sultan Suleiman I, The Magnificent. Forty years earlier in the winter of 1522-3, at the very start of the sultan’s reign, he had driven the knights from their previous home on the island of Rhodes. The 1522 Siege of Rhodes is just one in a series of famous Ottoman sieges, starting with the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, then the less talked about 1480 Siege of Rhodes during which the Hospitallers drove off the forces of Suleiman’s father, and the later Siege of Malta in 1565. Suleiman opened his reign by driving the hated Knights Hospitaller, a military order with its roots in the eleventh century and which had participated in nearly every major crusading conflict, from the eastern Mediterranean and opened the sea for future Turkish expansion.

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Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War

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Cutting Room Floor: The Bagler War

The Norwegian Civil Wars were a period of near continuous unrest that lasted for over a century, from1130 until 1240, and saw over twenty kings, pretenders, and claimants battling for control of the kingdom. Amidst this turmoil the reign of Sverre Sigurdson, who claimed the Norwegian throne in 1177 but only ruled as Sverre I from 1184 until his death in 1202, contains an interesting anecdote in the history of the crossbow.

Sverre’s rule was one marked by near constant conflict. He had originated as a pretender to the throne before eventually achieving legitimacy through warfare. An account of his reign was provided by the Sverris Saga, a poetic account of his life probably written by Karl Jónsson, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Munkaþverá in Northern Iceland. Jónsson died in 1213, meaning that the saga must have been written nearly contemporary to Sverre’s life. The saga says that Sverre’s initial group of followers consisted mainly of “vagrants, outcasts, and robbers who are primarily interested in plundering farmers.”

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Cutting Room Floor: The Calais Garrison

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Cutting Room Floor: The Calais Garrison

In the immediate aftermath of his famous victory at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, King Edward III laid siege to the city of Calais in Northern France. The siege was long and lasted through the winter, but in the end the city could not hold out and there was no sign of a relief army coming from the French king. In the subsequent decades Calais would provide a valuable foothold for the English on the European continent as well as granting them greater control over the English Channel. By the late fifteenth century the Pale of Calais, which consisted of the city of Calais and several nearby fortresses, was the last area in France still held by the English monarchy after King Charles VII’s reconquests of Normandy and Gascony. Defending Calais was a high priority, even during the upheaval of the War of the Roses. The soldiers defending Calais represented as close to a standing army as England had in the Middle Ages, and the information contained in the detailed records left by the garrison and its treasurers provide insight into the extent of crossbow use by the English during the era of the longbow.