A fairly standard British tactic in dealing with the tribal territories along the Raj/Afghan border was very specifically punitive and disproportion.

 

In the Tirah campaign of 1897-1898, the British marched a column of some 25,000 men into the Pathan tribal territory of the Afridi and Orakzai after they had closed the Kyhber pass and overwhelmed a couple of small garrisons on the southern edge of Orakzai territory. The commander, General Sir William Lockhart, was happy enough to engage the tribesmen in open combat the few times the Afridi or Orakzai tried to stand and fight, but was content to attack what today would be termed infrastructure when they did not.

 

Standard operating procedure was to drive off flocks/herds (saving a few for foraging purposes), destroy crops in the fields, cut down orchards, and dynamite the substantial houses of the village or town (these houses were designed as small fortresses due to constant infighting among the Pathan). There were specific orders forbidding the destruction of Mosques, although the Gurkhas did ring all of the trees in the sacred grove at Bagh with their Kukris. The idea was to inflict enough damage to force the Pathan leadership to submit to the terms of the Raj, which included the payment of a substantial fine in cash and in arms, and to demonstrate that there was no location, however remote, that was immune to the retaliatory touch of the British Empire.

 

How well did it work? The campaign bought thirty years of peace from the Afridi and Orakzai. Even when most of the Frontier went up in flames during the aftermath of the Third Afghan War in 1919, only the notorious Zakka Khel of the Afridi (a Khel is similar to a clan, a sub-divsion within the overall tribe) rose against the British; the rest of the Afridi and all of the Orakzai stayed home.

LINK

 

Born June 1, 1831

Owingsville, Kentucky

Died August 30, 1879

New Orleans, Louisiana

Confederate general

“An aggressive, ferocious fighter, Hood came to be considered one of Lee’s better brigade commanders. . . . Writer Steven E. Woodworth

John Bell Hood was a Confederate general of unquestioned bravery and dedication. As a division commander he displayed great courage at many of the Civil War’s most violent battles. These skirmishes included Second Bull Run (August 1862) and Fredericksburg (December 1862) in Virginia; Antietam (September 1862) in Maryland; Gettysburg (July 1863) in Pennsylvania; and Chickamauga (September 1863) in Georgia. Hood’s devotion to the Southern cause was so great that he remained on active military duty even after suffering wounds that crippled one arm and required the amputation of one of his legs. But Hood’s performance as commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from July 1864 to January 1865 has tarnished his reputation. During that period he not only failed to stop Union forces from capturing Atlanta, Georgia, but also made a series of disastrous battlefield decisions that virtually destroyed his army.

Adopts Texas as home state

John Bell Hood was born in Bath County, Kentucky, in 1831. His father was a prosperous planter (plantationowner) who also ran a rural medical practice. Hood’s childhood environment became even more comfortable in the mid-1830s, when his maternal grandfather died and left the family more than 225,000 acres of land.

As a youngster, Hood was a troublemaker who got in fistfights with other boys on a regular basis. He managed to gain admission into the prestigious U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1849, however, thanks to his father’s wealth and the assistance of an uncle who was a U.S. congressman. During his time at West Point, his poor grades and taste for mischief nearly resulted in his expulsion. As a senior, however, he developed a deep admiration for Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), who took over as the academy’s superintendent during that year. This admiration may have helped Hood reduce some of his bad behavior. In any event, he managed to perform just well enough to graduate from the school in 1853 (he ranked forty-fourth out of fifty-two graduates).

After leaving West Point, Hood was made a second lieutenant in an infantry company. He served in the U.S. Army in both New York and California until 1855, when he became a second lieutenant in the Second U.S. Cavalry in Texas. Hood developed a deep love for Texas’s rugged frontier country over the next several years. He liked the rough beauty of the land and identified with the independent pioneer spirit of its settlers.

Hood’s career in the U.S. Army came to an end in early 1861, after years of growing hostility between America’s Northern and Southern states finally boiled over into war. The main issue dividing the two regions was slavery. Northern states wanted to abolish slavery because many of their citizens became convinced that it was a cruel and evil institution. Southern states resisted efforts to end slavery, though. The Southern economy had become dependent on slavery over the years, and white Southerners worried that their way of life would collapse if slavery was abolished (eliminated). America’s westward expansion during this time made this dispute even worse, since both sides wanted to spread their way of life—and their political ideas—into the new territories and states. The two sides finally went to war in early 1861 when the Southern states tried to secede from (leave) the Union and form a new country that allowed slavery, called the Confederate States of America.

Hood resigned from the U.S. Army on April 17, 1861, after the Texas legislature voted to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. Disgusted by Kentucky’s decision to stay with the Union, he subsequently adopted Texas as his new home state and enlisted in the Confederate Army from there.

A fighting general

Once the Civil War started, Hood quickly gained a reputation as a tough and brave officer. He joined the Confederate military as a captain, but he rose rapidly through the ranks as word of his bravery and no-nonsense leadership spread. In March 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general and given command of the tough Texas Brigade, which was part of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Lee’s force was the Confederacy’s largest army, and as the war progressed it engaged in many of the conflict’s biggest battles. Hood participated in most of these clashes, impressing friend and foe alike with his fearless approach to war. “Hood turned out to be an excellent combat commander,” wrote Steven E. Woodworth in Jefferson Davis and His Generals. “An aggressive, ferocious fighter, Hood came to be considered one of Lee’s better brigade commanders and was soon promoted to major general.”

Hood’s bold approach to combat made him one of the Confederacy’s best-known officers and helped Lee secure several big battlefield victories. As the war progressed, however, Hood’s hard-charging style earned him a number of serious war injuries. The most serious of these injuries took place at the battles of Gettysburg and Chickamauga. At Gettysburg (fought July 1–3, 1863, in Pennsylvania), Hood received a wound that permanently crippled his left arm. A few months later at Chickamauga (fought September 19–20, 1863, in Georgia), Hood was shot in the right leg while leading a charge. Soldiers quickly transported him to Richmond, where doctors were forced to amputate his leg at mid-thigh in order to save his life.

Hood spent the next several months in Richmond. As he worked to regain his strength, he struck up a pleasurable friendship with Confederate president Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) and his family. Hood’s stay in the Confederacy’s capital city also brought him sorrow, though. As a man who had always been physically active and strong, he found it very difficult to adjust to his new physical limitations. In addition, he waged a desperate campaign to win the heart of an attractive Southern woman named Sally Buchanan Preston during this time. When she rejected him over the Christmas holidays, Hood was emotionally crushed.

Battling against Sherman

In February 1864, Hood returned to active military service despite his injuries. Assigned to command a corps of troops in the Army of Tennessee, Hood reached its camp in Georgia at the end of the month. Once Hood arrived, he tackled his new responsibilities with great eagerness. He routinely rode twenty miles a day, even though he had to be strapped on to his horse because of his war injuries. He also encouraged Army of Tennessee commander Joseph E. Johnston (1807–1891) to adopt a plan advanced by Davis to launch an invasion into Union-held Tennessee. Davis believed that one or two more big Southern victories might convince the Northern states to end their efforts to break the Confederacy and restore the Union.

Johnston, however, resisted calls for a major offensive. More cautious than Hood, he hesitated to attack unless he was sure that he could win. In addition, he believed that the Confederacy’s best chance of gaining independence was to avoid major losses and hope that Northern voters replaced President Abraham Lincoln in the fall 1864 elections with someone who would agree to Confederate independence in exchange for peace.

Davis and Johnston argued over strategy throughout the first few months of 1864. Then, in May 1864, Union general William T. Sherman (1820–1891) launched a full-scale invasion of Georgia in hopes of destroying the Army of Tennessee. Johnston used a variety of skillful maneuvers to avoid a full-scale battle with Sherman’s much-larger army. But while Johnston’s evasive tactics frustrated Sherman, the Union general kept moving his army deeper into Georgia. By early summer, the Army of Tennessee had been pushed all the way from northern Georgia to the outskirts of Atlanta, one of the most important cities still controlled by the Confederacy.

Hood takes command in the West

As Davis received reports detailing Sherman’s advance on Atlanta, he became convinced that Johnston’s reluctance to attack the invading Northern army would eventually result in the loss of the city. Hood contributed to Davis’s mounting anxiety by sending a series of letters that were highly critical of Johnston’s defensive strategy. The Confederate president thus decided to replace Johnston with Hood, even though General Lee thought that appointing Hood was a bad idea. “Hood is a bold fighter,” stated Lee. “I am doubtful as to [whether he possesses] other qualities necessary [to lead the army effectively].”

Hood assumed his new position as commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee on July 17, 1864. One day later he was made a full general with temporary rank. Hood understood that he had been promoted because of his aggressiveness and willingness to fight. With this in mind, he immediately made plans to attack Sherman’s forces. He ignored the advice of many other officers, engaging Sherman’s larger force in a series of battles around the outskirts of Atlanta. Delighted with the dramatic change in the South’s strategy, Sherman battered Hood in each of these engagements.

By August, Hood’s tired army was trapped in the city of Atlanta, and Sherman had seized control of most of the surrounding countryside. Rather than order a bloody assault on the city’s defenses, though, Sherman placed the city under siege (a military blockade designed to prevent the city from receiving food and other supplies from outside). Hood’s defense of Atlanta ended on September 1, when his forces lost control of the last railway lines providing supplies to Atlanta at the Battle of Jonesboro. Aware that he could no longer keep Atlanta out of Union hands, Hood hurriedly withdrew his army out of the city. Sherman’s Army of the Mississippi moved in to take possession of the town one day later, on September 2.

Hood’s desperate gamble In the weeks following Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, the Union Army engaged in a series of skirmishes (minor fights) with Hood’s force, which continued to lurk in the region. In November 1864, Sherman’s army set fire to Atlanta and marched eastward out of the city. Sherman planned to march through the heart of the Confederacy, seizing supplies and destroying croplands along the way. “If we can march a well-appointed [prepared] army right through [JeffersonDavis’s] territory, it is a demonstration to the world . . . that we have a power which Davis cannot resist,” said Sherman. “I can make the march, and make Georgia howl!”

Hood knew that his battered army did not have the muscle to stop Sherman’s superior force as it began its fearsome “March to the Sea.” Instead, the Confederate commander moved his army into Tennessee in a desperate attempt to catch Sherman’s attention. He hoped to lure Sherman out of Georgia by threatening both his supply lines and the Union-held city of Nashville. Hood’s strategy, wrote historian James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom, created “the odd spectacle of two contending armies turning their backs on each other and marching off in opposite directions. As it turned out, there was more method in Sherman’s madness than in Hood’s.”

Sherman ignored Hood’s offensive. The Union general knew that his army could supply itself by taking what it needed from Southern towns and farms as it made its way across the Confederate heartland. In addition, he knew that sixty thousand federal troops under the command of General George H. Thomas (1816–1870) would be awaiting Hood in Tennessee. Sherman thus continued his methodical march across the South, destroying Confederate property and morale with each passing mile.

Hood, meanwhile, continued to move deeper into Tennessee with his weary forty thousand–man army. Worried that the Confederacy was on the verge of total collapse, he came up with another desperate plan to reverse the war’s momentum. He decided to use his army in a bid to regain control of Tennessee and Kentucky and eventually move against Union forces gathered in Virginia. This plan was doomed to fail, but as historian Bruce Catton wrote in The Civil War, “the plain fact of the matter was that Hood had no good choice to make.”

On November 30, 1864, Hood’s dreams of somehow reversing the South’s fortunes were crushed once and for all. On that day he launched a full-scale assault on Union forces at Franklin, Tennessee, about twenty-five miles south of Nashville. The well-entrenched Union Army, commanded by Major General John M. Schofield (1831–1906), easily turned back every rebel charge. By the time Hood called off the disastrous attack, he had lost more than sixty-two hundred men and the respect of many of his troops. “I have never seen an army so confused and demoralized,” confessed one member of the Army of Tennessee who took part in the battle. “The whole thing seemed to be tottering and trembling.”

Two weeks later, Thomas finished off Hood’s exhausted and demoralized army at the Battle of Nashville. This battle, fought on December 15 and 16, virtually destroyed the Army of Tennessee, as wave after wave of Union troops battered Hood’s defenses. Remnants of the courageous rebel army managed to escape, but Confederate authorities never managed to put the pieces back together again. The Army of Tennessee remained sidelined for the remainder of the war. Hood survived the Battle of Nashville, but the destruction of his army depressed him terribly. Wracked with guilt and grief at his failures, he resigned his command on January 13, 1865. Four months later he surrendered to Union troops in Natchez, Mississippi, as the war drew to a close.

Settles in New Orleans

After the Civil War ended, Hood started a cotton business in New Orleans. He married Anna Marie Henen, with whom he had eleven children. He also wrote a book about his wartime experiences called Advance and Retreat. Before he could find a publisher for his memoirs, however, a yellow fever epidemic swept through New Orleans. The epidemic disrupted businesses throughout the city and bankrupted several prominent businessmen, including Hood. In August 1879, the epidemic claimed the lives of Hood, his wife, and one of his daughters. At first, it appeared that Hood’s ten orphaned children might be cast into poverty by the deaths of their parents. But family friends found a publisher for Hood’s memoirs and arranged to have the profits distributed to his children.

 

Born February 3, 1807

Cherry Grove, Virginia

Died March 21, 1891

District of Columbia

Confederate general

Johnston “was loved, respected, admired; yea, almost worshiped by his troops. I do not believe there was a soldier in his army but would gladly have died for him.” One of Johnston’s soldiers

Joseph Johnston’s reputation as a Civil War general is a mixed one. On the one hand, he became known as one of the Confederacy’s most sensible and intelligent military leaders. Careful and crafty, he never sent his troops into battle rashly. This reluctance to commit troops to battle without good cause understandably made Johnston very popular with many of the soldiers under his command. But critics of Johnston argued that he avoided conflict on too many occasions, such as during the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign and the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. This criticism, coupled with his bitter feud with Confederate president Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) has made Johnston’s Civil War performance a subject of continued debate among students and historians.

Born and raised in Virginia

Joseph Eggleston Johnston was born in Virginia in 1807 into a powerful and respected family. His father was Peter Johnston, a judge and congressman who had fought in the Revolutionary War on behalf of the rebellious American colonies. The Revolutionary War—also known as the War for Independence—was waged from 1776 to 1783 and eventually resulted in American independence from British rule. Joseph Johnston’s mother, meanwhile, was the niece of Patrick Henry (1736–1799), one of the most famous American heroes of the Revolutionary War.

Johnston grew up in Abingdon County, Virginia, attending classes in the state’s finest schools. In 1825, he left home for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York. Johnston excelled at his studies at the prestigious military school. He also became friends with a group of fellow cadets (military students) that included a young Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) during his stay at West Point.

Early military experiences

In 1829, Johnston graduated from the academy and joined the U.S. Army. He spent most of the next decade at frontier outposts and in Florida. During his time in Florida, he took part in the expedition through the state of explorer John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) and participated in the socalled Seminole Wars (1835–42). This war between the U.S. military and the Seminole Indians eventually forced the Indians off of their ancestral homelands and onto reservations in Oklahoma.

In 1845, Johnston married Lydia McLane, a member of a prominent Delaware family. A year later he traveled west to fight on behalf of the United States in the Mexican War (1846–48). This war was a struggle between Mexico and the United States for ownership of vast expanses of land in the West. Wounded twice during the conflict, Johnston impressed his commanding officers with his coolness and bravery. The Mexican War ended in 1848 when America forced its southern neighbor to give up its claims on California, New Mexico, and other western lands in exchange for $15 million.

With the conclusion of the Mexican War, Johnston returned to the army’s topographical engineering branch. This division was responsible for exploring and surveying the geography of the growing nation (topography is the practice of creating maps that show exact geographic features of a region). In 1855, however, Johnston received a promotion to lieutenant colonel in order to command a newly created army cavalry unit known as the First Cavalry. Five years later he successfully pushed to be appointed as the army’s quartermaster general when that position became vacant. Johnston thus became responsible for supervising all efforts to provide soldiers with food, clothing, and equipment. He also was promoted to brigadier general around this time.

In the spring of 1861, though, Johnston abruptly left the ranks of the U.S. Army when the nation’s Northern and Southern regions took up arms against one another. The arrival of war did not really surprise Johnston. After all, relations between the two sides had become tattered by years of bitter arguments and threats over a number of issues, especially slavery. Northern states wanted to abolish slavery because many of their citizens thought that it was a cruel and evil institution. The agriculture-based Southern economy had become extremely dependent on slavery over the years, though, and white Southerners worried that their way of life would collapse if slavery was abolished (eliminated). America’s westward expansion during this time made this dispute even worse, since both sides wanted to spread their way of life—and their political views—into the new territories and states. The two sides finally went to war in early 1861, after the Southern states tried to secede from (leave) the Union and form a new country where slavery was allowed, called the Confederate States of America.

Early Civil War success

Johnston viewed the South’s attempt to secede from the United States as a terrible mistake. Ignoring early offers of generalship in the Confederate Army, he did not join the rebel (Confederate) military until April 1861, when his home state of Virginia announced its intention to secede. But Johnston left the U.S. Army with a heavy heart. As he submitted his resignation to Union secretary of war Simon Cameron (1799–1889), he confessed his belief that secession “was ruin in every sense of the word.” Upon arriving in Richmond a few days later, he was made a brigadier general in the Confederate Army.

Initially assigned to defend Harpers Ferry, Virginia, from Union invaders, Johnston played a major role in helping the South win the first major battle of the Civil War in July 1861. Using clever maneuvers to escape from an advancing Federal army, he quickly transported thousands of soldiers by railroad to Manassas Junction, Virginia, where rebel troops under the command of General Pierre G. T. Beauregard (1818–1893) were being challenged by a larger Union force led by General Irvin McDowell (1818–1885). Johnston’s troops arrived just in time to turn the battle in favor of the South. Combining their two armies, Johnston and Beauregard produced a sloppy but decisive victory over McDowell’s troops. This triumph at the First Battle of Manassas (known as the First Battle of Bull Run in the North) gave Southerners confidence that they could fend off Northern attempts to restore the Union.

The Johnston-Davis feud

The victory at Manassas made Johnston one of the Confederacy’s first military heroes. Six weeks later, he and four other Confederate officers were promoted to the newly created rank of full general. Johnston, however, expressed great anger with the details of these promotions. As he understood Confederate law, the seniority of Confederate military officers of the same rank was supposed to be based on the relative position they held back in the federal army. According Johnston, this meant that he should be “top-ranked” of all the new Confederate generals. But Confederate president Jefferson Davis ranked Johnston fourth in seniority, ahead of only one other general.

Johnston responded to news of the promotions by writing Davis a furious letter. He claimed that the president’s rankings had been made “in violation of my rights as an officer, of the plighted [promised] faith of the Confederacy and the Constitution and laws of the land.” Johnston concluded his note by stating that “I now and here declare my claim that . . . I still rightfully hold the rank of first general in the armies of the Southern Confederacy.” But Davis refused to reconsider his decision. In fact, he sent Johnston an insulting reply in which he called the general’s arguments and statements “one-sided” and “as unfounded [without a factual base] as they are unbecoming [unattractive].”

Prior to the promotion controversy, relations between the two men had been cool and mildly distrustful. But the uproar over Johnston’s ranking dramatically worsened tensions between the two men. In fact, it created a cloud of animosity between Davis and Johnston that remained in place for years to come. Stubborn and proud, the two men spent the rest of the war believing the worst about each other.

Service in the West

Johnston’s next major engagement took place in the spring of 1862, when Union general George B. McClellan (1826–1885) launched his so-called Peninsula Campaign to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond. By late May, McClellan’s army had advanced to Fair Oaks, only a few miles outside of Richmond. But a large Confederate force under Johnston’s command awaited the Federal army there. On May 31, the two armies clashed together in a bloody struggle for control of the Virginia peninsula. The two-day battle (known as the Battle of Seven Pines in the South) ended in a virtual stalemate (deadlock), with neither side able to gain an advantage. Johnston, though, was seriously wounded in the clash and had to turn command of his Army of Northern Virginia over to General Robert E. Lee. One month later, Lee forced McClellan to end his offensive campaign by defeating the Union general in a series of fierce clashes that came to be known as the Seven Days’ Battles. Lee then followed up that victory with a series of other triumphs. Lee’s performance convinced Davis to give him command of the Army of Northern Virginia for the rest of the war.

Johnston spent the last months of 1862 recovering from the wounds he suffered at Fair Oaks. When Johnston returned to active duty in November, Davis sent him to the war’s western theater (the area of the country between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains). Despite growing doubts about Johnston’s abilities, Davis wanted him to take general command of the two main Confederate armies in the region. The president hoped that Johnston would be able to increase the effectiveness of the two armies by coordinating their actions. Johnston, though, complained about his new assignment. He told Davis that his command was “useless. . . . The great distance between the [Confederate] Armies of Mississippi and Tennessee, and the fact that they had different objects and adversaries [enemies], made it impossible to combine their action.”

Johnston, Davis, and other Confederate officials continued to argue and debate about strategy, military authority, and other issues throughout the first few months of 1863. Union general Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), meanwhile, launched a major offensive against Vicksburg, Mississippi, a strategically important Confederate stronghold. Grant knew that if he could seize the city from the Confederacy, the North would control the entire length of the Mississippi River.

By May 1863, Johnston was certain that he did not have enough troops to save Vicksburg from Grant’s advancing army. He told Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton (1814–1881), the commander of the Confederate garrison (military post) within the city, to evacuate his army before it was lost to Grant. But Pemberton remained in Vicksburg after receiving orders from Davis to hold the city at all costs.

The struggle for Vicksburg ended in disaster for the Confederacy. In late May, Grant ordered his army to surround the city and stop all shipments of food and other supplies. This strategy, known as a siege, was intended to starve Pemberton’s army into surrendering the city. Within a matter of weeks, Grant’s siege had created great hunger and misery within Vicksburg. Johnston tried to come up with a plan to lift the siege, but the small size of his army prevented him from posing any significant threat to Grant’s much larger force. Pemberton finally surrendered on July 4, giving the North control of both the city and the Mississippi River.

When Davis learned that Vicksburg had fallen into Union hands, he placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Johnston. The Confederate president and many other people believed that Johnston should have offered more resistance to Grant. They charged that Johnston had been too cautious and timid in his actions. Johnston and his supporters, meanwhile, blamed flawed strategies devised by Davis and other Confederate officials for the loss of the city. They also claimed that Johnston’s decision to avoid an all-out fight with Grant had kept the South from losing thousands of men in a hopeless cause. Not surprisingly, the debate over who was to blame for the loss of Vicksburg increased the level of hostility (ill will) and distrust that existed between Davis and Johnston. In fact, one acquaintance of Johnston’s commented that from this time forward, Johnston’s “hatred of Jeff Davis became a religion with him.”

Johnston replaces Bragg

During the fall of 1863, Davis relieved Johnston of many of his command responsibilities. He felt that Johnston’s tendency to retreat and avoid combat unless certain of victory was hurting the Southern cause. In November 1863, though, Davis reluctantly appointed Johnston to command the Confederate Army of Tennessee, the South’s last major army in the western theater. The Army of Tennessee was a tough and battle-hardened force. Over the course of 1863, however, it had been badly led by Confederate general Braxton Bragg (1817–1876). By the time Davis finally replaced Bragg, morale among the troops had plummeted to a very low level. Upon arriving in Dalton, Georgia, to take command of the Army of Tennessee in December 1863, Johnston immediately addressed the lingering morale problem. During the long winter months, he took steps to improve his troops’ food rations and living conditions. He also worked hard to reassure the soldiers that his command style would be different than the stern one adopted by Bragg. “[Johnston] passed through the ranks of the common soldiers, shaking hands with every one he met,” recalled one soldier. “He restored the soldier’s pride; he brought the manhood back to the private’s bosom. . . . He was loved, respected, admired; yea, almost worshiped by his troops. I do not believe there was a soldier in his army but would gladly have died for him.”

Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign

In May 1864, Johnston faced his first major test as commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee. At that time, a major Union army under the command of General William T. Sherman (1820–1891) marched into Georgia in order to destroy Johnston’s sixty thousand-man army. The North believed that if the Confederate Army of Tennessee could be wiped out, Union control of the West would be complete, and weakening Southern support for the war might collapse altogether.

As Sherman’s force of one hundred thousand troops began its pursuit of Johnston, Davis and Johnston once again quarreled about Confederate strategy. Davis and other officials wanted Johnston to strike against Sherman and recapture the state of Tennessee in an offensive campaign. Johnston, however, felt that his best course of action was to engage in a series of strategic retreats against his more powerful opponent. The general thought that if Sherman used up some of his troops in failed attacks, he might eventually be able to launch a counterattack. In addition, Johnston believed that if Sherman failed to gain a major victory during the summer of 1864, Northern voters might replace U.S. president Abraham Lincoln (1809– 1865) in the fall elections with a member of the antiwar Democratic Party who would grant independence to the Confederacy in exchange for peace.

Throughout the months of May and June, Sherman moved his army southward in an attempt to smash the Confederate Army of Tennessee. The two armies engaged in countless bloody skirmishes during this period, but Johnston quickly and skillfully avoided all efforts to trap him. Instead, he steadily retreated deeper into Georgia, even as President Davis and other Confederate officials urged him to turn and attack the Yankee (Union) invaders.

By mid-July, Sherman had seized large sections of Georgia. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee had been pushed backward to the outskirts of Atlanta, one of the Confederacy’s last remaining major cities. Johnston’s defensive maneuvers had enabled him to keep most of his army intact, but Davis and many other Confederate officials were very unhappy with his performance. They openly worried that Johnston might give up Atlanta without a fight, and became very frustrated when the general stubbornly refused to tell them about his plans.

On July 17, Davis finally removed Johnston from command and replaced him with John Bell Hood (1831–1879), an officer with the Army of Tennessee who had a reputation as a fierce and aggressive fighter. The switch delighted Sherman, who had grown weary of pursuing Johnston. “I confess I was pleased at the change [in the Confederate command],” he wrote in a letter to his wife. Hood promptly ordered a series of attacks on the Union Army, but Sherman and his troops smashed all of these attacks. Within a few months, Sherman had captured Atlanta and launched a devastating campaign deep into the heart of the South. Hood, meanwhile, took his army into Tennessee, where it was torn to shreds by Union forces.

End of the war

After being removed from command, Johnston spent the last part of 1864 traveling around the South with his wife. In February 1865, General Lee convinced Davis to recall Johnston to active service in the disintegrating Confederate Army. Johnston was ordered to assume command of rebel troops in the Carolinas and halt Sherman’s advance on Richmond. By this point, however, no Southern army was capable of stopping Union forces as they rolled across the Confederacy. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union forces on April 9, 1865. Eighteen days later, Johnston signed final surrender terms in a meeting with Sherman. Johnston’s surrender marked the end of his military career.

In the years following the Civil War, Johnston became involved in the insurance and railroad industries. He also served his home state of Virginia as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1879 to 1881. In addition, he continued his long-running feud with Davis in a series of articles and memoirs. He died in the District of Columbia in 1891.

Hodong Kim. Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. xvii + 295 pp. Maps, glossary, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-4884-1.

Reviewed by: Paul Lococo Jr., University of Hawaii-Leeward.
Published by: H-War (March, 2005)

Holy War, Unholy Warriors

Recent interest in Central Asia, especially Islamic and Islamist movements in the region, has made this book by Hodong Kim very timely. Kim’s focus is on the Muslim rebellion in Chinese Turkestan (later to be called “Xinjiang,” or “New Territories” by the Chinese) in the 1860s and 1870s. Most of what we have known about the rebellion has come from Chinese and Western sources (there were several Russian and British representatives and merchants present during Yaqub Beg’s brief regime). Kim’s extremely valuable addition to our knowledge of this rebellion is in his extensive use of Muslim sources. As has always been suspected, these sources provide a sometimes very different view of matters. However, Kim utilizes the other sources as well, and while he could have done more with the Chinese sources, his mining of the Western and even Ottoman sources is extensive.

According to Kim, this was very much a Muslim rebellion, from the earliest participants and their motivations, to the resulting state set up by Yaqub Beg. This revolt was seen by its followers as a holy war to expel the infidels and their rule of Muslim Turkestan. The revolt was initiated by the Tungans, a Chinese-speaking Muslim people, also called “Hui” or “Han Muslims.” They were a minority in lands populated mostly by a variety of Turkic-speaking Muslims. Indeed, these two groups were often suspicious of each other. However, in this revolt they were soon united as Muslim holy warriors. Kim does a fine job of demonstrating that during the course of the rebellion, after the Qing military and officials were killed or forced out of the land, a functioning independent Muslim state was formed, with very specific application of Muslim shariah law, including prohibitions on drinking and restrictions on women. This appeal to Islam gained the regime a measure of legitimacy, but Kim suggests the application of Islamic principles also repelled much of the population, some of whom eventually actually welcomed the return of the Chinese. Islam worked as an appeal to expel the Chinese, but was limited in enabling a stable, secure state. Once the mass slaughters of the Chinese inhabitants was completed and the common enemy removed, the Turkic-speakers often turned against the Tungans, and even the various Turkic tribes engaged in internecine conflict over lands, leadership positions, and taxes. The Islamic cement cracked.

Yaqub Beg’s regime made extensive efforts to gain international legitimacy, gaining recognition from Great Britain and Russia, including the negotiation of trade agreements with each. One of the highlights of Kim’s research was disclosing the very extensive contacts between the new Muslim state and the Ottoman Empire. Yaqub Beg’s state agreed to accept Ottoman suzerainty in return for weapons, uniforms, advisors, and even some troops. These activities help Kim explain why in 1876-77 the Qing military had such a relatively easy time of retaking the region.

Traditional Chinese and Western secondary accounts have tended to stress the competence and leadership of the Chinese commander of the expedition, Zuo Zongtang. Hodong Kim’s contribution in this work is to demonstrate that the Yaqub Beg regime in fact could not sustain a military force large enough to resist consistent Qing pressure; at least, it could not do so with the resources available to it in Turkestan. The need for good relations with the Ottoman sultan were not merely political and ideological, but above all military. Yaqub Beg needed the weapons, funds, and trained officers the sultan could provide. Maintaining his army of 40,000 put a terrible tax burden on a population estimated at about one million. Still, Ottoman training and Russian and British arms did not give Yaqub Beg a reliable army. During the Qing assault, the Tungan units often surrendered or fled before battle began, and other units abandoned their garrisons to flee deeper into Kashgharia.

One real addition to our knowledge of the military aspects of the Qing campaign to crush the revolt is the revelation that Yaqub Beg ordered his forces not to open fire on the Qing even if delaying fire required withdrawal in the face of attack. This order, according to the author, appears in several of the Muslim sources, but not at all in the Chinese sources. That would explain why traditional accounts of the suppression of the rebellion have not mentioned such an order. Kim notes the few explanations for this odd order, but finds them unconvincing and speculates that Yaqub Beg hoped to reach an agreement with the Qing court for the independence of his regime. Yaqub Beg himself died during the campaign–possibly of poison–leaving little fighting before the Qing fully recovered the land and made it a centrally administered province of the Qing realm.

Readers will be particularly interested in the author’s details of the military aspects of this rebellion and its suppression. Unfortunately, this is one of the weakest areas of the book. Since Kim is primarily interested in the political character of the event, my criticism may not be entirely fair. Yet, there are some issues regarding the Qing military in which this work is unnecessarily disappointing. For example, while Kim had access to and utilized a large array of Chinese primary and secondary sources, he seems unfamiliar with the structure of the Qing military. Also, he refers to the main Qing military forces as “Green Battalions.” This is a literal translation of the Chinese term “lu ying,” but since at least the mid-nineteenth century writers in English have nearly always referred to it as the “Green Standard Army,” or, “Army of the Green Standard.” Kim may have reasons for not using these common terms, but if so, he fails to explain them. He also seems to confuse all the Qing military forces, whether Eight Banner or Green Standard. Even readers familiar with the general disposition of Qing garrisons in Xinjiang will find it difficult to determine which Qing units fought during the early phases of the rebellion. The significance of this omission is that it ignores the quality of the Qing military units chased out of the region. The Eight Banners had been the main military prop of the dynasty and reputedly the forces stationed in Xinjiang were among the best. Kim describes a small number of actions in which the Qing forces exhibited a great deal of skill and courage, forcing the rebels to commit substantial time and large numbers of troops to defeat them. Knowing that these were Eight Banner units would help confirm the general view of the quality of the Banner garrisons in the region. On the other hand, if these were Green Standard Army units, prior assessments would need to be revisited.

Equally disappointing, Kim offers few specifics on the military conduct of the suppression campaign. If documents from the preceding two centuries are any indication, the material Kim examined should be full of details and descriptions. Official histories for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Chinese military campaigns have a wealth of data, not only on operations, but also planning, logistics, and intelligence. With some care, these documents can generally be relied on. It is possible, however, that such may not be the case for the mid-nineteenth century Chinese official documents Kim looked at for a rebellion that took place in a time of great upheaval, disorder, and change in China. These early official histories can also be very difficult to sort through and understand unless one is willing to invest a good deal of time. For example, chronology is based on events at the court and not when events occurred on the ground. Thus, battles or even actions within battles can appear out of order; to cite just one example, correction reports of casualties from a battle may appear in a history many pages before the original report of casualties. Even Chinese historians have found these sources sometimes difficult to wade through. This difficulty in sorting out details in the official histories might explain why Kim chose not to rely on them, and instead to use the Muslim histories. However, the author could have taken descriptions of the military campaign from the Muslim records. As his use of Muslim sources is clearly the most valuable addition to our understanding of this rebellion, my complaint is a minor one.

Readers wanting to understand this rebellion from the viewpoint of the rebels will not be disappointed. The introduction explains clearly the goals and structure of this work, and the book is very well organized. Nonacademic readers may find the constant analysis and critique of the sources somewhat tedious, but Kim writes in a smooth style and no section is extraneous to his main themes.

 

 John I Tzimiskes (969–76) was crowned only after he had agreed to the patriarch’s demand that he do penance for the murder of his predecessor Nikephoros and separate from Nikephoros’s Empress Theophano, who was sent away to a monastery. He then married Theodora, the daughter of Constantine VII, and, like his predecessor, he assumed the role of guardian of the young emperors. Civil affairs were left in the hands of Basil the parakoimomenos. Tzimiskes had to put down several revolts from aristocratic rivals, and his greatest ally was his brother-in-law, Bardas Skleros. Although Tzimiskes himself was, like his predecessor, a member of the military aristocracy, he sought actively to prevent the alienation of private peasant lands and the transformation of the peasants into paroikoi. The legislation to do this was already in place, and Tsimiskes used military power to round up the peasants settled on private estates and force them to return to their villages. In this he can hardly have been fully successful and, in effect, the peasants so treated had become essentially the paroikoi of the state.

Tzimiskes had been left with a difficult situation in the Balkans, where the Russian prince Svjatoslav had secured increasing authority over Bulgaria. In 971 Tzimiskes occupied the Bulgarian capital of Great Preslav and took the tsar Boris captive. He then moved on the city of Silistria, which Svjatoslav had occupied. After a desperate siege and an equally desperate resistance, Tzimiskes prevailed and Svjatoslav was forced to withdraw. He was killed shortly thereafter, and Tzimiskes was in effective control of Bulgaria. Tzimiskes was also able to deal successfully with the western emperor Otto II by agreeing to the marriage alliance his predecessor had rejected but sending, not an imperial princess born in the purple, but his own relative Theophano, who became the wife of Otto II in 972. This marriage was to have a significant effect on East– West relations, especially in the impact of Byzantine ideas on the western court. Theophano had considerable influence on her son, Otto III, who became western emperor in 983, and who copied Byzantine ceremonial and asserted the supremacy of the emperor over the pope.

In the East Tzimiskes sought to consolidate and expand the conquests made by Nikephoros Phokas. In this he was opposed by the Fatimids of Egypt, who had also sought to exploit the power vacuum in Syria. Tzimiskes, however, relieved Fatimid pressure on Antioch and pressed far into Syria and the Holy Land, taking Damascus, Tiberias, Caesarea, and stopping not far from the walls of Jerusalem. He returned victorious to Byzantium, conquering Beyrut and Sidon on the way. Unfortunately for the empire, this vigorous and successful emperor suddenly took ill and died, early in 976.It was in this context that Basil II, then 18 years of age, at last took power in his own name. It is true that throughout his reign he shared the throne with his younger brother Constantine VIII (two years his junior), but power always was effectively in Basil’s hands, and Constantine was content to enjoy palace life and leave the burdens of rule to his brother. For years, at least since the death of Romanos II in 968, members of the military aristocracy, who ruled in the names of the legitimate Macedonian emperors, had controlled the empire. Now, in 976, the domestikos Bardos Skleros expected to continue that tradition, and he rose in revolt when Basil II declared himself fit to rule on his own. There followed a monumental clash in which the young emperor displayed his own determination and strength of character, helped as he was by the cleverness of Basil the parakoimomenos. Skleros at first defeated all the forces sent against him and by 978 he had all of Asia Minor under his control. The parakoimomenos, however, formed an alliance with the head of a rival aristocratic family, Bardas Phokas, nephew of the emperor Nikephoros Phokas, and they were able to defeat Skleros and force him to flee to the caliphate.During the next few years Basil the parakoimomenos was essentially in control, as he had been for years, but Basil II finally sought to establish his independence and, despite a plot by the eunuch for Bardas Phokas to seize power, the emperor triumphed, and the venerable parakoimomenos was finally removed from power and exiled in 985.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of the confused situation in Constantinople, a revolt against Byzantine power had broken out in the Balkans, led by the Kometopouloi, the four sons of a provincial governor in Macedonia. This revolt was welcomed by the local people, and leadership was finally assumed by Samuel, the youngest of the Kometopouloi, who was founder of the second period of Bulgarian greatness in the Middle Ages. Even though the focus of power in this state was at Ochrid, in Slavic Macedonia (far from the earlier center at Pliska), both Samuel and the Byzantines regarded it as the direct descendant of the empire of Symeon some 150 years earlier. One of the first things Samuel did was to restore the independent Bulgarian patriarchate that had been abolished by Tzimiskes.

Samuel sought to expand his territory to the south, with attacks on Serres and Thessaloniki, and in 985 or 986 he succeeded in taking Larissa (in Thessaly). Basil II counterattacked in 986, but his forces were defeated. In part as a result of this failure, members of the Byzantine aristocracy revolted. Bardas Skleros returned from exile and again sought the imperial throne and, as before, he was opposed by Bardas Phokas. On this occasion, however, Phokas too revolted and had himself proclaimed emperor (987). Phokas quickly became the main pretender, and by the beginning of 988 he was prepared for an assault on the capital. In this situation Basil II called on the Russian prince Vladimir (the son of Svjatoslav) for assistance. The latter dispatched a force of 6,000 warriors, presumably Vikings from Russia, and, led by the emperor in person, they dealt a decisive defeat to Phokas, who died in battle the next year. Bardas Skleros once again rose in revolt, but this was quickly put down, and Basil II’s throne was secured, largely by help from his Russian ally.

As a reward for his assistance, Vladimir was offered Basil’s sister Anna as his bride, on condition that the prince and his people accept baptism from Constantinople. This was an enormous compromise by the Byzantines and an indication of how much the emperor valued his alliance with the Russians: no purple-born princess had previously ever been offered to a foreign ruler. Certainly, from the Russian point of view, the alliance was equally positive, and the conversion of Olga (Vladimir’s grandmother) some years earlier and the strength of Byzantine arms under Tzimiskes had undoubtedly convinced Vladimir that the future of his state lay in alliance with Byzantium. The Russian Primary Chronicle, of course, explains the conversion in terms of a Russian search for a religion best suited to the Russian temperament. This story, which certainly cannot be literally true, says that the prince sent out a body of ten officials to visit the homelands of the great religions of the time: the Volga Bulgars (who were Muslims), the Germans (who were Catholic Christians), and the “Greeks” (who were Orthodox Christians). The emissaries found objections in the first two religions, but they reported that in the church of Constantinople, presumably Hagia Sophia, “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men.” In fact, it is likely that Vladimir realized – as had many of his Slavic predecessors – that alliance with one Christian power or another was all but inevitable and that the Byzantine political tradition provided important benefits for the consolidation of his own domestic power and the cultural advancement of the principality. The Byzantines temporarily rethought the awarding of a purple-born princess to such a ruler, but in 989 Vladimir made a military show of force in Cherson, and the marriage was solemnly celebrated, Vladimir accepted baptism, and the conversion of Russia was begun.

In the view of the historian Psellos, Basil’s character had been radically changed as a result of the long struggle with Bardas Phokas, Bardas Skleros, and the landed aristocracy. From a pleasure-loving youth he became a hardened and resolute politician and commander; he was dour and short-tempered and – unlike his forefathers – he had no interest in literature or learning. In keeping with his personality he dedicated himself completely to the task of ruling the empire, and, most important, he never married and had no sons to succeed him as emperor.

In terms of land policy Basil II was, not surprisingly, one of the most outspoken critics of the growth of aristocratic holdings and a defender of peasant rights to keep their arms. In this regard, he restated the policies of his predecessors forbidding the alienation of peasant land, and he even withdrew the provision of a 30-year limit for the return of such purchases. He went even further than his predecessors and took the novel step of making the dynatoi (powerful landowners) responsible for payment of the allelengyon, the default payment for insolvent peasants that had previously been borne by the community as a whole. He was equally stringent in his attempt to prevent the alienation of peasant land by monasteries and the church. All of these efforts, of course, flew in the face of the dominant economic and social trends of the day, and – despite the emperor’s occasionally violent attempts at enforcement – it is questionable whether such a policy could have been successful. Basil’s actions, however, were the strongest of the attempts by the Macedonian emperors to defend the peasants against the growing power of the landed magnates.

In foreign affairs, Basil II’s greatest challenge was Samuel’s revived Bulgarian Empire, and he approached this struggle with the same methodical determination that characterized all other aspects of his reign. In 991 Basil invaded Samuel’s territory, but his successful campaign was soon interrupted by trouble in the East, where the Fatimids threatened Byzantine positions in northern Syria. Basil traveled to the East and was able to restore Byzantine supremacy with a significant victory in 995. Samuel, meanwhile, was able to take advantage of Basil’s absence and his armies advanced south into Greece, reaching as far as the Peloponnesos. On his return to the Balkans in 1001 Basil embraced the struggle with Samuel. Basil first moved against the old Bulgarian capital of Pliska, and his success there cut Samuel’s empire in half. The emperor then turned south into Macedonia, winning victory after victory. After four years of nearly ceaseless warfare the Byzantine Empire was once again supreme in the Balkans, but Samuel still held out and the war continued at a reduced level. Finally, in 1014, a great battle at Kleidion (on the Strymon River north of Serres in Macedonia) resulted in the complete victory of Basil and the capture, allegedly, of 14,000 prisoners. Although Samuel escaped the debacle, he could not survive the aftermath: Basil – afterwards always known as Bulgaroktonos (the “Bulgar-slayer”) – blinded the prisoners and sent them off to Samuel in groups of 100 men, each led by a one-eyed guide. When the tsar viewed this sight, he suffered a stroke and died almost immediately afterwards. [1]

There was some further resistance, first from Samuel’s son and then from other relatives, but in 1018 Bulgaria surrendered completely and Basil entered Ochrid in triumph. After a struggle of nearly 30 years Basil had accomplished his goal, and the whole of the southern Balkan peninsula was under Byzantine control – for the first time since the seventh century. Contrary to the policies of his predecessors, he did not leave Bulgaria as an allied client state, but rather annexed the center of Samuel’s empire, dividing it into themes. The outlying areas, such as Croatia and Dioclea (including Rascia and Bosnia), continued to be ruled by native princes, who were seen as Byzantine vassals. Basil sought to respect the special importance of Bulgaria, and, although he suppressed the independent patriarchate of Ochrid, he made the archbishop autocephalous, meaning that he was not subject to the authority of the patriarchate of Constantinople, but, in this case at least, he was directly responsible to the emperor himself.

After his unprecedented victory in the Balkans, and although he was well over 60 years of age, Basil II turned his attention to affairs in Asia, where he successfully intervened in Armenia and established new themes and other military districts in a wide arc from north to south, extending well into Mesopotamia. Toward the end of his life Basil turned to the West, where Otto III was well disposed to cooperate with Byzantium. The western emperor had even requested an imperial bride, and an agreement was reached, but Otto died in 1002, putting a halt to this initiative. Basil, meanwhile, reorganized Byzantine territories in Italy, and he was making preparations for a great campaign against the Arabs in the West when he died in December of 1025.

[1] Basil and the mass blinding

Now regarding Basil and the mass blinding, I recommend P. Stephenson’s last work, The legend of Basil the Bulgar-slayer, Cambridge University Press 2003. It is an excellent work on the representation of power and might in the eyes of the Byzantines and on the use and misuse of national and ethnic history. Simply put, Stephenson flatly denies that the whole incident ever took place (better: that if it ever took place, given Basil’s penchant for blinding his foes, it never happened on such a dramatic scale), with lots of convincing reasons, and that he fought in the Balkans far more sporadically than his official image suggests. He argues, again with merit, that Basil’s portrait as the Bulgar slayer, a surname associated with him only centuries after his death and not during his lifetime, served to galvanize the Byzantine first, and especially to spur the ambition and pride of modern Greece, becoming an icon of Greek might and ruthlessness in the struggle for Macedonia and in the Balkan wars, especially the second one, obviously.

 

by John S.C. Abott

Maximilian I of Habsburg (March 22, 1459 – January 12, 1519) was Holy Roman Emperor from 1508 until his death. He expanded the influence of the House of Habsburg through both war and marriage. He is often referred to as “The Last Knight”.

Louis XII., stung by the disgrace of his speedy expulsion from Milan, immediately raised another army of five thousand horse and fifteen thousand foot to recover his lost plunder. He also sent to Switzerland to hire troops, and without difficulty engaged ten thousand men to meet, on the plains of Milan, the six thousand of their brethren whom Ludovico had hired, to hew each other to pieces for the miserable pittance of a few pennies a day. But Louis XII. was as great in diplomacy as in war. He sent secret emissaries to the Swiss in the camp of Ludovico, offering them larger wages if they would abandon the service of Ludovico and return home. They promptly closed the bargain, unfurled the banner of mutiny, and informed the Duke of Milan that they could not, in conscience, fight against their own brethren. The duke was in despair. He plead even with tears that they would not abandon him. All was in vain. They not only commenced their march home, but basely betrayed the duke to the French. He was taken prisoner by Louis, carried to France and for five years was kept in rigorous confinement in the strong fortresses of the kingdom. Afterward, through the intercession of Maximilian, he was allowed a little more freedom. He was, however, kept in captivity until he died in the year 1510. Ludovico merits no commiseration. He was as perfidious and unprincipled as any of his assailants could be.

The reconquest of Milan by Louis, and the capture of Ludovico, alarmed Maximilian and roused him to new efforts. He again summoned the States of the empire and implored their cooeperation to resist the aggressions of France. But he was as unsuccessful as in his previous endeavors. Louis watched anxiously the movements of the German diet, and finding that he had nothing to fear from the troops of the empire, having secured the investiture of Milan, prepared for the invasion of Naples. The venal pope was easily bought over. Even Ferdinand, the King of Arragon, was induced to loan his connivance to a plan for robbing a near relative of his crown, by the promise of sharing in the spoil. A treaty of partition was entered into by the two robber kings, by which Ferdinand of Arragon was to receive Calabria and Apulia, and the King of France the remaining States of the Neapolitan kingdom. The pope was confidentially informed of this secret plot, which was arranged at Grenada, and promised the plunderers his benediction, in consideration of the abundant reward promised to him.

The doom of the King of Naples was now sealed. All unconscious that his own relative, Ferdinand of Arragon, was conspiring against him, he appealed to Ferdinand for aid against the King of France. The perfidious king considered this as quite a providential interposition in his favor. He affected great zeal for the King of Naples, sent a powerful army into his kingdom, and stationed his troops in the important fortresses. The infamous fraud was now accomplished. Frederic of Naples, to his dismay, found that he had been placing his empire in the hands of his enemies instead of friends; at the same time the troops of Louis arrived at Rome, where they were cordially received; and the pope immediately, on the 25th of June, 1501, issued a bull deposing Frederic from his kingdom, and, by virtue of that spiritual authority which he derived from the Apostle Peter, invested Louis and Ferdinand with the dominions of Frederic. Few men are more to be commiserated than a crownless king. Frederic, in his despair, threw himself upon the clemency of Louis. He was taken to France and was there fed and clothed by the royal bounty.

Maximilian impatiently watched the events from his home in Austria, and burned with the desire to take a more active part in these stirring scenes. Despairing, however, to rouse the German States to any effectual intervention in the affairs of southern Europe, he now endeavored to rouse the enthusiasm of the German nobles against the Turks. In this, by appealing to superstition, he was somewhat successful. He addressed the following circular letter to the German States:

“A stone, weighing two hundred pounds, recently fell from heaven, near the army under my command in Upper Alsace, and I caused it, as a fatal warning from God to men, to be hung up in the neighboring church of Encisheim. In vain I myself explained to all Christian kings the signification of this mysterious stone. The Almighty punished the neglect of this warning with a dreadful scourge, from which thousands have suffered death, or pains worse than death. But since this punishment of the abominable sins of men has produced no effect, God has imprinted in a miraculous manner the sign of the cross, and the instruments of our Lord’s passion in dark and bloody colors, on the bodies and garments of thousands. The appearance of these signs in Germany, in particular, does not indeed denote that the Germans have been peculiarly distinguished in guilt, but rather that they should set the example to the rest of the world, by being the first to undertake a crusade against the infidels.”

For a time Maximilian seemed quite encouraged, for quite a wave of religious enthusiasm seemed to roll over Europe. All the energies of the pope were apparently enlisted, and he raised, through all the domains of the Church, large sums of money for the holy enterprise of driving the invading infidels out of Europe. England and France both proffered their co.operation, and England, opening her inexhaustible purse, presented a subsidy of ten thousand pounds. The German nobles rallied in large numbers under the banner of the cross. But disappointment seemed to be the doom of the emperor. The King of France sent no aid. The pope, iniquitously squandered all the money he had raised upon his infamous, dissolute son, Caesar Borgia. And the emperor himself was drawn into a war with Bavaria, to settle the right of succession between two rival claimants. The settlement of the question devolved upon Maximilian as emperor, and his dignity was involved in securing respect for his decision. Thus the whole gorgeous plan of a war against the Turks, such as Europe had never beheld, vanished into thin air, and Maximilian was found at the head of fourteen thousand infantry, and twelve thousand horse, engaged in a quarrel in the heart of Germany. In this war Maximilian was successful, and he rewarded himself by annexing to Austria several small provinces, the sum total of which quite enlarged his small domains.

By this time the kings of France and Spain were fiercely fighting over their conquest of Naples and Sicily, each striving to grasp the lion’s share. Maximilian thought his interests would be promoted by aiding the Spaniards, and he accordingly sent three thousand men to Trieste, where they embarked, and sailing down the Adriatic, united with the Spanish troops. The French were driven out of Italy. There then ensued, for several years, wars and intrigues in which France, Spain, Italy and Austria were involved; all alike selfish and grasping. Armies were ever moving to and fro, and the people of Europe, by the victories of kings and nobles, were kept in a condition of misery. No one seemed ever to think of their rights or their happiness.

Various circumstances had exasperated Maximilian very much against the Venetians. All the powers of Europe were then ready to combine against any other power whatever, if there was a chance of obtaining any share in the division of the plunder. Maximilian found no difficulty in secretly forming one of the most formidable leagues history had then recorded, the celebrated league of Cambray. No sympathy need be wasted upon the Venetians, the victims of this coalition, for they had rendered themselves universally detestable by their arrogance, rapacity, perfidy and pride. France joined the coalition, and, in view of her power, was to receive a lion’s share of the prey..the provinces of Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and the Ghiradadda. The King of Arragon was to send ships and troops, and receive his pay in the maritime towns on the shores of the Adriatic. The pope, Julius II., the most grasping, perfidious and selfish of them all, demanded Ravenna, Cervia, Faenza, Rimini, Immola and Cesena. His exorbitant claims were assented to, as it was infinitely important that the piratic expedition should be sanctioned by the blessing of the Church. Maximilian was to receive, in addition to some territories which Venice had wrested from him, Roveredo, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Trevigi, and the Friuli. As Maximilian was bound by a truce with Venice, and as in those days of chivalry some little regard was to be paid to one’s word of honor, Maximilian was only to march at the summons of the pope, which no true son of the Church, under any circumstances, was at liberty to disobey. Sundry other minor dukes and princes were engaged in the plot, who were also to receive a proportionate share of the spoil.

After these arrangements were all completed, the holy father, with characteristic infamy, made private overtures to the Venetians, revealing to them the whole plot, and offering to withdraw from the confederacy and thwart all its plans, if Venice would pay more as the reward of perfidy than Rome could hope to acquire by force of arms. The haughty republic rejected the infamous proposal, and prepared for a desperate defense.

All the powers of the confederacy were now collecting their troops. But Maximilian was dependent upon the German diet for his ability to fulfill his part of the contract. He assembled the diet at Worms on the 21st of April, 1509, presented to them the plan of the league, and solicited their support. The diet refused to cooperate, and hardly affecting even the forms of respect, couched its refusal in terms of stinging rebuke.

“We are tired,” they said, “of these innumerable calls for troops and money. We can not support the burden of these frequent diets, involving the expense of long journeys, and we are weary of expeditions and wars. If the emperor enters into treaties with France and the pope without consulting us, it is his concern and not ours, and we are not bound to aid him to fulfill his agreement. And even if we were to vote the succors which are now asked of us, we should only be involved in embarrassment and disgrace, as we have been by the previous enterprises of the emperor.”

Such, in brief, was the response of the diet. It drew from the emperor a long defense of his conduct, which he called an “Apology,” and which is considered one of the most curious and characteristic documents of those days. He made no attempt to conceal his vexation, but assailed them in strong language of reproach.

“I have concluded a treaty with my allies,” he wrote, “in conformity to the dictates of conscience and duty, and for the honor, glory and happiness of the empire and of Christendom. The negotiation could not be postponed, and if I had convoked a diet to demand the advice of the States, the treaty would never have been concluded. I was under the necessity of concealing the project of the combined powers, that we might fall on the Venetians at once and unexpectedly, which could not have been effected in the midst of public deliberations and endless discussions; and I have, I trust, clearly proved, both in my public and my private communications, the advantage which is likely to result from this union. If the aids hitherto granted by diets have produced nothing but disgrace and dishonor, I am not to blame, but the States who acted so scandalously in granting their succors with so much reluctance and delay. As for myself, I have, on the contrary, exposed my treasure, my countries, my subjects and my life, while the generality of the German States have remained in dishonorable tranquillity at home. I have more reason to complain of you than you of me; for you have constantly refused me your approbation and assistance; and even when you have granted succors, you have rendered them fruitless by the scantiness and tardiness of your supplies, and compelled me to dissipate my own revenues, and injure my own subjects.”

Of course these bitter recriminations accomplished nothing in changing the action of the diet, and Maximilian was thrown upon the Austrian States alone for supplies. Louis of France, at the head of seventeen thousand troops, crossed the Alps. The pope fulminated a bull of excommunication against the Venetians, and sent an army of ten thousand men. The Duke of Ferrara and the Marquis of Mantua sent their contingents. Maximilian, by great exertions, sent a few battalions through the mountains of the Tyrol, and was preparing to follow with stronger forces. Province after province fell before the resistless invaders, and Venice would have fallen irretrievably had not the conquerors began to quarrel among themselves. The pope, in secret treaty, was endeavoring to secure his private interests, regardless of the interests of the allies. Louis, from some pique, withdrew his forces, and abandoned Maximilian in the hour of peril, and the emperor, shackled by want of money, and having but a feeble force, was quite unable to make progress alone against the Venetian troops.

It does not seem to be the will of Providence that the plots of unprincipled men, even against men as bad as themselves, should be more than transiently prosperous. Maximilian, thus again utterly thwarted in one of his most magnificent plans, covered with disgrace, and irritated almost beyond endurance, after attempting in vain to negotiate a truce with the Venetians, was compelled to retreat across the Alps, inveighing bitterly against the perfidious refusal to fulfill a perfidious agreement.

The holy father, Julius II., outwitted all his accomplices. He secured from Venice very valuable accessions of territory, and then, recalling his ecclesiastical denunciations, united with Venice to drive the barbarians, as he affectionately called his French and German allies, out of Italy. Maximilian returned to Austria as in a funeral march, ventured to summon another diet, told them how shamefully he had been treated by France, Venice and the pope, and again implored them to do something to help him. Perseverance is surely the most efficient of virtues. Incredible as it may seem, the emperor now obtained some little success. The diet, indignant at the conduct of the pope, and alarmed at so formidable a union as that between the papal States and Venice, voted a succor of six thousand infantry and eighteen hundred horse. This encouraged the emperor, and forgetting his quarrel with Louis XII. of France, in the stronger passion of personal aggrandizement which influenced him, he entered into another alliance with Louis against the pope and Venice, and then made a still stronger and a religious appeal to Germany for aid. A certain class of politicians in all countries and in all ages, have occasionally expressed great solicitude for the reputation of religion.

“The power and government of the pope,” the emperor proclaimed, “which ought to be an example to the faithful, present, on the contrary, nothing but trouble and disorder. The enormous sums daily extorted from Germany, are perverted to the purposes of luxury or worldly views, instead of being employed for the service of God, or against the infidels. As Emperor of Germany, as advocate and protector of the Christian Church, it is my duty to examine into such irregularities, and exert all my efforts for the glory of God and the advantage of the empire; and as there is an evident necessity to reestablish due order and decency, both in the ecclesiastical and temporal state, I have resolved to call a general council, without which nothing permanent can be effected.”

It is said that Maximilian was now so confident of success, that he had decided to divide Italy between himself and France. He was to take Venice and the States of the Church, and France was to have the rest. Pope Julius was to be deposed, and to be succeeded by Pope Maximilian. The following letter from Maximilian to his daughter, reveals his ambitious views at the time. It is dated the 18th of September, 1511.

“To.morrow I shall send the Bishop of Guzk to the pope at Rome, to conclude an agreement with him that I may be appointed his coadjutor, and on his death succeed to the papacy, and become a priest, and afterwards a saint, that you may be bound to worship me, of which I shall be very proud. I have written on this subject to the King of Arragon, intreating him to favor my undertaking, and he has promised me his assistance, provided I resign my imperial crown to my grandson Charles, which I am very ready to do. The people and nobles of Rome have offered to support me against the French and Spanish party. They can muster twenty thousand combatants, and have sent me word that they are inclined to favor my scheme of being pope, and will not consent to have either a Frenchman, a Spaniard or a Venetian.

“I have already began to sound the cardinals, and, for that purpose, two or three hundred thousand ducats would be of great service to me, as their partiality to me is very great. The King of Arragon has ordered his ambassadors to assure me that he will command the Spanish cardinals to favor my pretensions to the papacy. I intreat you to keep this matter secret for the present, though I am afraid it will soon be known, for it is impossible to carry on a business secretly for which it is necessary to gain over so many persons, and to have so much money. Adieu. Written with the hand of your dear father Maximilian, future pope. The pope’s fever has increased, and he can not live long.”

It is painful to follow out the windings of intrigue and the labyrinths of guile, where selfishness seemed to actuate every heart, and where all alike seem destitute of any principle of Christian integrity. Bad as the world is now, and selfish as political aspirants are now, humanity has made immense progress since that dark age of superstition, fraud and violence. After many victories and many defeats, after innumerable fluctuations of guile, Maximilian accepted a bribe, and withdrew his forces, and the King of France was summoned home by the invasion of his own territories by the King of Arragon and Henry VIII. of England, who, for a suitable consideration, had been induced to join Venice and the pope. At the end of this long campaign of diplomacy, perfidy and blood, in which misery had rioted through ten thousand cottages, whose inhabitants the warriors regarded no more than the occupants of the ant.hills they trampled beneath their feet, it was found that no one had gained any thing but toil and disappointment.

On the 21st of February, 1513, Pope Julius II. died, and the cardinals, rejecting all the overtures of the emperor, elected John of Medici pope, who assumed the name of Leo X. The new pontiff was but thirty.six years of age, a man of brilliant talents, and devoted to the pursuit of letters. Inspired by boundless ambition, he wished to signalize his reign by the magnificence of his court and the grandeur of his achievements.

Thus far nothing but disaster seemed to attend the enterprises of Maximilian; but now the tide suddenly turned and rolled in upon him billows of prosperity. It will be remembered that Maximilian married, for his first wife, Mary, the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy. Their son Philip married Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage, uniting the kingdoms of Castile and Arragon, created the splendid kingdom of Spain. Philip died young, leaving a son, Charles, and Joanna, an insane wife, to watch his grave through weary years of woe. Upon the death of Ferdinand, in January, 1516, Charles, the grandson of Maximilian, became undisputed heir to the whole monarchy of Spain; then, perhaps, the grandest power in Europe, including Naples, Sicily and Navarre. This magnificent inheritance, coming so directly into the family, and into the line of succession, invested Maximilian and the house of Austria with new dignity.

It was now an object of intense solicitude with Maximilian, to secure the reversion of the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia, which were both upon the brow of Ladislaus, to his own family. With this object in view, and to render assurance doubly sure, he succeeded in negotiating a marriage between two children of Ladislaus, a son and a daughter, and two of his own grand.children. This was a far pleasanter mode of acquiring territory and family aggrandizement than by the sword. In celebration of the betrothals, Ladislaus and his brother Sigismond, King of Poland, visited Vienna, where Ladislaus was so delighted with the magnificent hospitality of his reception, that he even urged upon the emperor, who was then a widower, fifty.eight years of age, that he should marry another of his daughters, though she had but attained her thirteenth year. The emperor declined the honor, jocularly remarking…

“There is no method more pleasant to kill an old man, than to marry him to a young bride.”

The German empire was then divided into ten districts, or circles, as they were then called, each of which was responsible for the maintenance of peace among its own members. These districts were, Austria, Burgundy, the Upper Rhine, the Lower Rhine, Franconia, Bavaria, Suabia, Westphalia, Upper Saxony and Lower Saxony. The affairs of each district were to be regulated by a court of a few nobles, called a diet. The emperor devoted especial attention to the improvement of his own estate of Austria, which he subdivided into two districts, and these into still smaller districts. Over all, for the settlement of all important points of dispute, he established a tribunal called the Aulic Council, which subsequently exerted a powerful influence over the affairs of Austria.

One more final effort Maximilian made to rouse Germany to combine to drive the Turks out of Europe. Though the benighted masses looked up with much reverence to the pontiff, the princes and the nobles regarded him only as a power, wielding, in addition to the military arm, the potent energies of superstition. A diet was convened. The pope’s legate appeared, and sustained the eloquent appeal of the emperor with the paternal commands of the holy father. But the press was now becoming a power in Europe, diffusing intelligence and giving freedom to thought and expression. The diet, after listening patiently to the arguments of the emperor and the requests of the pontiff, dryly replied…

“We think that Christianity has more to fear from the pope than from the Turks. Much as we may dread the ravages of the infidel, they can hardly drain Christendom more effectually than it is now drained by the exactions of the Church.”

It was at Augsburg in July, 1518, that the diet ventured thus boldly to speak. This was one year after Luther had nailed upon the church door in Wittemberg, his ninety.five propositions, which had roused all Germany to scrutinize the abominable corruptions of the papal church. This bold language of the diet, influenced by the still bolder language of the intrepid monk, alarmed Leo X., and on the 7th of August he issued his summons commanding Luther to repair to Rome to answer for heresy. Maximilian, who had been foiled in his own attempt to attain the chair of St. Peter, who had seen so much of the infamous career of Julius and Alexander, as to lose all his reverence for the sacred character of the popes, and who regarded Leo X. merely as a successful rival who had thwarted his own plans, espoused, with cautious development, but with true interest, the cause of the reformer. And now came the great war of the Reformation, agitating Germany in every quarter, and rousing the lethargic intellect of the nations as nothing else could rouse it. Maximilian, with characteristic fickleness, or rather, with characteristic pliancy before every breeze of self.interest, was now on the one side, now on the other, and now, nobody knew where, until his career was terminated by sudden and fatal sickness.

The emperor was at Innspruck, all overwhelmed with his cares and his plans of ambition, when he was seized with a slight fever. Hoping to be benefited by a change of air, he set out to travel by slow stages to one of his castles among the mountains of Upper Austria. The disease, however, rapidly increased, and it was soon evident that death was approaching. The peculiarities of his character were never more strikingly developed than in these last solemn hours. Being told by his physicians that he had not long to live and that he must now prepare for the final judgment, he calmly replied, “I have long ago made that preparation. Had I not done so, it would be too late now.”

For four years he had been conscious of declining health, and had always carried with him, wherever he traveled, an oaken coffin, with his shroud and other requisites for his funeral. With very minute directions he settled all his worldly affairs, and gave the most particular instructions respecting his funeral. Changing his linen, he strictly enjoined that his shirt should not be removed after his death, for his fastidious modesty was shocked by the idea of the exposure of his body, even after the soul had taken its flight.

He ordered his hair, after his death, to be cut off, all his teeth to be extracted, pounded to powder and publicly burned in the chapel of his palace. For one day his remains were to be exposed to the public, as a lesson of mortality. They were then to be placed in a sack filled with quicklime. The sack was to be enveloped in folds of silk and satin, and then placed in the oaken coffin which had been so long awaiting his remains. The coffin was then to be deposited under the altar of the chapel of his palace at Neustadt, in such a position that the officiating priest should ever trample over his head and heart. The king expressed the hope that this humiliation of his body would, in some degree, be accepted by the Deity in atonement for the sins of his soul. How universal the instinct that sin needs an atonement!

Having finished these directions the emperor observed that some of his attendants were in tears. “Do you weep,” said he, “because you see a mortal die? Such tears become women rather than men.” The emperor was now dying. As the ecclesiastics repeated the prayers of the Church, the emperor gave the responses until his voice failed, and then continued to give tokens of recognition and of faith, by making the sign of the cross. At three o’clock in the morning of the 11th of January, 1519, the Emperor Maximilian breathed his last. He was then in the sixtieth year of his age.

Maximilian is justly considered one of the most renowned of the descendants of Rhodolph of Hapsburg. It is saying but little for his moral integrity, to affirm that he was one of the best of the rulers of his age. According to his ideas of religion, he was a religious man. According to his ideas of honesty and of honor, he was both an honest and an honorable man. According to his idea of what is called moral conduct, he was irreproachable, being addicted to no ungenteel vices, or any sins which would be condemned by his associates. His ambition was not to secure for himself ease or luxury, but to extend his imperial power, and to aggrandize his family. For these objects he passed his life, ever tossed upon the billows of toil and trouble. In industry and perseverance, he has rarely been surpassed.

Notwithstanding the innumerable interruptions and cares attendant upon his station, he still found time, one can hardly imagine when, to become a proficient in all the learning of the day. He wrote and spoke four languages readily, Latin, French, German and Italian. Few men have possessed more persuasive powers of eloquence. All the arts and sciences he warmly patronized, and men of letters of every class found in him a protector. But history must truthfully declare that there was no perfidy of which he would not be guilty, and no meanness to which he would not stoop, if he could only extend his hereditary domains and add to his family renown.