Nine months was all it took for Oliver Cromwell to alter the landscape of Ireland forever. He did it with a hammer, blunt and forcefully applied to the walled towns that resisted him. But such bluntness came at a significant cost to his famous New Model Army, and never more so than on the banks of the river Suir in the spring of 1650.

Cromwell’s Nemesis

Oliver Cromwell was a man haunted by the past. Never more so then of his last month in Ireland when his hitherto invincible army smashed itself bloody against the stout walls of Clonmel in county Tipperary. Of his coming to the town and the storming of it, Cromwell was silent. His son-in-law, Henry Ireton, bore no such qualms, remarking long after of the horrors that befell the army on the River Suir. It was enough to turn him towards thoughts of vengeance against the man who had so blackened Cromwell’s eye, and when the city of Limerick succumbed to Ireton’s army a year later, its warrior governor fell into his hands.

That man who now stood with the threat of execution looming over his head, came from the line of the O’Neill’s of Tyrone, yet was born an exile in Brussels and learned his soldering in the wars of the Spanish Kings. He was 31 before he ever set foot in Ireland, following his uncle, Owen Roe O’Neill, to assist his ancestral land in a time of ruthless war. Now a decade later, with his life in balance, Hugh Dubh O’Neill stood firm in the conviction that he had always done his duty and had nothing to fear. His court martial agreed, and much to Ireton’s consternation, Hugh Dubh O’Neill departed Ireland intact.

O’Neill’s role in the storied military career of Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army was all too brief, yet of enormous impact. For no general ever delivered unto him such a reverse as he met before the walls of Clonmel in May 1650. But his stand at Clonmel, for all the slaughter reaped upon Cromwell’s army, was waged in isolation in a cause that was already on its knees. A year earlier it was not so.

Cromwell Smashes the Royalists in Ireland

The internecine warfare that plagued Ireland since 1641 had cooled as Protestants and Catholics rallied to the Royalist cause of King Charles I against the rising power of Parliament. When the Parliamentarians removed the King’s head in January 1649, they simply switched their allegiance to his son, Charles II. Cromwell warned of a potential invasion of England should they succeed in taking Dublin. But the Royalists led by the Marquis of Ormond faltered before the Irish capital and were routed in August 1649.

The victory of the Parliamentarians came a mere two weeks before Cromwell landed with a large army. Despite the sea sickness that attacked him during the crossing, Cromwell had cause to rejoice. Ormond’s army was dispersed. It had been the only force then in the field capable of challenging his own, and reeling in defeat was unable to offer him even token resistance, except from behind the walls of Ireland’s towns.

These Cromwell promptly set about reducing. Drogheda was the first. Nestled on both banks of the Boyne near where its waters flowed into the sea, it had withstood siege before. But Cromwell was a cavalryman at heart and wasted no time. With demands for its surrender refused, he blasted through the walls, and on September 11 fought his way in. The massacre that followed stunned Ireland and left Ormond reeling.

The annihilation of some of Ormond’s finest regiments within Drogheda’s walls deprived him of desperately needed manpower and left few of his men eager to engage Cromwell in battle. Thus, unable to keep an army in the field long enough to contest Cromwell’s advance, Ormond watched helplessly as his garrisons in Leinster and Munster succumbed one by one. Some like Wexford resisted and shared the same gory fate as Drogheda. The terror sown from these two sacks alone was enough to induce the garrison of New Ross to surrender after a breach opened up in their walls. Only before Waterford did the New Model Army finally stall.

Ireland’s greatest killer was disease, and after three months campaigning, the New Model Army had lost hundreds of men. Cromwell himself fell ill by November. On top of this, the tenacity of the Waterford garrison ensured the city would hold on until Cromwell was forced to seek winter quarters. He had been frustrated by soldiers newly entered upon the war against him, but who were as seasoned as any of the men Cromwell himself commanded. These men were opponents with whom he was to become intimately acquainted, for Ulster had joined the fight against him.

The Ulstermen Come South

Amongst the diverse factions of the Catholic Confederacy of Kilkenny there stood the old Gaelic Irish of Ulster headed by General Owen Roe O’Neill. His Ulstermen were forged by hard experience and equipped by Papal supplies and money into a formidable army.

But now Owen Roe was a sick man, his army was exhausted from years of campaigning. Keeping his men out of Ormond’s Rathmines fiasco, Owen Roe entered negotiations with the Marquis soon after. The specter of Cromwell was enough to reconcile the old foes towards an alliance. In exchange for concessions to Irish Catholics, Owen Roe agreed to place the Ulster army at Ormond’s disposal. With Owen Roe’s condition worsening to the point he could no longer travel, he dispatched an advance force of 2,000 men under his nephew Hugh Dubh O’Neill to act under Ormond’s commands. Within two weeks Owen Roe died, rendering his army operationally impotent as its leadership took to squabbling among themselves. Only those already sent south would play a significant role in the fight against Cromwell.

Like his deceased uncle, Hugh Dubh was a man of war. Fashioned by Spain’s long conflict with the Dutch into a professional soldier he followed his uncle to Ulster with 15 years of military service behind him. Unluckily, however, Hugh Dubh’s career in Ireland was cut short and he was forced to linger as a prisoner of war for three years. Now he led two veteran regiments of foot and several troops of horse southward. Ormond promptly placed them in Clonmel on the Tipperary side of the Suir. With 1,200 men at his command, Hugh Dubh quickly set about strengthening Clonmel’s defenses. An old hand at sieges, he recognized the limitations of the town.

Clonmel was a rectangle with its back to the Suir and high ground to the north. Thirty-foot-high walls six feet thick encased the town of four gates with a fosse and outer ditch offering the only obstacles to an attacker before the town’s walls. It was not the most imposing place in Ireland, but in Hugh Dubh it possessed a commander seasoned in siege warfare. Cromwell’s approach to these matters was far cruder compared to the more sophisticated sieges Hugh Dubh had known in Flanders: blast a hole in the walls and send in the infantry. It was a formula that often worked, but at a cost.

The mild winter aided by the recovery of many of his sickened soldiers, prompting Cromwell to recommence operations at the end of January 1650. Leaving his winter quarters on the Munster coast, he thrust into the counties of Tipperary and Kilkenny with a three-pronged assault that bagged him several towns in the immediate vicinity of Kilkenny.

Faltering Before Kilkenny

Once again, Cromwell’s rapid movements caught Ormond’s forces napping and within two months of the start of the campaign he stood before the old Confederate capital of Kilkenny, his guns hammering away with a brusqueness that signaled the inevitable infantry storm. More than six months after the first assaults on Drogheda, the New Model Army had yet to meet a town it could not subdue. But at Kilkenny the mental and physical costs of these successes became glaringly obvious.

In attacking the town Cromwell saw his infantry falter, storming the breach without the same spirit that had greeted past assaults. Indeed, Kilkenny’s defenders fought Cromwell’s attackers to a standstill and while surrendering in the end they did not suffer the fate of Drogheda or Wexford. By his own admission, Cromwell recognized his tactical handling of sieges was uninspired. Prolonged sieges cost money and supplies he did not possess, nor was England able to provide. Yet the frontal assaults were taking a toll on the effectiveness of his men who could only test their luck in the breach so many times. Kilkenny showed signs of their cracking. Clonmel would split them wide open.

Bloody Clonmel

With Kilkenny humbled, at the end of April Cromwell turned his eyes upon Clonmel, where he found an opponent far more active than any he had met before. Hugh Dubh would not sit idle but strove to disrupt Cromwell’s preparations to deploy his guns by leading his men on several sorties to disrupt the digging of batteries. The problem for Cromwell was that his field guns were too light to blast through Clonmel’s northern perimeter. After spending weeks bringing his heavy siege artillery inland from the coast, he found the ground too soft to hold all but a handful of guns. With so few guns, Cromwell had no alternative to a direct frontal assault from the north.

Hugh Dubh, that “surly old Spanish soldier,” quickly determined where the blow would fall, and using every available man and woman to hand, threw up a second line of defenses fronting the breach by fortifying the houses either side of a gaping hole in the walls. In connecting these makeshift fortifications, the Irish defenders raised a traverse across the breach that was made serviceable the afternoon of May 15, 1650. Cromwell, however, would only attack the next morning.

This delay afforded Hugh Dubh more time to prepare his killing zone, sighting every gun available to him at the breach. When Cromwell’s men finally came forward the next day, it was in a tightly packed column, one regiment upon another. Hurtling themselves up the fallen masonry ramp into an open area beyond, they entered Hugh Dubh’s carefully prepared trap and were cut down by the hundreds. Bunching together in what one historian has recently equated to the crush of the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, the New Model infantry were slaughtered in heaps amidst the nightmare of the breach. Those who survived the inferno recoiled in horror. Soon the dead were the only men Cromwell had inside the walls.

A Pyrrhic Victory

It was a nightmare Cromwell kept himself aloof as he waited with his ironsides to storm into town as soon as his troops opened the gates from within. Coming upon the wreck of his advance party, it was only with vigorous cajoling he managed to keep the survivors before the walls. Another attack was doubtful. Luckily enough for Cromwell, Hugh Dubh decided to abandon the town altogether that very night. His ammunition had been expended and despite inflicting extraordinary losses upon the enemy, he decided to live and fight another day.

Clonmel surrendered without a massacre and Cromwell left Ireland forever only a few weeks later to wage war with the Scots. His days in Ireland ended upon a sour note, but Clonmel was a reverse suffered in isolation. The Royalist cause was reeling, unable to recover from the disasters of Drogheda and Wexford. For all the bluntness of Cromwell’s siege operations they were enough to quell effective resistance to his reconquest, whose legacy looms over Ireland to this day. By comparison, Cromwell’s nemesis Hugh Dubh O’Neill died in a forgotten Spanish exile.

Suggested reading

Lenihan, Padraig. Siege in Ireland 1641-1653 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2025).

O Siochru, Micheal. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).

Wheeler, James S. Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1999).

The Battle of Lepanto was one of the fiercest clashes of the 16th century, where a rare alliance of European powers confronted the dominant Ottoman fleet. The Holy League’s victory ended Ottoman naval supremacy in the Mediterranean and shattered the myth of their maritime invincibility. It was also the last major battle fought primarily by galleys; in its aftermath, the galleon and other sailing warships rose to prominence. Lepanto marked both a decisive strategic moment and a shift toward the emerging Age of Sail.

Prelude to the Battle

In the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire was regarded by many in Christian Europe as an implacable and expanding threat. Despite suffering occasional setbacks on land and sea, the Ottomans were a formidable military power, especially when contrasted with the disunity and rivalries that plagued Christian states. The only factor preventing their complete dominance was that the empire was also engaged in a long-standing struggle with its eastern rival, the Safavid Empire in Persia.

The successful Christian defence during the Siege of Malta in 1565 proved that the Ottomans could be halted, but it was only a temporary reprieve. When Sultan Selim II succeeded his father, Suleiman the Magnificent, in 1566, Mediterranean observers expected a renewed Ottoman push westward. Venice, one of the main naval powers capable of resisting Ottoman ambitions, was particularly vulnerable after a fire in its Great Arsenal in 1569, devastated its shipbuilding capability. The following year, Ottoman forces launched an invasion of Cyprus, capturing key towns and besieging others with their customary efficiency.

Faced with overwhelming pressure, the Venetians sought assistance from other Christian powers. Their appeal coincided with the ambitions of Pope Pius V, who had long advocated a united Christian response to Ottoman expansion. The combination of Venetian desperation and papal ambitions would lay the groundwork for the formation of the Holy League, the coalition that would confront the Ottomans at Lepanto.

Formation of the Holy League

The Holy League was a broad Catholic alliance formed in 1571 under the leadership of Pope Pius V, intended to challenge Ottoman dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. Its core members were the Spanish Empire, the Republic of Venice, and the Papal States, supported by the Republic of Genoa, the Duchies of Savoy, Tuscany, and Urbino, the Knights of Malta, and several minor Italian powers. It was an unusual coalition, bringing together states with long-standing rivalries and conflicting political priorities.

Several major Christian powers remained conspicuously absent. France refused to join, maintaining its long-standing diplomatic partnership with the Ottomans as a counterbalance to Spanish power. Portugal, though a formidable naval state, was overstretched by commitments in Morocco, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. The Holy Roman Empire, embroiled in internal disputes and frontier conflicts, opted for neutrality rather than engage in another costly Mediterranean campaign.

Even amongst those who did join, unity was fragile. While all agreed on the need to oppose the Ottomans, the League’s members frequently quarrelled over military command, strategy, and the division of costs and spoils. It was an achievement of exceptional diplomatic skill that Pius V managed to hold the coalition together long enough to field a combined fleet at sea. Venice and Spain provided the bulk of the ships, money, and manpower, but contributions arrived from across Italy and beyond. In the end, the League’s victory at Lepanto would stand as its first, and effectively, its last great triumph before dissolving after the Pope’s death.

Opposing Forces

The Holy League assembled one of the largest Christian fleets of the 16th century. Venice contributed the single greatest contingent, supplying 109 galleys and six heavy galleasses, vast floating artillery platforms that would play a decisive role in the battle. Spain added 49 galleys, while Genoa sent 27. Smaller but still vital contributions came from the Papal States (seven galleys), the Knights of Malta (three), Savoy (three), Tuscany (five), and several privately owned vessels. In total, the Christian fleet comprised 206 galleys and six galleasses, manned by around 30,000 soldiers and 40,000 sailors, including Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of Don Quixote. The fleet was commanded by Don John of Austria, the half-brother of King Philip II of Spain.

The Ottoman fleet was equally formidable, drawing on both the imperial navy and experienced Barbary corsair squadrons. Their force consisted of 222 galleys, 56 galliots, and numerous lighter craft. The ships were crewed by roughly 13,000 sailors, supported by 37,000 slave oarsmen, and carried approximately 25,000 soldiers as marines. Many of these troops were skilled archers, including the Ottoman admiral Ali Pasha.

Overall, the two sides were closely matched, each with distinct strengths. The Ottomans possessed highly trained seamen and superb archers, while the Holy League relied on large numbers of professional soldiers and superior firepower from its arquebusiers and galleasses. Both fleets used slaves and convicts as oarsmen, though a higher proportion of the League’s rowers, especially amongst the Venetians, were free citizens. This difference in morale and endurance would prove critical. Within both camps, some commanders feared the risks of a fleet action of such scale, but advocates for battle ultimately prevailed.

The Battle Begins

The battle opened in the Gulf of Patras in western Greece, where the Ottoman fleet advanced in a wide crescent formation. Opposing them, the Holy League arrayed its fleet in three divisions positioned behind the six massive Venetian galleasses, which had been packed with cannon and arquebusiers and anchored slightly ahead of the line. As the Turks approached to the thunder of drums and battle cries meant to intimidate their foes, the Christian crews prepared for brutal close combat. Grease was smeared on the rails to hinder boarders, nets were hung to trap attackers, and in a remarkable move, chained slaves and prisoners were unshackled and armed with the promise of freedom if they fought bravely.

The opening phase of the battle belonged to the galleasses. Their devastating broadsides shattered the cohesion of the Ottoman advance, sinking seven galleys outright and crippling many more before they could close the distance. Any vessel that attempted to pass the floating fortresses was torn apart by cannon fire or swept by volleys of arquebus shot. Soon, along the full length of the line, Christian and Ottoman galleys collided. Ships grappled together as archers and arquebusiers traded fire before infantry surged over the gunwales in savage boarding actions.

At several points, the fighting became so dense that the sea was covered by a near-continuous mass of interlocked ships, turning the battle into a vast, chaotic platform of melee combat. On the League’s left wing, a bloody stalemate ensued; on the right, the Ottomans gained an early advantage. But the decisive struggle unfolded at the center, where the flagship squadrons and admirals of both fleets clashed head on.

Turning Point and Collapse

For hours the fighting raged, with neither side able to claim a clear advantage. Gradually, however, the momentum shifted toward the Holy League. The Ottomans were hampered by their reliance on chained oarsmen, who could not manoeuvre or support the crew when the battle turned to close combat. By contrast, Christian ships benefited from free oarsmen who could fight, reload weapons, or reinforce boarding parties. On every Ottoman ship captured by the League, slaves were unchained and armed, providing a steady stream of reinforcements to the Christian boarding forces.

In the center, the decisive clash unfolded between the flagship squadrons. Ali Pasha drove the Ottoman flagship Sultana directly at Don John of Austria’s La Real, and fierce boarding actions raged back and forth. Janissaries initially gained ground, only to be driven back by Spanish and Italian infantry. After multiple assaults on both sides, a final Christian push broke onto Sultana’s deck, overwhelming her defenders. Ali Pasha was killed fighting, and his severed head raised on a pike. Even still, many Ottoman ships fought on.

The one significant Ottoman success occurred on their left, where the experienced corsair commander Ochiali exploited a gap in the Christian line. He overwhelmed the Hospitaller flagship, captured its banner, and escaped with around 30 ships. Despite this local victory, the wider battle was a catastrophic Ottoman defeat: more than 200 Turkish ships were sunk or taken, up to 25,000 Ottoman soldiers were killed, and thousands more were captured. The Holy League lost about 8,000 men, and although nearly every ship was damaged, only a handful were sunk. They had also rescued over 12,000 galley slaves.

Aftermath and Legacy of Lepanto

News of Lepanto spread across Europe, sparking celebrations comparable to those following the Siege of Malta. For the first time in over a century, the Ottomans had suffered a decisive naval defeat. Like Malta or the later victory at Vienna, Lepanto demonstrated that Ottoman expansion could be halted, and it shattered the long-standing perception of Turkish naval invincibility. This psychological shift was significant: Christian powers that had feared the empire now sensed that its advance could be resisted.

In strategic terms, however, the victory delivered limited short-term gains. The Ottomans retained Cyprus, the very territory the Holy League had hoped to liberate, and they rebuilt their fleet with astonishing speed in the months following the battle. Because galley warfare relied on abundant timber and manpower, ships themselves could be replaced quickly; what could not be easily restored was the experience of thousands of skilled sailors, archers, and marines lost at Lepanto. This loss of trained personnel was the true long-term blow to Ottoman naval strength. It is telling that Ochiali as the new commander of their fleet ordered 20,000 arquebuses for his marines in 1572.

Although the Ottomans continued to dominate the eastern Mediterranean, Lepanto marked the beginning of their decline as a blue-water power. Spain, Venice, and Genoa remained unchallenged in the western Mediterranean for decades, and the empire never again fielded a fleet of the same quality or cohesion. The battle endures less for its territorial impact than for its symbolic and cultural legacy. Cervantes declared it “The greatest day’s work in centuries.”

During the 16th century, the Mediterranean Sea witnessed a prolonged struggle for supremacy between Christian and Muslim powers. The primary players were the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg Spain but France, the Barbary Corsairs, Venice, and the Knights Hospitaller all clashed. It was the latter who inflicted the most stinging defeat on Suleiman the Magnificent, the most celebrated Ottoman ruler.

A Strategic Island

For some the conflict had been going on since the Crusades. The Hospitallers, also known as the Knights of St. John, had been driven from the Holy Land in the 14th century and took refuge on the Greek island of Rhodes. There they withstood Ottoman sieges until their final defeat in 1522 when they were driven from the island and forced westward to Malta. The knights reorganized themselves as an order of pirates, prosecuting a constant war against all Muslim shipping. The island’s strategic location made it ideal as a base for naval warfare.

The long retreat westward was part of a constant expansion by the Ottomans. In 1453 they took Constantinople and began to conquer much of the Balkans, taking Belgrade in 1521 and conquering Hungary in 1526 after the Battle of Mohács. They were only checked at Vienna in 1529 when a hastily organised defense of the city turned them back. But at sea the Ottoman advance was relentless. The Battle of Djerba off the Tunisian coast in 1560 solidified Ottoman naval control and it was obvious that Malta was their next target.

Malta was a stepping stone, a base that could be used to conquer Sicily and then push the war onto mainland Italy. Suleiman also had unfinished business with the Hospitallers from 1522. They remained a constant thorn in his side and in 1564 a Hospitaller captain captured an Ottoman convoy containing the governors of Alexandria and Cairo and the former nurse of Suleiman’s daughter. This insult was the final straw and gave Suleiman his casus belli.

Preparations and Planning

Suleiman’s rival was the Grand Master of the Order, Jean de Valette, a French knight who even at 70 was a tall and strongly built man. He was fluent in Italian, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Turkish and had served time as a galley slave. Undeterred by the Ottoman threat, he continued to muster his strength. Since 1560 all knights of the Order had been issued instructions to return to Malta should war break out. Forts on the island were strengthened and mercenaries hired to augment the defenders.

Nearly 600 of the Order’s 700 knights made it to the island in time. A mix of some 2,000 mercenaries and professional soldiers joined them along with over 3,000 Maltese soldiers. These 6,000 defenders would fight against an invading force estimated to be between 30,000 to 40,000 strong. The Ottoman army consisted of elite Jannissaries (slave soldiers recruited from Christian communities) and Sipahis (elite cavalry) as well as thousands of volunteers, adventurers, corsairs, and auxiliaries. The Ottomans also brought many skilled siege engineers with them.

The Maltese defensive system was centred around three critical forts; Fort Saint Angelo, Fort Saint Michael, and Fort Saint Elmo. All were around the Grand Harbor and had been substantially upgraded in the preceding decade. Valette also ordered the harvesting of all crops to deny any food to the invaders. Additionally, all wells were poisoned with bitter herbs or dead animals.

The Fight for Saint Elmo

The Ottoman fleet arrived on May 18, 1565. Their main effort was directed against Fort Saint Elmo, the fortification that dominated the Grand Harbor. While the Turks estimated it would take a few days, the battle actually went on for over a month. Turkish bombardment reduced the walls to rubble but Valette evacuated the wounded every night and sent reinforcements.

Fighting was fierce with even the galley slaves inside the fort fighting as hard as the Knights and the Maltese auxiliaries. The defenders used early incendiary weapons that were lethal against the robed Turks. Hoops were wooden rings soaked repeatedly in inflammables before being ignited and flung over the walls with tongs. Trumps were metal tubes packed with inflammables that were used to defend breaches.

The Turkish command was split between general Mustafa Pasha and admiral Piyale Pasha, who disagreed on everything from where to anchor the fleet to where to attack. Complicating matters was the arrival of Dragut, a famous corsair who alone realized they needed to cut off the reinforcements arriving into St. Elmo.

St Elmo fell on June 23 with all the garrison perishing except a few Maltese who managed to swim the harbor. The battle had claimed the lives of 1,500 defenders and 6,000 attackers. Mustafa ordered the Knights beheaded and their corpses floated across the bay on crucifixes. Valette responded by decapitating all of his Turkish prisoners and firing their heads by cannon into the Turkish camp. There would be no quarter.

Stalemate and Counterattack

Now that St. Elmo had fallen, the main focus of the attack could switch to Birgu and Senglea, the two peninsulas jutting into the Grand Harbor. The Ottomans established heavy gun batteries to launch a constant bombardment against the Knights. One spectacular seaborne attack failed when a sea battery sank nearly all the Ottoman boats, drowning nearly 800 Janissaries and sailors in the Grand Harbor.

Luck seemed to be on the Knights’ side as defectors warned them of oncoming attacks. The Turks breached the walls in Birgu on August 7 only to turn back in a panic, thinking that a Spanish relief force had arrived. In fact it was only a small body of horsemen led by the knight Anastagi from the Mdina garrison. They used the distraction of the assault to sortie into the Turkish rear and slaughter many of their wounded in the field hospital.

Both sides showed desperate creativity. The Ottomans built a siege tower to storm St. Michael. It was destroyed by Maltese engineers tunneling out and firing at it point blank with chain shot. When Turkish swimmers threatened to destroy the palisades on the Senglea peninsula, Valette sent in his Maltese swimmers to fight them knife to knife. Anastagi bluffed with his meagre garrison in Mdina and continued daily cavalry raids throughout the siege, hunting Turkish stragglers and foragers. A mini relief force of several hundred Spanish and Italian soldiers even succeeded in landing on the island and crossing the siege lines at night.

Turning Point and Collapse

By September the Turkish army was in disarray. Disease was rampant and the constant fighting had sapped the morale of even the elite troops. The assaults on the walls had turned into a meatgrinder and daily cavalry raids from Mdina continued to wear them down. An estimated third of the invaders had died due to the fighting or disease. Worse still, a relief force of several thousand infantrymen had landed on the north side of the island under the command of the Viceroy of Sicily on September 7. The heat of the summer and lack of supplies had only made things worse. The decision was made to halt the siege.

By September 8 most of the Ottoman artillery had been embarked. The arrival of the relief force spread panic as they did not realise they still outnumbered the Spanish and Italian troops. Contradictory orders were given to embark and disembark by Mustafa. The veteran allied infantry routed anything that opposed them. An air of recklessness spread through the force which resulted in an all out charge on the retreating Ottomans.

The slaughter on September 13 was the final bout of fighting on the island. The surviving Ottomans set sail, abandoning the siege. Against all the odds, an anachronistic Order of crusading knights had defeated an invading army and turned the tide of Ottoman conquests.

Legacy of the Siege

Between 25,000 and 35,000 of the attackers are believed to have died in the siege, while a third of the population of Malta lost their lives. The three peninsulas where the fighting had been concentrated were mostly piles of rubble. But a small mixed garrison of 6,000 defenders had withstood a siege for over four months during the heat of a Mediterranean summer. The defense seemed incredible to the wider European population as prior to this the Ottoman advance had seemed unstoppable.

Valette was the hero of the hour, the man whose leadership had been central to keeping the morale of the defenders up. Donations came from across Europe to aid rebuilding and atop the ruins of St. Elmo rose a new city, Valletta, named for the Grand Master. Today it is the capital city of the small island nation.

It was not the end of the Knights nor of the Ottoman Empire. A single battle rarely determined the outcome of a war. Malta was a setback for the Ottomans but only a temporary one and they soon resumed the offensive on other fronts. The successful defense of Malta did serve as a rallying point for the Christian powers and inspired the formation of a Holy League. Six years later, Venice, Spain, and the Knights would inflict another defeat on the Ottomans in the Battle of Lepanto.

Despite Dietrich von Choltitz’s extensive career in the military, he is mainly remembered as the last commander of the Nazi forces in occupied France in 1944, who disobeyed Adolf Hitler’s order to destroy the city of Paris. According to his memoirs, his disobedience was dictated by his affection for French history and culture and his belief that Hitler’s mental state had deteriorated. However, there exist opinions that Choltitz did not have much control over the city due to the successful efforts of the French resistance. Was his memoir simply an attempt to reshape his image?

Early Life & Military Career of Dietrich von Choltitz

Dietrich von Choltitz was born on November 9, 1894, in modern-day Poland, in an aristocratic family of Prussian origins. Choltitz underwent military training and, in 1913, he joined the 8th Infanterie-Regiment Prinz Johann Georg N. 107 of the Royal Saxon Army in Dresden, Germany. With the beginning of World War I, he fought on the Western Front, participating in several key battles of the war: Battle of the Marne (September 6–12, 1914), First Battle of Ypres (October 19–November 22, 1914), Battle of the Somme (July 1–November 18, 1916), and Battle of St. Quentin (March 21–April 5, 1918).

After the end of World War I, Dietrich von Choltitz joined the German military of the newly established Weimar Republic. In November 1924, he was promoted to lieutenant and, in the spring of 1929, to Rittmeister, a rank equivalent to that of a captain.

During the inter-war period, Dietrich von Choltitz demonstrated resilience, dedication, and leadership skills, which gained him wider recognition and fame. As a result, in 1937, he was appointed as major of the Nazi forces. Before the outbreak of World War II, Choltitz played a key role in the occupation of Sudetenland by Nazi Germany in September 1938.

Soon, Choltitz was appointed as the commander of the 16th Air Landing Regiment in Sagan, tasked to prepare for the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939. He headed Nazi forces in key battles, including the Battle of Łódź (September 6–8, 1939) and the Battle of the Bzura (September 9–19, 1939).

The decisive battle for Dietrich von Choltitz was the Battle of Rotterdam held between May 10 and 14, 1940. Following the air landing in the city, he demonstrated excellent military skills and capabilities in urban warfare, successfully securing crucial strategic locations for the Nazi forces’ advance.

Then, Choltitz participated in the siege of Sevastopol from October 30, 1941 to July 4, 1942, though less successfully. His regiment faced strong resistance from Soviet forces. The siege proved to be a harsh and prolonged battle for the Germans, resulting in high casualty rates. In June 1944, Dietrich von Choltitz was transferred to the Western Front as head of the Army Corps tasked with curbing the Allied powers’ breakout from Normandy.

The Liberation of Paris

Nazi Germany had invaded France in May 1940. France had been under Nazi occupation for almost four years when on August 1, 1944, Choltitz was promoted to General of the Infantry and appointed as the military governor of Paris, the capital city of France. Choltitz inherited limited resources and troops consisting of unmotivated and tired conscripts. On the other hand, the French resistance and the French communist party were rapidly gaining strength.

By August 1944, the Allies had landed in Normandy and were advancing toward Paris, putting pressure on the German occupiers. The French Resistance, which had been organizing underground opposition since the Nazi occupation, saw an opportunity to take action. The situation became particularly tense when the French police went on strike against the Nazi occupation on August 19, 1944, marking the beginning of the French revolt. The French Forces of the Interior, a coalition of resistance fighters, launched attacks against German troops while awaiting the arrival of American and British forces, who were pushing the German army eastward.

Several weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler ordered Choltitz to suppress any attempts of revolt and insurrection “without pity.” Already on August 20, 1944, Choltitz received a direct order from Hitler to cause “the widest destruction possible” of Paris, adding in a cable dated August 23 that “Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.”

At this time, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Dwight Eisenhower, and Charles de Gaulle, the head of the French government in exile, did not plan to liberate Paris directly. Instead, they sought to encircle the city, forcing the Nazi forces to push back to the German border. The uprising, however, changed the circumstances. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, authors of Is Paris Burning? (1965), recall President Eisenhower’s words: “Just the kind of a situation I didn’t want, a situation that wasn’t under our control, that might force us to change our plans before we were ready for it.”

On August 20, Charles de Gaulle visited Eisenhower’s headquarters in Granville, Normandy, to urge him to reconsider and liberate Paris sooner. De Gaulle feared that the communists might take control of Paris, and he saw the entrance of the Free French Forces under his leadership into Paris as a matter of national importance.

Meanwhile, the situation in Paris was rapidly deteriorating. The ceasefire agreement negotiated by the Swedish consul in Paris appeared fragile and resistance fighters erected barricades and seized governmental buildings. However, despite their efforts, they had limited resources and could not liberate the city alone.

Choltitz debated Hitler’s directive to demolish the city. He hesitated to carry out the order for several factors. Most importantly, a few weeks prior, Choltitz had visited the German Führer whose mind was in a deteriorated state. During this meeting, Choltitz became convinced that Adolf Hitler’s mental state was declining and that Nazi Germany was losing the war.

Ultimately, Choltitz opposed the directive to demolish Europe’s cultural and historical center, considering his limited capacity to cope with the resistance and the advancing Allied forces.

Choltitz sought help from Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling, a neutral diplomat who had already helped negotiate the ceasefire on August 20. Choltitz requested that Nordling send a telegram to the Allied powers urging them to move quickly into Paris.

On August 25, 1944, the Free French Second Armored Division and the American Fourth Infantry Division entered Paris. The Nazi soldiers surrendered. Reportedly, Adolf Hitler called Choltitz the same day, asking angrily “Is Paris burning?” It wasn’t.

The next day, August 26, Charles de Gaulle led a parade from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées. Paris was liberated—and saved.

After World War II, Dietrich von Choltitz was placed at Trent Park in London along with other high-ranking Nazi military personnel. He was eventually released in 1947 without being charged with war crimes. In Nazi Germany, the military tribunal accused Choltitz of treason and convicted him in abstention. However, with the assistance of his high-ranking military friends, the enforcement of the order was delayed until the end of World War II.  Choltitz’s family managed to escape execution or imprisonment.

Due to his efforts in 1944, Dietrich von Choltitz became widely known as the “savior of Paris.” He passed away on November 4, 1966, in Baden-Baden, West Germany, at the age of 71.

The Controversy Around the Figure of Dietrich Von Choltitz

After his funeral, the Associated Press praised Dietrich von Choltitz as “a central figure in saving Paris from destruction.”

Jean Edward Smith, biographer of President Dwight Eisenhower, stated:

“Paris was saved by the actions of several leaders, including Choltitz, who disobeyed the führer’s instruction to demolish the city; … de Gaulle, who steadfastly exerted every ounce of influence as president of the provisional government to save Paris; and Eisenhower, who rejected textbook military doctrine and let common sense prevail.”

Indeed, World War II left most European cities in ruins, while Paris’s historical treasures remained almost untouched when the war ended.

In his memoirs, Dietrich Von Choltitz wrote: “If for this first time, I disobeyed (an order), it was because I knew Hitler was crazy.”

For many, Choltitz was simply not capable of destroying the city as he lacked both manpower and material to cause such destruction. Moreover, the fact that Paris was a less critical strategic location and the city’s early surrender saved it from mass destruction. Given his extensive military career, in which he had been involved in destroying cities like Rotterdam and Sevastopol without showing any sentimentality, Choltitz’s actions regarding Paris appeared particularly surprising.

For Lionel Dardenne, from the Museum of Order of the Liberation, “He’s created a legend for himself. People make a place for themselves in history either by saving or destroying, he decided his myth would be that he saved the city.”

Self-proclaimed or otherwise, the truth about Dietrich von Choltitz’s role in saving Paris likely falls somewhere in between.

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, Western Europe’s understanding of the world beyond its borders started to change. Tales from travelers, pilgrims, and shipmasters radically altered the medieval picture of the globe. Meanwhile, the discovery of Ptolemy’s works gave a scientific basis to cartography. Active between the 1480s and 1490s, the German cartographer Henricus Martellus witnessed the beginning of the Age of Exploration that brought European explorers to Africa, Asia, and America. Today, his maps show one of the last views of the pre-Columbian world from Europe’s perspective.

Who Was Henricus Martellus?

Little is known of the life of the cartographer who signed his maps as Henricus Martellus Germanus. We only know for certain that he was active between the 1450s and 1490s in Florence. Some suggest the name Henricus Martellus may be the Latinized version of Heinrich Hammer. While the signature indicates his German origins, no archival documents confirm this theory.

Recently, research into the German community in Florence in the 15th century identified Martellus with Arrigo di Federico Martello, an employee of the Martelli family, linked to the influential Medici dynasty and patrons of the arts. A subsequent study, however, disproved this identification. To this day, his background remains unclear. It is likely, though, that he came from Nuremberg, at the time the center of the German Renaissance.

When Martellus was based in Florence, all the leading cartographers based their work on Ptolemy’s Geography. An astronomer, mathematician, and geographer living in Alexandria during the 2nd century CE, Ptolemy remained largely unknown in Europe until the late 14th century. When the Byzantine humanist Manuel Chrysoloras arrived in Florence in 1397, he brought with him a manuscript of Geography, revolutionizing cartography.

Translated into Latin in 1406, Ptolemy’s work gave Europe a new view of the oikumene, or inhabited world, showing a more connected globe. By recording longitudes and latitudes for thousands of locations, he provided the necessary techniques to draw maps. He also showed how to reproduce the Earth on a flat surface. Like many other cartographers of his time, Martellus was deeply impacted by Ptolemy’s Geography, producing a series of manuscripts of the Alexandrine geographer’s opus.

Martellus, however, did not just reproduce Ptolemy’s world map but updated it with a series of tabulae modernae, additional maps with the new geographical data coming in from the voyages of discovery funded by Portugal. Martellus’s interest in keeping up to date with the latest data clearly emerges from his manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography located at the National Library of Florence:

“In this very splendid manuscript are contained the Cosmography of Claudius Ptolemy with modern regional maps and all the ports and coasts, both those already known and those newly discovered by the King of Portugal.”

Martellus’ World: Europe & The Age of Exploration

By the time Martellus was working on his manuscripts and world maps, Western Europe’s view of the globe had radically changed. In the 13th century, the Pax Mongolica, a period of relative stability under the Mongol Empire, gave European travelers the opportunity, for the first time in centuries, to visit the East, expanding their geographical knowledge. Through travel accounts such as Il Millione (The Million), the travelogue compiled by Italian explorer Marco Polo, people became more familiar with China and other lands beyond India.

Europe’s interest in the East was largely fueled by the popularity of spices. Used as a symbol of personal wealth, medicine, and cooking ingredients, spices became “the world’s first globally traded product.” Despite their craving for the “exotic aromas,” however, Europeans had only vague notions about the countries that produced them.

In the 15th century, the emergence of the Ottoman Empire began to threaten Venice’s monopoly on the spice trade and access to the trading routes, prompting European merchants to look for ways to reach the lands where spices grew in abundance. According to Ptolemy, reaching Cathay (present-day China) by sailing around Africa was impossible, as he believed the Indian Ocean to be landlocked. The data collected by the newest explorations, however, contradicted this theory. A map compiled by Fra Mauro (pictured above) in the 1450s in Venice, for example, showed Africa surrounded by water.

In the early 14th century, Prince Henry “the Navigator” of Portugal funded various expeditions on the western African coast. Then in 1488, Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias circumnavigated the southern end of Africa for the first time. The Age of Exploration had begun. From Florence, Martellus followed the Portuguese maritime exploits, adding the newest geographical knowledge to his maps.

The Martellus Map(s)

Though Martellus’s cartographic works are undated, scholars believe the map in the Insularium Illustratum at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence) is his earliest surviving attempt to reproduce the globe on a surface.

The Insularium Illustratum, meaning “Book of Islands,” was a popular genre in the late medieval and Renaissance periods. The one compiled by Martellus is the first to include islands outside the Mediterranean (Britain, Ireland, and Japan, among others) and a world map, a sign of the expanding horizon of 15th-century Western Europe.

The world map in the Florence manuscript of the Insulatium Illustratum was likely designed around 1488, as attested by the toponym ilha de fonti (also known as Penedo das Fontes, or Rock of the Springs) in southern Africa, a name given by Barolomeu Dias to an island in Algoa Bay. Compared to the modern atlas, in Martellus’s working map, the shape of Africa appears distorted, especially in the southern portion, which is drawn as an eastward jutting peninsula.

In the copy of the world map in the Book of Island located at the British Library, Martellus modified the shape and position of Africa. Likely struggling to design a coherent image from the incomplete and conflicting information, Martellus drew the southern tip of Africa beyond the map’s border.

Three legends added on the continent again attest to Martellus’s efforts to keep up to date with the Portuguese expeditions. “This is the modern true shape of Africa according to the map of the Portuguese, from the Mediterranean Seas to the southern ocean,” reads the first one. “This mountain, which is called Monte Negro, was reached by the fleet of [John] the second King of Portugal; the fleet was commanded by Diego Cão, who to commemorate the fact, set up a prominent marble column with a cross on it,” comments a second legend referring to Diego Cão’s 1484-86 voyage.

Martellus’s emphasis on the greater accuracy of the cartographic data obtained by the Portuguese navigators is an implicit critique of Ptolemy’s perception of the world. In nearly all maps compiled in this period, the Ptolemaic system is shown alongside the new data, a testament to the coexistence of ancient and modern that is a key feature of Renaissance culture. In this sense, the cartographic works of Matellus (among others) provide a crucial glimpse into pre-Columbian Europe’s ever-shifting view of the globe.

Africa & Europe in the Martellus Maps

Besides the British Library manuscript, Martellus’s individual world map located at Yale University is of particular interest. Designed around 1491, when Christopher Columbus had yet to cross the Atlantic to land on a previously unknown continent, the Yale map has considerably darkened over the centuries, making the text contained in the legends illegible. In 2014, however, a team led by historian Chet Van Duzer was finally able to decipher the map’s information using multispectral cameras.

Even before Van Duzer’s project, the Yale map (like the British Library copy) exaggerated the extent of Eurasia, a clear indication of Martellus’ Eurocentrism. The focus on Portuguese cartographic data regarding the African continent also reveals Europe’s obsession with finding a new route to the spice-growing lands in the East, a source of wealth that would derive from a combination of spices, gold, coffee, cotton, and slavery.

Van Duzer and his team also found that the German-born cartographer likely based his depiction of Africa on the so-called Egyptus Novelo map. Found in three manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography, the Egyptus Novelo used data from an African source: the geographic knowledge shared by the Ethiopian delegation at the 1441 Council of Florence, a meeting that was part of an ecumenical council aimed to end the East-West Schism between the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern churches.

The Martellus Map’s Legacy

Research on Martellus’ cartographic work shows he was still active in the 1490s, when Christopher Columbus made his first voyages across the Atlantic. However, Martellus does not mention Columbus, nor does he use data from his travels. Still, scholars believe the Genoese explorer was familiar with Martellus’ maps and consulted them while planning his expeditions.

According to Chris Van Duzer, the Martellus maps’ influence on Columbus’s understanding of the world emerges from a study of the writing by the navigator’s son, Ferdinand. In particular, Ferdinand’s description of Cipangu (present-day Japan) matches its configuration in Martellus’s works. In no other surviving maps from the Age of Exploration, explains Van Duzer, is Japan shown as in the German cartographer’s map.

In this sense, the Martellus maps embody the world as seen by the Europeans in the 15th century, before the discovery of a landmass across the Atlantic. Instead of showing the American continent, Martellus depicted an enormous peninsula south of present-day Malaysia. This so-called Dragon Tail is a source of debate among scholars. Some identify it with a portion of South America. Others put it down to the inexact geographical knowledge circulating at the time.

In the 1970s, Arthur Davies even used the presence of this westward jutting peninsula to claim that the map was not the work of Martellus, but it was made by Columbus’s brother, Bartholomew. According to Davies, Bartholomew distorted the map to persuade the Spanish monarchs to fund Christopher Columbus’s plan to reach the East by sailing westward across the Atlantic. While this theory is undeniably fascinating, it has since been disproven.

In the early 16th century, Magellan’s circumnavigation and Vespucci’s voyages confirmed that Columbus had not reached the East but “discovered” a new continent: America. In 1507, cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, influenced by Martellus’ works, designed the first world map referring to the “New World” as America.

The Novodevichy Convent on the banks of the Moskva River is one of the most distinctive buildings in the Russian capital. Inaugurated in 1898, the Novodevichy cemetery became Russia’s second-most prestigious burial ground during the Soviet period. The graves of many famous Russians buried in other monasteries were transferred to the site. In addition to world-renowned writers, musicians, and actors, Novodevichy is the final resting place for many Soviet and post-Soviet politicians, including three heads of state. But who exactly is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery?

1. Isaac Levitan (1860-1900)

One of the most celebrated Russian landscape artists, Isaac Levitan was born in 1860 to a Jewish family in present-day Lithuania. After the family moved to Moscow, Levitan studied at the Moscow School of Painting and began exhibiting his work in 1877.

In 1880, the Moscow art collector Pavel Tretyakov acquired Levitan’s painting Autumn Day. Sokolniki, featuring a path in a Moscow park with a female figure painted by his friend Nikolay Chekhov (the brother of the writer Anton Chekhov). Tretyakov retained an interest in Levitan’s work and acquired more than 20 pieces during the artist’s lifetime, which are exhibited in the State Tretyakov Gallery.

After leaving the Moscow Art School in 1884, Levitan routinely exhibited his work with the Peredvizhniki movement, a group of artists who moved away from representing classical and Biblical scenes and embraced subjects within Russia. Together with Ivan Shishkin, Levitan represented a new golden age of Russian landscape painting.

While Shishkin is known for bringing the Russian forest to life, Levitan acquired international renown for his “mood landscapes,” often featuring a vast open expanse with a path or creek extending into the distance. His 1894 painting Over Eternal Peace, featuring a small wooden church overlooking a vast body of water that disappears into the horizon, is emblematic of his style.

During the 1890s, Levitan made three trips to Western Europe and acquired international recognition, and he incorporated elements of French Impressionism into his later works. He suffered from poor health for much of his life and was diagnosed with a serious heart condition in 1894. After his death in 1900, he was initially buried at the Dorogomilovo Jewish cemetery in Moscow, but in 1941, his remains were transferred to the Novodevichy Cemetery near Chekhov’s grave.

2. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is one of the most famous Russian writers to have lived. In the West, he is best known for his players, who portray the decline of the Russian gentry at the turn of the 19th century, but in his native Russia, Chekhov is primarily known for his short stories.

Born in Taganrog, near the Black Sea, in 1860, Chekhov remained in his hometown for almost 20 years. In 1876, his father moved to Moscow with his eldest sons to avoid debtor’s prison, leaving Chekhov and his mother behind to sell the estate. After finishing his education, Chekhov joined his family in Moscow in 1879 and began training as a doctor. Before his graduation in 1884, he supported the family by submitting short stories to literary journals.

Chekhov continued writing after he qualified as a doctor. His medical work brought him into frequent contact with poor and sick people whom he treated for free. These experiences influenced his writing, and Chekhov developed a distinctive style by ending his short stories in a way that left it up to readers to draw their own conclusions.

In 1887, Chekhov wrote his first play, Ivanov, which proved an unexpected hit. It was at this time that he formulated the concept known as Chekhov’s gun, a principle stating that every single element of a story should be necessary and contribute to the final plot.

He continued to write several shorter pieces for the stage, but The Seagull played to a hostile audience during its St. Petersburg premiere in 1896. This setback proved a blessing in disguise, as Konstantin Stanislavsky saw the potential of the play as a tragedy and staged a successful revival at the Moscow Art Theater in 1898. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya premiered in Moscow the following year.

Chekhov was plagued by poor health throughout his life but was reluctant to submit himself to examination by his colleagues. He began coughing blood in the mid-1880s, but it was only in 1897 that he was officially diagnosed with tuberculosis. This prompted him to move to Yalta, where he wrote Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. In 1901, he married the actress Olga Knipper, but they were frequently apart as Chekhov remained in Yalta while Olga continued her career in Moscow.

In 1904, Chekhov and his wife set off to Germany to seek treatment for his illness. He died on July 15, 1904, at the age of 44. His body was returned to Russia in a refrigerated railway carriage carrying oysters and buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.

3. Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921)

Best known as a revolutionary theorist, Prince Pyotr Kropotkin was born in Moscow to an aristocratic family in 1842. As a child, Kropotkin enrolled in the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg and served as a courtier to Tsar Alexander II upon graduation in 1861.

As an opponent of serfdom, Kropotkin welcomed the tsar’s abolition of the institution in 1861 but later believed that the tsar’s reforms did not go far enough. In 1862, he took the opportunity to embark on a five-year journey through Siberia on government service. In addition to surveying lands recently annexed to Russia, he took a great interest in observing how animals survived the harsh climate. His observations helped him develop the concept of mutual aid, in which animals cooperated rather than competed with each other to ensure their survival.

Kropotkin’s existing sympathy for the political prisoners in Siberia and his observations of the natural world led him to adopt left-wing ideas about cooperation. He returned to St. Petersburg and was elected to the Russian Geographical Society, but was inspired by the Paris Commune of 1871 to become more politically active.

Although he rejected political violence, Kropotkin’s call for political agitation was enough to get him arrested by the tsarist secret police in March 1874. He escaped from prison in 1876 and went to Switzerland, where he lived for the next five years until he was expelled by the Swiss authorities following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

By 1886, Kropotkin established a base in London, where he would live for the next three decades. During his period, he produced some of his best-known works, including The Conquest of Bread, a political manifesto for anarchist communism, envisaging a society under common ownership where people were only required to work for five hours a week. Responding to claims that humans would not be willing to work without a profit incentive, Kropotkin argued that people are happy to do work they enjoy and are willing to help fellow members of the community.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Kropotkin split the anarchist movement by declaring in favor of Britain and France. After Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in 1917, Kropotkin returned to Russia in June. He refused an offer of a post in the Provisional Government but argued for Russia’s continued participation in the war. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Kropotkin challenged Lenin’s centralization of power. He died in February 1921 at the age of 78 and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. Although the Bolsheviks offered him a state funeral, they soon suppressed his writings after his death.

4. Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Sergei Prokofiev was one of the most accomplished Russian composers of the 20th century. Born in 1891 in present-day Ukraine, Prokofiev was a musical prodigy who wrote his first piano piece at the age of five and a short opera at the age of nine. In 1904, he began studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatory after a recommendation from the composer Alexander Glazunov.

Much younger than the other students, Prokofiev was regarded as boastful and arrogant. He was a talented pianist, and his first two piano concertos were regarded by contemporaries as extremely modern and difficult to play. However, he demonstrated his versatility with his First Symphony (the ‘Classical’) from 1917, conforming to a more conventional style.

In 1913, Prokofiev made his first foreign trip and encountered Sergei Diaghilev in Paris. His Scythian Suite of 1915 featured music initially intended for a ballet. He would later write three successful ballets performed by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in the 1920s. His 1935 ballet Romeo and Juliet features the famous “Dance of the Knights.”

After the Russian Revolution, Prokofiev received permission from the Soviet Union to leave the country, heading first to the United States and then to Paris. His most famous opera, The Love for Three Oranges, set to a French libretto written by Prokofiev himself, was premiered in Chicago in December 1921. By the 1930s, Prokofiev yearned to return to the Soviet Union. He was commissioned to write the music for the Soviet film Lieutenant Kijé, which premiered in 1934. Prokofiev’s music was so popular that he reworked it into a standalone suite. In 1936, he returned to Moscow permanently and wrote Peter and the Wolf, one of his most famous compositions.

Prokofiev continued to write music for the Soviet film industry, most notably collaborating with Sergei Eisenstein on the 1938 film Alexander Nevsky. A work of propaganda celebrating the triumph of Russian prince Alexander Nevsky over the Teutonic Knights at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were poised to go to war, the film was suppressed following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact but revived to great acclaim after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Once again, Prokofiev exploited the popularity of his film score to adapt the music into a cantata.

The German invasion encouraged Prokofiev to write a grand opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. After receiving feedback from the Soviet authorities to include more patriotic scenes, he initially produced a two-part version intended to be performed over two nights. A final revised version intended for performance on a single evening was not premiered until after the composer’s death in 1953.

In his later years, Prokofiev collaborated with a younger generation of talented musicians, including pianist Svyatoslav Richter and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1948, his music was denounced by Soviet Culture Minister Andrei Zhdanov “for confused, neuropathological combinations which transform music into cacophony.”

Famously, Prokofiev’s death at the age of 61 on March 5, 1953, was overshadowed by that of Stalin on the same day. His family could not hold his funeral for three days as crowds of Stalin’s mourners prevented the body from being brought out of his apartment near Red Square. When he was eventually buried at Novodevichy Cemetery, the mourners were unable to get hold of any flowers for the grave.

5. Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971)

Nikita Khrushchev served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964. As Soviet leader, he is best known for dismantling Stalin’s cult of personality following his ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, his unsuccessful efforts to boost agricultural production by turning over ‘Virgin Lands’ for the cultivation of corn, and his confrontation with President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Born in 1894 in Kalinovka near the border between Russia and Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev trained as a metal worker before becoming a political commissar during the Russian Civil War and rising up the ranks of the Communist Party. As head of the Moscow party organization during the 1930s, he was involved in the construction of the Moscow Metro.

In 1938, Khrushchev became head of the Communist Party in Ukraine and purged the party organization on Stalin’s orders. During the Second World War, Khrushchev served as a commissar on the frontlines in Kyiv and Stalingrad and was also present at the Battle of Kursk. After the war, Khrushchev was restored to the leadership of an enlarged Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow in 1949. As head of the party organization for both the city and surrounding province, Khrushchev launched an expansive housebuilding program to provide cheap accommodation after the ravages of war.

In the months after Stalin’s death in March 1953, Khrushchev emerged as First Secretary of the Communist Party and allied with Premier Georgy Malenkov to oust the notorious secret police head, Lavrenty Beria. He consolidated his power by replacing Malenkov with his protégé Nikolay Bulgarin in 1955 before demoting Bulgarin and becoming premier himself in 1958. Khrushchev’s unpopular reforms to the party apparatus and his decision to back down over the Cuban Missile Crisis saw him overthrown by his protégé Leonid Brezhnev in 1964. Khrushchev died seven years later, in 1971, at the age of 77.

Had Khrushchev died in office, he would undoubtedly have been buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis near Lenin’s Mausoleum. However, when he died in 1971, he was relegated to the Novodevichy Cemetery. At the request of the Khrushchev family, the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny designed a striking funerary monument made of black and white slabs, emphasizing Khrushchev’s positive and negative legacies. Ironically, Neizvestny had been criticized by Khrushchev in 1962 for “disfigur[ing] the faces of Soviet people.” Until Mikhail Gorbachev’s death in 2022, Khrushchev was the only Soviet leader buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.

6. Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007)

The first president of post-Soviet Russia, Boris Yeltsin was born in Sverdlovsk oblast in 1931. He became a construction worker and joined the Communist Party in 1961. During the 1960s, he was responsible for leading construction projects in the city of Sverdlovsk, present-day Ekaterinburg. In 1976, he was appointed First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Party Committee. At the age of 45, he was among the youngest provincial leaders in Soviet Russia. In 1977, he ordered the demolition of Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been killed in 1918.

In 1981, Yeltsin joined the Communist Party’s Central Committee. By this time, he began to have doubts about the effectiveness of the Soviet government and began conducting unannounced inspections to obtain a better idea of how the system was actually operating.

Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to the leadership in 1985, Yeltsin was transferred to Moscow, where he served as head of the city’s party organization and dismissed older corrupt officials in favor of a younger generation. Yeltsin believed that Gorbachev’s reforms were not ambitious enough and was dismissed from office in November 1987.

His departure from the government allowed him to lead the liberal opposition to Gorbachev. His election as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in May 1990 prompted a showdown with Gorbachev after Yeltsin issued a declaration of sovereignty for Russia in June. The following month, he resigned from the Communist Party.

When Communist Party hardliners launched a coup in August 1991 to overthrow Gorbachev, Yeltsin defiantly faced up to the tanks and helped ensure the coup’s failure. After saving Gorbachev, Yeltsin quickly moved to undermine his government. While Gorbachev sought to broker a new Union treaty to save the Soviet Union, Yeltsin met with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus on December 8, 1991, to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, effectively dissolving the Soviet Union. Gorbachev duly transferred power to Yeltsin on December 25, and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved the following day.

Yeltsin’s presidency is known for radical economic reforms that led to hyperinflation and economic inequality, as well as the rise of oligarchs who acquired privatized state enterprises at low prices. Yeltsin’s reforms faced widespread opposition from parliament, and in 1993, he controversially mobilized tanks to shell the parliament building. He forced through a new constitution that concentrated powers in the hands of the presidents. After trailing Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov early in the 1996 presidential campaign, Yeltsin cut a deal with the oligarchs and won reelection.

Yeltsin had a reputation for heavy drinking and reportedly canceled several meetings with foreign leaders because he was inebriated. Plagued with health problems, Yeltsin resigned from the presidency on December 31, 1999. His prime minister, the relatively unknown Vladimir Putin, succeeded him in a temporary capacity before winning the 2000 presidential election. Yeltsin died of a heart attack in 2007 and is buried at Novodevichy under a large gravestone representing the Russian flag.

The Adriatic port city of Trieste is one of the most unique cities in Italy. Founded on the site of Roman Tergeste and overshadowed by nearby Aquileia for much of its history, Trieste’s fortunes improved gradually under Habsburg rule from 1382. During the 18th century, the Habsburgs transformed Trieste into a thriving port and a cosmopolitan intellectual center, inspiring the nickname “Vienna by the Sea.” While Trieste has been an Italian city for most of the past century, it has retained many of these characteristics up to the present day.

The History of Trieste Begins: Roman Tergeste

The city of Trieste derives its name from the Roman city of Tergeste, first recorded during the 1st century BCE by Julius Caesar, who granted it the status of a colony in 46 BCE. Tergeste was built on top of a hill now known as the Colle San Giusto, where the Castle of San Giusto is now located.

A few years before he became emperor, Octavian ordered the construction of walls around the city. A surviving Roman arch known as the Arco di Riccardo is believed to have been a city gate. It is unclear how the arch received its name, but one theory links it to Richard the Lionheart, who passed through the area in 1192, shortly before he was taken prisoner by Duke Leopold V of Austria.

Tergeste’s fortunes were closely connected to the nearby city of Aquileia, one of the largest cities in Roman antiquity located at the head of the Adriatic. The Via Flavia, built during the reign of Emperor Vespasian, connected Tergeste with Pula on the Istrian peninsula and the Dalmatian coast. The theater of Trieste was built in the 1st century CE and later expanded by Emperor Trajan. The ruins of a basilica dating from the reign of Trajan can also be seen on the site of the Roman Forum on the hill.

Historical artifacts from the region can be seen in the city’s archaeological museum, named in honor of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was assassinated in Trieste in 1768. He was buried in the cemetery next to the Cathedral of San Giusto. His remains were subsequently deposited in a monument built in his honor in the 1820s.

The Middle Ages

Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Adriatic faced considerable political turmoil for several centuries. During this period, Trieste passed between the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy, the Lombards, and the Byzantine Empire. In 788 CE, the town became part of Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire, a precursor to the Holy Roman Empire.

Between the 10th and 13th centuries, Trieste was ruled by its bishop, who enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy from the Patriarchate of Aquileia, one of the most powerful ecclesiastical states in medieval Italy. The Cathedral of San Giusto, built on the site of a Roman temple next to the Forum, continues to serve as the seat of the bishops of Trieste. The first church was built in the 6th century CE, and two more basilicas occupied the site until the present structure was constructed during the 14th century. The church is dedicated to Saint Justus, a 3rd-century Christian martyr from Trieste who is venerated as the city’s patron saint.

By the mid-13th century, Trieste faced threats from the Republic of Venice and the Counts of Gorizia. Over the following half-century, the ecclesiastical authorities gradually relinquished their powers over the city until the government passed into secular administration by 1295. The city continued to struggle in the face of the Venetian threat and was occupied by the Venetians from 1368 to 1372.

Habsburg Rule

After Venice renounced its claim to Trieste in 1381, the citizens of Trieste sought the protection of Leopold III of Habsburg, Duke of Austria. The voluntary submission was agreed in September 1382, and the city remained under Habsburg rule for the next 540 years, with a couple of brief exceptions. The Habsburgs lived up to their promise of protecting the city’s autonomy and political rights.

In 1468, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III ordered the construction of a fortified residence for the Imperial Captain on the hill of San Giusto near the cathedral. This edifice, known as the Captain’s House, formed the core of the Castle of San Giusto, which was expanded in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1508-1509, Trieste was briefly occupied by Venice during the War of the League of Cambrai. The Venetians constructed a round bastion to protect the Captain’s House but withdrew before they could carry out their intention of building a triangular fortress. Construction work began on the Lalio and Fiorito bastions in 1553, though the latter was not completed until 1636.

The castle never saw any military action and was already obsolete at the time of its completion. It continued to serve as the residence of the Austrian Imperial Captain until 1750 when a palace was built in the city below. The castle subsequently served as an armory and prison and was restored in the 20th century.

Imperial Trading Port

Trieste reached new heights in the 18th century after the city was granted the privileges of a free port by Emperor Charles VI. The city continued its expansion during the reign of Charles’ successor, Empress Maria Theresa, who drained the swamps to the northeast of the old town to create the new district of Borgo Teresiano. The empress envisaged transforming Trieste into a modern Venice by constructing a network of canals. Financial pressures meant only the Canal Grande and two minor canals were completed. Nevertheless, the city became the largest port in the Habsburg Empire, with a population of 30,000 at the end of the 18th century.

During the turn of the 19th century, Trieste was occupied by French troops on three occasions during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It became part of the Illyrian Provinces in the Napoleonic Empire between 1809 and 1813. Trieste regained the status of Free Imperial City after the restoration of Austrian rule and continued to thrive as a commercial port.

In 1833, the company of Österreichischer Lloyd (Austrian Lloyd) was founded in Trieste to facilitate information exchange in the shipping industry, inspired by Lloyd’s of London. The company began its shipbuilding operations in 1836 with the construction of six steamships for the Levant trade. The company would soon become the largest shipping company in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, carrying both freight and passengers.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 enabled Austrian Lloyd to expand further into Asia, running passenger services to Mumbai, Colombo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The company had become so successful that, in 1907, it moved its operational headquarters to Vienna. After Trieste was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy,  the restructured company moved its headquarters back to Trieste and was renamed Lloyd Triestino in 1919.

Trieste’s political status was elevated in 1849 when it became the capital of the Austrian Littoral region,  and the city’s trade links were further enhanced by the completion of the Austrian Southern Railway in 1857, which connected Trieste to Vienna via Slovenia.

Archduke Maximilian and Miramare Castle

Located five miles to the north of the city center, Miramare Castle and its surrounding park are some of Trieste’s most famous attractions, welcoming some one million visitors each year. The castle was built between 1856 and 1860 for Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria, the younger brother of Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I. The archduke had been made an officer of the Austrian Navy in 1852 and appointed commander-in-chief in 1854. Since the Austrian Navy was based in Trieste, the archduke sought to build a suitable palatial residence for him and his wife, Charlotte.

The castle’s eclectic design reflected the personal tastes of Archduke Maximilian. The ground floor was intended for the personal use of Maximilian and Charlotte. Maximilian’s study and bedroom were based on the cabins of the frigate Novara, which completed a circumnavigation of the world in 1857-1859, commissioned by Maximilian. Other highlights include the library and the Throne Room on the first floor.

A few years after Maximilian and Charlotte moved into Miramare, the archduke accepted an invitation from Mexican conservatives to become emperor of Mexico. The couple duly left for Mexico aboard the Novara in 1864. Although he was able to establish a government in Mexico City with French military assistance, Maximilian’s reign as Emperor of Mexico was tragically brief.

The conservatives were no match for Benito Juarez’s Republicans, and after Napoleon III withdrew the French troops, Maximilian was captured by the Republicans in May 1867 and executed on June 19, 1867. In 1868, the Novara brought Maximilian’s body from Mexico to Miramare en route to the Imperial Crypt in Vienna.

After Maximilian’s death, Miramare continued to host members of the Habsburg imperial family, and Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) stayed in the castle on more than a dozen occasions. After Trieste became part of Italy in the aftermath of the First World War, Miramare became the residence of Duke Amadeo of Aosta, the cousin of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.

City of Culture

Trieste’s success as a trade hub made it a cosmopolitan city during the 19th century. Small but wealthy communities of Greek and Serbian merchants sponsored the construction of Orthodox churches, while the Great Synagogue of Trieste, built in 1912, served the city’s rich and influential Jewish community. The city’s architecture, particularly in the Borgo Teresiano, resembled that of the Austrian capital of Vienna.

As a major European center of the coffee trade, Trieste came to be known for its coffee culture, and it continues to be regarded as Italy’s coffee capital. The city’s famous coffee houses attracted several prominent writers and intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century. Italian writers Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo were born in the city, and Trieste served as James Joyce’s primary residence from 1905 to 1920. The Caffè Pirona in Trieste was a favorite spot for all three, and according to local legend, Joyce began writing Ulysses in the café.

During this period, Trieste was also subject to ethnic and social unrest as the Austrian authorities struggled to deal with nationalist sentiment among the city’s Italian and Slavic populations. According to the 1910 census, 52% of the population spoke Italian, and 25% spoke Slovenian, compared to the 5% of German speakers, most of whom were government officials. In December 1882, the Italian nationalist Guglielmo Oberdan was arrested and executed for planning an assassination attempt on Emperor Franz Joseph during the latter’s visit to Trieste.

The History of Trieste During the World Wars

Following the outbreak of World War I, Italy joined the Allies in 1915 intent on annexing Trieste and other Italian-speaking territories, called terre irridente (unredeemed territories) in Italian, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most of the city’s inhabitants refused to fight for the Austrians and instead enlisted in the Italian Army.

After the collapse of the Austrian war effort in late 1918, Italian troops occupied the city in November. The Italian annexation of Trieste was formalized in the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920, signed between Italy and newly independent Yugoslavia. Under the agreement, Trieste was transferred to Italy, but its surrounding hinterland became part of Yugoslavia. The partition led to a decline in the city’s economic fortunes.

During the interwar period, Trieste lived under Italian fascism, and the passage of anti-Jewish legislation in 1938 prompted attacks against the Jewish community. During the interwar period, Trieste served as the major European transit hub for European Jews emigrating to Palestine. During the Second World War, Trieste escaped heavy fighting until late 1943, when it became part of the Italian Social Republic, commonly known as the Republic of Salò, the German puppet regime headed by Mussolini in northern Italy. In 1944 and 1945, the city witnessed attacks by Slovene Partisans and Allied air raids targeting port facilities.

The Yugoslav forces took over the city at the beginning of May and launched brutal reprisals, known in Italy as the “Foibe massacres,” against Italians and anti-Communist Slovenes. They withdrew on June 12 after an agreement with the British. The city came under joint Anglo-American administration and was mentioned in Winston Churchill’s famous speech in March 1946 when he declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the continent.” The Anglo-American occupation was formalized in 1947 with the establishment of the Free Territory of Trieste. In 1954, the city returned to Italy, but border disputes with Yugoslavia were not resolved until 1975.

Trieste’s economy experienced a revival at the turn of the 21st century after Slovenia gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and joined the European Union and Schengen Area in 2004. This eliminated border controls between Italy and Slovenia and restored Trieste’s trade links with its historical hinterland.

Although not as famous as other Italian tourist destinations such as Rome, Florence, or Venice, Trieste has been attracting large numbers of foreign tourists in recent years. It remains a center of the coffee trade, and its historic coffee houses continue to attract a large number of artists and intellectuals. Trieste serves as a prominent hub for scientific research in Europe, hosting organizations such as the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the World Academy of Sciences.

The Irish Potato Famine, or Great Famine, began in 1845 with the first failure of potato crops in Ireland. It raged until 1852 and changed Ireland’s demographics forever. Around three million Irish men, women, and children either succumbed to starvation or disease or left Ireland altogether. Most emigrants did not return home.

The Great Famine (An Gorta Mór in Irish) fundamentally reshaped Irish history. It was a period of rampant food insecurity, disease outbreaks, societal collapse, and governmental mismanagement. But what exactly made An Gorta Mór so deadly?

1. Phytophthora Infestans

The initial culprit for the Great Irish Famine was an invasive microorganism, now known as Phytophthora infestans. It came to Ireland by accident; shipments of potatoes from the United States to Europe carried the pathogen.

Phytophthora infestans is an interesting microorganism. It is an oomycete—a water mold that propagates via spores, much like fungi do. It tends to thrive in moist environments, and its spores spread through the air or in water. Infected leaves can spread the spores to other potato plants. Historians once believed the causative agent of the Great Irish Famine actually was a fungus, until modern genetic testing revealed otherwise.

Late blight is the plant disease directly caused by Phytophthora infestans. Once the spores from the water mold infiltrate the soil, they eat away at the potatoes’ roots. The leaves of the potato plants develop brownish blotches and shrivel up. The tubers decay in the ground. Secondary pathogens, such as bacteria, can quickly invade the compromised tissues and speed up the plants’ death.

Ireland, with its wet, oceanic climate and a population that was reliant on a potato-heavy diet, would face a catastrophe. But does Phytophthora infestans on its own explain why the Great Irish Famine exploded out of control? Not quite. Late blight had an unwitting partner: the Irish potato crops themselves.

2. Ireland’s Potato Monoculture

What made Ireland’s potato crops so vulnerable to Phytophthora infestans? They were definitely unfamiliar with this pathogen, but an even more important reason lies in potato agriculture itself.

Planting potatoes is relatively simple compared to other vegetables. A single cutting of a potato can be planted in the ground easily and mature into a full potato plant. This was the most common method of sowing Irish potato crops in 1845. Yet, there was a huge downside to this method: if the new potatoes all came from cuttings of a single common ancestor, they would be genetically identical. When a population of any organism lacks genetic diversity, it is more susceptible to a disease outbreak.

Had the Irish grown many varieties of potatoes in similar quantities, they possibly could have mitigated the rot that was to come. But in 1845, a variety called the Lumper was the dominant potato in Ireland. It was resilient, but it lacked sufficient genetic variation. The Irish potato crop of the 1840s was a monoculture. This primed it for significant damage in the event of an outbreak.

So, the Great Irish Famine originated as an ecological crisis. An ecological disaster can do immense damage on its own. However, human-made structures can either function to minimize the damage or exacerbate it. The social structure of 19th-century Ireland did the latter. Once people started starving, social structures made the famine difficult to stop.

3. The Irish Social Structure

Compared to quickly industrializing Britain, Ireland in the early 19th century was mostly agricultural. Elite British observers claimed this agrarian lifestyle was evidence of an unchanging, deficient Irish character (Scanlan, 2025). But Ireland’s population was very much undergoing dramatic changes before the Great Famine. Compared to the start of the 18th century, the Irish population had nearly tripled by 1841. However, British authorities still treated Ireland as a colonial possession.

Most Irish people lived and worked as local farmers under landlords. The crops they grew were both for personal sustenance and for export back to Britain. The landlords themselves were a diverse group. The most elite landlords came from English Protestant backgrounds and lived separately from their Irish Catholic tenants. Under the landlords in the social hierarchy were middlemen, who directly oversaw the tenant farmers. Some middlemen in the 19th century developed reputations for exploitation.

When the Great Famine flared, it wasn’t just Ireland’s tenant farmers who were put in a tight spot. The landlords were as well. Many landlords were faced with the dilemma of either caring for their starving tenants—and risking loss of income—or evicting them. Starting in 1847, the responsibility for famine relief fell on local leaders and private organizations. The worst years of the Great Irish Famine were exacerbated by the policies of successive British governments.

4. British Government Policies

Does culpability for the Great Irish Famine ultimately fall on the British government? That argument can definitely be made. British policies, especially under Prime Minister John Russell, exacerbated the severity of the crisis.

Robert Peel was the United Kingdom’s prime minister when the Great Famine began in 1845. Peel’s primary concerns with the crisis were about the British Empire as a whole, but he was disturbed by reports of mass hunger in Ireland. So, he covertly directed the purchase of £100,000 of corn from North America for the Irish. His cabinet seems to have been kept in the dark about this purchase.

Factionalism in Parliament led to Peel’s replacement in June 1846 by Whig leader John Russell. Russell’s approach to famine relief was much more localized than Peel’s. That isn’t to say his government did nothing in Ireland—he actually spent far more money on relief efforts than Peel had (Scanlan, 2025). However, Russell and his allies did not believe state funds would improve the lives of the Irish poor. Instead, they worried that providing Ireland with emergency food would eventually cause the Irish to become too dependent on government aid.

One of Russell’s ministers, Charles Trevelyan, was especially vocal. As Minister of the Treasury, he oversaw early relief efforts. Trevelyan staunchly believed in a market capitalist approach to stemming the Great Irish Famine. He refused multiple times to order direct relief from London. As the Famine raged, Ireland continued exporting goods such as grains, in order to boost the United Kingdom’s coffers.

The burden of paying for government aid fell on Irish landlords and their tenants. The British government did set up soup kitchens across Ireland, but canceled that program after October 1847—unfortunately, the worst year of the Great Irish Famine. After a relative lull, the blight returned and wiped out the potato crops once again. More landlords evicted their tenants to save money. In the workhouses set up by the British, conditions worsened for the Irish poor. Those Irish families who could afford to emigrate faced a stark choice between leaving the island or wasting away in silence.

What Kind of Disaster Was the Great Irish Famine?

The Great Irish Famine was both an ecological disaster and a political one. A pathogenic microorganism, Phytophthora infestans, was the immediate cause. It decimated potato crops across Ireland, fueled by the potatoes’ limited genetic diversity and the Irish people’s overwhelming dependence on them. But the structure of 19th-century Irish society and British government policies truly caused the crisis to explode. Widespread poverty, imperial rule, and the British government’s emphasis on market solutions above all else meant that more people died of starvation. And once the workhouses opened, starving Irishmen and women were in extremely close proximity. Diseases like dysentery and typhus spread quickly.

The result of this chaos was the Great Irish Famine we now record in our history books. Lasting seven years, it emptied Ireland of three million people via death or emigration. No other crisis has shaped modern Ireland so profoundly.

Bibliography/Further Reading

Crowley, John, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy, eds. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. Washington Square: New York University Press, 2012.

Scanlan, Padraig X. Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine. New York: Basic Books, 2025.

The instability and violence of the English Civil War exacerbated religious paranoia and fervor throughout 17th century England. Capitalizing on this volatile period, Matthew Hopkins (c. 1620-1647), the son of a local Puritan preacher, created a lucrative business as a self-proclaimed witchfinder. Him and his associates travelled throughout East England, convincing local communities to pay hundreds of pounds to uncover, torture, and execute witches. Despite no legal authority or permission, Hopkins was responsible for the executions of hundreds of accused witches, mostly women, from 1644 to 1647. 

English Witch Hunting

Almost two centuries of witch hunting began with Henry VIII. During his reign, the 1542 Witch Act moved witch trials from church authority to secular courts, classifying specific forms of witchcraft as capital felonies. While Elizabeth I continued her father’s persecution of witches, James I further intensified fear towards witchcraft. He detailed in his treatise, Daemonologie (1597), how witchcraft was one of the most pressing threats against England. To combat this, his 1604 Witch Act classified almost all forms of witchcraft as capital offenses. 

Matthew Hopkins was born in 1620 to a strict Puritan family when this fearmongering against witches festered alongside religious fundamentalism and sectarian violence. By 1642, these decades of political instability and persecution erupted into the English Civil War. This set the perfect scene of paranoia and lawlessness for Hopkins to lead one of the bloodiest episodes of witch hunting in English history.

The Rise of The Witchfinder

While most of Hopkin’s early years remain lost to history, he appears in Manningtree, Essex, in 1644 to purchase the Thorne Inn. After claiming to have heard witches convening with the devil, Hopkins reported his findings to the local magistrate and offered to uncover them. Without any legal authority to do so, Hopkins joined forces with John Stearne, a local tailor, to begin a witch hunt.

They first incarcerate an 80-year-old widow, Elizabeth Clarke, and subjected her to psychological torture and sleep deprivation until she confessed to sleeping with the devil, summoning familiars, and naming other witches. In the end, 36 people were arrested, 19 were executed, and several died while incarcerated. Realizing the potential fame and fortune, Hopkins appointed himself as the “Witchfinder General,” and began travelling throughout East Anglia for profit under the pretense of purging local areas of their witches. 

Witch Hunting in East Anglia

Hopkins claimed Parliament commissioned his witch finding campaigns across East Anglia. From 1644 to 1647, he became the deadliest witch hunter in English history, resulting in 100-300 executions. However, he lied. He was never given any permission to arrest, interrogate, torture, and call for the executions of accused witches. Instead, he feigned authority by dressing in dramatic attire including a sweeping black cape, black hat, and buckled boots, while making a fortune by exploiting local superstitions. 

Paid handsomely for each conviction, some towns even levied taxes to afford his services. Once summoned, he and his assistants visited, collected local gossip, arrested, and interrogated those accused to force evidence and confessions. This led to speedy trials and quick hangings. Once all witches were executed or the town budgets were fully spent, he moved onto the next village. His bloodiest day led to the execution of 18 people in Bury St. Edmunds in 1645. 

Tactics and Torture Methods

Incentivized by profit, the Witchfinder General used mental and physical torture to force confessions and forge convictions. Hopkins targeted the most vulnerable members in society, especially women, despite lacking any legal or royal permission. Yet local communities were still most eager to fund and acquire his services.

Hopkin’s primary tactic was to inflict sleep deprivation on accused witches. This induced hysteria, paranoia, and hallucinations making it easier to force confessions. His assistants used needles and blades to slice and prod defendants to test for witch marks. They often used retractable blades ensuring the accused failed the test as they were compensated for every witch uncovered. Hopkins also loved “swimming tests,” where potential witches were bound and drowned. If they floated, the accused were condemned as witches as local superstitions believed the water, a sacred element in baptism, was rejecting them for devilish associations. 

The End and Legacy of the Witchfinder’s Brief Crusade

The magnitude of violence and profit generated by the Witchfinder General immediately raised concerns. In 1646, preacher John Gaule published, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft, condemning Hopkins and questioning the legality of his witch trials. After being confronted by local clergy and noblemen in Norfolk about his methods, credentials, and authority, Hopkins subsequently retired back to Manningtree in 1647.

To rebuttal Gaule, Hopkins wrote, The Discovery of Witches (1647), justifying his tactics and outlining how his methods are most effective to combat witchcraft. His book was well received in Puritan circles, later even influencing the witch tests used during the Salem Witch Trials. But by August 12, 1647, the Witchfinder joined the hundreds he had killed, dying at the age of 27. While folktales claim he died by the same methods he used to torture suspected witches, most historians agree he passed from tuberculosis.

Throughout the centuries since her death, Anne Boleyn has become a subject of fascination to a huge variety of people. Historians, writers, academics, and even television audiences have become obsessed with King Henry VIII’s second queen. It seems that her tragic fate only adds to her appeal as an enchanting figure.

In this article, we will step back into the 16th century and venture straight into the Tower of London. In order to relive the last days of Anne Boleyn, we will attempt to answer one integral question. How did her shocking downfall and untimely death unfold?

A Brief Timeline of Anne Boleyn’s Last Days

Anne Boleyn’s luck began to decline noticeably in January of 1536, almost exactly three years after her wedding to King Henry. There are several significant events that acted as markers for the beginning of her downfall. These include the death of Catherine of Aragon on January 7th, King Henry’s jousting accident on the 24th, and most notably, Anne Boleyn’s miscarriage on the 29th—contemporaries claimed that she had “Miscarried her savior.” By this point, it is likely that Jane Seymour was beginning to replace Anne Boleyn in King Henry’s affections. From this day onward, throughout the next three months, her story spiralled out of control.

One of the most surprising elements of the story of Anne Boleyn’s downfall is the speed of its progression. The swiftness with which her arrest, trial, and execution were carried out is shocking to behold, even five centuries after their completion. Between her arrest (the first step of her downfall, which would have been obvious to her) to her death (the end of her enduring story), there were only 17 days.

It all began on May 1, when King Henry VIII mysteriously vanished from the annual May Day joust, apparently without so much as waving goodbye to his wife. This was the last time Anne Boleyn would have had any sight of her husband. Less than 24 hours later, on May 2, she was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. After twelve days imprisoned in her lodgings at the Tower, Anne Boleyn and her brother George were both found guilty and sentenced to death.

Immediately following these events, the marriage between King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was declared null and void by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. This left their only child, Princess Elizabeth, as unwanted and illegitimate.

Anne Boleyn’s execution was originally scheduled for May 18, but was postponed due to the executioner being delayed on his way from France. On May 19, Anne Boleyn’s story came to an end with her execution inside the walls of the Tower of London.

The following day, King Henry VIII and his third wife, Jane Seymour, were formally betrothed. Ten days later, without a thought to spare for the woman he used to love, King Henry married Jane at Whitehall Palace, and shortly after, she was declared the new Queen of England.

The Arrest of Anne Boleyn

Tradition tells us that Anne Boleyn was watching a game of tennis at Greenwich Palace at the time of her arrest. A messenger arrived at her side and informed her that the King desired her presence before the Privy Council. Doing as she was bid, Anne Boleyn immediately left the game and made her way to the council chamber.

What came next must have been an incredible shock. The council informed her that she was being arrested on charges of adultery with numerous men. After exchanging a selection of heated words with the Duke of Norfolk, Sir William Fitzwilliam, Sir William Paulet, and a few others, she was escorted back to her apartments. She remained there for a few hours, but at around two o’clock in the afternoon, she was placed in a barge, taken down the Thames, through the Tower Gate (rather than Traitor’s Gate), and delivered to the Tower of London.

There, she was met by the constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, who was prepared for her arrival. It was Kingston who would be responsible for Anne Boleyn’s safety and well-being for however long she was required to remain at the Tower. This would have been a difficult job. On the one hand, Anne Boleyn was a prisoner awaiting trial. On the other hand, she was still technically Queen of England. The level of her treatment would have been extremely hard to assess, especially with the likes of Thomas Cromwell demanding regular updates on her behavior, her words, or anything else that might incriminate her.

On May 3, William Kingston wrote to Thomas Cromwell to tell him of Anne Boleyn’s reaction to her imprisonment. “I went before the Queen into her lodging,” Kingston explained. “She said unto me, ‘Mr. Kingston, shall I go into a dungeon?’ I said, ‘No, Madam. You shall go into the lodging you lay in at your coronation.” The fact that Anne Boleyn stayed in the queen’s lodgings rather than a dungeon is significant. Kingston continued, “‘It is too good for me,’ she said, ‘Jesus have mercy on me.’ And kneeled down, weeping a good pace, and in the same sorrow fell into a great laughing, as she has done many times since.”

Anne Boleyn was not alone in her imprisonment, but had many ladies to attend to her. However, it is important to remember that these ladies were not her usual companions but had been handpicked by Thomas Cromwell. They were Mistress Coffin (the wife of Anne Boleyn’s Master of the Horse), Lady Boleyn (whose identity has not been confirmed, but who is likely to have been an aunt on her father’s side), and Baroness Elizabeth Stonor (the wife of Walter Stonor). Mary Scrope, the wife of William Kingston, was also present at Anne Boleyn’s side.

A Letter From the Lady in the Tower

Although Anne Boleyn spent only 17 days imprisoned in her lodgings at the Tower of London, it seems likely that it felt to her an eternity. Throughout this time, it was reported that she grew gradually more anxious and increasingly fretful. Her greatest desire was to meet with the King and to speak with him face-to-face.

There was a good reason Anne Boleyn desperately sought to convene with King Henry. She believed that if they saw each other in the flesh, she would be able to convince him to change his mind; if not about their marriage, then at least about her current situation. Anne Boleyn was well aware of King Henry’s weakness when it came to desperate situations such as these. Some seven years earlier, she herself had forbidden King Henry from having any close contact with Cardinal Wolsey, for fear that he would relent in his presence and forgive him.

The requests to meet King Henry were met with firm and definite replies. The answer was no, without room for negotiation. However, there was an alternative offered. On May 6, Anne Boleyn was finally granted permission by William Kingston to write a letter to the King. This small mercy was not exactly what she had in mind, but it allowed her one last chance to make some form of contact with her husband, insist on her innocence, and even make a plea for forgiveness.

If and when he opened his letter, King Henry would have been greeted with the words “To the King from the Lady in the Tower.” Anne Boleyn began the content of her letter by professing her confusion over her arrest; “Your Grace’s displeasure, and my imprisonment are things so strange to me, as what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether ignorant.” 

Anne Boleyn finished her letter with one final appeal. She implored King Henry that the other men who had been imprisoned should not die for her sake. Her plea is so filled with genuine compassion and desperation that it may bring an air of sadness to any modern-day reader. “If I have ever found favour in your sight,” she began, “if ever the name of Anne Boleyn hath been pleasing to your ears, then let me obtain this request.” 

She signed her letter with the words, “Your most loyal and ever faithful wife, Anne Boleyn.” Her final words to the King were, “From my doleful prison, the tower, this sixth of May.” 

The letter consisted of nearly 700 words. It also included a plea for a fair trial, reminders that their daughter Elizabeth was innocent of all wrongdoing, assurance of acceptance and obedience if she should be sentenced to death, and prayers that God would forgive him for all his sins against her.

The letter received no reply, and obviously, her requests were wholly ignored.

The Last Night of Anne Boleyn’s Life

There are a few cases in which a person can predict the exact moment of their death. Upcoming execution is one of the exceptions. On the night of May 18, Anne Boleyn knew that she would die at eight o’clock the following morning. The thought of her final night in the Tower of London is chilling, perhaps even haunting.

Anne Boleyn’s final evening is undocumented, and so her actions, behaviors, and emotions remain unknown. We assume that she would not have slept, but would have spent hours before God in prayer. It is likely that she prayed for her soul, her painless death, her safe entry into heaven, and the safety of her daughter.

The Last Moments of Anne Boleyn

It was May 19, during the year of 1536, that Anne Boleyn was executed at the Tower of London. When she appeared at eight o’clock in the morning, she was said to have been calm, composed, and dignified. One eyewitness account tells us that she “ … went to her death with an untroubled countenance.” 

Anne Boleyn had spent the morning with her confessor, John Skip, who had administered to her the last rites. During confession, she supposedly once again confirmed her innocence. Then, less than an hour before her death, she took communion for the last time. The rest of the time, she is likely to have spent standing still, contemplating her former life and her upcoming afterlife, whilst her ladies dressed and readied her.

Anne Boleyn had been carefully prepared by her ladies for her death, and it is unlikely that any of the details on her clothing were placed there by accident. Her ermine trim represented her position as queen. Her kirtle was red, the traditional color of martyrdom. She wore an English hood, rather than the more fashionable French hood, so that she might cover her hair entirely.

George Boleyn, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Sir William Brereton, and Mark Smeaton had all been executed on Tower Hill two days previously. They were originally supposed to have been hanged, drawn, and quartered, but in his mercy, King Henry commuted their sentences to beheading. Anne Boleyn received similar merciful treatment; instead of being burned as initially intended, she was killed by the sword. An executioner from Calais, well known for his skill at delivering quick and painless deaths, was specifically selected by the King and Cromwell to perform the task.

Many notable figures gathered to watch the spectacle. Some of the most significant names include Thomas Cromwell, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry Fitzroy, Sir Ralph Warren, and even the Lord Mayor of London. Also present were aldermen, sheriffs, and representatives from various guilds. Most of King Henry’s Privy Council also had the pleasure of observing the beheading.

It was on the scaffold that Anne Boleyn addressed the crowd gathered before her.

The Last Words of Anne Boleyn

People always want to know the last words of their hero. Whether they be witty and amusing or deep and meaningful, the sentence a person chooses to say with their last breath can reveal so much about their life, their character, and even the nature of their death.

Unfortunately, the truth is that Anne Boleyn’s final words are not overwhelmingly exciting. They have been well documented and are well known to many historians, but have not been carried through history in the same way as many other final declarations. Even Catherine Howard’s famous jibe—“I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Thomas Culpepper”—is significantly better known than anything uttered by Anne Boleyn on the scaffold.

It is Edward Hall, a chronicler of the 15th and 16th centuries, that we have to thank for the longevity of Anne’s final words. It is he who recorded Anne Boleyn’s address to the crowd, which she delivered just moments before her beheading. The last speech of Anne Boleyn, as recorded in full, can be found below…

“Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the King and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.” 

That may have been an end to her public address, but it was not an end to her private prayer. After completing this speech, Anne Boleyn knelt on the scaffold in preparation for her death. While on her knees, she continued to speak quietly, to herself and to God. “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul,” she repeated, “Lord Jesus receive my soul.”

This short prayer highlights two things: firstly, her devotion to God, and secondly, her acceptance of her fate.

As Anne Boleyn was repeating her final prayer, she was swiftly and effortlessly dispatched by the French swordsman. The executioner was renowned for his expertise, and so as she knelt and prayed, he was already equipped with his sword. According to many eye-witness accounts, he shouted across the crowds for an imaginary assistant to bring him the sword. As Anne Boleyn instinctively turned her head in the direction of his calls, he caught her off guard and fulfilled his duty.

Anne Boleyn was dead. Her life had come to an end at the age of around 28 to 35 years.

Anne Boleyn: Discovering What Remains

To say that the body of Anne Boleyn was treated poorly after her death would be something of an understatement. Her burial could hardly have been less dignified. Anne Boleyn’s body and head were collected by her attendants, wrapped in linen, and placed in a chest made of elm. That chest was later laid beneath the chancel pavement in the Tower of London’s famous Chapel, that of Saint Peter ad Vincula.

Anne Boleyn’s grave was communal, which meant that a former Queen of England now lay with a selection of criminals who had also been executed at the Tower. There was nothing more to the process of her burial. Her body was concealed without so much as a funeral to commemorate her life.

For three centuries, it appeared as if Anne Boleyn had been lost to history. That was, until the year of 1876, when some major renovations were carried out and as a result, equally major discoveries were made. With Queen Victoria’s permission, the construction work in the Chapel was undertaken, and a skeleton of great significance was uncovered. It was taken for observation and identified as belonging to Anne Boleyn.

The surgeon presiding over the investigation was named Frederic Mouat. His findings were recorded by Donye Bell. Together, they gathered their evidence and determined that the skeleton belonged to Anne Boleyn.

Mouat and Bell made and published many comments regarding the skeleton. “A female of between twenty-five and thirty years of age, of a delicate frame of body, and who had been of slender and perfect proportions.” He also wrote that “The forehead and lower jaw were especially well formed,” and that “the vertebrae were particularly small.” Later, he continued to describe his findings by stating that the skeleton had “a well formed round skull, an intellectual forehead, straight orbital ridge, large eyes, oval face, and rather square, full chin.”

Although it was decided that these descriptions matched the appearance of Anne Boleyn as she appears in her authenticated portraits, it is important to remember that this is not a definitive finding. Some historians believe that the identified bones could have belonged to another woman executed at the Tower of London. Some even go as far as to suggest that they could have belonged to Anne Boleyn’s similarly fated cousin, Catherine Howard.

Nonetheless, whether Anne Boleyn’s or not, the remains were later reinterred in the same location.

In the 21st century, the grave of Anne Boleyn is prominently marked on the marble floor. Her monument includes a selection of moving words.

“Gentle visitor, pause a whileWhere you stand death cut away the light of many daysHere, jeweled names were broken from the vivid thread of life.May they rest in peace while we walk the generations around their strife and courageUnder these restless skies.”