by Rick Beyer
Had da Vinci pushed his concepts harder, he might have dramatically changed the face of Renaissance warfare. But he was notorious for leaving a project unfinished and moving on to the next grand idea.
Leonardo is best known today as the artistic giant who painted the enigmatic Mona Lisa. But it may be in the military arts that his genius showed through the most.
The tank that Leonardo designed was armored with heavy wooden beams and propelled by men inside operating hand cranks. It was designed to make quick penetrations into enemy lines that could be followed up by infantry . . . which is exactly how motor-driven tanks were first used more than four centuries later in World War I.
“WHATEVER THE SITUATION, I CAN INVENT AN INFINITE VARIETY OF MACHINES FOR BOTH ATTACK AND DEFENSE.”
— LEONARDO DA VINCI, IN A LETTER TO THE DUKE OF MILAN
When the leaders of Florence sought da Vinci’s advice in attacking Pisa, he came up with a scheme to divert the river Arno, which would deprive the Pisans of water and cut off their access to the harbor. Breathtaking in conception, it was, like many of da Vinci’s ideas, too difficult to execute. The effort was ultimately abandoned.
1519
SIEGE OF BREAD AND BUTTER
A famous scientist, a tasty spread, and a wartime outbreak of disease.
To Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus we owe our understanding that the earth moves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. It was a discovery that revolutionized science. Do we also owe to him the custom of putting butter on our bread?
In 1519, Copernicus was called upon to command Polish forces besieged in the fortified town of Allenstein, a Polish town on the Prussian border.
During the siege, the town was struck by plague. Copernicus isolated the town’s bread as being the source of the disease. But he suspected that it wasn’t the bread itself, rather the fact that something was contaminating it.
Sanitary conditions in the beleaguered town were marginal at best, and the coarse black loaves could be dropped in the dirty streets, or otherwise contaminated, without even showing it.
That’s when a fellow by the name of Gerhard Glickselig suggested to Copernicus that the bread loaves be covered with a thin layer of light-colored spread. That would make it obvious if the bread was dropped or if debris fell on it, and people could avoid eating it. Copernicus ordered it be done, and the plague soon ended.
Thus were married bread and butter, at least for the first time that we know of. It didn’t become common in Europe until the following century. And so we honor Copernicus as a man ahead of his time in matters of cuisine as well as the cosmos.
True to form, Copernicus employed the scientific method to discover the source of the disease. He divided the town’s residents into four groups and fed them different things. The group that got no bread was the only one that remained plague free.
Allenstein was being besieged by the Teutonic Knights, a religious order of German knights formed in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Later they conquered Prussia, and battled with Polish kings for centuries.
Copernicus’s revolutionary theory about the earth revolving around the sun was published on his deathbed, sparing him conflict with the Vatican, which would plague Galileo and others who followed in his footsteps.
1592
FIGHTING TURTLES
The most amazing warships you’ve never heard of.
The famous Civil War battle between Monitor and Merrimac in 1862 ushered in the age of ironclad warships. Or so it is generally assumed. In fact, a brilliant Korean admiral introduced the ironclad more than 250 years earlier.
Japanese invaders landed in Korea in 1592, and won several quick victories. The country was on the verge of defeat until Korean admiral Yi Sun-Sin stepped into the breach with a fleet of innovative vessels he had helped design. He called them kobukson, or “turtle ships.” These were the world’s first ironclads, the earliest ancestors of modern warships.
The turtle ships had rounded roofs covered with iron plating and spikes to ward off boarders. Ports cut into the side of the turtle ships could accommodate up to twenty-six cannons. The fearsome warships bore a remarkable resemblance to the Civil War ironclads that would see action centuries later, except that they were powered by oarsmen instead of steam engines.
The Japanese had many more ships than the Koreans, but they found that their guns could not penetrate the armor, and their fire arrows failed to set the turtle ships ablaze. A master tactician, Admiral Yi used the kobukson to win a series of battles against the larger Japanese fleet, enabling Korea to drive off the Japanese invaders. In 1598, during a second Japanese invasion, Yi achieved an even bigger victory, destroying more than two hundred Japanese ships.
Admiral Yi was killed in that battle, and his death spelled the death of the turtle ships. No one else had the vision to use them effectively, so the age of the iron-clad warship would have to wait.
Some forty thousand Japanese sailors and soldiers were killed in Yi’s last battle. That’s more than twice the number of Spanish who died when England defeated the Armada in 1588.
There are no surviving turtle ships, or even the plans from one. This replica was built from a description contained in Admiral Yi’s diaries. Smoke could be poured out of the dragon head, a tactic Admiral Yi used to confuse and frighten the Japanese—the first recorded use of a smoke screen in a naval battle.
Like Admiral Nelson centuries later, Yi was killed at his moment of supreme victory, about to win a battle that would save his homeland. His last words: “Do not weep, do not announce my death. Beat the drum, blow the trumpet, wave the flag for advance.”
1618
A FALLING-OUT IN PRAGUE
It might have been downright funny . . . if it hadn’t started a war.
In May of 1618, three men were hurled out a high window of Hradcany Castle in Prague. Instead of being killed or badly hurt, they landed in a dung heap that cushioned their fall. They took to their heels and scampered off, their pride being the only thing seriously injured.
The event sounds almost comical, but it proved to have tragic results.
The men were official representatives of the Roman Catholic Hapsburg emperor. An enraged crowd of Protestant nobles had thrown them out the window to protest the closing of several protestant churches. This act of rebellion outraged the emperor, and triggered a war.
It began as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Bohemia. Soon Austria got involved, then Denmark and Sweden. Shortly thereafter, Poland, France, and the Netherlands joined in. The scandal in Bohemia had exploded into a seemingly endless conflict that engulfed much of Europe: the Thirty Years’ War.
Ten million people would die in the war, more than a quarter of the population of Central Europe. When it was over, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was dealt a major blow. What emerged from the war was a Europe filled with sovereign states that could choose their own religions . . . the Europe we still know today.
The incident became known as the “Defenestration of Prague”—defenestration being a fancy word for throwing someone out the window. It has a history in Prague. Two hundred years before this defenestration, several town councillors were thrown out the window of Prague City Hall, an event that sparked a war of its own.
When a peace conference was finally called to end the war, it required six months of negotiations just to agree on where everyone would sit. After another year of discussions, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed.
The men were thrown out of the middle set of windows. The monument below marks where they landed. They claimed the Virgin Mary had magically appeared to cushion their fall, but onlookers said it was manure piled up in what was at that time the castle moat.
1620
DREBBEL’S DREAM
The forgotten vessel that was the first of its kind.
Drebbel was a jack of all trades: glassmaker, engraver, alchemist, doctor, and, of course, inventor. Despite his many skills, he died in poverty in 1634.
Not long after the Pilgrims set sail from England aboard the Mayflower, a far different vessel ventured forth on a journey up London’s Thames River. It traveled only a few miles, but it did something the Mayflower did not do, and could not do.
It traveled underwater.
The vessel, designed by Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel, was the first successful submarine ever built. Drebbel had been hired as a court inventor for England’s King James and was trying to convince the Royal Navy that this was the vessel of the future.
Drebbel took a fishing boat and built a wooden roof over it. Then he covered the whole thing with greased leather. It was powered by twelve oarsmen, who breathed air that came through a snorkel tube. A sloping foredeck acted as a diving plane, and the vessel moved up the river about twelve feet underwater. Observers said it traveled from Westminster Palace to Greenwich, a distance of about four miles, in three hours.
The successful test of the boat piqued the king’s interest, and Drebbel built two larger versions of his submarine. It is said that the king even took a ride in one of them. But the Royal Navy never did cotton to the contraption. They just couldn’t imagine that a vessel that traveled underwater could have any military use. It would be nearly three centuries before they changed their minds.
The first submarine employed for military purposes was the Turtle, designed by David Bushnell of Connecticut. The one-man sub tried to attach a mine to a British man-of-war in New York Harbor in 1776. The effort failed and the mine exploded harmlessly. Wrote George Washington later: “I thought, and still think, that it was an effort of genius.”
“A CONCEIT OF THAT DESERVEDLY FAMOUS MECHANICIAN AND CHYMIST CORNELIUS DREBBEL.”
— DESCRIPTION OF DREBBEL’S BOAT BY SIR ROBERT BOYLE IN 1662
The first submarine successfully used in battle was the Hunley, a Confederate submarine that rammed the USS Housatonic with an explosive torpedo in 1864. The explosion sank the Housatonic but also sent the Hunley to the bottom off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, costing the lives of everyone aboard.
1642
BEES IN BATTLE
Battlefields have been abuzz with bees from ancient times till today.
In the closing stages of the Thirty Years’ War, a Swedish army assaulted Kissengen, a walled city in Bavaria. The desperate defenders responded by throwing beehives off the wall into the ranks of the Swedes, who were forced to retreat in the face of stinging attacks from the angry swarm that enveloped them.
This was hardly unprecedented. When faced with the question “To bee or not to bee?” armies throughout the ages have consistently answered in the affirmative. The Romans frequently loaded their catapults with beehives and launched them upon their enemies. King Richard the Lionhearted did the same thing against the Saracens during the Crusades. The Saxons, the Moors, and the Hungarians also used them in various battles.
Bees have been used at sea as well. There is at least one recorded instance of sailors on a small ship in the Mediterranean climbing the rigging and throwing beehives down onto the deck of an attacking galley, instantly turning the tables on the larger ship.
Bee warfare hasn’t gone out of style, either. Both sides in Vietnam created fearsome booby traps using hives of Asian honeybees, larger and more ferocious than their Western cousins. And at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Pentagon scientists are trying to recruit bees into the war on terror, training them to sniff out explosives. They hope the bees will be able to uncover landmines and bomb factories.
That would be a honey of a trick.
In the so-called Battle of the Bees during World War I, both British and German forces fighting for the East African city of Tanga were tormented by swarms of angry bees provoked by machine-gun fire disturbing their nests. Some soldiers were stung hundreds of times. During the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War, the 132nd Pennsylvania Infantry was routed by bees after Confederate shells broke open a nearby farmer’s beehives.
Bees may look fierce, but the truth is that they tend to respond only when provoked. Hives handled with care could be transported or loaded on a catapult with little problem. Once dashed against a wall or on the ground, however, their peace-loving populations turn into winged warriors seeking venomed vengeance.
The Romans made such frequent use of beehives in their catapults that some historians feel it contributed to a massive decline in the European bee population during the later stages of the Roman Empire.
1683
THE SIEGE THAT GAVE BIRTH TO THE CROISSANT
An invading Turkish army provides the inspiration for a breakfast delicacy.
The croissant is not French—it was first baked in Austria. And its shape is anything but an accident. The popular pastry dates back to 1683. In that year an army of more than one hundred thousand Ottoman Turks was besieging the city of Vienna. They surrounded it for months, and residents inside the stout walls began to wonder if each day would be their last.
When the Turks tried tunneling under the walls, bakers working through the night heard the digging sounds and raised the alarm. This early warning prevented the Turks from breaching Vienna’s walls, and helped save the city. Eventually an army under Poland’s King John III reached Vienna and drove the Turks away.
The bakers celebrated the end of the siege in a remarkable way. They copied the crescent moon from their enemy’s flag, and turned it into a commemorative pastry. It was called a Kipfel (German for “crescent”) and it honored a victory that might never have happened but for the bakers themselves.
The Siege of Vienna is also believed by many to be the birthplace of the bagel. King John of Poland was widely known as a skilled horseman, and a baker supposedly created a roll in the shape of a stirrup to honor him. The Austrian word for stirrup is Bügel—eventually Americanized to “bagel.” Can it be true that one battle did so much for so many breakfasts?
Kipfels turned into “croissants” in 1770 when fifteen-year-old Austrian princess Marie Antoinette arrived in France to marry the future King Louis XVI. Parisian bakers started turning out kipfels in her honor, and the French found themselves in love with a breakfast treat that they soon made their own.
1739
WAR OF JENKINS’ EAR
The oddly named conflict that inspired an American landmark.
Admiral Vernon was known as “Old Grog” because he wore a grogram (gross-grain) cloak in stormy weather. After he diluted his sailors’ rum ration with water, the disgruntled seamen named the watered-down drink after their commander: grog
No war in history has a more striking title than the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Robert Jenkins was a British sea captain whose ship was boarded by the Spanish Coast Guard in the Caribbean. According to Jenkins, the Spanish captain tied him up and cut off his ear with a sword. He was so angry that he brought the severed ear to Parliament, prompting the prime minister to declare war on Spain.
Actually, things were a little more complicated than that. Jenkins didn’t exhibit his ear to Parliament until seven years after he said it was cut off. Some people wondered aloud if that shriveled thing in the box really was his severed ear. Critics claimed he had lost his ear in a bar fight, and that the whole thing was a political stunt designed to force a war the prime minister didn’t really want.
Whatever the truth, the alleged brutality inflamed public opinion. England was enraged, and war was waged.
The British hero of this war was Admiral Edward Vernon. Today we remember him less for his exploits, perhaps, than for what he inspired.
One of his officers was a young colonial who owned a farm in Virginia called the Little Hunting Plantation. Lawrence Washington was so impressed with his superior officer that he renamed the farm in Vernon’s honor. When Lawrence died a few years later, his younger half brother George inherited the place.
Mount Vernon. Home of President George Washington. And America’s only monument to the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
“I COMMENDED MY SOUL TO GOD, AND MY CAUSE TO MY C
OUNTRY.”
— JENKINS’ STIRRING DESCRIPTION OF HOW HE REACTED TO HAVING HIS EAR CUT OFF
Vernon achieved fame for his attack on the Spanish colonial town of Porto Bello, now a part of Panama. He attacked with just six men-of-war and emerged victorious. Londoners are reminded of the battle (or should be) when they go shopping on tony Porto-bello Road.
1755
A DANDY TALE
A soldiers’ song that made history by switching sides.
During the French and Indian War, a British surgeon named Richard Schuckburg put pen to paper to write some new words to an old folk tune. Schuckburg had the reputation for being a delicious wit. Soon his lyrics, which ridiculed colonial militiamen fighting alongside British soldiers, were on everybody’s lips.
“Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
In the years leading up to the American Revolution this song of insult became a favorite of British soldiers serving in North America. They dreamed up countless new verses mocking the colonials they were growing to detest, as a way of putting those uncouth Americans in their place.
On April 19, 1775, as British troops marched out from Boston to Lexington and Concord, fife and drum played the tune while soldiers sang merrily along. Later in the day as they found themselves in a desperate battle with an army of rebels, the song could be heard again.