Siege Warfare
28 battles
Walls breached, cities starved, and fortresses toppled. These famous sieges tested the endurance of both defender and attacker, often lasting months or even years.
What links these battles?
A siege is a battle against walls, hunger and time as much as against soldiers. The engagements here span more than three thousand years, from Lachish and Jerusalem in the ancient Near East, through Caesar's double ring of earthworks at Alesia and the fall of Constantinople to Ottoman cannon, to the trench sieges of Vicksburg and the modern city fighting of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Tobruk. Together they show how the balance swung between attacker and defender as fortification, artillery and supply changed, and why so many sieges ended not with a storm but with starvation, disease or negotiation.
The 28 battles in this collection
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