The walls of Antioch are the only visible memento of the ancient city. Continuously repaired and reconfigured, they encompass at least eight different phases. How these defenses document the transformation of the city through the ages is the core issue.

This considers Gibraltar as a special case in the history of Britains developing empire. Captured by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in 1704, assigned to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, the rock was devoid of the resources and potential for agricultural development that might justify the violence entailed in its conquest. This was a problem for an early observer (the poet John Breval, who described the place in Calpe, 1717), but the development of a taste for unimproved and mountainous landscapes, and a more confident sense of British power as civilizing, made it easier for later observers to justify British possession. The great siege of Gibraltar (1779-1783) cemented the rocks status as British: its bare features acquired an iconic status as a symbol of British independence and freedom, a reference point that could be evoked in the context of other imperial conquests.

The Mongol military centered on armies of decimally organized mobile horse archers. This system provided the Mongols with both a rationally organized military and a means of incorporating defeated enemies, as soldiers now belonged to units of a thousand rather than retaining old tribal identities. As the Mongol Empire expanded, new groups joined their ranks and the Mongols found new ways of accommodating them into their war machine without fundamentally disrupting their own ways of war. The Mongols also realized that regional needs sometimes dictated the use of other forces. Siege engineers, infantry, heavy cavalry, and naval forces all found use within the Mongol military. The Mongols showed flexibility not only in using personnel and military units, but also in adopting technologies, including gunpowder. After the dissolution of the United Mongol Empire, Mongol armies primarily fought each other in internecine wars. It became increasingly difficult to share training, technology, and personnel.

When we turned to the besieged Damascene suburb of Darayya, we found a very different narrative emerging around the production and evolution of rebel governance from those in Raqqa and Saraqeb. Darayya, a mere 8 kilometers from the country’s capital, sat close to the regime’s military airport, the General Intelligence Service Headquarters, and the Interior Ministry.1 The accounts from this place were not of people controlled by an occupying rebel force or an emergent limited access order, but rather a community – rebels included – that had cohered as the target of a sustained, merciless siege by the regime on account of its early and enthusiastic participation in the uprising.

From Antiquity through contemporary times, depriving populations of access to food, water and other means to sustain life has been a central tool of genocide. The deliberate withholding or destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population can be used to pursue policies that systematically target groups with an impact equal to, and potentially even more widespread than, acts of killing. However, the acts that produce and sustain starvation are treated as lesser crimes than killing. When described as famine, these calamities are often presented as natural or unintentional crises of hunger or low nutrition. Drawing on historical examples that range from ancient Carthage, colonial famines, the Nazi Hungerplan, Communist agricultural and political policies, manipulation of humanitarian aid during the war in Bosnia, and genocides in the 21st century, this chapter considers the complications of assessing intent and formulating responses to mass starvation. It offers a wide-ranging overview of the critical concepts, legal developments, and key issues at stake when deliberate deprivation is imposed on a people as part of genocidal policies.

Giovanni Villani, in his chronicle, reports that, in 1117, Pisa and Florence formed a military alliance. Pisa asked for protection against Lucca, while their troops were busy in Mallorca besieging a Saracen stronghold (Figure 4.1).1 The safeguard from Lucca meant a Florentine military presence right at the doorstep of their neighbors, the problematic nature of which did not escape the attention of the author. Villani explains at length the measures taken by the Florentine army to avoid any potential attack on women in Pisa while their men were away.

Chapter 1, “Warsaw Besieged: September 1939,” describes the September 1939 siege of Warsaw during Case White (the September Campaign or Polish Defensive War) by the German Wehrmacht and Nazi SS personnel and the city’s eventual capitulation. The first of four chapters on how Nazi Germany dismantled the Polish state and nation for long-term occupation by targeting the Warsaw intelligentsia, the description of the siege frames the project. The military invasion revealed German brutality and weak Polish military performance, and provoked a Polish government evacuation crisis. The evacuation created chaos, ruptured Poles’ faith in their government, and triggered the creation of a Polish government-in-exile in western Europe far from occupied Warsaw. The people of Warsaw, led by Mayor Stefan Starzyński, coordinated military-civilian cooperative defense efforts, setting the tone for elite behavior during the coming occupation. This chapter argues that the siege-time cooperation was the foundational experience of the capital’s intelligentsia, and framed responses to the persecutions of the coming occupation.

Who are these Romanian Germans? This chapter maps out the materials from which Romanian Germans constructed their identity from the late nineteenth century into the interwar period. It starts with an overview of the history of Germans in the region before engaging in detail with three key identity myths that emerged from and around that history. The final section embeds those identity narratives in a transnational web of reception and affirmation spanning interwar Europe. In making sense of their experiences in the twentieth century, this chapter argues, Germans in Romania used long-standing narratives that had been important to the two communities of Saxons and Swabians, picking and choosing older ‘foundation myths’ from these groups according to the needs of the circumstances in which they found themselves. These myths were highly malleable and usable by a variety of actors in the community, not just elites. Romanian Germans thus returned to three key themes time and again: Saxon privilege and superiority, a sense of being under siege, and the Swabian path of ordeal.

This chapter brings the different groups of actors together in the environment in which they would experience the final months of the war: Festung Königsberg. Establishing the role cities played during wartime, it reconstructs how the fortress strategy came into being. It then explores how the new balance of power in fortresses manifested itself and how the fortress strategy was perceived by those ordered to defend them. During the Soviet 1944 summer offensive, Operation Bagration, the strategy proved to be a failure, yet the High Command persisted with it as the Wehrmacht was forced back onto German soil. After analysing why the strategy was retained on home soil, this chapter examines the working relationship between the military and the Party in these fortresses. The origins and nature of this relationship had significant consequences for the everyday rule of the besieged fortress. Both Party and Army demanded final authority in Königsberg, but it was ultimately claimed by the latter. Factors such as personal standing, reputation, and commitment among the different groups all shaped local dynamics at the fortress command and shaped the organisation of the city’s defence and evacuation.

This chapter explores the visual sources for violence and warfare created over the millennium from 500 to 1500 in the lands where Islam became a major presence. It divides the copious evidence into three chronological blocks (early, middle and late) to highlight the different visual sources that predominate in each period (architectural decoration, portable objects and illustrated manuscripts). The many scenes of violence depicted on these buildings and objects reflect the unsettled times and places where they were made and the constant occurrence of battles and warfare, some of it with sophisticated weaponry. But these vignettes of warfare and fighting also reflect a more positive view of violence, designed to invoke the prowess and heroism of the object’s owner. This triumphal theme extends to nature and the animal kingdom, as man dominates and tames the often-inhospitable landscape and the wild beasts in it. Many incidents also allude to the legendary and literary past, particularly in Iran, and metaphorically tie the object’s owner (and the viewer) to epic heroes. These many scenes of violence are thus multivalent and require decoding.