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The Battle of Greece was an important World War II battle which occurred on the Greek mainland and in southern Albania. The battle was fought between the Allies (Greece and the British Commonwealth) and the Axis (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) forces. The battle of Greece began on October 28, 1940, when Fascist Italy invaded Greece, and ended with the fall of Kalamata in the Peloponnese. With the Battle of Crete and several naval actions it is considered part of the wider Aegean component of the Balkans Campaign of World War II.
Fascist Italy invaded Greece on October 28, 1940, from Italian-occupied Albania. The Greek army however, proved to be an able opponent, counterattacked and forced the Italians to retreat. By mid-December the Greeks occupied one quarter of Albania, tying down 530,000 Italian troops. In March 1941 a major Italian counterattack failed, humiliating Italian military pretensions.
On April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany reluctantly invaded Greece through Bulgaria to secure its southern flank. The Greek troops fought back with great tenacity but the Greek army was vastly outnumbered and outgunned, and it collapsed. Athens fell on April 27 and the British Commonwealth managed to evacuate nearly 50,000 troops. The Battle of Greece, however, is credited by some historians, such as John Keegan, as being "decisive in determining the future course of the Second World War" as the invasion of the area made it impossible for Hitler and Stalin to come to an agreement on their respective spheres of influence. (Read more...)
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The Cretan War (205 BC–200 BC) was fought by King Philip V of Macedon, the Aetolian League, several Cretan cities (of which Olous and Hierapytna were the most important) and Spartan pirates against the forces of Rhodes and later Attalus I of Pergamum, Byzantium, Cyzicus, Athens and Knossos.
The Macedonians had just concluded the First Macedonian War and Philip, seeing his chance to defeat Rhodes, formed an alliance with Aetolian and Spartan pirates who began raiding Rhodian ships. Philip also formed an alliance with several important Cretan cities, such as Hierapynta and Olous. With the Rhodian fleet and economy suffering from the depredations of the pirates, Philip believed his chance to crush Rhodes was at hand. To help achieve his goal, he formed an alliance with the King of the Seleucid Empire, Antiochus the Great, against Ptolemy V of Egypt (the Seleucid Empire and Egypt were the other two Diadochi states). Philip began attacking the lands of Ptolemy and Rhodes's allies in Thrace and around the Sea of Marmara.
In 202, Rhodes and her allies Pergamum, Cyzicus, and Byzantium combined their fleets and defeated Philip at the Battle of Chios. Just a few months later, Philip's fleet defeated the Rhodians at Lade. While Philip was plundering Pergamese territory and attacking cities in Caria, Attalus I of Pergamum went to Athens to try to create a diversion. He succeeded in securing an alliance with the Athenians, who immediately declared war on the Macedonians. The King of Macedon could not remain inactive; he assailed Athens with his navy and with some infantry. The Romans warned him, however, to withdraw or face war with Rome. After suffering a defeat at the hands of the Rhodian and Pergamese fleets, Philip withdrew, but not before attacking the city of Abydos on the Hellespont. Abydos fell after a long siege and most of its inhabitants committed suicide. (Read more...)
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The Corinthian War was an ancient Greek conflict lasting from 395 BC until 387 BC, pitting Sparta against a coalition of four allied states; Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos; which were initially backed by Persia. The immediate cause of the war was a local conflict in northwest Greece in which both Thebes and Sparta intervened. The deeper cause was hostility towards Sparta provoked by that city's unilateral domination of Greek politics in the nine years after the end of the Peloponnesian War.
The war was fought on two fronts, on land near Corinth and Thebes and at sea in the Aegean. On land, the Spartans achieved several early successes in major battles, but were unable to capitalize on their advantage, and the fighting soon became stalemated. At sea, the Spartan fleet was decisively defeated by a Persian fleet early in the war, an event that effectively ended Sparta's attempts to become a naval power. Taking advantage of this fact, Athens launched several naval campaigns in the later years of the war, recapturing a number of islands that had been part of the original Athenian Empire during the 5th century BC.
Alarmed by these Athenian successes, the Persians stopped backing the allies and began supporting Sparta. This defection forced the allies to seek peace. The Peace of Antalcidas, commonly known as the King's Peace, was signed in 387 BC, ending the war. This treaty declared that Persia would control all of Ionia, and that all other Greek cities would be independent. Sparta was to be the guardian of the peace, with the power to enforce its clauses. The effects of the war, therefore, were to establish Persia's ability to interfere successfully in Greek politics and to affirm Sparta's hegemonic position in the Greek political system. (Read more...)
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The Greco-Persian Wars or Persian Wars or Medic Wars were a series of conflicts between several Greek city-states and the Persian Empire that started about 500 BC and lasted until 448 BC. The expression "Persian Wars" usually refers to either or both of the two Persian invasions of the Greek mainland in 490 BC and in 480-479 BC; in both cases, the allied Greeks successfully defeated the invasions. Notably not all Greeks fought against the Persians, some were neutral and others were allied with Persia.
What is known today of this conflict is derived primarily from Greek sources (mainly Herodotus), and to a lesser extent some Roman writings. The Persians enter Greek history after they conquered the Lydians and thus the Greek city-states of Ionia that were previously under the Lydians. When in 499 BC an attempt to help restore the aristocrats in Naxos failed, the Ionians rebelled against the Persians. Token aid was sent from the Greek mainland which did not change the final outcome of Persian victory. Mardonius campaigned in 492 BC in Thrace to consolidate Persian power but was stopped by a storm. An amphibious force under Datis and Artaphernes razed Eretria but was defeated in Marathon a few days later by general Miltiades of Athens. Ten years later, in 480 BC, after massive preparation king Xerxes led a huge force to subjugate Greece. A small force under King Leonidas of Sparta caused disproportionate casualties at the Battle of Thermopylae but was defeated on the third day. Athens was sacked and razed by the orders of Xerxes but the Persian fleet was defeated in the battle of Salamis. Xerxes left Mardonius with part of the original force to finish the job and fled to Asia Minor. The next year Mardonius was defeated and killed in the battle of Plataea and the Persian fleet remnant in the battle of Mycale. The Greek fleet sailed to the Hellespont where the Athenians and the newly rebelled Ionians besieged Sestus. (Read more...)
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The Peloponnesian War (431 BC–404 BC) was an Ancient Greek military conflict fought between Athens and its empire and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta. Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases. In the first, the Archidamian War, Sparta launched repeated invasions of Attica, while Athens took advantage of its naval supremacy to raid the coast of the Peloponnese while attempting to suppress signs of unrest in its empire. This period of the war was concluded in 421 BC, with the signing of the Peace of Nicias. That treaty, however, was soon undermined by renewed fighting in the Peloponnese. In 415 BC, Athens dispatched a massive expeditionary force to attack Syracuse in Sicily; the attack failed disastrously with the destruction of the entire force in 413 BC. This ushered in the final phase of the war, generally referred to either as the Decelean War or the Ionian War. In this phase, Sparta, now receiving support from Persia, supported rebellions in Athens' subject states in the Aegean Sea and Ionia, undermining Athens' empire and eventually depriving the city of naval supremacy. The destruction of Athens' fleet at Aegospotami effectively ended the war, and Athens surrendered in the following year. (Read more...)
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The War against Nabis or Laconian War of 195 BC was fought between the Greek city-state of Sparta and a coalition comprised of Rome, the Achean League, Pergamum, Rhodes, and Macedon.
During the Second Macedonian War (200–196 BC), Macedon had given Sparta control over Argos, an important city on the Aegean coast of Peloponnese. Sparta's continued occupation of Argos at the end of war was used as a pretext for Rome and its allies to declare war. The anti-Spartan coalition laid siege to Argos, captured the Spartan naval base at Gythium, and soon invested and besieged Sparta itself. Eventually, negotiations led to peace on Rome's terms, under which Argos and the coastal towns of Laconia were freed from Spartan rule and the Spartans were compelled to pay a war indemnity to Rome over the next eight years. Argos joined the Achaean League, and the Laconian towns were placed under Achaean protection.
As a result of the war, Sparta lost its position as a major power in Greece. All consequent Spartan attempts to recover the losses failed and Nabis, the last sovereign ruler, was eventually murdered. Soon after, Sparta was forcibly made a member of its former rival, the Achaean League, ending several centuries of fierce political independence. (Read more...)
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The Byzantine-Arab Wars were a series of wars between the Arab Caliphates and the Byzantine Empire. These started during the initial Muslim conquests under the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphs and continued in the form of an enduring border tussle until the beginning of the Crusades. As result the Byzantines, also called the Romans ("Rûm" in Muslim historical chronicles, the Byzantine Empire was formerly the Eastern half of the Roman Empire), saw an extensive loss of territory.
The initial conflict lasted from 629-717, ending with the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople that halted the rapid expansion of the Arab Empire into Asia Minor. Conflicts with the Caliphate however continued between the 800s and 1169. The loss of southern Italian territories to the Abbassid forces occurred in the 9th and 10th centuries. However, under the Macedonian dynasty, the Byzantines recaptured territory in the Levant with the Byzantine's armies advance even threatening Jerusalem to the south. The Emirate of Aleppo and its neighbours became vassals of the Byzantines in the east, where the greatest threat was the Egyptian Fatimid kingdom, until the rise of the Seljuk dynasty reversed all gains and pushed Abbassid territorial gains deep into Anatolia. This resulted in the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus request for military aid from Pope Urban II at the Council of Piacenza; one of the events often attributed as precursors to the First Crusade. (Read more...)
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The Battle of Marathon (490 BC) was the culmination of King Darius I of Persia's first major attempt to conquer the remainder of the Greeks and incorporate it into the Persian Empire, to secure the weakest portion of his Western border. Most of what is known of this battle comes from Herodotus.
Darius first sent Mardonius, in 492 BC, via a land route to Europe to strengthen Persia's hold of Thrace and Macedon, which had been weakened by the Ionian Revolt. Although successful, most of this force perished in a storm off Mount Athos, and the remainder was forced to return to Asia, losing men along the way. In 490 BC, Datis and Artaphernes were sent in a maritime operation to subjugate the Cyclades islands in the central Aegean and punish Eretria and Athens for their assistance in the Ionian revolt. Eretria was besieged and fell; then the fleet landed in Marathon bay. There they were defeated by a small force of Athenian and Plataean hoplites, despite their numerical advantage. The long run of the messenger who conveyed news of the victory to Athens became the inspiration for the marathon race, which was first staged at the 1896 Olympic Games. (Read more...)
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The Treaty of Devol was an agreement made in 1108 between Bohemond I of Antioch and Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, in the wake of the First Crusade. Although the treaty was not immediately enforced, it was intended to make the Principality of Antioch a vassal state of the Byzantine Empire.
At the beginning of the First Crusade, Crusader armies assembled at Constantinople and promised to return to the Byzantine Empire any land they might conquer. However, Bohemond, the son of Alexios' former enemy Robert Guiscard, claimed the Principality of Antioch for himself. Alexios did not recognize the legitimacy of the Principality, and Bohemond went to Europe looking for reinforcements. He launched into open warfare against Alexios, but he was soon forced to surrender and negotiate with Alexios at the imperial camp at Diabolis (Devol), where the Treaty was signed.
Under the terms of the Treaty, Bohemond agreed to become a vassal of the Emperor and to defend the Empire whenever needed. He also accepted the appointment of a Greek Patriarch. In return, he was given the titles of sebastos and doux (duke) of Antioch, and he was guaranteed the right to pass on to his heirs the County of Edessa. Following this, Bohemond retreated to Apulia and died there. His nephew, Tancred, who was regent in Antioch, refused to accept the terms of the Treaty. Antioch came temporarily under Byzantine sway in 1137, but it was not until 1158 that it truly became a Byzantine vassal.
The Treaty of Devol is viewed as typical example of the Byzantine tendency to settle disputes through diplomacy rather than warfare, and was both a result of and a cause for the distrust between the Byzantines and their Western European neighbors.(Read more...)
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The Cleomenean War (229 BC/228 BC – 222 BC) was fought between Sparta and their ally Elis against the Achaean League and Macedon. The war ended in a Macedonian and Achaean victory.
In 235 BC, Cleomenes III ascended the throne of Sparta and began an ambitious program of reform to restore the old Spartan discipline and depose the ephors. When the ephors sent Cleomenes to seize a town on the border with Megalopolis, the Achaeans declared war in 229 BC. Cleomenes responded by ravaging Achaea; he defeated an army under Aratus sent to attack Elis at Mount Lycaeum, and second army near Megalopolis. He also ordered that the ephors be killed.
In quick succession, Cleomenes cleared the cities of Arcadia of their Achaean garrisons before crushing another Achaean force at Dyme. Facing Spartan domination of the League, Aratus was forced to turn to Antigonus III Doson of Macedon to help the Achaeans defeat the Spartans. In return for Macedonian assistance, the Achaeans had to surrender Acrocorinth to Antigonus. Cleomenes invaded Achaea and took control of both Corinth and Argos, but, when Antigonus arrived in the Peloponnese, Cleomenes was forced to retreat to Laconia. He fought the Achaeans and the Macedonians at Sellasia, but the Spartans were routed. He fled to the court of his ally, Ptolemy III of Egypt, where he eventually committed suicide after a failed revolt. (Read more...)
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The Morea expedition (French: Expédition de Morée) is the name given in France to the land intervention of the French Army in the Peloponnese, between 1828 and 1833, at the time of the Greek War of Independence.
After the fall of Messolonghi, Western Europe decided to intervene in favour of revolutionary Greece. Their attitude toward the Ottoman Empire's Egyptian ally, Ibrahim Pasha, was especially critical; their principal objective was to obtain the evacuation of the occupied regions, the Peloponnese in the first place. The intervention began when a Franco-Russo-British fleet was sent to the region, winning the Battle of Navarino in October 1827. In August 1828, a French expeditionary corps disembarked at Koroni in the southern Peloponnese. The soldiers were stationed on the peninsula until the evacuation of Egyptian troops in October, then taking control of the principal strongholds still held by Turkish troops. Although the bulk of the troops returned to France from the end of 1828, the French presence remained until 1833. (Read more...)
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The Greco–Turkish War of 1919–1922, also called the War in Asia Minor, or the Greek campaign of the Turkish War of Independence, was a series of military events occurring during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after World War I between May 1919 and October 1922. The war was fought between Greece and Turkish revolutionaries of the Turkish National Movement that would later establish the Republic of Turkey.
The Greek campaign was launched because the western Allies, particularly British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, had promised Greece territorial gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. It ended with Greece giving up all territory gained during the war, returning to its pre-war borders, and engaging in a population exchange with the newly established state of Turkey under provisions in the Treaty of Lausanne.
The collective failure of the military campaigns of Greece, and of the Turkish-Armenian and Franco-Turkish Wars against the Turkish revolutionaries, had forced the Allies to abandon the Treaty of Sèvres and negotiate at Lausanne a new treaty, recognising the independence of the Turkish Republic and its sovereignty over Eastern Thrace and Anatolia. (Read more...)
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The Sicilian Expedition was an Athenian expedition to Sicily from 415 BC to 413 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. The expedition was hampered from the outset by uncertainty in its purpose and command structure—political maneuvering in Athens swelled a lightweight force of twenty ships into a massive armada, and the expedition's primary proponent, Alcibiades, was recalled from command to stand trial before the fleet even reached Sicily—but still achieved early successes. Syracuse, the most powerful state on Sicily, responded exceptionally slowly to the Athenian threat, and as a result was almost completely invested before the arrival of a Spartan general, Gylippus, galvanized its inhabitants into action. From that point forward, however, as the Athenians ceded the initiative to their newly energized opponents, the tide of the conflict shifted. A massive reinforcing armada from Athens briefly gave the Athenians the upper hand once more, but a disastrous failed assault on a strategic high point and several crippling naval defeats damaged the besiegers' fighting capacity and morale, and the Athenians were eventually forced to attempt a desperate overland escape from the city they had hoped to conquer. That last measure, too, failed, and nearly the entire expedition surrendered or was destroyed in the Sicilian interior.
The impact of the defeat on Athens was immense. Two hundred ships and thousands of soldiers—an appreciable fraction of the city's total manpower—were lost in a single stroke. Athens' enemies on the mainland and in Persia were encouraged to take action, and rebellions broke out in the Aegean. The defeat proved to be the crucial turning point in the Peloponnesian War, though Athens struggled on for another decade. Thucydides observed that contemporary Greeks were shocked not that Athens eventually fell after the defeat, but rather that it fought on for as long as it did, so devastating were the losses suffered. (Read more...)
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The Battle of Crete (German Luftlandeschlacht um Kreta; Greek Μάχη της Κρήτης) was a battle during World War II on the Greek island of Crete. The battle began on the morning of 20 May 1941, when Nazi Germany launched an airborne invasion of Crete under the code-name Unternehmen Merkur ("Operation Mercury"). Allied forces defended the island.
After one day of fighting, the Germans had suffered appalling casualties and none of their objectives had been achieved. The next day, through miscommunication and the failure of Allied commanders to grasp the situation, Maleme airfield in western Crete fell to the Germans, enabling them to fly in reinforcements and overwhelm the Allied forces.
The Battle of Crete was unique in three respects: it was the first-ever mainly airborne invasion; it was the first time the Allies made significant use of intelligence from the deciphered German Enigma code; and it was the first time invading German troops encountered mass resistance from a civilian population. In light of the heavy casualties suffered by the parachutists, Adolf Hitler forbade further large scale airborne operations. However, the Allies were impressed by the potential of paratroopers, and started to build their own airborne divisions. (Read more...)
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The Greco-Italian War (Greek: Ελληνοϊταλικός Πόλεμος or Πόλεμος του Σαράντα, "War of '40") was a conflict between Italy and Greece which lasted from October 28, 1940 to April 23, 1941. It marked the beginning of the Balkans Campaign of World War II. From the April 6, 1941 intervention of Nazi Germany onwards, this conflict is known as the Battle of Greece.
On 28 October 1940, after Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas rejected an Italian ultimatum demanding the occupation of Greek territory, Italian forces invaded Greece. The Hellenic Army counter-attacked and forced the Italians to retreat and by mid-December, the Greeks occupied nearly a quarter of Albania, tying down 530,000 Italian troops. In March 1941, a major Italian counter-attack failed, with small gains around Himare. In the first days of April, as the German attack on Greece unfolded, the Italian army resumed its attacks. From April 12, the Greek army started retreating from Albania to avoid being cut off by the rapid German advance. Nevertheless, on April 20, the Greek army of Epirus surrendered to the Germans, and on 23 April 1941 the armistice was repeated including the Italians, and effectively ending the Greco-Italian war.
The Greek victory over the initial Italian offensive of October 1940 was the first Allied land victory of the Second World War, and helped raise morale in occupied Europe. Some historians argue that it may have influenced the course of the entire war by forcing Germany to postpone the invasion of the Soviet Union in order to assist Italy against Greece. This led to a delayed attack and subjected the German forces to the conditions of the harsh Russian winter, leading to their defeat at the Battle of Moscow. (Read more...)
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The Battle of Dyrrhachium or Siege of Durazzo took place on October 18, 1081 between the Byzantine Empire, led by the Emperor Alexius I, and the Normans of Southern Italy under Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia & Calabria. The battle was fought outside the city of Dyrrhachium, the Byzantine capital of Illyria, and ended in a Norman victory.
Following the Norman conquest of Byzantine Italy and Saracen Sicily, the Byzantine Emperor, Michael VII betrothed his son to Robert Guiscard's daughter. When Michael was deposed, Robert took this as an excuse to invade the Byzantine Empire in 1081. His army laid siege to Dyrrhachium but his fleet was defeated by the Venetians. On October 18, the Normans engaged a Byzantine army under Alexius I Comnenus outside Dyrrhachium. The battle began with the Byzantine right wing routing the Norman left wing which broke and fled. Varangians mercenaries joined in the pursuit of the fleeing Normans but became separated from the main force and were massacred. Norman knights in the centre attacked the Byzantine centre and routed it, causing the Byzantines to flee.
After the capture of Dyrrhachium in February 1082, the Normans advanced inland capturing most of Macedonia and Thessaly. However, Robert was forced to leave Greece following an attack on his ally, the Pope by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV. Robert left his son Bohemond in charge of the army in Greece. Bohemond was initially successful defeating Alexius in several battles. However, he was defeated by Alexius outside Larissa and was forced to retreat to Italy losing all the Norman conquests.
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