What were the most influential battles in history?

Not necessarily as in 1920s Central Europe could have been ran over by the red army if the poles failed to stop them.

Gettysburg

Only with help of the Nazi Germany.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_of_the_World

"No"

The number of times Poland has saved western civilization is matched exactly by the number of times western civilization has betrayed it.

Feels bad man.

They got cucked from two sides. There was nothing they could do.

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Hastings
0 results.

Come the fuck on. Also: Marathon, Waterloo, Nineveh, Ilerda/Dyrrhachium, Kaifeng, Cannae, Agincourt, Gettysburg, the Hundred Days Offensive, Stalingrad.

I'm very ignorant of Polish history, what are a few times they've done this?

See

Bosworth Field

Gommunism and the hussars at the siege of Vienna (largest cavalry charge in recorded history lead by polish winged hussars into the ottoman army)
Seen as a big reason Ottomans never expanded out of the Balkans and further into Europe.

The coolest part about that battle was that Soviet radio communications were disrupted by the Poles broadcasting readings of the Bible in Latin on all their frequencies.

Also Stalin being an insubordinate and incompetent commander was a major factor in the Soviet campaign failing. I wonder if his embarrassment could have contributed to his later purge of the competent ones.

>Seen as a big reason Ottomans never expanded out of the Balkans and further into Europe.

Only by memers on Veeky Forums and dumb eastern euro nostalgia idiots

Flaws in the Ottoman military existed with or without defeat at Vienna, the defeat only revealed them.

Who the fuck cares about hastings its not like it changed the world or something, it had only local repercusions

The south was doomed from the start, Gettysburg is literally irrelevant outside of USA.

t.Lindybeige

Battle of Diu 1509, it meant the decline of the Mamluks, and Venetians.

Whylle to the indians it meant the beggining of european colonisation.

The fuck is this shit?

Austerlitz sure, but Napoleon is fucked even if he wins Waterloo. Considering Lutzen, Bautzen, and Dresden before it, a victory at Leipzig might actually have changed things.

I've always thought the battle of Salamis was a pretty under appreciated battle. All anyone wants to talk about are Marathon and Thermopylae, and the Greeks didn't even win Thermopylae.

Agnadello is much worse for the Venetians desu

Many bad suggestions itt.
If you ask for the significance of a single battle, Waterloo and Stalingrad are not that important because Hitler and Stalin would've lost the entire war anyways.
Whereas a imperial victory at the battle of Breitenfeld had changed the fate of whole Europe and possibly the world.
You could think of thousands changes but at least protestants would most likely been driven out of central Europe.

Fuckin A+ pic right there

Was this written by a fifteen year old?

Marathon was a bigger win than Salamis if only because it was the first time Greeks and Persians actually fought and the Greeks were scared shitless of the Persians up until they smashed them at Marathon. The veterans of the battle were given more reverence than WW2 vets now even during the peloponessian war, so atleast during then it was viewed a major achievement

That's actually how 'smart' people were looking at history back in the days.
One can only imagine how people will look back at fields like 'gender studies" in 150 years.

>siege of vienna
>important

They could never have held it even if they took it and were already operating at the limit of their logistical capability

Battle of Tours.

I can just imagine the author with a monocle and teacup fantasizing about 5 trillion years of future British imperial rule.

Other anons have posted most of the big ones, just adding a couple:

>Yarmouk (636)
Arabs crush the Byzantine Army in Syria, setting the stage for Arab (and therefore) Muslim dominance of the entire Middle East and North Africa.

>Saratoga (1775)
Convinced France to intervene in the American War for Independence on the side of the US

>Gettysburg

Wasnt Lenin still in charge then? So wouldnt Trotsky be the commander?

Siege of Baghdad

Salamis
Marathon
Philippi
Saratoga
Hastings
Waterloo
Stalingrad
Tenochtitlan
Tours
Siege of Jerusalem (First Crusade)
Fall of Constantinople
Yarmouk
Siege of Vienna (Both)
Guadalete

I know I'm missing some important Russian battles.

Pretty much every event in the past 100 years has been influenced by the US in some way

Weaker US = wildly different world

By the time the Mongols knocked on his door the Caliph pretty much ruled Baghdad and only Baghdad. The whole Abbasid Empire had already fractured.

>were already operating at the limit of their logistical capability
What? It's not like Vienna was besieged after a long gruelling campaign. The war just started and the Ottoman forces were fresh and well prepared.

They would have likely given it to a vassal like Thokoly instead of holding it themselves, but even if they'd fuck off immediately the sacking of the capital of the HRE is a big deal.

Stalin was *a* commander, not *the* commander. Like I said, he was insubordinate so he had people above him.

Kamenev and Trotsky were above him and he disobeyed both.

>anglo historian
lmao

Some decisive one. Not fucking Waterloo, Stalingrad, Poltava etc. because the other side would've lost anyway.

Tours

t. Lindybeige's ancestor

On the same token, that's probably part of the reason he butted out in WW2. He knew he didn't know shit, so he let the people who did run the war.

Vicksburg > Gettysburg.

Kursk > Stalingrad.

Leipzig > Waterloo.

According to memes:

1287-1288: repelled a large Mongol invasion and mauled the invasion force. This was the last major Golden Horde raid into central Europe.

1683: led the coalition to victory at the Battle of Vienna against the Ottomans, with the largest cavalry charge in history winning the battle spearheaded by the Winged Hussars.

1920: crushed the Soviet Red Army at the "Miracle at the Vistula", checking their potential expansion into the weak states of central/eastern Europe.

In reality: never. "Western civilization" is a meme to begin with, and none of the above likely would've pushed any farther without those specific defeats. The Mongols were just raiding. The Ottomans were set to rot internally with or without sacking Vienna, and had pretty much the entire rest of Europe ganging up on them in the Great Turkish War anyway. The Soviets might have grabbed a bit more land from what used to be Russian Imperial territory, but they were not remotely expansionist and Stalin was all about "socialism in 1 country".

> but on the result of their deliberations depended, not merely the fate of two armies, but the whole future progress of human civilization.

>The Mongols were just raiding
True.

>The Ottomans were set to rot internally with or without sacking Vienna
Possibly, but things might have gone differently. The Great Turkish War was a huge factor in the Ottoman decline and the siege of Vienna was right at the start of it. The Holy League was only formed after the siege was lifted and the initial invasion beaten back. It's perfectly plausible that with the fall of Vienna the Habsburgs would simply sign a treaty solidifying Turkish gains, the wider Holy League would never be formed, and the Ottoman Empire would not be drawn into a long, exhausting slog.

>had pretty much the entire rest of Europe ganging up on them
...is blatantly untrue. France, the greatest European power at the time was firmly on the Ottoman side.

>The Soviets might have grabbed a bit more land from what used to be Russian Imperial territory, but they were not remotely expansionist
Leninism was explicitly expansionist, plus we are talking about 1919-1920 here for God's sake. Germany and Hungary were both having their own communist revolutions with shit like the Bavarian Soviet Republic cropping up that the Soviets would be able to support directly having gone through Poland.

>Stalin was all about "socialism in 1 country".
Stalin wasn't in power yet, dumbass.

Manzikert.

>Survival of Greece from heavy Persian influence or subjugation and consequent culture conversion under Persian yoke
Thermopylae
Salamis
Marathon

>Lead to the hellenization of the east
Gaugamela

>Halted the unification of China and created a North/South culture split that would impact the country for generations to come
Red Cliffs

>Deathblow to the Carthaginians, the last meaningful fight the Carthaginian army could put up
Zama

>Ultimate defeat of the Gauls and lead to Caesar's conquest of the entire region.
Alesia

>Signing of the Eternal Peace that allowed Justinian to attempt reconquests of the West and all its consequences
Dara

>Constantine's victory here set Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire which would become the religion of Europe
Milvian Bridge

>Crushing defeat of the Byzantines, directly caused the formation of the first Crusade
Manzikert

>The Rus finally throw off centuries of Tartar oppression
Battle on the Ice

>Halted muslim expansion and limited them to the Iberian region
Tours

>Conquest of the British Isles by French-Normans
Hastings

>Oda Nobunaga sets the stage for the Unification of Japan
Nagashino

>Korea as a nation survives instead of being wiped out and annexed by Japan after Yi Sun-Shin defeated the Japanese in an overwhelming naval victory
Myeongryang

>Tokugawa ends the Sengoku period and unifies Japan for good
Sekigahara

They weren't on the polish front, authority over operations here were in Tukhachevsky's hands.
The big problem was, technically, Stalin was of the same authority (rank was kinda funny at this time), so he was within his rights to fuck off to Lviv, and without knowing the breakdown that was occuring at warsaw it would have seemed easy glory.

Both Stalin and Tukhachevsky technically answered to Kamenev who answered to Trotsky (neither of whom were there).

At least in theory; their command structure was a hot mess and the fact both Trotsky and Kamenev would just send out vague and often contradictory (sometimes self-contradictory...) orders and hope for the best (i.e. to take credit if the commander succeeds whether he listened to you or not, and blame them for not following your instructions properly if he fails) made things very disordered. Sometimes Lenin would pitch in directly too, because if two people giving out contradictory orders is good, three will be great, right?

In fact some modern defenders of Stalin's conduct in the Polish-Bolshevik war conjecture that he must have received some extra orders from Lenin directly because he wouldn't have been so retarded all on his own.

Honestly at times it feels like a miracle that the bolsheviks did as well as they did...

i don't get this meme

>>The Rus finally throw off centuries of Tartar oppression
>Battle on the Ice

you mean Kulikovo.

>>Halted muslim expansion and limited them to the Iberian region
>Tours

Literally a meme, Tours was a raid in force.

>>Korea as a nation survives instead of being wiped out and annexed by Japan after Yi Sun-Shin defeated the Japanese in an overwhelming naval victory
>Myeongryang

The Koreans were never going to get annexed by Japan no matter how badly they lost, the Ming wouldn't have allowed it.

Tours might have been a raid but we have seen it before that, the muslims initially raided Iberia and simply meddled there to test the waters, when they sensed weakness they pounced. It is absolutely certain they would have followed up if they won, they'd probably have taken more of south carving a path to Italy.

during pelloponesian wars, athens sent an expeditionary force to attack syracuse which was sparta's ally and got horribly btfo by army smaller than them, some 10000 hoplites and 40000 trained oarsmen died

That time when we frogs kicked bong's asses

thank

>Literally a meme, Tours was a raid in force.

It was clear that the Umayyads were planning further conquest, they wouldn't have taken and kept Septimania and reinforced Narbonne as a base of operations if they hadn't. Or besiege Toulouse, and generally keep trying to expand further in that area.

It's true that Tours itself was not necessarily that momentous though.

>Conquest of the British Isles by French-Normans
There weren't any French involved in the invasion.

Yeah, I'm not the guy you're responding to but what is often left out of the Tours story is that the muslims continued to harass the franks in aquitaine for like a decade, they never managed to conjure up a force like they had at Tours though.

They really really wanted to break the Franks.

Even if you want to be edgy and not count the Normans themselves, William's army came from all over France.

>implying Normans were French
And yes William had other soldiers with him but they were Bretons not French

France, Castille and Britain would have crushed the Ottoman if they ever passed Vienna because the danger would have justified a coalition and total war, same for the mongols.
Just those three countries were more than half of the population of Europe, particularly France which was the demographic powerhouse of the continent until the rise of Russia after 1800 and Prussia 50 years late.

Tours in 732 was far more important than Vienna despite the size of the armies being nowhere near close because unlike in 1683 the only real power in Europe was the frankish kingdom, everything else outside of Byzantium was still weak and shaky.

The West was not in danger in 1683, Austria was.

>they were Bretons
Again, there were forces from all over France. Where did you think the men under Aimery IV came from?

>France, Castille and Britain
France was literally aiding the Ottomans.

Louis XIV was a smelly greedy rat but "aiding" them is a big word, he was exploiting the occasion to weaken the Habsburg and expand its territory, he didn't go as far as allying them or proving any form of material support.
It was realpolitik.

Someone has never watched 300

Will you STFU at once, buttdevasted bong?
Each time this topic comes on the table, you ridicule your country

By 1066, the Normans were pretty much French, both culturally and genetically
>Culturally
Spoke French, lived according to the French feudal system, believed in French religion and even fought like the French
Nothing "viking" remained
>Genetically
By 1066 the Normans had interbred with the French for eight generations
Rollo's son was already 50% French through his mom, so it's not hard to understand that William, seven generations of interbreeding later, was easily over 80% French genetically speaking

Btw, as if this wasn't enough, many mercenaries from other regions of France (Bretons, Poitevins, Angevins...etc) invaded alongside the Normans
It wasn't an invasion by the Kingdom of France, but it definitly was a French invasion

>he thinks that all normans only were french-speaking scandinavians
>implying the majority of the normans weren't ethnic frenchies

This is an excellent list but I would argue that the Nazis had lost even before Stalingrad. Maybe battle for moscow is more important

Stalingrad?
Fucking retarded question though

Battle of Hastings

Source: What language are you reading right now?

A mongrel mix of Anglo-Saxon and French, so I guess you're right

Thermopylae, salamis and marathon.
How different would the world be today if the persians had won?

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why are there three of him
and why is one arab

Couldn't find Wally

Brown people would rule Constantiope

4

[spoiler]by the stairs[/spoiler]

[spoiler]no wait, behind the rek'd siege tower[/spoiler]

Pretty thorough list, though by no means exhaustive. Can't be bothered to write out the justifications for each one but I'm pretty sure I can defend my choices.

Marathon (490BC)
Salamis (480BC)
Gaugemela (331 BC)
Asculum (279 BC)
Gaixia (202BC)
Alesia (52 BC)
Pharsalus (48 BC)
Teutoberg (9 AD)
Edessa (260)
Adrianople (378)
Chalons (451)
Yarmouk (636)
Tours (732)
Battle of Yongqiu (756)
Edington (878)
Hastings (1066)
Manzikert (1071)
Constantinople (1204)
Battle of the Ice (1242)
Sack of Baghdad (1258)
Ain Jalut (1260)
Siege of Meaux (1422)
Battle of Bosworth (1485)
Pavia (1525)
Panipat (1526)
Lepanto (1571)
Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588)
Sekigahara (1600)
Siege of Vienna (1683)
Blenheim (1704)
Plassey (1757)
Saratoga (1777)
Trafalgar (1805)
Gettysburg (1863)
Sedan (1870)
Marne (1814)
France (1940)
Singapore (1942)
Stalingrad (1943)
D-Day Landings (1944)
Pingjin (1949)

good list

How would an Anglo-Saxon England have been different at all from a Norman one?

Stalingrad
Austerlitz
Waterloo

More Scandinavian influence.

>no breitenfeld
>no grunwald
>no metaurus
>no bunker hill
>no lechfeld
>no emmaus
>no poltava
>no valmy

throw it in le garbage

>breitenfeld
interesting but not really decisive

>grunwald
The Teutonic knights expansionist phase had already ground to a halt and with the union of Poland-Lithuania they were unlikely to survive in the long term. What really changed anyway? Courland, Samogitia and Estonia might have been slightly more Germanised if the Teutonic Order had kept control, but with or without Grunwald the map would have looked pretty much the same a hundred years later.

>metaurus
Hannibal had spent ten years dicking around in Italy. A few extra siege engines probably weren't going to help him much.

>bunker hill
inconclusive as a battle, inconclusive as a political event.

>lechfeld
It might be a useful point for marking the end of the great barbarian raids on western Europe (that had been going on since the Huns), but other than that it hardly changed the course of history. It's hardly as if the Hungarians were going to conquer Germany and western Europe.

>emmaus
oh please, it's not like it was the decisive blow to the Seleucid Empire, and it barely slowed down the spread of Hellenic culture. Judea would end up Roman anyway and it's not like they did anything of any particular significance with their 150 years of independence.

>poltava
shit, I knew I forgot something. I genuinely fucking read through the wikipedia article on it as I was making the list and I still managed to forget to put in in. Derp.

>valmy
in a word - eh. Maybe? If the French revolution had been crushed that would obviously have been a major world event, but I'm not so sure that the Republic would just have collapsed if they'd lost at Valmy. France was the primary military and economic power in Europe at that point, and it was gripped by a patriotic fervour the likes of which Europe had never seen. The Republic could have just kept throwing men at the Austrians and Prussians. Valmy itself was a relatively small battle and it's hardly as if it conclusively decided the war in the Republic's favour.