The seven brutal sieges. In this article, we’re going to discuss the facts surrounding seven of the longest military standoffs ever.
The Siege of Megiddo
The Battle of Megiddo was one of the first recorded military confrontations in history, and it also culminated in a hard, months-long siege. In the 15th century B.C., the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III led his soldiers into modern-day Palestine to put down a revolt by a coalition of Mesopotamian city-states.
According to Egyptian military chronicles, the two armies clashed outside Megiddo in a deadly battle of infantry and charioteers, with the pharaoh himself fighting on the front lines. However, as the Egyptians routed the coalition soldiers, they squandered time looting an enemy encampment, allowing the Asiatic army to retreat to the city’s defences for safety.
Thutmose, undeterred, erected siege lines and shut down all traffic into and out of the city. The siege lasted for seven cruel months, until the town’s leaders, starved and diseased, sent out their young sons and daughters to beg for peace. Thutmose spared Megiddo in exchange for a pledge of fealty from the city’s survivors after pacifying the surrounding region.
The Siege of Vicksburg
The Siege of Vicksburg, along with the Battle of Gettysburg, was a crucial turning point in the Civil War. The siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, began in May 1863, when Union General Ulysses S. Grant trapped Confederate forces under John C. Pemberton within the city limits. Grant grudgingly ordered his forces to dig trenches and lay siege to the city after probing the Confederate defenses in two fruitless assaults.
Many of the city’s population were forced to seek sanctuary in a network of clay caverns known as the “Prairie Dog Village” in order to escape the slaughter. Grant’s soldiers eventually constructed a tunnel and detonated explosives beneath the city’s walls in an attempt to break the siege.
While the Southerners held their lines and sealed the breach despite being outmanned, their victory was short-lived. Pemberton finally surrendered on July 4th, without reinforcements and with minimal supplies. The loss of Vicksburg gave Union forces complete control of the Mississippi River, effectively dividing the Confederacy for the remainder of the war.
The Siege of Tyre
Alexander the Great, the legendary Greek conqueror, set his sights on the ancient city of Tyre, a Mediterranean island a half-mile off the coast of Lebanon, in 332 B.C. Despite the fact that Alexander’s 35,000-strong force overwhelmed the Tyrian troops, the city possessed a strong navy and enough supplies to survive a long siege. More importantly, the island was said to have 150-foot-high fortified walls.
The Greeks chose to lay siege to the island because they couldn’t get near enough to conquer the city through regular means. Alexander then ordered his troops to construct a causeway connecting the island to the mainland out of timber and stone, in one of history’s most daring feats of military engineering.
His forces were able to put up siege engines and assault the city walls once this constructed land bridge had come near enough to Tyre. The Greek army finally broke through the fortifications and captured the island in a devastating assault after a seven-month standoff. Alexander’s impromptu causeway miraculously accumulated sand and silt, permanently transforming Tyre’s island into a peninsula.
The Siege of Candia
This two-decade siege began in the 17th century, when a band of Knights of Malta assaulted an Ottoman fleet and escaped to Candia, a Venetian-controlled city on the island of Crete. The robbery sparked an all-out conflict between the Venetians and the Ottomans, who were already in a vulnerable political condition.
An army of 60,000 Turks landed on Crete in 1645 and began plundering the area. In 1648, after seizing the majority of the island, the Ottomans landed in Candia’s metropolis and established an extensive network of siege lines.
The Turks were unable to strike a decisive blow despite repeated assaults and bombardments. The residents of Candia, many of whom had lived their whole lives under the siege, were always able to push back the Ottoman forces and seal the gap before their castle was jeopardized.
In 1669, a French fleet arrived to reinforce the city and assist in the siege’s lifting, but it rapidly departed when its flagship was destroyed in battle. The defenders eventually surrendered long after, with Candia in ruins and only a few thousand warriors remaining. The city had been under siege for an incredible 21 years and four months by the time the blockade was eventually lifted in September 1669.
The Siege of Carthage
The Third Punic War, the last in a series of notably deadly confrontations between the ancient Romans and the Phoenician city of Carthage, resulted in this gruesome standoff. A Roman army headed by Scipio Aemilianus came to North Africa in 149 B.C. with the goal of permanently defeating Carthage. The Romans fenced off the city, set up camp, and laid siege to it, surrounded by 60-foot walls.
The Carthaginians had prepared for the invasion by converting a large portion of their city into an armory and enrolling slaves and townspeople as soldiers. According to Appian, the women of Carthage even chopped their hair off so that it might be used as rope for homemade catapults. The Romans were held at bay for three years due to this degree of resistance.
Scipio’s men had to fight their way through the city streets for six days and nights before beating the Carthaginian opposition when they finally broke through the fortifications in 146 B.C. The 700-year-old city of Carthage was in ruins at the end of the conflict, and its last 50,000 residents had been sold into slavery.
The Siege of Leningrad
The Siege of Leningrad during World War II is a sobering reminder of the toll a military blockade can exact on a civilian population. In 1941, as part of Operation Barbarossa, a large surprise attack on the Soviet Union, German forces initially arrived in the city. The Nazis made no significant attempts to conquer Leningrad by force, preferring to avoid the devastation of urban warfare. Instead, Adolf Hitler chose a harsher approach: laying siege to the city and starving it to death.
Leningrad’s 3 million residents were caught off guard, with insufficient supplies for a prolonged confrontation. In addition to being bombarded by the Luftwaffe on a regular basis, they were soon faced with acute starvation, subzero cold, and sickness. To augment their inadequate bread supplies, people ate anything from wallpaper paste to shoe leather, and some even turned to cannibalism.
Despite these atrocities, the people of Leningrad were able to survive the siege for 872 days, from September 1941 to January 1944. Even in victory, the siege was tragic: an estimated 1 million Soviets—most of them civilians—had died by the time the city was finally liberated by the Red Army.
The Great Siege of Gibraltar
During the Revolutionary War, Great Britain was engulfed in one of the greatest sieges in European history, while at the same time, it was fighting the American colonists.
The standoff began in 1779 when Spain and France officially joined the Continental cause in the Revolutionary War. In an attempt to strike back at England, the two countries teamed up to retake Gibraltar, a small rocky peninsula on the Iberian Peninsula that had played a vital role in British naval operations in the Mediterranean.
A fleet of French and Spanish ships blocked off Gibraltar from the sea in June 1779, while a huge infantry force built redoubts and other land fortifications. The two countries sought to push Gibraltar’s 5,000-strong garrison into a war of attrition, but their siege lines were no match for the British Navy, which broke the blockade twice—first in 1780 and then again in 1781.
Between these critical resupply missions, the defenders of Gibraltar used sharpshooters, cannon fire, and surprise nighttime attacks to keep the besiegers at bay. The French and Spanish attempted a tremendous onslaught in September 1782, realizing they couldn’t starve out the garrison, only to be prevented by the British artillery’s deployment of “red-hot shot”—heated cannonballs that set fire to entire ships and batteries. The French and Spanish embargo was finally removed in February 1783, when they were defeated. The British forces in Gibraltar had been besieged for three years and seven months at that point.
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