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In the summer of 1524 near the  Black Forest  in what is today Stühlingen, Baden-Wurttemberg in southern Germany, one of the largest and most significant popular uprisings of recorded history in the middle and renaissance ages began. A quibble between peasants and the ruling countess in the  province  of  Swabia  led to a greater revolt of a loosely confederated Serf/Peasant alliance that became the catalyst for great conflict, upheaval, and civil war in the early Renaissance age in the central European Germanic kingdoms associated with the Swabian League. The league was lead by Emperor Charles V; locked in continuous series of campaigns with the Italians throughout his reign from 1519-1556. Period drawing, Landsknechts depicted with eerie symbolism  The king appointed his brother and successor, Archduke Ferdinand of  Austria  (sharing the same name of his late ancestor, who’s assassination sparked the Great War in 1914) to crush the rebellion in mostly the south & southwest of Swa

King Philips' War, fought from 1675-1676 in the region known as New England in the Northeastern United States, predominately in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, was one of the most devastating and bloody wars in America's early colonial history. Named for the powerful and greatly revered chief Metacomet (b.1676), the conflict precipitated the virtual extinction of New England's greatly varied and long established Native American tribes in favor of the rapidly growing American colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  Two great figures dominate the military study of King Philips' War in New England, colonial officer and the "First American Ranger", Rhode Island born Captain Benjamin Church (b.1639-1718) of the Plymouth Colony, what is today  South   Shore  and  Cape Cod of  the state of  Massachusetts, and great  Wampanoag  sachem  (chief) Metacomet (d.1676) known to the colonials of the

The Zouaves of Death (in Polish  Żuawi Death ) are perhaps one of the most ghoulishly named fighting units of the 19 th  century conflicts which were fought in the buildup of empires, republican states, and commonwealths in the wake of the previous Napoleonic Age (c.1803-1815). Created by a former French army officer, François Rochebrune (b.1830-1870), the Zouaves of Death fought in the January Uprising of 1863-1864 against the Russian Empire who had dominated (along with  Austria  &  Prussia ) much of the former  Polish-Lithuanian   Commonwealth  since the Great Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The Zouaves of Death and Polish scythmen brace for a charge of Russian cavalry during the January Uprising in this dramatic and patriotic painting from the early 20th century Formed in Ojców in Febuary of 1863, Rochebrunes volunteer and free lance militia was styled in the debonair attire of the French Algerian Zouave, a popular style of dress for infantrymen from the 1850’s un