Castillon was the last battle of the Hundred Years' War and the first in European history decided primarily by field artillery. Jean Bureau, master of artillery to Charles VII, had prepared a fortified artillery camp with 300 cannon. When Talbot — now aged around 70 but still England's greatest captain — rashly charged the French camp after receiving false intelligence that it was being abandoned, he rode into a wall of cannon fire. Talbot was killed when his horse was felled by a cannonball and he was unable to rise in his armor; a French soldier then killed him. The English army was destroyed.
Castillon ended the Hundred Years' War and drove England from France entirely, save for Calais. The decisive role of Bureau's artillery announced the dawn of the gunpowder age and the permanent obsolescence of mounted chivalric warfare. The death of Talbot — the last of England's great medieval commanders — symbolized the death of an entire era of warfare.
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After the destruction of Cervera's fleet and the seizure of the San Juan Heights, Santiago de Cuba was encircled and its garrison of 11,000 men was cut off from resupply. General Shafter conducted negotiations while his army — wracked by yellow fever, malaria, and dysentery — struggled to maintain its siege lines. Disease was a more dangerous enemy than any Spanish soldier: thousands of American troops fell ill in the fetid Cuban summer. General José Toral, after receiving permission from Madrid to negotiate, finally surrendered the city and his entire 24,000-man command (including troops from the surrounding province) on July 17.
The surrender of Santiago de Cuba was the largest capitulation of Spanish forces in Cuba and effectively ended the land campaign on the island. Toral's agreement to surrender his entire provincial command, not just the city garrison, was more than the Americans had expected to achieve.
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In the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Cheka officer Yakov Yurovsky and a firing squad executed Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their five children (Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei), and four servants. The decision was taken by the local Ural Soviet, almost certainly with Bolshevik central approval, as White and Czech forces closed in on Yekaterinburg. The bodies were taken to the forest, doused in acid, and buried in secret pits.
Eliminated any possibility of a monarchist restoration and denied the White movement a legitimate figurehead. The murders became a founding atrocity of the Soviet state and a rallying symbol for the White cause and for Russian émigrés worldwide.
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The military uprising that began in Spanish Morocco on July 17 rapidly spread to garrisons across Spain, but encountered fierce resistance from trade union militias and loyal security forces in the major cities. Rather than a swift coup, the result was a protracted civil war — one half of Spain under the rebels, the other under the Republic.
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