Two years after Hideyoshi's death, his regime split between Ieyasu, the most powerful of the regents left to guard Hideyoshi's young son, and Ishida Mitsunari, a loyalist determined to preserve Toyotomi authority. Roughly 160,000 men met in fog at Sekigahara. The battle hinged on treachery: Kobayakawa Hideaki, commanding a large Western Army contingent on a hill overlooking the field, had been secretly negotiating with Ieyasu for weeks and switched sides mid-battle, folding the Western Army's flank and turning a close fight into a rout within hours.
Routinely ranked as the most important battle in Japanese history — 'the battle that determined the realm.' It replaced the Toyotomi settlement with Tokugawa supremacy in a single day and set up the shogunate Ieyasu formally founded three years later. Mitsunari's cause was, on paper, the legitimist one — defending the young Hideyori's inheritance against a subordinate's ambition — which is why the site frames the 'unifiers' label here as tracking whoever ends up governing Japan next, not moral legitimacy.
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Off Cape Trafalgar on the southwestern coast of Spain, Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson led the British fleet in a bold perpendicular attack against the combined Franco-Spanish fleet. Breaking the enemy line in two columns, the British achieved a tactical masterpiece, capturing or destroying 22 of 33 enemy ships without losing a single vessel of their own. Nelson was mortally wounded by a French sharpshooter during the height of the battle and died below decks, his last words reportedly being 'Thank God I have done my duty.' His victory was decisive and absolute.
Trafalgar permanently ended Napoleon's hopes of invading Britain and established Royal Navy supremacy for the remainder of the century. It compelled Napoleon to abandon maritime ambitions and pivot to his Continental System strategy, ultimately contributing to his downfall.
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