Wars by Era
3 major conflicts, 34 battles, and an estimated 395,000 dead.
On May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmed II's Ottoman army entered Constantinople after a 53-day siege of the Theodosian defenses. Constantine XI died during the final fighting. The conquest ended the Byzantine Empire and made the city the capital of an expanding Ottoman state; historians often use 1453 as one conventional marker between medieval and early modern history.
10 battles · 35,000 dead
A dynastic civil war fought between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne, ending with the Tudor victory at Bosworth Field and the founding of a new dynasty.
11 battles · 60,000 dead
Charles VIII’s 1494 invasion of Italy opened sixty-five years of conflict among French, Spanish, imperial, papal, Venetian, and Italian powers. The wars accelerated the use of mobile artillery, firearms, bastioned fortification, and infantry formations, culminated in the 1527 sack of Rome, and ended in 1559 with Spanish Habsburg predominance in much of Italy.
13 battles · 300,000 dead