Wars and Battles

The primary source for most of our battle information is Harbottle's Dictionary of Battles, published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. in 1902. It is an alphabetically arranged list of nearly 2000 historically significant battles fought from the age of Ancient Greece and Rome through the close of the 19th century. The date, combatants, notable commanders, troop sizes, casualties, and a brief summary of the conflict is provided for each battle, along with the war in which it was a part. We scanned in the entire book and organized its entries along the lines of a spread-sheet so that battles could be referenced by date, type, and war as well as alphabetically by name.

In order to incorporate this battle information into our history series we thought it would be helpful to list all battles associated with each particular war. A difficulty immediately arose because the idea of what precisely constitutes a "war" is not perfectly clear cut. Harbottle's war classifications were very helpful in a high percentage of cases, but there were a number of battles that were either unclassified, or identified with a minor war that could be considered part of a larger conflict.

Our solution to this difficulty was to continue to use Harbottle's classification of war in most cases, but in other cases to employ the concept of a campaign, to define a subsidiary conflict within a larger framework. For example the First through Ninth Crusades have been defined as campaigns within the Crusades and all of the rebellions in England related to the overthrow of James II, starting with the Williamite War in 1690, and continuing through the rebellion of 1745 are grouped together as campaigns of the Jacobite Rebellion.

In several cases a series of unrelated conflicts between two long time antagonists were grouped together into a war. For example, all of the miscellaneous border disputes between England and Scotland between 1050 and 1600 A.D., excluding the Scottish Wars of Independence, are grouped together and referred to as the Anglo Scottish Wars. Likewise all of the conflicts that Rome had with its Gallic neighbors to the north between 390 and 121 B.C. are considered part of the Gallic Invasion of Italy. This approach allowed us to group related conflicts together, and keep the total number of wars associated with each civilization down to a manageable number.

The grouping of battles into wars and related conflicts is a "work in progress", particularly in regions that we have not yet focused on, such as Asia, Continental Europe and the Americas. We will not complete these projects until we have put many more books related to these civilizations online, and expect to take several years to complete the entire project.

The Harbottle collection of wars and battles is far more extensive than those which are actually covered by our current collection of histories. When we do have material that pertains to a particular war or campaign however, we have provided links to the relevant chapters. The links are organized by war rather than by individual battle, so in order to access them, you must reference the associated war page. We have also provided a manner of sorting all of the battles in our database either alphabetically, or by date. Once one has located a particular battle of interest, links to its associated war page are provided.

Although Harbottle provides an excellent resource, there are a few omissions. Obviously, since the work was published in 1902, it excludes the critically important Great War. All battle definitions related to this war, therefore, had to be created originally. There are a several other omissions in Harbottle. For example, the collection of American Indian battles is extremely sketchy, and many wars in the region of Persia, Asia and Eastern Europe are not treated thoroughly. Harbottle also confines himself to describing battles for which specific historical information exists, and does not cite battles even in major wars, which are known to have occurred, but for which little reliable historical information is known. (The Taiping Rebellion in China, is a good example of this). Harbottle died before his Dictionary of Battles was published, and the final edits were done by an associate so there is no way of knowing the precise reason for some of these omissions, but overall, his book is an invaluable source of information, succinctly presented.

The sources that Harbottle used for his dictionary are not specifically referenced, but were obviously extensive. The details of military history, particularly in remote times is often controversial, and sometimes conflicts with other sources. Except in the cases of specific errata, which have been corrected, we have not altered the content of Harbottle except, as regards the definition of the associated war. We have, in several cases however, renamed some of Harbottle's battles, according to more current spelling, or a more commonly used name. A few of the battle entries were created originally, and sources that we used to fill in missing information included our own books, as well as various online directories of wars and battles. The non-Harbottle entries currently constitute only a very small percent of the total, although that percentage may rise as we complete our catalog of some of the areas such as American Indian Wars, that he appears to have neglected.