Siege Quotes
Any fortress can be stormed provided there is a way up for a donkey with a load of gold on his back.
The greatest general and conqueror always tried to avoid a battle and casualties whenever possible. He was a master and bribing corrupt officials to surrender forts and cities or to disclose weaknesses in the defense. Gold was one of his major weapons.
The Ottoman Turks had already conquered the Eastern Roman empire outside of Byzantium. They had overwhelming superiority and it was just a matter of time when they would take the city. Surrender would have been the sensible course, but religious passion against surrendering the holy city capital of Christendom to the Muslims was dominant in the Emperor and some of the leadership. But the morale of most was very low—and for good reason. The Ottomans soon captured the city.
Mad Anthony Wayne. The quotation may be apocryphal, as solid, multiple confirmation has never been found.
Ironically, when he attacked Athens in 480 BC, the Athenians under Themistocles, abandoned the city—see {612656}—and lured the overly-confident Xerxes into a sea battle at Salamis where the Persians were totally destroyed. A few public buildings of Athens were burned, but before Xerxes could fulfill his vow, he was defeated and had to retreat to Persia.
The Boxers were against Western and Christian influence. The Government was too weak to protect the foreigners or the Chinese Christians. So the Western Powers used their soldiers and diplomats to defend the Western Enclaves and Christian Churches not unlike the situation with the Taliban in Afghanistan a century later.
This quotation shows that the French revolutionaries wished for an invasion of England, even before Napoleon came to power. Part of the reason was the traditional enmity between France and England, even before the French Revolution, and the other part that England was covertly working against the French Revolution and ideologically stood for monarchy and inequality, while the French of the time were Republicans for whom equality was not only an ideal, but part of the law and much of post-revolutionary reality.
