title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: The cookery author Clifford A. Wright wrote in 1999: "There really is no such thing as 'Mediterranean cuisine'. At the same time, we seem to know what we mean when we use the expression ..." Wright argued that David's book itself was largely about specifically "French" Mediterranean food, pointing out that "only 4 percent of her recipes come from North Africa or the Levant".


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Since David's time, a variety of books on Mediterranean cuisine have been written, including Abu Shihab's 2012 book of that name; Helstosky's 2009 book; books by other cookery writers include S. Rowe's "Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume: Cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean" (2011); and Mari-Pierre Moine's "Mediterranean Cookbook" (2014). There are many more cookbooks covering specific cuisines in the Mediterranean area, such as B. Santich's "The Original Mediterranean Cuisine: Medieval Recipes for Today" (1995), on Catalan and Italian recipes; and H. F. Ullman's (2006) on the cooking of Tunisia, Spain and Italy, each one subtitled "Mediterranean Cuisine".


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: The ingredients of Mediterranean cuisine are to an extent different from those of the cuisine of Northern Europe, with olive oil instead of butter, wine instead of beer. The list of available ingredients has changed over the centuries. One major change was the introduction of many foods by the Arabs to Portugal, Spain and Sicily in the Middle Ages. Those foods included aubergines, spinach, sugar cane, rice, apricots and citrus fruits, creating the distinctive culinary tradition of Al-Andalus.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Another major change was the arrival of foods from the Americas in Early Modern times (around the sixteenth century), notably the incorporation of the potato into Northern European cuisine, and the eager adoption of the tomato into Mediterranean cuisine. The tomato, so central now to that cuisine, was first described in print by Pietro Andrea Mattioli in 1544. Similarly, many of the species of "Phaseolus" beans now used around the Mediterranean, including "P. vulgaris" (the French or haricot bean), were brought back from the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese explorers.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: David's introduction to her 1950 book characterises the cooking of the Mediterranean countries as "conditioned naturally by variations in climate and soil and the relative industry or indolence of the inhabitants."


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: David identifies "the ever recurring elements" in the food of this extensive region as olive oil, saffron, garlic, "pungent" local wines, as well as the "aromatic perfume" of herbs, especially rosemary, wild marjoram, and basil, and the bright colours of fresh foods in the markets, "pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs" and "shiny fish, silver, vermilion, or tiger-striped". She includes cheeses of "sheep's or goat's milk", "figs from Smyrna on long strings" and "sheets of apricot paste which is dissolved in water to make a cooling drink."


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: With common ingredients including the olive, wheat, and grape; a shared climate; and a long period for cultural exchange, it might be expected that a single, pan-Mediterranean cuisine would have developed. Certain items, such as olive oil, bread, wine, roast lamb or mutton (for example, Maghrebi méchoui, Greek kleftiko and souvlaki, Turkish shish kebab), bottarga, and stews of meat with vegetables and tomato (such as Spanish andrajos, French , Italian ciambotta, Turkish buğu kebabı), are indeed found all around the Mediterranean. Seafood including sea bream and squid is eaten, often in stews, stuffed, or fried, in Spanish, French, and Italian dishes. Despite this, however, the lands bordering the Mediterranean sea have distinct regional cuisines, from the Maghrebi, Levant and Ottoman to the Italian, French, and Spanish. Each of those, in turn, has national and provincial variations.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Mediterranean Maghrebi cuisine includes the cuisines of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. One of the most characteristic dishes of the region is couscous, a steamed, small-grained wheat semolina, served with a stew. The dish is ancient, mentioned by the Medieval traveller Ibn Battuta, and found for example also in the Western Sicilian cuisine, especially in the province of Trapani, where it was re-introduced after 1600.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: One stew that may be served with couscous is the Moroccan tagine, a hearty, somewhat dry dish of meat and vegetables, cooked slowly in a pot (called a tagine) with a tall conical lid. Dishes from the Maghreb region of North Africa are often coloured and flavoured with the hot spice mixtures harissa and ras el hanout (containing such spices as cumin, coriander, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, chillies, and paprika). Other characteristic flavourings of the region are preserved lemons and dried apricots and raisins.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Egyptian cuisine has ancient roots, with evidence that, for example, cheese has been made in Egypt since at least 3,000 BC. Falafel are small fried croquettes of bean or chickpea flour, currently also eaten across the Levant and the West, but originating in Egypt's Roman era; they are claimed as theirs by Coptic Christians. Duqqa is a dip made of pounded herbs, hazelnuts and spices, eaten with bread. Kushari is a vegan dish of rice, lentils and pasta, variously garnished; it began as food for the poor, but has become a national dish.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Levantine cuisine is the cooking of the Levant (including the Middle Eastern Mediterranean coast, east of Egypt). Among the most distinctive foods of this cuisine are traditional small meze dishes such as tabbouleh, hummus, and baba ghanoush. Tabbouleh is a dish of bulgur cracked wheat with tomatoes, parsley, mint and onion, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. Baba ghanoush, sometimes called "poor man's caviar", is a puree of aubergine with olive oil, often mixed with chopped onion, tomato, cumin, garlic, lemon juice, and parsley. The dish is popular across the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Ful medames, originally from Egypt and still a national dish there, consists of fava beans with oil and cumin; it is popular throughout the Levant. The dish may be ancient: dried beans of Neolithic age have been found near Nazareth.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Ottoman cuisine has given rise to the cuisines of modern Turkey, parts of the Balkans, Cyprus, and Greece. A distinctive element is the family of small flaky pastries called börek. These are popular and widespread across the Eastern Mediterranean region, and date as far back as ancient Roman times. Börek are made of thin sheets of filo pastry, filled with mixtures such as meat, caramelised onion and sweet peppers.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Another widespread and popular dish is moussaka, a baked dish of aubergine or potato with various other ingredients: often minced meat and tomatoes, sometimes a layer of egg custard or béchamel sauce on top. In its Greek variant, well known outside the region, it includes layers of aubergine and minced meat with custard or béchamel sauce on top, but that version is a relatively recent innovation, introduced by the chef Nikolaos Tselementes in the 1920s.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Greek cookery makes wide use of vegetables, olive oil, grains, fish, wine and meat (white and red, including lamb, poultry, rabbit and pork). Other important ingredients include olives, cheese, aubergine, courgette, lemon juice, vegetables, herbs, bread and yoghurt. Some more dishes that can be traced back to Ancient Greece are: lentil soup, fasolada, retsina (white or rosé wine flavoured with pine resin) and pasteli (sesame seeds baked with honey); some to the Hellenistic and Roman periods include: loukaniko (dried pork sausage); and Byzantium: feta cheese, avgotaraho (bottarga) and paximadhia (rusk). Lakerda (pickled fish), mizithra cheese and desserts like diples, koulourakia, moustokouloura and melomakarono also date back to the Byzantine period, while the variety of different pitas probably dates back to ancient times. Much of Greek cuisine is part of the larger tradition of Ottoman cuisine, the names of the dishes revealing Arabic, Persian or Turkish roots: moussaka, tzatziki, yuvarlakia, keftes and so on. Many dishes' names probably entered the Greek vocabulary during Ottoman times, or earlier in contact with the Persians and the Arabs. However, some dishes may be pre-Ottoman, only taking Turkish names later; the historians of food John Ash and Andrew Dalby, for example, speculate that grape-leaf dolmadhes were made by the early Byzantine period, while Alan Davidson traces trahana to the ancient Greek "tragos" and skordalia to the ancient Athenian "skorothalmi".


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: David barely mentioned the non-Greek Balkans, stating only that yoghurt and moussaka are widespread in the region. Some later cooks like Paula Wolfert give a few recipes from Dalmatia, some being Ottoman.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Albena Shkodrova notes that the cuisines of the coastal provinces of Istria and Dalmatia were influenced by Venice. She adds that cuisines labelled as "Italian" and "Mediterranean" are becoming popular in the Balkans, which she calls "a historical crossroads of Oriental, Mediterranean and Central-European influences".


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Mediterranean Italian cuisine includes much of Italy outside the north and the mountainous inland regions. It is a diverse cuisine, but among its best-known and most characteristic foods are risotto, pizza in Neapolitan and Sicilian styles, and pasta dishes such as spaghetti.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Risotto is a dish made using Italian short-grain rice, which is both highly absorbent and resistant to turning into a pudding when cooked with stock and flavoured with onions and garlic, cooked in butter. Anna Gosetti della Salda's book of Italian regional cookery lists 37 risotto recipes, 18 of them from the Veneto. Variations among Veneto risottos include additions of fish and white wine; chicken; eel; mushrooms and grated Parmesan cheese; quails; small pieces of beef; courgettes (zucchini); clams; "ragù"; beans; mussels; prawns; cuttlefish; and asparagus.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Pizza, or as David notes "pissaladina or pissaladière" in Provence (the cuisines of Mediterranean France and Italy having something in common), is a piece of bread dough rolled out thin, with a topping which varies from place to place, but is generally much simpler than those in the English-speaking world. In Naples this is tomato, anchovies and buffalo mozzarella. In San Remo it is onions cooked in olive oil, with salted sardines. The Provençal variety uses onions, black olives, and anchovies.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Spaghetti dishes also vary. It may be eaten as David says "simply with olive oil and garlic", without cheese, or with a sauce of "very red and ripe peeled tomatoes", cooked briefly and flavoured with garlic and either basil or parsley. One Sicilian variant includes pieces of bacon, onions fried in fat, garlic, stoned olives, and anchovies, served with olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Mediterranean French cuisine includes the cooking styles of Provence, Occitania, and the island of Corsica. Distinctive dishes that make use of local ingredients include bouillabaisse and salade niçoise.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Bouillabaisse is a substantial dish from the French port of Marseille, capital of Provence. It is a stew for at least eight people, because it should contain many kinds of fish such as crayfish, gurnard, weever, John Dory, monkfish, conger eel, whiting, sea bass, and crab. These are cooked with Mediterranean vegetables and herbs, namely onions, garlic, tomatoes, thyme, fennel, parsley, bay, and orange peel.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Salade niçoise is a colourful salad of tomatoes, tuna, hard-boiled eggs, Niçoise olives, and anchovies, dressed with a vinaigrette.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Spain's varied Mediterranean cuisines includes the cooking of Andalusia, Murcia, Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic islands. Paella is a characteristic Spanish dish, originally from Valencia, radiating early on to Catalonia and Murcia along Spain's Mediterranean coast. It comes in many versions, and may contain a mixture of chicken, pork, rabbit, or shellfish, sautéed in olive oil in a large shallow pan, with vegetables, and typically round-grain rice (often of the local "albufera", "arròs bomba", "sénia" varieties or similar) cooked to absorb the water and coloured with saffron. The dish may be varied with artichoke hearts, peas, sweet peppers, lima beans, string beans, or sausages.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Portugal lies on the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean, but it is in the Mediterranean basin, characterised by olive groves and a Mediterranean climate, except on the wetter Atlantic coast. Its cuisine too is partly Mediterranean, with the usual trio of bread, wine, and olive oil, but also partly Atlantic, with a tradition of fishing and many seafood dishes such as seafood rice ("arroz de Marisco"), clams, squid ("lulas grelhadas"), and "bacalhau", imported salted cod. There are, equally, many meat dishes, using chicken, pork, and rabbit. Other major ingredients are onions, garlic, bay leaves, sweet peppers (pimentão), cloves, and chouriço sausage. Portuguese vegetables include the tomatoes common in Mediterranean cuisine, but also kale, carrots, and broad beans. Sweet dishes include "pastéis de nata", custard tarts with cinnamon. The country produces red wines such as Alentejo.


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: The Mediterranean diet, popularised in the 1970s, is inspired by the cuisine of parts of Greece and Italy in the early 1960s. The American Diabetes Association writes about "Mediterranean-Style Eating", mentioning "the traditional Mediterranean lifestyle ... of ... eating healthfully ... together among family and friends", and asserting that "Mediterranean cuisine is plant-based", citing the ingredients "whole grains, fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, beans, nuts, seeds, and olive oil", and stating that most foods "in a Mediterranean diet come from plants".


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: The 1984 "Guida all'Italia gastronomica" states that "around 1975, under the impulse of one of those new nutritional directives by which good cooking is too often influenced, the Americans discovered the so-called Mediterranean diet. The name even pleased Italian government officials, who made one modification: changing from "diet"—a word which has always seemed punitive and therefore unpleasant—to Mediterranean "cuisine"."


title: Mediterranean cuisine

text: Since David wrote about Mediterranean food in 1950, and indeed since dietary researchers showed in the 1950s that people around the Mediterranean had less coronary heart disease than the peoples of northern Europe, the traditional Mediterranean ways of life and of eating have changed. Increased wealth and busy lives have led people to eat more meat and less vegetables: their diet is becoming more northern European, with more convenience foods and with less of a preventive effect on cardiovascular disease.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Leviathan (, "Leviafan") is a 2014 Russian crime drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, co-written by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin, and starring Aleksei Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, and Vladimir Vdovichenkov.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: According to Zvyagintsev, the story of Marvin Heemeyer's 2004 rampage through a small US town using a modified bulldozer inspired him. A similar concept was adapted into a Russian setting. The character development of the protagonist parallels a


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: biblical figure Job and the story of Naboth's Vineyard. The producer Alexander Rodnyansky has said: "It deals with some of the most important social issues of contemporary Russia while never becoming an artist's sermon or a public statement; it is a story of love and tragedy experienced by ordinary people". Critics noted the film as being formidable, dealing with quirks of fate, power and money.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: The film was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Zvyagintsev and Negin won the award for Best Screenplay. The film was judged the best film of the year at the 2014 BFI London Film Festival and the 45th International Film Festival of India. It won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards. and the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Feature Film in 2014. It was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. It was picked as the 47th greatest film since 2000 in a 2016 critics' poll by BBC.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: In a northern Russian coastal town live Kolya, a hotheaded car mechanic, his second wife Lilya and his teenage son, Roma. The town's corrupt Mayor Vadim is plotting legal chicanery to expropriate the beautiful seaside land on which Kolya's house is built. The city is forcefully compensating Kolya with a grossly undervalued sum, and Kolya believes the mayor wants the land to build a villa for himself. Kolya's old friend Dima, a sharp and successful lawyer from Moscow, arrives in town to fight the expropriation through the local court system.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: After the court rules in favor of the expropriation, Kolya is arrested at the police station for shouting at the officers, and no one in government will accept Dima's new criminal filing against the mayor. However, Dima meets with the mayor, extorting him with a thick folder of incriminating evidence proving his past crimes. A shocked mayor agrees to release Kolya and pay 3.5 million rubles. In a local hotel room, Dima and Lilya have an affair.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: The next day the family and Dima attend the seaside, birthday cookout of Kolya's friend Ivan Stepanich, where a child runs to the group saying that he just saw Dima choking Lilya. Kolya runs to find them. Afterward, Dima and Lilya drive back silent together, both with facial bruises. Meanwhile, Mayor Vadim goes for help to one of his crony bosses, the Russian Orthodox Church bishop, who tells him that all power comes from God and encourages him to stop whining to him and solve his problems forcefully. When Dima next meets with the mayor to finalize the payment, the mayor's thugs beat Dima and the mayor carries out a mock execution, advising him to return to Moscow. A conciliatory Lilya returns home to Kolya, but is depressed. Dima stands sadly looking out the window of a moving train.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: While the family is packing to move out, Kolya forces himself on Lilya, and Roma accidentally glimpses them in intercourse and flees the house, collapsing in tears by a whale skeleton on the shore. He returns home late, screaming that Lilya leave forever. That night Lilya is unable to sleep, and instead of going to work in the morning, she goes alone to the ocean cliff. When she turns up missing, Kolya desperately searches for her and increases his already very heavy consumption of vodka. Her body is discovered a few days later on the shore. A mournful, drunk Kolya asks the local Orthodox priest why God is doing this to him. The pious priest, quotes from the Biblical book of Job, and counsels Kolya that, when Job accepted his fate, he was rewarded with a long and happy life.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: The next morning Kolya is arrested for murder. The prosecutor claims to have evidence that Kolya had sex with her, killed her with his hammer, and threw her into the sea to hide it. Evidence includes his and Lilya's own friends' testimonies about threats he made to Lilya and Dima when he discovered them having sex at the cookout. Kolya is convicted and sentenced to fifteen years. With no family left, Roma reluctantly agrees to be taken in by Kolya's former friends, to avoid being sent to an orphanage. Mayor Vadim receives a call informing him of Kolya's sentence, and the mayor gloats that Kolya will now know to keep in his place. Kolya's house is torn down.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: The bishop gives a sermon extoling the virtues of God's truth versus the world's truth, and says that good intentions do not excuse evil acts. He urges the congregation, with the mayor attending, not to act with force or cunning, but to put their trust in Christ. The mayor finalizes the plans for a lavish church on Kolya's old property, and he and other local leaders drive away in their luxury European cars.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: When Andrey Zvyagintsev produced a short film in the United States, he was told the story of Marvin Heemeyer. He was amazed by this story and wanted initially to make his film in the US, but then changed his mind. The screenplay was written by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin and is loosely adapted from the biblical stories of Job from Uz and King Ahab of Samaria and Heinrich von Kleist's novella "Michael Kohlhaas". The script features more than fifteen characters, which is unusually many for a film by Zvyagintsev.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Principal photography took place in towns Kirovsk, Monchegorsk, Olenegorsk, near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. Preparations on the set began in May 2013. Principal photography took place during three months from August to October the same year. Filming of exterior scenes for "Leviathan" took place in the town of Teriberka on the Barents Sea coast.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: "Leviathan" premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened on 23 May. It is distributed by Sony Pictures Classics in the United States, Curzon Cinemas in the United Kingdom and by Palace Entertainment in Australia and New Zealand.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Peter Bradshaw, writing a full five-star review for "The Guardian", gave the film great praise. Bradshaw thought that the film was "acted and directed with unflinching ambition" and described the film as "a forbidding and intimidating piece of work... a movie with real grandeur". Finding parallels with the Book of Job, "The New York Review of Books" equated the villains with "Leviathan itself" and three characters (played by Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Aleksey Rozin and Anna Ukolova) with Job's three friends.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 97% based on 150 reviews, and an average rating of 8.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, ""Leviathan" lives up to its title, offering trenchant, well-crafted social satire on a suitably grand scale." On Metacritic, based on 34 reviews, "Leviathan" holds an average score of 92 out of 100, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Thirty-five percent of the funding for "Leviathan" came from Russia's Ministry of Culture. Vladimir Medinsky, the then Minister of Culture and a conservative historian, acknowledged that the film showed talented moviemaking but said that he did not like it. He sharply criticized its portrayal of ordinary Russians as swearing, vodka-swigging people, which he does not recognize from his experience as a Russian or that of "real Russians". He thought it strange that there is not a single positive character in the movie and implied that the director was not fond of Russians but rather "fame, red carpets and statuettes". In 2015 the Ministry of Culture proposed guidelines which would ban movies that "defile" the national culture.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: In turn, when appearing on oppositional TV channel Dozhd, director Zvyagintsev was criticised by journalist Ksenia Sobchak for accepting government subsidies. Specifically, Sobchak asked whether government funding had had no influence on the content of the movie. In response, Zvyagintsev maintained that he had always felt completely independent from the Ministry in writing and shooting the movie.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Vladimir Pozner, a veteran Russian journalist, said: "Anything seen as being critical of Russia in any way is automatically seen as either another Western attempt to denigrate Russia and the Eastern Orthodox Church, or it's the work of some kind of fifth column of Russia-phobes who are paid by the West to do their anti-Russian work or are simply themselves profoundly anti-Russian."


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Metropolitan Simon of Murmansk and Monchegorsk, the diocese where the movie was filmed, issued a statement calling it "honest". He said that "Leviathan" raised important questions about the state of the country.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: On 28 September 2014, it was announced that "Leviathan" would be Russia's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. It made the January Shortlist of nine films, before being nominated later that month.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: The film was named the Best Film at the London Film Festival Awards on 18 October 2014, at a ceremony where the main prizes went to Russia, Ukraine and Syria, three countries at the centre of long-running conflicts. The winning film-makers all said they hoped that culture could help to restore peace to their countries. It was nominated for and won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards. The film was adjudged the best film of the 45th International Film Festival of India.


title: Leviathan (2014 film)

text: Following the Golden Globe Award, "Leviathan" was leaked online among some of the other Oscar 2015 nominated films. On 12 January the website "Thank you, Leviathan filmmakers" appeared on the internet encouraging social media users to contribute any amount as a gratitude to the filmmakers. Alexander Rodnyanskiy, "Leviathan"'s producer, supported the initiative of Slava's Smirnov (the website's author and an independent digital producer) and asked to transfer the money to the Podari Zhizn charity fund which is held by actresses Chulpan Khamatova and Dina Korzun.


title: Newspaper of record

text: A newspaper of record is a major national newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative and independent; they are thus "newspapers of record by reputation" and include some of the oldest and most widely respected newspapers in the world. The level and trend in the number of "newspapers of record by reputation" is regarded as being related to the state of press freedom and political freedom in a country.


title: Newspaper of record

text: It may also be a newspaper that has been authorized to publish public or legal notices, thus serving as a newspaper of public record. Newspapers whose editorial content is largely directed by the state can be referred to as an official newspaper of record, but the lack of editorial independence means that they are not "newspapers of record by reputation". Newspapers of record by reputation that focus on business can also be called newspapers of financial record.


title: Newspaper of record

text: A "newspaper of public record", or government gazette, refers to a publicly available newspaper that is authorized by a government to publish public or legal notices. It is often established by statute or official action and publication of notices within it, whether by the government or a private party, is usually considered sufficient to comply with legal requirements for public notice. Such gazettes often have little editorial content (i.e. opinion articles), and are focused on transmission of information to the public regarding state services and state decisions; an example is Latvia's "Latvijas Vēstnesis".


title: Newspaper of record

text: In some jurisdictions, privately owned newspapers may register with the public authorities to publish public and legal notices, or be otherwise eligible to publish said notices (terms used may include "newspaper of general circulation" among others). Likewise, a private newspaper may be designated by the courts for publication of legal notices, such as notices of fictitious business names, if certain judicial and statutory standards are met. These are sometimes called "legally adjudicated newspapers".


title: Newspaper of record

text: In more extreme cases, some newspapers of public record are owned and operated by a Government that directs their entire editorial content (not just the legal and public notice content). Such newspapers, while pejoratively termed "state mouthpieces", can also be called "official newspapers of record", as their entire editorial copy represents the official view and doctrine of the State. Inclusion of the word "official" can be used to separate them from "newspapers of record by reputation". Notable examples include Russia's "Rossiyskaya Gazeta", North Korea's "Rodong Sinmun", and China's "People's Daily".


title: Newspaper of record

text: The second type of "newspaper of record" (also known as a "journal of record", or by the French term "") is not defined by any formal criteria and their characteristics can vary. The category typically consists of those newspapers that are considered to meet higher standards of journalism than most print media, including editorial independence (particularly from the ruling government and from its owners), accountability (mistakes are acknowledged), attention to detail and accuracy, and comprehensiveness and balance of coverage; they are often renowned internationally, and regarded as sources in their country and/or region by other global outlets.


title: Newspaper of record

text: Some newspapers of record by reputation, while respected for the accuracy and quality of their reporting, can still be recognized as ideologically conservative (e.g. "The Wall Street Journal" and "The Telegraph") or liberal (e.g. "The Washington Post" and "The Guardian").


title: Newspaper of record

text: While many countries are proud of their newspapers of record by reputation, in some countries, they face an openly hostile state or political system that tries to suppress their press freedoms. Examples include Turkey's "Cumhuriyet", where many of the staff have been imprisoned, Panama's "La Prensa", where staff have been shot and the owners forced into exile, and Venezuela's "El Nacional", which was effectively forced out of print by the state who seized all their assets.


title: Newspaper of record

text: Despite changes in society, newspapers of record by reputation have historically tended to maintain a similar tone, coverage, style, and traditions; many newspapers of record are over a century old, with some close to, or over, two centuries old (e.g. "Neue Zürcher Zeitung", "The Times", "The Guardian", "Le Figaro", and "The Sydney Morning Herald").


title: Newspaper of record

text: The term is believed to have originated among librarians who began referring to "The New York Times" as the "newspaper of record" when it became the first U.S. newspaper in 1913 to publish an index of the subjects covered in its pages. In recognition of the usage, "The New York Times" held an essay contest in 1927 in which entrants had to demonstrate "The Value of "The New York Times" Index and Files as a Newspaper of Record". "The New York Times", and other newspapers of its type, then sought to be chroniclers of events, acting as a record of the day's announcements, schedules, directories, proceedings, transcripts and appointments. "The New York Times" no longer considers itself a newspaper of record in the original, literal sense.


title: Newspaper of record

text: Over time, historians began to rely on "The New York Times" and similar titles as a reliable archival and historical record of significant past events, and a gauge of societal opinions at the time of printing. The term "newspaper of record" evolved from its original literal sense to its currently understood meaning.


title: Newspaper of record

text: The derived term "financial (or business) newspaper of record" is attributed to the "Wall Street Journal", the "Financial Times", and to the "Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei)".


title: Newspaper of record

text: Over time, some established newspapers of record by reputation have lost their status due to various factors including financial collapse, take-over or merger by another entity that did not have the same standards or allowed continued independence, and/or increased government control and suppression of the paper's editorial independence. The existence of newspapers of record by reputation is an aspect of the level of press freedom and political freedom in a country, with major first-world democracies having several such newspapers (e.g. United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Italy and Japan); in contrast, countries that have seen a decline in their newspapers of record by reputation can represent a decline in levels of personal and political freedom (e.g. Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Cambodia).


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Mr. Mercedes is a novel by American writer Stephen King. He calls it his first hard-boiled detective book. It was published on June 3, 2014. It is the first volume in a trilogy, followed in 2015 by "Finders Keepers", the first draft of which was finished around the time "Mr. Mercedes" was published, and "End of Watch" in 2016.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: The novel won the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and Goodreads Choice Awards for 2014 in the "Mystery and Thriller" category.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: During his Chancellor's Speaker Series talk at University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012, King indicated that he was writing a crime novel about a retired policeman being taunted by a murderer. With a working title "Mr. Mercedes" and inspired by a true event about a woman driving her car into a McDonald's restaurant, it was originally meant to be a short story just a few pages long. In an interview with "Parade", published May 26, 2013, King confirmed that the novel was "more or less" completed. Describing the novel for an interview with "USA Today", published on September 18, 2013, King said that while it was started prior to the Boston Marathon bombings, "Mr. Mercedes" involves a terrorist plot which is "too creepily close for comfort". An excerpt was published in the May 16, 2014 issue of "Entertainment Weekly".


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Many jobless people are standing in line for a job fair, but then a Mercedes S class plows into the crowd, killing eight and severely injuring many. Bill Hodges, a recently retired detective from the local police department living the life of a retiree, receives a letter from an individual claiming to be the person responsible for the job fair incident, referring to himself as "Mr. Mercedes". Hodges is divorced, lonely, and fed up with his life, occasionally considering suicide. The incident had taken place at the end of Hodges' career and was still unresolved when he retired. Mr. Mercedes knows details of the murder and also mentions Olivia Trelawney, from whom he had stolen the Mercedes. Olivia had killed herself soon after the massacre out of guilt. Hodges is intrigued and starts to investigate the case instead of turning the letter over to his former police colleague, Pete Huntley.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Brady Hartsfield, who is revealed to be Mr. Mercedes, is an emotionally disturbed psychopath in his late twenties who lost his father at age eight. When he was a young boy, he killed his mentally handicapped brother at his mother's prompting. He lives with his alcoholic mother and has an incestuous relationship with her, and he works in an electronics store and sells ice-cream from an ice-cream truck. Riding in the truck enables him to observe Hodges and Hodges' neighbors, among them seventeen-year-old Jerome Robinson, who does small chores for Hodges.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: During his research about the wealthy Olivia Trelawney, Hodges meets her sister Janey, who hires him to investigate Olivia's suicide and the theft of the Mercedes. Shortly after Hodges begins to work for Janey, the two begin dating. Hodges finds out, with the help of bright, computer savvy Jerome, how Mr. Mercedes stole the car and then drove Olivia (whom he made contact with through his job at the electronics shop) to suicide by leaving eerie sound files on her computer that were set to go off at unpredictable intervals, which escalated her feelings of guilt. Olivia, when hearing these sounds, believed them to be the ghosts of the victims of the Mercedes Massacre. At the funeral of Janey and Olivia's recently deceased mother, Hodges meets Janey's unpleasant relatives, among them Janey's emotionally unstable niece Holly. After the funeral, Mr. Mercedes watches as Janey goes to bring Hodges' car to the church steps. As the car approaches Holly and Hodges, he blows up the car with Janey in it using his remote device to call to a mobile phone on the car seat. Janey is killed in the explosion. Hodges feels remorse, but becomes even more eager to solve the case without the help of the police. Holly joins Hodges and Jerome in the investigation.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Hartsfield accidentally kills his mother with a poisoned hamburger, which he had prepared for Jerome's dog. With her rotting body in their house, he plans to kill himself by blowing himself up at a giant concert for young girls by feigning the need for a wheelchair and utilizing explosives hidden inside the wheelchair. Jerome, Hodges, and Holly manage to uncover Hartsfield's real identity and search his computer hard drives. They eventually deduce that Hartsfield's target is at the concert, and the trio rush to the concert venue to stop him. Hodges begins to suffer a heart attack and is unable to venture into the concert with Holly and Jerome, but urges them to press on. Holly locates Hartsfield and delivers several harsh blows to his head using Hodges's "Happy Slapper" – a sock filled with ball bearings. Hartsfield is left bleeding and comatose on the concert floor.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Hodges (who had been saved by concert staff), Holly, and Jerome have a picnic to discuss the recently transpired events. Hodges has learned that he will not be criminally charged for his actions regarding the Hartsfield investigation. Holly and Jerome have received medals from the city, congratulating them on their work. Meanwhile, Hartsfield awakens from his coma and asks to see his mother.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: "Mr. Mercedes" received positive reviews, with many critics responding well to the book being different from King's "standard horror stories" and being a "compelling crime novel." It received a 4.07/5 score on Goodreads, dropping to 3.87 as of 19 January with 43,562 ratings and a 4/5 on Barnes & Noble.


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Michael Marshall Smith of "The Guardian" noted the novel "is firmly positioned in suspense-thriller territory and the non-supernatural world – somewhere King evidently feels increasingly at home. … At its heart, "Mr Mercedes" is a traditional cat-and-mouse story about a psychopathic killer and the renegade cop who makes it his mission to bring him down." Considering three levels of evaluation – quality per se, expectations of King's "readers who return for his distinctively unstoppable storytelling engine, his particular and hugely dependable voice", and rules of "whichever genre" King increasingly departs to, he sums up: "Good book? Hell, yes. Good Stephen King book? Absolutely." Brian Truitt of "USA Today" gave the novel 3 and 1/2 stars: "With an accidental gumshoe and a freaky serial killer, … "Mr. Mercedes" takes the old detective genre in an excellent, modern direction". He commended "a fascinating look at what makes a serial killer in a post-9/11 context", adding that King also "really succeeds with Hodges' companions". Sheryll Connelly of "The New York Daily News" stated the novel is "telling a story that could almost be characterized as sweet except of course for the sociopath on a bloody rampage. King will be King, and he’s never less than scary. Who in their right mind would want him to be?" and noted that this is one of his books where instead of it being "horrific, King expresses outright tenderness and it’s evident here."


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: Tasha Robinson of The A.V. Club was more reserved, writing that the novel opens with its best moment and "sags significantly in the middle, but it barrels toward a memorable conclusion … his tense, propulsive, ultra-fast-paced climax here seems like it was written with the movie in mind". Her main complaint was "a collection of laughably creaky old tropes at the center … a halfhearted stop at Señor Lazy’s Bargain Cliché Bin … predictable King-isms … a cutout character following a well-worn path". But she praised the novel for being "unusual in its dedication to surprising readers" and found it "a major step up from his previous book, "Doctor Sleep"".


title: Mr. Mercedes

text: In January 2015, it was announced that "Mr. Mercedes" would be turned into a limited television series. David E. Kelley was slated to write the project and Jack Bender would direct. Kelley and Stephen King serve as executive producers. On October 10, 2017, the Audience network announced that the series would be renewed for season 2, and conclude the story from the original "Mr. Mercedes" novel. The third season was broadcast between September and November 2019.


title: Siege

text: A siege is a military blockade of a city, or fortress, with the intent of conquering by attrition, or a well-prepared assault. This derives from . Siege warfare is a form of constant, low-intensity conflict characterized by one party holding a strong, static, defensive position. Consequently, an opportunity for negotiation between combatants is common, as proximity and fluctuating advantage can encourage diplomacy. The art of conducting and resisting sieges is called siege warfare, siegecraft, or poliorcetics.


title: Siege

text: A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that cannot be easily taken by a quick assault, and which refuses to surrender. Sieges involve surrounding the target to block the provision of supplies and the reinforcement or escape of troops (a tactic known as "investment"). This is typically coupled with attempts to reduce the fortifications by means of siege engines, artillery bombardment, mining (also known as sapping), or the use of deception or treachery to bypass defenses.


title: Siege

text: Failing a military outcome, sieges can often be decided by starvation, thirst, or disease, which can afflict either the attacker or defender. This form of siege, though, can take many months or even years, depending upon the size of the stores of food the fortified position holds.


title: Siege

text: The attacking force can circumvallate the besieged place, which is to build a line of earth-works, consisting of a rampart and trench, surrounding it. During the process of circumvallation, the attacking force can be set upon by another force, an ally of the besieged place, due to the lengthy amount of time required to force it to capitulate. A defensive ring of forts outside the ring of circumvallated forts, called contravallation, is also sometimes used to defend the attackers from outside.


title: Siege

text: Ancient cities in the Middle East show archaeological evidence of fortified city walls. During the Warring States era of ancient China, there is both textual and archaeological evidence of prolonged sieges and siege machinery used against the defenders of city walls. Siege machinery was also a tradition of the ancient Greco-Roman world. During the Renaissance and the early modern period, siege warfare dominated the conduct of war in Europe. Leonardo da Vinci gained as much of his renown from the design of fortifications as from his artwork.


title: Siege

text: Medieval campaigns were generally designed around a succession of sieges. In the Napoleonic era, increasing use of ever more powerful cannons reduced the value of fortifications. In the 20th century, the significance of the classical siege declined. With the advent of mobile warfare, a single fortified stronghold is no longer as decisive as it once was. While traditional sieges do still occur, they are not as common as they once were due to changes in modes of battle, principally the ease by which huge volumes of destructive power can be directed onto a static target. Modern sieges are more commonly the result of smaller hostage, militant, or extreme resisting arrest situations.


title: Siege

text: The Assyrians deployed large labour forces to build new palaces, temples, and defensive walls. Some settlements in the Indus Valley civilization were also fortified. By about 3500 BC, hundreds of small farming villages dotted the Indus River floodplain. Many of these settlements had fortifications and planned streets.


title: Siege

text: The stone and mud brick houses of Kot Diji were clustered behind massive stone flood dikes and defensive walls, for neighbouring communities quarrelled constantly about the control of prime agricultural land. Mundigak (c. 2500 BC) in present-day south-east Afghanistan has defensive walls and square bastions of sun-dried bricks.


title: Siege

text: City walls and fortifications were essential for the defence of the first cities in the ancient Near East. The walls were built of mudbricks, stone, wood, or a combination of these materials, depending on local availability. They may also have served the dual purpose of showing potential enemies the might of the kingdom. The great walls surrounding the Sumerian city of Uruk gained a widespread reputation. The walls were in length, and up to in height.


title: Siege

text: Later, the walls of Babylon, reinforced by towers, moats, and ditches, gained a similar reputation. In Anatolia, the Hittites built massive stone walls around their cities atop hillsides, taking advantage of the terrain. In Shang Dynasty China, at the site of Ao, large walls were erected in the 15th century BC that had dimensions of in width at the base and enclosed an area of some squared. The ancient Chinese capital for the State of Zhao, Handan, founded in 386 BC, also had walls that were wide at the base; they were tall, with two separate sides of its rectangular enclosure at a length of 1,530 yd (1,400 m).


title: Siege

text: The cities of the Indus Valley Civilization showed less effort in constructing defences, as did the Minoan civilization on Crete. These civilizations probably relied more on the defence of their outer borders or sea shores. Unlike the ancient Minoan civilization, the Mycenaean Greeks emphasized the need for fortifications alongside natural defences of mountainous terrain, such as the massive Cyclopean walls built at Mycenae and other adjacent Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1100 BC) centers of central and southern Greece.


title: Siege

text: Although there are depictions of sieges from the ancient Near East in historical sources and in art, there are very few examples of siege systems that have been found archaeologically. Of the few examples, several are noteworthy:


title: Siege

text: The earliest representations of siege warfare have been dated to the Protodynastic Period of Egypt, c. 3000 BC. These show the symbolic destruction of city walls by divine animals using hoes.


title: Siege

text: The first siege equipment is known from Egyptian tomb reliefs of the 24th century BC, showing Egyptian soldiers storming Canaanite town walls on wheeled siege ladders. Later Egyptian temple reliefs of the 13th century BC portray the violent siege of Dapur, a Syrian city, with soldiers climbing scale ladders supported by archers.


title: Siege

text: Assyrian palace reliefs of the 9th to 7th centuries BC display sieges of several Near Eastern cities. Though a simple battering ram had come into use in the previous millennium, the Assyrians improved siege warfare and used huge wooden tower-shaped battering rams with archers positioned on top.


title: Siege

text: In ancient China, sieges of city walls (along with naval battles) were portrayed on bronze 'hu' vessels, like those found in Chengdu, Sichuan in 1965, which have been dated to the Warring States period (5th to 3rd centuries BC).


title: Siege

text: An attacker's first act in a siege might be a surprise attack, attempting to overwhelm the defenders before they were ready or were even aware there was a threat. This was how William de Forz captured Fotheringhay Castle in 1221.


title: Siege

text: The most common practice of siege warfare was to lay siege and just wait for the surrender of the enemies inside or, quite commonly, to coerce someone inside to betray the fortification. During the medieval period, negotiations would frequently take place during the early part of the siege. An attacker – aware of a prolonged siege's great cost in time, money, and lives – might offer generous terms to a defender who surrendered quickly. The defending troops would be allowed to march away unharmed, often retaining their weapons. However, a garrison commander who was thought to have surrendered too quickly might face execution by his own side for treason.


title: Siege

text: As a siege progressed, the surrounding army would build earthworks (a line of circumvallation) to completely encircle their target, preventing food, water, and other supplies from reaching the besieged city. If sufficiently desperate as the siege progressed, defenders and civilians might have been reduced to eating anything vaguely edible – horses, family pets, the leather from shoes, and even each other.


title: Siege

text: The Hittite siege of a rebellious Anatolian vassal in the 14th century BC ended when the queen mother came out of the city and begged for mercy on behalf of her people. The Hittite campaign against the kingdom of Mitanni in the 14th century BC bypassed the fortified city of Carchemish. If the main objective of a campaign was not the conquest of a particular city, it could simply be passed by. When the main objective of the campaign had been fulfilled, the Hittite army returned to Carchemish and the city fell after an eight-day siege.


title: Siege

text: Disease was another effective siege weapon, although the attackers were often as vulnerable as the defenders. In some instances, catapults or similar weapons were used to fling diseased animals over city walls in an early example of biological warfare. If all else failed, a besieger could claim the booty of his conquest undamaged, and retain his men and equipment intact, for the price of a well-placed bribe to a disgruntled gatekeeper. The Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in the 8th century BC came to an end when the Israelites bought them off with gifts and tribute, according to the Assyrian account, or when the Assyrian camp was struck by mass death, according to the Biblical account. Due to logistics, long-lasting sieges involving a minor force could seldom be maintained. A besieging army, encamped in possibly squalid field conditions and dependent on the countryside and its own supply lines for food, could very well be threatened with the disease and starvation intended for the besieged.


title: Siege

text: To end a siege more rapidly, various methods were developed in ancient and medieval times to counter fortifications, and a large variety of siege engines was developed for use by besieging armies. Ladders could be used to escalade over the defenses. Battering rams and siege hooks could also be used to force through gates or walls, while catapults, ballistae, trebuchets, mangonels, and onagers could be used to launch projectiles to break down a city's fortifications and kill its defenders. A siege tower, a substantial structure built to equal or greater height than the fortification's walls, could allow the attackers to fire down upon the defenders and also advance troops to the wall with less danger than using ladders.


title: Siege

text: In addition to launching projectiles at the fortifications or defenders, it was also quite common to attempt to undermine the fortifications, causing them to collapse. This could be accomplished by digging a tunnel beneath the foundations of the walls, and then deliberately collapsing or exploding the tunnel. This process is known as mining. The defenders could dig counter-tunnels to cut into the attackers' works and collapse them prematurely.


title: Siege

text: Fire was often used as a weapon when dealing with wooden fortifications. The Byzantine Empire used Greek fire, which contained additives that made it hard to extinguish. Combined with a primitive flamethrower, it proved an effective offensive and defensive weapon.


title: Siege

text: The universal method for defending against siege is the use of fortifications, principally walls and ditches, to supplement natural features. A sufficient supply of food and water was also important to defeat the simplest method of siege warfare: starvation. On occasion, the defenders would drive 'surplus' civilians out to reduce the demands on stored food and water.


title: Siege

text: During the Warring States period in China (481–221 BC), warfare lost its honorable, gentlemen's duty that was found in the previous era of the Spring and Autumn period, and became more practical, competitive, cut-throat, and efficient for gaining victory. The Chinese invention of the hand-held, trigger-mechanism crossbow during this period revolutionized warfare, giving greater emphasis to infantry and cavalry and less to traditional chariot warfare.


title: Siege

text: The philosophically pacifist Mohists (followers of the philosopher Mozi) of the 5th century BC believed in aiding the defensive warfare of smaller Chinese states against the hostile offensive warfare of larger domineering states. The Mohists were renowned in the smaller states (and the enemies of the larger states) for the inventions of siege machinery to scale or destroy walls. These included traction trebuchet catapults, eight-foot-high ballistas, a wheeled siege ramp with grappling hooks known as the Cloud Bridge (the protractible, folded ramp slinging forward by means of a counterweight with rope and pulley), and wheeled 'hook-carts' used to latch large iron hooks onto the tops of walls to pull them down.


title: Siege

text: When enemies attempted to dig tunnels under walls for mining or entry into the city, the defenders used large bellows (the type the Chinese commonly used in heating up a blast furnace for smelting cast iron) to pump smoke into the tunnels in order to suffocate the intruders.


title: Siege

text: Advances in the prosecution of sieges in ancient and medieval times naturally encouraged the development of a variety of defensive countermeasures. In particular, medieval fortifications became progressively stronger—for example, the advent of the concentric castle from the period of the Crusades—and more dangerous to attackers—witness the increasing use of machicolations and murder-holes, as well the preparation of hot or incendiary substances. Arrowslits (also called arrow loops or loopholes), sally ports (airlock-like doors) for sallies and deep water wells were also integral means of resisting siege at this time. Particular attention would be paid to defending entrances, with gates protected by drawbridges, portcullises, and barbicans. Moats and other water defenses, whether natural or augmented, were also vital to defenders.


title: Siege

text: In the European Middle Ages, virtually all large cities had city walls—Dubrovnik in Dalmatia is a well-preserved example—and more important cities had citadels, forts, or castles. Great effort was expended to ensure a good water supply inside the city in case of siege. In some cases, long tunnels were constructed to carry water into the city. Complex systems of tunnels were used for storage and communications in medieval cities like Tábor in Bohemia, similar to those used much later in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.


title: Siege

text: Until the invention of gunpowder-based weapons (and the resulting higher-velocity projectiles), the balance of power and logistics definitely favored the defender. With the invention of gunpowder, cannon and mortars and howitzers (in modern times), the traditional methods of defense became less effective against a determined siege.


title: Siege

text: Although there are numerous ancient accounts of cities being sacked, few contain any clues to how this was achieved. Some popular tales existed on how the cunning heroes succeeded in their sieges. The best-known is the Trojan Horse of the Trojan War, and a similar story tells how the Canaanite city of Joppa was conquered by the Egyptians in the 15th century BC. The Biblical Book of Joshua contains the story of the miraculous Battle of Jericho.


title: Siege

text: A more detailed historical account from the 8th century BC, called the Piankhi stela, records how the Nubians laid siege to and conquered several Egyptian cities by using battering rams, archers, and slingers and building causeways across moats.


title: Siege

text: During the Peloponnesian War, one hundred sieges were attempted and fifty-eight ended with the surrender of the besieged area.


title: Siege

text: Alexander the Great's army successfully besieged many powerful cities during his conquests. Two of his most impressive achievements in siegecraft took place in the siege of Tyre and the siege of the Sogdian Rock. His engineers built a causeway that was originally wide and reached the range of his torsion-powered artillery, while his soldiers pushed siege towers housing stone throwers and light catapults to bombard the city walls.


title: Siege

text: Most conquerors before him had found Tyre, a Phoenician island-city about 1 km from the mainland, impregnable. The Macedonians built a mole, a raised spit of earth across the water, by piling stones up on a natural land bridge that extended underwater to the island, and although the Tyrians rallied by sending a fire ship to destroy the towers, and captured the mole in a swarming frenzy, the city eventually fell to the Macedonians after a seven-month siege. In complete contrast to Tyre, Sogdian Rock was captured by stealthy attack. Alexander used commando-like tactics to scale the cliffs and capture the high ground, and the demoralized defenders surrendered.


title: Siege

text: The importance of siege warfare in the ancient period should not be underestimated. One of the contributing causes of Hannibal's inability to defeat Rome was his lack of siege engines, thus, while he was able to defeat Roman armies in the field, he was unable to capture Rome itself. The legionary armies of the Roman Republic and Empire are noted as being particularly skilled and determined in siege warfare. An astonishing number and variety of sieges, for example, formed the core of Julius Caesar's mid-1st-century BC conquest of Gaul (modern France).


title: Siege

text: In his "Commentarii de Bello Gallico" ("Commentaries on the Gallic War"), Caesar describes how, at the Battle of Alesia, the Roman legions created two huge fortified walls around the city. The inner circumvallation, , held in Vercingetorix's forces, while the outer contravallation kept relief from reaching them. The Romans held the ground in between the two walls. The besieged Gauls, facing starvation, eventually surrendered after their relief force met defeat against Caesar's auxiliary cavalry.


title: Siege

text: The Sicarii Zealots who defended Masada in AD 73 were defeated by the Roman legions, who built a ramp 100 m high up to the fortress's west wall.


title: Siege

text: The early Muslims, led by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, made extensive use of sieges during military campaigns. The first use was during the Invasion of Banu Qaynuqa. According to Islamic tradition, the invasion of Banu Qaynuqa occurred in 624 AD. The Banu Qaynuqa were a Jewish tribe expelled by Muhammad for allegedly breaking the treaty known as the Constitution of Medina by pinning the clothes of a Muslim woman, which led to her being stripped naked. A Muslim killed a Jew in retaliation, and the Jews in turn killed the Muslim man. This escalated to a chain of revenge killings, and enmity grew between Muslims and the Banu Qaynuqa, leading to the siege of their fortress. The tribe eventually surrendered to Muhammad, who initially wanted to kill the members of Banu Qaynuqa but ultimately yielded to Abdullah ibn Ubayy's insistence and agreed to expel the Qaynuqa.


title: Siege

text: The second siege was during the Invasion of Banu Nadir. According to "The Sealed Nectar", the siege did not last long; the Banu Nadir Jews willingly offered to comply with the Muhammad's order and leave Madinah. Their caravan counted 600 loaded camels, including their chiefs, Huyai bin Akhtab, and Salam bin Abi Al-Huqaiq, who left for Khaibar, whereas another party shifted to Syria. Two of them embraced Islam, Yameen bin ‘Amr and Abu Sa‘d bin Wahab, and so they retained their personal wealth. Muhammad seized their weapons, land, houses, and wealth. Amongst the other booty he managed to capture, there were 50 armours, 50 helmets, and 340 swords. This booty was exclusively Muhammad's because no fighting was involved in capturing it. He divided the booty at his own discretion among the early Emigrants and two poor Helpers, Abu Dujana and Suhail bin Haneef.


title: Siege

text: Other examples include the Invasion of Banu Qurayza in February–March 627 and the siege of Ta'if in January 630.


title: Siege

text: In the Middle Ages, the Mongol Empire's campaign against China (then comprising the Western Xia Dynasty, Jin Dynasty, and Southern Song dynasty) by Genghis Khan until Kublai Khan, who eventually established the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, was very effective, allowing the Mongols to sweep through large areas. Even if they could not enter some of the more well-fortified cities, they used innovative battle tactics to grab hold of the land and the people:


title: Siege

text: Another Mongol tactic was to use catapults to launch corpses of plague victims into besieged cities. The disease-carrying fleas from the bodies would then infest the city, and the plague would spread, allowing the city to be easily captured, although this transmission mechanism was not known at the time. In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Crimean city of Kaffa (now Feodosiya). It has been speculated that this operation may have been responsible for the advent of the Black Death in Europe. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30%–60% of Europe's population.


title: Siege

text: On the first night while laying siege to a city, the leader of the Mongol forces would lead from a white tent: if the city surrendered, all would be spared. On the second day, he would use a red tent: if the city surrendered, the men would all be killed, but the rest would be spared. On the third day, he would use a black tent: no quarter would be given.


title: Siege

text: However, the Chinese were not completely defenseless, and from AD 1234 until 1279, the Southern Song Chinese held out against the enormous barrage of Mongol attacks. Much of this success in defense lay in the world's first use of gunpowder (i.e. with early flamethrowers, grenades, firearms, cannons, and land mines) to fight back against the Khitans, the Tanguts, the Jurchens, and then the Mongols.


title: Siege

text: The Chinese of the Song period also discovered the explosive potential of packing hollowed cannonball shells with gunpowder. Written later around 1350 in the "Huo Long Jing", this manuscript of Jiao Yu recorded an earlier Song-era cast-iron cannon known as the 'flying-cloud thunderclap eruptor' (fei yun pi-li pao). The manuscript stated that (Wade–Giles spelling):


title: Siege

text: The shells ("phao") are made of cast iron, as large as a bowl and shaped like a ball. Inside they contain half a pound of 'magic' gunpowder ("shen huo"). They are sent flying towards the enemy camp from an eruptor ("mu phao"); and when they get there a sound like a thunder-clap is heard, and flashes of light appear. If ten of these shells are fired successfully into the enemy camp, the whole place will be set ablaze...


title: Siege

text: During the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368–1644), the Chinese were very concerned with city planning in regards to gunpowder warfare. The site for constructing the walls and the thickness of the walls in Beijing's Forbidden City were favoured by the Chinese Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424) because they were in pristine position to resist cannon volley and were built thick enough to withstand attacks from cannon fire.


title: Siege

text: The introduction of gunpowder and the use of cannons brought about a new age in siege warfare. Cannons were first used in Song dynasty China during the early 13th century, but did not become significant weapons for another 150 years or so. In early decades, cannons could do little against strong castles and fortresses, providing little more than smoke and fire. By the 16th century, however, they were an essential and regularized part of any campaigning army, or castle's defences.


title: Siege

text: The greatest advantage of cannons over other siege weapons was the ability to fire a heavier projectile, farther, faster, and more often than previous weapons. They could also fire projectiles in a straight line, so that they could destroy the bases of high walls. Thus, 'old fashioned' walls – that is, high and, relatively, thin – were excellent targets, and, over time, easily demolished. In 1453, the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, were broken through in just six weeks by the 62 cannons of Mehmed II's army, although in the end the conquest was a long and extremely difficult siege with heavy Ottoman casualties due to the repeated attempts at taking the city by assault.


title: Siege

text: However, new fortifications, designed to withstand gunpowder weapons, were soon constructed throughout Europe. During the Renaissance and the early modern period, siege warfare continued to dominate the conduct of the European wars.


title: Siege

text: Once siege guns were developed, the techniques for assaulting a town or fortress became well known and ritualized. The attacking army would surround a town. Then the town would be asked to surrender. If they did not comply, the besieging army would surround the town with temporary fortifications to stop sallies from the stronghold or relief getting in. The attackers would next build a length of trenches parallel to the defences (these are known as the "First parallel") and just out of range of the defending artillery. They would dig a trench (known as a Forward) towards the town in a zigzag pattern so that it could not be enfiladed by defending fire. Once they were within artillery range, they would dig another parallel (the Second Parallel) trench and fortify it with gun emplacements. This technique is commonly called entrenchment.


title: Siege

text: If necessary, using the first artillery fire for cover, the forces conducting the siege would repeat the process until they placed their guns close enough to be laid (aimed) accurately to make a breach in the fortifications. In order to allow the forlorn hope and support troops to get close enough to exploit the breach, more zigzag trenches could be dug even closer to the walls, with more parallel trenches to protect and conceal the attacking troops. After each step in the process, the besiegers would ask the besieged to surrender. If the forlorn hope stormed the breach successfully, the defenders could expect no mercy.


title: Siege

text: The castles that in earlier years had been formidable obstacles were easily breached by the new weapons. For example, in Spain, the newly equipped army of Ferdinand and Isabella was able to conquer Moorish strongholds in Granada in 1482–1492 that had held out for centuries before the invention of cannons.


title: Siege

text: In the early 15th century, Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote a treatise entitled "De Re aedificatoria", which theorized methods of building fortifications capable of withstanding the new guns. He proposed that walls be "built in uneven lines, like the teeth of a saw". He proposed star-shaped fortresses with low, thick walls.


title: Siege

text: However, few rulers paid any attention to his theories. A few towns in Italy began building in the new style late in the 1480s, but it was only with the French invasion of the Italian peninsula in 1494–1495 that the new fortifications were built on a large scale. Charles VIII invaded Italy with an army of 18,000 men and a horse-drawn siege-train. As a result, he could defeat virtually any city or state, no matter how well defended. In a panic, military strategy was completely rethought throughout the Italian states of the time, with a strong emphasis on the new fortifications that could withstand a modern siege.


title: Siege

text: The most effective way to protect walls against cannonfire proved to be depth (increasing the width of the defences) and angles (ensuring that attackers could only fire on walls at an oblique angle, not square on). Initially, walls were lowered and backed, in front and behind, with earth. Towers were reformed into triangular bastions. This design matured into the "trace italienne". Star-shaped fortresses surrounding towns and even cities with outlying defences proved very difficult to capture, even for a well-equipped army. Fortresses built in this style throughout the 16th century did not become fully obsolete until the 19th century, and were still in use throughout World War I (though modified for 20th-century warfare). During World War II, "trace italienne" fortresses could still present a formidable challenge, for example, in the last days of World War II, during the Battle in Berlin, that saw some of the heaviest urban fighting of the war, the Soviets did not attempt to storm the Spandau Citadel (built between 1559 and 1594), but chose to invest it and negotiate its surrender.


title: Siege

text: However, the cost of building such vast modern fortifications was incredibly high, and was often too much for individual cities to undertake. Many were bankrupted in the process of building them; others, such as Siena, spent so much money on fortifications that they were unable to maintain their armies properly, and so lost their wars anyway. Nonetheless, innumerable large and impressive fortresses were built throughout northern Italy in the first decades of the 16th century to resist repeated French invasions that became known as the Italian Wars. Many stand to this day.


title: Siege

text: In the 1530s and '40s, the new style of fortification began to spread out of Italy into the rest of Europe, particularly to France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Italian engineers were in enormous demand throughout Europe, especially in war-torn areas such as the Netherlands, which became dotted by towns encircled in modern fortifications. The densely populated areas of Northern Italy and the United Provinces (the Netherlands) were infamous for their high degree of fortification of cities. It made campaigns in these areas very hard to successfully conduct, considering even minor cities had to be captured by siege within the span of the campaigning season. In the Dutch case, the possibility of flooding large parts of the land provided an additional obstacle to besiegers, for example at the siege of Leiden. For many years, defensive and offensive tactics were well balanced, leading to protracted and costly wars such as Europe had never known, involving more and more planning and government involvement. The new fortresses ensured that war rarely extended beyond a series of sieges. Because the new fortresses could easily hold 10,000 men, an attacking army could not ignore a powerfully fortified position without serious risk of counterattack. As a result, virtually all towns had to be taken, and that was usually a long, drawn-out affair, potentially lasting from several months to years, while the members of the town were starved to death. Most battles in this period were between besieging armies and relief columns sent to rescue the besieged.


title: Siege

text: At the end of the 17th century, two influential military engineers, the French Marshal Vauban and the Dutch military engineer Menno van Coehoorn, developed modern fortification to its pinnacle, refining siege warfare without fundamentally altering it: ditches would be dug; walls would be protected by glacis; and bastions would enfilade an attacker. Both engineers developed their ideas independently, but came to similar general rules regarding defensive construction and offensive action against fortifications. Both were skilled in conducting sieges and defences themselves. Before Vauban and Van Coehoorn, sieges had been somewhat slapdash operations. Vauban and Van Coehoorn refined besieging to a science with a methodical process that, if uninterrupted, would break even the strongest fortifications. Examples of their styles of fortifications are Arras (Vauban) and the no-longer-existent fortress of Bergen op Zoom (Van Coehoorn). The main differences between the two lay in the difference in terrain on which Vauban and Van Coehoorn constructed their defences: Vauban in the sometimes more hilly and mountainous terrain of France, Van Coehoorn in the flat and floodable lowlands of the Netherlands.


title: Siege

text: Planning and maintaining a siege is just as difficult as fending one off. A besieging army must be prepared to repel both sorties from the besieged area and also any attack that may try to relieve the defenders. It was thus usual to construct lines of trenches and defenses facing in both directions. The outermost lines, known as the lines of contravallation, would surround the entire besieging army and protect it from attackers.


title: Siege

text: This would be the first construction effort of a besieging army, built soon after a fortress or city had been invested. A line of circumvallation would also be constructed, facing in towards the besieged area, to protect against sorties by the defenders and to prevent the besieged from escaping. The next line, which Vauban usually placed at about 600 meters from the target, would contain the main batteries of heavy cannons so that they could hit the target without being vulnerable themselves. Once this line was established, work crews would move forward, creating another line at 250 meters. This line contained smaller guns. The final line would be constructed only 30 to 60 meters from the fortress. This line would contain the mortars and would act as a staging area for attack parties once the walls were breached. Van Coehoorn developed a small and easily movable mortar named the coehorn, variations of which were used in sieges until the 19th century. It would also be from this line that miners working to undermine the fortress would operate.


title: Siege

text: The trenches connecting the various lines of the besiegers could not be built perpendicular to the walls of the fortress, as the defenders would have a clear line of fire along the whole trench. Thus, these lines (known as saps) needed to be sharply jagged.


title: Siege

text: Another element of a fortress was the citadel. Usually, a citadel was a "mini fortress" within the larger fortress, sometimes designed as a reduit, but more often as a means of protecting the garrison from potential revolt in the city. The citadel was used in wartime and peacetime to keep the residents of the city in line.


title: Siege

text: As in ages past, most sieges were decided with very little fighting between the opposing armies. An attacker's army was poorly served, incurring the high casualties that a direct assault on a fortress would entail. Usually, they would wait until supplies inside the fortifications were exhausted or disease had weakened the defenders to the point that they were willing to surrender. At the same time, diseases, especially typhus, were a constant danger to the encamped armies outside the fortress, and often forced a premature retreat. Sieges were often won by the army that lasted the longest.


title: Siege

text: An important element of strategy for the besieging army was whether or not to allow the encamped city to surrender. Usually, it was preferable to graciously allow a surrender, both to save on casualties, and to set an example for future defending cities. A city that was allowed to surrender with minimal loss of life was much better off than a city that held out for a long time and was brutally butchered at the end. Moreover, if an attacking army had a reputation of killing and pillaging regardless of a surrender, then other cities' defensive efforts would be redoubled. Usually, a city would surrender (with no honour lost) when its inner lines of defence were reached by the attacker. In case of refusal, however, the inner lines would have to be stormed by the attacker and the attacking troops would be seen to be justified in sacking the city.


title: Siege

text: Siege warfare dominated in Western Europe for most of the 17th and 18th centuries. An entire campaign, or longer, could be used in a single siege (for example, Ostend in 1601–1604; La Rochelle in 1627–1628). This resulted in extremely prolonged conflicts. The balance was that, while siege warfare was extremely expensive and very slow, it was very successful—or, at least, more so than encounters in the field. Battles arose through clashes between besiegers and relieving armies, but the principle was a slow, grinding victory by the greater economic power. The relatively rare attempts at forcing pitched battles (Gustavus Adolphus in 1630; the French against the Dutch in 1672 or 1688) were almost always expensive failures.


title: Siege

text: The exception to this rule were the English. During the English Civil War, anything which tended to prolong the struggle, or seemed like want of energy and avoidance of a decision, was bitterly resented by the men of both sides. In France and Germany, the prolongation of a war meant continued employment for the soldiers, but in England, both sides were looking to end the war quickly. Even when in the end the New Model Army—a regular professional army—developed the original decision-compelling spirit permeated the whole organisation, as was seen when pitched against regular professional continental troops the Battle of the Dunes during the Interregnum.


title: Siege

text: Experienced commanders on both sides in the English Civil War recommended the abandonment of garrisoned fortifications for two primary reasons. The first, as for example proposed by the Royalist Sir Richard Willis to King Charles, was that by abandoning the garrisoning of all but the most strategic locations in one's own territory, far more troops would be available for the field armies, and it was the field armies which would decide the conflict. The other argument was that by slighting potential strong points in one's own territory, an enemy expeditionary force, or local enemy rising, would find it more difficult to consolidate territorial gains against an inevitable counterattack. Sir John Meldrum put forward just such an argument to the Parliamentary Committee of Both Kingdoms, to justify his slighting of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.


title: Siege

text: Sixty years later, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke of Marlborough preferred to engage the enemy in pitched battles, rather than engage in siege warfare, although he was very proficient in both types of warfare.


title: Siege

text: On 15 April 1746, the day before the Battle of Culloden, at Dunrobin Castle, a party of William Sutherland's militia conducted the last siege fought on the mainland of Great Britain against Jacobite members of Clan MacLeod.


title: Siege

text: In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, new techniques stressed the division of armies into all-arms corps that would march separately and only come together on the battlefield. The less-concentrated army could now live off the country and move more rapidly over a larger number of roads.


title: Siege

text: Fortresses commanding lines of communication could be bypassed and would no longer stop an invasion. Since armies could not live off the land indefinitely, Napoleon Bonaparte always sought a quick end to any conflict by pitched battle. This military revolution was described and codified by Clausewitz.


title: Siege

text: Advances in artillery made previously impregnable defences useless. For example, the walls of Vienna that had held off the Turks in the mid-17th century were no obstacle to Napoleon in the early 19th.


title: Siege

text: Where sieges occurred (such as the siege of Delhi and the siege of Cawnpore during the Indian Rebellion of 1857), the attackers were usually able to defeat the defences within a matter of days or weeks, rather than weeks or months as previously. The great Swedish white-elephant fortress of Karlsborg was built in the tradition of Vauban and intended as a reserve capital for Sweden, but it was obsolete before it was completed in 1869.


title: Siege

text: Railways, when they were introduced, made possible the movement and supply of larger armies than those that fought in the Napoleonic Wars. It also reintroduced siege warfare, as armies seeking to use railway lines in enemy territory were forced to capture fortresses which blocked these lines.


title: Siege

text: During the Franco-Prussian War, the battlefield front-lines moved rapidly through France. However, the Prussian and other German armies were delayed for months at the siege of Metz and the siege of Paris, due to the greatly increased firepower of the defending infantry, and the principle of detached or semi-detached forts with heavy-caliber artillery. This resulted in the later construction of fortress works across Europe, such as the massive fortifications at Verdun. It also led to the introduction of tactics which sought to induce surrender by bombarding the civilian population within a fortress, rather than the defending works themselves.


title: Siege

text: The siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and the siege of Petersburg (1864–1865) during the American Civil War showed that modern citadels, when improved by improvised defences, could still resist an enemy for many months. The Siege of Plevna during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) proved that hastily constructed field defences could resist attacks prepared without proper resources, and were a portent of the trench warfare of World War I.


title: Siege

text: Advances in firearms technology without the necessary advances in battlefield communications gradually led to the defence again gaining the ascendancy. An example of siege during this time, prolonged during 337 days due to the isolation of the surrounded troops, was the siege of Baler, in which a reduced group of Spanish soldiers was besieged in a small church by the Philippine rebels in the course of the Philippine Revolution and the Spanish–American War, until months after the Treaty of Paris, the end of the conflict.


title: Siege

text: Furthermore, the development of steamships availed greater speed to blockade runners, ships with the purpose of bringing cargo, e.g. food, to cities under blockade, as with Charleston, South Carolina during the American Civil War.


title: Siege

text: Mainly as a result of the increasing firepower (such as machine guns) available to defensive forces, First World War trench warfare briefly revived a form of siege warfare. Although siege warfare had moved out from an urban setting because city walls had become ineffective against modern weapons, trench warfare was nonetheless able to use many of the techniques of siege warfare in its prosecution (sapping, mining, barrage and, of course, attrition), but on a much larger scale and on a greatly extended front.


title: Siege

text: More traditional sieges of fortifications took place in addition to trench sieges. The siege of Tsingtao was one of the first major sieges of the war, but the inability for significant resupply of the German garrison made it a relatively one-sided battle. The Germans and the crew of an Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser put up a hopeless defence and, after holding out for more than a week, surrendered to the Japanese, forcing the German East Asia Squadron to steam towards South America for a new coal source.


title: Siege

text: The other major siege outside Europe during the First World War was in Mesopotamia, at the siege of Kut. After a failed attempt to move on Baghdad, stopped by the Ottomans at the bloody Battle of Ctesiphon, the British and their large contingent of Indian sepoy soldiers were forced to retreat to Kut, where the Ottomans under German General Baron Colmar von der Goltz laid siege. The British attempts to resupply the force via the Tigris river failed, and rationing was complicated by the refusal of many Indian troops to eat cattle products. By the time the garrison fell on 29 April 1916, starvation was rampant. Conditions did not improve greatly under Turkish imprisonment. Along with the battles of Tanga, Sandfontein, Gallipoli, and Namakura, it would be one of Britain's numerous embarrassing colonial defeats of the war.


title: Siege

text: The largest sieges of the war, however, took place in Europe. The initial German advance into Belgium produced four major sieges: the Battle of Liège, the Battle of Namur, the siege of Maubeuge, and the siege of Antwerp. All four would prove crushing German victories, at Liège and Namur against the Belgians, at Maubeuge against the French and at Antwerp against a combined Anglo-Belgian force. The weapon that made these victories possible were the German Big Berthas and the Skoda 305 mm Model 1911 siege mortars, one of the best siege mortars of the war, on loan from Austria-Hungary. These huge guns were the decisive weapon of siege warfare in the 20th century, taking part at Przemyśl, the Belgian sieges, on the Italian Front and Serbian Front, and even being reused in World War II.


title: Siege

text: At the second siege of Przemyśl, the Austro-Hungarian garrison showed an excellent knowledge of siege warfare, not only waiting for relief, but sending sorties into Russian lines and employing an active defence that resulted in the capture of the Russian General Lavr Kornilov. Despite its excellent performance, the garrison's food supply had been requisitioned for earlier offensives, a relief expedition was stalled by the weather, ethnic rivalries flared up between the defending soldiers, and a breakout attempt failed. When the commander of the garrison Hermann Kusmanek finally surrendered, his troops were eating their horses and the first attempt of large-scale air supply had failed. It was one of the few great victories obtained by either side during the war; 110,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners were marched back to Russia. Use of aircraft for siege running, bringing supplies to areas under siege, would nevertheless prove useful in many sieges to come.


title: Siege

text: The largest siege of the war, and arguably the roughest, most gruesome battle in history, was the Battle of Verdun. Whether the battle can be considered true siege warfare is debatable. Under the theories of Erich von Falkenhayn, it is more distinguishable as purely attrition with a coincidental presence of fortifications on the battlefield. When considering the plans of Crown Prince Wilhelm, purely concerned with taking the citadel and not with French casualty figures, it can be considered a true siege. The main fortifications were Fort Douaumont, Fort Vaux, and the fortified city of Verdun itself. The Germans, through the use of huge artillery bombardments, flamethrowers, and infiltration tactics, were able to capture both Vaux and Douaumont, but were never able to take the city, and eventually lost most of their gains. It was a battle that, despite the French ability to fend off the Germans, neither side won. The German losses were not worth the potential capture of the city, and the French casualties were not worth holding the symbol of her defence.


title: Siege

text: The development of the armoured tank and improved infantry tactics at the end of World War I swung the pendulum back in favour of manoeuvre, and with the advent of Blitzkrieg in 1939, the end of traditional siege warfare was at hand. The Maginot Line would be the prime example of the failure of immobile, post–World War I fortifications. Although sieges would continue, it would be in a totally different style and on a reduced scale.


title: Siege

text: The Blitzkrieg of the Second World War truly showed that fixed fortifications are easily defeated by manoeuvre instead of frontal assault or long sieges. The great Maginot Line was bypassed, and battles that would have taken weeks of siege could now be avoided with the careful application of air power (such as the German paratrooper capture of Fort Eben-Emael, Belgium, early in World War II).


title: Siege

text: The most important siege was the siege of Leningrad, that lasted over 29 months, about half of the duration of the entire Second World War. The siege of Leningrad resulted in the deaths of some one million of the city's inhabitants. Along with the Battle of Stalingrad, the siege of Leningrad on the Eastern Front was the deadliest siege of a city in history. In the west, apart from the Battle of the Atlantic, the sieges were not on the same scale as those on the European Eastern front; however, there were several notable or critical sieges: the island of Malta, for which the population won the George Cross and Tobruk. In the South-East Asian Theatre, there was the siege of Singapore, and in the Burma Campaign, sieges of Myitkyina, the Admin Box, Imphal, and Kohima, which was the high-water mark for the Japanese advance into India.


title: Siege

text: The siege of Sevastopol saw the use of the heaviest and most powerful individual siege engines ever to be used: the German 800mm railway gun and the 600mm siege mortar. Though a single shell could have disastrous local effect, the guns were susceptible to air attack in addition to being slow to move.


title: Siege

text: Throughout the war both the Western Allies and the Germans tried to supply forces besieged behind enemy lines with ad-hoc airbridges. Sometimes these attempts failed, as happened to the besieged German Sixth Army the siege of Stalingrad, and sometimes they succeeded as happened during the Battle of the Admin Box (5 – 23 February 1944) and, during the short Siege of Bastogne (December 1944).


title: Siege

text: The logistics of strategic airbridge operations were developed by the Americans flying military transport aircraft from India to China over the Hump (1942–1945), to resupply the Chinese war effort of Chiang Kai-shek, and to the USAAF XX Bomber Command (during Operation Matterhorn).


title: Siege

text: Tactical airbridge methods were developed and, as planned, used extensively for supplying the Chindits during Operation Thursday (February – May 1944). The Chindits a specially trained division of the British and Indian armies were flown deep behind Japanese front lines in the South-East Asian theatre to jungle clearings in Burma where they set up fortified airheads from which they sailed out to attack Japanese lines of communications, while defending the bases from Japanese counterattacks. The bases were re-supplied by air with casualties flown out by returning aircraft. When the Japanese attacked in strength the Chindits abandoned the bases and either moved to new bases, or back to Allied lines.


title: Siege

text: In both Vietnamese cases, the Viet Minh and NLF were able to cut off the opposing army by capturing the surrounding rugged terrain. At Dien Bien Phu, the French were unable to use air power to overcome the siege and were defeated. However, at Khe Sanh, a mere 14 years later, advances in air power—and a reduction in Vietnamese anti-aircraft capability—allowed the United States to withstand the siege. The resistance of US forces was assisted by the PAVN and PLAF forces' decision to use the Khe Sanh siege as a strategic distraction to allow their mobile warfare offensive, the first Tet Offensive, to unfold securely.


title: Siege

text: The siege of Khe Sanh displays typical features of modern sieges, as the defender has greater capacity to withstand the siege, the attacker's main aim is to bottle operational forces or create a strategic distraction, rather than take the siege to a conclusion.


title: Siege

text: In neighbouring Cambodia, at that time known as the Khmer Republic, the Khmer Rouge used siege tactics to cut off supplies from Phnom Penh to other government-held enclaves in an attempt to break the will of the government to continue fighting.


title: Siege

text: In 1972, during the Easter offensive, the siege of An Lộc Vietnam occurred. ARVN troops and U.S. advisers and air power successfully defeated communist forces. The Battle of An Lộc pitted some 6,350 ARVN men against a force three times that size. During the peak of the battle, ARVN had access to only one 105 mm howitzer to provide close support, while the enemy attack was backed by an entire artillery division. ARVN had no tanks, the NVA communist forces had two armoured regiments. ARVN prevailed after over two months of continuous fighting. As General Paul Vanuxem, a French veteran of the Indochina War, wrote in 1972 after visiting the liberated city of An Lộc: "An Lộc was the Verdun of Vietnam, where Vietnam received as in baptism the supreme consecration of her will."


title: Siege

text: During the 1982 Lebanon War, the Israel Defence Forces besieged Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, to quickly realize their goals including the eviction of the Palestine Liberation Organization from the country.


title: Siege

text: During the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, Republika Srpska forces besieged Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The siege lasted from 1992 until 1996.


title: Siege

text: Numerous sieges haven taken place during the Syrian Civil War, such as the Siege of Homs, Siege of Kobanî, Siege of Deir ez-Zor (2014–2017) and Siege of al-Fu'ah and Kafriya.


title: Siege

text: Multiple sieges took place in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, most notably the Siege of Mariupol.


title: Siege

text: Siege tactics continue to be employed in police conflicts. This has been due to a number of factors, primarily risk to life, whether that of the police, the besieged, bystanders, or hostages. Police make use of trained negotiators, psychologists, and, if necessary, force, generally being able to rely on the support of their nation's armed forces if required.


title: Siege

text: One of the complications facing police in a siege involving hostages is Stockholm syndrome, where sometimes hostages can develop a sympathetic rapport with their captors. This is considered positively if it keeps the hostage from being harmed, but there have been cases where hostages have tried to shield the captors during an assault or refused to cooperate with the authorities in bringing prosecutions.


title: Siege

text: The 1993 police siege on the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas, lasted 51 days, an atypically long police siege. Unlike traditional military sieges, police sieges are much shorter in general. They usually last for hours or days, rather than weeks, months, or years.


title: Siege

text: In Britain, if the siege involves perpetrators who are considered by the British Government to be terrorists, and if an assault is to take place, the civilian authorities hand command and control over to the military. The threat of such an action ended the Balcombe Street siege in 1975, but the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980 ended in a military assault and the deaths of all but one of the hostage-takers.


title: House of Bernadotte

text: The House of Bernadotte is the royal family of Sweden since its foundation there in 1818. It was also the royal family of Norway between 1818 and 1905. Its founder, Charles XIV John of Sweden, was born in Pau in southern France as Jean Bernadotte. Bernadotte, who had been made a General of Division and Minister of War for his service in the French Army during the French Revolution, and Marshal of the French Empire and Prince of Ponte Corvo under Napoleon, was adopted by the elderly King Charles XIII of Sweden, who had no other heir and whose Holstein-Gottorp branch of the House of Oldenburg thus was soon to be extinct on the Swedish throne.


title: House of Bernadotte

text: Following the conclusion of the Finnish War in 1809, Sweden lost possession of Finland, which had constituted roughly the eastern half of the Swedish realm for centuries. Resentment towards King Gustav IV Adolf precipitated an abrupt "coup d'état". Gustav Adolf (and his son Gustav) was deposed and his uncle Charles XIII was elected King in his place. However, Charles XIII was 61 years old and prematurely senile. He was also childless; one child had been stillborn and another died after less than a week. It was apparent almost as soon as Charles XIII ascended the throne that the Swedish branch of the House of Holstein-Gottorp would die with him. In 1810 the Riksdag of the Estates, the Swedish parliament, elected a Danish prince, Prince Christian August of Augustenborg, as heir-presumptive to the throne. He took the name Charles August, but died later that same year.


title: House of Bernadotte

text: At this time, Emperor Napoleon I of France controlled much of continental Europe, and some of his client kingdoms were headed by his brothers. The Riksdag decided to choose a king of whom Napoleon would approve. On 21 August 1810, the Riksdag elected Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, a Marshal of France, as heir presumptive to the Swedish throne.


title: House of Bernadotte

text: The coat of arms of the House of Bernadotte impales the coat of arms of the House of Vasa ("heraldic right") and the coat of arms of Bernadotte as Prince of Pontecorvo ("heraldic left"). It is visible as an inescutcheon in the Greater Coat of Arms of the Realm.