Life in the Middle Ages was brutal and dirty. If you were a soldier, it was even rougher than you can probably imagine. Soldiers faced the prospect of being struck down by many crude weapons. If you didn’t perish immediately, you risked being carried off as a prisoner of war.…

Canons were the first to leave their mark in the late 15th century, when Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and used mobile artillery to breach castle walls up and down the Italian Peninsula.

Seven Years Bad Luck For Breaking a Mirror The superstition surrounding breaking a mirror did not start in the Middle Ages, but it was strengthened by it. In the 15th century, Venice, Italy manufactured mirrors for the wealthy. These mirrors were made of glass and backed by silver, which made them extraordinarily expensive.

The night before a battle, they even acted as early wartime entertainers, diverting the soldier’s minds with songs and stories. However, the Fools were not just battlefield buffoons.

As a Roman soldier, you wore specific armor and a helmet and were armed with a throwing spear called a pilum and a short sword for stabbing called a gladius which was strapped to your waist.

The Siege of Bristol, 1326, in which Isabella laid siege to a Despenser castle where her husband, King Edward II, was in hiding, Paris, 15th century. Wikimedia Commons

One of the most crucial changes (supposedly made by Marius) was to alter the legion’s construction from the maniple to the cohort. He abandoned the original three lines of soldiers system and the velites. Under the new system, the army consisted of soldiers with equal weaponry and armor.

Looking back, the child soldier was confronted by a Confederate colonel on horseback, riding ahead of and urging along his pursuing Rebel soldiers. Seeing a little boy in Union blue toting a rifle, the enemy colonel demanded that Clem to “ Drop that gun! ” and surrender forthwith.

Goethe’s poetry ran the gamut from lyrical to epic, and his 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, is seen as the spark which ignited the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) literary movement, a forerunner of the Romantic movement that …

The Ninja, however, had no such worries. The old-school Japanese equivalent of the modern-day Navy SEALS, Ninja warriors used sneaky, often underhand tactics, and established themselves as feared spies, raiders and assassins as internal conflicts engulfed Japan in the 15 th century. The Ninjas started to emerge as early as the 12 th century.