Peter Caddick–Adams
This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The greatest defence failures of history often originate from a lack of imagination. From the collapse of the walls of Jericho, as chronicled in the Book of Joshua; to the wooden horse left by the gates of Troy; to the monk-slaying expedition of the Vikings who raided Lindisfarne on 8 June 793, the inability to anticipate catastrophe has led to Armageddon.
At some stage in the past, instead of picking up a stone or club, Ug’s stone-age neighbour tied a sharpened flint to a pole and stabbed him to death. Generations later, Nog, armed with his spear, was impaled by a finely crafted arrow shot from afar.
The unknown genius who blended saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur into black powder to develop the first “fire-spurting bamboo lances” used by Chinese warriors in the 9th and 10th centuries, gifted 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II the perfect futuristic weapon with which to pound the walls of Constantinople for 55 days, leading to its capture on 29 May 1453.
The fall of Constantine’s city and of the Byzantine Empire not only marked the end of the 1,500-year Roman Empire but is regarded as the end of the medieval and beginning of the early modern period. It was also a turning point in military history, with the most impregnable of stone fortifications overcome by gunpowder in an excellent example of the blue-sky thinking of one side and the lack of vision by their opponents.
Such asymmetry has continued ever since, notably via the battlefield use of chlorine gas in 1915 and Japanese swoop on Pearl Harbor of 1941, to the 11 September 2001 and 7 October 2023 attacks of our own times.
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