Introduction

The Introduction offers a survey of the primary non-Christian and Christian sources available for a reconstruction of the short reign of Jovian. The most important source obviously is Book 25 of Res Gestae of the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus. He presents a gloomy picture of the person and reign of Jovian in order to save the image of his hero and Jovian’s predecessor, Julian (the Apostate). From Edward Gibbon onward, modern scholarship has adopted this unfavorable image that presents Jovian’s reign as a meaningless period between the emperorship of Julian (361–363) and the rule of the Valentinians (364–378). However, Jovian’s rule was vital for the sustenance of imperial leadership after Julian’s disastrous Persian military campaign and religious policies, both of which caused considerable upheaval. Jovian’s reign was a return to the norms of the pre-Julianic period and brought back stability to the Roman empire. For an emperor who ruled such a short time, the Christian Jovian had an unexpected and surprising afterlife. The second part of the book discusses Jovian’s “Nachleben” in the so-called Syriac Julian Romance, a text of historical fiction that has rarely been studied and is largely unknown to historians of the late Roman period.

Disputes over the permissibility of tobacco smoking among the ulama of Ottoman Syria

The article analyzes the history of tobacco smoking in Great Syria of the 17th - mid-18th centuries. The consumption of tobacco, brought to the Ottoman Empire by European merchants from the New World, began to spread rapidly among various groups of society, including women and children. The popularity of the new habit caused a wary attitude to it of the Ottoman theologians from the Turkish Kadizadeli movement. In the middle of the 17th century, they managed to achieve significant influence on the sultans court and banned tobacco smoking in the Ottoman Empire for a while. However, after the unsuccessful military campaign of the Turks initiated by the Kadizadeli near Vienna in 1683, the Hanafi Puritans of Islam were expelled from the capital. This time, they chose Greater Syria as one of the main strongholds of the movement. In Damascus, the question of the legality of tobacco smoking from the point of view of the norms of Islamic law was defended by Sufis under the leadership of the Syrian mystic ʻAbd al-Ghani al-Nablusi. As a result of the disputes, the Kadizadeli lost their influence in Syria, which partly contributed to the further rejection by the inhabitants of the region of another Puritanical movement in Islam, led by Muhammad ibn ʻAbd al-Wahhab.

The Habsburg and Transylvanian Aims Related to the Campaign of the Ottomans against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1634)

In 1634 the Ottoman Emperor, Murad IV (r. 1623–1640), decided to lead a campaign against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He wanted to request military support from the Prince of Transylvania, György Rákóczi I (r. 1630–1648), but the prince tried to avoid it, because at that time he had been struggling with his political enemies, who endangered his rule in Transylvania. In the same year, the Habsburgs sent an ambassador (Johann Rudolf von Puchheim) to Constantinople, who tried to dissuade the Sublime Porte from leading a military campaign against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The idea of that mediation came from the former Vizier of Buda and at that time, the commander of the Ottoman army, Pasha Murteza, because he did not want this war either. Prince Rákóczi, Puchheim, Trzebiński (Aleksander, the Polish envoy) and Murteza all wanted to stall for time in relation to that campaign. In this article, the author investigates the aims and the problem-solving strategies of the Habsburg, the Transylvanian, the Polish and also the Ottoman elite in that situation. The war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not take place in the end, because Murad IV began a campaign against the Safavid Empire.

Machine Learning-based Mist Computing Enabled Internet of Battlefield Things

The rapid advancement in information and communication technology has revolutionized military departments and their operations. This advancement also gave birth to the idea of the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT). The IoBT refers to the fusion of the Internet of Things (IoT) with military operations on the battlefield. Various IoBT-based frameworks have been developed for the military. Nonetheless, many of these frameworks fail to maintain a high Quality of Service (QoS) due to the demanding and critical nature of IoBT. This study makes the use of mist computing while leveraging machine learning. Mist computing places computational capabilities on the edge itself (mist nodes), e.g., on end devices, wearables, sensors, and micro-controllers. This way, mist computing not only decreases latency but also saves power consumption and bandwidth as well by eliminating the need to communicate all data acquired, produced, or sensed. A mist-based version of the IoTNetWar framework is also proposed in this study. The mist-based IoTNetWar framework is a four-layer structure that aims at decreasing latency while maintaining QoS. Additionally, to further minimize delays, mist nodes utilize machine learning. Specifically, they use the delay-based K nearest neighbour algorithm for device-to-device communication purposes. The primary research objective of this work is to develop a system that is not only energy, time, and bandwidth-efficient, but it also helps military organizations with time-critical and resources-critical scenarios to monitor troops. By doing so, the system improves the overall decision-making process in a military campaign or battle. The proposed work is evaluated with the help of simulations in the EdgeCloudSim. The obtained results indicate that the proposed framework can achieve decreased network latency of 0.01 s and failure rate of 0.25% on average while maintaining high QoS in comparison to existing solutions.

An ‘Evil State’

This chapter reflects on a 'copy of an intercepted and deciphered letter exchanged between one of the Queen of Bohemia's ladies in waiting, and her cousin, a young lady in England'. It is difficult not to read the letter as implicit criticism of the excesses enjoyed by the two courts in The Hague. The satire is directed at the leading ladies of these courts, and the military commanders infatuated with them, while the common soldiers died in their droves at Breda and beyond for lack of food, with neither Frederick V nor Frederick Henry able to intervene. The fact that there is little evidence that any such 'progress' ever took place merely adds to this feeling, as does the care with which the author appears to have hidden their identity. Though a fabrication, it nevertheless fits the general movement of Elizabeth Stuart's life very closely, as it moves from the deceptive frivolity of the court to the deathly earnestness of the military campaign without pausing to take so much as a breath. Thus, it appears that in some quarters, Elizabeth was held to blame for the dire state of Mansfeld's troops and the disaster that followed at Breda.

The Talibs or the Taliban in Afghanistan

The rapid military and political victory of the Taliban movement during the summer offensive in 2021 shocked the system of international relations and the regional security architecture. The Taliban’s military successes in rural areas were expected and predicted, but the capture of Kabul and the instant capitulation of the official Afghan authorities became the “black swan” of regional geopolitics. This study hypothesis states that the reincarnation of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was the logical result of an unsuccessful twenty-year military campaign by the United States and NATO. The attempt to integrate the Afghan society into an accelerated modernization process was carried out under immature socio-political practices and a complete lack of institutions. Another hypothesis of the study suggests that the victory of the radical terrorist movement can cause a domino effect and lead to the strengthening of international transcontinental terrorist groups. From the systems theory perspective, the victory of a radical group and establishing control over a UN member state cannot but cause a negative reaction for the global and regional security construction. The study puts forward a third hypothesis and thesis: the Taliban victory was the victory of radical political Islam (jihadism) at the global level, which significantly strengthened its position in the system of international relations.

The Battle of Fredericksburg

The December 13, 1862, Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, marked the defeat of Union Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, an important setback for the Union cause and military effort to seize the Confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia. The battle and military campaign preceding it, which occurred primarily along the Rappahannock River at the city of Fredericksburg and in adjacent Stafford and Spotsylvania counties, was the most lopsided victory the Army of Northern Virginia achieved during the American Civil War, with the Union Army sustaining combat casualties equivalent to more than double those suffered by Confederates. The campaign also saw the use of urban combat, military occupation, and the direct role of civilians at the center of the November and December military maneuvers around the city, which was positioned approximately equidistant between Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Principal battle locations included the Confederate position of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s corps on Marye’s Heights behind the city, the Union artillery position on Stafford Heights, the position of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Confederate corps at Prospect Hill south of the city of Fredericksburg, and the Rappahannock River itself, which was crossed only after Union engineers built a pontoon bridge under fire. The campaign is noted for Union Army shelling of the city itself as a military position, the failed, multiwave Union infantry assaults against fortified positions, and the destruction of property on December 12 as the town itself was sacked.

The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War

This volume integrates the military and social histories of the American Civil War in its chapter organization. Its contributors use war and society methods: a holistic approach to understanding war and its consequences that incorporates the topics and techniques of a variety of historical subfields. Each chapter narrates a military campaign embedded in its strategic, political, and social context. Authors explore the consequences of a military campaign for the people who lived in its path and provide analysis of how an army’s presence reverberated throughout society in its region of operation. The volume yields a number of important insights about the impact of military campaigns, including the scale of movement, deportation, and depopulation among civilians; how the refugee experience and military action shaped emancipation as a process; the extent of guerrilla warfare; resistance to federal authority in the Great Plains and the Southwest; locations of localized total war; the implementation of military conscription in the Confederacy; a campaign’s consequences for cities, rural areas, and the natural environment; and the synergy between war and politics. Chapters consider the role of weather, topography, logistics, and engineering in the conduct of military campaigns.

Suicide attack - Wikipedia

A suicide attack is any violent attack, usually involving an explosion, in which attackers accept their own death as a direct result of the attacking method used. Suicide attacks have occurred throughout history, often as part of a military campaign (as with the Japanese kamikaze pilots of 1944-1945 during World War II), and more recently as part of terrorist campaigns (such as the September 11 attacks in 2001). ***** For archiving purpose only *****