Crossbow

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A typical crossbow

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The Second Lateran Council banned the crossbow against Christians in 1139 — the first arms-control treaty in Western history. Knights ignored it, and within a century the bolt had made armor obsolete and chivalry theatrical.

Murdered by his own secretaries after single-handedly stitching Rome's three fractured pieces back together in five years. The man who saved the empire couldn't survive his own staff.

At a featureless map-grid called 73 Easting, nine M1A1 Abrams tanks destroyed 28 Iraqi Republican Guard tanks in exactly 23 minutes on February 26, 1991. It was the largest US tank battle since World War II.

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted amnesty to torturers who confessed on live television — perpetrators named their victims, described exact methods, then walked free while families watched from the gallery.

Simmons Bedding — maker of the Beautyrest mattress — was bought, loaded with debt, and sold seven times in a single generation of private equity deals, each time leaving workers with less and investors with more. The mattress never changed.

At 13, Jeanne Calment sold colored pencils to Vincent van Gogh in her father's shop. She died 122 years later — the oldest verified human — having outlived him by a full century.

In April 1919, thirty-six mail bombs were posted simultaneously to US senators, a Supreme Court justice, and John D. Rockefeller. Most were intercepted by a postal worker who noticed the postage due. Justice nearly by accident.

Gothic cavalry obliterated two-thirds of the Eastern Roman army in a single afternoon, killing Emperor Valens — whose body was never recovered. The battle proved infantry alone could not hold the empire. Rome began its long unraveling.

After playing his own game and feeling like a villain, Richard Garriott scrapped Ultima III's kill-everything model and invented a new goal: becoming a moral exemplar across eight virtues, with no final boss to slay.