In 1568 Oda Nobunaga began the movement of decisive military conquest over the daimyo that was later carried on by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and completed in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu.
So can we stop talking so much about "war", and reconcile ourselves to the fact that the punishment of terrorist crime and the gradual reduction of its threat cannot be translated into the satisfying language of decisive and dramatic conquest?
It had been, and was to be, a war of sieges; if the enemy had met him in the open field, after the arrival of the reinforcements, it is possible that he would have won a decisive victory, and the conquest of Italy might have been achieved almost as rapidly as the conquest of Africa.
However, at the ensuing Battle of Salamis, the Allied Greek navy had won an unlikely but decisive victory, preventing the conquest of the Peloponnesus.
Pizarro and his band went on to conquer what remained of the Inca Empire, making this the decisive battle of the entire conquest.
A thousand years later, it was taken as a malefic sign by Saxon armies, who were soon afterward defeated in the Battle of Hastings--the first and most decisive battle in the Norman conquest of England.
The fall of Palermo marks a decisive step in the Muslim conquest of Sicily: the Muslims gained not only an important military base, but possession of the city—henceforth known simply as al-Madina ("the City")—allowed them to consolidate their control over the western portion of the island, which was established as a regular Aghlabid province.
But near Tours, in 732CE, Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, defeated the forces of al-Andalus, and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the conquest of Frankish Europe.
