Constant Changeless War
While the dawn civilisations were building a brave new world of farms and cities and armies, major innovations in warfare were happening at the headlong rate of one every couple of centuries: large fortifications, phalanxes, composite bows, siege machinery, chariots, cavalry, etc. Once all these major elements of ‘classical’ warfare were in place, however, the pace of change slowed right down.
War was constant, and almost changeless. At the end of the Bronze Age in 1200–1150bc there was another, briefer Dark Age marked by the collapse of most Middle Eastern civilisations, but the subsequent transition to iron weapons did not bring any significant changes in military tactics. Indeed, many historians would agree that a well-trained army with competent commanders from 500bc would stand a fighting chance against a comparable army from 1400ad. Let the earlier armies swap their bronze weapons for iron ones and you could probably push this comparison back as far as 1500bc.
The Assyrians, based in northern Mesopotamia, had that kind of army. It was almost modern in its structure, with military engineers, supply depots, transport columns, and bridging equipment. It could move fast on the royal highways that were maintained throughout the empire, and campaign as far as 300 miles away from its base. It was the first army to incorporate effective siege machinery, to equip its soldiers with iron armour and weapons, and to supplement its chariots with a force of horse-riding cavalry. And it was campaigning almost all the time.
Assyria waxed and waned over the centuries, as any empire with no natural geographical, historical or ethnic borders is likely to do. Under Shalmaneser I and his son Tukulti-Ninurta I (1274–1208bc), the empire spread in every direction and reached the Persian Gulf in the south, only to collapse back to the core area after their deaths. In the final 300 years of its history it became a purely military enterprise, permanently at war and terrorising the whole Middle East to ensure a constant flow of booty and tribute to its treasury.
The Assyrians deported whole populations amid appalling massacres and resettled them far from home in punishment for rebellions: the Israelites were not the only people to suffer this fate. Assyria’s army grew to the astonishing total (for the times) of 120,000 men, able to wage several campaigns at once, and its kings and commanders cultivated a reputation for extreme cruelty. We know of the Assyrians’ addiction to sadism mainly from their own inscriptions; they boasted about it.
The commander-in-chief of the king of Elam, together with his nobles… I cut their throats like sheep… My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariots were bespattered with blood and filth… [In their terror] they passed scalding urine and voided their excrement in their chariots.
Sennacherib, King of Assyria, 691bce1
In the end, the Assyrian empire was consumed by war. When the Medes, new nomad invaders, rode into the Middle East in the 7th century bc – genuine cavalry this time, not charioteers, for selective breeding had finally produced horses strong enough to carry a rider in the forward ‘control’ position – Assyria’s civilised enemies joined forces with the nomads to bring the hated empire down: in 612bc the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, was destroyed so totally that its location has been lost to posterity.2
Siege Warfare
An ancient city was falling and the long years of her empire were at an end. Everywhere the dead lay motionless about the streets… Greeks were dashing to the (palace), and thronging round the entrance with their shields locked together over their backs: ladders were already firmly in place against the walls, and the attackers even now putting their weight on the rungs near the door-lintels. Holding shields on their left arms thrust forward for protection, with their right hands they grasped the roof. To oppose them the Trojans, on the brink of death and knowing their plight was desperate, sought to defend themselves by tearing up tiles from the roof-tops of houses…to use as missiles… Inside the palace there was sobbing and a confused and pitiful uproar. The building rang from end to end with the anguished cries of women.
Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil), c.19bce3
This is Troy, whose fall is traditionally dated to 1183bc, a time when history was rapidly transformed into legend. The story of the Trojan Horse may even be a garbled account of the siege machinery that finally breached the city’s walls, for the Achaean Greeks besieging Troy could easily have hired military engineers from one of the more civilised countries to the east: at this time the fall of the Hittite empire would have left a lot of unemployed professional soldiers around Asia Minor. If Hittite mercenaries had built a siege tower for the attackers – a wooden structure several stories high, mounted on wheels, with a hide-covered roof and a metal-tipped battering ram slung in the interior – the Achaeans might well have dubbed it a wooden horse, leaving subsequent generations to embellish the story. (A siege tower pictured in a roughly contemporary Assyrian bas-relief does look somewhat like a giant horse.)
Siege tower on Assyrian bas-relief, NW Palace of Nimrud, c. 865-860bce
Troy was actually destroyed after a long siege, but Homer did not compose his epic poem about it until four centuries later. Virgil wrote his vivid account of the sack of Troy eight centuries after that, in a personalised style that would never have been used by those who lived through the event. The details of his narrative are fiction, but he knew what must have happened because he lived in a world where some unfortunate city had met its end like this every few years for as long as memory ran.
Carthage, for example, was stormed by Roman troops in 146bc after a three-year siege at the end of the Third Punic War. There is an eyewitness account of how the despairing, half-starved Carthaginians held out inside the city through six days of street fighting.
Three streets leading from the market place to the citadel were lined on both sides with six-storey houses, from which the Romans were pelted. They seized the first houses and from their roofs they made bridges of planks and beams to cross over to the next. While one battle was in progress on the roofs, another was fought, against all comers, in the street below. Everywhere there was groaning and wailing and shouting and agony of every description. Some were killed out of hand, some flung down alive from the roofs to the pavement, and of those some were caught on upright spears…
Appian (based on Polybius’s eye-witness account)4
The relatively few Carthaginians who survived the sack of their city (population ca. 300,000) were sold into slavery, and the devastated site was formally cursed and sprinkled with salt by the victorious Roman general. It remained uninhabited until a Roman colony was founded on the ruins over a century later. All this leaves an impression of berserk violence and insane vindictiveness, which is precisely the impression that the victorious Romans wanted to leave.
The Phalanx Returns
In the battle line each man requires a lateral space of three feet, while the distance between ranks is six feet. Thus, 10,000 men can be placed in a rectangle about 1,500 yards by twelve yards.
Vegetius on Roman tactics5
Battles determined the course of our ancestors’ lives, and they were no less clever than we are. If for several thousand years they could think of no better way to fight than massed in shoulder-to-shoulder formations, there had to be a good reason. There have been enough desperate men with nothing left to lose on the countless battlefields of the past that almost everything got tried sooner or later. And nothing, until well after the introduction of firearms, worked better than the organisation and tactics that were already more or less standard before the time of Alexander the Great.
Vegetius is describing a Roman version of a phalanx because by the middle of the first millennium bc, the formation had once again become widespread. It had gone out of fashion with the rise of the ‘oriental empires’, but as the centres of wealth and power moved west from the Fertile Crescent to the rising city-states of Greece and Rome, large numbers of men with civic patriotism and high motivation were becoming available – and against the troops of another civilised state who would stand and fight, a phalanx was still the most effective way to deploy infantry in battle.
Modern armies talk of winning or losing ground, but for the phalanxes of earlier times the ground is merely the stage across which the formations move. It is the formations themselves that count, but the strength of the formation vanishes if gaps open up in the line, or if the terrain (or panic) causes the men in the formation to crowd together so closely that they cannot swing or hurl or jab with their weapons. Most of the endless drill goes into training the soldiers to maintain that vital three-foot interval – but if they are well trained, these soldiers are a formidable fighting machine.
A Greek phalanx of the fifth century bc consisted of thousands of hoplites (heavy infantry) in serried ranks, almost fully protected in front by large shields and bronze greaves on their shins, with sixteen-foot spears extending forward beyond the shield wall. It took much time and effort to array such huge formations on a battlefield facing the enemy, and battle could not be joined at all unless the commander of the opposing phalanx cooperated. However, both sides usually wanted a prompt and decisive outcome, because the hoplites were property-owning citizens who paid for their own weapons and armour, and most of them were farmers whose crops would rot unharvested in the fields if too much time was spent on manoeuvre. They wanted a decision now, and generally they got it.
Fighting hoplites as depicted on a c.5th-century bce urn
There were tactical choices to be made beforehand: should we make the phalanx as deep as possible to avoid being broken through, or make it shallower but longer, so as to extend past the ends of the enemy’s phalanx and outflank it? But once the two phalanxes made contact, there was little more that the commanders could do.
The men in the front ranks fought each other for a time, being replaced from behind as they fell, until one side thought it was getting the upper hand. At that point, all the ranks united their efforts in a gigantic shove to break the enemy’s line, and if they succeeded, then they had won. The enemy’s formation would crumble, men would turn to flee, and the massacre would begin. Typically the pursuit would relent after a short while in wars between Greeks, and death on the losing side would be held to around fifteen percent of the total force. In wars against non-Greeks, however, there was no quarter and no relenting in the pursuit.
The Athenian troops weakened their centre by the effort to extend the line sufficiently to cover the whole Persian front: the two wings were strong, but the line in the centre was only a few ranks deep… The word was given to move, and the Athenians advanced at a run towards the enemy, not less than a mile away… the first Greeks, as far as I know, to charge at a run… In the centre… the foreigners breached the Greek line… but the Athenians on one wing and the Plataeans on the other were both victorious… Then… they turned their attention to the Persians who had broken through in the centre. Here again they were triumphant, chasing the routed enemy, and cutting them down until they came to the sea.
Herodotus, describing the battle of Marathon6
These clumsy and bloody shoving matches like gigantic, regimented caricatures of an American football game, fought over a couple of hours on a patch of ground perhaps a hundred acres in area, could determine the future of whole peoples. There were cavalry present too, but they would almost never charge well-trained infantry who were prepared to receive them. A mass of horsemen thundering down on a formation of infantrymen may look irresistible, but horses will not run straight into an unwavering line of spear-points. They will stop or turn aside at the last moment, and as long as the infantry don’t panic, they are relatively safe from charges. The cavalry’s main purposes were scouting, skirmishing, and above all, riding down and killing the men of the defeated side once they had turned to flee.
Heavy infantry dominated the battlefields almost everywhere in classical times (ca. 550bc–350ad), and their numbers were generally less important than their discipline and morale. When Alexander the Great fought the Persian army of Darius at Issus in 333bc he had only forty thousand men against one hundred thousand, but his veteran hoplites charged straight across the field at the Persian centre. It’s just physics: forty thousand heavily armed and armoured men running (slowly) in tight formation would have hit the Persian line with a force equivalent to twenty-five hundred tons moving at six or seven miles an hour, building up over just a few seconds – and at its leading edge was a hedge of spear-points. Not many men in the two front ranks of Alexander’s phalanx would have survived the impact (veterans had no doubt placed themselves a little further back), but the sheer momentum of this force smashed through the centre of Darius’s army in only a minute or two. With the Persian army’s cohesion gone, its scattered and bewildered soldiers were easy prey for Alexander’s troops; probably half the Persian force was killed within two hours.
Various improvements were added to this basic formula for military success over succeeding centuries, particularly by the Romans. In two centuries of almost constant war in which they first subjugated all the other city-states of Italy and then conquered the other great power of the time, Carthage, they developed a far more flexible version of the phalanx. Roman legions were broken up into mini-phalanxes (‘maniples’ or handfuls) of about 150 men in three ranks, with the maniples arrayed checkerboard fashion in three overlapping lines, which gave them much greater manoeuvrability on broken ground. At the battle of Zama (202bc), where the Carthaginians tried to rout the Roman legions by a massive elephant charge, Scipio Africanus just moved the maniples of his middle line sideways in order to create straight corridors through all three lines of his formation, down which Hannibal’s elephants were herded quite harmlessly.
Roman infantry face the war machines of Carthage at the Battle of Zama in 202bc
The weapons were modified too, partly for psychological effect. In the Roman legions the cumbersome sixteen-foot spear gave way to two throwing spears, one lighter and of longer range than the other, which the legionaries threw in succession as they advanced, plus a short sword for close-in work when they had made physical contact with the enemy. A short sword: get in there and do the killing in a highly personal way, because that is what really terrifies the enemy.
By high Roman times, battles had become less of a shoving match and all manner of tactical stratagems flourished, but the basic logic of the battlefield was unchanged. Men armed only with edged weapons powered by their own muscles have very limited options for effective fighting, and infantry ruled the battlefields of the third century ad as confidently as it had the battlefields of the twenty-third century bc.
Navies
Straightaway ship struck ship with brazen beak. The attack was started by a Greek ship which sheared off the whole prow of her Phoenician foe, and others aimed their onslaught on different opponents. At first the flood-tide of the Persian fleet held its own. But when the ships became jammed and crushed in one place, they could bring no help to each other. Ships began to strike their own friends with their bronze-jawed rams, and to shatter the whole bank of oars. The Greek ships, in careful plan, began to press round us in a circle, and ship’s hulls gave in. You could no longer see the water, so full was it of wrecked vessels and dead men, while the beaches and rocks were thick with corpses.
Aeschylus, describing the battle of Salamis (from the Persian point of view) in The Persians, 472bc7
Nobody needed navies until civilisations began to produce goods like grain, wine, minerals and timber that were worth trading in bulk. Most of that trade was conducted by sea (it still is), and attacking the commercial ships of wealthy states became an obvious and highly profitable strategy in war. Moving whole armies by sea was also an attractive military option in the Mediterranean, where the sea was generally the quickest route between any two points. Large fleets of warships soon came to dominate naval conflict in the Mediterranean. Their first purpose was to eliminate the other side’s navy, after which the defenceless merchant shipping could plundered with impunity.
Like many artefacts of the classical world, the war galley rapidly matured into a standard design, whose technology then scarcely changed for several thousand years. Merchant ships used a combination of sail and oars, but warships, which needed to move rapidly in any direction regardless of wind, depended mainly on muscle power: up to several hundred rowers to pull the naval vessels through the water at high speed.
Artist’s rendition of a 4th-century bce trireme
A ship is a kind of machine, and making big machines in large numbers called for techniques of organisation and production resembling those of industrial societies. When Greece was faced with the great Persian invasion early in the 5th century bc, the Athenian shipyards adopted mass production methods, producing between six and eight triremes (galleys with three banks of oars) each month for over two years. They were paid for with the accumulated silver reserves of the state. By 480bc some 250 galleys had been built, requiring over forty thousand men to crew them. All the military manpower of Athens went into the fleet, leaving the other Greek city-states to provide the land forces for the peninsula’s defence. And it was the Greek fleet, predominantly Athenian, that destroyed the Persian fleet at Salamis and forced the emperor Xerxes to retreat from Greece.
Naval warfare in classical times was a simple affair. Two fleets of galleys, which might number in the hundreds, would line up facing each other off some stretch of coastline, and charge. The ships would try to hole each other head-on with their bronze rams, or at least shear off the oars on one side of the enemy galley (crushing most of the rowers in the process) then turn back and ram the disabled enemy from astern. Often, however, they would end up lying alongside each other, with the soldiers on each galley fighting it out along the decks of one ship or the other, as in the battle in Syracuse harbour in 413bc, where almost two hundred ships fought one another in a very confined space.
Many ships crowded in upon each other in a small area. Consequently there were not many attacks made with the rams amidships… Once the ships met, the soldiers fought hand to hand, each trying to board the enemy. Because of the narrowness of the space, it often happened that… three or more ships found themselves jammed together, so that the steersmen had to think of defence on one side and attack on the other… and the great din of all these ships crashing together was not only frightening in itself, but also made it impossible to hear the orders given by the boat swains.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars8
The greatest naval battles of classical times were fought between Rome, essentially a land power at the beginning of the Punic wars in 264bc, and Carthage, a maritime power with allies or possessions in Spain, Sardinia, Sicily and southern Italy. The naval harbour of Carthage (near modern Tunis) was a man-made circular space over a thousand yards across, with a central island and sheds for working on two hundred galleys at once – and it could turn out as many as sixty galleys a month.
In the generations of war that convulsed the western Mediterranean between 264 and 146bc, the Romans also learned to build and fight a navy. In the naval battles that followed, and even more so in the sudden storms that sometimes overtook the fleets of flimsy galleys in open waters, the casualties were huge.
At Ecnomus off the coast of North Africa in 256bc, a Roman fleet of 330 galleys routed a Carthaginian fleet of equal size, sinking 30 ships and capturing 64, a loss to the Carthaginians of between thirty and forty thousand men. On its return to Italy, the Roman fleet was caught in a great storm off the west coast of Sicily, and 270 of its galleys were sunk or driven ashore, drowning about a hundred thousand men. Never since has there been so great a loss of life in naval warfare.
Eighteen hundred years after Ecnomus, in 1571ad, the allied naval forces of western Europe fought the Turkish navy at Lepanto. There were over two hundred galleys on each side, built according to designs that would have caused no surprise in the shipyards of ancient Carthage. The tactics would have been equally familiar: ram if you can, board if you can’t. Thirty thousand men drowned in that one afternoon.
Not Quite Total War
Carthago delenda est.
(Carthage must be destroyed.)
Cato the Elder
A society that can send a hundred thousand men to sea would be a formidable contender in the great-power stakes even today, and Rome and Carthage were not just building huge fleets of warships. At times they were also maintaining armies on three or four fronts simultaneously, spread all over the western Mediterranean. At the height of the Second Punic War in 213bc, 29 percent of Rome’s male citizens were serving in the army9, a level that was rarely exceeded even in the great wars of the last century – and although Rome was ultimately victorious, 10 percent of its entire male population was killed in battle during the final two decades of the war.10 As for the Carthaginians, their casualties were virtually total: not even their language survived. Even so, these two powers were not really waging ‘total war’ in the modern sense of the word.
Rome was a complex and sophisticated civilisation, but its interest in technological innovation was very low** and it lacked the wealth necessary for genuine total war. The city-states of Rome and Carthage, each with fewer than a million full citizens, mobilised a high proportion of their own populations, but only a tiny fraction of the other people throughout the large empires they controlled. The basic military equation of pre-modern times held true: societies whose economic base is subsistence agriculture cannot afford to withdraw more than around 3% of their population from food production in order to send them off to war.
The size of the Roman army a few centuries later, when Rome ruled the entire Mediterranean and had legions guarding borders as far away as Scotland and Sudan, is a fair measure of the maximum size of military forces that a pre-modern agrarian society – even one with highly developed commerce – could sustain over the long run. Even in the late third century ad, when the empire’s population had risen to one hundred million and the barbarian pressure on the frontiers was getting serious, the Roman army never exceeded three-quarters of a million troops.11
It was a very good army, and quite modern in many respects. The troops were reasonably well paid, they were well trained, and they could even expect a decent pension if they lived long enough to retire. In the centurions, it had the first professional officer corps. Against other civilised armies it was almost guaranteed to win in the long run – and it hadn’t really had to fight against the horse nomads, because the civilised world of Europe and the Middle East had not had to contend with any major barbarian invasions for almost a thousand years. But then some change in climate or population out on the Central Asian steppes set the nomads moving again, and a few generations later the ripple effect began to hit the borders of the Roman empire. In the end, the empire went under, and most of Europe’s civilisation with it. It was almost a thousand years before it regained its former level.
Western Darkness, Eastern Light
The classical world took a long time dying. Western Europe was overrun by the Germanic invasions in the 4th and 5th centuries, but virtually the whole of the Eastern Roman Empire survived intact for another two hundred years. Arabs united by the new faith of Islam conquered North Africa and the Fertile Crescent in the 7th and 8th centuries, but a Greek-speaking and Christianised version of Roman civilisation (Byzantium) survived in the Balkans and Asia Minor until incoming Turkish nomads destroyed the main Byzantine army at Manzikert in 1071. But both the Arabs and the Turks were relatively small groups of conquerors ruling over larger and more sophisticated populations, and what emerged under their rule was an Islamised version of classical civilisation, preserving and even refining the urban, literate and commercial character of that culture.
In western Europe, however, the invaders were whole societies on the move who shared few of the assumptions and values of the civilised peoples they conquered. They came with an elite of mounted warriors, but the great majority were subsistence farmers from beyond the borders of the Roman empire, partly drawn by the prospect of loot, partly fleeing before horse nomads from the steppes like the Huns. When they arrived in present-day France or Spain or Italy, they mostly settled down to farm again. They never outnumbered the surviving Roman citizens in the western parts of the empire, and the fact that they were soon Christianised helped to ensure that it was the Latin language of the conquered, not their own Germanic tongues, which ended up as the common language in most places. But there were enough of these newcomers to ensure that it was their way of running things that prevailed, not the old ways evolved during three thousand years of imperial rule in the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean world. In the west, classical civilisation actually died.
Horses Come Back
When a stable social structure re-emerged in western Europe after several centuries of almost total breakdown, it was based on an extreme dispersion of political and military power. The real power base in feudal times was not the state (which scarcely existed), but the few dozens or hundreds of square miles either granted to some local warrior or just seized by him. The only military tool available to what passed for a central administration in the kingdom was an assembly of such landed warriors – if they decided to show up – for as long as they were willing to stay. And cavalry came to dominate the battlefield both in the east and in the west.
14th-century miniature of a cavalry clash during the Second Crusade, from William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer
In the Muslim east, warfare until the 15th century remained fully in the nomad tradition: fast, lightly armed and armoured clouds of horsemen who used composite bows for harassing attacks from a safe distance, and the sword and light lance for the much rarer occasions when they took on their opponents at close quarters. In the west, however, cavalry warfare gradually evolved into the unique form of heavily armoured riders, astride lumbering horses bred for their ability to bear weight, relying on the sheer physical impact of their charge.
By the time of the Crusades in the 12th century the cavalry of Christendom were fighting like a mounted phalanx – a heavily armoured phalanx eight feet tall and moving at twenty-five miles an hour. If it hit you, that was the end of it, but it was pretty easy to evade the Crusaders’ charge if you were not culturally committed to fighting that way (which is why the Christian armies had to go back home to Europe in the end). And by the late Middle Ages, when the population, prosperity and organisational competence of western Europe were again approaching the levels of Roman times, infantry re-emerged as the dominant force on the battlefield, even though there had been no significant change in the technology of weapons.
Notes
1. H.W.F. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria, London: Sidgwick & Jackson,1984, 197.
2. Robert L. O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Growth and Death of War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 145–58.
3. Virgil, The Aeneid, trs. W.F. Jackson Knight, London: Penguin Books, 1968, 62–65.
4. The eyewitness account of Polybius itself is lost, but this account by Appian is directly based on it. Susan Rowen, Rome in Africa, London: Evans Brothers, 1969, 32–33.
5. Graham Webster, The Roman Imperial Army, London: Adam Charles Black, 1969, 221.
6. Herodotus, describing the battle of Marathon in The Histories, trs. Aubrey de Selincourt, London: Penguin, 1954, 428–29.
7. Aeschylus, The Persians, lines 355 ff. For dramatic purposes, Aeschylus was describing the battle from the Persian side.
8. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian Wars, London: Penguin, 1952, 523–24.
9. Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 1, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1978, 33.
10. Ibid., 28.
11. Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire From the First Century AD to the Third Century AD, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1976, 15, 189.
** Between Lepanto and the first moon landing (398 years) Western civilisation went from galleys to spaceships. In the 580 years between the battles of Ecnomus and the Hellespont, the last major engagement of the Roman Navy, Roman galley design hardly changed at all.