War: A History in 100 Battles

1. BATTLE OF GAUGAMELA

1 October 331 BCE

In October 331 BCE, Alexander the Great destroyed in a single day the power of the largest empire in the Middle East, that of the Persian ruler Darius III. Success had followed Alexander since he took the throne of Macedonia in 336 BCE, but victory over Persia and its allies sealed his legendary reputation as a military genius at the tender age of twenty-five.

Alexander succeeded to the throne following the murder of his father, Philip. Within five years, he had confronted the Persian Empire and its wide network of satrapies (provinces) in Anatolia, the coastal communities along the eastern Mediterranean littoral and in Egypt. He seems to have been an instinctive battlefield commander, though aware of the lessons to be drawn from triumphs of the past and the strategic practices of his father. In 333 BCE, he inflicted a heavy defeat on the Persian emperor at the narrow coastal plain around Issus in northern Syria, but failed to capture him. Alexander had ambitions to become master not only of Western Asia and Greece, but of the entire area that the wealthy warrior empire of Persia had ruled for centuries. In 331 BCE, he set out from Egypt to track Darius down somewhere in present-day Iraq, determined it seems to inflict a decisive defeat on the Persians. According to classical historians, he went armed with news from the oracle at Siwah in Egypt’s Western Desert that he might be the son of Zeus, chief of the Greek gods. This certainly might explain the remarkable confidence that Alexander displayed in the final showdown against a Persian army at least four times larger than his own.

The Macedonian force was still large – 40,000 foot soldiers and 7,000 cavalry – and its movement across hundreds of miles of territory was an organizational feat in its own right. Alexander crossed from Egypt to Syria, where he lingered for some weeks, waiting to hear if Darius was preparing his own army for combat. When news reached him in mid-July of the Persian emperor’s whereabouts, Alexander led his army towards the River Euphrates, intent on his showdown. On the opposite side there were 3,000 of Darius’s cavalry under the command of Mazaeus, but they withdrew southwards, scorching the earth as they went. This was to force Alexander to take the longer northern route past the Armenian mountains then down into the valley of the Tigris, where Darius was already preparing his battlefield near the village of Gaugamela. Stakes and snares were set to halt a cavalry charge; the ground was flattened to enable the 200 Persian chariots armed with sharp scythes to run straight and fast at the ranks of the enemy. Ancient authors talked of one million men in the Persian army, but the number is likely to have been perhaps 200,000, of whom 30,000 were cavalry drawn from all over the empire. Fifteen Indian elephants were to guard the centre of the Persian line.

Alexander captured Persians sent to reconnoitre his force and learned exactly where Darius was. On 29 September, he ordered his army to march off in battle order for a possible night attack on the enemy; sensing their fear as they sighted the 100,000 camp fires of the enemy host, Alexander called a halt on the heights overlooking the ‘Camel’s Hump’, the hill from which Gaugamela took its name. He spent the day exhorting his troops and inspecting the prepared battleground. In the evening he made a sacrifice in honour of Fear, to propitiate the emotion. Then he worked out his battle plan in detail with his commanders, compensating for the strength of the enemy by unconventional means.

On the following morning, 1 October, Alexander woke late, well rested and confident of the outcome – a mood that was intended to inspire confidence in his men. His complex battle-line was drawn up: on the left, a large body of horse and shield-bearers under Parmenion; in the centre, 10,000 of the highly-trained Foot Companions in a phalanx armed with the formidable two-handed 6-metre (20-foot) sarissa spears, flanked by 3,000 shield-bearers (light infantry); and sloping to the right, creating an angled front, Alexander with his cavalry, fronted by archers and slingers. On each wing a ‘flap’ of cavalry was attached, among whom were concealed heavily-armed infantry, which could fall back to protect the rest from encirclement. Behind these were 20,000 reserve infantry, which could be moved forwards to create a large protected oblong.

Managing such a complex battlefield was difficult, as information could only be sent by messenger or trumpet, and thick dust was thrown up by the horses wheeling around on the sandy earth. Alexander’s strategy carried risks should any of the units misunderstand their orders or fail to hold fast. Darius had a simpler plan: to send forward his much larger bodies of cavalry, to decimate the Foot Companions with the scythed chariots, and to scare off the Greek cavalry with the elephants. Around mid-day, Alexander’s army moved onto the prepared battlefield in tight order. What happened next relies on accounts whose authors had a vested interest in painting Alexander’s achievements in glowing colours, but the main shape of the battle seems clear. Alexander moved his cavalry forwards but to the right to tempt the Persian left to follow him, thus exposing the centre and opening up a gap in the Persian line. On rougher ground, the Persian Scythian cavalry charged at Alexander, but were caught up among foot soldiers and archers. Darius released the chariots, but they were subjected to an accurate volley of arrows and sling-shots; those that reached the Macedonian lines were let through, then slaughtered by the soldiers behind. The rest of Alexander’s line was subject to heavy cavalry attack, and might well have collapsed, but Alexander, looking for the gap caused in the Persian centre, wheeled round and charged directly at Darius and his entourage, avoiding the elephants. The Macedonian Foot Companions with their fearsome sarissas and their cry of ‘alalalalai’ surged forwards and Darius, sensing his extreme danger, fled from the scene.

The flight of the emperor seems to have infected much of the rest of the Persian army, which melted away to the south and east. Large numbers of horsemen had succeeded in cutting past Parmenion and rampaged forward to seize Alexander’s baggage camp, where, to their surprise, they met the 20,000 reserves, who overwhelmed and destroyed them. Alexander rode off after Darius but his rearguard fought a ferocious defence and by the time the battlefield could be left behind and the hunt begun, Darius was already far away, fleeing to the mountains and the safety of the city of Ecbatana (Hamadan). The Persian emperor had overestimated the power of sheer numbers and fought a predictable battle; Alexander, by contrast, had made the most of his limited numbers, using them to unhinge the enemy at a crucial moment by careful exploitation of combined-arms tactics. Victory at Gaugamela brought him a reputation in the classical world to match the mythic stories of Achilles or of Hercules. Alexander moved on to Babylon and then the Persian capital at Susa. In so doing, he became, it has been estimated, the richest man in the known world.

2. BATTLE OF CANNAE

2 August 216 BCE

The Battle of Cannae is one of the most famous battles of all time. The catastrophic defeat of the Roman army by Hannibal’s smaller force has been regularly invoked to describe a particularly dramatic or heavy defeat. The myth that surrounded Hannibal as a general who carried victory with him wherever he went has lived down the ages. Hannibal’s own presence at Cannae and his operational genius explain an outcome that might well have gone another way.

The North African empire of Carthage dominated present-day Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and areas of conquest as far as Spain. The rising might of Rome in the third century BCE challenged Carthaginian ambitions and led to a series of Punic Wars between the two rival powers. In the second of these, at some point in 218 BCE, Hannibal persuaded the Carthaginian senate to let him set off on an epic journey across Spain, present-day France and over the Alps into Italy. What his ultimate objective was remains unclear, but he took with him an invasion force of probably 100,000 men, many of them Spanish mercenaries, and a huge train of supplies and animals, including his famous elephants. The journey itself undermined the scale of his ambitions. By the time the Alps were reached, he was down to 50,000 men; after crossing the mountains in autumn snow, he arrived in the northern Po Valley with only 20,000 foot soldiers and 6,000 cavalry to invade the Roman heartland. Bolstered by Gauls who joined his cause, Hannibal meted out heavy defeats on the Roman armies sent north to intercept him. As he moved south, Rome was gripped by panic. Hannibal’s military reputation inflated the threat out of all proportion. Lacking a secure base, living off the land, and not entirely sure of his Gallic allies, Hannibal chose to inflict on Rome what damage he could while himself avoiding defeat.

In 216 BCE, Hannibal moved into Apulia in south-central Italy and in June that year set up his camp at the hilltop city of Cannae, guarding the route to the rich grain-lands of the south. The Romans had begun to create a force to eliminate the threat from the invader. Four new legions were raised, bringing the Romans’ strength to around 40,000 men with 40,000 allied soldiers, but only a small number of experienced cavalry. The two Roman consuls for 216 BCE, Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, led the new army south to meet Hannibal, whose forces they probably outnumbered by two to one. At the beginning of August, the Roman army arrived at the flat plain in front of Cannae. As was customary, the consuls took turns to command on alternate days; Varro was the more audacious and on 2 August 216 BCE he led his force, spread out over nearly a mile, onto the plain to do battle. Accounts of the battle suggest that the infantry were packed between fifty and seventy ranks thick. The Roman cavalry were on one wing and the allied cavalry on the other, with a river protecting one flank. Roman battlefield strategy was to smash the enemy by sheer weight of numbers.

At Cannae, Hannibal showed his exceptional grasp of the battlefield. He formed his infantry into a shallow force, weaker in the centre, with his veteran Libyans on both flanks. On one wing were Numidian cavalry, on the other Spanish and Gallic, 10,000 experienced horsemen who greatly outnumbered the 6,000 Roman horses. His infantry were ordered to form a bulge outwards with the object of enticing the Roman legions into the arc, which would then bend inwards, giving the wings the chance to encircle and annihilate the enemy while the cavalry defeated the enemy horsemen and turned to attack the Roman army from the rear. It was a textbook operation and functioned like clockwork. The Romans pressed forward into the yielding arc, only to find themselves surrounded as the Libyan infantry advanced on the flanks. The Carthaginian cavalry swept aside Rome’s horsemen and plunged into the Roman rear. Cannae was a massacre, the worst defeat the Roman army ever suffered. An estimated 50,000 died that day; others were taken prisoner. Only 14,500 survived out of an army of 80,000. Hannibal lost 6,000, two-thirds of them Gauls. No effort was made to bury so many dead, which included Paullus and eighty Roman senators. The gold rings and ornaments were collected from the dead and sent to Carthage to show the extent of the victory and to demonstrate the need for reinforcements.

Hannibal could perhaps have marched on Rome and brought the empire to its knees. The disaster at Cannae left the city briefly defenceless, though new legions were immediately raised. The Senate ordered that there should be no weeping, and buried two Greeks and two Gauls alive to propitiate the gods. But Hannibal perhaps sensed that his depleted force was not large enough to march the 500 kilometres (300 miles) to Rome and to invest the city. Carthage was too busy fighting in Sicily, Spain and Sardinia to send help, so Hannibal undertook limited campaigns in southern Italy for a further fourteen years, too dangerous an opponent for the Romans to challenge again. To scare the citizens, he took 2,000 cavalry up to the gates of the city in 212 BCE, but could not risk a siege.

When Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal came to join him in 207 BCE by the same awkward route over the Alps, his forces were devastated near present-day Rimini and Hasdrubal was killed. Carthage was undermined on every front except in the south of Italy, where Hannibal was isolated. In 202 BCE, he finally left Italy for good to return to Carthage. A battlefield genius, he did not know how to win the war.

3. BATTLE OF ACTIUM

2 September 31 BCE

The victory won at Actium off the coast of Greece by Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (better known as Octavian, and soon to become Augustus) marked a decisive end to the long period of savage civil wars that had plagued Republican Rome from the middle years of the first century BCE. The battle was fought between the two most powerful men in the Roman Republic: Octavian, ruler of the western half of the Roman territories; and Marcus Antonius (better known as Mark Antony), ruler of the eastern region. Octavian had little reputation as a commander or soldier, but from an early age he had understood how to balance the arts of politics and war. Mark Antony was out-thought by a leader whose political intelligence and strategic calculation opened the way to a new imperial age.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, there followed an uneasy decade as Caesar’s supporters fought against the defenders of Republican Rome and rival claimants to his mantle. Octavian became the dominant figure in Italy because he was more clear-sighted and unscrupulous than his competitors. Though he had no constitutional basis for his claim to rule, he was backed by soldiers loyal to the legacy of the great Caesar, and had enough money to buy the loyalty of others. He collaborated with Antony for much of the decade, and relied on Antony’s military help against the armies raised by Caesar’s assassins. But by 34 BCE, when Antony married the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in a theatrical ceremony in Alexandria, Octavian could see the possibility that Mark Antony might soon want control of the whole Roman sphere and not just the east. By 32 BCE, their rivalry was overt. One-third of the Senate in Rome supported Mark Antony and fled to join his army, which was gathering in Turkey; Octavian had been busy recruiting supporters in Italy, raising taxes for a military expedition, buying the loyalty of his own troops and spreading hostile propaganda against his rival. Ambition turned both heads as the two men contemplated the prospect of ruling the whole Roman world.

In the second half of the year, Antony brought an army of around 100,000 soldiers and 12,000 cavalry to Greece, supported by 500 ships, many of them huge triremes capable of carrying large numbers of soldiers and catapults to be used while ramming and boarding enemy vessels. The object was to prepare for an invasion of Italy, or to lure Octavian into a land battle, which Antony was confident of winning. The fleet was scattered along the coastal ports, but around 250 ships were concentrated in the Gulf of Ambracia, a bay on the west coast of Greece protected by a narrow strait near the town of Actium. They included sixty vessels supplied by Cleopatra, who had accompanied her new consort to witness his triumphant return to Rome. Octavian knew that he had time on his side and decided to blockade Antony. His own fleet, commanded by the very effective Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, preyed on Antony’s supply routes. Octavian moved his army of around 80,000 legionaries and 12,000 horsemen to Greece and set up camp well to the north in order to avoid a land battle, while the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra remained bottled up at Actium, unwilling to risk a major sea battle against the larger naval forces waiting beyond the Gulf.

In this trial of wills, Octavian understood that Antony’s expeditionary force could only decline in fighting power as it struggled to find food and fodder locally and to cope with camp diseases. There were defections to Octavian as morale declined. Antony’s decision to base himself at Actium had been a mistake, but Octavian exploited this misjudgement to the full by avoiding a pitched battle and relying on attrition. Unable to bring his strength to bear against an evasive enemy, Antony decided that his only option was to try to break out of the Gulf and fight his way through Agrippa’s blockade. He concealed his intention from his already demoralized army and when a strong northwest wind arrived on 2 September 31 BCE, Antony ordered his fleet, now reduced to no more than 170 vessels, out of the Gulf and into the open sea.

The four-hour battle that followed was directed by Octavian, who was aboard a small brigantine (suffering, it has been suggested, from sea-sickness), but fought by his admiral, Agrippa. The long delay and the strategy of blockade both played to Octavian’s advantage. Antony’s ships did not seek battle, but were equipped with sails and masts for a break-out. The decks of his ships were cluttered with stores and 20,000 marines, who were embarked with the fleet. His oarsmen were hungry and disease-ridden and no match now for Agrippa’s 400 faster and lighter ships, but they were forced to fight rather than flee. As Antony’s three squadrons came out of the gulf they formed into a crescent, with a fourth squadron of Cleopatra’s sixty ships behind them, prepared with full sail and carrying the treasure needed to fund the war. Agrippa was ready for them. His right squadron engaged with Mark Antony’s left at once, coming to close quarters and using marines to devastate and board the enemy vessels.

As Mark Antony’s right tried to manoeuvre around Agrippa’s fleet, the latter moved his ships further north to envelop the enemy, until the two wings became separated from the rest of the battle. As the centre opened up, Cleopatra seized her moment to sail between the two fighting wings out into the open sea. Mark Antony and some of his vessels on the right then followed them, but sensing that his flagship was too slow, he transferred to a lighter and faster vessel and caught up with Cleopatra, leaving his fleet and his army to their fate.

That fate was harsh indeed. At least two-thirds of the fleet was captured after several hours of fierce fighting and perhaps 10,000 men killed, some of them, according to ancient accounts, ‘mangled by sea monsters’. Much of the army came over to Octavian and those who fled the scene surrendered not long after in Macedonia. The victory at Actium owed something to the mistakes of Antony and Cleopatra, but much to the strategic understanding of Octavian, who, though he lacked the hero’s touch, understood that a battle could be won by patient waiting and the fruits of calculated attrition. The following year, Octavian pursued Antony and Cleopatra to Egypt, captured Alexandria and shared its treasures with his army. Mark Antony stabbed himself and perished in Cleopatra’s arms; she died nine days later once it was clear no deal could be struck with Octavian, reputedly from the bites of twin asps. Gaius Octavianus returned in triumph to Rome in 29 BCE and was declared ‘Augustus’ by the Senate two years later, de facto ruler of the Roman Empire. A holiday was proclaimed to mark the victory in Egypt, still celebrated in Italy two millennia later as ‘Ferragosto’.

4. BATTLE OF THE MILVIAN BRIDGE

28 October 312

The battle between two rival emperors outside the gates of Rome in 312 CE was memorable not so much for what happened on the battlefield between two opponents steeped in Roman fighting traditions, but because Constantine, who had come to capture Rome, was supposed not long before the battle to have had a vision of the Christian cross in the sky with the inscription ‘by this win’, and a dream in which Jesus told him to use the symbol of Christ (the Greek letters ‘chi-rho’). It is claimed that Constantine, buoyed up by this apparition, led his army to a certain victory over the pagan Maxentius and opened the way to Europe’s Christian age. At the Milvian Bridge, God was on the side of the victor. Constantine was a leader on a divine mission.

The Roman Empire in the early fourth century was ruled by a ‘tetrarchy’ of four emperors, each ruling over a defined imperial territory. At York in 306, Constantine was declared ruler of the northern provinces of the empire, which covered present-day Britain, France (Gaul), Belgium and western Germany. That same year, the young Maxentius usurped the imperial title in Rome. A year later, one of the four emperors, Galerius, attempted to overthrow the usurper, but without success. Then in 312, Constantine, a popular ruler in contrast to the brutal and untrustworthy Maxentius, marched across the Alps at Susa to try his luck at capturing Rome, still regarded as the centre of the empire. His army captured Turin and Milan, won a battle at Brescia, then laid siege to Verona, where it defeated Maxentius’s leading general as he tried to flee. From a small force, Constantine’s army was augmented by deserters from Maxentius’s cause. He marched south towards Rome, mustering an estimated 50,000 men.