It is almost certain, however, that something happened at Troy. The written version 500 years later clearly derived from traditions of epic poetry passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation, like many other narratives in the civilizations of the Middle East before they were consigned to the written word. It is not unlikely that Greek raiders, perhaps on some excuse such as the pursuit of Helen, arrived at Troy to seek its treasures. Modern estimates guess at perhaps 300 ships and anything up to 15,000 men, if the Greek kingdoms had united their forces. Trojan forces and their allies numbered perhaps another 15,000. It is likely that the siege was short, and that the Greeks pillaged and raided the hinterland around the city before finding a way through its defences.
This steel engraving of the Trojan horse dates from 1876. Once the wooden horse had been dragged inside the walls of the city, Greek soldiers hiding inside were supposed to have descended at night to open the city gates to the waiting Greek army.
The idea of using deception to undo a city under siege was not unusual in the classical Middle East, when a city could be betrayed by a fifth columnist. The choice of a horse is also consistent with what is known from late Bronze Age archaeology of the special place horses had as offerings. A clay model of a horse from exactly this period was excavated from the ruins of Troy itself. The Greeks were skilled boat-builders and would have had no difficulty putting together a horse made of wooden planking. They would have left the horse, returned to their ships and sailed out of sight, perhaps behind one of the small islands a few miles from the coast, to await a signal that the horse had been taken into the city and that the gates would be opened by the soldiers hidden inside it. It has been calculated that the Greek ships would have taken perhaps two hours to row back to shore during the late evening and another two hours to march the 8 kilometres (5 miles) to the city. Once inside the gates, in the dead of night, with a Trojan population quite unprepared for assault, the Greek victory was assured.
This illustration from a Greek vase dating from around 500 BCE shows the Greek hero Achilles tending to the injuries of his companion Patroklos at the siege of Troy. When Patroklos was later killed by the Trojan warrior Hector, Achilles defeated him and dragged his dead body around the city walls.
This is all supposition, but it is consistent with what is now known about the Greek and Turkish world 4,000 years ago. The rest is myth, but it could clearly rest on a truth embellished over centuries of oral tradition. Much of the story rests on established patterns of behaviour in ancient warfare. The use of champions as surrogates for whole armies was not uncommon, from the Biblical Goliath to the fatal clash between Hector, son of the King of Troy, and the Greek champion Achilles. The sacrifice of prisoners to satisfy the gods – ordered by Achilles in front of the bier of his favourite, Patroklos, according to Homer – was a common practice, later recorded by Herodotus in his account of the Persian invasion of Greece. Finally there is Helen, who started it all. Modern research has not found a real Helen, but accounts of wars in nearby areas in surviving texts show that a supposedly personal motive for a war that was actually for treasure or land or power was common enough. We are left to imagine a beautiful queen seduced by the smooth-talking Paris, abducted only half against her will, pursued to Troy by her angry husband Menaleus and the Greek commander Agamemnon, where after mighty battles the city was finally taken by a famous ruse and Helen reunited with her vengeful husband, who only stopped his sword, so the story goes, when Helen showed him her breasts. The story of the Trojan Horse is the most famous story of deception, the ancestor of centuries in which tricks have been used to overturn a powerful enemy or to turn an uncertain outcome into victory.
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No. 54 BATTLES OF MOUNT VESUVIUS
Summer – autumn 73 BCE
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The slave revolt in southern Italy that began in 73 BCE resulted in humiliating defeats for the legions of the Roman army sent to suppress it. The principal slave leader (there were a number) was a tall, fit Thracian gladiator from what is today Bulgaria, known as Spartacus – a Latin version of his Thracian name Sparadakos, meaning ‘famous for his spear’. When he escaped from captivity with a band of seventy-three gladiators, a mix of Thracian, German and Celtic fighters, he had little chance of defeating a Roman force in open battle. Spartacus and his improvised army relied on stealth, surviving, as gladiators had to do in the arena, on strength and guile.
The historical record on the Spartacus revolt and its key battles is sparse, but enough is known to reconstruct something of the remarkable year in which the runaway slaves inflicted a series of defeats on the armies sent to crush them. Spartacus had once been trained to fight as a Roman soldier. Why he was subsequently made a captive and forced to fight in the arena as a heavily armed gladiator (named after the short Roman sword, or gladius, that they used) is not known. At some point in 73 BCE, he and around 200 fellow captives decided to escape from the gladiators’ enclosure in the southern city of Capua. Fighting their way out, only seventy-four escaped, together with an unknown Thracian woman – the mistress of Spartacus and a devotee of the Greek god Dionysus, deity of wine and the dance, who is alleged to have given the gladiators the god’s blessing.
The band moved south, destroying a small detachment of men sent from Capua to recapture them. Thirty kilometres (20 miles) away they arrived at Mount Vesuvius, then thought to be extinct, and climbed it to camp in its broad dormant crater. How many slaves joined the march south is not known. Roman writers speculated that there were 10,000, later 20,000, but at this point it seems unlikely that there were more than one or two thousand, using their new-found freedom to rampage through the countryside. A slave revolt was regarded in Rome as a police matter – a tumultus or ‘commotion’ that had to be quickly snuffed out using what men were available. Since Rome’s best armies were on distant battlefields in Spain, the Balkans and Turkey fighting wars of pacification, one of the eight Roman praetors (an elected office-holder, one rank down from the two consuls who conducted Rome’s affairs) named Caius Claudius Glaber was chosen to finish Spartacus off. He marched south with an estimated 3,000 foot soldiers, bearing in front the famous fasces – the bundle of rods tied round an axe, which signified life or death, later adopted by Mussolini’s fascist party. Glaber arrived at Vesuvius, camped at or near its foot and blockaded the slaves. The only narrow path down the side of the volcano was guarded. Glaber probably assumed that it was only a matter of time before hunger drove them down.
The slave band was led not only by Spartacus but by two Celts, Crixus and Oenomaus, who commanded the unknown number of Celts among the band. Like Thracians, Celts from all over Europe had a reputation as tough and brutal fighters: tall, tattoo-covered, bearded, they must have seemed both exotic and terrifying to the local population. The classical sources agree on what happened next, though the details are scrappy. The slaves weaved the wild vines growing on Vesuvius into ropes. They used the ropes to climb down the steepest and most difficult route on the far side, which the Romans regarded as impassable and had left unguarded. This subterfuge allowed them to arrive, probably at night (which Thracians preferred for ambushes), on the outskirts of the Roman camp. The sources vary on how the slaves approached the camp, but with the advantage of surprise and inherited woodcraft, it is likely that they silently killed off the sentries placed outside the stockades, before rushing forward to attack the soldiers sleeping in their rows of leather tents.
For the Roman militia collected by Glaber, the attack was unexpected. On the Roman frontier, surrounded by barbarian tribes, a sudden assault was routine. Here the frontier had been brought into the heart of the Roman countryside: an uncommon silence, followed by the ritual roars and shouts of the slave warriors as they burst into the enclosure. The camp was captured, an unknown number of Roman soldiers killed and the stocks and weapons plundered. Glaber, it seems, escaped, but his praetorian headquarters was in slave hands. The sources agree that now thousands more slaves, commonly used to f
arm the rich soil around Vesuvius, flocked to join Spartacus. News of Glaber’s humiliation reached Rome and two more praetors, Publius Varinius and Lucius Cossinius, were chosen to lead two entire legions (around 12,000 men) to avenge the defeat. The army made its way south in large cohorts, but separated from each other. The slaves ambushed the advance guard of Lucius Furius with 2,000 troops, killing Furius and annihilating his force. They then tracked Cossinius’s slow march south and chose their moment to ambush the second cohort. Cossinius was taking the waters in a villa at Salina, near Pompeii, when he and his guards were surprised by a slave attack. He fled back to his camp but was slaughtered along with many of his soldiers. Varinius, with a force now much reduced, met the same fate. He gathered together the remnants of the other armies and tried to bring the slaves to battle. The details of the final defeat are not known, but an army of perhaps 40,000 slaves seized his camp, slaughtered his forces and captured his standards and fasces, though he himself seems to have escaped.
Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy overlooks the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii. The slave rebels led by Spartacus were blockaded here until they used vine-ropes to climb down the steep side and surprise the Roman camp at night.
In six months of fighting around Vesuvius and the rich countryside of Campania, four Roman armies had been annihilated by European slaves who had fewer arms and little training but a great deal of brutal cunning. In the end the revolt failed. In 71 BCE, after long marches up and then down the Italian peninsula, Spartacus and some 40,000 slave warriors were defeated not far from the sites of his original victories. He died fighting with a raw courage under a hail of blows and javelins. The few survivors were crucified and left to rot alongside the Appian Way to Rome. The revolt lived on to become a symbol for Marxist revolutionaries, centuries later, of an ancient class struggle, slave against master, the ancestor of their struggle for proletarian emancipation.
A nineteenth-century engraving made in 1882 by the German artist Hermann Vogel (1856–1918) depicts the death of Spartacus. The slave leader was finally defeated by Marcus Crassus in a battle on the banks of the River Sele, near the village of Quaglietta, in southern Italy.
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No. 55 BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES
15 August 788
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The events that took place in a high gorge in the western Pyrenees one August day in 788 were turned three centuries later into one of the most famous European epic poems, the Chanson de Roland, the ‘Song of Roland’. The author of the poem is not known, and indeed the historical circumstances to which the poem alludes are sketchy in the extreme. The poem has Roland as a brave Christian hero, betrayed by his jealous step-father Ganelon during a campaign in Spain by the Frankish king Charlemagne. As the Frankish army returns through the mountains to France, Roland and the rearguard are ambushed by thousands of pagans (Muslims) and the nobles are slaughtered. Roland dies, sword in hand, and his soul is taken to heaven by angels. Ganelon is later caught by Charlemagne, tortured, and finally, still alive, torn to pieces by four horses.
There is enough truth in the epic to indicate that over 300 years an oral tradition passed down an embellished Christian version of the death of Roland, prefect of the Breton March, during the withdrawal of Charlemagne’s army from an unsuccessful campaign against the Muslim state of al-Andalus that dominated most of Spain. The poem itself is a fantasy, for little is known of the circumstances of the defeat of Charlemagne’s rearguard at or near the town of Roncesvalles in the present-day Basque country, though it was certainly not a showdown between Islam and Christianity, as the Chanson suggests. The first medieval accounts of Charlemagne’s reign passed over the defeat. Only the ninth-century biography of Charlemagne, the Vita Karoli, written by the monk Einhard, has a few hundred words about the ambush. There remains considerable uncertainty about the site of the battle, who organized the ambush, and even if the ‘Hruodlandus’ mentioned in the text really is ‘Roland’. For the details of the ambush itself, this is the only real record. The one thing that seems reasonably certain is that the Franks caught by the men concealed on the forested mountainsides were massacred.
The background to the Roncesvalles ambush gives at least some clues as to what might have happened. In 777, the rulers of small Muslim states in eastern Spain, led by Suleiman al-Arabi, governor of Barcelona and Girona, sent an embassy to Charlemagne in Paderborn asking him to help them in their struggle against the Muslim ruler of al-Andalus, Abd al-Rahman. There were hints that Charlemagne might gain territory or vassals if he helped them. Since the Frankish kings had spent decades slowly pushing back the Muslim control of southwestern France, Charlemagne was probably attracted to the idea of establishing a Spanish March in the areas of the Pyrenees. He mustered a major army from across his dominions and marched in two columns, one west, and one east of the mountain chain. They met up and moved on Zaragoza, whose ruler, Al-Husein, went back on his promise to co-operate with the Franks. Charlemagne spent a fruitless few weeks trying to besiege the city but abandoned the attempt when he was warned that the troublesome Saxons were again threatening the eastern part of his kingdom. He took Suleiman al-Arabi as a hostage and set off with his army through the passes that linked the Basque territories of northeastern Spain with Gascony, in southwest France.
According to the surviving annals, Charlemagne had a difficult retreat. Some sources suggest that a Muslim attack was made to free Suleiman and other hostages. When Charlemagne reached Pamplona, he found the Basque and Muslim inhabitants no longer willing to submit to him, so he captured and sacked the city. By the time his army began to wind its way through the pass across the Pyrenees, the local Basques and probably some Arab allies had plenty of reason to want revenge on the Franks. The rearguard was their target as it contained the baggage train and treasure taken from Charlemagne’s temporary Spanish allies. Einhard’s account describes a country where ambushes were everyday affairs, easy to mount ‘by reason of the thick forests’. As the rearguard entered the pass (the exact one is not certain), they were suddenly assailed by a more mobile and lightly armoured enemy. They were hurled down ‘to the very bottom of the valley’, where they were slaughtered as they struggled in heavy armour and unhelpful terrain against an enemy evidently familiar with the advantages of deception. Before any help could come from the rest of the army, the ambushers melted away in the dusk, bearing all the booty with them. Einhard confirms that pursuit was useless: ‘not the least clue could be had to their whereabouts’.
An illustration c.1460 from Les Grandes Chroniques de France shows the emperor Charlemagne discovering the dead body of his favourite, Roland, after an ambush by Basque soldiers near the Roncesvalles Pass in August 788. In medieval France the story came to symbolize the virtues of a Christian knight.
The story consists of little more than a classic opportunistic ambush that reversed the odds against what was certainly a large and powerful army. Charlemagne did not return to Spain for another twenty years, but the Carolingian Empire did eventually construct a Hispanic March to end any further encroachment from Muslim Spain. The death of Roland, if indeed it was he, is supposed to have weighed heavily upon Charlemagne. A chronicle in 829, the first time the defeat at Roncesvalles was admitted, claimed that ‘this wound that the King received in Spain almost totally erased from his heart the memory of his success there’. The ambush has since become the famous climax in the Chanson de Roland, the founding work of French literature, enjoying an unexpected afterlife long after any of its details could be recalled. In the poem, Charlemagne takes his revenge on the pagans, but in reality the ambush remained unavenged, a brief moment of triumph for the unruly Basques against the main power of Christian Europe.
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No. 56 BATTLE OF KLEIDION–STRUMITSA
July – August 1014
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Two battles fought in the space of a few days in the summer of 1014 between the Byzantine emperor Basil II and the Tsar of the First Bulgarian Empire, Samuel, were
won by the use of deception. The first, near the village of Kleidion (Klyuch in modern Bulgaria), resulted in a Byzantine victory; the second a few days later gave the Bulgarians revenge in the Battle of Strumitsa, thought to have been fought in the Kosturino gorge south of the town. In both cases surprise was the key that unlocked a military situation which otherwise seemed difficult to overcome, and in both cases concealment resulted in an annihilating victory.
War between the two empires had been persistent ever since the establishment of a Bulgarian Empire in the Balkan Peninsula in the seventh century. But under Byzantine emperor Basil II, who came to the throne in Constantinople in 976, the destruction of the Bulgarian state became a central ambition, even an obsession. By 1004, the eastern half of the Bulgarian Empire was lost to Byzantium. For the next decade, Basil campaigned in the Balkans each year, pillaging and burning the countryside and destroying one Bulgarian outpost after another. The Bulgarians’ strategy against their powerful neighbour was to rely on ambushes and raids, avoiding pitched battles, but in 1014 Samuel, whose empire was now confined to the mountains of Macedonia and Albania, decided to confront the next Byzantine invasion. Basil usually followed a route through the Kleidion Pass, which runs between the Belasitsa and Ograzhden mountains to the upper valley of the River Struma. Here Samuel set up palisades and earthworks to block Basil’s path.
A History of War in 100 Battles Page 25