A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  A painting from 1570 by the Italian Renaissance artist Giulio Romano (c.1499-1546) depicts the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. The imaginative reconstruction gives more prominence to the elephants in Hannibal’s army than they deserve. As the beasts charged, Scipio’s troops made gaps in the ranks to let them through, while other elephants turned and trampled Hannibal’s line.

  The two blocks of soldiers pushed one way and the other, neither side quite strong enough to gain the advantage, until Scipio’s more experienced second-line soldiers finally broke the Carthaginian mercenaries and levies, leaving just Hannibal’s Italian veterans in front of them. Hannibal stretched his line out, putting the survivors of his first two lines on the wings in the hope that a long line might envelop the shorter Roman line in front. But Scipio quickly reorganized his own forces so that the tough veteran legionaries stretched in a long line to match that of the enemy. While these two lines swayed and fought amid the piles of corpses and wounded, the battle hung on a knife-edge, both sides now deploying their toughest and most experienced troops. Suddenly back onto the plain galloped the Roman and Numidian cavalry, arriving behind the Carthaginian lines. They slaughtered Hannibal’s veterans just as his horsemen had slaughtered the Roman legions at Cannae. Estimates in Roman histories suggest 20-25,000 Carthaginian dead and almost all the rest prisoners, for the loss of only 1,500 Romans. These figures are certainly exaggerated, but it seems that few escaped. Hannibal himself fled to his headquarters near Carthage, leaving his men to their fate.

  Hannibal travelled to the capital at once to announce his defeat and recommend surrender. By spring 201 BCE, terms had been agreed and ratified in Rome, and Rome’s political power now extended to Africa. Both commanders ended their lives in exile. Hannibal killed himself with poison in Anatolia in 183 BCE to prevent the Romans from taking him prisoner; Scipio was victimized by rivals in Rome, accused of corruption and embezzlement, and died in exile at a villa in Campania in southern Italy a year before his famous rival, embittered by the ingratitude of a people whose empire he had helped to secure.

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  No. 88 THE BATTLE OF ADRIANOPLE

  9 August 378 CE

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  The fall of the Roman Empire in the late classical age was a slow but irresistible process. Few battles signalled its eventual fate more completely than the battle outside the town of Adrianople (modern-day Edirne in western Turkey), where an army of Gothic tribes all but annihilated a large Roman army led by the emperor himself, Flavius Valens Augustus. The defeat had not been a foregone conclusion, as the Goths had been nervous of a pitched battle with seasoned Roman troops. The tide was turned by the late arrival of reinforcements for the Goths. From a position of numerical inferiority, they suddenly found themselves on equal terms with the enemy. Valens’s prevarication and incompetence then turned what might have been a military stalemate into a comprehensive rout.

  Leading up to the battle, the Roman Empire had been trying to find ways to live in peace with the settlers and warriors who were moving in large numbers from mainland Asia into the heart of Europe. In the mid-fourth century, beyond the frontier of the empire in the Balkans, the Huns emerged as a powerful and predatory new kingdom in central Asia, causing major movements of population. The Huns pushed back the Alans, whose pressure in turn pushed the Gothic Greuthungi and Tervingi kingdoms further west and southwest. In 376, large numbers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of refugee Tervingi arrived on the Danube frontier with Rome and petitioned for permission to cross into Roman territory to escape the apparently unstoppable Huns. Negotiations took time as the emperor was in Antioch, on the southern coast of modern Turkey, not in Constantinople. Valens decided to agree to a treaty that would allow the Goths to cross the river, in the hope that he could use their manpower for his wars in the east against Persia. The Goths crossed over the river and were immediately subjected to harsh treatment by the local Roman generals, who stole the food allocated to the refugees and traded dog meat instead, at the rate of one dog in exchange for a Gothic child to be sold into slavery.

  While the Tervingi were being dispersed south, the leaders of the Greuthungi Goths, Alatheus and Saphrax, who had been refused entry to the empire, slipped across the Danube unnoticed and set up a large camp unsupervised by the Romans. Meanwhile, the local Roman commander Lupicinus invited the leaders of the Tervingi, Fritigern and Alavivus, to a feast in his headquarters in Marcianople; it is not clear if he intended to kill them, but he killed their bodyguard. The Goths outside the city threatened to break in and Lupicinus thought better of his plot. Fritigern escaped but Alavivus was not seen again. As a result, the Goths rebelled against Roman abuse and laid waste to much of Thrace. The Roman armies in the west, led by Valens’s young nephew Gratian, sent reinforcements, but the main army would not arrive until the late summer. Valens decided to snuff out the Gothic threat. He appointed Sebastianus as commanding general of his cosmopolitan army, drawn from all over the Eastern Empire, and on 11 June 378 set out from Constantinople to destroy the army of Fritigern. He set up camp in Adrianople and on the morning of 9 August, after rejecting overtures for an armistice from the Goths and receiving intelligence that the enemy numbered only 10,000, took his army out to the plain where the Goths had drawn up their forces. Valens was confident that a Roman victory was assured.

  A painting by the French artist Évariste Vital Luminais (1821-96) shows an army of Goths approaching Rome. The Goths symbolized the barbarian threat to the Roman Empire and the Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378 indicated clearly just how dangerous that threat was. In 410 Rome itself was sacked.

  The record of the battle has not survived in great detail in the one classical account that we have. Gratian was approaching but would not arrive for some days or weeks. Valens thought his help was not needed, but he was outmanoeuvred by Fritigern. While the Roman army stood in the baking sun in its usual battle order, the Goths lit grass fires whose smoke, like a twentieth-century gas attack, was designed to leave the enemy troops temporarily incapacitated. At the same time, Fritigern sent further envoys to Valens, ostensibly to seek peace but in fact to stall for time while he waited for his adopted allies, the Greuthungi of Alatheus and Saphrax, to arrive. In the confusion, the right wing of the Roman army began engaging with the Goths in front of them. What followed was, by Roman standards, a chaotic battle. The Roman line was distorted and then, at the critical moment, perhaps 10,000 new warriors appeared – the army of the Greuthungi – to cave in the Roman left flank. The newcomers turned the tide as they overwhelmed the now numerically inferior attackers. The Roman cavalry on the left found they had ridden too far and were cut off and slaughtered. As a result, the unprotected infantry line bent back on itself, leaving the soldiers with insufficient room to fight. The Goths swarmed over the Roman line, killing thousands where they stood. Roman reserves melted away from the battlefield in fear. Two-thirds of the cream of Rome’s eastern army were slaughtered, along with the emperor Valens, whose body was never recovered. It was later variously recorded that Valens had been shot by an arrow, or that he had been burnt to death in a nearby farmhouse. His senior commanders, Traianus and Sebastianus, also perished in the massacre.

  For the Roman Empire, Adrianople was a disastrous and humiliating rout. It signalled around the known world that the Roman frontier could no longer act as an effective barrier, and hundreds of thousands of migrants pushed into the empire over the following decades. But it was a battle that, with better judgement, intelligence and operational understanding, the Romans might have won. Fritigern was fortunate that Alatheus and Saphrax arrived when they did. We do not know why they came to his aid, but their arrival helped write a new chapter in the history of the fall of Rome. Only forty years later, the Goths sacked the very capital of the empire.

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  No. 89 FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

  April – May 1453

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  Sultan Mehmet (Turkish for Muhammad) was an impatient ruler. He came to the Ottoman
throne in 1451 and almost his first act was to order the murder of his baby brother to make sure there would be no fratricidal conflicts later in his reign. Though only nineteen at his accession, Mehmet was in a hurry to complete an ambition that had frustrated the Muslim east for centuries: the eradication of the last vestige of the centuries-old Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox Christian capital at Constantinople. The city boasted formidable fortifications, man-made and natural, which had frustrated earlier Turkish sieges. They almost defeated Mehmet after seven weeks of fruitless assaults on the city until two moments of good fortune opened the way to its conquest.

  The young sultan wanted to mark the start of his reign in spectacular fashion. The Ottoman Turks now controlled a large empire in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) and the European Balkan peninsula. Christian Constantinople lay between the two, a thorn in the Ottoman side. Mehmet wanted the city for his capital rather than the Greek city of Edirne, and even at a young age was capricious and forceful enough to compel his advisers and commanders, including the more cautious grand vizier, (Çandarli Halil Pasha, to accept his ambition. In 1452, he made a start by ordering a fortress to be built on the European side of the Bosphorus Strait above Constantinople to act as a ‘throat cutter’ for Byzantine trade. The fortress, Rumeli Hisari, was built in record time and heavy cannon backed by a rapidly constructed Ottoman fleet cut off trade routes to the city. Mehmet called on the Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, to surrender. The emperor refused and sealed up the gates.

  Constantine had little with which to challenge the huge Ottoman army that Mehmet summoned from all over his empire. There were probably no more than 6,000 regular soldiers and militia in the city, reinforced in January 1453 by 700 heavily armed Genoese under their commander Giovanni Giustiniani Longo. He quickly organized the defence of the city, repairing crumbling walls, stockpiling weapons, and instructing the anxious defenders in the best tactics to frustrate siege warfare. Their best protection, however, remained the ‘Wall of Theodosius’, a 20-kilometre (12-mile) fortification on the landward side of the city 60 metres (200 feet) in depth and 30 metres (100 feet) in height, with 192 towers, a fosse wall and a deep moat. The other walls of the triangular site on which Constantinople perched were protected by the Sea of Marmora to one side and the Golden Horn inlet on the other. These fortifications were all that stood between a frightened population, increasingly persuaded that God was punishing them for their sins by sending the infidel to scourge them, and the 200,000 Ottomans, 60,000 of them soldiers, who approached the city early in April 1453.

  Mehmet knew that siege warfare did not sit well with Ottoman traditions of war-making. He therefore ordered the construction of giant cannon, supervised by a Hungarian gunsmith, Orban, and transported with great difficulty more than 150 kilometres (100 miles) from Edirne to the gates of Constantinople. He set up the siege a mere 250 metres (800 feet) from the Theodosian Wall, his men protected behind a ditch and rampart. The cannon, including one 8.5 metres (27 feet) long, with stone cannon balls weighing half a ton, were set up to bombard what looked like the weakest parts of the fortification. His forces captured small forts and outposts outside the city and displayed the unfortunate survivors – impaled naked on sharp stakes driven with a heavy mallet through the rectum and along the spine – in full view of the Greeks on the battlements of the city. Terror was also one of the weapons at Mehmet’s disposal, but it was no more than Constantine and his soldiers expected. Ottoman tradition was to slaughter all those who resisted.

  On 12 April, the siege began with a six-day bombardment, the largest artillery barrage yet mounted. The ‘supergun’ devastated the defending walls until metal fatigue caused it to explode, killing, so it was said, the helpful Orban. To the Ottoman besiegers, the damage must have looked impressive as each massive stone ball knocked down sections of towers and battlements, but when Mehmet ordered the first storming of the damaged walls on 18 April, the stout defenders blocked the narrow entryways and slaughtered any who tried to break through. The attacks were usually made in the dark, accompanied by yells, constant drumming and cries to Allah, but each was repelled with savage hand-to-hand fighting, while civilians poured down stones and burning pitch from the tops of the fortifications onto the mass of Ottoman soldiery. Mehmet had wanted a quick knock-out blow but was now faced with a prolonged investment. Arguments began in the Ottoman camp over fears that crusading Christians would arrive from Europe to save the capital of eastern Christendom or that frustration, disease and pointless casualties would evaporate the previously high morale of the Ottoman army. Further assaults, on 6 and 7 May, and a brief penetration of the city on 12 May by a group of Ottoman soldiers came to nothing.

  A fifteenth-century Turkish miniature shows the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II, at the siege of Constantinople in 1453. After weeks of fruitless bombardment, the city was taken when a small door in the city walls, the Wooden Circus Gate, was left open by mistake by the defenders.

  Mehmet tried everything, including further offers of peace, even a new kingdom for the inhabitants in Greece, if Constantine would surrender, but the Byzantine leaders remained obdurate. The Ottomans recruited Saxon miners to tunnel under the walls, but a Scottish soldier resident in the city, John Grant, knew how to detect mining and managed to frustrate every attempt, burning or burying the miners underground. A huge wooden siege tower, even higher than the walls, was trundled into place but the Byzantine defenders threw barrels of gunpowder with lighted tapers and blew the contraption into the air. On 26 May, the Ottoman commanders debated with the sultan about what they should do. Halil Pasha thought it wise to abandon the siege, but the restless army needed the loot it had been promised (Ottoman soldiers were not paid) and Mehmet had already faced several near rebellions by his personal janissary guards. The assembled leaders accepted Mehmet’s plea for one last attempt. On 27 May, an endless bombardment was set up against the damaged walls, where Giustiniani had improvised stockades and earthworks to fill the breaches. On 29 May at 1.30 a.m., accompanied by a cacophony of screams, drums and trumpets, the whole Turkish army ran at the walls.

  They were beaten back relentlessly by the small and exhausted Byzantine army, until two pieces of luck suddenly undid the weeks of stout defence. A small gate, the Wooden Circus Gate, had been left open by neglect after a small group of Italian soldiers had returned from a sally. Some Ottoman soldiers saw it and rushed in. Within minutes they were on the battlements and Ottoman banners fluttered from the towers. At almost the same time, Giustiniani, in the thick of the battle, was severely wounded. His men carried him away to a Genoese ship still anchored in the Horn, and the rest of the Genoese followed, no longer willing to defend an apparently hopeless cause. Their loss suddenly exposed the weakened defence. Mehmet now threw in his last trump card, the 5,000 imperial troops of his own bodyguard. They hacked and pushed their way through a narrow breach in the wall and slaughtered the enemy soldiers. Though no eyewitness was certain what happened to Constantine, whose severed head had been promised to the sultan, he died somewhere in the mêlée along with his garrison. In Islamic law, three days of pillaging and violence were permitted, though this time Mehmet allowed only one. An estimated 4,000 of the population were killed, the rest taken into slavery. What was left of the wealth of the city, which was much less than expected, was taken by the soldiers during an orgy of violence, looting and rape.

  Mehmet’s siege was rescued at the last moment and his ambition fulfilled, more by luck than by the panoply of siege equipment brought to bear on the city. Two days later, Halil Pasha was executed to punish him for his restraint. Constantinople developed as an Islamic centre and the Topkapi Palace was constructed in the city as Mehmet’s refuge. The Christian West deplored the loss but had made almost no effort to come to Constantine’s aid. Hundreds of Byzantine nobles, and the fortunate Giustiniani, made it through the Ottoman sea blockade to fight another day.

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  No. 90 BATTLE OF SEKIGAHARA

  21 October 1600
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  There are few battles in Japanese history more famous than the clash between the so-called Western and Eastern armies in a brief civil war to decide who would become the new military hegemon of Japan. The country’s imperial system was dominated by the military leaders, who jockeyed for influence over the imperial court. At Sekigahara on the island of Honshu, the great regional lords, or daimyo, clashed over the rival claims of the Tokugawa and Toyotomi clans to dominate Japan. The battlefield was as much a political as a military site. A number of daimyo fighting for the Toyotomi Western Army hedged their bets about the outcome, uncertain whether to switch loyalty to the enemy commander, Tokugawa Ieyasu. At the last moment, with the outcome in the balance, Kobayakawa Hideaki, son of one of the guardians of the young Toyotomi heir, switched sides and victory went to the Eastern Army, opening the way to the long and relatively peaceful Tokugawa era.