100 Mistakes That Changed History: Backfires and Blunders That Collapsed Empires, Crashed Economies, and Altered the Course of Our World

by Bill Fawcett

  Rowing with the oars of one ship almost touching those of the trireme on either side, in a solid line formation 100 galleys wide, the Persians entered the Straits of Salamis. It certainly was a slaughter, but not the one the Persian emperor expected. In the tight waters, the larger Persian ships could not maneuver as well as the smaller Greek triremes. Persian ship after Persian ship was rammed and sunk. Except when ramming, the nimble Greek ships easily stayed away from the Persian vessels, meaning the extra crew and soldiers on them were of no use. When another line of large Persian ships poured into the straits, they met the same fate. The larger size of the empire triremes, which would have been a great advantage in open water, had proven to be a terrible disadvantage. Persian morale plunged, and fleeing ships broke up the formation of the reinforcements that were entering the battle, making them vulnerable to being attacked on both sides. So these ships too were rammed and sunk by the nimble Greek vessels.

  Incidentally, the Egyptian ships that had been sent around the island of Salamis to block the back of the straits had been scattered by a storm before they could get into position. All Xerxes could do was sit on his throne and watch as his navy and his plan for conquering Greece were both destroyed.

  More than 200 of the best ships in the Persian navy, thousands of veteran sailors and soldiers, and even Xerxes’ brother were lost. Most of the Persian sailors whose ships were sunk could not swim and drowned. Those who made it to the shores of Salamis were killed on the beach by Greek warriors. The Persian ships that managed to withdraw from the straits were not in any shape to continue the battle or the war.

  Without the fleet, the large Persian army could not be supplied. Worse yet, with the Greeks dominant in the Aegean Sea, they could sail north and destroy the bridge across the Hellespont—the bridge that was Xerxes’ and his entire army’s only line of retreat. Leaving a large force in northern Greece, Xerxes led most of his army out of Greece before it starved in place. The remaining army, however, was defeated the next year at Platea.

  Because the emperor of Persia acted on the word of a slave, he sent his entire fleet into the Straits of Salamis, virtually guaranteeing Greece would remain independent. If he had not listened to Sicinnus, Persia might well have triumphed, and the cradle of Western culture would instead have become a relatively poor, backwater province of Eastern culture. The world as it is today—including the historic predominance of democracy, our Roman culture, and Christianity—simply would have never been. But they all do exist because Xerxes made the fatal mistake of believing exactly the wrong man at the wrong time.

  5 and 6

  AMBITION AND SUPERSTITION

  Risking It All

  415 BCE

  It took two very different mistakes to destroy the power of Athens, but with great effort the leaders of that city made them both. There are few wars that contain as many military and political mistakes as the Peloponnesian War fought between Sparta and Athens. From the very beginning of the war, when Sparta completely misjudged Athens’ response to their invasion, until the whimpering end of Athenian power, the entire conflict was a tragedy of errors. This war, due to a nearly unending series of mistakes, misjudgments, and just plain egotism, lasted twenty-seven years and ended only when Athens found a way to lose. But even among so rich a selection of errors, two stand out that changed everything and took Athens, in one year, from the edge of victory to total defeat.

  Until the Battle of Mantinea, in 418 BCE, Athens had been winning its long war with Sparta, who was being financed by Persia. After the Spartan victory at Mantinea, several cities had been forced by Sparta to quit the Delian League (an alliance of city-states dominated by Athens), cutting back on the manpower and taxes available to Athens. By 415 BCE, the city’s leadership had devised a plan that they hoped would give them back the edge.

  One of the Greek cities supporting Sparta was Syracuse, located not in Greece, but on Sicily. This island just south of Italy contained a number of cities that had grown from Greek colonies. As large and nearly as prosperous as Athens, the distant city was a tempting prize. Syracuse had occasionally supported Sparta in the war, and it was a source for selling supplies and ships to the primarily land-based military power. The Athenians decided that knocking out Syracuse would restore momentum to their side. Not to mention that looting the rich city would pad their flagging treasury.

  Another Athenian hope was that while most of the cities in Sicily maintained a cautiously neutral stance, if the largest city on the island fell to Athens, the others would have to join the Delian League. This would greatly increase the resources Athens would have to finance future battles. The risk involved by invading was that Athens would force those cities into the Spartan camp until Syracuse fell. They had to win fast and they had to defeat a powerful city far from their own bases. A few leaders maintained that the whole venture seemed like a serious mistake. The skeptics thought there was no reason to extend the war to somewhere so far from Greece, fighting against a powerful city that would add to but was not really vital to Sparta’s power. Furthermore, the naysayers argued that Syracuse was the other leading democracy among Greek city-states, making the moral justification of the attack very tenuous. They maintained that there was very much to lose and not much to gain in attacking Syracuse. And they were, history shows, painfully correct.

  So why did the expedition to Syracuse happen at all? Part of the reason has to be desperation by the Athenians to find some strategy that could end a war that had already gone on for sixteen years and seemed destined to continue forever. That is twice as long as the United States fought in Vietnam or has been in Iraq. Another reason was that old inspiration for disaster: ego. Alcibiades, a notoriously self-serving politician, had managed to become a major influence in the Athenian Senate. To further aggrandize his position he needed to lead a successful military expedition. Many argued against attacking Syracuse, but in the end, Alcibiades persuaded enough citizens to support the attack for it to happen and for him to be in charge of it.

  A fleet carrying just under 9,000 veteran soldiers landed on Sicily in 415 BCE. They approached several of the smaller cities near Syracuse, requesting that they be allowed to base there, but all of them refused. Still, Syracuse was unprepared, and when the Athenian fleet was able to sail right into the city’s harbor, the populace was thrown into a panic. But for some reason, perhaps simply because there wasn’t enough glory yet, Alcibiades did not attack immediately. The Athenians instead sailed off and managed to capture Catana, a small city located a half day’s rowing from Syracuse.

  At about this same time, politics intervened, and Alcibiades was recalled to Athens to stand trial for sacrilege. The trial never occurred because Alcibiades fled to Sparta. Command passed to a notoriously cautious commander, Nicias, who had opposed the entire Syracuse venture. He did not attack Syracuse. Instead he sent the bulk of the fleet and army off to rampage and threaten along Sicily’s northern coast, but the cities there were not intimidated, and none joined Athens. After they returned to their original camp, the Athenian forces managed to lure Syracuse’s army to move near the base at Catana, but even after defeating them, the Athenians were unable to pursue the fleeing enemy soldiers due to a lack of cavalry. They could not win even by winning. Soon winter came, with the invading Athenians no closer to conquering a quickly arming Syracuse, and the other cities of Sicily avoided involvement.

  The next year, Nicias attempted to surround Syracuse with a wall that would have cut the city off from supplies of food and wood. The long siege and the reputation of the Athenians sapped the will of the citizens of Syracuse. Before the Syracusans could act, a Spartan commander, Gylippus, arrived, and his leadership restored Syracusan morale. Nicias knew only of the falling faith of the Syracusans and failed to realize the situation had changed. Within a few months, the Athenian efforts to build the wall were stopped, and forts were erected to ensure the city’s supplies. But even though Nicias’ strategy had been prevented, the Athenians held on. By 413 BCE t
he Syracusans had hired 7,000 mercenary soldiers. Then the Athenian commander discovered that the Sicilian city was in the process of building and manning a substantial navy.

  Nicias asked to be relieved of command due to illness and strongly suggested the whole invasion be withdrawn. Instead, the Athenians decided to double their bet by sending a second fleet and 5,000 more hoplites (citizen-soldiers) to Sicily. Yet even the new troops failed to force Syracuse into surrendering.

  Finally seeing that there was no hope of success, Nicias announced the entire expedition would return to Athens. This meant failure, but he prevented the failure from being a total disaster. That was a good decision, but a subsequent mistake nullified it and changed history.

  Before the Athenians could return to their ships, there was an eclipse of the sun. Nicias was superstitious, as most Greeks were, and he saw this as a sign and ordered the retreat to be halted. Fear of the anger of the gods, often in the form of storms that could sink entire fleets, was great. So when a soothsayer advised that the Athenians wait “thrice nine days” before departing, they did.

  The Syracusans did not simply wait for the invaders to leave, though. They fought a sea battle and managed to destroy a number of Athenian triremes. By this time, the Athenian fleet was anchored near Syracuse on the far side of the city’s harbor. With morale soaring after defeating what was a portion of the best navy in the world, the Syracusans used ships chained together to block the exit from the harbor, trapping all of the Athenian ships. With their ships trapped, the Athenian army was trapped as well.

  An attempt to break the blockade failed. With supplies running low and morale running lower, Nicias ordered a retreat to Catana, which Athens still controlled. He split the army into two columns, made up of about 20,000 men each, and they marched toward the small city. By now the bulk of Athens’ army was in the two columns. Sicilian troops blocked every road, bridge, and pass, slowing the retreat to a crawl. Each column was pressed from behind by the main Syracusan army and harassed from all sides. With only 6,000 men still alive, Demosthenes surrendered his column. Nicias had less than a thousand soldiers left when he too surrendered. After four years of bitter siege, the leaders of Syracuse were not feeling benevolent. Of the 7,000 survivors only a few hundred ever saw Athens again. Most were worked to death in Syracusan stone quarries. Athens paid a high price that it never recovered from by invading Sicily. It was a totally unnecessary mistake that was done for all the wrong reasons, to the wrong people, and carried out in the wrong way.

  That delay of twenty-seven days to retreat, for no other reason than superstition, changed the entire Peloponnesian War. Athens never recovered from the loss of more than 12,000 hoplites and twice as many rowers and light infantry. Sparta proved unable to replace Athens as the politically dominant city in Greece. The military dictatorship had lost too many of its highly trained hoplites in the war as well. Rather than a strong central leadership, such as Athens had provided for Greece before the war with the Delian League, the Greek world was once more split owing to jealousy and constant bickering among the city-states. This left the area vulnerable to the eventual conquest of one Philip of Macedonia.

  Athens might have survived Alcibiades’ mistake in starting the invasion if it had not been for Nicias’ miscalculation. Without the first mistake caused by the ego of Alcibiades, Athens likely would have continued to win the Peloponnesian War and maintained its dominance of Greece. Without Nicias superstitiously forcing that last-minute, highly risky delay, the army and fleet would not have been lost and the mistake of attacking Syracuse would have embarrassed, but not crippled, the city-state. Had Athens not been drastically weakened on Sicily the world of the ancient Mediterranean and our world today would have been totally different.

  If Athens had stayed strong, there would have been no Macedonian domination under Philip and so no Alexander the Great. Persia, playing a key role in Greek politics, might well have remained an intact Eastern empire for centuries longer. Instead of becoming the dominant culture in all the lands from Egypt to Babylon, Greek culture and democracy might well be a footnote rather than a force in history. That their city’s defeat and collapse led to the ideals of democracy and Greek values later being spread to all of Europe and Asia would likely be of little consolation to the people of Athens, who paid a very high price for both Alcibiades’ and Nicias’ mistakes.

  7

  COWARDICE

  How to Lose an Empire

  331 BCE

  In 331 BCE, Emperor Darius III made a decision during the Battle of Gaugamela (fought near present-day Irbīl in northern Iraq). His army greatly outnumbered his opponent’s, and he was fighting where and almost when he wanted. At the point Darius lost it all with one bad decision, the Persian emperor still had plenty of uncommitted troops and the other side was on their last reserves. Almost everything still favored Darius, except that he had an immediate and personal problem. The opposing commander was leading a charge directly at the king of kings, and that commander was Alexander of Macedon.

  Alexander’s charge was a grave threat to Darius, but at that point, the rest of the fighting was actually going well for the Persians. On the Persian right, they were pressing back the Greeks, who were commanded by Alexander’s top general, Parmenion. The Persian center was only lightly engaged except directly in front of the throne from which Darius was commanding the battle. There the elite companion cavalry, and a number of the best Macedonian phalanxes, had reversed a march across the Persian front and were cutting their way toward the emperor. Virtually no Greek forces faced the much larger Persian army’s left.

  A few years earlier, in the Battle of Issus, Darius had fled when the battle seemed lost. He had hurried back to Babylon with no ill effect on his control of the heart of his empire. There he raised a newer and much larger army. He intended to use that superior army to defeat Alexander in the current fight. Darius’ survival was politically important. Being a Persian emperor was a highly personal position; for Alexander to claim the throne and be recognized by the rest of the empire, he had to capture or kill Darius III. Perhaps the fact that he fled at Issus with no problems encouraged the emperor to think he could flee again without it being a disaster. Or maybe, although he was a most capable leader and politician, Darius III was just a coward when physically threatened. Whatever the logic or reason, before the Macedonians even got close to his throne, the Persian emperor got into a chariot and fled the battle.

  There were more Persian infantry covering Darius’ retreat than there were phalangists, the heavy infantry who carried the thirteen-plus-foot-long metal-tipped pikes known as sarissas and who endured the burden of the “push” that was the basis of the fighting in Alexander’s Macedonian army. And Parmenion was in the process of being mauled by far-superior Persian infantry and horsemen, and almost half the Macedonian army was in danger of being destroyed. So decimated were Parmenion’s troops that Alexander had to use his entire attack force to assist the hard-pressed left side of his army. This command decision was made all the more difficult because Alexander knew that all he had to do was eliminate the king of kings to win a clear victory. Fortunately, since the leadership of Persia was a very personal thing, when word got out that Darius III had run away, the rest of his army either backed off or fled outright.

  The Battle of Gaugamela

  By almost any standard, Darius was not losing the battle when he hurried away. He still had plenty of uncommitted forces that could have been called on, including a large number of cavalry. If he simply moved to another location and had his army continue to fight, he might even have won. Certainly he would have punished the Macedonian army, which was already at the end of a very long supply line with few reinforcements expected, and at the point where it could not effectively occupy the capital. Alexander the Great might today instead be known as the Alexander who overreached himself and failed. But for whatever reason or personal flaw, Darius did run and run hard. He was still fleeing when he died weeks later at the h
ands of his own generals. Because he abandoned the Battle of Gaugamela, the Persian threat to Greek culture was ended, and the world as we know it, democracy, heroes, and all, came to be.

  8

  LACK OF PLANNING

  The Death of

  Alexander the Great

  323 BCE

  Of all the historical figures to have the identifier “the Great” tagged onto their names, Alexander the Great is one who really lived up to the title. No other leader has been able to cross cultural boundaries or capture the imaginations of world leaders like he has done. He has stood the test of time. His tactics are still taught in military academies all over the world. He has become the measuring stick by which all others have compared themselves. When Julius Caesar came across a statue of Alexander, he fell at its feet and wept, marking how the great conqueror had accomplished more by his death at the age of thirty-two than Caesar himself had at the time of viewing the statue. Why does Alexander still have this immortal grip on us? If he was so great, why did his empire collapse? For one simple reason . . . Alexander did not name a successor. The vast empire that he created fell apart because he was unwilling to pass on the gauntlet.

  Philip II of Macedonia had his hands full when his wife Olympias gave birth to a son in 356 BCE. The overzealous mother named her son Alexander, meaning “the lion.” Most mothers believe their firstborn sons will rise to greatness, but Olympias believed her son was the son of a god. Philip himself doubted the child’s lineage when he supposedly spied his wife in the embrace of a serpent, a creature of which Zeus often took the form. Philip had to be sure. He sent an emissary to the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The oracle answered that Zeus should be revered above all other gods. She also said that Philip would lose the eye through which he saw his wife with the serpent. Two years later, Philip lost his eye.