War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  By the time that big horses from the steppes reached China around 400 B.C., battlefields were already dominated by masses of infantry with iron swords and spears, plus—ancient China’s great contribution to military technology—crossbows. A crossbow took longer to load than a composite bow and could not shoot as far, but it was simpler to use and fired iron bolts that could penetrate thicker armor, making it ideal for huge armies slugging it out at close range.

  Iron reached China around 800 B.C., and by the fifth century smiths could make true steel, harder than anything in the Fertile Crescent. These iron weapons spread slowly, not replacing bronze completely until after 250 B.C., but by then there were strong similarities between ways of fighting at the two ends of Eurasia.

  As in the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean, Leviathan kept outrunning the Red Queen, with small feuding states being combined into large pacified ones. Chinese texts tell us there were 148 separate states in the Yellow River valley in 771 B.C. These fought constantly, and by 450 B.C. just fourteen remained, but only four of them really counted. As they struggled, new states sprang up to their south and west, but in the third century B.C., one of the western states—Qin—devoured all the rest.

  In western Eurasia, the climax of violence began when Rome and Carthage went to war in the 260s B.C., and eastern Eurasia followed much the same timetable. The Changping campaign of 262–260 was probably the biggest single operation in ancient times, with at least half a million men from Qin and Zhao locked in trench warfare. By day, the armies tunneled under enemy lines; by night, they infiltrated raiding parties and stormed strongpoints.

  The tide finally turned when Qin spies convinced the king of Zhao that his general was too old and cautious to prosecute the war properly. Zhao sent a younger, wilder man in his place. According to our main source—the historian Sima Qian—the new general was such a poor choice that even his parents complained, and just as Qin had hoped, he promptly led a frontal assault. Thirty thousand Qin cavalry then sprang a trap, enveloping the Zhao army on both flanks. Rather like the archaeologists who call Sanyangzhuang “the Chinese Pompeii,” military historians often call the Battle of Changping “the Chinese Cannae,” likening it to Hannibal’s equally dramatic double envelopment of a Roman army in 216 B.C. Cut off, the Zhao troops dug in on a hill and waited for relief, but none came. After forty-six days, with their rash young general dead and their food and water gone, they surrendered. Another bad move: Qin massacred the entire force, except for the youngest 240 men, who were left alive to spread word of the disaster.

  Qin had invented the body count, looking to win wars not by subtlety or maneuver but by simply killing so many people that resistance became impossible. We will never know the total numbers beheaded, dismembered, and buried alive, but it must have been several million, and over the next forty years Qin bled its rival warring states white.

  When Qin’s King Zheng accepted the surrender of his last enemy in 221 B.C., he renamed himself Shihuangdi, “August First Emperor.” Most famous today for the eight-thousand-man Terra-Cotta Army that accompanied him into death, the First Emperor seems to have been hell-bent on proving Calgacus right about wastelands. Rather than demobilizing his armies and leaving his subjects to enjoy the fruits of peace, he dragooned them into vast construction projects, where hundreds of thousands died laboring on his roads, canals, and Great Wall. Like Rome, Qin replaced war with law, but unlike Rome, Qin managed to make law even worse than war. “At the end of ten years,” the historian Sima Qian claimed, “the people were content, the hills were free of brigands, men fought resolutely in war, and villages and towns were well ruled,” but in reality the costs were ruinous. When the First Emperor died in 210 B.C., his son (named, predictably, Second Emperor) was overthrown within twelve months. After a brief but brutal civil war, the Han dynasty took over the empire and began tempering the excesses of Qin state violence. Within a century, the Han were overseeing from their bustling capital of Chang’an the Pax Sinica described earlier in this chapter.

  We see a similar story line in India, although the evidence is as usual messier. Iron weapons largely replaced bronze in the fifth century B.C., cavalry appeared in the fourth (although chariots hung on here for another three hundred years), and Indian kings were raising forces hundreds of thousands strong by the third. There were differences too, though. One passage of the Arthashastra (the great book of statecraft mentioned earlier in this chapter) rated infantry in chain mail as the best troops for battling full armies, but most Indian foot soldiers were unarmored bowmen, not the heavy spear- and swordsmen of Assyria, Greece, Rome, and China. The best-trained Indian infantry (the maula, a hereditary standing army) could be as disciplined and determined as anyone, but the grunts were always at the bottom of the fourfold hierarchy of Indian troops. This, however, might have been because what the Indians had in the top rank was bigger and arguably better than any kind of infantry: the elephant.11

  “A king relies mainly on elephants for victory,” the Arthashastra bluntly tells us. What it does not tell us, though, is how unreliable elephants could be. Even after years of training they remained panicky, regularly stampeding in the thick of battle. If an elephant rampaged in the wrong direction, the only way to stop it from trampling friends rather than foes was for its driver to hammer a wooden wedge into the base of its skull. The result was that even the winning side often lost most of its expensively trained elephants. But despite all these drawbacks, when elephants got moving in the right direction, few armies would stand firm. “Elephants,” the Arthashastra calmly explains, “shall be used to: destroy the four constituents of the enemy’s forces whether combined or separate; trampling the center, flanks, or wings.”

  An elephant charge might have been the most terrifying experience in ancient war. Each beast weighed in at three to five tons, and many carried a ton or more of armor. Hundreds or even thousands would come crashing across the plain, shaking the earth in deafening rage. The defenders would try to slash their hamstrings, castrate them with spears, and blind them with arrows; the attackers would fling down javelins, thrust with pikes, and goad their mounts to trample men underfoot, exploding their bones and organs. Horses—sensible animals—would not go near elephants.

  Even Alexander the Great had to concede that armored elephants were formidable shock troops. After overthrowing the whole Persian Empire in just eight years, he reached the Hydaspes River in modern Pakistan in 326 B.C., only to find King Puru (called Porus in the Greek sources) blocking his path. Puru’s hundreds of chariots proved useless against the Macedonian phalanx, but his elephants were another story altogether. To get the better of them, Alexander had to pull off the most brilliantly executed maneuver of his whole career, but on learning that Puru was actually just a second-tier king, and that the Nandas (precursors of the Mauryans) who ruled the Ganges Valley had far more elephants, Alexander decided to turn back.

  In 305 B.C., after Alexander’s death, his former general Seleucus returned to the Indus River and squared off against Chandragupta (rendered in Greek as Sandrakottos), founder of the Mauryan dynasty, somewhere along its banks. This time the Macedonians could not prevail. Even more impressed by elephants than Alexander, Seleucus agreed to give Chandragupta the rich provinces of what are now Pakistan and eastern Iran in exchange for five hundred of the beasts. This sounds like a bad deal for Seleucus, but his judgment was vindicated. Four years later, after his men had herded the pachyderms twenty-five hundred miles to the shores of the Mediterranean, the beasts tipped the scale in the Battle of Ipsus, securing his kingdom in southwest Asia. These new shock weapons so impressed the monarchs of the Mediterranean that in the third century B.C., everyone who was anyone bought, begged, or borrowed his own set of elephants. The Carthaginian general Hannibal even dragged dozens of them over the Alps in 218 B.C.

  The wars being fought in South Asia in these years proved just as productive as those of East Asia and western Eurasia. Dozens of small states formed in the Ganges Plain
during the sixth century B.C., fighting constantly, and by 500 B.C. four big states—Magadha, Kosala, Kashi, and the Vrijji clans—had swallowed all the rest. India’s great epic poem the Mahabharata even came up with a name for this process: “the law of the fishes.” In times of drought, the poet says, the big fish eat the little ones.

  As the Ganges states expanded, new small states formed around their edges in the Indus Valley and the Deccan. By 450 B.C., though, just one big fish (Magadha) survived in the Ganges, and from its great walled capital at Pataliputra three successive dynasties pushed their power deeper into India before the Mauryans outdid them all. Raising armies of hundreds of elephants, thousands of cavalry, and tens of thousands of infantry, they fought massive set-piece battles and undertook complex sieges.

  The Mauryans’ wars climaxed around 260 B.C., the same time as Rome’s and Qin’s, with the great victory of King Ashoka over Kalinga that I mentioned earlier in this chapter. “A hundred and fifty thousand people were deported, a hundred thousand were killed, and many times that number [also] perished,” Ashoka recorded—only for victor’s remorse to set in and the reign of dhamma to begin.

  When we look at the big picture in the first millennium B.C., it is hard to find much sign of a unique Western way of war, with its distinction between Europeans closing to arm’s length and Asians keeping their distance. From China to the Mediterranean, the first millennium B.C. saw the rise of much bigger Leviathans that taxed and controlled their swelling populations more directly than ever before. Their rulers were killers, ready to do whatever it took to stay on top. They conscripted hundreds of thousands of men, disciplined them fiercely, and sent them in search of decisive victories, which were won with bloody, face-to-face shock attacks. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, and China, the decisive blow usually came from heavy infantry. In Persia and Macedon, cavalry played a bigger part. In India, it was down to elephants. But from one end of the lucky latitudes to the other, the same basic story played out across the first millennium B.C.

  In the West, this story got the Romans to Rome; in the East, it got the Chinese to Chang’an and the Indians to Pataliputra. Each, in its way, was a similar sort of place: not very democratic, but peaceful, stable, and prosperous. Caging, not culture, was the driving force, and it created a productive way of war, not a Western way.

  Wider Still and Wider

  Rome, Chang’an, and Pataliputra still had a long way to go to get to Denmark. Romans crucified criminals and killed gladiators for fun; Chinese and Indians flocked to public beatings and beheadings. Torture was legal everywhere and slavery widespread. These were violent places.

  That said, though, the evidence we have seen in the last two chapters suggests that the ancient empires had already come a long way from Samoa. Anthropological and archaeological data suggest that roughly 10 to 20 percent of the people in Stone Age societies died violently; historical and statistical data show that just 1 to 2 percent of the twentieth-century world’s population died violently. The risk of violent death in the Mauryan, Han, or Roman Empire probably lay somewhere between the modern 1–2 percent and the prehistoric 10–20 percent, and my guess (given the near-total lack of quantifiable information, it can only be that) is that it was nearer the lower than the upper end of this range.

  I say this because of some numerical modeling I did in my two most recent books, Why the West Rules—for Now and The Measure of Civilization. In these I calculated a rough index of social development, measuring societies’ abilities to organize themselves and get things done in the world. Social development does not correspond exactly to the strength of Leviathan, but it comes pretty close.

  The scores on this index suggest that by the time of the battle at the Graupian Mountain in A.D. 83, Roman social development was at roughly the same level that western Europe would regain in the early eighteenth century A.D. Development in Han China peaked a little lower, around about where western Europe would be in the late sixteenth century, when Shakespeare was beginning to make his name. Mauryan development peaked a little lower still, perhaps around the level western Europe would reach in the fifteenth century.

  The implication of these scores, I think, is that while the ancient empires did not get to Denmark, they did get to where western Europe would be between about A.D. 1450 and 1750. And if that assumption is valid, it might also be the case that rates of violent death in Roman, Han, and Mauryan times were comparable to those in fifteenth- through eighteenth-century western Europe, pointing us toward a figure above 2 but below 5 percent (Figure 2.9).

  Figure 2.9. How far to Denmark? My estimates of rates of violent death, showing the range for each period (10–20 percent for Stone Age societies, 2–5 percent for ancient empires, and 1–2 percent for the twentieth-century world) and its midpoint

  This is, of course, a very rough-and-ready estimate, with a lot of ifs piled on top of each other. At the very least, there must have been huge variations, both within and between the ancient empires. The risk of violent death might still have been closer to 5 percent than to 2 when Rome fought Carthage in the third century B.C. and might have drifted back up toward 5 percent during the tumultuous first century B.C. But in the second century A.D., which Gibbon singled out as Rome’s golden age, a figure at the bottom end of the 2–5 percent range seems much more likely.

  Neither the Han nor the Mauryan Empire seems to have gone quite this far, and the less well-documented Parthian Empire could well have stayed above 5 percent. But overall, the conclusion must be that by the late first millennium B.C., all the ancient empires were well on their way toward Denmark. Rates of violent death might have fallen by three-quarters since caging began in the lucky latitudes.

  It was a dramatic decline, to be sure, but it took nearly ten thousand years. This might in itself explain why Cicero and Calgacus disagreed so wildly over what Rome’s wars had wrought. Calgacus, a warrior in a preliterate society, looked only at recent history and—quite reasonably—saw nothing but death, destruction, and wastelands. Cicero, an intellectual in a great empire with a long history, looked back across seven centuries of expansion and saw that it added up to a productive way of war that had gradually made everyone—conquerors and conquered alike—safer and richer.

  When Agricola led his armies back to their camps at the end of A.D. 83, he was confident that he was waging productive war. He might have left a wasteland after the battle at the Graupian Mountain, but he would be back, and in his wake would come farmers, builders, and traders. They would plow up fields, lay down roads, and import Italian wine. Wider still and wider would the empire’s bounds be set; farther still and farther would peace and prosperity spread.

  At least, that was the plan.

  Footnotes

  1Also available as a (highly) dramatized thirty-hour Hindi television series, with English subtitles (http://intellectualhinduism.blogspot.com/search/label/Chanakya).

  2Paleoclimatologists technically date the end of the Ice Age proper around 12,700 B.C. but regularly treat the twelve-hundred-year mini ice age known as the Younger Dryas (10,800–9600 B.C.) as the Ice Age’s final phase.

  3echnically, domestication means the genetic modification of one species so that it can only survive with continued intervention from another species, as happened when human intervention turned wolves into dogs, wild aurochs into cattle, and wild rice and barley into domesticated versions that depend on humans to harvest and replant them.

  4My candidate for the most peculiarly named conflict in history. The casus belli was a Spanish coast guard’s decision to cut the left ear off a British merchant named Robert Jenkins in 1731. For eight years the British government did nothing about this but in 1739 decided war was the only possible response.

  5The San language is full of clicks, glottal stops, and other sounds not used in English, so anthropologists’ accounts are littered with names beginning with ≠, !, /, and even //.

  6When the Helvetii first decided to invade, a man named Orgetorix was trying to make himself
their king, much as Dumnorix was doing among the Aedui. Things came to the verge of civil war before Orgetorix abruptly (and suspiciously) died.

  7A room entered through a trapdoor in the roof.

  8I am showing my age, but to my mind there are few better examples of discipline in the face of violence than Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier forcing themselves back into the ring in 1975, concussed and half-blinded, for round after round of vicious assaults. Ali described the experience as “next to death.”

  9In A.D. 2004, after thirty-eight centuries of horse slaughter, a monument to all the animals killed in war was unveiled on Park Lane in London. It has a simple inscription: “They had no choice.”

  10Technically, blades less than fourteen inches long are daggers, those of fourteen to twenty inches are dirks, and anything in the twenty-to-twenty-eight-inch range is a short sword. Proper swords are over twenty-eight inches long. (The blade of the famous Roman short sword, the gladius, was typically twenty-four to twenty-seven inches long.)

  11The second and third ranks were chariots and cavalry (in that order).

  3

  THE BARBARIANS STRIKE BACK: THE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE WAY OF WAR, A.D. 1–1415

  The Limits of Empire

  The plan did not pan out. Instead of coming back to Caledonia, Agricola settled into retirement in the Italian sunshine. The cream of his army was redeployed to the Balkans, and the remainder pulled back into a string of forts across northern England. Their days of conquest were over.

  Since 1973, archaeologists have painstakingly excavated a set of noxious garbage dumps at Vindolanda, one of these Roman fortresses. In one pit, so drenched with urine and feces that oxygen could not penetrate it, they found hundreds of soldiers’ letters, written in ink on wooden boards. The earliest go back to the 90s A.D., just after Agricola’s campaigns. There are a few highlights, including an invitation to a birthday party, but most exude nothing so much as boredom. Roman soldiers in first-century Britain apparently thought about much the same things as American soldiers in twenty-first-century Afghanistan: news from home, the foul weather, and the eternal quests for beer, warm socks, and tasty food. Garrison life has not changed much in the last two thousand years.