This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly know as Alexander the Great. But I want to discuss his reign with that title, ‘the Great’ (magnus in Latin or μέγας in Greek) stripped off, as Alexander III rather than merely assuming his greatness. In particular, I want to open the question of if Alexander was great and more to the point, if he was, what does that imply about our definitions of greatness?
It is hardly new for Alexander III to be the subject of as much mythology as fact; Alexander’s life was the subject of mythological treatment within living memory. Plutarch (Alex 46.4) relates an episode where the Greek historian Onesicritus read aloud in the court of Lysimachus – then king of Thrace, but who had been one of Alexander’s somatophylakes (his personal bodyguards, of which there were just seven at at time) – his history of Alexander and in his fourth book reached the apocryphal story of how Alexander met the Queen of the Amazons, Thalestris, at which Lysimachus smiled and asked, “And where was I at the time?” It must have been strange to Lysimachus, who had known Alexander personally, to see his friend and companion become a myth before his eyes.
Then, of course, there are the modern layers of mythology. Alexander is such a well-known figures that it has been, for centuries, the ‘doing thing’ to attribute all manner of profound sounding quotes, sayings and actions to him, functionally none of which are to be found in the ancient sources and most of which, as we’ll see, run quite directly counter to his actual character as a person.
So, much as we set out to de-mystify Cleopatra last year, this year I want to set out – briefly – to de-mystify Alexander III of Macedon. Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?
Because this post has turned out to run rather longer than I expected, I’m going to split into two parts. This week, we’re going to look at some of the history of how Alexander has been viewed – the sources for his life but also the trends in the scholarship from the 1800s to the present – along with assessing Alexander as a military commander. Then we’ll come back next week and look at Alexander as an administrator, leader and king.
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Sources
As always, we are at the mercy of our sources for understanding the reign of Alexander III. As noted above, within Alexander’s own lifetime, the scale of his achievements and impacts prompted the emergence of a mythological telling of his life, a collection of stories we refer to collectively now as the Alexander Romance, which is fascinating as an example of narrative and legend working across a wide range of cultures and languages, but is fundamentally useless as a source of information about Alexander’s life.
That said, we also know that several accounts of Alexander’s life and reign were written during his life and immediately afterwards by people who knew him and had witnessed the events. Alexander, for the first part of his campaign, had a court historian, Callisthenes, who wrote a biography of Alexander which survived his reign (Polybius is aware – and highly critical – of it, Polyb. 12. 17-22), though Callisthenes didn’t: he was implicated (perhaps falsely) in a plot against Alexander and imprisoned, where he died, in 327. Unfortunately, Callisthenes’ history doesn’t survive to the present (and Polybius sure thinks Callisthenes was incompetent in describing military matters in any event).
More promising are histories written by Alexander’s close companions – his hetairoi – who served as Alexander’s guards, elite cavalry striking force, officers and council of war during his campaigns. Three of these wrote significant accounts of Alexander’s campaigns: Aristobulus,1 Alexander’s architect and siege engineer, Nearchus, Alexander’s naval commander, and Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s bodyguards and infantry commanders, who will become Ptolemy I Soter, Pharaoh of Egypt. Of these, Aristobulus and Ptolemy’s works were apparently campaign histories covering the life of Alexander, whereas Nearchus wrote instead of his own voyages by sea down the Indus River, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf which he called the Indike.
And you are now doubtless thinking, “amazing, three contemporary accounts, that’s awesome!” So I hope you will contain your disappointment when I follow with the inevitable punchline: none of these three works survives. We also know a whole slew of other, less reliable sounding histories (Plutarch lists works by Cleitarchus, Polycleitus, Onesicritus, Antigenes, Ister, Chares, Anticleides, Philo, two different Philips, Hecataeus, and Duris) do not survive either.
So what do we have?
Fundamentally, our knowledge of Alexander the Great is premised on four primary later works who wrote when all of these other sources (particularly Ptolemy and Aristobulus) still survived. These four authors are (in order of date): Diodorus Siculus (writing in the first century BC), Quintus Curtius Rufus (mid-first cent. AD), Plutarch (early second century AD) and Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus, writing in the early second century AD). Of these, Diodorus’ work, the Bibliotheca historica is a ‘universal history,’ which of course means it is a mile wide and only an inch deep, but Book 17, which covers Alexander’s life, is intact and complete. Curtius Rufus’ work survives only incompletely, with substantial gaps in the text, including all of the first two books.
Plutarch’s Life of Alexander survives intact and is the most substantial of his biographies, but it is, like all of his Parallel Lives, relatively brief and also prone to Plutarch’s instinct to bend a story to fit his moralizing aims in writing. Which leaves, somewhat ironically, the last of these main sources, Arrian. Arrian was a Roman citizen of Anatolian extraction who entered the Senate in the 120s and was consul suffectus under Hadrian, probably in 130. He was then a legatus (provincial governor/military commander in Cappadocia, where Dio reports (69.15.1) that he checked an invasion by the Alani (a Steppe people). Arrian’s history, the Anabasis Alexandrou (usually rendered ‘Campaigns of Alexander’)2 comes across as a fairly serious, no-nonsense effort to compile the best available sources, written by an experienced military man. Which is not to say Arrian is perfect, but his account is generally regarded (correctly, I’d argue) as the most reliable of the bunch, though any serious scholarship on Alexander relies on collating all four sources and comparing them together.
Despite that awkward source tradition, what we have generally leaves us fairly well informed about Alexander’s actions as king. While we’d certainly prefer to have Ptolemy or Aristobolus, the fact that we have four writers all working from a similar source-base is an advantage, as they take different perspectives. Moreover, a lot of the things Alexander did – founding cities, toppling the Achaemenid Empire, failing in any way to prepare for succession – leave big historical or archaeological traces that are easy enough to track.
Towards Assessing Alexander
Those, of course, are the ancient sources, but what about modern scholarship? The historiography on Alexander is one of those things basically every ancient history graduate student is required to study for comprehensive exams, so I may cover it in brief. One may broadly describe the scholarly symphony Alexander as proceeding in three general ‘movements,’ as it were.3
The first movement, Alexander the Hero, begins with Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) and his Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (“History of Alexander the Great,” 1833). Droysen is the foundational ‘Great Man’ historian and for him Alexander is the prototypical Great Man of history around whom major events turn, shaped by his vision and power. That vision of Alexander in turn makes it into English most notably through William Woodthorpe Tarn (1869-1957) in his Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind (1933). For both Droysen and Tarn, there could be little question that Alexander was Great – indeed both great and also good – a human force propelling humanity itself into a better future.
That vision is itself something of a product of Droysen’s and Tarn’s time and place and there are reasons both in the sources and in the men themselves for skepticism. Droysen was an ardent supporter of Prussia and a German nationalist through the decades of German unification and clearly saw something of Prussia’s House Hohenzollern in his Argeads (that’s the family of Alexander III and his father Philip II). Just as Prussia ought to unify German (by conquest, if necessary!) so Alexander unified the Hellenistic world (by conquest). Indeed, Droysen neatly elides the Macedonian nobility (too small minded and resistant to Alexander’s grand project) to the German nobility, resisting unification, by calling the former junker. Tarn, meanwhile, was a British gentleman (and a patriot of the empire – at 55 he volunteered for service in WWI) for whom Alexander appears as the prototype of the ideal British gentlemen heading out to civilize foreign peoples, by force if necessary. Thus Alexander’s violence was fundamentally good, motivated – as was the violence of any good British colonial officer – by a belief in (Tarn’s term) the “unity of mankind.” Also, Alexander was, for Tarn, very much clearly not gay, for the same reason, despite the weight of the evidence on the question going rather the other way. Indeed, Tarn in particular, makes an almost herculean effort to strip Alexander of anything he perceived as a foibles or failing, despite the sources being very, very clear that Alexander III was a deeply flawed person that did some quite bad things.
I mean, the man speared one of his best friends to death in a drunken rage – a man who had saved his life. There are some things you can’t walk back.
A correction was almost inevitable as the world wars, particularly the second, took the shine off of trying to ‘unify mankind’ through bloody conquest and also the colonial project of imposing one’s culture by force more generally.
Thus comes the second movement: Alexander the Villain. The first major marker here is Fritz Schachermeyr (1895-1987) and his Alexander, der Grosse. Ingenium und Macht (1949) but it is an awkward one. Schachermeyr’s Alexander is a military genius driven to destructive madness by the megalomania his success brought on; his generals do not rebel against his grand design for lack of vision, but rather his army collapses from exhaustion trying to follow his increasingly mad vision. And now it is probably worth noting that Schachermeyr was a committed Nazi and an open adherent to Nazi race ideology during the war who only disowned his Nazism and racism in 1945 (when it would have been deeply unpleasant not to). His Alexander is thus a particular vision of Hitler. Not the way we’d think of him – Hitler as the hateful villain all the way through – but as a Nazi trying to understand the collapse of the Third Reich might: Alexander-Hitler as the genius driven mad by his success, driving his armies beyond the limit of their endurance in his megalomania, leading to collapse and failure.
In English, the turn to ‘Alexander the Villain’ comes a little later but in, perhaps, a purer form with the early work of Ernst Badian (1925-2011), particularly a scathing series of articles beginning in 1958.4 Badian blasts Tarn, in particular, quipping at one point that “Tarn’s Alexander is Droysen’s, “translated into the King’s English.”5 It was not a complement. Instead, Badian’s Alexander is militarily capable, but an insecure, lonely tyrant who ends up alienating all of the friends he doesn’t murder and whose failures of leadership lead to the failure of his regime and the collapse of his empire after his death. He is not, perhaps, the raw evil of Hitler, but there is little left to admire, much less love, in Badian’s understanding of Alexander.
The final movement is more difficult to name, but perhaps Alexander the Uninteresting will do: the age of scholarship that finds the figure of Alexander the Great less interesting either than his victims or the Macedonian state he (and others) ruled. The transition point is fairly clearly the work of A.B. Bosworth in two major volumes, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988) and Alexander and the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (1996). Initially, Bosworth, in many ways an apprentice to Badian, presents a fully-formed Badian-vision of a ruthless, arrogant, tyrannical, insecure, autocratic and glory-hounding Alexander, the villain of his own story: Alexander as a Spanish conquistador, an exceptional killer with no other skills destroying a civilization he is too boorish to know how to replace. But in that portrait, Bosworth issued a call for scholarship to shift to focus not on Alexander, but on his victims and indeed in the decades that followed, the spotlight has mostly been off Alexander himself.
Pierre Briant comes to mind immediately as taking the direct call to focus on Alexander’s victims with his From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (2002) sparking a renewed interest in the study of the Achaemenids. Briant’s vision of Darius III, Alexander’s opponent, is hardly flattering, though I’d note it sure seems like there is an effort underway to rehabilitate Darius III and try to make a capable Great King out him.6 This side of the movement in the scholarship has, however, been slow because doing it well requires a lot of language expertise: not just Greek and Latin, but perhaps also Babylonian, Old Persian and Egyptian. Not a lot of scholars have that kind of language expertise, both because it’s hard to learn that many languages, but also because it is hard to learn those eastern languages at all because they’re simply not taught in many universities. Indeed, the number shrinks over time, as language programs are often under siege at universities.
In the other direction, we have a pull to focus not on Alexander, but on his father, Philip II, most notably in the work of Eugene Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (1990). That focus has tended to see Philip as the more interesting figure than Alexander, as Philip is the fellow that built the unbeatable military system Alexander would employ; Alexander merely pulls the trigger on an invasion Philip had already designed, with an army he had already built, commanded by officers he had already trained, backed by a political structure in Greece he had already secured. Alternately, I think some of the scholarship that in previous decades might have been focused on Alexander has instead shifted later, to the Hellenistic Antigonid kingdom which came to rule Macedon – after some twists and turns – after Alexander’s death.7 Fundamentally, both turns in the scholarship understand the Macedonian stateas fundamentally more interesting than any of its individual rulers.
For what it is worth, my sense is that everyone feels that the next ‘turn’ in Alexander scholarship, the start of the next movement in this story, is overdue, but it hasn’t come yet.8 And, not to disappoint in advance, but it isn’t going to come here: my take on Alexander is hardly earthshaking.
Still, I suspect readers at this point may already be rather surprised by just how far from the popular glowing image of Alexander the scholarship has come and so even my rather pedestrian take on the reign of Alexander III may do something to help you all understand why the scholarship has come to the place it has and also why this is pretty clearly a better place than it was in the 1930s.
In an effort to give Alexander a fair shake here, I want to consider him in three aspects: Alexander the Warlord, Alexander the King and finally Alexander the Leader. That is to say, I want to consider first his performance as a purely military leader – was Alexander III the military genius he is reputed to be? Then, we’ll look at Alexander the civil leader – was he dedicated to the ‘unity of mankind’ or otherwise a particularly effective or gifted administrator? Finally, I want to examine Alexander as a leader, judging him by the promises – explicit and implicit – that he forged, kept and broke with his followers: was Alexander a good sort of man to follow to the figurative ends of the earth?
The Legacy of Philip II
A different Alexander, Alexander Burns, had a good description of the various stages that students (and enthusiasts) who are ‘into’ military history move through, with the first two stages being “Paradigm Invocation,” where the student ‘knows’ something they’ve been told, but not why it is or why it is significant (“Alexander was a military genius!”), and then “Paradigm Rejection, where the student, having learned that some paradigms are incomplete or even wrong, turns on them rather too completely (“Alexander was nothing special.”) The ‘paradigm invocation’ is simple: Alexander fought four major battles and about two-dozen minor battles and won all of them, and therefore was an undefeated ‘military genius.’ The ‘paradigm rejection’ is, as is its wont, every bit as simple: Alexander won all of those battles because he inherited an army, officers and a tactical system from the actual great military reformer, Philip II.
In both cases, maturity in thinking about history (and military history) requires moving beyond the paradigm to the evidence in greater detail and with greater care, adding necessary context.
Alexander III becomes king in the summer of 336, at the age of twenty. By that point, the army he inherits had been at war more or less continuously since the start of the Third Sacred War in 356 which, conveniently, was also the year of his birth. Now, unfortunately for us, the sources for the reign of Alexander’s father, Philip II (r. 359-336) are both sparse and scattered. Ancient writers were far more interested in Alexander than Philip. That makes reconstructing Philip’s reign and military reforms difficult, but we can generally say a few things. First, the army of the Macedonian kingdom before Philip II was hardly a top-tier force. It seems to have been large, but lacking in heavy infantry. The aristocratic cavalry was good, but few in number. And the kingdom itself was prone to succession disputes spiraling into civil war.
Philip II made radical changes. He reorganized the infantry, drawing on new military ideas that were already probably brewing in Greece proper, arming them with two-handed pikes (the sarisa) and keeping them under arms for longer periods, allowing for greater training and drill.9 He also encourages esprit de corps by reframing his infantry as Pezhetairoi, ‘foot companions,’ tying them directly to the king. There is some reason to suppose this was more than just empty language and that Philip’s soldiers, by virtue of being on campaign, had more accesses to him as well. Finally, he reformed the Macedonian cavalry, the hetairoi or ‘companions’ (of the King), greatly expanding their number, drawing in both essentially the whole Macedonian aristocracy, but also using the institution as a tool to recruit Greek experts. In addition, after 352 or so, he is also the leader of the Thessalian League, giving him access also to the best cavalry in Greece.
In 338, Philip II took his army south, as part of a long and complicated rivalry with Athens and other Greek poleis we needn’t get into here. He was met with a Greek alliance that aimed to prevent him, now the ruler of a large and powerful kingdom, from asserting hegemony over Greece: Athens and Thebes made up the core of the coalition. The resulting battle at Chaeronea is, I think, instructive to the degree that Alexander is effectively inheriting not only an army, but a tactical system. Our accounts of the battle are frustratingly vague (the only full account is a very brief one, Diod. Sic. 16.86), but we can hazard a basic vision: Philip II took command of the Macedonian right (where the Companion cavalry will have been), while Alexander, at age 18, was given command of the other wing of cavalry (alongside, we are told by Diodorus, some carefully selected officers). Philip II seems to have first engaged and then refused his right (Polyaenus Strat 4.2.2), which created a rupture in the Greek lines between the Athenians who pressured Philip II and the Thebans who were being pressued on the far side, at which point Alexander hammered with the cavalry through the gap, leading to the collapse of the Greek army and Philip II’s great victory.
Now remember how I described Alexander Battle? To recap, the basic formula for Alexander’s battles – modified slightly in each – is to position the phalanx in the center, with the Thessalian cavalry (and sometimes some light troops) covering the phalanx’s left wing, while Alexander sits on its right, with additional light troops covering his right and the medium-infantry hypaspists keeping his cavalry connected to the phalanx. The extreme right wing and the left wing stall (often being refused), while the right of the phalanx provides pressure that creates a rupture, which Alexander then hammers his cavalry through – with him at the front – in order to achieve decision. Alexander seems to form his army up to aim his cavalry hammer at where he imagines the ‘joints’ in an enemy army might be, to punch at a relatively weaker spot, not on a flank, but where the center joins the enemy left.
At Chaeronea, Philip II splits his cavalry between his wings, with the phalanx in the center, refusing his right flank, while the left flank of his infantry advanced, creating a rupture at the joint between the Thebans and the Athenians, which Alexander hammered the cavalry through, leading to victory. We don’t have detailed descriptions of Philip II’s battles – Chaeronea is the best we have – and it is really striking that the basic outlines of Alexander Battle are visible here as well. It might suggest that not only was Philip II the author of the army Alexander would take East, but also the tactical formula Alexander would seek to employ.
Note that Philip II’s legacy isn’t just the tactics and the army itself, it is also the companions. The key men that are going to enable Alexander’s early victories are Philip II’s men. Antipater, who Alexander can leave in Macedon to handle affairs in Greece (and who crushes a Spartan effort to oust Macedonian control)? One of Philip’s men, probably in his service for most of Alexander’s life. Parmenio, the infantry commander who successfully holds the flank in Alexander’s great battles? One of Philip’s men, around as old as Antipater. Krateros, who commanded the phalanx at Issus? One of Philip’s men – fifteen years or so Alexander’s senior. Kleitos the Black, who saved Alexander’s life at the Granicus and commanded the royal squadron of the Companion Cavalry at Gaugamela? Another of Philip’s men, twenty years older than Alexander. And Eumenes – a Greek – who was Alexander’s secretary and bookkeeper? One of Philip’s men.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s other crop of key officers were the syntrophoi, the men of his own age and generation with whom he had grown up. On the one hand, these are Alexander’s friends, but on the other hand they were at court because they were picked to be at court by Philip II. This, by the by, are men like Ptolemy, Hephaistion, Perdikkas, Nearchus. Almost no member of Alexander’s inner circle had not served under his father or been tutored in his father’s court, simply as a product of Alexander’s age.
So now, Philip II has built the army for Alexander, arrayed the necessary political structures in Greece (which, admittedly, Alexander will have to reinforce by burying Thebes), developed the tactical system which Alexander will use to win his battles and trained the officers who can conduct that tactical system. And then, just to top it off, Philip II was already planning the invasion of the Achaemenid Empire when he was assassinated. Indeed, Parmenio and several others were already in Anatolia with an army to prepare a beachhead for the main effort when Philip II was killed. So Alexander likely inherited a fully-formed invasion plan as well, though I suspect it only went as far as detaching western Asia Minor from the Achaemenids, not the whole empire.
So what does that leave Alexander? Quite a lot, actually.
Alexander the Warlord
We may begin with the tactical: there is a difference between noting that Philip II and Alexander III seem to have had the same basic vision of the battle they wanted to fight – we might say they shared a doctrine – and these battles all being carbon-copies of each other. I think it is fair to say that Alexander has an ideal pitched battle in his head (which he seems – remember how weak our evidence is – to share with his father) that he wants to play out on the field, but there’s an awful lot that goes into getting the actual battle to play out into that ideal formula for victory and each of Alexander’s major battles poses different problems for him to get to that distinctive Alexander Battle climax.
This isn’t the place to go through each of Alexander’s victories in detail: for one, that would be a long post series of its own and for another, you can just read the sources too. But for readers for whom these battles all kind of blend together, I want to note the unique challenges each engagement presented Alexander, where he had to figure out, with the resources he had, how to get to that Alexander Battle formula.
The first is the Battle of the Granicus (334) and the key problem here is, well, the Granicus river, which – as Arrian has Parmenio note – had high banks and deep spots sure to disrupt a formation moving across (Arr. Anab. 1.13.4-5). And while Alexander’s army was probably comparable in size and possibly larger, the Persian force had a lot of cavalry.10 Alexander seems to have recognized – we’ll come back to this – that operationally, he couldn’t afford to wait and has to force the crossing. So his problem here is how to get the army over the river in a shape to fight and win on the other side.
The battle is a little hard to unpack (Arrian is our best source and his account is a confusing read), but it’s clear that the Persian force formed up with its infantry on the high ground behind the river and the cavalry right on the river-bank to contest the crossing. Alexander lines his army up all along the river in fighting formation (Arr. Anab. 1.14.1-3) which threatens the entire Persian cavalry line, holding its center and right in place, while Alexander aims to break over the river on his right (the Persian left). The effort to push across is a complex maneuver: Alexander has some of his light infantry (the Paionians) support his lead squadron of cavalry making what seems to have been a direct crossing, while Alexander crosses at a diagonal with the bulk of the cavalry pushing towards the left, essentially crossing behind that lead squadron. While the lead squadron is repulsed, that maneuver allows Alexander to get over the river and into a shock engagement with the Persian cavalry, for which his horsemen were better equipped (Arr. Anab. 1.15.4-1.16.2). That in turn allows the rest of Alexander’s cavalry following on (Arr. Anab. 1.15.8) to get over the river and finally for the phalanx itself in Alexander’s center to do so (Plut. Alex. 16.12).
As I read it then, Alexander first essentially sacrifices his lead cavalry squadron to pull the Persians out of position and hold their attention, to get the main body of his cavalry over the river and then begins levering the Persian cavalry off of their positions bit by bit to enable the rest of his army to cross. Once the Persian cavalry was pushed off the field, he then engages the infantry force – mostly Greek mercenaries, according to Arrian – in the front with the phalanx and then shatters it with cavalry. Note that Alexander lets the Persian cavalry go, focusing instead on securing his victory by annihilating the enemy infantry force. The outlines of the Alexander Battle are there, but so heavily distorted by the terrain as to be hard to see. Or, another way to put it is Alexander has successfully and adroitly modified the doctrine to get his ideal engagement.
As Issus (333) the problem is at least conceptually simple: Alexander is wildly outnumbered. His solution is, in part, to find a confined battlefield at Issus, which actually requires some adroit campaign maneuvering. Alexander is, after all, at Mallos when he hears that Darius III is moving into the region with his army, at which point Alexander books it into the Levant and down the coast to Myiandros in just a few days, getting his army out of the relatively wide spaces of Cilicia into the long narrow space between the Amanus Mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Darius follows, allowing Alexander to set the battle in a relatively narrow place, in this case along the Pinaros River at Issus.
Alexander then plays out a fairly classic Alexander Battle formula, refusing and holding on his left (under Parmenio, clearly an exceedingly capable commander himself) while hammering through on the center-right with his companions backed up by his elite hypaspists. Once again, he has to make adjustments, such as posting his best light infantry, the Agrianians, on the high ground to cover his own right flank as he hammers his way through. More critically, he has the presence of mind to identify the center of gravity in the Persian army as Darius III himself and targets the king. Alexander then lets Darius III escape, because he has to circle back to bail out his left wing, sealing his victory. Put a pin in that, we’ll come back to it.
Gaugamela (331) poses similar problems – Darius III’s army is very big – but the northern Tigris Basin (the area of operations, broadly construed) simply doesn’t provide the kind of narrow terrain Alexander used at Issus. So once again, he has to get clever: he now knows Darius is the weak-point in the Persian Army and that if he can run the Alexander Battle playbook against the center of Darius’ line – use the right edge of phalanx to create a disruption, then hammer through with the hypaspists and companion cavalry – he can win. So he positions Parmenio for the standard left-flank holding action, but also now puts his extreme right in an oblique as well, partially refusing it and sets a second Greek phalanx behind his first (the Macedonian one) to cover any gaps and provide more resilience, all to buy him the time to deliver that Alexander Battle hammer blow.
And it works, with Alexander shattering Darius’ center and sending the king into flight. But once again, Alexander becomes aware – this time by messenger – that his left under Parmenio was in severe trouble, as the Persians there were not aware that Darius had fled (Arr. Anab 3.14.4-15.4). And again, Alexander, with Darius fleeing before him turns and bails out Parmenio.
Of course that leaves the last major battle, the Battle of the Hydaspes (326), which is certainly complex, seeing Alexander fighting unfamiliar forces (elephants!) on unfamiliar ground, but the main tactical challenge and Alexander’s solution is fairly simple to explain, if difficult to execute. His problem, of course, is the river Hydaspes itself, which Alexander wouldn’t be able to cross directly into Porus’ army (it is a fairly substantial river and was swollen in the season, Arr. Anab. 5.9.4). So Alexander first declares to his troops that his plan is to wait for the river to go down in the dry season (Arr. Anab. 5.10.1), but then begins a long series of feints which eventually create the opening he needs to slip across the river (Arr. Anab. 5.10-13), which in turn sets conditions for the successful pitched battle to follow.
What I want to note here is the character of Alexander’s military leadership. On the one hand, Alexander invents no new tactics and employs only one clever ruse in this whole set of battles. And here we get into the nature of what we may term military ‘genius’ – a term long-time readers may note I avoid. This is not because I think the term is inappropriate – Clausewitz uses it (drink!), so it has pedigree – but because I think the way most popular readers understand it is unhelpful. The matter is either reduced to a sort of preternatural cleverness in employing ruses and deception or else the military genius is a chessmaster ‘controlling for every contingency.’ Actual military leadership is rarely like either of these things. Most battle plans are quite simple and ‘tricks’ in war (strategems) are also relatively simple. Indeed, no less than Clausewitz points this out, famously (drink!):
Everything [in war] looks simple; the knowledge required does not look remarkable, the strategic options are so obvious that by comparison the simplest problem of higher mathematics has an impressive scientific dignity. Once war has actually been seen, the difficulties become clear; but it is still extremely hard to describe the unseen, all-pervading element that brings about this change in perspective.
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.11
Alexander’s genius is not in clever ruses or brilliant ideas. His solutions are simple and workmanlike, as we’ve seen. Nor does he ‘control every contingency’ – he is forced, like any general, to allow vast space for uncertainty and chance. But he has a fantastic, intuitive grasp of how fast his army can march, how long Parmenio can hold that flank, how easily (or not) his cavalry can break through. Clausewitz (drink!) goes on at length (Book I, Chapter 3) about the need for a general to have this intuitive sense, to be able to know things from a mix of experience and talent at the stroke of the eye (coup d’oeil). Instead, Alexander repeatedly come up with relatively simple solutions that he knows, from experience and intuition, his army can execute. His plans are never too baroque and complex but always address the problem in an effective way.
I focused here on the battles, because they’re the easiest to explain in this sort of space, but I think Alexander’s excellent intuitive grasp of his army’s capabilities actually comes out more clearly if one begins to look at the logistics of what he is doing. Alexander, after all, is taking an army of around 45,000 men and marching them through mostly hostile territory for eleven years. He has to obtain food as he goes, in terrain that he only has imperfect knowledge of. And apart from the brutal march through the Gedrosian Desert (which seems to have been intentional, as if to punish his army for its mutiny), he doesn’t make mistakes in this. Remember that an army like this on the move only has, at most, a few weeks of food on hand at any given time, so he is managing a tight-rope balancing act continually, gauging when he has time for a battle or a siege or when he has to keep marching. And he manages it so flawlessly, you could read all of the sources and barely notice. For those who want more on this, the detailed study is D.W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (1978). Doubtless, some of that is luck, but a general that just gets lucky every time is a good general.
And beyond the rational aspect of military planning, there is the emotional aspect as well (which Clausewitz, keep drinking, also discusses), which has to be quite carefully balanced. A good general cannot be rash or reckless, but also cannot be vacillating or indecisive. Most of all, a good general has to master themselves, overcoming their own emotions in extremely emotionally charged moments to reach sound decisions.
And here I want to come back to something Alexander did in those battles above, at moments of extreme heightened emotions, three times: having shattered the elite core of the Persian Army (the cavalry at Granicus and Darius’ guard at Issus and Gaugamela) and having them fleeing before them he does not pursue. This is the task, you will recall, Antiochus III – otherwise a clearly very capable commander – failed at repeatedly.
Consider what a sore test of generalship this is, taking Issus and Gaugamela in particular. There is Alexander, at the head of his cavalry, his enemy fleeing before him, the prize of his campaign – Darius III – there for the taking if he will just reach out and grasp it. And yet in this moment, Alexander has to do a lot of difficult things very quickly to win; simple things – but difficult. First, he has to master himself: he has just been personally in combat, leading his companions directly, with all of the mix of emotions and adrenaline that implies. But he is either observing, or getting a messenger telling him, that his left flank is in trouble. The first thing he has to do is think rationally and do so quickly. Then he has to make the right decision, keeping in mind all of the reasons of personal glory which might lead him to rationalize his way to saying that Parmenio can hold his own, or that Darius is the more important prize. Then he has to recover control of his cavalry, rapidly reform them and have them follow him away from the loot-filled enemy camp and the defenseless, fleeing enemy towards enemies that are still in good order, fighting and dangerous, charging back into death and peril. And he has to do that in the chaos of an ongoing engagement!
And he does it, without fail, every time.
Alexander’s campaigns are so long and complex that we could spend ages analyzing both the soundness of his decisions and then his ability to actually get his army to carry out his plans, but I think these examples serve to make the point. For reasons we will get to next week, I do not think, had Philip II not done it for him, Alexander III could have reformed the Macedonian army, trained the Companions, or developed his doctrine. As I am going to argue in part II, Alexander was simply not that kind of deep thinker or leader; when he tries reforms, they mostly fail and when he brings younger men into the Macedonian leadership, they are mostly not the equals of Philip II’s old war horses.
But as a general, a leader of armies in battle and on campaign, Alexander was extremely skilled, almost never setting a foot wrong in handling the simple-but-difficult elements of leadership. Fellow ancient historian Paul Johstono offered a quip a while back on Twitter that I think makes the point perfectly:
Alexander has a lot of failings, and we’re going to get to them. But he was unnaturally composed and at least when it came to doing violence (and getting others to do violence effectively) he was highly competent, almost absurdly so. Not because he had some sort of world-shaking flash of brilliant insight, of ‘genius’ in the popular sense, but because he had a composed, calm but determined mind with an intuitive grasp of what his army was capable of and what simple solutions would work and be required in the moment, genius in the Clausewitzian sense (drink!). The question that raises, of course, is a value judgement: is it enough to merely be good at killing and destroying in order to be great?
Next time, however, we’re going to take Alexander III off of the battlefield and see how he fares. Not as well, it turns out.
- This is as good a place as any to make a note about transliteration. Almost every significant character in Alexander’s narrative has a traditional transliteration into English, typically based on how their name would be spelled in Latin. Thus Aristobulus, instead of the more faithful Aristoboulos (for Ἀριστόβουλος). The trend in Alexander scholarship today is, understandably, to prefer more faithful Greek transliterations, thus rendering Parmenion (rather than Parmenio) or Seleukos (rather than Seleucus). I think, in scholarship, this is a good trend, but since this is a public-facing work, I am going to largely stick to the traditional transliterations, because that’s generally how a reader would subsequently look up these figures.
- An ἀνάβασις is a ‘journey up-country,’ but what Arrian is invoking here is Xenophon’s account of his own campaign with the 10,000, the original Anabasis; Arrian seems to have fashioned himself as a ‘second Xenophon’ in a number of ways.
- This is going to be quite a general overview. For a much more detailed run-through, see D. Ogden, “Introduction” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander the Great (2024), ed. D. Ogden.
- Most notably “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind” Historia 7.4 (1958), “The Death of Parmenio” TAPA 91 (1960) and “Harpalus” JHS 81 (1961).
- “Some recent interpretations of Alexander” Etretiens sur l’antiquite classique 22 (1976)
- I don’t see it, to be honest.
- I have in mind here Billows, Kings and Colonists (1995); Sekunda, The Antigonid Army (2013); and Hatzopoulos, Macedonian Institutions Under the Kings (1996) and L’organisation de L’armée Macédonienne sous les Antigonides (2001).
- A more or less explicit effort to force the turn by trying to understand Alexander through his religious aspects with F. Naiden, Soldier, Priest and God (2018) was roughly received and has not prompted the intended turn, I think.
- This was expensive – Philip II has a few windfalls in his reign, and yet we are told ends it deeply in debt, which in turn provides some of the impetus for Alexander to conduct his war.
- Arrian, Anab. 1.14.4 gives a Persian force of a little under 40,000, evenly split between cavalry and infantry. He does not give the size of Alexander’s army, but has Parmenio suggest it is larger (Anab. 1.13.3). By contrast, Diodorus (17.19) gives the Persian army as massively larger, with some 100,000 infantry, which no modern scholar very much believes. Alexander’s whole army was around 35,000, a figure reportedly widely in our sources (Plut. Alex. 15.1, Arr. Anab. 1.11.3, Justin 11.6.2) and Parmenio’s comment given by Arrian suggests that Arrian at least thinks Alexander has the whole army up, but it is possible – as N.G.L. Hammond suggests in his article on the battle (“The Battle of the Granicus River” JHS 100 (1980): 73-88) that they weren’t all in the fight, so while Alexander’s overall army is larger, he has fewer men engaged, which I think is probably correct. The reason he can’t get his whole army in the fight is clear enough: the river and its obstruction.
- Emphasis mine, trans. Howard and Paret.
It sometimes seems like the mark of a truly great ancient general is the ability to get the cavalry to stop chasing the enemy cavalry off the field and come back to win the battle.
Not just ancient. Cromwell does it very well. His opponent, Rupprecht of the Rhine… is absolutely terrible at it.
I think we see something similar with Adolphus at Breitenfeld, although it’s been a while. Suffice it to say that telling horsemen to stop pursuing is a hallmark of a good commander by all metrics; they are almost universally societal elites whom may tend to impetuous behavior, all of them know a fleeing enemy can’t fight back, and the enemies loot is very likely in the same direction they are fleeing. A commander needs talent, trust, and charisma to redirect them.
You can even apply analogous standards to mechanized units to a degree.
Not a military person here but a Tolkienist; may I provide a cross-reference to our host’s series on The Lord of the Rings:
The Nazgul screeched and swept away, for their Captain was not
yet come to challenge the white fire of his foe. The hosts of Morgul
intent on their prey, taken at unawares in wild career, broke, scattering like sparks in a gale. The out-companies with a great cheer
turned and smote their pursuers. Hunters became the hunted. The
retreat became an onslaught. The field was strewn with stricken orcs
and men, and a reek arose of torches cast away, sputtering out in
swirling smoke. The cavalry rode on.
But Denethor did not permit them to go far. Though the enemy
was checked, and for the moment driven back, great forces were
flowing in from the East. Again the trumpet rang, sounding the
retreat. The cavalry of Gondor halted.
Discussed here, actually: https://acoup.blog/2019/05/17/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-ii-these-beacons-are-liiiiiiit/
Lee was unable to do it before Gettysburg. It didn’t help.
Don’t know much about the Civil War, but: is it possible that by the time Lee *was* able to do it, the damage had been done and it could not help?
Stuart came back of his own accord, and Lee was furious with him, but he didn’t actually do anything. Lee had lost his scouting at the crucial time before the battle.
The view that he was the reason the Battle of Gettysburg was lost is popular — among those who think the loss could be attributed to a single action committed (or omitted) by a single Confederate. Without which, apparently, victory would have fallen into their hands like a ripe peach, putting the responsibility entirely on that Confederate. And wide open to the quip attributed to Pickett when he was asked which of them was responsible: “I’ve always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.”
Lee never entirely had tight control over his cavalry, but the situations were very different compared to most Ancient and Medieval warfare. It was neither possible or desirable in the Civil War. Even in 1861, cavalry were almost irrelevant during battle, but vital at all other times as they engaged in scouting and strategic “fencing,” frequently tens and sometimes even hundreds of miles away from the main armies.
It was indeed Stuart who failed to properly control his impulses. While extremely good at fighting Union cavalry, often less individually skilled and as a rule in the East, very poorly led) he had little self-mastery. He made some decisions purely for the sake of gathering more public acclaim. He also failed to adequately or prepare for plan his escapades, with the result that once things went wrong they kept going badly wrong.
That said, Robert E. Lee absolutely cannot escape blame. His strategic sense was hilarious bad, to the point that it approaches outright parody. Although extremely capable in the tactical sense, *provided he understood the battlefield*, he engaged in multiple egregious strategic errors during the Civil War and specifically the Gettysburg campaign. These mistakes include, but are not limited to, sending Stuart off with ambiguous orders and no real thought about what might happen if the Union did not respond exactly as Lee wanted. For all that Lee complained about it, he was mainly responsible for creating the problem.
Although Buford did play a major role by dismounting his Cavalry and setting up skirmish and defensive lines to oppose the Confederate advance. The truth is that by the time of Gettysburg firepower and discipline had advanced to the point where being a bigger target was more of a liability than being faster on a charge, so cavalry tended to fight as dragoons or skirmishers a lot of the time.
This partially contributed to the later Trench warfare system of battle where maneuver was terrifyingly easy to shut down, although munitions development are better understood to be the main driver-that mobility elements were largely ineffectual was a secondary cause at best.
A large part of Buford’s brilliance there was posing as infantrymen. Not only did it enable better fighting, it was a bluff that the Union army held the hills with much better defenses than they actually had.
I seem to recalle there being an argument that part o the reason the ACW was so drawn out was that neither side had particularly good cavalry, and while cavalry was largely useless in the actual battle, they were still the best way you had of pursuing and potentially destroying a defeated enemy army. Which meant in a lot of cases armies could retreat relatively intact.
Responding to Arilou on the subject of Civil War cavalry, quality, and the results therefrom:
The short version is that much of the cavalry was high quality, especially from 1863 onward. That was a hardened force in both Union & Confederate armies. Cavalry could not longer “destroy” a retreating force, period. Even routing armies were just too big, the firepower of the infantry too great. At times cavalry scooped up hundreds and thousands of captives and it ultimately made little difference.
IN addition, it was difficult to even put that much cavalry close enough to a retreating force to make a difference, because they’d have to be placed very close to the front. But their best use at every other possible time was out on the far flanks, and they often had to fight dismounted – and they had less-effective armaments now.
So I think the argument just doesn’t work.
Slightly different situation. Alexander was good at keeping control of his cavalry *tactically* – i.e. stopping them charging off into the ulu during a battle. Lee failed to keep control of his cavalry *operationally* ie during the days leading up to the battle.
Things do in fact change in warfare.
“Things do in fact change in warfare.”
The distinction here is between tactical, which is a term meaning “what happens in the battle”, and operational, which is about the movement of troops around the wider area in the lead-up to the battle. Hope that helps!
Like I said, things do in fact change in warfare.
Ray Spruance’s decision not to pursue overnight at Midway.
You have to be in front of your cavalry to do this, because they’re not going to see you if you’re not in front of them and with how loud large numbers of horses are, they are certainly not going to hear you from any distance.
Your cavalry needs to trust that you’ll make sure they do better out of following you back into the battle than they will do out of pursuing all those ransoms or looting that helpless camp. (Which either means you have an enourmously good reputation already, or that you’re opperating at the front of a cavalry force that believes that you will have them executed for disobediance.)
And you need to spot that it needs to be done, that there is in fact something more important behind you than what’s in front of you, when pursuit is one of the things cavalry is best at and that you brought them to the field to do.
I’m not sure how anyone does it. But if you can pull it off, then, yeah, you’re probably a “great captain”.
Gee, our host makes Alexander sound just like U.S. Grant!
They both had drinking problems too. Drinking problems that tended to be worse in breaks from campaigning at that.
I am sorry to say this is something of an occupational hazard for soldiers, ancient and modern alike, and broadly for the same reason: hard and frequently tedious jobs, long hours, being placed for extended periods in dull environments.
That said, they were alike in several other senses: first, neither were tactical innovators (although Grant was involved in executing some tactical schemes that others thought up). Both focused with laser precision on a strategic objective, and very rarely let any military problem go un-answered.
Other than that, however, the two were so extra-ordinarily dis-similar I struggle to think of literally anything else they would have had in common.
Completely unironically that’s terrifyingly accurate accounting for the wildly different cultures; they both perform leadership in their society, control their armies, keep their heads, run tight and workmanlike campaigns that make really hard things look easy, and were consistent in making good strategic and tactical decisions.
And as an aside, I think it says something about democratic power structures that Alexanders life ultimately ends in disaster because he literally drinks himself dead waging bloody war without building anything besides a hierarchy of Macedonian lords in the east because that kind of thing was part of his inherited duties, whereas Grant wasn’t in charge and had a civilian president he happily deferred to. Even when he went into politics he could walk away, and ultimately left an enduring legacy as a patriot and leader despite his flaws as a president.
As I suspect we’re about to see next week being a good general doesn’t make you a great administrator or head of state, something which continually bites cultures where warfare, conquest, and heritage are the ultimate test of legitimacy in the ass. It not only shows up in what Alexander does, but in what happened when he died and leadership was unclear and how his successors consistently encounter delegation issues. Meanwhile healthy republics simply have an election and can shift who is in charge of what without risking civil war.
Grant was actually a halfway decent president though. His reputation has been undergoing a much deserved upward reevaluation now that the field isn’t crowded with Lost Cause historians who thought that letting African Americans vote during reconstruction was a crime against the South.
I remember how shocked I was when I learned that Grant had not only promoted “affirmative action” for blacks but for women as well. Agenda driven primary history education had told me to be deeply cynical towards the entire abolitionist cause, that the good things they had done was merely circumstantial and opportunistic. But there’s simply no way that championing women’s advancement in 1870 was an opportunistic cause.
Quick question, what does “refusing the flank” mean?
Oh! Apologies, I suppose that is a rather uncommon term. To ‘refuse’ part of your army is to set it back from the main line, usually at an angle, to make it harder for the enemy to attack.
If you do that by angling the whole line (making a kind of L-shape with your army), it’s called an oblique, whereas if every unit still faces forward, but the ‘refused’ flank is set with each unit a little further back than the one to the center of it, that’s called an echelon formation (units are never ‘in echelon’ but ‘en echelon’ because French).
Ah! Today I learned that “en echelon” is a special case of a refused line. Heretofore, I had thought that e.g. a refused left faced left, to defend the line’s left flank. I didn’t realise it could be an agressive posture.
Would’t this leave the flanks of the units en echelon exposed? Or would they be covered the unit behind them?
Refusing a flank would leave the flank of the echelon’d formation exposed. But a few factors make that harder for the enemy to exploit than the flank of a straight line.
For one the enemy soldiers simply have advance further. That takes time in and of itself; which is useful to the defenders. Giving a chance for the battle to be decided elsewhere.
Second, remember that enemy commanders have very limited visibility; so a flank that’s refused may lead them to misjudge how many defenders are there — it can just look like a shorter line from a distance.
Third the enemy formation now had to either perform an enormous wheel maneuver or else try to fight at an angle to their advance – they want to move forward; but their enemy is angled back, say 30 or 40 degrees so unless they pivot the part of the formation near the ‘hinge’ is engage and the rest of the offensive force is hanging off into space.
In either case this risks opening up a gap between the units attacking your line and the units attacking the refused flank — and opening that your commander may punch through to disrupt the enemy line.
And these big pike/spear units have some trouble turning after their pikes/spears come down. So if they deploy them and being their advance, and your defenders pivot back up to form an angle before bringing their own weapons into play the enemy has to either try to plow straight forward (only getting a tiny part of their formation to engage at a time, attempt to maneuver with weapons down, or manage sufficient battlefield control to halt, raise weapons, wheel their own formation parallel with the defenders, brings weapons down again and advance. Sounds fairly simple, but even the simplest things are hard (drink)
(Later, in the bayonet and musket era refusing the flank could be a prelude to forming a square, which has no flanks to turn — useful against cavalry at least)
Alexander the Great
His name struck fear into hearts of men
Alexander the Great
He died of fever in Babylon
“Alexander the Great was an immature, irrational trust fund manchild, whose successes are only for competently and rationally doing what any unnaturally composed and highly competent person would do under the same circumstances. Okay.”
So, Alexander the Great was Batman?
Reminds me of the (slightly paraphrased) quote: “I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford a phalanx, nor so rich as to be able to afford a Batmobile.”
There’s even a multiple choice backstory over why Phillip was killed! Was it to cover up a torrid affair? The crimes of the father? As part of a criminal conspiracy? A random act of violence? Is Pausanias secretly THE JOKER? Nappier or Chill, that is the question!
I’m all seriousness it’s kinduve astounding that Batman’s origins are about as coherent as a two millennia old murder whom we are hearing about via multiple layers of telephone, after eighty years or so of different authors.
A very apt analogy. Alexander turned into a superhero with an internally inconsistent “extended universe” canon:
“a mythological telling of his life, a collection of stories we refer to collectively now as the Alexander Romance, which is fascinating as an example of narrative and legend working across a wide range of cultures and languages, but is fundamentally useless as a source of information about Alexander’s life.”
In particular, according to such mythistory, he possibly invented, any in any case took, a diving bell in the Indian Ocean. Not Batsubmarine but Alexubmarine, I suppose.
When I had a girlfriend from Iran, I once referred to “Alexander the Great”.
You should have seen the look on her face! Not amused.
We have to call him something to distinguish him from all the other Alexanders out there. How about “Alexander the Moderately Impressive”?
Alexander Grozny?
Actually in Russian his title is Velikiy, the same as Peter I or Catherine II, and which means “the big” rather than “the excellent or admirable”. The same happens in all romanic languages that I can read, all three are “big”.
Considering Alexander as great in terms beyond the size of his empire may be an English loss in translation.
Actually in Russian his title is Velikiy, the same as Peter I or Catherine II, and which means “the big” rather than “the excellent or admirable”. The same happens in all romanic languages that I can read, all three are “big”.
Considering Alexander as great in terms beyond the size of his empire may be an English loss in translation.
If I’m not mistaken, the terms for “big” in Romance languages also have connotations of admirable or impressive, just like English “great” (which can also mean simply “big” — the Great Lakes, for example, are named for their size).
In French it’s “Alexandre le grand”, with grand meaning tall, but can also mean great. It’s the same as with great men, which is translated as “Grands hommes”.
Well, in Russian he is called Alexander Velikiy, same as Peter I or Catherine II, meaning “the big” rather than “the excellent or admirable”. The same applies to all three in all the romanic languages that I can read.
Understanding “the great” beyond meaning “the one with the vast empire” may be an English misunderstanding in translation.
In Russian he is generally called Alexander Makedonskiy (= of Macedon) and sometimes, jokingly, Alexander Filippych (=son of Philip), the joke here is that Alexander Filippych Makedonskiy sounds like a regular Russian name. While Alexander Velikiy (=the Great) is used sometimes, it is considered more typical for Western and not Russian historiography.
In Hebrew he is called “Alexander of Macedon.”
Doesn’t the Iranians call Alexander the Vandal? Well, not literally “the Vandal” of course, but something with the same meaning.
I concede victory in this discussion to them!
The term I had always encountered for how the Persians referred to Alexander III was ‘Alexander the Accursed’.
A curse would be one way to explain how he dropped dead just as he was settling in to enjoy the victory.
Well he did some conquering, so we could just go with “the Conqueror”. There’s only a couple of those (in English anyway) – all I got from memory just now is William and Saladin.
And one of those had previously been known as William the Bastard. Seems like he had motivation to go and get a new nickname.
And Mehmet II, in both English and Turkish (Mehmet Fatih).
I’ve never heard of Saladin being called “Saladin the Conqueror” – apart from anything else, it’s not like there are a lot of other Saladins around from whom he needs to be distinguished. He’s just “Saladin”.
Huh. Come to think of it I can’t remember where I heard it the first time, and searching for confirmation now the only direct answer I can get is from an AI, so who even really knows.
Salah al-din is the honorific itself meaning “Righteousness of the Faith”.
Mega-Alexander.
Though that sounds like a Final Fantasy boss.
Yes. He starts out as Alexander, then morphs into Mega-Alexander, and then his final form is Omni-Alexander.
Complete with extra arms, and then *even more* arms.
His boss battle song is entitled “Arma Virumque”.
Not quite but close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoHo_Sju-X0&ab_channel=hungrychad
And my answer to this would be “yes!”, because greatness is about mastery, not about ethics. If we restrict our admiration to people we consider morally good, we will miss many admirable things.
I find it interesting by the way, that the modern historians already in the 19th century try to push Alexander into a strict hero-or-villain-scheme, which includes trying to remove every flaw if he is considered a hero or removing every admirable quality if he is considered a villain.
I have noticed in the past that when it comes to fiction, modern stories tend to be much more morally black and white than ancient and medieval stories, and I wondered when this trend started. Now I am also wondering what connection that trend in fiction has to this hero-or-villain-trend in historiography.
I think the trend goes all the way back, but maybe when our morality shifts its axis, we don’t notice or care about the older moralizing as much?
Maybe. But I think that ancient and medieval writers liked the tropes of the “hero with tragic flaws” and “worthy enemy” more than modern ones do.
Re: “worthy enemy”, CS Lewis comments somewhere that we no longer consider fighting for the national interest to be acceptable, so instead we try to frame wars as conflicts between goodness as such (represented by us, of course) and evil as such. I suspect this has something to do with the decline in the worthy enemy trope — if you and your opponents are both fighting for your countries, you can respect the enemy’s motivation, and recognise that his motives are fundamentally the same as yours; if your enemies are fighting for evil, how are you supposed to respect that?
It’s just occurred to me, too, that this might be part of the reason why fantasy, with its inherently evil races of orcs and so on, has become so popular over the last few decades. We can’t really get behind a hero fighting for his country or his lord any more, because those are seen as inherently suspect motives, so instead we need to create antagonists who literally are fighting for evil as such, so that we can enjoy watching them get mown down with a clean conscience.
I think the Lewis essay you are thinking of may be The Four Loves:
“If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for “their country” they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity….. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.”
https://ia800104.us.archive.org/27/items/fourloves01lewi/fourloves01lewi.pdf
As someone who actually reads a lot of fantasy, I’d say “inherently evil races” are a very small part of it and its popularity. Probably the majority of books don’t even have such races, let alone revolve around a conflict with metaphysical Evil.
Most obviously, the most popular modern fantasy was Harry Potter, mostly about various human evils, even if it did also have Dementors.
“It’s just occurred to me, too, that this might be part of the reason why fantasy, with its inherently evil races of orcs and so on, has become so popular over the last few decades.”
The book you’re referring to was written in the *1940s*. Modern fantasy is far less likely to have “inherently evil” species (and this was a concept that Tolkien also struggled with and never resolved entirely to his satisfaction).
Hello Mr. X have you heard about this little series called ‘Game of Thrones’
I try this with art. There’s “Good” art, meaning of high quality, the artist objectively did the thing well. There’s “Art I like”, meaning the stuff I personally have a preference for and enjoy experiencing. And there’s “Great” art, meaning art that has left a lasting impact in some way, for good or ill. I like to think that the first and second have a reasonably large overlap, but the third is unrelated to the other two.
I think historical figures can be divided somewhat similarly. The Great ones are the ones that caused significant changes to society, for better or worse. Caeser was great in this sense; Rome was different after him than before him, and while we can debate whether someone like him was inevitable, it was he that did the thing. Pope Gregory the Great is similar. The social fabric of Europe was changing (especially the relationship between the kings and the Church), but he certainly put the nail in the coffin of the opposition! I think the discipline of History mostly resides here, or at least has in the past.
Good could be considered to be “Good by the standards of the society they were in”. Richard the Lion-Heart was the better nobleman; John was the better king. The Romans that gave up the Dictatorships were good Romans, doing what they understood to be good. This is sort of where History is going, I think. Because this is where the NOT-Great live, and because this is where we can enter their world. It forces us to understand what alien societies thought of as proper behavior. And those little things can often have far greater impacts on history than Great men did (for one thing, the vast majority of humanity fits here).
“People I like” would be more along the lines of “People our society understands to be good”. Not an entirely useless category, and certainly the most fun to argue about (social impacts are a matter of historic records, whether or not someone abided by the principles of their society is relatively easy to figure out), but realistically, there’s not much value in this discussion. Most of the time it turns into a Mirrors thing, where the speakers are commenting on how good they are by pointing out how bad other people were.
I would contest John as the better King given that he so pissed off the nobility it caused them to force him to sign the Magna Carta. A Feudal King that can’t keep his vassals in line to the point they rise up against him is not a good King.
Now, Richard did indeed have major problems himself, but arguably John was the wrong guy to follow him.
Also worth pointing out that contemporaries universally rated Richard above John, which strongly suggests that Richard was the better king by the standards of 12th-century Europe.
“I would contest John as the better King given that he so pissed off the nobility it caused them to force him to sign the Magna Carta.”
You’re saying he was a Bad King but a Good Thing?
No. Recall the series on Game of Thrones and the Medieval Era. King John undermined the trust of his vassals that he would uphold his part of the vassalage “bargain” so to speak, because far from defending their rights, he was often the one trying to seize their stuff, over-and-above their actual obligations.
The equivalent would be if the US Government decided one day to arbitrarily yank money out of people’s bank accounts to pay the National Debt. Which is in fact against the US Constitution (unreasonable seizure)
> John was the better king
Richard was rarely around to manage the kingdom. He left a mess for John to deal with.
I got my English history from Sellars and Yeatman, who declared John “A Bad Thing”. He might have been better than John, in terms of kingship; but Richard was a low bar.
So, backing up a notch, the notion of Richard as an “English” King is a very contestable point. He wasn’t English and saw England as such as merely one part of his titular holdings, and not the most important part, nor the area that required his interest. He was also interested in adventure more than day-to-day ruling, which in that era was frequently considered a considerable positive. That is, his kingship was also in part a “performance” in which certain deeds needed to be done publicly to order to demonstrate worth. (This is, of course, completely normal throughout global history, although the forms vary with culture and fashion.)
Or, contra George R. R. Martin, nobody wanted Richard’s tax policy and if he had tried to fuss over it he would have been an awful king. He demonstrated his prowess in battle and diplomacy. Notably, this was exceptionally effective during his own life.
He was a larger-than-life figure even in his own lifetime; that said, his reputation has gone back and forth wildly by historians for much the same reasons as Alexander. Richard had an immense capacity for action and seemed driven from an early age to do “great” deeds and accomplish “great” things. Some people are just life that, and in ages defined by war they are naturally attracted to conflict.
“So, backing up a notch, the notion of Richard as an “English” King is a very contestable point.”
An interesting trivia question is: who was the most recent monarch whose first language was not English? (It’s a lot more recent than you might think.)
Yeah, Martin’s “What was his tax policy” strikes me as being pretty much just snark.
None of these monarchs actually had the ability to change their tax policy. Taxes were on some things, and not on others. Changing that usually meant a war, since this was violating their vassals’ “ancient rights”.
At most the monarch could forgive the year’s tax for a vassal due to bad harvest or whatever.
Tax policy becomes something the monarch can actually do something about when the state gets enough visibility into the doings of people to actually be able to change things without a war. Which is basically the middle of the 19th century or so in some European countries (not all).
Even in towns one of the functions of guilds and the reason they got privileges from the overlord was because they were more capable of collecting taxes on the overlord’s behalf. Tax farming was due to incapability, not because they wanted to do it.
M @ May 22, 2024 at 11:15 am:
In “Fire And Blood” his big picture GoT prequel about the first half of the Targaryen dynasty, he talks a fair bit about various tax policies, though as I recall they are mostly about international trade or otherwise specific to port cities.
“None of these monarchs actually had the ability to change their tax policy. Taxes were on some things, and not on others. Changing that usually meant a war, since this was violating their vassals’ “ancient rights”.”
I think this is overstating things a bit. English monarchs before the 19th century could change the way scutage was applied. They could impose import tariffs on various goods. They could vary the rate of hidage. They could grant or withhold burgh status to towns, which had significant tax implications. They could impose poll taxes.
A lot of the time they needed parliamentary approval to do this, just as modern monarchs like the US president do, but I think it’s still meaningful to talk about a king or a president having a tax policy.
*On the subject of taxes: it is wrong to think very much about a tax *policy*, even though it’s correct to consider a monarch’s approach to taxes generally. The specifics always vary by time and place and culture and politics of course. However, medieval monarchs generally did raise taxes – but it was very difficult to change them permanently without a serious problem to solve, and often the revenues had to be dedicated in ways that complicate budgets.
*I.e., the king, through political power and leverage, gets his or her way and has the people of the county of Upper-Lowershirehillstadtbald build a fortress and support it. That means so much coin and food and wood going to the keep annually. The monarch may not see it as “cash”.
*He or she could call up special taxes, which were usually one-time grants, through some kind of political mechanism. There would be a pre-existing process which might be deliberative (Parliament) or contingent (Ship Money).
*There would be things he or she sees as “cash” income regardless of form, which included revenues from personal own lands, possibly separate crown lands, tariffs and some duties standard to the kingdom. These were much more difficult to raise permanently however.
Note that most of these forms still exist in various ways. The regular mechanisms of taxation have developed so much, and are so difficult to dodge, that it’s usually more effective to change the policy rather than try to change specific taxes. But also, people just have more to tax.
“He wasn’t English and saw England as such as merely one part of his titular holdings, and not the most important part, nor the area that required his interest.”
I would suggest that this would make him a very poor King of England indeed!
The whole half-A-press thing certainly demonstrates as much mastery over its subject matter as Alexander did over ancient warfare, but nobody calls anybody involved with that “the Great”.
“Greatness is about mastery”
Okay, so did he master his empire in the form of things like substantial institutions and structural cohesion?
That’s actually a more difficult question to answer, even though I fear Our Illustrious Host has already kind of answered by implication. Alexander probably expected to have had another thirty years of life. During this time he might well have been able to build a more lasting imperial legacy. Instead, he died almost as soon as his campaigning ended. I think it’s worth noting that during his lifetime, at least, he faced very little internal opposition.
The biggest problem he faced, too, was arguably geography instead of politics. He could potentially make his empire “work”. But in a generation or two it probably would have been next-to-impossible to keep it all functioning and united. That’s proven beyond the ability of many more recent empires with vastly-superior technology to accomplish permanently.
I mean, one of the big problems is that as far as I am aware, the limit of his known actual ruling was “leave it to a subordinate”
Of course, there is an argument that could easily be him being aware of his own flaws, but it leaves very little evidence as to how Alexander would have been as a ruler had he not died almost as soon as he finished campaigning.
As I said below, he at least realised that he needed to involve non-Greek elites in the imperial project, which is more than you can say for pretty much any of his successors. Of course, this doesn’t prove he’d have been a good ruler, but I think it’s evidence in his favour.
You’re not wrong, but it’s sort of like how a General that devises an overly-complicated battleplan that their army can’t actually carry out is in practice not a good general.
Here, Alexander quite possibly had the right idea as to what reforms were necessary to create a lasting Macedonian Empire…but failed to implement them successfully even with the Diadochi, his inner circle.
Meaning that if a King tries to implement reforms too ambitious for his subjects to accept, he’s not really a good King, as part of kingship is understanding how far you can go in pushing reforms.
Meaning that if a King tries to implement reforms too ambitious for his subjects to accept, he’s not really a good King, as part of kingship is understanding how far you can go in pushing reforms.
There isn’t any evidence that Alexander’s generals were planning on overthrowing him or anything like that, so it doesn’t look like he went beyond what he could wheedle his subjects into accepting.
Given that his reforms utterly failed, then yes, at a minimum he went too far too quickly.
Had he finished campaigning? I recall that he was planning a campaign against Carthage when he died.
IIRC he was planning to sail around Africa (for the sake of exploration), and then conquer Carthage afterward.
It is worth noting that when we talk about his empire collapsing, we’re talking about it turning into several kingdoms all controlled by Macedonians from his inner circle instead of having a massive Persian uprising force the Macedonians out of Persia, so I think he deserves some credit on that score.
Yes. While I’m having several successor kingdoms instead of one large empire is not what Alexander was aiming for with his conquests, it’s still a pretty giant impact to have several macedonian successor kingdoms dominating the region militarily and politically for so long after he died.
So long in fact that they were the immediate predescessor to Rome as we saw in the previous article seriousl
“And my answer to this would be “yes!”, because greatness is about mastery, not about ethics. If we restrict our admiration to people we consider morally good, we will miss many admirable things.”
The problem here is to some extend the question of what amount of mastery is required and if mastery in only a part of your role, that is critically hindered by incompetence in other key areas, is still worthy of the epithet.
Because alexander was not just a general, he was first and foremost a king, and while he was an amazing general he was kind of a terrible king who lacked a mind for administration, politics or to a lesser extend even effective leadership (in the sense of building competent hierarchies).
There are other great military leaders who were ad abd or worse people morally than alexander but who were much more generally competent at all skills their position demanded of them (Napoleon, Chinggis and Caesar all spring to mind to different extends). I dont think alexander is the equal of any of them, maybe as a general, but not as a ruler and statesman, which is an issue because that is what his role was.
‘Building competent hieararchies’. He had no problem with revolt in his life, his immediate successors (Perdiccas et al) insisted on maintaining his legacy of a united empire, and many of his circle were gifted generals and rulers (Antigonus, Seleucus, Eumenes, Ptolemy, Lysimachus …). The problem was not incompetence – quite the reverse – too much of it for one tent.
“He did great things – terrible, yes, but great.” – Mr. Olivander [JK Rowling – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone]
She will be remembered as a great woman – terrible, yes, but great.
This is a good point about English language: Alexander’s deeds were terrific and awesome, in the original sense: they inspire awe and terror.
However we define “greatness,” there seems to be an unwritten rule that you don’t get to be “the Great” if your empire doesn’t outlive you. Hence, we rarely refer to Napoleon or Hannibal as “the Great,” despite their being some of the most brilliant generals/conquerors in history, because their empires fell apart, and they died in exile. Alexander just got in under the wire on this criterion!
Is that the case? My read is that Napoleon and Hannibal, along with others like Caesar, were so great that they get the even greater honor of not needing the “the Great”. Their greatness becomes a connotation of their name. When we distinguish them from others of the same name we use phrases like “Hannibal, yes, THE Hannibal”.
And on the other side: Tigranes the Great conquered a lot, then was defeated by Pompey and all his conquests were lost again. For the last ten years of his live he was back to the territory he started with, now a buffer state for Rome.
There really isn’t confusion who we mean if we just say Napoleon, Hannibal or Julius Caeser. We generally specify the grandson Napoleon, the father Gauis Julius Caeser or the ancestor Hannibal in reference to their more famous family members. A name like Tigranes, let alone Alexander is far more common.
On the other hand you do have Cleopatra and Mithridates who get solo billing despite there being quite a few monarchs of the same name.
Caesar became an epithet in his own right – Kaiser, Tsar, Kayser, Hail Caesar! Caesarian …which is the step after Great.
Russian actually apparently has two words for “king” (different in connotation): ‘tsar’ from Caesar and ‘korol’ from Charlemagne.
“Tsar” in modern Russian (and all other Slavic languages AFAIK) is a translation / equivalent of “emperor”. It used to be a bit more muddled in its meaning in the past, with a lot of people who clearly weren’t close to any form of imperial rule being called “tsar”, but nowadays the distinction is pretty clear. Just as a piece of trivia 🙂
The Byzantine title of Caesar, which is the cognate of tsar, was a very high court title, somewhere between the fourth and second highest one. However, it was clearly inferior to “basileus”, the emperor, and to the various forms of “sebastos”, equivalent of Latin “augustus”.
The middle and late East Roman Empire did award the title of Caesar to some select neighbouring monarchs, most importantly, to the leader of Bulgars, so it was being claimed later by many a Russian princeling. It didn’t connote the idea that you were the absolute universal monarch, but it did convey a claim that you were peer of anyone, except perhaps the Emperor, and better than most.
Of course, when the Muscovites formed the current Moscovian Russia, they also monopolised the title, so this is simply historical pondering.
The word for a “prince” of one of the medieval Russian mini-states is (surviving from back then to current day) “князь”, which leaves “король” without a local niche. From what I noticed, it seems to be used as a foreign loanword for foreign rulers, who would most typically title themselves in Latin as “rex”. Russians sure like their loanwords, so you’ll also find stuff like “кайзер” (lit. Kaiser, German) or “кесарь” (lit. caesar, from old greek+latin), both written like they’re spoken.
@Draugdur,
i thought “tsar” was technically different, and a lower rank, than “emperor”, which was why Peter the Great officially had himself and his successors styled “Imperator” instead of “tsar”?
I’ve also seen the last Bulgarian monarchy (till 1946) referred to alternatively as “Tsardom” and “kingdom”.
And on the other side: Tigranes the Great conquered a lot, then was defeated by Pompey and all his conquests were lost again. For the last ten years of his live he was back to the territory he started with, now a buffer state for Rome.
Also Pompey himself, who ended up being defeated by Julius Caesar and murdered by the king of Egypt. You could also point to Mithridates the Great and Antiochus the Great, both of whom ended up being smacked about by the Romans.
Obvious criteria is being a king of an established monarchy system, so Julius Caesar isn’t the great even though the conquests lasted a long time, Hannibal would not have been if Carthage had won, Napoleon was doing his own thing with government instead of being in the established French line of kings. Meanwhile Alfred, Catherine, Frederick, and some others do a solid but not spectacular job at military and conquest*, and get the title.
Man, monarchs are snobs aren’t they. Always giving themselves titles….
*I’m including both the “military” and “conquest” parts here.
“Obvious criteria is being a king of an established monarchy system…”
Gregory the Great was a pope. Without getting into the theology, popes aren’t kings.
I’d argue the popes are, in their temporal role, a type of electoral monarch.
Yeah, the Pope acted and acts as a King in terms of ceremony and authority, inheriting a line of tradition stretching back to the institutions founding where explicitly monarchical language was used to describe it. It’s even in the bible, although theologically the Pope is best understood as a type of steward or majordomo for Christ.
Monarchy doesn’t need to be hereditary (and ignoring trivia regarding certain Italian families, the Papacy wasn’t). The Pope simply is a monarch.
TBH, most of the time the titles are given my thier successors/historians, not the monarchs themselves.
(or, as in the case of Gustavus Adolphus, by an act of parliament)
Presumably the West Francian and later French courtiers didn’t call any of Charles the Simple, Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat or Louis the Universal Spider that to their faces either.
Or my favorite: Charles the Bad.
Actually, I think Charles the Bald *was* referred to as Charles the Bald contemporaneously (love that word). The early Germanic king style of kingship could tolerate some gentle ribbing by their court, as long as it was limited to things that weren’t negative *personality traits*. With Charles the Simple it actually meant straightforward; a passable translation is Charles the Direct…for what he was called during his lifetime. He was called Charles the Idiot later.
And even later Kings weren’t absolute monarchs-I can’t find a source, but I suspect Louis the Universal Spider may have been known by that term as well. It’s a pretty wicked sounding name, you have to admit.
Do be wary of projecting modern hypersensitivity back into history. An anthropologist recounted talking a Chinese stutterer who not only did not regard his byname of “The Stutterer” as not offensive, but couldn’t get how anyone could find it offensive. It would not even be “mild ribbing” to call him Charles the Bald — it would just be stating the bald fact.
One important thing to note about Louis XI of France’s nickname is that, all backhanded it was, it was still a compliment: it still implies he was competent at diplomatic conquests. The pendant would be, from the same period, Charles, duke of Burgundy whose nickname went from the Bold to the Foolhardy. That one is an insult.
Absolutely Mary. People weren’t offended by things we might be today; many societal biases are modern. This isn’t helped by modern projection and mistranslation, or even cultural osmosis; we think Charles the simple speaks for itself, and it may even have acquired a meaning of “dumb” in modern German (or would it be Latin? Whatever language he used) but it didn’t at the time. Charles the idiot, of course, does, as does Charles the foolhardy.
We also have stuff like Vlad, known as the impaler or Dragon, whom had the latter name because he was a member of the order of the dragon…but which could also be translated as the devil due to the infernal connotations. Vlad seems to have either embraced that, or not cared. Fear was valuable in foes, respect in allies, and blurring the line between both was better than either.
And in some cases it’s hard to separate culture from nicknames at all. John George the beer keg was likely named such as he drank too much, or because of his … shape, but maybe Germans didn’t care as much, at first? The negative connotations certainly came, but perhaps later. How do we assess a name some people meant as an insult, some as a joke, and some as a neutral descriptor, when it depended entirely on who said it? Suffice it to say that rulers often tolerated names we’d think were unacceptable for various reasons.
I feel like calling Julius Caesar “the Great” would be a downgrade.
This is a man whose surname would go on to mean “supreme leader” not only in his own country but in other nations across Eurasia for over nineteen hundred years.
That reminds me about Louis XIV.
I had once read that he wanted to be remembered as Louis ‘the Great’, but instead he ended up known as the ‘Sun King’, which is even more memorable I suppose.
I don’t think there’s any consistent rule about who gets called “Great”. I’ve never been able to figure out how Herod the Great got that title.
Napoleon and Hannibal ultimately lost, however skilful they were as warlords. This damages their claims to greatness.
The above was intended as a reply to AJS. Says a lot about my own skill.
We’re saying the same thing, no?
Almost, but not quite. Alexanders empire fell apart after his death, but he died unconquered. Napoleon and Hannibal did not.
Having said that, other people have given examples of people of were defeated in their own lifetimes and were still called “the Great” by posterity.
sorry, still struggling to understand how we’re saying different things. My point was that Alexander gets to be “the Great” because he wasn’t defeated in his lifetime, even if his empire fell not too long after; while Hannibal & Napoleon lose out on that because they were. Isn’t that also what you were saying?
I agree that some of the other examples people have listed here (Tigranes, Antiochus, &c) are a problem for both our points
I may have misinterpreted your initial post. It’s probably not worth clearing up the confusion since, as you remarked, we have both been proved wrong by others.
This is why I consider Genghis Khan to be a better commander than Napoleon, Hannibal, or Alexander.
To be fair to Napoleon, he literally went down swinging. I honestly don’t think anyone could have won his final campaigns in that tactical or operational position…which, of course, means he buggered his strategic one up beyond all comparison.
He also had a rather lasting legacy on the legal, political, and cultural shape of Europe, it’s just not necessarily a good one. Hardly the worst either.
Napoleon was very clearly a great general (just like Alexander) and arguably a great ruler (his administrative legacy still stands in France today) but his failures were with diplomacy.
Even then he did manage to realign Europe for a time. Really I think his failures were ego; there isn’t a real single thread of “Bad at this” until he starts treating himself as the founder of a new dynasty of Imperial Emperors, appointing his siblings as Kings, himself as supreme authority, and ruling by fiat with the assumption that he could just brush aside opposition with force.
Basically, Napoleon’s failing was never talent, it was that he let it get to his head. It’s not a simple failure of the man in a field he was bad at, it’s an institutional failure of the position he ended up in and a psychological and cultural failure that flows from that.
My impression is that it wasn’t even pride as *such* so much that he thought that he could solve whatever problem he had by beating his enemies up, then weakening them in the peace settlment.
Except this only caused a cascade fo new enemies showing up out of fear of him distorting the balance of power, and then his old enemies just licking their wounds and coming back for another round.
He was just terminally incapable of handling balance of power politics.
Part of the problem also is that Napoleon believed (perhaps incorrectly, but not without justification) that his rule depended on military/imperial glory, só any diminution in that glory would undermine his rule & lead to his being overthrown. Hence why he refused the various offers the Coalition made him in 1813 and early 1814 to make peace and keep part of his empire; he said something to the effect of “you princes can lose 10 or 20 battles and retire safely to you castles; I cannot!” Anything short of a complete victory was, in his mind, a complete loss
This does sound like “Some problems you can’t solve by punching.”
Zamoyski (far more insightful than Roberts) argues that Napoleon’s low birth was no great obstacle in his diplomatic efforts. Most states in Europe were at some point allied to him, some German princes quite willingly as he greatly extended their territories (thus, the Congress of Vienna could never revert to the status quo ante bellum), and his rival Austria in the person of Metternich feared that weakening France would lead to Russia dominating the continent.
Yet Napoleon was unable to build a lasting peace because he avoided making concessions. His stated conviction that he needed to protect his honor, and that the other sovereigns would never respect him if he appeared weak, justified him in doing what he wanted to do anyway. (Zamoyski notes that the true source of his legitimacy was the stability and prosperity he had brought to France, rather than military glory.) After his Russian campaign, he could have withdrawn troops from German fortress towns, accepted the Frankfurt proposals, or at least gone into exile in the United States instead of invading the Low Countries after his return (when all the great powers of Europe had declared war on him personally).
There is also the denial of heredity. That the son of a highly successful warlord could have similar talents seems plausible to me, but any explanations involving genes are treated with suspicion (for very bad reasons, and in the age of behavioral genetics there are no excuses).
It does seem a lot of famous “greatest generals ever” run into the same problem, they overextend and keep fighting, and eventually lose. Napoleon, Pyrrhus, Hannibal are the obvious ones. (For Pyrrhus, if ancient sources say so, I’ll assume they are accurate for this) Then ones like Belisarius, Ghenghis Khan, Tamerlane(?) and Alexander the Macedonian have empires that fall apart pretty soon after they die, with Ghenghis taking a bit longer. And of course Julius Caesar who overextends politically and gets assassinated, even if his supporters/heir end up winning and doing about what he would have done afterwards.
The number of famous “greatest general ever” contenders who successfully leave a long lasting empire/series of conquests seem s about the same, which depends on how you count success (And Caesar, who’s military conquests did stick for a long time.)
Was thinking about why this might be, and came up with a few ideas:
-Might just be the randomness of which ones we know about. A lot of exact histories of battlefields don’t survive, so we don’t know if, say, Cyrus the Messiah or a Qin commander(s)/Shi Huangdi or an Assyrian king or similar were amazing battlefield commanders. If we did the numbers might look different. This Video speculates that Aurelian might by one of these, if we knew details of the battles.
If this is the explanation, everything else in this list is moot, but I’ll write it out anyway.
-A highly skilled general will obviously be tempted to push harder, keep doing this too much and people learn how to fight you or bad luck happens. Aggression and risk taking are of course part of how these guys do what they do.
-A more restrained general might not get the chance to demonstrate their skills over and over. The most famous ones had the time and power to continually get into battles, a commander that does what they are told or stays restrained might not have a chance to demonstrate skill in a memorable way. (Like a whole collection of Roman provincial governors and elected commanders, who have success in a campaign or battle, but don’t the opportunity to maybe show high skill multiple times.)
-Fast conquests don’t give as much time to build a connection between the conquered and the conquerors, or top build a stable government system to keep everything together, fast created large empires will tend to fall apart quickly. (Compare Romans who took awhile to grab all the territory they did and had one of the longest lasting empires ever, to caliphate, alexander conquests, etc. that start splitting apart much faster.)
“Like a whole collection of Roman provincial governors and elected commanders, who have success in a campaign or battle, but don’t the opportunity to maybe show high skill multiple times”
If the reason for calling Alexander Great is repeated execution of good tactics and logistics, maybe we should talk about “Rome the Great”.
It’s been done. The traditional breakdown of medieval romances (which I’ve seen attributed to the 13th century “Songs of the Saxon Wars”) is “the matter of Britain, the matter of France, and the matter of Rome the Great”.
i’m sure that usage in the couplet was partly for reasons of rhyme, though.
The real fun part was that the Matter of Rome was chiefly concerned with — Alexander the Great! (Thoroughly legendary, of course. Plus basically any legend of Greek or Rome including the Trojan War.)
Genghis’ empire lasted longer than most nomad empires, the successor states (all proudly Genghisid) longer still, and descent from Genghis was a sine qua non for nomad rule from Mongolia to Hindustan until the 18th century. Like Caesar in the west, he goes beyond Great.
Agreed. I feel like ‘Lord of the World’ (or however we translate Ghengis Khan) carries its own signification of ‘Great’ without having to spell it out!
It’s a failure of the autocratic mode of power. Put simply a state whose authority and legitimacy is derived from the person of the ruler or their military has pretty clear weaknesses. It’s not mistake that Republics can enact lasting conquest semi-reliably, and that states which derive some separate source of legitimacy or authority persist past their rulers lifetime.
We can see this by comparing the Caliphate and Mongols to the others on the list; the Mongols actually managed to persistently change the political makeup of most of the world via their conquests, and this was in part because they actually did a large amount of empire building. They were savage, brutal conquerors, but they also put the effort to form a syncretical bind to mold the empire into a tool of power, adopting local customs to legitimize themselves when possible. Hence why we have Mongol descendent empires that persisted for centuries, although they largely do fail because they didn’t really succeed in creating a theory of rulership.
Meanwhile the Caliphate actually had a relatively syncretic religious aspect and certainly a unifying one; while Islam is now viewed as a distinct religion that is resistant to incorporation of other ideas, the development of the religion itself took ideas from a half dozen regional faiths and made a new one that was designed around a total hierarchy and absolute obedience to God and his Prophets. We tend to shy from this understanding because of some externalities influencing the scholarship, but the religion *made sense* to Jews, Christians, Arab “paganists”, Zoroastrians, and the various other eastern religions that were being formed contemporaneously. Hence while the actual direct empire of the Caliphate didn’t last long we see a succession of…successors for a millennia after, all inheriting the scholarship, religion, and legacy of that original state.
But when these efforts were less persistent we see shorter legacies, often ones that end within a generation or two. The Diadochi are actually a middle ground, but they fail precisely because there’s no real legitimacy besides military force; everything can be traced to that.
As a final word I think we can see this most clearly with Napoleon. Because he embodied the French revolution but did so in an autocratic way there were multiple movements to reestablish him or his family as a legitimate authority, even when his power failed. There was a push towards Napoleon for generations. However this eventually fell apart and has almost completely faded as a legacy, in part because Napoleon was actually co-opting the stronger legitimacy of the *French Republic* which outlasted his family *and* the other monarchs which replaced him. At the end of the day legacy has a lot to do with *why you are ruler* and how you *establish rightful rulership*, the cultural and social backstop of power. Force is simply insufficient.
Republics can enact conquests semi-reliably, except when they don’t: For most of history republics are an outlier, and most empires are monarchical in some fashion.
Rome was an empire as long as it was a republic. (arguably longer, depending on how you count the byzantines) and in a lot of cases republican governments are fairly small. (venice and the dutch being fairly large as far as republics go, and while they were very significant they weren’t exactly huge)
There is a point about legitimacy, but there is also the point that monarchic succession can itself be a form of legitimacy, and republican governments don’t neccessarily have much in the way of legitimacy either.
Rome was still a Republican institution on some level, however. And ultimately it fell through several feedback loops involving the failure of its republic.
The Emperor also had a large civil society of rules to fall back on, built by that Republic, and frankly has already “won” by the point it became an empire. The Roman identity was built via the Republics rights of citizenship and the resulting empire merely needed to preserve and steward this identity.
I also agree that monarchy can and does impart legitimacy, but many theoretically monarchical nations are effectively autocratic. The Diadochi are nominally monarchs in historical terms, but the link of legitimacy was fatally severed when Alexander died. The resulting societies never quite managed to legitimize their rule, meaning usurpation, civil war, ethnic rebellion, and the corresponding limits to state manpower those security obligations required. This doomed them, both in the traditional sense of a horrific fate, and in the sense of impelling their fate inevitably.
It’s no mistake that Alexander has a dozen capable subordinates and could and did leave the in charge of his entire home country, whereas we see the Selucid kings run around like headless chickens trying to be everywhere because they had precisely two trustworthy generals; themselves and their heir.
Hence monarchs have fewer legitimacy issues than raw military autocrats and more than Republics, all things being equal.
Islam doesn’t seem especially ‘syncretic’ to me, especially with regard to Zoroastrianism. The two religions seem extremely different to me. The core principle of Islam is strict monotheism, whereas Zoroastrianism holds that there are two gods, not one (although only one is good and thereby worthy of worship). For that matter I think the degree of syncretism in Christianity is greatly overstated too. (if you want to see a genuinely syncretistic religion, the way that Hinduism and Buddhism incorporated the old animist gods wholesale seem like better examples).
I definitely agree with you that the caliphates proved to have a very long lasting religious, cultural and linguistic influence, and about the importance of establishing a principle of legitimacy in general.
It’s certainly complicated and I recognize my views are somewhat heretical for mainstream historiography, but there are some clear theological and sociological relationships between all the states religions. Syncretist religions don’t need to agree or be inclusive, at least not how I use the term. To me it merely indicates a shared descent where different social movements of the same type (inc. religions) combine to produce a new melding with idealogical or cosmetic elements of each.
This new meld can be opposed to any if the components, but it will generally be influenced by each component. And it’s clear that Islam has been influenced by virtually every middle eastern religion that was either effectively or explicitly compatible with monotheism.
Zoroastrianism is obviously compatible with Christian monotheism, as evidenced by it forming multiple other syncretist sects and a broad historical melting pot throughout the middle east. I’d argue an evil counter God is not really any less monotheistic than the concept of saints or Satan; dualism certainly filtered into Judaism and Christianity somehow, and it was probably via Zoroastrianism. The link is slightly hindered because we can’t know what happened in those hermit caves these prophets keep running off too, a problem with Islam as well.
It’s not as strong a thesis as, say, Greco-Egyptians sticking Anubis on top of Hermes and calling it a day, but it has some relevance to why Islam “worked” so well.
Maybe hybridization would be a better concept if you disagree on the semantic meaning?
Hermes was Thoth. Hence Hermes Trismegistus.
Though I supposed Anubis could also have figured. It was not unusual for the mapping not to be one-to-one, especially if different people were doing it.
I think one of the reasons Islam is so exclusionist (you can’t be a Muslim and also something else) is because it was hard to draw hard lines between believers and non-believers.
You want believers because they contribute to your religion (both financially and societally).
If you don’t draw hard lines, then people end up drifting around, and your religion eventually ends up splintering as various incompatible practices start being practiced by separated groups.
Also true of Christianity. Look at the arguments over the date of Easter between the mainlanders and the Irish monks for one example.
I am actually unsure whether it would accurate to describe Zoroastrianism, or at least how it was practised in Sassanid times, IRRC it greatly changed after Islamic Conquest, as ‘dualism’ instead of ‘monotheism’.
I remember having read on the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Zurvanism, somebody had linked it during a discussion in a history forum, that:
I had double checked it here ( https://iranicaonline.org/articles/zurvanism ) just to be sure.
Mary, Hermes was also Anubis. There’s a few famous statues of Anubis with the famous messanger-staff and Greco-Roman attire. Note that in this case, Greco-Roman is accurate; we have him wearing Grecian chiton with sandals and attire more like Roman Togas both, I believe.
Yeah M, I believe there’s a formal name for this but it’s effectively a centralizing effect of theological power via excisement of other modes of thought, one that’s easiest in systems that are monotheistic because it’s rhetorically easier, although we see other organized religions do it too. The basic loop for internal conflict is: people adopt religion because of some local figure. Figure, or memory, becomes natural point of distinction. Minor local differences develop. Central authority uses this as excuse to seize power, expanding their influence. Local figure is either excised or co-opted. Christianity did this with saints, schisms, and religious wars, Islam meanwhile tended to devolve into tribal conflicts between sects.
Occasionally the process fails and you get a new religion, occasionally it reverses and the center of power moves to the new local one true faith, but it’s not uncommon. The actual differences tend to be cosmetic.
It’s no mistake that Sunni and Shia Islam and Catholicism have the strongest trends to this process and the most exclusionary rhetoric, given how frankly obsessed those religions are with hierarchy.
Zoroastrianism is obviously compatible with Christian monotheism, as evidenced by it forming multiple other syncretist sects and a broad historical melting pot throughout the middle east.
well, i’d say yes and no, it depends on who you ask. It’s compatible in the sense that tons of people historically (what Steven Runciman called the Christian Dualist tradition) have tried to synthesize them, possibly even in Paul’s time and certainly by the second century, and throughout the middle ages. It’s not compatible in the sense that ‘orthodox’ Christianity was always violently opposed to Christian Dualists- even more vehemently than they were to other ‘heretical’ groups- and did their best to suppress them.
(for that matter, orthodox Zoroastrians were quite strongly opposed to Manichaeanism, which was intended as a kind of synthesis of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, as well).
“Tarn, meanwhile, was a British gentleman (and a patriot of the empire – at 55 he volunteered for service in WWI) for whom Alexander appears as the prototype of the ideal British gentlemen heading out to civilize foreign peoples, by force if necessary”
I feel that Alexander seems to have left it a bit late to civilize Persia.
I mean, the British Empire didn’t actually do much civilising either.
Even if one accepts their own rhetoric they failed to civilize Ireland for, oh, about a thousand years or so. British hyper conservatives kinduve still call the Irish savages.
I think you are misreading the meaning (to British conservatives) of the term ‘civilised’. A close synonym is ‘obedient’.
More that I’m being glib as to the entire concept. The larger idea of a civilizing mission falls apart when you consider that Britain had centuries to establish this “vision” on it’s literal neighbors and failed; the idea that this movement means anything except power when applied anywhere else is thus quite obviously pageantry on pigshit, was my point.
The larger idea of a civilizing mission falls apart when you consider that Britain had centuries to establish this “vision” on it’s literal neighbors and failed;
Ireland overwhelmingly speaks English, all the famous Irish writers wrote in English, and the country’s constitution, legal system, and culture all owe far more to English originals than to old Celtic traditions. ISTM that Britain actually did quite a good job imposing its civilisation on Ireland.
the idea that this movement means anything except power when applied anywhere else is thus quite obviously pageantry on pigshit, was my point.
That doesn’t logically follow. Failure to do X =/= lack of desire to do X.
British hyper conservatives kinduve still call the Irish savages.
I think you are misreading the meaning (to British conservatives) of the term ‘civilised’. A close synonym is ‘obedient’.
Ideological Turing test status: failed.
I know for a fact that I am correctly pegging Brits here, because I’ve “bloody well heard them speak”, to use the vernacular. British anti-Irish racism or ethnocentrism are absolutely real and among those that still unironically believe in the superiority of British culture. They absolutely speak disparagingly of the Irish as soon as it’s a profitable means of debate for them.
“Ireland overwhelmingly speaks English, all the famous Irish writers wrote in English, and the country’s constitution, legal system, and culture all owe far more to English originals than to old Celtic traditions. ISTM that Britain actually did quite a good job imposing its civilisation on Ireland.”
Which is a prime example; the Irish would absolutely not agree and British conservatives only agree as a tactic to move the goalposts of discussion. If framed in a way that would imply weakness if Britain *had* finished the “project”, like via implying that Ireland is more civilized because their GDP per capita is higher or something similar, they *seamlessly* transition to saying that Ireland is still a hopeless backwater which is culturally deficit compared to the greater mother culture and blah-blah-blah. Conservatives cannot rationally assert that Britain simultaneously replaced and civilized Irish culture and that Irish culture is deficit compared to British culture, yet I’ve seen them do so a dozen times.
“That doesn’t logically follow. Failure to do X =/= lack of desire to do X.”
Yes it does. It’s not an inequality in that it must be true (those don’t truly exist) but it is powerful statistical evidence. It’s only consistent with one of three situations given other background information; either British cultural engineering was always completely impossible from the beginning and no amount of power would change it, that Irish culture was “stronger” than other successfully “civilized” cultures, or that Britain was never actually interested in civilizing anyone and it was all propaganda.
1. Invalidates the British mission for an entirely different reason and means the entire British empire was idiots for trying, 2. is frankly racist bullshit, and 3. is consistent with all world events. It logically follows that 3. is right.
Put simply the British concept of civilizing other nations is a dead one, only making sense if your precept is that Britain is exceptional and then using that to post-facto justify whatever position you need with British “civilization” as a backstop.
To be fair, there is a third option: “The british” as a whole is a chimera, and there’s no such thing, just various british groups and interests not neccessarily acting in concert but often comrpomising or acting against each other.
And often the end result would be trying to compromise on the various agendas in a way that really didn’t suit anyone. (though usually the exploiters got the most of it isnce that was easiest)
I know for a fact that I am correctly pegging Brits here, because I’ve “bloody well heard them speak”, to use the vernacular. British anti-Irish racism or ethnocentrism are absolutely real and among those that still unironically believe in the superiority of British culture. They absolutely speak disparagingly of the Irish as soon as it’s a profitable means of debate for them.
I’ve lived in Britain all my life, and I’ve never heard anyone, of any political persuasion, speak like that. I think you’re just making it up.
Which is a prime example; the Irish would absolutely not agree and British conservatives only agree as a tactic to move the goalposts of discussion.
The Irish wouldn’t agree for nationalistic reasons. If you compare Irish and British culture, they’re about as similar as British and Canadian/Australian/New Zealand culture.
1. Invalidates the British mission for an entirely different reason and means the entire British empire was idiots for trying, 2. is frankly racist bullshit, and 3. is consistent with all world events. It logically follows that 3. is right.
(3) is inconsistent with, among other things, Britain’s multi-decade campaign against the slave trade, or its efforts to stamp out practices like widow-burning.
I know you’re British. Your is highly censored and legitimately controlled by special interests. It’s possible you can’t see the hateful aspects of your society because their existence is actively hidden. I’ve certainly seen it, often enough to be a trend.
The Irish not agreeing has a lot to do with it being wrong, actually.
And the British opposition to the slave trade they were one of the principle drivers of is entirely consistent with simple reapolitick. The slave trade was profitable when Britain controlled America and society wasn’t industrialized, then it only became profitable in the colonies, and finally it was more trouble than it was worth. The economic conditions are in lockstep with government policy.
Sati you’re right about. Too bad the policy was matched by greater horrors including the mass starvation of Indians caused by sociopathic administrative policies and an intentional refusal to allow industrialization by British elites.
Plus most of the progress made against it was headed by non state institutions. I’ll absolutely grant that non state missions-by missionaries, doctors, and scientists-could be positive, if often motivated by chauvinism or condescension. But that’s largely irrelevant to if the British government was legitimately trying or cared, to which the answer is-they didn’t, except as a means of political control. Hence why they largely tolerated the practice for several generations until opposition became politically convenient.
I suppose one could interpret the series of events favorably…in a vacuum. But given that the overall trend throughout the colonies was brutal exploitation post hoc justified by occasional secondary social reforms generations after outreach efforts had already begun in the private sector, I’m less inclined to do so. At all.
That second sentence should read “your media” for clarity.
Arilou while I’ve explained why I find that explanation insufficient in part the other main reason I find it so weak is that the entire world has seen social reform that has had nothing to do with European governments. Footbinding, for instance, was popular in China and died out because of feminist, Christian, and patriotic progressive organizations. This alliance successfully abolished the practice sooner than many similarly repressive practices, and China was never under European rule.
Because the ideals and social movements of a society can be exported without government rule, and are often *hindered* by oppressive government enforcement *even when valid*, the idea that some social progress can be traced to colonialism is usually laughable. Plus much of what apologetic (in the Christian apologia sense) minded nationalists say is evidence of successful civilizing, like language, are fairly arbitrary as a measure of progress. The things that end up mattering are often the movements the government opposed, like socialist or feminist ones. Both movements are western exports that spread worldwide and have foundationally changed humanity, and neither was supported by colonial administrations.
I know you’re British. Your is highly censored and legitimately controlled by special interests. It’s possible you can’t see the hateful aspects of your society because their existence is actively hidden. I’ve certainly seen it, often enough to be a trend.
Pray tell, where does this special gnosis of yours come from, that apparently trumps actually living in a country for several decades?
The Irish not agreeing has a lot to do with it being wrong, actually.
Because people saying “Oh no, our culture doesn’t have any foreign admixtures, it’s entirely pure and native” are always so reliable?
And the British opposition to the slave trade they were one of the principle drivers of is entirely consistent with simple reapolitick. The slave trade was profitable when Britain controlled America and society wasn’t industrialized, then it only became profitable in the colonies,
You obviously don’t know much about either social or economic history. Britain itself never had legal slavery, so its profitability in the British Isles is irrelevant.
and finally it was more trouble than it was worth. The economic conditions are in lockstep with government policy.
Slavery was still profitable when the UK abolished it. And if it had really been “more trouble than it was worth”, there’d have been need to abolish it, because it would have died out on its own. Again, you’re either ignorant, or you’re misrepresenting history to fit in with your preconceived biases.
Plus most of the progress made against it was headed by non state institutions. I’ll absolutely grant that non state missions-by missionaries, doctors, and scientists-could be positive, if often motivated by chauvinism or condescension.
Those non-state institutions were only present because the British state (well, technically the EIC, but you know what I mean) was already there. A timeline in which the British never colonise India isn’t a timeline in which sati gets abolished by missionaries, doctors, and scientists with imperial involvement, it’s a timeline in which sati doesn’t get abolished.
Footbinding, for instance, was popular in China and died out because of feminist, Christian, and patriotic progressive organizations. This alliance successfully abolished the practice sooner than many similarly repressive practices, and China was never under European rule.
It’s true, China was famously left completely alone by European imperialists.
Oh lol you think Britain never had a legal slavery trade?!? How fucking ignorant if your own history are you??? There were at least ten thousand African slaves in Britain before it was ruled illegal in court, maybe more. Slavery in the colonies persisted for decades after. The entire system was legally tolerated in some fashion until the abolition movement in the late 1700’s. This is literally in children’s books.
If you’re going to lie don’t do so in a manner that would fool a ten year old.
I could shit in the rest of your lies, but I’m done. Literally every word from your mouth with any modern political implications is worthless. No one could possibly think otherwise unless they already agree with you completely and have the same poisoned education base.
“it’s a timeline in which sati doesn’t get abolished.”
Mr X, you really claiming that sati would never have been abolished, would be present to this day, if India hadn’t been conquered by Britain?
Oh lol you think Britain never had a legal slavery trade?!? How fucking ignorant if your own history are you??? There were at least ten thousand African slaves in Britain before it was ruled illegal in court, maybe more. Slavery in the colonies persisted for decades after. The entire system was legally tolerated in some fashion until the abolition movement in the late 1700’s. This is literally in children’s books.
British courts had regularly ruled that slavery was not supported by English law since 1569.
Mr X, you really claiming that sati would never have been abolished, would be present to this day, if India hadn’t been conquered by Britain?
The reason European values spread around the world was because Europe was so much more successful than everywhere else, as made inescapably clear by the fact that Europeans ended up colonising most of the rest of the world. A world with no European colonisation would be a world where sati was never abolished; a world with European colonisation which for some reason never threatened India would also be a world in which sati was never abolished; a world in which India was at risk of colonisation but never actually colonised might see the abolition of sati, but it would happen considerably later.
“A world with no European colonisation would be a world where sati was never abolished”
This is utter bollocks. You cannot know the results of such a counterfactual. And your apologetic for conquest ignores the potential effects of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, and cultural influence, among others.
“I know for a fact that I am correctly pegging Brits here, because I’ve “bloody well heard them speak”, to use the vernacular. British anti-Irish racism or ethnocentrism are absolutely real and among those that still unironically believe in the superiority of British culture. They absolutely speak disparagingly of the Irish as soon as it’s a profitable means of debate for them.”
Not English, but lived there for most of my life, never heard this from anyone. Obviously that doesn’t mean that you’re making this up, but it does suggest that your experiences don’t reflect some sort of universal truth.
This is utter bollocks. You cannot know the results of such a counterfactual.
By that logic, you can’t know the results of a counterfactual in which colonialism didn’t happen, therefore you can’t say that colonialism was a bad thing.
And your apologetic for conquest ignores the potential effects of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, and cultural influence, among others.
This is a whiggish fallacy. Modern western values are not inevitable, and if westerners all stayed in the west, other parts of the world would have no motivation to westernise.
@the original Mr. X:
Maybe; it’s possible that, given another few hundred years, North America might have industrialized on its own, though it likely would have taken until the 21st century to get to flintlocks. At minimum, the rise of the Iroquois Confederacy would have resulted in a lot of the same state-formation dynamics that drove development in Europe, as their neighbors confederated in order to avoid being overrun.
All speculation now, though.
Maybe; it’s possible that, given another few hundred years, North America might have industrialized on its own, though it likely would have taken until the 21st century to get to flintlocks. At minimum, the rise of the Iroquois Confederacy would have resulted in a lot of the same state-formation dynamics that drove development in Europe, as their neighbors confederated in order to avoid being overrun.
Given that pre-Columbian North America was mostly reliant on stone tools, I think it’s unlikely the region would have industrialised by 2024.
@The original Mr. X
That is even clearer nonsense than dcmorinmorinmorin’s claim that the British only abolished the slave trade because of realpolitik.
Even before the BEIC conquered Bengal, missionaries were traveling to India. The French would also still provide military advisors to friendly regimes (like Mysore) in India, which would likely later grow into advisors for other fields, like industry, science, and medicine.
And even if those missionaries AND the French, Danish, and so on East India Companies also had not existed there would still be ‘Western’-influence and a pressure to modernize, à la the Ottoman Tanzimat or Meiji Restauration.
As a result of the implosion of the Mughal Empire the subcontinent was divided between many warring powers trying to conquer each other; Europe already had the Scientific Revolution and would still industrialize; thus Europe would still function as an example for Indian ‘Ataturk’-types who do not want their state be conquered by its neighbours.
@60guilders
Does your scenario involve Venetians discovering the Americas instead of the Spanish and then deciding to only trade with the Indians instead of conquering them, even instituting quarantines (the term came from Venice after all) to prevent their trade partners from becoming decimated by diseases?
I think something like that would be necessary to get North America to industrialize, in a few hundred years, without being conquered from outside.
@dcmorinmorinmorin
Before, I start I want to say I am not a British Empire apologist, in fact I have even argued before on the internet with British Empire apologists who came up with nonsense like ‘The British Empire brought good government to India’; however, some of your arguments are so wrong that I feel I have to reply.
After the UK abolished their own slave trade they began putting in enormous amounts of effort* to pressure other countries to abolish their own slave trades, even friendly or neutral countries like Portugal or Brazil. That simply makes no sense from an ‘amoral realpolitik’-perspective; it was simply way to disproportionate to any benefit which could be gained from that.
* According to one estimate the overall cost of anti-slavery activities was 1.78% of national income each year from 1808 to 1867. Whilst, IRRC that figure included increased prices British consumers had to pay for sugar (‘free-sugar’ from sources in the British Empire was protected from foreign competition produced by slave-labour through tariffs) and lost ‘business opportunities’; even after taking that into account it is simply too enormous an amount to be possibly explained through mere realpolitik. However, I know some instead explained it with both parties being forced to court single-issue abolitionist swing voters.
There is no real evidence that the famine situation had worsened (or improved) on that front after colonisation. The British were the first to hold Famine Commissions to determine how many people had died and how that number could be reduced in following famines, thus it is unknown how many people had been dying in famines before colonisation.
In that time famines were something which just happened. For example, Finland, a country with a much more favourable climate (no super-unpredictable monsoons), suffered a famine in which about 8.5% of the entire population died of hunger in 1866–1868. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_famine_of_1866%E2%80%931868 ).
I admit the British Empire often had callous attitudes to famines. However, the things I had read about the likes of the Mughal Empire or Travancore do not really give me the impression they would have done a much better job.
About which time period are you talking about?
I had heard such stories before; however, those were false.
For example, there is that one story about the East India Company cutting the thumbs of spinners who used to spin fine cloth in order to make way for English cloth. However, in reality the opposite had happened; there had been winders of raw silk who had, to prevent the BEIC from forcing them to wind silk, cut of their own thumbs.
During the 20th century the Princely State of Mysore also fully was free to subsidize its state-owned steel industry.
I had the impression that India’s failure to industrialize was primarily the result of the poor quality of the Raj’s government. For example, at independence only about 15% of the population was literate. I had also read that* when in 1928-29 the cotton mills in Mumbai were brought to a virtual standstill for 18 months due to strikes, this was mostly ignored by the colonial police as they were busy chasing Indian nationalists; curiously when in 1921 British-owned tea plantations in eastern India, coolies ran away without the employers’ permission the situation ended up with the military police firing on them at a railway station.
* Here to be exact: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/#raj
@dcmorinmorinmorin
Before, I start I want to say I am not a British Empire apologist, in fact I have even argued before on the internet with British Empire apologists who came up with nonsense like ‘The British Empire brought good government to India’; however, some of your arguments are so wrong that I feel I have to reply.
After the UK abolished their own slave trade they began putting in enormous amounts of effort* to pressure other countries to abolish their own slave trades, even friendly or neutral countries like Portugal or Brazil. That simply makes no sense from an ‘amoral realpolitik’-perspective; it was simply way to disproportionate to any benefit which could be gained from that.
* According to one estimate the overall cost of anti-slavery activities was 1.78% of national income each year from 1808 to 1867. Whilst, IRRC that figure included increased prices British consumers had to pay for sugar (‘free-sugar’ from sources in the British Empire was protected from foreign competition produced by slave-labour through tariffs) and lost ‘business opportunities’; even after taking that into account it is simply too enormous an amount to be possibly explained through mere realpolitik. However, I know some instead explained it with both parties being forced to court single-issue abolitionist swing voters.
There is no real evidence that the famine situation had worsened (or improved) on that front after colonisation. The British were the first to hold Famine Commissions to determine how many people had died and how that number could be reduced in following famines, thus it is unknown how many people had been dying in famines before colonisation.
In that time famines were something which just happened. For example, Finland, a country with a much more favourable climate (no super-unpredictable monsoons), suffered a famine in which about 8.5% of the entire population died of hunger in 1866–1868.
I admit the British Empire often had callous attitudes to famines. However, the things I had read about the likes of the Mughal Empire or Travancore do not really give me the impression they would have done a much better job.
About which time period are you talking about?
I had heard such stories before; however, those were false.
For example, there is that one story about the East India Company cutting the thumbs of spinners who used to spin fine cloth in order to make way for English cloth. However, in reality the opposite had happened; there had been winders of raw silk who had, to prevent the BEIC from forcing them to wind silk, cut of their own thumbs.
During the 20th century the Princely State of Mysore also fully was free to subsidize its state-owned steel industry.
I had the impression that India’s failure to industrialize was primarily the result of the poor quality of the Raj’s government.
For example, at independence only about 15% of the population was literate.
I had also read that when in 1928-29 the cotton mills in Mumbai were brought to a virtual standstill for 18 months due to strikes, this was mostly ignored by the colonial police as they were busy chasing Indian nationalists; curiously when in 1921 British-owned tea plantations in eastern India, coolies ran away without the employers’ permission the situation ended up with the military police firing on them at a railway station.
Even before the BEIC conquered Bengal, missionaries were traveling to India. The French would also still provide military advisors to friendly regimes (like Mysore) in India, which would likely later grow into advisors for other fields, like industry, science, and medicine.
There’d been a Christian community in India since ancient times, and this hadn’t stopped sati becoming prevalent. Adding European missionaries might result in a few more conversions, but (judging by Christianity’s progress in other Asian countries) almost certainly not enough to impose Christian values on Indian society as a whole.
As for the French providing military advisors, they did this for empire-related reasons, to increase their sphere of influence in the Subcontinent and decrease the British sphere. Without this motivation, there’d be far fewer advisors there in the first place. Nor do I think a few foreign technical experts would really be able to influence society as a whole that much. The Ming and Qing emperors kept various Western scientists in Beijing, and this didn’t at all translate into accepting Western ideas beyond a few specific areas with obvious utility (e.g., gunnery).
And even if those missionaries AND the French, Danish, and so on East India Companies also had not existed there would still be ‘Western’-influence and a pressure to modernize, à la the Ottoman Tanzimat or Meiji Restauration.
The Ottoman Tanzimat and Meiji Restauration were explicitly motivated by a desire to avoid being colonised. Without this threat, there’d be no motivation to Westernise.
As a result of the implosion of the Mughal Empire the subcontinent was divided between many warring powers trying to conquer each other; Europe already had the Scientific Revolution and would still industrialize; thus Europe would still function as an example for Indian ‘Ataturk’-types who do not want their state be conquered by its neighbours.
No society decides to adopt weird foreign customs from the other side of the world without a pressing reason. Indian rulers might adopt Western military techniques, and maybe some manufacturing techniques where these have an obvious military utility, but this doesn’t require a wholesale adoption of Western practices and values, and it doesn’t require abandoning sati in particular.
@Tus 3: An interesting notion, one I hadn’t thought of.
One thing I hadn’t taken into account in my musing is the lack of horses and draft animals (outside of South America), which would have severely affected logistics and created some problems for empire-building, particularly the movement of cannons.
Now I’m picturing your Venetians getting rich off of importing horses and cattle.
(Though if you wanted to do a really fun and not particularly grounded in reality AH, try this one on for size: for whatever reason, no contact happens between the Americas and Europe/Asia/Africa for a few centuries, and the Native Americans decide to try and breed bigger dogs to serve as draft animals.)
“therefore you can’t say that colonialism was a bad thing.”
Yes I can, because I think that conquest, murder, and theft are bad things.
Perhaps you don’t think that?
“This is a whiggish fallacy”
It would be a fallacy if I’d said such values convergence was inevitable. I merely said it was possible. You’re the one expressing fallacious confidence.
“I think it’s unlikely the region would have industrialised by 2024.”
Without outside contact, sure. With peaceful European contact, it might be possible.
“In that time famines were something which just happened.”
What I’ve read, perhaps from Amartya Sen, is that local landlords would be more likely to agree (being on the ground) “yep, this was a bad year, I’ll waive your taxes/rents so you don’t die”, while the distant EIC was more ruthlessly extractive. Sen also says that India’s GDP/capita growth basically stopped with the British in charge.
Yes I can, because I think that conquest, murder, and theft are bad things.
Perhaps you don’t think that?
It’s possible that, without British colonialism, India would have experienced more conquest, murder, and theft than it did historically. So, by the standard you use in the rest of your comment, we can’t say that British colonialism was a net negative.
It would be a fallacy if I’d said such values convergence was inevitable. I merely said it was possible. You’re the one expressing fallacious confidence.
All sorts of things are “possible”. That doesn’t make them likely.
Without outside contact, sure. With peaceful European contact, it might be possible.
Judging by historical experience, even peaceful contact would result in c. 80-90% of the population dying from disease, which isn’t exactly conducive to rapid technological advancement.
What I’ve read, perhaps from Amartya Sen, is that local landlords would be more likely to agree (being on the ground) “yep, this was a bad year, I’ll waive your taxes/rents so you don’t die”, while the distant EIC was more ruthlessly extractive. Sen also says that India’s GDP/capita growth basically stopped with the British in charge.
Meanwhile Maddison says that India’s GDP per capita was essentially stagnant in the centuries leading up to British rule, whilst the Maddison Project says that GDP/capita was declining from the Mughal period until the late 19th century, when it started to rise again.
For example, Finland, a country with a much more favourable climate (no super-unpredictable monsoons), suffered a famine in which about 8.5% of the entire population died of hunger in 1866–1868.
I would like to note that Finland has, in fact, a rather unfavourable climate for agriculture. There is a reason why India had a high civilisation already thousands of years ago while Finland didn’t. The average yields of crops are much higher in India.
In the mid-19th century, population growth had caused a Malthusian situation where large parts of the country were forced to turn from the traditional slash-and-burn agriculture to normal field-based agriculture: the population was so dense that you could no longer abandon fields after some five years and allow them lay fallow for a century.
However, field-based agriculture was not, in fact, sustainable in those regions: with the methods used at the time, only the Southern part of Finland can actually produce enough food for the population in a somewhat bad year. Large swathes of Northern and Eastern Finland were suffering from wide-spread malnutrition even in normal years, as the agriculture wasn’t really able to feed the local population. The year 1866 was a bad one, and 1867 was the worst in a century: there was snowfall in the Southern part of the country even in mid-June. So, you can have weather-based crop catastrophes even without monsoons.
“It’s possible that, without British colonialism, India would have experienced more conquest, murder, and theft than it did historically.”
It’s possible that anyone murdered might have gone on to kill even more people in the future. Therefore we can’t say murder is wrong! /s
That’s where your argument is leading, Mr. X. It’s morally and intellectually bankrupt.
However, the things I had read about the likes of the Mughal Empire or Travancore do not really give me the impression they would have done a much better job.
Travancore had a famine during WWII (which I was previously unaware of, so thanks for informing me), but in other respects are often considered one of the best run, most “modernizing” Indian native states, in terms of improvements in literacy, education, industrialization, reforms to the caste hierarchy, etc.. Which may not be unrelated to the fact that their successor state, Kerala, is one of the highest HDI parts of India today.
Our host has before recommended War in Human Civilization. From this and other works it would appear that in the societies Tarn considered “uncivilized” around half of all men were killed by other men, with a similar proportion of women being abducted for sexual and reproductive purposes by their captors.
In Tarn’s day they were people who could tell you the human sacrifices they had seen in Africa were not as bad as you might think, because many of them were criminals and would have been executed anyway. (But not all.)
In Tarn’s day there was a tradition in many parts of Arabia that if an escaped slave reached a British diplomatic residence he would touch the embassy flagpole and declared free by virtue of having touched the thing that flew the Union Jack.
(In our day, the spread of the power of the Islamic Republic of Iran into some of those areas has apparently seen slavery re-established there.)
Tarn would have been wrong to praise Alexander for carrying out the state-formation process, for he did more to destroy an existing state than to create a new one.
But I can’t help but think that many of his modern critics would learn something if they were dropped naked into North Sentinel Island, to find out what “uncivilized” means.
In Tarn’s day, his country had been a pivotal member in a war that killed approximately 21 million people in a little under 4 years. That’s 10 people a minute, 24/7, for 4 years straight. That’s not to mention things like the Opium Wars and Irish Potato Famine that he just missed, or the invention of concentration camps in the Second Boer War that he didn’t.
I’m British myself and I don’t think we have a leg to stand on when calling ourselves ‘civilised’ at that point in time.
Was the Empire more of a nuanced thing than either of the reactionary groups on either side believe? Definitely. Was it even mostly a force for civilising good in the world? That I doubt heavily, no matter what people claimed its motivations were at the time.
I’m British myself and I don’t think we have a leg to stand on when calling ourselves ‘civilised’ at that point in time.
Sounds like you’re one of those people who’d benefit from a trip to North Sentinel Island. Or any randomly-selected third-world country, for that matter.
Your imperializing cope isn’t justified because not every human on the planet has a nuclear fleet or other advanced technology, dude. I might as well say that the clear superiority of Brazilian civilization is evidenced by the Sentinel Islanders, what the fuck are you talking about?
I’ve lived in a third world (or arguably Fourth World) country before, it didn’t really change my opinions about the merits of the British (or in this case the French) empire much at all. (It did change my opinion on other social and cultural questions, in some cases permanently and in other cases temporarily, but not on the topic of colonialism).
I talked to plenty of people there who were nostalgic about the past, but in all cases it was the socialist era (1970s till 1990) that they were nostalgic for, when they had cheap rice rations, not the colonial era.
“I might as well say that the clear superiority of Brazilian civilization is evidenced by the Sentinel Islanders”
dcmorinmorinmorin, we don’t know what life is like on North Sentinel specifically, as they try to kill everyone they see and never speak to them. But we do know about the Yanomamö, who actually live in Brazil.
And it has been estimated that more than half of their adult males are killed by each other and around half of their women are abducted by a neighbouring village at some point, gang-raped and used as sex slaves.
Yes, I’d say that Brazilian civilization is superior to that. I’m fairly sure that most Brazilians would agree.
Would you like to give a rational reason to disagree?
Returning to Alexander, I would think that the Persian Empire was also superior to that, and that the chaos of Alexanders invasion made it less so.
Your imperializing cope isn’t justified because not every human on the planet has a nuclear fleet or other advanced technology, dude.
I’m not talking about nuclear fleets or advanced technology, I’m talking about being able to leave your house without having to worry about your physical safety, going to the shops and being confident that the things you buy will work properly and the shopkeeper won’t try to scam you, that sort of thing. High-trust, low-crime societies like early 20th-century Britain are absolutely better than low-trust, high-crime societies.
When was the last time you went to any randomly selected third world country? I’ve been to a fair few, and I don’t think the comparison to North Sentinel holds particularly well.
Even if it did, if a society does have problems that does not justify an imperial project to wholesale replace that culture with your own.
In the vein of your comment, I might reply ‘sounds like you’re one of those people who’d benefit from a trip to the Somme in 1916, or a Boer camp in 1901’.
I’m not trying to build some sort of false equivalency thing here. I’m trying to make you realise that the house you’re throwing stones from might be a little more fragile than you’re given to believe…
Even if it did, if a society does have problems that does not justify an imperial project to wholesale replace that culture with your own.
Well, from that point of view I would have thought that Alexanders actions were thoroughly in accordance with the traditions of the Persian monarchy.
When was the last time you went to any randomly selected third world country?
About five years ago.
In the vein of your comment, I might reply ‘sounds like you’re one of those people who’d benefit from a trip to the Somme in 1916, or a Boer camp in 1901’.
Both of which had casualty rates well below 50%. In other words, even in the worst-case scenario, you’d still have better odds dealing with the British Empire than living as an ordinary person in one of Tarn’s “uncivilised” countries.
This is fully fucked. I can’t even begin to unpack the logical fallacies here because my brain keeps tripping over the assumption that the places colonized were universally mad max style hellholes, an assumption that only makes sense if you were educated solely on the finest bigotry a Jingoist state can buy, with zero critical engagement in any topic.
And are you really saying you think a tribe sandwiched between two colonial powers which has been supplied with weapons *by the fucking anthropologist whom described that casualty rate* is somehow in a *precolonial* state? Yeah, sure, why don’t we give the north sentinel Islanders an armed and primed H bomb, you can claim that their savage low trust society has a *100%* casualty rate! Zero confounding variables here!
Jesus fucking Christ.
And are you really saying you think a tribe sandwiched between two colonial powers which has been supplied with weapons *by the fucking anthropologist whom described that casualty rate* is somehow in a *precolonial* state?
Are you under the impression that high violence rates have only been observed in societies with access to modern weapons? Because that’s not at all the case: https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths
No shit sherlock, societies can be violent, but there’s nothing about “civilization” that requires they not be violent nor anything about “primitivity” that requires they be violent. You’ve already been educated on this, WW1 neatly demonstrates that civilization isn’t peaceful, it’s just prone to different rhythms of war.
Nor is a tribe in the Amazon which has been supplied with weapons and *none* of the other amenities of technology a good example of natural development or a normal situation for a primitive society, particularly when you’re using it to justify some broad statement about anthropology.
If you want an actual defensible thesis; primitive societies are more prone to low level violence and less capable of or willing to engage in extreme violence, as a broad trend. Advanced societies are less prone to low level violence and more capable and willing to engage in extreme violence. That dichotomy is a result of the material conditions of the society and how technology incentivizes group behaviors.
And, as a corollary, societies which are exploited by advanced societies *are the worst of both*, simultaneously prone to constant violence and armed with tools making them capable of exterminating entire groups of people, as their social order is disrupted by outsiders and the individuals in that society face increasing strife.
Hence colonial exploitation is *fucking bad*. The legacy of European colonialism was to leave a deeply traumatized patchwork of states and peoples throughout Africa, South America, and Asia, along with the virtual extermination of aboriginal Australians and North Americans. That patchwork of states was horrifically violent during colonial rule and remains generally violent today as a direct result of the social scars of colonial rule. And the trade off for Europe was that it enabled the accumulation of wealth and power sufficient to create vast armies which led to such a catastrophic series of wars that the entire system collapsed.
Colonialism is stupid, wasteful, and evil. To defend any principle of it today or say that the third world justifies the excesses of empire *when it created the very conditions you’re using to justify it* is complete and utter brain rot.
No shit sherlock, societies can be violent, but there’s nothing about “civilization” that requires they not be violent nor anything about “primitivity” that requires they be violent.
Your chances of dying violently in a randomly-selected state society are considerably less than your chances of dying violently in a randomly-selected non-state society, as has been pointed out several times now.
You’ve already been educated on this, WW1 neatly demonstrates that civilization isn’t peaceful, it’s just prone to different rhythms of war.
WW1 involved so many deaths because so many people were involved. Proportionately speaking, tribal warfare normally has higher (according to Keeley’s War Before Civilisation, up to 20x higher) casualty rates than 20th-century warfare.
Nor is a tribe in the Amazon which has been supplied with weapons and *none* of the other amenities of technology a good example of natural development or a normal situation for a primitive society, particularly when you’re using it to justify some broad statement about anthropology.
You keep fixating on this scenario, presumably because it allows you to blame evil westerners and absolve the people doing all the actual killing of any agency or responsibility. But, as has been pointed out already, high rates of violence are observed in non-state societies which don’t have any weapons more advanced than a bow and arrow, so this excuse won’t wash.
@dcmorinmorinmorin Just want to say that I wholly agree with you, and I think you can let your arguments stand from this point on.
While Mr X does make a valid point that you can’t absolve the people perpetrating bad things wholly of guilt or responsibility, nor can you absolve the bad things enacted by colonial powers through the few good things achieved by it.
There’s only so much you can blame the boogieman for Imperialist ambitions.
If it were a purely (or even mostly) a civilising mission, there are far better routes to take to reach that end goal.
“Your chances of dying violently in a randomly-selected state society are considerably less than your chances of dying violently in a randomly-selected non-state society, as has been pointed out several times now.”
And your chances of dying as one of the “savages” being “civilized”? Or as the wrong type of person in a modern state? Nothing about my thesis requires that modern society be less safe to a random citizen, obviously, both because we’re not just talking about the end state but the process to get there, and because modern violence is targeted.
Of course there are some exceptions like every genocide, which are often more complete, faster pace, and higher volume than any pre modern warfare. So what your claim actually means is that societies that don’t commit genocide don’t commit genocide. It says nothing about how you get societies not to do that, and obviously civilizing then is insufficient by itself.
“WW1 involved so many deaths because so many people were involved. Proportionately speaking, tribal warfare normally has higher (according to Keeley’s War Before Civilisation, up to 20x higher) casualty rates than 20th-century warfare.”
While I would love to really dig into Keely and his methods and conclusions, that’s a huge topic. However the assertion is highly dependent on whom you’re talking about. Serbia suffered a high-probably around 20%, we can’t really tell more precisely-death rate. The Ottomans had a 10% death rate, France around 5%, a figure shared by the other western front nations.
WW2 shows similar numbers in Poland or the Soviet union. Other wars involving modern genocides are similar.
That’s all within Keely death rate. All we’re seeing is that tribal societies wage constant war ending in typically 10-30% death rates. Modern belligerent nations wage wars every 20 or so years resulting in in 10-30% death rates. Technology has changed the cycle, but it still churns absent other factors.
Those other factors, to be clear, are scientific development, industrialization, and democracy. None of which is necessarily brought by colonization and all of which have been actively hindered by it at various times. Real civilizing factors exist, but have nothing inherently to do with *empires*. The British certainly weren’t spreading them evenly, as a whole massive, bloated body of scholarship shows.
“You keep fixating on this scenario, presumably because it allows you to blame evil westerners and absolve the people doing all the actual killing of any agency or responsibility. But, as has been pointed out already, high rates of violence are observed in non-state societies which don’t have any weapons more advanced than a bow and arrow, so this excuse won’t wash.”
Because the evidence brought up keeps including the tribe in question, genius. A lot of the scholarship is similarly tainted because there’s no such thing as a truly isolated tribe; even those which don’t actually have weapons are still unnaturally constrained in movement by the states that surround them, which represent an inviolable wall. The resulting effects on group behaviors and culture are complex but often end in violence.
Of course just using archeological evidence we see a range between 0-60%, and generally average around 20%. That’s high. Higher overall than most wars. But it’s vitally not higher than the worst wars, including those typical of European colonial states, particularly when waged against non states.
The current global peace isn’t a product of colonialism bringing civilization. It’s a product of post colonialism and the new international order, dominated as it is by a democratic, science literate global hegemony, alongside abundant resources due to industrialization and free trade. If that breaks we’re right back in hell.
Ynnead: “Just want to say that I wholly agree with you, and I think you can let your arguments stand from this point on.”
Then this is my final word on the subject.
“If it were a purely (or even mostly) a civilising mission, there are far better routes to take to reach that end goal.”
Actually, last last word; we see actual peace come to much of the world after the extractive system of traditional colonialism ends. We still see exploitation but now it’s mediated by coercion rather than direct force. This has allowed for decolonized cultures to develop again and industrialize, something almost completely halted by colonial empires.
As evidenced by GDP per capita growth in India, which was basically fucking *flat* until the British left and is now an exponential growth function like any industrial economy. Which, incidentally, correlates with Indian contributions to science, history, literature, and media. Because enforced crushing poverty is bad for culture.
Point being, colonialism was objectively awful at actually achieving the civilizing mission. Actual civilizing happened once the empires ended and outreach and collaboration occurred instead, in particular scientific outreach. It was great at extracting wealth though.
If it were a purely (or even mostly) a civilising mission, there are far better routes to take to reach that end goal.
This is venturing a long way from the initial topic of Alexanders invasion of Persia, but I am curious about what routes you would suggest.
(There is a bit in David Attenborough’s autobiography, Life on Air, where he describes an attempt to film Birds of Paradise in 1950s New Guinea. The problem was that the local tribesmen also liked the birds feathers and hunted them down. At that time the Australians had a mandate over the area and were establishing a series of police posts into the interior. Beyond the posts the villages were constantly at war with each other, and the birds could survive in the gaps between the villages. So there were no birds to film in the policed areas, and there were birds in the unpoliced areas, but anyone who tried filming there risked being killed by one side or another. He never got to film a Bird of Paradise on that trip. If this is not an example of these “far better routes”, what routes would you suggest?)
And your chances of dying as one of the “savages” being “civilized”?
“Civilised” warfare generally has a lower proportionate death rate than tribal warfare, so your chances are better as a savage being civilised.
Of course there are some exceptions like every genocide, which are often more complete, faster pace, and higher volume than any pre modern warfare. So what your claim actually means is that societies that don’t commit genocide don’t commit genocide. It says nothing about how you get societies not to do that, and obviously civilizing then is insufficient by itself.
Tribal warfare is often explicitly genocidal.
While I would love to really dig into Keely and his methods and conclusions, that’s a huge topic. However the assertion is highly dependent on whom you’re talking about. Serbia suffered a high-probably around 20%, we can’t really tell more precisely-death rate. The Ottomans had a 10% death rate, France around 5%, a figure shared by the other western front nations.
WW2 shows similar numbers in Poland or the Soviet union. Other wars involving modern genocides are similar.
That’s all within Keely death rate. All we’re seeing is that tribal societies wage constant war ending in typically 10-30% death rates.
So in other words, if you cherry-pick the worst-suffering participants of a once-in-a-generation war, the figures are still mostly lower than the average, everyday tribal war.
Modern belligerent nations wage wars every 20 or so years resulting in in 10-30% death rates.
When’s the last time a modern belligerent nation suffered 10-30% death rates in a war?
Because the evidence brought up keeps including the tribe in question, genius.
Assuming you mean the Yanomamo, who are the only tribe I can see who’ve been mentioned by name, they’ve only been mentioned once.
A lot of the scholarship is similarly tainted because there’s no such thing as a truly isolated tribe; even those which don’t actually have weapons are still unnaturally constrained in movement by the states that surround them, which represent an inviolable wall. The resulting effects on group behaviors and culture are complex but often end in violence.
There’s no such thing as a truly isolated person. If “Yeah, but they were affected by external influences” is enough to absolve them, then it also absolves the European imperialists you hate so much.
Of course just using archeological evidence we see a range between 0-60%, and generally average around 20%. That’s high. Higher overall than most wars. But it’s vitally not higher than the worst wars, including those typical of European colonial states, particularly when waged against non states.
Why are you comparing the *average* tribal war with the *worst* non-tribal war? That’s not a fair comparison, and makes it look like you’re cherry-picking the data to reach a preconceived conclusion.
The current global peace isn’t a product of colonialism bringing civilization. It’s a product of post colonialism and the new international order, dominated as it is by a democratic, science literate global hegemony, alongside abundant resources due to industrialization and free trade. If that breaks we’re right back in hell.
Democracy, science, and industrialisation only became widespread because of European colonialism, either directly or indirectly (e.g., Meiji-era Japan industrialising for fear of being colonised).
“Why are you comparing the *average* tribal war with the *worst* non-tribal war? That’s not a fair comparison, and makes it look like you’re cherry-picking the data to reach a preconceived conclusion.”
WW1 isn’t unusual for industrial warfare. It’s just illustrative. Korea was similar at nearly 20%, Vietnam killed about 5% of Vietnamese civilians, the Rwandan civil war may have reached 30%, the Second Congo War 10% going further the Mexican revolution killed 10-16%…we can keep going. Numerous wars hit double digits percents.
Some industrial wars are minor. Some years there aren’t major wars. But when serious combatants are involved deaths match preindustrial warfare.
And read your sources. Yanomamo are cited as one of the primary data points in Keely. Every time you rely on his scholarship you’re relying on the same raw data collected by an arms dealer. If you can’t be bothered to realize what your citing why should I believe your thesis?
It’s not like you need it to make your factual point. Public archeological evidence supports a slightly elevated total death rate from violence compared to the numbers killed in the worst wars, on the order of 20-30% averaged across multiple worldwide sites, but well represented across the entire span there (it’s highest at a creek massacre site I believe).
I’m not even disputing that it’s sometimes higher, or even that violent deaths are common, it’s just absolutely matched by wars when they happen and the idea it’s universally higher is thus a lie. It’s only massively higher compared to stable rich nations now, which have shaped the entire world to make it so.
In other words, “civilization” isn’t enough. Being a modern, powerful, western nation is. The civilizing mission they engaged in didn’t make the world safer per say, it made them safer.
Ad9, scientific expeditions, trade missions, and religious missionaries, the last because of their social role. Most real social reform is traced to those groups anyway, along with some gunboat diplomacy, which is imperialist but not colonialist and balances death versus progess positively, at least.
@dcmorinmorinmorin:
I thought you’d already flounced off in a huff? Oh well,–
WW1 isn’t unusual for industrial warfare. It’s just illustrative. Korea was similar at nearly 20%, Vietnam killed about 5% of Vietnamese civilians, the Rwandan civil war may have reached 30%, the Second Congo War 10% going further the Mexican revolution killed 10-16%…we can keep going. Numerous wars hit double digits percents.
Korea was more like 7-10%, Vietnam 0.8-4%, the Rwandan Civil War about 10%, and so on. These are all at the low end of tribal warfare, and are much less frequent.
And read your sources. Yanomamo are cited as one of the primary data points in Keely. Every time you rely on his scholarship you’re relying on the same raw data collected by an arms dealer. If you can’t be bothered to realize what your citing why should I believe your thesis?
They’re one of the data points, but there are others, all of which indicate that tribal societies have much higher rates of interpersonal violence than state societies, so it’s false to suggest that high tribal casualties are due to the availability of modern weapons.
I’m not even disputing that it’s sometimes higher, or even that violent deaths are common, it’s just absolutely matched by wars when they happen and the idea it’s universally higher is thus a lie. It’s only massively higher compared to stable rich nations now, which have shaped the entire world to make it so.
@ad9
?
I had the impression that compared with other Ancient Empires, like the Roman Empire and the Caliphate. The Persian Empire was much more likely to leave conquered cultures intact.
What really interests me is how neatly the accusation “the British ‘mission to civilize’ was hogwash” got deflected to “it is better to live under a state than under a non-state; life is less violent.”
The thing is, the vast majority of land conquered by the British Empire was either already ruled by states, or saw the near-total genocide of the inhabitants by British settlers and their heirs. India, Southeast Asia, much of Africa- these were places that already had kings and legal codes and recognizable administrative power structures in place before the British showed up.
The places where the population wasn’t predominantly non-state and where the British showed up would have been in North America and Australia. And there, the natives never actually got the notional ‘reward’ of being converted into a state where they’d die less often. They died more often and were ethnically cleansed off the land almost entirely in the process of the imperial conquest, to the point where even continued life as groups like the Yanomamo might seem preferable. At least then they wouldn’t face the humiliation of being ignored and marginalized strangers in the land their ancestors once ruled.
But apart from the fate of these natives, the vast majority of the territory and population of the British Empire actually came from places that were not the jungles of the Yanomamo.
I’m sure, Mr. X., that you’d agree that it would be absurd to argue something like “well if it wasn’t for the British Empire, everyone would be killing each other all the time like this one specific tribe in the Brazilian rainforest that everyone uses as their go-to example of a spectacularly violent Stone Age tribe!”
The Irish, the Mughals, the Egyptians, the Zulu; these were civilized peoples with steel tools, agriculture, and law codes before an English flag showed up. Surely we wouldn’t imagine that the British Empire gets the credit for that?
The thing is, the vast majority of land conquered by the British Empire was either already ruled by states, or saw the near-total genocide of the inhabitants by British settlers and their heirs. India, Southeast Asia, much of Africa- these were places that already had kings and legal codes and recognizable administrative power structures in place before the British showed up.
This, exactly.
(Some parts of India, in the far northeast, as well as some parts of Africa, were non-state or pre-state societies, but your general point is correct. And a lot of the descendants of those northeastern tribal groups aren’t particularly happy about having been incorporated into the Indian state, even today).
shifting from talking about British colonialism to talking about the relative merits of state vs. nonstate societies is an odd transition.
“I’m British myself and I don’t think we have a leg to stand on when calling ourselves ‘civilised’ at that point in time.”
What exactly do you mean by the word “civilized” in this sentence?
Was any country “civilized” in Alexanders day, for example? Or in Droysen’s day?
Was the Mughal Empire “civilized”? Or the Roman Empire that our host studies?
“In Tarn’s day, his country had been a pivotal member in a war that killed approximately 21 million people in a little under 4 years.”
In the 1940s that country was a pivotal member of a war that killed several times as many people, did that make it less civilised? Would it have been more civilized if it had declared neutrality? Norway was involved in this second war, but Sweden stayed neutral, did that make it more civilized?
What do you mean by the word “civilized”? Obviously not the usual definitions about large-scale organisation, urban areas, writing, bureaucracy, law and order, and so on.
“What do you mean by the word “civilized”? Obviously not the usual definitions about large-scale organisation, urban areas, writing, bureaucracy, law and order, and so on.”
That’s clearly not the way Tarn is using it though, considering the Achamenid Empire had all of those things, so how could a guy from a backwater balkans-kingdom possibly be “civilizing”?
Arilou, I agree. That is why I started off by saying that Alexander had left it too late to do any civilizing in the Persian Empire: it was already civilized.
I suspect that Tarn wanted a justification for Alexanders invasion, found this one to hand, and chose to ignore the fact that it didn’t really apply.
“What exactly do you mean by the word “civilized” in this sentence?”
I was using it in terms of ‘not doing cultural practices which we deem as barbaric’, which I interpreted as the definition you were using when listing the things in Tarn’s day. Things like ‘engages in human sacrifice’ or ‘horrendously mismanaged a famine (in the most generous interpretation of events)’. Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted that.
I stopped short of WW2 (and aligned stuff like the Bengal Famine) as it happened shortly after Tarn’s death, so I didn’t think I could reasonably connect him to it.
Though you do raise an interesting ethical point. If there are horrible things happening, and you can stop them by doing horrible things yourself, what is the more civilised thing to do? I suppose my initial response is a rather glib ‘civilised people shouldn’t be doing these horrible things in the first place’, though I acknowledge that it’s a complex and nuanced subject.
And, no, broadly I don’t think any of these polities would live up to my personal conception of ‘civilised’ in this discussion. I’m not entirely certain our civilisation does today. I suppose I conceptualise it as an ideal to be strived for, with many different shades along the way in many different measures (i.e. we might rank quite well at ‘people dying from being sacrificed’, but not so hot on ‘currently contributing to a mass extinction’).
I think it largely depends on the target of those horrible things. If you do horrible things to someone that themselves would do horrible things to others if your acts hadn’t prevented that, then it’s pretty much net neutral. If you do horrible things to someone who aren’t capable of doing committing those, then that is a clear negative.
Of course it would be quite difficult to target and limit your horrible acts accurately. And Europeans would also had the means to civilize rest of the world with much less destruction if they had bothered.
Permit me to point out that said 21 million dead is considerably less than fifty percent of the adult male population in the combatant countries at the time.
I’ll absolutely permit you to point out that 21 million dead is considerably less than fifty percent of the adult male population at the time (though doing so in just 4 years is a feat).
I’m not sure that’s all that much of a resounding endorsement of our civility.
I’m sure that a society in which 10% of the adult male population are killed in the odd unlucky generation is a great improvement on, and more civilized than, a society in which 50% of the adult male population are killed in every generation.
Just because something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it can’t be better than something else.
@ad9 Oh absolutely. I don’t see it as a binary ‘civilised/not civilised’ measure, but one of degrees.
My point was more that I don’t think we were ‘civilised’ enough at that point to use it as a reasonable justification for our imperialist ambitions, and was listing things that I saw as knocking our ‘civilised’ score down a fair few pegs.
Not that I’d necessarily think that any ‘degree of civilised’ would justify that degree of Imperialism, but that was the argument that was being made.
You seem to be very sure of what would happen to a person, who was dropped naked into the North Sentinel Island. How do you know?
The inhabitants are known to kill outsiders that step foot on the island. As far as I am aware, you can count the exceptions on one hand.
Whatever their flaws, the Sentinel Islanders have pursued a policy that’s maintained their survival as a distinct ethnic group for something like 50k years, which is more than a lot of other groups have managed.
If the Native Americans had been as hostile to outsiders as the Sentinelese are, maybe they wouldn’t have experienced a 90% depopulation and the loss of their countries to colonialism.
The North Sentinelese also number only something like a hundred at the highest current estimates and IIRC the number is dropping.
But yes, certainly if everybody enacted genocide on members of other countries as soon as they meet the world would be considerably different.
I would suggest, however, that it would be likely to be a significantly more violent world, and not actually an improvement.
Though to make it clear, what I am saying is that the North Sentinelese go too far in the other fire by *completely* excluding outsiders. There’s a middle ground.
If the Native Americans had been as hostile to outsiders as the Sentinelese are,
What makes you think they weren’t? They did, in fact, besiege and attack the first settlers at Jamestown, the people Columbus left in Hispaniola were all killed before he returned on his second voyage, and so on. But the other side had a superior ability to concentrate force, so they won. Likewise, if the Indian government had any particular reason to take over North Sentinel Island, and exhibit its inhabitants in monkey cages in they felt like it, they could.
In the meantime, the Sentinelese know nothing of the rest of the world, for they have never talked to anyone from it. Their ideas about how it is sensible to treat an unarmed fellow man must be based on their experiences with each other.
And their experiences with each other teach them that you should kill anyone you can and hide from anyone you can’t. That should tell you what life on North Sentinel is like.
“the North Sentinelese go too far in the other fire by *completely* excluding outsiders.”
Given what happens to isolated populations when exposed to the rest of the world’s diseases, they probably *don’t* go too far. Sustained contact could mean a third of them or more dying in short order.
Given what happens to isolated populations when exposed to the rest of the world’s diseases
Perhaps not a lot in these days of vaccines and antibiotics. Not that the Sentinelese could know either way.
“maybe they wouldn’t have experienced a 90% depopulation”
Utterly impossible.
Let us take the story of Squanto. We tend to focus on the help and Thanksgiving, but before that, he was kidnapped from his tribe by a ship of whites and sold as a slave. He was ransomed by a friar, went to England to work in the shipyards in search of a voyage back, and finally found one.
To learn that his entire family and most of his tribe were dead. The next ship of whites that came along, they had brutally murdered, BUT one had been carrying a disease. Which is obviously unknown (ancient diseases are hard enough when we do have a description of the symptoms, impossible here), but it was brutal.
He managed to find a place to stay with another tribe.
The Pilgrims found a ghost village with the dead lying unburied.
Any contact at all would have caused the death toll, and then, well, all that open land. . . .
This is an excellent, but long, history of Squanto that I stumbled onto a few years ago (the blog also has some Algonquian linguistics work, for those interested):
https://miidashgeget.wordpress.com/2021/11/24/playing-his-own-game/
“Perhaps not a lot in these days of vaccines and antibiotics.”
Antibiotics don’t work on viruses and we don’t have vaccines for all the viral diseases.
Plus, good luck convincing a completely alien culture to let you stick them all with needles for some reason.
It probably is a sad fact that the only way to save the American natives would have been to completely forbid exploration from Eurasia. Even if all the contact had been completely peaceful trading, after Columbus discovered America the destruction of the natives would have been prevented only if a god had erected a ring of fire around Americas for the next half a millennia until knowledge of diseases and vaccination had advanced enough to limit the devastation.
Yesterday I read the wiki article for “Russian conquest of Siberia”. Diseases like smallpox destroyed up to 80% of some tribal peoples, and these were people that had always been connected to the rest of Eurasia, only protected by Siberian isolation.
@ Mary Catelli:
There’s also the example of the Amazon people. When the Spanish under Francisco de Orellana sailed down the river, they saw bustling towns and cities along the banks. By the time the next Europeans visited, the towns and cities were all gone, and Orellana’s reports were dismissed as wildly exaggerated fantasies for hundreds of years until archaeology suggested he was right after all. Obviously there’d been no big European invasions in between, but new diseases had been enough to wipe out the civilisation nevertheless.
Their ideas about how it is sensible to treat an unarmed fellow man must be based on their experiences with each other.
@AD9,
This isn’t true- as the Max Roser article linked above points out (and this was an article posted specifically to argue *in favor* of high war deaths among ‘pre state societies’), the Andamanese are at the *low end* of violent death rates among pre-state societies, at 20 per 100k.
20 per 100k is certainly higher than the homicide rate in America today, but it’s about as high as the homicide rate for Black Americans specifically in the mid 2010s (considered a relatively low crime period), or for Americans as a whole in 1800, or . I doubt you would want to argue that white americans would be justified in setting up a colonial rule over Black Americans because their homicide rate is higher than one would like.
I would expect, on the contrary, that the Sentinelese habit of killing outsiders on sight is a bit of learned wisdom based on the experience of seeing other related ethnic groups (including other Andamanese islanders, and maybe based on memories of what happened to their kin on the mainland) get completely swallowed up by the outsiders, and their unwillingness to share the same fate.
Though to make it clear, what I am saying is that the North Sentinelese go too far in the other fire by *completely* excluding outsiders. There’s a middle ground.
Yes, I’d actually entirely agree with that statement, and I was being kind of flippant in my remark above (mostly out of annoyance with, presumably, a Brit lecturing other cultures about how they should be more open to outsiders). I don’t actually think the Sentinelese policy towards outsiders is the ideal (it’s at the extreme of what a closed society looks like) any more than I think modern English immigration policy is ideal. What I would say in a more serious vein is something like this:
1) there are costs and benefits to being both ‘closed’ and ‘open’ to outsiders,
2) my own preferences are much more ‘closed’ than those of liberals or progressives would be, although not nearly to the extent of the Sentinelese,
3) I think that the successive waves of migration into South Asia, which displaced and swallowed up the distant relatives of the Sentinelese (completely in the linguistic sense, partially in the genetic sense) was a sad thing, and I sympathize with Andamanese Islanders who might not want to suffer the same fate, and
4) in the last 15 years or so, the division between closed and open worldviews (or more narrowly, what you could call nationalist vs. cosmopolitan) has become a major fault line of global politics, which I would expect to have made people (not just me, but people in general) aware of the costs of excessive openness, and to make them less inclined to lecture others about how they should be more open and cosmopolitan. Especially in England. Maybe I’m expecting too much though.
Maybe, if you only include the most exceptional warlike outliers in the sample, it is possible to achieve such numbers, it is possible to reach those numbers. However, that would tell us just as much as if one would take the most exceptional peaceful outliers of pre-state societies (which also exist); or compare Nazi-Germany and the USSR ducking it out on the Eastern front with the average pre-state society.
> The Legacy of Philip II
Speaking of differing views of key historical figures, I recall a history professor who maintained that Philip III was as despicable as Hitler, a fascist in all but name, crushing the freedom of the Greek city-states and turning them into cogs of a war machine.
> Alexander the Uninteresting
Wow. “Uninteresting” seems like an overreaction on someone’s part. He may not have been a god in human form, but it seems perfectly natural to look at his career and wonder “what the heck happened there”. Even if the conclusion is that on a personal level he’s just another kid high on self-actualization, plugged into a pre-made fighting system a generation ahead of anything between the Tiber and the Yellow River, there’s a huge chunk of history that revolves around him.
What happens to humans in those circumstances? I wish Plutarch had had a more scientific mindset, and not hacked his data to support his preferred conclusion.
There was a general trend, after WWI, even more so after 1945, to get away from ascribing “great things”, I. e., major changes in the course of history, to any one person. That trend was particularly pronounced in Europe, I think, and especially so in Germany.
It was something kf an overcorrection – some few people do change the course of history with their choices, not all of them politcal or military leaders – but the trend was to look at systemic causes. Reasons for events, and decisions, that had little to do with individual personality.
In this instance the “truth”, insofar as we can even determine that, tends to be between these poles. Alexander did change the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamian world quite thoroughly, but the man isn’t thinkable without the culture that made him what and who he was. What he attempted, his successes and failures, are all the product of both systemic causes and impetuses as well as who Alexander was.
It’s fairly trivial to show that some people really do have an oversized impact. Norman Borlung, Yuan Longing, and M. S. Swaminathan are credited on Wikipedia with the Green Revolution, and while from my own education there’s a lot of people behind them their political activism and scientific clout really did both speed and implement the technology in time to save *billions* of lives, which is almost unquestionably the biggest impact on history in recent memory. A world with a starving “third world” would be…very different. Maybe catastrophically so.
Then we have that dude who invented Freon and leaded Gasoline. Both.
So yeah, people can have huge impacts. Just a truism.
The classic argument is that while they were the ones who *did it* that doesen’t mean someone else wouldn’t have: This tends to get especially notable with scientific discoveries because a lot of the time you’ll find that there’s a ton of people working on similar ideas in paralell, and the “big names” were just the ones who got there first (or in not a few cases, got noticed first)
A world with a starving third world would be different, but would it be that different if the discovery had came 5 years later? Maybe? Maybe not.
Certainly feasible, but in a few cases the timing is super tight. For the best example I know, we only started bombarding things with Neutrons in 1933. Fermi thought he had made elements 93 and 94, but a small group of dissident voices including Noddack, Hahn, Meitner, and Strassman discovered he’d actually added the masses of two elements instead and proved fission…in 1939.
It took only six-seven years to make the first nuclear bomb and twelve to get to H bombs. We’re talking within years of missing WW2 or theoretically being a known weapon *earlier*. The idea the bomb project was a unique wartime crash project is still true, but the unlocking science of fission was the hard part, with that done it actually made it theoretically rather simple. It just required a few significant discoveries that almost got delayed for years.
Man when you apply stuff like this to the idea of a ‘Great Filter’ as a solution to the Fermi Paradox you get some really rather scary thoughts.
Perhaps if people had gone into WW2 with nuclear weapons they’d be more hesitant to use them, but if they’d just started with enough to use them tactically before escalating to city-destroying bombs right as war hits fever pitch…
Doesn’t bear thinking about.
The classic argument is that while they were the ones who *did it* that doesen’t mean someone else wouldn’t have: This tends to get especially notable with scientific discoveries because a lot of the time you’ll find that there’s a ton of people working on similar ideas in paralell, and the “big names” were just the ones who got there first (or in not a few cases, got noticed first)
That might be true in some cases, but wrt Alexander specifically, I don’t think any reasonable observer c. 357 BC have predicted that the entire Persian Empire would be conquered by the Greeks in just a few years.
@Ynneadwraith
If the WWII combatants had started with “small” nuclear arsenals (something out of 1950 or so, say a few dozen to a few hundred double digit kiloton bombs each) then the likely outcome would be one side or the other smashing up the enemy’s frontline armies and logistical capability to the point where the fighting would become impossible.
Global nuclear winter wasn’t really on the table and I doubt civilization would collapse entirely, at least in the sense of “city-building technological culture.” Obviously if the war had been won by a nuclear armed Nazi Germany or something, one might not wish to call the result ‘civilizated.’
To be “Great” probably also requires factors such as people still talking about you after your death, and/ or if you mention the name people know exactly who you are talking about?
(Which since 1945 there have been few of.)
You mean Thomas Midgley, Jr.? He also invented a mechanical device to help him get out of bed after he was paralyzed by polio; then he was found dead, strangled by his own machine.
There is a quote somewhere along the lines of “Men make their history, but in circumstances not of thier own making.”
Marx, from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The same introductory paragraphs that give us “Hegel says somewhere that that great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.'”
Also of course that was the Marxist line. Everything must be accomplished in groups.
That is more or less exactly wrong. “Men make their history” is the first part of the sentence.
It is entirely right. Marx treated it all as “class struggle” which is definitionally by groups. Furthermore, if people thought they were operating as individuals, they were suffering from “false consciousness.”
Also what Marx said doesn’t change how Marxist historians used history.
Marx treated it all as “class struggle” which is definitionally by groups.
Believing that class conflict drives much or most of history isn’t incompatible with individual agency, any more than believing in (say) national conflict, or ethnic conflict or religious conflict or ideological conflict is.
As for Marxist historians, plenty of them (inside the socialist bloc and outside of it) devoted quite a lot of time towards documenting the contributions and significance of important individuals, their beliefs in class conflict notwithstanding.
That they were not all uniform does not change the direction of their influence.
The trend in historiography you describe, with regard to Germany, is very interesting, considering how much influence one particular German had in precipitating the first World War.
Wait…Philip…the third? That’s Philip Arrhidaeus, the mentally handicapped half-brother of Alexander.
Surely he meant either Philip II or Philip V.
Gah, typo on my part. Yes, Philip the 2nd, father of Alexander the Great. I even copied and quoted your heading, but my eyes glazed over the extra ‘I’ when I typed it in. Sorry about that.
This is a bit off topic, but a suggestion/request for a future post or series of posts:
What was the role of disease in ancient warfare? I’ve been reading about the 30 years war recently and it’s very striking how these armies are just melting under the weight of plague, needing to be constantly reinforced with fresh troops just to maintain themselves. It seemed like an army that couldn’t do so would just cease to exist, often before accomplishing anything at all.
But in the ancient record, there’s tons of stories–including Alexander, which is why I was thinking about it–where you have large armies going deep into enemy territory with little hope of reinforcement and not really suffering the same issues. I can think of a lot of possible solutions to this conundrum (not least of which is I’m just wrong about something), but I’d be very curious to see a practicing historian lay out the current scholarship on the topic.
Seconded.
I believe that the first war in which more soldiers succumbed to battle field injuries than diseases was WWII.
Happened a bit before that actually. The Franco-Prussian war is often cited as the first ‘big’ war where this was true.
Thirty Years War is after the introduction of the Black Plague.
I suspect that the disease influence is extremely variable. Depends on where the troops are from, where they’re campaigning, how many there are, *what’s happening to the people in the areas they’re moving through* (likely the most important factor), and many other factors.
Alexander may have gotten really lucky on the troop front, since he’s taking a large army far foreign for years on end. This sounds like a prime candidate for your army to be swallowed by odd diseases.
I’m excited to be reading the first part of the first part of a two part series on Alexander the 3rd.
Which is also sort of the first part of the sixth part of a five-part series on the sunset of the Hellenistic era and the sunrise of the Roman Empire.
At some point we’re going to get a series with the act structure of Homestuck, and we’re all going to love it.
My own reading has given me the impression that, on top of his excellence as a general, Alexander was personally incredibly valiant. Brave almost to the point of madness, as if he believed himself supernaturally invincible.
Is that true, or just mythmaking?
And if it is true, was it a good thing for his army? I assume that kind of courage is a real morale-booster, but it would’ve been a serious problem if he’d actually gotten himself killed…
He led cavalry charges from the front and his basic strategy was to find the enemy leader and shove his personal cavalry wing down their throat.
Yes, he was personally brave, and it certainly helped morale. But so was everyone next to him. Bravery and valor aren’t rare virtues, in all honesty, and those without them simply didn’t succeed in the ancient worlds battlefields.
That’s not the way people tell it; the accounts I’ve read make it sound like he was the bravest person on any of his battlefields. I’m just not sure how far to trust those accounts.
He definitely seems braver than Darius, but that might have more to do with Darius than with him.
Political power. In a society where warfare is a critical part of kingship and bravery is a defining trait-and where if you mouth off there are very few taboos against killing you-it’s incredibly profitable and rewarding to engage in mythmaking for that leadership. This persisted past Alexanders death because each Diadochi was a heir to Alexander they all derived legitimacy through a reflection of him.
To put it another way-say there was some insane Thracian who advanced out of position to save a friend, fending off a dozen enemies and risking almost certain death, but he was poor, had no rich family members, and had no chance of advancement in Alexanders society or army. We’d never hear of him. He could be the strongest, bravest person in the entire army, and he’d fade into history. Even if someone thought to mention it the chances we’d keep track of that record is small-and we can actually see this because we *do* see those records every once in a while. They’re only preserved when our historical record is truly exceptional. Re: Vorenus and Pullo, two random characters we can see preserved solely because they exist in an exceptionally well preserved work (for multiple reasons). I suspect actual historical works were rife with random accounts of people like this, but we’ve lost many of them in the ancient telephone game of history.
Histories are written by and for power. To challenge it. To establish it. To justify it. That’s an inescapable level of analysis when reviewing the sources.
But *even within that* we can tell that Alexander really was brave and talented by what he actually does. Even accepting some fun little pet theories I have about body doubles and deceptions lost to time, he led his army from the front and was the tip of the spear; he had to be. It’s just that we can maybe trust that a person had a quality-we can’t really trust that he had the *most* of that quality just because it was written down. Particularly when being “most brave” isn’t a demonstrable thing anyway-bravery is something you have in that you aren’t motivated by fear, but you can absolutely be not-motivated-by-fear and still do things that *appear* fearful. Alexander charging headlong at Darius and leaving his army to die would also be bravery. It’s not something that can be tested in hindsight except by it’s clear failure; there isn’t a “most brave” thing, just a cowardly one.
Alexander definitely lead from the front. His role at the head of the cavalry most notably, but his willingness to be the first over the walls in a siege shows that this went beyond practical military necessity and into personal aptitude. As for if it was a good thing? Well it worked for him, given that he didn’t die in battle, though if he had we’d probably be singing a different tune.
The thing is, Alexander’s entire “theory of victory” so to speak was “Alexander leads the Companion Cavalry to deliver the decisive blow” so if Alexander’s troops see him as reluctant to deal that critical blow, that’s going to cause morale issues. (Witness that when the Old Guard broke at the Battle of Waterloo, that was pretty much it for the entire French Army, which fled the field, and indeed IIRC it ended up being the rare kind of battle that decides the entire war. It’s not clear if a cry actually went up that the Guard had broken, but the news spreading certainly seems to have utterly trashed French morale.)
In other words, the problem is that if Alexander hadn’t been so valiant, it could easily have been just as bad as had Alexander fallen in battle.
IIRC the fact that the Prussians came and hit Napoleons in the flank and IIRC in the back may have something to do with it
Give me night or give me Blücher
That had something to do with it, certainly, but it was the flight of the Old Guard that precipitated the final collapse.
I think it’s a bit of both. It’s been a while, but IIRC it could either have been Blücher approaching or more French troops. It’s not particularly difficult to imagine that the shock of the Old Guard breaking *then* the additional blow of an entire extra fresh enemy army approaching was what caused such an extreme collapse of the Grand Army.
Had it actually been French reinforcements, then it’s possible the Grand Army could have rallied, and Wellington himself admitted the battle had been damn close.
Thing is, Blucher reached the field before Napoleon threw in the Guard–that assault was essentially his last throw of the dice, trying to break Wellington before Blucher could bring his full army to bear on Napoleon’s right flank.
Sure, Napoleon knew that he was in trouble. His troops, however, almost certainly did not, since they were kind of busy fighting and didn’t exactly have access to whatever reports Napoleon was getting.
Which is my point- if you were conscript #46745 or something, you hear that the elite of the army has already broken and now you can see fresh enemy troops arriving, you’re tired and have been fighting for hours now…you’re going to be tempted to say “sod this for a game of soldiers” and leg it.
Which pretty much exactly fits what happened – not only did morale break, but cohesion shattered, meaning the army more-or-less dissolves as it flees, to the point that I don’t *think* they managed to rally until they reached Paris.
If he led from the front in two-dozen battles and no one managed to kill him, I’d say he was quite good at controlling his risk exposure.
“Thebans and the Athenians, which Alexander hammered the cavalry through”
Err have you not magicked away the other Greeks between the Athenians and Thebans? What of the Theban cavalry or the Athenian cavalry. This compressed narrative seems to fairly leaning on the side of all when as Philip planed. It not like the man never lost a battle.
I’m not going to claim Alexander was merely average general, but when I saw you argue that “a general that just gets lucky every time is a good general”, I am reminded of a quote from Carl Sagan discussing confirmation bias:
“My favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War II with U.S. flag officers. So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it’s a general who’s won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning a battle is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2, two battles l/4, three l/8, four l/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32—which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles—purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles…?”
You also say, “A good general cannot be rash or reckless”, but while Alexander might not have been maximally reckless, he does seem to have taken quite a lot more risks than seem strictly necessary. In general I would argue we should expect the most successful people in any field to be risk takers, not because risk taking is an unalloyed good, but because risk taking creates opportunities to get lucky (which unfortunately are also opportunities to get unlucky).
It seems like a rather useless definition; boxing scores offer an illustrative analogy.
If you look up a list of top boxing contenders you can see that there are quite a few who will have undefeated records of not just 10 but upwards of 15 or even 25 without a defeat. This isn’t just reining champions, there are contenders below the top with such records. This isn’t due to some fluke resulting in an age of boxing demigods flooding the earth. It’s just that top boxing talent tends to prefer matches where they are the clear favorite. A peer fight at the top is a huge commitment of time, a risk of injury and means one of them will finish with diminished standing. If the reward isn’t there to justify risking their career they can just pick less difficult fights. The win-loss records tell us nothing about their talents, they merely reflect how often the boxers risk difficult fights vs easy ones.
If a general wins 10 or even 100 battles, it tells us nothing beyond the fact that they had winnable battles. Generals make their own circumstances to an extent but the number of victories doesn’t tell you how much is talent. A good general might have reason to accept risk of defeat on many occasions, a bad general might never have need to risk defeat.
This analogy doesn’t work for a general who was also the national leader of the state of Macedonia and has set himself the target of not only subduing the entire Balkan peninsula (including re-subduing the whole of Greece, which until a couple of decades earlier mocked Macedonia for its irrelevance), but also the entire Middle East region plus a big part of South Asia. And then *succeeding* in that through a decade or more of unremitting warfare – sieges, skirmishes and pitched battles. That’s not a heavyweight beating a couple of good opponents and then settling down for a career of knocking down easy marks. That’s a middleweight knocking out a couple of other middleweights and then spending a decade taking on and beating all comers at any weight. If you survive that undefeated you’re indubitably the best at what you do.
It doesn’t make you a good person but it does make you the best boxer.
I’m reasonably confident that no American generals were kings of Macedonia.
When our host points out Alexanders “undefeated” record, I trust in it’s significance not because he was a king of Macedonia but because I trust in the judgement of our host. He wouldn’t mention this record unless he thought many of those victories were not a given.
Our host discussed the battle of Sellasia a couple months back. Antigonus III Donus reigned for 10 years, nearly as long as Alexander, and seems to have only had two major pitched battles, both in the last year of his life. Our host seems to imply Cleomenes was foolish for going toe to toe with Macedon. It’s likely that the fight against Illyria was even more of a mismatch. So that seems to provide a simple counter example to the assertion that a king of Macedon must necessarily fight difficult opponents.
I think boxing is a pretty terrible analogy here. Fundamentally, Alexander had one truly stunning feat: beating Darius. After he did *that*, he inherited Darius’ army, which made things comparatively easy from that point forward. Less like real boxing and more like some martial arts fantasy story where you defeat the big boss and absorb his power or something.
Fundamentally, Alexander had one truly stunning feat: beating Darius.
…Which in reality was the outcome of lots of different truly stunning feat.
You might as well say “Fundamentally, Rome only had one stunning feat: conquering the Roman Empire.”
After he did *that*, he inherited Darius’ army, which made things comparatively easy from that point forward.
Alexander kept using his own army in his conquests. He didn’t use Darius’ “army” — whatever that’s supposed to mean, because the Persians didn’t have a single army, they had a series of ad hoc forces raised for particular campaigns and largely disbanded again once the war was over.
the Persians didn’t have a single army, they had a series of ad hoc forces raised for particular campaigns and largely disbanded again once the war was over.
I would have thought that system would have made it easier for an invader to recruit troops from the occupied regions of the empire?
I would have thought that system would have made it easier for an invader to recruit troops from the occupied regions of the empire?
Probably, but it’s all moot anyway, because Alexander didn’t use Persian contingents in his army, even after defeating Darius. (He was raising some Asian phalangites when he died, but these never saw combat, and anyway were being incorporated into Alexander’s army, rather than being an inheritance from Darius.)
If he used Persian Empire contingents in his army of conquest, then integrating them would have been pretty difficult.
Different ways of fighting, and different roles.
Where would he put Persian cavalry? With his own? Separate? Both would cause problems.
Since he kept conquering, he solved it somehow.
More ammo for the “great general” thesis, as opposed to “he just used what he inherited”.
Well the end of your comment went in a different direction than I thought it would. See I would call “only fighting battles you’re confident you can win” to be a key skill in a general! Avoiding battles under unfavorable circumstances and forcing battles under favorable circumstances says a lot about talent as a general. (Less true with boxers, though correctly evaluating opponents isn’t nothing.)
Also, unlike boxers you don’t necessarily have a choice about picking your battles.
Or rather as you point out, picking your battles is a very, very important skill for a general so it can show skill as a general.
But also the other side and just circumstances in general have a say in the issue so you’d expect that sometimes you have to fight even if it’s not under the circumstances you’d like and a better general will win in those difficult circumstances.
Boxers aren’t forced to fight tough opponents in the same way. They do have some pressure to do so, because if they only pick easy wins they may get less money and fame, where a big name match has potentially greater rewards. But it’s not the same as the fate of your rule or the country is on the line.
“See I would call “only fighting battles you’re confident you can win” to be a key skill in a general”
Look at the article on Perseus a couple weeks ago. He avoided battles where his advantage was not overwhelming and in doing so lost the war. A good general simply can not guarantee success (outside of lopsided conflicts).
I suppose a broader way of saying it would be knowing which battles to fight.
Previous articles talked about both generals correctly refusing battle when it wasn’t in their interest and being forced to battle at a disadvantage because the alternative was worse.
But even if we can see if the choice was correct in hindsight it’s not always going to be clear beforehand.
Heck, sometimes it’s not clear in hindsight.
Setting things up in advance so you’re not forced to choose between battle at a disadvantage or something worse in the first place is also an importnat skill, but a different one
And it’s also not wholly within your control.
Refusing a boxing match is a lot easier, and has a lot fewer consequences, than refusing to fight an army.
I think the point is that it doesn’t entirely matter if it’s luck or being *that* good if somebody has such a large amount of luck that they never actually run out of luck.
Yes, on top of the fact that the required amount of luck starts to get to improbable levels if we posit that someone like Alexander III had only luck on his side. Take, for example, Alexander repeatedly reining in his cavalry so they wouldn’t gallop off the field in pursuit of the beaten enemy in front of them and leave the infantry to die. Dr. Devereaux points out, correctly, that in the roughly 2500 years of recorded military history, this is a problem that’s come up again and again. Even quite successful generals have problems with it sometimes.
Alexander? Never. His cavalry are tightly under his control and he can control them smoothly. It’s very hard to explain that by pure luck, because there is a direct cause and effect relationship between the ability to do that and a lot of the elements of good generalship.
If your definition of ‘luck’ is so broad that it can plausibly encompass things like “do your troops consistently heed you and serve you when in another army they might not, even with the best will in the world,” then you wind up in a place where a LOT of the things we normally agree to be skill are probably a matter of luck.
Ah, shall we assume spherical armies in a frictionless battlefield as well?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
One problem with the “battle as coin toss” model is that warfare is a competitive sport and the difficulties faced by each side are often not symmetrical. Most of the key skills of generalship involve working around various limitations and obstacles that would otherwise lower your odds of victory or result in you having to fight a nearly unwinnable battle.
Consider that we could argue that chess players are much like generals, and victory or defeat is effectively random… except that Elo ratings exist and have some degree of predictive power. If I play a chess match against a grandmaster, I have an absolutely overwhelming chance of being defeated. And we can identify the skills that cause this. The grandmaster is much more familiar with chess moves. They plan more moves ahead. They’re assuredly going to recognize and probably avoid any traps I may set.
Issuing Elo ratings for generals is impractical, but that doesn’t mean the idea doesn’t transfer correctly.
“D.W. Engels”
For as much as it has become a go to hand book it really needs a re issue with a some admissions on some key mistakes. Cart capacity, the laugh out load funny bit about horses not eating or grazing at night, and his dependance on Lefebvre des Noëttes. Also as I recall he also rather abuses some references to camels from British India service and cart ranges for the US colonial army.
Yes, Engels is, alas, old and long in need of revision. But it is what there is. I have some critiques of Engels in my dissertation which will probably make it into the book project, but I am not a Hellenic/Hellenistic historian, so replacing him is someone else’s job, I fear.
Seems like it should be his own job. Casson did what 2 or 3 revisions of Ships and Seamanship once his book became the go to desk reference and I suspect were he alive he would address the Carthaginian maybe or maybe not warships and disposable ram find of the supposed Marsala Punic war ships.
How did the logistics for this work? Was he getting regular shipments of supplies all the way from Greece, or was he “living off the land?” If its the latter, how much of his nonstop aggressive warfare was driven by a need to keep finding new places to conquer to feed his army?
All ancient (and medieval and early modern, and even later) armies ‘lived off the land’. Forage for the animals is impossible to transport any distance (and food is not much better). Engels goes into detail (as noted above, needs some correction), but Alexander levied supplies as he went He did receive periodic troop reinforcements from Macedon.
“All ancient (and medieval and early modern, and even later) armies ‘lived off the land’.”
In case of Alexander the Big (if you don´t like the implications of “Great”, the original Greek nickname “Megas” is a standard word covering “Great”, but also “Big”, “Large”…), he was waging war against Persian Empire.
Which was collapsing under his attack quite rapidly.
Did Alexander´s army have to spread out thin to rob and extort food supplies dispersed in villages for peasants´ own needs? Slowing them down and causing losses to guerrillas?
Persian Empire had their logistic infrastructure and taxes. Some of it included royal storehouses.
Did the Persian authorities on the frontline fight for Persian Empire and, like, destroy the contents of Persian storehouses to prevent them from falling in Alexander´s hands? Or did they defect already on approach of Alexander, delivering the government storehouses intact to Alexander´s army and ensuring Alexander advanced as if on his own country – well prepared own country – without needing to spread out to forage/requisition?
In case of Alexander the Big (if you don´t like the implications of “Great”, the original Greek nickname “Megas” is a standard word covering “Great”, but also “Big”, “Large”…), he was waging war against Persian Empire
Given that Alexander was by all accounts not very tall, “big” is very much the wrong translation.
How about “courageous, magnificent, magisterial and keeping enemies in fear, but people in obedience”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible#Nickname
In this case, “big” becomes something of a metaphor, in that it suggests that he was of much significance and impact. The fact that we’re still talking about him 2350 years later is alone evidence that we’re not talking about his physical stature.
He would have had foraging parties out most of the time. The thing is, how it tended to work is you’d send large enough foraging parties out that half the foraging party could be on guard while the other half did the actual foraging. (For example the average Roman foraging party was an entire Legion- so around a quarter of the average Roman army- so most guerrillas would have problems. )
Our host has a post on foraging here as part of a series on logistics.
https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/
Yes, yes. That is usual, typical foraging. In enemy land, including foraging food dispersed in villages. Plus some discussion of marching in own country – including Romans, who relied on cooperation of local elites rather than sending out foraging parties.
But Alexander fought in unusual conditions, including rapid collapse of Persian state and defection of a lot of Persians.
So, did Alexander´s logistics often include capturing intact centralized stockpiles of enemy food (collected as tax in peacetime)?
Cities which surrendered to him were usually required to provide food for his army.
A dark irony, for a post on Alexander, that we are called to drink! so much.
From my understanding of the Man, a Damm fine general and proper inheritor AS a General of his Fathers work AS a General so good job.
Phillip Did the work of forming his Army and State for it, the foundations, and Alexnder used them to exceeded expectations, but then over extend himself.
Half baked fucking mess as a administrator.
and King in the normal sense over extension and mess of inheritance,
Course I will give some credit to the fact that…. the job of the HEIR of Alexander, Napoleon, Hannibal, and the rest is so much horrifically harder then their Predecessor, because they were not THE big Man THEN when people were first learning of them, to understand the impact.
having a young child not yet old enough, or trained to actually INHERIT right there…
who has THESE Legacys to inherit and live up to….
Course…
woe to your Kingdom to you who have a child ruler and all that.
course if they had lasted long enough to get a Good enough Heir? who knows.
Not really Caesar, Agustus had Mark Antony and others to win the half gasp of the Second Civil war for him, then just prove the better political operator of the mess after for the third of those along with his one general I forget the name of. Agrippa I think? might be someone else.
So that.
I love that Orosius was already dunking on Alexander and the Diadochi back in the day (even though “back in the day” was still like 700 years after the fact)
I listed to some history podcast episodes on Martin Luther recently, and they both made the case that Luther is a rare of example of a non-military “Great”. I think that Greatness comes from a combination of living at the right historical moment and having the right resources to be able to change the world, but also being the unique person who could take advantage of that. Luther had to be living right where he was, at the rise of the printing press but before everyone understood the power of the pamphlet, to change the world like he did. But he also needed to be Martin Luther, to have that combination of courage, self-surety, a talent for writing in understandable and amusing ways, and a mastery of the social media of his day.
That he didn’t murder anyone other than a dog that one time is just a bonus.
You should look up what he did during the rebellions collectively called the ‘Peasants’ War’ in Germany and the way he encouraged people to treat Jews. Multiplying his influence over other people’s actions by the amount of time and effort he put in on those things… Well, I’m not going to blame him for the people who died in the Wars of Religion because that was largely other people refusing to allow religious change.
But one might partway blame him for people who died in a pogrom or an exceptionally brutal suppression campaign that he encouraged.
Then, we’ll look at Alexander the civil leader – was he dedicated to the ‘unity of mankind’ or otherwise a particularly effective or gifted administrator?
I don’t know if you’re planning to mention this in the next post, but I’ll point out here that Alexander was at least smart enough to realise that his empire needed the buy-in of non-Greek elites if it was to function, which puts him ahead of practically all his Macedonian subordinates and successors, who generally saw Easterners as a bunch of natural slaves not worth bothering about.
I think that is an important point. Yes, Alexander III’s attempt to do the reforms needed to make his empire actually function didn’t work, but at least he tried.
I think the “nah, Alexander was just a trust fund kid who got a great army from his dad and got lucky” take is a great example of how bad human intuition is at probability.
Doing a little bit of napkin math, the odds of winning ~30 battles without a single loss is really low. Unless you give Alexander at least 3-to-1 odds on every fight, the odds of pulling off a flawless run like that start looking like the odds of winning the lottery by buying a single ticket. At that point, “Alexander was good at commanding an army and winning battles” starts looking quite a bit more plausible than “Alexander was obnoxiously lucky, but only when it came to this one area of his life”.
If you assume a 50-50 chance of winning an average battle, then the chances of winning all of 30 battles in 1 in 2 to-the-power-of thirty (1/2^30).
That is almost exactly one chance in a billion.
I’m agreeing with Marcus, I just wanted to emphasise what is meant by “really low”.
Of course, of those 30 battles only 4 were against anything even remotely resembling a peer-level competitor (Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela, and Hydaspes). I’m not sure that butchering Afghani mountain villages (which, at a stylised level, describes most of the other 26 “victories”) really counts. That’s 1/8 odds and well within the realm of observation bias.
More generally, apart from the obvious cultural bias from the fact that all our sources on this are Greek or Latin, I’ve never been entirely clear why conquering the Persian empire is, itself enough to make one great. After all, the Persians had done it (more than once – it was relatively common for the emperor to be the victor in a civil war).
More generally, apart from the obvious cultural bias from the fact that all our sources on this are Greek or Latin, I’ve never been entirely clear why conquering the Persian empire is, itself enough to make one great. After all, the Persians had done it (more than once – it was relatively common for the emperor to be the victor in a civil war).
Winning an empire in a civil war is generally easier than conquering it as a foreign invader — in the former case, you only need to kill or capture your rival and the war’s generally done; in the latter, you need to occupy the whole place.
Also worth noting that Cyrus, who founded the Persian Empire in the first place, and Darius, who faced a lot of rebellions and essentially had to conquer the empire all over again, both also got the surname “the Great”.
“I’m not sure that butchering Afghani mountain villages (which, at a stylised level, describes most of the other 26 “victories”) really counts.”
I know nothing about these battles, but it occurs to me that if the other side had thought that defeat was inevitable, they probably would not have fought, and there would not have been a battle to put into the statistics.
Even if you gave him 8-to-1 odds on every one of his battles (including the major ones), the odds of him getting a perfect streak of victories would be around 300-to-1 against him.
That’s my point – even if you stack things heavily in his favor, he would still need an astounding amount of luck to be as successful as he reportedly was purely through dumb luck.
“The question that raises, of course, is a value judgement: is it enough to merely be good at killing and destroying in order to be great?”
AIUI, modern Mongolians are more than a little proud of Genghis Khan, and have named their major airport after him, which I am sure delights Chinese visitors immeasurably. After all, he did nothing that other kings did not also do, or try to do. If he was more successful than most, that is hardly a thing to be ashamed of.
And on that note, I give everyone The HU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1gDSao1eA
likewise, how you remember Tamerlane greatly depends on what part of the world you’re in.
The officers’ academy in Benin is named after King Gezo of Dahomey (that’s King Gezo “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery” of Dahomey).
Darius is an interesting case, I think. From what I can tell he seems to have been an able, but not exceptional general who just ends up failing no matter what he does. Like, he’s clearly trying new things for each battle, it’s not as if he’s comprehensively outmanuevered, it’s just that all the things he tries *doesen’t work*. The one thing you can blame him for is potentially running away too early, and that this collapses the morale, though there’s some arguments that this at least lets him get away and try another go.
There’s a bit of a problem in that we don’t exactly know what the internal pressures he had to deal with (considering he came to power in a civil war and persian elites seems to have been relatively willing to cooperate with Alex, I think you can judge that they were significant) but OTOH he was able to come back from a couple defeats. So…?
He’s clearly not a *great* ruler. But It’s not easy to (at 2000 something years remove) pick an “Ah, THIS is where he made his mistake” kinda thing?
Just to get an understanding of what was the norm at the time, was Alexander being Chaeronea at an unusual risk to the heir to the throne, or was it standard to keep young heirs close to showcase to them how it’s done in battle?
In the counterfactual of Philip not being assassinated, but his war plans still being carried out, would Alexander have been expected to also join or would the standard of the day have been to keep him safer at home?
He was 18 or 20 at the time. He needs the troops to see him winning, or commanding well.
If he were kept off the battlefield while his father was alive the troops wouldn’t trust him when he’s the king.
If he had been 10 that would have been different.
There’s a reason a lot of princes died on the battlefield.
Yeah. This is an area where Crusader Kings can spoil us- because the assumption is that as long as there IS an heir, the heir will still be able to command more or less functional militaries and preserve the state he’s inherited, assuming competent gameplay.
With realistic monarchy, the kingdom will tend to assume that if you’re keeping the prince away from battlefields where the king and most of the ranking nobility are routinely expected to show up and participate, there’s a reason.
Alexander III had an older half-brother, Philip III. There’s a reason the older brother is so much more obscure than the younger, though. By reputation, Philip III was mentally disabled or non-neurotypical in some way. It seems to have been universally accepted that he was unfit to rule, to the point where numerous prominent warlords and kings sort of maneuvered around him and at most considered him as a source of legitimacy or as a potential ‘dynast’ whose children might be politically relevant. Hypothetically, mind you; he never had any that we know of.
We never hear of Philip being a given a military command, either by his father Philip II or by Alexander or by the various Diadochi who used Philip as a puppet ruler after Alexander’s death. This is, by clear implication, because he would have been unfit for military command and this was generally understood.
For Philip II to deliberately keep Alexander out of battle by the time he was 18 (which would have been a few years into young adulthood by ancient standards) would have strongly implied that he was unfit for command like his older half-brother Philip III. It would have been outright insulting and humiliating to Alexander and would have weakened his future ability to command confidence from other members of Philip II’s court.
Nice article, and series so far. I recently watched Historia Civilis’ Battle of Granicus so seeing this article is a very great surprise. Looking forward for more.
I also recently watched Historia Civilis’ entire Caesar series so I hoped that you also make this kind of series focusing on Julius Caesar (And maybe Augustus? Was Agrippa really that great?). You have touched it before when you said that Caesar somehow can outrun his supply lines just right to achieve strategic advantage while not harming his army. A dedicated complication of these would be nice.
Before the next article, I can’t help but wonder if Alexander’s bad rulership is mostly because… He wasn’t 40 yet. He wouldn’t even qualify for US president. That kind of wisdom may eventually come to him if he lives as long as Augustus (who isn’t also as “August” when he starts) but that’s not where history went.
“I can’t help but wonder if Alexander’s bad rulership is mostly because… He wasn’t 40 yet. He wouldn’t even qualify for US president. That kind of wisdom may eventually come to him if he lives as long as Augustus (who isn’t also as “August” when he starts) but that’s not where history went.”
And Philip II was 23 on accession, 46 when assassinated. Whereas Alexander died at 32.
Philip would have been 32 in about 350 BC.
For Philip´s career, Battle of Crocus Field, making Philip the leader of Thessaly, was 353 or 352 BC. Capture of Olynthus was 348. In 350 BC, Philip was busy in the north.
How much of the achievements that Philip did and Alexander could not repeat (making situation appropriate reforms stick, picking good men) were achievements after 350 BC, the age Alexander never reached (and would have learned to do the same, had he lived so long)?
My take on “the Great” is that, even if your father set things in motion and you bungled the what-could-have-beens you can fairly be called “great” when you reshape that much of the world that thoroughly. Does not mean it was *good* but in general I interpret “great” as applied to kings as being about sheer impact.
I once read an observation that military leaders like Yamamoto or Arthur Harris did an incredible job building up the Kido Butai or Bomber Command into formidable military forces… and then proceeded to misapply them.
From the way this is written, it seems like Alexander was the exact opposite: he could apply the formidable military force he found himself in command of, but he would not have been able to build it up.
At least Yamamoto was aware in the first place that the force he had built, though formidable, was notably insufficient to achieve the aims he was obligated to pursue.
I think it’s worth considering that Alexander III was only 18 when he *unexpectedly* became king when evaluating him. The flaws I had when I was 18 took decades to work out (if, indeed, they even have been). One could make the argument that if Alexander’s off-battlefield decisions were poor that it was largely the responsibility of his father, Philip II, for failing to prepare him adequately. As far as executing the strategy he was given with the tools he was given–which is about all one can realistically expect of an 18 year old–it seems he did splendidly. If he failed to focus on some important aspects, which later came up to bite him, well, that’s part of being 18. Unfortunately for Alexander, he had no longer had anyone above him to develop discipline and the bigger picture in statecraft.
“I think it’s worth considering that Alexander III was only 18 when he *unexpectedly* became king when evaluating him.”
No, 20. Born in July 356, became King October 336. (And ruled 12 years – died age 32 in June 323 before reaching either 33rd birthday or 13th anniversary of rule).
You are missing a great work by an American military historian Theodore Dodge https://archive.org/details/alexanderhistory00dodg. Dodge conducted an extensive research of Alexander the Great’s campaigns.
A historiography is never intended to list every work – that would be, on this sort of topic, quite impossible – but instead to list the works that shaped the field. I don’t get the sense that Dodge’s work has had that impact, regardless of its quality.
Dodge’s work absolutely shaped the field. Dodge is probably the second best source after Arrian to study Alexander the Great. Not to mention that Dodge is readily available in public domain.
Before reading this I was planning to say it was his intuition/instinct more than any one skill, so I’m glad you brought that up. But I would add as evidence of it the numerous close calls he had almost dying in battle, and managed to survive each time; which certainly shows a good deal of luck but also an uncanny ability to judge exactly where the line sits between calculated risk and recklessness.
“D.W. Engels”
Is that the cat guy, of the myth of the mediaeval cat massacres?
Extremely interesting! Alexander comes off more as an early Napoleon, or perhaps Genghis Khan, in this analysis.
Apart from the fact that both of those other two were in large or in whole part self-made men, whereas Alexander inherited a sizeable kingdom and thus was able to start waging major wars of conquest at a younger age, I’d say the comparison is quite appropriate.
> Everything [in war] looks simple; the knowledge required does not look remarkable, the strategic options are so obvious…but the simplest thing is difficult.
This really clarifies something that has been digging at me for years: it seems like every goddamn tactic the US Army teaches, from Battle Drill 1A Squad Attack to I don’t know what echelon is fix and flank, fix and flank, fix and flank.