This is the third part (I, II) of our series looking at how Carthage’s complex, multipart armies were raised and constituted. Last time, we looked at the backbone of Carthage’s armies: North African troops levied out of Carthage’s subject communities in North Africa. These fellows seem to have been directly employed by the Carthaginian state, paid for their service, equipped by the state and mustered in Carthage itself.
But beyond these troops drawn from close to the core of Carthage’s empire, we also see a pattern of Carthage mobilizing troops from more loosely and indirectly controlled places. Carthage, by the third century, had extended a limited kind of control over the two kingdoms of Numidia (Massaesylii and Massylii) and Numidian cavalry – some of the best in the Mediterranean world – becomes an important component of Carthaginian armies. Meanwhile, Carthage also maintained a presence in Spain (dramatically expanded after 237) and Iberian warriors, men drawn from the communities of the Mediterranean coast of Spain, appear in Carthaginian armies, though as we’ll see their relationship to Carthage probably undergoes some pretty significant changes.
What unites these two groups is that we probably best understand their relationship to Carthage (at least, by 218) as something less than direct control but more than simply ‘mercenaries:’ instead as we’ll see these polities are more like vassals to Carthage, but with the notable quirk that their relationship with the Carthaginian state is often channeled through Carthage’s generals, who seem to have at times been at pains to develop deep personal ties with these communities as a means of gaining access to their military resources.
But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Generals and Magistrates
Before we look at how the Numidians and Iberians end up interacting with the Carthaginian state, we need to outline very briefly who exactly is the ‘face’ of the Carthaginian state that they see.
Carthage is somewhat striking in cleanly separating its chief domestic magistrates from its generals. Whereas in the Roman Republic, the consuls were both chief magistrates and chief generals (and in a Greek polis, while those two roles might be separate, they were often held by the same sort of elites), in Carthage, the chief magistracy and the office of general appear to have been mostly on different career paths. What follows, I should note, is essentially a summary of D. Hoyos, The Carthaginians (2010)’s description, with a few sprinkles from M.J. Taylor, “Generals and judges: command, constitution and the fate of Carthage” Libyan Studies 54 (2023).
The chief magistrates in Carthage were the sufetes (Latin: sufetes for Punic shophetim (špṭm)) two of which were elected each year. Early on it seems like these fellows probably had both domestic and military responsibilities, but by the time we can see them really clearly, they really do seem limited to civil affairs at home: handling legislation, managing courts, judging lawsuits, dealing with finances and son. But even though our Latin and especially Greek sources often call these guys kings (they weren’t, they were one-year elected magistrates), they came to have very little outward facing role.
Instead, armies were led by a general, the Punic term for which was rab mahanet (rb mḥnt), translating to something like ‘army leader.’ This office and the separation of civil and military leadership probably originates in the 500s, though even into the 400s and early 300s, sufetes sometimes show up also acting as generals, but this is clearly already very rare by Aristotle’s day (d. 322). By the third century the offices appear well and truly separate. The rabbim (that’s the plural) were elected, but did not serve fixed terms: instead they seem to have served for the length of the conflict or until they failed badly enough to be sacked from command (done by the ‘court of one-hundred and four’). The office was, as Hoyos notes, enough of a prize for seekers to “pay perfectly good bribes” for it, presumably because success provided for both fame and wealth, but failure was equally punished: unsuccessful generals tended to be put on trial and crucified for their failure. It is also striking that it seems like relatively few generals go on to be sufetes – some, but not many – suggesting that the position as rab mahanet was effectively the apogee of a separate career path for the Carthaginian aristocracy (so both sufetes and the rabbim are coming from the same background, the same aristocracy, but have different careers).
But what matters for us here most of all is that the office of general was a long-term office, generally held for years. Hamilcar Barca is a general from 247 to his death in 228, holding command for just short of two decades. Moreover, these generals tend to be assigned to specific theaters for extended periods (Hamilcar is in Spain from 247 to 241, then in North Africa from 241 to 237, then in Spain from 237 to 228), acting as the ‘face’ of Carthaginian rule in the region. If you are a local ruler who borders areas of Carthaginian control, the local Carthaginian rab mahanet is going to be a factor in your calculations for many years at a time, in stark contrast to the single-year terms of Roman magistrates and pro-magistrates.
Consequently, if you were a ruler who bordered Carthage, it would make a lot of sense to develop relationships with Carthaginian generals – or more specifically, with the Carthaginian general closest to you – as much as cultivating a relationship with the Carthaginian senate (the adirim, spelled ‘drm) or the sufetes. By contrast, a foreign power looking to interact with Rome on a long-term basis really wanted to interact with the Roman Senate, which represented the continuing component of Roman foreign policy.
All of which, as we’re going to see, matters for Carthage’s vassal states, beginning with Numidia.
Beginning With Numidia
We have only modest visibility into Carthage’s relationship with the Numidians (we are, ironically, better informed about the structure of Barcid control in Spain, despite its shorter duration), but Carthage’s relationship with Numidia was clearly an important component of the Carthaginian military system.
The Numidians were a Berber people, indigenous to North Africa. This was a primarily agricultural society (with some pastoralism) – the Numidians were not, for the most part, nomads and they had some urban centers like Cirta. Initially organized into tribes, by the time we see them clearly this tribal system of organization has coalesced into two larger proto-kingdoms, Massylii (to the east) and Masaesyli (to the west), which were rivals of each other. The rule of each of these kingdoms was held by a king, but the form of government here seems to be strongly personalistic, more akin to how a Gallic tribe with a king might function than the centralized, bureaucratic monarchies of the Near East.
The Carthaginian relationship with Numidia was complex: the Carthaginians never subdued this region, but at the same time until the Romans broke the back of Carthaginian power at the end of the Second Punic War, Carthage is clearly the dominant power compared to the two Numidian kingdoms (one thing the Romans do late in the Second Punic War is facilitate the unification of those kingdoms, creating a united Numidia hostile to Carthage). In particular, Carthage can play the two Numidian polities off of each other. That means that, somewhat paradoxically, Carthage is frequently fighting in Numidia and at the same time Numidians form a key part of Carthaginian armies.
Numidian armies seem to have generally been a mix of light-armed javelin infantry and light javelin cavalry.1 The former was, so far as we can tell, of little use to Carthage (or anyone else) and I don’t believe we ever hear of Numidian infantry ever deployed abroad. But Numidian cavalry was some of the best there was. Numidian aristocrats fought on horseback as light javelin cavalry. They rode bareback and without bridles (Polyb. 3.65.6) or perhaps with only light bridles made of rushes (Strabo 17.3.7) on fairly small horses (Livy 35.11.6-11), wielding javelins and a light shield covered (or perhaps made of) hide (Strabo 17.3.7 again), but generally – it seems – without armor or helmets (though we do find imported armor in royal Numidian tombs).
Whereas Carthaginian, African or Liby-Phoenician cavalry fought as heavy ‘shock’ cavalry, the Numidians fought as expert cavalry skirmishers, moving rapidly, largely keeping out of close combat with heavier shock cavalry and skirmishing on the flanks. Numidian horsemen play key roles in Hannibal’s successes and the defection of Numidia to the Romans clearly weakens his army in the run-up to Zama, robbing him of one of his most potent tools.
What is perhaps most striking is the Carthaginian relationship with their Numidian vassals seems also to have been substantially personalistic. This is something large states often struggle with: it is hard for the institutional structures of a state to interface successfully with the highly personalistic governing structures of non-state peoples or peoples only beginning to develop state institutions.
The odd Carthaginian solution seems to have been the use of the generals – the rabbim mahanet – as a sort of personalistic interface with these communities. So – as Taylor (op. cit.) notes, we see Carthaginian generals developing close personal ties with Numidian kings and princes (that is, tribal leaders with large retinues) in order to get access to the military force those Numidian leaders can harness. So for instance Hamilcar maintained a close friendship with the Numidian aristocrat Naravas, through whom he got access to Numidian cavalry (Polyb. 1.78.1), while Hasdrubal Giscso cultivated a personal relationship – a guest-friend relationship – with the Numidian king Syphax (Livy 28.18, 29.23). Even closer ties were possible: during the Mercenary War, Hamilcar Barca promised his daughter in marriage to Naravas and nets 2,000 Numidian cavalry in his army in the bargain (Polyb. 1.78.1-9), while the Numidian, Mazaetullus – having seized power among the Massylii – aims to cement his position by marrying Hannibal Barca’s niece who had been, we are told, previously married to the former king Oezalces (Livy 29.29). The last Carthaginian-Numidian marriage we’re told about is that of Sophoniba, daughter of Hasdrubal Gisco, given in marriage to Syphax to secure that alliance (Livy 29.23).
What is striking about these sorts of ties is that these Carthaginian generals aren’t kings and aren’t even the chief magistrates in Carthage. However, the long-service structure of Carthaginian generalship lets Carthage ‘play’ at personalist politics, because a rab mahanet sticks around long enough to build those personal relationships.
In the meantime, Numidian cavalry provided a key military capability for Carthage, making up probably the largest single part of all of Carthage’s available cavalry in our 215 snapshot. It’s tricky to be precise because our sources repeatedly lump African and Numidian cavalry together, but Numidian and African cavalry together make up 11,000 of Carthage’s 21,000 cavalry in that 215 snapshot and that 11,000 in turn are probably at least 2/3rds Numidian, suggesting perhaps something like 7,500 Numidian cavalry, which is quite a large figure indeed. Carthaginian victories often rely substantially on their use of cavalry, so these Numidians, levied through important personal relationships with key Numidian aristocrats, form a crucial part of Carthage’s tactical approach.
It also helps us to understand what the Barcids are doing in Spain.
What the Barcids Are Doing in Spain
Carthage had a limited presence in Spain prior to the end of the First Punic War, particularly around Gades (modern Cádiz) although it isn’t always clear how direct Carthaginian control here was.
However after the end of the Mercenary War (in 237), the Carthaginians decide to send Hamilcar Barca to Spain with an army. We aren’t given a ton of reliable insight into this decision by our sources, but it seems like one factor here was a wariness of Hamilcar’s rising power. Hamilcar had commanded the land armies on Sicily during the First Punic War from 247 to the end in 241 – where he had held his ground against the Romans, only for the war to be lost at sea (leaving him undefeated) and then had led the successful Carthaginian effort during the Mercenary War (241-237). As noted above, he had strong relationships in Numidia, an experienced, veteran army and huge political cachet and so the decision to send him to Spain may have been a way to both ‘reward’ him (he is given basically carte blanche to do whatever he wants in Spain) and also get him out of Carthaginian politics where his influence would have been disruptive.
In any case, Hamilcar, followed by his son-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair, followed by his biological sons Hannibal, Hasdrubal and Mago, proceed to expand Carthaginian power in Spain dramatically, consolidating control over most of the Mediterranean coast of Spain south of the Ebro River. After Hamilcar dies in 229/8, Hasdrubal the Fair, his son-in-law, takes over and founds a new city to serve as a capital for this Barcid-controlled part of Spain, which he called Qart-hadasht (‘New City’) which is of course also the name of Carthage: a Carthage for Spain to go with the Carthage in Africa. The Romans will call this place ‘New Carthage’ (Nova Carthago) and of course today it is Cartagena.
Diodorus reports that, upon replacing Hamilcar, Hasdrubal the Fair was acclaimed strategos autokrator by the Iberians (Diod. Sic. 25.12). Of course strategos autokrator is a Greek title, something like ‘supreme general’ and we have no idea what the Iberians in their own language would have called the position, but as we’ll see it is going to function like a kind of ‘warlord of warlords.’ That position in turn is the one that Hannibal Barca will inherit on Hasdrubal the Fair’s death in 221 and he largely completes the conquest of the Iberian coastal zone.
There is sometimes a mistake here in understanding the where and who of this Carthaginian zone in Spain. The people who lived on the Mediterranean coast of Spain were the Iberians (iberes in Greek, hiberi in Latin), a people who spoke a non-Indo-European language and were culturally and ethnically distinct. To their south in Andalusia, you had another people, the Turdetani, who had their own different non-Indo-European language. By contrast, in the uplands of the Meseta lived the Celtiberians, who spoke a Celtic (and this Indo-European language). The Celtiberians will be the fellows who cause the Romans no end of trouble in the second century but they are not the fellows the Barcids are incorporating: Barcid influence is thin in Celtiberia as far as we can tell and direct control basically non-existent.
Instead, it is the Turdetani and Iberians who come under Carthaginian control in this period and who thus make up the ‘Iberians’ of Carthaginian armies. Our sources actually are fairly careful in this regard – in the rare cases that Carthaginian armies have meaningful numbers of Celtiberians in them, our sources go out of their way to comment on it.
That said the historical event of Carthage cementing control of the Iberians in Spain under the Barcids means that Carthage’s relationship to these fellows changes fundamentally at this point.
Recruiting Iberians
We’re also not super well-informed about the structures of government among the Iberians. Our sources treat the basic unit of Iberian organization as the oppidum – the fortified town – but these aren’t city-states. Instead, those towns are further grouped into ethic/tribal groupings (Oretani, Bastetani, Edetani, etc. etc.; these are all the Latin names), but these aren’t always political units.
Instead, when outside powers (Carthage, Rome) interact in political or military ways, they interact with figures that our Latin sources (esp. Livy) call reguli, ‘petty kings.’2 It seems clear that what is implied here is that these fellows are ‘little’ not necessarily in the sense of the territory they rule, but in the limited nature of their power: they’re warlords, rather than true kings. Notably, they seem to lead coalitions of towns and those coalitions seem to have shifted regularly, with towns entering or exiting (note for instance Culchas who controls 28 towns in 206, but brings just 17 when he revolts against the Romans in 197; he’d be on the winning side of the wars until then, so he hasn’t lost these towns, they’ve just stopped following him).
What I think we need to understand here is that you have towns – that have their own town non-state/proto-state governments – which for collective warfare band together under charismatic war-leaders (the reguli) who then lead these coalitions. A system like that, if undisturbed from the outside, we would expect it to develop into true kingship as the reguli use their power and influence to make their position heritable and consolidate power. But that hasn’t happened yet, so the reguli are warlords or war-chiefs, leading ad hoc coalitions of towns and these coalitions are the largest political units in Iberian politics and warfare.
Beneath the reguli, our sources offer us almost no real visibility into Iberian politics, but archaeology reveals a consistent trend of aristocratic warrior burials around Iberian oppida, suggesting the same sort of non-state military aristocracy we’ve seen in Gaul and Celtiberia, where individual aristocrats wielded some small amount of military force on their own. In that case the reguli become immediately understandable as the leaders of coalitions of aristocrats who in turn dominate the local politics of their town and can mobilize their military forces.
In short then, this seems to be a non-state zone, where control of military force remains fragmented, with large scale and probably also small-scale warlords able to raise military force.
The Carthaginians seems to have recognized the potential of recruiting from this environment very early. Iberian mercenaries show up in Carthaginian armies as early as the fifth century, with Diodorus explicitly noting Carthage sending officers to Spain to xenologein, ‘foreigner-enroll’ Iberians into Carthaginian service (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6; 13.80.2); they’re explicitly sent with polla kremata, ‘a lot of wealth’ (which could mean money, but also trade goods or other stuff; I suspect if Diodorus had meant coined money, he’d have said arguros, ‘silver’ or a derivative) with which to do this, so service is being purchased. One wonders if these officers are hiring soldiers one-at-a-time or instead offering Iberian aristocrats access to some of the wealth that Carthage could provide if they would raise their retinue and lead it as part of Carthage’s army; I suspect the latter. Carthage was a large, developed city with access to a lot of wealth and access to a lot of stuff – metalwork, wine, import goods from the Eastern Mediterranean and so on – which could be important prestige goods in Spain, the sort of thing that an Iberian warlord could use as gifts himself to key retainers to cement his power or to demonstrate his own importance. We’ll come to this next time, but I don’t think Carthage ever had to pay these guys a lot of money, per se, even when the relationship was strictly transactional.
And that was probably the general state of affairs down to 237: Carthage, with lots of trade contacts into Iberia had plenty of opportunity whenever there was a war on to recruit Iberian infantry and even some cavalry as mercenaries and seems to have done so liberally.
Hannibal’s Iberians
This system has to change, of course, once Carthage is taking direct control over large parts of Spain.
The Barcids do not – probably could not – try to install some sort of bureaucratic system of direct rule in Spain, outside of a handful of new foundations (like New Carthage) designed as the hubs of Carthaginian control in the region. Instead, it seems like the Barcids brought with them the model of dealing with vassal polities they had from Numidia, getting access to military forces through personal relationships. That said, Barcid power was a lot more intense in Spain than in Numidia: the Carthaginians had never subdued the Numidians fully, but Hamilcar and his sons really do subdue the Iberians, demonstrating powerful military superiority.
What I think we should actually understand in Hasdrubal the Fair’s supposed title of strategos autokrator, is that the Barcids, in their conquest of Spain, have made themselves the warlords of warlords, essentially installing themselves at the top of a non-state pyramid of personalistic aristocratic-retainer relationships.
We see this most clearly in the replication of those marriage patterns we saw in Numidia above. Hasdrubal, just before he is proclaimed strategos autokrator, marries an unnamed Iberian princess (so the daughter of one of the reguli), presumably in so doing cementing his hold over a significant portion of Iberian military resources. Hannibal, likewise, marries an aristocratic woman from the Iberian town of Castulo that our sources name Imilce (Livy 24.41.7, Sil. Pun. 3.97-99). There’s also a ‘stick’ side to this: the Barcids take hostages from elite Iberian families to ensure loyalty. Presumably these hostages would be kept as honored guests in relative wealth and opulence in New Carthage (that is where they are when the Romans take the city), acting both as a kind of gift for loyalty and a potential punishment for disloyalty.
Crucially, this attachment is personal: Iberians are not loyal subjects of Carthage, they are vassals (sometimes of questionable loyalty) of the Barcids. This jumps out very clearly in Livy’s description of the defection of one of Hannibal’s reguli, Indibilis – who cites his services to the duces Carthaginienses, ‘to the Carthaginian leaders,’ which is to say the Barcids, not to Carthage itself. He cannot, after all, mean his services to the adirim or the sufetes – he’s never met either! Instead, Indibilis feels personally slighted by the Barcids and so is prepared to switch sides to the Romans if they will treat him better – an aristocrat defecting from being the vassal of one warlord to another. Notably, he clearly seems to understand himself as defecting not so much to Rome as to Scipio not-yet-Africanus (Livy 27.17).
Iberians at War
Now one of the things we discussed back when we covered non-state ‘tribal’ armies is that while non-state societies are generally very small – their personalistic systems of government do not scale well – they can often mobilize a very high proportion of their military resources. They may be poor and few, but they can get everything they have into the field, often allowing them to meet the armies of far larger and wealthier states in the field.
The Barcids, in making themselves warlords of warlords in Iberia have essentially taken their state-based military system, with Carthage’s large territory and revenues supporting an army of semi-professional conscript infantry levied from subject communities, and bolted on a non-state mobilization system. Indeed, they are able to bolt on several of them, because one Carthaginian general, with the wealth and power of the Carthaginian state behind him, can maintain several reguli as his vassals.
The result is that the Barcids, and thus Carthage, are able to pull tremendous amounts of troops out of Spain, despite the relative poverty of the societies in question. Prior to 237, Iberians made up a meaningful but by all accounts fairly small component of the Carthaginian army, minor compared to the role of North Africans and other groups. By contrast, in our 215 snapshot, Iberians make up the single largest portion of the Carthaginian army: 57,000 (counting cavalry) of the 162,000 man total, over a third of the entire force. And that in many ways understates the scale of Iberian participation, because the Iberian elements of Hannibal and Hasrubal(-his-brother)’s armies often take far heavier casualties than the African elements, which are then filled up – especially in the very heavy fighting in Spain – with ever more Iberians.
It is only through the tremendous mobilization of the Barcid’s Iberian vassals that Hannibal is able to rumble with Rome on an even footing in both Italy and Spain.
In terms of fighting style, the Iberians provided Carthage with a ‘medium’ infantry option. Metal armor of any kind (including helmets) were basically unknown in Spain in the third century, so Iberian warriors went to battle with at most textile defenses for the body and head. They did, however, use large shields – both a round shield of indigenous design (the caetra) and oval shields of the La Tène style were used – somewhat offsetting their lack of armor. The standard offensive loadout seems to have been a fairly typical thrusting spear, a single javelin and a sword as a backup weapon, the latter most commonly the devastating cutting falcata (our sources sometimes incorrectly want to give the Iberians the predecessor to the gladius Hispaniensis, but that sword derived from the Celtiberian variant of the La Tène sword, which was present in the Iberian coastal zone, but quite rare).3
In short they fought as spirited, but unarmored, ‘medium’ infantry, capable of skirmishing effectively with javelins but also able to hold as ‘line infantry’ when needed. Versatile and effective, but a lot lighter than the Roman heavy infantry they were often pitted against. Carthaginian generals are able to win pitched battles against the Romans with armies that rely heavily on these guys: Hannibal, of course, at Trebia (218), Trasimene (217) and Cannae (216), but also Hasdrubal(-brother-of-Hannibal), Mago(-also-brother-of-Hannibal) and Hasdrubal Gisco in twin battles on the Upper Baetis (211).
The weakness here is simply that Barcid control was personal, it was new and thus it was fragile. Once the Romans start really winning in Spain after 210, Carthaginian control begins collapsing as the reguli defect and bring over huge chunks of Carthaginian Spain with them. It is striking that the thing Hannibal wanted to do to Rome – trigger a mass revolt of Rome’s allies to undermine Roman military power – is precisely what P. Cornelius Scipio not-Africanus-yet does to Hannibal in Spain and then again in Numidia.
Importantly, we should probably not understand the Numidians at any time as ‘mercenaries‘ and equally after 237, we should not understand the Iberians as mercenaries either. Instead, Carthaginian generals – the rabbim – had developed a method of putting themselves into the reciprocal, personalistic systems of non-state governance and mobilization, enabling Carthage to access some of those non-state military resources in both Numidia and Spain.
Now, as an aside, I don’t necessarily think this structure was, in the long run, a good idea. The Carthaginians themselves, by 237, seem to have realized that Hamilcar Barca’s network of power was becoming dangerous (so they packed him off to Spain). My honest view is that had Carthage won the Second Punic War, they were in a position to effectively ‘speed run’ the Roman experience of the First Century, with powerful generals turning their loyal armies – loyalty secured through these sorts of personal ties – against the state. But of course Carthage didn’t win the Second Punic War, so that future remains only notional.
In the meantime, these systems enabled Carthage to pull an astounding amount of military power out of regions it only loosely controlled. That said, we’re not done with Carthage’s armies yet. Next time, we’ll look at Carthage’s allies and at long last at its actual mercenaries – there are some, I promise!
- For more detail on Numidian warfare, the thing to read is W. Horsted, The Numidians (2021); Osprey volumes can be really hit or miss, but Horsted is largely a ‘hit.’
- This is Latin rex, regis (m), ‘king’ with a dimunitive suffix, -ulus, creating regulus, reguli (m), ‘petty king, little king, kinglet.’
- For more on how these guys fought, the absolute best thing in English is F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera; if you want more, you need to read Quesada Sanz’ work in Spanish.
.JPG){kind=link}
Hello and thank you for this enlightening articles. Would there be any about Carthaginian navy?
Maybe as a treat at the end.
Carthage gets to have a little navy, as a treat.
Typo: Early on it seems like these fellows probably had both domestic and military responsibilities, but by the time we can see them really clearly, they really do seem limited to civil affairs at home: handling legislation, managing courts, judging lawsuits, dealing with finances and son.
I suspect ‘so on’ instead of ‘son’ is intended here.
One a more substantive note, one thing I don’t quite get. The ‘civilian’ government seems to be able to exert significant control over the generals, given that they can recall them to a horrific execution. If they’re so worried about Hamilcar, why wasn’t he just fired or rotated out and someone else put in his place if they’re worried about his personalist ties with the client peoples?
My guess would be that they are limited by tradition and political expectations. It is expected that a failed general will be punished, therefore society at large will support the civilian leaders in doing so and the general will have a very difficult time finding the support to let him object. Punishing a successful general on the other hand is not expected, and by breaking with tradition they loose their legitimacy, leaving them open to (potentially violent) opposition from the general in question and his allies.
This is a standard dilemma – you have a war-winning general with the loyalty of his troops.
If he elects to rebel, you have a Big Problem.
If you call him back to punish him without him doing anything to justify it, you can probably cut that off if you don’t immediately provoke it, but also, now you don’t have a war-winning general and your next general isn’t feeling so keen on success and more keen on self-preservation.
So… You send him on an adventure.
He had more personal power/loyal followers than most generals would be my guess. His personalist ties are personalist and would not go away if he were fired.
Is it possible that Hamilcar was considered to be too valuable an asset? I mean, they were worried about his ties to Numidia, and packed him off to Iberia for exactly that reason. But as Bret lays out, the relationships are highly personalistic.
I can only speculate, but if a general who is highly successful at building personal relationships with a client state is then killed for being too much of a threat, it may well agitate the client state. The post lays out that it wasn’t uncommon for families to intermix, like the Iberian princess thing.
So if some colonizing state goes and kills your brother in law, or even just fires him for being too competent, are you going to feel inclined to go along with their whims? Particularly as being likable and competent with the locals is the mark of competence in question.
Hamilcar brings to the table experience in generalship and the loyalties of auxilary units in Numidia. In a Mediterranean with a rising Rome as a peer power, and other polities such as the Greeks, getting rid of him in a “bad” way not only removes a competent general that you may rely on in times of trouble, but also threatens the allegiances of the troops you rely on to ward off entities. Rebellions are common enough that they seem like they have to be accounted for.
So like, they did rotate Hamilcar out. They sent him off to Iberia with an army and a mandate, notably away from Numidia and Carthage, where he can go cut his teeth on Iberians, and stay an asset to Carthage while minimizing his threat. All the while increasing the strength of the state, at least in principle.
Keep in mind that while there might be context and implications to assigning Hamilcar far from the homeland, the primary purpose of being sent to Spain was not exile.
The primary purpose was that they needed to conquer territory with veins of silver in order to pay their war indemnity to Rome.
Whatever concerns about the possibility of Hamilcar being excessively prestigious, they’re going to take a back seat to the fact that he’s a highly accomplished land general at a time when they need to take control of valuable land.
A state generally doesn’t want to be seen as punishing it’s most successful servants without cause. There is both a long term problem (of discouraging talent) and the short term problem that the person you want to punish might have allies and/or become a focal point for factions who already oppose you, and can now attach themselves to a person with a popular power base.
Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and do it. Sometimes you wait for something you can at least spin as a failure. But diplomatically managing it by “promoting” them into some area is a popular strategy (and familiar to anyone who pays attention to corporate management, too.)
Typo: “Hamilcar is in Spain from 247 to 241, then in North Africa from 241 to 237, then in Spain from 237 to 228”
Seems like it should be “is in Sicily from 247-241, then….”
Typo hunt:
“By contrast, in the uplands of the Meseta lived the Celtiberians, who spoke a Celtic (and this Indo-European language).”
Did you mean “and this is an Indo-European language”?
“he’d be on the winning side of the wars until then, so he hasn’t lost these towns, they’ve just stopped following him).”
Did you mean “he’d been”?
I wish we knew more about how Carthage functioned, it would be great to compare to Rome on a deeper level, but this insight we do have is really interesting. I wonder if perhaps there are some things required for the top jobs that we do not know about, that being often away from the Carthage leading armies might well have made difficult. Positions equivalent to the Roman Aediles, where it’s not necessary, but it’s a great thing to boost your popularity and political presence.
On the main areas of this article, really interesting, are you ever going to talk about the way javelin cavalry work in comparison to horse archers, and any important comparisons between the two? I know you’ve mentioned before how javelins can be a lot more likely to actually do damage than arrows are, so curious about the power of javelin cavalry.
I would also like to hear from the author, but there’s some information we can gather from sources and scholarship.
A word of brief caution about assumptions, horse archers can actually do a *lot* of damage against contemporary armor. The key was to charge and release at the final moment before turning, a Caracole maneuver. This can defeat mail, somewhat consistently, although the mail still reduces lethality. Shields work better, but Roman heavy infantry had to render themselves somewhat immobile to truly hunker down, yet disordered to hope to counter charge archers.
Similarly javelin cavalry practices a wheeling formation, the Iberian iteration named a Cantabrian circle, which was similar with the men riding into range, then galloping away while rotating around to come back for another throw in a wide circle. Of course you can only carry so many javelins, often two to four. Archers had deeper quivers, which was a major difference, moreso than any difference in stopping power.
I wonder if they could also grab additional ammo from porters of some sort on the far side of the circle, as an aside. We know combat resupply was possible and sometimes happened with ranged troops, but I don’t think we have any indication it was common.
Regardless the effective range of both weapon systems against mail is quite close, 10-30 meters for javelin and 50-100 for archers. Typically the wheeling tactic with javelins is a bit more open than the charge then turn with horse archers, and archers had a slightly longer range, but both needed to be well into close range to defeat armor.
This, incidentally, meant both were at least somewhat vulnerable to well timed counter charges by heavy cavalry or sometimes infantry.
The only other major difference i know of is that javelin cavalry could wear a shield, which more than stopping power was a significant difference. This meant they were much better at occasionally entering melee, either to inflict casualties on disordered infantry or to flank, whereas most horse archers were significantly less capable in that role. Eventually we get a form of armored horse archers that split the difference between being a cataphract and an archer, but that’s centuries out and hundreds of miles from here.
Throwing javelins from horseback is easily the hardest hitting personal missile weapon on the battlefield until the advent (and improvement) of firearms. Depending on the weight and such, it can be comparable to a couched lance.
Glad to see this series continue! I would translate rab mahanet as “chief of the army” to capture the genitive relationship and the well-known Semitic word rab “great, big.” Older Egyptologists used expressions like “great one of the army” for titles like this, but that would be a bit alienating.
You know, for all that I’ve been abstractly aware that the Phoenicians were a Semitic people for years, i never really put it together in a way that keeps reading that a term for military leadership is reminiscent of “rabbi” from being striking to me.
The notion of a general who is subordinate to the state and, in that function, keeps allied peoples on board by forming personal relationships with major aristocrats and kings is exactly the kind of fascinating power dynamic that I was looking for.
The similarity is even more striking than just being Semitic – Phoenician came from just up the coast in Lebanon, and is especially closely related to Hebrew of the pre-Persian period. They’re even written in the same alphabet (not the same as the modern Hebrew alphabet, which is a product of Persian rule), so someone who can read inscriptions in one can usually puzzle out inscriptions in the other.
In this example, rabbi is the first-person possessive of rab (Phoen.)/rav (He.). Rabbi is “my master” (in the “person of authority” sense, not in the “owner” sense), rab mahanet is “camp-master”.
I wonder how common the specific “camp master” construction is as a title or epithet for military leaders across languages. Seeing it here my mind goes immediately to Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, better known by his epithets El Cid and El Campeador. The former comes from Arabic for “Chief” or “Lord,” but the latter comes from Latin “campus doctor” – the leader of the field.
“rab mahanet” means “chief of (army) camps” in biblical Hebrew. Carthagian is surprisingly close to Biblical Hebrew.
btw, the biblical Hebrew plural would be “rabei mahanet”, not “rabim mahanet”, and would not be shortened to “rabim”. Is the Carthagian plural construction actually different from the biblical Hebrew one in this case?
Now I want to see an alternate history where Carthage conquers the entire mediterranean, and the Latins emerge as a small merchant class with a fanatical monotheistic devotion to Jupiter or something
“Delenda Est,” by Poul Anderson. One of his Time Patrol stories. A couple of Patrolmen return to 1960 from a vacation in 20,000 BC, and everything’s different. They’re able to communicate with a scholar who knows Classical Greek.
To follow up his hunch — “Did Rome and Carthage ever fight a war?”
“Yes. Two, in fact. They were allied at first, against Epirus, but fell out. Rome won the first war and tried to restrict Carthaginian enterprise. The second war broke out twenty-three years later, and lasted… hmm… eleven years all told, though the last three were only a mopping up after Hannibal had taken and burned Rome.”
The Sol Invictus cult being close but not quite there suggests that this would be quite difficult to pull off culturally. Even when faced with syncretist pressure to simplify the pantheon Roman paganism simply didn’t become monotheistic. Maybe after a period of Monolatrism it could have developed into monotheism, but several centuries of imperial cult and exposure to monotheistic competition wasn’t enough to trigger that shift, so it’d likely have been a long way out.
We know Israel had a similar shift, by the by, both attested to in biblical sources and some archeological and foreign records, but it’s less clear *why* in part because this happened in 800-400 bc. It seems to be related to either the period of mass “captivity” or more likely political subjugation by their neighbors.
The best model seems to be that an exiled contingent whom worshipped Yahweh as their patron took control over Israel after returning from exile. This patron deity aspect was amplified by exile-the most unique or applicable God for the exiled groups class and role becoming the only one which survives. The new priest kings then decided to implement sole worship of Yahweh as a means of social control and maybe encourage marriage within their aristocratic(?) in group. Basically a “my patron made me ruler, therefore my patron must be the *only* worthwhile God”.
So perhaps the best system for producing a monotheistic Rome is to have Carthage subjugate Italy imperfectly, triggering a cycle of revolutions, reconquest, and oppression that eventually ends with a group of exiled Roman nobles, possibly from an old Roman colony elsewhere in Italy, taking control, making themselves an aristocracy, and naming their patron sole God. This doesn’t need to be Jupiter, the top God might be replaced. In Israel it seems that Yahweh was either a foreign storm and war God or a fire and smithing God who became the sole deity over El, who should have gotten first billing by prominence in the original patheon. Hence Mars, Vulcan, etc. could have taken the role.
As a final aside, I find it interesting that Yahweh might have been a smith god-if the Israeli exile stories are literal (and they are likely only true for the actual city dwelling population or Jerusalem) then one group which might have maintained relative status and prominence, even in captivity, would be skilled smiths. Still, it’s all very speculative.
>Now I want to see an alternate history where Carthage conquers the entire mediterranean, and the Latins emerge as a small merchant class with a fanatical monotheistic devotion to Jupiter or something
Not that, but I’ve been amused for some time by the idea of Yahweh worship managing to penetrate the entire levant, rather than just the south (and I recently learned that there *was* significant Yahweh worship in the north, a bit further inland from Phoenicia, so it’s not particularly far-fetched). Instead of Yahweh worship ultimately concentrating in Judah (with the Kingdom of Israel being reduced to the Samaritans as a relatively insignificant group), it’s the entire levant, and subsequently the western half of mediterranean Africa plus Spain, worshipping it (amongst others).
A politically unified levant would be neat to go with it, but is… *considerably* less likely, given it tried in both, the middle bronze- and early iron age, and was stopped both times by pressure from the north (Hittites and Assyria, respectively) and the south (Egypt both times).
Nevertheless, just widespread Yahweh worship hitting the shores of Africa, Italy and Spain somewhere between half and a full millenium early would be something to behold.
I should note that I lean towards a relatively early establishment of monotheism amongst some yahwists (given that the aforementioned Samaritans were monotheists despite not experiencing the Babylonian captivity), though not all of them (given both, the theological conflicts described in the bible, and the archaeological evidence we have found of pre-captivity polytheism), so I tend to view the development of monotheism as having started fairly early, and with a few bumps on the road, but ultimately far enough along that the Babylonian captivity wasn’t decisive (I suppose that a switch from monolatrism to monotheism could be triggered by it, but honestly, the step is a very small one, and I think it’d happen either way).
Well, it might be less close than the transcription suggests. Punic inscriptions don’t have vowels – the quoted term is “rb mḥnt”. The obvious sources of vowels to supply into Punic words are (1) Latin transcriptions; and (2) Biblical Hebrew, where we have a firmer grasp on the vowels. Using that second source would make the languages look closer than they are.
How confident are we in the interpolated Punic vowels?
Also Northwest Semitic words written in Akkadian, although there are fewer of those than van Soden wanted us to believe. The word mḥnt does not seem to be preserved in Akkadian. In general see the Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions .
From Latin and Greek transliterations, fairly confident for a few things: personal names, place names, and government offices. From those we can deduce vowel shifts between Phoenician and Biblical Hebrew, and then use Biblical Hebrew as a much better guide for words that aren’t in our transliteration table.
Dr. Devereaux is using rabbim only in the isolated form, not in the construct form. In the construct form AFAIU the Phoenician plural ending undergoes a similar transformation to Hebrew.
> The odd Carthaginian solution seems to have been the use of the generals – the rabbim mahanet
The Hebrew Bible was composed by returning exiles determined to create a unifying narrative around devotion to a single patron god and a common history; while it’s clear that the people who went into exile believed that that god was a special patron (“no other gods before me”), it is also clear that they didn’t have the strict monotheist ‘other gods aren’t real’ idea yet. Pre-Assyrian conquest proto-Jews and pre-Assyrian conquest Tyrians were not ethnically distinct (within a wide range of tribal/clan identities) from one another and shared a common pantheon (with distinct patron gods for different communities).
What about the pre-exile story of Elijah challenging the priests of Baal to see whose god can burn a sacrifice, with Baal doing nothing and Yahweh sending the fire?
Do we know *why* the two Numidian kingdoms have such similar names or the significance of the distinguishing syllable?
More speculatively: “It is striking that the thing Hannibal wanted to do to Rome – trigger a mass revolt of Rome’s allies to undermine Roman military power – is precisely what P. Cornelius Scipio not-Africanus-yet does to Hannibal in Spain and then again in Numidia.” Does Hannibal’s attempted strategy here suggest that he fundamentally understood the relationship between Rome and the socii, possibly because he is seeing it through the Carthaginian lens of personal relationships? (“I’ve shown I can beat their warlord in battle… so why aren’t these Italian cities coming over to my side?”)
I don’t think we need to go that far as saying that he saw it through the lens of this specific relationship, and still arrive at your thesis that he misunderstood how the socii network functioned. Even in against more state-like imperial overlordship, a “peel away the imperial subjects” strategy can work. That’s what Alexander had been doing for example, re-routing the tribute of the Persian subject communities to fuel his army, even though he doesn’t attempt to heavily recruit from those places. So even if Hannibal was familiar with the empires in the East, he could still have made the same mistake of assuming that strategy would also work against the Romans and their socii.
We don’t even need to go as far afield as Persia, even just look at the Mercenary War (which happened during Hannibal’s adolescence, after all). As discussed last week, the direct-rule North Africans seem to have been at least somewhat like the socii, and they turned on Carthage pretty fast after the end of the First Punic War. But on the other hand they stuck it out through thick and thin until the war was definitively lost, so maybe the issue is that Hannibal is trying to put the subject-defection cart ahead of the war-losing horse.
I mean, it’s not like the socii stood by Rome as a monolithic block. Some socii defected. Just not *enough* of them.
I recall reading a post somewhere about how Hannibals operation would have had more success a generation earlier, and that Roman hold over the socii was much less secure during his father’s lifetime,, when particularly the samnites were much less loyal. The author was asserting that Hannibal was using his father’s plan, which I never quite bought completely for whatever reason.
I don’t remember what I heard this from, it might have been a history channel series or something, but the suggestion has always been that he was mistimed, not misidentifying the relationship. I find both possibilities plausible though, and I think it’d behoove us as scholars to remember that contemporary knowledge was often quite limited. We know Romans often barely understood or couldn’t articulate the social dynamics of their opponents given how imprecise some of their terms are when applied to non state systems in particular, it must have been similar for outside observers looking at Rome. Given that the socii system is dynamic, and strengthening, it’s nuances were probably obscured to their enemies at the time.
Did he misunderstand the relationship between Rome and the allies? Or did he anticipate the Social War by 100 years?
The names are possibly similar because of a similar descriptive providence, but it might otherwise be not much more significant than similarities between the term “American” and “Armenian”.
I remember you touching on this mismatch before in your post on how non-state polities raised armies and in the Fremen Mirage series; do you have more on the strategies states took to handle this mismatch, or any third-party reading to recommend on the subject?
yeah the Barca Family does seem to have held a huge pillar of Carthage power on their backs during the two punic Wars.
Its striking that only through their personal effort are they able to contest against Rome in the same weight class come the rematch, and when Braca relationships fail, Carthage itself suffers quickly.
the fear and envy of the Emperor to be, thus leading to spite actions… well.
Course Scipio. Course Fabius.
Course Scipio Father and Uncle can not be discounted.
Have you ever gone into how and why Rome had such heavy infantry compared to nearly all of their peer rivals? Is it just cause of the luck of what minerals they were able to get their hands on in Italy and the use of the Mediterranean as a huge Trading zone? Or just one third trade, one third mineral access, one third Food surplus.
There’s the series Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph. The sub series looking at the Republican Roman army and how it compared to the Successor states starts with:
https://acoup.blog/2024/02/09/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-iia-how-a-legion-fights/
When you get to the Iron Age you’re working with iron ore, which is virtually everywhere. The key factor in producing early iron is charcoal, and the amount of land given over to regrowing wood. Societies that adopted settled agriculture during the Bronze Age did have land use patterns that left less wood growing, and carried that habit into the Iron Age.
The best source of iron to make iron armor out of is other people’s scrap iron (still true today!) and the Romans were good at killing people wearing some iron and good at keeping control of the dead bodies. If the Carthaginians had been fighting forest Gauls instead of desert Numidians as their perpetual nuisance enemy they would have had more iron.
Fascinating stuff!
I’m not sure how many people reading this aren’t going to be familiar with Hannibal’s family, but someone who isn’t might read these statements and come away with the impression Hasdrubal the Fair is his father:
“Hamilcar, followed by his son-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair, followed by his biological sons Hannibal, Hasdrubal and Mago”
“That position in turn is the one that Hannibal Barca will inherit on Hasdrubal the Fair’s death”
If anything I would say the notable thing about the Iberians is not that they were opportunistic, but that they were surprisingly *loyal*. The Ilergetes lived *north* of the Ebro River, despite that they did not flip until 209. Given Upper Baetis was a crushing victory it is easy to forget, but the Romans had been having a good run until then. By 211, they were hundreds of miles behind the ‘front line’. Yet Indibilis and Mandonius gathered up 7,500 men and marched to help Hasdrubal win Carthage’s greatest victory in the Iberian theater.
They defect after Scipio takes New Carthage, but given the past loyalty even in rough times, I’m not sure we should just write off the story of how the Barcids offended them and Sciopio was tactful. They certainly seem to have been much less loyal to the Romans, revolting *twice* in the last years of the First Punic War.
As for the extent of Carthaginian control in Spain I think it benefits from shading. Spain west of the Ebro seems to have been divided roughly into thirds. 1. Coastal strip was backbone of Barcid power and seems to have been pretty loyal given it was ruthlessly conquered in the proceeding two decades. 2. In the southern interior groups like the Lusitanians and Carpetani, sometimes had Barcid military presence, but dominance was weaker. 3. Then in the north are groups like the Gallaeci and Cantabrians who sometimes fought in Carthage’s armies, but there was no direct Carthaginian presence.
Frankly the Romans seem to have been *far* less effective at managing Spain than the Barcids. The Barcids seem to have had about as much trouble carving out an empire in Spain as the Romans had with individual tribes. The Barcids produced a lot of manpower in Spain. As for Rome, it would be easy to call it Rome’s Vietnam, but the Russian conquest of the Northern Caucuses from 1763-1864 might be a better point of comparison. A seriously overlooked conflict with the Russians suffering about 200,000 combat casualties and dead of disease.
Incidentally I’ve never understood why the Romans put so little effort into conquest of the East. The Siege of Numantia involved more Roman and allied forces than the Battle of Magnesia. The former won Rome a mountain fort, the later 15,000 talents in reparations, roughly *200* tons of silver! Like why did they not treat the East like a loot pinata? Like sure individual Romans made fortunes, but the overall Roman deployment in the East was never that large.
Obviously “revolting *twice* in the last years of the First Punic War.” should read “Second Punic War”
I don’t think you’re wrong regarding the matter of maybe having to doubt the whole episode about Indibilis’ reason for defection. However, I’d say that the difference in loyalty can be in a good part be explained by the institutionalised nature of Roman diplomacy: They can’t play the marriage-or-expensive-gifts game the way the Barcids could because no individual Roman is in office long enough to build up the personalistic relationships.
As for the question of why the Romans went west instead of east, my personal impression is that it’s down to the nature of their empire-building. Somewhat jokingly put, the Romans build their empire in self-defense. Basically, whenever there was a war, the Romans fought until the opponent surrendered, and they escalated their resource investment until they could get that surrender. Pre-state Spain was endemic with warfare, so as soon as the Romans were there, it was basically inevitable they’d have to grind their way through it, because whenever they had subdued one fortified town and expanded their influence, the next town over would attack them. In contrast, the empires of the east did not have that vicious cycle – after the Seleucids get beaten once, they are very careful not to draw the attention of the Roman military apparatus again, even as the Roman senate is quite blatantly meddling in their politics.
Addendum to myself: Not having read the passage, I’m not sure into how much Livy goes, but “Hannibal was rude to me” is also a bit of a flexible concept. It could well be that it’s glossing over (or it’s the Iberian misunderstanding) Hannibal using his hostage-guests as leverage. This “I insist your favourite cousin stays in my palace” diplomacy does have a rather sharp jumping-off point in its threat curve, because the moment the overlord has to actually credibly push on the whole “I’ll torture or kill your cousin if you don’t stick with me” matter, the subject ruler will very seriously reconsider their relationship to avoid getting into that situation again. Burning bridges and joining forces with the opposition is one way.
>Somewhat jokingly put, the Romans build their empire in self-defense.
The ‘Accidental Empire’ was certainly a popular take for a while – I’m not particularly familiar with the history of Roman scholarship, but it certainly pops up a lot in post-WW2 works – but I’m pretty sure it’s considered invalid these days, what with
– Rome tending to be at war all the time
– career advancement being closely tied to military success
– proconsuls being essentially given free rein to attack everyone around them for fun and profit
– Rome’s staggering aggression and tendency to break treaties at will; seen in a Carthaginian context with their intrusion on Sicily over the Mamertines, and previously with the Samnites (originally allies, in whose sphere of interests Rome intruded with the flimsiest of excuses). They likewise tossed aside treaties made with Hispanic polities
There was no accident there. Rome conquered because it wanted to conquer, and a pretext was always found, no matter how flimsy.
That NOBODY ELSE in the mediterranean was anywhere near as belligerent as Rome should be telling.
There was exactly one way to avoid war with the Romans, and it was to voluntarily sign over your kingdom to Rome (as several hellenistic kingdoms did).
I’ll accept this explanation is undermining my reasoning, although I don’t fully agree with your position, particularly the following:
“That NOBODY ELSE in the mediterranean was anywhere near as belligerent as Rome should be telling.”
I think this needs more elaboration, because as Bret has argued, everyone went to war a lot in these times. Is the uniqueness of Rome really that they started more wars, or is it that they could afford to drag out wars longer, and that they were more successful in transforming victories into territorial gains than other polities at that time?
I suspect we’ll however both agree that Rome did not attack a place just to gain loot, like for example New Kingdom Egypt did to the Levant. That is something I realised is central to answering Hasting’s question, because it invalidates the basic framework: The Romans were not picking targets based on loot, but some other strategic consideration. So one would first have to make a statement about which consideration that was, to then say why that resulted in different approaches between Spain and the Successors.
For my money, I do think that long-term military security was a main concern to the Romans, and they could get that in the East by meddling in politics after having demonstrated their military superiority, to the point where they can dictate Seleucid foreign policy when they feel it’s against their interests. The same can’t be done in Spain, because of the ephemeral nature of non-state politics. Agreements with one ruler don’t keep when that ruler is deposed, and even if they get some part of the local notables on their sides, that does not stop any Big Man from going “Well, I don’t agree. Make me if you think you can” – and out come the legions. And secondly, I’d also argue that the fractured nature of these non-state polities generate more “events” that provoke a Roman response, compared to the east, where putting the boot on the necks of a few kings quieted down the whole region.
Treating the East like a loot pinata was exactly the cause of the civil war between Sulla and Marius.
Between the Hellenistic empires and this, there’s something that’s consistently fascinating to me about this model of assuming a position of rule that is not so much one polity assuming authority over another as it is a group from within a polity forming a new dominant clique.
Bret used to talk about the desire to share this information from a perspective of informing more sophisticated worldbuilding for certain types of fiction setting, and this is the kind of thing that makes me think about models to provide verisimilitude to the likes of “a family of evil sorcerers showed up from abroad and assumed control while always keeping themselves set apart” or “a society without a sophisticated bureaucracy falls under the control of a superhuman who has demonstrated effective capacity to beat up all the previously established bigshots”.
Common in European (and other colonialism). The group that gets an in with the new dominant power gets a privileged position (Catholics in Vietnam, Tamils in Sri Lanka, various castes in India are just some).
(Catholics in Vietnam, Tamils in Sri Lanka, various castes in India are just some).
Sorry for the derail, but I just wanted to supplement this since it isn’t quite true, not without heavy qualification. (The derail is also interesting in terms of how modern identities get formed).
This is true of one component of the broadly “Tamil” population in Sri Lanka, but very much not true of the other component. Tamils in Sri Lanka comprise (or comprised, anyway, during the colonial period and the first half-century of independence) two completely separate groups who came over at completely different times. The “Sri Lanka Tamils” or “Native Tamils” seem to have arrived on the island during the High Middle Ages period, and lived in the far north and east coast for centuries. They seem to have intermated to some extent with the Sinhalese (it’s South Asia, so probably not much, but some) and the two communities sometimes went to each other’s temples, etc.. They took enthusiastically to modern educational opportunities under the British and it would probably be fair to say they were favored- at the time of independence they were overrepresented among skilled professionals. The (confusingly termed) “Indian Tamils” or “Indian Tamils In Sri Lanka”, by contrast, were brought over by the British in the 19th and early 20th c to work as laborers on coffee and tea plantations. They tended to be poorer, less educated and have worse health conditions and quality of life than the Sinhalese majority or the “Sri Lanka Tamils”, and were much less integrated with the Sinhalese ethnic majority, and lived in the hill country in the center of the country. (They tended not to even be born in SL since the common practice was for women to return to their home village to give birth).
Before the rise of modern ethnic nationalism I’m not even sure these two groups would have seen themselves as one “ethnic group”. Not only did they differ in terms of geographic settlement and socioeconomic status, but the languages weren’t even fully mutually intelligibile in the spoken form. Tamil seems to have split from Malayalam, its closest major sister language, around I think 1000 AD or so, which was around the time the “SL Tamils” moved to the island, so their spoken language today seems to be somewhere between the two. At the time of independence the “Indian Tamil” and “Sri Lanka Tamil” communities were of similar size, about 12% of the total. The “Indian Tamil” population has decreased since then because many of them were expelled back to India after independence, and others moved north and started identifying with the SL Tamil community.
This is why when ethnic and political conflict became salient in the decades around and after independence, it didn’t really follow strict Left vs. Right lines: there was a left vs. right spectrum and then an ethnicity dimension. You had groups that were Communist and Tamil Nationalist, for example, and groups that were Communist and Sinhalese Nationalist, both of whom saw themselves as fighting for an oppressed ethnic group against their oppressors. And depending on which specific situation and context you chose to focus on, both groups were correct. I even remember reading about some right wing “SL Tamils” just before or around independence, who wanted to disenfranchise the “Indian Tamils”, presumably because they valued their class/caste interests more highly than their ethnicity.
This post just made it twig for me.
Celtiberians.
Celt Iberians.
Would have loved to hear more about the famous Balearic Slingers.
Also maybe a grade school level explaination of why skirmish cavalry are so useful.
I really recommend taking a look at the archives for this blog, there’s a lot good there and the titles are formatted to really let you know what’s going to be interesting to you.
What allowed textile-armored Iberian medium infantry to win pitched battles against Romans?
If I remember correctly, you’ve previously commented on the tendency for heavy infantry to absolutely flatten light/medium infantry in shock engagements. What did these guys have going for them to buck that trend? Or am I overestimating how true that is?
In theory, less win one on one, and more just barely able to hold the line for long enough that the cavalry can wreck the Roman flanks, I’d guess.
In reality, assuming Wikipedia isn’t talking nonsense, and looking at the (few) battles they won in Spain, less win one on one, and more just barely able to hold the line for long enough that the cavalry can wreck the Roman flanks.
Not for the first time, I’m getting the distinct impression that the quaint ‘Rome decided that the fastest way to win was to go through the front’ quip owes more to a relative lack of Italic cavalry, followed by a relative lack of armour by Rome’s non-italic opponents, than it does to actual practicality. Superior cavalry is what allows Carthage to challenge Rome despite a relative paucity of armour in its armies, and once Romans start fighting each other, Caesar promptly rediscovers the incredible usefulness of flanking cavalry at Pharsalus (German- and gallic cavalry instead of Numidian, though).
“Not for the first time, I’m getting the distinct impression that the quaint ‘Rome decided that the fastest way to win was to go through the front’ quip owes more to a relative lack of Italic cavalry, followed by a relative lack of armour by Rome’s non-italic opponents, than it does to actual practicality.”
If one army is relatively stronger on the flanks, and relatively weaker in the centre, the other must logically be relatively weaker on the flanks, and relatively stronger in the centre. In which case it is entirely practical for the second army to depend on winning in the centre. And in many ways the second type of army has the advantage, as it does not need enough space to extend its flanks. That should be an important point in delivering the final assault of a siege, in an age when the main point of an offensive was to deliver a siege.
Thick textile armor is apparently effective enough Alexander is depicted wearing it, and he led his heaviest cavalry into battle. So the gap in armor quality may not be as big as you’re thinking.
Also, the Iberian infantry did tend to lose shock engagements, albeit not as badly as lights. Cannae actually relied on the Romans pushing back the Iberian infantry so they’d flank themselves.
“Textile armor” means everything from a lightly quilted jacket up to the elaborate 25 layers of stitched cloth with deerhide reinforcement in a late medieval French jack.
We don’t know how a Hellenistic linothrax was made, but modern reconstructions have many layers of glued and stitched heavy canvas at minimum. Not as expensive and time consuming as a maille shirt or bronze cuirass, but still a significant investment of time and skill. As with mail, not impossible for Celts and Iberians to make such, but they would not be common.
And it’s not really possible to make textile helmets that are anywhere near as protective as metal helmets. (At least in ancient / medieval times, polyarimide fibers are not an option.)
It’s a spectrum, despite the force-fitting in neat categories by say wargame rule writers. We can still draw a clear qualitative distinction between the average Roman legionary / Successor phalangite / Carthaginian African infantry and the average Celt or Iberian.
Since this is the ancient world, and thus not obvious: when you say Carthaginian generals could be crucified for failure, do you mean that literally?
Literally.
What I’m getting from this is that Carthage did all the same things as Rome… but in a more selfish and exploitative manner? This meant that they could never risk their citizen soldiers abroad, because they were needed at home to keep the African hinterland from getting uppity, whereas Rome liberally spends Roman blood abroad, with no fear that the Socii will ever rebel.
The best those African subjects of Carthage could hope for was to have their taxes spent on good armor to keep them alive while they’re fighting for Carthage, and on a nice pay-day after the war is over, should the armor have paid off. In other words, the best possible scenario was getting back some percentage of what Carthage had extorted from them, whereas the Socii could expect to profit whenever Rome did.
Miraculously enough, Carthage seems to have been more liberal towards their African subjects than most Mediterranean powers.
From the viewpoint of someone drafted into the army, it is not obvious to me how the Roman demand that you pay for your own arms and armour was less selfish and exploitative than the Carthaginians providing that out of tax revenue.
Unless we are going to argue that the Romans were more noble than the Carthaginians because they did not disgrace their hands with money.
I think considering the Iberians and Romans of the Second Punic War as medium and heavy infantry respectively is slightly exaggerated. Metal armor was also scarce in Roman armies at that time. Quesada compares both types of warriors, and in truth both their equipment and fighting style were more similar than one might initially think. The supposed lightness of the Iberians is more characteristic of their later use as auxiliaries by Rome in the following centuries, a period during which Roman infantry itself was also becoming heavier.
It is also worth remembering, since it has been mentioned, that the falcata was not merely a cut sword or a simple copy of the kopis. Rather, it was a modified adaptation. The falcata developed a double edge near the tip and became a cut-and-thrust sword. As for its effectiveness against heavily armored troops, this appears to be attested: in Caesar’s time, an anecdote was recorded about how an Iberian machaira shattered the helmet of one of Caesar’s soldiers, severely wounding his head.
Very interesting as well is the comment about how the personal ties between Carthaginian generals and the military aristocracies around them may ultimately have led to a period similar to the Roman civil wars. In fact, even before the First Punic War we know of attempted coups in which Carthaginian generals used slaves and loyal troops in attempts (always unsuccessful) to seize power.
I think Quesada Sanz is correct that the Iberians fought as ‘line’ infantry (thus ‘mediums’) but the Roman heavy infantry (hastati/principes/triarii) were absolutely ‘heavies.’ Indeed, equipped as we see in artwork and as our sources describe – which is to say, equipped like our evidence suggests – they were the heaviest heavy infantry in the Mediterranean world at the time. Metal armor was not scarce in Rome in the late third century, as far as we know, but rather legally *required* for the heavy infantry (either mail or the pectoral), as Polybius tells us.
I think there’s a real risk of ‘conjuring’ a lighter version of the Roman infantry kit, just because we assume what is described to us by our sources, which we also see in artwork, seems implausible.
Did the Carthaginian generals command their army in a similar way to the Romans, the sort of “Battle Manager” on horseback as described in the Total Generalship articles? I presume that they didn’t get stuck in as archaic/classical Greeks did, but maybe on the back of elephants instead?
“dealing with finances and son”
-> and so on
“a Celtic (and this Indo-European language)”
-> and thus
It’s funny how I was just thinking that it sounded like Carthage was creating a whole bunch of Kwantung Armies (i.e. regional arimes able to independently direct state policy with minimal oversight from the central government) as a matter of deliberate policy, and wondering if that caused any problems for them, only for you to address it directly at the end.
Now what I’m wondering is: was there any way to avoid that problem? As you mention, the Romans would eventually face the same problem, so was this just inevitable for states above a certain size given the communications technology at the time? Or was there some alternative?
I thought of the British East India Company with its company-owned armies until 1857, and then of the Indian Army with its considerable degree of autonomy.
Those armies were not personally loyal to the governor-general.
Perhaps a closer analogy would be an early modern regimental colonel: Someone entrusted to raise a regiment in the Kings name, and who might well use personal connections to do so. But then, a colonel who has a personal claim on a small part of your army is much less dangerous than a general who has such a claim over a large part of it.
I feel this may explain why the Carthaginians are so often described as executing their generals: firing a general with such personal hold on the army’s loyalty is a much more dangerous business than firing a general without such a claim. You might well feel it safer to find a legal excuse to kill him before he can rebel.
But that creates the issue that, if a general who has failed for whatever knows he’s going to be executed anyway, then there’s much less reason for him not to roll the dice with a rebellion.
But then, a colonel who has a personal claim on a small part of your army is much less dangerous than a general who has such a claim over a large part of it.
I forget who made the claim, and if it turned out to be statistically true, but I remember once reading someone make the argument that colonels were actually, in the 20th c, the military rank that was most likely to stage a coup. The idea being, I think, that they were high enough in rank to be able to command loyalty from their followers, but low enough that they weren’t yet personally invested in “the system” and loathe to rock the boat.
Especially since a coup doesn’t necessarily need very many people. If you act decisive and quick a handful might be enough. Most soldiers and politicians don’t want to be on the losing side and most people don’t want their country in civil war, so they will sit out and greet the winner…
On the face of it, a country in which this is an issue is already dominated by its generals. Which seems quite likely. A coup is most likely to occur in a country that has already had one.
A sort of “javalry”, if you will…