A History of War in 100 Battles. Richard Overy
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Название: A History of War in 100 Battles
Автор: Richard Overy
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007452521
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© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
A nineteenth-century engraving of the Battle of Cannae (216 BCE) shows Hannibal on horseback while his Carthaginian and allied soldiers strip the dead Romans of anything valuable. The battle was one of the most comprehensive defeats inflicted in the whole history of war.
At Cannae, Hannibal showed his exceptional grasp of the battlefield. He formed his infantry into a shallow force, weaker in the centre, with his veteran Libyans on both flanks. On one wing were Numidian cavalry, on the other Spanish and Gallic, 10,000 experienced horsemen who greatly outnumbered the 6,000 Roman horses. His infantry were ordered to form a bulge outwards with the object of enticing the Roman legions into the arc, which would then bend inwards, giving the wings the chance to encircle and annihilate the enemy while the cavalry defeated the enemy horsemen and turned to attack the Roman army from the rear. It was a textbook operation and functioned like clockwork. The Romans pressed forward into the yielding arc, only to find themselves surrounded as the Libyan infantry advanced on the flanks. The Carthaginian cavalry swept aside Rome’s horsemen and plunged into the Roman rear. Cannae was a massacre, the worst defeat the Roman army ever suffered. An estimated 50,000 died that day; others were taken prisoner. Only 14,500 survived out of an army of 80,000. Hannibal lost 6,000, two-thirds of them Gauls. No effort was made to bury so many dead, which included Paullus and eighty Roman senators. The gold rings and ornaments were collected from the dead and sent to Carthage to show the extent of the victory and to demonstrate the need for reinforcements.
Hannibal could perhaps have marched on Rome and brought the empire to its knees. The disaster at Cannae left the city briefly defenceless, though new legions were immediately raised. The Senate ordered that there should be no weeping, and buried two Greeks and two Gauls alive to propitiate the gods. But Hannibal perhaps sensed that his depleted force was not large enough to march the 500 kilometres (300 miles) to Rome and to invest the city. Carthage was too busy fighting in Sicily, Spain and Sardinia to send help, so Hannibal undertook limited campaigns in southern Italy for a further fourteen years, too dangerous an opponent for the Romans to challenge again. To scare the citizens, he took 2,000 cavalry up to the gates of the city in 212 BCE, but could not risk a siege.
When Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal came to join him in 207 BCE by the same awkward route over the Alps, his forces were devastated near present-day Rimini and Hasdrubal was killed. Carthage was undermined on every front except in the south of Italy, where Hannibal was isolated. In 202 BCE, he finally left Italy for good to return to Carthage. A battlefield genius, he did not know how to win the war.
| No. 3 | BATTLE OF ACTIUM 2 September 31 BCE |
The victory won at Actium off the coast of Greece by Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (better known as Octavian, and soon to become Augustus) marked a decisive end to the long period of savage civil wars that had plagued Republican Rome from the middle years of the first century BCE. The battle was fought between the two most powerful men in the Roman Republic: Octavian, ruler of the western half of the Roman territories; and Marcus Antonius (better known as Mark Antony), ruler of the eastern region. Octavian had little reputation as a commander or soldier, but from an early age he had understood how to balance the arts of politics and war. Mark Antony was out-thought by a leader whose political intelligence and strategic calculation opened the way to a new imperial age.
© V&A Images/Alamy
This painting of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE) was made by the Austrian rococo painter Johann Georg Platzer (1704–61), famous for his historical and allegorical subjects. In reality, during the battle that ended the Roman Civil War, Cleopatra stayed back from the conflict until there was room for her vessels to escape into the open sea.
After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, there followed an uneasy decade as Caesar’s supporters fought against the defenders of Republican Rome and rival claimants to his mantle. Octavian became the dominant figure in Italy because he was more clear-sighted and unscrupulous than his competitors. Though he had no constitutional basis for his claim to rule, he was backed by soldiers loyal to the legacy of the great Caesar, and had enough money to buy the loyalty of others. He collaborated with Antony for much of the decade, and relied on Antony’s military help against the armies raised by Caesar’s assassins. But by 34 BCE, when Antony married the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in a theatrical ceremony in Alexandria, Octavian could see the possibility that Mark Antony might soon want control of the whole Roman sphere and not just the east. By 32 BCE, their rivalry was overt. One-third of the Senate in Rome supported Mark Antony and fled to join his army, which was gathering in Turkey; Octavian had been busy recruiting supporters in Italy, raising taxes for a military expedition, buying the loyalty of his own troops and spreading hostile propaganda against his rival. Ambition turned both heads as the two men contemplated the prospect of ruling the whole Roman world.
In the second half of the year, Antony brought an army of around 100,000 soldiers and 12,000 cavalry to Greece, supported by 500 ships, many of them huge triremes capable of carrying large numbers of soldiers and catapults to be used while ramming and boarding enemy vessels. The object was to prepare for an invasion of Italy, or to lure Octavian into a land battle, which Antony was confident of winning. The fleet was scattered along the coastal ports, but around 250 ships were concentrated in the Gulf of Ambracia, a bay on the west coast of Greece protected by a narrow strait near the town of Actium. They included sixty vessels supplied by Cleopatra, who had accompanied her new consort to witness his triumphant return to Rome. Octavian knew that he had time on his side and decided to blockade Antony. His own fleet, commanded by the very effective Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, preyed on Antony’s supply routes. Octavian moved his army of around 80,000 legionaries and 12,000 horsemen to Greece and set up camp well to the north in order to avoid a land battle, while the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra remained bottled up at Actium, unwilling to risk a major sea battle against the larger naval forces waiting beyond the Gulf.
In this trial of wills, Octavian understood that Antony’s expeditionary force could only decline in fighting power as it struggled to find food and fodder locally and to cope with camp diseases. There were defections to Octavian as morale declined. Antony’s decision to base himself at Actium had been a mistake, but Octavian exploited this misjudgement to the full by avoiding a pitched battle and relying on attrition. Unable to bring his strength to bear against an evasive enemy, Antony decided that his only option was to try to break out of the Gulf and fight his way through Agrippa’s blockade. He concealed his intention from his already demoralized army and when a strong northwest wind arrived on 2 September 31 BCE, Antony ordered his fleet, now reduced to no more than 170 vessels, out of the Gulf and into the open sea.
The four-hour battle that followed was directed by Octavian, who was aboard a small brigantine (suffering, it has been suggested, from sea-sickness), but fought by his admiral, Agrippa. The long delay and the strategy of blockade both played to Octavian’s advantage. Antony’s ships did СКАЧАТЬ