All posts tagged mercenaries

Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010)

According to legend Carthage was founded in 814 BC. Its history came to an end in 146 BC, the year in which Rome defeated and utterly destroyed it. Richard Miles is a young historian whose book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, sets out to record everything we know about Carthage, from the legends of its founding, through its umpteen wars, up to the final catastrophe.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is long, 373 pages of text, 77 pages of notes, 34 page bibliography and a 66-page index = 521 pages.

It is not a social or political history. There is hardly anything about Carthage’s form of government, a reasonable amount about its economy (trade and some agriculture), a surprising amount about the evolving design and metallurgy of its coinage (in the absence of other evidence, coins are a good indicator of cultural changes and economic success), and quite a lot about its religion, in particular a recurring thread about the syncretistic melding of the Phoenician god of Melqat with the Hellenistic demigod Heracles, about which Miles has a real bee in his bonnet.

But what the text is really filled with is relentless details of Carthage’s endless wars, wars, wars. It is an overwhelmingly military history. Countless battles, an apparently endless stream of generals with the same four names (Hannibal, Hamilcar, Hasdrubal or Hanno) and gruesome references to torture. Failed generals, defeated enemies, rebellious mercenaries, overthrown tyrants, unlucky hostages or ambassadors, an endless stream of unfortunates are publicly tortured, beheaded or crucified (pages 131, 147, 152, 165, 173, 203, 208, 211, 212, 219, 273, 358). The ideal reader of this book will really love details of ancient wars and sadistic punishments.

The single most surprising thing about the history of Carthage is how much of it took place on the island of Sicily. The western half of Sicily was colonised by Carthage from about 900 BC, the eastern half by Greek colonists from different mother cities from about 750 BC, and the economic and territorial rivalry led to almost continuous warfare between the two sets of colonists between 580 and 265 BC, a period known as the Sicilian Wars.

If you know nothing whatever about Carthage, here are the key facts:

The Phoenicians

is the general name given to the people who, 3,000 years ago (1,000 BC) inhabited the trading cities situated along the coast of modern-day Lebanon, ports like Byblos, Sidon and Tyre. The Phoenicians invented new types of more efficient sailing ships with which they established trading routes all round the Mediterranean, trading in precious metals and manufactured goods such as jewellery, ceramics, and food. The high point of Phoenician culture and sea power is usually placed between about 1,200 to 800 BC. They founded trading settlements on all the Mediterranean islands (Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia) and as far afield as Gades (modern Cadiz) beyond what the ancients called the Pillars of Hercules, i.e. beyond the Mediterranean, onto the Atlantic coast of modern-day Spain.

Carthage

The most successful of these settlements was Carthage. Carthage was founded in the 9th century BC on the coast of North Africa, in what is now Tunisia, by traders from Tyre in Phoenicia (Phoenicia being the coastal strip of the what is now Syria and Lebanon). It was a pivotal position, half way along the trade routes from east to west and also handy for the short routes north to and south from Italy and its two big islands, Sardinia and Sicily.

Map of the Mediterranean showing position, central to various trade routes (source: Politeia website)

In the following centuries Carthage became independent of its mother city (which was eventually subjugated by the Asian empire of Assyria) to become a trading empire in its own right, creating its own colonies around the Mediterranean and spreading inland from its coastal location to conquer territory originally occupied by Libyan tribes.

New city

Carthage’s status as a colony or settlement is indicated by its name: the Punic term qrt-ḥdšt directly translates as ‘new city’, implying it was a ‘new Tyre’ (p.62). The city states of Phoenicia – the leading ones being Sidon and Tyre – had thrived in the vacuum caused by the late Bronze Age collapse (about 1,200 to 1,100 BC). But from 900 to 800 onwards the big land empires returned, namely Egypt to the south and Assyria to the east, and repeatedly invaded and conquered the city states. Miles shows how they allowed some, Tyre in particular, a measure of independence because the Assyrian rulers relied on the luxury goods, and especially the rare metals, which were brought in from their trade around the Med (copper from Cyprus, silver from southern Spain).

Nonetheless, as the mother city, Tyre, lost power, its strongest child, Carthage, grew.

Punic wars

From the 300s BC onwards Carthage found its maritime empire threatened by the fast-growing new power of Rome, half-way up the west coast of the Italian peninsula. The Romans used the adjective poenus to refer to the Phoenicians and, by extension, the Carthaginians, and so the three wars Rome fought against Carthage are referred to as ‘the Punic Wars’:

First Punic War (264–241 BC)
Second Punic War (218–201 BC)
Third and final Punic War (149–146 BC)

Rome wins

Rome won the Third Punic War, stormed the city and utterly destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, leading away the survivors into brutal slavery and razing the buildings to the ground. During the final war a leading Roman politician, Cato the Censor, made a reputation by, whatever subject he was nominally addressing in the Senate, ending all his speeches with the same words, ‘Carthago delenda est’, meaning ‘Carthage must be destroyed’. It is this famous catchphrase that gives this book its title.

Not only did the Romans destroy all buildings, but all statues, inscriptions and records, emptying the libraries of Carthage and giving away the manuscripts and codices to local tribes. None have survived. This explains why, despite its long history and one-time predominance, the historiography of Carthage is so shadowy, and has to be reconstructed from references in the writings of its enemies or from the often obscure or ambiguous archaeological evidence.

Archaeology

The victorious Romans razed Carthage to the ground. Generations later, the first emperor, Augustus, ordered the erection of a new city on its ruins, Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago (p.364). Both are now embedded in the huge modern city of Tunis, capital of Tunisia (current population 11 million), which makes archaeological investigation difficult to this day. However, the Carthaginians had established many of their own colonies both across northern Tunisia and on many Mediterranean islands, and from time to time new Punic sites are discovered, or new discoveries are made at existing sites, which provide information which keep our view of Carthage’s history slowly changing and updating.

Punic gods

All written records were destroyed, all the poems and hymns and inscriptions which we have for the Greek or Roman pantheons. From archaeological evidence and references in Greek or Roman works it appears the main gods of Carthage were a couple, the god Baal Hammon and the goddess Tanit (list of 3 triads of gods on page 289).

Baal was a Phoenician name for ‘Lord’, so there were a lot of gods whose first name was Baal. In fact the common Carthaginian men’s name Hannibal is a combination of the Carthaginian name Hanno with the word ‘Baal’.

Melqart was the tutelary god of Carthage’s mother-city, Tyre, sometimes titled the ‘Lord of Tyre’ (Ba‘al Ṣūr), King of the Underworld, and Protector of the Universe. Miles shows how worship of Melqart was encouraged at all Phoenician colonies across the Mediterranean as a way of binding them together culturally.

Miles also shows how Melqart became identified and merged with Greek worship of Heracles, the hugely popular Greek figure who could be taken as both a demigod or a mortal hero, depending on context, and who was the signature figure for Greeks colonising westwards through the Mediterranean in the sixth century and later (pages 105, 221). Heracles was even adopted as a patron and icon by Alexander the Great.

In fact the prevalence of Melqart-Heracles becomes a recurring theme of Miles’s book, popping up wherever Carthage creates colonies, for example becoming the god/face or brand of the new colony in south Spain in the third century (p.221), depicted on the coins of Hannibal (p.227), and then co-opted by the post-Punic emperor Augustus. Miles develops what almost amounts to an obsession with Heracles, turning his myths and legends into a kind of central narrative to the five or six centuries leading up to the Christian Era which are fought over by Greeks and Carthaginians and Romans in turn, who each seek to commandeer and appropriate him as ancestor and avatar for their own colonial ambitions.

By contrast with the hundreds of mentions and extended passages about Heracles, the goddess Astarte is only mentioned a handful of times. She was a goddess of the Levant, of not only Phoenicians but the Canaanites too, rather than distinctively of the Phoenician diaspora. Still, I could have done with more about Astarte.

Carthage as ‘the other’ for Rome

Miles’s central point is that, for the reasons explained above, almost everything we know about ancient Carthage comes down to us from Greek, and then Roman sources, and that both of them were bitter rivals of Carthage’s trading and military might. In other words, all the written evidence we have about Carthage comes from her enemies.

Miles uses ideas derived from Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism about how colonial conquerors project onto their victims their own vices, to suggest that in these accounts the ancient Greeks and Romans projected onto the Carthaginians all the moral and social sins and transgressions and weaknesses they could think of. These included cruelty, dishonesty, effeminacy, luxuriousness, barbarity, sexual immorality, and so on. The notion of the unreliability or deceitfulness of the Carthaginians gave rise to a Roman proverb, fides Punica, meaning Punic or Carthaginian ‘faith’ – ironically indicating the exact opposite. Towards the end of the book he spends three pages describing how the Roman comic playwright Plautus’s play, The Little Carthaginian, performed in the lull between the second and third Punic wars, attributed all these perfidious characteristics to the hapless protagonist (pages

So Miles’s mission is to use the latest up-to-the-minute archaeological and scholarly knowledge to penetrate back through centuries of Greek and Roman prejudice and anti-Carthage propaganda to try and establish who the Carthaginians really were.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. It assumes that you are already fairly familiar with all the Roman prejudices against Carthage which he is setting out to overthrow. If you’re not familiar with Roman slurs against Carthage, then the book has to explain the prejudiced view first, before going on to rebut it and, in doing so, it turns out that the accusations of the Greeks and Romans are often so florid and vivid that you remember them more than Miles’s myth-busting antidotes.

2. This is especially the case when Miles’s anti-prejudice myth-busting is not as exciting or as clear-cut as you might hope, substituting a clearly defined line with the uncertain speculations of modern scholars.

The most obvious example is when Miles sets out to undermine the Greek and Roman accusation that the Carthaginians practised the ritual sacrifice of babies. But to do so he has to present all the evidence supporting the baby-killing view and this turns out to be pretty persuasive. He explains that a ‘tophet’ was the general term the Carthaginians used for a site where infants were sacrificed. It was a Hebrew term derived from a location in Jerusalem in the Gehinnom where worshippers, influenced by the ancient Canaanite religion, practised the human sacrifice of children to the gods Moloch and Baal by burning them alive.

Miles then goes on to look very thoroughly at the archaeological evidence from the cemeteries which have been found in Carthage itself and in the surrounding towns, where urns have been found which contain the ashes of infants. Up-to-the minute scholarly research using DNA and other types of scientific technology seem to have established that many of the infants who were (undoubtedly) burned to ashes, were so young as to maybe have been still-born. Maybe it was only still-born infants or infants who died within months of birth (i.e. who were already dead) who were burned as offerings to the gods. But still… the accusation is not completely baseless… the Carthaginians did burn babies… So Miles’s attempt to overthrow a modern ‘prejudice’ against the Carthaginians ends up bringing the prejudice more prominently to my attention and not really decisively rebutting it.

The endlessness of scholarly debate

And that’s the trouble with any book which sets out to take us into the heart of scholarly debate – the trouble is that scholarly debate is endless. And it is particularly exacerbated with a subject like Carthage where the Romans went out of their way to destroy every building, statue, stele or inscription, and all the books and manuscripts which recorded Carthaginian religion, culture or history.

What we are left with is an admittedly copious amount of archaeological evidence from the city itself and its numerous colonies around the Mediterranean, but evidence which is always partial, fragmentary, complex and open to differing interpretation.

Therefore Miles’s book doesn’t tell ‘the’ story of Carthage, it tells one possible story and, as his narrative proceeds, it is very scrupulous in pointing out where scholars differ and mentioning different interpretations. In fact he does this so often you feel you are reading not one but multiple versions, multiple possible histories of Carthage.

Take something as simple as the start of the Punic period itself, the period of Phoenician economic hegemony in the Mediterranean, presumably, after two and a half thousand years, historians are fairly clear when this began, right? Wrong.

The advent of what we call the ‘Punic’ era is notoriously difficult to define. (p.88)

Presumably historians have a clear sense of what ‘Punic’ culture was, right? Wrong. Turns out that Punic culture was highly ‘syncretic’ i.e. incorporating elements from many other Mediterranean cultures:

What we refer to as ‘Punic’ culture is an umbrella term for a whole series of diffuse cultural experiences that took place all over the western and central Mediterranean. (p.89)

In other words, wherever you look in the subject of Punic or Carthaginian history, there are scholarly problems of interpretation which the steady trickle of modern archaeological discoveries only makes more complex, sometimes bewilderingly so. In fact rather than one coherent story, the text can more accurately be described as a succession of puzzles, historical teasers for which Miles presents the evidence for and against particular solutions or interpretations.

For example, does the existence of the Ara Maxima altar and temple in the Forum Boarium in Rome testify to the early Roman adaptation of a local legend about a hero-brigand with the Greek legends about the wandering hero Heracles? Or, on the contrary, might it point towards early Rome being a mish-mash of Etrurian, Greek, Phoenician, Punic and other peoples in a typically Phoenician cosmopolitan trading community?

Miles devotes pages 108 to 111 to presenting the evidence for either interpretation, which were intriguing to follow but, ultimately, quite hard to remember or care about – and my point is that a good deal of the book is like this, a sequence of puzzles and mysteries and obscurities which scholars are wrangling over right up to the present day, and which Miles shares with us in some detail.

There is no consensus on the meaning of the Nora stone… (p385)
There has been considerable debate over the provenance of the Cacus myth… (p.404)
The identification of the goddess figure has been controversial… (p.405)

Greece, the first rival

For centuries before Rome rose, Carthage’s rival was Greece or, more precisely, the numerous Greek colonies around the Mediterranean. Not a lot of people know that the Greeks colonised or, more accurately, set up trading centres which became towns and sometimes fortified citadels, at points all round the Mediterranean coast, the ones Carthage clashed with dotting the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily. I’m always surprised to reread that the southern coast of Italy was for centuries known as Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece, because of the dominance of Greek towns.

The ubiquity of Greek colonisation was reflected in the spread of the cult of the Greek hero and demi-god, Herakles, whose legendary travels, labours and womanising, as Miles shows, became a symbol of ‘the Greek colonial project’, the ‘Greek colonial endeavour’ (p.171). Temples were built for him all over the Mediterranean littoral and local towns and cities and even ethnic groups claimed descent from the far-travelling bully. A particularly striking example is the way that the Celtic race claimed to be descended from Heracles after he slept with the daughter of the king of Galicia and fathered a son named Kelta (p.399).

Sicily, the endless battlefield

Sicily is separated from Italy by a strait just 1.9 miles wide at its narrowest point and is only 87 miles from the African shore.

Around 500 the narrative emerges from speculation based on archaeology into more reliable history documented by Greek sources, in the form of military campaigns in Sicily. A glance at the map shows why Sicily was important to anyone trying to set up a trading empire in the Mediterranean and Miles devotes several chapters to accounts of the long-running conflict between towns founded by Carthage in the west of the island, and towns founded by Greeks in the east, specifically Syracuse, founded by Greek settlers from Corinth.

The Sicilian Wars, or Greco-Punic Wars, were a series of conflicts fought between ancient Carthage and the Greek city-states led by Syracuse over control of Sicily and the western Mediterranean between 580 and 265 BC. (Wikipedia)

The Carthaginians set up small trading settlements on Sicily as early as 900 BC but never penetrated far inland. They had traded with the local peoples, the Elymians, Sicani and Sicels. Greek colonists began arriving after 750 BC.

580 BC – The Phoenicians in Sicily and the Elymians unite to defeat the Greeks of Selinus and Rhodes near Lilybaeum, the first such recorded incident in Sicily
540 – Carthaginian Malchus is said to have ‘conquered all Sicily’ and sent captured booty to Tyre
510 BC – Carthage helped the town of Segesta defeat the expedition of the Greek Dorieus
early 5th century; the higher 400s BC were the era of Sicilian ‘tyrants’ i.e. rulers who ruled a town and its surrounding area without consulting the landed elite; examples of these ‘tyrants’ crop up in the writings about contemporary political theory of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle; for example, Gelon who captured the main Greek city, Syracuse, in 485 BC and then deployed a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing, deportation and enslavement’
483 – Terrilus, tyrant of Himera, was deposed by the tyrant Theron of Acragas, and called on Carthage to help; Carthage was motivate to defend its Sicilian territory against Theron who threatened to take over; Carthage sent a large army, maybe as many as 50,000, many mercenaries, under general Hamilcar; the fleet suffered heavy losses en route to Sicily and was then slaughtered at the Battle of Himera; the defeat was a catastrophe and had political ramifications back in Carthage, leading to the replacement of government by an aristocratic elite with the institution of a special form of republic managed by a Council of 104 and an Assembly of Elders (pages 116, 130, 215); Carthage didn’t intervene in Sicily for 70 years, allowing the Greeks to undergo an era of expansion and building, although they themselves then collapsed into a dozen or so bickering commonwealths
410 – Carthage got involved in the complicated internecine Sicilian wars when Hannibal Mago helped the town of Segesta defeat the town of Selinus and then destroyed Himera, thus avenging the disastrous defeat of 73 years earlier
406 – second expedition led by Hannibal Mago was ravaged by plague which killed Hannibal but his successor Himilco, captured and sacked Akragas, then captured the city of Gela, sacked Camarina and repeatedly defeated the army of Dionysius I, the new tyrant of Syracuse, before plague brought the fighting to a halt

And so on for another 150 years. I’m not going to explain the details of this map from the Turning Points of Ancient History website, I’m including it to show how the island of Sicily was characteristically divided up into a surprising number of territories and towns all of which were, at some point, attacking each other, besieged, surrendered, burnt down and so on during the 300 years of the Sicilian Wars. Basically, for most of that period Carthage held the west of the island, various Greek rulers held Syracuse in the south-east, and then they got embroiled in scores of alliances to try and grab as much of the territory between them.

Map of Sicily 483 BC showing its division between different rulers.

What was surprising to me about this was:

realising just how much of a colonising, imperialist peoples the Greeks were: I had a very limited image of the ancient Greeks as philosophers in togas strolling round the agora in Athens or heroically defending themselves against the Persians at Thermopylae; it’s chastening to read about their ambitious imperial aims and their success at founding Greek towns on coastlines all around the Mediterranean; in this respect the long chapter Miles devotes to the cult and legends of Herakles and the way his cult was used to both explain and justify Greek imperialism, is genuinely eye-opening
and of course, where you have colonies you have people being colonised; Miles’s book and the Wikipedia article devote all their time to the names of Carthaginian and Greek leaders and their battles and only in passing mention the names of the local ‘peoples’ whose land and livings were stolen from them by one or other set of invaders – the natives being the Elymians, Sicani and Sicels – having read so much about the European colonisation of Africa recently, I was struck by the similarities, only on a much smaller scale, in the sense that we hear a lot about the colonists because they were literate and left records, and almost nothing about the illiterate subject tribes who have gone down in history without a voice

Rome’s civic nationalism

Most people think of Carthage in connection with its rivalry with Rome, which led to the three Punic wars (264 to 146 BC) and which climaxed in the conquest and utter destruction of the city. Miles describes the long prehistory to the conflict, describing the slow but steady rise of Rome from a Carthaginian point of view.

Putting to one side the blizzard of dates, events and individuals, what is fascinating is Miles’s analysis of Rome’s success. It had a number of causes. One was that Rome was ruled by a pair of consuls who were elected for one year’s service. This meant they were in a hurry to make their name in history and were encouraged to aggressive policies now. A contrast to most other polities led by kings or tyrants who could afford to take their time. Miles explains that this ‘war without respite’ was a new thing, and economically exhausted Carthage (p.192).

Another was that when the Romans were defeated they simply raised more troops and came back to avenge the defeat, unlike the Carthaginians who tended to withdraw.

Another big reason for Rome’s success was its astonishing ability to integrate newly conquered territory and peoples into the Roman state (pages 158-9 and 197). This was done via infrastructure – conquered territory soon benefited from the building of the famous roads and aqueducts and laying out towns rationally and efficiently. But also by law, whereby newly integrated populations became equal under Roman law. Rome espoused what Michael Ignatieff calls ‘civic nationalism’ – all Roman citizens were treated equally under the law regardless of race or religion – as opposed to the ‘ethnic nationalism’ which most other states (then and for most of history) employed to unite its populations.

The ancient Latin identity survived, but only as a set of duties, rights and privileges enshrined in Roman law. (p.159)

A huge consequence of this is that Rome was able to recruit its armies from citizens, albeit only recently incorporated into the Roman state, but still, freeborn Roman citizens, who were inculcated with a sincere belief in Roman laws and values. This was in striking contrast to most other Mediterranean powers, including Carthage, which relied heavily on mercenaries to fill their armies, mercenaries who were both unreliable (often mutinied or defected) but also very expensive (a fact pointed out by the contemporary historian Polybius, quoted page 241). One of the reasons for Carthage’s relative decline was it bankrupted itself paying mercenaries to fight the wars against Rome.

(The best example of this was the Mercenary War which began at the end of the first Punic War when a huge force of some 20,000 mercenaries mutinied and turned on Carthage because they hadn’t been paid. Under canny leaders, who allied with neighbouring African tribes who would benefit from the overthrow of Carthage, it turned into a full-blown war on its own account which lasted from 241 to 237 BC when the mercenaries were finally defeated and massacred. Miles describes it in vivid detail pages 200 to 211. The mutiny contributed to the further weakening of Carthage in her long-running feud with Rome and vividly demonstrated the weakness of relying on foreign mercenaries. It is also the vivid and barbaric background to Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Salammbô.)

To be honest, this was one of the seven main things I took away from this long detailed book:

The Carthaginians sacrificed (or were widely accused of sacrificing) babies to their gods.
The huge cultural importance of the figure of Heracles to Greek imperialism and how he was incorporated into the Carthaginian cult of Melqart.
Rome’s success was in large part to its efficiency at incorporating conquered territory and peoples into the civic nationalism of its polity.
Rome’s military success was attributable, in part, to the way they just would not stop or admit defeat, put pressed on relentlessly till they won. (A point seconded by Adrian Goldsworthy’s book about the Punic Wars.)
The gigantic role played by Sicily in Carthage’s history.
The Mercenary War.
The origins and career of Hannibal Barca.

The Punic Wars

Obviously Miles gives a very thorough account of the Punic Wars although here, as in his account of the Sicilian Wars, the immense detail and the explanation of scholarly debate about various key points and cruxes, often threatened to obscure the outline of the bigger picture. For example, in Miles’s narrative, it wasn’t exactly clear when each of the Punic wars either started or ended, since they merged into peace negotiations and visits by ambassadors and skirmishes and violent rebellions or coups and so on.

The overall message seems to be that the three Punic wars accelerated the rise of Rome, in all sorts of ways, militarily, culturally, economically and culturally.

The first war (264 to 241 BC) was fought mainly on the island of Sicily. Rome’s involvement was the first time that a Roman army was sent outside Italy (p.357). However, even having just read about it, it pales into the background compared to the second one (218 to 201 BC) which is dominated by the ‘romantic’ figure of Hannibal. Part of the reason is that, apparently, we have far better sources for the second war, not least because a number of biographies of the famous Hannibal survive in whole or part.

Slavery

In case it’s not clear, all these societies the ancient Greeks, the Romans and the Carthaginians, relied on slaves. In all the wars, the populations of captured towns and cities were routinely sold into slavery by the victors (pages 127, 140, 281, 296, 315, 347, 352).

Iberia

A fascinating aspect of the final period of Carthage was the success of its sub-colony in the south of Spain, which was established and triumphed due to the region’s extensive silver deposits. The Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca invaded and subdued the locals in 237 BC, putting them to work on the silver mines on an industrial scale. Eventually there were something like 40,000 slaves working in the silver mines to generate the precious metal to prop up Carthage and its military campaigns. (The town of Cartagena in south-east Spain was founded by Hamilcar as qrt-ḥdšt, which the Romans called ‘Cartago Nova,’ which was corrupted by the locals to Cartagena. So the city of Cartagena in Colombia owes its name to the same origin in the Phoenician language of the Middle East, page 224.)

The Barcids

Hamilcar’s success really brought to prominence the family of Barca whose era or influence is referred to by the adjective ‘Barcid’. Hence ‘Barcid Spain’. In fact the most famous Hannibal of all, the one who took his elephants over the Alps in 218 BC, was a Barcid, the son of the Hamilcar Barca who subjugated the Iberian tribes. When Hamilcar died in the early 220s, his son-in-law Hasdrupal took over, with Hannibal becoming a senior officer in the army aged just 18. When Hasdrupal was assassinated in 221 Hannibal was acclaimed leader by the army (and promptly issued new coinage depicting Heracles/Melqart, just one of the way in which Hannibal consciously associated himself with the oldest iconography of Carthaginian power, pages 227, 245, 247, 250-258).

Hannibal and the second Punic war (218 to 201 BC)

I remember Hannibal taking his elephants over the Alps from boyhood history books. I must have wondered why he did it. This book makes things clear.

1. Hannibal was seeking revenge or, more accurately, restitution from the peace settlement of the first Punic war (264 to 241 BC) which had given Sicily to Rome as a Roman province – the first ever Roman province – and cemented Rome as the leading military power in the western Mediterranean and, increasingly, the Mediterranean region as a whole. (Coming 20 years after the end of the first war, and seeking to correct the ‘injustices’ of the peace treaty which ended it, reminds me of the 20 year gap between the first and second world wars.)

2. Having been acclaimed general of the Carthaginian army in Spain Hannibal was ambitious to make his mark and confident, having been raised in an army family, gone on campaigns from an early age and been an officer at age 18, that he could do it.

3. But instead of trying to invade and conquer Sicily – graveyard of so many Carthaginian campaigns in the past – he would strike direct at the enemy and invade Italy.

4. But why over the Alps? Simples. The Romans controlled the seas. A sea-borne invasion was just too risky.

As it was, as soon as Hannibal’s left Carthage-occupied Spain they were attacked by Celtic Iberian tribes. Crossing the Pyrenees was dangerous. Then crossing the entire south of France, again, involved armed confrontations with a succession of local Gaulish tribes. Finally they were shown by guides how to ascend one side of the Alps, go through passes, and descend into Italy in late autumn 218, with 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and an unknown number of elephants – the survivors of the 37 with which he left Iberia.

Here Hannibal spent several years marching and fighting and campaigning. He won one of the most famous victories of the ancient world, crushing a Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC, but the description of the war quickly gets bogged down and complicated. Overall the war makes the point that you can be the best general of your day and win stunning battles but still lose a war which is being fought on numerous fronts. While he was in Italy the Romans shrewdly sent an army to Iberia; although they suffered numerous setbacks, the Iberian tribes the Carthaginians had oppressed were happy to defect to them and so, eventually, the Romans defeated them, and, despite mutinies in their own army and local rebellions, eventually forced all Carthaginian forces, led by Hasdrubal Gisco, out of Iberia. The thirty-year Punic occupation of south Iberia was over, and it became a Roman province, as Sicily had at the end of the first war.

Hannibal was in Italy from 218 to 203. 15 years. Long time, isn’t it? Lots of battles. Early on the Roman authorities panicked and appointed Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator. Fabius introduced the strategy of avoiding open battle with his opponent, instead skirmishing with small detachments of the enemy. This was unpopular with the army, public or Roman elite, as Hannibal marched through the richest and most fertile provinces of Italy wreaking devastation as he went. (This softly, slowly approach explains the name of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884 as a British socialist organisation which aims to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.)

At one point he seized key towns in the very south, Magna Graecia, notably Capua, not as Punic fiefs but giving them their independence. His aim was not to destroy Rome but to mortally weaken it by giving Rome’s Latin and Italian allies their independence. This explains why he only once marched on the actual city and then was rebuffed by its thorough defences. In the end, though, all the cities he’d liberated ended up being retaken by the Romans.

Nonetheless, in the book’s conclusion, Miles says that these fifteen years during which an alien invader roamed more at less at will across the sacred territory of Rome left a deep psychological scar on the Roman psyche which took generations to exorcise (p.361).

In 203 Hannibal was recalled to Africa because in his absence, Publius Cornelius Scipio who had led the Romans to victory in Iberia, had led a force to Africa. Scipio destroyed an army of 50,000 sent against him but failed to capture the town of Utica and realised that besieging Carthage itself would probably be a long drawn-out process, costly in men and resources.

Thus both sides had fought themselves to a standstill and were ready to sue for peace. The Romans imposed very harsh terms but when Hannibal finally arrived back in Carthaginian territory the stage was set for a massive battle between the two old enemies. At the Battle of Zama in October 202 BC Scipio won a decisive victory and brought the war to an end (p.316).

Wikipedia has a cool animated graphic which sums up the change in territorial holdings over the course of the wars:

Changes in Rome and Carthage’s territories during the three Punic Wars, 264 to 146 BC. (Image by Agata Brilli ‘DensityDesign Integrated Course Final Synthesis Studio’, Polytechnic University of Milan)

The third Punic war

Surprisingly, shorn of its empire, Carthage flourished after the second war, quickly paying off the reparations owed to Rome and actively supplying her with vast amounts of wheat and food to support Rome’s wars against Macedon and other kingdoms in the East. When the end came it was entirely of Roman prompting. Factions in the Senate warned endlessly of the threat Carthage could still pose. Cato visited Carthage and was appalled at its prosperity. Eventually argument in the Senate led to an embassy being sent to demand impossible conditions of the Carthaginians – to uproot their city and move inland and cease to be an ocean-going, trading nation at all.

The embassy withdrew into the city and a 3-year siege commenced. Scipio adopted grandson of the great Scipio Africanus. Eventually stormed the walls and broke into the city and destroyed it and massacred its population. There is no doubt in Miles’s mind the Carthaginians did everything they could to abide by the letter of the treaties and to avoid war, and that the Romans would accept nothing but utter destruction. Once again it was Roman inflexibility and relentlessness which triumphed. Miles notes how this was recorded around the Mediterranean where Rome’s determination was noted but many lamented its bad faith, its falling short of the values it claimed to promote, of fairness and good faith.

Appropriating Carthage

At the end of the book, Miles shows how Carthage served numerous ideological purposes for Rome. For a start, in later works it became THE enemy which Rome had to overcome to in order to become great. In a sense, if Carthage hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary to invent her (p.373).

Closely connected, as mentioned above re. Said, even as it was being besieged and for centuries afterwards, Carthage became the anti-type of all the virtues the Romans congratulated themselves on, perfidious compared to Roman fides, with a disgusting baby-killing religion compared to Rome’s dignified ceremonies. Rome’s self-image was built by contrasting itself with the imagined vices of Carthage.

Third, however, a series of poets and historians wondered whether, in defeating Carthage, Rome had somehow peaked. The existence of a potent rival in a sense kept Rome on her toes, not just militarily but morally. For some later moralists, the defeat of Carthage marked the start of the internal squabbles, factions and corruption which were to lead to the civil wars, starting in the 80s BC.

The many dead

Deep down, the book made me marvel and gape at just how many, many men, throughout history, have miserably lost their lives in war. As Adrian Goldsworthy writes in his book on the Punic Wars:

In just one battle, in 216, the Romans and their allies lost 50,000 dead. During the second Punic war a sizeable part of Rome’s adult make population perished, mostly in the first few years of the conflict.

Between one and a quarter and one and three quarter millions of men died in the 120-year war. God knows how many civilians perished or were sold into slavery.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (2) by John Julius Norwich (1995)

This is a review of the second half of the third volume in John Julius Norwich’s weighty and famous three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire, from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to the fall of the same city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

The third volume covers the period from the catastrophic Battle of Manzikert of 1071 in which the Byzantine army was massacred by the new power in the Middle East, the Seljuk Turks, through to the final triumph of the Ottoman Turks and the miserable fall of the city.

It is a long, miserable and frequently appalling book to read. It took a big effort to get over the emotional trauma of reading about the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204, so traumatic I devoted a detailed blog post to it.

The Sack of Constantinople

Byzantium: The Decline and Fall contains so much brutality, cruelty, violence, so much destruction, rape and sending into slavery that it is hard to process and hard to cope with, emotionally.

As mentioned in my review of the first half, it depicts a world of unending conflict, in which all nations, rulers, emperors, kings, princes, khans, sultans, emirs and warlords are unceasingly engaged in endless conflict with each other, in which no treaties last, no peace endures, and each spring armies are mustered the length and breadth of Europe and Asia, on that year’s campaign of war and conquest.

Key events

1202 Fourth Crusade assembled at Venice. 1204 The Fourth Crusade captures Constantinople. A Latin Empire of Constantinople is formed, with other territories parcelled out to crusader lords and upstart Greeks asserting new Byzantine ‘successor states’.

1209 to 1229 The Albigensian Crusade against heretics in the south of France.

1243 The Battle of Köse Dağ in which the invading Mongols devastate the Seljuk Turks. The Turks never recover, but disintegrate into a host of emirates and small successor states. One of the smallest of these, in north-west Anatolia, would be ruled by Othman who would become the semi-legendary founder of the Ottoman Empire.

1261 Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus recaptures Constantinople, not in a battle but almost by accident when the main Latin army is away.

1274 Union of Lyon – at the Second Church Council of Lyon the fourteenth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII made various pladges to reunite the Eastern church with the Western i.e. to submit to papal power and to change rituals and wordings to agree with the Latin rite. This was a bid to gain help from the pope and Latin nations but the Greek population and most of the clergy rejected it, and it was later repudiated by Michael’s successor, Andronicus II.

1282 The Sicilian Vespers – the Norman rulers of Sicily were a persistent threat to Constantinople, repeatedly mounting large expeditions to cross the Balkans and attack the city. The Sicilian Vespers was a rebellion of the native population of Sicily against their arrogant French overlords, which massacred them and for a generation neutralised that threat.

1291 The Fall of Acre, the last Crusader kingdom of Outremer.

1299 date traditionally given for the founding of the Ottoman Empire.

1354 The Ottoman Turks capture Gallipoli on the northern, European shore of the Bosphorus and henceforth use it as a bridgehead into the Balkans.

1389 After victory at the Battle of Kosovo (15 June) the Ottoman Turks take over most of the Balkans, depriving Constantinople of agricultural land and manpower.

1402 Tamburlaine devastates the Othman Turkish army at the Battle of the Chubuk Plain. If he had stayed and conquered more of Anatolia he might have wiped out Ottoman Rule but he ceased his Western campaign and turned East where he died the next year, leaving the Ottomans to regroup and renew their threat against Constantinople.

1453 May 29 – Fall of Constantinople Sultan Mehmed II’s forces capture the city, leading to a day of unprecedented massacre, pillaging and rape.

Key issues

The post-sack era

For sixty or so years after the sack of 1204, the history of the Byzantine Empire was one of a succession of Greek emperors based in Nicaea trying to unify the squabbling Greek statelets, negotiate with the new Latin rulers of Constantinople, while also managing relations with the Turks to the East and the Bulgars and Serbs to the North.

Family squabbles

Throw in repeated internecine rivalry within the extended families of the emperors themselves, and problems created by a series of religious divisions and you have an extremely complicated story to tell. The situation around the two sacks, in 1204 and 1453, are particularly complicated, but Norwich tells it all with admirable clarity, and finds the time to give a brief summary of the overall achievements of each of the emperors, men (and some women acting as regents) who were condemned to struggle with the steadily declining situation.

Schisms

The Arsenites took their name from the Patriarch Arsenius who excommunicated the emperor Michael VIII for his treatment of his young co-emperor and rival, John Lascaris (Michael had him blinded and confined to prison for the rest of his life). Michael had Arsenius deposed and replaced in 1267 but the Arsenites only grew in number and zeal, providing a powerful opposition for the rest of Michael’s reign.

The Hesychasts (from the Greek hesychasm meaning ‘holy silence’) teaching a meditation technique which could help the faithful attain a vision of ‘the divine, uncreated light which had surrounded Jesus Christ at his Transfiguration’. The practice spread sparking, as new movements do, reforming zeal among its adherents, and opposition to all the compromises and fudges of the orthodox establishment, until the church became divided into bitterly opposing factions of hesychasts and traditionalists, a schism which spilled over into politics and took up the energy of successive emperors throughout the 14th century.

The Catholic Church

By the 1200s the Roman Catholic Church demanded control over the Eastern Orthodox Church and was firmly of the view that the Easterners were schismatics, little better than heretics, a view dating from the actual schism of 1054, but accompanied by a background of suspicion and dislike.

In the last 250 years of its existence the empire was forced to approach the Papacy numerous times, begging for help against the encroaching Turks, in return for which the emperor pledged to convert his people en masse to Catholicism, at the 1274 Union of Lyon, and again in the 14th century. But this ploy never worked out because:

all the senior Orthodox churchmen refused to co-operate
the Greek people passively resisted all changes
the papacy never came up with the material aid to the struggling empire which the emperor had bargained for

Crusades

We all know about the conventional and numbered sequence of crusades against Muslims in the Holy Land (and Egypt). Reading this book makes you aware of quite a few other ‘crusades’. I was surprised to learn of the many times Western princes and kings tried to get the pope’s approval for almost any armed venture by persuading him to call it a ‘crusade’.

1190 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to secure papal blessing and the name of ‘crusade’ for his planned attack on Constantinople (p.161)
In 1265 Charles of Anjou and Provence, younger brother of King Louis of France, persuades pope Clement IV to declare Charles’s war against the pope’s arch-enemy, King Manfred of Sicily, a ‘crusade’ (p.225)
In 1280 the same Charles of Anjou (having defeated Manfred and become King of Sicily) persuades the pope also call his next campaign, a vast amphibious attack against Constantinople, a ‘crusade’ against the Eastern schismatics and heretics (p.249)
In 1396 Pope Boniface IX gives the name of ‘crusade’ (and historians call the Crusade of Nicopolis) to the vast army assembled by King Sigismund of Hungary. 10,000 French knights and 6,000 Germany knights joining Sigismund’s 60,000 who all set off down the Danube and, outside the city of Nicopolis, are massacred by the Turks. According to Norwich ten thousand captured prisoners were beheaded in the Sultan’s presence. (p.355)

Reading about the many, increasingly petty and secular, ‘crusades’ devalues them. Like the papal mechanism of ‘jubilees’ when all debts were meant to be forgiven, or the pope’s increasingly liberal use of ‘excommunication’, the term ‘crusade’ soon loses all religious meaning and becomes just another diplomatic tool in the endless series of conflicts which are the Middle Ages, just another tool in the armoury of popes struggling to maintain the independence of the Papal States and the authority of the Catholic Church.

The joke papacy

The devaluing of the idea of the ‘crusade’ was just part of the general absurdity of the papacy in the Middle Ages. The shenanigans surrounding the election of the popes, the interference of various kings (the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor in particular) and the repeated setting up of popes and anti-popes by rival factions, who promptly excommunicated each other and all their followers, reduced the concept of God’s one representative on earth to a laughing stock.

As I count it, there were no fewer than 21 anti-popes in the period covered by this book (1080 to 1453), and it was also the period when the papacy left Rome altogether and based itself in Avignon (from 1309 to 1376) where it fell under the domination of the French King. It is utterly typical of the period that the French ‘exile’ was triggered after Pope Boniface VIII was arrested and beaten so badly by soldiers of King Philip IV of France that he died.

The Avignon Papacy

Venice

Venice was responsible for the sack of Constantinople and plays the role of bad guy for the remaining 250 years of the empire, repeatedly attacking and burning the city, often as part of its ongoing and intensely bitter feud against Italy’s other maritime state, Genoa. The sequence of events is long and very complicated but Norwich gives the sense that, right up to the very last moment, Venice was guided purely by commercial self-interest, determined to screw as much land and trading advantages out of the Byzantine Empire as possible even when the ’empire’ amounted to little more than a half-ruined city. Only in the last few months of its existence do the Venetians seem to have realised that the loss of Constantinople and the unimpeded ownership of the entire Balkan Peninsula by the Turks would put them on the Adriatic coast right opposite themselves. Too late they offered to send the emperor ships and troops, decades too late, maybe a century too late.

Mercenaries

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Seljuk Turks were effectively free to move into Anatolia. The process wasn’t immediate but within a decade they had taken control of the whole central portion of Anatolia, submitting the native Greek Christians to Muslim rule and laws. Most importantly Anatolia had been for a thousand years the source of a) food b) fighting manpower to the Eastern Empire. With its loss, the empire had to turn increasingly to paying for mercenary soldiers to fight its cause.

The loss of Anatolia had long since deprived Byzantium of its traditional source of manpower; for many years already it had had to rely on foreign mercenaries. (p.259, referring to the year 1300)

As the book progresses, you become aware that mercenaries fought on all sides. It was, for example, striking to learn that when, in 1211 the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, Kaikosru, attacked the Byzantine forces of the emperor Theodore, both armies contained a contingent of Latin mercenaries at their core (p.190).

This sets the tone for the ever-increasing use of mercenaries by all sides: for example, the young general Michael Palaeologus – before he himself seized the throne – was sent into exile and ended up leading the Sultans Christian mercenaries in battle against the Mongol invaders in 1256 (p.205).

In 1258 Michael, now emperor, despatches an army against his Greek rival in the west, the Despot of Epirus: and this Byzantine army contains contingents from Hungary, Serbia, as well as Cuman and Turkish mercenaries (p.208)

‘Multicultural’ is not at all the right word, but the universal use of mercenaries brings home one of the many differences from our own ties. In our day we associate an army with the country which funds and organises it. We think of armies as being national. In those times an army could be made up of an extremely heterogenous group of man fighting for all kinds of reasons.

In 1302 a Byzantine force was caught just outside the city of Nicomedia by a Turkish army twice its size commanded by a local Ghazi named Othman. It wasn’t a decisive battle, the Byzantines turned and fled, the Turks proceeded west to the coast, ravaging all the towns and settlements they passed through. Historically the encounter is notable because it marks the first appearance of the legendary Othman, founder of the Ottoman Empire. But for the point I’m making the important thing is that the Byzantine force was largely composed of Alan tribesmen. (p.263)

As the reliance on mercenaries increased, successive emperors of Byzantium found themselves trapped into paying the spiralling costs of even basic defence. More and more income was diverted to pay the insatiable demands of foreign fighters. Thus when around 1350 Symeon, Grand Duke of Muscovy, sent a large quantity of gold to pay for the restoration of the St Sophia church, the emperor of the time was forced to use the entire sum in order to pay mercenaries, Turkish mercenaries – Muslim mercenaries. The Grand Duke was not pleased.

Because if their pay wasn’t kept up, mercenaries were a dangerously double-edged weapon.

In 1263 Michael sends a fleet and army against the King of Achaia (one of the breakaway Greek kingdoms created after the 1204 sack of Constantinople), an army of some 15,000 men a third of who are Muslim Seljuk mercenaries. (p.220) This did not end well as half way through the campaign the mercenaries, who had not been paid for six months, suddenly demanded their wages and when these were not forthcoming, deserted to the other side (p.222)

This of course was the weakness of mercenaries: if you ran out of money, they stopped fighting for you and, as the years went by, the Empire became increasingly strapped for cash. The most notable example of this was the Grand Catalan Company.

The Grand Catalan Company

This was a powerful group of mercenaries led by Roger de Flor between the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 and Roger’s assassination in 1305. During this period they evolved to become one of the most efficient fighting forces in the Mediterranean and were hired by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus to fight the increasing power of the Turks.

Norwich gives a fascinating account of the colourful career of Roger himself (sent to sea aged eight, pirate captain by the age of 24) and of the brilliant campaign they undertook against the Turks. He explains that, if only the Catalan Company had followed up its initial victories against the Turks and pushed on into Anatolia it is conceivable that the Empire might have been able to seize much of the territory back, re-establish its agriculture and earlier model of military service and generally been restored. But the Catalans, as mercenaries, were only interested in loot and broke off the campaign to return to the sea and their treasure stores.

It was fear about their increasing independence and refusal to obey orders which prompted the emperor to permit his other group of mercenaries – the Alans – to carry out a massacre of the Catalan Company during a feast at which Roger himself was murdered (the Alans had a long-festering grievance against the Catalans). The surviving Catalans went on a wild rampage through Adrianople (where the assassination took place) and beyond. It’s fascinating to learn that the memory of these massacres lasted so long that the monks of nearby Mount Athos prohibited the entrance of Catalan citizens until as recently as 2000.

The Great Catalan Company

Marriages

As explained in a previous blog post, in the absence of all international bodies or agreed norms of behaviour, one of the few ways rulers had of trying to control the chaos of endless international rivalries and war, was through family and kinship ties. Specifically, the tool of marrying off your brothers or sisters or sons or daughters to the children of other rulers you wished to secure an alliance with, or to structure the inheritance of property, specifically territories and kingdoms.

In May 1197 the Emperor Alexius III was obliged to stand impotently by while his niece, Irene, daughter of the blinded ex-emperor Isaac II, was married off by Henry VI King of Sicily to his own younger brother Philip of Swabia. (p.164)
When Henry of Hainault, Latin ruler of Byzantium, died in 1216, the Frankish barons elected his brother-in-law Peter of Courtenay to succeed him. In France at the time Peter set sail for the East with an army of 5,500 men, landing in Epirus and laying siege to the town of Durazzo. The town proved impregnable and Peter and most of his men were captured in the mountains of Albania and thrown in prison, never to be heard of again. His wife, Yolanda, had sailed direct to Constantinople where she adopted the title of Empress and regent for their new-born son. She consolidated her position by giving the daughter of her brother, Henry (who was named Mary) to the Emperor of the Byzantine government in exile in Nicaea, Theodore Lascaris.
When the Latin Emperor Robert I (the son Yolanda acted as regent for) died in 1228, leaving an eleven-year-old boy, Baldwin II, as his successor, the Latin barons offered the throne of Byzantium to an ageing adventurer and one-time King of Jerusalem, John of Brienne. John reluctantly accepted on the understanding that 11-year-old Baldwin would immediately marry his (John’s) own four-year-old daughter, Maria, and that she be given a sizeable dowry in the form of land. (p.195)
In 1235 John Asen emperor of Bulgaria signed a treaty of alliance with Nicaea which was sealed by the marriage of his daughter Helena to the son of the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes. (p.197)
In 1249 John Vatatzes secured a treaty of friendship with Michael II, Despot of Epirus (and illegitimate son of the despotate’s original founder, Michael I) by marrying his granddaughter Maria to Michael’s son Nicephorus. (p.200)

And so on and on.

In fact I noticed that there is a slowly increasing mention of treaties in the text, and it would be interesting to know how the concept of ‘the treaty’ changed and evolved over this long period and how it related to the early development of ‘the nation state’, whether there was an increasing recognition of the legal standing of treaties, or whether they remained agreements between individual leaders.

Whatever the theory, pieces of paper remained cheap and easy to tear up, whereas bonds of blood and marriage (and so grandparentage of the children of these unions) remained a primeval force understood by all sides.

In 1256 Tsar Michael Asen of the Bulgars was assassinated and succeeded by a boyar named Constantine Tich. Tich saw the strategic usefulness of an alliance with Byzantium and so he repudiated his wife in order to marry Irene, the daughter of Byzantine Emperor Theodore II. (p.205)
Early in 1258 Manfred of Sicily, the bastard son of Frederick II, invaded Epirus. The Despot of Epirus, Michael, was at that moment besieging the Byzantine city of Thessalonica so he decided to ally with Manfred against the Nicaean Empire, negotiated a deal with him and sealed it by giving Manfred the hand of his eldest daughter, Helena. (p.207)
In 1291 Charles II of Anjou proposed an alliance with Nicephorus, Despot of Epirus, against Constantinople, which he cemented by marrying his son, Philip, to Nicephorus’s daughter, Thamar. (p.260)

Child marriages

I was struck by the number of marriage contracts which involved very young children.

In 1136 Raymond of Poitiers, son of William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, married Constance, daughter of Bohemund II of Antioch, aged six, in order to give Raymond legitimacy as the new ruler of the Crusader Kingdom of Antioch. (p.77)
In September 1158 Theodora Comnena, niece of Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, was married to King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. She was 12, he was 28. (p.122)
On 2 March 1180 the Patriarch Theodosius celebrated the marriage of Princess Agnes of France to Alexius Comnenus of Constantinople. She was nine, her husband was ten. (p.137)
In 1244 the Nicaean Emperor John Vatatzes strengthened his position vis-a-vis the Latin kingdom by marrying Constance, the illegitimate daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Constance was just 12-years-old and forced to take the Byzantine name Anna, and married to a man forty years older than her who was, as everyone knew, having an affair with one of her own waiting-women. (p.199)
In 1282 an ambitious new ruler came to the throne of Serbia, Stephen Miliutin, who within a year declared support for Charles of Anjou (the threatener from Sicily) and allied with the Despotate of Epirus (on the west Balan coast). The Byzantine Emperor Andronicus realised he had to neutralise this threat and when he heard that Miliutin’s legal wife had died (he was said to keep at least two concubines) he offered his own sister in marriage. Interestingly, the sister, Eudocia, flat out refused to be married and so Andronicus turned to the next best thing, his own daughter Simonis. Simonis was five years old and Miliutin 40. Amazingly, the little girl was taken by a Byzantine deputation to Thessalonica where the wedding was carried out by the Archbishop of Ochrid. Miliutin was thrilled that her dowry included most of the territory of Macedonia (which he coveted) and he agreed to allow little Simonis to remain in the Serbian nursery ‘for a few more years until she was old enough to live with him as his wife’. It is interesting to note that many people at the time saw this as immoral, and that the Patriarch of Constantinople, John XII, resigned in protest. (p.261)
In 1284, Andronicus II married Yolanda (who was renamed Eirene as Empress) who was eleven at the time. (p.275)

You could see this as the exploitation of the young, or as treating women as pawns – but I see it as treating people as pawns.

Everyone in any kind of position of power might well have had their own identity, character, wishes, plans and all the rest of the fol-de-rol surrounding ‘personality’ and ‘individuality’ which we in our post-Enlightenment, post-religious, consumer society take for granted. But eminent people living then existed primarily as pieces on a vast chess board, to be switched, taken, or sacrificed without a moment’s hesitation, as the game demanded.

Manfred of Sicily was defeated by the merciless Charles of Anjou at the Battle of Benevento on 26 February 1266. Only after three days was Manfred’s body found and Charles then denied it a Christian burial but had it placed by the bridge at Benevento so that every passing soldier in his army could throw a stone at it and build up a burial cairn. Manfred’s wife, Helena of Epirus, and is three young children were imprisoned at Nocera. Of the four, three never appeared again: one son was still there in the same prison 43 years later. (p.225)
In December 1355 the Emperor John V sent a desperate letter to Pope Innocent VI begging for help. If the pope would send him 500 knights, a thousand infantry, fifteen transport ships and five galleys, John promised to oversee the conversion of the Greek Orthodox church to Roman Catholic rites and personnel. In addition he would send his five-year-old son, Manuel, to be raised a Catholic and disposed of as the pope saw fit. (p.326)

Youth

Very young some of these children may well have been but then, almost everyone was young. Lots of the rulers died in their 30s or 40s. Norwich repeatedly comments that rulers in their 60s were old for their time. And there are some staggering examples of how much was expected, and achieved, by people of incredible youth.

In 1268 Manfred of Sicily’s nephew Conradin marched south from Germany in a bid to save his family’s inheritance from the aggressor Charles of Anjou. On 23 August Charles shattered his army at Taglioacozzo. Conradin captured, subjected to a kangaroo court and then beheaded in the market square in Naples. He was just sixteen and the last of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. (p.225)

The most striking example of youth achieving astonishing things is the final capture of Constantinople itself by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Norwich shows in detail how Mehmed led Turkish forces to defeat the crusade led by John Hunyadi after the Hungarian incursions into his country broke the conditions of the truce Peace of Szeged, and then goes on to explain the thinking behind his final assault on Constantinople, and describe in great details both the preparations for the siege – by land and by sea – and a day-by-day account of the siege, breach and fall of the city. The attacking Turks gave themselves up to an orgy of violence and destruction, massacring and raping civilians, desecrating, looting and torching the churches. Through the mayhem strode the Sultan, surrounded by his bodyguard, to the vast church of Hagia Sophia, which he had already decided would be converted into the largest mosque in the world. He knelt and kissed the floor and thanked Allah for his victory.

And he had achieved all this – by the age of twenty-one!

The generality of the heartless, calculating treatment meted out to everyone was symbolised for me by the widespread blinding of the powerful when they were brought low or presented a threat – not as a punishment, but to neutralise them as a threat.

Blindings

From the eight or nine hundreds onwards it became customary to blind rival emperors you had overthrown and/or their male children, in order to permanently prevent them becoming a threat. It was considered less cruel than simply murdering them.

In 1077 the general Nicephorus Bryennius made a bid for the throne, but was captured and blinded by Nicephorus III Botaneiates. (p.64)
1204 following the fall, sack, and occupation of Constantinople, the Emperor Alexius V ‘Mourtzouphlos’ was blinded
In 1218 Boril of the Bulgars was overthrown by his cousin John II Asen and blinded. (p. 193)
1230 John Asil of Bulgaria defeated Theodor of Thessalonica and had him blinded. (p.197)
In 1295 the Empire’s foremost general, Alexius Philanthropenus, rose up in revolt. He was quickly defeated, captured and blinded. (p.262)
In 1373 the Ottoman Sultan Murad’s son, Sauji, rose against him. The Sultan quickly defeated the rebel forces and had his son blinded. (p.336)

But the most disgusting of the many, many blindings in this book is of a helpless eleven-year-old boy.

John IV Lascaris was only seven years old when he inherited the throne on the death of his father, Theodore II Ducas Lascaris. He was put under the regency of the bureaucrat George Muzalon who was hugely unpopular and swiftly murdered by the nobility (in church). The leader who emerged was the successful young general Michael Palaeologus who usurped the regency and then, on January 1, 1259, made himself co-emperor as Michael VIII. (Michael was, in fact, John’s second cousin once removed.) After Michael’s conquest of Constantinople from the Latin Empire on July 25, 1261, Michael needed to secure full control of the Byzantine inheritance and so four months later he had John IV – who he’d left behind in the palace at Nicaea – blinded on Christmas Day. It was the boy’s eleventh birthday. He was then sent to a prison in Bithynia where he lived for another fifty years. Many at the time were disgusted by this act and it led to Michael’s excommunication by the Patriarch Arsenius Autoreianus. (p.212)

Political mutilation in Byzantine culture

All this can be set against what became an embedded habit of the Ottoman Dynasty which was that, upon the death of each Sultan, his sons fought for power and the victor had all his defeated rivals strangled. This wasn’t just a bad habit practised by the occasional wicked sultan – it was enshrined in Ottoman law.

Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s Law of Governance imparted the right of executing the male members of the dynasty to his son in order to prevent an interregnum.

To prevent attempts at seizing the throne, reigning sultans practiced fratricide upon accession, starting with Murat I in 1362. Both Murad III and his son Mehmed III had their half-brothers murdered. The killing of all the new sultan’s brothers and half-brothers (which were usually quite numerous) was traditionally done by manual strangling with a silk cord. As the centuries passed, the ritual killing was gradually replaced by lifetime solitary confinement in the ‘Golden Cage’ or kafes, a room in the harem from where the sultan’s brothers could never escape, unless they happened to become heir presumptive. Some had already become mentally unstable by the time they were asked to reign. (Wikipedia)

Slavery

I also cannot get over the way slavery is so casually mentioned. Again and again entire populations of towns, cities and regions are led off into slavery. We are told slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Muslim lands, but also appears to have been common in the Byzantine Empire, and was practiced by all the lesser peoples fringing the narrative, like the Bulgars and Hungarians and Serbs. I am puzzled why the ubiquity of slavery across Europe and the Middle East for most of the Middle Ages isn’t better known, isn’t made more of – especially when you consider the enormous fuss which is made about the African slave trade carried out by the West European nations from the 1500s onwards.

After the Turks seized Gallipoli they began conquering Thrace, taking Didymotichum in 1361, Adrianople in 1362. ‘In every city and village that was captured, a large part of the population was transported to slavery in Asia Minor’ (p.328)
When the Turks seized the city of Thessalonica in 1430, they looted all the churches and burnt many of them to the ground, massacring most of the male population and selling some seven thousand women and children into slavery. (p.395)
In preparation for the final siege the Turks took the nearby island of Prinkipo. the garrison was burnt alive in their fortress, the entire civilian population was sold into slavery. (p.424)
The monk and scholar George Scholarius was sold into slavery along with all his fellow monks (p.442)

Why is black African slavery discussed, raised, debated and lamented on an almost daily basis in books, films, art galleries and the media – while the European and Asian slave trade is completely and utterly absent from all forms of culture whatsoever, except tucked away as a minor detail of histories of the classical world and Middle Ages?

Weren’t the huge numbers of people sold into slavery in the 1100s, 1200s, 1300s and 1400s just as much human beings with lives and hopes and fears, as the people sold into slavery in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s?

So why commemorate the one and not the other?

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1 Comment

by Simon on June 9, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Christianity, Crusades, Middle Ages

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Posted by Simon on June 9, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/byzantium-the-decline-and-fall-2-john-julius-norwich/

The Hard Way by Lee Child (2006)

‘Very tall, heavily built, like a real brawler. He’s in his late thirties or early forties. Short fair hair, blue eyes.’ (Patti Joseph’s description of Reacher, p.91)

You remember the way episodes of Friends were titled ‘The one with…’ and then specified the core element of that week’s show. You can do the same with the 22 Jack Reacher novels. This is the one where Jack is hired to solve a kidnapping, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems, and takes him from the streets of New York to a farm in Norfolk.

The café He is sitting in a café in New York when he sees a guy cross the street, get into a Merc and drive off. Nothing special in that. Next morning he’s at the same café when he’s approached by a tough-looking man and persuaded to come with him to meet his boss, Mr Lane. Turns out Mr Lane’s wife has been kidnapped, the kidnappers demanded a million in cash to be left in a car at that location. Lane agreed, had one of his people fill a bag with a million, put it in the boot of the car and drive it to the arranged drop zone. This was the car which Reacher had watched the kidnapper cross the street, get into and drive away. Without knowing it or intending to be, Reacher is a key witness.

The mercenaries Reacher tells them what he knows. ‘Them’? Yes, Lane runs a group of mercenaries (‘a private military corporation’, p.450) tough ex-Army, ex-Marines, U.S. Navy SEALs, British SAS etc. In fact, Reacher analyses their plight so logically and compellingly that Lane hires him on the spot to be a consultant to help manage the situation.

But there is, of course, more to the situation than meets the eye. It takes about 450 pages for Reacher to nail the real story, pages during which he, as usual:

acquires a small circle of helpers and supporters
who just happen to have privileged access to FBI/Army/Homeland Security sources
and manages to wangle financial backing to pay for the endless taxis and trains and planes he needs to take

Not the first time Firstly, it turns out this is the second time a Lane wife has been kidnapped. His first wife, Anne, was kidnapped five years earlier and, although Lane paid the ransom, was found shot dead in New Jersey.

The Dakota Building Reacher quickly discovers that some people suspect the first kidnap was a front, a put-up job. Lane’s base is the famous Dakota Building, next to Central Park, where John Lennon lived and outside which he was shot (Yoko Ono and her bodyguards make a small appearance in the book, walking past Reacher in the lobby).

Patti Joseph Outside the building he is approached by the first wife’s sister, Patti. She is convinced the first kidnap was a sham, and that Lane had her sister murdered. As the book progresses Reacher uncovers the evidence to prove this is true. He discovers that Lane had instructed a member of his inner circle, Knight, who usually drove his wife around, to return to base and tell everyone he’d dropped her off shopping as usual – but in fact to take her out to New Jersey and shoot her. Then paid someone to fake the ransom calls.

Lane had his first wife murdered Why? The first Mrs Lane had come to realise that Lane was a psychopath, and had told him she wanted to leave him. Which hurt his ego so much he had her eliminated. Although Knight – who knew all this – was loyal to his boss, on the mercenaries’ next job – to defend the government of Burkina Faso in Africa, from rebels – Lane contrived a situation whereby he ordered Knight and his best friend among the mercenaries, Hobart, to hold a forward post against the advancing army. Lane then ordered his main force to retreat, abandoning Knight and Hobart to the African rebel soldiers. The aim was to ensure that Knight was killed and along with him the evidence of his wife’s murder. Hobart was just collateral damage.

Detective Brewer The first wife’s sister, Patti Joseph, tells Reacher all this. She has been keeping a close watch on the Dakota Building for years, photographing who goes in and out, keeping a log of the movements of all of Lane’s central circle of mercs, for years. Is that obsessive or is she onto something? She phones in her results to a NYPD detective named Brewer. When Reacher meets Brewer the latter admits that he humours Patti, partly because something might come of her efforts, mostly because she’s a pretty chick.

FBI agent Pauling Turns out that Brewer passes on Patti’s observations to a third party, Lauren Pauling, an ex-FBI agent who was part of the original FBI investigation of the kidnapping of Lane’s first wife and has felt oppressed by guilt for five years that her and her colleagues screwed up the investigation and allowed the first wife to be killed. She is still interested in the case because she hopes evidence will surface to prove that it was Lane who killed the first wife, and not the kidnappers who did it, because that would get the FBI and the cops off the hook for bungling the case.

So who is carrying out the current kidnapping, five years later, of the second Mrs Lane, Kate Lane, a tall, slender, blonde, beautiful model, and her daughter by a previous marriage, Jade (also ‘a truly beautiful child’, p.424)?

Pauling becomes Reacher’s sidekick Reacher develops a close working relationship with Pauling, now a freelance investigator. She has a useful contact in the Homeland Security administration (they always do). Pauling becomes the person Reacher bounces his theories and ideas off, and who accompanies him on his investigations around New York.

Investigations They investigate the house where the kidnapper insisted the keys to each of the cars containing ransom money be dropped through the letterbox. It turns out to be empty. After clever detective work the pair track down the apartment the kidnapper used to oversee the dropping off place for the ransoms. They then manage to locate the apartment where Kate and Jade were kept hostage – though it’s now empty.

The man who doesn’t speak For a long middle stretch of the book, based on eye-witness accounts of neighbours and people who sold the kidnapper bits of furniture, they establish his appearance (non-descript white male) but the standout fact is that he never talks. From several hints they develop the theory that the kidnapper can’t talk and from descriptions of what’s happened to other white mercenaries captures in Africa, they speculate this may be because his tongue was cut out by the rebels.

Africa They think the kidnapper was one of the two men Lane abandoned in Burkina Faso – Hobart or Knight. Using Pauling’s contacts in Homeland Security to identify people who’ve flown back from Africa recently, and then another contact with access to all kinds of security databases, they track down the apartment of Hobart’s sister, which turns out to be conveniently close to the café and to the ransom-money-dropping-off point in Downtown Manhattan.

There’s a very tense moment when they break into the shabby apartment building where Hobart’s sister lives, and climb the squeaking stairs, at pains to be silent in case the kidnapper they’re seeking hears them, and has time to harm or shoot his hostages, Kate and Jade.

Hobart So the reader is surprised and shocked when they kick open the apartment door and find …. a washed-out shabby woman, Hobart’s sister, making soup, and that Hobart himself is a limbless cripple propped up on the sofa.

It is Hobart, he was a member of Lane’s mercenary gang, he was abandoned by Lane, he was captured by the rebel African soldiers. He was held captive for five long years during which he barely survived the starvation and disease and, once a year, they brought him and other prisoners out of their cells into an arena of baying warriors, and asked whether they wanted their left hand, right hand, left foot, or right foot to be hacked off with a machete – and whether they then wanted the stump seared in boiling tar, or left to bleed out.

Which explains why Hobart is in his pitiful state, without feet or hands, a wretched withered stump of a man. Hobart is clearly not the kidnapper, or the man who rented the apartments or who Reacher saw drive away the ransom car right at the start.

But he does confirm that his fellow merc and prisoner, Knight, did carry out the execution of Lane’s first wife, under Lane’s instructions, then helped the fiction that it was a kidnap. So that part of Patti’s story is correct.

Reacher and Pauling have sex Later that night, Pauling expresses to Reacher what a vast relief it is to her, to have confirmed that it was not her professional screw-up which had led to the first wife’s death. The wife was dead before the FBI was even contacted. To celebrate, she and Reacher have his usual athletic, fighting-with-a-bear, championship sex.

She is now his lover, as well as his close associate in the investigation.

The Taylor theory The book sprinkles more dead ends and deliberate false trails for Reacher (and the reader) to work through -, but the main focus of their investigation now shifts to Taylor. This man was in Lane’s inner circle of mercenaries, and was the guy who drove Kate Lane to Bloomingdale’s on the day of the kidnapping. The assumption had been that he was killed almost immediately by someone who got into the stationary car and pointed a gun at the women, forced Taylor to drive wherever they wanted him to go and then killed him.

Child has planted this false version of events in our minds by having Reacher ask not one but two of Lane’s mercs to speculate how they think the kidnapping went down, and both think it happened like that. This version of events had also been confirmed when Pauling’s cop contact, Brewer, told her that the body of a white man had been found floating off a dock in mid-town Manhattan.

Now Pauling and Reacher revisit this story and the first thing they establish is that the ‘floater’ is not Taylor. Wrong height to begin with. Taylor is still alive.

So now Pauling and Reacher develop the theory that Kate and Jade were kidnapped by a disgruntled member of Lane’s inner circle, Taylor, the very driver entrusted with their safety. He pulled out a gun, told her and Jade to shut up, drove them to a safe house, tied them up, made the ransom phone calls and picked up the money. Taylor will have needed an associate, so Reacher and Pauling spend a lot of time thinking through who that could be.

Reacher and Lane In case I haven’t made it clear, all this time – throughout this entire process – Reacher is still nominally under contract to Lane to find the kidnappers. At that first meeting in the Dakota Building, Lane offered Reacher a payment of $25,000 to find Kate and the kidnapper. Reacher is free to go off and roam the city, make his own investigations, contact whoever he likes – but periodically he has to go back to Lane’s apartment, filled with half a dozen surly mercs, and update the boss on progress.

Thus Reacher is sitting with the others when the ransom demand phone calls come through to Len’s apartment. He sits with the others when the second call comes through asking for confirmation that Lane has the cash, and then giving details of the pickup. And then he sits in suspense with the others waiting for a confirmation call that the money has been received, and – hopefully – that Kate is going to be released.

The character of Lane and the mercs Since the kidnapper ends up calling for three separate payments, there are three of these very tense scenes. They also gives Reacher plenty of time to get to know Lane, to witness his psychotic rages, and to see the hold he has over the other mercs. These are strong, well-trained men but each of them, in fact, was a failure in the military, in various ways in need of being led, and prepared to do anything for The Boss.

When there is no call-back after the third and final payment is made, Reacher along with the others begins to fear the worst. That the kidnapper has killed the girls and fled. Child reiterates this idea again and again, having Reacher emphasise that, in his experience, the majority of kidnappings end in the murder of the victims, and that the first 24 hours are key. Every hour after that increases the likelihood of failure.

A bounty on Taylor As the truth sinks in that the girls are probably dead, Lane increases the bounty he will pay Reacher to $1 million. Since he has kept Lane informed of his investigations up to the dismissal of Knight and Hobart as suspects, Lane, Reacher, Pauling and the reader all now think the kidnapping was carried out by Taylor the driver, who faked his own death, held the women hostage in Downtown Manhattan, collected the money three times, killed them, and has now absconded.

Reacher now clicks into Revenge Mode. He knows Lane is a louse, a psychopath who probably had his first wife murdered and abandoned his men to terrible fates in Africa. So he’s not doing it for Lane. He vows to track down Taylor for the sake of the women, for Kate and Jade. In the apartment they have now identified as Taylor’s, which they found empty and abandoned, Reacher noticed one of the speed dial phone numbers was to a number in Britain. He guesses it’s of a close relative.

The novel moves to England

All this has taken about 350 pages. For the last 150 pages of the novel the setting switches to England, for 20 or so pages to London, but then on to rural Norfolk, where Pauling and Reacher track Taylor down to his sister’s farm.

We know that Child – real name James Grant – is himself English. We know that he lives in New York, so we can guess that the extremely detailed descriptions of Reacher and Pauling’s investigative walks around Downtown Manhattan reflect Child’s own detailed knowledge of the area.

It adds a different, not exactly literary but psychological element – maybe a hint of tongue-in-cheek – to the English section of the book, to know that Child is himself English, but pretending to write as an American. So every description in this section is written by an Englishman masquerading as an American writing about a fictional American trying to pretend to fit in with the local Brits.

Thus Child’s description of Reacher walking into a rural pub in Norfolk is layered with ironies, as the Englishman Child imagines what it would be like for an American like Reacher to walk into a pub, and then to try and remember his own (Reacher’s own) days in the U.S. Army when he was stationed in England. All this results in Reacher ordering ‘a pint of best’ while his New York colleague and lover, Pauling, is made to point out all the quaint quirks and oddities of English life.

(The two most notable of these are that a) all the streets are absolutely festooned with signs and painted symbols giving instructions about every element of your driving, ‘the nanny state in action’ and b) London is a vast octopus extending its tendrils into the country for miles and miles, making it impossible to get into or out of at any speed. Both true enough.)

Reacher has been promised $1 million if he can deliver Taylor to Lane. Through British police contacts Reacher and Pauling track down Taylor, confirming he took a flight from New York JFK, arrived at Heathrow and then – using a different line of investigation – establish the whereabouts of his sister.

How? Using the speed dial phone number Reacher had noticed in Taylor’s New York apartment. This locates Taylor’s sister to a farm in Norfolk. Reacher and Pauling hire a car and drive there, locate the village, and the farm, and park in the early morning with binoculars, waiting for Taylor, his sister, her husband and little girl to exit the farmhouse, which they conveniently do a few hours later.

Reacher had already alerted Lane that he has confirmed that Taylor is in England, and so Lane and his crew are en route on a transatlantic flight. Sighting and identity confirmed, Reacher and Pauling drive back to London to meet Lane and his goons in the Park Lane hotel.

Lane doesn’t just want to kill Taylor. He explains how he is going to torture him slowly to death. Reacher is revolted by the psychopath, as ever. A few seats away in the lobby of the hotel, a mother is trying to quiet down her restless squabbling kids. One of them throws an old doll at her brother, which misses and skids across the floor, hitting Reacher’s foot. He looks down at it and has a blinding revelation.

The twist

In a flash Reacher realises what has been wrong with the investigation all along. In a blinding moment he realises he has made a seismic error of judgement and that his entire understanding of the case is not only wrong, but catastrophically wrong.

Why? What vital clues have he and Pauling (and the reader) missed in the last 400 pages? What can it be which totally transforms the situation? Why does he excuse himself from Lane for a moment, walk as if to the toilets, but instead hurtle down into the underground car park, call Pauling to meet him, jump into the hire car, and then drive like a maniac all the way back to Norfolk?

What is the real secret behind the kidnapping of Kate and Jade Lane?

That would be telling. It’s an expertly constructed book with many twists and false trails, tense moments, and sudden surprises. I read it in a day. Take it on your next long train or plane trip or to read by a pool. It is gripping, intelligent and – in much of its factual research (about mercenaries, about the coup in Africa) informative.

Credit

All quotes from the 2011 paperback edition of The Hard Way by Lee Child, first published in 2006 by Bantam Press.

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on August 8, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in America, Thriller

Posted by Simon on August 8, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/the-hard-way-lee-child/

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