Fanaticism is a belief or behavior involving uncritical zeal or an obsessiveenthusiasm.
The political theorist Zachary R. Goldsmith provides a "cluster
account" of the concept of fanaticism, identifying ten main attributes
that, in various combinations, constitute it: messianism, inappropriate relationship to reason (irrationality), an embrace of abstraction, a desire for novelty, the pursuit of perfection, an opposition to limits, the embrace of violence, absolute certitude, excessive passion, and an attractiveness to intellectuals.
Definitions
Etienne-Pierre-Adrien Gois, Voltaire defending Innocence against Fanaticism, circa 1791.
Philosopher George Santayana defines fanaticism as "redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim". The fanatic displays very strict standards and little tolerance for
contrary ideas or opinions. Tõnu Lehtsaar has defined the term fanaticism as the pursuit or defence of something in an extreme and passionate way that goes beyond normality. Religious fanaticism is defined by blind faith, the persecution of dissidents and the absence of reality.
Fanaticism is a result from multiple cultures interacting with one another. Fanaticism occurs most frequently when a leader makes minor variations
on already existing beliefs, which then drives the followers into a
frenzy. In this case, fanaticism is used as an adjective describing the
nature of certain behaviors that people recognize as cult-like. Margaret Mead referred to the style of defense used when the followers are approached. The most consistent thing presented is the priming, or preexisting,
conditions and mind state needed to induce fanatical behavior. Each
behavior is obvious once it is pointed out; a closed mind, no interest
in debating the subject of worship, and over reaction to people who do
not believe.
In his book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, Neil Postman
states that "the key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are
self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are
'false', but because they are expressed in such a way that they can
never be shown to be false."
Similar behaviors
The
behavior of a fan with overwhelming enthusiasm for a given subject is
differentiated from the behavior of a fanatic by the fanatic's violation
of prevailing social norms. Though the fan's behavior may be judged as odd or eccentric, it does not violate such norms. A fanatic differs from a crank,
in that a crank is defined as a person who holds a position or opinion
which is so far from the norm as to appear ludicrous and/or probably
wrong, such as a belief in a Flat Earth.
In contrast, the subject of the fanatic's obsession may be "normal",
such as an interest in religion or politics, except that the scale of
the person's involvement, devotion, or obsession with the activity or
cause is abnormal or disproportionate to the average.
Types
Consumer fanaticism – the level of involvement or interest one has in the liking of a particular person, group, trend, artwork or idea
Sports
fanaticism – high levels of intensity surrounding sporting events. This
is either done based on the belief that extreme fanaticism can alter
games for one's favorite team (Ex: Knight Krew), or because the person uses sports activities as an ultra-masculine "proving ground" for brawls, as in the case of football hooliganism.
The editorial cartoon "'The White Man's Burden' (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)" shows John Bull (U.K.) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) delivering the world's people of colour to civilization (Victor Gillam, Judge
magazine, 1 April 1899). The people in the basket carried by Uncle Sam
are labelled Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, "Porto Rico", and the Philippines,
while the people in the basket carried by John Bull are labelled Zulu,
China, India, "Soudan", and Egypt.
In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898). As an imperialist
poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the
enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured,
and paid in building an empire; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century. With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem.
History
"The White Man's Burden" illustration (Detroit Journal, 1898)"The White Man's Burden" published in McClure's Magazine, February 1899
"The White Man's Burden" was first published in The New York Sun on 1 February 1899 and in The Times (London) on 4 February 1899. On 7 February 1899, during a senatorial debate to decide if the US
should retain control of the Philippine Islands and the ten million Filipinos conquered from the Spanish Empire, Senator Benjamin Tillman
read aloud the first, the fourth, and the fifth stanzas of Kipling's
seven-stanza poem as arguments against ratification of the Treaty of Paris,
and that the US should formally renounce claim of authority over the
Philippine Islands. To that effect, Senator Tillman addressed the matter
to President William McKinley:
As though coming at the most
opportune time possible, you might say just before the treaty reached
the Senate, or about the time it was sent to us, there appeared in one
of our magazines a poem by Rudyard Kipling, the greatest poet of England
at this time. This poem, unique, and in some places too deep for me, is
a prophecy. I do not imagine that in the history of human events any
poet has ever felt inspired so clearly to portray our danger and our
duty. It is called "The White Man’s Burden." With the permission of
Senators I will read a stanza, and I beg Senators to listen to it, for
it is well worth their attention. This man has lived in the Indies. In
fact, he is a citizen of the world, and has been all over it, and knows
whereof he speaks.
He quotes, inter alia, stanzas 1, 4, and 5 of "The White Man's Burden", noting:
Those [Filipino] peoples are not
suited to our institutions. They are not ready for liberty as we
understand it. They do not want it. Why are we bent on forcing upon them
a civilization not suited to them and which only means in their view
degradation and a loss of self-respect, which is worse than the loss of
life itself?
Senator Tillman was unpersuasive, and the US Congress ratified the
Treaty of Paris on 11 February 1899, formally ending the
Spanish–American War. After paying a post-war indemnification of twenty
million dollars to the Kingdom of Spain, on 11 April 1899, the US
established geopolitical hegemony upon islands and peoples in two oceans and in two hemispheres: the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Pacific Ocean, and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic Ocean.
Text
Rudyard Kipling in Calcutta, India (1892) "The White (?) Man's Burden" shows the colonial exploitation of labour by various Western nations. (William Henry Walker, Life magazine, 16 March 1899)"The White Man's Burden" in The Call newspaper (San Francisco, 5 February 1899)
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man's burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
Take up the White Man's burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
The imperialist interpretation of "The White Man's Burden" proposes that the white race is morally obliged to civilise the non-white peoples of planet Earth, and to encourage their progress (economic, social, and cultural) through colonialism:
The implication, of course, was
that the Empire existed not for the benefit — economic or strategic or
otherwise — of Britain, itself, but in order that primitive peoples,
incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually
become civilized (and Christianized).
Kipling positively represents imperialism as the moral burden of the
white race, who are divinely destined to "civilise" the brutish,
non-white Other who inhabits the barbarous parts of the world; to wit, the seventh and eighth lines of the first stanza represent the Filipinos as "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." Despite the chauvinistic nationalism that supported Western imperialism in the 19th century, public moral opposition to Kipling's racialist misrepresentation of the colonial exploitation of labour in "The White Man's Burden" produced the satirical essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), by Mark Twain, which catalogues the Western military atrocities of revenge committed against the Chinese people for their anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion against abusive Western businessmen and Christian missionaries.
Kipling politically proffered the poem to New York governor Theodore Roosevelt (in office 1899–1900) to help him persuade anti-imperialist Americans to accept the territorial annexation of the Philippine Islands to the United States. In September 1898, Kipling's literary reputation in the U.S. allowed his promotion of American empire to Governor Roosevelt:
Now, go in and put all the weight
of your influence into hanging on, permanently, to the whole
Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pick-axe into the foundations
of a rotten house, and she is morally bound to build the house over,
again, from the foundations, or have it fall about her ears.
As Victorian imperial poetry, "The White Man's Burden" thematically corresponded to Kipling's belief that the British Empire was the Englishman's "Divine Burden to reign God's Empire on Earth"; and celebrates British colonialism as a mission of civilisation that eventually would benefit the colonised natives. Roosevelt sent the poem to U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge for his opinion and they agreed that it made "good sense from the expansion standpoint" for the American empire.
Responses
To
the white man's burden, the civilising mission of colonialism includes
teaching colonized people about soap, water, and personal hygiene.
(1890s advert)
Shortly after the poem's publication, it was embraced but also harshly rejected. Rejections included Satan Absolved by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a contemporary English poet.
Their poets who write big of the “White Burden.” Trash!
The White Man’s Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash.
— Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Satan Absolved, page 44
In the early 20th century, in addition to To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), Mark Twain's factual satire of the civilising mission
that is proposed, justified, and defended in "The White Man's Burden",
contemporary opposition to Kipling's jingoism provoked poetic parodies that expressed anti-imperialist moral outrage, by critically addressing the particulars of white supremacist racism in colonial empires. Said responses include "The Brown Man's Burden" (February 1899), by British politician Henry Labouchère; "The Black Man's Burden: A Response to Kipling" (April 1899), by clergyman H. T. Johnson; and the poem Take Up the Black Man's Burden, by educator J. Dallas Bowser.
In the U.S., a Black Man's Burden Association demonstrated to Americans how the colonial mistreatment of Filipino brown people in their Philippine homeland was a cultural extension of the institutional racism of the Jim Crow laws for the legal mistreatment of black Americans in their US homeland. The popular response against Kipling's jingoism for an American Empire to annex the Philippine Islands as a colony impelled the establishment in June 1899 of the American Anti-Imperialist League in their political opposition to making colonial subjects of the Filipinos.
In The Poor Man's Burden (1899), Dr. Howard S. Taylor addressed the negative psycho-social effects of the imperialist ethos upon the working-class people in an empire. In the social perspective of "The Real 'White Man's Burden'" (1902), the reformer Ernest Crosby addresses the moral degradation (coarsening of affect) consequent to the practice of imperialism; and in The Black Man's Burden (1903), the British journalist E. D. Morel reported the Belgian imperial atrocities in the Congo Free State (1885–1908), which was an African personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium.
British writer Charles Beadle's novel, The Whiteman's Burden [sic] (London, 1912), set in 1905 Uganda during the sleeping sickness crisis, explores colonizer attitudes toward their responsibilities and native views of their presence.
In The Black Man's Burden, Morel identifies, describes, and explains that the metropole–colony power relations are established through cultural hegemony, which determines the weight of the black man's burden and the weight of the white man's burden in building a colonial empire "The Black Man's Burden (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling)" (1920), by social critic Hubert Harrison, described the moral degradation inflicted upon the colonised black people and the colonist white people.
In the decolonisation of the developing world, the phrase the white man's burden is synonymous with colonial domination, to illustrate the falsity of the good intentions of Western neo-colonialism toward the non-white peoples of the world. In 1974, President Idi Amin
of Uganda sat atop a throne while forcing four white British
businessmen to carry him through the streets of Kampala; as the
businessmen groaned under the weight of Amin, he joked that this was
"the new white man's burden".
Inaugural meeting of the Beijing Revolutionary Committee, 1967.
Revolutionary committees (Chinese: 革命委员会; pinyin: Gémìng wěiyuánhuì) were tripartite bodies established during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in the People's Republic of China to facilitate government by the three mass organizations in China – the people, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They were originally established in the power-seizure movement as a replacement to the government of China.
Some have argued that it quickly became subordinate to it, whereas
others have argued that it effectively supplanted the old apparatus,
replacing it with an accountable system elected annually by the people
through mass organizations, for the duration of the Cultural Revolution.
Background
As
the spirit of the Cultural Revolution spread across China in the latter
half of 1966, it soon became clear to the Maoist leadership in Beijing that the ability of local party organizations and officials to resist the attempts by the Red Guards to remove them from power was greater than had been thought. As a result, Mao Zedong proposed dramatic seizures of power by the various Red Guard and workers' groups and the establishment of new local governments based on Karl Marx's Paris Commune model. The first of these planned power seizures was to come with the founding of the Shanghai Commune in February 1967.
However, in January and February 1967, in Shanxi province and in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, two other power seizures of power had occurred, with People's Liberation Army
(PLA) soldiers assisting workers and the Red Guards in overthrowing the
old CCP authorities – the Harbin revolutionary committee (established
on 1 February) was to be the first to be endorsed by Beijing. In both cases, the victors had established 'triple alliances' of the rebel people's organisations, the army and CCP cadres. These alliances were soon to be known as revolutionary committees.[4]
The leadership including Mao Zedong, who had originally advocated the
commune system of government, was attracted to this new type of
government, and by the end of February it had publicly stated that
revolutionary committees were the only acceptable way of reorganizing
government.
Role during the Cultural Revolution
With
the decision of the leadership to support the concept of revolutionary
committees, from February 1967 onwards mass organizations were
encouraged to ally with cadres and the army to establish this new type
of government. However, by the end of April 1967, only six of China's
twenty-seven provinces (Beijing, Shanghai, Heilongjiang, Shanxi, Guizhou and Shandong)[7]
had established revolutionary committees with official approval, due to
the continued resistance by old CCP organizations and the lack of
agreement amongst mass organizations and the PLA over which party cadres
were appropriate choices for the committees. By the end of 1967, only two more revolutionary committees (in Inner Mongolia and in the city of Tianjin) had been formed, despite a call from Mao in September for the forging of these alliances.
Following the founding of nine more revolutionary committees (including in Fujian and Jiangxi provinces) by March, in the summer of 1968, as the Red Guard movement was virtually extinguished by PLA suppression, in an effort to restore some unity to the Cultural Revolution
there was another drive by the leadership to establish provincial level
revolutionary committees. As a result, by the end of September 1968,
all of China's provinces and autonomous regions had provincial-level
organisations in place (with the last revolutionary committee being
formed in Xinjiang province),
and these groups were given the task of facilitating the establishment
of similarly structured committees at a district, county and municipal
level.
Some have alleged that the majority of revolutionary committees created rapidly came to be dominated by the PLA, because the army had military force at its disposal to enforce its will. For example, in the leadership of the revolutionary committee in Shanghai, seven out of the thirteen members were army officers. Twenty out of twenty-nine provincial revolutionary committees were
chaired PLA officers, and in several provinces PLA soldiers chaired up
to 98% of revolutionary committees above the county level. More often than not, in the interests of stability and order, the PLA
allied with cadres on the revolutionary committees against the more
radical organisations of the masses. Therefore, at the end of September 1968, only revolutionary committees in Shaanxi and Hubei provinces were chaired by civilians. Furthermore, the majority of those that sat on the revolutionary
committees as representatives of the people were those who had had a
stake in the pre-Cultural Revolution order of things rather than
radicals from the movement itself.
Some have also argued that by 1969, it was also the case that
both urban and rural revolutionary committees at all levels quickly
became subordinate to existing or revived Party committees. The leadership of both organisations was often almost identical, and
revolutionary committees became little more than instruments of the
Party committees' bidding. This was particularly evident with the
factory revolutionary committees – heralded as one of the great
achievements of the Cultural Revolution, they were often little more
than bureaucratic extensions of Party power.
However some, such as Dongping Han, have argued that, at the
local level at least, the Revolutionary Committees were an important
tool of popular power, accountable and representative of the people
throughout the Cultural Revolution.
Role after the Cultural Revolution
With
the winding down of the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution in
1969 and 1970, the revolutionary committees became increasingly
bureaucratic and an organizational and ideological formality. Although originally tasked with the representation of the Cultural
Revolution's mass organizations (the Red Guards and the worker's
groups), the dispersal of these mass groups made the revolutionary
committees increasingly defunct, especially as the Party had regained
administrative control of China. However, they were maintained for their increasingly effective
bureaucratic role (they were more efficient than the conventional Party
apparatus of government) and as the leadership did not want to undermine the ideological success of the Cultural Revolution.
The future role of the revolutionary committees was to be formalised at the Fourth National People's Congress held in January 1975. This congress ratified a new version of the constitution of the People's Republic of China,
in which the revolutionary committees were established as permanent
fixtures of the country's administration, but they were not given any
role in the formulation of policy. In addition, the three members of
the 'triple alliance' principle on which the revolutionary committees
were founded were redefined as 'the old, the middle aged and the young'.
However, in 1978, after an eleven-year history, revolutionary committees were abolished by the post-Mao government.
1935 lithograph titled Merchants of Death by socialist printmaker Mabel Dwight
Merchants of death is a pejorative directed at the arms industry and also often at international bankers. It originated in the Great Depression.
This theory claimed that an international munitions industry conspired
to control the fate of nations via improper influence over government
officials. The purpose of this supposed conspiracy was to extract
profits from human death. During peacetime, the conspirators would stir
up antagonism and war between nations so that they could then arm the
combatants and line their pockets with the proceeds. The phrase is a
forerunner of the military-industrial complex concept that became popular during the Vietnam War.
Usage
Merchants of death is considered a derogatory term by scholars. Anti-war activists who use the phrase likewise describe it as a pejorative. It has been described as ugly in spirit and slanderous. In addition to its use as a derogatory term, merchants of death refers
to a conspiracy theory claiming that war is caused by artificial
conflicts stirred up by arms makers and bankers for their own profit. The first use of the term occurred during the Great Depression and it quickly achieved popularity during the lead-up to WWII.
A very comforting myth has evolved
through the years to account for mankind's penchant for
self-destruction. War can be blamed squarely on two elements of society
that are limited in number, highly visible, and unloved—the munitions
makers and their associates, the international bankers. These devils
have come to be known collectively as "merchants of death," although the
term is quite often applied to the munitions makers alone.
— Anne Trotter
Although a few cases of unethical behavior on the part of arms makers
around the year 1900 influenced the later birth of the term, the
allegations of conspiracy that were widely alleged under the moniker merchants of death were found to be baseless by the Nye Committee and subsequent investigations.
The term became popular once again during the Vietnam War at the same time that the similar phrase military-industrial complex first achieved common usage. Military-industrial complex is likewise almost always pejorative and carries sinister overtones.
History of the theory
Popular
anxiety that a ruler may lead a nation into war for his own
self-interests has a long history dating to the dawn of society.
However, criticism of arms makers is a modern phenomenon originating in
the Industrial Revolution. Armorers were well-to-do artisans in Ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages in European towns known for arms making such as Toledo, Milan, Nuremberg, and Liège. But ancient armorers remained firmly in the class of respectable artisans rather than rising to become wealthy businessmen.
Animosity towards the arms industry became a matter of public debate at the start of the 20th century. Socialists began blaming war on capitalists at the Second International where they took up the cause of antimilitarism and J. A. Hobson claimed in 1902 that wars are started by businessmen feigning national antagonisms which have no basis in reality. A fictional arms manufacturer was portrayed negatively in the 1905 play Major Barbara with lines like You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn’t. The international peace movement first focused attention on large European arms makers such as Schneider-Creusot, Krupp, Vickers, Armstrong Whitworth, and Škoda around the time of the Second Hague Conference in 1907.
Following the Anglo-German Naval Race of 1909, public criticism of munitions makers increased in England. The War Traders
by George Perris influenced intellectuals and socialists to begin
discussing nationalization of munitions makers to put them under public
control.
The attacks on the arms industry just prior to WWI had all the elements
of the merchants of death theory that erupted 20 years later. These
included charges of war scares fomented by industry, international arms
cartels, manipulation of the news media, and conflicts of interest in
government procurement.These claims were promoted by pamphlets such as National Labour Press’s The War Trust Exposed, Union of Democratic Control’s The International Industry of War, National Peace Council’s The War Traders, and World Peace Foundation’s Syndicates for War and Dreadnoughts and Dividends.
there is a powerful group of
capitalists, closely allied to the fighting services, firmly entrenched
in society, and well served by politicians and journalists, whose
business it is to exploit the rivalries and jealousies of nations.
Conflict between the peace movement and the Navy League of the United States broke out in the lead-up to WWI when Clyde H. Tavenner
accused the League of being a front for the vested interests of its
officers and arms makers. Tavenner called for nationalization of the
arms industries in a speech in the United States House of Representatives.Progressives
in America began targeting arms makers as a subset of their more
general enemies of big business and bankers. An early victory in this
fight was a prohibition on loans to the belligerents by Secretary of
State William Jennings Bryan, though that was reversed the following year by his successor. When Woodrow Wilson
began preparing the nation for war, Progressives in Congress reacted by
enacting a special tax on munitions makers and a war excess-profits
tax.
Criticism of armaments cooled in Europe with the outbreak of war
in 1914, and in America when it entered the war in 1917, though a
minority in America including George W. Norris continued to claim that arms makers and financiers were pushing the country into the war.
The industrialized weapons of WWI ushered in the era of
industrialized warfare that efficiently killed men without any of the
chivalry of ancient battle. The general public came to consider large wartime profits as compelling evidence of profiteering
without considering the complexities of what constitutes a fair profit
or that munitions makers are necessary during wartime. An additional
aspect of moral outrage was a general feeling that producing equipment
for the purpose of destroying human life was wrong, but that the farmer
who grows cotton for explosives or the miner who digs ore that is forged
into guns was above reproach. Rather than considering the moral
dimensions of each citizen's participation, a simple stereotype
developed that assigned all moral opprobrium to owners of the munitions
industry, or merchants of death, as they came to be known. When DuPont
emerged from the war having made a large profit on sales of explosives,
they were branded as greedy profiteers despite having lowered prices
during the war.
Outrage cooled following the Armistice with the League of Nations's attempts at international arms control receiving little popular support in America. However, things flared up again in 1926 with the publication of Genesis of War by controversial historian Harry Elmer Barnes who claimed Germany was blameless and that Wilson and his warmongering assistants were at fault instead.
Arms control was debated by the United States Congress
in the late 1920s including the Burton Resolution of 1928 and the
Capper and Porter resolutions of 1929 which proposed to prohibit exports
of arms to any nation engaged in war. In August of 1929, three large
American shipbuilding companies were revealed to have employed William
Shearer to sabotage the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927. An investigation by the United States Senate resulted in considerable press coverage, but no concrete action. War itself was renounced with the signing of the Kellogg–Briand Pact.
The Great Depression
As the world descended into the Great Depression
and European nations defaulted on their debts, disenchanted Americans
became certain that “someone” in big business must be responsible for
the mess they found themselves in. Public fear of war built during the Depression as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, the Chaco War, and Adolf Hitler's rise to power made clear the possibility of another world war.
Congress investigated ways to “remove profits from war” with the
War Policies Commission established in 1930. The commission featured Bernard Baruch as its star witness, who published Taking the Profit out of War around the same time.
The term Merchants of Death was introduced to the public in 1932 as the title of an article in Le Crapouillot by French journalist Xavier de Hauteclocque [fr] about a British arms dealer named Basil Zaharoff, originally called in French "Sir Basil Zaharoff, le magnat de la mort subite" and translated as "Zaharoff, Merchant of Death." Hautcloque referred to Zaharoff as "marchand de mort subite," which had many idiomatic meanings in French but wasn't used to refer to arms dealers.
The American delegation to the World Disarmament Conference
of 1932 enjoyed broad public support for establishing international
control over arms makers. The international arms industry was then
accused of sabotaging this conference first in British and French press,
and then in the The Literary Digest and The Nation through 1933. The most important American publications of this period were a series of three articles by Progressive historian Charles A. Beard in The New Republic that focused specifically on alleged abuses by American arms makers.
American politician Gerald Nye who rose to fame by investigating "merchants of death"
Things came to a head with formation of the Nye Committee which generated headlines for the next two years. Gerald Nye
rose to fame by launching a series of congressional hearings aiming to
prove the theory that munitions makers and bankers were responsible for
American entry into WWI, and for war in general. Ninety-three hearings
were held, over 200 witnesses were called, and little hard evidence of a
conspiracy was found. The Nye Committee came to an end when Chairman
Nye accused President Woodrow Wilson of withholding information from
Congress when he chose to enter World War I. The Nye Committee failed to substantiate the theory, but succeeded in convincing the public by way of sensationalist rhetoric. When the hearings were finished and a final report made, the committee
members were almost unanimous in their view that the evidence failed to
support the merchants of death theory. However, Nye did uncover rampant conflicts of interest and questionable practices among members of the War Industries Board.President Truman later called the Nye Committee “…pure demagoguery in the guise of a Congressional Investigating Committee.”
The outrage whipped up by the Nye Committee resulted in a series of isolationist Neutrality Acts
that prohibited private loans and sales of war materials whenever a
state of war existed anywhere on the globe. These laws are now generally
regarded as having aided the rise of Nazi Germany and were repealed in 1941.
Influential scandals
Anglo-French naval panics
The Royal Navy was known to be in superb shape in 1884, but a series of editorials in the Pall Mall Gazette
claimed that England was in imminent danger of invasion by a secret
French navy. The rumor spread to newspapers around the country and was
aided by voices of businessmen who were concerned about the high
unemployment rate at the time. The panic caused the Admiralty to ask for
emergency funds to reinforce its fleet, despite believing such a tax
increase to be unnecessary.
Carnegie Steel
In 1894, allegations of fraud were made against the Carnegie Steel Company in connection with armor plate that it was manufacturing for the government. The company’s president, Charles M. Schwab,
was called to testify before Congress. However, despite the bluster of
some congressmen who pushed for a federal armor factory, the furor
passed after it became clear that the government gained more from the
relationship than it lost. The incident brought to light the problem of a revolving door where naval officers on temporary leave worked for these steel companies and even received royalties on patents.
Anglo-German Naval Race of 1909
British
naval officers and industrialists agreed to interpret German naval
expansion as a threat to British security in order to secure
dramatically increased naval spending from the British people. This
collusion fueled the arms race.
The arms race was fomented by H.H. Mulliner, director of the Coventry Ordnance Works who wished to increase his firm’s government orders.
He went about this by sharing what he claimed was secret intelligence
that the Germans were about to overtake England in shipbuilding. Krupp,
a German firm with a fearsome reputation, was implicated in this false
rumor. After attempting to directly influence the Admiralty with his
story it was leaked to the press which had the desired effect of
inflaming public sentiment to the point that protesters began demanding
an increase in English shipbuilding to counter the fictitious German
threat. Denials by Krupp and Berlin only made matters worse. Parliament
responded by allocating money for four new ships, which prompted Germany
to increase its own spending.
Mulliner’s scheme was revealed three years after he started
spreading the rumors when his firm received only a small share of the
anticipated work, prompting him to write a series of letters to the The Times
explaining his role in fabricating the scare, while defending himself
has having acted out of a sense of patriotism. Mulliner was fired by
Coventry Ordnance Works and the firm was blocked from government
contracts for 3 years.
Shearer affair
In August 1929, three large American shipbuilding companies were revealed to have employed William Shearer to sabotage the Geneva Naval Conference of 1927. An investigation by the United States Senate resulted in considerable press coverage, but no concrete action.
The Cultural Revolution Cemetery in Chongqing, China. At least 1,700 people were killed during the violent faction clash in Chongqing, with 400–500 of them buried in this cemetery.
The Violent Struggle (simplified Chinese: 武斗; traditional Chinese: 武鬥; pinyin: wǔdòu), also known as Wudou or Factional Conflicts, refers to the violent conflicts between different factions (mostly of Red Guards and "rebel groups" composed mostly of students and workers) during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The factional conflicts started in Shanghai and Chongqing in December 1966, and then spread to other areas of China in 1967 which brought the country to the state of civil war. Most violent struggles took place after the power seizure of rebel groups, and gradually grew out of control in 1968, forcing the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party as well as the Chinese government to take multiple interventions in the summer of 1968.
During much of the fighting weapons were either acquired by the
rebel groups through raids on arms depots or direct support from local
military establishments. Weapons used in armed conflicts included some
18.77 million guns (some say 1.877 million), 2.72 million grenades, 14,828 cannons, millions of other ammunitions and even armored cars and tanks. Researchers have pointed out that the death toll in violent struggles
ranged from 300 thousand to 500 thousand, while certain documents from
the Chinese Communist Party have revealed that 237,000 people were killed and another 7,030,000 were injured or permanently disabled. Notable violent struggles include the battles in Chongqing, in Sichuan, and in Xuzhou.
History
Origins
Establishment of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, 1967
The violent faction clashes in Shanghai and Chongqing in December 1966 were regarded as the first large-scale violent struggles in mainland China. In January 1967, factions in Shanghai started the "January Storm" during which Shanghai People's Commune was established. After receiving the support from Mao Zedong himself, the "Shanghai model" spread to other regions of China where factions began to grab power from the local governments, establishing the revolutionary committees. These seizures of power were successful in the provinces of Shanxi, Heilongjiang, Shandong and Guizhou with PLA support, but succeeded nowhere else. The violent struggles across China escalated significantly in the summer of 1967 after Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, promoted the idea of "Wen Gong Wu Wei (文攻武卫)", meaning "attack with reason, defend with force". During this time, a dizzying array of political groups and factions
rose and fell throughout China - a situation which often led to bloody
conflict between groups.
Motivations and ideology
The Cultural Revolution brought to the forefront numerous power struggles both within the Communist Party,
and against it from the left. Factional conflict between Red Guard and
rebel organizations happened for a wide range of reasons: some purely
for the seizure and dominance of political power, others were fought
over pre-existing class resentments, while still more struggled to stay
afloat in the turmoil of changing alliances. One of the primary reasons
for the emerging factionalism was about social discontent and access to
privileges. In Guangdong, for instance, fighting between student-based Red Guards was often predicated on the ability to apply to join the Communist Youth League and perceived prospects for upward advancement. Andrew Walder
writes that the political orientation of Red Guard factions could often
reflect the social group of its members, with deep-seated economic and
social motivations being a driver for conflict. One of the decisive factors pushing students to conservative or radical
factions was their relation to the Maoist system of ranking people by
their "class background." Many of those lacking a 'good class
background', and its associated privileges, were more likely to engage
in left factions. Students in families with cadre associations skewed conservative, and
were more likely to defend existing political authorities or otherwise
pursue much more moderate actions. These 'conservative' factions tended to characterize the radicals as
full of 'petty-bourgeois revolutionary spirit' and acting against proper
revolutionary authorities. Factions existed not just among students and workers, but also within the People's Liberation Army.
Wading into a complicated web of shifting alliances and political
positions, local army units often had to contend with the dual tasks of
interpreting contradictory orders from above, and then actually carrying
them out within the constraints of chaotic regional conditions. For
example, from 1967 to 1969, military units in Xuzhou
became embroiled in civilian factional politics and sharply divided
into 'Kick' (tipai 踢派) and 'Support' (zhipai 支派) factions based on
whether they wished to support the left or kick it out. These splits were driven by ideological beliefs, personal rivalries and
ambitions, as well as pragmatic attempts to make sense of orders from
the central government.
Splits between factions were not solely a question of broader
social issues though. Questions of strategy and tactics were also a
factor. In these debates, the question of whether a faction was
'radical' or 'conservative' could become increasingly muddy. As a rule,
the clean division between 'conservative' and 'radical' became harder to
sustain as 1967 progressed, and sub-groupings would drive conflict even
within existing factions. An illustrative example is the situation in Guangzhou,
where a group of 'radicals' collapsed into two distinct factions over
the question of whether power should be seized immediately (and thus
minimizing both public participation and shakeup of party officials) or
later on with a broader political base to draw from. These sub-factions, in different localities, sometimes collapsed into
even further infighting over minute ideological points, which were
driven forward by changing circumstances on the national stage. Often in
these cases, there was no such distinct social class that these
factions represented. The fighting increasingly became an attempt to
dominate the political scene and ensure the continued control of one's
own faction at the expense of others. Events going on at the elite level
of politics had a significant influence on the movement as well, and a
crucial part of Violent Struggle was the constant attempt not to end up
on the wrong side of the political battle being waged in the
bureaucracy and in the halls of power. Attempts to win elite favor could lead competing factions to engage in a
spiral of increasingly radical acts that were detached from the core
ideological beliefs of its members, as happened with escalating violent
confrontations at Tsinghua University throughout 1967 and 1968. Sometimes, support received from the center could be arbitrary or based
on misperceptions about the relative conformity that one faction had
versus their rivals. Nevertheless, at varying points the passion and political convictions
of factions participants were equally important determiners and should
not dismissed in favor of wholly cynical and pragmatic motivations.
Much of the early phase of faction clashes involved street brawls, brick throwing, and low level violence. However, after the Wuhan incident on July 20, 1967, Jiang Qing
thought that counter-revolutionaries appeared in the military and thus
publicly proposed the idea of "Wen Gong Wu Wei (文攻武卫)", or "attack with
reason, defend with force". Jiang's idea was published by Wenhui Bao
on July 23. At the same time, Chairman Mao called for a "nationwide
arming of the left", which emboldened radicals and swayed some PLA
formations onto the side of the rebels. Faction clashes subsequently entered into a new phase of violence which
rocked the nation. Weapons such as guns, grenades, cannons and even
tanks were used in battles. According to some documents, different factions received weapons from
supporting army branches, while some factions even raided local armories
or created their own guns. The total number of guns used in the violent struggles was approximately 18.77 million (some say 1.877 million). These developments brought many regions of the country into a state of virtual civil war.
End
In the
summer of 1968, the violent struggles had grown out of control in a
number of places, Ultimately, the PLA was the only organization which
was capable of restoring order to the country, and so the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was forced to issue several announcements to stop the battles. As a result, the factions gradually turned in their weapons and
dissolved their armed teams, or were crushed by the force of the PLA.
Factional violence on a local level declined precipitously after this
point, and the purges carried out during the Cleansing the Class Ranks campaign would herald the end of this portion of the Cultural Revolution.
Death toll
Chinese researchers have pointed out that the death toll in violent struggles ranged from 300,000 to 500,000.Serious cases of violent struggles included the battles in Luzhou, Xuzhou and Chongqing, each of which saw deaths of at least thousands of people.
An official document (建国以来历史政治运动事实) from the Chinese Communist Party
in 1996 claims that 237,000 people died due to the violent struggles,
and another 7,030,000 were injured or permanently disabled.
Andrew G. Walder
argues, however, that the death toll caused by the violent struggles
committed at the hand of insurgent Red Guards or rebel groups is only a
fraction of the deaths caused by the violent purges at the hands of
state forces, for example during the Cleansing the Class Ranks
campaign. Walder put the deaths at the hand of insurgent organizations
from 1966 to 1971 at 37,046. In comparison, Walder put the deaths at the
hand of state forces during the same period at 130,378.
From its origin as a city-state on the peninsula of Italy in the 8th century BC, to its rise as an empire covering much of Southern Europe, Western Europe, the Near East, and North Africa to its fall in the 5th century AD, the political history of Ancient Rome was closely entwined with its military history. The core of the campaign history of the Roman military is an aggregate of different accounts of the Roman military's land battles, from its initial defense against and subsequent conquest of the city's hilltop neighbors on the Italian Peninsula, to the ultimate struggle of the Western Roman Empire for its existence against invading Huns, Vandals and Germanic tribes. These accounts were written by various authors throughout and after the history of the Empire. Following the First Punic War, naval battles were less significant than land battles to the military history of Rome due to its encompassment of lands of the periphery and its unchallenged dominance of the Mediterranean Sea.
The Roman army battled first against its tribal neighbours and Etruscan towns within Italy, and later came to dominate the Mediterranean and at its height the provinces of Britannia and Asia Minor.
As with most ancient civilizations, Rome's military served the triple
purpose of securing its borders, exploiting peripheral areas through
measures such as imposing tribute on conquered peoples, and maintaining internal order. From the outset, Rome's military typified this pattern, and the
majority of Rome's campaigns were characterised by one of two types. The
first is the territorial expansionist campaign, normally begun as a counter-offensive, in which each victory brought subjugation of large areas of territory
and allowed Rome to grow from a small town to a population of 55 million
in the early empire when expansion was halted. The second is the civil war, which plagued Rome from its foundation to its eventual demise.
Despite their formidable reputation and host of victories, Roman armies were not invincible. Romans "produced their share of incompetents" who led Roman armies into catastrophic defeats. Nevertheless, it was
generally the fate of even the greatest of Rome's enemies, such as Pyrrhus and Hannibal,
to win the battle but lose the war. The history of Rome's campaigning
is, if nothing else, a history of obstinate persistence overcoming
appalling losses.
Knowledge of Roman history stands apart from other civilizations in
the ancient world. Its chronicles, military and otherwise, document the city's very foundation to its eventual demise. Although some histories have been lost, such as Trajan's account of the Dacian Wars, and others, such as Rome's earliest histories, are at least semi-apocryphal, the extant histories of Rome's military history are extensive.
Rome's earliest history, from the time of its founding as a small tribal village, to the downfall of its kings, is the least well preserved. Although the early Romans were literate to some degree, this void may be due to the lack of will to record their history at that time, or such histories as they did record were lost.
Although the Roman historian Livy (59 BC – 17 AD) lists a series of seven kings of early Rome in his work Ab urbe condita, from its establishment through its earliest years, the first four kings (Romulus, Numa,Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius) may be apocryphal. A number of points of view have been proposed. Grant and others argue that prior to the establishment of the Etruscan kingdom of Rome under the traditional fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus, Rome would have been led by a religious leader of some sort. Very little is known of Rome's military history from this era, and what history has come down to us is more legendary than factual. Traditionally, Romulus fortified the Palatine Hill after founding the city, and shortly thereafter Rome was "equal to any of the surrounding cities in her prowess in war".
"Events before the city was founded or
planned, which have been handed down more as pleasing poetic fictions
than as reliable records of historical events, I intend neither to
affirm nor to refute. To antiquity we grant the indulgence of making the
origins of cities more impressive by comingling the human with the
divine, and if any people should be permitted to sanctify its inception
and reckon the gods as its founders, surely the glory of the Roman
people in war is such that, when it boasts Mars in particular as its
parent... the nations of the world would as easily acquiesce in this
claim as they do in our rule."
The first of the campaigns fought by the Romans in this legendary account are the wars with various Latin cities and the Sabines.
According to Livy, the Latin village of Caenina responded to the event
of the abduction of the Sabine women by invading Roman territory, but
were routed and their village captured. The Latins of Antemnae and those of Crustumerium were defeated next in a similar fashion. The remaining main body of the Sabines
attacked Rome and briefly captured the citadel, but were then convinced
to conclude a treaty with the Romans under which the Sabines became
Roman citizens.
Lucius Tarquinius Priscus' first war was waged against the Latins. Tarquinius took the Latin town of Apiolae by storm and took great booty from there back to Rome. According to the Fasti Triumphales, the war occurred prior to 588 BC.
His military ability was tested by an attack from the Sabines. Tarquinius doubled the numbers of equites to help the war effort, and defeat the Sabines. In the peace negotiations that followed, Tarquinius received the town of Collatia and appointed his nephew, Arruns Tarquinius, also known as Egerius,
as commander of the garrison which he stationed in that city.
Tarquinius returned to Rome and celebrated a triumph for his victories
that, according to the Fasti Triumphales, occurred on 13 September 585 BC.
Early in his reign, Servius Tulliuswarred
against Veii and the Etruscans. He is said to have shown valour in the
campaign, and to have routed a great army of the enemy. The war helped
him to cement his position at Rome. According to the Fasti Triumphales, Servius celebrated three triumphs over the Etruscans, including on 25 November 571 BC and 25 May 567 BC (the date of the third triumph is not legible on the Fasti).
Tarquinius Superbus (Ruled 535–509 BC)
Early in his reign Tarquinius Superbus, Rome's seventh and final king, called a meeting of the Latin
leaders at which he persuaded them to renew their treaty with Rome and
become her allies rather than her enemies, and it was agreed that the
troops of the Latins would attend at a grove sacred to the goddess Ferentina
on an appointed day to form a united military force with the troops of
Rome. This was done, and Tarquin formed combined units of Roman and
Latin troops.
Tarquin next began a war against the Volsci. He took the wealthy town of Suessa Pometia, with the spoils of which he commenced the erection of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus which his father had vowed. He also celebrated a triumph for his victory.
He was next engaged in a war with Gabii,
one of the Latin cities, which had rejected the Latin treaty with Rome.
Unable to take the city by force of arms, Tarquin had his son, Sextus Tarquinius,
infiltrate the city, gain the trust of its people and command of its
army. In time he killed or exiled the city's leaders, and handed
control of the city over to his father.
Tarquin also agreed to a peace with the Aequi, and renewed the treaty of peace between Rome and the Etruscans. According to the Fasti Triumphales, Tarquin also won a victory over the Sabines.
Tarquinius later went to war with the Rutuli.
According to Livy, the Rutuli were, at that time, a very wealthy
nation. Tarquinius was desirous of obtaining the booty which would come
with victory over the Rutuli. Tarquin unsuccessfully sought to take the Rutulian capital, Ardea,
by storm, and subsequently began an extensive siege of the city. The
war was interrupted by the revolution which overthrew the Roman
monarchy. The Roman army, camped outside Ardea, welcomed Lucius Junius Brutus as their new leader, and expelled the king's sons. It is unclear what was the outcome of the siege, or indeed the war.
Republic
Early (509–275 BC)
Early Italian campaigns (509–396 BC)
Map showing Rome's Etruscan neighbours
The first non-apocryphal Roman wars were wars of both expansion and
defence, aimed at protecting Rome itself from neighbouring cities and
nations and establishing its territory in the region. Florus writes that at this time "their neighbours, on every side, were
continually harassing them, as they had no land of their own ... and as
they were situated, as it were, at the junction of the roads to Latium
and Etruria, and, at whatever gate they went out, were sure to meet a
foe."
In the semi-legendary period of the early republic, sources record Rome was twice attacked by Etruscan armies. About 509 BC war with Veii and Tarquinii was said to have been instigated by the recently overthrown king Tarquinius Superbus.Again in 508 BC Tarquin persuaded the king of Clusium, Lars Porsenna, to wage war on Rome, resulting in a siege of Rome and afterwards a peace treaty.
Initially, Rome's immediate neighbours were either Latin towns and villages on a tribal system similar to that of Rome, or else tribal Sabines from the Apennine hills beyond. One by one, Rome defeated both the persistent Sabines and the local
cities that were either under Etruscan control or else Latin towns that
had cast off their Etruscan rulers, as had Rome. Rome defeated the Lavinii and Tusculi in the Battle of Lake Regillus in 496 BC, were defeated by the Veientes in the Battle of the Cremera in 477 BC, defeated the Sabines in an unnamed battle in 449 BC, the Aequi in the Battle of Mount Algidus in 458 BC, the Aequi and Volsci in 446 BC, in the Battle of Corbio, in 446 BC the Aurunci in the Battle of Aricia, the Capture of Fidenae in 435 BC and the Siege of Veii in 396 BC, and the Capture of Antium in 377 BC. After defeating the Veientes, the Romans had effectively completed the conquest of their immediate Etruscan neighbours, as well as secured their position against the immediate threat posed by
the tribespeople of the Apennine hills. In the meantime, it also
affected the agriculture as well as diet regime of the empire. Since the
enlargement the population in Apennine peninsula had increased and led
to certain changes in agriculture, such as switch to goat breeding from
cattle, indicating higher levels of protein supply in the diet which
played a crucial role in stature of the locals.
However, Rome still controlled only a very limited area and the affairs of Rome were minor even to those in Italy and Rome's affairs were only just coming to the attention of the Greeks, the dominant cultural force at the time. At this point the bulk of Italy remained in the hands of Latin, Sabine, Samnite and other peoples in the central part of Italy, Greek colonies to the south, and the Celtic people, including the Gauls, to the north.
Celtic invasion of Italia (390–387 BC)
By 390 BC, several Gallic tribes had begun invading Italy from the
north as their culture expanded throughout Europe. Most of this was
unknown to the Romans at this time, who still had purely local security
concerns, but the Romans were alerted when a particularly warlike tribe,the Senones, invaded the Etruscan province of Siena from the north and attacked the town of Clusium, not far from Rome's sphere of influence. The Clusians, overwhelmed by
the size of the enemy in numbers and ferocity, called on Rome for help.
Perhaps unintentionally the Romans found themselves not just in conflict with the Senones, but their primary target. The Romans met them in pitched battle at the Battle of the Allia around 390–387 BC. The Gauls, under their chieftain Brennus, defeated the Roman army of around 15,000 troops and proceeded to pursue the fleeing Romans back to Rome itself and partially sacked the townbefore being either driven off or bought off. They were probably defeated by the exiled dictator Marcus Furius Camillus
who gathered the scattered Roman forces that consisted partly of
fugitives and partly those who had survived the battle of Alia, and
marched to Rome. According to tradition, he took the Gauls by surprise,
when Brennus, having tricked the weights in which the gold rescue that
had been set for the city was measured, uttered the expression Vae
Victis! (Woe to the losers!); Camillus claimed that, since he was a
dictator, no agreement was valid without his acquiescence, so no ransom
was due and he answered Breno with another famous phrase: 'Non auro sed
ferro liberanda est patria' (It is with iron, not with gold, how the
homeland is released). After defeating the Gauls in the subsequent
battle, he entered the city in triumph, greeted by his fellow citizens
as alter Romulus (the other Romulus), pater patriae (father of the
homeland) and conditor alter urbis (second founder of the city).
After swiftly recovering from the sack of Rome, the Romans immediately resumed their expansion within Italy. Despite
their successes, their mastery of the whole of Italy was by no means
assured. The Samnites were a people just as martial and as rich as the Romans and had the objective of their own to secure more lands in the fertile Italian plains on which Rome itself lay. The First Samnite War of between 343 BC and 341 BC that followed widespread Samnite incursions into Rome's territory was a relatively short affair: the Romans beat the Samnites in both the Battle of Mount Gaurus in 342 BC and the Battle of Suessula
in 341 BC but were forced to withdraw from the war before they could
pursue the conflict further due to the revolt of several of their Latin
allies in the Latin War.
Rome was therefore forced to contend by around 340 BC against
both Samnite incursions into their territory and, simultaneously, in a
bitter war against their former allies. Rome bested the Latins in the Battle of Vesuvius and again in the Battle of Trifanum, after which the Latin cities were obliged to submit to Roman rule. Perhaps due to Rome's lenient treatment of their defeated foe, the Latins submitted largely amicably to Roman rule for the next 200 years.
The Second Samnite War, from 327 BC to 304 BC, was a much longer and more serious affair for both the Romans and Samnites, running for over twenty years and incorporating twenty-four battles that led to massive casualties on both sides. The fortunes of the two
sides fluctuated throughout its course: the Samnites seized Neapolis in
the Capture of Neapolis in 327 BC, which the Romans then re-captured before losing at the Battle of the Caudine Forksand the Battle of Lautulae. The Romans then proved victorious at the Battle of Bovianum and the tide turned strongly against the Samnites from 314 BC onwards, leading them to sue for peace
with progressively less generous terms. By 304 BC the Romans had
effectively annexed the greater degree of the Samnite territory,
founding several colonies. This pattern of meeting aggression in force
and so inadvertently gaining territory in strategic counter-attacks was
to become a common feature of Roman military history.
Seven years after their defeat, with Roman dominance of the area
looking assured, the Samnites rose again and defeated the Romans at the Battle of Camerinum in 298 BC, to open the Third Samnite War.
With this success in hand they managed to bring together a coalition of
several previous enemies of Rome, all of whom were probably keen to
prevent any one faction dominating the entire region. The army that
faced the Romans at the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BC included Samnites, Gauls, Etruscans and Umbrians. When the Roman army won a convincing victory over these combined forces
it must have become clear that little could prevent Roman dominance of
Italy and in the Battle of Populonia (282 BC) Rome destroyed the last vestiges of Etruscan power in the region.
Pyrrhic War (280–275 BC)
Route of Pyrrhus of Epirus
By the beginning of the 3rd century Rome had established itself as a major power on the Italian Peninsula, but had not yet come into conflict with the dominant military powers in the Mediterranean at the time: Carthage and the Greek kingdoms. Rome had all but completely defeated the Samnites, mastered its fellow Latin towns, and greatly reduced Etruscan power in the region. However, the south of Italy was controlled by the Greek colonies of Magna Grecia who had been allied to the Samnites, and continued Roman expansion brought the two into inevitable conflict.
In the naval Battle of Thurii, Tarentum appealed for military aid to Pyrrhus, ruler of Epirus. Motivated by his diplomatic obligations to Tarentum, and a personal desire for military accomplishment, Pyrrhus landed a Greek army of some 25,000 men and a contingent of war elephants on Italian soil in 280 BC, where his forces were joined by some Greek colonists and a portion of the Samnites who revolted against Roman control, taking up arms against Rome for the fourth time in seventy years.
The Roman army had not yet seen elephants in battle, and their inexperience turned the tide in Pyrrhus' favour at the Battle of Heraclea in 280 BC, and again at the Battle of Ausculum in 279 BC. Despite these victories, Pyrrhus found his position in Italy untenable.
Rome steadfastly refused to negotiate with Pyrrhus as long as his army
remained in Italy. Furthermore, Rome entered into a treaty of support with Carthage, and Pyrrhus found that despite his expectations, none of the other Italic peoples would defect to the Greek and Samnite cause. Facing unacceptably heavy losses
with each encounter with the Roman army, and failing to find further
allies in Italy, Pyrrhus withdrew from the peninsula and campaigned in Sicily against Carthage, abandoning his allies to deal with the Romans.
When his Sicilian campaign was also ultimately a failure, and at
the request of his Italian allies, Pyrrhus returned to Italy to face
Rome once more. In 275 BC, Pyrrhus again met the Roman army at the Battle of Beneventum. This time the Romans had devised methods to deal with the war elephants, including the use of javelins, fire and, one source claims, simply hitting the elephants heavily on the head. While Beneventum was indecisive, Pyrrhus realised that his army had been exhausted and reduced by years
of foreign campaigns, and seeing little hope for further gains, he
withdrew completely from Italy.
The conflicts with Pyrrhus would have a great effect on Rome. It
had shown that it was capable of pitting its armies successfully against
the dominant military powers of the Mediterranean, and further showed
that the Greek kingdoms were incapable of defending their colonies in
Italy and abroad. Rome quickly moved into southern Italia, subjugating
and dividing Magna Grecia. Effectively dominating the Italian peninsula, and with a proven international military reputation, Rome now began to look to expand from the Italian mainland. Since the
Alps formed a natural barrier to the north, and Rome was none too keen
to meet the fierce Gauls in battle once more, the city's gaze turned to
Sicily and the islands of the Mediterranean, a policy that would bring
it into direct conflict with its former ally Carthage.
Middle (274–148 BC)
Rome first began to make war outside the Italian peninsula during the Punic wars against Carthage, a former Phoenician colony that had established on the north coast of Africa and developed into a powerful state. These wars, starting in 264 BC were probably the largest conflicts of the ancient world yet and saw Rome become the most powerful state of the Western Mediterranean, with territory in Sicily, North Africa, Iberia, and with the end of the Macedonian wars (which ran concurrently with the Punic wars) Greece as well. After the defeat of the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus III the Great in the Roman-Syrian War
(Treaty of Apamea, 188 BC) in the eastern sea, Rome emerged as the
dominant Mediterranean power and the most powerful city in the classical
world.
Punic Wars (264–146 BC)
Theatre of Punic Wars
The First Punic War
began in 264 BC when settlements on Sicily began to appeal to the two
powers between which they lay – Rome and Carthage – in order to solve
internal conflicts. The willingness of both Rome and Carthage to become embroiled on the
soil of a third party may indicate a willingness to test each other's
power without wishing to enter a full war of annihilation; certainly
there was considerable disagreement within Rome about whether to
prosecute the war at all. The war saw land battles in Sicily early on, such as the Battle of Agrigentum,
but the theatre shifted to naval battles around Sicily and Africa. For
the Romans, naval warfare was a relatively unexplored concept. Before the First Punic War in 264 BC there was no Roman navy to speak of, as all previous Roman wars had been fought on land in Italy. The new war in Sicily against Carthage, a great naval power, forced Rome to quickly build a fleet and train sailors.
Rome took to naval warfare "like a brick to water" and the first few naval battles of the First Punic War such as the Battle of the Lipari Islands were catastrophic disasters for Rome,
as might fairly be expected from a city that had no real prior
experience of naval warfare. However, after training more sailors and
inventing a grappling engine known as a Corvus, a Roman naval force under C. Duillius was able to roundly defeat a Carthaginian fleet at the Battle of Mylae.
In just four years, a state without any real naval experience had
managed to better a major regional maritime power in battle. Further
naval victories followed at the Battle of Tyndaris and the Battle of Cape Ecnomus.
After having won control of the seas, a Roman force landed on the African coast under Marcus Regulus, who was at first victorious, winning the Battle of Adys and forcing Carthage to sue for peace. However, the terms of peace that Rome proposed were so heavy that negotiations failed and in response, the Carthaginians hired Xanthippus of Carthage, a mercenary from the martial Greek city-state of Sparta, to reorganise and lead their army. Xanthippus managed to cut off the Roman army from its base by
re-establishing Carthaginian naval supremacy and then defeated and
captured Regulus at the Battle of Tunis.
Despite being defeated on African soil, the Romans with their
newfound naval abilities, roundly beat the Carthaginians in naval battle
again – largely through the tactical innovations of the Roman fleet – at the Battle of the Aegates Islands.
Carthage was left without a fleet or sufficient coin to raise a new
one. For a maritime power, the loss of their access to the Mediterranean
stung financially and psychologically, and the Carthaginians again sued
for peace, during which negotiations, Rome battled the Ligures tribe in the Ligurian War and the Insubres in the Gallic War.
Continuing distrust led to the renewal of hostilities in the Second Punic War when Hannibal, a member of the Barcid family of Carthaginian nobility, attacked Saguntum, a city with diplomatic ties to Rome. Hannibal then raised an army in Iberia and famously crossed the Italian Alps with elephants to invade Italy. In the first battle on Italian soil at Ticinus in 218 BC Hannibal defeated the Romans under Scipio the Elder in a small cavalry fight. Hannibal's success continued with victories in the Battle of the Trebia, the Battle of Lake Trasimene, where he ambushed an unsuspecting Roman army,and the Battle of Cannae, in what is considered one of the great masterpieces of tactical art, and for a while "Hannibal seemed invincible", able to beat Roman armies at will.
"Apart from the romance of Scipio's
personality and his political importance as the founder of Rome's
world-dominion, his military work has a greater value to modern students
of war than that of any other great captain of the past.. His genius
revealed to him that peace and war are the two wheels on which the world
runs."
Unable to defeat Hannibal himself on Italian soil, and with Hannibal
savaging the Italian countryside but unwilling or unable to destroy Rome
itself, the Romans boldly sent an army to Africa with the intention of
threatening the Carthaginian capital. In 203 BC at the Battle of Bagbrades the invading Roman army under Scipio Africanus Major defeated the Carthaginian army of Hasdrubal Gisco and Syphax and Hannibal was recalled to Africa. At the famous Battle of Zama Scipio decisively defeated – perhaps even "annihilated" – Hannibal's army in North Africa, ending the Second Punic War.
Carthage never managed to recover after the Second Punic War and the Third Punic War that followed was in reality a simple punitive mission to raze the city of Carthage to the ground. Carthage was almost defenceless and when besieged offered immediate
surrender, conceding to a string of outrageous Roman demands. The Romans refused the surrender, demanding as their further terms of surrender the complete destruction of the city and, seeing little to lose, the Carthaginians prepared to fight. In the Battle of Carthage the city was stormed after a short siege and completely destroyed, its culture "almost totally extinguished".
Conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (219–18 BC)
Rome's conflict with the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars led them into expansion in the Iberian Peninsula of modern-day Spain and Portugal. The Punic empire of the Carthaginian Barcid family
consisted of territories in Iberia, many of which Rome gained control
of during the Punic Wars. Italy remained the main theatre of war for
much of the Second Punic War,
but the Romans also aimed to destroy the Barcid Empire in Iberia and
prevent major Punic allies from linking up with forces in Italy.
Over the years, Rome had expanded along the southern Iberian coast until in 211 BC it captured the city of Saguntum.
Following two major military expeditions to Iberia, the Romans finally
crushed Carthaginian control of the peninsula in 206 BC, at the Battle of Ilipa, and the peninsula became a Roman province known as Hispania. From 206 BC onwards the only opposition to Roman control of the peninsula came from within the native Celtiberian tribes themselves, whose disunity prevented their security from Roman expansion.
Following two small-scale rebellions in 197 BC, in 195–194 BC war broke out between the Romans and the Lusitani people in the Lusitanian War, in modern-day Portugal. By 179 BC, the Romans had mostly succeeded in pacifying the region and bringing it under their control.
About 154 BC, a major revolt was re-ignited in Numantia, which is known as the First Numantine War, and a long war of resistance was fought between the advancing forces of
the Roman Republic and the Lusitani tribes of Hispania. The praetorServius Sulpicius Galba and the proconsulLucius Licinius Lucullus arrived in 151 BC and began the process of subduing the local population. In 150 BC, Galba betrayed the Lusitani leaders he had invited to peace
talks and had them killed, ingloriously ending the first phase of the
war.
In 144 BC, Viriathus formed a league against Rome with several Celtiberian tribes and persuaded them to rise against Rome too, in the Second Numantine War. Viriathus' new coalition bested Roman armies at the Second Battle of Mount Venus in 144 BC and again at the failed Siege of Erisone. In 139 BC, Viriathus was finally killed in his sleep by three of his companions who had been promised gifts by Rome. In 136 and 135 BC, more attempts were made to gain complete control of
the region of Numantia, but they failed. In 134 BC, the Consul Scipio Aemilianus finally succeeded in suppressing the rebellion following the successful Siege of Numantia.
Since the Roman invasion of the Iberian Peninsula had begun in
the south in the territories around the Mediterranean controlled by the
Barcids, the last region of the peninsula to be subdued lay in the far
north. The Cantabrian Wars or Astur-Cantabrian Wars, from 29 BC to 19 BC, occurred during the Roman conquest of these northern provinces of Cantabria and Asturias. Iberia was fully occupied by 25 BC and the last revolt put down by 19 BC
Macedon, the Greek poleis, and Illyria (215–148 BC)
Greece, Macedonia and their environs. Circa 200 BC.
Rome's preoccupation with its war with Carthage provided an opportunity for Philip V of the kingdom of Macedon in northern Greece
to attempt to extend his power westward. Philip sent ambassadors to
Hannibal's camp in Italy, to negotiate an alliance as common enemies of
Rome. However, Rome discovered the agreement when Philip's emissaries, along
with emissaries from Hannibal, were captured by a Roman fleet. Desiring to prevent Philip from aiding Carthage in Italy and elsewhere, Rome sought out land allies in Greece to fight a proxy war against Macedon on its behalf and found partners in the Aetolian League of Greek city-states, the Illyrians to the north of Macedon and the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon and the city-state of Rhodes, which lay across the Aegean from Macedon.
The First Macedonian War
saw the Romans involved directly in only limited land operations. When
the Aetolians sued for peace with Philip, Rome's small expeditionary
force, with no more allies in Greece, was ready to make peace. Rome had
achieved its objective of pre-occupying Philip and preventing him from
aiding Hannibal. A treaty was drawn up between Rome and Macedon at Phoenice in 205 BC which promised Rome a small indemnity, formally ending the First Macedonian War.
Macedon began to encroach on territory claimed by several other
Greek city states in 200 BC and these pleaded for help from their
newfound ally Rome. Rome gave Philip an ultimatum that he must submit Macedonia to being
essentially a Roman province. Philip, unsurprisingly, refused and, after
initial internal reluctance for further hostilities, Rome declared war against Philip in the Second Macedonian War. In the Battle of the Aous Roman forces under Titus Quinctius Flamininus defeated the Macedonians, and in a second larger battle under the same opposing commanders in 197 BC, in the Battle of Cynoscephalae, Flamininus again beat the Macedonians decisively.Macedonia was forced to sign the Treaty of Tempea, in which it lost all claim to territory in Greece and Asia, and had to pay a war indemnity to Rome.
Between the second and third Macedonian wars Rome faced further
conflict in the region due to a tapestry of shifting rivalries,
alliances and leagues all seeking to gain greater influence. After the
Macedonians had been defeated in the Second Macedonian War in 197 BC,
the Greek city-state of Sparta
stepped into the partial power vacuum in Greece. Fearing the Spartans
would take increasing control of the region, the Romans drew on help
from allies to prosecute the Roman-Spartan War, defeating a Spartan army at the Battle of Gythium in 195 BC. They also fought their former allies the Aetolian League in the Aetolian War, against the Istrians in the Istrian War, against the Illyrians in the Illyrian War, and against Achaia in the Achaean War.
Rome now turned its attentions to Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire to the east. After campaigns as far abroad as Bactria, India, Persia and Judea, Antiochus moved to Asia Minor and Thrace to secure several coastal towns, a move that brought him into conflict with Roman interests. A Roman force under Manius Acilius Glabrio defeated Antiochus at the Battle of Thermopylae and forced him to evacuate Greece: the Romans then pursued the Seleucids beyond Greece, beating them again in naval battles at the Battle of the Eurymedon and Battle of Myonessus, and finally in a decisive engagement of the Battle of Magnesia.
In 179 BC Philip died and his talented and ambitious son, Perseus of Macedon, took his throne and showed a renewed interest in Greece. He also allied himself with the warlike Bastarnae, and both this and his actions in Greece possibly violated the treaty
signed with the Romans by his father or, if not, certainly was not
"behaving as [Rome considered] a subordinate ally should". Rome declared war on Macedonia again, starting the Third Macedonian War. Perseus initially had greater military success against the Romans than his father, winning the Battle of Callicinus
against a Roman consular army. However, as with all such ventures in
this period, Rome responded by simply sending another army. The second
consular army duly defeated the Macedonians at the Battle of Pydna in 168 BC and the Macedonians, lacking the reserve of the Romans and with King Perseus captured, duly capitulated, ending the Third Macedonian War.
The Fourth Macedonian War, fought from 150 BC to 148 BC, was the final war between Rome and Macedon and began when Andriscus usurped the Macedonian throne. The Romans raised a consular army under Quintus Caecilius Metellus, who swiftly defeated Andriscus at the Second battle of Pydna.
Rome had, in the earlier Punic Wars, gained large tracts of territory
in Africa, which they consolidated in the following centuries. Much of that land had been granted to the kingdom of Numidia, a kingdom
on the north African coast approximating to modern Algeria, in return
for its past military assistance. The Jugurthine War of 111–104 BC was fought between Rome and Jugurtha of Numidia and constituted the final Roman pacification of Northern Africa, after which Rome largely ceased expansion on the continent after
reaching natural barriers of desert and mountain. In response to
Jugurtha's usurpation of the Numidian throne, a loyal ally of Rome since the Punic Wars, Rome intervened. Jugurtha impudently bribed the Romans into accepting his usurpation and was granted half the kingdom. Following further aggression and
further bribery attempts, the Romans sent an army to depose him. The
Romans were defeated at the Battle of Suthul but fared better at the Battle of the Muthul and finally defeated Jugurtha at the Battle of Thala, the Battle of Mulucha, and the Battle of Cirta (104 BC). Jugurtha was finally captured not in battle but by treachery, ending the war.
Resurgence of the Celtic threat (121 BC)
Memories of the sack of Rome
by Celtic tribes from Gaul in 390/387 BC, had been made into a
legendary account that was taught to each generation of Roman youth,
were still prominent despite their historical distance. In 121 BC, Rome
came into contact with the Celtic tribes of the Allobroges and the Arverni, both of which they defeated with apparent ease in the First Battle of Avignon near the Rhone river and the Second Battle of Avignon, the same year.
New Germanic threat (113–101 BC)
The Cimbrian War (113–101 BC) was a far more serious affair than the earlier clashes of 121 BC. The Germanic tribes of the Cimbri and the Teutons or Teutones migrated from northern Europe into Rome's northern territories, where they clashed with Rome and her allies. The Cimbrian War was the first time since the Second Punic War that Italia and Rome itself had been seriously threatened, and caused great fear in Rome. The opening action of the Cimbrian War, the Battle of Noreia in 112 BC, ended in defeat and near disaster for the Romans. In 105 BC the Romans were defeated at the Battle of Arausio and was the costliest Rome had suffered since the Battle of Cannae. After the Cimbri inadvertently granted the Romans a reprieve by diverting to plunder Iberia,[182] Rome was given the opportunity to carefully prepare for and successfully meet the Cimbri and Teutons in the Battle of Aquae Sextiae (102 BC) and the Battle of Vercellae (101 BC) where both tribes were virtually annihilated, ending the threat.
Internal unrest (135–71 BC)
The extensive campaigning abroad by Rome, and the rewarding of
soldiers with plunder from those campaigns, led to the trend of soldiers
becoming increasingly loyal to their commanders rather than to the
state, and a willingness to follow their generals in battle against the
state. Rome was plagued by several slave uprisings during this period, in part
because in the past century vast tracts of land had been given to
veterans who farmed by use of slaves and who came to greatly outnumber
their Roman masters. In the last century BC, at least twelve civil wars and rebellions occurred. This pattern did not break until Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) ended it by becoming a successful challenger to the Senate's authority, and was made princeps (emperor).
Between 135 BC and 71 BC there were three Servile Wars against the Roman state; the third, and most serious, may have involved the revolution of 120,000 to 150,000 slaves. Additionally, in 91 BC the Social War broke out between Rome and its former allies in Italy, collectively known as the Socii, over the grievance that they shared the risk of Rome's military campaigns, but not its rewards. Despite defeats such as the Battle of Fucine Lake, Roman troops defeated the Italian militias in decisive engagements, notably the Battle of Asculum. Although they lost militarily, the Socii achieved their objectives with the legal proclamations of the Lex Julia and Lex Plautia Papiria, which granted citizenship to more than 500,000 Italians.
The internal unrest reached its most serious stage in the two civil wars or marches upon Rome by the consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla at the beginning of 82 BC. In the Battle of the Colline Gate at the very door of the city of Rome, a Roman army under Sulla bested an army of the Roman senate and its Samnite allies. Whatever the merits of his grievances against those in power of the
state, his actions marked a watershed of the willingness of Roman troops
to wage war against one another that was to pave the way for the wars
of the triumvirate, the overthrowing of the Senate as the de facto head of the Roman state, and the eventual endemic usurpation of power by contenders for the emperor-ship in the later Empire.
Conflicts with Mithridates (89–63 BC)
Mithridates VI was the ruler of Pontus, a large kingdom in Asia Minor,
from 120 to 63 BC. He is remembered as one of Rome's most formidable
and successful enemies who engaged three of the most prominent generals
of the late Roman Republic: Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey the Great.
In a pattern familiar from the Punic Wars, the Romans came into
conflict with him after the two states' spheres of influence began to
overlap. Mithridates antagonised Rome by seeking to expand his kingdom, and Rome for her part seemed equally keen for war and the spoils and prestige that it might bring. After conquering western Anatolia
(modern Turkey) in 88 BC, Roman sources claim that Mithridates ordered
the killing of the majority of the 80,000 Romans living there. In the subsequent First Mithridatic War, the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla forced Mithridates out of Greece proper after the Battle of Chaeronea and later Battle of Orchomenus
but then had to return to Italy to answer the internal threat posed by
his rival Marius; consequently, Mithridates VI was defeated but not
destroyed. A peace was made between Rome and Pontus, but this proved
only a temporary lull.
The Mediterranean had at this time fallen into the hands of pirates, largely from Cilicia. Rome had destroyed many of the states that had previously policed the
Mediterranean with fleets, but had failed to step into the gap created. The pirates had seized the opportunity of a relative power vacuum and
had not only strangled shipping lanes but had plundered many cities on
the coasts of Greece and Asia, and had even made descents upon Italy itself. After the Roman admiral Marcus Antonius Creticus (father of the triumvirMarcus Antonius) failed to clear the pirates to the satisfaction of the Roman authorities, Pompey was nominated his successor as commander of a special naval task force to campaign against them. It supposedly took Pompey just forty days to clear the western portion of the western Mediterranean of pirates, and restore communication between Iberia, Africa, and Italy. Plutarch
describes how Pompey first swept their craft from the Mediterranean in a
series of small actions and through the promise of honouring the
surrender of cities and craft. He then followed the main body of the
pirates to their strongholds on the coast of Cilicia, and destroyed them there in the naval Battle of Korakesion.
Caesar's early campaigns (59–50 BC)
Map of the Gallic Wars
During a term as praetor in Iberia, Pompey's contemporary Julius Caesar of the Roman Julii clan defeated the Calaici and Lusitani in battle. Following a consular term, he was then appointed to a five-year term as
Proconsular Governor of Transalpine Gaul (current southern France) and
Illyria (the coast of Dalmatia).Not content with an idle governorship, Caesar strove to find reason to
invade Gaul, which would give him the dramatic military success he
sought. To this end he stirred up popular nightmares of the first sack of Rome
by the Gauls and the more recent spectre of the Cimbri and Teutones. When the Helvetii and Tigurini tribes began to migrate on a route that would take them near (not into) the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul, Caesar had the barely sufficient excuse he needed for his Gallic Wars, fought between 58 BC and 49 BC. After slaughtering the Helvetii tribe, Caesar prosecuted a "long, bitter and costly" campaign against other tribes across the breadth of Gaul, many of whom
had fought alongside Rome against their common enemy the Helvetii, and annexed their territory to that of Rome. Plutarch claims that the campaign cost a million Gallic lives. Although "fierce and able" the Gauls were handicapped by internal disunity and fell in a series of battles over the course of a decade.
Caesar defeated the Helvetii in 58 BC at the Battle of the Arar and Battle of Bibracte, the Belgic confederacy known as the Belgae at the Battle of the Axona, the Nervii in 57 BC at the Battle of the Sabis, the Aquitani, Treviri, Tencteri, Aedui and Eburones in unknown battles, and the Veneti in 56 BC. In 55 and 54 BC he made two expeditions to Britain. In 52 BC, following the Siege of Avaricum and a string of inconclusive battles, Caesar defeated a union of Gauls led by Vercingetorix at the Battle of Alesia,completing the Roman conquest of Transalpine Gaul. By 50 BC, the entirety of Gaul lay in Roman hands. Caesar recorded his own accounts of these campaigns in Commentarii de Bello Gallico ("Commentaries on the Gallic War").
Gaul never regained its Celtic identity, never attempted another
nationalist rebellion, and remained loyal to Rome until the fall of the
Western Empire in 476 AD. However, although Gaul itself was to
thereafter remain loyal, cracks were appearing in the political unity of
Rome's governing figures – partly over concerns over the loyalty of
Caesar's Gallic troops to his person rather than the state – that were soon to drive Rome into a lengthy series of civil wars.
Triumvirates, Caesarian ascension, and revolt (53–30 BC)
By 59 BC an unofficial political alliance known as the First Triumvirate was formed between Gaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus to share power and influence. It was always an uncomfortable alliance given that Crassus and Pompey
intensely disliked one another. In 53 BC, Crassus launched a Roman
invasion of the Parthian Empire. After initial successes, he marched his army deep into the desert; but here his army was cut off deep in enemy territory, surrounded and slaughtered at the Battle of Carrhae in "the greatest Roman defeat since Hannibal" in which Crassus himself perished. The death of Crassus removed some of the balance in the Triumvirate
and, consequently, Caesar and Pompey began to move apart. While Caesar
was fighting against Vercingetorix in Gaul, Pompey proceeded with a
legislative agenda for Rome that revealed that he was at best ambivalent
towards Caesar and perhaps now covertly allied with Caesar's political enemies. In 51
BC, some Roman senators demanded that Caesar would not be permitted to
stand for Consul unless he turned over control of his armies to the
state, and the same demands were made of Pompey by other factions. Relinquishing his army would leave Caesar defenceless before his
enemies. Caesar chose Civil War over laying down his command and facing
trial. The triumvirate was shattered and conflict was inevitable.
Pompey initially assured Rome and the senate that he could defeat Caesar in battle should he march on Rome. However, by the spring of 49 BC, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon river
with his invading forces and swept down the Italian peninsula towards
Rome, Pompey ordered the abandonment of Rome. Caesar's army was still under-strength, with certain units remaining in Gaul, but on the other hand Pompey himself only had a small force at his
command, and that with uncertain loyalty having served under Caesar. Tom Holland attributes Pompey's willingness to abandon Rome to waves of
panicking refugees as an attempt to stir ancestral fears of invasions
from the north. Pompey's forces retreated south towards Brundisium, and then fled to Greece. Caesar first directed his attention to the Pompeian stronghold of Iberia but following campaigning by Caesar in the Siege of Massilia and Battle of Ilerda he decided to attack Pompey in Greece. Pompey initially defeated Caesar at the Battle of Dyrrachium in 48 BC but failed to follow up on the victory. Pompey was decisively defeated in the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC despite outnumbering Caesar's forces two to one. Pompey fled again, this time to Egypt, where he was murderedin an attempt to ingratiate the country with Caesar and avoid a war with Rome.
Pompey's death did not see the end of the civil wars since
initially Caesar's enemies were manifold and Pompey's supporters
continued to fight on after his death. In 46 BC Caesar lost perhaps as
much as a third of his army when his former commander Titus Labienus, who had defected to the Pompeians several years earlier, defeated him at the Battle of Ruspina. However, after this low point Caesar came back to defeat the Pompeian army of Metellus Scipio in the Battle of Thapsus,
after which the Pompeians retreated yet again to Iberia. Caesar
defeated the combined forces of Titus Labienus and Gnaeus Pompey the
Younger at the Battle of Munda in Iberia. Labienus was killed in the battle and the Younger Pompey captured and executed.
"The Parthians began to shoot from all
sides. They did not pick any particular target since the Romans were so
close together that they could hardly miss...If they kept their ranks
they were wounded. If they tried to charge the enemy, the enemy did not
suffer more and they did not suffer less, because the Parthians could
shoot even as they fled...When Publius urged them to charge the enemy's
mail-clad horsemen, they showed him that their hands were riveted to
their shields and their feet nailed through and through to the ground,
so that they were helpless either for flight or for self-defence."
Despite his military success, or probably because of it, fear spread
of Caesar, now the primary figure of the Roman state, becoming an
autocratic ruler and ending the Roman Republic. This fear drove a group
of senators naming themselves The Liberators to assassinate him in 44 BC. Further civil war followed between those loyal to Caesar and those who
supported the actions of the Liberators. Caesar's supporter Mark Antony condemned Caesar's assassins and war broke out between the two factions. Antony was denounced as a public enemy, and Octavian was entrusted with the command of the war against him. In the Battle of Forum Gallorum Antony, besieging Caesar's assassin Decimus Brutus in Mutina,
defeated the forces of the consul Pansa, who was killed, but Antony was
then immediately defeated by the army of the other consul, Hirtius. At
the Battle of Mutina
Antony was again defeated in battle by Hirtius, who was killed.
Although Antony failed to capture Mutina, Decimus Brutus was murdered
shortly thereafter.
Octavian betrayed his party, and came to terms with Caesarians Antony and Lepidus and on 26 November 43 BC the Second Triumvirate was formed, this time in an official capacity. In 42 BC TriumvirsMark Antony and Octavian fought the indecisive Battle of Philippi with Caesar's assassins Marcus Brutus and Cassius.
Although Brutus defeated Octavian, Antony defeated Cassius, who
committed suicide. Brutus also committed suicide shortly afterwards.
Civil war flared again when the Second Triumvirate of Octavian, Lepidus and Mark Antony
failed just as the first had almost as soon as its opponents had been
removed. The ambitious Octavian built a power base and then launched a
campaign against Mark Antony. Together with Lucius Antonius, Mark Antony's wife Fulvia raised an army in Italy to fight for Antony's rights against Octavian but she was defeated by Octavian at the Battle of Perugia. Her death led to partial reconciliation between Octavian and Antony who went on to crush the army of Sextus Pompeius, the last focus of opposition to the second triumvirate, in the naval Battle of Naulochus.
As before, once opposition to the triumvirate was crushed, it
started to tear at itself. The triumvirate expired on the last day of 33
BC and was not renewed in law and in 31 BC, war began again. At the Battle of Actium, Octavian decisively defeated Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle near Greece, using fire to destroy the enemy fleet.
Octavian went on to become Emperor under the name Augustus and, in the absence of political assassins or usurpers, was able to greatly expand the borders of the Empire.
Secured from internal threats, Rome achieved great territorial gains
in both the East and the West. In the West, following humiliating defeats at the hands of the Sugambri, Tencteri and Usipetes tribes in 16 BC, Roman armies pushed north and east out of Gaul to subdue much of Germania. The Pannonian revolt in 6 AD forced the Romans to cancel their plan to cement their conquest of Germania. Despite the loss of a large army almost to the man of Varus' famous defeat at the hands of the Germanic leader Arminius in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD,Rome recovered and continued its expansion up to and beyond the borders of the known world. Roman armies under Germanicus pursued several more campaigns against the Germanic tribes of the Marcomanni, Hermunduri, Chatti, Cherusci, Bructeri, and Marsi. Overcoming several mutinies in the armies along the Rhine, Germanicus defeated the Germanic tribes of Arminius in a series of battles culminating in the Battle of the Weser River.
On the continent, the extension of the Empire's borders beyond the Rhine hung in the balance for some time, with the emperor Caligula apparently poised to invade Germania in 39 AD, and Cnaeus Domitius Corbulo crossing the Rhine in 47 AD and marching into the territory of the Frisii and Chauci. Caligula's successor, Claudius, ordered the suspension of further attacks across the Rhine, setting what was to become the permanent limit of the Empire's expansion in this direction.
"Never was there slaughter more cruel than
took place there in the marshes and woods, never were more intolerable
insults inflicted by barbarians, especially those directed against the
legal pleaders. They put out the eyes of some of them and cut off the
hands of others; they sewed up the mouth of one of them after first
cutting out his tongue, which one of the barbarians held in his hand,
exclaiming At last, you viper, you have ceased to hiss!."
Further east, Trajan turned his attention to Dacia, an area north of Macedon and Greece and east of the Danube that had been on the Roman agenda since before the days of Caesar[272][273] when they had beaten a Roman army at the Battle of Histria.[274] In 85 AD, the Dacians had swarmed over the Danube and pillaged Moesia and initially defeated an army the Emperor Domitian sent against them, but the Romans were victorious in the Battle of Tapae in AD 88 and a truce was drawn up.
Emperor Trajan recommenced hostilities against Dacia and, following an uncertain number of battles, defeated the Dacian general Decebalus in the Second Battle of Tapae in 101 AD. With Trajan's troops pressing towards the Dacian capital Sarmizegethusa, Decebalus once more sought terms. Decebalus rebuilt his power over the following years and attacked Roman
garrisons again in 105 AD. In response Trajan again marched into Dacia, besieging the Dacian capital in the Siege of Sarmizegethusa, and razing it to the ground. With Dacia quelled, Trajan subsequently invaded the Parthian empire
to the east, his conquests taking the Roman Empire to its greatest
extent. Rome's borders in the east were indirectly governed through a
system of client states for some time, leading to less direct campaigning than in the west in this period.
The Kingdom of Armenia between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea
became a focus of contention between Rome and the Parthian Empire, and
control of the region was repeatedly gained and lost. The Parthians
forced Armenia into submission from 37 AD but in 47 AD the Romans retook control of the kingdom and offered it client kingdom status. Under Nero, the Romans fought a campaign between 55 and 63 AD
against the Parthian Empire, which had again invaded Armenia. After
gaining Armenia once more in 60 AD and subsequently losing it again in
62 AD, the Romans sent Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo in 63 AD into the territories of Vologases I of Parthia. Corbulo succeeded in returning Armenia to Roman client status, where it remained for the next century.
Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD)
In 69 AD, Marcus Salvius Otho, governor of Lusitania, had the Emperor Galba murdered and claimed the throne for himself. However, Vitellius, governor of the province of Germania Inferior, had also claimed the throneand marched on Rome with his troops. Following an inconclusive battle near Antipolis, Vitellius' troops attacked the city of Placentia in the Assault of Placentia, but were repulsed by the Othonian garrison.
Otho left Rome on March 14, and marched north towards Placentia to meet his challenger. In the Battle of Locus Castorum the Othonians had the better of the fighting, and Vitellius' troops retreated to Cremona. The two armies met again on the Via Postunia, in the First Battle of Bedriacum, after which the Othonian troops fled back to their camp in Bedriacum, and the next day surrendered to the Vitellian forces. Otho decided to commit suicide rather than fight on.
Meanwhile, the forces stationed in the Middle East provinces of Judaea and Syria had acclaimed Vespasian as emperor and the Danubian armies of the provinces of Raetia and Moesia also acclaimed Vespasian as emperor. Vespasian's and Vitellius' armies met in the Second Battle of Bedriacum, after which the Vitellian troops were driven back into their camp outside Cremona, which was taken. Vespasian's troops then attacked Cremona itself, which surrendered.
Under pretence of siding with Vespasian, Civilis of Batavia had taken up arms and induced the inhabitants of his native country to rebel.The rebelling Batavians were immediately joined by several neighbouring German tribes including the Frisii. These forces drove out the Roman garrisons near the Rhine and defeated a Roman army at the Battle of Castra Vetera,
after which many Roman troops along the Rhine and in Gaul defected to
the Batavian cause. However, disputes soon broke out amongst the
different tribes, rendering co-operation impossible; Vespasian, having
successfully ended the civil war, called upon Civilis to lay down his
arms, and on his refusal his legions met him in force, defeating him in the Battle of Augusta Treverorum.
Jewish revolts (66–135 AD)
The First Jewish-Roman War, sometimes called The Great Revolt, was the first of three major rebellions by the Jews of Judaea against the Roman Empire. According to Fergus Millar, the revolt represents "the best-attested series of operations by the Roman army in the entire history of the Empire." Judaea, an independent kingdom under the Hasmoneans, fell into a civil war in which Pompey intervened, conquering Jerusalem in 63 BC. The territory gradually transformed into a client kingdom before eventually becoming a directly governed province. Jewish anger towards Rome grew due to the incompetent and often harsh rule of successive governors coupled with Roman insensitivity – Tacitus says disgust and repulsion – towards their religion. This discontent was further fueled by ethnic tensions between Jews and pagans, economic and social issues, and aspirations for national independence.The spark came in 66 AD, when violence broke out in Jerusalem after the
Roman governor seized a large amount of money from the Temple and
killed many; this act led to an open uprising against Rome. Cestius Gallus, the Roman governor of Syria, attempted to quell the revolt but withdrew after initial engagements in Jerusalem, with his force decisively ambushed and annihilated in the Battle of Beth-Horon, losing a contingent equivalent to a legion. By this point, the revolt attracted greater attention from Rome and Emperor Nero appointed general Vespasian to crush the rebellion. Vespasian led his forces in a methodical clearance of the areas in revolt. By the year 68 AD, Jewish resistance in the Galilee had been crushed, with the Romans besieging and destroying rebel strongholds such as Yodfat and Gamla. In 70 AD, Titus succeeded Vespasian and, using a force significantly larger than the one deployed for the Roman invasion of Britain, managed to take Jerusalem after a long siege, during which the Temple was razed. The city was systematically destroyed, with much of its population massacred or enslaved. Roman forces continued to suppress remaining resistance, culminating in the Siege of Masada in 73 AD. The Flavian dynasty
leveraged the victory to solidify its claim to imperial rule. This was
achieved through a triumph in Rome (the only one celebrating the
subjugation of an existing province's population), the minting of Judaea Capta coins, and the construction of commemorative monuments such as the Arch of Titus.
Circa 115 AD, a series of revolts broke out among Jewish diaspora communities in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire while Trajan was engaged in his Parthian campaign. The revolts, which came to be known as the Diaspora Revolt, erupted nearly simultaneously in Egypt, Libya, and Cyprus. Marcius Turbo, a leading general, was sent to quell the uprisings in Egypt and Libya, while Lusius Quietus handled Jewish unrest in Mesopotamia and Judaea (the "Kitos War"). The uprisings were largely suppressed by late 117 AD, just before
Trajan's death, resulting in the annihilation and expulsion of Jewish
communities in Egypt, Libya, and Cyprus.
In 132 AD, the Bar Kokhba revolt
emerged as the final major Jewish uprising against Roman authority and
the last bid for Jewish independence in Judaea. The immediate triggers
of the revolt, still debated by scholars, include Hadrian's establishment of the pagan colony Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem and his prohibition of circumcision. Led by Simon bar Kokhba, the Jews initially succeeded in creating a brief independent state. However, the Romans assembled six full legions with auxiliaries and other elements from up to six additional legions, all under the command of Sextus Julius Severus, that effectively crushed the revolt by 135 AD. This suppression caused extensive devastation across Judaea, leading to
massive loss of life, widespread displacement, and enslavement, while
also inflicting heavy casualties on Roman forces. After the revolt, the
province was renamed Syria Palaestina, and Jews were subjected to harsh religious restrictions.
Struggle with Parthia (114–217 AD)
By the 2nd century AD the territories of Persia were controlled by the Arsacid dynasty and known as the Parthian Empire. Due in large part to their employment of powerful heavy cavalry and mobile horse archers,
Parthia was the most formidable enemy of the Roman Empire in the east.
As early as 53 BC, the Roman general Crassus had invaded Parthia, but he
was killed and his army was defeated at the Battle of Carrhae.
In the years following Carrhae, the Romans were divided in civil war
and hence unable to campaign against Parthia. Trajan also campaigned
against the Parthians from 114 to 117 AD and briefly captured their
capital Ctesiphon, putting the puppet ruler Parthamaspates on the throne. However, rebellions in Babylonia and the Jewish revolts in Judaea made it difficult to maintain the captured province and the territories were abandoned.
A revitalised Parthian Empire renewed its assault in 161 AD, defeating two Roman armies and invading Armenia and Syria. Emperor Lucius Verus and general Gaius Avidius Cassius
were sent in 162 AD to counter the resurgent Parthia. In this war, the
Parthian city of Seleucia on the Tigris was destroyed and the palace at
the capital Ctesiphon was burned to the ground by Avidius Cassius in 164 AD. The Parthians made peace but were forced to cede western Mesopotamia to the Romans.
In 197 AD, Emperor Septimius Severus
waged a brief and successful war against the Parthian Empire in
retaliation for the support given to a rival for the imperial throne Pescennius Niger. The Parthian capital Ctesiphon was sacked by the Roman army, and the northern half of Mesopotamia was restored to Rome.
Emperor Caracalla,
the son of Severus, marched on Parthia in 217 AD from Edessa to begin a
war against them, but he was assassinated while on the march. In 224 AD, the Parthian Empire was crushed not by the Romans but by the rebellious Persian vassal king Ardashir I, who revolted, leading to the establishment of Sassanid Empire of Persia, which replaced Parthia as Rome's major rival in the East.
Throughout the Parthian wars, tribal groups along the Rhine and
Danube took advantage of Rome's preoccupation with the eastern frontier
(and the plague that the Romans suffered from after bringing it back
from the east) and launched a series of incursions into Roman
territories, including the Marcomannic Wars.
Struggle with Germanic tribes (163–378 AD)
Area settled by the Alamanni, and sites of Roman-Alamannic battles, 3rd to 6th century
After Varus' defeat in Germania in the 1st century, Rome had adopted a
largely defensive strategy along the border with Germania, constructing
a line of defences known as limes
along the Rhine. Although the exact historicity is unclear, since the
Romans often assigned one name to several distinct tribal groups, or
conversely applied several names to a single group at different times,
some mix of Germanic peoples, Celts, and tribes of mixed Celto-Germanic
ethnicity were settled in the lands of Germania from the 1st century
onwards. The Cherusci, Bructeri, Tencteri, Usipi, Marsi, and Chatti
of Varus' time had by the 3rd century either evolved into or been
displaced by a confederacy or alliance of Germanic tribes collectively
known as the Alamanni, first mentioned by Cassius Dio describing the campaign of Caracalla in 213 AD.
In around 166 AD, several Germanic tribes pushed across the Danube, striking as far as Italy itself in the Siege of Aquileia in 166 AD, and the heartland of Greece in the Sack of Eleusis.
Although the essential problem of large tribal groups on the
frontier remained much the same as the situation Rome faced in earlier
centuries, the 3rd century saw a marked increase in the overall threat, although there is disagreement over whether external pressure increased, or Rome's ability to meet it declined. The Carpi and Sarmatians whom Rome had held at bay were replaced by the Goths and likewise the Quadi and Marcomanni that Rome had defeated were replaced by the greater confederation of the Alamanni.
The assembled warbands of the Alamanni frequently crossed the limes,
attacking Germania Superior such that they were almost continually
engaged in conflicts with the Roman Empire, whilst Goths attacked across
the Danube in battles such as the Battle of Beroa and Battle of Philippopolis in 250 AD and the Battle of Abrittus in 251 AD, and both Goths and Heruli ravaged the Aegean and, later, Greece, Thrace and Macedonia. However, their first major assault deep into Roman territory came in
268 AD. In that year the Romans were forced to denude much of their
German frontier of troops in response to a massive invasion by another
new Germanic tribal confederacy, the Goths,
from the east. The pressure of tribal groups pushing into the Empire
was the result of a chain of migrations with its roots far to the east: Huns from the Russian steppe attacked the Goths, who in turn attacked the Dacians, Alans and Sarmatians at or within Rome's borders. The Goths first appeared in history as a distinct people in this
invasion of 268 AD when they swarmed over the Balkan peninsula and
overran the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Illyricum and even
threatened Italia itself.
The Alamanni seized the opportunity to launch a major invasion of
Gaul and northern Italy. However, the Visigoths were defeated in battle
that summer near the modern Italian-Slovenian border and then routed in
the Battle of Naissus that September by Gallienus, Claudius and Aurelian, who then turned and defeated the Alemanni at the Battle of Lake Benacus. Claudius' successor Aurelian defeated the Goths twice more in the Battle of Fanum Fortunae and the Battle of Ticinum. The Goths remained a major threat to the Empire but directed their
attacks away from Italy itself for several years after their defeat. By
284 AD, Gothic troops were serving on behalf of the Roman military as
federated troops.
Northeastern Gaul and the Rhine frontier of the Roman empire in the time of Julian
The Alamanni on the other hand resumed their drive towards Italy almost immediately. They defeated Aurelian at the Battle of Placentia in 271 AD but were beaten back for a short time after they lost the battles of Fano and Pavia later that year. They were beaten again in 298 AD at the battles of Lingones and Vindonissa but fifty years later they were resurgent again, making incursions in 356 AD at the Battle of Reims, in 357 AD at the Battle of Strasbourg, in 367 AD at the Battle of Solicinium and in 378 AD at Battle of Argentovaria. In the same year the Goths inflicted a crushing defeat on the Eastern Empire at the Battle of Adrianople, in which the Eastern Emperor Valens was massacred along with tens of thousands of Roman troops.
At the same time, Franks raided through the North Sea and the English Channel, Vandals pressed across the Rhine, Iuthungi against the Danube, Iazyges, Carpi and Taifali harassed Dacia, and Gepids joined the Goths and Heruli in attacks round the Black Sea. At around the same time, lesser-known tribes such as the Bavares, Baquates and Quinquegentanei raided Africa.
At the start of the 5th century, the pressure on Rome's western
borders was growing intense. However, it was not only the western
borders that were under threat: Rome was also under threat both
internally and on its eastern borders.
An army that was often willing to support its general over its
emperor, meant that if commanders could establish sole control of their
army, they could usurp the imperial throne from that position. The
so-called Crisis of the Third Century describes the turmoil of murder, usurpation and in-fighting that followed the murder of the Emperor Alexander Severus in 235 AD. However, Cassius Dio marks the wider imperial decline as beginning in 180 AD with the ascension of Commodus to the throne, a judgement with which Gibbon concurred, and Matyszak states that "the rot ... had become established long before" even that.
Although the crisis of the 3rd century was not the absolute
beginning of Rome's decline, it nevertheless did impose a severe strain
on the empire as Romans waged war on one another as they had not done
since the last days of the Republic. Within the space of a single
century, twenty-seven military officers declared themselves emperors and
reigned over parts of the empire for months or days, all but two
meeting with a violent end. The time was characterized by a Roman army that was as likely to be
attacking itself as it was an outside invader, reaching a low point
around 258 AD. Ironically, while it was these usurpations that led to the breakup of
the Empire during the crisis, it was the strength of several frontier
generals that helped reunify the empire through force of arms.
The situation was complex, often with three or more usurpers in existence at once. Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger, both rebel generals declared to be emperors by the troops they commanded, clashed for the first time in 193 AD at the Battle of Cyzicus, in which Niger was defeated. However, it took two further defeats at the Battle of Nicaea later that year and the Battle of Issus
the following year, for Niger to be destroyed. Almost as soon as
Niger's usurpation had been ended, Severus was forced to deal with
another rival for the throne in the person of Clodius Albinus,
who had originally been allied to Severus. Albinus was proclaimed
emperor by his troops in Britain and, crossing over to Gaul, defeated
Severus' general Virius Lupus in battle, before being in turn defeated and killed in the Battle of Lugdunum by Severus himself.
After this turmoil, Severus faced no more internal threats for the rest of his reign, and the reign of his successor Caracalla passed uninterrupted for a while until he was murdered by Macrinus, who proclaimed himself emperor. Despite Macrinus having his position ratified by the Roman senate, the troops of Varius Avitus declared him to be emperor instead, and the two met in battle at the Battle of Antioch in 218 AD, in which Macrinus was defeated. However, Avitus himself, after taking the imperial name Elagabalus, was murdered shortly afterwards and Alexander Severus was proclaimed emperor by both the Praetorian Guard and the senate who, after a short reign, was murdered in turn. His murderers were working on behalf of the army who were unhappy with their lot under his rule and who raised in his place Maximinus Thrax. However, just as he had been raised by the army, Maximinus was also brought down by them and despite winning the Battle of Carthage against the senate's newly proclaimed Gordian II, he too was murdered when it appeared to his forces as though he would not be able to best the next senatorial candidate for the throne, Gordian III.
Gordian III's fate is not certain, although he may have been murdered by his own successor, Philip the Arab, who ruled for only a few years before the army again raised a general, Decius, by their proclamation to emperor, who then defeated Philip in the Battle of Verona. Several succeeding generals avoided battling usurpers for the throne by
being murdered by their own troops before battle could commence. The
lone exception to this rule was Gallienus, emperor from 260 to 268 AD, who confronted a remarkable array of usurpers,
most of whom he defeated in pitched battle. The army was mostly spared
further infighting until around 273 AD, when Aurelian defeated the
Gallic usurper Tetricus in the Battle of Chalons.
The next decade saw an incredible number of usurpers, sometimes three
at the same time, all vying for the imperial throne. Most of the battles
are not recorded, due primarily to the turmoil of the time, until Diocletian, a usurper himself, defeated Carinus at the Battle of the Margus and became emperor.
After overthrowing the Parthian confederacy, the Sassanid Empire that arose from its remains pursued a more aggressive expansionist policy than their predecessorsand continued to make war against Rome. In 230 AD, the first Sassanid emperor attacked Roman territory first in Armenia and then in Mesopotamia but Roman losses were largely restored by Severus within a few years. In 243 AD, Emperor Gordian III's army retook the Roman cities of Hatra, Nisibis and Carrhae from the Sassanids after defeating the Sassanids at the Battle of Resaena but what happened next is unclear: Persian sources claim that Gordian was defeated and killed in the Battle of Misikhe but Roman sources mention this battle only as an insignificant setback and suggest that Gordian died elsewhere.
Certainly, the Sassanids had not been cowed by the previous battles with Rome and in 253 AD the Sassanids under Shapur I penetrated deeply into Roman territory several times, defeating a Roman force at the Battle of Barbalissos and conquering and plundering Antiochia in 252 AD following the Siege of Antiochia. The Romans recovered Antioch by 253 AD, and Emperor Valerian gathered an army and marched eastward to the Sassanid borders. In 260 AD at the Battle of Edessa the Sassanids defeated the Roman army and captured the Roman Emperor Valerian.
By the late 3rd century, Roman fortunes on the eastern frontier
improved dramatically. During a period of civil upheaval in Persia,
emperor Carus led a successful campaign into Persia essentially uncontested, sacking Ctesiphon in 283 AD. During the reign of the Tetrarchy, emperors Diocletian and Galerius
brought a decisive conclusion to the war, sacking Ctesiphon in 299 AD
and expanding the Roman eastern frontier dramatically with the Treaty of Nisibis. The treaty brought lasting peace between Rome and the Sassanids for almost four decades until the end of Constantine the Great's reign. In 337 AD, Shapur II
broke the peace and began a 26-year conflict, attempting with little
success to conquer Roman fortresses in the region. After early Sassanid
successes including the Battle of Amida in 359 AD and the Siege of Pirisabora in 363 AD, Emperor Julian met Shapur in 363 AD in the Battle of Ctesiphon outside the walls of the Persian capital. The Romans were victorious but were unable to take the city, and were
forced to retreat due to their vulnerable position in the middle of
hostile territory. Julian was killed in the Battle of Samarra during the retreat, possibly by one of his own men.
There were several future wars, although all brief and
small-scale, since both the Romans and the Sassanids were forced to deal
with threats from other directions during the 5th century. A war
against Bahram V
in 420 AD over the persecution of the Christians in Persia led to a
brief war that was soon concluded by treaty and in 441 AD a war with Yazdegerd II was again swiftly concluded by treaty after both parties battled threats elsewhere.
Many theories have been advanced in way of explanation for decline of the Roman Empire, and many dates given for its fall, from the onset of its decline in the 3rd century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Militarily, however, the Empire finally fell after first being overrun
by various non-Roman peoples and then having its heart in Italy seized
by Germanic troops in a revolt. The historicity and exact dates are
uncertain, and some historians do not consider that the Empire fell at
this point.
The Empire became gradually less Romanised and increasingly
Germanic in nature: although the Empire buckled under Visigothic
assault, the overthrow of the last Emperor Romulus Augustus
was carried out by federated Germanic troops from within the Roman army
rather than by foreign troops. In this sense had Odoacer not renounced
the title of Emperor and named himself "King of Italy" instead, the
Empire might have continued in name. Its identity, however, was no
longer Roman – it was increasingly populated and governed by Germanic
peoples long before 476 AD. The Roman people were by the 5th century
"bereft of their military ethos" and the Roman army itself a mere supplement to federated troops of Goths, Huns, Franks and others fighting on their behalf.
Rome's last gasp began when the Goths revolted around 395 AD. Led by Alaric I, they attempted to seize Constantinople, but were rebuffed and instead plundered much of Thrace in northern Greece. In 402 AD they besieged Mediolanum, the capital of Roman Emperor Honorius, defended by Roman Gothic troops. The arrival of the Roman Stilicho
and his army forced Alaric to lift his siege and move his army towards
Hasta (modern Asti) in western Italy, where Stilicho attacked it at the Battle of Pollentia, capturing Alaric's camp. Stilicho offered to return the prisoners in
exchange for the Visigoths returning to Illyricum but upon arriving at
Verona, Alaric halted his retreat. Stilicho again attacked at the Battle of Verona and again defeated Alaric, forcing him to withdraw from Italy.
In 405 AD, the Gothic king Radagaisus started a war by invading Italy
itself, but were defeated. However, in 406 AD an unprecedented number
of tribes took advantage of the freezing of the Rhine to cross en masse: Vandals, Suevi, Alans and Burgundians swept across the Rhine and met little resistance in the Sack of Moguntiacum and the Sack of Treviri, completely overrunning Gaul. Despite this grave danger, or perhaps
because of it, the Roman army continued to be wracked by usurpation, in
one of which Stilicho, Rome's foremost defender of the period, was put
to death.
It is in this climate that, despite his earlier setback, Alaric returned again in 410 AD and managed to sack Rome. The Roman capital had by this time moved to the Italian city of Ravenna, but some historians view 410 AD as an alternative date for the true fall of the Roman Empire. Without possession of Rome or many of its former provinces, and
increasingly Germanic in nature, the Roman Empire after 410 AD had
little in common with the earlier Empire. By 410 AD, Britain had been
mostly denuded of Roman troops, and by 425 AD was no longer part of the Empire, and much of western Europe was beset "by all kinds of calamities and disasters", coming under barbarian kingdoms ruled by Vandals, Suebians, Visigoths and Burgundians.
"The fighting became hand-to-hand, fierce,
savage, confused and without the slightest respite.... Blood from the
bodies of the slain turned a small brook which flowed through the plain
into a torrent. Those made desperately thirsty by their injuries drank
water so augmented with blood that in their misery it seemed as though
they were forced to drink the very blood which had poured from their
wounds"
The remainder of Rome's territory—if not its nature—was defended for several decades following 410 AD largely by Flavius Aëtius,
who managed to play off each of Rome's barbarian invaders against one
another. In 435 AD he led a Hunnic army against the Visigoths at the Battle of Arles, and again in 436 AD at the Battle of Narbonne. In 451 AD he led a combined army, including his former enemy the Visigoths, against the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, where Aëtius managed to halt the Hunnic onslaught. However, Concordia, Altinum, Mediolanum, Ticinum, and Patavium were sacked, and the Huns returned a year later. After brutally razing Aquileia, the Huns continued to move towards Rome. It was at this point that Pope Leo I managed to convince Attila to leave.
Despite being the only clear champion of the Empire at this point, Aëtius was slain by the Emperor Valentinian III's own hand 2 years afterwards, leading Sidonius Apollinaris
to observe, "I am ignorant, sir, of your motives or provocations; I
only know that you have acted like a man who has cut off his right hand
with his left".
Carthage, the second largest city in the empire, was lost along with much of North Africa in 439 AD to the Vandals, and the fate of Rome seemed sealed. By 476 AD, what remained of the
Empire was completely in the hands of federated Germanic troops and when
they revolted, led by Odoacer and deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustus there was nobody to stop them. Odoacer happened to hold the part of the
Empire around Italy and Rome but other parts of the Empire were ruled
by Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Alans and others. The Empire in the
West had fallen,and its remnant in Italy was no longer Roman in nature. The Eastern Roman Empire
and the Goths continued to fight over Rome and the surrounding area for
many years, though by this point Rome's importance was primarily
symbolic.
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