The Ancients - Hannibal: Crossing the Alps

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca's Carthaginian army, accompanied by horses and elephants, completed one of the most audacious military marches of ancient Mediterranean history. Setting off from southeast Spain, on their way they overcame a number of hostile Celtic tribes and traversed two major mountain ranges: the Pyrenees and then, most famously, the Alps. Battered and bruised Hannibal and his men eventually descended from the Alpine passes and arrived in Northern Italy at the end of 218 BC, where they soon clashed with the Roman legions awaiting them near the River Trebbia. This battle, fought on a snowy plain in freezing conditions, was the climax of the 218 BC campaign and the first of Hannibal's great victories against Rome.From the outbreak of the Second Punic War to the Battle of the River Trebbia, in this two-part podcast Dr Louis Rawlings, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University, dives into the events of 218 BC and the incredible leadership of Hannibal. In this first episode, Tristan and Louis discuss the background to Hannibal Barca's march to Italy, before focusing in on one of the greatest adventure stories from antiquity: Hannibal's crossing of the Alps.Episode two, covering the Battle of the River Trebbia, will be released in a couple of weeks.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we are talking about the run-up to one of the most famous winter battles of antiquity.

We don't normally associate clashes in ancient history with the winter. Usually they occur in the spring, summer and autumn, but there was an exception in late 218 BC in northern Italy. Then Hannibal Barca and his African, Spanish and Gallic force faced off against a Roman consular army led by Sempronius Longus. It was called the Battle of the River Trebia, one of the first of Hannibal's great victories against the Romans. Now this is the first of a two-part episode discussing the run-up to and the Battle of the River Trebia itself and in this first podcast we are covering the run-up to that battle. We're covering the background to the clash, the 218 BC campaign, from the outbreak of hostilities between Rome and Carthage, the outbreak of the Second Punic War, to Hannibal's marching of his army from Spain,

across the Pyrenees, across southern France, and of course, culminating in one of the greatest adventure stories from ancient history, Hannibal Barker's crossing of the Alps in the Winter of 218 BC. For this two-part special podcast, I was delighted to be joined by Dr. Louis Rawlings from the University of Cardiff. Louis is one of the leading experts on ancient Carthage and the ancient Carthaginian military, so it was great to get him on the show, this Hannibal expert, to talk about the 218 BC campaign and Hannibal's famous crossing of the Alps. Part two will be out in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, here's Louis. Louis, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. Now, not at all. And Louis, we you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Now, not at all. And Louis, we're talking about the Battle of the River Trebia. And this is an extraordinary clash because we normally associate battles in the ancient Mediterranean with either the spring, the summer or the autumn. But this is an extraordinary battle that occurs in the heart of winter. Oh I know and campaigning seasons in antiquity were all driven by access to food and it being relatively pleasant to march around so that you can actually go and find the enemy but because of Hannibal's long march he only manages to get into Italy by December the 21st. In fact Polybius says around about the winter sources so we actually have a more or less exact date being given by one of our ancient sources. That's absolutely amazing for an ancient battle to actually have an exact date for

it. I mean, I know everything is so much in antiquity is always debated. But before we go into the battle itself, let's get into the background and the context. You mentioned the year 218 BC. And let's go back to the start of 218 BC, because Louis, what's the situation between Rome and Carthage then? War has just broken out. Yeah, so Rome and Carthage have had a relatively uneasy peace for about 20 years after the First Punic War. This is the start of the Second Punic War. While Rome has been consolidating its position in Italy, Carthage has been expanding in Spain, where Hannibal's family have been campaigning. First, Hannibal's father, Hamilcar, who was a great hero and leader of the First Punic War,

has subdued a number of Spanish tribes. Then, on his death, his son-in-law, who is Hannibal's brother-in-law, His son-in-law, who is Hannibal's brother-in-law, takes over and expands from about 226 down to 222 and expands in Spain diplomatically as well as militarily. He's got this vast army that he builds up. He founds Carthagena, New Carthage, as the Romans called it. And in that context, Hannibal has been, and his other two brothers, Hasdrubal and Mago, have been growing up exposed to campaigning, exposed to the military life. And indeed, Hannibal has been acting as Hasdrubal, his brother-in-law's right-hand man. So there's Hasdrubal, his brother, and Hasdrubal, his brother-in-law. And Hasdrubal, his brother-in-law, is the one who's assassinated in 222.

So Hannibal's been gaining a lot of experience. He's been leading cavalry forces. And when Hasdrubal, his brother-in-law, dies, the army elects Hannibal to be commander in chief in Spain. And this is ratified back in Carthage as well. So Hannibal hasn't been to Carthage since he was nine, according to some legends. And he's now in his early mid-twenties, and he's taken control of the Carthaginian army, and he started campaigning to the north of the Carthaginian conquest. This has taken him to the city of Saguntum, which is south of the river Ebro, and he has besieged it. Now, Saguntum is a very interesting city. It's pro-roman it's reached out at some point in the past decade or so to the

romans and has either got some kind of formal treaty or at least has put themselves on the romans watch list as friends and potential allies and thorns in the side of the carthaginian expansion the romans have been mindful of the carthaginian expansion in Spain and in 226 had actually negotiated a treaty with Hasbril the brother-in-law that meant that the Carthaginians had undertaken not to cross the river Ebro in arms so the river Ebro is a major river to the north east of southern coast of Spain essentially it runs up parallel to the Pyrenees more or less. So Hannibal by attacking Saguntum isn't violating that treaty at least according to the tenets of geography but is interfering with one of Rome's allies which according to the treaty that was negotiated at the end of the first Punic war

neither side was supposed to be attacking the other's allies as terms of the treaty. So the Romans might see this as a breach of the treaty but hannibal thinks that it's not because this is an ally that the romans have gained either formally or informally after the treaty date so hannibal besieges this city it takes him a long time to capture it and in the interim the romans have sent a number of embassies both to him and to carthage trying to get him to desist from the siege he sends them away angrily and when push comes to shove and Hannibal has actually captured the city the Roman ambassadors in Carthage say now you've either got to hand over Hannibal who has sacked this city and all of his

staff for punishment or you have to accept that we are now at war the ambassador famously says i hold in the folds of my toga war and peace which do you choose and according to a fantastic evocative anecdote in livy the carthaginian senate stands up and shouts we choose war and then theatrically the senator shakes out his toga and so presumably war flops down onto the floor of the Carthaginian Senate. And there it is. So the Carthaginians have been very active in Spain. The Romans have just kept an eye on Spain. They've had other problems.

So at the start of 218, they have just come out of a war in Illyrium. So across the Adriatic, where they've been dealing with the people of Epirus and a certain queen tutor, and they've had their first Illyrian war, which they've fought successfully. But they've also been involved for the past four or five years in conquering northern Italy. So the area more or less north of the Rubicon, the Pove Plain, which is this huge huge plain and northern Italy nowadays is very prosperous it's got these great cities Turin, Piacenza, Milan all these great cities all of these were sort of Gallic communities of some standing even back then and the Romans have spent the last three or four years in particular defeating various Gallic tribes and at the beginning of 218 even as Saguntum is falling the Romans are sending out two colonies one to Piacenza to Placentia as the Romans called it

and the other one to Cremona so they've just set up these two colonies and essentially those things are just being built at that very point so that's the situation that the protagonists find themselves. The Carthaginian army, there's a very large Carthaginian army in Spain. The Carthaginians obviously hold a lot of northern Africa and a lot of the coasts all the way along the sort of Algerian coast and also through Tunisia all the way down into modern day Libya. through Tunisia all the way down into modern-day Libya. And so the Carthaginians have probably a smaller army based in North Africa to keep security. They have a number of indigenous tribes that they have to rule over and also to deal with in various ways.

They have allies with certain tribes of what would now be Moors, but were then Numidians, and they control the local Libyan population. So they have a smaller army there. And and actually at the very beginning of the war Hannibal transfers some forces from Spain to Africa and some African forces to Spain to make it harder for revolts and desertions to occur so once you've got Iberians serving as soldiers in Africa they're not likely to run home to their home tribes it's much more complicated for them and vice versa for the Libyans so he transfers and mixes some of the forces at the beginning the Romans they have military forces resources just coming back from

Illyricum but they've also have these veterans of the northern Italian wars as well which are available to them now louis you mentioned there how hannibal he's got this sizable army in spain at this time and also how the romans shall we say are still consolidating their control over the poerilla valley and what we now might say well what we will say is northern italy so hannibal he sees this in spain and he's now at war with rome what's his plan right so it depends a little bit on whether you think this is a plan that has been long in the brewing or one that is, oh no, we're at war with Rome. We were hoping that they wouldn't interfere because we're south of the

Ebro, but it looks like we're going to have to work out a strategy to attack them. The Carthage's best forces are with Hannibal in Spain. And so in order to deal with the Romans, you can either fight them wherever they want to fight. And we know that the Roman initial strategy becomes one of sending one army to Spain and another army to Africa. And it's incredibly predictable because this is the way the Romans like to operate. They like to operate by fighting in the enemy's territory rather than their own it's a very sensible thing to do so to forestall that Hannibal has to get his army to Italy because if he's fighting in Italy there's less chance of an invasion of Africa there's less chance for invasion of Spain and so

consequently Hannibal who is a great fan of the great Hellenistic general Pyrrhus of Epirus, has read the memoirs of Pyrrhus. We know that from various accounts that Hannibal was an avid reader of Greek history, of strategy. He'd read Pyrrhus' own accounts of his campaigns in Italy. And he understood that the way you deal with the Romans is to deal with them in Italy itself. Because in the first Punic War, the Carthaginians had predominantly fought over Sicily, which was neither Roman nor entirely Carthaginian at the time. And the war basically dragged on for 20 odd years in Sicily with a brief foray of the Romans to Africa, which actually

almost brought the Carthaginians to their knees. the Carthaginians realize that they are fragile in Africa potentially if a Roman army gets there then it can cause all kinds of problems but also that fighting the Romans broad doesn't bring victory so the way you have to deal with them is to try and get to them in Italy either capture Rome or perhaps more practically break up the Roman alliance system, which is something that Pyrrhus had actually started to manage to do. He prized away a number of recently conquered tribes in southern and central Italy when he campaigned in the 270s BC. So this is 50 years on and the allies of Rome may still have lingering resentment towards Rome, but nevertheless, time has passed and it's probable that the allies will be less likely to revolt. But nevertheless, it's worth a try.

So Hannibal needs to get an army to Italy from Spain, his best troops, and he needs to get himself because he's the ambitious young general. the kind of i wouldn't say he's an alexander wannabe but he's imbued with that hellenistic leadership approach which is to be decisive to lead from the front more or less and to really try and take the enemy to task in as many decisive battles as they need to realize that they've been defeated alexander conquered the persian empire in three great battles can handball do the same as the question so he's got to get his army to Spain the Romans however had demonstrated that in the first Punic war their fleet was something to be reckoned with the Carthaginians were traditionally a very powerful naval force probably the predominant navy in the western Mediterranean but the Romans had matched them and had taken as many casualties

if not more at sea than the Carthaginians so had the resources to match the carthaginians at sea and at the start of the war probably had a larger fleet and a fleet that was probably in a better state as well so sailing to italy was problematic not least because of the sheer numbers that hannibal wanted to take the need to actually require the ships to cross the whole of the western mediterranean and get past any kind of roman war fleets that are put out would be very very difficult and dangerous so he decides to march his army across the pyrenees across southern france across the alps and into northern italy where he may well expect a rather good reception from the recently conquered and oppressed Gauls.

Something you learn from Pyrrhus is that if you go somewhere the Romans had recently defeated, you are more likely to get support from those areas. So for Pyrrhus, it was the Samnites and the Lucanians and the Greeks in the south, which the Romans had only really overawed for about 20 years. Here, we've only got a gap of four or five years between the initial roman victories and actually the gallic defeat so hannibal is in contact with the gauls and negotiating with them throughout his short reign as commander-in-chief he's already put out feelers he's gathered information about the march it's possible that

his father and his brother-in-law had already thought through this plan that the only way you could get the romans was to march from spain that is obviously something that they considered and planned for collectively but it's hannibal who really puts out the feelers is in contact with the gauls in northern italy and in fact has a number of ambassadors from them who encourage him to come and I'd say also that at the beginning of 218 with the planting of these colonies in northern Italy the Gauls are really upset about that particularly the tribes of the Bori and the Insubres who are the major tribes in the north and they're both encouraging Hannibal to come but they also the Bori in particular decide to try and disrupt the foundation of these colonies and so they start

to wage war against the colonists and the Romans have to raise forces and send forces to deal with them and they in fact defeat the Gauls in a couple of engagements. So there were already sort of Gallic-Roman hostilities happening in the spring and summer of 280. and louis though that's all amazing how hannibal has already has these connections with those in northern italy the ghouls who aren't happy with the romans i love this link with one of my heroes pyrrhus and that Hellenistic style of leadership, that charismatic style of leadership. And let's go on towards the Basso del River Trebia. I know that the march to Italy is remarkable and even the initial stages of it going to the Pyrenees and to the River Rhone. So Hannibal and his army, they've marched out of Spain, they've passed the Pyrenees and they've managed to cross the River Rhone. What about the march through the Alps? When does this happen? And what happens during this, one of the greatest adventures in ancient history? Yeah, and it is an incredible adventure. I mean,

it's inspired people ever since British explorations in the 1940s and 50s who marched elephants across the Alps to reproduce this. Those guys, they knew about elephants from British rule in India. So they were able to sort of simulate and check on how fast elephants could walk through the Alps. And they all demonstrated that it was entirely possible for this to happen. But in antiquity, it was a complete amazement that Hannibal would be as audacious enough to invade Italy anyway, but also to carry these 37 elephants, which he starts out with, across two enormous mountain ranges,

the Pyrenees and the Alps. So yeah, it's become a really romantic thing. It's inspired all kinds of artists and writers ever since. And Polybius, our main source, gives us a very detailed account of it, spends an awful long time on it. Livy gives us another account as well, which is slightly more romantic in a way. Very interestingly, Polybius, who is writing about 60 years after the invasion,

his own life overlapped with Hannibal's by about 18 years. So he was about 18 years old when Hannibal died in 182. Polybius actually was able to interview people who had crossed the Alps with Hannibal. He interviewed Massinissa, who didn't, but who was the king of the Numidians who had actually served with Hannibal in Spain. And so other Numidians and other soldiers who had marched with Hannibal were still alive. And Polybius was able to talk to some of these people, or at least talk to their families, and get a really detailed understanding of the nature of the crossing hannibal's generalship hannibal's logistical planning and that sort of thing as well he'd also explored the alps himself so he knew this crossing

so when we're sort of looking at accounts polybius is probably the most reliable and it's the one that archaeologists people who have tried to explore which route Hannibal took across the Alps. They basically look at Polybius first and see whether or not the routes can be reconciled with his account. And if they can't, then you turn to other sources and see what happens. So Hannibal crosses the Rhone, which is a major river, and he gets his elephants across. he actually manages to defeat a gallic army that had assembled on the other side and he encounters a small scouting party sent by a roman force under the command of scipio the elder we can call him he's the father of the famous scipio africanus who wins the battle of zama against hannibal's some 16 years later and this scipio scipio had been sent by the romans with that invasion force i mentioned earlier that was going to invade spain so the roman initial strategy in the war send a consular

army of two legions and allies numbering a similar sort of amount to spain to contest with the barquids for control of that region and the other force under Sempronius Longus another consul has been sent to Sicily to Lilibion which was a Punic Carthaginian base in the west but is now in Roman hands has long been in Roman hands since the end of the first war there he's assembling a fleet he's got a force and he's going to make an expedition to Africa so what's interesting is Hannibal crosses the Rhône and then encounters this scouting party from Scipio's force which had just stopped off at Marseille and they just heard that Hannibal was in the area so they'd gone north to scout Hannibal sent a screen of cavalry down to have

a look to see what was going on and lo and behold there's a skirmish and Scipio's force comes out on top and Hannibal's Numidian light cavalry are driven back to the camp and Hannibal goes, oh crikey, there's a Roman army down there. Perhaps the route through the Alps, the easy route, which is to the south, is out of bounds. If I head that way,

I may have to fight a Roman army before winter and that might delay me and my army and no longer we'll be able to cross the Alps. So what he does is he actually heads north up the rhone and then the river is air comes off to the east and he follows the is aired up into the alps there are some debates about what his crossing was which of the various passes to the north that he could have taken and there are a number of scholars who disagree but there has been some recent really interesting archaeological and geological investigation by Bill Mahaney who in 2015 to 2018 has looked at the most difficult pass which is the

Col de la Traversette and is actually the highest the most awkward pass but Polybius says that Hannibal took the highest pass in the Alps and Polybius having traveled the Alps and having interviewed people I think we should probably listen to him first and what Bill Mahaney has discovered is that in the area just south of the highest part of the pass there's a low plain just below the very highest precipitous part of the crossing and there he's dug some cores of soil and taken samples of the soil and what he's found is that there is a disturbed layer a layer that's been disturbed by some kind of geological event possibly a rock slide but actually when they

analyzed it what they found was a lot of fecal matter produced by large numbers of horses. Now Hannibal's army had large numbers of horses. It's also been carbon dated and the carbon dating puts it in the right era. Now carbon dating is quite difficult to be very exact so we can't say 218 exactly. What we can say is we are pretty certain that it's the first two centuries BC. We're reasonably certain that it may be 218 plus or minus 50 years. We're less certain that it could the first two centuries bc we're reasonably certain that it may be 218 plus or minus 50 years we're less certain that it could be plus or minus 25 years and they're less certain that plus or minus five years whatever so the point is we may have found either hannibal's army or hannibal's brother's army which came over in 208 or a gallic army

that's crossed the alps and one of the things that Polybius says is that although Hannibal inspired people with wonder when crossing over the Alps with his army, actually, this was not a revolutionary thing. The Gauls and Gallic armies have been doing it for ages, is what he says. And in fact, they had in 225 crossed over a large force to invade Italy and join the Gallic tribes in the north, which had actually precipitated the Roman counterattack, which led to the subjection of the north.

So only seven years earlier, a Gallic army had gone over some of these passes. A large Gallic army of 20,000 plus had done that. So Hannibal is following routes that other forces had taken. He may well have taken the most difficult one, but even that is not necessarily impossible to cross for an army. However, it is getting towards the winter. Polybius says that the Pleiades were just setting and the Pleiades set towards the end of November.

So by the time Hannibal has actually got to the point where he's ascending, the snow has begun to fall and is starting to settle on the top of the Alps. So he's really late. The clock is ticking ticking he needs to get across before the passes are closed he has a number of encounters with hostile gallic tribes on route the first encounter that had been settled was at the rhone he then allies with a local tribe and gets supplies from them but then he has to head north and head up the is, and then up to whichever pass he chooses. And there he's opposed by various local groups, who understandably don't want to see, well, 40,000 people perhaps,

eat their food, and come through, so they oppose him at various passes, and he has very, very difficult and precipitous conflicts, on at least two occasions, where his army is really in danger because the enemy hold the high ground above the precipices or catch him at bottlenecks. And he has some very uncomfortable conflicts, which he's able to resolve mainly by using his light infantry, which he has an abundance of, who go up and storm into the mountain passes and remove the enemy but he has considerable casualties he particularly has casualties amongst his horses who tend to panic when people roll boulders down on them and his pack animals and he loses lots of pack animals as well and this intensifies the supply problems that he has getting across the so obviously he needs to stop wherever he can whenever there's a flat piece of ground so that his horses can eat and graze. So he's had

a very difficult ascension and his whole traversing of the Alps may only have been about 14 or 15 days but these are incredibly difficult days for him and even once he gets to the precipice and he's removed all the opposing tribes and he only has to deal with like sort of raiding parties from then on going down from the top into italy is actually really difficult because at that point the snow has fallen polybius livy both talk about how old snow had been compacted and new snow had fallen on top of it and this meant that descending was incredibly difficult because although you could sort of walk on the nice crispy snow below it was frozen ice or slushy

stuff which made it very treacherous and as soon as you slipped up you could tumble to your death or just go whizzing halfway down the mountain because plipus says actually when they crouched down on their hands and knees they just went down faster and for the horses and for the elephants this was incredibly difficult finally as they're descending they encounter a rock fall part of the path had been swept away and then another fall had fallen on top of that to make it for about 250 meters completely impassable and his army is stuck and the snow is beginning to fall so he needs to build a path so his army is trapped on the side of a precipice essentially for a couple of days while his troops clear the ice clear the debris some particularly big rocks apparently are unshiftable they're huge and so the story goes that Hannibal

warms up some vinegar some sour wine and pours it over these rocks because they're frozen they crack and this helps and push them apart and get the army through i would say that actually that's a fair story i think ancient armies did actually move with sour wine because you could bathe your horses in sour wine and that would prevent scurvy what is called hunger mange so it's a kind of horse scurvy you would bathe their coats in this and it would keep them in trim, really. So it's not implausible that he has Samarwine with him. So it's a possible story.

Eventually, he descends into the plains of the Po and his army is completely exhausted and he has to rest for a few days. And Plymouth says a mark of his generalship. Not only was his planning across the alps immaculate because he had established guides and possible routes and places where he might be fed and the sorts of supplies he needed but also when he got to italy he had a care for his men and his animals because they the men were so starved and so careworn that they resembled wild beasts and he spent several days restoring their health their spirits and their condition so this is a general who looks after his men and this means that his men will look after him in the future so one of the great things

about Hannibal is what a great man manager he is how carefully is to push his men as far as they possibly can and then to ease off the gas as soon as he possibly can to get them back to fighting trim and that's incredibly important for what comes next Thank you.