The Sieges of Alexander the Great

Stephen English

• Éditeur: Pen & Sword Military
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781844682805
• Sujet: Geschichte
• Sous-sujet: Altertum

During his spectacular career of conquest Alexander the Great attacked many cities and fortresses, never failing to take them. Such operations occupied more of his time than his famous pitched battles and were at least as vital in securing his vast empire. Sieges provided some of the sternest tests for the Macedonian army, and it is perhaps telling that Alexander received most of his many wounds in the shadow of enemy walls. Yet this is the first full-length study concentrating purely on his many dramatic sieges and his mastery of siege craft.Dr. Stephen English describes each of Alexander's sieges, analyzing the strategy, tactics, and technical aspects, such as the innovative and astoundingly ambitious siege engines used. From the shocking destruction of Thebes, through the epic siege of Tyre, which Alexander found an island and left permanently joined to the mainland, to his final (and nearly fatal) combat at the town of the Malli, where he was first to storm the enemy battlements, we see how Alexander's sieges helped make him great.Dr. Stephen English gained a BA in Ancient History and an MA in Classics from Durham University while simultaneously studying for a BSc through the Open University. He went on to gain an MSc from Sunderland University while already working towards his PhD at Durham, under the supervision of renowned classicist PJ Rhodes. His research at Durham focused on the military career of Alexander the Great and forms the basis of this book, as it did of his first, The Army of Alexander the Great. He has also written on the subject for the magazine Ancient Warfare. Dr. English lives in Durham with his partner, Elizabeth, also a writer.

Chapter 1
Siege technology

For much of early Greek history the defenders in any siege situation almost invariably had the upper hand. Walls were generally fairly strong and the only real mechanisms that an attacking army had available were ladders, primitive rams, occasionally sapping (although, surprisingly, this does not seem to have been too common), betrayal and starvation. During a siege where scaling ladders were, effectively, the major means of attack, it is not surprising that most sieges were unsatisfactory, at least from the perspective of the attacking force. Frequently sieges turned out to be lengthy affairs and were won and lost by attrition or betrayal. Successful diplomacy was vital during the classical and archaic periods for a besieger to achieve success, and was raised to a virtual art form by Philip. Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, was once quoted as saying that he could capture any city as long as he could get a mule laden with gold to the gates. This is a strong indication of the power of bribery and betrayal as a tool for a successful besieger. This situation changed radically with the invention of an entirely new weapon of war: the catapult.

Catapults

The catapult, as we would understand it, is one of those technological advances that have a clear and precise date and location for its invention. It was invented in Syracuse under the auspices of Dionysius I in, or very near to, 399. Earlier references have sometimes been argued, but are not convincing.¹⁹ Diodorus is the first historian to describe the new invention in detail; he tells us in that year ‘the entire city became one great arsenal’.²⁰ It seems that Dionysius gathered from all over Sicily the finest engineers of the day to construct for him vast quantities of the most modern pieces of military technology. As well as manufacturing current pieces of technology, these engineers and artisans were almost certainly also to undertake research and development work into other entirely new forms of armaments. From this research work the catapult was first developed. Diodorus goes on to tell us that²¹:

He (Dionysius I) gathered skilled workmen, commandeering them from the cities under his control, and attracting them by high wages from Italy and Greece, as well as Carthaginian territory. For his purpose was to make weapons in great numbers and every kind of missile, and also quadriremes and quinquiremes… not only was every space, such as the porticoes and back rooms of the temples as well as the gymnasia and colonnades of the market place crowded with workers, but the making of great quantities of arms went on. In fact the catapult was invented at this time in Syracuse… a natural consequence of the assembly in one place of the most skilful craftsmen from all over the world.

The first catapult, called the gastraphetes, or belly-bow, was a simple device. It was essentially a bow, although it was larger than that which a man could draw using his strength alone. A ratchet mechanism was added to allow the draw string to be drawn further back, and to keep it in position longer than could be achieved by a man holding a bow string in position. To load the weapon, one end was braced against the stomach of the user (hence the name), and the other against the ground or a wall. Both hands were then used to draw back the bow string and hook it to one of the teeth of the ratchet where it sat awaiting the weapon being fired. This early artillery was, essentially, little more than a large crossbow, although it should not be easily dismissed as it was from this weapon that the later ballistae were developed. The bow section of the gastraphetes was also slightly different from regular design, as it had to withstand greater stresses than a normal bow. In order to achieve this, the bow was constructed of a compound design. A compound bow would have been made up of three distinct layers. The core of the bow would have been wood, as with a regular weapon. On the inside (the side facing the operator) was glued a layer of horn, providing considerable strength, far greater than a simple wooden bow would have been capable of. On the outside of the device (the side facing the enemy) was glued a layer of sinew. These two diverse materials were both vital to the operation of the bow. The horn essentially resisted compression, and the sinew resisted stretching, and both snapped back into their rest position with considerable force when the tension on them was released. The result of this was that the bow would be under considerable stress when drawn back and ready for firing, and would always seek to return to the rest position.²² The tactical uses of the gastraphetes were limited, as the arrow was placed loose in a groove at the front of the device and, therefore, the gastraphetes could only be aimed horizontally or upwards. The weapon could not be aimed downwards because the arrow was likely to slide out of the groove. The gastraphetes, therefore, was of no use in defending a fortification when the operator would be on a wall or in a defensive tower; it was only of use in assaulting a fortified position.

Early catapults spread from Sicily to Greece at an unknown date in the fourth century. It is far from clear how quickly these new non-torsion catapults spread to the mainland, or how widespread they became at an early date. A significant turning point certainly occurred in 354 when Philip was first beginning to become involved in the affairs of Thessaly. He met, and was quickly defeated by, Onomarchus of Phocis. The latter achieved this success by the use of a quite brilliant stratagem. Onomarchus lured the Macedonians into a horseshoe-shaped canyon where they could use catapults stationed out of reach on the cliff tops of the canyon walls. It seems unlikely that the Macedonians possessed artillery before this point because this incident had a significant impact on Philip, prompting him to instruct his engineers to construct siege engines, and no doubt to conduct research into better and more powerful designs. Developments in Macedonia were apparently slow, as the Macedonian siege train had had little impact anywhere until the siege of Perinthus in 340, some fourteen years later. Even by this time Diodorus only records arrow-shooting catapults as being in the possession of Philip; Arrian adds to this the key point that ‘Macedonian stone-throwers do not appear until Alexander’s attack on Halicarnassus some years later’.²³

Macedonian engineers were apparently slow to develop the new technology, and perhaps Philip’s patronage was rather less generous than we may otherwise have presumed. It would appear, however, that this slow pace of development was echoed throughout the Greek world. There appears to have been a fairly considerable delay between the invention of the gastraphetes and the discovery of the principle of torsion; this is essentially where the propulsive force is provided by the twisting of some material, such as sinew, hair or rope, rather than a bow (which can be described as a non-torsion engine). The first torsion catapult was probably similar in some ways to the gastraphetes. Its overall design was similar, the string was drawn back, this time by the use of a mechanical mechanism rather than manpower, its overall appearance was similar to a crossbow, but instead of a bow at the front it had two arms. In essence it looked as though the bow had been cut in two at the centre, with the centre point of each half anchored on to a frame. This new design also incorporated a certain amount of extra wood in the framework of the device to cope with the extra stress that the machine would be subject to, especially at the front end where the two struts were attached to the frame. This device was capable of firing either an arrow or a small shot over a much greater distance than the simple non-torsion compound bow.

Macedonian engineers evidently had been investigating the three materials that constituted the compound bow of the gastraphetes, namely sinew, wood and horn, and had come to the belief that, of the three, the sinew was the material that provided by far the greatest propulsive force. The principle of torsion came out of their desire to isolate and magnify this force in order to fire larger arrows or shot, and to do it over greater distances than achievable by a normal compound bow.

The torsion principle was probably discovered, or at least developed into the standard two-arm device described above, in Macedonian at some point during the mid fourth century. The date is conventionally thought to be around 340 under the auspices of Philip II, although the first positive evidence for torsion springs date from between 338–326, during the reign of Alexander.²⁴ We do know, however, that Alexander used stone-throwing catapults against Halicarnassus and probably Miletus in 334, and they would certainly have been torsion engines in order to provide the propulsive force necessary to do any damage at all to the walls. Given this, I believe the discovery of the principle of torsion can be narrowed down further to between 340–334; more than this cannot be claimed with any degree of certainty.

Alexander’s stone-throwing catapults were of a rather different design than the ‘crossbow’ type of device, like the gastraphetes. Alexander’s single-armed stone-throwing catapults, called a mongakon, would have been similar in design, although perhaps less powerful, than the better known, but rather later, Roman onager. This was essentially a more traditional catapult design. Ammianus, a later Roman historian, described the Roman onager as follows:²⁵

The onager’s framework is made out of two beams from oak, which curve into humps. In the middle they have quite large holes in them, in which strong sinew ropes are stretched and twisted. A long arm is then inserted between the bundle of rope, at its end it has a pin and a pouch. It strikes on a huge buffer with a sack stuffed with fine chaff and secured by tight binding. When it comes to combat, a round stone (often clay balls with Greek fire in them, which explode on impact and burst into flames) is put in the pouch and the arm is winched down. Then, the master artilleryman strikes the pin with a hammer, and with a big blow, the stone is launched towards its target.

The description is useful, as Alexander’s device would have been of similar design and operation, although, as noted above, would have been rather less advanced. The mongakon was essentially a mechanized staff sling; it consisted of a long shaft with a slingshot pouch at the end that was projected forwards by means of tension built up in rope at the fixed end of the staff.

Alexander’s stone throwing devices represent a major shift in the balance of power during the conduct of siege operations. For the first time a besieging army could directly assault a city’s walls with a weapon far more powerful and devastating than a large arrow. The attackers now had the very real possibility of punching a hole through the defences of a besieged fortress, or of bringing down stretches of walls from a distance with the defenders being able to do very little about it other than hastily constructing a second layer of walls behind the section under attack, as the defenders did at Halicarnassus in 334. From this point forwards, the besieger would have the very real possibility of capturing any fortified position by force, rather than by attrition or deception. Alexander was to use this tactical shift brilliantly throughout his career. It was partly this development, and the success it helped Alexander achieve, that prompted Lane Fox to note that ‘it was as a stormer of cities that [Alexander] left his most vigorous impression’.²⁶ Alexander may have been more famous as a field commander, but I hope to demonstrate during this book that he was a truly brilliant besieger of cities.

Catapults were the terror weapons of their day; there is little doubt that they would have spread fear amongst those who were on the receiving end. To this end, they were not just used in sieges, but during field campaigns too, as demonstrated on two occasions during Alexander’s career. They did not have to be particularly effective against the opposition in terms of casualties to have a profound impact on their morale. In all of the many field campaigns that Alexander conducted, there are only two instances where he deployed artillery pieces against troops deployed in the open; both of which demonstrate very clearly their impact on the battlefield.

The first incident occurred after Alexander had been compelled to temporarily abandon the siege of Pellium in 335, and was in the process of extricating his troops from the trap in which he had found himself, to a safer area beyond the Eordaicus River. Most of his troops managed to cross safely and gathered on the other side, but his rearguard, consisting of the Agrianians and some archers, had considerable difficulty in disengaging from the enemy that were pressing them hard. Arrian describes the situation:²⁷

He deployed his artillery on the bank of the river and ordered his men to shoot, at maximum range, all the types of missile that are hurled from machines. He also ordered the archers, who had already plunged in, to shoot from mid-stream. Glaucias’ men did not dare to advance within range. Meanwhile the Macedonians crossed the river safely, so that not one casualty was suffered in the withdrawal.

Glaucias’ men did not dare advance within range of the catapult bolts, even though none of them were actually killed during the opening volley when they were in range. This psychological impact was clearly devastating and achieved exactly Alexander’s desired result of being able to disengage his troops and safely allow them to cross the river without being harried by the natives. This effect was almost certainly partly due to the catapult being a new form of weapon; it is highly likely that this was the first time the weapons had been seen by any of the inhabitants of that area of the Balkans.

The second incident of Alexander’s employment of catapults during field operations also occurred in the context of a river crossing, this time offensively rather than to cover a withdrawal. At the crossing of the Jaxartes River in 329, a group of Scythians was occupying the far bank, making any attempt at crossing extremely hazardous, as the Macedonians would have been at a severe disadvantage against these excellent horsemen and horse archers. Arrian records the events that followed:²⁸

When all the skin floats were ready and the army in full equipment drawn up on the river bank, the catapults, at the word of command, opened up on the Scythians who were riding along the edge of the water on the further side. Some of them were hit; one was pierced through both shield and breastplate and fell dead from his horse. The Scythians were taken completely aback by the long range of the catapults, and that, together with the loss of a good man, induced them to withdraw a short distance from the river, whereupon Alexander, seeing their consternation, ordered the trumpets to sound and himself led the way over the water, followed by his men.

Again, we can see that the actual impact of the catapult in a field operation was minimal, only one Scythian was killed, but the psychological impact of these weapons of apparently-limited destructive capability (outside of siege operations that is) was far greater than their operational effectiveness would warrant.

These two examples (along with the Onomarchus incident) of the use of artillery in the field illustrate very well the limited theatre in which they could be employed effectively, but also the devastating impact that they could have, especially when employed against enemies who had not seen these weapons before. They had to be close enough to the enemy in order for their projectiles to reach; they also had to be on ground that was easily defensible, or did not require defending at all. These examples show very clearly the psychological effect of these weapons was out of all proportion to their actual physical effectiveness. On the two occasions when Alexander employed catapults in the field, only one man is recorded as being killed, and yet they helped in ensuring a successful outcome to both operations. Their true usefulness in field operations lay in their shock value, and in the confusion that they caused amongst the enemy, although this was exacerbated by the fact that on each occasion the enemy had never before seen such weapons. We can not be sure how effective they would be if used again, or against a more experienced or better prepared opponent. We can probably also argue that warriors such as the Scythians may well have been prepared to die in hand-to-hand combat; but they were evidently not so prepared to risk their lives when there was no possibility of striking back at the enemy.

Catapults of the gastraphetes type were small, hand-held devices and could be easily transported from one siege to another. Once the principle of torsion was developed and catapults took on a rather larger structure, this became more problematic. They could no longer be carried by an individual and would have to be transported (and perhaps disassembled first) by cart or mule from place to place. The result of this was that they were likely to be designed to be dismantled while not in operation. This was partly for ease of transport and partly to ensure that the sinew was only under stress when the machine was in operation. This would prevent any reduction in the propulsive force provided by the sinew over time. The catapults, then, were in all likelihood ‘flat-packed’ for transportation over any distance and this is why we frequently hear of Alexander arriving at a city and having to wait for a period of time for the siege engines to catch up. This occurred at Tyre, Gaza and every siege after 332 in the northeast of the former Persian Empire, as well as in India. It would seem impossible for a fully-constructed catapult, or any of Alexander’s other siege engines (towers and rams, for example), to have been easily transported across desert, rivers or mountains like the Hindu Kush without first being dismantled. Scaling ladders could easily be built on site as a siege was about to begin, but better quality examples were probably also transported with the rest of the siege train. The ladders that collapsed at the city of the Mallians were probably hastily constructed and of rather poor quality.

We hear frequently of Alexander’s famous siege train; for most of his career he required his army, or more likely flying columns detached from the main army, to move at considerably greater speeds than a mule and cart was capable of. This led, at almost every siege, to his arriving before his siege engines, which had to be brought up later. At Gaza, for example, there is a delay of several days as the engines were brought first by ship, and then dragged across the desert, from Tyre. Again, throughout the Indian campaign we see a similar situation where Alexander is usually delayed by a week or more waiting for his engines so he could begin the siege proper. In India this time was usually spent fortifying his camp and by constructing a double stockade around the fortification t...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Chapter 1 Siege Technology
• Chapter 2 Pellium and Thebes: 335
• Chapter 3 Miletus and Halicarnassus: 334
• Chapter 4 Tyre: 332
• Chapter 5 Gaza: 332
• Chapter 6 The Northeast Frontier: 330–327
• Chapter 7 India and the Journey to Babylon: 327–323
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index