Alexander The Great's Battle at the River Jhelum
richeast.org
richeast.org
[1] crocodiles [2] tigers [3] monkeys [4] venomous snakes ( this is a major problem for moving at night) [5] mosquitoes [6] diseases ( with so much life, comes diseases )
He says alexandar would have won the war easily if he had attacked two months earlier. He had no idea about the heat in april and march. His horses don't stand a chance in the punjab heat. They would have lost more easily if they went two months earlier.
Alexander was accustomed to fight in temperate regions and deserts, where horses are very effective. Where as india is either tropical or sub-tropical, where horses don't do very well. What was once his weapon, has become his weakness.
Regarding Alexanders army, most of it was disbanded after he took the 4 main persian cities and then it was mostly local former persian empire subjects and officers (heteroi - εταιροι) with Macedonian Generals. They probably had a fair knowledge of the situation. The Persians said that they had already occupied some part of Indian territory but there are no Archeological evidence of sustained Persian presence after the Khyber Pass.
How verifiable are these numbers? This seems like an awfully large army, given the context.
To put this in some perspective, that's about the size of the army Hannibal entered Gaul with in the second punic war [1].
Remember, this was india and gathering a large, untrained army was probably not that hard (the number of casualties speak for themselves)
The snark is not constructive.
Different economics, populations, fighting styles, time periods. They probably estimate army size by time period sometimes.
Plus, in Medieval times, people were paid to wage war, therefore keeping a large army was extremely expensive, and often you did not keep an army on your own but hired mercenaries to wage war with/for you. In Antiquity, I believe the reward system was different.
The population densities were, it should be noted, not that different in the two periods. It was not until the mid-1700s that we started to see sustained significant improvements in the carrying capacity of the land thanks to agricultural improvements in England. Until then the carrying capacity would vary, higher during a warm period in the 1200s, falling significantly when things cooled down again in the 1300s.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%9313... to get a sense of how much worse life was in the 1300s than the 1200s.
Most fighting inside Europe was done with 5-20K armies during 400-1500. It started with the Romans. As they faced rebel "Romans" ever more frequently, they faced similarly equipped and trained men so results of big battles were unpredictable. They would favor skirmishes over big decisive battles. And if your fighting is indecisive, why field large armies at great expense?
The well trained, well armed foot soldiers, "man of arms" was equivalent to a Roman legionnaire and formed the basis of these armies. At the time a full suit of mail armor cost as much as a Ferrari today. Now this is an issue of economics because there were few complaints about the price of similar kit from Roman times.
Well trained and equipped armies could face numerically superior "peasant uprisings" with predictable results, just like in Roman times. Romans faced a lot of poorly armed opponents in Europe.
BUT it's hard to say what these trends were driven by. There was a lot of traditionalism around warfare.
Macedonian armies were actually poorly equipped early on. They used long pikes instead of reasonable spears like the Greeks. Macedonians wore rags for armor, while some Greeks they faced wore 70 lb almost full body armor. And similarly in Europe, states started fielding cheap pikemen combined with crossbowmen, archers, muskets and a few well trained melee fighters.
Such armies could stand up to more expensive Ferrari suited, trained all their lives, born into a higher class men. It was probably the noise of firearms that changed military traditionalism. But handheld firearms of the period were mostly noise and smoke. And as Macedonians demonstrate not really necessary to face better armed and trained opponents.
But I don't think any historian could untangle all the factors without a Matrix level simulator, complex systems and all that.
The 50k number was in reference to Porus' army. Allegedly, Alexander was outnumbered between 3 and 5 to 1.
As another basis of comparison, both sides at the battle of Waterloo also fielded about 50k infantry a piece.
It'd be a fascinating way to teach history, and it'll work perfectly on tablets.
Also these battles were visualized a million times by the Total War series. Although far from realistically with questionable educational potential. But that's largely a limitation of computer speeds. Still, more interesting than looking at charts.
But... Why post this? I am not sure I understand.
Then, when you're done, Gates of Fire is a classic (Pressfield's novel on the Battle of Thermopylae). Tides of War is on the Peloponnesian War that followed.
Examples from Wikipedia:
- The Greek name for Alexander is Alexandros (Ἀλέξανδρος).
- The Persian name for Alexander is Iskandar (اسکندر).
- Porus is a similarly Latinized version of the Greek version (Πῶρος) of the Sanskrit name Purushottam (पुरुषोत्तम).