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Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

that consensus seem to miss any candidates from outside europe except for hannibal.

Yep I dont have my reference works at work as one of the early musilm gererals probaly should be in the list but he got written out of history some what.

BTW Carthage was a Colony so not realy non european in that sense.

Khalid ibn al-Walid

Some others, often overlooked from a Western viewpoint, would be Subutai, Timur the Lame (Tamerlane), Belisarius, Zhukov, and Suleiman I. There are more.

Arguably Marius and Sulla were the equal, if not better than, Caesar. And Pompey was no slouch either. And another great Roman general was Scipio.

Some more modern generals not mentioned are Fredrick the Great and Gustavus Adolphus, plus Rommel.

Speaking of which are the greatest generals, according to Livy Hannibal and Scipio Africanus met at a dinner 10 years after Scipio definitively beat Hannibal and that's what their conversation was about. Scipio asked Hannibal, who are the greatest generals of all time? Hannibal said, Alexander, Pyrrhus and myself. Annoyed that he wasn't on the list Scipio said okay, what then if I hadn't beat you at Zama? Hannibal said, I'd have put myself ahead of both Alexander and Pyrrhus.

Unlikely to actually be true but a cute story.

That was the guy however to be a great captain you need to be a bit more than a brilliant general in a one or two campaigns which rules peopel liek rommel, monty and patton out

That's a little unfair to later generals as the nature of warfare has changed. No longer is the general the king, emperor, consul, tribal leader, etc.

One of Hitler's mistakes* was to believe he was a good general. Stalin at least had the good sense to let his generals get on with it.

* Thankfully.

After killing dozens of them and losing 1/5th of the Soviet Union in just 9 months... :)

Cartage was a colony of Phoenicians (before it become a thing of its own), so not European in any case.

I'm no historian or geographer but I never thought of considering the north African cultures of the time as not European, since Mediterranean at a time seemed a uniting force and not a dividing one like now. Perhaps my European-centric vision talking.

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