50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  A chariot of sorts had been around for centuries, not in Egypt but in Mesopotamia, in the lands of Sumer and Akkad. The first was a clumsy vehicle with four solid-disk wheels. It was pulled by two donkeys, because no horses had been domesticated. It had high sides and the front of it was almost as high as its occupants’ heads. There were two occupants, a driver and a man who threw javelins at enemy troops. There was a supply of javelins in a quiver hung on the side of the chariot. It was obviously heavy, and the four wheels on fixed axles made turning it extremely difficult. Later Sumerian chariots had only two wheels, but they were still heavy and though these donkey-powered war machines must have been slow, nevertheless they proved to be valuable in the many wars between the city-states of Mesopotamia. The high sides protected the warriors in the chariots, and they were faster than infantry, especially infantry formed into a stiff, massive phalanx.

  Word of the Sumerian war cart probably worked its way across the Caucasus.

  There, the steppe peoples had learned to domesticate horses. The horses weren’t strong enough to ride, but they could pull carts. The steppe people then developed a specialized war cart. It was light, had two spoked wheels, low wicker-work sides, and a floor made of criss-crossing strips of leather.

  The steppe nomads had already developed a composite bow, probably because trees were scarce, and trees providing good bow wood were scarcer. Their bow had a thin strip of wood in the center, but the back was a think layer of animal sinew and the belly was strips of horn. These parts were all glued together and covered with bark or leather and lacquered to keep dampness out. A bow of this type was more elastic than a wooden bow, so it could be much shorter than a wooden bow shooting the same length of arrow. It was so elastic, in fact, that it could be made to curve away from the belly when unstrung.

  Protecting their herds from predators and their camps from enemies required a lot of long-range shooting, so the nomads developed very powerful bows and excellent archers.

  But predators like wolves and leopards were fast-moving beasts. It wasn’t until they had their fast, light chariots that the herdsmen hunters could really deal with the hostile fauna effectively. They soon found that what worked on animals worked on human enemies, too. The combination of chariot and composite bow rapidly spread through all the Iranian language speakers of the steppe. The new weapons system led to more far-ranging wars, and tribes began to push each other into new territories. Early in the second millennium B.C., the charioteers from the steppes began to invade the settled lands. They drove east into central Asia and from there into China, where they founded the first historical dynas-ties. The Aryans, an Iranian people, galloped over the deserts of Iran and through the mountain passes to the Indus Valley, where they wiped out one of the world’s three literate civilizations. Other Iranian charioteers, the Mitanni, invaded Anatolia, where they established a kingdom. Some of the Mitanni mixed with the Hittites, who had invaded Anatolia previously, and others moved into Syria, where they made themselves the leaders of the Hurrian people already there.

  The Mitanni were acknowledged to be masters of horse training. Among the correspondence of the Hittite kings is a letter to a Mitannian seeking information on the subject. The military success of the Iranian charioteers was so striking that all the peoples of the east Mediterranean shore adopted chariot warfare. Only the Egyptians, happy in their isolation, seemingly protected by their flanking deserts, remained innocent of chariot warfare. That is, until the Hyksos arrived.

  After conquering the Hyksos, the Egyptians followed them into what became Palestine and Syria, conquering the cities and nomad tribes of that area.

  Egypt’s charioteers were the Pharaoh’s striking force, but he had infantry spearmen and archers to hold the enemy in place. The archers introduced a new tactic: volleying on command. The impact of thousands of arrows striking simultaneously proved to be almost as disconcerting to enemies as a chariot charge. The Egyptian move into Asia brought these African warriors into conflict with another rising power, the Hittite Empire. The clash of the Hittites and Egyptians at Meggido — Armageddon in Hebrew — became legendary in the Near East, a kind of “mother of all battles.” Tactically, it was a Hittite victory, although Egyptian inscriptions try to make it otherwise. Strategically, it was a draw, as neither empire advanced any farther.

  Chariots were also used in central and western Europe, where the terrain was much less favorable. Forests covered much of the area, and the Balkans, Greece and Italy were mountainous. Farther north, marshes covered wide areas, forests were huge and dense, and wide rivers cut through the land. Chariots seemed to have been used by European nobles to carry them to the scene of a battle, after which they would dismount to fight. Homer’s The Iliad is full of descriptions of this kind of fighting. In Cyprus, a large and largely deforested island that was a kind of Mycenean backwater in classical times, chariots were still used in the old way during the Greek-Persian Wars. And in Britain, the Romans encountered British chiefs still using chariots long after even the Gauls had abandoned them. The British chariots had sides but no front walls. The Britons would run out on the yoke poles to throw their javelins at the Romans.

  As a tactic, that wasn’t very effective, but the British nobles delighted in showing off their athletic prowess. By that time, the rest of the world had abandoned chariots for everything but triumphal parades and races.

  The chariot was gradually abandoned because people had learned to breed horses that were bigger and stronger and capable of carrying men on their backs.

  When warriors learned to shoot from horseback, they effectively doubled the firepower of their armies. Instead of two horses pulling one chariot containing two men (and only one an archer), cavalry decided that the same number of horses and the same number of men provided twice as many archers. And a few centuries later, a very simple invention gave cavalry even more striking power, as we’ll see in Chapter 7.

  Chapter 7

  More Horses: The Stirrup

  Ornate Spanish stirrup. This simple device gave the horseman a firmer seat for using the bow, and, especially, the lance.

  The Goths had been a pain for the last few years, Valens thought. In 365, Count Procopius had hired an army of Gothic mercenaries and occupied Constantinople. He then declared himself to be emperor. That ended in 366 when the newly crowned Valens defeated Procopius and his Goths, but 10 years later, the Romans allowed the whole Gothic nation to enter the Empire as refugees. The Goths had repaid that generosity by pillaging all through the Balkans.

  But now, in 378, Valens was going to solve the Gothic problem once and for all.

  In the Gothic camp, there were equally hard feelings about the Romans.

  The Goths had come to the Romans as refugees, fleeing terrible invaders from the east. Goths and Romans had been peaceful neighbors for 100 years, but, when they appeared on the border, the Romans let the Goths in only after they gave up their weapons. Roman officials sexually abused their women and children and reneged on their promises of food. The Goths had no choice but to go to war. In the last century, there were occasional border skirmishes, Romans sometimes intervened in Gothic affairs, and Goths occasionally fought in Roman wars, as in the recent revolt of Procopius against the emperor. But in general, the two peoples had been friendly. All that changed when the Romans took advantage of the Goths’ weaknesses.

  In spite of the modern stereotype, the Goths were not howling barbarians.

  They were all Christians, converted by an Arian Christian bishop who had translated the Bible into Gothic. They were about as well educated as the average Roman; many were literate and some were fluent in Latin and Greek as well as Gothic. Jordanes, a Gothic historian, is one of our main sources of information on this era.

  The trouble started when a new people, the Huns, began moving west from central Asia. The Huns moved into the pastures of the Alans, an Iranian tribe that was one of the great powers of the western steppes. The Alans were horse archers, of course. But they al
so wore lamellar armor and used lances. Roman and Goths alike considered the Alans fierce warriors, but they had a major weakness. They were divided into jealous, independent clans that frequently warred with each other. The Huns had that problem in the past, but they had recently become united. The Huns conquered the Alans, probably a bit at a time. Many of the Alans surrendered and were incorporated into the Hunnish horde. Others fled to the Caucasus, where other Alans had settled generations before. Some clans rode north and merged with the Slavs. The rest moved west.

  Many of those clans joined the kingdom of the Ostrogoths (the East Goths), the second great power of the western steppes. A few continued on into the fringes of the great European forest.

  Those who joined the Ostrogoths did not escape the Huns. King Ermenrich of the Ostrogoths lost his life fighting the Huns. Like the Alans before them, many of the Ostrogoths were incorporated into the Hunnish kingdom. The rest elected a new king to replace Ermenrich and moved west. On the western bank of the Dnieper River their way west was blocked by the Antes, a Slavic people ruled by an Alanic nobility. Jordanes says the Antes defeated the Ostrogoths in their first encounter, but the Goths eventually conquered the Antes. Enraged by the Antes’ resistance, the Gothic king, Vithimir, crucified the king of the Antes with his sons and 70 Antes chiefs. Those chiefs were related to the Alans now in the Hunnish horde. With the Huns’ permission, the Alans attacked the Ostrogoths. Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman soldier and historian, says, “Vithimir resisted the Halani for a time… But after many defeats which he sustained, he was overcome by force of arms and died in battle.”

  What was left of the Ostrogoths elected Vithimir’s son king, and two chiefs, Alatheus and Sarfac, became regents. Sarfac had an Alanic name. In this turbulent period, Alans could be found fighting in every war in every side. The Ostrogoths continued west, where they met the Visigoths (West Goths), who for generations had been separated from their eastern cousins by the Antes.

  The Ostrogoths told the Visigoths about the Huns, and both tribes prepared to resist the Huns on the bank of the Dniester. But although the two Gothic groups spoke the same language and had common traditions, they built two separate fortified camps.

  The Huns chose to attack the Visigoths first. They were the stronger foe; the long succession of defeats had greatly reduced Ostrogothic strength. The Huns crossed the river in the dead of night and sneaked up on the Visigothic camp. The Visigoths were surprised and panicked. They dashed in disorder to the banks of the Danube — the frontier of the Roman Empire. The Ostrogoths did not wait for a Hunnish attack. They followed their western kinsmen.

  Valens allowed the Visigoths to enter the Empire if they gave up their weapons. The border guards, however, proved easy to bribe with gold or sex, so many Visigoths kept their weapons. There were few boats, so crossing the Danube took some time, and, when they were finally in the Empire, the Visigoths found that the food they had been promised did not exist. Famine was their first experience as refugees in Rome. The Ostrogoths got tired of waiting for the Visigoths to cross the river. They moved to another spot on the river and crossed without asking permission. Once inside the Empire, fear of starvation replaced fear of the Huns. The Goths began pillaging the farms of the Balkans. Two Roman leaders, Lupicinus and Maximus, tried to end the Gothic trouble by inviting King Fridigern and a number of Visigothic nobles to a feast. The plan was to get them drunk and assassinate them, but some over-eager Romans attacked Fridigern’s bodyguards in a separate room. The king heard the noise, united his men and they fought their way out of the Roman camp. Eventually, Roman numbers and discipline began to wear down the Goths. Fridigern, from a camp fortified by forming a circle of wagons, offered to negotiate. Valens led his army up to the Gothic camp.

  Valens sent an envoy, with a small escort, to the Gothic camp for last-minute negotiations. But as they were walking up to the wagon ring, a Roman thought he saw a threatening movement and he shot an arrow at the Goths. The Visigoths replied with a storm of arrows. The Roman escort fled, disorganizing the Roman infantry as they ran through the Roman lines. At that moment, a swarm of Ostrogothic and Alanic horsemen emerged from the woods, led by Aletheus and Sarfac, the two regents for the Ostrogoths’ boy king. They hit the cavalry of the Roman right wing, drove it from the field and continued on to attack the left wing cavalry, which, well in advance of the Roman infantry, was vainly trying to break into the Visigothic wagon fort. The left wing cavalry, too, was quickly crushed by the armored Gothic and Alanic lancers. The warriors from the steppes seemed glued to their saddles, and their lance thrusts were able to pierce any Roman armor.

  The Ostrogothic and Alanic horsemen then attacked the Roman infantry from all sides. Roman infantry seldom worried about enemy cavalry, especially cavalry lancers. Lancers, precariously balanced on a running horse, could not easily thrust hard enough to wound an armored legionary, nor could javelin-armed riders throw as well as a foot soldier standing on firm ground. But these horsemen were different; their feet were firmly planted in metal rings suspended from their saddles. When a stirrup-equipped lancer charged, the strength and momentum of his 1,000-pound horse was concentrated in his lance point. The Ostrogoths and Alans pushed the Romans into a compressed mass, packed so tightly they couldn’t use their weapons. Then Fridigen and his Visigoths charged out of their wagon ring. Most of the Romans were killed, including Valens. It was the worst Roman defeat since Hannibal annihilated two combined consular armies at Cannae in 216 B.C.

  Adrianople was a decisive battle for two reasons. First, it resulted in the Goths staying in the Roman Empire, living under their own kings and armed with their own weapons — wandering armies completely independent of the emperor — a situation that eventually led to the Visigoths sacking Rome itself.

  Second, it introduced the stirrup to central and western Europe. The stirrup made possible the heavily armed cavalry lancers — the knights and men-at-arms who were to be the decisive element in most European wars for the next thousand years.

  Many histories say the stirrup was not in use in Europe until the 8th century. About the only justification for that statement is that cavalry was not used much in western Europe before that time. The “barbarian” tribes that destroyed the western Roman Empire — the Goths, Alans, Vandals, Heruls, and Huns —

  were horsemen, but the bulk of the European population, whether Celts, Germans, or Slavs, fought as infantry. It was the many attacks by the highly mobile Moors and Vikings that forced the Franks to organize cavalry.

  R. Ewart Oakeshott, in his The Archaeology of Weapons, cites literary and pictorial evidence that stirrups were used in the East as early as the 4th century B.C. Engravings on a Scythian vase from that time show a saddle equipped with stirrups, evidence that some Scythians were using stirrups. Most Scythians, being primarily horse archers, didn’t feel the need for this equipment, but that was later to lead to their defeat by the Sarmatians. Sculptures in a Buddhist stupa in India dating from the 2nd century B.C. show riders using stirrups. The Sarmatians, whose tribes included the Alans, moved west about the beginning of the Christian era. They wore heavy armor and used lances as well as bows, and all of them had stirrups. They replaced the Scythians as masters of the western steppes. The Goths, Visi and Ostro, learned to use stirrups from them, as did the Vandals, Gepids, Heruls, and all the other “East German” tribes that had trickled down into eastern Europe from Scandinavia. Of course, the Huns, who drove all those other nations into the Roman Empire, also used stirrups.

  The Huns stayed in Hungary long after the end of Attila’s empire and became the eastern Roman Empire’s best cavalry.

  Chapter 8

  The Most Secret Weapon: Greek Fire

  Siege engine throwing a barrel of flaming liquid into a frotress. The substance is often called Greek fire, but the original Greek fire was squirted through a nozzle on a ship.

  A huge Arab fleet was threatening Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. A little more than a generation
prior, Arabs were considered a rather minor nuisance — bandits who rode in from the desert to raid small settlements and who preyed on caravans that were not well-guarded. But about 40 years before this, a crazy man in the Arabian town of Medina, who called himself a prophet, had gathered enough followers to unite all the Saracen tribes of Arabia. Then those wild Arabs swept over Palestine and Syria and in 636 destroyed a Roman army in the gorges of the Yarmuk valley. The next year, they decisively defeated the mighty Persian Empire, which, with the eastern Roman Empire, was one of the two superpowers of the world west of China. By 640, the Persian Empire was extinct — entirely under the thumb of these Arab barbarians who called themselves Muslims.

  While one Arab army was gobbling up Persia, others conquered Babylon, invaded Egypt and swept across North Africa as far as Carthage. The Roman forces were unable to even slow them down. The Arabs also conquered the seafaring cities of Syria. By recruiting the sailors of Syria, heirs of the ancient Phoenicians, these desert fighters created a formidable navy. In 653, they took the island of Cyprus and two years later defeated a Roman fleet commanded by the emperor Constans himself.

  In 672, they sent a fleet into the Sea of Marmara, right up to the gates of Constantinople. The Arab fleet was enormous, and the Empire had not yet recovered from the long and exhausting war with Persia that had ended 44 years prior. That war was the reason the Muslims had conquered Persia so easily.

  Would the Romans be the second empire to fall before the Arab fury? The Arabs were certain that God had delivered this citadel of infidels into their hands. Their ships formed a line and swept down on the Roman ships that had filed out of their protected harbor. The Syrian sailors strained at their oars while the Arab warriors fitted arrows to their bowstrings. They noticed that the leading Roman ships were highly decorated. On the prow of each were gilded images of lions, bears, and other animals.