May, 2024 Research Update

Amici! It is now June!

We are now, properly speaking, into the academic summer (in practice, I have been in academic summer for all but the first few days of May). The popular perception is that academic summer is, for academics, a 'vacation,' but those of you who have been here will know that it is quite the oppose: it is writing season (or research season or both, depending on the stage one's projects are in).

Of course the focus this summer is on the book project, so here is where we stand as of June 1.

The book project has 12 chapter-length sections (one of them is an introduction, so there are 11 chapters), of which seven are completely done: the Introduction, Ch1 "Farming Foundations," Ch3 "Bronze, Iron and Steel," Ch4 "Gallic Equipment," Ch5 "Spanish Equipment," Ch10 "Roman Equipment" and Ch11 "Roman Mobilization." Collectively, those represent about three-quarters of the planned total word-count (they're the longest chapters, especially 10 and 11).

What is left to put in final form is:

Ch2: "Supply Costs"
Ch 6: "'Barbarian' Mobilization'"
Ch 7: "Carthaginian Armies and Mobilization"
Ch8: "Hellenistic Equipment"
Ch 9: "Hellenistic Mobilization"

Along with a very brief planned conclusion and any forward I end up writing. I should note, tehse chapters are not all of the same length, by any means. The longest (Ch10) currently sits at 25,391 words (so, about five times the length of my average blog post) while the shortest finished bit is the introduction at just 7,610, though I have budgeted just 5,000 words each for Ch2, Ch7 and Ch6 (the current Ch6 draft is over this, though...).

Of this bunch, Ch6 "'Barbarian' Mobilization" (I waffle between that title and 'Non-state mobilization') has been my current project and I expect to have it finalized this week (it is very close to done).

Chapters 2 and 8 will change very little from the dissertation to the finished book, mostly just a matter of editing, cleaning up language and updating a few footnotes to include some recent scholarship. By contrast, Ch7 and Ch9, while building on sections from the dissertation, are basically taking what were chapter sub-sections and beefing them out to full chapters, and so will involve a bit more work, although both are, in word-count, planned to be relatively short.

My plan then, is to finish Ch6 this week and start straight in on Ch7, ideally finishing that in July. Then my hope is to hammer out Ch 2 and 8 relatively quickly in August and September, before leaving October and November to finishing out Ch9, leaving December to frontmatter and the very short conclusion, editing and such in time to get a complete manuscript draft to the editor on time in January. As I noted on the blog, I think there's a good chance I will hiatus the blog at some point this year to keep this schedule, probably in August.

The one bit of good news for this schedule is a bit ironic: I am only teaching one class in the Fall. Our new department head has been attempting, understandably to rationalize the clutter of adjuncts the department accumulated over the years and I suppose it did not make much sense why modern US Military and US Naval history was being taught by a 'Rome guy.' So those classes were shifted over to another adjunct - to my great sorrow, I liked teaching them - leaving me with just the ancient history survey, which I have taught approximately a thousand times before.

That is sad in that I hate to lose those military history courses (which were, I must say, quite well regarded by the students), but having a lighter teaching load in the Fall is going to be really handy, especially because - as you will recall - the Fall is also Job Application Season.

All of that out of the way, let's talk about what Chapter 7: Carthaginian Armies and Mobilization will look like.

In the dissertation, Carthage got just about 1,100 words total, crammed uncomfortably in the 'pre-state peoples' chapter (note the language shift to 'non-state' from 'pre-state'). The reasoning for this was simple: the dissertation was very focused on military equipment. 350 pages of the core 536 pages were focused on reconstructing equipment (if you add the artifact catalog, that becomes 534 pages out of 718) and we can't reconstruct any Carthaginian military equipment. Militaria doesn't show up much in Carthaginian sites archaeologically and our sources are really vague about how Carthage's 'African' troops (our sources often refuse to distinguish between Carthaginian citizen-soldiers, of which there were few, and Libo-Phoenician mercenaries hired from Carthage's subject North African communities) were equipped.

But the book project is slanted more in favor of discussing mobilization systems (the mobilization chapters, including this Carthage chapter, make up a bit more than a quarter of the planned word-count of the book; I also expect to trim the equipment chapters in editing, but not the mobilization chapters), so there's more to say about the unusual Carthaginian system.

The normal way we describe Carthage's armies are as 'mercenary' armies, and that's not inaccurate, but it is perhaps a touch incomplete. Carthage's citizen-soldier forces were generally very small, a few thousand here or there, despite the large size of Carthage itself. Instead, Carthage drew revenue - largely taxes - from its empire to fund a paid, non-citizen army. The 'mix' of these fellows clearly changes over time and it is only with the Second Punic War that we get any kind of a clear sense of it, but fortunately for me that's also the apogee of the Carthaginian land warfare system so no one will fault me, I hope for focusing on it.

(The chapter focused on naval warfare in the First Punic War, of course, came out, and became the Historia article of a few years back).

The thing is, Carthage is not generally hiring mercenaries like on some sort of market. Instead, Carthaginian mercenaries are drawn from communities that Carthage has some sway over - sometimes total control, sometimes something less than that. So in a sense, the expansion of Carthaginian power opens up new sources of military resources (men, equipment, etc) for Carthage to mobilize.

In the Second Punic War, then, Carthage has a few major sources of military force. There are the rarely used Carthaginian citizen soldiers, but the core of most Carthaginian armies are the 'Africans' who are troops hired out of Carthage's subject Libyan and Phoenician (and Libo-Phoenician) communities; this is a very small core, I should note. Hannibal has perhaps 8,000 or so 'Africans' at Cannae, out of an army of c. 50,000 or so. Next, you have the Numidians, who provide crack light cavalry for Cathaginian armies; Numidia was a client-state of Carthage, an independent allied but generally smaller and weaker North African kingdom. Carthaginian generals have a habit of securing marriage alliances in Numidia, because such relationships with Numidian nobles could secure them this very, very effective cavalry force.

But the vast bulk of Carthaginian armies are Gallic and Spanish troops, raised from the non-state peoples Carthage controlled or influenced there. Iberians - the coastal peoples of pre-Roman Spain - made up the largest group, by far, making up roughly half of all of the soldiers in Carthage's armies (higher percentages of the armies fighting in Spain, of course - folks focus on Hannibal in Italy, but Carthage deploys far more troops trying to hold its Spanish domains in the Second Punic War). Another major source of troops were Gallic peoples; Hannibal has something like 20,000 Gauls in his army by 216. In practice, there are generally more Iberians (infantry and cavalry) than Gauls (infantry and cavalry) than Libyans (infantry) than Numidians (cavalry) than Carthaginian citizens in Carthage's armies, though again, region matters. Hannibal, by the time he gets to Italy, has more Gauls than Spaniards, for the obvious reason that he just came from (Cisalpine) Gaul.

And while on the one hand, it's clear that these troops are serving for money, I think it's also clear that Carthaginian generals seem to have gotten quite good at using the decentralized, non-state nature of these polities to get troops, knowing that alliances with aristocrats rather than with their 'tribes' could yield the opportunity to bring a lot of troops on board, probably at a steep discount from what the Hellenistic kingdoms were paying for mercenaries in the Eastern Mediterranean. One sign of this is that Carthaginian generals have a habit of setting up marriage alliances with key aristocrats in their area of operations (Carthaginian generals tend to stay in a region for a long time), which gets them access to that military power: these aristocrats show up, with their retainers and clients, already equipped, supplied and ready to go.

The Carthaginian system is thus, in an odd way I doubt the Carthaginians themselves would have claimed, doing something of the same thing Rome is doing: finding a way to 'franchise' small-polity mobilization systems, rather than relying on a fully-centralized tax-and-spend model, like the larger Hellenistic states do. In any case, it is clearly very effective: Carthage gets far, far closer to matching Roman numbers than any Hellenistic state does. Carthage's peak mobilization is roughly double that of the Seleucid or Ptolemaic Empires, and around 90% of Rome's peak. On the other hand, Carthage is recruiting cheaper, lower-quality troops: these non-state Iberians and Gauls are lightly-equipped, coming from relatively poor societies which are digging very deep to put basically anyone who can afford a spear on the field in order to compete with larger state societies (like Rome and Carthage, but also Greek colonies organized as poleis!)

In the long-run, I don't think the Carthaginian system was a stable replacement for the Roman one. Carthage's long-service generals with deep local alliances running their own private empires - like the Barcids in Spain - seems a pretty clear recipe for Carthage to 'speed run' the collapse of the Roman Republic had they managed to win the Second Punic War. But the Carthaginian system comes the closest, by far, to actually competing with the Romans, toe-to-toe on an even field, which makes it worth talking about.

So this chapter is going to discuss that, talking a bit about Carthage's financial and recruitment strategies, the size of Carthaginian armies as well as looking at the metal-intensity (and thus cost) of equipment over 'snap-shots' of Carthaginian armies, like Hannibal's army at Cannae or Carthaginian armies in Spain, to show that while these armies might be large, they were, per-soldier, generally relatively cheap.

At least, that is the plan, though we all know how well my plans tend to hold up over time!