I am listening to a podcast about (and called) the History of Rome and got to wondering how Hannibal or other ancient generals figured out their tactics. Did hundreds of scouts just constantly create maps of their new surroundings? This seems like a logistical nightmare, especially in fast-moving battles, or am I just overstimating the speed of troop movements? Thanks, hive mind!
We’ve got experts on ancient warfare on this board, and I hope they have specific information for you soon.
In Machiavelli’s The Prince, he offers many of the things that a Prince should do, and he says its the Prince’s job, to spend his free time in: hunting, riding, learning by experience how land forms transition from one type to another. Its not right for me to put a WAG so early in a thread, but people of these technology levels may have developed an intuitive sense of what to expect their and their opponent’s forces would do depending on subtle terrain hints.
This is probably a deeper question, that maybe has been given a fuller treatment on this forum before:
What did Roman scouts do? What did Gengis Khan’s or the Hun’s or the Tartar’s scouts do differently, or not do? How did Renaissance condottiere prepare themselves for terrain that might be far from their experience? What exactly did Custer’s scouts do – how had military technology of scouting advance, at West Point academy, in the early US history.
What exactly does an AWACS and satellite recon do, that historically scouts couldn’t?
Yeah, I can probably guess plenty for that last one. But a though military treatment, for the layman, could be helpful.
I don’t have much input about ancient battles, but I will guess that things hadn’t really changed much between then and the Civil War. Scouts (and spies) have always been needed to produce reasonably accurate maps showing geographical features, bridges, fortifications, troop dispositions, and so forth. Some Civil War generals excelled at making sure that maps were updated regularly using only the most reliable information provided by their mapmakers, scouts, and spies. (General George Thomas was noted for this. He had teams of personnel constantly drawing and updating maps for distribution to his staff.) I’m pretty confident that Hannibal did exactly the same thing. You can’t expect to conquer the world by just blundering into whatever is around the next curve.
Not at all an expert, but off the top of my head I can think of Thermopylae in ancient Greece, and Long Island in the US war of independence, where defenders thought they were in nigh impregnable situations, but an attacker got info of routes that allowed an end run. As I recall, in both instances, the alternative route was obtained from a local.
To some extent, it seems as though there was often an “agreement” that the massed opposing forces would clash head-to-head. Almost seemed as though there were “traditional” battlefields in some areas, until some creative thinker decided to do things otherwise.
And reading about the US Civil War, it is hard to escape the idea of blind elephants lumbering around, with huge elements of chance governing when and where they clashed.
Eager to hear from those more in the know.
One thing to consider is that until very recently, armies foraged for food and material. I expect there was a lot of overlap in function between foragers and scouts.
I’ll follow my earlier comments by pointing out that several of the early Union defeats in the Civil War were due largely to the failure of the Union forces to properly scout and map the countryside. This was especially true of conflicts in Virginia, where the Union commanders would fumble around on back-roads and generally end up sending their troops to the wrong place(s) and by the longest possible routes. They failed to use their cavalry, for example, to their advantage and paid the price.
One of the main uses of cavalry was reconnaissance and screening against enemy cavalry reconnaissance. Still is if you conceive of cavalry as aircraft and recce vehicles*.
I’m not sure what you mean by fast-moving battles. There might be fast movement within the designated battlefield but once the main bodies were facing each other, they typically wouldn’t move outside the battlefield until one side routed (and then the cavalry was useful once more to get the routers).
Cavalry wouldn’t need to constantly create maps and wouldn’t have to do it in real-time. They would presumably only make maps of the important locations they found. Just like today recon aircraft/vehicles won’t take images or SAR maps throughout their trajectory but only the more potentially important locations.
Even today, making a basic map of what you see is taught during early training in the Canadian military.
- like this, light armor with a TV/infrared/radar mast/remote sensor array: Bison and Coyote armoured vehicles - Wikipedia
And lots of times when you blunder into the enemy forces, your first defensive response (especially with ancient armies) is just “find a big hill nearby” to put yourself on higher ground, especially if you have the smaller force.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the American had surveillance and recce capabilities that were hitherto undreamt of.
They still regularly got ambushed/surprised by militants who knew the land better.
Not only are “reasonably reliable maps” historically recent, even our idea is historically recent: all though there were isolated instances of geographical maps, the idea didn’t really take on.
And we are talking about enormously expensive hand drawn maps until engraving printing technology.
When maps were available in the American Civil War, not everybody is equally good at using them. Grant was noticeably better than his officers (that is, his officers noticed). And WWII is full of stories about officers that couldn’t read maps.
Another point to keep in mind is that, in olden times, battles took place in a much smaller area. When your longest-range weapon is a bow and your fastest unit is a horse, there’s less terrain that you need to know, and a lot of it you’ll be able to see just by looking around.
The Romans had speculatores and exploratores as their scouting and reconnaissance elements. The exploratores appear to have filled a more conventional military reconnaissance role, while the speculatores appear to have been more akin to a sort of secret service and espionage cadre.
The exploratores were generally native to whichever land the Roman forces were in and patrolled about a day ahead of the main army, with roles including: looking out for enemy forces and enemy movements; assessing terrain strengths and weaknesses; identifying potential ambush sites; verifying intelligence from prisoners, deserters and suchlike; and locating camp sites.
The speculatores had roles including acting as bodyguards, couriers, law-enforcers, and sometimes executioners, and additionally performed undercover operations.
The duties of both exploratores and speculatores could involve them wearing “plain clothes”, thus making them spies.
The Romans also developed a network of spies and informers throughout their empire, including the frumentarii - provincial wheat collectors, whose position would bring them into contact with locals around the empire, and from whom human intelligence could be harvested and relayed to Rome.
I think everyone covered anything I could add, especially Walken. Often, ancient armies had auxilliaries who could be native to the area of battle, so had local knowledge. So, for instance, Romans invading Gaul might have some Gaul mercenaries - national loyalty not really being a thing for them.
Also, beyond maps, don’t forget the value of playing in a sandbox (or using a sandtable).
“Did you seriously just say ‘hitherto undreamt of’?”
Indeed. Louis XIV was a huge patron of scientific endeavours (among other things) and financed the first national geographic effort, which sent teams of mapmakers all across France with theodolites and suchlike to accurately measure stuff. When the final map was compiled, he quipped that they were worse than the enemies of France ; for they had diminished his kingdom by up to a third.
He also ordered precise 3D models of many features alongside the borders of France so he and Vauban could plot and design star forts the most efficiently and scientifically as possible - another big first.