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The Battle of Cannae

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  Quote mordred Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: The Battle of Cannae
    Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 09:45

During this battles severals roman legions were slaughtered by Hannibal troups: about 47 000 legionary died during this batlle.

I can't understand how it was possible that the best army was defeated? How was it possible for 47 000 roman soldiers , well trained, well equiuped and protected by cuirass to be killed?

 

Thnks for your answers.

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  Quote Belisarius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 12:18
They were incompetently led and faced the finest military mind of the time. I say incompetently led because the Romans played into whatever the Carthiginians tried to do. So much that if the Carthiginian infantry was a warband of peasants armed with pitchforks, they still would have won.
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  Quote Pelayo Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 14:12

It is mind boggling the amount of carnage that took place. We are talking bludgeoning >45K, by a largely numerically inferior force, just incredible.

 

There is good reason this is the most studied battle of all time. So many leaders tried to reproduce his tactics, but no one reproduced Hannibal's level of success.

The Romans failed to support their flanks, and continued to advance blindly while they were outflanked and surrounded. I think they were so used to being superior in force, discipline, and grit that tactics and good common sense were not considered.

Alternating leadership with the Roman Consuls certainly didn't help the Romans. Hannibal was such an electric leader, motivator of men. It's incredible that he lead so well, a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic force.

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  Quote vulkan02 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 15:30
this will explain you most of it:

http://www.roman-empire.net/army/cannae.html
The beginning of a revolution is in reality the end of a belief - Le Bon
Destroy first and construction will look after itself - Mao
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  Quote TheodoreFelix Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 16:59
Thats the thing. They werent wll trained. They were rushed recruits. Also numerically, the Roman army was too big for its own good. It had never been attempted before, the soldiers could not even properly use things like the pilums. The organization was off and once the Romans were lured into Hannibal's retreating soldiers they began to lose their formation.
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  Quote Belisarius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 18:49
Legionnaires that were not well-trained? That is something shocking. Perhaps you mean that they were raw recruits?

Pelayo explained it better than I did. Until the reforms of Cornelius Scipio, there was really no such thing as Roman tactics. Rarely did they meet an enemy that fought harder than them. It was this and their superior logistics skills that won their early wars.

In a nutshell, Roman tactics were as follows: Send in the velites and hastati. If the enemy survives, send in the principes. If the enemy survives that, send in the triarii. A popular Roman quote that went something like, "It came to the triarii", talked of something that was won by the slimmest of margins.

Against such a tactically inferior enemy, it is no doubt that Hannibal crushed them so absolutely. It was only when the Romans merged their imcomprable fighting ability, logistic capability, and advanced tactics that they became unchallenged in the Mediterranean.
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  Quote Heraclius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 31-Jul-2005 at 19:31

 The romans could of won had they not sacrificed the flexibility of the legions for the rigidity of the phalanx, their formation was so tight that it resembled the rigidity and the weaknesses of a massive phalanx.

 The maniples within the legions could not turn properly to face other enemies hence why when they were hemmed in by Hannibals Libyan troops on the flanks they were unable to engage them properly, the cavalry to the rear then hemmed them in fully and the massacre began in earnest.

 Had the Romans not crammed together in one big mass trying to smash right through the centre of Hannibals army theres no reason why they should of lost because not matter how good Hannibal was his army was  much smaller that even if the legions were reasonably well led theyd of overran the Carthagian army eventually.

 Hannibal knew his Iberian and Gallic troops were unreliable he used this weakness to an advantage by positioning them in the centre, when they started to buckle and the Romans even more sucked into the centre. The Libyans wheeled around and pin the flanks of the crammed legions. The Romans fell for it utterly and paid an unimaginable price in lives.

 Hannibal is said to have lost only around 6000 men most of them gauls and iberians the Romans could have lost as many as 50,000-55,000 it cant be known for sure.

 It was a truly amazing victory but Roman stupidity and the incompetance of its great majority of generals doomed countless thousands of men to death when the same men could just of easily had slaughtered their enemies.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.
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  Quote Moustafa Pasha Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Aug-2005 at 08:05

THE Battle Of Cannae

In detail,please click

http://www.roman-empire.net/army/cannae.html

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  Quote Constantine XI Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14-Aug-2005 at 14:21
Heraclius explained it best, Cannae was lost for a number of reasons:

*The loss of the Roman cavalry on the flanks hemmed in the Romans
*The Roman maniples lost formation in the conflict, being sucked into a converse Carthaginian formation which squeezed down on them like a vise
*One of the greatest strengths of the Roman army throughout its history was the tactical flexibility of its maniples. Whenever a weakness opened a maniple could be directed into it as it was an independent unit rather than a part of one conglomerated battle line. Squeezed down on by the Carthaginian infantry and cavalry, they lost this strength.
*Hannibal was one of the greatest military geniuses in history, he knew how to position his troops in such a way that their formation would change over the course of the battle exactly as he planned it, to coincide with his cavalry victories to dominate the Roman flanks and rear. His inspirational force of personality was critical in keeping his army united and ensuring they fought hard.
*The terrain of the battlefield meant the Romans could not spread their forces out more to outflank the Carthaginians. With foothills on their left and the Ofanto river on their right their superior numbers could not be brought to bear. Once they lost their cavalry support on the flanks they were truly hemmed in.
*Hannibal had some of the toughest cavalry who were led by experienced and skilled commanders. The Romans' cavalry was weaker by comparison, a weakness instrumental to Hannibal encircling the Roman army and destroying it.
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  Quote Ahmed The Fighter Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Aug-2005 at 09:38

The conventional deployment for armies of this time was to place infantry in the centre and split the cavalry between the wings. The Romans followed this fairly closely, but chose extra depth rather than breadth for their infantry (resulting in a front of about equal size to the numerically inferior Carthaginians) in the hopes of quickly breaking through Hannibal's centre.

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  Quote Ahmed The Fighter Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Aug-2005 at 09:44
Hannibal in his turn modified the conventional deployment by placing his lowest quality infantry  in the middle, and his better quality infantry (African mercenaries) either just inside or behind his cavalry on the wings. Polybius describes the weak Carthaginian centre as deployed in a crescent, curving out toward the Romans in the middle, but some historians have called this fanciful, and say it represents either the natural curvature that occurs when a broad front of infantry marches forward, or else the bending back of the Carthaginian centre from the shock action of meeting the heavily massed Roman centre. In any case, when battle was joined, the Carthaginian cavalry drove the Roman cavalry off on both flanks and attacked the Roman centre in the back, causing it to halt its forward charge. At the same time the veteran Carthaginian infantry flanked and boxed them in on the sides, creating an encirclement of the Roman infantry in an early example of the pincer The trapped Romans were hemmed in and almost completely slaughtered movement.. Polybius claims that 50,000-60,000 Romans diedincluding Lucius Aemilius Paullus , one of the two consul commanders, as well as the two consuls for the preceding year10,000 were captured, and 16,000 escaped (among them the future Scipio Africanus Major ). For their part the Carthaginians lost 5,700 men, the Celts and Iberians accounting for about 5,000 of these. Hannibal's victory at the Battle of Cannae is often viewed as the classical example of a smaller army thoroughly defeating a larger opponent, purely through the use of superior tactics on open terrain
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  Quote Heraclius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Aug-2005 at 10:04

 A close escape indeed for Scipio.

 Cannae was just a mess from the beginning, exposing every single weakness of Roman military power, its lack of appreciation for a cavalry wing, its arrogance, its disrespect for the flexibility of the carthaginian army, its unability to learn from past experiences, shoddy and divided leadership etc etc.

 

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  Quote rider Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18-Aug-2005 at 02:18
But did Romans werre cuirasses? I thought cuirasses were developed in the 15th-16th century.
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  Quote Belisarius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 18-Aug-2005 at 21:27
The heaviest armor worn by the Romans during this time was chainmail. The heaviest Roman troops, the triarii, wore a simple chain tunic.
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  Quote rider Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-Aug-2005 at 01:46
Yeah, i thought the same.. Cuirasses would have made romans useless, i think as it was better fending off bullets than blows.
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  Quote Nagyfejedelem Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-Aug-2005 at 14:34
Carthagian army was faster and more mobilable than the Romans one. Romans weren't good horsemen and allied cavalries were put to the wings. A good military leader put his allieds into the middle of his army.
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  Quote Heraclius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-Aug-2005 at 15:38

 The allied cavalry on the right flank of the Romans actually put up a good fight, but was severely outnumbered, the cavalry on the left flank fled when the Spanish heavy cavalry from the Carthaginian left came to join the Numidians on the right.

 The Carthaginian army was actually less mobile than the Romans, until Hannibal altered his Libyans formation and turned them from rigid block phalanxes to flexible infantry. However in this battle Rome sacrificed its flexibility for the ancient and outdated rigidity of a phalanx, trying to break the enemies centre with a massive concentration of force.

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  Quote Emperor Barbarossa Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 19-Aug-2005 at 20:45
Cannae, one of the great battles in history. It is surprising that Hannibal is one of the only generals to beat Rome outnumbered two to one. Not many generals have done this good was Parthian general Surena at Carrhae.

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  Quote Belisarius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-Aug-2005 at 00:02
The Parthians were outnumbered by odds as high as 5 to 1. However, the Romans had an excuse to lose this battle as the Parthians were a foe that they faced too rarely to be able to compile a strategy against.

However, the Romans had already faced the Carthiginians and their Numidian cavalry in a bloody war. The Carthiginians learned from that war, as opposed to the Romans who actually simplified their tactics. There really was no excuse for this defeat.

Originally posted by Nagyfejedelem

A good military leader put his allieds into the middle of his army.

I am not sure that I understand this. The center should be the strongest point in your line to avoid your army from folding or being split in two. Hannibal only did this because he knew of what would happen and used it to his advantage.

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  Quote Heraclius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 20-Aug-2005 at 10:11

 Theres examples of other Carthaginian generals attempting to copy Hannibals weak centre tactic, I believe Hasdrubal tried it in Spain but it fell to pieces. It shows that this tactic takes immense skill and ability to work.

 Cannae was a Roman defeat because of pure stupidity, even I could of got it right.

 Carthage could win the battles but not the war, not rebuilding the fleet and not sending enough help to Hannibal made battles like Cannae worthless, very very bloody but worthless nonetheless. Stupidity in Spain also played a major part, a total lack of coordination and foresight allowed Scipio to seize new Carthage for example. Romes problems on the field were largely negated by having domination of the seas and better focus, whereas Hannibal was waltzing around Italy in a futile attempt to break the Roman confederacy, Rome was looking further abroad to the main battle which was the one for Spain. Hannibal was contained in Italy whilst the Barcid empire was picked apart by Scipio.

 Carthage blew the best chance someone would have to take down Rome for the next 6 centuries.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.
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