Decisive battles?
If I may, this is always a fun and thought-provoking type of question.
The most imortant question, in my opinion would be - decisive to whom?
Please forgive my upcoming random rambling!
We can probably find many reasons why Waterloo was decisive, but the fact was that Napoleon was encompassed by too many enemies by 1815, thus, via hindsight, the great battle's fame probably outweighs it's 'decisiveness'. It was too late for him, as it was for Hannibal in 202 B.C.
Let's ask, with regards to the famous battles which are deemed ultra decisive, decisive in what way? An advent in weaponry innovations (eg, Crecy in 1346, Cerignola in 1503, and Noryang in 1598)? Revolutionary tactics (eg, Leuctra, 371 B.C.)? An ideal which has influenced military thinking (Cannae, 216 B.C.)? A victory wrought from the articulated use of combined arms (the Jaxartes, 329 B.C., and Breitenfeld, 1631)? Of course, most seemingly think of a 'decisive' battle as one that shaped the geo-political path the world (or the part it was fought in) due to its result. But perhaps such a definition doesn't come from one or two battles.
If the Teutoburger Wald disaster had not afflicted the three Roman legions in A.D. 9 under Publius Quinctilius Varus, would central and northern Germania have been absorbed into the Roman Empire substantially beyond the Rhine? Roman culture, primarily, was based on cities, and Germania, as Tacitus tells us, was a wild territory of endless forests and forbidding swamps, without the wealth and resources that the Iberian and Gallic lands offered (so he thought; the Germanic lands were rife with metals, primarily iron)) - lands more networked by towns and settlements than the Germanic regions. The Roman border fortifications and garrisons would lead to settlements, which would eventually lead to the cities of Cologne, Mainz, and Strasbourg - all located on the Rhine. My loose thinking is that no - empires have to stop somehwere, and the Romans were never going to conquer the Germanic peoples so long as they wanted to resist. The Romans surely wanted to conquer the regions, evidenced by the settlement of Waldgirmes, which was more than a military post. Waldgirmes was about 30 miles or so N (a little east) of modern Frankfurt, but not on the Rhine. It was located on the Lahn River, a tributary of the Rhine, between modern Wetzlar and GieBen, about 30+ miles east of the Rhine. It was abandoned, however, around the same time as the Teutoburger massacre (probably no coincidence).
The Teutoburger battle was fought somewhere in the region of Osnabruck-Paderborn-Detmold, a good 100 miles north of this area. From a broad point of view, the Germanic lands in the north and center were never going to be absorbed into the Roman Empire by military muscle. The fact the massacre occured illustrated some Germanic discontent towards the deep Roman enthusiasm of subduing the lands toward the Weser River and Elbe (Roman tax collectors were reputedly murdered). But many tribes still maintained commercial relations with Rome in the future. However, we have to remember the massacre was one of extreme magnitude: had it not happened, and the Germanic tribes merely harassed the legionnaires, I think Augustus, then Tiberiius, would not have been so quick to pull back and administer the border defense policy along the Rhine. The Germanic tribesmen could not win set-battles against the Romans, but given the 'wild' terrain, they would not have been conquered so long as they didn't want to be. Remember the inability of the Romans to militarily dislodge the likes of Viriathus, and in the next century, Quintus Sertorius, both in Iberia; they had to purchase their murders.
Indeed, Arminius became a national Germanic symbol in their fight against Rome and any 'Latin' peoples. Whatever his real name was, the name 'Hermann' became culturally entrenched, permeating through all sorts of fields as a nickname, whether in music (from Wagner to the Scorpions), the world's largest rabbit, a German beer label, and a giant floating crane in WWII. The two major statues of him are indeed called Hermannsdenkmal, in Detmold, Germany, and Hermann the German, in New Ulm, Minnesota. But much of it is mythological, as Arminius didn't substantially unite any tribes against Rome, and he was attacked heavily (and vice-versa) from 14-19 A.D by Germanicus (there's another 'titled' name); the strategic inconclusive nature of these clashes (both sides seem to claim tactical victories) may illustrate that the tribal system of Germania was far too removed from Roman ideas of 'provincial' civilization. Romans could beat anyone in set battles of infantry, after some adaptation following painful lessons, but adding peoples to the Empire required more subtlety. It can be argued that the Battle of the saltus Teutoburgiensis impacted Rome more psychologically than strategically; had it gone the other way, Rome perhaps would have wound up with a province, centered around the Germanic side of the Rhine where Varus' consulship administered over, dominated by a large military zone with little civilian development, akin to what took place later in northern Britain. Either way, they probably weren't going much further into Germania; maybe if they had not been destroyed, it would have happened soon thereafter, if not by Arminius, by someone else - and he would become a famous 'symbol'. Half a century earlier, Julius Caesar had 'appreciated' that the Germanic tribes were far more difficult to subdue militarily than the Gauls (his opinion); this doesn't mean Gauls were less ferocious than Germans per se, just the underdeveloped nature of Germania compared with Gaul (following Caesar) made it more difficult to absorb them into Romanitas. We should probably consider the fact that among his neighboring tribes, Arminius' power was a threatening, not a cohering one, and that he was killed by his own kinsmen shows they didn't seemingly share later generations' opinions of him as a national emblem. But there was no 'nation' then, and I'm just floating with a view with only (comparitively) rudimentary knowledge of the deep subject.
Tacitus thought Arminius was a 'liberator of Germania' (the Annals. 2.88), a term which was seized by later German humanists to create a natinal hero. So it seems likely that the impact of Arminius and his victory over the three legions in 9 A.D. had perhaps more influence on 19th century German nationalistic feelings (particularly in fighting the French, a Latin people) than it did in its immediate aftermath. But some 'decisive' battles can be very ambiguous in meaning: if everyone thought, then and now, Arminius' victory was a major reason why Romanitas didn't affect Germania as it did in Gaul and the rest of the Mediterranean basin, and, in the longer run, allowed for the Anglo-Saxon raids in Britain, creating Angle-Land, thus laying the foundation for much of the future Anglo/Saxon culture, well, that should not be discarded without careful consideration and scrutiny.
If Charles Martel had not stopped the army of the Ummayed Caliphate at Tours, would mosques be standing today in London and Paris? Somewhere in between? How much further could the Muslim have gone? Was it merely a giant raid, or a preliminary to conquest? Both? Was there another significant force in Europe to stop the Muslims from establishing themselves in central Francie (I think the modern term 'France' derived from the Capetians, some 200+ yeasr after Charles Martel)? That one may require even deeper conjecture and reflection.
How about the Battle of Ilerda (Dertosa), in which Gnaeus Scipio defeated Hasdrubal Barca in 215 B.C.? Or Otto I's victory over the Magyars Lechfeld, fought in 955? Someone want to give those (and many more?) a try?
The Graeco-Persian Wars were probably the most momentous conflict in Western history; the indirect ripple effect caused by Greece's influence upon Europe affected everything. But the Persians were hardly devoid of culture, and we must remember that in 490-479 B.C. Greece was in the nascent stages of its experiments with 'democracy' etc.
Darius I's incursion into Greece in 490 B.C. was indeed a mere punitive one, compared with his son's invasion ten years later (Darius was punishing Greece for aiding his Ionian subjects); but had the Persians been victorious at Marathon, their attempted hegemony of Greece would have certainly begun (Darius had conquered Thrace earlier). The great stand at Thermopylae does seem like the ultimate paradox; 'democracy' was saved by a bunch of ultra right-wing soldiers from a closed society, which advocated a form of apartheid. Even the Greek fleet at the clashes of Artemisium and Salamis was under the nominal command of a Spartan (Eurybiades), and the decisive battle of Plataea was won by another Spartan in command (Pausanius).
The jury is out on how 'decisive' Thermopylae was (Xerxes I did win, after all). It is quite possible Thermopylae raised the stakes of everything that would ensue; much of Hellas, particularly in the north, had already given up in the wake of the great invasion by Xerxes I in 480 B.C. Xerxes was crucially delayed, being horrendously beaten up for the three days; he saw how high the price of victory would be, if he could pay it at all. What next? Another couple of such 'victories' could ruin him, perhaps losing 20,000 men each time, and the Spartans would be coming again, now with the festival of Carneia over (if he knew about that). His men were willing to die for him, but found they were faced against an extremely efficient killing machine, fighting them in their territory. Many Persians were not unaccustomed to the mountains, but the Greek hoplites, much better equipped for close-fighting, could fight ideally in the narrow valleys and passes throughout centrla/southern Greece. A huge Persian army in Greece had to be supplied by sea (even in peacetime, Greece itself largely depended on commerce for food), and if the Greeks united, which they did more than ever in the late summer of 480 B.C., they could defeat any Persian navy under the conditions that Themistocles clearly foresaw - in restricted waters around the rugged coastline, with fighting taking place in channels etc. It's possible that Greece could never be conquered by force; it would require subtlety, something Xerxes didn't seem to advocate.
That very unity of Greece was indeed spurred by Leonidas' sacrifice. True, the battle was lost, and it has become a romantic and golden story down the ages. But it's quite possible, romanticism aside, that without Leonidas' stand the events that followed would possibly not have taken place. There may have been no Salamis or Plataea, resounding Greek victories on sea and land, without the inspiration triggered by Thermopylae and Artemisium - battles that were technically losses (a draw at Artemisium) but illustrated that beyond doubt, under the conditions here at home, the Greeks could defeat anything Xerxes threw at them.
But Persia would later attempt upon Greece with economics what they failed at militarily; the civil strife amongst the Greek states was exploited upon by Persian money. They all took Persian gold for their enterprises, which in the long haul was going to benefit only Persia. The Persian Empire was like a great black hole, sucking in the life of the small Greek city-states by economic gravity, so to speak. Philip II's hegemony negated the need for Persian money, and Alexander the Great transferred military and economic power from Asia to Europe, among other things.
What if Belisarius and Mundus had not suppressed the extremely threatening Nika Riots in Constantinople, in 532? Would Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis, the foundation of law practiced in much of Europe today, been published?
Decisive tactical victories have been greatly influenced by terrain: the Battle of Carrhae demonstrated the superiority of Parthian horsemen, light and heavy, over Roman infantry in the open; the Battle of Aljubarotta illustrated the superiority of Portuguese light infantry over invading Spanish light horsemen, after erecting barriers on their flanks.
Perhaps the famed Battle of Bunker Hill (Breed's Hill, really) could be viewed as an American Thermopylae (albeit not as romantic, in terms of sacrifice): it prevented the American Revolution from becoming stillborn. The fierce fighting was costly for both sides, and though the British cleared the Charlestown peninsula in Boston, not to mention gaining an unimportant hill, it was really a Colonial victory - from the perspective that the militia had proved themselves against professional soldiers. As long as the American colonists decided to resist, the British faced a very tough task.
Two significant naval clashes I'd like to present:
A naval battle which had a direct influence upon the massive, far-reaching conflict between Europen Christendom and Islam, was the defeat of Ottoman, Indian, Ragusian, and Egyptian Muslims by the Portuguese in the Battle of Diu, fought off western India in Februaury of 1509. Here, the Portuguese established Europe's foothold in the Far East, gaining the Indies trade. The Dutch, English, and French would follow, jostling in and establishing their seperate sections of sovereignty. When the 15th century began, Islam seemed poised to dominate much of the world. This prospect seemingly sank irrevocably off the port of Diu in 1509; mastery of the Indian Ocean was lost to them for good. Looking back, this was an immense factor in determining the nature of the historical link between the Far East and Europe following Francisco de Almeida's naval victory over the Muslims. However, the Ottomans did capture Rhodes some 13 years later, but not Malta in the 1560s.
But in 1661, Zheng Cheng Gong (Koxinga) of the Ming Dynasty, laid siege to Fort Zeelandia, in the town of Anping, Taiwan; 2,000 or Dutch soldiers valiantly held out for nine months against a force of over 10 times its size, losing 80% of their men before they surrendered. This battle pretty much kicked the Dutch out of the region for good (militarily), leaving their goods, and effectively thwarted European (the Spanish had already been here) attempts to control the trade routes of the China seas, the same way they took control of the trade routes of the Indian Ocean 152 years earlier.
Every major battle of WWII, if the outcomes had been different, such as Moscow in 1941, could very well have altered our history. Did 'General Mud' and 'General Winter' cause the mechanized panzer armies to grind to a halt enough for a vulnerable Moscow, the very nerve center of the Soviet state, to fortify and regroup? But if Stalin had lended his ear to repeated warnings to a German invasion, he wouldn't have left his defences in linear dpeloyment on the borders with the west - an invitation to disaster! But I guess he felt everyone could not be trusted.
Did the Japanese decision to attack the United States instead of the Soviet Union (wonderful choice on whom to attack, huh?), with whom she had an historical quarrel, have major consequences on the outcome of WWII? With a Japanese attack from Manchuria, the Soviet counter-attack around Moscow, replete with the Katyusas and T-34s, would not have been possible in such preponderance. Thus the famous Soviet victory over the Japanese at Khalkhyn Gol, fought just before WWII on the Mongolian border, had an impact on upcoming happenings at the onset of WWII. Perhaps the battle determined that the Japanese and Germans would never link up. What if the Finns had pressed the siege of Leningrad and attacked the Murmansk railway, thus completely isolating the only ice-free port in this region of the USSR? They had already cut the line leading to Leningrad in September 1941. It seems the astute Carl Mannerheim merely wanted to regain the lands Finland lost to the Soviets in the Winter War of two years earlier, and not engage himself in Hitler's ideological crusade of world domination.
Most of the 'decisive' battles in the East, such as Sekigahara (unification of Japan), Taraori (2 battles in India resulting which turn, Islam or the Buddhists, would dominate the country), Shanhaikuan (Ch'ing Dynasty in China), did not affect the entire globe in the manner other battles fought in the West did, such as Hastings and Diu. The effect of these battles in the eastern hemisphere, though of huge consequence to their cultures and peoples, stayed within the sphere of their borders. Diu was huge. The Europeans gained the foothold in India, thus crippling the thriving Arab trade with India and China.
It seems the ancient Greeks saw warfare as a fight between East and West (when they weren't fighting each-other); well, the world got much 'bigger' since them, and neither hemisphere has been unable to completely absorb the other, but not for a lack of assiduously trying. It basically began with the Ionian revolts to Persian rule, continued through Alexander the Great, the Roman/Parthian-Sassanid conflicts, and the interminable wars between Christianity and Islam; the Mongols may have given Europe a tremendous scare in 1241, but I think it is more likely Hungary was always going to remain the terminus to their advance; the huge pastures stopped (I know, it's deeper than that, but they probably were not going to go any further west). For better or worse, the West has extended their hegemony much more into the eastern nations than vice versa (very broadly speaking; there are of course many different peoples within both spheres). But the Crusades were a military failure for European Christians.
As well as Diu, the naval victory of the Venetians and their allies over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571 led to the end of Muslim naval power and, probably, ambitions of dominance in the Mediterranean, but only because of the confidence it fomented in Europe for future clashes with the Ottomans; the coalition fell apart, and the Ottoman fleet was re-strengthened. Hernan Cortes, fighting for a European power, opened a new trade route to the Far East across the Pacific. The defeat of the Armada in 1588 enabled England, after some trouble with the Dutch navy (the able Maarten Tromp and then brilliant Michiel de Ruyter), to push across, as well as the French, the Atlantic and establish hegemony in North America. Russia also entered a somewhat Western milieu with the conquests of Ivan the Terrible, most notably at the Battle of Kazan in 1552.
The latest trend in world history, very basically, seems to be that Western political domination is ending. Maybe it has already, and if China comes to dominate the world in the next century or so, then all the battles will have to be re-defined as to what degree their 'influence' was on today's world.
Many of the famed English victories in the 100 had far more tactical importance than any long term strategic significance. But, contrarily, the Battle of Manzikert, fought in 1071, cost the Byzantines their control of nearly all their recruiting area for men and resources in Asia Minor. Alp Arslan had lost to the Byzantines before, but this time overmastered them with steppe-style tactics.
All food for thought, but hindsight is 20/20.
Thanks, Spartan JKM
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Re: Decisive battles?
I've got a problem with that list, Tran. Notice any common themes with all of those battles? They were all battles where Europe was 'saved' from the invaders from the east, with the only exception of Metaurus, which actually had a significant impact regarding the future of Rome, which obviously had a significant impact on the world. Personally, whoever wrote that wiki article, was, in my opinion, very biased towards Europe and how Europe was 'saved' all those times from the Muslims/Persians.
Originally Posted by Marshal Murat
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