Chapter 1: What were the major battles in Alexander's campaigns?
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A real crossroads of Asia that connects east, west, north and south. Home to verdant river valleys full of fertile lands, surrounded by towering mountain ranges full of precious minerals, gold, silver… Not to mention the precious blue stone that Egyptian pharaohs, Indian elites and Chinese emperors alike have all sought for millennia – lapis lazuli. Bactria has a long and prestigious history.
Blowing through its heart was the mighty Oxus River, the Nile of Central Asia. Dozens of prosperous centuries-old cities line the river and its many tributaries. Their formidable walls are made of thick unbaked mud brick, towering several metres high. Their houses within are also made of this abundant mud brick material.
These cities are home to large populations, sustained by the nearby nutrient-rich farmlands irrigated by the Oxus along both of its banks. No wonder Bactria became known as the land of a thousand cities. The Oxus River has already witnessed many great armies crossing its waters. Now, a new formidable force reaches its banks, tens of thousands strong.
Most of these soldiers are tired and veteran, serving thousands of kilometers away from their homelands. For years on end, they haven't seen their loved ones back home. Instead, they have followed their king into countless battles and sieges, fighting their way through great plains, overcoming coastal strongholds and crushing fortified mountain defences.
They have won numerous victories to conquer the ancient superpower of the time, the Persian Empire. But their fight isn't over. King Alexander, their revered leader, wants to go even further. So now they cross this mighty life-giving river north towards the lands of Sogdia, modern Uzbekistan and the great steppe that lies beyond. For now, these lands prove welcoming to Alexander and his men.
The locals offer food, knowledge and hospitality. They expect Alexander's army to move on pretty quickly and indeed, this commander has every intention of moving on. Alexander's eyes are already fixed southeast, on India. But before he leaves, Alexander wants to found a city, permanently leaving his mark on this north-eastern fringe of his new expanding empire.
Does he have any idea that his actions were about to upset the status quo and spark some of the most vicious fighting of his entire career? Welcome to Episode 4, the final part of this series about the life and legend of Alexander the Great, one of history's most formidable commanders.
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Chapter 2: How did Alexander's leadership impact his army's morale?
So it comes down to how much of this whole campaigning and this whole expedition is focused on him and what he wants. In fact, enough men get inside, they fight their way, they get control of the city and sack the place. But it's a danger and it shows how this is not a famous battle and it's not even a famous siege like Tyre.
And yet it could have been the end of Alexander and could have been the end of his campaign. And it's a reflection of the fighting in these later years that he fights a lot. He spends much of his time, if he's not marching from one place to another, he's besieging a city. They're assaulting one of these little... And they're called cities.
They're often very small settlements, mostly of mud brick. But nevertheless, they've got walls. They're not easy to get into. The Macedonians tend to win all the time, but... takes them time, it means losses, it means risks. In all the fights of Alexander's campaigns, right from the beginning through, it is striking how there's always a very high proportion of wounded to the number of dead.
which does suggest that quite a high proportion of his men, like Alexander, are taking hits and they are recovering. So they're going on with wounds to the arms, to the legs, to the head, the memory of it. And there will probably tend to be more and more wounded and killed amongst the men who go first, the first up the ladder, the first through the open gateway.
So your most aggressive, your sort of real cutting edge of the army just gets ground down.
And also the lieutenants, like the key commanders. So we think of Alexander the Great's war wounds, but actually many of those generals who outlive Alexander, you also hear either through the accounts of Alexander or what happens afterwards. Because they have that similar mindset, they suffer wound after wound if they're leading their contingents up the ladders or wherever.
It's an interesting thing because when you think they're basically wearing a cuirass of some sort, a helmet, perhaps greaves, it does seem very successfully to protect the vital organs against the weaponry that's deployed against it, whether arrows, spears, bows. So there are, at some of the times where it's mentioned, there are 10 times as many wounded as there are fatalities.
So a lot of people are getting hurt. They are recovering and coming back eventually. But, you know, they've got their scars. And there may well be mental ones as well as the physical ones. So it's wearing everybody down. And it's hard. It's arduous. It isn't pretty. It's ugly fighting. But they keep doing it and they keep winning, but at a cost.
This revolt endures for two years or so, and it's almost that Alexander will plug the gap one place and then another forks will appear somewhere else or threaten them elsewhere and battery assault it or attack a garrison somewhere and deal a lot of damage. From the earlier stages, I just wanted to bring up quickly two other big events that happen.
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Chapter 3: What were the consequences of Alexander's decision to establish cities?
Not impregnable, as we'll find out, but they are still formidable defensive locations. Almost think of it like the traditional view of a hill fort in Iron Age Britain or wherever. Somewhere strong that you could retreat to and really difficult for someone to attack. So those kind of safe havens that these little guerrilla bands would venture back to.
And over the course, I also want to mention the fact that Alexander the Great does arguably suffer the worst loss of his entire career here. It's not him himself, but a detachment of 2,000 to 3,000 men are lured out near Samarkand and annihilated by a Sogdian Scythian army. And that's unprecedented for Alexander to lose so many men. And there's no wounded or barely anyone escaped.
They're all killed.
Yes, it's not. And it's not, we lose a lot of casualties as we're gradually taking Tyre. It's, we're defeated as well.
We are defeated. Absolutely smashed. A river crossing Polytenetis River. It's terrible for Alexander. The revolt will continue, hit and run tactics across Sogdia. Alexander, different detachments of his army trying to face them off for two years or so. Morale, inevitably, it must have plummeted around that time.
Well, they've all been away from home a very long time. You know, we go back to the second episode, I think we talked about the men who were allowed sort of winter's leave, the men that recently married to go home to Macedonia. But in contrast to Philip's campaigns, where generally speaking, every year you've got to go home for at least a bit of time. That's no longer the case.
Your home is now mobile. You're moving around. We'll learn from later on that many of the soldiers have taken local women as their companions. They've got children. They're building up because they've been away from so long. They've been cut off for so long. But clearly, a lot of them still think of themselves as Macedonian.
that's still home, that they think of this as, well, we go to war, okay, it's bigger scale than Philip's stuff, but basically it's the same idea. We go off, we win victories, we get loot, we get glory, then we go home to enjoy those things. But you're not going home. And the fighting continues. And you've already won more spectacular victories than anyone's ever heard of.
And yet it's still not enough. And now you're fighting as well, smaller scale, but as brutal, if not more so. People are dying. You have this defeat that's embarrassing, that's costly. And it doesn't seem to get you anywhere. You take one of these places and the one across the other side of the valley now rebels against you, or the one in the next valley over. And people keep raining. You can't
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Chapter 4: How did the Sogdian revolt challenge Alexander's authority?
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
You can see it means a lot to him because, archaeologically, one of my favourite sets of artefacts is you have these medallions surviving. There's one in the British Museum. I think there are a few others that have been found. But it's believed to be they're almost army medals for the soldiers that had served at that battle.
And it shows an elephant with either one or two riders, and the elephant is kind of going away. It looks like it's kind of fleeing away. And chasing the elephant is a cavalryman with a long Ziston lance. Yeah. looking to spear the rear man on the back of that elephant. It's kind of a triumph of that companion cavalryman against the porous elephant.
It's amazing to have that sort of artefact surviving. What I always thought about the Battle of the Hydaspes is, yes, Alexander wins it, and yes, Alexander takes a lot of pride in it. It'd be great defeating this army of elephants,
But when you look at the bigger picture, Porus's kingdom is a small kingdom, probably the size of Macedonia at most, in a little bit of the Indus River Valley between two particular river branches. Alexander's got an army of 100,000, maybe that's an exaggeration. He ought to win this. He ought to win it. And he does. Yes. But he still takes a lot of pride around it.
And is that Porus becomes an ally?
He's not fighting Chandragupta or anyone like this with a big united army.
There's a myth, isn't he, that he actually meets a young Chandragupta.
Yes, yes. Because it's, again, his main power will occur later. It's post-Alexander and so on. But it's, again, it's a reflection of India is quite fragmented politically just at that moment. Yeah. And then you will get the strong leader to emerge who is sort of Alexander in his own right. Yeah. But on that own scale, and they don't meet. And it was interesting.
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Chapter 5: What role did elephants play in the Battle of the Hydaspes?
If that fortress is impossible to capture, I will capture it. So you have this and you have this odd mixture. There are clearly some mistakes. You know, at one point they camp in dried up water course, which floods when it rains. It's fairly obvious stuff you probably should work out, but they don't. But you have the classic moment as well as they start to lose stragglers.
People are left behind, but they're running short of water. They have none left. And somebody finds enough to fill a helmet, brings it to Alexander, presents it to him, and he makes a big display of pouring it out onto the sand. I mean, you feel he could have perhaps given it to the man who brought it to him. But nevertheless, the message is, if you're not drinking, I'm not drinking either.
So you get Alexander the... incredible leader, along with Alexander, the unfocused, what's he doing here? What's this going on? So it's probably not the losses that are reported, the numbers of casualties are probably greatly exaggerated, but it's still a nasty moment for an army that's already tired.
And the fact that it is tired means that some of them are reaching the end of their tether and more vulnerable to collapse before they get there. So it's a very odd thing where you have another epic, you have this golden Alexander moment, but then the whole setting for it all, why this is happening in the first place, because there's nothing there worth conquering in this area.
And as you say, if there had been any attempt to keep in touch with the fleet, that's long since failed. But again, once Alexander's committed to something, Alexander doesn't quit. He keeps going. And of course, he does get away with it in the end. They do get through. But it's, you know, after suffering an awful lot, after losing quite a lot of people.
Absolutely. And one of my favourite books on Alexander the Great is one on logistics. Very nerdy. Engels. Donald Engels. Yeah. Points out that, yes, like the high numbers. The people that you don't hear about, that were probably the majority of those casualties, was the baggage train people. Yeah.
They're the people who would have been the first to die or be the stragglers, the women and children. By this time, most of those soldiers have their own wives. They're the ones who would have lost the most life, the highest casualties, not the soldiers, probably.
But yes, as we get to the end of Alexander's story, because when he finally meets up with Nearchus and the team again, I think Nearchus recounts how they go to see Alexander and his withered army and they've all got beards and stuff and they just look a bit draggled and exhausted, but they've made it.
But there's also the Nearchus. They've given him up for dead. They think the fleet's been lost. Oh, they think the fleet's gone. Yeah. So he appears and they don't believe who he is at first. Because by this time, the army's recovered. So it's the other way around where he's gone and it's just they've not heard anything. They don't really have that much sense of how far it is.
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Chapter 6: How did Alexander's campaigns affect local populations in India?
You do get a sense that many people are really unhappy with how things are, but don't really know what they want. But there is no alternative to Alexander. Roxanne is pregnant this time, but they don't know whether she'll carry to term. Would it be a boy? It turns out to be.
And we should clarify, because I don't think we actually ever mentioned her name, but Roxanne... Oh, sorry. No, no, that's quite right. I should have said earlier. So she is that Sogdian princess or Sogdian daughter of the nobleman to end that revolt, yes.
But there isn't anybody. There isn't an adult, you know, even an adolescent. You could have a guardian for a while and you could think of it as a viable alternative. So they are faced with a problem. So it's a bit like Philip's murder. You think with Alexander, well, he might have been murdered because some people might just have felt, we really, I can't cope with this anymore.
We've got to move on. On the other hand, nobody has that clear a plan of what they're going to do afterwards. And he's, you know, he's led a fairly wild lifestyle and people fall ill in the age world, particularly people who've moved through so many different environments, become exposed to so many different sorts of germs along the way.
Yes, they're tough in many respects, but there's still that one thing that can just prove fatal. And so I'm still, I think probably it is just disease and it is just chance that he dies then. But it's impossible to say. And there are plenty of people who are clearly fed up with him. Whether they were that fed up and able to do it, I don't know.
I'm on completely the same wavelength. I don't believe he was poisoned. Partly because the poison myth, you can clearly see its origins in the years that follow. Because it's specifically targeted against one faction that rises to prominence, the family of Cassander and Antipater. And it seems to be curated by the faction that were opposing them for power in Macedonia following that.
Secondly, as you've mentioned, it seems to be a combination of factors. We've mentioned all of his war wounds he suffered, the heavy drinking throughout his career, the illness, the weaker immune system that he would have had, the grief, the excessive grief of fighting. All of those things would have weakened him and made him more susceptible to
for whatever disease malaria typhoid lots of different ideas being put forwards for him succumbing to that particular illness so yeah i'm completely on the same wavelength there and what i love about the death of alexander the great as morbid as i say that um
is that you have basically almost word for word the same account of his last week and a half in two of our different sources, which suggests, and they actually say it in the source, that they took it from the royal journals, which were written down by his personal secretary, a man who will become fascinating in the following years, Eumenes of Cardia. I'm sure we could talk about him a lot.
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