A Drop of History 123

Alexander’s prophecy
And yet, conquered Persia considered him a devil

Alexander the Great started out from poor little mountainous Greece and in three years conquered almost the entire known world. If we consider Macedonia alone as his homeland, then he increased thousandfold the area of the state he ruled when his father, Philip II, was assassinated and Alexander took over. Three great battles – Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela – and he found himself with an empire in his hands. The organisation and administration of such a state was a formidable task.

Greek historians, with Arrian and, later, Plutarch primary among them, described Alexander’s whirlwind of a campaign as a great wave that civilised barbarians, as a great sustained effort of transmitting Hellenic culture to the hordes of savages who lived in the expanses of the East. Nothing is farther from the truth as far as intentions are concerned; nor the result is absolutely accurate. The victors write history; the victors impose their language, their customs, their values. The Macedonians went out as conquerors, and they gained everything they did with their swords. That is why very often they reacted to the kind of rulership that Alexander had opted for, which preserved the administrative mechanism of the Persian Empire, which he had brought down himself, almost intact. The satraps and city governors who swore fealty maintained their positions. The famous Hellenic cultural expansion developed into a complex two-way process in that vast multinational melting pot.

While the ruling classes in the conquered lands adopted the Greek language, the ruler himself resorted to clearly eastern models in order to assert himself. When Alexander demanded that he be worshipped as divine while still living, the Easterners accepted it as something reasonable and natural, while the Greeks were aghast. Their long democratic tradition did not allow them to accept such models. But even that cultural metamorphosis of the young ruler was not enough to impose internal peace to the end. Arrian mentions dozens of local revolts led by satraps and governors, which forced Alexander to move endlessly from place to place within his empire in order to put them down.

The nobility, as happens every time, adapted immediately to the new overlords, since they got to keep their privileges and properties. The same did not happen with the huge bureaucracy that held up the Persian government, the soldiers who had been disgraced in the battlefield, and above all the various priesthoods, whose old gods were neglected and their temples stopped being profitable. Greek history scrupulously avoids any mention of such issues, but during the time of Alexander and the first years of his successors’ Hellenistic times, there was a deluge of revolutionary literature all over the vast empire, with religious leaders mainly behind it.

There are hundreds of prophecies, Persian, Egyptian, Hebrew, in which the Greeks are identified with evil. Those prophecies are recorded in the histories of the respective people, but in Greece we have always eschewed translating and interpreting them. Here is a Persian prophecy of resistance:

“Once there will come to the lands of Asia an incredible man, a purple cloak on his shoulders.
Savage, despotic and arrogant, he will pass like lightning.
And he will throw an evil yoke over Asia, drenching our parched land with much blood.
But Hades will have him too; he will be ruined by the generation he seeks to ruin.
He will fall by the hand of the grandchild, in the manner of Ares.”

For the Persians, the Greeks were demons with loose flying hair, while the Egyptians called them hurricanes that ripped human society apart. The Hebrews, through the Old Testament (Maccabees I), portray Alexander as a pillaging butcher. The same opinions were voiced in Greece by Athens and Sparta, that were in decline by now. All those, of course, were the natural consequences of a cataclysmic change that had affected the entire known world, and they are just insignificant details compared to the grandeur of the tempestuous personality that was Alexander the Great.

We have said that violence is the midwife of history, but everyone rejoices in the child and nobody looks back on the pangs of labour. After all, apart from Alexander, there were the rest of the Macedonians, who were not exactly good boys. It is well known that the great commander married off his generals to Persian princesses in order to promote reconciliation and assimilation. Of the eighty such marriages that Arrian lists, only one flourished, that of Seleucus. The rest all failed, and almost all Macedonian husbands killed their wives.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 119

The barometer of history

Every time we experience an unbearable heatwave or a furious downpour, we turn towards the department of meteorology and demand more precise and detailed forecasts concerning the type, time and place of manifestation of any weather phenomenon. Particularly extreme weather phenomena infuriate us, because we simply think that, if they could be predicted, the victims could be saved and a lot of the damages averted. Do you know how many kings and generals have had the exact same thoughts throughout the centuries? The weather has repeatedly determined the outcome of battles or campaigns.

In 1274 the Koreans and Chinese gathered their fleets with a view of disembarking in Japan. A sudden typhoon sank the fleet and put a definitive end to the campaign. The Japanese named that typhoon “divine wind” – kamikaze in their language. That was also the name given to their notorious suicide pilots during World War II.

In 1346, the English and French faced off at Crécy. The French held out their crossbows, which fired huge, devastating bolts against the mass of attackers. The English had their longbows covered. A sudden rain loosened the strings of the crossbows, rendering them useless; the English won the day. Eighty years later, at Agincourt, the same opponents met again, under torrential rain, and history repeated itself. The ironclad French knights sank in the mud and were cut down by the English men-at-arms.

In 1588, a storm in the Channel finished off King Philip II’s great Spanish Armada, which meant to invade Britain. “I can fight against men, but not against Nature,” was the king’s exclamation. The naval omnipotence of Spain was past after that disaster.

Russia managed to defeat two invaders with the help of a “general” called winter. In 1805, Napoleon invaded with 400,000 troops and returned with 15,000; the rest left their bones on the frozen steppes. Hitler fared similarly when he dismissed his meteorologists, who warned him of the harshest winter of the century. When 250,000 troops surrendered in Stalingrad, the temperature was -30°C.

The most amazing story connecting a major battle with meteorology is, without any doubt, the Normandy Landings. The Allied forces were ready, but unable to move because of the bad weather and rough sea. The German meteorologists assured Field Marshal Rommel that the weather would allow no military operation for twelve days at least, and he left for Berlin without much care. But their British and American colleagues hesitantly informed General Eisenhower that they could forecast a small lull of about five hours, around dawn on 6 July 1944. Eisenhower trusted them and dared to disembark during that small break in the weather. An absolute surprise, but also a huge risk. Imagine what would have happened if the forecast had not been correct and 6,697 craft carrying eighty-six divisions had found themselves at the mercy of a storm in the Atlantic. The outcome of the war would have been very different.

In 1980, American president Jimmy Carter sent commandos to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran in order to free the hostages held by Islamic extremists in the US embassy in Tehran. The American meteorologists predicted good weather in the desert, so the special filters that protected the engines from the sand were removed from the helicopters, to make them lighter – the filters weighed sixty-eight kilos each. And then, during the operation, an unexpected local sandstorm broke out. Sand went into the engines and the helicopters went down. The deplorable outcome of the operation stabilised Khomeini’s power, irrevocably tarnished the Americans’ prestige, and led Carter to defeat in the next elections. All that because of a sudden localised storm in a corner of the Persian desert.

Historians also attribute several revolts and revolutions to the weather. In 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, the country had just experienced a brutal winter. The crops had been destroyed, the Seine had frozen over, and the prices of all goods had skyrocketed. Firewood was 90% more expensive, grain and bread 150%, rye 170%. Enraged, the famished mob attacked earlier than they would have otherwise, demolishing the Bastille and the French royalty.

Who said that the humble meteorologists we listen to every day do not play the role of small gods in critical moments of history?

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 111

The battle of Poitiers
When the Arab tide was stemmed

Every single nation in this world is convinced that it has at least one battle in its history in which it saved humanity and civilisation. We have Marathon and Salamis, the Austrians have the battle against the Turks before the walls of Vienna, the Germans have the stopping of Attila’s advance, the Americans have the battle of Midway, and so on. Everyone in this world has played the role of saviour at least once. The French boast about the battle of Poitiers, and they are right. I do not know if they saved civilisation, but they definitely saved Europe from the Arabs. Without the battle of Poitiers, most probably the Greco-Roman Christian continuum would have come to an end and another history would have begun – that of Islamic Europe.

The battle took place in a valley near Poitiers. The Arabs were the attackers, the Franks were the defenders. That critical confrontation took place in 732 CE, and brought a tremendous cycle of Arab and Muslim expansionism to a close. The nomads of Arabia, imbued with Muhammad’s teachings, kept advancing for two and a half centuries, and nobody could stop them. From the Arabian peninsula they spread towards the north, conquered the Mesopotamian plains, reached the Mediterranean and kept going, half to the north, half to the west. In 717 they reached the walls of Constantinople, where they were stopped through the destruction of their fleet by Leo III the Isaurian. To the west, they conquered the whole of north Africa and reached Gibraltar.

Their strength and warlike ability was such that their leader had conceived the incredible plan of reaching Constantinople after entering through Gibraltar, conquering the whole of Europe and arriving to the Queen of Cities from the west. The Arab horde invaded Spain and brought down the Visigoth state. Led by Abd-al-Rahman, they crossed the Pyrenees and stormed the French plains. In the plain of Tours, near Poitiers, 100,000 Arab warriors faced 75,000 Franks under Charles Martel. “It was the hordes of barbarian unbelievers against the armies of the Christian civilised world”; that was what Christian historians wrote, but, naturally, things were not like that at all.

The Arabs were definitely more civilised and refined than dark medieval Europe. Their architecture was unsurpassed, their knowledge of astronomy, medicine and mathematics was outstanding, and their scholars read Aristotle while Europe was literally illiterate. They were two completely different societies, with different levels of development, aesthetics, even martial organisation. The Arab troops were a mob on horseback; short, swarthy warriors in white turbans, with scimitars as their only weapons. The Franks were tall, blond, with long braids, half of them in iron breastplates and the rest in bearskins.

Charles lined up his troops and waited, but Abd-al-Rahman was facing problems. The fighters had amassed a lot of loot and wanted to turn back. He convinced them to hide the loot behind their lines and set guards there, so that the rest of them could fight. The battle developed as a series of furious Arab attacks against the ironclad Frankish line, which remained unmoved, nicknamed “ice wall”, and all attacks broke on it.

Towards the evening, Charles let out a rumour that his troops had found the guards of the loot and killed them; a rumour that reached the enemy camp very quickly. A lot of Arabs abandoned the battle and ran back to find the loot, which was what they were fighting for, after all. Then Charles launched his counterattack, not in a rush, but advancing the troops in solid formation. It was the first battle that was decided by the composed movement of the armoured mass, which walks roughshod over anything that gets in its way. The phalanx had existed for centuries, but in its traditional form, each man covered the one next to him with his shield. In medieval warfare the phalanx formation had disappeared and self-sufficient ironclad knights fought each by himself, showcasing more personal bravery than military tactics. Poitiers was the first occasion when armoured warriors formed a solid phalanx.

The end of the battle was virtually cinematic, with the two leaders in single combat before their troops. King Charles struck Abd-al-Rahman over the head with his huge warhammer and killed him. That was how he earned the sobriquet Martel, from the Latin martelius, which means hammer. The Arabs retreated and never dared attack Europe again. Poitiers in the west and Constantinople in the east had stopped them. However, it is not at all certain that an Arab Europe would have been worse than the Europe that was the result of the Byzantine and Frankish victories. It would have been just different.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved