WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (3 page)

Alexander The Great Destroys Thebes

336bc

The origins of the Greek city of Thebes, which was capital of the district of Boeotia, form a thick strand in the web of myths and legends woven by the Ancient Greeks to explain their early history. Cadmus was the hero of the Thebes legends. He was the son of Agenor, king of Phoenicia and the brother of Europa, the princess carried off by Zeus to Crete.

As Cadmus searched for his sister involved seeking advice from the Oracle at Delphi, following a cow into Boeotia and building the Cadmea (the citadel of Thebes) on the spot where the cow sank to the ground. Near the Cadmea was a well guarded by a dragon. On the advice of the goddess Athena, Cadmus slew the dragon, and sowed its teeth in the ground. From these teeth grew fierce, armed men, five of whom became the ancestors of the Thebans. Thebes was reputed to be the birthplace of two great divinities, Dionysus and Heracles, the setting for the tragedy of Oedipus, and at the heart of the legendary wars of Adrastus. In two separate wars, Adrastus fought Thebes, and during the second series of attacks Thebes was razed. All this was to provide plenty of material for later Greek epic and tragic poets, including the Theban Pindar, who was born in 518 bc in the village of Cynoscephalae in the district of Thebes.

By the time Thebes appeared in recorded history, it was a flourishing city on the fertile plains of Boeotia, large enough to require seven gates in the wall that surrounded it. The Thebans had acquired a reputation for being dull-witted – despite the fact that, according to Herodotus, they were the first use of written letters in Western Europe, which were introduced from Phoenicia (by Cadmus). In classical times, the city was the leading state among the 14 independent states of Boeotia that came together in a league.

EARLY BATTLES

From the earliest years of the founding of their city, the Thebans lived up to their legendary origins in those fighting men sprung from dragon’s teeth. They were constantly at war with their near neighbours, the Athenians, and sided with the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, where they played a sizable part in the downfall of Athens. Later, the Thebans, like other Greek states, became anti-Spartan, and scored a great victory against them at the battle of Leuctra in 371bc. For a time after this Thebes was the major power in Greece.

Within 40 years of this great victory, the story of Thebes had taken a dark turn indeed. The kingdom of Macedonia was north of Thebes, and it had been quietly flexing its muscles for centuries. It had acquired a new and ambitious king, known as Philip of Macedon. Philip, born in 382 bc, instilled a new sense of ambition and discipline into Macedonia and its army. Soon, Macedonia’s modest ambitions to exercise sovereignty over the Greek coastal states nearest to them had turned into an ambition to gain supremacy over the whole of Greece.

Faced with a common danger, Thebes set aside its centuries-old animosity towards Athens, and joined the Athenians in a league against Philip of Macedon. However, their combined forces proved no match for Philip and his reorganized army, and they were comprehensively defeated at the battle of Chaeronea in Boeotia in 338bc. The broken pieces of a marble lion that adorned the sepulchre built for the Thebans who fell in the battle can still be seen among the remains of this once-great Theban city. As for Thebes itself, just as Greece had lost its independence, so the city had lost its liberty.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

In 336 bc, the 46-year-old Philip of Macedon was murdered by poisoning during his daughter’s wedding feast, possibly as the result of a plot in which his wife was implicated. The Thebans thought they saw the chance of regaining their liberty and rose up in revolt. Unfortunately for the Thebans, they did not understand the calibre of the young prince, Alexander, who succeeded Philip.

The 20-year-old Alexander was as unlikely as his father to allow any show of independence from the cities and states under his control. Showing all the ruthless strength and determination that was to gain him the title ‘Great’, Alexander descended on Thebes and destroyed the city. The city wall was part of the fortifications that legend said had been built by Amphion and Zethus, twin sons of Zeus. During Alexander’s attack, the wall was flattened.

Within the walls, Alexander destroyed houses, theatres, shops and the Acropolis, or Cadmea, and almost everything else. He left standing only the temples and the house in which the poet Pindar had lived. Pindar’s great fame had grown out of his ability to compose fine choral songs for special occasions, a skill that had given him employment by princes all over the Hellenic world. Alexander the Great is believed to have spared the house that Pindar had lived in at Thebes because of the fine poems he had written in praise of Alexander’s ancestor, King Alexander of Macedonia.

Alexander may also have had spared the temples of Thebes because of their historical associations, perhaps picked up in his reading of the work of the sixth-century historian Herodotus. Herodotus mentioned in his
Histories
the oracle of Ismenian Apollo at Thebes and the great temple dedicated to Ismenian Apollo, where he recalled seeing the solid gold shield and spear that Croesus had dedicated to the Argos hero Amphiaraus and examples engraved on three tripods of the Cadmean writing that the Phoenicians had brought to Greece.

Determined that no Thebans would ever rise in revolt against him again and, no doubt, wanting to make an example of Thebes to the rest of Greece, Alexander slew 6,000 of the inhabitants and sold 30,000 of them as slaves. The once-great city was subdued indeed. At the same time, the four centuries-long era of the classic, Hellenistic city state was ended; from this time on mainland Greece became very much a political backwater.

Thebes was rebuilt 20 years later by the Macedonian prince, Cassander, with the help of the Athenians, but it later suffered considerable damage again during the wars for possession of Greece and Macedonia that were fought among the successors of Alexander the Great. Thebes never regained its former greatness and power, and its death blow was finally dealt by the Roman dictator Sulla, who handed over half its territory to the Delphinians.

SUCCESSFUL FORMATIONS

There is a historical irony in the fact that Alexander the Great’s amazing success as a warrior king owed much to the great Theban statesman and general Epaminondas, who scored a decisive success over the Spartans in the battle of Leuctra in 371 bc. The general was helped to victory by the way in which he changed the battle formation of his army. Instead of deploying his heavily armed soldiers (hoplites) in the usual long even lines, Epaminondas formed some of them into a wedge, 50 men deep, on one wing, in which he included the Theban ‘Sacred Band’. Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, improved on this ‘strength-in-depth’ principle demonstrated so effectively by Epaminondas by creating the more open and freer-moving phalanx. When Alexandra the Great added a large cavalry force on the wings of his father’s phalanx at the outset of his Persian campaign his army became virtually unbeatable.

Part Two: Medieval War Crimes

William The Conqueror And ‘The Harrying Of The North’

1069–70

Dictionaries define ‘to harry’ as ‘to ravage’, ‘torment’, ‘harass by forced exactions’, ‘make rapacious demands’ and, in warfare, ‘to devastate’. William the Conqueror did all these things in the north of England when, within three years of his victory at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, he found himself having to put down serious rebellions in the northern parts of his new kingdom.

William had fought at Hastings to gain the English crown from Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king. William claimed it had been promised to him by Edward the Confessor, who had spent many years at the court of William’s father in Normandy before mounting the throne of England in 1042. However, by the time Edward died in 1065, his realm was in disarray. He was not a forceful ruler and the kingdom’s great men, or thanes, had everything their own way, while at the same time they quarrelled among themselves.

England looked as if it would fall back into the hands of the Scandinavians, so the thanes buried their differences. Ignoring William of Normandy’s claims and those of Edward’s nearest blood relative, the youthful Edgar the Atheling, they elected the strongest among themselves as their new king. He was Harold Godwineson, the son of the Earl of Wessex. The thanes were prompted to this decision by two strong northern lords, Morcar, Earl of Northumberland, and his brother Edwin. Harold had worked hard to placate these two, even siding with them in a quarrel with his own brother, Tostig. However, this may have led to Harold’s defeat at Hastings. His army had been weakened by having to fight off a Scandinavian invasion, led by Harold Hardraada and Tostig, at Stamford Bridge, before marching rapidly south to deal with William’s invasion from Normandy. During the battle, Harold was killed by an arrow shot in the eye.

Although there was some bitter fighting against William of Normandy in the north and west of England, he did not respond too harshly – there were no burnings and hangings at the time – and by the time he was crowned king in Westminster Abbey at Christmastide 1066, rebellious thanes, including Morcar and Edwin of Northumberland, had submitted. William could be reasonably sure that his success was complete and he felt no need to be particularly harsh in his dealings with his new subjects and their leading men. He tried initially to rule England with the support of a nobility that was a mixture of Anglo-Saxons and Normans, but no genuine trust developed between the two groups and it was soon clear that William’s policy was doomed to failure. It was to take William and his Norman followers six years of often brutal campaigning in many parts of the country before his will was firmly imposed on his new kingdom.

QUELLING THE NORTH

The most brutal of all William’s responses to rebellion took place in the north of the country. In 1069, Morcar and Edwin of Northumberland took up the sword again on behalf of Edwin the Atheling, arguing that with Harold dead, Edgar was the legitimate heir of Edward the Confessor. Edgar had been proclaimed king in London immediately after the Battle of Hastings, but his claim had been easily brushed aside. Now Morcar and Edwin were raising armies in the former kingdom of Mercia, the heartland of which was in counties centred on the river Trent, while their northern neighbour, Gospatric, Earl of Bernica (who had actually bought his earldom from William), was trying to persuade the great men of Northumbria to rise on behalf of Edgar.

William led an army north to quell this latest rebellion. As he approached in force, the rebels retreated, Edgar the Atheling fleeing to Scotland and Morcar and Edwin submitting themselves to William’s mercy. Once again, he pardoned the leaders of this latest rebellion. However, he did not treat the ordinary people of the north so lightly. Perhaps he had been angered by the news of the Norman castle that the rebels had razed at York. More likely, he decided that now was the time to show his iron fist and make sure that never again would rebels have the resources to wage war against him.

Whatever the thinking that impelled him, William acted with extraordinary savagery against the north in the winter of 1069–70. He ordered the destruction of whole villages, the burning of crops and the killing of domestic animals over an area of northern England that stretched from York to Durham in the north and from York down to the county of Derby, and to Stafford and Chester in the south and west. There was wholesale destruction and burnings of much cultivated land and property between the rivers Humber and Tees. Starvation stalked the land.

The excessive force of William’s ‘harrying of the north’, as his campaign soon came to be called, deeply shocked Anglo-Saxon England. As the monk Simeon of Durham wrote, ‘It was horrible to see human bodies rotting in their houses and on the roads, and there was a terrible smell. And a great silence fell over the land.’ Oderic Vitalis, author of a contemporary
Ecclesiastical History
, said that he could not commend William ‘for an act which levelled both the bad and the good in one common ruin by a consuming famine.’

With much of the north now devastated and acquiescent, William began a process of breaking up the great estates of the Anglo-Saxon thanes, distributing smaller parcels of land among his Norman followers. He was careful never to give any one lord so much land in one place that it could be used as a power base from which to stir up trouble against the king. He emphasized the fact that the land came from the king, its ultimate owner, and that lords held it in trust from him. Thus the land-owning system of Anglo-Saxon England disappeared and was replaced by the system that came to be called feudalism.

After the northern rebellions of 1069-70, William’s rule in England became much harsher. To ensure his power, he began a major programme of building forts and castles the length and breadth of his realm. He brought from Normandy a style of castle-building that resulted in fortifications much more impregnable than anything the Anglo-Saxons built. The Norman castle, later built of stone but in William’s time mostly of wood, were based on the ‘motte and bailey’ castle, erected on a high mound so that they rose threateningly above the surrounding countryside. Norman lords occupied these castles, which were built by English serf labourers. Once William was assured that England was quiet, he returned to Normandy after 1072 and seldom visited his English possessions thereafter.

Oderic Vitalis had asserted that William should be punished for the ‘barbarous homicide’ he had carried out during the harrying of the north. Of course, he never was punished – except, perhaps, in his own mind. On his deathbed in 1087, William the Conqueror is said to have admitted that he had persecuted the native inhabitants of England beyond all reason. ‘I am stained with the rivers of blood I have shed,’ he said. Perhaps it was partly contrition that led him to leave his English lands to his second son, William Rufus, a man thought to be less hard and ruthless than his elder brother, Robert, who became Duke of Normandy on the death of his father.

As for other participants, Edwin of Northumberland was killed by his own men during another, abortive, rising in 1071, after which Morcar was imprisoned by William. Although he outlived William, Morcar was returned to prison by the new king, William Rufus, and disappeared from history. Edgar the Atheling, who had never been much more than a hook on which to hang rebellious thanes’ ambitions, was reconciled with William in 1074 and spent the rest of his life as a minor courtier. He took part in the First Crusade.