US Marines fight rebellious Boxers outside Beijing Legation Quarter, 1900 – copy of painting by Sergeant John Clymer

(14) CHINESE CIVIL WARS – TAIPING & BOXER REBELLIONS
(1850-1864 & 1899-1901)

China has such a long history of wars within itself that one really could do a Top 10 list merely for Chinese civil wars or rebellions. Indeed, one could round up a Top 10 for rebellions in Qing China alone. Few things were as spectacular in modern history – or loom as large in the hindsight of a Chinese revolutionary regime succeeding it – as the decline and fall of the Qing Empire, fighting endless rebellions within itself, until it was ultimately overwhelmed by the final one.

And by spectacular, I mean on a scale of international wars for casualties, or even world wars in the case of the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping Rebellion might well be styled China’s world war, in the same way that the Second Congo War is styled as Africa’s world war. It was effectively a world war fought within China – on a scale of casualties exceeding the First World War, or even matching the Second World War by some estimates. Although characteristically of Chinese wars, the overwhelming majority of casualties was not from actual violence in war, but from the famine and disease that invariably accompanied the disruption of the delicate balance or supply chains of Chinese peasant agriculture.

I’ve heard it said that the Qing Empire literally faced a peasant rebellion an average of every hour or so. I don’t know the truth of that assertion, which probably tallies up the hours in the numerous historical rebellions against the Qing, although I also suspect that many or most rebellions were too limited or localised to have any serious consequence.

Territories of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom held at various times during the rebellion by M. Bitton for Wikipedia “Taiping Rebellion” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Not so the Taiping Rebellion. I’ve always been fascinated by millennialist or messianic movements – and it fascinates me that Qing China, formerly one of the most powerful imperial states in the world, if not the most imperial state, would find itself struggling and slogging it out for over a decade (or two if you count holdouts until 1871) with…a cult.

That’s right – a cult, one with a leader who proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and declared his own Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. A cult which one would not anticipate to be particularly convincing or credible, but obviously tapped into popular unrest against the Qing.

It’s also amusing that this cult leader was effectively the equivalent of a university dropout, failing the examination for the imperial state bureaucracy. Declaring yourself the messianic leader of a heavenly kingdom and waging war against the state that failed you sounds totally like an admirable career goal in those circumstances. Why don’t more guidance counsellors recommend it?

The Taiping Rebellion marked the inexorable decline of Qing China, which was to prove terminal within half a century – and helped inspire the revolution that terminated it.

Movement of Boxers and Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion by SY – Wikipedia “Boxer Rebellion” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I also find the Boxer Rebellion almost as interesting as the Taiping Rebellion, because it fascinates me that Qing China could again find itself thrown into turmoil by…a secret society of mystical martial artists, generally known in English as the Boxers, but known in Chinese by the even more awesome name of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists.

It’s like that mysterious secret organization under crime lord Han in the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon – which seemed to spend all its time pointlessly drilling in martial arts to take over the world, rather than, you know, training with guns or something, existed in historical real life.

Or perhaps the Jedi in Star Wars, as like the Jedi, the Boxers claimed magical force or supernatural power, particularly invulnerability to bullets (much like the Jedi deflecting lasers)

Unlike the Taiping Rebellion which pitted itself against the Qing state and was inspired by foreign influences, particularly Christian missionaries, the Boxer Rebellion declared its slogan of supporting the Qing state and exterminating foreigners, particularly Christian missionaries.

One might consider the Boxing Rebellion as essentially the Chinese version of its near contemporary by eerie coincidence, the Ghost Dance (although the Taiping Rebellion could also be argued to be a Chinese Ghost Dance).

The Qing state found itself on the horns of a dilemma, but with those Righteous and Harmonious Fists stroking its ego, sided with the Boxers – at least by the decree of the Imperial Dowager. The Chinese imperial officialdom and military were more split, some supporting the decree and others opposing it.

The Boxer Rebellion and the Qing imperial state that supported it did as well as might be expected for combatants who placed their faith in their invulnerability to bullets. That is to say, they lost – handily defeated by the Eight Nation Alliance of Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Japan, who found rare solidarity with each other in curb stomping the Qing Empire and the Boxers.

My friends and I had a joke that it’s ironic that China, the nation of Sun Tzu and The Art of War, should have such a consistent lack of military competence (similar to Italy, the nation of Machiavelli and The Prince, with its consistent lack of political competence).

Like most jokes, it’s an overstatement – but China did top The Book of Lists’ 10 Most Defeated Nations in Modern History, and about half of its entry was Qing China. So not surprisingly its wars against rebellions were slogging matches.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Richard the Lionheart on his way to Jerusalem by James William Glass, 1850 (public domain image)

(13) CRUSADES

The Crusades – giving religious warfare a bad name for a millennium!

But seriously, the Crusades had everything – not surprisingly, as they took place at the crossroads (heh) of history, three continents and three major world faiths (with almost every variant of sect and some other faiths thrown in).

There’s the Crusades themselves, from which there are a number to choose. Eight or nine of them, counting the more formal crusades identified as such in the Middle East (by subsequent historians), but not counting all the pseudo-crusades or quasi-crusades in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as weird and generally disastrous spinoffs such as the People’s Crusade or the Children’s Crusade. If you throw in things like the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, Northern Crusades, crusades against heretics like the Albigensian or Cathar Crusade – “kill them all and let God sort them out” – and the crusading rhetoric of the Ottoman Wars, then you could easily just compile a Top 10 Crusades.

There’s the wider theme of religious warfare, beyond the crusades to other wars, exemplified by wars fought by, between or within monotheistic religions, such as the wars fought as part of the Protestant Reformation. That theme arguably also extends to wars of modern political ideology or moral causes, including religious or ideological terrorism. It’s not without reason Eisenhower called his memoirs of the Second World War “Crusade in Europe”.

And there’s the metaphorical use of crusade – as well as analogous forms of crusading movements – for ideological, moral or social movements, the paradigm of crusading as a metaphor for military or political campaigns fought for a belief or ideal.

Back to the more formal Crusades in the Middle East, on the European or ‘Western’ side, you have the Roman Empire coming together, in both its major western and eastern successors – the Catholic Church represented by the Pope in Rome answering the call for aid of the eastern Roman empire, which history disguises as the Byzantine Empire.

And answer the call they did, most famously with the knights of military orders – with my favorite the Templars or Knights Templar, which became rich and powerful, but ultimately ran afoul of the French monarchy and the Pope. Also worshipping Baphomet if you believe the medieval gossip.

Of course, the Crusaders were styled more as the Holy Roman Empire, or the founders of that empire, the Franks (despite the Franks increasingly being, you know, French) – and indeed Europeans in general continue to be called some derivative of the term Frank throughout Asia even today.

There were also Vikings, or rather their adventurous successors, the Normans, as well as those scheming Venetians, who ultimately succeeded in diverting the Fourth Crusade to attack their rival, the Byzantine Empire itself (whose claims to the Holy Land were conveniently forgotten by the Crusaders).

That was to prove one of the most short-sighted schemes of history, fatally wounding the empire that had long stood as the southern bulwark of Europe against Islamic invasion. Do you want Ottomans besieging Vienna? Because that’s how you get Ottomans besieging Vienna. Twice

And on the ‘Eastern’ side, you have a whole host of Islamic combatants, kicked off by the Seljuk Turks taking most of what is now known as Turkey from the Byzantine Empire (leading to that call for aid that started the whole Crusades), but most famously personified by Saladin (albeit he was of Kurdish ethnicity).

My favorite in the whole Crusades remains the Order of Assassins, who derived their name from the hashish with which their founder Hassan al-Sabbah doped them up and who in turn lent their name to our term for assassins.

Lacking the force for more conventional military campaigns, the Assassins focused on – you guessed it – targeted assassination as they infiltrated everyone, Muslim or Christian, until they were defeated by an enemy that came from too far away to have been infiltrated, the Mongols.

That’s right, the Mongols pop up in the Crusades, as they popped up virtually everywhere at that time. Even more interestingly, the Crusaders and Byzantines sought out the Mongols as allies against the Muslims.

This lent itself to the legend of Prester John, a mysterious Christian sovereign whose kingdom moved about Asia and Africa, much like the land of the Phantom – playing its part, as the Crusades did in general, in subsequent European maritime exploration and empire.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Go Greek fire you’re burning up the quarter mile
(Greek fire, go Greek fire)
Go Greek fire you’re coasting through the heat lap trials
(Greek fire, go Greek fire)
You are supreme, the chicks’ll cream for Greek fire – Greek fire in Byzantine manuscript

(12) ARAB CONQUESTS (622 – 751 AD)

The Arab conquests were a nigh-unstoppable historical explosion, once previously divided tribes in a historical backwater had been united under Mohammed – conquering one of history’s largest pre-modern empires (indeed the seventh or eighth largest in all history) on three continents in a little over a century, a blitzkrieg by horse, sail…and camel!

 “In speed and extent, the first Arab conquests were matched only by those of Alexander the Great, and they were more lasting.”

Mohammed had essentially conquered the Arabian peninsula, but his death left his successors – the three great Arab caliphates – only at the start of extending his empire to even wider conquests.

The Rashidun Caliphate, immediate successors to Mohammed, did most of the heavy lifting to break out of the Arabian peninsula. Two formidable empires blocked their path, the Persian Empire and the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, but the Arabs conquered the former and routed the latter back to Anatolia.

However, it was under their successors, the Umayyad Caliphate, that Arab conquests reached their greatest extent, westwards from the north African shore to Europe itself – conquering Spain (well, not quite all, in a manner similar to the famous caveat to the Roman conquest of Gaul in Asterix comics) and famously invading France before being turned back at Tours by Charles Martel.

Eastwards, the Umayyads also extended beyond Persia through central Asia to the fringes of India and China – the latter of which presented even the Tang Empire some difficulty resisting their advance.

The Umayyads were overthrown by the Abbasids in 750 AD and the Abbasids then formed the third great Arab caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, who then presided over what is often regarded as the Golden Age of Islam from their capital in Baghdad. The surviving Umayyad dynasty fled into exile across the Mediterranean to Spain, continuing their Caliphate as the Emirate of Cordoba independent from the Abbasids, even with their own rival golden age of Islam in the fabled Al-Andalus of Spain.

Although the Abbasids made some more territorial gains – notably Sicily and Crete – their Caliphate saw an end to the rapid Arab conquests, albeit with victory against Tang China in the Battle of Talas in 751 AD as a postscript:

“Muslim armies had come against a combination of natural barriers and powerful states that impeded any further military progress. The wars produced diminishing returns … The priorities of the rulers also shifted from conquest of new lands to administration of the acquired empire … the period of rapid centralized expansion would now give way to an era when further spread of Islam would be slow and accomplished through the efforts of local dynasties, missionaries, and traders.”

One is spoilt for choice for wars in the century and more of Arab conquests, but if one were to choose the wars that best encapsulate them as a whole, it would be the Arab-Byzantine wars from 629 AD to 718 AD.

The Byzantine or eastern Roman empire was the first state of substance that the Arabs faced when breaking out from their peninsula. It seemed incredible that the Arabs could defeat such a firmly established state, even when that state was weakened from recent war with Persia, yet they did – routing it back to Anatolia as they conquered its other territory in Asia and Africa, which then became their springboard for further conquests.

Ironically, it then seemed incredible that the Byzantines could hold the line or withstand complete defeat or conquest by the Arabs as the latter went from one victory to another – yet they did, from Arab attacks by land and by sea, even as the Arabs besieged Constantinople twice, in 674-678 AD and in 717-718 AD. Among other things, the Byzantine superweapon Greek fire was instrumental in their success.

The frontiers of Arab conquest finally stabilized between them in Anatolia, as it did elsewhere under the Abbasid caliphate at about this time, until from about 863 AD when the Byzantines – incredibly again – were able to regain both the initiative and some of their former territory, in wars usually reversed in name to the Byzantine-Arab wars to signify Byzantine ascendance.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Rock face relief at Naqshe-Rostam, depicting the victories of the Sassanid Persian emperor Shapur I over the Roman Emperors Valerian and Philip the Arab. Do you want emperors captured by Persians? Because that’s how you get emperors captured by Persians…

(11) ROMAN-PERSIAN WARS

The first world war, fought intermittently on the frontier between successive Roman and Persian polities over almost seven centuries.

No, seriously. Well, half seriously.

The Roman-Persian Wars were a world war, or war between two different worlds – that might have been fought on the frontier between them, a little like the Western Front writ large (and long) but had ramifications or repercussions throughout both empires that extended across Eurasia from Britain to India.

And that comparison to the First World War’s Western Front writ large and long stands. Despite seven slugging centuries of grinding war, the Roman-Persian border remained remarkably stable.

“One has the impression that the blood spilled in the warfare between the two states brought as little real gain to one side or the other as the few meters of land gained at terrible cost in the trench warfare of the First World War.”

That is, until the last dramatic phase of the wars, the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 – which might be compared to the similarly abrupt and dramatic reversals of fortune in 1917-1918 that ultimately saw the end of the First World War. However, even that last war of the Roman-Persian Wars effectively ended with the restoration of the status quo (and border) between the two empires.

The Roman-Persian Wars are an interesting contrast to those other Persian Wars of antiquity, the Greek-Persian Wars, in lacking the same existential stakes or outcomes – with the Greek city-states desperately defending themselves from outright conquest by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the classical Greek-Persian Wars, and Alexander the Great conquering that same empire outright in his Macedonian-Persian Wars.

The latter always struck me as incredible in contrast to the failure of the Romans, more powerful and commanding more resources than either Alexander or their own Persian adversaries, to achieve anything like Alexander’s decisive defeat and conquest of Persia. That is despite the Romans, at least emperors Caracalla and Julian, expressly seeking to emulate Alexander. The reality seems to have been that for the most part neither side did little more than essentially raid each other over the frontier, with the Romans famously sacking the Persian capital Ctesiphon numerous times.

The Roman-Persian Wars might be classified into four phases, corresponding to three successive Roman polities and two Persian ones – not to mention Armenia bouncing back and forth between the two empires as client state or protectorate.

First, there was Roman Republic against the Parthians – initiated by the invasion of Mesopotamia by Roman general Crassus, which saw one of the Republic’s most crushing defeats at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC. However, the Parthians did nothing to exploit this defeat or the subsequent civil wars of the Republic with one notable exception, as they generally sought to remain on peaceful terms with the Romans. That notable exception was their support of the so-called Liberators – the assassins of Julius Caesar – and invasion of the Roman eastern provinces after the Liberators’ defeat. The Romans defeated the Parthian invasion, but the Parthians then defeated the retributive campaign by Mark Antony against them.

Second, there was the Roman Empire against the Parthians, which saw five major wars between them, mostly to the defeat of the Parthians with their capital Ctesiphon sacked three times and four Roman emperors claiming the title of Persicus Maximus. Those wars were the Roman-Parthian War of 58-63 AD (with the Roman campaign led by the general Corbulo under emperor Nero), Trajan’s campaign into Parthia, the Roman-Parthian War of 161-166 AD under Roman emperor Lucius Verus (the co-emperor of Marcus Aurelius), the campaign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus in 195-197 AD, and finally the Parthian War of Caracalla in 216-217 AD.

Third, there was the Roman Empire against the Sassanids or Sasanians, successors to the Parthians. The Sassanids were very different to the Parthians in hostile character towards Rome – in the words of Youtuber Tominus Maximus, “Sassanid Persia was like Parthia…on cocaine and mixed with crystal meth”. Most famously, there were the Sassanid incursions deep into the Roman eastern provinces during the Crisis of the Third Century, after fighting between them during the reign of Roman emperor Severus Alexander.

However, the Romans subsequently defeated the Sassanids, sacking Ctesiphon a further two times in campaigns led by Roman emperors Carus in 283 AD and Galerius (with Diocletian holding his hand) in 298 AD. The latter was the most decisive Roman victory against the Sassanids, enduring for decades until hostilities resumed in the Perso-Roman Wars of 337-361 AD under Roman emperor Constantius III and the ill-fated expedition by Roman emperor Julian.

Surprisingly, the Sassanids mellowed in the fifth century, remaining mostly peaceful with the Roman Empire while the latter’s western half fell to barbarian invasions. In part that was due to the Sassanids facing off their own barbarian threats, but it was instrumental in the survival of the eastern Roman Empire. Which brings me to…

Fourth, there was the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire against the Sassanids or Sasanians. While the Persians were only peer state the Romans had as adversary, the classical empire had the advantage in population and resources, albeit that advantage was diluted by more far-flung commitments. After the fall of the western empire, the eastern empire and the Sassanids were much more closely matched.

Not surprisingly then, this saw the most dramatic and mobile phase of the Roman-Persian Wars from the preceding centuries of effective stalemate – with the Byzantine-Sassanid War of 602-628. First the Sassanids almost decisively defeated and conquered the eastern empire, even besieging Constantinople, but were then decisively defeated in turn by a near miraculous eastern Roman recovery under emperor Heraclius – albeit the eastern Roman empire was too weakened to exploit its victory other than regaining its lost territory and effectively restoring the status quo between them.

The ultimate futility of the Roman-Persian Wars came in their aftermath with the event that decisively ended them altogether – the Arab conquests, achieved in large part from both empires being so weakened fighting each other that they were unable to resist their new adversary, with one being completely conquered and the other barely surviving defeat as well as the loss of much of its former territory.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Do you want naked Germans humping your statues? Because this is how you get naked Germans humping your statues. Sack of Rome in 410 painting by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre (1890)

(10) GERMANIC & GOTHIC WARS

“Give me back my legions!”

The Roman-Germanic Wars – the longest wars fought by the Roman Republic, Roman Empire and eastern Roman Empire, both in space and time, the wars of the crisis and fall of the classical empire.

In space, they were fought along Rome’s northern frontier from the Rhine through the Alps to the Danube. I’ll see Turner’s Frontier thesis about the frontier defining American history and raise it with the Roman-German frontier defining world history.

In time, they exceeded even the seven centuries of Roman-Persian Wars, extending both before and after the latter if you count them extending through the Gothic Wars and Lombard Wars fought by the eastern empire.

And yes – I’ve effectively featured Roman-Germanic and Roman-Gothic wars in my special mentions for the Crisis of the Third Century as well as the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the Goths playing the leading role in the latter. It’s not overstating it to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths, even if as Youtuber Tominus Maximus quips, they’d didn’t mean to do it.

However, the Roman-Germanic wars date back before the empire to the republic, prior to the Republic’s wars with Persia, with the Cimbrian War in 113-101 BC – a war often overlooked for the more glamorous Punic Wars, despite a Roman defeat in the Battle of Arausio exceeding that at Cannae and the first threat to Italy or Rome itself since the Second Punic War.

The Republic saw more Roman-Germanic Wars with Caesar’s Gallic Wars – which despite being primarily directed at the conquest of Gaul also had campaigns against Germanic tribes such as the Suebi or across the Rhine, even if the latter weren’t much more than skirmishes compared to the subsequent wars.

When it comes to the classical empire, the Roman-Germanic Wars might be classified as falling into three phases.

The first phase was essentially when the Roman Empire held the initiative against the Germans – to the extent that there was the serious possibility of the empire incorporating Germania as a province or provinces, potentially pushing the imperial border from the Rhine to the Elbe or Weser. Famously that possibility was lost with Varus and his three legions in the Roman defeat at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest at the hands of Arminius, German turned renegade from his Roman citizenship.

Despite this defeat, the Roman Empire still (mostly) held the initiative against the Germans, although they used it more for pre-emptive or punitive expeditions, not least to avenge the defeat at Teutoburg Forest, rather than imperial expansion.

The second phase might be considered as one in which the initiative oscillated between the Romans and the Germans in clashes at and over the frontier. The Romans were mostly robust enough to retain both the initiative and frontier, but from the Marcomannic Wars in 161-180 AD onwards Germans and Goths were able to make substantial incursions within the empire – as in the Crisis of the Third Century or the invasions of the western empire fought by Julian or Valentinian.

The third phase is that of the decline and fall of the classical empire, when the Germans – particularly the Goths – increasingly held both the initiative and territory within the empire itself, from the Gothic War of 376-382 and the Roman defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 onwards. Ultimately, the western empire and Rome itself fell to the Germans and Goths.

The fall of the classical or western empire wasn’t the end of Roman-Germanic and Roman-Gothic Wars, as the eastern empire continued fighting them – against the Vandals in north Africa, against the Visigoths in Spain, and above all against the Ostrogoths in the Gothic Wars of 535-554 in Italy.

The Byzantine-Gothic Wars were initially very successful against the odds under the leadership of Belisarius, but bogged down with an impressive revival by the Ostrogoths and ultimately ended with a Pyrrhic victory for the Romans – (re)conquering Italy from the Ostrogoths but then left desperately clinging on to increasingly small parts of it against a new Germanic invader, the Lombards.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Battle between Romans and Goths on the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus dated to 250-260 AD

(9) CRISIS OF THE THIRD CENTURY (235 – 284 AD)

Before the Fall came the Crisis…

With the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire deserving first special mention, is it any surprise that the Crisis of the Third Century, that dress rehearsal of the fall, is far behind?

The Crisis of the Third Century – also known as the Military Anarchy or Imperial Crisis – had much the same scope as the decline and fall. Indeed, the Crisis of the Third Century was part of the decline, even if the empire narrowly forestalled its fall for another two centuries. Many of the fundamental problems of the empire from the Crisis endured to the fall, even when in muted form.

Narrowly forestalled its fall, that is, as in the empire “nearly collapsed under the combined pressure of repeated foreign invasions, civil wars, and economic disintegration” – “at the height of the crisis, the Roman state had split into three distinct and competing polities”, the so-called Gallic Empire and Palmyrene Empire vying with the central Roman Empire in its western and eastern provinces respectively.

Indeed, had it collapsed – or fragmented – it is hard to imagine the eastern half of the empire enduring in quite the same durable form as it did two centuries later. For one thing, the empire was divided into thirds rather than halves – with what was to become the eastern empire, that is, apart from the Palmyrene Empire, more resembling a quarter than half, albeit not unlike the eastern empire after it had rebounded from Arab conquests. It also lacked the capital founded by Constantine – Constantinople, with its nigh impenetrable defenses against all but the most overwhelming siege – or indeed the seat of imperial government founded as its own distinctive new Roman empire.

Although mind you, the eastern empire pulled off its own near miraculous recovery from crises – note that plural, crises – to rival that of the third century, like it looked back at the classical empire’s direst crisis and said hold my beer.

Two things saved the classical empire in the Crisis of the Third Century, even if it went from classical to late empire.

The first was that, as fearsome as the foreign invasions were, they lacked the ability or even intent to conquer territory or form their own states within the empire, rather than raiding it for plunder albeit on a larger scale than ever before. Even the Sassanid Persian Empire – the closest adversary the Roman Empire had to a rival peer state – for all its successes only raided Roman provinces and moved its border slightly away from its capital.

The second was a series of soldier emperors or barracks emperors – mostly the so-called Illyrian emperors originating from that region as the then heartland of the Roman army – who managed to hold the line and turn the tide to restore the empire, “an accomplishment many historians regard as about as unlikely and impressive as any of Rome’s Golden Age achievements in building the empire in the first place”.

Foremost among them of course was Aurelian – Restitutor Orbis or Restorer of the World, who reunited the empire by defeating the rival Palmyrene and Gallic Empires – but he built on the achievements of the emperors who came before him, Claudius Gothicus and arguably also Gallienus, and had successors who consolidated his achievements, notably Probus and the emperor who is credited with finally ending the Crisis, Diocletian.

At the core of the Crisis was the political instability of imperial succession (and usurpation) suggested by the other names used for the Crisis (Military Anarchy and Imperial Crisis).

Tacitus had observed that the ‘secret of the empire’ had been exposed with the succession crisis after Nero in the first century – “that emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome”, a secret that excited “all the legions and their generals”.

Despite this observation, those legions and their generals had mostly followed the various imperial dynastic successions for the first two and a half centuries of empire – its founding Julio-Claudian dynasty, the Flavian dynasty, the adoptive succession of the Five Good Emperors, and the Severan dynasty.

In the Crisis, however, the legions and their generals had become very excited indeed – as one so-called barracks emperor succeeded another, usually by usurpation. And that’s just the line of imperial succession generally regarded as legitimate – beyond that there were literally countless usurpers, some of which we are still discovering through archaeology or coins.

Indeed, it often seems from the Crisis that where even the most minor commanders of a legion or legions had even the barest degree of military success (or were just left outside or stranded by the ebbing tide of imperial authority), they would proclaim themselves as emperor – or their legions would.

Not surprisingly, with Roman commanders and their legions marching either to advance their own imperial claims or against those of others, that saw them abandon the defense of the empire’s borders.

That was compounded by drain on population by the Cyprian Plague that raged through the empire, and which struck military barracks or manpower particularly hard – indeed the capture of Emperor Valerian by the Persians, the first time an emperor was captured by foreign forces, was attributed to his army being laid waste by plague.

The population decline of the empire also compounded its economic instability, characterized by the collapse of its currency and trade.

Through the gaping holes left in the imperial borders poured the empire’s recurring foreign enemies to raid it – further compounding the empire’s economic decline as the empire’s problems became an intense feedback loop as each problem cranked up the others.

Foremost in notoriety as the empire’s recurring enemies were the German barbarian tribes – who had grown in military capability (and relative population) through two centuries of contact with the empire, although they were not yet as capable as they were when they brought about the fall (and mostly replaced those Roman commanders and their legions vying within the empire).

The capabilities of the Germans were increased by forming new tribal coalitions or confederations – particularly the Franks, who raided across the Rhine through Gaul as far as Spain, and the Alemanni, who raided through the Alps into Italy, even threatening the city of Rome itself (the first external threat the city had faced for centuries) and giving Aurelian himself pause, inflicting his only defeat before he rallied to victory against them.

And across the Danube came the Germans who were ultimately to do more than anyone else to bring about the fall of the empire – the Goths, raiding as far as Greece and even Asia Minor because they managed to get themselves a fleet and there’s nothing worse than barbarians with boats.

All these German raiders paled in comparison to the Sassanid Persians – which as I noted was the only state on Rome’s borders that came close to being Rome’s peer – as they raided deep into Rome’s eastern provinces, particularly Syria.

As was typically the case, Rome’s worst enemy was itself as it fractured into three rival empires fighting among themselves. The core empire remained around Italy, fortunately including the Illyrian military heartland of the empire and its breadbasket in north Africa – but it lost its western provinces to the Gallic Empire led by usurpers, and its eastern provinces to the Palmyrene Empire, essentially a client state that had loyally led the defense against the Sassanid Persians but had gone rogue under its queen Zenobia.

Fortunately, along came Aurelian – breathing two centuries of life into the empire before the fall.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Destruction of the Athenian army at Syracuse – illustration from John Steeple Davis, The story of the greatest nations, from the dawn of history to the twentieth century, published 1900 (public domain image used in Wkipedia – “Pelopponesian War”)

(8) PELOPONNESIAN WAR (431-404 BC)

Greek against Greek – Athens vs Sparta.

There was a point when I cracked during the film 300. It was when Leonidas spoke about the necessity of Sparta fighting Persia because even “those boy-loving philosophers” in Athens were fighting Persia. “Screw you, Leonidas”, I yelled “the Peloponnesian War isn’t over!” And after the ushers bounced me from the cinema, I ruminated on this slur on the Athenians. There was of course the fact that they were the true Greek heroes of the Persian Wars.

But there was also, you know, the Peloponnesian War of Athens against Sparta (or Peloponnesian Wars, as there was first and second war with a brief peace between them).

And we’re still fighting it, in that the war between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta underlies the grand ideological conflict in Western civilization. Few things may actually have an ideal Platonic form, but Sparta did – Plato’s Republic, with its philosopher-kings or guardians who perceive the Forms of the true reality, trained from childhood to govern in the interests of the polity (by physical and moral regimen) and bound by stricter rules than the rest of the populace.

It has been argued that Plato’s Republic was a dystopian satire rather than a utopian ideal, but it is difficult not to see it intended as the latter – or worse, as Plato’s distaste for his own democratic Athens (which after all, executed his beloved teacher and philosophical mouthpiece Socrates) and idealization of a philosophical version of Athens rival, Sparta, although he and his ideas didn’t do too well when put into practice with attempts at a philosopher-king in Syracuse.

And so we are still fighting the Peloponnesian War against Plato’s mystical fascism or totalitarian Spartanism as it has recurred throughout Western political ideology – the General Will of Rousseau, the dictatorship of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard in Marxism or communism, the Fuhrerprinzip of fascism or Nazism, and so on.

Of course, I know this is mostly my projection. I’m not sure if Western political ideology has actually been influenced by Sparta or even Plato and his Republic to that extent (or how much Sparta and Plato influenced each other for that matter). But I’m not the only one to see such parallels and I’m sticking with it – it has a certain mythic resonance. Hence its god-tier special mention entry second to the Trojan War, which might otherwise seem extravagant for a war between Greek city-states.

And what about, you know, the historical Peloponnesian War, you ask? To paraphrase Martin Prince’s sneer from The Simpsons, I’m aware of its work – namely, that Sparta won, with a little help from their Persian friends, albeit to be humbled later by Thebes, before the Macedonians and Romans swept over all the Greek city states.

And that Athenian political ideas didn’t work too well in Syracuse either, with the disastrous Athenian Syracuse Expedition sometimes likened to the American experience in Vietnam, only a lot worse for the ultimate defeat of Athens in their not so cold war against Sparta.

As I said previously, Plato’s ideas – and Plato himself – didn’t fare too well in Syracuse, when he came closest to implementing his Republic and its philosopher-kings in practical reality through Syracuse and its tyrant. Closest that is, as in not at all, founding the time-honored tradition of how intellectuals fare when courting people in power or political tyranny – running afoul of tyrants and narrowly avoiding execution or literal slavery and imprisonment.

Of course, history is a lot messier than our black and white projections of it. Lest we think of the Spartans too much as the bad guys, while their allies wanted Athens destroyed and its population enslaved after its defeat, it was the Spartans with their warrior code of honor who declined to do so – particularly as they regarded that all of Greece owed Athens a debt of honor for its role in the Persian War. And screw you, Thebes and Corinth! I’ve got a letter for the Corinthians and this time there’s no love in it. I’m an Athenian fan.

And for that matter, even the Spartanism or mystical fascism of Plato in my projection may be more nuanced than that, given it has a recurring appeal to or arguments for it. Even I’m a fan of one of the many pop culture versions of Plato’s Republic – Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One. Mega-City One is essentially Plato’s Republic in twenty-second century America, with the Judges as its philosopher-kings or guardians and the Law as its Forms. Judge Dredd – he is the Forms!

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Sea Peoples in their ships during battle with the Egyptians – relief from the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu (public domain image – Wikipedia “Late Bronze Age Collapse”and “Sea Peoples”)

(7) BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE

Styled as World War Zero by some historians.

The Bronze Age Collapse – or more precisely Late Bronze Age Collapse – was the widespread societal collapse of Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization in the 12th century BC, argued to be worse than the collapse of the western Roman Empire or even the worst case of societal collapse in human history.

Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece – the Greeks of the Trojan War – were among the most famous casualties, ushering in the Greek Dark Ages for a few centuries.

However, they are among about a dozen ancient civilizations that collapsed or declined – foremost among them the Hittite Empire that collapsed in Anatolia, while Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Assyrians clung on by the skin of their teeth, in decline or weakened. “Almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

I don’t know much about the finer details of the Bronze Age Collapse, but then neither does anyone else ultimately, as it remains the subject of argument and theory.

However, war is often cited as the main culprit, typically at the hands of the mysterious and to some extent still hypothetical “Sea Peoples”, seaborne raiders to rival the more usual horse blitzkrieg of nomadic herding tribes in civilization-crushing effect.

I certainly think war played a major part, hence this special mention, although am less clear whether it was the cause of the collapse or an effect – with the latter involving the Sea Peoples and others effectively moving into the void left by collapsing civilizations.

Interestingly, the Sea Peoples are proposed to include a number of ethnic groups – one of which is identified as the ancestors of the Philistines faced by the Israelites in the Bible. The Israelites themselves rose in the vaccuum left behind by the retreat or collapse of Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians – so that the Bible itself has origins in the Bronze Age Collapse, as does that other landmark of western culture, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Apart from Sea Peoples and war, other causes are proposed for the collapse – political fragmentation or rebellion within societies, drought or famine, natural disasters such as earthquakes or volcanic eruption, plagues, and the collapse of trade for manufacture of bronze (or the emergence of iron among adversaries).

Or a combination of all of these – “the civilizations could have endured any one disaster, but not multiple at the same time, especially not when they were feeding into one another”.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Chairman Mao Zedong proclaiming the People’s Republic of China on 1 October, 1949, colorized (public domain image)

(6) CHINESE REVOLUTION & CIVIL WAR (1911-1949)

That’s right – it’s the other definitive communist revolution, and arguably the true model of communist revolution or insurgency in the Global South.

The fourth of the four revolutions I rank as the god-tier revolutions of history and include in my special mentions for my top ten wars from sheer scale and impact – but also in this case as it was more civil war than revolution.

It naturally follows on from my special mention for the Russian Revolution and Civil War, not least because of the role Soviet assistance played in it but also because it replayed many of the same beats, albeit over a much more protracted period – in at least two phases, or three if you count the initial warlord period.

Of course, the original Chinese Revolution – of which both the two largest warring parties in the civil war, the Communists and the Nationalists or Kuomingtang (KMT) saw themselves as the true successors – the one led by Sun Yat-sen (or Sun Yuxian) that overthrew the Qing dynasty as China’s last imperial dynasty, was in 1911-1912 and hence preceded the Russian Revolution in 1917.

However, as was often the case with the collapse of central state authority in China (or the mandate of heaven), it devolved into the usual competing warlords or warring states from 1916-1927 – in an exotic multi-party battle royale that might be compared to the Russian Civil War at the height of all its chaotic glory.

It even had foreign intervention, albeit on a smaller scale than the Russian Civil War. The Soviets assisted the main warring party, the Nationalists seeking to reunify China under their Republic, as the Soviets saw them as the necessary prelude to socialism. Intriguingly, the Germans also assisted the Nationalists – and more intriguingly, that assistance continued from the warlord period to the first genuine phase of the Chinese Civil War, by both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

It is intriguing to ponder how world history might have turned out if Nazi Germany had continued to support Nationalist China, but they swapped to the foreign power that ominously loomed over China to exploit its weakness and ultimately was the one to intervene most decisively of all – Japan.

The warlord period is generally considered to have transitioned to the first phase of the Chinese Civil War proper from 1927 “when Chiang Kai-shek led the Socialist-Nationalist two thirds of the KMT’s military forces against Wang Jingwei’s Socialist-Communist/Internationalist third…the first time in the Republic’s history that two organisations with sufficient bases of popular support and military-economic power to potentially unify the country had fought one another”.

Wang Jingwei was subsequently eclipsed by the new Chinese communist leader who became virtually synonymous with the Chinese Civil War and for whom Chinese communist ideology was named – Mao.

However, the Chinese communists did not do too well in this first phase, with effective control of less than a twentieth of the population (compared to the third controlled by Chiang’s Nationalists) and were on the brink of complete extinction. “Their doom was, historians agree, imminent and inevitable” – until they were effectively saved by the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937.

The Japanese had already indirectly given the Chinese communists some much needed reprieve with their invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In an episode which also showed that some of the warlord period chaos lived on in the Nationalists, the Xian Incident, two of Chiang’s generals kidnapped him to force him to form a united front with the communists against the Japanese.

Chiang subsequently reneged on the united front with renewed hostilities against the communists but the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 forced his hand again to put those hostilities on hold for a second united front against Japan, even if both he and the communists increasingly paid lip service to it in preference to the inevitable renewal of civil war against each other.

Despite the united front, Chiang’s Nationalists bore the brunt of Japan’s war in China, which arguably dealt them their mortal wound in China’s civil war. In 1944, Japan launched its last major offensive, Operation Ichi-go – the last successful offensive by it or any Axis power towards the end of the Second World War and yet largely unknown outside specialist historians – which severely weakened Chiang’s forces (as well as an economy increasingly ravaged by hyper-inflation). In general, “the demands of fighting the war essentially destroyed the KMT’s capacity to function as an administration”.

The civil war resumed “as soon as it became apparent that Japanese defeat was imminent” (at the hands of the Americans) “with the communists gaining the upper hand in the second phase of the war from 1945 to 1949, generally referred to as the Chinese Communist Revolution”.

This again saw foreign intervention along predictable Cold War lines – the Soviets on the side of the Communists and the Americans on the side of the Nationalists.

The Americans were notoriously cautious in their intervention – subsequently giving rise to accusations of “losing” China and communist infiltration of the American government. What is interesting is that the Soviets were equally cautious in their own intervention, perhaps from Stalin’s intuition that a united communist China would be their rival in the long term. Hence the Soviets consistently urged restraint on Mao to accept the north-south partition that was all the vogue in Cold War Asia – between a Communist north and a Nationalist south.

Mao ignored this and the Communists gained control of mainland China anyway, proclaiming the People’s Republic of China. However, the Communists ultimately had to accept a residual partition of a different kind with the Nationalists retreating to the island of Taiwan to proclaim their Republic of China there, as the Communists had no means to pursue them – particularly after the US gave their naval support to Taiwan. That partition of course continued even until today, remaining as a source of tension with no armistice or treaty signed between them.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Montage of photos made during the Russian Civil War – from Wikipedia “Russian Civil War” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(5) RUSSIAN REVOLUTION & CIVIL WAR (1917-1922)

That’s right – it’s the communist revolution, as in THE communist revolution. The origin or archetype of all subsequent communist revolutions, which in turn have made the word revolution itself virtually synonymous in modern history with communist revolution.

“Civilization is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and corpses of their victims.”

I’ve included the two great eighteenth century revolutions or revolutionary wars – the wars of the American Revolution and the French Revolution – in my god-tier special mentions as wars that made the modern world.

However, they are only two of the four revolutions I rank as the god-tier revolutions of history pursuant to adding the two definitive twentieth century revolutions. I was going to reserve the latter two revolutions for my top ten revolutions but consider that they simply have too great a scale and impact, particularly in the fascinatingly convoluted civil wars fought because of them, to omit from special mentions for my top ten wars.

So following on from my special mentions for the American and French Revolutions, this is my special mention for the third of my four great revolutions or revolutionary wars – the Russian Revolution and Civil War, evolving from and overlapping with the Eastern Front of the First World War.

Whereas the American Revolution and French Revolution had been the vanguard of modern liberalism and nationalism, the Russian Revolution was the vanguard of modern Marxist socialism – literally in the ideology of its chief revolutionary Lenin, for which its strand of socialism came to be named as Marxist-Leninism.

Or in other words, communism, although technically communism was its professed theoretical end state – or rather, end-statelessness, since Marxism proclaimed its ‘temporary’ authoritarian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, would wither away.

However, the Marxist authoritarian state proved much more durable than Marx had anticipated, particularly the new communist government or Soviet Union that emerged from the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

It also proved to provoke much more fervor, both for and against it, in a manner similar to Marx’s opiate of the masses, religion. I sometimes like to quip about the four great evangelizing or missionary religions in history – Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxist-Leninism. And of the other three, the Bolshevik revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution and Civil War most closely resembled the militancy of Islam – as observed by Paul Johnson, although Johnson also thought Lenin even closer to Jean Calvin, “with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance”.

It tends to be forgotten that there were in fact two revolutions in the Russian Revolution, resulting in one of my pet peeves of history with the popular misconception that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian monarchy of the Tsar.

They did not. The first revolution or February Revolution did, instituting the new Provisional Government in the style of a parliamentary republic and closer to the liberalism or nationalism of the American and French Revolutions.

What the Bolsheviks overthrew, in the second revolution or October Revolution that is generally remembered as the Russian Revolution, was the first revolution’s Provisional Government – capitalizing (heh) on that Government’s single biggest weakness, the continuation of Russia’s war effort in the First World War.

Surprisingly, the Bolsheviks did this by mostly bloodless coup – at least at the outset. The resistance to their revolution and their reaction to that resistance proved very bloody indeed. The new Bolshevik regime, which ultimately became the Soviet Union, pulled out of the world war but fought a far-flung civil war on an even larger scale. It always seemed to me ironic that Russian war-weariness from the casualties of the First World War played such a large part in the revolution led by the Bolsheviks, only for the Bolsheviks to fight a civil war which involved even more casualties in the former Russian empire than the First World War.

And it’s that civil war which is particularly fascinating, albeit incredibly convoluted, as far removed from the more straightforward civil wars fought (at least largely) between two opposing sides. Instead, the Russian Civil War was what Wikipedia describes as a “multi-party civil war” and what I would describe as an all-out battle royale or pile-up.

Sure, there were the two largest combatants – the Bolsheviks or Reds, and the so-called Whites, “the loosely allied forces” in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Beyond the opposing Red and White Armies, there were the Blacks or anarchist forces, particularly those led by Makhno in Ukraine, and the non-ideological Greens or nationalist forces. Not to mention a Blue Army in there somewhere, rival militant socialists, village peasant factions, Baltic and Caucasian nationalist separatists, Poland, and more.

And beyond them were the foreign forces – the Allies intervening for the Whites or against the Red Army, “whose primary goal was re-establishing the Eastern Front of World War 1” and the Central Powers, chiefly Germany, intervening for the Reds or “rivalling the Allied intervention with the main goal of retaining the territory they had received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia”.

While the Allied intervention extended to a dozen or more nations depending on how you reckon them, it is another one of my pet peeves of history when people, usually left wing, bring this up as an indictment of capitalist states going all-out attempting to crush “the revolution”. While the Allies no doubt hoped to reopen the Eastern Front and therefore opposed the Reds, they were even less united than the Whites they ostensibly supported, and with a few notable exceptions never committed forces on any decisive scale – mostly more in the nature of a few guys as advisors or sitting around docks to protect them or the materiel they had shipped to their former Russian ally.

Ultimately the Bolsheviks or Reds won against all other combatants, among other things from their greater unity and fanatical purpose, as well as a greater ability to make promises and break them later – particularly the longstanding ability of communists to stab anarchists in the back. “Some historians have determined that the Black Army saved the entire war from the Whites at several points…However, they were betrayed three separate times by the Bolsheviks and defeated finally when they could turn their full force onto them”

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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