schema

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/04/24/collections-raising-carthaginian-armies-part-ii-the-african-backbone/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-raising-carthaginian-armies-part-ii-the-african-backbone

https://acoup.blog/?p=34840

This is the second part (I) of our series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. As we discussed last time, while Carthage has an unfair reputation for being an ‘un-military’ society, its military system was one of the highest performing in the ancient Mediterranean, able to produce vast and effective armies waging war on multiple fronts for prolonged periods.

Last time we surveyed the components of that military and then took a closer look at the role of Carthaginian citizen soldiers. What we noted was that Carthaginian citizen soldiers formed an important part of Carthage’s armies early in its history, and in its last decade, but at its height were generally not include in ‘expeditionary’ Carthaginian armies. I supposed that this is because Carthaginian citizen soldiers had their service restricted to Carthage’s North African homeland – because almost every time we gain visibility into Carthage’s wars there, we see citizen soldiers – but the evidence for this is extremely limited. What matters for us is that by the third century, Carthaginian citizens no longer make up a significant amount of Carthage’s military force outside of North Africa (though a handful still serve as officers).

That of course leads to the question: if Carthaginians weren’t the bedrock foundation of Carthage’s armies, who was? And this week, we’ll get to that answer, looking at the forces Carthage drew from North Africa. Our sources term them mercenaries, but we have more than enough reason to doubt that.

But first, as always, raising large armies of mercenaries, subject conscripts, vassal warlords and allies is expensive! If you too want to help me invade Italy with a multi-ethnic army of diverse origins in a doomed effort to stop the Roman Republic, you can help by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Conscripting Africans

Returning briefly to our schematic of the Carthaginian army in 215, the second largest single component of Carthage’s roughly 160,000 men under arms in that year were 50,000 African infantry, joined by at least 11,000 African and Numidian cavalry. We’ll discuss the Numidians next week for reasons that will be clear then. But it is clear that the backbone of Carthage’s armies were these African infantrymen.

Our Latin sources (like Livy) term these fellows Afri, ‘Africans,’ while our Greek sources, like Diodorus and Polybius, will call generally them λίβυες, ‘Libyans,’ though we ought to be clear here that most of these men are coming from what today is Tunisia, rather than Libya. At the end of the First Punic War, Polybius notes that these men made up the largest part of Carthage’s army, returning in defeat from Sicily (Polyb. 1.67.7) and as noted above they are present in substantial numbers in Carthage’s armies in the Second Punic War. It is hardly the first time for these fellows, though: North Africans are reported in Carthage’s armies from the Battle of Himera on forward.

I should note, I am going to pretty consistently call these fellows from here on in ‘Africans’ or ‘North Africans.’ First off, it is very clear that when our Greek sources say λίβυες, they mean the same thing as our Latin sources saying Afri (indeed, often in cases where Livy is just straight up translating passages of Polybius with only modest embroidering, the equivalence is clear); these are just two different languages’ terms for the same people. But I think ‘Africans’ may be more helpful here for the modern reader for two reasons: first, most of Carthage’s African infantry does not come from the territory of the modern country of Libya; most of them come from what today is Tunisia, so one doesn’t want to give the incorrect sense that these troops are ‘Libyan’ in the modern sense of the country of Libya (some of them are, but most are not). Second, I think ‘African’ also gives a sense of the wider notion of these fellows as primarily being from Africa – some are indigenous Berbers, some are Phoenician settlers, some are of mixed heritage and – to go by recent DNA studies – some are likely settlers of Aegean extraction, who have substantially adopted Punic (=Phoenician) culture. So they’re all Africans in the sense that they live in Africa (both in the modern sense of the continent and the ancient sense of the region around Carthage), but a relatively diverse group.

Our reception of these troops is, alas, I think quite badly bent by Polybius who – in driving some of his own arguments – allows some critical misconceptions to fester in his writing. Polybius, as a source, is usually relatively trustworthy, but while Polybius will almost never lie to you, he will often allow you to believe things that aren’t strictly speaking true – Polybius is a master of ‘lying with the truth,’ as it were and this is one case.

We’ve actually discussed this before, but to recap briefly: Polybius describes Carthage’s African troops as μισθοφόροι, misthophoroi, which has a broad meaning (‘wage-bearing, wage-receiving’) and a narrow meaning (‘mercenary’) and here, as in a few other places, Polybius is happy to be technically correct with the first meaning and then let the reader assume the second meaning (which is wrong). That’s because Polybius seems to be – we don’t have all of his work, but this seems to be a thread of it – arguing for the superiority of citizen soldiers over mercenaries in an effort to get the Greeks of his own day to reform their own militaries to rely more on the former than the latter. Carthage thus provides an opportunity for Polybius to drive his ‘mercenaries are bad’ argument and he does so, fudging the terminology as necessary.

Because Polybius is generally so trusted, that has led generations of scholars to carelessly assume that Carthage’s armies – and their North African components – were mercenary in nature, but that assumption is broadly wrong.¹

Instead, Diodorus Siculus gives us a remarkable picture of Carthaginian recruitment in the early 400s, describing Carthaginian musters in 410 and 406. In 410 (Diod. Sic. 13.44.6), the Carthaginian muster has three phases: first there is mercenary recruitment in Spain – signaled by the word ξενολογεῖν, xenologein ‘to recruit foreigners.’ Then Carthaginian citizens are mustered with καταγράφειν, katagraphein, ‘to write down, register, record.’ If that seems an odd way to muster someone, it has the same basic meaning and etymology as our own ‘conscript’ which comes from con+scriptus, ‘to write together.’² We actually use the same idioms, we’ve just forgotten that we do: someone who is conscripted is written down (in a list of soldiers), someone who ‘enrolls’ or is ‘enrolled’ in the military is being added to the roll (list) of names. So we would say Carthaginian soldiers here are being enrolled. Finally, Carthage’s North African subjects are mustered with ἐπιλέγειν, epilegein, ‘picked out, called by name.’

That last word is striking, because that isn’t a process of taking volunteers: the North African troops are being picked, in this case by Carthage’s generals. In the muster of 406 (Diod. Sic. 13.80.1-4), Diodorus shifts his vocabulary a bit and this time it is the Africans who are katagraphein‘d into the army, this time explicitly by Carthaginian generals who head out into non-Carthaginian North African subject communities to conscript soldiers. In short these soldiers are paid conscripts, serving (as we’ll see) long terms, their recruitment presumably part of the deal Carthage imposed on subject North African communities.

I should note that older scholarship³ often supposed that perhaps this system was later superceded, that Carthage may have stopped conscripting Africans and instead imposed harsher taxes and started hiring mercenaries. This would make Polybius right, but the problem is that no source says this and as noted before, it isn’t necessary either: Polybius is generally slippery with the term misthophoros. As a result, modern scholars tend to reject this argument and instead view Carthage’s African infantry in the third century (that is, during the Punic and Mercenary Wars) as paid conscripts rather than volunteer mercenaries.⁴ And I think that is probably correct, that these are troops levied from Carthage’s North African dependencies – probably with a mix of incentives and compulsion – who are then paid for their continued service and loyalty.

In terms of the makeup of these communities, they were clearly a mix: some of these are Phoenician colonial foundations, while others were indigenous Libyan towns, whose population would have been broadly Berber. In terms of the incoming settlers, recent genetic work has suggested that Phoenician colonization drew very widely, with Punic settlements often showing a lot of Sicilian and Aegean (read: Greek) population in the mix too and actually very little Punic ancestry. That latter point puts me a bit on guard, because our sources are very clear that they understand a lot of these populations to be Phoenician (=Punic) by culture and descent and to have cultural and familial ties back to the Levant and Syria and the material culture archaeology seems to confirm this. More work is clearly going to be necessary here: the c. 200 remains analyzed in the above-linked study is a big sample size for this kind of work, but could easily be thrown off by something as simple as different burial practices. That said, we know there was mixing between the indigenous Berber and settler-colonial populations and our sources sometimes pick out specific groups as being ‘Liby-Phoenician’ (λιβυφοίνικες in Greek; libyphoenices in Latin), ethnically blended groups mixing Phoenician and Berber heritage.

Terms of Service

Naturally, given our sources, we don’t have a great window into what the ‘terms’ of this military service were, but there are a few things we can sketch out. First, it seems like Carthage equips these soldiers out of its own stores. Appian (Pun. 80) gives the startlingly figure that prior to the Third Punic War (so Carthage has already been stripped of most of its empire by this point!), Carthage turned out 200,000 military panoplies (that is, sets of equipment); the number is surely exaggerated, but even a tenth of that number would imply large state armories in Carthage for maintaining its armies which – given that Carthaginian citizens don’t really serve outside of Africa – must be intended for this African ‘backbone’ force. It may also explain why, when Carthaginian citizens do serve, they seem indistinguishable from Carthage’s African levies (e.g. Plut. Tim. 27.5): they’re being equipped out of the same armories. So if you want to know what these guys carried, you can largely lean on the previous post for our evidence for Carthaginian citizen troops.

Mostly, this means that Carthage’s African troops served as heavy infantry, like Carthaginian citizens did. That’s certainly how Hannibal uses them: they are his heaviest infantry and form the backbone of his army. It also explains why they could loot Roman heavy infantry equipment and eventually reequip along those lines without a serious change in how they fought (Polyb. 3.114.1; Livy 22.46.4). Beyond that, it is almost impossible to give much detail to their equipment. Plutarch describes the Carthaginian battle line in 341 as having leukaspides, ‘white aspides,’ implying their shields were akin to the Greek aspis (round, dished) which fits with some of the very limited representational evidence we have, but perhaps with covers in hide rather than bronze (Plut. Tim. 27.4; 28.1). Later, Appian describes the Carthaginians during the Third Punic War as having thureoi (= the Roman scutum), so they may have switched to the Gallic/Roman oval shield at some point (App. Pun. 93). But on both cases these writers are not anything like eyewitnesses and give few details, so they could also both be wrong.

Soldiers from Libya also had a reputation as highly capable skirmish troops using javelins and we see hints of this too. Hannibal has a group of soldiers whose origin is never clarified, Polybius refers to as lonchophoroi (λογχοφόροι), lonche-bearers. This term has caused no end of problems, because W.R. Paton translates it as ‘pikemen’ (frustratingly un-fixed in the revised Paton, Walbank and Habicht (2010-2012) translation) leading a range of modern writers, especially popular ones, to misunderstand and imagine these fellows as Hellenistic-style sarisa infantry. But the lonche (λόγχη) is not a sarisa; the Greeks use this word very broadly to describe non-Greek spears, but most often to indicate kinds of dual-purpose thrusting-and-throwing weapons used by lighter infantry and cavalry. Arrian uses the word of the spears wielded by the Tyrians – fellow Phoenicians! – fighting Alexander at Tyre (Arr. Anab. 2.23.5) and Appian reports the Carthaginians preparing lonche for the Third Punic War (App. Pun. 93).

So these aren’t pikes – Carthage never utilized a Hellenistic-style pike formation – but rather a lighter dual-use spear. And let me just repeat that because I encounter this misconception all the time, so for the folks in the back: Carthage never utilized a Hellenistic-style pike formation and indeed, Carthage’s own tradition of close-order heavy infantry may also not have been a direct imitation or development from the Greek hoplite tradition either (the Greeks were hardly the only culture to stumble on the idea of ‘close-order infantry with spears and round shields‘). And indeed, if one looks even a little closely, the lonchophoroi are clearly a light infantry formation, generally deployed in a mixed group with Hannibal’s other elite light infantry, his Balearian slingers. We also get a reference to “light armed Balearians and Africans” at the Battle of Baecula with a different Carthaginian army, suggesting this sort of light infantry pairing may have been something of a standard (Livy 27.18.7).

So while most African infantry in Carthaginian service served as armored heavy infantry fighting in close-order, a small subset served as elite light infantry using lighter spears and often deployed alongside slingers. In this sense, the lonchophoroi may have filled a very similar role to Rome’s own velites: an integrated light-infantry javelin force that might scout or screen the main heavy infantry force. Hannibal’s combined force of Balearians and lonchophoroi at Trebia was 8,000, compared to probably something like 12,000 African ‘heavies,’ so there might have been something like 2 or 3 African ‘heavies’ for each light lonchophoros, which is quite similar to the Roman legion’s ratio of 2.5 heavy infantrymen (hastati, principes, triarii) to each veles.

Once recruited and equipped, these fellows evidently stayed in service for some time, perhaps for the duration of the campaign for which they were raised. They were probably gathered in Carthage itself to be marshaled and equipped. Notably, Polybius tells us that the families and possessions of the Carthaginian army returning from Sicily were initially waiting in Carthage itself (Polyb. 1.66), so it seems like these troops might leave their families in Carthage while out on campaign.

It’s also clear these soldiers were paid, though we don’t know the pay rates. What we do know, again from Polybius, is that like other mercenaries, most of their pay – their misthos (wages) as distinct from their sitos/sitonion/sitometria (maintenance pay) – seems to have been due at discharge, at the end of a campaign. That was, indeed, the problem that Carthage slammed into at the end of the First Punic War which led to the Mercenary War: the war being over, the arrears of their army suddenly came due at a moment when Carthage itself was basically bankrupt. That in turn might explain the willingness of African communities to put up with this conscription regime: at the end of each campaign, their men would normally come back with a whole bunch of cash in their pockets, essentially allowing each individual community to ‘recapture’ part of their tribute as it re-entered the community as settled misthos. That in turn, as Dexter Hoyos notes, might well have exacerbated the revolt against Carthage after the First Punic War: not only were the African troops incensed at not getting paid, but their home communities also felt cheated out of this economic bargain.⁵

What is clear is that African heavy infantry, supported probably in most cases by light infantry lonchophoroi were the backbone of Carthaginian armies. Even when Carthaginian armies are composed primarily of Iberian or Gallic auxiliaries, allies or mercenaries, they are constructed around an African ‘backbone,’ providing generals a reliable and loyal army component as the core of their army.

In battle, the Africans are often deployed in reserved positions. Hannibal tends (at both Trebia and Cannae) to put his Africans on the flanks, where their heavier formation provided strong structure to his army, but also where they avoided the brunt of the casualties. We’re told that Hannibal’s losses at Trasimene were concentrated among his Gallic troops (Polyb. 3.85.5) and at Cannae he evidently exposes his Gauls and Iberians and most of his losses (70%!) at that battle were taken by his Gallic troops, with the rest of the losses concentrated among his Iberians (Polyb. 3.117.6). At the Metaurus, Hasdrubal aims to win by attacking with his Iberian troops, holding his Africans in reserve and with his Gauls deployed simply to hold a hill on his left, suggesting both a lack of trust in his Gallic troops, but also a desire to avoid losses among his Africans (Livy 27.48, but see Lazenby (1978)). At Zama, Hannibal places his Iberians, Gauls and Ligurians (along with his skirmishers and elephants) in the front line, fresh African and Carthaginian troops in the second line and his own veterans in the final line (Polyb. 15.11; Livy 30.33). There’s a pretty clear pattern here in which Carthaginian generals aim to expend their Gauls first, their Iberians second and their Africans last.⁶

Carthage’s African troops are also frequently decisive, one way or the other. They are the heaviest infantry component in Carthage’s armies; our sources lead us to understand that they are as heavily equipped as any other kind of heavy infantry (hoplite, legionary, phalangite) in the Mediterranean at the time. Looking at our army figures from last time, we can also see that they are present in significant numbers in basically every Carthaginian field force during the Second Punic War. Polybius likewise reports that Africans made up the largest component of Carthage’s army at the end of the First Punic War, alongside Iberians, Gauls, Ligurians, Balearians and some Greeks (1.66.7).

It is hard to precisely assess the combat performance of these African troops, because they’re always deployed in mixed units. Certainly, as noted before, during Carthage’s Sicilian Wars, they seem to often be defeated by Greek hoplites, but equally – as noted – Carthage in that narrative seems to almost relentlessly ‘fail upward’ suggesting that perhaps Carthaginian (and thus African) military performance may have been somewhat better than our Greek sources let on. During the First Punic War, the Romans win nearly all of the open field engagements, but we never get a really detailed account of any of these battles, so it is hard to know what components of the Carthaginian army broke first.

During the Second Punic War, however, we do get some detailed battle narratives and what we see is that Carthage’s African infantry appear to be able to hold their own against Roman heavy infantry – quite clearly the best available at the time – pretty well. When Carthaginian armies are defeated, the Africans are generally the last to break; when they win, the Africans are often the key elements doing envelopment or holding key positions. On balance, then, I would say Carthage’s North African troops appear to be quite capable heavy infantry.

What Carthage doesn’t seem to have had was enough of them. We noted last time that at Carthage’s peak mobilization in 215, they had about 50,000 African infantry under arms. Michael Taylor in Soldiers & Silver (2020) looks more broadly at reported Carthaginian armies and estimated populations and concludes (and I think this is probably right) that this figure, around 50,000, probably represented the maximum sustainable mobilization from the North African population available to Carthage. That’s not bad – it’s far more than any Greek polis could manage – but hardly enough to rumble with alliances of Greek states (as in Sicily) or the major powers of the Mediterranean (like Pyrrhus or Rome in the Third Century) and so it would have to be supplemented.

And supplemented it was! And we’ll get to how in the next installment when we look at what we might term Carthaginian ‘vassals.’

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Posted by Bret Devereaux

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https://acoup.blog/?p=34774

Hey folks! Fireside this week; next week we’ll be back to seperating out the components of Carthaginian armies, looking at the real backbone of those armies, which are Carthage’s North African subjects.

But for this week’s musing, I wanted to talk a bit about how different historians approach our craft when the evidence is both limited and hostile and Carthage provides a good opportunity to do so. As we noted last week, the evidence for Carthage – its armies, politics, society, all of it – is quite difficult. The literary evidence that we have for Carthage is both very limited (relatively few ancient authors say much about them) and also quite hostile: Carthage’s history was written by its enemies. We know that pro-Carthaginian histories (notably that of Philinus of Agrigentum) existed, but their work does not survive to us. So for any given event or institution, we often only have one source (or at least one real source in cases where we have Polybius and several other authors whose source is also Polybius) and so not only is that source is almost invariably hostile to Carthage, we have no reliable other source against which to compare.

Now in other situations where this is the case – for instance in Greek treatments of the Achaemenids – we have a backup option, which is that we may have archaeology or shorter, more fragmented sources (epigraphy, papyri, temple records) against which to ‘check’ our literary tradition. But here, Carthage gives us very little as well. We have some inscriptions from Carthage, but they’re very few and quite short and limited. Likewise, archaeology has certainly confirmed the presence of Carthage and its Punic material culture, but it struggles to answer a lot of the questions we have.

So we have sources, which are to some degree unreliable, but which we are generally unable to ‘check’ with other kinds of evidence, but those sources are all we have. What is a historian to do?

In practice, there tend to be two responses and Carthage is also convenient as a demonstration here because those approaches can be neatly summed up in the English-language scholars who exemplify them: Dexter Hoyos and Nathan Pilkington.

The first approach – employed by Dexter Hoyos, I’d argue – is to assume that the sources are basically accurate unless you have reason to suppose otherwise. So assuming what Diodorus is saying is not absurd, we assume it happened and often even when what Herodotus or Diodorus is saying seems a bit ‘out there’ (like the size of the armies at the Battle of Himera (480)), we assume the event probably occurred, if perhaps in a more reasonable way (the armies being smaller, for instance). Implausible things (the Carthaginians attacking Syracuse in 480 in coordination with the Achaemenid invasion of Greece) can be discarded, but if there isn’t a good reason to doubt something, then we do not doubt it.

This approach is often married to a ‘positivist’ historical approach, which aims to establish objective facts in so far as they can be nailed down (and less interested what it views as interpretation). At its worst, it can be ‘under-theorized’ – that is, failing to think critically or analytically enough about sources or cause-and-effect and just presenting facts – though I would hardly level that accusation at Hoyos, who is well aware his sources are not always to be trusted.

The alternative, of course is the reverse: rather than assuming the sources are trustworthy, unless proven otherwise, the sources are assumed to be untrustworthy unless confirmed by some other sort of evidence or reasoning. This is, I think, fairly close to Nathan Pilkington’s approach in The Carthaginian Empire (2019). To return to the question of the Battle of Himera (480), Nathan Pilkington, well, questions the existence of the Battle of Himera and indeed contends that there may not have been a meaningful Carthaginian presence on Sicily at all in the early fifth century, because our only evidence that there was are these motivated, untrustworthy Greek writers.

There is a risk, in this kind of approach, for the resulting history to be, in a way, over-theorized. After all, if the sources are untrustworthy, they must be replaced by something. Ideally, they might be replaced by archaeology (this is Pilkington’s preference) and that can be valuable, but as we’ve discussed time and again, archaeology often cannot answer our most important questions. The first danger is that over-theorizing: the ‘blank spaces’ created by discounting the sources are in turn filled with theoretical frameworks, how it ‘must have been,’ which risk ending up as houses of cards: it is one thing to build a theory which fits the available evidence, but another thing to build a theory into the absence of such evidence (Pilkington, I should note, largely avoids this pitfall). But the alternative danger is the ‘council of despair’ – that despite having sources which comment on a period, the historian essentially throws up their hands and declares that nothing can really be known (or at least very little) – whole chunks of history consigned to dark ages created entirely by critique. Naturally, the positivist-inclined historians will rebel against this determination to declare that nothing can be known when there is evidence right there.

For my part, I think readers can guess that I am closer to the Hoyos end of this spectrum than the Pilkington. My tolerance for yawning uncertainty is fairly low, which is why I steadfastly refuse to work on basically anything in the Roman world before 264 when Polybius at last lets me put at least one foot firmly on the ground. But once there, my tendency is to assume the sources are broadly right unless I have a good reason to suppose they’re not. That isn’t to say Pilkington’s book is bad – I don’t think it is, even though I often disagree with it – I think it is valuable precisely because it overturns a bunch of apple carts. It is good and useful to send historians holding the consensus view scrambling to defend it – more often than not they succeed, but the result is a stronger, more clearly reasoned position.

But I think there is a real risk in attempting to read ‘against the current’ of one’s sources, which can become a sort of motivated reasoning. To take another example, I find N.L. Overtoom’s effort in Reign of Arrows (2020) to reframe Antiochus III’s victory over the Parthians as something closer to defeat or at least a clever feint and retreat by the Parthians, when the sources – admittedly, fragmentary and difficult – seem quite clear that they understand Antiochus III to have won a great victory and also we see Parthia brought back under Seleucid control (albeit not for very long) after the campaign. It’s an effort to take a theoretical construct (Parthian feigned flight as both a tactical and operational principle) and apply it against the sources. This, I think, we cannot do unless we have some really good reason to do so (like some clear evidence that Parthia’s position remained strong afterwards; they were vassalized, so evidently it didn’t).

But sometimes some suspicion about the sources is warranted. As I noted in last week’s post, there is an odd pattern in our sources where – up until Polybius kicks in and we have more reliable sources – Carthage seems to only ever lose battles and yet somehow Carthaginian power seems to keep expanding. One is left wondering not if the Greek victories over Carthaginian armies are fake (I don’t think they are) but rather if some Carthaginian victories have perhaps been forgotten or de-emphasized in the retelling.

In either case, there is no sure solution here. Momentum has been building for a while for scholars to be more skeptical – in some cases, extremely skeptical – of our Greek language sources when they discuss non-Greek cultures, especially ones (Persians, Parthians, Phoenicians) they view largely as enemies, an approach which has value if just to act as a ‘check’ on the rest of us (and often more than that). On the other hand, there is a strong pressure towards positivism in publication: no one wants an introductory textbook that just says, “we don’t know” on every page and folks buying books also want to be told what was, rather than what could not be known. I suspect as a result the skeptical approach will remain a strong undercurrent in the scholarship, while major publications continue to be dominated by works of a somewhat more loosely positivist bent.

On to recommendations:

Starting on a bit of a pop-culture note, I really enjoyed Peter Raleigh’s take over at The Long Library on Martin Scorsese’s criminal characters particularly in the context of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Peter’s essays on film are always a treat – even though he often picks movies rather more obscure than what I tend to watch – but this is a particularly incisive look at the way Scorsese paints his criminal characters (both protagonists and villains) and how his entire body of work really explores the kind of person and the kind of thinking that leads to that sort of criminality. A particularly good read for reminding you that however charismatic some of these characters (in movies other than Killers of the Flower Moon) are, the point of these movies is almost invariably that their behavior is both socially destructive and also self-destructive.

Meanwhile, on the historical side, I’ve recommended Partial Historians before, but let me do so again, as they have just now gotten to the Gallic sack of Rome (390) and so are starting to move into a period where our sources start to be on slightly firmer ground (though hardly very firm ground even at this point). For those who missed previous recommendations, Partial Historians is a podcast with two historians (Dr. Fiona Radford and Dr. Peta Greenfield) who are moving through the history of Rome on a year-by-year basis, comparing and contrasting the sources we have for each year as they go. It’s a great way to get a sense, especially for these early years (though they are now beginning to move into what we’d call the Middle Republic – historians differ somewhat on the exact start-date for that) how tricky the sources can be. Give it a listen!

And over at Astroclassical Musings, Oliver Clarke, curatorial assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, had as his ‘coin of the week’ a fascinating Punic coin with a pegasus design on its obverse. It’s a wonderful coin and Clarke uses it as a jumping off point for a fascinating discussion of the size of the coin, where the images come from and even the modern history of how the Ashmolean ended up with this particular coin. In particular, he argues that the coin may reflect an effort by Carthage to communicate its claim to control of Sicily, having a coin with Tanit on one side – the chief goddess of Carthage – and the Sicilian Pegasus on the other.

For this week’s book review, I’ll be a bit late to the party and recommend P. Wyman, The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, 1490-1530 (2021). We’ve touched on the topic of the ‘Great Divergence’ – or as I tend to frame it, the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and The Verge serves as a remarkably readable introduction to the answers to that question. The book is organized not as a dry discussion of these factors, but as a series of nine biographical sketches – a mix of powerful leaders and ‘smaller’ people living within those changes – which serve to illustrate the key factors which Wyman sees as responsible for setting Europe on the path to reshaping the world. The result is a narrative that is engaging to read and strongly grounded, complete with the literary flourish of short passages at the beginnings and ends of the chapters that adopt an almost historical-fiction vividness, attempting to describe the feeling that a figure has of being in a given moment.

The four major shifts that Wyman sees as responsible for the Great Divergence are the specific strain of capitalism that Europe developed, the (re)emergence of states in Europe (albeit very much not yet the powerful modern administrative states of later centuries), the military revolution and finally the printing press, leading to the more rapid dissemination of ideas outside of a narrow elite. This multi-factor approach is well suited for the structure – each chapter focused on a specific person can feature a focus on different elements or blends of these four factors. It also does a good job of reflecting current scholarly consensus in a way that I think is helpful for someone looking to start understanding early modern Europe, providing a platform from which to look at more focused scholarly treatments of specific elements of these factors.

I am, of course, not without my quibbles. While the military revolution is very clearly part of Wyman’s narrative, it is somewhat less prominent than I’d have it. For instance early statements that there wasn’t a clear reason why European ships led exploration and economic predation (piracy and raiding) – Wyman prefers to focus on the economic culture that created the raiding-trading-exploring naval entrepreneurs, which is absolutely a major factor here – struck me as a bit off. The European shipbuilding tradition really did have an edge by the 1500s in producing ocean-going multipurpose vessels that could fight effectively with cannon; there’s a reason that even at vast logistical distance, local fleets of dhows, junks, atakebune and so on found they couldn’t ever quite prohibit European warships from plying their waters, even when they wanted to (a factor that is especially strong in the Indian Ocean, where local shipbuilding traditions were not well set up to exploit gunpowder artillery). From a military perspective, my advice for someone finishing The Verge would be to make T. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016) their next stop, not because they disagree (they don’t), but because the emphasis is different.

That said, Wyman also succeeds in bringing home the cost of this massive change and how disorienting and distressing it was in the moment. What we look back on as the ‘rise of Europe’ at the time felt like conditions in Europe spiraling violently out of control, culminating (outside of the chronology of Wyman’s book, but frequently mentioned) in the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion (which were as much about politics and economics as religion). And of course the ‘rise of Europe’ in much of the rest of the world took the form of sudden exposure to a rapacious, often cruel and callous system of exploitation, a process that is really only starting as Wyman’s book ends, but which he discusses very clearly. In short then, this is a great book for someone looking to initially get their feet on the ground in addressing the ‘Why Europe?’ question – and an excellent jumping off point (with notes! and bibliography!) for further study of the question.

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