Word of the Sumerian war cart probably worked its way across the Caucasus.
There, the steppe peoples had learned to domesticate horses. The horses weren’t strong enough to ride, but they could pull carts. The steppe people then developed a specialized war cart. It was light, had two spoked wheels, low wicker-work sides, and a floor made of criss-crossing strips of leather.
The steppe nomads had already developed a composite bow, probably because trees were scarce, and trees providing good bow wood were scarcer. Their bow had a thin strip of wood in the center, but the back was a think layer of animal sinew and the belly was strips of horn. These parts were all glued together and covered with bark or leather and lacquered to keep dampness out. A bow of this type was more elastic than a wooden bow, so it could be much shorter than a wooden bow shooting the same length of arrow. It was so elastic, in fact, that it could be made to curve away from the belly when unstrung.
Protecting their herds from predators and their camps from enemies required a lot of long-range shooting, so the nomads developed very powerful bows and excellent archers.
But predators like wolves and leopards were fast-moving beasts. It wasn’t until they had their fast, light chariots that the herdsmen hunters could really deal with the hostile fauna effectively. They soon found that what worked on animals worked on human enemies, too. The combination of chariot and composite bow rapidly spread through all the Iranian language speakers of the steppe. The new weapons system led to more far-ranging wars, and tribes began to push each other into new territories. Early in the second millennium B.C., the charioteers from the steppes began to invade the settled lands. They drove east into central Asia and from there into China, where they founded the first historical dynas-ties. The Aryans, an Iranian people, galloped over the deserts of Iran and through the mountain passes to the Indus Valley, where they wiped out one of the world’s three literate civilizations. Other Iranian charioteers, the Mitanni, invaded Anatolia, where they established a kingdom. Some of the Mitanni mixed with the Hittites, who had invaded Anatolia previously, and others moved into Syria, where they made themselves the leaders of the Hurrian people already there.
The Mitanni were acknowledged to be masters of horse training. Among the correspondence of the Hittite kings is a letter to a Mitannian seeking information on the subject. The military success of the Iranian charioteers was so striking that all the peoples of the east Mediterranean shore adopted chariot warfare. Only the Egyptians, happy in their isolation, seemingly protected by their flanking deserts, remained innocent of chariot warfare. That is, until the Hyksos arrived.
After conquering the Hyksos, the Egyptians followed them into what became Palestine and Syria, conquering the cities and nomad tribes of that area.
Egypt’s charioteers were the Pharaoh’s striking force, but he had infantry spearmen and archers to hold the enemy in place. The archers introduced a new tactic: volleying on command. The impact of thousands of arrows striking simultaneously proved to be almost as disconcerting to enemies as a chariot charge. The Egyptian move into Asia brought these African warriors into conflict with another rising power, the Hittite Empire. The clash of the Hittites and Egyptians at Meggido — Armageddon in Hebrew — became legendary in the Near East, a kind of “mother of all battles.” Tactically, it was a Hittite victory, although Egyptian inscriptions try to make it otherwise. Strategically, it was a draw, as neither empire advanced any farther.
Chariots were also used in central and western Europe, where the terrain was much less favorable. Forests covered much of the area, and the Balkans, Greece and Italy were mountainous. Farther north, marshes covered wide areas, forests were huge and dense, and wide rivers cut through the land. Chariots seemed to have been used by European nobles to carry them to the scene of a battle, after which they would dismount to fight. Homer’s The Iliad is full of descriptions of this kind of fighting. In Cyprus, a large and largely deforested island that was a kind of Mycenean backwater in classical times, chariots were still used in the old way during the Greek-Persian Wars. And in Britain, the Romans encountered British chiefs still using chariots long after even the Gauls had abandoned them. The British chariots had sides but no front walls. The Britons would run out on the yoke poles to throw their javelins at the Romans.
As a tactic, that wasn’t very effective, but the British nobles delighted in showing off their athletic prowess. By that time, the rest of the world had abandoned chariots for everything but triumphal parades and races.
The chariot was gradually abandoned because people had learned to breed horses that were bigger and stronger and capable of carrying men on their backs.
When warriors learned to shoot from horseback, they effectively doubled the firepower of their armies. Instead of two horses pulling one chariot containing two men (and only one an archer), cavalry decided that the same number of horses and the same number of men provided twice as many archers. And a few centuries later, a very simple invention gave cavalry even more striking power, as we’ll see in Chapter 7.
Chapter 7
More Horses: The Stirrup
The Goths had been a pain for the last few years, Valens thought. In 365, Count Procopius had hired an army of Gothic mercenaries and occupied Constantinople. He then declared himself to be emperor. That ended in 366 when the newly crowned Valens defeated Procopius and his Goths, but 10 years later, the Romans allowed the whole Gothic nation to enter the Empire as refugees. The Goths had repaid that generosity by pillaging all through the Balkans.
But now, in 378, Valens was going to solve the Gothic problem once and for all.
In the Gothic camp, there were equally hard feelings about the Romans.
The Goths had come to the Romans as refugees, fleeing terrible invaders from the east. Goths and Romans had been peaceful neighbors for 100 years, but, when they appeared on the border, the Romans let the Goths in only after they gave up their weapons. Roman officials sexually abused their women and children and reneged on their promises of food. The Goths had no choice but to go to war. In the last century, there were occasional border skirmishes, Romans sometimes intervened in Gothic affairs, and Goths occasionally fought in Roman wars, as in the recent revolt of Procopius against the emperor. But in general, the two peoples had been friendly. All that changed when the Romans took advantage of the Goths’ weaknesses.
In spite of the modern stereotype, the Goths were not howling barbarians.
They were all Christians, converted by an Arian Christian bishop who had translated the Bible into Gothic. They were about as well educated as the average Roman; many were literate and some were fluent in Latin and Greek as well as Gothic. Jordanes, a Gothic historian, is one of our main sources of information on this era.