What are your thoughts on Carthage and Hannibal

It's subjective of course but he's my GOAT.
1. Cannae is perfection.
2. Lake trasimene is the largest ambush in history
3. made the Romans of all people adopt the Fabian strategy
4. just convincing people to follow you over the alps to fight romans on their territory with no chance of reinforcements is pretty based

although it seems like whoever had the nubidian cavalry won all battles in the 2nd punic war so I don't know what to think of that

One of the greatest Black leaders of all time.

>doubt.jpg
and he was horrendously defeated and had to comitt suicide. Really makes you think

>be me
>"why don't the Romans send some of their spear units to support the cavalry like caesar did against pompey and BTFO of hannibal"
>i am over 2 millennia too late to tell them

I know this post is a troll but
WE WUZ PHOENISIANZ N SHIET

I recently learned Barcelona was named after his dad, which is cool.
He was a fantastic tactician and was able to use his resources really well. Carthages refusal to help out in any way basically screwed him over. The same Carthaginian government that thought not paying your mercenaries was an ok thing to do.

>Carthages refusal to help out in any way

Sending more reinforcements than his initial invasion force was refusal to help! Not to mention that none of the closest sources we have to the 2nd Punic war don't actually mention any such refusal to help Hannibal out.

what to think of it? That the guy with a cav advantage usually wins, and that's how their battles went. The Roman infantry generally did their job well in every encounter where they could set up, pushing back Hannibal's infantry so automatically that it became a part of Hannibal's core strategy that he was bound to lose the center without flanking support, and indeed the Roman center generally won most of those battles before being outmaneuvered, sometimes going as far as too push them off the battlefield. The Romans would have won Trebia for instance if their center actually came back after routing the Carthaginian center, but instead they pulled an antiochus/prince Rupert and kept chasing, leaving the triarii to fend for themselves.

To the triarii's credit, it's noted that they held out by themselves for a really long time and did surprisingly well for themselves despite being surrounded, so you know just from tidbits that the Roman infantry was superior with no other factors, but the numidians kept showing up on a flank to save the day.

No surprise then that at Zama, after the cavalry and elephants were no longer in the picture and it was just the infantry left, the Romans finally found a battle they could win, and they decisively proved that the Roman infantry was always superior and was merely outwitted in anextremely unlikely chain of bad luck for the Roman infantry, who despite showing good signs throughout the 2nd punic war, only ever had a chance to win when Hannibal's cavalry was finally out of the way.

actually he didn't have spears, he had his legionaries use their Pila as spears, which is even more absolute madman and it makes it twice as incredible that it actually worked

He had the Romans by the balls so bad that he didn't need to try anymore at some point. He was one of the absolute best at what he was doing.

Overrated.

Halted(unsurprisingly) by the superior white man.

>romans
>white

>That the guy with a cav advantage usually wins,
Until then, Rome won every single battle by having a mobile infantry, despite the inferior cavalry.
Hannibal showed them how light cavalry can be devastating.

>No surprise then that at Zama,

At Zama, Scipio did a copy paste of Hannibal's cavalry use. There he had more Numidians than Hannibal's army (Numidians at the time where split in a civl war).

Pretty cool guy, he loves elephants and doesn't afraid of anything

the reason hannibal is so famous is because he forced the Romans to take cavalry more seriously, because their infantry were doing everything they could but we're ultimately losing because of cavalry. The Roman Republic would have ended then and there if the Romans didn't switch up on the fly and try new things.

As the Roman empire continues you'll notice a gradual increase in cavalry until the point where in the east, the "legions" are converted into cataphractarii and the first proto-knights at the top of a military hierarchy were established, leading to a thousand years of cavalry dominance.

Hannibal wrote the rules that the rest of the world then started playing by, and one of those rules was the guy with better cav usually wins. Scipio had to follow this rule in order to beat Hannibal. The only reason the WRE remained more infantry-focused compared to the east was because their enemies were infantry based and so they didn't need cavalry as much. In the east however, fighting against persians and steppe tribes forced them to adopt cavalry-heavy armies that resembled Alexander's army more than a roman Republican army, and that all starts with the Romans being taught a series of valuable lessons by hannibal that they then used to their advantage.

Alexander's army was not cavalry heavy

cont.

To further that point, my one example I'll offer is crasus. He took a basic bitch Republican army with barely an cavalry into Parthia and was promptly smashed by a 10k cavalry detachment that wasn't even remotely the entire parthian army. The very fact that they had a cavalry advantage completely negated the infantry advantage, and history can a nice little snapshot of what happens when a western roman army goes to the east and doesn't follow the rules of cavalry. This is why eastern armies became dominated by cavalry.

Alexander's cavalry won pretty much every field battle for him. It might not have been proportionally large quantity-wise but quality-wise it was the most important part of his army. Ultimately there are dozens of different forms of infantry that can hold a line, but the one thing that you absolutely need is a hammer for your anvil.

Byzantine armies functioned exactly like Macedonian armies minus the pike wall. Their infantry merely held the line so the cataphractarii could deliver the decisive blow. The age of roman infantry carrying the day with nominal cavalry support died with the Republic. When romans started finding other civilizations with strong cav, they had to adapt. Even the west had dedicated mobile cavalry armies added to strengthen the cavalry arm of the military.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Metaurus
had it not been for one messenger that got lost and ended up in Roman hands, the combined Carthaginian army under Hannibal and Hasdrubal would have outnumbered the Roman consular army and been in possession of the siege equipment necessary to assault Rome itself.

The problem was that up until that point Hannibal had been routinely spanking much larger Roman armies, but without siege equipment the individual city-states were safe from being directly assaulted, and able to maintain political cohesion even through repeated losses in the field. They also lucked out with a far seeing leader in Quintus Fabius, who was one of the only people in Rome with the patience and foresight to play the waiting game, knowing that time was on Rome's side.

Had the Carthaginians sacked Rome, this invulnerability would have vanished, and the Italians would have been forced to capitulate or face similar devastation.

>when some barbarian doesn't have siege equipment
if only they had siege equipment so sad what could have been hannibal could have should have would have blah blah blah! Everything is interconnected, every moment has a million potential outcomes, but things are as they are because that's how the variables played out. The Romans intercepted that shit because they still controlled Italy well enough to have the resources and reach to do so despite losing constantly for the good part of a decade and still holding out. That in itself shows the kind of resilience the Romans had that the Carthaginian could not match, and this has very little to do with any one tactical variable but a lot to do with the one overriding variable, which was that roman society of fanatic warriors dying for Mars was fundamentally stronger and more resilient than a Carthaginian society that traded and left the fighting to mercs that they then were too stupid to pay.
Carthage lost because despite the fact that the tactical variable of hannibal was overwhelming when you're looking at a stat page, ultimately this is meaningless compared to the sheer unfaultering nature of roman character, that same nature that will carry their last descendents into the 16th century where they really had no business still existing. They would not surrender despite losing half a dozen armies, whereas their opponents couldn't handle a single defeat well, much less the beating Hannibal gave.
>when romans don't have sie-
oh wait they always do because if they don't they'll just build that shit on the spot in their badass fort they also built the day before because they're romans and that's how they roll.

>had it not been for one messenger that got lost and ended up in Roman hands, the combined Carthaginian army under Hannibal and Hasdrubal would have outnumbered the Roman consular army and been in possession of the siege equipment necessary to assault Rome itself.

Are you retarded? Metaurus wasn't like right after Cannae or anything. In addition to the 50,000ish armies in Italy proper, you have close to another 50,000 men in what's now Spain, ripping up Carthaginian colonies there.

Worst comes to worst, Rome recalls Scipio, which it can do easily because of total naval dominance in the Med.

You also have the problem that even with "siege equipment", the walls of Rome are pretty thick, and will probably require some time to reduce. Time, is of course, not on Hannibal's side, given that he has no regular logistical train and has to rely on whatever he can steal from the locals for food, which means he can't stay in any one place for long.

Stop reading Creasy. Creasy is stupid.

>Are you retarded?

Do you know that prefacing your argument with an insult does nothing to strengthen your position?

I dont expect much from this site but can you at least try to keep it slightly civil.

>Do you know that prefacing your argument with an insult does nothing to strengthen your position?

It wasn't there to strengthen my position. It was there to express my utter disdain for the person who makes a post spouting such inane nonsense.

>I dont expect much from this site but can you at least try to keep it slightly civil.

I would only bother to be civil to people whom I respect. People who post idiocy deserve to be called idiots. This is Veeky Forums. Grow a thicker skin.

New Veeky Forums copypasta?