Carthage

they relied heavily on mercenaries, so their succes was likely dependant on the skill of their mercenaries

also in these two wars they fought against greeks and romans who were really good at fighting, to be fair

The first war was because they were unprepared for the roman boat spam
The second war was because they didn't have naval superiority which was caused by the first war

It's not like you have other people doing so great against Rome in the same time period.

Dude even Hannibal was shit at warfare.
>BUT MUH ENCIRCLEMENT
sure he could win battles but that is never enough to win a war. Logistically his invasion of Italy was pretty wasteful especially considering how Rome kicked Carthage around in Spain like it was fucking nothing while Hannibal was prancing around Italy.
During that aforementioned prancing he accomplished fuck all and didnt muster any allies or coalitions powerful enough to pose any real threat to actually defeating Rome.
Pair that horrific failure of an invasion to Rome's masterful use of Fabian strategy to keep Hannibal stuck while Roman generals annihilated Carthage in every other front of the war, and you begin to see how utterly inept Hannibal was at planning this war long term.
By invading Italy, he doomed Carthage to utter destruction. Starting a total war with a power far superior to your own is a death sentence. No amount of battlefield victories on a single front of a wider war could have saved Carthage after Hannibal crossed the alps.
Great tactician, horrible strategist, horrible leader, more responsible for the destruction of Carthage than any one Roman.

I read that these were the most brutal wars fought in the area, the hatred and atrocities between the Carthaginians and Romans reached Eastern Front/Pacific War levels, I can only imagine what the individual experiences of the Roman and Carthaginian Soldier must've been like

His victories at Lake Trasimene and Cannae prove he was Sun Zoo on steroids

at least later that wasn't something unusal, though. When some tribes raided a roman border town the punitive expeditions conducted by the romans were usally very brutal as well. The thing about atrocities back then is that all killings were done by hand, so yeah, that must have been pretty brutal.

nah
he would never have advised Hannibal to invade Italy because thats fucking dumb.
He instead would have had Hannibal use his resources to protect his people best he could.
NEVER go on the offensive against an enemy with vastly superior logistical capabilities than yourself.

I know the Romans didn't play around but there was some particularly bad blood between the Romans and Carthaginians

you right the strategy in total was bad, but that doesn't mean he wasn't great at battle tactics

>Rome was a the brink of collapse after Cannae
Oh my god! Its fucking Hannibal! Hannibal himself is posting ITT!
I dont know how it couldnt be him, because literally nobody else would believe that.

but thats sort of my point.
Being great at winning battles makes you look cool and imposing but its ultimately fruitless if thats all you're good for.
If Rome and Carthage both agreed that they would fight one battle and the winner would win the whole war, then Hannibal would be a great choice. In any other scenario he dooms Carthage to failure just as he did in real life.

I disagree, his strategy made him a constant terror for the Romans, the best defense is offense. It was the failure of Carthage to hold Sicily that led to them negotiating an end to the war.

i'm sure something like pic related didn't bother the romans at all

agreed, but he was sent to italy and supposed to defeat roman armies, thats what he did. Saying he was shit at warfare is just not true.

evidently not because they continued fighting in full force in Spain and fought several more battles with Hannibal.
>constant terror
not really. After the first year it was abundantly clear that Hannibal would never be able to take huge cities like Rome, or even some of the lesser ones like Capua. Yet Hannibal hung around stroking his ego while Carthage suffered with its greatest army fucking around doing nothing.
nope. He was sent to Italy to win the war. He failed. i twas stupid and foolish of him or any Carthaginian who agreed with him to believe that battlefield victories alone would ever be enough to stop Rome.

well ok, seems i got that wrong. Do you know why hannibal didn't attack Rome after cannae? Was it a lack of siege equipment or something else?

because there was literally a 0% chance of a full out attack on Rome succeeding even if it had a hilariously small garrison. Meaning that Hannibal would have to lay siege, but this would allow Rome to concentrate on a stationary Hannibal and that would mean utter annihilation of his army.
He had no hope of taking Rome or any major city for these reasons so he instead had to rely on breaking up Rome at an institutional level. He failed to do that through battlefield victories so he tried to do it through intimidation and diplomacy in southern italy, but few Italian cities were stupid enough to foresake the ultimate power of Rome for Carthage.
It was a foolhardy plan with no chance of success embarked upon to satiate Hannibal childish desire for revenge for his father and to satisfy his massive ego at the expense of all of Carthage.

Hannibal did as well as any Carthagean could at the time, he didn't have the manpower to occupy Italy and didn't have the siege engines to take Rome, neither of these was his fault.

but it wouldnt have been his problem had he not invaded Italy.
He did well to conquer Spain. Very well. He should have stopped there.

You're probably right that he wasn't the best strategist but he was unquestionably an amazing leader. The fact that he could lead such a diverse army through such incredible trials and never, ever had to deal with desertion or mutiny suggests that he had charisma and leadership skills through the roof.

He took the only course open to him, he gabled that defeating Rome in the field would break her grip over the other Italian cities, and his gamble very nearly paid off. What would you have him do, fight a defensive war that he would be certain to lose? At least by doing what he did, he gave his civilization a worthy parting shot and made himself famous forever to boot.

Romans were pretty well known for holding grudges
And then going apeshit.

Nothing uniquely Roman about this, take a look at the old testament some time.

to wit:

"It is a remarkable and very cogent proof of Hannibal's having been by nature a real leader and far superior to anyone else in statesmanship, that though he spent seventeen years in the field, passed through so many barbarous countries, and employed to aid him in desperate and extraordinary enterprises numbers of men of different nations and languages, no one ever dreamt of conspiring against him, nor was he ever deserted by those who had once joined him or submitted to him."

Hitler was charismatic too and the army was very loyal to him for the most part till the bitter end. Even to the point where they would rather continue fighting than accept a surrender from the United States. to the point where they would rather accept the rampant and brutal destruction brought by the Soviets than an early surrender to anyone else.
and yet we all understand him to be strategically incompetent in the way he ran the war. I feel much the same way about Hannibal.
>nearly paid off
He was never close. Carthage was certain to lose either way but they lost so emphatically and so totally in the second punic war that the third is just a footnote because Carthage had nothing left. Carthage would have lost either way, this is true, but if Hannibal used his resources better he could have prevented the total devastation of Carthage and its people at the hands of Roman swords.
He certainly could have put Carthage in a much better position to negotiate terms even in defeat.
But nah. He had to have his "glory".

>Carthage was certain to lose either way
Yes, and Hannibal chose to fight on Roman soil not carthaginian, sparing his countrymen the fires of war.

The total devastation of Carthage did not occur until the third Punic war.

I was implying that the reasons for the third punic war were spurred by conditions Carthage was forced to accept after Hannibals defeat. Hannibals useless invasion of Italy forced Rome to so totally defeat them that Carthage had no choice but to accept versaille tier unfairness in the peace treaty.
Scipios invasion of Africa is what broke the alliance between the Numidians and Carthage, and it was the Numidians who prompted Carthage to raise an army, which triggered their ultimate destruction at the hands of Rome.
Is it fair to say that Rome would have destroyed Carthage anyway? absolutely. But not with the brutality and totality that they employed out of spite for Hannibal.

>Rome kicked carthage around in Spain like it was nothing
the Romans were at one point on the brink of being kicked out of Spain. Both Scipio's dad and his uncle were killed and their armies destroyed iirc and a bunch of miraculous shit (at least according to Livy), like some lowly centurion rallying together the few remaining Roman soldiers, had to happen for them to be able to even stay in the country. it wasn't until Scipio Jr showed, 8 years after the battle of the Ebro, that the tide turned.

>Hannibals defeat.
Which defeat are you talking about?

He was a general, not the ruler of Carthage

imagine how succesful Rome would have been had Hannibal been there instead of camping in Italy.

Typical hannibalfag
Totally ignores Scipio' campaign in Iberia and Fabius Cunctator

he effectively was.
The parties in Carthage that supported the war had pretty much all their hope and power invested in Hannibal, and it was the same with the general population.
the specific defeat i refer to is Zama. After Zama neither Hannibal nor Carthage had any hope of surviving, even if a horrifically unbalanced peace treaty postponed it a few years.

again my whole point here is that if Hannibal did not invade Italy and fought more defensively against Rome Carthage had a much better chance of survival. As an empire it was sure to fall and be absorbed into Rome, but the city itself and their people would not have been subjected to near entire destruction of their culture.

Hannibalfags are literally even worse than Napoleoboos

>the best defense is offense
>he said about an offensive strategy that backfired so hard that Carthage (the state) was never of any importance ever again

Thats all i knew about carthage and since nobody answered OP i told him what i knew. Feel free to contribute and tell us about carthaginians on the iberian peninsula

this thread is about their conflict with Rome since OP specified thats what he wanted more knowledge about.

I've been contributing with posts talking about how fucking stupid Hannibal, the most important single figure to discuss from this time, was a fucking idiot who doomed Carthage to failure.
read the god damn thread

>To their luck, Hannibal didn't receive much support from his homeland and eventually had to return to Africa.
It had nothing to do with luck. It had to do with the fact that it takes months to go across the same route Hannibal took, and with Roman command of the central med, the more direct overseas route couldn't be taken. By the time you

>Got a message from Hannibal asking for reinforcements
>The messenger(s) go all the way back up through Italy, over the alps, across southern France, down through Spain, cross over to North Africa, and ride east to Carthage
>Raising a brand new army
>Marching that army back over the same route

A year or more could have gone by.

No one is worse than the plebby Romaboos

So many inaccuracies in this answer

I'm curious, such as?

they literally were the first total wars, both Rome and Carthage mobilized armies in numbers that were literally unseen in the ancient world let alone the mediterranean.

we're talking several MILLION men involved, on each, they eclipsed the Persian expansion, any war in Classic Greece, any war in Mesopotamia. They were the WW1 and 2 of the ancient world, they were only matched by certain uprisings in China, if you were to believe their numbers.

the battle of Ecnomus was the greatest naval battle of all time with ships alone

youtube.com/watch?v=jpGMSzgd8eg

OP here, and thanks to everyone who contributed, really clears things up.

>But not with the brutality and totality that they employed out of spite for Hannibal.
What did the Romans do?

they made the Carthaginians sign one of the most harsh peace treaties in history. They had to pay massive amounts to Rome, couldnt have a navy, and couldnt have an army, and had to give up all land outside Africa. On top of that, Rome instigated Numidia's betrayal of Carthage pretty much insuring that Carthaginian peasants were at their mercy. So when Carthage was forced to raise an army to stop the Numidian raids, they violated the terms of the treaty and Rome showed up, culled the city of Carthage and salted the earth, and essentially totally destroyed Carthage as a culture. Nothing of it outsie of sources on Hannibal and the Punic wars survives today in any meaningful way outside of Roman accounts of them.
Hannibal pissed them off so much that he cost Carthage its very soul.

>mentions that the Romans salted Carthage
>doesn't say why

Hmm I wonder what (((he))) meant by this selective history

In retrospective, now that we know how things turned out, yeah. At the time, this looked like a great plan where the biggest risk was getting through the alps, and he got through them. He couldnt've known the italian cities would be so loyal

So your solution is to not fight a war at all (or to expect the romans at your front door). Hardly a critique on Hannibal's skill as a general. He did the best he could all things considered. Carthage's navy had no hope of matching rome's

its almost as if you didnt read a single god damn thing i said.
The solution is that if they have to fight, which they did, that Hannibal fight defensively and protect his conquests in Spain and not engage Rome in the total war that Rome was inspired to fight by his invasion of Italy.
>he couldnt have known the italian cities would be so loyal
this is the part i have the most trouble understanding. I literally cannot conceive of even one reason a Carthaginian would reasonably believe that a powerful city of Rome would betray its own growing empire to form a coalition with a dying power in Africa that had fairly recently been smacked around in a naval war, which was supposedly what they claimed to be the best at.
>at the time
no even at the time it was stupid, which is why Hannibal faced so much resistance from the Carthaginian parties who wanted peace. They fucking knew that once Hannibal entered Italy their entire civilization was fucking doomed.

>he thinks Zama happened

He didnt really mention how Hannibal just kinda memed around in Italy for 17 years until Scipio btfo'd the other Carthaginians in Iberia and then went on to the the actual city of Carthage which is what forced Hannibal to return.

I hope there is an afterlife so Hannibal can observe the consequences of his actions.
Sure he will be happy that he is widely considered a great if not the greatest battlefield tactician, certainly the greatest of his time. But he has to live for all eternity forever and ever knowing that the reason he alone is all that is remembered of Carthage, is because of his own failures.

I think Carthage was doomed either way, Hannibal just tried doubling down and failed. Carthage didn't have enough money to pay for it's armies and not enough manpower to match all the roman legions. The campaign in Italy shows this, Hannibal pillaged the roman countryside and consecutively defeated any army sent his way, yet the romans kept on coming and coming until they won the fucking war.

If Hannibal tried to fight in Spain it's likely the same thing would've happened, he would've eventually lost and Carthage would've still burned. Besides, you're speaking in hindsight, knowing that Carthage couldn't have won, Hannibal thought he could defeat the romans and hated them hard enough to cross the alps and kill plebs.

>It's not like you have other people doing so great against Rome in the same time period.

I pray every day that they will one day be stupid enough to come to Little Asia and confront the Seleucids, so that based Antioch III can show the shitalians how real men fight.

...

Nah. If Hannibal fought in Spain the Romans wouldn't be as spiteful in their treatment of Carthage. Instead of wiping their culture off the face of the earth the Romans would have incorporated Carthage into the fold.
Yeah there would have been suffering either way, but not total annihilation