If Alexander the Great/The Greeks were so great why didn't they conquer any major territory above them in Europe

>If Alexander the Great/The Greeks were so great why didn't they conquer any major territory above them in Europe

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_settlement_of_Eastern_Europe#Great_expedition_of_279_BCE
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

What do you mean "above" them? like Dacia to the north?

Because everything above the bulgar was useless barbar land to the greeks

What would have been the point? Greeks thought of Europeans as barbarians incapable of creating states. People in the near east were also seen as barbarians of course, but they were barbarians capable of building shit actually worth conquering.

Like any of the European territory to the North.

Seems like that would be easier than traveling thousands of miles conquering the most advanced civilizations in Western Asia

because invading the Persaryans sounded a lot more appealing than invading the europoors.

who the heck wants to go further into thrace

Didn't they have ANY desire to expand upper wards?

I mean most empires wish to expand their boundaries in all directions regardless of how they viewed the populace.

The Romans did it and that went pretty well

Why would they
All the money was in the east, the easiest conquest was in the east, the people who knew them where in the east
Would you rather stick your dick in a bee hive or go fight a girl,but if you win you get to fuck her

Not really. Persia had been a problem for the Greek for like 2 centuries. Plus the Persians had tons of money like said.

nice female. been going on /s/ lately huh

don't answer inane trolling questions like this Veeky Forums, not without saging at least

>The Romans did it and that went pretty well
Yeah, AFTER they spent years conquering a lot of the more urbanized places around them. They hit Carthage, Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant well before Gaul.

The Greeks were never historically conquerors in the first place. Alexander was the first one with that kind of ambition, and like with the Romans, he focused on the big boys first. Would he have moved farther north at later point in his career had he lived? Who's to say. But it should be pretty apparent why he went the direction he did first.

>wasting your time on filthy barbarians loving in mud huts when you can be looting some of the richest cities in the known world
YGSIU

me

well the League of Corinth set up by Alex's father which gave him authority over the rest of the greeks was set up to invade Persia. Perhaps Alex would've conquered Illyria or Dacia had he returned from Babylon but we'll never know.

Furthermore if you're in the business of empire making who would you rather conquer, a rich and powerful east with centuries of established administrative institutions, trade, and military manpower? Or a bunch of tribesmen to the north with practically none of that in comparison? Caesar invaded Gaul for slaves, but mostly for the prestige of conquering the ancient enemy of the Romans (who sacked the city in the 4th century BC). The Persians were much the same to the Greeks.

He wanted to see the ocean on the other side of the world.

That being said, there was also little of value in going northward. We tend to forget that a lot of that soil is total shit before the industrial revolution and the invention of tractors, meaning it doesn't support people well, meaning the area doesn't have a lot of wealth in trading. There's also a pretty constant theme of people having trouble adapting to new environments. The Arabs, for example, never settled north of where olives could grow despite their conquests. It's part of why they were able to lose so much of Spain in the early days of the reconquista; there was no serious local garrison.

Natural borders are another distinct issue. The Danube and the Rhine were Rome's european frontiers for a reason.

All good answers thanks

But literally the first thing Alexander did was conquer the areas north of Macedon and push onto the Danube to secure his northern border.

He conquered Thrace first...

That was actually his plan to invade the balkans but he died before he could make that happen

Well first he wanted to invade arabia after creating a road system
Then after that nobody is 100% sure on what he wanted to do

Alexander sorta just stumbled from one conquest to another, there was never any master plan for expansion, though Persia was a long time rival.

he feared the european warrior

>We tend to forget that a lot of that soil is total shit before the industrial revolution and the invention of tractors

Wrong. Some of the best soil in the world is directly north of Thrace, the chernozem of the Pontic-Caspain steppe. Even in Alexander's time, this was not densely forested region. It had been inhabited for millennia. It was where the horse was domesticated. The Scythians who were occupying the land needed no more then a simple plow to work it.

The real reason Alexander didn't go north is because devil you know vs. devil you don't know. Persia was the devil he knew. Thrace up to the river was a very defensible border against the devil he didn't.

The G*eeks just didn't have the military prowess nor the wealth to do it. For example the Greek city-states militaries were mostly comprised of poorly trained levied militiamen. The Macedonians manage to cobble together a professional military force but they set their sights to the east.

I don't know but I'd definitely love to conquer those thighs.

Would you rather spend countless lives and dollars conquering a cold piece of shit or a fertile tropical paradise?

Nothing to the north of him but G*rmanic snowniggers, not worth conquering.

>why didn't the greeks invade mudhutland instead of Persia
gee I wonder why

Europe was nigger tier back then, Alexander woudl have considered italian and punic republics as half nigger at most.

>>If Alexander the Great/The Greeks
He was Macedonian, you fucking retard.

>what are Macedonians
or are you one of those purist rapebabies?

It wasn't just slaves, Gaul was actually the most wealthy and well developed civilization around the Mediterranean not under Roman control when Caesar invaded, so it was entirely logical to make it the next conquest.

He wanted to conquer good fertile land.
That's Egypt and the fertile crescent, not Europe!
At the time Europe didn't have many relevant resources, and European populations posed no threat to Alexander.

There was nothing there. Alexander sent his armies to places where there were already developed cities that he could conquer and have an immediate influx of revenue for his empire.

The Romans learned the hard way that conquering Germany and England just meant committing yourself to a multi-generational nation building project that was constantly opposed by hostile natives.

no fertile soil in Ukraine, huh? Nope, nothing important up there like Crimea. Nothing at all, just horses Macedon shouldn't really care about.

Contrarians and apologists are not welcome here lad

The Celts were there and did have the bad habit of gathering armies of over 50k troops to invade Thrace and Northern Greece on a few occasions

Phyrrus of Eprius did say that "the order of the barbarians, is not barbarian at all" during the Roman invasion of Magna Graecia some 60 years later after Alexander's conquests

funny thing is that the word barbar or barbarian was invented by romans because they were all a bunch of savages speaking "barbar". Meaning that these people were as good as unknown to southern europe until the romans started doing a bunch of shit with them.
the greeks never put any effort into meeting these savages, because its fucking stupid. There's nothing of value there except for forest and subhumans.
dont ask me why the Romans did it.

alexander wanted to conquer carthage

>barbar or barbarian was invented by romans
stopped reading right there the term is Greek in origin and was derived from how the language of foreigners sounded to them

>most developed civilization not under Roman control
In the sense of when there's no better competition, the worst will be elevated to the best. Gauls were mudhut people, they had no large or developed cities, no road system, no unified leadership, no written history or records. All we know of them is from what the Romans or Greeks wrote about them. They were very undeveloped except from maybe metallurgy. Obviously no one has a say on why Caesar conquered them, he had his own reasons (one of the primary ones is dying himself with the glory of a conqueror), they were the only unconquered adjacent lands to the Romans, and they were also a threat whenever their population gets out of line.

>the celts were there
There were no celts north of greece, fool. The closest thing to celts was Galatians. And I doubt they ever had an army bigger than 25,000. And for that you can see they only chose to invade Anatolia instead of mainland greece because it was much weaker.

Also the quote was "If those people are Barbarians, than I am a Barbarian" (While observing Romans drilling across the river at Siris before the battle of Heraclea commenced)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_settlement_of_Eastern_Europe#Great_expedition_of_279_BCE

He actually planned on conquering Carthage and Arabia.

Bump for cute udders

>wanting to set foot into what would later become R*mania
No thanks

Easy
Either conquer
>Barbarian tribes in the north without any predefined routes to traverse through and for little gain. Only ugly and smelly pale women with red and yellow hair to be found for the soldiers.
Or
>The rich and civilized lands to the east, where many cities along with their trade and spoils await to be plundered. Rich and curvaceous women of colored skin to be found to entertain your soldiers

Or, you know, Alexander merely fought his nation's nemesis and just didn't stop fucking conquering them.