Battles that Changed History

by Fletcher Pratt

With illustrative maps by Edward Gorey. Yes, him.

I was only aware of Pratt's fantasy and SF, but apparently he wrote far more extensively in history, and devised a naval war game that filled his apartment floor. When I read (via Pournelle) that he'd written at least one history, I fetched it from the library immediately.

Pratt wrote well, and his explanations are lucid. He liked to find the forgotten aspects of history and show why some unremarked factor made the difference.

Pretty much all of the battles he writes about are Western or Middle-Eastern; which is perfectly reasonable since no civilization until the Western has had a global reach, making its history much more central to the rest of the world. Probably the best way to start to give a flavor of the book is with a list of the chapter titles. followed by my quick explanation

1. Arela and the Man Who Would Be God Alexander beating Darius--but with a lot of leadup history
2. The Red King at Beneventum Pyrrhus creamed by the Romans
3. Fighting in the Streets and the Future of Order an attempted revolt against Justinian in Constantinople
4. Kadisiyah and the Cost of Conquest Moslems beat the Persians
5. Las Navas de Tolosa and Why the Americas Were Conquered Moslems defeated in Iberia--hundreds of years before victory was complete but this was a turning point
6. Jeanne d'Arc and the Non-Conquest of England how a saint could beat the English hedgehog--and why it was probably good for England in the end
7. Vienna and the Failure to Complete the Crescent who knew that the French had such common cause with the Turks?
8. Leyden and the Foundation of Sea Power William of Orange and privateers against the Spanish
9. Gustavus Adolphus and the End of the Middle Ages Sweden was once a mighty military power, and brought a new way of organizing
10. Interlude; the Day of Inadequate Decisions Learning the wrong lessons made for a drawn-out 30 years
11. Frederick the Great and the Unacceptable Decision Tiny Prussia's tightly disciplined army makes a difference
12. Quebec, Quiberon, America the French and Indian war, and a failed invasion of England
13. Why the American Revolution Succeeded part of the answer was on the opposite side of the globe
14. Trafalgar, Austerlitz, and the Fall and Rise of Empire the Holy Roman Empire becomes a ghost, the French rises
15. The Things Decided at Vicksburg less famous than Gettysburg to the public, but well known to historians
16. More than Midway everybody knows about this battle

For a taste of his prose--his explanation of why a revolt almost nobody hears of in Constantinople was decisive:

It was called the "Nike sedition," but in reality it was a military operation, with a staff, a plan of campaign, and an organized body of troops, the human Blue-Greens being irregular auxiliaries and the fires a surprise weapon. If Theodora had not talked the council out of their discouragements, if the Justinian-Belisarius team had not acted with lightning efficiency after she did, there would have been a siege as well as a campaign. We do not know who planned the operation, because whoever it was died in the Hippodrome, but it is clear that the planning was good and the campaign came perilously near to success.

Perilously: for the issued involved were far beyond the question of whether the empire should be Monophysite or Catholic, nationalist or imperialist. This issue had its importance, to be sure, and though nothing could have solidified the churches of Rome and Constantinople, they were brought far closer together than if the East had gone fully Monophysite. But it was particularly important that the emperor should remain Justinian, the man of wide vision and immense projects. The Nike sedition was directed against only one of these projects, the African invasion; but in a sense it included them all, it was a revolt in favor of provincialism, the narrow view, and fragmentation.

Justinian's conquests in Africa and Italy did not succeed in reuniting the empire, and his military adventures in the West have usually been treated as unproductive acts of aggression. But it is worth looking at what they did accomplish. They destroyed the Vandal kingdom in Africa and fatally crippled the Gothic kingdom in Italy. Sentimental regrets over the downfall of these noble barbarians cannot alter the fact they they were Arians, peculiarly determined to see the triumph of their own sect. Whether they used persecution, like Humeric in Africa, or, like Theodoric in Italy, toleration combined with a firm determination to make all major decisions for a church of which he was not a member, the result was the same. The Arian Church was gaining, it was the official church of the court and upper classes; and it was not a universal church, it had no focus. In a religious sense it was what the Monophysites were in a political: the thing whose greatest effort was turned back by the Justinian-Belesarius-Theodora team in the Nike sedition.

This is not all. It was perhaps not of vital importance that one of Justinian's large projects was the construction of that new Church of St. Sophia, which even yet remains one of the wonders of the world. But it was of the greatest importance that one of the officers whose dismissal was demanded by the mob was Tribonian, and that a dismissal would have been a warrant of execution. For Tribonian was in charge of the most monumental of all Justinian's projects and the most permanent--the codification of the Roman civil law.

The first section, the “Codes,” or index of what was to come, had just been published at the date of the Nike sedition and work was just beginning on the more complete classification. It was beginning primarily because Justinian had examined the Codes, decided they were nowhere near good enough or complete enough, and sent Tribonian and his law committee back to start all over. (Nothing was every good or complete enough for Justinian; his projects were always beyond the human, and partly because they were, what was left of them lasted perdurably.) Some idea of the size of the work done by Tribonian’s committee can be gained from the fact that the law had to be extracted from more than 2000 treatises, comprising 3 million sentences; reconciled, arranged, fused. That law had fallen into inextricable confusion, and it was challenged in various areas by barbarian custom. But after Justinian had sent Tribonian through it, it stood; and the whole of Western civilization was different and better and more just. This was the world that hung in the balance during the Nike sedition.

Someone said that you don’t know the present if you don’t know the history, and there’s some truth to that. Certainly history helps keep you from blindly trusting in the procedures and armies that worked last time.

Read the book. I’ll be looking around for more of his.