Great Military leaders of History? - Page 26

On February 24 2011 14:15 StorkHwaiting wrote:
My problem with Marian Reforms is that it drastically lowered the political stability of the legionnaires. The entire reason Rome's military was so powerful was that it was based on citizen-soldiers. These were the people most deeply invested in their country's fate and so their loyalty was unquestionable. It was also extremely difficult to use the legions for political purposes because so many of the legionnaires had their own family and clan affiliations and would not be easily swayed by one power-hungry consul or tyrant.

Fast forward to after the Marian Reforms and what do you have? Julius fucking Ceasar. The Triumvirate, the Civil wars. The death of the republic and the empire would not have happened if not for Marius' reforms in my opinion. Can that be debated? Sure. But I think Marius was the one who got the ball rolling.

Without dropping the requirement of being a citizen, you would not have had Goths serving in the legions, nor would you have generals able to rebel and keep their troops.

On February 24 2011 14:15 StorkHwaiting wrote:
I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, or maybe western military science is crazy, but if they can't see how Marian Reforms was a pandora's box, then I don't know what to say. It's a very non-Western way of looking at military science to say that less soldiers with more political stability is a stronger superior force than more soldiers, who are better trained and professional, but have the possibility of rebellion.

It's also why many of the best Asian generals were statesmen as well as generals, and you get lost looking at their information because there's a bunch of stuff about the political reforms and innovations and social policies along with their military achievements. What Asians know, with their very bloody history, is that political stability massively outweighs the conquest of a few new territories and some extra soldiers standing around.

Oddly enough, Chinese armies were much larger than Roman or later European armies before the modern era, and so Chinese generals dealt with much more difficult situations with logistics, politics, maneuvering, etc.

On February 25 2011 01:29 Adaptation wrote:
I absolutely appreciate the love for asian generals. It is so rare that i get to talk military history with non-euro centric people, its quite fascinating. Anyhow back to the list

I have Han Xin as my highest, and i have not seen any debate about that in terms of asian general. Im already actively re-working my list and all the points are taken in account. Nurhaci will defentily get a bumb while Hannibal, Hamilcar, Scipio and Marius will move down a bit(some others as well). However, im still debating on taizong - he was a good military leader and has to be on this list, however his main credit is the empire he created. Notice that i don't have diocletian, washington and bolivar on my list. Taizong is better then all of the above, but the creation of a long lastin empire has to do with policy and politics - which as some influence on the ranking but is not the main point.

To defend Marius slighty - i just cannot see how marian reforms hurt the romans. Yes it may have hurt the Roman republic, but that was going to fall anyway since the gracchi brothers. Also, do not forget that marius had military success early in his career against the barbarian/gaulic invasions.

I will be posting the new list fairly soon.

On February 24 2011 14:24 allecto wrote:
Regardless, I wholeheartedly agree with your point about stability > # soldiers. Some people might throw out Aurelian as a great general, but I would put him at the bottom of the bottom for his reforms that ended up screwing over what remaining unity Rome had.

Edit: As for Marius being ranked higher, honestly I didn't even go back and recheck where everyone was. I was just trying to make a case for him in the top 100 due to the fact of him being in the top 3 of Roman generals. I was trying to get at the point of putting Nurhaci above him, but didn't get the time to check where he was in the list =/

On February 15 2011 14:06 allecto wrote:
I agree completely on the Robert E. Lee pick.

Julius Caesar, while amazing, had an unbelievable cache of troops at his disposal.

On February 24 2011 21:56 Sm3agol wrote:

I believe this was already answered, but I definitely want to reinforce just how wrong this argument is.

The Germans were | | that close to capturing Moscow as it was, and that was with a massive Hitler caused delay in marching on the capital. In the end, it was the weather that kept the Germans away from Moscow, not the poorly trained and equipped, NUMERICALLY INFERIOR Russian forces protecting the capital. A month earlier, and Moscow at the very least would have been under siege, the Germans could have more or less wintered in the surrounding towns and been much better off. Russian morale would also have plummeted. Still, the German supply situation was totally screwed, and their inability to properly supply their troops had as much of an effect on the campaign as the Russian military.

On February 25 2011 01:46 mcc wrote:

A lot of historians point out problem with moving from citizen-based to professional army, but it is far from clear that it was necessarily bad move. There were also a lot of problems with keeping citizen army. One of those problems was actually problem of stability. How can you demand from private citizens that they serve in the army for 5,10,20 years , that will ruin your economy and create a lot of unrest amongst the population. So frankly again you are making broad generalizations and statements without much more than your opinion to support it. Furthermore you got so many facts wrong. Marius did not remove the requirement that only citizens can be in the legions, that came much later. He just removed necessity of owning a land and having property of given value to be allowed to the army. Caesar's army also was mainly based on citizens and did that help, no. Problem was they felt more linked to Caesar than to Republic/state. Problem is not citizen-based army vs "mercenary"-army but draft-army vs professional army.
Also are you sure Empire was worse for the future of Rome than Republic. That is very bold statement that would need a lot of supporting arguments.
As for my personal opinion, best way for Rome to solve problems with generals rebelling would be to introduce mix of professional army and draft army in some way. That can be done in many different ways, but my favourite would be to reduce number of professional legions, which would be used as mobile army used to solve crisis situations and introduce 1-2 year draft that would fulfill border duties partially and the rest would be stationed far from the borders, so everytime the general would like to revolt he would have few draft armies standing on his way to Rome.


You thinking that your ideas are non-Western is funny , but whatever. I would also like to point out that there is critical amount of soldiers that you absolutely need because of outside forces and any amount of stability cannot compensate for that. As for it better to be statesmen and generals, that is very questionable, but Roman generals before the Empire were mostly both also. I think it is much better to split those roles, and modern societies actually do that with good success, and I think Imperial Rome as well as Chinese emperors of longer lasting dynasties did so too.

Oddly enough you keep saying that Chinese armies were bigger even though it was shown to you that population-wise both empires were at best equal, and your quoted army sizes for China are by most historians considered inflated for multiple reasons.

On February 25 2011 02:10 StorkHwaiting wrote:


You have your opinion. I have mine. But you basically agree that a draft army has a much lower chance of rebellion than a professional standing army. And the system you're outlining was the basic system of Chinese dynasties. Border armies of mercenaries and professional troops, while the major cities and fortresses on the way to the capital were manned by fubing (militia-draft) troops. Dynasties always fell apart when they started to move away from militias and into full professional armies.

Maybe I'm of the opinion that a smaller empire that doesn't collapse is better than some huge, influential one that gets destroyed by their own war machine. Which is why I think Roman Republic was superior to the Roman Empire. But like I stated several times, maybe I'm crazy. It's just my opinion. I think it's a fact that the Marian Reforms got it all started, though.

On February 24 2011 14:15 StorkHwaiting wrote:
And mcc you tried to have this debate about population with me before. You ignored everything I said. I'm not going to waste any more time on it and frankly you're starting to piss me off while continuing to say the same dumb shit about most historians, while having zero sources. The things you sent me in PM were all from a single professor, who started every one of his papers by stating that he had very little hard data on the Han dynasty and that it was impossible to make hard comparisons between the two empires because they were fundamentally different in their organization.

On February 24 2011 14:15 StorkHwaiting wrote:
And Han dynasty armies were based on militia draft system where every able-bodied male was eligible, and so it's a much bigger population pool than Rome had to draw upon. You keep talking about comparable population sizes but that includes slaves and allies. Slaves were not recruitable and allies had quotas. They couldn't just endlessly draw from them or else the allies would rebel, which is exactly what Hannibal tried to get them to do.

You are obviously a fanboy of Rome. Me, not so much. Continuing to try to argue this with me is pointless. I'm not going to agree with you and you're not providing any hard sources to contradict me.

On February 25 2011 03:31 Adaptation wrote:
On the MCC vs StorkHwaiting debate

Its all on what your trying to achieve - Marian reform allowed the enlargement of the roman republic(and eventually empire). However to say that marian reforms led to the fall of the roman empire is too much. the political bickering and of the 200's as well as the ridiculous increase in pay of the legionnaires in the 200's is what killed rome(among other things). the Marian reform helped strongly to have a stable army which before was in terrible shape.

Im not sure i get the HAN empire vs Roman argument. What are you guys trying to prove? Im not sure i get where you guys are going 0-=

On February 25 2011 03:34 mcc wrote:

Our argument started with him stating that China fielded 4-5 times the army sizes of Rome, to which I replied that I doubt it since Rome had bigger population and was a wealthier state, and from that it went downhill Also part of the debate was in PMs when the thread was closed, so no all of that is available in here.
EDIT: As for the pay increase thing I agree and that is something that could have been possibly prevented by what StorkHwaiting and me formulated about draft armies.

On February 25 2011 03:31 Adaptation wrote:
On the MCC vs StorkHwaiting debate

Its all on what your trying to achieve - Marian reform allowed the enlargement of the roman republic(and eventually empire). However to say that marian reforms led to the fall of the roman empire is too much. the political bickering and of the 200's as well as the ridiculous increase in pay of the legionnaires in the 200's is what killed rome(among other things). the Marian reform helped strongly to have a stable army which before was in terrible shape.

Im not sure i get the HAN empire vs Roman argument. What are you guys trying to prove? Im not sure i get where you guys are going 0-=

On February 25 2011 03:31 Adaptation wrote:
On the MCC vs StorkHwaiting debate

Its all on what your trying to achieve - Marian reform allowed the enlargement of the roman republic(and eventually empire). However to say that marian reforms led to the fall of the roman empire is too much. the political bickering and of the 200's as well as the ridiculous increase in pay of the legionnaires in the 200's is what killed rome(among other things). the Marian reform helped strongly to have a stable army which before was in terrible shape.

Im not sure i get the HAN empire vs Roman argument. What are you guys trying to prove? Im not sure i get where you guys are going 0-=

on a side note stork: Do you consider Han xin the greatest asian general(not counting genghis obviously)? Or would that go to Toyotomi Hideyoshi or Tran hung dao?

On February 25 2011 04:42 Maenander wrote:

I agree, the Han vs Rome debate is quite off-topic. This thread is about the greatest generals, and it really doesn't matter who fielded the bigger armies, otherwise Dareios would have been a far greater general than Alexander.

On February 25 2011 04:28 StorkHwaiting wrote:


You don't seem to remember that I explicitly stated pre-AD Rome, while you continually keep trying to cite Roman Empire statistics from 200 AD. Which is also why I keep referring to the Second Punic War, and maybe I should mention more of Ceasar's actions, because those actually fall within the parameters I outlined, rather than the continual moving of goal posts that you've been doing.

And I've yet to see a statistic from you for Roman population numbers pre-AD. I could go by the Roman censors numbers, but those only include citizens, so like I said before, you have yet to produce a hard source confirming Roman Republic's population numbers pre-AD. And yet you still fail to acknowledge that Rome very likely did not have a larger population in pre-AD period.

Further, your source on monetization systems between the two empires is ridiculous. He consistently makes comparisons between BC Han Dynasty to 250 CE Roman Empire, then tries to pretend like they are comparable. And even aside from that, he makes a comparison on page 55 stating the Han government in late first century BC had an equal revenue to mid 2nd century Roman Empire. He tries to explain that equality by stating Roman elites and rich families might have hoarded more money than Chinese nobles, but ultimately he agrees that it is impossible for him to make that analysis just yet.

So basically, your source pointed out a time over 100 years after that I mentioned, and stated government revenues between the much much larger Roman Empire of 150 CE had an equal revenue to 90 CE Han Dynasty.

Which goes back to exactly what I was saying before, your assertion that pre-AD Rome was both more greatly populated and wealthier are not proven.