Hamilcar’s unexpected death was a great blow to Carthaginian affairs abroad and to Hannibal personally, although we can only guess his reaction because there was no word about it from Carthage or Hannibal himself.
How the news of Hamilcar’s death was received in Africa depended on whether the majority in the Gerousia, the Council of Elders, had sided with the charismatic and popular general or with his dovish enemies such as Hanno, who wanted to stay close to home and not venture out so boldly to provoke Rome.
Hasdrubal the Fair, now sole commander of the colonies, administered Carthaginian Spain effectively for a half decade from 228 to 221 BCE, consolidating positions held already while his adjutant Hannibal served him militarily across southern Iberia, expanding new territories under Carthaginian control. As war chief and virtual ruler, Hasdrubal was more inclined to administer Spain through diplomatic pragmatism than had Hamilcar, who’d carved out territory by military force and ruthless tactics that made him feared among the Celtiberian tribes. In this regard, Hasdrubal was more similar to the traditional rulers of Punic Carthage, who were less inclined to military power and more to commercial consolidation.1 Polybius refutes the charge of the contemporary Roman historian Quintus Pictor Fabius that Hasdrubal was ambitious and power hungry and that his policy in Spain was an underlying cause for the Second Punic War. Polybius maintains that it was Hamilcar who had “contributed much to the origin” of the Second Punic War but instead relates Hannibal’s admiration for Hasdrubal’s leadership.2 Under Hasdrubal, most of the southern half of Spain gradually fell under Carthaginian hegemony or at least operated with varying degrees of autonomy under its shadow. From Gades in the hot South along the Atlantic side of Gibraltar, to New Carthage (modern Cartagena) in the east along the Mediterranean coast, to the forested Sierra Morena northward, and soon even into central Spain along the Tagus Valley, Carthage was unchallenged by any cohesive foe, least of all Rome, which could only look on with envy at this time. Able troops spread throughout garrisons in Spain now complemented Carthaginian mercantile and engineering acumen.
The overall policy that Hamilcar had established would continue. Although Hannibal no longer had his father for counsel or further military training, the young commander had enough natural leadership ability that he was given increasingly more responsibility over the soldiers, moving ever farther north and west into the Spanish frontiers. Probably due to Hasdrubal’s skill at parleying with the Celtiberians, Hannibal now acquired a Spanish wife: the princess Imilce from the Punic ally of Castulo on the upper Gaudalquivir River, although we have no surviving accounts about her other than she might have later borne Hannibal a child, possibly a son.3
In the meantime, the silver mining operations and other Iberian trading ventures were enormously successful, and through spies and a network of informants and trading partners—colonies such as Massilia at the mouth of the Rhône River in Gaul (roughly modern-day France)—Rome could not help but notice that the Carthaginians were not suffering as much as they would have preferred under the chafing war indemnity imposed on them from the Treaty of Lutatius. By now, Rome was certainly also wishing it had some of the silver wealth of Spain for itself. Rome was waiting to reduce Carthaginian power and wealth in Spain.
Finally, the Romans, having subjugated some of the Celts who were living just south of the Po River Valley of Lombardia, Northern Italy, decided that Carthage’s hold over Spain was becoming too profitable and too close to Roman interests for comfort. In 226 a small envoy of Roman diplomats visited Hasdrubal, probably at Cartagena, and demanded that he draw the Punic boundary at the Ebro River. If the diplomatic mission was indeed at Cartagena, the Roman envoy would not have failed to notice the wealth of local silver flowing through the port city.
However much dissembling took place on both sides, a minor treaty was signed between the Spanish Carthaginians and the Romans that Carthage acknowledged this Ebro River boundary—and that Carthage would not cross the Ebro “for the purpose of waging war.” The Ebro River merely divides the eastern seaboard of Spain’s long coastline into two-thirds to the south and one-third to the north—not a natural boundary like the jagged Pyrenees Mountains. For Hasdrubal and Hannibal, this uneven treaty also played the Roman hand, showing its designs on the rest of Spain above the Ebro. Hasdrubal acquiesced nonetheless, although we don’t know whether he did it to buy his people time or to assuage Rome of Carthaginian ambitions about the rest of Spain.
But Hannibal and surely Hasdrubal would have remembered the disasters of the Treaty of Lutatius and how Rome had taken advantage of the Carthaginian desire for peace and continuity of its maritime trade after years of war—forcing Carthage to relinquish claims to any kind of toehold in Sicily even for shipping. They also would have remembered how Rome soon assimilated Sardinia not by battle victory or diplomacy and treaty, since Sardinia was not even part of the Lutatius treaty—instead, Rome had taken Sardinia by outright duplicity, clandestinely arming a revolt in its favor and landing an army on the island for peacekeeping, claiming it had been invited. It was an old ploy that has usually worked throughout history. Hasdrubal and Hannibal would surely have suspected that the Romans could not be trusted over the Ebro boundary. The treaty must have satisfied Rome, which left Spain alone for a few more years.
Once again circumstances changed for Hannibal. After ruling Spain for a little more than five years, Hasdrubal the Fair was killed in battle by insurgent Celtiberians in the far north in 221 BCE. The shock would have been far greater had not Hannibal been prepared to step into his natural role as general over the assembled forces. Now he was quickly elected commanding general. The trained Carthaginian military presence in Spain consisted not only of Carthaginians, Numidians, and other Libyans but also assimilated Iberians, Celts, Balearic Islanders, and others from Ibiza or islands such as Mallorca and Menorca, as well as friendly tribes spread throughout the Spanish peninsula. Livy marks the transition as one of destiny. Even Hannibal’s physical likeness to his father was a factor:
[The armies] imagined that Hamilcar himself had been restored to him as he had appeared in youth. They observed in his face the same intense expression and penetrating gaze, the same confidence and strong-willed countenance. But Hannibal had not needed time to prove his resemblance to his father was not just physically superficial and this mirror image was the least important in gaining the support of the army. Never before was there a more suited genius for commanding respect and obedience from his men . . . Nor did any other leader fill his men with courage and boldness . . . In addition he was indefatigable in body and spirit and took no comforts or pleasures beyond those of his men, in fact could often be found at night sleeping wrapped in a blanket like one of his merest scouts. The things that set him apart were not his clothes, which were identical to those of his men, but his horses and weapons and above all his position to be first into battle and last out.4
In this text, it is hard to miss the egalitarian role Hannibal encouraged regarding the lives of his soldiers, whose loyalty he carefully gathered and possibly manipulated, as Livy suggests. He inspired confidence not just in his unswerving military prowess but also in his personal virtues. He was not motivated or spoiled by luxuries like so many of his historical counterparts in Rome or elsewhere.
It is not unlikely that Hannibal’s physical toughness was influenced by the stories of Alexander the Great he knew through his tutors.5 En route to his victories in Persia, Alexander was often said to be more austere and unmovable like a Spartan—and his teacher Leonidas had trained him in his adolescence—when it came to personal comfort. Hannibal’s decades with his father, Hamilcar, had also strengthened his self-discipline. Sharing his soldiers’ daily hardships would cement the bond between Hannibal and his men even further.
When it came to “obedience”—Livy’s grudging choice of words for the soldiers’ response—Hannibal would come to expect his men to follow him unfailingly even when it appeared counterintuitive and dangerous. But Hannibal’s strategies would prove to be trustworthy to his armies. This was one of the greatest strengths of a Hannibal-led army, such that history has rarely if ever seen its equal before or after. It wasn’t a disregard for danger, as Alexander often displayed, thinking himself to be a demigod or a heroic avatar, but an ability to understand and exploit others’ weaknesses. Livy is forced to describe Hannibal as a military “genius” because how else could Hannibal wreak such destruction on Rome’s armies unless he had genius? Livy’s only other explanation is that Hannibal was treacherous—a characteristic that the Roman historian wants his readers to infer.
In 221–220 BCE Hannibal immediately set out to establish his authority and test his military power by starting to rein in the tribes on the fringes of Spain in the West, including the Turdetani and Turdulli, and the Cynetes, and tribes to the north such as the Lobetani, Veitones, Vaccaei, and Olcadi. Learning much from Hasdrubal’s policies, Hannibal also knew that Spanish silver would have to be spread around the peninsula. Hamilcar had also been careful to pay his mercenaries according to expected standards augmented by loot from conquests, and Hannibal had learned firsthand from observing his father in the 240–238 BCE Mercenary Wars back home in Carthage6 how important it was to take care of mercenaries. Fortunately, there was ample silver to be spread around Spain.
Basing himself in Cartagena, as had Hasdrubal, Hannibal carefully acquired the best possible army of trained soldiers—on the one hand, buying the loyalty of some veteran mercenaries; and on the other, offering other mercenaries the opportunity to share loot from his Spanish conquest as he subjugated the peninsula in lightning attacks and sieges. Although he still visited Akra Leuke, where his father had colonized and set up a military command just outside Andalucia, Hannibal seemed to always return to Cartagena and its silver as the primary Punic base of operations and also the primary link back to Carthage. He always made certain that the leaders in Carthage had favorable reports of his success to accompany the silver shipments, although the silver bullion spoke the loudest and underscored his reports with convincing evidence.
The fort that Hasdrubal the Fair began on the Cerro del Molinete hill closest to the harbor was made of worked stone in Punic style: carved blocks with detailed borders and many building foundations whose traces still line the hill with remnant walls. From the heights of this hill, one can still see across the blue harbor or across to the summits of the other hills that also housed urban forts or temples to Carthage’s gods. Carthaginian silver coins were also minted here from the nearby mines, and the local archaeological museum has a silver Punic coin of Tanit, the goddess consort of Baal, so there also may have been a Tanit shrine, or tophet, in or near Cartagena as well as in other Iberian colonies, especially since other early sanctuaries have been found in Sardinia and Sicily.7 The natural harbor has been so valuable historically over millennia that it was the primary Mediterranean port for the Spanish Empire of the fifteenth through twentieth centuries and more recently that of Spain’s submarine fleet.
As one arrives by boat into the Cartagena harbor, the jagged coastline here gives way to many smaller bays under looming plateaus, and panoramic remains of seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century cannon emplacements can be glimpsed that solidified Cartagena’s reputation as among the most impregnable ports of the historic world. That this port was also only a few miles from the richest silver mines in Spain demonstrates how canny and practical the Carthaginians were in carefully choosing locations of their maritime colonies for maximum trading convenience. The Archaeological Museum of Cartagena displays Punic amphorae—vessels for shipping oil or wine—and household pottery of all shapes and sizes. Quite a bit of it was imported from Carthage or Greek colonies, and the rest local copies; all evidence of a substantial Punic population of several thousand people, although there also would have been a constant flow of people back and forth from the mother city of Carthage. Archaeological exploration of more of Cartagena’s perimeter and survey of even some of the higher local peaks may yet uncover additional sanctuaries to Baal and Tanit and additional support communities outside the known walls. The now-dry lagoon to the immediate southwest of Cartagena could have accommodated an entire merchant fleet or warships. Unfortunately, when the Romans conquered Spain a few years later under the Scipio family, the Carthaginian buildings and the Punic stamp on the city was mostly obliterated—deliberately.8
From 230 to 220 BCE, there would have been a steady procession of mule trains down into Cartagena from the rusty red hills of the peninsula to its immediate east: sturdy pack animals on whose backs the piled silver ingots came by the hundreds. Carthaginian accountants and quartermasters kept a close watch on the bullion, and the Cartagena mints were busy stamping out silver coins, probably most of them with Barcid dynasty images. Hannibal could have become incredibly wealthy from this glut of Spanish silver but instead chose to focus his economic policy on military matters. The few surviving Punic silver coins found to have been minted in Cartagena—since the Romans later took them out of circulation and melted them down partly to avoid reminders of Hannibal’s victories—seem to show the older, bearded face of Hamilcar Barca or the younger, beardless Hannibal on one side. The peering profiles look as if these gifted Punic generals could see to the edge of the world and had their eyes on the future. On the reverse side of the portrait profile, some of these new Barcid family silver mints often portrayed an army elephant brought from Syria, where they had been bred for generations. Hannibal’s apparent first victorious use of elephants was in Spain against the Carpetani tribe, when he employed forty pachyderms stampeding along the Tagus River to trap and crush resistance after an uprising. These animals might have been many of the same elephants he took with him two years later to Italy.
Hannibal’s elephants are perhaps the most enduring image of his intrepid story. These huge beasts are what nearly everyone visualizes on the march—the picture made all the more impressive by the crossing of the Alps, where elephants are a visual oxymoron. Many famous depictions show the elephants with Hannibal’s army in the snow, often surrounded by rocky peaks.
Hannibal marched with elephants because they were so frightening and destructive. The best war elephants were trained to enhance their natural instincts to gore with their wicked ivory tusks, often sharpened or tipped with razor-sharp metal. They could lift and toss with these tusks, using them as we use pitchforks. They also had very thick outer skin, often one and a half inches or even thicker, especially in places where skin folds or calluses occur—hence the descriptive Greek name for them, pachyderm, meaning “thick skinned.” Often airborne projectiles such as spears and arrows could barely penetrate their skin unless used at very close range (and who would want to be that close?). Furthermore, nearly all cavalry horses—even the Numidian horses with Hannibal—hated the beasts’ unique smell and often stampeded away even when trained for battle.
The Celtiberians and later the Gauls were seeing elephants for the first time. Polybius says that the ragged Gauls in the snowy Alps avoided Hannibal’s elephants at all costs, never attacking or ambushing anywhere near them.
Everyone wants to know what kind of elephants Hannibal had. None of the ancient sources, primarily Polybius and Livy, record this detail. Instead, these historians tell us only that Hannibal crossed Gaul and the Alps with about thirty elephants (the historic estimates range from twenty-seven to thirty-seven). To this day, no one knows for certain which species Hannibal employed, but the primary candidate is the Asian or Indian elephant, Elephas maximus. Four or five subspecies of this elephant have been bred and used for millennia in labor and battle in Asia and Southeast Asia. The Asian elephant is highly trainable—although never really tamed. It had to be forcibly trained in warfare to charge and trample enemies either singly or in ranks. A herbivore, the adult can easily eat 10 percent of its weight in vegetable matter (up to five hundred pounds) and drink, on average, thirty gallons of water daily. Its maximum pace is generally about fifteen miles per hour unless charging, although it generally prefers a lumbering walk of about two to three miles per hour.
Historically, the Asian elephant was probably first encountered by Alexander the Great when he fought with the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC and again farther east on the Indus River frontiers of India around 325 BC in his battles with King Porus—where he faced almost a hundred war elephants at the Battle of the Hydaspes River. Asian elephants were subsequently imported from India and bred in Syria by Alexander’s Seleucid successors and also used in Macedonia by King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 280 BC.9 In the third century BCE, elephants were expensive but fairly common imports from Alexandria to Carthage, where they were also bred for war.10
In antiquity, there was a smaller species of elephants inhabiting the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, Loxodonta africana pharaoensis, now believed to be extinct. It is possible that this elephant species also was used by the Carthaginians, given its geographical proximity, and some historians think this may have been Hannibal’s elephant.
For two years, from 221 to 219 BCE, Hannibal slowly strengthened his leadership and trained his men into the best fighting unit in the world, a great achievement considering their multicultural backgrounds and the different languages they spoke, although their different commanders would have all spoken sufficient Punic to be able to relay commands from Hannibal downward. In the meantime, a waiting Hannibal stockpiled weapons and silver for his next step toward ultimate revenge against Rome, whether his allies in Spain or back home in Carthage understood or even guessed his long-term goal.
Some of Hannibal’s knowledge was acquired by his direct observation from military campaigns, with other information coming from a network of paid informants and intelligence gathered from his scouts in outposts, and some from merchants who doubled as spies.
Hannibal’s trained ability to make accurate assessments and observations was no doubt instigated and encouraged by his father when Hannibal was a young adolescent in Spain. He would apply this lesson throughout his subsequent engagements for the next decade as he marched through Gaul and into Italy. Hannibal reasoned rightly that if he could harness their strengths and address their weakness, these Celtiberians and their kin could make able allies or, at worst, could be the frontline buffer for his troops against the Romans. If he could both win their trust and simultaneously exploit their desire for independence while adding to their suspicions of Roman intents, Hannibal could amass an unusual military force that would more than give the Romans pause. Some of these very Celtiberians who came over to the Punic side would later accompany Hannibal into Italy and form a vital core of his most resolute veterans.
What Hannibal could glean from Celtic culture—especially weapons of good Spanish steel and their bravery in war—would also be a huge boon in his burgeoning dealings with far more of their kind as he moved ever closer to Roman Italy. That Hannibal was far more successful than the Romans with the Celts and their close kin in Spain and Gaul—observing and learning how best to deal with them in war and peace—is likely proof that his time spent in Spain was a necessary step toward invading Italy.
Hannibal’s continued successes in Iberia worried some Romans but did not much faze the Senate, which was more concerned at the time with Illyria. The aggregate people making up the Illyrians included the territories of modern Croatia, Serbia, and Albania on the Dalmatian coast. The Romans had to quickly deal with the Illyrians on their northeastern flank as a higher priority than this young Carthaginian upstart in Spain. Increasing Illyrian piracy had made the Adriatic Sea unsafe for Roman shipping for several years, and the Roman recourse to this danger was to invade Illyria with sufficient legions at the expense of any other interests. Roman ambitions for Spain were mostly postponed for the time being. This overcommitment to the Illyrian distraction would also prove to be a severe Roman mistake in 219 BCE regarding Saguntum.