How did the Romans swap units around mid-battle?

today I'm going to be talking about the manifold swap now some of you may be asking yourself what's a maniples wok and that is a good question because I'm going to contend that really nobody knows but the idea is that a manifold which was a unit of Roman soldiers now you'll be talking principally about the period around the second Punic War because I don't know if I've mentioned this before but I'm doing a graphic novel called in search of Hannibal and and you can pre-order it at this address anyway um in that I'm going to show Roman soldiers fighting in the way that they fought in the period and I quite like to show on Manipal swap at some point and I'd like to get it right but but what is amenable swap well at the unit of of troops and it was made up of two centuries so you had a one century of something like 60 or 60 for men and another one and together these would be one manifold so it's a unit of the army and they would be a mandible of hash dotty towards the front of the army and they lead the first heavy troops to smash into the enemy and behind them would be prepaid and behind there would be a half size line of triarii the third line of heavy troops in a roman army of the period so at some point you have to replace your front line with your second line so your front line has gone in there's a battle happening they throw their peeler that got stuck in with the the swords and they're fighting but maybe they start getting tired maybe they start getting beaten maybe they start doing well and if you if you hit the enemy now you will route the enemy but for whatever reason there comes a point where you want to throw your second line in but how do you do this because if you've got a continuous wall of men all fighting in front of you then you should bring up a continuous wall of your second line well you've got loads of your own guys loads of corpses loads of screaming wounded loads of quite objectionable frankly enemy all in front of you making that extremely inconvenient if you just slamming to the back of your own guys how are you helping your own guide and if your own guys turn around and try to pull back and run away where are they going to go because you've got a solid wall of troops coming forward and if they all pull back at the same time that might cause the enemy to surge forward and then you've got a route on your hands when you're loads of men you who can't get out of the way so there's a big problem now what you can do of course is have what bullet are often termed intervals so you have a block of men beat up a century or Manipal and then you have an interval between it and the next block so that if you move forwards in blocks like this then when the line in front of you does need to withdraw it can withdraw through those intervals but even that doesn't make everything clear because if the the first line withdrawing goes through these intervals what happens if the enemy then charges after that first line terms withdrawal into a route and then passes through those intervals then your second line coming forward suddenly finds itself surrounded and that could precipitate disaster so you need some method of feeding men in and getting mail out which doesn't cause a sudden surge of the enemy of some routes and collapse of formation you've got some goecart with some orderly way of getting units of men to replace others whilst keeping up the pressure on the enemy now of course there might be a lull it might be convenient low when you can pull back and the enemy is also pulling back and he's reordering his lines and so forth that could happen but let's imagine that it doesn't so the enemy is keeping up the pressure and you don't have a convenient lull how do you do it so that's the Manipal swap problem if you like and there are loads of people there's absolutely I know this from our I must been talking about mental spots for 20 years there's no shortage in this world of people who will tell you very precisely what a manifold swap was and and how everyone else's version is just wrong and I don't want to become one of those people so I'm not in this video going to tell you exactly what one was and exactly how it was done but I will propose it went what I think is a reasonably feasible way of doing it the way I'm thinking of doing it in the book but I'm also getting in my retaliation early because I think that if I do put a malleable swap in the book then there are people who feel that they know what the manimals was over no he's got a manifest what wrong yeah that's not how it was done and and you know so I'm good to face them now you don't know nobody knows in fact a lot of people question where the manacles what actually happened at all now there's something known as checkerboarding if you've seen the the 1960 film I think 60 by Stanley Kubrick Spartacus and then you've seen a very impressive array of Italian soldiers dressed up as Romans doing a checkerboard formation and advancing a very impressive way with good music playing and so forth all this big expansive battlefield and yes a word about battlefields actually I hate to break it to you I know this ruins an awful lot of films but battlefields didn't actually exist there were no large smooth open treeless areas of just plain ground that were set aside for having battles on the countryside we've actually farmed for the most part and would have fences and villages and copses and you know all the inconvenient things that get in the way of troops trying to find a battle fight fight a battle but you know the fact is that you cannot always that you usually can't choose your ground perfectly and you have to fight the enemy where the battle have happened to end up happening so the chances are that you won't have a beautiful plain open battlefield to fight on yes it's true that some generals would sometimes try to contrive things that way and they did sometimes succeed but battlefield areas for having battles on didn't exist and if there's a bit more of mine sorry I think this in so many films and what a convenient open area to fight on nevermind so there they are moving in this checkerboard formation that looks very nice and you'll notice that they have corners touching but then they don't do anything with it they don't actually fight in the checkerboard formation before the battle starts they do a bit more quite impressive maneuvering and then they just fall up into one great big block and that's what advances on the enemy and then of course as soon as they the block edge the two sides get to grips with each other the usual thing happens that all formation just dissolved and everyone pairs off and does nothing we hold a shield behind you as a counterweight and go ting ting ting ting with your sword and then the recovery charging and come to the usual stuff but anyway you see that quincunx now quincunx em is a latin term that refers to well it I was in it as I went to my I should say I went to my local war games club just recently and had a conversation about my little spots because I think you can do this video and I was talking to two guys who do a lot of ancient war gaming and they have over the years experimented with different war game rules for simulating the Manorville swap and they would mention water out the quincunx and I was a little bit unsure of my ground so I just wrote it down and annulled its ages because it's not to argue back but I think it's a latin term now for our period the historians are writing in Greek and yes it's true that the word checkerboard is of course modern English and and that in Latin is sometimes referred to as a quincunx but it's not really the five it's not so much the number it's the geometric pattern blink books is also a coin by the way just in case you're curious that they look like that or they some of them did and they were worth five twelfths of an ass but if you roll a die today a d6 it probably has a quincunx on it which is this pattern so you can imagine if you get that pattern loads of them next to each other you've got us with a checkerboard type formation so it was a way of describing a checkerboard the five could be as one of my war game of friends put it it could be past dirty hostility bring keep a tree re tree re and they go that's the five formation so they must have thought like that what will these arguments but there are some problems one being of course that you actually have the same number of printer pays at past RT so perhaps the five if it were a 5 would be past RT Astarte pre keep a print EPA's tree re which I know it doesn't look like a dine out of it and that's just a way of contriving 5 and I'm fairly convinced that this word was being used in its reference to the deformation the geometric pattern of the quincunx and so it was their way of saying checkerboarded so why would soldiers operate in checkerboard formations well one thing that most people are pretty agreed on is that it's a convenience form maneuver if you've got a massive line that's very deep and very broad and you want to move it it's very difficult as you move forwards there are going to be things little woods villages farmhouses rock streams all sorts of things but break up the ground and that will break up your formation and it's very difficult to move forward in a great big wide mass like that and if you want to wheel then the guys towards the one end have got to be walking increasingly slowly until perhaps right at the very end you've got one guy who's maybe standing stationary and everyone else has to speed up and you can very slowly wheel it can take ages to wheel a really big formation of guys particularly across rough ground so if you form up into lots of little blocks those little blocks can all maneuver and those those guys those centuries as manifolds there was no each other because that's how Romans drilled and that's how they camped and spent their lives they would be with the guys in their century in their small unit they would perhaps share a Kent with the guys just in their unit of ten and there would be six of these units of cane in a Punic War period century and when they capped they would they would have those tents next to each other and they would cook with and share meals with and do all sorts of tasks with other men's in their own in their own century so they would know we got the guys in their century and they would train with them if you'd been on campaign as a Roman soldier for any length of time you might be mobilized at some point it might be months before you actually get into action with the enemy you've had months every day to get to know the other guys in your unit and to drill with them to March them to train with them and to get used to receiving and taking orders and of reacting to trumpet calls getting to the voice and the commands of your your Centurion your ops here the first the two commanders of the century so they would know that stuff so in that little unit you can move quite efficiently and to move an army across a big landscape in little blocks is much more efficient and they can quickly get into position and then if you want to form a line along that diagonal you can just do it quickly in lots of little blocks and the guys could do it at the trot and that was a much more efficient way of moving of course if there is anything like a cops for instance you can just move around it now you know don't you that is much easier to to move in a narrow frontage than the white-fronted you if you choose been animal on some school trip and you're walking across the countryside you don't spread out sideways do you and then try to walk across the landscape like that no you follow the guy in front and you find a path you find the easiest route and you all go one behind the other it's much quicker and easier to move like that well if you have loads of small units then you can remove us much more easily so you can quickly get into position and then if you do need to close up the line well then you will have learnt maneuvers for closing up the line so you could change a quincunx formation into a solid line pretty quickly the Centurions could relay along the line blow whistles ask their corner sons to blow trumpets and so forth and it could happen so speeder manoeuvre is one reason for doing it and a lot of people will argue at that's all the quincunx was for it was just for manoeuvre and they didn't fight like that but there are people who think they did fight like that but they would actually clash with the enemy in quincunx formation so you would have one unit forward one unit back possibly touching at the corner possibly not and gaps in between so if let's imagine that the enemy has a continuous lines you've got loads of goals and they're just great great block of goals continuously you'll have a low the Romans hitting them then a gap then the load of Romans hitting them in the gaps and the loads of Rome's hitting them an Olympic will say well that's ridiculous we need the enemy would just flood into the gaps and hit the side of the front units and and they couldn't possibly have done that well maybe but then maybe not you see we don't know about the timing maybe one lot of that the forward units of the quincunx would hit and the second unit would hit only a short while later so if you've got shock troops that the legionary does not fight like the Greeks of a phalanx where you you move slowly up to the enemy and then you fight with your Spears and you try to slowly push the enemy back they are shock troops that go smashing in they throw their peeler and immediately follow up those peeler with their there's the short sword there Gladius Espania insist or whatever and they try to smash into the enemy so if you've got a continuous wall of enemy and you smash into them then you're going to dent the line a little bit and get a little bulge and then you've got a little bit of disruption so if you've got disruption depth disruption gap all the way along the line then when the second unit goes in maybe only a few seconds later you've got you're hitting something that's already a bit disrupted because as the units that do charge forwards go forwards the guys in a position to receive are probably going to prefer to be guys who are in the position in front of one of the gaps so it says a for instance I'm I'm I'm goal and I can see a Roman coming straight at me and they're there and there and there and there are more Romans but they are there and there there's a gap there okay so I'm quite likely to try to receive this charge like this all right but I'm unlikely to be on my own a lot of the guys around me perhaps going to be trying to maneuver into that gap as well because it seems safe man you can you can put your shield in front of you and you can look here we go Braveheart okay come on then Romans I've got you I've got you and so you may actually create a weak spot if you're charging irregular troops like gold and if you've got regular troops with well drills where regular troops with this this devastating this is devastating initial charge you could create weak spots and create bunches of guys with an bulge out of formation in those gaps who then get hit by the next slot so it's a bit like forming a forming a spear point forming a swine burg forming a pig snout forming a wedge and you smash into the line in order to create disruption and then what follows that wedge should be able to capitalize all the disruption caused by the wedge but which is one of the problems of the wedge is that you need a psycho going to be right at the point of the wedge but if you've got a unit that's much smaller but you know it's still you get part of the effect of a way just most of what I'm saying by having a smaller unit crashing to the into the enemy now there are loads of possibilities as to what unit was and was it amenable was it a century one conjectured commonly conjectured formation of the Roman army is that you have a manifold then a manifold width gap and then another manna port and at the front line and in that manifold with gap you have the metal of the second line either immediately touching corner to corner or back of it with an interval and there are many people will tell you that it's definitely one of definitely other and there are people who will tell you that it's definitely the case that the spaces in between the manifolds were not one full mammoth width and there are also people who will argue quite forcefully for the centuries being one behind the other or one alongside the other now we are told in the literature that there is EVB V and B the fours one and the and the real one either that the posterior one and the anterior one so that suggests okay so one one century was formed in front of the other but we also are told a presidency decision Polybius already quite recently that the one of the Centurions in manifold commanded the left hand century and the other one commanded the right hand century so that suggests that they are side by side and what a complication is it that they could move into position like that and then do that and this one might still be called the posterior century because that's where it came from hat so a complication and loads of people have drawn up all sorts of different schemes on paper and to try to rationalize and get to grips with this idea of the manifold swap you might want to research it yourself but you may feel that you're completely lost I mean how can you can't read the original sources you don't read ancient Greek well maybe you could because maybe maybe you could get yourself along to WWI great courses plus.com stroke linear age and there find a landing page which will give you an introductory free month to all the lecture courses of the great courses plus there are many of these on all sorts of topics and one of them I notice is ancient Greek yes so it's 36 half-hour lectures now you may say well you can master ancient Greek in that time well now you can master it but I think you could get to quite usefully familiar with it at least when you look at ancient Greek which to the uninitiated just makes the sounds I got in your head the compressional languages as gobbly gook alien script but at least you'll learn the alphabet you learn basic pronunciation you learn word order and you'll start to do all that's a noun that must be a verb and you'll start to get at least a feel for it and if you were a fan of a wild unkempt hair and the fact that you're watching this channel at all shows that you must be at least tolerant of it then you're gonna love this guy I mean look at that hair Wow and you know that he's a distinguished scholar because he can do the scholars cradle I mean I could just now you see I I wouldn't but he without looking he got what he does a double what this one - yeah oh yeah oh yeah he does the double and you know you know the guy is good without even looking I mean just do every single pick so precise so you know you know this guy knows his stuff so that's one of the very many courses that's on offer as the great courses classes along for three months tell me what can you lose right now what do I think actually have a wool of course I don't know and the first thing I have to admit myself is I don't know but there is a there is something which I quite like it and I quite like the idea that it actually happens century by century I think it's reasonable that the sub commanders were given some initiative these guys these Centurions were experienced soldiers who've been elected by their peers and they've been on campaign and they had drilled with their guide a lot they knew their guy their guys knew their voice knew their style of command and they could look at what was happening where their particular century was and make sensible decisions accordingly on the spot the overall commander of an army can't micromanage every century he's got to be able to rely on his junior officers to some degree and so I think they did and I think that the century is a very flexible unit they kept the century and if they do have this well we know from the literature reasonably competently that there were two centuries for manacles and that these did maneuver separately to at least some degree even if the fighting unit was considered to be the malleable so and this unit could make little tactical local moves in accordance with accidents of ground and the particular story of what's going on in that part of the battlefield now we don't exactly how many men there were but there is something like sixty to sixty four men in a century and we don't know exactly what frontage they have we think that in close formation in close combat a man occupied something like two and a half feet if you get too bunched up then you can't fight properly because you don't have the room to we wield your wielder weapons and so about two and a half feet so if they were in as it's commonly thought six files of ten that's six times two and a half feet it's only 15 feet it's only fit that to check that one to two books yes it's 15 feet which is really not very far so if there is a century here and next to it is a rock a wagon a clump of trees a house a but there are loads of things that 15 feets really not very far so it's very easy to imagine that there might be some accent to ground which breaks up the formation and that you can then cope with it so you look at what's happening your area oh we've got a we've got a clump of trees where we are there areas quite open but we've got this month of trees to to sort out so this local Centurion makes a sensible decision and says okay we'll just go in with one century you fall back guys and when we come back you can then hit the side so if the front unit in contact with the enemy falls back then if the enemy does surge forward this unit is in the position to crash into its flank and they're ready to only 15 feet away now when you do hit the enemy let's imagine that there isn't an excellent ground now and that it's just a constant wall of goals or whatever you smashed in with one century this second unit is not many 50 people even if the depth is great even if further depth is this five foot per man and there are ten of you there's still only 25 feet and you could throw a peel on 25 feet and you could follow up with you and another peeler and then you're glad is very very quickly so the idea that the enemy would just flood into that gap I think is is not true because would you go into that gap it's a killing box if you are the goal charge into that gap then turn sideways in order to have a fight with the guys on the sides of the forward centuries then the rear centuries can be chucking their PR straight into if you've turned left you've exposed to your shield left side to a great volley of peeler you're dead and if you surge into that area and lose formations then a unit that's in formation with pila standing at the ready charging straight into you that for them it's Christmas oh wow they flooded the gap will have them so I think that is perfectly feasible to be bid fight into quincunx formation I think that the the mandible SWAT was probably done by centuries rather than by a whole animals at the time but I also believe that the local commander would have made a sensible decisions as sometimes because of the situation because of the particular layout of the ground he might decide to do it as a whole mana pool at a time rather than a century the idea that this beautiful geometric pattern could be maintained right away across a battlefield under battlefield conditions is I think rather elegant so ah yes I think it's feasible I don't know if these what's actually happen like that but I think it's feasible I was watching Rome the HBO series and you'll notice that another of the many Possible's is that it was done file by file and actually show an above shot and getting to show this to show how clever they've been that these incredibly constricted lines these guys do not have room to fight properly and they're moving they're swapping dive in and out by files run by centuries or manifolds and to me I wasn't convinced by that but some people clearly who've read books and everything and some of them could even I'm looking I know it's cheating can even do that you know they think that's how it was done and they're not necessarily wrong just because I've contradicted them good lord well though I know I'm just some bloke off the interweb [Music] please be there [Music]

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 840,605

Rating: 4.8931813 out of 5

Keywords: Roman, soldiers, troops, legionaries, maniple, swap, swop, relieve, relief, battle, army, ancient, classical, warfare, line, front, century, centurian, file, rank, manoeuvre, battlefield, spartacus, rome, republican, cohort, hastati, principes

Id: croWDsDhgPo

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Cato_Snow]

I actually like the file by file replacements that happened in HBO's Rome.

[u/Sansa_Culotte_]

Whenever someone calls the Gallic mercenaries of the Punic wars "irregular troops", I die inside a little.