Geopolitically, Alexander the Great was born on third base.
Before he ascended to the throne, his father Philip had already achieved the impossible
by extending Macedonian influence over the entire Greek peninsula.
And his father's influence didn't stop at geopolitics.
Philip spent his entire career working to improve the Macedonian military.
When Philip died, Alexander inherited the finest army on the planet.
So let's talk about the Macedonian military.
There's no better place to start than with their cavalry.
The Macedonians called their cavalry The Companions, or The Companion Cavalry.
During this period, most western armies had a really narrow conception of the proper use
of cavalry.
Many trained them to harass the enemy by throwing javelins or shooting arrows.
Others used them as scouts and skirmishers, but beyond that their use was limited.
The Macedonians ignored this this conventional wisdom.
The Companion Cavalry specialized in charging the enemy flanks, and inflicting massive casualties
up close, with their swords and spears.
Despite what the movies may tell you, this was rare in the ancient world.
You could even say that it was unintuitive.
Stirrups hadn't been invented yet, and many people including the Macedonians didn't even
use saddles.
A person could get knocked off their horse by a stiff breeze.
To many, charging straight into a mass of humanity seemed suicidal.
But the Macedonians knew what they were doing.
For instance, the spears they used were quite interesting.
They were made to be as light and as thin as possible.
So thin that the wooden spear wobbled as they charged.
They were about 12 feet long and were held near in the center.
Both ends of the spear had metal tips, so if one end broke, all the rider had to do
was flip the spear around and continue fighting with the other end.
If that end broke as well, they had sword to use as backup.
Obviously these spears weren't designed to crash into the enemy line.
That would have shattered the spear, and knocked the rider off the horse.
The spear was designed to make lightning quick stabs while on the move.
This was hard to do, but the Companions were expertly trained, and quite deadly with them.
So all of this made The Companions pretty distinct in the ancient world.
But they also organized themselves in a strange way.
When they charged, they didn't do it in a line like you'd think.
They charged as a wedge.
There's a reason for this.
When cavalry charge in a line, they have a tendency to do this.
When the Macedonian wedges charged, they could do this.
Here's why: the person at the tip of the wedge was the guy in charge.
Since everyone could keep an eye on their leader, the entire unit could basically receive
orders non-verbally.
This meant that they could wordlessly change direction mid-gallop, or specifically target
vulnerable enemy units with surgical accuracy.
When they made contact with the enemy, any opening made by the riders at the front could
immediately be exploited by the riders further back.
As a result, the wedges were capable of creating chaos by cutting deep into the enemy line.
A well timed charge like this could single-handedly win the battle.
But no matter how successful the cavalry were, the opportunities they created needed to be
followed up by the infantry.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
For this to make sense, we need a rock-solid understanding of what a phalanx was.
If we're talkin' phalanxes, we're talkin' spears.
Dudes holding spears maybe 8 feet long, with big circular shields.
A phalanx was a group of these spearmen organized into a tight square.
In battle, they presented a solid shield wall, bristling with spears.
Since there were so many people packed into the square, and everybody in the square was
so well trained, the phalanxes had an intense forward momentum.
Against less disciplined opponents, they were nearly unstoppable.
But they had vulnerabilities.
They were slow as hell.
Both slow to move, and slow to turn.
Plus, since the entire phalanx had to work together, they were pretty bad at fighting
in two directions at once.
This made them vulnerable to flanking maneuvers.
When two opposing phalanxes met on the battlefield, the two squares would lock shields and push
against each other as hard as they could.
This would basically take both of the phalanxes out of commission for a while, and the shoving
would continue until one side lost their footing, or another group showed up to tip the balance.
Phalanxes were all the rage in Greece.
For the century or two preceding Philip's reign, the entire peninsula was basically
going through one giant phalanx arms race.
For the longest time, Macedon didn't have phalanxes.
The Macedonians were able to survive on the strength of their excellent cavalry, but the
infantry side of things was kind of ignored.
When Philip came to power, he busied himself with a bunch of reforms, and introduced phalanxes
to Macedon.
He gave these new units a new prestigious name, the Foot Companions.
Through Philip's leadership, they would become the backbone of the Macedonian army.
The Foot Companions were modeled after the Greeks phalanx, but were new and improved.
They used a new kind of spear called the the sarissa.
Technically, sarissas might be pikes rather than spears, but whatever, let's not be sticklers
to detail.
This weapon was usually 14, or 18, or sometimes even 20 feet long.
It was basically twice as long as the spears they used in Greece.
So what did this mean?
Well, if you can picture two phalanxes marching at each other, the one with the longer spears
would always draw first blood, and would therefore have the advantage.
Plus, the sarissas were so long that people 3, or 4, or 5 rows back could still reach
the enemy with their spears.
If you compare this with the Greek phalanx, the Macedonians were able to get like double
or tripple the number of spears attacking at once, with no additional manpower.
But the sarissas came with a downside.
They were absurdly long, and it took an equally absurd amount of training to be able to use
them effectively.
Unlike normal spears, the sarissas had to be held with both hands.
To accommodate this, the Macedonians shrunk down their shields and made them into an tiny
18 inch bucklers, which could be strapped to each man's upper arm and used to deflect
incoming spears.
To get the untrained Macedonian infantry comfortable with this new weapon, they had to be drilled
and drilled and drilled, at a huge cost.
But in the end, it was worth it.
Once they were in the field, the Foot Companions were basically elite phalanxes, better trained
and better equipped than their Greek counterparts.
But all of the training in the world couldn't change the fact that it was incredibly hard
for all phalanxes, including these new Foot Companions, to respond quickly to a changing
battlefield.
They still had all of the weaknesses of a normal phalanx.
They were still slow, and still vulnerable to being flanked.
When a bunch of phalanxes were lined up, the units at each end of the line were exposed.
Here, Philip placed a new kind of infantry, called the Shield Bearers.
The Shield Bearers were outfitted in a much more traditional Greek style, with a shorter,
more manageable spear, and a large shield.
They also carried swords.
Since they weren't weighed down with the giant unwieldy sarissa, the Shield Bearers were
much more versatile than the Foot Companions.
They were the Macedonian army's utility players.
They could fight as a regular phalanx, or they could spread out.
They could quickly redeploy on the battlefield, or totally break formation and charge.
They could fight with a spear or with a sword.
If you ever hear about the Macedonians doing anything weird like fighting on uneven ground,
or breaching walls, or scaling cliffs, it was the Shield Bearers who did it.
These units were entirely made up of veteran soldiers.
Men with long and distinguished careers, plucked from the Foot Companions and given a place
of honour on the flanks.
Under normal circumstances, these units were supposed to hold back, and leave the intense
fighting to the Foot Companions.
The Shield Bearers were kind of like a reserve force, except Philip's innovation was to put
his reserves on the exposed flanks, which is kinda genius.
When the enemy line began to falter, the Shield Bearers were sent in.
They could move much faster than the Foot Companions, and their looser way of fighting
was better for dealing with a retreating enemy.
Now, all of the pieces are in place.
Let's see how they worked together.
The most well known Macedonian tactic is called the Hammer and Anvil.
You may have heard of this, it's super famous.
With the Hammer and Anvil it was the infantry's job - in this case the Foot Companions - to
engage the enemy, and hold them in place.
They were the anvil.
It was the cavalry's job to swing around and attack the enemy from behind.
They were the hammer.
The whole thing relied on the speed and effectiveness of the hammer, and the reliability of the
anvil.
The whole point of this tactic was to quickly envelop the enemy, and force them to face
attacks from two directions at once.
If the enemy wanted to break the encirclement, they either had to go through the Foot Companions,
who were basically one giant unstoppable meat grinder, or go through the Companion Cavalry,
who happened to be one of the most effective cavalry units in human history.
It's simple, but it's extremely effective.
Hannibal, at the Battle of Cannae, used this tactic against the Romans with astounding
success, but we'll cover other famous examples in the near future.
Before Philip's reign, Macedon did not have reliable infantry.
They were able to get by because of their excellent cavalry, but nobody ever bothered
to invest the time and money to bring their infantry up to the Greek standard.
Philip changed this.
Through his leadership, he not only met the Greek standard, but exceeded it.
At the time of his death, Macedon was still a regional power, but thanks to Philip, it
could now field a world-class army.