Knowledge Bank

In this paper, I looked at five battles in history and the geomorphic influences that affected them. I1he 3attle of Issus was fought at the north east corner of the Mediterranean Sea , in the year 333 B,C,, between the armies of Alexander the Great of Macedon and Darius III, the emperor of Persia. The Persian army far outnumbered the Macedonians, but Darius, in his pursuit of Alexander, found himself giving battle on a narrow plain between a rugged mountain and the sea. In this limited space Darius could not deploy his army well and most of the fighting occurred between equal numbers of troops from both sides. Before the Persians' great numbers could be used as fresh reserves, Alexander broke the Persian line at a weak point and chased Darius himself from the battlefield. Without their emperor, the Persian army dissolved and victory belonged to Alexander. Darius had failed to seek battle on favorable terrain and miscalculated the defensive potential of a riverbed at a strategic point. This chapter also contains a brief discussion of why ancient battles were usually fought on level ground, and shows how effective various types of river channels could be in defense. Months later, Alexander was besieging the city of Tyre on the eastern Mediterranean coast. As Tyre was built on an island about a half-mile from shore, Alexander's conquest of the city was in defiance of the geomorphic factors against him. Alexander could and did overcome geomorphic disadvantages. In the Battle of Pharsalus, in 48 B.C., Julius Caesar defeated his rival, Pompey, by driving Pompey's troops into the rugged slopes of Mount Othrys, in northern Greece. He insured that defeat was a permanent one by securing the only local source of water, forcing Pompey's beaten troops to surrender from thirst. Geomorphic considerations took more forms than just terrain features used as obstacles. When King Hans of Scandinavia invaded the Ditmarsh area of northern Germany in the year 1500, the local peasants trapped his force by opening their dikes and flooding their land. The region's geomorphology was the key to its defense. Curing the American Civil War, two able commanders, Generals Lee and Meade, fought and maneuvered against each other in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Both commanders made such good use of local geomorphology, that the end result of the campaign was not caused by any geomorphic factors at all. In summary I point out that whether geomorphic factors played a greater or lesser role in these battles and their outcomes, their influence was still present, and the commander who best interpreted the terrain was more likely to win.