The Battle of Carrhae (53 B.C.E.)

Music is:
"The Wrong Way," by Jahzzar
"Drums of the Deep," by Kevin MacLeod
"The House Glows (With Almost No Help)," by Chris Zabriskie
"Hallon," by Christian Bjoerklund

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[danieljoaquinsegoviacorona]

In Spanish "Craso error" means fatal error, and is because Crassus made the mortal mistake of rejecting Armenian's help.

[lucrayon]

Alternative Title: Absolutely Not His Year - Crassus (53 B.C.E.)

[suddi]

"...but another tribune stepped forward and vetoed his veto."
I'm just imagining him running up and flaunting an Uno reverse card.

[alexanderorlov-holmes]

"46, 000 Armenians is a lot of Armenians"

Historia Civilis dropping the truth bombs as usual

[TheSecondVersion]

Hannibal at Cannae: Haha, I have tricked the Romans into letting me surround them!

Parthian General: Are.... are the Romans *letting* us surround them?

Vercingetorix: Caesar has us surrounded! But our allies have surrounded *him!* Wait, what is he.... No, there's no way he's that crazy

[anonymus]

Pretty sure the reason Crassus lost was a severe lack of building fortified encampments.
Also not enough village burning.

[goose]

The Parthian general, Surena was executed by the Parthian king after this because he was seen as a threat to his power

[charlesferdinand]

Fun facts:
-The Gallic cavalry contingent under the command of Publius was extremely loyal to him and would die defending his dead body.
-One of the legates who took over after Crassus became inconsolable was Cassius, he led a legion to safety back to Syria were he mounted a defense of the province, repulsing Parthian attacks; he became a senator and he and Brutus were leaders of the conspiracy to murder Caesar; both died in the battle of Philippi against Octavian and Marc Antony.

[bobmybobbob]

"He ordered the Romans to march off into the desert...at a breakneck pace". Good plan. If he had survived maybe later he could try and invade Russia in the winter.

[nept]

Crassus tried being Caesar but only managed the "get into bad trouble" part and missed the part where you win with lucky stuff and weird tricks..

[Kay-kgny]

Sidenote: just imagine being a random farmer or something and getting your town destroyed and your whole family sold into slavery because your city leaders (who you've possibly never even seen in person) decided to actively troll a Roman general when they could have just laid low.

[Lazyguy]

17:30 that Parthian general clearly had an entire humiliation itinerary lined up for Crassus, but then the guy went and died and now he had to find some other way to get it done.

[vladdumbrava]

Spartacus laughing his ass off from the underworld at "Crassus's Triumph".

[paulliu]

so basically crassus invented the total war noobbox

[AcZe]

crassus didn't have large roman onagers or large roman ballistas in the middle. that's why his noob box formation didn't work

[HazmanFTW]

Man it's good to see the Parthian's researched Parthian Tactics giving them that +1/+2 armour and +4 attack against spearmen.

[badgergaucho]

10:30
Fun fact: "parthian shot" ended up becoming an expression used by the romans to refer to those who keep yelling insults as they leave.



Either way, Crassus was a noob.

[freycomm]

The Chinese had a fairly simple (albeit expensive) way to deal with horse archers employing Parthian tactic. In a similar period, the chinese Han dynasty embarked on punitive raids deep into Mongolia. Han with their previous experience in dealing with the nomads employed a large percentage of infantry crossbowmen/archers. Almost half of the infantry were ranged troops armed with strong crossbows and bows. Even though both the Han and Mongolians used similar composite technology in their bow construction, horse archers use drastically smaller bows than the infantry counter part. Horse archer can't use big bows due to it interfering with them riding. The chinese crossbows were extremely effective. Not only it has an aiming device allowing it easy estimation of range. It also outranges horse archers due to its size, bigger the bow, more power, more power, longer range. So when the Mongolians tried to use shoot and scope against a large formation of Han infantry they were simply out matched. The horsemen lose the range engagement and can't charge in due to the other half the infantry were spearmen. Infantry ranged troops are also denser, because horses are bigger, so they can output far more arrows/bolts per area. Han's punitive raids were far more successful as a result.

[NoahWeaverRacing]

The way I see it is
1. Crassus started an unprovoked war (even Caesar had some version of a flimsy excuse)
2. He sent Soldiers to a garrison offer from a town in the empire he was attacking.
3. He constantly shrugged off the advice of his council. No man has all the answers and especially in war and always needs to accept advice of his council occasionally.
4. Chased an army in the desert away from water and food supplies (Caesar would have always put himself in a position to intercept supplies).
5. Indecisive leadership. He second guessed his tactics and when faced with encirclement he attempted very little to at least temporarily suppress the Parthian arrows and created some form of escape/ fortified encampment
6. Declined help from an allied power who’s cavalry would have significantly helped Crassus in a battle against Parthian horse archers.
6.5- the Armenian cavalry could have given Crassus the information he so desperately needed to execute a firm battle plan for where and how to invade.

[MephLeo]

In Portuguese you can call a gross error an _erro crasso_, literally meaning "crassus error". I guess that's a deserved tribute.