The Indian potentate had prepared a strong position on the east bank to defend his kingdom against the foreign invader. Because of spring rains the river was flooded. Using Taxila as headquarters, the Macedonian king received emissaries from Kashmir and elsewhere before moving on against the great Porus, whose domain stretched Alexander in India 35 far to the east beyond the Hydaspes River. He anticipated little opposition for the initial part of the advance because the first major city to the east was Taxila, and its ruler, whom the Greeks called Taxiles, had already joined Alexander’s cause. On a day in May, Alexander crossed the Indus and pushed into the Punjab. The streamlined logistical system created by Alexander’s father, Philip II, served the Macedonian army well, even though by one calculation Alexander’s troops had marched 17,000 miles from Pella, the Macedonian capital. While in India, Alexander’s army received a shipment of equipment that had been sent all the way from Macedonia. As a result, the collection of supplies proved relatively easy. The Indus valley was extremely fertile and crossed by many navigable rivers. One of the most remarkable features of Alexander’s campaigns in India is that supply was almost never a problem. Although Alexander went there mainly to round out his conquest of the Persian Empire, he also had a romantic desire to go to the edge of the world. The ancient Middle Eastern empire of Mesopotamia had traded with India, and Persia had exercised a nominal control over the Indus valley, but to Greeks and Macedonians India extended to the end of the earth and was inhabited by giants and elephants. At that time, India was a land of mystery. They believed, for example, that the valley of the Indus flowed through a large desert to the Upper Nile because there were crocodiles in the Indus’s tributaries, and the only other river in the world known by them to have crocodiles was the Nile. The Macedonian king and his men, 75,000 strong, knew little of what lay ahead. When Alexander was ready to rejoin the main army, Hephaestion had already succeeded in building a brudge across the Indus. In extremely difficult fighting against fierce Indian hill peoples, the mobile force under Alexander seized walled villages and strategic strongholds, notably the city of Massaga in the valley of the Swat and the mountain fortress of Aornos on the upper Indus, a site that, according to Greek mythology, not even Heracles could storm. As the main army moved south into the Punjab, the king took some crack infantry, skirmisher, and cavalry units by another route farther north in order to secure its flank. By carefully reviewing the war against Porus and taking a critical look at the Battle of the Hydaspes, it may be possible to resolve some of the uncertainties.Įarly in 326 B.C., as Alexander prepared to invade India, he sent the bulk of the Macedonian army under his close friend and companion Hephaestion over the Khyber Pass and down toward the Indus. Although many of the tactical details of the fighting are reasonably clear, there is still some confusion over the role of the squadrons on the Macedonian left and the Indian right, and in this confusion elephants figure prominently. The battle on the Hydaspes (today called the Jhelum River) turned into a hard-fought, near-run cavalry battle. Alexander and the Macedonians treated the beasts with wary respect, seeing them as fearsome instruments of war. In 326 B.C., at the Battle of the Hydaspes, a tributary of the Indus, the elephants were awesome. For the first time in a major battle, Alexander’s Macedonian troops also encountered a large number of elephants, and the huge beasts, driven by their mahouts, terrified the ranks. Porus, almost seven feet tall, was both literally and figuratively a giant of a man. There, at the edge of the earth (as the Macedonians believed), he faced King Porus of the Punjab. One of Alexander’s most interesting and romantic campaigns came near the end of his career during his march through India. A courageous, inspirational leader, he repeatedly exposed himself to great danger in the field, and as a master of strategy and tactics he had no superiors and few equals in all of ancient history. While the young Macedonian king was fortunate in at least one of his opponents-Darius, king of Persia, a faint-hearted commander who twice fled the field to avoid confronting him-Alexander personally deserved much of the credit for his victories. In a single decade of fighting, Alexander the Great conquered an enormous empire, as large as the one the Romans later painstakingly accumulated over hundreds of years.
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