by Stephen Janowsky

Created on: June 03, 2008

"If there is no way, we shall make a way".

These words are commonly attributed to the ancient Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, indisputably one the greatest military leaders that ever lived. At the age of only thirty, he inflicted a number of astounding defeats to the "invincible" Roman army in times when the Roman Empire ruled the world, a triumph that nobody else even dreamed to achieve. He surrounded and seized Rome under control for a decade and a half. The Romans could never beat him, except through betrayal. Many centuries after his death, great leaders like Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington recognized Hannibal as an unparalleled military genius, and his tactics became part of all classic warfare manuals.

Son of general Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal was born in 247 BC. At that time, the Roman Empire had come to dominate the Mediterranean after defeating and humiliating the powerful Northern African city of Carthage during the First Punic War. However, Carthage (which today is known as Tunis) had subsequently managed to regain some of its possessions in Spain. It is said that, as a young boy, Hannibal swore eternal hatred and revenge to Rome. He became leader of the Carthaginian army when he was only twenty-six years old, and three years later he decided to challenge Rome, after a suspected Roman violation of Carthaginian Hispanic territory.

To avoid fighting on Spanish ground, and since crossing the Mediterranean Sea from Carthage to Italy seemed unlikely to him, Hannibal chose the boldest and most surprising of all strategies: to go all the way through Spain and Southern Gaul (ancient France), then cross the Alps and Northern Italy, to fight the war with the Romans on their own land. He started his campaign with some 50,000 infantry and horse soldiers, and 37 war elephants. After some minor battles against local Spanish and Gaul tribes, Hannibal's army started crossing the Alps in the winter of 218 BC, in what has remained as one of the bravest military expeditions in history. Sixteen days of marching through the highest European mountains, while enduring extreme cold, exhaustion, hunger, and despair, killed about one-third of Hannibal's soldiers and most of his war elephants, but he still made it through. While the Romans sent their troops towards Sicily and Northern Spain, where they expected to confront the Carthaginians, Hannibal made a detour around Marseille and, after crossing the Alps, he reached the fields of the river Po in Northern Italy, thus

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