Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s10: Republican Tribes
Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c9.s10
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Republican Tribes
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Alexander himself landed with a body of picked troops and made an inroad against the Siboi (Śibis) and the Agalassoi (Agraśreṇis) to prevent their joining the powerful confederacy of the Malloi lower down the river. The Śibis, a wild people clad in skins and armed with clubs, who claimed descent from the soldiers of Hercules, made their submission when Alexander encamped near their capital. Their neighbours, the Agalassoi, were not so amenable; they had mustered an army of 40,000 foot and 3,000 horse and offered battle. They fought hard in the field and in the streets of their city, and many Macedonian soldiers fell; this roused the fury of Alexander, who set fire to the city and massacred large numbers of the inhabitants, condemning many others to slavery; a bare 3,000 sued for mercy and were spared.¹ Alexander then rejoined the fleet.
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¹ Diodorus xvii, 96
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From his camp below the confluence of the Jhelum and the Chenab, Alexander planned a great drive against the tribal confederations of the Mālavas, and their allies, the Kshudrakas, who lived farther tot he East along the Beas. While he himself with his favourite troops would deliver the main attack, Hephaestion, who had gone in advance, and Ptolemy, who was to follow behind, would prevent the enemy's attempts to escape in either direction. Nearchus was to take the fleet to the next confluence of the Chenab with the Rāvi, where all forces were to assemble again at the end of the campaign.
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Alexander struck across fifty miles of waterless desert and completely surprised the first city of the Mālavas he came against; the men, who were abroad in the fields unarmed, offered no resistance and were simply butchered; the rest were shut up in the city, guarded by a cordon of cavalry round the walls till the infantry came up. Then Perdiccas was sent forward to the next city, which he was to invest without attempting to storm the place till Alexander came up. The first city was now carried by assault, the citadel in the centre of it holding out somewhat longer; practically all the garrison were killed. Meanwhile Perdiccas reached the city against which he had been sent, and found it deserted; he rode in hot pursuit of the fugitives and overtook and killed some, but the bulk of them managed to escape him to the marshes of the river and beyond.
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Soon Alexander came up and joined the pursuit; many of the Mālavas were overtaken and slain while crossing the Rāvi, but others made good their escape to a position of great natural strength which was also strongly fortified; here they were attacked by Peithon, who carried the fortress by assault and made slaves of all who had fled to it for refuge. The next place to be attacked was a city of the Brahmins to which the Mālavas had flocked; here the resistance was desperate and most of the five thousand defenders sold their lives dear, only a few being taken prisoners. After a day's rest for the army, Alexander resumed the pursuit and, when he found the cities empty, he had the jungles scoured for fugitives, and his soldiers had instructions to kill everyone that was caught, unless he surrendered voluntarily. He himself marched against the chief city of the Mālavas; learning that they had recrossed the Rāvi and were ready to obstruct his passage, Alexander hastened to where they had dawn up in battle array, some 50,000 in numbers according to Arrian, on the right bank of the Rāvi; he plunged into the stream with his horse, and the Mālavas, not aware of the weakness of the force which Alexander took with him, withdrew from the bank without opposing the passage; when they saw the true position they returned to the fight. But Alexander kept them engaged with light charges till his infantry came up. The Mālavas now withdrew into the nearest stronghold, being hotly pursued by the enemy. In the assaults that followed the next day, the main walls of the city were yielded with little resistance; the citadel held out, and in the assault on it Alexander exposed himself in a way that nearly cost him his life; scaling ladders were few, and Alexander got up one of them, being the first to appear on the wall, a conspicuous target because of his shining arms; to escape the danger, he jumped within the citadel and only a few of his companions could join him there at once; they maintained an unequal contest for some time, but the arrows of the Mālavas killed some of them, and Alexander himself was deeply wounded in the chest, and fainted with loss of blood when the arrowhead was pulled out by Perdiccas. Possibly Alexander adopted the desperate expedient to keep up the morale of his troops in this difficult war. The danger to their king maddened the Greek troops and when they managed to gain the citadel by scrambling up the earthen walls and breaking in the gates, they did not spare man, woman or child.
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When Alexander was still here, recovering from the wound, the rumour spread to the main camp that he had died of it. Even when he had himself conveyed to their midst in a few days, they still doubted if he was really alive; to carry conviction to his soldiers, he rode a horse when he should have been conveyed in a litter and walked some distance to his tent, and there was universal joy and relief in the camp. Curtius gives a long account (IX 6) of the generals' friendly impeachment of Alexander's rashness, and his defence; ‘I measure myself not by the span of age, but by that of glory’.
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What was left of the Mālava people after the decimation of the war sent in their submission now, and the Kshudrakas, who had been holding aloof so long as the swiftness of Alexander's movements left them no chance of going to aid the Mālavas, also sent their representatives with full authority to conclude a treaty with the invader. These ambassadors, a hundred in number, says Curtius, all rode in chariots and were men of uncommon stature and of a very dignified bearing. Their robes were of linen and embroidered with inwrought gold and purple. Alexander accepted their excuses and entertained them on a sumptuous scale before he sent them back; they returned in a few days ‘with presents for Alexander which consisted of 300 horsemen, 1,030 chariots, each drawn by four horses, 1,000 Indian bucklers, a great quantity of linen cloth, 100 talents of steel, some tame lions and tigers of extraordinary size, the skins also of very large lizards, and a quantity of tortoise shells’. Alexander, demanded, according to Arrian, a thousand of their best men as hostages, and when they came, he did not like to keep them but sent them back. The two nations which had thus formally submitted were attached to the satrapy of Philip. But the campaign against the Mālavas was no unalloyed success. As a record of mere slaughter it stands out unique even in the blood-stained annals of Alexander's Indian campaigns. The deep wound in his chest, the result of a desperate expedient, left him weakened and indirectly hastened his end. The stout opposition encountered among the Brahmins of the Punjab and the cities of the Mālavas was indeed the beginning of the reaction that was soon to wipe out all traces of Alexander from India and to establish the empire of the Mauryas.