I love history, it is a great subject to study. My favorite area being military history, particularly during the ancient world.

Anyone else interested in military history? Who is your favorite general?

Mine is Hannibal Barca, the great Carthaginian general who almost destroyed Rome, but who was eventually defeated by another great general, Scipio Africanus. What about yours?

Tso Tsung-t'ang. but only for the chicken.

Tullius obviously. Such brilliance the way he defeated the Stormcloaks.

Ewald von Kleist who had the courage to stand up to Hitler and tell him he was wrong. He died a Soviet prisoner having been found guilty of the war crime of "alienating, through friendship & generosity, the peoples of the Soviet Union".

I'm a bit of a fan of Genghis Khan, his general Tsubodai, Timur Leng, Harald Hardrada and Agesilaos II, who was still kicking ass in the phalanx when he was in his eighties.

Hannibal was an amazing general, but he never had a real chance of destroying Rome. He never had enough manpower to take on the city itself. His plan was most likely to win a few big battles, expecting the Romans to then negotiate a peace treaty favourable for Carthage, as that was the normal Hellenic way of waging war. But the Romans didn't quit, knowing they had a nearly inexhaustible surplus of manpower to draw from.

Indeed, but he must have been quite optimistic that he could get them to negotiate when he went into winter quarters in 216 BC. It's not that he didn't have the manpower available per se - armies were raised both by Carthage and the Italians that joined him, only that they all suffered battlefield defeat (such as all the armies Hanno raised from the Lucanians and Bruttiums) - had they won some of their battles Hannibal would have been quite happy - but they didn't, hence the lack of manpower!

Sadly I know very little about Khan and his generals, other than they achieved some amazing feats - particularly Subatoi, who managed to conduct and win a series of campaigns over great distances (can't get my head around the logistics of that!) Do you think Subatoi was a better general than Genghis, as I hear he was the man than won most of his empire?

Does anyone have a hard time giving much credit to Roman generals from the 1st century BC onwards? Their feats were impressive, such as Caesar, but you can't help but wonder if the fact that the Roman army was so far ahead of the others in terms of basically everything, that perhaps men likr Caesar and Trajan wouldn't have accomplished such gains without it.

I don't have a specific one but here are some of my favorites of the top of my head in no particular order

Genghis Khan

Khalid Bin Al-Walid

Napoleon

Hannibal

Timur

Han Xin

Talking about genghis kahn,Soo many people have him as their ancestor.

I don't admire him as a person. But as a general, Alexander the Great has to be near the top.

He defeated the much larger Persian Empire, conquered pretty much everything from Egypt to India. And did this in innovative ways. Pretty much all when he was in his twenties or so. The only reason he didn't go all the way to China was that is Army \just fed up and essentially said "Okay we know you can conquer everything. You've already proved it. Enough already we're going back home to Greece".

I'm going to go with Patton. My grandfather fought under him in the Battle of the Bulge.

Oliver Cromwell. He had a powerful personality and was a proponent of the revolutionary concept of the cavalry not scattering like mad dogs after the first charge.

Sadly, I don't know enough about that to make such a judgement, but both Tsubodai and Genghis Khan were definitely brilliant men. Tsubodai conquered vast territories, but it was Genghis that united the Mongol tribes and forged a nearly unstoppable war machine.

The effectiveness of the Roman army compared to other armies of the age is usually very much exaggerated. And in the 1st century BC, the Romans were pretty busy fighting each other.

Alexander was an incredibly successful general, but people tend to forget how much he owed to his father. Philippos II created the incredibly powerful combination of heavy cavalry and sarissa wielding phalanx units that was to dominate warfare in the Mediterranean and much of Asia for centuries to come, and with which Alexander could defeat the hopelessly outclassed Persian army. Also, Alexander was usually not nearly as heavily outnumbered as one might think, based on the size of the Persian empire compared to Macedon. I don't think the Persians ever outnumbered Alexander more than 2 to 1 on the battlefield, for which the superior Macedonian weapons and tactics could fairly easily compensate.

The Persians even tried copying the Macedonian style of warfare after a few defeats, but by that time it was too late to turn the tide. The phalangites you can see on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mosaic are Persian soldiers.

He was a bit of a cad though, by all accounts.

Although better known as a field marshal, I'd like to nominate Kitchener because he had an awesome moustache, and for it being the subject of the original "oi, you!" recruitment posters.

Probably Rommel.

http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/d254zf Started with weaponless peasants, turned them into an army.

Alexios I Komnenos. While he was primarily a Byzantine Emperor, he personally led his armies when he could and had a long military career before he took the throne.

I like him because he was a very merciful man. The Alexiad, his biography, often mentions how he showed mercy to his worst enemies no matter how many times they betrayed him. He avoided violence when he could and cared for his men. That's a general I'd like to serve under. Just killing millions is not something that I'd call being a great general.

For some reason that reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Emil_von_Lettow-Vorbeck. With never more than 14.000 men, he managed to keep 300.000 British, Belgian and Portuguese troops occupied for the entire duration of World War I, without having suffered a single defeat. He was also the only white commander of that age to treat his native auxiliary soldiers as equals to his other troops.

Napoleon Bonaparte; first for his military genius, second for his ambition, and third for his political cunning.

Granted, he didn't have many other good qualities about him... but he's still my favorite.

Gaius Julius Ceaser

Rommel or Eisenhower

I was mostly referring to the Gallic conquest and those of Augustus.

I'm not just talking about soldier vs. soldier, because fighting Dacians, Germans or Parthians, the tactics and equipment of the Romans were shown to not be as invincible as is thought. The sheer scale and organization of a state-backed, permanent military force was the only advantage they needed, allowing them to wage long term campaigns against enemies who fielded levies who couldn't afford to be out too long lest the economy go to hell. Not to mention that control of the Mediterranean, combined with the most organized state bureaucracy for more then a millennium (excluding the Byzantines), allowed them to take advantage of their undeniably advanced engineering in siege situations, unmatched by any nearby potential enemy until the Persian revival in the 3rd century AD when they actually showed proficiency in siege tactics finally making them a viable expansionist threat, as they had the means to supply these armies if necessary and the ability to get through defenses in cases where they did not want a drawn out siege. It was so effective that it led to a general stagnation of military innovation, until prompted by the revived Sassanian Persians when there was finally a shift away from the reliance on infantry.

I'm not entirely up to speed on the historiography of The Alexiad though I did read it during my first year while I was taking a Byzantine history course, but I'm sure his daughter writing the thing helped colour the piece in his favour, which is the fun of all ancient history of course!

By Royalist accounts?

He was a devout puritan, caddery would not have struck him as a good idea.

All accounts? Suggest you read "Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy" by the Irish historian Tom Reilly which suggests his worst crime in Ireland was being more successful than all the other English leaders who campaigned there.

Given how he struck down the monarchy alongside others, I see him as a hero in my very small pantheon of admired war heroes. Just a shame what they did to his body. (Assuming it was his body) It's nice to see the people supported royals willing to desecrate corpses.