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Short description

Auxiliaries from Illyricum, armed with swords and javelins and carrying large oval shields.

Description

The Emperor Augustus' reforms of the Roman army resulted in the creation of the Auxilia cohorts that were recruited from the free non-citizens (or "peregrini") of the Empire. These were needed to add extra manpower to the Imperial army but at a far lower cost than a legion of citizen-legionaries. The auxilia were recruited from every corner of the empire, and their unit names usually reflect the tribe or area from which they came. The auxiliary cohorts were either "quingenaria" ("five-hundred-strong") or "milliaria" ("one-thousand-strong"), which were 480 men, and 800 men strong respectively. Though some units were recruited especially as light troops, skirmishers, or archers, most units of auxilia were heavy infantry that fought in much the same way as their legionary counterparts.

The Romans' involvement in Illyria began in 229 BC, when a large number of Illyrian tribes were united under one queen, Queen Teuta. The Romans sent an envoy named Coruncanius on a diplomatic mission to Teuta, but upon his arrival, the Roman envoy was arrested and executed on Teuta's orders. At this point, pirate attacks on Italian ships under Roman protection across the Adriatic Sea intensified. This prompted the Romans to send an army under consuls Lucius Postumis Albinus and Gnaeus Fulvius Centumalus to break the Illyrian's grip over the Greek cities around Apollonia, such as Epidamnus, Corcyra, and Pharos. The Romans established a protectorate over these Greek towns, and also provided financial support to Demetrius of Pharos in order to provide a counter to Teuta's power in Illyria. This war, which ended in 228 BC, would later be called the First Illyrian War.

The Second Illyrian War was similarly short lived - in 220 BC, Demetrius of Pharos, who was, up until that point, a faithful Roman ally, launched a fleet which he had slowly been building up over the years since the end of the First Illyrian War, against the city of Pylos, which was nominally a Roman protectorate. After capturing some of the city's ships, and roving the Adriatic, he decided to send some of his ships across the Adriatic to raid Italian ports. With the Illyrian forces divided, a combined Roman army and fleet crossed the Adriatic and successfully captured the Illyrian city of Dimale, described by Polybius as the strongest of the Illyrian's cities, due to the fact that the city was built on two hills, with a citadel on each connected by walls. From there, the Roman fleet sailed to Pharos, forcing Demetrius to flee from his capital to Macedon, where he remained as a councillor at the court of Philip V. Normally, Rome would have pursued him, but in 219 BC the Romans had far bigger problems to worry about - the Romans were struggling to pacify the Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul, and war was looming with Carthage as tensions grew in the Iberian Peninsula.

Following his victory over the Romans at Lake Trasimeno in 217 BC, Hannibal sent a letter suggesting the formation of an alliance between Philip of Macedon and the Carthaginian Senate to Philip V of Macedon. Philip only showed the letter to Demetrius, who, sensing the opportunity to regain his kingdom, urged Philip to accept the invitation, and declare war on Rome. After Philip launched two failed attempts at invading Illyria by sea, and suffering defeat outside Apollonia, his third attempt made some headway, but the war was shifting to Greece, and in the end, the First Macedonian War was merely intended by the Romans to ensure that Hannibal didn't receive any real assistance from Macedon during his campaign in Italy. When the war ended in 204 BC, the Romans were not completely satisfied with the result, but it was enough to know that it helped to defeat Hannibal. However, war soon broke out again in 200 BC. At the end of the second Macedonian War in 197 BC after the decisive Roman victory at Cynoscephalae, there was a lull in the fighting, and Rome turned her eye from Illyria.

War was to break out again in 171 BC, and this time, the Illyrians were directly involved. Initially, the Illyrians under their King Gentius declared for the Romans, but in 169 they defected to side with Perseus of Macedon, son of Philip V, who had died in 179 BC. He arrested two Roman legates, and sacked the cities of Apollonia and Dyrrhachium, which were Roman protectorates. It was, however, a futile exercise: after Perseus's defeat and surrender at Pydna at the hands of Lucius Aemilius Paulus, and the collapse of the Macedonian Kingdom in 168 BC, the Romans turned their attention to the Illyrians, and in the same year, Gentius was defeated at Scodra, and in 167 BC, he was taken to Rome in chains. Rome now considered the Illyrian coast a province of Rome. Though the coastal cities and ports of the province were definitively under Roman control, it would take the Romans many hard years of campaigning to finally conquer the remaining Illyrian tribes, and the tribes of Dalmatia, further inland. Over the next one hundred years, the Romans' grip on Greece and the Balkans tightened, as did their grip on Illyria. In 59 BC, Julius Caesar gained the governorship of Illyria, along with Cisalpine and Transalpine Gauls. The borders of the province were ill-defined, however, until Augustus became the first Emperor of the Roman Empire, in 27 BC. Augustus oversaw the official establishment of the province of Illyricum. Under the reign of Rome's first emperor, the border of Illyricum expanded, until, at the end of the Pannonian wars, (12-9 BC), the borders of Illyricum reached the River Danube.

During the years following the conclusion of the Pannonian campaign, Rome's expansion continued apace, primarily in Germania. However, such campaigns were not without their difficulties, and so, in 6 AD, the Romans gave orders for a "dilectus" or a levy to ensure that there were adequate reserves of manpower available to the Roman army. Several auxiliary cohorts of Daesitiates, led by a man known only as Bato the Deasitiate, while being gathered together before being sent to Germany to fight under the command of the Emperor's stepson, Tiberius, mutinied. The nearby communities of Dalmatians joined them, and following the defeat of a hastily assembled Roman force sent against them, the Daesitiates were joined by the Breuci tribe, who also provided several auxiliary cohorts to the Roman army. The governor of Moesia, Caecina Severus, led Roman troops from Moesia on a second counterattack that was better organised than the first. This army clashed with the rebels at the battle of Sirmium, and defeated them, but suffered heavy losses in the process, which halted their progress temporarily. Seeing this, more and more Illyrian communities joined the rebels. Rome was now in danger of losing control of not just the recently conquered territory of the Pannonii, but the entire province of Illyricum - given the fact that these tribes all spoke Illyrian and were culturally very similar, it was obvious that the average Illyrian tribesman would not hesitate in siding with the rebels against Roman rule. If Illyricum fell, then the gateway would be open for the rebel invasion of Italy. Realising this, Augustus summoned overwhelming military force to the area, drawing off troops from the campaigns in Germania and forcing Augustus to form around 50 Cohortes Voluntariorum Civium Romanorum, or "Cohorts of Volunteers, Roman Citizens", either from volunteer citizens, or slaves that were bought, emancipated, trained and equipped as auxiliaries. These troops, along with fifteen legions, one hundred cohorts of regular auxiliaries, and the large numbers of troops provided by the ruler of the client kingdom of Thrace, King Rhoemetacles I, totalled around 200,000 men. It still took this enormous Roman and Thracian force three years of hard fighting to quell the revolt. The last rebel tribes capitulated in early September, 9AD, apparently just a few days before the Roman army commanded by Publius Quinctilius Varus was ambushed and annihilated in the dark forests of Germania by Germanic tribesmen under Arminius. Though Augustus was distraught by the loss of his three legions, the Palatium was relieved that the Roman army had managed to crush the Illyrian and Dalmatian tribes before they could realise the Romans' fears that they would form an alliance with Arminius.

Following the suppression of the revolt and the stabilisation of Rome's frontiers along the rivers Rhine and Danube, the province of Illyricum was dissolved and separated into two provinces - Pannonia Inferior, which lay immediately to the south of the Danube, and Dalmatia, which lay on the Illyrian coast. Romanisation soon followed. There were already large cities such as Salonae and Segestica within the borders of the unified province of Illyricum, and these cities, along with the small towns that sprung up outside Roman forts and fortresses (known as "vici" - singular "vicus") were the hub of the process of converting the warlike Illyrians into civilised inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The Via Egnatia, which had been constructed in the 2nd Century BC, began at Dyrrhachium, which was a direct Roman road from the Illyrian coast to the city of Byzantium in Thrace (which later became Constantinople - the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire). Recruitment into the Roman army began soon after the Illyrian and Dalmatian tribes capitulated - no doubt the defeated tribes were required on the terms of their surrender to provide troops for the Roman Empire. This was fortunate for the Romans, and, eventually, proved beneficial to the Illyrians as well. The Romans began to recruit large numbers of Dalmatians, Pannonians, and other Illyrian tribesmen into their army once more, but the vast majority of them were stationed outside of their home provinces - the Romans learned from revolts like the Illyrian, and later, the Batavian revolt, that it was better to keep troops stationed away from their homelands in order to prevent mutinies amongst the local garrison inciting civil insurrection, or vice versa.

By the reign of Hadrian, there were roughly twenty five cohorts from the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia scattered all over the Empire. They were all named after the tribes or the province from which they came, with the majority of the cohorts named either Cohors Breucorum (of which there were seven), Cohors Delmaturum (of which there were six), or Cohors Pannoniorum (of which there were five). There were also some cohorts from smaller tribes, such as Cohors I Aelia Athoitarum (stationed in the relatively peaceful province of Thrace), Cohors I Montanorum I Equitata (stationed in Pannonia), Cohors I Montanorum Civium Romanorum (stationed in Syria), and Cohors II Varcianorum Equitata (stationed in Germania Inferior). The remaining cohorts were either a mixture of two different tribes (such as Cohors I Pannoniorum et Delmaturum, and Cohors Latobicorum et Varcianorum), or the result of the merging of two cohorts from different parts of the Empire (such as in the case of Cohors V Gallorum et Pannoniorum - a cohort of Gauls that was later joined by Pannonians, perhaps to combine two under-strength cohorts to form one cohort). Nine (over a third) of these cohorts were Cohortes Equitatae, i.e. they had a cavalry detachment of 120 cavalrymen (divided into four "turmae" or squadrons each led by a decurion) if the cohort was a Cohors Quingenaria ("Five Hundred-strong cohort"), or 240 cavalrymen (divided into eight turmae) if the cohort was a Cohors Milliaria ("One Thousand-strong Cohort"). Six of the Cohortes Equitatae were Cohortes Quingenariae, and the other two (Cohors I Delmaturum Equitata Milliaria and Cohors I Ulpia Pannoniorum Equitata Milliaria- the "Ulpia" in the second unit's title indicating that it was founded by Trajan, perhaps in preparation for his Dacian campaigns) were Cohortes Milliariae. Interestingly, both of these units were stationed in their home provinces (Dalmatia and Pannonia). However, the fact that a cohors Equitata Milliaria would be stationed in the largely peaceful internal province of Dalmatia, rather than on one of the more vulnerable frontier provinces of the empire (for example neighbouring Pannonia), is odd, especially when one considers that a cohors equitata milliaria was the largest single unit of troops present within a province, excluding a legion (given its nominal complement of 1,040 soldiers - 800 infantrymen and 240 cavalrymen). Six of the units from Dalmatia and Pannonia that were around during the reign of Hadrian had been awarded Roman citizenship by the end of the second century AD. These were Cohors I Montanorum Civium Romanorum (stationed in Syria), Cohors I Breucorum Civium Romanorum and Cohors V Breucorum Civium Romanorum Equitata (stationed in the Alpine provinces of Raetia and Noricum), Cohors VII Breucorum Civium Romanum Equitata, (stationed in Pannonia), Cohors III Delmaturum Civium Romanorum Equitata Pia Fidelis (stationed in Germania Superior - the unit was granted the title "Pia Fidelis" sometime during the reign of Trajan), and Cohors V Delmaturum Civium Romanorum (stationed in Mauretania - granted Roman citizenship by Hadrian in 122 AD). Most frontier provinces of the Empire seem to have had at least one cohort of Illyrians (the exceptions being Moesia Inferior, Dacia and Cappadocia), but Germania Inferior and Britannia had the lion's share with five cohorts apiece. Britannia's garrison was always large because of the fact that some parts of the province were always uneasy (such as Wales), and the northern border of the province (protected by Hadrian's Wall, and later, by the Antonine Wall) was constantly under pressure because of Caledonian raids. Germania Inferior, on the other hand, was occasionally subjected to raids from Germanic tribesmen across the Rhine, so a strong garrison was necessary to protect the large cities within the Roman province, such as Colonia Claudia (modern Cologne).

The fact that almost a quarter of the Illyrian cohorts were granted Roman citizenship as a reward for valorous deeds in combat speaks volumes for their fighting prowess, and goes some of the way to explaining why it took three years for the Romans to crush the rebellion of such hardy men. Their well-made equipment is fairly standard for Roman auxiliary infantry - a large, oval clipeus shield, a bronze helmet, chainmail armour, a couple of javelins, and the standard infantry sword of the Roman army - the gladius. Short and very sharp, the gladius complements the disciplined fighting style of these soldiers perfectly. Just like their legionary counterparts, these troops will throw their javelins before moving into contact with the enemy, using their shields' bosses to punch the enemy and then stabbing them with their swords in an almost mechanical fashion, before repeating the action as necessary. In this way, these troops will cut through most enemy infantry, or, at the very least, halt their charge, holding their formation under pressure thanks to their determination, discipline, and determination. They are an excellent asset for any Roman commander, whether he is organising the defence of a fort on the far-flung frontiers of the Empire, crushing rebels within the Empire, or bringing new land into the Roman fold - these troops are tough and adaptable enough for almost any engagement.