Hannibal Crossing the Alps (218 BC): Elephants Into Italy

Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps in 218 BC was the march that took a Carthaginian army, with its famous war elephants, from Spain across the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the Western Alps into northern Italy. It opened the Second Punic War on Roman soil and became one of the most celebrated feats of logistics and endurance in military history. It was also enormously costly: Hannibal reached Italy with perhaps half the men he had led across the Rhône.

Background: why go over the mountains

Carthage had lost the First Punic War in 241 BC, and with it Sicily and control of the sea. In the following decades Hannibal’s father Hamilcar Barca, then his brother-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair, built a new Carthaginian power base in southern and eastern Spain, rich in silver mines and soldiers. Hannibal took command there in 221 BC, at about the age of 26.

In 219 BC he besieged and took Saguntum, a town on the east coast of Spain that had ties with Rome (see Siege of Saguntum). Rome demanded that Carthage hand him over, and when it refused, war was declared in the spring of 218 BC.

Rome planned to fight the war abroad. One consul, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, was to sail from Sicily to Africa; the other, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was to take an army to Spain. Hannibal moved first. Because Rome dominated the sea lanes, he chose to march overland and carry the war into Italy itself, where he hoped the Gauls of the Po valley, recently conquered by Rome, would rise and join him.

The march

From Spain to the Rhône

Hannibal left New Carthage (modern Cartagena) in late spring 218 BC. Polybius gives his army as 90,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry at the start, figures many modern historians regard as inflated. He crossed the Ebro and fought his way through the tribes of what is now Catalonia, suffering heavy losses.

North of the Ebro he left an officer named Hanno with about 10,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry to hold the region, and sent home some unreliable Iberian contingents. Polybius says he crossed the Pyrenees with about 50,000 infantry and 9,000 cavalry.

He then passed through southern Gaul, mostly by negotiation, and reached the Rhône, probably somewhere north of modern Avignon. A Gallic tribe, the Volcae, gathered on the far bank to stop him. Hannibal sent Hanno son of Bomilcar upstream by night with a detachment, which crossed on rafts and fell on the Gauls from behind as the main army crossed in boats and canoes.

The elephants were the hardest problem. According to Polybius, the Carthaginians built large rafts, covered them with earth so that they looked like solid ground, and towed the animals across. Some elephants panicked and fell into the river but waded to the shore.

A near miss with Scipio

Meanwhile Publius Cornelius Scipio had landed his army near Massalia (Marseille), an ally of Rome, on his way to Spain. His cavalry patrols clashed with Hannibal’s Numidian horsemen, but when Scipio marched up the river he found that Hannibal had left about three days earlier.

Scipio made a decision of great importance. He sent most of his army on to Spain under his brother Gnaeus, to cut Hannibal’s lines of supply and reinforcement, and returned to Italy himself to meet Hannibal when he came down from the mountains.

Into the Alps

Hannibal marched north along the Rhône for four days to a district Polybius calls “the Island”, where he helped settle a dispute between two brothers of a local ruling family and received supplies, clothing and an escort. He then turned east towards the mountains.

On the ascent the Allobroges, a Gallic people, occupied the heights above a narrow pass. Hannibal learned that they withdrew at night, seized the positions himself after dark and fought off their attack the next day, though many pack animals and horses fell down the slopes in the confusion. He then stormed the tribe’s main town and seized its supplies.

A few days later another tribe came to him with branches and wreaths as signs of peace, offering guides and hostages. Hannibal was suspicious but accepted. In a narrow gorge they attacked the column; Polybius says Hannibal spent an anxious night separated from part of his army near a “white rock”, and that the elephants, which frightened the attackers, helped protect the column.

On the ninth day the army reached the summit, where it rested for two days. Snow had begun to fall, and morale was low. Polybius reports that Hannibal pointed out the plains of the Po below and told his men that they were standing on the walls of Italy.

The descent

Coming down proved even worse than going up. The path was narrow and steep, and fresh snow lay on top of old, hard snow, so men and animals slipped and fell. At one point a landslide had swept away a section of the path and the army could not pass.

Hannibal’s men spent days cutting a new track along the cliff, first for the horses and pack animals and then, after further work, for the starving elephants. Livy adds the famous detail that they heated a great rock with fire and poured sour wine on it to crack it. Polybius, writing earlier and closer to the events, does not mention this.

Polybius says the passage of the Alps took 15 days, and the whole march from New Carthage about five months.

Arrival in Italy and the first battles

Hannibal came down into the territory of the Taurini, around modern Turin, and stormed their main town after a siege of three days. Polybius, who says he took his figures from an inscription that Hannibal himself set up in southern Italy, gives the survivors as 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry.

In November 218 BC Hannibal’s cavalry defeated Scipio’s in a skirmish near the river Ticinus, in which Scipio was wounded. Later tradition says his life was saved by his teenage son, the future Scipio Africanus. Many Gauls now joined the Carthaginians, and in December Hannibal won his first major victory at the Battle of the Trebia.

Hannibal’s elephants

The elephants are the best-remembered part of the story. Polybius says there were 37 when the army crossed the Rhône. They were probably North African forest elephants, a smaller kind now extinct, perhaps with one or more Indian elephants; Hannibal’s last surviving animal was later remembered under the name Surus, “the Syrian”, which may hint at an Asian origin.

Remarkably, most of them seem to have survived the mountains. It was the bitter winter after the Trebia that killed them: by the spring of 217 BC only one was left, and Hannibal rode it through the flooded marshes of the Arno valley, where he lost the sight of one eye to an infection.

Key people

• Hannibal Barca (247–c. 181 BC): Carthaginian commander in Spain from 221 BC, son of Hamilcar Barca. He planned and led the march.
• Publius Cornelius Scipio: Roman consul of 218 BC, who missed Hannibal at the Rhône, sent his army to Spain and was wounded at the Ticinus.
• Hanno son of Bomilcar: officer who led the flanking force at the Rhône crossing.
• Mago Barca: Hannibal’s youngest brother, who served with him in Italy.

By the numbers

Modern historians accept the arrival figures as fairly reliable but doubt the starting totals. Even so, the loss between the Rhône and the Po valley, roughly 20,000 men in a few weeks, shows how brutal the crossing was.

The debate over the route

Polybius says he walked part of the route himself and questioned people who had known the events, yet he deliberately avoided naming places that his Greek readers would not know. Livy’s account is fuller but confused in places. As a result, the pass Hannibal used has been argued over since antiquity.

The main candidates are the Col du Clapier, the Mont Cenis, the Montgenèvre, the Little St Bernard and the Col de la Traversette, a high and difficult pass near Monte Viso. In 2016 a team led by geologist William Mahaney reported a layer of disturbed soil rich in horse-related microbes below the Traversette, dated to around the right period, and suggested it was left by Hannibal’s animals. Other scholars question both the dating and the interpretation, and the question remains open.

Legacy and myths

Legacy

The crossing made Hannibal a legend. Roman writers who feared and hated him still admired his daring, and the image of elephants in the snow has fascinated artists ever since, from Goya’s early painting of Hannibal looking down on Italy to J. M. W. Turner’s stormy “Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps” of 1812. Napoleon consciously invoked Hannibal when he took his army over the Great St Bernard Pass in 1800.

Military historians tend to see the march as both brilliant and very costly. It gave Hannibal surprise and Gallic allies, but it left him in Italy with a small army, cut off from Spain and Carthage, a problem that shaped the rest of his long campaign.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Hannibal’s elephants all died in the Alps. Fact: Ancient sources suggest most survived the crossing and died in the following winter.
• Myth: Hannibal said “I will either find a way or make one” in the Alps. Fact: The Latin phrase is attributed to him by later tradition, but it does not appear in Polybius or Livy.
• Myth: Hannibal was the first to take an army over the Alps. Fact: Gallic peoples had crossed the Alps in numbers for centuries; Hannibal’s achievement was to bring a large, organised foreign army, with elephants, across at the start of winter and fight on arrival.

Timeline

• 221 BC: Hannibal takes command of the Carthaginian forces in Spain.
• 219 BC: Hannibal besieges and captures Saguntum.
• 218 BC, spring: Rome declares war; Hannibal leaves New Carthage.
• 218 BC, summer: Hannibal crosses the Ebro and the Pyrenees.
• 218 BC, about September: The army and elephants cross the Rhône.
• 218 BC, about October–November: The Alps are crossed in about 15 days.
• 218 BC, November: Carthaginian victory in the cavalry clash at the Ticinus.
• 218 BC, December: Hannibal defeats the Romans at the Trebia.

Why it matters

By crossing the Alps, Hannibal moved the war from the edge of the Roman world to its heart and set up the great victories of the Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae. The march showed that the mountains were not a barrier Rome could rely on, and it remains a classic example of a commander accepting huge risks to strike where the enemy least expects.