The Persian Empire was an important period in ancient West Asia, and it successively defeated the media, Lydia, Elam, Neo-Babylon and Egypt, ending the chaotic geopolitical game in West Asia. In 513 BC, the Persian monarch Darius I conquered the Thrace region in the northern part of the Greek peninsula, becoming the first civilization in human history to span three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, and the imperial power reached its peak.
At this time, the Greek peninsula was in the era of the classical city-states and was the center of European civilization. Originally, the Persian Empire, which was in the ascendancy, would delay its expansion even if it coveted the surrounding neighboring territories, due to the dense mountains of the sea and the Balkan Peninsula. However, the Greek city-states in the plains of the southwest coast of Asia Minor revolted around 500 BC, which led to the suppression of the Persian Empire and brought the conflict between the empire and the Greek mainland to the table. In this article, let's sort out the causes of the Persian-Greek War and the influence of the geopolitical structure of the Greek Peninsula on the military posture of both sides.
※ The conflict between land power and sea power city-states?※
Originating from the ancient Greek civilization of Crete in the Aegean Sea, a prosperous overseas commercial and trade civilization was established in the Minoan and Mycenaean eras. Although it later experienced the ravages of the "sea peoples" and the southern invasion of the Doric (represented by Sparta), which led to the end of the Mycenaean era and the southern baptism of agrarian society, including the Achaeans who established the Mycenaean city-state (the main body of the Achaean League later), as well as the Aeolians (represented by Thebes) and the Ionians (represented by Athens) who married and shared the Mycenaean civilization, both claimed to be the successors of the Mycenaean civilization and continued to expand overseas commercial trade.
Although invaded by the Dorics of the North, the mountainous geomorphological features of the Greek peninsula made it difficult to form an overwhelmingly dominant geopolitical space in the region, which led to a chaotic situation of city-states. More importantly, the agrarian city-states, characterized by land distribution, successively established military autocracy, with Sparta in particular as the preeminent; in contrast, the city-states focusing on maritime commerce and trade successively established an ancient democratic system under the model of aristocratic co-governance. The two regimes inevitably created institutional rivalries in the narrow Greek peninsula-Aegean region, which led to a confrontation between the camps of the two city-states. For many democratic city-states, including Athens, the land power characteristics represented by the descendants of The Dorians such as Sparta were clearly incompatible with the development of their own maritime commercial societies, but the greater threat to land power came from the Peninsula of Asia Minor in the East.
※ The structural contradiction between Persia and Greece? ※
As an Aegean coastal region, the Peninsula of Asia Minor is across the sea from the Greek Peninsula, and its topography is roughly in the form of a "three-step staircase", namely the Anatolian Plateau in the central and eastern regions, the western coastal plains, and the low mountains in between. As early as the Mycenaean era in Greece, the Hittites had established empires on the Anatolian plateau, while the western coastal flat principle was occupied by the Trojans. After the fall of the Hittites and the Trojans, the Lydians in the low mountains began to rise and encroached west on the colonial strongholds established by the Greeks (snatched from the Trojans). These Greek colonial city-states were almost all founded by the Ionians of the same ethnic group as the Athenians, who continued their maritime trade along the Aegean coast. When the Lydians conquered these Ionian city-states, they did not try to change the way these Greeks lived, after all, it was more beneficial for the Lydians to continue to let these Greeks run the maritime trade and let them pay profits in the form of taxes and tributes. However, when the Persians rose in the heart of West Asia and occupied the entire peninsula of Asia Minor, the situation changed.
As an empire fought out from the southwest of the Iranian plateau, the Persians successively conquered the Medes (the northwestern Iranian plateau, the Armenian plateau and the Anatolian plateau), Elam (the low-lying plains of the southern Iranian plateau), Neo-Babylon (the two river valleys), ancient Egypt (the Nile Delta) and the Amu Darya Plain in Central Asia, becoming an empire that sat on both the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and there was no reason to allow the Greeks to be independent of their sphere of influence. As a Persian monarch who prides himself on being the "King of Kings", Darius I established a centralized system of power in order to consolidate his rule over the conquered regions, known in history as the "Darius Reform".
As mentioned earlier, the Auris and Ionians were mainly engaged in overseas commerce and established a series of greek city-states based on ancient democracies. The Persian Empire proposed a monarchy subordinate to the Persian emperors against the Greek city-states on the western side of Asia Minor, posing a serious threat to their interests (this was completely different from Lydian rule). More importantly, in 513 BC, Darius I further controlled the Black Sea Strait (later known as the Turkish Strait) and the Thrace region (roughly around present-day Bulgaria), directly threatening the security and trade interests of the Greek native states. Finally, in 500 BC, with the support of athens and other city-states, the Ionian city-states on the coastal plains of Asia Minor revolted, especially led by Miletus. Although the battle was eventually extinguished by the Persian army, Athens and its neighbor Eretria sent troops across the sea to capture Saldis, the capital of the Persian Lydian province, plundering it and burning it. As a result, the Ionian Uprising evolved from civil strife in the Persian Empire to an international dispute.
※ The First Persian Expedition and the "Storm of Athos"?※
In 494 BC, the Persians finally completely pacified the Ionian region, and the next step was to settle the old account with the Greeks. However, due to being blocked by the Aegean Sea, the Persian Empire would face two marching options. One was the Army crossing the Dardanelles along the northern peninsula of Asia Minor, passing through Thrace and Macedonia and then heading south into the Greek Peninsula; the other was the Navy crossing the Aegean Sea directly by boat. Two years later, the Persian Empire began their first expedition. Although the Persian Empire was not familiar with naval warfare at the time, it still formed a maritime army to assist the army with the Ionian region, whose main function was to provide logistical supplies for the army and prevent the Greeks from harassing the sea.
It is well known that the Greek peninsula is densely mountainous, but according to the division of mountains and topographical trends, it can still be roughly divided into six major plates, namely Epirus (northwestern mountainous), Macedonia and Thrace on the northern edge, and the Thessaly Basin in southern Macedonia, the Attica Peninsula and the Peloponnese Peninsula. When the Persian army passed through the Thracian region, the first to enter was the Macedonian region. Because Persia was land-by-sea and army-oriented, they passed through the "three fingers" of the central Macedonian region extending to the Aegean Sea, namely the Athos Peninsula, the Sithonia Peninsula, and the Cassandra Peninsula. In order to reach the destination of the trip, the Attica Peninsula (where Athens is located), the Persian navy was bound to skim over the top of the peninsula as soon as possible.
Just as the Yuan Dynasty crossed the sea on two expeditions to Japan, the Persian expedition also encountered a major storm (located at the bend of the Athos Peninsula, so it was called "Athos Storm") and led to the total destruction of the navy. The reason for this is that the Persians always choose to depart in the summer, so they are prone to Mediterranean tropical cyclones (called "typhoons" or "hurricanes" in some places). The "Athos Storm" had a great psychological shadow on the Persians, who were already inexperienced in naval warfare, so that when the Persians launched another expedition to Greece, it took three years to dig a canal in the athos peninsula where it connected with the mainland. Because the Persian monarch at this time was Xerxes I, it was called the Xerxes Canal. Because of this storm, the Persian army lost the logistical supplies of the navy, the empire's first european trip was brought to an end, and the Athos Peninsula was revered by the Greeks as the "Holy Mountain Peninsula".
※Marathon Battle?※
Due to the "Storm of Athos" and the Thracian plunder of the land, the Persian Empire was forced to retreat in 492 BC. Two years later, the revived Persian army began a second expedition, but in order to coerce and divide the Greek city-states, Darius I sent emissaries to demand a cup of water and a bouquet of soil to show his submission to Persia. Under the strong military pressure of the Persian Empire, the vast majority of the city-states expressed their submission, with the exception of Athens and Sparta. The reason why Athens did not want to submit to Persia was simple: it and Eretria had been fighting the Persians for many years on the western side of Asia Minor in order to protect the interests of the Ionian maritime trade, and they did not believe that the Persians would spare themselves. Even if the Persian Empire did adopt a policy of restraint to rule the Greek peninsula, Athens would probably be used by the Persians as a target for its establishment. Because of this, the Athenians still sent Persian messengers into the valley.
The unyielding behavior of the Athenians was widely regarded by the Greek city-states as a symbol of integrity, which stimulated its traditional geopolitical rival, the Spartans, to throw Persian emissaries into wells, thus showing their attitude. More importantly, if Persia invaded Greece, it would be the first to invade the Attica Peninsula where Athens was located, thus making Athens a frontal barrier for Sparta. Sure enough, after a series of tentative operations, in 490 BC the Persian army once again marched towards the Greek peninsula, targeting Athens and Eretria. Due to the surrender of many Greek city-states, this time the Persian army decided to set off from the western side of Asia Minor and attack the Greek peninsula along the Aegean Trade Route. The first to be attacked was the island of Evia on the eastern side of the Attica Peninsula, home to the eretria city-state. Threatened by the Persian army, Eretria soon surrendered due to the appearance of infidelity, and all the inhabitants were reduced to slavery and the city was razed to the ground.
After the capture of Eretria, the Persian army landed in the northeast of the Attica Peninsula and immediately rushed to the southeast of the city of Athens, and the two sides met on the plain of Marathon. It is said that the Athenian army chose to hold the Marathon Plain rather than defend itself, in large part to prevent a repeat of the internal disintegration of Eretria. Of course, making full use of their familiar terrain to block the enemy was also a consideration for the Athenian generals. On the one side was the Persian army with cavalry as the main force (although the number of infantry was large, but the tactical focus was not strong), and the other side was the Greek legion with heavy armored infantry, and the two sides were roughly equal in number (Persia transported 25,000 expeditionary troops through limited sea transport, but the 10,000 troops who conquered Eretria were ready to go south along the coast to insert themselves under the city of Athens, so there were only 15,000 Persian troops in the Marathon Plain).
In order to take advantage of their strengths and avoid their weaknesses, the Greek heavy infantry corps felt that they were lined up against the river valley (the closer to the coast, the more open the terrain was, the more conducive it was to the mobile encirclement of the Persian cavalry), and the Persians were eager to win, so they took the initiative to approach the Greek army. The Persians found that there was still a considerable gap between the two wings of the Greek array and the mountains, which created favorable conditions for the cavalry to detour. However, the gap between the two wings was deliberately left by the Greeks, because these two low-lying areas were actually swamps soaked by rivers and were not suitable for cavalry. As a last resort, the two sides had to go head-to-head, and since the Persian bow and arrow offensive could not penetrate the defenses of the Greek heavily armored infantry, the Greek soldiers, who had been in the melee of the city-state for a long time, finally won the victory by virtue of their physical superiority. The Battle of Marathon was not only the first victory for Europe in the face of an Asian invasion, but also a shot in the arm for the Greek city-states as they faced the next round of Persian expeditions.
To sum up, long before the Persian-Greek War, the Greek overseas trading city-states faced land power threats from the Dorics of the North and the Lydians of Asia Minor. However, due to the mountainous landforms of the Greek peninsula, between the commercial city-states headed by Athens and the agricultural city-states led by Sparta, no one can help anyone. As the western plains of Asia Minor on the Aegean coast, which naturally became a Greek city-state, they were still unable to resist the conquest of the Lydians, but the Lydians only demanded tribute from them, which did not affect the way of life and social structure of the Greeks. However, after the arrival of the Persians, they began to impose a monarchy on the region, which eventually led to the Ionian Uprising. The Ionian Uprising affected the trade interests of Athens and Eretria in mainland Greece, eventually turning it into a conflict between the Persian and Greek city-states.
In order to consolidate the Persian Empire's rule over the conquered areas and establish the authority of the "King of Kings", Darius I launched two expeditions. The first expedition was caused by the collapse of the Navy due to the "Athos Storm", which endangered the logistics of the main army and was eventually forced to withdraw. Although the second expedition succeeded in capturing Eretria, it was constrained by maritime technology, failed to establish a military superiority, and eventually suffered a setback on the Marathon Plain without familiarity with the terrain. The victory at the Battle of Marathon not only increased the prestige of Athens among the Greek city-states, but also prompted some of the city-states to change their attitude towards Persia, increasing the difficulty of the third Persian expedition.