In 98 AD, the former Germanic governor Trajan ascended the throne as the thirteenth Augustus of the Empire. Trajan was also the first to be born outside of Italy, augustus, his father a Roman military immigrant from the Iberian Peninsula, a legion commander in the Jewish War, and a Spanish governor, which meant that the clan gained a place in the Roman nobility through military merit. Under the care of his father, Trajan worked as a staff officer in the corps headquarters.
In 89 AD, after crushing the rebellion of the Governor of Upper Germania, Saltuning, Emperor Domitian admired the young talent who had arrived from Spain, and two years later appointed him consul to succeed him as Governor of Germania. During his tenure as governor, by constantly brushing the heads of local barbarians, Trajan began to rise gradually in the political arena, and his simple, resolute, bold and careful character also won the support of the legionnaires and the love of the people.
Trajan in the American drama Rome: The Rise and Fall of Empires
After Nerva ascended the throne in 96 AD, in order to gain the support of the army, he made Tulazhen crown prince. It turns out that Nerva really did not look at the wrong person, and after Trajan took the throne, he built public works, reduced taxes, and strengthened national defense. In addition to his achievements in internal affairs, Trajan also opened a new round of expansion for the empire since Claudius's conquest of Britain, and its first goal was the Kingdom of Dacia, which had humiliated the Romans more than a decade ago, after all, the annual economic aid was also a considerable amount.
Two years after the release of the famous epic film The Dacian, Mircea Deleggan, the second greatest director in romanian cinema history, directed Columna (1968), a film set in the Dacian War of the Trajan period, which was far less well-known in China than the Dacian because it failed to be introduced as a translational version.
Trajan in Pillar of Triumph (right)
Like "The Dacians", the film "Triumph column" has a free star in the Romanian People's Army, and the war scenes are equally spectacular, but compared to the former, the film has some dark tones and a heavy atmosphere, after all, the film shows the Romans' scorched earth policy in Dacia. But the film does not completely portray the Romans as a villain, and after conquering the land, the Romans in the film also began to create prosperity and peace in the local area, so that the Dacians who continued to fight could not help but think: Should they continue to fight?
A scene of Dacians and Romans fighting each other in Pillar of Triumph
Trajan spent three years preparing for war, and by the spring of 101 AD he had gathered an army of 110,000 men consisting of 8 legions, 90 auxiliary forces, Janissaries, and barbarian allies in the Dacian border area. At this time, the king of Dacian was still Desipalus, who had fought with Domitian, and as he had done more than a decade ago, his plan was to introduce the Romans into the heart of Daccia, attract their attention with a strong fortress fortress, and then wait for the opportunity to attack and annihilate the enemy from the rear.
Desibalus in The Triumphal Column
Tula's real deployment was indeed within the expectations of Desibalus, and the Roman army, led by two legions, directly attacked the hinterland of Dacia, and burned villages and destroyed buildings along the way in retaliation. DeSibalus tried to lead an army to sneak up on one of the Romans, only to be confronted by the Romans and forced to withdraw due to excessive losses.
In Column of Triumph, the Romans burned down farmland to drive away domestic animals
In the winter of 102, when the Roman armies met triumphantly at the gateway to the Dacian capital, outside the small town of Tapay, at the apex of the Bistra Valley, the Dacians had blocked all passages on the nearby highlands, and the Romans could only attack the enemy with the advantage of terrain if they wanted to capture the capital of Dacia. Desibalus had suffered defeat here 14 years earlier, so this time he used Roman engineers to build a large number of Roman-style bunkers and archer towers on the outskirts of Tapay.
Routes of military operations from 101 to 102
At the beginning of the battle, the Roman legions braved the geographical disadvantage to attack back, but due to the heavy equipment they carried was not conducive to mountain jungle warfare, under the insistence of the Dacian infantry and the condescending counterattacks of the archers, the Romans failed to break through several strong attacks. DeSibalus thought the time had come, so he wrote a letter to Trajan, implying that he would be able to put it away and almost get it. But the sturdy Trajan refused an armistice, and to boost morale, he even ordered that the clothes he carried with him be cut into small strips for bandaging the wounded.
If the battle continues in this way, Trajan may have to lose Tapay, but then a thunderstorm suddenly fell from the sky. Although this was only a natural phenomenon common in the summer, to the Dacians, who believed in the native religion, it meant that zamorxsis, the god of thunder, wanted them to hurry up. So the Dacians withdrew all the defenders deployed outside Tapay and ceded the city to the Romans, and Trajan took a big bargain.
In the American drama "Rome: The Rise and Fall of empires", Trajan and DeSiberus first make peace
Shortly after the capture of the city of Tapay, the generals Lucius Quintus and Maxim also led their armies all the way into the hinterland of Dacia to join Trajan in victory. Knowing that a further war would lead to the annihilation of the country, Desybarus had to declare surrender, according to which the Dacians must return all Roman soldiers, weapons, flags, and craftsmen captured since 85 AD, dismantle all fortifications, and accept the "guidance" of the Romans in foreign policy.
Bicilis in Column of Triumph
Like most non-Roman states of the past, Desibalus, who was forced to sign the Alliance under the city, rebelled in 105 AD, joining forces with other Celtic tribes to attack the Roman colony of Dacia. Trajan quickly led a large army into Dacia and quickly surrounded the Dacian capital, Samizzej Tusa. At first, the defenders of the capital repelled the first Siege of the Romans, but then a nobleman, Bicilis, secretly corresponded with the Romans and offered a water cutter.
The Dacian nobility secretly colluded with the Romans
Part of the site of Samizzej Tutusa, which was completely razed to the ground
At the direction of the nobleman Bicilis, the Romans destroyed Samizzejtusa's secret drinking water pipe, causing the city to quickly run out of water and food. The Romans then launched a second assault and soon succeeded, and the Romans destroyed the city until it was razed to the ground. Desibalus escaped from Samizejetusa with a small number of cavalry and has been fighting guerrilla warfare in the mountains north of Dacia ever since.
Road map of military operations for 105-106 years
In September 106, the cavalry under the general Maxime, based on information from Bicilis, beheaded Desibalus under a tree, and his head was sent to the Trajan battalion for identification. Due to the brutal war that lasted for many years, and 200,000 men were forcibly taken back to Rome as slaves, the local male population in Dacia had run out, and Roman immigrants and retired soldiers naturally filled the gap, forcibly pocketing the local girls, and the mixed-race children born later were the earliest origins of modern Romanians.
The second half of the sixth episode of the 2008 American drama Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire describes the Dacian War in Trajan, but it is an ordinary historical documentary drama that is relatively brief about the end of major battles.
Stills from "Triumphal Column", de Sibelus has won the first class
In the American drama "Rome: The Rise and Fall of empire", Desibalus is captured, and the modern brick wall is played in the background
Trajan seized a huge treasure in Dacia: 165,500 kilograms of gold and 331,000 kilograms of silver, for which he deliberately built a 38.2-meter-high column of Trajan near the Colosseum, which was densely documented in the form of reliefs of his conquest of Daccia by force. The top of the pillar originally had a statue of an eagle, but after the sixteenth century it was replaced by a bronze statue of St. Peter, a Christian elder during the time of Nero the Great.
Today's Pillar of Trajan
At the same time as the settlement of the Kingdom of Dacia, an old friend of the Romans, the king of the Arabian Kingdom of Pitra (located in present-day southern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia), died, and since he had no descendants, Trajan used the garrisons of Egypt and Syria to forcibly annex the kingdom. For the next seven years, the empire spent peacefully, and to please the Roman people, Trajan hosted a three-month gladiator festival in which more than 11,000 people were said to have lost their lives (all prisoners and slaves) and were seen by more than 5 million people.
In 113 AD, when the war in the East resumed, the Parthian king Khosroy deposed the pro-Roman king of Armenia and established a new monarch. Of course, Trajan could not condone the Parthian Hulai, and the following year, at the age of 60, he again personally led the eastern expedition, and after fierce battles conquered the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon, mesopotamia, the most elite of the two river valleys, also fell into his hands, this time it was the first time in history that a Roman legion reached the coast of the Persian Gulf.
Before Trajan's death, the Romans first extended their hands into the Persian Gulf
In 116 AD, the Parthians launched a counterattack, once dividing the Roman garrison and encircling the cities of Mesopotamia, but under the organization of Trajan, the assembled Roman legions successfully defended the new land. The following year there was a revolt of the remnants of the Palestinian Jews, and the elderly Trajan fell ill after the deployment of the response and died on the way back to Italy, and his cousin and adopted son Hadrian subsequently declared his succession to the throne.