Cantabrian Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cantabrian Wars began in 29 BC, the last stand of the last independent Celtic nations of Hispania against the full weight of the Roman Empire. For two centuries, Rome had been grinding its way across the Iberian Peninsula. By the time Augustus turned his attention northward, almost all of Hispania was under Roman rule. Almost. Tucked into the rugged mountains of the northwest, three peoples, the Cantabri, the Astures, and the Gallaeci, had refused to bend. What followed was a war that would demand eight legions, ten years, and the personal presence of the emperor himself. How did these mountain peoples hold off the most powerful military machine in the ancient world for so long? What made Rome fear them enough to deploy more than 50,000 soldiers against tribes the histories describe as living in freedom from imperial rule? And what happened when the fighting finally ended?

• 2. Centuries Before the Fight

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  The Cantabri appear in history long before their famous war with Rome, fighting as mercenaries for whoever would hire them. Cantabrian soldiers served in the army of Hannibal during the Second Punic War, and there is evidence they fought alongside the Vaccaei in 151 BC. They were reportedly present at the siege of Numantia, helping to break Roman lines, and Julius Caesar's own testimony places Cantabrian troops at the battle of Ilerda in 49 BC. The Astures had a similarly long martial record. They appear among the Iberian mercenaries of Hasdrubal Barca's army at the battle of Metaurus River in 207 BC, fighting against Rome on behalf of Carthage.

  This long exposure to Cantabrian and Asturian fighters meant Roman commanders were not ignorant of what they were walking into. Roman troops had at some point lost one of their military standards to the Cantabri, a loss considered an extreme disgrace in Roman military culture. The official Roman justification for the campaign was retaliation for Cantabrian raids into the Roman-controlled Meseta Central. But the sources suggest other motivations too: the pull of Asturian gold and Cantabrian iron.

  The first formal Roman campaign against these northern peoples came in 29 BC, when Statilius Taurus moved against the Cantabrians, Astures, and Vaccaei and received the title of imperator from Augustus for his results. Two further campaigns followed under Calvisius Sabinus and the proconsul Sextus Apuleius, each earning a triumph. The Roman historian Florus and others, however, note that these victories were more ceremonial than real. The peoples of the north remained independent, and the Cantabrians in particular refused to be subdued. That gap between official triumph and actual control is what drew Augustus himself to Hispania.

• 3. The Emperor Arrives

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  Augustus moved to Segisama, a town in what is now Burgos, in 26 BC to supervise the Cantabrian campaign in person. It was one of only two wars Augustus directed personally against barbarian peoples, the other being his campaign against the Illyrians from 35 to 33 BC. His presence signals how seriously Rome took the unfinished conquest of the peninsula.

  The strategy he brought was one of encirclement. Roman ground forces pushed in from multiple directions while the Roman navy, dispatched from Gallia Aquitania, sailed to the Cantabrian coast to seal off any escape by sea. Together, land and fleet completed a ring around the Cantabri. The scale of the deployment was enormous. Eight named legions served in the conflict: the I Augusta, II Augusta, IV Macedonica, V Alaudae, VI Victrix, IX Hispana, X Gemina, and XX Valeria Victrix. Alongside these were six auxiliary units, including the Ala Parthorum and the Ala II Thracum Victrix Civium Romanorum. The combined total of legionaries and auxiliaries reached 50,000; some calculations, accounting for naval forces and the reforms of Gaius Marius that put a legion's true strength closer to 6,000 men, push the estimate above 80,000.

  A year after arriving, Augustus had to retire to Tarragona, reportedly due to illness. He left the campaigns in the hands of his generals. The Romans had already conquered all of Gaul in less than seven years; the Cantabrian Wars would take more than ten, a comparison Roman sources themselves used to mark the difficulty of the fight. Augustus refused the standard victory celebration when he returned to Rome, acknowledging that the Astures, in particular, had never formally surrendered.

• 4. How the Mountain Peoples Fought

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  The Roman historian Dio Cassius described the Cantabrian tactics plainly: they avoided pitched battles because their numbers could not match Rome's. Instead, they exploited the mountains. Quick raids with ranged weapons, ambushes on Roman columns, strikes against supply lines, then fast retreats into terrain the Romans struggled to navigate. The Cantabri were armed for exactly this kind of war. Coins and the carved stone stelae they left behind show warriors equipped with short swords, daggers, short spears and javelins, round or oval wooden shields, and leather chest armor. The poet Lucan captured the contrast in a single line: Cantaber exiguis et longis Teutonus armis, meaning the Cantabrian with his short weapons and the Teuton with his long ones.

  Among their more distinctive arms was the bipennis, a double-headed battle axe that was specific to the peoples of northern Hispania. Their cavalry was light and fast. Two of their mounted formations were distinctive enough that the Roman army eventually adopted them. The circulus cantabricus was a circular formation of javelin-throwing horsemen, and the cantabricus impetus was a massive frontal cavalry charge designed to break enemy lines. Flavius Arrianus described both in his military writing.

  The Romans, for all their discipline and numbers, were being taught new tactics by the people they were trying to conquer. Three centuries later, Roman legions would still be carrying the Cantabri labaro, a solar and lunar standard they adopted from their former enemies.

• 5. The Battle of Mons Medullius

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  In spring 25 BC, the Astures Transmontani came down from what the contemporary historian Florus described as their snow-covered mountains, consistent with conditions in the Picos de Europa in that season, and gathered near the Astura River, the waterway now called the Esla River. Three Roman legions with troops from Hispania Tarraconensis were encamped nearby. The Astures intended to strike the Roman winter camps. The plan never reached its moment.

  A group called the Brigaecini, part of the Astures Cismontani from the Benavente region, passed Augustus word of what was coming. Augustus rewarded them with Brigantum, the camp of Augustan Asturica, and shared land in the plains with his other allies. The Roman general Publius Carisius then struck the Astur forces, whose commander was probably a man named Gausón, driving them to seek refuge in the hillfort of Lancia, which Florus identifies as the most important Astures Cismontani stronghold.

  From Lancia, the remaining forces withdrew to Mons Medullius. Some scholars place Mons Medullius at Las Médulas, based on Florus's specific naming of the site. The Romans surrounded the mountain by building a fifteen-mile-long moat and ditch. Orosius records what happened to those trapped inside: rather than surrender, many Cantabrian soldiers chose death, using their own weapons or yew tree poison. The resistance at Mons Medullius became one of the defining images of the entire war. Following that battle, the remaining Gallaecian resistance was hunted down and subdued by 19 BC.

• 6. Death Before Surrender

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  Rome's conduct in this war broke with one of its standard practices. Ordinarily, Roman campaigns produced large numbers of prisoners who could be sold into slavery or paraded in triumph. In the Cantabrian Wars, the Romans chose not to take prisoners. Partly this met a cultural fact of the people they were fighting. Among the Celts, according to the sources, there was a tradition of preferring death to captivity.

  Strabo described the Cantabrian attitude toward death and pain as something beyond ordinary courage: they belittled both, to the point of singing victory hymns while being crucified. For them, Strabo wrote, to die as soldiers and free men was itself a victory. Silius Italicus described the poison they preferred: a concoction made from the seeds of the yew tree, a plant that held mythic significance in Celtic tradition. Some chose sword or fire instead.

  The scale of the deaths and the persistence of local resistance meant that even after the major fighting ended in 19 BC, Rome could not simply walk away. Minor rebellions continued until 16 BC. The Romans stationed two specific legions, the X Gemina and the IV Macedonica, in the region for seventy more years after the war's conclusion. The legions that had struggled to defeat the Cantabri ended up adopting two of their cavalry formations, and the labaro standard would remain in Roman military use three centuries after the war that introduced it.