Badass Page 7
Well, fighting numerous battles and covering their blades in a demure shade of crimson really helped the Goths develop a taste for ultraviolence, so when they got back home they decided they were going to show the soft-ass Roman pussies who the toughest bastards in Europe really were. They proclaimed Alaric king of the Visigoths, raised him up on their shields in some kind of crazy Teutonic bar mitzvah ceremony, and immediately set about crushing all of Europe under their heel.
At the head of a screaming rabid horde of pissed-off bearded barbarians, Alaric the Bold made his way into Greece, capturing Macedonia and Thessaly without any resistance. He plundered the countryside, killing all men of military age and stealing their women, gold, and cattle. He allowed Athens to live in peace in exchange for a hefty ransom of gold and a nice hot shower, but Sparta, Corinth, and Argos weren’t quite as lucky—their citizens were sold into slavery and their cities were ruthlessly plundered. In an effort to put an end to the relentless ass-beatings, the Eastern Roman emperor in Constantinople offered to appoint the barbarian ruler to the office of master general of Byzantium—the second-highest position in the empire next to the emperor himself—if Alaric would please stop slaughtering, pillaging, and enslaving people.
Alaric agreed to this sweet deal, but only because he had a nefarious plan. As master general, he ordered all the armories and smiths in Greece to forge top-of-the-line weapons and armor for the Visigoth army, essentially commanding them to create the instruments of their own destruction. This really takes being diabolically evil to the next level.
Now, if you couldn’t afford the Oracle at Delphi, the next best thing in the classical age was to eat a bunch of shrooms, go to a place called a sacred grove, and stand around waiting for some random spirit to tell you something interesting. Alaric was pretty bored, so he went and did this a couple of times while his armies were reequipping with premium high-grade Grecian death implements. Eventually the grove said to him, “Away with delay, Alaric; boldly cross the Italian Alps and thou shalt reach the city.” Alaric took this as a not-so-subtle hint that he was going to be able to capture Rome if he invaded immediately.
Unfortunately, the sacred grove was full of crap. The Goths crossed the treacherous mountains into Italy and besieged the emperor’s summer home in Milan, but they were promptly counterattacked and defeated by the Roman general Stilicho. Alaric withdrew his forces back to Germany, and the Romans celebrated their victory by building a massive pillar signifying the utter and complete destruction of the Visigoth hordes forever.
Despite the fact that Stilicho bailed his ass out when his beach house was surrounded by bloodthirsty barbarians, Emperor Honorius of Rome still got arbitrarily ticked off at his general for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into right now. Honorius imprisoned Stilicho, his family, and his lieutenants, had them all executed, and then imprisoned the wives and children of all the Germanic troops serving in the Roman army. While the emperor thought this was a really goddamn brilliant way to exert his power over the Germans, it amazingly backfired—the troops all got pissed that their families had been locked up like criminals, ditched Rome, and flocked to Alaric with vengeance burning in their hearts. Thirty thousand soldiers rallied to the Visigoth king, and now that Rome’s only semicompetent general had been taken out by his own emperor, the Goths crashed into Italy like an out-of-control cement truck with a beard. The countryside was sacked, stuff was on fire everywhere, and Alaric soon found himself standing outside the gates of Rome.
Now, as I said before, the Romans at this point were lazy-ass fat bastards who never worked a day in their entire miserable lives, yet still had everything they ever wanted. Alaric was a hardcore soldier, and he had no respect for people who didn’t understand war. He surrounded the city, cut off access to food and communication, and proceeded to starve the Romans out. The gluttonous rich jerks of Rome tasted famine for the first time; men and women of the wealthiest families had to eat rat meat to survive, and most folks would have started violently murdering each other over a package of delicious chocolatey Swiss Cake Rolls. They begged Alaric for leniency, but he simply laughed in their faces. He told them he would agree to leave in exchange for 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silk robes, 3,000 pounds of pepper, and 666 jelly donuts. They complied.
Being a man of his word, Alaric told the emperor that he would accept the ransom and leave Rome. He only asked one thing of the Roman ruler: he wanted a small plot of land in Venice where his tribe could live in peace. Emperor Honorius spat in the Visigoth emissary’s face, saying, “The emperor of Rome will never submit to the demands of some dirty barbarian.”
“Oh, really?”
On August 24,410, Visigoth slaves living in Rome opened the gates in the middle of the night, and Alaric’s warriors flooded the streets. The Gothic warrior king ordered that no holy places be destroyed, and no man or woman seeking refuge in a church should be killed, but other than that it was pretty much six days of pandemonium. Oppressed Visigoth slaves, tormented for years by their cruel and brutal Roman masters, finally got their revenge. Everything valuable was stolen. For the first time in 619 years, Rome was in the hands of a foreign invader. Alaric the Bold was in their base, killing their dudes.
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After Alaric died the Visigoths got bored and migrated west, settling in Spain and western Gaul, where they lived peacefully until they got their asses wrecked by the Moors in 711. Rome would be sacked once again, this time by the Vandals, and the last Roman emperor was deposed by Germanic invaders in 476. The city has never really been the same since.
Alaric was a devout Arian Christian. Arians essentially believed that Jesus was divine, but that he was a separate entity created by God and wasn’t actually God himself. Naturally, the Arians were declared heretics by the Roman Church and were hunted down, persecuted, and killed whenever possible.
Alaric is known as “Alaric the Bold,” not just because he himself was bold, but because he was the leader of a barbarian tribe known as the Bolds. Furthermore, the name Alaric translates loosely to “king of all.” So when you break his name down, it’s “King of All, Ruler of the Bold People.” I find this to be totally awesome.
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Section II
The Middle Ages
11
KHALID BIN WALID
(592–642)
My sword is sharp and terrible. It is the mightiest of things when the pot of war boils fiercely…. I am the noble warrior, I am the Sword of Allah, I am Khalid bin Walid.
TRAINED FROM BIRTH IN THE HYPERMANLY ARTS OF HORSEMANSHIP, SWORD FIGHTING, WRESTLING, AND PUNCHING PEOPLE IN THE FACE SO HARD THAT THEIR BRAINS EXPLODE INTO TINY GRAY PARTICLES, THE GREAT MUSLIM WARLORD KHALID BIN WALID WAS BRED FOR ONE THING: KICKING SERIOUS ASS.
Born to the chieftain of the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, Khalid’s life changed forever when the Prophet Muhammad came rolling into town in the year 625. At the Battle of Uhud, it was Khalid who led the Quraysh to victory against the invading army of the Prophet, inflicting the only defeat of Muhammad’s well-documented military career. In the years following the battle, however, Muhammad and Khalid became homeboys, and Khalid eventually converted to Islam in 628. His penchant for slashing the face off anybody who crossed him and then suplexing their dead bodies over the side of a cliff led the Prophet to dub his mightiest warrior “the Sword of Allah.”
Now, you can be pretty sure that Muhammad didn’t give out totally dope nicknames like “the Sword of Allah” to just any idiot with a scimitar, and at the head of the Muslim army Khalid quickly became the most feared warrior in the Middle East. At the Battle of Mu’tah he flipped out and went into an insane battle rage when his force was surrounded and outnumbered by more than ten to one; during the maelstrom of ass-kicking he shattered nine different swords in his hand, probably by smashing them over people’s heads with enough force to fracture the earth.
After Muhammad’s death in 632 a bunch of jerkburgers decided that they were going to revolt and do their own thin
g, so the Prophet’s successor, Caliph Abu Bakr, unleashed the Sword of Allah on those silly heathen nonbelievers. Khalid bitch-slapped the heretical tribes into submission, subdued rival chieftains, and ultimately reunited everybody under the banner of Islam through a subtle, delicate, refined mixture of diplomacy, negotiation, and relentlessly clubbing people in the face with the hilt of his scimitar until their teeth fell out and they forgot how to play the piano. It was also around this time that he got married to a woman said to be the hottest babe in Arabia—her husband had just unfortunately been accused of treason and was summarily beheaded on the spot by Khalid, and she probably got so worked up watching the Sword of Islam do his thing that she pulled her burkha off and threw herself at him immediately. That’s just how Khalid rolled, baby.
While in the process of littering the desert with the decaying corpses of traitors, heretics, and nonbelievers, Khalid came across a dude known as Muslaima the Liar. This guy was a total douche-canoe who told everybody he was a prophet of God, so of course Khalid had to go and personally tear him a brand-new asshole. Khalid showed up at Muslaima’s crib with about thirteen thousand soldiers and found himself face-to-face with an army of nearly forty thousand ultrareligious zealot dumbasses. With both armies lined up across each other on the field of battle, Khalid took two steps forward, pounded his chest like Tarzan, and challenged the Liar to send forth his greatest champion. Some fool stepped up and didn’t even have a chance to be pitied before he got his ass righteously smote by the Sword of Allah. After that, four more witless dickmeisters thought they wanted a piece of Khalid, and they all ended up being pummeled to death with bricks and run headfirst through an industrial-sized meat grinder. After watching this giant berserker waste his five greatest warriors in the span of about ten minutes, Muslaima the Liar dropped his sword and promptly ran screaming away from the battlefield like the bitch that he was. This didn’t do a whole lot to bolster the fighting spirit of the warriors who believed Muslaima was the physical incarnation of God, and in the resulting battle the entire army of heretics had their heads cracked open like vinegar-soaked eggs. I’m not sure exactly what happened to the false prophet after Khalid caught up with him, but I can’t imagine that it involved polite handshakes, trial by jury, or diplomatic immunity.
This incident should give you a pretty good indication that Khalid wasn’t the sort of hands-off commander who was content to send his men into battle without trying to get a piece of the action for himself. He preferred to ride out at the head of his army, and before nearly every battle he would challenge the enemy commander to a mano-a-mano hell-in-a-cell ultimate-fighting death match. Taking Khalid up on his challenge usually resulted in a quick and painful death—there are no fewer than five recorded instances where Khalid jammed his sword through the abdomen of the enemy general before the battle even commenced, including one time in 634 when he decapitated the son-in-law of the Byzantine emperor and carried off the princess of Byzantium. Skipping the duel, while certainly a wise move, wasn’t always a guarantee that you were safe from the terrible wrath of the Sword of Allah, either. During battle, Khalid always made of point of trying to fight his way to the enemy commander and stab him in the goddamned face as hard as he could. His theory was that it was much more difficult to command your troops when you’ve also got to worry about some bloodthirsty wild man trying to chop your brain in half with a broadsword. He was probably right.
So now, with the traitorous tribes either brought back into the fold or hacked into submission, Khalid went forth to spread the word of Allah to the godless heathens in the lands of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Against the mighty re-formed Persian Empire, Khalid cut down his enemies at the Battle of Walaja, overcame a force ten times larger than his own without even breaking a sweat in the Battle of Firaz, and during the Battle of Ullais, the Khasif River was said to have run red with the blood of his enemies. In the span of a mere eight months, Khalid and his small army of badasses somehow managed to completely cripple the Persian military and overrun their entire country.
With the Persians now pretty much totally boned, Khalid continued on his quest to head-butt all nonbelievers into submission with his bone-crunching Forehead of Death. He personally led his army through the treacherous Syrian desert toward Damascus, even though attempting to cross that uninhabitable wasteland was considered to be nothing short of suicidal. Khalid had crotches to kick, however, and didn’t feel like wasting his time going around that bitch of a desert when he could just tear ass straight through it. To keep his men alive during the arduous journey, he took a bunch of camels with him, and halfway through the desert he had his men kill the camels, cut open their stomachs, and fill their canteens with nasty hump water. Sure, it’s disgusting, and certainly not an act that would have been condoned by the medieval ASPCA (or FDA for that matter), but even the most patchouli-loving, biodiesel-brewing, vegetarian beatnik pacifist tree-hugger has to admit that it’s also pretty damn hardcore.
Once in Syria, Khalid picked up right where he’d left off re: destroying all who opposed him in a cataclysm of gore. In 636, Khalid, now in charge of a combined force of twenty-five thousand Muslim warriors, drew up his battle lines against a massive army consisting of well over a hundred thousand soldiers from the all-powerful Byzantine Empire. Being the erudite tactician that he was, Khalid somehow managed to flank the enemy, donkey-punch them in the kidneys, and win a decisive victory, inflicting more than fifty thousand casualties on the enemy in just one day of fighting. This is an assload of kills, especially considering that the Muslims didn’t exactly have access to assault rifles, tanks, and forty-foot-tall mechs with Gatling laser guns for arms and antipersonnel grenade launchers duct-taped to their heads. After dispatching the main body of the Byzantine army and piling up enough dead bodies to fill most Major League Baseball stadiums to capacity, the Muslims blitzed through the Middle East, capturing Jerusalem, Damascus, and Antioch in the span of just a few months.
For reasons nobody can really figure out, Khalid was eventually dismissed from the military by the caliph, despite the notable fact that it only took him about four years to defeat the two most powerful empires on earth and almost single-handedly morph the Muslim caliphate from a small regional power into one of the world’s most dominant military forces. Being the honor-bound soldier he was, Khalid didn’t complain or whine about it on his blog; he simply returned home, where he died an old man in 642. Because he was such a war-mongering hardass, with his last words he lamented the fact that he had not been killed on the battlefield: “I fought in so many battles seeking martyrdom that there is no place in my body but have a stabbing mark by a spear, a sword or a dagger, and yet here I am, dying on my bed like an old camel dies. May the eyes of cowards never sleep.”
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The towns and villages that Khalid came across were given three options: fight, convert to Islam, or agree to pay a tax known as the jizya. As long as people paid this tax on nonbelievers, they were free to continue practicing their religion and were exempt from having to serve in the Muslim military.
Khalid’s tomb is located in an ornate mosque in Homs, Syria. His epitaph consists of an engraved list of the fifty major battles in which he commanded Muslim armies. He won all of them.
During the Crusades, the Muslim army featured specialized grenadier units known as naffatun. These pyromaniac foot soldiers wore fireproof suits and hurled pots full of burning pitch at their enemies, torching besieging armies and incinerating fortifications in a giant inferno of suck.
Another successful commander of the Islamic conquest was Tariq ibn Ziyad, also known as “Tariq the One-Eyed.” This cycloptic Berber led the Moorish conquest of Spain, sailing across the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 with several thousand warriors eager to puncture the codpieces of Hispania’s Visigoth defenders. When he landed his amphibious assault force on the southern coast of Spain, Tariq immediately torched all of his ships, telling his men that they had two options—victory or death. In the ensuing battle, th
e Muslims steamrollered the Goths, killing most of their nobility and establishing an Islamic presence that would flourish in Spain for nearly seven hundred years.
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12
JUSTINIAN II
(669–711)
May I perish this instant—may the almighty overwhelm me in the waves—if I consent to spare a single head of my enemies.
EMPEROR JUSTINIAN II OF BYZANTIUM WASN’T A BRILLIANT MILITARY STRATEGIST, A CAPABLE RULER, A BENEVOLENT DICTATOR, OR EVEN A HALF-DECENT HUMAN BEING. He was a ruthless, merciless bastard who crushed all who opposed him, brutally eliminated his enemies, and let nothing stand in the way of his insane, over-the-top, possibly misguided mission to exterminate anyone ballsy enough to think they could screw with him for any reason. His entire existence was dedicated to one key tenet of badassitude: live for revenge.
Justinian inherited the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire in 685 at the age of sixteen, and immediately started going to war with everybody he could find. He quickly defeated the Muslim Umayyad caliphate in battle and negotiated a peace treaty that resulted in the caliph agreeing to pay yearly tribute to the almighty emperor (proving to everyone who had the hugest sack in the land), and then his army of crotch-stabbing warriors was dispatched to beat the loincloths off some jerkass barbarians that were causing trouble in Armenia and the Balkan Peninsula.