Not Another Military History Podcast · Jakob Sibley

War Elephants: A History, Episode 5: Elephants in the Age of Gunpowder and beyond

·52 min·5 clips

Romans banned enemies from having war elephants, treating them like ancient WMDs they secretly valued.

This episode continues host Jacob's series on the history of war elephants, focusing on their use after the Second Punic War through the medieval and early modern periods. Jacob, the solo host, narrates the military and cultural trajectory of these animals across empires. The narrative picks up with Rome's conflicts against King Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus III after defeating Carthage. At the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE, Roman consul Flaminius used elephants to break the Macedonian left flank. Rome's treaty with Antiochus demanded he surrender all his war elephants, mirroring earlier terms for Carthage. Julius Caesar employed a single armored elephant to terrify British tribes during his 54 BCE invasion, as recorded by Polyaenus. Roman emperors like Germanicus and Nero kept elephants for spectacle, training them to dance or, allegedly, walk tightropes. The decline of war elephants in Rome is attributed to the Pax Romana and overhunting for ivory. The episode then shifts east to the Muslim conquests, detailing the failed Persian invasion where Arab leader Abu Ubayd was trampled after attacking an elephant. At the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636 CE, Arab forces learned to target elephants' eyes and trunks. In medieval India, the Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud used war elephants extensively, capturing 200 from King Jayapala and employing tusk swords and naphtha. Mahmud maintained a force of 1,300 elephants and even gave them rest sabbaticals in India. The Mongols, while largely avoiding elephant warfare, were repelled by them in Vietnam and India, and Kublai Khan owned 5,000. Indian sultans used elephants for executions, and one 14th-century conflict was allegedly averted by a distraction involving a rare spotted elephant. A surprising claim is that Roman treaties treated war elephants as ancient "weapons of mass destruction," forbidding defeated powers from keeping them. The account of Muhammad's Year of the Elephant describes lead elephant Mahmud miraculously refusing to attack Mecca. Sultan Mahmud's soldiers reportedly had to bathe to remove congealed blood from their hands after battle. In Timur's invasion of India, his veteran soldiers were so frightened of elephants they requested to be placed "with the ladies." Timur later mounted flamethrowers on captured elephants. The host speculates that "chain elephants" might refer to elephants wielding heavy chains as weapons. Akbar the Great innovated by mounting lightweight, disassemblable cannons called *gajnals* on elephant howdahs and developing comprehensive lamellar armor for them. The episode notes that into the 20th century, gangs of elephants in Thailand would ambush trucks to steal sugarcane. The tone is informal, conversational, and anecdotal, blending historical narrative with the host's personal asides, like his story about biking and his cat. The style is educational but leans into vivid, sometimes gruesome descriptions of battlefield events and animal behavior. Listeners interested in the tactical evolution of ancient warfare and the intersection of animals and military technology would find this episode engaging. Those preferring a tightly structured, purely academic history might be distracted by the host's digressive commentary.

As heard by us

War elephants are cast as instruments of fear, spectacle, and brute force.

The installment leans hard into the war elephants' role as engines of fear and spectacle, with its sharpest moments tying battlefield maneuvering to cruelty and execution.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want elephants, execution stories, and one very strange military-history series.

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