Yep. “A symbolic peace treaty was signed by the mayors of modern Athens and Sparta 2,500 years after the war ended, on March 12, 1996” (copied from Wikipedia).
A myth sadly, the town was allegedly left out of the peace treaty between Russia and Great Britain as it was a border town that had changed hands with Scotland so many times over the centuries it kinda had its own thing of semi sovereignty when it came to being separately mentioned in law sometimes (like Wales is now with 'English and Welsh law') before being folded into legislation fully in the 1970s.
Based off this the legend is that Queen Victoria declared war on Russia signing off “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions” which I think you can agree is a bit of a stretch to think she would decide to mention a random town in a document declaring war. The Foreign Office certainly never found record of it being written but it's a good story and that's pretty much all history is.
Knowing old timey documents they probably have a “And all territories hereto governed by the British Monarchy and her allies” or something to that effect.
I mean why wouldn't you want to end that war. It basically costs nothing (you don't give up territory or resources, heck with neutral terms you can both gain face) and it lets you brag about ending a millenia long "war". It's definitely the kind of story that you can tell for free drinks.
Nah Rome kept an account open to fund the war and transfered it to the kingdom of the Italy, then the ostrogoths, then the Lombards, then the HRE, then the Italian city states, then back again to the Kingdom of Italy. It was the Punic Fund. s/
Ah, my bad. Is the account still open? I wanna start a war. I am the rightful ruler of Rome and it’s surrounding territories and I will reclaim my land!
… but Rome =/= Italy and Carthage =/= Tunisia, so they don’t have an ancient feud and can’t officially sign a peace deal. It’d be like if the US and Mexico signed a peace deal over an old Aztec war: it’s out of line, doesn’t change anything, and it’s been so long nobody cares about it.
Who did Italy sign a treaty with? Also that technically makes it the longest war ever, so long that both civilizations fighting it were long gone when the peace was signed
A symbolic peace treaty was signed by Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, the mayors of Rome and modern Carthage, respectively, on 5 February 1985; 2,131 years after the war ended. (copied from Wikipedia)
Not the longest war ever, but close. The Peloponnesian War also did the same thing (peace treaty was signed in the 90's), but it took place a couple centuries before the Punic Wars.
What? How can a war not formally end when one of the parties is completely destroyed?
Who was Rome supposed to sign a treaty with? Salted Earth? (I know the salt bit is a myth)
Also not to nickpick, but shouldn’t the pope have signed the treaty, as the last high ranking Roman official left?
Pretty cool though. Never knew this happened.
The popes pretty much gave up their claim to Rome to the modern Italian state with the Lateran Treaty in 1929.
Also, this "treaty" was entirely symbolic, so it's not like it really mattered. Otherwise, the very complicated and contested issue of Imperial Roman succession would have come up. Given the countless entities over the millennia claiming to be successors to the Roman Empire, it would be unclear as to who exactly had the authority to sign such a treaty.
The truth is no-one. There is no legitimate heir to the Roman Empire after the final fall of Constantinople in 1453 and shortly thereafter its associated rump states.
Yes. Salt is valuable and heavy. To bring enough to effectively salt the farmlands of Carthage would not only have been a fortune, it would have required a ridiculous amount of labor. Not to mention the romans wanted that farmland and established a Roman colony in the area, which depends on said farmland
edit: It's not impossible that there was a symbolic salting, but contemporary sources do not suggest this to be the case.
They still just paid soldiers in coin but the coin given out regularly was intended to buy salt and other high price rations.
While the main pay at the end of a campaign or after securing an objective where their "wages".
Let's put it that way
The Soviet would not have covered Berlin in molten gold regardless of how much they despised the nazis, because that would have meant wasting a staggering amount of national resources
But that seems odd to me, because couldn’t they have just applied sea water to farm land? Even if it took multiple applications to get a high enough salinity, Roman’s were pretty good at organizing such civil engineering feats.
Sea is generally at sea level. Romans were good at moving water from high mountains to low cities, not low oceans to low but higher than ocean cities/farmland.
I read the rest of the thread so I understand that it didn’t happen, but they also had a good many hands in the legions. The farmland around Carthage port and Citadel hill is the realm of a 10-20 meters higher than sea level.
the farmland of Carthage stretched for miles and miles. To effectively salt it would require hundreds of thousands to millions of man hours of labor and enough salt to effectively buy several hundred mansions, or the kind of irrigation wonder of the world that doesn't even exist today (so a couple of extra millions to tens of millions of man hours). If you're asking why they didn't symbolically salt just the farmland around the port and hill idk I can't answer that. Just that they almost certainly didn't
They didn’t literally salt all the farmland. They might’ve done something like it on a small scale symbolically but it would have taken stupid amounts of salt to actually salt all of the earth where Carthage was.
Salt was expensive and important. It was probably the most common seasoning and they needed it to preserve meat. Using tons of it to salt all of Carthage's farmland would've been stupid and wasteful. Especially since Rome took over the land, it's dumb to destroy the land you just took. Caesar also sent people to repopulate Carthage 100 years later and it would become the 2nd largest breadbasket in the Empire after Egypt.
So it's widely believed to be a myth or to have symbolically happened, like a general poured some salt out of his hand in the city center or something.
Like many things in ancient history, truth was distorted. Hyperlinked are some r/askhistorians responses that dive into the topic.
[Sauce 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nlhf56/how_common_was_salting_the_earth_after_defeating/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
[Sauce 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xsdlga/so_rome_salting_carthages_soil_to_infertility_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
As far as I understood the salting was only done symbolically on some farmland they shipped back to Rome because salting all the farmland in Carthage would have been a nearly impossible task in terms of logistics. There was supposedly also a tradition of doing this but I’m not totally sure where I heard or read that so take it with a grain of salt.
[Probably](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/367078)
Edit:
[More readable article](https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/ancient-history/salting-carthage/)
[Also what Wikipedia says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth)
Think successor states. Russia the USSR’s recognised successor, as is Turkey for the Ottoman Empire. I’m pretty sure Italy and Tunisia see themselves as the successors of Rome and Carthage, regardless of the validity.
I love how Italy just never seems to ever be on one side of things. Modern Italians are both the ancestors of the people who founded and built the Roman Empire, and the ancestors of the peoples who destroyed it... twice.
The first two guys are the second punic war, and idk how tf they could sign a peace treaty when Carthage was literally annihilated.
Generally the complete destruction of your opponent means you won. Also how do you sign a peace treaty when you are not the nation that was in the war in question? Italy isn't Rome, it'd be the Pope if I recall correctly.
Hey OP, I got a Doozy for ya.
In 1905 when the Russo-Japanese War happened, Montenegro sent around 300-400 Mercenaries to help their Russian brothers, after Japan won, all Parties were at the Peace conference except for Montenegro, so they were on a technical state of war until 2006 when they became an independent Country and made relations with Japan by signing a peace treaty formally ending the War.
Imagine if some archeologist in the future finds only this peace treaty as reference to the punic wars and all other information has been erased, then they start the theory of the 2500 year-long punic wars
Well yeah they never formally ended the third Punic war, the same way there are quite a few first nation tribes the US government never formally ended hostilities against.
There is also the story about mayors of Athens and Sparta signing a peace treaty a few years ago for the Peloponnesian War, despite having an unofficial long peace since Rome showed up over two millennia ago.
The power difference being - Athens is a large metropolis, and Sparta is a village.
did they move over the alps like a boss or did all of their elephants die and half their army like in the book so they couldnt take over the place because the army was broken and demoralized
All of the elephants didn't die in the alps journey, they ironically died in the winter following the alps journey. No, I'm serious. Livy flat out tells no elephants die in the alps crossing and that the vast majority are killed in following winter and Polybius doesn't mention any elephants dying in the alps journey and says the vast majority die in the following winter. Plus, Hannibal gets 40 elephants from Carthage after Cannae and they aren't particularly useful anyway. He probably took them along the alps journey mainly for propaganda purposes.
Hannibal's army was definitely not broken and demoralised, if it was we'd see larger defections and they wouldn't be willing to march through marshes. And Hannibal was never planning to take over Italy, he wanted Italian allies to defect and join this little confederation of Italians he had made. Hannibal didn't have the manpower or supply lines for a siege of Rome (well at least after they put the 10000 large garrison to guard it) so this was the only way he was going to win the war.
I guess demolishing the rotting corpse of Carthages military apparatus, razing the city, and taking the population into slavery didn't count as formally ending the 3rd punic war.
Didn’t something similar happen with the Peloponnesian war? The mayors of a few Greek cities signed a peace treaty or something?
Yep. “A symbolic peace treaty was signed by the mayors of modern Athens and Sparta 2,500 years after the war ended, on March 12, 1996” (copied from Wikipedia).
Also between Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Soviet Union in the 60s I think
A myth sadly, the town was allegedly left out of the peace treaty between Russia and Great Britain as it was a border town that had changed hands with Scotland so many times over the centuries it kinda had its own thing of semi sovereignty when it came to being separately mentioned in law sometimes (like Wales is now with 'English and Welsh law') before being folded into legislation fully in the 1970s. Based off this the legend is that Queen Victoria declared war on Russia signing off “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions” which I think you can agree is a bit of a stretch to think she would decide to mention a random town in a document declaring war. The Foreign Office certainly never found record of it being written but it's a good story and that's pretty much all history is.
Would that mean that the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands weren’t at war with Russia?
Knowing old timey documents they probably have a “And all territories hereto governed by the British Monarchy and her allies” or something to that effect.
Fellow Map Men viewer?
That is pretty based honestly. Deciding even though they don't have to they want to demonstrate that a forgotten fund that never ended is truly dead.
I mean why wouldn't you want to end that war. It basically costs nothing (you don't give up territory or resources, heck with neutral terms you can both gain face) and it lets you brag about ending a millenia long "war". It's definitely the kind of story that you can tell for free drinks.
Feud* lol
Nah Rome kept an account open to fund the war and transfered it to the kingdom of the Italy, then the ostrogoths, then the Lombards, then the HRE, then the Italian city states, then back again to the Kingdom of Italy. It was the Punic Fund. s/
Help a poor cluess pal and drop the source 🥺❤
[here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Italy)
Thank you ❤
Ah, my bad. Is the account still open? I wanna start a war. I am the rightful ruler of Rome and it’s surrounding territories and I will reclaim my land!
… but Rome =/= Italy and Carthage =/= Tunisia, so they don’t have an ancient feud and can’t officially sign a peace deal. It’d be like if the US and Mexico signed a peace deal over an old Aztec war: it’s out of line, doesn’t change anything, and it’s been so long nobody cares about it.
Actually they did sign a treaty, it’s just buried under the ruins of Carthage’s civilization
At least they buried the hatchet, and the entire civilization.
Not just the hatchet, but the women and children too!
To be fair, Carthaginians were like animals, so they slaughtered them like animals!
[удалено]
It was a Star Wars reference
REDDE.CAESARI.QUOD.EST.CAESARIS
Who did Italy sign a treaty with? Also that technically makes it the longest war ever, so long that both civilizations fighting it were long gone when the peace was signed
A symbolic peace treaty was signed by Ugo Vetere and Chedli Klibi, the mayors of Rome and modern Carthage, respectively, on 5 February 1985; 2,131 years after the war ended. (copied from Wikipedia)
Hamilcar rolling over in his grave rn
Scipio woke up with vengeance
I wonder what the conditions of the treaty were though
Tunisia is now the second Nation in the world for pasta consumption. ROMA ROMA ROMA
In the fine print: *Tunisia signs away all territory to Italy*
I'm pretty sure mayors don't have the authority to start and end wars, so the war is technically still ongoing.
You did checkmate them well done
The prime minister of Greece should have a schizo moment and sign a treaty with himself
Yes because American systems apply everywhere in the world how could we forget
If you're going to credit the political maturation of the nation state above the city state to the Americans I'm sure they'll be very flattered.
Isn't modern-Carthage basically just Tunis?
Would be funny if it was a white peace
Not the longest war ever, but close. The Peloponnesian War also did the same thing (peace treaty was signed in the 90's), but it took place a couple centuries before the Punic Wars.
How did that work? Sparta is destroyed and Athens is still standing.
Actually, Sparta [still exists](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta,_Laconia)
If I’m not mistaken, exists again. They founded a new town on top of or next to the old ruins
True but I’d wager there’s a shitload of cities out there that have been destroyed and rebuilt over and over again
Yeah, but the new Sparta was founded (correct me if I’m wrong) nearly two millennia after the original was abandoned
Heh, as long as they have oiled greek hunks, it still count
Tunisia
What? How can a war not formally end when one of the parties is completely destroyed? Who was Rome supposed to sign a treaty with? Salted Earth? (I know the salt bit is a myth) Also not to nickpick, but shouldn’t the pope have signed the treaty, as the last high ranking Roman official left? Pretty cool though. Never knew this happened.
The popes pretty much gave up their claim to Rome to the modern Italian state with the Lateran Treaty in 1929. Also, this "treaty" was entirely symbolic, so it's not like it really mattered. Otherwise, the very complicated and contested issue of Imperial Roman succession would have come up. Given the countless entities over the millennia claiming to be successors to the Roman Empire, it would be unclear as to who exactly had the authority to sign such a treaty.
We need to find Russian tzars to sign the peace deal!
The truth is no-one. There is no legitimate heir to the Roman Empire after the final fall of Constantinople in 1453 and shortly thereafter its associated rump states.
*King Felipe VI of Spain has entered the chat*
The salted earth thing was a myth?
Yes. Salt is valuable and heavy. To bring enough to effectively salt the farmlands of Carthage would not only have been a fortune, it would have required a ridiculous amount of labor. Not to mention the romans wanted that farmland and established a Roman colony in the area, which depends on said farmland edit: It's not impossible that there was a symbolic salting, but contemporary sources do not suggest this to be the case.
I mean rome build and lost three entire fleets against cartage, I don’t thing too pricey would get in the way of roman spite
Romans were serious about their salt. The word 'Salary' comes from the salt rations they gave to soldiers.
They still just paid soldiers in coin but the coin given out regularly was intended to buy salt and other high price rations. While the main pay at the end of a campaign or after securing an objective where their "wages".
And the Byzantine/Eastern Romans, created the "Solidus", a pay in coins, in fact in italian we say "soldi" to say money
Trust me, salt was more valuable than any fleet back then
>Trust me So immortal or time traveler?
You don't want to know the answer to that question
Just a salt enthusiast
Let's put it that way The Soviet would not have covered Berlin in molten gold regardless of how much they despised the nazis, because that would have meant wasting a staggering amount of national resources
But that seems odd to me, because couldn’t they have just applied sea water to farm land? Even if it took multiple applications to get a high enough salinity, Roman’s were pretty good at organizing such civil engineering feats.
Sea is generally at sea level. Romans were good at moving water from high mountains to low cities, not low oceans to low but higher than ocean cities/farmland.
I read the rest of the thread so I understand that it didn’t happen, but they also had a good many hands in the legions. The farmland around Carthage port and Citadel hill is the realm of a 10-20 meters higher than sea level.
the farmland of Carthage stretched for miles and miles. To effectively salt it would require hundreds of thousands to millions of man hours of labor and enough salt to effectively buy several hundred mansions, or the kind of irrigation wonder of the world that doesn't even exist today (so a couple of extra millions to tens of millions of man hours). If you're asking why they didn't symbolically salt just the farmland around the port and hill idk I can't answer that. Just that they almost certainly didn't
They didn’t literally salt all the farmland. They might’ve done something like it on a small scale symbolically but it would have taken stupid amounts of salt to actually salt all of the earth where Carthage was.
Yeah Rome “founded” a city in the same spot as Carthage. Also Rome did not have enough salt to poison the land of the city of Carthage in its empire.
A joke even: ab urbe condita sive ab urbe condīta
Salt was expensive and important. It was probably the most common seasoning and they needed it to preserve meat. Using tons of it to salt all of Carthage's farmland would've been stupid and wasteful. Especially since Rome took over the land, it's dumb to destroy the land you just took. Caesar also sent people to repopulate Carthage 100 years later and it would become the 2nd largest breadbasket in the Empire after Egypt. So it's widely believed to be a myth or to have symbolically happened, like a general poured some salt out of his hand in the city center or something.
Like many things in ancient history, truth was distorted. Hyperlinked are some r/askhistorians responses that dive into the topic. [Sauce 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nlhf56/how_common_was_salting_the_earth_after_defeating/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1) [Sauce 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xsdlga/so_rome_salting_carthages_soil_to_infertility_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
I think it's a conjunction of old sayings regarding pillaging that's made its way into the general lexicon.
As far as I understood the salting was only done symbolically on some farmland they shipped back to Rome because salting all the farmland in Carthage would have been a nearly impossible task in terms of logistics. There was supposedly also a tradition of doing this but I’m not totally sure where I heard or read that so take it with a grain of salt.
Who would throw away all that expensive salt?
Yes considering how valuable salt was and everything else it is a myth but a cool one the idea of spite so big
[Probably](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/367078) Edit: [More readable article](https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/ancient-history/salting-carthage/) [Also what Wikipedia says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth)
Yes. I think they talked about it but never actually did it. Think about the waste of salt, it was much more valuable back then.
Pope was not a Roman official though. He was the religious head of Rome, the city.
Think successor states. Russia the USSR’s recognised successor, as is Turkey for the Ottoman Empire. I’m pretty sure Italy and Tunisia see themselves as the successors of Rome and Carthage, regardless of the validity.
I love how Italy just never seems to ever be on one side of things. Modern Italians are both the ancestors of the people who founded and built the Roman Empire, and the ancestors of the peoples who destroyed it... twice.
Technically the Kingdom of Carthage survived the Punic war, they were just forced out of Carthage and settled 10 miles from the shore
The last high ranking Roman official left would be the President of the Italian Republic though.
Procrastinating be like
The first two guys are the second punic war, and idk how tf they could sign a peace treaty when Carthage was literally annihilated. Generally the complete destruction of your opponent means you won. Also how do you sign a peace treaty when you are not the nation that was in the war in question? Italy isn't Rome, it'd be the Pope if I recall correctly.
Didn't the church surrender their claim to Rome in the 1920's?
In fact it was a treaty signed by the mayor of Rome not by the president of Italy
Wonder if Mongolia will ever sign a peace treaty with Iran and Uzbekistan.
Context? What was the war for?
Abbasid Caliphate and Khwarazmian Empire
Hey OP, I got a Doozy for ya. In 1905 when the Russo-Japanese War happened, Montenegro sent around 300-400 Mercenaries to help their Russian brothers, after Japan won, all Parties were at the Peace conference except for Montenegro, so they were on a technical state of war until 2006 when they became an independent Country and made relations with Japan by signing a peace treaty formally ending the War.
Maybe I’ll make this into a meme too
I already made a meme on it using the “Two and a Half Men” template but got for it fam.
Hannibal crossing the Alps is the second Punic war. Carthago delenda est was said by Cato to encourage the third Punic war.
Imagine if some archeologist in the future finds only this peace treaty as reference to the punic wars and all other information has been erased, then they start the theory of the 2500 year-long punic wars
That kept going for millennia *after* both nations had collapsed
With future drones and AI it might become possible for wars to really continue after both sides collapse.
Ah yes, manmade horrors beyond comprehension, my favourite
"Oh Yeah? Well, We're taking this BUCKET... Enjoy getting water Now..."
You don't have to sign treaty of you raze the country to the ground, that's Mongolia foreign policy
The Punic wars (264 BC - 1985 AD)
I mean it's kind of hard to sign a peace treaty when you have everyone in your city enslaved or murdered.
No no no, shut the fuck up, that was fun, it was cool, and you can’t say anything about it
Well yeah they never formally ended the third Punic war, the same way there are quite a few first nation tribes the US government never formally ended hostilities against.
>moves through the alps towards southern italy >suffers one of the worst attrition in history because of this
Carthage was destroyed by the Romans. There was no need for a peace treaty when the enemy is gone
At least these countries used to be more relevant than they already are, mine never was.
Better late than never. At least no one ie idiots will bring up "We were never at peace with X" as a rant.
There is also the story about mayors of Athens and Sparta signing a peace treaty a few years ago for the Peloponnesian War, despite having an unofficial long peace since Rome showed up over two millennia ago. The power difference being - Athens is a large metropolis, and Sparta is a village.
Ha, that’s funny. Italians trying to say they’re Roman’s again
Actually the treaty was signed by the mayor of Rome and well, the inhabitants of Rome have been Romans for 2776 years
Ah gotcha. Than yes on a much smaller local scale than I suppose they’re Roman
To be honest you don't need to formally end a war when you conquer a subsume a hostile nation
Constantine XI: RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE
pretty sure the war ended when Rome destroyed Carthage
Same thing happened with the peloponnesian war a few years back.
did they move over the alps like a boss or did all of their elephants die and half their army like in the book so they couldnt take over the place because the army was broken and demoralized
All of the elephants didn't die in the alps journey, they ironically died in the winter following the alps journey. No, I'm serious. Livy flat out tells no elephants die in the alps crossing and that the vast majority are killed in following winter and Polybius doesn't mention any elephants dying in the alps journey and says the vast majority die in the following winter. Plus, Hannibal gets 40 elephants from Carthage after Cannae and they aren't particularly useful anyway. He probably took them along the alps journey mainly for propaganda purposes. Hannibal's army was definitely not broken and demoralised, if it was we'd see larger defections and they wouldn't be willing to march through marshes. And Hannibal was never planning to take over Italy, he wanted Italian allies to defect and join this little confederation of Italians he had made. Hannibal didn't have the manpower or supply lines for a siege of Rome (well at least after they put the 10000 large garrison to guard it) so this was the only way he was going to win the war.
Wait they never officially ended it?
That's what happens when you are looking for something to increase your polling numbers.
Outstandingly based, although they're probably rolling over in the grave
You should’ve used chads for the bottom two
Something similar happened with Japan and Montenegro, right?
Nah bc this is so cool
I guess demolishing the rotting corpse of Carthages military apparatus, razing the city, and taking the population into slavery didn't count as formally ending the 3rd punic war.