Mercenary Balearic Slingers
Missile Infantry(0.6.7)Side / Back
Short description
The Balearic Slingers were the finest slingers in the western Mediterranean, renowned for their skill, range and accuracy.
Description
Balearic slingers were the finest slingers found in the western Mediterranean, renowned throughout the ancient world for their skill, range and accuracy with their simple but terrible weapons, and they were highly sought after mercenaries.
Balearic slings were made of black tufted rush, hair or sinew, and slingers carried several slings of different sizes, designed for long, medium and short range respectively (Strabo, 3.5.1). These slings may have been carried wrapped around the head when not in use (Strabo, 3.5.1), or else one would be wrapped around the head, another around the waist, and one carried in the hand (Diod. 5.18.3).
The Balearians, unlike their Rhodian counterparts, did not use lead shot, but rather preferred to use stones, much larger than those of other slingers, each weighing up to half a mina (436 g), giving rise to the claim that Balearian slingshot could have a force like a catapult (Diod. 5.18.3).
Balearic slingers were famed for their accuracy (Diod. 5.18.4; Strabo, 3.5.1). They wore simple woollen tunics, carried a small buckler, a caetra, strapped to the forearm in order to leave the hands free to load and use the sling, and a short falcate-type sword for when they were forced to engage in close fighting.
The Balearic Islands produced famous slingers, said to train from infancy, a child not being allowed to eat until he had hit his food with a slingshot.
The Balearic slingers were valued mercenaries, and were typically found in Punic armies from the fifth century BC (Diod. 13.80.2). While the Balearic Islands were firmly within the Punic sphere, Punic colonists themselves were only found in Ebusos; Carthaginian power did not penetrate further than the coast in the larger, more easterly islands of Mallorca and Menorca, and Carthage did not exert any sovereignty over the natives.
The Balearians were a wild, primitive peoples, using slings and fire-hardened javelins when they first came into contact with Carthage (Strabo, 3.5.1). It is said that when Carthage first began employing Balearic slingers they were paid in wine and women, for they did not use money (Diod. 5.17.4). The presence of Carthaginian recruiting officers with large sums of money must have soon become a regular sight however.
Hannibal used Balearic slingers widely, deploying them to both Africa and Spain in 218 (Polybius, 3.33.11, 16; Livy, 21.21.12; 22.2), as well as taking a contingent of them with him to Italy. In 206 Mago Barca recruited extensively in the Balearic Islands before landing his expedition in Liguria.