Cophen Campaign
| Alexander's Indian campaign | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of Indian campaign of Alexander the Great | |||||||
 The Valley of the Cophen River |
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| Belligerents | |||||||
| Macedon |
Aspasians Guraeans Assacenians |
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
|
Alexander the Great Craterus Perdiccas Ptolemy I Soter Leonnatus |
various | ||||||
The Cophen Campaign was a campaign conducted by Alexander the Great between May 327 BC all the way to March 326 BC It was conducted in the modern Punjab region, in the area specifically known as Swat, Pakistan. Alexander's goal was to secure his line of communications so that he could conduct a campaign in India proper without having to fear for his communications. To this effect, he had to take a number of fortresses from various Barbarian (needs citation) tribes.
Alexander had assumed the throne of Ancient Macedonia when he was 20 years of age after his father was assassinated at the hands of an intimate body guard . Having taken up his throne and put down all those who contested his claim to it, he then set about to confirm his rule of Ancient Greece as Hegemon. A number of measures had been taken up by the Greek city states to reclaim their independence from the Macedonians. He marched his army to Thebes, at which point Thebes surrendered, promptly followed by Athens. It was around this point that Alexander made the decision to leave Ancient Sparta independent, due to the political implications that would have in his capacity as Hegemon of Greece, it would depict him in the light of an autocrat instead of the ruler by the consent of the governed. He therefore decided to leave Antipater as his regent in Greece, with a force equal to the Spartans in the case that they should get ambitious. It was as the result of this decision that he decided to extend the borders of his Macedonian Kingdom—in other words he was simultaneously Hegemon of Greece, which was a strictly a civil office and the outright monarch of Macedonia—to the Danube river and subdue all the tribes between the northern Macedonian border and the right bank of the Danube, which he did. Greece required some final mopping up before he could begin his father's long planned expedition against the Achaemenid Empire.
Crossing the Hellespont in the early part of spring 334 BC, he had with him 30,000 infantry and 5,200 cavalry. He subsequently marched east to the river Granicus and defeated the Persians there at the battle of the Granicus. From there, he marched westward to the coast of Asia Minor, and then south, weaving it through Asia Minor's coast taking a number of critical ports of call from the Persians, who had stationed garrisons in all the major oppidums situated on the coast. These were largely Greek city states, and it was critical that they should be friendly to his cause, so he settled their local disputes and set about settling new governments more preferable to the local inhabitants. At Miletus, the last city on the western coast of Asia Minor and critical to his control of Asia Minor, Alexander decided to disband his fleet and take the rest of the cities along the coast by land. There were a number of reasons for this; it would free up 30,000 sailors who could be employed in garrison duty along his lines of communication to Macedon and Antipiter (Alexander is notable in his capacity as a general for his scrupulousness towards his lines of communication); his fleet was costing him fifty talents a month (which was equal to a month's rations); his fleet was only 160 ships strong—it had no chance of defeating the Persian fleet (400 strong) who had superior sailors—and a defeat would have terrible results on not only his men's moral but on the political situation in Greece. If he had not already developed it, it was at this point that he decided to take the Mediterranean sea coast of the Persian Empire before proceeding into the heartland of the Empire. He finished taking the coast of Anatolia in early 333 BC
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