Imagine a Highland Napoleon. Imagine a Bonny Prince Charlie with European ambitions who, having won back Scotland from King George II, sets off at the head of his clans not just to conquer England—a mere preliminary—but to cross the Channel, to meet and beat the French army on the River Somme, then journey south into Spain to besiege and subdue its principal fortresses, return north to challenge the Holy Roman Emperor, twice confront and defeat him at the head of his forces, seize his Crown, burn his capital, bury his corpse and finally depart eastward to cross swords with the Tsar of Russia or the Sultan of Turkey. Imagine all this compressed into, say, the years 1745-56 [C.E.], between the princeling’s twenty-second and thirty-third birthdays. Imagine on his death, at the age of thirty-two, the crowns of Europe shared between his followers—Lord George Murray ruling in Madrid, the Duke of Perth in Paris, Lord Elcho in Vienna, John Roy Stewart in Berlin, Cameron of Lochiel in Warsaw, a gaggle of tartaned chieftains braying for whisky in the small courts of south Germany and London garrisoned by a crew of bare-kneed highlanders. Finally, imagine most of the Jacobite empire enduring into the nineteenth century, parts of it into the twentieth, and its last fragment into the twenty-first.
Or imagine, if you prefer, a George Washington Bolivar, a Founding Father who determines also to be the Liberator of Latin America; who, having endured the long winter of Valley Forge and the setbacks of the middle years of the War of Independence, to exult at last in the capitulation of Yorktown, conceives the ambition of ridding all the Americas of foreign governments. Imagine him embarking the Continental Army in the ships of the new-born United States Navy to voyage south, clear Mexico of Spanish troops, garrison the West Indies with Virginians or New Englanders and make a landing on the shores of South America. Then, victorious in Peru, he crosses the Andes, defeats the Spanish army of the east, and expires on the approaches to the empire of Brazil.
Thus is it just possible to grasp how extraordinary was the career of Alexander the Great. The distances and obstacles of either enterprise defeat the imagination—and they have, indeed, no parallel in any reality except that of Alexander’s own life. The world has, of course, known conquerors of extraordinary ambition in its time: Attila the Hun whose horsemen rode from Central Asia to the gates of Rome in the fifth century; the Arab successors of Mahomet turned back into Spain by defeat on the banks of the Loire in the eighth century; and the sons of Genghis Khan, whose Mongols menaced Venice and Vienna in the thirteenth. Napoleon, a devotee of the Alexander epic, came close to re-enacting it in the years between Rivoli, 1797, and Moscow, 1812, as again did Hitler, in whom some gobbet of classical learning also nourished an admiration for Alexander. His orgy of victory was, of course, even more telescoped in time than Napoleon’s, who in turn gave battle oftener than Alexander ever did. Yet the achievements of none of these earthshakers quite match those of the original. Napoleon and Hitler scarcely ventured beyond their own continent. Attila, the Arabs and the Mongols broke the boundaries of Asia but only scratched the heartland of Europe. Alexander, by contrast, first made himself master of the Greek world, then translated himself to another, the Persian Empire, and finally ventured into a third in India. At his death in June 323 BC, he had subdued the largest tract of the earth’s surface ever to be conquered by a single individual—Genghis Khan’s short-lived empire excepted—and ruled as overlord, emperor or king from Mount Olympus to the [Himalayas]….
— Mask of Command, Chapter 1
Emphases mine.
