upon hamilcar barca's arrival to hispania in 237 bc, he succeeded at conquering multiple hispanic tribes and drawing reinforcements through them, either through alliance or usage of hostages. his son hannibal continued his effort after his death with plans to lead an expeditionary army to italy. as mentioned earlier, in this case it is not easy to differentiate true partisans from forced vassals either, except whenever their procedence didn't equate with conquered regions, as apparently hannibal only made a distinction out of his spaniards about the topic of their allegiance. in 218, before departing from cartagena, he sent 16,000 bastetani, oretani and olcade serfs to garrison carthage in exchange for 15,200 african javelin throwers, thus preventing any possible rebellion of any of them due to the distance from their home lands. he also licensed, before crossing the pyrenees, many carpetanians who did not wish to leave hispania. as a consequence of those moves, hannibal kept only those hispanics with a bond of devotion to him, which would presumably include mercenaries and the most loyal vassals. it is esteemed that between 8,000 and 10,000 spaniards, counting the sum of their many peninsular peoples, reached italy with hannibal. the majority of them might have been still alive and serving when he returned to carthage in 202, proving the reliability that had moved the punics to hire them.