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We should have stirred it up and then left the mess for everyone else. Responsible policy.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 08:19 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 23:20 |
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TaurusTorus posted:Tossing poo poo out a window: still the best means of conflict resolution. Serve your nation through defenestration.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 08:42 |
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Don Gato posted:He had a very long article on BBC's website that can be summed up as "Britain should have stayed out of WWI and if it did it would be the biggest superpower evar", and in general he has a massive boner for the British Empire. Not sure about hating brown people in general but it wouldn't surprise me.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 12:47 |
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HEY GAIL posted:i read some sort of disclosure by him where he said that he did what he did because the money was good, which means he doesn't even have honor You mean he... he engages in trade?
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 13:40 |
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Grand Prize Winner posted:From what I can tell the degree is optional Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 14:03 |
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Randarkman posted:This is from a few pages back but I will say that that is an extremely simplistic view of things. First of all it should be stressed that good numbers aren't always easy to come by for medieval battles, especially earlier ones. Second that it really depends on the situation which side will benefit and in that case superior or inferior numbers may not count for as much. The best example of that would be when Saladin was defeated at Montgisard as a couple of hundred knights came upon Saladin's larger force in narrow quarters (and I think under heavy mist so were essentially undetected) and shattered it with their charge, an example of the Muslims (Saladin) blundering and being handed a crushing defeat. Hattin (where the nunbers were in the Muslims' favor but not vastly so, though Saladin had many more mounted men) would then be an example of a Frankish blunder and subsequent defeat. This is an awesome answer. I realize the question was an obnoxiously simple one. That being said, is there a good primer on the various kinds of soldiers who fought the Crusades? This book I just finished was a good political/strategic primer but there was very little on the dudes who actually did the fighting (I realize this is another really broad question). Bonus points if it is on the internet and provides some sort of useful comparison in capability between the various populations.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 14:25 |
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Grenrow posted:But I am talking about interpretation, not fabrication. Interpreting "soldiers doing a war cry to get hyped up and scare the enemy as they move forward" as some kind of distinctive Southern tradition is taking a common military thing and turning it into something so unique people are speculating about whether they got it from the Jacobites. Most of these sources I'm looking at about it are from people decades after the fact. It seems like any times Southern soldiers ever shouted, cheered, or whooped, it gets elevated and described as "The Rebel Yell," which is supposedly a singular tradition that was known and performed all across the disparate regions that made up the Confederacy. Again, I'm not trying to argue that there were no Southern war cries or that you can't find civil war accounts of Union troops saying "we were scared when the enemy was yelling at us." But these sources alleging that it's this completely unique thing are all looking like poo poo written or recorded decades after the fact. That video you posted is from the 1930s. Those guys are at least in their seventies by the time this video was made. There was definitely a distinct battle cry that the CSA soldiers did, that was recognized by both sides as a unique thing to the CSA armies, and it almost certainly sounded similar even between armies operating in very different parts of the country. It certainly isn't deserving of any sort of mystical status but it is a kind of neat thing that adds some humanity to our study of the joes on the ground then.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 14:33 |
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Wait, if the crusades happened in the day of levying peasants for 40 days or whatever before the gently caress off back to work, how did the crusaders have enough professional soldiers for expeditions?
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 14:46 |
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Peasant levies and professional soldiers are two different things. If I remember correctly, crusader armies were typically knights and their professional retinues. Due to a lack of food, water, and other supplies, they tended to lose a lot of horses anyway, so their infantry was mostly dismounted knights/other soldiers.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 14:57 |
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Here's the thing though. Peasant levies or peasant conscripts never really made up a significant portion of medieval armies (there are exceptions such as the Anglo-Saxon fyrd or the later armed yeomanry of England). "Levies" will usually refer to the nobles, the knights and their retainers who under the various variations of the feudal system (whether there was a definitive "feudal system" at all is also debatable) who were obliged to fight and provide soldiers for a set number of days yearly as commanded. If a campaign lasted longer then usually something like mercenary contracts would be offered for the continued service of these feudal levies. Mercenaries throughout the middle ages made up an ever more increasing portion of armies, especially royal armies once the kings became more powerful and they became more adept at things such as taxation (mercenaries in general were thought to be more reliable than the feudal levies of your vassals, many later knights and sergeants, "men-at-arms", were mercenaries). As for the Crusades. At least the First Crusade was just the collection of a bunch of retinues of various nobles from northern, eastern and southern France (including parts that were then part of the HRE), nothing like a royal army with a centralized command, though a set of leaders did emerge somewhat naturally under way. As for the financial details of how they were paid, it simply has to be understood that going on crusade was a ruinously expensive affair and very few of those involved ended up gaining much materially from the whole endeavor. You should not here look away from the importance of faith in keeping these armies together. Also remember that the payment offered for many soldiers in history wasn't necessarily always a regular salary but often could be the opportunity to loot cities, castles, battlefields and capture prisoners for sale as slaves (admittedly this part was not that important in Medieval Europe, but was important in for an example the Islamic world) or ransom.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 15:35 |
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JcDent posted:Wait, if the crusades happened in the day of levying peasants for 40 days or whatever before the gently caress off back to work, how did the crusaders have enough professional soldiers for expeditions? Manorial systems had household troops once you got above a certain size. If you went Crusading, as a low-level property owning noble, you usually brought some quantity of your household troops. Maybe it's just a squire or two and a key retainer, if you have a small holding. If you have a large holding with lots of troops, you probably brought some percentage of your household troops (those that wanted to go, limited so that your lieutenant can still hold your property or so that you can provide your obligations to your liege in the event that a real war breaks out). There's a reasonable argument that part of the whole thing (or at least a nice side benefit) was to get rid of a bunch of landless professionals who were second/third/eighth sons with no chance to inherit and desires above their station as retainers.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 15:41 |
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JcDent posted:Wait, if the crusades happened in the day of levying peasants for 40 days or whatever before the gently caress off back to work, how did the crusaders have enough professional soldiers for expeditions? The 40 day thing was specifically the Albigensian Crusade I think.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 15:45 |
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Crossposting:JaucheCharly posted:
It's my paraphrase of a museum piece. A bit scaled down, as I'm not carrying +50 arrows for target shooting. In the original, the main bag would have been filled with broadheads. The front bags were used for specialized arrows like bodkin points. Ottoman and Mughal bodkin heads were usualy not barbed, but filed flat at the corners, so that they could be drawn out of these front pockets without damaging the quivers.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 16:11 |
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That's gorgeous.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 16:19 |
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Looks awesome. How did the Ottomans typically use archers in combat and how did that interact with firearms use? I know they were fairly early adopters of gunpowder stuff.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 16:20 |
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Jesus that quiver owns
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 17:02 |
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Light and heavy cavalry carried bows. One book quoted that it was the Sipahi who resisted the use of firearms the longest for reasons of traditionalism and "it would get their fancy clothes dirty" (lol?) Early modern turkish armies usually used a Laager in the center of their setup. This is where you find their foot archers. The german sources call this place a "Sultansschanze", which evokes pictures of earthworks, but it's actually a collection of carts bound together with chains and ditches with stakes, artillery pieces enfilading. Interestingly archery seem to have been the staple of the ottoman navy for quite a long time. Officially, the emphasis on archers was dropped after the battle of Lepanto in favor of firearms, but you still see large quantities of archers by the end of the 17th century. Ottoman armies of this era were huge and very fast moving. Look at the 2nd siege of Vienna, when they started off and when they reached Vienna. Compare that with the speed of Hegel's armies. The downside was, that they're mostly made up of ragtag dudes. Ottoman commanders said that their men have "sharp eyes and swift feet" - that was a completely ironic statement. They were too well aware that they'd loot everything that wasn't nailed down and run at the first sight of a proper enemy. I think it was Wallenstein who set out with 30.000 men to counter an advance of an ottoman provincial bigwig with 200.000 men under his command. This force was enough to give the ottoman second thoughts and he turned around and went home without giving battle.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 17:23 |
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:There's a reasonable argument that part of the whole thing (or at least a nice side benefit) was to get rid of a bunch of landless professionals who were second/third/eighth sons with no chance to inherit and desires above their station as retainers. I would say that sounds like one of those just so stories that explains something after the fact, but this problem stayed around for a long time. The Hussites were able to, for example, get a lot of professional soldiers from the landless nobility(Jan Zizka was one of them). I would go so far as to say, for much of the medieval period, landless nobles provided the bulk of the manpower.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 17:36 |
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JaucheCharly posted:Crossposting: Extremely bad rear end.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 17:47 |
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Thank you all.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 17:55 |
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:There's a reasonable argument that part of the whole thing (or at least a nice side benefit) was to get rid of a bunch of landless professionals who were second/third/eighth sons with no chance to inherit and desires above their station as retainers. The Marxist position that it was landless sons looking to strike it rich is pretty definitively dead, imo. And that is a pretty awesome quiver, nice job!
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 18:22 |
http://deremilitari.org/2013/06/the-byzantine-background-to-the-first-crusade/ This is an alternative first crusade take.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 18:24 |
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JaucheCharly posted:Ottoman armies of this era were huge and very fast moving. Look at the 2nd siege of Vienna, when they started off and when they reached Vienna. Compare that with the speed of Hegel's armies. The downside was, that they're mostly made up of ragtag dudes. quote:I think it was Wallenstein who set out with 30.000 men to counter an advance of an ottoman provincial bigwig with 200.000 men under his command. This force was enough to give the ottoman second thoughts and he turned around and went home without giving battle. very cool quiver btw
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 18:49 |
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Friar John posted:This is definitely not the case, cf. Jonathan Riley-Smith's work on the First Crusaders. The folks he found were doing the crusading were not the landless, because they couldn't afford to make the trip. It was the heads and heirs of large, wealthy families, who sold their lands and various rights off to get the cash necessary to actually transport themselves and their followers to the Holy Land. And not only that, but it was generally the same families who kept sending soldiers East, generation after generation. thanks for the information! it did seem a bit too tidy, post facto.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 18:52 |
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HEY GAIL posted:was that one of his first battles? Yeah, sometime between 04-06 when he fought for Hungary.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:00 |
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What's with this weird trend to dismiss religion or ideological commitment to an idea as a motivating factor?
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:00 |
OwlFancier posted:What's with this weird trend to dismiss religion or ideological commitment to an idea as a motivating factor? Very short version: Marxism gave everyone in every social sciences materialism and they decided to turn that in to a hard orthodoxy that nobody does anything for ideological reasons.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:03 |
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OwlFancier posted:What's with this weird trend to dismiss religion or ideological commitment to an idea as a motivating factor? It seems like in my very limited scholarship that this trend has been pretty emphatically reversed which is probably a good thing.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:34 |
Depends on the field but it's definitely declined in history since the 80's.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:36 |
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WW2 Data Part 2 of the US High Explosives Inventory is up. Which explosives are planned for use in the future?! Which one is planned for use in larger General Purpose bombs for its "maximum blast effect"? What is the main disadvantage to Mercury Fulminate? All that and more at the blog!
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:50 |
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Squalid posted:That quote's implication that HIghland culture was more 'individualistic" than English is making me inordinately mad. Prior to 1715 and even for some time after the fifteen much of the land in the highlands was governed by the custom of duthchas, in which Clans owned territory collectively. Many feuds are also attributable to to the inherent collective tendencies of extended kinship systems. If someone in your clan murders a neighbor, in a legal sense you are equally responsible, even if you had nothing to do with it. Similarly any affront to your Clan is an affront on yourself, and you are expected to behave as such. It's also a bit rich to talk about Celtic pastoralists and English arable farmers, when those highlanders who ended up in the US would mostly have been tenant farmers who had been evicted by English landlords to make way for sheep.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:54 |
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Disinterested posted:Very short version: I feel like there's something funny about an ideological commitment to materialistic historiography but I'm not sure how to articulate it.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 19:56 |
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This is made worse by modern cynicism about religion and, to a much lesser extent, politics as something worth fighting and dying for.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 20:59 |
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I suppose I just can't imagine how you can look at history even as close as like, the cold war, without considering ideology to be a factor. I mean it still goes on today but the latter half of the 20th century is not exactly a million years ago.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 21:02 |
OwlFancier posted:I suppose I just can't imagine how you can look at history even as close as like, the cold war, without considering ideology to be a factor. I mean it still goes on today but the latter half of the 20th century is not exactly a million years ago. It's super easy to not think about the cold war overly ideologically actually since it's two competing economic systems.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 22:08 |
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OwlFancier posted:I suppose I just can't imagine how you can look at history even as close as like, the cold war, without considering ideology to be a factor. I mean it still goes on today but the latter half of the 20th century is not exactly a million years ago. I think it's connected to the modern trend of many people refusing to admit modern terror organisations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda are driven by religion. One of my American friends, who I would consider to the Democrat equivalent of the Tea Party, claims it came from the American Religious Right refusing to admit to being similar to the Islamists. I think this stems from Nietzsche being right on "God is Dead and we have killed him." Religion gave way to idealogy in the 20th century, in the West and we haven't swung back the other way yet.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 22:15 |
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Disinterested posted:Very short version: Thank god some one dug up Gramsci and now there's a way to talk about that in a Marxist framework. A sort of Cultural Marxism if you will. It's a global phenomenon. I think it's pretty great that the genius for that was Gramsci sitting in a jail cell going "... so what did we miss?"
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 22:21 |
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You can't not analyze each and every part of the human experience through the lens of marxist materialism and class struggle. There is no way this will give you a flawed and simplistic view of human history and society.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 22:33 |
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Disinterested posted:It's super easy to not think about the cold war overly ideologically actually since it's two competing economic systems. Both heavily driven by ideology, however?
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 22:36 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 23:20 |
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Hazzard posted:I think this stems from Nietzsche being right on "God is Dead and we have killed him." Religion gave way to idealogy in the 20th century, in the West and we haven't swung back the other way yet. I'm not sure this holds up in the specific case of Cold War America tbh.
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# ? Aug 21, 2017 22:51 |