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Concerning the post-Westphalia period, it really depends on where you're looking in Europe when you want to determine how (un)popular soldiers were. Generally speaking, there's a big divide between Protestants and Catholics during that time in that regard (as in pretty much everything else). Protestant powers like Prussia or Hesse-Kassel started building up large and powerful standing armies accompanied by a ton of pro-military propaganda, which eventually led to the thorough militarisation of society we can see in Prussia and then the 1871 Empire, where soldiers are heroes and officers are pretty much gods. Not so Catholics: with the exception of France and Savoy-Piemont, the only Catholic territory to give at least half a poo poo about its armed forces was Austria, and they were embroiled in near constant war with either the Ottomans, the French, the Prussians or somebody else. Even then Austria held about 1-2% of its population in the military and used about half of its budget for military expenditures, which is poisitively paltry when compared to Prussia (3-4% of its population, 2/3 to 3/4 of the budget). Mostly the military was used in Catholic states as another possibility for noble young men to get a somewhat honourable job where they didn't have all that much to do. The tiny prince-bishopric of Mainz had six generals, for example! Still a miltiary career was much less appealing than a career in civil services or the Church; of those graduating Italian knight academies, only 12% would go on to become officers, compared to about double that for the Church and almost five times that for civil services. Conscription was massively unpopular, and there's tons of stories of people who desperately tried to avoid it. Catholic countries tended to be much more agrarian in their structure than Protestant ones, and no farmer likes to see his sons go away to some useless military service when he would instead have been dearly needed as a farmhand. Sometimes conscription was also used as punishment or means to get rid of a problem; a famous examle of this would be Matthias Klostermayr of Bavaria, who lost his job on a Jesuit-run farm for making fun of one of the fathers and afterwards had to resort to poaching to get by. Everybody knew what he was doing, but couldn't prove it, and Klostermayr was really lucky in the conscription draws and got off like five times in a row, so the officials finally lost patience and orderer him to be pressed into the armed forces nonetheless. Klostermayr knew the jig was up, went along with the soldiers sent to get him, got them friendly and drunk and then, when noone paid attention anymore, suddenly jumped up, ran all the way several miles to the river Lech and swam through, thereby reaching the "foreign" territory of the prince-bishop of Augsburg where Bavarian jurisprudence didn't apply  The dwindling of Catholic military power is interesting, because back in the 15th and 16th century it was often the other way round, with especially the Spanish being feared across Europe.Due to all that, the military wasn't all that highly regarded by most Catholics. Officers were seen as a mostly useless bunch of nobles who sat on their asses all day, whereas the general perception regarding the common soldier was that only those too dumb to get away would end up in the forces, which didn't exactly heighten the military's appeal. In Mainz (most clerical states didn't have conscription) military service was so unpopular that some of the archbishop's finest were actually cripples. An additional aspect was that Catholic countries used much more of their resources for architecture, music, ecclesiastical services, public games... than Protestant ones. Pope Innocence X famously quipped "We don't want soldiers, we want Rome to be joyful" and went on to build a ton of new buildings. This only started to change when the politics made military reforms necessary (Austria for example started to rebuild its military after losing repeatedly to Prussia) and when secularisation removed many of the former career venues in the Church for young nobles, who for better of for worse had to look elsewhere instead. This connection had already been discusses by Catholic intellectuals long before, with Abbot Roman Zirngibl for example prophesying that secularisation would lead to militarisation. He turned out to be absolutely right, and that many former monasteries were later converted into barracks can be seen as foreshadowing the coming societal changes in a nutshell. NB: this Catholic-Protestant divide isn't 100% universal, of course. There were e.g. some Protestant states like Sweden, Saxony or Württemberg decreasing the size of their armed forces in the later 18th century (mostly because of a comparatively long period of peace and because it was just too dang expensive) and the Catholic cantons of Switzerland were traditionally seen as having more military prowess than their Protestant neighbours (most of the famous Swiss mercenaries came from the Catholic parts iirc). They didn't have a standing military, though.
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Jun 23, 2016 10:38
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Amazing. Your guys are lucky they weren't fighting along the Med where literal pirates could spice things up further. You forgot the slavers. Ever heard stories about the number of people that they abducted, as far as Denmark?
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Jun 23, 2016 10:39
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Amazing. Your guys are lucky they weren't fighting along the Med where literal pirates could spice things up further. Piracy wasn't a problem until the Romans came and hosed everything up :cryingCarthage:
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Jun 23, 2016 10:40
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JaucheCharly posted:You forgot the slavers. Ever heard stories about the number of people that they abducted, as far as Denmark? As far as Iceland iirc.
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Jun 23, 2016 10:42
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Just started reading Furies by Lauro Martines, which I think I saw recommended somewhere in this thread. Jesus loving Christ am I glad I wasn't living basically anywhere in mainland Europe between the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Jun 23, 2016 11:27
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Owlkill posted:Just started reading Furies by Lauro Martines, which I think I saw recommended somewhere in this thread. Jesus loving Christ am I glad I wasn't living basically anywhere in mainland Europe between the 16th and 17th centuries. yeah 
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Jun 23, 2016 11:32
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Kopijeger posted:Seems so, wiki has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_War. Eh, it was remarked upon but frankly if you say anything about WW2 someone in the German media will comment on it. The "controversy" was nothing compared to what went down in the 90s with the Wehrmachtausstellung, and that was nothing compared to the 70s shitstorm over that miniseries. Some of the far right made some bleating noises but honestly if they are annoyed at how you talk about the Wehrmacht you're probably doing something right.
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Jun 23, 2016 13:31
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Trin Tragula posted:As I always say when the subject of the ordinary German WWII soldier comes up; if you are interested in this sort of thing you must buy Soldaten, by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. It's an utterly compelling collection of extract from transcripts of ordinary conversations in British and American POW camps between various German prisoners from army, navy and air force; their rooms were all bugged in case they let slip something of military importance as they talked among themselves. The best example of the sort of thing you find in there is that there's a section all about how there are devoted Nazis who say "you know, the Fuhrer's done a great deal for Germany, but I'm really not sure about our Jewish policy...", and there's strident Nazi Party opponents who say "of course, the one thing the Nazis have got absolutely correct is our Jewish policy..." There is a book - which I cannot recommend enough - titled Conversations with an Executioner. It is an account from a Polish Home Army officer who found himself jailed by the Communists after the war and eventually put on death row (and pardoned in 1956). In 1949, he was put into a cell with Jurgen Stroop, the man who destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto and quelled the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But there is also a third man in the cell: Gustav Schielke, a former low-ranking Sicherheitsdienst officer who never was a big believer in Nazism and grew even more disillusioned with time (or at least so he claimed). There is a very powerful contrast between Stroop, who still believes in his old ideals to some extent, and Schielke, who acts as a cynical voice of reason, even if he does not seem all that troubled by his own wartime crimes.
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Jun 23, 2016 13:54
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MikeCrotch posted:Piracy wasn't a problem until the Romans came and hosed everything up :cryingCarthage: Yeah but Pompey then re-solved that problem.
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Jun 23, 2016 14:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, it was remarked upon but frankly if you say anything about WW2 someone in the German media will comment on it. The "controversy" was nothing compared to what went down in the 90s with the Wehrmachtausstellung, and that was nothing compared to the 70s shitstorm over that miniseries. From my limited knowledge it seemed like most of the controversy was that it let the Germans off to lightly? I remember the Poles were pissed that it emphasized Polish anti-Semitism (which to be fair was A Big Deal)
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Jun 23, 2016 15:13
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Any amusing stories of "whoops, turns out one foraging party on our side shot another foraging party on our side and now there is a lot of paperwork"?  you can feel the  from here to vienna
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Jun 23, 2016 16:08
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As I type this, I'm watching the end of this week's Game of Thrones and feel like effort posting, so here we go. First of all, the pike and shield formation. I reckon that if the shieldsmen, (Or as they were known historically, pavisiers, after their pavise shields) should be carrying spears as well. Because that's what the Germans and Italians who loved their gigantic shields did. Having alternating pikes and shields in the ranks could maybe work, perhaps if you went with a few ranks of spearmen, then pikes. But it would be more trouble than it's worth and why not just have more pikes? I forget how many pikes Hey Gal's guys could have down and poking the enemy, but I think the golden number in the ancient world was five. Pikes are kindof out of place. They'd disappeared from most of Europe after the fall of Rome. Populations weren't big enough to make it worth it and the fighting men that did exist didn't use pikes. The sorts of professional soldiery, knights and men-at-arms would not be in the position to learn pikes. To use pikes you need fairly well drilled men in large numbers together, so they can learn it properly. I'd say the difficult re-enactors have today getting it right is testament to that. I recall reading of one of the early Battles in Alexander the Great's life, possibly while Philip II still rules, where part of the advantage the Macedonian Army had over the Greek Leagues, was how every taxies (Ancient Equivalent of a Regiment) could form up an effective phalanx with every other taxeis, while you could actually spot where one City-State's hoplites ended and the next began, because they hadn't been drilled together properly. I forget who claimed this, but it sounds possible to me. I've read online of some Italian city states using pikes to fight off the Holy Roman Empire, in the old style of the Macedonian pikes, before the Renaissance, but I have no idea how true that is. I don't think maintaining pikemen is feasible unless citizen or professional soldiery exists, like the Swiss popularised, simply due to the way you'd train them. On when everyone is getting Hillsboroughed, that did happen historically, at least once. It happened at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal vs Rome. I don't want to get too into covering this, maybe another time, but the master stroke of the battle was Hannibal surrounding the Romans who outnumbered him and then slowly squeezing them until they died. There's an account, I think from Livy of a Roman soldier actually biting another soldier to death, because he'd lost all his limbs and was being held up by the crush of bodies. I'd be shocked if it didn't happen in other battles as well. As much as I love the mountain of corpses, I don't think that's really possible. I do support more mountains in the future of Game of Thrones and other series showing medieval battles.
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Jun 23, 2016 16:10
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It's a testament to how different Greek culture was to ours, in some ways, that a well-drilled phalanx moving in formation is often described as the epitome of beauty in Greek poetry.
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Jun 23, 2016 16:12
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Disinterested posted:It's a testament to how different Greek culture was to ours, in some ways, that a well-drilled phalanx moving in formation is often described as the epitome of beauty in Greek poetry. edit: my guys don't, probably because they rarely see one from the outside and from the inside all you're looking at is the back of the head of the guy in front of you HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Jun 23, 2016 |
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Jun 23, 2016 16:14
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quote:Some an army of horsemen, some an army on foot
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Jun 23, 2016 16:20
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I know we have some poetry, but do we have much else from the Greeks that isn't war or statecraft?
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Jun 23, 2016 16:49
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Hazzard posted:I know we have some poetry, but do we have much else from the Greeks that isn't war or statecraft?
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Jun 23, 2016 16:50
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Hazzard posted:I know we have some poetry, but do we have much else from the Greeks that isn't war or statecraft? The founding body of European philosophy and science?
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Jun 23, 2016 17:02
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Disinterested posted:The founding body of European philosophy and science? Also some nifty art (albeit a lot of it in Roman copies). And, y'know, the alphabet. And literacy. And a big chunk of our literature (again, some of it via the Romans).
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Jun 23, 2016 17:04
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but aside from art, literature, statecraft, the alphabet, and philosophy, what have the Greeks ever done for us?
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Jun 23, 2016 17:11
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Feta cheese.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:16
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Disinterested posted:The founding body of European philosophy and science? I was just thinking about reading The Republic this afternoon. I can't believe I forgot all of that.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:35
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Butt stuff.
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Jun 23, 2016 17:37
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^^ fair pointTiler Kiwi posted:but aside from art, literature, statecraft, the alphabet, and philosophy, what have the Greeks ever done for us? Math, geometry especially (Might be counted under philosophy)
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Jun 23, 2016 17:38
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HEY GAL posted:peasants don't have pikes, you hide in the woods and ambush a soldier or two. if you're well armed and there's a lot of you, try for an entire convoy. This is why everyone travels in convoys--that and there's no such thing as "front lines" so Wallenstein and G2A are blobbing around within rock-throwing distance of one another a lot of the time
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Jun 23, 2016 18:23
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Axe handle to the balls, a fate not as bad as death but still petty awful.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:26
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Also, on archery in Battle of the Bastards. They said "loose" instead of "fire" for the archers, which is right.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:33
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Tiler Kiwi posted:but aside from art, literature, statecraft, the alphabet, and philosophy, what have the Greeks ever done for us? Semi-serious question: what is the most recent notable contribution to civilisation made by a Greek? The works of Domênikos "El Greco" Theotokópoulos is the most recent example I can think of off the top of my head.
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Jun 23, 2016 18:52
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Kopijeger posted:Semi-serious question: what is the most recent notable contribution to civilisation made by a Greek? The works of Domênikos "El Greco" Theotokópoulos is the most recent example I can think of off the top of my head. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_P._Cavafy
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Jun 23, 2016 18:54
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You phrased that question in a... really weird way. Anyway, I do enjoy the music themes of Conan the Barbarian, Robocop, and Starship Troopers. 
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Jun 23, 2016 18:54
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HEY GAL posted:this dude's p cool Yeah, I've heard of him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzFRXoovEbc I guess what constitutes a "notable contribution" is hard to define. I'm thinking of intellectual or artistic accomplishments that a reasonably well-informed person living outside of Greece is likely to have heard of. Like a scientist that is frequently mentioned in popular histories or an artist well-known in several countries. That sort of thing.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:01
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does cyprus count as "greek" or "italian" also the Last Temptation of Christ guy and the pap smear guy
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Jun 23, 2016 19:03
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HEY GAL posted:does cyprus count as "greek" or "italian" Does Venetian count as "italian"? I suppose you'd have to go with whatever ethnicity the person(s) involved considered themselves to be and possibly what mother tongue they had.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:06
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Tiler Kiwi posted:but aside from art, literature, statecraft, the alphabet, and philosophy, what have the Greeks ever done for us?  Thanks for the responses, everybody! Also, the 30yw sounded absolutely bananas and it's unbelievable that I learned basically nothing about it in school (until you remember that I'm American and then it's completely believable)
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Jun 23, 2016 19:16
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They won the Euro cup in 2004.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:23
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For some values of "contribution". Also I already checked, and Zamfir : Master of the Pan Flute is sadly Romanian.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:39
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Ainsley McTree posted:Also, the 30yw sounded absolutely bananas and it's unbelievable that I learned basically nothing about it in school (until you remember that I'm American and then it's completely believable) For sure, same in the UK. I'd only vaguely heard of it because of playing Cossacks: European Wars. Over here you'd think the Civil War was basically the only thing of note that happened in the 17th century based on our education system, it's pretty weird hearing that it was very much a minor sideshow to this massive awful conflict that was ravaging most of the rest of the continent.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:47
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Owlkill posted:For sure, same in the UK. I'd only vaguely heard of it because of playing Cossacks: European Wars. Over here you'd think the Civil War was basically the only thing of note that happened in the 17th century based on our education system, it's pretty weird hearing that it was very much a minor sideshow to this massive awful conflict that was ravaging most of the rest of the continent. i can't count the times i've heard one of them writing about some development in military science that everyone knows about as though it were something that became brand new when the first Englishman figured it out
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Jun 23, 2016 19:49
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feedmegin posted:Also some nifty art (albeit a lot of it in Roman copies). And, y'know, the alphabet. And literacy. And a big chunk of our literature (again, some of it via the Romans). The Alphabet is phoenician!
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Jun 23, 2016 19:51
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:The Alphabet is phoenician! Maybe yours is? But I use the Latin alphabet. True Roman characters for True Romans.
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Jun 23, 2016 19:58
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