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I had a practical question about armor. Did soldiers and knights wear it throughout the day while they were on campaign, or did they carry it as baggage and put it on before the fight? If they were in a situation where their enemy was known to be in the vicinity, would they sleep in their armor if they suspected a surprise attack at dawn or something like that?
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Jan 26, 2013 20:27
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puredeez posted:Could someone tell me about plague doctors and their cool costumes? The Black Death being Penthesilea's stated specialization, he can probably give you a more detailed answer. But as a general explanation, until modern times people didn't know how disease was transmitted. By means of observation they knew that you could catch some diseases just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and often great numbers of people would fall ill of the same disease at the same time, but they didn't know of any mechanism to explain it. The state of the art in epidemiology for most of history was something called "miasma theory." People observed that epidemics of disease often took place around foul-smelling things, like rotting organic material (e.g. dead bodies), feces, swamps and stagnant pools, etc. Today we know that this is because the bad odors are caused by microorganisms, some of which can cause diseases, and they also attract animal vectors like insects, rats, and so forth, that can carry the disease to people. As they had no knowledge of microorganisms, they could only guess that bad odors signified the possible presence of poisonous vapors that caused illness if they were inhaled or absorbed through the skin. The distinctive costume associated with plague doctors was designed to keep away contaminated air, with gloves, a full-body cloak, and a bird-like mask. The beak would be stuffed with herbs, to ward off odors. However, I believe that costume first appeared during the 17th century, which means it is not actually a medieval thing so much as a renaissance/early modern deal.
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Jan 29, 2013 04:54
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^^^^ beaten by Railtus as I was typing this, but the post still has some useful quotes, so here: bewbies posted:In any case, I don't find the argument that the pope realized that these people were going to be a problem and then decided to use the Crusades as a way to distract them and thin their numbers to be very compelling. That would be some pretty serious long term social engineering for a medieval pope. It wasn't so much that the pope realized that they were going to become a problem as they already were a problem. The Empire set up by Charlemagne and maintained (albeit in pieces) by his various successors had provided a overarching political structure that limited violence in Western Europe, but by the end of the ninth century it had basically fallen apart. Fighting between local lords and knights over limited real estate and personal feuds became a significant social problem during the 10th century, particularly because commoners and Church property were getting caught up in the fighting. Eventually the Catholic Church promulgated guidelines for how the nobility should behave and what kinds of activities were permissible in warfare. The most famous example of this was the Truce of God, which started in the early 11th century as a ban on fighting on Sundays, which meant from dusk Saturday to dawn on Monday. This was gradually expanded to the point that war was only sanctioned on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. This is also the period when the concepts that were later known as "chivalry" started to coalesce. So we know that for about a century prior to the Crusades, the Catholic Church was trying to figure out how to put a damper on warfare between Christians, but they were only having limited success as the fighting continued. There are some indications in contemporary sources that Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in large part because he believed it would focus aggression outwards for the useful purpose of the reclaiming the Holy Land, and relieve social pressures caused by the surplus of fighting men in society. Here's the Catholic Encyclopedia again, with what is supposed to be a quote from his speech at Clermont, that triggered the Deus lo volt freakout: quote:Let them turn their weapons dripping with the blood of their brothers against the enemy of the Christian Faith. Let them--oppressors of orphans and widows, murderers and violaters of churches, robbers of the property of others, vultures drawn by the scent of battle--let them hasten, if they love their souls, under their captain Christ to the rescue of Sion. Here's a website with several versions of his speech. They vary because they were laid down by different chroniclers, sometimes quite a while after the council took place, but there are common elements. If you look, you'll notice that most of the have Urban II deploring the fighting between Christians right before he urges a military expedition to the holy land, implying that he saw the latter as a solution to the former. This is from the version of Robert the Monk: quote:Let none of your possessions detain you, no solicitude for your family affairs, since this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. Now, given that the versions differ from one another we can't know for sure exactly what Urban II actually said, but at the same time, Robert the Monk was a contemporary of his, who was alive at the time and participated in the Council of Clermont. He wrote his recollection of the speech 25 years later. So, even if Urban II didn't literally say the above, we know that at minimum it's an expression of ideas that were on this guy Robert's mind at that time, so the idea of getting rid of surplus fighting men by sending them to colonize the Holy Land wasn't unknown at the time, and isn't just an invention of later historians.
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Jan 30, 2013 05:32
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Railtus posted:Where the idea seems to come from was an assumption by Steven Runciman, who tends to overlook possible bias in Byzantine-Roman sources, and Anna Comnene did not like the Crusaders – generally she portrayed them as villains and the Byzantine Emperor as saintly in his generosity. Considering that the arrangement Alexios had in mind was that the Crusaders do all the fighting and dying for him and he would receive all the land they died for, I am not inclined to trust Anna Comnene’s interpretation. I feel like I remember reading--sad to say I can't remember where--that Alexios had intended Urban II to send a modest army of professional soldiers who would retake Asia Minor for him. The territory they conquered would return to him, but in order to compensate them and encourage them to remain as a buffer against the Seljuqs, he would give them title via imperial land grants (pronoia) to the land along the border.
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Jan 30, 2013 05:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:Were there any formalized systems for unarmed combat during the medieval era, and if so, what were they like? There are groups like the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts (ARMA) that study surviving medieval and renaissance manuscripts to figure out how people actually fought in those days. Here's their website, which has some nice articles. The earliest such document dates from about 1300 CE but the techniques depicted are almost certainly older, and we just don't have earlier documents because (A) the manuscripts didn't survive or (B) people just passed the techniques on through practical training and didn't think to publish them until the 14th-15th century. I think there was a post about literacy somewhere earlier in this thread, where someone said that literacy was mostly isolated to clergy and professional scribes, and most noblemen didn't bother learning to read until the 12th century, which would have made manuals of arms useless to the people who actually did the fighting. Anyway, the techniques documented for unarmed fighting are mostly focused on wrestling and grappling, rather than striking. This is probably due to practical considerations about the nature of combat at the time. Everyone down to peasants carried at minimum a knife or dagger of some kind as a tool, eating utensil, and for purposes of self-defense, so even in a "street fight" scenario you would most likely be faced with an armed opponent. Trying to box with a guy who has a knife is pretty inadvisable, and it's imperative to grab onto them and take control of the weapon, or the arm holding it. In a wartime melee, if a knight found himself disarmed he would be facing opponents in full body armor carrying weapons of their own, meaning that kicks and punches would be almost totally useless and it would be even more important to get to grappling range where they couldn't bury an axe in his head. Ground-fighting seems to be notably absent, and again this is most likely due to practical concerns. Simply put, grappling on the ground immobilizes a fighter and ties up his hands, making him extremely vulnerable if there is another assailant, particularly since everybody had knives. The manuals indicate that they understood how to trap and break limbs with locks and holds, but most of the illustrations show these holds being applied on standing opponents. The purpose of grappling was instead to throw the opponent to the ground and land on top of him, or remain standing. There are some historical descriptions of grappling for sport (Henry VIII was a notable wrestler), and bouts are described as being decided when one man was able to throw the other to the ground, which may indicate that being thrown in a real fight also tended to end the combat quickly, probably by being stabbed in a vital area with a dagger. The modern martial art that bears the greatest resemblance to these systems is probably Judo, which is not a coincidence since Judo traces its lineage to unarmed combatives (jujutsu) used by samurai, who faced some of the same conditions (armed and armored opponents) as knights. The varieties of European "folk wrestling"--from which modern Greco-Roman, freestyle, collegiate, and other sport wrestling styles evolved--may be descended from medieval combatives, but that can't be known for certain as folk wrestling was practiced mostly by the lower classes and nobody bothered to record what they were up to until quite recently. Of these, Greco-Roman is probably the closest because of its emphasis on clinch grappling and throwing the opponent, rather than controlling position on the ground, but this is probably down to coincidence rather than direct descent (it also has nothing to do with classical Greek and Roman wrestling, the name was just adapted as advertising since people were very fond of the classics at the time the sport was invented in the mid-19th century).
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Feb 4, 2013 01:31
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Chamale posted:How vicious were medieval soldiers to their downed opponents? When they wanted to kill them they were as vicious as they needed to be to do that. If an enemy surrendered they usually didn't want to kill him. Medieval combatants generally preferred to take prisoners because holding them for ransom could be very profitable. A downed man would usually only be executed as above if he seemed too badly wounded to survive, or in cases where it was unlikely that he could be safely held prisoner. The English longbowmen killed most of the downed knights they found after Crecy, because they couldn't spare the men to guard all of the prisoners. Men who seemed unlikely to have money for ransom, like mercenaries, might also be denied quarter because there was little use in keeping them alive, but they could also be granted parole on the condition that they removed themselves from the fight for the duration of future hostilities. quote:When someone in good plate armour got knocked to the ground, how did his enemy go about actually killing him? The go-to method for killing a downed man in full armor was to lift his arm and slip a dagger through his armpit into his chest, which would pierce the axillary artery and cause him to quickly bleed out internally. The need for mobility in the shoulder joint dictates that the armpit could not be fully armored, which made it a weak point. There would still be mail, but not plate, and there also has to be a seam where the sleeve joins the torso which makes it easier to get through. Other major blood vessels like the carotid and femoral artery were much better protected by gorgets and armor skirts (respectively), so the armpit was the best bet. Alternatively the dagger could be thrust through the visor and into the face, to kill instantly by piercing the brain. There were a few different varieties of thrusting knives with very narrow, acutely pointed blades, which were specially designed to pierce mail and kill armored men by these methods.
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Feb 4, 2013 09:08
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Buried alive posted:I've heard of a medieval thing called the Murder Stroke. I'd always assumed it was the dagger to the face/armpit mentioned above, but a quick google shows it's some kind of half-swording technique I guess? Can you elaborate on what it is? I'm curious mainly because murder stroke just sounds If you're asking me, I don't actually know anything about this stuff beyond what you can pick up reading general works of medieval history and online articles. I'm interested in it but not that knowledgeable. Maybe somebody else actually knows a lot about renaissance fencing and can go into some detail, but I'd just be looking at the same google results you are. It looks like a bunch of people think the technique is mostly found in manuscripts that are basically advertisements for fencing instructors, like "come train with me and I'll show you how to do the murder stroke!" This would indicate it was unusual and eye-catching but there's no telling how much it was actually used in practice. Functionally it seems like a kind of trick, where you quickly transition from a half-sword grip to holding the blade with both hands and then strike with the crossguard or pommel as if using a hammer. This could be used to surprise your opponent and stun him, allowing you to follow up with something more effective. To explain half-swording, it's a way of controlling range. Swords (and other hand-to-hand weapons for that matter) have a certain range at which they are most effective; too far away and you simply can't reach your opponent, too close and you can't make contact correctly. It's like batting in baseball, where you get the best results if you hit the ball with the sweet spot of the bat at just the right instant during your swing. Generally speaking the longer the weapon, the further the sweet spot will be from your body, and if your opponent steps inside that range he prevents you from getting full extension and stifles your power. Half-swording moves the grip further up the weapon, effectively making it shorter and moving the sweet spot closer to your body, so you can strike more effectively at short distances. The murder stroke might be used if the opponent was trying to close range in this way; you would move your right hand to the blade just above the crossguard for a halfsword grip as he came inside your range, but then you would flip the weapon around and move your left hand from the hilt to a point on the blade nearer the tip, making it even shorter, which would allow you to land a forceful blow at much closer range than would otherwise be possible. It wouldn't be as effective as using the sword normally, but it might take a man by surprise and it seems like it would be pretty hard to defend against, again because of the very short distance. You could clock him on his helmet and force him back, then while he was recovering go back to half-sword or a normal grip and establish your range to deliver a full-power strike with the business end.
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Feb 4, 2013 19:39
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ookuwagata posted:How exactly did one go about fighting with a mace? It seems like a weapon very heavily skewed towards offense at the expense of defense, even if they were nowhere near as heavy as depicted in fiction. Generally speaking a weapon of whatever type meant to be wielded in one hand would usually weigh in the range of 1.2-1.8 kg (2 1/2 to 4 pounds, roughly). This is shown by surviving examples of weapons held in museum and private collections, and it goes for swords, axes, maces, and so forth. A mace derived its crushing power not from its sheer mass, which was not dissimilar from other weapons, but from the fact that it carried a lot of that weight towards one end, which gave it more angular momentum than a weapon balanced along its whole length. This momentum meant that it imparted much more force at the point of contact, but conversely it took more effort to get it moving and to stop it and recover to a guard position if the stroke missed. A person fighting with a mace would need to keep aware of this and be sure to choose his attacks carefully to avoid overextending himself. However, this would only really apply when attacking, because that's when he would go to full extension in the swing to build that momentum. When holding the mace in a guard position and parrying attacks, he wouldn't be building momentum, and the mace is similar in weight to a sword. It's possible that it would be a little more awkward because of its balance, but probably only to a small degree. There's also a popular image of the importance of parrying that doesn't necessarily mesh with actual practice. I think this probably comes from stage fighting, because clashing sword-on-sword and parrying reads well on stage and is exciting for the audience. This later spread from theater to film, and that's where most people get their idea of swordfighting. There is also sport fencing, in which parrying is very important, but that really bears little resemblance to historical methods of combat. Parrying with the weapon was one among several strategies for avoiding damage, and not necessarily the preferable one. A blow could be defended more efficiently by taking advantage of range, movement, armor, and possibly a shield. Shields were specifically designed to block attacks, so they were good for that purpose, but by the later part of the middle ages the use of highly effective plate armor had made them less necessary. It became standard for knights on foot to rely on movement and their armor for protection, while using larger two-handed weapons to generate the power necessary to injure and kill a man similarly armored. To go back to what I said above concerning range, if you were wearing armor and you saw your enemy preparing to make a cut, you could move backward or to the side and put yourself outside his range at the time it would have hit you, so that he missed. You could also move forward and put yourself inside the arc of his cut, so that he made contact with the wrong part of his weapon at the wrong part of his swing so the strike has little chance to harm you through your armor (similar to swinging a baseball bat at an inside pitch and making contact with the handle instead of the barrel). Or you could rely on your armor to protect you, changing your stance slightly to accept the blow on a well-protected area, like leaning to one side so a cut toward your helmet glanced off your pauldron instead. The advantage of these options over parrying is that they do not require the use of your weapon, so you can do them while simultaneously counter-attacking. Parrying is obviously still useful, because it stops the enemy hitting you, but--again--it's one among several options, and the situation would determine which was best. Like in that video about half-swording, that guy has no shield and isn't wearing any armor, so obviously he needs to rely very heavily on movement and parrying. If a mace really was less useful for defending against attacks than a sword (about which I honestly have no idea), then you would just have to rely on these other options more heavily.
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Feb 6, 2013 06:11
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Buried alive posted:I've sometimes heard that english/western European weapons were essentially big metal clubs in the area of 10-20 lbs. Are there any surviving historical examples of those that were intended for combat? Or is that more from the mistaken attitude that katana > all. It's completely false, and slightly insane. The links that Jorghnassen posted do a good job explaining it. It's also useful to think of what these weapons really are at the most basic level: simple machines, specifically levers and wedges. Swords, axes, maces, and so forth are third class levers, with the grip as the fulcrum, the hands supplying the effort, and the striking surface as the resistance. The cutting edge of a sword or axe, or the flange of a mace, is a wedge, which uses mechanical advantage to separate a target in pieces rather than just smashing it. The design of a weapon as a machine or tool has to balance different characteristics to be usable. For example, a longer lever arm has more mechanical advantage and will deliver a more powerful blow, as in a comparison between an axe (3' shaft) and a halberd (6' shaft), the latter of which can strike with much greater effect. However, beyond a certain length a lever just becomes impractical, which is why you don't see a 20' halberd. Of course if the weapon is too short, it won't have a very long lever arm to increase force, and it won't be able to reach an opponent. With respect to mass, more mass increases the kinetic energy of a strike and allows it to impart more momentum. As I explained above in discussing the mace, this can also be achieved without increasing overall mass by putting more weight at the striking end to increase angular momentum. But momentum cuts both ways, in that it has to be generated before it can be delivered, making a heavy weapon more difficult to swing, and more difficult to stop if a strike misses. This is all kind of obvious stuff when you think about it but it explains why these weapons have the proportions they do, especially when you consider that these are tools designed to injure and kill human beings. It's just a matter of balance between being lethal enough to do that, while light enough to use easily without tiring. Most of these one-handed weapons massed 2-3.5 lbs. and were 33"-40" inches long, which indicates that's roughly where things balanced out. Later on towards the renaissance armor was more protective and the force necessary to stop an opponent increased, so two-handed weapons like the greatsword and pollaxe became the standard. These were larger and heavier but not dramatically so. Nektu posted:It's even more complicated - check out the videos of HEMA groups I posted above. Countering the counter is actually the problem with the videos you posted; all of the clashes shown last about a second and are basically kata based on the illustrations and instructions from fechtbücher. We can't actually be sure if those are entirely practical fighting techniques or ads for sword schools. I glanced at some other HEMA videos on youtube that were fights instead of staged parry-ripostes, and most of them look very different.
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Feb 6, 2013 20:55
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canuckanese posted:Somewhat tangently related, but aren't fechtbucher fairly uncommon? I was under the impression that most were commissioned by a lord and were quite expensive, since they were generally put together by a master who had both the time and expertise to create such a thing. Since it's for an audience of one (the lord commissioning it, maybe his sons eventually) and generally focused on reinforcing skills the commissioner already had, I don't see why they would illustrate techinques that were impractical. The rarity and expense of the manuscripts is the exact reason that we can suspect that the techniques were not commonly used, because it would be a waste to devote that money and effort to depicting techniques that were common knowledge at the time. It's the same reason that when studying medieval cuisine, we have lots of recipes for delicacies but none for staple foods. When books are rare and expensive, you don't record recipes for foods that people eat all the time, because everybody already knows how to make them. You write down the recipes for foods that most people don't know, and are out of the ordinary. People remember and record extraordinary things, not mundane ones. Similarly, a master would probably use a fechtbuch to record techniques that were special, rather than the techniques that everybody used and were foundational to fighting. This doesn't mean that what's in the fechtbücher is impractical, only that they were out of the ordinary and most likely situational in their utility.
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Feb 6, 2013 21:48
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canuckanese posted:Thanks, that makes perfect sense actually. I had actually read the post about cookbooks and somehow didn't make the same connection to fechtbucher. As a further example, I believe many of the surviving examples from Germany are about how to win judicial duels, which involved specialized rules and equipment and would have been very different from informal brawls or wartime combat.
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Feb 6, 2013 21:58
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GyverMac posted:What would be the best weapon (non-ranged) to give a mass of fairly untrained people? A shield and a spear? The first part of the answer is that masses of untrained people were not a common sight on the medieval battlefield. It's a myth. Battle was the domain of military aristocracy, and most battles were clashes between well-equipped professional soldiers. Peasants were often caught up in wars, usually as passive observers or as victims of raiding and "foraging." This was partly because wars were mostly fought to resolve disagreements between rival kings or lords, to which peasants were not party; mostly it was because even a small force of professionals could overpower a huge mob. The Hussites made superb use of levies to repeatedly defeat professional armies, but that was less a function of their hand-to-hand weapons and more due to their exploitation of cannon and handguns in wagon fort tactics. Their infantry was noted for using flails, but they only went into action after the enemy had been disrupted by artillery and ranged weapons, and exhausted themselves by failed attacks on the perimeter of the wagon fort. In limited cases such as the Anglo-Saxon fyrd (a militia made up of small farmers) the spear and shield was a common weapon, though not necessarily because it was easy to use. The spear's prominence is more due to the fact that it required very little metal and consequently was extremely cheap. In an event such as a peasant rebellion or riot, people would equip themselves with what they had to hand. Most people carried knives or daggers with them, and it was also common to have a walking stick that could be used as a club (aka cudgel, shillelagh, shepherd's crook, and so forth). Tools such as woodaxes, hammers, mauls, agricultural flails (used to process wheat by beating the husks loose from the grains), and so on, could be used as weapons. quote:I've been also thinking about pikes, but I think that would require the regiments to be fairly well trained in maneuvering in order to be effective enough to keep the enemy from getting too close. Yes, effective use of pikes demands soldiers trained in close-order drill, because they are actually a remarkably poor individual weapon. quote:Aside from the shield and spear combo, I have always regarded the halberd as the best weapon to mass produce for untrained levies, since it can both stab and smash while keeping the enemy at bay, aswell as drag mounted troops of their horses. It just seems like a weapon that anyone could use somewhat effectively even with only minimal training. Nope. Effective use of a polearm like a halberd required a good grasp of timing, balance, and distance. Otherwise it would be too easy to miss with a strike and have your opponent push past the weapon, get inside your range, and gut you. There isn't really any particular hand-to-hand weapon that will be notably effective in the hands of an untrained man. The club is probably the least bad option, because the use of it is pretty self-explanatory and idiot-proof.
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Feb 14, 2013 22:01
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:What do you think of George Silver's assertion that the pike was a better weapon for single combat than the two-handed sword? I had to look this up, but in that respect he seems to be talking about the half-pike or spontoon, which was about 6-7' long. I was talking about the full length pike of 14' or more, which he calls the morris pike, about which he says, quote:The long staff, morris pike, or javelin, or such like weapons above the perfect length, have advantage against all manner of weapons, the short staff, the Welch hook, partisan, or glaive, or such like weapons of vantage excepted, yet are too weak for two swords and daggers or two sword and bucklers, or two rapiers and poniards with gauntlets, because they are too long to thrust, strike, and turn speedily. And by reason of the large distance, one of the sword and dagger-men will get behind him. It seems kind of hard to credit the notion that someone armed with a pike wouldn't be able to stop an opponent with a sword and dagger from getting inside his reach, but would be able to do so against a two-handed sword--but he'd be the expert, and I'd just be speculating.
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Feb 15, 2013 02:38
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:You seem to be misreading him. He is talking about a two-on-one situation, where, to be honest two men with any weapon would have advantage against a pike. You're right, I misread that. He also says that one man with one a short staff or half-pike can defeat two men armed with rapiers or pikes and so forth. Honestly, the idea of assessing weapons on their ability to defeat two opponents at once didn't occur to me and I assumed it was some idiosyncrasy of his language. He actually notes the main issue with using a pike as an individual weapon, which is that the length becomes a severe liability as your opponent closes: quote:Why should not the long staff have advantage against the short staff, since that the long staff man, being at liberty with his hands, may make his staff both long and short for his best advantage, when he shall think it good, and therefore when he shall find himself overmatched in the length of his staff, by the strength of the short staff, and narrowness of space of his four wards of defence, he can presently by drawing back of his staff in his hands, make his staff as short as the other's, and so be ready to fight him with at his own length? To this I answer(21), that when the long staff man is driven there to lie, the length of his staff that will lie behind him, will hinder him to strike, thrust, ward, or go back in due time. Neither can he turn the contrary end of his staff to keep out the short staff man from the close, nor safely to defend himself at his coming in. So he says that a pike will lose against a short staff, because the man with the staff will be able to get inside the pikeman's range, and the pike is too long to be useful in close. But I'm still not sure why he only says this about the short staff, when it seems like the same thing could be done with a number of the shorter weapon types. quote:I can certainly accept you don't think it to be reasonable. It seems peculiar to me as well, and perhaps a product of Silver's own dogmatism (the cut is greater than the thrust, the English staff is better than the Spanish rapier, etc) but I was interested to hear what someone who practices HEMA thought on the subject. Whoops. I didn't mean to be misleading, I don't do HEMA. I've had an amateur interest in this medieval stuff for quite a while, and I follow modern combat sports pretty closely and there are at least some transferable concepts, but I've never actually beaten on anybody with a sword. I think there were one or two people posting in the thread earlier who have done. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 09:00
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Also, in spite of the implication you might get from its name, the poleaxe was a combination weapon that had features of both the axe and the hammer, and it was as likely to have a blunt or spiked hammer head as it was to have an axe head. It seems to have become the weapon of choice for knights fighting as infantry during the renaissance. This was a polearm about 6-7' long overall. The business end was usually a hammer or an axe, and it would have a pick opposite side which could be used to strike or as a hook to drag a man from his horse. On top of the weapon was a spike, which allowed it to be used as a thrusting weapon like a spear. Sometimes there was another smaller spike at the butt end of the weapon, so it could also be thrust effectively while held reversed.
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Feb 19, 2013 20:24
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Railtus posted:My image-search is being uncooperative, but they tend to look just like wooden sledgehammers. You should rehost those pics on imgur or something if you want to post them, else you might get in trouble for leeching bandwidth. Anyway search for "mallet" instead, that gives more results. The root word is the same as maul, mallet is the diminutive; a full-size wooden maul would be larger and have a longer half than a carpenters mallet, but that's about what it would look like.
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Feb 19, 2013 21:58
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This is getting into discussion of the wrong timeline, but happily it's an area that I'm more qualified to talk about.Vivoviparous posted:So chastity belts were just the Victorians being extremely kinky? I know this is a little outside of the scope of this thread, but what was up with the Victorian era and all the sexual piccadillos that persisted as a result of whatever cultural trauma seems to have affected the time period? What was different about the sexual repression of earlier periods compared to the Victorian era? The Victorian period is essentially the high point of sexual repression in culture. It's important to note that sexual behavior in private and in secret doesn't actually vary that much between historical periods. In the Victorian period people were engaged in every sort of perversion they could come up with, they just didn't talk about it because it was unfashionable. There's actually an amazing chapter of Anne McClintock's "Imperial Leather" that I read for a class, which was about these diaries that had been discovered from the Victorian period. They were written by an upper class British gentleman who was in a life-long BDSM relationship just getting dommed by this big, muscular working-class woman he had met through her washing his clothes. The Victorian period was also the golden age of prostitution in Europe and the Americas, with whole districts given over to high class brothels, and street walkers widely available in any significant city. The same middle-class Victorian men who were supposed to be these paragons of respectability were sustaining a tremendous sex industry. The difference was just that people during the Victorian era didn't talk about any of it. Even in infamously repressive societies like those with widespread practice of Islamic fundamentalism, people will have frank discussion of intimacy within the bounds of marriage. Like when the internet became more widespread in the Middle East, websites where you could e-mail religious questions to an imam became popular, and a lot of the questions would be stuff like "is it okay for me to drink my wife's breast milk?" and so forth. Victorians didn't even do that. But it's hard to make general observations about stuff, because the Victorian period was also when doctors were fingerbanging women to treat "hysteria." Conversely there were periods of history, like Restoration England, where it was permissible to talk quite openly about all kinds of sex stuff, but that came in and out of fashion. It was out of fashion in the late 19th century. In trying to explain why that was, I think historians have looked mostly at the balance of power between social classes. At that time in history the middle class or bourgeoisie was supplanting the aristocracy in wealth and political power, but they also needed to show that they had the right to it. They did this by publicly subscribing to what you might think of as the bourgeois values--hard work, faith in education, rectitude (sexual, financial, whatever), religious faith, etc. "We deserve to rule because we are better people than the aristocrats in these ways." quote:In a similar vein, is there historical documentation that shows the effect cultural traumas like The Inquisition had on society, like how Japan is still affected by the bombing or Germany is still affected by WW2 or the southern United States is still affected by Reconstruction? The concept of cultural trauma itself is pretty recent vintage so anything along those lines would come from close readings of available historical document. I want to say that the first time people took the idea seriously was after WWI, when it was hard to avoid recognizing the damage that had been done by the war. Medievalists are able to look back at an event like the Black Death and see that it had very serious repercussions for quite a long time--like this whole mess. But people at the time didn't have that frame of reference.
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Feb 20, 2013 03:40
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Meat Mitts posted:I am interested in the evolution of defensive fortifications through Medieval times. What was used after cannons made castles obsolete? I can answer this one pretty well. Before gunpowder artillery came into use, tall vertical walls were stronger defensively because they were harder to scale. It was also good to build with stone, because it would not burn, and was hard enough to resist damage from rams and often from stones fired by mechanical artillery, which might simply shatter against them. However, a high wall or tower is weak against a projectile like a cannonball, because a lot of its structural strength simply goes to holding itself up. Stone is also problematic because its hardness makes it prone to shattering when hit hard enough. A projectile like a cannonball, which strikes at a near right angle with great force, will break the bottom of the wall and the wall's own weight will cause it to collapse. Lower, thicker walls are more resistant to cannon fire. The defensive counter to cannons was the star fort, which was principally developed in the Italian Wars of the 16th century. The French royal army had been an early and enthusiastic adopter of gunpowder artillery, which by the end of the Hundred Years War had yielded them a substantial advantage over the English armies, which lagged behind. In order to resist this firepower the Italians designed forts with very thick, low, sloping walls made mostly of heaped up earthworks, which could absorb cannon fire. In consequence of being built low to the ground like this, the forts could not rely only on their walls to deter assault. To make defensive firepower more effective, the perimeter of the forts had triangular projections that reached outward like the points of a star. Thus every part of the wall could be fired on from another part, with no dead spaces where assaulting infantry would be safe from the defenders. Star forts were the standard from the 16th century through the Napoleonic Wars, and they were tremendously effective. The seemingly slow pace of most military operations during that period is explained by the difficulty of making any real impact against this type of fortification. They were finally rendered obsolete in the 19th century by the development of high explosive shells, which could blast fixed defensive positions to rubble regardless of what they were made of.
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Feb 22, 2013 07:09
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:Why were the 'Serene Republics' (Venice, Genoa & Pisa) never conquered during the medieval ages? Pisa was conquered by Florence in 1406. As to Venice and Genoa, they were wealthy port cities with strong navies, located in favorable defensive terrain. Genoa is located in mountainous Liguria, hard between mountains and sea, making it somewhat difficult to access from the landward side if the Genoese didn't want you to. It also had sufficient wealth to build fortifications and maintain mercenary forces for its defense, the ease of resupply by sea made it practically impossible to take by siege. Venice was an even more impossible task, because it was located on an island in a huge lagoon controlled by the Venetian Navy, and the territory surrounding the lagoon was disease-filled swamps. Those cities were just situated in extremely strong defensive positions, and that's why they were unconquered for such a long time.
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Mar 1, 2013 20:05
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Chamale posted:What were the heaviest handheld weapons ever used in warfare? I know there's a tendency to exaggerate weapon weights for various reasons, but I'm curious to know the real answer. Pikes, most likely. A 20' wooden pole with a steel spearhead would have considerable mass (I don't know how much, wikipedia says 8-10 kg?) although the way it was employed meant that agility wasn't particularly important to the functioning of the weapon.
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Mar 25, 2013 06:57
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Grand Prize Winner posted:In a pike formation, would the dudes in front also be carrying big long pikes or would they be carrying spears to more controllable stabbing? The pikemen tended to all carry the same length of pike. The point of having such long weapons was so that the enemy could be kept as far from the square as possible, and so that the ranks behind the front could get their weapons into action as well. It isn't necessary for the front rank to have a great deal of fine control because anything that gets past their spearheads will only go a short distance before they run into the second rank's, and then the third's. So they get several bites at the apple. It could also be a huge weakness. Say you give your first rank shorter pikes and consequently you can only stab things once they get within 12' of the square, and fight an enemy who has the first rank carrying the full-length pikes so that they can stab at 17'. That's five feet where your guys are walking forward into knives and can't stab back, meaning they'll start dying first without inflicting casualties in return and probably wind up losing in the end. Finally, there is also the issue that the guys in front are somewhat likely to be killed or wounded, and will have to be replaced by men from the backranks anyway, so giving everybody different lengths of weapons would be pointless. There was usually a contingent of soldiers equipped with weapons like halberds, the sword-and-buckler, or two-handed swords, who were supposed break up the enemy formation by shoving past the pikes and engaging at short range where their length was a liability, though I don't think this ever worked particularly well in practice, at least unless the squares were already in disorder from the push of pike.
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Mar 25, 2013 07:50
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Mans posted:Portugal bought slaves to use in crops, mining and other activities in the new world but slaves weren't really used as an economic item during medieval times. Not exactly correct. This was the case for Portugal, but slavery was an important enterprise for the Italian merchant republics, particularly Genoa and Venice. The source of slaves were the Slavonic peoples in Central Europe and the Balkans, and this is supposed to be how we get the word "slavery" via the Greek. Acquisition of slaves in Central Europe stopped after those areas became Christianized but continued in the Balkans, probably because they were closer to Italy and could not rely on a strong political entity like medieval Poland or Bohemia for protection. Slaves were sent east for sale to Muslim and Greek buyers. The City of Caffa in the Crimea, controlled by Genoa for most of the medieval period, was the primary depot for the Mediterranean slave trade. People from nearby areas to the north of the Black Sea, like the Kipchaks were also trafficked through Caffa to the Muslim world, mainly for use as slave soldiers like the Mamluks. Coincidentally Caffa was also the place where Europeans first encountered the Black Death, and ships fleeing the plague were the vector for spreading it throughout Europe. I'm pretty sure Venice is continued the trade in humans with the Ottoman Empire on into the early 16th century, mainly young women. There is also an interesting connection between the Venetian practice of slavery and the later triangular trade in the Caribbean. One of the major centers of early sugar cultivation for Europe was the Venetian-controlled island of Crete, which ran on slave labor. I'm not super-familiar with the topic but I believe historians have recently suggest that the sugar plantations in the Caribbean may have been a conscious imitation of Venetian practices on Crete.
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Mar 29, 2013 08:03
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Poldarn posted:I don't want to blanket all ARMA members as pretentious asses, but their director, John Clements, has a "with us or against us" philosophy with other HEMA groups. Where other groups I am aware of/ part of have no problem pooling their knowledge or working together, John flat-out won't work with any group that doesn't become an ARMA-subsidiary. Interesting stuff. I had to look this up and I found some criticism on an ex-member's HEMA blog: http://paulushectormair.blogspot.ca/2009/04/arma-director-codifies-problem.html Apparently senior members of the organization who interact with Clements on a regular basis have a marked tendency to resign over his behavior, and he's been accused of running a cult of personality. A lot of the stuff I was able to find by looking this up online indicates that he runs the group like a kind of martial arts dojo with himself as "sensei" rathrr than as a organization based on historical inquiry. A lot of the stuff discussed in the above blog post, like the secrecy, exclusivity, and his control over intellectual property produced by members, are pretty much antithetical to scholarship and give a really bad impression of him.
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Apr 5, 2013 11:07
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Arglebargle III posted:Nice piece of fish has seen fit to criticize the swordsmanship on display in the Game of Thrones TV show. And so, Medieval History & Combat thread, what do you have to say about the fearsomely beweaponed combat therein? And most importantly -- should it be more like Ong Bak? People have already addressed this pretty well but I would add a few practical things about fight choreography in media. First, part of the problem is that the actors need to be able to perform the choreography. And not only must they perform it, but they have to do a series of rehearsals and then they might need multiple takes to get it right. For a film like Ong Bak the actors are chosen for their athletic abilities. Game of Thrones can't get away with this, because they have to find actors who are capable of doing a good job and who can to some extent approximate the descriptions of their characters as given in the books. There are also safety concerns, since the actors can't wear full protective gear so "going hard" would lead to injuries. This is bad enough in film, but with the way TV shows are produced shooting around an injury would be even more ruinous. Game of Thrones itself also probably presents an unusual problem in the size of the cast. Second, the audience has to be able to follow what is happening. If you check out some videos of combat sports like boxing, judo, MMA, whatever--which I would recommend just because they're fun to watch, although also because they're somewhat useful for thinking about stuff like this--you will often need the play-by-play commentary as well as the slow-motion instant replay just to keep track of what's going on. That's not something you can do with a TV show without ruining the effect of what's happening. If there was a medieval-style production with realistic combat there would be a lot of fights that lasted five seconds where two characters come at one another, something happens with their swords that is too quick to follow, and one of them falls down with his helmet cracked and is finished with a stab to the eye or something. This is more realistic but the audience is somewhat likely to find it unsatisfying. Third, audiences are used to the way sword fights are done on TV and in movies. There are just conventions to it. Doing it in a completely different way, even if technically accurate, is likely to cause confusion for most people. You might even get people arguing that the fights are terribly done because they don't look like Errol Flynn in the Adventures of Robin Hood. There are other excuses, I'm sure. If they were really committed to a realistic portrayal of historical martial arts I think it would be doable to come up with something that was audience-friendly, but most of the time the emphasis is on other issues and fight choreography brings up the rear.
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Apr 24, 2013 02:28
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Makrond posted:I'm certainly aware of the problems with fight choreography in media. It's just kind of weird to watch Game of Thrones' fight scenes because I've seen William Hobbs' previous work and it manages to be really entertaining to watch. Hobbs is great and does great work, but I believe this is the first time he's worked for TV. Since you're creating a much different product for TV than for film, especially in the respect of run time relative to budget, the production is going to be different. It has to be done cheaply and quickly, which in Hobbs case probably means that he can't get the one-on-one time training the actors and drilling the choreography with them to yield his best work.
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Apr 27, 2013 15:19
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Arglebargle III posted:I read this as "a man and a frog" and was confused for a minute. Now I'm only slightly less confused. It probably happened at some point. Putting animals of various sorts on trial was probably not something that people did all the time in the middle ages, but it was by no means unheard of. I think the most celebrated case of this was from the 14th century when a village in the Tyrol was devastated by a swarm of locusts, and the villagers sued them in ecclesiastical court. The locusts failed to appear and had to be tried in absentia, but they had an appointed defense counsel and everything. The verdict was that they were to confine their activities to a certain area which was set aside for their use, though the villagers maintained mineral and water rights to the parcel. The idea was supposedly that by settling the "dispute" in ecclesiastical court, God would cause the locusts to obey the verdict. When that didn't happen (obviously), it was explained away by the supposition that the villagers were sinful before God and he wouldn't enforce the verdict until they shaped up. These kinds of stories are sometimes read in a mocking fashion, "look how dumb people were!" It's important to keep in mind that people weren't stupid, they just operated under a radically different understanding of how the world worked. This particular thing is actually a pretty useful demonstration of that. The practice of trying animals in court just indicates that they didn't make a clear distinction between human and animal. If you see people and animals as existing along the same continuum instead of being sharply distinct, to the point that animals can also be held responsible for their actions, it makes perfect sense to put a horse on trial if he killed a man by kicking him in the head. The life experiences, cultural background, and worldview of people in distant historical periods can be so different at times that it actually seems very difficult to see things through their eyes.
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May 1, 2013 17:25
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pulphero posted:I have always been curious about the formation of the Papal states. The Emperor Justinian, who ruled the remaining eastern part of the Roman Empire in the sixth century CE, wanted to reconquer the west and devoted considerable forces to the effort. In a series of wars Justinian's forces were able to recover Italy and a good portion of North Africa and Southern Spain. The campaign for the Italian peninsula is called the Gothic Wars because it was the Goths who they beat for it. This was quite a long time before the split between Western (aka Catholic) and Eastern (aka Orthodox) Christianity, and the pope wasn't nearly as important as he later became. Justinian himself set something up called the Pentarchy, in which five patriarchs established in the five most important Christian cities functioned as the leaders of religious affairs in their general areas, with himself over them as emperor and head of the faith. Each of these five had a fairly good claim on preeminence. The Patriarch of Constantinople was seated in the capital and principle city of the known world, close by the Emperor himself; Alexandria had been effectively the first significant city in the Roman Empire to become Christianized; Antioch had been a major center of early Christian leadership; Jerusalem was the holy city where Jesus had died; finally the Bishop of Rome occupied the same position as once had the Apostle Peter, whom Jesus had designated the leader of the faith after his death, and also claimed the title of Pontifex Maximus, which had been the highest religious title in the Roman Republic and later the Empire. Compared to the eastern Pentarchs the Pope was probably the least important, because the area designated for him to lead was poor, wrecked, mostly outside Roman political control and ruled by barbarians, most of whom were Arian heretics. EDIT: This is most evident by the fact that 4 out of 5 patriarchs were based in the East, whereas responsibility for the entire West fell on one guy--clearly the West was a bit crap. At any rate restored Roman rule in Italy wasn't in a great position, partly because the Gothic Wars had left the area completely trashed. It was organized as the Exarchate of Ravenna, with the northern city of Ravenna as capital. Later in the sixth century another Germanic group, the Langobards or Lombards, made their way into Italy and began to take parts of it from the Byzantines. This process took a long time but by the middle of the 8th century the Lombards were in control of all but a few areas on the fringes like Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and so on, which the Romans were able to keep hold of for the time being. Part of the reason for this is that there was a certain amount of distraction occasioned by the Arabs appearing out of nowhere and conquering half the known world, including the better part of the Eastern Empire. The Lombards finally dismantled the Exarchate altogether around 750 CE. This all put the pope in a difficult position because he had little power of his own and could not count on any support from Constantinople. After getting pushed around by the Lombards a bit too much for his liking the Pope sought other allies. At the same time in what is now France, the Merovingian dynasty was in decline and their chief adviser, a man named Pepin, had become king for all intents and purposes. In order to legitimize his rule he appealed to the Pope, and they cut a deal where the Pope would recognize Pepin as King of the Franks and Pepin would recognize the Pope as the the secular leader of Rome and with it some adjoining areas that had been the last remaining bits of the Exarchate of Ravenna when the Lombards had finished it off, basically a strip of land running across the middle of the peninsula although the exact dimensions tended to vary a bit depending on what year this was. This was called the Donation of Pepin, and it formed the basis of the Papal States and also the close working relationship between the Pope and the King of the Franks. This culminated a bit later when Pepin's son Charles or Carl--better known as Charlemagne--came down and finished the Lombards off for the Pope and confirmed the Donation, and in exchange the Pope Hadrian I declared him (Holy) Roman Emperor. Or not in exchange, because I think there are some suggestions that Charlemagne had no idea that Hadrian was going to do that and he had just sprung it on him as a surprise power grab. That is, by crowning Charlemagne, Hadrian was asserting that he had the authority to do such a thing in the first place, which he probably didn't. In fact the whole arrangement was pretty illegitimate--Pepin/Charlemagne probably didn't have the right to grant that land to the Pope, and the Pope probably didn't have the right to crown somebody King of the Franks, and definitely didn't have the right to crown somebody Roman Emperor. But in the absence of anybody to stop them it all worked out. And this is how we get the Papal States. This is also more-or-less how we get the Pope as the most important single man in the Christian religion. Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria are all lost to the Muslims, and although they continued to have Patriarchs in some capacity representing the Christians living under Muslim rule there (still do, actually a whole bunch of them for the various sects involved) they were isolated. The Patriarch of Constantinople remained but he was directly under the thumb of the Emperor. The Bishop of Rome--the Pope--was politically sovereign and in possession of his own kingdom, and furthermore had a fairly close and influential partnership with the King of the Franks/Holy Roman Empire. This was parleyed into further concessions throughout what had once been the Western Empire, which the church winding up in control of large landholdings all over the place. They also effectively assumed control of a lot of the old Roman political apparatus, which sort of morphed into the church hierarchy, and set up ecclesiastical law courts in parallel to the secular legal system, really all kinds of stuff. As an aside as I'm writing this I realized that the history of the papacy could be interpreted as an empire-building narrative, with te empire being the powerful religious/financial/political structure that developed under the Pope between the 8th and 14th centuries, which makes me curious if any medievalist has written it that way. Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 8, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 04:45
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Davincie posted:If you include the whole knights on horse part there I would put the real death of it even earlier then the War of The Roses. The Battle Of Hastings already proved the impracticality of the mounted knight, In what sense? quote:but media/popular opinion continued to portray them as being a major force for a long time. The whole thing is mostly a romantic myth. Didn't mean they didn't keep being used though, nobles sought for a long time, and failed to do so, to live up to the tales such as in the Battle of Poitiers. So your assertion here would be that shock tactics with heavy cavalry were already obsolete in 1066, but that aristocrats continued trying to employ them for a further 400-500 years without success, out of pure stubbornness? Bearing in mind that we're talking about a military caste who dominant social position was predicated on their ability to fight, and who in any given place would have been engaged in fighting of one kind or another almost constantly throughout the period. quote:The ones who previously occupied the role of the knights slowly retreated to the role of leaders or skirmishing cavaliers. When and how exactly this all changed is something controversial though so keep in mind that what I type here is the opinion of both the Cambridge History of Warfare and Military Historian dr. Jan Hoffenaar whose courses I follow. It would be helpful if you would be more specific with your citations. Also, a search for Dr. Jan Hoffenaar indicates he has a dual specialization in the military of the Netherlands 1870-present as well as in Cold War military planning. Personally I wouldn't get up in arms about that since I'm hardly a medievalist myself, but if you're trying to support a pretty dubious argument like the above you might want a better authority to appeal to.
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May 10, 2013 20:11
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Arglebargle III posted:Like many nerds I have recently become familiar with succession law through Crusader Kings 2. Are you familiar with the game and can you comment on the accuracy of its legal system at all? Why did rulers divide up their titles for their sons? It sounds so obviously stupid. Like "Hey sons, you want to get conquered 50 years down the line by some guy whose dad wasn't an idiot? Great, here's some duchies for each of you!" Nowadays people are accustomed to thinking in terms of states, but in CK2 you're actually playing as a dynasty, i.e. a family. A feudal realm wasn't a country in the same sense as a modern state, it was the king's property, in the form of private landholdings and a network of personal/legal relationships with vassals (and through them, their vassals lower on the chain). When somebody who has a lot of kids dies, he splits up his property among them, to make sure they're all provided for, and because an equitable division of the inheritance will hopefully prevent his family tearing itself apart. Same thing with a king. Another thing to keep in mind is that the way the game works encourages you to take a long view--centuries long--whereas an actual human being is unlikely to plan for that long a term. Finally, most players' treat the objective of CK2 as being to build up the largest and most powerful realm possible. Some kings probably had this ambition, but I would say that a more normal life goal would be to have a lot of kids and make sure they all had good marriages that advanced their social position and that they would be provided for after your death.
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May 11, 2013 19:18
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The crossbowmen were Genoese mercenaries hired by the French, and they were not in battle-ready condition when the French decided to attack. The French had ordered a forced march through a rainstorm to run the English down, which left the Genoese exhausted and their equipment in disarray. They preferred to fight from behind large pavise shields which protected them from enemy archers, but the shields were still packed up in the French baggage train and they weren't given time to retrieve them. Finally their bowstrings were wet and that sharply reduced the effectiveness of their crossbows, while the English had been waiting to receive them and had the opportunity to unstring their bows and keep them dry and ready for use. The Genoese officers clearly told the French that they were not in any condition to give battle and they needed time to dry out, rest, and assemble their kit, to which the French basically said "gently caress you, we're doing this right now" and forced them to go up and shoot at the English. With every possible advantage on their side the English archers slaughtered the Genoese and they broke and ran after a few volleys, and the French were so mad about this that they actually charged their own mercenaries and killed a bunch of them before proceeding towards the English. At which point, surprise, the exact same thing that happened to the Genoese happened to them. This is especially dumb because the Genoese were very likely the best troops the French had, and more importantly the only ones with the particular skills and equipment to have any chance of dislodging the English from their prepared position along the ridge.
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May 11, 2013 22:59
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Sorry I didn't say this explicitly in the post, but the massacre of the Genoese mercenaries took place at Crecy, not Agincourt. In my opinion the French defeat at Agincourt was considerably less stupid and embarrassing than Crecy.
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May 18, 2013 04:42
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To explain the bit about everybody being the literal slave of the ruler, people often read "slave" and assume it means something like chattel slavery, such as they are familiar with from more recent European and American history. Islamic slavery was something rather different, with a number of firm religious laws and directives governing the relationship between owner and slave and defining their mutual obligations. Slaves were considered minors in the household of their owner, similar to a woman or a child. In pre-modern times the concept of the state as its own discrete entity hadn't been established and in most of the world the ruler and his family (or dynasty) functioned as the state. Somebody who was not directly related to a ruler became a member of his household if he was the ruler's slave, therefore it made sense for official positions to be filled by the Sultan's slaves because they had that immediate connection and could derive authority from it.
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May 26, 2013 23:28
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Jabarto posted:Can you tell me about the Islamic conquest of Iberia in the 8th century? I remember reading about it on the forums a long, long time ago and people mentioned that the Visigoths had spent so much time embroiled in a succession crisis that they practically welcomed the Muslim rulers. Even if that's not true, Spain has historically been a major pain in the rear end to invade, so I'd still like to know how they did it. I think the historical record is a little hazy on exactly what happened, but some things are known in a general way. The Catholic Church assumed many of the functions of government, it was not uncommon for kings to be deposed, and they seem to have struggled with rebellions. For example, coins recovered from this period demonstrate that there were often multiple claimants to the throne minting currency in their own name. After conquering North Africa the Muslim Arabs and Berbers would have seen the weakness and division among the Visigoths as an opportunity for raiding. There are suggestions that they were actually invited to invade by a pretender to the throne who had been defeated and forced to seek refuge in North Africa, and that they exploited this to take over altogether. I don't think that's established for certain and may just be a legend. The invasion may also have begun as a raid, but which was so successful that it quickly spiraled into a full-scale conquest. Or they may have planned an invasion from the start. At any rate, a relatively small force (actual numbers unknown) invaded Hispania by sea and defeated the Visigoths at the Battle of Guadalete. The king was killed on the field, supposedly along with most of the Visigoth nobility. The lack of leadership and the loss of fighting men explains the ease with which the peninsula was conquered, after the arrival of further reinforcements from North Africa. The Visigoths had also viciously persecuted the substantial Jewish population, who may then have made common cause with the invaders against their oppressors. Luigi Thirty posted:And on the other end, I read that in later periods the Muslim rulers of Iberia were hesitant to call in help from North Africa because they considered themselves modern, cosmopolitan, and tolerant while the people on the mainland they considered backward fundamentalist assholes. Is this true? Roman Hispania was probably the most Romanized in culture and society of any province of the Empire save Italy itself, and it's also supposed to have retained a lot of the Roman infrastructure and wealth into the period of Visigoth rule. The Muslims are supposed to have been quite impressed by the pillage from the campaign. Islamic Spain was notably wealthy and urbanized by comparison with the rest of Europe--around the 10th century the capital at Cordoba was probably the largest city in the world. By comparison North Africa would have been poorer and likely more backward, but then again so was most of the world. I think the more salient issue is that the western end of the Islamic world, in North Africa and Iberia, had a lot of problems with political instability. Part of this came from conflict between the two major ethnic groups, the Arabs and Berbers. The Arabs were more predominant in urban areas and tended to control commerce, the trades, and the good farmland, making the Berbers a kind of underclass. There was also a substantial population of nomadic Berbers in North Africa, and tensions between sedentary and nomadic peoples were a common theme in many parts of the Islamic world. The Berbers were also divided into tribes of their own, some of which converted to Islam at different times. Muslim Spain had a tendency to fragment into small independent emirates, called taifa, which were notably unsuccessful in wars with the Christian kingdoms. At around the same time North Africa was taken over by a couple of religious movements. The Almoravids were based in a Berber tribe that had converted relatively recently so their religious zeal was still fresh, so to speak. They struck out and conquered the Maghreb as a reaction against the decadence and weakened religious practices of mainstream society. Considering their background and the particular subjects of their complaints, it's likely they were also animated by anger over the one-sided distribution of wealth. After the Almoravids took over North Africa, the taifa emirs asked them to come over and save them from the Christians, which they did, but immediately following that they conquered Spain. In their turn they were replaced by the Almohads, who were an even more strict sect which had emerged from a different tribe of Berbers. The Almohad Caliphate finally collapsed after a massive offensive by the Christian kingdoms drove them out of Spain, and then revolts throughout North Africa broke up what was left.
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May 31, 2013 04:18
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Novum posted:If I had to guess I'd wager that trained soldiers didn't break formation in order to pinball around the battlefield like idiots where they'd get picked off by any jerk who stuck by his friends. Apart from that, wrestling was part of the professional soldier's core curriculum, which I rather doubt is the case for the people in that video. Just running into a guy and shoving him in the chest doesn't work too well when he's had that kind of training.
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Aug 1, 2013 05:16
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Magnus Manfist posted:Yeah but probably also harder to keep your footing and you're more hosed if you fall down. I mean I'm sure it didn't look like that, but just smashing into someone with a shield and stabbing them on the floor sounds way easier than fencing with them. If it actually happened on a regular basis that people were just body checking eachother to the ground in tourneys, duels, and battles, we would expect to see that attested in documents. Which we don't. Again, when somebody is trained in wrestling and specifically on how not to get knocked down, it is really difficult to knock him over just by running into him and shoving his chest unless you're dramatically larger than him.
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Aug 1, 2013 16:35
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WoodrowSkillson posted:If a big strong guy hits another big strong guy really hard when he is not looking, he is going to fall down. See - The NFL, rugby, the NHL, etc. I hope you can appreciate that your argument is not very good. In part this is because you specify that the target of the tackle must be unaware of the person tackling him. An additional problem is that none of those three sports actually supports your argument. In football, at any given time most of the players on the field will be on the line, slamming into one another as hard as they can, while very seldom falling over. Additionally, in football as well as in rugby, most tackles are achieved by grabbing on to another player and dragging him to the ground, so that both players end up grounded--which is (A) not practical for somebody whose hands are full of weapons and (B) an end result that is just fine in football or rugby, but is rather undesirable in combat, for reasons that should be obvious. In your final example, hockey is played on ice skates, which tends to make it difficult for people to set their stance and maintain a base. quote:Battles were not meant to be free for alls where everyone broke rank and just fought it out, though that could happen. This doesn't address the question of why we do not see fechtbucher recommending flying tackles, or accounts of tourneys or battles where dudes body checking eachother played a major role. It probably happened commonly after battles, as the losing side gave up fighting and fled for their lives, but if it had any utility against an enemy who was actually resisting, we would expect to see it attested in the documents. Which, again, it isn't.
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Aug 1, 2013 17:43
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Kaal posted:People who train in real martial arts learn how to fall well, not how to avoid it in the first place. Wrestling teaches that sort of thing because it's a controlled duel, without equipment, and "falling to the ground" is a technically specific thing that loses you points. This is wrong. The only martial arts that do not train takedown defense are sporting forms whose rules specifically ban grappling, such as boxing. Martial arts based in grappling or with a mix of striking and grappling often begin by teaching breakfalls, to prevent novices from injuring themselves in training, but takedown defense is a critical part of all of them. The point score assigned to takedowns in wrestling (or judo, sambo, jiu jitsu, mixed martial arts, etc.) is to reflect that being grounded by your opponent, with him on top of you or standing over you, is a disadvantageous position. To some extent it reflects that in the combatives from which those sports are probably descended, being taken down was likely to result in swift defeat. quote:No amount of wrestling training is going to keep you on your feet when you get surprise body-checked by 300 pounds of armored knight, nor when you're being pushed back by four ranks of spearmen. You're right about all this. The basic issue is that people have been commenting on a video of some kind of HEMA tourney posted above, which involved no formation fighting, little use of weapons, and seemingly no actual grappling, resembling a mosh pit. The fighting consisted mainly of men in armor rushing around and shoving one another with their shields until someone fell down, then the man still on his feet would run over to someone else to shove him. I'm asserting that in reality, fighting did not look like that because, in addition to the use of formation fighting, it is very difficult to knock down a man who is aware of your intent and trained specifically to avoid being knocked down. quote:As for historicity, remember that we're looking at a small subset of medieval warfare. The vast majority of medieval combatants were poorly armed peasant levies that couldn't defend themselves well against an armored knight in the first place. This is actually a modern myth; most medieval battles involved professional soldiers, probably in part for the very reason you say--that peasants could not resist men-at-arms. canuckanese posted:It's actually not as complicated as it looks, maintaining a strong base is hockey 101. Okay thanks. Not being Canadian, I don't have an outstanding appreciation for the techniques involved in hockey.
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Aug 1, 2013 19:20
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Kaal posted:This is backpedalling. "Training in takedown defense" is a far cry from ubermensch wrestlers that cannot be knocked down. Knocking someone to the ground is the key to fighting an armored opponent, and it's a lot easier than you think it is. You wrote this, Kaal posted:People who train in real martial arts learn how to fall well, not how to avoid it in the first place. Litmus Test posted:I take it this is totally unrealistic? I apologize if I was unclear about any of this. You also stated above that grappling was part of armored fighting, and it was, but from the sources is does not appear to have involved a lot of bullrushing guys and shoving them until they fell over. Instead the techniques seem to be mostly based around throws from arm and body locks, trips, and knee taps. For example http://www.thearma.org/Manuals/CodexW.htm. #90 in that series does show a guy hitting a nice double leg, though. At any rate what this shows is that, in order to put an opponent on the ground, it was necessary to overcome his base, which a body check is not very efficient at doing. Even if you run into him with enough force to overbalance him, he still has freedom of movement and can absorb the force by giving ground and resetting his feet.
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Aug 2, 2013 01:18
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Namarrgon posted:Well it was definitely an empire, I'm not sure why Voltaire was disputing that. He wrote that in 1756. The Holy Roman Emperor at the time was Francis I, who got the job because his wife (Maria Theresa of Austria), could not have it as she was a woman. He served as her proxy. The Seven Years War was in progress, pitting the two most powerful states within the Holy Roman Empire (Prussia and Austria) against each other, along with their allies among the German princes. That is, the Empire was at war against itself. Since the war of the Austrian Succession had been fought in 1740-1748, this was for the second time in 10 years. It was pretty clear at that point that the Empire was largely a political fiction beginning to outlive its usefulness. quote:It was holy in the sense that it was strongly connected to the pope, so I'd give them that. The last Holy Roman Emperor to receive a papal coronation was Charles V, in 1530. The Pope's influence in the political affairs of the HRE was largely severed by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. quote:It was originally crowned as successor to Rome by what is probably the second-best claim to Romanhood (the Papacy) so depending on how generous you feel you can give them that too. Voltaire apparently wasn't feeling that generous.
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Aug 15, 2013 20:49
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Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:I realize I forgot to mention any specific time frame, but I meant after the Arab conquests & before the 13th c. Wouldn't Arab & Turk be synonymous? No, not ever. They're completely different ethnic groups, originating from different parts of the world, culturally very distinct from one another, and they differed significantly in their military practices. quote:"It should be noted that the Arab, Iranian, Turk and generally Muslim horsemen felt a great affection for their horses, so the Byzantine spearmen, archers and javelin-throwers had to target the horse more than the rider. It is known that many Muslims preferred to flee rather than lose their horse, a choice that led to the disruption of their battle line." When direct quoting from a particular source please cite it in case somebody else wants to look it up themselves or at least assess its likely validity. Just going by the quote it doesn't look like much. It describes the Byzantines firing on the Muslims' mounts as a special tactic, when in fact it was ordinary practice wherever archers shot arrows at cavalry. The horses are bigger and easier to hit. Alternatively, their size and surface area makes them more likely to be hit when an area is being bombarded with volley fire. They also tended to be less well armored than the men riding them, especially with the kind of light cavalry preferred by many Muslim armies. Simply weathering a barrage of arrows, rather than turning away to preserve your mounts, would be very stupid. In any case I'm sure any cavalry soldier regardless of ethnicity would be fond of his mounts, because they spent a lot of time together, taking care of them was a huge part of his job, and they were very expensive. Basically the passage reads like an orientalist flight of fancy, trying to over-explain something that is normal and not particular to any culture.
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Sep 2, 2013 21:34
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