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A certain class of Sufi brotherhood could definitely fit a very similar model to the knightly orders. I mean, others would be all whirling dervishes or crazy night meditations or... well let's just say that Sufi orders could vary quite greatly. Something like the Senussi order in Libya is a bit, well, later than your medieval knight, what with this guy using guns and all, but it fits a lot of bench marks. Fraternal order, land grants, more or less autonomous function outside of 'normal' state control, focal point of military leadership in the war between righteous and the invading infidel. I'm pretty sure there are similar orders doing similar things on more restrained scales in other places. Comedy answer: the Assassins.
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Jan 6, 2014 04:40
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veekie posted:On swords against pikes. Wouldn't it be relatively easy to just knock the pike aside, once you're past the point? The basic physics of a long pole remains consistent after all. You'd have pretty poor leverage along it's length compared to someone who's near the point. The point (aha) of a pike formation is that, once you knock away one pikeshaft, the ones right next to and behind it are going to be coming right at your face.
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Jan 20, 2014 08:45
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1MCLMF posted:What has been the most bloodiest battle with one side losing minimal people. In other words: Has there been a battle where one side just completely destroyed the other with barely any loss? Cannae? Well, it wasn't bloodless for Hannibal, but the bang/buck ratio there was pretty outsized. Really, any of his wins. Comedy answer: any friendly fire incident.
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Jan 21, 2014 03:15
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Vigilance posted:How important was individual skill in medieval combat? It seems like contrary to Hollywood portrayals that skill wouldn't matter a whole lot as most armies relied on formation, discipline, and tactics to win the day. The average soldiers job is gonna be to stay in formation and fight as a unit, right? Being skilled I'm sure would help but not to the degree that one or two badasses could dramatically affect a battle. Are these not skills? That said, someone has to be out there killing people/making them not want to stick around. A winning strategy was to reduce individual heroism by bring more soldier up to an elite pvp level. A proper knight would have been training for war for most of his life. And encased in armor and really well armed and have a kickin' rad horse, but the whole life time of training would be pretty significant as far as something like a melee. Figuring out how to train your soldiers to consistently or reliably, e.g. fight in a phalanx, ride a horse, hit a target, not run, build fortifications, direct artillery, stand in the face of fire, reload a musket in under 20 seconds, lay down suppressing fire and execute a flanking attack, or outmaneuver an enemy fighter has always been an aspect of war. e: if it helps, not to be all  about things, but the Spartans build a pretty fricken bigass hegemony based on the idea of the ultimate lifelong soldier. It was terribly unsustainable, forced them to keep said badasses near home, made their decision making inherently conservative and, morally, was pretty loving horrific for the helots, but it worked. It's not the only way to win a war- a popular pop narrative of Athens v. Sparta is kinda the ur-brains v. brawn in western culture, and ultimately the winner was... Thebes. Who sorta did both and then got stomped on by the Macedonians. Anyway, yes, opting for 'skilled badasses' or at least 'a professional military class' or 'dude who really just hang around and train until it's time to kill people' can get you pretty far militarily.
the JJ fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Feb 4, 2014 |
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Feb 4, 2014 07:29
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:There's also stuff like the Viking at Stamford Bridge, but that's really a long-rear end duel in disguise. It's also a pretty extreme example, since it was literally one guy on a bridge holding off an army (Because the army couldn't march everybody over at once). Otherwise, the heroics of one person tends to save platoons or companies, rather than win a battle by themselves. One person save a platoon, one platoon saves a company, the company save a battalion, and that battalion wins a war. For want of a nail etc. etc. etc. Like, it's not that anyone didn't want to field a bunch of badasses, if you could get them, well, that's just peachy and great. But yeah, at a certain point (which varies a lot) having 3 okay dudes ready to back each other up is better than 1 superhero. On the other hand, 10 dudes on horses with steel armor could easily gently caress up n farmers with sticks with n = the number of farmers who need to die before the rest decide 'gently caress this.' What I'm saying is there's a balance between quantity and quality and pouring all your resources into one over the other is probably going to gently caress you up. Many not everyone needs to be a super hero but professional armies and/or warrior castes are a pretty universal part of human history (even modern history) for a reason.
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Feb 4, 2014 08:52
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:I'd like to know about this too and perhaps the wider Kiev\Rus\Rutheranian area too. You're missing a 'oh poo poo vikings' period.
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Feb 7, 2014 09:17
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:See I know nothing! I know in CK2 there's some Viking guy kicking rear end toward Kiev but well that's CK2 and I have no idea. Short version; you had rivers and long boats and angry Scandinavians.
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Feb 7, 2014 11:07
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TheCondor posted:I've seen it mentioned a couple times in the thread that lords/kings/landowners/etc. would conscript or require subjects to be armed for the militia. I've always wondered how this was enforced, especially in a conscription system. Was there any sort of registry like selective service systems today or did the king's goons just go ride around the countryside twice a year to make sure everyone's armed/round up conscripts? The short version is that they didn't. You decentralized power, so there was someone out there in charge of knocking heads and bringing enough soldiers to the fight. At least in a medieval context, you weren't drafting per say, just granting land (and, more or less, thus the labor of anyone living there) to a knight who was then responsible to show up himself, plus a few hangers on to fight. The transition to conscription stuff is more of an Early Modern phenomenon, you can ask Hegel about that. The ability to conscript broad swaths of the population sort of goes hand in hand with the rise of the Early Modern sort of state. Even then it takes the French Revolution for levee-en-masse to be a thing.
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Feb 9, 2014 22:12
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Thanqol posted:Speaking as someone who's played Assassin's Creed and CK2, what was up with the real life Assassins? Did they really use smoke bombs, throwing knives, parkour and all that ninja stuff? And did it work? They're a romanticized mess, but the short version is, not really. Assassination was part of a tool set they used, but (~supposedly~) the scary bit was, because they were all fanatic/high on hash/hooked on hash and would only get more if they followed orders/whatever, they'd straight up walk up to a dude, stab him, and then wait for the bodyguards to take them in. Not needing an escape plan made them hard to plan around. Blahblahblah romanticism supposedly.
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Feb 11, 2014 09:16
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:This is the Medieval History thread, arcane poo poo is pretty much par for the course. Delve and explain away. I'm not up and up on the specific details of the Assassins, but I can give some background. After the death of the prophet, the Muslim community was left in a bit of a pickle. Mohammad was supposed to the last, best messenger from God, which is sort of a hard act to follow. The community had been organized in a sort of ad hoc way around the close friends and family of the prophet. The community soon began to fracture. At first, leadership gets passed to Abu Bakr and Omar, real hard core warriors and good friends of Mohammad, so there's not too much dispute. Eventually one group, the 'partisans' or Shia of Ali, Mohammad's son-in-law, argued that he should be in charge. A lot of this argument rested on the notion that, as a relative and through the bloodline, a certain... connection to divinity, called the Imamate had been transferred to him. Well, that and 'gently caress the Umayyads, those decadent city-dwelling fucks are going to set up inheritance by blood and not merit anyway so...' Sure enough, once most of the candidates for Muhammad's day are dead, it ends up coming down to Ali or Muawiyah, who was the relative of Uthman, the third caliph. So the backers of Ali and Muawiyah have a bit of a dust up Ali seems to be winning, and, not really wanting have the whole community slaughter each other, he agrees to an arbitration. At which point some nut jobs up and stab him for being too nice. People from his own side. Anyway, leadership now is down to either the Umayyad's or Ali's family. The Shia declare that Ali's sons have the same special connection, and promise to follow him into battle. They die and become great martyrs and some of the more dramatic Iraqi Shia traditions include punishing themselves on the anniversary of the martyrdom because they'd promised to show up and hadn't. The Shia persist in existing despite a number of other martyred Imams. The Abbasids rise to power by using the Shia, but then promptly also start martyring Imams. Now, this turmoil in the Shia community causes a problem, because while the Imamate stayed in the family, there wasn't really a set 'first son inherits the throne' sort of policy, so you ended up with brothers and uncles and what not disputing succession. Most, but not all, subdivisions within the overall Shia umbrella are demarcated by the Imamate succession that sect holds to be legitimate. Twelvers, the 'main' Shia group today, for instance, believe that the eleventh Imam went into hiding and then that the twelfth went into super hiding (well, it's actually called the Occultation, but I like 'super hiding') and either he or the Thirteenth (I'm sorta fuzzy on it and can't remember exactly) will return either a. when we've built a utopia worthy of Mohammad or b. when we've hosed up so badly that we need an Imam to guide us again. The Alwalites, in Syria, are also Twelvers, but they think that a different dude was the Imam's courier. Not, like, in a mystical sense, there's a dispute over which one of them actually knew where the Imam was hiding and what sorts of notes he was sending out to his followers. Anyway, the Ismaili's are another branch, one that still has an Imam today. He lives in Canada I think. Anyway, part of that line, tracing to Ismail, which the Twelvers don't. They also said that their Imam, Ismail, had Occultated, but stuck around through the Dai's, or sort of mystical missionary priestly types. Anyway,a while later they sort of go 'surprise! Our Imam wasn't mystically Occultated after all, he was just regular normal hiding and now we have one of his successor and also a bunch of pissed off Berber tribes!' As has happened before, arriving unexpectedly on a border with a bunch of motivated soldiers is generally a good way to start a conquest, and the Fatimid (so named after Mohammad's daughter and Ali's wife) dynasty begins. They set up in North Africa and cruise into Egypt and the Levant. The Assassins come around toward the end of the Fatimids, basically stay behind remnants of their penetration into the Levant, though, again, Ismaili's before during and after the Fatimids acquired temporal power existed under the radar in a lot of places in the Islamic world. It's that sort of network that the Assassins would draw on, and it also sort of explains their drive to take and hold good fortresses all around, since the Twelvers, Sunnis and Christians all kinda hated their guts.
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Feb 13, 2014 21:52
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fspades posted:Right. So, central to Ismaili beliefs is the distinction between the zahir (the exoteric) and the batin (the esoteric) parts of Quran. Zahir is the foundation of the practical, readily apparent and intelligible side of Islam; rituals, obligations, laws; basically what is called the Sharia... The Batin, however, is the special Quranic knowledge that gives insight to what it all really means and what was the essence and purpose of Islam. For Ismaili's, (and some other Shi'i sects) this knowledge can only be obtained by the guidance of an Imam, a spiritually perfect being that was specifically ordained by God for this job. In fact, it was thought to be impossible for an Imam to not exist at any given time; God would not leave the believers without a living guide and existence of an Imam was the living proof of God. Similar to this, Ismailis divided history into 7 epochs, each marked by a new prophet and his new Law. So we were living in the Age of Muhammad and previous to that was the Age of Jesus and then Moses and so on, each with its special lineage of Imams... Each new law abolished the previous one, so the Zahir of the religion was clearly subject to change but its supposed essence and central teaching was eternal and unchanging. The seventh age, the one that would mark the end times, would be the final one and its prophet, also the final Imam of Islam, would bring no new law and everyone would live the true religion as it was supposed to be: directly through the Imam with no laws or compulsion whatsoever and everything would be super-awesome. Ah, so the Assasins are, er, mainline Ismaili? They're Nizari-Ismaili-Shia or something like that?
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Feb 14, 2014 05:37
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Railtus posted:Saladin could be negotiated with, which was probably a factor in his popularity with the west. First of all, he did keep his promise at the surrender of Jerusalem. Second, he agreed after the Third Crusade to allow Christian pilgrims to travel to Jerusalem. Also, before Saladin, the Crusaders had repeatedly trounced the Fatamid caliphate in previous encounters. So Saladin was a capable military leader who could be reasoned with. I can see him being easy to like from a Frankish perspective. I've always thought the fact that contemporary Crusader accounts apparently went back home and gave him a thumbs up pretty compelling. "Saladin was pretty cool for a Muslim" is a thing that shows up a lot in, e.g. Dante and stuff. So, I'm not saying that he was a cool guy by modern standards, but he fit a pretty good mold for European chivalry when it would have been very easy for them to cast him as an utter villain.
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Mar 5, 2014 19:11
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Bell the Cat posted:I appreciate your honesty, but I was referring to its real life application, not its use in a video game. I mean, gavelkind is de facto the 'normal' way most of the Western world operates at this point, unless you know a lot of parents who are literally (and I mean literally in the literal sense) giving their first born children ~99% of their wealth and cutting the rest loose or expecting them to live off the largesse of their siblings, and modern society has yet to cease to function. The 'advantage' is people in the family like each other more and don't hate each other. Usually. Tamerlane posted:Super strange question here: It's a pretty common rhetorical sort of turn. You have to remember that for most societies there's a pretty considerable concern about your fate in the afterlife and a concern that how your body is treated might affect that. So there's punishment by death, and then there's death. This can be the difference between, say, an execution with last rites and they put your body in a special graveyard, for criminals, or you can see it in the suicide vs. execution debate in Japan, where at certain points being allowed to commit suicide was an honor while having someone else execute you was a terrible dishonor. Another example, free blacks in Cuba, especially the free black militia, began to turn on the whites and align with the enslaved population only after provocations, like sharing barrack housing with slave pens and, especially, being punished alongside slaves. One of the key rights supposedly offered to the militiamen was the right to go through military courts and be imprisoned in military prisons. So basically there might not be a 'tradition' but public execution is always going to have an element of theater and symbolism to it. Creating gradations of 'good' and 'bad' deaths is important. Especially when, if, say, you're attempting to enforce conscription you're really only offering a choice between two deaths. If you can make death in battle glorious and death by execution shameful, you can preserve the punitive threat that execution offers.
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Apr 3, 2014 09:26
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SpaceViking posted:I dunno man, have you seen siblings go at each other when it's starting to look like their parents might be dying? It can get really brutal. Well, yeah, but that's because they're all operating on the basic assumption that everyone should 'get their fair share.' Sorta the point. Bell the Cat posted:Reasonable people will disagree. But to stay on point, I was not arguing the efficacy of gavelkind in a modern society, but specifically how it pertained to a lawless clan society. In addition, I never said that society would cease to function, but implied that it was not a workable structure for the maintenance of inheritable estates that contain indivisible assets. Well, I dunno too much about Scottish Lowlands circa whenever you're talking about but neither clans nor lack of laws pertain to what is, largely, a social/familial function. Certainly the clan structure was, itself, an an entity that existed to regulate this sort of familial poo poo? I'm also not sure that indivisible assets was a purely pre-modern phenomenon. Only one of my aunts is going to get grannies fine china, but then the other will get the silverware and the other will get, I dunno, a double share of the jewelry box. That's a joke, but the point is none of the assets are easily dividable, and certainly lose a considerable chunk of their value if you do try to split them up. And yet the system persists. I think there's a general assumption that, over the course of ones life, there is at least an attempt to increase the number of things that you have (by various means) and that, on the whole, matches somewhat with the birthrate in the family. WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:Have y'all ever heard of suicide by proxy? It happened in early modern northern Germany and the southern parts of the Nordic countries. What you would do if you were suicidal in one of those places is you would find a child before the age of reason, kill them (since they go to heaven automatically), then turn yourself in. You'd get executed, which was a huge party/massive spectacle, and you would confess your sins first, so you'd go to heaven too. Not to mention that an execution is a massive shindig, as close as most of these people would have ever come to being the center of attention. If you were a depressed Prussian that might have been very appealing. Huh. Reminds me of the Japanese nationalist who led a 'revolution' that he knew was doomed to fail just so he could commit seppuku on live TV.
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Apr 3, 2014 18:55
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Bell the Cat posted:In the Scottish Lowlands, Gavelkind was law. The fact that the area was lawless would most certainly have had some bearing on its practice. And it was rather presumptuous of you to chime in on a question that you freely admit you neither read nor know anything about. Now since we are both in agreement that you don't know what you're talking about, please stop making GBS threads up this thread.  Bell the Cat posted:My mistake, let me explain. During the late middle ages, the lowlands of Scotland were subject to near constant invasion, by English armies, foreign mercenaries, and border clans/families who would raid on both sides of the border. This fostered a distrust of the royal and noble families to whom they owed allegiance and it was not uncommon for Scottish families to ride into Scotland at the head of English armies. Additionally, up until the union of the crowns there was a segment of the lowlands called the Debatable Lands, where no county held sovereignty. This was, even by the most modest definition, a lawless land. No, I don't think I would call that lawless. The presence of a clan implies the presence of some sort of social structure, e.g. the clans themselves. It might not be the state-as-we-know-it sort of law, but a clan/family system is actually a pretty typical alternative in those sorts of periphery to the state situations. Mostly because the familial ties led to a certain degree of trust and mutual dependency. Which, as was quite politely pointed out to you, is exactly the sort of thing a 'fair' distribution of inheritance might foster. Big states with stronger central authorities needed primogeniture to hang together as such much more than these 'lawless' territories. See also, the fate of Charlemagne's empire.
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Apr 4, 2014 08:08
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Bell the Cat posted:My apologies. It was not my intention to draw this into a dick measuring contest, or to belittle anyone. But I do find it frustrating when people who don't have any information on a subject attempt to interject, for whatever reason. The question gets lost, and neither I nor the thread are served by the response. It was my hope that some well-read Scottish goon or an historian with some insight into the subject could expound upon my original post. That's cool. No one was being an rear end though. We're a bit short of specialists here, unless HEGEL wants to weigh in on Early Modern Germany. Railtus is good, but, like me, barely past undergrad and focused on arms and swordsmanship across the whole era. You can try SAL but that's hit and miss. Most of what we've been doing is just trying to tease out your question because, frankly, you've made some terribly obvious assumptions and clear leaps (if you know what you're talking about hohoho) and we're trying to apply what we do know to the situation. But we can't do that if the question is inaccessible to us. So let's break it down, shall we? Bell the Cat posted:My questions concern the real world implications of gavelkind, particularly as it pertained to the clan system of the Scottish Lowlands of the late medieval period. So. Well, the first response you got was quite on the money; this question, like many questions, starts from the presumption that X, was clearly the most efficient move from a nation/state/country/political group's perspective, so why did they Z. Typically, goons being goons, this comes out of people playing too many video games. (Alternatively, having taken Econ 101 and/or Marx 101 and absorbed the whole 'rational actor' or 'material interests > all else.') Gavelkind, in particular, appears in a goon favorite strategy game called Crusader Kings II that, while good fun, abstracts a lot of things and trains players to think of history and historical events in terms of video games. E.g. 'painting the map my color.' So the trained response in this thread to 'why didn't they just do Z?' is either 'your assumption about efficiency is wrong' and/or 'people are people and want different things.' Things like: quote:Its persistent practice throughout the ages suggests that it may have had advantages over the feudal system of primogeniture. Is what people were responding to there. In other words, that it's persistence may have to do with deep cultural concerns (certainly something to consider when you're talking about families) rather than 'simple' material expediency. But if you want a more in depth breakdown. Bell the Cat posted:I envision that to a land holding nobleman, those clans would be easier to control when their wealth and power was constantly being divided. That's certainly possible, but if a clan was sufficiently, well, clannish to act as a single unit then how things are distributed within the clan is rather moot isn't it? A clan is, if nothing else, a structure meant for reciprocal aid and gain, generally held together by family ties. Divide and conquer is a plan that works much better when dealing with individuals than with whole families at a time. My focus may not have been on the Scottish Lowlands but I'll happily chat about tribal relations in colonial Libya, you'll see some pretty similar trends. quote:But the lords themselves, it seems, were subject to the same laws. Ah yes, laws of inheritance. The short answer to this is 'yeah, but if they all made sense European history would be a lot less fun.' Seriously, the laws that grant you all the legitimacy you'll ever possess are very hard to change without upsetting that legitimacy. So, maybe it just didn't make sense. That's... a lot of history. quote:After so many generations of divided wealth and lands, how did so many clans manage to keep their lands intact and in the possession of one family? Wealth divided among individuals, yes, but kept within the same family. So... just as intact as before? This is one of those points where you're making assumptions that I, at least, am not seeing. Also we're jumping from clans to the nobles here, what exactly do you want to know? quote:Could someone please explain what those advantages might have been? quote:I am having difficulty wrapping my head around this and suspect that there were other factors involved. quote:If someone knowledgeable about the subject could chime in, I would greatly appreciate it. If by knowledgeable you mean 'someone who doesn't approach family matters like a money obsessed autist' then... well, we chimed in.
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Apr 5, 2014 01:49
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Bell the Cat posted:http://lacithedog.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/border-reivers-an-armed-society-is-a-polite-society/ that same blog posted:The reivers were both English and Scottish and raided both sides of the border impartially, so long as the people they raided had no powerful protectors and no connection to their own kin. ditto posted:The fact that the area was pretty much a lawless zone usually made people a target for depredations rather than conferring any security. They looked to their extended families for security and a “code of law”. So basically only custom, particularly the custom surrounding family ties, offered even a little protection. You need to be able to say to marauding folks that 'if you gently caress me up my brother will come over and kick your rear end.' And they need to believe that. And you need to thus, if someone fucks up your brother, go gently caress them up in turn. Not ideal, and a pretty cyclical system, but a resilient and hard to break cycle, at least internally. So if you're hypothetical dad you turn to your sons and say 'Timmy is in charge.' Well, aside from the fact that you've just hosed with the only social structure barely holding your clan together, Jimmy and Sammy are going to be pretty livid. When dad dies, what is Timmy going to do about things? Jimmy and Sammy are going to say gently caress you, take what's theirs (as they see it), and leave Jimmy out to hang, at which point Bobby and Billy MacOtherclan get together and take all of Jimmy's stuff. quote:They were brothers and sisters and distant relations sure, but you worked your land, you raised your kids, and it was during times of conflict that you got the clan together and acted as a single unit. So no, I do not think the question was moot. Again, just going back to your point, in times of conflict, as you so helpfully point out, was quite often. Even if Jimmy and Sammy weren't sitting at your doorstep with weapons in hand, the knowledge that screwing with one member of family meant picking a fight with the rest is about the only thing keeping things together in a situation like that. Arguably, spreading the wealth around make the whole clan more secure against sudden shocks. It's not perfect, but it is pretty workable all things considered. quote:Isn't that a cop out, though? If something in history doesn't make sense, I believe that it is because we either do not possess all of the facts or we are incapable of envisioning how it made sense at the time. No, it makes sense. It's just that the people involved are acting on different lines of motivation. This goes back to the first response you got, talking about the robotism and video game-y logic of it. The first thing that people said was 'well, it makes sense so long as you love your kids equally' which is really not all that incomprehensible. I think on top of that the big thing to think about is how a 'law' in a non-state society doesn't operate on lawyering and decrees. It's about custom and tradition and obligation. Think about it like... the distributed prisoners dilemma. That works only if you trust the other person and they trust you. In a clan society that's built on kinship ties and that means that screwing with inheritance custom, the basic assumptions made about how a family operate and how you relate to a family, is dangerous as poo poo. As pointed this sort of 'gavelkind' custom of fairly equal distribution is fairly common today. It's not a cop out, it's about 75% of what history is. Hell, HEGEL's putting out some great posts on how soldiers thought that strips of paper would make them bullet proof and how people who wanted to commit suicide would kill innocent kids (because they're guaranteed to go to heaven) and then turn themselves into the headsmen. And how that practice stopped when they stopped making executions quite so theatric. Now, you can look at that and say, well, short term that's the best option, but long term, surely the more stable systems win out. (Nevermind that primogeniture, as basically the rest of this thread attests, had [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain]it's own problems.[/url) And this is true and while it edges close to 'Social Darwinism' it's, well, the not loving dumbshit version of that. And, surprise!, the Scottish lowlands were eventually tamed by the state institutions of the surrounding monarchies. So you're right, it's just that sometimes the unit of, whatever, cultural evolution is not the individuals agency but rather whole societies competing for resources. Which makes humans bits of DNA. Okay, so the metaphor breaks down. The point is, evolution doesn't work by every individual figuring things out on it's own, it works by killing off the losers. quote:In a land largely bereft of an administrative arm to enforce the law, how does a clan laird/lord, who is at war with a cadet branch of his own clan, at blood feud with another, and under continual threat of English invasion and seasonal raiding by counterparts in his own country, possibly countenance a division of his assets when it's entirely possible that any number of his sons are inept or feckless drunks? All while seeing to the safety of several thousand head of cattle and hundreds of kinsmen. That wealth would need to be consolidated to be of any practical application. The scenario I just described was not anomalous. Bereft of an actual administration, custom, obligation, and delegation are going to be keys to maintaining control over those assets. Without the loyalty of those who are, at the base level, in control of those assets, our laird is powerless. Unless he's out herding all those cattle himself and fighting off the English with one hand while he carries out the feud with the other. His authority as clan head rests on custom and obligation precisely because there is no state administration equivalent.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:50
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Ohh okay. So Libyan tribal structures. First, if you're actually interested and want a real expert read E. E. Evans-Pritchard's The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. It's a bit old fashioned, and the scholarship's a bit out of date but he's a pretty luminary figure as far as anthropologists go, and the Sanusi is still pretty regularly cited as a sort of 'common knowledge about the area' footnote. E.g. Idris el Senussi took charge of the order in 1917 (Pritchard, 74) The work I did with it actually focused more on the effects the Senussi and modernity had on the tribal structure, and how the Senussi reacted to imperial powers, but I'll have a go. The tribal state of being in Libya was somewhat similar to how you've described the Scottish situation. Pastoral groups on somewhat marginal land between bigger powers, socially organized around kinship groups, most going back to a mythical founding member of some sort, most dating to this or that wave of migration from the Arabian peninsula. Many tribes had client or vassal subtribes within their circle. Blood for blood, tit for tat was a pretty common response to disputes both intra and intertribal nature. Around this evolved semi-hereditary positions of mediators and peacemakers. Generally the wealthier families, (due to their influence) while not able to wield dictatorial powers, could persuade and negotiate, a pretty honored power. Often this culminating in expending wealth, which of course helped garner influence. In the mid-1800's a Sufi scholar by the name of Senussi arrived, according to some account fleeing Wahhabists in Mecca, though there's other work out there that suggests that, as a 'sober Sufi' and an advocate of more 'legalistic' Islam he was actually one of the few Sufis in the Wahhabists good books. Others think that Senussi was on his way to Algeria to fight the jihad against the French. Either way, he ended up in Cyrenaica and, struck by the backwardness and superstition of the lot of them, sets about educating them.* In short order he's got quite a following, most importantly those tribal mediators. Within a generation the Senussi order is completely entangled in the tribal structure as a mediating force. How the Order interacts with the Ottoman Empire is very interesting. The Senussi encouraged the tribes to pay their taxes and even used their capabilities to assist the tax collectors, but when the Ottomans tried to tax the lodges (which, as religious property, were supposed to be exempt) whole tribes up and refused to pay taxes. So the Senussi sort of became this pseudo-state within a state that, after the Ottomans gave up North Africa became a pseudo-state that was not a state, and finally when the Italians invaded they became the core of resistance, at least in Cyrenaica. Then there this boring WWII poo poo and some UN negotiations and the Senussi come out Kings of all of Libya. Much to the dismay of the British (and to the confusion of thinkers who assume that a strong nation-state is the ultimate goal of leaders) they promptly carried out no nationalisation projects, barely tried to centralize, and were soon overthrown by Gaddafi. Succession among the Senussi was pretty tricky as well. A Sufi order is traditionally passed from the master to a chosen student, with any other, sufficiently advanced students heading off to found their own lodges. Like any good tribe, clan, or noble family, these cadet houses keep extensive genealogies that invariably go back to Muhammad via Junayd, Hallaj, or some other early Sufi. The Senussi, for instance, was an offshoot of the Idrisids, which is why Idris el Senussi was named as such. Now, in some lodges, where possible, the succession moves in a bloodline. For instance, the Muhammad Senussi stuck around the Idrisid lodges for a while as a sort of regent for the next leader before striking out on his own. Although succession passed in the family, there were no set rules about priority. One apocryphal tale has the Grand Senussi having his two sons into a tree and then telling them to jump. The younger jumps first, and so obviously trusted God more, and so was trusted with the leadership next. The actual history could be a deal more complex, with factions in the family vying based on differences of opinion. This really only came to a head during WWI after the Senussi expanded their fight against the Italians against the British as well. The British responded to a threat to the Suez about as well as you'd expect and Idris, an advocate from way back of using the Brits as a 'least bad' option to shield against the Italians and the French, took over for his uncle, who retired to Turkey. How much of that retirement was 'retirement' and how much was an internal struggle, well, that's not really answerable. Anyway, circling back to tribal issues, one aspect of Senussi authority that continually frustrated British attempts to deal with them (most of my info I'm drawing out of diplomatic cables from agents in Cairo back to London) was that at times the tribes would tie the Senussi's hands. It was clear that, while the Senussi could negotiate for the tribes and offer advice, they were not able to leverage the same sort of fanatical loyalty that other Sufi leaders the British had dealt with before had. Because their authority ultimately rested on their (limited) position as the mediators, to a certain extent that inherently restrained their options. How that relationship changed as the wars progress and Libya became an actual(?) state is a subject matter for a different post, and a scholar with way more time and linguistic skills than I. *Yes, there is some irony in that sentence.
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Apr 6, 2014 06:28
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Yeah, chasing footnotes is a way better way to do things than asking the internet.
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Apr 12, 2014 05:09
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Amazon posted:About the Author
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Apr 13, 2014 19:20
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I think Hercules and the hydra definitely show that the idea of adding some oomph to your arrows was at least not totally foreign to the Greeks. His ultimate fate, of course, also serves as a bit of a warning as far as proper handling goes. I think the Chinese used poison on their machine gun crossbows, but that's one of those pop hist 'facts' that is probably true but I've never actually seen sourced. Generally, I think the idea that, given the lethality of infections and the (relatively) long time it would take a poison to kill or disable someone, it's a lot of bother for not a lot of benefit. Making incidental wounds more deadly in an attritional situation makes a little more sense, hence the poison on arrows and not, you know, swords or some poo poo. I'm trying to thing of other examples. Punji sticks and the like fit the bill, again, as a sort of nasty doubling up of injuries in attritional situations.
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Apr 27, 2014 21:14
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Thanqol posted:Question relating to the early modern period: Were there any political assassinations in that era? Heads of state or very senior officials killed by foreign assassins or extremists of the kind that concern us today? Paradox games have taught me that everyone was murderin' each other all the time up until 1450 whereupon they finally figured out palace security and then it was totally safe until the industrial era, where it again became murder central. And of course there's the origin of the term...
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Jul 17, 2014 17:55
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King Hong Kong posted:Even the modern and contemporary reputation of the Spanish Inquisition is largely the result of the Black Legend since there were pretty significant variations in the accusation, prosecution, conviction, punishment, and censorship patterns of the Holy Office depending on the jurisdiction, period of time, type of heretical behavior, and the ethnicity of the individual in question. For example, an Indian could not be prosecuted by the Holy Office after it had been established in Mexico in 1571 although the earlier "apostolic" inquisitions could. Likewise, an individual engaging in something resembling witchcraft in New Spain probably would not have even been prosecuted despite the relatively high likelihood that he had would have been accused, but a bigamist or "Judaizer" would likely be less fortunate at least vis-a-vis prosecution. We actually know a lot about African kinship ties in America through bigamy vouchers (e.g. "This is Tom, he's my friend, and I know he's I married.") Which was kinda a big deal to the church. A lot of these are "he was my shipmate" even for the guys who'd been in he Americas for decades
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Jul 20, 2014 16:45
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Smoking Crow posted:The chroniclers would have seen him exactly the same because they were writing from a narrative of the united church. Richard the Lion Hearted defeated Saladin and saved the Crusader States; that's the story they would have recorded. For the modern historian, it would probably be the same considering that most hate him—it's only popular history that likes Richard I. Sorry, can you restate this? I'm not following the meaning.
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Jul 28, 2014 11:33
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HEY GAL posted:Some people might not know that those are a thing. Also, it's not just Latin, it's every loan word that's perceived to be still foreign, which means you can tell how foreign the writer thinks the word is by which handwriting they use. The word "musket" is more foreign to these people than the last names of Bohemians, Zs and all. Hey, in Japanese they use a whole separate syllabary for loanwords so... (also amusing, some words like 'karaoke' are considered loan words in Japanese. Weep for these poor orphaned terms, lost without a home language. Also also amusing, most Chinese words are not. Do not bring this up to Japanese nationalists.) Rabhadh posted:Thanks for the replies lads! Two :~waifu~: posts in a row but in Ancient Honrabu Nihon they'd hang silk behind important messengers and generals. It was pretty blingy, tended to distract fire away from the actual body and/or conceal where the torso was, but it also did really catch arrows, at least enough that it'd plink instead of plunk into their armor.
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Sep 2, 2014 04:38
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Phobophilia posted:Everything I've read and watched about feudal Japan makes them out as some of the least honorable motherfuckers ever. Yeah, it was a time of tremendous civil war where efficacy won out over honor any day. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (one of the 'winners,' more or less) started life as a shoe shiner and rose to the top by being real hard core. Oda Nobunaga may have committed glorious seppuku, but he only did so after he was betrayed by a vassal. Mostly because he'd used that vassal's mother as collateral for a deal which he then broke. Like, I think there was a sense of 'honor' to the culture but it was pretty blood thirsty. Nabbing a dude with one of those horo silk arrow catchers, for instance, was real nice because then you could wrap their head in the silk for a sick 2x bonus to your honor rating on that kill, brah. Or, for instance, the (true) story of the 47 Ronin. Yeah, they get big props for honor and poo poo, but their honorable action was basically 'hold a grudge for a year and then knife a dude in his sleep.' There's an 'honor' there but it's clear about violent men being encouraged to commit violence in a way that benefits their lords. Kemper Boyd posted:Yeah, the later idea of bushido and so on are basically made up. Yeah, I disagree a bit. The idea is clearly there, if often abused, as a sort of theoretical. But again it's almost always about how you treat your lord and how your lord treats you. It's an honor that keeps a closed circle because your circle is fighting with another circle, it's not about respecting you foe (because ew...) it's about your glory. But yeah, then the Tokugawa's take over and get really, really good at locking the country down. Like it's basically a clinic in 'how to create a stable system.'
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Sep 2, 2014 15:31
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JaucheCharly posted:Since loving underage boys up the rear end went out of style here in the west. Lol
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Sep 5, 2014 15:24
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Verisimilidude posted:The context of most fechtbuchs is such that you have a student of a master fighting a common fencer. While this video is focusing on Meyer, which I don't particularly study, the Liechtenauer tradition has a similar context where you're learning the "master strokes" which are built to defeat what was referred to as "common fencing", IE the common way of fencing without proper training. It's part of why it is believed that Liechtenauer wrote his fechtbuch in cryptic verse. In order for the "master strokes" to stay within the circle of his students, they were purposefully written to be difficult to decode. THis comes up a lot in the punching and hugging A/T a lot. Over there there's a pretty big meh attitude towards training towards those "master combos" that work against people throwing big exaggerated haymakers because that's what drunks do, right? The thread consensus is that, drilling to he the basic body mechanics of the technique aside, that's pretty silly and hammering a technique that will get you killed by someone who passes a certain level of skill into your muscle memory is a less that ideal way to train.
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Sep 30, 2014 22:36
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Siivola posted:Personal shields were used up until the fifth century or so, and afterwards as movable cover similar to European pavises. Pressure from the Mongols was more of a sharp shock sort of thing. The big changes there were the fortification efforts on the coast and the resulting weakening of the shogunate because a. they poured a bunch of resources into forts that were in really peripheral areas and b. the traditional way to reward warriors was to parcel out the lands of the defeated. Fine in most fights but when winning means "not being slaughtered by angry Mongols" there isn't much by way of spoils. Blah blah centuries of in fighting. And THAT'S when they really got on the pike train. (Also Maurician fire drill before Maurice, because Oda don't gently caress around.)
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Oct 25, 2014 16:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:How common were bandits and raiders living outside the normal borders of society? When/where? e: And what do you define as 'normal borders of society?' I do love a culture with a good vendetta/blood feud tradition.
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Nov 23, 2014 03:14
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Nektu posted:Dumb idea time: Sooooo, everyone goes off into their own corner and huddles up?
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Feb 1, 2015 22:02
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Worth noting too that not everyone (and not everyone's horse) is going to be decked out in plate.
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Feb 6, 2015 19:47
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icantfindaname posted:So tell me about Iran in the Middle Ages. To what extent was Islamic Persia/Iran a dominant force in the caliphates? I've read later on after the Mongol invasions Iran lost out to the Ottomans and gradually weakened, why was that? So way back in the day the 'Persian' Empire and the Roman Empire (at this point, the Western half has fallen and is only now kinda getting its poo poo together, but the East has kept on trucking okay) are scrapping when out of nowhere a bunch of Arab tribes under a new Abrahamic spin off absolutely faceroll big chunks of the Roman's and the entirety of the Persian Empire within just a few years. Then, aside from a quick trip to Iberia, they go about sorting succession issues and have a few civil wars. At this point there is no 'Persia' per say, but the Abbasid (in a rather calculating way, it seems) use Shia partisans and the resentment of non-Arabic Muslims against the Umayyads, and proceed to mostly go back to assassinating Shia Imams, though they are a bit nicer to the non-Arabs under their rule. Again, no Persia as a polity but Persian intellectual traditions keep rolling along with the other Greeco-Arabo-Roman poo poo going on. Eventually the Abbasids cede more and more power to different military groups that nominally follow the caliph but really ran the show. Of these the Buyids and the Seljuks are the most famous. These were Turkish folks but they set up their main power base in Persia so you might call them a Persian Empire. Eventually some Seljuk vassals were powerful enough to take the title Shah, (the Khwarezm Empire) so you might call that a Persian Empire. Again you have a sort of Turkic military/ruling class, but lots of Persian intellectual traditions (and geography), with an Arabic religion thing going on, then the Mongols roll in and it's the same situation. Some of the most elaborate Shahnameh illuminations were made for Mongol rulers, for instance. Persia really gets 'restored' later though, with the Mongol states tearing each other to bits post-Timur an actual honest to god Persian (... kinda) Sufi/Shia leader comes and sets up the Twelver Shia Iran more or less as we know it. Their decline relative to the Ottomans was probably a bunch of things (tm), general imperial rot, trying to hold territory in Afghanistan, have more, angrier neighbors, being more easily bypassed via ocean trade, that sort of stuff.
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Feb 9, 2015 07:12
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Fizzil posted:The first persian polities after the Islamic conquest were actually the Saffarids and then the Samanids, Also the Shia were still a largely Arabic sect exclusive to Iraq, the Abassid revolution came from Khorasan (not really a traditional Shia area). The Samanids are interesting, because alot of early medieval iranian pottery is attributed to them, and they evoke alot of artwork from the Sassanid era (including depictions of cataphracts). Yeah, I guess I should have made that more clear, those two were under nominal Abbasid control, but very nominally. The Samanids went after the Saffarids on orders/with permission from the Caliphate and, of course, promptly became strong enough to quietly ignore any more requests, so they went off and did their own thing. The Samanids have a very similar problem to the Abbasids though, in that they ended up relying too much on a Turkish warrior class that eventually ended up running the show, often as 'governors' supposedly under the big dynasties actual rule. I guess I was answering the 'what role did the Iranians play in the Caliphate' question, and there it was mostly social and intellectual. And yeah, the Abbasid revolution had Sunni Arab supporters and the Abbasids were themselves Sunni Arabs, but the revolt supported in particular by Shia Muslims and non-Arab Muslims who felt iced out by the Umayyads, and of those two only the non-Arab Muslims got what the wanted, as the Abbasids moved the capital from Damascus to Baghdad and generally emphasised a more Persianized cultural outlook than before.
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Feb 9, 2015 16:02
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Siivola posted:Hey I need to win an ~internet argument~ with some of my tabletop gamer buddies on IRC. Untrained peasant levies keep coming up, what's a good page to read up on how fighting people tended to be mostly professionals? Define professionals. There's a difference between a mercenary professional and a military class. Also a difference between an untrained levy and a militia that does occasional training and is on hand to be called up.
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Feb 24, 2015 17:05
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ManOfTheYear posted:There's a lot of talk about soldiers having PTSD and mental health problems after returning from combat, but I've started to wonder how much there were mental health issues with medieval people due to violence and fighting? Like how unstable would you have to be after surviving several battles where you cut people in two with a sword? So there's a couple of things going on. One is that 'modern' PTSD is tied in some ways to TBI, meaning that the old term 'shellshock' is even more apt than not. So the use of explosives in war is adding a physiological component to the old psychological ones. Some war vets now might face problems more like a football player who has led with his head a few to many times than they do other actual killers. Another is that psychological issues can present in different ways depending on cultural contexts, so that muddies the water a bit. Lastly you have different types of trauma going on. A single incident of complete and total violence can totally gently caress a person up, so can a constant grinding gnawing fear. WWI, Vietnam, and the current Afghanistan/Iraq conflicts are somewhat notorious for this sense of 'never safe' which can gently caress people up pretty well. Past conflicts usually did have most of their deaths outside of the big pitched battles, but some how waiting for the next round of dysentery to hit the camp is different than watching the trees for Charlie and the road for IED's. Rent-A-Cop posted:I've always found this to be weak evidence for a conclusion that soldiers intentionally avoided killing. Muzzleloading firearms can be quite fiddly. Their loading and firing process involves several steps, that if performed incorrectly, would result in a failure to fire or a squib. Loading and firing quickly and consistently under pressure takes a great deal of training that ACW soldiers often didn't have. I find it more probable that soldiers were improperly loading or priming or were firing with malfunctioning locks or broken flints and simply failed to notice under the sensory assault that is massed musketry. It does at least speak to stress and panic.
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Mar 16, 2015 22:28
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Ashcans posted:Of course, the source for the 40lb sword seems to be the same legends that say that guy was decapitated during the battle, and then continued to fight with his 40lb two-handed sword in one hand and his own severed head in the other until he had completed his vow. It's hard for something to be more obviously a 'our dude is awesome as gently caress' bragtalk, so the real problem is that anyone read that story and thought any of it should be approached as fact. The forums poster forever memorialized by caught my attention by insisting that Homer should be treated as a factual account of events.
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Apr 7, 2015 21:58
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Tomn posted:Not a fully-fledged expert on this, but I can give a quick (and fairly inaccurate, please consult a real historian before throwing these around) rundown. This is pretty spot on but I'll add that part of the pacification process was the Shogun's trying really hard to cement the existing social castes as absolute.* So the shogun needed to simultaneously emphasize the samurais' 'role' as a warrior while at the same time defanging them. Carrying swords wasn't just a fashion the samurai picked up to compensate for their now neutered status, it was legally mandated that they carry them at all times as sign of their social station, meanwhile the peasant classes were being forcibly and emphatically disarmed. The dissonance between the samurai's actual role and their societally proclaimed one manifested in a few ways, and you could see the cracks forming even before Perry showed up, but the shogun tried to make sure it expressed itself in pointless acts of 'honor' and petty duels. That said, honor and loyalty were well regarded traits in the Sengoku times... if only because it was so distressingly rare. Ruthlessness led Oda Nobunaga to the top of the pile but loyalty has it's own pragmatic value. Oda commited suicide after a vassal turned on him after he [Oda] sent that vassal's mother to another party as a hostage held as collateral for a deal he deliberately broke. Tokugawa's great strength was knowing when loyalty and honor was the pragmatic choice and when treachery was the best option. *Mostly this was because the gun and long pike had, as in Europe, upset the 'normal' military situation that was dominated more by a horse and bow warrior class. Preventing that crossover put a ceiling on how militarised one daimyo could get (without, at the very least, openly defying the status quo and getting dogpiled for it) and also prevented 'Lord Such and such is arming and drilling his peasants so I must as well etc. etc. etc.'
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Apr 27, 2015 23:26
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Phobophilia posted:The gun had been introduced to Japan long before the Tokugawa shogunate. Portuguese matchlocks were introduced to Japan in 1543, and they were very rapidly adopted. Japan, being part of China's sphere, already had a familiarity with gunpowder, but the European weapons took that to the next level. Nobunaga was already arming masses of his peasants with matchlocks and using them to conquer his rivals. And after unity, Hideyoshi had a massive veteran army of musketmen that he used to devastating effect in the invasion of Korea. Yup. That's the army that Ieyasu wanted to defang. I'm not sure that all the musketmen were peasants, (and we should not forget that the long pike was also there to protect the musket men) but the militarization of previously under-militarized classes was part of the run away growth in power of the regional lords and thus the Sengoku instability. I think the other thing to note is that this wasn't just an attack on militarization, the shogun's also took wives and first born sons as hostages and demanded that each lord visit Edo so that they a. got constant reminders of the shogun's power b. spent a lot of money, esp. because they had to maintain their Edo estates while at home and their home estates while in Edo, and c. spend a lot of time travelling and less time plotting/administrating.
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Apr 28, 2015 00:40
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Phobophilia posted:On this note, I've never had a satisfactory answer as to how Japan developed a horse archer culture. Japan is extremely mountainous. China, I can understand, it was to counteract steppe nomads who had a horse archer culture. Korea, I can understand, they were originally steppe nomads as well, even if a large fraction of the Korean peninsula is mountain. Korea and Japan have always had huge amount of cultural exchange going on, even if nationalists on both sides would rather ignore that. (Or, better yet, claim that they did it first - and those barbarous bastards stole it from us!) Best bet right now (it's all a little pre-history) but the first 'Japanese' agriculturalists probably came from Korea and then the locals saw how well that was working and joined in. The country is very mountainous but the people tend to live in the plains and valleys, even now, with Japan as crowded as it is, massive swaths of the country remain forested mountains simply because it's too much of a bother to flatten it. So horsemen had room to ride around. This was from a brief lecture before we moved on to more cultural stuff, but (very) early Japanese horse archery has been described to me like Iliad-style or WWI fighter ace combat. You'd ride out, pick an enemy rider, insult his mother, proclaim your own prowess, and then the two of you would ride about for a while plinking at each other with bows. Retainers mostly hung around and ran new quivers out to the riders. But yeah, the military aristocracy was built in part on the supremacy of cavalry and archery and the fact that those two required expensive equipment and were skills took a long time to develop.
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May 4, 2015 15:52
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