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First of all hello there and thank you for taking a look at my thread. I hope you find helpful and interesting answers here. Who am I? I am an Honours Class History student in Liverpool Hope University, planning to start my Master’s at the end of this year. In February I become a room & tour guide in Speke Hall (originally a Tudor manor house which later became a Victorian mansion, with a brief career in-between as a cattle shed). Generally I enjoy teaching and sharing information, and I figure this is a much more constructive venue to do that than responding to Youtube debates. What is this about? Medieval History. Anything from the Viking Age to the Teutonic Knights to Marjorie Kemp and what a strange person she was. Any aspects of medieval history that interest you; or any aspects that confuse you and you would like to understand better. Whether food, medicine, technology, daily life, the reasons behind the Crusades. Ask away and I will give the best answer I can. A particular focus of mine is medieval arms and armour. I study medieval swordsmanship from historical manuscripts such as the Talhoffer Fechtbuch – which also contains mad-scientist ideas such as tanks (armoured war wagons with cannons), mobile land-mines with blades, and 15th century diving suits (which are fully functional, if inconvenient). I do not have a HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) group in my area, but I am familiar with some of the fighting texts and much of the research into the performance of medieval arms and armour. A difference between this and the military history thread is I expect a different focus. This will be part military history, part martial arts, and part social/political/cultural history. Anything else to know in advance? Medieval history is mostly guesswork, so answers will revolve around not only what we know but also how we know and what evidence there is to support that conclusion. A lot of answers will have a simple version and more nuanced and detailed version. I like busting misconceptions. A huge amount of what people think they know about the medieval world turns out to be completely wrong. Actually that is true for almost any area of history, but the medieval world is the area I feel most qualified to answer in detail. University does not like me keeping a sword on campus, so if answering your question means testing things out with my practise sword then you may have to wait until the weekend for a full answer. Let the questions begin!
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Jan 23, 2013 02:01
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Karl Fungus: Many common fantasy “medieval” weapons were used somewhere at some time. That somewhere might not have been a very large place, and that some time might not have been very long, although generally fantasy weapons have a loose tie to reality. Except for double-headed axes. That is the one weapon off the top of my head I can say was never used in battle. There was a huge difference between armies of 700 AD and armies of 1400 AD, although the most common weapon for either was a version of either a bow or a spear. The spear of 700 AD might be 7-8 foot long and used with a shield, while the spear of 1400 AD might be a pike (10-20 foot spear) or a halberd (combine a spear with an axe). The bow of 1400 AD might be crossbow. However, bow or spear is the broad theme. Bows and spears were relatively inexpensive, might be used for hunting, and being able to attack without the enemy attacking you was a huge advantage. According to Konungs Skuggsja (a diverse text from around 1250) one spear was worth two swords in a shield wall. Using a bow also allows an unskilled fighter to fight at less risk to himself. Swords, axes and maces were used, although were typically not primary weapons. Exceptions did exist, such as the Dane Axe or Scottish Claymore, although these were not particularly common. The first weapon was always the one that could strike from further away, and then the secondary weapon is drawn once you get closer. These weapons also changed significantly over the medieval period. Actual swords tended to be reserved for the wealthy, although cheaper options existed that resembled oversized knives – these could be the seax in early medieval Europe, a messer in later Germany, and later on cheaper swords for pikemen such as the Swiss Degen and German katzbalger become possible. Most medieval armies were properly equipped for battle. Some places (England, Denmark) had militia laws requiring every man above a certain level of wealth to keep weapons and armour, others (France) tried to forbid the peasants from owning weapons but relied more on household troops. The German & Italian states varied too much for me to easily keep track of, although I think they tended towards armed. Flails were mainly used in the Hussite Wars, although mainly saw use in East Germany during the 1400s. The advantage is most peasant farmers had used a flail to thresh grain, so he would know how to use a version adapted to combat. It seemed to be used about as much as the pike according to ordinances. For example, Duke Albrecht V ordered in 1421 that of every 20 men, there should be 3 handguns, 8 crossbows, 4 pikes & 4 war flails. It also tells us something about Duke Albrecht’s maths (3+8+4+4=19, not 20). LUMMOX: I have never really experienced hot debates in medieval history, at least not within scholarly circles. Instead there is just straightforward cases of either outdated information (such as with medieval sword use, the concept of the Dark Ages) or a disconnect between scholarly research and popular culture (attitudes towards the Crusades, views of medieval science, and so on). The closest answer I could give would be to give a list of common misconceptions about the medieval period. On medieval combat, the chief debate I can think of is whether the longbow is really able to pierce plate armour or not (the answer: not reliably). I hope those help!
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Jan 23, 2013 05:11
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Zombieswithblender: Castle sieges were the most common way to conduct medieval warfare, although assaulting the walls was a last resort. Actually it was battles that were avoided if possible, unless you were confident of victory, because a battle that goes badly meant losing your army, which was difficult to recover. Instead, you tried to avoid exposing your army to risk. Raiding or indirect warfare was popular. The English during the Hundred Years War used raids called chevauchees against the French, where soldiers would sweep in burning villages and sweep out. The idea was to reduce productivity of the land and a bizarre PR-campaign. A feudal lord had a responsibility to protect his population, and a chevauchee proved the lord was failing that. In practise, the PR campaign tended to cause disorganisation, but also earned a lot of hatred. Good examples are the raids by Edward the Black Prince in his 1355 campaign laying waste to the lands of Armagnac, which caused the count to lose a lot of support. He launched them again in 1356, 1373, and 1380. The interesting thing is there did not seem to be much of a solid goal to those campaigns other than loot and pillage. Again it was used by William the Conqueror during the Harrying of the North. Essentially rather than fight the rebels he would slaughter civilians, burn crops and destroy livestock, and just let people starve over the winter. That said, William did get criticised in a lot of chronicles for the extent of this. Orderic Vitalis says “I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this slaughter. God punish him.” Al-Kutami, an Umayyad (Moorish) poet wrote down “Our business is to make raids on the enemy, on our neighbour and on our own brother. In the event we find none to raid but a brother.” If we look at Frederick I’s invasions of Italy, there was the Siege of Crema (1159-1160), the Siege of Milan (1161-1162) and the Siege of Alessandria (1174-1175). There were battles in between, such as the Battle of Tusculum. However, where a battle could be won or lost in a day, each those three sieges crossed the boundary from one year to another. Months would be spent besieging a castle or a city, possibly sapping/undermining, possibly bombardment, rather than sending troops forward. Ferdinand: Europe probably did get gunpowder from China in 1242, introduced to it by the Mongols. In fact a term for gunpowder was “Chinese snow”. Paper was introduced through Islamic Spain to Europe in the 1200s as well. The most important imported technology in Europe was Arabic Numerals, the numbers we use today. Before that they used the I, II, III, IV system of the Romans. Most inventions, however, were not imported from Asia. The compass appears slightly later in Europe than the compass in China (1186 Europe, circa 1040 China) but before the compass spread to the Middle East (1232), and independent invention seems more likely than the compass spreading from China to Europe without crossing the space in-between. Alphadog: Doing a brief read-around I have not found that debate, although it sounds interesting. I have not come across it in my research, however. As far as I knew, the clothes Vikings or Norse peoples wore were described by other sources and artwork as well, although that would be biased towards the upper classes and people who generally appeared in tapestries. There are lots of references to tunics, I think Dorsey Armstrong describes a humorous anecdote about a thing a man keeps beneath his tunic, to put in a hole he has put the thing in many times before (referring to a key). Trousers get described in the sagas, such as Fljotsdaela saga, where the trousers of Ketill Prioanderson are described as having no feet, but straps under the heels like stirrups. Does this mention mean trousers were supposed to have feet? So overall I would be surprised if there was such a heated debate on the subject, just because there are other sources such as tapestries or the sagas that can tell us what they wore during the Viking Age. However, if you do come across anything on that debate, please send it to me because I would love to learn more about historiographical issues. Avalanche: If you want a good archer, start with the grandfather. Or so the saying goes, most often applies to longbowmen. Most English longbowmen had distinctive skeletons, such as those found on the Mary Rose. Twisted spines, grossly enlarged left arms, bone spurs on the wrists, shoulders and fingers. This is because the draw weights are so high (100-120 lbs seems to be the average, although with some in the 150-180 lb range). Quite a few laws required archery practise in England. Edward III in 1363 decreed weekly archery practise on Sundays, supervised by village priests. In 1477 Edward IV banned a cricket-type game because it interfered with archery practise, and Henry VIII passed statutes on archery in 1515. I have heard it even goes back to the 1252 Assizes of Arms but have not been able to confirm that. No weapon ever truly required a lifetime of training, although many are much more skill-based than others. A trend I notice is single-edged swords tended to be more common among the less-skilled troops, while the knights and elite professional warriors preferred double-edged swords (because you can use lots of cuts with a double-edged sword that are not obvious). My favourite weapons are things like the bill-hook, which is essentially a modified gardening tool. Nearly any farmer would be familiar with how to use it, which would cut down on training time considerably. I am running low on time but will answer the rest of your questions when I get back. Svarotslav: Thanks for the heads up, I have a little more to say on that subject when I get back. Tzikourion seems to be a general term for axes. The archaeology on them seems to be kind of complicated, with single heads and spikes on the back that apparently can slot together into a double-headed construction. I will post images when I get back.
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Jan 23, 2013 13:36
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Avalanche: Part II, Knights. Knights were extremely skilled warriors. Early on, they were death on horses. Later on, fighting on foot became more common, at which point knights became death on legs. Most of our evidence is concentrated from 1300 and later. The main reason for this was because that was when the fighting classes became more literate. Before then, the people who knew how to fight were not the people who knew how to write books, which limited how much information survived today. However, what we do know seems to imply that it was in place beforehand. First of all, we can look at the martial arts. If we look at the fight-manuals such as the I.33, the Talhoffer Fechtbuch, Flower of Battle and Nuremburg Handschrift, they all depict advanced and sophisticated martial arts even from the limited picture we have of them. Johannes Liechtenauer, an early fighting instructor from the mid-1300s, claimed that everything he taught had already existed for centuries. Actually his teachings included relatively recent weapon designs like the longsword, but I interpret it as saying that fighting techniques relying on the same principles existed before. Second is athleticism. The Towton Graves indicate knights or men-at-arms had fairly distinctive skeletons too, such as separations in their shoulder blades that come from vigorous exercise beginning at early childhood. Highly developed arms similar to tennis players. We definitely know knights during the Wars of the Roses were extremely physically capable men. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-gcvq7Vk90&t=6s For more on athleticism, the works of Marshal Boucicaut aka Jean Le Maingre, describes an exercise regimen and the feats a knight was expected to be able to do. Example feats: Leaping onto horseback in full armour (no cranes required, you should be able to jump onto the horse unaided). Turn somersaults whilst clad in a complete suit of mail (save for the helmet). Vaulting over a horse. Climb between two perpendicular walls standing 4-5 feet apart by mere pressure of his arms and legs, without resting on either ascent or descent. Climb the underside of a ladder using just his arms, while in full armour. Doing the same without armour, but only with one arm. Watch gymnastics and imagine doing that stuff wearing 50-60 lbs of armour. From that evidence we know knights at the time (1300-1450 for those sources) trained extensively like athletes, presumably with the same willingness to endure discomfort as any athlete would have. Sources that directly tell us how skilled knights of the day were are harder to find (read: I can’t think of any :P ) but their athleticism tells me they took their training seriously. We have less information on earlier times, however the Annales Lamberti of 1075 complained about the physical fitness of labouring peasants, implying that the warrior class were expected to be more fit. If we know they took their training seriously and they had access to sophisticated martial arts, I would expect them to be highly skilled fighters. Thirdly is the social system, which is why I think earlier knights were also just as highly trained. Feudalism and the institution of knighthood were structured to support an elite class of full-time warriors trained from childhood. In many ways the education of a knight mirrored that of a guild craftsman who was first an apprentice, then a journeyman, and finally a master. Except with a knight his trade was war. A knight began his career between the ages of 6 & 8, when he was sent off to another nobleman’s court. He started off as a page, which was partly a glorified servant but received part-time military training. Often the servant work would toughen them up, such as pulling wooden horses on wheels so that older squires could practise jousting, so it would help build up strength. At ages 13 or 14 he became a squire, apprenticed to a knight, if he has demonstrated an aptitude for being a warrior. This would act mostly as a support troop, managing a knight’s horses, bringing him fresh lances during battle. In many cases a squire would protect his master if the master was injured, or guard prisoners. Normally, between ages 18 & 21 one would be knighted, ideally having either proven ones skill or shown valour in battle. This system was in place from early on, so I doubt they would have such a detailed system of raising knights and not train them well. Additionally devices like the Pell or Quintain used for training also existed early on. Occasionally people did get knighted for other reasons, such as Balian of Ibelin knighting 60 men in the defence of Jerusalem, or a Holy Roman Emperor (Sigusmund) knighting a peasant to stop a knight from abusing his rank in a legal dispute. However, the knight as a military figure as opposed to a social title was about as skilled a warrior as was likely to ever be. Part III, Commanders. Early on, commanders routinely fought alongside their troops. Perhaps not the infantry though. At Hastings, William the Conqueror was participating in attacks on the Saxon shield wall, enough that there was a suspicion he had died and he had to take off his helmet to show everyone he was alive and well. Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick fought on foot at the Battle of Barnet to show his men that he had no intention of fleeing. Which did not work out well for him due to a friendly fire incident. I also think Warwick was described as "with great violence he beat and bore down all who stood before him." Henry V fought near the front at Agincourt, I think his helmet got damaged, and before that he was known to have a scar from being shot in the face with an arrow. John of Bedford led a charge by the English men-at-arms at Verneuil, after the French/Lombard/Milanese cavalry had scattered his longbowmen. At the Battle of Lewis it was a nobleman leading the charge. Overall, I think it would be more noteworthy to find a commander who didn’t take part in the charges. It started happening more towards the 1500s, but it was far more traditional for a king or duke at the head of the army to be kicking rear end and taking names. Svarotslav: I looked into Tzikourion, and it seems to be a general word for axe. The Tactica of Leo (900 AD) says the cavalry should have a double-edged axe, although then says one edge should be long spear-like point. Others had a long protrusion like a hammer face on the back. Apparently there is mention of some axes being like the bipennis (which was a double-headed axe, strictly ceremonial, and later used as a symbol of both fascism and feminism). What I was thinking of when I mentioned double-headed axes was the larger fantasy-style axes, which would just be a huge extra weight on an already heavy weapon. I imagine with a much smaller axe it would be plausible, although I would much prefer a spike or a hammer on the back so my weapon could be multi-purpose. The image I wanted to post would stretch the board, but it shows the curved back-spike of one head fitting snugly over the axe-side of another, and vice versa. All the archaeological finds I can see are single-headed, although with a point or hammer or something on the back. What I did find that was interesting was two axeheads together could be placed on top of each other and fit together to form a double-headed axe shape. However, I learned something from that, so thanks for letting me know! ASIC: Early on they used a type of furnace called a bloomery which was essentially a glorified chimney with air forced through by bellows. This initially produced a mix of iron and slag called sponge iron, then it was shingled which means drawing out under a hammer, which probably involved gratuitous beatings. Eventually these got larger and larger, which is just as well because you would only get 1 kg of iron at a time. Eventually they moved onto the blast furnace that could produce fully molten steels, as well as crucibles. This was economical in that it could provide larger amounts of iron/steel at once, and it also was less work because it could produce more homogenous steels. The early bloom steels required pounding, folding and welding to be high quality steel – similar to Japanese tamahagane. Or you could carburise the surface to harden the iron. Alpha Dog: I think later hose were more sock-like in design, with full feet. Often hose were combined with breeches, so the breeches would be the pants and the hose would be essentially glorified socks. My main concern when judging Viking Age clothing was warmth. If it is practical, warm and comfortable, it makes sense for Vikings to use. Grave goods were probably fancy, but trousers and tunics are a pretty safe bet. They could definitely work designs in. Pattern-welding was sometimes layered on top of a soft iron core, which would say it was decorative rather than functional. How detailed these designs got I am unsure, but they could definitely use it just for decoration. Heimskringla seems to be more accurate the further forward in time it goes. The first few sagas are believed to have been essentially made up, but more credible the nearer to the 13th century the sagas get. For me, it is still valuable as a resource of the time, because even exaggerations tell you what people felt a need to exaggerate, which is an important aspect of my dissertation. However, I am just parroting the established consensus rather than conducting an analysis of my own. Railtus fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Jan 23, 2013 |
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Jan 23, 2013 15:28
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Nelson: Specific diets for knights do not seem to be well known. The MS_3227a (Nuremburg Handschrift, or Codex Dobringer) seems to have food recipes despite being largely a martial arts manual, although that could be general, not just knightly. It also has magic spells in there. Some organisations like the Knights Templar or Hospitaller would sometimes be required to eat like monks, essentially living off bread and vegetables, yet it never seemed to impact their fighting prowess. No superweapon truly existed, although game changers would be the advancement of cannons in the 1400s. Older castles were designed with higher walls and often a square shape to maximise the space enclosed within its walls. These forts were vulnerable to cannons. Later forts would then be built resistant to cannons, but the castles that had dominated in previous centuries stopped dominating. Another game-changer was the adoption of munitions armour. These are cheap sets of plate armour for foot soldiers that do not require fitting to the individual soldier. Not as good as a knight might wear, but it will still stop a sword or a spear or an arrow reliably, and that resembles the general pattern – instead of investing massive resources into one man (the knight) you can get a more cost-effective use of resources by having cheaper infantry with mass-produced equipment. There was an idea for tourism, normally under the guise of pilgrimage. The Canterbury Tales was actually fairly realistic in describing pilgrimage as a semi-social event. Margery Kemp went on a lot of pilgrimages, while her fellow pilgrims kept trying to ditch her. Anyway, things like pilgrimages were great excuses for vacation. If you could afford it. One thing people did for entertainment was carve the medieval equivalent of noughts-and-crosses on the back church benches. Pews were not standard, but those that did exist had some interesting carvings on the back.  Hunting and hawking were considered recreation for the nobility, and hunting was important as training for war (if you want practise fighting for your life, engage a boar in hand-to-hoof combat). Dancing was extremely common. I’ll try to think of others.Sweevo: A go-to guide for medieval tactics and strategy was De Re Militari. Early tactics seemed to involve the shield wall, to give as much mutual protection as possible. The idea was to break their shield wall while keeping your formation in good order. One way this was done was through tools like the Dane Axe – a mail-clad Saxon huscarl could hack down on the unshielded side (there is a rumour they used their long axes left-handed on purpose) and disrupt the formation, causing enough of a break for your own shield-wall to capitalise. An important tactic was combined arms. The English in the Hundred Years War combined dismounted knights using pollaxes with archers, the idea being that the archers can shoot directly at the approaching Frenchmen and then step back behind the cover of the knights once the French get closer. Later on you see fully armoured knights or doppelsoldners mixed in with the pikemen, to hack down anyone who gets past the pikes or to exploit breaches in formations. Field fortifications were important. Again, the English in the Hundred Years War would use fields of sharpened stakes to prevent cavalry charges, which worked early on (Azincourt & Crecy) and failed elsewhere (Verneuil & Patay). This was also used in Laager or Wagonburgs in the Hussite wars, which was literally creating a fort by making wagons in a circle and using the wagons as shooting platforms. A few had planking and cannons installed specifically to assist this purpose. Pike formations became popular later on, pioneered by the Swiss (although largely with the help of ambush and ferocity) which later inspired the German Landsknecht and Spanish Tercio. The Scottish also used early pikemen. It was noted the best place to charge a pike square was on the rear corners. A circle or schilltrom could be formed, but if the pikemen defend all sides at once, they make an excellent target to shoot at. Those are off the top of my head. Obvious stuff like flanking, cavalry charges and so on were also important. Godhio: That is a really good description of the transition from medieval to renaissance warfare. I like it. I would say training and organisation. I do not know any historical languages; to be honest I think I would really struggle to learn them. If I get a good chance I will, but I think it might be difficult. Ed: Honours Class means I’m in my 3rd year of a 3 year Bachelor’s Degree. It sounds better than 3rd year student so I go with that. I will try to start using quotes. I cannot guarantee I will always remember, and these forums are different to the ones I usually use, but I will do my best. Reading through the forum rules there seems to be no rule against double/triple/quad-posting (am I correct?), so I could give each reply its own post with a quote. Would that help? Railtus fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Jan 23, 2013 |
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Jan 23, 2013 19:18
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Moridin920 posted:Use the [timg] tag, it'll adjust the image to a thumbnail that expands to fit the board or to its full resolution depending on where you click on the thumbnail. Thanks!   
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Jan 23, 2013 19:25
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Trump posted:Awesome thread. I've been wanting to get into the middle ages a bit, is there any general overview works you would recommend to get started? Thanks! That helps a great deal. Dusseldorf posted:You mention raiding villages? Were wholesale atrocities on the opposing serfs commonplace earlier in the 100 years war like what happened later in the 30 years war. I assume having a roving army in your countryside is at the very least bad for the food supply of the average peasant but did it also result in every male of age being strung up in a tree? To what extent was medieval war "total"? Not to the same extent, although still pretty bad. Chevauchees were essentially acts of terrorism, PR campaigns designed to undermine the French king by proving he could not protect the French people. Of course Edward the Black Prince needed survivors for his point to be proven to, so the slaughter was not generally that severe. I think slaughtering the population was typically not the done thing, although it did happen on occasions the city was taken by storm (such as the capture of Jerusalem in the First Crusade). However, medieval war was sufficiently harsh on ordinary folks that militia became very popular later on. So I guess low-level atrocities were more the thing? JoeCool posted:What was the deal with self flagellation during the black plague? An imaginatively named cult called the Flagellants took one form of penance – mortification of the flesh – and got carried away. The idea is that there are many ways you can repent for sins, prayers of contrition, good works, pilgrimage, although a few monks would occasionally beat themselves. Because nothing says sorry like self-harm. They were a heretic cult during the 13th & 14th centuries, cast out from the church for their practises. The essential belief that made them grow to the extent they did was that by repenting for their sins they could receive some kind of protection from the Great Death or the pestilence. That the church cast these guys out implies some measure of disapproval, so I don’t think their position was the mainstream of the church. Earwicker posted:I have read in a few places that clean water for drinking was relatively rare for most people in medieval Europe and so everyone constantly drank beer or other alcoholic beverages instead. Is this true or a misconception and if it's true how anyone get anything done and why didn't people constantly die from dehydration and alcohol poisoning? Absolutely. LUMMOX gave a good answer. Essentially regular alcohol could be quite watered down, so you get more water from the beer than you need to digest it. An interesting thing is if you look at the medieval peasant diet, it was very low on calories and high in vegetables. Now pair that with the fact that heavy drinkers get an ale gut because of how calorific most alcoholic beverages were. One problem was used to solve the other. However, with alcohol being a staple, I wonder if Foetal Alcohol Syndrome was particularly common back then. AlphaDog posted:Thanks again! I struggle to think of any off the top of my head, but it is an angle I am using for debating the reliability of William of Tyre’s Historia and accounts of how the Crusader kingdoms treated their Jewish and Muslim population. I have heard it be suggested William of Tyre’s work might be propaganda meant to glorify King Baldwin. However, if it is propaganda, then any suggestion of Baldwin showing kindness towards Jews & Muslims – whether true or false – would be a sign that such kindness was considered admirable according to the people of the time. Another example is the myth of Prima Nocta, or Droit du Seigneur – rumour was that a lord essentially had first dibs on the virginity of a woman on his land when she got married. The rumour is false; every contemporary source that mentions anything of that nature is accusing an enemy of it and using it as an example of how evil and corrupt they are. What tells us is 1: everybody thought it was evil, and 2: nobody thought it was acceptable. Between those two things, we can be very confident it was neither a law nor a custom in western Europe (also, that law is not on any of the books, and no woman was ever identified as having suffered it or even commenting on the practise). EDIT: Apparently there was one reference in Zurich to lords interpreting a bride-pride or marriage fee to mean this, but this was also in the context of the church condemning them for abusing their position of power to sexually harrass their subjects. In Ancient Greece they used to use wine to disinfect water (in my Classics A-level I remember one person was notable for only adding the minimum of wine to his water for it to be safe to drink), so I lean towards the alcohol kills germs theory just because it worked for pre-medieval peoples. However, boiling + alcohol is certainly more thorough. Railtus fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Jan 24, 2013 |
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Jan 24, 2013 12:23
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Aggressive pricing posted:Cool thread, I was wondering if you could expand on something: A little of both. At Hastings the knights rode up and down the hill with fresh spears, which must have been exhausting work. In 1066 they were still using spears rather than longer specialised lances, so often they would just throw the spear and ride down for fresh spears, although they would couch (tuck the spear under their arm) as well. For more general lance charges, if the enemy formation is still intact after impact you generally do not want to stick around in a prolonged scrum of fighting - too much risk of being surrounded & mobbed. Also a risk of your horse being killed, since particularly in the earlier years horses were often less armoured than their riders. A mounted knight will make short work of individual infantry (ie: a broken formation), but drawing his sword against a solid shield wall is playing to his weaknesses. If they resist the charge, it is better to ride off a short distance and your squire will ride forward with a new lance for you, so you can be back into the fighting quickly. A point I should make here is that war lances were never designed to break on impact. Only tournament or sporting lances broke on impact. The entire design of the lance was to maximise the amount of force the lance could deliver from the horse's charge, and designing the lance to break would be counterproductive to that. A good example of lance design is provided by the ever-enthusiastic Mike Loades - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NblAIujdzeU&t=2s - starting around 2:20 If knights used their lances on foot, such as at the Battle of Arbedo (1422), using the lances was very similar to a pike formation. If you lost your lance, and the enemy had not got close enough for you to draw a sword or a dagger (by the way, daggers were VERY important), then you could step back and let the man behind you take your position. Go to the back of the formation, and again your squire should hopefully have a new lance waiting for you. This is mostly speculation, but that is how I would do it. Chamale posted:How did health affect the effectiveness of troops in medieval times? I imagine most soldiers were much weaker than they could have been due to malnutrition, sleep deprivation, dysentery, and various other conditions. Health was a major factor in medieval troops. More soldiers died from disease than combat, which makes sense considering that the preferred method of war was to attack supplies or rely on siege rather than direct battle. However, the English at the Battle of Azincourt were suffering from illness and still won. A more complicated version is called Nine Mens Morris. I cannot remember what the basic version is called. I am listening to Dorsey Armstrong, the Medieval World (the Great Courses are awesome), to find out what the game was (she was my source). Earwicker posted:Am I correct in assuming that if a person from the Middle Ages were to somehow fall into a time machine and show up in 2013, that anyone who met them would probably pass out due to their hideous stench? Heck no. Medieval people were no less clean than in any other period, and probably much more clean than people in the 19th century. Missing a bath was sometimes imposed as a penance for a sin, which tells us that bathing was standard. Most towns and even villages had public bath-houses (Etienne de Boileu wrote down some regulations for the Parisian guild of Bathhouse Keepers in 1270). As far as I am aware archaeological finds include wooden tubs or even barrels lined with padding on the inside, used for bathing. Medical texts such as Physica by St Hildegarde of Bingen includes instructions on washing. Compendium Medicinae (1240) gave careful instructions on washing, and also discusses treatment for body odours, strongly suggesting medieval people were at least conscious of the subject. Chamale posted:Conversely, if a person from 2013 somehow ended up in the Middle Ages would they most likely get burned as a witch, die of smallpox, become a beggar, or use their futuristic knowledge to get rich? My suspicion is the modern man would become a beggar. Look at the conveniences we are accustomed to? Our futuristic knowledge is mostly theoretical, I know gunpowder is a mix of charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur, but that does not mean I am in any way qualified to make it. I know adding carbon to iron produces steel, but that does not mean I could use it effectively. Maybe being literate would help? Although even that would need adapting. I think the best chance for a modern man would be the monastery. Witch burnings were not that common in the medieval period. That was much more of a 1600s trend. In fact, until the 1300s, the church considered witchcraft a delusion and it was heresy to accuse someone of it.
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Jan 24, 2013 20:39
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Answers somewhat short because it is late, I am tired and have class in the morning.Ron Don Volante posted:How accurate is the popular depiction of the Medieval era as the "Dark Ages"? If the Roman Empire hadn't fallen, do you think things would have been vastly different? The idea of the “Dark Ages” (a time of ignorance and superstition) is completely inaccurate, I would go so far as to say it turned 180 away from accurate and started running. The medieval period included the Carolingian Renaissance (Charlemagne’s drive for education), the establishment of universities, it was the time when persecution of alleged witches was forbidden by the church (Council of Frankfurt 794, Lombard Code 643, Canon Episcopi circa 900). It was the copying of texts by Irish monks to thank for how much ancient history survives. Technology includes central heating through underfloor channels (8thC), mechanical clocks (13th/14thC), the blast furnace (1150), water-powered trip hammers (12thC) and the printing press (1440). Spectacles/eyeglasses were made in 1286. Admittedly most of this is elite culture, middle-class and up, but the point is the medieval world still had some amazing inventions. That said; we did lose a lot with the fall of Rome. However, Rome was already in decline, the barbarians were growing stronger, and I think the circumstances that would allow the Roman Empire to survive in the west would have made Europe a very different place by themselves. Much of Rome’s military technology was copied from their neighbours. A different balance of power would be needed for the empire to survive. Arnold of Soissons posted:Coming back to this: is there reason to believe that these were commonly attained goals )like the President's Fitness goals) and not theoretical No True Scotsman goals? In other words, is it reasonable to assume that the average knight could actually do these things, or were the merely laudable examples that he ought aspire to? Good question. I am not sure how many of these feats were common. Some of them, like leaping onto a horse in full armour, were presumably expected – I often read that for a knight to fail to do that after his knighting ceremony that would be a cause for great embarrassment. Others, like cartwheels in armour, are easy. Overall I suspect those exact feats were not uniformly expected (I doubt the training knights received was regulated enough for that), just that these feats were examples of how a knight or squire should train. Geoffrey De Charney (14thC knight) did criticise overweight knights, so it is clear not all reached those standards. I would assume the average knight could do quite a lot of those things, just from their bodies. The Towton Graves example mentioned earlier. Another sign is the armour; Dr Tobias Capwell points out that knightly plate armours were typically tailored to the individual warrior – if you look at the Wallace Collection these armours are overwhelmingly designed for men with deep chests, broad shoulders, narrow waists and well-proportioned thighs. Later armours, the munitions armours of the 16thC and later, is when that trend disappears. Also munitions armours tend to be more drab and lower quality metal. This is not something I have studied in detail - and I really should - but it is a trend I have noticed in armours surviving in museums.
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Jan 25, 2013 01:47
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Earwicker posted:Hey just want to say thanks for answering my questions and the others, this has been a really great thread and you really know your poo poo! You are welcome! Thank you for the kind words. ScottP posted:Excellent thread already, thanks! Glad you enjoy it! Most information I have on mercenaries is towards the later period, because the growth of urban centres meant more and more warriors were independent the rustic feudal economy. The condottori of Italy grew out of the 1200s and became big around 1400, the landsknecht were from around 1490, the Swiss Reislaufer emerged from around 1300, etc. Earlier than that, mercenaries only show up occasionally. Norse and Saxon peoples (including King Harald Hadrada) tended to travel all the way to Constantinople to serve in the Varangian Guard, which hints to me that the opportunities for mercenary service in North and West Europe were probably not that reliable. If you entered under some lord’s contract, you were expected to stay on as his household warrior more or less indefinitely. From what I can tell, formally recognised mercenary companies were rare, although centralised authority was so weak in places that lords might sell military support to foreign powers. So a mercenary might be a lord’s warrior or a bandit, but whichever he was, he was that thing first and a mercenary second. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:To expound on a couple things about the so-called Dark Ages, it's actually incredible how non-innovative the Roman world was. I mean there were some pretty impressive engineering achievements, but the Romans were basically cribbing things off the Greeks and improving their deployment, and peoples' accesses. They weren't actually inventing new things wholesale. In fact, it's not entirely unfair to view a significant portion of the Roman period as relatively stagnant in terms of technological development. In some sense, the "Dark Ages" were actually significantly more inventive, although access to technology and information was definitely curtailed compared to Rome. The Romans cribbed off everybody. Mail was copied from the Celts. The favoured form of steel was Noric steel from Austria. I think the gladius hispaniensis was originally Spanish, and the pilum was based on the soliferrum. Apollodorus posted:What's the name for those big centre-grip shields with the spiky ends from the Talhoffer fechtbuch? The only name I have found for them is duelling shields, or judicial duelling shields. The idea behind them was to be as strange and unconventional a weapon as possible. That way, a duel is a “fair fight” because neither combatant is expected to be skilled with that particular weapon. AlphaDog posted:I have a mail shirt from my reenactment days. It's made out of thicker than historical rings because those were what I had. It weighs just under 19kg, or about 42lbs. It turns out I can swim in it. Not very far, and probably not with the padding, but I won 50 bucks off a friend who said there's no way whatsoever it could ever be done by anyone. Is your mail butted or riveted? I notice modern mail tends to be heavier, probably because with butted mail it needs thicker wire to hold its shape and structure.
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Jan 25, 2013 12:54
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Earwicker posted:What are your thoughts on how average people constructed national/tribal/ethnic identities in this time? I understand that in general "nations" as we know them today did not really exist and it was instead a system of land belonging to various lords who swore fealty to nobility and royalty, but I'm wondering more how people thought of themselves. Did people typically think of themselves as Saxons and Jutes for example or are these tribal identities something that modern historians use to talk about these times, and maybe the people just thought of themselves as living on Lord So-and-So's land? It seems like a time when a lot of these things were sort of in flux All of the above. In England, a Norman/Saxon divide existed up until the Hundred Years War, when a concept of "Englishman" was created to raise support among the French... despite the fact the English crown was fighting the war on the grounds that they were the rightful heirs to the French throne. However, that the English people bought the notion of "Englishman" tells me that maybe Norman/Saxon tension was already on the way out by this point. In Spain, people thought of themselves as not-Moors & Moors, since the Iberian Peninsula (Spain & Portugal) was ruled by African Muslims between 700 & 1000 AD. During the Reconquista, religious identities were the most important, which was probably why Spain became such hardcore Catholics - I sometimes joke that Spain was the most Catholic place in Europe, followed by the Vatican. That said, Spain also developed a concept of racism around 1350-1400, since a lot of Moors who "converted" to Christianity to avoid discrimination remained Muslim in secret, and soon dark skin became a mark of Muslim sympathies. In Germany, people were very divided. To some extent there was a sense of being Bavarian or Franconian etc, but they seemed to organise themselves more into Leagues. You would get Leagues of Knights, Leagues of Cities, etc. France I know less about. I have heard that Parisian French only became the dominant language in the rest of France much later, and there are references to the Flemish, Burgundians & Normans as a distinct group. However, there also appeared to be something more of a shared Frankish identity as well. Italy never existed as a political body at the time, each city state was very independent, so there was a clear sense of being Venetian or Milanese. So England had a concept of race or ethnic group, Italy identified by city-state, Germany identified primarily by their local political body, France was a mix of the lot, and Spain identified primarily by religion. These are generalisations, but it seems to be the trend.
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Jan 25, 2013 18:02
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GyverMac posted:One thing I've always been curious about, is the armour of the Normans when they invaded england. On the bayeux tapestry they are all shown to wear scale armour, but that was probably just due to the fact that depicting chainmail would be really hard on that particular medium. So i assume they used chainmail, but was it just the nobles that used it? Or did the entire army use it? First things first, yes it was probably mail. To me it looks like rings sewn too large since depicting every individual ring would be ridiculous. Another thing is the Bayeux Tapestry was made by lots of people; some sections were even stitched by children, so the many different people working on the Bayeux Tapestry may have chosen to different ways to show mail-armoured knights. That said, scale armour was known. Not common or popular, but known. Not the entire army used it; you can see a lot of guys in the Tapestry on horseback carrying spears and shields but only wearing what looks like a cloth tunic. Knights would wear mail, so would some of the more well-off serjeants (the word coming from “to serve”), although most of the others would wear cloth armours often called gambesons. gyrobot posted:So what led to the trend of "lightly armored warrior with either a hulking sword or is a brilliant duelist" can easily overwhelm men in armor? The Barbarian simply just use sheer strength to overwhelm the guy without armor to weight him down while the guy who is a duelist can outfence the guy with a sword and broad before striking him down with a knife in the throat A few misconceptions led to those ideas being popular. First of all, in the 1600s heavier suits of armour were made for cuirassiers (pistol-armed cavalry) to better withstand the more powerful firearms of the day.  The dent in it is a “proof mark” to show it can stop a bullet (whether pistol or musket is unknown). Anyway, these armours might weigh 80-100 lbs, whereas medieval plate armour was typically around 60 lbs for everything. So this gave later people an inaccurate idea about armour. Second is jousting armours were routinely heavier than battlefield armour, for obvious reasons. All you are doing is staying on a horse, so mobility is less important. And you are intentionally crashing at 50 mph (assuming both horses charge at 25 mph) which means thicker armour is more important. Between these two factors, later people overestimated the weight of medieval armour, and therefore its effects on mobility. As far as I know, the barbarian image was based on later media surrounding Conan the Barbarian. Not the original media, since in the Robert E Howard stories Conan would wear armour whenever possible. It is also worth pointing out that in every real “barbarian” culture, whether Goths, Celts, Saxons, Vikings, Gauls, their elite warriors would almost invariably favour the most extensive armour they could find. As for the brilliant duellist, this was caused in an imbalance between military and civilian swordsmanship. Battlefield swordsmanship became less and less important by around 1600 when guns were the dominant weapon on the battlefield. Meanwhile, civilian swordsmanship based around the rapier was still practised, although it got less and less realistic over time as it became more a sport and less a method of self-defence (rapiers in the 1500s were for street-fighting, not polite duels). By the 1700s, medieval-style swordsmanship designed for the battlefield was largely unknown, and 1700s-era fencing simply did not work with older medieval swords that were never designed to be used that way. With the cultural supremacist attitude typical of the Enlightenment era, the fencers of the 1700s assumed that medieval warriors had no skill or technique to their fencing. It was the same arrogance that promoted slavery and colonialism being applied to their past. I should mention rapiers rarely saw use in battle. Even in the 1650s, soldiers preferred wide-bladed cut-and-thrust swords. One reason is rapiers were poor against armour. Another reason is a rapier had less stopping power, a stab that kills someone does not necessarily kill them quickly enough to stop them from taking you with them. Wider-bladed cutting swords could leave a larger stab wound or chop off limbs, giving them less chance to kill you before their wound kills them.
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Jan 25, 2013 21:15
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ammo mammal posted:Are there any movies or shows with accurate depictions of medieval combat? A few have made token efforts. Ironclad with James Purefoy uses half-swording (where you grip the blade with one hand to use the sword as a spear) at one stage and a mordhau (where you hold the sword by the blade and use the handle as a club), and has armour actually make a difference when hit a few times. However, the bulk of the fighting is clearly not done with historical techniques. Which might not be entirely unrealistic (no one has perfect form in a real fight). Kingdom of Heaven has a scene where Balian uses posta de falcone or a Vom Tag (overhead stance), although Godfrey's advice to "never use a low guard" is inaccurate and a bad idea. It also shows armour actually making a difference. Those are about as good as it gets. The bar is pretty low. ookuwagata posted:In most museums I've seen with displays on Medieval and Renaissance armor, you see a lot of ornately designed parade and festival armor, which while impressive looking, doesn't seem terribly practical for actual combat, (the giant protruding animal or monster faces from the faceplates of grotesque armor, for example). What would an upper-class (who could afford to buy custom-made armor) wear to a real battle, and how would the decorative details differ from the armor for show? It depends a lot on the period. Armour design progressed a lot, and most of the decorations were actually defensive features as well. I will give you examples: Transitional armour from around the 1350s:  This is called transitional because it is during a transition between mail armour and plate armour, so it is somewhere in-between. That canvas-looking apron actually has metal plates bolted onto the inside. Decorations for the wealthy are likely to be such things as a velvet cover for the coat-of-plates, or gilt & latten for the studs sticking out of the front. However, a knight might also just wear a surcoat over the top. Decorations are pretty limited at this point. Now for a fairly decorated suit of plate armour from maybe 1380-1420:   The gold or brass trim around the edges of the plates is actually quite ornate by these standards. The full mail shirt is still needed at this point, since the breastplate is fairly limited in coverage. Plainer examples will just miss out the gold trim. However, that would be just fine as a field armour. A later Milanese plate armour from around 1450-1500:  Not many examples of decoration, although imported Milanese armour is a big enough symbol as it is. A decorated German gothic armour from 1450-1500:  Gold trim. The fluting looks decorative, and you might see it on more armour, but those beautiful looking ridges are actually to reinforce the steel. Think of I-beams, the shape is supposed to give structural strength. This allows you to get similar results without making the armour as thick all the way across (saving weight). The pointed shoes are intended only for horseback combat. A later Maximilian (German) armour from around 1500 and later:  Again, more fluting. This was intended not as an upgrade from earlier armours, but to emulate the fashionable clothing at the time, which tended towards pleated looks. An English armour from around 1590:  These were Royal Armours, Queen Elizabeth would award licenses to nobles allowing them to have splendidly decorated suits of armour. This has black-oxide which may or may not help prevent rust, and it is also gilt with a thin layer of gold. This would still be a fairly functional fighting armour. Metropolitan Museum of Art has a good resource on the subject here: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dect/hd_dect.htm Generally, battlefield armour treated decorations as superfluous, though. The stuff is beautiful enough without the extra help. The main rule is practical armour for a real battle clearly looks like armour. If it looks like anything else (most faces for example, or a lion's head, a beard etc) then it is probably parade or ceremonial armour. Another thing is parade armour could often be heavier, it might be bulkier or the body shape is blocky enough to make the arms look as though the shoulders are constantly drawn back. Parade armours typically show more engraving, enamelling, stamped or pressed patterns, cutting into the edges of the plates. The main warning sign of a parade armour is anything that compromises the shape. Being rounded provides structural strength, which is one reason early breastplates could be pot-bellied, since it was a strong shape and the bulbous shape was a glancing surface to make weapons skim off without a solid hit. Others would be pigeon breasted with a point at the front, again to make sure an attack from the front would glance off. Railtus fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Jan 26, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 02:20
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space pope posted:Some scholars have argued that French did not become the national language until after WWI and that a lot of regional dialects like Occitan persisted until then. Although semi-fictional The Life of Simple Man shows that in many areas there was little if any sense of being "French." Frankish is a little bit broader than French. 12th century texts like Gesta Francorum or Historia Francorum were not shy about referring to people from all over the Kingdom of France (and a bit beyond) collectively as Franks or Frankish. It also included parts of Germany, but it was distinct from other ethnic groups like the Lombards or Saxons. Railtus fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Jan 26, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 03:47
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Sevron posted:Speaking of accurate sword fighting, what do you think of this project? http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang CLANG sounds excellent! I have seen beautiful motion capture in Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade (although not the first one). I would really like to see a CLANG based fighting system in a game. I really loved the sword-armlock they showed. Kaal posted:Fantastic thread Railtus. I was wondering what you thought of some of the ideas that this guy comes up with in his video series, for example his theories about how pikes were used in the renaissance period: Thank you for the compliment! I really like his videos in general, I am considering making similar videos when I get comfortable with the technology. I think he normally makes good points, he is intelligent, entertaining, he looks at things from a realistic angle. You have probably guessed by now that I disagree with him about pikes. Pikes did clash and there was carnage. Sources refer to it as Bad War. The Swiss used extremely aggressive tactics, so did the Scots. There are occasions when formations of knights charged all the way through a Swiss pike block and came out the other side (and the Swiss reformed!). What I would do if back in the medieval age is find a monastery. I know they were the social support systems to the poor, I know they valued literacy and education, and they would be the best place for a modern man to survive while adjusting to the new environment and also find a way to apply his knowledge. cargo cult posted:I haven't even made it through the OP yet, but thank you, just thank you. You’re welcome. Pimpmust posted:You brought up the Gambeson, but whenever someone talks about this era it's always about Chainmail/Plate (Knights) vs "Leather Armour" (which every fantasy/RPG every seem to mimmick). Cloth armour was worn by virtually everyone in battle. Even the guys wearing other armour had relatively thin cloth armour as well. It cushioned the armour so it does not chafe, acts as a shock absorber for blows that struck the armour. Another thing was it often had cords on to help attach plates on so the weight of the armour is spread out across the body more easily. Crusader knights were noted by Baha al-Din to wear a vest of felt and a coat of mail so dense and strong that Saracen arrows made no impression upon them. One reason for this is the arrows that worked well against mail (narrow spike-like arrows) were very different to the arrows that worked well against dense fabric (broad cutting-head arrows). By combining mail with padding, neither arrow gest through. Thicker gambesons would be worn by anyone who could not afford metal armour. Sometimes “armour of jerkin” is mentioned, although I expect that to be padded rather than leather. I have worn an arming coat, and the amazing thing is how well it breathes, so on a hot day it actually felt quite cool. I have tried stabbing through the armour with household knives and stuff, though with no one inside it at the time (may affect results), and while I scratched up the fabric a little I did not pierce through. Main advantages are that it was fairly effective armour. It could work quite well against dull blades, although a sharp blade can slice through very easily. This means if the opponent’s sword or “knife” gets nicked or damaged in the fighting that armour will save you, and depending on the spearhead or arrowhead the armour would stop you being skewered. I am not sure how it would perform against maces or warhammers though. Disadvantage is it is ablative. Arrows stick in and tear into it. Slashes that fail to get through will leave gashes that would be vulnerable to the next attack, and the next, etc. Thicker padding could be only slightly lighter than metal armours, and relying on thickness can give the padding a bulk that metal armours do not have. Morholt posted:Crossposting some questions I asked in the general Military History thread. Both forces would be mostly professional warriors, but knights are unlikely. At Grunwald/Tannenburg, one side was the Teutonic Knights, and their armies were certainly not mainly composed of knights. Looking at the casualty figures will tell you that – 8000 dead for the Order, including 200-400 knights. To be honest I doubt the Teutonic Knights ever had around 8000 knights. Another example is either Mohi or Legnica (I cannot remember off the top of my head), when the Templars lost 500 men, including 3 knights, 2 serjeants and 9 brothers. If we interpret knights, serjeants and brothers all as heavy cavalry, that is still only 14 out of 500. That said, it should be noted that the armies that met the Mongols in Poland and Hungary were some of the most slipshod rabble possible. Knightly units, called Lances Fournies, or Gleven, were more likely. These were units consisting of a knight, a secondary horseman, and an archer. Those units would make a good chunk of the forces. Then add militias. Then add mercenary companies. I doubt knights vs knights would resemble duels or pushing matches, although I am not entirely sure how to describe it. Personally I think it depends on which formation got the worst of the lance charge, and then that determined which side was more likely to get mobbed. The only reference I have to knights trampling their own men was at Crecy, when the Genoese crossbowmen mercenaries retreated. I might find other examples if I looked but I think that was just the French being very disorganised at the time. By 1410 there was definitely tactical control. The position on the hill allows the commanders to see how the battle was progressing from above and know where to commit reserves, or where to concentrate archery support and artillery. A problem did exist of calling back men once they were committed, and there were cases of cavalry chasing off the enemy for miles and coming back to find the battle lost. How well a commander had tactical control could dictate the result of the battle; the Scottish won Bannockburn because they had greater tactical control of their schilltroms, able to deploy and attack faster than the English could adjust (read: pull the knights back and let the archers pincussion them). Artillery in the 15th century was certainly common enough to be of importance. The Hussites used it to good effect from the Laager or wagon-forts. Artillery trains were brought at Barnet, and the Yorkists stayed quiet when Warwick bombarded the wrong location, which tells me the effects of having artillery aimed at them were taken seriously. In my mind, the advantage of artillery is you can force the enemy to move; holding position under a sustained artillery barrage is going to get your army shot to pieces. That is why I would expect artillery rather than handguns, apparently the Teutons wanted to provoke the Polish-Lithuanian forces into advancing, rather than trying to chase them. A Buttery Pastry posted:The Franks are of course also a group Germanic invaders, so confusing them with the later French identity might be a mistake. The Langobards/Lombards were as well, but were likewise assimilated into the local population. That both grups placed themselves as the ruling class of an ethnically different population probably makes it even harder to figure out identities I suppose, as the ruling classes have a tendency to not care particularly about anyone but themselves. Trying to assign a modern identity to medieval people is never going to be a perfect fit. The Franks are part of French history but not all French history is Frankish. Inventors might run into trouble from the guild system, which was eager to preserve trade secrets. That interfered with the spread of technology and invention. Another thing is a predominantly rural economy gave many people very limited opportunity to invent, particularly when we have a harvest to bring in. However, I would say to the educated social class with financial backing, medieval times were fairly open to science, discovery and learning more about the natural world.
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Jan 26, 2013 17:09
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Morholt posted:Thank you for your answers. These two pages both mention the Order knights trampling their own men as they were being routed by the Lithuanians at the opening stage of the battle. Especially in the first one it seems like an attempt at vilifying the Teutons, which is why I asked. Vilifying makes a lot of sense. The first source says the Germans had the best field leaders in the world, if that was true then such poor discipline would be very unlikely. Running down their own men would also waste the force of their charge, and I think the knights would have known that. All the knights would need to do to avoid trampling their own men is to form wedges before charging, which would allow the infantry to scatter safely. Again I think that would be very easy to manage if the Teutonic field leaders were so impressive. Overall, I would say the first source is unreliable in general. By 1410 “massive plates” would describe the German armour far more than it would the Polish/Lithuanian armour. Germany, particularly Augsburg (along with Milan as an independent city state) more or less pioneered plate armour in Europe. In fact, East Europe was the place most likely to use mail-based ‘bechter’ armours which integrate mail with rectangular plates. Grand Master Ulrich “who always underestimated the Poles and Lithuanians” is clearly not the subject of an attempt at being impartial. The second page shows much better scholarship, it identifies patterns in the sources and it talks about possible interpretations and so on. It also seems intended for relatively light reading, rather than delving into the sources with any detailed analysis. A Buttery Pastry posted:That's what I figured, since they did invent some cool stuff in the period. It's not like the "Renaissance" would have worked if people from the middle ages hadn't invented the tools and thinking they needed to do their thing. Yes, although the Renaissance might be overstated historiographically. Some food for thought to throw out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vufba_ZcoR0
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Jan 26, 2013 19:04
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Third Murderer posted:I've done some amateur blacksmithing and I thought I'd say something about this. Pattern welding is done by layering different types of steel and then messing around with the layers by twisting or cutting the resulting chunk of metal. You apply an etching chemical after the piece is finished to make the different types of steel stand out (since they will etch at different rates). The idea that metal made this way is superior in some way is a little spurious - I expect it's a myth. Pattern welding is decorative, although it can indeed be used on a functional blade or other tool. It depends on the quality of the metal you work with. Messing about with layers is helpful if working with poor metals, such as an uneven carbon distribution. By spreading the carbon across layers you can make sure that a sword does not have too much carbon in one area (meaning a brittle spot) and too little carbon in another (a soft spot), to ensure a more consistent quality to the steel. However, once you have the metalworking technology to produce homogenous steel all that becomes unnecessary and a waste of extra effort. Overall, it is not superior, it was just an earlier, more labour-intensive method of compensating for limited metallurgy. Around 600-1200 it was the main type of sword in use, but during the later half of the medieval period forge-folded or pattern-welded swords were considered medium quality, and the best swords were the ones made of homogenous steel. Railtus fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jan 26, 2013 |
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Jan 26, 2013 19:09
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EvanSchenck posted: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? Both. There were cases of soldiers wearing armour all the time, particularly with groups like the Landsknecht, who seemed to ditch leg-armour because it was a chore for marching. However, there was also a case of a Duke at the Battle of Azincourt not arriving in armour, and since he tried to armour up quickly he was missing out things that identified him as a Duke – which led to him being killed rather than captured. I can’t remember his name, however. Sleeping in armour depends on the armour. Sleeping in mail or a gambeson is possible; I think it happened during the Crusades. Sleeping in full plate armour would be very difficult.
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Jan 26, 2013 21:50
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Kaal posted:I am super enjoying this video series. World History, Literature, Ecology, Biology, all wrapped up in pretty little videos! The one about the Crusades is hilarious.
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Jan 26, 2013 22:21
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Third Murderer posted:Anyway, I have an actual question. How common was it for the western European kingdoms to claim to be inheritors of Rome? I know Charlemagne was crowned emperor, probably to the annoyance of the Roman emperor over in Constantinople. I would think that, after hundreds of years of Roman rule in places like France and Iberia, that linking your kingdom to the Empire might have been a good way to claim legitimacy? The main one was Germany, despite being perhaps the one nation with the least right to make the claim (the Holy Roman Empire was more or less the territory in Europe that the Romans didn’t conquer). What happened was Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire split on his death into the Kingdom of the Franks (aka: Kingdom of France) and the Kingdom of the Romans (aka: Holy Roman Empire). Kaiser is essentially the Germanic form of Caesar. Apparently East European empires used the term Tsar for it, although without as strong a Roman connotation. I have heard that the Russian Tsars were the eventual heirs to the Byzantine/Roman Empire, but I have not studied that. After the sack of Constantinople a group of Crusaders formed the Latin Empire to try to claim the title of successor to the Romans. Ultimately claims of being the Romans tended not to go anywhere. Germany was largely thought of as the Empire rather than as being particularly Roman. The Byzantine Romans were frequently called Empire of the Greeks or of the Hellenes, though. A complicated factor is that the Pope had already crowned Charlemagne the “King of the Romans”. So anyone else trying to link their kingdom to the Roman Empire had to either claim a link to Charlemagne or dispute the legitimacy of Charlemagne’s coronation. This put people off. Pfirti86 posted:I think the coolest part of medieval history is the stuff that was going down between 1000-1300 in Germany. And like no one ever talks about it. Was Otto IV really beaten to death by his priests? I guess that's what you get for being a Welf! Do not forget, he asked his priests to beat him to death. Nothing springs to mind to say about Italy, although I might add some comment if something reminds me of them. Sicily was apparently Muslim lands for a while, and then Norman lands after that. Kaal posted:I mean, pretty much everyone called themselves Tsar of this or Kaiser of that. The one exception might be England, but on the other hand their kings did pretty much declare themselves to be the pope. The English issue about being head of the church actually goes back to King John Lackland/Softsword aka King John the Completely useless (although the only King John England had). King John essentially seized papal lands in England and the lands of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which resulted in an interdict being placed on England in 1208. An interdict is essentially the church going on strike. Baptisms were allowed, confession and absolution for the dying was allowed. But no marriages, no funerals, maybe even no Mass. Lay people had very limited access to the churches in England etc. Eventually, King John was frightened by the suggestion that the Pope was supporting potential invasions of England that he made England a vassal of the Pope. So when the later troubles with Henry VIII began, remember that England was actually Papal property at the time.
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Jan 27, 2013 04:25
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Lacklustre Hero posted:How cool was El Cid El Cid is very celebrated, he was an extremely successful military commander and a champion of Prince Sancho. Unfortunately, he made his career partly against Sancho’s brothers, which meant that after Sancho died without heir El Cid lost his status and eventually went into exile. Until King Alfonso started losing and needed El Cid’s help. El Cid was loyal to Sancho, however, not necessarily the crown or the family. Particularly as El Cid had been fighting the family for Sancho. Instead of immediately coming to the rescue El Cid started seeing the conflict as an opportunity to carve up some more land for himself. Valencia. Which he succeeded in, officially one of Alfonso’s servants but functionally independent. The city and his administration were tolerant of both Christians and Muslims, with administrators and soldiers of both faiths. That he commanded the loyalty of both religions is a sign that he probably was pretty cool. Another cool aspect was he was very inclusive in his leadership; he would discuss tactics with his troops and accept suggestions. Overall, El Cid was the ideal of knighthood. A valiant champion, an inspiring leader, fair-minded enough to win the loyalty of Christian and Muslim alike, he loved his horse (kind to animals is cool to me) and was a keen tactician. You do not get remembered in history books as simply “The Lord” without some level of awesomeness. AlphaDog posted:Railtus, you said you got to slash at a gambeson without a person inside it - did you place it over something? Trying to cut at things when they're just hanging there is significantly harder than if they have something solid behind them. We did a test with an old mail shirt, and couldn't break it when it was hanging up. As soon as we laid it over a watermelon, the first blow split rings and left a hole (and wrecked the melon). With padding between it and a melon, it still wrecked the melon, but the padding had enough give that the rings didn't split. I just had my arming coat hanging. It was a quick demonstration to my mother’s-fiance’s-granddaughter. INTJ Mastermind posted:How common was differential hardening in European swordsmithing? The Japanese figured it out with their swords - getting a very hard (holds a sharper edge) yet brittle edge section that's backed by a softer and more resilient core. Hard edges with softer cores were standard, the edge hardest nearer the ‘sweet spot’ (part of the blade was most intended to cut with) and softest near the base of the blade (more likely to defend with). This tells me it was mostly strategically chosen hardness levels. However, they typically used different methods to the Japanese. Rather than using clay as a form of insulation, they would use differential tempering. Low quality swords might just have carburised edges, which means the edges would harden more than the core during quenching. Some research on blade hardness: http://www.myarmoury.com/feature_bladehardness.html All of the swords they examined had differential hardness contents, which seems to be the pattern with studies into this. That does not tell me whether all European swords had it or whether they just picked the ones that did for the studies. Since even the lowest quality swords had harder edges and softer cores, I would expect it was commonplace. It was an alternative form of differential hardening, although it produced the desired effect. Differential hardening appeared to be present on swords as early as the Nydam ship (3rd-4thC). Arabic accounts of western swords seem to suggest both flexibility and hardness. Al-Kindi describes both iron and steel used in European swords. Ibn Miskawaih reports raids of Viking graves to find high-quality swords. Nasirredin al-Tusi refers to western swords as extremely flexible and so hard they could hack iron nails. I do not think they differentially hardened it to the same degree as katana, but I think that was a conscious design choice. EDIT: I have heard some at SwordForum say "occasionally" differentially hardened, although that could mean more than one thing - it could mean other swords have uniform hardness, or it could refer to differential hardening as a technique instead of differential tempering or carburisation (other ways to have a hard edge and soft core). However, all research into the hardness of western swords throughout the blade seems to suggest strategically distributed hardness and none of the research I am familiar with has ever provided evidence of a sword with uniform hardness content. So it could just be that these studies have simply not looked at the ones without differential hardening/tempering/carburisation. A Buttery Pastry posted:Ivan III married the niece of the last two Eastern Roman Emperors, Sophia Palaiologina (AKA Princess Zoe). Through her, the Tsars claimed to be the Third Rome (though they're not the only ones), and got it into their heads that they should retake the Second Rome (Constantinople) which kind of set the tone for Russia for the next 450 years. Thanks for the information! Railtus fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Jan 28, 2013 |
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Jan 27, 2013 16:23
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SoldadoDeTone posted:As far as I recall, the Russian Tsar, Ivan III at some point married "the last princess of Byzantium." Basically, Russia sought to obtain the title of Rome and found a woman who may or may not have actually been related to the royal family of the Byzantines. She was reputedly the niece of Constantine XI. Moscow itself was referred to as "the Third Rome." There is a famous quote by one of the Tsars at the time that I cannot correctly attribute, but it was something along the lines of "Moscow is the Third Rome, and it will never fall." Thanks, that is really helpful.
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Jan 27, 2013 18:14
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puredeez posted:Could someone tell me about plague doctors and their cool costumes? EvanSchenck’s reply is excellent, although I would add that the costume in general was kind of a crude hazmat suit as well. The costume was typically waxed to prevent moisture getting through and to generally insulate the doctor against possible infection, they also carried canes so they did not have to touch the patient directly. The mask often had glass windows for the eyes to also act as a barrier between them and possible infection. It actually worked quite well at protecting the doctor, but a doctor could still spread the infection by going from patient to patient. However, whether the costume dates from the 14thC or 17thC is a good question. Modern historians have mentioned ‘beak-doctors’ in reference to the 14thC, although we do not have medieval illustrations backing it up. The mask may have come before the rest of the costume, Guy de Chauliac recommended air be purified, which suggests at least the concept behind the mask existed. However, looking at old illustrations, I see lots of people tending to plague victims but no costumes. I think if the specialist medics were wearing the costume, then that would be more represented in the art - the costume would be a convenient way to show "This is a doctor" for the purposes of the art. Penthesilea posted:I, despite the username that is a reference to a Homeric epic, am also involved in the study of Medieval History. I am currently working towards my MA at a university in the United Kingdom. If Railtus is okay with it, I'm open to answering queries. I certainly do not mind. I will still post my own comments or interpretations though. A friend of mine did his dissertation on how the Black Death contributed towards the development of plate armour.
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Jan 29, 2013 06:04
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To anyone I miss, I have not forgotten you, but I will answer when I get chance.Grand Prize Winner posted:How does that work? True, the 1351 Statute of Labourers was a good example to show the reaction to increased labour prices. I answer this first because it is the main reason for the development of plate armour. Mail, the main armour in use prior to the Black Death, was incredibly laborious to make. Each individual link needs to be hand-riveted shut, which can take hundreds of man hours and involves thousands of rings. The mail-makers and armourers could simply give that work to apprentices and essentially throw semi-skilled labour at it. After the Black Death, labour prices going up made that method more expensive. Shaped metal plates required more skill to make, but fewer man-hours and less overall labour. The water-powered trip hammer and solid steel helmets were around in the 12th century, so the technology already existed to make plate armour. To give some price ideas, Alan Williams in The Knight And The Blast Furnace (excellent book, I recommend the preview at Googlebooks) mentions that in 15th century Iserlohn a mail haubergeon (short shirt) cost 4.6 gulden while a set of plate armour cost 4.3 gulden, and mail could require 2 months to complete while a breastplate required only 2 days. Essentially plate armour was cheaper and quicker to make.
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Jan 29, 2013 16:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:I know this is vague as hell, but I don't suppose you could talk some about currency? Using an oversimplified model, the Carolingian Empire established a Livre as a unit equal to one pound of silver, 20 Sous made 1 Livre, and 12 Deniers made 1 Sous. That was the Frankish version. For England, £ = L. Shilling = Sous. Penny = Denier. For Germany, a Pfennig was a penny. In theory this worked as a model for all over Europe, but eventually standardisation fell to pieces and French duchies would each mint their own currency. For a while, Deniers were the only coin actually minted, with Sous & Livres just being used as units for accounting purposes. Florins were from Florence, the most consistent coinage there was. It lasted around 300 years with little change in the composition (so the same amount of gold used) and was used widely in Western Europe. Guilders or gulden were Dutch, referring to gold. I know a landsknecht mercenary (pikeman) from 1515 was paid 4 guilders per month, whereas a bricklayer or stonemason might earn 2.5 guilders and a labourer 1.6 guilders. That would imply a guilder was also used in Germany. Generally, Europe did not entirely believe in exchange rates. For modern people, money is a value assigned by the government. Today £1 is worth £1 because the authority says so. In medieval times, the worth of a coin was determined by the precious metals in it. On top of that, the manorial economy was based more on land and labour, where people would work the land of a lord in exchange for a portion of land that they could work to grow their own food and crops etc. So if you cannot make head or tails of medieval currency, you probably have a good idea how medieval people sometimes felt. Chamale posted:What kind of opportunities did women have to learn in Medieval England? I understand that formal education didn't exist for most people, but I'd like to know more about the kinds of informal education from family and friends that were available to girls and women at the time. Women in medieval England had it worse than the rest of medieval Europe, from what I can tell. Coverture was a feature of English common law where a married woman ceased to be a separate legal entity from her husband, so she lost property rights (although a husband might be held to blame for a wife’s actions). This kind of arrangement could reduce the incentive for a family to educate their daughters, since those conditions can reduce the impact of any education she might have on her life. Anyway, women did seem to routinely run businesses such as breweries and grain mills, so they probably were taught at least a little business know-how. Generally women would assist their husbands in business, which again assumed a level of on-the-job training so that they could be useful assistants. Spinning, weaving and midwifery were very much female activities at the time. Again, women had to know what they were doing. This may or may not count as education, but medieval society tended to have very work-based education. Women in Medieval England by Helen Jewell seems to suggest that more women owned books than teaching opportunities would suggest, so there definitely was more education for women than was necessarily recorded.
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Jan 29, 2013 19:06
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Pimpmust posted:The coin and plate examples are interesting. A breastplate would cost a average mercenary around 1 months pay? (Not counting other expenses), I suppose it shouldn't be completely unexpected but I guess years of RPGs have taught me the heirarchy/cost of armor in a screwy way. Going by Iserlohn, a set of plate armour would cost just over a month’s pay for the landsknecht. Probably more than the breastplate, although an entire foot armour could cost as much as 16 guilders. Gear, if well-looked after, could be handed down generations. Ancestral swords were a real thing in the early medieval period, and much of the armour used by the less wealthy warriors (for example mail worn by a serjeant instead of a knight) would be second-hand. Another thing is it depends how much fighting you did. Generally a sword can be expected to last. Peasant draftees could be surprisingly well-equipped. The Assize of Arms in 1181 would require all burgess and freemen to have a gambeson (cloth based armour), helmet and a lance (spear). All above a certain level of wealth were required to have a hauberk (mail shirt). However, this requirement was also a limit to the amount of equipment a man could have. To me that tells me other guys were not supposed to have weapons, which means they were not expected to be drafted. Duke Albrecht in 1421 issued a feudal levy saying 1 men in 10 households should be equipped with a sword or knife (closer to a machete), body armour of iron or jerkin, along with a pike or gun or flail. Overall I would say most soldiers on a medieval battlefield were well-armoured. Ordinances would set demands on the kit a serving soldier would have: a French coutilier in 1446 was expected to have leg armour, helmet, haubergeon, jack or brigandine, dagger, sword and either a small lance or a voulge (pole-cleaver). Hordes of unarmoured peasants being used as cannon fodder was not desirable in medieval warfare. Remember, the peasants you call for military service are also your workforce and source of income. Throwing their lives away would cost you money, so it was better to have fewer well-equipped men. If you must have conscripts, giving them bows was better The 30 Years War was well into the period of munitions armour, so breastplates and helmets were cheap and mass-produced. Most mercenary companies eventually became very organised. The Swiss Cantons were essentially a national industry, the Free Companies such as the Catalan Company or Black Band had leaders who did all the recruiting. Landsknecht companies were official soldiers or colonels who hired private employees. The recruiting for Landsknecht went really well, enough to tell me that if a farmer’s son was to decide to be a soldier then he had to wait for a good opportunity rather than just go out and join a company.
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Jan 29, 2013 21:04
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(Well, or steal it off the dead).
" and be able to pull it off somehow?
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Anne Whateley posted:This is kind of misleading. On a domestic level, then yes, if someone was spinning by the fireplace it would be Mom. As time went on and guilds grew, production moved outside the home, and producing textiles for sale was definitely a man's world. There were more women in textile guilds than in other guilds, but it was still overwhelmingly male. I was thinking in an educational context (what women would know how to do) rather than an economic context (how much it produced). My apologies for not clarifying that point. There was a third group in-between women starting businesses on their own and widows inheriting their husband’s business, and that was married women supplementing their family income by selling produce on the side. The casual alewife who did part-time business seemed to be a common feature of medieval England, it was informal, small-scale business, and it was heavily limited by the restrictions of coverture, but I like to include them because I feel the contributions of working class women were underappreciated. *climbs down off soap box* BetterWeirdthanDead posted:I know I'm now a couple pages behind, but I have a question about the equipment listed for only 19 men that were supposed to be in a unit of twenty. It is certainly possible. My guess is it was the wagon driver, since the Hussite laagers (wagon-forts) had a fairly similar organisation and included 2 drivers.
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Jan 30, 2013 01:47
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Effectronica posted:Barbara Frale, in her history of the Knights Templar, argues that the Crusades were largely triggered by a surplus of young nobles without access to decent income, who turned to banditry to support the lifestyle, and that the Pope promoted the Crusades as a way to channel their desires for wealth. Is this a fairly reasonable argument for the first few Crusades, and how did areas without large-scale involvement in the Crusades deal with that social pressure? Personally I would say the Crusades were dramatically different. Most of the people who joined the First Crusade were not knights, but instead were peasants who were not really warriors. The knights who did come along were the retainers of a more powerful lord who had spent 4-5 times his annual income for the journey; guys like Godfrey of Bouillon mortgaged most of their estates to go on Crusade. In short, the nobility who went along seem to be the exact people with the least to gain (materially) and the most to lose. Another factor, noted by Thomas Asbridge, is that most of the Crusaders came home after completing their heavily armed pilgrimage, rather than trying to claim land there. There was certainly lots of unowned land to claim after the massacre of Jerusalem killed or drove off most of the original owners. An exception to this was Bohemond of Taranto, who did go to claim his own territory, which became the Principality of Antioch. 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. Tancred of Galilee, who worried about the morality of war and was excited to discover a battle he could enter into with a clear conscience. I think that would reflect the mindset of Crusading nobility, when most wars in Europe were over petty reasons it probably appealed to their identity as warriors to see a war that seemed righteous. One suggestion for Pope Urban II’s motivation for the Crusade, one which I find convincing, was that His Holiness wanted to heal the rifts within the Christian church. Some of the speeches attributed to him give suggestions what he may have said, and his speeches seemed to focus on atrocities committed by the Seljuk Turks – persecution of Christians, destruction of holy places – not on potential financial gains. We do not know for sure what was actually said, but the possible speeches we have seem to have appealed to idealism rather than greed. The Second Crusade was triggered by the fall of the County of Edessa. The Turks had been gaining military successes, and they were essentially reinforcements. Initially there was not much enthusiasm, the Pope had to call for Crusade again once he found out Louis VII had chosen to answer, it was only after the French king got involved that people took interest. The Third Crusade was in response to the fall of Jerusalem, Saladin had took it back. Leading the Crusade were three kings; Richard the Lionheart, Philip II Augustus, and Frederick Barbarossa (who drowned anticlimactically in a river). Again it was an organised effort of kings raising their armies rather than knights looking for adventure. Places without large-scale involvement with the Crusades just… went on as normal. In the case of Spain, this normally meant fighting the Muslims on their doorstep, since they had not finished regaining the Iberian Peninsula yet. The Italian city states would generally act as ferrymen, providing shipping and supporting the Crusades that way. East European powers such as Poland and Hungary were either demilitarised or decentralised, so there was little point in demanding they take part. I think the social pressure for other places simply was not that great.
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Jan 30, 2013 05:02
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EvanSchenck posted: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. That sounds very plausible, and interestingly most of Crusaders seemed to agree to terms like that, although they were expecting an integrated strike with a combined Frankish-Greek army. When it became apparent Alexios was not going to do that, the Crusaders felt betrayed. I think it was less the subject of land grants and more that they were being expected to take all the risks that upset them - they saw themselves as rescuers and thought Alexios was viewing them as cannon fodder. Railtus fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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Jan 30, 2013 16:53
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SlothfulCobra posted:What did the lower down troops like the longbowman wear into battle? Longbowmen varied. Period illustrations such as one of Crecy show men with longbows wearing brigandines (a canvas coat lined with small metal plates riveted or sewn to the inside) and helmets. However, doublets (another term for padded armour like a gambeson), hauberks and mail coats are mentioned. In short, they were less well-protected than a man-at-arms (knight) but might have anything from padded armour to a mail coat. Generally references say such things as “body armour of iron or jerkin” – which usually means to me something like a jack of plates or brigandine, although gambesons were acceptable too. This should be open up to a copy of the 1252 Assize of Arms, if it does not go to page 177: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...%201252&f=false After 1388, this becomes looser and all servants or labourers were to have bows. However, this just means their equipment varied even more. The longbow never really caught on outside of the British Isles. France tried making Francs-archers although they made mixed use of longbows and crossbows. Initially they started off seeming pretty well-equipped, ordinance for them was a ‘sallet’ (though any kind of helmet would do), dagger, sword, jack (padded armour), either brigandine or mail shirt, and their bow. However, they were short-lived, being established in 1448 and disbanding in 1479. Apparently they were not all that respected. For continental Europe, training longbowmen seemed more trouble than it was worth. Instead you could just hire the White Company which had longbowmen in. Welsh longbowmen were different mostly for their tactics, the Welsh used them in ambushes at point-blank range. They seemed to do quite well, although seemed more or less interchangeable. Scotland had longbowmen, although they do not seem to be mentioned that much. In wars between Scotland and England, longbow and artillery seem to play a more prominent role in the English victories thant he Scottish ones.
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Jan 31, 2013 03:23
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Soylent Pudding posted:Loving this thread so far, thanks for posting. Can anyone please tell us about what the normal diet was like for nobles and commoners? A fun thing to watch on the topic is this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH5O_fCstyI I cannot fully vouch for it, but my professor at university likes to use it in our lessons. An interesting thing when it comes to medieval cookbooks is they often represent the least commonly made meals. Before paper, people used parchment or vellum, and that was fairly costly. If you make a meal regularly, you know how to make it, so there’s no point in writing it down and using up costly parchment and ink. If you see something on paper, then it is probably for the upper classes and probably an uncommon enough dish for the cook to forget if it wasn’t written down. Around 1000, peasants did start getting a little more meat in their diet than before. This, combined with the use of new cooking pots, meant peasants were getting more iron in their diet. A helpful consequence of this was that puberty began earlier – previously it could begin between 16 & 18! (Dorsey Armstrong, Medieval World, I was floored when I first heard it) Meat became more common after the Black Death. Or rather, meat remained as common as it was before; there were just far fewer people around to eat it. Overall most people did not eat meat that often. Nobles ate more meat – hunting was considered part of his war training. Also, most meaty animals were producing other things, such as milk for cows or wool for sheep. Essentially cattle were too much effort to raise for them to butcher lightly. Pigs were the main meat, just because they required far less attention to raise. You could just turn them loose and they could find their own food. How exactly you got the pig to come back after foraging I don’t remember. Also, medieval people tried to be economical about food. Black pudding or blood sausages were a thing. If the household is going to slaughter an animal, we are going to get a lot of food from it. Cereals and vegetables were the major foodstuffs for most people. Between 700 & 1100, cereals (such as porridges, gruels and bread). increased from 1/3 of the diet to 3/4. Meat and fish days imply that there was definitely meat and fish available, although perhaps to be used economically. Assizes in England measure wealth by the amount of cattle kept, which hints to me that dairy products were common, although milk was mostly reserved for the sick. Cheese and butters were more common. That said, almond milk is a popular recipe. However, the usual source is cookbooks for that and that indicates it was not standard fare. Quality_Guaranteed posted:What did pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons believe in, and how does it compare to what we know about Viking religion and mythology? I understand they had gods like Woden and Thunor which were their versions of Odin and Thor, but did they believe in Valhalla and valkyries? This is something I have never looked into before, so this is just what 5-10 minutes of research turned up. On Anglo-Saxon religion, there were regional variations. Rather than Valhalla, they seemed to have a more meadow-like heavenly place. A less violent interpretation of heaven. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neorxnawang Old English manuscripts occasionally mention Waelcyrie which seemed to get use as a synonym for sorceress. So they did have a concept of Valkyries, but they were not necessarily match up with the Norse interpretation.
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Jan 31, 2013 21:46
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Heads up: answers will be slower for the next week maybe - I have an essay about war, food and civilian populations.A Buttery Pastry posted:I never thought about that, but the part about only writing down recipes for stuff you rarely make makes a lot of sense. That of course would also go for other stuff, making it more likely that things that were common knowledge would never be written down. Proportions is an excellent to describe it. The poor might have barley bread and the rich have wheat bread, but it is still bread. The rich will eat meat more often than the poor, but that is not the same as the rich having a meat-based diet (grain was 65-70% of calories for gentry in 14thC England). My guess, is medieval lords still got their food from the same general land that the peasants were getting their food from, so while what the lord got was the best what was practical to grow in the area was still kind of similar regardless of who owned the land. Cookbooks tend to tell us about the rich diets, and sometimes include clearly imported ingredients. For example, there was a distinction in one cookbook between cinnamon and Chinese cinnamon. Spices in general were more common among the rich, save for the common herbs such as sage, mustard and parsley. St Hildegard of Bingen (1100s) described mustard with meat products as a poor man’s food, but King Henry V is reported as having said “war without fire is like sausages without mustard.”
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Jan 31, 2013 23:30
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A Buttery Pastry posted:To be fair, 1100's to Henry V is a considerable time difference, and the geographic difference could also matter a lot. Not to mention King Henry V maybe just not giving a gently caress, he just wanted some drat mustard on his sausages. I doubt anyone would tell him he was acting like a poor person by preferring it. EDITED - I kept reading this and feeling I had not properly expressed what I meant to. Exactly. The class boundaries tend not to be rigid, you find lots of areas of overlap, despite the sumptuary laws. In fact, to me, sumptuary laws are normally a sign of overlap - why forbid people from doing something if they'll never have chance to do it? The different attitudes towards foods and social class were also not set in stone during the time. I certainly see the flamboyant and extravagant diets as a late-period phenominon, gradually growing towards the end. bewbies posted:As an aside, I've been fascinated by this stuff for a long time and I've prepared many "medieval" (or at least...sort of medieval) dishes and drinks. As a general rule, it is a lot more bland than what we eat today, and of course far more labor intensive, but it isn't all that different from your average steak dinner or stew or fish/fowl dish that we eat today. The beer is different but still tasty, the wine is delicious. It is certainly worth taking the time to do in my opinion if it is something that interests you, particularly the beer. Overall an excellent post, but you're making me hungry. Railtus fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Feb 2, 2013 |
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Feb 1, 2013 02:19
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A Buttery Pastry posted:As to spices, that series linked earlier seemed to state that trade had declined severely before the Mongols reestablished it, which if true would probably indicate some variation between different periods. Fever exotic spices coming to Europe might mean that simply being nobility wouldn't be enough, you had to be high nobility or royalty to actually get access to it on a regular basis. That would really make some of the nobility nothing more than rich peasants, in terms of diet. I got curious about the part about the Mongols and decided to look into it. It seems like the Silk Road was relatively sporadic and unreliable; it's about 1270 before it seems like a solid trade network, then it starts falling apart in the 1340s when the Black Death struck and the Ming Dynasty took over. Fractured groups in the area disrupt trade, then the Ottomans obstruct trade between Europe and Asia in 1453. It seems like there were periods when the trade was steady and periods when the trade was reduced to a trickle, which is a further complication.
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Feb 2, 2013 01:36
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sullat posted:One of the main routes for the spice trade was from India to the Red Sea ports, and then overland to Egypt. The Venetians would then distribute it to the Europeans. Obviously, with so many middlemen, the price was pretty hefty, but that route was pretty well established by about 1100-1200 or so. It lasted until the Portuguese destroyed the Indian Sea trading fleets in 1500 or so. This was a real double-whammy for the Venetians, since the Black Sea trade was cut off in 1453, and then the Indian spice trade was cut off in 1500. It may have been well-established even sooner. I know a Moorish cookbook from around 900-1000 mentioned Chinese cinnamon specifically, which at least assumes the reader was expected to be familiar with it. Thanks for the info!
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Feb 2, 2013 03:06
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Still going to be delayed, essay takes priority. However, I am having trouble sleeping tonight and I thought I would put it to good use.cda posted:The depth of knowledge represented in this thread is astounding. Thanks for making it. Prisoners of war seemed to vary. There are indications that the practise of ransom did extend beyond just soldiers, there is a new book on the subject you might want to check out, it’s so new I don’t have it yet - http://www.southampton.ac.uk/history/news/2013/01/24_not_just_a_kings_ransom.page It raises a good point that recruitment would be far more difficult if the non-knights would all be slaughtered out of hand. There also had to be some incentive to surrender. In the cases of towns, there was an incentive. Towns that surrendered when besieged rare usually left unharmed. The massacre of Jerusalem at the end of the First Crusade was not a religiously motivated extermination (although the fact all the Christians had already been thrown out the city might have been a factor), it was simply what happened when a city was taken by storm – i.e. if they fought until the end rather than surrendering. Some sources like Honore Bouvet, a priest from the mid-late 1300s, wrote “Nowadays we have abandoned the ancient rules of making slaves of our prisoners and of putting them to death after they have fallen into our hands.” Which certainly was not the case at Vernuil or Agincourt, so I do not know just how seriously to take that source, only that it indicates that the idea of mercy to the defeated was there. On the other hand Henry V was alleged to have told his troops at Agincourt that the French would kill non-nobles if they surrendered, and the troops apparently believed him, which suggests that killing of prisoners was not too unusual either. Another thing is that Henry gave the order to kill the French prisoners partway through the battle (he was scared of them escaping), and what is interesting is that French sources do not condemn him for this. William of Normandy in 1054 held on to prisoners from the battle of Mortemer until a peace treaty was made. I do not know the rank of those prisoners, however. There were also times in Spain when prisoners were exchanged with the Moors, and although Richard the Lionheart ended up butchering his prisoners when Saladin negotiated a trade (because it took too long) it seems like the idea of exchanging prisoners was fairly tolerated. These prisoners numbered in the thousands, so I imagine not all of them were noble. Next, Children’s Crusade was actually two ‘Crusades’ – one in Germany and one in France. I hesitate to call them Crusades since neither was really a holy war. The first was a shepherd boy named Nicholas who travelled around preaching, and a major part of his message was not to fight the Saracens but to defeat their kingdoms by persuading the people to convert to Christianity. They stopped at Genoa when the sea did not part before them. Seriously, they expected the sea to part for them. Anyway, the shepherd boy was told by the Pope to return to his home, died on the way back while crossing the Alps, while the families of people who had died following Nicholas demanded that Nicholas’s father be hanged. As you do. The second was again children who thought themselves miracle-workers. It gathered about 30 000 people, apparently people who saw the leader (Stephan) say they saw miracles. Anyway, Stephan preached a lot and started leading people around France, but instead of growing the movement started shrinking and kind of fell apart on its own. Black Bones posted:I get the impression that no one could tell Henry V anything. Like King Charles VI was like "No, your not the King of France, don't be ridiculous - ok fine! Here's the crown and my daughter, just please stop killing people, Jesus!" I like your description of Henry V. Shakespeare only got mentioned to me in English Literature class, never in History, which probably says something about the influence of his plays in history. :P It is possible that his plays promote misconceptions; the way he presents Henry V was as a victory for the gentry, he barely acknowledges the role of the archers or the common man – which is heading in the opposite direction to the main popular misconception (that it was all about longbows as a superweapon). Shade2142 posted:Thanks for the thread, this is a great read. I imagine quite a lot of people joined the Crusades for non-religious reasons. Quite a few in the Prince’s Crusade (First Crusade with the lords) were partly influenced by family loyalties to each other, quite a lot of their retainers would be going because their lord (read: employer/meal-ticket) was going and they worked for him. I imagine Raynald of Chatillon was not a particularly good Christian, but we don’t know his real motives. On Kingdom of Heaven, I would like to point out they had exactly the wrong people in Templar gear. Guy de Lusignon was not a Templar, nor was Raynald of Chatillon, both men hated each other. Also, the Templars were not mouth-foaming warmongers. Rant over. Anyway, the army Saladin brought to Damascus was the same he brought from Hattin, with maybe some reinforcements replacing casualties. The original army he brought out was around 30 000 men, not 200 000. We do not know if Barbarossa really brought 100 000 men, another figure suggested is 15 000. I think an army that size might be possible, I would have to check the Mesoamerica thread but I think the Aztecs and Incas have fielded armies above 100 000. However, I think the question is how long is it possible to keep such a force in the field? Sniper Party posted:This is a fantastic thread. Thank you. We do not know the combat training in detail. As others had mentioned, the manuscripts showing their martial arts were really more advertisements than comprehensive descriptions of their martial arts. Talhoffer was particularly notable for showing things in his texts that missed out an important detail, such as a diving suit without explaining where the air supply comes from. We do know of devices called pells; essentially wooden posts in the ground to practise your strikes on, overreliance on sparring tends to result in developing a reflex to pull your blows that becomes a problem in a real fight. Another device they had was a quintain for lance practise, the most common design was a post with a shield on one end and a bag on the other – when you charged with the lance you hit the shield and then the quitain swung a sack full of sand at you (which you had to avoid). Pages would also pull wooden horses on wheels to practise their lance skills without a real horse. Another thing I have heard of in sparring practise is called the Afterblow, which is a rule where if you get hit you can negate the hit if you hit them back almost immediately afterwards. The idea is to train you to keep fighting if you get hit (rather than to stop). Tourneys could be less training and more licensed warfare. Early on it was just literally a friendly battle. The melee was essentially knights gathering together, organising themselves into teams (or not, it could be a free-for-all), then just laying into each other. William Marshall once needed a blacksmith to hammer out a dent in his helmet so he could take it off. Those are just some general interest points. Obdicut posted:Are there any signs that the "Sweating Sickness" of the early English Renaissance was actually present in Medieval times as well? Sweating Sickness was first recorded in 1485, so towards the end of the medieval period, but it fitted in there. It was used as an excuse to miss the Battle of Bosworth Field. SlothfulCobra posted:Were there any formalized systems for unarmed combat during the medieval era, and if so, what were they like? Absolutely, unarmed combat was mostly grappling-based as others had mentioned. It was sometimes referred to as ringen (wrestling) or kampfringen (combat grappling) or abrazare. They were moderately mixed, although with a focus on joint locks and throws, but they do include a bit of minor strikes called the mort-stoss (murder-jolts). I call them minor strikes, they are actually very vicious, but the point is that the strikes were intended mainly as weakeners so you could get to the grappling part. I should mention our sources are overwhelmingly German & Italian for this. Not that other areas lacked unarmed combat, but those are just the sources that survived. Ultimately it was very similar to jujutsu for an obvious reason – it was developed with the same purpose in mind. Punches and kicks against armour are virtually useless, whereas a joint lock or a throw works well in battlefield conditions. The human body is very similar all over the world, so one grappling-based battlefield martial art is not going to be too different to another. There are only so many ways to lock the wrist, after all. Another factor is the law in Germany specifically forbade fist-fighting, so Germans found other ways to fight each other. Aside from the obvious loophole abuse, it allowed a controlled level of violence. You cannot use punches effectively without injuring someone, but you can use wrestling techniques to restrain someone without harming them. Chamale posted:How vicious were medieval soldiers to their downed opponents? When someone in good plate armour got knocked to the ground, how did his enemy go about actually killing him? Medieval soldiers seemed to be very matter-of-fact about their downed opponents. It would finishing them off quickly without too much fuss. I notice ringen am schwert (wrestling at the sword) rarely involves the degree of standing over people that you tend to see in the movies or games, instead you just got efficiency without lowering your defences too much. Face-stabbing was generally the most reliable way. You can push someone’s visor up, and most knights fought open-visored anyway to breathe and see properly, so I think the face would probably be the easiest target. You could stab up under the groin, if they are down you could get under the armour skirt. Or the armpit was a good target as was mentioned. This is of course assuming armour was a factor. If not then you can just hack off their limbs. 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 The murder stroke was as others mentioned reversing the sword (so holding it by the blade) and using the handle as an improvised hammer. Ironically one of the less lethal things you can do. Primarily it was done in armour – since it protected against most cuts and stabs, and attacking the joints was very difficult if the other person is trying to stop you, but you can use the sword as an improvised warhammer and slow them down that way. Either by stunning them or simply bashing their arms and legs in. An example here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi757-7XD94
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Feb 5, 2013 07:46
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Guys, I have never heard of cat burning or fox tossing until people brought it up in this thread. And I was much happier for it. I would prefer the animal cruelty stuff be kept to a minimum please. Also, these things are getting a good 200-300 years after the medieval period. Railtus fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Feb 5, 2013 |
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Feb 5, 2013 19:39
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Dr Scoofles posted:What on earth was up with Marjorie Kemp? I read her as part of a medieval literature module but the seminar leader refused to discuss anything to do with her mental health and insisted we focused entirely upon the text. Discounting spiritual possession, what do you think was wrong with her? She seriously did my head in, and that was just through the written word, can you imagine going on a pilgrimage and having her in your group? Kempe first seemed to have gone delirious after childbirth, which implies maybe that was something to do with it. I would describe her as a religious ecstatic, which does not necessarily imply it was pleasant. She seemed to have delusions and hallucinations, but this might not have necessarily been genuine schizophrenia, it could have been something like Histrionic Personality Disorder. On one hand, she claims to have changed quite a bit, which would not fit with the pride and resistance to change characteristic of Histrionic Personality Disorder, but she did have exaggerated behaviours (overdoing the appearance of purity), loud and inappropriate behaviours (making a point of dressing all in white as though to highlight her virginity… despite being a mother of 14 and being quite open about her lustful past), a high need for attention (seems likely) and generally being a pain in the neck. On top of that, she seemed to be resistant to change after she had her religious experiences. I think attention-seeking describes her rather well. The time she propositioned a young man by the church and he ran away screaming always amuses me. In fact, reading up on her now reminds me just how much people wanted to get rid of her. Actually I dislike reading Middle English. Most of the primary sources I deal with tend to be excerpts or letters or gobbets. The primary source I had the most fun reading was a translation of Malleus Malificarum, just because as a modern person it is kind of astonishing to read and know that someone was seriously suggesting these things. I should at this point mention that Malleus Malificarum was not entirely typical of the attitudes at the time – the author got thrown out of Tyrol, the Inquisition cautioned against relying on it, I think it even got denounced in 1490. Still, sometimes it is entertaining to read something spectacularly offensive.
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Feb 6, 2013 01:18
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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. Fewer sources tell us anything about mace-fighting, although the Talhoffer 1459 book shows a duel between a man and a woman with the man using a wooden mace (while buried waist deep and the woman has a rock in a headscarf being used as a flail). http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Talhoffer_Fechtbuch_%28MS_Thott.290.2%C2%BA%29 Mechanically the strokes of a mace would be fairly similar to a messer (one-handed cutting sword), although compensating for the extra weight of the head. Messers tend to be short, with the weight a little more towards the striking end. I think you could adapt messer techniques quite successfully with them. Another option is looking for any sources on using an axe, because essentially a mace is just the same as a similar-sized axe. This is a big point why swordsmanship was so popular. The mechanics of using the longsword and messer could be transferred to most other weapons. According to Bill Grandy, there were even dagger techniques used with the pollaxe (similar to a halberd). A general source I would recommend to people interested, although not quite answering the specific question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9JKmXzauD0 There is also a mace and duelling shield (aka: longshield). http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Hans_Talhoffer/Complete Maces are quite skewed towards offence. However, defensive options would be a shield or grappling, as well as armour. Interestingly, there are apparently maces weighing as little as 1 lb, to gain the maximum striking speed possible. For larger or longer maces, I think the pollaxe or halberd techniques would work well. It is difficult to generalise, because a 1 lb small mace intended for maximum acceleration would be very different to a 6 lb mace that is around 5 feet long. What EvanSchenck says about the importance of parrying is an excellent point. Blocking their weapon with yours was one of the least desirable forms of defence according to medieval swordsmanship. Instead it was better to attack from a safe angle (such as while grappling them with your other hand) or void the blow (dodging, sidestep) and immediately counterattack. This is all guesswork, but I hope it helps! Fat_Kiwi posted:William Marshal is one of my favourite figures from history, he seems like a real badass. He fought the French during the Baron Wars when he was an old man, almost hung as a child, helped save Eleanor of Aquitaine during some rebels and was loyal to his kings until death, even John. But was he really like that, or was it good propaganda after his death? William Marshal seems to have been quite genuine. When he was younger, no one really expected him to be that impressive, since as a squire he seemed to spend an awful lot of time eating and sleeping. I think he got captured in his first battle, but fought bravely enough that a lot of people helped him out, including Eleanor who paid his (then modest) ransom. However, the guy did beat 500 knights in his tournament career (which were not the rule-heavy jousts, but were essentially battles without a cause). Essentially he made his career from semi-sport battles rather than in war. One reason I like Marshal is he developed the land he had gained, making improvements while he owned it (although mainly expanding two castles). We know he was generally loyal, although that might have something to do with the amount of royal lands he had been granted. We do know he was principled, because when he acted as regent of England he did not have to reissue Magna Carta, but he did so anyway. Personally I think if his life was propaganda the rest of the world would not have been so willing to buy it. The French seemed to take him seriously as the regent of England, and his prestige seemed to help England in dealing with foreign powers. That implies to me his reputation was already formed in his lifetime.
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Feb 6, 2013 07:08
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Dusseldorf posted:So is there any historical evidence of diseased animals being launched into besieged towns to real effect? We know the Mongols did it, which is alleged to have led to the spread of the Black Death in Caffa. It happened at a few other sieges, such as Thun-l’Eveque in the Hundred Years War, the siege of Karlstein Castle in the Hussite Wars. What is likely a myth is the idea that using bubonic plague victims was common. Plague victims were either too rare to easily have available to throw over the walls, or would be just as dangerous to the attackers as the defenders. Instead I think it was more common to just use corpses or carcasses that had rotted a bit. I have not found much evidence that it was successful, although it occasionally was still tried until the 1700s. Personally I think the tactic would generally be counterproductive, it risks your own army, it could take weeks or months to kill people, and in that time anyone that dies would be one less mouth to feed (defeating the object of the siege in the first place). Another factor is if you do win then you have a disease-infested town, which is not the greatest of territorial gains. Essentially, it happened, but it is overstated. The reason we hear about it is because it is a gruesome story, it probably was not particularly common or effective.
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Feb 6, 2013 07:23
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