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Are there any signs that the "Sweating Sickness" of the early English Renaissance was actually present in Medieval times as well?
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Feb 3, 2013 15:31
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Did the use of war-dogs continue during the Medieval period? I know that the use of them by the Romans and the pre-Roman Britons was mainly in scouting and guard duty, but they did actually use them it pitched battles too. Subsidiary question: Since horses tend to be terrified of smoke (and, well, a lot of things) were the war horses of the era trained heavily to desensitize them to blood, smoke, etc? Also a note to those saying that a cavalry charge is still going to take down the front row-- if the horse actually decides to avoid, they're going to suddenly run laterally. Horses can pivot really really freaking quickly-- something that's actually useful in missile cavalry, who can charge right at the infantry and then wheel in front of them to deliver the arrows, javelins, what have you-- and so if the horses actually resisted the charge onto the spearpoints they're more likely to turn away and get in the way of other horses than they are to try to stop and fail or whatever.
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Feb 6, 2013 17:56
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Earwicker posted:It continues to the present day, I don't think people ever stopped using dogs in the military. Yeah, but we don't ever have just like an enormous wave of dogs. The Romans and Britons, while it was infrequent, sometimes would have a big pack of dogs that would actually be used on the battlefield as an attack force. I wouldn't imagine that dogs would be any use against fully-armored opponents, of course.
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Feb 6, 2013 18:51
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Anne Whateley posted:I'm not sure. I watched it awhile back, so I don't remember specific quibbles, but I remember being irritated a lot. My dad, who's an excellent Chaucerian and Piers Plowman guy (and who got to study under the late, great Charles Muscatine, long will he be missed) thinks it's a great series, and that it does a good job of showing the way people lived rather than focusing on the rare and unusual. It's purpose isn't to deliver a scholarly portrait to other scholars, but to engender interest in the field, correct popular misconceptions, but I think you're wrong in saying that it's not good for someone who wants to get into it. It's always good to remind yourself of the basics and of past false assumptions because it helps you safeguard against making assumptions yourself.
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Feb 14, 2013 19:46
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Railtus posted:
Oh, he's not to be relied on in a scholarly way, but he's good at making an argument. I kind of think of him like a Thor Heyerdahl.
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Feb 15, 2013 01:26
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Suddenly I'm seeing this Madden thing everywhere. It's weird. He's not the most credible professor on this topic-- he did a lot of bizarre press stuff after 9/11, talking about the crusades and how they relate to 9/11. And my dad, who's also a mediavalist, just burst out laughing at the idea that the church was a moderating focus. The initial desire to pure the crypto-Jews came from the Church, or at the least from the clergy. There were very prominent churchmen who were telling the royals that their nations were infested with crypto-Jews and they ought to do something about that. Madden manages to talk about people being killed for heresy by the secular authorities. Heresy isn't a secular crime. If you're killing someone for heresy, you're enacting religious law. It is true that the Inquisition wasn't solely composed of sociopaths. Most trials ended in an acquittal-- many times after a sufficient bribe had been paid, so I'm not sure where you're getting that the Inquisition acted as a control against corruption-- and the penalties were at least formalized. Prior to that, the Reconquista was originally more of just a land-war, but the Church got in and made it a religious one as a way of getting Christians to go fight heathens instead of each other. The Church promoted the idea of holy war against infidels, and later clergymen told royals that there was a conspiracy of crypto-Jews.
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Feb 20, 2013 14:04
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Kemper Boyd posted:I think the best way to summarize the Inquisition is that they were very fair in carrying out unjust laws, which is kind of a running theme in early modern jurisprudence. For instance, Sweden implemented Mosaic as the criminal code in the 17th century, but the courts never punished the guilty to the full extent of the law. They weren't very fair, though. The Inquisition itself was extremely corrupt in many places.
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Feb 20, 2013 15:42
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Railtus posted:
Are you guys going to deal with the fact that clergy started the whole "root out the crypto-Jew" thing at any point?
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Feb 20, 2013 21:12
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Railtus posted:Well, you have not really asked a question, and this is an ask thread. Your comment did not look like it needed any response from me. Unsurprisingly, that level of research isn't sufficient. Ferrand Martinez, Alonso de Hojeda, Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, and this little known guy named Tomás de Torquemada. All clergymen absolutely instrumental, Martinez in laying the original antisemitic, antimuslim groundwork, and the latter in exploiting it and convincing the royalty that there was an infestation of crypto-Jews. Prior to that, the Spanish court had been rather open to Jews. It is entirely true that after it got started, the pope weakly tried to stop it on occasion, and the royals used it to further their own political ends, but the pope is not the Church; the origins of the Inquisition, the antisemitic conspiracy theories, the holy war preached by the pope during Reconquista-- all sprang from the Church.
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Feb 20, 2013 23:27
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Railtus posted:
Think Spanish society's persecution of conversos might have had anything to do with the holy-war terms that the Church promoted during the reconquista And why do you think having a formal inquisition that codified this was somehow tamping it down, unlike, say, speaking out against the practice? This is like saying that trying black people for raping white women in the US was fairer than just lynching them. From a very tortured angle perhaps, but who gives a poo poo, and the trial itself gives justification to the idea in the first place. quote:Ferrand Martinez died in 1395, within a few years of the 1391 massacre that led to large numbers of conversos. History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Joseph Perez & Lysa Hochroth (page 43 for anyone interested) also gives the impression that Martinez was opposed by others in the church. I'm sure he was opposed by some within the church. That didn't stop the original papal bulls, or the appointment of Torquemeda who only the most flower-child mind could see as a moderating force in this. This is really bizarre. The impetus for the anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim fervor came from the church, obviously. It was church teaching that war and conversion under threat of violence was acceptable. It was the Church that turned the reconquista from a reclamation of land to a holy war. You can claim the Inquisition is fairer than a lynch mob, but that's about as weak praise as you can get and the existence of the Inquisition validates the ideas behind the lynch mobs in the first place. You cannot simply look at 'The inquisition' separate from the Church's anti-semitic and anti-Muslim views, writings, policies, and diplomacy at the time. It is also odd to view any authority as secular when enacting religious law. This is turning into a threadjack, so I'm going to drop it, but I severely caution you against this essay by Madden. It seems highly political rather than scholarly. Looking into his background, I can see he's written for National Review and is well-liked by John Derybshire. https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...KzGYBiXD9kBgorQ
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Feb 21, 2013 12:47
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Kaal posted:
As well as by the church, who championed it as a holy war. This is not controversial in the least. quote:And certainly holding a trial governed by laws is better than having lynch mobs and feudal lords doling out arbitrary punishment. These nuances between secular and religious authority, or the difference between the Inquisition and a lynch mob, might seem meaningless to you, but they served as a foundation for medieval society and were the political catalysts for the Renaissance. I don't see any nuance in naming them 'secular' authorities when they're carrying out religious law. There was no clean division between secular and religious, and its anachronistic to suppose there was. Obviously the competing interests of church and state were significant, but describing secular courts punishing heresy is like describing Henry VIII's break with Rome as an increase in his secular power. Trials may be better than lynch mobs, or they may simply be a codified version of a lynch mob that also allows you to steal the person's property. And the trial, by their existence, approves of the concept in the first place. There is no way of dealing with the Inquisition without looking at the background of antisemitic and antimuslim propaganda by the church, or the very idea that heresy is a mortal crime, also promoted by the church. The idea that the church was a moderating influence is simply bizarre. Again, this is a derail, I think it should be dropped-- we can do an A/T on the inquisition, reconquista, and/or crusades, perhaps, but I do hope in that that this essay by Madden will be looked at critically.
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Feb 21, 2013 14:07
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swamp waste posted:Oh yeah I was researching this recently. A relic (the dead saint, or part of one) is supposed to physically have the Holy Spirit in it, almost a kind of spiritual radiation emanating from it. If you think of the Holy Spirit as the action of God in the world (that's probably an oversimplification) the saint's physical body is the mechanism through which the action took place. Speaking of: How did people deal with all the multiple copies of relics, with skulls everywhere, enough splinters of the true cross to float a boat, etc? Did they nod and a wink at this stuff, or was city-to-city communication really so bad that nobody would put two and two together and figure out that the same Saint's skull was in four places?
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Feb 26, 2013 03:13
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Bitter Mushroom posted:I'm pretty sure proto celts from Iberia were in Britain long long before the later immigration waves that we associate more with the British population. And before them were the awesomely named "Beaker people", but this is getting very off-topic.
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Feb 28, 2013 13:11
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life is killing me posted:I have no doubt that ships were probably the main mode of transportation, but I am confused as to how the Scots got there and why they went. This isn't really medieval history. ToxicSlurpee posted:Here's the thing to consider: the English Channel is narrow enough in spots that some people are capable of swimming across it. Yeah, the Vikings were amazing ship builders, but you didn't exactly need to be a seasoned seafaring culture to make it across the English Channel. Basically anybody that was anywhere near that area of the world and capable of making something that floated for more than a week could have made a trip to England. No, the Norse really did have far superior naval technology, or at least, better shipbuilders. They clinker-built their ships, they used exactly the right woods, they kept great care of their ships. In addition, the Vikings had some way that we're not entirely sure of of passing on navigational information. The best that we can interpret from the sources we have is that they used the locations of currents and the directions of winds, as well as landmarks where available, in order to navigate, based on accrued knowledge. Some people speculate they had other tech too, like polarized crystals for sun-finding, but there's no real strong evidence for that. The written records we have of their navigational charts, though, show that they were amazingly accurate. The question of why the Viking expansion began is one with a lot of theoretical answers but no strong prevailing theory. They may have had an overpopulation with not enough farming land, they might have simply wanted to expand trade markets and the warfare was a side effect of the Christians not being willing to trade with them-- not that they didn't also raid trading partners. There is also a theory that it was just technology driven-- that as their boats got better and their navigational techniques superior, they were able to attack other lands without any fear of counterattack. Not only were their boats superior, their home ports were a nightmare to reach for foreigners, impossible in many cases without pilots who knew the waters. And even if the British or the Franks had such pilots and such ships, they weren't going to be able to mount a long-range punitive expedition with very uncertain success and no possibility of actual subjugation. During this period, the Vikings also took over poo poo. They went into France, and the Normans have a lot of Scandinavian, particularly Danish, influence in them, and the ship technology they brought with them is part of the reason that the Norman invasion of England was successful.
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Mar 1, 2013 01:10
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life is killing me posted:Noted, but considering the Scots were around during the time the Danes were antagonizing the Saxons in Britain and neither wanted to mess with them, and also the fact that this thread contains questions and answers related to Swedish, Danish and Scandinavian Vikings, I assumed it was at least slightly within the scope of the thread. But I digress. I'm sorry, I don't get how your question of how the Scots got there is related to Medieval history. The Scots had been there for a long time, no matter how you define them, before medieval times. So, it'd be pretty much definitely not medieval history.
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Mar 1, 2013 01:39
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:By 1066 the Normans did not really wage war differently from other members of the Frankish sphere. Additionally, the voyage to Pevensey was not perilous. Wace claims that only two ships out of hundreds were lost, and they may have been overburdened. If the technology helped, its effect was not really measurable. I'm not sure what you mean by the Normans' not waging war differently; I wasn't claiming they were. The English fleet, however, was quite powerful and also well-constructed. I know in the actual invasion, the enemy fleet was scattered, but the plan included actual naval fighting as well. I guess it'd be more fair to say that their naval technology made them think the invasion was feasible. I'm sure that this technology was disseminated through the Frankish sphere, but that doesn't really contradict what I'm saying. The Norman seamanship shows itself best in their conquests in Italy and beyond. This is a great book about the foundations of naval technology in Europe post-Rome. http://www.amazon.com/reassessment-Frankish-Anglo-Saxon-Seafaring-Activity/dp/189828122X
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Mar 1, 2013 18:05
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:What have you read about Norman fleets in the Med? http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/127/527/958.full Please note I don't agree with his analysis of the motives and understanding of the Norman leaders, but there's a real wealth of primary and secondary research there. Also, the logistical skill of the Normans as seafarers is something I'm including, I guess loosely, in 'technology'. Even at the beginning of the Viking age they were able to field very large flotillas that demonstrate an excellent logistical ability.
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Mar 2, 2013 16:54
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ganglysumbia posted:During Robert Guiscard's invasions of Byzantium, the Venetian fleets pretty much had there way with the Normans. I retract the 'and beyond' bit, then. I don't actually know much about the Norman-Byzantium thing, I'm afraid.
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Mar 4, 2013 15:47
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Squalid posted:You must have a really weird and pedantic definition of medieval history given that Scotland didn't exist until the 10th century. Complaining about pedantry in an A/T thread is kind of weird too, dude, so that's cool. I have no idea what you're talking about, either. Scotland existed. It didn't exist as a functional nation-state, but it existed as an actual territory, and what the guy was asking was about the migration of people's to and from those territories, which happened a long time before Medieval times. He was also talking about Pangea. Now, unless you're saying that Scotland rose out of the sea in the 10th century, which would be a zesty theory full of gumption, I have no clue what you're actually complaining about.
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Mar 21, 2013 13:01
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Blue Star posted:Here's a weird question: for how long have people been interested in medieval history? Were there medieval historians back in the 1500s or 1600s? When did people start reconstructing Old English or Old French? Hearne and Thomas Browne were really the first significant Britih 'antiquarians'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hearne_(antiquarian) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Browne Following their correspondence to various people basically shows the building of the antiquarian societies that were the beginnings of medieval studies. The development of the university system made this into real scholarship. Of course, it was highly propagandistic.
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Mar 22, 2013 00:22
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Squalid posted:I'm complaining because you're talking out of your rear end. The guy was clearly talking about the theoretical migration of Gaels from Ireland into modern Scotland, a theory proposed to explain the replacement of Pictish by Scottish Gaelic between the 9th and 11th centuries. Simultaneous with the language shift the Pictish state of the Roman era evolves into the Medieval Scottish Kingdom. We know very little about Pictish or why people stopped speaking it, but until it disappears we don't usually talk about the Scottish people. Most historians don't think there was an actual invasion anymore, and explain the change through longterm peaceful contact between northern Ireland and western Scotland and then an internal shift in political power within the Pictish Kingdom towards a Gaelic faction. There isn't a whole lot of evidence available unfortunately, but whatever happened it wasn't very interesting since nobody bothered to record it. And before that, there was Dál Riata. Gaelic settlement in Scotland from Ireland wasn't really anything new-- landmasses that close will trade population even without any big migrations. I'm sorry, but when someone is talking about Pangea I'm unwilling to take as generous an interpretation of their question as you. The Scots didn't come from Ireland any more than the English came from Germany and Denmark. Anyway, his question was actually about the proto-celts and already got answered.
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Mar 22, 2013 02:22
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Squalid posted:yeah, that's exactly what makes you an insufferable pedant. That's awesome bro. Back on topic: Other earlier studies of the middle ages came about through the Reformation; as the monasteries got broken up by Henry VIII, there were a lot of scholars, nobles, etc. frantically buying up the old manuscripts. Then, they'd hire somebody to catalog them, and in a fashion that cataloging was the start of medievalism, in a very limited way.
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Mar 22, 2013 09:58
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I've read that during the Mongol invasion of the 'Russian' states, the Mongols made their arrows in such a way that the Russians couldn't use them after they'd been fired, whereas the Mongols could re-use the Russian arrows fired at them. So how's that work? This is from multiple sources, most recently "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford.
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Apr 21, 2013 21:51
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canuckanese posted:I don't know for sure but here are a few guesses: The first sounds like it, because it's usually described as having something to do with the notching of it. And I hate incomplete information like that. If you're going to put in your book that the Mongols could use Russian arrows but not vice versa, explain why, or say it's unknown.
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Apr 22, 2013 00:18
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NEED TOILET PAPER posted:It could also be something like what the Romans did with their pila spears. That is, the head is attached to a heavy shaft with a thin piece of metal (IIRC) that would bend whenever it hit anything so that the pilum would go from a perfectly serviceable throwin' spear to a bent stick that was pretty useless in combat, thus the enemy couldn't just pick up Roman spears and chuck them back. I doubt it was that. I think a lot of that was so the pilum would trip them up and drag on their shields and stuff. Arrows you have much less force to work with and I doubt you'd want to sacrifice any by having it bend like that. You'd want the full weight of it driving in the point. I'm betting it was just having a notch that was too narrow, or one that fitted against a special piece on the bowstring (whether with a blade or just a little button or something) given that the limited references I've seen always talk about the notching of it. The bent arrows is easier to explain and would probably be mentioned specifically. It's also not recorded, as far as I know, in any other Mongol battle.
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Apr 22, 2013 01:39
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:This is most probably correct, but I'd be curious to know what primary source this comes from. It sounds like an oddly specific bit of information to be wholly fanciful, but other battle accounts exist which were written long, long after the fight that have little bearing on reality, but have nevertheless been treated as reliable sources by incautious scholars; the 13th century account of the Saxons fighting on horseback at Stamford Bridge comes to mind. I 99% know I saw it elsewhere, other than just the cool-but-rather-pop book. I'll try to confirm that and see if there's any reference for it. I haven't seen references for it in other battles that the Mongols engaged in, but most of their archer vs. archer battles were vs. other steppe tribe types who were more likely to have a similar bow. Do bowstrings survive well?
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Apr 22, 2013 17:44
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:The thing is the same thing could be said about Rus' much of the time. Especially in the South (where Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereyaslavl are) exposure to the steppe nomads would have been fairly substantial. Defence against steppe raids or expeditions against them were quite normal, and one of the most famous was Igor of Novgorod Seversky's campaign, which is preserved as an epic. I think that the particular Rus force they faced at that point was a "Europeanized" one, but you're right that they faced the Kikchick(sp?) and a bunch of other steppe tribes using very similar weapons. It's going to remain a puzzler; as you say, it's a weird detail to just suddenly make up, but it's also hard to figure out why it would happen, why it's not mentioned in another story of Mongol warfare, and why it would surprise the Rus in particular since they were used to fighting steppe nomads. In a semi-related question, what did the European armies use for communication on the battlefield? I assume that there were various technologies employed at various times, but I'm thinking here of the Mongol verse-order thingy, where they had a preset verbal format for orders that made them harder to confuse, and also a strong flag-signal structure to use when vision was good, and also a system of verbal calls. What I'm mostly interested in, I guess, is if any armies had significant advantages, as the Mongols did, due to the utility or redundancy of their signal corps.
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Apr 22, 2013 20:43
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Nothing you say backs up your assertion. There were two campaigns in Hungary, neither of which ended with the subjugation of the kingdom. The claim that 'their hearts were not in it' for the second invasion needs a little bit more than your gut feeling to substantiate. It's worth remembering that the invading army of 1241 was absolutely tremendous, and represented the culmination of the push across Siberia and Rus'. What was the military, rather than the strategic outcome of the campaign? I had been under the impression that it was an enormous slate of casualties for the Hungarians.
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Apr 29, 2013 22:37
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I wonder if the repeated scale-like pattern is intentional, to cause it to fragment along those fault lines, or just decorative. Anyway, neat and purty. It reminded me that there's a few citations of the Mongols using devices that created really bad smells that disoriented people. Anyone have any clue what that was? Just burning a bunch of poo poo (maybe literally) to confuse the enemy, or was there something particular that was used for noxious smokescreens in medieval warfare?
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May 26, 2013 16:02
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Chamale posted:How did pikes influence the reduced popularity of plate armour? I've heard that guns alone weren't enough to end the era of heavy armour, but the combination of "pike and shot" made plate mail knights obsolete on the battlefield. Pikes first started getting used in the 1300s (apart from antiquity). Plate armor reached its zenith in the 1600s.
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Jun 19, 2013 13:38
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:
It's been my impression that spears shortened considerably and then lengthened again, but I certainly overstated it by saying that they started getting used again. There definitely always were some people using them, but my main point was that plate armor didn't reach its zenith until hundreds of years after the pike had been in very common use and so plate didn't fall out of favor due to pikes.
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Jun 27, 2013 12:20
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Cream_Filling posted:I'm no expert, but I bet the only real difference in terms of amusements to modern times would be the relative popularity of bloodsports, and even then only when we're talking about as compared to middle-class Americans. Well, there's also a much higher level of literacy now.
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Jun 28, 2013 17:26
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Alekanderu posted:The only thing you should take seriously from the Total War games (if even that) is the historical background descriptions of units, buildings and factions. The gameplay itself, both strategic and tactical, has very little in common with how things actually worked historically. The only valid thing to take away from strategy is that you can go broke as gently caress waging war. And from tactics that you often kill fall more in the rout than in the battle. Over in the Ancient thread, I made the somewhat careless assertion that the blood taboo of the Mongols was a cause of their archery culture and therefore their military success. Since it's a derail there, I'm porting it over to here to take my licks. The point has been made that the Mongols had plenty of lancers too, and I'd agree but I'd say the way they were used was also governed by the blood taboo-- that they attacked only after disorder had overtaken the enemy, mainly being used to impale fleeing enemies. They weren't generally used as shock cavalry to slam into the line with lances and cause the disruption. I totally concede that causation with tabboo and action are highly interrelated, so saying that the blood taboo was causative of the archery culture rather than resulting from it is a contention I've done nothing to support, except for adding now the very trivial support that the way they used lances was similarly more blood-phobic than the way that lance cavalry was used elsewhere. The question has been asked if the same blood taboo existed in the other nearby steppe cultures that were similar in tactics to the Mongols in emphasis on horse archery: I do not know and I will attempt to find out.
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Jun 28, 2013 20:09
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Phobophilia posted:Uh, didn't they massacre civilian populations using axes. There are some reports of that, but they tend to be mixed in with exaggeration of the number of those killed by the Mongols. The most famous account of it has, after a terrific battle where the Mongols have already killed a ton of people, the Mongols, after having separated out the tradesmen and the rest, killed fifty civilians apiece. If the population actually outnumbered the Mongols by a lot more than fifty to one, it is difficult to imagine the city falling or surrendering. By the time the Mongols got to those areas, they also had a lot of non-Mongol support staff with them, so it's conceivable they farmed out that task. That they had a blood taboo isn't really under dispute.
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Jun 29, 2013 11:48
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:There are a usually more civilians than there are soldiers. The Mongols' first conquests were in China. I don't have it with me, but it's secondary (or primary, depending on how you view it) source, from The Secret History of the Mongols (Mongγol-un niγuca tobčiyan). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_History_of_the_Mongols The blood taboo is represented frequently, and it is among the traditions that Ghenghis Khan codified in his laws, though the translation of that isn't sure if it only applied to fellow Mongols or everyone. And like I said, I don't know much about the cultural differences between the Mongols and the many tribes near them that they absorbed during their expansion. It may have been shared, it may not have.
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Jun 29, 2013 18:23
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Rabhadh posted:I can only imagine them as being pragmatic warriors. When you gotta stab a dude you gotta stab a dude, blood taboo be dammed. Sure, but it's more about whether it influenced the development of technology in weapons or if it is the result and codification of that development of technology and particular tactic.
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Jun 29, 2013 20:44
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tonberrytoby posted:So what is a blood taboo in this context? There are two in the Mongol tradition, one is that letting an enemy (or friend, actually)'s blood touch you lets them curse you or haunt you or defiles your soul with them-- Mongol religion from that time period is either very pithy or very much interpreted by one Shaman one way and one another. The second blood taboo is that the spilling of blood-- and translation is messy again here, it's either noble blood or foreigner's blood or anyone's blood-- onto the ground wasn't good. The Mongol form of execution for 'nobility' (or maybe foreigners, or maybe just anyone) was to roll them up in a carpet and trample them, or break their legs and let them die of exposure, or rarely, garroting.
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Jun 29, 2013 22:54
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Amyclas posted:Many cultures had horse archers and light cavalry, but didn't develop blood taboos. Horse archers shooting enemies from far away and using light cavalry in an exploitation and pursuit role is generally how such units were used across the world. Do you have any sources describing the Mongol blood taboo and how it is related to their military practices? As I said, The Secret History of The Mongols, the primary (or secondary, depending on how you view it) source is the main source of information about the blood taboos, though contemporaries (like Marco Polo) confirm it. I am not making the argument that the blood taboo is the sole reason for military tactics; I think with a lot of cultural stuff that self-perpetuates it's both a repository and an active agent. And yes, using light cavalry in an exploitation role is hardly news, but the Mongols use of-- early on-- nothing but horse archers and light cavalry, with no shock troops, infantry at all, is not unique but still unusual. These tactics were definitely shared by some of their immediate neighbors, and it's somewhat difficult to get a good read on those other cultures because of their absorption into the Mongol empire.
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Jul 1, 2013 12:13
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I thought the blood taboo applied to nobles, which is why they came up with rather creative ways to execute captured princes and caliphs and such as well as rivals within the Mongol empire. I didn't say they had no lancers early on, I said that they didn't employ them as shock troops. The standard use of lancers (and I don't think calling them light cavalry is accurate, they had lamellar armor and horse armor as well) was to charge and disrupt formations, or to flank after infantry had engaged and fixed the middle. The Mongols usually operated with no infantry, did not fix a middle, and used horse archers to disrupt and then lancers to pursue. I mean, they had no fixed strategy, but they almost never used cavalry in a shock role. And the translation and cultural interpretation of the blood taboo is difficult to interpret. Most of the Secret History is about nobles, and there's definitely an idea that noble blood (or noble people) have more power to harm, but it's still kind of weirdly iffy. There's definitely still blood taboo represented in the early part of Temujin's story before he has any claim to nobility. It may be that nobles had to be killed, when executed, by others of high rank, too. The text suffers from the problem common to most historical texts, which is that it doesn't spend much time stating what would have been obvious to those reading it, but unfortunately isn't so obvious to us.
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Jul 1, 2013 15:47
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Can you explain where the blood taboo is in the secret history? A google search of "Mongol blood taboo" brings up no results, and the only refrences I can find with searches like "Mongols shedding blood" are refrences to their custom of not killing nobles by shedding blood, but by such lovely methods as wrapping them in a carpet and kicking them to death. I'm sorry, I don't have it with me so I should really shut up about it until I do. Even worse, it was probably a felt carpet.
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Jul 1, 2013 16:43
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