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veekie posted:-Momentum, heavily armored cavalry can use the momentum of the charge to smash their target, then rely on superior equipment on both man and horse to win through. Ish. Cue our resident historians debating the point. (I fall on the Hegelian perspective, for what it's worth.) Those aren't the 'roles' though. Cavalry fits into a few different roles. Your earliest western cav. are the Greek cav of Xenophon. Basically their role is to be the 'rock' to a peltast's 'paper' to which the hoplite is 'scissors.' Modulated by conditions on the field. Additionally, the threat of a cavalry attack (mostly with javelins, except against a broken formation) would encourage enemy hoplites to stay in formation. Thus, even if your side lost, you cavalry could stick around and keep the enemy from pursuing. If, however, you win, a cavalry advantage turns a retreat into a rout and a rout into a slaughter. More or less, cavalry is not a decisive arm, but it will either mitigate a loss or turn a victory from 'making them all run away' into 'they're all deal let;s go take their stuff.' This is why the Greek mercs under Cyrus were so despondent. They had just proven that they could easily handle most or less the worst the Persians could throw at them. But they were relying on Cyrus and his allies for cavalry support. Basically, they knew they could win, say, 9 out of every 10 fights.* But in each of those 9 fights, the enemy would be able to run away, regroup, and try again later. Meanwhile, that tenth fight would, inevitably, be a horrific loss.** Then, starting around Alexander,*** you start to see the shock role come into play. At various points people are going to point to spurs or stirrups or lances or bigger horses or better armor as The Thing that lets this happen at various times, but inevitably someone realizes that if you point your horsie at a big mass of men, sometimes those dudes don't want to hang around. Convincing the enemy to Not Hang Around has always been the way you won fights (not, as is commonly assumed, making him Be Dead), and as a bonus, being on a horsie meant that you're in prime position to chase everyone running away in terror, and thus completing the self-fulfilling prophecy that states that 'if a horse is charging at me, I'm about to have a really bad day.' This pendulum swings a bit as either trained men or trained cavalry find primacy, but shock cav sticks around, at least in some capacity, until at least Napoleon. A third mode is that of the 'gently caress you, I'm on a horse' variety. This is the Egyptian/Hittie/Chinese chariot, early Japanese warrior caste, the typical steppe raider, and the caracole. Basically, ride in close enough to shoot at the enemy (bonus points if it's some poor pleb who can't even afford a horse of his own) and then run away while you reload/consider trying out the whole 'shock' thing now that the enemy is picking arrows out of his armor. Finally, we get the mounted infantry, who have horses but decide to fight on the ground. From a strategic perspective, you can have an all mounted force, ala the chevauchee or the Mongols (ignoring that the mongols were also quite capable of incorporating levies from conquered territories and extensive siege trains...), cavalry and scouts or screens to keep scouts away from your own forces, cavalry as messengers, etc. etc. *Numbers totally made up. **Citation: Xenophon. Admittedly, he's a total cavalry fanboy (not the least because gently caress you poors who can't afford horses), but he's not really wrong here. *** We're talked 'western' tradition here, so basically Greek until you hit Roman and then ~400 AD we can talk about Franks and Germans as they 'civilize,' everyone else is stereotyped as Always Already being as they were when they were first encountered by the West. (Yes, I'm abusing always already. Sue me.) Also, scythed chariots were a thing that filled this role, but shut up, we're going with the western centric narrative.
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Nov 15, 2013 09:09
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Fangz posted:This battleship focus plan is pretty silly, because it ignores that the planes are not just a carrier's offensive arm, but also its eyes and ears. A battleship force would be sailing essentially blind against a carrier force that is tracking its every movement, and thus able to engage at will. I think the point is you're replacing the big CV with wonderfully expendable CVEs. There would still be birds in the air, but instead of trying to send out wings of bombers you'd spot the enemy and then send in the battlewagons. The big thing I see happening is what would be the Japanese CAP, no longer obliged to play defense, going in and providing cover for the bombers. I think you're right in that the big thing the Japanese can do here is control the range. Just keep launching planes and scooting away from the American fleet, collect the planes, send it out again. Maybe their attack wings would get hosed, but they're not really risking the carriers while they put the American battlewagons at risk.
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Nov 19, 2013 04:30
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Darth Brooks posted:The most famous story about bumper messages during WWII came from Wake Island. I like the bit of Allied counter-intel that led to Midway. Basically, they had broken Japanese codes, but not the code names. So they could read that there was an attack coming at "Base Delta"* but they weren't certain which Allied base was Base Delta. But they knew that the Japanese had broken an Allied code but that the Japanese didn't know that the Allies knew that the Japanese had broken that code. So they used said broken code to send a similar messages ("Send more water" I think it was) from the bases most likely to be attacked. Then the Japanese went "good news for the attack, Base Delta needs more water!" And thus the Americans were able to match up Base Delta with Midway and send a few carriers to wait for the Japanese to hit the island, and then bomb them as they refueled and rearmed. *Greek letter selected at random. You get the point though.
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Nov 19, 2013 04:43
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sullat posted:Was the goal to capture Midway? I thought they just wanted to force ”The Decisive Battle™” that would sink the US carrier fleet and force us to the negotiating table. After all, they were under the impression that they had sunk 2 or 3 carriers at Coral Sea, and that we had no more in reserve. They didn't know the American carriers were there. That was sort of the point of Midway.
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Nov 19, 2013 19:54
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Ship-killing is not something galleys do terribly well, especially when facing galleons. I'm not disputing the general point, but reading the top link it seems there were 6 galleys being ambushed by 9 ships with much better intel. Even then the Spainish flagship, separated and on its own, manages to elude 10 Dutch ships and get to port.
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Nov 19, 2013 21:28
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Plutonis posted:A: Were the Janissaries really the elite unit that most historians claim to be? A: Yes and no. You are, you have to remember, talking about over 500 years of history, there is going to be some variation. Basically they were a professional class of soldiers, whether you want to call that "an elite unit," well, it's certainly better than a bunch of drafted peasants. Eventually they get blamed, in part anyway, for the fall of the Ottomans, for being too decadent and looking after their own interests instead of the Sultan's. (Which is fascinating in its own way, since it's basically an artificial 'ethnic' group within the Empire. Identity is interesting.) B: The traditional explanation is "lol decadent Muslims," but it was basically two factors. First, as the Portuguese rounded Africa and the Spanish started digging into the New World (literally) Europe was able to access trade in China (at that point, as it will be in ~100 years or so, the unquestionable center of the world economy) without the trading through the Ottomans. Second, they simply hadn't been, well, mean enough ~three, four hundred years before. Nationalism is a weird deal but the short version is that the Ottomans lost out when it came to the fore.
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Nov 24, 2013 18:58
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Please explain this. The Ottomans had a lot of enclaves and autonomous, unintegrated populations. They didn't really Turkify anyone and their attempts to convert were pretty half-hearted as well. Basically, the millet let sub-groups stay cohesive, largely self-governing and self-governing entities and keep their own identities. This worked fine for most of the Middle Ages when all you needed from your population was some taxes and could compete with, say, slave soldiers and a small landed military caste. ~1800 it became pretty clear that this was going to lose out to levee-en-masse and national identities. It's more or less the same thing that happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Prussia, in staying German, had a much better time of things. E: This is not to say that nations did just naturally appear and work out for the best. Read Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780, it's a pretty short look at that process. the JJ fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Nov 24, 2013 |
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Nov 24, 2013 20:43
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Squalid posted:Except that isn't what happened. Bows are not obvious at all, and it is entirely possible they were only invented once on earth, subsequently spreading everywhere else through diffusion. Arrow points are unknown in the Americas until 2000 years ago, and probably spread to the continent over the Bering strait from Eurasia. Places like Australia which were very isolated from most of the human population just never figured it out. Clovis points? Aren't those more ~10000 years old?
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Nov 27, 2013 19:33
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Slavvy posted:Worth mentioning here that ancient greek hoplite battles really were just a shoving match. Short, soft spears, and everyone wearing nigh-impenetrable (for the time and area) armour led to the two formations just sort of shoving at eachother trying to stab the other guy over his shield. And because everyone was more protected on the right, by his buddies' shield, each formation would drift to it's right. So the two lines would sort of slide along eachother and auto-flank. That is sort of the prototypical Greek hoplite battle, though a. terrain, tactics, and other forces could change things very quickly and b. they are still trying to stab each other. Pushing was incidental, not a major part of the game plan. And yeah, Salamis hosed up the Persian supply lines and they lost at Plataea. The Athenians were off shore looking for a ruckus, the Spartans could hold the Isthmus of Corinth pretty much indefinitely, so there was no real 'exit plan' for the Persians. What else were they going to do, settle down for an attritional war in a foreign land while that big rear end army starts to cough politely and ask about when their paychecks are coming though?
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Nov 27, 2013 23:11
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Azathoth posted:Would you (or someone else) be willing to go into more detail about the command structures of armies prior to the Romans? I know that one of the reasons they were so effective was because they had what we would now call NCOs, or something close to it, but how were the armies they were facing organized? I know the Greeks had a similar set up. I think Xenophon goes into detail on how the Ten Thousand rounded out, and his Cyropaedia (basically his response to Plato's Republic, what he thinks an ideal society ought to look like, which is, Xenophon being Xenophon, a virtuous and valorous monarchy supported by loyal aristocrats) has a big chunk on command. Basically his hypothetical great king gives rewards to the generals with the best section, they reward the tier below them, etc. etc. until... I think it's platoons of 8 or 10 or something.
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Nov 29, 2013 21:37
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veekie posted:How costly was a professional army compared to a landowning warrior class or a citizen army? Economically that is. I mean, in a macro term it's a man off the farms sucking up surplus however you slice it. For a ruler/government/state (where such terms apply) you can parcel out your land, let the fucker's deal with taxes and poo poo, and get fighty dudes from them. Overall a good deal, because extracting wealth off that land yourself would probably involve setting up some sort of overseer bullshit anyway. The downside is, you've got much less control. If they own the land, they're going to want to put a fort on it, if they put a fort on it, they can tell you to gently caress off. Roughly. A professional army mean you've got to get a bureaucracy/the taxes you need from some civilian administration. But you get more control over them since you're running that layer between taxes and paying that army. (Or you can turn that responsibility over to the generals and welp you just made the Roman Republic.)
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Nov 30, 2013 09:46
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a travelling HEGEL posted:
My favorite is this gem I stumbled on doing research as an under grad. Hang on... as the Allies scramble to deal with the remnants of the OE, the Italians wanted their chunks, and the ambassador starts pestering Balfour. His response (after like the ninth 'BTW, Rome called, they want to talk about...'): "The Italians will never be able to penetrate any part of Yemen worth having if their Abyssinian and Tripolitan deeds are any guide... Italy has no business in the Aegean, still less in Asia Minor."
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Dec 4, 2013 08:13
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Also competent Arab military leaders have a tendency to start coups and then hollow out the officer corps as a preventative against more coups so... There are cases of Arabic forces doing well, like Omar Muhktar, or the various pseudo-militias currently tearing up Syria. Hizbullah is also coming off as fairly competent in that conflict, though if that sectarian split spills back to Lebanon they may regret bleeding in Syria. e: It can also be a bit of a 'jury duty' phenomenon with conscripted national militaries. The ones actually competent enough to fill those jobs are also the ones competent enough to find something better to do with their lives. Oooof. There maaaaaay be a little hint of orientalism in this analysis... the JJ fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Dec 8, 2013 |
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Dec 8, 2013 21:55
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Alekanderu posted:Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway, Sweden But Denmark has its own peninsula...
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Dec 12, 2013 19:58
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Why is Gustavus Adolphus terrible? Wasn't everyone pretty bad back then? Hegel probably hates the way everyone acts like he wasn't as terrible as everyone else.
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Dec 28, 2013 02:46
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Davincie posted:Fucker ripped of Maurice Of Nassau and Willem and got all the credit As a Japano-Swede, nationalist pride demands that I argue that Nobunaga did it first and Adolphus did it best. But seriously, I want a time vortex dropping Hideyoshi's army into Germany instead of Korea. That'd be fun.
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Dec 28, 2013 04:29
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The Entire Universe posted:'Serial numbers filed off' was the phrase I couldn't quite remember someone posting in a thread! I remembered it was something implying a near 1:1 story, but couldn't recall the wording. Thanks! Good to know I was on the right track not really seeing the level of similarity that implies. It's a bit after Ashurbanipal, but I'm going to recommend Xenophon for like the nth time. His Anabasis is basically one long running fight from Anatolia down to Mesopotamia and back. Xenophon, aristocrat that he was, takes the time to argue about the necessity of cavalry,* basically that a cavalry wing could cover a routing infantry force or chase a routing enemy. Good cavalry made losses bearable, and made victories meaningful. It also details the organization of the march, selecting and using skirmishers and archers to counter the hill people they fought in Anatolia, discusses all manner of supply problems and leadership issues. Xenophon's Cyropedia is his sort of 'utopian' work (though, again, stick in the mud conservative that he was, it's a throwback to an idealized past.  ) and he takes the time to go over what he thinks is an ideal army makeup/training and management methods, and has a great Clancy-esque hypothetical throwdown at the climax, complete with an ex-enemy redeeming himself with a glorious death and his beautiful wife committing sympathetic suicide**. His Hellenika also has his take on Leuctra (and the final defeat of his dear  ) Thucy is also real good, the disaster at Pylos and the whole Syracusan debacle are both quite gripping and great examples of both Athens and Sparta shooting themselves in the foot so perfectly in line with their cultural stereotypes. *the Greeks, once Cyrus died and his allies fell in line behind the King, had none. Without it, they were sort of in a 'they only have to **And taking some of her slaves with her, but Xenophon, embodying as only a man who wrote a loving eulogy to the actual could, doesn't really count them as human.
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Dec 30, 2013 23:37
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) and really like that the thread's putting a lot of effort into stuff like the early modern era. Any schmuck can write a thousand pages on what made McClellan so cripplingly deliberate, but pages and pages of leisurely talk of Landsknechts and (H)Arquebusiers? 
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Comstar posted:I know about the Syracusan debacle, but what happened at Pylos, and why were they both examples of both Athens and Sparta shooting themselves in the foot so perfectly in line with their cultural stereotypes? The Athenians had established a minor fort on a peninsula the Peloponnesian coast from which to raid out and supply their ships. The Spartans decide that they don't want to let the Athenians have a staging are so close and besiege the fort. Now, for some reason,a bunch of decided to camp out on an island off the peninsula because... actually Thucy wasn't very clear on why they all piled onto this island, it's not like they could have set up coastal guns to interdict Athenian supply ships, but regardless, a bunch of Sparta's best and brightest strand themselves on this island and the Athenian's begin to circle like sharks. Sparta immediately sues for peace. They've been regularly tramping all up and down the Athenian countryside. They've fought proxy fights all across Greece. Athens has been reeling from the plagues. But as absolutely hardcore as they were, the threat of losing ~150 full on citizens is hands down 100% a reason to start looking for a truce. The Athenians push too hard, in the end, but it's a very close decision. The Spartans resist the demands in part because they're allowed to feed the men on the island and figure (correctly) that they'd be able to sneak a few row boats of food over to the trapped soldiers some nights. Of course, having a bunch of Spartans on the island is one thing, but blockading them indefinitely is getting somewhat tiresome. Bot no one is really eager to try and amphibious landing against a bunch of Spartans and try asking them to lay their arms down. Eventually, some Athenian rear end in a top hat* runs his mouth about how good he is and a rival calls him out. This being the time honored motivation-by-spite-and-rhetoric that was so good, and bad, for Athens. Anyway, Cleon's got a chip and need to prove himself, he grabs a bunch of Demosthenes' peltasts**, lights fire to the island, lands, and posts up on some hills. When the Spartans try to storm a hilltop his men retreat uphill while the other forces come down from the hill to toss at the Spartan's backs. They turn around to face the new threat, wash rinse repeat. The Spartans fall back to their own minifort they put up on the island, but a clever detachment of Athenian allies sneak around a cliffside, more or less, and emerge above and behind the defenses. Then the unthinkable happens; Spartans surrender. Athens basically tells the Spartan that if they invade Attica and burn the Athenian crops, they'll kill the hostages. Meanwhile, they're still able to raid from Pylos, and the focus of the war shifts once again to the proxies. Even after the Spartans take Amphipolis, the treaty signed a few years later returns all of the captured cities back to Athenian control, while the Athenians get to keep some of the gain they'd made. Only then did the Spartans get their prisoners back. tldr version: The Spartan soldier was world class, but an elite of an elite that made them irreplaceable. One stupid mistake and the Spartans were tripping over themselves to get their citizens back. By the time Thebes rolls in as the new Greek hotshots the Spartans simply don't have the manpower to police their own slaves, much less contest hegemony. *Cleon, I think, the same guys who led the whole 'gently caress your peace terms how about we dismantle your whole empire?' school of negotiation. Thucy was not a Cleon fan. **Demosthenes being something of a skirmishing/asymmetrical war savant, and really the true hero of this little fight since he's the one who baited the trap and sprung it.
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Dec 31, 2013 10:19
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:This practice is hundreds of years older than the 17th century. The earliest codification I can think of is Las Siete Partidas of Alfonso el Sabio, which are from the 13th century, but there are less-formalised examples from earlier. For a practical example, the whole lead-up to the Battle of Bannockburn came about because of negotiated surrender terms for Stirling Castle. Yet again we find Early Moderns taking something from the Middle Ages and pretending they did it first. See also: Reading Vegetius, using math, thrusting with swords. I think Hegel's talking about a more formalized 'checklist' after which a commander (not the feudal owner of the fort) could surrender and not face  ing from their own side. E.G. 'stores were at 50%, they shelled us for 8 days, it'd been 8 months and you fucks never sent help, so... yeah we surrendered.' The return of the thus, led to more assaults.
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Jan 8, 2014 03:01
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a travelling HEGEL posted:This lasted right up until the French Revolution, when a garrison commander who surrendered in the old way was executed, along with his wife, for giving in to enemies of the revolution. I'm flying solely on reading comprehension skill here, but I think this is the point Hegel was making. As Diaz pointed out, "don't make us come gently caress you up because that would gently caress us up too, just not as much" has been, well, the central point of siege warfare ever since one soldier looked at a wall and said "gently caress that I'll let the rear end in a top hat starve." Where as the confluence of 'this fort is not yours but granted to your command as part of a big state so you've got greater responsibilities than your own immediate hide here' plus the overall seriousness of 'national' armies vs. strictly professional (as in, fighting for coin, not country) was much more something that developed with the Revolution. (And the we all go read Hobsbawm.)
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Jan 8, 2014 07:07
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There were also some Nestorians among the Central Asian tribes that got folded into the general Mongol horde as it pushed west. A lot of people were hoping that Chiggis was in fact the mythical Prester John come to help the Crusaders.
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Jan 8, 2014 18:38
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Lord Tywin posted:Was the battle of Tours really that vital in stopping the Umayyads from advancing further into Europe? It seems like they had overextended themselves and there was some serious instability going on around the Caliphate. I would hesitate to say that the troubles 'at home' for the Caliphate played much of a role in the fall back from France. It was always a little bit on the periphery, and by the time it rolled into France, no longer really dependent on what happened in the Levant. Case in point; the Abbasids kicked the Umayyads out of the Levant and they went and set up shop in Andalusia so... But yeah, I'd say it was fairly important in demonstrating to the Muslim leadership the cost/benefit breakdown of pushing too hard in Gaul. They probably could have pressed the issue some more, but after Tours it was pretty clear that doing so wouldn't really get them much for their troubles.
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Jan 16, 2014 06:32
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I was under the impression that the Ottomans had a lot of dedicated looters in their army, or is this just the sickly 19th century Ottomans I'm thinking of? That's part of the good logistics my friend: camping your army on enemy turf so they gently caress his poo poo up and not yours.
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Jan 24, 2014 19:46
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Fangz posted:Was there any popular military fiction in the pre-modern age? The Cyropedia? It's basically got a Tom Clancy-esque theory crafting section on making the best army possible. (Interestingly, Xenophon proposed disciplined sword and shield as an alternative to the hoplite warfare common at the time...) Boondoggles, noble figures in the opposition flipping sides, a terribly conservative political outlook, a saintly hero figure beloved by everyone...
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Jan 26, 2014 01:02
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ArchangeI posted:So what you are saying is that it was pierside literature. Kinda. I mean, all that is sandwiched between pontificating on correct rulership and also relaying a kinda skewed version of the founding of the Persian Empire to an audience that probably hadn't heard it before.
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Jan 26, 2014 04:38
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The Entire Universe posted:When did armies stop doing poo poo like 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and start offering elements enough leeway in objectives to not knowingly ride straight into a massacre? I know communication fuckups still happen (and probably will always happen) but was there ever a point where armies were reformed so that comms fuckups like that don't end up in a whole brigade getting annihilated because nobody was able to say 'how about we flank them instead of charging at their muzzles?' Since the beginning of time. No bout seriously, histories is not this uniform procession from 'good' to 'bad' that everyone moves along in lock step. Subcommanders being given more or less independence in the overall picture is a thing that changes from army to army and general to general. In fact it is highly dependent on the personality of the commanding officer (obsessive and overbearing? weak and indecisive?) and the subcommander (headstrong and arrogant? dull and unimaginative?). So... yeah.
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Jan 27, 2014 18:56
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Yeah, I thought one of the more iconic moments of the War in Afghanistan was CIA/Spec Opsy dudes riding around on horses with the Northern Alliance to call in airstrikes from B-2's to dunk on the Taliban. The media got a real kick out of the ancient transport, laser-guided smart munition payload vibe.
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Jan 30, 2014 08:25
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If I know tank chat, this is ~the point bewbies or someone posts up the whole first to hit correlating with winning more than armor or penetration... Then in a few posts Hegel takes us back to the Early Modern and the milhistpers regain control of the thread.
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Feb 7, 2014 06:53
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Glorgnole posted:Who was the archaeologist and where can I read more about the state boundaries of pre-columbian civilizations? This is really interesting to me right now for some reason. Oo, oo, pick me. So the Mesoamerican 'state' is a pretty interesting one. It's based around (at least in the Nahuatl areas) the altepetl, often translated as 'city-state' though it's a bit more... complicated than that. The literal translation is 'water and mountain' but is often used to, e.g. refer to people. As in 'the whole alteptl showed up for the ball game.' It's often called an 'ethnic city-state.' Each altepetl is comprised of subunits that are essentially the altepetl in miniature. Farmers, artisans, nobles, the whole kit and caboodle. They would rotate responsibilities (corvee labor, tribute taxes to the king, overseeing state functions like legal cases) on a yearly basis. These sub units had their own land claims, and an altepetl might actually simply have several central villages, one from each tribe instead of a contiguous city. Each altepetl would have it's main god, each subunit would have a shrine to the altepetl god and their own subunit's god. Some altepetls were comprised of several altepetls (just as altepetls were comprised of subunits) and yes that's confusing. The Mexica (pronounced me-she-ka, the x is a sh sound in medieval Spanish) are actually an example. Tenochtitlan was actually contiguous with the city of Tlatelolco, which was also part of the 'Aztec' alliance. But, you know, not ruled by Montezuma at all.* TOTALLY different government and 'ethnic identity.'** Conquest wasn't really a thing the Aztec's did. They have a sort of founding myth in which they migrated into the area (along with the rest of the nahuatl speaking people) but they showed up late and pissed a bunch of people off and sort of had to set up shop out in the middle of nowhere. One thing about the Aztec Empire was that is wasn't really how we would imagine an empire. The Aztecs would show up, knock heads, take captives, demand tribute, and force the local king to put up a shrine to their god (which wasn't the same as demanding they all convert or something, more a traditional way of, well, teabagging an enemy. Showing dominance, or, by destroying an intruding shrine, defiance.) Reordering land didn't seem to be a big concern, but tribute and captives were. Gold wasn't terribly valuable to the natives, sure it was pretty, but jade and especially bird feathers were a much bigger deal. The Mayan's had a bit more of a traditional city-state/god-king vibe going, while the Mixtecs had an Nahautl-ish set up, only with female rulers being much more common. Royal marriages would lead to states (even though geographically seperated) unifying totally- but only for that one generation of rule. * One of the native accounts we have is from the Tlatelocans, who basically say 'once the rafts with the cannons showed up all the Mexica ran through the city, clogging up the streets as our warriors tried to gather and fight.' It was particularly frustrating because they felt the Mexica had basically gotten them into the mess in the first place and they'd had their food interdicted along with Tenochtitlan. **I mean, everyone spoke Nahuatl, but people thought of themselves in terms of their altepetl or in terms of their subunit. There was no 'nahuatl pride' opposed to, say, a Mayan model, aside from a little 'people who speak clearly' and 'mushy mouthed barbarians' aside. e: I should mention, the altepetl became the sort of base unit of the Spanish conquest. The church parishes were based on the system, as well as the encomiendas, which were kinda semi-feudal grants to the original conquistadores and their descents, entitling them to the labor/tribute that would have gone to their king otherwise. Oh! Yeah, the altepetl kings were elected... by the nobility of the subunits... from a pool consisting of the male relatives of the king. Uncles, brothers, cousins, sons, nephews whoever. the JJ fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 05:37
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Frostwerks posted:Meesh-teks? More or less, yeah.
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Feb 11, 2014 09:12
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A really short version is that the nation-state becomes a big (explicit) deal with the French Revolution, because... reasons. Lots of very good reasons that I don't feel like elaborating. Hobsbawm built his career on it. One of his points: it's quite easy to argue that the modern state precedes the modern nation. Not coincidentally, that's pretty much the break point between Early Modern and Modern.
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Feb 11, 2014 10:26
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:But seriously, it's really great to be told by someone who just attended a history class at the college level that we should not read Jefferson because he was a racist or Locke because he owned land, and that parliamentary democracy is bad because it prevents the will of the people from making policy unimpeded. Listening to that stuff never gets old. The DnD American History thread just had a great derail on why the question of human agency shouldn't be studied in history man. Because that's like blaming the victim.
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Feb 16, 2014 01:46
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But you see history is deterministic because... I think I'd can call Grant's more productive boozing a pretty similar case, though that's actually a pretty deterministic scenario... There's at least a few battles won or lost due to general alcoholery on various sides. e: Sorry this is related to the boozing, not the battleships. E: HEY ACTUAL ACEDEMIGOONS, since this is still sorta an A/T, what are your thoughts on Carlin? I've not stuck through him in depth but he seems to embody pop hist pretty well; not deep on theory or historiography but certainly accessible and able to cover a great breadth of topics. the JJ fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Feb 19, 2014 |
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Feb 19, 2014 09:45
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Frostwerks posted:Was reading up on John Paul Jones on wikipedia for some bizarre reason (seriously, I have no clue what train of thought led me to here), I came across a (potential) example of grenades getting used in ship of the line combat: One thing I'll say is that while small guns etc. might be a more effective way to do it, you might not have enough small guns, or you might have small guns and a dude with a grenade. More boom is often better. e: This comes up a lot in this thread. "Why did people do Y? X seems clearly better" and like 90% of the time it's a matter of material availability. the JJ fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Feb 22, 2014 |
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Feb 22, 2014 06:52
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Don Gato posted:And then we're going to put a fuckhuge laser into the front of that to make up for the lack of armor and spaceworthiness When I am without orders and unexpected occurrences arrive I shall always act as I think the honour and glory of my King and Country demand. But in case signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy. - Horatio Nelson, maybe. So yeah, basically.
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Feb 27, 2014 18:46
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Was there actually an organized way to do that? I know the American Civil War used different naming conventions, so you have things like the Battle of Bull Run/Battle of Manassas. I remember reading about Agincourt where the heralds from each side met up after the fight. (One of the reasons it came up; despite everyone meeting up and hashing it out, the name of the battle is one of the few things every account agreed on.) So it was definitely a thing during the Hundred Years War.
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Feb 28, 2014 18:33
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StashAugustine posted:On the subject of Sherman's march, my dad (an amateur history buff and not forums poster my dad) likes to say that the three greatest logisticians (that's a word) were Caesar, Napoleon, and Sherman. Is that at least a reasonable statement? Well, one of the issues with that is that logistics often relies on a system more than a person. Hegel's got the example of the 30YW era armies flailing at each other and running supplies via 'I bet this land hasn't been quite picked over yet' while the Janissaries across the border were meticulously counting sewing needles and pillowcases.
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Mar 1, 2014 01:39
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:This one went to Cambridge, so probably not. So are you mercenary enough to, say, break all their typing fingers so I can have a marginally better shot at getting into a cool hip European institution?
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Mar 5, 2014 04:41
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:In my period, the victor strips the bodies for cash and goods, then leaves the area. Anyone nearby can bury them if they feel like it--which is one of the ways we know that there were women fighting disguised in the 30YW, because some bishop found some women among the naked dead after Lützen. Even in the Greek 'you don't ever gently caress with the bodies' period stripping the losers for their stuff was an integral part of the process. The original trophy (now used to mark sporting victories instead of military ones) would basically have been a scarecrow hung with the armor of the fallen. It was usually put at the 'turning point,' or where ever the rout that ended the battle started, but, for instance, naval trophies often involved the rams of damaged enemy ships being dragged to a nearby shore.
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Mar 8, 2014 03:07
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khwarezm posted:So mostly studying the early modern period here its all sieges, sieges, sieges and its kind of one note. I know siege warfare was how most of how most of war was conducted since, like, forever, but what period might have seen the highest amount of pitched battles compared to sieges and why? WWII? The Napoleonic era also had quite a few grand clashes. Then you get warfare where sieges are simply too hard to manage and every battle becomes a pitched battle followed by some raiding. This is more or less the Greek model. No one, aside from the Spartan's immediate neighbors, was getting wiped out, but the threat of 'my army is bigger than yours and, while we can't get into your city to destroy you, we will gently caress up your agriculture if we stay here' was generally enough to get favorable treaties and the like. Of course, once the hegemonic powers get strong enough that they can dispatch men even during harvest time you start seeing sieges again.
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Mar 17, 2014 17:45
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