Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[Galloglaich]

Yes they had some influence, of course.
They where the major trade partners. Just like USA have a lot of influence on its neighbourghs today. Every area with amercian influence is not contested areas between USA.

I think the analogy is the 'trade partners' the US has traditionally had in the Middle East. If Syria, Iraq, Libya and so on, suddenly lost 85% of their oil, I suspect they would experience a lot less trouble with the US, England and France.

G

[Epimethee]

In mythology, the stringing of a bow as a test of worthiness, kingship, and/or adulthood pops up now and again - Odysseus is of course the obvious example, and it's worth remembering that he has to stop his son Telemachus from stringing his bow and implicitly challenging his authority. Offhand there's also the bow of Shiva in the Ramayana: Rama strings it and is very nearly killed by Parashurama, who takes this as an insult to Shiva's authority (also Parashurama just likes to murder Kshatriyas, but that's besides the point).

I wonder if this has an Indo-European root, or something of that sort? Can anyone shed light on that?

It may require a longer answer than you wished for... and that i expected. Mainly for the celts, germans and greek it was a weapon for non military purpose. In India and Iran, it was the weapon of the full warrior. Then you have a set of differences along the line of young/old, male /female, warrior/non warrior, hunt/war civilised / barbarian and so on.
I have still a few things to read about that but in Greece you have as archers the gods of initiation, like Artémis or Apollo and the barbarians Kings like Paris. Even Herakles or Odysseus are in the process of initiation when they use bows. The fact that centaurs use bows, and centaurs were close to the savage world and often initiator, point to a symbolic use for the under (as the uninitiated) or over( gods and half gods) warriors but not for the warriors.
Also it was linked to the hunt.
(And of course as lighter forces were actually used the bow was better considered.)

In India, you have gods and warriors actually using the bow in fight.
I’m less familiar with that part of the world so i will read a bit more but i have some comments on the subject of bows by the great hellenist Vidal Naquet and the anthropologist B.Sergent.

Interestingly, some of those distinctions seem to carry on till medieval time and Le Goff wrote something about it. It’s a bit old, 20-30 years, but it may give you something.

So that’s A short preview. I will come back with a lot more as i’m currently learning a few things myself!

[Vinyadan]

For fun: a portrait of Cleomenes III, a Spartan king that lived in Hellenistic times, wore a diadem, and minted silver coins with his face on them. How unspartan of his!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Sparta-02.jpg

@Epimethee: there also is Apollo. I also don't think that the Greeks found it a weapon not meant for war; more like a weapon not meant for Greeks, and something advantageous, but unworthy of praise. It might have been different in the times of the Iliad, or even when Homer lived; I can't right now remember how many use the bow, but Apollo's terrifying revenge on the Greeks is done with his bow (the pestilence), and there also is the fact that duels in the Iliad tend to be dealt with at a distance, and the spear is normally used for throwing.

[Mr Beer]

Some comparable prices in Prussian marks from Dollinger these are per "last" - a maritime unit of measurement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_(unit)) ranging from 770- 1000 kg depending on the time and place.

I notice saffron is worth roughly 1000x its weight in beer. I like the beer economy notion for price comparisons so I found this unreasonably pleasing.

[Clistenes]

I notice saffron is worth roughly 1000x its weight in beer. I like the beer economy notion for price comparisons so I found this unreasonably pleasing.

I like to use the price of wheat/flour/bread as a point of reference when measuring wages and prices...

[Vinyadan]

That makes it sound like saffron was cheaper back then. I see it sold for between 4,500 € and 120,000 € / kg nowadays at the market.

[Kiero]

That makes it sound like saffron was cheaper back then. I see it sold for between 4,500 € and 120,000 € / kg nowadays at the market.

That's because most of the world's saffron grows in Iran, and so is subject to trade restrictions.

[Epimethee]

@Epimethee: there also is Apollo. I also don't think that the Greeks found it a weapon not meant for war; more like a weapon not meant for Greeks, and something advantageous, but unworthy of praise. It might have been different in the times of the Iliad, or even when Homer lived; I can't right now remember how many use the bow, but Apollo's terrifying revenge on the Greeks is done with his bow (the pestilence), and there also is the fact that duels in the Iliad tend to be dealt with at a distance, and the spear is normally used for throwing.

I speak mainly here of the symbolic use of the bow. But yeah, it may be better to say not for the greek, as even in hunting it was not well regarded. In any case, it was a shortand: the Greek is the Warrior, his weapons are the spear and the sword. So the bow is not a weapon of war, aliens, who don’t know better, may use it, but no true warrior... We say basically the same thing i think.

But you’ll notice that greeks don’t use bows in the Iliad, Pâris does and he is clearly an Alien. We will go back to Apollo, as he show the ambiguities of the representations around the weapon but bear in mind he was a god of the initiation like his sister.
Of course such exploration may not be an accurate representation of the war and the everyday life. For example we have few representations of bows in mycenian age and allways in the context of hunting. We have nevertheless some accounting that show storage of huge quantities of arrows in Knossos and the requisition of bronze from the temples to make arrowheads in Pylos. And also a group of bowmen in the armies of Pylos.
The mythical constellations are not the real life but may inform us about mentalities.

So i will share some myths. I will mainly follow here an article from Sergent, you can find it for free here:
https://www.persee.fr/doc/metis_1105-2201_1991_num_6_1_970

it’s in french but i won’t copy every source here so you may find some references to classical texts inside.)

In mythical texts, some specifics peoples use bows.
- The woman, from Artemis to Atalante and the Amazons. Notice that Athena, an armed godess, use a spear. According to Plutarque, Spartan found the bow effeminate.
-The aliens, Scythians, Amazons again, or Pâris and Sarpedon.
-The youngs, like the gods of initiation Artemis and Apollon, or the uninitiated heroes, Philoktetes, Parthenopaios or Herakles.
-The traitors, like Pandaros and the bastards like Teukros.
Then you have the armies of the inferior greeks people like Locrians or Crete. Also the scythians slave in Athens.

In Euripides, the king Lukos criticize Herakles because he wear a bow. Dion said of the Philoktetes of Eschyles that he could not have been very clever because he used a bow.

Interestingly, the representation of bow in mundane hunting context on vases is so rare it is meaningless to mention it. Only mythological scenes and representations of scythians show his use.

There is a change of mind around 424, the year Sparta enlisted bowmen in the army. It is quite interesting to find a dispute in Herakles from Euripides around the valor of an hoplite and an archer. The dispute may be read as a lecture on the martial valor of the hunt. It was written in 424.

So you have a weapon that was not so well regarded. But you have also a kind of super-bow, used by the best warriors, like Herakles or Philoktetes, (but notice btw never Theseus or Perseus ) like Odysseus to prove his sovereignity.
In this case the bow is really lethal, as shown by Apollo and the Achaians, Artemis and the Niobides, Odysseus, Herakles and Nessos, Latinus, Geryon...
The bow of sovereignity, the use of a bow to prove one kingship is really a one off in Greece.

I will go deeper in the subject of bow and the education in Greece, and on other ancient culture but if you agree i will take a few steps.
So spoiler: next time i will write about poison...

[Kiero]

Plenty of poor Greeks used the bow, as well as the sling and javelin, but they weren't part of the warrior-aristocracy who scorned the bow. They'd feature amongst the rarely-mentioned psiloi supporting the heavy infantry and cavalry.

Furthermore, the Kretans were famous proponents of the bow, likely due to their predilections for internecine strife, banditry and piracy. A bow is a very good weapon for a raider.

The Athenians usually got their archer-marines from the Skythians and steppe peoples, though.

[Galloglaich]

I notice saffron is worth roughly 1000x its weight in beer. I like the beer economy notion for price comparisons so I found this unreasonably pleasing.

Yeah Saffron is one of those amazing things which is, has been, and perhaps always will be incredibly valuable... I don't know why, is it hard to grow? Ginger and pepper by comparison finally got cheap. But you can see on that chart exactly why the Silk Road was so important compared to all other trade routes.

(Though I gather they also produced some Saffron in Southern Europe so it's even more confusing...)

[Galloglaich]

Plenty of poor Greeks used the bow, as well as the sling and javelin, but they weren't part of the warrior-aristocracy who scorned the bow. They'd feature amongst the rarely-mentioned psiloi supporting the heavy infantry and cavalry.

Furthermore, the Kretans were famous proponents of the bow, likely due to their predilections for internecine strife, banditry and piracy. A bow is a very good weapon for a raider.

The Athenians usually got their archer-marines from the Skythians and steppe peoples, though.

Seeing as the Cretans had a rep already in Classical Greece for being troublesome or violent, what is the consensus here on how warlike Crete was in the "Minoan" period back around 1400 BC or whatever. I don't know much about them but I remember their being some debate over how warlike they actually were and that their settlements weren't fortified like the Mycenaeans.

What really did them in the eruption at Santorini or was it something else? General Bronze Age Collapse?

S

[snowblizz]

Yeah Saffron is one of those amazing things which is, has been, and perhaps always will be incredibly valuable... I don't know why, is it hard to grow? Ginger and pepper by comparison finally got cheap. But you can see on that chart exactly why the Silk Road was so important compared to all other trade routes.

(Though I gather they also produced some Saffron in Southern Europe so it's even more confusing...)
Still do.

Also they make a lot in North Africa IIRC. Think Algeria or Marocko or something. Some of the best comes from Spain I think I heard on a documentary once.

Saffron is expensive because you can't machine farm it. There's no farming a huge field and running a mover over it and pressing everything. You need to pic the flowers and the pluck the requisite parts by hand basically.

It needs certain conditions to grow yes, but that's not the difficult part. Saffron is the pollen(?) stigma and styles from the flowers and there's very very little in each flower. The main problem lies in that it needs to be handpicked. Ofc the growers and pickers only see a fraction of the value of the finished product.

[Kiero]

As before, bear in mind the vast majority of saffron (94% apparently) comes from Iran. Every other source is niche by comparison, and trade flows with Iran are the primary determinant of the world market price.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah Saffron is one of those amazing things which is, has been, and perhaps always will be incredibly valuable... I don't know why, is it hard to grow? Ginger and pepper by comparison finally got cheap. But you can see on that chart exactly why the Silk Road was so important compared to all other trade routes.

(Though I gather they also produced some Saffron in Southern Europe so it's even more confusing...)

Saffron is for all intents and purposes a doomed species without intense and continuous human intervention. The only extant cultivar is sterile, has been for ages, and is grown purely from cuttings of existing plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron#Species

(Finally something I might have an original contribution on for this thread...)



As before, bear in mind the vast majority of saffron (94% apparently) comes from Iran. Every other source is niche by comparison, and trade flows with Iran are the primary determinant of the world market price.

Possible answer then, links to the sterility of the plant... if the only way to propagate the plant is to split existing "bulbs", and if most of the bulbs are in one country, and if that country is in a generally hostile relationship with most of the world...

[Epimethee]

Plenty of poor Greeks used the bow, as well as the sling and javelin, but they weren't part of the warrior-aristocracy who scorned the bow. They'd feature amongst the rarely-mentioned psiloi supporting the heavy infantry and cavalry.

Furthermore, the Kretans were famous proponents of the bow, likely due to their predilections for internecine strife, banditry and piracy. A bow is a very good weapon for a raider.

The Athenians usually got their archer-marines from the Skythians and steppe peoples, though.

Agreed Kiero, but even in the IV century Xenophon say that those kind of weapons should feature in the back of the army, that they are basically too cowards to be in front.
Also as we shall see the warrior class was in fact proficient in the use of bows.
As i said i speak here from an ideological perspective. It may differ more or less significantly from the archeological facts and the polemological deductions.

For the Kretans, the fact that they were more allied with the main greeks than an important Nation may be meaningfull. The Locrians, near Athens, used also a bow predominantly and were mainly auxiliaries in war. Local conditions may have been significant but it was also a more general trend.

In the hunt, skythians were also used to bring the beasts near the hunters. As in war, the bow may be used but as a specific weapon distinct from the act of hunting, the killing of the beast. On vases, both actions are distinct, never show er together and the bowmen are skythians.
Notice also that the fact that using a bow seem so specific shine a light of why a woman who hunt and kill should use such a weapon. As a specific art it is appropriate for a special woman like Atalante.

Notice also how Atalante refuse the wedding. She stay in the realm of Artemis, and again we see this accent on the young people.

The bow, like the sword, the helmet, the hunt and the military games were invented by the Kouretes, according to Diodorus of Sicily. As Xenophon describe the same activity for the young persian warrior, ( in fact a description of the perfect military upbriging) and the kouretes were a mythification of young people we should understand that the bow was specialy linked with the youngs.

There is more. According to the Odyssey, Odysseus went to see Ilos, son of Mermeros. He was seeking poison to use on his arrows. Lucien, in a metaphor about the letter phi said: he will use on his arrows neither venom like the skythians nor poison like the Kouretes.
So in this case Odysseus may have been tied with the uninitiated as he certainly share the bow and poisoned arrows with them.
Philoktetes present a Variation of the theme and bind some mythical archers together. He use a bow like à salvage and alone in Lemnos, like if the bow was a sign of his ilness provoked by the arrows of Herakles, that were taken from his grave. The bow, who never miss his target, is also from Herakles. Then Odysseus come to take the warrior in Illion were Philoktetes kill Pâris. Both faces of the bow, as an important but dangerous weapon, reserved to specific circonstances and specific peoples, is apparent here. Also the bow was then dedicated to Herakles and Philoktetes was healed.

And that’s not yet the end of it...

[Clistenes]

(Though I gather they also produced some Saffron in Southern Europe so it's even more confusing...)

It's not that weird; saffron cultivation probably started in Greece or Anatolia and was brought by Greeks, Romans and Muslims to other regions within their domains...

[Galloglaich]

It's not that weird; saffron cultivation probably started in Greece or Anatolia and was brought by Greeks, Romans and Muslims to other regions within their domains...

Well the fact that 94% comes from Iran explains it for me. Persia was an entrepôt and origin point for many goods on the Silk Road. They may have produced some in Spain and Greece, but if that much came from Persia it explains why it was so expensive.

But it does remain incredible that the demand is so hi. I think a lot of these 'spices' were also considered Aristotlean (and folk) medicines back in the day. Tumeric, giner and pepper and so on as well.

The high value of so many luxury goods and products speaks to the buying power of the middle class in those days. There weren't enough princes around to justify the volume of goods brought all the way from distant lands like China, India and Persia.

G

[Vinyadan]

Try eating Milanese rice with and without saffron, and you will find out why people want it ;-)

[Kiero]

Agreed Kiero, but even in the IV century Xenophon say that those kind of weapons should feature in the back of the army, that they are basically too cowards to be in front.
Also as we shall see the warrior class was in fact proficient in the use of bows.
As i said i speak here from an ideological perspective. It may differ more or less significantly from the archeological facts and the polemological deductions.

For the Kretans, the fact that they were more allied with the main greeks than an important Nation may be meaningfull. The Locrians, near Athens, used also a bow predominantly and were mainly auxiliaries in war. Local conditions may have been significant but it was also a more general trend.

In the hunt, skythians were also used to bring the beasts near the hunters. As in war, the bow may be used but as a specific weapon distinct from the act of hunting, the killing of the beast. On vases, both actions are distinct, never show er together and the bowmen are skythians.
Notice also that the fact that using a bow seem so specific shine a light of why a woman who hunt and kill should use such a weapon. As a specific art it is appropriate for a special woman like Atalante.

Xenophon was a product of his time and class, so you have to take his opinions with a pinch of salt, for all that they were based on experience. Frankly his views on warfare go out of the window with the hegemony of Philip II and the Makedonians more generally. The Greeks enjoyed over a century of having their own curated little preserve where they could fight a hoplite-on-hoplite, that was shattered by the rise of Philip.

While Xenophon and his contemporaries might have used the bow to hunt (though they'd also have used javelins), they didn't use it in warfare. Archery was for the psiloi (if Greek) or else foreign allies.

I'm not sure why you keep making this distinction between Kretans and Greeks, Kretans were Greek. They were just as Doric as the Spartans, and unlike the Makedonians, there was never any question of their "Greek-ness".

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm not sure why you keep making this distinction between Kretans and Greeks, Kretans were Greek. They were just as Doric as the Spartans, and unlike the Makedonians, there was never any question of their "Greek-ness".


From what I've read, I think that depends a great deal on when we're talking about, and which "people living on Crete".

If we're talking about the people on Crete in 500 BCE, then I think you're right.

If we're talking about the people on Crete in 2000 BCE, then I think there's still a LOT of question as to their origins, and they probably weren't "Greek".

[Epimethee]

About kretans, and Locrians, really i think it is important to keep both in mind, i never questionned their greekness. They were economically weak. They were also auxilliaries in other armies. The fact that two different populations of greek who share socio-economical traits also use the same weapons seem meaningfull. I don’t know if your hypothesis apply to the Locrians but in any case and on both basis many scenario are possible.
Secondary may have been an akward term but intended to depict a socio-economical status and not an ethnical problem.

I allready said that my terminus ante is 424, and i touch only incidentaly what exist before the VIII century. As i understand my sources, we are exactly in the ideology of Xenophon. So the pinch of salt is of course necessary. But as i said i’m less concerned with the current usage than with the ideologies. You are right to warn us and i agree with your factual points.

And of course, every interpretation of myth is perillous. We can only read what is available and it is a little part of what a little part of a society was into. And even then, like in music, you have only interpreted a set of data. Another interpretation may stand, according to a different point of view.

As i read a bit about bows, i wonder if Vernant wrote something about that. Another huge hellenist, he wrote some excellent lines about Metis, intelligence and ruse. Obviously, Odysseus is the perfect exemple of this kind of quality and the use of poison may also go in the same way. But again we find something ambiguous, metis is clearly a quality, something the Hero need even if it means breaking some rules cleverly.

But that’s another story.

I said that archery was linked with the young, and Atalante, as dedicated to Artemis and refusing both Aphrodite and Hera, show that clearly. She stay in the same state were young women usually stay before they move on to wedding and maternity. She essentialy stay in a young state.
Again, young and bows seem linked in many other places, like the younger Brother of Aiax, Teukros, explicitly described as such. Or Partenopaios, described as Aeschylus as the youngest of the seven against Thebes.

We have Seen Philoktetes using a bow outside of civilisation. It was the bow of Herakles. As Philoktetes, Herakles is outside the normal order of the world. Compare is weapons with those of Theseus. In effect, the whole life of Herakles is an initiation to become a god. As such, he tend to use weapons out of the ordinary like the club.

As for Odysseus, his actions with bow are effectively close to those of an Iranian king. We will see later some differences. Again, it could be understood as a kind of initiation, Odysseus need to come back to the world and thus use a weapon linked with this transitivity.

The fact that the gods that use bows are clearly linked with this transitional state show that the ambiguous meaning of the weapon was integrated in the warrior ideology.

What it exactly mean for his use in warfare i leave it to you. But next time we will talk about the barbarians.

[HeadlessMermaid]

So i will share some myths. I will mainly follow here an article from Sergent, you can find it for free here:
https://www.persee.fr/doc/metis_1105-2201_1991_num_6_1_970
This is fascinating, thank you for sharing it. At the same time, I've never read a paper (only the chapter about the Greeks so far) citing so many sources that left me so... unconvinced. I kept thinking that I could use a series of entirely comparable arguments to prove that the sword was considered "inferior", in comparison with the mighty spear and the honoured shield. Every time a god wields a bow, it's the wrong kind of god. A mythological hero? The wrong kind of hero. Real people? Wrong kind of people. Wrong age, wrong status, wrong sex, wrong culture, wrong activity, wrong I don't know what. And since we couldn't find anything wrong with Odysseus, well he's an exception.

In the mythological examples, it seems to me that ALL the value judgements (as in "bows are lesser") are modern interpretations, and no primary source actually says that. In the historical examples, let's go with "a tiny minority of primary sources" instead. (Xenophon was condescending, sure. He was condescending about a lot of things.)

I could be completely wrong, but that's the impression I got by looking at the sources in the notes - though without checking them one by one. I didn't do that. Too much work. :P

And I have a language question, if you'd be so kind: when it says "l'arc vil, inférieur" (p.233), does it mean vil as in worthless, or as in vile?

[Max_Killjoy]

This is fascinating, thank you for sharing it. At the same time, I've never read a paper (only the chapter about the Greeks so far) citing so many sources that left me so... unconvinced. I kept thinking that I could use a series of entirely comparable arguments to prove that the sword was considered "inferior", in comparison with the mighty spear and the honoured shield. Every time a god wields a bow, it's the wrong kind of god. A mythological hero? The wrong kind of hero. Real people? Wrong kind of people. Wrong age, wrong status, wrong sex, wrong culture, wrong activity, wrong I don't know what. And since we couldn't find anything wrong with Odysseus, well he's an exception.

In the mythological examples, it seems to me that ALL the value judgements (as in "bows are lesser") are modern interpretations, and no primary source actually says that. In the historical examples, let's go with "a tiny minority of primary sources" instead. (Xenophon was condescending, sure. He was condescending about a lot of things.)

I could be completely wrong, but that's the impression I got by looking at the sources in the notes - though without checking them one by one. I didn't do that. Too much work. :P


If we weren't talking about Greeks, it might almost sound like "no true Scotsman".

[Clistenes]

Well the fact that 94% comes from Iran explains it for me. Persia was an entrepôt and origin point for many goods on the Silk Road. They may have produced some in Spain and Greece, but if that much came from Persia it explains why it was so expensive.

But it does remain incredible that the demand is so hi. I think a lot of these 'spices' were also considered Aristotlean (and folk) medicines back in the day. Tumeric, giner and pepper and so on as well.

The high value of so many luxury goods and products speaks to the buying power of the middle class in those days. There weren't enough princes around to justify the volume of goods brought all the way from distant lands like China, India and Persia.

G

Well, I recall saffron is expensive because of how very little every plant produces (it is the stamen of a flower, so each plant produces really, really little saffron...), which in turns means each pound of saffron requires a lot of soil and manpower to produce, compared to other spices...

Saffron trade probably was a very good business because of how little space was required to transport a great worth of saffron... But cultivation probably wasn't as profitable... As in, given the same amount of manpower and earth, a peasant in sourthern Spain or Italy couldn't make much more money growing saffron rather than winegrapes...

As for how could non-wealthy people afford saffron... I have seen saffron used for cooking, and people usually keep only a tiny box with a few fibers even today... It was very expensive, pound by pound, but on the other hand, you need very little of it...

EDIT: Also, about why saffron became so widespread in Persia... besides climate, I think the silk route helps explain it... Persians needed something to exchange for the spices, silk, diamonds and porcelain from China, India and South Asia. Growing saffron was like growing the currency needed for East Asian trade...

[Max_Killjoy]

Well, I recall saffron is expensive because of how very little every plant produces (it is the stamen of a flower, so each plant produces really, really little saffron...), which in turns means each pound of saffron requires a lot of soil and manpower to produce, compared to other spices...

Saffron trade probably was a very good business because of how little space was required to transport a great worth of saffron... But cultivation probably wasn't as profitable... As in, given the same amount of manpower and earth, a peasant in sourthern Spain or Italy couldn't make much more money growing saffron rather than winegrapes...

As for how could non-wealthy people afford saffron... I have seen saffron used for cooking, and people usually keep only a tiny box with a few fibers even today... It was very expensive, pound by pound, but on the other hand, you need very little of it...

EDIT: Also, about why saffron became so widespread in Persia... besides climate, I think the silk route helps explain it... Persians needed something to exchange for the spices, silk, diamonds and porcelain from China, India and South Asia. Growing saffron was like growing the currency needed for East Asian trade...

See also, my post above about the saffron plant being sterile, and only propagating by splitting the "bulbs".

[Epimethee]

This is fascinating, thank you for sharing it. At the same time, I've never read a paper (only the chapter about the Greeks so far) citing so many sources that left me so... unconvinced. I kept thinking that I could use a series of entirely comparable arguments to prove that the sword was considered "inferior", in comparison with the mighty spear and the honoured shield. Every time a god wields a bow, it's the wrong kind of god. A mythological hero? The wrong kind of hero. Real people? Wrong kind of people. Wrong age, wrong status, wrong sex, wrong culture, wrong activity, wrong I don't know what. And since we couldn't find anything wrong with Odysseus, well he's an exception.

In the mythological examples, it seems to me that ALL the value judgements (as in "bows are lesser") are modern interpretations, and no primary source actually says that. In the historical examples, let's go with "a tiny minority of primary sources" instead. (Xenophon was condescending, sure. He was condescending about a lot of things.)

I could be completely wrong, but that's the impression I got by looking at the sources in the notes - though without checking them one by one. I didn't do that. Too much work. :P

And I have a language question, if you'd be so kind: when it says "l'arc vil, inférieur" (p.233), does it mean vil as in worthless, or as in vile?

You re welcome! I think the sheer volume of sources warrant the sharing. I’m also not learned enough to assess each of those sources without a copious amount of work.
I roughly follow Sergent here because it is easier but i have like you some reservations. Some of the sources for example on the Kretian equipement are less than relevant for the argument without the secondary work of other Scholars. I thought it was fair to follow some points of his argument, a copious amount of informations, before discarding it.
As they are often easy shortcuts and really learned, i intend to read at some point in the future the works of Vernant about Odysseus. It may shine a very different light. I read it a few years ago but i trust only partially my memory.

I think Sergent is also a bit fast with the comparisons between time and places.

Nevertheless about the „wrong“ heroes and peoples, it is more a question of status than of identity. Philoktetes before and after his time around the bow is still a perfect ephebos. More generally they are not wrong but specificaly assignated to a world significantly different from more common experiences.
Also lesser is a relative term here. You are right that it is a modern quality but used as such to organise the classification of the weapon.
Philoktetes show that the same hero and bow can be qualified as less and more but each time in a specific setting. Wrong is also more like specifics, unusual, dangerous sometimes. Outside of a kind of normality.

Sergent try to make a comparison with the bows in other antic cultures were they seem more valorised, and i think we could discuss what wrong and lesser mean in light of this comparison.

Also there is arguably something wrong with Odysseus as he come back home. His position in the world is clearly challenged and he need to prove his true Identity. The exception is in the rarity of a trope, the use of bow, that seem very common in other part of the world but are only attested by Odysseus in the greek world.

Achilles get out of his womanly disguise by grabing a sword ( and a shield). That would be an interesting starting point for your argument about swords. And i will certainly enjoy it (sincerly, i would read that!)

About «*vil*», more like vile, despicable than worthless. And my pleasure of course!

[Kiero]

About kretans, and Locrians, really i think it is important to keep both in mind, i never questionned their greekness. They were economically weak. They were also auxilliaries in other armies. The fact that two different populations of greek who share socio-economical traits also use the same weapons seem meaningfull. I don’t know if your hypothesis apply to the Locrians but in any case and on both basis many scenario are possible.
Secondary may have been an akward term but intended to depict a socio-economical status and not an ethnical problem.

I allready said that my terminus ante is 424, and i touch only incidentaly what exist before the VIII century. As i understand my sources, we are exactly in the ideology of Xenophon. So the pinch of salt is of course necessary. But as i said i’m less concerned with the current usage than with the ideologies. You are right to warn us and i agree with your factual points.

And of course, every interpretation of myth is perillous. We can only read what is available and it is a little part of what a little part of a society was into. And even then, like in music, you have only interpreted a set of data. Another interpretation may stand, according to a different point of view.

As i read a bit about bows, i wonder if Vernant wrote something about that. Another huge hellenist, he wrote some excellent lines about Metis, intelligence and ruse. Obviously, Odysseus is the perfect exemple of this kind of quality and the use of poison may also go in the same way. But again we find something ambiguous, metis is clearly a quality, something the Hero need even if it means breaking some rules cleverly.

But that’s another story.

I'm less concerned with mythology or ideology as I am the realities of military history, such as we're able to glean from the sources. Xenophon and people who thought like him were successful in creating a cosy little arrangement within Hellas for highly customary and ritualised style of warfare between like-minded people who wanted to restrict fighting to the "right" class of men. And keep the "little men" out of proceedings for the most part. This consensus lasted from the end of the Greco-Persian Wars up to the Makedonian conquest/assumption of the leadership of the Hellenic League.

But that only worked in Greece (the Delian League on operations abroad didn't keep to any of those maxims) and only for a time. Iphikrates started that process and Philip finished it. The points you're raising are almost entirely about how those aristocrats dreamed warfare should be, not how it actually was, outside of the preserve they'd created.

Again, Philip exposed the lie of their fiction when he beat them time and again with his armies featuring combined arms, including the "little men". All of his heavy infantry were dual-trained, and he could tell off entire regiments to act as skirmishers if he wanted them to. They weren't the "right men", but his professionalised levy, who had traditionally been little better than an armed mob before Philip. Most of them could already hunt with the javelin, which made their dual-training a little easier.

For all Xenophon's lionisation of the Persians, they proved to be a paper tiger. They were excellent empire-buildings, administrators and logisticians. They could raise and support huge armies, with which they could overawe most of the nations they fought, and were sophisticated besiegers. But they failed against better-disciplined troops. Their infantry was generally terrible at close-order fighting, which is why they relied so heavily on Greeks to do that (both mercenaries and contingents from cities under their control). That's how the Greeks managed to defeat many times their number in the Greco-Persian Wars. Alexander brought a system that had beaten the Greeks who disposed of the Persians even though outnumbered.

Philip's adoption of Thessalian cavalry tactics (particularly close order drill and formation charges) showed that the notion of Persian cavalry superiority was fake as well. There was lots of it, especially the lighter sort for scouting, screening and skirmishing. While they were individually peerless horsemen and archers, their heavies very well-equipped, they fought in small family groups or even as individuals, which wasn't really a match for a discplined wedge or diamond. They were too long from the steppe to have retained the fighting qualities of some of their allied nomads.

[Vinyadan]

Thinking of what the Cretans were known for during Classical times, I find:

1. antiquity
2. legislation
3. archers

[Clistenes]

Thinking of what the Cretans were known for during Classical times, I find:

1. antiquity
2. legislation
3. archers

Also, for being stinky liars...


See also, my post above about the saffron plant being sterile, and only propagating by splitting the "bulbs".

But saffron has been cultivated in South Europe and other places for thousands of years... time enough to multiply if people really wanted...

[Epimethee]

I'm less concerned with mythology or ideology as I am the realities of military history, such as we're able to glean from the sources. Xenophon and people who thought like him were successful in creating a cosy little arrangement within Hellas for highly customary and ritualised style of warfare between like-minded people who wanted to restrict fighting to the "right" class of men. And keep the "little men" out of proceedings for the most part.

And why not have it both ways? I‘m sure it is impossible to talk about sources without an understanding of the underlying ideologies. Here the archeological sources are few and far between so at some point we have to explore the texts and pictures.
Also in my opinion the mythological sources show a surprising extent for the use of bows. Everything happen as if you can‘t hide the efficiency of the weapon but you have also to put it in a neat box, as a specific technic, not to alter the ideologies of the ruling class but including stories to justify that even they can use it. The case of Philoktetes is exemplary, his bow is essential for the fall of Troy but he can use it efficiently only after being litteraly taken outside the community. How the bow travel among both poles of representation, the negative and the positive, seem to hint to a wide familiarity with the weapon. Every one of those consideration may be usefull to assess sources on military history.

On a related note, the monopoly of violence, who is entitled to fight, may be one of the most basic point in the anthropology of war. As much as we tend to think of war with the mind of current strategist it is often meaningless in traditional societies. In many cases war is not intended to achieve a clear political goal but to underline existing relationships. Most wars were in some way highly ritualised. And the ruling classes, often the same warriors that were entitled to violence, were well placed to influence the proceedings.
So their ideology may be somewhat meaningfull.

In any case this may be more to your tastes: http://brewminate.com/the-bow-and-arrow-in-archaic-greece/

It also lessen some of the arguments i presented before about the Locrians, which is always a delicate pleasure!

I believe there is more than one way to look at things and in this case i’m convicted your views and mine are not opposed. They both can be used to shine light on the general question of bows.



But that only worked in Greece (the Delian League on operations abroad didn't keep to any of those maxims) and only for a time. Iphikrates started that process and Philip finished it. The points you're raising are almost entirely about how those aristocrats dreamed warfare should be, not how it actually was, outside of the preserve they'd created.

Even in Greece my sources point to a wider familiarity that would be warranted for a lesser weapon. Also 4 centuries of preserve make for a large piece of time. And if they created it, it should have at least a degree of reality.
A bit rhetorical i know but at this point we are arguing about a point of view and again i‘m not sure one is better than the other, just different.



Again, Philip exposed the lie of their fiction when he beat them time and again with his armies featuring combined arms, including the "little men". All of his heavy infantry were dual-trained, and he could tell off entire regiments to act as skirmishers if he wanted them to. They weren't the "right men", but his professionalised levy, who had traditionally been little better than an armed mob before Philip. Most of them could already hunt with the javelin, which made their dual-training a little easier.

I think it is a very modern take of the question, as if the end result was the only thing to consider. Lie and fiction are different things and the previously quoted lines about the debate around the bow of Herakles the same year Sparta included bowmen in his army illustrate that point. It show clearly a weapon at the center of a reflexive discussion.

Think about it that way: i find today a tv show from the height of the great Sega Nintendo war that reference both in a kind of tongue in cheek debate. As you rightly pointed out, i need more informations to understand what happened, like some numbers of sales, technical data and maybe some informations on gameplay. Nevertheless, armed with the show, i can understand that there was a debate and some of the underlying arguments. But i fail to grasp the weight and the cultural meaning of the debate if i concentrate only on the technical data or if i understand the question only by his end result, the (almost) disparition of Sega.
Both views are limited but they both explain something.

Again, discussing the cultural artefacts does not contradict the more factual analysis.




For all Xenophon's lionisation of the Persians, they proved to be a paper tiger. They were excellent empire-buildings, administrators and logisticians. They could raise and support huge armies, with which they could overawe most of the nations they fought, and were sophisticated besiegers. But they failed against better-disciplined troops. Their infantry was generally terrible at close-order fighting, which is why they relied so heavily on Greeks to do that (both mercenaries and contingents from cities under their control). That's how the Greeks managed to defeat many times their number in the Greco-Persian Wars. Alexander brought a system that had beaten the Greeks who disposed of the Persians even though outnumbered.

And don‘t you think that the close order fighting may have been informed by the mindframe of the greek fighters?
As much as the realities of fighting are the greatest test, i believe that it is never enough to understand what happened. Cultural realities and socio-economical conditions may shape the face of warfare. It is clearly different but in my opinion interlinked with more tactical considerations.
That‘s also why i think it is essential to have a diversity of point of views.



Philip's adoption of Thessalian cavalry tactics (particularly close order drill and formation charges) showed that the notion of Persian cavalry superiority was fake as well. There was lots of it, especially the lighter sort for scouting, screening and skirmishing. While they were individually peerless horsemen and archers, their heavies very well-equipped, they fought in small family groups or even as individuals, which wasn't really a match for a discplined wedge or diamond. They were too long from the steppe to have retained the fighting qualities of some of their allied nomads.

So a natural follow up question would be:“why those qualities were lost“ but i‘m nagging you.
My main point was to answer a question about info-european bows. As much as i‘wary of the term i have found a trove of informations. As any historical piece it may be discussed but in this case i believe that our arguments echoes each other.

[snowblizz]

Well the fact that 94% comes from Iran explains it for me. Persia was an entrepôt and origin point for many goods on the Silk Road. They may have produced some in Spain and Greece, but if that much came from Persia it explains why it was so expensive.

94% of the *modern* trade, note the emnphasis.

[Carl]

The times described by the Iliad were remarkably different from those of classical Greece. There were kings, who looked for kleos. The decisive fighting was done by them, maybe because they were best armed, maybe because they were commanders that led by example.

Around the time of the fall of Troy (let's say 1200 BC), this world disappears. Thukydides ascribes this to the fact that these kings had spent too many years abroad, which allowed powerful factions to form at home. When they came back, they were killed or ousted, or had to fight hard to regain their place.

Even after the fall of the Mycenaean civilization, however, the cult of heroes keeps going. Many people claim to descend from heroes, like the Heraclides. The cities worship their ancient heroes in a way akin to gods. Sometimes, a man receives heroic cult after his death: the founders of colonies, for example, become heroes for their new cities. But this already shows a huge shift in mentality. The old heroes are great for their individual kleos, but these new heroes are great because of their relationship with their cities.

This shift in general informs the whole of classical Greece. The difference between free citizen and slave of a king was very strongly felt. Sparta had kings, but their powers were limited by the law. And the great legislators are never kings (Drakon, Solon, Cleisthenes, Lykurgos). The citizen body is what matters.

This also leads to a conflict between family code of conduct and city laws. We see it in Athens with the juridical handling of "honour killings", and in the theatre with the Eumenides and the Antigone.

Athens also imposes laws that aim to equalise the looks, size, and richness of tombs. Athens was unusual in its democracy, but it's interesting to note that the heroon, where the hero was worshipped, generally started out as his tomb. So it becomes impossible for families to start out their own hero cult of a fallen family member without the city's consent.

Anyway, a full citizen was supposed to feel first and foremost a part of his citizenry. By serving the interests of the citizenry, he served his own.


With the rise of the city, kleos was replaced for the most part by arete as a driving goal for the citizen who wanted to make a name for themselves. Arete is "excellence" and you can show that in many fields, not just combat. Kleos undermines the cohesion and community of the phalanx, which is a collective endeavour of all the important citizens.

It wasn't just the Greeks who changed their opinion of personal glory - the Romans had a similar shift when they adopted the phalanx. The prescribed punishment for leaving the phalanx to seek individual combat was as harsh as that if you fled.

That's not to say people didn't read Homer and dream of glory through conquest - Alexander the "Great" was channelling his inner Achilles most of the time, and before he thought he was a god, he thought he was a hero from the epics.

I feel like maybe my choice of language has thrown the wrong idea up here. Though i wasn't aware of the distinction between classical vs heroic greece, i allways thought they were one contiguous so there's definitely though not exclusively, some mixing, (see my comment son Area's below). But to come back to my point about my initial choice of language.

The weapon, (or possibly piece of armour, that is fairly valid), isn't the sole symbol of kingship, or even the main one, rather it's a symbol of a specific important aspect of his kingship. Specifically his ability to call the other city states to war solely on the authority of his position. Via ever changing alliances and treaties they can call for aid from each other against internal or external threats. But they lack any direct military authority over each other, it's all built on a mixture of word of honour and quid pro quo. However as part of it's nature as a sort of focal point for the gods earthly attentions, (they pay attention elsewhere and may manifest power elsewhere, but all their divinely appointed priests and priestesses are drawn from the capital population), it's above and apart from the normal politics of the other states, but in turn it's ruler is the sole ruler of a city state who can directly command the others to war. Because the capital is apart from the rest politics wise this isn't used to mess with the internal politics, (and is thus rarely needed), but it's a unique and powerful capability because it means on at least a limited level the ruler thereof has direct authority over the other city states. In modern terms you could say it's a symbol of a specific extra title on top of his priestly and normal city level rulership titles.

Equally, whilst per what i'm going to have to say on Ares in a second individual bravery and glory isn't dead, thats not what his position as a war leader is about. He's expected to be the strategist, tactician, logistician and all round general for the combined armies of the city states. He's not expected to be the best individual warrior or the best individual unit leader. he's expected to be the best at commanding the armies. At the same time a general who hides in the back never getting close enough to engage the enemy isn;t accorded much respect, to be a worthy general he needs to be involved in actually engaging the enemy, but he doesn't have to be the best or anywhere enar the best at it, (in this respect all your talk about working collectively towards the good of the city fits well here), being the best warrior isn't his gods thing and he's not expected to fill it.

Also as a sort of possibly confusing side note it's probably worth noting that whilst hades himself is an infantry type person, (he dates back to Zeus's rule and Zeus strongly favoured it over all else), there's no requirement for the ruler of the capital to fight in that fashion, (Olympians can embody concepts better than humans but over any given time frame they're much less able to grow and change and are thus less flexible), and thanks to Hade's own reforms which have filtered down to the mortal plane, (admittedly neither Artemis nor Apollo where around back then), they're not as wedded to the phalanx only style. (even in Zeus era this was somewhat true, but they were melee infantry centric back then). Heavy infantry is still the elite of the warriors, (think medieval heavy cavalry status, bg and important but far from making everything else irrelevant), but other types of warrior are accorded greater respect than IRL greece.

In case it's not clear this is a medium level of direct translation, there's a strong core thats built out of IRL mythological elements but i've fiddled with many of the small and medium level details. Anyway to get back to what i was talking about.

The item in question as i noted is just one of the items presented at the wedding, virtually all are fixed by tradition, but only a few go back to Hades and Aphrodites actual wedding. All of them also serve as something of an oath of fealty from the other representatives of the gods, (naturally given the two gods acrimonious relationship Poseidon's priests present there's a day late), I hadn't put much thought into the rest yet when i made the initial question but for the sake of providing this answer i gave it some further thought. Zeus's [priests probably present some more overt symbol of his overall kingship, given the replies, probably a diadem. The priests of Artemis will bring in the game for the wedding feast fitting her role as a huntress. Apollo's will present an oracle, Hera wil provide a group of her priestesses as volunteers to provide the core of the "household staff" (not sure on the proper greek erms and equivalencies), Athena will provide warriors that will form what amounts to the royal Guard. Ares will probably also provide warriors though i'm not sure how they fit in, (Athena is the IRL classical greek style of warrior, focused on the coordination and combination of an entire unit towards a single goal at the expense of personal glory, Ares is more of the Achilles style peerless champion type. That makes Athena a natural choice for the royal guard as that requires a combined approach where doing the job takes precedence over ones own glory or even survival, Ares is all about one's own personal ability). Dionysus would probably present horses and/or wines. And so on and so forth through the rest.


An elegant solution may be to focus on the whole panoply. You have a lot to play with: the shape and color of the plate, including engraving or geometric shapes, the shield and his many symbolic options, add matching weapons and you have an epic warrior. You could mix something like the homeric depiction of armors with a more classical style easily.

In time of war the king but not exactly a king stand out. In peace you could have the panoply around the throne but not a throne, like the shield where his arm rest, a spear leaning on the back of the seat and so on. If you don’t go all Saint Seiya it should be fine.

After all Achilles was given a full set of armor by Thetis.

You may have a point there. At the same time this isn't going to be the only thing Hephaestus's priests will forge for the king, (or the other priestly orders various members), it's merely a special symbolic one, but that doesn't rule out somthing more complex. To be fair part of my reluctance probably stems from the fact i haven;t exactly hammered out, (pardon the pun), what the panoply will look like. I definitely want to keep it greek influenced but they've been around longer than the real greeks where and their metallurgy has advanced as a result so it;s not going to look exactly the same as IRL ethier. I'm definitely not wanting to bring in steel prod crossbow or firearms, and that probably means no full plate practically speaking. (Though there's enough weapons forged by priests of he gods with imbued properties floating around that even full plate would be far from invulnerable, of course there's imbued armour and then you start remembering there's the priests/priestesses themselves some of whom are peerless fighters with considerable godly given power and it get really messy). But that still leaves some questions about how their kit might have evolved whilst keeping it recognisably grounded in their roots.



Anyway hope this helps everyone somewhat even if it's taken me so long to write it the discussion has kinda wandered a bit, (sorry hayfever spent a bit hammering me :().

[Max_Killjoy]

I feel like maybe my choice of language has thrown the wrong idea up here. Though i wasn't aware of the distinction between classical vs heroic greece, i allways thought they were one contiguous so there's definitely though not exclusively, some mixing, (see my comment son Area's below).

Roughly...

Heroic Greece is right on that edge between history and pre-history, between fact and myth... it blurs into Mycenaean Greece in that some of the stories are maybe based on a kernel of fact from real people and events (see Troy).

The "Greek Dark Age" separates "heroic" and "classical" Greece, and this time period of a few centuries includes the lifetime of Homer (or the poets who are now collectively known as "Homer", depending on who you ask).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Heroic_Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegean_civilizations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Greece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenistic_period

[S@tanicoaldo]

Would a metalic quarterstaff work as well as a wooden one?

[Knaight]

Would a metalic quarterstaff work as well as a wooden one?

No. Either you get something so thin that it makes handling weird, or you make something hollow, which tends to have weird harmonics around the hand and similar. I could see something like an aluminum foam working, but that's way more trouble than it's worth.

[gkathellar]

Would a metalic quarterstaff work as well as a wooden one?

It would work better for strength training!

Otherwise, no. Too heavy.

[Raunchel]

Today, I was thinking about a battle scene that I'm writing that takes place in a pseudo-medieval world (oh yes, I am the most original person in the world by far). The setting is roughly early thirteenth century and naturally involves some heavy cavalry equivalent to knights being used. I've noticed that many popular wargames like having people blowing horns and all that mixed in with the knights, but I've not been able to find anything about that. Was this really done? Or is it more of a game construct to have musicians between the knights?

I do know that in earlier times (Hellenistic) it wasn't really done. At most, there would be flutists behind the lines, but that's about it. But still games like to include them for some reason. What do you all think?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Today, I was thinking about a battle scene that I'm writing that takes place in a pseudo-medieval world (oh yes, I am the most original person in the world by far). The setting is roughly early thirteenth century and naturally involves some heavy cavalry equivalent to knights being used. I've noticed that many popular wargames like having people blowing horns and all that mixed in with the knights, but I've not been able to find anything about that. Was this really done? Or is it more of a game construct to have musicians between the knights?

I do know that in earlier times (Hellenistic) it wasn't really done. At most, there would be flutists behind the lines, but that's about it. But still games like to include them for some reason. What do you all think?

At least in Hindu myth/history (I was reading the Bhagavad Gita recently), it was not uncommon for individual warriors to have horns that they'd blow before combat began. Even named, legendary horns. Beyond that, I'm not sure.

[Kiero]

Today, I was thinking about a battle scene that I'm writing that takes place in a pseudo-medieval world (oh yes, I am the most original person in the world by far). The setting is roughly early thirteenth century and naturally involves some heavy cavalry equivalent to knights being used. I've noticed that many popular wargames like having people blowing horns and all that mixed in with the knights, but I've not been able to find anything about that. Was this really done? Or is it more of a game construct to have musicians between the knights?

I do know that in earlier times (Hellenistic) it wasn't really done. At most, there would be flutists behind the lines, but that's about it. But still games like to include them for some reason. What do you all think?

The Celts had the carynx and the Iberians had the trompas in antiquity. Battlefield music did not originate in the medieval era.

[Brother Oni]

Today, I was thinking about a battle scene that I'm writing that takes place in a pseudo-medieval world (oh yes, I am the most original person in the world by far). The setting is roughly early thirteenth century and naturally involves some heavy cavalry equivalent to knights being used. I've noticed that many popular wargames like having people blowing horns and all that mixed in with the knights, but I've not been able to find anything about that. Was this really done? Or is it more of a game construct to have musicians between the knights?

Music has been used for signalling (from horn blasts to attack/retreat/etc to drums to help the column keep in step), identification (if you're hearing The British Grenadiers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGrxHO-B2TY), that group of soldiers that you can't see through the mist/gunsmoke isn't friendly if you're Continental Army) and morale (to bolster morale to help you stay shoulder to shoulder with your comrades as the enemy charge and to demoralise the enemy; bagpipes were famed for this, from the Scottish using them against the English in the 18th Century Jacobite rising, to bagpipes wailing as the soldiers landed at Sword Beach on D-Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Millin)).

Medieval European battlefield musicians didn't really come into vogue until after the Crusades where they revived the concept after the Saracens used it against them to great effect. Bartholomeus Anglicus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomeus_Anglicus) recorded that the returning Crusaders adapted the anafil (a straight, valveless trumpet), the tabor, (a small drum, sometimes snared) and the thenaker (a small, round kettledrum, usually deployed in pairs) from Saracen instruments.

Music became even more important for signalling as gunpowder weapons became more prevalent due to the increased noise on the battlefield, but that's a little past your time in question.

[Galloglaich]

Music has been used for signalling (from horn blasts to attack/retreat/etc to drums to help the column keep in step), identification (if you're hearing The British Grenadiers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGrxHO-B2TY), that group of soldiers that you can't see through the mist/gunsmoke isn't friendly if you're Continental Army) and morale (to bolster morale to help you stay shoulder to shoulder with your comrades as the enemy charge and to demoralise the enemy; bagpipes were famed for this, from the Scottish using them against the English in the 18th Century Jacobite rising, to bagpipes wailing as the soldiers landed at Sword Beach on D-Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Millin)).

Medieval European battlefield musicians didn't really come into vogue until after the Crusades where they revived the concept after the Saracens used it against them to great effect. Bartholomeus Anglicus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomeus_Anglicus) recorded that the returning Crusaders adapted the anafil (a straight, valveless trumpet), the tabor, (a small drum, sometimes snared) and the thenaker (a small, round kettledrum, usually deployed in pairs) from Saracen instruments.

Music became even more important for signalling as gunpowder weapons became more prevalent due to the increased noise on the battlefield, but that's a little past your time in question.

Don't forget the "mehter", the infamous Ottoman war song full of brass bands. Sounds a bit like John Phillip Sousa but apparently back in the day it was considered terrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZr1ibaFE_4

The Czech hussites with their war wagons also had notoriously terrifying music. This is a 20th Century (I think 1930s) rendition of a medieval Hussite War Song called Ktož jsú boží bojovníci. I cannot pronounce that. But it's quite a moving portrayal. It's a nice song, doesn't sound harsh like heavy metal or punk or gangster rap. But you can certainly feel the power in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiYzysQKqGI

One of the larger Crusading armies broke and ran upon hearing the hussites singing this back in the 1420s leading to a catastrophic defeat for the Crusaders.

G

[Mr Beer]

Modern military uses battlefield music to this day e.g. IIRC Marines blasting gangster rap and heavy metal while clearing houses in Fallujah while the enemy responded with amplified chanting.

[VoxRationis]

Don't forget the "mehter", the infamous Ottoman war song full of brass bands. Sounds a bit like John Phillip Sousa but apparently back in the day it was considered terrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZr1ibaFE_4


In my current game, we're fighting a vaguely Perso-Turkish enemy, and my DM plays that song when they're about to attack. In context, it does indeed inspire dread. The following recording (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nj8fCjGRAg) is a tad more intimidating, though. In-character, I make quips about them playing their own funeral marches, but it's sort of whistling in the dark.

[Kiero]

In my current game, we're fighting a vaguely Perso-Turkish enemy, and my DM plays that song when they're about to attack. In context, it does indeed inspire dread. The following recording (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nj8fCjGRAg) is a tad more intimidating, though. In-character, I make quips about them playing their own funeral marches, but it's sort of whistling in the dark.

Was all that stuff about Ptolemaic marines (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23140431&postcount=1184) useful?

[snowblizz]

Today, I was thinking about a battle scene that I'm writing that takes place in a pseudo-medieval world (oh yes, I am the most original person in the world by far). The setting is roughly early thirteenth century and naturally involves some heavy cavalry equivalent to knights being used. I've noticed that many popular wargames like having people blowing horns and all that mixed in with the knights, but I've not been able to find anything about that. Was this really done? Or is it more of a game construct to have musicians between the knights?
"Game constructs" tend to be informed by real history, though some bleeding of concepts exists because often those constructing games are not historians.
Especially heavy cavalry tends to exploit the psychological angle (ostentious or "scary" dress eg) as much as they can.

Instruments as organised battlefield command is probably just a slightly later phenomena. You sort of need more permanently featuring formations for it to really work.

What am saying is that's (usually*) it's not going to be wildly inaccurate but they may push trumpeters into a cavalry unit a bit earlier than they should, if used as formation/communication tool (liek ti fotne is, say bonuses on receiving orders or changing formation).


(*) there's always a Pulp/Punk game out there breaking all the rules.


Music became even more important for signalling as gunpowder weapons became more prevalent due to the increased noise on the battlefield, but that's a little past your time in question.
I'd probably say it coincides with armies becoming so large coordination at the speed of foot/horse gets problematic (that also coincides with the development of gunpowder). I wouldn't necessarily says it due to the noise just more being able to extend command and control in general.

Samurai armies used conch shells (and flags) to augment signalling. Not sure how far back it goes.

And of course once you invent military music it doesn't go away even though army sizes might shrink.

[Brother Oni]

I do know that in earlier times (Hellenistic) it wasn't really done. At most, there would be flutists behind the lines, but that's about it. But still games like to include them for some reason. What do you all think?

I was going to add this as an edit, but the thread's moved on. Just be aware that medieval times had some funny ideas about music - don't mistake a flautist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flute) for a flatulist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulist). :smallbiggrin:


Modern military uses battlefield music to this day e.g. IIRC Marines blasting gangster rap and heavy metal while clearing houses in Fallujah while the enemy responded with amplified chanting.

I was aware of AFV crews having a 'war tunes playlist' to get themselves mentally prepared as they went into combat, but I wasn't aware that the infantry were using them while actively engaging the enemy.

There's also heavy music played for psychological effect on both prisoners and people holed up inside buildings and on a larger scale, the constant propaganda that the PRC and ROC are blasting out at each other across the sea between the mainland and the Kinmen islands, but we're straying away from the battlefield here.

[VoxRationis]

Was all that stuff about Ptolemaic marines (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23140431&postcount=1184) useful?

Oh, yes, it was. Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't reply earlier.

[Storm Bringer]

"Game constructs" tend to be informed by real history, though some bleeding of concepts exists because often those constructing games are not historians.
Especially heavy cavalry tends to exploit the psychological angle (ostentious or "scary" dress eg) as much as they can.

Instruments as organised battlefield command is probably just a slightly later phenomena. You sort of need more permanently featuring formations for it to really work.

What am saying is that's (usually*) it's not going to be wildly inaccurate but they may push trumpeters into a cavalry unit a bit earlier than they should, if used as formation/communication tool (liek ti fotne is, say bonuses on receiving orders or changing formation).


(*) there's always a Pulp/Punk game out there breaking all the rules.

I'd probably say it coincides with armies becoming so large coordination at the speed of foot/horse gets problematic (that also coincides with the development of gunpowder). I wouldn't necessarily says it due to the noise just more being able to extend command and control in general.

Samurai armies used conch shells (and flags) to augment signalling. Not sure how far back it goes.

And of course once you invent military music it doesn't go away even though army sizes might shrink.


I'd point out that the Chinese armies of Sun Tzu's day (about 500-450BC, or about the same time period as the greeks were fighting the Persians at Marathon & Thermopylae) were described as being commanded by drums and such, so it was a known thing at least that early.







23. The Book of Army Management says: On the field of battle, the spoken word does not carry far enough: hence the institution of gongs and drums. Nor can ordinary objects be seen clearly enough: hence the institution of banners and flags.

24. Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point.

25. The host thus forming a single united body, is it impossible either for the brave to advance alone, or for the cowardly to retreat alone. This is the art of handling large masses of men.

[Beleriphon]

I was going to add this as an edit, but the thread's moved on. Just be aware that medieval times had some funny ideas about music - don't mistake a flautist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flute) for a flatulist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulist). :smallbiggrin:

What amuses me most about that is the fact that fart jokes have been funny since there have been people. I mean, it takes a special kind of fart to get 30 acres of land from a king.




I was aware of AFV crews having a 'war tunes playlist' to get themselves mentally prepared as they went into combat, but I wasn't aware that the infantry were using them while actively engaging the enemy.

Tends to screw up local communication if you aren't using closed radio channels. When the enemy is trying to communicate by voice, and it sounds like a jet is taking off outside anybody using radio comms is going to have an advantage.

[Vinyadan]

Has nobody said paean yet? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paean it was a kind of hymn frequently sung by the Greeks before battle.

[DerKommissar]

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'm catching up with the thread as I finally find the time again and I wanted to add something to the discussion of colors. In particular to the color blue:

If you understand German the following podcast was could be interesting:

https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiowissen/blau-farbe-100.html

The summary of it:

William Gladstone was a Homer enthusiast. One thing he discovered was, that there are hardly any colors mentioned in the Illiad/Odysee and when they are, they are used in weird ways (e.g. green honey). The color blue is not mentioned at all (e.g. whine dark sea). He thought that the Greek were completely colorblind. This turned out to be wrong, but linguists suspect, that the ancient Greek had indeed no word for blue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_Homer_and_the_Homeric_Age).

Later a guy named Lazarus Geiger took up the idea. He was kind of a language genius and could read basically all (at that time) known languages and undertook it to read other ancient texts according to colors. He found out, that neither the Bibel/Old Testimony, the Quran, islandic sagas, Vedas Hymns, nor old chinese writings used a lot of words for colors in general (an when, then again in a rather weird, from todays perspective, unintuitive way). Again there was no mentioning of the word blue which is kinda surprising, as e.g. the sky is one of the most cited topics in most of those myths. It rather seemed that light and dark colors were grouped together. So things we would call light blue would be light green, dark blue would be dark red (as e.g. the whine dark sea).

It seems, that they were definately able to see blue, but they had no word for it, as it was simply not relevant, as blue is very rare in nature (as someone else stated already upthread). So with the ability to artifically make colors, they developed words for it. Notably the egypts who had the ability to artifically make blue pigments were the only ones having the word blue.


Another small tangent as the “Gods in Color” Exhibition was mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_in_Color): My Girlfriend is working as a restorer at the museum that originated them and she says, that the colored statues should be taken with a grain of salt. We mostly know which part of the statues had roughly which color, but we don’t know much about the colors themselves, e.g. how ‘covering’ the colors were. She says, that it was partly a marketing decision to make the colors as bright and gaudy as you see them on the pictures, to make it more of a sensation and attract people. So not surprisingly it’s more a “they could have looked like that” than a “this is how it looked”.

[Max_Killjoy]

I can't recall where I read it or I'd give more detail, but "wine dark sea" isn't really a statement that the sea is the literally the same color as wine, it's a sort of poetic shorthand.

[DerKommissar]

I can't recall where I read it or I'd give more detail, but "wine dark sea" isn't really a statement that the sea is the literally the same color as wine, it's a sort of poetic shorthand.

Yes you are right, its about the state the sea is in, not so much about the color per se. I think the emphasis is on the dark, i.e. deep sea that was crossed. But also the Green faces he talks about e.g. are not so much meant literally green faces, but as a description of an emotional state (as today some colors are connected with emotions). Or green in connection with plants, as fresh or fertile (like today in green wood).

Still I guess most people would not intuitively compare the sea to whine today...

[Vinyadan]

About the ancient world and colours.

First of all, keep in mind that Homer's language was in no way normal or usually spoken. Ancient Greek was divided among dialects; Homer's Greek is made up mostly by the Ionic dialect, but with infiltrations and stratifications from many different dialects. It was an artfully made language, that had to respect certain metrics. But you also need to think that it was a formulaic language: the composer used many fixed formulae, which he learnt by heart, as did the others aiodoi. Since much of the job of the aiodos was live performance and improvisation, these fixed formulae could be used to quickly build up verses. This is where, for example, epithets come from. If you need to fill up a verse like

His throat Achilles cut |

you can always add

| fleet-footed.

and get the right number and combination of syllables for the verse. Homer in particular wrote in hexametres, which are made up of (long + short + short syllable)x5 + (long + short or long)x1. There is some room for metrical expedients, so, for example, any of the first five "feet" can be made up of (long + long) instead of (long+short+short).

Anyway, this brings us to a highly specialised language, with many oddities. It also shows extremely archaic traits, because of the long tradition whence it comes. The result is that the Greeks themselves weren't exactly sure of what certain words by Homer meant.

Since the Veda have been named earlier: there actually is a science (Proto-Indo-European poetry) that studies common elements in such ancient texts that can be expected to derive not from cultural exchange, but from the separation of multiple poetry traditions from an originally unified one. There is a book called "How to Kill a Dragon" that is considered very good and talks about this.

What this means is that it's fully possible that there was a drift in the meaning of words that were anyway still used in their original meaning by the aoidoi. Concerning the "wine-faced sea" ("wine dark sea" is just a traditional translation that isn't literal), consider that we have an ancient lexicon explaining a similar adjective (="wine-looking") as "dark, black". In certain regions, people still call red wine "black" (I'm looking at you, Friuli). It could also refer to the boiling wine, be it because of perlage, or because they actually warmed it up to the point of boiling, and this can be compared to the foam of the sea; the problem with this last interpretation is that it also is used for oxen.

Anyway, I am completely opposed to the idea that lack of knowledge of a word to mean a hue means colour blindness. That theory is so absurd, I am surprised that anyone actually cares about it. This is especially ridiculous if you examine the small amount of Greek paintings that have reached us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitsa_panels Hey, look, that's blue!

It is definitely true that the Greeks used words for colours in a different way than we do. So there was a word for yellow-to-green, found in a famous poem by Sappho. Blue and black were described with one word, kyanos, in Homer. Melainos was used for black in a more precise way, and also described personifications of death. White was leukos, which has something to do with light (compare Latin LUX = light). Erythros, "red", could have meant something about movement; but this would have been a late development, since it comes from the same word from which "red" and "RUFUS" come.
Words were picked up from other languages, too. So argyros (=silver) is originally Greek, and also connected to a different word for "light", but chrysos "gold" was imported from the East. The Inhospitable Sea "axenos pontos" (now the Black sea) was called that way because of an adaptation of a Persian adjective that actually meant "blue sea".

Blue wasn't seen as its own colour for a long time, no doubt about it. It was seen as a shade of something else. English "blue" is related to German "Blei", which means "lead (the metal)", and comes from a word originally meaning "light colour" (think white lead). Blue can be seen as a shade of green, or gray. I do think that the ability to create the colour has some influence in choosing the name of the colour (so you have "ocre" and stuff like "Sienna"). But it doesn't have to be that way, since the paintings clearly show that the Greeks could produce blue painting, and yet didn't have a clear name for this colour; and they could do it for a very long time, since Myceneans already had blue on their walls.

About the statues and their reconstructions, personally I find them either not going far enough, or going way too far. The statues on the Wikipedia page are pretty old, and I don't think that we have frescoes from those times (maybe tombs in Italy?); but there are frescoes from Hellenistic times and from the tomb of Phillip II. In general, I think that simply there aren't people skilled enough today, to paint what they must have looked like. These people were absurd perfectionists and made it a point to make their idealised statues as realistic as possible. If you are willing to have statues made out of ivory and gold, then you also are willing to have marble statues whose colours resemble life. Something that surprises me is how light the archer looks. Ok, he isn't Greek, so that might be the reason; but Greek art tends to use very dark colours for male figures, and this was very evident in the theatre, where white lead was used to paint female masks, but male masks used a dark red colour from remains of pressed wine grapes. There also is the famous tomb fresco with the diver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Diver

[DerKommissar]

This thread never stops to amaze me :D I wonder if there‘ll ever be a topic where there wont be well informed answer from one of you guys!

[Tobtor]

On colours

I agree that there is not any form of extreme colour blindness in historic times. BUT what things are which colours in different languages do differ quite a bit from language to lkanguage. As I understand the language literature (through my wife who is a language/literature person), it is that most languages have a "dark" and "light" seperation as the basic one (or black/white), then red is often the first "next" colour. Then other colours are added. It does not entails that they did not see the colours or did not distinguish them. "pink" for example is much more of a colour in English than the Danish version lyserød which is just "light red", that does not mean we cannot see the colour or describe it. But if you ask Danish children to list colours they might not be as prone as English children to include it. Today we see red-blu-yellow as the main colours (light seperation), but in parts of printing etc it is cyan, magenta and yelleow (CMYK). Very few children will mention cyan if asked to make a list of colours they know. It does not mean they cannot see the deffirence between cyan and lets say a "royal blue".

It is actually sort of wrong to say that the sagas didn't have a word for blue, the the thing is that the word for blue is the same as the word for black (blau, which today means blue, so if anything its the word for black that is missing). So in old icelandic both a black horse and the sky is blue (and blau-men is people from northern Africa - not because they saw them as "blue" but because in this case blue means black/dark), and people did see the different, but found it to be within the same "spektrum" or colour, just as light red (pink) and red.

On battle music
We have bronze age "lurs"
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D174K7/metal-age-lurs-the-lur-horns-are-nordic-wind-instruments-1200-700-D174K7.jpg

It is of course difficult to prove it was used in military contexts. Others have mentioned the carynx, and it most likely was used in battle. It is at least seen as such on the Gundestrup cauldron (and I thin written texts, but cannot find the place at the moment).
Soldiers and hornblowers:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Gundestrup_E.jpg

Also in the weapon sacrifices (yes I continue to call them that), we have remains of a long straight horn included at Nydam, and appears in Roamn imagery:
https://natmus.dk/typo3temp/GB/4641d10db1.jpg
https://natmus.dk/typo3temp/GB/1a24af768c.jpg

So it also seem that it was used at this time.

The Viking mythology have the Gjallerhorn which will be blown at Ragnarok to herald to war. We also have sources indicating horns were used during the Viking age. So it indeed seem like "war horns" were used in the early medieval as well.

[DerKommissar]

But how would you differentiate (more or less complex) signals and actual music? Or was it always both (e.g. demoralizing the enemy AND signals)?

I can see the advantage that a horn is louder than a voice and the signals are understandable by your own troops, but not by the enemy, but i would not necessarily qualify it as ‚music‘. I would be hard pressed to give a definition of music nowadays and moreso how people long ago saw it. But I think that ‚music‘ emphasizes a quality outside of signaling, as in to bolster moral before fights or to simply entertain and keep the spirit up and organized while marching. Im not sure if mixing this with signaling would work as then people would need to pay a lot of attention to it and the music itself would break down as it has to constantly react to what is happening at the moment...

[Mr Beer]

I was aware of AFV crews having a 'war tunes playlist' to get themselves mentally prepared as they went into combat, but I wasn't aware that the infantry were using them while actively engaging the enemy.

I could be mistaken, it's a while since I read about it and my memory is not particularly precise.

I definitely remember Drowning Pool's Let The Bodies Hit The Floor was a popular choice.

[Max_Killjoy]

I could be mistaken, it's a while since I read about it and my memory is not particularly precise.

I definitely remember Drowning Pool's Let The Bodies Hit The Floor was a popular choice.

A friend of mine who was a tanker in 1-1 Cav during 2nd Gulf once told me that AC DC's Thunderstruck was popular among tankers.

[Brother Oni]

But how would you differentiate (more or less complex) signals and actual music? Or was it always both (e.g. demoralizing the enemy AND signals)?

I can see the advantage that a horn is louder than a voice and the signals are understandable by your own troops, but not by the enemy, but i would not necessarily qualify it as ‚music‘. I would be hard pressed to give a definition of music nowadays and moreso how people long ago saw it. But I think that ‚music‘ emphasizes a quality outside of signaling, as in to bolster moral before fights or to simply entertain and keep the spirit up and organized while marching. Im not sure if mixing this with signaling would work as then people would need to pay a lot of attention to it and the music itself would break down as it has to constantly react to what is happening at the moment...

I suspect it depended on the situation. During battle, signalling for changes of command would most likely be quick and simple, similar to morse code (three short blasts, pause then repeat for example, or a repeated drumbeat), while morale boosting/intimidation would happen in the pre-battle 'warm up' (often set piece battles started with the two sides lining up at opposite ends of the field and getting themselves worked up as going into battle is a terrifying prospect) or for simple but daunting tasks (advancing to engage the enemy).

As an example of music being used to help command, here's a representation of a skirmish from during the 18th Century Seven Years War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War) from the film Barry Lyndon: link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zSowOS4Wyg). In this case, the soldiers are marching to the beat of the drum to keep unit cohesion, with the rest of the tune being used for morale.
The depiction of British Army doctrine at the time is accurate - advance to 50 paces and fire off a volley, then give a loud 'huzzah' and charge, so I think that anything that either helps your morale when advancing under fire or anything that unnerves the enemy so that their shooting is impaired is a good thing; for example, The British Grenadiers playing as that line of red approaches at 0:48 (https://youtu.be/1zSowOS4Wyg?t=48) is rather intimidating.

Something that's not captured well over video is how loud those drums actually are - you feel them just as much as you hear them. It's much like listening to gunfire on a movie compared to actually hearing a gun fired - you can't replicate that supersonic crack easily.

[Storm Bringer]

A friend of mine who was a tanker in 1-1 Cav during 2nd Gulf once told me that AC DC's Thunderstruck was popular among tankers.

The Scots Dragoon Guards rolled over the border into Iraq in 2003 to Money for Nothing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0) by Dire Straits, having timed it more or less perfect as the first tank started rolling as the guitar riff dropped.

[DerKommissar]

I‘m getting into playing drum rudiments and it seems that quite a few of the 40 international drum rudiments originate from switzerland/germany and some of those i guess date back to the 30 years war. Wikipedia states that the first written one we have are from switzerland around 1618.
Do you have more information on the origins of western military drum rudiments and how they spread over Europe? Or where they developed parallel?

I‘m really curious, as I think the military rudiments are an important basis for modern music, especially when they fused with western african rythmn. Not much i could find on the topic so far, but my gut feeling tells me, that symphonic, classical percussion is not the basis, but rudiments. An interesting video about how to apply rudiments to modern music:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G9QiJ0r2KM8

[Carl]

A friend of mine who was a tanker in 1-1 Cav during 2nd Gulf once told me that AC DC's Thunderstruck was popular among tankers.

So basically all tankers ae Tony Stark? The ladies will appreciate it if nothing else.

[gkathellar]

Music (or at least noise) was also employed as a defensive weapon by Scipio Africanus in his showdown with Hannibal at the Battle of Zama. Rightly cautious of Hannibal's elephants, Scipio exploited their sensitive hearing with trumpeters, whose job was to terrify them and even drive them harmlessly between the Roman skirmishing columns.

(If you're thinking, "why haven't they made a movie about that battle?" all I can say is, "Hollywood is dumb and bad.")

[Brother Oni]

(If you're thinking, "why haven't they made a movie about that battle?" all I can say is, "Hollywood is dumb and bad.")

Isn't that the campaign where the Romans discovered that launching greased up flaming pigs from catapults scared elephants away?

It may be a case of reality being too unrealistic - apparently in the film Gladiator, the director Ridley Scott nixed a scene of Maximus Decimus Meridius and his fellow gladiators using their fame to sell stuff like real gladiators did, as he didn't think audiences would believe it.

[rrgg]

So do we get to post landsknecht songs now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiPLBI2Lm-o

Landsknecht voran!

[HeadlessMermaid]

So do we get to post landsknecht songs now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiPLBI2Lm-o

Landsknecht voran!
Wait, is that real? Is it an actual Landsknecht song?

I experienced a profound and inexplicable cognitive dissonance while listening to it, until I finally realised why: the tune of the first two verses (not the chorus) of this German mercenary march is remarkably similar - if sped up - to the tune of "In Kamf (https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=38001)", which is a Yiddish anarchist hymn. (Here it is from the Klezmatics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2OJUsBEO3Q).) And these two just don't mix, you know? :P

[snowblizz]

Also in the weapon sacrifices (yes I continue to call them that)


On weapon sacrifices. The latest issue (well alst months) of Populär Historia (Swedish popular history magazine) has an article about a bronze age battle at Tollense. As a side article there's short blurb about weapon sacrifices where an archaelogist notes that they put different stuff in different places. So swords and daggers were sacrificed specifically in swamps on land, whereas axes and spears "belonged" to sea inlets. The area and period is 1100 BCE and middle Sweden. Apparnetly there's a book "In the landscape and between worlds", 2015.

Just thought that was interesting.

[Max_Killjoy]

Isn't that the campaign where the Romans discovered that launching greased up flaming pigs from catapults scared elephants away?

It may be a case of reality being too unrealistic - apparently in the film Gladiator, the director Ridley Scott nixed a scene of Maximus Decimus Meridius and his fellow gladiators using their fame to sell stuff like real gladiators did, as he didn't think audiences would believe it.

It's amazing how "modern" some aspects of Rome were.

Personally, I think audiences could use more looks at things they "wouldn't believe" in fiction, challenge their preconceptions and blow up some tropes.

[Tobtor]

On weapon sacrifices. The latest issue (well alst months) of Populär Historia (Swedish popular history magazine) has an article about a bronze age battle at Tollense. As a side article there's short blurb about weapon sacrifices where an archaelogist notes that they put different stuff in different places. So swords and daggers were sacrificed specifically in swamps on land, whereas axes and spears "belonged" to sea inlets. The area and period is 1100 BCE and middle Sweden. Apparnetly there's a book "In the landscape and between worlds", 2015.

Just thought that was interesting.

Well.... First off the depositions in the bronze age is very different from the later iron age ones. The bronze age stuff from Scandinavia at least is mainly single, double or small deposits of bronze things (95% of the finds are two items or less). And mainly weapons and a few prestige objects. Whereas in the iron age we have the whole military "kit" (belts, purses, coins, scrap, surgical tools, gaming pieces, dices, repair tools, strike-a-lights, combs, earspoons etc).

It migh be different in Sweden, but I definitely knows about finds from the same bog/lake with daggers, axes and spears (and swords are rare in the bronze age deposits, though frequent in the graves). So for the bronze age practise I think we can suggest "non"-sacrifice theories (such as taboo about used weapons or similar or symbolic graves etc). The bronze age practise goes back to the Neolithic where we in the late period have "dagger" deposits.
https://files.guidedanmark.org/files/442/141504_Hindsgavl_Dolken.jpg?qfix

And before that polished flint axes with the edge pointing downwards. All of these deposited in wetlands.

https://natmus.dk/typo3temp/GB/236900ebc9.jpg

[Vinyadan]

Landsknecht voran!

Also Geld voran, bitte.

[Storm Bringer]

Wait, is that real? Is it an actual Landsknecht song?

I experienced a profound and inexplicable cognitive dissonance while listening to it, until I finally realised why: the tune of the first two verses (not the chorus) of this German mercenary march is remarkably similar - if sped up - to the tune of "In Kamf (https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=38001)", which is a Yiddish anarchist hymn. (Here it is from the Klezmatics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2OJUsBEO3Q).) And these two just don't mix, you know? :P


their was a incident during WW1, where several British units were incensed when they heard what sounded a aweful lot like God save the Queen coming form the German lines, and thought they were being mocked. it was explained to them by a more knowledgeable person that the Germans were singing Heil dir im Siegerkranz, a song which used the same basic melody.

[Galloglaich]

Wait, is that real? Is it an actual Landsknecht song?

I experienced a profound and inexplicable cognitive dissonance while listening to it, until I finally realised why: the tune of the first two verses (not the chorus) of this German mercenary march is remarkably similar - if sped up - to the tune of "In Kamf (https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=38001)", which is a Yiddish anarchist hymn. (Here it is from the Klezmatics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2OJUsBEO3Q).) And these two just don't mix, you know? :P

That is pretty neat!

You might be surprised to know there were some Jewish Landsknechts. One example (https://books.google.com/books?id=lRp_DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=Salomon+Ricco+landsknecht&source=bl&ots=3lXFQtUQmf&sig=Hy6cu4i0btdg2sjWGUugYXdGmK8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjasJeVyO_bAhUNP6wKHdxABjIQ6AEIOTAH#v=on epage&q=Salomon%20Ricco%20landsknecht&f=false). (he was Italian to boot!)

In some towns in the HRE, notably Frankfurt, Jewish people could be citizens and were expected to own arms and armor and fight in the militia basically integtrated with the regular militia ranks. In others Jewish residents or citizens were organized to defend their own quarter / towers. In others they were not allowed to own arms (Strasbourg after the 1350s).

The general rule though was that Jewish people were in a status similar to Priests or women, by default they were protected by the authorities and to assault one would be to violate the peace of the town, the peace of the roads or the peace of the king / duke / bishop (all bad).

However if the Jewish person (or priest or woman) chose to arm themselves they would then forefiet that special legal protection but suffer no other penalty.

It seems that Jewish merchants and travelers did arm themselves as I have found regulations from inns requiring "all jews to turn their throwing axes into the innkeeper for the duration of their stay".

I think those may be hurlbats.

G

[Nargrakhan]

Thinking of a campaign where "electrical devices" no longer work. Around what era would war machines be reduced to? I'm guessing World War 2 level technology?

I was reading about the P-51 Mustang for example, and it doesn't really mention electrical systems outside of the radio and radar. Did such a plane need an alternator for the motor to work?

What about tanks from WW2? Did they have "mandatory" parts that required electricity to function?

[Max_Killjoy]

Thinking of a campaign where "electrical devices" no longer work. Around what era would war machines be reduced to? I'm guessing World War 2 level technology?

I was reading about the P-51 Mustang for example, and it doesn't really mention electrical systems outside of the radio and radar. Did such a plane need an alternator for the motor to work?

What about tanks from WW2? Did they have "mandatory" parts that required electricity to function?

If electricity stops working, everything dies the instant before all matter in the universe flies apart. Poof, no campaign or story over.

That aside, yes, any gasoline engine is going to need electricity for the spark plugs, and while diesels work without electricity they can be a giant chore to start without the electrical glow plugs many of them have now.

Without electricity, you're stuck at steam power and gas lamps.

[Galloglaich]

Also I don't think any version of a P-51 had radar...

[Berenger]

I'd also guess that planes and tanks are hard to make without electricity-powered factories.

[Max_Killjoy]

Also I don't think any version of a P-51 had radar...

Some later P-51s had a tail warning radar with an indicator light and bell to warn of the presence of a plane in an area to the rear of the plane.

Pilots were iffy on it because it added about 400 lbs (IIRC) to the tail and kept going off (for some of the pilots) if used in many sorts of formations.

[Nargrakhan]

If electricity stops working, everything dies the instant before all matter in the universe flies apart. Poof, no campaign or story over.

You most certainly live up to your name. :smallcool:


That aside, yes, any gasoline engine is going to need electricity for the spark plugs, and while diesels work without electricity they can be a giant chore to start without the electrical glow plugs many of them have now.

* Wikipedia Spark Plugs *

Hmmm... well damn... that's certainly important, isn't it. LOL

However it doesn't totally ruin my plans. I see it's possible to have a combustion engine without spark plugs or the like (seems Mazda is on the case), but it definitely requires a manufacturing infrastructure that has access to advanced technologies.

I can work with this. Good enough for Star Trek level science at least.

Planet that has plot-tonium induced phenomena that interferes with electrical technology working properly... machinery manufactured offworld to work around the problem are dropped from orbit. Difficult or expensive, so its not done for everyday items.

It's a start I get brainstorm over.

Thanks! This is really helpful. You da Man. :smallsmile:



Also I don't think any version of a P-51 had radar...

According to some aircraft restoration forums there was stuff like the AN/APS-13 installed on them.

Not an aircraft buff really, but Wikipedia claims it was around until 1984 with the Dominican Air Force. Third World country of course, but it seems they (and other late users) tried to jury rig radar on them too.

[Brother Oni]

Planet that has plot-tonium induced phenomena that interferes with electrical technology working properly... machinery manufactured offworld to work around the problem are dropped from orbit. Difficult or expensive, so its not done for everyday items.


I think the viability of orbital dropping items intact (as opposed to an inadvertent rod from god (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment)) depends very much on the range of the anti-electricity phenomena.

Too high up, I can't see how anything's getting to the surface intact (how were you planning to deploy the parachutes; if it's a manned crew on board, how are they surviving long enough to pull the lever or when to pull the parachutes).
Too low and you still have space/atmosphere fighter/bombers strafing ground targets from the upper atmosphere.

Then there's the issue of it being a one way trip - you can get down, but how are you going to get back up?

Of course you can use Star Trek teleporter-style tech, but that kind of makes a mockery of any military defence, especially when you can't deploy planet-side countermeasures.

As far as I can tell, you essentially have mostly-mechanised WW1 tech at highest (at the time, only American dreadnoughts were using turbo electric engines, while other dreadnoughts were steam turbine), but any aluminium or modern ceramic/composite materials would have to be orbital dropped in.


On a separate note, since people aren't dying the moment they land, the local flora has presumably generated a breathable atmosphere and (I assume) there are animals of sufficient size that have a nervous system, it implies that bioelectricity still functions. Given sufficiently advanced technology, couldn't the relevant inhibited components be substituted or outright replaced by biological versions?

If the phenomena is inhibited by biological tissue, then you end up with the T-800 from The Terminator franchise, where robotic components are encapsulated by a biological layer. It would make warfare more disturbing though - shooting a vehicle would make it bleed.

[Carl]

I think the viability of orbital dropping items intact (as opposed to an inadvertent rod from god (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment)) depends very much on the range of the anti-electricity phenomena.

Too high up, I can't see how anything's getting to the surface intact (how were you planning to deploy the parachutes; if it's a manned crew on board, how are they surviving long enough to pull the lever or when to pull the parachutes).
Too low and you still have space/atmosphere fighter/bombers strafing ground targets from the upper atmosphere.

Then there's the issue of it being a one way trip - you can get down, but how are you going to get back up?

Of course you can use Star Trek teleporter-style tech, but that kind of makes a mockery of any military defence, especially when you can't deploy planet-side countermeasures.

As far as I can tell, you essentially have mostly-mechanised WW1 tech at highest (at the time, only American dreadnoughts were using turbo electric engines, while other dreadnoughts were steam turbine), but any aluminium or modern ceramic/composite materials would have to be orbital dropped in.


On a separate note, since people aren't dying the moment they land, the local flora has presumably generated a breathable atmosphere and (I assume) there are animals of sufficient size that have a nervous system, it implies that bioelectricity still functions. Given sufficiently advanced technology, couldn't the relevant inhibited components be substituted or outright replaced by biological versions?

If the phenomena is inhibited by biological tissue, then you end up with the T-800 from The Terminator franchise, where robotic components are encapsulated by a biological layer. It would make warfare more disturbing though - shooting a vehicle would make it bleed.

Potentially bypassable if it works similarly to EMP's, though that carries a host of other issues (touching ungrounded ferrous material is gonna get you electrocuted as that kind of standing field will induce a charge in the metal).

[Nargrakhan]

I think the viability of orbital dropping items intact (as opposed to an inadvertent rod from god (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment)) depends very much on the range of the anti-electricity phenomena.

Too high up, I can't see how anything's getting to the surface intact (how were you planning to deploy the parachutes; if it's a manned crew on board, how are they surviving long enough to pull the lever or when to pull the parachutes).
Too low and you still have space/atmosphere fighter/bombers strafing ground targets from the upper atmosphere.

Strong at planetary surface and gradually weakens further out. Strong enough to make space launch impossible, but eventually gives way to allow some sort of orbital satellite network or have a spaceship approach to drop things if they're very careful and very heavily shielded (still super dangerous with such precautions though). Maybe things are delivered by "disposable one way" spacecraft a bit outside planetary orbit if they're really scared of getting caught in the field.



Then there's the issue of it being a one way trip - you can get down, but how are you going to get back up?

I'm thinking of making it a prison world. People aren't expected to leave it. Prisoners are dropped on the planet and occasionally supplies too. Probably some entertainment network or private prison firm has orbital satellites that records what's going on the surface for broadcast. Machines and weapons not requiring electronics are dropped to the surface because it spices things up. Maybe equipment is dropped for human rights reasons. Not everyone who does the orbital drops are concerned if the people/contents survive, so sometimes they don't.

Player Characters are dropped on the planet. If they're innocent or not depends on the player. Leaving the planet isn't really the end goal... being rulers of a Mad Max style city-state would probably be the endgame.


Of course you can use Star Trek teleporter-style tech, but that kind of makes a mockery of any military defence, especially when you can't deploy planet-side countermeasures.

I'm going with an idea that the galaxy is at a Star Trek or Star Wars level of technology, but not the planet itself. Some people will remember or know about advance technology, but they're locked to non-electronics. The best stuff is restricted to whatever off world material literally drops from the sky. Battles between societies occur over such supplies or additional manpower: even when no one knows what's incoming until they reach or find it.

[Brother Oni]

I'm thinking of making it a prison world. People aren't expected to leave it. Prisoners are dropped on the planet and occasionally supplies too. Probably some entertainment network or private prison firm has orbital satellites that records what's going on the surface for broadcast. Machines and weapons not requiring electronics are dropped to the surface because it spices things up. Maybe equipment is dropped for human rights reasons. Not everyone who does the orbital drops are concerned if the people/contents survive, so sometimes they don't.

Player Characters are dropped on the planet. If they're innocent or not depends on the player. Leaving the planet isn't really the end goal... being rulers of a Mad Max style city-state would probably be the endgame.


That actually changes things a lot. Scaled up Apollo Command Modules for orbital dropping inmates and off-world supplies in. Inmates get told 'when the electric light goes out, pull this lever to deploy parachutes' then get sealed inside the module which gets dropped out of the prison ship on a (hopefully) viable re-entry vector.

If the prisoners run out of air before they make planetfall, meh.
If the vector is too shallow and the module ends up in an orbit, meh.
If the vector is too deep and the module burns up during re-entry, meh.
If the onboard situation falls apart and the prisoners are too busy fighting/killing/raping each other to pull the parachute and they pancake into the ground, meh.
If the parachute doesn't open properly (either it jams, fails to open the module is tumbling, etc) and they pancake, meh.
If the doors are jammed shut by the impact and the prisoners suffocate/starve to death inside the module, meh.
If they don't land in a viable spot (half way up a mountain, in the middle of an ocean) and they all die from exposure/drown, meh.

And if they somehow survive all that and don't murder each other while exiting, you don't have to worry about the resupply as they're prisoners and are expected to fend for themselves!

Wow, not valuing human life or the integrity of the components is such a refreshing change. :smallbiggrin:


I'm going with an idea that the galaxy is at a Star Trek or Star Wars level of technology, but not the planet itself. Some people will remember or know about advance technology, but they're locked to non-electronics. The best stuff is restricted to whatever off world material literally drops from the sky. Battles between societies occur over such supplies or additional manpower: even when no one knows what's incoming until they reach or find it.

Depending on the terrain and whether they can co-opt any local wildlife as draft animals or cavalry, you can get a real mish-mash of technologies and tactics.

Imagine bicycle riding dragoons riding around the battlefield in order to outflank quadraped powered warwagons made from drop pod remnants, fighting for control of one of the few steel bloomeries that are on the planet.
The twist is that because of the advanced technology level, only people with a major history background would know how to re-invent these technologies - as an example, in the real world, we haven't been able to get reproduction crossbows to the same level of performance of medieval crossbows listed in the texts.

I believe that during the Middle Ages, artillery crews were highly prized as the knowledge of operating their machines was in such a short supply. The crew chief was especially valued since he had a working understanding of the arcane art of mathematics and trigonometry. :smalltongue:

Edit:
Your comment of people remembering about advanced technology implies that the planet has been used as a prison for multiple generations and that the influx of new people are minimal. If they're getting regular drops of inmates, then the societies that form planetside will be comparatively up to date with galactic affairs; if the planet has been used for multiple generations, then as soon as a defendant learns that they may be sent to the planet, learning up on all primitive technologies would be a very good pre-cautionary measure, possibly artificially inflating the number of valuable people to keep alive.

[Carl]

Honestly the biggest issue i see here is that well, it's supposed to be a prison. A prison needs to actually be a prison, and a prison without wardnes and careful control of the inmates might as well be made of cardboard for all it's long term ability to hold prisoners is. There's a lot of things that are highly impractical to the point of just not being worth it for any normal civilisation without electricity or electrically operated computers. But there's quite a lot of that stuff that is at least theoretically possibble without electricity, it's just without a really, really, really, really pressing need no one's going to go to the trouble of it. But given them enough time and the inmates are going to find a way to smash, blow up, or otherwise do somthing nasty to whatevers stopping electrical tech from working, at which point your all kinds of screwed if anyone down there retains the knowledge necessary to take that newfound ability to use electricity and turn it into a suitable escape vehicle, (and someone will). Sure it's unlikely that they'll succeed every time, and even when they do there may not be a huge number of escapees and they may not often have a huge effect on your empire, but sooner or later there is going to be an escape that does cause huge issues for you, and then your screwed.

An effective prison requires you to be in a position to severely restrict the prisoners ability to act unobserved, coordinate amongst themselves, and access to resources. Because the you can severely limit their possibble options which has serious positive effects on reducing escape chances and severly limits their resources if they do escape and means that you not only know about it almost as soon as they escape, they're escaping into what amounts to enemy territory, all of that severely limits their options and choices.

TLDR: Don't let the lunatics run the asylum or you'll end up like Harley Quinn.

[Max_Killjoy]

All true, but on the other hand the sort of regime we're looking at here is probably short-sighted, stupid, and callous enough to not see that outcome coming.

[Brother Oni]

All true, but on the other hand the sort of regime we're looking at here is probably short-sighted, stupid, and callous enough to not see that outcome coming.

While true, I think the current countermeasures are adequate:


The planet is blockaded and there's a ring of monitoring satellites - as the company is using the satellite footage as revenue to supplement the cost of running the prison, expect better than normal coverage.
Anything that remotely looks like it's leaving the surface is likely to get shot down by a Star Trek level countermeasure.
Assumption of co-operation between the inmates when basic needs aren't being met; in a normal prison, inmates don't typically have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, clean running water or a roof over their heads to protect them from the elements. It's a lot harder to find time to develop an escape route when you're too busy trying to survive at a hand to mouth subsistence farming level.
There's nothing forcing them to stay together - there's a whole planet to wander around and presumably the orbital drops are randomly dispersed around the planet (if they weren't then you'd get settlements developing at regular drop sites).
Suppose you do sort out the supply issue and find time to start researching the plot-onium, there's a planet full of convicted felons that are more than willing to take your food security (at the very least) for themselves.
Suppose you figure out a way to disable the plot-onium, you'll still need to develop a working space craft (sensors, propulsion, life support, crew space etc) that can get out of a gravity well, survive being shot at by a superior force, then reach FTL speeds with a correct heading.
You'll have to do all this with a WW1 tech level at best and without the industrial base of a nation.
Assuming they're dropping inmates of mixed genders and after multiple generations, small nations that can potentially thrive and start developing a suitable tech base will develop, at which point they'll just get bombarded from orbit by the prison company, taking them back to square 1.
With Star Trek level tech, their sensors can detect significant population densities so you can't hide underground - even if the plot-onium interferes with their sensors and you can build up people, there's only so much farming you can do without access to sunlight and hence observation from orbit.


While I agree the inmates could take control of the asylum, it's very difficult to do so, especially with the tech level disparity.

Edit: On second thoughts, this could be a interesting plot thread for the game - the PCs are infiltrators with the overall goal of getting plot-onium samples off planet so that their scientists can reverse-engineer it for use against the Evil Empire™. They've managed to sneak down a small scale biological computer with a version of wikipedia and tech schematics inside one of the players, so their immediate goal after survival is to get it out of the player without killing them, then build up the tech necessary to investigate the plot-onium then launch it off planet, or get samples of it off planet via a stealth rocket or something.

As they advance through the steps required to secure a power base (eg form a nation) they have to juggle the politics of surviving with developing the necessary tech base. Bonus points if it's a lineage style game with the players taking control of their PCs' descendants as it takes years or decades to do complete their actions.

It sounds impossible, but doing the impossible is the point of a heroic RPG. :smallbiggrin:

[Carl]

While true, I think the current countermeasures are adequate:


The planet is blockaded and there's a ring of monitoring satellites - as the company is using the satellite footage as revenue to supplement the cost of running the prison, expect better than normal coverage.
Anything that remotely looks like it's leaving the surface is likely to get shot down by a Star Trek level countermeasure.
Assumption of co-operation between the inmates when basic needs aren't being met; in a normal prison, inmates don't typically have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, clean running water or a roof over their heads to protect them from the elements. It's a lot harder to find time to develop an escape route when you're too busy trying to survive at a hand to mouth subsistence farming level.
There's nothing forcing them to stay together - there's a whole planet to wander around and presumably the orbital drops are randomly dispersed around the planet (if they weren't then you'd get settlements developing at regular drop sites).
Suppose you do sort out the supply issue and find time to start researching the plot-onium, there's a planet full of convicted felons that are more than willing to take your food security (at the very least) for themselves.
Suppose you figure out a way to disable the plot-onium, you'll still need to develop a working space craft (sensors, propulsion, life support, crew space etc) that can get out of a gravity well, survive being shot at by a superior force, then reach FTL speeds with a correct heading.
You'll have to do all this with a WW1 tech level at best and without the industrial base of a nation.
Assuming they're dropping inmates of mixed genders and after multiple generations, small nations that can potentially thrive and start developing a suitable tech base will develop, at which point they'll just get bombarded from orbit by the prison company, taking them back to square 1.
With Star Trek level tech, their sensors can detect significant population densities so you can't hide underground - even if the plot-onium interferes with their sensors and you can build up people, there's only so much farming you can do without access to sunlight and hence observation from orbit.


While I agree the inmates could take control of the asylum, it's very difficult to do so, especially with the tech level disparity.

Edit: On second thoughts, this could be a interesting plot thread for the game - the PCs are infiltrators with the overall goal of getting plot-onium samples off planet so that their scientists can reverse-engineer it for use against the Evil Empire™. They've managed to sneak down a small scale biological computer with a version of wikipedia and tech schematics inside one of the players, so their immediate goal after survival is to get it out of the player without killing them, then build up the tech necessary to investigate the plot-onium then launch it off planet, or get samples of it off planet via a stealth rocket or something.

As they advance through the steps required to secure a power base (eg form a nation) they have to juggle the politics of surviving with developing the necessary tech base. Bonus points if it's a lineage style game with the players taking control of their PCs' descendants as it takes years or decades to do complete their actions.

It sounds impossible, but doing the impossible is the point of a heroic RPG. :smallbiggrin:

The problem with that is that at the rate any modestly sized or larger steller empire is going to be dumping even just hardcore criminals down there your going to have decent nation states start cropping up real fast, you'd be bombing them every few decades, which quite apart from probably rendering the planet completely uninhabitable real fast ends up just being a delayed form of capital punishment, and is going to be a hell of a lot more resource intensive than maintaining an actual prison. Keepin the necessary level of firepower on hand has some serious costs.

I think your also seriously underestimating the degree of cooperation that would happen, they may not be very nice as a rule, but they're still human beings effectively trapped in hellish conditions against their will. The tendency for humans to band together in those situations is pretty strong, and it only takes one group to get started and it will grow and quickly. There's a reason historically the fiction style carry everything on their backs and steal everything they need disorganised barbarians Almost never seriously threatened a healthy nation state. An organised force able to coordinate it;s actions on both a strategic and tactical scale can seriously outfight a more disorganised opponent thats les able to plan ahead.

Also fro the OP's question it dosen't sound like said empire is trying to stop tech advances.

[Beleriphon]

TLDR: Don't let the lunatics run the asylum or you'll end up like Harley Quinn.

I rather think that's the point of the game being proposed. Also, read current Harley comics, she runs of Mayor of New York... maybe that says something about New York City.

[VoxRationis]

But given them enough time and the inmates are going to find a way to smash, blow up, or otherwise do somthing nasty to whatevers stopping electrical tech from working, at which point your all kinds of screwed if anyone down there retains the knowledge necessary to take that newfound ability to use electricity and turn it into a suitable escape vehicle, (and someone will).

I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of prisoners lack the knowledge base to construct a vehicle capable of reaching escape velocity on their own simply because electrical devices can theoretically work. Even if one person miraculously did remember exactly how to pull it off, that's the sort of project that is associated with nation-states or multinational corporations. An immense amount of covert organization and industrialization (among prisoners, no less) would be needed to launch even a handful into orbit, where they still would face whatever defenses their captors have on hand.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of prisoners lack the knowledge base to construct a vehicle capable of reaching escape velocity on their own simply because electrical devices can theoretically work. Even if one person miraculously did remember exactly how to pull it off, that's the sort of project that is associated with nation-states or multinational corporations. An immense amount of covert organization and industrialization (among prisoners, no less) would be needed to launch even a handful into orbit, where they still would face whatever defenses their captors have on hand.


On the other hand, this is also a setting in which an interstellar empire can afford to waste an inhabitable planet as a sadistic prison to terrorize and titillate its population, and that has the science/tech to create devices to suppress selective aspects of basic physics without also destroying matter or killing off every living thing in the area of effect.

They probably have methods of getting from the surface to orbit that we consider "bad science fiction", that don't involve massive controlled explosions shooting out the back of metal tubes.

[VoxRationis]

But those methods probably require even more technological sophistication, and even more of a well-developed industrial base, to create. The fact that I come from a society that can produce moon rockets doesn't make it easier for me to create a car if I'm dropped into the woods with a jacket and a wave "good luck." The height of my society's technological sophistication is irrelevant if I'm required to start from the bottom.

[Max_Killjoy]

But those methods probably require even more technological sophistication, and even more of a well-developed industrial base, to create. The fact that I come from a society that can produce moon rockets doesn't make it easier for me to create a car if I'm dropped into the woods with a jacket and a wave "good luck." The height of my society's technological sophistication is irrelevant if I'm required to start from the bottom.

First, this empire literally defies multiple aspects of reality as we know it. Casually, it seems. We have no idea how their technology works or what crossover applications might be possible. The difference between what they're capable of, and getting from surface to orbit, is like the difference between doctorate-level mathematical theory, and kindergarten math flashcards. Based on what we know they can do, things like "I'd like to get to that station in orbit" are equivalent to "what's 2+5?".

Second,, I don't think they're starting from scratch.

[Carl]

I rather think that's the point of the game being proposed. Also, read current Harley comics, she runs of Mayor of New York... maybe that says something about New York City.

Heh possibbly on the first point, as for the second, i don't read the comics but i recently got my hands via a relative on the suicide squad DVD which is what inspired the comparison. Knowing comic purists your probably grinding your teeth at the mention of that movie right now. Sorry.


I'm pretty certain that the overwhelming majority of prisoners lack the knowledge base to construct a vehicle capable of reaching escape velocity on their own simply because electrical devices can theoretically work. Even if one person miraculously did remember exactly how to pull it off, that's the sort of project that is associated with nation-states or multinational corporations. An immense amount of covert organization and industrialization (among prisoners, no less) would be needed to launch even a handful into orbit, where they still would face whatever defenses their captors have on hand.

This would undoubtedly be a long term effort to set up and might well turn into a generational effort. It's not going to be easy. But being hard never stopped countless prisoners and POW's over the years. Pulling this sort of thing off is basically a matter of time, effort, and pooling available knowledge.

[Vinyadan]

So the Civilization games are actually a jail simulator?

[HeadlessMermaid]

So the Civilization games are actually a jail simulator?

"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" :smalltongue:

[VoxRationis]

This would undoubtedly be a long term effort to set up and might well turn into a generational effort. It's not going to be easy. But being hard never stopped countless prisoners and POW's over the years. Pulling this sort of thing off is basically a matter of time, effort, and pooling available knowledge.

That's a generational effort at a minimum and quite possibly a trans-civilization effort. Digging an escape tunnel is hard, but it can be done with sticks or even bare hands, potentially. Building an escape combat-capable spacecraft is another thing entirely. Hell, even an escape aircraft is tricky. If you told the inmates of a prison in the US or another developed country that they could have total legal amnesty if they could process (generously provided) raw materials into a working rocket and used that to get over the walls, using only the knowledge they have memorized, I'm guessing they would get nowhere. Most of them wouldn't know where to begin. A selection would have some very basic theoretical knowledge of how it would work, but wouldn't know how to begin applying it. The people with applicable knowledge would have learned how to apply it in the context of a broad industrial base and would be helpless outside of it (e.g., your welders would just be used to having welding gear when they need to weld things and wouldn't know how to make, or even approximate, said gear). That's to say nothing of the fact that the people who know the really in-depth technical things tend not to be put in prison in the first place.

[Brother Oni]

I think your also seriously underestimating the degree of cooperation that would happen, they may not be very nice as a rule, but they're still human beings effectively trapped in hellish conditions against their will.

Just want to highlight this point as the others have already been covered - Nargrakhan can correct me, but aside from an off hand reference to the endgame being in command of a Max Max style city state, there's nothing in the brief that says the planet is an irradiated hellscape or a single biome desert planet like Star Wars' Tattoine.

The fact that it has a breathable atmosphere indicates that there's substantial vegetation (or something that's generating oxygen), so the planet could be just like Earth before the arrival of people - an untamed wilderness. Depending on how long the prison has been running, you could have anywhere from isolated communities of first generation convicts to fully formed nations at around the medieval level full of the descendants of the former inmates.


On the other hand, this is also a setting in which an interstellar empire can afford to waste an inhabitable planet as a sadistic prison to terrorize and titillate its population, and that has the science/tech to create devices to suppress selective aspects of basic physics without also destroying matter or killing off every living thing in the area of effect.

I thought that it was they found this unknown material that completely screwed up their tech and immediately quarantined the planet in fear. While the planet is habitable, it's a one way trip get down there, so turning it into a prison planet was basically a way to make use of an otherwise useless resource.


That's to say nothing of the fact that the people who know the really in-depth technical things tend not to be put in prison in the first place.

It depends exactly on who's being put into prison - if it's the serial killers and other professional criminals with sentences longer than their natural lives, then I'd agree they mostly stuck down there. If it's including political prisoners and other people inconvenient to the regime, then it gets a lot more likely that the prisoners have the knowledge base - they just need to survive the other group long enough to apply it.

Edit: Thinking about it some more, terrorists in the vein of the IRA would exactly be the sort of people capable of taking over the asylum and achieving the result that Carl suggests. Knowledgeable in adhoc manipulation of technologies and machinery, ideologically united and driven, well disciplined and organised, well versed in the use of violence and comfortable in dealing with shady people. The professional criminals down there with them would either be recruited, trade (comparatively) peacefully or give them a wide berth - the less socially functional people would be unlikely to be able to form a coherent group to oppose them effectively.

[Clistenes]

That's to say nothing of the fact that the people who know the really in-depth technical things tend not to be put in prison in the first place.

Also, they would have trouble getting people to listen to them in a society in which the pecking order is established stabbing each other's faces with sharpened bones or bashing each other brains with clubs and stones...

[DerKommissar]

Somehow that reminds me of that south park episode, where Randy discovers warp drive only to have the world been cut of from the rest of the universe forever :D

[Knaight]

Edit: Thinking about it some more, terrorists in the vein of the IRA would exactly be the sort of people capable of taking over the asylum and achieving the result that Carl suggests. Knowledgeable in adhoc manipulation of technologies and machinery, ideologically united and driven, well disciplined and organised, well versed in the use of violence and comfortable in dealing with shady people. The professional criminals down there with them would either be recruited, trade (comparatively) peacefully or give them a wide berth - the less socially functional people would be unlikely to be able to form a coherent group to oppose them effectively.

On the other hand, that only really applies if you have either one IRA like group or a few that are at all likely to end up working together. Having more than one makes it very easy to systematically remove any trace of "ideologically united".

That might not even be necessary - there's more than a few of these groups united more by a common enemy than anything else, remove the enemy and they'll balkanize.

[Mike_G]

On the other hand, that only really applies if you have either one IRA like group or a few that are at all likely to end up working together. Having more than one makes it very easy to systematically remove any trace of "ideologically united".

That might not even be necessary - there's more than a few of these groups united more by a common enemy than anything else, remove the enemy and they'll balkanize.

I figure whoever stranded them on the craphole prison planet with no electricity will probably be a good enough common enemy.

[Knaight]

I figure whoever stranded them on the craphole prison planet with no electricity will probably be a good enough common enemy.

Normally I'd agree, but getting back to orbit is a long enough prospect for them to not represent an immediate common enemy that well.

[Clistenes]

Edit: Thinking about it some more, terrorists in the vein of the IRA would exactly be the sort of people capable of taking over the asylum and achieving the result that Carl suggests. Knowledgeable in adhoc manipulation of technologies and machinery, ideologically united and driven, well disciplined and organised, well versed in the use of violence and comfortable in dealing with shady people. The professional criminals down there with them would either be recruited, trade (comparatively) peacefully or give them a wide berth - the less socially functional people would be unlikely to be able to form a coherent group to oppose them effectively.

Going from pre-industrial tech to interstellar travel would be such a long term goal and so resources-consuming and work-demanding that the IRA-like would be a very hard time convincing the rest of the inmates to work with them...

I mean, slaving yourself your whole life so your great-great-great-grandchildren may be able to escape?

Any competent enough criminal leader would have an easy time raising the inmates against the IRA-like organization...

[Mike_G]

Going from pre-industrial tech to interstellar travel would be such a long term goal and so resources-consuming and work-demanding that the IRA-like would be a very hard time convincing the rest of the inmates to work with them...

I mean, slaving yourself your whole life so your great-great-great-grandchildren may be able to escape?


Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.

--Bobby Sands

Since we're mentioning the IRA.

[Brother Oni]

I mean, slaving yourself your whole life so your great-great-great-grandchildren may be able to escape?

On the other hand, work for us and we'll guarantee you food and a roof over your head so you don't starve or freeze to death when winter comes, doesn't sound like a bad deal.


Any competent enough criminal leader would have an easy time raising the inmates against the IRA-like organization...

Except that the IRA-like organisation would like have better tech, or at least the knowledge for it. It would make for an interesting scenario though - the players climb out of their capsule, the outside still smoking from the heat of re-entry, to find themselves in the middle of a war between a criminal gang and a nascent IRA-like terrorist organisation. Criminals offer freedom to do whatever you like but no long term plan or personal safety from fellow members while the terrorists offer food, shelter, comfort and a distant hope of escape in return for hard work and allegiance to their cause.

Murder hobos style PCs would obvious favour the former, but signing up for the latter could make for some interesting options.

[Mike_G]

On the other hand, work for us and we'll guarantee you food and a roof over your head so you don't starve or freeze to death when winter comes, doesn't sound like a bad deal.



Except that the IRA-like organisation would like have better tech, or at least the knowledge for it. It would make for an interesting scenario though - the players climb out of their capsule, the outside still smoking from the heat of re-entry, to find themselves in the middle of a war between a criminal gang and a nascent IRA-like terrorist organisation. Criminals offer freedom to do whatever you like but no long term plan or personal safety from fellow members while the terrorists offer food, shelter, comfort and a distant hope of escape in return for hard work and allegiance to their cause.

Murder hobos style PCs would obvious favour the former, but signing up for the latter could make for some interesting options.

Don't underestimate the sticking power of the resistance.

Norman Invasion of Ireland 1170
Battle of the Boyne 1690
Potato Famine 1845
Easter Rising 1916
Irish Free State 1922
Republic of Ireland 1937
Good Friday Agreement 1996

Reunited with the Six Counties TBD

A long time to work toward a cause

[Recherché]

I just realized that in this sort of situation experimental archeologists would probably be invaluable. I can shear a sheep using medieval tools, card and spin the wool using hand carved tools, build an early medieval loom out of a pile of lumber and a sharp knife and weave and dye fabric with it. A colleague of mine makes stone tools out of pieces of flint on the weekends and uses them to butcher animals and tan hides. Another has built a miniature old Irish hill fort as part of a project. More theoretically I know how to treat infected wounds using Roman era tech and how to make a medieval house with mud and minimal tools. We end up with some freaking weird skill sets.

[Mr Beer]

Overcoming the difficulties of having a functional industrial base depend a lot on the time frames involved. Take a look at Australia, it's not a perfect comparison by any means but it doesn't look much like a prison colony these days.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Overcoming the difficulties of having a functional industrial base depend a lot on the time frames involved. Take a look at Australia, it's not a perfect comparison by any means but it doesn't look much like a prison colony these days.

Australia wasn't cut off from the outside except carefully monitored drops, either. And didn't have to overcome plot-inium.

[Clistenes]

On the other hand, work for us and we'll guarantee you food and a roof over your head so you don't starve or freeze to death when winter comes, doesn't sound like a bad deal.



Except that the IRA-like organisation would like have better tech, or at least the knowledge for it. It would make for an interesting scenario though - the players climb out of their capsule, the outside still smoking from the heat of re-entry, to find themselves in the middle of a war between a criminal gang and a nascent IRA-like terrorist organisation. Criminals offer freedom to do whatever you like but no long term plan or personal safety from fellow members while the terrorists offer food, shelter, comfort and a distant hope of escape in return for hard work and allegiance to their cause.

Murder hobos style PCs would obvious favour the former, but signing up for the latter could make for some interesting options.

But, would that IRA-like organization really offer any of that? I think you are greatly overstimating their capacities... They may know how to make explosives using industrial chemicals and even how to make primitive guns using electric equipment and steel tubes, but, what good would that be when you are trying to figure how to rediscover agriculture, and all you have are sticks and stones? Are they going to make food and shelter appear out of thin air?

They may have a chance to start something if they manage to secure the few guys with useful skills at the very beginning, but at the same time, the people they would be working with would be criminals who used violence and broke society's rules for their own benefit... how long before Don Corleone decides to make a coup and take over, promising the other inmates to produce more food with less work by relocating the resources of the "Build a Starship 300 years in the future" project to the "Eat Meat Twice a Week Next Year" project?

[Mr Beer]

You guys are missing a really obvious point here, the society (or societies) do not need to be founded with the mission statement to build a starship. They should be founded just to get a society because that's what people do. The real possibility of starting Project Escape Planet Craphole can emerge after achieving industrialisation.


Australia wasn't cut off from the outside except carefully monitored drops, either. And didn't have to overcome plot-inium.

Hence the whole 'not perfect comparison' thing. What I'm saying is, you can start with unpromising beginnings and end up with a functional society and given enough time that's completely reasonable.

[Knaight]

You guys are missing a really obvious point here, the society (or societies) do not need to be founded with the mission statement to build a starship. They should be founded just to get a society because that's what people do. The real possibility of starting Project Escape Planet Craphole can emerge after achieving industrialisation.

We're addressing the point - operation build a starship doesn't work as a society forming motivation, and the group there can be selected to make society building harder. You'd still probably see one (as you said, that's what people do), but that particular incentive just doesn't work.

[snowblizz]

We're addressing the point - operation build a starship doesn't work as a society forming motivation, and the group there can be selected to make society building harder. You'd still probably see one (as you said, that's what people do), but that particular incentive just doesn't work.

Just strikes me how all of this is basically the plot of Gorkamorka. A 40k spinoff game featuring orks stuck on a desert planet trying to rebuild a spaceship from the wreckage of the spacehulk (think conglomeration of dozens starships and asteroids mangles together, it's not a moon it's a space hulk!).

Being orks with the mental aquity and inclination of a bunch of English football hooligans (the base template for the ork) it doesn't progress super smoothly. Though they do have the benefit* of innate technological savants popping up in the population.


Mostly it's a bunch of green burlky walking fungi haivng a good scrap about a choice piece of scrap.

*well "benefit", a Mekboy is more of mad scientist-engineer, so YMMV when he rebuild your gun

[Clistenes]

You guys are missing a really obvious point here, the society (or societies) do not need to be founded with the mission statement to build a starship. They should be founded just to get a society because that's what people do. The real possibility of starting Project Escape Planet Craphole can emerge after achieving industrialisation.

Somebody mentioned that the hate against a common enemy (the justice system that trapped them there) and the will to escape could work as the ideological glue to make the innates work together, and I answered I think that's too long term a goal for such self-serving population...

As for they forming a society because that's what people do... yes, they would form a society, but they could easily get stuck at Yanomami's technological and organizational level for centuries... once the first generation of inmates dies you are left with kids that have spent their whole lives without experiencing any tech more complex than a bone-tipped spear, a shelf bow or a vine net, or, if they are really lucky, a primitive loom or ceramic oven...

Yes, they have heard tales about planes and computeres, yes, they may have some theoretical knowkedge of basic sciences, but their main concerns are to hunt the next meal and to steal some wives from the nearest tribe...

[Knaight]

As for they forming a society because that's what people do... yes, they would form a society, but they could easily get stuck at Yanomami's technological and organizational level for centuries... once the first generation of inmates dies you are left with kids that have spent their whole lives without experiencing any tech more complex than a bone-tipped spear, a shelf bow or a vine net, or, if they are really lucky, a primitive loom or ceramic oven...

Yes, they have heard tales about planes and computeres, yes, they may have some theoretical knowkedge of basic sciences, but their firemost concerns are to hunt the next meal and to steal some wives from the nearest tribe...

A primitive loom is basically nothing - hand looms are stone age tech, and can be made pretty effortlessly out of a handful of sticks (though that does assume particular earth-life is there with them, namely trees or vines).

There's also the matter of conceptual technologies. At the very least they'll inherit a language structure from a much more complex society, and that matters. Writing is probably going to be there, concepts like the very existence of a standard system of measurements (not to mention the concepts embedded in that about what can be measured) are going to be very helpful, etc.

[Max_Killjoy]

If there are deposits of this stuff that mucks with electronics, maybe the prisoners start digging it up, putting it on dumb rockets, and firing it into orbit... there's some revenge.


(The V2 reached space before coming back down, and was designed using slide rules, pen, and paper.)

[Brother Oni]

As for they forming a society because that's what people do... yes, they would form a society, but they could easily get stuck at Yanomami's technological and organizational level for centuries... once the first generation of inmates dies you are left with kids that have spent their whole lives without experiencing any tech more complex than a bone-tipped spear, a shelf bow or a vine net, or, if they are really lucky, a primitive loom or ceramic oven...


Until the next batch of inmates get dropped in, who still have the knowledge or more up to date knowledge.

Thinking about the issue from another perspective, assuming that the drops are completely random and there aren't any designated landing spots:

Using incarceration numbers from America (no bias here, just that they're the easiest to find), around 0.91% of the adult population is imprisoned at any one time. Approximately 10% of those are in federal prisons, so use that as a minimum sentencing yardstick to get sent to Prison Planet.

Assuming the Evil Empire is in control of a single planet with a similar population to Earth (7.4 billion), the population of Prison Planet would be ~6.7 million, spread over a whole planet. That's not a very high population density, even if you add multiple planets, so the likelihood of groups interacting is incredible minute.

Planetside population growth would skew the numbers, but we'd need more information on how long the prison had been operating for. Lack of healthcare and pre-modern healthcare would also increase the mortality rate, but we'd need to decide on a tech level before I can start looking up numbers for that.

Of course, if the drops aren't random, then as I mentioned earlier, expect communities to start developing around the drop sites, either to recruit, scavenge or otherwise take advantage of the fresh meat.

[Clistenes]

Until the next batch of inmates get dropped in, who still have the knowledge or more up to date knowledge.

While new batches of inmates would bring a small minority of people with technical skills, they would also bring a steady supply of antisocial, criminal outsiders who would try to prey on any society previous generations had managed to develope...

It's not impossible, but a functional, modern society would take a very long time to develope, and by the time they were able to build starships they would probably not care too much about the way the original settlers arrived to the planet...

[Max_Killjoy]

Given the empire sending them there, I don't know if I'd refer to it as a "justice" system, and I don't know if I'd presume the people being sent are strongly selected for any sort of actual anti-social or violent tendency.

[Brother Oni]

While new batches of inmates would bring a small minority of people with technical skills, they would also bring a steady supply of antisocial, criminal outsiders who would try to prey on any society previous generations had managed to develope...

Australia manage to federate and secede in 113 years after we started using it as a prison, so a constant influx of antisocial criminal outsiders doesn't seem to be too much of a hinderance. :smalltongue:

[ExLibrisMortis]

Using incarceration numbers from America [...]

Planetside population growth would skew the numbers [...]
Putting these two together: incarceration rates for women are significantly lower than for men. If we use the US prison population as reference, the initial population and subsequent drops will have men outnumbering women 10:1 or worse. I'm not exactly a population growth modeller, but I imagine that an imbalance like that takes several generations to correct, and might cause serious tension. I can imagine the female population taking aggressive measures to protect themselves in such an environment. Depending on scale, there might be common genetic defects, due to the relatively wide distribution of a small pool of mother's genes.

[Brother Oni]

Putting these two together: incarceration rates for women are significantly lower than for men. If we use the US prison population as reference, the initial population and subsequent drops will have men outnumbering women 10:1 or worse. I'm not exactly a population growth modeller, but I imagine that an imbalance like that takes several generations to correct, and might cause serious tension. I can imagine the female population taking aggressive measures to protect themselves in such an environment. Depending on scale, there might be common genetic defects, due to the relatively wide distribution of a small pool of mother's genes.

Women becoming little more than breeding stock is an issue, but unfortunately it has historical precedence. How (or if) Nargrakhan wants to model this in his game is entirely up to him.

[Galloglaich]

Australia manage to federate and secede in 113 years after we started using it as a prison, so a constant influx of antisocial criminal outsiders doesn't seem to be too much of a hinderance. :smalltongue:

The questionable nature of some of the people / colonists is counterbalanced by the absence of Absolute Monarchs, Oligarchs, 'Donor Class' etc., which resulted in a net positive there and in other places.

The difference between Australia and say, Guatemala is that the latter colony had a multi-tiered class system which was very aggressively enforced. I think Botany Bay was far enough away and unappealing enough from a commercial point of view that it was more or less left alone for a while.

It's actually kind of similar in Costa Rica where you never did have the Great Landowner class or the indigenous underclass of most of the rest of Central America. And no gold or anything to attract the former. In the long run results in a more prosperous, more peaceful place with a middle class.

G

[Galloglaich]

Putting these two together: incarceration rates for women are significantly lower than for men. If we use the US prison population as reference, the initial population and subsequent drops will have men outnumbering women 10:1 or worse. I'm not exactly a population growth modeller, but I imagine that an imbalance like that takes several generations to correct, and might cause serious tension. I can imagine the female population taking aggressive measures to protect themselves in such an environment. Depending on scale, there might be common genetic defects, due to the relatively wide distribution of a small pool of mother's genes.

It may not take so long - I think a substantial proportion of men were wiped out in Europe during WWI and WWII and the population bounced back pretty quickly to normal male / female ratios. One or two generations. Usually there is a "baby boom" for a while right after a lot of the men are killed off.

I read a while back that the Mongols killed 90% of the men in Iran when they invaded, but the population (somewhat amazingly) recovered from that as well and the Persians re-asserted their culture.

G

[rrgg]

So I've been reading up a bit more on the Battle of Fornovo and I'm getting more and more curious about this "anonymous" period illustration on wikipedia. The layout of the battle and the troops involved seem fairly accurate including the stradiots sneaking around the flank to attack the french baggage train and the French guard Archers positioned on the far side of the Swiss pike square near the river. There are also other details I'm noticing for instance some sources claim that the lances of the Italian Men at arms were long, hollow, and painted more like tournament lances unlike the lances used by the French men at arms. And in this illustration you can see the italian and french lances depicted very differently.

If this illustration is from a reliable source it also seems to suggest some interesting new things about the battle. For instance Fornovo is the battle where Paolo Giovio claims a bunch of Swiss two-handed swordsmen charged forward into the italian pikemen and defeated them by cutting the heads off their pikes, but this illustration doesn't show any italian pikemen at all, and instead has all the italian infantry armed with shields and early partisans. This might be even further evidence that Giovio, who was 12 when the battle happened, was full of ****.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Albanian_Stradioti_at_Battle_of_Fornovo.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albanian_Stradioti_at_Battle_of_Fornovo.jpg

On a somewhat related note, I think I have a new theory about the whole "holding the pike about the middle" thing which seems to show up in a lot of early illustrations of swiss pikemen. Even La Noue breifly mentions that he thinks pikemen should hold their pikes in the middle for defense against cavalry, prompting a response from humphrey barwick of "Well that doesn't make any sense, everyone knows you're supposed to brace the rear of your pike against your back foot and put your front hand forward 1/3rd the pikes length at the most when fighting against cavalry."

What I think is maybe holding the pike in the middle made it easier to stay mobile while going on the offensive against cavalry like the swiss often did. Perhaps holding the pike in the middle made it easier to quickly brace the rear of the pike against the dirt behind you in case the enemy cavalry suddenly decided to counter-charge.

[ExLibrisMortis]

It may not take so long - I think a substantial proportion of men were wiped out in Europe during WWI and WWII and the population bounced back pretty quickly to normal male / female ratios. One or two generations. Usually there is a "baby boom" for a while right after a lot of the men are killed off.

I read a while back that the Mongols killed 90% of the men in Iran when they invaded, but the population (somewhat amazingly) recovered from that as well and the Persians re-asserted their culture.

G
Those cases involve a surplus of women/lack of men, not a surplus of men/lack of women. I'm not sure that those cases are comparable to a prison world with ten men for every woman. I'm also not sure it isn't, but it's worth noting the difference.

Secondly, WWI deaths resulted in men:women ratios much closer to 1. Wikipedia mentions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties) casualty rates of 1.69-1.89% of the population for all nations involved in the war, with some outliers, such as a very high 16.67-27.78% in Serbia and 13.26-15.36% in the Ottoman Empire (including the Armenian Genocide). Those casualties include a large number of civilians--around half of all WWI deaths, by this table, which includes malnutrition deaths and disease, but not the influenza epidemic. The civilian casualties would be about 50% women, I imagine, so the resulting m:f ratio would be closer to .98-.99:1 across all nations, or .9-.95:1 in Serbia. Of course, the ratio is smaller in the age bracket for military service, but still not below .8:1.

Thirdly, for all cases on Earth, it's possible to (slightly) balance the ratio through migration, which doesn't work for an isolated prison world. In fact, the only migration is the dropping of new prisoners, which further skews the population, instead of evening it out.

That's not to say that the population won't recover, but I think it'll take more than one or two generations.

[Mr Beer]

This all favours the idea of using the prison planet for political prisoners, dissidents and the like.

If the population resembles 'worst of the worst' prisoners from a typical western nation, then they are generally going to be extremely violent and/or physically dangerous people. That heavily selects against women.

It also naturally leads to a pretty terrible society, at least initially, and very terrible indeed for female prisoners.

Conversely, you go the political route, then you have the following:

1. An actual Evil Empire to fight against.

2. Intellectuals who more reasonably possess technical knowledge.

3. Plenty of female bloggers, professors, activists and mothers/wives/daughters of dissidents to be imprisoned.

4. More chance of a functional society emerging and more chance it happens quickly.

5. Much easier to justify not having a rapey hellhole for a setting.

Not to say it would be all sweetness and light but I think it would be pretty horrendous to sweep out a maximum security jail and chuck in a few female prisoners.

[Brother Oni]

4. More chance of a functional society emerging and more chance it happens quickly.


I think this point should be emphasised in that there will be multiple societies that will form - a drop of political dissidents would have very different group dynamics to a group of sex offenders.

I think it's also important to point out that not all violent criminals are the same - generally speaking, an armed robber, a serial killer and a cartel enforcer would all behave differently. Some of them could even integrate into the calmer groups.


Not to say it would be all sweetness and light but I think it would be pretty horrendous to sweep out a maximum security jail and chuck in a few female prisoners.

Yeah, there's a whole porn sub-genre that demonstrates what would happen in ample graphic detail.

[Clistenes]

If the Evil Empire is doing this as a mix of repression tool and reality show, they will make sure plenty of psychos, rapists and gangsters are dropped...

[Mr Beer]

I think it's also important to point out that not all violent criminals are the same - generally speaking, an armed robber, a serial killer and a cartel enforcer would all behave differently. Some of them could even integrate into the calmer groups.

Oh yeah agree...not like everyone with a really long prison sentence is some kind of slavering cartoon monster.


If the Evil Empire is doing this as a mix of repression tool and reality show, they will make sure plenty of psychos, rapists and gangsters are dropped...

Why not have both? The GULAG had scum of the earth in the system as well as people who said the wrong thing or just were in the wrong place when Stalin was writing his hit lists.

[Knaight]

Oh yeah agree...not like everyone with a really long prison sentence is some kind of slavering cartoon monster.
Particularly when a lot of them aren't actually guilty, because the justice system that incarcerated them is deeply corrupt. That doesn't necessarily mean political dissidents either - private prisons run by corporations with enough lobbyists to both secure large payments and round up prisoners could work just as well. Which in this particular case probably means overt bribery and the like.


I think it's also important to point out that not all violent criminals are the same - generally speaking, an armed robber, a serial killer and a cartel enforcer would all behave differently. Some of them could even integrate into the calmer groups.
It's also worth noting that the behavior of people in particular environments is influenced both by who the people are and what the environment is - which can be seen with prisons in particular, where different prisons holding basically the same sort of people can end up with vastly different rates of violence, both because of simple variation in conditions due to economic factors, and more notably different standards of allowable/encouraged/participated-in violence on the part of the guards. There's also the matter of how captivity in general has its effects.

I'm not saying that the planet would be pretty, but that there's a pretty good chance it ends up significantly less violent than the prisons a lot of people here have seen portrayed/heard stories about.

[Raunchel]

First of all, I really want to thank you for your help with my question about music in battle.

Secondly, I have found myself with another question. While looking into arms in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, I came across this manuscript image:
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/media/cache/manuscriptminiatures.com/original/624-3_large.jpg

I was under the impression that at that time, the norm for shields was that they were more triangular in shape (like heater shields), but here, someone has a round shield that I would generally associate with earlier periods. Does anyone know if round shields till were in use around 1350 in Europe?

[Knaight]

I was under the impression that at that time, the norm for shields was that they were more triangular in shape (like heater shields), but here, someone has a round shield that I would generally associate with earlier periods. Does anyone know if round shields till were in use around 1350 in Europe?

Round shields stuck around well past 1350 - take the Spanish Rodeleros in the 1500's (though that's not the best example, given that it was to some extent the deliberate revival of an older style of combat).

[Clistenes]

Why not have both? The GULAG had scum of the earth in the system as well as people who said the wrong thing or just were in the wrong place when Stalin was writing his hit lists.

That's the point: If only non-violent political disidents or non-violent conmen and similar are sent to the planet, isn't as effective a punishment... yeah, the living conditions would be hard, but they would eventually, slowly get better...

If you send a large amount of really violent criminals too, it becomes a veritable hellhole and an effective deterrent against political disenters...

[Galloglaich]

That's the point: If only non-violent political disidents or non-violent conmen and similar are sent to the planet, isn't as effective a punishment... yeah, the living conditions would be hard, but they would eventually, slowly get better...

If you send a large amount of really violent criminals too, it becomes a veritable hellhole and an effective deterrent against political disenters...

Going back to living in Neolithic conditions if you come from a tech-age society is fairly significant punishment regardless, at least in terms of comfort and safety. Usually the goal of such marooning ala Botany Bay is just to get rid of excess (and undesirable) population.

On the other hand if it's not too high of a mix of murderers etc. then presumably there is also scope for rehabilitation. Which may or may not be part of the States agenda (usually it isn't sadly)

G

[Raunchel]

One important consideration to keep in mind with using Australia as an example is that many of these criminals were people driven to it by poverty, not people who had much in the way of other options. That means that you get a quite different population from what you would get when you look in modern prisons where you will have a higher proportion of mentally disturbed people.

[Max_Killjoy]

One important consideration to keep in mind with using Australia as an example is that many of these criminals were people driven to it by poverty, not people who had much in the way of other options. That means that you get a quite different population from what you would get when you look in modern prisons where you will have a higher proportion of mentally disturbed people.

Many of those sent to the old prison colonies were literally being cleared out of debtors' prisons, and their only crime had been having debts they could not pay.

[Knaight]

One important consideration to keep in mind with using Australia as an example is that many of these criminals were people driven to it by poverty, not people who had much in the way of other options. That means that you get a quite different population from what you would get when you look in modern prisons where you will have a higher proportion of mentally disturbed people.
That's not particularly different from modern prisons in a lot of places. It's also likely a pretty good analog for the likely justice system of the people operating this system.


Many of those sent to the old prison colonies were literally being cleared out of debtors' prisons, and their only crime had been having debts they could not pay.
This also seems like a case where the Australia analog is, if anything, better. This is also a case where the difference between this and a lot of modern day systems aren't necessarily that huge, where a minor traffic offense with a fine is added to the debts that can't be paid. Or where people are arrested for a bounced check.

[VoxRationis]

My understanding of Australian history is fairly surface-level, but wasn't development of the Australian colonies a desired goal, though? The British didn't just sail up and literally kick people off the side of the boat. There was effort in making Australia a vaguely serviceable part of the Empire.

[Kiero]

Many of those sent to the old prison colonies were literally being cleared out of debtors' prisons, and their only crime had been having debts they could not pay.

Along with pretty much any kind of petty crime. Transportation was a step down from the usual punishment for virtually everything at the time, which was death by hanging. Children could be sentenced, which tells you all you need to know about their approach to jurisprudence back then.

If it's Australia-style, demography won't be a problem, though it'll be a tithe of the poor and unlucky for the most part.

[Carl]

Just want to highlight this point as the others have already been covered - Nargrakhan can correct me, but aside from an off hand reference to the endgame being in command of a Max Max style city state, there's nothing in the brief that says the planet is an irradiated hellscape or a single biome desert planet like Star Wars' Tattoine.

What i meant is they're going from a high tech society to a much lower tech level, for most people thats going to be a severely unpleasant shock to the system.


Also, they would have trouble getting people to listen to them in a society in which the pecking order is established stabbing each other faces with sharpened bones or bashing each other brains with clubs and stones...

Thats kind of the problem, a society like that doesn't work, at least not conventionally, (start bringing magic and gods into it and some other stuff and you can start making it work), The problem is such a disorganised society has no well, organisation, that means even a small group of organised people can deal with considerably greater numbers of disorganised people. Not every attempt at an organised group will succeed, but on the whole organised groups have all the advantages that mean they will quickly become the dominant social construct.

The person who used civilisation games as a jockey comparison was actually more or less on point. With one key exception. A large part of the difference between our earlier beginnings and the modern day is that our concept of how a society should be organised has changed with time. These prisoners might be dropping in without our modern tech, but they have a much different idea of how a society should be organized, that's going to be influenced by the nature of the people who are dropped in, why they got dropped and of course the the nature of the society they're coming from, but you've also got issues with them being on the wrong end of the existing system, thats going to bias them against it to some degree. Certainly you'll then see these initial groups go off in a lot of different directions in terms of how they grow from there. But they're going to be organised very differently from a traditional early farmer tribesmen.


That's a generational effort at a minimum and quite possibly a trans-civilization effort. Digging an escape tunnel is hard, but it can be done with sticks or even bare hands, potentially. Building an escape combat-capable spacecraft is another thing entirely. Hell, even an escape aircraft is tricky. If you told the inmates of a prison in the US or another developed country that they could have total legal amnesty if they could process (generously provided) raw materials into a working rocket and used that to get over the walls, using only the knowledge they have memorized, I'm guessing they would get nowhere. Most of them wouldn't know where to begin. A selection would have some very basic theoretical knowledge of how it would work, but wouldn't know how to begin applying it. The people with applicable knowledge would have learned how to apply it in the context of a broad industrial base and would be helpless outside of it (e.g., your welders would just be used to having welding gear when they need to weld things and wouldn't know how to make, or even approximate, said gear). That's to say nothing of the fact that the people who know the really in-depth technical things tend not to be put in prison in the first place.

Here's the thing, much o our advances in technology down the years has been built on better understanding of physics, biology, chemistry, an the application of mathematics and the written word to those things. We've had a lot of bad science down the years. That puts the drop in's in a much better position than IRL civilizations at a given level of tech. Your average high school graduate knows more in most of those fields than many of the more learned people of yesteryear. APplying that knowledge is going to include some trial and error and a lot of work, but they're in a position to improve their technological base very rapidly because they understand far more of the underlying principles and experimental method needed to apply them. People of yesteryear weren't stupid, but the level of knowledge they possess had not benefited from as many centuries of advancement and work.


As far as some of the other society factors raised goes. I think the key thing to allways remember is that unless they're deliberately sending the worst of the worst there and nothing else most of the people in prison on long sentences are not innately severely violent. Most severe end crimes are either committed by people close to the victim in the heat of the moment or by organised criminals. The true lone wolf nutcase who does awful things for kicks and giggles is pretty rare IRL, (they certainly exist ofc) . Thats going to work in the favour of stability. If the drop in includes political prisoners that goes many times more.

[Galloglaich]

Also a lot of the violence in prisons is at least in part because of having so many people - some with rival gang, or cartel, or just ethnic affiliations - crammed so close together in such tight, literally confined spaces.

In a place like Australia, or North America, there is a lot of room to spread out. This is a good way to ease tension - if you don't like the other prisoners trek further out into the wilderness to make your own settlement or separate community. If you can claim your own land and hold on to it, especially if it is "good" or productive land, your descendants will have a chance of moving upward socially and economically.

Of course historically a lot of people who got banished or 'transported' to the New World or places like Australia were sent because they were of some unpopular religious sect, or just because they were poor or for very petty crimes like stealing a loaf of bread. On the other hand, I wouldn't totally discount the predatory element. There are a lot of very bad people out there - it's a smaller subset of even the prison population but not that small.

In modern times a lot of bad / criminal behavior is driven by addiction. What would addicts do if they got free in some wilderness but perhaps didn't have access to their drug of choice? Probably find the closest local equivalent they could. Just like in prison you can make 'wine' out of fruit and so on, in a new planet you would undoubtedly have some plants with psychoactive or narcotic effects.

Drug addicts can be easy to control if you control the source of the drug. That would be a mechanism by which armies or feudal hierarchies could be put together. You see this with some of the armed groups for example in Congo or Sudan.

G

[Nargrakhan]

Wow. This topic went a lot further than I possibly imagined. :smallredface:

To be honest, I didn't put that much foresight into the idea or think it could evolve into such depth.

However I really, really, really enjoy all the information and discussion provided, as it gives me a lot to think upon and resolve in case the players reach similar conclusions. As such I was against responding back to this thread, because I wanted it to continue without tainting it's direction. However I felt it would be dishonest of me to do something like that.

All that being said... while I don't want to make the planet a complete crapsack world - outside the notion that being on a low-tech prison world is crapsack enough - the information provided here will be used to make escape from the world as close to impossible as possible. As mention prior: the end goal of the campaign isn't leaving the world. It's more towards somehow making it better, carving out a warlord empire, or creating a legendary name for one self.

Of course if the players want to spend time and resources towards planetary escape, I'm not going to stop them. And of course I'm not against the idea of providing such a final reward if they REALLY do a good job at role playing and remaining focused at the task. They're the player characters, so it makes perfect sense if they're the ONLY people to ever achieve that legendary feat.

Nonetheless, the more I see loopholes in how "anti-electronics plot-onium" can be subverted, the more I'm stacking the deck against such opportunities. (Such as restricting access/availability to natural resources such as mining metals and exploitable biofuels - a resource exhausted world).

I do like the social aspects of prisoners unifying - if only temporarily and in isolated locations - to escape the planet. But I want such a feat to have only happened once, if it ever happened at all, before the player characters arrive. Perhaps the escape never did happened, and is just a legend passed down to instill (possibly false) hope.

***EDIT***
I also did not consider the impact of generational descendants. To be punished for a crime your great, great, great grandfather committed.
Perhaps having prisoners sterilized before planet drop is an answer. It certainly is a morality issue, but then, so is having a prison planet to begin with.

[Galloglaich]

To prevent electronics / electrical tech from developing, you could have a satelite or spaceship that periodically drops EMP bombs -just something to flash an EMP which would zap all functioning electrical devices etc. Say once a year or every 10 years or whatever.

G

[Carl]

Wow. This topic went a lot further than I possibly imagined. :smallredface:

To be honest, I didn't put that much foresight into the idea or think it could evolve into such depth.

However I really, really, really enjoy all the information and discussion provided, as it gives me a lot to think upon and resolve in case the players reach similar conclusions. As such I was against responding back to this thread, because I wanted it to continue without tainting it's direction. However I felt it would be dishonest of me to do something like that.

All that being said... while I don't want to make the planet a complete crapsack world - outside the notion that being on a low-tech prison world is crapsack enough - the information provided here will be used to make escape from the world as close to impossible as possible. As mention prior: the end goal of the campaign isn't leaving the world. It's more towards somehow making it better, carving out a warlord empire, or creating a legendary name for one self.

Of course if the players want to spend time and resources towards planetary escape, I'm not going to stop them. And of course I'm not against the idea of providing such a final reward if they REALLY do a good job at role playing and remaining focused at the task. They're the player characters, so it makes perfect sense if they're the ONLY people to ever achieve that legendary feat.

Nonetheless, the more I see loopholes in how "anti-electronics plot-onium" can be subverted, the more I'm stacking the deck against such opportunities. (Such as restricting access/availability to natural resources such as mining metals and exploitable biofuels - a resource exhausted world).

I do like the social aspects of prisoners unifying - if only temporarily and in isolated locations - to escape the planet. But I want such a feat to have only happened once, if it ever happened at all, before the player characters arrive. Perhaps the escape never did happened, and is just a legend passed down to instill (possibly false) hope.

***EDIT***
I also did not consider the impact of generational descendants. To be punished for a crime your great, great, great grandfather committed.
Perhaps having prisoners sterilized before planet drop is an answer. It certainly is a morality issue, but then, so is having a prison planet to begin with.

Bear in mind even a resource depleted world still has tons of exploitable resources and many types of material are the next best thing to impossible to eliminate because they're so incredibly common. In normal industrial operations and normal usage we choose materials to manufacture with and to extract resources from based on their cost efficiency. Most common resources and more than a few rare ones have sources that are technically usable, but not worth the cost. And many technologies can substitute one material for another relatively readily, doing so just introduces a lot of extra expense and other problems. But create a situation where that is the only way and people will move to alternatives.

[Carl]

To prevent electronics / electrical tech from developing, you could have a satelite or spaceship that periodically drops EMP bombs -just something to flash an EMP which would zap all functioning electrical devices etc. Say once a year or every 10 years or whatever.

G

The problem is you can shield electronics from EMP's or make them proof against them relatively easily. It's just that the time, cost, and effort involved in doing it isn't justified.

[Hazzardevil]

Round shields stuck around well past 1350 - take the Spanish Rodeleros in the 1500's (though that's not the best example, given that it was to some extent the deliberate revival of an older style of combat).

I've seen depictions from the 1600s of standard bearers and other soldiers who aren't regular sorts carrying a shield for reasons other than it being the default style of the time.

There's also sources that I know of as late as the 1600s from fencing masters with at least some instructions on how to use them. Marco Diochillini is one I haven't studied, but I'm fairly sure he has them. As do some of the Bolognese styles.

Here's an article on round shields called a rotella.
https://elegant-weapon.blogspot.com/2016/03/episode-57-rotella.html

[Saintheart]

My understanding of Australian history is fairly surface-level, but wasn't development of the Australian colonies a desired goal, though? The British didn't just sail up and literally kick people off the side of the boat. There was effort in making Australia a vaguely serviceable part of the Empire.

Correct. The French in particular were also engaged in the Civilisation colony rush building of territory in the South Pacific and elsewhere. Literally a few days after the first Australian colony at Botany Bay (Sydney) was founded -- 25 January 1788 -- the Astrolabe and Boussole arrived, commanded by La Perouse, who'd been conducting exploration in the area. He wouldn't have claimed Australia for France, that wasn't his mission, but it illustrates how busy that part of the world was at the time.

The Botany Bay colony had a primarily convict workforce to establish it, but what they generally forget to tell people is that many of the convicts were skilled tradesmen or farmers already, which is why they were put on the ship - they had generally been sentenced to 7 years' transportation, and most were pardoned prior to the end of their sentences and become free settlers. The first free settlers to Australia turned up five years later, 1793. Even the British Empire didn't have the money to ship convicts halfway around the world for that reason alone, and the British explorers (Cook, and Banks the botanist under him) had targeted Australia as an excellent site for settlement and expansion, and Sydney Harbour was a superb natural anchorage for the British fleet. That's the primary reason it was founded.

The reason it didn't grow anywhere near as successfully as, say, the US, was primarily because the British had misunderstood the land. Australia's basically the oldest continent on Earth in the sense that the land has been exposed to the elements for longer than anywhere else. One of the reasons Ayers Rock is so red, like much of the earth around it, is because of its sheer age. The soil's had most of its fertility knocked out of it and such fertility as there was tended to dry up and blow away when the British applied European methods of agriculture to it, i.e. clear-felling everything in sight and putting water-thirsty and nutrient-hungry European crops on it. That's one of the reasons Botany Bay almost starved when it was first established. You can make the land work - if you're prepared to introduce plants that tie moisture to the soil and make sure that your waterways are always shaded - but not if you farm it the way the English did, at least to start with.

As Australia had more colonies established, the convict contingent diminished and eventually disappeared. In the south, Adelaide was founded solely on free settlers, not one convict was ever sent there by way of sentence.

[Epimethee]

So I have resolved my computer issues after too many days and trips to the shop... and the tread moved on and he move so fast. I'm not sure what topic is worth pursuing.

Nevertheless, as it was mentioned again (a fews days ago, catch up...), I have a few things to share about ritual places in early metal age. I won't talk about Scandinavia, I haven't got time to read more about this part of the world and I have certainly a lot to learn (Tobtor, I warmly wish you haven't taken our conversation the wrong way, I really enjoyed your knowledge and I'm more interested in falsifiable hypothesis than in winning an argument.)

But I learned today about a very recent discovery in England. I haven't see any scientific paper yet, as the place is currently under work, so everything is to be taken carefully. The place seem clearly ritual, as ancient as the neolithic but used till medieval time.

"When the timber trackway was originally laid, the site had already been important for 500 years. A causewayed enclosure with a bank sheltering the slope and its springs is probably early Neolithic, built around 4,800 years ago. This was then reinforced by a later Neolithic ring ditch, which was then enclosed by a bronze age enclosure, which was then itself enclosed by an early iron age ditch. The archaeologists found Roman ditches clipping the edge of the site, and traces of Saxon buildings, but the site remained almost unchanged for centuries until the slope was filled and levelled around the 11th century – which had the effect of burying the springs level and preserving the timbers."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/28/archaeologists-stumble-on-neolithic-ritual-site-in-suffolk

As much as I understand, the place is interesting because the springs were channeled to surround a platform. Object appear to have been dropped from this platform into running water, including an auroch skull far older than the place and maybe tied at one time to a pole. Objects dropped in running waters... At first it seem to be the classical scenario. But some stuffs need to be explored. The continuous use of the site is very curious, as much as the lack of sources about it.
It should be noted that springs are a very common place of ritual activity and it is not unusual to see them occupied for quite a long time, even evolving into christian pilgrimage. The most common ritual is a kind of fertility rite where pins were dropped. We have occurrences till the modern age but in some places we find Iron Age pins in sources. It is unclear if the meaning of the pin is the same but the continuity of the object used is startling.

I'm very curious to learn more about the place, to have a better chronology of his use. The general layout is also surprising and I wonder how it can connect (or not) with other places across Europe. For example skulls fixed to a pole seem also attested in La Tène were their meaning is disputed. But the chronology is too unclear to say anything seriously for the time being.



On a related note, and to share another spectacular, strange and mysterious place, I wanted since quite some time to talk about the lesser known but spectacular site of Le Mormont-La Sarraz. Again, it has certainly something to do with ritual acts. Again, understanding what happened there is really difficult. But a short presentation is in order.

We are in the Swiss plateau, a huge plain between the Alps and the Jura Mountains. Le Mormont is a rocky hill on the limit between the Rhone and the Rhine bassins. A few miles to the north is the Lake of Neuchâtel. A few miles south the Léman lake.

The hill is flat on top, and was used for centuries to extract stones. They are still extracted today. The archeological survey was made before a new stone pit would be opened.

On top of the hill, archeologist found more than 350 pits. They reach the underlying rock. A few were even dug trough it. The pits, from 80 cm to 5 meter deep, were filled with a curious assortment of objects: tools, crockery, jewelry, money, grindstones, but also a lot of humans and animals bones...

The site was used for no more than a few generations between the second and first century BC. The scientist refer to it as a "sanctuary", because obviously, but a lot of thing are problematic and it is in my opinion a good illustration of the difficulties of interpreting an archeological find. The first problem is the hugeness of the place for such a short period of use. It is more usual for a sanctuary to be in a fixed location and some of them remain places of worship even after the fall of the religion that used them first. It is not unheard of offering in random places, like the offering were the lightning strike in Rome, but the size of this place make it exceptional and unlikely to have been random. The reason of the use of this specific location are unclear. The find was surprising as most of the important Iron Age places are not really close to le Mormont. They are also not far, the Swiss plateau is not that big, but the place is still away from the known locations.
Then we go to the objects found...

The most spectacular are the human remains. Isolated bones, mainly skulls, but also long bones, arms, legs, some manipulated and cut. Even stranger, some body parts, like an entire arm, some torso, severed heads. And then you have body deposed in unusual positions: lying on their face, thrown head first in a pit, suspended or scenarized in a pile of rock...

Two adult and a child were found on a pit with burning marks by a fire no warmer than 400 degree celsius. This is the usual temperature of a grill. The adults are incomplete, only the torso, the heads and the severed left limbs were found. Also both adults have the same burning marks, they were exposed in the same fashion to the fire. Nothing compare to that in all the Celtics finds.

The human remains are sometimes mixed with animals remains. Those are also cut and present burning marks. It seem to point to an offering but what about the missing part? What was their use?

We have also a lot of body parts, from heads (we are certain they were still heads and not skulls before they were dug) to legs that show markings, coherent as much with the aftermath of a fight than with tampering after the death of the subject. In the case of a young girl, the mandibles were severed from the head. Those manipulations were made shortly before or after death but it is impossible to give the exact process and to assert exactly which wound was fatal, if that was even the case.

The animal remains are also quite interesting. It should be noted that the domesticated Celtic animals were smaller before the roman conquest. In le Mormont, some of the beasts (30 on about 250) were actually bigger than the usual animals and at least two horses were clearly imported from the south. This can have major implication for the study of domestication in Europe.

Again, the most striking part is the disposition of the bones. Some of the pit are full of bones of eaten animals, but the size of the deposit seem to imply a huge feast. The quantity of meat prepared was clearly too much for a single family. Disturbingly, among those remain of meal, human remains were found.

Some of the pits seem more ritually oriented and were filled with a mix of human and animals remains, mostly skulls and horns, or mandibles of cows. The wild beast were pretty rare, only 9 different find, but were most notably composed of a bear skull and teeth, and a wolf head.
Some pits were filled with entire beast. Horses, cows, sheep and pigs were found in the pits, sometimes thrown head first. A cow seem even to have been suspended above the pit and decomposed, dropping the bones in the process.

A lot of objects were also found, from kitchen utensils to tools like axes and hammers. And more than a hundred grinding stones. But quite interestingly no weapon at all.

You have here (http://www.archeodunum.ch/FILES/mc9/124_tmp_197.pdf) the first report of the archeologists who made the dig. In French again but look at it if only for the pictures.

I love this kind of places, were saying ritualistic is akin to saying mysterious. The main layout of the place scream of a religious use but what kind of deities could have been adored in a place like this? Some activities are undocumented in any other places. It is tempting to ascribe every find to a ritual purpose, even when they could be mundane. As an illustration the rests of the meals could equally be the witness of ritual practice or of the huge number of peoples present. Were the pits the result of an enormous one time offering or a repeated activity for a few generations? In any case it would have drained a lot of the local efforts and the purpose is really unclear.




Then about blue... Really the history of colors, of sensibilities, of mentalities, made huge leaps forward in the last half century. Guys like Gladstone, and Nietzsche, ( Morgenrothe 426)were exploring the greek world from the outside, like XIX century peoples with their idea of objectivity. Since then, with the like of Eco, but also if some lesser known scholar like Jacques André, we know that naming and perceiving are two different things.

First for the metaphor of the wine-dark sea. The point is more about the deep of the sea compared to the deep of the wine. The relevant metaphor is not about the color. On a lot of drinking cup you could find picture of ships and dolphins, mixed with the god of wine and his more usual symbols like grapes, like in the illustration below. Dionysos has tie with the sea, he use a boat, he is even trailed on a boat around Athens, he is called the mariner, the lord of the liquid element (kyrios tes hygras physeos), among is many names. I won't go to long on Dionysos as a god of the dark deep, as covered and revealed by the sea and the wine, but I think the famous line has more to do with something like that than with the color of the sea.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Exekias_Dionysos_Staatliche_Antikensammlungen_2044 _n2.jpg

That's really difficult to understand, that the colors can be seen differently in another cultural frame. Thus the "they don't see it" hypothesis, that is something of a joke today among anthropologist and cultural historians. Nevertheless, it's easy to say that they think differently but it's hard to appreciate the consequences of such saying. And of course the culture is not the only thing to consider, bluntly " the sea is blue" may be the least meaningful thing to say on a boat, and clearly, talking of historical societies, you need to be careful.
Again, my main references on those subjects are in French, but since some of you read that, here are two articles that I find quite interesting on the subject of colors in Greece , or more precisely on the color of the sea here: https://journals.openedition.org/pallas/187 and on Dionysos and the sea here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/rhr_0035-1423_1982_num_199_1_4750
(I love the work of Maria Dark btw)

As the start of the conversation was about medieval blue, I would like to try another way to make you understand how alien the medieval understanding of colors are and more generally their way of looking at the world.

Have some of you ever looked into a bestiary? An original bestiary? Like this one (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24) (albeit they are more spectacular examples).
Look at the animals pictured, their colors, the stylized depiction... It clearly contrast with for example the more realist depiction of the Renaissance. If you read the bestiary it is even stranger: the bear lick his child to finish him because he is born incomplete, the pelican share his blood with his children... Every story is more crazy than the last. But the medieval peoples were surely closer than us from the natural world. They can see birds and animals every day, even a monk in his monastery. They know how a fox, a hen, a dove live but they rarely offer something close to our natural history to describe them. Why do they write about them in such a strange fashion?

We have to understand that they use another grid to engage the world. They see the same colors, the same animals as us but they notice different thing because they need different informations in their cultural world. Umberto Eco illustrate this brilliantly, in the Name of The Rose, as Baskerville arrive in the monastery and describe and name the horse of the abbey to the surprise of the monks. He read the signs of the world but understand also the frame of mind of the peoples he face. (you can read the extract here (https://books.google.ch/books?id=3RQX3XFeNuIC&pg=PA21&hl=fr&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false), pp. 25-27).

In the same passage, Eco give a good start to any reflexion about the philosophical and intellectual frame of medieval thinking:

"Alanus de Insulis said that
omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum
and he was thinking of the endless array of symbols with which God, through His creatures, speaks to us of the eternal life."

The world in medieval thinking is like a collections of symbols that speak of eternal life. The important point is not to discuss natural history but to understand the ways God speak trough his creation. Of course, that's the view of an educated monk in the words of a modern professor. And I'm close to talking about religion, am I? Ah... I never intended that and I don't want to break any rule but it is hard to speak about medieval mentalities without at least acknowledging christianity. Let's just say that when they were depicting the world, or writing down what needed to be remembered, they were more concerned by a symbolical and theological order than by a natural one.
That doesn't mean people were blind to the natural order, they used it as much as us. But they used a different set of informations to classify the world and thus they saw other meanings in the same signs than we see.

We have something close with colors. We know the rules of optic since Isaac Newton so we tend to think about color along those lines. It is possible for Suger and Bernard of Clairvaux to argue about the color in a very different way. For Suger it is light and thus divine, for Bernard it is matter and thus terrestrial and impure. In cistercians abbey, you have only stone and white walls. On the other hand, Suger was the abbot of St-Denis (were the kings of France are buried) and was instrumental in his renovation. Among other things, he was one of the first to use a large amount of blue on the stained glass of the basilica.This blue was later known as the blue of Chartres and widely used on a lot of cathedrals.
Interestingly, at the same time the Virgin Mary became a major figure in the christian faith and the king of France started to use a coat of arm with lys and blue, and thus linked again to the Virgin Mary. (Also broadly the coats of arms were adopted at the same time, during the XII century.)
From the XII to the XIV century, at least among the rich and famous, and following the king of France, the blue was more and more promoted across Europe. The black became more fashionable around the 1350-1380, after it was prohibited in Rome to wear blue and red, considered too opulent at the time of the Black Death.

It's a long reply for a rough outline of a complex subject. But I'm not following the thread closely and it is maybe far from the main topic. I promise to better myself next time. Would it be right to follow one or both discussions, the archeological places of offering or rituals and the perception of colors in historical times, on other threads? I'm not sure it is worth starting a new discussion as we have already discussed a lot of things, but maybe someone would like to go deeper.

[Clistenes]

One of the reasons Ayers Rock is so red, like much of the earth around it, is because of its sheer age. The soil's had most of its fertility knocked out of it and such fertility as there was tended to dry up and blow away when the British applied European methods of agriculture to it,

Soil fertility has nothing to do with the age of the continent, since soil is lost and recovered constantly...

I don't know about the climate of Botany Bay, but soil like you have described usually mean some hot, wet months every year, which rots away all the nutrients...

[gkathellar]

To prevent electronics / electrical tech from developing, you could have a satelite or spaceship that periodically drops EMP bombs -just something to flash an EMP which would zap all functioning electrical devices etc. Say once a year or every 10 years or whatever.

G

I think a lack of certain resources could also accomplish that. On a planet with very little available silicon, for instance (yes, I know that's unlikely), you wouldn't be able to develop the microchip. A planet without a long history of biological life wouldn't have access to fossil fuels. There are lots of barriers you can put in place that aren't hard stops on development, but would slow it down significantly if only because settlers would have to find ways to skip to third- or fourth-generation tech.


Soil fertility has nothing to do with the age of the continent, since soil is lost and recovered constantly...

Yes and no? It really depends on local factors, including how the land formed and what it's been through. Young landmasses can have fertility problems on account of homogeneous composition, lack of rivers, etc. Old landmasses, especially those lacking in rivers and/or local volcanism, may simply be depleted to the point where basically all of the available nutrients are found in the topsoil. In a lot of climes, topsoil can take a long time to accumulate and is very fragile; without local plants to hold it down, topsoil may simply blow away in the wind. If you go and read up on some of the national parks in Utah or other parts of the American Southwest, one thing they stress is staying on the paths, because even walking on the topsoil can disrupt it catastrophically.

[Mr Beer]

Soil fertility has nothing to do with the age of the continent, since soil is lost and recovered constantly...

Australia's extremely geological age and stability negatively affects its soil fertility because its been continuously weathered and leached over aeons. Its not the whole story but it's certainly part of it.

[snowblizz]

The human remains are sometimes mixed with animals remains. Those are also cut and present burning marks. It seem to point to an offering but what about the missing part? What was their use?
Oh that easy, cannibals!


Disturbingly, among those remain of meal, human remains were found.
Ah, I see we got there anyway.



Let's just say that when they were depicting the world, or writing down what needed to be remembered, they were more concerned by a symbolical and theological order than by a natural one.
That doesn't mean people were blind to the natural order, they used it as much as us. But they used a different set of informations to classify the world and thus they saw other meanings in the same signs than we see. IIRC Galloglaich often points out that there's a lot more in eg medieaval writing and pictures than we see. I know it's often brought up in stuff I read. It's hard to understand people who are basically aliens from our cultural viewpoint yet we imagine we understand them becasue we are effectively their descendants so they must have been just like us...


It's a long reply for a rough outline of a complex subject. But I'm not following the thread closely and it is maybe far from the main topic. I promise to better myself next time. Would it be right to follow one or both discussions, the archeological places of offering or rituals and the perception of colors in historical times, on other threads? I'm not sure it is worth starting a new discussion as we have already discussed a lot of things, but maybe someone would like to go deeper.I think you'll find speciality threads live short, unfullfilling lives. That's why we tolerate tangents on this thread. Also ofc we are all very interested in various stuff.



All that being said... while I don't want to make the planet a complete crapsack world - outside the notion that being on a low-tech prison world is crapsack enough - the information provided here will be used to make escape from the world as close to impossible as possible. As mention prior: the end goal of the campaign isn't leaving the world. It's more towards somehow making it better, carving out a warlord empire, or creating a legendary name for one self.

Of course if the players want to spend time and resources towards planetary escape, I'm not going to stop them. And of course I'm not against the idea of providing such a final reward if they REALLY do a good job at role playing and remaining focused at the task.
Slight problem. That will mean you and the players are going to be playing on vastly differnt teams in the game. Also, it's kinda, erm two-faced to say players have a choice but then do everything in your power to deny them that choice. I think you are setting yourself up to be mentioned in the worst DM ever threads.


Nonetheless, the more I see loopholes in how "anti-electronics plot-onium" can be subverted, the more I'm stacking the deck against such opportunities. (Such as restricting access/availability to natural resources such as mining metals and exploitable biofuels - a resource exhausted world).

I do like the social aspects of prisoners unifying - if only temporarily and in isolated locations - to escape the planet. But I want such a feat to have only happened once, if it ever happened at all, before the player characters arrive. Perhaps the escape never did happened, and is just a legend passed down to instill (possibly false) hope.
Be careful with applying the plebotinum. If you end up layering it too thick you'll either choke the players or they'll swim up using it as a meidum. You don't want to end up in an armsrace with the players.

One of the worst DM/gamers experiences I've ever seen described on these boards stemmed from a DM creatively trying to mess with laws of nature to keep players down and tied to the DM's plot.



I also did not consider the impact of generational descendants. To be punished for a crime your great, great, great grandfather committed.
Perhaps having prisoners sterilized before planet drop is an answer. It certainly is a morality issue, but then, so is having a prison planet to begin with.North Korea does this. Frankly if you're going to have a never-leave-prison planet why be squemish?

I'll also bring up a logical problem. Prisons are temporary things. If you want to get rid of people you kill them. The whole point of a prison is that there is an eventual "out". When your prison is just a drawn out death sentence you are going to end up with some pretty spectacular blowouts. Ie "I'll take them with me before I go". Not in all cases but still. This is a major concern for current prison systems.

And of course if the goal you see is a Mad Max empriebuilding what purpsoe does all this window dressing off stuff you can't have serve other than to frustrate the players?
If you want to run low tech don't start with super high-tech and try to cut away parts.

[Kiero]

The "prison planet" thing works better for political prisoners and the like, rather than as a general policy. Like people have said, you don't go to all the trouble of imprisoning people unless you intend one day to release them.

As mentioned, if you have criminals who are simply dangerous, an empire without qualms should be killing them. Or else going the Dune route and using them as recruiting material for elite soldiers/killers.

The reason you keep the political prisoners alive is that they're also hostages for the good behaviour of their families/allies.

[Deepbluediver]

The "prison planet" thing works better for political prisoners and the like, rather than as a general policy. Like people have said, you don't go to all the trouble of imprisoning people unless you intend one day to release them.
How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

[Saintheart]

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

Again, the idea of using prisoners in colonising Australia was because they were prisoners with useful skills. They didn't just throw random people on the First Fleet, they generally chose prisoners who were already tradesmen or skilled farmers - generally with sentences of 7 years transportation for minor offences. They were basically a convict labour workforce, and towards the end of their sentences often pardoned or given ticket-of-leave to become free settlers once their sentences were over. Most of these prisoners had close to nothing back in England and were offered land, which is not to justify the policy, but maybe explain why it was popular among those prisoners who stayed in the colony. That said, it wasn't an offer tempting without exception: in other Australian colonies, large fractions of the convict workforce left at the conclusion of their sentences and returned to England.

[HeadlessMermaid]

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others
France sent both political prisoners and common criminals to New Caledonia, near Australia. Thousands of people were hauled there after the suppression of the Paris Commune (including Louise Michel, most famously), though later an amnesty was issued, and most of them came back.

Their other penal colony was on the Salvation's Islands, off French Guiana in South America. That one was notoriously brutal, especially Devil's Island, and was preferred for political prisoners, from Alfred Dreyfus to Marius Jacob and a whole bunch of illegalists and anarchists and assorted revolutionaries. But it wasn't exclusive to them either, murder could also get you there, if you were really unlucky.

Now, internal penal colonies are a different sort, sometimes the term "(internal) displacement" is used instead of "exile", these are common in totalitarian regimes of all stripes, and are often exclusively for political prisoners. Don't think only large countries that can sent you somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere, Greek dictatorships would send people to tiny islands, very close to the mainland, but effectively as isolated as in the middle of the ocean.

And we should also note Guantanamo, if nothing else because it combines a physical construct (a big prison) with a legal construct ("enemy combatant") invented precisely to bypass both due process for civilians and those pesky PoW rights per the Geneva Conventions. I believe that legal constructs are a crucial overlooked feature, that any prison dystopia could benefit from.

[Kiero]

How does that stack up against the historical use of penal-colonies? Australia was the most famous but I know there were others

As people have said above, it wasn't a "life sentence" and they still executed lots of people for a range of crimes.

[Storm Bringer]

And we should also note Guantanamo, if nothing else because it combines a physical construct (a big prison) with a legal construct ("enemy combatant") invented precisely to bypass both due process for civilians and those pesky PoW rights per the Geneva Conventions. I believe that legal constructs are a crucial overlooked feature, that any prison dystopia could benefit from.


your missing the third ingredient of Guantanamo, which is its funky legal status (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dU4IMex4F) as a US controlled site, outside of the US (and the jurisdiction of US civil courts), and not under the jurisdiction of the local civil courts (as Cuba's official stance is the based was forced upon them at gunpoint, and they call it illegal and want it back).


also, the lack of protections for non-state combatants was a semi-deliberate feature of Geneva. The idea was to encourage rebels to create a unified, recognisable, and negotiable entity, and to encourage them to use some sort of uniform or other marks of distinction to separate themselves form the civil populace (for example, the red/white armbands worn by polish fighters in the Warsaw Uprising).

[Epimethee]

I like the idea of a prison planet. A lot was already said but I will add a few things. Some topics were discussed at length but I'm a bit late and anyway I may stumble upon something fresh.

And also this, by the great Franquin at his darkest:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/2fb0129aa4fce8327c3baae179aa7e49/tumblr_nxlsseRyJa1tfp7lao1_r2_1280.png
https://78.media.tumblr.com/9249ca458bfdc25f987a3516b3753a9c/tumblr_nxlsseRyJa1tfp7lao2_r2_1280.png


So you have three main things to organise. The way the warden watch upon the inmate, the power structures among the inmates and the interactions between the planet and the intergalactic society. Each will have an impact on the other and the decisions you make here are essential.
I don't think the penal colonies are the best example, as they were colonies and supported by the metropolis. They were intended to advance the power of empires so the comparison is interesting but not really accurate. The aim of a penal planet is different. You are in my opinion closer to a totalitarian society. Everything should be designed to stuck the inmates in their place. That's your one and only goal. So you need a society on the planet, and you want to have it well organized to satisfy this aim.

The layout of the planet is important, but only as your background. Of course, the easiest way to stuck your inmates in some low technological level is to make the planet a true nightmare to survive, like Fenris in 40k. The bare necessities of survival are too much to allow fundamental research.
In any other case you will need an active intervention from the warden to check the planet. They are many possibilities to limit the technological advances of a society but each implies a direct or indirect contact.

In my opinion, those interactions may be the most interesting playground, like the political dynamics of the inmates.

The interactions between the inmates and the galactic society encompass many things: who are the inmates, why are they here, but also how are they brought on the planet. Some aside should be considered, like the knowledge about the prison of the galactic society, their opinion, and eventually the allies that inmates may have in the galaxy. Later on, it will also include actual interactions, but you should decide about that later, when your planet is better shaped.

The idea of political prisoners is fine, and may explain the difficulties of the society. Look for example at the Great Leap Forward in China. Overqualified peoples can't use their competences. They are under qualified for the task at hand and so the entire society suffer and local communities may even collapse.
It is also easier to imagine the children of the losers of a civil war still stuck on a backward planet generations after the facts. Of course that's evil but every other feasible option is. You could go for something like humans are an evil race and must be separated from the galaxy or like a huge experiment but that's equally vile. A more humanist choice, like petty criminals, implies regularly to drop new inmates. Also, as pointed above, petty criminals should probably have legal options to be taken out. (BTW, not to make the debate here where I don't judge moral positions, some societies could be against death penalty and go a long way not to use it. Also there could be reasons not to kill the guys, like opinion in the galaxy, as for Napoleon who was exiled because of the political cost of his death. The planet could have the same use on a larger scale.)

The main problem you have with too many new arrivals is that you need more steps to suppress technologies and knowledge and thus the actions of the wardens will be more visible. Each new intervention will multiply the potential of mischief from the inmates so a warden want to be as invisible as possible. I'm not against new arrivals but they should be limited not to impact the technological level. A few every generation seem the most reasonable quantity.
In my opinion, a first dropping for political prisoners then some news arrival every generation on a very little scale may be a realist option, as you have the best of both world, a local society well established and some regular interactions between the warden and the inmates.

Here the politics of the inmate are relevant. As much as the physical planet, a backward society should be a prison for a galactic citizen. From the point of view of the warden, it is easier to engineer a society than a group of inmate. What I really want is a society made as much as a trap as the planet I choose. Time is less a problem for a galactic society, and I have as much potential inmates as I want, considering the size of the galactic population.

So I start by dropping a huge population, hopefully mainly of young and old people, and as few people with farming experience or hunting or the like as possible. They could be a political faction, the losers of a war or something like that and their fate may be as tragic or justified as you like. Maybe they are the families of an evil order, or they are just a displaced society of oppressed peoples. Anyway, they will be the basis of my brave new world.
Then I let boil for a few generations. I try to suppress as much writing as possible but I let the people do their things. I can reasonably be sure that they will organise at some point, and I can let that happen. It is unlikely that the first generation should be able to use their knowledge and I need at some point to have political entities to play with. Hopefully, they will fight a bit for limited ressources before they organise, all the better for me.

Thus my attack on knowledge. It would be hard for the inmates to write anything down and easy for me to destroy the supports. (It is also easier to make it as discrete as possible, a fire, a flood, a strange moisture... the ancient can say "peoples in the sky" did it, as long as the young have no proof, it just plant the seeds for the next step.) In any case, they are unlikely to have the necessary infrastructure to support the knowledge needed for space, let alone intergalactic travel. Education would be limited to the basic, because of the necessities of survival.

My aim is to uproot the inmates, to dissolve their knowledge. They will have memories, oral tales with limited context. Each generation will lose a bit of these knowledge. I'm confident that the technological infrastructure will crash down rapidly. Even something simple like the steam age technology is dependent of a huge net of universities, laboratories, usines and so on. So I can concentrate on the humanities, on making uncertain and rare the historical archives. I try to get as close as possible to a blank state. Relatively soon some cultural differences will start to appear.
By this point I can start engineering.

As I said, they are many possibilities by this point. The easiest is to build a society opposed to the idea of technological advance. Religion is of course an useful tool. The memories of space civilisation will help me. With my technological superiority, it should be easy to appear as a supernatural force. It also frame my next interventions.

By this point I have many options: corrupting and manipulating leaders, framing and reframing the culture and education of new generations, using something akin to the inquisition so the inmate are their own warden regarding technology... If I need a more direct intervention, I will use the cultural references of the inmates to reinforce my narrative. I can even have some warden as agent on the surface to direct the course of history.

By this point, a few galactic citizens could be dropped sometime without disruption to my prison. The society of the inmates will be like a huge shackle: technology would be seen as evil, the knowledge of the news inmates as heretical and so on. So I have a nice place to drop political opponent, and some criminals too dangerous to be kept elsewhere.

By this point the planet has a lot of interesting dynamics to explore as a player. The galactic citizens versus the warden and the other inmates, the journey of an inmate to discover the lies around the world were he is born are self-evident plots. But the society of the warden, certainly as complex and alien as the society on the planet, is also quite interesting.

So as I said I encourage you to think about the planet as a totalitarian society. It may give you another perpective on the situation.


To snowblizz: Thank for the niceties. This thread is really engrossing and the path of discussion are endless. Not to mention the very interesting people who share their knowledge.

About cannibalism, yeah, it's the first thing that come to mind. And that's the problem also. In other cases, clear marks of ingestion were found, like broken bones to eat the marrow. Here we have no clear evidence and the remains are still to be studied in laboratory. Without clear evidence it should be said with a grain of salt.
Another problem is the lack of other occurence for something like that. Nothing compare among the Celts and even the lack of respect for human remains is unusual.
Even then, the idea of human sacrifices is contentious for the Celts. Some will point to roman sources like Cesar, Ciceron, or Lucan, but they should be taken as the rewriting of Poseidonios, like Diodore and Strabon, the plea of a great advocate and a poetic vision respectively.

So again I think you should be careful not to be blinded by the first hypothesis. It's tempting because then you have an explanation and you can fit the discoveries in the frame but you should try to go the other way around, building a frame with the precision of your elaboration on the objects.

[Galloglaich]

France sent both political prisoners and common criminals to New Caledonia, near Australia. Thousands of people were hauled there after the suppression of the Paris Commune (including Louise Michel, most famously), though later an amnesty was issued, and most of them came back.

Their other penal colony was on the Salvation's Islands, off French Guiana in South America. That one was notoriously brutal, especially Devil's Island, and was preferred for political prisoners, from Alfred Dreyfus to Marius Jacob and a whole bunch of illegalists and anarchists and assorted revolutionaries. But it wasn't exclusive to them either, murder could also get you there, if you were really unlucky.


France also "transported" a lot of people to Louisiana, Haiti / Santa Domingo, Martinique, and later places like Indochina.

G

[Vinyadan]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Exekias_Dionysos_Staatliche_Antikensammlungen_2044 _n2.jpg


This pottery in particular refers to a certain myth -- the one in which Dionysos wants to travel by ship, but the sailors (actually pirates) try to capture him and sell him as a slave. Dionysos then turns the pirates into dolphins, and the ship into a vineyard.

Concerning art in the Middle Ages, some were stylistic choices. Miniatures are incredibly expressive. Realism wasn't a main objective, although it sometimes was there. I remember one illuminated manuscript in particular that was edited on the request of the buyer to show not just a stylised cathedral, but the cathedral of the city he lived in; this was unusual, and it happened before 1100. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Hasak_-_Der_Dom_zu_Köln_-_006_Alter_Dom.jpg <- the realistic depiction of the old Cathedral of Cologne. In the original, you can see that the original miniature was edited.

But yes, I have read some texts concerning how symbolism in figurative arts was explained in the Middle Ages. I also have attended some courses relative to the metaphysical subtext that caused the choice of what may just look like colours or poses. It's a LOT of content, and the elaboration of centuries of thinking into an immediately perceivable form that also had to be enjoyable to the eye. I remember something about the other colours for Mary -- that she simply had to have some black, for example, because of certain implications in meaning. I think Georges Didi-Huberman wrote a lot about this stuff.

About the prison planet, I could see some sort of Benedectine Order appearing, in which people are not born but which nonetheless has a vital function in the conservation, expansion, and propagation of theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

[Epimethee]

This pottery in particular refers to a certain myth -- the one in which Dionysos wants to travel by ship, but the sailors (actually pirates) try to capture him and sell him as a slave. Dionysos then turns the pirates into dolphins, and the ship into a vineyard.


Correct, here is the version of the Homeric Hymns (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=HH%207). You will notice that a ship transformed in a vineyard for a god transported on a ship in Athens seem to connect the god and the sea. As you said, we have centuries of elaboration and only glimpses of the thinking behind. But I stand by this direction, as one refreshing way to look at the famous line.



Concerning art in the Middle Ages, some were stylistic choices. Miniatures are incredibly expressive. Realism wasn't a main objective, although it sometimes was there. I remember one illuminated manuscript in particular that was edited on the request of the buyer to show not just a stylised cathedral, but the cathedral of the city he lived in; this was unusual, and it happened before 1100. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Hasak_-_Der_Dom_zu_Köln_-_006_Alter_Dom.jpg <- the realistic depiction of the old Cathedral of Cologne. In the original, you can see that the original miniature was edited.

Again I'm with you here. It stress the importance of stylistic choices, as meaningful choices dictated by cultural reasons. Of courses other explanations are needed, building a cathedral is subject to technical limitations. But some choices are really made for other reasons. It seems for example that the middle age know the perspective and use it in buildings, like in the entrance of cathedrals. But they make other choices in their pictures.



But yes, I have read some texts concerning how symbolism in figurative arts was explained in the Middle Ages. I also have attended some courses relative to the metaphysical subtext that caused the choice of what may just look like colours or poses. It's a LOT of content, and the elaboration of centuries of thinking into an immediately perceivable form that also had to be enjoyable to the eye. I remember something about the other colours for Mary -- that she simply had to have some black, for example, because of certain implications in meaning. I think Georges Didi-Huberman wrote a lot about this stuff.

Because picture were made to be immediately perceptible, I think they are a great way to touch some of the medieval sensibilities. Of course we need some symbolic vocabulary, some keys of understanding, but with only a few directions you can fell the utter strangeness of the medieval frame of reference. The bestiary is great for that aim. We see almost the same beasts than medieval people, arguably less often. We have a good grasp of what animals look but certainly worst than them. But they make specifics choices when depicting them and those choices are easy to see. I'm not sure everybody need to read Isidore of Seville, understanding that we speak of a symbolic frame and maybe feeling it a bit seem a good first step.

But if you really want to dig as deep as possible in the medieval history of colors, you should read Michel Pastoureau (https://www.amazon.com/default/e/B001HMQS5G?redirectedFromKindleDbs=true), is mans books, Red, Blue, Green and Black are available in English, but sadly not Stripes: the Devil's Color. It's hard to dig deeper on this specific subject and most of the bases are covered.
I warmly recommend his book about the Bear, History of a Fallen King, and his work on heraldry as an aside.




About the prison planet, I could see some sort of Benedectine Order appearing, in which people are not born but which nonetheless has a vital function in the conservation, expansion, and propagation of theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

Exactly, and as a warden I would want that! Such order is easy to shape and manipulate with a few well placed agents! I would have involuntary pawn everywhere, and the population would seek them every time they need an explanation about some unusual phenomenon, giving me a huge network of intelligence. The curious minds would come to me and I will have process in place to dispose with the most dangerous. My order would be the better placed to shield any dangerous knowledge from the feeble minds of the people. Then add some circle to preserve the most arcane knowledge, and you have every opportunity to better manipulate the planet with as few direct action as possible. The inmates are their own warden again.

By the way you want rebels and adversaries. You should use the cultural differences to nurture a few different societies. It may take more effort at first but then you add a political weapon to your arsenal. It will use a lot of energies on the planet.
You may not wish a total militarization, but coupled with other means of control, a military society may be more disciplined. As much as war tend to drive innovation, in this case you should be able to engineer an equilibrium between your different societies and use your social engineering tools to reinforce the stasis.
Think of the nobility, or of the samurais of the Tokugawa shogunate. You will use honor, social order and other noble values to cut any head too high.
Again, this violent state play totally into your hand.

The rebels are great to play your narrative, to instill a sense of danger in your population. You could totally play the devil's card and use your technological knowledge to mimic magics, so you could burn some credible witches. More to the point it will make a great way of explaining any rogue galactic citizen, new inmate, lost traveller or interstellar helper of the inmates.

By this point we need to talk about the wardens. As my prison may endure an infinite amount of time they are likely to have made their own society. They may be close to human and here for as many generations as the inmates, or they may be something else, human with an expanded lifespan, AI, any kind of alien.
In any case their society is centered on their duty and could certainly be broken in two, the planetary agents and the space warden (They may be on a moon for all I care).
If you wish they could be as strange and arcane as their prisoners, stuck for the most part of their life on a backward planet upon which they have godly power.
I think it work better than a regular changing of the guards, as you will need a huge amount of time to engineer something like that.


I was also thinking about the Culture of Iain M. Banks, because it is always worthwhile when you ponder dubious social engineering. Something like the culture may have an old pact with an extinct society to preserve an old planet (thus the evilness of the process is less evident) and your galactic society use it as a prison for special personalities because it is already there. It open another path of stories, what was the aim of the extinct society for example, but if some players as inmates discover the truth it may be more interesting to see their reactions to this complex reality than go for the straight evil.

Also special Circumstances make for great field agents in this kind of scenarios, and the description of technology could be easily adapted to ressemble magic. So...

[Galloglaich]

All this is quite interesting, particularly enjoying the detours into Classical Greek etc. cult practices and philosophy, but when it comes to the later part of the medieval period, I think it becomes increasingly dangerous to confuse some distinct subset of medieval theology or religious orthodoxy with a general medieval point of view.

In the later periods I'm familiar with - say 1200-1500, you had myriads of different religious orders (the 'religious' - monks, nuns and friars) and theological factions within the priesthood, and a wide and steadily widening gap between almost all of the clerics of every stripe and nearly all of the other estates of people (princes, burghers, gentry, peasants, etc.).

You also had an ever-increasing gang of prince-prelates (bishops and archbishops, cardinals and abbots or abbesses) who acted in almost all respects exactly the same as secular princes, that is to say brutal, greedy, venal, cruel, capricious and generally behaving nothing even remotely resembling any kind of piety let alone the finer nuances of theological discourse such as has survived in the writings of some of the nuttier Dominicans or Carthusians or theology professors at the Sorbonne.

Just to give you a sense of how disliked the Church was in the 14th-15th Century in Central Europe consider the whole phenomenon of the Rolandstatuen (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Rolandstatuen&prev=search), the statues of Roland erected in towns and castles as a symbol of defiance to the Church.

Towns also started running their own schools specifically to free their offspring from the influence of the Church, as early as the 1100's. By the 1250's nearly all towns in Central Europe and most in Italy had their own schools. By the 1400's many had evicted their archbishop and hired their own priests. Towns, princes and entire regions or kingdoms were so routinely placed under interdict or ban by regional prince-prelates they were in disputes with, or by the Pope himself that they got sick of not being able to perform weddings, last-rites, funerals, baptisms and so on, so therefore hired their own clerics under Church authority. More or less the same to how the Kings of France ran the Church within their own borders or how Henry VIII eventually split away into his own Church.

When you read the writing of most of knights, artisans, mercenaries, and natural philosophers of the time, it is not saturated with the kind of religious overtones you'd find in the works of 17th or even 18th Century writers. If you want to understand medieval thinking I would say first you would be wise to focus on a particular region- Central Europe, the Low Countries, Italy, the British Isles, Iberian peninsula and France all had their distinct cultural footprint. Second, you should familiarize with some of the very Classical Auctores you are referring to such as Greeks like Aristotle or Epicurus and Romans like Livy or Cicero. Then familiarize yourself at least somewhat with the Arab gurus on the Greeks such as Avicenna, Al Jabir, Al Kindi, Rhazes, etc., because those guys are the filter through which the medieval literati (and there were more literate people - and more secular ones- than you might think) learned their Classical sources.

It's not to say they weren't religious - most of them were, but the type of bizarre theological constructs that we tend to associate with the medieval mind existed mostly inside the cloisters and priestly domains. For a typical knight, burgher or even University student they were more interested in hard science like geometry of Euclid and Vitruvius - which could help them build the next marvel or win the next war, and leaned in more superstitious realms more heavily into astrology and numerology than whether the devil dwelled within the color blue or some striped pants their wife bought at the market.

G

[HeadlessMermaid]

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

2) May I go back to the colour of the sea for a moment?

I believe that the only reason SO MUCH INK has been spilt about that damn "wine-dark sea" is that from the two (2) instances of the word in Homer, one refers to the sea and the other refers to cattle. If it weren't for the damn cattle, if we only had oinops pontos to work with, I'm sure everyone would interpret the phrase "sea that looks like wine" (and not "dark" or "red" or anything) simply as a nice, poetic image that likens one liquid with another. And has absolutely nothing to do with colour, hue, or luminosity. Maybe implying a frothing sea, maybe even an enticing sea, but in the end: it's a liquid, that's all.

It's the damn cattle that mess up this perfectly satisfactory explanation, and the slightly arbitrary assumption that the word must mean the exact same thing in both instances. And since "frothing" or anything liquid-related can't possibly apply to cattle, then surely it must be the colour. (Right?) And then the colour was assumed to be dark (?) or red (???) although it could literally be anything, we have elsewhere descriptions of white wines, black wines, yellow wines, green wines, grey wines, just pick a colour word, it's there - and Hippocrates opined it's a remedy for some ailment or the other.

And from there we got to what colours even mean, for ancient people, for modern people, for different cultures and languages. It's not simple you see, there's an "objective" frequency for every colour in the visible spectrum, and that's a number expressed in Hz, but how people lump them together in categories like "blue" or "green", oh, there's nothing objective about that.

And it's all the cattle's fault. Damn those wine-looking cattle. Damn them to hell.

Here's a proposal, let's stop wondering how the sea could be dark or red, and start wondering how cattle could be liquid. WHY would cattle look like wine? What went through Homer's head? How did the ancient Greeks view cattle? Were they wobbly and wavy in their eyes? Were they frothing? Were they wet? Drenched in sweat perhaps? How about drunk? DID THE CATTLE LOOK WASTED, IS THAT IT??? Now there's some worthy research I'd like to see. :smalltongue:

[snowblizz]

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps? Marsipulami? Gaston? Spirou? All these I've seen in English.
Btw does that leopard monster whatever look a bit like an angry Marsipulami or what! (also that signature with the predators eyes... sublime).

I my never be able to read those Dupuis/Dargaud comics which such childful glee again...


I believe that the only reason SO MUCH INK has been spilt about that damn "wine-dark sea"
Historians like to spill ink though. If they didn't argue they'd all have toa gree they don't know anything due ot lack of sources. I remember reading or watching something that explained how little we really know of Roman times. A lot of it comes only infragments so we in many cases have only specific instances that we paint the whole Roman world with.



And it's all the cattle's fault. Damn those wine-looking cattle. Damn them to hell.

I think I'll go have a burger for lunch. Show the cows who's boss.

[Vinyadan]

About liquid, I am fairly sure that there is a Greek word meaning "fast-footed" that literally reads "water-footed".

I'd have to check the details, but oinops could also be a very old word for "one-eyed", or "one-voiced". Oinos in Greek meant wine, but oine was the number one on the dice. This meaning comes from a broader use as "one".

Ops also has two meanings. One is that of face, eye, and look. The other one is that of "voice".

Personally, I like "one-voiced", because the sea and animals can be contrasted to the variety of human expression.

[Kiero]

Talking of "ops", "opson" means "meat", and "opsonion" is "wages".

[Epimethee]

All this is quite interesting, particularly enjoying the detours into Classical Greek etc. cult practices and philosophy, but when it comes to the later part of the medieval period, I think it becomes increasingly dangerous to confuse some distinct subset of medieval theology or religious orthodoxy with a general medieval point of view.

And cue an endless debate... How to study sensibilities, mentalities? Where the generalities stops and when the specific start? A lot of fun that... I want to stress that I can totally live with both objects, generalities to have something like a medieval society to study and then specifics to fill the frame. So I'm not refuting your point, just nuancing with my perspective. In my opinion it is the fun thing with history: a different bait catch a different fish but the sea is still there!


All In the later periods I'm familiar with - say 1200-1500, you had myriads of different religious orders (the 'religious' - monks, nuns and friars) and theological factions within the priesthood, and a wide and steadily widening gap between almost all of the clerics of every stripe and nearly all of the other estates of people (princes, burghers, gentry, peasants, etc.).

You will notice that my main examples, Bernard de Clairvaux, Suger, the color blue, were mainly from the XII century. From the perspective of the church, it is a time of growing power, even with more than a single pope. The monastics orders, like Citeaux and Cluny, are present across a large part of Europe. The architecture, as much as stylistics component are diffused from Spain to Scandinavia.
Even on more ideological things, like the wedding, the church is powerful enough to impose his vision.
That's not a one way phenomenon and as you said theological factions were abundant but I think both dynamics are important.

(By the way, if I may, as much as you are really learned, I think sometimes you tend to infer some phenomenon backward from the later medieval time. It's really relevant sometimes but in this case the early medieval time has some specificity.)


You also had an ever-increasing gang of prince-prelates (bishops and archbishops, cardinals and abbots or abbesses) who acted in almost all respects exactly the same as secular princes, that is to say brutal, greedy, venal, cruel, capricious and generally behaving nothing even remotely resembling any kind of piety let alone the finer nuances of theological discourse such as has survived in the writings of some of the nuttier Dominicans or Carthusians or theology professors at the Sorbonne.

But you have also concrete proofs of the effects of the theories of Sorbonne professors on the material culture of medieval time. One of the best example is the falling from grace of the bear and the boar, replaced by the deer and the lion. The bear was a powerful symbol of royalty since the pagan time and, with the boar, they were the preferred prey of hunting parties. (BTW the hunt is a scenography of power here.) The church promoted the lion and the deer, filled with christian imagery, to replace them and succeeded. Of course the main clues are in dusty codex, but the heraldry, where lions came suddenly, or the tradition of dancing bears as a vilification of the noble beast speak volumes of the diffusion of theological constructions on the general population.
Again, it is not a binary choice, both phenomenon are relevant here.




Just to give you a sense of how disliked the Church was in the 14th-15th Century in Central Europe consider the whole phenomenon of the Rolandstatuen (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Rolandstatuen&prev=search), the statues of Roland erected in towns and castles as a symbol of defiance to the Church.

Yeah, you have also a lot of fabliaux where the priest were ridiculous, greedy and so on. But look at the many daily shows today: when peoples use humor, derisive symbols and so on, it is often to mock the power in place. In a way, an act of defiance assess that you are the less powerful side.




Towns also started running their own schools specifically to free their offspring from the influence of the Church, as early as the 1100's. By the 1250's nearly all towns in Central Europe and most in Italy had their own schools. By the 1400's many had evicted their archbishop and hired their own priests. Towns, princes and entire regions or kingdoms were so routinely placed under interdict or ban by regional prince-prelates they were in disputes with, or by the Pope himself that they got sick of not being able to perform weddings, last-rites, funerals, baptisms and so on, so therefore hired their own clerics under Church authority. More or less the same to how the Kings of France ran the Church within their own borders or how Henry VIII eventually split away into his own Church.

Yeah, but that's a lot of centuries. And it was also a dynamic process were the church was not always the loser, as shown by the many Interdicts that were put upon almost every christian country with various results. The kings were not always powerful enough to resist.(BTW, this possibility is a clue to the extent of christianity and to the cultural power of the church.)
Also, as shown brilliantly by Georges Duby, the roots of the Henri VIII situation can be traced back to the X-XI century, when the church was able to use a new definition of incest to become a necessary intermediary in the wedding, as the warrant of his validity.




When you read the writing of most of knights, artisans, mercenaries, and natural philosophers of the time, it is not saturated with the kind of religious overtones you'd find in the works of 17th or even 18th Century writers. If you want to understand medieval thinking I would say first you would be wise to focus on a particular region- Central Europe, the Low Countries, Italy, the British Isles, Iberian peninsula and France all had their distinct cultural footprint. Second, you should familiarize with some of the very Classical Auctores you are referring to such as Greeks like Aristotle or Epicurus and Romans like Livy or Cicero. Then familiarize yourself at least somewhat with the Arab gurus on the Greeks such as Avicenna, Al Jabir, Al Kindi, Rhazes, etc., because those guys are the filter through which the medieval literati (and there were more literate people - and more secular ones- than you might think) learned their Classical sources.

The regional approach may work but there is also in my opinion a more general landscape, unified at least by christianity and maybe by the classical references. Roughly speaking you have like a synthesis between regional footprints, and the huge cultural streams of the growing christian faith, the roman intellectuals framework, the more germanic traditions of the late roman era (don't forget that vandals were in Spain), and then some, like the Celtic influences brought by the great Irish monks, like Gall, Colomban or Urscisinus.

And I tend to like the Compilations better than the classical sources. The like of Ovide could be interpreted as a biblical metaphor so the Ancient were taken with a very specific frame of mind.
So I think Isidore of Seville or some other compilation like The Six Age of The World (https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=kas-002:2000:51::450), may be more useful. That's also why I like bestiary, as they use and reshape the Authorities. As explicit encyclopedia they tend to be already organized among epistemological lines. And the compilations were often actually used to share knowledge with the less literate. As much as the connection was never really lost with the ancient, the general public would only read the originals in latter time.


It's not to say they weren't religious - most of them were, but the type of bizarre theological constructs that we tend to associate with the medieval mind existed mostly inside the cloisters and priestly domains. For a typical knight, burgher or even University student they were more interested in hard science like geometry of Euclid and Vitruvius - which could help them build the next marvel or win the next war, and leaned in more superstitious realms more heavily into astrology and numerology than whether the devil dwelled within the color blue or some striped pants their wife bought at the market.

G

Here I tend to disagree with you, and the reaction of the peoples to Interdicts, the huge reach of the Crusade, the size and efforts and money put in religious constructions, the reach and success of pilgrimage, the dotation of abbey and so on show that medieval peoples were not as secular as you make it sound. Again, that's not to say they were blind to the natural order, and of course the most arcane theological constructs were reserved to theologians. But I think hard science is the worst choice of words. Vitruvius was read (if at all) as much for his technical informations as for the aesthetic of his writing that hinted to the construction of the world.


Also superstition is anachronistic. You need to have a scientific frame to have superstition. Take the case of Astrology. In early medieval age it is linked to a christian frame. It is not a superstition but one of the many ways God reveal itself to the world. The status of astrology change in latter time, defined as heretical then as a false thing, and only latter as a superstition. Superstition is a construct of modern time, and was also promoted by the church to reshape faith for a more secular society (According to Carlo Ginzburg in the Night Battles).

Again, I agree with most of what you said and have only a different point of view. As I said I don't think they are opposed, but at one time you should choose where to focus.



1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

2) May I go back to the colour of the sea for a moment?

1) and also @Snowbliss

Honestly I don't know. Here I think it is the Phantagraphics edition of Idées Noires. It was published in French by Fluide Glacial.

I love Franquin as much today as yesterday and I'm always amazed by how powerful his drawing is. His sense of movement is incomparable and he is able to express a full range of emotions even on objects.

Also keep the childish glee, he liked that but that was not the only point of his work.

About 2.)

Interestingly, the French translation read: "la mer vineuse", "la mer aux couleurs de vin", or "la mer aux teintes lie-de vin". Dark is never really used. The word is also fairly archaic, disappearing after Hesiode and Alcée. Remember as an aside that greek were drinking in dark recipient, not transparent like our own, thus the wine would appear as a dark and brilliant surface. Notice also that the wine dark sea is often violent, dangerous.
Also the wine is only qualified as red (eruthros) and black (melas) in homeric epics. It was not any color you like but a precise range.
And most scholar I know make a distinction between the cattle and the wine. The wine metaphor is more used in sources, and more prevalent in greek culture.

Later we have drinking cups decorated on the side with ships, as if they floated on the wine. The connections between sea and wine run deep and mobilize a lot of sensibilities, not only the visual one.

Most scholar think that the cattle metaphor is visual. As you said it is part of the problem because it implies a notion of color. But connections between sea and cattle are really rare, the only think I could think of, and that's something totally different, is the bull of Poseidon. Also the probatov was a kind of fish and a word for sheeps and little cattle. And they said goat of the sea, and dwelled on the likeness of the word for whirlpool.

But yeah, I would like to see an essay on wasted cattle.

[Vinyadan]

If the word is "probaton", it sounds to me like "that which goes forward". It's rather vague, and so it isn't strange that it was applied to many different animals.

[Galloglaich]

(By the way, if I may, as much as you are really learned, I think sometimes you tend to infer some phenomenon backward from the later medieval time. It's really relevant sometimes but in this case the early medieval time has some specificity.)

Well, it's true there are always simultaneously contradictory trends in medieval society. I find it annoying when one gets emphasized to the exclusion of the others. The role of the Cistercians in particular can't be overstated to the development of medieval society in general, but it was in fact in this same early period when the independent cities started splitting away from both Feudal and Church society. The rural world was not yet fully indoctrinated in many rather vast parts of Europe, and the nobles and military estates were doing their own thing as well without much concern for the demands of the Church (or their complex internal struggles over doctrine)

The first university (bologna) arrived autonomous outside of Church control in the 11th Century.



But you have also concrete proofs of the effects of the theories of Sorbonne professors on the material culture of medieval time. One of the best example is the falling from grace of the bear and the boar, replaced by the deer and the lion. The bear was a powerful symbol of royalty since the pagan time

And yet, for cities like Berne or regions like Samogitia in Lithuania (just to name two among many), the bear remained a heraldic symbol of the utmost importance. The reach of such trends doesn't go as far as is typically assumed.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Berne-coat_of_arms.svg/190px-Berne-coat_of_arms.svg.png


Yeah, you have also a lot of fabliaux where the priest were ridiculous, greedy and so on. But look at the many daily shows today: when peoples use humor, derisive symbols and so on, it is often to mock the power in place. In a way, an act of defiance assess that you are the less powerful side.

No doubt the priests were powerful, but it's also true that the bishops were evicted from hundreds of their own cathedrals in Europe in the 12th and 13th Centuries, typically by force. For example when Bishop Walter von Geroldseck was defeated by the Strasbourg militia in 1262. Almost all the Free Cities, most of the Italian and Central European cities with recognizable names today, did this. So it wasn't just the feeble protests of the weak against the strong.




Yeah, but that's a lot of centuries. And it was also a dynamic process were the church was not always the loser, as shown by the many Interdicts that were put upon almost every christian country with various results. The kings were not always powerful enough to resist.(BTW, this possibility is a clue to the extent of christianity and to the cultural power of the church.)

No of course they didn't always lose. They were incredibly powerful - but things like the schisms, the Avignon captivity and the three popes, and the overuse of excommunication and the ban and the interdict - ultimately weakened them. By the 1300's the ground was laid for the much later Protestant reformation. And of course it happened 100 years early in Bohemia.




And I tend to like the Compilations better than the classical sources. The like of Ovide could be interpreted as a biblical metaphor so the Ancient were taken with a very specific frame of mind.
So I think Isidore of Seville or some other compilation like The Six Age of The World (https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=kas-002:2000:51::450), may be more useful. That's also why I like bestiary, as they use and reshape the Authorities. As explicit encyclopedia they tend to be already organized among epistemological lines. And the compilations were often actually used to share knowledge with the less literate. As much as the connection was never really lost with the ancient, the general public would only read the originals in latter time.

Depends where. Keep in mind the big push to spread the vernacular translations in places like Florence as early as the 14th Century.




pilgrimage, the dotation of abbey and so on show that medieval peoples were not as secular as you make it sound. Again, that's not to say they were blind to the natural order, and of course the most arcane theological constructs were reserved to theologians. But I think hard science is the worst choice of words. Vitruvius was read (if at all) as much for his technical informations as for the aesthetic of his writing that hinted to the construction of the world.

I wouldn't say they were secular, just not as influenced by the often very strange theology found deep in the Church. They were very interested in aesthetics and loved the Classical (and Arab) auctores, and had their own ideas of the sacred, which were a mixture of Church doctrine with whatever their own remnant traditions and new ideas from new types of communities (like the cities, but also things like knightly orders and secular literature).



Also superstition is anachronistic. You need to have a scientific frame to have superstition. Take the case of Astrology. In early medieval age it is linked to a christian frame. It is not a superstition but one

The Christian (and metaphysical) links to things like Astrology and Alchemy tend to be overstated. They created a patina of Christian acceptability but they tended to be pragmatic. Astrology being linked to Astronomy and thereby navigation, not to mention calendars for everything from when to plant crops to when to move armies out.



Again, I agree with most of what you said and have only a different point of view. As I said I don't think they are opposed, but at one time you should choose where to focus.

Of course - agreed. I just try to point out the realms typically left out of any discussion of the medieval.



G

[Epimethee]

Well, it's true there are always simultaneously contradictory trends in medieval society. I find it annoying when one gets emphasized to the exclusion of the others.

Very true, but I think very rhetorical here. You know as well as me that every historical reflexion is by necessity a reduction. I love the notion of complexity, because it literally mean woven together so I understand that following a thread blind you even momentarily to the others. I don't forget them. It's no exclusion.



The role of the Cistercians in particular can't be overstated to the development of medieval society in general, but it was in fact in this same early period when the independent cities started splitting away from both Feudal and Church society. The rural world was not yet fully indoctrinated in many rather vast parts of Europe, and the nobles and military estates were doing their own thing as well without much concern for the demands of the Church (or their complex internal struggles over doctrine)

The first university (bologna) arrived autonomous outside of Church control in the 11th Century.


About the indoctrination, I would be more cautious than you. Don't forget that the evangelization between the fall of Rome and the Great Schism of 1054 was a huge popular movement, driven of course by missionaries but unlike the latter crusades, the Cathars wars or the Teutonics expeditions for example. The help of the monarchs and the nobility was essential but the christianity was popular and baptism were genuine. (Here should follow a discussion on the difference between the political religion of the ancient and the individual concept of salvation that put the responsibility of faith on the individual and would be really relevant to the following discussion because of the consequences for the notion of individual itself, that an history of religion topic so I won't dare go further). Of course they were political tensions from the beginning. But there was also genuine concern to follow the precept of the church.
Also, the struggle over doctrine were often contiguous with political concerns, think of the Lombard against Charlemagne for example.
Really, it is a concept that I find hard to grasp and that already cost me time and effort. The speed of conversion and the extent of christianity could make for an endless debate.


One of the genius of the church, and again I point to you the excellent Georges Duby and his The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, was to be able to put itself in a position where it was a necessary interlocutor in the political problems of the time.

Also, as much as a free university appear at the end of the XI century, it is rooted in the church tradition and the scholastics guilds. The knowledge was scholastic and rooted in the christian understanding of the world, as theology was the highest and most valorized degree. What they will become a few centuries latter is quite different.



And yet, for cities like Berne or regions like Samogitia in Lithuania (just to name two among many), the bear remained a heraldic symbol of the utmost importance. The reach of such trends doesn't go as far as is typically assumed.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Berne-coat_of_arms.svg/190px-Berne-coat_of_arms.svg.png

No, not the utmost importance. Really it was declining by the time heraldry was adopted at the end of the XII century. But they were about 4 millions documented coat of arms in medieval time so you are likely to find some bears and boars. You need more than the coat of Bern to state his cultural meaning. Also Bern was linked with the bear since pagan times, look at the goddess Artio for example and the famous statue: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/HMB_-_Muri_statuette_group_-_Artio.jpg It may be a case of talking coat of arms, a kind of wordplay, but it is also a witness of the staying power of the bear since pagan time, not contradicting his more general decline.

(I will more or less copy here a chapter of The Bear: History of a Fallen King, from Pastoureau entitled Crowning of the Lion: the heraldic bestiary (and also heraldry is a very specific vocabulary, I may make some mistake translating my sources, I hope you will take them with fair play!))

At the end of the XII century, the shield with a lion became the stereotyped shield of the christian knight in French and anglo-normand literature, opposed to the pagan knight whose shield is marked with a dragon or a leopard. The germanic regions resist longer and keep the pagan mythological bestiary for some time. By the XIII century, the bear or the boar are still the attribute of heroes. But Tristan lose in Scandinavia and Germany the boar that was on is shield around 1250, taking like in France and England a century ago, and like in Austria and Italia a bit latter, a lion in his place.

The lion is present on about 15% of all medieval coat of arms, regardless of the time period and the social classes. That's huge, the second most frequent piece, the fasce count for about 6% of the total and the eagle make for about 3%. This primacy of the lion is found everywhere: from northern to Southern Europe, in the arms of nobility or non-nobility, for moral and physical peoples, in real and imaginary coat of arms, as noted above. In the XIII century they said: "who bears no coat of arms bears a lion".
It should also be noted that, among the king of christianity, only the king of France and the Emperor never used a lion in their coat of arms. At some point, any other did.

From the XIII century, the herald and authors writing about the fauna of heraldry speak of the lion as the king of animals, pared with all the virtues and the heraldic figure par excellence.

(As an aside, you should read the Roman de Renart: here again the lion is king, with all virtues and the bear is often the butt of a joke, funnily, it was written around 1150-1200)

Compare it to the bear: except in some part of northern Germany and maybe Spain, it count for less than 5% of figures. Also heralds were less talkative about the virtues of the beast. So the bear was not adopted because of his symbolic value. Mainly, they are talking coat of arms, making a pun with the name of the bearer. The most ancient known is from Canterbury, around 1190-1120. That's the famous cognizance of Sir Reginald Fitzurse, one of the killers of Thomas Beckett. Urse, ours, bear. That's a wordplay. The coat may even have been made after the death of sir Reginald, but that's not really relevant. It is the first of a series were the name of the individual, of the family, the community speak with the design of the coat of arm.
You have for example Bern, Berlin, Madrid (from the theory it was named Ursaria), Abbey like Urscamp or Saint-Ursanne (from Urscicinus, a Celtic missionary) and so on.

Of course, the ancient meaning of the bear is not totally forgotten, as shown in the crest of some helms again mainly in northern Germany. But you have also around the XII-XIII century a few German, Danish and Swedish coats were the bear is also talking but with an ancient royal name, like in Königsberg, Königgut, Könnecke, Kungslena or Herringa. It is interesting as a witness of the ancient dignity of the bear but as a trace of something disappearing.
Everywhere else, the lion was the king.

And soon the king was also a lion: Richard King of England and Wilhelm of Scotland for example: The Lion, the Generous Lion...

Interestingly, there is a limit, a last germanic dynaste to be called a bear: Albert, Magrave of Brandeburg, in his fight against Henry, Duke of Saxe, Henri the Lion... (that was 1164-1168).
Funny that... Notice that the Lion won. And that it is not certain if the name was given during the lifetime of Albert the Bear.

So by the XIII century the bear was really declining, from a symbol of royalty and power to some kind of more domesticated beast. The lion, an imported creature was the new symbol of royalty and easier to connect with christian imagery.




No doubt the priests were powerful, but it's also true that the bishops were evicted from hundreds of their own cathedrals in Europe in the 12th and 13th Centuries, typically by force. For example when Bishop Walter von Geroldseck was defeated by the Strasbourg militia in 1262. Almost all the Free Cities, most of the Italian and Central European cities with recognizable names today, did this. So it wasn't just the feeble protests of the weak against the strong.

No of course they didn't always lose. They were incredibly powerful - but things like the schisms, the Avignon captivity and the three popes, and the overuse of excommunication and the ban and the interdict - ultimately weakened them. By the 1300's the ground was laid for the much later Protestant reformation. And of course it happened 100 years early in Bohemia.

We clearly agree on most of this. I would point out this time that there could be many reasons for the eviction of a bishop, as he may have been a secular figure as much as a religious authority. So as much as the bishop was evicted, faith was not really under question. The same play for the Protestant reformation: even with the political context, you have a theological problem that grow and became one of the most violent war in Europe. The truth of christianity was never under question. In this sense, the ideological victory of christianity seem evident. But of course the true power of the church is hard to asses and varies according to time and places.



Depends where. Keep in mind the big push to spread the vernacular translations in places like Florence as early as the 14th Century.

Here I think the general trump the specific. But you're right to point it out.



I wouldn't say they were secular, just not as influenced by the often very strange theology found deep in the Church. They were very interested in aesthetics and loved the Classical (and Arab) auctores, and had their own ideas of the sacred, which were a mixture of Church doctrine with whatever their own remnant traditions and new ideas from new types of communities (like the cities, but also things like knightly orders and secular literature).


Ah ah, here I have found our biggest difference, I think! And unsurprisingly it is about interpretation! So I don't think we could have a definitive position.
In my opinion, the medieval time is of course a synthesis that bring on new things (like the cities as you rightly point out), and for a synthesis you need a few sources, or streams. Of course, the remnant of traditions were used, but there is like a cut, as if christianity was the decanter in which those sources melt. As I said, the roman tradition never disappeared, and was easier to find again because of written sources but it was melted with other component like the germanic laws, the Celtic literature and son on. But the traditions were reshaped not only aesthetically but also symbolically. Christianity implemented a new frame of reference in which the ancient traditions were read. So for example the medieval romance that play the same tunes that the theologians but shaped for their audiences.
Notice also that the first vernacular pieces on ancient matter, like Alexander or Cesar, are also romances, clearly reshaped by christian and medieval ideology.

As much as I believe in the own ideas of peoples at any time, I think ideas, ideologies, play also a part and the difficult part is balancing those two realities.


The Christian (and metaphysical) links to things like Astrology and Alchemy tend to be overstated. They created a patina of Christian acceptability but they tended to be pragmatic. Astrology being linked to Astronomy and thereby navigation, not to mention calendars for everything from when to plant crops to when to move armies out.


Again, I think that the way the church reshaped the medieval culture was more than an aesthetic. And again I think you overstate a bit the term pragmatic: as I said the symbolical does not exclude the pragmatic. They were balancing both differently!





Of course - agreed. I just try to point out the realms typically left out of any discussion of the medieval.



G

And I thank you for that!

[snowblizz]

It may be a case of talking coat of arms, a kind of wordplay, but it is also a witness of the staying power of the bear since pagan time, not contradicting his more general decline.

Everywhere else, the lion was the king.

Funny that... Notice that the Lion won.

So by the XIII century the bear was really declining, from a symbol of royalty and power to some kind of more domesticated beast. The lion, an imported creature was the new symbol of royalty and easier to connect with christian imagery.


That's interesting because here (In Finland) we still talk about the Russian bear. To be understood as the everpresent though not always acute threat of the deep uncivilized forests of the east. Despite the fact that the Russian empire used the eagle as device which could as easily been used in such connotations. There's at least one famous nationalromantic painting depicting a fight between Finlandia and an eagle tearing up the book of law.

Unsurprisingly the heraldic device of Finland is a lion (created by the new Vasa dynasty to increase their prestige).

[Galloglaich]

Very true, but I think very rhetorical here. You know as well as me that every historical reflexion is by necessity a reduction. I love the notion of complexity, because it literally mean woven together so I understand that following a thread blind you even momentarily to the others. I don't forget them. It's no exclusion.

Thee thing is, though historians are aware of these things, only one part of the historiography typically makes it into the popular culture. This is what I'm referring to.

I also think historiography for by and about one region, or a couple of closely linked ones (England and France for example) tend to get erroneously extended well beyond that area. France for example was very influential in matters such as heraldry and princely or knightly fashions of all kinds, but there were definite limits to that, and to the dominance of such estates in other parts of Europe. The thing with the Bear and the Lion for example, is a case in point.

I don't see Berne and Samogitia as outliers for sticking with their Bear symbology, in the Baltic region which I specialize, the Bear was quite common as a symbol or coat of arms across Latinized, Greek-Russian, and indigenous Pagan regions. The boar too was not exactly rare.

The depictions in heraldic symbols - which are often portrayed the same way also typically correspond to the ritualized keeping of live bears in captivity, and a ritualized and highly dangerous method of hunting wild bears on foot, with a spear. I'm referring specifically to the method you see depicted here in one of the Bern Chronicles - on foot with a spear featuring a crossbar.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Tschachtlan-Chronik%2C_Berner_B%C3%A4renjagd.jpg/405px-Tschachtlan-Chronik%2C_Berner_B%C3%A4renjagd.jpg
You can also see the Bear coat of arms above the gate in the town behind the hunters.


This was a common hunting technique in Poland, in Prussia, in Lithuania, in Bohemia and in Pomerania and Silesia, among both German and Slavic speaking people, as well as the indigenous Baltic tribes. They would stab the bear in the chest and then prop the spear against the ground, the bear then wearing itself out trying to push against the crossbar. Needless to say a very dangerous way to hunt, but it was a somewhat common trait of hunting in this period, at least in the Central European polities with which I am familiar, to hunt in dangerous ways and during dangerous times (for example in Spring when many animals are in rut)

I have a colleague in fact who is researching the Bear heraldry and associated practices as some kind of remnant of a bear cult throughout Central Europe. Last time I spoke to him he mentioned over 70 polities which fit the pattern. As you pointed out, the Bear symbol and associated practices (for example during Carnival) of course predates Christianity and like many other things, continued into the Christian era.

Perhaps the best single source on all this is Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, where he carefully documented practices such as at Carnival or 12th night celebrations ala Krampus et al, which include cult like practices associated with animals such as bears. Consider these traditional (peasant) Carnival costumes found from Portugal to Bulgaria:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-H4lN5HEBPRc/UWmRZaBQR1I/AAAAAAAAdOQ/E88O-3TCejo/s1600/Bear+Palanca+Romania+2010.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/37/d9/6937d9f31f184e016ed9e4064c8f4147.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4c/6f/61/4c6f6152a4ec9f0f898b31ca89fb0d96.jpg

https://cdn.trendhunterstatic.com/thumbs/wilder-mann.jpeg

We also see bear Carrnival costumes in places like Nuremberg in the 15th Century:

http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8081/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/Size4/ODLodl-1-NA/1063/bodl_Douce346_roll403.1_frame11.jpg&userid=1&username=insight&resolution=4&servertype=JVA&cid=1&iid=ODLodl&vcid=NA&usergroup=ARTstor&profileid=4

So undoubtedly, the French court was influenced, but I think it's very common to overstate the actual influence beyond certain courts. Nor is a count of symbols sufficient since it matters more how powerful the polity, noble family, town or prince in question was. Berne was very powerful.

Another important example is Madrid - still using this bear in the 16th Century

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Shield_and_Coat_of_Arms_of_Madrid_City_%281544-c.1600%29.svg/399px-Shield_and_Coat_of_Arms_of_Madrid_City_%281544-c.1600%29.svg.png

Veliki Novgorod, one of the most powerful City States in Russia (in it's heyday, comparable to Venice)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Coat_of_Arms_of_Veliky_Novgorod.svg/397px-Coat_of_Arms_of_Veliky_Novgorod.svg.png

Berlin, rather small in the medieval period but of increasing importance as we know...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Coat_of_arms_of_Berlin.svg/365px-Coat_of_arms_of_Berlin.svg.png




About the indoctrination, I would be more cautious than you. Don't forget that the evangelization between the fall of Rome and the Great Schism of 1054 was a huge popular movement, driven of course by missionaries but unlike the latter crusades, the Cathars wars or the Teutonics expeditions for example. The help of the monarchs and the nobility was essential but the christianity was popular and

The Cathars was are a good example of what I'm referring to. Christianity - in theory- spread far and wide, but the "Devil was in the Details" to use an aphorism, and to Rome the Cathars were very much Devils, leading to the devastation of much of Lange-D'Oc and the crushing of what might have been an early Renaissance into a smoking ruin. Much of the details of Church doctrine, what Latin Christendom considered "legitimate" Christianity, was imposed, or attempted in imposition, by force. Numerous rural clans, towns, principalities and even entire Kingdoms were attacked in the Middle Ages within Europe in attempts to enforce Christianity.

For The Church (writ large) much of Europe had a thin patina of Christianity but were not in fact on the road to salvation. In practice this frequently meant what to them were pagan practices or even diabolical ones. They could not accept Greek Orthodox Christianity, and even relatively minor variations in ritual such as the Czechs slightly more liberal attitudes about women (like when women could and couldn't enter a Church after childbirth) or whether to have wine at communion, triggered a long series of bloody wars (which were failures for the Church).

Debates between towns and Church leaders over doctrine and what would be taught to Children, especially by the Inquisitional Orders such as the Dominicans, are what led to the towns establishing their own schools. Nor was this sense of unease with Church doctrine limited to the burghers - many of those Roland statues I posted earlier were in castles and erected by princes or Imperial Knights.



Really, it is a concept that I find hard to grasp and that already cost me time and effort. The speed of conversion and the extent of christianity could make for an endless debate.

No doubt - I think it just depends on how you define Christianity. Rome itself defined it rather narrowly as time went on. If you say - how many people accepted baptism and liked the idea of Jesus and / or the Virgin Mary, I would agree it was very widespread. If you said, how many people were paying their tithes, sticking to doctrine on matters of the nature of the Holy Trinity, or eschewing pagan rituals, I would say it was much more patchy and as evidence I would point to the numerous wars and Crusades fought over the issue of Church control and 'thoroughness' of conversion in various areas.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Peesten_Tanzlinde.JPG/360px-Peesten_Tanzlinde.JPG

Often, significantly - these were right next to the Church.

Another urban example of the pagan beneath the Christian, are the sacred linden trees in Central Europe. Tanzlinde, Dorflinde, DoomLinde, and by various other names, hundreds of these sacred trees still exist in the very center of dozens of cities, towns, villages and castles throughout Europe. They were closely associated with a cult of Freyja. Later downgraded to a 'good faerie'. More importantly these were the site of weddings, court judgements including condemnations, carnival and May Day celebrations, and public assemblies of all kinds (including the Vehmic Court in many cases).

These were in larger cities as well as small villages, almost all the Free Cities of Central Europe had them and most still do. A good example is the Lindenhof in Zurich, site of a settlement with cultic activities going back to at least the Iron Age. used as late as 1798 for the citizens as a site to swear oaths for their new constitution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindenhof

Quite a few of these that still stand today are over 1,000 years old. If the Church had sufficient authority I believe they would have stamped this out - they may have put some kind of thin patina of Christianity over it but it's really not Christian.

Here is a partial list (via auto-translate / wikipedia) (here (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzlinde) is the German Wiki)

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzlinde&prev=search



One of the genius of the church, and again I point to you the excellent Georges Duby and his The Knight, The Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, was to be able to

In France, no doubt - I think part of what is going on here is a French historiography vs. a Central / North European and Italian one.



Also, as much as a free university appear at the end of the XI century, it is rooted in the church tradition and the scholastics guilds. The knowledge was scholastic and rooted in the christian understanding of the world, as theology was the highest and most valorized degree. What they will become a few centuries latter is quite different.

The original focus of Bologna was on Civil - specifically late Roman law based on the digest and other documents of Roman Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_(Roman_law)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Juris_Civilis#Recovery_in_the_West

This is what the first professors at Bologna were teaching after it was rediscovered

Scholasticism isn't precisely Christian either, it represented a kind of fusion of Christian doctrines with Classical Auctores with the aim of making the latter acceptable for study in the Christian era.

G

[gkathellar]

@Epimethee, can you expand on the matter of Georges Duby's work on the church's involvement with marriage that you mentioned above?

@Gallogliach: The dogs in that bear-hunting image remind me of something the Ainu did, where a specially trained Shiba would leap on the bear's back while a hunter speared it from the front.

[Galloglaich]

I should add though, i do think we are just debating different emphasis of the same facts. And I like the way you write, it has a poetic ring.

G

[Vinyadan]

About Bern and Berlin, the name of the city probably played a role there, when it came to bears.

I wonder if the spread of eagles actually had more to do with Rome and Constantinoples, than with purely Christian symbolism.

The bear being turned into a dancing bear also reminds me of stories of saints like Saint Corbinian, who forced a bear to carry his luggage. This is stuff that occasionally saints were said to do to devils, forcing them into temporary servitude to help them do God's work. Frisings still has that pack bear in its emblem.

[Galloglaich]

About Bern and Berlin, the name of the city probably played a role there, when it came to bears.

I wonder if the spread of eagles actually had more to do with Rome and Constantinoples, than with purely Christian symbolism.


A lot of what we think of as the spread of Christianity was really the spread of Latin (or in the East, Greek) culture to various barbarian tribes. Sometimes voluntarily sometimes by force.

Historians usually refer to medieval Europeans West of the Volga as "Latinized" - you'll see me use that term in here myself. A lot of cultural baggage (and some advantageous cultural "software") was spread that way, and it was also a large part of the basis for the inability for Eastern and Western Churches to unite and for more or less permanent enmity across certain borders like Poland / Russia.

How you measure the actual impact of Christianity is of course subject for deep debate as Epimethee noted. Tribes didn't become peaceful that is for sure, but you can certainly identify many Roman traditions ranging from the military through economic and cultural spectrums.

G

[Deepbluediver]

I'm sure this question has been asked before (maybe we should make an FAQ thread?) but does anyone have any good resources on how long it would take a smith in antiquity (any era) to make weapons and armor? Just rough estimates would be good.

I know from previous discussions that one of the issues historians have with things like production time and cost is that many of the surviving records and examples only refer to the most ornate equipment, because that's what the historians of the day considered important to record. And probably was the most likely to be preserved, instead of being recycled or just straight-up scrapped. It's the same mentality that leads to people putting Ferraris and Mercedes in museums, but not a Honda-Civic.
So while there's at least one account I read of ceremonial dress-armor for a king or prince taking nearly a year to complete, I'm more interested in the stuff a common soldier, sellsword, or low-ranking knight would use.

Anywho, I've seen youtube videos were modern smiths with readied stock, bandsaws, gas-fired forges, and power-hammers can throw something together in a few hours, but does anyone know of attempts using entirely traditional tools that I might be able to watch/read? Or anything similar.
I've heard that classical smiths could sometimes keep suits of armor, particularly maile, in a partially-completed state and then just fit them to the buyer as necessary, but I don't know how if there would be any benefit to try and do something similar with a sword or spear blank.

Anything anyone can contribute to help satisfy my curiosity would be appreciated.

[Galloglaich]

For armor, it wouldn't usually be just one guy making it. It would be a workshop. For one guy to make a whole "suit" of armor ... it would take a while. Months.

Same for swords though it's a bit less involved. You still have a cutler who designs the sword and supervises the whole thing, an ironmonger who provides the steel and / or iron billets (this made in a blast furnace or bloomery forge which would be a fairly large scale operation), a blade maker who forges the blades from the billets, a hilt maker who makes the hilt and scabbard, another smith who specializes in heat-treating the blades, a sharpener and a polisher.

At any one time many blades would be in different stages of production, they were usually done in batches of 20 or 50.

The whole thing could be done for one blade though fairly quickly if you rushed it. I think there are reality TV shows where they make a halfway decent sword in 48 hours or so. More normally it would probably be more like at least 2 weeks.

G

[Saintheart]

1) @Epimethee, that brought back memories, I don't think I've ever seen Franquin comics in English. Who published that? Heavy Metal magazine, perhaps?

2) May I go back to the colour of the sea for a moment?

I believe that the only reason SO MUCH INK has been spilt about that damn "wine-dark sea" is that from the two (2) instances of the word in Homer, one refers to the sea and the other refers to cattle. If it weren't for the damn cattle, if we only had oinops pontos to work with, I'm sure everyone would interpret the phrase "sea that looks like wine" (and not "dark" or "red" or anything) simply as a nice, poetic image that likens one liquid with another. And has absolutely nothing to do with colour, hue, or luminosity. Maybe implying a frothing sea, maybe even an enticing sea, but in the end: it's a liquid, that's all.

It's the damn cattle that mess up this perfectly satisfactory explanation, and the slightly arbitrary assumption that the word must mean the exact same thing in both instances. And since "frothing" or anything liquid-related can't possibly apply to cattle, then surely it must be the colour. (Right?) And then the colour was assumed to be dark (?) or red (???) although it could literally be anything, we have elsewhere descriptions of white wines, black wines, yellow wines, green wines, grey wines, just pick a colour word, it's there - and Hippocrates opined it's a remedy for some ailment or the other.

And from there we got to what colours even mean, for ancient people, for modern people, for different cultures and languages. It's not simple you see, there's an "objective" frequency for every colour in the visible spectrum, and that's a number expressed in Hz, but how people lump them together in categories like "blue" or "green", oh, there's nothing objective about that.

And it's all the cattle's fault. Damn those wine-looking cattle. Damn them to hell.

Here's a proposal, let's stop wondering how the sea could be dark or red, and start wondering how cattle could be liquid. WHY would cattle look like wine? What went through Homer's head? How did the ancient Greeks view cattle? Were they wobbly and wavy in their eyes? Were they frothing? Were they wet? Drenched in sweat perhaps? How about drunk? DID THE CATTLE LOOK WASTED, IS THAT IT??? Now there's some worthy research I'd like to see. :smalltongue:

Cribbing a bit from Guy Deutscher, apparently one of the reasons for this oddity is because the Greeks didn't have the word "blue", and possibly not even a word for the colour. It wasn't genetic colour blindness; it may have simply been cultural colour blindness in the sense that not all cultures identify all colours. Indeed some cultures -- the Piraha, see Daniel Everett -- don't name colours at all, they just use "like a leaf" for green. We do the same for "orange", "cherry", or "peach", but for us these are names of colours; for the Piraha, they are descriptions, and only descriptions, of colours. Deutscher notes that linguistically, blue tends to be the last colour that's identified in a language. Ancient texts (Semitic and Greek alike) had a much smaller vocabulary for colour, and those much more clustered around the concepts of light and darkness.

[Galloglaich]

It's a bit of a cliche I know but the inuit have dozens or hundreds of words for 'white' right? We see all the same shades they do but don't focus on them as much, they are more transitory for us because less precisely defined.

But I think the wine dark sea thing is just about the deepness of the color though. A poetic analogy. I once looked into the North Sea from a ferry and that phrase came right into my head. It's just a certain depth of color you never see close to shore.

[DerKommissar]

It's a bit of a cliche I know but the inuit have dozens or hundreds of words for 'white' right? We see all the same shades they do but don't focus on them as much, they are more transitory for us because less precisely defined.

For most, but not all of us. People who work with colors might know a huge amount of words for e.g. different types of white, possibly far more than the inuit:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_colors

But outside of these professions, there is not much point to it as you said...

[Epimethee]

The word was probaton, I forgot about this one! A reminiscence of the greek letter...

I musst confess first that I will start today ten days of movie festival. I regret nothing but I may not be in the perfect state of mind, after an Indian superhero movie and before an Italian musical comedy about the maffia to go as deep as necessary on the very interesting subjects we are exploring.

So i will clear some little things here, in the hope you could wait a few days for more extended answers. I may come atsome point between two movies to clear my mind but remember I try to blow it for the next ten days! Sorry for the timing!

@gkathellar: gladly, but shortly. I will come back later and it may be rough for now. Please take it accordingly!

You have the families of the nobility. They are concerned by the next generation. As much as mariage are documented, it is usual for the men to have many spouses. Also most mariages take place in the extended family, a circle of allies, friend, and other parents. Those ties are important to keep the political power of a given extended family.
Then you have the church. At first, the church is not so sure about sexuality, even celibacy for the priests was not a given. They decide then for an asceticism were te body is frown upon. So (so short it sound bad) they cannot tolerate the ways of the nobility.

The genius of the church was to insert itself into the political struggles of the powerful to promote this new vision. The way was to use incest. As I said above, the the nobility married in a close circle. As a registry of weddings, the church was able to make genealogical assessment. A lot of union were forbidden or broken because of incest, with a expanded definition that included more and more relatives, even some distant cousin. Of course, the church followed often the political interest of the time, but it became an authority, a necessary player in the power struggle that were the weddings of the nobility.


By this mean the church was able to distill his new vision of wedding. As much as some kings were able to change wives, the difference is really startling for most of the nobility. One of the most visible effect is to deprive a lot of young men of their usual spouses among the close relatives. As mariage were more difficult to arrange, a lot of young men stayed alone, limiting also the possibilities of a fief. This was one of the causes that made the crusades possible, a lot of young men without anything better to do. Also you have one of the roots of the fine Amor, as those unwedded men needed a new ideology to understand their relationship when wedding is less an option.

That's the sketch, I need to read a few pages for dates and characters. And I don't want to give the impression it was some Machiavellian scheme from the church. When discussing ideas, it is easy to characterize them as such, as if there was a conscient will behind each step. That's not the case.

@vinyadan: I need a little time but I should be able to come back with a few things.Notice that the Holy Roman Empire used an eagle, as the czar, so the connection is clear, but I don't know the specifics by hearth here.

@Galloglaich : Glad I don't sound gibberish, honestly. That mean something to me as it is always harder to write in another language. Every word has more weigh so I'm relieved it's not a bad thing and I am grateful of the compliment.

And I really agree about the different emphasis. We are mainly talking about interpretation, about tools and perspectives. In my opinion it is the hardest part, as erudition is only about reading but interpreting is about trying to understand. As as I said repeatedly I think there is no definitive answers to the problems we discuss. As was brilliantly said by Eco: I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events that I happened to observe in my youth, now repeating verbatim all I saw and heard, without venturing to seek a design, as if to leave to those who will come after (if the Antichrist has not come first) signs of signs, so that the prayer of deciphering may be exercised on them.
I love the sound of something like "the prayer of deciphering".


You will feel that I let you down, because I don't think it is the best moment for me to answer all your interesting points.

I disagree strongly with the implication that latin and greek culture were equal to christianity, but that's also up for a long debate.

And I think we could go even deeper on the bear, but it is not the best of time. I will just point out that a vilified beast still retain different meaning even in the same cultural range. Take the case of the spider. As much as it is a vilified beast in occident, it still could be used as a laudative surname, like for Lev Yachin, the Black Spider, goalkeeper of the Russian soccer team a few years ago. So even when the bear was vilified, every use of the beast is not a vilification.

But if you agree I will concentrate on my movies and come back as soon as possible! If you disagree I will in any case do the same!

But I will be glad to come back to you after that long awaited parenthesis!

[Galloglaich]

@Galloglaich : Glad I don't sound gibberish, honestly. That mean something to me as it is always harder to write in another language. Every word has more weigh so I'm relieved it's not a bad thing and I am grateful of the compliment.

So... French?



I love the sound of something like "the prayer of deciphering".

Umberto Eco is one of a very, very short list of modern authors who I believe has some genuine insight into the Medieval World, albeit for him specifically just the Italian part for the most part. Italy was at it's zenith then and (as I have argued) near the pinnacle of cultural and economic influence in Europe in the High- to Late Medieval periods so it's a good place to start. Name of the Rose is an excellent book, Baudolino also if somewhat less accessible.

And a poetic author, so much so that it sounds good even after translation into English.



You will feel that I let you down, because I don't think it is the best moment for me to answer all your interesting points.

I understand completely - this happens to me often as well (usually big arguments or interesting discussions start up right when I'm going on a work trip). Enjoy your films, I will only briefly comment to give you something to mull over for your triumphant return.



I disagree strongly with the implication that latin and greek culture were equal to christianity, but that's also up for a long debate.

I'm not arguing that they are equal, I think they are distinct for sure, but I was saying that what gets labeled as Christianity is often really just Latin or Greek culture, and that these cultural systems - the laws for example, but also less tangible mores and traditions, are as important as Christianity in the development of medieval culture.

Certainly the dividing line between the Greek influenced zone (Russian alphabet being essentially Greek for example) and the Latin is one of the stronger themes of medieval life in Europe.



And I think we could go even deeper on the bear, but it is not the best of time. I will just point out that a vilified beast still retain different meaning even in the same cultural range. Take the case of the spider. As much as it is a vilified beast in occident, it still could be used as a laudative surname, like for Lev Yachin, the Black Spider, goalkeeper of the Russian soccer team a few years ago. So even when the bear was vilified, every use of the beast is not a vilification.

I just don't think you could say what was vilified in one place was so in another in the medieval context. The various estates (burghers, clergy, University students, gentry, knights, princes), the hundreds of great families, the numerous cultural-religious milieux (Greek vs. Latin are just two of the bigger ones - but you could also distinguish quite clearly between Tyrolian and Bavarian say, or between Alsatian and Provencal, Occitian and Burgundian, Estonian and Latvian, Croat and Serb and so on), all had their own ideas of what was good and bad, what was fashionable and what was dull.

I think this is one of the biggest barriers to understanding the medieval world - we always tend to identify one theme which we can point to in one place, say Paris or London, and project it across Europe in space and across many centuries in time. I'm not immune to this of course, but I focus on what I think are actually the most influential and salient regions that are paradoxically the least represented in the popular historiography and Tropes. Italy, Flanders, Rhineland, South-Germany, Hanseatic etc.

But I shouldn't project either. France was France - in fact France was dozens of distinct provinces under the growing (cultural and political) influence of an increasingly powerful Monarchy. Italy was 100 city states, Flanders was 50 City States under a crafty Duke, Central Europe was 200 small Free Cities with 500 principalities and 7 Great Families Electors. They all had their own ideas, their own legends.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Mitteleuropa_zur_Zeit_der_Staufer.svg/369px-Mitteleuropa_zur_Zeit_der_Staufer.svg.png
What I'm saying is I think it's very fraught to lump all this together into one thing.

Each of these tiny polities also had a very uneven and variegated level of indoctrination into Christianity and in many cases, their own regional variants of it, as well as varying degrees of Latin (or sometimes Greek) cultural influence, and new cultural innovations which were happening at a very rapid pace particularly in the most dynamic regions. This is precisely what happened in the Lange D'Oc in Southern France, their rapid local cultural growth had crossed over into 'editing' their own regional version of Christianity (at least among a relatively small if influential minority of people) and the Church reached a breaking point where they could no longer tolerate that, thus leading to the destruction of that region.

In other places however they weren't so successful - Bohemia defied them successfully and after the 1420's the Church had very little influence there.

The Church wasn't going to lead an inquisition into Switzerland to revise their practices and say, ban them from dressing up in Krampus costumes on 12th Night / Winter Solstace were they? Who would lead the army there to do it?

In many places, cultural homogeneity was not the rule, quite to the contrary. The Church tried to manage it as best they could, but it was not as effective as people tend to think, in fact by the later part of the middle ages it was starting to unravel. The Reformation didn't come out of nowhere.


G

[snowblizz]

It's a bit of a cliche I know but the inuit have dozens or hundreds of words for 'white' right? We see all the same shades they do but don't focus on them as much, they are more transitory for us because less precisely defined.
That's most likely not true at all. Not in the least as Iniut (the language) doens't have "words2 per se.

Usually it's "X words for snow" and that "saying" has been debunked for decades.

[Storm Bringer]

That's most likely not true at all. Not in the least as Iniut (the language) doens't have "words2 per se.

Usually it's "X words for snow" and that "saying" has been debunked for decades.

It kinda does, but kinda doesn't.

Several of the Iniut languages (there are many related languages) are additive, in the sense that modifier words in English are added to the base word as prefixes or suffixes. So for example "wet snow", or "deep snow" would be rendered as "wetsnow" or "snowdeep" or some such.


ergo, they have only a few words for "snow", but you can create a great number of single words that describe different types of snow.



however, its been proven in tests that people who work in colour related occupations have a much greater ability to distinguish. identify and remember shades of colour than the "average" population. the test I heard about involved showing the subjects three colours (such as a red and two different shades of grey), then asking them sometime later what colours they were shown. Most people could remember the non-similar colour, but couldn't remember much about the two similar shades (they'd remember they were shades of grey, but couldn't say if shade 2 was brighter or darker then shade 3, for example). However, people like graphic designers, interior decorators and such. who worked with lots of colours, were much better at getting the shades correct. Also, while "Normal" people would say they saw "a red and two greys", those that worked with colours tended to give answers like "Garnet Red, Slate Grey and Pewter Grey".

[ExLibrisMortis]

That's most likely not true at all. Not in the least as Iniut (the language) doens't have "words2 per se.

Usually it's "X words for snow" and that "saying" has been debunked for decades.
The various Inuit languages tend to be agglutinative, meaning they (can) add a lot of morphemes (non-basic/indepenent unit of meaning) onto a lexeme (basic/independent unit of meaning) to express things that English would use multiple words for. That doesn't mean they don't have words, though.

As for having a hundred words for snow: that depends on how metaphorical you're allowed to get, as it does for every language.

[Deepbluediver]

For armor, it wouldn't usually be just one guy making it. It would be a workshop. For one guy to make a whole "suit" of armor ... it would take a while. Months.

Same for swords though it's a bit less involved. You still have a cutler who designs the sword and supervises the whole thing, an ironmonger who provides the steel and / or iron billets (this made in a blast furnace or bloomery forge which would be a fairly large scale operation), a blade maker who forges the blades from the billets, a hilt maker who makes the hilt and scabbard, another smith who specializes in heat-treating the blades, a sharpener and a polisher.

At any one time many blades would be in different stages of production, they were usually done in batches of 20 or 50.

The whole thing could be done for one blade though fairly quickly if you rushed it. I think there are reality TV shows where they make a halfway decent sword in 48 hours or so. More normally it would probably be more like at least 2 weeks.
That's very useful, thank you. Most TV shows, movies, cartoons, etc, show a single blacksmith (occasionally with an apprentice) working alone in his shop. It sounds like that's the equivalent of one guy assembling Ford pickup-trucks in his garage. So it's not exactly impossible, but historically inaccurate.

[snowblizz]

As for having a hundred words for snow: that depends on how metaphorical you're allowed to get, as it does for every language.
Which they absolutely do not. Proven by linguists, there are 4 (though if it was Inuit or another one I can't recall). The idea about the "X amounts of words" is totally bogus.

And when 1 "word" is an entire sentence (say your entire quoted reply in one "word") of sounds they don't exactly have "words" in a way to compare it to English words. Because you can't compare words like that in any langauge for it to have any meaning.

I've read a linguist taking that idea to absurdum in comparing Swedish and English to prove just about anything, because Swedish has loads of suffixes (compared to English). I belive it was "X is more complex than Y because it has more words" that was the question being answered.



ergo, they have only a few words for "snow", but you can create a great number of single words that describe different types of snow.

however, its been proven in tests that people who work in colour related occupations have a much greater ability to distinguish. identify and remember shades of colour than the "average" population. the test I heard about involved showing the subjects three colours (such as a red and two different shades of grey), then asking them sometime later what colours they were shown. Most people could remember the non-similar colour, but couldn't remember much about the two similar shades (they'd remember they were shades of grey, but couldn't say if shade 2 was brighter or darker then shade 3, for example). However, people like graphic designers, interior decorators and such. who worked with lots of colours, were much better at getting the shades correct. Also, while "Normal" people would say they saw "a red and two greys", those that worked with colours tended to give answers like "Garnet Red, Slate Grey and Pewter Grey".
Uh-huh. And I describe purples as Imperial Purple, Warlock Purple, Regal Blue etc becasue that's was the name of the paints I used to paint minaiture soldiers. Nor does it have much meaning to differentiate between a dozen different purple shades. Which is entirely besides the point that I can't find any basis for the "they know X colours" other than that it sounds awfully similar to the exact same claim about snow that has no basis in facts.

None of this actuially is germain to my main point was that the posited claim seems to be entirely made up (and rendered almost exaclty like a similar false aphorism. And circles back into how difficult it is to make guesses based on words without the context.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Which they absolutely do not. Proven by linguists, there are 4 (though if it was Inuit or another one I can't recall). The idea about the "X amounts of words" is totally bogus.
I think you're confusing lexemes and words. In an agglutinative language, there are many, many words built up around a core lexeme. It's quite possible that one particular Inuit language has four lexemes meaning "snow", just like it's quite possible that there are a hundred words meaning "snow", that in English would be rendered as multi-word phrases. I doubt, however, that there's exactly four words for "snow" in every Inuit language (or dialect, as you prefer).


And when 1 "word" is an entire sentence (say your entire quoted reply in one "word") of sounds they don't exactly have "words" in a way to compare it to English words. Because you can't compare words like that in any langauge for it to have any meaning.
Inuit has words and they do compare to English words. They are not the same in all respects, but they can be identified using the same basic tests. Your intuitive use of "word" as being a "short" unit is not the linguistic notion of "word".


Edit: I agree that the claim that Inuit languages have hundreds of words for snow is uninformative and pointlessly vague, but I don't think your criticism shows why, hence my elaboration.

[Vinyadan]

About the Rome/Greece vs Christianity thing, it still is an open debate. That famous speech held in Regensburg in 2006 did hold a good summary of the problem, with many points of view. There is little doubt that the church took up a lot of material from Classical Culture. Augustine also talked about how this was necessary, that it might have been a pagan culture, but it gave instruments that could be used by the new faith, too. Just to make an example, allegorical interpretation was an invention of scholars of Homer.

Galloglaich probably is talking about more practical things. Like the expansion of bureaucracy, the writing of letters, or certain models of teaching in schools. The Church, in this, doubtlessly became the cultural link between the late Western Empire and areas that had never been submitted to it. The use and spread of Latin is the most egregious signal.

[Kiero]

But then you had the Laws of Justinian, which outlawed all sorts of "pagan" elements of Greek culture, like panktration and athletics in general.

[Galloglaich]

That's very useful, thank you. Most TV shows, movies, cartoons, etc, show a single blacksmith (occasionally with an apprentice) working alone in his shop. It sounds like that's the equivalent of one guy assembling Ford pickup-trucks in his garage. So it's not exactly impossible, but historically inaccurate.

Yes that is a very good way to put it. A lot of metalwork was basically done in workshops powered by watermills with a variety of large tools like mechanical triphammers and automatic bellows and so on.

You don't make a suit of armor outside over a campfire with your shirt off.

This video should give you some idea. He gets the trip hammer going at about 02:15. You need something like that to make armor and swords efficiently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M24nZbhKkdU

G

[Galloglaich]

But then you had the Laws of Justinian, which outlawed all sorts of "pagan" elements of Greek culture, like panktration and athletics in general.

They could kind of take what they wanted from Roman Law (including specifically Justinians Laws like the Digest) and it would have the weight of Authority based on previous Church precedent. I.e. the Church approved this or that Auctore or type of law as sufficiently Holy so princes would then use that to justify using it.

Princes in particular liked Roman Laws that codified the powers of lords, landowners, and princes as being just and righteous. Like laws saying that you needed to pay them rent and taxes.

Burghers looked for other things like essays on civic virtue and civil law related to the rights of towns, which they used to incorporate into their Handfeste

For example around ~1250 the city fathers of Berne apparently conspired with the Cistercian Friars of Friensberg Abbey to add legal statutes to a 1218 document which were derived from Justinian law thus creating a falsified document declaring their (extremely extensive) Town Rights as a Free City.

This (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handfeste&prev=search) is an auto-translation of a German wikipedia page on it.

The Church even had a term for this kind of 'document hacking' - Pia Fraus "Pious Deception"

G

[Epimethee]

So... French?

Not at all!





I understand completely - this happens to me often as well (usually big arguments or interesting discussions start up right when I'm going on a work trip). Enjoy your films, I will only briefly comment to give you something to mull over for your triumphant return.

As you can see, I had to respond!




I'm not arguing that they are equal, I think they are distinct for sure, but I was saying that what gets labeled as Christianity is often really just Latin or Greek culture, and that these cultural systems - the laws for example, but also less tangible mores and traditions, are as important as Christianity in the development of medieval culture.


I think the specificity of medieval culture was to operate a synthesis between the huge streams that are the Antiquities and christianity and others even less tangible, like germanic laws, Celtic mythology and so on. That's really apparent in the roman like the famous books of Chretien de Troyes promoted by Marie de France (euh... roman is the name of the post latine language in France, then the name of the literature that followed the chanson de geste, then the French for novel... here, I mean the second). You have like different seams woven together to address the specific of the time. So you can read this kind of book as a way to adapt the christian ideal to the warriors, as a book of rules for the court, as a rewriting of older tales... Each proposition give you different options but each is only a part of the synthesis. It' not that they labeled something this or that, they adapted different sources in a new frame and that's were I think we can speak of a distinct medieval culture or civilisation.



Certainly the dividing line between the Greek influenced zone (Russian alphabet being essentially Greek for example) and the Latin is one of the stronger themes of medieval life in Europe.


Quite right that! Medieval should perhaps only count as a notion of time for the orthodox part of the world, as much as for China.



I just don't think you could say what was vilified in one place was so in another in the medieval context. The various estates (burghers, clergy, University students, gentry, knights, princes), the hundreds of great families, the numerous cultural-religious milieux (Greek vs. Latin are just two of the bigger ones - but you could also distinguish quite clearly between Tyrolian and Bavarian say, or between Alsatian and Provencal, Occitian and Burgundian, Estonian and Latvian, Croat and Serb and so on), all had their own ideas of what was good and bad, what was fashionable and what was dull.

Yes and no... You have a material culture, that's not the same as a political identity, again not the same as cultural representations, not the same as literature and son on... Attesting similarities in one domain does not mean that all is equal... And were you trace the limit define subject matter. For example The US and China share a material culture: we wear the same shoes. But I can obviously speak of China and America as different entities. And then in China like in America Beijing is not Nanjing as much as Atlanta is not Philadelphia, I can go on and on, till the street corner, different from the next street corner (and yes, an anthropologist made a book about this specific culture...)
In my opinion the least common denominator of the medieval culture was christianity. We can choose to discuss the specifics of some place or to look how some phenomenon were more generally adopted.

And in medieval time, political limits were really less relevant than today. A political map is certainly interesting but tell only part of the story.




Each of these tiny polities also had a very uneven and variegated level of indoctrination into Christianity and in many cases, their own regional variants of it, as well as varying degrees of Latin (or sometimes Greek) cultural influence, and new cultural innovations which were happening at a very rapid pace particularly in the most dynamic regions. This is precisely what happened in the Lange D'Oc in Southern France, their rapid local cultural growth had crossed over into 'editing' their own regional version of Christianity (at least among a relatively small if influential minority of people) and the Church reached a breaking point where they could no longer tolerate that, thus leading to the destruction of that region.

In other places however they weren't so successful - Bohemia defied them successfully and after the 1420's the Church had very little influence there.

Here I should point out that christianity, the church and the Orthodox Church are in my opinion different things. The power of the church and the level of indoctrination are certainly a thing worth discussing, but again, in the context of christianity, not defining it. I talked to you before of the Six Ages of The World. The copy I'm familiar with is from the bookstore of a bishop of a mountainous region. The surviving ceiling of his son's house is painted with scenes inspired from the book (albeit made a bit latter, in 1505). Like this book, cultural productions and materials artifacts bear testimony of common phenomenons across continental Europe around something that call itself christianity. As much as I think it is illuminating to know the specifics of each time and places, some phenomenon have a wider reach.




The Church wasn't going to lead an inquisition into Switzerland to revise their practices and say, ban them from dressing up in Krampus costumes on 12th Night / Winter Solstace were they? Who would lead the army there to do it?


In fact the inquisition in the diocese of Lauanne is really well documented. As soon as 1430 we have the first trial for witchcraft (mainly men and described as heretics and sorcerers but still...). The diocese included a part of the Swiss alps were the same phenomenon are fairly well documented.
Lausanne was also the place of famous animal trials by the way.
And the Higher Rhone valley was an independent diocese. The duke of Savoy was all too happy to send his army there.

I have a few interesting ethnological works on the region, albeit for more modern time obviously. Not only did they show even remote places as populated by peoples with political motivations connected to the rest of Europe, they also paint a dynamic around popular practices were the church is not exactly an opposing force. Also interestingly, I have the field work of an anthropologist on a little town in the mountain. She was on the place for more than 60 years. Interestingly, after a time, the local people were referring to her when they discussed the folklore of their town, as if the observer became the authority.
I know we are away from medieval time but those little factoids are like warning about the dynamics of popular culture.



In many places, cultural homogeneity was not the rule, quite to the contrary. The Church tried to manage it as best they could, but it was not as effective as people tend to think, in fact by the later part of the middle ages it was starting to unravel. The Reformation didn't come out of nowhere.


Yes, but by trying the church shaped the time period. And again, I stress the difference between church and Christianity. The Reformation prove the triumph and integration of christian ideology even among the general population.



About the Rome/Greece vs Christianity thing, it still is an open debate. That famous speech held in Regensburg in 2006 did hold a good summary of the problem, with many points of view. There is little doubt that the church took up a lot of material from Classical Culture. Augustine also talked about how this was necessary, that it might have been a pagan culture, but it gave instruments that could be used by the new faith, too. Just to make an example, allegorical interpretation was an invention of scholars of Homer.


I like the way they used Ovide. But I mainly agree with you here


probably is talking about more practical things. Like the expansion of bureaucracy, the writing of letters, or certain models of teaching in schools. The Church, in this, doubtlessly became the cultural link between the late Western Empire and areas that had never been submitted to it. The use and spread of Latin is the most egregious signal.

Again, I think you are quite right on every count. Thank you for that!


But then you had the Laws of Justinian, which outlawed all sorts of "pagan" elements of Greek culture, like panktration and athletics in general.


One of the trace that I never really followed was the relative decline of the use of flowers in early medieval time. As valorized as antiquities were, it is again not a univocal phenomenon and some practices were explicitly frown upon.

Yeah... I should have taken twice as much days of vacation... To remember for next year... And I didn't see the last comment... next time... no more time today till really late...

[Vinyadan]

But then you had the Laws of Justinian, which outlawed all sorts of "pagan" elements of Greek culture, like panktration and athletics in general.

This is why I talk about a debate: a debate often between various factions in the church(es). Their religion had been born by Jews, but had almost immediately absorbed Hellenistic cultural traits. As a result, there was (is) a constant conflict between the Jewish and the Hellenised traits. Add to this the new elements, which meant that even the proponents of e.g. Jewish traits had to account for the fact that they weren't Jews themselves. Those who wanted to exclude one side could not just say "we simply are the other side, as is".

So there is a lot of back-and-forth between two irreconcilable worldviews, for example when it comes to iconism and iconoclasty. Or you have Marcionism.

Anyway, the point is that they knew that they could pick up from Hellenism, but not from paganism, which was an important part of Hellenism. So they had to draw a lot of lines, which tended to move around a bit. Thinking of Justinian, closing down the Academy probably was a big deal. It's also true that paganism didn't fade away quietly. Iirc, it was actually on the rise in V century Asia Minor. Interestingly, however, Justinian also forbade the destruction of pagan temples, which runs counter to the examples of hagiography, but made a lot of practical sense.

At the same time, you have II century Christian apologist Justin trying to explain himself by saying "you know, it's kinda like in this pagan myth, where x thing happens".

Just think about this: until recently, the clergy was forbidden from joining into any celebration of holidays outside the divine service. This is because they were aware of the many pagan rituals that had survived by association with the new holidays. So they didn't go as far as forbidding them to the populace, but they refused to legitimise them by joining in.

Lots of blurred lines, adoptions, absorption, rejection...

[Zombimode]

Ignoring construction, what are the differences between bronze weapons and "iron" weapons. If the timeframe is important, lets say arround 300 BC, hellenistic culture.

Would a bronze Kopis or Xiphos be functional different then the same weapon made from "iron"?

[Kiero]

Ignoring construction, what are the differences between bronze weapons and "iron" weapons. If the timeframe is important, lets say arround 300 BC, hellenistic culture.

Would a bronze Kopis or Xiphos be functional different then the same weapon made from "iron"?

Iron is cheaper (because iron ore is common, as is coal/charcoal to heat it), though probably doesn't hold an edge as well.

Bronze is about 10% denser by volume, so slightly heavier. Given the sophistication of bronzework at that time, compared to ironwork, it's probably the better quality weapon.

If you were outfitting an army, you'd go for mass-produced iron weapons. If you were outfitting your personal panoply, you'd go for bronze.

[Martin Greywolf]

If you want to really get into the christianity and pagan influences, you have to remember that there was this place called Constantinople and that there are, in fact, places east of Vienna. Okay, a bit condescending sentence there, but Anglosphere has a bad tendency to forget about eastern half of Europe, let alone Asia.

In this context, this is pretty crucial. Not only do you have places like Great Moravia, Hungary, Poland and so on there, there are other areas where islam and christianity were coexisting more or less peacefully. The most prominent was probably Khwarezmian empire, but Hungary was no slouch either (jews and muslims held even very high royal offices, usually economical in focus). Before the rise of Islam, you also need to include north Africa in this - and also after this, of sorts, what with Iberian peninsula.

An interesting thing to look into are Constantine and Metod, two monks from Constantinople who were invited to Rome and managed to make Slavic language a liturgic one for a time - and also were on missions to the Khwarezmians, they had a pretty interesting life. Their power struggles with East Frank missionaries are pretty well documented. What this shows is that Rome and Constantinople at this time were both kinda-sorta thinking about cancelling the schism thing and weren't as fractured as people tend to think.

What is also interesting are actual practices of priests in these new areas and how the popes saw them - there were several missions to Hungary to teach the priests how to priest properly and stop them from marrying, gosh dang it. Add to that that there was significant debate over who picks a bishop, king or pope, and there was a lot of uncertainity, conflict and shady practices, and locals often just ignored all that noise and did what they wanted. Last plausible evidence of ritual cannibalism in Europe are from, IIRC 17th century Hungary (present day Slovakia), and those bones with eaten marrow probably weren't meant to be the Body of Christ.

There is some truth to generalizing the France - Germany - Italy area into one, though. They were all part of Charlemagne's empire, and a lot of their similarities and practical applications of christianity come from that, and since France and HRE were the superpowers of their age, they influenced a lot of satellite kingdoms. Remember struggle between Constantinople and Eastern Francia between who will have the dominant influence over christianity in Hungary? So, while we can talk in some generalization about the Charlemagne's legacy kingdoms, this same generalization doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of christian Europe, christian Africa or christian Asia.

For a nice place to start looking into this, I suggest Zákon sudnyj ljudem (Judicial law for common people) - it's based in Byzantine laws (specifically the Ekologa), but apparently served as more of an addition to already existing judicial practices, and focuses more on the topics that christianity wanted to regulate. I'd also suggest Regestum Varadiense (actual records of trials), but I have yet to see that one available to public anywere.

[HeadlessMermaid]

Constantine and Metod, two monks from Constantinople
Cyril and Methodius?

[Deepbluediver]

Iron is cheaper (because iron ore is common, as is coal/charcoal to heat it), though probably doesn't hold an edge as well.

Bronze is about 10% denser by volume, so slightly heavier. Given the sophistication of bronzework at that time, compared to ironwork, it's probably the better quality weapon.

If you were outfitting an army, you'd go for mass-produced iron weapons. If you were outfitting your personal panoply, you'd go for bronze.
To add to this, from everything I've read you can't cast iron weapons- they just end up to brittle (or swords do at least, maybe a spear would still be functional). This means you have to forge them individually, and if they break you have to re-purify then re-carbonize the iron to make low-quality steal again. With bronze, you can just melt the chunks down and pour it back into the mold over and over again, with no loss in structural integrity.

[Galloglaich]

The thing about the religion, which I know we have to tread carefully about, is simply in how you define it.

Today, anyone can call themselves a Christian or a member of any religion and it's accepted. In the Medieval world, at least after Charlemagne's campaign against the Saxons, it's true that most people in Europe accepted Baptism. But that was not sufficient to be called a Christian in the eyes of the Church in Rome.

Actual instruction in religious canon and enforced adherence to religious codes of behavior, from the paying of tithes etc. to the conduct of holy days to minutae like how weddings were conducted, took place very unevenly across Europe. Many, many wars were fought in attempts to enforce a more uniform and acceptable adherence to Church orthodoxy. The Church heavily used their greatest weapon, the "ban hammer" of interdiction and excommunication in order to get people in line, but they overused it and gradually the impact of it wore off. Locals adapted to the inconvenience and found other ways to sanctify births, marriages and deaths.

This was especially exacerbated during the so-called "Babylonian Captivity" when there were two and even three rival Popes, each of whom excommunicated the followers of the other.

There were three main problems for the Church.


Church leaders mixed the push to enforce official doctrine with their own personal (family, financial, or power) interests, often rather blatantly. This started to assume labels like Simony, the selling of Indulgences and of course, blatant military exercise of naked force by Bishops and Archbishops and so on.

Church doctrine on the finer points of things like marriage, priests celibacy, the prerogatives of prelates or rules for women had more to do with local Italian customs (or perhaps you could say, Latin culture) than they did to actual Christian religion. These kinds of customs were often the ones most hotly resented by locals.

and locals often had sufficient political and military power to resist Church pressure.


The Church attempted to enter Frisia for example on 10 different occasions between 1100- 1500 and were rebuffed every time. The only religious Order the locals would tolerate was the Franciscans.

Activity within Swiss Confederation territory (as distinct from "Switzerland" alluded to upthread), was entirely contingent on public opinion. If the locals didn't agree someone should be prosecuted, it wasn't going to happen.

And in Bohemia of course, the attempted Church crackdown and Crusade was catastrophically annihilated. The initial plan was to send an inquisitor to 'correct' local practices, the Bohemian nobles signed a famous letter warning the Vatican not to try it, and that is what led to the Crusade.

In Lithuania they got a much better deal, including freedom from harassment (or financial depradation) from foreign Priests or prelates.

All kinds of 'heresies' from numerous variations of Gnosticism such as seen among the Albigensians of Lange D'oc, or the English Wycliffite heresy adopted by the Hussites, were found all over Europe and the Church was playing an increasingly unsuccessful game of "whack a mole" to try to suppress them, sometimes through wars and Crusades, sometimes through inquisitions, sometimes through compromises with political agencies.

In addition, latent heathenism or paganism (which was generally not considered heresy unless it was used to create some new variant of Christianity) prevailed in much of the countryside and in many towns.

Even among the Religious, the monks, friars and nuns who lived in cloistered communities, the Church was struggling to control sexual scandals and outbreaks of heresy and other questionable practices. The practice of alchemy and black magic was considered widespread in certain religious orders.

My point is that the degree of the conformity to what Rome considered appropriate religious practice was very spotty to say the least in later medieval Europe. And this in fact is what directly led to a large number of the more significant wars.


By the way I think it is disingenuous to suggest that "Christian and Muslim lived in harmony" anywhere in Europe, but it's true that Poland developed a fairly strict religious tolerance law after their family union / merger with Lithuania. This was done at the insistence of the Lithuanians precisely because they did not want foreign prelates to be imposed upon them nor would they accept inquisitors or Dominicans to come among them and verify that they were practicing their religion in accordance with doctrine and canon law. To be sure, they in fact were not.


There were some 'friendly' Muslims settled in Lithuania and later Poland who were allowed to practice their faith in peace so long as they remained loyal to the Kingdom / Duchy, but the general relationship to Muslim polities ranged from a very wary truce, to skirmishing and raids, to outright full scale war more or less continuously.

When it comes to individual regions, everybody in Europe tends to think their land was unique and all the others fit the cliche. But in this period the unique and particular local variation was in fact the general pattern.


G

[gkathellar]

To add to this, from everything I've read you can't cast iron weapons- they just end up to brittle (or swords do at least, maybe a spear would still be functional). This means you have to forge them individually, and if they break you have to re-purify then re-carbonize the iron to make low-quality steal again. With bronze, you can just melt the chunks down and poor it back into the mold over and over again, with no loss in structural integrity.

Mostly yes, with the proviso that homogeneous composition is not actually desirable in most weapons. A bronze sword cast in a mold is not the equal of something assembled with the metallurgy of different parts in mind.

And even then, individual forged iron is still going to be cheaper in most cases.

[Galloglaich]

As far as I know 'pure' wrought iron swords were pretty rare, they usually had some 'steely iron' in the edges.

G

[The Jack]

To what extent can PMCs get a hold of military vehicles/military robots (UAVs in particular) I understand one can purchase old fighter planes after they've been de-militarized, and simple military vehicles are often used, but what could a private military company do? Assuming they're strong financially and have ties to companies that can actually make the military stuff.

[Mr Beer]

To what extent can PMCs get a hold of military vehicles/military robots (UAVs in particular) I understand one can purchase old fighter planes after they've been de-militarized, and simple military vehicles are often used, but what could a private military company do? Assuming they're strong financially and have ties to companies that can actually make the military stuff.

No idea but I imagine this depends a lot on where they can take delivery. If you want operational tanks delivered to say France, I imagine it's more difficult to arrange purchase than if you can operate out of Djibouti.

[Storm Bringer]

To what extent can PMCs get a hold of military vehicles/military robots (UAVs in particular) I understand one can purchase old fighter planes after they've been de-militarized, and simple military vehicles are often used, but what could a private military company do? Assuming they're strong financially and have ties to companies that can actually make the military stuff.


mostly, they can get hold of things like MRAPs and other light/medium armoured wheeled vehicles, but anything "front line" is off limits. they could get a MRAP, for example, but not a Bradley, or even a M113 APC. their is just no need for them to have that sort of kit. tanks are out of the question, at least for a "real world" PMC.


UAV's are a tricky question. theirs no reason they couldn't operate light scouting drones of some sort, but I have never heard of them doing so as thats the sort of investment that gets complex and hard to justify to shareholders when you can piggy back off the military and use its kit.



the key thing is to understand what PMCs actually do mostly, which is sub out for army soldiers in bodyguarding or logistics duties. these are jobs with (relatively) low risk, good pay and avoid any potentially nasty legal arguments about rules of engagement (since they would only be shooting in self defence). Its cheaper for the Military to use a PMC and its own troops for these jobs, so thats where they get used. assaulting sites, storming building and such need are much more dangerous jobs that are more likely to get PMC operators killed (and unlike governments, PMC are not immune to prosecution), so the PMCs are loath to take these jobs.

[The Jack]

mostly, they can get hold of things like MRAPs and other light/medium armoured wheeled vehicles, but anything "front line" is off limits. they could get a MRAP, for example, but not a Bradley, or even a M113 APC. their is just no need for them to have that sort of kit. tanks are out of the question, at least for a "real world" PMC.


UAV's are a tricky question. theirs no reason they couldn't operate light scouting drones of some sort, but I have never heard of them doing so as thats the sort of investment that gets complex and hard to justify to shareholders when you can piggy back off the military and use its kit.


Is that because of laws or expenses? A PMC, well connected to big businesses, is trying to eradicate shape changers (in secret) They sometimes operate in banana republics, warzones and other places where they can put money in pockets, and wish they could do the same in europe and northern America.

I was thinking something like a predator drone would be a nice way to deliver sizable explosive payloads, I mean, I could just have some military planes from the 50's or retrofitted civies drop explosives, but that isn't as cool and probably raises it's own questions. I want to modernize a force, but they need to be able to get away with this stuff. It's difficult to hide a plane.

[snowblizz]

Is that because of laws or expenses?

Laws. And more correctly the ability and willingness of a state to enforce it's monopoly on violence.

Expense is a relative term after all.

Just watch Lord of War and realise they are probably not exaggerating too much.

The problem is that working in any reasonably coherent state means you are 1) outgunned and 2) dealing with some very unhappy people when rolling intoa town with your private tanks.

[Telok]

I I mean, I could just have some military planes from the 50's or retrofitted civies drop explosives, but that isn't as cool and probably raises it's own questions. I want to modernize a force, but they need to be able to get away with this stuff. It's difficult to hide a plane.

Oddly enough a Cessna can carry a fairly decent load of boom, and they’re common enough that even moving four or five into an area wouldn't raise alarm. Although he wing mounts might raise eyebrows by people with enough experience.

http://airportjournals.com/overlooked-workhorses-of-the-vietnam-air-war/

https://www.planespotters.net/photo/517633/n590d-private-cessna-o-2-a-skymaster

http://www.combatreform.org/RLIfireforce.htm (About half way down the page)

Edit: Geeze, sometimes I'm blind. Last link is Lynx, which look a lot like the Cessna Airmansters.

[Tyg3rW01f]

No idea where I saw it figured out, but what would be the dmg type of a Klingon Bat’leth from Star Trek TNG as well as feat and stat requirements for effective use? Also, as the bat’leth can be used defensively, what would the AC bonus (if any) be?

[Storm Bringer]

Is that because of laws or expenses? A PMC, well connected to big businesses, is trying to eradicate shape changers (in secret) They sometimes operate in banana republics, warzones and other places where they can put money in pockets, and wish they could do the same in europe and northern America.

I was thinking something like a predator drone would be a nice way to deliver sizable explosive payloads, I mean, I could just have some military planes from the 50's or retrofitted civies drop explosives, but that isn't as cool and probably raises it's own questions. I want to modernize a force, but they need to be able to get away with this stuff. It's difficult to hide a plane.

both.

the situation your describing is rather unlike the actual real world uses and roles for a PMC, so its hard to make exact comparisons.

very few governments are comfortable with the idea of a PMC that has access to "warfighting" capability, because they mostly don't trust something as mercenary as well, actual mercenaries. Most countries would treat a PMC with that level of firepower as a invading army and react appropriately. Many would also consider the PMC to be part of the military of whatever country the PMC was based in, and complain to that government about the actions of its citizens.

added to that, armoured vehicles are extremely expensive to buy, maintain and operate, requiring specialised technical and mechanical support personnel, large stocks of hard to acquire spares, and large amounts of transport assets (http://www.royallogisticcorps.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Tk-Tptr.jpg) just to get to the start line.


Also, what are they fighting that needs a tank to kill? unless the shapeshifters have control of the local military, they wont have anything that requires a tank or pred drone to deal with.


if your looking for air support, a helicopter is a much better option. it can operate out of many more locations, can be ultilised for transport or extraction missions, and is much less conspicuous and very easy to justify acquiring. think something like a Puma, with door gun or maybe rocket pods (http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/apache-helicopter-45.jpg)

[Mr Beer]

No idea where I saw it figured out, but what would be the dmg type of a Klingon Bat’leth from Star Trek TNG as well as feat and stat requirements for effective use? Also, as the bat’leth can be used defensively, what would the AC bonus (if any) be?

It looks like a badly designed club/knife combo. I would let someone use it as either weapon, with a -1 to hit. AC bonus would not be happening.

edit

If you want it to have some Rule of Cool bonuses rather than be realistic though, do what you like. Maybe damage like a bastard sword, +1 AC and make some kind of Feat available to top it off.

[Knaight]

No idea where I saw it figured out, but what would be the dmg type of a Klingon Bat’leth from Star Trek TNG as well as feat and stat requirements for effective use? Also, as the bat’leth can be used defensively, what would the AC bonus (if any) be?

Bolding mine.

You can only get one of these things - the bat'leth is a terrible weapon. As for being usable defensively, so are the vast majority of melee weapons, almost all of them much more so than the bat'leth. This isn't a thread for specific mechanics, but if those get a +0 AC bonus and simulating the AC benefit is helpful the bat'leth should probably get a penalty.

[The Jack]

both.

the situation your describing is rather unlike the actual real world uses and roles for a PMC, so its hard to make exact comparisons.

Also, what are they fighting that needs a tank to kill? unless the shapeshifters have control of the local military, they wont have anything that requires a tank or pred drone to deal with.


Well, it's Werewolf: the apocalypse. Changers are pretty hard to kill. Silver bullets are good if you can actually hit anything, but all the changers are cunning bastards and you'll likely never see them coming. Fight just one them in the jungle and it'll look like Predator, fight them in a facility and you'll lose at least half of it. Plus, their true forms inflict the delirium, supernatural crippling fear of them,

Wolves and co need to be wiped out is because they're terrible for business; They're terrorists. Almost all of these changers see themselves as warriors of mother earth, defenders of the green and blue planet, destroyers of demons and so on. They're mass-murdering eco terrorists that attack many multinationals, so pooling together resources and organizing PMCs to kill off the bastards would save billions in the long run. (The PMCs also do regular jobs for all the reasons regular PMCs do. Protecting a VIP doesn't require the threat of werewolf assassination, money'll do).

Amongst other weaknesses, the beasts draw their power from, and fiercely protect, places of spiritual strength. They need these places for their rituals and often create cult communities nearby where their human relatives support their way of life. If you destroy these often-remote places, they lose a power source, their power diminishes; reinforcements becomes difficult and they often abandon the place.

So, finding and bombing these places from a high altitude (or blasting them with artillery or what have you) would save the troops countless lives. The monsters typically have minor magical defences around these placces, and many have the power to disable technology temporarily within the range of a shout, but I don't think they could do anything against heavy ordinance from a distance.


Also, is there even an advantage in using remote UCAV's over manned piloted planes, other than the safety/comfort/ability to switch out pilots? A quick google search reveals that they're often rather slow in comparison to conventional vehicles. At the moment I'm thinking I want them just because they're more techy/more relevant (and more prestigious/exclusive) Pilot comfort isn't really a selling point in a war where ten men dying to kill a wolf is considered a decent trade.

[Carl]

both.

the situation your describing is rather unlike the actual real world uses and roles for a PMC, so its hard to make exact comparisons.

very few governments are comfortable with the idea of a PMC that has access to "warfighting" capability, because they mostly don't trust something as mercenary as well, actual mercenaries. Most countries would treat a PMC with that level of firepower as a invading army and react appropriately. Many would also consider the PMC to be part of the military of whatever country the PMC was based in, and complain to that government about the actions of its citizens.

added to that, armoured vehicles are extremely expensive to buy, maintain and operate, requiring specialised technical and mechanical support personnel, large stocks of hard to acquire spares, and large amounts of transport assets (http://www.royallogisticcorps.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Tk-Tptr.jpg) just to get to the start line.


Also, what are they fighting that needs a tank to kill? unless the shapeshifters have control of the local military, they wont have anything that requires a tank or pred drone to deal with.


if your looking for air support, a helicopter is a much better option. it can operate out of many more locations, can be ultilised for transport or extraction missions, and is much less conspicuous and very easy to justify acquiring. think something like a Puma, with door gun or maybe rocket pods (http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/apache-helicopter-45.jpg)

To build on this the thing to remember about historical military grade mercenaries is that they existed in an environment where there where a lot of moderately wealthy nation state entities with the desire and money to have a professional fighting force but for one reason or another lacked the ability to raise on themselves. There's a real lack of that in the world today. Most nation states are either prosperous, stable and able to do it themselves or unstable, poor and unstable. The latter is especially important because not only do the hiring nations have to be able to trust the PMC, the PMC has to be able to trust the nation state to not try and stab them in the back for their gear ethier.

That said it's not unreasonable that there could exist a very different political climate where a large portion of what is today considered the third world could become sufficiently stable and modestly wealthy that many of it's members might desire a more up to date military. In those circumstances assuming it remains primarily smallish states there's a potential for a market to develop.

But that brings us onto the second problem. One of the advantages old school mercs enjoyed was that they could easily and readily gain access to all the modern implements of warfighting of their era. The sword, the bowm, the cavalryman, the musketm the bolt action rifle where all in their day the primary means of waging war. But around the end of WW1 technology reached a point of destructiveness where for obvious reasons nation states started restricting what people could own. A PMC getting access to that kind of gear is something that makes modern nation states nervous. For better or worse PMC's aren seen as far more likely to engage in old school rape, pillage, burn stuff. And with the size of modern cities no one wants that happening to a major population center of theirs.

So the really hard part is going to be getting them established. Once they get established it gets a lot easier for them because they will have built a reputation for trustworthiness and that will let them get lobbying pressure from economic groups. It would still be a tough sell but it;s not utterly ridiculous anymore. The mostly likely scenario is a formal military force of a nation state deployed in a country on some sort of peacekeeping operation on behalf of the locals who's nation state implodes in some fashion and due to long deployment a fair chunk of the force decided they'd rather stick around and offer to keep doing the peacekeeping if the locals will pay basic bills. Most nation states are probably going to let that stand whilst keeping a close eye on things, and with a foot in the door and a few decades of time there's room for the to start hiring out.

The alternative is top have the OMC start as a security arm of some other company with international interest, (some sort of large scale trade company probably makes the most sense), in that case it becomes plausible for a combination of mission creep and in house produced kit to upgrade them to that level. Nation states are probably going to be much less freaked out by a non-arms company fielding it;s own home designed and built tanks and jets and ships because they won't have the tech to make them equivalent to even 4th rate equipment. Their going to be functionally restricted to stuff only slightly more advanced than early post WW2, (approximately, it gets messy because certain civil tech advances will let them beat some area's whilst they'll lag in others), which is going to be enough with proper training to kick the stuffing out of third world powers, (more because of their ability to use the gear better than it's inherent superiority however), and that again gives them the foot in the door. Once they get established it all becomes much easier.

[Brother Oni]

Well, it's Werewolf: the apocalypse. Changers are pretty hard to kill. Silver bullets are good if you can actually hit anything, but all the changers are cunning bastards and you'll likely never see them coming. Fight just one them in the jungle and it'll look like Predator, fight them in a facility and you'll lose at least half of it. Plus, their true forms inflict the delirium, supernatural crippling fear of them,

Edit: I've added explanations of Werewolf terms for those unfamiliar in parenthesis.

It's been a while since I've played Werewolf, but fire inflicts aggravated damage and they can only soak (resist) that in their Crinos form (classic werewolf human/wolf hybrid form). Any damage that gets through they can only heal slowly.
This makes incendiary round, flame throwers and WP effective against them.

Since this is World of Darkness, the PMC is going to be Pentex funded (main setting antagonist), so would most likely have banes (evil spirits) and other anti-werewolf measures and knowledge. If all else fails, they can purchase/steal/scavenge some Strike Force Zero implants (Japanese anti-supernatural agency) which let human agents resist the Delirium.

Since World of Darkness goes for the worse case version of the real world, you can rule that corporations have extra-territoriality ala the corps in the Shadowrun setting, so provided that the corporation's security arm keeps their toys on their property, legally import and transport said toys (including suitable taxation and security fees) and deploy them in strict circumstances, then most nations would be tolerant of heavier hardware.
This would probably be limited to IFVs like the M2 Bradley as without their anti-armour suite, they're mostly ineffective against MBTs, which can be fielded by proper militaries.

Since Werewolf is mostly small arms, these would be fairly effective against the werewolves - I'd like to see a charging werewolf try and soak HEI from the M2's 25mm autocannon.


Also, is there even an advantage in using remote UCAV's over manned piloted planes, other than the safety/comfort/ability to switch out pilots? A quick google search reveals that they're often rather slow in comparison to conventional vehicles. At the moment I'm thinking I want them just because they're more techy/more relevant (and more prestigious/exclusive) Pilot comfort isn't really a selling point in a war where ten men dying to kill a wolf is considered a decent trade.

Endurance and cost are the main advantages. A F18-E costs 70.5 million USD while a MQ-9 Reaper costs 16.9 million USD, so initial capital outlay is a big difference. That said, neither vehicle would be on the market - you'd have repurposed civilian drones (like the not-Russians used in the recent Ukraine conflict) for scouting and suicide attacks with an attached IED and helicopters/Cessnas sneakily retrofitted with rocket pods or a door gun.

Endurance is the big one as a drone can remain on station for several hours, and can even alert the pilot if something suspicious has entered the patrol zone - thankfully the military still require a human input on the authorisation to fire despite the idea being floated of drones automatically engaging targets.

[Vinyadan]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes


Professional soldiers and military hardware
As is characteristic of one of the first PMCs, Executive Outcomes was directly involved militarily in Angola and Sierra Leone. The company was notable in its ability to provide all aspects of a highly trained modern army to the less professional government forces of Sierra Leone and Angola. For instance, in Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes fielded not only professional fighting men, but armour and support aircraft such as one Mi-24 Hind and two Mi-8 Hip helicopters, the BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle and T-72 main battle tank.[15] Note that these were the property of the client state and not Executive Outcomes itself.[16] It also possessed medevac capabilities to airlift the wounded out of combat zones via Boeing 727 D2-FLZ owned by Ibis Air. These were bought from sources in the worldwide arms trade within Africa as well as Eastern Europe.[17]

The aircraft were owned and operated by a separate partner company called Ibis Air which also owned MiG-23 "Flogger" fighters and a small fleet of PC-7 turbo-prop trainers converted for the recce and ground attack role (with the capability to fire SNEB air-to-ground rockets). Ibis Air also had the connections to operate MiG-27 "Flogger" strike aircraft and Su-25 "Frogfoot" close support aircraft for EO that were loaned out via the Angolan Air Force.[18]

[Brother Oni]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes

That's actually a common thing for PMCs - the clients own the hardware, the PMC provides 'trainers' to educate the client's own military in the use of said hardware. Even regular armed forces do this with members of various Coalition forces being seconded to help train the Iraqi Armed Forces for example.

In countries where the government is more amendable to corporate influence, the PMC 'borrowing' government heavy hardware to attack caerns/dragon nests (the aforementioned sites of spiritual power) could very well be a thing.

[gkathellar]

Bolding mine.

You can only get one of these things - the bat'leth is a terrible weapon. As for being usable defensively, so are the vast majority of melee weapons, almost all of them much more so than the bat'leth. This isn't a thread for specific mechanics, but if those get a +0 AC bonus and simulating the AC benefit is helpful the bat'leth should probably get a penalty.

The bat'leth was designed by a writer who had done "Tai Chi" and allegedly based it off of the movements of "Tai Chi." Maybe you already got this from the scare quotes, but as someone who's studied taiji with a lineage holder, and who has done taiji weapons work, I find this a teensy bit completely infuriating.

It's an absolutely godawful idea for a weapon and there is no good way to use it.

[Knaight]

The bat'leth was designed by a writer who had done "Tai Chi" and allegedly based it off of the movements of "Tai Chi." Maybe you already got this from the scare quotes, but as someone who's studied taiji with a lineage holder, and who has done taiji weapons work, I find this a teensy bit completely infuriating.

So what I'm hearing is that if you have take someone who doesn't really know Tai Chi, have them practice Tai Chi movements that definitely aren't strikes, and then just stick one stick between both of their hands and sticking slightly outward you basically get the bat'leth fighting style. That sounds about right to me.

Also, if I'm being as fair as I can to the weapon I will say that it comes out looking good compared to brass knuckles, at least if you completely ignore displayed usage. Sure, it's far worse than a sword (or even a decent knife), and the idea of bat'leth against spear is just hilarious, but at least it edges out something that definitely isn't a weapon of war or even a particularly good option for low intensity modern street fights.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's an example of what happens when you let artists design a weapon, under the premise that it must be different from weapons humans used and "look cool" -- while ignoring what makes a weapon work, how a humanoid body works, how weapons are actually used... and that if you have a melee weapon no human culture ever used, there's probably a lot of good reasons.

[snowblizz]

Shadiversity has a lot of intelligent things to say about the bathlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsElSDXPgSA

Spoiler, not a lot of good things though.

[Lapak]

It's an example of what happens when you let artists design a weapon, under the premise that it must be different from weapons humans used and "look cool" -- while ignoring what makes a weapon work, how a humanoid body works, how weapons are actually used... and that if you have a melee weapon no human culture ever used, there's probably a lot of good reasons.
You know, that makes me wonder: is there a conceivable body configuration that would make it a good idea? Like, forget how Star Trek has mostly humanoid aliens - is there a theoretical arrangement of body mechanics that would make it a winner? I'm thinking about how it looks a bit like an ant's mandibles - would it make any more sense for a species, say, where the only gripping appendages are flush with the body rather than having long arms?

[VoxRationis]

I feel like a creature with short gripping appendages would need reach even more when it comes to melee weapons. Perhaps something with tentacles, something whose limbs aren't capable of holding a guard stance, but could exert a lot of whipping force on the weapon with the grips as a fulcrum?

[gkathellar]

I'm not sure a creature with short limbs would have a reason to use handheld weapons at all, as opposed to just strapping a bunch of blades and spikes to themselves. Gripping appendages in general are pretty important and fragile, so if you're not actually getting a combat advantage out of using them, isn't it better not to?

The bat'leth is a random mashup of better things, and just physically, it's hard to imagine anything it would do well. You could rotate it around itself like a staff, but without any of the versatility or ability to move the axis of rotation on the spot that a staff manages. You could swing it with two hands like a sword, but it'd be slow and awkward because the entire thing is a counterweight to itself. You could sort of thrust with it, but all of those extra points and hooks aren't doing that any good, so it's just a big dumb sharp thing. And ... that's it. It's a Deer Horn Knife (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_Horn_Knives) (itself already one of those gimmicky martial arts weapons of debatable usefulness), but huge and bulky and with three grips for some reason. It's a big silly anime sword with no reach and no structural advantages, and I'm pretty sure you could outfight someone using it with a rolled-up magazine. Klingons might as well run around with a giant pair of gardening shears.

[Brother Oni]

Sorry to interrupt this bashing of Star Trek weaponry, but it's page 50.

New thread is up here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?564037-Got-a-Real-World-Weapon-Armor-or-Tactics-Question-Mk-XXVI).

[Deepbluediver]

The bat'leth is a random mashup of better things, and just physically, it's hard to imagine anything it would do well.
I'm not sure how the bat'leth is described in-universe (was never a really Trekkie-fan, sorry), but is it possible that it exists BECAUSE it's such an awkward weapon?

To explain, look at something like the German dueling shield: https://www.freelanceacademypress.com/duelingshield.aspx
It's a giant 2-handed shield with spikes and hooks and a big ridge down the center, and I'm pretty sure at least one of the webpages I read about it once said that it was used in judicial trial-by-combat because no one would ever practice enough with something like this to really get good, which would put the combatants on more even footing. So assuming that's true (and that's a big "if"), then maybe the bat'leth is in a similar vein and it's a weapon specifically designed to be more about show and less about lethality?

Also, here are some videos showing dueling shields in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQbj8c5OLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9VG4ClQcJk
both of them start out with a shield-and-weapon combo and the switch to two-handed shield use

[Knaight]

I'm not sure how the bat'leth is described in-universe (was never a really Trekkie-fan, sorry), but is it possible that it exists BECAUSE it's such an awkward weapon?

To explain, look at something like the German dueling shield: https://www.freelanceacademypress.com/duelingshield.aspx
It's a giant 2-handed shield with spikes and hooks and a big ridge down the center, and I'm pretty sure at least one of the webpages I read about it once said that it was used in judicial trial-by-combat because no one would ever practice enough with something like this to really get good, which would put the combatants on more even footing. So assuming that's true (and that's a big "if"), then maybe the bat'leth is in a similar vein and it's a weapon specifically designed to be more about show and less about lethality?

Also, here are some videos showing dueling shields in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQbj8c5OLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9VG4ClQcJk
both of them start out with a shield-and-weapon combo and the switch to two-handed shield use

It would make sense for certain forms of ritualized combat (e.g. judicial duels) where everyone is using one or otherwise hampered - though this is admittedly more because you can justify basically anything for this context. It's portrayed as a weapon of war though, and an effective one at that, which is where it doesn't fit so well.