Got a Real-World Weapon, Armour or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIX [Archive] - Page 4

Catullus64

2021-10-27, 08:15 AM

This is only a guess, but I'd think that the best stuff (with either a very favourable weight-to-value ratio or immediate military use, such as money or good weapons) would be looted by the soldiers of the winning side after the battle unless they are prevented from this by direct orders (for example to retreat or pursue the fleeing enemy).

I daresay that our scavenging band would probably keep their eyes sharp for circumstances where the army is ordered to move on swiftly without looting; although perhaps rare, that could be a potential goldmine.

The next best stuff that the soldiers can't or won't take would be looted by the persons in the baggage train of the army, which may contain traders specialized in such "second hand" stuff. These are often children or spouses of the soldiers and might do this on their behalf.

I do like the idea of the scavengers being an acknowledged, if disliked part of the baggage train. People know, but can't prove, that they're mainly there to look the dead, so it's just a matter of picking the right time to move in.

If the army buries the dead before moving on, everything not taken would be buried with them. In this case, your hypothetical looters would be graverobbers and not tolerated in most cultures, so they would have to work in secret for scant pickings while risking hefty punishments if caught.

If the army doesn't bury the dead, they (and the leftover loot) will be left to rot unless they are buried (and likely robbed of the last useable things) by the local populace. During this time, I think they could be looted with relatively few repercussions.

Another possibility is that they establish themselves as part of the local populace, who are usually responsible for disposing of the defeated dead. They can use the locals as a "screen" for their own looting (of second-order loot like clothing, pins, cookware, food), while carrying arms to discourage the locals themselves from protesting. (In case it wasn't clear, my heroes here are not very nice people.)

Pretty much all references to looting I have read of in the ancient world referred to the fighters or the polity they belonged to. A big example are the Greeks looting the Persian camp after Plataea, or the Germani taking Roman eagles and sacrificing soldiers (people were booty). And there's that famous poem by Archilochus: "A warrior of the Saians now adorns himself with my costly shield..."

In Homeric epic, there is clearly an expectation that all loot will be collected after the battle and then divided among the fighters, based on their worth and power. In Roman times, some loot would be put on display: rostra, the extremely valuable bronze rams found on enemy ships, were salvaged and placed near the stage from which politicians addressed the people.

I think that the presence of many helpers meant that not much would be left for others. For example, a Spartan soldier had 7 Helot servants following him during the campaign. Roman legionaries were more autonomous, so who knows. But I think that locals preferred if an army just plundered the enemy camp and got all the cattle and horses held in there, compared to having to forage on the territory, so there were good reasons not to be.

I definitely intend for the story to include a great deal of ironic parallel between the "morally upright" looting of a victorious army (the sort of looting that elites of a society love to put in their literary records), and the the "dishonorable" looting of opportunistic civilians, who in this case have been displaced from their ordinary lives by the war itself. One of the looters is a poet, who is well aware of the idioms and formulas for classical, heroic spoils, and probably takes an ironic delight in applying them to his own disreputable business.

When a chain mail shirt or a bronze curiassis the mark of a rich man and increases you're likelihood of living greatly, you don't leave it there for a random barber-surgeon to snatch up. Lesser valuables like clothes and boots, you might pick those over - I think there's a Napoleonic account of a field of literally naked bodies after some battle where the soldiers and camp followers had literally picked the corpses (and in some cases the still wounded) clean.

On top of which, big battles were not the norm for the period of muscled powered warfare. Lots of marching, disease, bad food, and maybe smaller raids and skirmishes, but big decisive fights leaving enough dead and wounded on the ground indiscriminately enough to loot as a camp followers would be uncommon.

So, limited opportunities to take second Crack at whatever the warriors left behind. Not great odds for the professional looter.

However, separating soldiers from their pay and loot after the fact is a time honored tradition.

That Napoleonic account, true or not, is good imagery. I'll definitely be thinking about that when writing; an expert, maybe an ex-tailor or something, in quickly stripping the clothes off of corpses without damaging them, sounds like a fun side character.

By funny coincidence, one of my planned main characters is (or was) a literal barber-surgeon.

It's the case as you say, I think, that just battlefield looting by itself probably doesn't have a profit-risk ratio that would entice anyone to do it. I'll definitely portray my protagonists as multi-purpose camp followers; its just that the main action of the story itself takes place in the aftermath of the battle, when they spy a good opportunity for loot.

The late 15th c. English word riffraff (and the Old French rif et raf that it derives from), meaning "persons of disreputable character or low degree", originally referred to scavengers in battlefields, and specifically those who plundered "every little thing". High value loot was normally claimed by the victors, so these people picked the leftovers after all the soldiers had gone. The sources treat these scavengers with great contempt, considering them nothing short of human refuse picking up refuse, and the word was derogatory from the start.

But they were just trying to scrape (literally!) a living in war-torn lands. Remember that wherever armies passed, they "lived off the land", i.e. plundered the locals for food and resources. For the civilian population, that was often the worst part of war, as it could get very brutal and/or destroy their livelihood. Taking a little something from the dead seems to me less of a transgression in comparison, especially if the scavengers were locals, who were just taking a little something back.

Sometimes they weren't locals, though, they were camp-followers. From what I understand, scavenging was not their primary occupation, it was complementary to doing errands for the army, or whatever else sustained camp-followers normally. [EDIT: as KineticDiplomat describes above.] Another class of scavengers is vagrants, especially after the Black Death. War, disease, famine, and enclosures uprooted many many people, and on the road options were limited: you could beg, do odd jobs, steal, or scavenge, and if you had the opportunity to do any of that, you would. How else would you survive?

I'm not sure we could call any of these people "professional" looters. Usually it was opportunistic. And I don't think anyone put too much energy in stopping them from scavenging: again, they weren't taking valuable loot, they were only picking leftovers, belts and shoes and anything that got overlooked.

If you want to write about a believable band of professional looters, I can think of two suggestions:

1) Have them operate in a limited geographic region, which happens to be ravaged by war in a prolonged conflict. This gives them lots of battlefields to plunder, lots of reasons to resort to plundering, and you can choose to make them as sympathetic or unsympathetic as you please.

2) Make them almost bandits. Give them arms and horses, and have them raid battlefields immediately post-battle, during the (official) plundering stage. This will allow them to take stuff more valuable than belts and shoes, but also now they're an enemy that the army would keep an eye out for, and fight. This isn't historical, AFAIK, but I wouldn't have any trouble suspending my disbelief for it. Bandits were everywhere, opportunistic raiders were everywhere, official armies operated much like bandits and opportunistic raiders themselves, so you're just mixing the timing here, it's fine.

This is all tremendously useful info/insight, and much of it aligns with my own thinking. My heroes are definitely people displaced by war, though still rather unscrupulous for all that. They're "professional" only in the sense that 1) Camp-following and looting are their main occupation, since their sedentary occupations have been destroyed, and 2) They've gotten really good at it.

As for your numbered suggestions, I think there will be elements of both. There's a particular war that I've thought up in the backdrop, with particular geography and combatants. Even with prolonged warfare, the protagonists have a creeping sense that a big battle is a sign that the war isn't going to last much longer, and this is one of their last chances to actually get their hands on some big spoils, so there's pressure to take risks on this one. While I don't think I'l go so far as to make them a fully armed gang of bandits, there will definitely be some military-like organization in their ranks, with with officers, guards, looting teams, and specialists.

One issue is that soldiers have always taken non-soldiers looting battlefields very badly.
1) If you kill an enemy soldier he us one of ”them” and it’s OK to take his gear. However a civilian looting a battlefield casualty is looting on of “us” i.e. another soldier.
2) Looters who came across a wounded soldier would either strip his body bare and leave him to die, or put a knife across his throat. Soldiers seeing that think “there but for the grace of god go I” and object.
3) The looters don't discriminate between good guys and bad guys, they’re all loot bags waiting to be emptied.
4) It goes against the long held custom of treating the dead with respect, which is a near universal human trait.

Any professional looting bands would attract the attention of the people best equipped and most motivated to do them harm.

All this, really, is just reasons why I think it makes a good story. Natural antagonism between civilian looters and soldiers means conflict, and a sense of real danger. The danger that the soldiers present, and their advantages over the scavengers, mean that our heroes need to be clever and bold to pull off their plans.

Martin Greywolf

2021-10-27, 08:19 AM

What can people tell me about the practices of looting and scavenging in the ancient and medieval worlds?

I'm considering a story about a band of scavengers who follow armies around in order to loot the battlefields & camps. How practical do you think this sort of occupation might have been? My guess is that if such "professional looters" existed, they're not the sort of people who tend to be well represented in literary sources.

If such people existed, do you think they're likely to be regarded as criminals, or merely disreputable tradesmen? Would a battlefield even be ripe for looting, or would the actual victorious army mostly pick it clean? Would they need to evade the notice of the armies in question, or could they openly follow them?

I know this is a lot like asking "What color did people wear in the past?", where just about every answer under the sun is true in some time and place. Nevertheless I appreciate any good examples to draw upon, or educated guesses rendered.

Nature of pre-modern warfare

I and others have written on this extensively, in this thread as well as in books, so short version is - battles are incredibly rare, large battles even more so. Most of the warfare of the period is conducted by small skirmishes (about a hundred people total, so not unlike what you see in reenactments) between groups looking for supplies, and sieges.

Taking 100 years war as an example, it has maybe a dozen big battles, with three being notably large, for a war that lasted for over a century. As you can imagine, majority of supplies such as food came from scavanging expeditions, and majority of valuable loot came from sieges.

This has a notable consequence that, were someone to make a business model of looting after battles, he would soon starve, and looting after a siege is done by the victorious army.

Nature of pre-modern war gear

The gulf between combat capabilities of a civilian and those of a soldier was increased in staggering amount since the industrial revolution. A medieval farmer can put on several shirts, grab a pitfork and go into war as an equivalent of medium infantry. Modern civilian has no hope in hell of matching a mortar team, let alone attack helicopters.

What this means for any looters and pillagers is that the people they are looting from, even if they are simple farmers, are an actual, notable threat. While you don't need overwhelming force to intimidate them, you can't be outnumbered five to one and expect things to go smoothly.

Therefore, even if there is an otherwise open season on loot, you will have to have enough military force to intimidate the locals at a minimum, at which point the two armies may well be looking at you suspiciously, because you posses a level of force that is a concern to them, if not a threat.

Medieval ethics

We can't discuss politics and religions here, so let's generalize - if there is any sort of a code of conduct between two sides, whatever it is based on, it may well be upheld by both belligerents.

To put it simply, if the two sides get even marginally along, and you decide to loot from the loosers of a battle, the winners may well arrest you and either punish you or hand you over. This has happened fairly regularly during the Outremer crusades, often enough that Kingdom of Heaven movie actually had a scene about it.

Customs of looting already in place

I'm only well-versed in high and late medieval customs, but the general ideas were in place in ancient and renaissance armies as well.

Most of the soldiers in place are there with the understanding of being paid partially in loot. This is a major motivation behind them being there, in fact, since regular pay, if present, isn't all that much, and more winning means more loot. This did cause problems were frequently - mostly of the "soldiers run to loot before the battle is over and get ambushed" kind, but it was so ingrained into the ethos of the times you saw it even in the written contracts.

Those written contracts often mandated that a soldier brings loot back to the people in charge, where it will be amassed and shares will be given out - this is not unlike the pirate charters.

As an example:

[this was all one paragraph in the original charter, I separated it for my sanity]
Ale jestliže by kde Pán Buoh dal nepřátely přemoci a porazili, města, tvrze, hradu dobyti, táhnouce polem nebo polem ležíce, kterých kořistí dobyti: aby ten vzatek a ty kořisti sneseny, svedeny, svezeny a na hromadu skladeny byly, kdež by bylo tomu místo ukázáno a jmenováno od starších, buďto mnoho nebo málo. A k tomu aby byli vydáni a voleni starší ze všech obcí, los panských, rytířských, městčích i robotěncuov, aby věrně způsobili ty věci chudým i bohatým, a spravedlivě, jakž na koho sluší, rozdány a rozděleny byly, aby nižádný sám sobě nebral, ani co kdo zachoval.

Jestli pak že by co kto vzal neboli zachoval, a to bylo usvědčeno dobrejm, svědomím, k tomu takovému chtěli by popraviti, k jeho hrdlu i k statku, buď kdož buď, žádných osob nevynímajíce, jakožto k zloději Božímu a obecnému, jakož se jest stalo Achanovi pro čepici dcer královských a pro plášť, neboli jinou smrtí, buďto kníže, pán, rytíř nebo panoše, měštěnín, řemeslník nebo sedlák, i žádného nevymlouvajíce ani k vosobám hledíce a zříce, s pomocí Boží takovým činiti nad nimi pomstu.

And were the Lord to give us victory over an enemy, were it a city, fortress, castle, field battle or field encampment, and should we acquire loot: this taking and this loot is to be taken and put in a pile in a place that was pointed out and named by the commanders[1], were the amount fo this loot great or small. And to this loot will be elected elders from all villages, a random selection[2] from lordly, knightly, citizenry and working class[3], so that they faithfully divide this loot to rich and poor, and fairly by merit divide and distribute; so that not one can take loot by himself or keep it from them.

Were someone to take or keep the loot for himself, and this was proven in good conscience, this one will we want to execute by throat and by property[4] no matter his station[5], without exception to any person; for he is a thief from God and from people, as happened to Achan for the hat of king's daughters and for the cloak; with any death, were it a duke, lord, knight, squire, burgher, craftsman or paesant[6], for no one of any rank will be excused; with the aid of God will we over these persons carry out a vengeance.

[1] the word starsich literally means 'elders', but this charter uses it to denote commanders of various ranks
[2] 'los' means that they were drawing straws or names from a hat or some such
[3] this means hign nobility, ordinary knights, burghers from cities with imperial charters and the rest
[4] this means loss of life and of your property, the translation from archaic Czech doesn't roll well in English
[5] literally 'whoever he happens to be'
[6] the English words for these titles aren't exactly 1:1, but close enough for our purposes

If we win any sort of battle and acquire loot, we will put it in one spot, pre-determined by the commanders, no matter how much loot there is. We will then randomly select from among our commanders a commitee that will see to it that this loot is divided by merit.

If anyone keeps stuff for himself, he dead, no matter how important he is, and we will take his stuff and divide it as well.

You can imagine that people who wrote this into their charters would be... displeased over someone else taking spoils from under them.

Non-belligeernt looters

They happened. Sometimes.

As you could see above, the armies of the time had entire systems dedicated to plundering the goodies. Moreover, they often didn't loot a conquered city or a village to the bone, since they wanted to either conquer it, or to loot it the next year, which means said city or village was capable of resisting any subsequent lootings by small forces.

When this happened most often was in cases when the victorious army couldn't take it all, for reasons of time or carrying capacity. Then, the locals happily helped themselves, and remember, these locals are both farmers and local lords and militias, so you can't intimidate them that easily.

Is your idea possible?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. It's not economically viable to make a living this way in the first place, and everyone would try to stab you.

So how do we make your story work?

I'm considering a story about a band of scavengers who follow armies around in order to loot the battlefields & camps. How practical do you think this sort of occupation might have been? My guess is that if such "professional looters" existed, they're not the sort of people who tend to be well represented in literary sources.

Good news: it's not impossible. Consider a mercenary company whose leader gains reputation for being very effective at the distribution of loot, and is therefore hired by armies to handle this for them. Basically, take the Zizka charter and replace random distribution by a professional with good reputation.

If you want this guy to work for both sides, have him cleverly negotiate contracts with both of them at the same time, or simply switch sides. This was hardly an uncommon thing among the various mercenaries, were they Swiss, Landsknechts, Condotierri or others - Fiore de'i Liberi, author of a famous fencing manual, was himself an artillery captain who was hired all over Italy and HRE.

Catullus64

2021-10-27, 09:25 AM

Nature of pre-modern warfare

I and others have written on this extensively, in this thread as well as in books, so short version is - battles are incredibly rare, large battles even more so. Most of the warfare of the period is conducted by small skirmishes (about a hundred people total, so not unlike what you see in reenactments) between groups looking for supplies, and sieges.

Taking 100 years war as an example, it has maybe a dozen big battles, with three being notably large, for a war that lasted for over a century. As you can imagine, majority of supplies such as food came from scavanging expeditions, and majority of valuable loot came from sieges.

This has a notable consequence that, were someone to make a business model of looting after battles, he would soon starve, and looting after a siege is done by the victorious army.

I used the word "battles" rather loosely. Sacks, raids, and skirmishes were definitely included in my vision, even if the aftermath of a proper battle is the centerpiece of the story.

The gulf between combat capabilities of a civilian and those of a soldier was increased in staggering amount since the industrial revolution. A medieval farmer can put on several shirts, grab a pitfork and go into war as an equivalent of medium infantry. Modern civilian has no hope in hell of matching a mortar team, let alone attack helicopters.

What this means for any looters and pillagers is that the people they are looting from, even if they are simple farmers, are an actual, notable threat. While you don't need overwhelming force to intimidate them, you can't be outnumbered five to one and expect things to go smoothly.

Therefore, even if there is an otherwise open season on loot, you will have to have enough military force to intimidate the locals at a minimum, at which point the two armies may well be looking at you suspiciously, because you posses a level of force that is a concern to them, if not a threat.

Again, I don't necessarily find this discouraging for my writing. If the sweet spot of "strong enough to intimidate farmers, not strong enough to draw the attention of soldiers" is historically non-existent, I'm comfortable using artistic license to stretch it to "existent, but narrow enough that the odds are strongly against the protagonists."

The theme that these scavengers occupy an ultimately unstable and unviable economic niche, one that they know can't last even if it doesn't get them killed, is deeply appealing to me. It shares a lot of thematic territory with the "Twilight of the Old West" tropes that are so popular in modern Westerns. In a way, your explanations of why this sort of occupation wouldn't work have helped me clarify how I want to tell the story, though I may need a few handwaves to do it.

Martin Greywolf

2021-10-27, 10:10 AM

though I may need a few handwaves to do it.

You don't need handwaves, you need something that will cause a paradigm shift in pre-modern warfare. The base facts are that there are two groups already wanting to loot all they can: the winning soldiers and the armed locals. Neither of those wants armed looter organization around, and will need a damn good reason why they would allow it.

You could move the tech to such a place where locals don't have the means to resist (e.g. modern military situation), you could place some sort of cultural taboo on looting to the soldiers or so on. All of those are major changes that will completely change how war is fought when compared to ancient and medieval methods (e.g. with prohibition on looting, you will need supply lines that would shame the Roman empire and so on).

Catullus64

2021-10-27, 10:28 AM

You don't need handwaves, you need something that will cause a paradigm shift in pre-modern warfare. The base facts are that there are two groups already wanting to loot all they can: the winning soldiers and the armed locals. Neither of those wants armed looter organization around, and will need a damn good reason why they would allow it.

I think the answer, which I had partly already come to, and have partly gleaned from people in the thread, is that they aren't tolerated; or rather, they need to pass as something other than corpse-robbers in order to be tolerated. I feel that by using the word "professional" I may have implied something more open and formal than I was imagining; it would certainly be wrong to say that any of them "profess" looting. These are camp followers whose main intention in following the army is to loot, and as such they're always watching for the opportunity, but they can still blend in with and function as the normal sort of camp followers who provide logistical support to the army. They are, functionally, thieves, but they still exist within a recognized, if disreputable, social role.

While your arguments about why both local populace and military forces are incentivized to prevent this sort of activity are convincing, that doesn't mean that there aren't gaps for opportunistic individuals to operate in. As has been pointed out, a commander might actively curtail looting amongst his own troops in order to maintain cohesion in his forces, or to move on quickly for operational reasons. Soldiers and civilian looters alike might just plain miss things. When I talk about hand waves, I'm not talking about ignoring social and logistical factors, but about narrative contrivances which allow these opportunities to line up.

Archpaladin Zousha

2021-10-27, 06:49 PM

tyckspoon

2021-10-27, 06:58 PM

Pauly

2021-10-28, 03:20 AM

Question for the old-firearm-experts in this thread. One of the guns in the newly released 2e Pathfinder book, Guns & Gears is the Harmona, described as such:

A favored weapon of monster hunters in Arcadia, the harmona gun is a large-bore long gun that fires a heavy, slow-moving round. The gun got its name due to the eerie similarity between the buzzing sound its oversized projectiles make flying through the air and the flight of a fey bird called a harmona.

The question is, how large a bore are we talking here? How big of projectiles? I'm just having a little trouble envisioning the size and shape of this particular gun.

And lo, Gun Jesus did descend from the mountain carrying 4 bore stopping rifles (4 bore fires a round lead ball of 1/4 of a pound)

https://youtu.be/MDYtxxRU_cY

Then he turned and produced forth a 2 bore hunting rifle. (2 bore guns shoot a half pound round ball)

https://youtu.be/OYlDgwo52tI

There were larger rifles made, but 4 bore was the practical upper limit, with 2 bore being the overkill version. Anything larger would be impracticakmexcept maybe for shooting from the back of an elephant.

Stopping rifles, aka dangerous game rifles, are designed to stop charging animals such as Lions, Cape Buffalo or Rhinos. You can use much smaller rifles to kill such animals, but maybe not before they’ve taken you with them. They areoften misnomered as “elephant guns”.

Gnoman

2021-10-28, 09:42 AM

I daresay that our scavenging band would probably keep their eyes sharp for circumstances where the army is ordered to move on swiftly without looting; although perhaps rare, that could be a potential goldmine.

Such situations wouldn't be "rare". They would be completely nonexistent. The only way combatants are leaving a battlefield (even a tiny one) "swiftly" is if they got crushed and were running for their lives. Sorting out the chaos after the engagement will take much longer than looting would.

Archpaladin Zousha

2021-10-28, 01:51 PM

And lo, Gun Jesus did descend from the mountain carrying 4 bore stopping rifles (4 bore fires a round lead ball of 1/4 of a pound)

https://youtu.be/MDYtxxRU_cY

Then he turned and produced forth a 2 bore hunting rifle. (2 bore guns shoot a half pound round ball)

https://youtu.be/OYlDgwo52tI

There were larger rifles made, but 4 bore was the practical upper limit, with 2 bore being the overkill version. Anything larger would be impracticakmexcept maybe for shooting from the back of an elephant.

Stopping rifles, aka dangerous game rifles, are designed to stop charging animals such as Lions, Cape Buffalo or Rhinos. You can use much smaller rifles to kill such animals, but maybe not before they’ve taken you with them. They areoften misnomered as “elephant guns”.
This was really informative, thank you! :smallsmile:

Pauly

2021-10-28, 03:27 PM

This was really informative, thank you! :smallsmile:

One little comment is that by ‘long rifle’ they mean a shoulder fired firearm, the barrels of stopping rifles are proportionally much shorter than other rifles, having the a similar length to normal hunting rifles despite having a much larger bore. The ratio of bore to barrel length is comparable to normal caliber carbines.

Their practical maximum range was 100 meters or so and were often used at much shorter ranges.

The design requirement is for
- bring the rifle on target
- acquire a site picture
- adjust your aim
- fire
- *edit to add* have what you’re shooting at drop dead before it reaches you
to be done in the shortest possible time.

By ‘long rifle’ people may think if something like an Afghani jezail, which is designed to burn the most possible powder for high velocity bullets.

https://youtu.be/B-aEWZrTibE

halfeye

2021-10-28, 03:59 PM

One little comment is that by ‘long rifle’ they mean a shoulder fired firearm, the barrels of stopping rifles are proportionally much shorter than other rifles, having the a similar length to normal hunting rifles despite having a much larger bore. The ratio of bore to barrel length is comparable to normal caliber carbines.

Their practical maximum range was 100 meters or so and were often used at much shorter ranges.

The design requirement is for
- bring the rifle on target
- acquire a site picture
- adjust your aim
- fire
to be done in the shortest possible time.

By ‘long rifle’ people may think if something like an Afghani jezail, which is designed to burn the most possible powder for high velocity bullets.

https://youtu.be/B-aEWZrTibE

Another extreme gun was the punt gun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_gun

They were shotguns firing huge numbers of small shot, but the bores were immense.

Archpaladin Zousha

2021-10-29, 09:54 AM

One little comment is that by ‘long rifle’ they mean a shoulder fired firearm, the barrels of stopping rifles are proportionally much shorter than other rifles, having the a similar length to normal hunting rifles despite having a much larger bore. The ratio of bore to barrel length is comparable to normal caliber carbines.

Their practical maximum range was 100 meters or so and were often used at much shorter ranges.

The design requirement is for
- bring the rifle on target
- acquire a site picture
- adjust your aim
- fire
- *edit to add* have what you’re shooting at drop dead before it reaches you
to be done in the shortest possible time.

By ‘long rifle’ people may think if something like an Afghani jezail, which is designed to burn the most possible powder for high velocity bullets.

https://youtu.be/B-aEWZrTibE
True, but in-game the harmona is a separate gun type from jezails, which are statted up in Guns & Gears as well.

Pauly

2021-10-29, 03:29 PM

True, but in-game the harmona is a separate gun type from jezails, which are statted up in Guns & Gears as well.

That’s good. The original description was unclear..

For reference this is a video of someone shooting Ernest Hemmingway’s .577 Nitro Express, which is the smokeless powder equivalent of a 4 bore rifle. This one shows the effect the round has on a target.

https://youtu.be/pZ2tWPKv3GU

Martin Greywolf

2021-10-30, 10:02 AM

It probably bears mentioning that stopping rifles weren't firing projectiles that were all that slow for their time period. Sure, they were black powder ammunitions, and they are slow compared to modern ammo, but only some muskets were barely supersonic, and some earlier models had muzzle velocities as low as 150 m/s. The stopping rifles were pretty much in the same boat, usually in the 350-450 m/s muzzle velocity range, same as most of the later muskets.

As for distinctive sound of the projectile, just about the only thing that could realistically cause a noticeable difference is a specific shape, kind of like whistling sling bullets. I'm not sure how much that would impact accuracy, though. That said, different bullet sizes in flight do sound slightly different, but to a point where you'd make a special note of it?

AdAstra

2021-10-30, 10:43 AM

Pauly

2021-10-30, 03:03 PM

The ‘distinctive sound’ that should be associated with a stopping rifle equivalent is the earth shattering kaboom.
I haven’t been at a range when someone has shot a stopping rifle, but I have been there when people have fired reproduction rifled muskets. The boom is much lower (larger bore) and longer (black powder burns slower than cordite) than modern rifles.

There’s no way the user will hear the projectile, that is assuming they still have functioning ears after firing one of them without hearing protection. At the receiving end: you’re shooting at monsters not people; at the ranges you engage targets the bang will overwhelm and sound the projectile makes.

As for firing a slow projectile, it is slower than smokeless powder rounds. But black powder has a limit on how fast it can push a bullet, which is why 4 bores were invented in the first place. The only way to increase stopping power with black powder is to increase the mass of the projectile. So assuming a black powder world the ‘harmona’ wouldn’t fire a ‘slow’ round.

The idea of a ‘slower heavier’ round being desirable seems to come from a misunderstanding of what modern hunters call a “brush gun”.
https://lockedback.com/brush-gun-rifle-merit-myth/
Lower velocity heavy rounds with rounded noses stay on target through vegetation much better than higher velocity rounds with pointed noses.

Martin Greywolf

2021-10-31, 08:54 AM

The only guns I can remember that were attested to as having a distinctive sound as the projectile flew by were the Whitworth Rifles (mainly the breachloading cannons). They used polygonal rifling where the bore was hexagonal in cross section, with the cannon projectiles in particular having a very interesting shape, as they also had a hexagonal cross section that twisted along their length to match the rifling. They supposedly made a very eerie whistling sound when passing by.

Artillery is a bit of a different matter, I recall a few accounts from WW1 where veteran soldiers were able to not only tell what caliber of guns was being shot at them, but also if they went long, short or to the side. I think it may also have been in All quiet on Western Front (which is pretty much an eyewitness account), but it's been decades since I read it.

halfeye

2021-10-31, 12:56 PM

Artillery is a bit of a different matter, I recall a few accounts from WW1 where veteran soldiers were able to not only tell what caliber of guns was being shot at them, but also if they went long, short or to the side. I think it may also have been in All quiet on Western Front (which is pretty much an eyewitness account), but it's been decades since I read it.

It also depends on the trajectory, in WW2 the "88" was supersonic, so the detonation came before the sounds of the shell through the air, which was just like the V2 rocket, whereas the V1 was noisy while travelling.

Khedrac

2021-10-31, 03:54 PM

It also depends on the trajectory, in WW2 the "88" was supersonic, so the detonation came before the sounds of the shell through the air, which was just like the V2 rocket, whereas the V1 was noisy while travelling.

In many ways that added to the "terror" factor of the V1. If you could hear it you were safe, it was when the engine cut out that you worried - was it about to land on you?
My father lived under the flight-path so for him, as a teenager, there wasn't any terror - they just watched them fly over or watched the air force engage them Apparently for those who lived in London though the "terror" effect of hearing the engine cut out was very real.

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-01, 09:58 AM

It also depends on the trajectory, in WW2 the "88" was supersonic, so the detonation came before the sounds of the shell through the air, which was just like the V2 rocket, whereas the V1 was noisy while travelling.

A lot of WW1 guns would probably be supersonic at the muzzle, but fall under speed of sound at long enough ranges. IIRC modern artillery shells can loose about half of their muzzle velocity, and assuming this is true for cordite as well... artillery of the time has muzzle velocities of as low as 500 m/s.

This would be a massive problem with small arms, corssing sound barrier destabilizes your projectile to a point where your aim is wrecked, but field artillery of WW1 will likely not care that much.

Saint-Just

2021-11-01, 11:26 AM

A lot of WW1 guns would probably be supersonic at the muzzle, but fall under speed of sound at long enough ranges. IIRC modern artillery shells can loose about half of their muzzle velocity, and assuming this is true for cordite as well... artillery of the time has muzzle velocities of as low as 500 m/s.

This would be a massive problem with small arms, corssing sound barrier destabilizes your projectile to a point where your aim is wrecked, but field artillery of WW1 will likely not care that much.

Spitzer loadings for 8mm Lebel, 8mm Mauser and .303 Mark VII supposedly stay supersonic for 1000 m. For round-nosed Carcano can only find info about 200m, still, extrapolating it pessimistically would give more than 600 m of supersonic range. Have no idea where to find anything on Russian Imperial 7.62 loadings.

Seems like it would not be such a big problem for riflemen - hitting stuff at 1000 m with iron sights is pretty much a "no" either way.

Pauly

2021-11-01, 07:49 PM

Seems like it would not be such a big problem for riflemen - hitting stuff at 1000 m with iron sights is pretty much a "no" either way.

Early bolt action rifles, essentially WW1 and prior, were sighted out to 1500m or more. The expectation at 600m+ wasn’t to engage individual soldiers but to hit battalion sized targets. There are a lot of battles in 1914 where this type of fire was used to serious effect, not just Mons.

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-02, 04:13 AM

Spitzer loadings for 8mm Lebel, 8mm Mauser and .303 Mark VII supposedly stay supersonic for 1000 m. For round-nosed Carcano can only find info about 200m, still, extrapolating it pessimistically would give more than 600 m of supersonic range. Have no idea where to find anything on Russian Imperial 7.62 loadings.

Seems like it would not be such a big problem for riflemen - hitting stuff at 1000 m with iron sights is pretty much a "no" either way.

Well, yeah, small arms will be safely supersonic, you can go supersonic with black powder and a musket, smokless powder will give you enough speed to not have to worry about it. What I was talking about is artillery, where you don't use speed of projectile to do damage, only to get range - using a large shell and dealing with sound barrier inaccuracy isn't an unreasonable tradeoff in battery fire situation, but would be pretty bad if you added weight to your Carcano ammo to a point where it would drop from supersonic at 200 meters.

halfeye

2021-11-02, 10:27 AM

Howitzers (firing at over 45 degrees of elevation (where 0 degrees is flat and 90 degrees is vertical)) vs field guns (firing at less than 45 degrees elevation) is also a significant factor (though Wikipedia seems to have partially adopted a USAian useage that makes howitzer mean what used to be field guns?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_gun

Since about the start of World War II, the term has been applied to long-range artillery pieces that fire at a relatively low angle, as opposed to howitzers which can fire at higher angles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howitzer

A howitzer (/ˈhaʊ.ɪtsər/) is generally a large ranged weapon that stands between an artillery gun (also known as a cannon outside the US) – which has smaller, higher-velocity shells fired at flatter trajectories – and a mortar – which fires at higher angles of ascent and descent.

KineticDiplomat

2021-11-02, 07:08 PM

fusilier

2021-11-03, 12:58 AM

Re: sighting.

This is one of those areas where conditions matter so drastically as to make the technical means less relevant. I'm personally a merely adequate rifleman, and given a Mauser 98k (refurbed), can and have hit E-types at 800m, and seen people use similar rifles to hit at 1000m. But...a stationary target at a known range, with me comfortable on a mat with a sling and a rifle zeroed in that day, well rested, fed, and stress free, knowing I have all the time in the world to make a shot and that no conditions will change, is not exactly a practical test for actually shooting people.

One officer explained to me that the point of those old "volley sights" wasn't to pick off individual soldiers at extreme ranges (some of those sights go up to over 2km!). Instead it was for suppression fire -- if, for example, there was a bridge at extreme range that you didn't want the enemy to cross. An officer would call out the range, and have his men fire on the target. I believe more modern tactics would call for the use of machine guns, but circa 1900, when many of these rifles were designed, machine gun use was quite limited.* Similarly, in WW1 you can find examples of anti-aircraft sights for bolt action rifles; they didn't have enough machine guns for AA work, at least at the start of the conflict.

*At the start of WW1, there might be a couple machine guns assigned to each battalion, not platoon, not even company, but battalion(!) -- and many nations were still lacking enough even for that.

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-03, 04:17 AM

The real story of long range on rifles circa WW1 is a lot stupider - but only in hindsight, and hindsight is 20/20.

Remember that at the time, technology changed at a somewhat glacial pace, there were admirals in WW1 who were one step removed from Nelson. What most of the brass was thinking in terms of was Napoleonic formation warfare, with cavalry breakthroughs and so on. Every piece of gear was thought of in that context, and that... explains a lot. Sure, there were some more forward-thinking folks out there (French had, IIRC, something of an intermediate cartridge for their rifles), but majority of old generals...

In a battle like that, you absolutely want the long range, because if you can hit the enemy line from further away, you're gonna win. Target acquisition is dead easy, accuracy matters only to a point and so on. This was the primary purpose behind the ludicrous ranges you saw on infantryman's rifles, and why you didn't see scopes on them - scopes would only be needed for specialised skirmishers.

Machineguns were almost a brand new invantion, and, well, many thought they were of use in colonial engagements only. This was... pretty silly even at the time, actually, there were some recent wars that showcased their usefulness, but again - top brass wasn't used to rapid innovation, and many thought cavalry will beat machineguns the same way it could beat artillery.

Then WW1 break out and all goes to hell, and suddenly there is trench warfare (well, on the western front), and you have to make do with what you have. Sure, you can ramp up machinegun production, but in the meantime, you have to press rifles into MG roles, and those long range sights are pretty useful for suppressive fire at long ranges in a pinch. They aren't that effective when compared to an actual machinegun, but you don't necessarily have a machinegun - in many cases, it takes a while before people in charge even realize you need an LMG (that is, not just a man-portable MG, but one that can be used by one guy on the move) to make advances.

This is all very obvious to us, but again, hindsight.

Saint-Just

2021-11-03, 04:58 AM

Then WW1 break out and all goes to hell, and suddenly there is trench warfare (well, on the western front), and you have to make do with what you have. Sure, you can ramp up machinegun production, but in the meantime, you have to press rifles into MG roles, and those long range sights are pretty useful for suppressive fire at long ranges in a pinch. They aren't that effective when compared to an actual machinegun, but you don't necessarily have a machinegun - in many cases, it takes a while before people in charge even realize you need an LMG (that is, not just a man-portable MG, but one that can be used by one guy on the move) to make advances.

Ok, I really need more info. My current understanding is that not merely they were "aren't that effective when compared to an actual machinegun", they were so much less effective that it required some extraordinary circumstances for the volley fire to be of any use, especially at ranges of more than 1 mile (which was not a big deal for the heavy machine guns once people developed proper procedures). Obviously better than nothing, still not a reasonable use case (especially if you consider that you need to burn many times more ammo to suppress an area with rifles than you'd need for a machine gun).

Am I wrong and it was a passable substitute? With the benefit of hindsight was it a sensible decision to spend money on extreme-range musketry instead of spending the same amount on even a small amount of additional MGs? Where I can learn more about actual use of volley fire in the war as opposed to theatrical pre-war exercises and doctrines?

Mike_G

2021-11-03, 07:58 AM

Ok, I really need more info. My current understanding is that not merely they were "aren't that effective when compared to an actual machinegun", they were so much less effective that it required some extraordinary circumstances for the volley fire to be of any use, especially at ranges of more than 1 mile (which was not a big deal for the heavy machine guns once people developed proper procedures). Obviously better than nothing, still not a reasonable use case (especially if you consider that you need to burn many times more ammo to suppress an area with rifles than you'd need for a machine gun).

Am I wrong and it was a passable substitute? With the benefit of hindsight was it a sensible decision to spend money on extreme-range musketry instead of spending the same amount on even a small amount of additional MGs? Where I can learn more about actual use of volley fir in the war as opposed to theatrical pre-war exercises and doctrines?

The WWI bolt action rifles were all developed in the late 19th Century. Volley sights were used with effect at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, which was only 16 years before WWI. The firing started with field guns at 2500 yards, then machine guns and rifles at 1500. No enemy soldier got within 50 yards, and the casualties were horrific. The Zulu were engaged at long range in the 1870s with effect, and there are other similar cases. The Boers in South Africa had engaged the British very effectively at long range with pretty much the same rifles that Germany would go to WWI with.

Cavalry had made effective charges in the 1890s, so it wasn't outlandish to think they'd still be able to in WWI. In fact, the Australian Light Horse did successfully charge entrenched Turkish troops who were armed with modern rifles,machine guns and artillery at Beersheba in 1917.

Now, the targets in those colonial battles was a mass of enemy in the open, and at 1500 yards a volley from a company of riflemen should put some rounds into a battalion sized target. Much like a single machine gun firing a burst.

So, yes, the generals of the early war, who had been company officers during the colonial wars of the 19th century, had seen long range volley fire be very effective. I'm sure that played into the planning.

The pace of technology increased rapidly around that time. You look at the lifespan of the Brown Bess musket which was in use for over a century from the 1720s to the 1850s, and then the Martini Henry which was only used from 1871, and saw it's replacement adopted in 1888.

The space between the last of the Colonial wars and the outbreak of WWI is shorter than the gap between the First and Second World Wars. While new weapons were developed and adopted, and tactics and doctrine changed, the lag is understandable.

halfeye

2021-11-03, 02:23 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_machine_gun

...

The weapon had a reputation for great solidity and reliability. Ian V. Hogg, in Weapons & War Machines, describes an action that took place in August 1916, during which the British 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps fired their ten Vickers guns to deliver sustained fire for twelve hours. Using 100 barrels, they fired a million rounds without breakdowns.

...

The Vickers was used for indirect fire against enemy positions at ranges up to 4,500 yards (4,115 m) with Mark VIIIz ammunition.[38] This plunging fire was used to great effect against road junctions, trench systems, forming up points, and other locations that might be observed by a forward observer, or zeroed in at one time for future attacks, or guessed at by men using maps and experience.

Rifles don't come anywhere near that.

Mike_G

2021-11-03, 03:07 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_machine_gun

Rifles don't come anywhere near that.

And they don't have to and that isn't the point of volley sights.

The 1000 to 1500 yard volley sights on rifles were put there for long range fore at area targets or suspected enemy concentrations. They were used very successfully for that in the period when they were designed and issued. An infantry battalion dropping rounds onto a Zulu impi advancing across open country at half a mile is feasible. Against entrenched or dispersed enemy using cover and drab uniforms, not so much

That's why the overly optimistic sights exist. They seem silly, but nobody expected solider to be making hits on individul enemy at 1000 yards with iron sights

Gnoman

2021-11-04, 12:40 AM

Most of the Great Powers were in the process of developing replacement rifles when war were declared. Volley sights were not a requirement for the new trials, and it was becoming common to remove them from existing guns during maintenance or refurbishment.

There was no movement toward an intermediate cartridge - all weapons intended for military use* were full-rifle designs in the 6-8 millimeter range. There is good reason for this, as the conditions of WWI made the range of a full-rifle cartridge very attractive. Guns like the vaunted US shotguns were of strictly limited use no matter how effective they were in the trench itself due to range - they lacked the ability to provide covering fire during trench assaults or to bring the enemy under fire when they were assaulting.

*Due to massive attrition, all combatants procured huge numbers of arms from neutral powers, including those intended for civilian sale. This included weapons that could arguably be called "intermediate cartridge" setups, but this was a result of desperation, not desire.

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-04, 04:12 AM

Am I wrong and it was a passable substitute? With the benefit of hindsight was it a sensible decision to spend money on extreme-range musketry instead of spending the same amount on even a small amount of additional MGs?

With the benefit of hindsight, it wasn't. Problem is, MGs were a brand new weapon and no one was quite sure what to do with them and how best to integrate them into the army - do you use them as light artillery? Defensive points for infantry support? DO you integrate then into every squad?

Well, it was the latter, obviously, but again, hindsight. WHat's worse, that solution is very expensive compared to others, since you'll need a lot of MGs and a lot of ammo, and ammo was often very scarce when compared to modern supply. If you look up how many rounds a standing army soldier had to train with his rifle per year, you get numbers that are usually well under 50. Using MGs would increase training cost by an order of magnitude.

Where I can learn more about actual use of volley fire in the war as opposed to theatrical pre-war exercises and doctrines?

Personal accounts. This isn't the middle ages, you can actually find journals and direct eyewitness reports floating around. Find a battle you are interested in, find a biography of someone in it and you're set.

Cavalry had made effective charges in the 1890s, so it wasn't outlandish to think they'd still be able to in WWI.
[...]
Now, the targets in those colonial battles was a mass of enemy in the open, and at 1500 yards a volley from a company of riflemen should put some rounds into a battalion sized target. Much like a single machine gun firing a burst.

And there's the word that's the crux of the issue - colonial. The problem was in the assumption that your enemy will give you those concentrated masses of troops to shoot at outside of colonial engagements against technologically inferior opponents (who were using actual muskets and often had pure melee units).

Thing is, this wasn't unforseeable if you compared what the doctrines of various major powers looked like, but even that sort of intelligence analysis was kind of a new thing - this is still a time when British newspapers were giving out critical strategic information.

I think it's fair to criticize the generals for sticking to what they knew too much (especially some, *cough* von Hotzendorf *cough*), but at the same time, it's a bit unreasonable to demand complete foreknowledge. Where top brass erred the most was not listening to their subordinates, many of whom had fairly good ideas about working with these newfangled inventions.

In fact, the Australian Light Horse did successfully charge entrenched Turkish troops who were armed with modern rifles,machine guns and artillery at Beersheba in 1917.

That had more to do with the... I'll go as far as to say incompetence of their enemy. Why the Turks performed so poorly, I don't know, answering that would require a long research trip. At any rate, this is sort of a trend, direct cavalry charges tend to succeed only when the opposition screws up, or there are other overwhelming circumstances. I mean, we saw cavalry charge work in the 21st century, but that doesn't mean we should revive light horse as a unit.

Most of the Great Powers were in the process of developing replacement rifles when war were declared. Volley sights were not a requirement for the new trials, and it was becoming common to remove them from existing guns during maintenance or refurbishment.

Volley sights are one thing, but even WW2 Mausers had sights going up to 2 km.

There was no movement toward an intermediate cartridge - all weapons intended for military use* were full-rifle designs in the 6-8 millimeter range. There is good reason for this, as the conditions of WWI made the range of a full-rifle cartridge very attractive. Guns like the vaunted US shotguns were of strictly limited use no matter how effective they were in the trench itself due to range - they lacked the ability to provide covering fire during trench assaults or to bring the enemy under fire when they were assaulting.

Okay, so I looked it up. The French Lebel wasn't intermediate, but it was unusually small when compared to its contemporaries (8 mm to 10-11 mm). It was also successful enough that it became the new standard, and sort of what we define full-power cartridge by.

At the same time, there definitely was a movement towards intermediate cartridge. Lever action rifles did prove effective in several battles, and several armies were looking into adopting them in some sort of capacity - again, no one was too sure in what capacity, and integrated MGs weren't yet a thing. Some of the Winchesters especially were adopted pre-war, deliberately for their rapid fire rate, albeit in limited numbers.

If WW1 happened a decade or two later, we probably would have seen military adoption of an intermediate cartridge, since several companies were working on them behind the scenes. But WW1 happened when it did, and after it was over, military spending decreased by a huge amount since everyone was too busy rebuilding their economy, and weapons became less profitable on account of surplus of military guns.

Pauly

2021-11-04, 05:17 AM

That had more to do with the... I'll go as far as to say incompetence of their enemy. Why the Turks performed so poorly, I don't know, answering that would require a long research trip. At any rate, this is sort of a trend, direct cavalry charges tend to succeed only when the opposition screws up, or there are other overwhelming circumstances. I mean, we saw cavalry charge work in the 21st century, but that doesn't mean we should revive light horse as a unit.

.

I highly recommend Volume VII ‘The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine’ by Henry Gullet of the official history of the Australian Armed Forces in WW1.

The short version of what happened is that the Australian Light Horse deployed at long range and the Turks set their sights for 1,000 meters because they expected the Australians to dismount and move forward in skirmish order.
However in smaller skirmishes the Australians had the experience that in rapid mounted advances the enemy often forgot to adjust their sights. Consequently the most dangerous part of a rapid mounted advance was roughly 800m to 1200m from the enemy and that once you got under 800m the majority of shots went over the troopers.
The Australians expected that the same would happen in a full scale charge.

The difference between Palestine and France was that in France engagement ranges were often 400m or less, so the cavalry didn’t get the opportunity to ‘go under’ the sights the way ten Australians did in Palestine.

The Turkish army was generally considered to be very competent at an individual soldier level, with the problems occurring at higher command levels and administration.

Gnoman

2021-11-04, 10:25 AM

Okay, so I looked it up. The French Lebel wasn't intermediate, but it was unusually small when compared to its contemporaries (8 mm to 10-11 mm). It was also successful enough that it became the new standard, and sort of what we define full-power cartridge by.

At the same time, there definitely was a movement towards intermediate cartridge. Lever action rifles did prove effective in several battles, and several armies were looking into adopting them in some sort of capacity - again, no one was too sure in what capacity, and integrated MGs weren't yet a thing. Some of the Winchesters especially were adopted pre-war, deliberately for their rapid fire rate, albeit in limited numbers.

If WW1 happened a decade or two later, we probably would have seen military adoption of an intermediate cartridge, since several companies were working on them behind the scenes. But WW1 happened when it did, and after it was over, military spending decreased by a huge amount since everyone was too busy rebuilding their economy, and weapons became less profitable on account of surplus of military guns.

You're off by around 30 years. The closest thing to an intermediate cartridge in the 1900s-1910s was things like the .351 Winchester Self-Loading cartridge - civilian rounds for hunting. Stuff like 6.5mm Arisaka is on the low end of a full-rifle loading, but is still a full-rifle caliber that is significantly stouter than 7.62x39 or 8mm Kurz. The big experiments with intermediate cartridges came on the eve of World War II, with things like .30 Carbine (a scaled-up pistol round intended to give vehicle crews and such a more potent self-defense weapon, not a replacement for standard rifles) and the .276 Pedersen round that the Garand was initially chambered in. Despite the similar designation, the .276 Enfield from the WWI period was a hotter and longer ranged replacement for .303 British.

EDIT (because Post is not Preview):

The Lebel was smaller than the previous generation of rounds because it was the first smokeless powder cartridge. This meant that it could hurl the bullet much faster (the expansion rate of black powder is fairly slow, which is why really big bullets were a standard - you can't throw the round any faster no matter how much powder you cram in, so you make it heavier) if you make it small bore, creating a much flatter trajectory with a longer effective range. That generation of cartridge was more powerful than the big-bore rounds it replaced.

There was limited experimentation with lever action rifles, but that mostly just helped prove to the armies of Europe that single-shot rifles weren't good enough, and you should really put a magazine on your bolt actions. After a few early experiments, the only real military use of leverguns was desperation measures during the Great War.

chitoryu12

2021-11-04, 10:49 AM

"Intermediate cartridge" is defined by more than just the diameter of the bullet. While 8mm Lebel has a physically smaller bullet than the 11mm Gras it was based on, it's only 1 millimeter shorter in overall length. Intermediate cartridges are physically smaller in overall size even if their caliber is similar to the larger rifle cartridge they're replacing, which is what allows them to have significantly reduced recoil and a lighter weight and smaller size that allow for more ammunition to be carried.

8mm Lebel was a hasty design made pretty much by just necking down 11mm Gras to a smaller bullet. The two have very similar muzzle energy, with the Lebel getting it from the velocity rather than the physical mass of the bullet. This, along with the later spitzer (pointed) bullet shape, gives it a much longer and flatter trajectory that maintains energy at range. It's more powerful than 11mm Gras at 100 yards.

This is also why it turned out to be a very poor cartridge within a few years: the massive taper and thick rim were only really workable with the tubular magazine (the Lebel itself was a hasty redesign of the Kropatschek system, which used a Winchester-style tubular magazine). Machine guns have to pull them out of a belt backwards before they can be chambered and the incredible curvature of a box magazine severely limits capacity and reliability, which is why the Chauchat has a full half-circle mag that can only fit a max of 20 rounds and in practice usually can't even be fully loaded. This slapdash design was because France wanted to capitalize on their invention of smokeless powder before any other nations found out it existed; while they got the first smokeless rifle into service, it was quickly superseded by the end of the decade by other designs and France's attempts at creating a replacement never went anywhere.

And then war were declared.

chitoryu12

2021-11-04, 12:07 PM

To further explain the development of the intermediate cartridge, I'll bring up the one weapon that actually was close to an "assault rifle": the Fedorov Avtomat.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Avtomat_M1916_Fedorov_noBG.jpg

As you can see, it's hardly a small rifle. But it's chambered for 6.5x50mm Arisaka. This is right on the bottom edge of what constitutes a "full power" rifle round; it's still a good 50% longer than a 7.62x39mm or 7.92x33mm Kurz cartridge, the same overall length as any of its contemporaries, but it has a much smaller and lighter bullet. This allows it to maintain a high velocity and correspondingly good energy at long range while having less recoil than a larger bullet. Russia was looking at adopting an automatic rifle and Fedorov had developed his own 6.5mm rimless cartridge (as I said with the Lebel, rims hang up and cause feeding issues) that would have lighter recoil than their standard 7.62x54mm round. Because they didn't have the budget to produce a whole new cartridge, but they had bought a ton of Arisakas previously when building up their military, they changed the rifle to 6.5mm Arisaka.

What's the difference here? This wasn't an assault rifle. It was a crew-served weapon, with a gunner and a loader/magazine carrier. Despite having invented a potent (on paper) automatic infantry rifle, the doctrine of the time was still focused on long-range suppressing fire. The Fedorov was considered more of a light machine gun, just one that was more portable and accurate.

It was not to be, unfortunately. In addition to the general resource problems Imperial Russia had that precluded mass adoption of this new weapon, it was extremely complex and expensive to manufacture and poor manufacturing tolerances meant that each rifle was essentially hand-fitted to the point where magazines made for another gun might not fit (they continued to have this problem all the way through World War II with the PPSh-41). The Russian Revolution in 1917 finally put a stop to the adoption of the rifle and about 3200 ended up actually being built.

Likewise, all of the rifles firing "intermediate" cartridges, or pistol cartridges like Winchester lever-actions in .44-40, were emergency purchases due to desperation for any kind of weapon. The same phenomenon is why there were so many random designs for .32 ACP handguns in the war, especially the Ruby style based on Browning's design: attrition was so massive for the time that they had to take anything they could get. There's no evidence I know of that anything like the Winchester 1907 in infantry usage was considered doctrinally different than their bolt-action rifles or served so well as to inspire later developments; France already had their own semi-auto rifle project predating 1914 and the RSC 1917 would see frontline service. Othais from C&Rsenal also has not been able to find true evidence of the French converting their Winchesters to full auto despite the common knowledge of that statement, and he believes it to be an untrue "fact" that's simply repeated constantly.

If you want to look at actual doctrinal changes in weaponry during the war, the submachine gun is your answer. Trenches are extremely difficult to fight inside of, especially with such long bolt-action rifles, which led to heavy usage of handguns, grenades, and melee weapons (including improvised ones) for taking them. There was also a desire to give rear echelon troops like artillery crew a more effective weapon than a handgun but smaller and less dedicated to long range than a rifle (the same thinking would later create the M1 Carbine, which basically fires a magnum handgun round to muzzle energies almost on par with assault rifles). Early attempts were giving pistols stocks and extended magazines, as well as converting them to full auto. This proved impractical, as machine pistols always do. The MP 18 was the first dedicated weapon to put a pistol caliber in a full auto carbine configuration.

But in the end, none of these changes actually mattered. War was not decided by the specific details of the small arms. Any attempt to change to a semi-auto carbine would just result in more expensive weapons being lost in artillery barrages, or company-scale rifle fire blasting your trench raiders from a distance. The answer ended up being to mobilize as many men and arms as possible and use more successful tactics.

Pauly

2021-11-04, 03:32 PM

The Inrange TV channel on youtube did a series on why intermediate caliber lever action guns weren’t adopted by militaries, despite them being very popular with non-military combatants, in the post Civil War west. Arguably the 44-40 lever guns could be considered the assault rifle equivalent of their time.

The series runs to 10 episodes of roughly 20-30 minutes each so there is a huge amount of info.
Even if you are to magic away the financial and logistical issues as well as the conservative military desire for full power rifles there are a number of issues that prevent their military adoption. The most significant of which were:
1) the difficulty of operating a lever gun whilst firing prone.
2) for sustained fire a trap door Springfield, or similar, offers the same rate of fire. Once the initial magazine is fired a lever gun has no advantage over a single shot gun.
3) you cannot ameliorate (2) by carrying extra magazines because the size and shape of the tubular magazine is too fragile for military use.
4) single shot guns were much more robust and reliable.

It would take the invention of the box magazine to resolve issues (2) to (4) by which time magazine bolt action rifles were available, and bolt actions trump lever actions because of (1).

Saint-Just

2021-11-04, 04:58 PM

It was not to be, unfortunately. In addition to the general resource problems Imperial Russia had that precluded mass adoption of this new weapon, it was extremely complex and expensive to manufacture and poor manufacturing tolerances meant that each rifle was essentially hand-fitted to the point where magazines made for another gun might not fit (they continued to have this problem all the way through World War II with the PPSh-41). The Russian Revolution in 1917 finally put a stop to the adoption of the rifle and about 3200 ended up actually being built.

I agree with your assessment of Avtomat as a weapon system, but want to add a correction about its' production history:

Russian Revolution delayed its' adoption, not precluded it. The plan was to produce 5000 guns to run the troop trials in 1917; that didn't happen; less than 200 were produced. However during 1920-1924 Soviets resumed its' production, produced more than 3000 and run the troop trials, before concluding in 1928 that they did not need that thing after all and warehousing what was left. Finally during the Winter war they were so strapped for automatic weapons that they re-issued the Avtomats and pretty much either lost or worn out all that remained.

Clistenes

2021-11-05, 04:38 AM

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-05, 10:26 AM

Was the Fang-tian ji chinese halberd (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://battlingblades.com/products/spear-fangtian-ji-polearms-halberd-78&ved=2ahUKEwjy3v-I9YD0AhWQmhQKHVlWAn8QFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1ngOVNoR_QHW2d7dnU6CoN) an effective weapon?

I have read that it was actually worse than a simple Qing-long ji (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D_iV85jVni94&ved=2ahUKEwiq7OWq9oD0AhXVB2MBHd-eDbIQwqsBegQIFhAB&usg=AOvVaw26taCtgfRxWOCHjljDJMz6) due to more weight for no real advantages, on top of being a more expensive weapon, hence it was mostly a ceremonial weapon...

Pretty much straight bunk, all the way.

Let's examine the first point, price difference. There is no standardized pattern to which pre-industrial manufacture weapons are made. Differences in blade shape, thickness and so on vary how much material you need for them. As for how fiddly they are to make, for your specific examples, quing would probably be more expensive because of the wavy blade. Also more of a PITA to sharpen.

In the grand scheme of things, the price point difference between the two weapons is so small you'd not really consider it. If you're outfitting an army and are that concerned about cost, you'll give them spears, or simple ji.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Eastern_Zhou_Bronze_Ji_%28Halberd%29.jpg/1200px-Eastern_Zhou_Bronze_Ji_%28Halberd%29.jpg

http://totallyhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Han-Dynasty-weapons-iron-ji-and-knife.jpg
These munitions-grade weapons survive only rarely, and usually in bad condition, that's why you don't see a lot of them

Maybe you could say that fang is, in the broadest of strokes, slightly more expensive statistically, but the specifics will change.

Now, on to no advantage. That is very obviously false - if nothing else, fang has two blades on it, giving you the ability to flip it over if one edge gets dulled or damaged. That same fact can be useful for easier hooking of opponents or their weapons, as well as for blocking downward strikes with head of the weapon and false edge cuts. There is at least one way to follow up a standard strike from above with a staff weapon with a flase edge cut from above.

The question is, is that enough of an advantage? And, well, in unarmored fight, the answer is no, because spear's much greater speed and nimbleness beats any ji. In an armored fight, the additional hooking ability is just about worth it in terms of added weight.

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/corseque-c-1520-italy-venice-16th-century-steel-round-wood-haft-cm-picture-id1172245377

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/g8An5uYYklCUYjvo-C4PR2kYRXLhf_l-xIIGPkYrjXj7DgKadvq3lozAzYN8TzCgn4IPs4irG6QPrmU0Kq rogUzxagqQewukKeLhVxenk5-rxkU540uO4MSTuVRl_5DYMGjESnvSdUWusX8J5JG-CeM

And all of that kind of doesn't matter. Because you need to do a lot of unkindness to a weapon before it becomes ineffective. Even if you took all the weight from a fang and slapped it on top of a quing as a decoration or something, you'd still have what is a pretty dangerous halberd, just with a heftier swing and less nimble. The real reasons you see more of the fangs in ceremonial roles is, I suspect, just the reverse:

You had two weapons, both of them effective, both with pros and cons. When people in charge were deciding which one to make into a ceremonial piece, they went with the one that was symmetrical.

halfeye

2021-11-05, 10:48 AM

Saint-Just

2021-11-05, 11:11 AM

Stainless steel was invented in the west in the 1840s:

So no, this as described is entirely a fantasy weapon.

I think people routinely link to replicas when discussing historical usage; people do make things out of stainless steel which are reasonably faithful to originals at least in form.

Clistenes

2021-11-05, 02:36 PM

From your link:

Stainless steel was invented in the west in the 1840s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel#History

So no, this as described is entirely a fantasy weapon.

The Fangtian and the Qinglong are NOT fantasy weapons, they are very much historical weapons.

I just linked images just in case somebody didn't remember what kind of weapon they are (having hard to remember chinese names), and one of the links shows a modern replica.

rrgg

2021-11-13, 07:09 PM

Re: sighting.

This is one of those areas where conditions matter so drastically as to make the technical means less relevant. I'm personally a merely adequate rifleman, and given a Mauser 98k (refurbed), can and have hit E-types at 800m, and seen people use similar rifles to hit at 1000m. But...a stationary target at a known range, with me comfortable on a mat with a sling and a rifle zeroed in that day, well rested, fed, and stress free, knowing I have all the time in the world to make a shot and that no conditions will change, is not exactly a practical test for actually shooting people.

From Ardant du Picq:

"Nothing is more difficult than to estimate range; in nothing is the eye more easily deceived. Practice and the use of instruments cannot make a man infallible. At Sebastopol, for two months, a distance of one thousand to twelve hundred meters could not be determined by the rifle, due to inability to see the shots. For three months it was impossible to measure by ranging shots, although all ranges were followed through, the distance to a certain battery which was only five hundred meters away, but higher and separated from us by a ravine. One day, after three months, two shots at five hundred meters were observed in the target. This distance was estimated by everybody as over one thousand meters; it was only five hundred. The village taken and the point of observation changed, the truth became evident."

The Fangtian and the Qinglong are NOT fantasy weapons, they are very much historical weapons.

https://i.imgur.com/2CtuFsn.png

From an illustration of the siege of Boulogne made in the mid 1500s.

I dunno too much about east asian polearms though.

Myth27

2021-11-14, 05:18 PM

Max_Killjoy

2021-11-14, 07:56 PM

How much height would a catapult and or a trebuchet need to launch a projectile at a target. How arched were the shots? 1/10 of the distance ? 1/5? 1/2 ?
Also what would be the minimum distance to shoot ?

https://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/trebuchet-physics.html ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAX72Xgf1U

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-15, 05:47 AM

https://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/trebuchet-physics.html ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAX72Xgf1U

Huh, I was about to gripe about using barely high school physics again, but the guy in that link actually uses the Siano paper on trebuchets. Kudos for that.

How much height would a catapult and or a trebuchet need to launch a projectile at a target.
[...]
Also what would be the minimum distance to shoot?

That's not how these weapons - let's collectively refer to them as catapults - work.

A catapult has what we call the release angle, i.e. an angle at which the projectile looses the contact with the weapon. If you want maximum range and you are using ballistic equation, that angle should be 45 deg, if you are accounting for air resistance, the angle is ~35 deg, if the projectile is spinning, it may go as low as ~20 deg. More importantly for us, that angle is controlled by adjusting something on the catapult itself - the sling length, adding to the padding that stops the arm, etc.

That means you don't ned any height at all, it's perfectly possible to bury your catapult completely in the ground and have it shoot out of said hole.

The minimum range is similarly adjustable, and in both directions. You can either angle the release downwards to spike the projectile into the ground directly, or upwards so that it goes on a little trip into the sky and falls a few meter in front of you. Both of these can also happen accidentally, and let me tell you, it's a bit of a rush, even if your projectile is a basketball and you are wearing a helmet.

The reason this wasn't done was that, well, these are siege weapons for use against building, they aren't meant for shooting at moving things. Because of that, all you want is the maximum range possible, so the besiegers won't bother with decreasing the range too much. The besieged will want some control, because they want to hit the siege engines with their siege engines, but because the besieging engines are far away, they won't really bother with close range capabilities either.

How arched were the shots? 1/10 of the distance ? 1/5? 1/2 ?

With pure ballistic equation, at 45 degrees for maximum range, height of shot is half of range. Once you want to account for air resistance, it goes a bit lower that that, although how lower depends on the projectile's air resistance and speed, and also on its spin once you start accounting for that. That is all in the ideal scenario, tha actual arc can be both higher and smaller, both at the cost of range.

Pauly

2021-11-15, 07:24 AM

halfeye

2021-11-15, 10:31 AM

A catapult has what we call the release angle, i.e. an angle at which the projectile looses the contact with the weapon. If you want maximum range and you are using ballistic equation, that angle should be 45 deg, if you are accounting for air resistance, the angle is ~35 deg, if the projectile is spinning, it may go as low as ~20 deg. More importantly for us, that angle is controlled by adjusting something on the catapult itself - the sling length, adding to the padding that stops the arm, etc.

This 35 degree angle may be correct for guns particularly where the muzzle velocity is considerably supersonic, however for arrows and other deeply subsonic projectiles I believe that 45 degrees is close to the angle that achieves maximum range.

Max_Killjoy

2021-11-15, 10:56 AM

With pure ballistic equation, at 45 degrees for maximum range, height of shot is half of range.

I was tempted to just say "height of the arc will be roughly half the range to the target on a max-range shot", but... I couldn't leave it at that either.

Martin Greywolf

2021-11-17, 10:56 AM

The effective minimum range is “out of bowshot”. Which depends on the type of bow being used, the relative height of the bow vis a vis the trebuchet/catapult, the skill of the archer and the arrows being used.

I don't know where you heard this, but it's wrong. Max range of most catapults is about on par with bows, going from 0.5 to about twice that of a military bowshot. The difference is that the heavy warbow arrow weight tops off at maybe a hundred grams, while trebuchet can do a ton and a half.

This 35 degree angle may be correct for guns particularly where the muzzle velocity is considerably supersonic, however for arrows and other deeply subsonic projectiles I believe that 45 degrees is close to the angle that achieves maximum range.

The 35 degree figure is for the spherical projectiles, or rather, golf balls, tested experimentally. The reason behind this is... well, kinda simple.

Air drag slows your projectile more if the flight time is longer, so reducing flight time reduces air drag and increases total range. There is a sweet spot for "45 deg optimal ballistic range" and "spike the thing straight to the ground to reduce flight time", obviously, and since less flight time is achieved only if you go under 45 deg, thats where your best angle is.

Now, air drag has a hell of an equation: F = 1/2 * rho * v^2 * C * A, and the lower this resulting force F is, the closer your optimal angle is to 45 deg. You can lower A, area of cross-section (sling bullets do this by being egg shaped rather than round), you can lower the drag coefficient C (again, sling bullets, as well as arrows), you can lower medium density rho by going uphill or waiting for good weather (there's a reason why the record for bow shot range was made by Ottoman bow in fairly high hills), but lowering speed is exponentially effective for reducing air drag.

Unfortunately, reducing speed is also very effective for reducing your maximum range.

tl;dr For ball, use 35 deg, for sling bullet, use 25 deg, for streamlined shapes, use 40-45 deg, regardless of how fast they are going.

Frozenstep

2021-11-17, 11:47 AM

Mike_G

2021-11-17, 01:40 PM

So, I'm writing a setting where characters have access to a magic that allows them to somewhat manipulate the physical properties of their bodies, and magical armor that's created to be an extension of their body. They can change the strength of the strength, flexibility, and friction of the material to a certain degree, and freely change it.

So first question, would making your armor/flesh more flexible without giving up any material strength be a good thing for absorbing damage? That should increase the toughness of the material, right?

Second question, if you could manipulate friction on your armor, would decreasing it be the right play? I imagine it would make it harder for anything but a direct hit to do any damage, and I don't think a decrease in material friction would make it noticeably easier for a spear/sword trying to get through the armor, right?

So, there's a lot that goes into this.

More flexible armor would transfer more force from the blow to the body beneath than rigid armor. So that's worse. But it would allow better coverage of joints and more mobility in the armor. Making flesh and bone more flexible might help it absorb damage in a "bend, don't break" fashion. So I guess it depends?

Now, reducing friction would probably be a good thing in general, as blows would slide off and transfer less of their force/impact/momentum (I'm not a physics major, so I'm not sure which is the most correct term) to the target. This is the reason for sloped armor. Make hits glance off rather than be stopped and transfer all that oomph to the target.

Frozenstep

2021-11-18, 01:33 PM

So, there's a lot that goes into this.

More flexible armor would transfer more force from the blow to the body beneath than rigid armor. So that's worse. But it would allow better coverage of joints and more mobility in the armor. Making flesh and bone more flexible might help it absorb damage in a "bend, don't break" fashion. So I guess it depends?

Now, reducing friction would probably be a good thing in general, as blows would slide off and transfer less of their force/impact/momentum (I'm not a physics major, so I'm not sure which is the most correct term) to the target. This is the reason for sloped armor. Make hits glance off rather than be stopped and transfer all that oomph to the target.

Thanks for the answer! I was imagining more flexibility would lead armor to work more like a car's crumple zone, but thinking on it again, you definitely wouldn't want to make it easier for metal armor to cave in. Not sure about the padding beneath it though?

Mr Beer

2021-11-18, 02:24 PM

Max_Killjoy

2021-11-18, 08:05 PM

Plate armor almost requires a flexible padded layer underneath.

Vinyadan

2021-11-19, 11:01 AM

Even today, I believe pretty much all helmets have some padding or a suspension system, so that the helmet is actually slightly distanced from your head and the force it would transmit when hit is dampened.

Storm_Of_Snow

2021-11-19, 04:08 PM

If you have multiple layers of armour, I suspect a more flexible layer somewhere would be helpful to absorb shock. I'm not convinced it would be a game-changer.

Maybe you could mix up a non-newtonian fluid with water and cornstarch, change it's properties so it doesn't ooze out or evaporate and then incorporate it into a gambeson, that might be a highly effective shock absorber.

The obvious priority is to take rigid metal armour and make it stronger, harder and probably lighter. You want a certain minimum weight I think for helmets because below a certain mass it might be too easy for your opponents to knock them into your skull.
Non-newtonian fluids would give you a higher range of movement than solid plate - although not much more, because you'd need to incorporate it into a cellular structure, or it'd wind up sitting at the bottom of your armour.

The sort of biomancy Frozenstep's talking about would be good with melee IMO, especially martial arts and blunt force weapons, to absorb the impact forces before they damage internal organs. Once you're into piercing weapons, and especially projectiles, you really need to limit the distance they can get through tissues, whether that's stopping them in place or deflecting the impact off at an angle. And even then, hits on the head can at least cause concussions, and potentially fatal injuries to blood vessels in the neck or cerebral haemorrages.

SleepyShadow

2021-12-01, 12:37 PM

Milodiah

2021-12-01, 01:35 PM

Hey everyone, I've got an adventure coming up for my group, and I'd like some advice on how to handle a few things. The players are going to be coordinating an armed revolt in an attempt to liberate a Germanic(ish) port city from the control of an occupying Byzantine(ish) force. Technology is approximately that of the 1450s, so gunpowder weapons such as cannons and harquebuses are available but not in widespread use. Not the most realistic scenario, I know, but I'm already dealing with a wizard and a centaur in the party, so there's that :smalltongue:

My question is twofold: What are some things the Germanic freedom fighters would do when not being given direct orders by the players, and what are some countermeasures the Byzantines would do to maintain control of the city?

Please feel free to ask for more details. Thank you in advance.

One thing I can say without doing a ton of research (which I kinda wanna do for you, not gonna lie, this sounds fun), is that one of the key things most urban insurrections have done for pretty much as long as there have been cities is the art of the barricade. It's something anybody can throw together, with pretty much random furniture and stuff, and in addition to being an improvised fighting position, it slows the movement of the opposition who is more likely to be coordinating larger groups of regular troops, especially cavalry, compared to the rebels who are moving around with smaller groups of more lightly equipped fighters. In addition, the locals know the city a lot better than the occupiers, they know that if this street is blocked off they can cut through the walled garden two streets over, go down the alley behind the butcher shop, climb over the fence next to the plaza with the water well, and be at their destination only thirty seconds slower.

Plus, if you have gunpowder at your disposal, you've got the possibility of having a hidden cache of it near said barricade, with someone waiting to set the fuse and run if a large enough group shows up to start tearing it down, on top of the traditional tactic of bringing some skirmishers out of hiding, hitting them in the rear, and breaking off contact.

Also, pretty much anything to erode the occupiers' morale is essential, since that's what is really being fought here, rather than their actual military force. Burn their food stockpiles, assassinate officers, pick off any soldier who's alone. Scrawl graffiti where they can see it. Steal pretty much anything you can from them. Hell, the Swiss published a literal guidebook on how ANY CITIZEN can ruin the day of an occupying soldier called Total Resistance and while its obviously about the period immediately after WW2, the general takeaway from it is timeless; anything you can do to make the common soldier have a bad time increases his anxiety, keeps him from feeling comfortable or safe, and in time might even break his will. Keep him from sleeping by making loud noises outside their barracks at night. Put out any light sources around their positions when they aren't looking. If they ask for directions, give them wrong ones. If they ask for food, give them spoiled things. Be rude to them in public but never quite enough for you to be punished. If they make you build new structures, do it as shoddily as possible. If they make you drive a cart, take the worst, roughest roads you know.

You can leave the sword fights and sabotage to the small percent of people who are actually taking up arms, but everyone can do these things.

This treatment can be extended to anyone who cooperates with them too, to drive home the message that they are The Enemy and they are Not Welcome.

As for the occupying force, to reference things like Jeffery Record's work Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win or Andrew Mack's Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: the Politics of Asymmetric Conflict, the occupying force has two general approaches to uprooting and ending an insurgency, assuming this is an ongoing conflict rather than a powderkeg moment where the insurgents attempt to transition to conventional warfare. The insurgency ends not when every single fighter has been hunted down and exterminated, because that's nearly impossible even today with all the technology in the world (though if there's any sort of thought reading magic, things may be different). Instead, the occupying force needs to convince the overall population that is supporting, hiding, and supplying recruits to the insurgency that its in their best interests to stop doing that. You've got two general routes, hearts and minds or total barbarism. Historically total barbarism has been preferred by empires like Rome or Byzantium; civilian reprisals (every time one of our men die, ten of yours will, even if they're just bakers or carpenters or farmers), extortionate taxation or commandeering of resources to drive the population into poverty, destruction of food supplies, and generally just letting their men sack and pillage at will. Obviously at first the population hates this and support for the insurrection will grow, but as time goes on and the rebels don't make any meaningful, visible gains or victories, and as the occupying force demonstrates that they simply will not stop doing these things until the rebels stop, the population will start to turn on them.

Another key element for the occupiers is infiltration and surveillance of the actual leadership of the rebels; obviously its nice to be able to steal plans, discover identities, and locate supplies, but beyond that it instills a sense of paranoia and mistrust amongst the rebel leadership and forces them to start being more and more secretive which can begin impeding their actual effectiveness. If leadership is too paranoid to send messages except in complex ciphers delivered by their most trusted inner circle, then they're not communicating nearly as well as they were before. If one leader starts suggesting changes in strategy, the others might think he's a double agent or is being coerced. And if every other month a rebel group is ambushed and broken up, then publicly executed based based on spies and insiders, the public isn't going to be sending their young men to join it, nor are the insurgents going to be as accepting of new members that could be plants.

Frozenstep

2021-12-01, 01:41 PM

As for the occupying force, to reference things like Jeffery Record's work Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win or Andrew Mack's Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: the Politics of Asymmetric Conflict, the occupying force has two general approaches to uprooting and ending an insurgency, assuming this is an ongoing conflict rather than a powderkeg moment where the insurgents attempt to transition to conventional warfare. The insurgency ends not when every single fighter has been hunted down and exterminated, because that's nearly impossible even today with all the technology in the world (though if there's any sort of thought reading magic, things may be different). Instead, the occupying force needs to convince the overall population that is supporting, hiding, and supplying recruits to the insurgency that its in their best interests to stop doing that. You've got two general routes, hearts and minds or total barbarism. Historically total barbarism has been preferred by empires like Rome or Byzantium; civilian reprisals (every time one of our men die, ten of yours will, even if they're just bakers or carpenters or farmers), extortionate taxation or commandeering of resources to drive the population into poverty, destruction of food supplies, and generally just letting their men sack and pillage at will. Obviously at first the population hates this and support for the insurrection will grow, but as time goes on and the rebels don't make any meaningful, visible gains or victories, and as the occupying force demonstrates that they simply will not stop doing these things until the rebels stop, the population will start to turn on them.

Another key element for the occupiers is infiltration and surveillance of the actual leadership of the rebels; obviously its nice to be able to steal plans, discover identities, and locate supplies, but beyond that it instills a sense of paranoia and mistrust amongst the rebel leadership and forces them to start being more and more secretive which can begin impeding their actual effectiveness. If leadership is too paranoid to send messages except in complex ciphers delivered by their most trusted inner circle, then they're not communicating nearly as well as they were before. If one leader starts suggesting changes in strategy, the others might think he's a double agent or is being coerced. And if every other month a rebel group is ambushed and broken up, then publicly executed based based on spies and insiders, the public isn't going to be sending their young men to join it, nor are the insurgents going to be as accepting of new members that could be plants.

I'm not the one who asked the question, but thank you for giving this answer! This has given me a lot to think about for my own writing. Great stuff!

Berenger

2021-12-01, 04:34 PM

SleepyShadow

2021-12-01, 07:05 PM

It's already implied by Milodiahs post, but a good way to annoy an occupying army is to force them to waste resources, such as manpower. If the invaders have to maintain a strong presence of sentries, patrols and bodyguards watching every bridge, road, water supply well, grain silo, storehouse, port facility, supply ship, army officer and important colloborators mansion, this a) stresses the hell out of the individual soldiers, b) hits the empires treasury really hard and c) drains strategic assets the invaders could proably use elsewhere, especially in the case of a large empire that might have to deal with several insurrections, insecure borders or open wars at any given time.

One thing I can say without doing a ton of research (which I kinda wanna do for you, not gonna lie, this sounds fun), is that one of the key things most urban insurrections have done for pretty much as long as there have been cities is the art of the barricade. It's something anybody can throw together, with pretty much random furniture and stuff, and in addition to being an improvised fighting position, it slows the movement of the opposition who is more likely to be coordinating larger groups of regular troops, especially cavalry, compared to the rebels who are moving around with smaller groups of more lightly equipped fighters. In addition, the locals know the city a lot better than the occupiers, they know that if this street is blocked off they can cut through the walled garden two streets over, go down the alley behind the butcher shop, climb over the fence next to the plaza with the water well, and be at their destination only thirty seconds slower.

Plus, if you have gunpowder at your disposal, you've got the possibility of having a hidden cache of it near said barricade, with someone waiting to set the fuse and run if a large enough group shows up to start tearing it down, on top of the traditional tactic of bringing some skirmishers out of hiding, hitting them in the rear, and breaking off contact.

Also, pretty much anything to erode the occupiers' morale is essential, since that's what is really being fought here, rather than their actual military force. Burn their food stockpiles, assassinate officers, pick off any soldier who's alone. Scrawl graffiti where they can see it. Steal pretty much anything you can from them. Hell, the Swiss published a literal guidebook on how ANY CITIZEN can ruin the day of an occupying soldier called Total Resistance and while its obviously about the period immediately after WW2, the general takeaway from it is timeless; anything you can do to make the common soldier have a bad time increases his anxiety, keeps him from feeling comfortable or safe, and in time might even break his will. Keep him from sleeping by making loud noises outside their barracks at night. Put out any light sources around their positions when they aren't looking. If they ask for directions, give them wrong ones. If they ask for food, give them spoiled things. Be rude to them in public but never quite enough for you to be punished. If they make you build new structures, do it as shoddily as possible. If they make you drive a cart, take the worst, roughest roads you know.

You can leave the sword fights and sabotage to the small percent of people who are actually taking up arms, but everyone can do these things.

This treatment can be extended to anyone who cooperates with them too, to drive home the message that they are The Enemy and they are Not Welcome.

As for the occupying force, to reference things like Jeffery Record's work Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win or Andrew Mack's Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: the Politics of Asymmetric Conflict, the occupying force has two general approaches to uprooting and ending an insurgency, assuming this is an ongoing conflict rather than a powderkeg moment where the insurgents attempt to transition to conventional warfare. The insurgency ends not when every single fighter has been hunted down and exterminated, because that's nearly impossible even today with all the technology in the world (though if there's any sort of thought reading magic, things may be different). Instead, the occupying force needs to convince the overall population that is supporting, hiding, and supplying recruits to the insurgency that its in their best interests to stop doing that. You've got two general routes, hearts and minds or total barbarism. Historically total barbarism has been preferred by empires like Rome or Byzantium; civilian reprisals (every time one of our men die, ten of yours will, even if they're just bakers or carpenters or farmers), extortionate taxation or commandeering of resources to drive the population into poverty, destruction of food supplies, and generally just letting their men sack and pillage at will. Obviously at first the population hates this and support for the insurrection will grow, but as time goes on and the rebels don't make any meaningful, visible gains or victories, and as the occupying force demonstrates that they simply will not stop doing these things until the rebels stop, the population will start to turn on them.

Another key element for the occupiers is infiltration and surveillance of the actual leadership of the rebels; obviously its nice to be able to steal plans, discover identities, and locate supplies, but beyond that it instills a sense of paranoia and mistrust amongst the rebel leadership and forces them to start being more and more secretive which can begin impeding their actual effectiveness. If leadership is too paranoid to send messages except in complex ciphers delivered by their most trusted inner circle, then they're not communicating nearly as well as they were before. If one leader starts suggesting changes in strategy, the others might think he's a double agent or is being coerced. And if every other month a rebel group is ambushed and broken up, then publicly executed based based on spies and insiders, the public isn't going to be sending their young men to join it, nor are the insurgents going to be as accepting of new members that could be plants.

This is fantastic! Thank you :)

Gnoman

2021-12-01, 07:38 PM

Forged documents, or genuine ones you've gotten a hold of but can't use can be useful as well. A pretty solid adventure could be done where you're trying to slip notes on patrol routes or garrison rosters or whatever (such things did exist in the period) into the pockets of occupying officers. So that those documents will be discovered and that guy looks like a Resistance agent.

Pauly

2021-12-03, 02:07 AM

VoxRationis

2021-12-03, 04:23 AM

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-03, 05:49 AM

This might be beyond the scope of what knowledgeable people are allowed to tell me, but how do stealth aircraft communicate? If the idea of survivability rests on a bus-sized hunk of electronics reducing its radio signature to the minimum possible extent, how does that coexist with the nature of communicating via bursts of emitted radio waves?

The exact details of this are classified, so the people who know how it's really done can't tell you. What we have are fairly good guesses.

The general idea is that you have two general solutions to this problem.

First one is passive reception. After you go quiet, you don't send out any signals, merely receive the ones sent to you. While that may theoretically reveal that something is going on to the enemy, the signal is encrypted, so all they know is that something is being sent. In practice, the air is filled with all sorts of traffic, and being able to pick out one specific frequency as "this is a stealth jet" isn't really possible. After all, you don't necessarily need to say anything to the mission control, you just need them to send you updates.

Second solution is directed signals. The easiest to get your head around are lasers, they go from point A to point B and are hard to see from the sides. You can do this with all sorts of electromagnetic waves, sending them out in a tighht cone instead of a sphere, the problem is that you need to claibrate your antenna direction fairly precisely. Also, this deosn't mean there will be no signal to detect outside of that cone (you can still see a laser from the side if it has to go through, say, mist), just that there will be a lot less of it and therefore harder to detect.

Gnoman

2021-12-03, 06:09 AM

You can also keep the transmission power very low. If you're just sharing data with nearby aircraft, you don't need as strong a signal as it would take to transmit to base. Couple that with burst transmission, where each communication is extremely brief, and you don't make nearly as much noise.

Playing with frequencies can do a lot as well, but that veers into the "this is really hard to answer because anybody who knows is not telling" area.

Berenger

2021-12-03, 09:20 AM

I strongly doubt that this is the correct answer for modern stealth aircraft due to obvious drawbacks, but one hypothetical method to broadcast a message without revealing your exact position would be to eject a disposable transmitter that only activates after a short time (when you are several miles away in an unknown direction), sends a message pre-recorded on launch and then self-destructs.

AdAstra

2021-12-03, 09:42 AM

Even modern active radar has ways to pretty significantly reduce the ability of passive sensors to detect it, which is fairly important given that a receiver of equal sensitivity will always be able to detect an emitter/receiver set at a greater distance than the latter can if it knows what to look for. Frequency hopping and transmitting across a range of frequencies at once both serve as a means of reducing the degree of signature on any given frequency, thus making the same total amount of emissions less obvious even if you're looking at the whole spectrum, and more likely to be excluded as background noise. Managing emissions that aren't part of the main beam and messing with your scan pattern and beam width also helps a lot.

There's certainly a lot of top secret stuff (most militaries are reluctant to even use their most advanced radar sets or algorithms in exercises because it would allow other participants to get a better idea of their quirks), but even publicly available info has a lot of pointers in terms of keeping radio transmissions as sneaky as possible. These same methods, particularly directionality, are applicable to communications, as the F-22's directional communications demonstrate (I was under the impression that they just used directional antennae as opposed to lasers). Hell, you can use a radar as a particularly big and complicated directional communications device if you want.

As mentioned, there is also the brute force way of just emitting signals as little as possible. No matter how clever you are, still good to minimize emissions in the first place.

Milodiah

2021-12-03, 03:12 PM

There is also the fact that in order to detect signals, you have to have equipment in place to detect signals, and it has to be functional and networked to have any sort of meaningful impact on triangulation and rangefinding. Which is why militaries have invested so much into electronic warfare options such as jammers, decoys, specialized attack aircraft targeting such equipment, and doctrines designed to minimize the advantages of such equipment.

Honestly this is, as has been pointed out, one of the cutting edges of arms races, and its moving both so quickly and so secretly that outside observers have pointed out our current assumptions might be all wrong. The core concept of a 'stealth' aircraft is that as far as we know it's impossible to truly 100% cancel out all radar reflection, so the goal is to reduce it so much that its minimal apparent cross section gets dismissed as some birds, or atmospheric interference, or generally anything other than a warplane. But there's a lot of talk going around that some radar systems are being paired with powerful enough computers now that the deception threshold is much lower, and the pattern recognition capabilities of these processors have made the current generation of stealth aircraft obsolete because even the tiny, intermittent radar contacts generated by stealth craft is enough once all the random noise is more or less fully weeded out by a cutting edge system.

But it sounds like the actual experts are conflicted on whether or not that's true, since nobody has the full picture, and even if they were certain that's sure not going to be something they outright say in a press conference. Its no doubt the focus of several multi billion dollars black-budget projects the Pentagon is running right now, of the type that come from the vague slush funds because even having it be a named item in a Congressional line item budget would be giving away too much.

Pauly

2021-12-03, 03:32 PM

One method used in radio transmissions is burst transmissions. Basically the message is recorded, encoded, compressed then sent in a very short message. Something that might take 3 seconds of transmission by regular means can be compressed to less than 1/10th of a second.
This also helps make your messages harder to decrypt.

The drawback is that even if it is harder to detect, triangulate and decrypt it is a very distinct type of transmission.

Another method involves bouncing messages off the ionosphere. The message is sent in a focussed beam that is sent to a known location.
This involves having radio receptors in a wide range of locations that can relay the message securely to the base. I assume with advances in computing that you need less receptors than previously, but there is a limit to the possible pathways that can be used. Countries with a small physical presence will find this method almost impossible for aircraft, countries with a continent wide or global presence will find it easier.

Eladrinblade

2021-12-03, 06:24 PM

Is there a consensus on what the 3.5 rules for a poleaxe should be?

Berenger

2021-12-04, 04:28 AM

Is there a consensus on what the 3.5 rules for a poleaxe should be?

I don't think so. Personally, I'd just use the values of a halberd, remove the "set against charge" option and add "bludeoning" to the damage options. I guess the developers omitted a weapon that has bludeoning, piercing and slashing damage on purpose so you can't sink all your wealth by level into one badass magic weapon that circumvents the "monster has damage reduction x vs. damage type y" minigame.

Storm_Of_Snow

2021-12-04, 03:39 PM

Second solution is directed signals. The easiest to get your head around are lasers, they go from point A to point B and are hard to see from the sides. You can do this with all sorts of electromagnetic waves, sending them out in a tighht cone instead of a sphere, the problem is that you need to claibrate your antenna direction fairly precisely. Also, this deosn't mean there will be no signal to detect outside of that cone (you can still see a laser from the side if it has to go through, say, mist), just that there will be a lot less of it and therefore harder to detect.

I'd guess at that - up from the aircraft using a dorsal transmitter to satellites and/or a C&C aircraft. And if it's a squadron flying in formation, low powered pulsed laser semaphore generated and interpreted by computer for anything they need to communicate between them.

Pauly

2021-12-04, 08:45 PM

Is there a consensus on what the 3.5 rules for a poleaxe should be?

Considering that any correlation between D&D’s combat system and reality is coincidental and unintended, no.

Eladrinblade

2021-12-05, 01:29 AM

I don't think so. Personally, I'd just use the values of a halberd, remove the "set against charge" option and add "bludeoning" to the damage options. I guess the developers omitted a weapon that has bludeoning, piercing and slashing damage on purpose so you can't sink all your wealth by level into one badass magic weapon that circumvents the "monster has damage reduction x vs. damage type y" minigame.

Sensible. Personally I don't think any of a poleaxes ...weapons? would go up to 1d10, especially not that rinkydink little spear, but your version is simple and works.

SleepyShadow

2021-12-05, 10:50 AM

Re: The Byzantine response.
The most famous Byzantine way of dealing with enemies was to pay the foes of their enemies to make trouble and force the enemies to retreat and deal with the other foes.
Another method they used was to mix populations that disliked each other, moving a group of ethnicity [A] into ethnicity [B]’s region and vice versa. Thus ethnic groups A and B would spend a lot of time fighting each other and less time resisting the Byzantines.
The punishment for rebellion was blinding, and if provoked severely enough they could employ Emperor Boris II’s method of subjugating the Bulgars.

I'll definitely use this one. Thank you :smallsmile:

Pauly

2021-12-05, 03:28 PM

Sensible. Personally I don't think any of a poleaxes ...weapons? would go up to 1d10, especially not that rinkydink little spear, but your version is simple and works.

A few things about that “rinkydink little spear”. Talking broad strokes here and I’m sure more expert users in the forum can add more information/correct my errors.

1) It is a purpose built armor penetrator, not a traditional spearhead.
2) traditional spears are used with the front hand providing guidance and the backhand providing power. Poleaxes are built for both hands to deliver full power.
3) the spearhead can do more damage than the axe or hammer. Swings are delivered faster but with only the weight of the head delivering mass, thrusts are delivered with the full weight of the weapon, plus an additional 80+kg of user mass behind them.
4) Other polearms (spears, halberds, bills, glaives etc.) are designed to fight at distance. A lot of their use is prodding and poking to keep the enemy at range. Poleaxes are designed to be used in close (i.e. sword distance) and their use is predicated on using full force blows and relying on your armor to protect you.

It’s a long time since I ventured into 3.5 territory but here are a few things.
- it shouldn’t have reach like a spear or halberd, you should only attack adjacent.
- it should give the user Power Attack, which is always on and can’t be turned off, except for stepping up to Improved Power Attack.

Edit to add
As for a weapon that does slashing, piercing and bludgeoning damage, I present the ubiquitous European longsword (bastard swords and 2 handed swords in D&D naming system)
Regular use = slashing
Half swording = piercing
Murder stroke = bludgeoning

Max_Killjoy

2021-12-06, 09:36 AM

Yeah, many sources calling a pollaxe a "polearm" is probably leading to some confusion as to how they were used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5mqf-GNIXI

Brother Oni

2021-12-06, 12:10 PM

Re: The Byzantine response.
The most famous Byzantine way of dealing with enemies was to pay the foes of their enemies to make trouble and force the enemies to retreat and deal with the other foes.

Incidentally, this was also the go-to foreign policy of most feudal Chinese kingdoms, yi yi zhi yi (以夷制夷) where they paid the closest set of 'barbarians' to act as a border force against other 'barbarians'.

This policy hasn't worked all that well, with more than one set of paid barbarians overthrowing the Chinese regime and installing their own dynasty (and then they also falling into the same trap, a few emperors down the line).

Mr Blobby

2021-12-06, 02:03 PM

Grim Portent

2021-12-06, 03:41 PM

One thing about the occupation scenario I haven't seen come up, how long has the port city been occupied?

Is this a very recent thing, or has it been going on for several years?

The longer it's been going on the more likely the city is going to be run by locals loyal to the empire who are actually somewhat legitimate leaders, as opposed to purely by a military governor from the empire who rules by the threat of arms, which makes the situation more complex and potentially more fun.

Subverted nobles, the town council, wealthy merchants and really anyone who's decided they benefit from the occupation and are averse to the city being restored to it's prior state would all have cause to try and thwart rebels to try and prevent the imperial military returning in force to implement harsh crackdowns.

This would make the initial conflict primarily with quislings, the local guards and officials collaborating with the empire, with the return of the empire's actual forces being a looming threat that threatens to escalate the situation if the locals can't keep it under control.

Pauly

2021-12-06, 03:50 PM

Incidentally, this was also the go-to foreign policy of most feudal Chinese kingdoms, yi yi zhi yi (以夷制夷) where they paid the closest set of 'barbarians' to act as a border force against other 'barbarians'.

This policy hasn't worked all that well, with more than one set of paid barbarians overthrowing the Chinese regime and installing their own dynasty (and then they also falling into the same trap, a few emperors down the line).

The Byzantine response was slightly different. They would pay barbarians from further away to attack the closer barbarian. Which lead to a famous reply to a Byzantine suggestion that the Pechenegs attack the Turks. The Pechenegs reply was that since the Turks were both numerous and fierce that they’d rather not.

Mr Blobby

2021-12-06, 04:05 PM

We have to remember that it might not be a two-sided struggle either. Third parties might also be playing a game too, desiring the place for themselves. The pro-Independence forces might also be split; side X going for the last Prince's bastard kid, while side Y has chosen Noble A to start a new line, but side Z wants the old oligarchic republic [which X's great-granddad overthrew] to be restored...

It might be that the occupiers are holding on not because they're popular or powerful, but their enemies are split and half the time, fighting each other.

Another complication might be 'the Empire' may be in decline; that it's suffering from 'Imperial overstrech' and is weakening due to contant fire-fighting and wars on other fronts. A new conquest or not, the knowledge that their overlord's grip is fading might spur La Resistance [for example, the Empire has to pull out much of the garrison to fight elsewhere]

Pauly

2021-12-06, 08:49 PM

Saint-Just

2021-12-07, 08:35 AM

Another historical thing the Byzantines did to consolidate power was to offer local nobility a promotion, a bigger better richer fiefdom, but in wayovertheristan on the condition they give up their current fiefdom. The Byzantines could do this because their nobility wasnÂ’t as tightly tied to the land in feudal Europe.
Refusing the offer marked you as a rebel, or rebel in waiting. Accepting the offer cut off your local power base and made you dependent on the empire to enforce your will on the new fiefdom.
This wasnÂ’t used a lot as the condition to do it (a vacant fiefdom) wasnÂ’t a common thing.
The new guy the emperor would appoint to replace the current incumbent could be relied upon to be more loyal than the predecessor.

Japanese central government (however it was called at the particular point in time) tried to do this regularly with varying degrees of success. Date under Masamune famously defeated two attempts at that (first by taking new lands which were not that far away and turning them into even better power base, and then by persuading Hideyoshi to rescind his demand for resettlement on Shikoku somehow - my only source talks about semi-staged semi-rebellion which semi-delivered semi-demands and Hideyoshi chose to focus his ambitions on Korea instead of making Date fall in line).

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-07, 09:33 AM

Yeah, many sources calling a pollaxe a "polearm" is probably leading to some confusion as to how they were used.

They were used like polearms, because they were polearms, polearms being weapons on a pole that you need two hands to use. It's about as broad a category of use as swords, and if you take your two examples from both of those, there will be fairly small crossover in use, whether it is spear vs pollaxe or dussack versus a longsword.

Still, in both cases there is a significant crossover in techniques. Lichtenauer tradition mixes up messer and dussack terminology, and Fiore's axe (azza is what he calls what we refer to as pollaxe) in armor and spear in armor sections are fairly incomplete without each other (axe section dealing with crossings initiating from strikes, spear with crossings from thrusts).

What confuses most people at a casual glance is how different spear sparring looks to pollaxe sparring, but that's because of armor. Take that same spear and spar in armor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrqxV80EqIU) (well, as if you were fighting in armor), and you will look very similar to pollaxe spars. I mean, yeah, pollaxe is much better at striking (but only with one end!), but parries and general approach to the fight stay the same.

Fiore MS Latin pollaxe strike parry
https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/1/18/MS_Latin_11269_09r-c.png/400px-MS_Latin_11269_09r-c.png
carrying one to persumably brace it against charge, shield and all:
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/10885/1000
long range thrust alongside spears, in formation:
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/15998/1000

Pollaxe is a polearm, and has most of the traits a polearm should have, it's just very specialized towards one specific polearm use: against armor in two hands. But that doesn't make it not a polearm, that would be kinda like looking at someone halfswording a longsword, compare it to Highland broadsword and promptly declare longsword not a sword.

Milodiah

2021-12-07, 09:38 AM

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-09, 06:19 PM

I think the confusion is that in tabletop terms "polearm" and "reach" are fairly synonymous. You could classify it as a polearm if you wanted, since it is in fact a fairly long haft with a head, but that's rather missing the point. The actual manuals of arms from the (later) periods like those of George Silver didn't consider it one in terms of use, since the haft is more an item of leverage than of range.

Yeah, but Silver deals with pikes and halberds. In the context of the 5 or 10 foot discrete squares, i.e. 1.5 m to 3 m...

Your standard footman's spear that is about or a bit under 2 m will not be able to reach a square over consistently. Taking my spear as a case study, my reach is about 2 meters when delivering a proper stab, and tops up at about 2.5 meters when I slide my lead hand. Any more than that, and you get into a dangerous territory where a parry will knock your point off line long enough for you to be rushed with ease. Sure, if I decide to lance with it, I can get a bit over 3 meters, but that's feat territory.

Assuming that the spear is the prototypical polearm, we can deduce the definition of a polearm to be this: provided you are standing on the edge of your square, you must be able to reach into the suqare one over with one of your standard-issue attacks. Can a pollaxe do that? The answer is yeah, it can, but not if you hold it in 2/3 "halfswording" way, you need to either thrust with it or swing it, and then it can just about reach the far square.

Another way to look at it is by asking yourself, how do you use it? And from that point of view, it is definitely a polearm, because the way you use a spear or a staff against armor is almost identical to pollaxe.

Another another way is to look at a pollaxe and declare that it is a hurty thing on a pole that you need two hands to use, and therefore a polearm. Which is perhaps not the most practical way of looking at it, because then two handed maces also qualify.

The real problem is that 5 ft square is an arbitrary measurement, and with those, you will always get weapons that are exactly borderline on the reach spectrum. It's just that this particular one hits pollaxes, but add a foot and you replace them with spears, remove a foot and you get longswords.

Thane of Fife

2021-12-09, 09:04 PM

Eladrinblade

2021-12-09, 09:14 PM

I read recently that crossbowmen would put honey on the tips of their bolts in order to aid with armor penetration (I think it said something about the honey gripping the armor and helping to guide the bolt in). It sounds plausible, I suppose, but I've never heard anything like that before. Anybody know if there's any truth to it?

I don't know about honey, but some people did grease their arrow/bolt tips which does make them penetrate better. Tod's Workshop on youtube did a video about it.

SleepyShadow

2021-12-10, 02:04 PM

In RL examples of this era, 'rebels' won due to one or both of the two things - figurehead(s) to rally around [perhaps in exile or hiding] and things to encourage a feeling of 'Us' [and not Them]. The first could be members of the deposed Royal Family, senior nobles etc, while the latter would often be either nationalism and/or religion.

Therefore, savvy conquerors would try to eliminate one or both of these. And as the second is usually really hard to do, the first one is the best. Make sure the ruling line is as extinct as possible, slaughter the resisting nobles and give out their lands to your partisans, most of which will be loyal subjects from other places [the others being quisling locals]. If possible, find one of the latter to be your puppet ruler/viceroy.

Then you apply the 'damp course' between our foreign nobles and native peasants - a large cohort of colonists from somewhere else to serve in what passes as the 'middle class' at this time [church, trading groups etc]. Divide and rule - the native peasants may be seething but they're basically unfocused, and they are unable to join up with either the nobles or burghers because they're all different and often these three groups would be at each other's throats anyway.

Therefore, if the conquerors have a 'barbarous' reputation, the city-state might have surrendered and be play-acting compliance as they ready themselves for the 'Great Rebellion' - knowing they only have one shot at this.

That's good to know. There is a figurehead the rebels are rallying behind. He's not a noble per say, but he is a well-regarded veteran from the last war.

One thing about the occupation scenario I haven't seen come up, how long has the port city been occupied?

Is this a very recent thing, or has it been going on for several years?

The longer it's been going on the more likely the city is going to be run by locals loyal to the empire who are actually somewhat legitimate leaders, as opposed to purely by a military governor from the empire who rules by the threat of arms, which makes the situation more complex and potentially more fun.

Subverted nobles, the town council, wealthy merchants and really anyone who's decided they benefit from the occupation and are averse to the city being restored to it's prior state would all have cause to try and thwart rebels to try and prevent the imperial military returning in force to implement harsh crackdowns.

This would make the initial conflict primarily with quislings, the local guards and officials collaborating with the empire, with the return of the empire's actual forces being a looming threat that threatens to escalate the situation if the locals can't keep it under control.

The occupation has officially been going on for two decades, but it's really just an extension of an occupation that's been going on much longer. The flag has changed, but the occupying army is functionally the same as the last one.

We have to remember that it might not be a two-sided struggle either. Third parties might also be playing a game too, desiring the place for themselves. The pro-Independence forces might also be split; side X going for the last Prince's bastard kid, while side Y has chosen Noble A to start a new line, but side Z wants the old oligarchic republic [which X's great-granddad overthrew] to be restored...

It might be that the occupiers are holding on not because they're popular or powerful, but their enemies are split and half the time, fighting each other.

Another complication might be 'the Empire' may be in decline; that it's suffering from 'Imperial overstrech' and is weakening due to contant fire-fighting and wars on other fronts. A new conquest or not, the knowledge that their overlord's grip is fading might spur La Resistance [for example, the Empire has to pull out much of the garrison to fight elsewhere]

There are multiple factions with interest in the outcome of this conflict, but only the Byzantine and the Germans have soldiers in the area right now. A neighboring country is supporting the Germans, because they want to use them as a buffer against the Byzantine. A more distant but more influential nation supports the Byzantine because they have a lot of economic investments there, and it's much easier to conduct trade with an organized country than with a loose coalition of tribes.

Storm_Of_Snow

2021-12-11, 02:10 PM

There are multiple factions with interest in the outcome of this conflict, but only the Byzantine and the Germans have soldiers in the area right now. A neighboring country is supporting the Germans, because they want to use them as a buffer against the Byzantine. A more distant but more influential nation supports the Byzantine because they have a lot of economic investments there, and it's much easier to conduct trade with an organized country than with a loose coalition of tribes.

You could also have other countries(*) who are acting as spoilers to keep one side or the other's attention this area rather than somewhere else, bleed their treasuries dry through having to fund the occupation or force them to keep troops involved in the occupation and bring newly raised units in rather than defending other locations, promote dischord in the country to provoke a revolution and put a new leader in who's more amenable to them and so on.

(*) Countries, different religious faiths, mercantile groups - pick whoever and as many as you feel like.

Mr Blobby

2021-12-11, 03:27 PM

SleepyShadow

2021-12-12, 11:41 AM

There's also the possibility that 'the Empire' is currently unstable and/or weakened. 'Byzantine-style' empires are autocratic in form, yet the technological level makes central control difficult. Any half-decent 'Emperor' is one who's able to perform the political 'herding of cats' to keep the show on the road. Sometimes the worst Emperor is the 'not utterly terrible' one; skilled enough to hang on to power, but too incompetent to actually to much more than that.

In situations like this, it's quite possible the Empire is running mainly on inertia and the edges are fraying. In this case, it might be possible to persuade the 'occupiers' to actually help them strike out on their own [or they might think of it themselves]. Therefore, fraternisation might be the name of the game, not hostility - to hope that when push came to shove, enough would have 'gone native' that they ignored the orders of the 'Loyalists'.

Right now, the "Byzantines" are doing pretty well for themselves. They've got a small but strong army, a leader experienced as a wartime general and peacetime senator, and trade agreements with more powerful nations, one of which is willing to wage war on behalf of the Byzantines if open conflict breaks out. The Byzantines are a very young nation and haven't had any major setbacks yet, so the first and only generation of Byzantine natives are riding high on a history of success. The older and more experienced Byzantines originate either from "Old Rome" or allied "Germanic" tribes. If the PCs plan to persuade the occupiers, they'd have an easier time with the older soldiers.

Duff

2021-12-13, 07:33 PM

I don't know about honey, but some people did grease their arrow/bolt tips which does make them penetrate better. Tod's Workshop on youtube did a video about it.

And here's te link

https://youtu.be/PKrbXurFrHw

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-14, 06:11 AM

And here's te link

https://youtu.be/PKrbXurFrHw

That's a Raid: Shadow legends ad. Even on this forum, there is no escape. Here's an actual link. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56ijR7aPy3U)

It definitely helps, especially with shields, allowing you to especially punish people who brace the damn things against their body - which we are explicitly advised against in some period sources. Outside of shields, however, the effect isn't as significant.

What really defeats arrows in mail + gambeson combo is the blunting of the arrowhead by the mail, making the gambeson under it a lot more effective. Greasing your arrow shaft will make the wound deeper, but we're talking half a liver vs all of the liver penetrated - kinda inconsequential, really. The real way to defeat mail is by either having hardened edges on arrowheads, or arrowheads shaped such that they won't get blunted (bodkins), carrying the disadvantages of much greater cost and being considerably worse at penetrating gambeson, respectively.

Against plate, greased shafts help a bit more, since a lot of the plate components sit on the body with a sizeable gap, but we're now in the realms of arrows maybe not being able to penetrate that armor at all.

Milodiah

2021-12-14, 10:42 AM

It's an entirely understandable thing to do, and I imagine it's something that one archer would say and it would kinda pass around the camp with some people saying "that's preposterous" and some saying "huh I might try that". Ideas like that have survived into the modern era, with stuff like rumors of "teflon coated cop killer bullets" causing some criminals to try coating their bullets in all sorts of nonsense to try to get through Kevlar. I feel like at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that it's really simple to do, it really is like those One Weird Trick(tm) ads on clickbait websites. You might not be able to afford proper tempered steel bodkin arrowheads, but if you can't afford to get your hands on some simple cooking grease or lard, I'd have to wonder how you can even afford a bow or some arrows. And I figure if it did get tried, a good bit of the people doing it probably recognized that even if it didn't work, there wouldn't be all that much harm in trying. After all, it IS just grease, and it's not like it's going to ruin the ballistics of the arrow.

Pauly

2021-12-14, 02:51 PM

The obvious reason to grease arrowheads is to protect them against rust. From there it makes sense that someone may perceive that greased arrowheads penetrate better than non-greased arrowheads. NB it doesn’t matter if the perception is true, just that it becomes an accepted belief amongst a significant enough group of people. But as Tods Workshop’s video shows there is enough to it that people may have greased their arrows for their effect as well as protection.

An alternative to using grease to protect against rust is using wax. Generally speaking grease would be cheaper, but someone of higher status might want to use the premium product, or because of local conditions wax might be more readily available than grease. From there it’s a small step to assume waxing has a similar effect as grease on the performance of an arrow. Then in the game of telephone of texts being translated and rewritten, usually by non experts, over the centuries at some point someone mistranslated “coated with bees wax” into “coated with honey”.

You have to remember that (a) Honey wasn’t cheap and (b) people were often short on food which makes using good food as a coating for your arrows very unlikely.

halfeye

2021-12-14, 07:30 PM

Bees' wax was sometimes used on bowstrings.

Brother Oni

2021-12-15, 03:40 AM

Bees' wax was sometimes used on bowstrings.

Wax still is used on bow strings as you don't want the individual strands to rub against each other too much (which causes fraying), protect them from moisture (particularly important if they're some sort of natural fibre, like linen or hemp) and helps them retain the number of twists (sets the bracing height).

Mr Blobby

2021-12-15, 03:42 AM

I think some of the confusion might be also down to the fact tallow candles were more common than beeswax. And tallow can be quite greasy. You see a bit of this confusion when you read old reports of people eating candles [such as the siege of Colchester in 1648, soap too].

Also; 'grease'/'wax' slippage might be down to the use of dubbin - a product which was around then. I've never used it on metals, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't help protect from rust.

Catullus64

2021-12-16, 01:07 PM

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-16, 02:19 PM

I'm interested in the military education of medieval European aristocrats, and the extent to which they received anything that we might call formal instruction in military science.

The sources I've read seem to put a lot of emphasis on training in the actual use of arms, particularly horsemanship, but not much mention is given to training in tactics or logistics. The closest thing to tactical instruction seems to have been melees (in the sense of a tournament combat), and even the accounts of those seem to emphasize them as tests of personal prowess and courage.

The picture I form, therefore, is that actual skills of command and military organization were not taught as theory, but simply learned "on the job": as soon as you're old enough to wear armor and not fall off your horse, you're on campaign and witnessing your senior relatives and overlords engaged in the process of command. This forms an obvious contrast with modern military academies and officer training programs, but also a contrast with the ancient world, where there seems to have been a robust tradition of military manuals intended to instruct young men.

But my knowledge is of course sharply limited, so if anyone is aware of instances where there were formal traditions of military science in the medieval period, please share!

Well, the first problem you will have is that the concepts of learning as such don't apply. And also the old issue of medieval also including Migration period about which we know very little. Going forward, assume I'm talking about high to late medieval periods, so about 1000-1500.

First topic we will tackle is education in general. There was very nearly no such thing, since the entire system of learning things for your livelihood was organized around apprenticeship. This doesn't quite mean you're learning things on the job the way you are sometimes forced today, there was a fairly rigid system to it with about three general tiers.

When you were young (and remember, there is no such a thing as teenagers when it comes to middle ages), just about to go from a child to an adult (so, anywhere from 12-20, often depending on how adult the people perceived you), you got yourself an apprenticeship. This was sometimes very formal, as was the case with squires or burgher craftsmen, involving agreements, verbal or written, and often informal, such as starting to work properly on your father's farm.

This apprenticeship meant doing the low-skilled labor associated with the job. You carried the coal to the forge, you carried messages between knights (sometimes on the battlefield) and so on, things you don't have to know anything to do. The learning happened partly on the job, but partly deliberately, by your master (or one of his journeymen) teaching you how and what to do when he had spare time. Some times, you see this tier split in two, one for menial labor phase, and then the second, where you know how to do parts of the job, or can work on some smaller parts of it independently.

Over time as an apprentice, you'd learn your craft, and graduate to second tier, the journeyman, called such because at this point, you know how to do a job and can travel around and earn your pay that way. A landless knight is a good analogue, as is a freshly independent blacksmith travelling to a newly-established town. Sometimes, you'd see these folks operating independently, sometimes they'd stay with their master and work with him as more valued and paid assistants.

Final tier is the master, and there is often no formal delineation fo who is and who is not a master. At first, you had to own your business proper, a house with tools and such. That meant you could very well skip phase two in some cases.

This quickly changed when guilds came around, and you had to register with them and be acknowledged as a master in them. This was, of course, politicized.

Parallel to this secular education, you had clerical institutions, and those resembled academia a lot more. The general idea was that you had access to libraries and to lecturers, and could learn from both of them, which meant one master/lecturer could handle a lot more apprentices. This is why you see first fencing treatise in the world (I.33 from 1300) being written by a monastery - they were the places with the necessary culture and skill to do so. There is more discussion to be had here, but going into it is against forum rules, so suffice to say that this form of education started to spread to secular sector starting roughly in 1200.

This is extremely important, because you saw a whole lot of nobles going to these newfangled universities, many of whom started to be entirely secular, and earn their titles there. If you see someone referred to as Magister such-and-such in period documents, it means he graduated from one of those and earned his title. By about 1400, most of the wealthier nobles have some sort of formal education they participated in this way, and they get cushy positions as royal scribes and whatnot thanks to them.

A rise in not just literacy (most nobles could probably at least passingly read and write by 1100), but intellectualism as well meant that personal libraries were very popular, and the topics of choosing were particular to each noble. That said, since every noble was a soldier, military treatises were at about the top of the popularity, alongside Aristotle and Galen. De Re Militari in particular has a flood of medieval copies made of it.

On to military-ish education specifically

First thing to remember is that nobles weren't just military arm of the kingdom, they served as judicial and administrative branch as well. This immediately means a noble will (well, should) be able to appreciate the logistical side of things a lot more than your random private trying to get to NCO rank. They already have an idea about how supplies are made and procured in general terms because they need it for their peacetime day job.

With this in mind, a young noble would serve in that assistant role a lot sooner than you might think. Even a relatively small child could help his parents around the house, managing servants and running messages, and being taught about how taxes worked and help out counting eggs levied from a village. This role would often be formalized in the form of a page, and pretty often, such pages would be exchanged between families.

The resons for the exchange could be two: first of all, plain political hostage. Even then, however, the hostage taker would be expected to educate this young noble in how to doo things. The second reason is a bit more complicated: imagine you are a knight who has sum total of one village, and everyone there knows your kid. Sure, you could keep him home, but he wouldn't learn much, but the lord you serve has a massive castle over there, so why not sned him to be a page there? He will meet more people of note, learn more skills and so on. If you are said lord of a massive castle, more hands is more good and if this young lad is partly raised by you, he's more likely to stay loyal, and you have a cousin who will need to marry off his daughters in a decade or so.

The importnat thing about pages is that they stay in relative safety, because they are, almost or entirely, children. They can accompany you too some campaigns, but will most definitely not participate in battles. You will be training them to do so, so they will be theoretically able to in desperate situations, but still.

Second phase is squires. These are analogous to apprentices from above, and while pages don't go into battles, squires often do. They most often run messages or carry spare lances for their master, not fight, but since they are on or near the front lines, that fighting often finds them, even if they themselves aren't looking for it. Much like apprentice learns by observation and instruction, so does a squire, his master will tell him what they are doing and why, and what the overall army commander is going for with his strategies and tactics. In peacetime, this will be supplemented by the master's library texts - he may even assign our squire a homework: "Go read Vegetius and come ask me when you have questions."

A squire graduates at 21, age that was most likely picked because 3*7=21 and middle ages were big on numerology, but this is also about an age where men stop growing - which means that the armor you get now won't have to be replaced in a year.

A noble who graduates from being a squire to being a knight is already a veteran of a few battles, and may have commanded men in such abttles if his master permitted it. Abovementioned formal education was usually handled just before or just after being knighted/becoming an adult (this is often synonymous with nobles), so by the time our fresh knight goes into battle as a knight, he will be pretty good at it.

So why were some commanders idiots?

Because a lot of this process fell prey to nepotism and skipping over rungs on the ladder. Some managed to deal with it with more grace than others, as can be seem with Charles Robert and Louis II, both kings of Hungary. Charles Robert fought in the first battle he led in person at 24, and managed to barely win it. From what we know, he recognized he was a much better strategist (I'd say a prodigy at it, or he had some advisor that was one) and left the leading of subsequent battles to his nobles.

Louis II. led his first battle at 20, refused to listen to any of his advisors when they told him to get a horse more suited to terrain and promptly drowned in a swamp when he tried to retreat. The battle (Mohacs 1526) he commanded was fought with some intelligence in spite of that and came down to the wire, and was ultimately lost.

Mr Blobby

2021-12-17, 12:07 AM

On the 'why were so many commanders idiots?', I'd argue it's less nepotism and more the perils of rank/status. Often, the most senior noble would command, or failing that the person who brought the most troops. This is parodied in Discworld's Jingo, where Lord Rust ends up in command due to a) seniority in noble rank and b) 'his ability to afford several thousand funny hats' even though anyone with a iota of military experience or even common sense knows he's completely terrible a choice.

It's why kings/princes took to the field more often than their actual skill level dictated. They had the rank to shut up the most peevish and haughty noble (usually). The wiser ones (who knew their lack of military skill) would often take a decent commander with them and defer to their 'advice'.

Charles Robert and Louis had to go on campaign because it's a fair chance half of the Hungarian nobles would have refused to follow with their forces some able but lowly-ranked commander.

Brother Oni

2021-12-17, 05:31 AM

Further to Martin's excellent post, the medieval period covers a very long time frame and there were significant changes throughout this.

As an example, Henry I of England (1068-1135) had the nickname "Beauclerc", meaning 'fine scholar', supposedly for the unusual ability for a King of that period to able to read and write in Latin (sources may vary).

It should also be remembered that cultural and technological development throughout Europe was very uneven, with central Europe being the leaders and England being very much a backwater until about the Renaissance period (between the 14th and 17th Century, depending on country).

Mr Blobby

2021-12-17, 07:30 PM

That might have been partly a desire to find a 'distinguishing feature' in Henry, as his two elder brothers [Robert and William] were much more of the devil-may-care, fighting/hunting/looting/drinking stamp which was the House of Normandy. The fact he was fourth in line on birth and third on the death of his father also suggests Henry may have been slated for the Church [which would have required knowledge of Latin].

Speaking of which, high-ranking boys seemed to often be given an personal instructor than the normal apprentice system. Henry, for example appeared to have a 'Robert Achard' as his. However, it might be quite possible that this Achard was not just his teacher, but also bodyguard and general minder.

Anyway, one thing Martin didn't mention was that as Europe entered the early Renaissance [14th Cen] nobles/royalty would get more access to Greco-Roman military history. To study 'the Ancients' and how they campaigned; this would be of more utility than you'd think because the basics of European warfare only changed in the rudiments with the advent of gunpowder. This, coupled with the low technical level, smallish size of forces, general inability for sustained campaigns and relatively poor quality of forces meant that often a simple application of a few maxims and a good dollop of common sense would usually suffice for anything not a siege.

Lastly, we need to remember that in this period, there was always conflict. Bandits, border raids, rebellions and such like. It was not uncommon for a feuding noble to settle dispute with a fellow with the point of a sword, sometimes to the point of siegeing each other - so most would be at least familiar with the bare rudiments of fighting. There's also hunting, which encouraged decent horsemanship and physical fitness.

Lvl 2 Expert

2021-12-18, 07:14 AM

Speaking of which, high-ranking boys seemed to often be given an personal instructor than the normal apprentice system. Henry, for example appeared to have a 'Robert Achard' as his. However, it might be quite possible that this Achard was not just his teacher, but also bodyguard and general minder.

It's an attractive alternative particularly if there is no friendly court with a perceived standing higher than your own to which to send your son as a page and/or squire. We can't have the prince growing up thinking of someone lesser than himself as his superior and an authority figure after all. By taking a teacher into your own court you can appoint someone wise and respectable, maybe an old family friend, a wandering priest/scholar/poet of good reputation or a knight from one of the religious military orders, while waving the requirement that he is of higher standing (and has a big ass luxurious palace to house the kid in).

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-18, 07:30 AM

On the 'why were so many commanders idiots?', I'd argue it's less nepotism and more the perils of rank/status.

I mean, it gets a bit murky - nepotism is picking someone based on connections rather than ability, but this is a period where one of those connections (family) determines your rank. Bottom line is, you usually see this happen when someone is put into position of leadership before completeing the knight journeyman... journey.

As for Louis and Charles Robert, details are more complicated. Charles Robert did compete knight journeyman thingy, and in his case, commanding Rozhanovce was most likely to prove to nobles he can do it - but his supporters weer perfectly fine with following him before in some numbers, he was fighting for Hungarian crown since he was 13. The salient point is that he waited until he knew what he was doing.

Louis on the other hand was begged by his advisors - who were nobles - to not command the army at Mohacs at all, he just refused to listen to all advice, being all gung-ho about chivalrous victory where he would lead the charge. The contrast with a more thoughtful, strategic approach of Charles Robert is apparent.

As an example, Henry I of England (1068-1135) had the nickname "Beauclerc", meaning 'fine scholar', supposedly for the unusual ability for a King of that period to able to read and write in Latin (sources may vary).

That might have been partly a desire to find a 'distinguishing feature' in Henry, as his two elder brothers [Robert and William] were much more of the devil-may-care, fighting/hunting/looting/drinking stamp which was the House of Normandy. The fact he was fourth in line on birth and third on the death of his father also suggests Henry may have been slated for the Church [which would have required knowledge of Latin].

This is just my opinion, but I'm guessing that all higher ranking nobles from about 900 onwards could read somewhat competently - but reading and writing is one thing, being able to compose fromal letters in latin with all the proper titles and phrases (which were incredibly specific in church correspondence) is quite another feat. Most of these nobles would therefore employ some kind of church-latin-educated guy to handle their correspondence, and tell them that the next noble over had, in fact, insulted them when he addressed them as "your noble grace" instead of "your most noble grace".

Being able to handle this formal correspondence on your own would be pretty unusual throughout the middle ages, getting you monikers like "the Scholar" or "the Learned".

Speaking of which, high-ranking boys seemed to often be given an personal instructor than the normal apprentice system. Henry, for example appeared to have a 'Robert Achard' as his. However, it might be quite possible that this Achard was not just his teacher, but also bodyguard and general minder.

This was extremely rare and only reserved for the highest of ranks, at least for permanent teachers. What you saaw fairly commonly for the less excessively rich was hiring of people for short lessons. Fiore mentions teaching people like this in his treatise, and we know from tax records that his fencing school business boomed.

Anyway, one thing Martin didn't mention was that as Europe entered the early Renaissance [14th Cen] nobles/royalty would get more access to Greco-Roman military history. To study 'the Ancients' and how they campaigned; this would be of more utility than you'd think because the basics of European warfare only changed in the rudiments with the advent of gunpowder. This, coupled with the low technical level, smallish size of forces, general inability for sustained campaigns and relatively poor quality of forces meant that often a simple application of a few maxims and a good dollop of common sense would usually suffice for anything not a siege.

I've seen this argument, and I don't buy it. Some areas of Europe in Migration period maybe had this issue, but by high medieval period, not soo much. You had enough libraries spread around to access those military treatises, and in the East, many nobles went and studied in Byzantium, where you not only had access to them, but had new ones written even during the Migration period itself.

Even the army size wasn't as small. Sure, loosing Roman logistics network knocked down your reasonable army size from 100k max to 30k max, but that's still a lot of men. The major reason why you couldn't straight up apply De Re Militari to most high medieval armies was organization, they were simply built and trained very differently - and Vegetius is pretty damn fanciful in his treatise as well, we have no reason to believe that armies of any Roman period packed quite that amount of siege weaponry or had everyone proficient in slinging.

Lastly, we need to remember that in this period, there was always conflict.

Not quite true locally, but as far as Europe as a whole goes, yeah. There was always some civil war going down somewhere, and nobles weren't above venturing to the other countries to win fame is their home was too stable for their liking. One example I saw quite a lot was a great number of both English and Hungarian nobles serving together as mercenaries, and often founding joint Anglo-Hungarian companies, in Italy in 1300-1350 period.

Oh, and Crusades were a thing, some of which were permanent. Again, forum rules say we can't go too in-depth on how they were organized and why nobles joined in.

Mr Blobby

2021-12-18, 02:33 PM

This is just my opinion, but I'm guessing that all higher ranking nobles from about 900 onwards could read somewhat competently - but reading and writing is one thing, being able to compose fromal letters in latin with all the proper titles and phrases (which were incredibly specific in church correspondence) is quite another feat. Most of these nobles would therefore employ some kind of church-latin-educated guy to handle their correspondence, and tell them that the next noble over had, in fact, insulted them when he addressed them as "your noble grace" instead of "your most noble grace".

Being able to handle this formal correspondence on your own would be pretty unusual throughout the middle ages, getting you monikers like "the Scholar" or "the Learned".

We also need to remember that Henry was the first of the cohort raised as a Prince of England rather than a mere son of a Duke. The family's standing had risen, and it's quite likely he got a better-quality education to fit this.

I've seen this argument, and I don't buy it. Some areas of Europe in Migration period maybe had this issue, but by high medieval period, not soo much. You had enough libraries spread around to access those military treatises, and in the East, many nobles went and studied in Byzantium, where you not only had access to them, but had new ones written even during the Migration period itself.

Even the army size wasn't as small. Sure, loosing Roman logistics network knocked down your reasonable army size from 100k max to 30k max, but that's still a lot of men. The major reason why you couldn't straight up apply De Re Militari to most high medieval armies was organization, they were simply built and trained very differently - and Vegetius is pretty damn fanciful in his treatise as well, we have no reason to believe that armies of any Roman period packed quite that amount of siege weaponry or had everyone proficient in slinging.

What 'don't you buy', exactly? The only thing I'm going to dispute here is '30k armies'; most European 'states' could not afford this, the logistics would have been difficult in most regions and/or for long and the primitive staff officer system would have required a commander of exceptional skill to get to function well [or even at all]. Case in point; Crécy. The large size of the French army [perhaps the 30k mentioned] may have led to it's defeat because it was simply too large to command.

Though let us remember that chroniclers at this time seemed to suck at large numbers. I think it was - for example - utterly physically impossible for William the Bastard to raise ~750 ships and ~150k troops for his 'English expedition' in 1066.

Oh, and Crusades were a thing, some of which were permanent. Again, forum rules say we can't go too in-depth on how they were organized and why nobles joined in.

In the most general of terms, I think we'd say in modern parlance that nobles had a 'toxic culture'. That a 'good King' was one who managed to direct their malign attributes outwards rather than poisoning inwards, and a 'great King' one who also managed to get a benefit from it too.

snowblizz

2021-12-19, 10:55 AM

Oh, and Crusades were a thing, some of which were permanent. Again, forum rules say we can't go too in-depth on how they were organized and why nobles joined in.

The Baltic crusades run by the Teutonic knights practised literal battlefield tourism. Nobles would come for a campaign season providing money and materiel and then go home again after their trip.

Sapphire Guard

2021-12-19, 01:08 PM

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-19, 03:36 PM

This is a question so incredibly specific I have to say, buy this book (https://www.medievalists.net/2013/09/a-medieval-how-to-book-for-shepherds/). There is little else you can do. One caveat I will give you is that if the original texts say "you should not do this", it usually does so because a significant amount of people did do the thing, and the author is trying to correct them. Kinda like Vegetius and "everyone should be a slinger".

Is this a thing that happens or was it more likely to be groups rather than the unwanted younger son? Subsistence farming, all sheep products are consumed locally.

Historically, this was always doen with groups. The way it works is you have a group with head shepherd, plus at least half a dozen people, and they gather the animals to be shepherded to pasture from all the locals, then eff off to the hills. They will send (usually) a pair of their number to the nearest village with some regularity (weekly, bi-weekly) to get supplies.

This is for a simple reason - doing this alone is pretty much a death sentence, and no one will give you their animals if you try, because they don't want you to die in a ditch because you caught dysentery, leaving all the animals quite literally to the wolves. Shepherding is also a semi-respected profession among the locals, not the least because shepherds know a lot about helping ainimals, and were, together with blacksmiths (for reasons I'd rather not digress into), the veterinarians of the day.

If you're looking for a job for an unpopular child that is liable to get him ostracized, and potentially killed, two come to mind. The first is a lookout on a watchtower or a watch hill - these were also done in groups, but considerably smaller ones, think two or three in really small villages. A position like this will only apply if there is some kind of danger to watch out for, but then it is respected again. A good solution is that there was, once upon a time, danger, and the local lord mandated that someone has to man the watchtowers. BUt the danger was soundly trounced and the edict was forgotten about, so now they man those watchtowers out of obligation they think is pointless.

Second job is a hunter. They also worked in teams, in case of proper professional hunters, but your guy can just supplement his family income with some small game, like birds, rabbits or squirrels. That means he spends the entire day out, sometimes maybe has to stay out a night. This is less of an outright murder simply because, should he not return in two days, you can go begrudgingly looking for him.

KineticDiplomat

2021-12-19, 05:39 PM

Wow, lot of good topics.

Re:stealth communications. This generally breaks down into two categories in the public eye.

1. Lo Probability Intercept/Detect. As the name implies, this is focused on making communications that are hard to notice. The methods are various - wave form manipulation, wave length choices, or Line of Sight communications. Each sub tech has its own peculiar uses and limits, but generally speaking you need two out of three things for it to work: positions that are either fixed or have known relative positions, a large network of similar devices, and/or some pretty extensive work gone into making sure everyone and device is on the same page for technical details of execution. Suffice to say, if you're working with a large and regular organization with funding, this works just fine (ish). Drone swarm, plane to plane, a radio network on its own waveform for soldiers. Sure.

2. Burst transmission. Because the above is technically difficult, often has range/position constraints expensive, and requires lots of intra device and inter device (and by extension, organization) coordination, the other alternative is burst transmission. Generally speaking, the burst IS going to be detected if sent and the other side is playing competent nation state level EW defense. That's not the point. The point is you loaded all the information you needed ahead of time on the thing, and aren't there when it gets found. And because you know it's going to be found, you can broadcast over wide areas and in methods that require less technical excellence and coordination.

Of course, it is by definition a depleteable resource. You wouldn't use it if you thought you could stick around where you were sending it from. And of course it requires someone else be listening when you press send, so to speak. Which opens its own can of worms, since obviously anything using RF can be triangulated with active searches in the right mkde even if it's only in receive...

But. That should be enough for RPG rule sets

halfeye

2021-12-19, 07:17 PM

HeadlessMermaid

2021-12-19, 09:24 PM

Are there any good sources on being a shepherd in the pre-industrial era?

Depending on location and era, pastoralism (herding sheep, goats, cattle etc) can be nomadic, sedentary, or transhumant.

Nomadic pastoralism is where you take your herd to a pasture, deplete it, move on to the next one, deplete that, and so on. This can be a peaceful procedure, or an extremely violent one. It's somewhat unpredictable where you'll end up from year to year, you rely on sedentary people for some kinds of provisions that you can't produce yourself on the road, and in turn can sell and trade your own products, dairy and so on. There are entire cultures based on nomadic pastoralism.

Sedentary pastoralism is where your herd stays permanently on the same place. To do that, you need to have either very few animals (so you're probably a farmer with a handful of animals to complement your subsistance/income), or huge amounts of land (so typically a rich landlord owns it, and the shepherds are the people who do work for hire/by force; think England around ~1500 when, for the profit of wool and at the expense of the tenants, arable land was turned to pastures: this dramatically reduced the need for labour, and proportionally increased the number of destitute vagrants (https://roguish.wordpress.com/2017/12/04/no-rest-for-the-wicked-anti-vagrancy-laws-in-tudor-england-1495-1604/)).

Transhumant pastoralism, or transhumance, is a middle ground, extremely common with sheep and goats though less ubiquitous with cattle. This is where you have a fixed summer pasture (generally on the highlands) and a fixed winter pasture (on the lowlands), and you migrate between them twice per year. You very rarely own both of them, and often you own none of them, though you could temporarily rent them. The peculiarities of transhumant pastoralism make the whole thing inextricably tied with a lot of things:

rural banditry (you can read here (https://wewererogue.tumblr.com/post/187836078796/shepherd-equals-bandit-the-roman-experience) about the Roman example; the gist of it applies for thousands of years before and after: shepherd equals bandit)
rustling, blood feuds, and assorted displays of honour culture
the custom of shepherds having a ton of kids, and the enduring myth/practice that if you abandon a baby in the wilderness it will surely be picked up by shepherds: this type of herding takes a lot of manhours, but most of the labour can be easily done by adolescents and even prepubescent children; so for shepherds, having many children is considered an asset rather than a "too many mouths to feed" burden

The nature of the labour: transhumant pastoralism needs permanent labour in a way that farming does not. Every single day, someone needs to gather the sheep, lead them to the pasture, stay with them all day long and keep them from getting lost, potentially protect them from rustlers/wolves/etc, and then, before nightfall, take them back behind a fence and lock them up. More intense and skilled labour is needed when it's time to slaughter animals, shear them, make cheese and yoghurt etc: these tasks take expertise, but straight herding can be done by children. How many workers you need depends entirely on the size of the herd. Is it 20 animals? 200? 2000? None of these is inconceivable.

Temporary work is less pronounced, and it may not be a thing at all. With farming, harvest is an "all hands on deck" situation, including hands that were doing nothing all year, or hands that weren't there at all but migrated specifically for harvest. With transhumant pastoralism, the day when sheep are sheared is a day when sheep are NOT led to the pasture, so you don't need more people, per se.

Family: When the family lives on the highlands, the migration down to the winter pastures often involves only the shepherds themselves, who live in makeshift huts or something, while their families (typically, wives and small children) stay back. It's a separation not unlike sailors going away for months. In other cases, everyone packs ups and moves, and makes a new home near the new pasture. In a few cases, you can even have an unofficial (but more or less silently accepted) bigamy, while in other societies polygamy is the norm anyway, and it's natural to have two permanent bases of operation, and even more children. But on the other hand, shepherd girls are far from unheard of, not just in the sense of making dairy products but also guarding the sheep and moving around as needed. Basically, the family arrangements vary wildly, and we can't make generalisations. We can only note how each arrangement works in the specific context of pastoralism.

For every case, you need to figure out who owns the pastures (if anyone does, because it's not a given). In pre-modern agriculture, fields need to stay fallow every second year (or thereabouts) to remain fertile. So an arrangement between farmers and shepherds can be made. On year 1, field A gets farmed, sowed and tended and harvested, field B lays fallow, and shepherds take their herds to field B which functions as a pasture. On year 2, field A lays fallow, field B gets farmed, and shepherds take their herds to field A. Quite a lot of people need to agree on terms here, and stick to them. Ye olde hostility between shepherds and farmers often begins in conflicts about such agreements, or lack thereof. The balance is very delicate and a single bad crop or month of bad weather can unmake it. Historically, transhumant pastoralism declines when (and where) modern agricultural methods come into play, and fields can yield crops every year, almost all year long. That leaves only the wilderness for the shepherds.

And of course, you need to figure out who owns the herds. Those who own the sheep and those who tend them might be the same people, or they might not. In transhumant pastoralism, both options are on the table.

DrewID

2021-12-19, 10:05 PM

Are there any good sources on being a shepherd in the pre-industrial era? As in, types of work that could be done alone, types that needed help, how big a herd one person with dogs could reasonably control, problems that could arise, and so on. It's a broad question I know, I'm just trying to fact check myself.

Any particular location or era is fine, but North Europe/Scandinavia for preference, I'm just trying to get an understanding of the kind of things that can be accomplished with one person and dogs without modern tools, assuming they're up on a mountain relatively alone with their flock, they can get seasonal labour as needed but day to day care and predator watch is done alone, with (a few) fences, paddocks and dogs. Is this a thing that happens or was it more likely to be groups rather than the unwanted younger son? Subsistence farming, all sheep products are consumed locally.

May be an impossible question, but y'all usually know a lot. I want my fantasy protagonist to actually get to do some farming before his life gets hijacked by mages.

Bret Devereaux's A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/) had a series on historical textile production, and the first essay in the series covered the source fibers (flax, linen and wool) and gives more of a macro look at historical shepherding and wool production that you might find interesting. Not too much sadly on the lives of the shepherds themselves.

Anyone on this thread will in general probably find Bret's blog interesting. He is an assistant professor of history, and writes primarily on the intersection of historical studies and pop culture. From a four-part series on how textiles were produced in the pre-modern world, to an eight-part series on a military historian's look at The Battle of Helm's Deep (both the movie and book versions). It's fascinating stuff! I highly recommend giving it a look.

DrewID

Kraynic

2021-12-20, 12:13 AM

As in, types of work that could be done alone, types that needed help, how big a herd one person with dogs could reasonably control, problems that could arise, and so on. It's a broad question I know, I'm just trying to fact check myself.

A couple things that may or may not be of use to you that haven't been brought up (or I didn't notice).

1. The dogs will be different based on environment and threats. There may even be different breeds in use at the same time. You can check out the Great Pyrenees (flock guard dog) and the Pyrenean Sheep Dog (flock herding dog) as an example of 2 breeds used at the same time in the same region for 2 different tasks.

2. A shepherd will most likely be running on much reduced sleep during lambing season. Not only is this is the time that predators will be have access to the most vulnerable prey, but a shepherd will also be checking on (at the very least) first year ewes every few hours through the night. This is something that is obviously made much easier with more people. If it is late winter or early spring, feel free to have grouchy shepherds... :smalltongue:

Brother Oni

2021-12-20, 05:06 AM

The Baltic crusades run by the Teutonic knights practised literal battlefield tourism. Nobles would come for a campaign season providing money and materiel and then go home again after their trip.

In true Germanic style, these crusading journeys or Reisen, even had an itinerary worthy of a package holiday - meet up in Marienberg or Konigsberg, from where the knights would organise your travel to Lithuania. From there, you had the options of outdoor feasts, hunting, jousting, killing some pagans, etc, before the knights arranged to get you back to your starting town when you were finished.

You even had had the choice of winter campaigns (faster travel as the ground was frozen, but winter in northern Europe is no joke) or summer campaigns (warmer, but you had to hope the sun dried out the marshes a bit).

Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV of England) liked crusading, with his first 1390 trip out to Baltics listing an entourage of 13 knights, 18 squires, 3 heralds, 10 miners, 6 minstrels, 60 servants and others.

On his second trip out in 1392, he combined crusading with some pilgrimage and sightseeing:

Started out at Gdansk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gda%C5%84sk) and go to Konigsberg and back
Headed southwards to Frankfurt an der Oder
Travel to Bohemia to see Prague and the great castle at Karlstejn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%C5%A1tejn)
Onwards to Vienna followed by Klagenfurt
Crossed the Alps (apparently not too difficult)
Aim for Venice, spending a few days on the Lido (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lido_di_Venezia) as well as in the city itself.
From Venice, take a ship to the Holy Land and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem
Head back to Italy, making stops at Cyprus, Rhodes and the Greek mainland.

This trip took Henry a whole year to complete and among the souvenirs he brought back were a leopard and a parrot.

Clistenes

2021-12-20, 02:19 PM

In true Germanic style, these crusading journeys or Reisen, even had an itinerary worthy of a package holiday - meet up in Marienberg or Konigsberg, from where the knights would organise your travel to Lithuania. From there, you had the options of outdoor feasts, hunting, jousting, killing some pagans, etc, before the knights arranged to get you back to your starting town when you were finished.

You even had had the choice of winter campaigns (faster travel as the ground was frozen, but winter in northern Europe is no joke) or summer campaigns (warmer, but you had to hope the sun dried out the marshes a bit).

Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV of England) liked crusading, with his first 1390 trip out to Baltics listing an entourage of 13 knights, 18 squires, 3 heralds, 10 miners, 6 minstrels, 60 servants and others.

On his second trip out in 1392, he combined crusading with some pilgrimage and sightseeing:

Started out at Gdansk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gda%C5%84sk) and go to Konigsberg and back
Headed southwards to Frankfurt an der Oder
Travel to Bohemia to see Prague and the great castle at Karlstejn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%C5%A1tejn)
Onwards to Vienna followed by Klagenfurt
Crossed the Alps (apparently not too difficult)
Aim for Venice, spending a few days on the Lido (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lido_di_Venezia) as well as in the city itself.
From Venice, take a ship to the Holy Land and make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem
Head back to Italy, making stops at Cyprus, Rhodes and the Greek mainland.

This trip took Henry a whole year to complete and among the souvenirs he brought back were a leopard and a parrot.

King Alfonso VIII of Castile, king Pedro II of Aragon and king Sancho VII of Navarre had trouble with these kind of crusaders in 1212. These came to help against the Almohads, but they got bored during the trip and tended to kill, rape and loot a lot on the way, their logic apparently being "hey, these guys dress and speak funny! how was I supposed to know they were on our side?"

Besides the fact that many of these people were Christian subjects of the kingdom of Castile, king Alfonso was actually trying to have Muslim castles, towns and villages to surrender without a fight by offering them good terms, but the foreign crusaders kept ruining it by going in a rape-loot-murder-arson spree every time. Worse than that, king Alfonso was secretly negotiating with the local Andalusian nobility for them to desert the Almohads, and having Muslim settlements ravaged didn't help at all... in the end, they sent all the foreign crusaders back home and fought the war with Iberian troops alone.

Max_Killjoy

2021-12-20, 03:19 PM

Bret Devereaux's A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-high-fiber/) had a series on historical textile production, and the first essay in the series covered the source fibers (flax, linen and wool) and gives more of a macro look at historical shepherding and wool production that you might find interesting. Not too much sadly on the lives of the shepherds themselves.

Anyone on this thread will in general probably find Bret's blog interesting. He is an assistant professor of history, and writes primarily on the intersection of historical studies and pop culture. From a four-part series on how textiles were produced in the pre-modern world, to an eight-part series on a military historian's look at The Battle of Helm's Deep (both the movie and book versions). It's fascinating stuff! I highly recommend giving it a look.

DrewID

I'd highly recommend both the takedown of the myth of Sparta, and his "Fremen Mirage" series.

Sapphire Guard

2021-12-26, 10:07 AM

Milodiah

2021-12-26, 10:18 AM

I just want to commend you all on not only having a detailed replies but somehow having to hand a contemporary manual to to do with my completely random specific question. This thread's incredible, thank you all.

This forum's rather a confluence of unusual hobbies, and by virtue of this being such a visible thread a lot of people with said interests wander in here.

I do feel validated sometimes, seeing how many other people are Fountains of Random Facts like myself.

Martin Greywolf

2021-12-27, 12:10 PM

Brother Oni

2021-12-30, 10:27 AM

Here's something that some people might find interesting: shinai vs epee sparring (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAPwMrDGAfE).

Scoring has been adjusted (limited lateral movement as they're fighting on the piste, kendoka isn't allowed to strike the torso or thrust for the throat), but some interesting exchanges between the fighters.

Vinyadan

2022-01-23, 04:34 AM

Is using a scope on a rifle while wearing night vision goggles possible? Or would you need to take the goggles off and use a night vision rifle scope?

Kriegspiel

2022-01-27, 11:40 PM

Is using a scope on a rifle while wearing night vision goggles possible? Or would you need to take the goggles off and use a night vision rifle scope?

Sorry for not answering sooner, but this thread was locked when I first saw your question.

When you say scope, do you mean a magnified optic or a non-magnified reflex sight (ie a 'red dot' sight)?

If the former then it is effectively no using currently available NVDs.

If it is the later, then it is more 'it depends'.

Red dot sights are useable with monocular NVDs like the PVS-14. The NVD is over your non-dominant eye which allows you to achieve a typical cheek weld/sight picture with your dominant eye. Keeping both eyes open will combine the images from both eyes and you'll see the red dot super-imposed normally.

If you are wearing a binocular style NVD it is much more difficult as you cannot easily maintain a normal sight picture behind the optic. It is technically possible if you mount the weapon optic far forward on a rail but even then it's a hassle. An IR laser is the primary method of sighting in a low light situation.

Vinyadan

2022-01-28, 12:51 PM

Hi, thanks for the answer! I was mostly thinking about magnified optical scopes (like the PSO-1), but the information about reflex sights is also interesting.

Are there scope attachments to add NV to a magnified optic?

Also, how free to move are you while wearing NV? Can you run, or does the NVD jump around if you aren't careful? Does the added weight in the front feel bad on your neck after a while?

Palanan

2022-01-28, 10:54 PM

Vinyadan

2022-01-29, 04:54 AM

I think the problem here would be a definition of agricultural efficiency. I think it wouldn't be too hard to look for the population of a well-studied city like Florence, the population of its countryside, and the size and composition of its armies in different battles across the centuries. However, Florence was a city of business (traders, bankers, and artisans), so that would need to factor in somehow, as foodstock could be imported from other polities (Venice for example imported massive amounts of food from the Turks during the famine of the early XVII century).

EDIT: about primary sources, the Book of Montaperti is a collection of unusually detailed records held by the Florentine state during the months of preparation before the battle of Montaperti (1260). The book detailed the name and origin of the various men in the army, as well as where the resources originated, and provisions by the autorities concerning the war. It was with the army when it was defeated, and taken as part of the spoils by Siena, which preserved it as a trophy. It's in Latin, and it's a LOT of info; when it was published, it was considered unique, as far as the Middle Ages are concerned. Now more than a century has passed, and maybe there are more documents like this available. https://archive.org/details/illibrodimontape00libruoft/page/n5/mode/2up

Gnoman

2022-01-29, 02:53 PM

That's kind of a "doctorate in history" level question, where the primary sources would be stuff mouldering in some Italian or French Archive that nobody's looked through in a century or two.

Brother Oni

2022-01-30, 06:07 AM

I have a fairly broad-scale question for the history folks in these parts.

I’m looking for primary sources that give information on the linkages between land area, agricultural efficiency, population size, and how these help determine the sizes of armies in different historical periods.

I know that’s a tall order, and I’m aware of the difficulties involved with even the most basic estimates. There are any number of threads on Reddit and elsewhere that touch on this issue in one way or another—but unfortunately, those threads tend not to cite any published sources, which is what I’m really looking for.

This may be too broad a question for this thread, but I’m hoping that the folks who often contribute here may be familiar with the kind of sources I’m looking for, and may be able to point me in the right direction. I’ll appreciate any examples in any region or period, from ancient to early modern.

You might want to look at muster lists then look at the comparative wealth of the lords and what they brought.

The simplest measurement I know of is a knight's fee in Anglo-Saxon and Norman times, which is the smallest amount of land that is capable of supporting a single knight, his family and any folks tied to the land.

There's not a set acreage as it depends on the fertility of the land, mines, fish stocks, bee hives, etc, etc, but a knight's fee with a manor (ie a fortified home, which supported the knight, their family and their tenants) would be between 1000 - 5000 acres as around 45% of the land was still undeveloped (not arable or pasture/meadow) during the late 11th Century. Circa 1200, a knight's fee was approximately 20 pounds.

According to the Assize of Arms 1181, a single knight's fee got you 40 days a year of military service from:

the knight himself, who must be equipped with mail hauberk, helmet, shield and lance.
Richer fiefs require the knight to have at least one set of this equipment per knight's fee (so a 60 knight's fee fief, would require the knight to be able to support 60 armed men of this standard).
Freemen who had at least 16 marks in chattels and/or rents were also required to be similarly equipped, while those who had 10 marks are required to have a mail shirt, iron cap and lance.
All burgesses and the remaining freemen shall have a gambeson, an iron cap and a lance.

If you're after a list of fiefs from around this period, you're going to have to go digging around in the Domesday Book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book), which can be accessed for free through the Open Domesday project (https://opendomesday.org/).

To help with your guide, English money from back then:
1 pound = 20 shillings
1 crown = 5 shillings
1 shilling = 12 pence
1 penny = 4 farthings
1 mark = 13 shillings and 4 pence.

Going half way around the world and a few hundred years later, the 16th Century Sengoku Era Japanese also ran a similar system, but with different base measurements of 1 koku = the amount of rice required to feed a man for a year. Akechi Mitsuhide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akechi_Mitsuhide)'s orders/guide to his retainers, dated 1581 required:

Bring 6 men to muster for every 100 koku. Gather men at that ratio.
Between 100 and 150 koku: 1 armour, 1 horse, 1 sashimono, 1 yari
Between 150 koku and 200 koku: 1 armour, 1 horse, 1 sashimono, 2 yari
Between 200 koku and 300 koku: 1 armour, 1 horse, 2 sashimono, 2 yari
Between 300 koku and 400 koku: 1 armour, 1 horse, 3 sashimono, 3 yari, 1 flag, 1 gun
Between 400 koku and 500 koku: 1 armour, 1 horse, 4 sashimono, 4 yari, 1 flag, 1 gun
Between 500 koku and 600 koku: 2 armours, 2 horses, 5 sashimono, 5 yari, 1 flag, 2 guns
Between 600 koku and 700 koku: 2 armours, 2 horses, 6 sashimono, 6 yari, 1 flag, 3 guns
Between 700 koku and 800 koku: 3 armours, 3 horses, 7 sashimono, 7 yari, 1 flag, 3 guns
Between 800 koku and 900 koku: 4 armours, 4 horses, 8 sashimono, 8 yari, 1 flag, 4 guns
Those with 1000 koku: 5 armour, 5 horse, 10 sashimono, 10 yari, 1 flag, 5 gun. One mounted man can count for two.

Much later on, there is the 1694 Edo era standardisation by the Tokugawa. The Tokugawa Kinreiko (徳川禁令考) (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/787011/95) is a list of many of the laws passed by the Tokugawa, first compiled in Meiji 12 (1879) records the following numbers for a hatamoto (personal guard).

200 Koku: 1 Samurai, 1 Yari, 1 Armour carrier, 1 Groom, 1 Porter, 5 men in total
250 Koku: 1 Samurai, 1 Yari, 1 Armour carrier, 1 Groom, 1 Porter, 6 men in total
300 Koku: 1 Samurai, 1 Yari, 1 Armour carrier, 1 Groom, 1 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 7 men in total
400 Koku: 2 Samurai, 1 Yari, 1 Armour carrier, 1 Groom, 2 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 9 men in total
500 Koku: 2 Samurai, 1 Yari, 1 Bow, 1 Armour carrier, 1 Groom, 2 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 11 men in total
600 Koku: 3 Samurai, 1 Yari, 1 Bow, 1 Gun, 1 Armour carrier, 1 Groom, 2 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 13 men in total
700 Koku: 4 Samurai, 2 Yari, 1 Bow, 1 Gun, 1 Armour carrier, 2 Groom, 2 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 15 men in total
800 Koku: 4 Samurai, 2 Yari, 1 Bow, 1 Gun, 1 Armour carrier, 2 Groom, 2 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 17 men in total
900 Koku: 5 Samurai, 2 Yari, 1 Bow, 1 Gun, 2 Armour carrier, 2 Groom, 2 Porter, 1 Sandal bearer, 1 Large chest, 1 Small chest, 19 men in total

Sources:
"The Knight and the Knight's Fee in England", Sally Harvey, Past and Present, No. 49. (Nov., 1970), pp. 3–43. JSTOR 650206
Assize of Arms, 1181
"English Weapons & Warfare", 449-1660, A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, Barnes & Noble, 1992 (orig. 1966)
Domesday Book, 1086
Tokugawa Kinreiko, Meiji 27 (1894)

Quicunque habet feodum unius militis habeat loricam, et cassidem, clypeum et lanceam: et omnis miles habeat tot loricas et cassides, et clypeos et lanceas quot habuerit feoda militum in dominico suo.
Quicunque vero liber laicus habuerit in catallo vel in redditu ad valentiam de xvi. marcis, habeat loricam et cassidem et clypeum et lanceam: quicunque vero liber laicus habuerit in catallo vel redditu x. marcas, habeat aubergel, et capellet ferri et lanceam.
III. Item omnes burgenses et tota communa liberorum hominum habeant wambais, et capellet ferri et lanceam.

https://dl.ndl.go.jp/view/jpegOutput?itemId=info%3Andljp%2Fpid%2F787011&contentNo=95&outputScale=2

Palanan

2022-01-30, 09:15 AM

Originally Posted by Vinyadan
…about primary sources, the Book of Montaperti is a collection of unusually detailed records held by the Florentine state during the months of preparation before the battle of Montaperti (1260).

Great suggestion to look into, thanks.

Originally Posted by Brother Oni
You might want to look at muster lists then look at the comparative wealth of the lords and what they brought.

Thanks for the excellent numbers, and for listing your sources.

When I wrote “primary sources,” I was thinking in terms of primary academic literature—either journal articles, book chapters, full books or dissertations. I’m assuming there’s been a lot of research on this topic already, and those publications are what I’m trying to find.

Brother Oni

2022-01-30, 12:46 PM

When I wrote “primary sources,” I was thinking in terms of primary academic literature—either journal articles, book chapters, full books or dissertations. I’m assuming there’s been a lot of research on this topic already, and those publications are what I’m trying to find.

I'd count those as secondary sources - the Domesday Book and the original Latin text of the 1181 Assize of Arms are primary sources, while academic literature drawing on those primary sources and things like the Tokugawa Kinreiko are secondary sources.

Palanan

2022-01-30, 01:50 PM

However you describe it, what I’m looking for is published historical research on the topic—whether journal articles, full books, edited volumes, etc.

There are endless discussions on Reddit about this issue, but no one ever cites anything, apart from a very few web pages or blog posts. Those in turn only cite works which barely touch on the topic, or often enough don’t cite anything at all.

Hope this clarifies what I’m looking for.

Clistenes

2022-01-30, 07:07 PM

tomandtish

2022-01-30, 08:37 PM

I have a question:

In all TV shows, when they test a sword on a dead animal, be it a pig, a goat, a deer or whatever, they use a carcass without any of the internal organs or blood...

Do you know if anybody has ever tried to test a sword on a whole dead animal, blood and lungs and guts and all? I suspect the result of the test would be FAR less impressive than when using a clean carcass...

Depends on what you mean by impressive. The blade MIGHT not go as far, but you'd have much more of a visual image as blood and intestines flowed out.

Which is probably why most shows won't do it. The blood/gore could bump up the rating.

fusilier

2022-01-31, 02:47 AM

I have a fairly broad-scale question for the history folks in these parts.

IÂ’m looking for primary sources that give information on the linkages between land area, agricultural efficiency, population size, and how these help determine the sizes of armies in different historical periods.

I know thatÂ’s a tall order, and IÂ’m aware of the difficulties involved with even the most basic estimates. There are any number of threads on Reddit and elsewhere that touch on this issue in one way or anotherÂ—but unfortunately, those threads tend not to cite any published sources, which is what IÂ’m really looking for.

This may be too broad a question for this thread, but IÂ’m hoping that the folks who often contribute here may be familiar with the kind of sources IÂ’m looking for, and may be able to point me in the right direction. IÂ’ll appreciate any examples in any region or period, from ancient to early modern.

However you describe it, what I’m looking for is published historical research on the topic—whether journal articles, full books, edited volumes, etc.

Mercenaries and their Masters, Michael Mallett, pp. 115-120, lists the strengths of armies of the Italian states at various points in the 15th century. The examples consist of reports of troops actually in the field, and estimates for how many troops could be called up in wartime. He doesn't give the size of the corresponding populations, but he does give dates, and it may be possible to find out the relevant information.

"At the beginning of the century Giangaleazzo Visconti was reputed to have 20,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry under arms. It is not an impossible figure as Milan was often fighting on two fronts, and the surprisingly large proportion of infantry clearly includes auxiliaries."

While the condotte are more reliable for assessing army strength than many assume, the difficulty in getting good estimates of the total force are further explained: "One always has to bear in mind that total numbers and actual fighting strength have to be distinguished in the figure available, and that many of the non-combatants, who accompanied armies and often had to be paid, never appear in most official records. This confuses the issue particularly when one tries to asses the size of armies in the field when the numbers of auxiliaries, pioneers, and even lightly armed militia, are rarely given more than approximately."

To find out the number of soldiers engaged in a particular battle, it's usually necessary to compare a variety of sources to get a reasonable picture. So even getting the basic information to perform the analysis is not that straightforward.

Works like Mercenaries and their Masters have useful information, because they aren't focused on a battle/campaign, but instead on the organization, structure, effectiveness, tactics, etc. (and their development). But there's a lot to search through to find the relevant information. Even then, in this case, it's going to be limited to various Italian states at different points in the 15th century. And state organization is probably going to be another factor (the Italian states were fielding a lot of troops for their size).

Maybe some of those keywords would be useful? Perhaps there are works about the "organization of medieval armies", that will cover troop strength?

I don't know of a work that's tackled this question across history, but would be interested in one. Maybe there's some journal article, or thesis/dissertation paper, on this topic?

This seems like the kind of thing that may have been partially addressed by one of the articles on https://acoup.blog

The author, Dr. Bret Devereaux, is usually good about providing sources. But off the top of my head I can't remember a source covering this subject.

Palanan

2022-01-31, 09:42 AM

Originally Posted by fusilier
Mercenaries and their Masters, Michael Mallett, pp. 115-120, lists the strengths of armies of the Italian states at various points in the 15th century. The examples consist of reports of troops actually in the field, and estimates for how many troops could be called up in wartime. He doesn't give the size of the corresponding populations, but he does give dates, and it may be possible to find out the relevant information.

Looks like an excellent resource, thanks.

Originally Posted by fusilier
I don't know of a work that's tackled this question across history, but would be interested in one. Maybe there's some journal article, or thesis/dissertation paper, on this topic?

I’m hoping there is, since it seems like it would be a fundamental question.

Clistenes

2022-01-31, 05:04 PM

Depends on what you mean by impressive. The blade MIGHT not go as far, but you'd have much more of a visual image as blood and intestines flowed out.

Which is probably why most shows won't do it. The blood/gore could bump up the rating.

What I mean is, the soft guts and liquid probably would soak a lot of the force, so you would end with a blade stuck inside a dead pig instead of a pig carcass cleanly cut in two...

So these shows make the cuts more impressive than they really are because they are making you believe you could cut somebody in two with that sword, which isn't true (well, maybe somebody with a lot of strength and training could really do it, like these samurai who tested swords on dead bodies during the Edo period and before, but not the guys testing the swords in the modern shows...).

That's the reason I as if you know of somebody who has ever tested the swords on dead animals with all their innnards. I am not speaking of just TV shows, but about serious scientific studies, or even about sword fanatics trying it on their own...

Grim Portent

2022-01-31, 07:22 PM

DrewID

2022-01-31, 10:28 PM

What I mean is, the soft guts and liquid probably would soak a lot of the force, so you would end with a blade stuck inside a dead pig instead of a pig carcass cleanly cut in two...

So these shows make the cuts more impressive than they really are because they are making you believe you could cut somebody in two with that sword, which isn't true (well, maybe somebody with a lot of strength and training could really do it, like these samurai who tested swords on dead bodies during the Edo period and before, but not the guys testing the swords in the modern shows...).

That's the reason I as if you know of somebody who has ever tested the swords on dead animals with all their innnards. I am not speaking of just TV shows, but about serious scientific studies, or even about sword fanatics trying it on their own...

Search for information on deer hunting sites.

DrewID

DrewID

2022-01-31, 10:34 PM

Does anyone know what kind of armouring was used on war elephants in late medieval India, as in the materials and weight and how long they were expected to wear it?

I've seen images of elephants covered with what looks to be steel lamellar barding, but I'm having a bit of a hard time finding information about the way such armoured elephants were actually used or what weapons they were needing protected from.

Not to harp on Prof. Devereaux's acoup.blog, but he did do a three-part series on war elephants starting here (https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/). I don't remember how much detail he went into on their armoring, but I know there was scholarly discussion on their expense, which would have at least touched on how much was spent to armor them, I would think.

DrewID

Palanan

2022-01-31, 11:04 PM

Originally Posted by Grim Portent
Does anyone know what kind of armouring was used on war elephants in late medieval India, as in the materials and weight and how long they were expected to wear it?

I've seen images of elephants covered with what looks to be steel lamellar barding, but I'm having a bit of a hard time finding information about the way such armoured elephants were actually used or what weapons they were needing protected from.

Originally Posted by DrewID
Not to harp on Prof. Devereaux's acoup.blog, but he did do a three-part series on war elephants starting here.

From glancing over the blog posts, it looks like the discussion is focused primarily on Greek and Roman use of elephants. The third post touches on India, but superficially, and there’s no mention of armor on their elephants.

Your best bet is to look at Elephants and Kings (https://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Kings-Environmental-Thomas-Trautmann/dp/022626436X/) (cited by the blog) which mentions elephants wearing armor, and looks like a really interesting read on the use of war elephants throughout India’s history.

Kriegspiel

2022-02-01, 12:06 AM

Are there scope attachments to add NV to a magnified optic?

Yes absolutely. Not counting dedicated sights, the PVS-14 itself is capable of being rail mounted

Also, how free to move are you while wearing NV? Can you run, or does the NVD jump around if you aren't careful? Does the added weight in the front feel bad on your neck after a while?

If everything is properly attached/tightened the NVD will stay in place even when running.

I'd course like anything mounts can loosen up over time when used enough.

Adding another pound or so to an already 3-4 lb helmet isn't fun but you get used to it.

Sapphire Guard

2022-02-01, 11:55 AM

Le Bon Berger arrived today, thanks again everyone.

Gnoman

2022-02-02, 06:09 AM

What I mean is, the soft guts and liquid probably would soak a lot of the force, so you would end with a blade stuck inside a dead pig instead of a pig carcass cleanly cut in two...

So these shows make the cuts more impressive than they really are because they are making you believe you could cut somebody in two with that sword, which isn't true (well, maybe somebody with a lot of strength and training could really do it, like these samurai who tested swords on dead bodies during the Edo period and before, but not the guys testing the swords in the modern shows...).

That's the reason I as if you know of somebody who has ever tested the swords on dead animals with all their innnards. I am not speaking of just TV shows, but about serious scientific studies, or even about sword fanatics trying it on their own...

I don't know so much about blades, but what I know of bullets suggets that the difference you envision isn't necessarily a thing. Penetration data in living tissue is very similar to that from carcasses.

Vinyadan

2022-02-02, 09:51 AM

Yes absolutely. Not counting dedicated sights, the PVS-14 itself is capable of being rail mounted

If everything is properly attached/tightened the NVD will still in place even when running.

I'd course like anything mounts can loosen up over time when used enough.

Adding another pound or so to an already 3-4 lb helmet isn't fun but you get used to it.

Thanks a lot! There's something else I wondered about, do NVDs usually have magnification?

Martin Greywolf

2022-02-02, 10:18 AM

I don't know so much about blades, but what I know of bullets suggets that the difference you envision isn't necessarily a thing. Penetration data in living tissue is very similar to that from carcasses.

So. I have experience in using live blades on living animals, since I did hang around on a farm. I'll spoiler my take on this since it involves killing of animals that didn't exactly happen safely in the past. It's not going to be graphic, but if you are twelve and like sheep...

Okay, so for the most part, carcasses are more resistant to blades than the living animals. That is mostly due to bones, but we'll take it by the numbers.

Fur and skin are about the same, living or dead. If you take time to turn it into rawhide or tan it, that's a different story, but that's outside of this discussion. It probably bears mentioning that some animal skins are tougher than others, with boars being particularly infamous.

Meat/muscles are also about the same, unless your carcass was left alone in specific conditions to start to cure itself and get that leathery quality to its meat, then it is significantly tougher.

Organs don't accomplish much, except for splattering, living or dead.

The real culprit is the bones. The longer a bone is dead, the harder to cut it gets. Even bones in your average meat sold by butchers and supermarkets are already harder to cut through than living ones. Living bones have a (usually) pinkish color and have blood going through them, and are just a bit soft and squishy.

All of that means dead carcasses are much harder to cut.

As for why shows use them, rating is one thing, working with living animals is another. Any living animal is, in general, a massive pain to work with if you're shooting any kind of movie/show, and that's a hassle that you may well eschew if you're on a budget.

Gnoman

2022-02-02, 01:10 PM

I'm not sure how long it takes for bones to get that effect, but this otherwise matches my expectations from reading ballistic tests. Only ,eat and bone really make much of a difference.

Catullus64

2022-02-02, 04:02 PM

What are people's opinions about the occurrence of single combats in historical warfare (as distinct from judicial or civilian single combats)? My primary source base gives me a mixed impression. On the one hand you have poetic sources like the Cattle Raid of Cooley or the Iliad, that are at best dubious in terms of representing things that actually happened. In the Nordic world, most of the descriptions of single combats from sagas are in the context of civilian feuds and legal disputes, though the line between those arenas and open warfare often seems very thin indeed. Livy is probably the most reliable source I know of who frequently describes military single combats as an actual historical event, but even he's writing centuries after an already-mythologized past. One frequent thread seems to be that single combats are rarely used as a means of resolving a conflict, and more often are simply preludes to a wider-scale engagement.

More broadly, how do you think the idea of single combat can be handled intelligently in fiction? I feel like a great deal of modern historical and historical-fantasy fiction (A Song of Ice and Fire being probably the most widely-read example) treats the concept of resolving conflict by single combat with a certain amount of contempt, and a proposal of single combat is often used to display that a character is rash, naive, or has no other cards left to play. If a single combat is agreed to, one or both sides usually treats it cynically or seeks to cheat the outcome, such that a more conventional siege or battle has to be resorted to. The all-around-ok Netflix film Outlaw King also contains a prominent example of this, as does the not-so-good film Troy; it even happens in Narnia of all places.

In short, how would you envision single combat as a plausible military event, somewhere between the empty ceremony that modern authors seem to view it as, and the over-romanticized practice of the sagas?

Sapphire Guard

2022-02-02, 04:42 PM

I can't throw up examples from history like some of our posters can, but I expect it could be useful as a way to avoid a wider war that has potential to be mutually destructive. They don't want to escalate, because a proper total war destroys both.

The way fiction sometimes handles it where a character has the brilliant idea to not play fair as though it's a revelation never sits well with me. Professional fighters have encountered the concept of cheating before, it's not some great revelation. Cheating in a formal contest has consequences.

Many of the rules of war are basically pragmatic. 'Don't fake surrenders'. If you fake a surrender, and then betray it, then the time you actually need to surrender the enemy thinks 'this is another trick' and massacres you.

'Don't poison wells' After the war, you'll need that well.

By the same principle, if you poison your weapons, and its discovered, then everyone poisons their weapons and all single combats end with both combatants dead. And so on.

Kriegspiel

2022-02-02, 07:39 PM

Thanks a lot! There's something else I wondered about, do NVDs usually have magnification?

Devices meant to be worn don't, but magnified monoculars & binoculars with night vision capability are available.

Palanan

2022-02-02, 10:45 PM

Originally Posted by Catullus64
What are people's opinions about the occurrence of single combats in historical warfare (as distinct from judicial or civilian single combats)?

I’m no expert, but I seem to recall reading that wars in medieval Japan often involved one-on-one duels with samurai from opposing sides—not simply one fight, but a whole series of individual duels.

Clearly this had changed by the time of Sekigahara, if not much earlier. But I'll rely on Brother Oni and others better-versed in Japanese history to follow up on this.

Mechalich

2022-02-03, 01:21 AM

In short, how would you envision single combat as a plausible military event, somewhere between the empty ceremony that modern authors seem to view it as, and the over-romanticized practice of the sagas?

The viability of single combat has a lot to do with the cost-benefit analysis of war versus battle. If the cost of war - meaning all the logistical costs associating with mustering, fielding, and deploying an army among others - is high but the cost of battle is low - because the weapons systems involve result in low casualties, or because you have conscripts to spare, or because your warriors represent excess population your homeland can't sustain if you lose, among others - then there's a huge pressure to engage in battle so long as you appear to have any chance at all. By contrast if the cost of war is low - for example if all 'going to war' entails is having the men of the tribe grab their spears and walk a day over to the neighboring tribe's village - and the cost of battle is high - because you don't have any armor and a melee will kill tons of people even on the winning side - then there's a strong incentive to end a 'war' without battle.

In such situations single combat serves as a potential escape valve. Therefore single combat makes most sense in which war is frequent, localized, and highly deadly. This is particularly likely when you have lots of closely neighboring competing polities that can easily field forces against each other but lack the means to achieve a decisive victory (the balance of weaponry versus fortification technology also plays a role here).

Martin Greywolf

2022-02-03, 05:20 AM

More broadly, how do you think the idea of single combat can be handled intelligently in fiction?

By doing actual research, something many, many authors seem to be pathologically opposed to.

I feel like a great deal of modern historical and historical-fantasy fiction (A Song of Ice and Fire being probably the most widely-read example)

Well, ASoIaF treats the concept of not exterminating your own farmers with contempt. It has more to do with what mood you're going for in the story than any semblance of reality.

If a single combat is agreed to, one or both sides usually treats it cynically or seeks to cheat the outcome, such that a more conventional siege or battle has to be resorted to. The all-around-ok Netflix film Outlaw King also contains a prominent example of this, as does the not-so-good film Troy; it even happens in Narnia of all places.

To be fair, this is usually what happened. We'll get to it.

What are people's opinions about the occurrence of single combats in historical warfare (as distinct from judicial or civilian single combats)?
[...]
In short, how would you envision single combat as a plausible military event, somewhere between the empty ceremony that modern authors seem to view it as, and the over-romanticized practice of the sagas?

Okay. So. First of all, medieval warfare is mostly not about battles, but rather about sieges and skirmishes while looking for supplies. Most of the fighting is therefore done between small bands of soldiers, about 12-50 per side (see Chevauchee of 100-years war as an example), because sieges are mostly resolved by one side giving up rather than storming of the walls.

This is... pretty damn important, because it shifts the most common engagement from 'regiments of soldiers fighting decisive battle' to 'small bands squabbling over some resources'. That means two commanders on the opposing sides may well decide to have a joust to decide their clash if they are so inclined, because the gain in prestige is great, loosing isn't that big a deal strategically and winning will be less costly than the alternative.

The obvious problem for your epic fantasy story is that, well, it isn't all that epic and can't be used as a climatic fight.

Second area of interest is seeking out specific people in a battle. This isn't all that hard with all the heraldry and it seems it happened very often. Mallory's Death of Arthur has too many examples to count of one knight spotting another and then riding to attack him, then defeating him and being stopped from finishing his opponent off by another. This isn't exactly single combat, but you can get a chain of one on one clashes this way if the fight isn't too cramped.

Finally, single combat before battles. Well, Illiad is kinda right. Probably.

If the battle you're in isn't in its 'main bodies advancing to engage' phase, and you're sitting in a shield wall and lobbing stones, a challenge may well be issued. If you're sitting in a castle being besieged, even more so.

When this happens and both sides accept (note that it doesn't have to be leaders of the sides doing it), then yeah, everyone can stop shooting at each other for a bit and look at two people fight it out. The result of this duel isn't going to decide the battle, but will get the participants quite some prestige and will impact the morale quite a bit. Sometimes these fights even evolve into tournaments of small groups, and they could get fancy, even erecting specific barriers to discourage one side from rushing into the open castle:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zuOpdSzE7L4/T_DEy07emwI/AAAAAAAAAgc/8S1R3QJayXE/s1600/Elisabethan_tournament0001.jpg
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/16282/1000
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/12903/1000
As you can see, sometimes things... didn't go according to plan.

snowblizz

2022-02-03, 08:04 AM

As for why shows use them, rating is one thing, working with living animals is another.

Frankly shows use carcasses because they are available. When the Mythbusters tried to get hold of whole pigs for a Jimmy Hoffa experiment, oh and dead body in car one, it was near impossible as you can't actually sell them like that, it's a biohazard. Same is true for other parts of intestines. Like sourcing the complete digestive tract of a pig was also very very tricky. The way factory farming and wholesale is set up is specifically to only get the right parts tot he market and keep the "other stuff" away from it. So you are kinda at the mercy of what a local meat-wholesaler can provide you with.

Oh and live animals... you get PETA or the Animal Human society or some thing like that on you so fast your production shuts down at a snap. Check the credits of any movie featuring an animal and you'll see the watch group listed...

Vinyadan

2022-02-03, 03:58 PM

In short, how would you envision single combat as a plausible military event, somewhere between the empty ceremony that modern authors seem to view it as, and the over-romanticized practice of the sagas?

Machiavelli wrote something along these lines: if you have much to lose, you shouldn't put it all on balance on something small that won't let you bring your power to bear.

Champions fighting each other is something that happened. "Champion" as a word is related to "kampfen" -- to fight. However, I believe that those were mostly judicial duels; I saw the equivalent word on law codes from the high middle ages.

The Iliad is a very complex text (various historical eras were collapsed into it), but, as a narrative, it's quite coherent and offers an explanation for most of its events. There are two big duels that come to my mind as examples: Menelaus vs Paris and Achilles vs Hector. The first one is possible because it proposes to end the war there and then, as the war was due to Paris offending Menelaus. It's a set duel complete with a prize (Helen). The two characters aren't really champions, they are the primary parties in the dispute that devolved into the war.
The second one isn't a set duel, but becomes similar to one; Hector was left outside the walls when the Trojans retreated and Achilles ordered the Greeks not to kill him, because he wanted to do it himself (and the Greeks have learnt not to cross Achilles).
There also are cases where an exceptionally strong warrior challenges the heroes of the other army, like Hector challenging all of the Greeks to fight him in a duel. The prize in this case is the loser's armour, not the victory of the war.
About seeking people out, that certainly happened*, and glory and booty can explain why the heavily armed heroes of epos had a tendency to fight each other. However, I think that there could also have been a practical reason for that: a metal-clad noble warrior on a chariot was an extremely difficult target for anyone who wasn't similarly armed. When off his chariot, the hero was too heavily armored for lesser people to fight, and, if enough enemies joined forces against him, the hero could jump back on the chariot and get away. Someone with a similar armour had a better fighting chance, and the chariot helped get a hold of him.
That's how I understand the many nameless warriors that perish at the hands of named heroes: common folk that just weren't in the same league, as far as equipment was concerned.
Another aspect is that of leadership. The noble hero often was a chief or king; I don't know if his warriors would have remained, had he been killed (the choice would likely have gone to his heir or second in command).

In classical Greece, when push came to shove, personal duel wasn't seen in a positive light. We have a dialogue of Demaratus with Xerxes, where Demaratus (an exiled Spartan king) observes that he wouldn't fight one-on-one against some exceptionally skilled Persian warriors who would fight multiple opponents at once. Herodotus talks about a battle where Argos and Sparta chose their champions, but they were 300 for each side: in classical Greece, the citizen body and the community are the ones that matter, and one-on-one duels among nobles and kings just don't make sense (the battle still ended inconclusively).

The one personal duel among soldiers I can recall is one between a Macedonian soldier or mercenary and some Athenians. But it wasn't about war, it was about personal esteem. I think someone here mentioned it, and could give more precise info about it.

If you can access it, you can take a look at this article: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/ideology-in-the-middle-ages/duel-in-medieval-western-mentality/EE65FCF3F5DD8408CBEA8EE9D7A83EA4#

I don't have access to it, but it mentions the riepto. If I understand correctly, the riepto was a judgment that could contain a mix between the judicial duel and the duel between chiefs: two feuding nobles would fight each other before the king to determine who was right. https://www.academia.edu/2533245/El_riepto_en_el_Derecho_Castellano_leones_del_Dere cho_municipal_al_Derecho_regio In a way, I guess, all judiciary duels among leaders could be seen as a substitute to a war inside the kingdom (law as a way to limit the conflict among families is something already present in Greece, and described in the Iliad as handled through weregild in one of the depictions on the shield of Achilles; the city must make it clear that the men aren't just the leaders of their house, but also part of the wider polity, so peace must be kept).

*at the battle of Cunaxa (401 BC), Cyrus the Younger died while leading the attack targeting his own brother, in the middle of the enemy army. An event in the same battle gives us an idea of the glory from killing in combat an enemy of renown: Cyrus reportedly was killed by a man called Mithridates, and the Great King later had Mithridates killed, because he wanted to be known as the man who had killed Cyrus.
There is one Roman example I can think of that isn't in Livy: in 29 BC the commander Licinius Crassus demanded spolia opima for having personally defeated the king of the Bastarnae. He was refused his request, because Augustus claimed to be the real commander of all military action, and instead he was given a triumph. However, his fight didn't decide the battle, which was won by the Roman army as a whole.

Devices meant to be worn don't, but magnified monoculars & binoculars with night vision capability are available.

OK, thanks a lot!

Brother Oni

2022-02-04, 02:04 PM

I’m no expert, but I seem to recall reading that wars in medieval Japan often involved one-on-one duels with samurai from opposing sides—not simply one fight, but a whole series of individual duels.

Clearly this had changed by the time of Sekigahara, if not much earlier.

Kind of for both points.

Reputedly, samurai had a habit of riding out in front of the army lines and boasting of their name/lineage/achievement, as both psychological warfare against the enemy and to boost friendly morale. Sometimes they might pick up a duel as a bit prestige earning, much like Martin Greywolf mentioned, but these were uncommon. This habit had disappeared by the time of the first Mongol Invasion (late 13th Century) although whether it was because the samurai didn't feel the need for it, or the Mongols broke them of that habit, isn't clear.

Battle lines devolving into duels after the initial clash was not ideal and actively discouraged, but plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy and there's a couple of factors that influenced this: the way samurai were rewarded for their prowess in battle, how the samurai specifically (ie not ashigaru) were organised and the tactics that these two factors both led to.

Samurai were rewarded for their prowess in battle - the easiest way of proving this was to display the heads of all your famous and important opponents you had taken after the battle in a head viewing ceremony. So samurai were encouraged to go out hunting for important leaders, despite maintaining formation being the best way of staying alive in combat.

The next factor that lead to this was the way samurai were organised, as opposed to ashigaru. Taking the basic yari (spear) squad, they were 14 samurai strong, with each samurai having 1 or 2 ashigaru supporters or 'men at arms' not armed with spears. Each samurai/ashigaru team would fight together as close knit unit, but the whole samurai squad would be a much looser formation than an equivalent ashigaru spear squad.
These men at arms would be responsible for collecting the head after the samurai had taken it from its former owner.

These two factors often lead to samurai tactics and warfare focusing on decapitation strikes (pun intended), that is going after high value targets and leaders almost exclusively, sometimes to the exclusion of actually winning the battle.*

This hadn't changed by the time of Sekigahara - what had changed was the increased predominance of ashigaru, who weren't as well rewarded for head hunting, plus they weren't as well trained, equipped or organised to go after a samurai's head (in comparison to the elite, semi-independent samurai spear squads, an ashigaru spear squad was 25 ashigaru shoulder to shoulder in a line, one man deep with a squad commander right behind them).
*The daimyo, Imagawa Yoshimoto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagawa_Yoshimoto), took time out after conquering two Oda castles in 1560 for headviewing ceremonies and a celebration of their victories. This delay in his march allowed his forces to be ambushed by another Oda army, resulting in his death.

Moving away from Japanese combat, I found mentioned of the Combat of the Thirty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_of_the_Thirty) in an earlier version of this thread, so it appears that organising such ritual combat might be an option to stalemated siege warfare throughout the rest of war.

Edit: On a separate note, i found this reference to a Shimadzu clan mobilisation order from 1578

Holders of 1 cho: 2 men, master and follower; the master's service shall be personal;
holders of 2 cho: 3 men, master and followers;
holders of 3 cho: 4 men, master and followers;
holders of 4 cho: 5 men, master and followers;
holders of 5 cho: 6 men, master and followers;
holders of 6 cho: 7 men, master and followers;
holders of 7 cho: 8 men, master and followers;
holders of 8 cho: 9 men, master and followers;
holders of 9 cho: 10 men, master and followers;
holders of 10 cho: 11 men, master and followers;

1 cho was ~2.94 acres back in 1578.

Pauly

2022-02-04, 03:00 PM

Mechalich

2022-02-04, 06:03 PM

Probably the most famous example of an individual combat of single combat is David and Goliath. Leaving aside whether or not it is a true account or not, the situation described leading up to the duel is fairly common. Both armies had taken up defensive positions and neither was prepared to come out and attack. The offer of single combat was part of the psychological warfare to get the other side’s morale to break. So as a way of breaking a stalemate, a duel of champions was useds. This seems to have been reasonably common at least in literature.

Single combat as a psychological weapon of this nature also shows up extensively in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and there seems to be a fair amount of historical backing as the accounts reveal that many of the generals of the time were horrible jerks who couldn't lead an army out of a paper bag but whose personal combat prowess was exceedingly important, such as Lu Bu.

This seems to have a lot to do with the nature of the armies and the weapons systems available to them. The average Three Kingdoms army was comprised almost entirely of conscripted peasants with minimal training, only simple polearms as weapons and no armor to speak of. At the same time, however, those armies were huge, regularly throwing mid-five figure forces at each other. Additionally, due to the nature of the Chinese central plains and its heavy cultivation (of wheat, not rice), they often drew up against each other more or less in the open. Even further, because of environmental considerations and ongoing hostilities with the steppe tribes to the north, the Chinese state at the time had proportionally very few cavalry to break up infantry formations.

The result was a military situation that prioritized any method whatsoever to 'break the line' and cause infantry to scatter before assaults. A huge portion of Three Kingdoms involves seemingly endless stratagems to take the enemy unawares so as to avoid letting them draw up their formations, but when that failed, it seems the practice was to send out your champion to fight the other guys champion in the hopes that a decisive victory would break enemy morale and allow a massed infantry attack to succeed.

So this sort of duel-to-break-morale situation can exist, but it will only happen if the right military conditions emerge to support it. Large conscript armies seem to be a key part - because that's the kind of army that depends on this sort of morale-boost.

Brother Oni

2022-02-05, 03:59 AM

Single combat as a psychological weapon of this nature also shows up extensively in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and there seems to be a fair amount of historical backing as the accounts reveal that many of the generals of the time were horrible jerks who couldn't lead an army out of a paper bag but whose personal combat prowess was exceedingly important, such as Lu Bu.

While true that a significant number of generals did end up being betrayed by their subordinates (Zhang Fei is mentioned multiple times to be a giant, drunken [redacted] bag which led to his assassination by two defecting subordinates and he's the sworn brother of the patron saint of loyalty and righteousness himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guan_Yu)), take anything from Romance with a great pinch of salt as it's essentially historical fanfiction that was collated and written down by a Liu Bei fanboy, centuries after the Three Kingdoms era.

Thane of Fife

2022-02-05, 10:14 AM

So this sort of duel-to-break-morale situation can exist, but it will only happen if the right military conditions emerge to support it. Large conscript armies seem to be a key part - because that's the kind of army that depends on this sort of morale-boost.

I suspect that these sorts of single combats were more common than that. I'm going mostly off secondary (or worse) sources here, but I can find references to similar single combats at (I'm just looking in Europe):

The Battle of Kulikovo (Russians vs Mongols). Both champions purportedly killed each other.
Battles of the Arab Conquests, even going so far as to claim that the Arab Mubarizun were a special unit devoted primarily to these kinds of single combats against the Byzantines.
At the Battle of Nineveh, Byzantine Emperor Heraclius purportedly fought a single combat before the battle.
Geoffrey le Baker apparently records a combat between an English and Scottish champion before the Battle of Halidon Hill, and other combats between the English and French before Poitiers.
At the Siege of Melun in 1429, the commander of the French garrison, Arnaud Guillaume, purportedly jousted with King Henry V underground during a counter-mining operation.

Likewise, we know that people fought duels and such outside of battles - there's the Combat of the Thirty mentioned just a few posts ago, for example. I also saw an interesting reference to a challenge made in 1398-ish by seven French knights against the English, with the losers giving diamonds or golden rods to the winners' ladies. These sorts of challenges seem to have been highly lauded at the time, win or lose.

---

My understanding of the current conception of pre-modern combat is that it was brief spasms of action between when lines met and when they broke apart again to regroup. These lulls, or the moments before the battle actually started, would seem like ideal moments for single or small group combats.

If people from these sorts of warrior cultures were willing to fight deadly duels for honor during comparative peacetime, I would think they would have been even more willing to do it during battle, when their blood was up and they were in front of all their peers, unless they had it sufficiently beaten into them that they were not supposed to do that.

That's all speculation on my part, though.

Palanan

2022-02-05, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by Thane of Fife
The Battle of Kulikovo (Russians vs Mongols). Both champions purportedly killed each other.

This is mentioned in Osprey’s book on Kulikovo (https://www.amazon.com/Kulikovo-1380-battle-Russia-Campaign/dp/1472831217/):

“Although it is entirely possible this is simply a colourful apocryphal tale, the convention is that, in a clash evocative of older times, champions from each side met and duelled in the no man’s land between armies before the battle.” (p. 57)

The book adds the detail that after the first pass with spears, the Mongol champion’s body “was knocked clean off his horse," while the Russian champion’s body stayed in the saddle, which the Russians considered a good omen.

Clistenes

2022-02-05, 02:18 PM

Speaking about duels during a war, I would like to mention the Challenge of Barletta (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_of_Barletta).

It seems such duels were quite common during sieged in the Italian Wars.

About duels between samurai, it's important to remember that they originally weren't soldiers serving in the armies of independent countries, but bodyguards and enforcers of imperial governors. At the beginning, samurai wars looked more like small scale vendettas between aristocratic families... like, you killed the servant of my cousin, so I send some guys to burn one of your villages.

Samurai were mounted archers at that time. Their armies were small and fast, and their main goal was to kill other samurai.

Afterwards, fiefdoms became more and more like independent countries that conquered each other, and they created true armies.

At the beginning, ashigaru were seen as a poor man's weapon, a poor replacement for samurai that you resorted to when you lacked them.

But later they raised large armies of ashigaru footmen, with samurai being officers and cavalry.

So. I have experience in using live blades on living animals, since I did hang around on a farm. I'll spoiler my take on this since it involves killing of animals that didn't exactly happen safely in the past. It's not going to be graphic, but if you are twelve and like sheep...

Okay, so for the most part, carcasses are more resistant to blades than the living animals. That is mostly due to bones, but we'll take it by the numbers.

Fur and skin are about the same, living or dead. If you take time to turn it into rawhide or tan it, that's a different story, but that's outside of this discussion. It probably bears mentioning that some animal skins are tougher than others, with boars being particularly infamous.

Meat/muscles are also about the same, unless your carcass was left alone in specific conditions to start to cure itself and get that leathery quality to its meat, then it is significantly tougher.

Organs don't accomplish much, except for splattering, living or dead.

The real culprit is the bones. The longer a bone is dead, the harder to cut it gets. Even bones in your average meat sold by butchers and supermarkets are already harder to cut through than living ones. Living bones have a (usually) pinkish color and have blood going through them, and are just a bit soft and squishy.

All of that means dead carcasses are much harder to cut.

As for why shows use them, rating is one thing, working with living animals is another. Any living animal is, in general, a massive pain to work with if you're shooting any kind of movie/show, and that's a hassle that you may well eschew if you're on a budget.

Thank you. I wasn't speaking of living animals, but of dead animals whose blood and organs haven't been removed, but your post answers my question.

I understand why carcasses are used in shows instead of whole dead bodies , of course. It would be too gruesome for TV. Scientific tests done in lab conditions are another matter...

As for living animals, it probably is illegal in most countries (and honestly, I wouldn't want to watch that show myself).

fusilier

2022-02-09, 08:17 PM

Speaking about duels during a war, I would like to mention the Challenge of Barletta (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_of_Barletta).

It seems such duels were quite common during sieged in the Italian Wars.

Ah the Challenge of Barletta, that's a fascinating event. I was thinking about it recently. I didn't realize such duels were common, although it makes sense as a good way to pass the time during sieges.

Martin Greywolf

2022-02-10, 06:26 AM

Samurai were mounted archers at that time. Their armies were small and fast, and their main goal was to kill other samurai.

Afterwards, fiefdoms became more and more like independent countries that conquered each other, and they created true armies.

At the beginning, ashigaru were seen as a poor man's weapon, a poor replacement for samurai that you resorted to when you lacked them.

But later they raised large armies of ashigaru footmen, with samurai being officers and cavalry.

It's a pretty fascinating thing - Japan basically had middle ages on fast forward during the Sengoku Jidai. At the end of Muromachi period and start of Sengoku Jidai, the samurai armies were not unlike those of early medieval Hungary: centered around well-armored horse archer aristocracy. And then, during sengoku jidai, they discovered heavy cavalry massed charges and subsequently countered them with pike and shot formations, with all the organizational innovation you need to have those.

And then they stagnated for a few centuries, only to repeat the blisteringly quick modernization during the Meiji restoration.

Catullus64

2022-02-10, 09:50 AM

Here's a thing on which I would be keen to gather people's speculations: why does the sword, in so many times and places, achieve its status as a poetic and cultural symbol of martial values, as opposed to other weapons.

There are, I am aware, countless exceptions to this rule, many times and places where spears, bows, shields, and battle rifles receive this romantic treatment as a metonym for warriors and warfare. But it seems fair to say that the sword receives this treatment more persistently, even in cultures that differ vastly in terms of how swords fit into their fighting practices. It's a sufficiently powerful cultural motif that every arms enthusiast or professional seems to feel the need to push back and emphasize the importance of other weapons.

As for my own speculations about the matter, they are always baffled by the diversity of the periods. The claim that swords represent specifically elite fighting has never rung true for me in the face of the Romans, whose most successful infantry system revolved around a sword in conjunction with a large shield, and who used the sword as a martial motif with aplomb. Curious to hear what people's takes are based on their own sources and periods of interest.

Sapphire Guard

2022-02-10, 11:53 AM

Because they're more expensive and therefore worn by rich people. Either that or because they were used in formal duels.

You hear about duelling with pistols more than rifles or shotguns, even though they are not better combat weapons overall.

(All of this is guesswork)

Vinyadan

2022-02-10, 03:20 PM

halfeye

2022-02-10, 03:33 PM

I think the Greeks didn't really care about swords. For them, the symbolic weapon was the spear. Homer's heroes used a spear, poets describing military service mentioned it through the spear, Greece vs Persia was described as spear vs bow, and the land conquered by the Hellenistic kings was "conquered by the spear" (doryktetos).

About the Romans, I am not sure that the sword was that important for them. I haven't really searched, but, off the top of my head, I can't really recall any use of it as a symbolic, particularly meaningful weapon. Spears instead were used as a symbol of autority for commanders and emperors, and were themselves a symbol of war (an emperor pointing a spear downwards represented peace). Rome itself, personfied as the goddess Roma, bore a spear.
The one special use of the gladius I can think of is in episodes of violence (sometimes involving soldiers) outside the field of battle, like when Gaius Luscius was killed, or when the Emperors were done with someone, or someone was done with the Emperor (and, now that I think about it, the tyrannicides in Athens were also represented with swords).

The way I heard it, the legions avanced with a shield wall and stuck their swords forward through gaps, while the celts were coming at them looking for single combat with longer swords and not getting it. This could easily be wrong, but I'd need citations before accepting another account.

Mechalich

2022-02-10, 08:11 PM

Here's a thing on which I would be keen to gather people's speculations: why does the sword, in so many times and places, achieve its status as a poetic and cultural symbol of martial values, as opposed to other weapons.

Because 'martial values' are not necessarily the values of the battlefield, and may in fact be rather idealized or even opposed to them.

The sword was, until the development of pistols (and even for some time after that, depending on location) the predominant sidearm and the dominant weapon in non-battlefield combat such as urban brawls, duels, sporting contests, and indoor fighting. In times of relative limited open battle by high rates of commonplace violence - a common state in many eras of history when battles were rare but raiding and sieging were more frequent - the sword acquired prominence. Additionally, battlefield combat techniques tend to be simple and emphasize collective action - for example, phalanx fighting stresses unit cohesion over individual thrust technique - while dueling or sport techniques may be extremely complex and involved. The latter makes them much better for literary purposes which means they tended to get immortalized in art form at a comparatively higher rate. There was also an economic incentive behind this - a swordmaster has every reason to make his school as complex as possible in order to milk young nobles out of fees for years, even though the marginal utility of such teachings is rather low.

Consider The Book of Five Rings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings), possibly the most famous manual on swordsmanship ever written. Miyamoto Musashi wrote it for his students as a compilation of the teachings of his school. He had served in battle and briefly discusses the utility of the other major battlefield weapons of the time (bows, spears, slashing polearms, and guns), even conceding situational superiority in some cases - such as guns being unrivaled until melee commences - but he focuses overwhelming on the sword and uses swordsmanship as his central metaphor for tactics, strategy, and the philosophy of life as a whole. Musashi wasn't trying to teach ideal battlefield combat methods, he was trying to convey his idea of the warrior ideal, and he did so in a artistically compelling fashion. Actual military combat manuals, by contrast, simply can't compare in terms of cultural penetration.

AdAstra

2022-02-10, 08:32 PM

I think it's less that swords are specifically a rich person's weapon (if anything, heavy armor for the period tends to be more associated with status) and more that swords are typically a weapon that is easy to carry, either in one's day to day life or on the battlefield, particularly when you have other weapons to lug around. In addition, unlike axes and knives, swords are almost solely martial implements (hunting swords being one of the few exceptions), while spears are a bit more subject to wear and tear even when used carefully while being more cumbersome outside of battle (and have more associations with hunting). For someone who wants to commission a fancy/custom/really excellent weapon, a martial badge of office, a weapon that's kinda akin to jewelry, a sword makes sense since it's feasible to take just about anywhere while still being impressive. So while swords were more than a status symbol, a lot of status symbols are going to end up being swords (though not all, you see dolled-up versions of just about anything).

As for Roman use of swords as symbols, you do see them in the form of wooden swords/Rudis given to retiring gladiators. Not a military association, but a martial one at least.

Lacco

2022-02-11, 02:08 AM

I'd go for a baseless speculation: swords are weapons made for war. Other weapons were either hunting tools (e.g. bows, spears) or tools (axes, hammers) that were later turned into weapons.

But swords... they were made with only one purpose in mind. So if you owned one... you were a warrior. Not a hunter that also goes to war. Or lumberjack that goes to war.

Still: it's a baseless speculation on my side.

Martin Greywolf

2022-02-11, 05:34 AM

Here's a thing on which I would be keen to gather people's speculations: why does the sword, in so many times and places, achieve its status as a poetic and cultural symbol of martial values, as opposed to other weapons.

Let's address some of the myths floating around.

Swords aren't significantly more expensive than other weapons. The good ones can be, but buying a basic sword was within the abilities of a common soldier in most of medieval era. They were sometimes prohibitively expensive in migration period Europe, but that's an exception that got blown out of proportion. You need about as much metal for one as you need for a helmet, so if swords are rare, helmets should be as well. Which is true for the more tribal areas of migration period Europe, but not for, say, ancient Egypt, Rome or Chinese dynasties.

Secondly, sword isn't necessarily a sidearm, albeit for most of the pre-gunpowder era, this is the case. Roman legions used heavy pilum as a spear, and fought much in the same way Greek phalanxes did - spear and shield, chuck spear once tight press is about to happen and switch to sword and shield. You can argue about which weapon was the primary one, and you'd be wrong with either, the primary 'weapon' in this case is clearly the shield. Once gunpowder era hits, some of the heavy cavalry has swords as primary weapons, and officers with pistol and sword have... two sidearms? It gets a bit wonky.

Third issue is that of hunting weapon. There is quite a lot of hunting swords around, for anything from stiucking the boars through to slitting the throat of incapacitated prey. They were worn and often used at hunts. You could argue they are associated with hunts less than bows, crossbows and spears - albeit I don't know how successfully and for what period - but that's about it.

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/11014/1000
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/20271/1000

So, why the mythologizing? You can wear them at all times. That's pretty much it. It has... a lot of effects.

First of all, if you are a random commoner, you will see your local aristocrat a lot, since he has administrative duties. At those times you see him, he will not be in heavy armor and with a pollaxe/ji/naginata, because why the hell would he, he's there to make sure the taxes are paid. But, what he will have is, and this will build an association between swords and people in charge.

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/20219/1000

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Zach_Felician_merenylete.jpg

Moreover, and this applies to societies without military aristocracy (e.g. China), if you have a heroic story, people in it will be doing a lot of plot things other than being in major battles. While they will definitely have their heavy fighting gear in battle, once they go to have a dinner or hold court and get jumped by ninjas, all they have left is a sword. Combine this with using a sword once their weapon breaks (and sometimes subsequently breaking the sword as well), and you have a sword that is at the side of your heroic characters at all times. I'm currently reading through Morte de Arthur, and this sort fo things happens quite a lot.

VonKaiserstein

2022-02-11, 05:45 AM

As for the individual combat, there does appear to be a strong cultural element to it.
Cultures that had a strong history of boasting of individual prowess (Celts, Viking era Scandinavians, Japanese for example) had higher reported instances. Some of the reports come from epic poems/myths/sagas so there is a chance that it was seen more as an ideal than an actual practice. More organized/pragmatic cultures (eg Romans, Mongols) discouraged the practice.

Probably the most famous example of an individual combat of single combat is David and Goliath. Leaving aside whether or not it is a true account or not, the situation described leading up to the duel is fairly common. Both armies had taken up defensive positions and neither was prepared to come out and attack. The offer of single combat was part of the psychological warfare to get the other side’s morale to break. So as a way of breaking a stalemate, a duel of champions was useds. This seems to have been reasonably common at least in literature.

Absolutely this. You see individual duels in warrior societies, typically in routine warfare. The Cattle Raid of Cooley is an excellent example because you have many warlike political entities (Ireland was known as having a king on every hill) and very low stakes warfare. The loss of a duel might mean the loss of a cow, or a few sheep, or the village beauty- a very survivable experience for the tribe that lost. On the other hand, as you're surrounded by equally warlike warrior groups, if you throw all your warriors into battle against the raiding party even if you win the casualties might cause the end of your tiny kingdom.

It doesn't make sense if someone is trying to wipe you out. If they're trying to force you into some treaty, or steal a few resources, then it definitely does. It's one of the main differences between warrior culture, and a culture with a standing army. Ironically, a standing army or professional soldiery will fight harder because that's what they're for. Somebody already paid you to get very good at fighting- they want their money's worth! The warriors of a village will fight when required, sure... but typically they've got farms, fishing, or other regular jobs to tend to, so let's wrap this up and get back to the business of living.

Vinyadan

2022-02-11, 09:40 AM

The way I heard it, the legions avanced with a shield wall and stuck their swords forward through gaps, while the celts were coming at them looking for single combat with longer swords and not getting it. This could easily be wrong, but I'd need citations before accepting another account.

What I meant was importance on a symbolic level: spears clearly were used as symbols by the various ancient incarnations of the Roman state, swords, however, not so much.

I think it's because spears were a symbol of war, and, therefore, of military might. In Herodotus there is a line by Leonidas who tells a subject of Xerxes, "If you knew freedom, you would fight for it not just with spears, but even with axes". Spears here are the military weapon of choice, while axes are civilian items used as improvised weapons in an imaginary desperate and underequipped revolt. Swords would have been less interesting to name, because they were somewhere in between the extremes: military weapons that weren't as apt or as important as spears. Spears vs swords is like rifle vs pistols, a state will more likely exalt a soldier's rifle than a pistol.

I would add another detail, which is the severe arms control in the republics of the ancient era: even when you were allowed to own weapons, you generally couldn't carry them in public places. What these places were varies by time and place; Rome had the pomerium, other places had the temple, the market, and the agora, or the whole of the city within its walls. So a sword couldn't become a status symbol like in later eras, because you didn't wear one when performing your public duties.

Instead, two civilian weapons gained special regard in Rome: sticks and axes, that represented the power of the magistrate to punish citizens with beatings and decapitations and were bundled in the fasces. The lictors carrying them weren't there just for show, but actual jailors, torturers, and executioners that accompanied the magistrate to enforce his decisions.

In medieval times, the Doge of Venice occasionally carried a bare sword for similar reasons while parading someone sentenced to death. Swords represented the might to punish evil deeds. For similar reasons, we see as Justice carrying a sword. In Greece, however, the goddess of justice (Dike) had many aspects and identifications, and so she could show a number of implements, among which the cornucopia and lighting (as Astraea), parts of a mouse trap or a mallet (to beat up Injustice), a sword (as an infernal deity), a box full of books and more.

Secondly, sword isn't necessarily a sidearm, albeit for most of the pre-gunpowder era, this is the case. Roman legions used heavy pilum as a spear, and fought much in the same way Greek phalanxes did - spear and shield, chuck spear once tight press is about to happen and switch to sword and shield. You can argue about which weapon was the primary one, and you'd be wrong with either, the primary 'weapon' in this case is clearly the shield.

Just for clarity, not knowing if your "chuck" meant "cast aside" or "throw", I don't believe the Greeks in this age threw their spears before clashing with the enemy. There is a description in Herodotus where the Spartans have turned to swords because they have to, as they have been fighting for so long that most of their spears had been broken.

As for Roman use of swords as symbols, you do see them in the form of wooden swords/Rudis given to retiring gladiators. Not a military association, but a martial one at least.

Interesting; legionaries could be rewarded instead with the hasta pura, a spear without the iron tip (different authors give different occasions when it was bestowed; one was the retiring of centurions holding a particularly important position).

This sort of purely symbolic rewards (not much worth to them) was to be found in the panellenic games, too: a laurel wreath or branch in Olympia and Delphi, a celery one at the Nemean games, and a pine one at the Isthmic games.

Gladiatory games, suspended between battle and civilian life, do look like one of those places where a sword could gain a very special meaning.

Martin Greywolf

2022-02-11, 03:37 PM

In medieval times, the Doge of Venice occasionally carried a bare sword for similar reasons while parading someone sentenced to death. Swords represented the might to punish evil deeds. For similar reasons, we see as Justice carrying a sword. In Greece, however, the goddess of justice (Dike) had many aspects and identifications, and so she could show a number of implements, among which the cornucopia and lighting (as Astraea), parts of a mouse trap or a mallet (to beat up Injustice), a sword (as an infernal deity), a box full of books and more.

This is where we need to be really, really careful not to put cart in front of the horse. Why did the Doge use the sword as a symbol of authority? Was it because it was associated with the judiciary duties, or was it because sword as such was associated with authority in the first place?

With most of the post-migration period medieval rituals, it's probably the latter. There is a wealth of sources from 900-1200 that have swords in positions symbolizing knighthood or some other sort of authority, and it holds fairly uiversally across Europe. Hungarian chronicles have kings being knighted by being belted with swords in rivers (probably a Slavic ritual), Arthurian myth prominently features sword as the object that chooses the king (French or Welsh in origin? there is no consensus) and so on.

But all of that is kind of... not applicable to the topic, in a way. There are different resons why sword became so entrenched with knights that to those for Samurai and katanas, but they do share common traits: both are swords, and both are considered to be the coolest melee weapon in their culture. With cultures that disparate arriving to a convergent mythology of weapons... the reason has to be somewhere other than mythology and region-specific developments.

Just for clarity, not knowing if your "chuck" meant "cast aside" or "throw", I don't believe the Greeks in this age threw their spears before clashing with the enemy. There is a description in Herodotus where the Spartans have turned to swords because they have to, as they have been fighting for so long that most of their spears had been broken.

Homer describes spears being thrown by heavy infantry, and even later hoplites did throw them, occassionally. It wasn't the Roman-style pre-charge pilum throw, Greeks seemed to prefer to charge in a phalanx with spears, what I was referring to was being in a situation where you know you will have to use your sword, so you opt to do something useful with the spear and throw it. There are definitely situations where it would be devastatingly effective - the one that comes to mind immediately is flanking. If you are about to clash into side of enemy formation already in a melee, the people on their sides will turn to face you, but people behind them will not.

The macedonian phalanxes with what were effectively pikes would only throw them very rarely. I don't know about Greeks specifically, but:

https://wiktenauer.com/images/thumb/7/73/La_Picca_%28Alfieri%29_13.png/400px-La_Picca_%28Alfieri%29_13.png
On sliding the pike, and on the sword

Chapter XII

In this design we see the method for sliding the pike back, until it rests on your left hand near the head. The soldier finds his left flank forward, and wishing to avail himself of his arms, and not abandon them, flips over his left hand, which he must use to pass the pike over his head. With this motion he returns to his natural posture, holding the pike, and after can easily put his hand to his sword, without disordering himself by drawing it over his left arm, without moving his feet.

In this way he can easily employ both of them together, to better resist, and fight with the advantage of two weapons, which is obvious to those who know how important this is, and who dedicate themselves to the military arts. However, the prudent never have their fill of practising and learning: demonstrating their strength and agility by throwing the pike in different ways, letting it slide from the point down to the butt, and extracting a thousand new discoveries, all contributing to the completeness of this art.

It's the first rule of pragmatic polearms: if you can't use it any more, throw it at someone.

Gladiatory games, suspended between battle and civilian life, do look like one of those places where a sword could gain a very special meaning.

This may once again be putting things backwards. Gladiatorial games had very specific rulesets, and allowed weapons, and whether or not the prizes were associated iwth them more than any militarily significant weapons is... well, a pretty good topic for a thesis.

Berenger

2022-02-11, 05:15 PM

Gladiatory games, suspended between battle and civilian life, do look like one of those places where a sword could gain a very special meaning.

Swords seem to have held some special meaning in this context because the symbol of a successful gladiator's manumission was shaped in the form of a rudis, a wooden training sword.

Vinyadan

2022-02-11, 07:09 PM

About the meaning of swords in the gladiatory games, it just came to my mind a text by Artemidorus, a Greek diviner, who offered an interpretation of the meaning of different gladiators. The gladiators represented the kind of woman you were going to marry, based on his technique and equipment. For example, if you dreamt of a gladiator with two blades, well, tough luck: it meant that your wife was going to be duplicitous, ugly, or an outright poisoner.

It isn't strictly related, but it's something I find funny and interesting.

This is where we need to be really, really careful not to put cart in front of the horse. Why did the Doge use the sword as a symbol of authority? Was it because it was associated with the judiciary duties, or was it because sword as such was associated with authority in the first place?

There are multiple swords in the history of Venice, and the symbols of the Doge varied with time. The original ones came from Constantinople and where a sword, a sceptre, and a throne. The sword represented the dignity of spatharios, while the sceptre and the throne were probably derived by the late ancient-early medieval custom of bestowing them to Constantinople's consuls (other Italian dukes, like the duke of Naples, also used them). In a couple of centuries, both sword and throne disappeared from the ceremony of the doge's ascension, and he would only get a sceptre.
During the times of the comuni, the sceptre (that had become a judiciary symbol) also disappeared, and the doge would instead get a standard, possibly because it was closer to what had been happening in other cities (with roles such as "gonfaloniere", the city's standard-bearer, and, sometimes, its highest office). The standard is also visible on the sigils and the coins showing the doge (Enrico Dandolo receives the standard from St. Mark (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Venezia%2C_grosso_da_26_denari_%28matapan%29_di_en rico_dandolo%2C_1192-1205.JPG)).
As the power of the doge lessens, the number of his regalia increases, until they comprise the 7 "triumphs". Among these there is a sword given by the Pope to the doge in 1177 as a defender of Christianity (= defender of of the Pope against the Emperor). This sword will become known as the "sword of justice"; Jacopo Bertaldo (a jurist, d. 1315) connects it to the power of vengeance (for the state) of the doge. It normally wasn't carried by the doge, but by some magistrates or judges who accompanied him. Its connection to the power to punish is generally attested in all secondary sources I read about it.

It's a pity that I cannot find the description of the parade I mentioned earlier; I read it years ago, and my memory is a bit hazy. The procession proceded by boat, and the doge was on the ducal barge; the sentenced man, whose hand was cut and hanged at his neck, also was on a barge. I don't remember if the doge exceptionally carried the sword personally in this case, or whether it was naked or sheated, and when exactly the hand was cut (before or after leaving the barge).

Homer describes spears being thrown by heavy infantry, and even later hoplites did throw them, occassionally. It wasn't the Roman-style pre-charge pilum throw, Greeks seemed to prefer to charge in a phalanx with spears, what I was referring to was being in a situation where you know you will have to use your sword, so you opt to do something useful with the spear and throw it. There are definitely situations where it would be devastatingly effective - the one that comes to mind immediately is flanking. If you are about to clash into side of enemy formation already in a melee, the people on their sides will turn to face you, but people behind them will not.

If you have some references on hoplites throwing their spears, I'd like to take a look. It's the sort of thing that gets barely mentioned. The one case I have in mind is a vase where hoplites carry two spears, one noticeably shorter than the other and probably meant to be thrown (although this is different from throwing the main spear).

Martin Greywolf

2022-02-12, 07:49 AM

The original ones came from Constantinople and where a sword, a sceptre, and a throne. The sword represented the dignity of spatharios

So, in this specific case, the sowrd is there because it was the weapon of choice of imperial bodyguards whose name/title got used in political plays in the sense of "the emperor trusts you", and it's a sword because a sword and a shield are a really good weapon choice for a bodyguard. Kind of how we associate semiauto pistols and black suits with single headphone with modern bodyguards.

If you have some references on hoplites throwing their spears, I'd like to take a look. It's the sort of thing that gets barely mentioned. The one case I have in mind is a vase where hoplites carry two spears, one noticeably shorter than the other and probably meant to be thrown (although this is different from throwing the main spear).

For literary references,, I don't have a lot of Greek ones, being a medieval guy, but, there is all of Iliad, spears get thrown there quite a lot at targets of opportunity, or in duels where some opt to throw all the spears and go into sword and board fight rather than throw all but one spears.

For depictions, the situation is both simple and complicated. Complicated because overhand spear thrust is the same position as the one used to throw a spear (not that you can't throw underhand if pressed), but simple because of amentum. It's a rope thingy that functions as an atl atl.

https://sites.psu.edu/thehopliteexperience/wp-content/uploads/sites/10736/2014/04/make-and-throw-iron-javelin.w654-300x157.jpg

And amentum is seen used on hoplite spears, even if they are only holding one.

https://www.historyforkids.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Ancient-Greek-Warrior.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJILKPGWsAwH-Qg?format=jpg&name=900x900

You could argue artistic license, but I don't like that argument much, especially since there are depictions of hoplites with two spears. It's equally, if not more, likely that we see some hoplites putting a light piece of string on their spears to be able to throw them better if they have the reason to. It's not like that string weights much or gets in the way.

Vinyadan

2022-02-12, 01:44 PM

So, in this specific case, the sowrd is there because it was the weapon of choice of imperial bodyguards whose name/title got used in political plays in the sense of "the emperor trusts you", and it's a sword because a sword and a shield are a really good weapon choice for a bodyguard. Kind of how we associate semiauto pistols and black suits with single headphone with modern bodyguards.

In the very first instances, yep, that's the case. Then the sword seems to disappear from descriptions of the elevation of new Dogi. The sword that appears after 1177 is symbolically the one given that year by the Pope with the meaning of a defender (although an ideologically charged one, as the Doge isn't the defender of any lord, but of the Pope himself, and therefore fighting a just fight sanctioned by the highest moral authority). It then is closely associated to the judiciary; Justice itself, in Venice, bears the scales and a sword, but wears no blindfold. The phisical sword of the doge is then clearly associated to judiciary functions by the XIV century, as I mentioned in the previous post,as it must be carried by a judge or magistrate. Much later (1600s), we see coins showing on one side the Doge receiving the standard from St. Mark, and, on the other, receiving the sword from Justice herself (https://numismaticaranieri.it/archivioscheda/22559-venezia-leonardo-dona-doge-xc-1606-1612-osella-anno-iii-1608.aspx).

Now, on one hand, I admit that it's a mistake to rely too much on contemporary allegorical understandings of the meaning of items, because the medieval man loved that stuff and would make up his own allegory, if one wasn't already available from the start (I say this in particular about the aforementioned Jacopo, a contemporary of Dante "Allegory" Alighieri himself). On the other hand, I wonder whether "I got this sword because I have iustitia" (the personal virtue) was separated from "I have this sword because I wield iustitia" (the justice of Venice).

It's notable however that, by the time of Jacopo, the Doge didn't judge or execute anyone. He was be present at judgement and execution, and the judge explicitly told him "I speak in your name" when pronouncing verdict, but he wasn't allowed to exercise such powers in person. Which is different from Roman magistrates, and might explain why judges would carry the sword instead of him.

For literary references,, I don't have a lot of Greek ones, being a medieval guy, but, there is all of Iliad, spears get thrown there quite a lot at targets of opportunity, or in duels where some opt to throw all the spears and go into sword and board fight rather than throw all but one spears.

For depictions, the situation is both simple and complicated. Complicated because overhand spear thrust is the same position as the one used to throw a spear (not that you can't throw underhand if pressed), but simple because of amentum. It's a rope thingy that functions as an atl atl.

https://sites.psu.edu/thehopliteexperience/wp-content/uploads/sites/10736/2014/04/make-and-throw-iron-javelin.w654-300x157.jpg

And amentum is seen used on hoplite spears, even if they are only holding one.

https://www.historyforkids.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Ancient-Greek-Warrior.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJILKPGWsAwH-Qg?format=jpg&name=900x900

You could argue artistic license, but I don't like that argument much, especially since there are depictions of hoplites with two spears. It's equally, if not more, likely that we see some hoplites putting a light piece of string on their spears to be able to throw them better if they have the reason to. It's not like that string weights much or gets in the way.

The problem with that image in particular is that it doesn't represent an hoplite: instead, it represents Achilles fighting Memnon (n. 25) (https://archive.org/details/limc_20210516/Lexicon%20Iconographicum%20Mythologiae%20Classicae/LIMC%20VI-2/page/n118/mode/1up). So it's possible that the artist depicted Achilles with a throwing spear or javelin, instead of a common melee spear, because Homeric heroes frequently threw their spear (the duel between Achilles and Hector being probably the best known case). To better explain what I mean, vases representing Achilles & Co. often show chariots, but we don't assume hoplites used them (although I admit that a detail on a spear is different from a whole chariot). On the other side of the vase, Memnon is dying, his own spear is broken (possibly a memory from the death of Patroclus in the Iliad) and he has another spear deep in his neck, suggesting that that wasn't Achilles' only spear.

You mentioned that you aren't an expert of ancient Greece. Homeric battles don't have much in common with those of the hoplitical age; they represent a different era (arguably, many different ages represented in fragments compiled in a coherent narrative, but not classical Greece). The Iliad has many kings, a focus on kings and nobles fighting in duels, the spear is frequently thrown, and horseriding is almost absent, while chariots are frequently described.
In the hoplitical era, there are almost no kings in Greek cities; they were substituted by nobles, who were then often joined by non-noble citizens in the government of the city (generally the rich ones, although how power was distributed varied from city to city). The spear is generally described as the prime melee weapon. The focus during the battles is on the community of citizen soldiers, united because they belong to the same city. They are only subjected to laws, and the rare kings are, too (e.g. the two Spartan kings were supervised by the ephors). Horses are frequently ridden (Athens even has horse archers) and chariots have left the battlefield.

There are some points of contact at the edges of these two eras. Homer once describes the Greeks orderly advancing together in a way that recalls the phalanx. The Lelantine war, assuming it even happened, apparently had chariots in it, and featured a great celebration for a slain hero.

Brother Oni

2022-02-25, 07:42 AM

The world of weapons tech is still progressing slowly but surely; meet the ArcFlash Labs' GR-1 Anvil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAHKS0nVlL4), the world's first commercially available gauss rifle.

While on paper, the specs aren't amazing (you've essentially got a 20lb weapon that has the same damage output as .22L), I'd argue we're essentially at the handgonne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_cannon) stage of the weapon's existence.
The video's also raised some interesting questions like sound and viability as a sniper system - theoretically speaking, the only emitted sound would be the bullet going supersonic.

The EMP pulse could also be a potential issue (if sensors were developed to detect it) or a defense mechanism (unhardened electronics get fried if they get too close, which could put paid to smaller drones or listening devices if they lack sufficient capacity to fit enough shielding).

halfeye

2022-02-25, 10:38 AM

The world of weapons tech is still progressing slowly but surely; meet the ArcFlash Labs' GR-1 Anvil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAHKS0nVlL4), the world's first commercially available gauss rifle.

While on paper, the specs aren't amazing (you've essentially got a 20lb weapon that has the same damage output as .22LR), I'd argue we're essentially at the handgonne (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_cannon) stage of the weapon's existence.
The video's also raised some interesting questions like sound and viability as a sniper system - theoretically speaking, the only emitted sound would be the bullet going supersonic.

The EMP pulse could also be a potential issue (if sensors were developed to detect it) or a defense mechanism (unhardened electronics get fried if they get too close, which could put paid to smaller drones or listening devices if they lack sufficient capacity to fit enough shielding).

Interesting, even if it is very early days.

KorvinStarmast

2022-03-04, 03:59 PM

Just ran into this Armour Versus Arrows test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE).
Interesting, Agincourt being the test case.

Eladrinblade

2022-03-06, 04:49 PM

A few things about that “rinkydink little spear”. Talking broad strokes here and I’m sure more expert users in the forum can add more information/correct my errors.

1) It is a purpose built armor penetrator, not a traditional spearhead.
2) traditional spears are used with the front hand providing guidance and the backhand providing power. Poleaxes are built for both hands to deliver full power.
3) the spearhead can do more damage than the axe or hammer. Swings are delivered faster but with only the weight of the head delivering mass, thrusts are delivered with the full weight of the weapon, plus an additional 80+kg of user mass behind them.
4) Other polearms (spears, halberds, bills, glaives etc.) are designed to fight at distance. A lot of their use is prodding and poking to keep the enemy at range. Poleaxes are designed to be used in close (i.e. sword distance) and their use is predicated on using full force blows and relying on your armor to protect you.

It’s a long time since I ventured into 3.5 territory but here are a few things.
- it shouldn’t have reach like a spear or halberd, you should only attack adjacent.
- it should give the user Power Attack, which is always on and can’t be turned off, except for stepping up to Improved Power Attack.

Was going through the thread again and realized I never responded to this. This was very helpful.

Pauly

2022-03-06, 11:48 PM

Was going through the thread again and realized I never responded to this. This was very helpful.

Well my first response was a little snarky and unhelpful, so I’m glad I made up for it.

SleepyShadow

2022-03-17, 01:53 PM

I have a question I'm hoping you lovely geniuses can help me with. In a setting with technology roughly on par with the 1950's, what would be the best way to locate an enemy sniper?

Khedrac

2022-03-17, 02:23 PM

I have a question I'm hoping you lovely geniuses can help me with. In a setting with technology roughly on par with the 1950's, what would be the best way to locate an enemy sniper?

That would depend on a lot of factors, for example:

1. What is the terrain? - some of the techniques for the city don't work in the jungle or the open plain etc. Different spaces call for different techniques.

2. Are you needing to react to a sniper, or can you pre-position knowing that if a sniper makes an attack it is likely to be in this location?

3. How populous the area is likely to be? (Dogs trained to find people are great where there are no people, less good in a crowded area.)

If you can pre-position then listening cones (as used in WW2 to detect incoming aircraft) could be used to greatly refine the area to be searched.

Pauly

2022-03-17, 03:55 PM

I have a question I'm hoping you lovely geniuses can help me with. In a setting with technology roughly on par with the 1950's, what would be the best way to locate an enemy sniper?

Since the technology is essentially unchanged from WW2 you can access WW2 Field Manuals for the ‘according to the book’ answer.

Some comments based on my research into WW2 and WW1 sniping. Sniper rifle technology didn’t really improve much until the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, although improved practical range finding did commence in the mid ‘60s.

1) Maximum effective range for a sniper is 300m. This is based on the limits of scopes and range finding in the era, and the ability to acquire a camouflaged target that is actively hiding. On a range with well marked targets much longer ranges were possible
2) the FMs recommended a maximum of 3 shots from any one position, in practice sniper teams changed position after every shot if possible, and the only accounts I’ve read of snipers taking more than 2 shots from a position involve either sniper being unable to move or firing from an emplaced position such as an armored loophole. So snipers of the era considered that 2 shots from a position was sufficient for an enemy to locate a sniper.
3) High value targets like officers and specialists were targeted. A sniper might spend days in a position waiting for the right target. They didn’t waste rounds on regular soldiers. A designated marksman might, but not a proper sniper.
4) Snipers operated from ‘safe’ areas. i.e. areas where no random enemy was going to stumble into them.
5) Regular troops hated snipers operating from in or near their positions. The return hate from the enemy would often fall on the line soldiers holding a position, and generally snipers avoided taking up positions too close to other friendly troops.

SleepyShadow

2022-03-17, 08:03 PM

That would depend on a lot of factors, for example:

1. What is the terrain? - some of the techniques for the city don't work in the jungle or the open plain etc. Different spaces call for different techniques.

2. Are you needing to react to a sniper, or can you pre-position knowing that if a sniper makes an attack it is likely to be in this location?

3. How populous the area is likely to be? (Dogs trained to find people are great where there are no people, less good in a crowded area.)

If you can pre-position then listening cones (as used in WW2 to detect incoming aircraft) could be used to greatly refine the area to be searched.

1) The terrain is a farming community. Lots of trees nearby, a small river runs through town, and most buildings are only one or two stories tall.

2) Somewhat reactionary. The players will know that they're going into hostile territory, but not necessarily know about the sniper.

3) Low population, but there are civilians in the combat zone.

Since the technology is essentially unchanged from WW2 you can access WW2 Field Manuals for the ‘according to the book’ answer.

Some comments based on my research into WW2 and WW1 sniping. Sniper rifle technology didn’t really improve much until the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, although improved practical range finding did commence in the mid ‘60s.

1) Maximum effective range for a sniper is 300m. This is based on the limits of scopes and range finding in the era, and the ability to acquire a camouflaged target that is actively hiding. On a range with well marked targets much longer ranges were possible
2) the FMs recommended a maximum of 3 shots from any one position, in practice sniper teams changed position after every shot if possible, and the only accounts I’ve read of snipers taking more than 2 shots from a position involve either sniper being unable to move or firing from an emplaced position such as an armored loophole. So snipers of the era considered that 2 shots from a position was sufficient for an enemy to locate a sniper.
3) High value targets like officers and specialists were targeted. A sniper might spend days in a position waiting for the right target. They didn’t waste rounds on regular soldiers. A designated marksman might, but not a proper sniper.
4) Snipers operated from ‘safe’ areas. i.e. areas where no random enemy was going to stumble into them.
5) Regular troops hated snipers operating from in or near their positions. The return hate from the enemy would often fall on the line soldiers holding a position, and generally snipers avoided taking up positions too close to other friendly troops.

This is great information. Thank you so much :smallsmile:

Gnoman

2022-03-17, 08:12 PM

One standby was to blanket the direction the sniper was firing from with artillery. Don't have to find the sniper if there is no sniper.

One of the biggest giveaways, traditionally, was light glinting off the scope - some of the most famous snipers in history used iron sights specifically to avoid that.

If you've got a significant number of low buildings, the possible firing angles are going to be a lot narrower than they'd be in an open field - 1950s-era cartridges are very flat-shooting within the limits of 1950s-era scopes. So if a round comes in, there's going to be a lot of masking that would make it clear what directions the round can be firing from. Especially if you can pick a rough direction via hearing the shot or observing the impact. This means your sniper is probably going to be sticking to single-shot shoot-and-scoot tactics, because he knows his position is revealed. That would give your players an opportunity to catch him moving, or advance in before he gets set up again.

Once they know he's around, there's also various baiting techniques that a clever player might come up with - the helmet on a stick is a classic. Make your sniper dumb enough to fall for them.

Pauly

2022-03-17, 08:47 PM

Some more points.

- Sound, masking and observation of impact will give a rough idea of where the shot came from, and reasonably competent soldiers would then narrow down possible hiding spots from there.
- My reading is that muzzle flash was the big give away, which was why sniper would either relocate or wait for cover of darkness after their first shot if possible. Although glints from optics was another source of identifying the sniper team’s position.
[edit to add]
A lot of the advice the FMs give on choosing a position seems to be directly related to reducing perceived muzzle flash - don’t shoot from closed rooms, always extend the barrel of the rifle out of cover, shoot with the sun behind you if shooting at dawn/dusk, shooting from sunlight is better than shooting from shadow and so on.
- Snipers operated in 2 man teams, a spotter and a sniper, so it's not just reflection from the gun’s optics, but also binoculars or telescope of the spotter. 2 men are also much easier to spot than one man.
- Snipers can be given away by nature. There’s an example from an Australian FM where an enemy sniper was spotted because he set his position too close to a bird’s nest and the Australian sniper observing the bird’s strange behavior protecting it’s nest was able to deduce that something must be close to the bird, and through closer inspection of was able to locate the enemy sniper.
[edit to add]
It was not doctrine to use smoke to blind a sniper. In that era smoke rounds were expensive and uncommon, and using your precious smoke to take care of a single rifle was not allowed. Smoke was not fired speculatively on where the enemy might be, it was only used on acquired targets, and if you had acquired a sniper’s location then HE was the solution. Making smoke freely available and capable of firing at any place anytime is a very common mistake WW2/immediately post WW2 rulebooks make.

Brother Oni

2022-03-18, 01:15 PM

Once they know he's around, there's also various baiting techniques that a clever player might come up with - the helmet on a stick is a classic. Make your sniper dumb enough to fall for them.

Or you can wind up the snipers to take shots by laughing at them: link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_md8Ok17-Y).

Incanur

2022-03-19, 02:09 PM

Here's a thing on which I would be keen to gather people's speculations: why does the sword, in so many times and places, achieve its status as a poetic and cultural symbol of martial values, as opposed to other weapons.

In his 1590 manual, Sir John Smythe indicated that people valued swords because they were sidearms:

Swords of conuenient length, forme and substance, haue been in all ages esteemed by all warlike Nations, of al other sorts of weapons the last weapon of refuge both for horsemen, and footmen, by reason that when al their other weapons in fight haue failed them, either by breaking, losse, or otherwise, they then haue presentlie betaken themselues to their short arming Swords and Daggers, as to the last weapons, of great effect & execution for all Martiall actions

In a hard-fought battle, a man-at-arms would likely finish the fight with sword in hand rather than the heavy lance he started out with. Similarly, cavalry typically used swords to cut down fleeing foes. In this fashion, the sword can be seen as the weapon of victory: what many soldiers (particularly those who fought the hardest) had in their hands when they won the field.

Pauly

2022-03-20, 01:26 AM

Or you can wind up the snipers to take shots by laughing at them: link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_md8Ok17-Y).

In the Gallipoli campaign some ANZACs drew a target on a bed sheet, hoisted it over the parapet, then posted the Turkish sniper’s scores. That was until the brass spoiled their fun and made them stop.
On one hand you’re helping the enemy zero their equipment, but on the other it can help your snipers licate the enemy snipers.

Vinyadan

2022-03-20, 03:12 AM

In the Gallipoli campaign some ANZACs drew a target on a bed sheet, hoisted it over the parapet, then posted the Turkish sniper’s scores. That was until the brass spoiled their fun and made them stop.
On one hand you’re helping the enemy zero their equipment, but on the other it can help your snipers licate the enemy snipers.

I guess that the officers were worried this could display the skill of the enemy and demoralise the men, or even lead them to fraternize with the enemy through the game.

Eladrinblade

2022-03-23, 05:35 PM

Is padded armor a gambeson or is it more than that? Regardless, how warm is padded armor? Could it count as a "cold weather outfit"?

Mike_G

2022-03-23, 05:52 PM

Is padded armor a gambeson or is it more than that? Regardless, how warm is padded armor? Could it count as a "cold weather outfit"?
Pretty sure it's a gambeson. People did wear gambeson as stand alone armor and it is somewhat protective.

And it's very warm. It would keep you as warm as a winter jacket. Not sure is a "cold weather outfit" is like "Find the South Pole" stuff, or "Go outside and shovel snow" stuff, but a gambeson is easily warm enough to be outside in the winter. Like normal "cold enough to snow, go skiing, play ice hockey, go sledding" winter. Not "top of Everest" cold.

Eladrinblade

2022-03-23, 06:02 PM

Pauly

2022-03-23, 06:56 PM

Pretty sure it's a gambeson. People did wear gambeson as stand alone armor and it is somewhat protective.

And it's very warm. It would keep you as warm as a winter jacket. Not sure is a "cold weather outfit" is like "Find the South Pole" stuff, or "Go outside and shovel snow" stuff, but a gambeson is easily warm enough to be outside in the winter. Like normal "cold enough to snow, go skiing, play ice hockey, go sledding" winter. Not "top of Everest" cold.

Slightly different, but I’ve read of a modern attempt to re-create George Mallory’s attempted ascents of Everest using 1930s climbing equipment. The feedback from the climbers was that the wool clothing was just as warm as and less bulky than modern climbing clothes. It is heavier and harder to dry if it gets wet.

So maybe not, “South pole expedition” level of warm, but plenty warm enough for “inhabited parts of Russia in Winter”.

As an additional note when the conquistadors were doing their stuff in Mexico they went to gambesons and reduced their metal armor to breastplate and helmet, or helmet only. Being a natural fabric it breathes and is much less hot than metal in the tropics. They also reduced their armor in the Inca campaign. The altaplano isn’t as hot and humid as Mexico because of the altitude, but it’s still gets tropical sun that’s very strong.

Thane of Fife

2022-03-23, 08:56 PM

Pretty sure it's a gambeson. People did wear gambeson as stand alone armor and it is somewhat protective.

My understanding is that a gambeson designed to be worn standalone is thicker than one intended to be worn under other armor. They're not the same thing.

Mike_G

2022-03-23, 09:52 PM

My understanding is that a gambeson designed to be worn standalone is thicker than one intended to be worn under other armor. They're not the same thing.

Everything pre-modern varied a ton. There's no "standard" gambeson. Any gambeson would offer some protection. Probably it was common to wear a lighter padded garment under mail, but I'm sure that gambesons of all weights were worn as standalone armor at times.

And the OP question of "is a gambeson padded armor?" I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes."

Martin Greywolf

2022-03-25, 04:43 AM

Repeat after me: medieval terminology was not prescriptive.

We can argue ourselves silly in circles about what gambeson or aketon or whateverton is supposed to be like, period sources use terms like these descriptively and interchangably. For some, gambeson may be a standalone padded armor, for others just a relatively thin layer under armor, and so can aketon. There is no consistency.

Modern usage, in some circles, uses gambeson to mean standalone thick padded armor, at least 15 layers and up to 30, while aketon is the thinner version for wearing under armor of 5-15 layers. Where the hell arming doublet, which is usually 5-10 at most, falls exactly is... not clear. Some use it to specifically denote padded garment meant to be used under plate armor, others use it as a subset of aketons to denote stylistic shape of it.

Most people use gambeson to mean any padded armor in existence, no matter where or when it is from. By that usage, gambeson is padded armor, because the definition of gambeson is padded armor.

If historical gambesons are meant to be DnD padded armor... probably? Who the hell knows, people making DnD consistently refuse to let anyone who knows what armor looks like near their rules.

As for warmth... it's an extremely thick coat. If you have a gambeson on you in winter, your biggest problem is going to be sweating into it and cold wind getting under it through the gaps in the armpits, if you have those. I didn't feel strong winds in -20 C in it, the issue you'd have is the bits not covered in it, like legs and face. You do have padded legs, but those are kinda rare, and probably not a part of your DnD standard issue padded armor.

If I'd let it work for cold resistance, no. Not unless it was specifically described beforehand as having padded coif, padded mittens and padded legs as well. The issue is twofold. First of all, the bits not covered by normal gambesons include neck, head and legs, and that's a lot of important bodyparts left out there for the elements. It's very possible to get frostbite on your hands if you don't have gloves.

Second problem is water. Cloaks are made the way they are for a reason, and that reason is to be able to redirect a lot of water should it rain, absorb most of it and be easy to take off and switch while one of them is drying. A cloak soaked in water clocks in at about 5-10 kilos, a gambeson soaked in water can be over 30, to say nothing of the hypothermia. You wear your cloak when travelling over armor, you just don't see it often in illuminations because the thing is meant to be discarded once the hostilities start for ease of movement.

https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/15053/1000
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/12983/1000
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/22587/1000
https://manuscriptminiatures.com/image/14573/1000

Lvl 2 Expert

2022-03-25, 10:05 AM

Swords seem to have held some special meaning in this context because the symbol of a successful gladiator's manumission was shaped in the form of a rudis, a wooden training sword.

Late to the party, but replying to this discussion.

I think one of the reasons swords were important to gladiators might be the same as one of the reasons swords were important to knights: a sword is apparently a pretty hard weapon to master. When you have something to prove or want to show off but still want to end up being a good fighter, pick a sword.

I don't really know why swords in particular would be heard to learn to handle, but it may not even be entirely about the weapon, but about the context it's most suited for. Spears and pikes and pole arms and shields and such are excel on the battlefield. And when you're shoulder to shoulder with the next guy there's only so much you can do to fight super well. You could also end up getting stabbed at by several opponents at ones, and there's only so much you can do about that too. So a relative novice of a fighter can do pretty well in these circumstances, and there's only limited added value in a master of the weapon. Swords are good for when there's lots of open space and you can maneuver better. In this situation, having more options, mastery pays off. So if you want to practice to be good at fighting, a sword is a good choice of weapon. To gladiators it would not matter that a sword is an easy weapon to always bring along hanging at your side, which is probably what put it over the top compared to pole arms, which are good weapons for this more complex style of fighting in addition to being good battlefield weapons, for someone like a knight. But just the association of the weapon with skill might be enough?

Martin Greywolf

2022-03-25, 01:03 PM

a sword is apparently a pretty hard weapon to master

No it isn't. Or rather, it is, but so is every other weapon, hence why mastering anything is a notable achievement.

Sword and shield are the most demanding on your physical conditioning, the hardest weaon technically is the spear. You need to use it like a spear, in one hand with a shield, overarm and underarm, then in two hands against lightly armored people and in two hands against heavy armor (like apollaxe, basically). That last bit means you also need to be good at grappling to really master it, and be able to switch to dagger, so add those two to the list.

I think one of the reasons swords were important to gladiators might be the same as one of the reasons swords were important to knights: a sword is apparently a pretty hard weapon to master. When you have something to prove or want to show off but still want to end up being a good fighter, pick a sword.

If you are a part of a social group that has to go into actual fights, this sort of thinking will get you killed. You use what is effective, or you die, simple as that.

Gladiators are a bit different, because the goal there was to make interesting but fair matches, but they still wanted to kind of stay close to what the actual soldiers were using because of the whole social context (i.e. they were warriors, and therefore should have something to do with wars at least a little bit, unlike e.g. modern MMA) surrounding them.

And when you're shoulder to shoulder with the next guy there's only so much you can do to fight super well. You could also end up getting stabbed at by several opponents at ones, and there's only so much you can do about that too. So a relative novice of a fighter can do pretty well in these circumstances, and there's only limited added value in a master of the weapon.

Not really. Skill in fighting duels, skill in fighting skirmishes and skill in fighting in a battle line are three different skills, so theoretically, a master of duelling may be absolute pants at formation fighting. And that is often true, I've seen very good HEMA fighters struggle at LARPs because they just didn't have the necessary observation skills to not get flanked and spanked. That said, there is overlap, and some of the basics are the same, so a good duellist will be able to train himself to be a good line fighter very quickly.

You stick poorly trained people in lines because it is the only place where they will not get immediately destroyed by anyone else, simple as that. There is still great value in having well trained soldiers in apike wall (see: Swiss pikemen), but if you have fresh recurits, that is where they will go.

Or, to put it another way, line fighting doesn't have lower skill ceiling than duelling, it has lower skill floor to be effective in.

Swords are good for when there's lots of open space and you can maneuver better. In this situation, having more options, mastery pays off.

Nah, take a spear every time someone grabs a sword and destroy them in open spaces. Only once you get into cramped conditions do the swords get an advantage.

So if you want to practice to be good at fighting, a sword is a good choice of weapon.

The only good choice of weapon is the weapon that will be effective. There is no weapon that will somehow magically make you be better at fighting with other weapons, there are just weapon types and the bare basics and skills in those overlap. You can use a longsword like a katana and be fine, you can't use a halberd like a longsword and except good things.

Brother Oni

2022-03-25, 01:20 PM

No it isn't. Or rather, it is, but so is every other weapon, hence why mastering anything is a notable achievement.

Kind of. There's a Chinese proverb of uncertain origin that says "it takes 100 days to master the spear, 1,000 days to master the dao and 10,000 days to master the jian".

The days aren't literal - in Chinese, hundred/thousand/ten thousand are single word counters (百, 千, 萬) with increasing comparative size - 'hard, harder and hardest' would be a comparative translation.

10,000 also shows up a lot in Chinese literature when they're being poetic in describing a large number, in which case it means 'lots and lots of' rather than the literal value 10,000.

Lemmy

2022-03-26, 07:58 PM

Tobtor

2022-03-27, 06:09 AM

I'd say the main reason swords were so romanticized is simply because they were sidearms that civilians could use... So they were the ones that writers and readers would be most familiar with and most likely to imagine using in combat, if the need ever arised, including duels...

So texts and plays featuring swords would likely grow more popular more often than those focusing on other weapons... Unless there was another weapon that was equally or more familiar to yout average reader and writers... e.g.: bows in England or, mostly everywhere in later times, pistols.

That is looking at it from our modern perspective and back to medieval times. We should instead start of the beginning and go forward. Swords were used way before "texts" and notions of "civilian" versus "soldier". As soon as Bronze swords appear (around 1800 BC) they quickly replaces spears and axes as the grave goods of high status graves. This is before texts (at least written ones). You could argue that oral histories have the same effect, but bronze swords were also the status weapon way out of cities and civilizations, - in tribal lands across Europe.

So when the sword is a symbol in a text from the 14-16th century, it built on a 3.000 years of history of usage, and not only the context of the time.

The question is then: how come swords were one of the most prevalent weapon of choice as status marker for thousand of years (and across many cultures).

There are different explanations, but they all have drawbacks and counter arguments, and we should likely see them together.

The price argument: While a sword could be expensive early on, and indeed for a long time, it begs the question: if swords were expensive and not better than lets say axe or spear, why were they developed and spread across cultures? I really don't buy that a weapon which is more expensive spreads as widely as they did, if they didn't offer something better.

Civilian use: most of the time swords were used, they where used in cultures where there is no such distinction. Thus this argument cannot fully explain the issue.

I think the point is that sword ARE really good. Both in duels, skirmishes and battles. The point is that they offer something extra. They can be used in combination with shields. And a warrior can be equipped with both a spear and a sword. They offer something extra, whether it be bow and sword, javelin and sword, spear and sword etc. They are also very solid and will not break as easily as a spear. So a battle might start with the use of spear, but end with the sword. So many 'good fighters' will be ending with a sword in hand, whether they can raise their sword in victory or die with the sword in their hand.

My point is: don't look at how swords are used in a very narrow context of late medieval text, but rather a larger part of their history which pre-dates the medieval period, and Arthurian legend etc. have their root in earlier times.

Martin Greywolf

2022-03-27, 06:57 AM

Kind of. There's a Chinese proverb of uncertain origin that says "it takes 100 days to master the spear, 1,000 days to master the dao and 10,000 days to master the jian".

The days aren't literal - in Chinese, hundred/thousand/ten thousand are single word counters (百, 千, 萬) with increasing comparative size - 'hard, harder and hardest' would be a comparative translation.

10,000 also shows up a lot in Chinese literature when they're being poetic in describing a large number, in which case it means 'lots and lots of' rather than the literal value 10,000.

I'm not saying there isn't a proverb, I'm saying it's wrong. First of all, where does it come from? Is it something someone actually skilled in weapon use and training thereof wrote as an advice, or is it one of the quotes from the period where Chinese martial arts started to be all the rage and people were making up an unbelievable amount of BS? Considering that no one else agrees with this quote in any other culture using weapons, I'm quite comfortable calling this one BS.

The price argument: While a sword could be expensive early on, and indeed for a long time, it begs the question: if swords were expensive and not better than lets say axe or spear, why were they developed and spread across cultures? I really don't buy that a weapon which is more expensive spreads as widely as they did, if they didn't offer something better.

Counterexample: Smallswords. They are inferior to pretty much every other sword of the time (except cane swords, hich are flimsier smallswords, so...), and yet they were widespread as a cultural thing.

Civilian use: most of the time swords were used, they where used in cultures where there is no such distinction. Thus this argument cannot fully explain the issue.

Okay, so we have to go into full pedantry for this one. While we didn't have modern "civilian" as a concept, there very much were distinct social groups based on how stab happy you were.

Firstly, we have fighting elites, be they knights or Egyptian charioteers, someone whose social role was to fight, as opposed to farmers, merchants and all the others. Mercenaries were often a sort of half-acknowledged social group as well, so you have a distinction of people whose job is to fight and other people, and those other people are usually colloquially called civilians.

Second distinction is more of a moment-to-moment thing, and doesn't apply to all cultures, but medieval era did see it - if you are in armor, you are dressed for war, and different social norms apply to you. Carrying around a spear in "civilian" clothes will be looked at weird, carrying a spear in armor won't. Whether you parading around in armor will be looked at weirdly is another question. This is important for us because showing up to a fellow noble's house dressed in full plate with a pollaxe sends a very different message from being dressed in brocade tunic and having a sword and a buckler.

What is usually menat when someone is talking about civilian use of weapons is the latter, you're not in armor, walking around the town shopping, and still want a weapon with you, but without the social stigma of being ready to start a war. In this, you are drastically distinct from someone in, as the period sources usually call it, "full panoply of war", and so we talk about use of weapons in civilian life.

I think the point is that sword ARE really good. Both in duels, skirmishes and battles.

In this you are already wrong, because you decided to use swords as a category and use it for argument for specific usage. Sure, I can find you a sword for a battle, a skirmish and a duel, but they won't be the same sword. Some will be absolutely terrible based on what armor the opposition or you are wearing, some will be awful to use with shields, other will be bad from horseback.

I can say the same about axes and use a carpentry axe, ice axe, one handed horseman's axe and a pollaxe as my example.

They can be used in combination with shields. And a warrior can be equipped with both a spear and a sword. They offer something extra, whether it be bow and sword, javelin and sword, spear and sword etc.

The same applies to axes (you need a blade sheat for that one, but it's doable), maces and pretty much any one handed melee weapon.

They are also very solid and will not break as easily as a spear.

Not true. Modern swords from modern steel are less likely to break, historical ones not so much. Spears break in battles more because spears are used more, and even then, we have numerous cases of swords breaking in historic record.

Even in our modern times, I've see about the equal amount of swords and polearms break in battles and duels - granted, the polearms have the slight advantage of not going against sharp blades, but so do the swords for not being sharp and more prone to chipping.

Lemmy

2022-03-27, 10:09 AM

That is looking at it from our modern perspective and back to medieval times. We should instead start of the beginning and go forward. Swords were used way before "texts" and notions of "civilian" versus "soldier". As soon as Bronze swords appear (around 1800 BC) they quickly replaces spears and axes as the grave goods of high status graves. This is before texts (at least written ones). You could argue that oral histories have the same effect, but bronze swords were also the status weapon way out of cities and civilizations, - in tribal lands across Europe.
Sorry, English isn't my native language, so I'm not all that good into putting my meaning in "historical wording", so I used words like "writers" and "readers" even though I know they felt out of place in this context...

But my main point is that most stories will be told with things the story-teller and/or its audience are familiar about. So sidearms in general should have a pretty big advantage there in getting popular or wide-spread.

There's probably also the fact that swords are generally more expensive than, say, a spear or ax, and therefore a little bit more of a status symbol. And well... They look cool. hahaha

But of course, that's just my theory based on my personal observation of human nature and my limited knowledge of history. I'm an engineer, not a historian, so... Well... Not exactly the most reliable source. Heh

Mr Blobby

2022-03-27, 11:51 AM

...Second distinction is more of a moment-to-moment thing, and doesn't apply to all cultures, but medieval era did see it - if you are in armor, you are dressed for war, and different social norms apply to you. Carrying around a spear in "civilian" clothes will be looked at weird, carrying a spear in armor won't. Whether you parading around in armor will be looked at weirdly is another question. This is important for us because showing up to a fellow noble's house dressed in full plate with a pollaxe sends a very different message from being dressed in brocade tunic and having a sword and a buckler...

I think that's the best answer so far. I'd also argue 'bulk' also played their part. Maces, axes etc were pretty hefty and rather obvious too [though it's quite possible to have a culture which an axe on the back was considered 'normal']. A sword, relatively speaking is discreet and easy to carry; changes are it would be able to be under my cloak etc.

I'd also cite 'ease of use' too. A good double-bladed sword can stab and slash, and relatively speaking requires less space to use. I've not done any proper weapons training, but I have used in my time machetes, hammers, axes, billhooks and a sythe [well, once] in occupational settings and you need a lot more space to wield them right. Now think where this would be an advantage. Not just fighting in formation, but also urban areas, indoors and crowded places. Alleyways, staircases, a bedroom, a busy market-place and so on. You frankly would prefer to be able to use one weapon in many situations rather needing to bring along extras for particular circumstances.

Next, size. If an 'average' male is say 5'7, effectively a sword with more than 33in blade shall threaten to drag on the floor if being worn from the waist. Say an inch less if using a good scabbard. Even a six-footer would be effectively limited to 36in. Now, if I wanted to sit down while still wearing it [without it poking out etc], I'd guestimate you're limited to the hip-knee length, which I guestimate is 60% of the previous length. So, for a 5'7 it would be ~20in and at 6'0 ~22in.

I think the types of Roman Gladius would fit these criteria best. The shortest ones would do for 'dress', the longer ones for 'war'. Many blades around the world would fall towards these general designs because we're dealing with mainly human bodies and basics, which shall be the same. Similar can be said for the various types of 'cavalry blade' which came about.

With the 'dress swords', I'd personally think of a variant of the 'side-sword' for levels of simple practicality. A Gladius-style with an ~18in blade; large enough to be a credible threat, small enough to be worn under a cloak, to be able to sit down etc. We have to remember these stemmed from the time where everyone carried a form of utility knife [eating, cutting, sharpening] and personal safety was not assured in cities etc. Now, a single 'gentleman' with one wouldn't be able to fight off a whole band of outlaws, but it wasn't intended to. It was more to allow them do defend themselves against a cutpurse, deal with a rabid dog or fend off an angry pleb who's trying to bury their skinning dagger in your spleen.

halfeye

2022-03-27, 05:39 PM

The price argument: While a sword could be expensive early on, and indeed for a long time, it begs the question: if swords were expensive and not better than lets say axe or spear, why were they developed and spread across cultures? I really don't buy that a weapon which is more expensive spreads as widely as they did, if they didn't offer something better.

That argument really does not work when you are talking about the personal possessions of the rich. Ask a rich (enough) man if he wants a £20, 000 car or a £2, 000, 000 car, and it'll be the £2, 000, 000 one every time.

Martin Greywolf

2022-03-28, 04:31 AM

But my main point is that most stories will be told with things the story-teller and/or its audience are familiar about. So sidearms in general should have a pretty big advantage there in getting popular or wide-spread.

I stand by what I said, swords have gotten so popular because the people in charge of other people wore them. All the time. In civilian contexts. When shopping, serving as judges and so on.

Familiarity by itself isn't a strong argument, pre-modern world didn't put such a distance between its civilian population and war - modern wars see civilians just... sitting around in contested territory, not fighting, medieval siege of a city saw them on the walls, chucking rocks at the besiegers. The people were much more familiar with the military gear of their time than most people are with ours.

I think that's the best answer so far. I'd also argue 'bulk' also played their part. Maces, axes etc were pretty hefty and rather obvious too [though it's quite possible to have a culture which an axe on the back was considered 'normal']. A sword, relatively speaking is discreet and easy to carry; changes are it would be able to be under my cloak etc.

Wrong. Here are some maces:

https://curiavitkov.cz/sites/default/files/images/zivot/bulava-au.jpg

http://deepeeka.in//media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/800x/040ec09b1e35df139433887a97daa66f/a/h/ah6081_1_.jpg
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0226/6487/2010/files/High-Gothic-Mace-193_large.jpg?v=1578019896

https://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/DSC_1043.jpg

Every decen replica of these I've ever held have been lighter than a sword to very slightly heavier. A bulava is about half to a third of the sword's weight, flanged maces can be on the heavier side.

As for obvious:

https://www.nitralive.sk/images/stories/kam-v-nitre/podujatia/nitra-mila-nitra-2015/pribinova-nitrawa/foto/pribinova-nitrawa-2015-16.jpg
The guy on the far right has a mace, look closely

https://aquilas.sk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/66364800_3001939226513724_682814265790300160_n.jpg
No, I'm the second guy, the one in brocade, look closely at the walking stick

I'd also cite 'ease of use' too. A good double-bladed sword can stab and slash, and relatively speaking requires less space to use. I've not done any proper weapons training, but I have used in my time machetes, hammers, axes, billhooks and a sythe [well, once] in occupational settings and you need a lot more space to wield them right. Now think where this would be an advantage. Not just fighting in formation, but also urban areas, indoors and crowded places. Alleyways, staircases, a bedroom, a busy market-place and so on. You frankly would prefer to be able to use one weapon in many situations rather needing to bring along extras for particular circumstances.

Look, realistically speaking, as someone who has swung a sword and an axe or mace in all of those places, at the point where it's too cramped to hit someone with an axe, you're better off using dagger rather than a sword. It's another one of those reasons that sounds good, but doesn't pan out in practice.

Next, size. If an 'average' male is say 5'7, effectively a sword with more than 33in blade shall threaten to drag on the floor if being worn from the waist. Say an inch less if using a good scabbard. Even a six-footer would be effectively limited to 36in. Now, if I wanted to sit down while still wearing it [without it poking out etc], I'd guestimate you're limited to the hip-knee length, which I guestimate is 60% of the previous length. So, for a 5'7 it would be ~20in and at 6'0 ~22in.

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but... research how swords were worn before you comment on it. I have a 105 cm total length arming sword and can sit down with it just fine. On the ground. Let alone on a chair.

I think the types of Roman Gladius would fit these criteria best. The shortest ones would do for 'dress', the longer ones for 'war'.

Except that the short gladius was for infantry and long for cavalry, and late Roman switched to the long gladius. Which is called a spatha. And all of them were for war.

Many blades around the world would fall towards these general designs because we're dealing with mainly human bodies and basics, which shall be the same. Similar can be said for the various types of 'cavalry blade' which came about.

Longsword is a cavalry sword. So are several types of saber. Most of thet ime, you can't tell apart a cavalry sword from an infantry sword by the photo, only by the balance of weight.

With the 'dress swords', I'd personally think of a variant of the 'side-sword' for levels of simple practicality. A Gladius-style with an ~18in blade; large enough to be a credible threat, small enough to be worn under a cloak, to be able to sit down etc.

And yet, we see nothing of the sort in actual history. Jian isn't 18 inches, and a longsword most definitely isn't. Hell, even smallswords and spadroons are significantly longer than that, at about 25+ in.

That argument really does not work when you are talking about the personal possessions of the rich. Ask a rich (enough) man if he wants a £20, 000 car or a £2, 000, 000 car, and it'll be the £2, 000, 000 one every time.

When we get to people that rich, it's no longer about sword vs an axe, it's about "how much gold and ivory do you want on your weapon of choice".

https://64.media.tumblr.com/ce818e1c5efff3a3b23368fc5f032bde/d3ba5e6706d64392-5e/s540x810/fea57d2f503997471541de1c3f7ccdc7e35b6ea9.jpg
https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_9/29_17/104908e1_1e72_4828_b1df_a3b5011a7699/mid_00147807_001.jpg

Mr Blobby

2022-03-28, 08:27 AM

Wrong. Here are some maces...

Eh, was thinking of metal maces. But as a gentleman I think I'd refuse to walk about with what could be mistaken for say, a table-leg taken during a tavern brawl or something. Which was the question I was considering; your point of why knights etc didn't go around fully armed 24/7. Thinking about it, I would be more inclined to go with carrying a heavy/sturdy walking-stick [plus weighted head] for 'self defence' than a wooden mace.

Look, realistically speaking, as someone who has swung a sword and an axe or mace in all of those places, at the point where it's too cramped to hit someone with an axe, you're better off using dagger rather than a sword. It's another one of those reasons that sounds good, but doesn't pan out in practice.

I considered that. But I reasoned a) I would already have my knife and b) a side-sword would offer the advantage of extra length. After all, it's quite possible for that rabid dog to bite your forearm or the assailiant to grab it before the dagger hits flesh...

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but... research how swords were worn before you comment on it. I have a 105 cm total length arming sword and can sit down with it just fine. On the ground. Let alone on a chair.

a) I did. b) I was considering, again 'dress wear'. If you're going around the city, changes are you'd prefer a weapon which didn't keep on getting in the way of stuff and c) if your hilt is about 15cm, that makes the blade itself around 90cm / 36in and so is 'close enough' to the size I mentioned before.

Except that the short gladius was for infantry and long for cavalry, and late Roman switched to the long gladius. Which is called a spatha. And all of them were for war.

You don't know that for sure. The four blades found in Pompeii were short enough for my 'dress' definition. And it appears they didn't host any military forces at the time, so those blades may have belonged to bodyguards, watchmen or gladiators. Plus, 'Roman' covers several hundred years, there would be little standardisation and not much hard evidence of it survived either.

And yet, we see nothing of the sort in actual history. Jian isn't 18 inches, and a longsword most definitely isn't. Hell, even smallswords and spadroons are significantly longer than that, at about 25+ in.

You're overfitting my point, here. I was considering the most discreet 'dress' blade which was still functional as a one. Smaller jians, side-swords etc *do* to some extent follow the leg-length point I made.

Lastly, we both know 'Jian' is a general type/style, and thus doesn't have a fixed length. Like all blades before mass production.

Tobtor

2022-03-28, 01:55 PM

To Martin Greywolf: first of I would like to say that I respect your knowledge in many ways, but also need to to tell you that many of your answers and post tend to come of as condescending (at least in my eyes). Both when directed to me, but also when directed at other posters.
Your tone and replies meant that I was about to make a fairly long post, but ended up deleting quite a bit of it, not to spur further arguments (since I got a bit sarcastic). Below is a condensed post, and I hope i have gotten rid of any unwanted sarcasm or irony. I there is any left, I apologise in advance.

Counterexample: Smallswords. They are inferior to pretty much every other sword of the time (except cane swords, hich are flimsier smallswords, so...), and yet they were widespread as a cultural thing.

"of the time" is the point. I agree fully, thhat at the very end of sword use period (that is the last lets say 300 years from around 1600-1900AD), things are different.

Okay, so we have to go into full pedantry for this one. While we didn't have modern "civilian" as a concept, there very much were distinct social groups based on how stab happy you were.

Lets not get full peantry on this.

Firstly, we have fighting elites, be they knights or Egyptian charioteers, someone whose social role was to fight, as opposed to farmers, merchants and all the others. Mercenaries were often a sort of half-acknowledged social group as well, so you have a distinction of people whose job is to fight and other people, and those other people are usually colloquially called civilians.

That is not true for lets say, 1800BC bronze age people in the black sea region, germanic tribes of the 200 AD northern Europe, nor of mane, many other cultures. Yes, you do have warrior elites (which have swords), but there isn't anything like "civilian" weapons.

Second distinction is more of a moment-to-moment thing, and doesn't apply to all cultures, but medieval era did see it - if you are in armor, you are dressed for war, and different social norms apply to you. Carrying around a spear in "civilian" clothes will be looked at weird, carrying a spear in armor won't. Whether you parading around in armor will be looked at weirdly is another question. This is important for us because showing up to a fellow noble's house dressed in full plate with a pollaxe sends a very different message from being dressed in brocade tunic and having a sword and a buckler.

What is usually menat when someone is talking about civilian use of weapons is the latter, you're not in armor, walking around the town shopping, and still want a weapon with you, but without the social stigma of being ready to start a war. In this, you are drastically distinct from someone in, as the period sources usually call it, "full panoply of war", and so we talk about use of weapons in civilian life.

Yes, that is true. And if you go back and read my post, I mentioned that we should start from before the medieval period. As I said: swords as as markers of status weapons PRE-dates those social norms - so therefore said social norms CANNOT be the (main) reason for the status of swords. In let us say 600 AD Anglo-Saxon England there is no such differentiation. Either you are armed or not.

Your argument is solely based on your great knowledge of the high-late medieval period.

In this you are already wrong, because you decided to use swords as a category and use it for argument for specific usage. Sure, I can find you a sword for a battle, a skirmish and a duel, but they won't be the same sword. Some will be absolutely terrible based on what armor the opposition or you are wearing, some will be awful to use with shields, other will be bad from horseback.

Here I had to cut quite a lot of text (see introduction). My main point is: no, I am NOT wrong. Most sword-users throughout history had one sword they used for all the purposes mentioned above.

Not true. Modern swords from modern steel are less likely to break, historical ones not so much. Spears break in battles more because spears are used more, and even then, we have numerous cases of swords breaking in historic record.

In general the spear points where made of same (or inferior) quality steel/iron/bronze tips.

Sure, we have examples of swords breaking (and most mentions refer it as an odd or very unlucky thing, or as a claim of superiority, for instance Romans mentioning the Gauls sword bending etc), but not actually that many.

Spears broke much more often in battles. Your argument is its mainly because they where used more, but I thing its fault logic. We see many accounts of people "using up" their spears during a battle, and very few examples of mass-breakage for instance Roman swords.

I stand by what I said, swords have gotten so popular because the people in charge of other people wore them. All the time. In civilian contexts. When shopping, serving as judges and so on.

But why did a tribal warrior in 100 BC in Northern Germany where his sword? He did go shopping at the mall? In the Viking age Scandinavia (700-1100) any one could bring a spear or other weapon to the thing (often been expected to) - no "civilian" use there. In most sword using cultures for most of the sword using period swords where a a weapon like any other.

Your answer bring on a question. That question is: why did the people in charge wore swords? They did so well before they where judges, and well outside cultures who regulated weapon carrying .

To Lemmy: I am not discounting the story perspective. It is notewothy though, that most people in let us sar 1200 BC, had seen and likely used spears. Thus they would be more familiar with spears than swords.

But my main point is that most stories will be told with things the story-teller and/or its audience are familiar about. So sidearms in general should have a pretty big advantage there in getting popular or wide-spread.

There's probably also the fact that swords are generally more expensive than, say, a spear or ax, and therefore a little bit more of a status symbol. And well... They look cool. hahaha

Swords where not "sidearms" as we understand it. It was an addition to a complete weapon system (often spear, sword an shield, but could be javelin, sword and shield, or bow, sword and shield).

Why do sword look cool? Here I agree on the story part. Swords have 'grown' into the culture (of Europe, Japan and many other cultures), and that is why they, to us, look cool. My point is; we need to go back in time and figure out WHY they got into our culture in the first place.

What was the culture that embraced them like.

Vinyadan

2022-03-29, 08:46 AM

I think the types of Roman Gladius would fit these criteria best. The shortest ones would do for 'dress', the longer ones for 'war'. Many blades around the world would fall towards these general designs because we're dealing with mainly human bodies and basics, which shall be the same. Similar can be said for the various types of 'cavalry blade' which came about.

Things of course change across the centuries, but I don't think a dress sword could be around in the final days of Pompeii. Cities back then were very restrictive when it came to wearing weapons. The most common reading of some parts in Tacitus is that even the pretorian guard did not openly bear arms in Rome, except in exceptional circumstances (the cohors togata of the praetorians was the one which operated in the city, and wore togae instead of armour, usually concealing their swords beneath them).

Once in a while, you do read of private citizens wearing a hidden blade (people plotting a targeted killing, but also just some guy with such a habit to protect himself), but that's a different story -- a dress sword sounds like the swords commonly worn as symbol of their status by military officers before WW2, and it certainly wasn't hidden.

Concerning the swords found in Pompeii, there seems to be a divide between the one-edged Campanian shortswords and the gladii, which are understood to be of military origin and typical of soldiers. One proposal has been that of veterans working as bodyguards for rich families. Others underscore that gladii in a civilian setting don't need their owner to be an active soldier, and instead the presence of a specialised military belt would be the signal.

From that point of view, you have a sure example of a soldier in a man from the fleet at Misenum who died at Herculanum while helping during its evacuation. He wore a pugio (dagger) and a gladius, as well as the cingulum (the belt) and some more paraphernalia. The gladius is now a single piece with its sheath, 72 cm long. This soldier has recently been identified as a rather high-ranking or elite one, and some details suggest he might have been a praetorian (the coins he had with him are the salary of a pretorian). To make a comparison, one of the gladii found in Pompeii with its shield has lost most of its handle (3 cm left) and is 54 cm long. Another one (shield+gladius, missing part of the handle) is 60 cm long. A last one is 69 cm long and was found in a shop.

https://www.academia.edu/19868011/Cohortes_praetoriae_e_cohors_togata_a_proposito_di _tesi_vecchie_e_nuove
https://www.na-verlag.de/wp-content/uploads/image/Auszug_Achtung-Lebensgefahr.pdf
https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/germania/article/download/61789/54216
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/2-000-year-old-skeleton-identified-senior-roman-soldier-vesuvius-n1267056

Mr Blobby

2022-03-29, 01:09 PM

Mike_G

2022-03-29, 03:23 PM

Perhaps I phrased it incorrectly; when I meant 'dress' I meant not ceremonial wear, more a semi-everyday affair. The original discussion was about what kind of weapon would a gentleman wear in a non-war situation in a late Mediaeval/Renaissance before they became primarily status symbols.

It was fairly common (depending on time and place, "late Medieval/early Renaissance" covers a lot of ground) for "gentlemen" to carry swords openly. Arming swords, sideswords, rapiers, smallswords, there are even illustrations showing men in civilian dress with longswords at their belts. Broad, heavy blades tended to be for war and narrow, lighter ones for civilian wear/self defense but there is a huge overlap. The idea of concealed carry for swords doesn't really come up. Daggers, absolutely, but swords were pretty much openly worn by those people in society who were expected to have swords. And even a relatively short sword like a gladius is hard to conceal under clothing.

I'm sure the smallsword developed partly as an easier to wear sword than a broadsword or rapier while still being a sword you could fight with. Up through the 19th century, military officers "dress swords" were still real weapons that could be used for combat, even if that was becoming less and less likely as firearms got better and better. Modern military dress swords are pretty much just ceremonial and probably wouldn't stand up to the abuse of cut and parry, but functional swords for day to day wear are very common in the late medieval and early renaissance, and often would have been very similar to battlefield weapons

Vinyadan

2022-03-29, 03:31 PM

My thought was more that ultimately of what designs we know of the gladius would fit my criteria, not that I believed that they were used like that at the time [though we have deficient data to show either way]. And I was under the impression that the famed weapons ban was only for Rome herself, not other settlements.

It's a common trait among ancient cities. Ownership of weapons is a different deal, but wearing them was strongly restricted, be it by law or custom. This is true for both Sparta and Athens, as weapons were seen as a way to make the laws of the city ineffective; and then, of course, in Rome. Pompeii was a Roman colony, and I am not certain about laws that applied there, but it did have a pomerium, which normally wasn't to be passed by people in arms. Of course, most cities weren't policed as well as Rome, so that probably gave some leeway in carrying weapons for self-defense; how openly, that's a different matter.

EDIT: About the early XVII century, there was an episode that shows how normal it was to carry weapons: the new Bishop of Milan was almost crushed by the exulting crowd and was saved by some gentlemen who drew their swords inside the church to keep the people away from him. It's something on which Manzoni insists quite a bit in The Betrothed: a respectable man, even of humble birth, had at least to carry a large knife on his person, and, apparently, would wear a better-looking dagger for special days, even if he was just visiting the local curate.

Lvl 2 Expert

2022-03-31, 06:26 AM

That argument really does not work when you are talking about the personal possessions of the rich. Ask a rich (enough) man if he wants a £20, 000 car or a £2, 000, 000 car, and it'll be the £2, 000, 000 one every time.

Up to a point. A bus is quite a bit more expensive than a regular car, yet very few people drive a bus. Presumably this is because most of the extra cost of a bus goes towards features that a private user doesn't have much use for (high torque at low revs, extra gears, space for all your friends, extra roomy ceilings, double automatic doors in the front and the back) or that even actively hinder the experience the rich person is looking to have (low top speed, sluggish in corners, difficulty in parking, gets stuck in allyways, the driver can't easily hear you when you're giving instructions from the back seat). Same with tanks, amphibious vehicles, aircraft tows etc. An expensive thing still needs to be thing someone would want independent of cost for lots of people to buy it. It doesn't have to make a lot of direct practical sense, diamonds have been popular for a while now and they just kind of look pretty, but if a thing sticks around as popular for more than a few years there's usually some sort of reason to like it.

halfeye

2022-03-31, 07:37 PM

That argument really does not work when you are talking about the personal possessions of the rich. Ask a rich (enough) man if he wants a £20, 000 car or a £2, 000, 000 car, and it'll be the £2, 000, 000 one every time.

When we get to people that rich, it's no longer about sword vs an axe, it's about "how much gold and ivory do you want on your weapon of choice".

https://64.media.tumblr.com/ce818e1c5efff3a3b23368fc5f032bde/d3ba5e6706d64392-5e/s540x810/fea57d2f503997471541de1c3f7ccdc7e35b6ea9.jpg
https://media.britishmuseum.org/media/Repository/Documents/2014_9/29_17/104908e1_1e72_4828_b1df_a3b5011a7699/mid_00147807_001.jpg

Well, yeah, but then the typical expensive weapon is a sword.

An expensive thing still needs to be thing someone would want independent of cost for lots of people to buy it. It doesn't have to make a lot of direct practical sense, diamonds have been popular for a while now and they just kind of look pretty,

They are also very hard. Gems on shields might be expensive, but if the shield they are on is actually otherwise strong, they might also be practical for a very righ person who valued their own life.

but if a thing sticks around as popular for more than a few years there's usually some sort of reason to like it.

Two people quibbling with me from opposite sides of the "swords are better" argument, I think perhaps I got something nearly right.

Vinyadan

2022-03-31, 11:30 PM

They are also very hard. Gems on shields might be expensive, but if the shield they are on is actually otherwise strong, they might also be practical for a very righ person who valued their own life.

About precious shields, I remember a Seleucid king holding a parade of his army in front of Hannibal, showing off his riches; a large group of soldiers had silver shields (or just shields with silver decorations). When the king asked him what he thought about them, Hannibal answered, "I think that the Romans are going to be very happy when they loot them".
However, if I recall correctly, in the same parade there were soldiers deliberately armed in Roman style. In practice, the king had gone with whatever looked prestigious at the time: soldiers armed to show off his riches, and others to look like the best fighting force of the time. Hence Hannibal's comment, as he worried about performance, and instead saw an army meant for showing off.

fusilier

2022-04-01, 04:09 PM

I'm a little late to the conversation, but I would like to made a few observations about swords as status symbols.

A sidearm is, I believe, a weapon which is carried or worn "at the side." As such it doesn't need to be actively held to be carried, and therefore sidearms usually make good secondary or backup weapons, and often times this is what is meant when a weapon is described as a "sidearm." But, as others have noted, swords aren't necessarily secondary or backup weapons, and in its most generic sense "sidearm" doesn't have to connote a secondary weapon. (Again that's my opinion on the term).

Many different things can be status symbols, and some can be "symbols of authority" (and some may be both). A fancy spear or mace can be a status symbol (or a symbol of authority), but they have to be actively held, which will limit them either to a static display, or to be carried during special functions and parades. A sidearm, however, can be carried on the person while leaving the hands free, and can be used to show off the wearers status, wherever the person should be, and whatever function the person may be performing. Of course it's not the only form of status symbol that can be worn, clothing, colors (e.g. imperial purple), etc., and cultural/societal norms clearly play into the choices. A feudal society (and those descended/influenced by them), where ostensibly those with status are supposed to have martial role, a sword makes sense as an "everyday" status symbol.

Yora

2022-04-04, 09:17 AM

Does anyone know of any surviving examples or decent reconstructions of castles from the very early middle ages? So 6th to 8th century?
What would castles at the time have looked like?

Gnoman

2022-04-04, 09:32 AM

"Castles" as you think of them probably didn't exist in that era. Forts and fortresses existed, but the integration of them with administration and the personal residence of an individual ruler is an artifact of the feudal system that cropped up in the 9th and 10th centuries. In the time period you're talking about, the primary examples in Europe would be Roman-style forts, which were good enough until the great revolutions in fortress technology during the misnamed Dark Ages. A good example of these is the Sallburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saalburg)

Tobtor

2022-04-04, 01:08 PM

I agree with Gnoman. At least for "Northern Europe" (England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia) direct parallels to "castles" were not common. Nobles lived in "villas" or further north in longhouses with associated "halls".

There are fortified settlements (the largest were old roman towns in France, England and southern Germany), but also extended roman forts grown into towns, but also german and anglo-saxon forts with enclosed settlements.

I think there might be a few villas or "germanic halls" that where where fortified enough to maybe count as a castle. But they would look like a fort enclosing a villa/hall (but with only the noble farm enclosed, in contrary to fortified towns/villages with commoners as well as chieftains/kings etc inside).

The Byzantine continued to use fortresses, but I believe they where mainly sate controlled and I do not know if they qualify to your definition.

The Lombards in Italy mainly had their chieftains reside in Italian towns, but I guess they used the Roman town fortresses as castles? I am somewhat unceartain about the precise organisation of their social model (how much was Roman and how much were Germanic). Similar I don't know enough to comment on the situation in Iberia, but I suspect that they also relied heavily on old Roman towns and any fortification associated with them, but I think they where renewed and repaired somewhat more than in northern Europe where many roman towns quickly fell into disrepair.

Yora

2022-04-04, 02:38 PM

My definition is "fortification to protect a group of soldiers against attackers". :smallbiggrin:

Martin Greywolf

2022-04-04, 03:25 PM

My definition is "fortification to protect a group of soldiers against attackers". :smallbiggrin:

This esentially didn't exist in early medieval era at all. To figure out why, we need to look at three general topics.

1) What is a castle good for?

to protect a group of soldiers against attackers

right?

Well, yes, but how does that actually protect your kingdom from being ransacked? The roles of castles in strategic roles can be roughly divided into two types, fortress castles and refuge castles, with many castles being both, and which role a given castle had could shift.

Castle's primary characteristics are that is is horrendously expensive per square meter and extremely hard to successfully besiege. The two different castle kinds used that to defend the area they were responsible for in different ways. A refuge castle was used as just that, a refuge for the people. Once an enemy army was spotted, the local population put all their valuables in pots and buried them, took all they could and booked into the local refuge castles. They could only hold out there for a liimted amount of time, but if they managed to last a week to a month, the reinforcements would usually come.

Fortress castles are a different matter. They themselves couldn't take in very many refugees, but could, as a result, hold out much longer. They were often built in very inaccessible spots (there's one of these near me that is in the middle of hills on a big stone spur, some 50 meters above the mountain pass), without many people around in the first place. The role of these was to serve as strong points from which you could sally forth to take out small enemy foraging parties and generally be a pain in their literal rear. A proper army on a campaign could take these out fairly easily, sure, but that took time and casualties, and by high to late medieval era, you had so many of these it often wasn't feasible.

So, you have twin strategies of protecting your taxpayers and denying the enemy supplies.

2) What about the Romans?

When it comes to early medieval era, you always have to divide what you're talking about to Roman and not Roman. In this case, we're really talking about cities, many of which were built and fortified by Romans, and still in use at this time. That means a large metropolis with big walls, pretty much universally, even a Marcoman wars era Carnuntum had more people in it than most medieval cities, and it was a small town in its time.

https://images.historicenglandservices.org.uk/p/106/silchester-roman-city-walls-j950063-1436865.jpg.webp
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/siteassets/home/visit/places-to-visit/silchester-roman-city-walls-and-ampitheatre/south-gate-recon-silchester.jpg

These cities and towns declined quite a bit, and some of them fell apart, but with declining population, you could use what once was a large city to serve as a refuge for pretty much anyone within walking distance. Still, even then, the Roman areas did have places where there weren't enough cities, in which case they had to use what the rest of Europe was using. Which brings us to...

3) Early medieval defensive strategy

The first hurdle here is not enough resources. Early medieval era doesn't have a lot of centralization or stability, and that means large projects aren't possible. That rules out castles as we know them from later eras right out, since they require a lot of materials and labor to build, and it rules out Roman-style extensive city walls as well. You have to go down in scale, and here we see what are more or less direct predecessors of refuge and fortress castles.

The first is the nobleman's fortified villa/stone house/motte and bailey. All it is is a house of the guy who rules over local three villages, and is usually a central stone building with wooden pallisades and sometimes ditches.

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

https://c.pxhere.com/photos/97/ce/bach_ritterburg_knight_s_castle_castle_lower_needl e_middle_ages_wooden_castle_tower_kanzach-547289.jpg!d

https://o.quizlet.com/CSPxVfI65.C1pcoT7vvjkg.png

It usually can't take in all that many refugees or stand up to armies, but there is a lot of them, making them a decent analogies to fortress castles. The analogy isn't perfect, you don't find these standing on hard to get to places for one, but it roughly checks out.

Second structure of interest is oppidum.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Celtic_Oppidum_1st_century_B.C..jpg

The key feature of them is their large size - not perhaps when compared to Roman cities, but they were bigger than almost all hgih and late medieval castles, being often hundreds of meters long. This almost universally meant that their walls were pallisades, with only the innermost ring being stone, but their sheer size meant that they could serve as refuge castles did in later times.

There are significant disagreements on how exactly they worked, whether living in them was a reflection of the society getting more social layers and so on. We do know some of them weren't really inhabited, serving as ritual sites, or perhaps as refuges to run to in times of danger. Some of them could potentially be build in places where the people ran to in times of danger anyway, e.g. hard to get to mountain meadows, Dunharrow-style. We have several of those confirmed in high to late medieval eras, and castles were often built on them at some point. But we also have a lot of sites that clearly had a permanent population and day-to-day hustle and bustle, so... Like I said, there are disagreements.

Why not even small outposts?

Right? A small fortified camp for fifty soldiers sounds like a good idea. And it is, but to do that, you need a military that is organized along the lines that let you do that, and that's the problem. Even a powerful local ruler in ealry medieval era will only really control a fairly small area directly, let alone be able to give orders to soldiers hundreds of miles away (Romans had an entire, very expensive, postal system for that). You may see some wooden lookout towers in some places, but that's about the extent of it.

The bulk of your fighting forces are either a part of your personal retinue and around you all the time, or part of some other nobleman's forces. In the latter case, they will be around said nobleman, in his fortified villa rustica/motte and bailey, not out in the middle of nowhere, guarding your borders.

Berenger

2022-04-04, 03:31 PM

A good example of these is the Sallburg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saalburg)
The original Saalburg didn't survive into the 6th century, though. The modern Saalburg was reconstructed on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm II. I can offer three pictures from Meyer, Werner: Deutsche Burgen, Schlösser und Festungen, Frankfurt am Main 1979. There is also a nice beginner's guide on the general use and principles of fortifications over at ACOUP (https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fortifications/).

https://abload.de/img/1cqkxp.jpg

Ostrogoth castle Golemanovo Kale, modern Bulgaria, 6th century.

https://abload.de/img/23tjou.jpg

Royal holdings near Dorestad, modern Netherlands, 8th century.

https://abload.de/img/3azki0.jpg

Saxon ringwall near Bremen, modern Germany, 8th century.

Pauly

2022-04-04, 07:52 PM

Does anyone know of any surviving examples or decent reconstructions of castles from the very early middle ages? So 6th to 8th century?
What would castles at the time have looked like?

You’re looking for ‘Viking’ ring fortresses.

https://youtu.be/8Iz0Sy0L7Ys

https://youtu.be/fBZHjUzhD1g

https://youtu.be/ARVpLMhmPmU

https://youtu.be/OY1T9UPvBuU

Yora

2022-04-05, 03:28 AM

Berenger

2022-04-05, 05:45 AM

My definition is "fortification to protect a group of soldiers against attackers". :smallbiggrin:

What I forgot, 'typical' medieval castles had multiple purposes. This does not apply to all types of castles (especially not refuge castles), but I feel it bears mentioning.
..
Their military role, in which the defensive structures serve as a force multiplier for defenders, is the most visible and obvious one. But they also served as a safe and prestigious residence (for whole noble families and a large "civilian" staff, including children), centers of rulership and noble representation, centers of the local economy and centers of law and administration - at the very least for the surrounding villages supporting the castle. Which of these roles was the most important could shift from castle to castle and from time to time. Places which lack the facilities for one or more of these functions might be better described as a fortress, a manor or a palace.

Martin Greywolf

2022-04-05, 06:31 AM

You’re looking for ‘Viking’ ring fortresses.

I'd hesitate to call them early medieval. Thechnically they are, most being built in late 900s, but they aren't really typical of the era, being more of a transitional step to high medieval castles.

Something I've been taking away from what I found about early Bizantine fortification is that it looks very much like "curtain walls + fat towers". They can get quite big, but still really plain. I've not seen stuff like massive keeps, multiple nested courtyards, and clusters of differently shaped towers, as they are common in later west European castles.

Yeah, pretty much. You don't tend to see specialized military-only, or rather military-mostly buildings as standalone structures. The closest you can get to multiple layers is city walls with a citadel, or maybe central citadel with a town around it.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LQU3AMlqEbc/XK1Vj7B93xI/AAAAAAACWvc/A5XOE2Jm9TI52WoskWuL2y6xMTWFoPRnQCLcBGAs/s1600/11tun1%2B%2528500x462%2529.jpg
Note the houses standing outside of the fort, they would have a pallisade around them at best, giving you what is technically a two-level fortified complex, but still not quite a castle.

It seems that when Romans wanted to make fortifications harder to get, their answer wasn't to make multiple levels of them, but rather to make one level and build the hell out of it.

https://weaponsandwarfare.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/2rh67o0.jpg

https://weaponsandwarfare.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/tgrt.jpg?w=584&h=749

Or, there are the really, really big oppidums, there are almost no good reconstructions or maps of them, but if you got to this link (https://mobt3ath.com/uplode/books/book-92667.pdf) and scroll down a few pages, you'll see a picture of one such example.

Vinyadan

2022-04-05, 11:53 PM

There are a few early Lombard castles still standing in Italy. How heavily they were modified over the centuries, however, is a different story. There is a square castle in Sant'Agata di Puglia (you can probably easily google some images), but, for example, we know that it used to have towers. Were they part of the original project, or added in the following centuries? Hard to tell. Some academic studies probably deal with that.

As far as the Visigoths in Spain were concerned, there isn't an actual break from previous Roman architecture on a stylistic level (as the Lombards, they kept using local workers), although we do know that the population contracted and roads fell in disrepair after the Roman state and trade system collapsed. Sometimes the villas still held a rich Roman family inside - people capable of arming thousands of slaves and senting them as military help to the king - but other times they were left without an owner and the rurals reused them as they saw fit, sometimes even as a graveyard.

Gnoman

2022-04-06, 04:07 PM

Something I've been taking away from what I found about early Bizantine fortification is that it looks very much like "curtain walls + fat towers". They can get quite big, but still really plain. I've not seen stuff like massive keeps, multiple nested courtyards, and clusters of differently shaped towers, as they are common in later west European castles.

Part of this is that fortification is an arms race like any other. Even if you could build a late-era super castle in, say, the year 900, it would cost you massive amounts of resources and labor. Meanwhile a much simpler fortress would do just fine against the ability of somebody to attack your castle. To use an analogy, a pre-gunpowder breastplate won't stop a bullet, but there were no bullets then, so building one that could give that level of protection was probably a waste.

The other factor is technology. It can be hard to really see this looking back from a thousand years later, but you couldn't build that super-castle in 900. Architecture, tools, building materials, and underlying theory just were not advanced enough to do it.

Thane of Fife

2022-04-06, 06:25 PM

Something not mentioned yet is that in Britain, at least (I imagine similarly elsewhere, but I'm less familiar), people built lots of dykes (see Wansdyke, Offa's Dyke, Devil's Dyke, etc) in the Post-Roman period. I believe that there isn't really any consensus as to what the primary purpose of these was, or how they worked, but there is at least some thought that they were a form of defensive fortification.

Khedrac

2022-04-07, 02:15 AM

Martin Greywolf

2022-04-07, 10:46 AM

Part of this is that fortification is an arms race like any other. Even if you could build a late-era super castle in, say, the year 900, it would cost you massive amounts of resources and labor. Meanwhile a much simpler fortress would do just fine against the ability of somebody to attack your castle.
[...]
The other factor is technology. It can be hard to really see this looking back from a thousand years later, but you couldn't build that super-castle in 900. Architecture, tools, building materials, and underlying theory just were not advanced enough to do it.

Not really - we do have structures that are supercastle-like in the level of architectural complexity and necessary resources and labor built usually in pre-medieval times, sometimes even in early medieval. We don't see castles in Roman era not because of insufficient technology, but simply because they didn't fit into their defensive strategy or their army organization. It's only once those go away after Rome wanes that you see castle slowly evolve from oppidum and villa rustica, along the lines of very un-Roman defense.

Related to this, is that once cannon were invented and came into common-enough use to be a factor, you needed a different type of castle. A strong hard wall capable of resisting all but the largest trebuchet serves pretty well against any pre-gunpowder army, cannon will shatter the wall, so you need the big earth or rubble berms to absorb the cannon shot. Similarly pre-gunpowder attackers who reach the base of a wall cannot do much without scaling ladders or similar, once they have gunpowder they could be emplacing a blasting charge, so the ability to shoot them first becomes a lot more important.

Okay, this is a hell of a tangent, but what the hell. Gunpowder gets introduced to Europe around 1300, star forts only really appear in 1550 - sure, technological progress takes long, but not that long.

Thing is, early gunpowder weapons kinda sucked. There's a post on Czech forums regarding Hussite wars about where Hussite siege camps were located, and it turns out closest were something like 200 meters away from the castle, which gives us a range estimate for their heavy cannon. That's... not great, it's well inside bowshot, and well inside trebuchet range, so early gunpowder had same offensive capabilities that the trebuchet had, it was just a lot more portable, and had better density (i.e. more shooty things per meter of frontline).

http://husitstvi.cz/wp-content/uploads/jednotky-vyzbroj-vystroj12.jpg
Even the biggest examples had max range of about 500 meters, and those had very low rate of fire, these are the ones around the 200-300 meters mark

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Great_Turkish_Bombard_at_Fort_Nelson.JPG/800px-Great_Turkish_Bombard_at_Fort_Nelson.JPG
Looks impressive and will eventually take a wall down, but it has rate of fire of 15 shots. Per day.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Siege_orleans.jpg/800px-Siege_orleans.jpg

Blasting charges aren't all that great either, you need to get close to place them, and if you have some sort of method to do that safely, why not deliver a battering ram? As for blasting charges that could make a hole in the stone wall... it's probably not happening. Even the charges used against the gate were enclosed in something that would redirect the explosion towards the door, rather than away (often a bell from nearby church), stone would be even worse.

When you do see gunpowder explode a wall, it's usually done by sapping - dig a tunnell under the wall, make the underwall section deep and then collapse it. But for that, you can use non-gunpowder methods too, just set the beams on fire. Gunpowder was faster and you didn't need to dig such a large cavity (the explosion did that for you, it has nowhere to go but the narrow access tunnel), but it was still just an incremental upgrade.

That said, this is not quite so much a myth as gunpowder vs plate armor, Machiavelli states in ~1500 that no walls can resist cannon over several ady's worth of bombardment, and once you get to late 1500s, you do need star forts to resist the big cannons at all.

http://home.mysoul.com.au/graemecook/Renaissance/04_Culverin.jpg

fusilier

2022-04-07, 05:51 PM

Okay, this is a hell of a tangent, but what the hell. Gunpowder gets introduced to Europe around 1300, star forts only really appear in 1550 - sure, technological progress takes long, but not that long.

Early 14th century cannons were too small to do much to walls (earliest depiction of cannons in Europe date to 1326 and show small "vase" like weapons), not until around the second-half of the 14th century do they start to make their presence felt. The War of Chioggia (1380) used a good number of cannons to take down walls. While the trace italianne may not have evolved into it's final form by the mid 1500s, there was a considerable amount of development between the late 14th century and the mid-16th.

By the mid 15th century, new "artillery" forts were being constructed. While the walls were still tall, they were much thicker. The towers were also being made thicker and cut down to the height of the walls (or just a little taller). Although constructed in the late 15th century, the Sarzanello Fortress in Italy is a good example of this early response to artillery (also it has a very early example of a ravelin):
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortezza_di_Sarzanello

The Fortress at Salses (on the border between Spain and France), is even more impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_de_Salses

One source I have describes it as being built in the "reinforced castle" style. Thick walls, deep, wide ditch, it also had built-in countermines and vents(? need to confirm that) -- countermines allow the defenders to detect, and hopefully disrupt enemy mining attempts, and (if that fails) vents redirect the force of an exploding mine away from the base of the walls. Completed in 1503, Henri de Campion, writing in 1639(!), over one-hundred years later, considered it the best all-masonry fortress in Europe!

The problem with this style of fortress should be clear -- thick AND tall walls made them very expensive! By shortening the walls, you were able to get just as good (if not better) protection from artillery fire, and spare both time and expense.

See Siege Warfare, The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494-1660, by Christopher Duffy. The first chapter briefly covers the developments beginning around 1470 in Italy.

When you do see gunpowder explode a wall, it's usually done by sapping - dig a tunnell under the wall, make the underwall section deep and then collapse it. But for that, you can use non-gunpowder methods too, just set the beams on fire.

A comment upon sapping, and just to be clear this is not directed at anything said here. My complaint is that many military historians seem to conflate mining and sapping, and not make clear the distinction. It's a bit of pet peeve of mine, so I'm going to take the opportunity to make the distinction clear. I suspect the confusion arises from the Medieval (and earlier) periods where sapping and mining (during a siege) had the same goals -- i.e. to undermine the walls of the castle, and collapsing them to create a breach. The difference is in how they approached that goal.

- Miners dig mines, i.e. tunnels, from their own lines to some point under the foundation of the walls.

- Sappers, as their name implies, dig "saps" up to the walls. What is a sap? It's a kind of trench (not tunnel). This would be done in the full view of the enemy. Only after reaching the wall would the sappers then dig down to undermine it.

While it might sound crazy to let the enemy know precisely where you were trying to undermine their walls, not only does sapping require less skill and resources, a lot of siegecraft was about convincing the enemy to surrender before trying to storm their fortifications. So if the defenders can't stop the saps from reaching their walls, it might encourage them to surrender.

This distinction was well understood in the 19th century, sappers and miners were separate specializations, by which time, mining was still used in the traditional way, whereas saps were used primarily to advance the trenches closer to the enemy work, to allow cannons to be placed closer, and give a better "jumping" off point for attacking infantry.

Recently somebody finally returned my copy of a 19th century Engineering manual so I've been thinking about this lately. So thanks in advance for tolerating the digression. :-)