8 ms·

Modern misconceptions about medieval warfare

78 points by aldarion 3y ago

EligibleDecoy 3y ago
Summed up: war is complicated and people will think up every possible advantage they can get to avoid getting killed. Also; logistics matter (laymen talk tactics, experts talk logistics and all that) I wonder what myths people will say about our current or recent times? - That soldiers would just shoot like there’s no tomorrow (bullets are heavy and reloading matters) - That fortifications didn’t matter (look at the success of T walls and hesco barriers) - that small units could be found just driving around the desert like Hurt Locker would lead you to believe (only the most specialized units would go without local and quick support forces, and they almost always had aerial support instead) I could go on a long time about this stuff - look up videos posted by TRADOC or MCoE to see how complicated seemingly simple things can get: https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=CFeSzzhobzzYIeDg https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=CFeSzzhobzzYIeDg
- pvdoom 3y ago
  I was involved with historical reenactment, of the medieval kind, and have interacted with those of the later era. So, there is a lot of research that is going on, and a lot of it involves both artefacts and visual evidence ... and if we look at these, we may get a very weird picture of modern warfare. Operator, shades, action heroes, promotional materials. And most of all - propaganda and depolitization are all forces in our media, that distort the picture.
fbdab103 3y ago
Admittedly only skimmed some of the parts, but this one stood out to me: And large castles were incredibly difficult to take. In fact, up until the appearance and widespread adoption of (relatively) modern gunpowder artillery (late 15th / early 16th century) it was more common for a castle to surrender because it ran out of food. And that could take months or even years, a period during which besieging army would suffer from disease, possibly food shortage, and was vulnerable to relief forces. How was it possible for medieval technology to feed a population for years? Sea access to enable fishing seems the only option, but that seems like a prime target for the attackers to do their best to blockade the port and harass the fishermen.
- bsder 3y ago
  A castle doesn't necessarily have many people in it. If you have access to water, you can store quite a bit of food for a small number of people. The issue is that an army MUST forage. An army will burn up all the food in an area very quickly--at which point it must move. Now that you are moving, your back flank is vulnerable to the attackers which were in the castle. And you have a bunch of pissed off locals who hate you for eating all their food. There was a reason why "quartering of troops" was explicitly written into the US Constitution.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Not only that, an important thing to consider as the besieging force was to have at least triple the numbers of the garrison defending the castle.[1] So if a castle was garrisoned by a defending force of 2,000, you wanted at least 6,000 men as the besieging force to even stand a chance of winning the siege whether through killing or attrition. And this quickly grows exponentially for the besiegers as the defending force becomes bigger: If the defenders numbered 5,000 men, you wanted 15,000 men as the besiegers. So not only did the besiegers have a harder time fighting compared to the defenders, the logistical requirements and demands for the besiegers was significantly larger than anything the defenders had to deal with. [1]: https://www.quora.com/How-large-of-an-army-unit-in-medieval-times-is-needed-for-a-siege-attack-1 https://www.quora.com/How-large-of-an-army-unit-in-medieval-...
    - persnickety 3y ago
      Nitpick: you mean that it grows linearly, not exponentially.
- lmm 3y ago
  You don't put the population in the castle, just a fighting force, and you could have enough food (taken from the surrounding country in normal times) stored there to supply them for a year or more.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
mdhb 3y ago
[flagged]
gattilorenz 3y ago
“in Middle Ages, oil was expensive. And edible oil was simply not something people under siege – where food meant survival – would simply throw away. […] Other substances were also popular. […] In Siege of Pontoise in 1441, English defenders allegedly used boiling animal fat” Well, that’s a weird argument: “oil was edible and not commonly used. There are recorded instances of animal fat being used instead”.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  That isn't a contradiction, not all fatty animal byproducts are edible, or at least not without filtering, sterilization, or other steps defenders may not have had available.
  - samus 3y ago
    Also, animal fat for such uses can be made out of any meat. Rats, dogs, diseased animals, horses, and in principle even human corpses.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Not to forget using the stuff that is beyond acceptance by everyone. Animal fats can keep, but there is always some limit. At point it is so rancid that no one wants it. Either you burn or dump it.
    - reddit_clone 3y ago
      The water belongs to the sietch!
- aldarion 3y ago
  Point wasn't that it was never used, though, but that it wouldn't have been the first choice. But yeah, bit of a weird wording.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  Clearly they preferred to chuck unhealthy unsaturated animal fats to the enemies and keep the healthy Extra Virgin Olive Oil to eat.
WalterBright 3y ago
Very interesting article, I enjoyed reading it. But there's something odd about it. The author sounds like a well-educated person, except that there are a lot of grammatical errors that disrupt the flow. They don't seem like the kind of errors an English-As-Second-Language person would make.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  My own suspicion is that the author's native language lacks articles (so perhaps some Slavic language?), since the majority of grammatical errors I noticed at least are missing articles ("battle was fought", "knight did this" etc). And those tend to be very jarring to someone who is used to articles.
  - sio8ohPi 3y ago
    Good guess -- their bio lists them as born and living in Croatia.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  I would guess that the type of grammatical errors depend a lot on the mother tongue of the author though, e.g. one can see German, French, Spanish, etc... shine through in an English text by the types of errors, for instance as a German I like to write overly long sentences, split by commas. ;)
- gostsamo 3y ago
  The author says that he is from Croatia: https://warfantasy.wordpress.com/author/aldariontelcontar/ https://warfantasy.wordpress.com/author/aldariontelcontar/
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Thanks for the satisfying explanations!
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
In one of the books I've read about crusades there was a siege, where the people locked in a fortress were out of water while the weather was quite hot. So how do you get water when totally desperate and thirsty? They immersed their leather belts in the cesspit, then after a while, pulled them out and squeezed the water out, plus, of course drank their own piss.
chewz 3y ago
Re 19. Horse Archers Were Unstoppable People do not realize, that Carrhae was a special case. In normal circumstances horse archers would run out of arrows quickly and Roman infantry would simply wait them out in testudo formation. Surena (Parthian general) had prepared well for this particular battle and for every horse archer he had 2-3 transport animals with spare arrows (that must had been a lot of arrows per archer) so his archers could keep pressure for a few days without running out of arrows, wearing Romans out. He could do that because Parthians had been operating close to home [so Surrena didn't have to worry about fodder for horse and transport animals] (and he had enough time to manufacture all those arrows ahead). Also generally Roman infantry had been generally more rapid force in the field then any larger mounted force. Mounted Roman army required fodder transported by oxen carts - which made horsemen much slower over larger distance then marching infantry... So logistics matter... > Crassus now hoped that his legionaries could hold out until the Parthians ran out of arrows.[28] However, Surena used thousands of camels to resupply his horse archers. Upon this realisation, Crassus dispatched his son Publius with 1,300 Gallic cavalry, 500 archers and eight cohorts of legionaries to drive off the horse archers. The horse archers feigned retreat and drew off Publius' force, which suffered heavy casualties from arrow fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae
- ithkuil 3y ago
  “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…” – Sun Tzu “My logisticians are a humorless lot… they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.” – Alexander the Great "An army is a creature that marches on its stomach.”—Napoleon ...
sph 3y ago
> Myth: Medieval Soldiers Were Conscripted Peasants The word "soldier" ("soldato" in Italian) comes from the Latin solidus, a type of coin. This term used to refer to paid professionals, as opposed to conscripted peasants. In modern colloquial Italian, "soldi" means money. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldo
- chromanoid 3y ago
  In German it is also very obvious: Sold (payment), Soldat (soldier), Söldner (mercenary)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Gazoche 3y ago
    In French too. "Solde" means "pay", but only specifically the pay given to a soldier. For other professions you'd say "salaire".
  - natmaka 3y ago
    French: « soldat » (soldier), « solde » (soldier's payment, not used for any other occupation).
keiferski 3y ago
Medieval people viewed war as something very different. For nobility, it was an opportunity for fame and glory. For common soldiers, it was an opportunity to get rich or at least gain some wealth. For everybody involved, it was a duty and a question of honor. One thing that seems unexplored in historical writing to me is how we use the same concept to refer to activities that have changed dramatically over the millennia. War, specifically, is a good example: war today is a certain kind of experience, filled with bombs and drones and driving around avoiding IEDs and artillery. War a thousand years ago was an entirely different thing, where you might be fighting another guy in direct close quarters combat. Of course it was more complex than that and you had other things like widespread disease, or boiling fat thrown at you, but it seems plausible to me that it was much easier to feel “heroic” about war in the past than in our mechanized age.
- aldarion 3y ago
  Precisely. First World War has fundamentally changed our society - including our attitude towards the war.
  - pferde 3y ago
    It's not just WW1, it's that the system or rules the society is organized in has changed. Under feudalism, one of its basic tenets was that vassals provided their liege with not only money, but certain amount of men for the army. Hence the "For everybody involved, it was a duty and a question of honor." part of the quote. Although I suspect that for common peasants, there was no sense of duty or honor in this, it was just a potentially family-destroying event, where men would be rounded up and marched off against their will to die. Modern society sometimes still has that in limited form (mandatory military service), but it's very different, and time-limited.
    - aldarion 3y ago
      "where men would be rounded up and marched off against their will to die" That is the thing, however - they weren't, at least not in feudal system. Peasants would be present only as personal servants of nobility, but weren't actually expected to fight. "All men under arms" is only typical of tribal society, but in that case theywere basically defending their homes - and also hoping to profit.
orwin 3y ago
I'm not knowledgeable enough to critique this piece, but I feel it's mostly right from what I know from war in the 16th to 18 century that I know way better. However I have to critique the author modern horses knowledge. We still breed some horses to be stout, not afraid of collisions and basically be terrors on a field. Maybe because he's from the west, he isn't aware. But our nomad/ex-nomad neighbors still practice kok buru, horseback wrestling, their horses are extremely aggressive to people they don't know, and their horses are everything a battle horse should be. Also I'm not so sure about the point on horseback archers. They weren't just archers, at least in mongols armies. They were also either light or heavy cavalry, extremely well organized. The battle in Poland (maybe medieval Lithuania, I don't remember) where Christian armies met the Mongols for the first time was a typical example of how nomad horseback archers fought (or should fight). Harass to rile up the enemies, when a part of the army is separated (knights in the case), fix them with heavy cavalery and have the lighter cavalery divisions hit them in the back. If the point is about 'pure' horseback archers, I agree, but it's not how the majority of middle age horseback archers acted.
- samus 3y ago
  I also find that the author should have covered the horse nomads a little more, and how their logistics worked. It would deepened the otherwise excellent points of TA.
paleotrope 3y ago
This is mostly debunking strawman arguments that no serious historian would make.
- mcv 3y ago
  No historian would, but plenty of amateurs still do. Although possibly less than 30 years ago.
- aldarion 3y ago
  World doesn't consist of historians and animals, you know. Most people are not historians and (unfortunately) get their "historical" "education" from popular culture. Hence, articles like this matter.

78 points by aldarion 3y ago

Summed up: war is complicated and people will think up every possible advantage they can get to avoid getting killed. Also; logistics matter (laymen talk tactics, experts talk logistics and all that) I wonder what myths people will say about our current or recent times? - That soldiers would just shoot like there’s no tomorrow (bullets are heavy and reloading matters) - That fortifications didn’t matter (look at the success of T walls and hesco barriers) - that small units could be found just driving around the desert like Hurt Locker would lead you to believe (only the most specialized units would go without local and quick support forces, and they almost always had aerial support instead) I could go on a long time about this stuff - look up videos posted by TRADOC or MCoE to see how complicated seemingly simple things can get: https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=CFeSzzhobzzYIeDg https://youtu.be/ZZ-sCT_maAQ?si=CFeSzzhobzzYIeDg

pvdoom 3y ago
I was involved with historical reenactment, of the medieval kind, and have interacted with those of the later era. So, there is a lot of research that is going on, and a lot of it involves both artefacts and visual evidence ... and if we look at these, we may get a very weird picture of modern warfare. Operator, shades, action heroes, promotional materials. And most of all - propaganda and depolitization are all forces in our media, that distort the picture.

fbdab103 3y ago

Admittedly only skimmed some of the parts, but this one stood out to me: And large castles were incredibly difficult to take. In fact, up until the appearance and widespread adoption of (relatively) modern gunpowder artillery (late 15th / early 16th century) it was more common for a castle to surrender because it ran out of food. And that could take months or even years, a period during which besieging army would suffer from disease, possibly food shortage, and was vulnerable to relief forces. How was it possible for medieval technology to feed a population for years? Sea access to enable fishing seems the only option, but that seems like a prime target for the attackers to do their best to blockade the port and harass the fishermen.

bsder 3y ago
A castle doesn't necessarily have many people in it. If you have access to water, you can store quite a bit of food for a small number of people. The issue is that an army MUST forage. An army will burn up all the food in an area very quickly--at which point it must move. Now that you are moving, your back flank is vulnerable to the attackers which were in the castle. And you have a bunch of pissed off locals who hate you for eating all their food. There was a reason why "quartering of troops" was explicitly written into the US Constitution.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Not only that, an important thing to consider as the besieging force was to have at least triple the numbers of the garrison defending the castle.[1] So if a castle was garrisoned by a defending force of 2,000, you wanted at least 6,000 men as the besieging force to even stand a chance of winning the siege whether through killing or attrition. And this quickly grows exponentially for the besiegers as the defending force becomes bigger: If the defenders numbered 5,000 men, you wanted 15,000 men as the besiegers. So not only did the besiegers have a harder time fighting compared to the defenders, the logistical requirements and demands for the besiegers was significantly larger than anything the defenders had to deal with. [1]: https://www.quora.com/How-large-of-an-army-unit-in-medieval-times-is-needed-for-a-siege-attack-1 https://www.quora.com/How-large-of-an-army-unit-in-medieval-...
  - persnickety 3y ago
    Nitpick: you mean that it grows linearly, not exponentially.
lmm 3y ago
You don't put the population in the castle, just a fighting force, and you could have enough food (taken from the surrounding country in normal times) stored there to supply them for a year or more.
- Ekaros 3y ago

mdhb 3y ago

[flagged]

gattilorenz 3y ago

“in Middle Ages, oil was expensive. And edible oil was simply not something people under siege – where food meant survival – would simply throw away. […] Other substances were also popular. […] In Siege of Pontoise in 1441, English defenders allegedly used boiling animal fat” Well, that’s a weird argument: “oil was edible and not commonly used. There are recorded instances of animal fat being used instead”.

Terr_ 3y ago
That isn't a contradiction, not all fatty animal byproducts are edible, or at least not without filtering, sterilization, or other steps defenders may not have had available.
- samus 3y ago
  Also, animal fat for such uses can be made out of any meat. Rats, dogs, diseased animals, horses, and in principle even human corpses.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Not to forget using the stuff that is beyond acceptance by everyone. Animal fats can keep, but there is always some limit. At point it is so rancid that no one wants it. Either you burn or dump it.
  - reddit_clone 3y ago
    The water belongs to the sietch!
aldarion 3y ago
Point wasn't that it was never used, though, but that it wouldn't have been the first choice. But yeah, bit of a weird wording.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
Clearly they preferred to chuck unhealthy unsaturated animal fats to the enemies and keep the healthy Extra Virgin Olive Oil to eat.

WalterBright 3y ago

Very interesting article, I enjoyed reading it. But there's something odd about it. The author sounds like a well-educated person, except that there are a lot of grammatical errors that disrupt the flow. They don't seem like the kind of errors an English-As-Second-Language person would make.

tsimionescu 3y ago
My own suspicion is that the author's native language lacks articles (so perhaps some Slavic language?), since the majority of grammatical errors I noticed at least are missing articles ("battle was fought", "knight did this" etc). And those tend to be very jarring to someone who is used to articles.
- sio8ohPi 3y ago
  Good guess -- their bio lists them as born and living in Croatia.
flohofwoe 3y ago
I would guess that the type of grammatical errors depend a lot on the mother tongue of the author though, e.g. one can see German, French, Spanish, etc... shine through in an English text by the types of errors, for instance as a German I like to write overly long sentences, split by commas. ;)
gostsamo 3y ago
The author says that he is from Croatia: https://warfantasy.wordpress.com/author/aldariontelcontar/ https://warfantasy.wordpress.com/author/aldariontelcontar/
WalterBright 3y ago
Thanks for the satisfying explanations!

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

In one of the books I've read about crusades there was a siege, where the people locked in a fortress were out of water while the weather was quite hot. So how do you get water when totally desperate and thirsty? They immersed their leather belts in the cesspit, then after a while, pulled them out and squeezed the water out, plus, of course drank their own piss.

chewz 3y ago

Re 19. Horse Archers Were Unstoppable People do not realize, that Carrhae was a special case. In normal circumstances horse archers would run out of arrows quickly and Roman infantry would simply wait them out in testudo formation. Surena (Parthian general) had prepared well for this particular battle and for every horse archer he had 2-3 transport animals with spare arrows (that must had been a lot of arrows per archer) so his archers could keep pressure for a few days without running out of arrows, wearing Romans out. He could do that because Parthians had been operating close to home [so Surrena didn't have to worry about fodder for horse and transport animals] (and he had enough time to manufacture all those arrows ahead). Also generally Roman infantry had been generally more rapid force in the field then any larger mounted force. Mounted Roman army required fodder transported by oxen carts - which made horsemen much slower over larger distance then marching infantry... So logistics matter... > Crassus now hoped that his legionaries could hold out until the Parthians ran out of arrows.[28] However, Surena used thousands of camels to resupply his horse archers. Upon this realisation, Crassus dispatched his son Publius with 1,300 Gallic cavalry, 500 archers and eight cohorts of legionaries to drive off the horse archers. The horse archers feigned retreat and drew off Publius' force, which suffered heavy casualties from arrow fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae

ithkuil 3y ago
“You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…” – Sun Tzu “My logisticians are a humorless lot… they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.” – Alexander the Great "An army is a creature that marches on its stomach.”—Napoleon ...

sph 3y ago

> Myth: Medieval Soldiers Were Conscripted Peasants The word "soldier" ("soldato" in Italian) comes from the Latin solidus, a type of coin. This term used to refer to paid professionals, as opposed to conscripted peasants. In modern colloquial Italian, "soldi" means money. EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldo

chromanoid 3y ago
In German it is also very obvious: Sold (payment), Soldat (soldier), Söldner (mercenary)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Gazoche 3y ago
  In French too. "Solde" means "pay", but only specifically the pay given to a soldier. For other professions you'd say "salaire".
- natmaka 3y ago
  French: « soldat » (soldier), « solde » (soldier's payment, not used for any other occupation).

keiferski 3y ago

Medieval people viewed war as something very different. For nobility, it was an opportunity for fame and glory. For common soldiers, it was an opportunity to get rich or at least gain some wealth. For everybody involved, it was a duty and a question of honor. One thing that seems unexplored in historical writing to me is how we use the same concept to refer to activities that have changed dramatically over the millennia. War, specifically, is a good example: war today is a certain kind of experience, filled with bombs and drones and driving around avoiding IEDs and artillery. War a thousand years ago was an entirely different thing, where you might be fighting another guy in direct close quarters combat. Of course it was more complex than that and you had other things like widespread disease, or boiling fat thrown at you, but it seems plausible to me that it was much easier to feel “heroic” about war in the past than in our mechanized age.

aldarion 3y ago
Precisely. First World War has fundamentally changed our society - including our attitude towards the war.
- pferde 3y ago
  It's not just WW1, it's that the system or rules the society is organized in has changed. Under feudalism, one of its basic tenets was that vassals provided their liege with not only money, but certain amount of men for the army. Hence the "For everybody involved, it was a duty and a question of honor." part of the quote. Although I suspect that for common peasants, there was no sense of duty or honor in this, it was just a potentially family-destroying event, where men would be rounded up and marched off against their will to die. Modern society sometimes still has that in limited form (mandatory military service), but it's very different, and time-limited.
  - aldarion 3y ago
    "where men would be rounded up and marched off against their will to die" That is the thing, however - they weren't, at least not in feudal system. Peasants would be present only as personal servants of nobility, but weren't actually expected to fight. "All men under arms" is only typical of tribal society, but in that case theywere basically defending their homes - and also hoping to profit.

orwin 3y ago

I'm not knowledgeable enough to critique this piece, but I feel it's mostly right from what I know from war in the 16th to 18 century that I know way better. However I have to critique the author modern horses knowledge. We still breed some horses to be stout, not afraid of collisions and basically be terrors on a field. Maybe because he's from the west, he isn't aware. But our nomad/ex-nomad neighbors still practice kok buru, horseback wrestling, their horses are extremely aggressive to people they don't know, and their horses are everything a battle horse should be. Also I'm not so sure about the point on horseback archers. They weren't just archers, at least in mongols armies. They were also either light or heavy cavalry, extremely well organized. The battle in Poland (maybe medieval Lithuania, I don't remember) where Christian armies met the Mongols for the first time was a typical example of how nomad horseback archers fought (or should fight). Harass to rile up the enemies, when a part of the army is separated (knights in the case), fix them with heavy cavalery and have the lighter cavalery divisions hit them in the back. If the point is about 'pure' horseback archers, I agree, but it's not how the majority of middle age horseback archers acted.

samus 3y ago
I also find that the author should have covered the horse nomads a little more, and how their logistics worked. It would deepened the otherwise excellent points of TA.

paleotrope 3y ago

This is mostly debunking strawman arguments that no serious historian would make.

mcv 3y ago
No historian would, but plenty of amateurs still do. Although possibly less than 30 years ago.
aldarion 3y ago
World doesn't consist of historians and animals, you know. Most people are not historians and (unfortunately) get their "historical" "education" from popular culture. Hence, articles like this matter.