fishonthetree:

allsortsoflicorice:

slashmarks:

rumpelstiltskinix:

jumpingjacktrash:

vastderp:

youcantseebutimmakingaface:

sunderlorn:

rhube:

Suddenly all those Hinterlands quests to go round up a random farmer’s druffalo don’t  seem so silly.

Dragon Age Inquisition – doing something right.

(source)

#war in pre-industrial societies was *very different* from what many people imagine#i keep seeing calls for ‘realistic medieval huge military battles’ and im like#yon average feif could maybe afford like 10 guys tops

YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.

I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.

I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.

THANK YOU

i think this post has changed my world. literally. 

the ‘death is cheap’ approach to warfare only really came on the scene in the 19th century, and not full-blown until WW1. the american civil war and similar conflicts, with mass charges against cannon and the like, that’s a very modern approach to warfare and it assumes manpower is your cheapest resource.

in a non-industrialized setting, manpower is your most EXPENSIVE resource. you don’t throw masses of bodies against a position unless you’re an idiot, except in very rare cases – say, xerxes vs the 300 – where numbers are your only advantage and you don’t have any other options.

in pre-industrial warfare, tactics could make a shockingly outsized difference. there are many documented cases of a few commandos or a surprise flanking move defeating an army ten, twenty times their size. well-trained, well-equipped soldiers are not expendable in that setting. they are your best hope of winning. a medieval warlord would no more throw away his knights, archers, sappers, or other trained troops on massed action than a modern general would throw away her heavy bombers on a strafing run. that’s not how you use those.

just as the modern general uses long-range missiles for bombardment before sending in rare and expensive things like helicopter gunships for close engagement, the medieval warlord used mobile cavalry to isolate and harrass the enemy, and archers to soften them up, before picking his moment and ground to strike with heavy cavalry.

as ellis points out, these trained and equipped troops need a lot of support. reducing the enemy’s support was an essential tactic. when fantasy writers have a siege happen, they tend to think it’s just about starving the other guy or breaking down the wall. but the besieged army often ran into trouble long before that. running out of arrows was a problem, for instance, and when you eat your horses you no longer have a cavalry. a lot of times, that heroic ‘sally forth’ business that broke a siege one way or the other was just because it was eat the horses or use them, and a knight on foot was no longer able to fulfil his tactical role, so the leader rolled the dice rather than have his knights downgraded to footsoldiers.

one result of the need for civilian support for these troops was that you really, really didn’t want to slaughter the peasants if you could help it – at least not if you were taking over the territory, or thought you might want to at some point. it’s not like you could just ship a hundred thousand political prisoners from moscow to work the farms. the peasants WERE the land. without them, it was just a lot of mud you had to get across. you couldn’t stay, you couldn’t use it.

so i’d advise a moratorium on medieval armies burning every farm they pass, and slaughtering the inhabitants of cities they occupy. a few particularly ruthless warlords in history did that a few times, to make a point, and it was shocking back then, or it wouldn’t have worked. alaric sacked rome as revenge, not a takeover bid; you wouldn’t do that to a city you wanted to keep.

Thank you.

Fantasy writing has often forgotten how essential communities are to support that sort of setting.

This post has some good points, but
it’s generalizing them WAY too far.

So, first off: the number of food
producers you need per full time non-food producer is not constant
across all environments and agricultural systems. The Vikings are
probably one of the worst areas to generalize from, because they
lived in an area that was very poorly suited for their agricultural
crops, to the point where their economy was dependent on raiding for
subsistence survival and iirc there was some abandonment of
settlements because the land just wasn’t set up for survival based on
grain crops. You should assume that numbers pulled from them are the absolute highest
end.

Somewhere like Ireland, with a year
round temperate climate that allows multiple growing seasons and has
high rainfall, is going to have a much lower number of food producers
per non-food producer; somewhere like Incan era Peru, with
centralized agricultural planning and spectacularly high producing
plants like the potato, will be lower still. If your food producers
are pastoralists who mainly herd instead of growing, things are again
very different; same with people who subsist mainly off of orchard
crops with wildly different labor requirements; etc.

Side note: I always see people talking
about food production historically, but very rarely cloth production,
which has generally been equally labor intensive and vital. I would
really love it if people paid attention to this.

As for the death is cheap thing –
yeah, warfare at pretty much any time in the ancient past is not
going to be exactly like modern warfare. That said, there were
absolutely periods and places where throwing peasants at the enemy
was a standard approach. To a certain extent, the reason that empires
like Rome and China were so powerful was that their
centralized planning, their vast populations and (at least in Rome, I
know less about China) their slavery-dependent food economies allowed
them to keep throwing more troops at rebellious provinces until they
won.

There have also definitely been
recorded historical incidences of slaughtering huge percentages of a
local population, such as the Mongol conquest of Baghdad or the
Turkish conquest of Constantinople. (These instances also involve
enslaving most or all of the survivors.) On a smaller scale, the
herem institution or rite among nomadic populations in the Bronze and Iron Age Middle East involved the slaughter of entire villages as a
prerequisite to taking them over and settling there.

None of this negates the fact that for
many other times and places, warfare might look more like stealing
cattle and maybe exchanging a couple projectiles, or posturing at
each other for a few hours, or a fist fight between rival families in
the market place.

In general, assume that there isn’t
an “in general,” historically.

Some relevant citations:

[On Viking agricultural economies being
poor]

“Feasting in Viking Age Iceland:
sustaining a chiefly political economy in a marginal environment” –
Davide Zori, Jesse Byock, Egill Erlendsson, Steve Martin, Thomas Wake
& Kevin J Edwards, in Antiquity 87.

“The Midsummer Solstice As It Was, Or
Was Not, Observed in Pagan Germany, Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon
England” – Sandra Billington in Folklore 119.

[discusses Peruvian and general
American agriculture, including some stuff about orchard crop systems
too]

1491: New Revelations of the Americas
Before Columbus – Charles Mann

[discusses the herem
institution mentioned above, as well as some information about
pastoral economies, though neither are a focus of the work]

The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the
Reinscribing of Tradition – Daniel E. Fleming

You can verify the information about the conquests of Constantinople
and Baghdad by checking Wikipedia, so I’m not going to cite those,
and basically any decent book about Roman warfare will include the
vast population advantage; I got that from a Roman history class.

That all gave me immense pleasure. 

Just adding that in 1241, the mongolian armies under the rule of Batu khan invaded Hungary with around 90 000 soldiers, while the hungarian army consisted about 50 000. Still middle ages!

Also the invading army killed around 40-50% of the population in the span of a year (around 1.5 million people).

That said, after laying ruin to basically the whole of Eastern Europe, they went home the next year, possibly because the hardships of consolidating their rule (too big expansion in too little time, they couldn’t get the stone castles/cities either) and supporting the army.

This would make some pretty spectacular movie while being totally realistic!