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Ali the Helering

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Everything posted by Ali the Helering

  1. The Spolite Empire and the fall of Dara Happa would seem replete with possibilities.
  2. The Seleric Wars. A decades long campaign against empires of dragon-lovers and chaos sympathisers by a great liberator.
  3. Absolutely. I would still be a grumpy Scrooge type, however.
  4. I am half-Scots, half-Welsh. You surely don't expect me to defend stupidity on the English side?😜 Point is, they expected the Scots to run. When they didn't, it required infantry to break them. You seem to favour the sources that back you up. Anything else can be derided. By the way, archers are foot soldiers. My bad. At Wilton Stephen's army was 'forced back' by the whole army before it was 'dispersed' by cavalry, indicating it was on the point of routing anyway.. In 1093 it was 'by surprise', not exactly open battle! In 1174 they were part (400) of a larger army who happened upon the Scots after getting lost in heavy fog. At Bauge the rest of the English commanders told Clarence not to go ahead with only his 1500 men at arms. The attack was sheer stupidity, for which he suffered. In which case, they are still named the Rus in 1460, and Ivan IV isn't crowned first Tsar of Russia until 1547, having previously been Grand Prince of Moscow. If you are shifting your argument to well outside the medieval era, you really should say so. Anyway, I am bored with this, since you are shifting the goalposts of your argument with each post, and citing atypical battles as though they were the norm. Bye.
  5. While there were some cavalry charges in warfare against fellow English or Scots, they didn't tend to fight mounted against other armies. I assume the Battle of Lincoln you cite is 1141, rather than 1217. The already outnumbered horse under King Stephen defected, so this was hardly a normal battle in any way. At Falkirk the English cavalry routed the lighter armed Scots horse, and then signally failed to make any impression until the Scots were routed by massed archery. At Bannockburn cavalry made up around 15% of the English army. It was the schiltroms who charged, not the English. With respect to Russian forces, they can be divided into pre-Mongol conquest and later. Before, they were almost entirely composed of militia infantry. After, the boyars and retinue formed the majority, but the nobles and their detachments frequently fought dismounted. If you relied upon art to indicate unit and equipment prevalence then you would get extremely distorted pictures of forces' strength throughout the whole of history. Compare the relative frequency of depictions of Armour as against horse-drawn equipment in the Wehrmacht, or of the Pzkfw-I as opposed to Pzkfw-VI. Art is almost meaningless as a guide to historical forces.
  6. Yup. It looks far worse elsewhere, wherever you stand. As has been said "The grass is always greener over the septic tank"🤣
  7. I am afraid you miss the point. The English very seldom fought mounted. Agincourt and Crecy are the most obvious examples of this. Fighting dismounted was a choice, not an archaicism.
  8. There are no similar cultures now. It is one of the problems with late 19th and early 20th century anthropology which assumed there could be such parallelism. Post-modern critique demonstrates that it is not so. Even representative democracies have a ruling elite. In the UK certain schools and universities provide the vast majority of our upper political echelons. Whether you view this as a scam or an inevitable problem is up to you. I view it as an inevitable outcome of a post-imperial capitalist society. We too have to adjust our needs to their whims....
  9. I don't own a copy of KAP. I am simply commenting as an historian with particular interest in the periods involved. Mounted infantry aren't cavalry either.
  10. Unfortunately British society in those days wouldn't generally understand the concept of 'racism'. My parents were in the forefront of liberalisation amongst the tail-end of colonialism in the old Raj, but I had massive difficulty explaining that certain words were not acceptable, since they had been raised in the 1920s and experienced the implicit racism of the Empire as the norm. Tolkien would never have thought of himself as racist, but his unconscious assumptions make LotR difficult to read in the here and now. Don't get me started on the fact that he wasn't misogynist - he simply couldn't write females well.☹️
  11. I can't help feeling that 28% is a rather significant portion of the army. This was a force that was less than 3/4 cavalry. At Bremule the English were almost all dismounted.
  12. Nonetheless, this is not a purely cavalry army, only 72%. I am afraid that Delbrueck's work - particularly that relating to the medieval period - is quite undermined by other scholarship, and has been since 1907.
  13. I have to agree with Morien - the idea that HMA armies were even predominantly cavalry is incorrect. They may have been on extremely rare occasions, but I cannot recall any battle when a western European army was in that situation, nor Russian, Polish or Byzantine. The only army where I think it might have been true is the Kingdom of HUngary, but again I am away from my books....
  14. IMG they are the rulers based at the temple, sending raiding bands out for slaves and loot.
  15. Which simply goes to indicate an implicit problem with the mechanistic approach to fumbles.
  16. As ever, your case does nothing to undermine my point. As Morien says, head of state does not dictate intrinsic structure of state.
  17. Trust me, I understand collectivism - but individuals still retain personality. Any form of government that specifically ignores 50% of the population is certainly not a representative democracy, nor if it excludes the poor and unlanded. It is a dictatorship of plutocratic males.
  18. Unfortunately that doesn't for a moment convince me of your case. Collectivism is a useful structure, but individuals within that structure still existed as discrete entities. Similarly, describing something as a representative democracy when it was anything but doesn't help.
  19. I would hardly be the nit-picker you know so well if I didn't point out that Mallory finished LMd'A in 1470, well into the gunpowder era.😈😉
  20. I don't see that you limited it to pre-gunpowder societies in your post, but if I missed it, fair enough.
  21. Philippa Gregory doesn't attempt a hatchet-job on present day organisations. Her novelisations are open to criticism, certainly, but opinions about the past differ. YRWMV. It is also worth remembering that David Starkey, possibly her strongest critic, is a man who talks about Britain having become a foreign country due to the speech of immigrants, and that he wishes people would "stop going on about slavery". Not, I would suggest, a man whose opinions should be taken seriously.
  22. I think we may be straying into the Thanatar thread, given the rearmost soldier! (Yes, I do know the historicity of it)
  23. I have used the Thanatari as infiltrators, softening up a target area for invasion by Lunar military forces. Losing your established and loved (?) leaders to a cult who leave only decapitated bodies behind is bad enough. Having their powerful (perhaps even of hero level) magics at the invader's disposal thereafter can be terrible indeed. Therefore I see them as an active part of the Empire's foreign policy.
  24. If the Crimson Bat has a place, I don't see why Thanatar is that big an issue, tbh.
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