Armies in this modern system [discussed here] still aim to control territory, as with second-system war, but they no longer square off in open fields. Rather, relying on cover and concealment to mitigate the overwhelming firepower a modern battlefield covered with machine guns, artillery and airpower, they aim to disorient and overwhelm the decision-making capabilities of their enemy with lightning mechanized offensives.
What happens when two current-day modern systems meet? We don’t really know, though there is a lot of speculation. One of the things which made the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia so closely watched last year (in 2020, for those reading this later) was that it provided a chance to see two sides both with (sometimes incomplete) access to the full modern kit of war – not only tanks, jets and artillery, but cyber warfare, drones and so on. The results remain to be much discussed analyzed, but it may well be that a fourth system of war is in the offing, defined by the way that drone-based airpower combined with electronic surveillance and cyber-warfare redefined the battle-space and allowed Azerbaijan in particular to project firepower deep into areas where Armenian forces considered themselves safe.
But I shouldn’t get too off track. The point of all of this is that these systems of war are not merely different, they are so radically different that armies created in one system often fundamentally fail to understand the others (thus the tendency for second and third system armies to treat first system war as some strange new innovation in war, when it is in fact the oldest system by far). As we’re going to see, the aims, experiences and outcomes of these systems are often very different. They demand and inculcate different values and condition societies differently as well.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
August 19, 2023
QotD: The third system (or “Modern system”) of war
August 15, 2023
QotD: Iron ore processing in pre-industrial societies
Ore removed from the mine would need to be crushed, with the larger stones pulled out of the mines smashed with heavy hammers (against a rock surface) in order to break them down to a manageable size. The exact size of the ore chunks desired varies based on the metal one is seeking and the quality of the local ore. Ores of precious metals, it seems, were often ground down to powder, but for iron ore it seems like somewhat larger chunks were acceptable. I’ve seen modern experiments with bloomeries […] getting pretty good results from ore chunks about half the size of a fist. Interestingly, Craddock notes that ore-crushing activity at mines was sufficiently intense that archaeologists can spot the tell-tale depressions where the rock surface that provided the “floor” against which the ore was crushed have been worn by repeated use.
Ore might also be washed, that is passed through water to liberate and wash away any lighter waste material. Washing is attested in the ancient world for gold and silver ores (and by Georgius Agricola for the medieval period for the same), but might be used for other ores depending on the country rock to wash away impurities. The simple method of this, sometimes called jigging, consisted of putting the ore in a sieve and shaking it while water passed through, although more complex sluicing systems are known, for instance at the Athenian silver mines at Laurium (note esp. Healy, 144-8 for diagrams); the sluices for washing are sometimes called buddles. Throughout these processes, the ore would also probably be hand-sorted in an effort to separate high-grade ore from low-grade ore.
It’s clear that this mechanical ore preparation was much more intensive for higher-value metals where making sure to be as efficient as possible was a significant concern; gold and silver ores might be crushed, sorted, washed and rewashed before being ground into a powder for the final smelting process. Craddock presents a postulated processing set for copper ore for the Bronze Age Timna mines that goes through a primary crushing, hand-sorted division into three grades, secondary crushing, grinding, a winnowing step for the low-grade ore (either air winnowing or washing) before being blended into the final smelter “charge”.
As far as I can tell, such extensive processing for iron was much less common; in many cases it seems it is hard to be certain because the sources remain so focused on precious metal mining and the later stages of iron-working. Diodorus describes the iron ore on Elba as merely being crushed, roasted and then bloomed (5.13.1) but the description is so brief it is possible that he is leaving out steps (but also, Elba’s iron ore was sufficiently rich that further processing may not have been necessary). In many cases, iron was probably just crushed, sorted and then moved straight to roasting […]
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
August 11, 2023
QotD: Subsistence versus market-oriented farming in pre-modern societies
Remember: in most pre-modern societies, the small farmers are largely self-sufficient. They don’t need very many of the products of the big cities and so – at least initially – the market is a poor mechanism to induce them to produce more. There simply aren’t many things at the market worth the hours of labor necessary to get them – not no things, but just not very many (I do want to stress that; the self-sufficiency of subsistence farmers is often overstated in older scholarship; Erdkamp (2005) is a valuable corrective here). Consequently, doing anything that isn’t farming means somehow forcing subsistence farmers to work more and harder in order to generate the surplus to provide for those people who do the activities which in turn the subsistence farmers might benefit from not at all. But of course we are most often interested in exactly all of those tasks which are not farming (they include, among other things, literacy and the writing of history, along with functionally all of the events that history will commemorate until quite recently) and so the mechanisms by which that surplus is generated matter a great deal.
First, the large landholder’s farm itself existed to support the landholder’s lifestyle rather than his actual subsistence, which meant its production had to be directed towards what we might broadly call “markets” (very broadly understood). Now many ancient and even medieval agricultural writers will extol the value of a big farm that is still self-supporting, with enough basic cereal crops to subsist the labor force, enough grazing area for animals to provide manure and then the rest of the land turned over to intensive cash-cropping. But this was as much for limiting expenses to maximize profits (a sort of mercantilistic maximum-exports/minimum-imports style of thinking) as it was for developing self-sufficiency in a crisis. Note that we (particularly in the United States) tend to think of cash crops as being things other than food – poppies, cotton, tobacco especially. But in many cases, wheat might be the cash crop for a region, especially for societies with lots of urbanism; good wheat land could bring in solid returns […]. The “cash” crop might be grapes (for wine) or olives (mostly for olive oil) or any number of other necessities, depending on what the local conditions best supported (and in some cases, it could be a cash herd too, particularly in areas well-suited to wool production, like parts of medieval Britain).
Second, the exploitation by the large landholder forces the smaller farmers around him to make more intensive use of their labor. Because they are almost always in debt to the fellow with the big farm and because they need to do labor to get access to plow teams, manure, tools, or mills and because the large landholder’s land-ready-for-sharecropping is right there, the large landholder both creates the conditions that impel small farmers to work more land (and thus work more days) than their own small farms do and also creates the conditions where they can farm more intensively (both their own lands and the big farm’s lands, via plow teams, manure, etc.). Of course the large landholder then generally immediately extracts that extra production for his own purposes. […] all of the folks who aren’t small farmers looking to try to get small farmers to work harder than is in their interest in order to generate surplus. In this case, all of that activity funnels back into sustaining the large landholder’s lifestyle (which often takes place in town rather than in the countryside), which in turn supports all sorts of artisans, domestics, crafters and so on.
And so the large landholder needs the small subsistence farmers to provide flexible labor and the small subsistence farmers (to a lesser but still quite real degree) need the large landholder to provide flexibility in capital and work availability and the interaction of both of these groups serves to direct more surplus into activities which are not farming.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-31.
August 7, 2023
QotD: How do we determine Roman dates like “46 BC”?
Now the Roman calendar is itself kind of a moving target, so we can start with a brief history of that. At some very early point the Romans seem to have had a calendar with ten months, with December as the last month, March as the first month and no January or February. That said while you will hear a lot of folk history crediting Julius Caesar with the creation of two extra months (July and August) that’s not right; those months (called Quintilis and Sextilis) were already on the calendar. By the time we can see the Roman calendar, it has twelve months of variable lengths (355 days total) with an “intercalary month” inserted every other year to “reset” the calendar to the seasons. That calendar, which still started in March (sitting where it does, seasonally, as it does for us), the Romans attributed to the legendary-probably-not-a-real-person King Numa, which means in any case even by the Middle Republic it was so old no one knew when it started (Plut. Numa 18; Liv 1.19.6-7). The shift from March to January as the first month in turn happens in 153 (Liv. Per. 47.13), probably for political reasons.
We still use this calendar (more or less) and that introduces some significant oddities in the reckoning of dates that are recorded by the Roman calendar. See, because the length of the year (355 days) did not match the length of a solar year (famously 365 days and change), the months “drifted” over the calendar a little bit; during the first century BC when things were so chaotic that intercalary months were missed, the days might drift a lot. This problem is what Julius Caesar fixed, creating a 365 day calendar in 46; to “reset” the year for his new calendar he then extended the year 46 to 445 days. And you might think, “my goodness, that means we’d have to convert every pre-45 BC date to figure out what it actually is, how do we do that?”
And the answer is: we don’t. Instead, all of the oddities of the Roman calendar remain baked into our calendar and the year 46 BC is still reckoned as being 445 days long and thus the longest ever year. Consequently earlier Roman dates are directly convertible into our calendar system, though if you care what season a day happened, you might need to do some calculating (but not usually because the drift isn’t usually extreme). But in expressing the date as a day, the fact that the Gregorian calendar does not retroactively change the days of the Julian calendar, which also did not retroactively change the days of the older Roman calendar means that no change is necessary.
Ok, but then what year is it? Well, the Romans counted years two ways. The more common way was to refer to consular years, “In the year of the consulship of X and Y.” Thus the Battle of Cannae happened, “in the year of the consulship of Varro and Paullus,” 216 BC. In the empire, you sometimes also see events referenced by the year of a given emperor. Conveniently for us, we can reconstruct a complete list of all of the consular years and we know all of the emperors, so back-converting a date rendered like this is fairly easy. More rarely, the Romans might date with an absolute chronology, ab urbe condita (AUC) – “from the founding of the city”, which they imagined to have happened in in 753 BC. Since we know that date, this also is a fairly easy conversion.
Non-Roman dates get harder. The Greeks tend to date things either by serving magistrates (especially the Athenian “eponymous archon”, because we have so many Athenian authors) or by Olympiads. Olympiad dates are not too bad; it’s a four-year cycle starting in 780 BC, so we are now in the 700th Olympiad. Archon dates are tougher for two reasons. First, unlike Roman consuls, we have only a mostly complete list of Athenian archons, with some significant gaps. Both dates suffer from the complication that they do not line up neatly with the start of the Roman year. Olympiads begin and end in midsummer and archon years ran from July to June. If we have a day, or even a month attached to one of these dates, converting to a modern Gregorian calendar date isn’t too bad. But if, as is often the case, all you have is a year, it gets tricky; an event taking place “in the Archonship of Cleocritus” (with no further elaboration) could have happened in 413 or 412. Consequently, you’ll see the date (if there is no month or season indicator that lets us narrow it down), written as 413/2 – that doesn’t mean “in the year two-hundred and six and a half” but rather “413 OR 412”.
That said, with a complete list of emperors, consuls and Olympiads, along with a nearly complete list of archons, keeping the system together is relatively easy. Things get sticky fast when moving to societies using regnal years for which we do not have complete or reliable king’s lists. So for instance there are a range of potential chronologies for the Middle Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. I have no great expertise into how these chronologies are calculated; I was taught with the “Middle” chronology as the consensus position and so I use that and aim just to be consistent. Bronze Age Egyptian chronology has similar disputes, but with a lot less variation in potential dates. Unfortunately while obviously I have to be aware of these chronology disputes, I don’t really have the expertise to explain them – we’d have to get an Egyptologist or Assyriologist (for odd path-dependent reasons, scholars that study ancient Mesopotamia, including places and cultures that were not Assyria-proper are still called Assyriologists, although to be fair the whole region (including Egypt!) was all Assyria at one point) to write a guest post to untangle all of that.
That said in most cases all of this work has largely been done and so it is a relatively rare occurrence that I need to actually back convert a date myself. It does happen sometimes, mostly when I’m moving through Livy and have lost track of what year it is and need to get a date, in which case I generally page back to find the last set of consular elections and then check the list of consuls to determine the date.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
August 3, 2023
QotD: Blacksmith forge techniques
A modern blacksmith can gauge the temperature of a metal using sophisticated modern thermometers, but pre-modern smiths had no recourse to such things (and most traditional smiths I’ve met don’t use them anyway). Instead, the temperature of the metal is gauged by looking at its color: as things get hotter, they glow from brown to dark red through to a light red into yellow and then finally white. For iron heated in a forge, a blacksmith can control the temperature of the forge’s fire by controlling the air-input through the bellows (pushing in more air means more combustion, which means more heat, but also more fuel consumed). As we’ve seen, charcoal (and we will need to use charcoal, not wood, to hit the necessary heat required), while not cripplingly expensive, was not trivial to produce either. A skilled smith is thus going to try to do the work in as few heats as possible and not excessively hot either (there are, in fact, other reasons to avoid excessive heats, this is just one).
Once hot the metal can be shaped by hammering. The thickness of a bar of metal could be thickened by upsetting (heating the center of the bar and them hammering down on it like a nail to compress the center, causing it to thicken) or thinned by drawing (hammering out the metal to create a longer, thinner shape). If the required shape needed the metal to be bent it could be heated and bent either over the side of the anvil or against a tool; many anvils had (and still have) a notch in the back where such a tool could be fitted. A good example of this kind of thing would be hammering out a sheet of iron over a dome-shape to create the bowl of a helmet (a task known as “raising” or “sinking” depending on precisely how it is done). A mass of iron can also be divided by heating it at the intended cutting point and then using a hammer and chisel to cut through the hot, soft metal.
But for understanding the entire process, the most important of these operations is the fire weld. Much like bloomery furnaces, the forges available to pre-modern blacksmiths could not reach the temperatures necessary to melt or cast iron, but it was necessary to be able to join smaller bits of iron into larger ones which was done through a fire weld (sometimes called a forge weld). In this process, the iron is heated very hot, typically to a “yellow” or “white” heat (around 1100 °C). The temperature range for the operation is quite precise: too cold and the iron will not weld, too hot and it will “burn” making the weld brittle. Once at the right temperature, the two pieces of iron are put next to each other and hammered into each other with heavy blows. If done properly, the two pieces of metal join completely, leaving a weld that is as strong as every other part of the bar.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-time”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-02.
July 29, 2023
QotD: How pre-modern cities shaped the surrounding landscape
Every town or city, of course, will be different. For agricultural societies especially, local terrain sharply constrains possible land uses. Some land is simply too wet or dry or rough or rocky or infertile for this or that purpose. In a modern city, apartments or factories or offices can be built almost anywhere; the sort of land suitable for intensive farming is more limited. This is even more true for pre-modern societies working without modern fertilizer, without electric-powered irrigation and without the industrial technology to massively reshape terrain (draining swamps, filling ravines, flattening hills, irrigating the desert, etc – some of these can be done with hand tools, but not to the extent we can today).
Still, we want to begin thinking about how cities impact the land around them without all of these difficult and confusing variables. We want to image a city, isolated and alone in the middle of an endless, flat and featureless plain. This is exactly what J. H. von Thünen did in The Isolated State (Der isolierte Staat). This kind of exercise can give us a baseline of what the landscape around a decent sized city might look like, which we can then modify to respond to different terrain, technology and social organization.
(Note: I would be remiss if I didn’t note that my discussion of these ideas owes heavily to Neville Morley’s Metropolis and Hinterland (1996), where he applied this very method to the city of Rome and its hinterland (and also first introduced me to von Thünen’s ideas). That book and also his Trade in Classical Antiquity are both great books to give a read if you want to begin building a sense of how pre-modern economies work).
The key factor von Thünen looks at is transportation costs. For a society without trains or trucks, moving bulk materials of any kind over long distances is extraordinarily expensive. Moving grain overland, for instance, would cause its cost to double after 100 miles. Thus land close to our theoretical city is extremely valuable for production, while land far away is substantially less valuable (because the end goal is transporting the agricultural production of that land to the city). As a result, transit costs – and thus distance – dominates how cities influence land-use patterns (along with population, which determines the intensity of the city’s influence).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.
July 25, 2023
QotD: Non-free farm labourers in pre-modern agriculture
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-31.
July 21, 2023
QotD: War elephant weaknesses against Roman troops
So today we’re going to ask, “why?” We’ve answered that question in the immediate term – to quote Trautmann (2015) on the point, “the Roman refusal of the war elephant … was based upon a low estimate of its value” (250). To put another way, they thought they sucked. We know elephants could be quite potent in battle, so the answer must be a touch more complicated. We’ll look at this two ways: first (because it’s me) in terms of logistics, and then in terms of anti-elephant tactics, to see why elephants could not succeed against (or with) Rome. I am also going to speculate – just a touch – on which of these factors might explain the other major area elephant warfare did not penetrate: China.
Roman Elephants
But first, a necessary caveat to an objection no doubt already brewing in the minds of some: but didn’t the Romans use elephants sometimes? Yes, though Roman employment of elephants was at best uneven (this is a point, I’d like to note, where Trautmann (2015) shows its value over, for instance, J. M. Kistler’s War Elephants (2006) – the latter’s reading of Roman use of war elephants bends the evidence to serve an argument, rather than the other way around). Nevertheless, the Romans did use war elephants during the last two centuries of the Republic.The Romans had some war elephants (just 20) at Cynocephelae (197 B.C.) against Macedon – these had been drawn from the kingdom of Numidia, which had sided with Rome against Carthage in the Second Punic War. Plutarch (Flam. 8.2-5) leaves the animals out of the battle narrative, but Livy (who is the better source; Liv. 33.9) notes their use to break up the Macedonian right wing, which was not yet even in fighting formation. It’s not clear the elephants were necessary for the Roman victory here and the key action was actually a flanking attack by infantry.
The Romans brought elephants to Magnesia (190 B.C.), but left them in reserve; the Romans only had a few, whereas their Seleucid opponents had brought many more. Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants, effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the Seleucids used. Pydna (168 B.C.) against the Macedonians again, is harder to assess because the sources for it are poor (part of Livy’s narrative of the battle is mostly lost). Plutarch (Aem. 19-22) leaves the elephants out again, whereas Livy notes that Perseus’ dedicated elephant-fighting corps was ineffective in fighting the Roman elephants on the right wing, but attributes success there to the socii infantry rather than the elephants (Liv. 44.41.4-6). Kistler reads this as a notable elephant success, but Livy does not say this, instead crediting the socii on the right and the legions breaking up the Macedonian center.
The Romans did find elephants useful in places like Spain or southern Gaul (modern Provence) where just a handful could bewilder and terrify opponents completely unused to and unprepared for them. The last gasp of true Roman war elephants came in 46 B.C., where Julius Caesar defeated a Roman army led by Metellus Scipio which had sixty elephants in it. The elephants lost and one of Caesar’s legions (my personal favorite, Legio V Alaudae (Larks!)) took the elephant as a legionary symbol in commemoration of having beaten them.
So absolutely yes, the Romans of the Middle and Late Republic made some use of war elephants, but it was hardly a distinguished run. As Trautmann notes – quite correctly, in my view – the Romans were always more interested in ways to defeat elephants than to use them.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-02.
July 17, 2023
QotD: Cavalry combat in Rings of Power versus history
The first thing we see is the cavalry in a great mass riding down into the village with Orodruin clearly behind them; they must be approaching then along the East road. Then we see a 2-horse wide column of cavalry crossing the narrow bridge from the West (at 39:14), then a bunch of orcs gather up into a mass to engage that cavalry force as it gallops up the main road into the village (from 39:16 to 39:26) before getting hit by the vanguard of that column in a really dumb moment we’re going to come back to at 39:30. And now look up at the village above there again and note that it takes one cavalry column at full gallop 16 seconds to go from that bridge to the inn, but the massive wave of cavalry coming over the hill from the other direction has still not managed by this point to actually enter the village proper. They have, apparently, frozen completely solid the moment they were off screen.
So it seems like, while galloping wildly to the rescue of a village they didn’t know was under attack, the Númenóreans also took the time to carefully work their way around the village in order to strike it from two sides at once (somehow filtering through the forest without being noticed, rather than working around the more open terrain to the north side; I cannot communicate clearly enough that cavalry generally avoids moving through forests for a reason), then galloped in at full speed. But the one direction they do not attack from is the North road, which is the only area that is clear and unobstructed (good cavalry ground) and where the slope of the ground is favorable (they’d be charging down hill) with enough space to form up into a proper charge. Instead when we see Galadriel next, she is charging up that hill.
So on the one hand this battle plan doesn’t make any sense, but at the same time I feel I must note just how inferior this is as film-making to the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings (or even, dare I say it, Game of Thrones). I had to rewatch these scenes, slowly and carefully multiple times to get any sense of where anyone was. By contrast, good battle scenes are careful to make sure the audience understands the geography of the space. Hell, the “battle” scenes in Home Alone are careful to establish the geography of the place (I found the video at that link, by the way, a very approachable introduction to some elements of film study). In The Lord of the Rings we get a lot of big wide shots at high altitude showing us where the armies are in relation to each other […]
Moreover, Peter Jackson’s cavalry doesn’t simply show up. In both of his Big Cavalry Rescues at Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith he follows the same highly effective pattern of first revealing the presence of the cavalry, then pausing a moment for the cavalry to form up and to give the characters there time for some dialogue and character beats. At Helm’s Deep this is a short exchange between Éomer and Gandalf, while at Minas Tirith it is Théoden’s big defining character moment and speech. From a realism standpoint, it gives the audience time to understand where the cavalry is and how they’ve set up (and a sense that this is organized, planned and prepared).
But this brief delay before “the good stuff” also serves an obviously important emotional narrative aspect that Rings also loses here: it builds anticipation. By the time Théoden is giving his speech outside Minas Tirith, the audience has been waiting for about an hour since the beacons were lit for this very moment of emotional release, waiting for the score to be evened, waiting for the emotional satisfaction of the bad guys getting their come-uppance and so Jackson draws that out just a little bit longer, which builds the anticipation that creates that intense emotional response when the charge at last surges forward. You can even hear the emotions he wants you feel in the music, which starts low and subdued but builds and builds as Théoden sets up his army and gives his speech, booms across the charge itself but then cuts hard to silence in the moment of impact – the moment of greatest suspense (will the charge work?) – before surging back as the charge succeeds, culminating in a big overhead shot showing the good guys winning. It is not historically perfect, but the emotional beats land flawlessly and Rings just fumbles shockingly on both counts.
The resulting melee is also confusing. This village is tiny and while we don’t have a good idea of Adar’s remaining force, it isn’t huge because it seems to all fit in this village which looks to be a fair bit smaller than a regulation soccer pitch. A cavalry charge should be able to run from one side of this road to the other in under 10 seconds (moving at c. 12m/s, a rough horse’s gallop speed); the two leading edges of this charge should be slowing down to meet in the middle in well under five seconds. Consequently the decisive phase of this battle, the one in which orcs are trying to hold the open ground between the buildings (these wide mud streets) should last only seconds, but instead it draws out into a minutes-long melee because, as far as I can tell, the Númenóreans have next to no idea how to fight on horseback.
The thing is, fighting from horseback is quite hard but it is also quite simple. If using stirrups, one’s feet remain in the stirrups pretty much the whole time because the goal here is to retain a firm seat on the horse. Horse archers will sometimes stand up just a little in the stirrups to create a stable firing platform, but only a little bit and at speed an observer may not even notice they are standing at all. But showrunners, it seems, just love putting in all sorts of equestrian tricks; Game of Thrones had to make the Dothraki shoot while standing on the saddle (not a great idea), and so Rings of Power has to do some trick riding. In this case they have Galadriel flip over the side of her horse upside down to slash at an orc while dodging an arrow […]
A close look and you can see that this trick requires a special handhold on her saddle just for the purpose (just like the Game of Thrones standing horse-archers required special trick saddles for that stunt too). And she then cuts an orc’s head off while flipping herself back on to the horse, a sword-stroke that is traveling in the opposite direction of her horse’s movement (it is moving forward, she is swinging backwards), which she cannot brace properly and thus, if it had hit anything but CGI would have been a fairly weak strike; fortunately for Galadriel, CGI orcs are very flimsy so their heads come straight off. The whole thing is a too-clever-by-half effort to look cool, which I also find a bit confusing because Elves don’t seem to me to fight on horseback very often in the Tolkien legendarium; they do it from time to time, but the great elf heroes tend to fight on foot, so it’s not clear to me why Galadriel has to also be the best rider. But that routine is then topped by the baffling idiocy of Valandil here who, despite having a perfectly good sword (though he seems to have lost his spear in the fighting) decides his best plan of attack is to jump off of his horse and tackle two orcs […]
Needless to say a high speed falling dismount is a good way to injure yourself in an actual battle but also that jumping off of your horse is not a good use of you or the horse. Meanwhile the rest of the Númenórean cavalry seem to have mostly come to a stop and are now having stationary fights with orc infantry; some of them get pulled down off of their horses which, yes, is the predictable result of being stupid enough to bring your cavalry to a full stop without of any kind of mutually supporting formation or infantry support. I think many of the problems in this sequence stem from the apparent need to have this seem like a fight that could go either way, when in practice this should have been a short and decisive engagement the moment the cavalry arrived, given that the cavalry is more heavily armored, faster, has the advantage of surprise and presumably outnumbers the orcs given how small the village is. I suppose it might take a bit longer because Adar’s first wave of orcs are hitting their respawn timer so there were adds. Once again the utter inability of the show to keep track of just how many orcs there are ruins any sense of tension but also any hope of the battle making sense; it sure seemed like there were just a few dozen orcs left, which ought to make a battle against 300 armored riders a remarkably short and one-sided affair.
But the moment in this whole fight that broke me completely actually came quite early right after the Númenóreans crossed the bridge. […] I will admit that I burst out laughing when this happened: the horseman ride up in a pair holding on to opposite ends of a chain, which they then use to clothesline about two dozen orcs while steadily fanning out. Once again this is one of those too-clever-by-half Hollywood tactics moments, which defy both physics and logic. The first problem is that I’m not clear on how long this chain is: they need to be holding it tightly or it is just going to snag on the first impact, but they also fan out meaning they need to keep letting out more chain to cover the increasing distance between the two horses. In practice looking at the stills it seems like the chain isn’t under much of any tension at all, which would make it fairly useless as a weapon here – sure a metal chain will have some momentum to it, but not enough to knock multiple ranks of armored troops down.
But of course the broader problem is that if the plan is to merely smash into the orcs with a lot of kinetic force you should just trample them. Putting all of that impact energy in the chain is just going to pull the rider off of their horse since the sole point of contact for that energy is their arms. By contrast, medieval knightly cavalry eventually adopted high-backed saddles, couched lances and lance-rests on their armor all to help keep the knight in his seat through the force of a heavy impact at full speed (cavalry with or without these various devices might need to let their point trail at impact that it wasn’t pulled from their hand but rather the movement of their horse pulled it from their target, a motion pattern easily observed in the modern sport of tent-pegging). But just carrying a chain gives none of these advantages or options: if there’s enough force to knock down a half-dozen orcs, there’s enough force to knock a rider out of his saddle.
Of course in an actual battle this wouldn’t even get this far because the other disadvantage of this chain is that it sacrifice’s the reach of a spear. Now, credit where credit is due, the Númenóreans do seem to have standard issue spears (good!), except for these two guys with the chain (a tactic that only works when advancing two-by-two, which is a terrible way to fight, through a narrow space where cavalry should not be, but nevertheless apparently one the Númenóreans come ready for as standard). No one seems to use their spears on horseback (they shift to swords immediately), but at least they have them. The advantage of a spear or lance of course is that it is a weapon which can project beyond the head of the horse, thus reducing some of the reach advantage an infantryman might have, while concentrating all of the energy of impact at a single point.
But the riders here have to hold this silly chain on their laps, which puts it several feet behind the head of their horse and because it isn’t perfectly taut it lags their motion meaning that it impacts the orcs several feet behind that, which means – as you can see above – the entire horse has to gallop past the target orc before he is hit by the chain. Any any time during that operation that orc could strike at the horse or the rider, spilling them both to the ground and to make the whole thing worse because the riders can’t have a sword or a shield in their hands, they can’t even defend themselves if an orc decides to do this.
Much like the ships, much like the falling tower trap, much like the nonsensical ring forging, it is another instance of the creators attempting to be novel and clever without really understanding the historical practices they are working from. Cavalry tactics, like battle tactics, like ship design, like metalworking, were fields of human endeavor that absorbed the sharpest minds humankind has to offer and persistent experimentation and adaptation for centuries, resulting in highly tested, highly refined patterns of behavior. I will not say that improvement on those practices is impossible, but it would certainly be very hard, the sort of thing which would itself require extensive dedicated study and experimentation. It is not the sort of thing likely to be accomplished in a writer’s room brainstorming session, which is why efforts to “outsmart” the past tend to end up looking silly, rather than clever.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-02-03.
July 13, 2023
QotD: The Annales school of history
The big shift in focus for the Annales school was an interest in charting the experience of society below the level of elites (though the elites are not abandoned either), what is sometimes termed “history from below”, as distinct from traditional elite-centered “great man” history or the more deterministic Marxist models of history at the time. You can see the political implications, of course, in the very early 1900s, of declaring the common man worthy of study; this is generally a history from the left but not the extreme left. That focus in turn demanded new approaches because it turned the focus of social history towards people who by and large do not write to us.
In reaching for that experience, Annales scholars tended to frame their thinking in terms of la longue durée (“the long run”); history was composed of three parts: événements (“events”), conjonctures (“circumstances”) and finally la longue durée itself. Often in English this gets rendered as a distinction between “events” (kings, wars, politics, crises) and “structures” (economics, social thought and at a deeper level climate, ecology, and geography). What Annales scholars tended to argue was that those structures were often more important than the events that traditional historians studied: the farmer’s life was far more shaped by very long-term factors like the local ecology, the organization of his farming village, the economic structure of the region and so on. And then the idea goes, that by charting those structures, you can figure things out about the lives of those farmers even if you don’t have many – or any – of those farmers writing to you.
Important to this was the idea of enduring patterns of thought within a society, what Bloch termed mentalités (“mentalities”, like longue durée, this is a technical term usually used in French to make that fact clear). Mentalités – Bloch’s original example was the idea that kings had a holy healing touch, but this could be almost any kind of social construct or pattern of ideas (indeed, one critique of it is that the notion of mentalités is broad and ill-defined) – can last a long time and can inform or constrain the actions of many actors within a society; think of how successive generations of kings can have their decisions shaped or constrained by their societies view – their own view – of kingship. That view of kingship might be more impactful than any one king and so pervasive that even a king would struggle to change it.
So how does this influence my work? I tend to be very much a “history from below” kind of historian, interested in charting the experience of regular farmers, soldiers, weavers and so on. The distinction between the long-term structures that shape life and the short-term events that populate our history is very valuable to think with, especially for identifying when an event alters a structure, because those tend to be very important events indeed. And I think a keen attention to the way people thought about things in the past and how those mentalités can be different than ours is very important.
That said, the Annales stress on mentalités has in some ways been overtaken by more data-driven historical methods on the one hand or a strong emphasis on local or individual experience (“microhistory”) on the other. Mentalités tend to be very big picture, asking how, say, “the French” thought about something over a period of decades or centuries and seeking to know how that shaped their experience. But archaeology, demographics or economic data can reveal patterns of behavior which might not correspond to the mentalités that show up in written texts; this is fundamentally the interaction that informs the “revenge of the archaeologists” in the study of the ancient economy, for instance. On the other hand, not everyone in that big group thinks the same and a microhistory of an individual or a single village might reveal telling local variations not captured in massive-scale structures.
Fortunately, historians do not need to be doctrinaire in our use of theory, we don’t have to pick one and stick to it. Different projects also lend themselves to different approaches. I think the Annales school offers a lot of really useful tools to have my historian’s toolbox, but they sit alongside military theory, archaeological material culture studies methods, philological approaches, a smattering of economic and demographic tools, etc.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
July 9, 2023
QotD: Military history informs modern concepts of conflict
At the same time, something has not changed, which is the human propensity for conflict. And so the most obvious reason to study the history of human conflict remains: to prepare for the conflicts of our day which, despite our best efforts, are sure to occur. And since political decision-making is no longer confined to a small elite, it makes sense that both the target and scope of military history has changed. This is part of why the focus on the broader “war and society” lens is important: if average citizens need to (through elections) make choices on the security posture of their country, they are going to want to know “what is conflict going to be like for me and my family?” Thus the greater focus on the experience of the common soldier (what is sometimes called the “Face of Battle” school of military history, after J. Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976)) and on the experience of the “homefront” as well as on the victims of conflict. I know that last focus sometimes frustrates the “cult of the badass” adherents, but frankly, no matter how many reps you can do, you were always more likely to be one of Alexander the Great’s victims than one of Alexander’s soldiers (much less Alexander himself).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.
July 5, 2023
QotD: The role of merchants in pre-modern societies
It thus tends to come as something of a surprise that with stunning consistency, the merchant class tended to be at best cordially disliked and at worst despised by the broader community (although not typically to the point of suffering legal disability, as did some other jobs; see S. Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (2016) for this in Rome). This often strikes students as strange, both because we tend to think rather better of our own modern merchants but also because the image they have of the merchant class certainly looks elite.
For the farmers who need to sell their crops (for reasons we will get to in a moment) and purchase the things they need that they cannot produce, the merchant feels like an adversary: always pushing his prices to his best advantage. We expect this, but remember that our pre-modern farmers are just not that exposed to market interactions; most of their relationships are reciprocal, not transactional – the horizontal relationships we discussed before. The merchant’s “money-grubbing” feels like a betrayal of trust in a society where you banquet your neighbors in the good years so they’ll help you in the bad years. The necessary function of a merchant is to transgress the “rules” of village interactions which – and this resounds from the sources – the farmers tend to understand as being “cheated”.
At the same time, while most merchant types are humble, the high-risk and potentially high-reward involved in trade meant that some merchants (again, a small number) could become very rich. That, as you might imagine, did not go over well for the traditionally wealthy in these societies, the large landholders. Again, the values here often strike modern readers as topsy-turvy compared to our own, but to the elite large landholders (who dominate the literary and political culture of their societies), the morally correct way to earn great wealth is to inherit it (or capture it in war). The morally correct way to hold that wealth is with large landed estates. Anything else is morally suspect, and so the idea that a successful merchant could – by a process that again, strikes the large landholder, just like the small farmer, as “cheating” – leap-frog the social pyramid and skip to the top, without putting in the work at either having distinguished wealthy ancestors or tremendous military success was an open insult to elite values. Often laws were put in place to limit the ability of wealthy non-aristocrats (likely merchants or successful artisans) from displaying their wealth (sumptuary laws) so as to keep them from competing with the aristocrats; at Rome, senators were forbidden from owning ships with much the same logic (Roman senators being clever, they still invested in trade through proxies while at the same time disapproving of the activity in public politics).
[…] As far as elites were concerned, merchants didn’t seem to produce anything (the theory of comparative advantage which explains how merchants produce value without producing things by moving things to where they are most valued would have to wait until 1776 to be mentioned and the early 1800s to be properly explained) and so the only explanation for their wealth was that they made it by deception and trickery, distorting the “real” value of things (this faulty assumption that the “real value” of things is inherent in them, or a product of their production, rather than their use value to an end user or consumer, does not go away in the modern period).
Merchants also – almost by definition being foreigners in their communities – often suffered as members of “middleman minorities“, where certain tasks, particularly banking, commerce and tax collection are – for the reasons just discussed above – outsourced to foreigners or ethnic minorities who then tend to face violence and discrimination because of the power and prominence those tasks give them in society. Disdain for merchants was thus often packaged with ethnic hatred or racism – anyone exposed to the tropes of European or Near Eastern antisemitism (or more precisely, anti-Jewish sentiment) is familiar with this toxic brew, but the same tropes were applied to other middlemen minorities engaged in trade – Chinese people in much of South East Asia, Armenians in Turkey, Parsis in India and on and on. Violence against these groups was always self-destructive (in addition to being abhorrent on its face) – the economic services they provided were valuable to the broader society in ways that the broader society did not understand.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-21.
July 1, 2023
QotD: The ever-increasing size and number of artillery pieces in WW1 trench battles
So by the Second Battle of Artois (May, 1915), the barrage was four days long and included 293 heavy guns and 1,075 lighter pieces. At Verdun (February, 1916) the Germans brought in 1,201 guns, mostly heavy indirect fire artillery (of which the Germans had more than the French) with a shifting barrage that expected to fire 2 million shells in the first six days and 4 million during the first 18 days. At the Somme (1916) the British barrage lasted from the 24th of June to the attack on July 1 (so a seven-day barrage); a shorter barrage was proposed but could not be managed because the British didn’t have enough guns to throw enough shells in the shorter time frame. A longer barrage was also out: the British didn’t have the shells for it. By Passchendaele (1917) the British were deploying some 3,000 artillery pieces; one for every 15 yards of frontage they were attacking.
These efforts didn’t merely get to be more, but also more complex. It was recognized that if the infantry could start their advance while the shells were still falling, that would give them an advantage in the race to the parapet. The solution was the “creeping” barrage which slowly lifted, moving further towards the enemy’s rear. These could be run by carefully planned time-table (but disaster might strike if the infantry moved too slow or the barrage lifted too early) or, if you could guarantee observation by aircraft, be lifted based on your own movements (in as much as your aircraft pilots, with their MK1 eyeballs, could tell what was happening below them). […]
I find that most casual students of military history assume that these barrages generally failed. I suspect this has a lot to do with how certain attacks with ineffective barrages (e.g. the Somme generally, the ANZAC Corps’ attack at Passchendaele) have ended up as emblematic of the entire war (and in some cases, nationality-defining events) in the English-language discussion. And absolutely, sometimes the barrages just failed and attacks were stopped cold with terrible losses. But rather more frequently, the barrages worked: they inflicted tremendous casualties on defenders and allowed the attackers to win the race to the parapet which in turn meant the remaining defenders were likely to be swiftly grenaded or bayoneted. This is part of why WWI commanders continued to believe that they were “on the verge of a breakthrough”, that each attack had come so close, because initially there were often promising gains. They were wrong, of course, about being that close, but opening attacks regularly overran the initial enemy positions. Even the worst debacles of the war, like at the Somme, generally did so.
And at this point, you may be wondering if you’d been lied to, because you were always told this was a war where advances where measured in feet and meters instead of miles or kilometers and how can that be if initial attacks generally did, in fact, overrun the forward enemy positions? I’ll push this even further – typically, in the initial phases of these battles (the first few days) the casualty rates between attacker and defender were close to even, or favored the attacker. This is of course connected to the fact that the leading cause of battle deaths in the war was not rifle fire, machine guns, grenades, bayonets but in fact artillery fire and the attacker was the one blasting fixed positions with literal tons of artillery fire. So what is going on?
Because both sides quickly figured out that their forward positions were badly exposed to artillery barrages and began designing defenses in depth, with rear positions well out of the reach of all but the largest enemy artillery. For instance, most of the so-called “Hindenburg Line” (the Germans called it the Siegfriedstellung or “Siegfried Position”) was set in multiple lines […] The plan consisted of a thin initially defense which was assumed to fall in the event of an attack, but still featured channels made by heavy barbed wire and machine guns designed to inflict maximum casualties on an advancing force (and be dangerous enough to require the artillery barrage and planned assault). Then behind that was more open ground and then a second line of trenches, this time much more solid, with communications trenches cutting vertically and the battle positions horizontally, enabling reserves to be brought up through those trenches without being exposed to fire. Finally the reserves themselves were in a third line of trenches even further back, well outside of the enemy’s barrage (or indeed the range of all but their heaviest guns). Of course while your artillery is in the back, out of range of the enemy artillery, the enemy infantry is attacking into your artillery range. This keeps your artillery from being disabled into the initial barrage (you hope) so that it can be brought into action for the counter-attack.
And now the enemy of the attacker is friction (as we’ve discussed before with defense in depth). If everything possible goes right, you open with the barrage, your infantry sweeps forward, the creeping barrage lifts and you win the race to the parapet. The forward enemy defenders are either blasted apart by the barrage or butchered in their holes by your gas, grenades and bayonets. Great! Now you need to then attack again out of those enemy positions to get to the next line, but your forces are disorganized and disoriented, your troops are tired and your supplies, reinforcements and artillery (including many heavy guns that weigh many tons and shoot shells that also weigh 100+lbs a pop) have to get to you through the terrain the barrage created […]
So rapidly the power of your initial attack runs out. And then the counter-attacks, as inevitable as the rising sun, start. Your opponents can shell you from nice, prepared positions, while your artillery now has to move forward to support you. Their troops can ride railways to staging posts close to the front lines, advance through well-maintained communications trenches directly to you, while your troops have to advance over open group, under artillery fire, in order to support you. The brutal calculus begins to take its toll, you lose ground and the casualty ratios swings in favor of the “defender” (who to be clear, is now attacking positions he once held). Eventually your footholds are lost and both sides end up more or less where they started, minus a few hundreds or thousands of dead. This – not the popular image – this is the stalemate: the attacker frequently wins tactically, but operational conditions make it impossible to make victory stick.
The brutal irony of this “defensive” stalemate is that at any given moment in a battle that might last months and swing from offensive to defensive and back again that casualties typically favored the side which was attacking at any given moment. More ironic yet, the problem here is that the artillery itself is digging the hole you cannot climb out of, because it is the barrage that tears up the landscape, obliterating roads, making movement and communication nearly impossible for the attacker (but not for the defender). But without the barrage, there’s no way to suppress enemy artillery and machine guns to make it possible to cross no man’s land. Even with tanks, an attack without supporting artillery is suicide; enemy artillery will calmly knock out your tanks (which are quite slow; this is in 1918, not 1939).
The problem, for the attacker and the defender isn’t machine guns, it is artillery: the artillery that makes assaults possible in the first place makes actual victory – breaking through the enemy and restoring maneuver – impossible.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-17.
June 30, 2023
QotD: Changing patterns of combat on the Great Plains
F.R. Secoy (op. cit.) essentially breaks warfare into four phases, which happen at different times in different places, based on if they have horses, guns, both or neither. Because horses entered the Great Plains from the South (via the Spanish) but firearms entered the region from the North (via the British and the French, the Spanish having prohibited gun-sales to Native Americans) and spread out from there, for a brief time many of these systems were active on the Plains at once, as both guns and horses diffused through the region.
In the pre-horse, pre-gun phase (described by McGinnis as well, op. cit., 8-9), battles consisted of long-range missile exchanges between warriors who stood behind large shields which protected their whole bodies. Native American warriors in this system also wore armor, heavy leather coats, laminated in multiple layers using thick hide with glue that was sometimes mixed with sand or gravel (one more example of how “leather armor” is almost always hardened leather armor, not modern clothing-leather). Some of this armor may have been effectively quilted leather as well. Clearly, there was plenty of concern about survivability here.
Both guns and horses were apt to disrupt this system. Horses allowed attackers to rapidly close the distance between the two opposing lines of shield-protected foot-missile-warriors, causing the shield-lines to drop away (though smaller shields, used on horseback to ward off arrows and blows were still used) and for both sides to seek instead the mobility of mounted fighting. That was not the end for armor though, because contact with a supply of horses meant contact with the Spanish, and the Apache at least swiftly adopted some of the Spanish methods of making leather “buff coats” into their own armor tradition and copied the shape and pattern of the buff coat itself (while often still making the material using their own tradition). As Secoy notes (op. cit., 18-20), our sources are quite clear that these forms of armor (both original and Spanish-influenced Native armors) were quite effective at resisting the archery fire that dominated both the pre-horse, pre-gun system and the post-horse, pre-gun system.
Meanwhile on the Northern Plains, while the horse had not yet arrived, firearms had, and these had different effects. Firearms spelled the end of the armor once they became common enough, since there was no protection which could resist bullets; some shield use survived, since arrows remained fairly common as well. But this didn’t lead to suicidal warfare. Instead – as had happened on the East Coast as well, Native Americans adapted their warfare to the increased lethality of firearms (on this, note Lee, op. cit. above) by mostly avoiding pitched battles as they became too lethal (which, by the by, the relatively low lethality of pitched battles pre-gunpowder is often taken to mean that Native North American warfare in general was low-lethality; this is wrong. As with most forms of non-state warfare, most of the killing happened in surprise raids and ambushes, which could be extremely lethal and were still quite common).
Once the horse and the firearm were both in wide use in an area, warfare shifted again. War parties became smaller, faster moving and more reliant on surprise (essentially an extension of the raiding-focus of the pre-horse, post-gun system to the high mobility horses supplied). Infantry battle dropped away entirely because it was too lethal and resulted in casualties that low-population density nomads could not sustain (the contrast with the much higher population-density agrarian United States, which was self-immolating in massively costly massed-infantry engagements during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, at exactly this time is striking). These are fairly big, noticeable changes in warfare patterns!
In short, the tactics used in all four of these systems were conditions by casualty aversion, which makes a lot of sense in the context of a low-population density society which simply cannot afford massive losses.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.
June 24, 2023
QotD: The plight of miners in pre-industrial societies
In the ancient Mediterranean, the clear testimony of the sources is that mining was a low-status occupation, one for enslaved people, criminals and the truly desperate. Being “sent to the mines” is presented, alongside being sent to work in the mills, as a standard terrible punishment for enslaved people who didn’t obey their owners and it is fairly clear in many cases that being sent to the mines was effectively a delayed death sentence. Diodorus Siculus describes mining labor in the gold mines of Egypt this way, in a passage that is fairly representative of the ancient sources on mining labor more generally (3.13.3, trans Oldfather (1935)):
For no leniency or respite of any kind is given to any man who is sick, or maimed, or aged, or in the case of a woman for her weakness, but all without exception are compelled by blows to persevere in their labours, until through ill-treatment they die in the midst of their tortures. Consequently the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present and therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life.
It is clear that conditions in Greek and Roman mines were not much better. Examples of chains and fetters – and sometimes human remains still so chained – occur in numerous Greek and Roman mines. Unfortunately our sources are mostly concerned with precious metal mines and those mines also seem to have been the worst sorts of mines to work in, since the long underground shafts and galleries exposed the miners to greater dangers from bad air to mine-collapses. That said, it is hard to imagine working an open-pit iron mine by hand, while perhaps somewhat safer, was any less back-breaking, miserable toil, even if it might have been marginally safer.
Conditions were not always so bad though, particularly for free miners (being paid a wage) who tended to be treated better, especially where their labor was sorely needed. For instance, a set of rules for the Roman mines at Vipasca, Spain provided for contractors to supply various amenities, including public baths maintained year-round. The labor force at Vipasca was clearly free and these amenities seem to have been a concession to the need to make the life of the workers livable in order to get a sufficient number of them in a relatively sparsely populated part of Spain.
The conditions for miners in medieval Europe seems to have been somewhat better. We see mining communities often setting up their own institutions and occasionally even having their own guilds (for instance, there was a coal-workers guild in Liege in the 13th century) or internal regulations. These mining communities, which in large mining operations might become small towns in their own right, seem to have often had some degree of legal privileges when compared to the general rural population (though it should be noted that, as the mines were typically owned by the local lord or state, exemption from taxes was essentially illusory as the lord or king’s cut of the mine’s profits was the taxes). It does seem notable that while conditions in medieval mines were never quite so bad as those in the ancient world, the rapid expansion of mining activity beginning in the 15th century seems to have coincided with a loss of the special status and privileges of earlier medieval European miners and the status associated with the labor declined back down to effectively the bottom of the social spectrum.
(That said, it seems necessary to note that precious metal-mining done by non-free Native American laborers at the order of European colonial states appears to have been every bit as cruel and deadly as mining in the ancient world.)
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
