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dnewhous

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Posts posted by dnewhous



    On crossbow's slow speed. The Han used an organised drill to counter this. Pretty much, while one rank fired, another reloaded, and when they fired, another began to reload. It was like the gun drills used by 18th century Europeans, exept with crossbows.

     

    Han too have been known to win battles outnumbered.

     

    and would crossbows pierce the tetsudo? Most definitely yes. Roman shields can stop Roman arrows, but not ones of Han. The Parthians soundly beat them with a mounted cavalry army (the style which Han favours).

     

    *an ironic note- On Roman javalins- The Chinese considered javalins as weapons fitting only for barbarians, as they had crossbows.

     

    as for Rome vs the Mongols. <_<

    It would be a "most glorious slaughter"

     

    And you must also remember that the Mongols defeated China last, and fought them first. The mongols warred in the Middle East and rampaged through Europe before being able to defeat the Song. They warred with them for nearly eighty years, suffered their greatest amount of casualties, before they could claim their most sought after prize. The Song are also considered a somewhat militarily weak dynasty in the scope of Chinese history.

     

    and this is a fighting force that comes around 1000 years after Rome's demise, that's not really fair.

     

    The Byzantine empire was still around when the Mongols were, so the question is not that unfair.

     

    I figured that the Roman shields would be unreliable against the Mongol compound bow, but how do you know that the Chinese crossbow would penetrate it? The Romans did eventually defeat the Parthians, though they chose not to attempt to add the territory to the empire. Their big defeat at the hands of the Parthians was when they were led by an incompetent fool whose only claim to fame was defeating a slave revolt.

     

    Also, the cataphract cavalry intrigues me. Could it have had some success agains Chinese archers? If I'm not mistaken Roman cavalry was more of a run up close and use your sword kind of thing, not much into archery.

     

    Also, when did Rome invent their crossbow? It could be after encountering China they found it much more important than they did before.


  1. The Romans adopted cavalry themselves. The Romans in their heyday had the abiility to adopt innovations into their military whereas at their end they were increasingly dependent on foreign mercenaries. Remind anyone of the Persian empire?

     

    The Romans didn't have crossbows, but as someone else points out, crossbows weren't very good for cavalry anyway.


  2. The Roman army seams to have operated as an ani-poverty program for the poor. Julius Caesar was murdered in part because he was a populist and the patricians hated him for it. Julius's anti-poverty program - invade backwards Europe, murder and displace the natives, and replace them with impoverished Roman colonists. In addition to being unethical the territory conquered was undeveloped and didn't contribute much to the empire.


  3. Octavian is the one who really organized the empire's army.

     

    I have been very impressed with the Romans, given what I have learned about their military organization. The Romans discarded the Greek phalanx because it wasn't good enough. Yet the Persians relied on Greek mercenaries because the Greek phalanx was so much better than their own military organization. Alexander commented that there were more Greeks fighting against him than for him. But this is anecdotal since I know very little about Chinese history.

     

    As demonstrated by the people who think the Roman empire only had 7 million people, very few people know much about both.

     

    But generally speaking, Western civilization fields superior armies - where numbers don't tell the true strength. The Spartans are credited with starting this tradition. The Roman army was much larger than the organized armies of the European middle ages, but it was typically outnumbered by the natives as the empire expanded. Alexander had 30000 infantry and 5000 cavalry and look what he accomplished.

     

    Even today, China only fields an army of 275,000 men that we would consider a front line fighting force, compared to 500,000 by the United States (we are relying heavily on 2nd and 3rd stringers in Iraq). The rest of the Chinese army is for the purpose of occupation. If it weren't for the other 2.5 million men the Chinese empire, even now, would splinter up. Not just Tibet. Various officials would grab what men and power they could and form independent domains.

     

    History also demonstrates something else - the requirements of an army that is designed to destroy other armies in the field are very different from one that is designed for occupation. I say the Roman army destroys the Chinese army in the field, but occupying the empire is hopeless. If the population of the Roman empire was underestimated by these people, the population of China may have been too.

     

    A more interesting question - could the Roman empire have fought off an invasion by the Mongols? (Moving Ghenghis about 1000 years into the past.) The Chinese couldn't. And they certainly outnumbered the Mongols.

     

    Technologically, the Romans liked heavy infantry whereas the Chinese and Mongols liked cavalry and archers. The Mongol composite bow far outclasses anything even today. But the Romans had those giant shields.

     

    However, military prowess is not the best way to measure an empire. The Roman empire is better because it fell. This eventually led to the decentralization and innovation of the Rennaissance and Enlightenment. The Chinese Empire is what Rome would have been had the stagnation of the late empire continued for 1000 years.


  4. In Primus Pilus's description of the Marus reforms, he mentions that in the late Republic all the land was bought up by the patricians and equestrians leading to a dispossession of the family farmer. Why did that happen? His write up doesn't answer that.

     

    There's something else that is ambiguous. Could a plebian who owns his own land but is not equestrian serve in the army? I suppose it's a question of whether they could afford to equip themselves. Something tells me this might have changed over time in the Republic, I have a mental image of the early Republic's army being somewhat irregular but the late Republic's army being fairly well equipped.


  5. Ok here we go. Plebians were below patricians. Plebians had a revolt that led to them eventually getting a part in the government. There is way too much information to describe here. I advise you read up on the beginning of Rome. Here is a good start: The Beginnings of Rome by TJ Cornell. this book gives and excellent base for how the roman institutions were set up and describes everything more clearly.

    Don't get condescending, jerk. Except for your book reference I already knew what you have written in this post. In an earlier post, you implied that the landless headcount of Rome were not plebians, but beneath them, which is something I had not heard before.

     

    You also state "there was no peasantry in the city of rome." Since peasantry is not a well-defined term in the Roman world (perhaps I shouldn't have used it) I'd like you to explain exactly what you mean by it. What you mean by "peasantry" and what I mean by "peasantry" might be different.


  6. A couple of things here. First, there was no peasantry in the city of rome, there were the headcount who were the landless people of Rome. They were not allowed into the army because they could not afford to buy their own equipment relying on the patrician and plebians to make up the majority of the army. After several wars back to back the patrician and plebians were in short supply for the army, so Marius took matters into his own hand and thus his reforms happened. And with these headcount now having something to do it got them out of the city and after a certain number of years they got their own land to life on.

    Plebians - by this do you mean non-nobles who had their own land? I didn't know that the landless were not considered plebians. I haven't specified what I meant by "peasantry" but I can hardly imagine that there were no farmers who had their homes in the city of Rome.

     

    Like someone posted earlier, for some reason the land started to get bought up by the patricians and the equestrians and the family farmer started to disappear. Why did that happen? That is critical.


  7. I wasn't talking about racism at all. I am saying prisoners of war and people from conquered territories should never have been made slaves in the first place.

    I am well aware that slavery has been with mankind since the beginning, but it wasn't until I learned about the Marius reforms that I realized how devestating it was to the common people of Rome.

     

    My point is that if the peasantry was free - whether farmers, or paid, or even indentured servants, then letting common people into the army would not have been a problem.

     

    You can't have democracy (or a republic) when the majority of your people are landless poor. It doesn't work. Ever.

     

    The effects of this are a problem even now. Most people in England do not actually own the land upon which they have their home!

     

    Unlike what some Europe loving leftist economists think, private property is the cornerstone of prosperity and freedom.


  8. I remember reading part of a book on the first 12 emperors, and when Marc Antony made it known he wanted to be emperor following Caesar someone laughed at him. Julius was truly an extraordinary though mad individual. Marc Antony was just a lower measure of man. There's no way Marc Antony could have kept the empire together.

     

    What's amazing about the Roman empire is that so many of the emperors really were talented individuals - which was partially due to the nature of succession. To some extent, whoever was emperor was the man who could make himself emperor. Heredity was only loosely correlated with succession. In the Octavian/Marc Antony dispute I'm sure part of what happened was that the legionaires could plainly see who the better man was.

     

    The people of Egypt may have bought Cleopatra/Antony as gods, but Italy and Greece? Italians took Julius seriously because he proved himself on the battlefield.

     

    Poor Cleopatra, she probably just assumed the heir apparent would be the man to get power. She was trying to tie her nation's fate to the rising star of Rome. It's just that Roman politics were a bit complicated.

     

    I just thought of something - wasn't Marc Antony equestrian and not patrician?


  9. I'm really interested in the opinion of those more knowledgeable - it seams to me that if it weren't for Octavian, that the Roman Empire would probably have fragmented into bits and pieces after the major exapansions of Julius Caesar, much like Alexander's conquests fragmented after his death. Octavian is the one man in the West who figured out how to govern that much territory under one government. And, unlike China, the emperor remained firmly in control of the governing bureacracy.


  10. although, if they'd been in the provinces for long enough, I'm sure they knew at the very least enough Greek to get by... I'm sure they had plenty of opportunity for interaction with the locals and that interaction would most likely have happened in Greek.

    The first thing the soldiers learned was "Where is the brothel?"

     

    Anyway, where was Pontius's wife from? I want to ascertain if he might have fallen back to Latin in his private moments.

     

    Greek was the language of culture and learning of the entire Mediterranean - but by the Englightenment European scientific papers were published in Latin. That't the language Newton published in.

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