How brutal was medieval warfare actually?
Compared to antiquity.
For some reason, when I think of combat in the middle ages I think of mud, blood, limbs falling off, decapitations and lots of violence.
But when I think of ancient warfare, it seems to be much more romanticized. Like it wasn't as hardcore. Or am I wrong?
bump
Dude Sieges LMAO
Most deaths and casualties for soldiers throughout the middle ages would have been from disease and supply issues. Unless you were in a particularly bloody time you wouldn't see that many battles in your life as a career soldier.
read the iliad
Well, when it came down to it, you can imagine how a battle really was.
A big amount of levies and another part of professionals and knights.
It's as brutal as having people stabbing each other in close quarters can get.
Imagine a shitload of peasant levies getting hit by a huge wave of arrows.
I imagine it was really fucking gritty.
Game of Thrones - battle of the bastards.
Really realistic version of warfare kind off. Many soldiers were trampled, choked under piles of dead men rotting over a few days etc.
Youre right about linbs etc too.
Warfare was hardcore
Antiquity was just as a gorey.
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Any large scale close proximity organized battle with bladed weapons was brutal beyond reckoning. The difference between that and now was essentially the length of battle, modern battles having the fear and anticipation spread out over a longer period of time as well as a bigger distance.
You could just replace middle ages with history and this sentence would still be correct.
From the most ancient stone-age warfare up to but not including WW1, most deaths were from disease and malnourishment.
The battle of the bastards is more realistic than most hollywood shit but it is still not quite realistic at all.
Imagine the sound.
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is this historically accurate, Veeky Forums?
and the smell
>Antiquities
-Battles involving tens and thousands of men in huge wars that build empires.
-No mediators.
>Medieval ages.
...glorified gang-fights between less than 10,000- or evern 5000, men, and then for some reason they can't conquer their fucking neighbors.
-Plenty of mediators ranging from the Church, noble families calling it off, muh chivalry & ransoming, etc.
>stabbing someone in the balls
Not cool dude. I don't care if it's war, men do not target the groins.
>send your cav first
>shoot your own cav
>massive pile of bodies that would have never happened with only a couple thousand dead, people don't just keep fighting on top of the pile it would be more spread out that whole sequence was contrived
>missile fire being portrayed as slaughtering men by the hundreds when in reality a volley of arrows would do only minimal damage to armored men
>nobody has shields for some reason except for the weird pike phalanx shield wall hybrid thing they had
>this tight formation of pikes and large shields outmaneuvers light infantry
it was pure hollywood fantasy. A total clusterfuck of men when in reality battles were far more organized and it wasn't just thousands of individual 1v1s like it was portrayed as with arrows randomly killing everyone.
Neither the cavalry, archers, nor infantry were portrayed historically, but I guess you can chalk this up to ramsay being the most unreasonably terrible field commander of all time.
To be fair, there were more professional soldiers in the Medieval Ages than in the Classical Ages.
Here's Lindybeiges video about the battle of Visby and how quite brutal it must have been.
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Here are the remains of the rebels:
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>Medieval 1
Man, that brings back memories.
thats pseudohistory with no scholarly support to back it up
John keegan has a book called "the face of battle" which has a really interesting perspective on how Agincourt would have been.
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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWRWRA WRWRW AAARUAURAUR A
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HELPG A AA AGAGGAG AGRGER
I can't believe something as simple and useful as telling you the starting units never made it past MTW 1.
Historical Campaigns also never made it past MTW.
The description of the 100 Years War is funny.
Apparently, the French threatened to cut off the fingers of captured longbowmen. That started a tradition where the English would wave their fingers around to taunt the French in the battlefield.
I got the impression the number of soldiers scaled down a bit in the middle ages compared to the massive armies seen in antiquity.
Also, in classical/roman times seems that lot more people were soldiers full time as opposed to conscripted peasants.
>those two guys half-assing their fight
I would do the same and wait until the battle was over.
They do it in Warhammer Total War. Some factions have different faction leaders you can choose: each with different abilities and starting units. You can rename units too
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This is my favorite battle scene of any movie.
Alexander's Gaugamela is also top notch.
The Norman Conquest of England hardly respected chivalry or any notions from the Church. After Hastings, the Normans and their mercenaries pillaged and raped all across southwestern England. This was done to isolate London as well as browbeat any potential resistance. Besides the thousands of Anglo-Saxons that died at Fulford Gate, Stamford Bridge, AND Hastings, thousands upon thousands of peasants were murdered and raped. Whole villages were razed.
Centuries later, the English would get their revenge in the 15th century when Normandy lost 3/4 of its population (which was about 1.5 million) from the devastation and looting that English soldiers inflicted.
Medieval battles may not conjure up as many troops and logistics as Ancient warfare, but it was no less brutal. The only reason chivalry was instituted was because knights were no better than thugs on horseback. A code of ethics was to rein in the savagery of the Middle Ages.
>Also, in classical/roman times seems that lot more people were soldiers full time as opposed to conscripted peasants.
The conscripted peasant thing is a meme, there were far more professional soldiers in the medieval period than in antiquity.
What was the most painful era of warfare?
Antiquity, Medieval, Pike&Shot, Musket, WW1, WW2, Modern?
Not in terms of damage or destruction, but just which inflicted the most agonizing pain on people.
>Most deaths and casualties for soldiers throughout the middle ages would have been from disease and supply issues.
Is there any source for this other than speculation?
>shouts and screams, flesh being rent, shields shattering, swords hitting armor like a blacksmith's forge, some rando mercenary pulls a shoulder strap over his intestines and keeps fighting, the enemy despite losing an eye and part of his cheek is still swinging like a madman
glorious
Iron and Copper then rotting dust, except there's no dust the smell is just that strong.
>these people trying to demonize invaders are telling the 100% complete and unbiased total truth
history is cucking you
take a fourth of what you said and it might be accurate.
Irish
I don't know what would be the loudest and most deafening, the screams or the clashes.
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Naval battles must've been a pretty sight.
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I wish there were more images like these, gritty and realistic.
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>3 Kerns, 1 Catholic Bishop, 1 Royal Bodyguard, 2 Irish Dartmen
A pure skirmisher army with a small force of melee troops... prolly the worst faction
Stop.
Pike and shot sounds the worst, you have a good chance of getting impaled by a giant spear or getting pelted with spheres of hot lead
Worst of both worlds I suppose
WWI would've been unbearably shitty as well
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Check this shit out.
>The guy in the foreground is most likely doing some kind of MJ forward-lean
Is this a JoJo reference??
Thought you were brap-posting there for a sec
how would you handle this situation
>DUDE LORDS SENT UNTRAINED AND UNARMED PEASANTS INTO BATTLE LMAO
This was not a thing.
Turn 360 degrees and walk away
If you did that you'd go right back. Should've done a 180.
Uh, there are historical campaigns for Rome 2 and Medieval 2.
Any selection other than Picts is entirely plebitan.
>you cover the british isles in brown
The depiction of Gaugamela in Alexander was way more realistic than that trash, and it still fucked up a lot.
Bait
not so fast
t. Someone who knows nothing about medieval warfare
>To be fair, there were more professional soldiers in the Medieval Ages than in the Classical Ages.
Nope.jpg
The Late Republican/Empire Roman legions were pros.
The Persian armies were pros
The Macedonians were phalangites were pros.
Their armies dwarfed anything Medieval European states ever fielded.
Meanwhile in the Medieval ages it takes a single village to field one cavalryman, hory shet.
t. Phillip Popadopaloupolis
newfag spotted
leader of red squad ready to engage
over
For a lot of medieval to Renaissance Europe, war was literally a game. Nobles were just playing a big political chess game with one another. When Napolean started doing Napolean things, the nobility of Europe would write letters griping about how Napolean had totally ruined war with his "taking it seriously and playing to win" schtick
WW1, easily. The shellings, the trenches, the sanitation of said trenches, the jaw-dropping scale of death, the nerve gas... Just, everything about that war was fucking abhorrent.
This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever read on Veeky Forums and that's saying something.
>those spearmen in the way of the knights so they don't get a charge bonus
noob
Well then maybe you should read a book, retard. The amount of knights that died in most warfare was nearly 0, it was a taboo to kill them, even if they were your enemy. You weren't supposed to kill anyone who surrendered. Besieging armies were expected to allow messengers to leave the cities to seek help.
yeah in both my mount and blade and total war saves I lost like all my soldiers to no bread and plague wtf
get mistaken for a persian due to my weird clothing and stabbed
Soldiers sometimes obeyed certain conventions of honor =/= "war was just a political chess game and nobody actually wanted to win wars until the 19th century"
That doesn't line up with what the earlier post said. The claim that "nobody actually tried to win wars until the Napoleonic era" is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.
>marching so slowly into each other
yeah dude its just like my tw game
Recounts of many generals as well as famous historical examples such as the march to Moscow by Napoleon.
There's no point in sprinting into your opponent's lines from a mile away like most media shows, you'd just tire yourself out
I imagine it was something like this
>Lose "chess game war"
>Pay massive ransom to get released
>Find out the victorious side has taken my ancestral home for their own
>Now have nothing except the clothes on my back
>Heh,good thing I wasn't playing to win, what kinda retard does that
>Lose battle
>invaders pillage my lands and destroy my property before leaving
>wow dude its just a game chill out
>now have no income for however long it takes to replace my peasant population, crops and various animals
>nitpicking and taking everything literally and acting like that's a refutation
Well Jesus, sorry for making generalizations to explain trends. I must have forgot my #notall at the end of the post.
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Yes, I'd consider doing things like allowing a besieged city send messengers to call for backup "not playing to win". I never said "nobody before Napolean tried to win" I said that Europe in the centuries before that treated it much less seriously
> kind off. Many soldiers were trampled, choked under piles of dead men rotting over a few days etc.
Youre right about linbs etc too.
Reading helps.
thats what they did, especially romans
Except it was not a trend and its not true generally speaking, you are outright wrong.
People fucking died m8, if that isn't taking an issue seriously I don't know what is, the fact that the issue has come to war means its a serious issue.
Letting a messenger out of a besieged city could have just as many benefits for the attackers, it puts pressure on the defenders allies, the messenger could be discussing terms of surrender with their superior or just informing their superior that they're all going to starve to death and probably surrender soon.
>muh information on the attackers numbers
That's something anyone outside the besieged city could measure.
fuaaaark why did guns have to be invented?? war will never be epic again.
i'd just scream, stab and go forward. play it simple.
No escape. You fall in the sea, you drown. Nowhere to maneuver or retreat. When the ships clash, it's kill or be killed. Sea battles are some of the most ferocious stuff. The story of Ormurin Langi is a re-telling of an old viking battle which i highly recommend.
Carthage: 1
Rome: 0
>implying the era of horse & musket wasn't the most epic war has ever been
*AHEM*
>That direct blow to the forehead with that thin ass stick
Black bloc leftist confirmed for born in the wrong era
war is war, m8. there's nothing romantic about it. just chaos and the most degenerate aspects of human nature. everywhere, now and always
autism