How do you defeat an army of horse archers in battle if you have infantry?

Richard the Lionheart found utilised an effective counter strategy. During one of his crusade battles. I think it was the one where the crusaders were trying to get from A to B and the Saracens kept harassing them.

It was like something two archers and a pikeman per every regular infantryman.

Generally speaking you just need a ton of ranged troops so you can give as good as you get. Carrhae was an anomaly since the Parthians had a ridiculous supply of arrows with them.

Foot archers and crossbowmen surrounded by a square or circle of infantry with pole weapons and shields

Archer for archer assuming equal skill an archer on foot has the advantage on being able to shoot slightly higher weight bows with more accuracy.

The one thing that horse archers can't really do is protect themselves with shields. Infantry on the other hand can setup a line of big shields or even war wagons. This allows foot archers (or crossbowmen) to fire back with little risk to themselves.

Which kingdoms were always fighting against horse archers through history? Just take a look at what they did.

crossbows, choke points, castles, horse archer mercenaries

Well if its just a battle in a vacuum you've already lost. In war there are ways to avoid such battles and fight horse archers mostly logistically and strategically.

Guns niqqa.

>Form squares
Crassus did exactly that at the battle of Carrhae, it failed miserably

are those camel cannons?

...

Give them crossbows and proper discipline.

Barbarians of all directions fear the crossbows.

It's not easy. Your best bet would be to field mostly archers, with some pike to protect them from charges. An archer on foot has a range and accuracy advantage over one on horseback, assuming they're both equally skilled. Of course, the horse archers can simply retreat if they come under heavy fire, so unless they /have/ to defeat you ASAP and engage without retreating then you've really got no way to force them to.

Nah, they're small cannons just carried around via camel.

Ming and Qing China does have a swivel gun with a saddle mount though.

That's because the Romans at that point were shit at fighting cavalry-centric armies and lacked a significant archer presence in their forces

Walls

Defeating horse archers in battle is not difficult, only requiring disciplined infantry and a decent number of ranged weapons. What is difficult is bringing them to battle in the first place.

Horse archery is actually very ineffective unless on completely open field. You would need one rider to guide the horse while one shoots. It also requires a lot of horses, since riders would use multiple per battle.

That said, massed bowmen with Spears. Or better yet, crossbowmen if you have a highly developed bow. Have highly disciplined troops so they don't break and run and just clap the horses until you can force a charge.

He had an army of heavy infantry, no cavalry of his own and no ranged weapons to speak of

Also it was the cataphracts that did most of the damage not the horse archers

Chase the camp not the army. The army might be able to move quickly, but a horde encampment cannot.

You avoid open battle and use defensive terrain, strongholds and siege warfare.

advance knowledge from spies/scouts/other intel so you can leave or evade
swamps and lakes so the horses get stuck or blocked
caltrops because fuck them
(can you imagine the Mongols engaging with a naval defense?)

So, get killed and let them ransack your cities?

I have some unrelated questions, but since there are no 'questions that doesn't need a new thread' threads, I'll ask them here. Does Europe have (more or less) local mounted archers other than Hungarians and the Byzantines? How often were they fielded in pitched battles?

Point of fact, they did, and won against what was probably the foremost naval power of the world at the time.

So, bribe them?

As I recall, England and France did have mounted archers, but they rode into battle and dismounted to fight.

Spain also had the greatest Navy known to man at the time of the Spanish Armada.

>form squres

itt: people that think a crossbow outranges a bow

avars, sarmatians, kipchaks
ottomans used both regular and irregular cavarly wielding bows in large numbers though they would engage on horseback in melee instead of hit and run tactics

they were used often, atleast as a screening wing for the main body of the armies

I'm pretty sure bows have a much much smaller draw weight than a crossbow.

You don't "defeat" people who have no capital, no money or grain reserves, or any objective you can capture.
Even in modern days you can't "defeat" any people who don't have an HQ to bomb and invade.

War is about capturing objectives, if one side doesn't have any objectives to capture there isn't really a victory scenario.
You just try not to start such wars, as they will go on until you surrender, and the process will cost you more than it would cost them.

retreat into mountain forest

Also, people who think that crossbows/bows were one shot-one kill and not spray&pray

Only the british longbowmen, who shot at point blank range, could boast a decent kill per arrow ratio.

You outshoot them. Dismounted archers have better range and accuracy than mounted archers.

Armored bowmen with pavises would be the best, I think.

>dismount
>setup shields
>COME AT ME
>....
>they move past you and go rape your settlements until peasants rebel in protest

Nigga they could just move.

>everyone here saying that foot archers would have bigger range

Most nomads used composite bows which have longer range than the self bow most europeans used in the middle ages.

>can you imagine the Mongols engaging with a naval defense?
The final victory the Mongols had versus the Song Dynasty was a naval battle.

To be fair, it was the Yuan versus the Song, and both armies possessed loads of Chinese military personnel.

Mongol Naval Retardation started when the race-based Caste System of the Yuan Dynasty was established which removed Chinese commanders off overall campaigns. Leading to the retarded naval campaigns in Vietnam, Japan, and Java.

If horse archers were so great, horse shooters would be even greater. Why didn't anyone employed this tactics and conquered half of the world? Hell, with automobiles this army would be invincible.

what if... what if we make those cars offroad and armor, and a big gun

Give them proper armour, spears and crossbows. Also fortifications.

Exactly. We could've easily have second mongol empire with jeeps instead of horses and machine guns instead of bows.

What matters is penetration ability. Composite bows do badly against armours, especially with longer distances. But horses not protected by anything will get hurt on any distance.
>So, get killed and let them ransack your cities?
>Which kingdoms were always fighting against horse archers through history? Just take a look at what they did.
Poland and Russia for few hundred of years had borders with Mongols/Golden Horse/Crimean Tatars/Others and did well. The answer is good armoured cavalry force and later firearms. Horse archers quickly become close to useless in battles, but tactics used by Mongols and other were still viable, and to counter them you had to have former experience with it. For example, Tatars were cakewalk for 17th Poland, but HRE forces were helpless against Polish mercenaries, which used Tatar tactics (Lisowczycy).
So basically horse archers are a meme, but Mongol tactics, which could be used by most cavalry forces were really great.

It's called ISIS, problem is that planes with bombs/Helicopters with rockets are even faster.

Also trucks don't self-reproduce like horses do.

>The first years of the Han-Xiongnu War were a disaster for the Chinese. It was not until a second generation of leaders—familiar with the steppe and its peoples—came to prominence that the Han stumbled upon a more successful strategy. Wei Qing and his nephew Huo Qubing are the most famous of these men; their famed victories were built upon a type new military operation that was often called a flying cavalry column. The grand historian describes these campaigns in uncharacteristically vivid terms:

>“The Han strategists plotted together, saying, “Zhao Xin, the marquis of Xi, who is acting as adviser to the Shanyu is convinced that, since the Xiongnu are living North of the desert, the Han forces can never reach them.” They therefore agreed to fatten the horses on grain and send out a force of 100,000 cavalry, along with 140,000 horses to carry baggage and other equipment (this in addition to the horses provided for transporting provisions). They ordered the force to split up into two groups commanded by the general in chief Wei Qing and the general of swift cavalry Huo Qubing. The former was to ride out of Dingxiang and the latter out of Dai; it was agreed that the entire force would cross the desert and attack the Xiongnu.

>….Wei Qing’s army, having traveled 1,000 li [aprox 310 miles; 644 km] beyond the border, emerged from the desert just at the point where the Shanyu was waiting. Spying the Shanyu’s forces, Wei Qing likewise pitched camp and waited. He ordered the armored wagons to be ranged in a circle about the camp and at the same time sent out 5,000 cavalry to attack the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu dispatched some 10,000 of their own cavalry to meet the attack. Just as the sun was setting, a great wind arose, whirling dust into the faces of them until the two armies could no longer see each other. The Chinese then dispatched more men to swoop out to the left and the right and surround the Shanyu. W

>When the Shanyu perceived how numerous the Han soldiers were and perceived that the men and horses were still in strong fighting condition, he realized that he could win no advantage in battle…. And accompanied by several hundred of his finest horsemen, broke through the Han encirclement and fled to the northwest…. All in all Wei Qing killed or captured 10,00 of the enemy, He then proceeded to Zhao Xin’s fort at Mt. Tianyan, where he seized the Xiongnu’s supplies of grain and feasted his men. He and his army remained there only a day, however, and then setting fire to the remaining grain, began the journey home.

>Meanwhile Huo Qubing with his 50,000 cavalry rode more than 1,000 li north from Dai and Youbeiping and attacked the forces of the Wise King of the Left. He was accompanied by a force of carriages and baggage similar to what traveled with Wei Qing’s army, but had no subordinate generals beneath him….When Huo Qubing’s army returned to the capital the emperor issued an edict which read: “The general of swift cavalry Huo Qubing has led forth the trips and personally commanded a force of barbarians captured in previous campaigns, carrying with him only light provisions and crossing the great dessert. Fording the Huozhangqu, he executed the enemy leader Bijuqi and then turned to strike at the enemy general of the left, cutting down his pennants and seizing his war drums. He crossed over Mt. Lihou, forded the Gonglu, captured the Tuntou king, the Han king, and one other, as well as eighty generals, ministers, household administrators, and chief commandments of the enemy… He seized a great multitude of the enemy, taking 70,443 captives while only three tenths of his own men were lost in the campaign.” [2]

>The logistics machine the Han created to defeat the Xiongnu is one of the marvels of the ancient world [3]. Each of the Han’s campaigns was a feat worthy of Alexander the Great. But Alexander only pushed to India once. The Han launched these campaigns year after year for decades [4]. The sheer expanse of the conflict is staggering; Han armies ranged from Fergana to Manchuria, theaters 3,000 miles apart. Each campaign required the mobilization of tens of thousands of men and double the number of animals. Chang Chun-shu has tallied the numbers:

>"In the many campaigns in the Western regions (Hexi, Qiang, and Xiyu) and the Xiongnu land, the Han sent a total force of over 1.2 million cavalrymen, 800,000 foot soldiers, and 10.5 million men in support and logistic roles. The total area of lad seized in Hexi alone was 426,700 square kilometers. In developing this region the Han spent 100 billion in cash per year, compared to the regular annual government revenue of 12 billion. In the process the Han government moved from the interior over 1 million people to populate and develop the Hexi river. Thus the Han conquest of the land west of the Yellow River was the greatest expansion in Chinese history." [5]

>The demands of the war forced the Han to restructure not only the Chinese state, but all of Chinese society. [6] The Han’s willingness to radically restructure their society to meet the immense financial and logistic demands of an eighty year conflict is one of the central reasons they emerged victorious from it.

>Huo Qubing, Wei Qing and the other generals on the frontier were able to negate the nomad's central advantage by changing the nature of the Han armies they commanded. Frontier armies were no longer free holding peasant draftees from the interior, but professional soldiers permanently stationed on the frontier. This is important, because it gave them the time to master the equestrian techniques a column of flying cavalry required.

>By the end of the war the Han cavalry were just as good at lancing and shooting from horseback as the nomads themselves. Tactically they were the Xiongnu’s superiors.

>The switch to a cavalry dominated force opened up new options to the Han army. Now it was possible to move just as fast as the nomads—if a Han force set out in surprise then they could usually arrive in the midst of the Xiongnu before the nomads knew what was coming. At best the Xiongnu were given a small space of time to prepare a response, and at worst the Han would arrive in the middle of the night and slaughter the Xiongnu in their sleep.

>Slaughter is the proper word to use here. The only way to dismantle a nomadic empire is to play the steppe warfare game as well as they do. That meant changing both the strategic aims and tactical principles Chinese armies usually relied on in extended campaigns. Sunzi’s judgment that “one who excels in employing the military subjugates other people’s armies without engaging in battle, captures people’s fortified cities without attacking them, and destroys other people’s states without prolonged fighting. He must fight under Heaven with the paramount aim of ‘preservation’” [7] was sensible in the context it was written—a world of agrarian warfare in an interstate system of two dozen petty kingdoms that lacked the means to sustain extended operations—but it was suicidal on the steppe. “Preservation” cannot be the paramount aim of an army operating on the steppe. A nomad that gets away is a nomad that will fight you on a later day. Conversely, nomadic peoples had very little in terms of lands, cities, or possessions worth plundering or ‘preserving’. A nomadic empire’s greatest wealth was its people. Warfare between nomadic confederations were ultimately wars over people, where one side would do everything in its power to slaughter as much of the enemy as they could and capture, forcibly resettle, and incorporate anybody left over.

>The Han followed the same basic strategy. The aim of generals like Wei Qing and Huo Qubing was to kill every single man, woman and child they came across and by doing so instill such terror in their enemies that tribes would surrender en masse upon their arrival. By trapping the Xiongnu into one bloody slug match after another the Han forced them into a grinding war of attrition that favored the side with the larger population reserves. The Xiongnu were unprepared for such carnage in their own lands; within the first decade of the conflict the Han’s sudden attacks forced the Xiongnu to retreat from their homeland in the Ordos to the steppes of northern Mongolia. Then came a sustained—and successful—effort to apply the same sort of pressure on the Xiongnu’s allies and vassals in Turkestan and Fergana. By sacking oasis towns and massacring tribes to the east, the Han were able to terrorize the peoples of Turkestan into switching their allegiance to China or declare their independence from the Xiongnu.

>The Xiongnu were left isolated north of the Orkhorn. Under constant military pressure and cut off from the goods they had always extorted from agrarian peoples in China and Turkestan, the Xiongnu political elite began to fracture. A series of succession crises and weak leaders ensued; by 58 BC the Xiongnu’s domain had fallen into open civil war. It was one of the aspiring claimants to the title of Chanyu that this conflict produced who traveled to Chang’an, accepted the Han’s suzerainty, and ended eighty years of war between the Han and the Xiongnu [8].

>How did the Chinese transform an enemy whose realm stretched thousands of miles across Inner Asia into a mere tributary vassal? They did it through flame and blood and terror.

tl;dr tactically you might be able to do it every now and again on a grand scale you cannot, you have to get your own cavalry and terrorize them into submission.

>How do you defeat an army of horse archers in battle if you have infantry?
Terrain.

>this kills the mongol

Read A History of Hungary, by Peter F. Sugar, Péter Hanák and Tibor Frank:
books.google.bg/books/about/A_History_of_Hungary.html?id=SKwmGQCT0MAC

>the mongol army handily beat the hungarian and allied armies multiple times
>the mongols sieged most cities, any big castles they thought would be too slow they just moved past
>killed 25-30% of all humans in the country, completely removing human life from some areas
>went back home when they couldn't carry anymore booty

>any big castles they thought would be too slow they just moved past
>w-we didn't want to siege you anyway

Literally yes.
The reason you normally don't do that, is because the army in the castle comes out, flanks you, and beats you.
The mongols won so fucking hard, that they didn't have to worry about that.

If they won, how comes they didn't manage to conquer Hungary?

They didn't conquer Bulgaria, Wallachia, the Rus kingdoms, etc other land they won battles in during the same campaign.
Why conquer when you can just come next year and steal more?
Conquering ruined the horde imho, should've stuck to raping and pillaging.

Ok cool, so they conquered like half of the known world, then suddenly, when they attacked countries with stone castles, they were all "nah, conquering isn't really worth it after all"

if you don't have guns then you don't

mongols used a mix of lancers and archers anyway, if they're all archers then you can pretty much just ignore them

The chinese had stone castles much bigger and more sophisticated than the europeans though.

chinese didn't have stone castles

>or you can use the "monk's gone but the temple doesn't move strategy"

But what if they're nomads and the "temple" does move? And can fight back? And is a thousand miles away?

They walled off whole cities, like Constantinople was in Europe.
And yes, in that walled off city, there was a walled off armory, and thats what you'd call a castle.

Shield phalanx with spears sticking out on the front. Shield phalanx with archers in their midst in the back.

Alternatively, pray their leader dies of a heart attack and see their great horde disband and retreat

Because the Mongols weren't a hive mind despite their meme empire.

You have cunts who went "Time to settle down and do civilized stuff." (i.e, the guys who built the Il-Khanate, Yuan Dynasty)

And then you had the maniacs in the west who lived the old life. And by that, "LOL GIBE ME YUR STUFF OR I WILL KILL MANY OF YOU" traditional Steppenigger life of Extortion-funded Nomad States (i.e. Golden Horde).

For example: Mongols in Russia didn't control the Russians directly. They had cucked principalities who ran around basically doing extortion work for them, among these being Muscovy funnily enough.

But they'd just walk around it.
Any force that can beat them can't outrun them.
And you can't go destroy their cities, because lol no cities.

When there are no objectives to capture, you have to win battles; when you can't catch them, you can't win battles.

no, that's what you call a walled city.
China didn't have stone castles

Only if you define "stone castle" as "a walled of barracks and armory in Hungary".

you don't. You bring a an intelligently balanced combined arms army, pin the enemy with cavalry and out maneuver them with your infantry and foot archers.

>Mongols in Russia didn't control the Russians directly. They had cucked principalities who ran around basically doing extortion work for them, among these being Muscovy funnily enough.
And why didn't they do the same with Hungary, or any other country with stone castles for that matter?

Thousands of wolves to outrun an eat the horses

a castle is a sort of bunker where you hide your troops, so enemy has either to siege them down or move on, making his supply lines vulnerable to attack
Typical defense in the depth

Which is why the chinese had castles inside of walled off cities.
Defense in depth against invaders, and a solid defense against their own tax cattle.

A castle is literally a walled off barracks and armory. You can have that in the walled off city.

Because the Western mongols got hit by crises that focused their attention eastwards. Namely: whenever they have to elect a Great Khan.

Then afterwards they were content in threatening Russia and Eastern Europe.

>A castle is literally a walled off barracks and armory. You can have that in the walled off city.
But it serves a differtent purpose in the city: to defend the local elites.
It wont help you with defense in the depth

Because it was election time and they had to go home to vote.
This is literally why Europe was spared. History 101.

it seems like building stone castles brings countries lots of luck

It seems like you continue to ignore all the stone castles in Asia that were sieged and fell.

there were no stone castles in Asia

Tell that to the Seljuks and their collection of Crusader/Middle Eastern fusion fotresses.

I thought we were talking about China

>there were no stone castles in Asia
Is this a stone castle? The mongols sieged and conquered it.

We were talking about your MUH ANCESTORS THO understanding of history.

>But it serves a differtent purpose in the city: to defend the local elites.
He's talking about "arrow towers."

They're basically keeps within the cities which serve as strongpoints in urban combat when the walls get breached. They're not private property.

Are you saying that if this same exact construction were replicated in medieval Europe it wouldn't be called a castle?

Use pikes so long that horses are easily trampled before the horseman reach you

>they walk around you and go burn your house

they would be called shit castles

and they lost the war and were driven out of syria, werent they? once again it shows that stone castles bring good luck

Basically sticking to cities and fortified places and holding out.
Or if you can somehow ambush them, put them in a shitt

In Europe they would just be the keeps. A more accurate translation of "Arrow Towers" would be blockhouses. Very big ones. Scattered throughout a city.

Look, Chinese cities are big. The walls are also big. But you can't focus the whole city for defense like a multilayered castle because people live there and do economic shit.

But when breached the Chinese do expect to fight an infantry urban battle within the streets of the city. Whereby the arrow towers serve as lines of defense in the absence of concentric walls n shiet. There's a reason why Chinese siege weaponry has shitloads of inner-city defensive engines like mobile towers and barricades, like this "knife cart."

That thing is the size of 30 blockhouses. You are being dishonest, there are whole castles smaller than the image posted here.

I am literally the guy you just linked.

Blockhouses is just a fucking english word about a fortified building no matter how big.

Pic related: a blockhouse.