So I was watching Game of Thrones the other day (sue me), and in one of the scenes...

Battle of Samara Bend

Checkmate

You get your army in the field and either force them to battle or make them fuck off.

The French army at the siege of Tournai did the latter. They just camped like 5 miles from the English and waited for the English supplies to run out.

im sure your population will love you for that

Didn't the Polacks use their jewish magic to win the battle of Dunajcem and Starym Sączem

The Saxons built forts to store all their food and valuables and keep their people safe from viking raiders. Everyone nearby would get their shit and go inside their local fort. Without food invaders are dead unless they can resupply which is costly, slow and near impossible to defend. Even small forts and castles can be costly and time consuming to capture. The vikings could burn farms and dig around for buried wealth but unless they were willing to lose at least one man for every man inside a fort they couldn't get anything of value.

Game of thrones is notoriously bad with numbers for army sizes and city populations as well as even simple things like heights and lengths of buildings/continents. So I assume any army of 300,000 people will need to capture a city of 100,000,000 or something and will either do it or not do it depending on the plot and how horny that over-weight author guy is.

Sadly enough that was last season as well

Dothraki are literally not Mongolians. Just because they share some features
>steppes
>lot of horsies
it doesn't make them good warriors, although uneducated brats will have hard time seeing difference, and they will automatically assume Dothraki=Mongols
>lack of any tactics
>didn't achieve anything, they ale only dangerous to some unprepared city states in books
>they don't only have armours, they also lack any good weapons(muh mobility)
>no bows either
They are primitives so in any realistic scenario they wouldn't be any danger against late medieval/Renaissance armies.
You can absolutely forget about them capturing any fortified positions, not only castles and walled cities
You can forget about them beating any organized army in open battle. They have absolutely no way to deal with armoured units.
So basically all they can do is to avoid any combat and fortified settlements and loot some villages. 300k Army is out of question, because it will be not worth it for them.

Depends. Early Rome they had far larger numbers and better discipline allowing them to overtake incursions.

Later the population outside the Empire had grown, borders were longer, and Roman armies often smaller, particularly in comparison. They switched to defense in depth using interior forts, paying foreign militia with frontier land they then had an incentive to guard, and forcing beaten tribes to give them conscripts to fight other tribes.

Once you develop decent fire arms Mongols become rapidly obsolete.

As WWI demonstrated, bolt action rifles then make all calvary forever useless.

Oh, it's the classic
>It didn't count, they were not real Mongols!
>Real Mongols didn't fail to conquer x, they just decided to not to!

They only don't have bows in the show, which is such an odd change and makes the gift of the dragonbone bow make no fucking sense

Ah, my bad. I could only remember descriptions, how they did broke up on infantry formations.

>So I was watching Game of Thrones the oth-
Kill yourself.

>What do when large army shows up on your shores?

In the beginning you just pay them off and hope they fuck off and raid your rivals (i.e. Huns, Magyars, Vikings). After a while you can figure out decent tactics, but for the given examples the most important thing imho was for the fractured kingdoms/states to unite against the Steppe/snowniggers (an enemy you know is always better)

>strength for both sides: unknown
>casualties for both sides: unknown

so ten guys get injured and this is a mighty European victory?

and it's won by the most European of Europeans: the Bulgars

kek

>Volga Bulgaria
>Europe

damn...

Check version history, some Turkish retard deleted strenght and casualties. Also whether Bulghars had superior numbers (they couldn't) is irrevelant, your claim that Mongols were never beaten on the field got refuted.
It literally is you retard. Europe ends on Caucascus and Ural.

No! Europe is my completely arbitrary definition of what best fits my narrative and makes me feel superior!

T. The Shitgarian poster

True. Zey were Germans after all.

You sure showed him.

>Any historical examples of a large army just appearing on an empire's shores?
If you've got 90 minutes to kill, listen to this podcast. It's from a lecture given at West Point about the Crusades, specifically the contrast between Western and Eastern warfare. He hits on a lot of what you're asking.

bobrowen.com/nymas/podcasts/John France - Crusades 128.mp3

>destroying tax opportunity
go after their homeland

>As WWI demonstrated, bolt action rifles then make all calvary forever useless.
What is the Russian Civil War and the Polish Bolshevik War, in which the Soviets used army-sized cavalry formations?

> go after their homeland
That sure worked well for Hannibal didn't it

The Danube Bulgars also had victories against the Mongols. Funny as hell they won after the throne was seized by a angry peasant who crowned himself king. He fucked the Byzantines, then he fucked the Mongols, then everyone believed him he was of noble birth, he then got fucked and died in Mongol imprisonment

I really had to laugh when there's that part in the first season where the one knight with the notmongols is saying "yeah that curved sword you have is nice on horseback, but it won't do anything against platemail. What you really need for that is a longsword"

Only because Rome was the exception to this rule because of its unbelievably dogged determination not to be defeated. Generally when over 300k of a single generation of your male population is killed in battle, you sue for peace. Rome? They recruited 100k more men, armed them, and gave Carthage the finger while the built more ships and recruited more auxilia to invade Spain and Africa with.
Rome was unstoppable for over three centuries just because they refused to be beaten and were willing to sacrifice every able-bodied Roman male for war. Which is fucking bonkers if you consider the fact that this is half a step away from modern mobilization in an age where entire armies went home to sow and harvest crops and spent winter off the field entirely.

...

>pointy sword can pierce plate
Every time I see this meme I die a little on the inside.

GRRM doesn't need to care about the details of combat. His only concern is the grain production and it's inflationary effect on the Westeros economy during a period where bank lending is at an all time high while poverty is at an all time low and whether or not dragons should have 4 limbs or 2.

Read what fabius did to ``great`` general of carthago. That is what you do to superior force.

>dump into Personality and Luck
>neglect Intelligence, Willpower, and Strength
I've been in better written D&D campaigns

The Golden Horde isolated themselves from the rest of the Khans too by attacking Ilkhanate. Lack of foresight due to "muh islam" also contributed to the second mongol raid failure.

The first one was with the full backing of the Mongol empire. The second one was after they split off.

"!mongols"

mongols would not have been armoured on a large scale before they captured china

Why wouldn't they be?

cus they were a bunch of poor pastoral nomads.

I know, anyone else would recommend a katana for it's ability to cut through anything

not that it matters much.
But I think we should compare the dothraki to the mongols BEFORE they got big

well, the show has shown us that longswords can stab through plate, chain AND padding!

Your ignorance is showing.

Genghis Khan simply didn't shimmer out of steppe and started conquering. The tribes surrounding the Jin/Song were always fighting each other either against Chinese or against each others.

They weren't poor nomads, they were nomadic tribes that regularly fought against others.

Genghis Khan and other local tribes are often employed by Song/Jin to fight each other, fight other parties, etc. They have historical lifetime of war experience.

>They have historical lifetime of war experience.
That does not make their equipment great

Also to add, the Chinese strategy to keep the nomads controlled was to have them fight each other. Every time one tribe became too strong, the Chinese would employ alliance of other tribes to destroy the new "big" shot.

Even Mongols before they got "big", assuming before conquering China, would have raped the GoT "!mongols". The !mongols are comparable to vikings with horses. Completely garbage for anything other than show of force.

armies' management is completely irrelevant. What about tax policies?

The nomads surrounding China have always traded with China and adopted their war weapons. This was true for Xiongnu, it was true for the Mongols.

I don't know how you perceive of the mongols or the normadic tribes surrounding China, but they're not savage without any idea of civilization. The tribes surrounding China simply choses to be nomads due to cultural and societal forces. They still have contacts with China, they still trade goods/culture, they still fight wars, etc. Not only that, they are tributary states of China. So when they send China with goods as tributes, China sends back goods in return, often times much more than they got. This includes weapons/armors/culture/clothing, etc

>What about tax policies?
what about them?
Cant remember GoT ever mentioned them in any depth...

clothes, sure. but why arm barbarians that might be your enemies tomorrow?

That wouldn't happen because the Mongols feared the black warrior

To fight other barbarians.

Chinese are quite arrogant but also intelligent enough to control the barbaric tribes to fight against one another.

The Chinese are also more powerful if they need to fight them, but they're also generous so the barbarians are shown that its better off to simply play nice with China.

The downfall of China is when few genius/intellectual people seize power in the nomadic tribes. Or when intelligent/genius people seize power elsewhere.

Some swords can

In reality they wouldn't get very far. In every engagement they would take losses from crossbows, a proportion would die of disease, their supplies and grazing for horses would be expended and supply lines were vulnerable to raiding parties from untaken castles.

Hungary is far smaller than "Westeros" and only had a few castles on its borders at the time of the Mongol invasions, it contains vast plains which would have given the Mongols and advantage and the Holy Roman Empire was at odds with the Papacy and the Mongols did not face a committed effort by the major powers of Europe. Although their withdrawal was due to the death of Ögedei Khan, I don't think it was feasible for them to push into Germany and Italy with more bottlenecks due to forests and rivers, often guarded by castles, and fewer grazing for horses. The Mongols may have defeated the armies sent against them, but war is chaotic and it would be an incredible risk facing repeated battles on the scale of Mohi. The Mongols were far more technologically advanced than the "Dothraki", I would go as far as saying the Huns were also.

Wasn't Hungary full of smaller fortresses wich exhausted the Mongols with siege after siege after siege?

Light sabers maybe

>European armies frequently met Horse archers in combat and won
I would go to wikipedia and screencap and make a MS paint compilation of the amount of Mongol victories in European soil & their destruction of multiple European kingdoms, but I'm too lazy right now. So have this general overview.
In the few times the Mongols encountered these, they mowed them all down with next to no survivors.

Only after they built stone castles in response to the first invasion. Wooden city walls and fortifications were apparently not as difficult to take.

He's right. Good luck stabbing a gap in armor with a curved sword, especially one as sharply curved as a dothraki-kopesh-thing.

The comparison is wildly different. Mongols had an organized army that used decimal systems and command hierarchy, not a hoard. They also employed the best siege tactics in their times and stormed many large cities.

No. The reason mongols didn't face the combined force of Europe was they knew that Europe was divided. The mongols split their own ~100K force down to multiple smaller divisions and raided different parts of E.Europe. This wasn't a random act of mongol, but rather a calculated act by Subutai, the aged general, planning this. He split off his army to divide and conquer and to keep them from reinforcing each other.

You can say "oh mongols can't fight a united Europe" but in reality, mongols didn't let it happen as they took advantage of a divided Europe. You can also say "mongols possibly cannot have known Europe was divided and its impossibru", but in reality, mongols had already known what the European climate was like. They had previously skirted near Europe during their invasion of Middle East. Not only that, before the European raid even took place, they spent ~3-5 years gathering information on the terrains/local politics before planning this whole campaign.

>mongols exhausted by siege after siege
Not quite so. Mongols had been riding high up until the Battle of Mohi without much resistance, mainly because lack of discipline/confusion on defenders side. The battle of Mohi is when the Hungarian King had gained bit of knowledge on mongols and was smart enough to try to counter them. Still it wasn't much to the mongols, one bit of problem in this entire campaign was easily accountable in this campaign run.

The mongols only withdrew their campaign due to the Khan's death. Europe was spared the destruction. Subutai had drawn up the line of invasion of entire europe, his plan was to conquer europe within 10-15 years.

Don't forget that the Mongols had the most sophisticated spy system in history up to the point, they reportedly had spies all the way up to northern England who lived there as citizens, so they know the climate, political situation, culture, and many other things very well.

>They had previously skirted near Europe during their invasion of Middle East.
What part of Europe? The only place they got remotely close to by then was Constantinople and maybe some Italian trading posts. There were no Mongol scouts trotting around Ireland and Norway.

The myth that mongols did all their conquering without infantry, siege engineers or logistics, just archers on horseback needs to die.

They defeated groups of Russians/Turks early on during the Middle East campaign, more specifically, Subutai.

Mongol information gathering system wasn't simply limited to them horsing around. It was sophisticated in such a way that they'd get the locals to talk information. They'd also send ambassadors/etc across the regions or just as plaincloths merchant/spy.

>As WWI demonstrated, bolt action rifles then make all calvary forever useless.

Except they are fantastic for scouting and transportation.

>they reportedly had spies all the way up to northern England
proof?

The trouble is the mongols were expert siege engineers. The motley assortment in the series is probably more akin to the horde of Atilla. The way Atilla was dealt with was they tried to avoid fighting him or bribed him off until he died and his empire disintegrated overnight.

Same reason that the Europeans sold guns to African tribesmen. Having armor/guns gives that tribes/clans a huge advantage over tribes/clans that don't. Depending on your needs, you can now harness that clan to pacify the other clans and get them to leave you alone, or your can supply both sides (and make money from both sides) and get the nomads to kill each other instead of raping and pillaging your peasants.

The Southern Song supplied the Mongols with large batches of armor/other equipment during their "alliance" against the Jin. Worked out well in helping the Mongols wreck the Jin, didn't work out well when the Mongols continued on to conquer the Song.

I fell for this meme. Redpill me.

I know they had armor that was even quite sophisticated for its peers, and I know they were supposedly very good tacticians, but other than that, whenever I hear "Mongolians", all I can think about is what I saw on that one episode of Southpark.

Stop falling for mainstream meme on mongols. This is highly inaccurate.

The mongols came to power through the use of their intelligence/diplomacy/societal reform/etc.

Think diplomats, warriors, strategists, etc when dealing with Mongols. Especially before they split off. Their system of warfare is highly sophisticated for its time, more so than the Europe/MiddleEast of its time.

They attack based on intelligence network, not brute strength. They promote generals/leaders based on merits, capability and intelligence rather than familial connections.

They pressed a ton of non-Mongols into their military and had high ranking non-Mongol advisors/generals to help with diplomacy, intelligence, siege warfare etc.

>I know they had armor that was even quite sophisticated for its peers,
It's plain old Lamellar, the kind niggers from China all the way to the Middle East's Turkic invaders wore.

Too bad Ogedai's ambassador reached all the way to England, than.

>I know they had armor that was even quite sophisticated for its peers
Any proof? And keep in mind, we are talking about Mongols BEFORE they conquered China

Mongol armors were't superior by any means, they were similar to the ones used by the Jurchins/Jin/Song, atleast the mass produced version. However mongol version is slightly modified to be bit more lighter. Song/Jin were wearing heavy iron/steel lamellar. Mongols probably opted for variety depending on their tactics, light hit/run leathers and steel/iron for lancers.

Here's another podcast/lecture, "The Development of Infantries in the Late Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance."

bobrowen.com/nymas/podcasts/Al Winkler - Medieval Infantries 320kbps.mp3

The best longsword tactic against an opponent in plate armour was literally to flip the sword around, hold it by the blade and use the pommel as a mace. It's in quite a few fighting manuals.

Before news of Ögedei's death the Mongols had sent at least 1 mingghan to Vienna. Vienna by this time had grown wealthy from trade along the Danube. A few decades earlier the Duke of Vienna had captured Richard the Lionheart and used some of his ransom to build city walls. The current Duke also fought at Mohi and was well aware of the threat, he quickly raised his knights and cornered the Mongols who lost 100s of men in 2 engagements.

If I were biased in favor of the Mongols I might argue that had Ögedei not died and they attacked Vienna in full force they might have sacked it also, though it isn't realistic to suppose they could do so for every city in Europe without being worn down. If Subutai had accurate information he would have reached the same conclusion. The idea the Mongols would have conquered everything from Ireland to Finland to Constantinople to Portugal had Ögedei not died is a veritable meme.

While they could siege the cities of China and the middle east successfully and this was an impressive feat a Mongol conquest of a heavily fortified Europe would put them to the test. The difference is that one is a walled city that dominates an entire region and the other is a network of fortresses that defend local areas and each other.

One large siege is difficult enough. A dozen smaller sieges is worse, plus the benefits of capturing a large city are larger (loot, captives, dominating the region). If you capture a castle you get a lot less of all those things.

>descendants of horseniggers would hate horse niggers
Does not compute

>some turk

Prove it. Provide a real source that isn't wikipedia.

>your claim that Mongols were never beaten on the field got refuted.
No, little one, it didn't. For starters your "source" has no numbers, and I said a real army. The numbers *are* relevant. Yeesh.

I disagree, China was one of the most heavily fortified places on earth. They would wall off entire mountain passes, if one could not capture the gate, the army has to detour around the mountain range or go no further. They also built giant walls to force horses to travel through choke points (the walls can be scaled easily, but horses cannot climb). These form a similar strategic purpose to the hedge rows popular in Germanic countries, with the exception that they cannot be set on fire. The irony is, that the hedgerows were destroyed in many places to make room for the Manorial Open Field system, which sacrificed actual defensive value for the province in exchange for greater profits and a concentration of defensive force in the hands of the local liege lord, who could rake in the dough from his now defenseless and plaintive serfs. Another reason for this was the hedgerows negated the cavalry advantage the nobility held, they removed this impediment to improve their own effectiveness, while rendering the area as a whole vulnerable to cavalry attack.

Fortifications were generally better in the east than the west. Before the crusaders brought the knowledge back from the Levant, European castles were basically simple square tower and barbican designs. From the east they learned the art of hidden entrances, oblique entry, and angled zones of fire. But even the sophisticated eastern designs fell to the Mongols' mastery of gunpowder.

Volga Bolgars != bulgarians
They were Muslim Turkics and pretty much used the same horse archer/ hit and run tactics as Mongols.

In a sense the Volga Bulgars preserved their Bulgar/nomadic identy for far longer, well into the 13th century than the Danube Bulgars who pretty much lost it when they became christians in the 9th century.

furthermore today's Kazan Tatars are basically Volga bolghars that got KHAN'D for a while.

Oops, my bad. I was thinking of that paper armor thing invented by the Koreans or the Chinese or something that was cheap to produce and provided similar protection to bronze and stuff.

I mean, he's KIND OF right. Murder stroking and half-swording weren't bad alternatives to spare hammers and maces, and it's not like you can employ those kinds of tactics with a kopesh or a katana. Also, I've yet to see them actually cut through plate armor on the show with just their swords.

In one duel between Brienne of Tarth (big bitch) and sme gay dude (that gay dude), Brienne manages to knock him over and lift his visor with a knife in her hands, because both of them were wearing full plate. In another scene between Bronn (mercenary dude) and some knight (that guy from the trial), Bronn only manages to kill him by slicing at the unprotected parts of his legs and driving a sword through a chink in his neck.

I don't know if Jorah Mormont (the guy who said you need a longsword to go through plate) meant it literally as in "You need a longsword to hack through plate armor", or if he meant it metaphorically as in "You can use the design of the longsword to defeat someone in plate armor", but the methods the actors use to kill similarly defended opponents in the show implies it's the latter, and I don't think Jorah Mormont (a well-trained knight) is dumb enough not to know the difference.

>The Poles and Hungarians figured this out when the Mongols came back the second time

>The dilemma was they couldn't really take the Mongols in a normal field battle

The hungarians actually beat the absolute shit out of the mongols in open battle during the second invasion.

Force them to fight.

Steppe nomads are not known for their industrial output.

Experience in war doesn't magically grant you metalworkers, metal, and the knowledge needed to make it into armor.

They literally started preparing to leave before the khan died. The Hungarian campaign had turned into a profitless meat grinder by that point, and the HRE was massing in sufficient numbers to give them pause.

Risk/reward was horribly off. "they left because the khan died" is old propaganda.

No, you'd primarily be stabbing. Mordhau isn't the super common thing you'd think.

>Fortifications were generally better in the east than the west. Before the crusaders brought the knowledge back from the Levant, European castles were basically simple square tower and barbican designs. From the east they learned the art of hidden entrances, oblique entry, and angled zones of fire.

And by the time the mongols got to europe, western designs were flatly superior.

...

>"they left because the khan died" is old propaganda
Hungary/Poland/Russia was done by the time Ogedei died Mid Dec 1241. Within a month or two, they were preparing to leave. Mongol pony express can travel across thousands of miles in few weeks. So timeline is right within. I don't understand what you mean by mongols retreating before their Khan died. Mongols were still active pretty much up until the death of the Khan. They especially have a vested interest in going back to the kurultai meeting to elect a new Khan that is favorable to their conquest.

>Experience in war doesn't magically grant you metalworkers, metal, and the knowledge needed to make it into armor.

The name Temujin means blacksmith. He got that name after the death of a blacksmith from a rival tribe. The great general Subutai is from a family of blacksmiths. The turkic empire, from which the modern turkics all over the eurasia, was founded by a group of nomadic blacksmiths who got powerful. Not to mention they trade with other tribes, with the Chinese, with the Arabs, etc

Nomads doesn't mean retards.

The vast majority of them would die to disease and there is no goddamn way the land could support those horses. But they'll still wreck the shit out of the land before they die/settle/assimilate/dwindle back to where they came from.

It'd be one thin if they were attacking over land, but over sea is just suicide for them. They'd figure it out pretty much the second they land, too.

That 100K might be bit of an over estimate. Modern estimate is actually around ~30-40K. This was split up into few different segments, probably ~10K each or so, and then further subdivided for smaller raids.