Barbarian Warfare

I enjoy how pretty much every guy in that pic is the same person

both. germans used the boars head formation and roman tactics. Boars head is their own tactic. They relied a lot on their strength and size and fought more with their bodies then their weapons. Their weapons were originaly very crude in comparison to romans. Swords were rare, helmets and corelsets even rarer. They'd use spears with small metal heads or even just a sharpened end in the fire. One thing I dont know is why iron was so scarce among them. Does anybody know? I read that the romans assumed iron ore was rare in germania but this wasnt actually the case.

If I am not mistaken fighting the romans would be their first experience with combat on that scale. When they fought each other they would try to square off one to one, as in each warrior would face an enemy warrior one by one. or they fought pitched battles. They may have had large scale battles amongst each other but it wasnt common.

>They'd use spears with small metal heads or even just a sharpened end in the fire.

*sharpened end that had been hardened in fire. They used clubs as well.

>I don't know much about Germanic fighting tactics, but it seems to me that at least before the migration period era they were kind of unsophisticated

Migration era germans seemed to have different values to premigration era germans. Because originally they beleived in sharing all possesions equally among the clan. And the clan was the central unit of society, where as later the cheif became more important, which reflects an adaptation to the roman social hierarchy.

All houses were common good which means that you had to give people hospitality if they wanted it. They lived on extended family unit per long house / farm stead, which were fairly spaced out from one and other. And a clan was made up of many extended families. They organised themselves into clans to regulate the use of the forest. They only pracitced subsistance farming so as not to over burden the land.

Rather then being unsophisticated per se they seem to be a people with an ecological hippie type philosophy, like most indigenous people. They had magistrates and judges who distributed the land amongst the clan and resolved disputes.

Migration era germanics were much more materialistic. Ironically their more barbaric endeavors like their campaigns of raiding and pillaging in the migration era, seem to be inspired by the roman way of doing things . The cheifs wanted to be like the roman generals and emperors

What are viking shieldwalls

What is the teutoburg forest ambush

Stop buying into greco-roman/byzantine germanophobic fairy tales OP

Absolutely not true. In fact early Gaulish victories against the romans forced changes to the military structure at the time.

What the romans excelled at was in diplomacy to turn tribes against each other, professional officers, siege craft and logistics.

>What are viking shieldwalls
We're talking about Antiquity, man, not the early medieval period. And other than the ambush, what tactics did Teutoburg involve? Not doubting you here, just curious.

Also, I don't see what is particularly clever about a shieldwall, the Romans had the Testudo. Could you elaborate a little, mate?

roman tactics mainly, arminius was raised as a roman and he was a roman knight

>Vikings fighting Romans
What

>roman knight
Are you an American?

>equites are not knights.

They are not. Both are rich cavalrymen, the comparison ends there.

I can see it being used as a translation desu.

its ok to call them that sometimes but they enjoyed building villas instead of castles and liked money and trade which is pretty different from a knight
probably what that user is about

Yeah it does happen but it is frowned upon because there is a certain association with castles, feudalism and all that jazz if you use the word knight.

Horseman is a correct translation aswell.

The Germs fought in shieldwalls though occasionally they were arrayed in triangular columns which they called Boars something something formation.

However by the first century AD quite a few Germans had served in the Roman legions. You see this during the Batavian revolt or the battle were Varus lost his legions. The former even had Roman equipment and routed a numerically superior Roman force in open battle.

No. Celtic armies fought in formation. Their charges are just legendary, having broken the Roman Phalanx earlier in history in addition to wrekting Hellenic Armies during Brennos' great raid in the Balkans/Greek Peninsula.

Heck, Romans lifted from the Celts the tradition of heavy infantry hurling javelins prior closing in. In addition to damn near everything from Celtic Equipment from helmets, armor, the shields, and sword forms.

Even Roman Cavalry traditions was largely Celtic, following the annexation of Gallic territory and wholesale recruitment of Auxiliary Cavalry from them.

if they fought like mindless apes then it wouldnt have taken so long to conquer them

boarshead.

no, I just heard that translations in documentaries and I'm fairly sure I've seen it written too. I thought that medieval europeans modelled a lot of their society on roman society anyway.

but didnt' the celts get their arms and armour from the etruscans?

The celts forced the Romans to abandon their maniple system because their rush tactics were very effective against thin lines.

Nope.jpg. Well they did adopt Greek-style Helmets from Etruscans.

But Celtniggers invented most of their own stuff. Chainmail famously.

Sort of a nebulous thing, weapons and armor styles spread back and forth through Europe, its not clear who did what first but a common origin seems more likely

The maniple was anything but thin you dunce, it was a checkerboard adapted to fight hill Samnites

>3 lines
>Not thin
You're right, that sure is a thick line.

Wasn't it four?

Romans abandoned the maniple system because they no longer arranged soldiers by age and wealth, but rather every soldier was made into a paid professional and provided with state equipment.

Financial and demographic realities is what made Romans abandon Polybian legions in favor of Marian legions.

The whole point of spacing the soldiers out was so that they wouldn’t just fight as a single giant mob, but that officers could reinforce parts of the line which started to waver.

Julius Caesar writes that the Romans were initially fearful of the taller long sword armed Gauls until realizing that their own style of fighting had the edge in a cramped melee, and then began to actively disdain them for being lanklets

If you count the skirmishers

>and then began to actively disdain them for being lanklets
So, the roman conquests were the true beta uprising?

I was talking about ranks.

I searched through my book again and found that it could be between 3 and 6 with three successieve lines making the whole battle order around 9 or 18 ranks deep.

>One thing I dont know is why iron was so scarce among them. Does anybody know? I read that the romans assumed iron ore was rare in germania but this wasnt actually the case.

does anyone know this? did mining iron ore out of bogs have really scarce returns? or did they have some weird belief that their weapons should be made from the trees

Their economy, division of labor and all that jazz was shit.

They practised shifting cultivation, dairy farming and their biggest political entities were tribes of a couple of ten thousand. They simply didn't have the economy to support dedicated artisans working forges.

Granted that over the four hundred years of contact the Germans did get more developed and at the end they were relatively well accoutred

>They simply didn't have the economy to support dedicated artisans working forges.

Correctionn

Many dedicated artisans*

They sure had a few but for the most part they got buy without many metal items.

I thought they spent a lot of time hunting for sport, sitting around the fire all day and getting pissed. And women and children took care of a lot of the farm work and household / camp labour. Couldn't they have spent some of that time mining and forging instead?

>I thought they spent a lot of time hunting for sport, sitting around the fire all day and getting pissed.

Exactly, now how are they going to pay for mail shirts and swords doing that.

Besides fighting, doing fun stuff and the occasional bit of farming it would be hard to earn enough cash to buy a lot of things. Hardly enough demand to spur on economic or technological development in the metal sector.

>Picture implying that's how Gallic fighting men were equipped.
At best some nobles might have that type of armor but compared to the Romans whose legionaries all had mail armor the gallic warriors were pathetic

T. Gnaeus Mallius Maximus

>Picture implying that's how Gallic fighting men were equipped.
Not at all.

But your average gallic warrior did have a thureos and a helmet. And that was usually enough in a battle line. In addition Mail would be affordable by middling rank warriors, not even the super rich.

>compared to the Romans whose legionaries all had mail armor the gallic warriors were pathetic
For the longest time, only the richest had armor. Hastati for instance only had pectorals. Everyone being armored to fuck was by the time of the late Republic.

Fair enough

The theory pushed by Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians claims that the issue Germania had was poor agricultural output brought on by poor soils and a lack of metallurgical ability to create the kinds of permanent high-output farming that even the Celts across the Rhine were able to sustain. Farms tended to be lower output and, because of a lack of "modern" tools, plots were often infertile after a couple of generations, forcing settlements to move.

However, Germans at the time recognized the wealth across the border, and thus would resort to raiding for not only things like gold and jewelry, but more practical things like tools. The Romans, meanwhile, would use punitive raids as a means of control - raids would be used to install and prop up leaders more favorable to Rome or oust ones perceived as getting too powerful. At first, this wasn't much of a problem, but over time the influx of tools and technology across the border allows for those Germanic tribes to support larger populations, which in turn leads to larger fighting forces and larger political organizations.

In short, the simplicity of the Germanic tribes was due to environmental factors, and their growth and advancement (at least immediately across the Rhine and Danube) was thanks to some fairly active Roman influence.

GODS

I HATE GAULS

t. buttblasted schmeisser

>Strokes beard
So hol up a minute.
>adjusts loincloth
You be sayin.
>Picks lice from scraggly ginger hair
We wuz civilised?

there was some battle with the romans against the italics where the italic tribes celtic allies remained after all the italics fled and went into a tight phalanx type formation and pretty much got picked off by the roman's missile troops
celts are also recorded using formations similar to greek phalanx with spears and later swords

in caesar's de bello gallico he writes of the the belgae tribes having men march in slow, compact formation silently before charging

celts also had a system for their cavalry where one horseman would have two attendants who would either ride in to give him his horse if it had died or take his place if he had died i believe it was called trimarca or something like that

Trimarca was a three horse chariot. Maybe the word took on a different meaning once they stopped using chariots though. To my knowledge, the case you mention was just a noble with assistants. I could be wrong though, my only knowledge of Trimarca is from an article called, "Trouble comes in three's" in an ancient history journal. The celts were pretty savvy though, to counter Cataphracts, they would roll under the horse and slice it's belly or legs.