Why did Europe drop mass pike formations, then re-adopt them 1800 years later? Pikes are cheap, efficient...

plus long-ass 22-foot pikes

>classical
The Vikings and A*glos would stand close enough together to lock shields, they all so had laws for minimum armour and arms requirements.
Weren't Greek hoplites mainly citizen volunteers while heathguard were al most professional soldiers as well?

>Also good armor coverage
Keep in mind they had pretty much nothing BUT that for armor. The trick to beating the phalanx, as the Romans found, was to penetrate the spear wall and engage the enemy with swords. Roman lorica helped a lot with both getting into contact with the phalangites and subduing them in hand-to-hand combat.

To answer OP's question, pikes fell out of vogue when armor became common, and started coming back when guns started making armor irrelevant.

>Why did Europe drop mass pike formations
Macedon/Greece is not all of Europe

Why must you opine on something you know nothing of?

Because pikes are everything but mobile

More mobile tactics replaced them, then warfare and economics changed, and a pike wall became one of the best tactics to allow a militia to stand against men at arms

How about making in argument instead of shitposting?

Because arguments made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

that sounds like a statement made without corroboration or supporting facts

There's a fundamental difference in the way that the Macedonian Phalangites and Renaissance pikemen operated.

The Macedonian phalanx was not primarily designed to be used against cavalry. Classical cavalry is not a very big threat on the battlefield, since without stirrups and couched lances, classical cavalry had little ability to threaten infantry from the front. Alexander's famous Companion Cavalry was only effective against infantry when charging from the rear. The job of the phalanx was to fix enemy infantry in position while the cavalry delivered the hammer blow. The Phalanxes themselve were not very good at causing casualties to the enemy.

The Swiss used pikes in an offensive manner. Swiss pikemen were lightly armored and used shorter, more maneuverable pikes, which allowed them to charge while in formation. The Swiss are known for making counter-charges once they halted the enemy cavalry, and this had a devastating effect.

Pikes disappeared in Europe due to the dominance of the Roman system, and between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, societal structures could not support pikemen, who needed to be well drilled and deployed in large numbers to be effective.

You're clearly a homosexual, but since you got dubs I'll indulge you with some evidence.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pydna

>At close quarters the longer Roman sword and heavier shield easily prevailed over the Macedonian Kopis and lighter armor of the Macedonians.

>Classical cavalry is not a very big threat on the battlefield, since without stirrups and couched lances, classical cavalry had little ability to threaten infantry from the front.
>Alexander's famous Companion Cavalry was only effective against infantry when charging from the rear.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Because normal spears are just as good when you aren't fighting heavy cavalry, and are cheaper to make.

>he job of the phalanx was to fix enemy infantry in position while the cavalry delivered the hammer blow.
For Alexander it was. The phalanx had been around for literally centuries before that, you retard, often operating without cavalry support. But I guess the guys who fought at battles like Marathon and Platea were just keeping the Persians busy while their nonexistant cavalry set up for a flanking attack, amirite?

The classical Phalanx used one-handed spears. They used one-handed spears at Marathon and Plataea

Because canons are more effective
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marignano

I can't wait 'tll heavy cavalry flank them.

>Pikes are cheap, efficient, and a whole group of guys having them is a deadly force.
You need a pretty good state infrastructure to train, maintain and use pikemen, and a lot of money to recruit them. It isn't the same as having some militia spearmen.

This is why in ancient Greece, only the most powerful and wealthy states had pikemen, the smaller weaker ones had to use groups of semi skirmisher thureos shield/spearmen.

Also Pikes aren't that great once the enemy figures out ways to counter them. The only way they really work is if you can go down the Alexander route and field a gigantic army of them which stretches across the entire battlefield.

Greek pikemen wore pretty good armour, for their day especially.

They had the linothorax, which while we don't know its actual composition, must have been pretty good to have been used for like six centuries, plus they often made the waist out of metallic scale. Then they had a decent cheek covering helmet, and usually armoured greaves for the legs.

Pic related, and these are the less armoured Egyptian version.

>Classical cavalry is not a very big threat on the battlefield, since without stirrups and couched lances, classical cavalry had little ability to threaten infantry from the front
Hahaha, why must you talk about things you know nothing about.
The Stirrup made almost no difference to cavalries ability to charge. Stirrups benefit the rider in agility and turning, not in keeping the rider in the saddle in a forwards, backwards motion, that is helped by saddle horns which they all used in antiquity.

The real reason cavalry was less effective was because horses were smaller and less well trained, however this was already changing by 200BC and eastern cataphracts were enough of a match for medieval knights.

>Alexander's famous Companion Cavalry was only effective against infantry when charging from the rear
He literally did a head on charge into a spear formation and won.

>Weren't Greek hoplites mainly citizen volunteers
yes, your role in combat was determined by your income with the wealthiest citizens given command but expected to pay for the logistics

>The job of the phalanx was to fix enemy infantry in position
This never made much sense to me, mechanically. I can imagine a hoplite shield wall holding an enemy in place, but isn't the point of a pike formation to move forward irresistibly and skewer anything that doesn't run or move out of the way?

Macedonians used actual pike formations at the same time that other Greek states were using hoplites.

Its more passive, when your enemy is a literal spikewall of death, what do you do?

Heavy Cavalry became easier to field and Pike Armed Peasants are a solid counter to a much more "efficient" style of warfare.
>tfw you will never see a charge from 2,000 fully armored knights
Must have been really amazing to see them crashing into infantry.
They didn't continue using pikes because they were essentially useless against heavy infantry. The Sarrissa was good literally only against light and fast infantry and cavalry. Pike formations had little to no close range capability, if the first man has to drop his pike and contend with the swordsman in front of him then this will only snowball into more swordsmen/spearmen coming in and just overwhelming the pikemen.
Also consider Alexander's army was an army of hardened vets who could drive a pike through an eyesocket, they were not men that could be fielded enmass. They are not exactly cheap when you factor in the man wielding them.
All Germanic peoples did this.
To call the Greek Hoplites citizens is a bit misleading, they went to war every summer and trained every season. They were like soldier citizens rather than citizen soldiers.
You just nullified everything I've said by making it redundant.
this
No they fucking cant lmao, fallacy fallacy much?
yes.
Although I think it's worth stating classical cavalry was a major threat to infantry formations, however cavalry went out of fashion with the Romans and Germanics since they were just a race of foot soldiers. Cavalry in the classical world was devastating, we need only look at cataphracts, germanic horsemen, scythians, gallic horsemen, iberian light cavalry. But cavalry doesn't construct cities or forts, nor are they plentiful.
Thus the Romans and Germanics did fine without them.
>phalanx
You refer to hoplites while the other user refers to phalangites.

The hoplite phalanx at marathon fell apart btw, the Greeks only managed to turn the battle around because they realize their center which broke was in a valley and the wings were on opposing hillsides, thus the persians were trapped between two ironclad walls of angry Greeks.

>suddenly a pikologist appears

>, they all so had laws for minimum armour and arms requirements.
Imagine this nowadays
>sorry sir but you need to buy the AR-15 with pump stock, your lousy semi auto SA80A2 no longer qualifies as arms sufficient to protect yourself from the goverment

Woah look at that, swords as side arms
>cheap
WEW, do you know how much drilling you need for them to all work together
>a group is a deadly force
No a group of musketeers is, pikemen have to catch you on foot then stab you in areas where you bleed sufficiently, and if only one pike is attacking you then you can grab it and split the head off
Alexander's pikes were two handers, whilst Marathon's were one handed
GOSH have you never played rome 2

except they would also be mandated to train with those weapons. Something that gun nuts forget.

No they weren't

The Swiss didn't use pure pike squares in the 15th century, but mixed formations, the majority of combatants alway were halberdiers.

>gun nuts forget
Wait do they not have the culture of shoot every wednesday and friday or just saturday across the pond?

That doesn't make an effective unit.

I understand morale drilling is different to aim drilling, but still do they not do that?

Walk to the nonspiky side

There is none.

There is if you move fast enough.

You can outmanuever them very easily and if they go over rough terrain they can be picked apart very easily.
The Romans were fucking experts on exploiting Macedonian pike phalanx's i suggest you read up on the battle of Cynoscephalae and other Roman battles against Greek/Macedonian armies which pretty was usually just them either out manuevering or flanking the Phalanx and then just fucking their shit up in close sword range combat.

Nope, pike formations would work in every direction and literately could turn on the spot.

>You can outmanuever them very easily and if they go over rough terrain they can be picked apart very easily.
Interestingly enough, the Swiss unit tactics was not about pikes or halberds, but about moving a large closed infantry formations fast and in good order over the battlefield. That was the main difference to earlier medieval warfare, not the weapons.

You are absolutely retarded.

Thanks for you informative and well founded comment user.

I wasnt talking about swiss units tactics at all in my posts.
You are correct?

Ill see you in the next thread to let you know how much of a dumbass you are since you seem to enjoy it so much.

Yes, I am aware of that, I just wanted to state that the Swiss approach was different and just because they had long pikes doesn't make them equal to earlier hoplites. Sorry.

Ok, by then.

>The trick to beating the phalanx, as the Romans found, was to penetrate the spear wall and engage the enemy with swords. Roman lorica helped a lot with both getting into contact with the phalangites and subduing them in hand-to-hand combat.

The trick to defeating the phalanx was to pull it apart by using more agile units or baiting it into bad terrain, thus allowing you to close in to begin with.

At both Cynoscephalae and Pydna, Rome suffered grueling loses taking on the phalanx head-on until they managed to get around and besides the formation, slaughtering the locked-together Macedonians. The armor did nothing and your argument is wrong.

They arent equal to earlier hoplites at all thats right.
Not being rude but i have no clue why that needed to be clarified.
I was talking about macedonian pike formations and why they became ineffective during a time of Roman expansion, which is why they were done away with for the most part for, like the OP stated, 1800 years give or take.

dailymotion.com/video/x2h81lh
skip to 9:30 to get a glimpse how pike squares worked. Yes, they could turn on the spot.
not sure what you are doing in this thread. seriously.

Trying to point out that the Swiss were not similar or related to hoplites just because of the pike. But reinventing large infantry unit tactics is what made them special in the medieval context.

Im sorry but my autism is really strong.
The romans didnt take heavy losses at Cynoscephalae, it was a decisive victory with heavy Macedonian casualties
not the other way around

You confused me because you were calling pike formations hoplites forgive me i understand what youre trying to point out now.

Not only was that very slow it was only around 40 guys doing that.
Now imagine a huge line of infantry all doing that at once quickly with out hic ups or miscommunication during that chaos of a full scale battle.
Please understand that you arent taking into account what it would have been like at ALL

Took them 1800 years to forget how to use big ass shields

Quality shitposting; this is what it looks like.

Interesting enough, historic battles sources always tell about how the Swiss could move faster than anybody else over the battlefield and where able to turn and attack in different directions. Battle of Laupen 1339 is a good example. Matter of fact, the Swiss successes was not because of the pike (the didn't use it for over 150 years) but because of mass infantry tactics, namely using drums and horns to coordinate unit movements.
I'd recommend you John McCormack "One Million Mercenaries" for a good entry level book into Swiss military organization in the high medieval.

>Not only was that very slow it was only around 40 guys doing that.
It was a 100 guys ( you know 10x10) and they do it faster than anyone else at the time. The Swiss literally reinvented with organized moving infantry formations, that was their edge and all of Europe copied it pretty fast.

>The trick to beating the phalanx, as the Romans found, was to penetrate the spear wall
Dude trust me just run through the spear wall and you win easy.

Because it went out of fashion.

What almost every person in these kinds of debates gloss over is that military history in the pre-modern era was dominated by fashion and culture far more than science and research.

People tended to adopt the latest fad in warfare because of the prestige and reputation of some nearby empire they fought with or against, or some mercenaries that were paid well and got the ladies wet, or because their family married in to a new culture and their veterans trained in this or that weapon for generations.

> eastern cataphracts were enough of a match for medieval knights

Not remotely true. One of the highlights of the Komnenian army reforms was to model their cataphracts more like knights after Frankish knights repeatedly defeated 11th century Byzantine Cataphracts, which were greatly superior to Companion Cavalry or earlier cataphracts. The Kontos was changed from a two handed grip to being couched under 1 arm. Barding was reduced to allow the horse to charge at a gallop rather than a trot.

>fashion
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was just fashion and not the total colapse of civilization and return to tribal warfare (aka Migration age) that lead to the loss of coordinated infantry formations in battle...

>The romans didnt take heavy losses at Cynoscephalae, it was a decisive victory with heavy Macedonian casualties

They suffered initially when they went against the phalanx uphill and were unable to get through, the middle and left sides pushed their spears with their full weight against the Romans below and killed many, but once they got around on the right flank they stabbed the unwitting and defenseless macedonians from behind while they were unable to turn and lower their pikes or switch to their swords, slaughtering the macedonian line unit by unit until the whole army was routed or dead.

Christianity plunged the West into a dark age where man lost the capacity to form complex spear and pike formations. The return of large pike formations was evidence that the fog was slowly dissipating, but it was a difficult journey full of reverses.

Western Rome's armies were capable right up until the collapse, and the barbarians that overtook them were themselves long Romanized militarily.

Yes, and then suddenly infantry unit tactics did vanish completely from the European theater for 800 years. Im sure it was just fashion and didn't have anything to do with that major collapse of civilization.

Which infantry tactics are you refering to?

Infatry unit tactics in closed formations. This is what was lot after the fall of the roman empire and got rediscovered by the swiss.

The writing down of infantry tactics disappeared, yes. That's not the same thing at all as infantry tactics themselves disappearing. They involved smaller scale engagements, but not disorganized mobs.

>Infatry unit tactics in closed formations
>what is the shield wall

There is literally no single source for any organized infantry tactics in medieval Europe, and contemporary chronists write about the Swiss's tactics as something new and never seen before.

forming a battle line != infantry unit tactics.

Marching in formations, being able to move formations over the battlefield in good order, thats what I am talking about. And yes, that simple bit of soldiering got lost during the medieval.

There are no sources for building techniques either, but that doesn't mean people didn't know advanced construction techniques until the Renaissance.

>And yes, that simple bit of soldiering got lost during the medieval.
How do you know that? We only know they stopped writing these things down.

This sounds like shit. The Scots and Flemish used pike formations succesfully in the middle ages. Sure there are other examples as well.

Why did they use halberdiers in the middle of the formation?

I imagine because once the melee begins and the front lines of pikes are locked in a push, haberdiers were more flexible

They dropped the pike because the Romans proved their style of infantry tactics would win against the pikes of the era most of the time. It is that simple.

>Roman military text De Re Militari remains popular throughout the middle ages and is one of the first ever books to be printed

What did they mean by this?

It would have been interesting to see wars between Rome and a Hellenistic power that didn't surrender after one battle due to the crippling manpower deficit among the Diadochi.

But how would they be able to reach? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have the reverse? I.e halberdiers on the front, sides and rear and pikemen in the middle.

>The Scots and Flemish used pike formations succesfully in the middle ages
Actually in the late medieval.

Guys, it might come as a surprise to you, but from like 600-1300 no one used formation combat in europe. You just did march your guys to the battlefield and then let them battle it out.
Dividing your units into tactical formation, using this formation to form line or square, synchronized marching in formation. All those things where lost and only rediscovered at the dawn of the modern age. And thats what made the Swiss so successful, because they were curbstomping Austrian knights 120 years before there was pikes.
Again, try " One Million Mercenaries" by McCormack for references.

One of the key purposes of the pike is to repel horsemen and other people with pikes.

The strength of the halberd is that even when fighting gets disorganized, and halberd er can still hold his own, while pikes are pretty much useless outside of a closed formation.

the pikemen create the initial defense for the halberdiers to advance (halberdiers can advance towards enemies while enemies are blocked by pike ends)
the pikes would be mostly useless if the halberdiers were in front

Pikes are solely there to protect the infantry from heavy cav attack, the halberdiers where the real butchers and did most of the killing.

>Why did they use halberdiers in the middle of the formation?
Halberdiers where the main infantry weapon that did the brunt of the combat. Pikes are only for protection against cavalry rushes. Pikes made up 20-30% of a Swisd formation, with the rest being halberds and some crossbows.
Later the halberds where switched for arquebuses and you got pike&shot warfare.

>Guys, it might come as a surprise to you, but from like 600-1300 no one used formation combat in europe.

Byzantines

Nope, at least they did not during the Norman conquest of Italy in the 11th/12th century.

>Guys, it might come as a surprise to you, but from like 600-1300 no one used formation combat in europe
>Shield Walls.
>Battles & Lances organization.

because romans didnt have muskets

they even had problems with crossbows

they just didnt know how to make good steel in large enough quantities, some papirus in whichever post-fire incarnation of the alexandrian library probably had some recepie on how to make powder that goes bang, but the thing is romans just werent that good at metallurgy