Peasant Rebelions

Also worth noting that, in addition to using some of the first real firearms in Europe, the Hussites were all about the flail, as in the "short pole attached to a longer pole that you swing at people" type rather than the knightly weapon with the iron ball at the end that the term usually refers to. Basically nunchaks but a pole weapon, maybe with some weights or spiky bits if you had some metal lying around.

Great for smacking a knight off his horse and, being made of wood and derived from an agricultural tool, a great peasant weapon if you're looking for one for a setting.

>. The common early Christian belief in reincarnation didn't help matters either, which is one of the reasons the early Catholic church did away with that.

I thought that was due to rivalry with the Marian Church that was also around during the Catholic Church's infancy?

It was; don't believe the 'muhpression'.

That also played into it.The guy who cast deciding vote at the council also argued that whether it was true or not that people reincarnated, it was better that people be told they only had one chance at life before facing judgment, as it would encourage them to be good here and now.

France had the Jacquerie.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie

Early part of this gives a solid overview of rome’s relation to the Christians.
m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLDb22nlVXGgdnyUmhoPII-EnX-hx6y_Ev&t=1043s&v=A86fIELxFds

>Did knights spend most of their time putting down these insurrections when they weren't fighting each other?
Did knights actually spend a lot of time fighting each other?

Not nearly as much time as they spend fighting their kings, actually.

>even in the middle of a war that mans wife is fucking nagging him

BURTRICE THERE'S A BATTLE ON

time to post something horribly historically inaccurate and start a fight, desu

The Hussites were pretty fucking rad and it's a shame they're never really included in anything fictional.

Also the Ikkō-Ikki in Japan, guys. Those peasants/monks got up to some real rad shit.

Honestly, the Hussite Wars are like something out of some mediocre fantasy series.

A rag-tag army of rebels with a few gallant knight allies about to be smashed by a force of arrogant douchebag nobility who conventional military thinking says they have no chance in hell of beating, until a grizzled old veteran with an eyepatch has a crazy idea that just might work.

You can even see exactly how Hollywood would cut it, with a bunch of haughty nobles in shining armor laughing at how "They must be mad!" while the poor rebels wheel horse-drawn carts out onto the field of battle.

And what's funny is that there's a reason the "wagon fort" style of combat only happened in that one instance, because it's really not very effective against any enemy that bothered to bring infantry. All the knights had to do was get off their horses and footslog it, but all their experience in warfare was just "slap on your expensive armor, get on your expensive horse, and charge with all the other rich guys" and they just couldn't think of doing it any other way. In that way it was a lot like what happened at Agincourt.

>it was a lot like what happened at Agincourt
Eh? IIRC French decided to dismount and fight on foot. Then footslog through a long long muddy slop of a hill no less. French were to exhausted when they finally crawled up to their enemies.

The French opened with a cavalry charge at Agincourt, which when about as well as you can imagine.
But I was referring mostly to the nobility getting a kick in the ass after making poor decisions because of their perceived superiority over the common folk. At Agincourt the French knights insisted at being at the front of the line so they could be assured to capture English knights to ransom once they'd won. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they might actually be killed by some English commoners with bows and arrows until shit started to hit the fan. The Hussite Wars played out similarly, except that in the Hundred Years' War the French stopped making the same mistakes whereas the Hussites evidently had new crusaders keep showing up thinking they'd succeed where the others had failed. So it was essentially Agincourt ad nauseam for a while.

That's some spicy peasant fighting. But it seems like they are poned without hand gons.

Well, they pretty much sparked everyone in Europe wanting guns because they kicked so much ass with them.

And now the European nobility doesn't allow their peasants to own guns anymore. Learned their lesson.

>Nobility

It wasn't the nobility; the nobility got killed off in the early 20th century; it was Communists, Socialists, Fabian Society members, etc.

The last peasant rebellion in England was in 1607 and had a strange story to it

>The Newton Rebellion
>Parliament had passed a new law allowing Lords to enclose common land
>The common folk couldn't grow their own food
>John "Captain Pouch" Reynolds, a small time peddler began instigating riots and creating a small peasant army
>He always carried a leather pouch which he claimed was a token from King James I that they were legally in the right
>The small peasant army met in Newton to overthrow the unpopular Lord Thomas Tresham, because of his enthusiasm to enclose land and his cousin Francis Tresham had been a member of the gunpowder plot 2 years before
>King James orders that his neighbour Lord Edward Montagu put down the riot
>Montagu's call to arms was ignored by the militia and many instead joined the peasants
>Instead he armed the servants and families of local landowners
>Battle of Newton, 50 killed and the leaders of the rebellion captured
>John Reynolds was hanged for treason
>His pouch contained nothing but some cheese

Hence the expression "Hard Cheese" to mean bad luck.

The Munster Rebellion is probably the craziest one that's happened in the West, but was much smaller than some.

youtu.be/ROP_19UNF3U

The East has had the worst ones.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Xianzhong

>to give thanks for his recovery after an illness, he was said to have cut off the feet of many women. The severed feet were heaped in two piles with those of his favorite concubine, whose feet were unusually small, placed on top. These two piles of feet were then doused in oil and set alight to become what he called "heavenly candles".

>The last Ming census figure for Sichuan in 1578 (more than 60 years before Zhang entered Sichuan) gave a population of 3,102,073. However, by 1661, only 16,096 adult males were registered in Sichuan, and Chengdu was said to have become a virtual ghost town frequented by tigers.

The biggest and most successful? I'd have to say the Russian Revolution during/after the first world war

Man, what is it with Chinese nobles and mutilating feet?

That's the guy attributed with building the Seven Kill Stele. He was nuts.

What the actual fuck china
How long until another fucking rebellion happens over there?

You have to remember that most of these horrific historical acts are also exaggerated by later historians and political powers. Wu Zetian is good example.

>How long until another fucking rebellion happens over there?
Sooner than you imagine.
>China will run out of drinkable water in 2030 due to mass pollution
>2030 is also the estimated point where China's Christian community becomes the largest in the world, the commies aren't gonna like that
>The commies also aren't gonna like the growing middle class, which learns of the living standards and freedoms of the Middle Class in the West and Westernized East (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) and wants the same
>Growing prosperity will be associated with growing costs of production, meaning many sweatshops will move to India or West Africa
Even ignoring its upcoming drinking water and religious problems, China's communist party is faced with a dilemma: will it allow the Middle Class to grow and liberalize, weakening its grip over Chinese politics and ending its economy of mass production for a more luxury centric one (like Japan did before them), or will it instead actively keep the Middle Class impoverished in order to keep their party in power and retain their economy of mass production of cheap goods? Another interesting tidbit that will make China's future a bit more exciting: China has no army, the Communist Party has an army. All its soldiers swear allegiance to the Party, not the nation. It's not like most other countries where the army is loyal to the state regardless of who is running it or what his political affiliations are.

Oh jesus. That place is basically a powder keg waiting to explode at this point. I wonder if it'll stay as one country, or fragment into a few. Well, other than Tibet, theyr'e just gonna fuck off in the ensuing chaos

Without a strong central authority like a divine emperor (who was very impotent against outward threats) or a group like the communist party I very much doubt China could stay unified. Can't say I'd personally be against the idea of a balkanised China. It's kind of an unnatural super-nation, much like India and the old Soviet Union.

>It's kind of an unnatural super-nation, much like India and the old Soviet Union
and Britain and France. Not a fan of the Chinese, but what they're attempting (forcing through this idea of a unified Han identity for all Chinese) is what France achieved over the past few centuries (forcing through this idea of a unified Parisian identity for all Frenchmen... well, except the "new Frenchmen"). But you're right in that outside threats were always important for China, it lacks a natural frontier to the north so it was always on the lookout for invasions by the goddam Mongorians. With that threat gone, a lot of the pressure for the country to stay together is gone which is why China will rise and fall with its ability to instill a sense of Chineseness in its people.

Hell, if we want to go back to France just compare it with its southern neighbor. The most dissenting part of France, Corsica, only has about 10% support for total independence (and about 40% support for greater autonomy within the whole of France, which still means about half of all Corsicans are fine with the status quo). Meanwhile in Spain the Catalans, who already have far more extensive autonomy than any part of France (every region of Spain even has its own independent Civil Code), have shaken the entire nation with their drive for independence.

Identity will play a big role in the future of nations, not just in China but outside of it as well. A nation is a fiction that only exists as long as its inhabitants believe in it or the government has the guns to enforce it.

Of course, we can't forget the real estate bubble that's due to pop by the best next decade. That's true about the Chinese Army, but man-for-man, they're a joke by international standards. Look up how low some of their physical standards for recruitment are, it's crazy.

Hussite Revolt was religious not peasant

>and Britain and France.
True, but consider how large China is by comparison, and how massive the language differences can be between regions. Though India's a better example of an exceedingly artificial nation; it's held together a colonial idea rather than a national identity.

Whilst true, the two often overlap.

Like here; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaga_Rebellion

Isn't India held together by religion? As in, their system of sister cults and common caste system? Isn't that the reason india and Pakistan are separate?

Thomas Müntzer was a Protestant priest who combined both radical Christian theology with a radical critic of the existing distribution of wealth and power and came to propagate an almost communist and egalitarian ,but also fundamental Christian ideal state that would try to re-establish a early and true Christianity that existed before it became an instrument of the ruling classes.

Why did the hussites go heretic? Wouldn't their cause be a bit more accepted had they not decide to play heresy?

But catholics were the real heretics all along, user

They wanted the bible written in their own language, you know, the usual shit

>nobility
You mean merchants and bankers, all of them belonging to the third state like peasants?

Heresy is preferable to schism.

Isn't this chap Mr. 7kill?

Wasn't Switzerland founded after a successful peasant revolt?

t. fatass americlap who knows nothing about history

Merchants and bankers are no worse than nobles who don't fulfill their obligations, they just have much more money

Is it just me or does that sound really immoral to change a major idea of the faith like that?
It has the potential to happen soon if the Chinese get hit with a considerable economic down turn that would put millions out of work. If the PRC cant give them any sort of aid to keep them afloat until the economy gets on track again or political agitators come out the wood works you might see some large uprisings.

Are you aware of how varied hinduism is? Calling it a religion as opposed to a religious group (akin to abrahamic faiths) is already a stretch. Only posible because they're not influenced by autistic semitic notions of spreading your truth as the only one.

Also not indians are hindu and pakistan is a failed state.

Ok stop the autism for a second (I'm not even christian) and replace heretic for "unpopular religious decisions". Like, Joan of Arc who otherwise could have sympathized with them wanted to crush them solely for this. Can't they rebel against feudalism and adopt whatever sect later?

t. French aristo

Better or worse, they're very different in everything.

They take their name from a preacher that was executed while negotiating in good faith IIRC, Huss or some such. They can't just not be heretics, their identity as a group is defined by their adherence to something other than straight Catholicism.

More or less, yes. It was a peasant revolt with heavy backing from local nobility and merchant classes IIRC, against direct Habsburg rule from Austria.

Like we said; it wasn't just about feudalism. It was about catholic rule, having a bible in the local language etc. Before the religious shenanigans of the 16th century, there practically was no such thing as a non-latin bible for most peoples in Europe. To translate it was heresy, as it was not meant to be read by non-clergy.

The thing about nobility using religion, in this case catholicism, to maintain their power is that the peasants become religious to a degree where they're willing to take up arms in the name of their own faith if offered an alternative to the aristocrat-backing mainstream.

They were just following their conscience bro, doing what they thought was right.

If you look at peasant revolts and independence movements prior to the invention of the printing press, they almost always occur for one of two reasons: "They ain't lettin' us have our Jesus the way we want to," "The taxes is too damn high," or the still-relevant-in-contemporary-society "They say we're part of their country but we are obviously a different country let's just be our own country." The Hussite Wars happened to stem from the first one.

Keep in mind that these people were feudal serfs, they weren't at all educated, and the popular image of a bunch of peasants meeting by candlelight and saying "You know, the feudal system isn't really working out for us" wasn't really a thing until the Enlightenment. The idea of even having a non-feudal system of government either didn't occur to or seemed impossible to the common folk, so they just dealt with the shit until the nobility started affecting either their religion or their ability to feed their families.

The idea of "social reforms" didn't exist then in the same way they do now. Reforms were either something that a new king or emperor put in place because he saw that shit was fucked or they didn't happen at all.

Shortly after the Peasants' Revolt began, Ball was released by the Kentish rebels from his prison.[3] He preached to them at Blackheath (the revolting peasants' rendezvous to the south of Greenwich) in an open-air sermon that included the following:

When Adam delved and Eve span,[a] Who was then the gentleman?[4] From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)

And a primary cause of the Peasants' Revolt was that the taxes were too damn high.

I didn't mean to suggest that everyone sans the nobility in those times were idiots rolling about in the muck Monty Python style, just that it wasn't possible to get the ball rolling solely on the ideas of liberty or social reform.

>They take their name from a preacher that was executed while negotiating in good faith IIRC, Huss or some such.

Jan Hus, sometimes translated as John Huss.

The catholic church was intimately woven into the fabric of feudalism, and the corruption within the church was as much what they were rebelling against as feudalism ever was, and their opposition to the feudal system was largely founded not on them getting shafted by it, but on the Bible (take a wild guess why the catholic church didn't like translated bibles).

>Ok stop the autism for a second (I'm not even christian) and replace heretic for "unpopular religious decisions".

As some one who ran a game during that time I have done a lot of research. So here is make best short version.

They came out of the bad effects of the Western Schism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Schism

Church stopped doing a lot of things people liked, like caring for orphan, poor, etc. Other groups had to step in for those things. This is the era and place that "Son of a gun" comes from because the Gunsmiths Guild of Prague took over caring for orphans in its area. Because of there being 2 to 3 Popes at a time ground level church officials started doing what ever they wanted. Catholics crossed the line of "unpopular religious decisions" during that time and did so hard. Fast foreword 30 and people were tired of that shit. People like Jan Hus tried to fix things from the ground up, but a top down reformer Sigismund of Luxembourg was having none of that.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismund,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

TLDR on above Sigismund was easily the powerful man in the know world at the time and had a VERY powerful alliance to back him up. Also his brother was Wenceslaus IV of of Bohemia who felt that the Hussite were picking on him.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenceslaus_IV_of_Bohemia

Sigismund wanted to move the church back to its old days before the Western Schism . The New Pope he picked also did not like Jan Hussite either. One ecclesiastical court case later after breaking A LOT of Jan Hus rights everyone got inside ecclesiastical courts Jan Hus was put to death and his followers were up in arms. Inculed a few of Wenceslaus generals like Jan Žižka.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Žižka

>Can't they rebel against feudalism and adopt whatever sect later?

They were against their king but not against the idea of having a king. The Hussite armies were peasants and city folk.

Gentlemen, the Capitalists of today hardly need guns to keep people in line. Consumer advertising works far better.
Now back to discussing your history peasants.

kind of ture.

Or America.

This man walks up to your gf in a bar, slaps her ass and proposes that you form an international congress to solve all the religious, economic, social and geo-political issues of Europe in a peaceful way to avoid the horrors of war repeating themselves over and over

What do you do?

We tried twice, George, it doesn't work

>Is it just me or does that sound really immoral to change a major idea of the faith like that?

The early church did a lot of that kind of shit. It was a weird time.

Didnt Richard 2 agree to their demand to end serfdom?

... but a lot of nobles either sit out the war or even were Hussite themselves. Same with church men in the area. Really the Hussite were not a peasants revolt, they were a full revolution.

>Let's have a real look at peasant rebellions in Europe.

Time to clear up a big issue: peasant is only a medieval social class from the outside looking in. Their was in order of wealth wage labors ( daytellers), tenant farmers, serfs, rural craftsmen. and land owning farmers ( yeomen, bondsmen, etc). They all had different interest, many of those at odds with each other. Peasant revolts failed most of the time because the revolt could not align all of the peasant class's together. Heck even a democratic goal could not do it because the rural craftsmen would see that as leading to price regulation of their goods. They were not wrong in thinking that either.

Yeah, and the minute everyone went home he killed the leader of the rebellion and reneged on his promise to end it.

Peasant revolts failed because nobles could wait them out safely inside their castles until the peasants food ran out, and they had to disperse

>Be Feudal
>Realistically need brunt of your manpower to harvest and preserve food, during a few weeks of fall
>Be Feudal Peasant
>Rebel
>Harvest season hits, and you need to fold, because you can't wage war and be peasant at the same time
Its not even about just Castles either. A lot of nobility will fold, once they realize their source of food is in jeopardy.

>(relatively) advanced.
For the purposes of peasant revolutions, they are. Vastly less prone to failure, far greater range of mobility and usable conditions, increased accuracy (especially in the later half of the century). They're a massive improvement over early gunpowder weapons

>Honestly, the Hussite Wars are like something out of some mediocre fantasy series.

There was even a bunch of movies made in that style based on it

youtube.com/watch?v=tMVGUm-J1zQ

>A lot of nobility will fold
Correct me if I'm wrong but I can't recall a single time nobility folded in this situation. Nobles have storages, they have money, they can wait peasants out. Peasants can't do the same to nobles.

>"They say we're part of their country but we are obviously a different country let's just be our own country.
This motherfucker right here. Everyone gets down on religion, but this bad boy has killed more humans than heart disease

Go to war, obviously

Dynastic cycle is 2-300 years so I reckon give it another century or so

>Dynastic cycle
I love that we're not even pretending that the communist government isn't just another dynasty. Next, can we point out that the Soviet/post Soviet leaders of Russia might as well call themselves tsars?

Except Jan Zizka was literally undefeated in the field, so it was more like they had a truly visionary general who repeatedly wrecked the flower of Teutonic chivalry that one lucky honhonfest of some stupid knights.

I mean, the word pistol in the English language practically exists because of the Hussites. Those peasants got on top of gunpowder in a new, drastically less suicidal way.

>And what's funny is that there's a reason the "wagon fort" style of combat only happened in that one instance, because it's really not very effective against any enemy that bothered to bring infantry. All the knights had to do was get off their horses and footslog it

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. If the cavalry dismounted to proceed as infantry, they would still find themselves drastically out-positioned and out-fortified by the peasant infantry which would have the distinct advantage of an incredibly defensible position. You seriously think these knights were so stupid that they didn't ever try the obvious course of action you suggest? They were dying in droves over the course of years and somehow you're the only genius that could come up with getting off the horse? Get real, pleb.

1. I don't have a gf, it's all bound to fail anyway.
2. ONLY if we also invite the Orthodox, Syriac and Coptic churches too. If we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right.

I mean, you're not wrong, but I'd say it was a combination of both- a military genius in Jan Zizka and the inflexibility of his opponents.

If that's the case, then why did almost nobody else in history do the same thing?

Keep in mind that the wagon fort isn't really a "mobile castle", but more like a bunch of mobile walls. It's not designed to keep people out so much as to stop the people inside from being bowled over by a cavalry charge. There are gaps between each wagon where you've got guys with polearms and pavise shields (see above picture.)

Historical people weren't idiots, but in hindsight they didn't always act completely rationally either, even if their life depended on it. There's a reason that almost nobody before or since used the same tactics and that's because it isn't really that hard for a superior military force to deal with. But in order to probably counter that situation you first have to admit that cavalry charges by mounted noblemen are going to be useless, and that's a hard thing to accomplish when the social worth of the guys running your army depends on that not being the case.

It's not any different then the French having plenty of crossbowmen at Agincourt but saying "Fuck it, we'll charge the archers" or the Nazis wasting so much of their manufacturing capability on bullshit "super weapons" or the modern US Air Force saying "Close support planes are stupid, we'll just use the F-35 for that." I'm not the first to say those aren't great ideas, and doing so doesn't make me a genius, just someone with a perspective outside the ones whose positions depend on their belief in those concepts.

Canons became a thing on the battlefield shortly after.

But even after that, field fortifications were still applied if an army had time for those kinds of preparations.

>If that's the case, then why did almost nobody else in history do the same thing?
Except they have and did. Zizka did not invent the battle wagon or that particular strategy of using them as fortified positions. It extends all the way back to at least the beginnings of the Assyrian Empire in the 25th century BC, but Zizka was one of the first to so devastatingly add the then new firearm weapons into the mix. After Zizka, fortified positions continued to dominate firearm warfare, but the advent of small caliber field cannons eventually made wagons not as useful, causing soldiers to rely on fortifying field positions with sandbags and other types of bundled material. Warfare in the Napoleonic age heavily relied on maneuverability to secure a location and field fortifications to hold it, with choice weapons being rifles and field cannons. Armored wagon tactics have lived on in tanks, which were often used to cover troops from fire, especially in WW1 and such early periods.

I was, of course, referring to the wagons specifically, not field fortifications in general, as implied that the wagon fort would also be an effective defense against infantry. Similar tactics do show up a few other times in history but to my knowledge it's always strictly as a defense against cavalry.

Also on the Assyrians using wagon forts, can you point me to somewhere that talks about that? I've never heard of such a thing; I know the Sumerians used pretty boxy cart-chariots but that's the closest I'm aware of.

What killed the wagon forts was the use of artillery which could simply destroy the forts at greater distances. It had nothing to do with infantry combat because the wagon forts would be just as good at repelling infantry as they are at repelling cavalry.

Never. The Chinese would just send in the army, like at Tiananmen Square.

Throw him out a window.

Boers laagered their wagons against the Zulus pretty frequently, and the Zulus were pretty much entirely melee infantry.

Good point, but the Boers (and the settlers in the American West) already had the wagons with them. At that point you might as well put them between you and the enemy as a makeshift fortification even if it's not the best. In that way it's different from building dedicated "war wagons."

>take a wild guess why the catholic church didn't like translated bibles
They wanted educated clergy to be the only ones explaining and interpreting it, not random jimbos.

Good point as well. But I think it's fair to note, as other anons have pointed out, that while the use of actual wagons fell out of military practice due to the proliferation of field cannons able easily to destroy wagon forts, the concept of quickly-built field fortifications, like sandbags or trenches (or war wagons), never did.