It's called Mount and Blade for a reason. Cavalry are overpowered by the nature of the game.

I don't have a citation immediately on hand, but lances weren't all that heavy - sure, there were definitely extremely heavy lances, but not all of them were that heavy. Of course, there was a trend of increasingly heavy lances as time went on, but they were never so heavy as to be completely useless on foot. The extremely heavy ones were reserved for jousting. Regular lances, while definitely inferior to an infantry pike at doing the job of a pike, could still be pressed into service when necessary and wouldn't do too bad of a job.

It was a fairly unusual situation, though, from what I remember. I'll see if I can find it, but no guarantees. It's been months now and I've read a lot of books and threads in the meantime.

On another note, I'd argue that the crossbow itself wasn't that great of an equalizer - only the most powerful, heavy, steel shafted and windlass (or similarly complex mechanism) cranked arbalests were really particularly effective, otherwise crossbows were really fairly unimpressive and not really much of an equalizer at all. Naturally, these only began to appear at around the same time the gun was appearing.

Useful for arming masses of peasants with a ranged weapon, but ranged weapons were really just harassment, even with the best longbowmen, let alone the comparatively underskilled and unappreciated bowmen of the rest of Europe.

Useful, but not really a game changer.

 

First, I've worn plate armor.

It.Is.Heavy.

"But the cartwheels!"

Battles were not fought over the .5 seconds it takes to complete a cartwheel. Constant motion while wearing armor is tiring, it may not feel like much when you've just put it on, but after 45 minutes in the sun doing heavy activity? Different story.

Ever get boots or shoes stuck in the mud? Ever see what reenactments or concerts can do to a grass field?

Try wearing 60lbs and climbing a horse, then throw yourself off of that horse at full gallop (because some uneducated peon took his pike and said "Fuck your horse"), then get up and run around with those 60lbs on for a good 30 minutes to an hour. Oh ya, swing a period accurate longsword (5 - 10lbs) at full strength that whole time. Then tell me how you feel.

That museum is the Met, good source regarding plate armor.

But... when picking your sources, try to choose ones that don't contradict your other statements.

"The lance was the primary weapon of the medieval knight"
- You, pg.1 post 1.

"Throughout medieval Europe, swords were the chief weapon of knights and mounted men-at-arms."
- Same source page, right near the bottom.

You're also debating topics that cover a few different centuries. Things that worked for Alexander III probably didn't work as well in the battle of Poitiers. Pick a fucking time period and confine your debate to that. This "Oh but Alexander III..." bullshit doesn't fly when referencing 14th century European knights.

I'm also going to leave this here for you to peruse at your leisure. Not a workable source, but a nice explanation for those strange pointy swords with no obvious purpose...

gbbz may have been wrong in a couple of instances, shit who isn't from time to time. But at least he was polite about it.

You, on the other hand, debate like a whiny bitch who can't back up his statements. You go on the attack with little to no provocation, issue ultimatums like you're Sith, and somehow find him reprehensible for things that you yourself do.

Oh, and posting PMs in a thread is kind of a dick move.

For all of your harping on about sources, gbbz at least provided books. You provided a video of a bullshit fights, with 3 1/2lb (At maximum) swords made of spring steel, where the fights are closer to fencing or kendo than any sort of real world battle, That guy is wearing a tshirt. Jesus wept.

Your second source was the Met website, which also contradicts one of your points entirely.

Did you actually read any of those pages you linked? Or did you just search for the first pages that agreed with you and link them? Because so far, your research amounts to the space battles forum, youtube, a public museum website, and this website.

Reliable place that last one, with it's Starcraft articles, and an article titled "Nine rules for forming a lasting gaming clan"

Admit it, you found that on google, skimmed it, and posted the link. Never checking the veracity of his claims, or how reliable it was as a source. "Oh but I found it in 20 seconds, I said that." So? If you use it as a source, that source better be legit in the extreme. If you want to act like an expert, then you'll get treated like one.

Your sources need to be fucking impeccable.

Not a single one of your "sources" would cut it in the real world, at all. Ever.

For all of your interest, you are not an archaeologist, nor are you a credible expert. As such, if you're going to say something is FACT, cite that shit. You've made a ridiculous amount of statements here, and I would truly like to see some sources. Now I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, nor am I admitting that you're in any way right, because truthfully, I don't give a shit about this argument. I just want sources.

This is me, saying to you, as you said unto gbbz.

 

I don't doubt it's tiring, wearing plate armor, but they trained for it. It's not quite the same, you wearing plate for the lulz (if that's why you did it) versus a knight who trained for it.

When I was in highschool a halfway decent DT trained in the off season with a weighted vest and shorts (upwards of 80-100 lbs.). He ran stairs with one leg, ran wind sprints with us (and was faster than any other lineman), and did a bunch of other really tiring shit, and he was at it for longer than thirty minutes. Yeah, he was really tired afterwards, but he still did it.

Is it so farfetched then, that knights could be 'agile and quick' in plate? I don't think so. Not as agile or as quick as a man in say, leather armor, but he wouldn't be that encumbered.

Were swords really that heavy? Everything I've googled over the last few weeks lists most longswords as weighing between 2.5 to 4.5 lbs, with ceremonial greatswords weighing upwards of the 10-15 lb. mark.

 

Yeah, I would keel over and die in platemail. But that goes for a marathon too. You can do it, you just have to train for it. Lazy nerds reading fanfiction aren't typically built for it lol..

 

Oh, absolutely. Please don't get the idea that I'm saying plate is too heavy to use effectively. Simply put, that shit was amazing. I'm just saying that 60 lbs. is no joke, and referring to it as "Not that heavy." doesn't really any justice to the reality.

And I wore it to understand how it moves and functions, the fact that I was chanting "Oh hell yes!" in my head never factored into it.

No matter how hard you train, wearing anything like that, you're always going to be 'less agile' than you were without it. But the images portrayed on TV and in movies where the knight stomps along and swings in almost slow motion are comically false. My experience with plate was brief, hot, tiring, and completely awesome (Wonderful opportunity for a sex joke of some sort.).

But that's just my experience with it as an average, fairly in shape guy. Not someone raised to be a page --> squire --> knight, who trains in full plate. I'm just saying that when people refute the heaviness of plate, they frequently downplay those 50-60 lbs. For someone who trains in it, I'm sure you adjust accordingly. But for the average guy?

This here. Right here. Is someone catching an absolute fuckup of mine.

That paragraph originally had something about shields in it, and was actually combined with the paragraph above it. During revisions and additions I simply missed that. My bad, good catch.

- Ewart Oakeshott, Sword in Hand, pg. 13.

 

I would like to interject here and say that a katana could easily bisect a knight wearing full plate...

Wait, why are you looking at me like that?

:fire

Seriously guys, it's history. I adore it to the bottom of my black and withered heart but it is the most poisoned well ever. For every documented and cited historical fact there's three documented and cited fallacies backed by people with tenure and nothing to lose but their pet theory. Then there's 'history is written by the victor', and Hollywood pouring condensed bullshit into the collective subconscious of western civilization, and internet nationalists with nothing better to do but shitpost 24/7 trying to retcon their country as the most dangerous motherfuckers ever to call themselves Nth Rome... add all that up and you reach a scenario wherein any given conversation about history everyone is going to be wrong about at least one thing and be utterly convinced that they are right.

Let's trace out a chain here. What language are we speaking? English. Who were the English often at odds with during the time period of knights and plate mail? France. What type of troop characterizes the Middle Age French Military? Cavalry. So if in English-speaking cultures, there arose a meme that knights in platemail were clumsy, useless twits just waiting for a crossbow bolt to sprout between their ears, is the more likely culprit historical fact or the lasting legacy of military propaganda? Then came the Revolution, and they certainly didn't have a vested interest in setting the record straight re: the effectiveness of the old regime's aristocratic military structure.

Or maybe it's right, as demonstrated at Crecy. Or maybe it's not, because it's more likely that the French knights at Crecy were wearing plate-and-chain instead of full plate. Or maybe the defeat of the French knights isn't about arrows but instead about mud, shovels, stakes and knives. Or maybe it was because Philip VI was a tosser.

This is just one example. There's been piss flowing in the well 24/7/365 since one caveman said to another caveman, 'that guy's club sucks, mine's better'.

There are historical facts. But it may be it's impossible to identify them all with certainty. We still don't know how to make Damascus Steel or Greek Fire, though there's a bunch of theories for each. To pick another example not at all influenced by the recent release of The Old Gods for CK2, we don't know who Ragnar Lodbrok actually was, if indeed he was anyone at all.

Y'all are saying "I am right, you are wrong" where you should be saying "it seems to me that the theory I support has more compelling evidence than the theory you support". If you want concrete answers get a fucking STEM degree.

 

Good point. The first thing any history course at degree level will teach you is that everyone has a bias. Historians included. A treatise on the Peace of Westphalia (1648 ) would look very different from a Holy Roman perspective than from a French one, for instance, but it would also look different from a German historian's perspective, from a Marxist German historian's perspective, from a royalist English perspective, from a post-modern perspective and so on.

I was taught in school and college mostly from the viewpoint that there were historical 'facts' out there and that it was the historian's job to find them and show them in as objective a manner as they could. That mode of thought is outdated now, because even the act of reading through the raw data of a given event or period confers a bias on the results. Every historian looks at data through the lens of his own personality, the culture he lives in, the politics of the day and the economic situation of the day. You can't filter all that out. It's fundamentally impossible to do so even if you limit it to just selecting which data you include in your treatise.

Historical facts only exist from an objective view point, which is impossible for us to achieve. This not even considering the fact that information on entire centuries is spotty for many places, and has to be filtered through the lens of both the historian and the original creator. History isn't only written by the victors; it's written by the time period as well.

So yeah, history is not a subject based on fact. The vast majority of it is conjecture that even the most ridiculous scientific hypothesis would scoff at, and you have to take everything you read with a large grain of salt. It's not just the modern world that is full of lies.

EDIT: Though I suppose I should mention that post-modern historiography is a load of shit and fuck anyone who actually takes it seriously.

 

QFT. As doddering as Empiricism is at times, at least its legible. I had to read a postmodern historical debate once - 4 pages of writing: 5 sentences. Fucking painful run-on sentences abound in postmodern horseshitography.

In terms of the weight of swords, the blades may have been heavy but they were designed to be very well balanced. Dead weight-wise it doesn't change a thing but actual use wouldn't have been as physically tiring as the bludgeoning weapons.

Also, regarding the Valyrian steel dagger Harry is bequeathed - is black the colour you're attributing to all Valyrian steel? Canon states that it somewhat resembles modern Damascus steel but gives a lot of room for imagination. The blade Red Rain is supposedly reddish and nothing else is said of the other blades. Modern damascus can be hot-blued into almost any colour you want but for natural forge colour only the shades of black through silver/grey can be done. I'm a budding knife collector and make handles for blanks as a hobby so I notice things to do with sharp pointy pieces of metal.

 

For the most part. Other house blades will have differing color palettes, but for the most part, the blades will be black/dark grey.

 

Hmm, you might want to take a look at Peter Connolly's reconstruction of a Roman war saddle. The horned saddle was also used by the Persian cataphracts before the arrival of stirrups.

 

While the lance-swinging is true, you can't really turn on a dime when you're in formation, nor was that particular technique ever used in what I was recounting. What I was trying to describe is how I would expect similar stampedes to occur in real life. You have what, maybe ten, twenty seconds of warning for a company of soldiers to prepare against a charge? And if it hits, you're done (I suppose you might have all the time in the world if they're charging straight at you, but it depends upon the terrain). It's not like fighting another soldier on the battlefield, where you can potentially shake off several hits before dying, a cavalry charge will cripple you and devastate morale and formation. I feel like cavalry are the be-all, because as great as archers might seem, I'm not convinced they were that effective against people clad in plate. As others have already said, penetrating plate with melee weapons is not easy task.

Of course, I admit it's not historical evidence. How did armies operate in the 1300's? Did they split up into many small groups? Or did they fight as one giant blob...? A cavalry charge is obviously not very effective against a dense blob.

And let's not forget Atilla the Hun, who nearly unified all of Asia through the use of horse archery. The circumstances are very different from what I think we're talking about, but well-coordinated mounted attacks are responsible for far more than the katana or the broadsword can be attributed to.

 

I'm just going to point out that from a physics perspective, arrows are substantially better against plate armor than most bladed melee weapons.

A good bow is capable of multiplying a man's strength several times and endowing its projectiles with phenomenal amounts of force, and the arrows concentrate the entirety of that force into a very small, sharp point. It's like a sword thrust moving 3-4 times faster than even the quickest man can possibly stab. Against a flat piece of steel, an arrow will generally penetrate faster, cleaner and deeper than most melee weapons of the same period.

Of course, this ignores the fact that most armor was designed to deflect blows rather than outright oppose them, and melee weapons have the advantage when it comes to precision. I cannot speak to that any further however.

 

I think you must mean Genghis Khan. Atilla the Hun lived in Europe during the fifth century.

 

The matter whether arrows or bolts could penetrate a knight's plate at range is in contention, although they were definitely effective against their mounts. There is an opinion (though not supported by actual evidence) that it were the horses which suffered the most, and therefore caused knights to dismount before a battle when they knew they would face a large amount of missile troops.

Though it is a fact that when a battle was fought primarly with mounted men casualties in horses were greater than those in soldiers.

The greater problem was the matter of economy. It took a long time to train a good bowman, even longer to train a longbowman, while a crossbowman took comparatively little time to reach full effectiveness. It is also believed that the crossbow was a weapon powerful enough to be banned by the Second Lateran Council in 1139, which proves the weapons power and usefulness.

The matter of how much deflection armour provided is not likely to be settled soon. There are many arguments to consider.

 

More cynical people argue that it was banned by the nobility because it gave the ordinary peasant equality in the ability to kill knights and that just wasn't shiny.

Some ancient Chinese (forgot which dynasty, I think Tang) warlord came up with the idea of a bunch of specialised troops that if I recall correctly translates into something like the Ground Rolling Group that were trained specifically to maim the legs of cavalry and chariotry (and I guess in a pinch hack people's legs). Can't verify it as my Mandarin is pants but I remember reading somewhere that in one battle one side dug some secret trenches that put the soldiers out of the effective reach of the mounted opponent but put them at the same level as the legs of the horses as they closed in.

Regarding the penetrative effect of arrows and bolts at range I've always found it puzzling. For anyone who actually likes maths and has studied physics, if an arrow is flying in a ballistic parabolic arc, wouldn't the arrow's horizontal force be greatly weakened by the time it reaches its target due to the law where horizontal force is independent of the vertical? Seems like the horizontal would keep diminishing due to air resistance. At what point would the air resistance increase from the extended travel time of the parabolic trajectory outweight the acceleration generated by gravity acting on the arrow from the apex of the arc? It just feels like straight "sniping" where travel time is minimised always does far more damage than an arrow from a barrage.

 

That's because, from what I understand, most of those barrages were less about piercing the armor/killing the enemy and more about disrupting formations and forcing their men to hold their shields overhead, where they would tire in minutes.

Edit: And what Basilisk said.

 

I'm not sure about the speed thing, but I'm quite sure shooting in a parabolic arc was mostly done to cover a greater distance. Otherwise gravity would make sure the arrow hit the ground too fast for you to reach your enemy.

 

I'm aware of that. I'm wondering about the respective ability to penetrate full plate: at near maximum range and say within 50-100m. I believe a crossbow bolt can be fired to 350m or so but accurate range only to 130m or so whilst a longbow while actually being outranged by the crossbow at the peak of medieval technology would have greater long distance accuracy due to the stability in flight of the arrow compared to the bolt. Just wondering how effective are the weapons when used at their near greatest range.

 

A knight on horseback is a much more dangerous foe than a man on foot, plate armour or no. Take out the horse and suddenly you have a much less dangerous adversary. Adding on to that the fact that falling from a horse going at full gallop in 60-70lbs of armour is not going to do anything good to you and you'll begin to see why killing the enemy's horses was a valid tactic.

 

I just wanted to drop in and say that this nerdy shit is what I live for. Thanks everyone for posting the interesting information and being almost as nerdy as me.