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Alex W.
Location: Canada, Alberta Joined: 16 Feb 2016
Posts: 10
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 Posted: Tue 31 May, 2016 4:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
Thanks a lot, Alex. You could tell me why all these archaeological and artistic evidence findings are always in the historical regions of Italy, Germany or Scandinavia? It's like most of the medieval western nations, such as France and England, had not known these armors until the last two decades of the fourteenth century or whether they only were slow to adopt them anyway. |
Sorry for the late reply. I'll try to answer your question, but I'm only a hobbyist and have no formal education on the matter and this is simply my best (if at least a little educated) guess; Italy and the HRE were basically the main producers of armour at this time. Most of the english and french were ordering their armour from Milan, Nuln, or various other armour producing cities. Mostly only the fabulously wealthy were getting local smiths to custom tailor their personal armour, whereas, the rest were getting their armour made in the aforementioned armouring cities, to be made to measurements sent in, never meeting the armourers in person. It was much, much cheaper to do this way, and the armour was still fantastic, but not quite the work of art the local smith would make for the Fabulously wealthy.
Also keep in mind that the English were still getting "English" armour made in Milan, as that was what they needed, and the armouring cities would often make armour suited to the local fashions of their clients.
This is just what I have gathered from reading various books and discussions, and could be entirely wrong, and if so I would greatly appreciate it if someone more knowledgeable could correct me so I can be ever so slightly less wrong.
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Alan E
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| Posted: Wed 01 Jun, 2016 4:21 am Post subject: |
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| Alex W. wrote: | Mostly only the fabulously wealthy were getting local smiths to custom tailor their personal armour, whereas, the rest were getting their armour made in the aforementioned armouring cities, to be made to measurements sent in, never meeting the armourers in person. It was much, much cheaper to do this way, and the armour was still fantastic, but not quite the work of art the local smith would make for the Fabulously wealthy.
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Just that most "local smiths" would not have producing any armour (more making horse-shoes, repairing ploughs etc) let alone producing the fine work of art the wealthy would demand: Unless of course you were either local to a renowned armour centre (where the armour specialists were generally located, armour being a highly specialised area of work) or were so fabulously wealthy that (like some monarchs) you relocated some renowned specialists and set them up in your own local workshops. An alternative method used for 'made to measure' armour was to have a suit of clothes made specifically tailoured to show your limb lengths, or to have casts made of your limbs; either (or potentially both) being then shipped to the master makers in whichever centre you chose.
Member of Exiles Medieval Martial Arts.
Currently teaching Fiore's art in Ceredigion
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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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| Posted: Fri 03 Jun, 2016 5:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | | Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Quote: | | Besides cavalrymen, they would grant these serjeanties to a veteran longbowmen, for example? |
By the time longbowmen became a truly important component in English armies, the serjeanty was already becoming an irrelevant institution and most tenurial serjeants were having their tenures converted upwards into knight service or downwards into socage. |
From about that time the medieval armies no longer have this primary basis of 40 days feudal service to military sistems based on cash payment? Did this cash system could have been the cause behind the suplantation of earlier sergeants and knightly armies to more generic men-at-arms based core? |
Not really. See, the importance of the 40-day feudal service has been greatly exaggerated and overemphasised in modern literature. Paid soldiers had been there all along. A large proportion (perhaps the majority!) of William's army at Hastings was made up of paid soldiers with little or no feudal relationship with William. There's also evidence that the English force opposing them were paid, either for wartime militia service or full-time service as guards or housecarles for the King and important nobles. Even Crusading forces weren't entirely made up of unpaid volunteers -- especially in the Second and later Crusades, one of the reasons Crusading was so expensive was because the leaders had to raise money for the regular pay of their soldiers. The Baronial party's attempt to kick Mercadier and his continental mercenaries out during the civil war against King John was arguably more of a futile attempt to stave off changes that were already well underway rather than a revolutionary assertion of the English nobility's privileges against royal fiat and so on and so on.
Short answer: no. Even during the earlier "knights and serjeants" era (just using your terminology -- I have no idea how you define it), paid military service was already quite common.
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One very important thing to note is that the troops in this era were already partly (or mostly) trained through their civilian experiences before they even joined a military force. Just to take the longbowmen as an example, they were recruited from among the best, strongest, and most skillful archers in rural militias. Some of them would have had experience coordinating with each other during expeditions organised by local law enforcement officials to clear the roads of banditry. Some might have been bandits and horse-thieves themselves. Some others might have been recruited as hunters by local nobles, thus giving them the chance to undertake coordination exercises with those noble patrons and their retinues of men-at-arms. |
But generally 40 days used to be enough for a typical campaign of XI-XIII centuries?
If in 1066 already we had such a significant amount of paid soldiers, then it should be quite expensive to raise armies, and they would have a much higher quality than "historians" usually made me think: legions of poorly trained and poorly armed peasants forced to fight against each other while a minority of knights and noblemen would be the only competent and reasonably well-armed warriors in these armies.
But if the troops used to be paid and used to be of a certain quality, this would mean that armor (meaning armor in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as mail hauberks and similar stuff) were not there so unusual and limited to the nobility? I don't know if it's true, but certain illustrators made me believe that as we walk walking through fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, armor became much more common for the less affluent soldiers than would was in previous centuries. This is true? Did metallurgy at that time has advanced so much that it was possible to equip more soldiers than was possible in times past?
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| Alex W. wrote: |
Sorry for the late reply. I'll try to answer your question, but I'm only a hobbyist and have no formal education on the matter and this is simply my best (if at least a little educated) guess; Italy and the HRE were basically the main producers of armour at this time. Most of the english and french were ordering their armour from Milan, Nuln, or various other armour producing cities. Mostly only the fabulously wealthy were getting local smiths to custom tailor their personal armour, whereas, the rest were getting their armour made in the aforementioned armouring cities, to be made to measurements sent in, never meeting the armourers in person. It was much, much cheaper to do this way, and the armour was still fantastic, but not quite the work of art the local smith would make for the Fabulously wealthy.
Also keep in mind that the English were still getting "English" armour made in Milan, as that was what they needed, and the armouring cities would often make armour suited to the local fashions of their clients. |
Then import armor would be cheaper to hire than a local blacksmith? But what about the cost of delivering the the order details and the transport itself (which I believe that usually would means shipping)? Not to mention the taxes that would be paid as the product was transported through the towns, roads and lordships, making the product more expensive after all.
Well, we know that the local smiths who made armor were really good at it. Did local blacksmiths were already in great demand by the high nobility's orders, making the contracts always too expensive?
And how exactly an Italian or German blacksmith know what kind of military fashion people had, for example, in England or in Castile? They traveled a lot or had a very "multicultural" team in their workshops?
By the way, I've been reading that when Giles de Rais (1405-1440) turned 15, his uncle presented him with a Milanese armor. He was from a knightly/baronial family, so I was thinking: how or from whom the less-wealthy soldiers, like those who came from yeomen and bourgeois classes, would buy their armor?
I don't know about other countries, but in 1340-1380's Portugal, knights and other lower military classes wore armor slightly different from a XIII's french man-at-arms. They hadn't coat-of-plates or significant arms protection except from gauntlets, which weren't also that common. For the legs you just had greaves and typical protection for knees, the rest was mail. The armour disparity between a common knight and a higher lord wealthy enough to import italian armour was immense. Of course, this can be explained by the relative isolation of Portugal, but I don't know how abysmal was the difference in places more "connected" such as England and France .
I may sound a little flippant about it, but that's why I intend to write a XIV-XV centuries's european based RPG and for that I must understand how far the technological limitations of a given local region would be, for example: in 1400-1450 Scotland they had a local production of plate harness for the less-wealthy man-at-arms or they were stuck in less advanced armor production, such as brigandines and coat-of-plates?
Last edited by Pedro Paulo Gaião on Sat 04 Jun, 2016 5:54 am; edited 3 times in total
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Alex W.
Location: Canada, Alberta Joined: 16 Feb 2016
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Fri 03 Jun, 2016 6:29 pm Post subject: |
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Let me just preface this by saying I am no expert and this is just my understanding, which could be completely wrong and I am open to being corrected on anything you think might be mistaken.
| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
Then import armor would be cheaper to hire a local blacksmith? But what about the cost of delivering the the order details and the transport itself (which I believe that usually would means shipping)? Not to mention the taxes that would be paid as the product was transported through the towns, roads and lordships, making the product more expensive after all. |
Kinda. due to guild laws, the Milanese amour smiths were some of the most efficient producers of armour, working on an almost industrial scale, before one battle in 1427 Milanese armourers provided thousands of armours in less than a week, though they probably had a decent amount from their stock. Compared to local amour smiths, who could not have more than 12 people in any smithy there was just no real comparison.
| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
Well, we know that the local smiths who made armor were really good at it. Did local blacksmiths were already in great demand by the high nobility's orders, making the contracts always too expensive? |
Kinda, yeah. They could only make so many, and they tended to be of excellent quality, so they tended to take their time and make more exclusive products.
| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
And how exactly an Italian or German blacksmith know what kind of military fashion, for example, in England or in Castile? They traveled a lot or had a very "multicultural" team in their workshops? |
Because that is what was ordered. 27 pauldrons in the "english style" or whatever. It was a well known style, meant to fit the needs of the customer.
| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
By the way, I've been reading that when Giles de Rais (1405-1440) turned 15, his uncle presented him with a Milanese armor. He was from a knightly/baronial family, so I was thinking: how or from whom the less-wealthy soldiers, like those who came from yeomen and bourgeois classes, would buy their armor?
I don't know about other countries, but in 1340-1380's Portugal, knights and other lower military classes wore armor slightly different from a XIII's french man-at-arms. They hadn't coat-of-plates or significant arms protection except from gauntlets, which weren't also that common. For the legs you just had greaves and typical protection for knees, the rest was mail. The armour disparity between a common knight and a higher lord wealthy enough to import italian armour was immense. Of course, this can be explained by the relative isolation of Portugal, but I don't know how abysmal was the difference in places more "connected" such as England, France and so.
I may sound a little flippant about it, but that's why I intend to write a XIV-XV centuries's european based RPG and for that I must understand how far would the technological limitations of a given local region would, for example: in 1400-1450 Scotland they had a local production of plate harness for the less-wealthy man-at-arms or they were stuck in less advanced armor production, such as brigandines and coat-of-plates? |
Scotland was generally considered the complete backwater for armour (among other things) in the 14th century. They had pretty much no iron of their own so couldn't really produce their own armour, so they needed to import it, making it more expensive. Much like Portugal in your example.
To Alan, I specifically meant armour smiths, rather than a black, green, gold or silver smith. Or even a sword smith. None of them would ever make armour, as that required extreme expertise and was a carefully regulated guild. Your other points are excellent though, thank you.
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Alan E
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| Posted: Mon 20 Jun, 2016 9:57 am Post subject: |
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| Alex W. wrote: | | To Alan, I specifically meant armour smiths, rather than a black, green, gold or silver smith. Or even a sword smith. None of them would ever make armour, as that required extreme expertise and was a carefully regulated guild. Your other points are excellent though, thank you. |
Alex, I could see that you would know that but could also see the assumption that 'local smith' would become 'blacksmith' in Pedro's next posts...
| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | Then import armor would be cheaper to hire than a local blacksmith? But what about the cost of delivering the the order details and the transport itself (which I believe that usually would means shipping)? Not to mention the taxes that would be paid as the product was transported through the towns, roads and lordships, making the product more expensive after all.
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Pedro, various types of smith had differing specialities as Alex indicates in his reply to me: In an armour production shop you would have helmet specialists, leg-armour specialists as well as planishers, polishers etc. All different roles. These were certainly not blacksmiths whose work would not even be allowed to be sold.
Shipping: Arranged through (highly organised and prosperous) merchant groupings. There was in fact a great deal of trans-european trade and armour centres certainly did not have difficulty shipping anywhere there were paying customers.
Member of Exiles Medieval Martial Arts.
Currently teaching Fiore's art in Ceredigion
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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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| Posted: Fri 24 Jun, 2016 2:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Alex W. wrote: | Let me just preface this by saying I am no expert and this is just my understanding, which could be completely wrong and I am open to being corrected on anything you think might be mistaken.
| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
Then import armor would be cheaper to hire a local blacksmith? But what about the cost of delivering the the order details and the transport itself (which I believe that usually would means shipping)? Not to mention the taxes that would be paid as the product was transported through the towns, roads and lordships, making the product more expensive after all. |
Kinda. due to guild laws, the Milanese amour smiths were some of the most efficient producers of armour, working on an almost industrial scale, before one battle in 1427 Milanese armourers provided thousands of armours in less than a week, though they probably had a decent amount from their stock. Compared to local amour smiths, who could not have more than 12 people in any smithy there was just no real comparison. |
How exactly the guilds could make a locally made armor more expensive than an imported one? I mean, I know they controlled prices, but had anything else?
| Quote: | | Scotland was generally considered the complete backwater for armour (among other things) in the 14th century. They had pretty much no iron of their own so couldn't really produce their own armour, so they needed to import it, making it more expensive. Much like Portugal in your example. |
But Scotland had trade relations with such far places as Milan? I mean, I've been reading a book about a battle between English and Scots around 1380-1390 and said book stated that the scottish knights wore armor identical to the English. The book was wrong or lower elite of Scottish Lowlands had access to this large market? I thought that Sctoland were almost isolated from the rest of the world except from contacts with France and Scandinavia.
By the way, how great were the districts of blacksmiths in cities like Milan? They should be able to meet colossal contracts with an entire army. There was any other armour center besides Milan and german cities?
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| Quote: | | To Alan, I specifically meant armour smiths, rather than a black, green, gold or silver smith. Or even a sword smith. None of them would ever make armour, as that required extreme expertise and was a carefully regulated guild. Your other points are excellent though, thank you. |
| Quote: | | Pedro, various types of smith had differing specialities as Alex indicates in his reply to me: In an armour production shop you would have helmet specialists, leg-armour specialists as well as planishers, polishers etc. All different roles. These were certainly not blacksmiths whose work would not even be allowed to be sold. |
I didn't know that. I thought "blacksmith" means every kind of craftsman working with metal (people who translated the word here gave it the sense that blacksmith meant anyone who makes anything with iron and steel, to be more precise). It's interesting to know that there was a kind of "labor's division" backthen in such a proto-industrial production.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Sun 26 Jun, 2016 10:57 am Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | | But generally 40 days used to be enough for a typical campaign of XI-XIII centuries? |
There was no such thing as a "typical" campaign. Feuds between local lords or knights could be resolved (or could just peter out indecisively) within 40 days, but larger conflicts between significant barons -- let alone kings -- frequently took longer than that.
| Quote: | | If in 1066 already we had such a significant amount of paid soldiers, then it should be quite expensive to raise armies, |
IT WAS. What few records we have about William the Bastard's finances show every indication that he would have gone bankrupt if his invasion of England had failed, whether due to the weather or military defeat.
| Quote: | | and they would have a much higher quality than "historians" usually made me think: |
THEY DID. You must have been reading some seriously poor or misinformed historians if you got that kind of impression.
| Quote: | | legions of poorly trained and poorly armed peasants forced to fight against each other while a minority of knights and noblemen would be the only competent and reasonably well-armed warriors in these armies. |
"Poorly trained and poorly armed peasants" simply weren't brought to war, period. Even a common soldier had to meet certain qualifications in terms of wealth and social status to have the right and obligation to wear arms, and this also meant they had to meet at least a minimum standard of equipment. Training was a different issue -- the average urban or rural militia was probably rather poorly trained if we compare them to professional soldiers in US or Western European armies today, but they probably wouldn't look so bad compared to many modern Third World armies. The evidence we have (albeit mostly from later periods) show that training in arms was considered a matter of civic pride, and sometimes (especially in the fractious political landscape of medieval Italy and Germany) it was a matter of survival too. Let's not forget that we have evidence of civic/urban militia units being hired out as mercenaries as early as the 13th century (such as the Brabancons at Bouvines) and probably even in the 12th century. They had to be reasonably competent and well-equipped fighters for potential employers to consider hiring them at all.
The knights and men-at-arms . . . now that's complicated. For small-scale, short-term fight like local feuds, sometimes mounted men-at-arms were the only forces mobilised, since it would have taken too long (and, yes, too much money) to raise substantial infantry forces. For larger campaigns, well, why bother raising or hiring troops if they weren't at least reasonably competent? They'd just end up being that many more parasitic mouths to feed without making any substantial contribution to the army's fighting power.
| Quote: | | But if the troops used to be paid and used to be of a certain quality, this would mean that armor (meaning armor in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as mail hauberks and similar stuff) were not there so unusual and limited to the nobility? |
Yes. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries was where we started seeing more and more infantry wearing heavy padded or quilted jacks/gambesons/aketons/whatever you call it, which was already a massive improvement over the largely unarmoured condition of 11th-century infantry -- though, as if in compensation, many infantrymen were ditching their shields and opting to carry two-handed weapons instead. Mail was still somewhat less common, but not all that rare either.
| Quote: | | I don't know if it's true, but certain illustrators made me believe that as we walk walking through fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, armor became much more common for the less affluent soldiers than would was in previous centuries. This is true? Did metallurgy at that time has advanced so much that it was possible to equip more soldiers than was possible in times past? |
To some extent that's true -- armour did become much more common among ordinary non-chivalric soldiers in the 14th and 15th centuries. But it was a culmination of a very gradual process that had already begun to take place in the 12th and 13th centuries, not a sudden cataclysmic change where non-chivalric soldiers were poorly armoured before the 14th century and then suddenly acquired much more armour in just a decade or two around the turn of the century.
| Quote: | | I may sound a little flippant about it, but that's why I intend to write a XIV-XV centuries's european based RPG and for that I must understand how far the technological limitations of a given local region would be, for example: in 1400-1450 Scotland they had a local production of plate harness for the less-wealthy man-at-arms or they were stuck in less advanced armor production, such as brigandines and coat-of-plates? |
Unfortunately, if you're trying to write an RPG, you're inevitably going to end up relying on a huge amount of guesswork. The nice thing about studying actual history is that we can simply say "we don't know" if the surviving sources and archaeological artifacts don't provide us with enough information to let us decide one way or another. If you're writing a game, though, you simply have to know in order to have a well-constructed game world, and that often means having to make blind guesses when there's no real historical data available to guide you. That being said, it might help if you can constrain the temporal or geographical extent of your game's setting and pick a particularly well-researched timeframe or geographical area.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Sun 26 Jun, 2016 11:44 am Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | | How exactly the guilds could make a locally made armor more expensive than an imported one? I mean, I know they controlled prices, but had anything else? |
Many factors. Availability of suitable iron ore; availability of smelting technologies that could produce larger wrought iron billets; availability of wind and/or water power for bellows, hammers, and grinding wheels; social institutions/practices that regulate the management and organisation of work; and so on and so on.
| Quote: | | By the way, how great were the districts of blacksmiths in cities like Milan? They should be able to meet colossal contracts with an entire army. |
Pretty huge. However, it's worth noting that they could have fulfilled large contracts partly by building up large stocks of armour in peacetime just to keep their workers busy and then finishing and/or assembling them into wearable sets when such large orders came around. Of course, this kind of speculative production must have depended heavily on a robust financial network, and it's no surprise that medieval Italy was essentially the birthplace of modern finance and accounting.
This article by Craig Johnson (also a forum member here) might be worth reading:
http://www.oakeshott.org/metal.html
and also this one from the Metropolitan Museum:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/make/hd_make.htm
| Quote: | | I didn't know that. I thought "blacksmith" means every kind of craftsman working with metal (people who translated the word here gave it the sense that blacksmith meant anyone who makes anything with iron and steel, to be more precise). It's interesting to know that there was a kind of "labor's division" backthen in such a proto-industrial production. |
Their translation is correct in the sense that "blacksmith" is a general term for people who work in base metal, and especially today when the industrial mass production of steel implements have reduced the demand for blacksmithing skills in developed countries to the extent that people who do smithing as a profession have to be jacks-of-all-trades just to be able to get enough work to pay for their everyday living expenses. But back then before modern industrial processes, the demand for smithing services was much higher and people could often afford to specialise in particular lines of work such as smithing sword blades or particular armour components.
This kind of division of labour is still present to some extent today -- note that high-end swordsmiths today usually don't make armour, while high-end armourers rarely make swords. And companies that make both usually have different people (or different subsidiary workshops/factories altogether) handling the production of weapons and armour.
This blog post has many links to useful resources you might want to check out if you need some seriously in-depth information about armour production: http://armoury.co.za/armouring-for-hema-part-...-armourer/
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Alan E
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| Posted: Mon 27 Jun, 2016 3:21 am Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
But Scotland had trade relations with such far places as Milan? I mean, I've been reading a book about a battle between English and Scots around 1380-1390 and said book stated that the scottish knights wore armor identical to the English. The book was wrong or lower elite of Scottish Lowlands had access to this large market? I thought that Sctoland were almost isolated from the rest of the world except from contacts with France and Scandinavia.
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Very few places in Europe were isolated, if they could be reached by water: What isolated a region with the technology available was being landlocked and surrounded by difficult terrain, such as mountains. Even then, trade routes crossed many ranges if the draw was sufficient.
A good read for a feel of how interconnected Europe was already in the Medieval period is 'Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe' by Peter Spufford (e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Power-Profit-Merchant-Medieval-Europe/dp/0500285942).
Member of Exiles Medieval Martial Arts.
Currently teaching Fiore's art in Ceredigion
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Alex W.
Location: Canada, Alberta Joined: 16 Feb 2016
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Mon 27 Jun, 2016 9:54 pm Post subject: |
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One of the main reasons Milan was so successful was it's guild laws, or lack thereof. Most guilds had a hard limit on the number of journeymen in a single workshop, and a limit of workshops per city. A typical number being about 12 journeymen per workshop. Milan had no such restriction, and had almost construction line style production, as well as contracting extra work to smaller workshops. these things allowed them to make armour at incredibly competitive prices compared to anywhere else in europe, though some places in western germany did compete.
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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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| Posted: Tue 28 Jun, 2016 6:38 pm Post subject: |
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Thank you for all these links, it will help me a lot. By the way, I recently discovered that the custom of giving golden spurs to newly made knights were actually a very popular tradition in the Kingdom of Portugal. At the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385), King John I, who was also Master of the Order of Avis, has invested 60 noblemen before the battle, putting them golden spurs on their feet, he also said before the battle:
| Quote: | "Belos senhores, eu vos envio no primeiro escalão da batalha. Fazei tanto que aí obtenhais honra, porque do contrário vossas esporas de ouro teriam sido mal colocadas".
Translated: Good gentlemen, I shall send you to the battle's front lines. Do as much as you can and won honour, because otherwise your golden spurs would be misplaced |
It is true that at this time Portugal received considerable influence in England, still I cannot surely say if this was a recent cerimony received by influence or if it was an older tradition. Anyway, if there was in Portugal, there also was in England, France and other spanish kingdoms.
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| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | | But generally 40 days used to be enough for a typical campaign of XI-XIII centuries? |
There was no such thing as a "typical" campaign. Feuds between local lords or knights could be resolved (or could just peter out indecisively) within 40 days, but larger conflicts between significant barons -- let alone kings -- frequently took longer than that. |
I see. By the way, feuds between barons could be simple solved by duels between their champions? I know that it occurred in France at least until late 14th century, between a knight and non-noble warrior. The french king was even there to watch the duel
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The knights and men-at-arms . . . now that's complicated. For small-scale, short-term fight like local feuds, sometimes mounted men-at-arms were the only forces mobilised, since it would have taken too long (and, yes, too much money) to raise substantial infantry forces. For larger campaigns, well, why bother raising or hiring troops if they weren't at least reasonably competent? They'd just end up being that many more parasitic mouths to feed without making any substantial contribution to the army's fighting power. |
Minor scale battle between dozens of men-at-arms? They simply charge against each other or would it be something more likely an HEMA's tournament? Or more like Chevauchée raids?
Also, if it was at least uncommon to see dismounted knights and men-at-arms before the Hundread Years War (and outside Germany), who exactly would climb the stairs and be in siege towers during ... sieges? I mean, most of medieval battles were actually sieges, not pitched battles. Did knights and gentry disliked "plebian sutff" like climbing the walls and got eminent deaths?
| Lafayette C Curtis wrote: | | If you're writing a game, though, you simply have to know in order to have a well-constructed game world, and that often means having to make blind guesses when there's no real historical data available to guide you. That being said, it might help if you can constrain the temporal or geographical extent of your game's setting and pick a particularly well-researched timeframe or geographical area. |
Now that you mentioned that there was a well developed commercial networking, I could hardly explain rationally how certain regions could be 50 or even 100 years tecnologically behind more modern ones (like Italy and so). That is, if the explanation was isolation or constant wars (on the premise that a state of constant war prevents you from evolving commercially and technologically, an idea of liberal economic schools I read from a Mises Institute's Analysis of Game of Thrones), I would problably appeal to low fantasy explanations like ... monsters?
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Graham Shearlaw
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| Posted: Sat 16 Jul, 2016 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: |
Now that you mentioned that there was a well developed commercial networking, I could hardly explain rationally how certain regions could be 50 or even 100 years tecnologically behind more modern ones (like Italy and so). That is, if the explanation was isolation or constant wars (on the premise that a state of constant war prevents you from evolving commercially and technologically, an idea of liberal economic schools I read from a Mises Institute's Analysis of Game of Thrones), I would problably appeal to low fantasy explanations like ... monsters?
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Think of it like cars today, just all most everyone today can buy a car, so to can they buy some armour.
And just like how today you see old cars around you see old armours for the same two main reasons, a lack of money and familiarity.
Just like how a cheap car is often old and out of date, maybe it's worn out or it has been badly repaired, cheap armour often was the same.
But there a floor like a nice car say a Ferrari, a set of good plate armour never depreciates all that low.
That should enough of an argument to have poorer areas in older armour.
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Lafayette C Curtis
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| Posted: Tue 19 Jul, 2016 8:24 am Post subject: |
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| Pedro Paulo Gaião wrote: | | I see. By the way, feuds between barons could be simple solved by duels between their champions? I know that it occurred in France at least until late 14th century, between a knight and non-noble warrior. The french king was even there to watch the duel |
Sometimes, but not that often. The thing is, judicial combat (whether by the principals themselves or by champions) was usually a legal measure used to pre-empt further violence, not to stop or resolve violence that had already begun. As a matter of fact, most wagers of battle (i.e. promises of judicial combat) were resolved without any duels being fought -- the parties settled their difference before any blows were struck. And even in the cases where the judicial combat was actually fought, it was quite common for the combat to be indecisive; the parties could reach a peaceful resolution while the champions were still fighting (or resting between periods of active combat).
But to get back to the point, by the time two neighbouring landlords got into an open feud, it was normally too late to initiate the proceedings of a judicial combat.
| Quote: | | Minor scale battle between dozens of men-at-arms? They simply charge against each other or would it be something more likely an HEMA's tournament? Or more like Chevauchée raids? |
All of them and none of them. This includes just staring at each other across the distance, then turning back and deciding that it wasn't worth risking a pitched battle right now.
But to be honest, warfare at this small scale was probably dominated by ambushes and surprise attacks. As in modern warfare, it was probably easier to ambush or surprise a smaller party since smaller groups usually have a harder time balancing the need to detach men for patrol/sentry/outpost duties with the need to keep the force together so that its strength would not be dissipated..
| Quote: | | Also, if it was at least uncommon to see dismounted knights and men-at-arms before the Hundread Years War (and outside Germany), who exactly would climb the stairs and be in siege towers during ... sieges? I mean, most of medieval battles were actually sieges, not pitched battles. Did knights and gentry disliked "plebian sutff" like climbing the walls and got eminent deaths? |
No. Dismounted men-at-arms were everywhere. They were one of the most important types of infantry available to the medieval European commander. Even in the period between 1150 and 1300 or so, when there were apparently very few instances of men-at-arms dismounting to fight on foot in open battles, the dismounted man-at-arms was still a very common sight in sieges and assaults against fortified places.
(Don't forget that most Latin knights in the First Crusade fought on foot after they had lost their horses!)
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Pedro Paulo Gaião
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| Posted: Sat 21 Jan, 2017 4:16 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the information. But, I actually realize that "Milan" could meant both the city itself and its duchy. The had other major centers in the Duchy of Milan which weren't the city of Milan itself? A was reading some parts of Osprey's "Venetian Empire 1200 - 1670" and they said that Venice was conquering many cities in the former Duchy of Milan, and they even say that they create a major center in Brescia (but the book wasn't clear if the city already had an industry of production there) by bringing ers unsatisfied with the Visconti's reign. Brescia already had a relevant industry before or did this just come with Venice's stimulus policies? In fact, only the Duchy monopolized the production centers in Northern Italy or they would also be scattered in other neighboring states?
In the same book they also say that by the end of the sixteenth century, German industries passed to Italy in the production of .
By the way, I find what happened with France's first attempt to create a standing army in late 14th century (it's on "Armies of Middle Ages, vol. 2 by Ian Heath):
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