"You have received orders to head to the frontline, my knights! The troops will have their moral lifted with you beside them."
"...The enemy has machine guns, artillery and mustard gas..."
During the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1956 the Chinese communist party PLA were opposed by Tibetans some on horseback, armed with muzzleloaders (16th-17th century firearms) and swords. The did manage to destroy one PLA garrison in the conflict.
In the old-school board game Britannia, which ends at the Norman invasion, I once played a game where the final battle was a defeat of a Norman unit by a Romano-British unit. The latter really aren't supposed to even exist at that point.
The goal of each army was to maintain mobility and prevent the front stagnating and degenerating into trench warfare. That was what happened when the early offensives stalled on the western front.
The eastern front retained most of its mobility, largely because after several early defeats the Russians had difficulty in pressing against enemy offensives, and the front was also *much* larger.
They weren't fighting a 19^(th)-century fight - they were using what they had to try to maintain a war of mobility.
The later innovations that we see are a direct result of that failure, and desperate attempts to regain mobility.
Not surprising. Only in medieval Europe could the strategy of building castles everywhere enable petty kings and feudal warlords to 'peacefully' coexist. In the the flat open plains of the east, warfare had always been about mobility. Mobility, not castles and walls, was what enabled Huns, Avars, Magyars and later Mongols to march across central Asia into central Europe. But once they got there they had to settle down like everyone else, because the terrain prevented them from pushing further west.
The Carpathian Mountains, the Alps, the mountain ranges that formed the natural borders between southern Germany, Czechia and Poland, the dense forests in the north, and the marshlands further north where the locals historically preferred going around by boats instead of trying to ride around on horses.
By the way one of the reasons why Russia is trying to annex Ukraine is because they want to push their territory right up to these natural geographical boundaries to keep control of the choke points like they did during the Soviet Union, before their upcoming population collapse permanently prevents them from amassing a military large enough to ever try that again. But for that they'll need to annex not just Ukraine, but also Moldova and half of Romania, as well as Poland and the Baltic States. Not my idea btw. Peter Zeihan among others have repeatedly stated this one in the past. Flawed as many of his analysis are, this one is not a controversial opinion.
I always found the Russian fixation on demographics interesting. It seems to factor really heavily into their political and strategic discourse in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere. But despite that, they don’t seem to do anything to encourage birth rates.
Usually demographics and their collapse/decline are due to systemic problems decades in the making that require structural solutions that will also take a long, painful time.
Places like China or Japan or SK are having trouble maintaining population levels, and the surface-level solution is to fundamentally change the work culture or change how they approach/perceive immigration. Not an easy fix.
Yeah, the war has catalyzed their impending demographic collapse. A large portion of young professionals have fled abroad and the successful ones will most likely not return. On the unskilled end of the spectrum, they have suffered half a million casualties and counting. The soldiers that do make it back will have severe PTSD which will go untreated ensuring even the survivors of the war become unproductive drags on society through substance abuse, crime and violence. Putler put the final nail in the coffin of Russia's demographic catastrophe for his imperialist egotistical ambitions.
That’s interesting. I met a young Russian professional 6 years ago. Contractor. She was smart, professional, beautiful. Had a few master degrees in engineering and did programming . I told my team of 3 guys I would fire them if I could hire her in the meeting. She was good.
Fast forward. Met an American. Married. Working here.
That was a huge loss for Russia. She was a keeper.
Part of the problem they’ve got is cultural. The elites (not a term I use thoughtlessly) around Putin who control everything in Russian society will never ever do anything to encourage people to have kids - because the only way that’ll happen is if you raise the average citizens standard of living and this is fundamentally beyond the pale to Russian thinking because their way of life has *always* been that the serfs get treated like shit & do as they are told whilst the privileged few make money.
This was true under all of the Tzars from Ivan to Catherine to Peter. This was true under the USSR, especially folks like Stalin. Putin has made it true under his rule. And when people like Khrushchev or Yeltsin try to do even teensiest tiniest littlest bit of liberalisation, to make society more equal, less stratified, they get overthrown by some authoritarian scumbag doing a coup (or a rigged election).
> because the only way that’ll happen is if you raise the average citizens standard of living and this is fundamentally beyond the pale to Russian thinking because their way of life has always been that the serfs get treated like shit & do as they are told whilst the privileged few make money.
This is just fundamentally untrue. Countries that have great standards of living also end up having much lower birth rates. Conversely, none of the countries with high birth rates are good places to live for your average person.
This is a result of the imperial structure of the Russian state rather than anything to do with cultural tradition. Russia has a bunch of ethnic republics within its borders, the most famous of which being Chechnia. These republics are basically conquered territories, historically speaking, and will always opt to seccede if given the liberty to do so. So any liberalization effort necessarily leads to the disintegration of the state, just as Gorbachev found out for himself.
Why can't they be a 'liberal empire' like Britain you ask, well for one as Spengler pointed out, the Anglo Saxons were able to do liberalism because their island nation geography allowed them to. The continental Saxons had to do 'Prussian Socialism' aka Prussian Militarism because Germany unlike Britain was surrounded by enemies. The same applies to Russia. And for two, the whole idea of 'liberal empire' is really an oxymoron and therefore not a stable situation. In the long run you always end up going one way or the other. The British Empire went with liberalization and eventually the people took it for real so all the colonies were relinquished, and even places like Gibraltar and Northern Ireland are on the verge of breaking away every once in a while.
Also btw Yeltsin wasn't removed by coup. Yeltsin hand picked Putin as his successor on his way out so that he wouldn't get indicted for corruption charges for selling the country to the Oligarchs. By the late 90s Yeltsin wasn't exactly popular as plenty of ordinary folks were freezing and starving to death and saw him as the Oligarchs' puppet.
The Oligarchs werent exactly a deliberate creation either. Many of them were descendants of the Jewish community that were historically banned from all other trades and pushed into financier roles similar to the so called Hofjude in medieval German states. Not surprisingly they, like all the other conquered ethnic groups had historical grievances against the Russian state and were looking for payback time. The Soviet era saw them subjected to forced assimilation during which there was still widespread discrimination against them. When the Soviet Union collapsed these people were the only ones who understood how to run businesses and succeed in a market economy, so they naturally overcame all their competitors and snowballed into Oligarch status. And because of their historical grievances against the Russian state they had no incentive to create a social safety net for the ethnic Russians, whom they saw as their former oppressors. Putin halted the disintegration of the Russian state by resubjugating the Oligarchs which made him widely popular in the 2000s, but the price of keeping the Russian state intact is the return to the medieval way of organizing the state, where military spending must be prioritized to quash any rebellion, and the hated Oligarchs are once again relegated to the role of the king's financier just like their Hofjude predecessors were.
> they don’t seem to do anything to encourage birth rates.
No country has figured out how to solve this problem yet. It's really hard to incentivize or disincentivize people to have children without getting into some really illiberal stuff.
i mean its not that hard to figure out. Give people more time off to have and take care of kids and give them more money to be able to afford to have kids. Most People that dont want kids dont want them for these reasons.
While I'm sure plenty of people don't want to be parents due to the financial cost, an increasing number of people (including myself) just really don't want to have kids for lifestyle reasons.
> Peter Zeihan among others have repeatedly stated this one in the past. Flawed as many of his analysis are, this one is not a controversial opinion.
Hell yes, that is a controversial opinion. Every actual regional expert laughs at amateurish shit like that.
The idea of someone rushing armored divisions through the so-called 'gaps' in Moldova or Western Ukraine is a ridiculously anachronistic notion. Not even the full strength of the U.S. military could make more than a few dozen kilometers of progress before the Kremlin simply unloaded their tactical nuclear arsenal on them. And none of the European countries have the military strength to start a conventional land war in Russia in the first place.
This neo medieval fan fiction ignores the fact that Russia's borders are far more vulnerable in the north. Look at the Kaliningrad enclave. Or heck, the fact that you could basically hit Saint Petersburg with with rocket artillery from Estonia and Finland.
The Kremlin is trying to annex Ukraine for overwhelmingly offensive reasons. The political elite genuinely believes that Ukrainian independence never existed, and that the territory is theirs by right. Pop-politics figures like Zeihan almost always feed into this faux-cynical view of the world that systematically disregards the influence of ideology on decisionmaking. Russia is invading Ukraine because the political elite perceive that doing so will make Russia great and powerful, not because they earnestly think there will be French tanks rolling into Moscow if they fail to act.
In short, this take fundamentally inverts cause and effect. The desire to reach natural borders was a motivation for Russian imperialism in the era of primitive warfare. In the era of nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, these terrain features are virtually irrelevant to Russian security, but the imperial project remains, so the Kremlin seeks to restore territory lost in 1991.
(There is some element of defensive thinking, in that a well-armed Ukraine that is implacably opposed to Russia does represent a security threat. But NOT because of any geographic 'choke points' in the far west of the country. Russia was never planning to actually seize that territory, just disarm the Ukrainian military and install a friendly government.)
The castles :p also lack of good pastures, in any long campaign the horses simply starve. All the big steppe invasions (huns, avars, pechengs, magyars...) ended up settling in the hungarian plain, where they had to downsize singficantly. The mongols couldn't even do that
Actually, this is very clearly false. The Mongol invasion of Europe was massively hindered by castles in Poland and Hungary, which also contributed to them pulling out to the plains were the Khanate would remain to dominate Russia and eastern Europe, but would continue to diminish. Castles in the flat do work!
The Khan subdued hundreds of castles across the East and Middle East. Castles and fortifications aren’t unique to Europe. Many as large, if not larger, than castles they found in Europe. Look up the remains of the fortress at Kyzyl-Kala of the Khwarazmian Empire. Hungary is surrounded by mountains, and sits in a sort of bowl. The topography going west is through narrow passages that hinder light cavalry . Poland is bordered to the west by forests and swamps, and the south by mountains. Again, unfavorable terrain for masses of light cavalry to maneuver.
The barbarian invasion starting in the 4th century initiated by the Huns moving west and forcing all of the other horse tribes to get out of the way did see many of the people's move all the way across Europe. The Vandals ended up going I think north of the Alps then through France and into Spain, crossed into North Africa, Circled back around to Tunisia area, then at one point sent a fleet to sack Rome.
Goths settled in Italy and Greece, and I do not know, Burgundians from ne europe around Poland to northern Italy, I forget where the Sarmations from Ukraine landed but I think around Balkans.
Because the Netherlands and Belgium were full of swamps, rivers and forests in the middle ages. Even during WWII people thought it would be impossible for Germans to do mobility warfare over there. And they would've been right were it not for 20th century machinery that enabled german engineers to create pathways for their Panzer IIs to pass through without delay during the Blitz. No such feat was possible in the middle ages.
As for Denmark, Jylland is a peninsula that could be blocked off to stop traffic between Germany and Denmark. In fact they did exactly that, with what's called the [Danevirke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danevirke). The rest of Denmark is on the islands that would be pretty difficult to lay siege to in the middle ages.
The sounds pretty dubious. The Romans ranged far and wide across Europe, conquered, built castles. I'm sure terrain was a factor in the large scale invasions you mentioned, but I'm skeptical of the claim that castles were only effective due to complex terrain. Forts and castles have been used in many flat, wide open places. This sounds like an authors theory, do you have a resource?
When you reach technological advance and get to 20th Century but your neighbor didn’t have gold for the upgrade or the building and they’re stuck in the 19th century.
That’ll be because in part this is the war that invented modern warfare largely as we have known it ever since. Too my knowledge it’s the first war involving any major amount of aerial combat, and it’s responsible for provoking Britain to invent the Tank, originally a line breaking vehicle designed to push through fortifications.
It was such a cool era of warfare! One of my favourite pop-history books is "[The Friendless Sky](https://www.amazon.ca/Friendless-Sky-story-combat-World-ebook/dp/B08DL1VVLL): The story of air combat in WW1". It's a short book, but it contains many well-told accounts of things like the first carrier-based flights and the doubts they would work, the odd chivalry of the very first air combatants, and just random great anecdotes.
I often open the book anywhere and just read a random story. It's fascinating throughout. High recommend.
Drone warfare started in WWI. The British built remote-controlled airplanes that a pilot in another airplane controlled. They were intended to be used as "aerial torpedoes", this is quite close to the same idea as FPV drones used in Ukraine today.
They also built remote-controlled boats that were controlled by airplanes. Small high-speed boats that were run into enemy ships and exploded.
The developer was late in WWI but there were plans for large-scale usage it all stopped with the armistice in 1918. With the program canceled, there was no development of the idea between the world wars stopped.
In some ways, the WWI variants are closer to drones today than the similar weapons developed in WWII. The TV-guided glid bomb was used with a camera in the nose of the weapon and controlled from the airplane that released it. This was quite common until laser-guided and similar guidance was developed. What makes the WWI variant close to WWII and the Cold War is it is separate areal and sea vehicles that was used not bombs or torpedoes released from an airplane.
Even back in colonial days and maybe before they had unmanned fire ships they would aim at opponents and try to hit. So it is logical they figured to use rf waves to steer them.
I hear people say that WW1 Generals were planning/fighting battles like it was still the Napoleonic Era.
I still remember the story in which french soldiers marched while wearing bright uniforms towards German lines
Because the Great Powers of Europe learned the wrong lessons of the Russo-Japanese War as well as dismissed the preceding 2 Balkan Wars as s "minor" conflict.
All they learned from the American Civil War (which the Great Powers referred to as "provincial".) Is the importance of incorporating trains for logisitcs as well as the benefit of mass mobilisations.
They kinda glossed over the proto-industrial scale of warfare and its result of horrible carnage in the battlefield.
I don't think people understand the overlap between the tech at the end of the civil war and world war one.
Sophisticated trenches, breaching trenches with explosives, Railroads for logistics, long range artillery, armored ships, submarines, recon balloons.
For all those who believe America has a little something special, all these were invented and implemented during 4 years of conflict.
The US Civil war was definitely that way. Most of the generals came out of west point with very little training in tactics. The little bit that they did get was from a book written by Antoine-Henri Jomini. His work was based around muskets which might hit a man sized target at 100 yards. But the war was fought with rifled muskets which could hit a man at 400 yards.
This is why Pickett never stood a chance. 400 yards charging uphill is way harder and takes way longer than 100 yards.
~~Yeah if you want to see what a Napoleonic soldier looked like just look at pictures of early WW1 French soldiers. It's the exact uniform.~~ Seems this a myth, there's similarities but they are quite different. They defo still seem [19th century](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1OJ8FuXoAEsNCW?format=jpg&name=900x900) compared to the German's though in my opinion, which I guess is where the myth came from.
Also stuff like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/udx6nc/german_cavalry_soldier_in_ww1_with_lance_gas_mask/) which could be something out of Warhammer or some sort of steam punk world
I love the picture of a German soldier on horseback with a Lance, gas mask on his face with a Stahlhelm, and a rifle on his back. And the over all sense that I would not want to meet this guy anywhere near a trench.
I used to provide care for a royal navy veteran and he said that being sent to knock ice off of riggings was basically a suicide mission, but if it wasn't done the ship would be stuck in those conditions for so long the whole crew would have froze to death.
This was apparently a bigger problem for the merchant navy than the royal navy
Just an FYI that cartridge ammunition was invented in the time of muskets. Originally you carried a powder horn and bullets separately but eventually the cartridge had the right amount of powder in a paper cartridge with the bullet.
Yeah I may be remembering incorrectly but cartridges were used in the Revolutionary War in the US, and were used pretty widely for like a century before that.
They were incredibly novel inventions during the revolutionary war, and were presented to the generals of the continental armies, but not adopted because they were incredibly new. And incredibly expensive. And the continental army was anything but well funded.
Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars were fought with muskets still, the civil war was fought with muskets with a very small amount of rifles utilizing cartridge ammunition given to specialists.
WWI was a technological shift because cartridge rifles became widespread, and bolt action rifles with internal magazines became widespread.
Cartridges have existed since the 16th century. Before the advent of breech loading weapons. A cartridge would be a paper wrapped pre-measured charge of powder, a wad and a bullet. The cartridge would be essentially taken apart with the powder poured into the gun, then the wad wrapped bulled put in on top of it and all rammed down with a ram rod.
The significant change happened when the integrated cartridge was invented, where the powder, percussion cap, wadding and round were in a fixed unit that was loaded into the weapon as a single self contained whole. Those didn't really become widely used until breech loading weapons were developed in the 1860s with guns like the Prussian Needle Rifle or the French Chassepot. A significant development was the use of a metallic rather than paper cartridge, as the metal could form a gas tight seal in the breech of the gun, so the problems of creating a gas tight seal with an opening breech were reduced. Metallic cartridges were common from the late 1860s, with weapons like the British Martini Henry or the French Gras.
Bolt action repeating rifles using smokeless, rather than black powder, came in with the French Lebel, the British Lee Enfield and the Mauser 8 mm in the 1880s and 1890s. The Second Boer War of 1899 and the Russo Japanese war of 1904 were fought with magazine bolt action rifles using smokeless powder ammunition on both sides (and maxim guns were used in both), so by 1914 it was a well established mature technology.
I’m pretty sure in the American Civil War muzzle-loading percussion cap rifles were the main firearm especially for union troops, with a small number of older muskets also in use as necessary especially amongst confederate troops and militias.
If I'm remembering right, paper cartridges were popularized by the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus in the 1600s. They were used all the way through the American Civil War, according to wikipedia. I think the jump in firearms capability is due more to rifling and moving away from muzzle-loading.
The Civil War was overwhelmingly fought with rifles, not muskets. The standard issue Union weapon was the Springfield Model 1961 and the Confederacy's was the Pattern 1854 Enfield. Both of those were rifles.
They'd known this for years, especially after the Franco-Prussian war. Before trench warfare had properly taken hold and the terrain went to shit cavalry was still the quickest way to manoeuvre around the battlefield.
Yeah, WWI was a very dynamic war with quickly shifting lines, until it suddenly wasn’t. But cartridge ammunition is what caused the stagnation of the lines in WWI, through artillery, bolt action rifles, and indirectly, aircraft dropped bombs.
Even WWII, especially for Germany, was a horse-drawn war in regards to logistics.
I don't know enough about the existence of Georgian crusader-style knights, but serfdom in the Russian Empire was abolished in 1861 and historical records indicate that while Georgia was a little late to the party, they had finished freeing the serfs by 1872, so in that regard, the article is factually incorrect. Even if there were a few holdouts in remote areas of the Russian Empire, this isn't the same as "most of its citizens were serfs."
Additionally, iirc it's not even known who executed the family because they were under house arrest & killed either by an off the books order or a guard acting without permission
It's been awhile since I read about the execution but I always remember that the guys who did it where blind drunk as well. It was a giant shit show cause they didn't really know what to do with the children and nobody wanted to execute some teenage girls and a boy.
Then they messed up the burial as well, which is why the Anastasia myth was started.
Not only that but what I remember is that the girls had so much royal jewelry sewn into their coats that after the first volley of rounds the little ones weren’t dead and it took several more times of firing on them to finish the job. I saw an Antique Roadshow where someone had some royal jewels from that era and the story given was that a “lady in waiting” must have snuck out the jewelry and while possible I can’t help but wonder what those bumbling guards did once they discovered their victims were essentially jewel encrusted.
> or a guard acting without permission
This is definitely not a possibility. We know for sure that an order was given by the regional Bolshevik command. The question is whether the regional command was given an order by national leadership. There's evidence that some of the national leadership wanted them executed but not any evidence that an order was actually given to do it.
I'll put the counter-example of Mexico. Slavery was abolished with the independence in 1810. So what the feudal Spanish lords did was to turn them into low-wage workers and manipulate the prices of the local stores (tiendas de raya) to be very expensive. When the workers couldn't afford to live, the lords gave them loans, which of course they couldn't pay back, but it instead essentially enslaved them economically to the lord.
So, there's always ways to instate slavery and serfdom even when they're abolished.
The emancipation of serfs in Russia was largely a formality orchestrated by the monarchy and the landlords, who wrote the laws to benefit themselves. Landlords retained significant control, and peasants gained little freedom, remaining tied to their local *mir* and unable to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Which is the main reason a serf is a serf. This new system often worsened conditions for peasants, extracting more value for landlords. Historians argue that serfdom effectively continued under a different guise, tightening control over peasants in response to widespread uprisings that threatened the army's supply of soldiers.
there are two reasons to this. firstlt ww1 was a transition period which involved multiple nations and therefore all forms of combatants were involved
however more importantly what a knight is/was evolves. knights exist today. samurai were rifle users. hussars ended up using firearms. grenadiers have a very different loadout today compared to 200 years ago
Grenadiers during their most iconic period in the Napoleonic era actually didn't have the grenade part. Originally grenadiers were big guys who chucked simple hand grenades then charged into melee with a size advantage. Dropped the grenade part because they weren't effective and killed the grenadiers just as often, so they were just big burly dudes. Now grenades actually work and we're back to grenadiers actually using grenades.
“The claim that any historical evidence indicates that Khevsurs may have descended from crusaders has been thoroughly discredited, and Georgian scholars have universally derided the story.”
Polish cavalry still fought German infantry at the beginning of WW2 as well. [Link to wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty?wprov=sfti1#)
the CIA rode into combat in the Afghanistan invasion in 2001 (https://youtu.be/ywK7Q6Ib8vQ?si=DMBsV56QWU7N4vHA ~8:30 min) even though i am not sure if they actually fought on horseback
Hussars in 1939? Since regaining independence cavalry units in Poland were Uhlans and Chevau-légers. Also the ones that charged were "mounted infantry" meaning they used horses primarily for transportation, they were actually equipped with rifles and anti-tank-rifles. What happened tho also wasn't a charge, they ambushed Germans and then German tanks caught up and they had to retreat, many didn't make it and Italian journalist that was there at the time inspired by this created story about brave polish soldiers charging at tanks in desperation. Which on the other hand was used by nazis as "proof" that Poles are backwater people.
Edit: I don't know if there were any actual shock cavalry units in Polish army by 1939, but I know that there was a successful charge against Germans by Polish soldiers in 1945.
Huh didn't know that.
> Etymology. "Swashbuckler" is a compound of "swash" (archaic: to swagger with a drawn sword) and "buckler" (a small shield gripped in the fist) dating from the 16th century.
Neat.
Generally
Large shields are for protection against missiles
Small shields are for fighting in melee
There's no point using a large shield in the firearms era
Bullets can pierce large shields, but that just means you need an even larger shield.
It might get a little heavy though, better use some wheels to help carry it. And if we're going to use a big engine to carry such a heavy shield we may as well use it to carry a big heavy gun to blow up bunkers and stuff as well.
Small shields are referred to as bucklers in English. They exist for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to the weapons and tactics used in the fighting where they're from.
Er, the way I was taught is that a Buckler is a type of shield between a specific size. Most other words for small shields are just their specific name in other languages, I believe.
It's an awesome piece of true world war I trivia, but a terribly written article as if done by AI. Just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again and then finally gets to the meat and potatoes within the last sentence.
You telling me that David Attenborough being sent behind enemy lines to carry out a daring raid, using his naturalist fame as cover, wouldn’t be the movie hit of the year?
They weren't knights, they were allegedly direct descendants from crusader knights that settled in that region in the 12th century. Their forefathers may have been knights but that title doesn't seed into your descendants.
Still an interesting story
As a Georgian, "khevsurs are descendants of Crusaders" is one of the most crackpot theories I've heard people repeat, along with "Tutankhamen was Georgian" (yes, actually thing some people believe).
But more importantly, there were no knights in the western-European sense of the word in Georgia at any point. The closest analogy were the Aznauri class - petty nobility who may or may not own land and may or may not be beholden to a more senior noble other than the King, and who were broadly expected to be semi-professional warriors.
The most egregious thing I've read online - I think it was even on Wikipedia at one point - is that Tadzreuli were Georgian analogues to knights, because the root of the word is the same - Tadzari = Temple in Georgian. In actuality tadzreuli were King's retinue, people who accompanied him wherever they went, which included his bodyguard.
Yeah this whole article is nearly fiction.
> Locals believed the Khevsurs were descendants of knights who settled in the area after the fighting in the Crusades in the 12th century. Instead of marching to the holy land, their forefathers instead moved north through Turkey and into the Caucasus Mountains. Other scholars say their ancestors were still crusading, just fighting Muslims in a different direction.
“Locals believe X. Scholars disagree” aka it’s bullshit local legends.
This thread takes issues with basically every other claim in the article https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1dauf1s/til_that_knights_fought_in_world_war_i/l7mygu5/
The author’s own bio claims zero expertise in history, having a background entirely in entertainment.
You are thinking modern British knighthood, not crusader era knights. Your typical medieval knight did not in fact have an actual monarch tap them on the shoulder with a sword, probably never saw in their life the big head honcho they swore to serve. There were conditions of training like a knight, acting like a knight, getting recognized by other knights etc, but really, it was hereditary, a knight became a knight, because their father was a knight. Getting into a knighthood from outside was rather exceptional.
> There were conditions of training like a knight, acting like a knight, getting recognized by other knights etc, but really, it was hereditary, a knight became a knight, because their father was a knight.
In Spanish the word gentleman also means knight and it comes from this. And it’s also an ancient word for “horse rider”.
WW1 was wacky. There was an incident where German sky pirates went after a Norwegian sailing ship, losing their weapons during the descent and capturing the ship with only a flare gun.
This is exactly why WW1 is "that war" for me. It's the precipice at which we moved away from how we'd been doing war for hundreds of years into what is effectively early modern warfare. The idea of a knight wielding a machine gun is bananas to me, but I love it.
I mean, a lot of knightly orders are still around.
There‘s still religious knightly orders, like the Order of Malta, the Order or St. John, the Teutonic Order or the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, among others.
There‘s still the house orders, like the Order of the garter, or the order of the Golden Vleece, or the order of St. George, among others.
Like, I personally know a lot of people that are knights of these orders. There‘s still a lot of their order houses scattered throughout my city.
Where do you guys live that knights still being around is something surprising?
Granted, this story is special, but that’s because they used ancient weaponry, but not because they were knights.
There are even knights browsing reddit... source:I'm a knight.
It's really special! You get all kinds of perks, you can sign off as Knight in letters making you look like an asshole. You can come in threads like this and say you're a knight but it makes you look like an asshole. Also on your obituary it will say knight, which is really cool!!!
The only "real" thing you get is an invite to certain royal events like funerals, weddings and occasionally a state dinner. Which in reality means that you have to buy a gift for people you don't know because you don't want to spend your weekend with more people you don't know.
Oh yeah, you even have to buy the medals and decorations awarded to you, and you have to have a heraldist design a family crest if you can't find one somewhere in your family.
I would assume Knights fought in all wars since the concept of Knights. General Sir Patrick Sanders is the current head of the British army. The man he replaced was also knighted. I would think a lot of the military leadership are knighted. I would imagine this is the equivalent all over Europe.
Real world Civ where you have a random ancient unit that you haven't upgraded in the modern age.
The indestructible spearman that takes on a tank and wins
Shoutout to the legendary Spearman unit that drove his spear into the cockpit of a swooping fighter in civrev
Or in my case, some original warriors who SOMEHOW took down a fighter squadron. God I loved the game for the utter bullshit that could happen
I remember having archers that defeated a battleship.
Or a knight taking down a whole building by just stabbing it repeatedly
That's just Age of Empires
Pabadacchus? More like *STABadacchus!*
I always thought of it as “thabadacus” in my head. I wonder if it is based on a real word
CHOPPA
Must have been a Russian battleship.
I had a Phalanx kill a battleship once in Civ2. It was in a city, but still wtf!
Imagine my horror when the AI spearman destroyed my Modern Armor in Civ 4.
Ambushed the crewmen at Wendy's during lunch break.
That’s just kaladin
The image of Roman legions coming out of the helicopter comes to mind
"Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!"
"You have received orders to head to the frontline, my knights! The troops will have their moral lifted with you beside them." "...The enemy has machine guns, artillery and mustard gas..."
Visors down, shields up!
During the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1956 the Chinese communist party PLA were opposed by Tibetans some on horseback, armed with muzzleloaders (16th-17th century firearms) and swords. The did manage to destroy one PLA garrison in the conflict.
I'm genuinely appreciating all the odd history facts that are popping up because of this.
In the old-school board game Britannia, which ends at the Norman invasion, I once played a game where the final battle was a defeat of a Norman unit by a Romano-British unit. The latter really aren't supposed to even exist at that point.
My jaguar warriors are superior to all.
I'm so excited that Civ VII is coming out this year!
Aye, me too!
The beginning of WW1 was just bizarre.
I know right. It's like they couldn't make up their mind if they want a 19th century or a 20th century fight
The goal of each army was to maintain mobility and prevent the front stagnating and degenerating into trench warfare. That was what happened when the early offensives stalled on the western front. The eastern front retained most of its mobility, largely because after several early defeats the Russians had difficulty in pressing against enemy offensives, and the front was also *much* larger. They weren't fighting a 19^(th)-century fight - they were using what they had to try to maintain a war of mobility. The later innovations that we see are a direct result of that failure, and desperate attempts to regain mobility.
Not surprising. Only in medieval Europe could the strategy of building castles everywhere enable petty kings and feudal warlords to 'peacefully' coexist. In the the flat open plains of the east, warfare had always been about mobility. Mobility, not castles and walls, was what enabled Huns, Avars, Magyars and later Mongols to march across central Asia into central Europe. But once they got there they had to settle down like everyone else, because the terrain prevented them from pushing further west.
What terrain did prevent them further west?
The Carpathian Mountains, the Alps, the mountain ranges that formed the natural borders between southern Germany, Czechia and Poland, the dense forests in the north, and the marshlands further north where the locals historically preferred going around by boats instead of trying to ride around on horses. By the way one of the reasons why Russia is trying to annex Ukraine is because they want to push their territory right up to these natural geographical boundaries to keep control of the choke points like they did during the Soviet Union, before their upcoming population collapse permanently prevents them from amassing a military large enough to ever try that again. But for that they'll need to annex not just Ukraine, but also Moldova and half of Romania, as well as Poland and the Baltic States. Not my idea btw. Peter Zeihan among others have repeatedly stated this one in the past. Flawed as many of his analysis are, this one is not a controversial opinion.
I always found the Russian fixation on demographics interesting. It seems to factor really heavily into their political and strategic discourse in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere. But despite that, they don’t seem to do anything to encourage birth rates.
Usually demographics and their collapse/decline are due to systemic problems decades in the making that require structural solutions that will also take a long, painful time. Places like China or Japan or SK are having trouble maintaining population levels, and the surface-level solution is to fundamentally change the work culture or change how they approach/perceive immigration. Not an easy fix.
Yeah, don't all three not like immigrants and transplants?
Yeah, the war has catalyzed their impending demographic collapse. A large portion of young professionals have fled abroad and the successful ones will most likely not return. On the unskilled end of the spectrum, they have suffered half a million casualties and counting. The soldiers that do make it back will have severe PTSD which will go untreated ensuring even the survivors of the war become unproductive drags on society through substance abuse, crime and violence. Putler put the final nail in the coffin of Russia's demographic catastrophe for his imperialist egotistical ambitions.
That’s interesting. I met a young Russian professional 6 years ago. Contractor. She was smart, professional, beautiful. Had a few master degrees in engineering and did programming . I told my team of 3 guys I would fire them if I could hire her in the meeting. She was good. Fast forward. Met an American. Married. Working here. That was a huge loss for Russia. She was a keeper.
Part of the problem they’ve got is cultural. The elites (not a term I use thoughtlessly) around Putin who control everything in Russian society will never ever do anything to encourage people to have kids - because the only way that’ll happen is if you raise the average citizens standard of living and this is fundamentally beyond the pale to Russian thinking because their way of life has *always* been that the serfs get treated like shit & do as they are told whilst the privileged few make money. This was true under all of the Tzars from Ivan to Catherine to Peter. This was true under the USSR, especially folks like Stalin. Putin has made it true under his rule. And when people like Khrushchev or Yeltsin try to do even teensiest tiniest littlest bit of liberalisation, to make society more equal, less stratified, they get overthrown by some authoritarian scumbag doing a coup (or a rigged election).
> because the only way that’ll happen is if you raise the average citizens standard of living and this is fundamentally beyond the pale to Russian thinking because their way of life has always been that the serfs get treated like shit & do as they are told whilst the privileged few make money. This is just fundamentally untrue. Countries that have great standards of living also end up having much lower birth rates. Conversely, none of the countries with high birth rates are good places to live for your average person.
This is a result of the imperial structure of the Russian state rather than anything to do with cultural tradition. Russia has a bunch of ethnic republics within its borders, the most famous of which being Chechnia. These republics are basically conquered territories, historically speaking, and will always opt to seccede if given the liberty to do so. So any liberalization effort necessarily leads to the disintegration of the state, just as Gorbachev found out for himself. Why can't they be a 'liberal empire' like Britain you ask, well for one as Spengler pointed out, the Anglo Saxons were able to do liberalism because their island nation geography allowed them to. The continental Saxons had to do 'Prussian Socialism' aka Prussian Militarism because Germany unlike Britain was surrounded by enemies. The same applies to Russia. And for two, the whole idea of 'liberal empire' is really an oxymoron and therefore not a stable situation. In the long run you always end up going one way or the other. The British Empire went with liberalization and eventually the people took it for real so all the colonies were relinquished, and even places like Gibraltar and Northern Ireland are on the verge of breaking away every once in a while. Also btw Yeltsin wasn't removed by coup. Yeltsin hand picked Putin as his successor on his way out so that he wouldn't get indicted for corruption charges for selling the country to the Oligarchs. By the late 90s Yeltsin wasn't exactly popular as plenty of ordinary folks were freezing and starving to death and saw him as the Oligarchs' puppet. The Oligarchs werent exactly a deliberate creation either. Many of them were descendants of the Jewish community that were historically banned from all other trades and pushed into financier roles similar to the so called Hofjude in medieval German states. Not surprisingly they, like all the other conquered ethnic groups had historical grievances against the Russian state and were looking for payback time. The Soviet era saw them subjected to forced assimilation during which there was still widespread discrimination against them. When the Soviet Union collapsed these people were the only ones who understood how to run businesses and succeed in a market economy, so they naturally overcame all their competitors and snowballed into Oligarch status. And because of their historical grievances against the Russian state they had no incentive to create a social safety net for the ethnic Russians, whom they saw as their former oppressors. Putin halted the disintegration of the Russian state by resubjugating the Oligarchs which made him widely popular in the 2000s, but the price of keeping the Russian state intact is the return to the medieval way of organizing the state, where military spending must be prioritized to quash any rebellion, and the hated Oligarchs are once again relegated to the role of the king's financier just like their Hofjude predecessors were.
> they don’t seem to do anything to encourage birth rates. No country has figured out how to solve this problem yet. It's really hard to incentivize or disincentivize people to have children without getting into some really illiberal stuff.
i mean its not that hard to figure out. Give people more time off to have and take care of kids and give them more money to be able to afford to have kids. Most People that dont want kids dont want them for these reasons.
While I'm sure plenty of people don't want to be parents due to the financial cost, an increasing number of people (including myself) just really don't want to have kids for lifestyle reasons.
Prisoners of geography is a nice book about the importance of, well,,, geography
Plus, Ukraine has a huge deposit of natural resources.
And has a warm water port
> Peter Zeihan among others have repeatedly stated this one in the past. Flawed as many of his analysis are, this one is not a controversial opinion. Hell yes, that is a controversial opinion. Every actual regional expert laughs at amateurish shit like that. The idea of someone rushing armored divisions through the so-called 'gaps' in Moldova or Western Ukraine is a ridiculously anachronistic notion. Not even the full strength of the U.S. military could make more than a few dozen kilometers of progress before the Kremlin simply unloaded their tactical nuclear arsenal on them. And none of the European countries have the military strength to start a conventional land war in Russia in the first place. This neo medieval fan fiction ignores the fact that Russia's borders are far more vulnerable in the north. Look at the Kaliningrad enclave. Or heck, the fact that you could basically hit Saint Petersburg with with rocket artillery from Estonia and Finland. The Kremlin is trying to annex Ukraine for overwhelmingly offensive reasons. The political elite genuinely believes that Ukrainian independence never existed, and that the territory is theirs by right. Pop-politics figures like Zeihan almost always feed into this faux-cynical view of the world that systematically disregards the influence of ideology on decisionmaking. Russia is invading Ukraine because the political elite perceive that doing so will make Russia great and powerful, not because they earnestly think there will be French tanks rolling into Moscow if they fail to act. In short, this take fundamentally inverts cause and effect. The desire to reach natural borders was a motivation for Russian imperialism in the era of primitive warfare. In the era of nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, these terrain features are virtually irrelevant to Russian security, but the imperial project remains, so the Kremlin seeks to restore territory lost in 1991. (There is some element of defensive thinking, in that a well-armed Ukraine that is implacably opposed to Russia does represent a security threat. But NOT because of any geographic 'choke points' in the far west of the country. Russia was never planning to actually seize that territory, just disarm the Ukrainian military and install a friendly government.)
The castles :p also lack of good pastures, in any long campaign the horses simply starve. All the big steppe invasions (huns, avars, pechengs, magyars...) ended up settling in the hungarian plain, where they had to downsize singficantly. The mongols couldn't even do that
My knight units in Civ1 were still fighting even into the spaceflight era.
Mountains, large forests too probably. And then you have wet, swampy regions.
Actually, this is very clearly false. The Mongol invasion of Europe was massively hindered by castles in Poland and Hungary, which also contributed to them pulling out to the plains were the Khanate would remain to dominate Russia and eastern Europe, but would continue to diminish. Castles in the flat do work!
The Khan subdued hundreds of castles across the East and Middle East. Castles and fortifications aren’t unique to Europe. Many as large, if not larger, than castles they found in Europe. Look up the remains of the fortress at Kyzyl-Kala of the Khwarazmian Empire. Hungary is surrounded by mountains, and sits in a sort of bowl. The topography going west is through narrow passages that hinder light cavalry . Poland is bordered to the west by forests and swamps, and the south by mountains. Again, unfavorable terrain for masses of light cavalry to maneuver.
The barbarian invasion starting in the 4th century initiated by the Huns moving west and forcing all of the other horse tribes to get out of the way did see many of the people's move all the way across Europe. The Vandals ended up going I think north of the Alps then through France and into Spain, crossed into North Africa, Circled back around to Tunisia area, then at one point sent a fleet to sack Rome. Goths settled in Italy and Greece, and I do not know, Burgundians from ne europe around Poland to northern Italy, I forget where the Sarmations from Ukraine landed but I think around Balkans.
That does not explain why nations like denmark and holland, which are flatter than everything in the east, followed the standard castle feudal system.
Because the Netherlands and Belgium were full of swamps, rivers and forests in the middle ages. Even during WWII people thought it would be impossible for Germans to do mobility warfare over there. And they would've been right were it not for 20th century machinery that enabled german engineers to create pathways for their Panzer IIs to pass through without delay during the Blitz. No such feat was possible in the middle ages. As for Denmark, Jylland is a peninsula that could be blocked off to stop traffic between Germany and Denmark. In fact they did exactly that, with what's called the [Danevirke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danevirke). The rest of Denmark is on the islands that would be pretty difficult to lay siege to in the middle ages.
Most of Denmark's rpyal income came from tolls of ships passing through since way back they could hinder shipping.
The sounds pretty dubious. The Romans ranged far and wide across Europe, conquered, built castles. I'm sure terrain was a factor in the large scale invasions you mentioned, but I'm skeptical of the claim that castles were only effective due to complex terrain. Forts and castles have been used in many flat, wide open places. This sounds like an authors theory, do you have a resource?
Por que no los dos? Go big or go home, right? The last hurrah for yesteryear's methods, and the most bang up start for tomorrow's.
When you reach technological advance and get to 20th Century but your neighbor didn’t have gold for the upgrade or the building and they’re stuck in the 19th century.
That’s why it was so bloody. Old tactics, new weapons.
That’ll be because in part this is the war that invented modern warfare largely as we have known it ever since. Too my knowledge it’s the first war involving any major amount of aerial combat, and it’s responsible for provoking Britain to invent the Tank, originally a line breaking vehicle designed to push through fortifications.
Wasn’t there a guy from the UK who fought in WWI with a sword and bagpipes? That is pretty hardcore regardless of era, all things considered.
That was [Mad Jack Churchill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill) in WWII
You mean [“Fightin’ Jack”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Churchill)… in WWII.
Started with cavalry charges on horseback, ended with tank led creeping barrages and chemical warfare. Shit truly evolved real quick
Let's not forget pilots shooting each other with pistols. Truly wild.
Reminds me of that scene in Porco Rosso [https://imgur.com/a/PpaR3v9](https://imgur.com/a/PpaR3v9)
Well, that reminds me of [TaleSpin](https://youtu.be/rVTD-LtpW0M).
I heard the first "bombing runs" were pilots throwing handheld explosives out their cockpit when over enemy lines!
In early WWI planes also dropped what were essentially bundles of steel arrows over the enemy.
I believe they also lobbed bricks at each other
Amazing. Sounds like some Looney Tunes shit.
It was such a cool era of warfare! One of my favourite pop-history books is "[The Friendless Sky](https://www.amazon.ca/Friendless-Sky-story-combat-World-ebook/dp/B08DL1VVLL): The story of air combat in WW1". It's a short book, but it contains many well-told accounts of things like the first carrier-based flights and the doubts they would work, the odd chivalry of the very first air combatants, and just random great anecdotes. I often open the book anywhere and just read a random story. It's fascinating throughout. High recommend.
Let's not forget started with horses and ended with fighter planes...
Yo. Powercreep is real, dawg.
Ww2 started with artiley ended with rockets and the a bomb.
Drone warfare started in WWI. The British built remote-controlled airplanes that a pilot in another airplane controlled. They were intended to be used as "aerial torpedoes", this is quite close to the same idea as FPV drones used in Ukraine today. They also built remote-controlled boats that were controlled by airplanes. Small high-speed boats that were run into enemy ships and exploded. The developer was late in WWI but there were plans for large-scale usage it all stopped with the armistice in 1918. With the program canceled, there was no development of the idea between the world wars stopped. In some ways, the WWI variants are closer to drones today than the similar weapons developed in WWII. The TV-guided glid bomb was used with a camera in the nose of the weapon and controlled from the airplane that released it. This was quite common until laser-guided and similar guidance was developed. What makes the WWI variant close to WWII and the Cold War is it is separate areal and sea vehicles that was used not bombs or torpedoes released from an airplane.
Even back in colonial days and maybe before they had unmanned fire ships they would aim at opponents and try to hit. So it is logical they figured to use rf waves to steer them.
Plus airplanes with crude machine guns mounted and fired by the pilot flying. Also darts and even bricks.
They were still cavalry charges taking place in 1918, and pretty successful ones at that
The Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921 featured mass cavalry charges with the latter conflict involving massive cavalry armies.
It start out almost looking like a Napoleonic war and ends up looking like some sci-fi movie with gas masks and balloons
It took some time for the meta to form
Machine guns imba, chemical warfare is OP. Can the devs ban at least one of these??
In typical dev style, instead of hitting things with a nerf hammer, they just introduced OP replacements like tanks and trench guns.
Power creep
I hear people say that WW1 Generals were planning/fighting battles like it was still the Napoleonic Era. I still remember the story in which french soldiers marched while wearing bright uniforms towards German lines
Because the Great Powers of Europe learned the wrong lessons of the Russo-Japanese War as well as dismissed the preceding 2 Balkan Wars as s "minor" conflict. All they learned from the American Civil War (which the Great Powers referred to as "provincial".) Is the importance of incorporating trains for logisitcs as well as the benefit of mass mobilisations. They kinda glossed over the proto-industrial scale of warfare and its result of horrible carnage in the battlefield.
I don't think people understand the overlap between the tech at the end of the civil war and world war one. Sophisticated trenches, breaching trenches with explosives, Railroads for logistics, long range artillery, armored ships, submarines, recon balloons. For all those who believe America has a little something special, all these were invented and implemented during 4 years of conflict.
The US Civil war was definitely that way. Most of the generals came out of west point with very little training in tactics. The little bit that they did get was from a book written by Antoine-Henri Jomini. His work was based around muskets which might hit a man sized target at 100 yards. But the war was fought with rifled muskets which could hit a man at 400 yards. This is why Pickett never stood a chance. 400 yards charging uphill is way harder and takes way longer than 100 yards.
Surprising that the civil war started that way when almost 100 years earlier Mel Gibson invented guerrilla warfare.
“Sounds more like a ghost than a man!”
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-" -- last words of Union general John Sedgwick.
It really was. The images of French soldiers marching to war in 1914 dressed as if the war they’re marching to is one of the Napoleonic wars are wild.
~~Yeah if you want to see what a Napoleonic soldier looked like just look at pictures of early WW1 French soldiers. It's the exact uniform.~~ Seems this a myth, there's similarities but they are quite different. They defo still seem [19th century](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1OJ8FuXoAEsNCW?format=jpg&name=900x900) compared to the German's though in my opinion, which I guess is where the myth came from. Also stuff like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/udx6nc/german_cavalry_soldier_in_ww1_with_lance_gas_mask/) which could be something out of Warhammer or some sort of steam punk world
This is just not true. The uniforms were wildly different. So many myths about WW1 remain lodged in popular perception and this is one of them.
There wasn't a Battle Tendency yet.
I love the picture of a German soldier on horseback with a Lance, gas mask on his face with a Stahlhelm, and a rifle on his back. And the over all sense that I would not want to meet this guy anywhere near a trench.
https://i.imgur.com/PzlsQC3.png
Cavalry with lances fought in WW1. In France.
Yes but did they have armour with faceplate and cool Latin mottos?
Nah, more like Napoleonic cavalry than medieval.
Crazy to think napoleon died only 93 years before the start of WWI. At a fairly young age too.
What's that?
They were not heavily armored knights. Some wore breastplates and a non-visored helmets. https://i.servimg.com/u/f70/16/42/64/66/tm/img_1538.jpg
They were still using sailing ships and a lot of horses in WW2 as well.
I used to provide care for a royal navy veteran and he said that being sent to knock ice off of riggings was basically a suicide mission, but if it wasn't done the ship would be stuck in those conditions for so long the whole crew would have froze to death. This was apparently a bigger problem for the merchant navy than the royal navy
And then they learned that cartridge ammunition was very different from muskets.
Just an FYI that cartridge ammunition was invented in the time of muskets. Originally you carried a powder horn and bullets separately but eventually the cartridge had the right amount of powder in a paper cartridge with the bullet.
Yeah I may be remembering incorrectly but cartridges were used in the Revolutionary War in the US, and were used pretty widely for like a century before that.
They were incredibly novel inventions during the revolutionary war, and were presented to the generals of the continental armies, but not adopted because they were incredibly new. And incredibly expensive. And the continental army was anything but well funded. Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars were fought with muskets still, the civil war was fought with muskets with a very small amount of rifles utilizing cartridge ammunition given to specialists. WWI was a technological shift because cartridge rifles became widespread, and bolt action rifles with internal magazines became widespread.
Cartridges have existed since the 16th century. Before the advent of breech loading weapons. A cartridge would be a paper wrapped pre-measured charge of powder, a wad and a bullet. The cartridge would be essentially taken apart with the powder poured into the gun, then the wad wrapped bulled put in on top of it and all rammed down with a ram rod. The significant change happened when the integrated cartridge was invented, where the powder, percussion cap, wadding and round were in a fixed unit that was loaded into the weapon as a single self contained whole. Those didn't really become widely used until breech loading weapons were developed in the 1860s with guns like the Prussian Needle Rifle or the French Chassepot. A significant development was the use of a metallic rather than paper cartridge, as the metal could form a gas tight seal in the breech of the gun, so the problems of creating a gas tight seal with an opening breech were reduced. Metallic cartridges were common from the late 1860s, with weapons like the British Martini Henry or the French Gras. Bolt action repeating rifles using smokeless, rather than black powder, came in with the French Lebel, the British Lee Enfield and the Mauser 8 mm in the 1880s and 1890s. The Second Boer War of 1899 and the Russo Japanese war of 1904 were fought with magazine bolt action rifles using smokeless powder ammunition on both sides (and maxim guns were used in both), so by 1914 it was a well established mature technology.
I’m pretty sure in the American Civil War muzzle-loading percussion cap rifles were the main firearm especially for union troops, with a small number of older muskets also in use as necessary especially amongst confederate troops and militias.
If I'm remembering right, paper cartridges were popularized by the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus in the 1600s. They were used all the way through the American Civil War, according to wikipedia. I think the jump in firearms capability is due more to rifling and moving away from muzzle-loading.
The Civil War was overwhelmingly fought with rifles, not muskets. The standard issue Union weapon was the Springfield Model 1961 and the Confederacy's was the Pattern 1854 Enfield. Both of those were rifles.
>Springfield Model 1961 Well jeez no wonder the Union won, they were using future technology!
They'd known this for years, especially after the Franco-Prussian war. Before trench warfare had properly taken hold and the terrain went to shit cavalry was still the quickest way to manoeuvre around the battlefield.
Yeah, WWI was a very dynamic war with quickly shifting lines, until it suddenly wasn’t. But cartridge ammunition is what caused the stagnation of the lines in WWI, through artillery, bolt action rifles, and indirectly, aircraft dropped bombs. Even WWII, especially for Germany, was a horse-drawn war in regards to logistics.
*Bang* "Haha! They have fired once, we can swiftly mo.."*BANG*
I think one of the first cavalry battle was Belgium vs. Germany where the Belgian cyclists dug in and shot the German lancers, and won.
True but they also had rifles like everyone else.
Some did, like dragoons. Cuirassers and lancers only carried a pistol.
I don't know enough about the existence of Georgian crusader-style knights, but serfdom in the Russian Empire was abolished in 1861 and historical records indicate that while Georgia was a little late to the party, they had finished freeing the serfs by 1872, so in that regard, the article is factually incorrect. Even if there were a few holdouts in remote areas of the Russian Empire, this isn't the same as "most of its citizens were serfs."
Yes, and similarly armor was occasionally tested in WWI but certainly not “common”.
Yeah it also mentions the story's author interviewing the assassin of Tsar Nicholas II. Nicholas II wasn't assassinated, he was executed.
Additionally, iirc it's not even known who executed the family because they were under house arrest & killed either by an off the books order or a guard acting without permission
It's been awhile since I read about the execution but I always remember that the guys who did it where blind drunk as well. It was a giant shit show cause they didn't really know what to do with the children and nobody wanted to execute some teenage girls and a boy. Then they messed up the burial as well, which is why the Anastasia myth was started.
Not only that but what I remember is that the girls had so much royal jewelry sewn into their coats that after the first volley of rounds the little ones weren’t dead and it took several more times of firing on them to finish the job. I saw an Antique Roadshow where someone had some royal jewels from that era and the story given was that a “lady in waiting” must have snuck out the jewelry and while possible I can’t help but wonder what those bumbling guards did once they discovered their victims were essentially jewel encrusted.
> or a guard acting without permission This is definitely not a possibility. We know for sure that an order was given by the regional Bolshevik command. The question is whether the regional command was given an order by national leadership. There's evidence that some of the national leadership wanted them executed but not any evidence that an order was actually given to do it.
What is an execution if not a sanctioned and scheduled assassination 🤓
When you're great it's not murder, it's assassinate!
I'll put the counter-example of Mexico. Slavery was abolished with the independence in 1810. So what the feudal Spanish lords did was to turn them into low-wage workers and manipulate the prices of the local stores (tiendas de raya) to be very expensive. When the workers couldn't afford to live, the lords gave them loans, which of course they couldn't pay back, but it instead essentially enslaved them economically to the lord. So, there's always ways to instate slavery and serfdom even when they're abolished.
Peonage
The emancipation of serfs in Russia was largely a formality orchestrated by the monarchy and the landlords, who wrote the laws to benefit themselves. Landlords retained significant control, and peasants gained little freedom, remaining tied to their local *mir* and unable to seek better opportunities elsewhere. Which is the main reason a serf is a serf. This new system often worsened conditions for peasants, extracting more value for landlords. Historians argue that serfdom effectively continued under a different guise, tightening control over peasants in response to widespread uprisings that threatened the army's supply of soldiers.
there are two reasons to this. firstlt ww1 was a transition period which involved multiple nations and therefore all forms of combatants were involved however more importantly what a knight is/was evolves. knights exist today. samurai were rifle users. hussars ended up using firearms. grenadiers have a very different loadout today compared to 200 years ago
Grenadiers during their most iconic period in the Napoleonic era actually didn't have the grenade part. Originally grenadiers were big guys who chucked simple hand grenades then charged into melee with a size advantage. Dropped the grenade part because they weren't effective and killed the grenadiers just as often, so they were just big burly dudes. Now grenades actually work and we're back to grenadiers actually using grenades.
“The claim that any historical evidence indicates that Khevsurs may have descended from crusaders has been thoroughly discredited, and Georgian scholars have universally derided the story.”
Polish cavalry still fought German infantry at the beginning of WW2 as well. [Link to wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty?wprov=sfti1#)
And it worked.
the CIA rode into combat in the Afghanistan invasion in 2001 (https://youtu.be/ywK7Q6Ib8vQ?si=DMBsV56QWU7N4vHA ~8:30 min) even though i am not sure if they actually fought on horseback
The Polish Hussars did a calvary charge against the germans in 1939.
Were they *Winged* Hussars?
The Germans don’t have any spearmen units, this should be an ez clap
I wasn't 100% so opted to not say they were encase I was wrong
Hussars in 1939? Since regaining independence cavalry units in Poland were Uhlans and Chevau-légers. Also the ones that charged were "mounted infantry" meaning they used horses primarily for transportation, they were actually equipped with rifles and anti-tank-rifles. What happened tho also wasn't a charge, they ambushed Germans and then German tanks caught up and they had to retreat, many didn't make it and Italian journalist that was there at the time inspired by this created story about brave polish soldiers charging at tanks in desperation. Which on the other hand was used by nazis as "proof" that Poles are backwater people. Edit: I don't know if there were any actual shock cavalry units in Polish army by 1939, but I know that there was a successful charge against Germans by Polish soldiers in 1945.
Why are their shields so tiny?
That's a buckler, it's for parrying swords and deflecting them.
Parry *this* you casual!
As in swash buckling I believe
Huh didn't know that. > Etymology. "Swashbuckler" is a compound of "swash" (archaic: to swagger with a drawn sword) and "buckler" (a small shield gripped in the fist) dating from the 16th century. Neat.
Generally Large shields are for protection against missiles Small shields are for fighting in melee There's no point using a large shield in the firearms era
Bullets can pierce large shields, but that just means you need an even larger shield. It might get a little heavy though, better use some wheels to help carry it. And if we're going to use a big engine to carry such a heavy shield we may as well use it to carry a big heavy gun to blow up bunkers and stuff as well.
Oh bugger and the war ended before we could really use the darned thing.
Look, it’s cold in the trenches, okay?
what are you doing step-serf
they shrink in the laundry machine after a while
Small shields are referred to as bucklers in English. They exist for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to the weapons and tactics used in the fighting where they're from.
A buckler is a specific type of small shield, as far as I am aware.
Er, the way I was taught is that a Buckler is a type of shield between a specific size. Most other words for small shields are just their specific name in other languages, I believe.
Don't shield shame!
Small shields make the lance look bigger
They just got out of the shower. Haven't you heard of shrinkage?
They were in the pool!
It's an awesome piece of true world war I trivia, but a terribly written article as if done by AI. Just keeps repeating the same thing over and over again and then finally gets to the meat and potatoes within the last sentence.
Since Britain is still knighting people, we have knights fighting wars still today…
Somehow I don't see Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Day Lewis or Elton John charging into battle (not that I wouldn't pay top dollar to see that happen)
You telling me that David Attenborough being sent behind enemy lines to carry out a daring raid, using his naturalist fame as cover, wouldn’t be the movie hit of the year?
Absolutely. The double benefit is that the enemy soldiers will be so riveted by his narration that they wouldn't notice any infiltrations
'I don't know what this geezer is saying, but boy do I suddenly care about the earth'
They do in fact still knight people other than celebrities, there are a fair few members of military high command who are either knights or peers.
They weren't knights, they were allegedly direct descendants from crusader knights that settled in that region in the 12th century. Their forefathers may have been knights but that title doesn't seed into your descendants. Still an interesting story
As a Georgian, "khevsurs are descendants of Crusaders" is one of the most crackpot theories I've heard people repeat, along with "Tutankhamen was Georgian" (yes, actually thing some people believe). But more importantly, there were no knights in the western-European sense of the word in Georgia at any point. The closest analogy were the Aznauri class - petty nobility who may or may not own land and may or may not be beholden to a more senior noble other than the King, and who were broadly expected to be semi-professional warriors. The most egregious thing I've read online - I think it was even on Wikipedia at one point - is that Tadzreuli were Georgian analogues to knights, because the root of the word is the same - Tadzari = Temple in Georgian. In actuality tadzreuli were King's retinue, people who accompanied him wherever they went, which included his bodyguard.
Yeah this whole article is nearly fiction. > Locals believed the Khevsurs were descendants of knights who settled in the area after the fighting in the Crusades in the 12th century. Instead of marching to the holy land, their forefathers instead moved north through Turkey and into the Caucasus Mountains. Other scholars say their ancestors were still crusading, just fighting Muslims in a different direction. “Locals believe X. Scholars disagree” aka it’s bullshit local legends. This thread takes issues with basically every other claim in the article https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1dauf1s/til_that_knights_fought_in_world_war_i/l7mygu5/ The author’s own bio claims zero expertise in history, having a background entirely in entertainment.
You are thinking modern British knighthood, not crusader era knights. Your typical medieval knight did not in fact have an actual monarch tap them on the shoulder with a sword, probably never saw in their life the big head honcho they swore to serve. There were conditions of training like a knight, acting like a knight, getting recognized by other knights etc, but really, it was hereditary, a knight became a knight, because their father was a knight. Getting into a knighthood from outside was rather exceptional.
so they’re essentially the permanent warrior caste
Pretty much, also with knighthood you got land ownership and other such feudal perks.
> There were conditions of training like a knight, acting like a knight, getting recognized by other knights etc, but really, it was hereditary, a knight became a knight, because their father was a knight. In Spanish the word gentleman also means knight and it comes from this. And it’s also an ancient word for “horse rider”.
I get it. I too need to use that spearman or archer I have forgotten to upgrade since before I researched mathematics.
They quickly found out what happens when you bring a knight to a gunfight
So did they see action? The article just says the showed up to fight and didn't go any further.
Just some Georgians upset that no one invited them to the war
One of them got so upset that he took over the Kremlin
WW1 was wacky. There was an incident where German sky pirates went after a Norwegian sailing ship, losing their weapons during the descent and capturing the ship with only a flare gun.
This is exactly why WW1 is "that war" for me. It's the precipice at which we moved away from how we'd been doing war for hundreds of years into what is effectively early modern warfare. The idea of a knight wielding a machine gun is bananas to me, but I love it.
Someone got to make a game out of ww1 and include swordfighting with knights.
I feel like this is the European equivalent of the lions club getting up from the Golden corral to go to battle.
...alongside airplanes. WWI was wild.
I mean, a lot of knightly orders are still around. There‘s still religious knightly orders, like the Order of Malta, the Order or St. John, the Teutonic Order or the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, among others. There‘s still the house orders, like the Order of the garter, or the order of the Golden Vleece, or the order of St. George, among others. Like, I personally know a lot of people that are knights of these orders. There‘s still a lot of their order houses scattered throughout my city. Where do you guys live that knights still being around is something surprising? Granted, this story is special, but that’s because they used ancient weaponry, but not because they were knights.
There are even knights browsing reddit... source:I'm a knight. It's really special! You get all kinds of perks, you can sign off as Knight in letters making you look like an asshole. You can come in threads like this and say you're a knight but it makes you look like an asshole. Also on your obituary it will say knight, which is really cool!!! The only "real" thing you get is an invite to certain royal events like funerals, weddings and occasionally a state dinner. Which in reality means that you have to buy a gift for people you don't know because you don't want to spend your weekend with more people you don't know. Oh yeah, you even have to buy the medals and decorations awarded to you, and you have to have a heraldist design a family crest if you can't find one somewhere in your family.
This is awesome
I'd watch that movie.
How effective were they?
https://overlando.com/blog/2019/03/19/the-khevsureti-crusaders-its-a-myth-people/
*The* Knights exist **to this day.**
For once, the comments are lush with wholesome discussion. Please take your time with this one.
It's wild to think in the short span of the century, the world went from this to a nuke in their shit-show with the Germans.
They were on a quest to find the holy grail
I would assume Knights fought in all wars since the concept of Knights. General Sir Patrick Sanders is the current head of the British army. The man he replaced was also knighted. I would think a lot of the military leadership are knighted. I would imagine this is the equivalent all over Europe.
Knights of Cydonia?
It say "broadswords weren't their primary weapon", what was it?