Re: 13th Century Ayyubid Horsemen
Sometime in the past couple of years, someone posted in the Monastery a link to an extremely detailed site on the subject of WW2 Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union.
I mean, ridiculously detailed and rich in info.
Unfortunately, after trawling through the first 5 pages of the Monastery I couldn't seem to find the post.
Any help?
Re: 13th Century Ayyubid Horsemen
Hi guys,
I hope I'm posting in the right place.
I'm very exited for the release of Rome II in a couple of weeks and decided to brush up a bit on the history of the era.
What I'm looking for essentially is a comparison between the regions and factions set during the campaign of the game and the current countries and nations these regions and factions roughly correspond to today.
I don't need a large volume of information regarding each faction, just a short description of what these factions are known as today ( Example: Gauls are today's Frenchmen and Gaul was what is now France (give or take).
Could someone point me to a website or a thread that would help me with my personal research?
Thank you!
The Portuguese Military Orders
Re: The Portuguese Military Orders
Adding an online resource on the Medieval part - Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. :book:
The Dumbarton Oaks website has a couple of issues available for download that deal with a wide variety of Byzantine topics, available here - http://www.doaks.org/resources/publi...on-oaks-papers
Re: The Portuguese Military Orders
Adding another source - Google has digitised significant books, and some are available to read online.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006734253 - Byzantine Empire by C.W.C. Oman.
Re: The Portuguese Military Orders
Fascinating set of blog posts on the military use of elephants.
The blog, "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (A look at the history of battle in popular culture)", seems cool.
https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collec...le-pachyderms/
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collec...gainst-wolves/
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collec...hant-memories/
I: Elephants could be devastating against unprepared enemies, but their core usages were always to disorder and disrupt enemy formations (infantry or cavalry), rather than the epic charge thing. Elephant towers were actually a Mediterranean invention exported to India.
II: As a weapons-system, elephants were an exorbitant logistical and combined-arms investment that were also extremely easy to counter with preparation. The Romans (and Han Chinese) for their part found them of marginal utility.
III: "[I]f the elephant was at best a limited weapon, why did its use persist in India?" In Indian culture, elephants had higher availability as well as cultural significance. Their use persisted in part as a "royal symbol" in the competition between aristocrats and kings.
Quote:
So long as the elephant remained even moderately militarily valuable, it was a perfect vehicle for a warrior-aristocrat to display his power and prowess... This isn’t just a vanity project for the king (though it is that too) – extravagant displays of royal power are a key component of remaining king (the key big-word idea here is legitimacy).
Quote:
[A]s the Indian model of kingship spreads into that region, war elephants spread with it. Whereas in places where there is plenty of contact, but the institution of Indian-style kingship doesn’t spread, war elephants are used rarely, if at all... This tie between elephants and kings seems to have been quite strong. Trautmann (2015) notes that even within India, states without kings (oligarchies, independent tribes and cities, etc) only rarely acquired elephants and never in the same sort of numbers as kings. So even when elephants are cheaper – because they are close by – unless you need elephants as physical symbols of the power and legitimacy of the king and his warrior-aristocrats, they are largely not worth the effort to procure.