Out of pure interest...

[stratigos vasilios]

Hello all,

I have a very superficial and interesting question I'd like to ask . I was watching Deadliest Warrior (yes yes I know its fabricated, but I like seeing the weapons in action) today and I thought to myself, how would a elite Roman army fare against a Chinese army from the same era. Ie. Rome in CE 001 vs an elite Han army or Rome in CE 300 vs an elite Jin army? I think other than 2 major trade missions that was the only major contact between the two empires?

I was looking online at some available literature but none really provided enough information to satisfy me with an answer, I figured the EB forum is the only place I could get a decent answer and spawn some good discussions!. If anyone can provide a link to some readings that would be wonderful. Also I am not sure if this question has been asked before; apologies in advance if it has, and apologies if this is regarded as an inappropriate comment for this forum.

Many thanks

[paleologos]

A long time ago I saw a movie titled "Stand by me". It was based on a Steven King novel.
I think everybody must have seen that one by now.
In that movie somewhere along the story one of the kids asks his friends who they thought would win in a fight between Superman and Mighty Mouse.
I don't know why I remembered that.

By the way, in a KH army, if you absolutely had to choose, would you rather have Thorakitai Hoplitai or Epilektoi Hoplitai? And are Rhodian Slingers really better than regular Hellenic Archers?

[Watchman]

Well, I'd imagine the Romans might find the crossbow something of an unpleasant novelty.

[stratigos vasilios]

Well, I'd imagine the Romans might find the crossbow something of an unpleasant novelty.

True. Hmmm I remember reading somewhere that the Chinese had either bought or captured Roman soldiers from the East and commented on the 'fish-scale' formation they used, ie the testudo.

[ARCHIPPOS]

On the other hand ancient chinese had gladius-like swords.I've seen pics of them and they looked very similar...

aha.Here's the pic i saw."bronze swords of warring states" upper left.They look quite identical, no ???

[Watchman]

True. Hmmm I remember reading somewhere that the Chinese had either bought or captured Roman soldiers from the East and commented on the 'fish-scale' formation they used, ie the testudo.

IIRC that was the theory that Roman POWs taken by the Sassanids may eventually have ended up fighting for them in Central Asia, where the Chinese then took note of the unusual tactics employed.
Though I can't really see how one makes "fish-scales" out of the testudo - if anything it mostly resembles nothing so much as what the Romans named it after...

Also, Archippos ? For one thing see the dates. For another, yeah well; there's only so many shapes you execute a decent double-edged cut-and-thrust sword in you know.

[ARCHIPPOS]

i'm not saying they copied it from spaniards or romans.It's probably parallel evolution.But it's interesting nevertheless...

[bobbin]

True. Hmmm I remember reading somewhere that the Chinese had either bought or captured Roman soldiers from the East and commented on the 'fish-scale' formation they used, ie the testudo.

Thats a very controversial fringe theory based around the description of a Han battle in Sogdia, it's based on some very shakey thinking and most historians don't beileve a word of it. The "fish scale" formation could also be translated as describing a normal shield wall or even just how the soldiers looked like a school of fish.

Concering the OP I agree with Watchman, the chinese crossbow would cause major problems for the roman heavy infantry.

[Badass Buddha]

I'm reminded of the argument at the beginning of the Family Guy episode Let's Go To The Hop.

Guy 1: "Dude, the Bronze Age was so much cooler than the Iron Age."
Guy 2: "Dude the Iron Age could kick the Bronze Age’s butt any day of the week!"

Also, the Jin had Zhuge Nu. That could kill half the Romans before they could even get into close combat.

[Watchman]

i'm not saying they copied it from spaniards or romans.It's probably parallel evolution.But it's interesting nevertheless...

*shrug* Pretty much the same thing as why the basic guard stances of late-Medieval European longsword and the Japanese katana AFAIK have a lot in common - there's only so many ways to do stuff right, and the kind of "destruction testing" the combat-related stuff was regularly subjected to by necessity led to a decent amount of convergent parallel evolution.
Ditto, while we're at it, why things like spearheads tended to be basically similar the world over.

[stratigos vasilios]

Thats a very controversial fringe theory based around the description of a Han battle in Sogdia, it's based on some very shakey thinking and most historians don't beileve a word of it. The "fish scale" formation could also be translated as describing a normal shield wall or even just how the soldiers looked like a school of fish.

Concering the OP I agree with Watchman, the chinese crossbow would cause major problems for the roman heavy infantry.

Oh I was making a very superficial comment regarding the testudo and possibly in hindsight I should have put a question mark at the end of the statement; so it didn't seem like I was arrogantly making a point but rather asking another question, for that I apologise. How do you think the Romans whould have gone against Chinese cavalry? or even the siege weaponry?

[Watchman]

Cavalry's fundamentally the same everywhere and countered by the basically same tactics (not that a lot of people haven't gone and tried rather excessively elaborate schemes for it...), and the Romans proved themselves able to fight on equal terms the Sassanids who certainly knew a thing or two about mounted warfare. As for siege weapons, uhhh ? Those are used in, you know, sieges...

[stratigos vasilios]

Garh! My apologies, I meant siege weapons like the Scorpion (if that's classed as siege?) that were primarily used against troops rather than buildings.

[Hannibal Khan the Great]

I'd just use the word "artillery".....

[satalexton]

IMO, to the barbaroi of barbaropolis, the prospect that practically every Han grunt is armed with a katapeltai.....is not a very pleasing sight.

[Andy1984]

Cavalry's fundamentally the same everywhere and countered by the basically same tactics (not that a lot of people haven't gone and tried rather excessively elaborate schemes for it...), and the Romans proved themselves able to fight on equal terms the Sassanids who certainly knew a thing or two about mounted warfare. As for siege weapons, uhhh ? Those are used in, you know, sieges...

I don't see what point your trying to make... for as far as I know there was a significant diversification in the methods used to stop cavalry. There is off course the shield wall/pike formation as we know it, but scythes were also used. Other ways to stop cavalry involved deploying minor pins on the ground (a metal tool consisting of four minor pins with one upwards directed). Charging cavalry would make these metal devices jump up and rip open the soft belly of the horses. If I'm not mistaken, these devices were found on the British islands, even in EB's timeframe. And then I don't even mention the more exotic ways of fighting cavalry (missile fire, elephants, using fire/artillery or anything else to make the horses panic)...

The same goes for the way in which cavalry is deployed. Charging with long (or shorter) spears, relying on speed or just trying to strike terror in the hearts of your opponents who never saw a chariot, a horse or the silk or armour which covered it ... Cavalry could be used in stationary situations (as those clibinarii and cataphracts), but also rely on their missile/harassing powers. I wouldn't say cavalry tactics are 'basically the same', but rather heavily depending on the socio-cultural aspects (the aspect of honor for barbarian warlords/Roman victorious Dictators and their chariots) as well as on military needs and on the situation the cavalry is involved in.

To get back on topic: it does matter which cavalry would be deployed by both Han and Romans, and it equally matters what strategy would be chosen to fight off that cavalry. However, since this confrontation would be purely fictional, we have no clue which kind of cavalry the Romans would deploy. (And my knowledge of Chinese warfare is by far too make even a remote guess about the kind of cavalry they'd have at their disposal.) Saying the Romans could handle cavalry as they fought off the Sassanids is therefore to me an unsatifactionary argument for claiming they'd be capable to fight off Han-cavalry. Romans wouldn't necessarily use the same tactics against the Han than against the Sassanids. We don't even know whether they'd keep their legionary organisation unchanged if they would enter such a war, whether they'd opt to rely for a great extent on local allied forces (as they seemed to have done in Gaul), or whether the war initiated would consist of guerilla-warfare and looting instead of pitched battles. One can imagine fighting off cavalry in a guerilla war in some mountainous region would be more difficult for an infantry army than fighting the same cavalry in a pitched battle. All these factors (and thus the most likely outcome of such a war) depend on the way how both the Romans and the Han would wish to wage this war, rather than on specific characterics of Roman or Han military itself. And then I didn't even mention the uncertainty as to how many soldiers could be deployed by both sides, whether these forces could be sufficiently supplied, the absence or presence of exotic diseases, or the Chinese (and possibly also Roman) 'habit' of trying to muster such impressive armies to make sure no-one would fight them in the first place. (I know the Chinese did this in later era's).

kind regards,

Andy

[stratigos vasilios]

I'd just use the word "artillery".....

Thats the word I was looking for! Garh I just couldn't think of it! It was the tip of the tongue situation. *bangs head*

[Watchman]

I don't see what point your trying to make... for as far as I know there was a significant diversification in the methods to stop cavalry. There is off course the shield wall/pike formation as we know it, but scythes were also used. Other ways to stop cavalry involved deploying minor pins on the ground (a metal tool consisting of four minor pins with one upwards directed). Charging cavalry would make these metal devices jump up and rip open the soft belly of the horses. If I'm not mistaken, these devices were found on the British islands, even in EB's timeframe. And then I don't even mention the more exotic ways of fighting cavalry (missile fire, elephants, using fire/artillery or anything else to make the horses panic)...
The same goes for the way in which cavalry is deployed. Charging with long (or shorter) spears, relying on speed or just trying to strike terror in the hearts of your opponents who never saw a horse or a chariot,... Cavalry could be used in stationary situations (as those clibinarii and cataphracts), but also rely on their missile/harassing powers. I wouldn't say cavalry tactics are 'basically the same', but rather heavily depending on both socio-cultural aspects (the aspect of honor for barbarian warlords and their chariots) as well as on military needs and the situation the cavalry is involved in.

Ummm, okay.

Look, when you boil it down to the essentials cavalry basically comes in two main flavours, light and heavy. The former is the short that shoots stuff at you and stays out of contact, the latter the sort that tries to trample you fat (and usually poke you with something sharp while at it). The division is of course often blurry and the minutiae of the equipement and methodology naturally varies wildly by time and place, but the fundamentals are the same.

As far as countering them goes, the basic solution to the lights is to shoot them to bits (foot missile troops tend to be able to put out more massed and longer-ranged fire plus don't have the big vulnerable horse to complicate things, so it's normally not that difficult to do in a straight firefight) while the heavies stop dead in the face of unyielding close-order infantry. And of course if you have cavalry of your own, that can be used as a mobile counter. If the opportunity exists creative battlefield engineering and traps (including field-expedient stuff like caltrops - "jump up to rip the horses' bellies" indeed... ) could be used to shape the battlefield and set up potentially devastating surprises for the opponent's mounted troops. And so on and so on.

And the Romans were pretty well aquainted with all of this stuff, having themselves used and had it used against them only too often in their many wars. As far as the Chinese go they'd have little in the way of novelty to offer for Roman tacticians; their cavalry method was more or less directly copied off the Central Asian nomads, and any Roman commander who had a basic grasp of the techniques used to counter the horse-archer/cataphract tag team (say, from fighting the Parthians or Sassanids) would be on fundamentally familiar ground.

So, yeah.

[antisocialmunky]

IIRC, I posted an article about army deployments during the Qin Period as best as can be read from the Tomb of the First Smperor. It mentioned that the Chinese armies of the period were divided into smaller tactically flexible groups that operated semi-independently with their own cavalry, heavy infantry, and missile complements(mostly missile). Much of this was due to the broken terrain of central China. These formations proved quite robust when led well as it allowed atleast in one instance a commander to withdrawl his forces safely when the rest of the army had routed. Not sure how the difference in army organization would have helped or hindered the Chinese against Romans though.

It seems like one of the primary strategies was to form a position surrounded by heavy infantry that allowed cavalry and missile units to effectively operate from.

[Duguntz]

All this seems very interesting Watchman, but even without novelty of tactic, i for a part, am sure the Roman would have been beaten, at the end, by exaustion of man ressourses. account (by modern historians, not ''patriotic'' accounter of the period) talk about fielded armies of sometime a wooping 1 000 000 soldiers. Now, i'm sorry if i name no name, not that I want to hide, butmy history books are all home in Canada, so it's hard to make quotation when I'm in Bucharest, as i don't hold internet for a veeeeery trustworthy source!

Still, Chinese were not, as were gauls or less organised societies, a disorganised warband, but always were represented very organised, often using a ''phalanx'' type of... squadron (is the word appropriate?) anyhow, so clearly show a level of organisation rivaling the romans, for the mobility of troops. now, when you put basicly two armies on a par level of organisation, and maybe not using the same tactics, but, on the same ''tactical ability'', i do think rome would have been overcome by sheer number. Because ok, i take example at Cannae... terrible defeat for the roman, but througout (sorry for orthograpf!) chinese military history, considering that both side together formed roughly 150 000 soldiers, this was but a rear guard of an much MUCH massivier army (we should not forget that we're speaking about numbers approaching the million men... for the chinese side)

Resume... at the end of the world, pool of men wins the day... (IMHO)

[Megas Methuselah]

You guys should probably do a search of the forums before gettin involved in another Chinese vs Roman thing again...

[satalexton]

well one of their best innovations was to combine the steppe composite bow with a trigger mechanism, so that even the average conscript can learn to use it within a very short amount of time....Think of all the extra time for drilling other important things that has enabled...

[bobbin]

Oh I was making a very superficial comment regarding the testudo and possibly in hindsight I should have put a question mark at the end of the statement; so it didn't seem like I was arrogantly making a point but rather asking another question, for that I apologise. How do you think the Romans whould have gone against Chinese cavalry? or even the siege weaponry?

No need to apologise, i certainly didn't think you were being arrogant in anyway, in hindsight my response should have been put a little less blunty.

[mountaingoat]

well all you would need is about 300 or so spartans per million troops?

[stratigos vasilios]

You guys should probably do a search of the forums before gettin involved in another Chinese vs Roman thing again...

Hrmmm I did one but I only found discussions on contact between the two worlds and opinions of eachother? If there is one on this question (or one similar) I apologise and was wondering if anyone can link me to it? I might be searching the wrong keywords, giving me limited results?

[Watchman]

Contact between the two would have been extremely indirect at best, for reasons obvious enough when you look at the map of Eurasia and recall that practically speaking the Romans never held territory east of Syria and the Chinese west of the Tarim Basin...
Also assorted Central Asian powers, nomads plus the minor detail of Parthia/Sassanids in the way.

Silk Road FTW, though.

[antisocialmunky]

Should be noted that direct contact on the Silk Road was still rare since most trade wasn't direct and went through tons of middle men via sales and resales of goods.

[Watchman]

Direct contact via the Silk Road was ever rare, due to the mildly ridiculous distances involved. It's not like the Chinese ever came *themselves* to sell their silk in the Levant and Black Sea ports, or had any reason to.

[antisocialmunky]

Though they did try to contact Rome and vice versa and heard rather funny rumors(Chinese live 400 hundred years and Rome was ruled by an ideal Republican Institution where people gave up power freely).

[moonburn]

All this seems very interesting Watchman, but even without novelty of tactic, i for a part, am sure the Roman would have been beaten, at the end, by exaustion of man ressourses. account (by modern historians, not ''patriotic'' accounter of the period) talk about fielded armies of sometime a wooping 1 000 000 soldiers. Now, i'm sorry if i name no name, not that I want to hide, butmy history books are all home in Canada, so it's hard to make quotation when I'm in Bucharest, as i don't hold internet for a veeeeery trustworthy source!

Still, Chinese were not, as were gauls or less organised societies, a disorganised warband, but always were represented very organised, often using a ''phalanx'' type of... squadron (is the word appropriate?) anyhow, so clearly show a level of organisation rivaling the romans, for the mobility of troops. now, when you put basicly two armies on a par level of organisation, and maybe not using the same tactics, but, on the same ''tactical ability'', i do think rome would have been overcome by sheer number. Because ok, i take example at Cannae... terrible defeat for the roman, but througout (sorry for orthograpf!) chinese military history, considering that both side together formed roughly 150 000 soldiers, this was but a rear guard of an much MUCH massivier army (we should not forget that we're speaking about numbers approaching the million men... for the chinese side)

Resume... at the end of the world, pool of men wins the day... (IMHO)

this means nothing the romans at their height had a population of 100 million people within their borders and had they wished so they could probably turn 10% (?) of it into military units

also i never heard the chinese using artillery the way ceaser claimed he used so in a pitched batle the chinese would have all of it´s formations disgruntled and disorganised by the scorpions onagers and other artillery

as for the way the chinese used their heavy infantry to create a strong base for cavalery and missiles to work from belisarius also used similar tactics with far less resources then the roman emperial time so i suspect the romans wouldn´t be caught off guard

furthermore the chinese huge army would represent a big burden to feed and have available water while going trough euroasia so it´s very likely that such a burden would undoudabtly end up with civil strifes and rebellions in china

imho it would all end up in who the generals where and how well both societies where willing to endure the costs of a such a war and in this regards i don´t remember the chinese having the same type of experience as the romans did in the punic war

also roman politicians seem a bit better in persuading foreign powers to help them and the mauryan empire would probably end up taking the roman side because seriously they had faced the sassanids and chinese more often then the chinese and therefore they would probably have more to gain by suporting the romans also the nomadic tribes could probably also benefit more from siding with the romans so overall it´s a war the chinese couldn´t win imho even tough the batles would be tough and dificult for the romans (makes litle sence ? yes i know but from my point of view even if the romans would have alot of dificulties winning the 1st batles they would place themselfs in a position where they couldn´t loose)

reason for it? the romans where quicker to adjust and adopt new tactics and weapons then the chinese