Re: Bachrach vs Halsall - Early Medieval Warfare

On May 25, 8:52 pm, Paul J Gans <g...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
a...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 25, 2:32 pm, "Curt Emanuel" <ceman...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
"David Read" <david2...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:EJmdnZvU09HFVofXnZ2dnUVZ8lidnZ2d@xxxxxxxxx
 I know Paul Gans has read

Guy Halsall's book in the last few years, as I believe, has Soren Larsen
and perhaps some others . I know that Curt Emanuel hasn't, and neither has
Alex Milman.

Nope - it is on my list however.

Unfortunately (not really - I've enjoyed it actually) I've been bogged down
in reading through late antiquity Roman/Byzantine stuff. You ever want to
fry your brain, try reading Theophylact, which I'm doing now - hard to tell
just where he's coming from, though it IS special when he has armies moving
150 miles in a day.
That's funny. In the old Russian chronicles the distances like this
one are all over the place (judging by the Soloviev's books on Russian
history). OK, I understand how sizes of the armies can be exagerrated,
especially by the people who was writing from other people's accounts.
But all of them, including their readers should know what horses are
capable of. How could they get away with the things like this one?
["Sir, your men are excellent by the horses do not posess the sense of
petriotism and should be be left starving" :-)]

They got away with it because they were NOT writing history
as we know it.

_They_ did not but Soloviev most definitely did (he happened to be the
greatest Russian historian regrdless of agreement/disagreement with
some of his personal views). And he did this in tehlate XIX. People
just did not pay attention to these things.



That's the problem with reading the sources.

What most in the west were writing were theological tracts aimed
at pointing out how those who had God's favor could do amazing
things.  So distances multiply, the size of armies grows, and
those that have God's favor do mighty deeds.

Some of these examples of the amazing speed of the communications
brough by Solovioev applied to the people who most definitely were on
the wrong side of the God (at least from the Christian perspective)
and some of the cases are related to the flight of the defeated
personages (and their troops).

Of course, sizes of the armies were, quite often around 10% of the
mentioned. Sometimes even less so (IIRC, one of the accounts of the
Battle at Grunwald evaluated Polish-Lithuanian army as approximately
1M).





I trust that I don't have to mention that the common foot soldier
does not have God's favor in the eyes of the chronicle-writers.
The noble lords on the other hand, well, God LOVED them.


God could not love ALL of them because some of them were on the wrong
side.

Well, Froissart managed (most of the time) to be quite evenhanded on
this account. Very interesting writer.
.

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