- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
Since they still have armies, I'd have to say "slightly more often than they stumble upon an unrelated and much scarier threat than they were going out to deal with and get eaten"
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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Probably depends on what you count as army and horde. Is a hundred men an army? It might be the complete forces of the local boss, but I'm not sure I'd call it one.
But it probably does happen. Every army will have scouts and screening forces because pre-modern scouting is hard, and because it's hard it still happens with actual armies looking for each other. So an unexpected, unrelated army would be even easier to miss. That said, armies/hordes aren't that common because logistics is hard, so I'd guess it's something that happens and it's something people keep in mind, but it's not really a pressing concern.
Zedman7054
Eternally 3rd
- Location
- United States
I just noticed the most recent gilded post, and god is it hilarious in hindsight.
- Location
- Canada
Quickly skimming that, I see your professor is mostly talking about Europe, Rome, and the nomadic groups in the wilder spaces around the Roman Empire, only giving a brief nod to the Mongols in the last post. Naturally, focusing on smaller, weaker, and less successful nomadic groups simply because they were documented by Western sources might give one a skewed view on things.
Notably, your point that a cycle of steppe peoples conquering a place, settling down, getting weaker, and then getting conquered again by other steppe peoples never happened is directly contradicted by your own source, where in part 4, the timeline he gives shows that happening on the scale of all of China! That's to say nothing of the tiny little kingdoms and warlord states that constantly dotted the area whenever there wasn't a strong central government, or of the even less stable steppe-adjacent areas in the neighborhood that never became part of China. The churn is a lot more obvious on lower levels, ranging from a simpler case of knocking over an existing elite to set themselves up in their place, to killing or driving off a sedentary population before slowly settling into their economic niche in nicer lands, to the occasional major war of conquest that more easily makes the history books and redraws the borders.
Granted, major established empires, which would naturally contain a lot of non-steppe lands, were only occasionally conquered by steppe peoples (unless the Mongols or their successors were involved), but lesser powers frequently were, such that you usually didn't have to look back far in the history of any given buffer state between the steppe and civilization to find the point where a tribe of steppe people came out and conquered the place. For a longer list of times when this happened in China and adjacent territories, see Wikipedia's list of "States established by proto-Mongols", and note how many different names are on that list, and how many of those territories overlap with territories which were previously claimed by other tribes. As usual for Chinese history, individual tribes start to appear in the records mostly after they'd settled down for long enough to intermarry and form vassal relationships with existing Chinese rulers.
Similar things happened in other areas. For example, in India, see how the Scythians came in to conquer the scattered Indo-Greek kingdoms, and held them for a few centuries before they were themselves conquered by the nomadic Yuezhi, who settled down to form the Kushan Empire, which lasted for a few centuries before it broke up and got conquered bit by bit by the Persians (under the Sassanid dynasty), the Indians (under the Gupta Empire), and other nomadic peoples (the Kidarite Huns). The Kidarites were conquered by the White Huns, who formed the Hepthalite Empire around the same time the Alchon Huns were busy invading the Gupta Empire, causing its collapse. Then various groups of Hunnic peoples had control over northern India for a bit before being defeated and driven out by more successful Indian dynasties, which held things for a few centuries until the Mongols came riding in... ironically one of a few places where the Mongols were relatively unsuccessful, but about three centuries after the Mongol's first attack on Indian territory, one of Genghis Khan's descendents finally managed to conquer the place, establishing the Mughal Empire.
That said, one general point here to note is that Asian steppe nomads really did have a huge territorial advantage over their European counterparts. If, faced with a superior opponent, they decided to run into the steppe, they basically couldn't be caught except by their fellow nomads (an advantage more or less shared by the various tribes inhabiting the Chaos Wastes). Once they decided to settle down, though, they had something to defend, and couldn't easily pick up and run when an unfavourable fight presented itself.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Which one is that?
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- Location
- Australia
Elementalist bros we are so back.
Let's hecking go!
- Location
- Washington
The base unit of food production for a pastoral nomad isn't really the man, but the herd animal. A smaller amount of guys is LESS EFFECTIVE at herding a larger herd but not ineffective, so there very much is slack.
- Location
- Aotearoa
I can picture this debate taking place in the lecture halls of the University of Altdorf.
"You can't compare the military prowess of the nomadic migratory tribes as they originally settled the Reik basin to the power of the settled, nascent tribal nations Sigmar conquered and united!"
Perhaps while an earnest Journeymanling Grey Wizard, angling for promotion, sneaks into the classroom to make off with the chalkboard containing the original thesis statement everyone is animatedly discussing.
"You can't compare the military prowess of the nomadic migratory tribes as they originally settled the Reik basin to the power of the settled, nascent tribal nations Sigmar conquered and united!"
Perhaps while an earnest Journeymanling Grey Wizard, angling for promotion, sneaks into the classroom to make off with the chalkboard containing the original thesis statement everyone is animatedly discussing.
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The 'Fremen Mirage' is an argument to be made about real-life history and historiography, but it might not actually be something that can be grappled with when you're writing a story about Fremen. The phrase 'life in such a harsh land breeds hard men and women' appears in the third paragraph of Realm of the Ice Queen.
Also, horse archer armies are very hard to make stop being at the least an irritant, given that they are almost certainly faster than your armies, and the fact that the seventeenth century sees the Manchu conquest of China should make people hesitant about assuming they're always going to lose the war either.
K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
I don't think anyone was suggesting that horse nomads loose every time. But Norscans aren't horse nomads, they're pseudo-vikings. They don't really have that excuse for their big numbers.
- Location
- Australia
Context here is Great Crusades, so Chaos steppe tribes are included and they are horse nomads.
- Location
- New Zealand
I would argue that time is so malleable in the chaos wastes that they have all the time they need to replenish their numbers and then some. Maybe an army is raised and marches through a storm to attack the empire, only to find that thirty years have passed for the rest of their people, who have grown another generation of warriors and launched a second army that attacks alongside them. Meanwhile, for the empire, ten years have passed in between hearing about an attack and then having an army twice as large as expected (and twice as large as the land should be able to support) suddenly appear.
Vikings can pull out big numbers on occasion—there were roughly 10,000 Vikings at the Battle of Stanford Bridge (about 8000 of which died), and the Siege of Paris featured about 4000 Vikings.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Are they big numbers? In the first Punic war Rome controlling only the boot has raised 100k+ army and a new fleet, lost it in battle. Raised another 100k+ and lost in a storm, raised another 100k+ army and lost it another storm raised 50k and lost int yet another storm and still kept going until Cartaga just couln't keep up.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Boney almost certainly gave them horse archers (they have bows in the passage where Mathilde first meets the Kurgan), but canon doesn't actually seem to.
Ungols have Horse Archers, the Hobgoblins have Wolf Archers, but the Chaos roster doesn't. Marauder Horsemen are explicitly drawn from tribes like the Kurgan according to the army books, but the only ranged weapons they can take are throwing axes and javelins.
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- Location
- Australia
While everything in your post is correct, I'm not sure how it relates to my own post.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Somehow I saw 'horse nomads' multiple times and read 'horse archers' every time.
Becaise it is nearly interchangable if we are talking RL warfare. In fiction... much less so.
pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
Yes, they are, as a matter of fact, big numbers. For whatever reason, the battles of antiquity significantly outsized most battles of medieval times. Don´t ask me how.
Comparing Punic wars to that is like comparing apples and oranges.
It wasn´t until mid-modern times (Napoleonic wars for example, or some of the largest battles of 30 year war) that armies started being as big as they were back then again.
EDIT: For comparison, largest battle of Medieval Europe (The Battle of Grunwald) saw total of 66000 men, and some consider those accounts exagerrated almost twofold. So yeah. Ten thousand men is, in fact, a lot.
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The Roman Empire could field significantly more soldiers than post-collapse Europe could. Spain was able to field an almost Roman sized army in the 16th century as part of the Spanish Amarda—30,000 soldiers and 20,000 sailors. This was considered to be a notable number of troops for the time period, and the English were only able to muster about 16,000 men in response.
Rome is actually a really interesting example for looking at societies through this lens, because in the time period leading up to the Second Punic War, Cannae, and the necessity of pulling another 100k soldiers out of their asses, they hadn't developed a 'warrior caste' - the legionaries as they're usually thought of didn't exist yet. These were phalanx spearmen raised from their land-owning population that would be going back to that land once the fighting was done, and if you didn't own at least 100 denarii worth of property, you weren't worthy of being in even the lowest rungs of it - not just because they had to supply their own equipment, but also because that meant their first loyalty would be to the society that recognized their right to that property. So they were, like a nomadic society, putting themselves in a position where a bad enough military defeat would gut them. And it pretty much did. In any sane universe, Cannae would have been the end of the story of Rome.
And... it kinda arguably was. Yes, they pulled out another 100k soldiers and ended up defeating the Carthaginians, but they did it by slashing the property requirements for their military - not just directly by repeatedly slashing the property requirements by a cumulative 90%, but also by fiddling their currency to indirectly drop the property requirements by another third. This set the stage for the final chapter of the Roman Republic, where Marius would complete the evolution of the legionary and create a true warrior caste - one that Julius Caesar would wield in a way that he never could have in its original form.
In the same way, the Empire's military has been shaped by the necessities that its history has dictated. In the time of Sigmar it was pretty much the nomadic model where fighting and food production was the job of everyone but the very old and the very young. Over the years it developed into an agrarian system not all that dissimilar to that of Bretonnia, where the nobility became the warrior caste and everyone else focused on food and industry. This was influenced quite significantly by being taught how to craft steel by the Dwarves, because that meant peasants in the fields and smithies produce more useful military output in the form of steel-clad warrior than if you gave them pointy sticks and dropped them on the battlefield. This is the system that Bretonnia stuck with.
The Empire's Cannae was the Time of Three Emperors and all the disasters that struck during it. Pouring all your resources into your nobles stops seeming like a great idea if you can't count on them being on your side tomorrow, and you still need someone to stay home and fight off the innumerable non-internecine threats. The growing influence of Myrmidia and the introduction of gunpowder accelerated the evolution of a professional military, and in the current time the core of the Empire's military are the state troops. This wasn't chosen because state troops are better than, say, a military made up of nobleborn knight-dragoons might have been, it just sort of happened because it was necessary at the time and changing it after the fact would have been too much trouble. When you dig down far enough, that's how an honestly frightening amount of everything comes about.
Kislev can be seen as trying, with the Kreml Guard and the Streltsi, to make the same jump to have a professional and standing military. But these are products of the cities, of which Kislev has at most three. In most of the country there are just the towns and villages that raise their rotas of winged lancers and horse archers, and in the oblasts there are still nomadic tribes that fight and die all as one. This is perhaps not an efficient system, but it is a very durable and responsive one. The same amount of land and people might be able to feed and equip a mighty army of Kossars that, on paper, would be a greater military force than the equivalent output of rotas... if the state was able to maintain control over and keep track of all those people. But the system now is one where a village that hasn't had any official communication from the Tzar in generations can and will produce a rota that will be riding out against a threat to Kislev that afternoon. It is a heavily decentralized system. That sucks if you want to be Julius Caesar, but it actually works out pretty well if the only strong central authority you've had for six generations was a vampire.
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I would however add that one of the reasons the Roman Republic was able to pull those disproportionate armies out of their ass was due to decently higher than typical social cohesion of its population (for that era at least).
Of course, Malleus societies can actually surpass that due to them existing in a deathworld (well, barring intense chaos/vampire infiltration).
Of course, Malleus societies can actually surpass that due to them existing in a deathworld (well, barring intense chaos/vampire infiltration).
I don't think any one factor can be pointed to as what made the Romans able to go back for round two after losing a third of their citizens in one battle. History has shown that to be very hard to replicate, despite quite a lot of people and states trying their best to do so.