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No Barbarians Necessary

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Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#11

Post by DamnYuppie »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8
Joker_vD wrote: post #6

Europe was too fragmented to be conquered by the Mongols. Their way would have been blocked by castles and town walls, each originally thrown up by one group in conflict with others—by a fractious nobility against its kings and against its own peasants, and by townsmen against them all. Above all, “there was no central government to offer surrender.” For the same reason, Mongols failed to conquer the medieval Rus, it…

They didn't really have castles there. Castles were pretty much impenetrable until artillery was invented. You could try to starve out the people in the castle, and that did occasionally work, but transportation networks were poor so it was hard to keep an army supplied long enough for a siege to work.

Mongols did have a primitive form of artillery which they used on the Song. Most large cities were well fortified back at that time, none of that stopped the Mongols from laying siege to them and decimating them.

In short they would have laid waste to Europe.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#12

Post by Joker_vD »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #11
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't really have castles there. Castles were pretty much impenetrable until artillery was invented. You could try to starve out the people in the castle, and that did occasionally work, but transportation networks were poor so it was hard to keep an army supplied long enough for a siege to work.

Mongols did have a primitive form of artillery which they used on the Song. Most large cities were well fortified back at that time, none of that stopped the Mongols from laying siege to them and decimating them. In short they would have laid waste to Europe.

And after Chinese conquest was done, Mongols had fancy new-fangled Chinese siege weapons to use for themselves.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#13

Post by eruci »

Barbarians will always exist, historical context will perhaps help devising better policies to deal with them.

You can however find something good in anything bad, and vice versa. That doesn't mean "bad" is necessary.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#14

Post by NikolaeVarius »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8
Joker_vD wrote: post #6

Europe was too fragmented to be conquered by the Mongols. Their way would have been blocked by castles and town walls, each originally thrown up by one group in conflict with others—by a fractious nobility against its kings and against its own peasants, and by townsmen against them all. Above all, “there was no central government to offer surrender.” For the same reason, Mongols failed to conquer the medieval Rus, it…

They didn't really have castles there. Castles were pretty much impenetrable until artillery was invented. You could try to starve out the people in the castle, and that did occasionally work, but transportation networks were poor so it was hard to keep an army supplied long enough for a siege to work.

And then the Mongols came

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#15

Post by jeffreyrogers »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #11
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't really have castles there. Castles were pretty much impenetrable until artillery was invented. You could try to starve out the people in the castle, and that did occasionally work, but transportation networks were poor so it was hard to keep an army supplied long enough for a siege to work.

Mongols did have a primitive form of artillery which they used on the Song. Most large cities were well fortified back at that time, none of that stopped the Mongols from laying siege to them and decimating them. In short they would have laid waste to Europe.

Except that they did invade Europe and while they were initially successful eventually failed. In part because the Europeans (if we can call them that at the time) improved their fortifications and had cavalry as well.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#16

Post by [deleted] »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #14
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't really have castles there. Castles were pretty much impenetrable until artillery was invented. You could try to starve out the people in the castle, and that did occasionally work, but transportation networks were poor so it was hard to keep an army supplied long enough for a siege to work.

And then the Mongols came

[deleted]

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#17

Post by dragontamer »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #15
DamnYuppie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mongols did have a primitive form of artillery which they used on the Song. Most large cities were well fortified back at that time, none of that stopped the Mongols from laying siege to them and decimating them. In short they would have laid waste to Europe.

Except that they did invade Europe and while they were initially successful eventually failed. In part because the Europeans (if we can call them that at the time) improved their fortifications and had cavalry as well.

The Mongols successfully invading Europe would have been as impressive as the Romans invading China. (Didn't happen, but really, think about the logistics). That's a lot of land to cover.

I think the long-range logistics of supporting an army thousands of miles away from your civilization centers was just too much to handle for Iron Age / Dark age civilizations.

Even if one leader (Genghis Khan) could successfully lead such an expedition, it was clear that his successors were unable to.

As such, once Genghis Khan died, the Mongol Empire could only sustain itself for a short time before collapsing. First into the four Khanites, then total collapse a few decades later. That's just too large a land-area, without any decent form of large-scale transportation (ie: boats) that could assist travel.

----------

The Roman Empire's expansion was primarily driven by the Mediterranean Sea. Going over the land-route through the Silk Road between Europe and Asia is... hard. Very hard.

Another part of the Roman Empire was that they were a bureaucracy: they spread their ways and very carefully organized their empire as it expanded. You didn't need once-in-a-thousand year leaders like Genghis Khan to do things, your standard Roman Magistrates were effectively trained to do the task. Even when Rome itself collapsed, the Byzantine empire (Eastern-half) continued to run itself for nearly a thousand years later, under largely Roman-inspired principles.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#18

Post by trgn »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #4

There is a strange tendency in modern scholarship to try to say, "actually the fall of Rome wasn't that bad". Which I guess is true from the perspective of several hundreds of years later after new, more successful societies have begun to form, but the fall of the Roman empire really was quite bad. Trade networks collapsed, entire industries disappeared, and animals and people shrunk in size because there wasn't as m…

Yes, flippantly, because each new generation of historians needs to find a new hook to hang their career on. They add nuance, but it's unclear if it will stick. The same happens for example with the rehabilitation of the Vikings, which were savages who built a culture, by any account, on pillage, rape and murder, supported by the archaeological record (the many burnt settlements) and the historical one (the many first hand accounts of the despair and fear they sowed).

The stability of the roman empire was a marvel. After incessant war within the borders during the republic, violence moved to the borders of the empire. To be Roman, and citizenry became quite broadly spread, during those few centuries, was to be free and safe.

Fiction can often capture this truth better than any scholarship. In "Augustus", a portrait of the first roman Emperor, the author John Williams conjures a scene where Augustus, near the end of his life, contemplates his successes and failures on the deck of his cruise-ship. An Egyptian freighter pulls alongside, and the crew sings him a song, thanking him for the stability he brought, the captain recalling the pirates that used to terrorize the Mediterranean. Now, they could voyage safely.

That change, in just a generation, exemplified the stability of the roman empire. While adding color to this history is great, it often tends to cheapen this enormous achievement.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#19

Post by tomca32 »

johnnycerberus wrote: post #7

I was thinking recently how the "sack of Rome" really happened and then I've read a book called The Illustrated History of Romanians by Neagu Djuvara which answered some of my questions. The core problem of the Roman Empire was immigration and the speculators that it has attracted. For example, when gold was discovered in Dacia (Provincia Dacia, nowadays Romania), they rushed to the Eastern Europe building colonies n…

Interesting, I never connected "viteaz" with viking. "Vitez" is a word that in many Slavic languages means "knight". In Hungarian it's "Vitéz".

A short trip down wikipedia and wiktionary leads me to Proto Slavic word vitędzь https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/v...

And indeed, there it is: > Based on the ethnonym Proto-Germanic *wīkingaz (whence Old Norse víkingr (“bay's dweller”)).

I was a bit skeptical about your claim, but you were indeed right. Thanks for the little history and etymology lesson.

Re: No Barbarians Necessary

#20

Post by hacknat »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #4

There is a strange tendency in modern scholarship to try to say, "actually the fall of Rome wasn't that bad". Which I guess is true from the perspective of several hundreds of years later after new, more successful societies have begun to form, but the fall of the Roman empire really was quite bad. Trade networks collapsed, entire industries disappeared, and animals and people shrunk in size because there wasn't as m…

What's interesting is it's not even close to being a new observation. Taking the blame for the fall of Rome off of the shoulders of "the Barbarians" is as old as Gibbon[1].

Elites got to define history (especially before the printing press). Of course they blamed "the Barbarians", but what's really true is that Roman society started eating itself.

The claim that the fall of Rome was a "good" thing, on the other hand, is simplistic beyond belief.

[1]https://smile.amazon.com/Decline-Empire-Volumes-Everymans-Li...

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