warfare-msg - 1/31/92 Period warfare. NOTE: See also the files: Women-Battle-art, wounds-msg, siege-engines-msg, mercenaries-msg, battle-ideas-msg, pottery-wepns-msg, p-armor-msg. ************************************************************************ NOTICE - This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday. This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with seperate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter. The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the individual authors. Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this time. If information is published from these messages, please give credit to the orignator(s). Thank you, Mark S. Harris AKA: Lord Stefan li Rous mark.s.harris@motorola.com stefan@florilegium.org ************************************************************************ From: jvincent@eagle.wesleyan.edu (The Ulair) Date: 25 Sep 91 20:12:09 GMT Organization: Wesleyan University Greetings to the Rialto from Eirik Bjarnason! Recently, one good gentle inquired as to the size of armies during our lives. I shall present the results I have found in the works of the learned clerk J.F.Verbruggen in his "The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages". The figures cited are for the First Crusade and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Date Battle #of Knights #of foot-soldiers --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1098 Battle of The Lake of Antioch 700 ------- Battle of Antioch (500-600) ------- 1099 Ascalon 1,200 9,000 1101 Ramla 260 900 1102 Ramla 200 ------ 1102 Jaffa 200 1105 Ramla 700 2,000 1119 Athareb 700 3,000 1119 Hab 700 1125 Hazarth 1,100 2,000 Also, at Bremule Louis VI fought Henry I {then Duke of Normandy} with 400 to 500 knights, respectively. In 1217, the English King used 400 knights and 347 crossbowmen against his rebellious barons, who had 611 knights and 1,000 foot soldiers. As additional evidence that such forces were small, feudal rolls and documents show that in Normandy in 1172 only 581 knights had to be raised for the Duke's army from 1,500 fiefs. In Brittany in 1294, 166 knights and 16 squires were obliged to perform military service for the Duke. Hopefully soon, I will have an analysis of major battles of the Hundred Years' War completed. Additional comments or requests are welcome. I hope this will help shed some small illumination on the nature of battles during our time. Yours in Service, Eirik Bjarnason Haven's End Barony of Dragonship Haven East Kingdom From: sbloch@euler.ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch) Date: 28 Sep 91 16:41:21 GMT Organization: Mathematics @ UCSD jvincent@eagle.wesleyan.edu (The Ulair) lists some sample army sizes from the time of the First Crusade, the largest example by far being the Battle of Ascalon, with 1200 knights and 9000 grunts. I would point out that Compleat Anachronist #56 gives a similar list for major battles of the Byzantine empire, and the numbers there are an order of magnitude larger, the largest being the Battle of Amorium (year 838) with a total 170,000 troops in the field. -- Stephen Bloch mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib >sca>Caid>Calafia>St.Artemas sbloch@math.ucsd.edu Date: Wed, 20 Nov 91 00:06 EDT From: JRECHTSCHAFF@hamp.hampshire.edu Subject: Numbers at Crecy Greetings to Rialto, A few digests ago, a gentle posted that there were 20,000 crossbowmen at the battle of Crecy in 1346. According to Alfred Burne in his book _The Crecy War_, there were about 6,000 crossbowmen, the French army as a whole at the battle totalled around 40,000. (p175-76). The crossbowmen were placed in a terrible position and were caught between the English archers and cannon and the French knights who rode them down from behind. It did not help that the Count d'Alencon, brother of King Philip VI, suspected the crossbowmen were traitors (they were actually fleeing from the English arrows) and ordered his division to ride them down. Needless to say, the crossbowmen (Genoese mercanaries) started attacking the French in self- defense. Alecon was killed in the Fray. The English army, by the way, numbered around 12,000 to 13,000 (Crecy War p.170). Reference: Alfred H. Burne _The Crecy War_ (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955) In Service, Lyanna ferch Gwynhelek of Bergental Barony of Bergental EK 24 Jan 92 From: kleber@husc10.harvard.edu (Gwydden "Galen" ap Hafgan) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Organization: Harvard University Science Center Quoth Dave.Aronson@f120.n109.z1.FidoNet.Org (Dave Aronson): >I have a question about the oil that was heated or set afire and then >poured from battlements onto attackers. What SORT of oil was it >usually? Mineral? Vegetable? Animal? Please be as specific as >possible. Ten queue. According to my high school history teacher (well, *I* consider her authoritative... :-), that's another of those "false facts"-- no castle in its right mind would have poured precious oil over the walls just to scald enemies. Especially if you're under seige, you want all your resources conserved-- and boiling the old laundry water might not get as hot, but it sure don't hurt any less, and there's a whole lot more of it! --Gwydden ("Galen") ap Hafgan I don't have an overactive Provost of the Borough of Duncharloch imagination... I have an --kleber@husc.harvard.edu underactive reality... --EG 25 Jan 92 From: dani@netcom.COM (Dani Zweig) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Dave.Aronson@f120.n109.z1.FidoNet.Org (Dave Aronson): >I have a question about the oil that was heated or set afire and then >poured from battlements onto attackers. What SORT of oil was it usually? >Mineral? Vegetable? Animal? Please be as specific as possible. Not as specific as I'd prefer but... Pouring *burning* oil would be hideously expensive, and not very practical. Oil heated to the boiling point (any sort would do, but in practice it's going to be vegetable) is still too expensive to be a routine ploy, but it could be highly effective in restricted emergency situations. (If you've ever been spattered by a single drop of hot oil, you'll know that it's distracting.) ----- Dani of the Seven Wells dani@netcom.com 26 Jan 92 From: bill@psych.toronto.edu (Bill Pusztai) Organization: Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto Greetings and Blessings to all assembled. on 20 Jan 1992 Dave.Aronson@f120.n109.z1.FidoNet.Org (Dave Aronson) wrote: /I have a question about the oil that was heated or set afire and then /poured from battlements onto attackers. What SORT of oil was it /usually? Mineral? Vegetable? Animal? Please be as specific as /possible. Ten queue. As far as I know, oil was only ever used *cold*, to cause slippage, and then rarely, due to expense (somewhere in my library is reference to two large jars of olive oil being a year's wages for an unskilled labourer). What WAS used was heated sand - reputedly, first deployed against Alexander the Great during his siege of one of the hilltop cities on his way to India. The method was to fill a vessel with sand (the ladles and beakers and crucibles from foundries were used) and bake it in the brick ovens for about half of one watch (say, 4 hours), until it glowed cherry red (about cone 012, 850 C, 1500 F - only sand that was nearly pure silica would take this treatment, any impurities would tend to lower its fusing point -that is, it would melt). It was then poured over invaders. Besides causing casualties directly, it also set flammables afire. It's use occasioned the same kind of consternation that napalm would today - indeed, they are similar in effect (thoroughly horrid). May God Bless and Keep you. Your servant, Fra. Capricornus 26 Jan 92 From: viking@iastate.edu (Dan Sorenson) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA >Dave.Aronson@f120.n109.z1.FidoNet.Org (Dave Aronson): >>I have a question about the oil that was heated or set afire and then >>poured from battlements onto attackers. What SORT of oil was it usually? >>Mineral? Vegetable? Animal? Please be as specific as possible. I would suspect it of being animal oil heated to the boiling point, mainly because I believe this to be the cheapest and most easily obtainable oil one could find inside a seiged castle. I do wonder at the very idea, though. Boiling waste water may as well have been used, as well as any other fluid one could boil. The idea was to distract, right? Why use oil when simple water would work just as well and be much cheaper for a beseiged castle to afford? Boiling honey is much worse than boiling oil, by the way, in that it sticks like napalm and burns almost as badly. If a castle had an ample supply this may have been used, but as a sugar source it was probably too valuable to waste pouring on attackers. Better the remains of the stew or the rancid milk nobody wanted to drink yesterday. <============================================================ < Erik Aarskog, Canton of Axed Root, located somewhere in Calontir > <============================================================ 28 Jan 92 From: cav@bnr.ca (Rick Cavasin) Organization: Bell-Northern Research Ltd. Reply-To: cav@bnr.ca (Rick Cavasin) Unto the good folk of the Rialto does Balderik send his greetings. Regarding burning oil, those having access to the technology would undoubtedly use Greek fire. As this was a closely guarded secret, it may not have been available outside Byzantium. Burning pitch seems to ring a bell in my memory. This again would have an effect like napalm, and might be somewhat cheaper than various oils. No doubt a certain amount could be stored in a castle for the purpose of defense. Regards, Balderik 30 Jan 92 From: 72007.302@compuserve.COM (Clayton Neff) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Organization: The Internet To: >INTERNET:SCA@mc.lcs.mit.edu Fujimoto writes: > Dave Aronson asks what sort of oil was poured onto attackers of a castle. > > If I recall correctly, pouring oil onto attackers was mostly a > Hollywood invention; you wouldn't waste good oil that way. > > On the other hand, you wouldn't mind wasting, say, chamber pot > contents on an attacker...this had the advantage that the attackers, > if they got in, could be immediately located.... ;-) > > Erik suggests boiling water, which seems unlikely for the same reason > that heated honey seems unlikely. You would NOT waste your limited > water supply that way, because if you ran out of water, you had to > surrender anyway. (Of course, if you had an unlimited water supply, > say like those castles on small rivers and what, then it's feasible). > When touring the castle at Conwy in Wales, our tour guide walked us through as if we were attacking it. After getting inside the city walls, crossing the dry moat, hacking our way through the drawbridge, crossing the next dry moat, and figthing our way through the first killing passage, we stood in the courtyard still outside the castle proper. (Realistically no one would have made it that far, as the obstacles were all but insurrmountable.) Here he pointed to the battlements and described the wooden platforms that were there in period, and he described the holes there would have been in the floors of them. He then proceeded to debunk the myths about boiling oil, lead, and water, for much the same reasons as have already been stated. What he said they did use, which was in large supply in castles in period was pitch. They would heat the pitch until it became liquid, and then pour it through the holes, setting it on fire with a torch as it went. This was an effective equivalent for naplam, as it stuck to whatever it touched and continued to burn. Very nasty stuff. The rest of the defenses of the castle were also _very_ impressive, and I wasn't surprised when he said the castle had never been taken by force. -- Logan -- Duncan Bruce of Logan Clayton Neff Forgotten Sea, Calontir Kansas City, MO Re: burning oil poured from castletops 31 Jan 92 From: trifid@agora.uucp (Roadster Racewerks) Newsgroups: rec.org.sca Organization: Open Communications Forum Both pitch and lead were commonly used in repair around the castle. Pitch for caulking and preserving rope, and lead for repair of roofs. There was also the rendered fat of the animals slaughtered to feed the garrison. In at least one case a plague victim was catapaulted into the enemy ranks by the dying opposition, and more than one injured or dead horse, mule, or ox made the same abrupt trip... Castles had an opening in the ceiling of the gate area, called, aptly, a "murder hole", where once the intruders got past the first defense they could be pinned in the entry, and hot pitch, large stones, spears and arrows could be rained down...whatever was lying around the house, so to speak. (Beams could be shoved behind the entry to block retreat, and often the drawbridge was arranged to slam them into this small space. Or some had a pit they were dumped into, and when it was lowered afterward, they were crushed by the counterweight. Very effective...) NicMaoilan Edited by Mark S. Harris warfare-msg