Dan Carlin, in his “Hardcore History” podcast, said that the Roman army could have competed with any army for the next 1000 years, though I’m not sure exactly which time period in Roman history he was talking about.
So take Caesar’s army that conquered Gaul and won the civil war against Pompeii, around 40BC. Drop them into the future 1000 years, 960AD. Using their 1000 year old technology, is there anyone around that would give him a run for his money. When does his army in terms of logistics and technology become obsolete?
What about the Roman army in Belisarius’ time, around 500AD. Fast forward 1000 years to 1500AD. What happens?
For the first-- well, not any army. I don’t think that the Romans would fare well against the Magyars, for instance; they couldn’t beat the horse-archers from the steppes in their own time. Second, I don’t think that those Romans ever faced heavy cavalry, certainly not in the numbers that they’d face in 960 AD. They’re not the knights-in-shining-armor stereotype that we’re used to yet, but they’re well armed and armored in heavy mail and trained with a serious focus on devastating charges, compared to the relatively light Germanic cavalry that the Romans did figure out how to beat. Their organization and supply lines might be better than the locals’, though, and they would not be entirely ineffective.
In the second case, no, the armies of the late Roman empire could not beat the massed pikemen, arquebuses, knights in plate mail, and early cannon of the early Renaissance. Neither could they beat the Mongols of about 1200 A.D.
There’s no way the Romans could have footed it with the Mongols - it’d be Carrhae all over again. So figure 1200 AD for a certain end date.
I’m not sure how well they’d do against the Arabs during their expansion, say the Umayyid invasion of spain form 711. We already know that the contemporary Roman army couldn’t stop the Huins and the Goths so all in all I’m very dubious. You need someone like Tamerlane to pop in and give you a definitive answer.
Also, even if you ignore guns, heavy cavalry is hard to beat for primitive armies. Romans didn’t have stirrups so they, as I recall, had to stab with lame overhand pokeys for their horsemen.
Also, I think Mongols would be pretty scary to a Roman army.
Do they get Caesar as well? and is it a campaign or are they dropped onto a field to fight one battle? Lots of Caesar’s victories seem to have come from logistics, sieges and his incredible forced marches putting his men where his enemies did’t expect.
re: Heavy cavalry and stirrups - the Romans certainly faced the first and the second was not necessary for shock cavalry. The Persians utilized heavy cavalry fairly extensively as heavy assault troops. It was a combination of mounted archers and cataphracts ( supposedly at a ratio of 9:1 ) that shattered the Romans at Carrhae. The archers would concentrate fire to disrupt a formation and then the cataphracts would charge to shatter it.
Stirrups were not necessary as they apparently used other techniques for grounding their lances in a charge, such as straps attached to their saddles or to the horses neck and a saddle designed to absorb the shock and stabilize the rider. Such technology were inferior to true stirrups in terms of stability, but the differences were almost certainly less profound to mounted shock warfare than was once theorized. You can see Persian armored cavalry at full charge here, depicting events around 224 A.D…
re: The early Arab armies - they consisted largely of highly mobile mounted infantry, with a unusually large proportion of foot archers. Cavalry was very much a secondary arm, usually used to scout, skirmish and screen ( though they played a decisive role at Yarmuk in particular ). When you think of the scarce pasturage available in Arabia this makes sense - the Arabs were mostly a true desert folk, not steppe warriors. Camels were fine for mobility but performed poorly in combat and horses would be expensive and much scarcer. So Arab armies mostly rode to combat, but mostly dismounted to fight ( and made no known use of mounted archers at all ). This gave them a definite edge in terms of strategic mobility, but no particular tactical advantage once combat was joined. Indeed they were probably under-equipped relative to the hardened mobile field armies of the Sassanids and early Byzantines. A combination of factors led to their eventual victory, among which superior leadership can’t be discounted. But tactical superiority almost certainly wasn’t one of them. They’d make elusive foes for a late Republican Roman army, but not an unusually deadly threat on a battlefield.
It is also worth noting that late Republican/early Imperial Roman armies depended very heavily on auxiliaries. Up to 50% of the army was non-Roman and non-heavy infantry, consisting of non-citizen subject specialists ( like Balearic slingers ), quasi-mercenaries ( like Germanic cavalry ) and troops provided by vassals ( like the kingdoms of Anatolia ). Julius Caesar had plenty of praise for his Germanic cavalry for instance. It was this use of auxiliary forces that turned the Roman army into a combined arms machine. The Roman army that ended up at Carrhae only had 4,000 horse on hand, but at one point they had 10,000 and could have had 16,000 more if Crassus hadn’t been an idiot.
Julius Caesar’ army transported to 960? Yeah, I can imagine it would probably still be reasonably competitive, aside from having lost all of its support infrastructure ;). Technology hadn’t changed that much by the early Middle Ages.
Would a Roman general, seeing his legion’s “shield wall” formation smashed by heavy cavalry with lances, know enough about Greek phalanx tactics to retrain his troops into phalanx/pike formations?
The Romans had already demonstrated the superiority of legions vs phalanxes at Cynoscephalae. Turning them back into phalanxes just so you could do better vs cavalry would be a huge step backwards.
The Romans did pretty well against the Persians and cavalry they capture the Persian Capital 5 times and on one occasion penetrated deep into Iran. They Roman superiority was their organization, which would not be matched by frankly any European Army till at least the era of Napoleon. The Arabs and Chinese could possibly have matched them though.
Horde is a misnomer when applied to the Mongols. A horde implies a huge disorganized mass winning battles by sheer weight of numbers. Nothing could be further from the truth regarding the Mongols. The Mongols were extremely well organized and extremely disciplined. They were divided into Tuman of 10,000 much as the Roman legions were, and subdivided into smaller units by the decimal system. Their tactics were very good and constantly practiced; one of the favorites being the feigned retreat where the attacking Mongols would fake a panicked disorganized rout, change to fresh mounts that had been hidden in the rear, and return at the charge at their now disorganized and winded pursuers.
Partly because of tactics like this (where it would be assumed the troops on fresh rested mounts must be new troops), partly to excuse their own defeats, and partly from never really understanding how swiftly the Tuman could move and concentrate, Europeans saw Mongols as hordes, able to win battles due to vast numbers. In fact, more often than not the Mongols fought outnumbered by their enemies but won anyway.
Sounds a little like the Korean War in which the [del]American[/del]UN forces presumed that the Chinese were committing vast numbers of troops when more often it was simply that the Chinese were good at moving units in night marches.
