Or, as some pear shaking dude wrote, “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.”
On a side note, the change in the miltary from chariots to cavalry is a dramatic example of “unnatural selection” in action: humans bred larger and larger horses, until it became practical for a horse to carry an armed and armoured man into battle on its back, rather than relying on two to pull a chariot. This seemingly happened relatively recently.
Fascinating stuff. Thanks so much. Here’s a question: what’s the advantage to honoring a surrender? Here you have an enemy army willingly admitting defeat! What value would you gain by showing mercy and leaving them alive? Is it loyalty of the defeated if they are treated fairly? I would be wary of swearing fealty to someone who just moments prior had wanted my head on a pike. I would ingratiate myself and wait for my opportunity to strike back in vengeance.
What’s the point of fighting in the first place? If you can accomplish your war aims without fighting, isn’t that better? If you allow the other guy to surrender, you win the war and don’t have to expose your tender body to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You get to go home with whatever spoils you negotiate from the losers who surrendered, and they get to go home to get back to work and make more spoils for you to carry off the next time you whip their sorry asses.
Killing the enemy army isn’t the goal of war. It is a means to achieve what you want–which is to enslave their women and children, carry off their treasures, take their lands, and so on.
If both you and your enemy are part of a larger system of powers, then not following the customs of war means that your side has a reputation among the other powers. If you are one city-state among many other city-states, this war is just one war, there’s going to be another war next year and another war the year after that, and another war the year after that. The city that was your enemy in this year’s war might be your ally in next year’s war.
All this goes out the window if you’re fighting people from outside your home territory. Mongol hordes aren’t going to follow the same codes of behavior as civilized people. Christian noblemen who are expected to follow certain codes of behavior when fighting each other don’t expect the same behavior from pagan Vikings. Also note that prisoners who surrender can be held prisoner for ransom, ones you slaughter can’t be. But you’ll only get the random if the people who pay the ransom can reasonably expect their friend returned in one piece if they pay. If they believe you’ll just take the money and they kill him anyway, they won’t pay.
I also suspect a big factor was cost. A bronze, or even iron chariot would be quite an expense. Metal in ancient times could be very expensive, and chariots used a lot of it. Even if the chariot was mostly wood and hide, it would require a considerable quantity of metal - potentially enough to arm many men. And chariots have a distressing habit of breaking down which requires time and money to fix. Sure, horses for war aren’t cheap on their own. But horses breed and the ones not suitable for warfare can be used for farm work. Also, since the chariot takes at least one horse, and many models used two, then you can functionally get more soldiers by converting to cavalry.
Further, the chariot has some real issues in warfare. They may be more agile than they seem, but they’re still not as quick or maneuverable as cavalry. You can’t dart in or out of combat nearly as easily as a horseman, and they’re probably even worse for trying to break disciplined infantry. Not surprisingly, chariots declined in importance as infantry numbers increased and their discipline became more prominent.
I’m not sure what your plan is when 5,000 dudes with spears show up and run the old “nice city, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it” routine. Partisan groups do go away back, but it’s a lot easier nowadays. You got IEDs, sniper rifles, RPGs, and easy means of mass communication for propaganda and coordination. A small group of people can do a lot of damage with modern toys.
Sieges were a common form of warfare in the ancient world. It’s not as glamorous and celebrated as an epic pitched battle in the field, but it works.
As for battles, unless they’re caught off guard or have no other choice both sides will generally fight when it thinks it can win. Otherwise they’ll reposition or retreat.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu
If people notice you kill your enemies instead of accepting surrender they’ll fight to the death. Why not, if you’re just gonna kill them anyway? Even a small animal can do a lot of damage when it thinks it’s cornered.
Moreover, if you’re into the whole imperial conquest thing you want them to be your subjects. You want them to work the fields and pay you tribute. If you have to take extreme measures like burning everything you haven’t really gained a whole lot.
The Mongols basically had a “surrender or die” strategy. Surrender and they’ll treat you pretty alright. Resist and you’ll end up in a mountain of skulls.
Tut’s chariot was fairly light wood. Admittedly it was a hunting or practice one, likely. However, to build a solid but light chariot requires a degree of woodworking expertise. Plus… horses are expensive. A serious chariot attack force would involve stabling hundreds of horses, suggesting a fairly large surplus of meadow not used for raising people food. Chariots is sufficient numbers were likely a large kingdom fighting asset, not something a moderate sized city state like Troy in the darker ages could muster.
The Greeks fighting Troy, from what I understand, were running open sailing/rowing galleys not unlike the Vikings two millennia later. They were not likely bringing much in the way of chariots or horses from home.
A small chariot force on a sortie from the city would be pretty vulnerable. The Greeks need only congregate within arrowshot of anyone trying to return to the gates - a bottleneck- and try to pick off what they could during the traffic jam to get back in. Meanwhile, any prime pasture for a large horse force would be occupied by the enemy.
Plus, there’s the terrain issue. The Mesopotamians and the Egyptians had the advantage of fighting on wide open flat plains when they needed to use chariot tactics.
Just as, somewhere in the development of civilization, there’s the emergence from villages of subsistence farmers to a town with a non-agricultural class of tradesmen, administrators - there also emerges a central cadre of professional soldiers, the core of an army. When not busy strong-arming their own peasants, they start to intrude on other town-states. This is where solidarity in hostile territory is a survival imperative… IIRC the emergence of larger towns happened somewhere around 10,000 to 5,000 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Well, in ancient times the value is “you can make them your slaves”. In the Middle Ages, it became “you can sell them back to their families for a net profit”. And besides, cutting the fighting short is a net positive for the victor.
Say both sides start with 1,000 dudes. They clash for an hour, until one side A has 900 left and side B has 800. B offers to stop the fighting if given guarantees that they won’t be harmed. A has two choices : either comply (and gain whatever it is the fighting was about in the first place) or keep fighting, which will result in the same final gain (i.e. whatever the fighting was about) but fewer than 900 guys left to fight the next battle. Which result is better, do you reckon ?
Sometimes the fighting really *is *about “killing every last one of them”, but that’s vanishingly rare. Most often the invader just wants to either take your stuff and leave with it, or take over the administrative side of things while the locals still do the working bit followed by the paying up bit. What’s the point of taking over a country where every field has been burned and every farmer killed ?
And that has happened, of course.
But ultimately, a group of guys who just want to lord over the place and don’t really care what you do with your day is not such a huge burden to bear, and could even be a net benefit if your current rulers happen to be shit.
For example, the people of Egypt offered precious little resistance to Muslim invaders in the 7th-8th century because the particular strain of Christianism popular in Egypt was branded as heretical by the emperors of Byzantium (who owned Egypt at the time), and there was much persecution going on. The Muslims came with the offer “we’ll let you be whatever Christians you want to be, we really don’t give a fuck as long as you pay a tax”, which happened to still be lower than the taxes they had to pay under the Greeks. So people wisely reasoned that if they could run the country adequately, which they could, and do not kill us or discriminate against us, which they don’t, then isn’t it better that they be in charge ?
And so, doors were opened.
You also have to consider that it follows a rational long term strategy : if a town surrenders to you and you don’t kill everybody in it or go overboard with the looting, the next town over will have heard of it and will be more likely to offer surrender rather than fight to the last. People typically paired this positive reinforcement with a negative one, which is : if we offer to let you surrender and you don’t, IOW if we have to do this thang the hard way, it’s going to play with no survivors. Your choice, mate.
In the golden age of piracy, many commercial ships were taken by notorious pirates without a shot fired or a cutlass drawn, simply because the choice was either surrender some loot (and go home) or fight (and die to the last if that doesn’t work out), and they knew by reputation that the word of the pirates offering these terms could be trusted. When people know you’re a fierce but fair motherfucker, all you have to do is raise your flag.
The value of honouring surrender - Reputation.
Think of it in terms of “game theory”. This isn’t the only conflict you are likely to be in: if you make a habit of honouring surrender, your enemies are (a) more likely to surrender in the future (rather than fight to the death); and (b) more likely to honour your surrender if you come off second-best in a future conflict.
Early wheeled vehicles where heavy, lumbering things, but the war chariots of the golden age of charioteering were very light; more akin to a high-tech fighter plane (or a bicycle) than a tank (in modern terms), made of light materials - wood, sinew, etc.
Cost would definitely be a factor, but not because they were made of large amounts of metal - more that they were made by expensive specialists. I imagine they needed a lot of careful maintenance. A major expense for a significant government, for certain.
There definitely is an increase in fighters per horse. Most chariots took two horses and held a driver plus a fighter. With cavalry, each man was on his own horse.
I do think that cavalry had the advantage in terms of mobility.
The main problem was simply that horses were, initially, too damn small to make useful cavalry - only after a lot of breeding did the average size become large enough to support an armoured warrior.
The famous Standard of Ur shows early four wheeled battle carts pulled by teams of 4 onagers–you can tell they’re not horses because of the tails.
Yup.
Early battle carts where (apparently) heavy, lumbering things like modified farm carts; later chariots were much lighter, more manuverable 2-wheeled vehicles.
Google “King Tut Chariot” - we have one fully preserved thanks to the lazy excavators who hid Tut’s tomb entrance with the diggings from the tomb uphill. Very light and minimal, which makes sense since you can’t make it properly armoured anyway - so very maneuverable.
The problem, of course, is the economics of keeping horses. They contribute minimally to the food cycle (until the advent of the horse collar around the middle ages, they were pretty useless for ploughing or other hauling work.) Since unlike cattle they don’t digest cellulose, they need a lot more feed. An effective chariot force probably needs a lot of horses, meaning the government needs to be bigger and richer than some minor city-state. And like tanks, they need effective ground troops, they can’t win all by themselves.
Or simply Chariots are far too specialised to be useful for long. The rule of war has been that determined and disciplined infantry will always defeat cavalry. That has been true in 2000 BC when horses were first used in large numbers in war and also in 1973 when Egyptian ATGM teams cut Israeli armour to ribbons in the Sinai. So once, you had infantry which would not break in front of the attacking chariots, you had a problem.
Horseman are much more tactically useful than chariooters. They can operate in more varied terrain, are less expensive to use, unlike chariots, they can be employed in a variety of ways, for scouting, for raiding, as mobile infantry, not just in the main line of battle, which is all a chariot can realistically do.
That’s far, far too simplistic an analysis.
Cavaly (usually) can’t beat disciplined infantry in a head-on charge, if the infantry stands firm.
However, cavalry can be, and was, a useful part of the rock-paper-scissors type armamentarium of a good general. The trick was knowing when to use the cavalry, and not attempting to use it like a hammer all the time.
As in Sinai, where, as you may recall, after futile tank charges (that is, attempting to use tanks like a hammer and getting beat), and a similar repulse of an Egyptian attack with tanks, the Israels set about a combined-arms assault - and crossed the Suez canal behind the Egytian army, smashing the Egyptians. Tanks were a useful part of that.
Same thing tended to happen to the Brits in N. Africa vs. Rommel - attempt tank charges, get lured onto a screen of 88s (anti-tank guns), get smashed, then get beat by an all-arms counter-attack. The lesson isn’t that cavalry (or tanks) are useless against a good, disciplined opponent - it is that they must be used skillfully, and a general who knows how to combine arms effectively to oppose the enemy’s weakness against the general’s strength (rock-paper-scissors like) will succeed. A general who plays the “scissors” of heavy cavalry all the time will be beat by the “rock” of disciplined infantry.
This is I think partly true, but not totally: chariots were indeed more expensive and had a lower ratio of warriors to horses (one warrior plus a driver to two horses, usually). But it would seem they were used for such tasks as scouting and raiding - allegedly the Britons used chariots for that.
They certainly used chariots for “mobile infantry”. Tactus describes this:
Very true; the IDF had become very tank-heavy in 1973 and had an unhealthy contempt of Arab infantry from the 1967 war where flat out tank charges had broken defending infantry with ease. The brigades in close reserve in the Sinai used in immediate counterattacks against the Egyptian crossing sites were all very tank heavy. After the 1973 war the IDF moved to shift the ratio of tanks to infantry to artillery to be less tank heavy.
This was just history repeating itself as it tends to do; at the beginning of WWII everyone’s tank/armored/panzer divisions were very tank heavy with the ratio of tank to infantry to artillery battalions running in the 2-3:1:1 range. As the war progressed the organizations were changed to a ratio closer to 1:1:1.
While I understand the value of steady infantry and of combined arms, not sure what “for long” means. Chariots dominated warfare for 500 years. The only other weapons system of comparable dominance and duration is the gun.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15308178&postcount=27
I should have considered the woodwork and craftsmanship as well. However, even just speaking of the metal, you’ve got fittings, studs, and the axle/s which will require metal - probably more than it would take to arm several infantrymen or cavalrymen.
I agree, but many cavalrymen fought in limited armor anyway. And most of the bronze-age armors appear to have been bulky and not-terribly-flexible, which would drastically limit the practicality of fighting from horseback.
Depends on how they were outfitted, I suppose.
One of the advantages of chariots is that the warrior fighting in it could be armoured. Some of the bronze-age armour they found appears to have been for chariot-fighting.
The famous “Dendra” armour appears to have been of this type:
Indeed, chariot warriors wearing armour is even specifically mentioned in the Bible:
While there is no doubt that most cavalry used in antiqity was “light” cavalry made up of unarmoued missile-shooters and flingers (like the north african cavalry, armed with javalins), Cavalry cannot fully replace chariots until you could put an armoured man on a horse - thus making “heavy” cavalry.
Such armoured cavalry existed well before the use of the stirrup, and could (again, if used properly) be very effective - albeit the most expensive type of soldier to employ.
Some of the most successful ever guerillas were the Spanish in the early 19th century against Napoleons soldiers.
Napoleon had made a pretty dodgy takeover of the Spanish government, but the population (driven along by the priests who feared N’s ideas about the role of religion in politics) hated the French and all they stood for. This meant that no French soldier could go anywhere without and solid escort, thus tying up thousands of troops.
N (or rather Joseph) retaliated by burning, raping shooting and all the usual terror tactics of a ruthless authority. Lemur866 said "But the problem comes when all the men in the enemy village get their weapons together and march over to your village. What are you gonna do now? Run away and harass them with guerrilla tactics? You could do that, but that means they’re in your base killing your dudes. You can’t run away from your fields and houses and women and animals and stored food and goods and let the enemy villagers do what they like. They’ll burn your fields, burn your houses, rape and/or enslave your women, capture your animals, and carry away or destroy your food and goods.
In fact, once your family is dead and your home gone, you have little left to lose and much to gain (loot etc) so you head off to the hills and join a gang of bandits who (like Robin Hood) rob from the hated French and support (and get supported by) the local population. Of course - if another power (like the English) give you gold and guns as well, you have even more chance of coming out on top.