First of all, let me preface this by saying that I realize Game of Thrones is not real life and complete fantasy. However, it has parallels to medieval England and features a number of men pushing 50 and beyond (sometimes well beyond) in the capacity of professional warriors. Wearing full suits of armor and swinging around massive broadswords. They can fight off multiple people and really hold their own.
I would put Jorah on the less extreme end and Ser Barristan on the more extreme end. And there are plenty in between.
Were there any real life parallels to this? Was this in any way common?
The Fourth Crusade rivals GoT in being a messed up situation where allies turned on each other. The Doge of Venice, who helped the crusaders sack Constantinople, was 90+ Enrico Dandolo. While he may or may not have slain men there, he commanded them while being old and blind.
Many kings were warring in old age, e.g. Edward I at 68.
Swords weren’t particulary heavy, nor was armor. They still had to be fit, but not superhuman.
Charlemagne was still kicking ass at 50, while Godefroy de Bouillon died at age 40, and Henry V at 35. In general, though, if you actually survived infancy you had a decent chance of making it into your 50s where you could continue to roll the dice on the battlefield.
ETA Genghis Khan made it past 60, for example. All that horse milk must have been good for him but you can only cheat death for so long.
John of Bohemia would fit the bill where badassosity is concerned. He wasn’t really decrepit when he died (in battle) - a mere 50. OTOH, you have to know that he was **blind **and had been for over a decade. Which, I’m being assured, presents a slight handicap wrt:fighting. On horseback. For your life.
And so that’s rightly what he’s now famous for : being the “blind King of Bohemia”, who was too stubborn to let a little thing like total blindness get in the way of his fun and told his people to lead him onto the battlefield so that he could hit people with his sword. They all died with him, BTW. Turns out lashing oneself to a blind idiot on a battlefield is also being an idiot.
With good nutrition, lots of exercise, and a good deal of luck in avoiding debilitating injuries and diseases, it’s easily possible to be in good enough shape to fight a battle well into old age. Even as old as 70, 75. Admittedly, that last requirement (avoiding injuries and diseases) was difficult in that era of poor medicine, but some people managed it.
We have the idea today that going over 50 or so means you get run down and can’t perform physically anymore because most people don’t get enough exercise. Get the exercise and you don’t even notice your age.
The most Viking-est of them all, Harald Hardrada, died age ~50 at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Here is what Wikipedia says about his death:
“Harald was struck in the throat by an arrow and killed early in the battle in a state of berserkergang, having worn no body armour and fought aggressively with both hands around his sword.”
If you are sufficiently hardy to have fought successfully and lived thru a battle at age 40, the odds of you being fit to fight at age 50 are pretty good, etc.
Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as “El Cid” (1043-1099), conquered the city of Valencia at the age of around 50. He died five years later when the Moors besieged it, probably of famine or other ill effects of the siege.
According to legend, after his death his wife had his corpse dressed in his armor and mounted on his horse to bolster morale. In some versions, the corpse was sent out at the head of a band of knights where they won a (temporary) victory against the besieging Moors, who were intimidated by the sight of their foe, so winning a victory even after his death.
Guillaume IV Bremond d’Ars was killed at the 1415 Battle of Agincourt while his father, Guillaume III, was killed at the 1346 Battle of Crecy! So Guillaume IV would have been 68 years old even if born posthumously. Thomas de Camoys was about 64 years old when he commanded the left wing of the English army at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. These and several knights in their 50’s showed up with a cursory glance at Battle of Agincourt names.
Not quite medieval, but Francisco de Carvajal “the Demon of the Andes”. Born in 1464, he had a long military career in Europe, culminating in fighting in the Battle of Pavia when he was already over 60. Two years later, he made a fortune in ransoms at the Sack of Rome, which he used to travel to Mexico.
Aged 70, he was sent to Peru in command of a relief force to break the Inca siege of Lima, he subsequently became one of Pizarro’s lieutenants and fought both against the Incas and in the conquistador civil wars, still leading from the front and acquiring a reputation as a master of guerrilla warfare. At the battle of Chupas in 1542, he is said to have showed his contempt for the enemy by riding to the front line and taking off his armour.
In 1546 he fought a brilliant campaign in Gonzalo Pizarro’s service but was finally wounded and captured two years later when unlike most of his comrades he refused to desert Pizarro. Unrepentant to the last, he was executed by the royalist forces. He was 84.
At the age of 70, William Marshal, protector and regent of the 9-year-old King Henry III (the fifth English king he had served), fought at the head of the English troops, defeating the French at the Battle of Lincoln, preparing to besiege the French in London till the French capitulated.
Speaking as someone who has arguably had good nutrition and medical care into my 50’s, and engages in some fairly physical stuff… I don’t care how well you’ve been taken care of, by your 50’s you’re starting to get wear and tear if you’ve been physically active for decades.
I also know a lot of athletic types, folks who engaged in manual labor for a living, etc. - the same applies. Back in the middle ages a big problem would be recovering from injury without modern medical care and rehab, but if you can power through a bit of pain you can keep moving and doing. If you’ve lost an eye or a couple fingers, maybe an ear or been scarred up… well, you just look more badass and you’re still dangerous. Being on horseback could compensate for bad knees or ankles. If you were a warrior and made it to 50 you were probably in command or close to it, which meant that you might not need to do some of the physical grunt work of being in the military so you could save your strength for the fighting instead of the latrine digging (or whatever).
The biggest obstacle to guys being warrior in their 50’s was not so much “can a 50 year old do swing a sword?” but rather the accumulated damage such a lifestyle incurred. As an example Henry VIII of England was still jousting at the age of 45, at which point he incurred severe injuries during a bout of same. Among other things, it left him with a chronic, non-healing wound that festered for the remaining 20 years he was alive - he would have stood a much better chance of getting that cured these days than back then. Then there was his gout - we treat that a lot better, too. He also had a head injury from that incident as well and it’s debatable how well we could have dealt with that, but if nothing else getting his leg wound and gout taken care of would likely have meant he could have maintained a high level of physical activity and avoided the obesity of his latter life. In which case Henry probably would have still been able to swing a sword and/or lead an army into his 50’s.
I’ll just note that Arnold has required not one but two heart surgeries, and broke a thigh bone while skiing in 2006. If he was living, say, 500 years ago even if his heart issue didn’t kill him off in 1497 (at which point he was 50) the broken leg in 1506 (which in 2006 required surgery to fix) would, if he survived it, probably left him crippled and able to walk only poorly and with great difficulty, if at all. He’s an able-bodied, active 71 year old largely because of modern medicine. Not as strong as when he was, say, 25 but so what? Like you said, he could probably knock your block clean off.
Even so - at 50 he would have been a bad-ass in battle, if that was the way he had gone. And maybe dropped dead at 51 due to a wonky heart valve.
King Edward I of England, known as “Longshanks” due to his height, a warrior all his life, personally led an attack on horseback on Berwick in Scotland in 1296 when he was about 57. He died of illness while leading another invasion of Scotland in 1307 when he was 69.
Speaking of Game of Thrones, he was probably one of the inspirations for Tywin Lannister.
This is the one bit I disagree with in your post and I’ll nitpick. Knees & thighs are really important in horse riding, even moreso presumably when both of your hands are busy trying to murder people with and/or not getting murdered yourself and you’re mostly not using the reins to steer the horse at all.
I’d say knees and ankles would also both be important and take an absolute beating when your main tactic is the lance charge, which at its core is basically a deliberate high speed crash while you’re standing in your stirrups. And you’re expected to keep doing that all day long. Hopefully without unhorsing yourself in the process, because then it’s not happy funtimes at all.
GoT does better than most, but still includes several of the standard inaccurate tropes of how combat would have worked in this period.
If you’re imagining guys in full plate armor swinging swords around at each other in long 1v1 fights…that’s not how it was AIUI.
Battles were group affairs, swords were rarely the primary weapon, and plate armor would largely make swords useless anyway by the end of its evolution.
And dancing around doing spins and shit has basically never been a thing. So it’s quite likely that superior experience and tactics could often win out against the reaction speed and strength of youth…guys in their 40s or even 50s often being on the right side of a poleaxe seems plausible to me.
