The Athenian general and author Xenophon (427-355 [B.C.E.]), was so particular about the quality of his equipment that his shield came from Argos, his breastplate from Attica, his helmet from Boeotia, and his horse from Epidaurus.
Caring for the 3,000-4,000 horses that formed part of William the Conqueror’s army in 1066 [C.E.] required some 8,000-12,000 horseshoes and about 75,000 nails a month, for about 8 tons of iron.
Dojo is a word most martial arts students are familiar with, though many students erroneously associate it with the word school, as in high school or college. The dojo, however, is a place where only martial arts are taught and. strictly translated, it implies the instruction of only the “true Japanese martial arts” of Ken-Jutsu. Ju-Jutsu. and Kyu-Jutsu. It is more than a gymnasium or club; it is a cherished place of learning and brotherhood.
The Japanese use a broad interpretation of the word. To them, dojo is symbolic of the methodical, ideological, philosophical, and, most importantly, the spiritual aspects of the martial arts. Jujitsu involves more than physical techniques: it involves the molding of one’s character, the training of one’s mind, and—last, but not least—the developing of one’s body. The dojo’s foundation is based on the idea of virtue. Keep in mind that students of martial arts today are, in effect, the descendants of the samurai of yesteryear. Today’s students should work toward the propagation of the spirit of the Zen warrior, a spirit that encompasses more than an expert knowledge of lethal fighting techniques. It represents the attainment of a virtuous way of life where the main theme is the code of Bushido—The Way of the Warrior.
— Japan’s Ultimate Martial Art, Chapter 1
There is a major difference between a trick and a technique. A true technique involves the skillful execution of timing, balance, posture, coordination, and speed and will always work if properly executed. Its development and mastery depend entirely on your personal commitment to training. Jujitsu training requires practicing at the dojo at least twice—preferably three times—a week. But true training requires more than just practicing techniques at the dojo: it requires a change in one’s way of life. One must train oneself both physically and mentally. In Jujitsu, extreme mental discipline is both, a requirement and a result.
— Japan’s Ultimate Martial Art, Chapter 1
Seventeenth century muskets typically had a misfire rate of one round in six, and one in four in foul weather.
A former factory worker from the British Midlands may be the last living master of the centuries-old Sikh battlefield art of shastar vidya. The [44-year-old] father of four is now engaged in a full-time search for a successor.
The basis of shastar vidya, the “science of weapons” is a five-step movement: advance on the opponent, hit his flank, deflect incoming blows, take a commanding position and strike.
It was developed by Sikhs in the 17th Century [C.E.] as the young religion came under attack from hostile Muslim and Hindu neighbours, and has been known to a dwindling band since the British forced Sikhs to give up arms in the 19th Century….
On his first day of training [with his 80-plus-year-old master], the frail old man handed him a stick and instructed Mr. Singh to hit him. When he tried, the master threw him around like a rag doll.
“He was a frail old man chucking me about and I couldn’t touch him,” he says. “That definitely impressed me….”
But even his most advanced pupils have only recently reached the stage where they can fight him with weapons without getting hurt….
“It is not just martial technique, there is a lot of oral tradition and linguistic skills that has to be there as well,” he explains.
The great limitation on the equipment of the Army of Flanders in the sixteenth century [C.E.] was financial: a pike and body-armour (the corselete) cost 30 florins in the 1590s, a musket cost 10 florins, a 24-pounder cannon cost 1,000 florins. With prices like this, there was never enough money to arm all of the soldiers all of the time. There was only limited concern about this: sixteenth-century strategists believed that wars should be fought with men, not material…and faced with a choice between feeding their men or equipping them, they always chose food. Eight hundred men could be fed for a month with the money required to cast one cannon; a pike-man could be given bread for two years with the price of his corselet.
Only gradually did the Army systematize the supply of weapons to its men, deducting the cost of arms, powder and shot by [installments] from their future wages….
Arms and armour were…provided on credit to the troops by contractors engaged by the government. This was essential since few men could afford to purchase their own firearms (a musket cost 10 florins in the 1590s, more than a musketeer’s wage for a month), but it was perhaps shortsighted to charge the powder and shot used by each man against his account—it was hardly an encouragement for a marksman to use his weapon! In their defence the government argued that the musketeers and arquebusiers already drew a slightly higher wage to cover the cost of using their guns, but of course this was only effective when wages were actually paid….
— The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567-1659, pp. 48-49, 165
Death: the Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier’s valor; no heaven will receive him. The Iliad‘s words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful: dark night covers the dying warrior, hateful darkness claims him; he is robbed of sweet life, his soul goes down to Hades bewailing its fate. Again and again, relentlessly, the Iliad hammers this fact: The death of any warrior is tragic and full of horror. Even in war, death is regrettable.
— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 4
The culmination of selective breeding was the destrier, the “great horse” or warhorse which by the late Middle Ages could reach eighteen hands in size and astonishing prices. The warhorse was suited for combat and was the symbol of the aristocracy; its value and rarity meant that not too many soldiers could afford one. Most soldiers seem to have ridden more humble animals, or rounceys. The use of a different horse may have been dictated by other reasons. For instance, the favorite English horse in the chevauchées in France during the Hundred Years War was the courser, which combined stamina and mobility. In reality every heavy cavalryman would need several horses: the warhorse, which the knight’s squire would lead with his right hand, a more modest horse for the squire himself, and a horse to carry the knight’s armor to the battlefield. It was only when confrontation became inevitable that the knight would wear his armor and ride his warhorse into battle.
— Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels, p. 132
Emphasis mine.
When Dardalion joined him Waylander blinked in mock disbelief. A white horse-hair plumed helmet was buckled at the chin, and the leather-trimmed cloak lay over a shimmering breastplate embossed with a flying eagle. A leather kilt, studded with silver, protected Dardalion’s thighs, while silver greaves were buckled to his calves. By his side hung a cavalry sabre, and on his left hip a long, curved knife sat in a jewelled scabbard.
“You look ridiculous,” said Waylander.
“Most probably. But will it serve?”
“It will serve to draw the Vagrians to you like flies to a cowpat.”
“I do feel rather foolish.”
“Then take it off and find yourself something less garish.”
“No. I can’t explain why, but this is right.”
“Then keep away from me, priest. I want to stay alive!”
“Will you not get yourself some armour?”
“I have my mail shirt. I don’t intend to stand in one place long enough to be cut.”
“I would appreciate some advice on swordsmanship,” said Dardalion.
“Gods of Mercy!” snapped Waylander. “It takes years to learn and you have an hour, maybe two. There’s nothing I can teach you—just remember throat and groin. Protect your own, slice theirs!”
— Waylander, Chapter 7
All the Mayhews’ guards were down now, but so were many of the assassins, and Honor and [her treecat] Nimitz were in among the others. She knew there were too many of them, yet she and Nimitz were all that was left, and they had to keep them bottled up in the entry alcove, away from the Protector and his family, as long as they could.
The killers had known she’d be here, but she was “only” a woman. They were totally unprepared for her size and strength—and training—or the mad whirl of violence that wasn’t a bit like it was on HD. Real martial arts aren’t like that. The first accurate strike to get through unblocked almost always ends in either death or disablement, and when Honor Harrington hit a man, that man went down.
— Honor of the Queen, Chapter 20
The [Mamluk] trooper was protected by a knee-length chain-mail shirt that extended up to the neck as a coif; Saladin was once saved from an Assassin’s knife stroke by his coif as he sat watching a siege near Aleppo. The hazagand, a jerkin of leather and mail that was commonly worn by Islamic troops in Syria is definitely not light in terms of the protection it affords but it is light in terms of the Syrian summer. It was taken up by the Latins of Outremer and spread to Europe as the [hauberk jazerant]. Turkish and Islamic armour was designed this way for mobility and because of the climate in which men fought. There was, however, another reason why the armour of the East never moved toward the total body coverage with plate that was a feature of the Western knight in the later medieval age—the technology and techniques of Islamic metalworking. Ibn Sina (d. 1037) describes three types of iron being produced within the Islamic lands but al-Biruni (d. 1048 [C.E.]) tells us that the crucible steel or ‘wootz’ used to create weapons was imported from India. This steel was perfect for blades but it could not be formed into plates any larger than twenty-five centimetres, which meant that even into the Ottoman age Islamic troops would have been wearing lamellar armour….
— The Knights of Islam, Chapter 3
Today our armies are parallel societies or total institutions. They take in individual recruits, separate them from their prior friends and relations, and teach them everything they will need while they are isolated from their civilian associates. They re-organize these recruits into a new hierarchy of units for both everyday and tactical purposes (people in the same platoon both live and fight together, at least in the field). Armies like the army of Classical Athens were nothing like this and yet they fought….
Soldiers in Classical Greece were expected to teach themselves or seek out whatever training would be useful. Cities which wanted to be skilled at war encouraged pastimes such as archery or choral dancing to prepare their men for war. The closest thing to this in our societies are the Scouting movement…, physical education and free lunches in schools, all of which were meant to create a population of healthy and skilled recruits. Except in Sparta, there is no clear evidence for mandatory peacetime training of infantry before 338 BCE (although armies could train together once they were assembled with their arms). We have a number of examples in Thucydides and Herodotus of armies and navies which refused training or work which their commander wished them to perform.
Greek cities were small and recruited their troops by subdivisions such as the tribes of Athens or messes of Sparta. Soldiers in one of these groups knew each other before they joined the army. It would have been impossible for most cities to break up these ties, since they had only a few hundred or a few thousand adult male citizens. In the Iliad, enemies like Glaucus and Diomedes sometimes know each other, and since many Greek wars were between great families not great cities, this may not have been unknown in real warfare.
We [today] have elaborate systems of professional military education modelled after universities and public schools with examinations and grades and certifications. Commanders of ancient armies learned in their families or through apprenticeship with more experienced commanders. They sought out idiosyncratic personal training and education from all kinds of sources. Among other things, this let groups which were good at war like the Spartans keep their practical wisdom for themselves and only share it with people who took time to befriend them. Anyone [today] can go to a leadership course for senior NCOs or a staff college by meeting meritocratic criteria, but someone like Iphicrates had to like you or decide you were useful before he took you under his wing. If you were in the position to decide who had access to secret knowledge, you had social power.
…Classical Greek armies grew out of Classical Greek societies, rather than creating a new parallel society with new rules, social ties, and systems of reward. Good generals worked with this rather than trying to turn these armies into something more like the Roman army of Augustus or whining that their solders were self-governing citizens not mute pawns from a board game….
— Ancient Greek Armies Were Part of Ancient Greek Society – Book and Sword
During the Fourteenth Century [C.E.] an area of approximately 1,050 square kilometers just south of the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris had twelve forts, 28 fortified churches, five towers, four fortified manor houses, and six full-fledged castles, for a total of 55 fortified places, or roughly one for every 19 square kilometers, so that few people were more than six kilometers from a place of refuge.
…While local peasantry, paid or pillaged, usually furnished food and horses’ forage, a major expedition or siege or fleet at sea required organized supply of biscuit, smoked or salted meat and fish, wine, oil, and oats and hay for the horses. Ordinarily knights ate white bread made from wheat, meat in the form of beef, pork, and mutton, and drank wine daily. The common soldier received wine only on feast days or in active combat; otherwise he drank beer, ale, or cider, and ate rye bread, peas, and beans. Fish, cheese, olive oil, occasionally butter, salt, vinegar, onions, and garlic also figured in the rations. Poultry was so widely consumed and easily obtained that it was not recorded. Sugar, honey, mustard, spices, and almonds were kept for the wounded and sick and the privileged. On active duty, soldiers did not fast but were allotted fish as substitute for meat on the twelve “thin” days a month. The more continuous war became, as it did in the 14th century [C.E.], the more organization and money it required.
— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 6
But whatever his antecedents, the feudal knight was an important cog in the military machinery of the eleventh and twelfth centuries [C.E.]; and although Sidney Painter may have been guilty of some exaggeration in his summary of the achievements of European military feudalism, his opinion is worth quoting:
Feudal military organization was on the whole highly effective. The knights of Europe conquered vast territories from the Slavs, pressed the Moslems steadily back in Spain and drove them from Sicily, and established themselves at least temporarily in Palestine, Syria, the Byzantine lands, and Greece. As a defensive system feudalism was almost perfect. No organization ever devised could so quickly produce an effective military force wherever it was needed. The feudal army was essentially a militia, but a militia composed of the best soldiers of the day.Perhaps so strong an assertion was needed to put the accomplishments of the feudal knight in proper perspective.
— Warfare in England: 1066-1189, Chapter 10
Imagine a Highland Napoleon. Imagine a Bonny Prince Charlie with European ambitions who, having won back Scotland from King George II, sets off at the head of his clans not just to conquer England—a mere preliminary—but to cross the Channel, to meet and beat the French army on the River Somme, then journey south into Spain to besiege and subdue its principal fortresses, return north to challenge the Holy Roman Emperor, twice confront and defeat him at the head of his forces, seize his Crown, burn his capital, bury his corpse and finally depart eastward to cross swords with the Tsar of Russia or the Sultan of Turkey. Imagine all this compressed into, say, the years 1745-56 [C.E.], between the princeling’s twenty-second and thirty-third birthdays. Imagine on his death, at the age of thirty-two, the crowns of Europe shared between his followers—Lord George Murray ruling in Madrid, the Duke of Perth in Paris, Lord Elcho in Vienna, John Roy Stewart in Berlin, Cameron of Lochiel in Warsaw, a gaggle of tartaned chieftains braying for whisky in the small courts of south Germany and London garrisoned by a crew of bare-kneed highlanders. Finally, imagine most of the Jacobite empire enduring into the nineteenth century, parts of it into the twentieth, and its last fragment into the twenty-first.
Or imagine, if you prefer, a George Washington Bolivar, a Founding Father who determines also to be the Liberator of Latin America; who, having endured the long winter of Valley Forge and the setbacks of the middle years of the War of Independence, to exult at last in the capitulation of Yorktown, conceives the ambition of ridding all the Americas of foreign governments. Imagine him embarking the Continental Army in the ships of the new-born United States Navy to voyage south, clear Mexico of Spanish troops, garrison the West Indies with Virginians or New Englanders and make a landing on the shores of South America. Then, victorious in Peru, he crosses the Andes, defeats the Spanish army of the east, and expires on the approaches to the empire of Brazil.
Thus is it just possible to grasp how extraordinary was the career of Alexander the Great. The distances and obstacles of either enterprise defeat the imagination—and they have, indeed, no parallel in any reality except that of Alexander’s own life. The world has, of course, known conquerors of extraordinary ambition in its time: Attila the Hun whose horsemen rode from Central Asia to the gates of Rome in the fifth century; the Arab successors of Mahomet turned back into Spain by defeat on the banks of the Loire in the eighth century; and the sons of Genghis Khan, whose Mongols menaced Venice and Vienna in the thirteenth. Napoleon, a devotee of the Alexander epic, came close to re-enacting it in the years between Rivoli, 1797, and Moscow, 1812, as again did Hitler, in whom some gobbet of classical learning also nourished an admiration for Alexander. His orgy of victory was, of course, even more telescoped in time than Napoleon’s, who in turn gave battle oftener than Alexander ever did. Yet the achievements of none of these earthshakers quite match those of the original. Napoleon and Hitler scarcely ventured beyond their own continent. Attila, the Arabs and the Mongols broke the boundaries of Asia but only scratched the heartland of Europe. Alexander, by contrast, first made himself master of the Greek world, then translated himself to another, the Persian Empire, and finally ventured into a third in India. At his death in June 323 BC, he had subdued the largest tract of the earth’s surface ever to be conquered by a single individual—Genghis Khan’s short-lived empire excepted—and ruled as overlord, emperor or king from Mount Olympus to the [Himalayas]….
— Mask of Command, Chapter 1
Emphases mine.
Apart from the changes that took place in the method of ignition, the evolution of portable firearms may also be understood from another point of view. Given a certain level of development, the power of any technological device is a function of its weight and size. In the case of the arms in question, too, what mattered was finding an acceptable balance between weight and size, a balance which determined tactics, and was in turn determined by them. Early firearms were very small but, in order to add power, increased steadily in size. This development meant that, whereas the sixteenth-century arquebus could still be couched in a soldier’s arms while it was fired, the early seventeenth-century musket no longer could. The weapon, weighing 12 to 14 pounds, had to be supported by a forked rest. This impeded mobility and made muskets difficult to use on the offense—an unwelcome development. The bayonet, invented around 1660, would have been useless unless the musket was lightened to the point that the rest could be discarded and the weapon swung in the arms of an average soldier. This was duly done, even at the cost of some loss of power. Not everybody liked the change, and the Marechal de Saxe during the middle of the eighteenth century was calling for the introduction of an amusette, an even heavier musket which would have to be pivoted on a wall or attached to a cart. Thus the different qualities demanded of the weapon clashed and interacted, pushing development along.
— Technology and War, Chapter 6
Emphasis mine.
Going to war with [medieval knights] was a costly affair, in many cases bringing belligerent princes to bankruptcy. A knight would rarely embark for battle without the six horses which he was permitted, or his page apprentice to help him on with his armour. Providing enough food, shelter and material for a large number of these knights and their attendant foot soldiers was…a far more complex and sophisticated job of administration than is generally imagined. The logistics were considerable, involving smiths, armourers, painters, tent-makers, fletchers (arrow-makers), cordeners (leather-workers), bowyers, turners, carpenters, masons, wheelwrights, saddlers, purveyors (of food), quartermasters and farriers. There were also surgeons, chaplains, legal and clerical staff, trumpeters and pipers, and, most important, cooks.
— Connections, p. 57
While not exclusively, the bulk of this logistical challenge is people. Squires, retainers, and hirelings, oh my!
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