PA Schaeffer wrote:- Eastern european (Bulgars/Hungrian) were not really fighting with european martial art, because they were themselves descent of people coming from the center asian plains
Not exactly accurate, since by the time of the Mongol invasion there was a strongly Westernized aristocracy in the Polish and Hungarian lands that bore the brunt of fighting against the invasion; this aristocracy, along with the Teutonic Knights and a significant number of Crusaders, was able to field a large number of both men-at-arms and foot troops in the Western European style. In fact, if you read military history works that took a broader view of the European Middle Ages rather than focusing solely on England and France, you'll see frequent mentions of the Hungarians being feared by their Western neighbors (especially the Holy Roman Empire) because they had a powerful force that made use of both Western European and Steppe fighting techniques and tactics.
- it's well known that mongol armies crushed both russian and hungarian troops, but who knows that during the battle of Legnica the order of the temple reported only 3 knights killed!, showing that heavily armored knights were not easy to kill.
It's certainly true that a well-armored man-at-arms would have been hard to kill. I have to wonder, though, about what kind of "knights" these three were. The Teutonic Knights had a complex internal hierarchy, and the three "knights" killed might have been the number lost from among one of these subdivisions rather than from the Order as a whole. Can you find a citation to the primary source for this?
the most impressive is the evolution of Byzantine army as she faced Turks. Their response to light Turk cavalry was not to develop some light cavalry but rather to go back to heavy infantry supported by cataphracts, the heaviest cavalry they knew. As they opposed the Turks successfully during numerous battles before their final collapsing, we can suppose that this was the good answer.
Um...no. Their response to the Turks was primarily to hire other Turks to fight for them. In terms of the Byzantine army's internal organization, I can't see any general trend towards the increasing use of heavy infantry; if anything, the Byzantines became more and more of a cavalry-based army as they relied more heavily on Turkish and Norman mercenaries to build up their forces (though, to be fair, the Normans were perfectly able and willing to fight dismounted or as light cavalry, just like any other Western European men-at-arms). The cataphracts, too, were no longer a major factor when the Turks came--while logically they would have been an excellent tactical device for use against horse archers, it's likely that their high maintenance costs made them prime targets for budget cuts during the thrifty Konstantinian period, and the attempted revival under the Komnenian dynasty didn't seem to have been very successful.
After the first invasion of their country by Mongols, the Hungarian shifted from their former asian martial organisation to the german/french model. The second invasion of the mongol was a disaster and their army was destroyed,
Really? The impression I got was rather that the Hungarians were eager to preserve the versatility of their army by maintaining the presence of both Western-style and Steppe-style elements in their armies, as evidenced by the alliance they made with the Cumans, and later on invitation they extended to the Szekely to settle in their lands in order to revive the declining horse-archery skills of the native militia. Moreover, it would be quite an exaggeration to say that "their army was destroyed." True, one army was destroyed at Mohi, but there were other Hungarian armies operating elsewhere with considerable success against the Mongols.
- Mongols never managed to take by force the european modern stone fortress and castle, but were able to take chinese/japanese and arabic castle.
Read the histories more carefully. On one hand, the Mongols did manage to destroy a number of castles and fortified cities in Eastern and Central Europe; on the other, were there any substantial difference in technological advancement between Western European fortifications and those of, say, Kiev or Baghdad? Siege engineers who knew how to take one would have known how to take the other, too.
I found that Chinese warriors were buying japanese Katanas, considering them better than their chinese-made swords.
If I remember correctly, that was in the 16th or 17th century, when the Ming Dynasty was in decline and the production of its armories were also declining in both quantity and quality, while the Japanese had a large surplus of swords that had been produced in the civil wars of the Sengoku Jidai and then rendered superfluous after the unification of the realm under Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. So it was just logical that, in these specific circumstances, the Japanese were exporting swords to the mainland. But note the words specific circumstances; the superiority of Japanese blades over Chinese ones was by no means universal even at that time, let alone at other points in history when China had vigorous empires that actively sponsored the production of good-quality weaponry. I think I also remember something about the general Qi Jiguang's remark that it was only the peasant militias that had to be rearmed with Japanese swords, not the regular troops that already had good Chinese weapons.
But when they prefered over japanese swords arabic ones, because of a superior quality.
Citations, please? And even if you could find one, it'd be easy to surmise that the blades exported to such distances from the Middle East would be inferior to what the Middle Eastern princes were keeping for their own use!
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