First post and a lot of questions about medieval combat

[Lukasz Bodurka]

Hello all.

This is my first post at ARMA Forum. I have been lurking at ARMA Forum for some time and I have found it very interesting and useful. Also it completely ruined my satisfaction from watching “historical”/”knightly” Hollywood movies and made me grimacing every time I read in some novel about heavy, ponderous swords.

I have some questions about medieval warfare that I can’t find answers for here at ARMA, so at last I decided to create an account and ask them myself.

I am interested in medieval combat techniques, armor and weapons that can be used during sieges, especially during escalades, with storming the walls from siege towers, close combat in confined areas (streets, doors, rooms). Sieges are important part of military history of Middle Ages and yet curiously historians don’t seem to devote much attention to them. I have spend some time in libraries but I couldn’t find much. Most of the books say that the combatants were throwing some stones and pitch, but mainly besiegers waited for the defenders to starve. And that’s all. Google was more helpful but most of the pages are repeating the same scant information.

To narrow, my questions are:

Are there any books, source texts, web pages known to you, which deal with intricacies of siege warfare (construction of siege engines, their effectiveness, field hygiene, storming the castle walls) and medieval equivalent of urban warfare?

What a medieval knight and his armsman could be wearing during such fight? I suspect the heaviest armor they could find, but maybe there is something I am missing?

But the most important question, and I think the most relevant to this Forum are: what kind of weapons they would prefer for such an environment: long swords, maces, and spears, what else? How would combat in such conditions look like? I have envisioned very messy, chaotic fight, with combatants crossing the streets under the protection of shields (like Roman testudo) and chopping the doors with axes. What do you think about that?

What do you think about using bows and crossbows from very close distance? This forum has a lot of posts of “Arrow vs. Plate or Mail” type - but could a missile shot from several feet go through shield and armor?


Why I need such information? It started as small exercise in worldbuilding and fantasy writing that got out of hand. Now I have discovered that I am more interested in economy, politics and militaries of imaginary lands that in writing stories about heroes and monsters, so please help me feed my small obsession.

Lukasz

[Jonathan Hill]

I would recommend reading through the Battle of Alesia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia. There are many accounts but this is just a quick summery. If you wish you can track down Caesars account as well.

The wiki article on sieges isn’t bad and has links to other noted sieges you may find interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege

As you can see the siege is more about building and devising ways to keep them in, and keep supplies out, or defeating the walls. Once you are in they generally surrender as you have been starving them out and ideally reducing their ability to fight as each day goes by without food or water. There is no reason to assault walls and loose men fighting against the walls when you can surround the city, cut off all water and food, then throw a few diseased bodies in to the city or lob some flaming missiles in so the place burns down and dies of disease. Killing people with the sword is not the preferred way to win a battle. Desertion and starvation will win you far more battles than open fighting.

Quick answers.
Armor and weapon, whatever armor and weapon is common to the era. If you are thinking a knight in armor, then he’s using armor. Weapons go towards armor, if the guy is in plate armor you want a poleaxe, halberd or mace to get to him, a sword is relatively ineffective against plate armor.

Why would I want to kick a door down when I can burn the building down? There are only a few sieges where capturing the city intact was the goal, maybe some buildings. Why send troops into a castle when I can close up all doors and wait until the defenders can hardly lift a sword. I would much rather my men act as executioners than face other fighters.

A phalanx formation is still the preferred way to fight in a city - http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt ... =160&ty=59
sorry for the huge link...

Arrows as close range; the best chance of defeating armor is to loose the arrow from close range, so yes it may go through the shield and armor, then what? The problem with close range is people don’t drop dead with one hit, especially trained fighters who have a high pain tolerance. You may get through armor, but that doesn’t mean you even injured him. If you injured him there are very few ‘off switches’ for humans, and you can sink an arrow into his heart and he may still have the ability to catch you and gut you before he drops dead. You need a place to shoot from that is protected from his infantry, or protected with your own, for example tiered buildings where the archers can get on top of one building and shoot at the streets and roofs of other buildings. Five to ten feet apart means at least one dead archer, maybe if you are lucky a dead archer and a dead infantryman

[Greg Coffman]

Certainly your best bet would be to avoid direct action against to take a fortified position, but it still happened plenty. For example, the sack of Rome.

The two images I have attached depict actions like you are asking about from approximately 1500 to 1540. The first shows soldiers storming a wall. They are using large siege shields as the go up the ladders to protect themselves from rocks being dropped from above. The second shows a fight within a town. The combatants are armed just as they would be on the battlefield: pike, halberd, harness for those who had it, etc. And it looks like the same pike tactics that worked well on an open battlefield or in a narrow alpine pass work just well in city streets. Notice the guns fired from open windows. So as far as weapons go, it seems the same weapons used in any particular time were the same weapons used for these close-in actions.


http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/pp51/gcoffman06/Reislaufer%20and%20Landsnkecht/scan0005.jpg


http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/pp51/gcoffman06/Reislaufer%20and%20Landsnkecht/Erstrmung_einer_Stadt.jpg

[Stacy Clifford]

I think most any commander in any time would agree that patience is the chief virtue of successful siege craft, but there are still plenty of reasons you might not wait for the city to wear itself out. If you have an impatient, impetuous commander (plenty of those in history), or an angry and restless army responding to some great insult or atrocity, or a unique opportunity due to natural forces, a traitor, or somebody's brilliant idea, or you just want to avoid a bad season that might be worse on your own troops than those safely inside. For example, the Turks desperately wanted to conclude the siege of Malta before winter set in because their galleys weren't seaworthy enough to blockade the island in winter weather or ferry supplies to their troops. They were also increasingly embarrassed that the siege was taking so much longer than they predicted and were afraid of the sultan's wrath if they failed. Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley provides a fantastic description of the siege of Malta as well as a good one of the siege of Rhodes years earlier, I highly recommend the book. It's later than the Medieval period and there is lots of gunpowder involved, but there was still a huge amount of hand to hand fighting when two out of three forts on the island fell, and I think you could gain a lot of insight from reading it. Best lesson: if you really want to defend your fort the right way, hire the Knights of St. John.

[Lukasz Bodurka]

Thanks for your input. Sorry for not answering earlier, I had to think it over.

It seems that everyone agrees that waiting the defenders out is the best solution. However it is also long and costly: troops need to be paid and fed, supplies transported through enemy territory, which is probably stripped from everything useful. Besides waiting doesn’t sound so interesting while assault gives opportunity to use some fascinating tactics and machinery.

For the sake of realism I decided for a scenario with both waiting and fighting. A castle have been besieged for a few months but now summer is coming to an end, the rains will soon make the travel impossible and the allies of the defenders at last have gathered forces and are coming to relieve them. So the besiegers must choose to leave and waste the time and resources they have already sunk into the siege or assault the castle. In this point my troubles with minutiae of siege have began.

The linked picture is interesting. I checked for the riot police tactics and it indeed resembles ancient battles. In case of this picture roman army tactics comes to mind: first rank (hastati) standing, second (princeps) is sitting to avoid moving forward without orders, with shields over their heads. I will try to find some testimonies from such occasions. It may give some insights.

However I think your suggestion of burning the building together with its defenders is inapplicable in my situation (it sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it).

Why would I want to kick a door down when I can burn the building down?

That may be an acceptable solution in some cases, but in many others it seems… wasteful. What about loot and slaves and potential ransom for nobles? Correct order is I believe: “Rape, pillage, and then burn”. This reminds me of some Viking sagas where they barricaded the doors and set fire to the long hall. Or cut defenseless people running outside. Capturing them instead can mitigate some drawbacks of your suggestion. But I don’t know if its reasonable in a city which a commander may want intact for taxes, not burned.

Arrows as close range; the best chance of defeating armor is to loose the arrow from close range, so yes it may go through the shield and armor, then what? The problem with close range is people don’t drop dead with one hit, especially trained fighters who have a high pain tolerance. You may get through armor, but that doesn’t mean you even injured him. If you injured him there are very few ‘off switches’ for humans, and you can sink an arrow into his heart and he may still have the ability to catch you and gut you before he drops dead. You need a place to shoot from that is protected from his infantry, or protected with your own, for example tiered buildings where the archers can get on top of one building and shoot at the streets and roofs of other buildings. Five to ten feet apart means at least one dead archer, maybe if you are lucky a dead archer and a dead infantryman

I have not considered the low stopping power of arrows. That’s the most useful. I think I need to change disposition of some imaginary troops.

@Greg Coffman

Thanks for the pictures. XVI century is a bit more advanced than the setting I am creating but it can be adapted. Decidedly more shields. My fantasyland may not have gunpowder but the thought of stones and tiles raining on the tight formation of soldiers is sobering. BTW – is the guy in right, lower corner of the picture throwing tiles or the roof is destroyed by something else?

So as far as weapons go, it seems the same weapons used in any particular time were the same weapons used for these close-in actions.

So by analogy I think I can adapt a group of soldiers going through siege towers bridge under the protection of some large shields.

@Stacy Clifford

Thanks for the book recommendation. If I ever get my hands on this book I will read it. Incidentally I had something similar to medieval knight order in my plans but I decided to hold it back for another occasion.

Lukasz

[Tom Reynolds]

For a fictional reconstruction of the sort it sounds like you're interested in, try the King Arthur series by Bernard Cornwell. It takes place in England around 500 ad, and in it Arthur is a Celtic warlord trying to hold back the Saxon invaders. Militarily it is quite believable; the reason why I thought of recommending it to you, for example, is that Cornwell has the battle of Mount Baden as a siege. I won't spoil the details for you, but the outcome of that siege makes a lot of sense.

There are three books in the series. Unfortunately I can't remember all their names (it's been a while since the last time I read them), but the first is definitely called "The Winter King."

[LafayetteCCurtis]

It seems that everyone agrees that waiting the defenders out is the best solution. However it is also long and costly: troops need to be paid and fed, supplies transported through enemy territory, which is probably stripped from everything useful. Besides waiting doesn’t sound so interesting while assault gives opportunity to use some fascinating tactics and machinery.

Waiting doesn't sound so interesting? Think again.

Anyway, the blatant NatGeo borrowing aside, when you besiege a place by surrounding it and trying to starve it out, there's a lot more going on than just a staring game between two static lines (the besiegers' and the besieged). For one thing, if the defenders aren't desperately short of men, they'd obviously be busy trying to maintain their communications with friendly forces outside--or reopening a channel if the besiegers had managed to cut it off. Similarly, the besiegers would mount patrols and probing attacks, both to maintain their control of the space beyond the defenders' walls and to look for opportunities to enter the besieged city by surprise or guile. In short, there's a lot more to sieges than the rather simplistic dichotomy of waiting or assaulting.

As for source recommendations, if I'm not mistaken Philippe Contamine wrote a fairly detailed book on the subject of medieval sieges. There are also primary sources worth checking out such as Philippe de Commynes's memoirs from the late 15th century (I'm too lazy to look for the link but the Ricardian Society has an English translation of it online--OK, OK, damnit, I give up!) or Blaise de Montluc's memoirs from the early- to mid-16th century (a bit harder to find, but not that hard); both have many passages dealing with sieges and urban combat.

Rather coincidentally, I've been reposting the materials for an online class I did on sieges for a writing forum a couple of years ago. Only the first and second parts out of four are out so far, and the stuff is obviously an amateur introduction rather than any sort of serious scholarly research, but it might help with the fiction writing aspect anyway. Another online resource I'd strongly recommend is Barry Siler's feature on Renaissance sieges; its narrower focus on the 16th and 17th centuries allows it to go into much more detail than I could in my generalist classes, not to mention that good old Barry is a much more experienced researcher and living historian than me!

[LafayetteCCurtis]

While we're at it, the depiction of the Siege of La Rochelle (162something) in Alexandre Dumas's Three Musketeers may not necessarily be true to that specific siege, but nevertheless it gives a (surprisingly) accurate picture of what the "small war" between the lines might have been like.

[Stacy Clifford]

there's a lot more going on than just a staring game between two static lines

Indeed, here's a fascinating passage from Empires of the Sea during the siege of Malta:

Mustapha proceeded with all speed to try to break the defense. In the first few days after defeat at the Spur, attempts were made to cross Senglea's ditch with a bridge of masts. The defenders made several attempts to burn it - the grand master's nephew, hideously visible in rich armor, was shot dead in one incautious assault - but ultimately they were successful. Undeterred, Mustapha put his miners to work tunneling through the solid rock to lay explosives charges, covering the noise of the work with gunfire. Only luck saved Senglea; on July 28 "by the will of God," the miners were probing with a spear to see how close they were to the surface, when the men on the wall spotted the spear tip protruding from the ground. They dug countermines and burst into the tunnel, hurling incendiaries and chasing the miners out. The shaft was blocked up. Mustapha was visibly discouraged by this failure - it had represented a huge effort, but the battle of wits went on. When the Ottomans bombarded the streets, La Valette had stone walls built across them. When the arquebusiers started to pick off laborers repairing the ramparts, Marshal de Robles screened his men with ships' sails that forced the marksmen to shoot blind. Attempts to fill in the ditches were countered by night sorties to clear them out. As the outer defenses collapsed under cannon fire, the defenders responded by constructing retrenchments - makeshift fallback barriers of earth and stone - to staunch the crumbling front line, demolishing houses for building materials. In the rubble-strewn wasteland each side attempted to maintain positions of cross fire and to build barriers to protect their own men. Siege warfare required huge quantities of human labor, but the Ottomans had the resources to work on an immense scale: digging tunnels, erecting walls, snaking forward covered trenches, moving earth, repositioning cannon. And Mustapha drew on a wide vocabulary of stratagems: he moved his guns from place to place, mounted sudden attacks at mealtimes or in the dead of night, inflicted nerve-shredding bombardments in irregular patterns, sometimes targeting precise sectors of the wall, sometimes randomly shelling the town behind to frighten the civilian population, repeatedly attempting to distract or undermine morale with requests to parley.

There seemed no limit to these variations. When the Ottomans launched a concerted attack on August 2 it was accompanied by a heavy bombardment. While the defenders were forced to keep their heads down, the enemy troops mysteriously advanced unhindered by their own gunfire and started to climb the walls. It took some time for the hard-pressed defenders to realize that the guns were firing only blanks. They regrouped and repulsed the assault.

Substitute older siege engines for guns and use a little creativity and you've got quite a catalog of tactics just in those two paragraphs.