Re: Gregor & Tarly trapping the northmen, I’m getting maybe Tarly isn’t quite a military genius, but that seems like obvious tactics. Which do you think is more likely the cause? Gregor charging into the retreat path Tarly would have left out of bloodlust (or Tywin’s vindictive orders), or Tarly being affected by Robert’s successful retreat, maybe taking the lesson that you can’t count on an ally to finish a defeated foe, and not want Glover & Tallheart to rally elsewhere? Or some other factor?

Well, it’s not such obvious tactics, because outside of some of the best premodern armies ever (the Byzantines, the Mongols), people usually went for the complete encirclement. But there are other things that could have happened:

Gregor charging in recklessly is quite in character – his wing of the battle takes the heaviest casualties in the Battle of the Green Fork, he loses half his men at the Battle of the Fords, etc.
It could be that Robett Glover is good enough of a commander that he reacted well enough to a bad situation to make the Lannisters pay dearly for their victory.
Or something else.

How did the Lannister/Tyrell forces at the Battle of Duskendale manage to take heavy casualties given the massive advantages they were given?

Great question!

Sweeping victories in warfare tend to be rather rare, and even more rare without cost. Cannae is deservedly famous in military history as a complete victory, but even that total rout still cost Hannibal more than 10% of his army.

For this very reason, the Byzantine manual of war (hat tip to @warsofasoiaf) advised against completely surrounding one’s enemy, because men who are completely surrounded will often fight like cornered rats and inflict surprisingly heavy casualties. Instead, the Strategikon advised that one should always leave a path of escape for the enemy, because then rather than standing their ground, the enemy was more likely to make a run for it, which would allow one to inflict heavy casualites on a fleeing enemy at a lower cost to oneself.

Indeed, as military historians have pointed out, it was often the retreat from a battle that was the most deadly part of any premodern conflict, because a fleeing enemy couldn’t defend themselves against attacks coming from behind them, and often threw away heavy shields and armor in the process of flight.

My guess is that Randyll Tarly and Gregor Clegane didn’t think about this.

Why did soldier get paid in land rather than gold?

As I discuss here and here and here, paying soldiers in gold requires substantial state capacity – you need a large bureaucracy that can collect taxes in cash (which requires significant record-keeping, valuation, and enforcement capacities), you need the logistical ability to mint the necessary amount of coins and ship them to the army in time for pay day, you need both the authority/legitimacy and economic development to ensure that coin can exchanged with civilians for food and other supplies, and so forth.

Thus, even in the late Roman Empire, you see this system begin to break down – the commercial economy is weakening and urban centers are declining, which means the state is having a harder time extracting the necessary amounts of gold to pay the army (especitally when the army has gotten a sense of its political power and starts demanding more and more gold), the currency is becoming less valuable as a result, which means fewer people are willing to take coins (they’re not trading as much and now you see how all of these factors are mutually-reinforcing)

So the late Roman Empire begins to shift to a proto-feudal system. First they shift to a system of direct requisition of supplies from provinces by the army (which means the army is collecting the taxes itself so you don’t need a bureaucracy to do it for them) and taxes being paid in kind (which means that you don’t need to worry about currency as much). Second, from there it’s not much of a jump to just hand over land to armies in return for military service – whether you’re talking about the limitanei under Diocletian and Constantine or the stratiotika ktemata of the Byzantines, etc.

And in the West, once the Roman Empire falls completely, it was similarly an easy shift for ring-giving kings to start giving out land, now that the Roman bureaucracy and economy that let them get their hands on gold to turn into rings to hand out went away.

How does bastard feudalism allow bannermen to have more troops then the obligation to supply troops? I mean that money is what was being used to train and equip the troops being supplied so how does that translate to more troops? is it just that they have more troops under their direct command but not really more overall? Also if the money is instead of obligation to supply troops, shouldnt the king also have more troops because the money goes to him?

1. To quote an earlier post:

Under the normal rules of feudalism, military capabilities were limited by the terms of the feudal agreement – you get so much land, you agree to raise so many men, the number of men per unit of land is fairly standardized – and it was hard to alter that, because the vassals’ vassals know their rights in law and get pretty litigious about it.

It’s really more when you get to what’s known as “bastard feudalism” that things start to go off the rails. Under bastard feudalism, instead of relying on those feudal agreements to raise soldiers, you convert military service obligations into taxes paid in cash and then use the cash to put fighting men on the payroll, who wear your livery and are counted as members of your “affinity.” So now you have a system where noblemen can raise and maintain private military forces above and beyond their feudal rights – and the only limit to how many of these guys you have on the payroll is your ability to make payroll on the first of the month.

By way of an analogy, traditional feudalism conceives the relationship of lord and soldier as an ongoing contractor-client relationship with terms that are fixed by written agreement and tradition. Bastard feudalism reconceived the relationship as one between an employer and a salaried, uniformed employee, which allowed the terms to be dictated by the means of the employer and the current conditions of the military labor market.

2. Members of an affinity were paid in cash, not in land, so while a noble only had a certain amount of land to give away to make up knight’s fees, if they could improve the productivity of their estate, then they could employ more men per acre of land then they had in the past.

3. The money doesn’t all go to the king. What makes you a noble is the right to extract rent and taxes from a given area of land, a portion of which you’re supposed to kick up to the king and the rest you get to keep. And if you were a powerful nobleman with a big private army, you might be able to get away with not paying your taxes, especially if the king you were dealing with was weak.

How does one combat war elephants?

There’s a couple options:

Panic them. For all that elephants are enormous, they spook quite easily (hence the whole thing about mice). War pigs, were quite effective against them, but any large group of fast-moving animals that make noise would do the trick if herded toward them. Incendiary weapons are also very effective, because elephants do not like fire.
Loosen your formation. Rather than stand in front of them, let the elephants pass through your lines, surround them at a good distance, and then stab the elephants in their legs/belly, which can either bring them down or cause them to panic.
A mix of long spears and throwing weapons. If your spears can outrange the elephant’s tusks, you can jab them good before they can gore or trample you. Combine that with throwing weapons to wound the elephant or their mahouts.

How did ancient and medieval armies get their horses off their ships?

Great question!

One of the problems that had to be dealt with in medieval warfare was that you had all of these armies where the mounted knight dominated, but if you have to attack somewhere from the sea, you need to take your horses with you.

And so a variety of strategies were used. For example, the Norman Invasion of 1066 involved a flotilla of longships which would land, and then horses would be led off the side of the ship and into the shallows/beach, as seen in the Bayeux tapestry:

And that works well as long as you control the beach-head and have time to get your horses off the ship, get them saddled and so forth, and then distribute them to their waiting riders. It’s not so good if your enemy are right there on the beach and able to disrupt your preparations.

So by the time of the Fourth Crusade, we see specialized horse transports where knights could mount their horses on deck and charge straight off the side of the ship, presumably either via a ramp or gunwales that could be lowered:

And they were quite successful, allowing the Crusaders to surprise the Byzantines with their speed and mobility and seize the vital fortress of Galata, which guarded the northern end of the boom chain that protected Constantinople’s Golden Horn. With the boom chain down, Venetian galleys could sail into the Golden Horn and launch amphibious attacks against the city’s less formidable northern walls.

Regarding the percentage of soldiers under arms, how do historians reconcile the low populations of certain countries with the amount of soldiers supposedly present at battles? For example, Scotland likely had a population just under a million in the 1500s, yet were supposedly able to field 30/40,000 men at Flodden, which would suggest a population that they wouldn’t achieve until the modern era.

I wrote a long post about this which just got eaten by a browser crash, so I’m a bit annoyed. Premodern MPR statistics are not comprehensive, ultimately estimates based on how much you trust partial, sometimes noncontemporary, and often biased sources.

However, the stuff I just read suggested that premodern MPR was at its lowest in the 12th century, highest in the 17th century, and even then rates of 1.7% (in France under Louis XIV) or 3% (in Sweden in the 17th century) were quite astonishing compared to the norm.

So Flodden…could be the sources are wrong, could be the Scots hired a bunch of mercenaries, could be that 30,000 men represented a sudden intense mobilization of every able-bodied man as opposed to the number of men who could be normally trained and equipped for war as professionals.

How many arrows would an archer fire in a battle, how does this compare to early infantry wielded firearms?

According to Juliet Barker in her study of the Battle of Agincourt:

“A Welsh or English military archer during the 14th and 15th Century was expected to shoot at least ten ‘aimed shots’ per minute. An experienced military longbowman was expected to shoot twenty aimed shots per minute. A typical military longbow archer would be provided with between 60 and 72 arrows at the time of battle, which would last the archer from three to six minutes, at full rate of fire. Young boys were often employed to run additional arrows to longbow archers while in their positions on the battlefield.[8]”

By contrast, the matchlock arquebus introduced in the late 15th century took 30-60 seconds to reload, allowing for a rate of fire of perhaps one or two shots a minute. The muskets of the 18th and 19th century were faster, but even the best crack infantry regiments of the British army could only manage 5 shots a minute.

The reason why the firearm replaced the bow is partly because the noise and smoke and stopping power of bullets was quite frightening on the battlefield, but mostly because it was much faster to train someone to use a musket than to use a bow, and because expensive firearms required storage in a central depot to keep them maintained, making them more suited to centralized standing armies.

In a pre-modern society how many people need to be farmers to support a non-farmer? Like whats the percentage? More than the 99 to 1 for soldiers, would 9 farmers for 1 non-farmer make sense?

9 to 1 is way off.

A knight’s fee was a common metric used for fiefdoms – larger estates were usually calculated in multiples of knight’s fees, smaller estates in fractions that led to the imposition of scutage – which is meant to represent the size of land needed to support one knight.

A knight’s fee works out to five or more (I’ve seen 12 cited most often) hides, and a hide of land was supposed to support ten families. So a knight’s fee would have around 50-120 families living on it, and given an average household size of around five people during the Middle Ages, that works out to 250-600 people to support a knight.

Why couldnt the lannisters raise a new army during the dance like Tywin tried to do with stefford lannister?

Good question!

And ultimately this is why I have a problem with the army sizes during the Dance, which in turn are part of my overall problem with the Dance as military history. Where we have numbers to tell, the armies of the Dance are pretty small by the standards of later Westerosi wars:

Battle of Rook’s Rest: >800 greens, 100 blacks.
Battle of the Gullet: ~100 ships on both sides.
The Fishfeed: At least 2000 greens, at least 3,100 blacks.
The Butcher’s Ball: 3,600 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
First Tumbleton: >9,000 greens, ~7,000 blacks.
Second Tumbleton: <= 9,000 greens, 4,000 blacks.

While one could argue that, post-Aegon’s Conquest, the Westerosi had shifted to a model of having multiple smaller armies rather than one big host to avoid losing everything to one dragon, this creates another problem.

We know from later wars that the various regions of Westeros can field much larger armies in the several tens of thousands, so if that is the case, the various regions of Westeros should have had more armies in the field at one time, and should been able to raise new armies and be ready to keep fighting.

Moreover, these numbers create new problems for historical consistency: if only 2,000 or so Westerlanders marched east with Jason Lannister, then the Westerlands couldn’t have been “thinly defended,” and so Dalton Greyjoy’s reaving should have been met by 43,000 Westermen ready to defend their homes against the 15,000 Ironborn. But since we know the Westerlands were “thinly defended,” then the casualties at the Red Fork and the Fishfeed should have been larger by at least an order of magnitude.