These are two forms of shields used by the ancient Romans at various times. The aspis is theshield we think of when we think of the Greek hoplite and (pre-Alexandrian) phalanx: a large round shield, covered in bronze, and largely supported by the shoulder and the Argive grip. Borrowing as they had much of their military technology from the Greek-influenced Etruscans, the early Romans used this kind of shield quite heavily.
However, the aspis wasn’t that well-suited to the more flexible and less tightly-packed ranks of the maniple (a tactical formation that the Romans borrowed from their neighbors the Samnites) and so the Romans replaced the aspis with the iconic scutum. By contrast, the scutum was a curved rectangle, with iron edging and an iron boss in the center of the shield:
Without all of that heavy bronze plating, the scutum was much lighter, so that it could be wielded easily in one hand without the need for shoulder support, which made it easier to hold up the shield while throwing the pilum or stabbing with the gladius, as opposed to relying solely on spear thrusts. Moreover, the longer scutum did a better job at covering the legs and feet during combat, so that despite being lighter than the apsis, it actually provided more protection. And finally, the scutum’s design allowed for tactical innovations: the testudo formation, for example, wouldn’t really work with the aspis because it would be more exhausting to lock shields and you wouldn’t be able to huddle together closely enough, leaving gaps.
None whatsoever. I think Benioff and Weiss wanted something to show that Sansa was being a good ruler when it came to military logistics, and just don’t understand that you don’t wear a breastplate against bare skin (which would be a problem in a frigid winter, I concede) but rather you wear a breastplate over quite thick padded jackets, which themselves are worn over one’s normal clothing, providing quite a bit of insulation from the cold.
Indeed, the one example I can think of of cloth being added on top of armor is the precise opposite of the climate of a Northern winter: namely the long cloaks and robes worn by crusader knights over their metal armor to shield it from the sun, so as to cut down on the serious problem of heat stroke and heat exhaustion that they faced wearing metal armor in the Levant.
Chiefly, a failure to coordinate combined arms. When the Scottish and English armies encountered eachother at Falkirk, the English knights charged rather hastily before the rest of the army had gotten into position – but the Scots for some reason had left their archers outside the protection of the schiltrons, so while the knights bounced off the schiltrons to no effect, they overran and wiped out the archers as the Scottish pike and cavalry looked on. Compounding error with error, the Scottish gave King Edward time enough to get his knights back under his command and into formation, and then stupidly charged with their cavalry against Edward’s much larger cavalry and were driven off the field.
*credit to MIke Young
The Scottish schiltrons were left completely undefended, with no cavalry to chase off the English archers and no archers to punish the English cavalry and infantry. Edward was now able to use the same tactics that had been used agaisnt the Welsh at the Battle of Maes Moydog: surrounding his enemy on three sides, he simply had his archers advance and fire into the tightly-packed schiltrons, who couldn’t advance against the archers for fear of leaving themselves open to the knights. Once the schiltrons were weakened enough, Edward sent in the infantry, and the schiltrons broke, and then Edward sent in the cavalry to chase down the fleeing infantry, causing huge casualties.
To use a counter-factual for a moment, imagine that the Scottish archers and cavalry had remained on the inside of the schiltrons – Edward couldn’t have advanced his archers for fear of counter-fire and cavalry charges, reducing their efficacy, and sending in the infantry would have had the same problem. Now, these aren’t unsurmountable obstacles, and at the end of the day Edward had more archers, more cavalry, and more infantry than the Scots, but it would have given the Scots a fighting chance, which they didn’t have in OTL.
While flags and other signals have been used throughout history, beginning in the 17th century there was a movement to standardize their use and link individual flags to letters and numbers, so that extensive messages as well as standard signals could be sent.
The way it usually worked is that you’d have a lookout on the crow’s nest of each ship who would look out for the signals of other ships and shout or run the message down to the deck, and then some of the crew manning the ropes who would send up particular sequences of flags when ordered to. While each ship could obviously send and receive information on its own, generally the rule was that the flagship (and yes, that’s where the name comes from) would initiate orders and then ships would re-broadcast that message out to the rest of the fleet, and then other ships would send back updates, warnings, requests, etc. to the flagship.
The tercio was a Spanish infantry formation that was highly effective during the Early Modern era of “pike and shot,” and a big part of the reason why the Spanish were so dominant in European warfare in this period.
In essence, the tercio was a tightly-packed, well-drilled square formation of mixed pikemen, musketeers, and swordsmen, designed to be extremely durable and very hard to be broken by cavalry. The pikemen would protect the musketeers from cavalry, and the musketeers would in turn direct their firepower at opposing pike, while the swordsmen would be used to attack weakened formations or to fill any gaps in the line. On the battlefield, the Spanish would field multiple tercios in a kind of checkerboard fashion that allowed the tercios to support one another with enfilade fire against enemy units, making them incredibly daunting to assault in hand-to-hand combat.
But more than just a clever formation and use of mixed arms, the Spanish tercio was dominant because Spanish soldiers were experienced professionals with incredible discipline, executing the complex drill of the tercio (where lines of pike and musketeers had to move past one another repeatedly) in the most difficult of circumstances, and keeping their lines together even after absorbing hideous amounts of casualties, which often allowed them to exhaust their opponents.
Gradually, the tercio became obsolete as other strategies evolved to deal with the dominant Spanish. Because of how close-packed and thus slow-moving the tercios were, they were incredibly vulnerable to massed firepower, both from infantry and artillery. For example, Maurice, Prince of Orange moved his armies into longer, thinner lines that could bring more guns to bear on the enemy than square blocks where the sides and rear couldn’t always fire, and found success at the Battle of Nieuwpoort. Likewise, the Duc d’Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi used a combination of superior cavalry to encircle the tercio and massed artillery to blast them to pieces.
Well, sieges and seasonal warfare had strong interactions: the foks inside would hope that supply problems would make the larger army go away before their stores inside ran out, the folks outside would try to feed themselves as best they could on the surrounding areas. But it’s also true that because of the size disparity between a castle garrison and an army, you could downsize your army to just enough men to keep them bottled in if the levies were needed in the field (this is another reason, btw why kings started to rely more on professional soldiers).
The two-handed longaxe was the province of the housecarls, professional warriors who served in the household guard of thanes and kings alike. Thus, they weren’t the most common weapon on the battlefield, but rather the sign and tool of office of an elite even within the warrior caste::
In combat, the axe was continuously (and unpredictably) swung to create a deadly zone around the axeman, and when that axe hit, it could easily hit with enough force to split a shield open or knock a man onto his back or cut through a spear or knock a sword out of someone’s hand – which made the thrusting/jabbing combat you’re talking about an extremely dicey proposition if the axeman was fast enough to avoid getting stuck.
Thus, the housecarls seemed to function in two ways: first, on the offensive, they would open up holes in the enemy shield-wall for other soldiers to exploit. Remember, the longaxe’s haft could be as long as six feet, making it a forerunner of the polearm, which gave the user a good deal of reach into the enemy line, and the axe’s blade was bearded, allowing the wielder to hook over the lip of shields and drag them down, opening up the shield wall:
On the defensive, the housecarl was there to disrupt the enemy shield-wall, either by opening up holes in their defense or by creating zones that soldiers naturally shied away from.
In either case, the housecarls seemed to function as skirmishers, stepping in front of the shield-wall to contest the area in between. When we look at the Bayeux Tapestry, for example, we see images of housecarls wielding only the longaxe standing between a Saxon shield-wall and the oncoming Normans (which shows you how insanely brave these guys were):
Having discussed this with @warsofasoiaf and doing a bunch of research, my conclusion is that the three battles formation isn’t an issue of tactical effectiveness as much as an organizational issue, whereas something like the flying wedge (which maximized the effectiveness of a knightly charge in forcing a breakthrough in the enemy line) or a shield-wall (which was both an excellent defensive tactic especially for armies relying on less experienced and less well-equipped forces) were tactical in nature.
The advantage of the three “battles” is that it’s a very simple organizational structure, which makes it well-suited to armies made up of feudal levies with relatively little experience of fighting together compared to standing armies. More sophisticated organizational forms require a good deal of coordination, which means you need an officer corps to make sure that all the different parts function. The Roman legion’s famed flexibility on the field, for example, would never have been possible without an elaborate officer corps of optios, centurions, military tribunes, etc. who were given wide discretion in the field to ensure that these kind of complex formations worked:
By contrast, a three-battle system didn’t need that level of complex organization – you had your overall general, your two or three commanders, and the men under them. The three battles had set locations (the vanguard at the front of the column or at the right of the line, the middle in the middle, and the rear-guard at the end of the column and on the far left) and set responsibilities that everyone knew ahead of time (the vanguard was responsible for scouting and foraging, the rearguard covered retreats, etc.) which meant that you didn’t need very good communication and coordination, and they were also political prizes that generals could dole out to reward their vassals (the vanguard being the place of honor).
There’s a couple factors, a lot of which boil down to the intersections between culture and warfare, but technology is also involved.
First, we have to talk about technology. For most of their history, Rome did not have access to the stirrup. Without stirrups, mounted combat is extremely difficult – any time you swing or hit with your weapon, or are hit in turn, you risk falling off your horse. It’s not impossible to fight without stirrups, but it takes a hell of a lot more training because you have to learn to grip the horse with your legs in time with your attacks and defenses.
For most of their history, Romans simply preferred to spend their time training in some of the best infantry drills the world had ever seen – which after all, had allowed them to conquer almost all of what was the known world – and subcontracted out their cavalry to auxiliaries from places, like Numidia, that had invested their time in perfecting the difficult art of pre-stirrup mounted combat. Think of it like a military version of comparative advantage.
And then when the Eastern Roman Empire managed to survive the devastating invasions of the 6th century, they did something amazing: they changed their entire way of warfare on the fly. They borrowed the tools of their enemies – the recurve bows favored by the Huns and the Persians and the stirrups of the Avars – and used them to construct a highly-trained, well-equipped professional mounted soldier armed with both bow and lance (and sword and axe and mace) whose skill and flexibility could offset the Byzantine’s perpetual manpower disadvantage, and redesigned their tactics and strategy around them.
Next, we have to talk about culture. For most of the early Republic, soldiers were expected to provide their own arms, and horses were incredibly expensive. So expensive that there was an entire Roman social class right below the senators called the equites, whose status derived from the fact that they had enough money to equip themselves with horses. Thus, Roman cavalry was always going to be a minority affair, because most of their soldiers simply couldn’t afford horses.
Once Rome shifted to a professional military, the cost transferred to the state and Romans had a very large military indeed. (Consider the Battle of Phillipi, where as many as 400,000 soldiers took part) Mounting this number of men would have been incredibly expense, and before the advent of the stirrup wouldn’t have seemed worth the effort, when Roman foot soldiers were just as effective and far cheaper to equip and maintain.
Now, this gradually changed for a couple reasons. First, as the empire expanded, Rome came in contact with more and more peoples who fought on horseback, first expanding their auxiliary forces and later on (as those people were gradually Romanized) their own cavalry forces. Second, as the empire expanded, foot soldiers couldn’t adequately defend extended borders against fast-moving mounted invaders. So the Roman army had to change. The relatively slow and quite expensive Roman legion was abandoned in favor of a new system that divided the military between the numerically larger limitanei (who guarded border fortifications and acted as a first line of defense against invasion) and the elite comitatenses (the mobile field armies stationed in the interior who could be scrambled to fight invasions that had gotten past the limitanei before the invaders could reach major cities).
Given this division of labor, you increasingly got specialization whereby limitanei were most useful as infantry and
comitatenses were most useful as cavalry. So even before the advent of the stirrup, there was already movement in the direction of emphasizing cavalry, simply due to the need to protect longer and and longer borders.
Disputed Lands – maybe, but there’s no textual evidence. Likely depends on terrain – are there any hills or fords or other geographical features which would make a fortress useful? Or is it a featureless plain where mobility and flexibility are key and fortresses just limit you?
Lower Rhoyne – far more likely, although again, no direct textual evidence. Forks in the river, fords, bends in the river where the speed of the current changes, etc., rivers offer far more locations where one would want a fortress.
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