[Comanche Vs. Mongol Movie Free Download Hd
Virginie Fayad
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And immediately we run into problems, not that any of these weapons are wrong per se, but that their proportion and prominence is all mixed up and that there are other, far more important weapons missing.
(I should note that the bow was also the paramount weapon for the Native American horse-borne nomads of the Great Plains, at least until it came into competition with firearms, though my understanding is that Native American bows were not as powerful as Steppe bows).
Nevertheless, credit where credit is due, while the place of the arakh is entirely out of all sensible proportion with how it would be considered by actual nomads, it is the correct sort of sword for a steppe nomad (if we assume it is, in fact, a scimitar of sorts). That said, prioritizing the arakh belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how Steppe (or Plains Native American, for that matter) warfare and culture worked. Placing the arakhat the front is thus indicative of deeper problems.
F.R. Secoy (op. cit.) essentially breaks warfare into four phases, which happen at different times in different places, based on if they have horses, guns, both or neither. Because horses entered the Great Plains from the South (via the Spanish) but firearms entered the region from the North (via the British and the French, the Spanish having prohibited gun-sales to Native Americans) and spread out from there, for a brief time many of these systems were active on the Plains at once, as both guns and horses diffused through the region.
Once the horse and the firearm were both in wide use in an area, warfare shifted again. War parties became smaller, faster moving and more reliant on surprise (essentially an extension of the raiding-focus of the pre-horse, post-gun system to the high mobility horses supplied). Infantry battle dropped away entirely because it was too lethal and resulted in casualties that low-population density nomads could not sustain (the contrast with the much higher population-density agrarian United States, which was self-immolating in massively costly massed-infantry engagements during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, at exactly this time is striking). These are fairly big, noticeable changes in warfare patterns!
In short, the tactics used in all four of these systems were conditions by casualty aversion, which makes a lot of sense in the context of a low-population density society which simply cannot afford massive losses.
Meanwhile the Mongols were quite fond of armor, though it is clear that they required access to the products of agrarian economies to get it. That same Khitan regulation I noted above required soldiers to possess nine pieces of iron armor, along with barding (that is, armor) for their horses. John de Plano Carpini describes the use of thins trips of leather and hide, bouind by cord to create a scale of lamellar horse barding. As May notes (op. cit., 53) the Mongols tended to prefer lamellar armors (that is, armors of overlapping rectangular plates attached to each other rather than to a backing) of either hardened leather or iron because these were more effective at stopping arrows than mail. The Mongols also seem to have really liked pointed conical helmets (the Turks did too) and seem to have contributed to their spread. There is actually a fair amount of evidence that the later European brigandine was a Western European adaptation of steppe lamellar armors, mediated through Eastern Europe. In short, Mongol armor (which again, is generally not being produced by them on the steppe but produced for them by the agrarian societies, which in some cases involved violently moving those craftsmen to where the Mongols needed them) was so good that it was quickly adopted in Europe when it arrived.
I know we have dealt with this distinction before in a number of other places, but I want to make sure we are all on the same page here, briefly. Tactics concern the how of warfare at the small scale; how a battle is fought. Operations concern how armies are moved and thus where a battle is fought. Strategy concerns the ends for which a war is waged in the first place and thus why battles are fought.
Each of these levels is a category of analysis, but of course not every general starts at first principles when going into a conflict. Instead, wars are often waged according to traditional systems of norms and expectations. That said, when you dig in to those systems of norms and expectations, the basic correlation of strategic ends to the means of operations and tactics generally emerge (if not the least because polities which fail to coordinate these things tend not to be permitted to play the game for very long).
Assessing the strategy of Dothraki warfare is tricky, because while we spend a good chunk of the story near a Dothraki leader, strategic aims are usually not discussed with our viewpoint characters. Still we see enough of how Dothraki khalasars function to get a sense of the general aims of Dothraki warfare.
This bears little resemblance to the strategic concerns of historical nomads. As a direct consequence of failing to understand the subsistence systems that nomads relied on, Martin has also rendered their patterns of warfare functionally unintelligible.
Exactly none of that complexity appears with the Dothraki, who have no alliances, no peace agreements, no confederations and no territory to attack or defend. Instead, the Dothraki simply sail around the grass sea, fighting whenever they should chance to meet. Which brings us to:
The other strategic aim nomads might fight over is for the acquisition of some kind of movable good, which is to say raiding for stuff. Because all of the warriors (which is generally to say all of the free adult males) of these societies are mounted and because they have a subsistence system which allows rapid, relatively along distance movements (often concealed; remember that Mongols need not light any camp fires), nomads make fearsome raiders, able to strike, grab the things they are looking for and quickly retreat before a counterattack can be mobilized. That goes just as well for raiding each other as it does for raiding the farmers at the edges of the grasslands.
But what are the things here that they are aiming to get? It depends on the targets; nomadic raids into the settled zone generally aim to capture the goods that agrarian societies produce which nomadic societies do not: stocks of cereal crops, metal goods and luxury goods. But most nomadic raiding was directed against other nomads, seeking to acquire either people or animals.
Raiding for people is more complex, but undeniably part of this system of warfare. But crucially this raiding was generally not for slave-trading (though there are exceptions which I discussed last time), but instead incorporative raiding. What I mean by that is that the intent in gaining captives in the raid was to incorporate those captives, either as full or subordinate members, into the nomadic community doing the raiding. Remember: the big tribe is the safe tribe, so incorporating new members is a good way to improve security in the long run.
We may, I think, now safely dismiss this statement as false. What we have found is that the Dothraki do not meaningfully mirror either Steppe or Plains cultures. They do not mirror them in dress, nor in systems of subsistence, nor in diet, nor in housing, nor in music, nor in art, nor in social structures, nor in leadership structures, nor in family structures, nor in demographics, nor in economics, nor in trade practices, nor in laws, nor in marriage customs, nor in attitudes towards violence, nor in weapons, nor in armor, nor in strategic way of war, nor in battle tactics.
And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate spot blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.
Instead of doing that basic amount of research, or simply saying that the peoples of Essos were made up cultures unconnected with the real thing, Martin and the vast promotional apparatus at HBO opted to lie about some real cultures and then to put hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting that lie.
But this is exactly why I think it is important for historians to engage with the culture and to engage with depictions like this. Because these lies have consequences and someone ought to at least try to tell the truth. With luck, even with my only rudimentary knowledge, I have done some of that here, by presenting a bit more of the richness and variety of historical (and in some cases, present-day) horse-borne nomadic life, in both North America and Eurasia.
One thing I find interesting about Martin is that despite obviously not being very well-versed in history in terms of actual facts he does seem to have something of an intuitive grasp of such things as the limiting perspectives of sources , biased perspectives and such. Blood and Fire (while obviously simplistic compared to the real thing) does a fairly passable job of having feeling like someone trying to synthesize a narrative out of disparate sources.
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