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Using A Shield With A Spear?


bigdamnhero

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I'm not sure if this is a RAW question, or a GM ruling question, or both. So I'm posting it here instead of the Ask Steve section.

 

Long spears, pikes and the like are 2-handed weapons. Which means you shouldn't be able to use a shield with one. (Ignoring for now the I Have Enough STR To Use It One-Handed Option.) But there are obviously countless historical and fictional examples of people - heck, whole armies doing exactly that.

 

I could've sworn there was a rule covering this in either the core rules, FH, or in the Equipment Guide, but can't find it - please point me in the right direction if you know where it is. If not, let me know how you handle that, or would handle it. Do you limit to a certain shield size? Require a Skill/Talent for it? Ban it altogether? Or whatever? What about other 2-handed weapons like Greatswords, or even bows/crossbows?

 

Thanks,

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There are a couple different kinds of spears.  The ones that are pole arms, 2 handed, are really big, long spears that you can't comfortably wield with one hand.  They're more like pikes, an are at least as long as a man is tall, with a heavy end.  The ones people used one handed (such as in the film 300) were smaller and lighter.  

 

Romans used Pilum, which wasn't meant to be used to stab people with.  It was primarily a shield disabler; the head was attached by a neck of softer metal designed to bend under the weight of the heavy pole.  It would piece a shield, bend to be hard to pull out, and weigh down the shield so it was useless.

 

Incidentally, the whole "two weapons" thing was extremely rare in historical combat, the major exception being in renaissance era rapier/maine gauche combos where the offhand was mostly to block with, not meant as a main weapon.  Almost everyone used either two handers or a single weapon and shield - sword and board - for the same reason any smart Fantasy Hero fighter does.  Shields rule.

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Greek Hoplite spears were generally about 9-10 feet long.

 

Similar weapons were used by the Romans, Carthaginians and pretty much everyone else.

 

Two-handed spears were the rarity.

 

PS: when I say "Similar weapons were used by the Romans", I'm talking about the Hasta, not the Pilum.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasta_%28spear%29

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You can use a bigger spear one-handed in a shield wall because you don't have to move it around much.  Its basically hold your ground, shove at enemies, and jab.  But if you're going to be doing stuff like Jet Li does with a spear, you're going to need both hands (as he does when he uses a polearm).  So basically, 2 handed spears weren't a rarity, they just were used in a specific way.  The Hasta was not as long as the others you list (just about 2 meters in length) and is more the 1 handed variety.

 

So probably shield wall fighting requires its own set of rules and systems.

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When you're holding a spear in the middle, it's surprisingly well balanced. Definitely not worse than shield + axe, which is a unreasonably popular choice in RPGs. And as you're stabbing with it, it's not like you gain that much more leverage when holding it at the end, that's mostly a matter of reach.

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Couple of points.

 

First off "long spears" - which includes macedonian pike in the ancient era, European pikes in the renaissance and early modern era, and long spears as used by - among others - Flemish and low country medieval infantry, italian and spanish town militia in the renaissance and medieval arab militia in the early medieval period, are a lot longer than man-height: they could be over 7 metres in length and at their shortest about 3 - say 10 to 27 feet for our US and Burmese readers. They're not designed to be used with one hand, obviously, (though you can, do so with the shorter ones) but you can still use a shield with them. They were designed to be used en masse, where troops could stand up to 24 ranks deep, so that the front of the unit was like a hedgehog. Each individual soldier had limited mobility and a limited space in which he could stab, but to anyone facing them, there was a wall of stabbing iron points, and the actual soft fleshy part was well back behind it, which is a pretty scary prospect.

 

This was particularly the case with the shorter versions - 3 to 4 metres. While still unwieldy, and still mostly used with two hands, you could use a shield with them. People even used shields with the longer pikes. As far as we can tell, this was one one of three ways. First you could use a buckler. This strapped to your forearm, leaving both hands free, but you could fairly rapidly move it into place to gain some protection. Bucklers provide relatively little passive protection, and historically don't seem to have been that popular: they dropped out of use fairly quickly in every case where they first appeared and were just replaced by up-armouring the front rankers in the unit.The second way that shields were used - which was much more popular, or at least stayed in use much longer - was to use a very large shield, which provided good passive protection. I don't know of any cases off hand where this was combined with really long weapons such as pikes:I'm guessing the combination was simply too unwieldy. The last combination was a medium-sized shield, which was used both with pikes and with shorter longspears, but it does not seem to have been as popular with pikes, and also dropped out of use. It should be noted also that many European armies used longspearmen carrying pavises, which provide great missile protection, but are not so handy in melee, suggesting that the major role of the spearmen was defensive (and that seems to be true from historical accounts).

 

Although we know what was used (based on contemporary illustrations and some surviving equipment) we don't know exactly how it it was used. Given that bucklers dropped out of use fairly swiftly every time they were introduced, I'm guessing they were not much use. Macedonian pikemen used them, but gave them up during the conquest period, as far as we can see. Spanish Tercio pikemen also started out with bucklers, as did English renaissance pike. In both cases, they were dropped fairly swiftly. English pikemen continued to be issued them for a while but almost no illustrations or writings from the era show them using them, suggesting that it was the troops who didn't want to bother. Large shields stayed in use for centuries, suggesting that they did offer some benefits, but they were also not used much with really long pikes or deep formations.

 

So .... rules? I don't know about printed rules, but here's how I'd house rule it, if the question came up. When using a shield passively with a two handed weapon, it provides 1 less DCV, and also gives you a -1 OCV. You can always forgo an attack, and hold your weapon in one hand, to use your shield actively, in which case it functions normally.

That rule means that bucklers are essentially useless. They offer no passive DCV and actively hinder you fighting. Their only advantage is that you can choose to use them actively, which means it would be handy to have when advancing under missile fire and when the frontline has broken down and you have to resort to your sword.

Medium shields are a mixed bag - when fighting with your spear, they give you a +1 DCV at the cost of a -1 OCV. They do give better protection when not actively fighting in melee. You might want them, you might not.

Large shields are a better bet. They still cost you -1 OCV, but they give you +2 DCV, and in addition, you get +3 DCV when not engaged in hand to hand: which is a big deal when facing archers or crossbowmen.

 

This simple rule would support the kind of behaviour we saw historically, and is easy to implement.

 

cheers, Mark

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Thanks Christopher Taylor & Markdoc. I think you're right there's a big difference between doing something as part of a shield wall (ie - historical examples) vs fighting as an individual (ie - most RPGs). So while you can use a shield with a two-handed spear if you really want, the penalties to your individual combat will generally ability outweigh the benefits.

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The spear + shield combo is pretty elementary. (Shove the sabretooth tiger away with the shield --it's got sharp bits!-- and poke it with the wooden stick with the fire-hardened end.)

 

 

That looks a lot more dangerous than I was imagining it, and you can see why the guys want big shields! We'd have had a hard time becoming the dominant mamalian predator, much less herdsmen, without this combo, and it seems crazy to penalise people for using it, although Markdoc's proposed rules don't, at least for a larger shield. The spear has to be short enough to throw, though. No pikes or half-pikes. (Or guisarme-volage, either.) On the other hand, it's pretty crazy to disarm yourself when facing a bear or a boar, and that's where you bet bigger, two-handed boar-and-bear spears, typically with heads long enough to be useful for slashing (or deepening the penetration wound), and a cross-guard. There's your two-handed spear.   

 

Now, once you have a two-handed spear, they tend, all other things being equal, to turn into pikes for a very, very basic reason. You can poke people who can't poke back! I'll admit to being a wee bit skeptical that the Macedonian sarissa was actually 21ft long, since it seems to me that an arms race would have brought 21ft pikes back in the Renaissance if they were actually practical. 18ft pikes, on the other hand, not only existed, but seem to have been quite handy weapons, to the point where they seem to have been weapons of choice in hand-to-hand affrays, like the arrest/assassination/execution of Wallenstein. (Though the sources maybe conflating half-pikes with pikes.) Certainly if you watch a skilled arborist in action you'll gain some respect for bardiches and Lucerne Hammers. 

 

It seems pretty pointless to me to encumber a pikeman with a defensive shield, when he's supposed to be poking people at long range and foining off their attempts to do the same with the aid of his buddies. As Markdoc points out, the main defensive effort involved putting pikemen in body armour, not shields. 

 

Now you say, but why weren't pikes everywhere and always used? I have a crazy theory. Although going to war in the Early Modern was "trailing a pike," it is hard to imagine a column of men making a route march down a road dragging the heels of their pikes behind them. In practice, a wagon was attached to each company to carry pikes. If your army can't afford wagons (which means wagon roads, and pioneer detachments to improve them, and axes, shovels, pulleys and crowbars to equip the pioneers, and animals to pull the wagons, and foraging details to feed the traction animals, and cavalry to cover the foragers), then you give up on the pikes. The Macedonians obviously "cheated" somehow, perhaps by having large numbers of camp followers carry the pikes around on stretchers, but once the Romans arrived to punish their ponderous road movements, the weapon system was given up until the emergence of a whole new level of military-infrastructural-logistical effort.

 

For using the two-handed spear in melee, I'm tempted to say that it's a wash, unless you use weapon ranks and lengths rules, since there are offsetting OCV and DCV advantages and disadvantages. If you do use some kind of weapon rank rule --and I'd have to go back to the books to see what Steven Long recommends-- then the two-handed spear is going to have whatever advantages come from outreaching swors and single-handed spears. 

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Back when we invented spears (okay, sharp sticks) the primary use was as a throwing weapon.  That puts an upper limit of about 2m on any spear that is intended to be used one-handed with a shield, and even then it'd be awfully unwieldy to use in non-massed combat.  If you want a pike or spear that is too long to be used one-handed, then you quickly find that it might as well be extremely long, because then (again when used en masse) you don't need a shield--your opponent is held at bay by the forest of pikes.

 

Regarding the OP, I would actually say that there are few, if any, real world examples of actual two-handed spears being employed with shields.

 

For a while there was a nice rock-paper-scissors thing going with cavalry-pikemen-archers in Europe.  A gross oversimplification but there is some truth to it.

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The spear + shield combo is pretty elementary. (Shove the sabretooth tiger away with the shield --it's got sharp bits!-- and poke it with the wooden stick with the fire-hardened end.)

 

 

That looks a lot more dangerous than I was imagining it, and you can see why the guys want big shields! We'd have had a hard time becoming the dominant mamalian predator, much less herdsmen, without this combo, and it seems crazy to penalise people for using it, although Markdoc's proposed rules don't, at least for a larger shield. The spear has to be short enough to throw, though. No pikes or half-pikes.

 

Note: the suggested rule states that it is specifically for spears large enough that they were designed to be wielded in two hands. Spear + Shield was a standard combo for around 3 millennia, so we can assume it was pretty practical - but that was with a spear short enough to throw or wield in one hand.

 

The question was about really long spears - which in many cases were used with shields (even though the rules would kind of imply that you can't use them with two handed weapons). So the rule is an attempt to simulate the usage that was actually common at the time.

 

The forerunners to the the pike and shot troops of renaissance and early modern Europe were the communal troops of major cities in Spain, and especially Italy and the Low Countries. They were a major battlefield presence for about 200 years, and fought with very long spears (not quite pikes - about 3-4 metres or 10-12 feet) backed up by guys with heavy crushing weapons (clubs, hammers, axes) plus  archers and (mostly) crossbowmen. The basic formation was petty straightforward - the guys with spears and big kite shields or rectangular shields formed the front ranks (heaviest armour to the front), while behind them the more lightly armoured crossbowmen formed up. Against cavalry, the spearmen were effective at preventing charges. Against massed infantry, the spearmen and guys with heavier short weapons served as shock troops. Against missile troops, the spearmen, with their big shields served as cover. In all cases, the crossbowmen served as missile support - analysis of corpses from battle graves indicated that in many cases, the victims of crossbows were short at point blank range, but from the front, indicating that the crossbowmen were right behind the guys with spears and axes, shooting directly into the enemy's front line.

 

Probably not coincidentally, the use of shields became less and less common as armour got heavier and heavier - not just for infantry , but for cavalry as well. By the 1500's, the shield had pretty much gone out of use by spearmen (except for specialist cases), frontliners were increasingly wearing plate which was proof against arrows and bolts outside of very close range, the spears were getting longer and heavier (turning into pikes) - and the crossbow was being replaced by guns, which hit harder.

 

As a side note (not referring to your post but another one) I don't think we actually need extra rules for fighting in formation, or extra ranks: all you need to do is apply the knowledge of how things worked historically. Formations served multiple major purposes (and still do, in am ore distributed way). First off, they have a simple function in keeping all your guys together in a space where you can give them orders and keep an eye of them. Secondly, they serve a protective function - they stop your guys getting surrounded and cut down with one guy against three, for example, and they keep someone from getting on your shieldless side (if everything works as it should). They allow you to put your best-armored  guys up front to protect the missile troops, etc. They let lightly wounded guys fall back among their comrades so that they don't get swiftly killed. Finally they provide some offensive bonuses. They let - as with the communal spearmen - the missile troops do their stuff with less concern about being run down by cavalry. They let (and this is why spears got longer and heavier) several ranks of guys fight in a narrow frontage. Warfare has always rewarded concentration of force.

 

In Hero games terms, this is all pretty easy stuff. The thing about keeping your guys together where you can issue orders speaks for itself: troops without orders tend to do nothing. The issue of protection is also pretty straightforward - if you are attacking the enemy, it's easier to kill the guys without armor - and you can't do that if they are behind the guys with armour - unless you have a missile weapon and are prepared to take "cover" penalties for shooting over/through the front liners. As for the offensive aspect, having your frontliners backed up by missile troops is straightforward: there will be continual incoming missile fire while you are advancing and fighting. Even though you could reasonably expect to have cover once in melee, more attacks means more chance of something getting through on a lucky dice roll. And with spearmen, multiple ranks with spear long enough to reach past the front rank, mean multiple attacks on each opponent, with consequently greater chance of a hit.

 

cheers, Mark

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Warfare has always rewarded concentration of force.

"Always?" I can think of a few hundred counter-examples, especially starting with WWI and proceeding through Vietnam and on into current counterinsurgency wars. In fact, you could almost argue the entire history of warfare in the 20th Century was one long decline in the importance of massing/concentration of force compared to other strategic principles like maneuver and economy of force. But that's a whole `nother conversation, and it's been years since I read Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, et. al. :)

 

[/nitpick] Spot on with the rest of the post. Thanks!

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"Always?" I can think of a few hundred counter-examples, especially starting with WWI and proceeding through Vietnam and on into current counterinsurgency wars. In fact, you could almost argue the entire history of warfare in the 20th Century was one long decline in the importance of massing/concentration of force compared to other strategic principles like maneuver and economy of force. But that's a whole `nother conversation, and it's been years since I read Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, et. al. :)

 

[/nitpick] Spot on with the rest of the post. Thanks!

 

Actually, Viet Nam and Iraq are examples of concentration of force being not only rewarded, but prioritised. It's no coincidence that the chopper is the symbol of the US war effort in Viet Nam: it was the first war where airborne deployment went mainstream. "Concentration of force" is not a question of raw numbers. A smaller force that is more mobile than its opponent can still employ concentration of force, by moving your forces to the place where you want to fight in such numbers that that you have superiority of force locally.  It's the "local" part that's crucial, which is why it's described as "concentration": you are concentrating part (or all) of your force in a limited space, at the cost of fewer resources being available elsewhere. Of course "concentration of force" is more than just a simple headcount - modern militaries concentrate force by applying force modifiers - artillery, armour and air power - but that does not change the basic principle, just the resources that are being deployed.

 

Far from being a counter-example, WW1 is a perfect example of why you want to employ concentration of force - and what happens if you don't. Operations like Amiens that were successful relied on concentration of force (in that case, massing tanks on a narrow front to pierce the enemy defences) - operations that frittered away resources on broad advances tended to be fiascoes (and costly ones at that). The classic example from WW1 of course is Tannenberg (though it's far from the only one), where the numerically inferior Germany 8th Army, under Ludendorff, faced off against two invading Russian Armies (the 1st and 2nd).Ludendorff did not even have sufficient troops to cover the entire front. So, he employed superior mobility (in his case, a good railway network) to concentrate his troops, enabling him to hit the two Russian armies seperately, one after the other. He not only achieved numerical parity by pitting the 8th army against the 2nd and the 1st armies in turn, but was able to achieve superiority at the actual point of attack, overrunning the Russian 6th corps which was spread out over a much wider front than the attacking Germans, and which was defeated in detail, opening up the 2nd army's rear and flank. The 2nd army was swiftly encircled and completely destroyed. The Russians were sloppy and the Germans operated brilliantly, but concentration of force was the key.

 

You never want to fight your enemy on an equal footing if you can avoid it. Concentration of force via superior deployment speed is one of the core concepts that the US military is built around today. It was also an essential element of the Wehrmacht's strategy in WW2, but the idea is much older. All the great commanders knew this - and still do. Nothing has changed in that regard.

 

cheers, Mark

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm not sure if this is a RAW question, or a GM ruling question, or both. So I'm posting it here instead of the Ask Steve section.

 

Long spears, pikes and the like are 2-handed weapons. Which means you shouldn't be able to use a shield with one. (Ignoring for now the I Have Enough STR To Use It One-Handed Option.) But there are obviously countless historical and fictional examples of people - heck, whole armies doing exactly that.

 

I could've sworn there was a rule covering this in either the core rules, FH, or in the Equipment Guide, but can't find it - please point me in the right direction if you know where it is. If not, let me know how you handle that, or would handle it. Do you limit to a certain shield size? Require a Skill/Talent for it? Ban it altogether? Or whatever? What about other 2-handed weapons like Greatswords, or even bows/crossbows?

 

Thanks,

6E2. You can always wield a two handed weapon with one hand, but the str minimum goes way up (if you lack the STR, you have a high to hit penalty).

Also the book has rules about "different lenght weapons", wich make the longest spears absolutely useless once the enemy got past them.

You could also consider allowing the "bracing" rules for ranged weapons to be applied here.

 

As others pointed out, there are a lot of different spears:

There are throwing spears (by definition one handed).

There are one handed melee spears that can be used together with a shield.

And then there are the pike-like spears, wich have extreme range but are two handed. For those it is actually nessesary to put on end into the ground. That is the kind of unit that cannot charge with thier weapons.

 

Spears are terrible melee weapons actually. Thier whole point was to keep the enemy out of melee range/in your optimal attack range. While it made them good against cavalery (the longer even against heavy), spear wielders are notoriously weak to other infantery.

 

The classical phalanx actually often used a 2 handed spear (up 7 m long). While it gave them tremendous defense power in the front (especially against cavalery), they had to rely on swords in melee. And those formations simply could not turn easily. Or traverse terrain good. Or really do anything other then take a enemy charging against them from the front:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx#Weaknesses

 

The original roman legions were (in part) designed to counter the phalanx. The big shields allowed resistance to enemy archery fire while also helping against the long spears.

The heavy throwing spears could be used to take out the enemies shields on close range. While the main fighting way was with a sword+shield combo.

They were organised into smaller, 10 man teams. As such the teams could easily outflank and break the static phalanx (wich could not react to such a thing as a infantery flanking).

The romans still used the phalanx where logical, but the roman legion pretty much killed the phalanx as "go to" infantery formation.

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Although, it should be noted that when the Roman legions first came up against the Phalanx, the legions repeatedly got their butts handed to them. It took them quite a long time to develop tactics to deal with it (the tactics actually being to avoid a direct fight where possible and concentrate on the rest of the army, so the phalanx could be isolated and worn down over time later, or - preferably - not fought at). The Romans also made good use of fortifications and terrain to try and reduce the effectiveness of the phalanx.

 

But it's a myth that the phalanx could not turn easily or fight in rough terrain - the initial victories of Pyrrhus' army were mostly won in rough mountainous terrain - including Asculum, where the phalanx attacked - and defeated - legions dug in on a steep hillside. The Romans had learnt from their earlier disastrous defeats by the phalanx that they could not stand against it in open terrain and the rest of that campaign - a string of victories for the Greeks - was fought mostly in and around the mountains. Likewise, the Macedonian phalanx under Alexander proved capable of taking on all comers - including in rough terrain. 

 

The phalanx's biggest weakness is that to function effectively, it needed to be made up of highly-trained soldiers - making it expensive to build and expensive to maintain. It's no coincidence the same sort of troops only reappeared in Europe once professional military or mercenary corp.s became common.

 

cheers, Mark

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  • 2 weeks later...

And yet in Hero terms, the spear is clearly superior to any other melee weapon. One wonders why swords were even invented. ;)

If you use the rules about "lenght of weapons" from the basic comabt rules, this is doubtfull.

Sure you get a earlier strike (especially with held action) and more range. But once the enemy got past (or just destroyed) your weapon, you would be nearly defenseless.

 

 

But it's a myth that the phalanx could not turn easily or fight in rough terrain - the initial victories of Pyrrhus' army were mostly won in rough mountainous terrain - including Asculum, where the phalanx attacked - and defeated - legions dug in on a steep hillside.

Pyrrhus was not exactly the epitome of a successfull general. And that was the battle about he famously said "One more such victory, and we are undone.".

 

Also Wikipedia tells the story a bit differently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Asculum_%28279_BC%29

Only at the second day where he early took thier high ground did phalanx+light infantery+elephants proove effective against the legion in a open battle.

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Pyrrhus was not exactly the epitome of a successfull general. And that was the battle about he famously said "One more such victory, and we are undone."

This is the problem with using wiki as your only source of information :) Pyrrhus won almost every battle against the Romans and inflicted heavier casualties than he took. He was considered by the Romans as one of the greatest military leaders of his time - Hannibal of Carthage reportedly called him the greatest military leader ever (which does sound like a stretch, to be honest) and he had a long string of military victories both before and after the war with Rome. So yeah, definately a successful general, no question about it.

 

His problem was that he was not a successful politician. His military victories were never really matched with good political deals. As a result he spent his time racketing around the Med., continually fighting (and usually winning) battles only to lose the territory once he moved on. What happened in the Roman war - and the context of the famous quote - was that he expected the Romans' allies to desert them after the first few Greek victories, for Carthage to join him against the Romans and the Romans to sue for peace. None of those things happened - instead Carthage allied with Rome. At that point he realised he was facing a war of attrition against a much more numerous enemy.

 

Also Wikipedia tells the story a bit differently:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Asculum_(279_BC)

Only at the second day where he early took thier high ground did phalanx+light infantery+elephants proove effective against the legion in a open battle.

I'm not seeing your point here, to be honest. Yes, Pyrrhus used combined arms - the phalanx was always used as part of an army - but there's still no question that the phalanx went toe to toe with the legions in hilly terrain ... and beat them, as I noted. Amusingly, wiki - on a different page (did I note you should be wary of wiki as a primary source? :)) states exactly the same (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Asculum_(279_BC)). According to Dionysius, on the first day of the battle, the phalanx met the Roman 1st legion on the left flank and routed them. In the meantime, the Roman 3rd and 4th legions drove his italian allies back and some Roman allies arriving (apparently by chance from behind Pyrrhus' army) attacked his camp. The Greek cavalry drove them off and with the phalanx on their flank, the Romans retreated to a steep wooded crag. On the second day of the battle, Pyrrhus seized the steep crags with light infantry. But that wasn't what defeated the legions - he did it just to prevent them retreating there as they had done the day before. Instead, he sent infantry supported by elephants against the legions. This time when they broke, there was no handy refuge and the Romans retreated. The wiki article makes reference to the elephants breaking the Roman line, and this comes from Plutarch, who made a big deal of them but (beware using wiki as a sole reference!) it ignores the rest of what he wrote, namely that the Romans fought valiantly sword against spear, but were driven back by Pyrrhus' spearmen.

 

So yeah, the phalanx took on the legions and beat them when they were on the defence in rough terrain. Here's what Plutarch has to say 'Consequently, Pyrrhus found himself obliged to fight another battle, and after recuperating his army he marched to the city of Asculum, where he engaged the Romans. Here, however, he was forced into regions where his cavalry could not operate, and upon a river with swift current and wooded banks'. Asculum today is called Ascoli Piceno and if you google map it, you can still see the wooded crags, around the town, many of which have near-vertical sides. But it's all hilly terrain - there is, literally, no flat land anywhere in the vicinity ... which is hardly surprising, given that Asculum was a fortfied town in a river bend in the middle of the frikkin' mountains. You can see the terrain where the battle was fought here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/72776685@N05/8179839853/

 

Cheers, Mark

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Roman Cavalry was never much to cheer about anyway, any time they had to fight on wide open plains they tended to get hammered (see Battle of Carrhae etc).

 

But in terms of fighting yeah, shield + weapon was the standard for millennia, and almost never two weapons like RPGs and computer games have so often these days.

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Roman Cavalry was never much to cheer about anyway, any time they had to fight on wide open plains they tended to get hammered (see Battle of Carrhae etc).

 

But in terms of fighting yeah, shield + weapon was the standard for millennia, and almost never two weapons like RPGs and computer games have so often these days.

 

Yeah. Two-weapon fighting was a specific style, developed for very niche cases, not something that was ever common on the battlefield. European rapier and main-gauche was developed not as a battlefield style, but as a civilian fencing style, to provide extra protection in a situation where carrying a shield was no longer socially unacceptable. Likewise, the use of two swords by samurai was also a niche style that evolved long after the samurai had lost most of their military function and the focus had shifted to dueling. I might be missing something, but I cannot think of any situations off hand, where two weapon usage was widespread in actual combat, or where it was considered a viable alternative to single weapon plus shield.

 

As for Roman cavalry, even roman propagandists conceded that they were not best. Dionysius specifically contrasted Roman cavalry to that of the Greeks and stated that the Romans as much as possible halted their horses and “fought like infantry” whereas the Greeks excelled at fast movement and maneuver. There’s been a lot of debate about what he actually meant – whether he meant that Roman cavalry fought in close order, or whether he meant that they dismounted to fight. Either way, he stated that the Greeks would skirmish with the Roman cavalry, and hated to face them when they were drawn up to fight, but were their superior in the open field.

 

This probably reflects paradoxically what was one of the Roman’s army’s strengths: from Republican times, they did not have a dedicated military caste from which they could draw expert horsemen – but they did have a burgeoning martial population from which they could draw large numbers of new recruits. So they could much more easily replace their losses, even if the new recruit were not of the same standard as their opponents. This is why the Romans made so much use of allied cavalry – even the Romans admitted their own cavalry was not up to much.

 

cheers, Mark

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You really, really don't want to recruit troopers from a "regular" population. First, a cavalry trooper must, just must be able to take care of his animal. Horses are expensive, and there's a fair bit to learn about horse care. I seem to recall a book about that, pitched to teenaged female audiences?* Second, riders really need to be physically fit in ways that walkers aren't, and in premodern armies, you do not physically condition your soldiers to do the jobs. (Notice the historical dominance of infantry branches by people from mountainous regions, of the artillery by urban populations, etc, etc. Where life's built your muscles, that's where your military niche will be.)

 

Third, and probably most important, if your mobilisation is expedient and half-arsed, you are going to get most of your cavalry out of men coming in with their own horses. Both the Romans and Greeks intended to built state cavalries from amongst the wealthiest population classes, since they owned horses and supposedly were all about the equestrian sports. That, however, doesn't work without a huge amount of social pressure to  keep the boys on horseback, rather than chillin' with their homeboys and drinking. Probably it doesn't even work then: turn-of-the-Twentieth Century mass conscription armies had minute cavalry arms in proportion to their populations, and not by choice, either. 

 

The exception to that is, of course, Russia, and for obvious reasons. (Cossacks, Kalmycks, Tatars, etc.) In the end, you turn to working class equestian populations.

and you get those by looking to "shepherds," as Claudius Mamertius put it in describing the horse arm of the "Bacaudae," and, as you lose control of the shepherds, to the "Young ones" (1,2). There's an interesting question here about why the Romans could not find "Roman" shepherds for their own cavalry. I suspect that it is because of geography, that the mountains where transhumant pastoralism is practiced in the vicinity of Rome are connected by lowland drovepaths to the Appenines, and thus with a region imagined by the Romans as "Gallic," or "Celtic." That is, the ethnic label assigned to the young men who practiced this work, and, to some extent, the social communities they entered as they proved themselves, were "Gallic" rather than Roman. There is evidence of intensified horse raising in downlands in southern Italy during the early-to-late Republic which might be interpreted as attempts to develop a domesticated, Roman cavalry, or, on the other hand, simply the high price that horses were fetching in the Mediterranean basin. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTwnwbG9YLE

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Actually, thanks to Tacitus, we have a detailed description of Roman infantry training, so we know that they did in fact physically condition their recruits - actually almost all of their training fell into three categories: Physical conditioning (the largest part), formation drill and building. Actual combat training was by far the smallest part of legionary training.

 

You're right though, that the Romans initially recruited their cavalry mostly from among the wealthy classes (mostly the  Equites, or second-class citizens, but also Patricians , or 1st class citizens) who already knew how to ride and owned horses. But these were also the classes from which senior officers were drawn, and there were never enough of them to supply all of Rome's cavalry needs to start with.  So we know by Livy's time that plebeians were being recruited to serve as cavalry, and since plebeians did not own horses, yes, the Roman state had a public horse buying and breeding program. Livy actually comments that some of the equites chose to use state-provided horses instead of providing their own, as had been traditional. But patrician or plebeian, being a cavalryman was expensive (cavalry were traditionally not paid - just given a grant to cover the cost of their horse), so the Romans started to rely on allied cavalry long before they became an empire (originally mostly Italian, not Gallic: that came later). And as noted, the equites may have been horse-owning and horse-riding, but they were not a military caste the way feudal knights were, which is probably why everyone (including the Romans themselves) thought their cavalry was a bit rubbish.

 

cheers, Mark

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"Physical conditioning" is a bit problematic. Here's a review of Sara Phang's Roman Military Service which gets at what is probably really going on with the Roman insistence that regular soldiers go out and exercise. I doubt that it was sufficient to build up infantry mobility, but I wouldn't be the farm on that argument. Cavalry, though, was certainly not getting the necessary physical exercise, because it would impose wear and tear on the horses, and that was expensive! That's why you want rich kids who spend their days riding around chasing foxes and suchlike. (Except that they don't usually spend enough time chasing the inedible.)

 

As for the mercenaries --well, I'm thinking here, and I'll admit that my thinking isn't really that well developed, that whether you call them "Italic" or "Gallic," you're talking about the same people: the shepherds who rode the Via Flaminia and Via Aemilia. The process by which they became "Gallic" is either one of wholesale migration and population replacement, or, I would argue, an ethnogenesis in situ of a working population in relation to Rome.  What can I say? It's all about my crazy theories deconstructing ethnicity as an essential category in favour of understanding it as being constantly socially constructed. 

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I'll agree that your thinking is not at all developed :) Roman cavalry were initially drawn from the upper classes, not from shepherds (who were, by definition poor, and who would have rarely, if ever owned horses - or for that matter, shoes :)). The italian allies referred to as auxilliary cavalry were also drawn from the upper classes and were culturally, geographically, ethnically and tactically distinct from the gallic mercenaries who were later recruited.

 

I appreciate that it doesn't fit with the idea of deconstructing ethnicity as a dividing factor, but it has the advantage of being consistent with concrete facts such as physical artifacts (equipment, depictions, etc) and less concrete ones such as contemporary texts. It's important to realise that yes, ethnicity is constructed, but still - like many constructed things - it's also quite real.

 

Cheers, Mark

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