History in Books

[LongRider]

Just finished the book, CASTE (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson.  She argues that there is a caste system in the USA, that basically grew out of 246 years of enslaved people from Africa, and then reinforced by Jim Crow.  Unlike the caste system in India, this caste system is based on skin color.  She compares and contrasts three caste systems; the USA caste of color, the Hindu caste system in India, and the caste system of Nazi Germany, where Jewish people were at the bottom.

The Nazi system annihilated the Jewish population, and others, LBGT, Romany, and more.  The high caste was of course the 'Aryan' people. In America during the Jim Crow era, the lowest caste; black people; were ruthlessly preyed upon with lynching and other cruelties.   While I though lynching meant hanging, that was not the only grotesque action--some black men were burned at the stake!  I found this fact to be very distressing, as I naively thought that was left behind in the Middle Ages.   

She argues that caste is still alive here today only it's thought of as racism, which she argues that while racism does exist, caste is different.  She gives many examples including personal ones that happened to her.  This book was an eye opener and at times very tough to read.   Wasn't planning on reading more CRT just yet, but for once my library got out a hold to me much quicker than usual.  The problem for me is, these subjects included in what I call CRT books expose so much violence against black Americans and it's disturbing to me.  However, I plan to continue (although not right away) as this subject is very important and enlightening to me.

Because of this book, when the news broke on the sentences passed on Ahmaud Aubrey killers, and I reframed this killing from a racial hate crime to a caste hate crime.  Put a new and very chilling perspective on it for me.  This book is important and worth reading.  I put my review here because much history was discussed in it.

[Zorral]

6 hours ago, LongRider said:

CASTE (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson. 

You will find her earlier work, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) equally eye-opening: "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration is a historical study of the Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.The book was widely acclaimed by critics."

(Not all of us buy 100% into the arguments she makes that it's not racism but caste -- though indeed caste did/does operate within the African American communities, even before 1863.

She's such a good researcher and equally good writer!

[Zorral]

“The first act of history is often farce,” Kyle Harper muses in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, regarding the ascension and fall of emperor Maximinus in the 3rd C.  

Endemic pandemic is inevitable for cultures that are dense, urban and widely connected -- and are experiencing climate change, all of which happened at the end of the  Roman Warm Period, or Roman Climatic Optimum,  a period of unusually-warm weather in Europe and the North Atlantic that ran from approximately 250 BC to AD 400. Theophrastus (371 – c. 287 BC) wrote that date trees could grow in Greece if they were planted but that they could not set fruit there..

This happens is in the mid 3rd century as the empire transitioned into late antiquity, losing its resilience to recover from various difficulties due to the pressure of pandemic diseases and climate change.  This emperor was just about the first of what the author calls the "barracks emperors", those put in power by the army.  This particular guy was such a clown that the army that put him there, took him outta there, not that long after.

In other words, people breathed a sigh of relief that this clown was gone -- the creator of the farce he was making of Rome by his behaviors and stupidity -- only to be succeeded by worse and more competent usurpers, opening that long period that essentially led to the first partitioning of the empire, as so much of what Romans had been used to for hundreds if not thousands of years, began to disappear, along with population and institutions. [Or, as Dr. Jeet Heer claims, romperisto is not the Mussolini, he's the Gabriel d'Annunzio who heralds the arrival of fascism. ]

The Fate of Rome (2017) is astoundingly good, with all sorts of pointers as to what we're facing and up against presently, as he traces the combination of pandemic and climate change's effects on the Roman empire -- and the whole world for that matter, since the world's connectivity had NEVER been so thorough before, and there had never been so many cities, not just in this empire, but in the Chinese and Asian empires too.  With such density, which always needs to be fed, there's relentless pushing into the habitats of the wild -- and so, pandemic.  There hadn't been any before. [ As I'm reading a history of China too, I see the same in China at the same time.  The West and the East seemed to mirror each other during the era of the third Century - 6th-7th Centuries C.E., as Michael Wood observes in his The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream  (2020). Coincidentally Wood's book is enthusiastically blurbed by Tom Holland, author of Persian Fire (2005), which thoroughly enthralled me as well.]

His latest, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (2021), is likely just as good -- and uses some of the same material one would guess. Perhaps, partly, because as good as The Fate of Rome is, it got no attention in the media, whereas, of course, this one did.

Harper is professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma -- so, he better watch out for visits from the CRT vigilantes!

[LongRider]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

(Not all of us buy 100% into the arguments she makes that it's not racism but caste -- though indeed caste did/does operate within the African American communities, even before 1863.

While I can agree with that, for me her book really explained what caste is and she gave her developed theory about it.  So, just learning about caste is good, and gives me another valid way to look at the world, even if it's not perfect.  

[Toth]

21 hours ago, Zorral said:

The latest Brett Deveraux Unmitigated Pedantry essays have been all about armies supply and pay and logistics were all bout looting the villages and towns, and raping, killing and taking into slavery, and how this stuff tends to be left out of these games.

Well, it certainly isn't a primary concern in most games. Total War Troy (unlike most other Total War games) has a resource system that almost touches the topic, but most of the resources still come from your own cities, not from foraging, without consideration for supply lines. Penthesilea is an exception because she isn't allowed to conquer and hold cities and sacking places is her only means of gathering resources, but settlements are treated so much as pinatas that it really doesn't matter, my troops are nowhere near threatened with starvation. Paradox games are somewhat better in that regard, even though more abstract. If your armies march through enemy territory it does lasting damage to the productivity there and when you try to use armies that are too big to live off the land they instantly start to starve. Of course it's notable that your own domains don't get raided by the foragers. With the 30 years War coming to mind, that kind of restraint portrayed there seems cute.

Leaving the gaming portrayals aside, it's actually one of the things in The Silence of the Girls that struck out to me in difference to how I imagined the siege of Troy in my version. When I was writing it, I just couldn't see the Greeks being able to live off the immediate area surrounding Troy for 10 freaking years, so I portrayed them more as various marauding hordes wandering up and down the Meander, leaving Troy unmolested for prolonged stretches of time, but turning the whole country into a barren no man's land full of torched ruins. Therefore Barker's portrayal of the Greek camp as a number of compounds with wooden huts for prolonged use struck me as an odd decision that plays directly into the idea that they've truly camped there for 10 years. Heck, even the Iliad suggests that they set up camp in front of Troy only in the last year because of that very reason. And while I could have misread it, it also struck me as odd that Briseis at the beginning describes being able to see the smoke coming from Lyrnessus, which... no, I severely doubt the city would be in spitting distance of Troy and still intact after all this time. When playing "Total War - Troy" I looked out for Lyrnessus and found it deep inland near the bay facing Lesbos, which checks somewhat out with the map from Wikipedia. So that trip to the camp in the opening chapters should have taken at least a week or so.

Granted, the other thing that slightly bothered me was the lack of non-hostage non-slavewoman non-combattants in the Greek camp. I had expected a retinue of free servants, freedmen and slaves attending to equipment, cattle, accounting, ships and the like, especially including male slaves that would have been taken along the expedition from the very beginning. It seemed very simplified that every slave seen was a local woman and every man was a Greek fighter, with those remaining in the camp only due to age. Adding to that, the "all men killed, all women enslaved" thing sounded very Caesar in Gaul when the reality should have also been a little more complex. Male slaves and royal hostages get a whole lot of money after all and the Iliad does mention stuff like Patroclos selling one of Priam's sons on the slave market. So there should have been quite a lot of blurred lines and even more complex hierarchies even among the slaves in the camp, depending on nationality, gender and position.

... I think it gets across why historical novels so easily spoil for me? XD
But yeah, it's a mythological story and as such I can shrug away most simplifications and appreciate the character studies as they are.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Toth said:

... I think it gets across why historical novels so easily spoil for me?

I hear ya, all right!

Considering though, that the sieging armies came to Troy by ship, one doubts there were female camp followers with them, certainly not in numbers.  However, surely, eager help showed up from disgruntled, wanting to make some money locals from the countryside.  Also Barker's books tell us how many in the camps were captives, made slaves, from their constant incursions into the countryside and the great territory that Troy had controlled.'

Not enough though about the inevitable enemy of all besieging armies, disease epidemics.  One might think then, that refresher fleets of coming of age soldiers would arrive frequently.

 

[Gorn]

On 8/9/2022 at 12:35 PM, Toth said:

Some fallout from reading The Silence of the Girls: I recently booted up again the game "Total War - Troy" and loaded my last save file (obviously playing Penthesilea because of my own story). I then sacked a nearby village and when the game only gave me the options "Kill and enslave" or "Kill everyone", I felt miserable.

My recent playthrough of Age of Empires II Definitive Edition single-player campaigns left me like that. Winning pretty much every game requires you to kill all enemy villagers and destroy most of the economical buildings, including when playing with historical so-called good guys. And yet this aspect somehow goes unnoticed by 99% of players.

[Toth]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Considering though, that the sieging armies came to Troy by ship, one doubts there were female camp followers with them, certainly not in numbers.  However, surely, eager help showed up from disgruntled, wanting to make some money locals from the countryside.

I had exactly the same thoughts, it looks impractical for them to bring women with them, but certainly not everyone on the ships were warriors. But having local camp-followers gather around the Greek armies to a degree makes sense for some who wagered they could make some bucks off them rather than become a target themselves.

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Also Barker's books tell us how many in the camps were captives, made slaves, from their constant incursions into the countryside and the great territory that Troy had controlled.'

Mmh... sure, but again, logically there should be far more slaves from the incursions, except if we think that they regularly sent out ships to go sell them. While Briseis several times notes her fear of getting sold at a slave market, we really never see anyone shipped off to one.

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Not enough though about the inevitable enemy of all besieging armies, disease epidemics.  One might think then, that refresher fleets of coming of age soldiers would arrive frequently.

No? I think the plague outbreak was a fairly notable event in the first quarter, even though Briseis' narration makes it a bit too amusing to read (poor Myron and the rats, also the happy end for Chryseis). And I think it was hinted with the time skip and Pyrrhus' arrival that they indeed got fresh reinforcements, but yes, only through implication. Come to think of it, that timeskip towards the end was a bit jarring. As if to say with Achilles' death Briseis' story comes to an end, pretty much jumping right to the aftermath of the fall of Troy and the depiction of events from Euripides' Women of Troy play. You'd think a book focused on the fate of the women wouldn't have quietly dropped Tecmessa and Ajax. He committed suicide during the timeskip, so what happened with her? Having googled a bit for the other characters, I found out that Machaon also gets killed, which should have affected Briseis and Ritsa to some degree (amusingly, when he was wounded earlier in the book, it probably was a reference to Paris wounding him in the Iliad). Well, I guess that's what the sequel is for.^^

Interestingly, Iphis should be relatively fine, what with Diomedes settling quietly in Italy after his wife kicked him out. Meanwhile Uza is fucked because of Odysseus being the worst captain ever, as always (though since she is a book original character... good for her not existing, I guess).

55 minutes ago, Gorn said:

My recent playthrough of Age of Empires II Definitive Edition single-player campaigns left me like that. Winning pretty much every game requires you to kill all enemy villagers and destroy most of the economical buildings, including when playing with historical so-called good guys. And yet this aspect somehow goes unnoticed by 99% of players.

My feeling is that especially with RTS games where villagers are controllable units, they don't quite feel like civilians because they are the same as military units gameplay-wise, that's why it's treated the same as them. Similarly it's quite telling in Total War games that cities are just empty battlefields where only occasionally a house crumbles with basic physics effects when a stray catapult shot hits it. You never get the sense that there are actually people huddling in there praying for the battle to be over soon. I feel like the last game that only vaguely attempted it was Rome 1 which allowed you to look at cities outside of battles. But it's very basic with just hundreds of clones of male citizen 1 and female citizen 1 mindlessly walking up and down the streets. It doesn't feel as real as, say, wandering through Alexandria in Assassin's Creed Origins.

Of course then there is Paradox games gleefully showing you how evil and inhumane past times were, but at the same time hiding it behind lots of ledgers and tables, grabbing you only with the subtext of how fucked up you are for playing the Game of Thrones as you do.

[Zorral]

45 minutes ago, Toth said:

No? I think the plague outbreak was a fairly notable event in the first quarter

 

45 minutes ago, Toth said:

there should be far more slaves from the incursions, except if we think that they regularly sent out ships to go sell them.

Partner wants to take a break from reading history and read the Iliad, so when doing this I'm going to keep these matters you have brought up in mind.

Mostly these days when thinking of the Iliad I think of the roll call of ships and heroes, like those long roll calls of Herodotus, those of who was at the battles in medieval Romances, and Mallory's of whom participated in the tournaments and battles he describes.

Edited August 10, 2022 by Zorral

[Wall Flower]

On a whim, I picked up a book called Empire of the Normans by Levi Roach from the new books display at my library. It's described as 'the first global history of the Normans and their quest for dominance'. The author is a professor at Exeter Uni and has previously written about Anglo-Saxon kings. I'll be reading it as soon as possible as there are already four reserve requests for it; so I guess I'm not the only person in Canberra with an interest in history.

[Zorral]

Those Normans -- they did get around, all right!  And it began long, long before Normandy.  I bet this book is a good one, all right.

One of the first books I escaped into when covid hit pre-vaccine and the entire city was shut down was The Norman Conquest (2012) by Marc Morris.  So much I thought I knew -- I didn't know anything.  These histories are such joys for me.  (One does burn out on the unceasing horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the 'new world', and particularly in Dixie -- and those works and the brilliant research keep coming in tides and surges.)

[SeanF]

On 8/9/2022 at 5:56 PM, Zorral said:

The latest Brett Deveraux Unmitigated Pedantry essays have been all about armies supply and pay and logistics were all bout looting the villages and towns, and raping, killing and taking into slavery, and how this stuff tends to be left out of these games. This is what 'foraging' and 'living off the land' means. Funny though, how seldom historians never actually come out and say that, except for the French ones in outrage, and the English ones with applause to this strategy of the Black Prince in the Hundred Years War, when it was called, chevauchée. Armies have always operated this way.  One significant exception to the taking slaves part was Sherman's March to the Sea, which brought freedom to the enslaved, in contrast to the Army of Virginia's invasions of PA, in which, no differently than any army of antiquity, classical times, up through the Ottoman wars, in which taking of free people to sell into slavery was so much the point.  Still, of course, Sherman's army's policy to 'requisition' and destroy what they couldn't take, was deliberate strategy as well as logistics.

https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/

As we made our way with Xenophon and his '12,000' during his Anabasis, Partner was astounded and astonished to learn this is what was going on.  It, in fact, this is essentially the theme of The Anabasis -- or at the very least the second, primary theme.  The constant concern of food.  It's never said this is what they were doing, but it was.  They also had to feed whatever animals they got hold of, and they had to get the animals from somewhere.  With Xenophon's semi-bemusement, though non-surprise or shock, at the emphasis most of the men, both friend and foe, put upon their favorite boys, there is no mention of women, who are very seldom missing from an army.  Somebody has to wash the clothes and take care of the wounded.

Partner learned a whole lot of what had previously been unknown or mistakenly thought all these years -- particularly that the Siege of Troy didn't happen in the days of Athens's golden age, and that Helen was a Spartan.

 

 

“Foraging “ was always a polite term for pillaging.  Prior to the invention of railways, which could transport food swiftly, armies survived by foraging or (if in friendly territory) being fed from markets and  magazines.  Foraging was usually bearable if the locals lived in fertile territory.  In an arid country like Spain, Portugal, or Southern Italy, it meant starving the locals, which is one reason why guerilla movements rose against the French, during the Napoleonic wars.

Wellington wrote a note on General Whittingham's Memorandum on the War, in April 1813, where he commented upon the French army's ability to live off the land, in ways that other armies could not manage.

To what are these facts to be attributed?  Certainly not to the inclinations of the inhabitants of the country to the enemy. … but to the system of Terror on which the French and those under their authority invariably act.     

And here's Sir George Walker, to Lord Liverpool in 1810

a fifth part of the vintage throughout the whole of Rioja has been demanded’ [by the French from the inhabitants], while ‘General Roguet has ordered the road from Ohara to Logrono to be fortified and the inhabitants are by force at work….’

Probably more Spanish died of starvation between 1808-14, than directly at the hands of the French (overall, 10-15% of the Spanish population perished). 

I’d disagree that murder, rape, and arson were the norm (save when a city had been stormed, in which case, they were routine).  They were more like terror tactics, to be deployed against a disobedient population, or heretics, who deserved no mercy.  All sides practised terror in the Thirty Years War, for example. Going back to Spain, Kellerman and Suchet had no qualms about deploying murder and rape as terror tactics.  Soult, on the other hand, was a lot less brutal.  I'd disagree with Devereaux that these were symptoms of an army that was out of control.  Sean McGlynn, in By Sword and Fire, Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare, demonstrates that more often than not, these things were ordered by the high command.  

Sherman’s army was brutal, but rape and murder were not part of his strategy, and were indeed punished by him.

One of the many stupidities of later seasons of Game of Thrones, was Sansa's belief that Daenerys' soldiers ought to have brought their own food with them, over more than a thousand miles.  What that would have meant in practice is Daenerys' armies pillaging every farm within 50 miles of the route of march and killing anyone who resisted. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by SeanF

[SeanF]

On 8/9/2022 at 5:35 PM, Toth said:

Some fallout from reading The Silence of the Girls: I recently booted up again the game "Total War - Troy" and loaded my last save file (obviously playing Penthesilea because of my own story). I then sacked a nearby village and when the game only gave me the options "Kill and enslave" or "Kill everyone", I felt miserable.

It’s a narrow line to walk.  How much horror should be depicted, before people decide they can’t stand it?

I thought the TV series of Spartacus was very good at depicting how awful Roman slavery was, without making the slavers cartoon villains.

 

[Zorral]

9 hours ago, SeanF said:

murder, rape, and arson were the norm (save when a city had been stormed, in which case, they were routine).  They were more like terror tactics, to be deployed against a disobedient population, or heretics, who deserved no mercy

 

9 hours ago, SeanF said:

I'd disagree with Devereaux that these were symptoms of an army that was out of control. 

Which says a great deal about the mercs of the late medieval - Renaissance eras.  Not to mention the Russian troops currently.

I am not sure I can agree with your disagreement that these horrors were NOT symptoms of a force out of control.

Abu Ghraib, immediately comes to mind, not to mention so many other events committed by armies lately that we don't even hear of.  In Africa every force commits atrocities as a matter of course and a matter of joy, particularly, as usual, against ordinary children, women and others just trying to survive.  The same as in Serbia.

The same as here in the USA in almost every force of cops across the nation -- not to mention young white guys who aren't army or cops or National Guard or anything except owners of dreadful weapons of mass destruction -- and again they target the unarmed and most vulnerable in the population -- another reason I so loved that story out of San Francisco when some White punk decided to do anti-Chinese terrorism on an elderly, small Chinese grandmother, who knows and practices martial arts, and kicked his frackin' ass.

Most so called police forces in the US anyway, no longer police -- they behave as an occupying army, so serving, no protecting.  Instead preying, and running away from others who might be seen as equally armed.  This is the consequence of so many decades of militarizing the cops, beginning with 'the war on drugs.'

[SeanF]

13 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

Which says a great deal about the mercs of the late medieval - Renaissance eras.  Not to mention the Russian troops currently.

I am not sure I can agree with your disagreement that these horrors were NOT symptoms of a force out of control.

Abu Ghraib, immediately comes to mind, not to mention so many other events committed by armies lately that we don't even hear of.  In Africa every force commits atrocities as a matter of course and a matter of joy, particularly, as usual, against ordinary children, women and others just trying to survive.  The same as in Serbia.

The same as here in the USA in almost every force of cops across the nation -- not to mention young white guys who aren't army or cops or National Guard or anything except owners of dreadful weapons of mass destruction -- and again they target the unarmed and most vulnerable in the population -- another reason I so loved that story out of San Francisco when some White punk decided to do anti-Chinese terrorism on an elderly, small Chinese grandmother, who knows and practices martial arts, and kicked his frackin' ass.

Most so called police forces in the US anyway, no longer police -- they behave as an occupying army, so serving, no protecting.  Instead preying, and running away from others who might be seen as equally armed.  This is the consequence of so many decades of militarizing the cops, beginning with 'the war on drugs.'

Army commanders understood that terror frequently worked.  Mass rape was a terror tactic, used by the Mongols and Romans, as a means to break resistance;  as well as rounding up enemy civilians and driving them up to city walls as human shields.  

Similarly with the chevauchee, the aim was not just to seize resources, but to demonstrate that the rival government could not protect its subjects, by murdering and raping them, and burning their homes.

Commanders frequently could impose restraint (eg Henry V in the Agincourt campaign).  Not imposing restraint was often a deliberate choice by those in charge.

[James Arryn]

On 8/9/2022 at 12:56 PM, Zorral said:

The latest Brett Deveraux Unmitigated Pedantry essays have been all about armies supply and pay and logistics were all bout looting the villages and towns, and raping, killing and taking into slavery, and how this stuff tends to be left out of these games. This is what 'foraging' and 'living off the land' means. Funny though, how seldom historians never actually come out and say that, except for the French ones in outrage, and the English ones with applause to this strategy of the Black Prince in the Hundred Years War, when it was called, chevauchée. Armies have always operated this way.  One significant exception to the taking slaves part was Sherman's March to the Sea, which brought freedom to the enslaved, in contrast to the Army of Virginia's invasions of PA, in which, no differently than any army of antiquity, classical times, up through the Ottoman wars, in which taking of free people to sell into slavery was so much the point.  Still, of course, Sherman's army's policy to 'requisition' and destroy what they couldn't take, was deliberate strategy as well as logistics.

https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/

As we made our way with Xenophon and his '12,000' during his Anabasis, Partner was astounded and astonished to learn this is what was going on.  It, in fact, this is essentially the theme of The Anabasis -- or at the very least the second, primary theme.  The constant concern of food.  It's never said this is what they were doing, but it was.  They also had to feed whatever animals they got hold of, and they had to get the animals from somewhere.  With Xenophon's semi-bemusement, though non-surprise or shock, at the emphasis most of the men, both friend and foe, put upon their favorite boys, there is no mention of women, who are very seldom missing from an army.  Somebody has to wash the clothes and take care of the wounded.

Partner learned a whole lot of what had previously been unknown or mistakenly thought all these years -- particularly that the Siege of Troy didn't happen in the days of Athens's golden age, and that Helen was a Spartan.

 

 

Good post. One point of contention, though. Chevauchees did not, that we have any record of, involve slavery/capturing slaves. In fact there is no record of European Christian powers taking Christian slaves after ~ the 11th or 12th century. Now some historians think that after it was outlawed by the Vatican people just got quiet about it…for example, there isn’t too much record of it earlier either and one of the times it occurred in around the 8th century it was only recorded because someone was making a record of something else they considered important and the slavery issue was kind of an aside, which might indicate it was so common as to escape notation at the time…but the point is you’d have to either suppose it happened with zero sourcing or you’d have to uncover some evidence yet to appear to think it was still happening concurrent with Chevauchees, which was 1066 at the earliest. 
 

Which is not to say chevauchees weren’t terrible, and instead of taking slaves they often just killed people or rendered their lives untenable by virtue of destroying their ability to eat and take shelter. So this is in no way a defense of the tactic, it’s just that you are kinda adding to it in a way we don’t think happened. They occasionally took hostages, and you may think this is hair-splitting but there was a material difference.
 

But for the most part chevauchees relied too much on being able to move pretty quickly to consider getting bogged down by taking masses of slaves to transport/guard/feed. Quick-hitting slave raids were almost always by sea throughout history…otherwise you get things like a conquering legion which moved much, much slower than a legion’s normal pace, and as such generally only happened after victory had been won and speed became less important. 

The point of living off the land is accurate otherwise, but as you are dealing with a limited amount of food you want it all to go to your army. And I agree it’s a terrible enterprise often glossed over, much like ‘collateral damage’ is in modern times. 

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, James Arryn said:

Good post. One point of contention, though. Chevauchees did not, that we have any record of, involve slavery/capturing slaves. In fact there is no record of European Christian powers taking Christian slaves after ~ the 11th or 12th century. Now some historians think that after it was outlawed by the Vatican people just got quiet about it…for example, there isn’t too much record of it earlier either and one of the times it occurred in around the 8th century it was only recorded because someone was making a record of something else they considered important and the slavery issue was kind of an aside, which might indicate it was so common as to escape notation at the time…but the point is you’d have to either suppose it happened with zero sourcing or you’d have to uncover some evidence yet to appear to think it was still happening concurrent with Chevauchees, which was 1066 at the earliest. 
 

Which is not to say chevauchees weren’t terrible, and instead of taking slaves they often just killed people or rendered their lives untenable by virtue of destroying their ability to eat and take shelter. So this is in no way a defense of the tactic, it’s just that you are kinda adding to it in a way we don’t think happened. They occasionally took hostages, and you may think this is hair-splitting but there was a material difference.
 

But for the most part chevauchees relied too much on being able to move pretty quickly to consider getting bogged down by taking masses of slaves to transport/guard/feed. Quick-hitting slave raids were almost always by sea throughout history…otherwise you get things like a conquering legion which moved much, much slower than a legion’s normal pace, and as such generally only happened after victory had been won and speed became less important. 

The point of living off the land is accurate otherwise, but as you are dealing with a limited amount of food you want it all to go to your army. And I agree it’s a terrible enterprise often glossed over, much like ‘collateral damage’ is in modern times. 

I think what Devereaux means is that men and women were rounded up to labour for the army, and in the case of the women, to provide sex.  They weren’t bought and sold in medieval Europe.

A good example of a typical practice is the one that I cited upthread, of Spanish civilians being forced to construct fortifications for the French.

Edited August 11, 2022 by SeanF

[Gorn]

1 hour ago, James Arryn said:

Quick-hitting slave raids were almost always by sea throughout history…otherwise you get things like a conquering legion which moved much, much slower than a legion’s normal pace, and as such generally only happened after victory had been won and speed became less important. 

Not really. Majority of African slaves were captured by African states in land slave raids. Slave raids of Ottomans and Crimean Tatars in Eastern Europe were also done by land. 

[Zorral]

19 minutes ago, Gorn said:

Not really. Majority of African slaves were captured by African states in land slave raids. Slave raids of Ottomans and Crimean Tatars in Eastern Europe were also done by land

Gorn is right. This also applies to the Mongols taking massive number of slaves from the cities and territories they conquered. The thing about slaves as merchandise, as proved over and over and over in the Southern colonies, 

starting already in the 17th C, and Southern states until the domestic trade was stopped by the Wah, is that it moves itself.  Coffles, those infamous walking merchandise going from the coast to Mississippi, were called.  Same as the coffles going up out of sub-sahellian Africa up to the Southern coastal Mediterranean markets in ancient times.

BTW those who do these kinds of statistical historic research and scholarship have concluded that even more Africans died in the raids and the coffles to the coast than even did on the Middle Passage.  This is a hollowing out of population in places such as Kongo that never recovered, not even in the present day.

2 hours ago, James Arryn said:

Chevauchees did not, that we have any record of, involve slavery/capturing slaves.

I never said the Hundred Years War armies did.  I wouldn't since I know otherwise.

However Western merchants did engage in slavery, big time, throughout the Renaissance.  Genoa was the biggest slave market in Europe -- Pisa, Genoa, Venice, etc. didn't sell all the slaves they acquired in their colony entrepots on the Black Sea etc. to the Ottomans by any means The Renaissance depended on slavery in the Mediterranean, as due to both the navies and merchants needing galley slaves (Prior to the Ottomans breaking into the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean trade/war, the rowers were not slaves.) Slavery never disappeared around the Mediterranean, after its tremendous revival in the age of Constantine and the coming of endemic plagues and pandemics.  

 

[SeanF]

14 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Gorn is right. This also applies to the Mongols taking massive number of slaves from the cities and territories they conquered. The thing about slaves as merchandise, as proved over and over and over in the Southern colonies, 

starting already in the 17th C, and Southern states until the domestic trade was stopped by the Wah, is that it moves itself.  Coffles, those infamous walking merchandise going from the coast to Mississippi, were called.  Same as the coffles going up out of sub-sahellian Africa up to the Southern coastal Mediterranean markets in ancient times.

BTW those who do these kinds of statistical historic research and scholarship have concluded that even more Africans died in the raids and the coffles to the coast than even did on the Middle Passage.  This is a hollowing out of population in places such as Kongo that never recovered, not even in the present day.

I never said the Hundred Years War armies did.  I wouldn't since I know otherwise.

However Western merchants did engage in slavery, big time, throughout the Renaissance.  Genoa was the biggest slave market in Europe -- Pisa, Genoa, Venice, etc. didn't sell all the slaves they acquired in their colony entrepots on the Black Sea etc. to the Ottomans by any means The Renaissance depended on slavery in the Mediterranean, as due to both the navies and merchants needing galley slaves (Prior to the Ottomans breaking into the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean trade/war, the rowers were not slaves.) Slavery never disappeared around the Mediterranean, after its tremendous revival in the age of Constantine and the coming of endemic plagues and pandemics.  

 

I wonder why and how being an oarsman on a galley went from being a respectable occupation for the free poor to being a job for enslaved prisoners of war and criminals.

It seems self-defeating to me.  Galley slaves frequently mutinied, whereas that would be far less of a problem with free men.