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The Nobility - A Hierarchy all of its Own

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Having a hierarchy is a fundamental part of any being living in a group to keep things a bit organized. In almost every system you have a clear leader calling the shots, a trusting figure (or as trusty as they get) that enforces the leader’s will, and then everyone else, sometimes broken down into the normal members and the ‘lower class’ encompassing the young, elderly, and new comers . There are some exceptions to this, like the penguins who, despite being highly social creatures living in large groups, don’t have any designated figures of authority. Of course, we humans also have developed complex systems of hierarchies, forming and evolving depending on time and cultures to create and end various classes. In Western Europe, for example, before the social revolutions of the Enlightening era, people were divided among the peasantry, artisans/merchants, and ruling nobility. However, each of these groups can be broken down into further sub-divisions, each having their own functions an...
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The last French Knights - Gendarmes

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If today the gendarmes in France are known as lawn enforcers within the military domain and mostly act outside of the cities, their name is much older than that. You see, for most of the era of medieval warfare the Kingdom of France was considered the heart of chivalric warfare. For centuries, the French had set themselves as a major power in Europe; in a time when cavalry dictated the battlefield, they fielded the best on the continent. However, the good times wouldn’t last as France’s knightly prestige would be severely damaged by the coming of one of the biggest calamities in our history: the British. Our story starts with the advent of the Hundred Years’ War, an agglomeration of smaller conflicts started over a succession crisis. You see the last three kings of the House of Capet, Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV, though it would be hilarious to die without a male heir. However, it was less funny for French society, which required a man sitting on the throne, and while the first tw...
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The End of Medieval Battles

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The history of warfare is full of adaptation, innovation and evolution to find new a more effective ways to kill your opponent. And sometimes, such innovations can lead to rather bizarre units, like the dual riders of early horsemen by Assyria as mentioned in the previous post, or the Korean Hwacha which fired rocket-propelled spears. While most of the time these strange experiments tend to create sub-part or situational products, from time to time a true breakthrough was created. One of such examples was the method of warfare that dictate much of Renaissance Europe, Pike-and-Shot with the most famous being the Spanish Tercio.   With the closing days of the medieval age and the coming up of the Renaissance, European warfare had developed a solid meta on the battlefield, taking on another strategy. This took the form of elite pikemen, generally of Swiss origin, mixed with heavy knights within the most popular being the French Gendarme... no not these guys. Indeed heavy cavalry,...
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