Flo's History

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...

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...

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,...

Just like Cataphracts inspired the medieval knights in Europe, horse riders evolved from a similar unit employed in warfare during the Bronze Age: war chariots. During the Bronze Age, the time of the first civilizations, chariots were the dominant force on the battlefields. They were the earliest form of truly heavy units, able to crush infantry formations in a devastating charge while also providing fire support, either from javelinists or archers. The first report of chariots used in warfare came all the way back from Sumer, taking the form of a war cart. Despite being relatively inefficient on the battlefield, as the cart was too slow and was relegated to transport, the idea of a mobile platform stuck. The first proper chariots came from one of the great hegemons of Bronze Age Anatolia, the Hittite people. Starting as Indo-European nomads, they were the first to pioneer the usage of chariots, from construction to tactics, before being adopted by their neighboring nations. Taking the...

Heavy cavalry was, for a very long time, the dominant force on the battlefield. Many of such units have reached legendary status, like the noble French knights, whose effectiveness tended to be heavily hampered by their extreme arrogance, or the Polish Winged Hussars and their renowned charge at the Battle of Vienna. Their era of dominance in warfare would be ended with the development of pike-and-shot warfare, obsoleting the unit while lighter mounted units endured for a bit longer. And while heavily armored cavalry has become a symbol of the medieval period, just like crossbows and the feudal system, it finds its roots in more ancient times. Before the knights, there were the Cataphracts, a unit that finds its roots in ancient Persia, and was kept by its successor nations all the way to the Eastern Roman Empire. Cataphracts were straightforward: a rider covered in the heaviest armor of their time, riding a horse protected by fish-scaled armor. Even their name doesn’t deal in subtlety...

The Mongols under the Great Khans were truly one of a kind, forming the second-largest empire in History, right above the Russians but a fair bit short of the British. They went nearly everywhere in Asia, from the coasts of the Song to the eastern regions of Europe and Anatolia. Only three places have escaped their touch: the inhospitable lands of Siberia, the Indian Peninsula, and Japan. Now anyone who knows a bit about Japan’s history might be surprised by this, as the two great Mongol invasions are a big part of the Island Nation’s past. Now I am not denying these attacks ever happened, but rather that our favourite horse riders had very little to do with them. Let me explain.     Now the main reason why the idea that the Mongols tried to invade Japan on two separate occasions stemmed from the fact that both events were led by Kublai Khan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty and grandson of Genghis Khan. The problem with this is that Kublai, after the fragmentation of the g...