Flo's History

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...

  As I mentioned in my post on Rome’s economy, trade is a vital aspect of a healthy society. As civilizations developed and advanced, so did the trading routes, becoming more complex and farther reaching. Today, we will talk about one of the first transcontinental trade networks on the planet, the Silk Road, connecting the far east of Asia to Europe.   Everything started during the days of the Han dynasty, when Emperor Wu was searching for ways to end the threat of the Nomadic nation of  Xiongnu  in modern day Mongolia. As such, he sent an emissary , named  Zhang Qian, to central Asia for potential allies. Zhang, despite traversing the territories of his enemies, made it to his destination and successfully  made contact with  the local Yuezhi and  Dayuan  people, but was quickly attracted by something else: horses. Now, the Hans were no strangers to these animals, as they themselves fielded cavalry and chariot units in significant quantity. H...