Yes, but that video does rather assume that the pikeman has extensive freedom of movement. That’s not necessarily going to be the case on a battlefield. I wouldn’t mind seeing that little experiment repeated in different conditions, when the pikeman was hemmed in and not free to run around like Usain Bolt!
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For what I know about ancient and medieval warfare, (correct me if I missed something) the spear fall in a crippling overspecialisation: good for charge in to the enemy (when the ground allows It) and stopping a charging enemy (usually cavalry) but it’s bad in basically everything else, even Greeks and Roman had a short sword along with the spear
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The Romans did (and also their spears were mostly for throwing), but I haven’t heard of the hoplites using one as a matter of rote, because the point of hopliting was that you stood in formation with locked shields and then PUSHED until one side cracked and ran. If you had bypassed the shields enough for a short blade to be useful you had, in effect, already won and the enemy was running away.
Even Greeks, the very first Roman sword, used until the fall of Cartago Nova during the 2 Punic War where they changed it for the famous gladio, was of Greek origins… and beside when you broke your spear in combact you have to do something for breaking the enemy, good luck doing it with just pushing with a shield
Second you are confusing spears with javelins regarding the Romans
You break the enemy BY pushing with the shield, because if you’re hopliting and break the enemy line, then the enemy is, uh, in a not great position. If you push the enemy line enough that it buckles, then you’ve won, because an isolated hoplite is either dead or running away, so if you broke your spear there’s a couple of dozen other dudes on your side with spears, and you’re not going to be able to deploy a short sword in a hoplite fight, because your shield is very large and convex and interlocked with two others, and the enemy’s shield is ALSO very large and convex and interlocked with two others. And you can’t switch stances to close that gap, because if you do you’ve broken the phalanx formation and your side has lost. And also you’re probably dead.
I think we all know that the best weapon to bring to a sword fight is a gun (and jokes aside, there is some overlap between the end of the medieval period and the use of firearms so that could be fun to play with in a medieval-inspired world)
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I know that. But, the video if I remember correctly was not about pikes. Pikes are much much longer than spears. The video talked about the average spear. So not sure what you talking about, unless I’m not remembering the video correctly, which might be the case.
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The thing that he’s wielding is bigger than him. I’d call that pike-length rather than spear-length, but I might be wrong. Either way, whether it’s a spear or a pike, my basic point was just that I’m not sure that video really proves anything about battlefield conditions.
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Let’s not get too invested into what is a spear, a pike, a voulge, a guisarme, or a voulge-guisarme. There aren’t any, in any case. 136 It's Not a Gaming Session Until Someone Quotes Monty Python - Giant in the Playground Games
Medieval worlds: infant and birthing mother mortality is through the roof, but if you survive the first like 10 years you’re good for a bunch more decades. DEATH! Nearly everybody farms, because you’re a few agricultural revolutions (and a couple of crop imports) away from agricultural goodness. PLAGUES! FAMINE! Kings are assholes and will send you to war over what the other king, who’s also their cousin, their uncle, AND their brother-in-law said about his Jan. WAR! (and now we’ve made it through the modern incarnation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). Everyone is the church’s bitch. FUN! (not really). Contrary to popular belief, people were actually reasonably good at hygiene. BATHING MAIDENS!
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Btw, my quibble above was just a very specific one about that video, not a general complaint about spears / pikes. I think spears are great, and fantasy authors should definitely use them more often and do more cool things with them.
One thing that I DO sometimes wish that people who wrote stories in medieval / pre-modern settings paid more attention to is how slowly news spreads in those societies. If you have a magical means of instant communication in your fantasy setting, then fine, but otherwise, understand that people at one end of a kingdom are not going to know as soon as something happens at the other end of the kingdom. Word takes time to spread. Even in the Roman Empire, which had a well-developed road network and (under the emperors) a whole system set up to communicate information rapidly (the cursus publicus), it could take weeks for news of things that happened in distant provinces to reach Rome. Actually, one thing that GRRM does do pretty well is account for this in his Ice and Fire books. There can be a significant gap between things happening in one place and people elsewhere hearing about it, which actually has narrative possibilities, because it means that people can end up making important decisions in ignorance of major developments elsewhere.
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I really don’t want to hyperfocus on this one specific part of this conversation, but this is just… wrong.
Dante is known as the “Father of the Italian language”. His writings are so influential that they popularized his dialect of Italian. His writings were so influential that they solidified the concept of purgatory in the mind of Catholicism.
Our idea of the stereotypical hell being all fire and brimstone comes from Dante (even though parts of his hell are freezing cold).
I would even argue that the modern concept of worldbuilding comes from Dante. He blends elements of Greek and Roman theology with Christianity in a super interesting way. He also has some really brilliant teachings on theology and morality in general, even if many of his beliefs are dated by modern standards.
And sure, it was a self-insert “fanfiction” (and political hitpiece, at least in Inferno), but the fact that his “fanfiction” is so damn influential proves that he is far from a hack. Hack writers don’t literally popularize an entire language. Please don’t slander him lol
Most of the time, though, medieval battles would be fought in formation. But even in a hack and slash melee, the spear is still a formidable and dominant weapon, especially if paired with a shield.
Ehhh, I’d argue that polearms were the primary weapon of the vast majority of all infantry throughout the majority of the middle ages. If you were going to war, you’d probably bring a spear. Swords are expensive and require a lot of training. If you’re Mr. Joe-shmuck-peasant, you’d have a spear, not a sword.
I would agree. If I was going to a medieval battlefield, there’s a dozen other weapons I would have before a basic sword. Namely, the spear.
I would agree, but in a set-piece battle with formations, the polearm is still king. When you have a dozen guys on either side of you, you don’t need to worry about being outflanked by a guy with a sword. I’d take a shield and spear any day over a sword in a medieval battle.
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Yes! And I’d also like to point out that a lot of modern people (especially in the US, say) tend to underestimate just how linguistically diverse the world was before nationalism and mass media. You can well expect a variety of languages within countries—like pre-modern France was not majority French-speaking. And dialectical variation is likely to be immense. You’d see a lot of “dialect continuums,” which is where nearby communities speak similarly to each other, but the further you travel, the more the speech variety diverges until it’s clearly a separate language, without having had a stark dividing line.
This is also why you’d be likely to get a commonly known language used for diplomacy or scholarship, though, like Latin in Medieval Europe—which is a common phenomenon across the world, seen with Arabic (or Persian in the early modern period) in the Middle East, Sanskrit and the Prakrits in India, Swahili in eastern Africa, etc.
Of course, if your setting does have mass media or nationalism, that’ll make a big difference, but you’ll also look at something increasingly less like our medieval period. (And circumstances can differ, like medieval China was a whole lot less linguistically diverse than medieval Europe, but it still had some.)
For an illustration of the kind of diversity you might expect, take a look at this map of Italy’s languages, from wikipedia… nowadays, this variety is much less present, but traditionally, Italy used to be a hotbed of language variation.
Generally speaking, similar colors represent similar speech varieties that might be considered the “same” language, but boundaries are fuzzy.
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One thing I don’t think I’ve ever seen portrayed.
DIGGING DITCHES IN SIEGES
Please, be special, dig ditches. They are your dear friends.
There are many reasons. If you want me to explain them, just ask me.
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I’m entirely sure why I didn’t say this sooner. I must have read it wrong. But the thing is, the spear, or pike, or whatever, is more advantageous when it is an hemmed in environment, unless you are being attacked from more than one angle, or if there is not enough room behind you to thrust.
Okay, I know the drawing is very ugly, don’t need to tell me it.
Anyways, one of the main ways to fight a spear is to go through it by the sides, and if your against multiple opponents, one of your friends go this way and the other go that way. An hemmed in position ends up making it easier for the spearman to defend himself against swordsmen.
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