Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

[VeliciaL]

For weaponry, games usually hand-wave target and focus issues away. Broad phased arrays are the only way to keep a laser beam focused at great distances, but that doesn't look as cool as the long barrel of a naval cannon. Who wants ship armament that looks like a bank of solar panels?

Hey! Says who? :P I think a mass of solar panels focusing a laser at extreme distances sounds cool. Not all weapons need to look like phallic objects. ;)

I've dabbled a little in a game called Attack Vector: Tactical, and one of the stated purposes of mass driver weapons is to herd enemy ships around to make them easier to hit with other weaponry. This is at comparatively close range though, not at the extreme ranges the discussion has focused on.

[Spiryt]

But those aren't armored, trying to dodge, and also trying to kill you in turn. In an actual combat situation, there is probably almost no chance at all to carefully aim a precise chop like that.

Obviously, but still was happening from time to time. And obviously full decapitation would be usually an 'overkill' most of the times.

[fusilier]

I'll have to dig up the source on this, but it comes down to this: there's been a gradual reduction of violence for a very long time. The medieval period was far more violent than today, the iron age more violent than the medieval period, the stone age more violent than the iron age. This also carries over to the ages in between those ages.

I read something similar to this. They correlated increased education with a lower likelihood of violent death.

Decline of violence: Taming the devil within us, by Steven Parker in the journal Nature (478)

[Galloglaich]

Yeah I'm familiar with that theory, but I think it's utter garbage. Designed to make people feel better as part of this idea of 'progress'.

Way, way more people were killed in war and civilian violence in the 17th Century than the 15th. That is just an historical fact. 100 times more Witch-burnings, 100 times more religious violence. Entire cities depopulated. But the 20th Century as the worst of all. It made the previous 500 years combined look like paradise. World War II alone eclipsed all the other wars in the previous 500 years combined I think.

The difference is more in the distribution of violence. Whereas in the Middle Ages more people in the middle and upper classes were killed by murder today it's mostly poorer people, and people in poorer countries (i.e. the Third World).

Warfare which used to be practiced by all kinds of small entities from towns to individual clans and families, is now increasingly the monopoly of the State in most of the world. But this doesn't make us any safer, to the contrary. You get much less violence for a while, but then when two powerful States go to war with each other in full scale war which seems to happen every 50 or 60 years, there is no restraint whatsoever. It's industrial scale butchery like nothing the world has seen since the Mongols, and it's gotten worse every century since the State was invented in 1648.

If a State goes haywire as we also frequently saw happen in the 20th Century, it's the same thing only turned inward upon itself. How many people did Mao kill? Caligula could only dream of such excesses.

G

[Mathis]

Let's not forget the impact of the pre-industrial world on population here. Of course Caligula would not have access to the same amount of population numbers as Mao. But maybe you are referring the amount of civilian casualties compared to military casualties comparatively between the two, percentage wise? I do not wish to digress the discussion, just wanted to point that out.

[Spiryt]

It certainly is rather mind blowing to form theory like that with atrocities from Red Khmers regime, trough Gulags to Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Holocaust committed in very 20th century...

The fact that this violence was often very 'dehumanized' and not quite as personal as good all splitting someone's head open doesn't really make it better.

[Galloglaich]

Mathis, I think it's not just in whole numbers, but as a percentage, Mao did far worse than Caligula... so did Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ataturk, Franco, and so on. In the Middle Ages, for an entire city to be put to the sword did sometimes happen but it was a major event (outside of the realm of Tamarlane or Ghenghiz Khan) and it stood out, Rome in 1527, Magdeburg in 1631. These shocked the world then, and represented the limits of the excesses of how bad war could get. By contrast, I couldn't even count how many cities were destroyed in WW II.

Spyrit, exactly. I only hope we have learned our lesson, but it seems naive to think so.

G

[fusilier]

I don't really want to get into this discussion, you can track down and read the article yourself. However, they are not talking about total deaths, they are talking about number of deaths relative to the total population (or percentage of deaths). Certainly the first half of the 20th century had a lot of deaths, but population was considerably greater than it was in 17th century. The scale of wars in the second half of the 20th century was surprisingly small.

As has been noted before there was a population increase between the 15th and 17th centuries (leading to among other things a decrease in the amount of meat in peasants' and commoners' diets). They considered not only wars, but also murder rates, although I think they acknowledged that properly calculating such statistics can be difficult.

Also, I'll need to double check the article, but the correlation could be (should be?) seen across modern societies with varying levels of education. [Standard caveat that there are always outliers and variation]

[mcv]

Lopes is very well known in HEMA circles worldwide. For one thing, he travels a lot and he's a hard person to forget when you have met him.

For the others here, here is one of his matches in Sweden in 2010. Lopes is in black. Unfortunately they are sparring with those horrible rubbery rawlings simulators so it undermines the fencing a little bit, but as you can see he is pretty aggressive and fast. Not that it helps when you lose your sword!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5IrR...feature=relmfu

Aggressive, but not as technical as I'd have expected from him. Might be the nylon. But I admit I haven't seen him fight that often. Especially this year he's been almost constantly crippled by a variety of injuries.

He made short work of me in the quarter finals in Houston in 2010 but I hope next time we fence I'll give him more of a challenge.

You might have to wait a bit until he's fully recovered.

Lopes is well regarded as a fencer, I'd guess he's in the top 5% or 10% of longsword fencers worldwide.

Who exactly do you count as fencers here? There's loads and loads of beginners out there. Top 5-10% doesn't sound like very much then. But top 5-10% of people who compete in international tournaments is quite something else.

He's also well respected for his understanding of body mechanics, you should learn as much of that as you can from him.

That certainly fits my impression. Body mechanics seem to be his specialization.

Is that Ties Kool?

It is. I wasn't sure whether Ties would be a recognizable spelling of his name in English.

Try it out and let me know what they say, I'll be interested to hear.

I will. Thanks for your advice.

[Mathis]

I suspected that might be what you meant Galloglaich, just wanted to mention it in case someone wasn't aware of what happened to population numbers after the industrialization. But I guess in this thread, most people are fairly well-educated anyway, however one never knows. I wouldn't mind reading the article, but I'm very suspicious of drawing a conclusion that links lower chance of violent death to a higher level of education, if that's the main point the article discusses. Considering all the other changes that has occured. Off the top of my head I would rather attribute such a thing to a more organized society, but the borders between those things become blurry at some point.

[fusilier]

I suspected that might be what you meant Galloglaich, just wanted to mention it in case someone wasn't aware of what happened to population numbers after the industrialization. But I guess in this thread, most people are fairly well-educated anyway, however one never knows. I wouldn't mind reading the article, but I'm very suspicious of drawing a conclusion that links lower chance of violent death to a higher level of education, if that's the main point the article discusses. Considering all the other changes that has occured. Off the top of my head I would rather attribute such a thing to a more organized society, but the borders between those things become blurry at some point.

The article didn't quote sources or anything, but it is derived from a book by the same author, which, I would hope, would get into many of these issues in much greater depth:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes

[fusilier]

One thing I would point out, is that the mass killings of the 20th century were clearly much more organized than during previous centuries.

That *may* (as I haven't looked at the data myself) skew our perception of violent deaths. Many, many American Indians were killed in combat, or killed in brutal conditions of slavery, but while there was an intention, there wasn't nearly the organization that Stalin, Hitler or Mao would have had. Which might make them difficult to compare. We have reasonably good (they still vary by a lot), but perhaps more importantly *direct*, data on how many people died during Stalin's purges, that we can link to Stalin. Whereas calculating the number of American Indians killed in an innumerable number of skirmishes and battles, died in mines or on plantations as slaves, or were intentionally infected with smallpox, can be more difficult. --EDIT-- and can't be linked to one person, or even one government --EDIT--

[Mathis]

Hey thanks! My google-fu is weak and you have saved me much searching. I'll see if my library can get a hold of it if it doesn't already have it.

[Galloglaich]

However, they are not talking about total deaths, they are talking about number of deaths relative to the total population (or percentage of deaths). Certainly the first half of the 20th century had a lot of deaths, but population was considerably greater than it was in 17th century.

I believe my comment stands up, relative to the overall population.

The scale of wars in the second half of the 20th century was surprisingly small.

Well, yes... the scale of civil wars in the US was surprisingly low after 1865. Cambodia has been relatively peaceful since Pol Pot was overthrown...

I think Tacitus had a name for that, 'the peace of the graveyard'

G

[fusilier]

I believe my comment stands up, relative to the overall population.



Well, yes... the scale of civil wars in the US was surprisingly low after 1865. Cambodia has been relatively peaceful since Pol Pot was overthrown...

I think Tacitus had a name for that, 'the peace of the graveyard'

G

Heh. All I'm saying is let's not dismiss this study out of hand -- it looks like it's gotten at least some peer review.

I also think that Mathis brought up a good point, about societies becoming more organized. When you stop thinking of your neighbor or a person in the next village as "the other", and start thinking of them as your "fellow countrymen", then that perhaps leads to a decrease in violence.

One statistic they do point out in the article, is that homicide rates in Europe have dropped from around 40 in 100,000 per year in the 14th century, to 1.3 by the end of the 20th century.

[rrgg]

With all this talk about simulated fighting, a question came back to mind:

How does a warrior train for a killing blow? How does one condition themselves to go through practiced movements with random resistance from tissue. Is it easy to cut off a limb? To behead? To bifurcate? Is it any harder or easier to thrust or stab a torso and recover to a ready state?

I'm mostly interested in the physical aspects of preparing to kill, but how did warriors of the past cope with killing other humans psychologically? Good ol' stupid hatred can't have been all there was to a mentally stable career murderer.

I'm not so sure a fear of killing is as big as an issue when you or your friends are under attack. But those who did have a problem likely just did their best to skulk like the regular cowards.

[Incanur]

But the blow being strongly made, takes sometimes clean away the hand from the arm, has many times been seen. (Note: A blow cuts off the hand, the arm, the leg, and sometimes the head.) Again, a full blow upon the head or face with a short sharp sword, is most commonly death. A full blow upon the neck, shoulder, arm, or leg, endangers life, cuts off the veins, muscles, and sinews, perishes the bones: these wounds made by the blow, in respect of perfect healing, are the loss of limbs, or maims incurable forever.

This speaks to the kind of physical damage folks expected one-handed swords to inflict in combat. Deadly thrusts required much less force but considerable precision. For example, many people survive thrusts through the belly or lungs.

[Mike_G]

This speaks to the kind of physical damage folks expected one-handed swords to inflict in combat. Deadly thrusts required much less force but considerable precision. For example, many people survive thrusts through the belly or lungs.

Speaking from actual experience as a medic, a bad cut will incapacitate a person, but is treatable and survivable, with possible loss of function, but survivable. A bad thrust will let a person keep on fighting right up until he falls over from blood loss, but you'll never get that guy back.

We literally had to chase a guy up two flights of stairs and forcibly treat him for the big stab wound in the side of his neck. He would absolutely have died without rapid surgery, but he was able to get away from his attacker and run up two flights. The guy who had his forearm opened up could do nothing but grip his bleeding limb and keen in agony, but we just tourniqueted him and he waited hours for an OR.

[Knaight]

I don't really want to get into this discussion, you can track down and read the article yourself. However, they are not talking about total deaths, they are talking about number of deaths relative to the total population (or percentage of deaths). Certainly the first half of the 20th century had a lot of deaths, but population was considerably greater than it was in 17th century. The scale of wars in the second half of the 20th century was surprisingly small.

It's also worth noting that wars are not all that get included. The work I'm familiar with looks at assaults and murders, which have been drastically reduced. This isn't surprising, given that concepts like "killing people to preserve one's honor" have been on the decline for a long while, habitual low level raiding declined, so on and so forth. The observation about distribution is very much notable; modern wars (and genocides) are far larger than those in history, but habitual raiding, street violence, interfamilial violence, and similar have dropped off. Modern killing has been largely concentrated, though it is nowhere near totally concentrated.

[mcv]

Yeah I'm familiar with that theory, but I think it's utter garbage. Designed to make people feel better as part of this idea of 'progress'.

Way, way more people were killed in war and civilian violence in the 17th Century than the 15th. That is just an historical fact. 100 times more Witch-burnings, 100 times more religious violence. Entire cities depopulated. But the 20th Century as the worst of all. It made the previous 500 years combined look like paradise. World War II alone eclipsed all the other wars in the previous 500 years combined I think.

Absolutely, but you're missing out on the context here. WW2 was one single war that dominated the entire planet. In the middle ages, there were thousands of little wars where entire towns were murdered.

A single emotional argument about the scale of WW2 does not trump actual statistics. The number of violent deaths per capita during the middle ages was far, far higher than during the 20th century. Several orders of magnitude even, I believe.

Note that absolute numbers also fail to take into account that there are a lot more people in the world now than there were during the middle ages. Back then, 10,000 people was a major city. Now it's a village.

The difference is more in the distribution of violence. Whereas in the Middle Ages more people in the middle and upper classes were killed by murder today it's mostly poorer people, and people in poorer countries (i.e. the Third World).

You don't think poor people got killed during the middle ages? They got killed in far greater numbers than the higher classes. Often, the higher classes could kill them with impunity. And did.

Warfare which used to be practiced by all kinds of small entities from towns to individual clans and families, is now increasingly the monopoly of the State in most of the world. But this doesn't make us any safer, to the contrary. You get much less violence for a while, but then when two powerful States go to war with each other in full scale war which seems to happen every 50 or 60 years, there is no restraint whatsoever. It's industrial scale butchery like nothing the world has seen since the Mongols, and it's gotten worse every century since the State was invented in 1648.

Wars are more large scale, but they're also a lot more rare. The two world wars notwithstanding, for most of the 20th century, all of Europe has been at peace, and it might well be the first century where this has been the case.

If a State goes haywire as we also frequently saw happen in the 20th Century, it's the same thing only turned inward upon itself. How many people did Mao kill? Caligula could only dream of such excesses.

Only because he had less people to work with. You have to look at deaths per capita.

[a_humble_lich]

As far as wars go, there is an interesting (and more than slightly disturbing) table on wikipedia listing the conflicts with the most casualties. Now with the normal caveats on the accuracy of wikipedia I found the table to be very interesting. Of the top ten in terms of total casualties (i.e. not per capita) the majority took place in China and about half took place in the middle ages. As a percentage of world population, the conflicts in the middle ages were massive. For comparison in World War II they list 1.7%-3.1% of the world's population were killed. For the An Lushan Rebellion in China in 755, they estimate 14%-15.3% of the world's population were killed. For the Mongol invasions as mush as 17.1% of the world's population were killed (on the other hand that conflict lasted two and a half centuries).

I want to do a more sophisticated analysis and look at a moving average of the data on that table.

Also, it was sobering to realize that many of the conflicts on the list I had never heard of. I need to learn more about the history of China.

[Matthew]

I dunno, Caesar was pretty proud of his Gallic butchery and if we believe his numbers (and I am not necessarily convinced) the slaughter of millions of Gauls was effected by him and around 30,000 Romans during his conquest. Could be as high as 50% of the total population of Gaul at that time, if I remember rightly what was being said in papers ten years ago!

[Ashtagon]

What is the difference between a staff and a quarterstaff?

Obviously, they both describe a stout wooden stick 5-6 feet in length, with little or no embellishments. But why the two names for what, is supposedly the same object?

[Fhaolan]

What is the difference between a staff and a quarterstaff?

Obviously, they both describe a stout wooden stick 5-6 feet in length, with little or no embellishments. But why the two names for what, is supposedly the same object?

Quarterstaff as a whole word is a 19th century term. Prior to that it was a qualifier like 'quarter ash staff'. Supposedly the qualifier actually refers to the method of manufacturing, from quarterings of a trunk of a tree rather than the cheaper (and weaker) tree branch.

Another qualifier would be 'short' and 'long' according to Silver. For him, the 'short staff' was about 8 feet long, and the 'long staff' was about 12 feet long. 5-6 feet in length is more commonly from Eastern traditions, with the bo staff.

[Ashtagon]

Quarterstaff as a whole word is a 19th century term. Prior to that it was a qualifier like 'quarter ash staff'. Supposedly the qualifier actually refers to the method of manufacturing, from quarterings of a trunk of a tree rather than the cheaper (and weaker) tree branch.

Another qualifier would be 'short' and 'long' according to Silver. For him, the 'short staff' was about 8 feet long, and the 'long staff' was about 12 feet long. 5-6 feet in length is more commonly from Eastern traditions, with the bo staff.

So, at the time it was a popular weapon in Europe, it would have been referred to as a staff or a short staff? Would the following be a reasonably accurate description?

Staff (Japan: bo; China: kon (棒)): 6-9 feet long in Western tradition (McCarthy (1883): "both hands should be 2 feet 6 inches [76 cm] apart, and the same distance from each end".) East Asian version was 5.9 feet (jo was a related weapon about 4 feet long).

Long Staff: 11-12 feet long. No equivalent weapon appears to have been described outside of Europe.

[mcv]

So, at the time it was a popular weapon in Europe, it would have been referred to as a staff or a short staff? Would the following be a reasonably accurate description?

Staff (Japan: bo; China: kon (棒)): 6-9 feet long in Western tradition (McCarthy (1883): "both hands should be 2 feet 6 inches [76 cm] apart, and the same distance from each end".) East Asian version was 5.9 feet (jo was a related weapon about 4 feet long).

You mean the Hollywood style of staff fighting? I don't really know all that much about staff fighting, but I do know that they're often held at the end. Wikipedia says one hand at the butt and the other a foot and a half, though it also mentions that at the end of the 19th century, it was apparently held as you describe: equal distance from each end. I've also seen bo katas where they constantly switch from holding one end to holding the other end.

[Straybow]

What is the difference between a staff and a quarterstaff?

Obviously, they both describe a stout wooden stick 5-6 feet in length, with little or no embellishments. But why the two names for what, is supposedly the same object?

In the English system, a quarterstaff is typically 8 feet, though proper length for a very short person might be about 7 feet, and 9 feet for the tall. It is called "quarter" staff because you grip it about the quarter point, like a spear. (The technique shown in Robin Hood movies is called half-staffing, but the weapon was never called a half-staff.)

A 5-6 foot staff would be called a shortstaff. A battlestaff was typically 10-12 feet, intended for use in formation. The proper length quarterstaff was judged to be the best combination of speed and reach. A shorter staff gives up reach, a battlestaff gives up speed and versatility.

[Incanur]

Speaking from actual experience as a medic in a post-sword world

Edited for clarity. The kind of cuts that happened in Silver's time - sometimes penetrating six inches into the head -could prove immediately lethal.

The guy who had his forearm opened up could do nothing but grip his bleeding limb and keen in agony, but we just tourniqueted him and he waited hours for an OR.

To be fair, you also have cases of folks that have limbs entirely severed who remain competent and functional.

As far Steven Pinker goes, I advise caution. While it's hard to contest the drop in killing since medieval times - the medieval German murder rate was as high as 100 per 100,000 - but Pinker tends to make stuff up when it comes to hunter-gatherers. There's little question that per capita violence in the form of direct butchery has decreased in recent centuries, but considerable doubt about the extreme numbers Pinker claims for so-called prehistory. As far as overall health outcomes, the archeological evidence shows hunter-gatherers had if anything longer and healthier lives than the vast majority of civilized folks until around 1850.

[Galloglaich]

I was trying to respond earlier, but the server has been continually overloaded...

Absolutely, but you're missing out on the context here. WW2 was one single war that dominated the entire planet. In the middle ages, there were thousands of little wars where entire towns were murdered.

No, entire towns (by which I'm referring to the 10,000 people cities) were rarely wiped out in the Middle Ages by war (the Black Death of course did wipe out several cities and a good chunk of the general population in the mid 14th Century)

Context is my specialty, so I don't think I'm missing it. Knaight summarized my actual point pretty well:

"killing people to preserve one's honor" have been on the decline for a long while, habitual low level raiding declined, so on and so forth. The observation about distribution is very much notable; modern wars (and genocides) are far larger than those in history, but habitual raiding, street violence, interfamilial violence, and similar have dropped off. Modern killing has been largely concentrated,

This is what I'm suggesting, in a nutshell, to which I would add, the wars in the Modern era are far worse than any wars, crime, or other human violence experienced in the Middle Ages, at least outside of Asia.

A single emotional argument about the scale of WW2 does not trump actual statistics. The number of violent deaths per capita during the middle ages was far, far higher than during the 20th century. Several orders of magnitude even, I believe.

I disagree, in fact I would contend that the Steven Pinker book which others upthread have been directly or indirectly (via online review articles) referring to is actually the one making the emotional argument, a very warm and fuzzy one. But as popular as Pinkers argument has been in the press, it has received a much more lukewarm response in academia. Here for example is a review of a book by another professor with a counterpoint:

http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/it...ook_sempa.html

Pinker is a psychologist not an historian, and it shows in his very optimistic interpretation of the facts.

As a percentage of the world population WW II might not have matched Ghenhiz Khan or Tamarlane, but for many parts of Europe, it far exceeded anything they ever experienced West of the Vistula. If you were a citizen of Brazil or frankly, the United States, World War II wasn't a major catastrophe, but Russia lost 13% of their population, Germany 10%, Poland 17%, Lithuania 14%, Greece 10%, Romania 8%, Hungary 6% and so on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_W...s#Total_deaths

And of course, I'm not referring to WW II solely, it's just the most titanic example. There were innumerable genocides and catastrophic industrial scale wars in the 20th Century, far more than in any other century, at least in the Western Hemisphere. You also have World War I, the Russian Civil War, the Korean War, the Partition of India, the Ottoman Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Greek Genocide, the Ottoman Assyrian Genocide, the Chinese Civil war, the Guatemalan Civil War, the Soviet - Ukranian War / Genocide, the French-Algerian War, the Khmer Rouge Genocide and subsequent invasion by Vietnam, the Sinio-Vietnamese War right after that, the Japanese-Manchurian War, the Yugoslavian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam wars (French and American), and any number of massive wars in Africa... and on and on.


I googled "war deaths by century" and got these two charts.

*China, as others pointed out, seems to go through a titanic mass slaughter every hundred years or so, but China is arguably the closest thing to a modern State most of the world had going that far back. And of course both Ghenghiz Khan and Tamarlane made quite a notch in the human population. Enough to make forests grow ...

With regard to crime, you could also argue that Pinker is cherry picking certain areas of the world which are rich and sitting at the pinnacle of military and political power, while ignoring much larger parts of the world which are poorer (i.e the Third World). I can guarantee you that Kinshasa Nigeria, Juarez Mexico, or for that matter, Naples Italy are not substantially less violent today than the average Medieval Town of the 15th Century.

You don't think poor people got killed during the middle ages? They got killed in far greater numbers than the higher classes. Often, the higher classes could kill them with impunity. And did.

Of course poor people were killed, I never said otherwise. But the difference between now and then is that wealthy and middle class people killed each other frequently as well, which has now changed. Murder is very rare in the above $100,000 annual income bracket today, outside of the cocaine business.

However it is a myth that even the highest aristocracy could kill with impunity, even poor people. Many of the most powerful princes and Kings of Europe lost their lives trying to subjugate peasants in the Middle Ages, I'd be glad to cite a bunch of examples if you like.

Wars are more large scale, but they're also a lot more rare. The two world wars notwithstanding, for most of the 20th century,

See above

all of Europe has been at peace, and it might well be the first century where this has been the case.

Disagree wholeheartedly. Europe was peaceful in the second half of the 20th Century because it was A) busy recovering from the massive, unprecedented devastation of World War II, and because it was occupied by the Armies of the United States and the Soviet Union as part of the uneasy heavily armed truce which came out of that war and was known as the Cold War, reinforced by the mind-numbing threat of utter nuclear annihilation. Very shortly after the Cold War ended a very nasty ethnic civil war and genocide broke out in the Balkans, which has still not entirely been settled (Kosovo is still rather a tense place).

Historically, large wars in Europe have happened every 50-60 years since the advent of the modern State, in 1648. I hope we won't see any more of them, but I think it would be naive to assume we never will again.

G

[Straybow]

For the Mongol invasions as much as 17.1% of the world's population were killed (on the other hand that conflict lasted two and a half centuries).

Yes, that would be akin to totaling up all the casualties of European/Russian war and resulting famines/epidemics from the Napoleonic onward and calling it "European conquests," then comparing the total casualties in one throw as a percentage... See? Merely adding the wars in the list gets us up to 7.3% by comparison with the WW2 figures. And I've ignored the European and Russian conquests in Asia and Africa during the same period, those should surely be included in European conquests. Then we add in all the "internal" conflicts like Stalin's purges and genocide, the figure climbs upwards.

No, if you aren't going to break the Mongol invasions down into stages historically, do it empirically by recognizing that every time the emperor died all the generals and nobles were recalled until the new emperor was crowned and established. If that averaged once every forty years (probably too long, but I can't be arsed to look up all those silly Mongol emperors) then divide the Mongol figures into 6 tranches of 5-10 million. Now we're down to a dynastic average of 1.25%-2.85% of world pop per emperor.