Got a Real-World Weapon or Armor Question? Mk. XIV

[AMFV]

Horses aren't going to be any use in the city, any cavalry should either stay outside the city to secure the supply train, or they should dismount and serve as heavy infantry if you have more than are needed for those tasks.

Archers wouldn't be much use either. They would mostly be restricted to strong points, mostly the walls, towers, and any tall buildings such as churches. They wouldn't be able to support ground troops, since the narrow buildings and overhangs would prevent them from hitting anyone further than the street below them, if that. Instead, they would serve to deny specific areas and a counter to enemy archers trying to do the same. They might take some potshots when they get the chance, but probably won't be much use overall.

The real fighting will happen in the streets, and it'll be between small groups of infantry fighting building-to-building. Unless one side has far superior forces, expect the fighting to drag on for days, if not weeks or even months. I'd suggest looking at the kind of fighting that happened in Stalingrad if you want to know what it'd be like.

Which is generally why both sides try to avoid that sort of fighting as much as possible, either by driving the defenders out (the flood method, or with artillery) or lowering their morale till they surrender. Usually that sort of battle isn't any good for anybody.

[Brother Oni]

Oni: Oh right, you'll be thinking of stabbing from a distance. I really advise against that. If you're going to use a knife: Get very close, grab them, then turn them into mess you'll probably have nightmares about for the rest of your life. Stabs and cuts from a distance are not conductive to surviving, they'll end up with both you and your attacker being lightly wounded and bleeding out (and you'll have multiple attackers). I'm not experienced with how cutting out goes when stabbing at a distance..

Except I wasn't talking about a knife, I was talking about the pugio that Galloglaich mentioned and by extension, other short swords like the gladius.

Whether you'd twist with a knife depends very much on its construction - kitchen knives are likely to snap if you tried it with them.
Other aspects of knife fighting have already been covered, the primary one being don't get into a knife fight in the first place.

[Mr. Mask]

The pugio can be considered a knife. The line between knife and short sword is fuzzy, mainly relying on how the blade is balanced (if weighted correctly, a knife or short sword works well enough at range).

With a sword or short sword, the reason to not cut out is inability or armour.

Avoiding muggers is indeed much better than having knife-based exchanges.

[AgentPaper]

Whether you'd twist with a knife depends very much on its construction - kitchen knives are likely to snap if you tried it with them.

Er, no, that would not cause a kitchen knife to snap. Or cause it any kind of harm whatsoever.

[Brother Oni]

Er, no, that would not cause a kitchen knife to snap. Or cause it any kind of harm whatsoever.

Hmm, the one I had must have been damaged then, or it possibly got stuck between a pair of ribs.

[Galloglaich]

There is a really good, vivid, detailed and extended account of urban combat in Bernal Diaz fantastic Conquest of New Spain, especially during their retreat from Tenochtitlan. It seems to follow the pattern of most of these types of fights I've read about in that rocks and in this case, roof tiles, were often some of the most important weapons.



This battle was also unusual in that it was partly a naval battle - the crusaders had made some 'schooners' which were sailing around this big lake and providing valuable fire support (they had a few small cannon and arquebus, and some crossbows on them) and in turn being attacked and ambushed by fleets of canoes and traps like with spikes in the water and so on. I don't think Cortez and his crew would have made it out of the city without their support, as they were so outnumbered.

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In the account you'll notice the use of large shields (I think in particular when they tried to assault one of the pyramids) which is also typical- even after shields had largely declined in use in the open battlefield in the 14th and 15th Centuries you still see them quite commonly displayed in depictions of sieges.

There is a big difference from fighting in a city or town vs. attacking a city or town. There are also some pretty vivid descriptions of the latter in Jan Dlugosz as well. I have transcribed a few somewhere and if I can find them I'll post here. I remember in one where the attackers (Silesians fighting for the Hungarian warlord Jan Hunyadi if I remember right) tried to set a city on fire but were driven away by the defenders (town militia) and the fire was put out; in another attack on Wroclaw in the 15th Century the attackers initially overwhelmed the defenders who held up in a citadel, but later used hidden sortie tunnels to harass the invaders and eventually caused panic among them and they left in disarray.

The citadel was also a very common feature of medieval towns and cities, they would have a citadel, what the Greeks called an acropolis or the Russians call a kremlin, and in other places was just called the castle - like Prague castle) in which to retreat during a major invasion.

Later when the city walls were heavily improved the castle was sometimes destroyed to prevent rulers from using it as a fort in internal fights or civil wars within the town.



Firearms were early-on a major element of siege warfare of all types, especially in both defending and attacking towns since even the earliest most primitive firearms were effective in that role (where you could take your time to reload behind cover, basically). The Mongols used fire-lances in their initial invasion of central Europe in 1241, and they were probably used to defeat them in Krakow in 1280, and they were used to spectacular effect to break the back of a huge attack on Moscow in 1380.

G

[Mr. Mask]

Brother: Tests on a carcass?

Kitchen knives these days are usually pretty lousy, sub-par for combat.

[Brother Oni]

Brother: Tests on a carcass?

Kitchen work, meat preparation.

[warty goblin]

Knives are designed to cut, not to pry. Twisting seems a generally sub-optimal use of the weapon from a design point of view. Also in terms of leverage, since you've only got the grip to provide torque, while the victim's flesh has the entire width of the blade to do so. It also just seems slower than retracting the blade while cutting and stabbing the guy again, which gives more opportunity to sever something of mortal import.

[Spiryt]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I honestly can't see how archers would be 'unimportant' in town setting....

With your 'stereotypical' Medieval architecture, every single house could really be little fortress, a lot of spaces to lay crossbow at, and pull the trigger...

Particularly while defending.

Archery as in 'mass of guys firing volleys' would be limited indeed, or perhaps bows in general, but crossbows/samostrzałs/arbalests/what you call it would thrive.

After all, buildings in the middle of the towns often had arrow slits as well. At least if they were fortified places.

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Still preserved arrow slits on the inside of the gate - I believe. Also in Gdańsk.

[Galloglaich]

Makes me think of this old 15th Century 'map' of the German / Swiss town of Rottweil (a town with a lot of butchers, home of the Rottweiler dog). If you look closely you can see some guys pointing crossbows out of the window of houses in the town. Tough folks in that place...



(larger image here:)

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... which is part of why that town managed to stay independent for 500 years

G

[AgentPaper]

Makes me think of this old 15th Century 'map' of the German / Swiss town of Rottweil (a town with a lot of butchers, home of the Rottweiler dog). If you look closely you can see some guys pointing crossbows out of the window of houses in the town. Tough folks in that place...

I only see two of them, and both seem to be fairly clearly on the outskirts of the town, pointing outwards.

@Spiryt:

That specific building looks like it's designed to be defended with bows/crossbows, but that kind of building was by no means the norm. From the looks of it, I assume that it's a minor noble's residence. Most buildings would be made of wood, have much larger windows, and would be jam-packed against each other with very narrow streets running between them.

Depending on the city (and the location in the city, for that matter), the streets might be as little as 5-10 feet wide, and would be very curvy and snaky, which would make it impossible to shoot at someone from more than 20-50 feet away. And that's assuming that the soldiers even bother to use the streets at all, and don't just break down a few walls and/or attack out of a side-street where you can't see them until they're on top of you.

Archers would certainly still have their uses, defending specific fortified areas, especially stone buildings where you can tear/burn down the surrounding structures, to keep the roofs clear, to fend off enemy archers with counter-fire, and to create designated "kill-zones" in the few places that do have a clear line-of-sight. However, the real fighting is always going to come down to the infantry.

[Galloglaich]

I only see two of them, and both seem to be fairly clearly on the outskirts of the town, pointing outwards.

That's because there are no enemies in the city yet...

@Spiryt:

That specific building looks like it's designed to be defended with bows/crossbows, but that kind of building was by no means the norm. From the looks of it, I assume that it's a minor noble's residence. Most buildings would be made of wood, have much larger windows, and would be jam-packed against each other with very narrow streets running between them.

How many medieval cities have you seen? Actually wood buildings in that time period aren't as common as you seem to think. I think there is a common misconception that medieval towns look like this pathetic cliché of Hollywood and video games



... when in fact, they actually looked like this (13th century clock tower in Bern, clock dates to the 15th century)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zytglogge


or this (old town square in Prague, mostly 15th Century):

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or this (St. Marks square in venice, from a 15th Century painting - 1496)



There are numerous intact medieval towns (scores of Czech and Swiss towns for example consist of almost fully intact 15th Century architecture) which are still medieval and most of the buildings are stone or the type of timber / masonry construction called fachtwerk



Many if not most homes of ordinary artisans were made of stone and the city council typically lived in fortified homes which would count as castles if they were in the countryside.

Guild houses also tended to be heavily fortified and included large armories for use in sieges.

For example this is the blacksmiths guild house in Zurich



This is the spice merchants guild hall, also in Zurich



Both of those buildings are from the 15th Century

Town halls from the same era also tended to be veritable castles, this is the town hall of Wroclaw, 15th Century



Churches, of which there were typically dozens in a town, were also fortified, like this 13th Century Church also in Wroclaw



and they also had towers all over the place like this one in Danzig / Gdansk (15th Century)



And huge municipal buildings like this 14th Century crane, also in Gdansk

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Depending on the city (and the location in the city, for that matter), the streets might be as little as 5-10 feet wide, and would be very curvy and snaky, which would make it impossible to shoot at someone from more than 20-50 feet away. And that's assuming that the soldiers even bother to use the streets at all, and don't just break down a few walls and/or attack out of a side-street where you can't see them until they're on top of you.

Breaking through city walls isn't exactly a simple matter, depending of course on the city. There were dozens of cities in Europe whose walls were never breached for many centuries in spite of numerous efforts.

There are also numerous accounts of battles within towns in which both bows and crossbows were extensively used by both sides. I remember one in Bruges between the Duke of Burgundy and his entourage vs. the town population which there is a first hand account that is transcribed somewhere.

I think missiles were of immense importance in medieval combat ... even down on the street when people were fighting with hand weapons the bows and crossbows remained prominent (as you can see here in this painting of civil strife in Bologna in the 14th Century ... not also the stone buildings)

G

[Spiryt]

That specific building looks like it's designed to be defended with bows/crossbows, but that kind of building was by no means the norm. From the looks of it, I assume that it's a minor noble's residence. Most buildings would be made of wood, have much larger windows, and would be jam-packed against each other with very narrow streets running between them.

Those are not 'residences' of any kind

Those are river gates of Danzig/Gdańsk. Made to control the traffic, both on the roads and on the water, and of course to provide fortification for numerous cases.

Part of defensive/control system, in short.

Depending on the city (and the location in the city, for that matter), the streets might be as little as 5-10 feet wide, and would be very curvy and snaky, which would make it impossible to shoot at someone from more than 20-50 feet away. And that's assuming that the soldiers even bother to use the streets at all, and don't just break down a few walls and/or attack out of a side-street where you can't see them until they're on top of you.

That's weird way to put it.

As mentioned above - resisdents/defenders, always are going to have advantage as far as 'breaking' and what else go, they know the place and can make preparations.

'Breaking down walls' is not exactly trivial with mines etc. and the question was about 'no gunpowder', so 'just' breaking stuff up is pretty much out of question.

Most buildings would be made of wood, have much larger windows, and would be jam-packed against each other with very narrow streets running between them.

more than 20-50 feet away

And this is kind of my point...

Archers packed in somehow hard to reach places, that are easy to hold closed, that can shoot you from very close distance.

From which crossbow/bows can be really effective - but on the open field, that distance would mean that archers are getting close to getting speared.

Wooden houses could still have 4 of more storeys - a lot of windows to shoot from, a lot of places to defend.

Wooden buildings could be sometimes easy to burn, of course, so if attacker didn't mind potential complete destruction, it was a danger, no doubt.

[Spiryt]

Actually wood buildings in that time period aren't as common as you seem to think. I think there is a common misconception that medieval towns look like this pathetic cliché of Hollywood and video games

(S)He actually has a point here - most of those pictures are, all in all, cities in their modern state, and the very centre of town.

In actual medieval/later periods huge portion of cities were still wooden, that's why fires were such a problem.


But, I fully agree - those weren't some wooden huts you could kick open.

Just wooden constructions.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...tnowy_2010.jpg

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[AgentPaper]

You guys seem to be talking specifically about defensive structures and the richer parts of town, such as government buildings and residences, town squares, and so n. The kind of medieval street that I'm talking about is something like The Shambles, where the streets are very narrow, the buildings overhand the street, and the buildings are made of wood. My impression is that this was by far the more common street in any kind of large medieval town such as London, whereas the large plazas, fortified structures, and so on that you describe would be the exception.

If you look at just the medieval buildings that have survived to the present day, then yeah you're going to see a ton of large stone buildings with not a lot around them, because that's the kind of building that lasts 500 years, whereas the small wood house tends to get torn down eventually because nobody cares as much about "Town Residence #4953" as they do about something significant like a guild house or church.

Edit: And no, you're not going to kick down the walls of most buildings, but give four burly men axes and it's not going to take long to carve yourself a path. Much harder if there's defenders on the other side of the wall trying to poke sticks at you while you do it, but I mostly meant it as a way to get close to the enemy without marching down the street, then once you're close enough you can charge the last 10-20 feet on your own.

[Galloglaich]

The types of houses you posted an image of Spyrit are what I referred to upthread as "the type of timber / masonry construction called fachtwerk" I think in Poland they call them "Prussian style" or something. But I know that in many Polish towns stone buildings were common (more on that in a second)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachwe...h.C3.A4user.29

A timber framed house is not the same thing as a wooden house. It's much sturdier and makes a better fort (at least, it was legally considered so back in those days, which is why their construction was restricted in some areas). In some towns even in the late medieval period (Moscow for example) wooden houses were still pretty common, but in most of the urbanized parts of Europe stone and timber framed brick houses had become the norm in most of the city.

As for the shambles and this notion this notion that all the wood houses were gone so only the big nice stone ones are left, you don't understand something really important about medieval towns. They were pretty well regulated, and shambles and abbatoires, like in your link, were typically forced to be outside of the town walls, because they were the origin of bad smells and townfolk believed bad smells caused disease (they weren't too far off on that actually since diseased or rotten things usually smell bad). This was the typical rule in scores of towns under German town law.

Furthermore, wooden houses in towns did tend to burn down - which is why they were replaced by increasingly sturdy materials such as stone and / or brick when the towns were rebuilt after they had burned or during defensive military upgrades of the town. This is why by the late medieval period most larger towns were mostly stone or brick. We have regulations from many towns which are very specific about how houses must be built and defensive considerations are top among these regulations. They also mandated the use of non-flammable roof tiles.

This becomes pretty clear when you look at contemporary maps of towns from this era like in the Nuremberg chronicles (1493)



As for this issue of the town square or major buildings, that is part of the story of town defense for one thing, for another, one of the reasons I asked about whether you had been to any medieval towns, is that it's very common in much of Europe that the entire original medieval part of the old city is preserved - this is particularly true in places like Czech and Switzerland as I mentioned upthread because they were never bombed or shelled in WW II (which is BY FAR the largest reason medieval town-houses were destroyed).

This section is typically called the Altstadt or "old town" in German towns (and towns which used to be partly German in what is now Poland and Czech and other Central European countries) and it's the biggest tourist draw in most of them. In addition they frequently also have one or more other very old municipalities which may be called something like the 'main town' or the 'old suburb' which also date back to medieval times. In most cases 90% or more of the buildings in these sections ARE the original 14th or 15th Century buildings. This is what the towns were made of.



There are also towns like Bruges in Flanders or the smaller towns of the Lusatian League which were essentially preserved in 15th Century form when political / economic conditions caused them to largely stagnate (at least in terms of architecture) in the early 16th Century, essentially preserving them as sort of Medieval museums. You'll see a LOT of very sturdy old stone houses in these towns.

As for Polish towns, some images from the Balthasar Behem Codex (1505)





G

[Galloglaich]

Notice the arrow slits and gun loop in that house on the left in that Balthasar Behem painting - that's from Krakow of course, which was a mixed German / Polish* city at that time.

G

* plus a substantial number of Italians, Hungarians, Scots, Lithanians, Armenians and others

[Thiel]

It's also worth noting that building timber was expensive whereas fieldstones and bricks weren't. Making wooden boards and beams was a specialized skill and it took a lot of man hours to make them before the Dutch invented the sawmill. Fieldstone was readily available across most of Europe. That's why the quintessential English cottage is made of stone and typically has a stone wall around the garden.

Clay was everywhere in Northern Europe as well and all it took to make bricks was a mould and a bit of summer sun. As far as I'm aware most Fecthwerk or bindingsværk as it's known in Denmark is made with clay bricks.

[Mr Beer]

Kitchen work, meat preparation.

That's your story and you're sticking to it ;)

[Brother Oni]

Furthermore, wooden houses in towns did tend to burn down - which is why they were replaced by increasingly sturdy materials such as stone and / or brick when the towns were rebuilt after they had burned or during defensive military upgrades of the town. This is why by the late medieval period most larger towns were mostly stone or brick. We have regulations from many towns which are very specific about how houses must be built and defensive considerations are top among these regulations. They also mandated the use of non-flammable roof tiles.

As an example of dramatic urban rebuilding after a fire, the Great Fire of London is hard to beat, and the rebuilding plans specifically mention sturdier buildings and wider streets to prevent another fire.

That said, not every town had the same ordinances and some streets inside towns were very narrow with overhanging buildings:

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Canterbury Cathedral can be seen in the background and the street sign indicates this was taken along the main street of the town, clearly marking it inside of town.

Note that in English towns, London especially, sanitation was nowhere near as good in continental cities and waste was typically dumped in open air sewers in the middle of the street, often by chucking it out of a first floor window: Look out below!.

That's your story and you're sticking to it ;)

I can neither confirm or deny any further details regarding the nature of the work or the source of the meat.

[Mike_G]

I think archery would be useful, particularly sniping from high windows. And yes, the ability to shoot through a narrow window at point blank range would be deadly.

But the massed flights of arrows from massed bowmen wouldn't really be as useful, simply because you don't have the space to deploy or the visibility to shoot long range.

But I never said archers wouldn't be quite nice to have.

If I had to fight in a city, I'd think Roman type heavy infantry would be a good idea. Men trained to fight in groups, but more flexible than a phalanx, good armor, trained to use the tortoise formation which would help with stones from above, the gladius is a nice versatile weapon for close quarters battle.

The natives always will have a big advantage in street fighting, but there's plenty of history o look at.

[fusilier]

(S)He actually has a point here - most of those pictures are, all in all, cities in their modern state, and the very centre of town.

In actual medieval/later periods huge portion of cities were still wooden, that's why fires were such a problem.


But, I fully agree - those weren't some wooden huts you could kick open.

Just wooden constructions.

Spiryt beat me to it. The issue is what has survived to this day is usually the stone or brick construction, and the wooden constructions have been more ephemeral. The general trend seems to have been towards more stone and brickwork as time progressed (and repeated fires cleared out the wooden buildings). A medieval city of the 1100s would have had a lot more wooden construction, than one from the 1400s. Of course there's always local variation, etc. I've seen a picture, from the 1400s or early 1500s, of a walled Italian town that had a wooden wall -- which surprised me. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I saw that . . .

[Galloglaich]

By the 14th Century very well built stone and brick houses were common in reasonably prosperous towns. By the 15th Century they were the norm in the older parts of the larger trading cities and the homes of ordinary citizens were as often as not made of stone. As others have mentioned, this was largely a process of the wooden houses being burned down and increasingly stringent regulations put in, as well as the mounting prosperity of the towns which tended to be growing rapidly especially in the period 1100-1300 and again 1350-1520.

Sawmills were around for a LONG time, they go back to Roman times. The saw mill was one of the many water powered machines that had become widespread in Europe thanks to the Cistercians and their dissemination of the overshot water wheel in the 10th-11th Centuries. There were also a lot of sawmills powered by windmills. By the so called 'high' middle ages they were all over the place. The reason houses weren't built of wood so much (with a few exceptions) definitely wasn't cost, they used to make tens of thousands of wooden barrels in fact to ship goods around the way we make shipping containers today. The main purpose of sawmills was probably ship-building actually.

Houses were of course made of wood too quit often, but especially in the countryside and in the smaller and less prosperous (and more provincial) towns.

Regarding sanitation and so on - most of the towns around Europe had pretty good sanitation given the technoloy level and throwing sewerage in the street like you always see in movies was a serious crime- in some towns (Gdansk for example) throwing sewage or garbage in the river they drank out of was punishable by death.

http://dolly.jorgensenweb.net/medievalsanitation.html

Stone gutters were common by the middle of the 13th Century, systems of water pipes that distributed water to fountains around the town were also common and are well documented in detail in several cities (we even have maps of the systems in a few towns). People typically used outhouses or 'privies' as they are usually referred to in Acadmia for bathrooms, much as they did in the 19th Century. Stone gutters (mainly for runoff water) and later underground sewers gradually began to be put into place starting in the 14th Century. Towns also had regular garbage removal and drain cleaning, and even cleaned out the latrines on a regular basis. As I mentioned before, messy or stinky businesses like abbatoires ansd skinning yards were forced to locate outside of town.

In fact in that map of Nuremberg I posted upthread the building in the lower right is the first known paper-mill set up north of the alps. It was forced to be set up downstream from the town and outside city walls due to the accompanying smell (if you have ever been around a paper mill you know what I mean)

The exceptions to the general rule on sanitation were the big Royal cities like London and Paris, and Moscow too I believe. London and Paris were two of the last two cities in Europe to get sewer systems suitable for their size- Paris had a small underground sewer in the 14th Century but the city had far outgrown it by the 15th. Most of the bones in the famous catacombs in Paris were created when they finally put in a modern sewer system in the 19th Century - the tunneling kept running into cemeteries and they had to put the bones somewhere.

Castles often had privies built into the walls so that whatever came out rained down on anyone stupid enough to stand beneath. The huge Teutonic Knights castle in Malbork famously has one like that. Some other castles were more civilized and had sewer systems and even flush toilets, which are first documented unequivocally in a book by an Arab alchemist in the 9th or 10th Century.

G

[Mr. Mask]

There are a variety of interesting kinds of sewer systems. One really is to throw the matter onto the streets and it gets trampled down. Eventually, the street level raises, and you can't even open your doors! You have to replace them. I think they might have had street sweepers to clean things up in some of those systems.

Another was a system where they have a hill or slope, so that the matter piles up into a cesspit, usually with trenches at the sides of the street for it to run down. Street sweepers were sometimes hired.

Another one was where they had cesspits inside buildings, with cases of the floor collapsing and people dying in the cesspits.

As G alluded to, some castles allowed the matter to pile up in an area near the wall, and a bung collector would come to remove the mess.

[Galloglaich]

In most of the Central European towns under German town law, which is something like 200 of the largest cities, the way of dealing with this was pretty systematic. Basically they had privies in the back courtyard, these would be cleaned out periodically. City garbage was carted away, some was burned outside the town walls, some was fed to animals like pigs and goats, also outside the town walls.

The towns also paid to have the gutters repaired and cleaned out on a regular basis, and the gutters drained into a water way which was not used for drinking water - great care was taken not to contaminate the sources used for drinking. As I mentioned already, the law in Gdansk / Danzig was that you would be executed if you were caught polluting their canals that brought in the drinking water. They even sealed up the windows overlooking one of these canals to prevent people from throwing garbage in it.

The link I posted upthread has a bunch of detailed papers on all of this kind of stuff.

In northern Italy most of the towns were if anything more fastidious than the German towns were. Generally speaking, towns in the US in the 19th Century were much filthier than Medieval towns were.

As far as I know the famous cases of floors collapsing and people falling into cess pits was only in castles out in the countryside, and mostly before the 14th Century. I think some English Prince died that way.

G

[Mr. Mask]

Mm. I just wanted to mention some of the systems I've heard before, since I find the different methods interesting.

Actually, on the subject of outside the walls, how much of the town was outside the walls? That is to say, how many homes and shops would you find outside the walls (most of my knowledge of this subject is pretty ancient)?

[Matthew]

If you score a direct hit with a couched lance, strength doesn't come into it, it's the weight of the horse, the speed you're moving at, and where you hit them that matters. A warhorse charging at full speed that hits you square is going to do some serious damage, even if the armor can technically survive it. You don't need to pierce armor to deal damage through it, after all.

A sufficiently strong man with a decent sword isn't going to do as well as the couched lance, but it could still cause some injury if you hit them just right and your weapon is fairly strong. The system may also be representing you defeating the armor through other means, such as hitting into joints or other vulnerable areas.

Apparently, strength is hugely important for the couched lance. It is not a simple matter of the energy from the horse being transferred through the man and lance to the target. Here is an interesting article on the subject: Saddle, Lance and Stirrup.

Cavalry lose their advantage. horses can be ambushed from doors and windows, hit from above and lured into alleys where they can't maneuver. It's easy to hide caltrops or tripwires in dark alleys and lame the mounts.

Famously, or infamously, the brother of Louis IX led the flower of his cavalry into an urban environment pursuing some enemies on the seventh crusade. The result was predictably bad, with the whole force being annihilated. Generally speaking, the crusades have a fair number of interesting urban combat narratives, but as often as not it is just indiscriminate slaughter once the enemy are inside. Archbishop William of Tyre, a pro crusade fellow himself, gives some pretty harrowing descriptions of what went on once Antioch and Jerusalem were breached. He neither revels in it nor flinches from the brutal details.

[Galloglaich]

It's actually a good question - the answer is it varied and changed over time.

Typically what happened was that when the original town got a charter and / or permission to make their walls (which was a big deal, since having functional walls meant de-facto independence in many cases) they would have a certain area surveyed, and the town, officially, was within that area. Sometimes this would be expanded but quite often this was the original town and it stayed that way. The really tricky bit is that the authority of the town charter technically only extended to the limit of the walls.

So other people would begin to gather outside the walls and build houses. In practice, the town controlled this area too, sometimes a vast region around the town called the feldmark. But sometimes rival powers controlled the territory outside the town. So you get a second municipality under a different charter. For example, in Krakow, the King of Poland and nobility were annoyed at the town burghers, but they needed the town due to it's economic and military value. So the King founded a second town, named after himself, right outside of Krakow.



So if you look at this 15h Century map of Krakow, also from the Nuremberg Chronicle, what you are actually looking at is three municipalities -plus another entity (the castle). You see on the map it says Cracovia, then on the other side of the river (on an island) it says Casmirus, and then in the lower right it says Clepardia. Casimiers is Kazimierz, the town built by Casimir III as a counterweight to Krakow (this didn't actually work for that purpose but it's another story). Clepardia I think was another municipality. All three were under slightly different town charters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz

Now Krakow was in an area which was quite dangerous. Case in point, they got their walls because they held out in their citadel in a siege by Knights who were trying to overthrow the local Duke (Leszek the Black). Krakow remained loyal and he left his family in the care of it's citizens, and was able to return with an army and drive off his enemies. The duke in gratitude granted them the right to build the walls... and this was very lucky indeed for Krakow because 4 years later the Mongol Horde launched their third major invasion of Poland. The first two times Krakow had been burned, this time due to the walls, Krakow was saved and the rest of Poland suffered.

Some of these walls were preserved they are pretty amazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Florian%27s_Gate

Needless to say any buildings outside the walls at that point were wiped out. Regardless, Free cities like Krakow didn't necessarily tolerate just random buildings clustered outside of their gates, since it could be a problem for a variety of reasons, but if someone like the king pushed, they had to tolerate it.

In other zones powerful abbeys or churches might have territories right outside of the town, and these sometimes grew into new municipalities in their own right. And those had different mayors, different city councils and might be under their own (different) town charter, which specified details of the town layout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...aw#Town_layout

G

[Kaww]

1) Can a repaired weapon be as good as it was when it was first forged?
2) Can a repaired weapon be better than it was when it was first forged?
3) Does reforging a weapon mean you first have to destroy it?
4) Can a reforged weapon be as good as it was when it was first forged?
5) Can a reforged weapon be better than it was when it was first forged?

Also, does the smith that's doing the reparation/reforging have to be more skilled than the original smith?