Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXIV

[Vinyadan]

Did they have an equivalent official to the Roman censors actively looking to remove people from classes they no longer qualified for? More pertinently, even if they did, were they immune to political pressures from impoverished, but still influential families staying their hand?

I think the reality is that mobility would be stymied, both by people working not to fall from their traditional class, but also those higher up the ladder trying to keep those below them down.

I wanted to go back to this, because I think it's interesting. The Greek word for census was timema, and Athens had no censor-like magistrature. Instead, the populace essentially kept watch (which probably wasn't very effective). If someone who lived like a rich man didn't pay what rich people normally had to pay, another citizen could spot the incongruity and start a legal process against him. During this process, there would be an attempt to determine the timema of this person, and have him pay his obligations to the city accordingly.

With the liturgies, things could get weird. These were taxes reserved for the absolutely most wealthy. They comprised payment for the theater festivals, as well as the price of arming triremes. Keeping a trireme manned for a year costed four times the hull, which was given by the city for free (a modern comparison I read recently assumed a price of 4 million £ for the liturgy).
If a citizen thought that he had been ordered to pay, while someone richer than him had been spared the tax, he could start a legal process to get the other person to pay instead of him. If the other one refused, the accuser could request to swap their possessions. At this point, the accuser, now being the richer one, would pay the liturgy.
We know that some requests for antidoses were really made, although we don't know if it ever really came to the swap.

Now, what could be close to a censor was developed in the IV century. Liturgies were now given to groups of people, instead of the single richest. Each of these groups was called symmoria. We know that a diagrapheus was tasked with recording the timema of the people in each symmoria; every symmoria was to have a total of 15 talents. However, it isn't clear if there was a diagrapheus for each symmoria, or if there was a single one for all of them.

About the Athenian cavalry: the war horses could be property of the cavalrymen, or they could get one paid for by the city, if they had none at recruitment. The horseman would need a lot of money anyway: stable, stableman, field servant, horse for the servant, saddle and all needed to ride, and of course armour, spear, sword and javelins. The result was that the families and tutors of the young recruits could actually be against their very costly decision of serving in the cavalry. The cost of being a horseman even became a recurring joke in comedy. Around 430, the city started the gradual introduction of subventions: payment for the food of the horse, and a large initial loan to buy the necessary equipment. This loan would be given back at the end of service. The horses were examined yearly by the city; if they were ill-fed, the horseman would lose the subvention for the food. The city would replace a horse that had been killed in battle, but not one that died due to negligence.

Now, about the old discussion of how free the choice between cavalry and infantry was: it was free, as long as the city had all of the horsemen it needed. If this quota wasn't reached, then the city had lists, with the names of those who would be conscripted. If they were wealthy and able bodied, they had to serve as horsemen.
This also worked backwards. A horseman could be requested to serve as a hoplite in a certain expedition, and be processed if he didn't obey. Such a situation probably wasn't common, but, after 404/403, when Athens had suffered under the Thirty Tyrants, the hippeis were seen with great suspicion and hate for having supported them. So they were trampled over any time it was possible for some fifty years, and those who had served under the Thirty Tyrants lost their subventions.

Athens had 200 mounted archers. At least some of them were Athenian citizens. The son of the famous Alcibiades was one of them. I wanted to point this out, because I thought that they were mercenaries.

[Martin Greywolf]

Would monastery towns count as another category?

Not really. Once you start to look at the issued documents that gifted a land to a monastery, it becomes pretty clear that they had a very, very clear in mind: help establish a certain type of town. Usually, it was a market town - settle a region and you get this nice hill to build a place on and some taxes. It was IIRC Dominicans that were really, really good at this.

The benefit to the king or a noble was a land settled that didn't belong to a noble and therefore endangered him a touch less (though by no means not at all, bishops weren't above throwing on some chain mail and solving disputes mace to face), and it already had a pretty solid system of administration and keeping records. And also gave him some brownie points with the pope.

There are some monasteries that don't quite fit there, but those belong to isolationist orders almost exclusively, and therefore don't have towns spring up near them. I was at the ruins of one such place, and the closest town was 5 km in distance, about 600 meters in elevation and accessible by a gorge that had chains and ladders in the walls to make it accessible to general public without half of them ending up dead on the rocks. Other, safer routes were approximately five times longer.

[Clistenes]

IMO they sold the captives to the Europeans in exchange of materials used to make gunpowder/musket ball.

At least that's my very limited Sengoku knowledge have taught me.

Yes. As a matter of fact, Ieyasu Tokugawa asked the Spanish crown to stop the trade and return the slaves.

Japanese poorest people were used to abandon children they couldn't feed during times of famine, and to sell girls to brothels, so selling kids to foreigners rather than letting them starve to death in the forests or mountains may have be seen as a merciful alternative...

Asian slaves were in high demand in the Philippines. The trade of European and Native American slaves was illegal in the Spanish Empire, with a few exceptions (cannibals could be enslaved, as could non-christian prisioners of war, and sometimes Christian and/or European slaves could be bought from countries under Ottoman rule), because they were subjects of Christian Monarchies (of course, that law was broken very often; the Caribbean Tainos were enslaved to extinction despite the feeble attempts of the Spanish government to stop it... the Taino slaves were needed to extract gold, after all...).

It was illegal to enslave the Philippino natives too. They were considered subjects of the Spanish Crown too (the muslims from Mindanao, Palawan and Sulu who fought against the Spaniards weren't Spanish subjects and could be captured and enslaved).

As for African slaves, it was illegal to bring them to Philippines. During the reign of Philip II of Spain the Spanish government had already realized what a fukked-up society they had allowed to be created in America, and were disgusted by it (but again, they didn't try to reform it because they needed the money from the American colonies), so, in order to assuage his conscience, Philip II tried to make the Philippines a heavily religion-focused slave-free colony...

That means rich people in the Philippines who wanted to buy slaves had to turn to China, Japan and Southeast Asia...

[Vinyadan]

I like how he gave them his name.

"This is my plaaaaaaaace, everybody's happyyyyyyyyy..."

I mean, it's very interesting to see how the dichotomy between being a king and protector with certain duties towards his subjects and also being the head of something that looks a lot like an evil multinational played out.

[Vinyadan]

I would add education to the advantages of having a monastery. They often comprised schools, and could produce people fit for both the merchant's trade and bureaucracy and administration. Women could get an education there, too.

[Clistenes]

I like how he gave them his name.

"This is my plaaaaaaaace, everybody's happyyyyyyyyy..."

I mean, it's very interesting to see how the dichotomy between being a king and protector with certain duties towards his subjects and also being the head of something that looks a lot like an evil multinational played out.

Philip II's problem was that, from his point of view, it was crystal clear that he had been chosen by God to rule the world and reshape it according to Catholic doctrine: He had inherited a huge chunk of Europe and most of America plus a bunch of Asian and African settlements, the spice trade, more silver and gold that had ever been mined in all of Europe, more titles than all the other European kings combined, the best army and navy in the world (at least until the English and the Dutch produced a new generation of warships able to defeat the Spanish navy), subjects who would fanatically follow him to war against heretics and infidels, he had almost complete control of the Church within his territory, and he could order around the Popes most of the time...

It was plain to see that God wanted him to do His work on Earth... wasn't it? Why else would He give him all that?

So, when you honestly believe that you are God's own lieutenant, you just can't give up. You can't accept defeat. You can't accept loss. Not at all. Because, if you have God on your side, you just can't lose. You can only suffer setbacks, not defeat, and those setbacks are just trials you need to overcome in order to prove your resolution...

So Philip II just had to fight every fight. He couldn't say, strike a deal with the Protestants in the Low Countries, and allow them to choose their religion on their own in exchange for peace, or show his Austrian cousin the finger and refuse to help him fight his wars. Or give up on the costly fortresses on the North African coast. Or stop funding the missionary work in East Asia... He felt he had to take every challenge and that he was obliged to win...

But it was too much. He didn't have enough men, enough ships or enough money. He must have felt overwhelmend, against the ropes. Every defeat meant he was failing God as a servant...

So every day he had to face the Trolley Dilemma people around these forums love so much... should he stop evil and misdeeds even if in doing so he weakened his Empire and risked losing the war? Or should he allow those evil and misdeeds in order to keep the fight? He had to make sacrifices, and in his moral scales the European wars weighed a lot more than say the plight of the Peruvian peasants who were forced to leave their homes and go work in the silver mines of Potosí, because human beings are fated to suffer and die anyways, but the war against heretics was a war against Satan himself...

[Gnoman]

So I'm planning a Savage World's game where the PCs are WWI soldiers and while they are fighting a temporal rift opens up and dumps out a bunch of Nazis from an alternate future. In this future the SS, Gestapo and the Thule assassinate Hitler and put a puppet in charge. They then go on a bloody rampage fueled by Thule blood magic and wind up conquering the world.

What I'm wondering is, what would Nazis tech look like in the 60s? Also feel free to get a but silly cuz they are using Magitech.

There are three things important here.

1. Having anything we would recognize as "Nazi" surviving that long would be highly unlikely. That regime was fundamentally unstable, riddled with empire building, and would be almost guaranteed to erupt into civil war once the strongman in charge of it died.

2. Most Nazi equipment was, to put it bluntly, trash. Essentially, their military equipment (with a few major exceptions, the most famous of which include the Me-262, the Type-IX U-Boat, and Mauser 98K rifle) fell into one or two categories. The first category was workable gear that suffered from deep and fundamental flaws. The second category was deep and fundamental flaws with a bit of decent equipment stuck to it.

3. The 1960s were not that far ahead of WWII tech (with the obvious exception of nuclear weapons) OTL, that was with an ongoing arms race and cold war sputtering hot in places. Most small arms were just simple improvements on the previous models, armored vehicles were essentially scaled-up versions of the older ones, and even the aircraft were designs that the engineers of the 1940s would have understood immediately. There were a few new wrinkles with guided missiles, but even those had crude WWII analogs. In a setting where WWII ended in a final victory for the Reich, and where that insane regime somehow managed to hold together, there would be much less need for innovation.


In short, a significant amount of their gear would be nearly or completely identical to WWII stuff, another large portion would be "a drunken moron thought this was kool, unfortunately it was the drunken moron in charge of procurement", and a tiny sliver would be fairly high end. Of course, even WWII gear would be pretty dangerous in a WWI-era fight.

[wolflance]

Yes. As a matter of fact, Ieyasu Tokugawa asked the Spanish crown to stop the trade and return the slaves.

Japanese poorest people were used to abandon children they couldn't feed during times of famine, and to sell girls to brothels, so selling kids to foreigners rather than letting them starve to death in the forests or mountains may have be seen as a merciful alternative...

Asian slaves were in high demand in the Philippines. The trade of European and Native American slaves was illegal in the Spanish Empire, with a few exceptions (cannibals could be enslaved, as could non-christian prisioners of war, and sometimes Christian and/or European slaves could be bought from countries under Ottoman rule), because they were subjects of Christian Monarchies (of course, that law was broken very often; the Caribbean Tainos were enslaved to extinction despite the feeble attempts of the Spanish government to stop it... the Taino slaves were needed to extract gold, after all...).

It was illegal to enslave the Philippino natives too. They were considered subjects of the Spanish Crown too (the muslims from Mindanao, Palawan and Sulu who fought against the Spaniards weren't Spanish subjects and could be captured and enslaved).

As for African slaves, it was illegal to bring them to Philippines. During the reign of Philip II of Spain the Spanish government had already realized what a fukked-up society they had allowed to be created in America, and were disgusted by it (but again, they didn't try to reform it because they needed the money from the American colonies), so, in order to assuage his conscience, Philip II tried to make the Philippines a heavily religion-focused slave-free colony...

That means rich people in the Philippines who wanted to buy slaves had to turn to China, Japan and Southeast Asia...

I remember reading somewhere that there were as much as five hundred thousands women (modern estimate) sold to the Europeans (Portuguese) due to Japan's insane hunger for more gunpowder. I think that modern figure is a bit overblown, although it does illustrate that how brutal the war was, and how
serious the Japanese people were on the matter of getting their hands on more firearms.

Off topic, I came across this interesting article:
http://gunbai-militaryhistory.blogsp...e-shields.html

It appears that Japanese did use shield after all.

[Blackhawk748]

There are three things important here.

1. Having anything we would recognize as "Nazi" surviving that long would be highly unlikely. That regime was fundamentally unstable, riddled with empire building, and would be almost guaranteed to erupt into civil war once the strongman in charge of it died.

2. Most Nazi equipment was, to put it bluntly, trash. Essentially, their military equipment (with a few major exceptions, the most famous of which include the Me-262, the Type-IX U-Boat, and Mauser 98K rifle) fell into one or two categories. The first category was workable gear that suffered from deep and fundamental flaws. The second category was deep and fundamental flaws with a bit of decent equipment stuck to it.

3. The 1960s were not that far ahead of WWII tech (with the obvious exception of nuclear weapons) OTL, that was with an ongoing arms race and cold war sputtering hot in places. Most small arms were just simple improvements on the previous models, armored vehicles were essentially scaled-up versions of the older ones, and even the aircraft were designs that the engineers of the 1940s would have understood immediately. There were a few new wrinkles with guided missiles, but even those had crude WWII analogs. In a setting where WWII ended in a final victory for the Reich, and where that insane regime somehow managed to hold together, there would be much less need for innovation.


In short, a significant amount of their gear would be nearly or completely identical to WWII stuff, another large portion would be "a drunken moron thought this was kool, unfortunately it was the drunken moron in charge of procurement", and a tiny sliver would be fairly high end. Of course, even WWII gear would be pretty dangerous in a WWI-era fight.

I should probably give more info, though to be fair it was only a basic plan at the time of posting that has now become something.... else.

Anyway, the Nazis remain in control because they figured out this world hopping thing, mostly on accident, and are now running around conquering other world's. ATM they've conquered two world's that are much lower tech and are in the process of conquering a third world, one in which Germany won WWI. The resistance that will help the PCs is from here.

Also this setting is Pulp Fiction as hell, so don't dig to far

[Nargrakhan]

I remember reading somewhere that there were as much as five hundred thousands women (modern estimate) sold to the Europeans (Portuguese) due to Japan's insane hunger for more gunpowder. I think that modern figure is a bit overblown, although it does illustrate that how brutal the war was, and how
serious the Japanese people were on the matter of getting their hands on more firearms.

I don't recall reading about the Japanese trading thousands of slaves for firearms and gunpowder. Is there a source? I'm really curious about it.

The account I remember is Tanegashima buying two or three rifles from Portuguese traders. He hired the best blacksmiths in Japan to reproduce them, but Japan lacked the technology to replicate a certain screw. After a year of failure, he found another Portuguese trader to sell him the blueprints to a machine that could it.

The secret of gunpowder was purchased with the first set of rifles, and Tanegashima forced closely monitored Eta communities -- which Japan had no problem finding or exploiting -- to do the dirty work of it.

When Hideyosh invaded Korea at the twilight of the Senkogu era, he did so with 40,000 rifles and canon pieces. People seem to forget samurai used gunpowder weapons and recognized them as the ultimate fortification weapon. The legendary Miyamoto Musashi wrote about them, pointing out that until you get into close combat, the gun is going to kick your ass every time. Musashi wrote you can least see the arrow coming at you. The bullet? Not so much.

[Marcus Amakar]

Second, what exactly are you picturing "hide" armor as? Again, from earlier discussions, I know that a lot of the D&D named-stuff is pretty nonsensical. If it's just leather-but-thicker, there are issues with that. Historians actually know a lot less about leather armor than metal, because it tends to degrade much faster than metal. Modern tests have had mixed results (there are some cool videos on youtube) and the all-over leather suit as presented by Hollywood probably didn't exist, at least not in that time period. Leather has to get very thick, and therefor heavy, so it was quite early on in history that metallurgy produced metal armor that provided better protection at lighter weight, especially for critical areas such as the chest. Leather was still used frequently as an underlayer, or for areas like wrists and ankle-greaves, for joints, or in combination with other types of armor. Combining different materials for different areas that required different levels of protection was fairly common as I understand it.

Now, I'm definitely not saying you can't have leather in your games- I have it in mine and it's a classic fantasy trope, but I went with a method that uses a bit more in the way of abstraction. I've got 2 types of each "weight" or armor (light, medium, heavy), and then I say a lot of stuff is equivalent to another. For example, a solid breastplate over clothing might be "equivalent" to a suit of mail. Just something to think about.

Finally, I have concerns about your currency system. Imagine a society where the only denominations are $1, $10, and $100 bills, and minimum wage is about $1 per hour. Now imagine trying to pay wealthy people, like the CEO of a big company or Rock-star celebrities, in $100 bills. And imagine people trying to buy things like houses, fancy equipment, or sportscars all with hundred-dollar bills. Rich people would have to hire teams of servants just to cart their money around when they go shopping.

I know the 1:10:100 delineation is very popular because it's easy to do the math for, but you might want to consider other materials and/or other value of coinage. For example "Talent" was a unit of money (and also weight, but that's not the relevant bit) in ancient Sumeria and Babylon. A talent was worth 60 minas, and a mina was worth 60 shekels. Plus some sources record other coinage as fractions of a shekel. Also, modern precious-metal prices (are highly volatile, but anyway) have a much larger difference. Last time I checked, the approximate ratios of copper to silver to gold was in the range of 70-80 times as much, i.e. silver was ~75 times as much as copper, gold was ~75 times as much as silver. I don't know what it was historically (and coinage often had problems with debasement) but if you are trying to make your setting "realistic", then I think it's something important to keep in mind.


Edit: Here is my homebrew. There's a bunch of video-game style quality improvements that you're obviously not obligated to follow, and the prices are still based on 3.5's completly bjorked economy, but if you want to see what I did for the basic armor, there it is.

Thank you for the response.

Hide armour isn't leather but thicker in this; Hide armour is leather armour crafted from the hides of magical beasts. While it is thicker and more cumbersome than leather armour, this isn't what causes it to be more protective, it's a supernatural property of the hide.
That said, whilst it is more protective than light armours, a full suit of mail is still better armour; it's usually used by Druids who can't cast spells in metal armour.

The point about my currency system is actually really useful; I didn't look at it like that! How does this sound for a new system:
50 cp = 1 sp
50 sp = 1 gp
Unskilled labourer earns on average 10cp/day (and can save about 10sp a year)
Semi-skilled labourer earns on average 2sp/day (and can save about 3gp a year)
Skilled labourer earns on average 10sp/day (and can save about 20gp a year)

Cloth 10sp
Leather 25sp
Mail shirt 1gp
Hide 40sp
Full mail 3gp
Breastplate 7gp
Plated mail 12gp
Halfplate 25gp
Fullplate 40 gp
Light shield 10sp
Heavy shield 25sp

and for comparison, some weapons:

Spear 25sp
Longsword 4gp
Heavy crossbow 6gp

Thoughts?

[wolflance]

I don't recall reading about the Japanese trading thousands of slaves for firearms and gunpowder. Is there a source? I'm really curious about it.

The account I remember is Tanegashima buying two or three rifles from Portuguese traders. He hired the best blacksmiths in Japan to reproduce them, but Japan lacked the technology to replicate a certain screw. After a year of failure, he found another Portuguese trader to sell him the blueprints to a machine that could it.

The secret of gunpowder was purchased with the first set of rifles, and Tanegashima forced closely monitored Eta communities -- which Japan had no problem finding or exploiting -- to do the dirty work of it.

When Hideyosh invaded Korea at the twilight of the Senkogu era, he did so with 40,000 rifles and canon pieces. People seem to forget samurai used gunpowder weapons and recognized them as the ultimate fortification weapon. The legendary Miyamoto Musashi wrote about them, pointing out that until you get into close combat, the gun is going to kick your ass every time. Musashi wrote you can least see the arrow coming at you. The bullet? Not so much.

Their appetite for gunpowder precisely came from the adoption of matchlock. No, they knew the secret of making gunpowder, they just lacked the material for making them (and lead too, for that matter).

Japan does not produce saltpeter naturally, so the Japanese had to rely on European imports almost entirely (China produce saltpeter naturally and in abundance, but it had a trade ban in place due to Japanese pirates causing troubles). The secret of making saltpeter from poop/urine was apparently unknown to the Japanese until Hongan-ji Kennyo discovered them some time before 1570 (as his bitter enemy Oda Nobunaga monopolized saltpeter import). Even then, it was kept a military secret for a long time, and not until 1580s it became well-known.

So there's about 3~40 years time span that Japanese had to trade slaves etc. for gunpowder. Given how widespread firearm was during the later stage of Sengoku period, the demand must be mind-boggingly high, which drove the price even higher. It is said that at some point a single barrel of black powder could exchange for FIFTY female slaves.

(For comparison, Europeans discovered saltpeter farming around 1388, 121 years after Roger Bacon wrote down that gunpowder formula.)

[gkathellar]

Thank you for the response.

Hide armour isn't leather but thicker in this; Hide armour is leather armour crafted from the hides of magical beasts. While it is thicker and more cumbersome than leather armour, this isn't what causes it to be more protective, it's a supernatural property of the hide.
That said, whilst it is more protective than light armours, a full suit of mail is still better armour; it's usually used by Druids who can't cast spells in metal armour.

The point about my currency system is actually really useful; I didn't look at it like that! How does this sound for a new system:
50 cp = 1 sp
50 sp = 1 gp
Unskilled labourer earns on average 10cp/day (and can save about 10sp a year)
Semi-skilled labourer earns on average 2sp/day (and can save about 3gp a year)
Skilled labourer earns on average 10sp/day (and can save about 20gp a year)

Cloth 10sp
Leather 25sp
Mail shirt 1gp
Hide 40sp
Full mail 3gp
Breastplate 7gp
Plated mail 12gp
Halfplate 25gp
Fullplate 40 gp
Light shield 10sp
Heavy shield 25sp

and for comparison, some weapons:

Spear 25sp
Longsword 4gp
Heavy crossbow 6gp

Thoughts?

It's worth bearing in mind that leather is hide that's been treated so that it smells better and is relatively easy to take care of. The difference is one of thickness and toughness, not really one of composition - skin being skin, as it were. If the idea is that the leather is strengthened by magic, it might make sense to treat it as a material, rather than a discrete type of armor. That way you can rationalize the lower value along a straight metric. There was a good photo of a suit of leather plate posted upthread, easily as bulky as a steel suit, which may be somewhat illustrative.

[Deepbluediver]

There was a good photo of a suit of leather plate posted upthread, easily as bulky as a steel suit, which may be somewhat illustrative.

It's in this post here. I don't know how effective something like that would be, but it is a seriously cool picture.

[snowblizz]

I should probably give more info, though to be fair it was only a basic plan at the time of posting that has now become something.... else.

Anyway, the Nazis remain in control because they figured out this world hopping thing, mostly on accident, and are now running around conquering other world's. ATM they've conquered two world's that are much lower tech and are in the process of conquering a third world, one in which Germany won WWI. The resistance that will help the PCs is from here.

Also this setting is Pulp Fiction as hell, so don't dig to far

You should look into the Wolfenstein line of pc games. They are filled with this stuff.

And more particularly, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is set in a 1961s America where the Nazis won. That has to be relevant.

[Nargrakhan]

Their appetite for gunpowder precisely came from the adoption of matchlock. No, they knew the secret of making gunpowder, they just lacked the material for making them (and lead too, for that matter).

Japan does not produce saltpeter naturally, so the Japanese had to rely on European imports almost entirely (China produce saltpeter naturally and in abundance, but it had a trade ban in place due to Japanese pirates causing troubles). The secret of making saltpeter from poop/urine was apparently unknown to the Japanese until Hongan-ji Kennyo discovered them some time before 1570 (as his bitter enemy Oda Nobunaga monopolized saltpeter import). Even then, it was kept a military secret for a long time, and not until 1580s it became well-known.

So there's about 3~40 years time span that Japanese had to trade slaves etc. for gunpowder. Given how widespread firearm was during the later stage of Sengoku period, the demand must be mind-boggingly high, which drove the price even higher. It is said that at some point a single barrel of black powder could exchange for FIFTY female slaves.

(For comparison, Europeans discovered saltpeter farming around 1388, 121 years after Roger Bacon wrote down that gunpowder formula.)

Thank you. Your post gave me the info I needed to find more info about it.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ポルトガルの奴隷貿易

Always learning something new on this forum.

[Blackhawk748]

You should look into the Wolfenstein line of pc games. They are filled with this stuff.

And more particularly, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is set in a 1961s America where the Nazis won. That has to be relevant.

I shall, the only Wolfenstein i've played was Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein the New Order

[Kiero]

I wanted to go back to this, because I think it's interesting. The Greek word for census was timema, and Athens had no censor-like magistrature. Instead, the populace essentially kept watch (which probably wasn't very effective). If someone who lived like a rich man didn't pay what rich people normally had to pay, another citizen could spot the incongruity and start a legal process against him. During this process, there would be an attempt to determine the timema of this person, and have him pay his obligations to the city accordingly.

With the liturgies, things could get weird. These were taxes reserved for the absolutely most wealthy. They comprised payment for the theater festivals, as well as the price of arming triremes. Keeping a trireme manned for a year costed four times the hull, which was given by the city for free (a modern comparison I read recently assumed a price of 4 million £ for the liturgy).
If a citizen thought that he had been ordered to pay, while someone richer than him had been spared the tax, he could start a legal process to get the other person to pay instead of him. If the other one refused, the accuser could request to swap their possessions. At this point, the accuser, now being the richer one, would pay the liturgy.
We know that some requests for antidoses were really made, although we don't know if it ever really came to the swap.

Now, what could be close to a censor was developed in the IV century. Liturgies were now given to groups of people, instead of the single richest. Each of these groups was called symmoria. We know that a diagrapheus was tasked with recording the timema of the people in each symmoria; every symmoria was to have a total of 15 talents. However, it isn't clear if there was a diagrapheus for each symmoria, or if there was a single one for all of them.

Agreed, this is an interesting discussion, and possibly a little tangential from the core purpose of the thread since we're talking about society.

I think there's always a danger of reading ancient laws and assuming they were how things went. Societies of the past were hilariously corrupt by our standards, cronyism and graft were the order of the day, the establishment was hugely powerful and often unassailable from outside their own set. That a small number of affluent individuals and their families were able to more than hold their own against the overwhelming majority (in numbers) of the commons demonstrates that.

Laws were a tool for the elites to extend and maintain their power, along with keeping those below them at bay. Liturgies had huge potential for abuse by stacking the assemblies that voted for them with your supporters, and bribing/intimidating them. That meant prestigious liturgies that brought acclaim to your family could be diverted your way, and expensive ones that could be financially ruinous could be placed on your rivals.

Theoretically a citizen could launch a suit against someone wealthy, but who would they get to represent them? More pertinently, would they even be able to get a court to hear their case without the wealthier/more connected accused suborning the judges/jurors? Even if they somehow managed to get a judgement, how would they enforce it? Many ancient societies depended entirely on the social structure via patronage/clientage to maintain order; the way the little person got things done was to enlist their patron to do it on their behalf. But if your patron is allied to the accused and doesn't want to upset their relations, they're going to be motivated to squash your suit.

Again with the diagrapheus - there's huge scope for that person to be corrupted or otherwise co-opted by the people with the most resources to use them to their advantage. That's if it wasn't simply used as a stepping-stone to more senior positions by young aristocrats, or as a retirement sinecure by older ones (I'm not sure who would hold that office).

About the Athenian cavalry: the war horses could be property of the cavalrymen, or they could get one paid for by the city, if they had none at recruitment. The horseman would need a lot of money anyway: stable, stableman, field servant, horse for the servant, saddle and all needed to ride, and of course armour, spear, sword and javelins. The result was that the families and tutors of the young recruits could actually be against their very costly decision of serving in the cavalry. The cost of being a horseman even became a recurring joke in comedy. Around 430, the city started the gradual introduction of subventions: payment for the food of the horse, and a large initial loan to buy the necessary equipment. This loan would be given back at the end of service. The horses were examined yearly by the city; if they were ill-fed, the horseman would lose the subvention for the food. The city would replace a horse that had been killed in battle, but not one that died due to negligence.

Now, about the old discussion of how free the choice between cavalry and infantry was: it was free, as long as the city had all of the horsemen it needed. If this quota wasn't reached, then the city had lists, with the names of those who would be conscripted. If they were wealthy and able bodied, they had to serve as horsemen.
This also worked backwards. A horseman could be requested to serve as a hoplite in a certain expedition, and be processed if he didn't obey. Such a situation probably wasn't common, but, after 404/403, when Athens had suffered under the Thirty Tyrants, the hippeis were seen with great suspicion and hate for having supported them. So they were trampled over any time it was possible for some fifty years, and those who had served under the Thirty Tyrants lost their subventions.

Athens had 200 mounted archers. At least some of them were Athenian citizens. The son of the famous Alcibiades was one of them. I wanted to point this out, because I thought that they were mercenaries.

As above, I read that as the ideal which might in reality be very different. Could an unpopular family secure a subvention on terms that wouldn't be crippling, for example? I'd also note one horse doesn't really make a cavalryman. Maybe in Greek warfare, where cavalry isn't all that important, they could get away with that. But two was the minimum, if you weren't to ride a horse to death. For steppe cultures, they didn't consider a warrior to be a rider unless they had at least four mounts.

Same again the business of being "made" to serve as cavalry. I'd guarantee the most influential families got things their own way. If they wanted to serve as cavalry, they would; if they didn't, it would become someone else's problem.

[Yora]

Interesting find I made: Obstacle course run in full plate, modern soldier kit, and firefighter gear.

I got a recommendation request that someone here might be able to help with. Is there any good source on the history of the Baltic Sea and Eastern Europe region in the Late Middle Ages? I'm particularly interested in the Kalmar Union, Novgorod Republic, and Lithuania.

[Deepbluediver]

Interesting find I made: Obstacle course run in full plate, modern soldier kit, and firefighter gear.

Cool video. I wouldn't have been looking for this if someone else hadn't just brought it up, but one thing it makes apparent is how hard it is to run with plate-armor on your legs in a way that static pictures don't show as obviously. If you didn't have a horse to ride, or thought you might be dismounting it often, some soldiers opted to replace that part of their gear with something more flexible. (best picture I could find on short notice, sorry; there's a better one upthread)

[Yora]

Someone once ran a test on the energy consumption (by measuring exhaled CO2) for running in plate armor. And running without the leg protection on made a huge difference. All the upper body armor parts are moving at a quite steady velocity as you run, and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. It's quite energy efficient and you only have to support the weight and push against air resistance.
It's a completely different situation with the feet, where you are constantly using energy to accelerate and decelerate your feet with all the metal that hangs on them. I don't remember the exact amount, but the amount of additional energy used by having the greaves on was very significant.

As I mentioned a few days back, the most common inury at the Battle of Visby are severe leg and ankle injuries. Numbers I've come across are 70% of all wounds visible on bones, and leg injuries found on 40% of all bodies. The Danish knights seem to have been trained to go for the legs so it would have been a known weakness in the defense. Greaves don't seem like terribly complicated parts of an armor (and you could even make a boot of plates quite easily), so I don't think that leg protection was too expensive to afford. More likely it was seen as not being worth the trouble you get from wearing it.

[Mike_G]

If you are fighting sword and shield, the leg is great target. Feint at his head to make him raise the shield, then hack his near leg. His own shield will block some of his field of vision and make it harder for him to see you change your angle fo attack and do something about it.

And, critically, you have your own shield to defend against his counter. If you are fighting with a single weapon and you go low, he can just counterstrike at your head. He may limp home, but at least he'll have the chance. Double hits are a big concern fighting with a single sword each.

[Galloglaich]

Interesting find I made: Obstacle course run in full plate, modern soldier kit, and firefighter gear.

I got a recommendation request that someone here might be able to help with. Is there any good source on the history of the Baltic Sea and Eastern Europe region in the Late Middle Ages? I'm particularly interested in the Kalmar Union, Novgorod Republic, and Lithuania.

Dude, you are pulling my leg, right?

[snowblizz]

I got a recommendation request that someone here might be able to help with. Is there any good source on the history of the Baltic Sea and Eastern Europe region in the Late Middle Ages? I'm particularly interested in the Kalmar Union, Novgorod Republic, and Lithuania.

There's this guy who posts a lot to this thrtead I could swear had put together something like that, almost a Codex of Medieaval Baltic. If only I could remember the name.

Dude, you are pulling my leg, right?

Maybe G rembers who it was.

[Max_Killjoy]

There's this guy who posts a lot to this thread I could swear had put together something like that, almost a Codex of Medieval Baltic. If only I could remember the name.


Maybe G rembers who it was.

I ordered that book, and it's great.

[Yora]

While it's called Codex Guide to the medieval Baltic, it actually is about 1450s Danzig. Not what I am actually looking for. I want to know what is going on in Denmark, Sweden, Novgorod, and Lithuania 200 years earlier.

[wolflance]

If you are fighting sword and shield, the leg is great target. Feint at his head to make him raise the shield, then hack his near leg. His own shield will block some of his field of vision and make it harder for him to see you change your angle fo attack and do something about it.

And, critically, you have your own shield to defend against his counter. If you are fighting with a single weapon and you go low, he can just counterstrike at your head. He may limp home, but at least he'll have the chance. Double hits are a big concern fighting with a single sword each.

Does this apply to all shields? Won't a large kite shield protect the legs already?

[Knaight]

Does this apply to all shields? Won't a large kite shield protect the legs already?

Somewhat, yes. Broadly speaking though shields are rarely large enough to simultaneously protect the head and the lower legs well, which can make feinting for one then the other particularly effective.

Sword and shield on both sides is one circumstance where this applies, but it's hardly the only one - spear against sword and shield is another major case, particularly if the spear has a long enough tip to cut with. Thrusting to the face then switching to a leg cut can be tricky to defend against, and even if you do it tends to leave you crouched deeply enough that a good spear fighter can take a step back.

With spear I use it mostly in two specific situations. One is at fairly long range, particularly against people building up speed; the change in reach between the high and low angle can often compensate for them closing a bit and gives two good opportunities to strike while also working well for getting to the side of their closing (the shield getting in the way of vision really helps here.

The other is once people are closer than I'd like them to be. Choking up heavily on the spear tends to line it up well for a high thrust (neck, face), and again the difference in angle lines up a good cut to the leg, which also puts your spear in a decent position to try and block while attempting to regain distance. It's still not a great situation to be in, but that particular maneuver has gotten me out of it a fair few times.

[Martin Greywolf]

Somewhat, yes. Broadly speaking though shields are rarely large enough to simultaneously protect the head and the lower legs well, which can make feinting for one then the other particularly effective.

This is a big modern artifact, if you ask me. Historically, I doubt many people bothered with blocking most blows to the head that much for one simple reason - helmets work really, really well. Lean into that blow and it'll do very little.

[Knaight]

This is a big modern artifact, if you ask me. Historically, I doubt many people bothered with blocking most blows to the head that much for one simple reason - helmets work really, really well. Lean into that blow and it'll do very little.

Open faced helmets were ubiquitous enough that this seems unlikely - particularly as all it takes to deal with someone leaning in is dropping your point a bit. Thrusts especially can be changed relatively little, and that's without getting into the question of how the new angle might direct them from helmet to face.