The Pursuit of Power

I have usually found it a useful rule to trace concepts back to where they came from. Thus, for example, my continuing quest for the caracole in history: where and when was it actually used in action, and by whom. As some of you might know I have not found an answer to that one.

Often concepts are a bit easier to trace back in historiography. That is, a historian has a bright idea, writes it down and publishes it. Then someone else can come along and use that idea, and it grows and is developed as criticism mounts and evidence is searched out. One such concept is the military revolution, which has occasionally graced the pages of this blog. Whether the concept is still a useful one or not is, perhaps, a bit moot, but it is still a model for how history happened, albeit in an increasingly restricted part of time and geography.

Another concept which has emerged is that of a ‘gunpowder empire’. The term is usually taken to apply to the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with sometimes a side order of the Manchu state thrown in. The basic idea of the gunpowder revolution is that the coming of gunpowder to Muslim Asia blew away the ‘feudal’ systems that had been there before and enabled the founding of these longer-lasting major empires which monopolised gunpowder violence and hence the means to conquer territory.

Gommons comments that the ideas of gunpowder empires and military revolution are rather at variance. The military revolution argues that only the west properly adopted to gunpowder weapons and hence came to conquer the world by blowing the opposition, including the Muslim empires, away. On the other hand, the gunpowder empire idea suggests that these states only came into existence through adopting gunpowder and using it, integrated into their armed forces, to blow other people away. Clearly one or both ideas at least need nuancing (Gommans, J., Mughal Warfare (London: Routledge, 2002) p 133-4).

Tracing the idea back leads us to two historians who came up or popularised (so far as anything gets popular in historiography) the idea: Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill. I have not seen Hodgson’s work, but I have just finished McNeill’s book where the idea of gunpowder empires is at least noted:

McNeill, W. H., The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since 1000 AD (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

A few comments more generally about McNeill’s work are probably in order. The book is a work of world history, a twin to another book I have not read titled Plagues and People. It starts with the ancient world, in spite of the title and is, as I mentioned, about world history. Thus is does not go into huge amounts of detail about campaigns, wars, strategies and tactics. McNeill’s view seems to be more along the lines that technology was important, perhaps more important in warfare than is usually thought.

The real point of contact for me, however, is the concept of the gunpowder empire. McNeill (p. 95) actually defines the Portuguese and Spanish overseas empires, along with the Mughal, Muscovite and Ottoman Empires as gunpowder empires, with perhaps the Safavid and Japanese states as contenders. The Ming Empire, McNeill contends, did not rely that heavily on gunpowder weapons.

McNeill argues that the Ottoman, Muscovite and Mughal Empires were defined by the extent to which they could haul (or construct in situ) their heavy guns. The Muscovites, he says, prevailed wherever they could use river transport to bring their siege guns against fortifications. In India, the Mughals did the same, although transport was a lot more problematic. He also notes that once the rulers had exclusive use of these heavy weapons, development ceased and the gunpowder empires were overtaken by their European rivals, at least eventually.

The next step in McNeill’s argument is that the possession of heavy gunpowder weapons enabled foreign elites (the Mughals and Manchu) to dominate ethnically diverse subject peoples. This led to distrust between rulers and ruled and meant that they could not respond to European threats easily. The exception was Japan, which managed to exclude the outside world until the nineteenth century.

As I mentioned, McNeill writes in broad brush strokes and I would imagine that since the book was published few of the points above have been unchallenged. It is also noteworthy that the actual definition of a ‘gunpowder empire’ is rather vague. It seems to be one of those models that rather dissolve under scrutiny. I am unsure if anyone today would define the Portuguese and Spanish Empires as gunpowder; naval, perhaps, especially the Portuguese, but it is not terribly clear to me at least that gunpowder defined them, or was the key factor in creating them. Metal weapons, certainly in Central and South America, seem to have been more important and, as I noted the other week, in some parts of Africa muskets had little effect on the local warriors.

A second point might be that the reality of the Mughal Empire had collapsed well before the Europeans had much influence on the subcontinent. The things I have read recently suggests that any political authority in India had become at best regional by 1710, and the vacuum awaited the arrival of another outside force, in this case, historically, it was the British, but it did not have to be. A further point is that Indian fortresses, according to Gommons, simply became bigger and more difficult to approach as a result of the arrival of gunpowder weapons. The absence of the trace italienne outside European enclaves should probably make us suspicious that the issue, in India at least, was not siege guns but political will.  

Overall, however, I think McNeill’s book stands up fairly well to the test of time. No work of synthesis is ever going to cope with over thirty years of work in the areas it covers. It has to be said as well that the last chapters, covering the Twentieth Century have rather been overtaken by events. It would be unfair to judge the book by that: how many people, really, predicted the fall of Communism from the vantage point of 1983?

Breakout or Bulldozer?

‘Cheers!’ Glasses and tankards merrily clicked around the room. Captain Amnesia wandered over. Cranium sniffed his glass.

‘Excellent Burgundy, Captain.’

‘Thank you Colonel. Yes, it is I believe a good vintage. To be sipped, not swigged.’ Amnesia frowned at some of his fellow officers.

‘I think they are only swigging the beer, and possibly the vodka.’

‘Swigging vodka sounds like a disgusting idea, Colonel, particularly from the vantage point of tomorrow.’

Cranium shrugged. ‘They are off duty, Amnesia, and will make their choices.’ He sniffed the glass again; part of the enjoyment, after all, was in anticipation.

‘Amnesia, why did you join up?’

‘To forget.’

‘Forget what?’

‘Can’t remember.’ Amnesia grinned.

‘Trouble with a woman?’

‘Probably.’

‘Your wife?’

‘Her too.’ Amnesia smiled again, slightly less warmly. Cranium decided to change the subject.

‘The operation went surprisingly well this morning.’

‘Caught them napping Colonel. Migraine’s scepticism was ill-founded. My lads did not fire a shot, or even get their pikes down from port; remarkable. We went through them like a hot knife through butter. Or,’ Amnesia glanced again at his fellow officers, ‘a mixture of beer and vodka through a mercenary officer.’

‘Be fair, Amnesia. In the officer, it will come out the way it went in. We, at least, went straight through.’

Amnesia grinned again and swirled the wine in his glass. ‘Do you think they will try to take revenge, Colonel?’

‘I imagine so after they get themselves sorted out again. That might take a while, however, as they seemed to be running in all directions. I suppose we had better double the guards on the gates, though, just in case.’

*

I finally got around to ‘fighting’ the breakout scenario proposed I cannot remember how long ago. Anyway, as I am sure you recall, the convoy to Tsarputinsberg had been captured by the besieging Polish army, and Cranium and his colleagues had decided to launch a night attack on the Polish camp to regain their supplies, in particular, their Christmas booze.

There were a number of delays in playing the scenario. Firstly I needed to paint and base a number of barrels and crates to be the targets. Secondly, some other battles were fought out before this one, and thirdly life intervened a bit. Still, eventually, the tables were set and the initial set up looked like this:

The early morning sun (actually, it was late afternoon winter sun, but I am allowing myself some poetic licence) reveals the walls of Tsarputinsberg nearest the camera, with the mercenary companies drawn up ready to assault the Polish camp. The cavalry to left and right are two squadrons of Russian horse and two of mercenary, who are not really on the table but arrive after a time to be decided by dice roll. At the far end of the table, out of shot, the 12 base Polish army was set up in tent order (three rows of four tents), quietly slumbering.

This is a closer view of the Polish camp, which is based around (if you were wondering) the Irregular Miniatures Roman Marching Camp, which is, I find, a very useful item for Renaissance wargames. I think the tents are Irregular, too, the figures with the tents on the left are Baccus, as are the fireplaces. The target barrels and crates are by Perfect Six and the Polish command stand is, again, Irregular. I could have filled the gaps up with tabor waggons, but for reasons best known to myself, I did not, probably because I forgot.

In the interests of balance, the mercenaries are below.

The figures, here again, are Irregular with a very, very old Baccus city wall (now out of production – shame, I could do with some corners). The two fore companies of shot are not part of the surprise attack; you will recall that Cranium deployed them to shoot the raiding party home. They are under orders not to sally forth.

The end game situation is as below.

The remnants of the Polish army are fleeing to the left of the picture. Cranium himself is nearest the camera and the mercenaries have ploughed through the camp, capturing the tents and routing the Poles without any resistance. They even captured the booze and declined to start drinking it immediately. In short, it was a walkover.

The Polish catastrophe was, of course, engineered by dice throwing. The mercenaries contrived to arrive under the walls of the camp undetected. Cranium thereafter got the tempo and never relinquished it. The Polish dice throwing was appalling and they never stood a chance. Indeed, as Amnesia mentioned above, there were no actual combat rolls involved; once the mercenaries made contact with a tent with un-woken and unrallied troops in it, those troops had no choice but to rout.

Of course, given that the game only took about fifteen minutes, I could have reset it and had another go. Indeed, in a face to face game, or a one-off game, I probably would have done so. But this is part of a campaign, albeit a narrative campaign, and one of the resolutions I have made about such is that what happens on the table happened. I think this is particularly important when, as I am, you are trying to develop some rules as well. If I kept re-running the battles every time I tweaked the rules, the campaigns would have got very bogged down and I would probably have given up in frustration.

As it is, I now have to exert my brain cell with respect to the Pole’s next move. Are they going to be sufficiently annoyed to assault the walls or so disgusted that they pack up and go home, aiming to recruit Cranium and his band for next year’s campaign? There is also the question of what the local Ottomans might be up to, plus the possibility of Cossacks or Tartars intervening too. I have rebased this lot as well and it would be a shame not to get them onto the table at some point soon.

She’s Coming In, Twelve Thirty Flight

You have thirty seconds to name the song and the band from which the title of the post is taken.

…. Tick, tick.

Did you manage it? Of course you did; I’m sure my readers are as good at obscure cultural references as the next reader. If, on the off chance you have no idea, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTQbiNvZqaY

It should give you a reasonable idea as to the subject matter of this post: The Dark Continent.

Of course, Africa is only the Dark Continent if you do not live there and you are a certain sort of Victorian Imperialist. Laband, in the book I am going to partially talk about here, notes that really, the Scramble for Africa only got going in the 1880s when the Berlin Conference demanded that European countries made good their claims to large chunks of the continent by actually having a presence on the ground. The locals were not consulted. Some of them objected to a change in what had been, for some, a reasonable trading arrangement with maybe a few unpleasantries along the way.

The objections, of course, perished in the face of machine guns, quick-firing artillery and modern rifles. Western Civilization had arrived along with Empire and the importation of European disputes. After all, Bismarck once famously remarked (something along the lines of) ‘my map of Africa lies in Europe’. The division of Africa was, more or less, an extension of European politics to a globalising world.

I remarked a while ago that we tend to read history along the lines of what happened fairly recently. Toby Green, in a recent History Today article, notes that Africa and its influence before the slave trade, and more specifically before the rise of the abolitionist movement in the 1780s has largely been erased from history. This is because, in his view at least, both sides of the European debate found the idea of the Dark Continent useful. For abolitionists, Africa’s instability and warfare was a direct result of the slave trade, and therefore an argument for its cessation. For the pro-slavery side, slavery could ‘save’ the African from the ‘savagery’ of their home. The result is, of course, a view of Africa as needing salvation in the form of Europeans:

Green, T., 'At the Centre of It All', History Today 69, no. 2 (2018), 28-39, quoting from page 39.

Green’s point is that some African political entities were players on the international scene at least from the seventeenth century. West African diplomacy included embassies to Portugal and to Dutch colonists in Brazil, which was held (1630 – 1654) by the Dutch as part of the war with Spain. Of course, the Thirty Years War finished in 1648, but that did not mean that the Dutch were going to relinquish Brazil easily. An Embassy from the Kingdom of Kongo arrived in Brazil in 1643, the Kongolese and Dutch allies having seized Luanda in 1641 (we note that the Portuguese had just rebelled from Spain at this point). I suspect that some of these issues are explored in:

Thornton, J. K., 'The Kingdom of Kongo and the Thirty Years’ War', Journal of World History 27, no. 2 (2016), 189 - 213.

However, I have not read this piece yet.

Pulling back the focus a bit enables me to ponder Africa more broadly. I have been reading John Laband’s book on the Portuguese in Africa:

Laband, J., Bringers of War (London: Frontline, 2013).

This is subtitled ‘The Portuguese in Africa during the Age of Gunpowder and Sail from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century’. And a very interesting book it is too. Laband remarks early on that Africa is too big really to deal with as a narrative, and so he has tackled Portuguese activity thematically by geographical area. This is a little confusing, perhaps, as some of them overlapped or influenced each other, but then a narrative construct would probably have been even more puzzling. He tackles Morocco, West Africa, the Swahili Coast and Ethiopia, and then returns to Kongo and the Portuguese slave trade to Brazil.

The Portuguese were, of course, after slaves, spices (from the East Indies) and gold, and they found them in some quantities. They also brought firearms which, in many circumstances (although not in Kongo where dispersed fighting meant the matchlock’s inaccuracies limited its effectiveness) gave them a major initial advantage. This tended to be counteracted by Africans responding to the musket by acquiring their own, either from trade with the Portuguese or, on the east coast, direct or indirect contact with the Ottomans.

Numbers were small. Taking service in Africa or further east was regarded, so far as I can tell, as a one-way ticket for most people. The rates of death were terrible as Europeans had no immunity to African diseases. This is in marked contrast to South America where it was the natives who succumbed to European disease. The Portuguese naval empire was never as profitable as the Spanish one.

The Portuguese were also much more heavily challenged by both local and European forces than the Spanish beyond the line. Initially, superior naval technology and gunpowder weapons enabled them to dominate the Indian sea trade. However, the Dutch, followed by the English started the challenge this in the seventeenth century, followed by the Omanis, who had gained Western technology. The Portuguese were squeezed out of a large portion of the trade.

Laband’s book has an awful lot about the fighting, of course. The Portuguese (and English and Dutch) saw themselves as crusaders, outflanking Islam for the sake of the Gospel. The most interesting and unexpected, perhaps, is the Portuguese expedition to Ethiopia, which, on some readings, saved that country as a Christian one, as it was being swamped by Muslim sultanates supported by Ottoman troops. As a tale of a small group of Europeans with large numbers of African supporters and wily opponents H Rider Haggard could do little better. The only difference is that the Ethiopians were in control and the remaining Portuguese settled merged with the population.

The only problem I have now is that I do not think anyone makes suitable figures, at least no in 6 mm. Anyone know better for Kongolese or Ethiopians, or Zimba for that matter, although Zulu figures might work for them.

A Philosophy of Historical Wargaming

Someone once, in response to the question ‘what is philosophy?’ replied ‘Thinking about thinking’. That is, the activities of philosophy are, at least in part, thinking about how we think. More than that, philosophy is perhaps reflective and recursive; we think about how we think about how we think. Somewhere in this, we need to hit some bedrock, or human thought will be deemed to be impossible. As it happens I think that can be done and that human thought is possible, but here is not the place to go into that.

You might note, however, that there can be philosophies of things, such as ‘philosophy of mind’ or ‘philosophy of religion’. This would then suggest that these subjects are framed as ‘thinking about thinking about mind’ or ‘thinking about thinking about religion.’ What, then, might a philosophy of historical wargaming consist of?

Well, initially, of course, we have to split the topic into two. Firstly there is something to do with a philosophy of history, that is, thinking about history. Many people, of course, will gaily sail past this, and quite right too. On the other hand, Mary Midgley, in her latest (and, alas, last) book, notes that history is important because it tells us how we come to be where we are. She roundly condemns some modern university philosophy courses for ignoring, self-consciously, history of philosophy, and focussing only on the last twenty years. How, she asks, quite correctly in my view, can this be even slightly reasonable or logical (quite some condemnation for those philosophers who think it a good idea) when those twenty-year-old works will be in response to those twenty years before, and so on back to Socrates.

There is, of course, a fair bit of philosophy of history around, starting roughly with Hegel. I am currently reading a book which takes the ethical demands of history very seriously indeed, with a vaguely Hegelian basis. However, things have developed a lot since then and ethics in historiography is, perhaps, coming to be critical. The issues revolve around selection, silencing and advocacy. By these, I mean that historical writing is, by its very nature, selective of its sources. How, then, can this be done honestly and reasonably, when we all know that humans are often neither? A particularly stark and unpleasant example of this is Holocaust denial, which relies on a number of sleights of hand with the evidence (that is attempting to put it politely; if you want to argue the toss over this one, please do, just not here).

The second item is silencing: history tends to be written by the victorious and the powerful. There is not much around on how, say, the Moors felt about their expulsion from Spain, or the Incas about their conquest, or how medieval women felt about being besieged with rape threats (at least) if the city was stormed. The victims of war, economic mismanagement, persecution, patriarchy and so on are under-represented in the historical, and in the historiographical records. Even such people who can be viewed as less victimised such as servants are under-represented. Thus history, even when conducted honestly and with due respect to the existing evidence, can be (and is) biased.

 History, of course, is not, and cannot be neutral. What would an honest and unbiased account of the Conquest of Mexico look like? Most of the accounts we have are by the Conquistadors themselves, who had a vested interest, after all, in protecting what they had gained from both native and government interference. Further, of course, everyone wants to be a hero and, just to complicate things, there is little evidence that the conquistadors understood the political and social arena they had entered. No matter how careful the historian, bias, or advocacy is bound to enter their accounts.

A philosophy of wargaming is not, I think, high on anyone’s agenda. Firstly, most wargaming is, after all, performative, in the same way that most religion is, in fact, only meaningful when performed. A wargame only has meaning as a wargame, the activity. A long time ago I noted that some of the ethical objections I had heard to wargaming related to performative locutions, such as ‘I shoot at you’. These are to be understood at the level of the game in which they are performative.

That said, there is a suggestion that thinking about wargaming (or thinking about thinking about wargaming) might be an idea. The question ‘what are you doing when having a wargame?’ can intrude. Of course, most sensible people will ignore it and carry on gaming. I have never said that the blog is written by anyone quite so sensible. More to the point, the question ‘what are we doing when we are historical wargaming?’ might be, as the recent post on my Rajput game suggested, pertinent.

The question there, you might recall, relates to the question of the historical in historical wargaming. When neither the scenario nor the armies represent historical prototypes, what is being done? At worst, I suppose we might land up with a sort wargaming Holocaust denial, although the overwhelming number of wargamers are far too sensible for the latter. But ahistorical armies in fictitious situations are, perhaps, buying into one or more of the problems identified above with historiography. Anchoring our armies, rules and scenarios in some sort of history (even if that history is via an imagi-nation; most imagi-nations are based in some sort of historical period, at least) at least might permit the argument of reasonableness – the game is a reasonable representation of some event or period in history, real or imagined.

Of course, wargaming could then become mired in the same sort of relativist, postmodern, radical critique that besets some areas of history. There are, whether we ignore them or not, ethical issues associated with history and, hence, historical wargaming. How, for example, does a wargame relating to the Zulu Wars make a native Zulu feel? How, indeed, should it make them feel? The historical events are undeniable, but is it a game for them, or a painful reminder of a colonial past?

Interpenetration

Well, if the title does not get some excitement from Russian botnets, I do not know what will. Incidentally, I would like to thank my regular readers who kept the number of hits on the site up during my recent absence, particularly ‘britany34’ and ‘tiffany 23’. I hope you enjoyed the discussions about world wargaming.

In a spirit of disappointing those more casual readers who happen on this post, I think we need to talk about interpenetrating bodies of troops. Perhaps it is just me, but I have a suspicion that I have not been taking the topic sufficiently seriously in my rules, and also in reading other people’s rules.

The topic is prompted by my recent comments on Korean units during the seventeenth century, whereby, as I am sure you recall, the musketeers, archers and spear and sword armed units moved through each other as the situation demanded. Thus, the musketeers shoot and, when exhausted or unloaded, fall back through the archers, who keep up the ranged combat until the enemy is too close, at which point they retire and the Kill Units take up the, um, cudgels, until the enemy retire and the archers and/or musketeers resume the fray.

I hope I am not sufficiently naive to suppose that this all happens seamlessly, but it does suggest that there are problems with sets of rules that do not or try to restrict too much, the interpenetration of bases of troops. After all, a base is a wargaming construct for a tactical unit. It is still made up of individuals who can move in a fairly small space. So it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that an archer unit could advance through musketeers to take up the shooting, or then fall back through a load of spearmen while the close combat troops get into action. It is just that the base is a lot less flexible than this.

In Polemos: SPQR I tried to handle this through allowing, say, skirmishers, to retire through formed foot facing the same way. The idea was, and is, that the skirmishers could be the ‘ablative’ front to a block of troops and, when disrupted, retire to the back of the block. I suspect this is a reasonable model of what really could have happened, in that the skirmishers, in battle reports, open the action and then are heard of no more.

We get into more complex areas, however, when we consider something like the Roman triple line formation of the middle republic. Someone asked me recently how I handled that in SPQR. The answer is, of course, that I do not, because the Roman legion had evolved by then, but it is an interesting question. My initial reaction is that there is no really good model for the sort of movement and relief we are talking about, even if what is described is is, as in the Korean case, rather idealized and certainly discounts any enemy activity.

My second reaction is not to model it at all. After all, in Polemos: ECW we avoid the question of the interaction of pike and shot by basing them as the same unit and varying the ratio of pike to shot to reflect the capability of the base. This managed to escape problems of micro-managing formations and support, which is what does damage to the DBR model.  By extension, therefore, we could do something similar with the Roman middle republican legion. Have the hastati, principes and triarii all on the same base, one behind the other. Thus the first line can be assumed to move behind the second, and be relieved by the third and so on. Velites, deployed in front of the base can retire straight through it.

There are objections to this of course (and do not believe that I have thought it through at all). Roman legions were not that inflexible, and the third line was formed of half the number of men as the first two. So the above might be a model of how the fighting was supposed to proceed, it probably would not do for a set of wargame rules.

An alternative would be something like what I have already described for the SPQR rules. We could, conceivably, deploy the Roman legion in two or three lines (with the skirmishers out front, of course) and by nifty rules work enable the Romans to pass through each other, thus simulating the relief system. In Polemos terms, when the front base recoils, it can pass through the second and third lines and pitch up, shaken but not destroyed, at the back while the second line takes up the burden.

So far as I can tell (and I have not done any more work on the idea that what is written here) this model would work, at least for the Romans and assuming that the legion really did work as we envisage. Whether a similar relief process works in other circumstances I am not sure. Did Macedonian pike have a similar sort of relief system? If not, then why not? If so, then why did they lose consistently to the Romans?

If we make the assumption that the pike blocks did not have a relief system, then the relief model outlined above would need some tweaks to ensure that the Macedonians do not become Romans. This is trickier than it looks in terms of rule writing, but I suppose it is possible. On the other hand, we could argue that the pike blocks were so deep to enable a different sort of relief system, based around the individual file, to be used, which would require a different sort of model.

At the current rate of progress, I could be talking myself into writing a set of rules for the Punic and Macedonian wars. As I have no Carthaginians at all and do not feel particularly inclined to start buying and painting any (already having two major projects and at least three campaigns underway) I shall leave the subject there, for the moment, and go back to pondering Korean troop interactions.

Dragon Lords

And now, long-suffering reader, for something completely different. I do not always read either ancient or early modern history. Nor do I always read military history. Occasionally I branch out, as the more astute among you might have noticed, into broader history, philosophy, philosophy of science and theology. Even so, the next work is still a bit of a departure for me, but it is good to stretch one’s horizons and ponder things anew.

The book in question is this one:

Parker, E., Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (London: I B Taurus, 2018).

Now, Vikings are something I know little about, apart from the obvious that they came from Norway and wore helmets with horns on them. Unfortunately, neither of those two facts are actually true. Vikings have been traduced much as Boudicca’s chariot with the nice knives on the hubcaps and African history.  Vikings in England, at least, mostly came from Denmark, and the horns on the helmets are, well, shall we say the product of over-active historical imaginations and a few misreadings of the little evidence we actually have.

That said, Parker’s book has very little wargaming information, and is, I suppose, a bit more like a ‘reception history’ of the Vikings, perceptions of the Vikings and the sorts of Vikings the Middle Ages would have liked there to have been. Then as now, of course, history is hijacked (one might say kidnapped) to serve particular points of view, desires for the present and so on. Thus, for example, post-Norman Conquest Vikings could either become freedom fighters from oppression, or foreign oppressors. It depended, it would seem, on the writer.

There are a few other things in Parker’s book which are of interest. The question of sources presses. Who wrote what and why is the first one, but the complex genealogy of the later works, that is, how dependent they were on earlier chronicles and accounts, is a live and tricky question. Some authors had a good deal of information and chose to select it in ways which served their purposes, others had less information and either relied on oral sources (which may or may not be historical), legends, myths or simply made things up.

Overall, then, the book is about how historians used other historians. Its focus is on the Vikings and the perceptions of the Vikings. As England was regionalised, this, of course, depended on where you were. North and east of Watling Street, your view of Vikings might have been a bit more positive than to the south. On the other hand, your view of Vikings may well have depended on the view of your patron. After all (and this is a factoid that I was vaguely aware of, but had never come into focus), after Hastings the Normans did not have a particularly easy time, with various rebellions and or revolts (or resistance efforts), some of which were supported by Danish ships, men, and money. Hereward the Wake (of whom I had heard by dint of my grandparents living in range of Radio Hereward) was only a part of it.

The other thing that comes clear from this whole tricky historiographical mess is that there was really no such thing as a Viking, or even a Dane or Anglo-Saxon. While the languages may vary, all sorts of people got together and fought together. I, therefore, have come to doubt if a Danish army of the period, at least deployed in England, would be all that ‘Viking’, even minus the horned helmets. While an early era raiding party would, presumably be more Danish, the later armies, from before Cnut, would, it seems to me, be much more of a mix of types, arms and enthusiasm. Cnut used the rhetoric of conquest of an earlier age to legitimise Danish rule of England. So far as it can be true in any early medieval setting, not many objected to either the rule (once the opposition was deceased) or to the use of a partially imagined past.

Furthermore, England was even more parochial than it is now. Communications between the different bits was difficult and slow. The stories of different regions reflected local legends, people. places and events and were not necessarily part of any ‘national’ story. For example, the stories around (the mythical) Guy of Warwick centre on the Midlands and Winchester; such tales are not found in the north.

Incidentally, the Guy of Warwick stories solved a decade's long puzzle that the Estimable Mrs P and I had. As residents of the aforementioned burgh, on one of our walks, we passed a cliff with a ruined manor house on top of it. A perusal of the local OS map indicated that this was called ‘Guy’s Cliffe’, and much puzzlement was expressed as to whom this Guy was and why he had a cliff named after him. Parker explains that Guy of Warwick retired as a hermit to a cave in a cliff just outside Warwick after his heroic deeds had been performed. The cave was a nice little money earner for someone in the Middle Ages, even though the stories were legends.

I do rather digress, however. The book is an excellent one, and the lesson of it is more general than just the Vikings or early Medieval England. All sources in history are, to some extent, secondary. It is a fairly rare early historian acknowledges their sources and distinguishes written, oral and magical information. The situation is further confused, potentially at least, by subsequent authors. For example, Parker notes that the sixteenth and seventeenth-century antiquarians and historians, who first investigated the sources and translated them, had their own slips and misinterpretations. Hence, by one misreading, the Vikings were portrayed as drinking the blood of their enemies from those enemies’ skulls (or, possibly wine – I may be misrepresenting the misrepresentation, of course).

Recent work on DNA suggests that the conquests were neither as complete nor as bloody as history usually represents them. For the state of the North of England, William the Bastard is picking up much of the blame these days. I am not entirely sure about that – deindustrialisation also has its effects. But then the histories I’ve read are dependent on their sources and they might be misrepresenting or misunderstanding. Overall, it is a bit of a wonder that we know anything about the past, or, perhaps, we don’t….

A New Korea

One of the interesting things that can happen when the idea of world wargaming hits a research library is the unexpected. Someone, somewhere, has hit upon an idea that might just give some insight into wargaming, world history and probably a few other things which are not quite so expected.

I have just finished rebasing my old Early Modern period Koreans. Again, they are cobbled together from Irregular figures and fit the 100 AP DBR condensed scale army lists. Now, my recent interaction with said lists has been less positive than it might have been, but given that I already have the toys, and no historian will be harmed by the rebasing exercise, I went ahead and did it.

Subsequent to the rebasing activity, I read an interesting paper:

Andrade, T., Kang, H. H., Cooper, K., 'A Korean Military Revolution? Parallel Military Innovations in East Asia and Europe', Journal of World History 25, no. 1 (2014), 51-84.

As you may be aware, I am interested in the idea of a military revolution, mooted originally for Northern Europe around the end of the sixteenth century or so. Various historians are attempting to fit the story that the idea gives us around what happened in different places. Hence we obtain a Chinese military revolution, an Indian (or Mughal) revolution, and a Japanese one and so on. The key element of such debates turns on the influence and impact of gunpowder in these places, preferably before great numbers of Western ships and troops arrived.

The interest in Korea is, of course, focussed around the Japanese invasion of the 1590s.  By that time the musket was well embedded in Japanese military culture. Meanwhile, the Chinese had also been adapting to gunpowder weapons, probably for a much longer time than anyone else. Korea seems to have been a bit of a minor backwater in such things, along the same lines as England was in the middle of the sixteenth century. Korea had a mostly cavalry effective army, with part-time peasants as the rest.

The impact of the Japanese invasion was the major introduction of the musket or arquebus. There is some debate as to whether the Japanese fired the weapon en mass, as European armies were learning to, or exactly how it was used. Some argue that volley fire was used at Nagashino in 1575, others dispute it. Probably it was used in Japan by 1615. The development is intriguingly similar to that in Europe.

Of course, the use of a matchlock musket imposes certain restraints on the units using it. It is a bit slow to load, and so units are needed in depth. The Koreans developed a system of a unit five deep, and they sort of countermarched. That is, the first pair stepped beyond the sergeant, gave fire and returned to their places, and were followed by the second pair, and so on, the hope being that the first pair would have been reloaded by the time the fifth pair had discharged their weapons. This is, of course, comparable, but not exactly the same as, European countermarch systems.

The Koreans were aware of the problems with matchlock weapons systems, such as the fact that they do not work terribly well in wet weather. Thus they retained archers, to second and augment the firepower from the guns. A seventeenth-century source advises four thousand matchlock men, three thousand archers, two thousand mounted archers, one thousand heavier cavalry and a thousand sword and spearmen.

The idea here is that the musketeers open fire at about 100 paces and fire by the above-outlined method. When they have ‘exhausted’ their fire, the archers step up and deliver their fire. If the enemy get too close, the third layer of sword and spear armed troops (called in the sources ‘Kill Units’) step up and see the enemy off. Once they have done so, the musketeers and/or archer can resume their fire. The kill units, the authors argue, fulfil the role taken by pikemen in the West.

The authors go on to discuss the actions in the Amur region between Manchu forces and Russian Cossacks. The Manchu had, by the 1650s taken suzerainty of Korean and added highly regarded Korean musketeers to their forces, which greatly assisted seeing off the Cossacks. The authors concede that the numbers were small and the outcome of two small battles can hardly be determinative of how Korean and European forces would have fared in action against each other, but the implication is that it would not have been a pushover for the West.

Korea was not averse to incorporating foreign ideas into its armed forces. Captured Japanese soldiers were recruited, as was a Dutchman. Where the Korean ideas about how to use muskets came from is unclear. It might have been parallel development, it might be from Ming innovation and copied during the Sine-Japanese war, it might have been from the Japanese or their own invention. History does not tell us.

We do know that Western influence, including that of the Dutchman Jan Jansoon Weltevree, or Pak Yon to the Koreans, improved Korean cannons significantly. However, the most likely influence on musket tactics is the Japanese, and this suggests something of a difference between east and west. The Korean musketeers used by the Manchu were valued for their accuracy, which indicates they were using fowling pieces. The authors suggest that the Koreans were good marksmen and drilled to deliver continuous fire, rather than the Western inaccurate fire (but lots of it).

This suggests to me that the Japanese and Korean musketeers were using weapons which were slower to reload than their Western counterparts and that again to me, suggests a reason why the Koreans retained archers to cover the gaps in musket fire. Alongside financial and logistical constraints and a cultural preference for archery (again, we could compare with England here) the use of archers to cover the problems with muskets seems logical, if not inevitable.