Re: [FT] (LONG) The Balance of Power -- Fighters and a Defense

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Jaime Tiampo wrote:

> China, 12th century. Chinese standing army had few calvalry men.
Average
> chinese troops were armed with crossbows and short swords. Course they
> had the stirriped crossbow which allowed one handed reloading at high
> rate. For quite awhile they were able to hold off northern excursions

The Chinese infantrymen had a lot of pole arms too.  In fact, pole arms
were the primary weapons as with any other medieval army.  Even then
most
of the successful battles were fought from behind walls.  Usually if
Chinese armies met nomad cavalry in field battles they (the Chinese) got
slaughtered.  But then the advancing nomad cavalry would run against
Chinese city walls and get stumped.  This was how it usually went except
for the few times the nomads got successful siege equipment, or when 
the Chinese had effective horse archer armies, usually from subject
peoples.  The most spectacular case was probably during the Ming
dynasty,
when at the battle of Tu-Mu a Ming army of 500000 men (by *Ming*
records) was defeated by a Mongol army of 20000 men.  The Mongols
captured
the Chinese emperor and got to the city walls of Beijing, but then they
weren't able to attack and pretty much gave up.

> into chinese territory. The "knight" was outdated by 9th century in
> china. The advent of the grenade in the 12th century also brought down
> finally the real effectiveness of the mounted calvary to a tactical
> instead of overwhelming unit.

The heavily armored Chinese cataphract of the Northern and later Sui
dynasties was ended by the introduction of Turkish style light lamellar
armor and horse archer tactics.  Heavily armored cavalry were still used
quite a few times by the Khitans, the Jurched, and even the Song in
later
times, usually with spectacular success against Chinese infantry.  On
the
whole though, the light horse archer tended to dominate field battles in
the Chinese sphere.  The early gunpowder weapons were actually next to
useless.  They didn't have enough explosive power or reliability to
successfully do anything.  This is clearly indicated in the fact that
no successful battles against any unit type has ever been recorded for