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Comment by jasonjamerson | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I understand how they were going full out and so few died.

It seems from the wiki article that the loosing team was executed - or am I reading it wrong?

> As evening fell that day, the victor, Captain de Beaumanoir, returned the prisoners to Josselin and had them executed.

The Britannica (encyclopedia) website claims they were well treated and returned for ransom.

So its disputed I guess.

Armor

It also would not have been chivalrous to kill an opponent who yielded, so the only ones dying are those who were killed in short order on the battle field, or those who refused to yield in hopeless circumstance.

Tis but a scratch

"you can't ransom the dead!" and basically all the combatants were noble.

Weren't they all executed in the end?

>All the prisoners were treated well and were released promptly on the payment of a small ransom.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-the-Thirty

But then again,

According to the visitors' guide to the Chateau de Josselin "As evening fell that day, the victor, Captain de Beaumanoir, returned the prisoners to Josselin and had them executed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_of_the_Thirty#Battle

Probably much more important than chivalry: you can't ransom off a captive who is dead.

Ransoms were really, really large in that period. Five years after this battle, the English captured the French king at Poitiers. His ransom was 4 million gold coins plus, I think, various concessions. The French ended up having to pay a lot of ransoms through the whole war, and as a result, the nobility and crown were so poor they couldn't prevent banditry and famines.

Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a very engaging account of this period.

My takeaway from reading that book was that if I was a time traveler I'd avoid that place and time. I thought the banditry may have served as inspiration for the middle books of Game of Thrones.

I think the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century were worse. Even high nobility was not immune from torture and gruesome executions.

You can't bribe a fanatic.

In today’s age of firearms it’s easy to not realize just how effective medieval armor was against the weapons of the time. An armored knight was basically a terminator tier threat to lightly armed footmen until the longbow and later weapon advances.

The recent movie "The Last Duel" featured a duel to the death by two knights. I thought the fight sequence was good, but was amazed to learn it was historically accurate. Observers at the time had actually documented the fight blow by blow, and the movie hewed to it.

So if you want to see a best effort recreation of how two heavily armored knights would fight, watch it!

You underestimate how ceremonial battles were.

That's not it at all. Armor and tight ranks are really, really good at keeping people alive right up until gunpowder weapons.

It was entirely normal for armies of several thousand people on each side to clash and have <1% casualties for an hour or more. And you can tell this is not because of some ceremonial reasons because of what happens when ranks of one side finally break, because then the side that manages to hold cohesion will absolutely slaughter the losers.

Go watch some videos of modern melee tournaments where the participants are in full armour. Armoured combat essentially turns all weapons into blunt objects unless you manage to get a point of a sword into a gap which is hard to do while being pummeled over the head.

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