Hacker News Reader

Comment by suoduandao3 | Hacker News Reader

I think a point we forget when we think of the 'Samurai' or other 'armed nobility' classes like the European knight is that they were much more similar to police than soldiers in a modern analogue. Their job was to enforce the peace in a mostly peaceful place and deter violent crime, not really to fight on equal footing with other armed nobility. In war time, they were the most effective one on one fighters but far more important was their ability to raise a group of retainers who'd follow them into battle.

View on HN

Is that actually true? Aren’t there several examples of relatively small cavalry forces (of knights) winning against much, much larger forces?

Quickly googling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Lake_of_Antioc...

Yeah, its basically wrong.

I would agree w/ the OP - from what I can gather, at least from Brett Devereaux's blog, the serious academics seem to focus more on the economic/political history behind the warfare, i.e. how could Rome afford/produce enough metalwork to equip X or Y amount of legions, afford salaries etc, how could different greek cities feed the men in the field for so many days and however many miles of marching, etc. Also, slavery.

1 on 1 duels are glamorous but are more apt for literary works than warfare which is really a branch of political/economic science.

Modern samurai popularity seems to owe a lot to Kurosawa's desire to film Westerns...I can't recall exactly, but I had come across a few accounts where public resentment of the samurai class as corrupt government officials surged from time to time...

>how could different greek cities feed the men in the field for so many days

I thought that until the last few centuries foraging/pillaging was the main way armies were fed in the field. Gives the obvious advantage of not needing to maintain and defend supply lines.

almost 200 000 men fought in Sekigahara, how is that like police?

right but most of those men weren't samurai, were they? The Samurai were basically responsible for raising a private army in times of war like that, they were the first point of defense if someone threatened their people in peace times but they also brought fighting men along when their lord needed it.

Feudal social structures are just very counterintuitive to us. We think of is as being a job but it was a lot more built on personal relationships than that, and a Samurai's relationships with his inferiors depended largely on effectively scaring away unpopular criminals. That's why I say it's a role more like a police officer's than a soldier's, but it was really quite unlike either.

right but most of those men weren't samurai, were they?

Assuming a rhetorical question, can you share sources?

Here's the first I found:

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=4cf111c139290637JmltdHM9MTcwN...

Ask Historians in neat, thanks.

How do knights fit in with reeves? Did they complement each other?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com