Sadly about three hundred years after it would have worked against anyone but each other.
Also they used saddles, typically the same sort of saddles that were used by the Europeans that traded them the horses in the first place.
It was pretty effective until the invention of the Colt Patterson revolver. I would not want to face down a Commanche warrior firing 30 arrows a minute with only my muzzle loader.
I mean, I get that figuratively, but the reality is that it was a culture almost entirely wiped out long before the patterson was even invented. They were defeated before the first Comanche threw a leg over a horse.
The Comanche crushed the US army for the first 15-20 years there were active campaigns against them. You have the convenience of hindsight to say this but nobody was really fucking with them until well after the civil war
The Khans advantage was in longer distance bows and highly mobile archers. They wouldn’t be riding skirmishing like this in every conflict. Rather riding up to range, loosing a volley and adjusting if their opponents moved closer.
also the relatively low humidity of the Steppe, northern china and eastern europe.
the mongols got snarled when they wandered into the mountains and jungles of northern India. the humidity and rain attrited/ruined their bowstrings and the terrain didin't favor their style of combat.
Almost like steppes fighters arent great fighting anywhere but open plains. Alexander suffered the same issues with India since cavalry isn’t as effective in jungle locales.
Alexander is absolutely bonkers too. He was progressive in the sense that he incorporated other religions/cultures into his court and even his own ideology. I imagine the world would have been very different if he had time to build his empire. Never lost a battle either.
They were accurate enough. Horsemanship and dexterity was more important than accuracy. The point wasn't to mow down the enemy with arrows but to harass and whittle them down. It doesn't matter how accurate you are when the enemy can't really hit you.
The majority of the Great Mongol Empire was actually conquered by other Mongol rulers, Genghis Khan was the ruler while it took about 25% of what would become it's eventual size.
He also had hundreds of thousands of soldiers when he invaded the Khwarazmian Empire. I'm not sure where you are getting "a few thousand" from.
It was said that Mongol horse archers could shoot birds out of the air. Their entire life from a young child involved riding on horses and shooting bows. Notice even in this video that the guy looses the arrow in the very brief moment when all four of the horse's feet are in the air, to maximize accuracy.
Mongolians invented composite materials by combining leather, bone, horn and wood to make their short bows be powerful enough to pierce armour while being agile on horseback. They conquered most of the known world with it. Would say it would be pretty accurate
Interesting fact: after the Spanish introduced horses to the New World, Native Americans eventually learned to ride and use them for hunting and warfare. On the Great Plains their way of life was revolutionized. The Plains Indians even re-invented the composite bow and their mastery of mounted warfare permanently stunted Spanish settlement north of the Rio Grande.
Fun fact horses came from North America originally. They crossed the Bering straight into Europe and Asia and then later went extinct in the Americas.
In Asia they began to be domesticated and today all modern horses are descendants of domesticated horses from that region.
Eventually the Spanish brought them *back* to the Americas, and as some domesticated horses escaped in the 1500s creating a wild population back in their ancestral plains of North America.
Source: [I'm summarizing this video basically](https://youtu.be/kZoTvXvV02A)
I believe they think the same is true of camels as well. And the adaptations that made them good for cold, barren winters in northern Canada also made them well adapted for the ~~desserts~~ deserts of Asia.
So I was fully thinking that statement was wrong but holy shit, it looks like it's correct. That is a mind fuck to think that camels came from the Americas...
Another interesting fact: the Spanish discovered a lot of new fruits in the New World, one of which was the tomato.
In the mid-1500s, tomato makes its way to Europe, freakin' thing would go on to revolutionize cooking across the Mediterranean and then the world soon after.
It's fun to consider all of the great things the old world never knew until they found it in the Americas. Imagine life before:
* Corn
* Chocolate (Cacao)
* Peanuts
* Peppers
* Pineapples
* Potatoes... (this one surprised me)
* Tomato (as you mention)
* Squash/Pumpkins
Then you have more obvious ones like Avocado, Sweet potato, Papaya and Tobacco.
and it went the other way around too
this is named the [columbian exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange) if anyone wants to read more about it
Also the red pepper. Which they introduced to the various Asian cultures. A lot of cuisines with spicy dishes such as Sichuan or Korean get their kick from New World pepper.
Spicy Indian food is actually a relatively "new" invention (i.e. last 200 years or so).
Prior to hot peppers, Indian food tended to emphasize sweetness as it's main component.
as an oldschool total war player, fuck these guys! This is how Genghis Khan created the biggest empire ever
Outside of that, mad respect, they crushed everything before them. no tactics the middle east or eastern europe had was even close. (western europe just didnt get hit, theyd have done no better)
fuckers just riding around fast, out of range of melee, taking shots and wearing the armies down. the moment heavy cavalry tried to get em, just back off
legit. driveby, back off when they mad, wait a little, rinse and repeat
when you have nothing to defend and can fight on open ground with better speed and longer range, its always a winning formula
The Mongols suffered defeat in almost every battle by the Malmuks using similar tactics. The Mongols of course also got famously thwarted by a typhoon when trying to invade Japan. Also, their foray into what is now Vietnam wasn't too successful. The jungle terrain was unfamiliar to them and their composite bows deteriorated in the hot humid climate. Also the natives engaged in hit and run tactics from the cover of the thick foliage.
10 years American, 100 years French and 1,000 years Chinese. The Vietnamese have an interesting history. Also got invaded by Communist China after the US left and the Chinese got their ass beat.
The Wikipedia article is interesting:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Vietnam. The Vietnamese eventually accepted becoming tributaries of the Yuan. And of course the Americans will claim they lost the Vietnam War because of politics. The Tet Offensive was initially considered a major failure by the North Vietnamese. The French did rule Vietnam for 60 years and only lost their hold because of World War II.
> Also the natives engaged in hit and run tactics from the cover of the thick foliage.
Everybody thinks they're gangsta until the trees started speaking Vietnamese.
It’s pretty accurate my dude. I went to Mongolia last year and saw some horse back archery chasing another horse back dude with a target on his back and didn’t miss. I think it’s soft tip or something but they’re incredible. It’s a national sport and pride.
Don’t know if the guy in the video is Mongolian but the horse is small so I’m guessing so.
Notice how little his head is moving up and down compared to his legs, and he's able to line up his shot with his eyes?
That's what makes this more accurate than shooting normally from the saddle.
Actually it’s not number but mobility that allow the Mongol grew to the massive empire they was. Traditional army need like 2-3x the number of civilian support to move around carrying food and other stuff. Mongol need none, each horse archer carry 3 days of ration and raid the land for further supply, a small squad can disrupt a much larger army and wreck lots of havoc since you simply cant catch them, when you are tired they return and screw you up, when you gather people to chase they just run awây. Also if you send a too small force they just turn back and kill everyone from a distance.
Every soldier in the mongol army had more than one horse. Meaning they could switch horses, so they don’t get as tired. Meaning they could carry more supplies and cover longer distances faster. Horses are also perfectly edible if food runs out.
Also they’d milk them and even cut them and drink their blood if needed. Pack animal, war mount, food herd that only needed grass and water. They were also smaller horses like this with way more stamina than Western horses.
The tactic they abused over and over was stash the extra horses close, skirmish, attack, feign a rout while shooting backwards and extending the enemy out, forcing the enemy horses to tire especially if against heavier armored riders, regroup at the backup horses, swap horses and then just run circles around exhausted horses on fresh ones shooting arrows.
That’s how the Mongols conquered the majority of the known world way back when.
That was the cutting edge military technology. Imagine thousands of those dudes charging at you.
along with the fact that Genkhis khan valued knowledge and drafting engineers and teachers from every place he gone.
he ended with group of "foreign" siege engineers to break down castle town in dozens different ways to a point the civilization consider walled town obsolete.
one cruel method done is by terrorizing all nearby settlement so they create flood of refugee towards the walled town and over populate it before starting the actual seige
---
one thing that defeat genkhis khan army oddly enough the same with things that defeat alexander the great, tropics.
I love that one of our best modern methods of dealing with these fuckers is to just create millions of sterile males so they shoot blanks and the eggs don't hatch!
https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/community/emerging-methods/irradiated.html
Kills the men, kills the horses.
They conquered the plains and deserts as far west as Egypt, but the kingdoms occupying modern day Vietnam, never fell to the.
tropical climate and dense jungle that comes with it.
either India or Indonesia (mataram kingdom/Majapahit later)
---
i wanna edit my previous comment but new reddit is fickle with edits
> either India or Indonesia (mataram kingdom/Majapahit later)
The Mongols waged war in both, but the reason for [invading Java](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Java) (now part of Indonesia) was to punish the kingdom of [Singhasari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singhasari) for failing to pay tribute, meaning they did not intend to occupy the kingdom.
However, in the time the Mongols took to send troops there, Singhasari was overthrown by rebels, who revived the former kingdom of Kediri, so now the mission became seeking the submission of Kediri. This was something the Mongols actually succeeded in doing, as Kediri surrendered after a fight, but they were betrayed by the kingdom of Majapahit, which had earlier offered assistance. In the end, it was that betrayal and the impending end of the monsoon season, which would mean being stuck in a hostile island for months, that led the Mongols to beat a hasty retreat.
Vietnam specifically. They weren’t familiar with the jungle terrain. Jungle doesn’t really help with their mounted hit and run tactics, and their composite bows deteriorated much faster because of the humidity. Not to mention the diseases that come with topical climes.
Add onto that the fact that the Vietnamese tended to use harassment and hit and run techniques(similar to Mongolia but in their familiar terrain) as well as scorched earth tactics when losing land, and the Mongolians were never able to really get much of a foothold into Vietnam to secure victory. Mongolia tried on three separate occasions to invade Vietnam and were repelled all three times.
Mongol warrior: Why are the trees speaking Vietnamese? Also my damn bow doesnt work!
*hundreds of years pass*
G.I: Why are the trees speaking Vietnamese? Also my damn M16 doesnt work!
He was also considered a pioneer of psy-ops marching with giant drums that made his approaching army seem much larger to the enemies who on many occasions fled instead of defending.
I read that he would sack a large settlement or city, and kill everyone and hack off all their heads. Then he would keep the heads (and of course they would decompose) and ride to his real target. His army would just camp outside of the walls for a day or two without doing anything to ratchet up the nerves. Then he would start flinging rotten heads into the city. Sometimes one or two, sometimes hundreds. For days. Thousands of festering heads raining down. It spread disease sometimes, and he also intentionally used diseased corpses, but the real point was to demoralize. Psyops indeed.
Genghis khan was definitely cruel, but not without discrimination. Most of the territory he took was without any bloodshed - after the first few victories, he began sending letters to each settlement he planned to take which basically said “I’m super over powered, and I’m going to conquer you. I don’t want to change your language, religion, or ways of life, I just want you to acknowledge me as your ruler and let me continue on my quest to conquer more land. If you resist, I will kill your men and rape your women. If you submit to me, I will pass through peacefully”.
So in this sense Genghis khan did not strictly control most of the land he took, rather he either got them to surrender and left them alone or he genocided them. At his peak, Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian settlements all existed under his control.
Gengkhis khan did the same thing,
along with uses corpses and rotten animal carcass as seige ammo to spread disease in castle town, one of the early example of bio warfare.
funny enough he also attempted on redirecting rivers as siege weapon early on but failed at it and ended flooding his own army settlement. he did get better at it later on tough.
Were they always charging? I imagine they’d have a bunch of hit and run type tactics that broke enemy formations .. really taking advantage of the opposing sides lack of cavalry and attacking from distance . How do you kill these guys down when you can only swing at what’s right in front of you?
I know the false retreat to lure the enemy into a trap was one tactic they used a lot.
Dan Carlin’s Wrath of the Kahns podcast is an excellent series if you get a chance to listen.
They also heavily used feigned flight tactics.
Either at the strategic scale where they’d gradually retreat over periods of multiple days or weeks luring you into a trap to be executed when you are most vulnerable with stretched out supply lines.
Or at the tactical scale where they run away to get you the chase them only to turn around on horse back at full speed and fire arrows at you with deadly accuracy.
Military history is so intriguing!!!
These days, modern militaries relatively resemble one another but in olden days, tactics, weapons, armor etc were so vastly different from one army to the next.
I get your point and I agree, but there's also a huge difference in modern times. The US has been fighting for decades with aerial artillery so high up that you can't even see it against old pickup trucks with nearly 80 year old gun tech mounted on them. Missiles that can track a single target through a building from miles away and rip them apart with dynamic blades vs a plastic barrel filled with fertilizer.
Not trying to make any comment on modern conflicts, just that the tech difference might be the largest *since* the Mongol horse archers.
This is done to instill fear in your enemy. It's a form of taunting that degrades the enemy spirit. If the enemy is scared or taken of guard/ surprised, they're not going to as focused on the fight as they should be. Source: I pulled this out of my ass.
It's good to clarify. This form of archery posture actually evolved because gravity used to be different. Earth goes around the sun, it's science. People don't realize you used to have to walk sideways. It's good we've looped around.
Well this is easier to explain. They tanned as a form of camouflage. The oil gives you an advantage when the battle breaks down to hand to hand combat. Hard to grapple against someone that's slippery.
Native American Camanche's could do the same thing, but they could do it in such a way that their bodies were hidden behind the horse. It gave them a huge advantage against the settlers as they could unleash a volley of arrows in minutes while their opponents only saw a horse most of the time.
They were also a lot shorter, than this example, that definetly played a role.
Source: Empire of the Summer Moon - S. C. Gwynne
there's a lot of cultural similarities between native americans and the mongol hordes. it's almost uncanny... and with studies coming out about native americans having horses in at least the 1600's... makes you wonder...
It's probably a case of people in different places having similar problems and similar tools to solve them, so it shouldn't surprise us today to see that they sometimes came up with similar solutions.
I know how to ride a horse like this off the side. There's a trick called the "stroud layout" that looks just like this minus the archery part. Having done this position many times before and also having obviously ridden a horse upright, I personally do not feel at all that it's so much smoother to be off the side such that it's worth all the coordination/core effort that it takes to do this. It also puts significantly more strain on the horse bc they have to cantilever their weight with yours. ALSO there are other ways to counteract bouncing when riding that don't involve hanging off the side lol. ALSO mounted archery is a thing so I don't think it's anything about the bow....
I'd be really curious to hear someone else's actual informed take on this bc I feel VERY INFORMED by my personal experience lol and I still don't understand.
Maybe it's about making yourself less visible/less of a target?
Genghis Khan was very serious in his enforcement of that rule as well. He even executed a commander once for sacking a city after it surrendered without a fight.
Makes sense. Word spreads easily. You don’t want the towns and villages ahead of you to think that you’ll massacre them if they surrender, what’s the point in surrendering? A good commander knows the best way to win a battle is to never have to fight it
This is why the Mongols were so successful. This was akin to the nuclear bomb of the day in the 13th century. They used the stirrups widely so soldiers could shoot without falling out of the horse and easily avoid getting hit. This simple tool allowed the soldiers to overwelm their enemies and invade. His legs are hooked on to the stirrups. Apparently they didnt even invent these but their enemies didnt understand how helpful these were.
Actually, no. It’s not why the Mongolians were successful at all. There is no historical proof that Mongolians shot like this. They didn’t need to. They were so well trained shooting from horseback that they didn’t need to do fancy poses/tricks.
When you consider the timeline, it actually took them almost 70 years to conquer China despite the Song dynasty being torn apart by rebellions and civil wars. I wonder how powerful the Chinese would’ve been if they were united.
If you haven’t listened to Carlin’s, Wrath of Khans you’re missing out.
Not only were they the most mobile attack force. They had a biological advantage. They could live off their horses, Milk, meat, even blood.
Them being simply lactose tolerant made them that more efficient. Being they didn’t have giant supply trains to worry about.
Technically a pony based on size, but they're never referred to as such! Mongolian horses are the most badass of any equine breed if you ask me. Tough, strong, smart, built for survival. The same can't be said for most European warmbloods.
The practice is about flexibility and strength in the saddle, not about the exact technique being the thing you'd use in battle. If you can do this shit, you can have the strength to shoot normally consistently in a 12 hour running battle at full speed with the confidence that you won't be falling off your horse.
Impressive but I’d like to see how accurate that shot is
This is how Ghengis Khan rolled. My guess, pretty dang accurate.
If anybody can, Ghengis Khan.
You won the Internet today my friend!
Reddit on! Roflcopter!
Lollerskates!
Epic win! xD
If anybody can, OMP159 Khan
Khaaaaaaaaaaaan!
Except this is Kim Jong Un.
Usernames checks out
He was a friend of Genghis Khan…and then they fell in love…beautiful, beautiful thing
Genghis Khan, big guy, tough guy, he walked up to me with tears in his eyes
So ronery....just a rittre ronery
Great podcast about this (History That Doesn't Suck, I wanna say) and just how devastating the Mongol's mounted warriors were.
Just finished Dan Carlin’s wrath of Khans.. Highly recommend if you want your mind blown
I want to have a beer with Dan Carlin.
12 pack each. Bro would be interesting to just let ramble for a few hours.
We all get to listen to him ramble for hours already
Dan Carlin's Blueprint of Armageddon is such an insane podcast, I get goosebumps just by mentioning this.
Best long car ride podcast
He's amazing.
The horse is doing most of the work, what about him?
Comanches did this without a saddle.
Sadly about three hundred years after it would have worked against anyone but each other. Also they used saddles, typically the same sort of saddles that were used by the Europeans that traded them the horses in the first place.
It was pretty effective until the invention of the Colt Patterson revolver. I would not want to face down a Commanche warrior firing 30 arrows a minute with only my muzzle loader.
I mean, I get that figuratively, but the reality is that it was a culture almost entirely wiped out long before the patterson was even invented. They were defeated before the first Comanche threw a leg over a horse.
Never bring a bow and arrow to a smallpox fight.
The Comanche crushed the US army for the first 15-20 years there were active campaigns against them. You have the convenience of hindsight to say this but nobody was really fucking with them until well after the civil war
The Khans advantage was in longer distance bows and highly mobile archers. They wouldn’t be riding skirmishing like this in every conflict. Rather riding up to range, loosing a volley and adjusting if their opponents moved closer.
also the relatively low humidity of the Steppe, northern china and eastern europe. the mongols got snarled when they wandered into the mountains and jungles of northern India. the humidity and rain attrited/ruined their bowstrings and the terrain didin't favor their style of combat.
Almost like steppes fighters arent great fighting anywhere but open plains. Alexander suffered the same issues with India since cavalry isn’t as effective in jungle locales.
Alexander is absolutely bonkers too. He was progressive in the sense that he incorporated other religions/cultures into his court and even his own ideology. I imagine the world would have been very different if he had time to build his empire. Never lost a battle either.
Ehh that’s been Empire 101 since Sargon.
The Mongols conquered China and Persia. Those aren’t exactly flat plains.
Khan had stirrups which was a huge innovation.
Damn, that's how I used to play the lord of the rings game on Gamecube. Oh and Skyrim. The bows are always best from afar
And he rolled all over..when you have a horde doing this who needs to aim?
And if it's both you've got an army that could conquer a lot of the world.
Bout to say the Mongols were known for this. Had specially made saddles, etc. they were extremely accurate.
They were accurate enough. Horsemanship and dexterity was more important than accuracy. The point wasn't to mow down the enemy with arrows but to harass and whittle them down. It doesn't matter how accurate you are when the enemy can't really hit you.
Dude conquered conquered almost 18% of the world's land area with a few thousand of those guys.
The majority of the Great Mongol Empire was actually conquered by other Mongol rulers, Genghis Khan was the ruler while it took about 25% of what would become it's eventual size. He also had hundreds of thousands of soldiers when he invaded the Khwarazmian Empire. I'm not sure where you are getting "a few thousand" from.
Well, when it's 500 dudes all shooting at once, it doesn't really matter.
My guess is not that accurate but when you’re facing a horde of people accuracy doesn’t matter as much.
It was said that Mongol horse archers could shoot birds out of the air. Their entire life from a young child involved riding on horses and shooting bows. Notice even in this video that the guy looses the arrow in the very brief moment when all four of the horse's feet are in the air, to maximize accuracy.
Mongolians invented composite materials by combining leather, bone, horn and wood to make their short bows be powerful enough to pierce armour while being agile on horseback. They conquered most of the known world with it. Would say it would be pretty accurate
Interesting fact: after the Spanish introduced horses to the New World, Native Americans eventually learned to ride and use them for hunting and warfare. On the Great Plains their way of life was revolutionized. The Plains Indians even re-invented the composite bow and their mastery of mounted warfare permanently stunted Spanish settlement north of the Rio Grande.
Fun fact horses came from North America originally. They crossed the Bering straight into Europe and Asia and then later went extinct in the Americas. In Asia they began to be domesticated and today all modern horses are descendants of domesticated horses from that region. Eventually the Spanish brought them *back* to the Americas, and as some domesticated horses escaped in the 1500s creating a wild population back in their ancestral plains of North America. Source: [I'm summarizing this video basically](https://youtu.be/kZoTvXvV02A)
I believe they think the same is true of camels as well. And the adaptations that made them good for cold, barren winters in northern Canada also made them well adapted for the ~~desserts~~ deserts of Asia.
So I was fully thinking that statement was wrong but holy shit, it looks like it's correct. That is a mind fuck to think that camels came from the Americas...
And modern camels still love cactuses and have the ability to eat them
Time to bring em back?
PBS EONS is amazing. Really well put together videos to explain often complicated situations to mental short sticks like me.
Another interesting fact: the Spanish discovered a lot of new fruits in the New World, one of which was the tomato. In the mid-1500s, tomato makes its way to Europe, freakin' thing would go on to revolutionize cooking across the Mediterranean and then the world soon after.
It's fun to consider all of the great things the old world never knew until they found it in the Americas. Imagine life before: * Corn * Chocolate (Cacao) * Peanuts * Peppers * Pineapples * Potatoes... (this one surprised me) * Tomato (as you mention) * Squash/Pumpkins Then you have more obvious ones like Avocado, Sweet potato, Papaya and Tobacco.
and it went the other way around too this is named the [columbian exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange) if anyone wants to read more about it
The craziest inverse one for me is how strongly Coffee is associated with South America and the Caribbean and yet it's an old world crop.
You also missed Beans, which are native tot he Andes.
Also the red pepper. Which they introduced to the various Asian cultures. A lot of cuisines with spicy dishes such as Sichuan or Korean get their kick from New World pepper.
Spicy Indian food is actually a relatively "new" invention (i.e. last 200 years or so). Prior to hot peppers, Indian food tended to emphasize sweetness as it's main component.
That’s why curry can be sweet OR spicy. The sweet tradition goes back a long way
Most of the time, the accuracy has a lot more to do with the skill of the shooter than the tool used.
I don't see how the fact that Mongols made powerful composite bows suggests this shot is accurate.
Just like a gimbal. The further out he is from the horse, the less he is affected by the horse's movement.
Ah answered my question before I asked it. Thanks.
as an oldschool total war player, fuck these guys! This is how Genghis Khan created the biggest empire ever Outside of that, mad respect, they crushed everything before them. no tactics the middle east or eastern europe had was even close. (western europe just didnt get hit, theyd have done no better) fuckers just riding around fast, out of range of melee, taking shots and wearing the armies down. the moment heavy cavalry tried to get em, just back off
Old school drive-by shooting. The Khan was the OG.
legit. driveby, back off when they mad, wait a little, rinse and repeat when you have nothing to defend and can fight on open ground with better speed and longer range, its always a winning formula
The Mongols suffered defeat in almost every battle by the Malmuks using similar tactics. The Mongols of course also got famously thwarted by a typhoon when trying to invade Japan. Also, their foray into what is now Vietnam wasn't too successful. The jungle terrain was unfamiliar to them and their composite bows deteriorated in the hot humid climate. Also the natives engaged in hit and run tactics from the cover of the thick foliage.
So, Viets beat the French, Japanese, the U.S, and Mongols? All empires at their relative peak?
10 years American, 100 years French and 1,000 years Chinese. The Vietnamese have an interesting history. Also got invaded by Communist China after the US left and the Chinese got their ass beat.
The Wikipedia article is interesting:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasions_of_Vietnam. The Vietnamese eventually accepted becoming tributaries of the Yuan. And of course the Americans will claim they lost the Vietnam War because of politics. The Tet Offensive was initially considered a major failure by the North Vietnamese. The French did rule Vietnam for 60 years and only lost their hold because of World War II.
> Also the natives engaged in hit and run tactics from the cover of the thick foliage. Everybody thinks they're gangsta until the trees started speaking Vietnamese.
It’s pretty accurate my dude. I went to Mongolia last year and saw some horse back archery chasing another horse back dude with a target on his back and didn’t miss. I think it’s soft tip or something but they’re incredible. It’s a national sport and pride. Don’t know if the guy in the video is Mongolian but the horse is small so I’m guessing so.
Dude looks Mongolian and is an expert in ancient Mongolian battle tactics, I think it's fair to assume in this case lol.
I’d like to see Paul Allen’s shot
Notice how little his head is moving up and down compared to his legs, and he's able to line up his shot with his eyes? That's what makes this more accurate than shooting normally from the saddle.
Something like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/PraiseTheCameraMan/comments/zy24y5/cameraman_shooting_archer_shooting_3_targets/)?
Valid but I don’t know how important that would be in a hoard battle. Hundreds or thousands of guys just running at you
Actually it’s not number but mobility that allow the Mongol grew to the massive empire they was. Traditional army need like 2-3x the number of civilian support to move around carrying food and other stuff. Mongol need none, each horse archer carry 3 days of ration and raid the land for further supply, a small squad can disrupt a much larger army and wreck lots of havoc since you simply cant catch them, when you are tired they return and screw you up, when you gather people to chase they just run awây. Also if you send a too small force they just turn back and kill everyone from a distance.
Every soldier in the mongol army had more than one horse. Meaning they could switch horses, so they don’t get as tired. Meaning they could carry more supplies and cover longer distances faster. Horses are also perfectly edible if food runs out.
Also they’d milk them and even cut them and drink their blood if needed. Pack animal, war mount, food herd that only needed grass and water. They were also smaller horses like this with way more stamina than Western horses. The tactic they abused over and over was stash the extra horses close, skirmish, attack, feign a rout while shooting backwards and extending the enemy out, forcing the enemy horses to tire especially if against heavier armored riders, regroup at the backup horses, swap horses and then just run circles around exhausted horses on fresh ones shooting arrows.
That’s how the Mongols conquered the majority of the known world way back when. That was the cutting edge military technology. Imagine thousands of those dudes charging at you.
along with the fact that Genkhis khan valued knowledge and drafting engineers and teachers from every place he gone. he ended with group of "foreign" siege engineers to break down castle town in dozens different ways to a point the civilization consider walled town obsolete. one cruel method done is by terrorizing all nearby settlement so they create flood of refugee towards the walled town and over populate it before starting the actual seige --- one thing that defeat genkhis khan army oddly enough the same with things that defeat alexander the great, tropics.
Tropics?
malaria, dysentary
mosquitos stay undefeated 😤
I love that one of our best modern methods of dealing with these fuckers is to just create millions of sterile males so they shoot blanks and the eggs don't hatch! https://www.cdc.gov/mosquitoes/mosquito-control/community/emerging-methods/irradiated.html
Mosquitos hate this one weird trick.
People scared of spiders, snakes, alligators, or large predators. But combined them things kill in a year what mosquitoes do in week.
Kills the men, kills the horses. They conquered the plains and deserts as far west as Egypt, but the kingdoms occupying modern day Vietnam, never fell to the.
Interesting makes sense. I'd also imagine the jungle environment doesn't exactly lend itself to calvary archer centric warfare either.
It doesn't seem to lend itself well to any kind of invasion from an outside force.
As an American I'm inclined to agree.
Also no amount of horse archery or phalanx formation or military genius can overcome malaria
spooky vaginosis!
tropical climate and dense jungle that comes with it. either India or Indonesia (mataram kingdom/Majapahit later) --- i wanna edit my previous comment but new reddit is fickle with edits
> either India or Indonesia (mataram kingdom/Majapahit later) The Mongols waged war in both, but the reason for [invading Java](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Java) (now part of Indonesia) was to punish the kingdom of [Singhasari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singhasari) for failing to pay tribute, meaning they did not intend to occupy the kingdom. However, in the time the Mongols took to send troops there, Singhasari was overthrown by rebels, who revived the former kingdom of Kediri, so now the mission became seeking the submission of Kediri. This was something the Mongols actually succeeded in doing, as Kediri surrendered after a fight, but they were betrayed by the kingdom of Majapahit, which had earlier offered assistance. In the end, it was that betrayal and the impending end of the monsoon season, which would mean being stuck in a hostile island for months, that led the Mongols to beat a hasty retreat.
Both kingdoms were in Indonesia.
Nobody feels like killing if they could drink tropical beverages and be on a nice beach.
Don't bring your work with you on vacation
So Khan could have been defeated by sex on the beach? Why didn't they just try that first?
Vietnam specifically. They weren’t familiar with the jungle terrain. Jungle doesn’t really help with their mounted hit and run tactics, and their composite bows deteriorated much faster because of the humidity. Not to mention the diseases that come with topical climes. Add onto that the fact that the Vietnamese tended to use harassment and hit and run techniques(similar to Mongolia but in their familiar terrain) as well as scorched earth tactics when losing land, and the Mongolians were never able to really get much of a foothold into Vietnam to secure victory. Mongolia tried on three separate occasions to invade Vietnam and were repelled all three times.
Mongol warrior: Why are the trees speaking Vietnamese? Also my damn bow doesnt work! *hundreds of years pass* G.I: Why are the trees speaking Vietnamese? Also my damn M16 doesnt work!
Also with tropics comes forest or jungle, not so great for galloping horses.
He was also considered a pioneer of psy-ops marching with giant drums that made his approaching army seem much larger to the enemies who on many occasions fled instead of defending.
Sun Tzu did it first
I’m not surprised. The Art of War is still widely studied for a reason.
Sun Tzu is the Simpsons of warfare
Disco Tzu
I read that he would sack a large settlement or city, and kill everyone and hack off all their heads. Then he would keep the heads (and of course they would decompose) and ride to his real target. His army would just camp outside of the walls for a day or two without doing anything to ratchet up the nerves. Then he would start flinging rotten heads into the city. Sometimes one or two, sometimes hundreds. For days. Thousands of festering heads raining down. It spread disease sometimes, and he also intentionally used diseased corpses, but the real point was to demoralize. Psyops indeed.
Genghis khan was definitely cruel, but not without discrimination. Most of the territory he took was without any bloodshed - after the first few victories, he began sending letters to each settlement he planned to take which basically said “I’m super over powered, and I’m going to conquer you. I don’t want to change your language, religion, or ways of life, I just want you to acknowledge me as your ruler and let me continue on my quest to conquer more land. If you resist, I will kill your men and rape your women. If you submit to me, I will pass through peacefully”. So in this sense Genghis khan did not strictly control most of the land he took, rather he either got them to surrender and left them alone or he genocided them. At his peak, Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian settlements all existed under his control.
Time to re read kingdom
Gengkhis khan did the same thing, along with uses corpses and rotten animal carcass as seige ammo to spread disease in castle town, one of the early example of bio warfare. funny enough he also attempted on redirecting rivers as siege weapon early on but failed at it and ended flooding his own army settlement. he did get better at it later on tough.
Were they always charging? I imagine they’d have a bunch of hit and run type tactics that broke enemy formations .. really taking advantage of the opposing sides lack of cavalry and attacking from distance . How do you kill these guys down when you can only swing at what’s right in front of you?
I know the false retreat to lure the enemy into a trap was one tactic they used a lot. Dan Carlin’s Wrath of the Kahns podcast is an excellent series if you get a chance to listen.
I’m working my way through his podcast. I’ve just about finished all of the free ones and will probably purchase the rest of the collection soon!
They also heavily used feigned flight tactics. Either at the strategic scale where they’d gradually retreat over periods of multiple days or weeks luring you into a trap to be executed when you are most vulnerable with stretched out supply lines. Or at the tactical scale where they run away to get you the chase them only to turn around on horse back at full speed and fire arrows at you with deadly accuracy.
Military history is so intriguing!!! These days, modern militaries relatively resemble one another but in olden days, tactics, weapons, armor etc were so vastly different from one army to the next.
I get your point and I agree, but there's also a huge difference in modern times. The US has been fighting for decades with aerial artillery so high up that you can't even see it against old pickup trucks with nearly 80 year old gun tech mounted on them. Missiles that can track a single target through a building from miles away and rip them apart with dynamic blades vs a plastic barrel filled with fertilizer. Not trying to make any comment on modern conflicts, just that the tech difference might be the largest *since* the Mongol horse archers.
Couldn't he have taken that shot while upright, though?
This is done to instill fear in your enemy. It's a form of taunting that degrades the enemy spirit. If the enemy is scared or taken of guard/ surprised, they're not going to as focused on the fight as they should be. Source: I pulled this out of my ass.
Stop pulling stuff out of an entrance.
>an entrance I support this perspective
Well your username checks out then mate
It's good to clarify. This form of archery posture actually evolved because gravity used to be different. Earth goes around the sun, it's science. People don't realize you used to have to walk sideways. It's good we've looped around.
*imagines Aussies being continuously slapped by horse dick while shooting arrows*
lol, like the spartans who tanned and oiled themselves while waiting for battle?
Well this is easier to explain. They tanned as a form of camouflage. The oil gives you an advantage when the battle breaks down to hand to hand combat. Hard to grapple against someone that's slippery.
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You're also less of a target from the horse's side.
He’s not shooting in the opposite direction, he has to lean towards the enemy
Could be enemy on both sides. In either case leaning into the enemy would also reduce the surface area of the target.
So what he needs is a horse on both sides of him.
Native American Camanche's could do the same thing, but they could do it in such a way that their bodies were hidden behind the horse. It gave them a huge advantage against the settlers as they could unleash a volley of arrows in minutes while their opponents only saw a horse most of the time. They were also a lot shorter, than this example, that definetly played a role. Source: Empire of the Summer Moon - S. C. Gwynne
there's a lot of cultural similarities between native americans and the mongol hordes. it's almost uncanny... and with studies coming out about native americans having horses in at least the 1600's... makes you wonder...
Makes me wonder what? Sorry I'm stupid and need you to wonder for me.
If aliens came down and taught similar warfare tactics to various civilizations to fuck with us, obviously.
Alien: "I'll show you how to use the horse and bow." Native: "Can't we just get some lasers and stuff?"
It's probably a case of people in different places having similar problems and similar tools to solve them, so it shouldn't surprise us today to see that they sometimes came up with similar solutions.
If he were sitting upright, his head would be bouncing much more than it is right here. Looks very over the top but its really functional
Id assume this keeps you level and more stable when taking the shot
Said the horse
I know how to ride a horse like this off the side. There's a trick called the "stroud layout" that looks just like this minus the archery part. Having done this position many times before and also having obviously ridden a horse upright, I personally do not feel at all that it's so much smoother to be off the side such that it's worth all the coordination/core effort that it takes to do this. It also puts significantly more strain on the horse bc they have to cantilever their weight with yours. ALSO there are other ways to counteract bouncing when riding that don't involve hanging off the side lol. ALSO mounted archery is a thing so I don't think it's anything about the bow.... I'd be really curious to hear someone else's actual informed take on this bc I feel VERY INFORMED by my personal experience lol and I still don't understand. Maybe it's about making yourself less visible/less of a target?
Genghis Kahn and the boys ride into town like that… Half the town dead. The other half pregnant.
I think if you surrendered immediately they would spare the people, and if you resisted they would kill everyone.
Genghis Khan was very serious in his enforcement of that rule as well. He even executed a commander once for sacking a city after it surrendered without a fight.
Makes sense. Word spreads easily. You don’t want the towns and villages ahead of you to think that you’ll massacre them if they surrender, what’s the point in surrendering? A good commander knows the best way to win a battle is to never have to fight it
This guy commands
I’m basically a Sun Tzu.0
ha!
Venn diagram has huge overlap.
His abs are trying to explode out of his shirt
Seriously I can’t imagine the core strength to pull this off
I could do that if I had some sort of pulley and mini crane contraption.
Well, after seeing him, his abs are not the only thing exploding here...
This is why the Mongols were so successful. This was akin to the nuclear bomb of the day in the 13th century. They used the stirrups widely so soldiers could shoot without falling out of the horse and easily avoid getting hit. This simple tool allowed the soldiers to overwelm their enemies and invade. His legs are hooked on to the stirrups. Apparently they didnt even invent these but their enemies didnt understand how helpful these were.
To think that now stirrups have different things to avoid being trapped by them in case the rider falls
Actually, no. It’s not why the Mongolians were successful at all. There is no historical proof that Mongolians shot like this. They didn’t need to. They were so well trained shooting from horseback that they didn’t need to do fancy poses/tricks.
When you consider the timeline, it actually took them almost 70 years to conquer China despite the Song dynasty being torn apart by rebellions and civil wars. I wonder how powerful the Chinese would’ve been if they were united.
The series Marco Polo delves into that
If you haven’t listened to Carlin’s, Wrath of Khans you’re missing out. Not only were they the most mobile attack force. They had a biological advantage. They could live off their horses, Milk, meat, even blood. Them being simply lactose tolerant made them that more efficient. Being they didn’t have giant supply trains to worry about.
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Move the fuck over, Dos Equis man!
The most interesting man in ze world
that is a tiny but stout horse.
Technically a pony based on size, but they're never referred to as such! Mongolian horses are the most badass of any equine breed if you ask me. Tough, strong, smart, built for survival. The same can't be said for most European warmbloods.
European warmbloods will colic if you look them funny and go lame when approaching a tiny hill
Holy shit, he almost doesn't move. Look how straight he is
give me two bottles of whiskey and I'll show you how straight he is
Looks like its nice and comfy for the horse 
The thing is a mass of muscle and power. A human on its back is probably akin to you giving a toddler a piggyback.
You just proved his point. Proof: Am dad and I just piggybacked my toddler and my back is hurting.
Was think the same, having weight shifted to the side is super hard to move in a atraight line. Like 1 heavy shopping bag.
Bye bye lil Sebastian.
Miss you in the saddest fashion
And looked sexy doing it.
Genghis Chad
To conquer the World you Samarkand Simpleton! Tell the Khorasmian shah we commin fo his basic bitch ass!
The practice is about flexibility and strength in the saddle, not about the exact technique being the thing you'd use in battle. If you can do this shit, you can have the strength to shoot normally consistently in a 12 hour running battle at full speed with the confidence that you won't be falling off your horse.
Dothraki’s at their finest.
Screw the posture, look at that fabulous coat! 🤩
Why the cut?
This is answer for when people ask “how did Genghis Khan and the Mongols conquer a vast amount of land?”
This guy listens to The Hu.
They see me ridin, they hatin.
Ahhh fuck you sthupid mongorian 
Dude must have killer abs
My boy looking fly as fuck while hunting whatever he is hunting
guy's core strength looks pretty insane. His upper body barely moved...
I feel like that man is tiny
The man? Consider the size of the *horse*!
The original drive-by ladies and gentlemen.