Normans

Why were they so strong ?
Their stories are unbelievable, even if you read the accounts of their ennemies
They always roam in a band of like 200-400 warriors and destroy everything they come across

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    A combination of hybrid vigor (both of genes and cultures) and bringing tactics from the other side of the world to tacticlets who aren't ready for you.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >hybrid vigour
      That only works in domesticated animals Pedro.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Vikings and Franks were nearly of the same race
      Maybe normans had a bit more celtic blood due to their french part but thats it

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >Vikings and Franks were nearly of the same race
        They absolutely were not, the Nordic haplogroup is distinct from the European and Mediterranean strains and clearly show the mixing, but even today someone with Norman ancestry is distinct from native French with Gaulish heritage

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >even today someone with Norman ancestry is distinct from native French with Gaulish heritage
          Lol no
          Even back in 1066 the norman that conquered England had more french blood than nordic

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >hybrid vigor
      >referring to norsemen
      Actual moron.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        He mean due to the normans being the mix of vikings (Germanics) and french people (Celto-Germanic with a bit of Italic blood)

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >hybrid vigor
      a term used to explain why the inbred dogs where less healthy than less inbred.

      https://i.imgur.com/fZyH0Zl.jpg

      Why were they so strong ?
      Their stories are unbelievable, even if you read the accounts of their ennemies
      They always roam in a band of like 200-400 warriors and destroy everything they come across

      Their viking ancestors only did well against undefended coastal villages and monasteries who thought the vikings raiding them was a sign of their own failings to god, not that they where undefended and secluded on a coast with alot of wealth, Vikings often didn't do so well against armies with any form of drilling and training. when they where settled in normandy, they where encouraged to become a well drilled armed force, as they kept inheretence laws of all for one that encouraged viking raids, they encouraged second born noble sons to seek lands elswhere.
      Poligamy often encourages the same thing, Mongols, Yamnaya, Arabs and countless pastoral African groups had similar practices granting them an edge over diminished equivalent forces or less warrior inclined societies.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Most moronic and redditor post of all time

        >also using the term yamnaya

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      unbelievably moronic post

      https://i.imgur.com/0IkwL1Z.jpg

      a weird people whose military prowess reached levels that make no fricking sense

      Even when you read the sources of their ennemies, they describe them as undefeatable.

      When you read into it a bit more, past the wikipedia articles and actual history, you see them attacking North Africa in groups of like 100-200 men and winning everywhere, then they attack the Italians and Byzantines all over the place, same small groups, win literally every time against ridiculous odds, and all these engagements written by their enemies.

      Then you read about them after the battle of Manzikert, and you have various Norman bands roaming around Anatolia defeating Byzies and Turks alike, finally settling in Germanikea or whatever the frick that fortress city in Cilicia is called.

      They were literally top tier in war.

      It makes no fricking sense.

      200-400 man bands were already a large army for the Early Medieval period. Like THE biggest battle of that era was a mere 10k VS 10k at the Battle of Lechfeld (which was considered so grand for the period it made the Pope create the Holy Roman Empire).
      So 200-400 were already considered a small army in of itself. Most forces that they would meet would be small militia forces of maybe a few dozen men at best.

      So regardless of combat capabilities they'd always have the numerical advantage until some realm managed to scrape up enough men to actually meet them in battle. But then of course experience makes a big difference. An experienced veteran is easily worth 4 greenhorns.
      Warfare in that era was less based on field battles and more on essentially "wreak havoc behind the enemy lines until they lost too many resources" so armies would try to avoid fighting one another and rather just rape and pillage as many enemy villages as they could. So mobility became a big advantage as well. Don't forget that there were no standing armies at the time. If you were at war you first needed to mobilize levies which would take MONTHS if not years... by which point any raiders would be long gone.

      Only with the development of the knighthood and the feudal system as we know it and with it something akin to a small standing and professional army. It made mobilizing armies a tad bit faster than back then when everything was much more decentralized full of tiny petty and squabbling kingdoms. This allowed a faster response against bandit armies and raids and finally put a stop to it.

      200 people was not a lot, but infantry of that time was not ready for the cavalry charge as aggressive as those conducted by Normans. The advantage Norman cavalry had over the others was adapting an improved stirrup which allowed them to charge much faster.

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Scandinavian pattern autism (Finno-Korean hyperwar induced) and LOOOOOOOTING fixation
    >French grade arrogance, entitlement and aggresivity
    >Mix and match
    You now have a breed of hyper-agressive autist who think everything they look upon is them by right (or soon will be if they can help it)

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    a weird people whose military prowess reached levels that make no fricking sense

    Even when you read the sources of their ennemies, they describe them as undefeatable.

    When you read into it a bit more, past the wikipedia articles and actual history, you see them attacking North Africa in groups of like 100-200 men and winning everywhere, then they attack the Italians and Byzantines all over the place, same small groups, win literally every time against ridiculous odds, and all these engagements written by their enemies.

    Then you read about them after the battle of Manzikert, and you have various Norman bands roaming around Anatolia defeating Byzies and Turks alike, finally settling in Germanikea or whatever the frick that fortress city in Cilicia is called.

    They were literally top tier in war.

    It makes no fricking sense.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      I'm sure some of it is tall tales and folklore, to make the sting of defeat less painful. The Norman Knights were actually quite adept, though. I think it came from their tradition of horsemanship from a young age. That tradition has served many peoples quite well, it would seem. The Scythians and various other west Asian/Eastern Europian tribes come to mind. They all had various levels of military success that could be contributed to having a population of young men all trained in horsemanship and archery from before the age of 10

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >That tradition has served many peoples quite well, it would seem. The Scythians and various other west Asian/Eastern Europian tribes come to mind. They all had various levels of military success

        Nomadic steppe horsemen armies are a meme
        The only top tier people among them were turks and mongols
        Its mostly because of turks and mongols that everyone think that that nomadic steppe horsemen are invicible when they arent in the majority while normans were nearly flawess everywhere, especially when you know their small number

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          You forgot
          >Turks
          Meh, they were never all that impressive to me.
          >Mongols
          Were an effective example of the phenomenon I'm referring to.
          Also you left out:
          >Goths
          >Huns

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >goths
            They not traditional steppe people
            They used horses a lot and thats it

            >huns
            The defenition of meme
            They lost the majority of their battles and got destroyed very quickly
            Also they needed the heavy help of other peoples for their wars but despite this they were still very pathetic
            Comparing them to mongols is like comparing a cat to a tiger

            Hephtalites were good tho, they managed to make sassanid persia a vassal and they beated them a lot, even taking half of their territory

            https://i.imgur.com/oAbgxyi.jpg

            They also managed to be incredibly fricking aesthetic the whole time
            The only thing I'm interested in doing in CK3 now is creating alt-his culture hybridizations with them

            I agree but i dont like those weird masks tho
            I prefer the classic chainmail, nasal helmet, kite shield and sword/spear look like in op pic

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Imagine not like Norman faceplate helmets

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                I dont like them
                Either make it a full helm (i know pic is fantasy but still you know what i mean) or leave the face visible

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                "no"

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                Look moronic

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                you look moronic

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                Look at that swagger

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              >huns
              >a meme
              Black person, the only people during the fall of the Roman Empire the Goths never wanted to fight were Huns.

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                They were a fricking meme
                Only people who dont know Jackshit about late antiquity think they are worth anything
                They lost their only battle against the WRE while being in numerical superiority and got Bumfricked by the ERE and Germanics 20 years later
                Not to mention they were literal cucks who gave their women to local tribesmen

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                They also took noblewomen and married with Thuringians. Their warfare was so keen the only ones who kept them in check were the proto-Sassanid Alanians. Plus the Romans gave then tons of gold for their services and pitted them against all other tribes. Attila at his peak would wreck the Empire

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                No one wanted to fight them because they were pain in the ass and you couldn't really loot anything from them as easily as from romans or other tribes

                https://i.imgur.com/WdyNxku.jpg

                >Nomadic steppe horsemen armies are a meme

                >horsemen

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                >horsemen
                Yes. Horse domestication originated somewhere in the pontic caspian steppe, most indo-European peoples would have had domesticated horses for riding and driving. Domestication for horse riding was some time in the 3rd or 4th millennium, right around the same time IE/PIE people spread into Anatolia and made the "civilized" grain manlets in the "cradle of civilization" seethe.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >Nomadic steppe horsemen armies are a meme

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            They also took noblewomen and married with Thuringians. Their warfare was so keen the only ones who kept them in check were the proto-Sassanid Alanians. Plus the Romans gave then tons of gold for their services and pitted them against all other tribes. Attila at his peak would wreck the Empire

            They werent all nomadic, in fact only a minori
            They were mostly charioters and dragoons you moron

            >Attila at his peak would wreck the Empire
            Then why he lost to the WRE at his worst ?
            Fricking redditor have a nice day

            >proto-sassanid alanians
            have a nice day

            >horsemen
            Yes. Horse domestication originated somewhere in the pontic caspian steppe, most indo-European peoples would have had domesticated horses for riding and driving. Domestication for horse riding was some time in the 3rd or 4th millennium, right around the same time IE/PIE people spread into Anatolia and made the "civilized" grain manlets in the "cradle of civilization" seethe.

            IE were like dragoons you moron and they werent nomadic
            Only yamnaya was

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              >chariots
              >in the 5th century AD

              LMAO

              • 2 years ago
                Anonymous

                Im talking about IE you moron

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            The early Indo-Europeans weren't nomadic or much of a horse-warrior culture. Their initial domestication of horses was for food, not riding. The early horses were just too small and too wild to really be useful. Instead, what allowed them to spread was likely the Männerbund/Koryos tradition where youths would head out into foreign lands, raid, conquer, and settle down, then father the next generation who would do the same thing.
            The Sintashta culture (proto-Indo-Iranian) was most likely responsible for breeding the first really capable horses. This breed then spread across the whole Indo-European world and pretty much replaced all previous breeds.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              This
              They were mostly dragoons
              They fought at foot but moved in horses

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    200-400 man bands were already a large army for the Early Medieval period. Like THE biggest battle of that era was a mere 10k VS 10k at the Battle of Lechfeld (which was considered so grand for the period it made the Pope create the Holy Roman Empire).
    So 200-400 were already considered a small army in of itself. Most forces that they would meet would be small militia forces of maybe a few dozen men at best.

    So regardless of combat capabilities they'd always have the numerical advantage until some realm managed to scrape up enough men to actually meet them in battle. But then of course experience makes a big difference. An experienced veteran is easily worth 4 greenhorns.
    Warfare in that era was less based on field battles and more on essentially "wreak havoc behind the enemy lines until they lost too many resources" so armies would try to avoid fighting one another and rather just rape and pillage as many enemy villages as they could. So mobility became a big advantage as well. Don't forget that there were no standing armies at the time. If you were at war you first needed to mobilize levies which would take MONTHS if not years... by which point any raiders would be long gone.

    Only with the development of the knighthood and the feudal system as we know it and with it something akin to a small standing and professional army. It made mobilizing armies a tad bit faster than back then when everything was much more decentralized full of tiny petty and squabbling kingdoms. This allowed a faster response against bandit armies and raids and finally put a stop to it.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >200-400 man bands were already a large army for the Early Medieval period.
      Not even
      If you really read about this period, you would know that its really small and even 10k vs 200-400 is a huge difference

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >they'd always have the numerical advantage until some realm managed to scrape up enough men to actually meet them in battle.

      Again not even true
      >Don't forget that there were no standing armies at the time. If you were at war you first needed to mobilize levies which would take MONTHS if not years... by which point any raiders would be long gone.

      Again not even true
      Byzantines, saracens, turks etc... all had standing armies and even some parts in europe

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hastings
      13K
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cerami
      Between 25k and 50k
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dyrrhachium_(1081)
      25k

      You just an historylet spitting redditor knowledge

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Not him, but those were battles between kings or rulers of the whole realms, with months or even years of preparation behind them, like in case of Hastings, since they required major logistic to march and sustain thousands of people in the field. Normans built their power conducting small wars against local dukes, counts and byzantine governors, swallowing their fiefs piecemeal over the course of decades, its doubtful most of their opponents had more than few hundred household (standing) troops at their disposal. And medieval warfare consisted mainly of small war type operations with the goal or economically ruining the enemy (chevauches, border raiding, attempts to overwhelm small fortresses without investing them), every now or then the sovereigns took the field to intimidate or provoke each other, but major battles were not regular events. Big armies and big battles without participation of monarchs in Europe began to be more frequent after the reintroduction of professional infantry as main arm roughly during Rennaissance period.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Reddit tier post

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    They also managed to be incredibly fricking aesthetic the whole time
    The only thing I'm interested in doing in CK3 now is creating alt-his culture hybridizations with them

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >The only thing I'm interested in doing in CK3 now is creating alt-his culture hybridizations with them
      Its absolutely moronic that Norman culture lacks any kind of unique cultural cavalry units or any kind of trait for that matter.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Well you get access to the French unique cavalry, but that's like late medieval tech tier. Maybe they thought an earlier Norman-specific one would be redundant.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >paradox game
          >implying something missing wasn't deliberately excluded for a DLC down the line

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Several reasons.
    1. They inherited an equestrian tradition from the Franks, who had defeated them and vassalized them. The Frankish knights were the best in Western Europe and probably as good as the cataphracts of the Byzantines and Persians. This enabled them to conquer England, since the knightly culture of the Anglo-Saxons was poor; the Saxons tended to defeat Normans (Vikings) before 1066 back when their material cultures were roughly equivalent but the Saxons never capitalized on horsemanship like their friends across the channel did.
    2. High material wealth and metallurgical skill produced the most powerful lances, swords, shields, and most importantly maille armor put them on a level equivalent to or surpassing all potential rivals. People seriously underestimate how effective even simple chainmail was at protecting the body from slashing and even thrusting attacks; a good set of mail could stop arrows, and was only vulnerable to a charging lance, of which the Normans themselves were the preeminent leaders.
    3. The marauder culture of the Vikings, of which the Normans were a set, enabled them to beat the Muslims at their own game, namely invading countries far away, conquering them, and staying there virtually unchallenged for centuries. The saracens could never match a Norman knight on the field, which is why crusaders almost always won, until they were finally starved out of the Holy Land because they had never had any real interest in maintaining it, just killing and looting.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >who had defeated them and vassalized them
      It was more of a draw
      >probably as good as the cataphracts of the Byzantines and Persians
      As good ?
      They would buttrape cataphracts

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      You've got it a little turned around but all the right parts are there. The Normans did run up and hit a wall with the Carolingians, but they weren't conquered- rather they failed to conquer the Frankish kings, which was the surprise. They took the Carolingian feudal system to heart and built it out considerably, far more so than the Carolingians themselves. They also developed their martial prowess and the Franks learned from them, almost the entire canon of stuff we call "the medieval knight" stems from the Norman influence. By 1066 they had left every vestige of their Viking ways behind and were a civilization to be reckoned with instead a bunch of tribes in longboats

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >By 1066 they had left every vestige of their Viking ways behind
        Except for the wanderlust to go rape and pillage unbelievers

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        It was also a knida high IQ move from the Carolingians, Franks kings where getting real tired of hairy norsemen sailing up the Seine to pillage monastery and shit because they had other thing to deal with and could not spare the armies to defend everywhere (and while they had the forces to match the raiders forces, catching them was another story) so they took the strongest and more reasonable looking of the norsemen lord they could find, told them that if they stopped being a pagan shit and converted, they would be granted something better than usual looting : the land that produced the loot themselve. And in exchange they would have to stop their fellow raiders (something they would have a big insensitive to do since part of the land being looted was now theirs).

        Normand really quickly started to integrate into Franks culture and feodal system and while they kept some cultural odities from their legacy, it's impressive how quick they integrated.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, per usual.

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    No. They won because the Anglo Saxons literally just finished defeating the invading Norwegian army THREE fricking days before in NORTHERN England and then marched south to fight the Normans. Even then the battle was going well for the Anglo Saxons until their King died in battle.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Bro you think the normans only fought against anglo saxons ?
      They BTFO the french, italians, irish, byzantines, turks, saracens, sicilians etc....

      I know about harold bad Luck but still normans were top tier at war

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous
  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    General adaptability was key. Between 1030 and 1070, the Norman cavalry moved from a mix of using overarm and underarm lance strikes to almost purely underarm in the now traditional couched position. They adapted Fulk Nerra's passion for castle building to create a cavalry raiding / secure defensive base hybrid doctrine that meant small mounted warbands could absolutely dominate almost any area against enemies that weren't pure cavalry, as long as the enemu lacked a siege train. In southern Italy, the Normans went from having no siege expertise at all to being able to take walled cities like Bari because they brought Greek siege engineers onto their side as soon as they saw there was a problem their standard tactics couldn't crack. Same with the development of naval warfare skills towards the end of the 11th century. Basically, they weren't racial purists and would adopt anyone and anything that worked. The 'Norman' armies were hotchpotch hybrids of people from all over fighting for gain, and from 1070 on the number of actual ethnic Normans in them rapidly ran down to a small minority. They were also crafty and more than happy to flee when needed. There aren't too many pitched battles in Norman history because they avoided them whenever possible, which was an essential step to maintaining the small numbers of their elite core. Some of the pitched battles they fought, like Hastings or Civitate, could easily have gone the other way, in which case we would have a very different view of 'the Norman achievement'.

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >have a band of 200 warriors
    >come across a fortified town with population of 5000
    >bypass it
    >come across a a village with population of 1000
    >raid it
    homie its not water-mil-science

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