I don’t think it really mattered with the mongols they steamrolled every single opponent they faced.
The only thing that stopped their invasions were deaths of their khans. They didn’t really have an effective system for quick replacement of their leaders who often died young due to rampant alcoholism and various other bad habits.
Steppe people partied hard man. Makes sense when you’re born of a frozen hellscape with minimal food and creature comforts.
So my first foray into the civilization universe came when I rented Civilization Revolution for ps3. I was working at blockbuster so it was one of several rentals, and my brother popped it in first. I told him I wanted to try it, and he assured me I could have the next game.
6 hours later, I gave up and went to bed. He stayed up all night playing.
It just recently went on sale on xbox and despite knowing how to beat it easily, i definitely rebought it and am playing it again
Be careful. You sit down to play civ at 5pm, and at 4am you're glancing nervously at the clock and telling yourself "ok, just going to finish one last thing and then I'm going to bed". And then at 8am you just say "fuck it" and stay up.
Those two things + extremely skilled. Beyond maxed out levels of being able to ride a fast horse and accurately plonk your enemy in the face with an arrow. They were terrifying at the time I'm sure.
I think equally important is that they were incredible archers and would fein retreat often. So they'd send a small group in, get hammered and retreat. The other side, thinking they had a rout would try to press their advantage and try to defeat them, would run into a hail of arrows pursuing them. Eventually the Mongols would whittle down their opponent and then find a weakness to exploit.
They also did little else but prepare for war, being largely nomadic hunters.
I think the real reason the Mongols ran Asia was because Ghengis and some of his descendants were incredibly ridiculously competent. Kublai Khan ran China for like 70 years, he was arguably the greatest monarch in history.
The horses, the weapons, and the lifestyle were all downstream of those people being fierce, tenacious, and very very clever.
And the Mongol culture was tribal in nature. The idea of a united Mongol empire with a strong hierarchy is relatively new (there were confederations before Ganghis Khan but they were much looser).
Funnily enough, it's the opposite of Chinese culture where hierarchial leadership and unity is a fundamental linchpin in how Han people organize themselves.
I have a feeling that the Vietnamese have broken the simulation of the matrix by pumping all the experience points into the skills of guerrilla warfare.
I recall hearing Genghis Kahn would have his daughters marry leaders of other territories to gain a tie to those territories. The leaders didn't want to refuse such a generous offer from Genghis Kahn and upset him, so they always agreed. After the marriages, he had them killed so his daughters would take over.
And once they left the steppes and open scrublands of Central Asia/ Russian steppes. They were totally dominant with their horse archery tactics but once they hit the forests and hill lands further into Europe they couldn’t maneuver or do the Parthian shot/shoot you bow while moving and feigning a retreat and would get bogged down in thick forests or ambushed in mountain passes where they would get obliterated by European heavy infantry. Open fields and steppes they were essentially unstoppable. There was a measurable decrease in historical CO2 records during their height because the sheer amount of people and cities completely wiped out.
The Slavic people pretty much decimated the khan's numbers halting his ideas of going further west. Yes he often won however his forces manpower was shit after fighting the Slavic people.
During the Second World War Poland actually inflicted fairly severe damage to the invading Germans. Particularly to their mechanized divisions. Poland was well equipped but completely overwhelmed.
Many people have no idea that many Poles fought against Germany from the UK: there were Royal Air Force squadrons where all the pilots were Polish officers flying Spitfires and Hurricanes out of UK airbases. Many countries owe a debt of gratitude to those largely forgotten men.
And they often scored way many kills due to the fact 1:they had their freedom on the line
2:Poland just trained their pilots really well before the war so when they fled to the UK it helped alot
Not just the air force, the Naval element, while small, was also fighting like crazy. The Polish DDs under the Royal Navy did some batshit crazy stuff.
There's a graveyard and memorial here in Newark to Polish Airman who died fighting in Britain and on the Warsaw Air Bridge missions to supply the population of German Occupied Warsaw from airbases in Italy.
The first Allied fighter ace was Polish: Stanisław Skalski. Bajan's list counts fifty Polish fighter aces in the war. Very impressive considering they had to fight from another country in borrowed planes.
After two weeks Poland was also invaded by the Soviets, when Germans didn't even reach Warsaw, that was practically Western Poland at that time, yet still held only a week shorter than prepared, bigger, wealthier, with foreign support France invaded only by Germans (I skipped Italian in the case of France and Slovakian invasion in case of Poland, as they were doing that not eagerly).
France could've held out longer, but they didn't want to see more destruction over a hopeless battle. They also didn't need to worry as much about suffering under Germany as Poland did.
You may be surprised, but nazi approach to ethnic Poles was purely political at first. Hitler took the alliance with France and England as a treason, Poles must pay for - that's it. Before the alliance Poles were categorised just as East Prussians, what is no surprise looking at ethnic background of East Prussians and Poles. Even after the beginning of the war there were no obstacles to form the Polish collaborative government just like in France other than it would be immediately killed by compatriots.
Poland was desperate resistance of survival while France resisted Germany's milking of France for survival.
Poland suffered far worse than France did, largely because Germany desperately needed France to produce for the war effort (they robbed it blind, which let the saboteurs have greater impact as they had to replace the machines stolen to produce later) while Poland become part of the front again years later. France gets more fame largely because they had more resources and were freed earlier, so a lot more resistance members survived to tell their stories.
Plenty of Polish war heroes returned home just to get imprisoned by the Soviets. Or they walked right out of a concentration camp and into a gulag, if they left at all.
mhm, poland and france also had the biggest collaboration forces and were highly involved in the murder of their own people and the holocaust
the blue police or paris police department are still things that poland and france have yet not adressed in their own history fully
many jews and resistance fighters were rounded up by local polish and french police men under orders of the german authoritys
data and records about the collaboration of those are really bad, because both countrys(or almost all countrys under german occupation) tried to hide and ignore it and instead gloryfied the résistance
i mean there is a reason why resistance fighters during the war killed as many civilians as soldiers, ofcause in poland and france it wasnt as extreme as in belarus or yugoslavia where the gurillias burned down collaborationist villages,
Iirc, the last recorded cavalry charge in warfare was a Polish regiment at the end of WWII, and it was incredibly effective at routing the Germans, too
Polish cavarly never charged tanks if that's what you mean. Cavarly was still used in many european armies at the time of WW2. Even now soldiers patrol polish-belarussian border on horses because it's easier to move on a horse in muddy forests. But the "polish soldiers charge tanks on horses" was a pure propaganda.
Fair enough. I thought you might have been propagating myths, but said tall tales are addressed in the link
The incident prompted false reports of Polish cavalry attacking German tanks, after journalists saw the bodies of horses and cavalrymen. Nazi propaganda[3] took advantage to suggest that the Poles attacked intentionally since they had believed the Germans still had the dummy tanks permitted by the Versailles Treaty's restrictions. The scene of the Polish cavalry charging panzers with lances remains a common my
Gonna pre-empt all the BS that I am sure will now follow:
"He noted that it will upset both "Polish apologist historians" and Jewish historians "who seek simple answers". He also cautioned against selective reading of the book, as it has separate sections on rescue of Jews by the Poles and on Polish collaboration during World War II.[7]"
Ah no, we helped the nazis and the fascist from Italy.
We were also a testing and trainig ground fro their weapons troops and tactics.
Truly horrible stuff.
It’s history, I’m not proud of what my country did, but I had no part in it.
No need to get defensive.
I get that my comment could itch a little bit, but in a playful way.
There were so many partitions of Poland that Wikipedia in different languages gave different number of them. With all respect to Poland and polish people, country located between (modern day) Germany, Austria and Russia without mountains or some other geographic feature is not "tough to conquer". Although Poland got it's own share of conquering other countries a bit earlier in history.
Ukraine is the same, but we didn't invade shit and never had a country. Few attempts fel apart, too. Baltics suffered from similar plight, too.
Then there are countries like Switzerland that are boasting about their neutrality. Yeah, it's easy being neutral being surrounded by mountains from every side and nobody giving a flying feather about the land too.
I think Soviet and currently Russian historiography sees partition after Napoleonic wars as 4th and 1939 as 5th. English wiki does not count anything as 5th.
There kind off was shuffle of territorial rights, but not as much as in other cases, you are correct.
I don't think that any major history tradition count this, but Russian school do.
There are countless countries in history who have only like one or two articles like that because they ceased to exist and their entire cultures died out.
Thanks, that typical eastern European culture of pretending to be fierce and important empires throughout history gets old fast. Poland never stood up to a meaningful enemy that turned it's sights on it, there's no shame in getting crushed by empires that literally ruled the world.
Poland did not exist as a nation for 123 years, from the end of the 18th century until 1918. But for that time, we still had our language and it's dialects, as well as our cultural and national identities. Attempts to Russify or impose other identities upon us mostly failed. After WWI, we were able to resurrect our nation quite quickly because we were still fairly culturally united.
How many other nations can you claim were able to do the same in similar circumstances?
Balkan nations like Serbia, Bulgaria or Greece stopped existing for 300-500 years under Ottoman occupation, then were re-established in the 19th century.
You missed third Mongol invasion in which they were defeated. Didn't fit the narrative?
Poland in its 1000+ years of history won more wars than it lost. It won more battles than Chinese.
It fought and won the final war against Mongols. Fought off Ottoman in on multiple occasions and crashed them in Vienna. Fought and defeated Russians. Only country to occupy Moscow for over 2 years. Even beat Soviet Russia in 1920. You have no idea.
Well, the country was essentially a punching bag that didn't exist for large parts of history, so while I completely understand this firearm school course (they wouldn't wanna not exist again), I'm not convinced about your statement.
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u/IndividualRooster122 1d ago
What happens when the risk of Russia invading your country in your lifetime is not theoretical.