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Also, the baggage train contained the women/whores of the enemies, which gives your army another reason to lose discipline.

LaCroix wrote: That concept proved to be successful and spread quickly, to the point that some of the border regions had castles almost in shouting range of each other, which later caused warfare to center mostly around sieging.

Sieges are also simply low risk if carried out with any half standard of competence. Disease and hunger might destroy your army, but precisely because of no standing armies, relief for the besieged will be months or years away, and be seen long coming. So your not likely to actually loose. The enemy might even just choose to let certain fortified points fall to your siege, in favor of engaging in his own sieges or operations to continue to avoid a potentially decisive field battle. Then stuff would be traded back in the peace treaty.

Early cannons changed this for a short period in the early 1500s, as they could batter down gates in a day or two once emplaced, long before they could easily breach walls, but then the easy countermeasure was to mound earth in front of the gate, and build a retrenchment behind an existing wall, which could not be demolished until mortar fire was developed to a decent state of efficiency.

As I recall it really took until the early 1600s for castle walls to become more or less completely useless because of said mortars; while newer bastioned fortifications required considerably more men to defend because they had longer perimeters relative to the defended area. Fits right in with the final decline of pikes in the thirty years war ect... Not to mention the cost of providing cannons and gunpowder to defend them was also a serious issue, otherwise a bastioned wall would fall nearly as quickly and easily as a tall one. This all shrank the number of useful fortifications that could exist in a state to a considerable extent.

mining a castle wall however got seriously easier and most castle walls could not handle cannons being mounted on them. When the Emperor Maximilian destroyed the power of the free knights in the 15th century this pretty much destroyed them.

Mining the wall does not however defeat a castle reinforced with a retrenchment; well, not unless you built one hell of a mine past the wall and as far back as you think, or your spies told you, the retrenchment goes. You couldn't build a retrenchment in smaller castles though.

I believe more then one castle solved the problem of weak walls by simply filling in the interior of the towers, and only mounting guns on top of them, which was better for flanking fire anyway. It meant loosing some positions for flanking small arms fire, but that could be more then made up for with a small cannon firing grapeshot. The main problem was a tower would collapse more easily then a straight wall under bombardment, particularly if it were square and not round, but this would not breach the defense the same way either. Ergo enemy breach time and cost still rises.

Sea Skimmer wrote:Mining the wall does not however defeat a castle reinforced with a retrenchment; well, not unless you built one hell of a mine past the wall and as far back as you think, or your spies told you, the retrenchment goes. You couldn't build a retrenchment in smaller castles though.

The last part is actually the big problem. Most castles in "Germany" were of the smaller variety and barely had enough space to live in. Sure it won't do much against large castles but those were not the mainstay of medieval forces anyway.

Simon_Jester wrote:To add a bit, this also explains why whole armies might fly into a panic when there was a threat to their baggage claims. Picture a thousand armed men, or several thousand, all shouting as one:

"OH SHIT WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO PAY FOR THAT!"

At the same time, it also explains why your army is likely to disintegrate in a wave of heedless looting when they reach the enemy's camp and baggage train: the baggage is literally treasure, piles of valuable expensive stuff that can be looted, and each individual man in your army is at least partly out for himself because of feudalism.

It takes excellent organization and discipline to resist this. You have to be able to order your men to not pick up literal piles of wealth equal to a year's wages for a commoner and have them actually obey that order.

Or to say "you guys stay on guard, we'll divide up the loot after the battle!" and have them actually believe that. It is not simple.

That particular thing turned a French/Scottish victory into a bloody massacre at Verneuil.

The French army met the English/Burgundians before these could plant stakes to repel charges and organize, and immediately took initiative, charging through them with Milanese and other mercenery knights in arrow-proof armor, without notifying their Scottish allies. The Milanese mercenaries rode down the English archers and routed them in a single charge. Then, the mercenaries immediately started plundering the baggage train, leaving the french troops to fight without support. This gave Bedford a good cause to rally his troops again, and they viciously attacked, slaughtering the French against the city walls, drowning them in the moat. Instead of noticing that and relieving them, the other mercenaries were too afraid the Milanese would take everything for themselves, and went to plunder, as well. The Scots were way out of position to help, and Bedford had dispatched a part of his troops to keep them that way, proceeding to encircle and kill them once he ran out of French.

When the English were done with the French and Scots, they took care of the (dismounted, looting, and thus mostly harmless) heavy mercenary cavalry with extreme predjudice.

It was maybe the bloodiest battle in the 100 years war, with 2/3 of the French/Scottish army slaughtered, a death toll of about 8-10,000 in a single day. It more or less ended the Scottish support for France, depleted France's army significantly, allowed the English to rlieve sieged towns and win more territory, cementing their position in France for almost 5 years.

All because of the huge value of a baggage train.

You could substitute some of it with the Frankish methods.
They had a yearly raid/war structure in summer.
They also had loot divvying rules and enforced them - as per the accounts of Greg of Tours.
https://archive.org/stream/historyoffranks00greguoft

LaCroix wrote:The lack of standing armies was one of the reasons why Viking raids, and mounted steppe hordes were so successful - by the time you had assembled some men to pick up arms, the whole thing was already over.

Funny note, is that the raid structure and culture of what would later be called vikings existed almost all through the iron age in the baltic/north sea. Its a constant all through the pre-roman and roman iron age of the nordic/baltics, and then a huge increase during the migration period.
We can see this in the bogs and in the need for walled villages all along coastlines and rivers. Heck, the first report of something like longships are from Tacitus in 98AD. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2995/pg2995.txt
The goethes, jutes, angles and the saxons all did this to great effect right before the advent of the norse.

Thanas wrote:

krakonfour wrote:I think it is also the length of specialized training required to draw a bow until it can penetrate armor. The rate of fire on english longbows was impressive, and they could go through contemporary armor.

No, they could not. Not a single modern test at battlefield ranges has ever managed to penetrate armor and the padded undercoats worn. This is one of the greatest hollywood myths of all time. (If it were that effective nobody would ever have used armor as it takes way longer to train armored knights than it does to train longbowmen). BTW, training with English longbows is less training than is required to fight with well with a sword so that argument goes out the window as well.

Rate of fire was not as good as the rate of fire of eastern bows. What made the longbow a decent weapon was the combination of range and range of fire.

But it could not penetrate armor.

IIRC wasn't the part of the reason the English did so well at Crecy because the English just shot out the French horses from underneath the knights?

Yes, as stated already in this thread.