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Poll: Which of these Units would you prefer to see in the near future?
🕑 Added 2022-06-23 16:01:04 +0000 UTCHi, we want to hear from you!
Tell us which of these Units of History videos would y'all like to see at some point? Here's a brief description of these videos before you make a choice:
The Byzantine Infantry: This video discusses Byzantine Infantrymen which, much like the western peasant soldier, was a levied farmer. These men were given land by the Empire and in return they held a Strateia, roughly translating to ‘military obligation.’ Aside from these semi-professional and militia troops there were also fully professional thematic soldiers that were supported not by themselves, but by the people who worked their thematic land for them. At the risk of drawing a false equivalence we can think of these men as analogous to lesser western knights. They were rare, heavily armed, heavily armored, likely mounted, and fully professional soldiers. These men would form the hard core that a thematic army was built around alongside the imperial tagmatic units from Constantinople
Roman Army Medics: The Roman army was known as the institution with some of the best medical care in the ancient world, with one tombstone proclaiming that the doctor buried there had been in his late 80s when he finally died. The army not only allowed doctors to have exceptional hands-on training with reliable pay and benefits, but it also proactively sought out these doctors, hoping to add them to its ranks - and by extension, to maintain the army as well as possible. The doctors, then, were trained in a bit of a haphazard way. While the practices of the military doctors themselves are not exceptionally well documented, enough surrounding evidence survives that we can draw a general picture.
Mycenaean Warriors: Warriors of the Trojan War come in two different forms, depending on whether you focus on the text of the Iliad or on the archaeological evidence of the Late Bronze Age. In the former case, we can reconstruct warriors and warfare based on the epic world as sketched in Homer’s Iliad. Most likely, these descriptions are based on the warfare of Homer’s own time, probably ca. 700 BC. In the latter case, we base ourselves on the archaeological evidence from especially the late thirteenth century BC, when the conflict at Troy is often believed to have taken place.
The Anglo-Saxon Infantryman: The 793 attack on Lindisfarne was a watershed moment in English history. By the 840s, what had started as isolated coastal raiding had escalated into mass Viking incursions by armies of thousands, and finally into a full-scale Danish invasion led by the “Sons of Ragnar”. By 871, when Alfred of Wessex came to power, the situation in England was extremely perilous: the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia had fallen entirely to the Danes, Eastern Mercia was largely over-run, and Wessex was on the brink of exhaustion and collapse. If Alfred’s kingdom was to survive, it needed more than just courage and valor on the battlefield.
