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Provide me an instance. (Besides Iran who seems to get pissed at everything)
I already did, and you have conveniently ignored it.
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Lol? My argument is that Genghis Khan should not be viewed as worse than Caesar or Alexander, and since all 3 did harsh things, they should all be judged based on their military excellence.
Genghis Khan was much worse than those two.
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Where is the impact? Iraq? You mean the guys who have no money to fix things and are plagued by constant warfare?
Well yes, I don't see how Iraq currently "not having money and stability" invalidates what the Mongols did to that country.
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I suppose you're going to say the Ottoman Empire's fall in WW1 was because of the Mongols and that the Mongols created ISIS.
Don't be stupid. The Mongol invasion led to the decline of these civilisations in general, but what the current region is suffering is not directly related to the Mongol Conquest itself.
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No, you're biased against anything that is not Persian.
No, you're biased in favour of anything that is Mongol.
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Did I ever say it was? By mentioning "gunpowder empires", I was saying that the areas post Mongol kingdoms were able to advance to better military technology faster than Europe, which shows something, although European weapons did improve later. The reason the Europeans defeated Ottomans in gun battles was not because Europe had better guns, but because European units were more organized.
But military technology is only one aspect of a civilisation's advancement. You can't just pretend that the areas invaded by the Mongols were not negatively affected on the long run just because some of them later developed gunpowder.
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Yes, Russia and China that can take on any Western country by themselves (with an exception to the United States perhaps). But if you argue the Mongols are the reason the US is more advanced than Russia and China, you are just babbling nonsense, as the Ottomans did not effect British colonialism and their area of conquest was very far away from Western Europe. Even if they were not attacked by the Timurids, it would have affected Western Europe very little.
Not sure WTF you are trying to say here. I cannot really comprehend that incoherent part of your post.
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Barbaric equates to primitive.
No, not really. The Nazis were barbaric and yet far from primitive.
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Do you praise the Persians? Do you lack respect for those they killed, even if they killed less? Those people still died. Do you think someone has to kill a certain amount of people before they die? Do you lack respect, again, for those families who mourned their lost ones from the hands of Persian swords?
Praising the Persians is one thing, ignoring the few atrocities they committed or apologising for them is quite another.
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You do not really care about anyone who died,
That's just your imagination kicking in.
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you are just arguing for the sake of arguing.
Really? I'm not the one here who is trying to talk about Mongols, ISIS, hejab, Sassanids, Achaemenids, Arabs, Christians, and Manicheans all in the same post just to score some points.
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Why? Throwing away the fact that you are biased against non Persians?
That's not a fact, but rather merely a product of your imagination. And why the hell are you responding to points I made whilst replying to another person?
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What is the most affected nation, then, solely from Mongol rule?
Iran and Central Asia.
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NOW, regarding "Persian tolerance", with our Sassanian friends.
"in 277 A.D. Mani, the founder of a new faith, the Manichæans, was crucified and his body flayed."
- H.G Wells
http://www.bartleby.com/86/41.html
"He was flayed alive and his skin stuffed with straw, was nailed to a cross and suspended over the main gate of the great city of Jundishapur as a terrifying spectacle for those who followed his teachings. His corpse was decapitated and the head placed on a spike. Bahram also ordered the killing of many Manicheans."
Nobody in this thread said anything about the Sassanids with regards to tolerance. You are strawmanning.
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The Achaemenids crucified people before the Romans.
So?
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Darius I crucified 3000 political opponents.
And?
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The Arabs also got the idea from having women wear veils from Persia.
Your point being?
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Khosrau II, the Sassanid King, did try to introduce her to his harem. He demanded from a Christian Arab (Na'aman) his daughter (named Hadiqah). Na'aman refused and he was trampled to death by an elephant, by order of Khosrau II.
That's nothing more than a literary motif repeatedly used throughout history. Cyrus the Great is said to have invaded the Scythians because their queen had refused to marry him. Cambyses II, we are led to believe according legend, invaded Egypt because the previous Pharaoh Amasis had tricked Cyrus the Great by sending him another girl after Cyrus had asked Amasis for his daughter in marriage. And know you are telling me that Khosrow II deposed the Lakhmid king because the latter had refused to marry him his daughter. That's just legendary nonsense. Khosrow probably had more convincing reasons to take over the Lakhmid kingdom, most likely because the rule of Khosrow II was exceptionally absolutist and aggressive, and having a client king was something to put an end to.
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One word, Safavids (except for Shah Abbas I)
All other Safavids were Shiite extremists and extremely intolerant to non Shiites, especially Sunni
Great, so you now turn to the Safavids after talking about the Sassanids for no apparent reason. Desperate and want to score some points perhaps? Strawmanning is not going to help you achieve that.
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Originally Posted by
Dromikaites
Carthage was sieged for 2 years and was conquered only through house-to-house fighting. That is why the loss of life was so great.
House-to-house fighting? You're probably thinking of the Battle of Stalingrad. There was no "house-to-house fighting" in ancient warfare but rather house-to-house massacres, as most of the soldiers fought in the open and not inside houses whilst taking cover behind walls and shooting the enemy with firearms. You know who died in "house-to-house fighting" in Carthage and elsewhere? Helpless civilians; men, women, and children hiding from the invaders.
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The initial intention wasn't to actually destroy Carthage an the Roman commander was seen weeping as he watched the ongoing destruction happening.
The intention was indeed to destroy Carthage, regardless of the fact that the Roman commander was overwhelmed by emotions whilst witnessing the ugly spectacle.
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The conquest of Dacia was similar to that of Carthage, in the sense the Dacian fortresses had to be taken one-by-one and on many occasions the defenders committed suicide when their cities fell. Even the Dacian king killed himself when the Moorish auxilia cavalry was about to capture him. Add to that the Dacian religion guaranteed instant access to Heaven for whoever was killed in battle, plus it was preaching that death should be celebrated because it was the passage to a better world. hence the contemporary sources tell the Dacian were weeping when somebody was born and partying at funerals.
After the war was over, there were several Dacian uprisings taking place, which resulted in further destruction of the Dacian villages. However the archaeology shows the Dacian pottery continued to be manufactured in the Roman cities of Dacia and in the towns built around the Roman castra (forts). This indicates quite likely the Dacians didn't perish with the destruction of the villages but were relocated where the Romans could keep a closer eye on them.
I didn't say Dacians had physically perished, but nevertheless the slaughter of Dacians in general (not only soldiers) was great and unnecessary.
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As for the Gauls, the Romans didn't take Caesar's figures seriously.
But the slaughter and destruction must have been great, great enough to make Caesar indulge in hyperbole.
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You are beating a dead horse, I have already said myself the Europeans learned how to manage empires after they conquered the Persian one.
And I have already refuted you by saying that Europeans (including the Macedonians) learned how to manage empires from Xenophon who himself had learned it from the Persians in general and Cyrus the Great in particular.
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However when I said that in the absence of the Achmenid Persian Empire the world would have not missed much I had in mind the whole world. Almost all of those things you listed were independently discovered by the Chinese. As such they would have ultimately spread to Europe, like all the other Chinese discoveries.
Firstly, I don't know much about Chinese history to either agree or disagree, but for the sake of the argument, I'll assume you're correct in saying that China developed these things independently. Secondly, Europe is not the whole world. Thirdly, if the Persian Achaemenid Empire had not existed, the entire course of human history would have changed. The Near East would have remained dominated by the civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, there would have been no Iranian civilisation (with all its contributions) as we know it, there would have been no Cyrus the Great and therefore no Xenophon to teach Europeans, there would have been no Athenian Golden Age following the Greek victory in the Persian invasion, there would have been no Alexander and no Alexandria with its renowned library, and Europe would have had to wait for the Mongols in the 13th CE century to connect China to the West in order for Western civilisation to learn the Chinese things which they would otherwise have learned from the Persians of the 6th century BCE, meaning that the development of European civilisation and its colonisation of the would have been very much delayed or even prevented, and so the modern world you very much value would not have existed today. Lastly, the Achaemenid Empire didn't just exist in order to be conquered by Macedonians who would make good use of its legacy. On the contrary, the Empire made its own contributions to its own world.
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As for tolerance I have explained there is a fine line between being tolerant and being dangerously careless.
I'm not convinced that Persian tolerance was "dangerously careless".
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It did succumb after 500 years. Even the final stage took about 3 generations. As for the barbarian kingdoms which replaced it, they were almost as Roman and the Empire they took over. Charlemagne's Franks look like Roman legionaries, 400 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (there's a thread in Vestigia Vetustatis with contemporary images of Charlemagne's soldiers). Not only they looked like Romans in their civil and military lives, they kept speaking Latin.
That was the result of the Roman melting pot. When the Achmenids were gone everybody reverted to their local languages and customs or adopted Greek.
Nobody reverted back to their local cultures, because they had not been forced to abandon them in the first place. You are basically criticising the Persians for not Persianising the civilisations they conquered, which is unwarranted.
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The lack of standardization and the lack of Persianization meant the satraps would be hard to replace.
You keep talking about the lack of Persian standardisation but you haven't yet provided a satisfactory reason for saying that. Lack of standardisation of what exactly? The core elements of the army were standardised, the administration was standardised, and the laws were codified. Just because the Persians did not impose their language and religion on their conquered subjects, it doesn't mean there was a lack of standardisation. And I don't see how this standardisation issue ties-in with the satraps and the ability of the central government to replace them.
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Remember the incident after the battle of Cunaxa, when the Greek mercenaries offered to make Ariaeus king of Persia?
The episode is telling for two reasons:
1) It shows how little the Greeks were thinking of the huge Persian army, at the end of a battle which had been a Persian victory;
The opinion of Greek mercenaries is of no relevance to my original point, that the satraps preferred to employ Greek mercenaries instead of deploying their satrapal forces (the forces that actually constituted the power base of the satrap in his satrapy) because the satraps had plenty of money, and they preferred spending it on Greek mercenaries instead of risk losing the forces they primarily relied on as satraps. Without satrapal forces, a satrap would have been virtually powerless, and unreliable foreign mercenaries would not have helped him maintain position without loyal Persian troops (who were not infinite by the way, as the feudal lands granted to them could only support a certain number of troops).
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2) Ariaeus' answer is also telling: the other satraps would not accept him as a king.
But he refused mostly because he was not of royal lineage to begin with.
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That meant the satraps had real power bases in the provinces they governed.
Lots of money, plenty of satrapal troops, and executive power granted by the Great King, so yes of course. But a satrap could still be relieved from his duties at once if the King so desired, so a satrap was not really rooted in his office.
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Contrast that situation with the Roman Empire, where troops in a province would proclaim their general as emperor and most of the other generals stayed put. If there was a civil war, that would involve at most 3 parties, even though the Romans had much more legions than that. Why? Because the standardization resulted in generals being rotated from one corner of the empire to another, likewise with the provincial governors. As such only a handful of those highly ranked people was confident enough his local power base was strong enough to make a bid for the position of emperor. That in turn meant the civil wars were actually a very localized affair, with most of the empire being left untouched.
You are piecing together irrelevant things and drawing the wrong conclusion from them. Not any satrap could make a bid for the throne of Persia, and the ones who did, Cyrus the Younger and Bessos, were able to do it only because they had royal blood. The situation was different in the Roman Empire, where any powerful military commander could claim the seat of Emperor, since Roman culture did not take into consideration or value royal lineage. It's also telling that even the Greeks did not understand the ideological situation in Persia, proven by the fact that they "offered" the crown to a satrap of non-royal lineage, not realising how silly to Ariaeus it sounded. Also, the satraps were ideally loyal to the Great King, and so even if Cyrus the Younger had succeeded in deposing his brother, not all satraps would have acknowledged him as a rightful King, and that's because of the royal principle of the Persians. The Romans were different in that regard not because they were more "standardised", but because they did not have a regal culture like the Persians.
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That explains the bouncing back as soon as a good emperor managed to win the civil war: he didn't have to reconquer it province by province.
The only instance where the Persian Empire had to be reconquered province by province was when Darius the Great gained power after deposing an imposter. That was an exceptional situation for various reasons, but it requires its own thread, so I'm not going to dwell on it here.
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The Immortals were what Persia called heavy infantry, but with wicker shields and scale armor they would be medium infantry.
Incorrect. The Immortals were armoured with iron scales and carried heavy wooden shields with metal rims and embossed with bronze circles. They were not lighter than hoplites in that regard, since hoplites also wore a scale armour and carried heavy wooden shields with metal rims. Both were heavy infantry, though the only disadvantage of the Immortal against hoplites was their shorter spears. The effectiveness of the armour the Immortals wore is demonstrated by the manner in which Masistius was killed by Greek hoplites; their repeated spear and sword strikes could not penetrate his scale armour, so they finally killed him by stabbing him in the eye.
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As for the Kardakes nobody knows exactly what they were. Given that at Issus the Macedonian cavalry charged them head on suggests they were at best medium infantry.
"Of the heavy armed infantry, he [Darius III] placed first the 30,000 Greek mercenaries to oppose the phalanx of the Macedonians, and on both sides of these he placed 60,000 of the men called Kardakes, who were also hoplites." (Arrian, Anabasis, 2.8.6)
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Really?
Those satrapal forces were so effective that in Anabasis they run away when the Greeks launch a mock charge, then they run away again at Cunaxa. Could that be the satraps already new that thus preferred to hire Greeks for the job?
I never said anything about their superiority or lack thereof. I merely talked about the fact that the satraps preferred not to risk losing them, due to aforementioned reasons.
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Actually the two eye witnesses whose testimonies survived (unfortunately through other authors) call them differently: Ptolemy calls them "hoplites" while Calisthenes calls them "peltasts". That suggests they were hard to classify by the Greeks, which in turn means they were most likely medium infantry, just like the Immortals have been.
Since both Arrian and Ptolemy call them hoplites, we have little reason to favour Calisthenes' claim. What confuses scholars with regards to the Kardakes is mostly their origin, ethnic identity, and whether or not they were professional soldiers or mercenaries, not their arms and armour.
