The Tartars were never really a country like that other than when the mongols unified the entire region for a century. Tartars was simply a grouping for most steppe nations by outsiders. The most...
The Tartars were never really a country like that other than when the mongols unified the entire region for a century. Tartars was simply a grouping for most steppe nations by outsiders.
The most interesting battle for me would probably be the Siege of Caffa (no wiki unfortunately) in which the Golden Horde Mongols were besieging a port city held by Genovese Italians. The siege lasted for years as the Mongols had complete control of the land and the Genovese had complete control of the sea, so they could provision the city. Eventually the Mongol army was being ravished by the Black Plague but before they retreated they catapulted infected bodies into the city. The story goes the Genovese also retreated, abandoning the city but the infection already took hold and so the ships that brought the Genovese home also brought the black plague to europe.
Oh lord. Rarely have the words "even though it is a conspiracy website" and "it has some very good arguments" belonged together in a sentence. And this is not one of those times. This is a website...
Some people consider otherwise, often citing this website, which even though it is a conspiracy website, it has some very good arguments for why it was actually a country.
Oh lord. Rarely have the words "even though it is a conspiracy website" and "it has some very good arguments" belonged together in a sentence. And this is not one of those times.
This is a website that claims that the 1812 French invasion of Russia was actually a joint operation between an alliance of Napoleon and Russia against a country, "Tartaria", that has since been erased from history. How could you possibly take this seriously?
In reality, "Tartar", a European misreading on the Russian "Tatar", was a geographical term applied to a very large area which was largely unknown to Western Europeans well into the modern era. Many of the people who lived in this area were members of various Turkic peoples, but not all, and aside from the Mongol empire, they did not form a unified state. It's like the term "Central Asia" or "Southeast Asia" today; it references an area, not an ethnicity and certainly not a nation-state. Except back in the day, knowledge was harder to come by, and a lot of people would just fill in terra incognita parts of the map with fictional or semi-fictional countries and mythological creatures. The idea that "Tartary" was a unified state is one such idea, taking the generic term for a very large area populated by many disparate peoples and imagining them as being some unified empire.
Here is an actual historian talking about "Tartary" and the way Europeans muddled everything.
Even a cursory glance at the sources "cited" would betray just how ridiculous this conspiracy theory is. I took a quick glance at a couple and neither talked about "Tartary" as some kind of independent mega-empire, although of course it's hard to tell when you dump a 500+ page book and fail to provide any page numbers for the places that supposedly support your argument. One source I checked talked about a visit to Yarkand and "East Toorkestân", referring to the region of Xinjiang in modern day China, which had been conquered by the Qing dynasty in the 1700s and briefly at the time of that source's writing (1870s) was controlled by a native regime supported by Russia. (You might familiar with the plight of the Uyghurs of the Tarim Basin in China today, brutally oppressed while supposedly constituting an "autonomous" area of the People's Republic of China. They're the natives of this area, and would not identify with the Tatars of South-Western Russia.) These are areas supposedly part of "Grand Tartary". Another source identifies the "Tartars" with the Mongols, referring to them as "Mongol-Tartars". I can't be bothered to dig through the thousands of pages of confused European travelers in the 1700s and 1800s but you get the point.
I would go with The Siege of Alexandria in 47 BC which I learned about in this video. I mostly just find it interesting that so much about this fight feels modern, despite it being thousands of...
I would go with The Siege of Alexandria in 47 BC which I learned about in this video. I mostly just find it interesting that so much about this fight feels modern, despite it being thousands of years ago. It has drawn-out, urban combat; it has international debt negotiation; it has a internal power struggle being meddled in by a foreign empire; it has government incited riots. All of this being done with swords and spears.
I love the Battle of Vienna. A massive Ottoman army besieges the city of Vienna with the intention of using it to control a number of lucrative trade routes. The Holy Roman Empire and the Polish...
I love the Battle of Vienna. A massive Ottoman army besieges the city of Vienna with the intention of using it to control a number of lucrative trade routes. The Holy Roman Empire and the Polish ally to repel the Ottoman invasion as part of 300 years of hostilities, mount the biggest cavalry charge in history and crush the Ottoman forces.
The Tartars were never really a country like that other than when the mongols unified the entire region for a century. Tartars was simply a grouping for most steppe nations by outsiders.
The most interesting battle for me would probably be the Siege of Caffa (no wiki unfortunately) in which the Golden Horde Mongols were besieging a port city held by Genovese Italians. The siege lasted for years as the Mongols had complete control of the land and the Genovese had complete control of the sea, so they could provision the city. Eventually the Mongol army was being ravished by the Black Plague but before they retreated they catapulted infected bodies into the city. The story goes the Genovese also retreated, abandoning the city but the infection already took hold and so the ships that brought the Genovese home also brought the black plague to europe.
Mongols vs Italians using biological warfare.
Oh lord. Rarely have the words "even though it is a conspiracy website" and "it has some very good arguments" belonged together in a sentence. And this is not one of those times.
This is a website that claims that the 1812 French invasion of Russia was actually a joint operation between an alliance of Napoleon and Russia against a country, "Tartaria", that has since been erased from history. How could you possibly take this seriously?
In reality, "Tartar", a European misreading on the Russian "Tatar", was a geographical term applied to a very large area which was largely unknown to Western Europeans well into the modern era. Many of the people who lived in this area were members of various Turkic peoples, but not all, and aside from the Mongol empire, they did not form a unified state. It's like the term "Central Asia" or "Southeast Asia" today; it references an area, not an ethnicity and certainly not a nation-state. Except back in the day, knowledge was harder to come by, and a lot of people would just fill in terra incognita parts of the map with fictional or semi-fictional countries and mythological creatures. The idea that "Tartary" was a unified state is one such idea, taking the generic term for a very large area populated by many disparate peoples and imagining them as being some unified empire.
Here is an actual historian talking about "Tartary" and the way Europeans muddled everything.
Even a cursory glance at the sources "cited" would betray just how ridiculous this conspiracy theory is. I took a quick glance at a couple and neither talked about "Tartary" as some kind of independent mega-empire, although of course it's hard to tell when you dump a 500+ page book and fail to provide any page numbers for the places that supposedly support your argument. One source I checked talked about a visit to Yarkand and "East Toorkestân", referring to the region of Xinjiang in modern day China, which had been conquered by the Qing dynasty in the 1700s and briefly at the time of that source's writing (1870s) was controlled by a native regime supported by Russia. (You might familiar with the plight of the Uyghurs of the Tarim Basin in China today, brutally oppressed while supposedly constituting an "autonomous" area of the People's Republic of China. They're the natives of this area, and would not identify with the Tatars of South-Western Russia.) These are areas supposedly part of "Grand Tartary". Another source identifies the "Tartars" with the Mongols, referring to them as "Mongol-Tartars". I can't be bothered to dig through the thousands of pages of confused European travelers in the 1700s and 1800s but you get the point.
I would go with The Siege of Alexandria in 47 BC which I learned about in this video. I mostly just find it interesting that so much about this fight feels modern, despite it being thousands of years ago. It has drawn-out, urban combat; it has international debt negotiation; it has a internal power struggle being meddled in by a foreign empire; it has government incited riots. All of this being done with swords and spears.
Gotta be the Emu War.
I love the Battle of Vienna. A massive Ottoman army besieges the city of Vienna with the intention of using it to control a number of lucrative trade routes. The Holy Roman Empire and the Polish ally to repel the Ottoman invasion as part of 300 years of hostilities, mount the biggest cavalry charge in history and crush the Ottoman forces.
Sabaton did a great song about it too!
The Battle of Schrute Farms.