[HN Gopher] Military Motivation and Frontier Maintenance
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       Military Motivation and Frontier Maintenance
        
       Author : throwup238
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2024-08-21 15:14 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
 (TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
        
       | bee_rider wrote:
       | I absolutely love his destain for Game of Thrones.
        
       | postepowanieadm wrote:
       | I would go with something like Habsburg's military borders and
       | Pandurs or Registered Cossacks. Different religions were not a
       | problem within these groups.
        
         | ptsneves wrote:
         | Funny you mention the Habsburg because it reminds me one of the
         | reasons pointed for the Austria-Hungary empire's disaster in
         | WW1. It was precisely the lack of cultural and ethnic cohesion.
         | 
         | The author channels a lot of clash of civilisation, which I am
         | very fond of.
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | So how were the defenses of the Great Wall of China staffed for
       | two millennia?
       | 
       | There's some description at [1]. At peak, it took a million
       | soldiers to defend the wall. That's huge. China today has a
       | military only about twice that size, and a far bigger population
       | than in the days when the Wall mattered. Staffing the wall was
       | using up a huge amount of manpower. That article, by an American,
       | says the soldiers spent most of their time farming near the wall.
       | So they were what the original posting calls "military settlers".
       | 
       | How was that huge army kept from taking over the country?
       | 
       | [1] https://www.china-mike.com/china-tourist-
       | attractions/great-w...
        
         | johngladtj wrote:
         | It wasn't. Do nasties fell when that army decided to open the
         | gates
        
         | jcranmer wrote:
         | Simply put, the Great Wall of China (as we know it today)
         | didn't exist for two millennia.
         | 
         | What many people now see as the Great Wall of China was built
         | by the Ming dynasty in the late 1400s and lasted at most 200
         | years before the Ming dynasty fell (they were still
         | constructing it when the Ming dynasty fell, and the subsequent
         | Qing dynasty declined to continue building it).
         | 
         | Before then, the walled fortifications were generally more
         | sporadic, more temporary, and definitely more lightly manned.
         | It would have required much fewer men to defend it--probably
         | looking at say 20k for the Qin or Han era walls--and the
         | Chinese state was, well, a state during much of this time
         | period (by Weber's definition, that it has a monopoly on the
         | legitimate use of force), unlike most of Medieval Europe.
         | 
         | Even then, the Chinese state failed several times over the
         | course of two millennia, and a few of those times were quite
         | literally people manning faraway places going "why are we doing
         | this?" and sacking the capital.
        
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