Ten Best Warriors in History - Page 2

quote Lynxx

Those guys were undefeated in battle, and their "clubs" as you put it, were actually more akin to axes, they could chop off a horse's head quite easily (inb4 hurrr no horses there: remember the Spanish? They had horses.)

They were also exceedingly vicious, often scalping their victims and sewing them to make garments (the more scalps your garment was made of, the greater warrior you were), cannibalising their fallen foes too. Also, human sacrifice via cutting open the chest and ripping out the heart (then sometimes eating what was left) was a part of everyday life. They did that to their own people by the way, not their enemies.

I'd say they get points for taking on steel armor, swords, horses, and early firearms with stone-aged weapons. Pretty much the Foreswarn, without working magic. Slings versus Cannons. Sure, they eventually lost, but disease killed more of them than the Spaniards. Just shows the effectiveness of Home Team advantage, superior numbers, and good defensive positions.

I don't think the Aztecs would have faired well compare to some of the other armies on the original list. Especially those with a lot of horse (and hence greater mobility for flanking or for either mass heavy cavalry charges or hit and run tactics depending on the type of cavalry). When the Spanish arrived in s. America their cavalry was especially effective & often only because the natives had not seen horses before and just ran away from them.

A Roman or Spartan army would have made short work of any Aztec infantry I suspect as well. Formed heavily armed and armoured ancient infantry formations like those deployed by Rome and Sparta almost always trounced "rabbles" of fierce warriors fighting independently of each other, sometimes achieving truly spectacular results against the odds. Suetonius' 10,000 Legionaries defeated Boudicca's 230,000 fierce Briton warriors in what amounted to a massacre in a pitched battle after all. Tacitus wrote that "according to one report almost eighty thousand Britons fell" compared with only four hundred Romans.

The Romans would have used a similar tactic against an Aztec foe probably - i.e. deploy in wedges in a saw formation & taunt the Aztecs into charging them. When the Aztecs charge home they would be met by a massed pillum volley to break up their attack & then they would come against a shield wall designed to channel their charge into the V of the wedges. As more charge in they press the Aztecs in front up close against the shield wall. The Romans advance slowly in formation crushing the Aztecs in front of them against those behind. In such a confined space there is little room to wield large melee weapons - but the Romans have short swords that are ideal for close fighting in confined spaces. The Romans are trained to fight in tight formation at close quarters with limited space - the Aztecs would probably find such fighting awkward and restricting. As the Aztecs fall they get killed one by one by the Romans marching over them as the second rank of Romans focuses on putting to the sword any fallen foe they march over. The more aggressively their enemy presses home their attack the more effective the Roman saw formation becomes. The Romans rotate their front rank as the battle progresses so that the men in front are always reasonably fresh. The Aztecs don't rotate, so the men in front (if they survive long enough) eventually become exhausted and then fall easily to the fresher Roman soldiers they fight.

Also the Aztecs are warriors who want glory by fighting one on one with a worthy foe but the Romans are professional soldiers who just want to defeat the enemy by whatever means; to do that they are happy to wait for the opportunity to strike against a foe who is distracted/fallen/tiring/injured/busy fighting the Roman standing next to them. The typical Aztec warrior will probably try to focus on the one Roman imediately in front of him, hoping to pair off in glorious single combat, but in so doing he becomes vulnerable to attack from the Roman standing either side of the one he is attacking - and those Romans are specifically trained to look for opportunities to take advantage of that.

quote Thrud the Barbarian

I don't think the Aztecs would have faired well compare to some of the other armies on the original list. Especially those with a lot of horse (and hence greater mobility for flanking or for either mass heavy cavalry charges or hit and run tactics depending on the type of cavalry). When the Spanish arrived in s. America their cavalry was especially effective & often only because the natives had not seen horses before and just ran away from them.

A Roman or Spartan army would have made short work of any Aztec infantry I suspect as well. Formed heavily armed and armoured ancient infantry formations like those deployed by Rome and Sparta almost always trounced "rabbles" of fierce warriors fighting independently of each other, sometimes achieving truly spectacular results against the odds. Suetonius' 10,000 Legionaries defeated Boudicca's 230,000 fierce Briton warriors in what amounted to a massacre in a pitched battle after all. Tacitus wrote that "according to one report almost eighty thousand Britons fell" compared with only four hundred Romans.

The Romans would have used a similar tactic against an Aztec foe probably - i.e. deploy in wedges in a saw formation & taunt the Aztecs into charging them. When the Aztecs charge home they would be met by a massed pillum volley to break up their attack & then they would come against a shield wall designed to channel their charge into the V of the wedges. As more charge in they press the Aztecs in front up close against the shield wall. The Romans advance slowly in formation crushing the Aztecs in front of them against those behind. In such a confined space there is little room to wield large melee weapons - but the Romans have short swords that are ideal for close fighting in confined spaces. The Romans are trained to fight in tight formation at close quarters with limited space - the Aztecs would probably find such fighting awkward and restricting. As the Aztecs fall they get killed one by one by the Romans marching over them as the second rank of Romans focuses on putting to the sword any fallen foe they march over. The more aggressively their enemy presses home their attack the more effective the Roman saw formation becomes. The Romans rotate their front rank as the battle progresses so that the men in front are always reasonably fresh. The Aztecs don't rotate, so the men in front (if they survive long enough) eventually become exhausted and then fall easily to the fresher Roman soldiers they fight.

Also the Aztecs are warriors who want glory by fighting one on one with a worthy foe but the Romans are professional soldiers who just want to defeat the enemy by whatever means; to do that they are happy to wait for the opportunity to strike against a foe who is distracted/fallen/tiring/injured/busy fighting the Roman standing next to them. The typical Aztec warrior will probably try to focus on the one Roman imediately in front of him, hoping to pair off in glorious single combat, but in so doing he becomes vulnerable to attack from the Roman standing either side of the one he is attacking - and those Romans are specifically trained to look for opportunities to take advantage of that.

I don't guess there's any way to stop this becoming a Hollywood History thread? According to contemporary accounts (Which were doctored for the queen to depict them as savages to justify genocide.) The Azteks tidn't meet the Sapniards on the feild of battle with illusions of "glorious single combat" but retreated to the safety of their fortified mounds, ambushed, and attacked them in their sleep when they had their armor off. They fought a Guerilla war of attrition, for survival against an invasion to wipe them out for their sacred artefacts.

The SPARTANS!i! would have been a closer match, Bronze age against Stone Age, and the the Roman Army would have probably wiped them out in short order, being a highly regemented, and disciplined army in full heavy armor, if the latter two had any way to get there including a contrived time travel device. "If they don't make a movie out of it, it's not worth knowing."

quote psiberzerker

quote Zhang Liao

Lu bu and Guan yu should be in the top 10 easy.

I doubt they were like represented in the books, and games, but while we're at it, Myamoto Musashi, (The original Cherry Tapper) and Sun Tsu.

It's more for the sake of it but sun tzu yes!

quote gogengantes

In their home terrain the Aztecs would have been able to fight the romans by means of guerilla warfare which the romans didn't know how to fight, making it much harder for romans to achieve victory in battle.

This is kind of what they did with the Spanish - that and opting to defend various key fortified positions. It was a tactic that most barbarians such as the Britons, Gauls and Germans used against the Romans with mixed results.

Defending fortified positions usually failed against Roman armies because they used such sophisticated siege warfare technology. Guerilla tactics either succeeded or failed largely depending on how determined the Romans were to see things through. Thus the Romans pacified Britain and Gaul and had mixed results in Germany and eventually gave up on Scotland.

In terms of pacification strategies, when determined, they were more ruthless than the Spanish Conquistadores. Indeed the Spanish destruction of Aztec culture was a very Roman strategy. The Romans did not hesitate to raise cities to the ground (like Carthage) and wipe out religions (such as the Druids) when they felt it necessary. Their usual response to a culture that resisted Roman rule (if the more usual tactics of conquest and bribery failed to work) was usually very extreme - such as when the leveled Carthage to the ground, destroyed all punic literature, killed half of the population, and sold one in every ten of the remaining population into slavery. That would probably have been the fate of Tenochtitlan (which was actually quite a bit smaller than ancient Carthage) if the Aztecs had proved too awkward.

Whilst you can now get a view of the brutality of the Romans to a degree through things like Spartacus Blood and Sand - believe it or not, in some ways, they were even more brutal than that.

What sums up the extremes to which they were prepared to go best for me, is this little poem from Martial's On Spectacles (poems about the arena):


IUNCTAM Pasiphaen Dictaeo credite tauro :
vidimus, accepit fabula prisca fidem.

nee se miretur, Caesar, longaeva vetustas :
quidquid fama canit, praestat harena tibi.

Translated:

Pasiphae really was mated to that Cretan bull:
Believe it: we’ve seen it, the old story’s true.

Old antiquity needn’t pride itself so, Caesar:
Whatever legend sings, the arena offers you.

In other words a woman prisoner (probably a criminal or perhaps a defeated enemy) was raped (and almost certainly killed in the process) by a bull in the arena for entertainment and as a warning as to what happens to Rome's enemies.