I want to do another episode like we did with the Antikythera thing. You mean the thing where we both study something and then we have a very deep conversation about our different side of it? I go the technical route, you go the humanities route? Yes, we pick something from the shaded area of the Venn diagram of our specialties and then we teach each other.
I'm pretty sure you have a degree with an emphasis in military tactics, is that correct? Yeah, something like that. I don't think emphasis is a real thing. I think it's something you say afterwards, but yeah, I took classes in military tactics and I have a degree in history.
Well, a couple of them. So yeah, that counts. Yeah, I'm some kind of expert. Let's go with that.
Sweet. And I'm pretty sure you've shot missiles at stuff and tried to think of how to defend against missiles and how to bust bunkers and things like that. That sounds pretty CG. Yeah.
Yeah, I've actually studied cannons. This is going to be fun. Yeah, let's talk about sieges today. Game on.
OK, let's start here. How does a siege happen? And I guess why does it happen? Huh, that is a good place to start.
That is not an easy question. Let's back it up even one step further. Question for you. What is a siege?
Well, a siege is in my mind, a siege is when you've got one person that's dug in or one group of people that's dug in, usually in a defensive role. And then you have these other people that are trying to get into their fortifications or into their position to take over. And so you've got an offensive force and a defensive force in their opposition. It's like they're at the stalemate and they basically have to figure out who's going to win.
And it's a long drawn out process. Yeah, so I agree. I think I think what separates a siege from a regular battle would be that regular battles are usually much, much quicker because everybody's willing to fight because they either have to or because they both think they're going to win. So they do get out and get it over with.
And I think the other thing that separates it is a siege is usually a desperation move to say the only play we've got is to depend on this thing we built and the provisions we have to basically die slower than the. The people who want to kill us. And another thing is usually it's not something that they built. It's the generation that preceded them or either the fortifications that they overtook or something like that.
So yeah, often they've inherited this big fortress or something like that, right? Often I can think of quite a few exceptions, including one that I want to tell you about where fortifications were built overnight toward awesome Vikings. Yeah, that's awesome. How are we going to do this?
Like I've researched the weapons and the defenses and I'm assuming you've researched specific moments in history where sieges happen. Is that what you? Yeah, I've put some thought into the psychology and strategy of it and some specific examples. But I got a man, my notes, they're nonexistent.
I don't have anything open in front of me. So I think my best course of action is just kind of the storytelling approach. So I'll do my best. Well, let me ask you, how did you research this episode?
Like we decided we were going to talk about sieges and then we both want to weigh into the research. What were your sources? OK, source number one would be just this is my discipline. And so I think about it a lot and read about it a lot for a long time.
Source number two would be I went and grabbed an audio book and powered through it. And I don't have it in front of me, but we'll put it in the show notes because it was pretty good and pretty fast. That was mostly about medieval siege warfare. And I read a whole bunch of articles and.
Oh, and you linked me to that podcast, Jaws of Defeat. Yeah, you can't steal one of my sources. Did you can't do that? I know I didn't I didn't even listen to it.
Which one was it? I didn't even podcast or stupid. How did you prepare? So what I did is first of all, I spent 15 years working on weapons and countermeasures.
I'm really glad you started the same way. Yeah. Yeah. Number two, I visited a lot of fortresses over the years, civil war air fortresses, stuff from around the 15, 16 hundreds in Europe.
I visited some of those and of course, like everybody goes to castles when they go to Europe, right? So places like that. They did listen to Jaws of defeat, this podcast that I found. I don't think they have many listeners, but it was a really good podcast.
So I listened to a couple of episodes of that and then I read a lot about weaponry, mostly from the World War I era, which is not a period of time that I know a lot about in terms of weapons. And then there was this time recently that I went and shot civil war cannons with a bunch of old guys in the hills of Tennessee. That was awesome. So I feel prepared.
I really like the way we both in our subtle way tried to preempt the internet by being like, well, I guess the first thing would be my career and experience that I'd like to cite as a source. Sounds kind of egotistical doesn't it? But honestly, this is a perfect topic for us because these are disciplines. This is what we do.
And I think it's fair to list that. And every time you go to a fort, do you think these thoughts, every time you look at a castle or whatever? Yeah, no doubt. No doubt.
See me too. And in the last five weeks, I've been to a civil war fort. I went to Fort Monroe in Virginia called you from there and said we should do this episode. Yep.
I went to Acra or Akka in medieval and Turkish fort. And then I went to Masada where there was a siege we're going to talk about in here. Jerusalem has been siege like four times. I was there, sizing that up, just went past and only got a little bit of a look at it.
But Fort Ticonderoga today, which is again in that same kind of class of fort. So I do the same thing. Anytime I go and look at these things. I'm not in tourist mode.
I'm in. Oh, how would this work? How many people could you garrison in here? How would you supply these people during a siege?
So antenna up for a long time is a fair source to site, right? Yeah, exactly. Cool. I think we start with how a siege happens, man.
I mean, you've got the degree in whatever, all the classes and the stuff. So I mean, am I correct in saying basically you have two forces that meet at one location and one has a better defensive position than the other and the other one basically in circles. That's kind of how a siege happens, right? Yes.
Let's start with the simplest version and then understand that there's a whole lot that does not fit this pattern historically. What do you mean? Seashes are weird, dude. Like the whole thing I said earlier, the whole goal is to die slower than your opponent.
If you can die slower inside the walls, you're going to win. If you can die slower outside, you're going to win. And so it's deliberate desperation time. People on the outside of the wall, they're an open loop system that they can bring in sources from the outside.
You think people on the inside of the fortress or whatever it is, they're a closed loop system. They have to sustain you think you think. And so that's why I say your initial description of a siege is basically how it works. You've got usually a meaningful fortification at the very minimum, some kind of stockade if there aren't walls, a siege won't usually last very long.
So I wouldn't count like the trench warfare of World War I as a classic siege scenario. It's kind of both sides playing offense and defense at the same time. There has to be some kind of fortification and you can't go anywhere. And usually that fortification will give you the defender an advantage in that anyone who's attacking is wildly exposed to projectiles, to things that you can just drop off of the walls, to having to work through like a labyrinthine gate system where only one dude at a time can get through, which just makes it into a death hallway.
And so the idea there is that the people inside are making it really undesirable for the people outside to finish them off. The people outside are trying to size up this location and figure out what the weak spot is and doing crazy crap to try to crack each one of these individual nuts. And the crazy crap is what introduces so much variety historically in the seas. The most nuts military stories in history are all about seas.
Oh, yeah, it's it's really, really cool stuff. I would I would push back with you on the trench warfare thing though, because if you have a group of people that you've encircled and they have any sort of fortification, whether it be trenches or walls or whatever it is, as long as you have them cut off from the outside world, at that point, you're under seas, you're waiting for them to run out of food or ammo. Yes, ish. But part of the deal too is that oftentimes people who built these fortifications thought in advance about what it would look like to get people out during a siege.
So a lot of times you could leave if you wanted to, but you know that if you leave that controlling location that has such a great sphere of influence is gone forever. You're never taking it back. And so there's a reluctance to leave on the part of defenders, even when they theoretically could get out of there and save their own lives. But wouldn't you just burn your own castle down or destroy all the whatever makes where you're at, important and then leave?
This ain't a scuttling a boat. That's a great question. OK, let me throw this out. What's the most strategic location you've ever been at?
Just traveling around. You're like, Oh my goodness, I see why they put that there. I've been to the Eagles Nest in Germany, purchase garden. I have not.
What's it like? I've actually been there twice. I did a sound traveler from there. It's very, very high, obviously.
It's amazing. So the cool thing about that area is they still use it strategically today, like not far away from where for those of you that don't know the Eagles Nest is where Hitler's bunker was where he would retreat at the very end. There's this underground network of tunnels, but it's up in the mountains. So first you have to get to the mountains.
And then once you get there, you have to go down in these tunnels and they have all kinds of really neat things, like a really long descending staircase down straight into the mouth of a machine gunner's nest. Like there's a right angle at the bottom of the stairs you have to take. And there's nothing but a machine gun turret at the bottom, not really a turret. It's just a wall with a slit in it.
So I mean, obviously the way you try to get around that is you pour something down in the, you know, in the stairs. I don't know. It's it's very, very well defended. That's like video games, man.
Like a side scroller, 8 bit game. It's like Wolfenstein. Yeah, it's exactly like Wolfenstein. Well, I mean, you know, like in Mario, it's super Mario Brothers.
The original one, how many times did you get a place? And you're like, if that stupid turtle wasn't right there, this would be the easiest thing in the world. That's exactly the wrong place for there to be a stupid turtle. Right.
In this case, it's a machine gun. That was a really strategic location. I mean, the term strategic could mean many different things. Like if it's just ease of a defensive position, the castle in Heidelberg's pretty good.
But I don't just mean ease of defense. I mean, I suppose there are all kinds of places in the world that I could easily defend, but nobody would ever want it. I mean, ease of defense coupled with people would really want it. Have you been to Malta?
No, I haven't. Malta was fought over back in the 1500s. That's one of the locations that I studied on for this. I found that to be really, really interesting.
In general, islands tend to be good, right? Because you have to get to them by boat and you can let people enter out. I mean, those are really cool. There's a really cool castle in the middle of the Ryan River in Germany.
And this guy owned it and you had to get to it by boat, but he had these chains that he would pull up from the river. You know what I'm talking about? Yes. Yeah, go ahead.
I'll let you run with that one. No, that's it. Exactly. That is a place where I would submit to you that if we restarted world history a hundred times, one hundred times somebody's going to figure out that that's a pinch point that grants or restricts access into the rest of their territory.
They're going to put a fortification there and they're going to make it so you can't pass that water without their blessing. One hundred times out of one hundred. It's really awesome. There's another place here in Alabama at the mouth of the Mobile Bay.
You've heard the term, damn, the torpedoes full speed of head. You've heard that, right? No, is that something Liam Neeson said in the motion picture? Battleship.
We're talking about the television history. It's supported that you take this seriously. No, I am. OK, so the Battle of Mobile Bay.
I wrote a paper on this one. I was in sixth grade still remember it to this day. And the Battle of Mobile Bay was interesting because on one side of the bay, you had Fort Morgan and on the other side of the bay, you had Fort Gaines. And they were set up such that you could fire from one fort to overlap the middle with the other fort.
And so in theory, nobody could run through the middle and the torpedoes at the time were actual aquatic mines they put in the bay. And the idea was they would keep the Union fleet from coming up into Mobile Bay. OK, and so it was super, super strategic positions, right? In reality, Barricket, the admiral of the US fleet, he figured out that, well, heck, the angle of depression of the cannons from Fort Gaines can't shoot down close enough to get me if I scoot in real close to it.
And they don't have mortars at the fort. I don't know how he knew that. So he took the whole fleet and he just ran straight up next to Fort Gaines, like as close as you could imagine, like within rifle shot. And he just went straight through there.
And so damn, the torpedoes were full speed ahead. He just kept going. So torpedoes were, like I said, those mines. And so the thought was, if you hit one of these things, you blow up in your day.
Anyway, there was a Confederate boat, the CSS Tennessee that was made in the UK that fought for a really long time. I don't know. The battle mobile bay is fascinating because it involved forts and fleets and all kinds of stuff, really fascinating stuff. And it's humbling to hear you talk about that and a reminder that history is an infinite field and I will never know all this stuff because I didn't know about any of that hanging out with you makes me feel like I am getting more knowledgeable every hour.
More knowledgeable every hour. OK, I'm sorry. I'm really excited about this topic, dude. So I could just babble on.
Yeah. And I say, and I say, let's just I mean, you feel free, man. So I think I'm still tracking with our flow of thought here. And I've got it mapped in my brain.
My question to you is still what you kind of just answered it. Have you ever seen a place that if the world started over 100 times, that would be a strategic location that defenses would be built and you just talked about the mobile bay. I mean, it's dependent on what kind of weapons are developed, right? Yes.
Because if cannons aren't a thing, nobody cares about mobile bay. Yes, but they don't care about those points. Something that has existed for all of time is the ability for a person on foot to kill another person on foot, which means that we all know that if somebody has the high ground, they automatically win and you should just quit or else all your limbs will get cut off. So getting the high ground.
Yeah, exactly. Anakin. I don't know what you're talking about would be a great idea. And so historically, these castles aren't just protecting the rock on which they sit.
They have a sphere of influence and aura and orbit of feather effect, where effectively the size of the garrison inside that fortress is big enough that it could be deployed within a day or two's march of everything within that sphere of influence. So in other words, if you want to do anything within that sphere of influence, you have to eliminate that castle first. So when I first started thinking about seizures, I was like, well, why not just not? Like why go to their castle?
They're waiting for you right there. I mean, why walk straight into the boss's lair, just go, I don't care. Like raid some stuff or kill some things. Just don't.
But the point is you can't. And that's why the whole of Europe is spotted with these defensive outposts, because if you were to put a picture like a Petri dish and you have some kind of culture in there and you put teeny tiny little drops of Clorox around it, they'll all have auras and if they all overlap, well, then the entire Petri dish is now clean. Same thing with Europe or somewhere you're trying to defend throw a power center everywhere. It's all within a day or two's march of a certain garrison.
Make reciprocal agreements with your neighbors and raiders can't do anything in your territory. Then ultimately, there's always going to be a key fortress that is the most defensible, the largest garrison. And that seems to be where the fights just inevitably drift toward in history so that what you're trying to defend regionally is really significant to how big or how good a fortress you build. Does that make sense?
It does. But something that I've as I read this stuff, some of it just is perplexing because it's like, okay, for example, in Malta, right? So the Ottoman Empire wants to come and take over all these nights that are hold up in Malta. What is this 1500s?
I don't know this. Yeah, these are leftover crusader states. Yeah. So they're hanging out.
And then all of a sudden they're like, Hey, what if we just go take over that fort? What I don't understand is why don't they just bypass Malta? Because there's this one fort there. Why don't they just go to the other side of the island or something like that?
You know what I'm saying? Right. And again, it's about sphere of influence. They can go over there and sit on the other side of the island for a little while, if they want, but they can't do anything there.
They can't build anything there. They can't get a foothold there because the fleet is protected and controlled from the fortress on the other side of the island. You have to deal with that, which is near the natural harbor. Yeah.
So let's say, let's say you want to go camping with some buddies. I want to go camping with some buddies. Yeah. Great.
Let's say you pack up all your stuff, right? You got your little camping outfit on and you guys go. Out into the woods and you're like, I want to camp in this really pretty place on this guy's property, but the guy on the property has a sign up that says, I'll kill anybody who tries to camp on this property. Well, I mean, I guess you could just not go to where that guy is and hope it works out, but really you can't set up camp because now you're immobile and vulnerable on the home turf of somebody else.
You don't feel real comfortable taking a nap at your desk at work. If there's an intruder in the building, even if he's in another room, you know what I mean? You have to deal with a threat first. Basically, you can never have peace unless you've dealt with a threat.
That is correct. Got it. You know what's so interesting about this is you use the term camping that's what you let's assess Grant said of Vicksburg. So you have the Mississippi River.
So do you know the two? I'm so sorry. I know you know this better than I do. The two opposing plans for the Civil War, you had the Anaconda plan or the rattlesnake plan.
There were two opposing thoughts. You know, let's choke out the south or let's just strike deep to the heart quickly. I know the Anaconda plan is one where they don't want none. No, I'm thinking of something different.
No, I guess. OK, OK, I'll let you explain them. That's the song, Matt. I'm in such a serious place because I'm so excited and you keep derailing me with Star Wars references and Anaconda don't.
Well, what do you think I'm here for? No, I'm not going to this. OK, so you got the two plans. Yeah, you got the two plans anyway.
So Grant really wanted to just take Vicksburg as quickly as possible. Yes, obviously they couldn't do that. And he wrote in his memoirs. He's like, well, I guess we're going to have to out camp them.
So he basically resigns to a traditional siege, which he didn't want to do. And he says, literally what we're doing is trying to out camp them who can camp better at this point. That's what it is. Yeah, that's really what I've not heard that he said that didn't grant even in the process of out camping.
Didn't he dig a canal like in Louisiana or something to sit here looking at it right now. Grants canal. Yeah. So that is a weird thought.
I'm going to I think we mentioned this earlier. I'm going to reroute an entire river because I want my boats to go in a certain location. That's a crazy thought that similar to what Alexander the Great did at the Venetian, you know, Tyrant Sidon, you know, yes, great reference. Yes.
OK, so here's the deal. Can I try this and you correct me when I'm wrong? Yeah. Yeah, rock and fire.
OK, I'm overextended here. So whatever you've got this. Go. OK, so you've got these two these two cities.
You've got Tyrant Sidon, right? And they they're on different sides of the water. This is in the Mediterranean, correct? Yeah, it's just like modern day Lebanon, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, I'm so I'm so unsure of myself, I'll make grunting sounds when you're wrong. OK, they're out there on this island in long story short, Alexander the Great is like, I'm going to freakin whip you and they're like, no, he goes, OK, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to burn down the city of Sidon and we're going to just pick it up and put it into the water and build a land bridge to you and freakin kill you.
And he did. And what's cool about that one is it's in the Bible like hundreds of years before it happened. Yeah, cool. Yeah.
A lot of people do read that that way. That is interesting. No, no, it didn't it didn't work. What do you mean it didn't work.
The bridge proved overwhelmingly to be a waste of time. OK, so the Terrians, I think that is what you call them. The Terrians were able to harass the engineers as they were building the bridge. Because again, this bridge isn't just like some single person swinging footbridge that would create a death alley.
It wouldn't work. You got to move a lot of troops across this bridge. And so Alexander worked on it for months, but the Terrians were able to prevent the progress and then eventually I didn't look this one up. I think eventually they burned part of it or destroyed part of it or weather did.
And Alexander was like, oh, fine, forget it. I'm 20 years old. All I want to do is kill the world. How hard is it?
And so he summoned favors from quote, liberated cities along the way. And they finally sent ships and then Alexander handled it by votes. And up until that point, Alexander had been kind of a goofball when he beat people, like he'd been kind of benevolent and also, I don't know, am I allowed to say, did the fourth century BC equivalent of teabagging his fallen opponents just a little bit? Because it's basically what I guess I just did.
We'll decide how offensive that is later. Because like he just won the battle of Isis, just north of there. And like in that battle, he shamed his opponent Darius by capturing, like, I don't know, his wife and his daughter or something and being like, uh, well, I decided to let your wife and daughter go free if they wanted to, but they both like me better now. So married your daughter and now I call your mom, my mom.
So your mom's my mom. So that just happened. Yeah. Like he's a cocky, like, you know, I don't know.
He was probably like 22 at this point. I mean, he's a kid. He's never meaningfully been beat. Aristotle was his personal teacher and he just knows no limits.
So he's such a goofy, funny, brave, sort of irritatingly and during winter. And then his demeanor changed because of a siege. Seages mess with people, dude. They break people, dude, because people get desperate.
You run out of food, you get angry because you, you come up against the first thing that you literally cannot cross. You can't do the thing you want to do. Yeah. It's just like traffic.
Like why do people rage when you're sitting in traffic? It's because you want to be somewhere, you want to accomplish something and there's this stupid dumb wall in your way. Yes. The wall would just move.
Everything would be cool, but the wall is not going to move. That's what it does to people. Now imagine that that wall sat there in front of you for a year and every now and then that wall of cars just randomly loaded like the head of some dead soldier on a catapult mounted to the front and launched it onto your windshield. Just picture how much route you're that would make you?
Yeah, I wouldn't be too happy. No, there's this long tradition of mockery being a part of seizures. You've seen money, Python on the Holy Grail, right? That's where I was going, man.
I was just, I was just, I was just, I was just, I was, I just, I'm talking your general direction. That's what it is. And that's like, that's a riff on all of these stories of the craziest crap that people thought of to provoke and mock their enemies on either side of a siege wall. And so the Terrians were a little bit smug and it really irritated Alexander that they wouldn't be liberated by him.
I'm Alexander the Great. Like, you know what his mission was, right? Is like to take Greek culture and spread it around and don't kill people. You don't have to mingle them together and unify the world under his leadership.
You don't want to kill the Terrians. He was delivering freedom to everyone? Yeah. You know what these people need?
Freedom. They need freedom right now. They need freedom. So bad.
Freedom so bad. I'm going to tear their walls down and give them freedom right in their faces. Freedom is the only way. Yeah.
What a line. Here's what we should do, man. I think we should clearly we're both motivated to talk about sieges. Yes.
I think we should break just for a second. We should collect our thoughts, do a quick little ad and then let's try to get some structure to this because we're just like, we're so excited. We're all over the place. We say we huddle up and figure out how we want to attack this.
OK. See what I did there. See what I did there. I see what you did there and it was excellent.
And as I so often do, I still get this map in my brain and I can see the eggs at ramp in front of us that gets us where you want to be. So I'm going to take it right now. Do it. I'm in the car after Alexander.
Somebody just hit the car. Oh my goodness. Sorry. Go ahead.
I'm back in the car. I'm back. OK, good, good, good. Run the wipers.
OK, there they go. Oh my gosh. The I he killed everybody entire, dude. And honestly, to me, that is that is Alexander's Anakin in the Jedi Temple moment.
I'm trying so hard to be with you right now, but I just imagine I just imagine we're on I-565 in a little Toyota Corolla in the truck in front of his just trim his shade, a human head or windshield. This is not I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sure you have a really important history point here.
What the heck was that Dale? Really intelligent podcasting here. Oh, God. So it was it was it was his Anakin turn to the dark side moment in my humble opinion.
And he was a different dude. That siege broke his brain. And what I want to talk about when we come back from our little breaky break time, are you thinking about breaking the brain because ahead? Yes, I am.
OK. All right. You want to talk about when we come back from the little break is the psychology of the siege thing, because I think that's the really fun part. And that's really how it's won and lost.
And you're going to tell me why it's actually ballistas and tributias. Excellent point, Matt. Thanks for saying that. This episode of Notive Questions is brought to you by Hello Fresh.
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Thank you guys. Speaking of killer, let's go back to talking about seizures. So circling all the way back around to what we were saying a little bit ago, where you know, the seizures are an open loop versus a closed loop. Right.
That was your read on it. Correct. Here's why I would say no. If a siege pits say 50,000 attackers against say 30,000 defenders, that's 80,000 people.
Let's say the siege is happening in the Middle Ages. How is the land going to support that number of people for an extended period of time? Well, I mean, rape and pillage burn the village. The attacking arm and normally takes over the local area and takes all their food.
Yeah. How far will that go? Oh, I see what you're saying. So you're going to deplete the local area of resources quickly.
That's correct. And most defenders would not be surprised by a siege. I mean, it's not like if there's an army of 50,000 crusaders marching on Antioch, it's not like the people of Antioch wouldn't get word of that in advance. Like a group of people the size of your city is walking toward your city right now.
I mean, you can't prepare ahead of time because you don't have like the telegraph and you don't have a radio back then. Yeah, but you've got a huge orbit of influence of people who are going to be more aligned with you than they are with the others. And you're going to have a network of information to communicate that kind of advanced warning. You're going to know you can't move an army that big.
That fast. The main thing that happens is people, I mean, they get rid of the civilians and anybody that eats that's not a fighting age person, they get them out of the way as quickly as possible. Get on a horse, get out of here. We're going to keep people with armor and shields and know how to light pitch on fire and pour it on people.
That's what we're keeping here. Again, you would think all of those things, but that's often not how it bore out. Refugees would crowd into cities and the cities would swell when they were under siege. There's one example of a siege in Germany in the Middle Ages, where part way through the siege, the defenders were like, we just cannot sustain the refugees.
So they sent the refugees out to their opponent and the opponent was like, we don't want them, but we're also not going to let them pass. So all like 12,000 refugees sat in the ditch, the dry moat between the castle and the attackers and slowly starved to death and rotted right there in that ditch in front of everybody and they couldn't leave. Nope. The attackers wouldn't let them leave.
Why? I don't know. Cause you hate them and you want to kill them and you want to win, but there's civilians. Yeah, that's not how everybody thinks throughout history.
So actually in Aleppo that got weird in Syria, you mean recently? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm told that, you know, you have you looked at any of the news articles on that?
Have you watched any of the video from that? Some it's I mean, it's been a while we talked about it a few days ago. You talked about the guy who filmed stuff about it and posted it. Yeah, it's pretty wild.
The thing is, a lot of times people that are part of the fighting force will act like a civilian to sneak around and sneak out. And you know, that's the thing that guy said, he said, my neighbors appear to be working for both sides. I said that earlier, but it's very interesting that it's unclear who's the fighting force and who's just the most civilian at that point. Yeah.
And when everybody's sick and emaciated, I suppose everybody could pass as a refugee. So if they send 12,000 people out and they're like, don't kill them. Those totally aren't soldiers or people who are going to work for us. Just let them through.
You're going to take that risk. No, maybe you would in 2018, but in 1400, if you're wrong and those were fake refugees, you lose and all the people you care about die. See, these are horrible. They're the worst.
But here's what I'm driving at on this whole closed loop open loop thing. And I think it's really important to nail this down before we get further down the road here. The idea of the closed loop is exaggerated because provisions would be enormous because you have time to prepare for a siege. And secondly, any fortress worth its salt has some way to get in and out and maybe even an internal water supply to keep things clean and, you know, to keep keep your forces watered.
So it's more open than you would figure. What you imagine to be an open loop is more closed than you would figure because of how painstaking it is, not just a moving army, but to raise an army. Remember, it's not until the mid to late 1300s that you start to see any kind of standing armies happening in Europe prior to that and still overwhelmingly on into the early modern age, armies are farmers. Like there are people who get called up for campaign season for a month or so every year to go and, you know, have a little football game style skirmish.
Maybe a couple of people get killed and we get to steal your crops and that's that and we'll do it again next year. It's very hard to raise another fighting force to come and support you in the process of a siege, even though you're theoretically outside the walls. Yes, especially if you don't have a formalized government at that point in time. Yeah, all you've got is a nobility hierarchy.
And while generally speaking, if you're a part of a nobility hierarchy and another nobleman dies, it's actually kind of good for you. So there could be some nefarious motivations even in choosing to offer with hold support further. Those inside the castle, they are going to lay waste to their own turf. We've got records of forests being completely cleared villages being burned down by their own people, food being destroyed, crazy steps being taken to make sure there is nothing outside these walls to support these attackers who are on their way here.
They will find nothing but blood and ash when they come and try to mess with our fortress. That is how they wanted it to be. That's crazy. Okay.
I'm dying here. I really want to talk about weapons. It's time to go weapons. Yeah.
So in general, you talked about the fact that foot soldiers could go up against foot soldiers. So there's a point in warfare where people line up with sharp stakes and poke each other, right? That sounds adorable. That's what they do.
Right? Yeah. I mean, it's hard poking. It's like heavy poking.
So, so at the beginning, what's the first seed you know of? The first one I'm aware of is the battle of Jericho. Does that count as a siege? But yeah, what's the first one that you know of in history and what kind of weapons would be used there?
So battle of Jericho, which I think happened, how that exactly went down is obviously a subject of debate. The biblical account says people blew trumpets and the walls collapsed miraculously. Yeah. And obviously somebody who is not Jewish or Christian is going to be pretty skeptical of that.
But that's what the Bible describes in that situation. Yeah. If that went down, there's some weird physics going on, right? Yeah.
But what I will say is this, just because of that, you know, sphere of influence of fortresses, and I was just at Jericho, like last week, I can picture it, you couldn't take that area on the West side of the Dead Sea without taking Jericho. So we know that the Israelites ended up in Canaan, which means they had to have occupied Jericho to do it. So that much we know. So when is that dude?
That's got to be 13. Well, the early date for the Exodus, like 1200 something or the late date, early was like 1400. So put it somewhere in there. Yeah.
So is that the earliest siege that you know of? Is there one earlier? There were that many fortress cities before that. OK, cool.
I'm just sitting in boundary conditions. I'm trying to figure out where the earliest recorded record of a siege, you know, whether people think it happened or not. Yeah. You know, and I'm stalling because I want to be all smart and be like, well, actually, there's just one.
But that's all I got. Let's go Jericho. Oh, one side we've got trumpets and banging pots on the ground, right? Those are the weapons that they used to take down the walls.
Yes. And ribbon sung by prostitutes. Yeah, that's a very fascinating story. And what book is that in in the Bible?
You know, Joshua. OK. Yeah. OK, Joshua, false battle, Jericho.
I feel ashamed. There's a song. So yeah, so that's the first account that I'm aware of. And so moving forward, what's the next big siege activity that you're aware of?
Well, I know is the Greeks and the Romans, right? And so I'm moving towards what kind of weapons they used. There are more biblical examples. There are sieges in the ancient Near Eastern fights with the Assyrians, the Babylonians.
But yeah, let's warp up to the Greeks. OK, so the Greeks had this really neat device. It's basically a siege engine. And the translation is taker of cities, right?
Start with an H. What's it called? I know you know how to say it. I don't know what you're talking about.
Really? Yeah, butcher it. Let's hear it. I want to hear your version.
So here's the thought. A siege engine is this device. Let's say you have a really big wall and you've got to get over the wall. Well, step one, walk up with a ladder, but the ladder against the wall, climb up and say, excuse me, sir, I'm here to take a city.
But that doesn't work, obviously, because he has a stick and he pokes you in the eye, right? Sure. So rock. Or he pushes your ladder off the wall.
That's the best strategy right there. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that.
Well, the next thing we do is we're going to walk up and we're going to try to, I don't know, climb the wall with any pores boiling oil on you. That stinks. So it's all about sure. It's all about offensive tactics and countermeasures.
That's what the game becomes. And so eventually the invention of the siege engine happens. And the way I heard it described as this thing, if I'm not mistaken, this was a Greek invention, this thing is what is it? 90 qubits high.
Am I saying that right? I really want to get this right? And 45 qubits wide. It's a 90 qubits high.
That's like an elbow to a fingertip, right? That's a qubit. Yeah, it's over a hundred foot high and then over 60 foot wide. Guy, I feel I'm totally butchering this, but they basically build a moveable tower.
And it takes a huge team of men to move this thing around and it has multiple layers. And so you go up to the side of the wall and you open up. It's just imagine if you're in a tower of terror, no, but it sounds awesome. Yeah, it is.
You basically get in a elevator and elevator breaks and you fall down. But imagine going up and down on steps or something like this and you can open a door and then you could do things to the wall or the attacker or whatever, all the while providing shields for yourself. That's what a siege engine is. It's this big moveable building that you can move up directly next to a wall and then you can open doors and you can basically molest the wall in whatever way you choose.
So many words you could have picked really good. I know I just I don't know if I'm right. And so basically you're doing bad things to the wall, right? That works.
No, it's it's great. It's perfect. Yeah, how many jokes I just had to skip out of the attempt at decency as I 1214. That's a great guess.
Yeah. Anyway, that's a siege engine, right? So what's the counter to a siege engine? OK, best movie example I've ever seen of that technology.
What? Return of the king. Oh, yeah. Can you picture the siege of minus Kerith, the Battle of Pelonor fields?
You remember this? In Lord of the Rings? Yeah, the third one. All I can picture is the orcs running up at the base of the wall with gunpowder.
It's on YouTube. You should just watch it real quick. Siege engine return of the king. Yeah, siege of minus Kerith, something like that.
Of course, you would know the names of these things. What? Who doesn't? Come on.
Everybody knows that. It's coming knowledge. I know Helms deep. That's all I know, which is also a siege.
The second movie and the third movie both end with sieges. Isn't that interesting? It is. You know, something that I think a lot in my life is when he yells out to the keep and they retreat inwardly towards the center of the fortress to the keep.
You know, OK, well, that perimeter is too large to defend. Let's go into the smaller perimeter. Yes. Yeah.
So I actually think that in my own life at times when there's so much going on around me and I can't keep up like, you know, family members or injured or whatever, I just say to the keep and I retreat inwardly and I'm like, OK, it's all about family right now. Forget everything else that's going on outside. I just hold out in here until a white wizard shows up and saves me with fireworks. That's right.
Yes. Anyway, so siege engines were a thing. Obviously, the other weapons that everybody knows about are the ballista. Whoa, hold on.
Before we get out of the ballista thing. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
What? Lord of the rings, though. At the Battle of Helm's Deep, all of those orcs and Urakai, they attack the fortress at Helm's Deep head on and how do they scale the walls there? Do you remember?
No, I don't. Is it grappling hooks? Ladders. They come up with a whole bunch of ladders and they swing them up and they try to go with so just such overwhelming numbers that the defenders won't be able to deal with the ladders.