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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and we are back with part two in our series looking at shield walls. Now, in the last episode, we ended up focusing primarily on one maybe unlikely, but a pretty interesting problem.
explanation of a passage in a first century Chinese history that described a group of soldiers in formation with shields overlapping like fish scales. We ended up looking at a paper from many years ago by an American scholar named Homer Dubs that tried to connect that observation in the ancient Chinese history to a fact from Roman history about
a group of soldiers that were sent somewhere east after being captured by the Parthian Empire in battle.
And we ended up coming down with some major doubts about this particular theory, but it's interesting because of the various facts it connects to. One of which was simply that you could have a formation of ancient Roman soldiers with their shields overlapping so that they looked like fish scales. Now, that's a kind of striking image in itself. So I know, Rob, that that captured your attention and made us want to come back and talk about shield wall maneuvers more generally today.
That's right. And before we get into shield walls, I thought it would be helpful to just talk about shields for a minute. Acknowledge the underlying invention.
So as Brian Fagan and Thomas Hewlett describe in The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, a book I've referred to on the show many times, the shield likely predates human body armor. In fact, I'd say it seems to be a little stronger than that. I think pretty much everybody agrees that the first armor of any kind was the shield. Body armor itself probably only goes back to the third millennium BCE, but the first shields are just lost in the shadows of prehistory.
The use of shields likely emerged from just the use of found objects or nature facts to fend off attacks. And of course, we can easily imagine how one would quickly realize that, oh, the simple club that I can use offensively is also something I can use defensively. What else could I do to this to make an even better block?
Right. Just going from holding any object to fend off an enemy attack, maybe any hard object and turning that into more dedicated design, something that has a broader face maybe to face against the enemy, something that would have more deflecting zone and so forth. Exactly. And it's thought that early hunters...
likely quickly learned that you could stretch an edge you could stretch an animal hide of some sort over a wooden frame or a wicker frame in order to provide a wide durable defensive block
Now, I did briefly glance at Douglas J. Emlin's Animal Weapons on this topic. This is a great book that gets into—I've brought this one up in the show before as well—about the evolution of various offensive and defensive features for organisms, and then comparing that to various arms races and the development of different weapon systems among humans.
Emlyn doesn't have much to say about the shield specifically, but in general compares the development of human body armor to an interesting case, that of the stickleback fish. Uh,
With marine species having more spines, more pronounced armor plating, and then freshwater variations being like less spiky, less armored. And the idea is that this kind of underlines his general statement, and that is that in general observation of nature is that any kind of weapon is costly. You're putting...
biological energy into the development of those that armor or those weapons and you're missing out on other things because of it and you know it's it's like that in actual warfare as well i mean there are various human complications as well but generally if something is no longer useful it will stop being used and if there is a need for something to keep up with and with some sort of other advancement well then that's where the development is going to go
Right. And that's something people it's easy to forget about the costs of defenses. And that'll definitely play into some things I think we're going to talk about in the episode today that like, you know, you might think like, well, why not just have a really, really huge shield?
You know, like just takes up gigantic space. So the enemy really can't get to you at all. If you think about it for a minute, that comes with all kinds of downsides. It's getting heavier. It's harder for you to move around. It makes it it reduces the amount of space that you have access to and attacking and so forth. There are downsides to defenses. They're not only upside.
Yeah.
We can't help but sort of absorb the image of that. And then we carry that around. Even if we're like I do this, I find myself doing this. I'm like reading some sort of text about ancient warfare. And, you know, it's it's a it's a really good text, very well cited, making very rational arguments.
But, you know, I have seen movies like 300. I've seen movies like Gladiator and Troy and so forth. And, you know, those movies are going to inherently have errors and they're just part of like my visual catalog of the time period. They influence your view of what happened in history without you even consenting to the fact that they're doing that.
You didn't like set out to say, I'm going to learn what ancient combat was like by watching a movie. It just kind of gets in there. You don't have to try. Now, this idea of what if I just had a big shield, though? This is really interesting when we get into the history of armor, though, because like we just pointed out, the shield came first. Everything else followed. As we've discussed in the show before, you had the invention of the helmet thing.
roughly 2500 BCE being the time when this becomes popular. And this largely emerges as a counter to the devastating battlefield prowess of the mace. And so soldiers of the ancient world did typically wear helms, but according to Fagin and Hewlett, they typically wore no additional body armor and depended on the use of a large shield to cover them from head to foot.
With the frequent addition of a pair of greaves, they write, to protect the lower legs. But we'll have more to say on that in a bit.
So, yeah, this idea of you go back to the ancient world, it's like you have a shield, you have a helmet, and you're essentially good to go. No notes. And this would remain standard for centuries upon centuries to follow. And even on up into the 16th century CE among the Aztecs of the Americas, big caveat here, there's going to be a lot of variation in specific shields, military
But there are some sweeping generalities that are in play. Basically, they say it was a popular approach for various militaries at various times, in part because a simple shield was far easier to produce and mass produce compared to fitted body armor.
Yes. Another really important economic consideration. The cost of making something is not just the cost of the materials that go into it. Something that can be, you know, made a thousand times the same way is generally going to be easier to do than something you need to fit to individual people. Yeah.
Another really important thing about the shield, and this is not going to come as a shock to anyone who has even just ever had a character pick up a shield in a role-playing game, but if whatever you're doing on the battlefield can be done one-handed, be it like a spear or a short sword versus a two-handed weapon or a bow, then a shield adds a great deal of additional protection. And unlike in your RPG, you
you can't in real life, you're not going to say, well, I could give my character a shield, but would it look as cool? Because ultimately, you know, it may just be like one point of armor class, two points of armor class, whatever the case may be in your game. But in reality, it can make a obviously a huge difference. Yeah, that's a good point. I would almost say note for the the creators of D&D, like I
Then again, you know, I'm not a military historian, so I don't really know. But I would tend to think that you should get more AC from your shield than you should from your armor. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm guilty of this, too, though. It's like I'll just think, well, I don't know if this character would have a shield. That's not really their style. And, you know, the counterargument as well would be, well, I guess getting pelted with arrows is your character's style. Yeah.
Maybe it depends on the kind of armor. Like you get more AC from like plate armor. But yeah, people get a lot of AC from just putting on hide and stuff. Yeah, I guess it also in Dungeons and Dragons and stuff, it also depends on sort of like what is your visual iconography that you're leaning on to create your character. And that might be actual historic iconography or more likely iconography from films and fantasy.
Anyway, coming back to the idea of a helm and a big shield, we do see just this arrangement depicted in ancient art. An example that the authors here bring up is the 2500 BCE vulture stela from Tello, which shows the troops of Sumerian ruler Enanatum dressed in helmets, brandishing spears, and carrying large rectangular shields.
The depiction, they also argue, seems to provide us with a very early depiction of a shield wall, so a collective formation of shields. However, as we'll touch on in a bit, just because you see shields positioned a certain way in art, even ancient art, doesn't mean that's necessarily exactly how it was arranged, but we'll come back to that.
They add that the exact kind of shield used would depend largely on the role of the given infantry. So fast-moving skirmishers are typically going to depend on small shields that could be used with precision and without hindering your speed and maneuverability.
Meanwhile, your plotting heavy infantry would often benefit from these big rectangular shield designs that, you know, that could provide a great deal of cover and could be lined up to present a shield wall against attacks. A very late example of the former, though, you can look to the clans of the Scottish Highlands and the Highland Charge, where they would...
They would drop their musket after firing it and then rush forward with a small shield and a melee weapon. It's like a shock attack. But that would be a prime example where you can benefit from the protection of the small shield, but still being able to maintain a great deal of mobility and speed. Yeah.
Now, one of the resources we turn to for this episode is the excellent blog of Dr. Brett C. Devereaux, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which is a great blog if you're interested in the history of warfare, especially if you're interested in Roman warfare. But he gets into a lot of medieval warfare as well and frequently analyzes war
Warfare that we see depicted in the Lord of the Rings show even movies like Dune and of course things like Game of Thrones or Rome or you know the latest gladiator movie and so forth. Analyzing those scenes with a historical lens talking about what matches up to what we know about ancient warfare and what does not exactly yeah.
One particular post, though, relates to what we're talking about here today, and that's a 2023 post titled Collections, Shield Walls and Spacing, Hollywood Mobs and Ancient Tactics. So we'll come back to some of his observations regarding depictions of shield walls in modern media, but I bring him up now because he makes the following observation about shield sizes. Quote, battlefield shields tend to vary within a relatively narrow range of sizes and basically two major shape categories.
either round or oblong. So there's a lot of variety, certainly, as I already mentioned, but they tend to fit into these two broad categories alongside the usage already cited. He also points out that there were never, so far as he could tell, square shields. So if you see a square shield, like a perfect square shield in art or in some sort of TV show or movie, you are right to be suspicious.
right so the real shields found in history are either like a circular disc of varying size or something that is fairly tall basically sort of the shape that you would imagine a person could hide their tall body behind yeah it's like it's either going to be like those round sleds that you slide down a hill on or they're going to be like those the long sleds you slide down a hill on but I mean you just don't see square sleds it's
It's a good point. So Devereux makes some really fine points about shield size relative to the body of the soldier wielding it, that these shields were on the whole big, generally larger than we see in films and video games. The larger ones were broad enough to, on their own, block a significant portion of the soldier's body.
And even the smaller examples could cover exceptionally well if you were turning your body, turning your shoulder toward the enemy, making yourself as narrow as possible behind the shield, which was typical form. Right. And in fact, it almost seems that people tend to instinctively know to do this. If you're in a dangerous situation, if you are...
think you're about to get into a fight, whether armed or unarmed, you tend to want to pivot your body so that you become narrow so that your side faces your opponent instead of you're facing them head on.
Now, in looking at these different shield sizes, you know, I can think about what's cool and what looks effective for combatants. But I know when I see it, I'm like, if it was actually me, I would say, give me the biggest one you have with the most coverage possible. You know, it needs to be about the size of a church door. But an interesting thing that Devereaux points out as well is that most shields are going to focus on protecting the head and the chest.
And even smaller shields are going to do this quite well. And as far as lower parts of the body goes, like, you know, lower legs, the feet and all, he adds that in close combat, all strikes are going to originate from shoulder height. And, you know, certainly you could aim at your opponent's feet in such combat, but it would be tricky and it would expose you to counterattack.
So the defense is ultimately well placed here. Also coming back to body positioning, you're going to have your body perpendicular to the combat. And on top of that, most of the shields you're looking at are going to be maneuverable to some degree or another. I mean, they're all maneuverable to a degree, but perhaps more so than a novice might assume just looking at images.
Right. So a shield is not like a static defense, say, of a particular part of your body, but it is something you move around in reaction to the enemy and to protect the parts of your body that need to be protected depending on what you're about to do. It makes me think about Captain America's shield. I haven't watched enough Captain America recently, and maybe he's my least favorite, so I don't notice what he's doing as much. But he does throw the shield around, which does feel kind of like...
Like someone thought, well, the shield isn't interesting enough. Maybe he can throw it. It can be a weapon. Like, let's make it more active and less passive. But in reality, like the shield is going to be a rather active, defensive bit of armor.
Now, as far as arrows go, Devereaux points out that it's only short range that you'd need to worry about concerning like your lower legs and feet. Long range missiles are going to be coming from above anyway. So, again, imagine yourself holding that shield up. You know, if it's positioned correctly towards the incoming arrows, you're not going to have to worry as much about your feet.
So basically, shields can provide a great deal of coverage for the individual fighter on their own. But then in formation, we get into the widely used shield wall formations that you see in various militaries throughout the ancient world and for centuries and centuries after that. ♪
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Now, Devereaux goes into a great deal more detail about all of this that we're not going to cover. That post is a great deep dive, so I recommend checking it out. But there are several key points that he makes about shield walls and points about how shield walls are generally incorrectly depicted in video games, movies, and art. And again, this is kind of important because these are the examples that end up coloring the way we think about it.
So I'm compressing many of his points here, but essentially this one I found really entertaining and insightful. Really tight formations of soldiers with shields and swords just look cool.
They look cool now and they look cool in Roman times. And we, as he points out, we actually see Roman depictions of their own troops like locked into tight formations for seemingly this reason, like tighter formations depicted than they would have actually had on the field. That's right. So he's making the point that when you see a movie scene today where armed
Armed infantry with, say, spears and shields or swords and shield are going into battle and you see them with the shields all lined up side to side touching, you know, so like you couldn't even get in between the shields. They're making a literal wall of the shields or even overlapping walls.
that that was not actually a common battle tactic in many ancient armies. You would have different kinds of formations and sometimes for various reasons soldiers would close up into tighter ranks and hold their shields out and we'll talk about some reasons for that as we go on but
But they're not often in reality as tight as we see in fictional media. There's more space in between them for good reasons. Yeah. But I guess part of it is like the idea that it gets across. Like, look how tight these soldiers are. Like they are a single unit. They're like a single mass, you know, um,
We like the idea of that. Another example he brings up is that early modern gunpowder tactics eventually became quite tight in their formation to maximize fire over frontage.
And this also did not depend on combat maneuverability. You weren't having to swing your rifle around. But this tight image of formations then is used to imagine formations for historic soldiers who were swinging around weapons or using big spears or something like that.
Uh, so that that's, I think that's a great point as well. Uh, the way we, we take modern or at least more recent examples and then use those perhaps even subconsciously to imagine the past, uh, which, you know, this is a big tool that we use in imagining the past in general, like start with what you know, and then, and then imagine, uh, like ancient people doing that. But, uh, you know, it doesn't apply, you know, one-to-one for every situation. Another point that he brought up that I really liked was that, um,
In various screen depictions especially, we see more unrealistic depictions of shield walls. And that is because fictions often revolve around some sort of novel and exciting solution to a tactical problem, when in reality, quote, like most tactics, shield walls are effective but not particularly clever. Right?
Right. In reality, the so-called shield wall is not a, it's not a trick. There's nothing especially clever or counterintuitive about it. It's like lining up your infantry, your heavy infantry in a formation where it would be hard to get through them. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I was watching an episode of The Studio, which is a comedy about the movie industry. It has nothing to do with Shield Walls, but there's a part in one of the episodes where they're saying, look, they're telling this young, promising director, we're not going to tell you how to make your movie, but we have a formula that absolutely works and makes money. And we'd like you to keep that in mind. It's basically what's going on here. This is not...
Exciting ideas on the battlefield make for great stories, but at the end of the day, there's a formula that works, and generally those generals are going to stick to it as much as possible. Okay, so what were most real shield wall infantry formations like, and why were they like that?
Well, Devereaux gets into more detail, but basically, like, you're just going to have more space because, I mean, this is the big one. You need space to move around and wield your weapon and wield the shield. Because remember, we were talking about the shield is is a more active defense than it may seem in like a still photograph or in some of these movies.
You know, shields were mobile and permitted a fair amount of coverage when utilized properly. Shields were also large, again, and could cover an individual quite well, even against incoming arrows, which he drives home were not as plentiful and rapid fire as films make it seem. So troops could and did advance against incoming arrows like arrows. Like it's not just suddenly that it's raining arrows and the troops just can't move for five minutes.
Our arrows will blot out the sun. That's hard to do in real life. Yeah.
And then something we'll definitely come back to in a bit, super tight formations tend to just in general make troops slower and less effective at fighting, which kind of comes back to what we're saying. They need space to do what they need to do. Right. So you can imagine a formation that is still in effect a wall of soldiers with shields. So it is a shield wall, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the shields are touching edge to edge or even overlapping. There
There would be some reasonable space, probably a few feet in between them in most of these formations where you'd be expecting a soldier to fight. Yes. So again, many ancient armies made use of the shield wall as well as rectangular formations of troops, the phalanx. And it's one of those tactics that likely developed independently more than once.
There's a lot of variation and certainly different terminology, but suffice to say that it all generally came down to how, as a unit, these soldiers could stick together, cover adjacent troops with their shields, and keep the front line offensive against the opposing forces' front line.
And all of this was the domain of domain of trained soldiers. Though Devereaux warns that it's easy to err on either side of this realization. You'll either assume that the troops were inexperienced and untrained or that they were robots or just super humanly trained professional soldiers who just could not err and would not break. One of the points he makes that I think is pretty interesting is that.
Yeah.
But that just the threat of a soldier paying attention to the space in between the shields is in reality a barrier that you can't really get through because it is a threat barrier. It's not that the shields are physically touching all the way down the line, but you can't just like rush into that space because, you know, if you rush into that space, you will almost certainly get get hit with a spear or a sword.
It's almost like, um,
taking the game, the childhood game of Red Rover, where you actually join arms, if I'm remembering correctly, to try and keep the other children from running through your line. Like there's that mentality. But obviously in, say, professional American football, nobody's locking arms as part of a defensive line or anything like they're mobile. They can move. And if they're spaced appropriately or in the right position, like they can stop somebody trying to run past them. Right. So, yeah, that's a good comparison because
I don't play football, but the way I assume it works is like you're also trying to notice where the person blocking you on the other team is looking. And if they're paying attention to where you're about to go, that's going to probably deter you because you know that they're going to come to meet you there if you go that way. Why don't they let them wear shields, though? They have helmets, they have body armor, but no shields. No spears either. All right. I think it's time for us to finally come back, though, to the Roman Testudo.
Again, not the default mode of Roman shield formations, but one they could form in certain circumstances and one that has, I think, for many people become like just the icon of a tight shield wall and also one that just like resonates with us on multiple levels. That's right. And this is the formation actually that Homer Dubs talks about in the paper that we we discussed in the last episode. So just to refresh, Homer Dubs, 20th century American scholar, writes,
famously argued that a group of Roman soldiers captured by the Parthian Empire after the Battle of Kari, which today would be in southeastern Turkey in 53 BCE, he says that they made their way east into Asia and fought in a battle against the army of the Han Chinese Empire in the 30s BCE.
And then eventually the survivors, same group of Roman soldiers, settled in a region of northern China and became the ancestors of a group of people called the Li Qian.
Now, in the previous episode, we raised a number of reasons for doubting this hypothesis with different levels of doubt for the different parts of it, particularly doubting the Roman ancestry of the Lichian people at large, which was, I would say, pretty thoroughly discredited by Y chromosome genetic analysis published by Joe et al. in 2007 in the Journal of Human Genetics.
We also raised doubts about the role of Romans in the historic battle between the Hun warlord Qi and the Chinese army. There's less direct evidence against this, but we just noted that
It's an interesting idea, but many scholars with the relevant historical specializations have disagreed with Dubs. And we observed personally from reading his paper that it just rests on a lot of speculative assumptions. He's making a lot of jumps and it's dubious the amount of certainty he seems to have when he gets to the conclusion. It's more, I would rank it more like kind of an interesting possibility. Yeah.
This is kind of a side note, but I've mentioned this on the show before. It's the kind of idea that I think benefits from what I would call aesthetic epistemology. The kind of thing that people want to believe is true because it's cool to think about. And I think the age we live in and the podcasting medium in particular really have a weakness for aesthetic epistemology. I don't know why it is.
podcasts, but it seems to me podcasts today are a place where it is so easy to leverage information
interest into factuality and there are some big shows out there that make this i would say almost their entire project it's just something uh something seems it's a really cool idea it kind of changes everything you know about history or it's like whoa you never would have thought this could have happened but that's crazy to imagine and so it just starts to be like well then it is true and if you doubt it you've got you're covering it up there's you're trying to hide something
Uh, it's just something I think podcasters and podcast listeners should be aware of. Yeah. I mean, we have to be aware of it as well. You know, I'll get excited about an idea and then, you know, maybe I'll learn a little bit more about it and I'll have to, you know, realize, well, we got to couch this in the appropriate knowledge and in the appropriate analysis. Yeah. Same here. It affects me too. Uh,
But we're doing our best, folks. We try to bring you things that are interesting, but also be real about what we can know and what is likely based on our knowledge.
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But anyway, so coming back to Dub's paper itself, the original reason he suggests that it was a group of Roman soldiers that were the people described fighting in this battle against the Western Chinese army. The reason he says they're Roman soldiers is a line in a Chinese history composed mostly in the first century called the history of the former Han dynasty, or sometimes just the book of Han dynasty.
And it's a passage describing the battlefield in this battle based on a painting made by someone who was there. And it mentions a troop formation defending the city as, quote, more than 100 foot soldiers lined up in a fish scale formation. And.
And Dubs takes this to mean that the soldiers were holding shields in their hands and that the shields were overlapping one another and covering them in all around, like the scales overlapping on the skin of a fish and covering the fish. Now, for a number of reasons, Dubs argues that this description really could only refer to Roman legionaries holding a particular type of center grip shield called a scutum or plural scuta.
And performing a maneuver called a testudo. Now, whether or not Dubs was correct about the battle, it's again, I think it's not impossible. Interesting idea, but there are a lot of causes for doubt. It is worth taking a look at what the testudo was and what we know about it.
Testudo is a Latin word that means tortoise. And if we look at some passages in ancient Roman texts, we can see a bit about what it was and how it was used.
For example, I picked up a few references to the Testudo in Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. This is a text that Julius Caesar wrote himself about his firsthand experience of military conquest and suppression of uprisings in the region of Gaul.
that's a lot of modern day france basically and yes he did write this himself about his own experiences and yes he does refer to himself in the third person so it's quite funny so the first passage i was going to mention uh and by the way this is the english version translated by mcdevitt and bonn this is in book two chapter six caesar says quote the
The Gauls' mode of besieging is the same as that of the Belgi, when after having drawn a large number of men around the whole of the fortifications, stones have begun to be cast against the wall on all sides, and the wall has been stripped of its defenders. Then, forming a testudo, they advance to the gates and undermine the wall.
which was easily effected on this occasion, for while so large a number were casting stones and darts, no one was able to maintain his position upon the wall.
So this is describing the Gauls attack on the wall of a fortified position. They gather around the walls. They're throwing stones. I guess you have to imagine missiles are probably going both directions. And mainly they're throwing stones to get the defenders away from the edge of the walls. And then, quote, forming a testudo, they advance to the gates and undermine the wall. So the testudo is something they assemble into when approaching the gates of a fortress or a walled town.
There's another passage in book five, chapter nine. Caesar is describing leading a detachment of Roman soldiers to meet the enemy in a position, I think, in a forest.
And referring to the enemy, he says, quote, They, advancing to the river with their cavalry and chariots from the higher ground, began to annoy our men and give battle. Being repulsed by our cavalry, they concealed themselves in woods, as they had secured a place admirably fortified by nature and by art, which, as it seemed, they had before prepared on account of a civil war, for all entrances to it were shut up by a great number of felled trees.
Okay, so that's the setup. The enemy has retreated to a fortified position in the woods. Then Caesar says, "...they themselves rushed out of the woods to fight here and there and prevented our men from entering their fortifications. But the soldiers of the Seventh Legion, having formed a testudo and thrown up a rampart against the fortification, took the place and drove them out of the woods, receiving only a few wounds."
Okay, so once again, the testudo, this time created by the Roman soldiers of the 7th Legion. It's described as a formation useful for approaching and eventually overtaking a fortified enemy position.
Now, in both of these cases, Caesar does not bother to explain the testudo. He doesn't say what it is. He just assumes the reader will already know. So what exactly is being described here? Well, we'll get a more complete description in Plutarch's Life of Antony, which comes in the middle of a description of a Roman campaign against the Parthian Empire, that of Antony, not Crassus this time. And this is a version of this section translated by John Dryden.
And so again, other than the Romans, they were forced to pass.
others over these, much like the tiling of a house or the row of seats in a theater, the whole affording sure defense against arrows which glanced upon them without doing any harm.
So here's the testudo formation. It is like a tortoise pulling its head and legs inside its shell. Soldiers in a testudo formation close in tight with one another. So the men in the front row present a wall of shields held side to side or overlapping like roof tiles facing the enemy. And
And sometimes shield walls would also be formed on other sides of the formation, depending on need, I guess, depending on where the enemy was facing. And then the men behind the first row would put their shields up on top of the formation and then layered going row by row all the way back to create a protective roof. So it's like you have entered the tortoise's shell. You are protected all around or at least on whatever sides are facing the danger. Yeah.
Yeah, you've kind of made like a tiny fortress, a tiny house out of your shields there.
Now, you might ask, if you can create this nearly impenetrable dome of protection all around, why wouldn't soldiers just always move in the testudo, right? Plutarch says that the arrows glanced off them without doing any harm. Why wasn't this just what all pre-modern soldiers did all the time? The answer is the testudo might be very safe, but it is not very good for most things you would want infantry troops to do.
So first of all, it's slow to move. It's like for one thing, maintaining that barrier is going to be actually kind of difficult to do. And the troops are going to be bunched very close together. So the formation can move. You can march this way, but it can't move very fast and it's not going to be very maneuverable like moving around things or changing directions is just going to be difficult.
You can also imagine that for most soldiers within this formation, visibility is going to be greatly reduced. You can't really get a very good idea of what's going on around you. If you're at one of the edges, maybe you can peek out, but even then you're probably going to have limited visibility in the other directions, not the side you're facing anything except the side you're facing toward. So yeah, that's going to be a problem as well.
Also, soldiers can't fight in this formation. Armed infantry are not only supposed to move around and avoid getting killed, they need to be able to engage with the enemy and either drive them back or kill or wound them.
And in fact, we see examples in the writings of Cassius Dio of Roman soldiers in the testudo formation actually not doing very well because they're being savaged by heavy Parthian cavalry charges. So they form a testudo and then the armored horses rush on them and they're overtaken. And it apparently just, you know, crashes through the shields and, you know, many men are killed or are killed or wounded.
So despite what you're going to see in a lot of movies with medieval combat, where you see something like the testudo often used at least the one row of shields, you know, all lined up like a wall. Uh, it was not very useful in situations of melee contact with the enemy.
So what was it actually good for? It seems that the Testudo was an ideal formation if you wanted to protect infantry from a heavy barrage of missiles, from arrows, javelins, even thrown stones. And this is why you often see it being used for...
for attacking maneuvers during sieges or in approaching fortified positions. So there are defenders up on the city wall and they're shooting arrows or throwing stones and you want to approach the wall or the gate to attack it or to undermine it. The testudo formation is useful because it allows you to close that distance with minimal casualties from airborne missiles along the way. That's something that it is very good for.
Absolutely. Yeah, this, you know, I'm going to make another sports comparison here, which is rare for me. But and in doing so, I make it the sports terminology and correct. But I kept thinking of the of the testudo is being kind of like a granny shot in basketball, something that I'm to understand. And even in professional basketball, basketball.
can be very effective, but only in certain circumstances. Like there's a strong case to be made that what was it, the free throw? Is that what you call it? That someone can make baskets with better regularity and control if they're using a granny shot, like, you know, between the legs.
underhanded as opposed to the more cool looking and I think largely more effective in other areas of the game, overhanded pitch of the basketball. So it's kind of like that. The testudo is going to be highly effective in very certain circumstances. And if you try to use it outside of those circumstances or those circumstances were compromised, then it might spell disaster.
I would say the other thing about the Testudo, like the Granny shot, is that it does look kind of stupid. And I think this is worth acknowledging. Like the Testudo looks, yes, it does look really cool. It is really neat. It is kind of this idea of perfect,
you know, combat and defense in unison by trained soldiers. And we love that aspect of it. But it also just looks weird and kind of dumb, you know, like they're becoming a turtle. They're making a little house on the battlefield. And at the same time, it's amazing. People becoming a shape, individual shields becoming an enclosure.
So I find myself entertaining both of these feelings anytime I look at an illustration of the testudo. Or I found a video online where some class somewhere had managed to get children to form one with plastic shields and swords while I assume the teachers pelted them with things. And then they successfully advanced on the teachers and then massacred them.
Now, one more observation that Devereaux makes about shield walls, festudos, and how they're depicted in modern entertainment. He pointed out something that I've seen at least one of the shows that he's referencing here, but it did not occur to me. He said that if you watch Game of Thrones, there are episodes where you see the Lannister troops
engaging some sort of system where on the front line you have dedicated shield men. So guys who have no weapons, just a two-handed shield of some sort. And then behind them, there are people with a pike, a two-handed pike. And then behind them, you have people with bows.
And he points out that this idea of having like a dedicated shield bearer and a dedicated spear bearer, you just don't see this. Like it just, it might look cool in a film like this, but it's almost always, it's always going to be like a shield and spear bearer or shields and swords. And a big part of this is that otherwise, like your shield guy gets taken out. The guy behind him doesn't have a shield. He just has a pike.
that means the defense on that line has just completely fallen apart. Like one of the strengths of a shield wall or, you know, the testudo is that any individual in the formation could step up and replace somebody who's injured or killed. Right. So you'll have a file within the formation that's like lined up behind all of the soldiers in the first row. Yeah. And if someone is killed or wounded or asked to fall back or whatever, the file advances up behind them.
Yeah. So that's a great point. It's something I'd never noticed before in fantasy warfare. Perhaps there are other examples of it out there. I know that on his blog in general, you can read lots of comments about details and historic and semi-historic television shows and films, as well as, of course, fantasy and sci-fi as well.
So, of course, the use of shield walls and fish scale-like formations fell in and out of fashion on through to the Middle Ages and ultimately became obsolete in the age of gunpowder.
But it is often pointed out that you do still see some version of these tactics used with, say, riot police who are contending generally not with firearms, but with improvised projectiles and simple hand-to-hand weapons that may be improvised as well. So you can look up various images of this online, you know, some sort of like big kind of plasticky looking shield, like a riot shield. And then, you know, they'll often form some sort of a wall and sometimes they will also form the roof walls.
over the heads of the soldiers. The examples tend not, they don't look as regimented as a proper testudo, but it is kind of like the spirit of it, still useful in very certain stripped down circumstances in our modern world. Likewise, you also see examples of protesters using shield walls of one sort or another as well.
But no football players, again, for some reason, no shields on the American football field or the British football field for that matter. No shields there. All right. Well, we're going to go and close out these episodes here. Hope that everyone has enjoyed our detour into the world of shields and shield walls. But we're going to be back with something else next week.
In the meantime, yeah, we invite you to write in if you have thoughts about this, especially some of the various media that we've mentioned, you know, how this stuff plays out on TV, in films, in video games. Devereaux frequently cites Total War as being a franchise that often influences the way we picture things like this.
So write in. All that is fair game. Just a reminder, the Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
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