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In the era of cold weapons, the cavalry is equivalent to the tank on the battlefield, rampage, pointing to where to fight, moving forward, and the machine power is stronger than the tank, coming and going freely, with dry food, like a BUG existence.
No wonder, the mighty Khitan leader Yelü Abaoji once said: Jurchen is dissatisfied with ten thousand, and full of ten thousand invincible. That is to say: in the era of cold weapons, if you can have a cavalry force of more than 10,000 people, you can run amok in the world!
However, horses are mostly produced from nomadic tribes, who have a natural advantage in cavalry equipment, while for farming peoples, they are much more constrained. Therefore, no matter how developed the agricultural civilization, it always faced the threat from the nomadic people, starting from the Zhou Dynasty and continuing until modern times.
I remember that during the Spring and Autumn Warring States, I liked to use chariots, but it also relied on horses, and the Jin and Qin dynasties produced horses, so they had more chariots, and the Jin kingdom was known as the "country of a thousand multipliers", fighting all the invincible hands of the princes. That's the power of horses.
So, in the future, how did the agricultural civilization restrain the horse?
Note that restraint is not about passive defense, that is, effective damage to cavalry.
The weakness of the cavalry is the horse, and if the horse is done, the power of the cavalry is much smaller. So, for horses, the farming people invented the crossbow, shooting down a row first.
Then there are the horses and the spears, and at the moment of contact between the two sides, there is another wave, so it is normal for the horse to be injured.
Finally, there is close hand-to-hand combat. To kill a horse, the blade must be sharp enough, so the Han Dynasty invented the sword of chopping horses.
It is speculated that the chopping sword is about 1.4 meters long, weighs 900 grams, and is very sharp after repeated forging.
However, I would like to say that the sword of the horse in the picture above is not a weapon used by ordinary people, it is a special sword specially built for high-ranking nobles, and the army is equipped with similar to this, but obviously the quality is worse than this, but it is also enough to cause huge damage to the cavalry.
In the Tang Dynasty, people summed up and found that although the horse-cutting sword was good, it was too short, and it was too troublesome to cut people when cutting the horse, so it was better to solve it at one time, so they invented a strange knife on the basis of the horse-cutting sword.
It is speculated that the mo knife is about 3 meters long, weighs about 20 pounds (modern units), and is also very sharp, but it is far superior to the chopping sword in terms of length and weight.
In this way, in close combat with cavalry, as long as a knife goes down, the people and horses are broken, and there is no need to be so troublesome. The famous Tang Dynasty general Li Siye was a famous strange knife general, and his strange knife team advanced like a wall in battle, which was called a meat grinder.
However, after the Tang Dynasty, the protective gear of the cavalry was comprehensively upgraded, and all were covered with heavy armor, such as iron harriers and iron floating tu. This strange knife is not easy to use, and gradually evolved into a cutting knife that only cuts the legs of the horse. The armored cavalry was invincible for a while, and it gave birth to nomadic empires such as Liao, Jin, and Yuan.
After the Song Dynasty, with the continuous use of gunpowder, a new type of nemesis of cavalry also appeared, that is, the Ming Dynasty's Shenji Battalion.
Zhu Yuanzhang had three sharp weapons under his command, namely the three battalions: the five battalions, the three thousand battalions, and the Divine Machine Battalion. Among them, the Divine Machine Battalion is a special force, because they use a hot weapon, the Fire Hammer.
Facts have proved that the spear and the shield are not contradictory, only the spear is not sharp, there is no shield that cannot be pierced, and in the face of the hot weapon, the cold weapon is eclipsed. The Ming army thus rewrote the myth of the invincibility of cavalry, but they did not take advantage of the victory to pursue, carry forward the firearms, and as a result, they were used by European pirates to dominate the world in the future.
But Chinese wise and unyielding, and one day we will finally stand up, move forward, move forward.
There are more stories about abbreviations, and we'll continue tomorrow...
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The author of this article, "Shushan Penman", a historical author who can "speak" in articles, focuses on different perspectives on history and explores different Spring and Autumn.