Because they were literal morons who hired mercenaries
AKA THE LITERALLY BIGGEST ERROR TO DO
The most hilarious thing is when they hired turks......... to reconquer cities and lands.... FROM QFRICKING TURKS
Literally what were they thinking ?
Mercenaries have no loyalty and would betray you even when you have money
Btw Manzikert and Fourth Crusade are disasters starded..... BY MERCENARIES
bullying Balkanoids and Gayreeks and then getting raped by Ottomans is not a good military record
3 years ago
Svetovid
Venetians never bullied anyone in SE Europe, at best, they took advantage of Ottoman invasions to undermine the native states, they were also trashed by the Narentines for several hundred years, while vastly outnumbering them.
3 years ago
Anonymous
>Venetians never bullied anyone in SE Europe
HAHAHAHA
Your mother's lips are engulfing my shaft as we speak, post your results.
3 years ago
Anonymous
schizoid and schizo are two wholly different things
3 years ago
Svetovid
That's what's actual schizos says, now post them results, mutt.
3 years ago
Anonymous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Zara
3 years ago
Svetovid
Not sure what's more amusing, the fact that you consider Catholic crusaders treacherously sacking a Catholic city an example of Venetian bullying or the fact that the article lists the Croatian/Hungarian numbers as "unknown", even though we know that the garrison was only 1200 strong.
3 years ago
Anonymous
yeah and what about the local population moron. They were forced to flee while the Venetians and Crusaders gobbled everything left behind. The Venice defense force really needs to do a better job
3 years ago
Svetovid
How am I the "Venice defence force", when I'm pointing out the absurdity of their claim? The ((Crusaders)) quite literally sacked a Christian city, and these mutts consider that a triumph.
3 years ago
Anonymous
Venice was the leader and directed the entire crusade
3 years ago
Svetovid
And?
3 years ago
Anonymous
What's funny? Here in MonteBlack, all they did was an attempt to assassinate rulers of Zeta or invade when our armies were busy with the Ottomans, that's 9/10 of Venetian involvement on the peninsula, real history isn't a EU4 run.
3 years ago
Anonymous
>MonteBlack
no one cares about your tiny shithole
3 years ago
Anonymous
Zeta, unlike whatever hole spawned you, had the world's first state-owned printing state during its twilight years, and even if it were a shithole, how does it refute Venetians being israelite-born vermin? Why are you moving goal posts?
3 years ago
Anonymous
Getting strong schizo vibes from this user.
3 years ago
Anonymous
Byzantium probably would have been able to hold its ground against the Turks, if the Venetians weren't constantly stabbing them in the back. People who try to defend them are idiots.
3 years ago
Svetovid
I blame Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis for these obsessions with upstart merchant-states.
3 years ago
Anonymous
i think it comes from City of Fortune by Roger Crowley more than anything. fwiw I agree, Venice did Byzantium in moreso than Manzikert did.
3 years ago
Anonymous
Why would you be mad at a richer state that can field an actual infantry army composed of a middle class who can afford it? I can point to the city states and point at the average person and go 'that's literally me, but medieval.'
3 years ago
Anonymous
Their only weapon against the Turks was to evangelize them and then cuck them, like they did to the pechenegs, bulgars, western kipchaks. They couldn’t do this to khazars or to Seljuks.
3 years ago
Anonymous
Rhomanos BTFO'd a Pechneg army on the field so hard they swore fealthy to him before he turned around to face the Seljuks in the East and get sent to Alp Arslan's rape dungeon.
3 years ago
Anonymous
After the Byzantines made the Pechenegs Christian, they were weaker and defeated. They couldn’t do this to Muslim Seljuks or israeli Khazars.
The Muslim Seljuks were hired as mercenaries to fight Byzantine civil wars, and that’s the first time a major contingent crossed into Europe from Gallipoli/Cannakkale. The Kantakuzene brought him over to fight his grandad I think.
3 years ago
Anonymous
Also the Byzantine Tourkopole Pechenegs switched sides in Manzikert
The stereotype of the treacherous Greek was 100% justified.
Now, most of the time they were backstabbing each other, but also many times they betrayed their Christian, supposedly allied Western Latins. The first time they were called to act, the Latins assembled the largest army in Europe at Constantinople ready to help the Emperor reconquer Anatolia, but after more than a century of constant betrayal they stopped caring to help unless the Greeks payed them to do it.
Byzantiboos always ignore the times when the Greeks betrayed the Latins, but then cry nonstop about the Latin response.
Eg. 1: >Alexios makes a deal with the infidels he's supposedly fighting against during the siege of Nicaea, completely snubbing the Crusaders he himself asked for help >in return, Crusaders consider the pact they made with the emperor to give him the lands they conquered in Anatolia to be forfeit, and go to create the Outremer kingdoms
Eg. 2: >Deposed Greek prince asks excommunicated "crusaders" (aka mercenaries) to help him regain his throne, in exchange of a lot of money >"crusaders" do just that, they put him in the throne >Greek prince refuses to pay and tells crusaders to go away >crusaders sack Constantinople and take their pay by force >incessant screeching about muh perfidious crusaders and muh fourth crusade ensues
And don't forget about the massacre of the Latins.
In the particular case of the Byzantines, Roger de Flor, Catalan mercenary, was very successful at driving back the early Ottoman Turks from Anatolia. The only problem is that the Greeks backstabbed him, literally.
After the death of their commander and 1,000 of their members, the remaining Catalans went on their own murder spree across Greece, which ended with them taking over Attica, which they ruled as the Duchy of Athens for almost 70 years until Attica was conquered by another group of Spanish mercenaries, which ruled it until the Ottomans conquered Greece.
What's funny to me is the Greeks backstabbed Romans before Byzantium and the Greeks fell to Romans because they backstabbed each other and the Greeks fell to Persians because of betrayal as well.
They have literally no advantage
Mercenaries are literally bandit who want easy money
Thats why everybody and their mothers became mercenaries in middle ages/antiquity
Btw Manzikert and Fourth Crusade are disasters starded..... BY MERCENARIES
>Muh mercenaries
You do know that's pop history, right? They didn't use mercenaries as often as pop history makes you think. They only stopped having a large-ish professional army by the time of the Komnenos, hence why Alexios called in the crusaders and started using mercenaries.
>Alexios
Mate, I mentioned Alexios >They only stopped having a large-ish professional army by the time of the Komnenos, hence why Alexios called in the crusaders and started using mercenaries.
At least read the entire 3 sentence response before posting. By the time Alexios becomes emperor, Anataloia is flooded with the Turks, Normans have crushed their armies in the West, Pechenegs and Magyrs are becoming more of a threat. Between 400 AD to 1071, they weren't relying heavily on mercenary forces. They only started doing so when the game was more-or-less over. They lost their recruiting territories (and tax revenue territories) in the Balkans and in Anatolia, so they had to rely in mercenaries.
In short, they didn't fail because of mercenaries, they used mercenaries, because they failed. This is where my pop history comment comes into play.
3 years ago
Anonymous
>This is where my pop history comment comes into play.
and that's why you're still wrong. The Byzantines employed Norman mercenaries decades before Alexios as well
3 years ago
Anonymous
Not in large quantities.
3 years ago
Anonymous
yeah right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roussel_de_Bailleul
This dude was a major thorn on the side of the byzantines and he's just one example
3 years ago
Anonymous
How are you contradicting anything? Frankish type mercenaries aka Normans or Catalans ended up going on their own tangential conquering sprees.
>The numbers, dedication and discipline of troops who feel invested in a Republican form of government far dwarfs, for almost 2000 years, the level of dedication a repressed peasantry has towards an arrogant and explotative system of aristocrats who treat human beings as nothing more than animals and beasts of burdens with no rights.
Shocking. Who could have possibly forseen a lack of commitment by the people to a system which went from existing to guarantee the rights of Romans citizens, to exploiting them as serfs as just another medeval kingdom, the kingdom of the greeks mark 1000, torn apart by trechery and civil war, which can't come close to meeting the standards of the Republican SPQR.
>The numbers, dedication and discipline of troops who feel invested in a Republican form of government far dwarfs, for almost 2000 years, the level of dedication a repressed peasantry has towards an arrogant and explotative system of aristocrats who treat human beings as nothing more than animals and beasts of burdens with no rights.
Shocking. Who could have possibly forseen a lack of commitment by the people to a system which went from existing to guarantee the rights of Romans citizens, to exploiting them as serfs as just another medeval kingdom, the kingdom of the greeks mark 1000, torn apart by trechery and civil war, which can't come close to meeting the standards of the Republican SPQR.
>The Roman Republic, with it's resources almost entirely limited to that of the Italian peninsula, lost more soldiers in 3 battles with Hannibal in the second punic war, and still fielded a larger army in total, than the Kingdom of the Greeks was able to field in the last 1000 years of it's existence.
Despite what many anons say, Byzantium had constant steppe nomads pouring into Anatolia and Bulgaria and when they'd defeat one another would appear. They also had constant infighting.
Also they started the crusades after Manzikert in 1071, so they can’t really complain that the crusaders turned on them in 1204, or really, from the start when they refused to hand over the territories in the Levant.
Becuase instead of doubling down after Manzikert and raising more, larger armies they spent the next 300 years fighting civil wars. They also put 0 effort into improving defenses for their new adversaries. This included the use of turkic mercenaries who were then allowed to settle even closer to the Aegean. Rinse, repeat, game over
Yes. The Byzantines called for the First Crusade, and the Crusaders succeeded in pushing back the Turks from the Marmara Sea to Konya/Kayseri. And then the Byzantines said: we will keep the Levant for ourselves, starting with Bohemond in Antioch (Siege 1097-98), and set up their own Latin Frankish Crusader Kingdoms (capitalized to refer to a specific phenomenon). Eventually the Byzantines won 382 from their gambit of calling for Western help, but in 1204 one of these Crusades sacked the Byzantine capital itself, so you can think for yourself whether it was really worth it.
3 years ago
Anonymous
> And then the Byzantines
Correction, this should state: and then the Crusaders said…*
The latter crusades lost not because the Turks adapted, regrouped, and won. Every inland crusader army would face 10-20% losses by Skirmishing Anatolian Seljuk Turks, another 10-15% by Syrian Seljuk Turks, and then face a combined Muslim army to finally lose the rest of their soldiers.
3 years ago
Anonymous
**Lost because the Turks adapted…. **
Sorry lads. So many typos today.
3 years ago
Anonymous
Yes, but that's a lack of focus. The crusaders primary goal was always the Levant and Byzantine leaders post 1100 were very stupid
Because they were literal morons who hired mercenaries
AKA THE LITERALLY BIGGEST ERROR TO DO
The most hilarious thing is when they hired turks......... to reconquer cities and lands.... FROM QFRICKING TURKS
Literally what were they thinking ?
Mercenaries have no loyalty and would betray you even when you have money
Btw Manzikert and Fourth Crusade are disasters starded..... BY MERCENARIES
but it worked for the Italians bro
Exemple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_Republic_of_Venice
bullying Balkanoids and Gayreeks and then getting raped by Ottomans is not a good military record
Venetians never bullied anyone in SE Europe, at best, they took advantage of Ottoman invasions to undermine the native states, they were also trashed by the Narentines for several hundred years, while vastly outnumbering them.
>Venetians never bullied anyone in SE Europe
HAHAHAHA
Name two SE European states they've bullied?
Your mother's lips are engulfing my shaft as we speak, post your results.
schizoid and schizo are two wholly different things
That's what's actual schizos says, now post them results, mutt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Zara
Not sure what's more amusing, the fact that you consider Catholic crusaders treacherously sacking a Catholic city an example of Venetian bullying or the fact that the article lists the Croatian/Hungarian numbers as "unknown", even though we know that the garrison was only 1200 strong.
yeah and what about the local population moron. They were forced to flee while the Venetians and Crusaders gobbled everything left behind. The Venice defense force really needs to do a better job
How am I the "Venice defence force", when I'm pointing out the absurdity of their claim? The ((Crusaders)) quite literally sacked a Christian city, and these mutts consider that a triumph.
Venice was the leader and directed the entire crusade
And?
What's funny? Here in MonteBlack, all they did was an attempt to assassinate rulers of Zeta or invade when our armies were busy with the Ottomans, that's 9/10 of Venetian involvement on the peninsula, real history isn't a EU4 run.
>MonteBlack
no one cares about your tiny shithole
Zeta, unlike whatever hole spawned you, had the world's first state-owned printing state during its twilight years, and even if it were a shithole, how does it refute Venetians being israelite-born vermin? Why are you moving goal posts?
Getting strong schizo vibes from this user.
Byzantium probably would have been able to hold its ground against the Turks, if the Venetians weren't constantly stabbing them in the back. People who try to defend them are idiots.
I blame Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis for these obsessions with upstart merchant-states.
i think it comes from City of Fortune by Roger Crowley more than anything. fwiw I agree, Venice did Byzantium in moreso than Manzikert did.
Why would you be mad at a richer state that can field an actual infantry army composed of a middle class who can afford it? I can point to the city states and point at the average person and go 'that's literally me, but medieval.'
Their only weapon against the Turks was to evangelize them and then cuck them, like they did to the pechenegs, bulgars, western kipchaks. They couldn’t do this to khazars or to Seljuks.
Rhomanos BTFO'd a Pechneg army on the field so hard they swore fealthy to him before he turned around to face the Seljuks in the East and get sent to Alp Arslan's rape dungeon.
After the Byzantines made the Pechenegs Christian, they were weaker and defeated. They couldn’t do this to Muslim Seljuks or israeli Khazars.
The Muslim Seljuks were hired as mercenaries to fight Byzantine civil wars, and that’s the first time a major contingent crossed into Europe from Gallipoli/Cannakkale. The Kantakuzene brought him over to fight his grandad I think.
Also the Byzantine Tourkopole Pechenegs switched sides in Manzikert
No it doesnt work moron
I said hiring mercenaries
Not being a mercenary
No it literally didn't. Mercenary use bit them in the ass
Croat and Iberian mercenaries often fricked over their adventures.
Then why was Machiavelli so butthurt about them?
The stereotype of the treacherous Greek was 100% justified.
Now, most of the time they were backstabbing each other, but also many times they betrayed their Christian, supposedly allied Western Latins. The first time they were called to act, the Latins assembled the largest army in Europe at Constantinople ready to help the Emperor reconquer Anatolia, but after more than a century of constant betrayal they stopped caring to help unless the Greeks payed them to do it.
Byzantiboos always ignore the times when the Greeks betrayed the Latins, but then cry nonstop about the Latin response.
Eg. 1:
>Alexios makes a deal with the infidels he's supposedly fighting against during the siege of Nicaea, completely snubbing the Crusaders he himself asked for help
>in return, Crusaders consider the pact they made with the emperor to give him the lands they conquered in Anatolia to be forfeit, and go to create the Outremer kingdoms
Eg. 2:
>Deposed Greek prince asks excommunicated "crusaders" (aka mercenaries) to help him regain his throne, in exchange of a lot of money
>"crusaders" do just that, they put him in the throne
>Greek prince refuses to pay and tells crusaders to go away
>crusaders sack Constantinople and take their pay by force
>incessant screeching about muh perfidious crusaders and muh fourth crusade ensues
And don't forget about the massacre of the Latins.
In the particular case of the Byzantines, Roger de Flor, Catalan mercenary, was very successful at driving back the early Ottoman Turks from Anatolia. The only problem is that the Greeks backstabbed him, literally.
After the death of their commander and 1,000 of their members, the remaining Catalans went on their own murder spree across Greece, which ended with them taking over Attica, which they ruled as the Duchy of Athens for almost 70 years until Attica was conquered by another group of Spanish mercenaries, which ruled it until the Ottomans conquered Greece.
What's funny to me is the Greeks backstabbed Romans before Byzantium and the Greeks fell to Romans because they backstabbed each other and the Greeks fell to Persians because of betrayal as well.
>How could they fail with such a giant army and so much fricking money?
mercenary armies are good for short term gain nothing else
They have literally no advantage
Mercenaries are literally bandit who want easy money
Thats why everybody and their mothers became mercenaries in middle ages/antiquity
>Muh mercenaries
You do know that's pop history, right? They didn't use mercenaries as often as pop history makes you think. They only stopped having a large-ish professional army by the time of the Komnenos, hence why Alexios called in the crusaders and started using mercenaries.
>You do know that's pop history, right? T
You do know it's historical fact right? Alexios was dependent on Turk mercenaries in his balkan wars
>Alexios
Mate, I mentioned Alexios
>They only stopped having a large-ish professional army by the time of the Komnenos, hence why Alexios called in the crusaders and started using mercenaries.
At least read the entire 3 sentence response before posting. By the time Alexios becomes emperor, Anataloia is flooded with the Turks, Normans have crushed their armies in the West, Pechenegs and Magyrs are becoming more of a threat. Between 400 AD to 1071, they weren't relying heavily on mercenary forces. They only started doing so when the game was more-or-less over. They lost their recruiting territories (and tax revenue territories) in the Balkans and in Anatolia, so they had to rely in mercenaries.
In short, they didn't fail because of mercenaries, they used mercenaries, because they failed. This is where my pop history comment comes into play.
>This is where my pop history comment comes into play.
and that's why you're still wrong. The Byzantines employed Norman mercenaries decades before Alexios as well
Not in large quantities.
yeah right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roussel_de_Bailleul
This dude was a major thorn on the side of the byzantines and he's just one example
How are you contradicting anything? Frankish type mercenaries aka Normans or Catalans ended up going on their own tangential conquering sprees.
they were too busy doing roman things (backstabbing each other) to actually realize that their country is shitting the bed
Also this
Too much Civil wars
Look at this absolute unit of a military
Fixed
>The numbers, dedication and discipline of troops who feel invested in a Republican form of government far dwarfs, for almost 2000 years, the level of dedication a repressed peasantry has towards an arrogant and explotative system of aristocrats who treat human beings as nothing more than animals and beasts of burdens with no rights.
Shocking. Who could have possibly forseen a lack of commitment by the people to a system which went from existing to guarantee the rights of Romans citizens, to exploiting them as serfs as just another medeval kingdom, the kingdom of the greeks mark 1000, torn apart by trechery and civil war, which can't come close to meeting the standards of the Republican SPQR.
>The Roman Republic, with it's resources almost entirely limited to that of the Italian peninsula, lost more soldiers in 3 battles with Hannibal in the second punic war, and still fielded a larger army in total, than the Kingdom of the Greeks was able to field in the last 1000 years of it's existence.
that's more the result of ancient historians claiming 5 billion people killed in every battle
They got fricked by Italian traders, Norman mercenaries, Turkish mercenaries.
Are Chinese particularly interested in byantines? Lol just curious.
There's a bit of interest online
By being greek.
Incompetence
They didn't have a large army, had to deal with multiple rising powers on all sides.
Despite what many anons say, Byzantium had constant steppe nomads pouring into Anatolia and Bulgaria and when they'd defeat one another would appear. They also had constant infighting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_civil_war_of_1352–1357
Also they started the crusades after Manzikert in 1071, so they can’t really complain that the crusaders turned on them in 1204, or really, from the start when they refused to hand over the territories in the Levant.
Are the Chinese Byzaboos or Ottoboos?
I'd say they had a good run, nothing lasts forever.
Decadence and corruption, the later period byzantine empire was ran like a sicilian mob outfit
Becuase instead of doubling down after Manzikert and raising more, larger armies they spent the next 300 years fighting civil wars. They also put 0 effort into improving defenses for their new adversaries. This included the use of turkic mercenaries who were then allowed to settle even closer to the Aegean. Rinse, repeat, game over
After Manzikert (1071) they begged/bribed the Western Latin Franks to send help, and they did, in the form of the First Crusade (1091).
The initial crusades were successful. They just decided the problem wasn't worth pursuing to an actual conclusion
Yes. The Byzantines called for the First Crusade, and the Crusaders succeeded in pushing back the Turks from the Marmara Sea to Konya/Kayseri. And then the Byzantines said: we will keep the Levant for ourselves, starting with Bohemond in Antioch (Siege 1097-98), and set up their own Latin Frankish Crusader Kingdoms (capitalized to refer to a specific phenomenon). Eventually the Byzantines won 382 from their gambit of calling for Western help, but in 1204 one of these Crusades sacked the Byzantine capital itself, so you can think for yourself whether it was really worth it.
> And then the Byzantines
Correction, this should state: and then the Crusaders said…*
>382
382 years*, calculated from 1453-1071
The latter crusades lost not because the Turks adapted, regrouped, and won. Every inland crusader army would face 10-20% losses by Skirmishing Anatolian Seljuk Turks, another 10-15% by Syrian Seljuk Turks, and then face a combined Muslim army to finally lose the rest of their soldiers.
**Lost because the Turks adapted…. **
Sorry lads. So many typos today.
Yes, but that's a lack of focus. The crusaders primary goal was always the Levant and Byzantine leaders post 1100 were very stupid