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Originally Posted by IDonT
Parthian Composite bows did inflict wounds that render a roman legionaire combat ineffective, which has a greater resource draw than having a death casualty. (Similar concept as modern anti-personel mines that are designed to wound.)
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I am well aware of that. However combat incapacitation from non-lethal wounds is far less than a reliable means to stop the enemy, providing only a softening effect on him. As you have noted yourself, the Romans would not have routed had the Parthians failed to secure an extraordinary quantity of missiles. If out of ammo, the missile armed army would be at a tremendous disadvantage, especially if your enemy could negate your mobility by either A. possess equal mobility or B. fighting on the defensive.
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3.) Not all of the Han Army consists entirely of crossbowman. Archeological records shows a combined arms force. The army sent by Han Wudi to defeat the Xiongnu were entirely cavalry. Unfortunately, we do not have records of the Han army that has the same amount of detail that we have on the Roman Legions. We can however infer to how a crossbow, halberd, sheild and sword, and cavalry armed army operates by how a similarly armed European army fought during the high middle ages.
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Yes I am aware of that. However the Romans had fought armies with combined arms capability before. Having a weak infantry core between your cavalry may very well be a fatal vulnerability when exploited properly.
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Parthian weakness, not Roman strength led the the capture of Csitephon several times. However, the Romans could never push through the Parthian heartland in the Iranian Plateau. Same for the Parthians, the furthest west they could go was Judea and Syria.
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That is sort of subjective. I hope you don't take this as a cheap shot but the same could be said about Roman defeats
vis-a-vis the Parthians. This type of argument is easy to make but hard to prove.The historiography painted an utterly unflattering picture of Crassius as a military commander. The Romans did have screening cavalry at the time and as many historians had pointed out, Crassius's heterodox deployment of the legions at Carhae denied his own army of freedom to maneouver. The Romans made as many offensives as the Parthian during the Roman-Parthian Wars which suggests to me that the Rommans were at least on an equal tactical footing with their adversaries. The Romans reguarly built field fortifications at 24 hour intervals on forced march, the discipline of which was far beyond the grasp of any medieval European armies. I have not researched Chinese armies during the Han period enough to know how well the Chinese compared to the Romans in this respect, but I doubt they could.
Furthermore the advantage of an combined arms army can be illusory. The clash of shock troops dedicated to face-to-face combat against light infantry that was used to ellusive tactics at a distance often proved an extremely unhealthy experience to the latter. In the Greco-Persian Wars the Persians, who had light cavalry in large numbers lost to the Greeks who had no real cavlry to speak of, almost every time they failed to achieve gross numerical superiority. Darius deployed a far more diverse army in troop types than Alexander the Great, whose army was basically composed of shock troops and mounted shock troops. The results of known battles do not prove to me conclusively the superiority of one type of army to another as far as technology and tactics are concerned.