Battle of Grunwald 1410 The biggest medieval battle. Germans smashed.

that may or may not be true but i can't find where I stated anything contrary to your assertion. I think you have me confused with someone else.

Bloody hell i really have issues with the quoting option ...

ahhh you pressed the quote button above and not below i'll bet. No one likes a quitter, try again and good luck.

Well, internet says that they were smaller...

Depends, for example at Azincourt the french army is estimated to have between 40 and 50 thousand men while the polish/lithuanian/ruthenian alliance at Grunwald had approximately 35 thousand men.

During the capture of Jerusalem Saladin commanded an army upwards of 40 thousand men, while Grunwald was definitely one of the bigger ones and ceirtanly the most important battle of its century twas not the biggest one of the medieval.

i sort of see what your saying, yes i do have a football match that i can think of again and again and again and enjoy watching the goals. However that was a game while i was alive, its history but recent history that i can remember and not an event that i was no where near being alive for. I have my interests granted, i'm interested in WWII. Its just 1410!!!!! WOW thats going a bit over the top, lol.


lol a friendly :) a world cup qualifier but that is not the game i'm thinking off :):):).


then either forget it or read again :).


yes i understand that, however, today is today. Don't we need to think about tommorow now??? :)

polish, english and french wikis say about much smaller numbers of knights


hehe yeah, but i read about the battle and watched the movie while i was alive and it lives in me like the game you love to watch again and again ;) if it would be like you said there would be no reason to teach history in schools. or let's say about times before the industial revolution.

Of course, knights were always a fraction of any given european army i'm talking about the grand total including mercenaries, men at arms and peasant infantry as well as mounted seargants and squires.

For the 35 thousand alliance forces at Grunwald only Poles fielded knights as heavy cavalry, the numbers vary between 15 and 20 thousand whereas the Teutons had around 18 thousand heavies the rest being a detachment of infantry and mounted knechts.

Alsoooo...the german wiki says the following:
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlacht_bei_Tannenberg_(1410)

all the time, without ever reflecting on the past? As brit, do you ever reflect on how things could be different today but for events in the past? There's a lot of history, it'd be a shame to never appreciate it.

to be honest i don't see why they do teach further back than say the industrial revolution, what can we learn in History that life is not going to teach you?? I mean from the victorians, don't throw your poop out of the window, it will attract rats etc etc which bring disease. From the Germans, don't let a mad dictator run the country he will drag you into a war you do not need or want. etc etc etc :)


what has been has been, i can't change it and to be honest in the here and now it does not 'affect' me, yes it shaped the country etc but does not directly affect me now or have any relevance to the way, i or any other person in my generation live their lives. It dosent' help pay the bills, it does not add any skills to the arsenal!!!

Yeah its fine if you wanna chat round the table about the Romans or something but apart fom that!!!

If people are writing about something that doesn't interest you then don't post in those threads.

yet you're justified in trying to belittle the accomplishments of their ancestors?

The Battle of Grumwald is quite interesting to me but i just don't see what the point of your original comments were. What was the point of your original post?

for reference:


Foreigner4, the writing in red means a moderator or Admin has edited into the post, in the case of tornado2007 it was to point out to him that he shouldn't contribute to things that don't interest him. :)

I checked a few sources and they says total French forces were between 20 and 30 thousand people and English only about 6 thousand. In Grunwald there were about 60 thousand people on both sides.


But that's not Europe and I think that Crusaders' forces were much smaller.



Torn, this topic was posted in "Poland politics & history" section and so is perfectly OK here. If you aren't interested then just f. out and stop polluting this topic.

The sources vary wildly as with Grunwald, for example Długosz claimed there were sixty thousand teutonic knights alone while prussian chronicle by von Posilge claims there were 100 thousand tatars accompaning the polish royal forces.

While both of these claims are obviously rubbish and meant to show that "we lost because they had such an effing huge army" or "we won despite them having such a massive army" the contemporary chronicles from 100 years war both put the french force at well above 30 thousand.

Currently historians watered the numbers down and reached an academic consensus but France of the time was perfectly capable of fielding such a force.


Only initially, once the crusader states were established they fielded armies of 20 thousands upwards and it was not unusual for eighty thousand men to take part in a single battle.

According to Giles Milton's 'Samurai William' The battles of the Japanese in the 16th and 17th Centuries eclipsed European ones in scale of amount of fighters involved.

I'm hoping to make it to the 600th anniversary celebrations of Grunwald in 2010.

Instead of arguing over the battle of 1410, both homelands accept it for what it is, and worry about the next upcoming battles inwhich you may need each other...But of course, its mainly up to your leaders if you get along or not, and the problem with that is, some of your leaders are not home grown, and care not for the sake and well being of ethnic germs, poles and ruskys.

Were there also Serbs in the battle of Grunwald?There were for sure Poles,Lithuanians,Czechs and Russians.

History that goes beyond that which you are interested in does affect you here and now. You are English and what is or isn't English started being shaped long time ago. Some people are interested in their heritage, you are not. You are interested in the latest football result, which, frankly, is idiotic from my angle of view.

Actually,


So what should the cutoff date be for those interested in history? 60 years? 80? Why not 83? or 8883? The only criteria you go by is what is interesting to you. Why should we all focus on what you want to focus on? If something doesn't meet the criteria then save your time and just move on - nothing here for you.


We do. But tomorrow doesn't define us since it is uncertain and we don't know what it will bring. "Tomorrow" is not what history deals with. This thread is about history and you must be very confused if, with your deep interest in "tomorrow" you stopped by a thread which has nothing to do with it.

May I suggest another forum that will be more suitable to you? trekbbs.com

There might have been a few, there were no ethnic Russians acting as an organised part of the army though, there was a Kievan detachment of some 700 infantry so there might well be a few Serbs or Muscovites and Novgorodians.

I think there were two divisions from Moscow who resisted brave when the Lithuanian cavalry retreated.

Definitely not, we know for sure that there was a kievan detachment of infantry and three Smolensk units, all of them infantry, also we cannot take Smolensk into account because at the time the people there were both parth of the Grand Duchy and for the most part ethnic Lithuanians with a large part being ruthenian.

I know and that's not true of course but serious estimations vary in case of Teutons from 16 thousand to even 38 thousand and in case of Polish-Lithuanian forces from 28 to 45 thousand, so together between 44 and 83 thousand, so maybe not for sure the biggest but definately one of the few biggest battles of medieval Europe.


Are you sure ?

No i'm not. some of the sources list them as infantry but then again some of the sources say they were putting down a rebellion somewhere else and were absent completely.

However given that they were from ruthenian lands and these guys at the time favoured fighting on foot then its a good bet they were foot soldiers. Of course the chronicles list the lithuanian banners as all cavalry but given the fact that Lithuania at the time was spit poor and extremely backwards its doubtfull Vitauatas even had that much cavalry available.

where'd you find that, my limited reading only lead me to that many historians haven't come to anywhere near those numbers. Yikes now that I look at it again, 60K per side? Are you sure?

60K all together. In earlier post I wrote about "extreme" estimations but most likely Teutonic forces were about 25K and Pol-Lit about 35K, so that's 60K.

ah ha, that clears that up, cheers for that. Hey, anybody happen to know where I can read an account of the battle? Yeah I realize it's gonna be biased if it's taken from source a, or source b, but I still wanna read one if it's out there.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grunwald

Look for "Battle of Tannenberg 1410" or "The first Battle of Tannenberg" (as there was also 2nd during WW1.

The Germans called the battle they won in 1914 battle of Tannenberg although it did not take place exactly in Tannenberg.They did so because their books referred to the battle of 1410 as the battle of Tannenberg and they wanted to take revenge.

One of the Teuton knights who were killed in 1410 was called von Hindenburg and his descendant was von Hindenburg who won the batlle of 1914.

So it seems that the Germans remembered the battle very lively during the 500 years between 1410 and 1914.They never forget defeat and want to take honour back in the same place they lost it.(for example Hitler signing treaty with French generals in the same place,the same train,the same vagon and exactly the smae position which Germans had when signing the treaty of Verssailles).

smashed yes, many times but, thanks to their loyal friends from western Europe and USA they somehow always survive, again and again manage to assimilate more and more Slavs and, again and again attacking Slavs

what to tell you.... Loyal friends are valuable. To Germans, west of Europe gave loyalty, to Slavs - only oblivion

at least, Slavs could learn something from west of Europe. Slavs should stop to divide among themselves over religious lines, ...

They were not smashed because of generosity of Poles who did not conquer the castle of Marienburg.(later a Czech conquered it and he sold it to Poles).