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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1530437" data-attributes="member: 6533">Look, I certainly don't want to derail the spirit of the thread with a nasty series of rather tangential arguments, so let me get straight to the heart of the matter.It's not that I think free infantry are a bad idea.  It's that I find them to be a very suspect idea.When looking at history it's important to give respect to where it's due.  To do otherwise is to both discredit the very value of history and to cast it falsely.The reason why I suspect discourse on the ultimate value of free infantry is that all too often people are only willing to give respect to the home team.Such, for lack of a better term, chauvinism is particularly apparent when discussing the middle ages and the early modern period, my two favorites, and holds near total dominion over much of popular classical learning.The problem is that it renders the discourse mute over both the disadvantages of the priveleged themes and the advantages of their alternatives.Take, for instance, this recent debate over Alexander the Great's armies.  Now it's all well and good to praise them for any number of reasons and to hold forth Alexander as, initially, a shining example of Greekness in the face of Persian barbarism......but to claim that his soldier's thought of themselves as freemen taking vengeance on Persian tyranny is to ignore the desperate struggle of the Greek states to free themselves first from Alexander and Phillip's rule.A rule they had feared as the greater threat long before in Thucydides's descriptions of the great events of Thrace as dwarfing the Pellopennessian war.And a resistance that had been immortalized in the speeches of Demosthenes.  Speeches that were, for centuries nigh on millenia, hailed as the greatest speeches in praise of liberty and freedom ever made, if not the greatest speeches ever made.And I question how these things could possibly be ignored but for the need of the idea of infantry formations to be associated with victory, freedom, and a view of history that allows for no alternatives.Similarly, to state the Turks fought against nothing but Balkan peasants as a means of discrediting them is a statement of at best igonorance and at worst blatant racism.The overwhelming power and skill of the Turkish empire is testified to by the fact that much of our modern history developed as Europe desperately attempted to react to the threat the Turks represented.The greatest Christian city of the world fell to them and the cities of Vienna and the peninsula of Italy survived only because they were saved by forces that had spent decades, if not centuries, training themselves to fight the Turks.The fact that the Turkish Empire is not remembered in all our minds as greater than that of Rome's is not a testimony to the Turks' incompetence as it is the astounding excellence of their Spanish and Polish adversaries.So please, let us not denigrate the striving and bloodshed of our ancestors as a whole in order to better praise a few of their descendants.</blockquote>

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