2.my most recent assertion (less aristo/more central) was what I had gathered as the point of your post, outside trying to disprove mine. Trying to find a task which could be presented to the OP from what you said. If not that, then what?
It goes back to material conditions and circumstances on the ground. Medieval European cultures won't favor a curved sword unless there is a definite advantage to using one any more than the Arab and Persian powers aren't going to go with one because it is less advantageous.
caliburdeath said:3. I understand that India is a very diverse region worth at the very least half a Europe. But, is that so true before the mughal conquest(probably so)? And, Japan is most certainly not any more diverse than a single large European kingdom.
In India this was much more the case with a degree of ritualization setting in with war suggesting there was a certain status quo expected to be maintained. It was, in fact, thanks to being so used to this status quo that allowed the Delhi Sultanate to roll over so many northern Ganges domains.
Sengoku and Bakufu Japan matches the circumstances of Medieval Europe pretty closely in many respects, down to the nature of warfare in some ways but there is one major difference: ANYONE with a weapon up until Toyotomi Hideyoshi formalized a new caste system could be a samurai. This meant the same issues of self-equipment were, if anything, even more endemic in Japan than they were in Europe.
caliburdeath said:4. I never said my assertions were universally true. I said they were tendencies. So, south Asia and a small part of east Asia are heavier armor. What with west, central( & what there is of a north), & most of east Asia, and that's excluding southeast Asia, wearing lighter armor according to you, I think that still counts. And you didn't even refute that Europe tends towards heavier armor (until gunpowder). Byzantines, okay, they were an exception, and like a third Asian.
Now, if we say that the warring states period in China, and the Mesopotamian times generally wore heavier armor, which is probably true, then THAT would invalidate that part of my statement.
And of course we have the Celtic peoples, but that was in mostly tribal times. I don't think the Germanic feoderati or romanized Celts were the same.
The problem isn't that you are asserting such tendencies existed, it is that you are asserting these tendencies were dictated by what continent one was on or some kind of implied overculture that never really existed in any of the examples discussed. In each case the nature of war, the equipment used, and the tactics employed were a direct consequence of the specific circumstances they were each facing and not due to some kind of latent cultural or continental factors.
Also another thing you're missing is by adding all the nomad steppe tribes in the mix is you've added another element in there: the tribal nomad army. That was a completely different beast from the other two models already discussed that developed out of their pastoral way of life where every male had to know how to fight to defend the tribe. Even this model would end up disappearing and being replaced with either warlord armies (similar to to the aristocratic situation) or with the Great Hordes of the Mongol Empire that much more closely resembled the centralized armies of China and the Caliphates. And of course the Germanic and Celtic tribal levies were their own situation as well but one where it was unlikely they regularly wore armor outside of a handful of individuals and leaders prior to Romanization; we know as much from Caesar's account of his war in Gaul and the many descriptions of the Germanic tribes in Tacitus and other sources. There it was, again, due to economic and material limitations more than any other reason leading to those groups of cultures to develop their own responses to the situation and its limits.