My question is how medieval peasant riots began really
Same way any riot begins- a critical mass of angry and/or drunk young men (and others) deciding to go on a bit of a rampage. This tended to happen more often in cities both in modern times and in pre-modern eras (the mob in major cities, like Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, etc. were infamous for rioting, at sporting events even!)
Of course "riot" isn't the same thing as a "revolt" and that's what the peasants did quite a lot especially in the later middle ages.
Usually under conditions of famine. The lord's thugs, chivalrous knights, come to plunder the meager supplies of grain.Well a lot of revolts began with riots no?
Honestly I don't really know how peasant revolts began
Well a lot of revolts began with riots no?
Honestly I don't really know how peasant revolts began
The most illustrious example amongst all of these, is Timur. Timur himself was a person of no noble pedigree and no amount of prestige. Beginning as a lowly steppe child and becoming a warrior under the Ilkhans, he was able to manipulate his position as a man of immense ambition and intellect (though never literate) to become the dominant political player for the weak Chagatayid rulers. From his position as a general, he used the Chagatayid army to conquer the Ilkhan remanants and build a fearsome empire.
My question is how medieval peasant riots began really
Taxes.
Well yeah I figured, but what like the tax collector would come and it happened to be a bad harvest that year so instead of pay they just killed the guy and his guards or something?
In that case it was that the Royals demanded everyone pay a tax twice, and when a committee in one village came to say they wouldn't do it (also there was apparently some issues of men checking under women's dresses to see if they were virgins or taxable) the tax collectors attacked sports tried to arrest them.You really can’t standardise the events of medieval peasant revolts, but if you look at the 1381 Peasant’s War in England, the events leading up to the uprising mirror your assumption quite nicely.
So I was playing a video game called Mount and Blade: Warband, and basically you're this character who comes to this land called Calradia, full of internal strife and medieval warfare and bandits and whatnot. You can almost immediately just kinda get a few peasants to volunteer to follow you and all of a sudden you're a minor warband.
Obviously this is wildly unrealistic, but really how easy would it be to make a minor bandit group, or peasant rebellion (I know those are very different things) or something to that end in medieval Europe?
I imagine it would depend on the place. A high-density rural region like Denmark it would be harder to hide in the wilderness (but also harder to notice a few serfs missing?) Meanwhile in Italy the semi-urbanized regions would be hard to live like that in.
Any ideas on what I'm going for?