Wider usage of Hussite style War Wagons

In my (very small) thread about Joan of Arc attacking the Hussites, everyone mentions how powerful the Hussite War Wagons were. I knew that they were effective; but if they were so good, why weren't they adopted more widely? Could they be more widely adopted in the Late Middle Ages?
 
Aparently your army needed some experience in organizing and establishing the wagon forts and others who copied the Hussites were far less sucessful due to this learning curve. Maybe that had a lot to do with it. Also, if you already have a system of traditional forts to support traditional armies the old ways work well enough. Set up time would be a problem if you were under immediate threat, as cavalry running amok in a half-build wagon fort would be very nasty. Just speculating.
 
In my (very small) thread about Joan of Arc attacking the Hussites, everyone mentions how powerful the Hussite War Wagons were. I knew that they were effective; but if they were so good, why weren't they adopted more widely? Could they be more widely adopted in the Late Middle Ages?

They were not powerful: it was the crusading leaders that were fairly incompetent and the hussite leadership that was military very skilled. The wagon tabor was a very intuitive and very basic defence system used in various regions of Eastern Europe...but was far from excellent.
 
In my (very small) thread about Joan of Arc attacking the Hussites, everyone mentions how powerful the Hussite War Wagons were. I knew that they were effective; but if they were so good, why weren't they adopted more widely? Could they be more widely adopted in the Late Middle Ages?

Aparently your army needed some experience in organizing and establishing the wagon forts and others who copied the Hussites were far less sucessful due to this learning curve. Maybe that had a lot to do with it. Also, if you already have a system of traditional forts to support traditional armies the old ways work well enough. Set up time would be a problem if you were under immediate threat, as cavalry running amok in a half-build wagon fort would be very nasty. Just speculating.

The wagenbergs arose due to both technological and geographic issues. They came about in a period where the power of the horse was beginning to wane in the West, but still had some life left in the East, mostly due to the overall terrain (and thus military doctrine) and the level of firearm integration in the East as well (fewer numbers than West, as a rule).

I'm in class, but that' the major gist of it, else I'd get more into detail.
 
They were widely used on steppes of Ukraine/Southern Russia, by P-L Commonwealth, Cossacks and Russians in 16th-17th centuries.
 
Defensive tabors were very widely used in the steppes, possibly since the middle ages, by the Ghuzz/Cumans and the other eastern tribes, as well as the Russians, but certainly very heavily in the 15-17th c. Eastern Europe. It's well-documented.

They were a very good defensive measure against cavalry-dominated armies and somewhat useful against infantry assaults too. But there are limitation - they're slow and you're risking your supply mobility every time you use your supply wagons to defend.

In Western Europe there's another consideration - ditches and hedges. Land in Eastern Europe wasn't as cultivated and demarcated as in the West. Those things prevented mass deployments of skirmishing cavalry and would have given problems to wagenburgs as well.
 
War wagons were a regular feature of German armies in the late fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were commonly used and worked pretty well. I suspectthey were used, simply speaking, wherever they turned out to work and abandoned where they didn't.
 
Another reason they were so successful farther West was simply the calibre of soldiery. Most Western armies were small professional cores surronded by a much larger ratio of levies - those levies were generally the ones used to weaken the enemy. You stick a large, heavy wagon in front of them and they immediately lose their capacity to aid the professional core.

During this same time in the East, most semi-nomadic peoples and horse-borne peoples are as much soldiers as they are herders, so they didn't run into this same issue quite so much. The more sedentary peoples, however, found that wagenbergs were useful against said peoples and didn't require as much training.
 
During this same time in the East, most semi-nomadic peoples and horse-borne peoples are as much soldiers as they are herders, so they didn't run into this same issue quite so much. The more sedentary peoples, however, found that wagenbergs were useful against said peoples and didn't require as much training.

Eh, well. The nomads etc. used the wagons THEMSELVES, and may have been the one to introduce it. While the army was mobile to a fault, the nomadic population didn't consist of the army alone. The total warfare nature of steppe tribes meant you needed to defend the non-soldiers, and that's how the Ghuzz and Pechenegs and Cumans did it, with wagons.

This is attested to in Byzantine chronicles and Russian 12th c. epics. That is also where Tolkien got his inspiration for "Wainriders"
 
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