Knights vs elvish guerillas

Question

I am working with a fantasy setting wherein a society of feudal humans launches a crusade against a continent largely controlled by elves. Though the human society is not entirely without its own magical resources, the primary source of its military strength is in fielding large numbers of heavily armored Knights. It's basically late 14th century France, with bad infantry and mediocre skirmishers.

The Elves in this setting are on their home turf and have large numbers of truly top notch skirmishers in the form of crossbow wielding marksmen and mounted archers.

What would be the best way for the humans to go about combating a force such as this? I know that guerilla campaigns are frequently unsuccessful, but most of the information I can find about combating such tactics are for modern armies. How would a medieval army go about suppressing a force of determined guerillas?

Edit I have been asked for a fuller explanation of the scenario several times now, so here goes.

The situation: A large feudal nation of humans has launched a crusade against a distant continent ruled by hostile elves. These elves have operated like the Barbary Pirates since time out of mind and a variety of factors have finally motivated the humans to attempt to put a stop to all this raiding and slaving. The crusaders aim to devastate the elvish homeland, raze one of their major cities, destroy their naval power and rescue enslaved citizens.

To this end the King of the human nation has declared a crusade. All major lords of his nation are expected to send forces if not attend themselves. Due to his prestige and widespread sympathy for this cause independent knights from various foreign powers have also joined, inflating the proportion of knights vs footmen in the crusading army.

The voyage from the human continent to the elvish is quite long, and can take from a month to a month and half depending on weather.

On a neighboring continent to the hostile elves, about a week to a week and a half away, a nation of far more friendly elves exists. Though they are not sending troops, they approve of the cause and have agreed to sell them supplies at discount, provide aid at sea and grant them certan guides. These other elves will not allow them to land on their continent however. Hence their supply lines are shorter than their reinforcment lines.

Neither side is willing to negotiate with the other in any meaningful way.

The Land: A long narrow continent in the northern hemisphere. It is relatively small in the south, 100 -150 miles across, fanning out into a wide land further north till it hits polar ice. Much of it is a rocky wasteland, though coniferous forests run up and down the center of the continent. Between these and the mountains the land is quite rugged. The besieged city in question lies roughly in the center of this southern portion about 50 miles inland from where the crusaders have landed. This is the southernmost city of the elves and is relatively isolated, cut off by mountain ranges from the others. It sits in the middle of the forest on the shore of a lake, which, by various rivers leads eventually to the sea.

The Forces: The Humans are a picture of 13th-14th century France with some magical elements. I will leave those out for the most part as they are rare enough to not dramatically impact the strategic picture.

Human Knights clad in plate and chain with heavily barded warhorses comprise the prime force of the nation. In one of the few widely available magical things they have going for them, their horses interbred with magical elven steeds in the past. They are larger on average than horses in real life, and can wear heavier armor while maintaining their stamina. Imagine that 4 out of 5 knights in the army is riding an abnormally intelligent Destrier the size of War Admiral. The foreign men at arms ride more normal Courcers and the like.

Accompanying the Knights and Men at Arms are an assortment of poorly trained peasant soldiers. They are accustomed to being deployed in battle to a static location, holding that area and letting the knights do most of the work. They are supported by longbowmen, who are quite good, but average out to mediocre in a fantasy setting. Around 1000 professional soldiers have come with the foreign knights, giving a little bit of backbone to the infantry.

Of finnal note on the humans I will mention something about their higher nobles. A very small number of the knights and higher Nobles in the army, including the King, have extended lifespans and superpowers a la Arthurian Legend/Orlando Furioso. Assassinating or sniping the highest leadership of the army is a dubious prospect at best even for the elves. At the highest levels of command the Peers of the King have supernatural levels of military experience. The King is around 130 years old, with some of the Peers being in the 200 to 300 year range.

The Elves in this setting are basically good at everything, but suffer from low numbers. They have superior infantry, cavalry, archers, the works, but not in high enough numbers to drive the crusade from the field in a single hammerblow unless conditions were optimal.

Their citizen militia, which is the bulk of their forces, is competitive with professional human soldiers, and they have large numbers of very good crossbowmen and horse archers.

The elvish professional soldiers are equipped with nearly weightless armor of similar strength to heavy steel plate. They have a full range of weaponry but prefer swords for close shipboard combat.

Elvish heavy cavalry are superior to human knights, riding the elvish steeds that the human steeds originally mixed with to become what they are now. Again however, there are so few that they would be quickly overwhelmed in most massed cavalry engagements.

The Numbers: I do not have concrete numbers for the forces involved here, however the nation is larger than France and like in the real crusades forces from multiple neighboring countries have arrived to assist. I will say 25,000 Men at Arms, and 80,000 Footmen. Lets then add in another 40,000 for workers, sailors, woodsmen, grooms ect.

The Elves are a bit trickier, they are on their home turf, but suffer from a low population compared to humans. Although their citizens can almost all fight, they cant mobilize all of them for obvious reasons. They also have a huge slave population which they have to keep under heavy guard at all times, especially when they are under siege. A slave revolt from within is to be expected at some point, but we will assume that it is suppressed with minimal elvish casualties.

Let's say a population of 300,000 elves of fighting age in the city and surrounding countryside. A fifth of those can be mobilized directly against the invaders. 20,000 within the city, 40,000 without.

Of these 60,000 lets say 10,000 are professional soldiers, the rest are citizen militia, generally superior to the human footmen, but inferior to knights. Lets put their cavalry force at 5,000 horse archers, and 1500 elvish knights.

Answer 1

Here comes the shortest answer of the all: just let them do as they would have doe anyways, but even more cruel. They will have to kill any elve they see, whether children, women or elders, burn villages, fields, and forests. They should at any cost avoid the mountain range, and instead should try to fight the battle on the rocky desert, as it is open field and should only move on after they have burned down woods before them. They should land on different locations around the continent instead of marching for a longer period through the country, and should later, when the elves are already hurt, cut one swath to the center, to conquer the hole continent.

Answer 2

1: You want your mounted knights to be arrowproof. Armor helps with that. A problem at Agincourt is that the horses were not arrowproof. Armor helps them too. Your end result: a Cataphract.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Depiction-of-Iranian-type-cavalry-at-Dura-Europos-after-Robinson-1975-fig-190_fig54_323545452

The English word is derived from the Greek Kataphraktos, literally meaning "armored" or "completely enclosed". Historically, the cataphract was a very heavily armored horseman, with both the rider and steed draped from head to toe in scale armor, while typically wielding a kontos or lance as their weapon.

The Persian / Parthian cataphracts were pretty much invulnerable; certainly they would not succumb to a few measly arrows. So too your crusaders.

2: The elves will never close and do battle with these mounted knights. It would be suicide. They will harass them and harass them. The solution for the knights: do not fight the guerilla archers. Instead, destroy the countryside and the livelihood of the elves. This becomes a Chevauchée

A chevauchée was a raiding method of medieval warfare for weakening the enemy, primarily by burning and pillaging enemy territory in order to reduce the productivity of a region, as opposed to siege warfare or wars of conquest. The chevauchée could be used as a way of forcing an enemy to fight, or as a means of discrediting the enemy's government and detaching his subjects from their loyalty. This usually caused a massive flight of refugees to fortified towns and castles, which would be untouched by the chevauchée.

http://fighting-the-earth.leadr.msu.edu/shermans-march-to-the-sea-wasting-natural-resources/

The canny reader will note that the depicted troops are not those of Henry V ravaging the French countryside. This is the Civil War and General Sherman's March to the Sea which is exactly the sort of warfare described by a chevauchée.

from above source

This campaign is often regarded as a revolutionary war tactic because Sherman operated deep in southern territory without any direct supply lines. His methods of procuring the resources his troops needed and destroying what they didn’t in an attempt to weaken the Confederacy was an appalling waste of many resources gleaned from the environment and had catastrophic affects on the agricultural lands of the south...Later in his address, Jones explains how Sherman’s march waged war against women and children by pushing them to starvation and burning down their homes and property. He explains the ghastly state of the area after Sherman’s troops ravaged the land, “Such was the wholesale destruction of animal life that the region stank with putrefying carcasses. Earth and air were filled with innumerable turkey buzzards battening upon their thickly strewn death feasts”.

In early 1865, Mary B. Chestnut describes the effects of the rampage, “There will be no aftermath. They say no living thing is found in Sherman’s track, only chimneys, like telegraph poles, to carry the news of Sherman’s army backward.

So to your knights: instead of engaging warriors they lay waste to the land. This is a crusade, not a war of conquest. Once the countryside has been crushed, the knights can go home and come back in the spring. A hungry winter will make the elves more tractable.

Answer 3

After reading the comment:

Static siege.

Basically, your model should be the Battle of Alesia (52 BC) or the Siege of Acre (1189–1191). Your invaders build a double palisade with towers to warn against skirmishers.

The problem with mounted archers as the elves have is that they can't take fortresses and they can be killed by shooting from secure positions.

Once built the siege's wall, the invaders start mining the walls or attacking them with rams well protected against projectiles. Because they outnumber the defenders they can make these attacks in two or more places at the same time or make relays to fight at night and meal times.

If your elven cities are far away one from the other, they need the resources from the neighboring fields and forests. Punishing expeditions from your invaders to grab everything edible and burn the rest could work: your invading force has a good heavy cavalry, they can protect their own skirmishers.

Basically, when the crusader armies fought in the Holy Land against the Turkish cavalry archers, they placed their cavalry in the middle, protected by troops with shields. When they were attacked, the crusader crossbowmen picked their targets and from time to time the ranks opened for a charge of their own heavy cavalry.

As powerful as horse archers are with their hit-and-retreat tactics, they usually only bring a limited supply of arrows, so waiting for them to run out of ammo and not falling for the trap of following them into an ambush is a good strategy.

However, I guess your supply lines are very long and your elven skirmishers will attack them. Protecting those lines was the main problem in a lot of Medieval wars and there is no good tactic other than "committing a lot of troops to their defense".

Answer 4

(Hello, allow me to sing to you the song of my people!)

I know that guerilla campaigns are frequently unsuccessful, but most of the information I can find about combating such tactics are for modern armies.

Have you ever heard of a man, a giant of his time physically, being over six feet tall; as well as politically, as one of the fathers of a not-inconsequential nation called the United States of America; and also militarily, as the general of a successful guerrilla campaign against a much larger, better trained, and better equipped British Empire?

His name was George Washington. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7iVsdRbhnc Link contains language that some may find offensive.)

Seriously though - the only advantages the Continental Army had at the beginning of the war were 1. it was fought on their turf, and 2. they had better marksmen. As a result, a guerrilla campaign was the only option that played to those advantages while minimizing the number of men killed by the British in open fields.

Guérilla techniques work against conventional armies. That's why the only information you're finding about successfully combatting them is modern: as a species, humans did not begin systematically developing asymmetrical techniques to defeat guerrillas until the late 1800's in Cuba and South Africa, and did not begin codifying those techniques until after WWII.

I'd suggest researching those modern, asymmetrical techniques, and seeing if the humans in your setting can begin to develop them with the technology and military they have available to them. Otherwise, it's more likely that your Elves would win.

Answer 5

Diseases

Do what every good human invader has done to the natives and that's give them your own lovely Diseases "small pox just a dirty human thing, last thing an elf says before his whole settlement gets wiped out" hell the humans may not do any fighting at all just give your sick to the elf's (they like slave right); Don’t worry even if they kill them the sickness is already at work reeking havoc to their bodies and minds. If your men can’t get close? Just catapults the pox covered clothes over there walls and just wait till they open the doors begging for death. the elf's have gone bush you say, well just send out a vulnerable caravan filled to the brim with said clothes and some nice blankets "I hear it will be getting cold soon" then let them run off to their Little rats nest and let the pox do the rest, most will be dead before winter comes knocking.

Infiltration, Intel, And Assassination

(If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles Quote by Sun Tzu)

Use your elven allies to infiltrate the enemy camps, doesn't matter if there is only a few of them use them to their fullest. Intel is key in any war this one included, find out where the enemy camps are, their numbers and fighting strength a wise general is a great general. When you get all the info you can. You start attacking them in their homes, poison there water burn their supply's kill their commanders. Killing the commanders and strategists is very important doesn't matter how many they are or how elite they are cut off the head and watch it wriggle. Make sure the elves don't do the same to you as well the reason I said the above is because the tactics are effective, expect them to do the same. Make plans around their plans and you could turn this war around

Answer 6

The previous mentions of chevauchée covers the physical angle quite well, but there is another way to interpret the directive to inflict carnage upon the offending elves: to strike not just at the material body, but also at the racial psyche

Full Mithril Jacket

To weaken their spirit, the humans can target their holy sites and other places of note to the elves' culture. Intelligence from the friendly elves' will be invaluable to determine where exactly to strike. Their temples are to be sacked and razed, their wise elders to be killed as priority targets and any means of passing down their culture and history to be destroyed.

The human army will have to lay siege to the elf city eventually. When they do so, they can do it not just with their troops and field fortifications. They can borrow from Vlad Tepes' playbook and surround them with a ring of captive elves impaled in plain sight and left for the carrion eaters. Troops would then accompany the stakes with shouts of "Come and get them, cravens!". The goal with this is to anger the Elf Cong enough that they will sally out in force; when they do, the human army can finally engage and defeat them decisively.

Castle Elfeinstein

Elf captives don't all have to be killed either. Instead of execution, they can be sent to Auschwitz-equivalent camps to be experimented on in all sorts of sick and twisted ways in the name of 'science'. This may be too dark for your story though, so you could omit this. Another way of dealing with that issue is to make Elfschwitz fake; no more than bait for the Elf Cong. Leaked to hostile elf leadership, word that their captives are being tortured in unspeakable ways in this particular fortified camp(s) could draw the Elf Cong into a decisive engagement if impaling captives alone doesn't cut it.

Rape can be employed against the elf women(especially those they hold in high esteem). Soiling the purity of the elf race cuts deep in ways swords alone never will. Once again, could be too dark though.

Answer 7

From a strategic point of view:

1. Destroy enemy fleet
2. Capture enemy port, close to your supply lines (good elves)
3. Disembark and create a military outpost
4. Start to chop / burn forest around your spearhead
5. Contact and bribe local tribes / factions antagonistic to ruling faction (hard to imagine that 100% of population are happy with the current rulers)
6. Use local info to map towns / garrisons / main resources
7. Send military raids to crucial economics assets (can be mines / food fields / ports) or to capture key people.
8. Force the bad elves to send his armies to YOU. --> field battle --> profit