Burmese (Bagan) Allied Contingents

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

Can anybody give me a source for Khmer armies having Burmese (Bagan) allied contingents in various army lists please? This seems to go back to some of the earliest WRG army list book, but I am struggling to find any historical justification for such an alliance.
So it is perfectly possible that this is another army list 'legend' that is passed on like Chinese Whispers from one new list to another 

Thai/Siamese allies are clearly depicted on both the Bayon and Angkor Wat relief carvings (& at Angkor they are even names as being a Siamese contingent - well what the Khmer called the Siamese anyway).

Whilst Bagan was a northern neighbor to the Khmer, I think it unlikely that they were allied in war, as most of the Khmer's external campaigning was against the Cham (in Southern Vietnam) and the Diet Viet (in Northern Vietnam). Although as the Khmer Empire started to decline and the Thai/Siamese claimed their independence, it might have been possible that the Khmer & Burmese jointly fought the Thai, but I can find no records of this.

Also, the Mongols (Yuan Dynasty) appear to have taken a pretty dim (& hostile) view of the Burmese, as they openly harbored Song Chinese refugees (as well as behaving badly towards Mongol envoys). So I'd suspect that had the Khmer been allied to the Bagan Empire they might have been damned by association in Mongol eyes and that should have led to military retribution, as occurred to the Dali and Diet Viet. However, the Khmer were not attacked by the Mongols and seemed to have been on good terms with the Yuan Dynasty.

Anyway, I digress. I've been reviewing both contemporary sources (mostly Chinese court documents & Khmer inscriptions) and other more recent historians views and I am coming up with a blank.

Many thanks
Mark

[lionheartrjc]

Mark,
I couldn't find any evidence for Burmese allies when I looked at Angkor armies.  In reviewing battles and campaigns for the MeG army lists I have found a large number of allies that I think are at best dubious and quite a few which I suspect are just plain wrong.
I am however amazed at how the original WRG lists were put together and the work that went into them.
Richard

[Keraunos]

I had always assumed that WRG was an "anything goes" system.  If you can have Normans and Arab allies fighting Samurai, Rajputs or Sargonid Assyrians, why can't the Khmer have Burmese allies?

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

Hi Keraunos - personally I think there is a big difference between which armies can fight each other and the historical composition of lists.

Sicilian Normans with North African/Sicilian Arab allies is historically justified (there are contemporary sources that state such a thing occurred). But having troop types that never existed or allies that were never allied makes a mockery of an army list. You might as well allow players to field whatever troop types they wanted and not have lists at all 

Thanks Richard - it is good to hear that I am not alone in my thinking.
And I also agree that the original WRG lists (and all the other army lists they 'spawned') were an amazing feat of research - just attempting to maintain the continuity between lists submitted by an assortment of contributors is (as I am sure you know) a significant achievement.

From my own research I think that Khmer Empire armies should be allowed Siamese/Thai; Champa and Diet Viet allies. It might be that they can also have Yunnan Chinese allies, but that is contentious (& I need to undertake more research on that). Most Khmer lists allow Siamese/Thai allies right through to the nominal 'fall' of the Empire, but I think that as the Thai/Siamese kingdoms started to break away this is less likely. However, they could be replaced by an allied Khmer contingent, reflecting the gradual contraction and break-up of the Empire and the fragmentation of central control and an increasing state of civil war.

Thanks
Mark

[lionheartrjc]

I had always assumed that WRG was an "anything goes" system.  If you can have Normans and Arab allies fighting Samurai, Rajputs or Sargonid Assyrians, why can't the Khmer have Burmese allies?

WRG probably did more to promote historical tabletop gaming than any other organisation.
The purpose of army lists was always to constrain players and to provide a historical foundation to the game. For competitions it was never practical to only play historical match ups.

[lionheartrjc]

From my own research I think that Khmer Empire armies should be allowed Siamese/Thai; Champa and Diet Viet allies. It might be that they can also have Yunnan Chinese allies, but that is contentious (& I need to undertake more research on that). Most Khmer lists allow Siamese/Thai allies right through to the nominal 'fall' of the Empire, but I think that as the Thai/Siamese kingdoms started to break away this is less likely. However, they could be replaced by an allied Khmer contingent, reflecting the gradual contraction and break-up of the Empire and the fragmentation of central control and an increasing state of civil war.

Thanks
Mark

Mark,

What evidence did you find for Khmer Empire having Viet allies?

One of the issues with allies is determining the criteria for permitting an allu. Does the ally have to contribute forces to an army? Can you have an ally when two armies campaigned on separate fronts against the same opponent?  Sometimes a ruler would "support" another but that support might have been in the form of money, mercenaries or supplies.

Richard

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

Mark,

What evidence did you find for Khmer Empire having Viet allies?

One of the issues with allies is determining the criteria for permitting an allu. Does the ally have to contribute forces to an army? Can you have an ally when two armies campaigned on separate fronts against the same opponent?  Sometimes a ruler would "support" another but that support might have been in the form of money, mercenaries or supplies.
Richard

Hi Richard

On the Bayon bas-reliefs there are 3 allied contingents depicted as supporting the Khmer King Jayavarman VII against the Cham (and maybe assisting him upon his return from exile to claim his throne alongside Cham supporting troops).
One of these allied contingents is very clearly Thai/Siamese - as they almost exactly resemble the named allied Thai/Siamese contingent that is depicted on the (earlier) Angkor bas-relief carvings built by Khmer King Suryavarman II.

The other two are more enigmatic.
Whilst both are equipped similarly to the Khmer troops (with elephant mounted noble archers, a few spear or sword armed cavalry and the bulk of the force being infantry with short spears or swords and long shields - all unarmoured) both have different ethnic features from the Khmer, Cham or Thai troops they are fighting alongside (& against) and both are dressed very slightly differently.

However the notable differences are in their distinctive physiognomy e.g. no thick lips, no extended pierced earlobes, almond shaped eyes and small goatee type beards without moustaches, and in their highly distinctive hair ornaments (that differentiates these two contingents from the Khmer, Cham and Thai troops as well as from each other ). One of these contingents is also depicted as being 'bulkier' (more well fed) than the Khmer or other allied contingents. In addition, that same contingent has a group of musicians accompanying it, that are playing instruments that are distinctly not Khmer in nature.

It is when you start to research the distinctive hair ornamentation that it becomes apparent that one of these contingents may well be from Diet Viet, as very similar hair ornamentation appears on contemporary (Royal Palace) wall paintings in North Vietnam. We also know that Jayavarman campaigned extensively and successfully against the Diet Viet, even building military roads, bridges, hostelries and way-stations towards Diet Viet territory.

Now it could be argued that this is all a fairly tenuous assumption upon my part, and the local historical guides at Siem Reap all claim that both these allied contingents are "Chinese". However, I suspect that this probably reflects the distinct current dislike of the Vietnamese by the Cambodians, rather than being evidence based. Also why depict both contingents as being (even marginally) different if both are "Chinese".

There are no contemporary Khmer inscriptions or Diet Viet writtings indicating that Diet Viet contingents fought for Jayavarman VII, so we only have the carvings at Bayon to go on.

So it is, as is often the case with such things, a theory 
The other mystery is who are the other contingent? Are they "Chinese" as the local guides claim - and if so are they Yunnan Chinese - despite the composition of the troops (eg. elephants, spear armed cavalry and short spear armed infantry)?

Cheers
Mark

[Erpingham]

The purpose of army lists was always to constrain players and to provide a historical foundation to the game. For competitions it was never practical to only play historical match ups.

It is actually one of the fundamentals of the traditional ancients game that non-historical match ups are OK and were before WRG.  It is said to derive from scattered wargamers assembling the armies they fancied then needing to be able to play each other when they got together.  WRG systematised it by creating army lists to ensure that armies represented their originals accurately, rather than what the wargamer had collected.  It went along with trying to get more accurate portrayals of armies via the WRG books and working with figure manufacturers to update and expand their ranges.

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

One of the issues with allies is determining the criteria for permitting an ally. Does the ally have to contribute forces to an army? Can you have an ally when two armies campaigned on separate fronts against the same opponent?  Sometimes a ruler would "support" another but that support might have been in the form of money, mercenaries or supplies.

Richard

I agree that what constitutes an 'ally' is actually quite nuanced Richard.
Personally, I'd prefer it that an ally actually contributed troops to fight with or on behalf of their allies. I think the monetary and political side of things is not really going to influence a table-top game that much.

However, in this case, are the Thai/Siamese actually allies?
Possibly not, as they have already been within the Khmer Empire for hundreds of years - probably acting more like 'Foederati' under their own noble commanders, than actual allies - as what we call modern Thailand was already part of the Khmer Empire and probably had been since at least the reigns of Jayavarman I/II, if not before that under one of the earlier Chenla Kingdoms. However, if you look at the way that the Khmer kings operated, provincial Khmer governors appear to have had a reasonably high degree of independence and autonomy. Whilst the majority of them would have been related (even distantly) to the king, or come from a stock of royal dignitaries or attendants (civil servants) sometimes going back generations, the challenge with the Thai is one of language and cultural differences. So local leaders, as depicted at both Angkor and Bayon, would make sense.

It is also perfectly possible that the Diet Viet contingent depicted on the Bayon reliefs is of a similar nature to the Thai, in that they are troops from an area of Diet Viet that has been subsumed into the Khmer Empire via conquest. The standard S.East Asian approach to conquest at this time also involved the mass deportation of a conquered local population - very much like in the Middle East Bronze/Biblical age. Enemy warriors captured in battle were used as slaves (most usually by temple authorities), with the skilled craftsmen (& women) deported en-masse and resettled on a comparable basis to the local Khmer population, with local laboring peasantry left to work the land, overseen by either a subjugated nobility or an implant of Khmer aristocracy/theocracy or even relatively minor court officials (e.g: we have a record of a royal fan bearer, whose position went back for 13 generations, being awarded a 'frontier' estate in northern Thailand, to which he and his extended family were expected to relocate to, with a brief to 'civilize' the local barbarians).

The Cham are less likely to be federated troops (although that is also perfectly possible) but we do have inscriptions that state that Jayavarman VII had external Cham support in asserting his right to the Khmer throne. There is also a growing modern theory that some of the battles depicted at Bayon, showing Cham troops fighting Khmer troops which are not led by Jayavarman VII, are actually Cham fighting against the then current Khmer King's troops on behalf of Jayavarman VII.

But as a lot of what we know about the Khmer Empire at this time, from a military perspective, is based on the bas-relief carvings at Angkor Wat, the Bayon and Banteay Chhmar plus other isolated individual depictions on the many Khmer temples and monuments throughout the empire, we are approaching this very much from a speculative basis.

Cheers
Mark

[Andreas Johansson]

When doing the DBMM army lists, Phil's rule (sometimes honoured in the breach) was that to qualify, foreign allies had to be attested as campaigning together with the main army at some point - more distant cooperation like concurrently but separately invading the same enemy isn't supposed to count.

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

When doing the DBMM army lists, Phil's rule (sometimes honoured in the breach) was that to qualify, foreign allies had to be attested as campaigning together with the main army at some point - more distant cooperation like concurrently but separately invading the same enemy isn't supposed to count.

That is a very sound approach, for the sets of rules I play 

[lionheartrjc]

When doing the DBMM army lists, Phil's rule (sometimes honoured in the breach) was that to qualify, foreign allies had to be attested as campaigning together with the main army at some point - more distant cooperation like concurrently but separately invading the same enemy isn't supposed to count.

I had heard this from someone else.  I have found quite a few cases where I couldn't find any evidence for the ally that I was doubting it. Some I am 99% certain are just plain wrong. I suspect that some cases have become so embedded in wargames army lists that trying to remove the ally from the list would have become controversial.
I cringe at some of the early decisions we took on the MeG army lists, but under the time constraints we were working to at the time it was inevitable. I expect it will take another ten years to correct these!
Even decisions like when an army list should start and end can be difficult.  There is just so much history to try and get your head around.

Richard

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

There is just so much history to try and get your head around.
Richard

Unfortunately Richard, it's getting worse not better, we are getting more and more history by the day 

In fact, it is only getting more and more complex - I have just spent the last 6 months correcting, recalculating and putting into place a 'continuity process' for a set of some 60+ Cold War army lists (for Cold War Commander II), and even as we head towards re-publication I know that there will be errors in there - unfortunately that is the trouble of being a 'human' in the system.

[Aetius-last-of-the-Romans]

Even decisions like when an army list should start and end can be difficult.  There is just so much history to try and get your head around.
Richard

Again we agree Richard - however, as there is a 'need' from gamers to classify their armies, in an attempt to ensure a degree of technological parity in their games, we end up with artificial boundaries within rules and army lists.

The Khmer & Cham lists are a great example, extending back as far as c.550AD (if you include the early Chenla Kingdoms - and why wouldn't you) right through to the sacking of Angkor (in 1430-31 by the Siamese) and the conquest of the Cham coastal kingdoms in 1471 by the Diet Viet. So in effect we have a single list that covers what gamers generally classify as 'the Dark Ages', Feudal Medieval and High/Later Medieval periods. When the reality is that prior to the introduction of Chinese torsion engine technology (& crossbows) in the early C13th the Khmer & Cham could easily be classified as late Bronze or early Iron Age from a technological perspective.

[Duncan Head]

Can anybody give me a source for Khmer armies having Burmese (Bagan) allied contingents in various army lists please?

Unfortunately, a lot of the discussion for the DBMM lists was carried out on an old Yahoo email list, and vanished when Yahoo Lists did. But I think I may have found the source for this one.

Coedes' Indianized Kingdoms of Southeast Asia (p.181 of my 1968 ppbk) says that the Chinese writer Chao Ju-kua lists P'u-kan (Pagan/Bagan) amongst Angkor's vassal-states; and he says "Its claims over Burma were perhaps based on the fact that Burmese contingents accompanied Cambodian armies in their expedition of 1207 against Dai Viet". A footnote links this to an Angkor inscription.