October 16th, 2018 6:44 PM
VLAD’S SIMPLE STRATEGY
Vlad’s strategy was ‘scorched earth‘. A territory with no crops, and no farmers to work it is a desert to a ruler who wishes to collect taxes from it. Tepes made it irrational to pursue him because (a) he had already penetrated the sultan’s camp to assassinate him, (but the sultan had moved on), (b) there is nothing to feed an army if the land is empty and the crops are burned, (c) there is nothing to tax if the people are dead. So the sultan left because it was better to use insurrection (funding Vlad’s brother to defeat him) than fight a man who would scorch the earth. The romans did even worse to the Carthaginians (Phoenicians) and salted the earth and tore down the buildings as well. The Russians just threw bodies at germans to collect bullets until the winter came. The french killed off their aristocracy entirely, and doomed france to mediocrity for eternity. The northerners murdered and burned their way across the south for similar reasons. The jews raided the Philistines (metal workers) until they were able to burn their cities to the ground. Stories go on and on. Americans were stagnated in vietnam for not understanding the rice trade. Today we would just infect the rice with biochemistry and everyone would starve and die in less than a year.