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Comment by moriara | Hacker News Reader

This is surprising to me, since I have read many primary source documents and have not seen mention of camels in Ottoman cavalry, besides some of the Yemen and Hejaz campaigns. It certainly does not make sense to bring "war camels" to Austria when Ottomans had horse cavalry which are much more suitable to the geography, I think at most it could be a pack animal.

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Letter from King Jan III Sobieski to his wife describing the battle: http://literat.ug.edu.pl/listys/095.htm

Describing the captured booty, the first thing he mentions is camels :)

It is surprising that they brought them, considering that they had besieged Vienna 150 years prior and found that camels were ill-suited to the terrain.

All armies have the disease of CRS: Can't Remember Shit.

Thank you for the source!

The article says that skeletal evidence suggests the presence of a harness and rider, so at the very least it was a mount for a soldier, if not an actual "war" camel in the sense that it fought in battle. Relatedly, true war camels actually happen to be a personal interest of mine! I wrote a bit about Persian experiments with mounting swivel guns on camels toward the end of this blog post:

http://theappendix.net/blog/2014/3/behind-the-rocket-cat-ani...

I do not know about the harness, but Ottoman's used camels as food. They have strength and ability to handle long and hard journeys and they are edible with high protein and fat content. It's a great food source for a long running army.

I remember a photo of my grandfather with the Italian army in Africa, alongside his camel. Must've been the war in 1940. It didn't occur to me at the time to ask in-depth about what role the camel played specifically. He seemed reluctant to talk about war there, though I got the impression that he hadn't played an aggressive role and had mostly been moved from base to base rather than in any front lines.

Sometimes having something the other party doesn't have translates into an advantage, lore has it that the Camels upset the horses in the enemy's cavalry.

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