"The Medieval Legacy"

The Medieval Legacy Published as: Clifford J. Rogers, “The Medieval Legacy,” Early Modern Military History, ed. Geoff Mortimer (London: Palgrave, 2004): 6-24. The armies and navies inherited by the sixteenth century were conquering armies, though in the new era they soon became very different in role---less so in form. Conquering Naples in 1494, Charles VIII of France wielded forces forged in a dark time by his well-served grandfather, and tempered and tried by internal conquests: Normandy, Gascony, Brittany, Burgundy. When Gonsalvo de Cordoba, ‘El Gran Capitán,’ reached the peninsula to make the Spanish riposte, he and his army too had been shaped by the developments of the late Hundred Years War, and hardened in the decade of invasions launched to subdue the 250-year-old Emirate of Granada. On the other rim of the Mediterranean, Ottoman armies were grinding forward in the Balkans, seizing Serbia, the Morea, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Negroponte (Euboea) between 1459 and 1470, and even smashing their way into Otranto in southern Italy in 1480, only to ebb back on the death of the sultan a year later. In America at least, the Middle Ages are traditionally defined as ending in 1453. Of course, everyone realizes that there was no hard division which suddenly rose up in that year---but still, for military historians in particular, the events of 1453 were indeed of great importance, even ‘epochal.’ At one end of Europe, Bordeaux surrendered to a French army, bringing an end to the Hundred Years War, the crucible of the most important military developments of the late Middle Ages. Far to the east, Mehmet the Conqueror fully earned his sobriquet when he captured Constantinople, thus dealing the death-blow to the Eastern Roman Empire. In between, the smallest and shortest-lived of the European ‘Gunpowder Empires,’ the Burgundian state, hammered down three castles with artillery, won a major battle, and thereby restored its authority over the rich and populous city of Ghent, which had rebelled rather than submit to a tax increase and interference with its municipal levies. The French and Ottoman armies shared important characteristics with one another, and likewise with Burgundian and Spanish forces that would soon enough make their own bids for conquests of great importance---though only the latter would succeed, when Ferdinand and Isabella destroyed the last Islamic state in Iberia between 1482 and 1492. There were of course significant evolutionary developments in military structures and methods between 1453 and, say, 1529, but most of them were essentially refinements and extensions of the patterns already extant in 1453. In other words, the armies of Charles VIII and Gonsalvo de Cordoba were essentially legacies of the middle ages, in their structures and their methods. To understand the Wars of Italy and the Early Modern Military Revolution, then, we have to understand the conquering forces of 1453, and how they came to be the way they were. France, throughout the late middle ages, had around triple or quadruple the population and economic strength of England, yet for the first hundred years of the Hundred Years War, the French suffered many more defeats than they gained victories. Indeed, when it came to full-scale land battles, it could be argued that the French did not win a single one during that period, whereas the English gained decisive results at Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt, and Verneuil. (The French did win at Baugé [1421] and Patay [1429], but these involved substantially smaller forces than the others mentioned, and had no king or regent fighting on either side.) During some phases of the war, notably under Charles V, the French had nonetheless managed to make some gains by avoiding battle and making use of their superior resources to occupy territories castle by castle, town by town. This method worked well enough during periods when the French leadership was strong and the English leadership was weak---provided that it was directed at the reconquest of areas recently captured by the English, where the lords of the castles and the bourgeoisie in the towns were not averse to returning to Valois rule. Despite their huge advantage in resources, however, the French armies of this period were never up to the task of seizing English Gascony, as demonstrated in the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of 1337-40, 1377, 1403-7, and 1442. (See Labarge 1980 for summaries of these campaigns). In 1450-53, however, things were very different. The last two major battles of the war, Formigny in Normandy and Castillon in Périgord, were the first two to be won decisively by the French. Even before the first of those battlefield successes, Charles VII’s captains had demonstrated a new ability to make rapid conquests in Normandy. Then in 1451, without needing to fight a real battle in the south, the French overwhelmed the defenses of Gascony and occupied Bordeaux, a feat they had attempted and failed many times before. Castillon, two year later, sealed and solidified the conquest, but did not drive it. The forces which accomplished this remarkable turn-around were created between 1439 and 1448, carefully designed to solve a variety of political and military problems, and to put into effect lessons learned by experience and reinforced by the study of old Roman institutions and practices. The problems were those of conquest. The solution was a combined-arms force of well-equipped, well-trained and well-disciplined soldiers, principally the famed compagnies d’ordonnance and the skilled gunners of the royal artillery. In western Europe, especially from the twelfth through the fourteenth century, the conquest of a province, much less of a country, was a daunting prospect. The eleventh century had been a great period of conquests, with the Norman occupations of England, southern Italy, and Sicily; the Reconquista in Iberia; German expansion to the east, and the establishment of the crusader states in the Levant. In all of these cases, however, the defeated enemies had been at a disadvantage in battle, and the territories seized had been only lightly fortified. Thereafter, as stone castles sprang up at every major road junction or river crossing, the strategic defender’s position improved greatly. In such an environment, conquest required either many sieges or mass defections by the people who controlled the fortifications. Realistically, in fact, it took both. Each major siege was an expensive, time consuming, and difficult task. Attempts to capture a major castle or a fortified town often failed. Assaults typically required the attackers to pass a palisade and a moat while under heavy fire from above, then to climb siege ladders and somehow, from that unsteady platform, outfight the defenders on the stone walkways at the top of the walls, all the while suffering from enfilading fire from the projecting towers on either side. If resisted by a suitable garrison, such assaults rarely succeeded. That forced the besiegers to turn to slower methods. Siege engines, mainly counterweight trebuchets, were not usually able to batter down walls efficiently enough to cut holes for direct attacks. The besiegers’ projectiles could, however, demolish machiolations, merlons, and tower-tops to help clear the way for renewed attempts at escalade. Moreover, broad sections of walls could be brought down, with the suddenness necessary to prevent the defenders from constructing a second line of defense behind the gap, by mining. This involved tunneling up to the wall, then along below it, holding up the stone with wooden supports. When this work was far enough extended, the tunnel would be filled with combustible material (or eventually gunpowder) and set afire; once the timber props burnt away, the fortifications would tumble down. But this process, like the other major option---to starve the defenders into submission---was very slow. Every day that went by during these long processes posed challenges and risks for the besiegers. The first problems that had to be overcome were ensuring the flow of money and troops. If the large sums necessary for an army’s wages could not be found, the siege would likely fail; it was lack of funds that ended Edward III’s siege of Tournai in 1340. Even if sufficient money was available, a siege might fail because there was simply not enough food and forage coming in to sustain the soldiers and their horses, as in the same king’s siege of Reims in 1359-60. Disease might ruin a siege army, as at Gibraltar in 1350; internal conflicts between reluctant allies could shatter it (another contributing factor to the failure to capture Tournai). Sieges that did not simply fail might be broken. Depending on the situation, if a relief army arrived, it might be able to cut the besiegers off from supplies. In that case, they would have to come out from their field fortifications and fight in the open; if they lost, the siege would be over. Of course, the defenders of a threatened place could also choose to fight even before the siege began. The ‘home-field advantage’ meant that the invaders had to be very strong to have any chance. This was especially true from the fourteenth century, as infantry forces, including urban militias, improved in quality to the point where they could be a major factor in battle. Think of the situation in economic terms. A powerful prince could raise for offensive operations an army of two or three thousand men-at-arms (armored soldiers, each provided with several horses, and well trained to fight either as heavy cavalry or on foot) and a force of infantry several times that large. It could take a substantial effort even from a whole kingdom to find that many troops willing to undertake a long-term offensive operation, and to raise the funds necessary to pay them for the time required to assemble, travel to the target city, and hold the field for the months a siege might take. (Even if the campaign proved to be a short one, the budget and therefore the size of the army would usually be determined by the expectation of a long one. As late as 1409, one authority recommended planning for sieges lasting six months each.) The defenders, on the other hand, faced with a threat to their homes, could be expected to contribute a much greater proportion of their financial resources and of their manpower. Furthermore, if they were willing to risk battle, they would only have to pay wages (including those of mercenaries or allies, if they were available) for just a short period, just long enough to forestall or break a siege. Thus, they could hire far more troops with a given amount of money. The dramatic difference these considerations made can be illustrated by contrasting two simultaneous campaigns undertaken by Edward III, the siege of Calais and the response to the Scottish invasion of 1346. The siege of Calais, which lasted from October 1346 to August 1347, had to be maintained by an army large enough to stand up to a French relief army. Because the English had just won the battle of Crécy, that was not as demanding a requirement as it otherwise would have been, but still the besieging force averaged somewhat over 10,000 men. (Rogers, 2000, p. 273n.) Sustaining this force required the full attention of the English government, which had to organize a massive logistical effort, and exert pressure by a host of means to keep the manpower up to sufficient levels. All in all, it was the single greatest task the English crown had ever undertaken. In wages alone, the cost of the operation (including the preceeding campaign across northern France) amounted to over £127,000, the majority of which represented the expenses for the siege proper. (Grose 1812, p. 261) This sum exceeded the total revenues of the English Crown for the first four years of Edward’s reign. Although the siege did succeed (unlike the even more expensive, though shorter, siege of Tournai in 1340), and the capture of Calais was far from trivial, the ratio between the scale of the effort and the extent of the gain offers a powerful example of the difficulty of conquest in the fourteenth century. While the siege was in progress, the Scots invaded England to aid their French allies, thinking that with the royal army overseas, and other substantial forces committed to Brittany and Aquitaine, they would find only priests and shepherds to oppose them. Instead, they were promptly met by an army which had been rapidly assembled almost entirely from the resources of the northern counties of England. The retinues of the northern magnates, including the small standing forces maintained at government expense by the Wardens of the Marches, amounted to something like five hundred men-at-arms and an equal number of mounted archers. The rest of the roughly 9,0000-man army was composed of arrayed troops, the majority of them mounted archers. The service of the 4,328 soldiers in the Lancashire and Yorkshire contingents cost the Crown a mere £307 18s for 4-5 days’ pay. The remainder of the army seems to have cost nothing at all to Edward III, since their duration of service did not exceed the eight days provided at the expense of the county communities. Within that period, they defeated the Scots at the battle of Neville’s Cross, captured King David, and effectively ended the Scottish threat to northern England for a generation. (Morris, 1914; Rogers, 1998) The same logic of disparity helps explain how the city of Staveren could defeat the expeditionary army of the wealthy Count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland in 1345, and how the people of Liège could defeat their bishop and his allies at Vottem the following year. Another good example is the failure of the anti-Hussite crusades of the 1420-31. A whole series of armies, built up from the resources of nearly all of Europe, were routed time and again by inexpensive local forces, whose high level of commitment helped compensate for their relatively low level of training and equipment. In 1499, the Swiss put over 34,000 men into the field out of a total population of around 800,000; this was more than double the size of the largest army any English king took to France during the Hundred Years War, at a time when England’s population was around five million. The Flemings, Scots, and Frisians employed similar levées en masse, with comparable results. (Winkler 1982, pp. 101-7; Verbruggen, 1997; Rogers, 2000, pp. 40-41.) Even if circumstances allowed the besiegers to continue their operations without leaving their camp (e.g. if their perimeter included a harbor and they were being supplied by sea, as in Edward III’s siege of Calais in 1346-7), or if their opponents could not muster a force strong enough to face them in regular battle, they were still vulnerable. A siege line typically had to extend several miles even to encircle a fairly small town. This left the besiegers vulnerable to defeat in detail: even a weak relief army could sometimes hit a portion of the lines in a surprise night or dawn attack, then roll up and defeat the besieging army. The relief force under such circumstances typically enjoyed major home-field advantages from knowing the terrain and having the assistance of local partisans. Just such operations led to the failure of the French sieges of La Roche Derrien in 1347 and Auberoche in 1345---and indeed to the failure of the whole efforts to subdue Brittany and Guienne of which those sieges were a part. Finally, attempts at conquest were often frustrated by the recall of the invasion force to deal with counter-strikes or other crises in other theaters of operations. The future John II’s attempt to capture Aiguillon in 1346, for example, was aborted by his father’s defeat at Crécy, despite the solemn oath the prince had sworn at the start of the siege to see it through to the end. And even when the besiegers managed to keep their army together for the necessary length of time, and avoid destruction by disease or a relief army, and captured a substantial town or a key castle, they were likely to nearly bankrupt themselves in the process. An invading army that kept concentrated could only expect to complete two or three major sieges in a year, even if all went well. The enemy, meanwhile, could gain ground elsewhere in the theater of war, or stage a recovery during the period of financial exhaustion that was likely to follow a major offensive operation. If the invading army tried to accelerate the process of conquest by conducting several siege operations simultaneously, it faced a very serious risk of defeat in detail, of the sort Henry of Grosmont inflicted on the French around Bergerac in 1345. There was also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work. If the inhabitants of a walled town expected an invasion to be successful, and were summoned to surrender, they were likely to make a deal to do so on favorable terms. But if they thought that they could resist effectively, they might well choose to fight, and if they chose to fight, they were fairly likely to succeed, and almost certain to prevent any extensive conquests by the enemy. This was especially important because, during a major siege, the invaders would normally send out detachments to try to persuade neighboring strongholds to surrender if the main operation was successful. These negotiations rested on the threat that any town which refused such an arrangement would be next in line for attack, and would be treated harshly if captured. Such a threat held little terror if it were presumed that a single major siege was the most that could realistically be carried through in one campaigning season. Considering all these difficulties and perils, it is easy to see why the major French efforts against Gascony in 1337, 1339, 1345-6, 1377, 1403-6, and 1442 all failed to complete their mission and capture Bordeaux, as did any number of other offensive operations in other areas of Europe in this period. The defender’s advantage in warfare was so huge that it was almost impossible to surmount it, even when the attacker was three or four times as strong in absolute terms. When large areas did change hands, it was usually in the wake of a major battle, but for that very reason, belligerents attempting conquest were often met by foes who refused to oblige them by fighting in the open field. Faced with these problems, aggressive powers often turned to the main strategic alternative to siege-based conquest: the chevauchée, or “war-ride.” The two different styles of warfare coexisted; the same armies, the same commanders, would employ each at different times and under different circumstances. There was the war of fortresses, and there was the war of chevauchées. The war of fortresses focused on major sieges, with the full apparatus of encirclement, bombardment, sally and assault. It also comprised the tangled struggles of small garrisons spread throughout networks of fortifications, as they raided cattle, sprang ambushes, intercepted supply columns, attempted night escalades, and so on. These elements of ‘little war’ were sometimes the endemic wrestling of frontier zones, sometimes directed towards the support or frustration of a major siege. The chevauchée was a slashing mounted invasion of enemy territory, characterized by widespread devastation and burning. An army of six or ten or tweve thousand on chevauchée typically created a zone of ashes and tears around fifteen miles wide, and dozens or hundreds of miles long. Within this area, the strongly fortified towns and the castles of the countryside would be packed with refugees. Unwalled or ill-defended settlements and individual manors would often be emptied out three times: first by their fleeing inhabitants, next by the army charged with ‘defending’ the area, and its hangers-on, and finally by the foragers and outriders of the invading force. Peasants too slow to evacuate would sometimes be rounded up and herded along with the stolen livestock, to be ransomed later for whatever small sums their more fortunate relations and neighbors could raise. All of the devastation inflicted by such operations served to weaken the enemy regime economically and politically, and to pressure the defenders either to give battle, or to seek peace. The defenders, meanwhile, would have as strong a force as they could spare from the defense of the strongholds assigned to shadow the invaders, warily watching their movements, laying ambushes for scouts, stragglers, and foragers, and otherwise doing their best to minimize the damage inflicted on the countryside. (These same scenes were often recreated on a smaller scale by the garrison raids that were a major feature of the war of fortresses.) Grand battles were less common than sieges and chevauchées. The possibility of a general engagement, however, remained important in nearly every campaign, even when that possibility did not become a reality. Belligerents on the strategic offensive typically hoped for an opportunity to win a decisive tactical victory, which would clear the way for siege and ravaging operations to be conducted with much greater dispersal, and therefore speed and effectiveness. The defenders, on the other hand, often preferred to avoid battle, and employ a Vegetian defense-in-depth strategy. By strongly holding the well-fortified towns and castles, emptying out the countryside as much as possible, and hemming in the invaders with small detachments harassing their supply lines and cutting up their outriders, the defenders could prevent their enemies from making any easy conquests. Though very effective, this strategy was also difficult to sustain. It enabled the defender to limit, but not to eliminate, the devastation of his lands. To put a stop to the ravaging, the only real option (other than surrender) was to destroy the invading army in battle. Defeat deep in enemy territory was usually catastrophic. Thus, an army conducting a large-scale chevauchée had to be ready to face a battle, and that requirement was as important in shaping the army and its commanders’ strategy as were the demands of efficient pillaging. Similar logic applied to siege-based schemes of conquest. Very often major sieges would run their course without a battle, but the besieging army had to be ready to fight off a relieving army. Thus, the structures of fourteenth-century armies were molded by the demands of siege operations, open battles, and ravaging or counter-ravaging operations all at once. Yet the different modes of strategy called for different emphases and balances of troop types. The elements were quite consistent across Europe, though there were regional specialties such as the longbowmen of England and the jinetes (light cavalrymen) of Iberia. Almost everywhere there were three main categories of soldiers: men-at-arms, mounted infantry, and simple infantry. The men-at-arms were mostly knights and esquires drawn from the lower nobility; they were by definition well-armored and well-equipped, mounted and trained sufficiently to fight effectively as heavy cavalry. Men-at-arms were always accompanied by noncombatant pages (at a minimum one per two men-at-arms, usually one per one), and had to provide themselves with three or more horses, typically at least one expensive battle charger, one riding horse, and one pack horse. Very often, being nobles, even simple men-at-arms brought on campaign much more substantial stables and households of servants, as well as retinues of lesser soldiers. Men-at-arms were able to fight very effectively on foot as heavy infantry, and over the course of the century this became more and more their normal battlefield role. This was the result of a sort of chain-reaction of cavalry charges which suffered crushing defeats. By the time of Poitiers in 1356, the large majority of the French men-at-arms fought on foot. In doing so, they were imitating the English, who had defeated them at Crécy ten years earlier. The English in turn were imitating the Scots, who had beaten them at Bannockburn in 1314; the Scots had been inspired by the victory of the Flemish communal infantry at Courtrai in 1302. Still, at Poitiers (just as at Agincourt in 1415) the French began the battle with substantial flanking and reserve contingents who remained mounted. Furthermore, even the men-at-arms who fought on foot, if victorious, mounted for the pursuit. This was an extremely important tactical function, since the losers often suffered more losses in the chase than in the battle itself. During ravaging operations, too, the men-at-arms’ service as heavy cavalry was extremely important. Much of the actual work of pillaging and burning was conducted by other sorts of troops, but it was vital for their success that they be ‘covered’ by men-at-arms. Mounted infantry might be very effective in large numbers and tight formations in battle, but small bands of such troops could still be ridden down and hacked up fairly easily by lancers, if caught without support. Similarly, true cavalry played a crucial role in siege operations. Many historians have made derisive quips about the inability of mounted men to attack fortifications, but it must be remembered that sieges very often became races to starvation. Besieging armies required vast quantities of supplies every day. Unless water transport was practical, this meant long trains of slow-moving wagons and pack animals. It made no difference if the wagons had been loaded by foragers, government officials, or merchants seeking profits: in any case, the supply lines had to be protected by cavalry. Furthermore, it remained the men-at-arms who normally did spearhead assaults over walls or through breaches, albeit without their steeds. For all these reasons, men-at-arms were valued more highly than any other soldiers by medieval commanders. Even though in the fourteenth century an esquire cost twice as much in wages as a mounted infantryman or light cavalryman (and quadruple a true footman), governments were constantly making efforts to increase the proportion of men-at-arms in their armies. The cavaliers’ proportional contribution to overall army numbers varied greatly from country to country, tending to rise from the beginning to the middle of the century, then (in some areas) to fall again. The balance between these elite fighters and other types of soldier also depended on the purpose for which a given army was raised. Forces intended for offensive operations, especially chevauchées, might typically include twenty-five or even fifty percent men-at-arms. Shadowing forces might have an even greater proportion of men-at-arms, while garrisons emplaced mainly to defend a fortification (as opposed to garrisons intended to defend or cut supply lines, to dominate a region, or to conduct or guard against raids) might have very few. Urban contingents, and armies drawn from poor, mountainous, or heavily forested areas (like Switzerland and Scotland) usually contained only a small fraction of men-at-arms. In Iberia, light cavalrymen known as jinetes were employed in large numbers. The French varlets or gros valets also served as true light cavalry in at least some cases; they were normally equipped with brigandines or mail haubergeons, supplemented by plate protection for head, neck, and hands, and mounted on horses whose descriptions and values indicate that they were meant for use in combat. The English seem not to have employed any such troops, though it is possible that the “hobilars” who were fairly numerous in the 1330s could fight on horseback. Mounted infantry, on the other hand---that is, soldiers who rode to the battlefield but had neither the training nor suitable mounts for fighting on horseback---went from rare to extremely important over the course of the century. The Irish and Scottish led the way in this, but it was the example of the English mounted archers, superb fighters, which eventually inspired widespread emulation. In the 1330s it was normal for English military retinues to include around one mounted archer for each man-at-arms; a century as it became more difficult to recruit the latter, the ratio often rose to three or four to one. These troops were much cheaper and usually easier to raise than men-at-arms; like light cavalrymen, they normally received only half the pay of a regular man-at-arms, and could be drawn from any social class. In battle, under the right circumstances and as part of a balanced combined-arms team, English longbowmen were man-for-man at least as effective as knights and esquires. They were also invaluable in assaults on second-rate fortifications, where their covering fire could sweep the ramparts of defenders, allowing other troops to stage successful escalades or demolish walls with picks and rams. Even when longbowmen were not available, other forms of mounted infantry---typically crossbowmen or spearmen---were widely employed. On chevauchée, their inexpensive hackneys gave these troops the mobility to keep up with the men-at-arms. Measured by linear distances, fourteenth-century armies, even all-mounted ones, tended to advance by reasonably short stages (typically averaging around twelve to fifteen miles a day), but many of the individual soldiers actually went much farther, often swinging out five or so miles from their divisions’ main lines of march in order to plunder and burn. Thus, if the army pushed forward fifteen miles, some of its members might well have covered twenty-five miles that day, a rate which only horsed troops could sustain. Without a large proportion of mounted troops, an invasion force would have to move much more slowly, and lay waste a much narrower band of territory. That, in turn, would make it more difficult for the army to supply itself, and reduce the damage and provocation inflicted on the enemy. True footmen were not as useful as mounted infantrymen, especially for offensive operations, but they had two key advantages: they were even cheaper, and under the right circumstances they could be available in very large numbers. An army raised for a major siege would normally include a large proportion of simple infantry. The siege lines had to remain heavily manned at all times; other soldiers were needed to dig, and to fill out the ranks in case a relief army appeared to attempt to break the siege by battle. No horses were needed for these duties, and since each horse had to be provided with forage, and each rider’s wage had to reflect the capital and maintenance costs of his mount, it was obviously preferable to hire footmen for jobs footmen could effectively perform. In areas like Flanders and Italy, where wars often centered around the large towns as protagonists and targets, and when operations were typically conducted mainly within relatively short distances, infantry drawn from town militias often formed the great bulk of armies. Except among the English (and, later, the Scots and Welsh), who favored the longbow, the predominant type of infantryman was a soldier armed with a spear or pike. Spearmen often used large shields, which might “cover them up to their noses,” whereas those employing the longer pike or other pole-arms typically needed both hands free to employ their weapons. Although “lances afoot” or armati with armor comparable to a man-at-arms’ were not unknown, it was more common for infantry to be equipped more lightly, with a mail haubergeon or hauberk and an iron cap, a quilted gambeson composed of many layers of canvas, or a jack, brigandine, or (more rarely) a coat-of-plates, the latter three all being various forms of protection composed of thin iron plates riveted into cloth or leather coverings. (The defensive equipment of mounted infantry was similar, though tending to the higher end of the scale.) The spearmen were typically supplemented by smaller numbers of three other types of soldiers: crossbowmen, paviseurs, and various forms of what might be dubbed ‘strikers,’ that is, men armed with halberds, goedendags, battle-axes, bills, etc. In a formation of pikemen or spearmen, the strikers would be interspersed among the front rank or ranks. From there, they could hit out at enemy troops, especially cavalrymen, who were halted by the serried points of the longer pole-arms, or who tried to push in among them. The role of the crossbowmen was essentially the same as that of the longbowmen. In battle, they attempted to clear away the enemy missile troops. If successful at that, they could employ their fire to wear down the strength of a stationary enemy force, or to weaken and disrupt an advancing one before retreating out of its way. Even if defeated, an advanced force of crossbowmen would still serve a useful purpose, screening the other soldiers from harassment for as long as it was able to hold the field. Paviseurs, equipped with very large shields to protect their partners as well as themselves, were very often paired with crossbowmen to make the latter less vulnerable during the relatively slow reloading process. Unlike longbowmen, however, crossbowmen were not expected to be able to stand up to a serious attack of infantry or cavalry, not even with the aid of the paviseurs. Across the lines of such functional divisions, troops could also be categorized by the ways they were raised for service. By the 1340s, traditional feudal service had essentially disappeared in France, England, and most other areas. All soldiers were paid, from foot archers to princes. Native troops, serving their own sovereigns, were mostly recruited in one of two ways: to use the English terminology, they were either volunteers serving in retinues, or arrayed troops who had been called into service by royal authority. The retinues were normally composed of men-at-arms and mounted infantry (or gros valets in France) who had contracted to serve for one or more quarters. The companies of great lords (earls, counts, etc.) and of important professional captains might contain hundreds or even (in a few cases) thousands of men, including many men raised by subcontracts. Individual knights and esquires often enlisted to serve under friends, relatives, or lords, but they could also enter the army on their own account, serving as the head of a retinue of just a few men. Their terms of service were fairly standard; sometimes they were spelled out in writing in a letter of indenture (roughly the same as the French lettre de retenue or the Italian condotta), but these written agreements were usually dispensed with if the king was leading the army in person. Heads of retinue were usually given their men’s pay in advance. In addition to their daily wage, men-at-arms normally received a lump-sum bonus known as a regard, typically equal to 50 or 100% of an esquire’s pay. In the former case (the norm from the 1340s to the 1370s), troops were theoretically expected to surrender half their war gains (plunder and ransoms) to their captains, who in turn provided the same proportion to the king, but on the other hand the men were entitled to replacement costs if their principal warhorse were lost on campaign. With the higher regard, the captain’s share of profits fell to a third, but the troopers lost their right to restor for dead horses. (Ayton, 1994) Soldiers were generally required to stand muster at the start of their service, and twice a month or so if stationed in garrison. At musters, the men would ‘show’ (monstre in French, hence the English word) their mounts, armor, and weapons; if these were not up to par, they would be fined or have their wages reduced. Contract forces of this sort were the norm for garrison service, and also provided most of the men-at-arms and mounted infantry for major offensive expeditions. When an enemy invasion was expected, the defending ruler, if he had sufficient warning, would likely build the core of a field force by the same means. Once the attacker had begun operations, the defender might supplement his army by drawing forces out of garrisons not directly threatened, though this would be counterbalanced by detachments from the main force to stiffen the defenses of fortified places which were in the invader’s zone of operations. Meanwhile, the defender would typically issue a general summons requiring all those in the affected area who were able to bear arms to join his army. In practice, most people would instead pay a monetary fine in lieu of personal service. Especially if the invasion took the form of a chevauchée, only mounted men would be of any use anyway, since only they would be able to keep up with the pace of maneuver. Noble men-at-arms, however, could be expected to turn out in significant numbers. In areas with strong traditions of broad military service, such as Scotland, Northern England, Gascony, Switzerland, Flanders, Frisia, and many parts of Iberia, quite large forces of reasonably effective infantry could also be raised. If the invaders settled down into a siege, or if they were expected to march straight to battle, so that mobility was not as much of an issue, such troops could form large portions of defensive field armies. Especially in the former case, when a relief army was to be prepared, contingents of urban militiamen might be requested or demanded from a wide area---though more often requested than demanded, since most significant towns had charters limiting their military obligations to local operations. In England, such armies were raised by ‘commissioners of array,’ who were empowered to select the fittest, strongest archers from each community, up to a specified number, and compel them to serve. Such arrayed forces could also be used in some cases for offensive operations, particularly within the British Isles. The use of substantial contingents of arrayed troops for the Crécy-Calais campaign of 1346-7 was, however, the exception rather than the rule for overseas operations. In addition to these two basic categories of native troops---those raised by contract and those gathered by array or general summons---armies often contained substantial bodies of paid mercenaries from other lands. Usually these were volunteers, organized under their own captains in areas with at least some loose alliance with the power they agreed to serve. The French, for example, often employed large numbers of Genoese crossbowmen. In Italy, such condottieri, drawn from all over Europe, formed especially large proportions of most armies. Foreign troops were typically retained in much the same way and with basically the same conditions as the indentured native forces. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, battles had normally, though by no means always, been won by cavalry charges. By the middle of the century, a whole series of battles from Courtrai to Crécy had witnessed mounted men-at-arms suffering crushing defeats at the hands of men fighting on foot. Infantry in close order (unlike cavalry) are most effective fighting on the defense. The inherent strength of a tightly arrayed force of footmen was normally increased still further by the use of various forms of obstacles, including hedges, agricultural ditches, streams, lines of baggage wagons, belts of horse-tripping potholes, hastily dug trenches, etc. These were almost invariably used to protect the flanks, and sometimes also to cover the front of a formation. Frontal attacks into these defenses were often made, but almost never succeeded. It was relatively easy for the side on the strategic defensive to employ such defensive tactics, simply by positioning themselves between the aggressor and his target. Invaders could also sometimes use the pressures of siege or chevauchée to impel an enemy into taking the tactical offensive (as the English did at Halidon Hill, Crécy, and Poitiers), but this was a tricky proposition and required skilled generalship. Since siege operations were so difficult and costly, chevauchées were generally the preferred means of offensive warfare. Thus, for armies of invasion, mounted infantry, which had the mobility to outdistance or bypass defensive blocking forces of simple footmen, but also the combat effectiveness to win battles if attacked, became increasingly popular. Faced with fast-moving enemies, defenders too had to rely on cavalry and mounted infantry who were capable of rapid maneuver. This meant a general trend towards armies more and more composed of contract retinues, with less and less reliance on troops raised by general levy. The interminable wars kept significant numbers of troops in constant, or at least frequent, service in frontier garrisons, and also spawned large mercenary companies. Both these developments offered more opportunities for men of all social ranks to make careers in arms. The Black Death, which hit in the middle of the century, contributed to these phenomena. Minor lords found that the real revenues produced by their lands declined with the impact of inflation and falling rents; military service offered an excellent way for them to tap into the rising wealth of the urban and village middle classes to subsidize their noble lifestyle, whether through the medium of royal taxation, or through pillage and the exaction of appatis (protection money). By the turn of the fifteenth century, however, the grand chevauchée had lost much of its luster as a method of offensive warfare. Taking a page from the Scots, the French had re-learned the effectiveness of the Vegetian, battle-avoiding strategy, and all across Europe heavy expenditures on fortifications, urban and seigneural, reduced the impact of ravaging. Tactics continued to favor the defense, and formal sieges continued to be long and expensive. One change did favor the offensive in siege warfare: the steadily growing strength, revenues, and administrative capacities of central governments increased armies’ staying power, which reduced the chances of sieges simply failing due to lack of money or supplies. Still, conquest remained extremely costly and difficult. It was only the combination of French errors in the Agincourt campaign and the political divisions in France deriving from Charles VI’s madness that made Henry V’s occupation of Normandy possible. Venice was able to make significant territorial gains in the wars of 1404-5, 1411-12, and 1418-20, but the scale was much smaller. Offensive wars were more likely to end in failure, as with the Angevin and Imperial invasions of Italy in 1391 and 1401, the Castilian invasion of Portugal in 1385, the Austrian attempt to subdue Switzerland in 1386-8, the Ottoman sieges of Constantinople in 1396 and 1422, or the five Hussite Crusades. When conquests were made, they rarely extended much beyond a single town and its environs; the major Castilian offensive against Granada in 1407 led to the capture of Zahara, but then ended in failure with an attempt to capture Setenil. In 1410, in a follow-up operation, the border fortress of Antequera fell after a siege of nearly five months. There the effort at conquest halted for a generation, with relatively small return for such great effort. In 1482, Zahara was back in Moslem hands, and Granada not signficiantly smaller than a century before. The picture was little different than it had been in the 1340s, when a major battlefield victory at Rio Salado and an international crusading effort enabled Alfonso XI to capture Algeciras after an exceptionally difficult two-year siege, but not to capture neighboring Gibraltar. That took until 1462. Similarly, even the great Polish victory over the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg in 1410 led to no sweeping territorial losses by the Order, which successfully defended its great stronghold of Marienburg. The French siege of Arras in in 1414 simply failed, as did Philip the Good’s siege of Compiègne in 1430 All this really started to change with the reconquest of Normandy in 1449-50 and the conquest of Guienne the following year. The French and Burgundian suppressions of the revolts of Gascony and Ghent in 1453 only confirmed the change. The Burgundian conquests of Guelders and Lorraine between in 1473-5, the Spanish conquest of Granada, the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople (1453), Serbia (1459), Bosnia (1464) and Herzegovina (1467), and even Charles VIII’s drive to Naples (1494) were cut from the same cloth. Two key developments served to tip the balance between offense and defense: the creation of permanent, standing forces, and improvements in artillery design. Both of these were natural, evolutionary progressions of trends dating back at least to the mid-fourteenth century, if not the late thirteenth. But at a certain point, evolutionary change had revolutionary implications. Let us first consider gunpowder artillery. Cannon were first employed in Europe as early as 1326, but it was not until the 1370s that they became truly formidable weapons, throwing stones of 3-400 pounds or more. These great guns, however, were essentially what we would today call mortars. Their short barrels spat out stone balls at a high trajectory and low velocity, making them still more suitable for demolishing buildings inside towns than for breaching fortifications. By the 1420s and 1430s, we see true cannon, with much longer barrels, which fired large projectiles much more rapidly and accurately; these guns were capable of knocking down the walls of many towns or castles within a few short weeks. Even a badly breached wall was not easy to assault, and determined defenders could still beat off assaults, as the garrisons of Beauvais, Neuss and Rhodes did in 1472, 1474 and 1480. Still, what had been the general rule became the exception, and what had been the exception became the rule. Rouen, which took Henry V six months to capture in 1418, fell in days in 1450. In 1415, it was considered almost miraculous that the English were able to take Harfleur in just six weeks; in 1450, the French managed the job in seventeen days. To reach Ghent in 1453, Philip the Good had first to deal with the castles of Schendelbake, Poeke and Gravere; all three were reduced so rapidly that the advance on the main target was not seriously impeded, even though the duke’s brutal policy of executing the defenders ensured that they were not surrendered lightly. Dinant, which had been besieged without success seventeen times before, was pummelled into submission by Burgundian guns in just one week in 1466. It took just three days of bombardment in 1484 before the walls of Setenil, which had halted the Spanish offensive of 1407, were “reduced to great chunks of rubble.” (Pulgar, quoted in Cook, 1993, p. 51.) Although the new artillery created unprecedented potential for conquest, it of course could not do its work against enemy walls unless it could be brought up against them. Thus, the role of battle in defensive strategy became vastly more important, with the Vegetian style of defense declining proportionately. As Guicciardini put it, “whenever the open country was lost, the state was lost with it.” (Quoted Rogers, 1993, p. 74.) In other words, almost the only way for a strategic defender to prevent total defeat was to fight and win an open battle. Such battles normally took one of two forms: either the defender had to block the enemy army and its artillery as it approached its target, or if he could not manage that, he had to attack the aggressor’s siege lines and drive him away. Artillery, in addition to its role in battering down fortifications, was coming to play a greater role in the field, and this too tended to facilitate successful invasions. The two possibilities are illustrated in the two main battles of the French conquests of 1450-1453. Formigny was of the first type: the English, as in so many other battles, formed up in a defensive array, playing to the strength of their longbowmen. The French proceeded to take advantage of their superior artillery to bombard their enemies until they had to break formation, leading (after some hard fighting) to the biggest English battlefield defeat of the war thus far. At Castillon in 1453, an English relief army arrived after the siege of the town had begun. The English were thus compelled to take the tactical offensive, and their attacking columns were shredded by French columns. This defeat essentially brought the Hundred Years War to a close. These two battles were not, of course, won by artillery alone. Another crucial ingredient to French success was the creation, between 1439 and 1448, of a whole new military structure for France. The centerpiece of these army reforms was the formation of the compagnies d’ordonnance in 1445. (Solon, 1970; Contamine, 1972) In 1450 there were 20 of these companies, each composed of 100 lances fournies: one man-at-arms, one swordsman (coutillier) on a ‘fighting horse,’ who seems to have filled the role once carried out by a squire, two well-equipped archers, a valet, and a page to manage the horses. The soldiers of these ordinance companies were an elite group, selected from the much larger body in royal service in 1444 on the basis of their physique, skill, valor, equipment, and military experience. Even in peacetime, these companies were kept a full strength and earned full pay, making them the first real national standing army in Europe. Most French walled towns of any size had 10, 20, 30 or more lances stationed in them and supported by their taxes; in addition to maintaining their readiness to fight in war, these men enforced royal authority and performed some police duties. Louis XI later observed that armies composed of new troops can collapse of their own weight without even seeing the enemy. (Solon 1970, pp. 208-9) With these hardened warriors, there was little risk of that. These ordinance companies formed the solid core of the French army on campaign, but by no means were they the full strength of the military establishment: not even of the standing forces. There were also large numbers of men in the ‘little lances,’ less well mounted and equipped, and intended mainly for defensive garrison service. For the conquests of 1449-53, the cavalry and mounted infantry of the lances were supplemented by a sort of ready militia, the ‘free archers,’ who kept themselves prepared for service in exchange for tax exemptions. Each parish was to support one free archer. Later in the century, Louis XI employed strong contingents of Swiss and other mercenaries to round out his forces when needed. Finally, there was the impressive independent structure of the royal artillery, organized by Jean and Gaspard Bureau. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the great wrought-iron bombards were largely replaced by cast-bronze cannon of smaller bore but---thanks to stronger powder charges and cast-iron balls with triple the density of stone---comparable hitting power. This greatly increased the operational mobility of the artillery, speeding up campaigning still further. The success of this military system in 1449-53 left France, according to one contemporary, ‘the envy of the world.’ Envy inspired emulation, sometimes coupled with improvement. The Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany created their own ordinance companies, in the latter case justified by the assertion that without them Burgundy would lack ‘a proper military defense.’ (Solon 1970, 227-8, 222, 254) The Burgundian companies were structured by an elaborate chain of command and required to engage in regular field training; their officers received formal commissions and printed copies of their ordinances. By the 1470s Venice and Milan had ready militia forces, provisionati, somewhat similar to the free archers, and as early as 1456 the latter state reportedly had 12,000 cavalry in standing squadrons. (Mallett 1974, pp. 108-18) The Spanish national army developed somewhat later and with greater differences from the French model, but still along the same general lines. (Stewart 1961) By 1472, the Ottoman Sultan had 10,000 full-time infantrymen in his corps of janissaries, and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary matched them with his own standing army. Permanent forces of mostly-mounted men who could be set into motion at short notice, ready forces of well-equipped infantry who could be mobilized with a minimum of delay, lighter artillery which remained capable of rapidly reducing stone fortifications: all of these acted to speed up the pace of offensive operations. This was of crucial importance, for conquest delayed could be conquest denied. A campaign that ended with the target region only half occupied was likely to be followed by a strategic riposte which could regain much of the territory that had been lost. Furthermore, and even more importantly, the best way to made large conquests was through mass surrenders. When it became natural to assume that an invading army would be able to carry through many sieges in a single campaigning season, rather than just a few, the result was an exponential increase in the ability of the aggressor to make convincing threats. This in turn meant that (even more than in the fourteenth century) the capture of a town usually cascaded into the surrender of its whole hinterland. The age of the European “Gunpowder Empires” had arrived. Within Europe, however, there was only so much room for these expansive states to grow before they ran into one another. When they did, after Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494, a new era began. That new era, however, cannot be understood without reference to the structures and methods of war it inherited from the medieval period. .