"The Medieval Legacy"

European Warfare 1350-1750, 2010

Journal of Medieval History, 1998

One wonders how many people in the world beyond the groves of academe might consider the two words of my title virtually synonymous. In England at least, medieval history only impinges regularly upon the school curriculum at its youngest levels, where exciting and dramatic events are those most easily communicated and absorbed, and where heroes are often those whose renown derives from military success-or failure. The period continues to be offered up on television or film with much the same emphasis. If people aren't being 'done in' individually (so that their deaths can be investigated by a monk who was himself once a crusader, against a background of civil war), they are killing or dying collectively, fighting for or against Saracens, Scotsmen, dragons, kings of England or whatever. It is hard to think of a popular portrayal of the Middle Ages which does not include at least one brutal death. Perhaps it is the intimacy of the bloodshed which seems distinctive, underpinned by the feeling that to kill and to be killed in hand-to-hand combat is a more gruesome fate than to be shot by an anonymous bullet. But violence forms only one side of this distinctive image of the popular Middle Ages. It is complemented by the notion of chivalry, that is, by a strong sense of personal and collective honour which justifies and explains otherwise brutal actions, and by a whole panoply of decorative features, shining armour, banners, caparisoned horses. Yes it is violence, but doesn't it look nice, and isn't it exciting? It was striking that on a recent trip to northern France, our students and staff were visibly moved by a visit to a battlefield associated with the first day of the Somme ( ), yet did not feel such emotions at the sites of Cr6cy or Agincourt. No doubt several papers could be written on this last point alone, but I would argue that the dichotomous popular portrayal of medieval warfare has been a burden under which even professional historians have laboured long and hard. The sources at their disposal have not helped. Even the bloodiest scenes of medieval battles in illuminated texts appear to the modern eye as colourful and stylized: they do not bite home in the same way as the ANNE CURRY is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Reading. Her principal research interests are the fifteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War and women and warfare in the Middle Ages as a whole. She has published several articles on English military organisation and on Normandy under English rule. 82 Anne Curry face of a nineteenth-or twentieth-century soldier captured on celluloid. There was no real equivalent to today's war-journalist and little chronicling of medieval warfare was executed by those involved in the actual fighting. Warfare impinged on much imaginative writing in the Middle Ages, but heroic or religiously-motivated elements tended to predominate, and the emphasis may be said to have been on idealism rather than realism. Indeed, it is surprisingly difficult to study medieval warfare, and this may be why a one-dimensional picture has often been transmitted and received. As J.F. Verbruggen wrote at the beginning of his Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, 'Few historical problems have received such unfortunate treatment at the hands of historians as that of the art of war in the Middle Ages'. ~ Military men may claim a special insight into the subject based on their personal experience, but rarely has this made them effective historians. Overviews of the subject, attempting to deal with all or at least a substantial chunk of the Middle Ages, at best, have never been able to deal evenly with such a long period, and, at worst, have contributed to popular misconceptions, the classic example being the supposed dominance of the mounted knight and of cavalry warfare over the period as a whole. A major problem is that military history cannot be studied in a vacuum; it is a product of the age and the society which produces it. But few historians can claim to be equally at home in all periods, and the Middle Ages were never simply a homogenous lump. Moreover, the most successful studies arise out of research which uses as wide a range of sources as possible. It is not too precipitate, I think, to admit that this is the major conclusion reached in the light of reading the books embraced within this review. Many earlier writers such as Oman and Burne were disproportionately dependent on narrative sources. This raises particular difficulties when assessing numbers of troops, or when looking at topics in which chroniclers had only an indirect interest, topics which include many aspects of what we nowadays lump under the general heading of military organisation. Chroniclers were not terribly interested in or well-informed about how troops were paid or fed, for instance. Naval activity was less appealing to them and thus less understood. Most chroniclers focused on, or even wrote for, only one side of a conflict; some wrote for a purpose, often several years after the events they recorded. They were prone to dealing with great men rather than the masses, and, being 'events driven', they found short-term engagements easier to deal with than long-drawn-out campaigns. Only by understanding fully the context in which chroniclers were writing and, where possible, researching in governmental archives and exploiting all sources which impinge on the subject, can we come to firm conclusions on medieval warfare, and even then only on a small part of it. Historical research is, however, very much the sum of the individual parts which make up the whole. A glance at the bibliographies of recent works reveals how much research has been going on in the field of medieval warfare. 2 Even restricting ourselves, as in this current review, to works dealing only with England ~J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, second edition, revised and enlarged (Woodbridge, 1996), 1. 2A useful list is provided in the footnotes of K. DeVries, Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century. Discipline, Tactics and Technology (Woodbridge, 1996), 3-4. 'Verbruggen, ix.

History, 2020

The latest volume of the always excellent Journal of Medieval Military History is dominated by the later part of the period, with five of its nine articles focusing on the fourteenth century. Of the other four, two delve into Carolingian military affairs and two concentrate on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The eclecticism is, as ever, part of the appeal and strength of the series. Carl Hammer opens proceedings with his study of Charlemagne's campaign against the Avars in 791. The casus belli was given as the Avars' depredations against the Church, but in reality the primary driving factor was, Hammer reasonably posits, Charlemagne's concerns over their alliances with his enemies closer to home. He suggests that Charlemagne thought the Avars were very lowhanging fruit and that the campaign would 'more than pay for itself' (p. 3). But Avar battle-avoidance and disease among Frankish horses resulted in a 'relatively uneventful and inglorious campaign'; nonetheless, it has many points of interest as Hammer reveals (not least Charlemagne's uxorious pining). Walter Goffart follows with his densely referenced contribution examining the recruitment of freemen into the Carolingian army, arguing contra the revisionism of Timothy Reuter and others to challenge the accuracy of the widely accepted Heeresreform (army reform) initiated by Charlemagne from 804 to 808. Building on Müller-Mertens's comments from 1963 that 'it must be taken into account that, by and large, the capitularies did not establish new institutions, but that they meant to reform and stabilize an already existing order' (p. 28), Goffart pugnaciously challenges Reuter's assertion that 'it will not simply do to take the provisions of the period 800-30 and project them indefinitely into the Frankish past' (p. 32) to argue reasonably that 'eighth-century silence does not imply that a serious change of army regulations was instituted in 806-08' and that it is a 'mistake' in current thought to think 'that the military obligation of freemen was limited to a defensive mass levy in cases of emergency' (p. 33). Rabei Khamisy (mysteriously omitted from the list of contributors) takes us a few centuries ahead to the Middle East to analyse the offensive 'micro-strategy' (p. 35) of Mamluk sultan Baybars against the crusaders in the 1260s and 1270s, chiefly through contemporary Mamluk sources. Recognizing their weaknesses, Baybars took an aggressive stance against the Franks from the start of his reign in 1261. His first full invasion in 1265 saw him prioritize Caesarea as his first objective before Arsuf, Khamisy explaining the sound strategic thinking behind

War in History 3/4 (1996), 467–71, 1996

"(undergraduate, upper division [taught 2x]) Readings / lecture course that surveys the history of warfare and the rise of "Western" style warfare from the Chariot Kingdoms to the rise of the military-fiscal state and explorers. Modules include: The Chariot Kingdoms: Sumerians, Assyrians & Egyptians Greeks and Persians at War The Romans Ways of War Medieval Warfare: Feudalism, Knights, Chivalry & Crusades The Military Art: Gunpowder and the Renaissance Explorers and Cross Cultural Encounters"

Many books bear the title " ancient and medieval warfare " (or some variant on that theme), but there are remarkably few that link " medieval and modern ". To historians of all specialisms, there is a gulf between the medieval and the modern, as if one world suddenly came to an end and a new one began with little connection to what happened previously. When I was at school, English history ceased to be medieval at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. After that, we had the Tudors and modern history had begun. We also learnt that the renaissance began in 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks and the flight of Byzantine knowledge to the west. Of course, the interpretation of historical development and in particular the understanding of the key role of social and economic changes has improved a great deal since then, but in popular understanding the gap between medieval and modern remains stark. Now when world leaders want to denounce a barbaric regime like Islamic State, they describe its practices as medieval. Leaving to one side that such assessments are made by a self-proclaimed civilisation that witnessed the liberation of Auschwitz just 69 years ago and followed this up with genocide in Bosnia only 20 years ago, these sound bites play on popular ignorance of history. They also misrepresent the middle ages and the original Muslim caliphates, the practices of which involved a religious tolerance that should shame many so-called modern states. But they rest on a perception that the medieval world has no continuity with our own. The other point to stress about the transition from medieval to modern, and this was helped by the appearance in the teaching of history of an intervening " early modern " period, is that the dates at which it was meant to happen vary by up to two hundred years depending on your own country's history, and the very characteristics serving to define medieval and modern are indistinct and remarkably flexible. This is not to deny that there were very big changes in the economy, society, religious life, and the form and the role of the state across the several centuries that traditionally mark the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the modern. In different places, these changes occurred in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth or even eighteenth century. The starting point for this paper therefore is that there was change in the way war was carried on, but not a single decisive event or even set of events to compare with the changes in the way of conducting warfare that happened with the advent of the industrial age and the days of mass conscripted armies – none of which had happened during the period between the medieval centuries, however their limits are defined, and the seventeenth century sieges of Limerick. Interestingly, nowhere is the alleged distinction between medieval and modern more sharply made than on the subject of war. What the decisive

A brief glossary of military history terms I made up for my survey course on War in the Middle Ages

Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. fr. 5054, fol. 24v.

From the very beginning of our species history we have waged war. Some archaeologists claim the first act of homo sapiens on the world stage was that of genocide with the systematic destruction of the Neanderthals although there is no suggestion of an organized war effort, evidence points to small scale conflict slowly driving the physically stronger Neanderthals into less favorable areas for survival as they were defeated by the homo sapiens who although weaker and less well adapted to the northern European climate could communicate and unite to gain dominance of better settlement areas. So what does explain the advent of war? Archeological evidence offers several explanations including large regional populations that increased competition; more anchored living that prevented people from moving away from conflict; social structures such as clans that provided flexible frameworks for splitting into “us” and “them”; the emergence of a distinct political elite with its own interests; trade in goods that provided something to fight over; and ecological reverses such as droughts or large-game extinction. Clearly as Stone Age societies began warfare, the next stage of warfare became collective and systemized, where large kingdoms developed and waged war for prestige and to gain land and resources including slaves. A good example of this period is that of ancient Egypt and the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East such as the Hittites. During this period armies started to develop and the king of the battle was the chariot. The chariot represented the shock element in the armies of the day. The next stage in the evolution of warfare (400BC-900AD) saw the rise of infantry as the dominant force on the battle field, well trained and disciplined infantry could deal with chariots by remaining steady in the face of a charge or opening their ranks to let the chariots through and then attacking them. This period could be termed the legionnaire age because it saw the heavy infantry of Rome come to dominate the battlefield. Infantry became better organized and drilled with heavier armor, the Greeks saw the development of the long spear and pike-like Sarissa and the devastating phalanx formations. As these factors became more common around the world, so did war. War was frequent across Anatolia by around 5,500 B.C., central Europe by 4,300 B.C., and northern China by 2,500 B.C. Ancient states encouraged more militarism along their “barbarian” boundaries and trade routes. European colonial expansion from 1500 A.D. forward generated much more war—not just resistance to colonial powers, but between peoples as they were pushed onto others’ lands, enlisted in colonial rivalries, sent out as slave raiders, or given new goods to fight over or weapons with which to fight. This explains why the indigenous peoples of later prehistory, and those indigenous peoples observed from the time of Columbus to today, have lived through much more war than their distant ancestors. No doubt the idea that it is possible to banish war from the human experience will be seen by some as a dangerously naive idea. The idea that soldiers in their roles as advisors to political leaders can play an important role in eliminating war might strike some as even more naive. Yet, who better than the soldier is in a position to assess the destructive consequences of a political policy gone awry? Who, if not the soldier, can offer an assessment of the destructive power of modern weapons seen from the perspective of actual experience? Moreover, who, if not the soldier, can more accurately assess and express the cost of war in human suffering and pain? If the soldier can be enticed to place his own experience of war within a larger historical context, then he or she, more than any other member of our society, is in a position to restrain the hand of the politician in making war.

The Journal of Military History, 1994

Historians writing during the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries unambiguously recognized the importance, indeed the central role, played by siege warfare in European military history during the Middle Ages, i.e., from the dissolution of the Roman empire in the West at least until the emergence of high quality gunpowder weapons. Thus, for example, Hans Delbruck observed: "Throughout the entire Middle Ages we find…the exploitation of the defensive in fortified places."(1) Charles Oman, Delbruck's contemporary, took much the same position. (2) Recognition of the importance of siege warfare, however, did not lead historians to the obvious conclusion that the subject merited intensive study as an essential aspect, if not the essential aspect, of medieval military history, and as a key to our understanding of the Middle Ages. Indeed, Henry Guerlac observed in 1943: "nothing is more conspicuously lacking in the field of military studies than a well-illustrated history of the arts of fortification and siegecraft."(3) Yet, only two years later Ferdinand Lot wrote in the introduction to his classic study, L'Art militaire et les armees au moyen age et dans le proche orient: "il laisse de cote une parti essentielle du sujet, la Guerre de sieges, qui a joue un si grand role dans les siecles qu'on a passes en revue."(4) In 1980, Philippe Contamine noted: "In its most usual form medieval warfare was made up of a succession of sieges accompanied by skirmishes and devastation." Indeed, Contamine goes so far as to suggest that medieval warfare was dominated by "fear of the pitched battle" and a "siege mentality." Like Lot, Contamine did not provide a major change of focus.(5) The failure of military historians to pursue the study of medieval siege warfare can be rather simply, if not simplistically, explained as a result of "presentism." During the later nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth, military planners cleaved to the doctrine which is often styled "the strategy of overthrow." This emphasized "the importance of battle to such a degree that they regarded it as the only important act in war."(6) Indeed, those historians who wrote medieval military history, whether professional scholars or amateurs, not only would appear to have adhered to this doctrine but regarded any other way of conducting warfare as ostensibly unworthy of study.(7) Thus, when scholars such as Delbruck, Oman, and Lot wrote medieval military history they looked for battles to study. Even more importantly, they focused attention upon the so-called "knights" or "heavily armed cavalry." This element in society putatively dominated the battlefield, and thus they are also thought to have dominated medieval warfare with the shock of their mounted charge. This model is still regarded as the "key" to understanding the military history of the Middle Ages.(8)