Download PDF | (Warfare and History) John France - Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000-1300-Routledge (1999).
344 Pages
cknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to an enormous number of people who have helped me in the writing of this book. In 1995 I was able, through the generosity of the British Academy, to travel in Italy and much of the Middle East. Subsequently, with help from the University of Wales, Swansea, I went to the Lebanon and revisited Syria. During these travels a large number of people provided a lot of practical help. In Italy, I would like, in particular, to thank the local authorities at Manerbio and Frascati, whose officers went out of their way to put their local knowledge at my disposal, and the librarians at Avezzano who took so much trouble over my queries. Peter Clark and his colleague, Hadeel Alahmad, at the British Council in Damascus were immensely helpful. Dr Alison McQuitty, Director of the British School at Amman, provided hospitality and helpful advice, as did Dr R. Harper, Director of the British School at Jerusalem, who also laid on a memorable tour of castles. Dr Mohammed Moain Sadek, Director of Tourism and Antiquities for the Palestinian National Authority, was kind enough to escort me around some fascinating sites in Gaza. In all these countries and others I was received with great kindness, for which I offer thanks.
I must acknowledge great debts in terms of ideas. Professor J. C. Holt, though writing in a different context, first fixed my mind on the importance of landed property. I owe a great deal to the ideas of Professor John Gillingham, whose work on war has been so influential. It was thanks to Professor Bernie Bachrach that I was invited to address the Haskins Society at Houston, providing me with an opportunity to sharpen my ideas at a critical time: as a result of these discussions I owe a particular debt to Professor Richard Abels and Dr David Crouch. Kelly de Vries is a splendidly robust person to try ideas out on. Ronnie Ellenblum of Hebrew University was kind enough to share with me his enormous knowledge of crusader archaeology, while Denys Pringle has generously provided much knowledge and assistance on crusader castles.
On Middle Eastern warfare I owe a great deal to Yaacov Lev of Bar Ilan University. Valerie Eads was extraordinarily generous with her research on the wars of the Countess Mathilda of Tuscany and I look forward to it coming to fruition. I have been able to draw upon Matthew Strickland’s profound knowledge of the Anglo-Norman world. Numerous discussions with Matthew Bennett of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst have contributed greatly to my knowledge of the nitty-gritty of medieval warfare. Dr David French, former Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, fixed the importance of roads in my mind, while Peter Edbury and Helen Nicholson of University of Wales, Cardiffhave been extraordinarily helpful. Professor Malcolm Barber of Reading University and his colleague, Tom Asbridge, have both provided much stimulation. I owe a great debt to Jonathon Phillips of Royal Holloway who runs the Crusades Seminar so well. Susan Edgington kindly allowed me to use her forthcoming edition of Albert of Aachen and provided many references. A. V. Murray of the University of Leeds was relentless in the pursuit of bibliography on my behalf. Andrew Lambert of King’s College stimulated my interest in the Lebanon. Professor Gerrit Schutten of Groningen was kind enough to provide assistance on maritime history.
I owe special thanks to Professor Bernard Hamilton who read Chapter | and improved it enormously, and to my colleagues Bill Zajac and I. W. Rowlands who looked at many parts of the text and were generous with their time and knowledge. I must thank Professor Jean Richard, Professor Michel Balard, Professor J. Riley-Smith and Professor Gérard Dédéyan, for their kindness and encouragement at various times. Professor David Eastwood and my colleagues in the History Department of University of Wales, Swansea deserve thanks for putting up with my enthusiasms. For all these ideas and advice I am enormously grateful, but of course responsibility for the material is mine alone.
All scholars rely heavily on learned institutions and libraries. The staff of the University of Wales, Swansea library, Cambridge University Library and the Institute of Historical Research have been extraordinarily helpful, but I must also thank those who work at the British Library and the National Library of Wales.
The staff of UCL Press have given me considerable and useful guidance, and the General Editor of this series, Professor Jeremy Black, has been a great inspiration.
Proprietorial warfare
This book examines the history of war in what are usually called the “High Middle Ages”. At the beginning of the second millennium, Europe was no longer threatened by external attack and it was clearly set on a course of remarkable economic, social and political development. In 1095 the First Crusade was launched, establishing a great military endeavour that was a central preoccupation of Europeans until the end of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century ushered in great changes in war and society under the influence of economic change, the Black Death and the invention of gunpowder. This is not to say that in the period 1000-1300 warfare was unchanging. But change was subtle, and across this period armies and warfare bore a common stamp which was different from what had gone before and certainly different from what came after.
It is a truth barely worth labouring that an army will reflect closely the nature of the society that produces it. The writer of military history, therefore, is not concerned with some discrete and separate corner of history which can be written about on its own, but must consider the whole political, social and economic development of the age in order to understand the nature of war and the changes that occurred in it. In this period, warfare was shaped by four main factors: the dominance of land as a form of wealth; the limited competence of government; the state of technology which, broadly, favoured defence over attack; the geography and climate of the West.
Landownership was the distinguishing characteristic of the ruling elites of western Europe. In itself it conferred power, as it always had. Kings claimed an overarching sovereignty and proclaimed that others exercised governmental power only as their delegates. But in practice they were not sharply distinguished from other landowners, who shared their authority rather than acted as its agents. Nor was the pattern of royal ownership in any way different from that of other powerful men and women. In the nature of things, landownership was dispersed, for estates were gathered into families by random means — the accidents of birth, death, marriage and political patronage. A landholding was normally made up of packets of land, often very small individually, scattered amongst the similar holdings of others. The power of sovereign authority over these agglomerations was limited, because communications were poor, and the king could only make real his authority where he or some close delegate resided — on his own demesne. Given this weakness, war was essential to defending and expanding lands and rights because — in the absence, or at least relative weakness, of superior authority — it was, ifnot the only, then at least the ultimate, means of settling disputes.!
Warfare in this period was, therefore, nearly always proprietorial, or at the very least influenced by proprietorial considerations. This is not to say that warfare was always and only about landed possession; but merely that it was a powerful influence that was always taken into account. The outstanding characteristics of medieval warfare, the castle and the armoured knight, arose from the dominance of proprietorial power. Because land transport was poor and expensive, it was cheaper for landowners to travel around their estates eating up the renders of scattered lands. This meant that they needed collecting points with comfortable accommodation, which were strong enough to resist a degree of attack — in short, castles. But, in the end, strength rests in men, so easily raised mobile local forces were needed that could gather at the lord’s command. In this sense, the armoured, mounted knight is a response to the needs of proprietors. Some were mere hirelings, sharing the lord’s table, but this proximity gave them ambitions and a commonality of interest with their masters. Knights were the most important element in the armies of the age, but everywhere they needed infantry. The knight was very mobile, but the landscape of western Europe is highly variegated and does not always favour mounted warfare. Indeed, although there was much open land, hedges, thickets and woodland were common and could shelter infantry, especially archers. Even in armies of modest size, therefore, the knight was never alone. Moreover, medieval society changed and the make-up of the people who went to war changed with it, although this was to some extent disguised by very obvious elements of continuity. In fact, so deep-seated in the minds of western Europeans were the economic, social, political and geographical forces which shaped warfare that they proved singularly reluctant to change their style of warfare when they came into contact with other civilizations.
The fact that land was the dominant form of wealth and that liquidity was very limited was a major reason why armies were small. Even kings could not afford to maintain standing armies or large arsenals. War is an expensive business: in 1091, King Philip I of France was happy to defray the costs of supporting his bodyguard by hiring them out.’ As a result, soldiers were expected to equip themselves from the proceeds of their landed holdings — often provided for them by the lord for this very purpose — and from the fruits of pillage. Even so, soldiers always expected cash payments, not least if they served beyond customary limits, and commanders preferred to engage them on flexible terms. As liquidity increased in the twelfth century, the “cash nexus” became ever more important. However, because this remained a relatively poor society, dependent on exploiting the peasant surplus, armies remained ad hoc bodies, kept together only for as long as necessity demanded. Professional soldiers did emerge, but commanders dismissed them as soon as possible because of the enormous drain on resources.
This had a considerable effect on military technology. Without an infrastructure of war there could be no systematic development. The only repository of military memory, beyond that of individuals, lay in the households of major rulers, but these were very few and far between and their members never wholly military in their concerns. Therefore, it is not surprising that there was never a great leap forward. Throughout the period, the killing-ground was always very largely limited by the range of the bow and the length of sword or spear, and of the right arm that wielded it. There was change, because the general economic growth of Europe allowed a wider use of metal and individual ingenuity produced some diversification of weapons. But, in general, because provision of weapons was the obligation of the individual, the wealth and skill generated by economic expansion was diverted into the weapons and protection of the wealthy. The most obvious technical improvements were in fortifications. The wooden tower built at Montargis in 1056 by the Lord Seguin could hardly be compared with the huge stone mass of Caerphilly constructed 200 years later. But the development of military architecture and of siege-machinery, which occurred in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, depended on civilian innovation and arose from the hiring of specialists from outside the military sphere. In the earlier part of our period, the principles of siege-engines seem to have been well known, but actually building them was difficult and subject to frequent failure.* Improvements in siege-technique seem to have sprung from better general organization rather than advances in technology.
Medieval warfare was, in some very important respects, markedly different from that of the modern era. Most fundamentally, war was not solely the prerogative of government. The notion of sovereignty survived from the Roman Empire and helped to give the royal office its special prestige. However, there was a skein of competing forces that pretended to aspects of sovereignty or rivalled and paralleled what we would recognise as its proper competence. Throughout our period the primary form of wealth was land, and everywhere its ownership on any scale gave quasi-governmental powers. Landed property was seen in a very absolute sense and its very concrete nature tended to overshadow sovereignty, for power sprang from possession of land. To bea king was of necessity to be first landlord of the realm, a position which merged into that of other landlords and blurred the distinction between the king and others, and that between sovereignty and ownership. The prestige of monarchy in medieval times was enormous and its position unique, but its uniqueness could be very narrowly interpreted and it could certainly be seen as excluding a commanding authority.*
“Private war” has been excoriated by modern historians and regarded as the scourge of the medieval world, but government was so limited, and its competence so narrow, that the struggle for power and influence amongst the elite could often only be conducted by war. We call the men against whom Louis VI of France fought in the early twelfth century “robber barons”, but it is a description that they would hardly recognize. It was their misfortune to be survivors of an older genre of behaviour in a new age with new ideas. At the beginning of this period, medieval states lacked any clear definition or firm structure: these emerged only in the second half of the twelfth century, but even then their position was not unchallenged. In the eleventh century the very existence of monarchy was threatened, and one writer has remarked that at that time “the age of kings seemed to have passed and that of princes to be the future”’.° The notion of the state and the remains of such an organization had decayed, and had largely been usurped by an aristocracy whose strength was built on its special position in the European countryside, a strength buttressed greatly by castles. Kings always had to rely on the powerful to support them and raise troops. In the monarchies of Germany and France, sheer distance, poor communications and the rivalries of royal houses enabled nobles and local authorities to take power and hold it. Even in England, which is usually regarded as a small and tightly ruled land, the North was almost another country, and the lords of the Welsh March were largely left to their own devices by the Norman kings.
In fact, there was a deep confusion of what for us are two separate concepts — sovereignty and ownership. Every kingdom was a lordship and every king had the preoccupations of a landowner: every lordship resembled a kingdom and its holders felt entitled to some of the perquisites of a king. Both can best be seen as mouvances, circles of influence based on landownership which rarely coincided with the geographical area of settlement of any nation or any particular geographical unity. Moreover, these circles of influence overlapped heavily. Otto-William, Count of Macon (982-1026), was the son of a king of Italy; he held Macon of the Duke of Burgundy who was a vassal of the Capetian king of France. He was also related to the old Carolingian ruling house, whom the Capetian kings had displaced and held land of the Empire east of the Sadne. A very important group of lords, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Louvain and the Count of Hainaut, were vassals of both the Empire and the Capetian monarch. In conflicts between mouvances this gave scope for vassals to change sides: in 1185 the castellan of Péronne, a vassal of the Count of Flanders, defected from his lord and received his castle of Braine as a fief of Philip of France.°
Although the history of war is primarily that of war between the mouvances, it must be remembered that there was another dimension to medieval warfare. The holders of power were a tiny minority in an armed or potentially armed society. Force of arms was the final sanction of the elite, and thinkers would soon seize upon it as the justification of their power and privileges. So the apparatus of war in the widest sense was also intended to enforce the social order. The castle and the armed band were not merely a defence against other mouvances but also the means by which the lord exploited the peasantry. It is no accident, as we shall see, that military terminology and practice were deeply infused with considerations of status. Moreover, the threat of social war was present in the minds of the elite and informed the way in which they treated their necessary allies, the footsoldiers and other socially inferior troops. Kings and magnates claimed a monopoly of war and in time generated a military ethos, chivalry, which glorified their role. Because the great magnates had colonized the Church, which produced most of the written records, these focus on their role, but war was not an entirely aristocratic business and it involved very directly considerable sections of the populace. The basis of their involvement is a complicated matter. It has often been assumed that all freemen were obliged to provide military service to the Crown, and there were certainly occasions in the life of any group or nation when all able-bodied men would wish to rally to the support of the authorities, but the evidence for an actual obligation owed to a sovereign authority is vague. Only in areas under special threat — Christian Spain being an obvious example — or in moments of crisis, was the /evéeen-masse a reality. Indeed, the whole notion of a “nation in arms” was inimical and dangerous to an elite that claimed a monopoly of war.’
Kings and great princes looked first and foremost to their own lands to raise troops. Their lands, like those of all the great men, were scattered, which made the process difficult. If they wanted to raise a large force, or even a relatively small force whose raising did not strip all their lands of troops, they had to persuade others to join them. Hence armies tended to be small and took time to gather. Hence, too, they were always ad hoc gatherings, for there were no barracks, no regulars, no infrastructure of war such as Rome had enjoyed or we have developed in the modern age; persuasion was always political in its nature, producing inconsistent results. In fact, the gathering of anything that we might call a large army was a relatively rare act, for few great lords or even kings had a single interest that compelled concentration of forces — rather, they had many local enemies and friends in the various zones of their activity, and thus many objectives, and so the raising of limited resources for limited ends was for a long time the norm.
This situation legitimized what we tend to see as private military followings: hence that special characteristic of medieval society — the lack of a distinction between public and private war. All kings, until the very end of our period and beyond, had great subjects who were capable of waging war on their own account. Therefore, they had to be satisfied by successful war, and the need to plunder was often paramount in the minds of contemporaries — even kings. The successful leader was one who rewarded his followers — in early medieval times gold rings were traditional — or who gave them an opportunity to reward themselves. Charlemagne’s great attack upon the Avar kingdom may have had other objectives, but it yielded an enormous booty of significant economic importance, while the fruits of Christian victory in Spain made possible the building of the huge abbey of Cluny in the late eleventh century. At the end of the twelfth century, it was widely believed that Richard I of England was killed in a dispute over plunder.® This essentially private motive powerfully influenced decisions about war and peace, and continued even down into the early modern period, for kings were long expected to wage war for a profit.
War, therefore, was not simply a public function. Even the Church, which had inherited Roman notions of sovereignty, had ambivalent attitudes. For contemporaries, private war was not a contradiction, but simply an extension of legitimate self-interest which was not wholly differentiated from sovereign power, itself always deeply personal in nature. Indeed, it is often difficult to see much sense of public good, clear and distinct from private aggrandizement, in the decisions of monarchs about peace and war. This is hardly surprising. There was a notion of sovereignty and of the king’s duty to all his people, but until the end of our period no sense of separation between the person of the king and his office. The king was many persons and presided over a society in which some kinds of governmental power had become mere property, so his war-making was conditioned by a variety of forces, notably a deep concern for his property and that of his family.’
By the beginning of our period, in most parts of Europe, private arrangements between king and magnates, and magnates and their greater followers, were the main way in which kings supplemented the military resources of their own demesnes. Magnates acknowledged themselves as vassals of the king, owing him homage for their lands and in turn demanding service from those who held of them. This system was not purely military: it arose from the problem of delegation in an age of dispersed holdings and poor communications. But holding land inevitably involved protecting it, so that the system was militarized, although to an extent that varied from time to time and place to place. This military—tenurial system, which we often call “feudal”, provided the best-equipped soldier of the age, the heavily armoured cavalryman.
However, what a magnate or a knight was prepared to concede to an overlord in military service depended on particular circumstances. A knight holding a single fief was not in a strong position to resist his lord, although custom and practice might limit his service to 30 or 40 days, and he might even modify this if he owed service to another lord. When the Count of Anjou wished to join with King Philip of France in attacks on Normandy in the mid-eleventh century, he raised great numbers of troops, but never acknowledged a formal obligation. Within duchies, counties and lordships, servitium debitum, the military service owed by landowners to their lords, only became fixed very slowly. These substantial men, the dukes, counts, vicecounts and domini, held castles that were the guarantors of their land; near his castle a man was strong, beyond it his power shaded away into the power of others. All of these men, from the king to the most minor castellan, employed others — soldiers who garrisoned their castles and served them in arms — some of whom held land and some of whom did not. Multiple homage was common, so there was no tidy feudal pyramid, and this increased the basic confusion created by the fragmentation of landholdings.
The oath that we call feudal, essentially not to harm, but to aid and counsel one’s lord, might be taken simply as a means of making peace between men, implying no subordination; this was even the case when an act of homage for land was involved. What mattered was that the lord was the predominant power who could enforce his authority and prevent his vassals moving to somebody else. The king, the dukes and the counts of France predominated within their areas, which is not necessarily to say dominated. A magnate of forceful character with extensive lands, such as Duke William of Normandy, could dominate, but a succession problem could weaken even a strong unit — such as the county of Anjou in the 1060s. Every great magnate had to watch his mouvance lest it fray at the edges or be encroached upon by others. The result was a pattern of constant petty war, in which feuds and personal quarrels were commonplace. The weakness of sovereign authority in most of Europe meant that war was a frequent means of settling disputes between great men.
German magnates acknowledged that their offices and fiefs were held of the king and performed homage. But in practice they held autogenous jurisdiction based on huge allodial holdings. The monarch had extensive lands and, by successful war leadership in Italy and on the eastern frontier, drew others into his service. In a real sense, “Emperor” was a military title. Royal power over the Church enabled kings to fix quotas for the military service of the great bishoprics and monasteries, but even this was not something that could be automatically called upon. The autonomy of the German princes was such that feud and war were normal methods of settling quarrels. It was the obligation of all of the German king’s vassals to join the expedition for his coronation at Rome, but in the case of Frederick I, preparations and internal problems meant that he departed in October 1154 “almost two years having elapsed since the expedition had first been vowed” and was crowned only in June 1155.'° In Italy, the German monarch was king, but there were relatively few great magnates. For the most part, the economic power of the cities drew the local nobles into their orbit, and it is impossible to differentiate between them and the urban mercantile patriciate. The cities exercised a kind of collective lordship over the surrounding contado. In defence of their privileges, strong city militias arose which could be supplemented from the rich revenues of mercenaries. These city-states were valuable but undependable allies and dangerous enemies.
From our perspective, much medieval warfare seems very small-scale. This tended to change because the greatest of the lords — the king, dukes and great counts — profited from the economic expansion of the twelfth century, and this facilitated the raising of troops, amongst whom mercenaries became more common, while credit transactions made possible ambitious fortress construction. Competition amongst feudal lords led to the rise of larger units of control and conflict developed on a greater scale, but it was essentially about the same thing — keeping the mouvance together, exploiting family claims and defending the patrimony — and fought by the same means of ravaging and destruction. Even when armies of considerable size were raised, major engagements were rare. The leaders who gathered armies had to invest enormous resources of their own and to persuade others, many of whom might be doubtful adherents, to do likewise. Weapons, warhorses, means of transport, the paraphernalia of war — all of these represented a huge investment of resources and political credibility which could only in extreme circumstances be exposed to the risks of battle.
Succession disputes in which both sides had claims that commanded respect, rendering compromise difficult, often produced battle: in April 1068, Fulk Requin defeated his brother at the Battle of Brissac and succeeded to the county; at Cassel in 1071, Robert the Frisian fought Arnulf III for the county of Flanders; the Anglo-Norman succession dispute was settled in favour of Henry I by his victory over Robert Curthose at Tinchebrai in 1106 and in 1141 Stephen was defeated at the battle of Lincoln. The inconclusive nature of some of these encounters is a good indication as to why battle was often avoided: at Cassel, Robert was captured but Arnulf killed — political negotiation then decided the outcome of the succession dispute. And Stephen’s defeat at Lincoln had little effect on the long civil war in England. The highly conclusive results of Hastings and Tinchebrai, however, provide another very good reason for avoiding battle — it could be conclusive in entirely the wrong way for those who sought it, as Harold did in 1066. Medieval commanders were perfectly aware that in battle, as Vegetius said, “fortune tends to have more influence than bravery’. At Conquereuil in 992, Conan of Brittany was in hot pursuit of his defeated Angevin foes when he paused to strip off his armour because of the heat, and was promptly killed by some Angevins who had fled into the thickets where he halted — and so the verdict of battle was reversed. At Tagliacozzo on 23 August 1268, the victorious Germans seem to have scattered to pillage and were surprised by a rally of the fleeing French."' Battle was often the outcome of extreme situations when the very existence of one side or another was threatened, as in the Crusades, but it was not always open to commanders to avoid it.
Nor were major sieges lightly entered into. The garrison of a castle or fortified town, if well prepared, could strip the surrounding country, exposing the besieger to starvation. A sally, such as that when Robert Curthose unhorsed his father, whose forces then scattered at Gerberoi in 1079, could catch them unawares. Allies could harass them in their camp. In any case, stripping other lands to mount a long expedition might expose you to attack elsewhere. Philip I of France was defied by so many of his vassals from behind the walls of their castles that he spent his life rushing from one siege to another, and on his deathbed confessed that the resistance of Montlhéry had made him old before his time.'? By the later twelfth century, better organized armies could make short work ofall but the strongest castles with elaborate fortifications that few could afford. The increasing numbers of castles which are apparent by the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries is a tribute to growing wealth and new standards of ostentation amongst the aristocracy. But the very existence of castles from the early eleventh century had the effect of intensifying the fundamental nature of medieval war.
The sheer expense of raising an army and the technical limitations that made it difficult for an army to feed itself tended to limit the size of armies. It was also a powerful influence on tactics. Because of the need for food and the fact that plunder was part of the soldier’s pay, ravaging was an integral part of the business of managing an army. And this could be made to serve a military purpose — destroying the countryside of your enemy would impoverish him, shake the loyalty of his vassals, who it was his duty to protect, and make him and them question the point of fighting on if a settlement was possible. By the standards of the twentieth century, medieval man’s capacity for destruction was limited. Few armies would have bothered to uproot an olive grove, or totally burn damp corn, but then they did not need to. When yields were so small, the destruction of any significant part of a crop could reduce a whole community to beggary, or its lord to borrowing. Mills, ovens and presses could be wrecked with long-term consequences. If stored food, especially grain, was plundered and spoiled, the whole village would starve in the winter. This would be a terrible injury to inflict on a rural society and it would have a direct effect on the lords who dominated it — for the great took their renders largely in kind, although this changed somewhat in the course of the twelfth century. No wonder that Duke William of Normandy “sowed terror in the land” when he made war. The cushion between society and starvation was very small.
The multiplication of strongholds increased the attractions of this strategy. Moreover, destroying the land about a castle might make the garrison, apprehensive of starvation when military operations ceased, come to terms. Living off the land imposed further problems: it was only really possible in summer and autumn, and hence war tended to be episodic, with a well defined “campaigning season’. The need to feed an army’s horses reinforced this, for they needed such vast quantities of food that it was possible only when there was plenty of grazing. Moreover, it created a tactical problem. An invading army that spread out to ravage could be defeated in detail — this happened to Saladin at Montgisard in 1177. But if the army stayed together it would starve, not least because it needed to disperse to feed its horses. It was not for nothing that Vegetius was admired at this time, for he understood the very essence of the military problem, feeding an army: “A great strategy is to press the enemy more with famine than with the sword”. It was, therefore, a good tactic for a defending army to stand off and refuse battle, while staying in the presence of the enemy —a frequent pattern of war throughout our period. Border areas between substantial rival powers, such as the Norman Vexin or the Welsh March, were particularly exposed to the war of ravaging which was the invariable accompaniment even of larger-scale operations, and as a result were studded with fortifications that acted as places of refuge and centres of defence."
Brutal though it was, war as fought within western Europe was not without restraints, which resulted largely from its proprietorial nature. Its leading combatants were landowners who were commonly neighbours and kin. In a situation of frequent conflict, the victor of today might be the vanquished of tomorrow, so self-preservation inclined men to mercy. Moreover, the possibility of ransoming prisoners offered rich rewards. The economic motivation for such clemency is indicated by the brute fact that infantry on the losing side in a conflict were generally massacred. The complexity of landed relationships blurred allegiances and made it difficult to define treason to a ruler, hence the obvious fact that there were very few political executions in this period. The obvious victims of war were the peasants, but even they were spared the worst horrors because conflicts were usually about control of land and the people on it, and nobody wanted to rule over a desert. Furthermore, by the eleventh century, slavery — such a scourge of peaceful populations in the past — was uneconomic. The Church inveighed against the horrors of war, and doubtless this had some influence, but it was the economics of landowning that really mitigated the horrors of war.'4
War had its ethics, and these were grafted on to the warrior ethos which infused the upper ranks of society and exalted the military virtues of bravery and loyalty to form what we call chivalry, the “Code of Conduct” of the European upper class. But ethical considerations had only a limited influence on the conduct of war, and when great issues were at stake horrific behaviour was not uncommon. Wars between Christians might be loosely governed by rules, but these did not apply when Christian fought pagan. For many years, Charlemagne’s armies ravaged Saxony with great brutality, but he was careful to persuade the Church to agree to his conquest of Christian Bavaria in 787. In principle, Christians felt that they could behave much as they pleased in war with non-Christians, and something approaching total war did sometimes occur in such circumstances. However, in practice, unless they could conquer their enemy in one fell swoop, Christians were obliged, at least for some of the time, to treat them as neighbours and thus some of the ethics of war came to apply. The case of those Christian peoples whose economic and social structures, and therefore ethical behaviour, was different from that of mainstream Europe was more complex. Here again, a predisposition to total war had to be mitigated.'* The ethics of war arose from and were limited by the central concerns ofa landowning group — they were an aspect of proprietorial warfare.
Our understanding of medieval war has changed radically in recent years. To an older generation of historians, war was battle. The most important modern writer on warfare was Clausewitz. At Jena in 1806, Clausewitz witnessed Napoleon’s destruction of the Prussian army in which he served. Drawing on this experience, Clausewitz rejected the ideas of the eighteenth-century school of warfare, which emphasized manoeuvre and position, and argued that the real point of war was to destroy the enemy in battle. His ideas were popularized when von Moltke the Elder, asked to account for his startling victories, attributed them to Clausewitz’s ideas. Clausewitz never wrote about medieval warfare, but his ideas influenced those who did. Hans Delbriick (1848-1929) wrote a monumental History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History, whose third volume, appearing in 1923, dealt with the Middle Ages. The impact of Clausewitz is apparent in the heavy emphasis that he places on battle. The same can be said of Sir C. W. C. Oman’s History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, whose two volumes were published in London in 1924.
Recently, historians have emphasized the infrequency of battle and the relatively small size of medieval armies. They have noted the strength of fortifications and observed that the technology of the age made assault on them difficult. Because of the difficulties of maintaining forces, war was frequently fought for limited ends and interrupted by periods of trace. It has seemed to recent writers that the sources, when carefully examined, suggest that the staple of war was the raid—a cheap and expedient way of undermining the economy and willpower of your enemy. Even when a larger force was gathered, its primary function was to destroy, and in so doing feed itself — ravaging was integral to the business of feeding an army and therefore an essential part of war. In the words of Vegetius: “It is preferable to subdue an enemy by famine, raids and terror, than in battle where fortune tends to have more influence than bravery”. Thus modern writers on medieval war emphasize what might be called “Vegetian warfare’, centred on raids and destruction, rather than battle or even siege.'®
This may be a general picture of war in this period, but it is not a complete one. This pattern of war involved a tremendous commitment of resources in terms of the capacities of the competing forces and it could have terrible consequences for the parties to it. The Giroie were a prosperous Norman family, patrons of the abbey of Evreux, but when Robert found that his castle had been burnt during his absence on a raid, Ordericus comments: “So at one blow the noble knight was utterly disinherited and forced to live in exile in the houses of strangers”. The perspective of the combatants has to be considered, therefore, when we make judgements about warfare. Even a major power such as the King of France might find himself with very limited resources in a particular area, where a defeat might have major consequences. In the 1030s, Odo II of Blois, a mere count, had challenged the might of both the King of France and the German Emperor in an effort to gain the throne of Burgundy: their extended responsibilities laid them open to his localized challenge. The savagery of war and the destruction that it wrought was a frequent cause of ecclesiastical criticism. Evidence of such horrors is not confined to churchmen: “He does not leave a good knight alive as far as Baiol, nor treasure nor monastery, nor church nor shrine nor censer nor cross nor sacred vase: anything he seizes he gives to his companions. He makes so cruel a war that he does not lay hands on a man without killing, hanging and mutilating him.” We need to recognize the brutality and destructiveness as they appeared to contemporaries. William the Marshal distinguished himself in his first action, when the knights of Philip of Flanders and Matthew of Boulogne tried to break into the town of Neufchatel. In a nasty scrum of armed men in the narrow streets of the town, William’s horse was killed and he was almost captured by enemy foot who cast an iron hook about his shoulders.'7
Nor should we fail to recognize that throughout this period there was much largescale warfare. At the beginning of the period Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou (987-1040), was prepared to hazard battle and to build some of the most formidable fortresses of his age in a sustained effort to extend his county. The Norman army that conquered England in 1066 mobilized in all some 14,000 men, including 7,000 effectives, of whom about 3,000 were cavalry. Guiscard’s army, which attacked the Byzantine Empire in 1081, numbered some 15,000, supported by a fleet. The Crusades to the Holy Land raised armies of quite exceptional size. At Hattin in 1187, 20,000 troops of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem faced 30,000 of their Islamic enemies, while large French and German armies clashed at Bouvines in 1214.'8 In the thirteenth century, armies of up to 20,000 were raised in Italy. Raising and equipping such forces was an enormous investment in terms of the resources of the age.
It is, therefore, remarkable that armies were sometimes sent and sustained far from their own homes. The Crusades have always attracted historians, but the expeditions of the German emperors to Italy were remarkable efforts that called for tremendous exertions, and they have been neglected of late. Much recent writing has been about the Anglo-Norman world, whose warfare has sometimes been spoken of as though it typifies that of western Europe. In fact, special conditions in every part of the world had their effect on the conduct of war, and this is a false perspective.
Medieval commanders were cautious about hazarding their armies in major confrontation, but they were not entirely unwilling, nor were they fully in control of any given situation. In 1054, Philip of France struck into Normandy with two armies, and as the royal forces spread out to ravage, Duke William of Normandy’s forces fell upon some of them at Mortemer, inflicting losses significant enough to force a withdrawal. In 1057, another French invasion army was attacked as it crossed the river at Varaville, with heavy losses to its rearguard. To those who took part in them, these were real battles. This was the obvious response to the entry of a ravaging enemy army — to shadow it, restricting its foragers — but in the course of such a campaign running fights would develop to a greater or lesser degree of intensity. In 1188, Philip Augustus raided Gisors and was repulsed: Henry II, acting on the advice of William Marshal, pretended to have dispersed his troops and then fell upon his enemy’s unprepared army and routed them. The sharpness and sustained nature of fighting needs to be recognized: after his victory in 1188, Henry II devastated Montmirail in a winter campaign whose savagery recalled the Conqueror’s notorious harrying of northern England a century before. The common experience of medieval warfare — raid and counter-raid — could merge easily into battle. At Carcano on 9 August 1160, Frederick I’s infantry were caught napping and a major battle ensued. At Brémule in 1119, the King of France seems simply to have lost patience and launched a disastrous charge.!°
Moreover, when the prize was right, commanders were perfectly prepared to fight pitched battles. The Hohenstaufen wars in Italy produced many battles — the city— states of northern Italy were highly aggressive in defence of their autonomy and were quite ready to fight. It is notable that sieges of their cities are marked by very frequent sallies: one by the citizens of Parma defeated Frederick IJ at Vittoria on 18 February 1248. And here perhaps is another perspective: we make a clear distinction between field-warfare and siege. But in reality this is a false distinction. Every commander has to decide how best to strike at his enemy. An attack on any fortress required considerable resources and organization. To attack a city was a huge undertaking. Frederick Barbarossa besieged Crema from July 1159 to June 1160 and Milan from May 1161 to March 1162. These sieges triggered a whole series of military engagements. This warfare was especially bitter because, in a sense, it was also social war: Barbarossa and his barons saw the city people as different and inferior. By contrast, AngloNorman warfare was between people of essentially similar social backgrounds and outlook. Moreover, it is much easier to dismiss sieges from an Anglo-French perspective, for in this theatre of war there were no major cities. Even so, the siege of Chateau Gaillard lasted for five months and had a decisive effect on the war between John of England and Philip of France.”° Sieges were simply a specialized form of battle. The methods of attack and the devices of defence became ever more elaborate, but the risks remained as great to both sides. Milan was razed in 1162 and Frederick II’s army was destroyed at Vittoria in 1248.
Battles and major sieges were not common in European warfare, but nor were they so rare that they can be set aside as exotic events — for the reality is that they were the ultimate tests of war, and examination of them tells us a lot about medieval armies. The common experience of war was ravaging and destruction, but when great issues were at stake there was a readiness to accept battle, and enormous efforts were made to raise large forces and sustain campaigns, many fought over long distances. Large-scale military activity became more common as feudal regimes consolidated and articulated. Even so, campaigns often did little more than ravage; but we need to remember how effective that could be, what a vast effort the maintenance of an army over a period of time was, and what an enormous risk was involved in taking it into the presence of the enemy.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق