Download PDF | Bernard S Bachrach, David Bachrach - Warfare in Medieval Europe c.400-1453-Routledge (2016).
445 Pages
Warfare in Medieval Europe c.400–c.1453
Warfare in Medieval Europe c.400–c.1453 provides a thematic discussion of the nature and conduct of war, including its economic, technological, social, and religious contexts, from the late Roman Empire to the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The geographical scope of this volume encompasses Latin Europe from Iberia to Poland and from Scandinavia and Britain to Sicily and includes the interaction between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, particularly in the context of the crusading movement. Bernard and David Bachrach explore the origins of the institutions, physical infrastructure, and intellectual underpinnings of medieval warfare and trace the ways in which medieval warfare was diffused beyond Europe to the Middle East and beyond. Written in an accessible and engaging way and including chapters on military topography, military technology, logistics, combat, and strategy, this is a defi nitive synthesis on medieval warfare. The book is accompanied by a companion website which includes interactive maps of the chief military campaigns, chapter resources, a glossary of terms and an interactive timeline which provides a chronological backbone for the thematic chapters in the book. Warfare in Medieval Europe is an essential resource for all students of medieval war and warfare.
Bernard S. Bachrach is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His numerous publications include Charlemagne’s Early Campaigns (768–777) (2013).
David S. Bachrach is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. His previous books include Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany (2012).
Introduction
War, the preparation for war, and war’s aftermath consumed the greater part of the surplus economic resources of society throughout the long millennium of the European Middle Ages. Massive sums of money, material resources, and labour were expended on the training and payment of soldiers, the production and procurement of arms and supplies, the construction and repair of roads, ports, and ships, and perhaps most signifi cantly, the construction and maintenance of a vast number of fortifi cations that were built throughout Europe, and in the crusading states of the Near East. Warfare at one time or another likely affected the lives of almost every man, woman, and child in medieval Europe either directly as participants in or as victims of military operations, or indirectly through the imposition of military-related obligations, taxes, and labour duties.
Medieval Europeans also were exposed to war through the practices of their religion, including the very sacraments of their faith, especially the celebration of mass and confession, as well as through technological innovations, new foods, architectural techniques, languages, and communication networks that were transmitted and established through the vectors of armies on campaign, and soldiers returning from war.
The production of food, the practices of commerce and trade, indeed the economic systems of medieval Europe as a whole developed, in large part, to meet the military needs of polities large and small. In sum, it is correct to say that during the entirety of the Middle Ages, European societies were organized for war. For all of these reasons, warfare deserves to be at the centre of the discussion of the history of medieval Europe if this society is to be understood in its own context. This volume is intended as a synthesis of scholarship dealing with medieval warfare that will serve as an introduction to the subject for general readers with an interest in the history of the Middle Ages and for use in the classroom, in both medieval history and military history courses. We also believe that this synthesis will be of use to those who already work in one or another fi eld of medieval studies and are seeking an entrée into the fi eld of military history to understand its central and critical place in the history of the Middle Ages. As this work is a synthesis and not a monograph, we have provided very few notes, limiting these to direct quotations from scholarly works and translated sources. Unless otherwise noted, all of the translations in this volume are our own.
At the end of each chapter, we have provided a selection of further readings for those interested in pursuing their interest in either the Middle Ages or military history in general. We have listed most of the studies only once in these selected readings, although in many cases a single work is relevant to a number of the themes that we treat in the seven chapters of the text. Finally, the additional readings are all in English, although we have included translations of some seminal works that originally were written in languages other than in English. Because, as previously mentioned, this work is intended as a synthesis rather than as a monograph, it was not our intention to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive list of pertinent scholarly works, even in English.
However, in making our selections, we chose to call readers’ attention to articles and books that would provide both general readers and students with access to the much broader corpus of scholarship on medieval warfare. We have striven to provide a synthesis of scholarly views as well as to give attention to a range of historical models, some of which we do not, ourselves, accept as valid, but about which the reader should be informed. Nevertheless, when we set out to write this work, we intended it to be thesis-driven and ultimately to refl ect our own views regarding the nature and conduct of medieval warfare. As indicated above, we see warfare as intertwined with almost every signifi cant aspect of medieval society. Consequently, we have attempted to show the impact of warfare inter alia on Christian doctrine and practice, the social and political organization of medieval societies, the development and diffusion of new technologies, and the adoption of new agricultural and administrative practices. In short, our major point is to illustrate the numerous ways in which warfare was embedded within the medieval world.
The second important and somewhat controversial thesis that we pursue in this volume is the importance of the Roman inheritance on the nature and conduct of warfare in medieval Europe. We do not hold doctrinaire positions, arguing that military practices, technology, organization, and the conduct of war, itself, were marked by stasis, or that medieval warfare was simply a slavish copy of Roman warfare at a later date. Rather, we, in a manner similar to historians of medieval Christianity, start from the proposition that early medieval European kingdoms inherited a wide range of practices, institutions, physical topography, and ways of thinking from the late imperial government in the West. We have argued consistently over our careers that the elements of governmental and societal organization inherited from Rome were marked by gradual change and development over time rather than by any kind of abrupt disjuncture or revolution. Our views in this regard are consistent with a large and growing body of scholarship over the past three decades that demonstrates considerable economic, administrative, religious, and social continuities across the period AD 400–700, and in many cases even later, which have led to the new periodization of the postRoman world as Late Antiquity. With respect to warfare, continuities in both the military topography of western Europe, consisting of Roman roads, ports, and fortifi cations, and also aspects of military organization, are especially relevant to understanding warfare not only during Late Antiquity but also throughout the medieval period as a whole. Our third and fi nal thesis in this work is that warfare in the Middle Ages was marked both by its complexity and its considerable, and on occasion, massive scale. A main reason why warfare affected so many people and so many institutions in medieval Europe was that very large numbers of combatants, requiring vast quantities of arms and supplies, were needed, in general, to conduct important military operations. For the most part, such military efforts were directed toward the capture or defence of fortifi cations, many of Roman origin, which dominated both the urban and rural topography of medieval Europe. The large scale of military operations required, in turn, the maintenance and further development of advanced techniques in administration, logistics, transportation, and architecture. The complexity of military operations also brought with it the necessity for the extensive education of future and current military commanders in a manner again consistent with what both they and we know to have been late Roman practice. This volume differs from its numerous predecessors in its examination of military history across both a much broader geographical stage, and over a much longer temporal plane. These rather expansive chronological and geographical perspectives include a major emphasis on the Roman inheritance of medieval Europe and the importation of western traditions of warfare east of the Rhine River, into the eastern Mediterranean, and throughout the North Sea world. These factors give us the opportunity to explain the conduct and nature of medieval warfare in a more nuanced manner than has heretofore been possible in a synthetic format. In contrast to earlier syntheses, we account for the origins of institutions, physical infrastructure, and intellectual underpinnings of medieval warfare, and trace the diffusion of western practices beyond those regions such as France and England that have been the traditional focus of scholars in the English-language tradition. This volume is also equipped with an extensive series of maps and images that are intended to help our readers in assimilating the information provided in the text, itself. The volume is organized in seven chapters, each of which focuses on a specifi c theme regarding the conduct of war during the Middle Ages. Each of these chapters is further sub-divided into sections that provide focused attention to particular issues, regions, or periods. Within this thematic format, Chapters 2–7 are each organized in a roughly chronological manner. The text as a whole is made easier to follow through a detailed ‘timeline’ that is part of the digital accompaniment of the volume, as well as numerous maps. The one exception to this pattern is the fi rst chapter, in which we discuss both the broad range of sources that are available for the writing of medieval military history, and the successful approaches that scholars have used in order to understand the reality of warfare during the Middle Ages. These approaches include developing an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of various types of written works, and the assimilation of material sources of information that have been produced through the efforts of paleographers, numismatists, specialists in onomastics, codicologists, art historians, literary theorists, and especially archaeologists. Finally, we introduce the reader to the wide range of disciplines, such as animal husbandry, physics, and physiology that can be deployed to provide crucial insights regarding the context in which war was conducted during the Middle Ages. Chapter 2, which focuses on the military topography of medieval Europe, begins with the Roman inheritance of fortress cities, lesser fortifi cations, roads, bridges, and ports, and then examines further developments in the construction and maintenance of fortifi cations and transportation infrastructure over the course of the medieval period. An important element of this chapter is the discussion of the ways in which western-style military infrastructure was brought into or adopted within regions that once were outside of or largely peripheral to the Roman Empire. Another central question addressed in this chapter is the relationship between the enormous investment of human and material resources in this military topography, and the development or increasing sophistication of medieval governments, particularly with regard to administrative matters. In Chapter 3, we discuss the military organization of medieval Europe, again beginning with the institutions inherited from Rome, and then examining how these developed and were altered over time in response to contemporary developments. In this chapter we treat both land-based and naval forces. Throughout the chapter, moreover, we focus on the central questions of who served in war and under what circumstances, as well as the relationship between military service and economic and social status. We also address the hotly contested issues of the rise of the so-called ‘warrior aristocracy’, including the thorny questions of the nature of knighthood, the roles of women in combat, and chivalry. In addition, we treat the relationship between military service and the development of representative government. The focus in Chapter 4 is on logistics, which is the fundamental issue of supplying an army with food, arms, and equipment. Logistics lies at the nexus of economic, administrative, fi scal, and military history. As a result, we discuss the ways in which the conduct of war played a role in the development of market economies and the so-called administrative state. In this context, we consider the establishment of systems of magazines and commissaries, taxation, and the management of royal, ecclesiastical, and princely estates. The discussion of logistics necessarily also bears on the history of transportation technology, and so we also consider developments in the technology of both land and water-based transportation resources. Everyone knows the cliché that an army travels on its stomach, but few medievalists venture to investigate this key aspect of warfare, or its implications for the impact of war on society.
In Chapter 5 we analyze the wide range of military equipment utilized by combatants from the late Roman period up through the end of the medieval millennium. We consider personal arms and armour, as well as large-scale weapons systems, including artillery and naval assets, and fi nally fortifi cations. Our discussion of these subjects is accompanied by medieval illustrations and sculpted reliefs that will help the reader visualize the equipment that is being discussed. We devote considerable attention to developments in these various weapons and weapons systems, and how these developments affected the conduct of both offensive and defensive military operations. The investigation of military technology also illuminates the matter of cultural transmission both across time and space during the course of the medieval millennium. In the sixth chapter, we turn our attention to combat, with a focus on tactics, training, and morale. As is the case in the earlier chapters, we begin our discussion with an analysis of late Roman traditions, which were well known to military leaders during the Middle Ages. We then consider how developments in technology and military organization during the course of the Middle Ages impacted the ways in which military commanders oversaw the training and deployment of their troops in the fi eld, including for sieges, as well as on the sea. We also consider the ways in which the Christianization of the Roman Empire affected the conduct of military operations, and how the needs of war impacted Christian doctrine and religious practice. Looking at religion in both directions, i.e. cause and effect, illuminates the importance of treating warfare as central to the human experience during the Middle Ages. The fi nal chapter considers strategy with a focus on the interplay between warfare and geo-political relations. We give considerable attention to the distinctions between ‘grand strategy’ or long-term strategy, and campaign strategy. We devote attention as well to important elements in the development of both long-term and campaign strategy such as planning, intelligence gathering, diplomacy, and the use of calculated destruction or restraint, with the concomitant issue of ‘collateral damage’. We conclude this chapter with a discussion of military education once more providing an overview of late Roman practice and then continue with a focus on continuities as well as new developments during the Middle Ages. The intellectual part of warfare is a subject that is neglected at the reader’s peril.
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