Download PDF | Niall Christie, Maya Yazigi - Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities_ Warfare in the Middle Ages (History of Warfare, Vol. 37) (2006).
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INTRODUCTION
There is nothing new in saying that warfare was an important factor in the formation and evolution of medieval society. Wars dictated political boundaries, stimulated or depressed commerce and economic growth, and touched the lives of members of all social classes. Wars led to advances in technology and science, contributed to developments in the articulation of theological thought, and provoked various forms of literary and artistic expression. Warfare was a universal undertaking, transcending political and regional boundaries and having an impact on all aspects of life in the period.
Despite this widespread nature, many of the root characteristics of warfare were similar regardless of the geographical location or the politicoreligious character of the theatres in which it took place. Warfare in theory and warfare in practice rarely resembled each other. While theological and political tracts presented an abstract perception of war that frequently highlighted its positive features, be they religious merit or noble characteristics, the actual conduct of war was periodically marred by practical realities, which often diverged from the ideal. Political ambition and greed for worldly gain often supplanted gallant morals and chivalry, and conditions on the ground frequently necessitated unlikely or (in the eyes of some) immoral alliances, the turning of a blind eye to illegal or morally questionable activities, and various forms of brutality. Warfare continues to hold a popular appeal in the world today that extends to the academic community.
The topic has attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines throughout the centuries, and the scholarly perception of its many aspects continues to evolve as more evidence becomes available and new sources or readings thereof require many accepted truths to be reconsidered and re-analyzed. The contributions presented in this volume address a number of issues related to the topic of medieval warfare from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and examining a number of geographical regions. The contributors analyze social and economic issues, military strategy, technological and medical developments, ideology and rhetoric, and present studies of warfare in Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world. In doing this, they seek to investigate warfare not only as a military pursuit but also as a social phenomenon. The articles in this volume are arranged in three thematic sections.
Part One, “Noble Ideals: Perceptions of Warfare,” presents three articles examining the theoretical conception of medieval warfare in the minds of those who experienced or witnessed it. David Hay pays particular attention to non-combatants in his article, “‘Collateral Damage?’ Civilian Casualties in the Early Ideologies of Chivalry and Crusade.” Hay shows that there were a variety of opinions and theories proposed by medieval thinkers to justify or critique the waging of war, especially violence perpetrated against non-combatants.
He also discusses the relation between such theories and the actual practices of soldiers, observing that the Peace of God and Truce of God movements of the period had considerable if in some cases limited influence on their actions. Broadening the scope of the enquiry somewhat, and observing that many military historians have been studying the phenomenon of warfare from cultural and technological perspectives, in “Medieval Warfare and the Value of a Human Life” Kelly DeVries distinguishes himself from either viewpoint (both of which he deems unsatisfactory) by bringing to attention the value placed on human life in general in the Middle Ages. Taking this as his primary focus, DeVries proves that this factor greatly influenced the conduct of medieval warfare.
The high value placed on the life of soldiers (and to a lesser extent non-combatants), he argues, is reflected in three developments: the evolution of medieval armor, intended to protect the individual soldier; the development of fortifications, aimed at societal protection; and improvements in military surgery, potentially reversing failures of the previous two forms of protection. In “Religious Campaign or War of Conquest? Muslim Views of the Motives of the First Crusade,” Niall Christie addresses a different theoretical question related to medieval warfare. Surveying the perception of the motives of the early crusaders as depicted in the Muslim sources, he shows that his sources ascribed a variety of impetuses to the arrival of the Latin Christian invaders. Motives of revenge for earlier wrongs, greed for plunder or territory, religious expansion and sheer malice are all found in the sources, but only one, the Damascene jurisprudent 'Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), appears to have been aware that the crusaders were fighting a holy war.
Christie observes that it is not clear whether the apparent ignorance of the other sources stems from genuine lack of knowledge or a desire to avoid the risk of granting even the vaguest legitimacy to the crusaders’ actions. The six articles that make up Part Two, “Bloody Realities: War in Practice,” turn from theoretical perceptions to more practical issues, addressing a range of different case studies that portray both the direct and indirect effects of warfare on those who experienced them. John France, in “Thinking about Crusader Strategy,” demonstrates that the crusades, especially in the 12th century, formed part of overall papal strategy, intended above all to assert church control over the states of western Europe, promote Christianity and foster diplomatic relations with the Byzantine Empire. France also examines the strategies of the political powers of the Latin states, showing that practical concerns meant that their choices did not always align with the papal vision, something that ultimately contributed to the downfall of the crusader states. Piers Mitchell addresses a rather more graphic issue in “The Torture of Military Captives in the Crusades to the Medieval Middle East.”
He shows that torture was a widespread activity used by both Christians and Muslims for a variety of military, financial, punitive, psychological and judicial objectives, or even simply as a form of morale-boosting entertainment. Various techniques were employed in the period, ranging from the crudely brutal to the carefully orchestrated. Mitchell concludes with an attempt to understand the attitudes of contemporary Latin Christians towards the use of torture. Noting that few writers contemporary with the Crusades address this issue, he nevertheless draws some enlightening conclusions from some observations found in the sources. In “Holy War, Royal Wives, and Equivocation in Twelfth–Century Jerusalem,” Deborah Gerish focuses on the tension between royal consorts’ gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation and royal status in the first Kingdom of Jerusalem. She shows that female royal consorts were generally marginalized from public affairs unless they could positively affect the holy war, the defining feature of royal identity in the period. This marginalization was normally exacerbated if the consort in question was a religious or ethnic outsider to Latin Christian society, leading the sources to regard her with suspicion. She shows that this situation was in contrast to that in most of western Europe, where queens played an important role in defining royal identity, a contrast that Gerish attributes to the overwhelming concern with holy war in the Levantine context and the effect of more common unions between Latin Christian rulers and women of other ethnic or religious backgrounds. Paula Stiles shifts our attention to Spain, where she addresses an aspect of the co-operation between religious groups in her article, “Arming the Enemy: Non-Christians’ Roles in the Military Culture of the Crown of Aragon during the Reconquista.” She demonstrates that non-Christians participated in many facets of the military culture of the kingdom, explaining why they were encouraged to stay in conquered territories, why they chose to do so and why they were trusted with some military duties and rarely betrayed their cities to foreign co-religionists. Stiles shows that municipal identities came to supercede religious or ethnic ones, leading to this rather unusual state of affairs.
Part Two closes with two papers on medieval England. In “Communal Piracy in Medieval England’s Cinque Ports,” David Sylvester investigates why the Barons of the Cinque Ports came to be seen as the epitome of English piracy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, despite both their legal (sometimes quasi-legal) naval service to the crown and the fact that they were not the only ones who engaged in frequent activities of this type. He shows that a number of factors affected their image, with the situation being further complicated by the fact that the boundary between official raiding and piracy was often blurred during the period. Ilana Krug, in “Wartime Corruption and Complaints of the English Peasantry,” shows that corrupt practices conducted in the king’s name also occurred on land. Focusing on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, she discusses how England’s involvement in warfare affected peasants who were not only expected to contribute officially to the war effort but were also often victimized by the abuse and corruption endemic to any prolonged situation of war, especially in matters of taxation and purveyance. Krug dwells on the methods of corruption that surfaced during this period, and taking into account many types of sources (judicial records, literary treatises and political songs and poems), she examines the peasantry’s complaints about and responses to these corrupt practices.
In Part Three, “Unto the Breach: Re-examining Issues in Medieval and Modern Military Historiography,” three contributors re-assess some of the extant notions relating to Islamic, Byzantine and European conduct of war. Hugh Kennedy’s “The Military Revolution and the Early Islamic State” addresses developments in warfare as it was waged in the seventh to eleventh centuries in the Muslim world. Starting from the well-established notion that technological changes in warfare affect the evolution of political society, Kennedy examines how this phenomenon applies to the evolution of the early Islamic state. To make his case he focuses in particular on the introduction of two important innovations in Islamic warfare, namely the use of stirrups and the development of mounted archery.
He shows that both Arabic literary sources and depictions in Islamic art stress the novel nature of this technology and its universal and speedy adoption by the Muslim armies. He sees that by the early to mid ninth century the combination of both of these technologies was perceptible on the ground and led to both a permanent change in the primary method of fighting and the creation of expensive armies of professional soldiers to replace the tribal armies mainly used thus far. Kennedy also discusses the negative consequences of the latter development on the long term political, administrative, social and economic well-being of the early 'Abbasid state. Warren Treadgold investigates Byzantine attitudes towards warfare in “Byzantium, the Reluctant Warrior.” He shows that the general Byzantine inclination, at least as far as external conflict was concerned, was to defensive war, be it actual defense of frontiers or reconquest of lost territories.
This tendency was reinforced by the fact that only such defensive wars were regarded as being morally and religiously justifiable. In addition, the risks to one’s own political and personal security that waging external, offensive warfare entailed made the Byzantine emperors reluctant to pursue it. Treadgold then turns to the issue of civil wars and the Byzantines’ greater willingness to engage in them, a topic that has hitherto received relatively little attention. He shows that despite the Byzantine disinclination to wage external wars, there were numerous civil wars that took place in the course of Byzantine history (he counts 120 in total between 285 and 1461), a fact that he attributes to the ease with which they could be justified once they were over and the rich prizes that could be won by the victor. In the final article of the volume, “Reynald of Châtillon and the Red Sea Expedition of 1182–83,” Marcus Milwright offers a reexamination of this infamous incident in Reynald’s career and the objective ascribed to it by some Arabic sources, namely the removal of the Prophet’s remains from Medina.
Milwright speculates on the potential validity of such claims by studying the context of Reynald’s life and his possible experience and awareness of Muslim ritual practices relating to the dead and their remains. Milwright concludes that given the clear veneration that many Muslims accorded to the graves of holy figures (in contradiction of official Muslim teaching), such an accusation may not actually have been that far-fetched, and Reynald may indeed have considered the looting of Muhammad’s remains as being a potentially profitable enterprise. It is clear from the range of concerns and issues raised in this volume that warfare had an impact on the individual at all levels of medieval society, regardless of their ethnic, regional, religious or professional affiliation.
War could have an equal, or even greater, impact on the non-combatant peasant than it did on the knight on the battlefield. This widespread impact is reflected in the wide variety of sources that shed light on its features and the reactions of those who experienced it, either directly or indirectly. The images of warfare presented in their pages range from the heroic to the corrupt, the pious to the heretical, and the attractive to the repellant; attitudes to warfare then, as now, remain a diverse mixture of noble ideals and bloody realities.
The majority of the articles in this volume arise from papers presented at the 33rd Medieval Workshop at the University of British Columbia in 2003. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the conference participants for their timely cooperation during the compilation of this volume and to recognize with gratitude the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Committee for Medieval Studies at the University of British Columbia. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation for the editorial assistance of Jane Roy, Kelly DeVries, Marcella Mulder and Julian Deahl. Niall Christie and Maya Yazigi Vancouver, 2005
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