Warfare in Medieval Europe c.400-c.1453

Bernard S. Bachrach, David S. Bachrach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000429510
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Warfare in Medieval Europe, now in its second edition, offers considerably more attention to the transition from the later Roman Empire to the early Middle Ages, the composition of the armies of the opponents of the West, and the experience of commanders and individual combatants on the battlefield.

This second revised and expanded edition provides a more in-depth thematic discussion of the nature and conduct of war, with an emphasis on its overall impact on society, from the late Roman Empire to the end of the Hundred Years' War. The authors explore the origins of the institutions, physical infrastructure, and intellectual underpinnings of warfare, with chapters on military topography, military technology, logistics, combat, and strategy. Bernard and David Bachrach have also added a new chapter, which provides two detailed campaign narratives that highlight the themes treated throughout the text. The geographical scope of the volume encompasses Latin Europe, the Slavic World, Scandinavia, and the eastern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the conflict between Western Christianity and the Islamic Near East.

Written in an accessible and engaging way, Warfare in Medieval Europe is the ideal resource for all students of the history of medieval warfare.

1
Sources

The writing of medieval military history

DOI: 10.4324/9781003032878-2

Introduction

On the eve of the Second World War, the great British historian Sir Charles Oman wrote:

both the medieval monastic chroniclers and the modern liberal historiographers had often no closer notion of the meaning of war than that it involves various horrors and is attended by a lamentable loss of life. Both classes strove to disguise their personal ignorance or dislike of military matters by deprecating their importance and significance in history.¹

1 Charles Oman, On the Writing of History (New York, 1939), 159–160.

This distaste for the writing about, and thereby teaching about, war did not lead to the end of warfare, as the events of 1939–1945 and since have demonstrated so starkly. Rather, with the honourable exception of Oman and a small handful of other scholars, the writing of medieval military history up through the late 1950s was left to retired military officers, who focused most of their attention on battles. These were viewed and evaluated on the basis of the conformity of medieval commanders to the military doctrines of the modern world, chief among them Clausewitz’s argument, based on his observations of the success of Napoleon Bonaparte, that the main task of a general was to seek out the enemy army and destroy it in the field. Because most successful military commanders assiduously avoided battle throughout most of the Middle Ages, they were deemed deficient by their modern successors, who asserted that military science overall was at a nadir in the millennium following the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Medieval military history was rescued from the margins of scholarly discourse in the decades after the end of the Second World War as a new generation of academics, many of whom had seen military service but not made a career of it, devoted their intellectual energies to evaluating medieval warfare on its own terms. Among their important insights were that battle-seeking strategies generally were not relevant to medieval warfare, which was dominated by sieges, and the control of territory through the construction and garrisoning of fortifications. In addition, scholars began to turn away from a focus on battles to investigate the relationship of military affairs to other aspects of society, particularly social status. During the 1980s, medieval military history was further revitalized through the development of the ‘war and society’ school of inquiry that sought to understand the impact of warfare on society at large. Historians began systemically to investigate topics such as logistics and the impact of warfare on the economy and culture, and also to develop a more nuanced understanding of medieval military technology.

The increasing sophistication over the past two generations of the study of medieval warfare has been accompanied and also driven, in part, by the growth of available source materials. In many cases, sources of information such as administrative documents and charters had been edited and published by the late nineteenth century, but were not used by historians, trained in older methodologies, who focused their attention on easily accessible narrative texts. By contrast, the veritable explosion of archaeological studies in the period since the Second World War has opened up vast quantities of information about the Middle Ages that simply was not available to earlier generations of scholars. Ironically, the great destruction wrought by this war, particularly in urban settings, opened up large areas for archaeological investigation that previously had been inaccessible. This is especially the case in the field that is now known as ‘landscape archaeology’, a term used to describe the efforts of scholars from across a wide range of disciplines to read human intention into the natural and man-made topography and the relationship between the two.

From a methodological perspective, the historian working today to investigate warfare during the Middle Ages is responsible for understanding and using a wide array of sources, some of which have a long pedigree, and others that only recently have been applied to the study of medieval history. Perhaps even more importantly, the traditional model of picking one or two of the supposed ‘best’ narrative texts and refining them to create a narrative is no longer viable. Indeed, such a method, although common, never was viable for the development of an accurate depiction of the past, as is revealed in the critiques levelled against their colleagues by scholars such as John E. Morris, who pioneered the use of administrative documents in writing about the campaigns in Wales that were conducted by King Edward I of England (1272–1307).

The present chapter is intended to provide an overview of the great variety of sources of information that are available for the study of medieval warfare, and to give guidance about how to use them effectively to write military history. Somewhat arbitrarily, we have divided our discussion between written and non-written sources, although it is the case that some illustrations in manuscripts, stone carvings, and above all coins, often contain written information, as well. In addition, we have divided our discussion of written sources between those whose authors were motivated explicitly to provide an account of past events, and other types of documents that were produced in large part for prescriptive, didactic, administrative, personal, or entertainment purposes.

Historiographical texts

Historiographical texts – that is, written sources that purport to offer information about the past – generally have been favoured by modern medieval military historians because they tend to offer the greatest detail in a collective sense regarding both the overall conduct of military operations and the actions, including the supposed thoughts, of individual participants, and especially of the leadership. By contrast, many dozens of administrative documents often need to be accessed to get a similar range of information. In addition, it is rare that administrative documents are published in large quantities and even rarer to have translations of such texts. In comparison, a great many narrative sources have been translated during the past two centuries into numerous modern languages, albeit with varying degrees of quality, completeness, and accuracy.

It is certainly true that the many genres of historiographical texts (more on this in what follows) are essential for the writing of military history, or perhaps it is better to say, for answering specific questions that relate to the military history of medieval Europe. However, before the historian can draw effectively upon information in these texts to develop an accurate understanding of past events, it is necessary to understand not only the strengths but also the limitations of each type of historiographical source, and also of each individual exemplar within a genre. Taking a selection of quotations from a particular text, for example, either to prove its value or to reject its usefulness is methodologically unsound. Rather, the entire text must be evaluated as a whole. In this context, it also must be kept in mind that the authors of many historiographical texts drew upon more than one literary tradition when writing so that differentiating between genres must be done in a nuanced rather than dogmatic or rigid manner. In short, historiographical works must be understood both as works of literature and as sources.

As we begin this discussion of both the strengths and limitations of various types of historiographical sources of information, it is also important to draw attention to at least some of the most important current scholarly arguments regarding the epistemology of historical knowledge. This is the question of how we can obtain accurate information about past human action. The two authors of this volume espouse what might be termed an optimistic epistemology, meaning that we believe that it is possible to come to an accurate understanding of what happened in the past by using historiographical texts in conjunction with a wide range of additional types of sources, especially archaeological materials, which will be discussed in later sections.

This optimistic epistemology can be contrasted with a pessimistic approach to historio-graphical texts that has been illuminated recently in the works of the prominent German medieval historian Johannes Fried. In a series of books and articles, which draw upon older scholarship, Fried has argued that a true understanding of what actually happened in medieval Europe, particularly early medieval Europe, is impossible because written texts, by their very nature, cannot convey reality of the type necessary to write political history, and consequently military history as well. This pessimistic view of the value of historio-graphical sources for ascertaining aspects of what actually happened in the past depends on two basic premises. The first of these is that it was impossible for the putatively ‘oral society’ of medieval Europe, and particularly early medieval Europe, to provide an accurate record of past events. This is because humans not only forget most of the things that they have experienced; it is also the case that they remember past events inaccurately in order to suit their present needs. The second fundamental reason offered for rejecting the information provided by historiographical texts is that the authors were not concerned with providing an account of events as they happened in the past, but rather sought to use accounts of the past to shape the present in pursuit of a political, or even more commonly, an ideological agenda. In short, the distortion of the past by writers during the Middle Ages was purposeful.

The premises espoused by scholars such as Professor Fried depends on a reductio ad absurdum with respect to realities inherent in the human condition, on the one hand, and the nature of historical writing in the pre-modern period, on the other hand. It is certainly the case that human beings in the present, as well as in the past, forget much of what they have experienced, and engage, sometimes intentionally, in ‘misremembering’ for a wide range of purposes. And yet, it is also the case that all of us rely upon our memories to navigate effectively among all of our daily activities, relationships, and tasks. In short, we rely on our memories every day, and they are sufficiently reliable to enable to us to succeed far more often than not. As a corollary to this point, the written word played a much larger part in all aspects of medieval life than is granted by scholars such as Professor Fried, and this was certainly true with regard to the conduct of military affairs. In effect, the use of memory was strengthened by the equally effective use of documents.

Fried and others also are correct to point out that medieval authors generally did not write in order to provide information about ‘how things really were’. Indeed, we endorse the proposition made by scholars such as the early medieval historian Walter Goffart that medieval writers did not naïvely transmit fact, but rather were engaged in complex dialogues with their contemporaries about the proper organization of human society, at both theological and political levels. From the perspective of military history, one of the most important of these biases is the emphasis on aristocrats and their participation in warfare at the expense of all other members of society. However, the blanket rejection of all of the information provided by a historiographical text because it is clear that the author added, left out, or misrepresented some information relating to the narrative arc of the work is methodologically unsound, or to put it colloquially, is tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In this context, it bears emphasis that in order to create a view of the past, the authors of historiographical texts deployed facts – that is, accurate information concerning events that actually happened – to make their case. Such facts, many of which are verifiable through a wide variety of means, are of considerable importance for the writing of history by modern scholars. As a consequence, unless it can be shown that a particular medieval writer made things up – that is, produced phony information all the time in all cases – and made no use in any way of contemporary speech, dress, culture, or thought in his text, it is the task of the historian to identify what is accurate and what is not.

As a corollary to these questions with regard to the value of historiographical texts in providing accurate information about the past, we also wish to draw the readers’ attention to one further aspect of epistemological pessimism. This is the idea that historiographical sources, particularly from the early Middle Ages, are so laconic with regard to military matters that they offer very little scope for anything other than a bare bones recitation of the names of conquerors and lists of battles or sieges. This approach to historiographical sources, in our view, is a manifestation of the old-style positivistic approach to history, in which the historian’s task was to collect data points provided by the text and then develop a coherent image from them. What is missing is the use of historical imagination, which makes it possible to pose a series of questions that are raised if the information provided by a source is, in fact, accurate.

For example, the observation made by Bishop Gregory of Tours (died c.594) in his Histories that in 531 the Thuringian king Hermanfrid prepared the battlefield along the Unstrut River with ditches to thwart a potential Frankish cavalry attack opens up a number of fruitful avenues for questions. It is clear that Hermanfrid had to obtain information regarding both Frankish military organization and tactics. He had to have specific information considerably prior to the Frankish attack in order to prepare the field of battle. Consequently, the modern historian must ask, how did Hermanfrid obtain information about the approach of the Franks, how did the Thuringians know about Frankish tactics, and how did the Thuringians know that preparing a field with ditches was the proper response to the typical Frankish style of attack? These questions open the way to investigating matters such as military training and intelligence that are discussed in Chapters 6–7.

Interrogating historiographical sources

Rather than making wholesale judgements about historiographical texts, whether positive or negative, each individual medieval work that is considered by the modern historian must be evaluated according to a wide range of criteria. The interrogation of a particular text should begin by ascertaining the potential access of an author to reliable or accurate information, the abi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Sources: the writing of medieval military history
• 2 Military topography
• 3 Military organization of medieval Europe
• 4 Military logistics
• 5 Military technology
• 6 Medieval combat
• 7 Strategy
• 8 Two campaigns in focus
• Conclusion
• Index