Migrations and invasions of peoples from the Asian steppes began to affect the Roman world as early as the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180). By the reign of Diocletian (284-305), these stresses had transformed the social, economic, and military structures of the Roman Empire. Diocletian’s administrative division of the Empire recognized a growing differentiation of the eastern and western halves of the Roman world. Another influx of invaders brought an end to the Western Empire in the fifth century. Two centuries later, Islamic Arab conquests divided the old Roman world again, this time between north and south.
By the mid-600s, the Roman world had split into three: Latin Europe, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), and the Islamic world, all of which were heir to some aspects of Roman civilization and military tradition. Roman infrastructure shaped warfare for another millenium as Roman walled cities continued to be the focus of campaigns, especially in Mediterranean lands, and Roman roads continued to serve as military highways. Successor states continued to use and imitate Roman military (and civil) administration, with varying degrees of success. And Christianity—the religion that had triumphed in Rome following Constantine’s conversion—not only provided an administrative and cultural link to the past but also increasingly infused warfare with a new ideological significance. Conquest and conversion were married; paganism, different brands of Christianity, Christian heresies, and Christianity’s new cousin, Islam, entered a long battle waged with words and swords.
Each of the heirs of Rome developed its own distinctive identity. Chapter 8 will examine Islam and the Byzantine Empire. This chapter looks at Latin Europe from 350 to 1050, a world of strong connections to the later empire and the transformed Roman world after Diocletian, but also a world of significant change.
The military forces of the Germanic successor kingdoms reflected the fusion of Roman and barbarian elements that characterized the whole society (Figure 7.1). Frankish, Burgundian, and Gothic kings and their rivals consciously attempted to maintain Roman systems of recruitment and organization. But the socioeconomic conditions of the time and the invaders’ own traditions made complete continuity impossible.
The population dwindled for several centuries, due to plagues and the disruptions of the Germanic migrations themselves, and the demographic pattern became more rural. Cities shrank within their walls, reflecting not just population loss but a decline in trade and commerce. This less monetized economy, operating closer to subsistence levels in many areas, had clear implications for the ability of rulers to employ paid professional soldiers or mercenaries.
The problem of reduced economic resources was compounded by reduced administrative resources. A general decline in lay literacy made bureaucracies harder to maintain, a trend offset only marginally by the survival of the Christian Church as a literate institution. The legal reach of governments contracted as customary laws displaced written codes. Authority tended to fragment and become privatized: Governing, especially at the local level, tended toward a form of estate management. Again, in such a context, the ability of rulers to maintain professional, centrally administered armies clearly waned.
Figure 7.1 Germanic Invasions and Successor Kingdoms
Social changes were also significant. Late Roman society had seen the rise of powerful rural magnates, replacing urban elites as the backbone of local society. Powerful men were powerful by virtue of the number of their followers, armed and otherwise. The intrusion of barbarian military commanders and their followers fit neatly into this pattern, though their presence increased the insecurity of the civilian population. Such insecurity made powerful patrons with armed followers even more important for protection and stimulated the formation of self-help groups, especially in cities and towns. This volatile social mixture was further stirred by the connection of constructed barbarian ethnicities with military service and exemption from taxes and by religious ferment. The alliance of the Franks and the papacy as defenders of orthodoxy against Arianism demonstrates the potential for an ideological dimension to warfare in this period.
In many ways, the arrival of the Germans simply harmonized with or accelerated changes ongoing in the Empire since at least Diocletian’s time. The reforms of Constantine and Diocletian had divided the Roman army into limitanei, border units guarding against small raids, and a mobile field army designed, with increasingly fortified urban centers, to allow a “defense in depth” against major incursions. Over the fourth century, the limitanei tended to merge into the local population, while the field army and palace guard units came to be dominated by barbarians, a category that reflects ethnogenesis (cultural constructions of identity) more than actual ethnic descent (see the Issues box “‘Barbarization’ of the Roman Army,” page 72). Whether barbarians are seen as Romanized Germans, Germanicized Romans, or both, they served under terms that maintained the structure of the Roman military system, at least in theory. But the “barbarization” of the army, including the use of federate troops who were not subjected to Roman organization, had significant results for military organization and warfare. These results can be seen in the aims of war, the constitution of forces, and the patterns of war.
Grand Strategy
At the broadest level, the successor kingdoms were the heirs of Rome’s defensive posture. Under regular external threat, this civilization struggled merely to maintain its boundaries; in fact, it suffered losses to Justinian’s eastern Roman forces in the mid-500s and to Islam with the conquest of Iberia in the early 700s (see Chapter 8). Further Germanic pagan invasions, such as the Saxon conquest of Britain, were countered, slowly, only by conversion of the invaders. But there was no coherent grand strategy of defense or cooperation, simply an inability to do much else than hang on. Most of the conflict in the period consisted of small wars over dynastic claims and of local power grabbing. Domination of towns and the countryside as sources of wealth tapped either through rudimentary taxation or by pillage was the goal of ambitious magnates and warband leaders. Even kings, though important as symbols and foci of an often artificially constructed tribal unity (see below), and adopting as far as possible the symbols of Roman and Christian legitimacy, were ultimately measured by their ability to distribute gifts to their followers, gifts usually gained in pillaging raids. In short, warfare was transformed from a state into a personal and dynastic enterprise.
Armies and Society
The makeup of the armed forces of the successor kingdoms is an obscure and much debated topic. But several broad trends are visible. Perhaps most important, like wars, forces got smaller. Armies in the tens of thousands were rare; most would have numbered under 10,000, and many under a 1000. In part, this reflected the fragmentation of political authority: Each kingdom could raise only a fraction of the forces Rome had deployed over the region as a whole. But the demographic, economic, and administrative constraints outlined above undoubtedly affected the total numbers that could be raised. And forces got smaller despite two trends that probably tended to mitigate the weakness of states in raising armies and to increase the proportion of the population under arms.
First, armed forces, like politics, became increasingly privatized. The key components of armies were the followers of great men—armed forces maintained, not at state expense out of tax revenues, but out of the private wealth of the magnates (which could be built on theoretically public sources of income). In effect, there was a devolution of responsibility for supporting armies from the center to the localities. Therefore, kings had available to them warriors whom they did not have to support themselves—but only if they could maintain the loyalty of the magnates who followed them, by no means an easy task. (Nor were magnates always sure of the loyalty of their followers.)
Second, the militarization of society, represented among the elite by private warbands, extended to lower levels as well. We should probably not think of armed peasants—farming and soldiering have always been difficult jobs for the same set of people to engage in consistently, and the slaves and semifree tenants who made up much of the rural population were poor candidates for fighting effectively. But townsmen certainly were armed and organized for self-defense. Urban forces could also join royal expeditions, and they outnumbered magnate warbands in some armies. Further, it is unclear how low on the social ladder the reach of warbands went, as the followers of followers were undoubtedly often men of little substance. The militarization of society is neatly summarized in the common definition of freedom: “Free men” had the right to bear arms along with the widely recognized obligation to come to the defense of the kingdom when summoned by the king. Early in this period, freedom and the right to bear arms was also associated with Germanic or barbarian ethnic identity: barbarians fought, while Romans paid taxes. This led to widespread adoption of barbarian identity among soldiers and the powerful: The “Germanness” of many Germans was a choice. (This helps account for a Frankish kingdom that claimed a Germanic ethnicity but that ended up speaking a vulgar form of Latin.) When barbarian ethnic identity had become widespread enough to lose its usefulness in distinguishing warriors from commoners, military-aristocratic pedigree emerged to replace it, becoming one of the key social distinctions of medieval Europe thenceforward.
Patterns of Campaigning
The social and economic context of the successor kingdoms also affected the patterns of warfare. There was a marked tendency toward localism, as poor communications made coordination of large-scale enterprises more difficult, though not impossible. Above all, logistical constraints—where armies could find food for themselves and fodder for horses, always a major concern for any preindustrial army—probably tightened even more, keeping forces small.
Pillaging was the most common activity of war. Pillaging provided supplies and booty, reduced the enemy’s resources (if carried out in enemy territory), and sent a message to rivals, hostile populations, and rebellious subjects. It could intimidate a fortified town into surrender, and it could also serve as revenge for earlier plundering—and could easily descend into pointless cruelty. And distribution of the loot gained in pillaging further underpinned royal authority.
Fortified towns were centers of supply as well as centers of control of the surrounding countryside, and thus were the focus of some campaigns. Especially where conquest or control of a polity was at issue, military leaders sought to capture enemy strongholds and defend their own. Thus, sieges and siege defense remained part of the prosecution of war. The outcome of sieges often turned on whether the fort or the besiegers ran out of supplies first. A relief army could lift a siege merely by harassing the besieger’s foragers and causing a supply crisis. Battles were sometimes the result of a determined besieger facing off with a determined relief force.
Two contradictory impulses influenced leaders’ attitudes toward battle. On one hand, battles were risky—above all for commanders who led from the front to prove their prowess—and advanced the territorial aims of a campaign only indirectly even if successful. (A battle that destroyed all enemy field forces allowed the victor to pursue sieges without threat of a relief force showing up, but it did not guarantee success.) So, from this perspective, battles were to be avoided except as a last resort, as Vegetius, the late Roman writer on military affairs, advised. On the other hand, a leader’s need to maintain his honor and the loyalty of his followers impelled him to meet invasions head-on and prevent the ravaging of his and his followers’ lands. The widespread view that, in fighting a battle, combatants submitted the outcome of the dispute to the judgment of God (whichever god(s) it happened to be) reinforced this incentive to fight and added an almost ritual element to the face-to-face confrontation of rival armies (see the Sources box “Gregory, Bishop of Tours”). Thus, battles were fought regularly. There is little to say about tactical developments in this period: Barbarian attacks in wedge formation may have been new, but, for the most part, declining professionalism and insecure command control enforced simplicity in battlefield dispositions.
Infantry and Cavalry
One final effect of the changing social and administrative context on patterns of war had to do with the tactical and operational balance between infantry and cavalry. As we saw in Chapters 1-4, there are two main bases of infantry effectiveness. In the Greek model, massed infantry derived from its communal origins the cohesion and morale necessary for it to face a cavalry charge and maneuver on the battlefield. Neighbor fought shoulder to shoulder with neighbor, and the communal identity of the polis held the whole together. Such units, to be most effective, also had to fight frequently, because experience in the field was the only serious training they got. They were, in other words, part-timers, for the ability of a small community to support a full-time, professional, and drilled body of soldiers was very limited—only the Spartans among the Greek poleis managed it. On the other hand, in the imperial Roman (and Chinese) model, infantry gained its cohesion from training and drill imposed by a central authority on full-time troops. Such a model required a much larger polity and population base, and much higher levels of governmental income, administrative expertise, and central control. In the late Roman world and its successors in the west, both bases of effective infantry suffered serious erosion.
The Roman model virtually disappeared—not surprisingly, given the economic and administrative conditions outlined above. One of Vegetius’s most frequent complaints involved the decline in standards of infantry training that he saw in his day. This left the Greek model. We have seen that urban militias continued to constitute an important part of the armed forces of the successor states. But even here, some decline was evident. For one thing, economic contraction reduced the material resources and the morale of many urban communities. Even more important, urban militias in the successor states operated most frequently in a strictly defensive capacity, guarding their own walls. They did not campaign enough to gain a critical level of experience in the field, and even those that did fought battles infrequently, unlike the phalanxes of the poleis, whose reason for campaigning was to fight a battle. As a result, their usefulness in combat, outside of standing in a defensive block, remained limited. Finally, the economic and military elites of this society were often based outside the towns, unlike those of the Greek poleis, so that as military communities the towns were deprived of their heads, so to speak. In fact, urban infantry was at its best on the battlefield when the better-equipped and more experienced warriors of magnate warbands fought as their front rank.
With the decline in the quality of infantry, cavalry forces assumed greater prominence in the warfare of this age compared to Greek and Roman times. This phenomenon has often been attributed to a significant increase in the quality of cavalry. The Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378 at the hands of Ostrogothic horsemen used to be taken as the beginning of an age of cavalry, for example. Alternately, the introduction of the stirrup is supposed to have lifted the horseman to dominance, in either the 300s or perhaps the 700s. But the coming of an age of cavalry was neither sudden nor overwhelming. The evidence for the development of the stirrup is disputed, as the wide range for the dating of its introduction indicates. By making the rider more secure on his horse, the stirrup did make some difference in cavalry-versus-cavalry combat, and it was in universal use in western Europe probably by the ninth century. But morale and cohesion were the key to infantry’s ability to face cavalry. If a wall of foot soldiers stood fast in the face of an intimidating charge, the horses would refuse (pull up short in the face of an obstacle they could neither jump nor go around), and the charge would devolve into hand-to-hand combat.
The stirrup made no difference to the psychological effect of a charge. Cavalry became more important on the battlefield, not because it got better, but because infantry got worse.
In military terms, this is a limited claim, for as we have seen, battles were only part of warfare. Infantry forces remained crucial to armies of the age because of their role in siege warfare, and they often constituted the bulk of forces numerically. Western Europe was unsuited, geographically and climatically, to supporting mounted armies such as arose on the steppes, and it was far enough from the centers of nomadic lands and power to be less affected than many areas by nomadic cavalry tactics. We should qualify the claim in two other ways. First, soldiers of this age were not fixed in their tactical roles, as our terms infantry and cavalry may misleadingly imply. Mounted soldiers could and often did dismount to fight on foot, becoming, for that battle, infantry. Second, and related to the first point, there was a significant difference between the use of horses as a battlefield weapon system and the use of horses for strategic mobility. The small size of many armies meant that they could be mounted for purposes of campaigning and pillaging, without that having much bearing on whether such forces usually fought battles on foot or on horseback. Thus, even if a decline in infantry quality (rather than improved cavalry technology) did create the beginnings of an age of cavalry, we must be careful about the parameters of this claim.
Nevertheless, it is a significant claim because of its social ramifications. In many places and times, dominant social elites have ridden horses as a way of displaying their superiority and wealth (horses being large and expensive items). The great rural men who increasingly dominated this society took up the horse for the same reason. They were a warrior class, and their ability to control resources made them the elite warriors of the age in terms of equipment and experience. They dominated armies, courts, and countryside from horseback, but in a sense were cavalry only incidentally and could fight equally well as infantry. Thus, an age of men on horseback gradually dawned in western Europe as a social as much as a tactical development.
Gregorius Florentius, the sixth-century Frankish prelate and bishop, describes the battlefield religious experiences of one monarch of the day, as well as battle and seige tactics.
[The Conversion of Clovis, King of the Franks]
It happened that many were killed as the two armies were fighting fiercely, and Clovis’s army began to fall apart in the slaughter. Seeing this, raising his eyes to heaven, with remorse in his heart, and bursting into tears, he cried: “Jesus Christ, whom Chlotilda [Clovis’s wife] claims to be the son of the living God, who is said to give aid to those who are struggling and to give victory to those who place hope in you, I beg the glory of your help, such that if you grant me victory. . . . I will believe in you and be baptized in your name.” . . . And when he said this, the Allamanni turned their backs, and began to give way in flight. And when they perceived that their king had fallen, they put themselves under Clovis’ rule. . . .
[Battle Tactics]
Afterward Theodoric [king of the Franks], not forgetting the perjury of Hermenfred, king of the Thuringi, called his brother Chlotar to his aid and prepared to go against him, promising king Chlotar a part of the plunder if the gift of victory be conferred on them by God. . . . The Thuringi prepared traps against the coming of the Franks. For in the plain where the fight was to happen they dug ditches, which by covering the openings with thick turf they disguised as a level plain. Thus many of the horsemen of the Franks fell into these snares when they began to fight and it was a great obstacle to them; but after learning of this trap they began to watch out for it. And then when the Thuringi saw themselves being fiercely slaughtered, and with the flight of their king Hermenfred, they turned their backs. . . . Having achieved victory [the Franks] seized that country and brought it under their control.
[Siege Tactics]
Fifteen days passed in this siege, and Leudeghisel prepared new engines to destroy the city [Comminges]: carts with battering rams, woven branches and planks under which the army was to move forward to demolish the walls. But when they approached they were so battered down by stones that all who got near the wall died. They tossed out pots with burning pitch and fat over them, and pushed others full of stones down on them. But when night stopped the battle the army returned to the camp. . . . As morning came the army again rose for battle, and they made bundles of sticks as if to fill the deep trench which was on the eastern side; but here the engine could do no harm. And Sagittarius the bishop circled the walls frequently in arms and often threw stones from the wall with his own hand against the enemy.
source: Gregorio di Tours, La Storia dei Franchi, ed. Massimo Oldoni (Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1981): II.30 (v. 1, p. 168); III.7 (v. 1, pp. 220-22); VII.37 (v. 2, pp. 212-14), trans. S. Morillo.