From the time of the reign of Clovis (481-511, the legend of whose conversion is recounted above), the kingdom of the Franks had been the dominant power among the successor states of Latin Europe. By the mid-500s, the Franks ruled nearly everywhere from the Rhine valley west and south to the Alps and Pyrenees. They had been the most successful of the barbarians to harness their military vigor to the influence and skills of the old Gallo-Roman elites. But the Frankish custom of dividing an inheritance among all surviving sons splintered the kingdom and led to frequent internecine conflict. By the late 600s, the kingdom was fragmented.
Charles Martel, mayor of the palace (a sort of prime minister, and by this time the real power behind the throne) of the Merovingian king from 714 to 741, began reuniting the Franks, as well as repulsing a major Muslim invasion at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. His son Pepin III, crowned king in his own right in 751, and his grandson Charles the Great (Charlemagne—the Latin Carolus, for “Charles,” is the basis of the family designation, Carolingian) completed the unification and extended Frankish rule considerably. There was no major change from the Merovingian to the Carolingian period in economic, social, or administrative developments or in military systems. However, the successes of the early Carolingians demonstrated the potential of the system when it was well led and its strengths were systematically exploited. But the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire in the century after his death in 814 also demonstrated again the weaknesses of military and political force in this period. Nevertheless, the conquests of Charlemagne had lasting consequences.
The foundation of Carolingian military success was the class of great magnates who were the kings’ immediate vassals (sworn followers). United by the leadership of the Carolingian kings, they extended the reach of royal power to the many regions of the kingdom. When called on by the king, they, in turn, called on their followers and mobilized the soldiers in the regions they controlled. Estimates of numbers in medieval armies are problematic—the surviving evidence does not allow for accurate assessment, and the total pool of manpower would never have been called out at one time. But the kings clearly could call on vast manpower resources, which were crucial to the Carolingian conquests.
Frankish armies almost always had a numerical advantage over their enemies. But the Carolingians also used their manpower advantage to advance into enemy territory in multiple columns, each strong enough to campaign independently. This allowed them to outflank border defenses and to launch converging columns on enemy positions. It also permitted operations on multiple fronts against different foes when necessary. Further, by using rotating or selected callouts the Franks could keep forces in the field longer than their enemies could: In 798, Frankish forces even campaigned in winter, breaking a final Saxon rebellion.
The same group of magnates who made possible raising and maintaining such numbers were also crucial to this pattern of flexible deployment. For they provided the loyal and competent subordinate commanders who could lead independent operations; the king did not have to be everywhere at once. How were the early Carolingians able to draw on their resources of leadership and manpower so successfully?
One key was that almost all the early Carolingian wars were offensive. Offensive campaigns produced plunder and made warfare attractive and profitable for the king’s followers. In a self-reinforcing spiral, success made recruiting men and retaining their loyalty easier, which made further success more likely. The other key was that the early Carolingians made administrative arrangements that were remarkably effective, at least for a time, despite limited resources. A large part of this had to do with a close and mutually beneficial partnership with the church, which provided an administrative and territorial structure descended directly from the late Roman Empire. Bishops had significant military responsibilities, including leading their personal retinues to muster, and reforms directed from Charlemagne’s court revitalized this structure. On the secular side, the empire was divided into counties, each headed by a count who served at the king’s pleasure and could be transferred or removed. Counts were the highest public officers of the realm and in border areas oversaw local defense arrangements.
Through this administrative system, the Carolin- gians issued a comprehensive set of military regulations. These set out the obligations of royal vassals in providing forces; the obligations of individual soldiers, based on their landed wealth, to appear in specified circumstances with specified levels of equipment; and the sorts of equipment (siege machinery, carts for supply, and the like) that larger units should bring to campaign. Exporting of arms and armor was prohibited, and regulations governed logistics and discipline. By tying service and equipment obligations to landed wealth, a vast but economically underdeveloped empire harnessed its resources as efficiently as possible, and military leadership and rank conformed to social status. Grouping smaller estates, so that, for example, four landholders in a group of five would contribute to the equipping and campaign expenses of the fifth, helped spread the burdens of service at lower social levels. Similar arrangements made service in distant theaters of operations possible: The farther off a campaign, the lesser the proportion of a district’s soldiers had to serve. Though it is doubtful that reality throughout the empire conformed to the ideal of the regulations, their ambition and scope is impressive.
The methods the early Carolingians, especially Charlemagne, used in employing their forces on campaign were equally well developed. Raiding and pillaging became less ends in themselves than part of the arsenal used in systematic conquests. Several years of raiding were often preparatory to large-scale invasion, softening up the target. And methods of conquest were fitted to the foe. Against areas such as the Lombard kingdom in Italy or in northern Spain, the Frankish siege train focused on key fortified cities. The unified Lombard kingdom was conquered in one campaign. In northwest Germany, Saxony, with no real cities and a decentralized political structure, posed a tougher problem. But engineering proved crucial here, too, as Saxon forts fell easily to Frankish siege techniques. The Franks then built lines of border forts connected by roads to provide a launching pad for operations, and the network of forts would be steadily advanced into enemy lands. Permanent garrisons held the forts and responded to local uprisings. It was a slow method—operations in Saxony lasted thirty-three years, and Charlemagne eventually resorted to warfare against the Saxon population, including massacres and mass deportations, to seal the conquest. But the method was relentless and produced lasting results. The conquest of Saxony was the jewel in Charlemagne’s imperial crown.
The elite forces of the Carolingian army, the followers of magnates both lay and ecclesiastical, were mounted for campaigns. The size of the empire and the range of its offensive operations put strategic mobility at a premium. This (and social prestige) dictated a substantial mounted contingent. Tactical factors did not. An influential school of thought long held that the adoption of the stirrup by the Frankish cavalry led to their tactical dominance on the battlefield and formed the basis of their success (and created the basis for feudalism—see the Issues box “Feudalism”). However, more recent scholarship has cast doubt on this thesis. The best evidence is that the stirrup was not widely adopted until the end of the eighth century, after the bulk of Frankish expansion. There is no evidence for a change in cavalry tactics; the charge with couched lance—the supposedly irresistible stirrup-based tactic—was not widely used for several more centuries, was never the exclusive method of effective cavalry, and, as noted above, made little difference against infantry. But most important, battles were inconsequential to Carolingian success. Charlemagne fought only two battles in his career, and all his subordinates only a few others.
Instead, engineering—building forts and bridges, and besieging strong points—cemented Charlemagne’s conquests. And engineering was the province of men on foot (whether they rode on campaign or not). Careful logistics opened the road for the engineers. Supporting the large Frankish armies on campaign required well-planned supply arrangements. Expeditions usually followed a spring meeting of the great men of the realm, called when the season had advanced enough to make fodder for the horses abundant. Foraging, which always had the potential of degenerating into ill-disciplined plundering in which armies were vulnerable to counterattack, was kept organized and was carefully supplemented by the use of cartage of supplies where possible. Naval transport was harder to arrange, but supply boats on the Danube accompanied an invasion of the Avar kingdom in 791. Herds of cattle accompanied armies, providing self-transporting supplies. And engineering worked hand in hand with logistics: The Carolingians did not build roads like the Romans, but they did build bridges to improve their communications, and their forts served as supply depots.
In short, Charlemagne’s armies wore down their enemies with superior numbers and logistics, and then engineered them into submission. The Carolingian expansion thus bears a marked similarity to the creation of the early Roman Empire under the Republic. It would not, however, prove as lasting. For the Carolingian army was still a product of its time, with the same social and economic limitations the successor states had faced. As a result, every Carolingian strength had a corresponding weakness.
The empire’s expansion slowed to a halt after 800, and campaigns became less frequent. Around 810, Charlemagne faced the first Viking raids on the empire. They were repelled easily, but defensive warfare already showed signs of making recruiting harder, as it offered little prospect of plunder or profit. For a system whose armies were not paid, defense thus threatened to undermine the basis of reliable manpower and the loyalty of subordinates. But continued expansion was difficult because, in an age of slow communications, the very size of the empire posed a threat to the personal ties that were the key to holding the administrative system together. Like the army, the officials of the empire were not paid cash salaries out of central tax receipts—neither the economy nor the government were that monetized. Instead, they received land grants and shares of the income of the districts they governed. Such a system had a tendency to decentralization, with regional officials becoming the focus of local loyalties in preference to a distant central authority. This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that land was a poor substitute for money as compensation to officials. Local officials could more easily become possessive about a district than a salary. They would build up local support networks and entrench themselves and their families in office. Eventually, transferring or removing officials became a royal prerogative in theory more than fact. In short, offices tended to become heritable, reducing central control.
None of these problems were necessarily fatal. But they were all made more acute by the central flaw in the political structure of the empire: Frankish custom still dictated division of the realm among the king’s surviving sons. Under Charlemagne’s grandsons, internal conflict exploded. Civil war and renewed external invasions (see below), piled on top of the inherent weaknesses of the system, brought low the structures of Carolingian imperial and military power in less than a century after Charlemagne’s death in 814.
Nonetheless, the Carolingian Empire had a lasting influence in some areas despite its short period of glory. Perhaps most important was the conquest of Saxony. Along with the conquest of Muslim-held lands in southern France and northern Spain and the extension of Carolingian rule or influence into Bavaria and the upper Danube, it permanently reversed the contraction of this civilization. By adding significant territory east of the Rhine to the Latin Christian world, it also shifted the civilization’s center of gravity north, away from the Mediterranean, and brought more land that had never been part of the Roman Empire into the cultural mix of Latin Europe. Carolingian successes against the pagan
Saxons, who were forcibly converted, and against the Muslims strengthened the relationship in this civilization between warfare, Christianity, and conversion. The participation of Frankish bishops in the organization and leading of military forces added to the link, which was given a sort of papal seal of approval by the crowning of Charlemagne as emperor of the west in 800. The link was mutually beneficial, at least in theory: The church gained powerful defenders and a spearhead for conversion, while wielders of military force gained in legitimacy and prestige.
The coronation and the connection of the church to military organization also reinforced the influence of surviving Roman ideals and institutions. Perhaps the most significant and lasting of these were the counties that were the backbone of Carolingian regional organization. Underneath the level of the counties, social and military relationships continued to be influenced by the forms of Carolingian vassalage, formalized and tied to military obligation by Charlemagne’s military regulations.
Yet these survivals would work their influence in a changing world. Internal conflict and renewed invasions in the end significantly altered the social structures of this world. Carolingian Europe survived a siege, but not intact.
The political fragmentation and military arrangements of ninth-century Europe have often been described as contributing to the birth of feudalism. But what is “feudalism”? Most medieval historians these days consider it a misleading term that does more to obscure our view of the past than to illuminate it. For the term feudalism is paradoxically both too vague and too precise.
Though based on the medieval word feudum, Latin for “fief ” (discussed below), the word feudalism was coined by reformers in the eighteenth century to describe (unfavorably) the system of rights and privileges enjoyed by the French aristocracy, especially with regard to landholding and peasant tenancy. This broad socioeconomic meaning was taken up and extended by Marxist historians, for whom the “feudal mode of production” succeeded the classical mode and preceded the capitalist mode. For military historians, this has always been far too broad a definition. Indeed, if a privileged landholding class and a subject peasantry constitutes feudalism, then most civilization before the Industrial Revolution was feudal, and the term loses any real analytic usefulness.
Military historians have usually taken a more restricted view of feudalism. For them, it referred to the system of raising troops in which a lord granted a fief—typically, a piece of land—to a vassal (Latin, vassus). In return, the vassal gave the lord a defined and limited term of military service, usually forty days a year and usually as a fully armed and armored horseman—a knight. Sometimes the lord provided armor and weapons, but often the vassal provided his own. The fief was the payment for service and was also known as “the knight’s fee.”
Feudalism in this sense has also often been taken as a sign of weak central authority with limited cash resources, limited and somewhat ritualized warfare (knights fought not to kill but to capture and ransom other knights), lack of discipline, individualistic tactics, and incompetent leadership. While there is some truth in the assumptions about central authority, the rest is simply wrong. And the mistakes stem from problems in the definition of feudalism, problems arising from spurious precision.
Recent research has traced modern conceptions of feudal service to the terms and definitions of the Libri Feudorum, an Italian legal handbook written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its academic view of fiefs and vassals became the basis for interpreting feudal institutions in the sixteenth century and have held sway since. But this view does not, in fact, fit the medieval evidence. Feudum and vassus were vague and mutable terms, and military systems from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries were far more varied, flexible, and rational than conventional interpretations have allowed.
Restricted service in return for granted land was inherently limited as a basis for military force and has been vastly overrated as the basis of medieval armies. Soldiers did serve for land. But often they were household knights—young men who lived with their lord and served him in military and nonmilitary capacities—who were rewarded for long service with land of their own and who served in expectation of this reward. And even service for land already granted was far less defined and restricted than the traditional “forty days a year” formula implies. Feudal service—unpaid service by the vassals of a lord—worked best on the “let’s go, boys” model: A lord in need of armed support in his local disputes and in serving his lord (if he had one) said to the young men who were his friends, relatives, hunting and drinking companions, and social dependents, “Let’s go, boys,” and they went. Social cohesion in the lord’s military household (Latin, familia) translated into military cohesion, and constant hunting and fighting together imparted small-unit skills.
Should we then define feudalism more generally as a landed support system for unpaid military service? There are several problems with this. First, individuals and groups also served for pay from an early date, wherever economic conditions made it possible and even when they owed feudal service. And paid service became increasingly common in the period after 1050. Second, in a global context, there have been many forms of “soldiers’ lands” in different times and places, in combination with paid service and not. To call all these feudal is again to arrive at a uselessly broad definition. To try to distinguish some as feudal has inevitably involved the privileging of the European model, for no other reason than that it was studied first. For military historians, the term is probably best avoided, to be replaced by functional descriptions of the world’s (and Europe’s) varied military systems of landed support and militia service, and the social hierarchies that accompanied them.
Legal historians of Europe will rightly come to a different conclusion. In the more settled European conditions of the twelfth century and later, the informal arrangements of an earlier age tended to crystallize into formal legal arrangements with defined terms of service and defined inheritance rights on the part of the vassal. This process marked the decline of feudalism as a viable military system but the rise of feudalism as a fundamental legal system. Indeed, the lord-vassal tie of landholding became crucial as one of two key bonds (with marriage, which it resembled) among the European aristocracy. The twelfth-century English system of fief law became the basis of most later English estate law and thence of modern American property law. Feudal property law has a definite history. The mistake is to read the legal history back into the military sphere.