The political instability and social transformations of the period 350-950 in western Europe gave rise, in the century between 950 and 1050, to a new aristocratic social order and a new sociomilitary system (see Chapter 7). This system was built around three major elements: the private castle, knights, and mostly urban nonknightly soldiers. Especially at first, the private castle was the key to the system. It stimulated the shift to patrilineal family structures among the aristocracy that lay at the heart of the period’s social reconstruction; it housed the local lords and their followers, who formed the knightly class and dominated politics; and it formed the focus of warfare.
It would seem at first glance that the rise of the private castle reduced western European warfare to localized violence and political futility under incompetent leadership—this used to be a common assessment of feudal warfare among historians. It is a mistaken conclusion, however. Medieval generals were no better or worse than generals in any other age—meaning that some were blunderers, a few were geniuses, and most were competent but not outstanding. They may have had fewer resources to work with in terms of administration and finances, but they made intelligent use of the resources they did command. More fundamentally, however, such a conclusion misleads because the system of castles, knights, and infantry acted as a foundation for two long-term trends whose significance can hardly be overstated.
First, the rise of the system as an aspect of the aristocratic reconstruction began to fuel a steady expansion of the frontiers of this civilization. Second, the system functioned as a foundation for new state building as regional rulers and then kings slowly reasserted some element of control over the elements of the system. Both these developments took place within a particular culture of war that also emerged as an aspect of this sociomilitary system.
The system that had emerged by 1050 proved prone over the next seven centuries and beyond to continuous instability, to competition—both between distinct political units within Europe and among the various elements of the system within the separate polities—and thus to innovation. There would be steady development and elaboration of the military elements of the system, and of the expansionism, state building, and culture of war that the military system fostered. Such evolution—essentially uninterrupted, unlike in much of the rest of Eurasia, by the Mongol scourge—eventually produced results that were increasingly noticeable, in a global context, after 1500, and revolutionary after about 1720. But there was no short moment in those seven centuries between 1050 and 1750 that can be convincingly pinpointed as the revolutionary turning point. Rather, the Military Revolution of early modern Europe is a somewhat illusory aspect of a military evolution whose roots are firmly planted in the medieval world of 1050-1500.