A crucial consequence of the emergence of this sociomilitary system was the establishment of a European culture of war that would remain fairly consistent for centuries. A set of values and attitudes evolved by the early twelfth century in relation to killing in warfare, conquest and colonization, and the legitimacy of authority.
Medieval warfare has often been portrayed as a relatively bloodless, restrained affair. The wars of knights between 1000 and 1300 were supposedly almost ritualized. At the least, battles were a matter of capturing opponents for ransom rather than killing. This picture is often drawn to emphasize the dramatic changes that supposedly overtook European warfare in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. But this picture is inaccurate. Certainly, there were battles between largely knightly armies that resulted in casualty rates of under ten in an army of several hundred. But such battles make up only a fraction of medieval warfare. Much medieval warfare was vicious and bloody after 1050 (as it had been before), and especially so when conflict crossed cultural divisions.
Warfare that crossed lines of ethnicity, class, and culture as broadly conceived, especially linguistic boundaries and boundaries of socioeconomic structure, saw plenty of killing. Knights who fought urban infantry rarely gave or received quarter, for example, either in formal battles or in communal riots and rebellions. This was only partly because infantrymen weren’t worth ransoming. A real class antagonism, rooted in differing and not always compatible worldviews, fueled this hostility.
Similarly, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans all fought bloody battles for control of England; English and Welsh did not capture but killed each other; and Germans and Slavs fought deadly wars. The claim that European warfare was relatively restrained would certainly have surprised the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the wake of the city’s capture by the forces of the First Crusade; knee-deep rivers of blood (according to Christian chroniclers) testified to the contrary. Perhaps the only change after 1300 was that conflict across such lines (especially social class) became more frequent. The culture of killing was already well established.
As the above examples show, the culture of killing intersected strongly with the culture of conquest and colonization fostered by the expansionism of this era. Expansion brought Europeans of the castles, knights, and towns culture into increased contact with peoples who spoke alien languages, had unrecognizable political structures and religions, and often supported themselves in ways antithetical to their aggressive neighbors—pastoralism or seminomadic agriculture versus the intensive cereal farming and urban trade of the European core. Such differences fostered visions of an uncivilized Other beyond the borders of Christendom, a world of savages who did not play by the rules and who therefore merited death if they refused to submit to civilized authority and convert to Christianity. Like the culture of killing, these colonial attitudes would also have a long history: The inhabitants of Jerusalem would not have been surprised at the fate of the inhabitants of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan at the hands of the Spaniards centuries later.
Further, the focus of the sociomilitary system on warrior-aristocrats affected to some extent the broader culture of this civilization. The ideology of crusade, the end result of the gradual fusing of warrior and Christian ideologies that took place throughout the period 350-1050, is one example of this, especially considering that the crusading ethos came to be applied with increasing frequency to conflicts between Christian forces as well as to external wars. French kings, for instance, could draw on crusadelike imagery in suppressing rebellious Flemings in the fourteenth century. The Wars of Religion were as much children of the Crusades as the conquest of the Americas was; conflict over the Reformation showed the European culture of war at work at almost every social level.
Another example of the dominance of warrior values in this civilization was the cementing of military success as a conveyor of legitimacy to rulers. This too had a religious element in the notion that the outcome of battles reflected God’s judgment. It is evident in the iconography rulers often used to portray themselves on their coins and seals: on horseback, in full armor, sword raised in triumph-—all a sort of shorthand for “might makes right.” It is even reflected in the symbolism the church used to explain the legitimacy of political powers. The Two Swords theory divided authority between the spiritual sword of the church and the temporal sword of kings. After 1050, the church would attempt to assert the superiority of the spiritual sword, but, in a sense, it had already lost the symbolic battle. This was a culture with warrior values at its heart. The contrast with Chinese civilization, for example, is instructive. Whereas Chinese conquerors took up the image of the scholar-king in a tradition that looked back to Confucius, European religious leaders called for conquering crusades in a tradition that looked back to Alexander the Great.