In addition to fueling expansion, the sociomilitary system of castles, knights, and infantry functioned as a foundation for new state building. The effective political units that first emerged in this period were smaller than the Roman successor kingdoms and the overambitious empire of the Carolingians. In fact, Carolingian counties often provided sites of renewed central authority. The process was uneven: Where regional lords failed to control their castellans (governors or wardens of castles or forts), their power remained truncated. But the counts and dukes who did manage their own aristocrats, castellans, and kinsmen effectively built a solid base of regional power. The counts of Anjou and Flanders and the dukes of Normandy (descendants of Vikings settled in the Seine valley around Rouen) led the way in northern France; certain German duchies and the tiny Christian kingdoms of northern Spain followed the model elsewhere. Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou from 980 to around 1030, virtually pioneered a power-building strategy based a network of castles, increasingly constructed in stone, held by loyal castellans. Despite its tenuous beginnings, Anjou was probably by 1050 the most powerful dynastic polity in Europe. Kings, including the dukes of Normandy who became kings of England, then followed in this path.
The almost independent military power of the aristocracy and their knights on the one hand and of towns and their nonknightly forces on the other meant that the leaders of these new-style states could not be all-powerful despots. Indeed, since most were not royal at first, they lacked even the aura of sanctity that attached to anointed Christian kings. Instead, they should be seen more as the leaders of cooperative enterprises. They could not “tame” their aristocracy without making the result profitable to those “tamed,” because the bulk of knightly warriors were attached to the aristocracy. They could not afford to oppress or suppress towns and limit their legal liberties, because they needed urban military forces and economic resources, and townsmen were willing and able to defend their rights and privileges. Such leaders therefore needed to build up networks of loyal kinsmen in key castles and regions and to co-opt their most powerful followers, often through their joint participation in predatory expansion. The spoils of expansion were then parceled out among the participants in the enterprise. The most spectacularly successful of such enterprises was the conquest of England in 1066 by William, Duke of Normandy (see the Highlights box on page 136).
One result of this style of leadership was a political structure built around mutual rights and obligations and constant consultation. The focus of politics was the leader’s court, where the magnates of the state met to bargain, advise, and settle disputes. The magnates were churchmen as well as lay aristocrats, in part because the church was a major landholder. But the moral and administrative resources of rulers were reinforced by their alliance with the church. The violence and constant local warfare that a turbulent aristocracy engaged in, in the absence of strong central authority, had led to the rise of the Peace Movement by about 1000. Initiated by peasants (who always suffered the worst of the violence) and soon backed by churchmen, the Peace of God attempted to put certain people (women, children, churchmen), places (monasteries, churches), and possessions (peasant livestock) beyond the scope of warfare. The Truce of God prohibited fighting on certain days. However, the Peace Movement met with little success, except where effective leaders took up the cause as a way of harnessing the violent energies of their vassals to their own ends. The Peace Movement gave moral force to the ruler who outlawed private warfare among his followers, forcing them to fight for him or not at all. And, in general, whatever increase in order the new leaders could bring to their lands benefited the church. In turn, the church backed the ruler and provided, as virtually the only source of literate men, the manpower of a rudimentary bureaucracy. When the foundations of state building laid down by counts and dukes were taken up by kings, military force remained central to the process and to the shape that politics took.
Another result of this leadership was that European states became firmly rooted in particular localities. The tight relationship between leaders and their followers, aristocratic and urban, embedded in local legal traditions and defended by walls around both knights and urban infantry, made rapid conquest of such states increasingly difficult. In other words, the military system that arose in this period came to guarantee that Europe would remain politically divided, rather than being subject to the rise and fall of vast empires, such as the Carolingian, or such as remained common in other parts of the world. In turn, political division gave to European warfare a context of ongoing competition that would stimulate further evolution of armies and military systems.
The locally rooted and governmentally limited polities that emerged after 1050 took advantage of European-wide demographic and economic growth. Contributing to and fueled by expansion of both internal and external frontiers, the economy benefited from more stable conditions after the cessation of invasions by the Vikings and Magyars. And new technologies such as three-field rotation and the heavy plow contributed to increased agricultural productivity. More agricultural wealth, in turn, stimulated trade, manufacturing, and town growth, all operating on the basis of a growing money economy. And these provided the economic foundations for increasing lay literacy and a twelfth-century cultural flowering that included renewed traditions of Roman law (and the emerging Common Law in England). All these trends gave to rulers greater resources for better governance. The result, between 1100 and 1350, was a steady increase in most states’ administrative and fiscal capabilities, driven by the increasing costs of war in the context of constant competition. In turn, military systems and the armies they produced were transformed as rulers brought increasing resources and control to bear on them.
Manpower and Administration
Increased security and prosperity affected military manpower in two ways. First, the period saw an increase in the legal definition of military obligations. Feudal service—the service owed by the knightly holders of fiefs—came to be defined as part of the land law of fief holding, and in restricted ways: Forty days of service a year was the primary wartime obligation. This was accompanied by the emergence of knighthood as a recognized social class with specific legal rights and privileges. Landed service below the knightly level was defined by sergeantry tenure, which often supported not just nonknightly horsemen but foot soldiers and specialists such as engineers. The limitations of feudal service led some rulers, particularly the kings of England from Henry II on, to experiment with mandatory and universal systems of obligation based on landed wealth: Henry’s Assize of Arms of 1181 established the precedent. Under Edward I a century later, the legal obligation extended down to the level of yeoman farmers through a system of Commissioners of Array, who would muster a county’s eligible men and select a proportion for service, allowing Edward to raise substantial infantry forces of fair quality. More commonly for nonknightly duty throughout most of Europe, town charters came to specify the military and financial duties the townsmen owed the ruler in exchange for the freedom to run their own affairs commercially. There was even some reinvigoration of the truly universal obligation for all free men to muster in defensive emergencies, though peasant levies remained rare and almost always worse than useless.
Second, increased resources led to even more crucial changes in how rulers actually created and maintained armies: There was a steady increase in the use of paid service as governments tapped the growing cash economy. Rulers hired mercenaries, sometimes maintained a small core of professional soldiers in their household establishments, and even came to pay soldiers who nominally owed feudal service, especially once their term of unpaid service was up. Despite steadily rising incomes, however, rulers were always short of money, so plunder, booty, and ransom remained essential attractions to military service for most soldiers, from infantry to knights. In their search for cash to meet the sudden short-term expenses of war, some rulers by the late thirteenth century were turning to loans from merchants and bankers, guaranteed against future tax revenue.
In administrative terms, the king’s role as the war leader meant that administration started with the familia regis, the king’s military household. The familia of the English kings became the central professional core of their military. But elsewhere, a variety of mechanisms prevailed for calling up troops and organizing them on campaign. Local units of administration were not standardized in many areas, nor, as a result, were the small units of an army. Small units were built around aristocratic households (royal familiae in miniature) of varying size or around the administrative divisions in urban militias, while mercenary bands varied according to the ability and success of their leaders and to their employers’ ability to pay.
The limitations of military systems in this period thus remained clear. While the armies grew slowly but steadily in size—from maximum forces of perhaps 5000 in 1050 to 20,000-30,000 around 1300—no state could afford a true standing army, and so there was no large-unit training. Such small-unit and individual training as there was resulted from social ties and culture rather than government; and, naturally, it favored the aristocracy, whose accepted role was fighting. These limitations affected the battlefield capabilities of medieval armies. And yet, the period 1050-1350 witnessed a steady assertion of greater royal control. Legal limits on private warfare were increasingly enforced, and the growing expense of war favored kings, whose incomes, despite their inadequacies, still greatly exceeded those of individual lords. The keys to success for kings in creating and controlling effective military forces were to gain a preponderance in fortifications and to bind together the potentially hostile elements of the system, especially infantry and cavalry forces often drawn from very different social classes.
The Elements of Military Force
Social change and improvements in royal administration, finances, and control affected all three elements of the western European sociomilitary system: castles, knights, and urban nonknightly forces.
The increase in resources was evident in castle building as more and more construction was in stone and designs became more massive and elaborate, culminating in the magnificent and costly Edwardian castles that secured Wales. Concentric designs, in which an outer wall shielded an inner wall, which sometimes shielded a keep, added to the defensive strength of major castles. As on Europe’s frontiers, such defensive strength not only provided a secure base—Henry II’s extensive program of castle building in England proved its worth during two revolts by his eldest son—but could be part of an offensive strategy as well. For example, Henry’s son Richard the Lionhearted made Chateau Gallaird on the Seine the linchpin of his defense of Normandy and his reconquest of the border district between Normandy and the Ile de France. Royal control of castles was exercised by the garrisoning of key castles with royal troops and, much more widely, by royal licensing of private castles. Thus, royal dominance over castella- tion grew significantly but by 1350 was far from complete, while the increased strength of baronial castles meant rebellions were still difficult to crush quickly.
Medieval Knights
This illustration of knights at the Battle of Bouvines shows the development of plate armor, initially to supplement chain mail over vulnerable areas.
The social status of knights became more defined in this period, as noted above. At the same time, the armor of knights became more elaborate as plate armor increasingly replaced chain mail for both the warrior and his horse. (The lance and sword remained the main offensive weapons.) This was partly a reaction to the penetrating power of crossbows, partly a conspicuous display made possible by growing wealth and improved metallurgy, and partly related to the rise of tournaments as a road to fame and wealth—plate was better suited to tournament jousting and helped ensure that melee tournament foes could be captured for ransom rather than accidentally killed. The tactical result of heavier armor was the gradual slowing of cavalry, with direct shock favored at the expense of mobility. This and hardened class lines were not necessarily beneficial in strictly tactical terms: The cavalry forces of 1150 may well have been more effective than those of 1300 in terms of both physical and cultural flexibility. But, in the general absence of strong central authority, imperatives of social status, individual protective advantages, and the lure of ransoms in restricted warfare among the knightly class outweighed tactical logic. Kings, also members of the knightly class, were slow to respond to this trend.
It should also be noted that an increasing percentage of mounted soldiers in medieval armies were not technically knights but sergeants, vavassors, and squires—either the retainers of or men of lower social status than knights proper. The closing of knighthood socially and the increasing costs of knightly service, which discouraged some who qualified from becoming knights, both contributed to this trend. But the arms and tactics of nonknightly cavalry were similar to those of knights, if not quite as elaborate.
Perhaps the most significant transformation in this period occurred among urban infantry forces. The revival of towns and the rise of politically independent communes to govern them led to a re-creation of a Greek-style effective infantry: neighbors bound together by common interests fighting side by side. The process was unevenly spread across the continent (as was urbanization). For example, the size and social dominance of the French knightly class stunted the emergence of confident French urban troops somewhat, though French communal infantry fought well at Bouvines (see the Highlights box). But mercenary service by urban infantry provided foot soldiers even where local forces remained less developed.
Spanish urban militias (which were, in fact, mixed cavalry and infantry) were effective early on because they campaigned often and as offensive forces. But the major Christian advances of the thirteenth century removed many towns from frontier zones, and their martial traditions faded somewhat. Northern Italy and Flanders, the two most urbanized and commercial zones in western Europe, were the most consistent producers of infantry forces. Italian crossbowmen served as mercenaries in many theaters, and the urban spearmen of the Lombard League played a crucial role in defeating Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Legnano in 1176, making a solid defensive stand around the Milanese carrocio, an ox-drawn wagon that carried the city banner and served as a symbol of its communal solidarity, until the league’s cavalry could rally and counterattack. Flemish and Brabancon mercenary infantry served English kings in the twelfth century: Henry II’s force of several thousand Brabancons were fearsome castle crackers, though the king’s success as a strategist and besieger meant that his infantry were never tested in battle. By 1300, Flemish urban forces were acting independently during revolts.
English infantry forces of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (see the section on the Hundred Years War for a tactical discussion) were a bit odder. An unusual level of royal direction of local communities, both urban and shire based, was established during the twelfth century—what constitutional historians have called “self-government at the king’s command.” Furthermore, a less rigid class structure meant that mounted and unmounted soldiers were less separated socially than on the continent. When royal power revived in the 1260s under Edward I after a period of baronial turbulence in the wake of the Magna Carta, Edward developed ways, such as the Commissioners of Array noted above, to tap the military potential of this governmental structure. This allowed the English kings to raise substantial infantry forces that came to include the famous longbowmen. Renewed royal control also enabled the kings to fuse the knightly and nonknightly elements of their armed forces more successfully than elsewhere. In addition, it enabled them to reimpose tactical flexibility on their knights, reflected in their willingness to dismount and fight as infantry— a technique lost during the period of baronial dominance but used regularly by Anglo-Norman knights in the twelfth century.
Infantry arms and armor tended not to become more elaborate as knights’ did, as status was less an issue and economic constraints were tighter. Most infantry wore leather jerkins, and some wore mail shirts and steel helmets. The crossbow and the spear or pike were the main weapons, with the pike gaining in importance and the longbow being adopted by the English in the late thirteenth century.
Campaigning
The patterns of warfare in this period did not change radically from earlier ages. Since control of castles and the landed estates dominated by castles was now the key to power, distribution of booty lost some of its importance as a linchpin of political prestige. But plundering raids still served to damage an opponent’s economic base, to feed and reward a leader’s army, and to threaten fortified positions, so nearly every campaign began with episodes of burning, looting, and pillaging. At times, as in many Scots raids into England, plundering constituted the sum total of a campaign’s activity. But more often, it was part of a larger scheme of attack or defense. The spread of castles made sieges even more frequent than they had been in the early Middle Ages and further reduced the number of battles. Where castles were rare or absent, as in Anglo-Saxon England prior to 1066, battles were more common.
Despite poor roads and no maps to speak of, medieval commanders could show considerable strategic skill and insight in campaign maneuvers. Reconnaissance, scouting, and intelligence gathering were limited but by no means nonexistent. Some armies found each other by accident or by the smoke from burning villages, but, more often, mounted scouts provided at least some sense of where an opponent was. On the grand strategic level, however, the same limitations meant that conception often exceeded execution. For example, John of England planned his reconquest of Normandy in 1214 around a twopronged pincer attack, with his forces moving northeast from Poitou and his imperial allies moving southwest into Flanders from the empire. But time and distance made close coordination of the two thrusts difficult; relying on interior lines, the French under Philip Augustus first stalled John at a siege in Anjou, then moved north and defeated the imperial forces at Bouvines—a rare pitched battle that cemented the prestige of the French monarchy (see the Highlights box “The Battle of Bouvines, 1214”). In short, no medieval European armies achieved the levels of strategic planning, mobility, and coordination displayed by the Mongols.
Sieges Again, most strategy centered on holding or capturing fortified positions, as their possession was the key to territorial domination and political power. As a result, sieges were by far the most common tactical action engaged in by medieval armies—one reason infantry forces usually predominated numerically, even if an army’s spearhead was mounted elites. Siege techniques advanced somewhat but generally failed to keep up with advances in fortification, so that sieges in 1350 probably took longer on average, and were more often settled by starvation or negotiation, than in 1100.
Assault was the most direct method of taking a castle and was especially useful against large castles with small garrisons. Henry II of England’s success as a castle taker was built on rapid marching that brought his crack Brabancon infantry up for a massive, overwhelming assault with scaling ladders before the defense had time to properly organize. Higher curtain walls, stronger keeps, and sites designed to restrict attacks to one path were responses to such tactics. Attacks on the walls themselves used stone-throwing machines—above all, the increasingly effective counterweight trebuchet developed in this period—battering rams, and mining, which was often the most effective method where it could be used. Fire was a deadly tool not just against wooden fortifications but against the interiors of walled towns and against the roofs and interior buildings of stone castles. Techniques associated with more methodical blockades included poisoning or diverting a castle’s water supply and ravaging the surrounding countryside both to deny the supplies to the castle (and feed the besiegers) and to demoralize the garrison.
Battles
Battles were rare, not just because they advanced the strategic aims of armies only indirectly, but because they were recognized by medieval commanders to be risky affairs, far more likely to be decided by chance than campaigning and sieges were. The limited visual range of leaders, the lack of standard command structures, and the somewhat limited abilities of armies that did not drill or train in mass maneuvers—all these made medieval battles particularly difficult to direct, increasing the potential for accidents and chaotic unpredictability. The continuing view that battles’ outcomes were decisions made by God, not men, reflected this. Paradoxically, the importance of leadership was heightened as a morale factor in such circumstances: The army whose leader fell in battle or ran away nearly always collapsed. As a result, the leader was often the object of the most determined individual and group attacks, further reducing his ability to direct the battle as a whole while putting a premium on his personal skill and bravery.
This is not to say that generalship was impossible. Within the limits of the forces at their disposal, many medieval commanders did what they could to direct battles intelligently and learn from experience. Most generalship took place in dispositions for battle: Keeping back a force in reserve was common, and arrangements of cavalry protected behind a line of infantry or archers stationed before or on the flanks of a formation to provide covering fire were common. In 1106, Henry I of England won the battle of Tinchebrai by prearranged generalship. The knights of his and his brother Robert’s armies dismounted to fight on foot in the front lines of the substantial infantry forces on both sides, but Henry concealed a cavalry unit behind a hill. Its charge into the rear of Robert’s line after the fight was joined caused the flight of Robert’s second in command and the rout of Robert’s army.
Their dispositions also indicate that medieval generals usually understood the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different types of troops under their command. Knights used as cavalry provided a mobile strike force best used for a single, decisive attack (as in the Holy Land). Once a charge failed, it was difficult for the cavalry to regroup and charge again. Infantry, especially spearmen, created a solid defensive base. Knights fighting as infantry stiffened a defensive formation with their superior arms, armor, and individual prowess; dismounting also made it harder to run away, stiffening a defense psychologically. Archers could assist in such defense or soften up a target for an attack and help neutralize opposing missile troops.
Some recent scholarship has purported to see an infantry revolution around 1300, in which blocks of pikemen (Flemish, Scottish, and English, mostly) suddenly rose to dominate battlefields. However, this picture is radically overdrawn and misleading. There was no sudden break around 1300: Solid masses of infantry had always been able to turn back cavalry charges if they maintained their cohesion and morale. The slow but steady recovery of the urban and communal bases of effective infantry made forces with such cohesion somewhat more common by 1300—in addition to which, knightly cavalry had become socially, and thus tactically, more rigid and stereotyped by that time. A small rash of widely noted battles in which infantry forces defeated knightly cavalry—notably, Courtrai, Bannockburn, and Crecy—brought this trend to prominence but created no major change in tactical fundamentals. Thus, the picture also overstates the effectiveness of infantry forces after 1300. Though the longbow gave English infantry added defensive range, early-fourteenth-century infantry remained effective almost only in defense. No infantry force was well trained enough to maintain its cohesion in attack, especially against opposing forces with mounted troops available. Only in the next century, when the Swiss reintroduced marching in time to music, did infantry regain a real offensive role on the battlefield, a role lost since Roman times in Europe. Nor was there any change in the culture of war after 1300. If intra-European warfare began to appear more bloody than it had previously, this was because the sources began to take more notice of nonknightly forces and because cultural lines (of class, in this case) perhaps began to be crossed more often than before, with the same results already evident in frontier and crusading warfare for centuries. As in most battles prior to the introduction of effective gunpowder small arms, casualties were always far greater in the losing army, as it was not killing but psychological collapse that decided battles: Men died when they stopped fighting or ran.
The picture also overstates the nature of knightly armies as cavalry forces. Knights dominated as a social class and as elites, not necessarily as cavalry, and commanders did generally recognize the advantages of combined-arms tactics. But using such tactics was also as much a social as a tactical problem, and their successful imposition on an army depended heavily on the power and prestige of the leader. Dismounting knights involved not just making them fight as infantry but making them fight alongside their social inferiors. Even their effective use as cavalry involved cooperation across class lines. That French knights rode down their own archers in the opening stages of the battle of Crecy had as much to do with the French defeat as did the tactical capabilities of the English army. Similarly, English knights blocked their own archers at Bannockburn under the weak Edward II, despite cooperating admirably with them under both his father and his son. Again, it was the ruler who could impose unity on the dynamic and potentially hostile elements of his military forces who stood the greatest chance of victory—and it was only a chance— in medieval battles. England’s precociously effective and unusually cooperative political structure let its kings lead the way in creating socially mixed, tactically flexible and effective armies; France, dominated by a large and truculent knightly class, lagged.
Good generalship was thus, for medieval leaders, a complex problem of tactics, strategy, social policy, and cultural symbolism, learned mostly by experience. Vegetius remained a popular text through this period (see Chapters 4 and 7), but the practical usefulness of his De Re Militari is open to question. Its logistical and strategic advice consisted of common- sense principles. Much of the text is concerned with the systematic drill of infantry forces, a topic that the social structure and governmental limitations of the day rendered opaque to medieval generals. Not until Maurice of Nassau in the late sixteenth century would that crucial aspect of the text be read as a practical guide. Apprenticeship in the field, not book learning, educated medieval commanders in the Art of War.
King John of England launched an ambitious campaign to reconquer Normandy in 1214. While he landed in Poitou and advanced into Anjou, an allied army financed by John and led by Emperor Otto IV, Count Ferdinand of Flanders, and Renaud de Dammartin moved southwest into Flanders. Having stalled John’s advance in June, King Philip Augustus of France left his son Louis in Anjou to keep an eye on the English king and took the bulk of his army against the allies. By July 26, the two armies had actually marched past each other when they became aware of their proximity. The next day, Philip marched back west from Tournai toward Lille, reaching the bridge at Bouvines by late morning. The majority of his army, including all his infantry, was already over the bridge when messengers from the rear guard, which had been sent south to watch the allied army, reported that the allies were approaching rapidly, intent on fighting even though it was a Sunday. Louis reversed his march and began to deploy onto the plain to the east of Bouvines, where his heavy cavalry could be most effective.
The best estimates of the numbers in each army give Philip around 1200 knightly cavalry (and a few hundred more lightly armed sergeants) and perhaps 4000 infantry drawn from the communes of northern France, while the allies had about 1500 cavalry and 5000-6000 infantry, both mercenaries and urban pikemen from the Flemish towns. But the way the battle developed nullified the allied advantage in numbers.
The allies, when they learned how close Philip’s army was, were apparently divided over whether to attack that day. Otto and Renaud urged patience, but more aggressive counsel—driven partly by pride and partly by the hope of catching Philip’s army divided by the bridge—prevailed, and the army set off on a rapid march to the northwest. As they approached Bouvines, the leading allied cavalry, Flemings under Ferdinand, became engaged in a running skirmish with the crossbowmen, light cavalry, and a few knights of the French rear guard. The French resistance and the wooded terrain served to slow the Flemings enough that the rear guard reached Philip intact and deployed as part of what became the French right wing. The pursuit then turned into a running deployment from south to north as the allies brought up their long column and Philip matched them with troops returning over the bridge, extending his line to avoid being flanked. Philip and Otto faced each other in the center of each line, with Philip’s communal infantry, the last of his troops to deploy, stationed in front of him. The French right then opened the battle with an attack on Ferdinand’s Flemings, probably before the allied right was in position and certainly before substantial units of Flemish infantry from Ghent and Bruges were even on the battlefield.
As the largely cavalry action on the southern wing turned the battle slowly in favor of the French, Otto launched a combined infantry and cavalry attack in the center, aiming for Philip. The French infantry gave way to the better-trained German mercenary infantry, a group of which actually unhorsed Philip and briefly put him in danger of losing his life. But a cavalry counterattack rescued the king and then surged on to Otto’s position. The emperor’s horse was mortally wounded and carried him away from the line before collapsing; when Otto remounted, his retainers led him from the field. His retreat eventually led to a general collapse of the allied center. Meanwhile, on the allied right, Renaud de Dammartin with a strong mercenary force and an English contingent under King John’s half-brother William Longsword distinguished themselves in an attack begun perhaps after the center was already giving way. Renaud formed his 700 Brabancon pikemen into a two-rank circle and used this impregnable human fortress as a base from which to launch attacks with his cavalry. But, eventually, reduced to just six mounted retainers and heavily outnumbered as elements of the French right moved to reinforce the left, Renaud was captured during a sally; the French then surrounded the Brabancons with infantry forces, probably including archers, and overwhelmed the fierce mercenaries, who were slaughtered almost to a man.
The rest of the allied army fled; Philip’s forces pursued only for a mile or so before he recalled them to protect the prisoners already taken. The allies lost several hundred knights killed or captured and many more infantry; French losses are unknown but certainly far fewer.
Bouvines, the first battle fought by a Capetian monarch in over a century, secured the conquest of Normandy and made the French monarchy the most prestigious in Europe. It stands as a decisive and tactically fascinating example of medieval combat.
By the mid-fourteenth century, the developments of the previous three centuries had produced stronger states that could call on better administrative techniques and more-sophisticated financial mechanisms in pursuit of their aims. Their aims continued to be dominated by war. Armies therefore tended to get bigger, and there was a slow shift to more- effective infantry forces.
Yet, in another way, the intra-European wars of this period had been remarkably limited in their ambitions and conquests. Small armies, the defensive strength of castles, and theories of just war that favored the defense of rightful claims and kept rulers’ambitions limited combined to keep the damages of warfare relatively confined. This certainly contributed to the impressive growth of population, economic activity, and cultural output that also characterized the period 1050-1350.
Figure 12.2 Europe and the Hundred Years War, 1337-1453
But, by 1300, strains were beginning to show. Population growth slowed as the productive capacity of the land was pushed to its limits. Famine hit in 1315 as the long-term European weather pattern turned colder and wetter. Social tensions rose. And the bigger armies and better control over them that governments could exercise created a temptation to bigger, more destructive, wars. The Hundred Years War, medieval Europe’s largest and longest armed conflict, bridged the traumatic transition from the high to the late Middle Ages and showcased both the advances and continuing weaknesses of Europe’s military systems.