Though the effectiveness of the French armies in the last stages of the war can be exaggerated—English collapse played a large role—the establishment of a permanent core of cavalry companies and artillery units in the king’s pay presaged developments in European warfare generally. These developments, in France and elsewhere, arose out of the effects of the widespread crises that afflicted most of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Demographic crisis was heralded by famines starting in 1315. The eruption of the Black Death into Europe in 1347 resulted in the loss of between a quarter and a third of the population of Europe within three years; periodic outbreaks of plague continued for centuries, and population levels did not begin to grow again for a century. The economic and social disruption caused by such a pandemic was exacerbated by the spreading violence of the Hundred Years War and other conflicts and by the breakdown of public order brought on by governmental overreach in conducting those wars. Meanwhile, the removal of the papacy to Avignon in 1305 and the subsequent schism between 1378 and 1415 eroded the solidarity of religious authority and compounded the church’s inability to cope with the psychological effects of the plague. In short, life was bad, and with rival popes and antipopes excommunicating each other’s followers, the afterlife promised little better.
One consequence of this atmosphere of crisis and breakdown seems to have been some weakening of traditions and an increase in the questioning of established authority. A younger leadership class (one demographic result of the plague) seemed more willing to experiment. The results showed not just in culture, religion, and government but also in military matters. The tendency of the western European sociomilitary system to conflict, competition, and change was accelerated.
The military changes fostered in this period tended not to affect strategy, which remained grounded in time-tested principles and constrained by logistical limitations. Instead, there were changes in the culture of war and in tactics.
Increased social tensions and breakdowns in public order heightened the general levels of violence in this civilization. Cultural boundaries of class and religion stood out in greater relief, boundaries that when crossed in war led to more prominent examples of the sort of butchery Europeans had been capable of for centuries already. This was especially true as more effective infantry forces—generally drawn from classes antagonistic to the knightly aristocracy—served more widely as mercenaries. English archers, Flemish pike- men, and Italian infantry of all sorts were as likely to kill as to capture and ransom noble opponents. The Swiss above all developed a reputation for savagery, neither taking nor giving any quarter on the battlefield. New religious divisions had the same effect; the Hussite Wars, for example, saw massacres on both sides. There was even some breakdown of the codes of behavior between knightly opponents (see the Issues box “Chivalry”).
Tactical flux and experimentation focused on a reassertion of true offensive capabilities by heavy infantry forces and on the beginnings of a steady rise in the importance of missile weapons. The bewildering variety of types of troops characteristic of fifteenth- century warfare led the most creative generals to try many ways of combining the strengths of heavy infantry, missile weapons, and cavalry, as well as the artillery that slowly came to play a small role on the battlefield and a large role in sieges.
The Swiss created the first heavy infantry forces with a consistent offensive capability, even in the face of good cavalry forces, since the heyday of the Roman legions. Organizationally, however, they harked back more to the phalanxes of the Greeks. The cantons of the Swiss valleys raised forces in which neighbor fought next to neighbor in defense of their lands and liberties. They carried halberds—fearsome ax-headed spears that could turn back a cavalry charge and then, in a melee, hook a man-at-arms from his saddle and smash through his plate armor—and pikes. (The proportion of the latter, better for frontal attacks, increased dramatically when the Swiss fought as mercenaries in combination with other types of troops who could cover the pike- men’s more vulnerable flanks.) Above all, they learned to march in time, which gave them the ability to maintain the cohesion of their blocky formations while maneuvering on the battlefield. Swiss pike phalanxes were copied first by German mercenary landsknechts and later by the Spanish. Despite Spanish experiments with sword-and-buckler formations that were effective against pikemen, Swiss-style phalanxes would become the foundation of European infantry forces for several centuries, in combination with missile troops.
The English longbowmen of the Hundred Years War demonstrated the battlefield potential of massed missile fire, and English archers served as mercenaries in Spanish, Italian, and Burgundian armies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the longbow was a difficult weapon to learn to use, and English archers were always in short supply outside of English armies. (In the Wars of the Roses, longbowmen on both sides tended to cancel each other out, leaving the heavy infantry of dismounted men- at-arms to play the decisive role.) So generals turned to increased use of crossbowmen and then to handguns.
Medieval Bombard
An example of an early gunpowder weapon, this piece, known as the Boxted Bombard, was used to fire cannon balls.
Gunpowder was a Chinese invention that made its way across Eurasia during Mongol rule. Europeans appear to have first harnessed the power of the explosive through cannon and handguns; the first pot guns appear in European manuscripts in the 1330s. Heavy, clumsy, slow to fire, quick to clog or misfire, and certainly at first less effective than bows, handguns were, however, no more expensive to make (counting ammunition) and easier to use. Thus, handgunners could eventually be raised in larger numbers than archers. Indeed, some historians have characterized guns as a labor-saving device encouraged—like the printing press and the full-rigged ship—by the high cost of labor in postplague Europe. Gradual improvements in design added to their novel psychological impact, but even by 1500, handgunners were far from a decisive element on any battlefield. Rather, handguns’ effect on tactics was simply to reinforce trends toward better infantry and greater missile fire that had already developed for other reasons, not to initiate change by themselves.
Cannon had an earlier and greater impact on warfare. In the 1420s and 1430s, the Hussites used armored wagon-forts as bases for the battlefield use of small cannon and handguns. By the 1460s, Charles the Bold of Burgundy was bringing considerable numbers of cannon on wheeled carriages to battlefields, though their effect was limited and they were captured in large numbers in Charles’s defeats.
Cannon were still too heavy to be maneuvered in battle, and their rate of fire was even slower than handguns, so their tactical significance remained largely unrealized in this period. In two other areas, however, cannon began to have a huge impact. Mounted on ships, they represented a revolutionary development in naval warfare (see Chapter 15), and in siege work, they created a brief but significant period of flux. The low trajectory of fire cannon could achieve, compared to traditional siege engines, allowed them to quickly collapse high medieval walls. For a time in the fifteenth century, sieges could be shortened dramatically, and extensive rapid conquests seemed possible. But new cannon-resistant fortification designs returned European warfare to its traditional siege-based patterns and political fragmentation in the sixteenth century (see Chapter 16).
With disciplined pikemen added to crossbowmen, longbowmen, handgunners, armored cavalry, and lighter-armed cavalry, a bewildering variety of tactical combinations presented themselves to European generals. The most creative experimented. Charles the Bold of Burgundy (1467-77) combined troops from his realm with mercenaries into a small standing army, training the various types of troops separately and together, and issuing codes of discipline and uniforms. His tactical aim was to combine the firepower of archers and handgunners with heavy infantry, cavalry, and field artillery. If his reach exceeded his grasp (strategically as well as tactically), his army pointed the way to later developments. By the end of the era, Spanish tercios had standardized an effective combination of shot and pike that would dominate European warfare for 150 years.
Chivalry was a knightly ethos or ideal of conduct that fused warrior, aristocratic, and religious values. It arose after 1100 in France and spread rapidly in conjunction with troubadours, romances, and courtly love as a central aspect of elite secular culture. It was an aspect ofthe emergence of knighthood as a defined social class. Chivalry stressed knighthood as a sacred order with its own rituals of initiation (dubbing), its own historical mythology (above all, the whole Arthurian cycle), and its own visual symbolism (heraldry). Christian values and symbols pervaded the chivalric ethos—it was certainly a part of the Christianizing of warrior culture—and the growth of chivalry was linked to crusading. But the knightly class’s self-definition as a sacred order was resisted by the church, which viewed chivalry with ambivalence at best, given chivalry’s glorification of war. But by 1300, chivalry was the dominant cultural theme of aristocratic and even royal courtly culture, and the fourteenth century saw the spread of secular Orders of Chivalry such as Edward III of England’s Knights of the Garter.
Chivalry was linked to war in two related ways. First, it was intimately tied up with the rise and spread of tournaments and with the evolution of the tournament from a free-for-all melee into the individual jousting of modern popular imagery. Tourneying served as the practical initiation into knighthood that dubbing performed symbolically. It allowed knights to prove themselves in near-real combat and perhaps earn the favor of a powerful patron, to make (or lose) their fortune through ransoms, and simply to meet with members of the knightly class from all over Europe. The value of tournaments as training for actual warfare was mixed, however, and declined as individual jousting in the lists replaced the melee.
Second, the central values of chivalry epitomized the contradictions of medieval warfare. On the one hand, chivalry stressed courage expressed through heroic feats of arms, a value that could easily emphasize individual glory at the expense of group cohesion—indeed, this aspect of chivalry long influenced historians’ views of medieval warfare as artless and undisciplined. And it is true that chivalry flourished in the period after 1300 when knights were challenged with increasing effectiveness on the battlefield by masses of disciplined foot soldiers.
On the other hand, the second central value of chivalry was loyalty to one’s lord and companions, a value that did encourage group cohesion. Chivalry survived for as long as it did because it supplied some of the moral glue that held late- medieval armies together. It died out when more effective central governments could apply that glue with drill and regular pay instead.
Modern notions of chivalry can also seriously distort our understanding of its social effects. Chivalry was definitely a class-bound code. Chivalric knights may have shown honor and mercy to other knights of their class (encouraged by the financial rewards of capturing versus killing one’s foes), but such behavior did not extend any further. Chivalric knights could pillage, plunder peasants, and kill infantrymen with the best of marauders. And, despite the modern connotations of the word, chivalry had little to do with behavior toward women except, perhaps, again in a class context. Peasant and merchant women were the victims of violence and rape by chivalrous warriors as often as by nonchivalrous ones. Even treatment of noblewomen was essentially beyond the bounds of chivalric codes, for chivalry was a code for and about knightly warriors. All other types of people—women, merchants, peasants—fell outside its purview and remained objects of contempt and potential violence.