The period 1100-1500 is characterized by two opposed trends. First, in the wake of the age of migration and invasion, stable cultural traditions emerged that, despite further disruptions, would influence the shape of the world’s civilizations down to the present. Cultures specific to the warrior class would be a major aspect of that trend in many places. Second, even as distinct and stable traditions were emerging, they were also coming into increased contact and interaction, often militarily, with consequences of global significance. In several important respects, these trends were both the culmination of earlier developments and a prelude to later changes.
The foundations of classical culture, the ending of the age of migration, and the rise of the salvation religions combined in this era to create a variety of cultural traditions that were either new or newly elaborated. The larger traditions were not necessarily military, but many of the world’s civilizations contained warrior subcultures that exerted a strong pull on the culture as a whole.
Perhaps the best known and most formally worked out was western European chivalry, the code of conduct for the warrior aristocracy or knightly class. Treatises of a legal nature as well as philosophical tracts and popular literature all helped define proper modes of knightly behavior. Similarly, in Japan, a genre of war tales publicized the standards and ideals of warrior behavior there, creating the foundations of bushido, the “way of the warrior.” A different context of philosophical and theological traditions meant that bushido was less precisely defined than chivalry (much as Buddhism largely lacked the theological hair-splitting of western Christianity), but its wider cultural influence through links to the tea ceremony and other art forms rivaled chivalry’s influence on poetry and art. The Islamic world actually had widespread warrior cultures. The ghazi tradition of frontier warriors for the faith bore some resemblance to the crusading aspects of Christianity. Its appeal was strongest among newly converted peoples, especially of nomadic origin, and among other marginalized elements of the Islamic population, and it was adopted most widely among the Seljuk Turkish peoples of the Middle East. The peculiar slave soldier tradition also existed throughout Islam. These unfree but powerful groups often developed identities and traditions that, at times, as with the Mamluks in Egypt, became dominant at least in government. The caste system in India provided a framework for warrior conduct there, with philosophical foundations going back to the Bhagavad Gita., while warfare continued to define the lifestyle of nomads such as the Mongols. Smaller warrior traditions existed throughout Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Polynesia. The two major civilizations without a distinct warrior tradition were Byzantium, where the transformations of the eleventh century had fostered reliance on groups of foreign mercenaries each with their own traditions, and China, where Confucian civilian domination of culture made soldiering a low-prestige way of life.
Despite their many differences in detail, all warrior cultures tended to share certain basic features. Foremost among these were an emphasis on individual honor expressed through fame, heroism, boasting, and fear of being shamed, and an emphasis on loyalty to the group and its leader—at times, as in Japan, to the point of death.
The potential contradiction between these two imperatives was often a source of creative tension in the traditions. Warrior traditions also leaned (as did most traditions among the elites of agrarian societies) toward conservatism. This expressed itself in the tendency of warrior classes, especially at the upper end, to become closed castes entered only by birth and in the attachment many warrior groups developed to particular weapons or tactics. Horse-archery was the pride of nomads, Mamluks, and Japanese warriors in the Kamakura period. Japanese samurai later developed a cult of the sword, moving them closer to the European chivalrous tradition of hand- to-hand combat with sword and lance, but trickery similar to the feigned flights of nomadic horsemen remained prized among samurai, whereas European knights disdained such tactics (at least in theory). Although in this age such conservatism was simply a characteristic of most warrior cultures, with no one tactical system being dominant, it would prove in some areas and in later centuries a barrier to meeting new challenges effectively.
Such challenges were foreshadowed in this period by the increased interactions of Eurasia’s traditions. These interactions came in three main forms. Crusaders from western Europe came into closer contact with the neighboring Byzantine and Islamic worlds. The creation of the Mongol Empire under Chingiz Khan and his successors brought more of Eurasia under one rule than ever before. And after the economic disruptions of the previous age, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a notable increase in the scope and scale of world trade, linking much of the Old World in a network of commercial routes that survived, even if in altered form, the Mongol conquests. All three paths of interaction had significant military consequences.
The Mongol conquests brought devastation to many areas and facilitated the spread of the Black Death to much of Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century, as armies and travelers carried it from those areas of central Asia where it was endemic in the rodent population. Destruction was especially great in the Islamic heartlands, leading to a shift in the center of power in the Islamic world away from the Fertile Crescent and toward the westward-looking Ottomans. In this, the Mongol conquests reinforced the effect of the Crusades in heightening, at least for a time, the factionalism of the Islamic world. The combination of Mongol rule, Ming reaction, and Black Death mortality that was centered disproportionately in the cities dealt a setback to Chinese scientific culture, and the continuing Mongol threat played a major part in the cessation of Chinese interest in overseas exploration and the subsequent period of self-imposed withdrawal. Mongol rule isolated Russia from its European neighbors even more directly, turning the focus of Muscovite attention eastward for two centuries or more. The Mongols and later Tamerlane contributed to the fall of the Delhi Sultanate in India; the subsequent fragmentation of political power opened the door to the later Mughal invasions. The general stress and disruption of the Mongol conquests may have contributed to a conservative, traditionalist reaction in many parts of Eurasia, including a rise in mysticism. But in Japan and western Europe, where Mongol invasions reached only briefly and without leading to conquests, culture was dominated not by retrospection but by change in response to Mongol invasions and the Black Death, respectively.
In tactical terms, both the Crusades and the Mongol conquests brought into conflict many of the warrior cultures and their tactical systems that had evolved in this period. Of these, the Mongols easily proved the most widely successful, demonstrating again the effectiveness of nomadic horsemen when united and well led. Mongol armies defeated other nomadic cavalry, large Chinese infantry forces, Islamic horsemen and infantry levies, and European knights and townsmen. But part of their success rested on the flexibility of their tradition. They were willing to borrow foreign troops and techniques—most notably, Chinese siege engineers and their machines— and to adapt their methods to the opponent and the terrain. Although some terrains, especially areas with wet tropical climates where diseases killed horses or with insufficient fodder where horses starved, proved beyond the Mongol ability to penetrate effectively, they succeeded more widely than anyone else ever had and adapted more readily than any of their opponents were able to. Not only was their tradition flexible, but strong leadership and discipline subordinated the individualistic element in their warrior culture to the needs of the group, whereas individual interest and glory seeking may have hindered attempts at adaptation elsewhere. The discipline and massed tactics of the Mongols were a revelation to the Japanese in the first invasion there, for example.
There were limits even to Mongol adaptability. They remained essentially steppe horsemen, using foreign troops where their own style of fighting was inappropriate. Elsewhere, the clash of systems reveals the same limits to adaptation. Crusaders, Byzantines, and Turks adjusted their strategies and tactics to the nature of the opposing forces, for instance. But the adjustments worked within and played on the strengths of the troops each tradition had already produced, and they did not include adopting the tactics or weapons of the enemy in most cases, no matter how effective they were. The reason for this was the strength of the warrior cultural traditions each area had developed, reinforced by the close linkage between style of warfare and social system. That is, most tactical systems in this age were, not purely military inventions created for their battlefield effectiveness, but expressions of the ways of life and internal political and economic arrangements of each people. Thus, any significant change was likely to prove economically unfeasible and, more crucially, politically off limits because of the dishonor involved for individual warriors. Such change as did come to some areas reflected deeper social and economic transformations, and it was slow and evolutionary in character. Even responses to new technology took place within the social and cultural structures each tradition had already established and was likely to be most transformative where deeper changes were already under way.
Thus, the invention of gunpowder weapons took place in a Song China undergoing significant economic development and social realignment. Spread to other areas through the united Mongol realm, it was developed further in a western Europe in the process of its own long transformation, pushed by intra-European competition and the social and economic dislocations of the postplague period. It spread thence to the Ottomans, heirs to the mixed traditions of the Near East, and to others, a story for the next part of this book.
The spread of gunpowder along Mongol trade routes also highlights the growing importance of commerce as a path of interaction in these centuries. Important in its own right, the increase in trade also had significant effects on military history. It began to create a new source for the sinews of war—the economic and financial means rulers used to pay for armies. The wealth and produce of land was still fundamental to almost all military forces. But Song China relied heavily on revenues from foreign trade to finance its military establishment, whereas in England around 1300, kings leveraged the wealth of the wool trade through loans from Italian bankers, whose wealth also derived originally from commerce, to pay for expeditions to France. Such examples pointed toward future developments. The rise of commerce also directly affected modes of naval warfare, calling into being ships, sailors, financial incentives, and new forms of partnership between rulers and the merchant marines of their realms. The mercantile empires of Venice and Genoa were forerunners to the global trade empires of the centuries after 1500, again a story for the next part of this book.
It is difficult not to see the period 1100-1500 as a prelude to a coming age of global contact and warfare after 1500. The rise of trade foreshadows the shift to ocean- centered trade routes, the creation of mercantile empires, and the development of new technologies and techniques of naval power. Similarly, the spread of gunpowder along Mongol routes is an ironic preface to the role of gunpowder in the subsequent decline of the nomadic threat.
However, it is equally possible to view this period as a culmination of trends begun centuries earlier. The Mongol conquests were the latest and largest of a longstanding pattern. Likewise, the Crusades and the Islamic jihad that responded to them arose easily from centuries of competition centered on the increasing role of religion in warfare.
Neither view is untrue, but both risk the error of thinking that what did happen had to happen, and both tend to lead away from understanding the period on its own terms. One reason for the emphasis in this commentary on warrior cultures is that those were the terms in which the fighting men of the time saw themselves. Warriors and their families were not faceless tools of large historical movements but men (and women) who constructed their own worlds around values that worked for them. The history of 1100-1500 with its separate traditions, none dominant, in increasing conflict highlights this fact especially well.