PART TWO
FIVE
Poitiers, October 11, 732
But once the city-states grew and those with infantrymen in heavy armor became stronger, more people shared in government.
—ARISTOTLE, Politics (4.1297b16–24, 28)
HORSE VERSUS FOOT
THE BATTLEFIELD CONFRONTATION between foot soldier and horseman is universal, age-old, and brutal. Cavalrymen have always mercilessly ridden down, trampled, and slain with impunity fleeing infantrymen or unfortunate pockets of poor disorganized skirmishers. Cowardly, in a sense, is this mounted knight’s slaughter of the isolated or terrified foot soldier, whether Pedro de Alvarado’s shameless lancing of unarmed Aztecs, the British 17th Lancers’ butchery of terrified Zulus at Ulundi, or sweeps of Mongol slashers in the villages of Asia Minor. At Omdurman (1898) a young Winston Churchill wrote glowingly about the last charge of the British lancers, but his story is mostly about the systematic spearing of the already defeated and fleeing.
There is also a class bias in war between horse and foot soldier, in which the aristocratic disdain of the peacetime noble is instantaneously realized in the murderous downward stroke of his lance or saber. Or perhaps the natural insolence of the knight derives not entirely from the past cargo of his birth and wealth, but is created at the moment he mounts, and therein realizes a freedom of movement, relative impunity, and the need for a coterie of retainers unlike his brethren below. The same is true of the modern fighter pilot, whose command of the air, speed, and possession of a complex machine make his rocketing and strafing of soldiers seem almost effortless and in a macabre sense therefore nearly deserved— a different task from shooting face-to-face men who are charging into his foxhole.
In defeat, the swift horseman can beat death through flight—those few British who survived the Zulu slaughter at Islandhlwana were almost all mounted. In victory, fresh and clean knights (the war world of the horseman is not the muddy universe of the infantrymen) often appear from nowhere to kill—but only after the tough hand-to-hand of their inferiors on the ground is over. The Locrian cavalry who nearly ran down a fleeing Socrates at the battle of Delium (424 B.C.) did so only after their tough Theban hoplite allies had shattered the Athenian phalanx. More often, horsemen at the onset of battle fear lines of grim infantrymen. Mounted warriors the world over, whether they are born or invited into the cosmos of the horse, have always hated crossbow bolts, a wall of spears, a line of shields, or a spray of bullets—anything that allowed the man without a mount to destroy in seconds the capital, training, equipment, and pride of his mounted superior.
Just as in peace the middling and poor are always more plentiful than the elite, so in Western battle horsemen are rarely as numerous as foot soldiers. Whereas away from the chaotic killing of the battlefield, the wealthy man has the predictable structures of society on his side, in the melee such protocols of class and tradition mean nothing. War, as the antebellum failures Grant and Sherman both learned, is democratic in a way: the carnage of battle is one of the few arenas in which ingenuity, muscle, and courage can still trump privilege, protocols, and prejudices.
No horse will charge a wall of serried pikes. Even the most heavily mailed mounted warrior will be thrown or pulled down from his mount and killed on his back should he try. In a crowded throng of swords and bobbing spear points, where the horseman cannot use his speed to attack or to retreat, even the advantage of his height and the power of the downward angle of his blows are no guarantees of success. Consequently, armies value disciplined heavy infantrymen because when properly organized and deployed they can kill horsemen. Foot soldiers are more nimble. They can dart easily behind the rider, who turns to his rear only with difficulty. The infantryman’s sharp pike or sword blows to the animal’s flanks, rear, legs, and eyes can send the poor horse rearing in milliseconds, throwing his master several feet up into the air, often with a lethal landing for a man in heavy armor. Horses are large targets and, when wounded, can become the enemies, not the servants, of their riders. Foot soldiers have two hands free for fighting, not one on the reins.
Riding a horse is also a dangerous thing in itself and has killed thousands in peacetime. Xenophon reminded his horseless Ten Thousand that they enjoyed intrinsic advantages over mounted Persians: “We are on much surer footing than horsemen; they hang on their horses’ backs, afraid not only of us, but also of falling off” (Anabasis 3.2.19). The masterful equestrian George S. Patton was nearly crippled while galloping at his leisure and at home, only to come through unscathed amid German bullets and shells. Throughout the worst of the fighting in the Civil War, Grant was also immobilized not by enemy guns, but by the bucking of his own mount. Whereas horsemen attack far more quickly, kill with a flick of the lance or saber, and vanish in minutes, infantrymen have the advantage when the killing zone is at last clogged and the fighting face-to-face. It has been unwise, whether at Gaugamela, Agincourt, or Waterloo, for even the best cavalry to charge formations of tough foot soldiers—and Europeans, more than any other culture in the history of civilization, produced infantrymen who wished to meet the enemy shoulder-to-shoulder at close quarters, mounted or not.
THE WALL
At Poitiers the Islamic throng of mounted Berbers and Arabs, generally known by Europeans as Saracens, from the original homeland of Syrian tribesmen in the Middle East, swept against the line of Frankish infantrymen. Charles Martel and his assorted army—spearmen, light infantry, and aristocratic nobles who had ridden to battle—formed up on foot to hold firm for hours until nightfall. The Arabs shot arrows from their mounts and flayed the Franks with sword blows and spear thrusts while wheeling at their flanks and sides; but they neither killed nor dislodged the Europeans.
The meager accounts of the battle of Poitiers that survive are in agreement on one key point: the Islamic invaders rushed repeatedly against the Franks, who were static and arrayed in a protective square of foot soldiers. The defending infantrymen who were blocking the road to Tours methodically beat back the assaults until the attackers withdrew to their camp. The chronicle of the continuator of Isidore relates that the Franks (or rather “the men of Europe”) were “an immovable sea” (104–5). They “stood one close to another” and stiffened like a “wall.” “As a mass of ice, they stood firm together.” Then “with great blows of their swords,” they beat down the Arabs. The image from the contemporary chronicle is clearly one of near motionless foot soldiers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder using their spears and swords to repel repeated charges of horsemen. The Franks’ surprising strength lay in the collective weight of their bodies and their skill in hand-to-hand fighting. In the fourth book of the continuum of the Chronicle of Fredegar, we learn further that Charles Martel “boldly drew his battle line” before the Arabs. Then he “came down upon them like a great man of battle.” Charles routed them, overran their camp, killed their general, Abd ar-Rahman, and “scattered them like stubble.” Clearly, a “wall” of some sort had saved France. Abd ar-Rahman had been stopped by the “many spears” of the Franks.
What was it like in the confused fighting at Poitiers? The Franks were large and physically formidable, well protected with chain-mail shirts or leather jerkins covered with metal scales. Their round shields, like those of the old Greek hoplite, were nearly three feet in diameter, curved, made of heavy hardwood, stoutly constructed with iron fittings, and covered with leather. If a man was strong and skilled enough to handle such a monstrosity, there was little chance that either an arrow or a javelin could penetrate its nearly one-inch thickness. A small conical iron helmet protected the head, ideal for warding off downward strokes from horsemen. Each Frankish infantryman lumbered into battle with nearly seventy pounds of arms and armor, making him as helpless in open skirmishing as he was invulnerable in dense formation.
In past battles with the Romans, lightly clad Germanic tribesmen had either thrown their feared axes from fifteen yards distant or cast their light spears before closing with large double-edged broadswords—weapons that required plenty of room to slash and hack. Battle on the frontier had quickly evolved into a confused affair of individual duels and weapon prowess before successive attacks of Roman cohorts broke barbarian resistance. By the eighth century, however, Frankish infantrymen were less inclined to use their traditional javelins or axes and shunning individual combat for the more classical Roman technique of fighting in unison. At Poitiers the heavily protected Franks were more likely to have used stouter spears for thrusting and short swords that could be stabbed upward while maintaining shields chest-high along a continuous line.
When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop. Unable to penetrate the Frankish lines, most Arabs would wheel around in confusion to shoot arrows, cast javelins, or slash with their long swords. There was no attempt of Islamic cavalrymen to hit the European lines head-on in efforts to blast through the phalanx. Penetration through shock alone was impossible. Instead, the Muslims would ride up in large bodies, slash at the clumsier Franks, shoot arrows, and then ride away as the enemy line advanced, hoping that their own attacks and the irregular movement of the enemy would result in gaps for successive horsemen to exploit.
In response, each Frankish soldier, with shield upraised, would lodge his spear into either the horsemen’s legs or the face and flanks of his mount, then slash and stab with his sword to cut the rider down, all the while smashing his shield—the heavy iron boss in the center was a formidable weapon in itself—against exposed flesh. Gradually advancing en masse, the Franks would then continue to trample and stab fallen riders at their feet—careful to keep close contact with each other at all times. In the dust and confusion of battle, it was not so critical for lines of foot soldiers to see their enemy as to stay in rank while slowly walking and striking out at anything ahead. In contrast, men on horses and fighting as individuals needed clear sight to search for gaps in the enemy line or to target those wounded and disoriented soldiers that might provide a rare inroad to the enemy mass.
It was exhausting for heavy-armed foot soldiers to pound their shields and stab spears against mobile mounted targets. There were also other critical factors in the battle beyond mere questions of endurance. A foot soldier presented a far less inviting target than a mounted warrior at close range: his conical helmet, armored limbs and shoulders, and upraised shield made him nearly invulnerable. Not so the mounted Arabs. Once their horses were wounded or their shins sliced, they might easily fall, and then find themselves on the ground and helpless. The chroniclers leave the impression that Abd ar-Rahman never anticipated that his fast-moving pack of raiders would find themselves opposed by a large mass of heavily armed foot soldiers in a confined valley. Under such conditions the ingredients that made his army a thing of terror in the streets of Poitiers—isolated, galloping horsemen riding down unprotected groups of twos and threes—ensured their slaughter by a waiting line of armored spearmen.
Charles’s men were the first generation of such heavy-armored foot soldiers of western Europe to face Islamic armies. Poitiers would thus inaugurate a near thousand-year struggle between the discipline, strength, and heavy armament of western Europeans and the mobility, numbers, and individual skill of their Islamic enemies. As long as the Franks stayed in rank—and miraculously they seem to have maintained order even in the aftermath of battle rather than pursue the withdrawing Arabs—it was impossible for them to be broken or ridden down. Although contemporary accounts wrongly suggest that little more than a thousand Frankish fell, while killing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, it may well be true that Charles lost only a fraction of his men in repelling an enemy unusually large for the times. Poitiers was, as all cavalry battles, a gory mess, strewn with thousands of wounded and dying horses, abandoned plunder, and dead and wounded Arabs. Few of the wounded were taken prisoner— given their previous record of murder and pillage in Poitiers.
The word Europenses, used by the continuator of Isidore, makes one of its first appearances in historical narrative as a generic noun for Westerners. While the chronicler perhaps meant that Charles’s army was an amalgam of a number of Germanic tribes and Gauls, he may have also intended “Europeans” to emphasize an emerging cultural fault line: men above the Pyrenees still fought in the Roman tradition of heavy infantry, and, for all their internecine killing, were more alike than disparate when facing Islamic armies.
After the day’s fighting, the respective armies, who had already eyed each other for a week before the battle, returned to their camps. The Franks made ready to renew battle at dawn, hoping for more reinforcements and expecting another wave of Arab horsemen to attack their positions. Instead, when they returned to the battlefield at daylight, the entire Arab army had vanished, leaving behind empty tents and booty— and their dead on the battlefield. Dead also was their emir and leader of the invasion, Abd ar-Rahman himself. Plans for the Islamic sack and occupation of nearby Tours—they had looted the Church of St. Hilary at Poitiers in the days before the battle—were abandoned.
Poitiers was only the beginning of a gradual expulsion of Muslims from southern France. Frankish lords in the decade to follow would beat back other raids from Islamic Spain, Charles himself soon defeating Saracen armies at Avignon (737) and Corbière (738). Yet Poitiers signaled the high-water mark of Islamic advance into Europe: Muslim armies never again reached so far north. With the near simultaneous repulse of the Arabs from the harbors of Constantinople in 717, the Islamic wave of the prior century was at last checked on the periphery of Europe.
THE HAMMER
We do not know the precise date of the battle—probably a Saturday in October 732. Some historians continue to call the engagement the battle at Tours, since the actual battle took place somewhere on the old Roman road between there and Poitiers. Later Christian hostility against Charles Martel because of his confiscation of ecclesiastical property encouraged medieval chroniclers to ignore or downplay his achievement; and the greater glory of the subsequent Crusades naturally overshadowed this initial confrontation between Muslim and western European armies. Most of the contemporary and modern mythology that surrounds the battle can easily be dispensed with. The Muslims did not invade with hundreds of thousands of troops—300,000 of which, according to one source, were killed. Just as likely, both forces were about the same size—somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000. Given the Franks’ success in calling out thousands of rural folk to protect their farms and estates, the Europeans may well have outnumbered the invaders. Although Arab losses were much higher than the number of Frankish dead, the attackers were hardly wiped out. Somewhere around 10,000 Arabs were killed at Poitiers.
The near contemporaneous spread of early feudalism probably does not explain the Frankish victory either. Charles’s expropriation of ecclesiastical lands to be distributed to his lords and retainers occurred mostly after the battle. Nor was Charles’s achievement, as sometimes claimed, the result of newly adopted stirrups by his European cavalry. Stirrups, in fact, had appeared in the West decades earlier, but there seems to have been only haphazard appreciation of their true value in western Europe—and then not until much later, between 800 and 1000. In their emphasis on Frankish technological dynamism and sudden organizational innovations to explain the Muslim defeat, most scholars have misunderstood two universal tenets of ancient battle: that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry; and that an army of horsemen far from home needed a sophisticated logistical system if it was to be anything more than a throng of raiders, in constant search of forage and booty.
Abd ar-Rahman’s invasion of 732 was not in itself a systematic attempt to conquer France and to establish Islamic rule north of the Pyrenees. Contemporary chroniclers made much of the prominent role of booty in their accounts of the battle: the Arabs plundered every church and monastery in their path to Poitiers, were burdened before the battle with spoils, and left tents full of loot in the middle of the night to ensure their escape. Both the morale and mobility of the Muslims were probably diminished by the time they arrived at Poitiers, laden as they were with baggage and captives. Had the Muslims won—Poitiers is not much more than two hundred miles from Paris—such raiding would have been continuous and perhaps have led eventually to an Islamic enclave such as had been established two decades earlier in southern Spain.
Permanent Islamic possession of the entirety of France, however, was unlikely, chiefly because the Franks under Charles possessed a well-armed and spirited army of some 30,000 infantrymen, aided by a few thousand heavy cavalrymen. Arabs and their Berber subjects also for much of the latter eighth century in Spain were fighting each other as frequently as they were Europeans, as Syrian tribes with difficulty imposed Islamic culture far to the west on native North Africans. By 915 the Muslims were expelled entirely from the southern border of France. For most of the ninth century, the Franks were more likely to raid Islamic settlements across the Pyrenees than Muslims were to invade France.
Charles won at Poitiers for a variety of reasons. His troops were fighting for their homes, not for plunder far from their bases of operations. The armies were evenly matched, and rough numerical parity is an advantage for the defender. While both sides had chain mail and steel swords adopted from earlier standard Roman designs, the Franks probably used heavier armor and weapons. The Carolingians were careful to prohibit the export of their mail and offensive arms, suggesting a superiority in design and quantity. Charles had found a naturally strong position at Poitiers, in which his phalanx of infantrymen could not be outflanked or surrounded. He kept his ranks together and was apparently determined to fight entirely on the defensive. For his surprising resistance of the mounted charges at Poitiers, Charles became known as “the Hammer” (Martellus)—an allusion to the biblical hammerer, Judas Maccabaeus, whose Israelite armies through divine intervention had smashed the Syrians.
For much of the seventh century the Muslims, with relatively small mounted forces, had swept aside a variety of weak enemies—the Sassanid Persians and overextended Byzantines in Asia, and Visigoths in North Africa and Spain. When Abd ar-Rahman crossed the Pyrenees, however, he encountered an entirely new force in the Franks. French scholars of the battle were largely correct when they pointed out that the Arabs had been successful against similarly nomadic interlopers like the Visigoths and Vandals, who had themselves migrated into North Africa and Spain, but hit a wall against the Frankish rustics who were indigenous to Europe. In their eyes, the battle of Poitiers was a referendum of looters versus soldiers “sédentarisés,” who stayed in one place, owned property, and considered battle more than a raid.
The Franks, descendants of the Germani described by Tacitus in the first century A.D., originally lived in what is now Holland and in eastern Germany around the lower Rhine. They seemed to have migrated in large numbers into nearby Gaul by the fifth century. Scholars do not agree on the origin of the word “Franks”; most associate it with either their famed throwing ax, the francisca, or the old Germanic word freh/frec, meaning “brave” or “wild.” In any case, under Clovis (A.D. 481–511) the Frankish tribes united in the old Roman province of Gaul in what came to be known as the Merovingian monarchy, named after the legendary Frankish chieftain Merovech (Merovaeus), grandfather of Clovis, who had fought against the Huns at Châlons (A.D. 451).
After Clovis’s death a series of dynastic wars among his offspring led to independent kingdoms: Burgundy to the southeast in the valleys of the upper Seine, Rhône, and Loire Rivers; Austrasia to the east across the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine Rivers; and Neustria in the west along the large plains bordering the Atlantic coast. By 700 Gaul was a petty kingdom of warring states until the reign of Charles Martel; nevertheless, the Franks increasingly saw themselves more as a nation than a tribe, more in the classical than in the Germanic tradition. Indeed, the Merovingians sought to trace their Frankish ancestry not back to the dark forests of Germany, but to migrations of mythical Trojans after the conquest of Troy.
Charles Martel was not in direct line of succession to the Merovingian throne, but the bastard son of King Pippin. Despite the absence of a legal claim on the Frankish kingdom—Charles was mayor of the palace, equivalent to being a duke of the Austrasian Franks—he engaged in a lifelong effort to unite these kingdoms. His eventual victories provided the foundation of the much larger, stronger Carolingian dynasty, which under his grandson Charlemagne saw the reunification of central Europe. In eighteen years of uninterrupted civil war, from 714 to 732, Charles consolidated the old tripartite realm of Clovis and then quickly expanded his rule throughout Gaul. Almost every year of the reign of Charles until his death in 741 was spent in warring to unite Gaul or to rid Europe of Islam. In 734 he fought in Burgundy; the next year he furthered his consolidation of Aquitaine. The years 736–41 saw war once more in Burgundy, in Provence, and against the Saxons. This yearly fighting eventually allowed his son Pippin (751–680) to rule over a united Francia officially as the first Carolingian king. It is often forgotten in accounts of Poitiers that when Charles brought his infantrymen to the battlefield, they were hardened veterans from nearly twenty years of constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.
Besides his stunning victory over Abd ar-Rahman at Poitiers, contemporaries record three great accomplishments of Charles, which reflect the continuity of classical approaches to religion and government. The first was to reestablish political control over the church, by allotting more ecclesiastical lands to private landowners, who would in turn serve in Charles’s national army. Second, he attempted to bring more secularization to the church hierarchy through appointments of his own servants and generals to Christian offices. Third, Charles extended Frankish control over most of the old province of Gaul, and was able to tie local lords and barons together into a national army, which systematically defeated Islamic incursions until Gaul was mostly free for a generation from Muslim attackers.
Every free household in Charles’s realm was to provide an adult warrior for a national army, most commonly a heavily armed infantryman who was to fight with similarly armed foot soldiers, with large wooden shields, reinforced leather or chain-mail jerkins, conical metal helmets, broadswords, and either spears, javelins, axes, or combinations of such arms. Strong classical antecedents explain the preponderance of heavily armed foot soldiers in Merovingian armies:
The Merovingian military was greatly influenced by the Roman empire and its institutions, and it owed comparatively little to the Franks, who were only a minority of the population and a small part of the fighting forces. As with many aspects of Merovingian life, the military organization recalls Romania and not Germania. (B. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization,128)
Charles Martel’s most important legacy, besides creating a unified Western state strong enough to withstand the onset of Islam’s advance into southern Europe, was the continuance of the classical tradition of mustering free men into a large infantry force, in which citizens, not slaves or impressed serfs, formed the corps of the army. Charles reestablished the principle that the Frankish monarchy and the church were separate entities, and that ultimately church property and offices were dependent on a central monarch. All this was in antithesis to his adversaries at Poitiers. In theory, for the next thousand years of warring, all Muslim political states were theocracies subservient to the laws of the Koran, while their mostly mounted armies would be built around a corps of servile soldiers. The thousand-year-old cultural fault lines characteristic of the past Greco-Roman wars against the Achaemenids and Sassanids reappeared in the Christian struggle against Islam.
ISLAM ASCENDANT
The prophet Muhammad died exactly one hundred years before the battle of Poitiers. In that century between 632 and 732, a small and rather impotent Arab people arose to conquer the Sassanid Persian Empire, wrest the entire Middle East and much of Asia Minor from the Byzantines, and establish a theocratic rule across North Africa. In the past the Romans had built a wall to protect their province of Syria from the warring tribes of Arabia, thinking that there was little danger from an impoverished and nomadic people of the desert, who had no real settlements, a tiny population, and no systematic logistical capability. Yet by the mid-eighth century, the suddenly ascendant kingdom of the Arabs controlled three continents and an area larger than the old Roman Empire itself.
The Arab conquests were a result of two phenomena: prior contact with Byzantines, from whom they borrowed, looted, and then adapted arms, armor, and some of their military organization; and the weakness of the Persian Sassanids and the barbarian Visigoth successors in the old Roman provinces of Asia and North Africa. It is often forgotten that Islamic dynamism between the eighth and tenth centuries represented a reconquista of territory that had been ruled largely by others from Persia or Europe. Despite nearly seven hundred years of Greek and Roman power in northern Africa, local populations still maintained indigenous religious, linguistic, and cultural practices, and vastly outnumbered Europeans and their own educated Westernized elites. All these Islam swept away. Once the old Asian and African provinces returned to a religion and government of the East, only Europe proper of the old Roman Empire remained uninvaded from the Islamic south and east. Yet conquest of central Europe—“the Great Land” to the Arab chroniclers—was a different matter altogether. It was understandable that Islam—without a tradition of heavy infantry, shock battle, and civic militarism, or the ability to create sophisticated lines of supply and transport—stalled in its attack against the West until the rise of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.
The weakness of other empires, the borrowing of arms and organization from the Byzantines, and the natural role of an Asiatic kingdom in Asia proper still do not entirely explain the miraculous Islamic conquests. Arab armies also won because of the peculiar nature of their newfound religion, which offered the nomad singular incentives to fight. There was to be a novel connection between war and faith, creating a divine culture that might reward with paradise the slaying of the infidel and the looting of Christian cities. Killing and pillaging were now in the proper context, acts of piety.
Second, the onslaught of the Muslims into the Persian, Byzantine, and European realms was considered a natural—or fated—act. The world was no longer bound by national borders or ethnic spheres, but was properly the sole domain of Muhammad—if only his followers were courageous enough to fulfill the Prophet’s visions. Islam was not a static or reflective religion, but a dynamic creed that saw conquest and conversion as prerequisites to world harmony. Islam came at an opportune time for conquest, as the eroding urban centers of the seventh-century Persian and Byzantine Empires were especially vulnerable to large mounted attacks of spirited warriors.
Finally, race, class, and status themselves were secondary to faith. The slave, the poor, and both the darker- and the lighter-skinned foreigner were all welcomed into the army of Muhammad—once they professed fealty to Islam. Abd ar-Rahman’s army that swept into Poitiers was probably composed mostly of Berber converts, supervised by Syrian Arabs, and replete with conquered and converted Spanish Visigoths and Jews. The Arabs were a relatively small tribe, so the mechanics of pacification and control of their newly acquired Islamic domains was impossible without the active participation of conquered peoples themselves.
The contrasts between the lightning-quick rise of Islam and the gradual spread of Christianity are often glossed over, but nevertheless striking. As Edward Gibbon most famously argued, in strictly military terms the thousand-year rise of Christianity after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (500–1500) had weakened Western armies. European military atrophy came not merely from evolving religious schisms and dynastic rivalries, or even from the loss of a uniform Latin language and Roman culture, but in part from the very nature of Christian dogma.
The worship of the rather mystical Jesus, who was not a man of this world—not a soldier, trader, or politician—the message of the Sermon on the Mount, and the call to “render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s” would for a time turn out to be poor incentives for achieving European political unity, religious orthodoxy, and military power. The pacifist traditions of Christianity in the short term stood in stark contrast to Islam, which in theory professed that Muslims should not fight fellow believers, but kill all others until “there is no god but Allah.” As late as the twelfth century, church fathers attempted to deny a proper Christian burial to any knight who had been killed in a joust or tournament; their aim was not merely to save Europeans for the struggle against Islam but also to curb the bloody and barbaric spectacle from the daily experience of Christian society. Turning the other cheek, repugnance for bloody combat, and preparing for the next world in the present one were antithetical to most traditional classical notions of civic militarism, patriotism, and the zeal for martial recognition from the state. The message of the New Testament was much different from the Iliad, Aeneid—or Koran.
The army of the Arabs was never designed to engage in a systematic collision of heavy infantry, followed by possession of territory and the installation of permanent garrisons, in the manner of Western imperialism of Macedonian, Roman, and Byzantine militaries. The Islamic army—itself largely mounted—counted on swiftness, mobility, and terror, with the assurance that ideology rather than ramparts would ensure lasting victories. Mounted sorties and ambushes, not decisive battle between phalanxes of heavy infantry, marked the Muslim way of war:
The make-up of Islamic armies was very different from those of the West. Horsemen of all kinds were predominant and infantry played a limited role. . . . There was much reliance on ambush, partly because this was an obvious tactic for light cavalry. But the really great contrast between East and West was in the approach to battle. Everywhere, close-quarter confrontation was decisive and the Western tradition was to bring that about as quickly as possible. In the East, light cavalry could outflank and unhinge formations by rapid movements. (J. France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 212–13)
As long as the Arabs faced either dying empires like the Sassanids or the tribal Visigoths in northern Africa and Spain, success was guaranteed. None of those powers could provide large enough numbers of heavily armed infantrymen to bring the Muslims to close quarters; after the disastrous battle of Manzikert (1071), even the Byzantines were to learn that they no longer had the manpower or the logistical support to defeat Islam in Asia.
The breakneck spread of Islam was astounding. By 634, a mere two years after Muhammad’s death, Muslim armies were well engaged in the conquest of Persia. Syria fell in 636; Jerusalem was captured in 638. Alexandria was stormed in 641, opening the entire Visigothic realm to the west. Forty years later Muslims were at the gates of Constantinople itself, and from 673 to 677 nearly succeeded in capturing the city. By 681 the Arabs neared the Atlantic, formalizing Islam’s incorporation of the old kingdoms of the Berbers. Carthage was taken for good in 698 and their last queen, Kahina, captured, her head sent to the caliph at Damascus. Only seventeen miles now separated Islam from Europe proper. By 715 the Visigoths had been conquered in Spain, and periodic forays into southern France were commonplace. In 718 Arabs had crossed the Pyrenees in large numbers and occupied Narbonne, killing all the adult male inhabitants and selling the women and children into slavery. By 720 they were freely raiding in Aquitane. The large expedition of 732, led by Abd ar-Rahman, the governor of Moorish Spain, had already captured Poitiers and was advancing to sack Tours when it was intercepted by Charles Martel between the villages of Vieux-Poitiers and Moussais-la-Bataille on the road to Orléans.
For the rest of the ninth through the tenth centuries, the war between East and West would break out in northern Spain, southern Italy, Sicily, and the other larger islands of the Mediterranean, as the old mare nostrum of the Roman Empire became the new line of battle between two entirely antithetical cultures. The presence of Muslim ships on the Mediterranean and near constant wars with the Byzantines in the Adriatic and Aegean meant that western and eastern Europe were to be permanently separated. The idea of a unification of the old empire was abandoned for good, leaving a growing rivalry in Europe between a monolithic, imperial, and Orthodox Christian East and the fragmented and warring states of the Roman Catholic West.
Yet war by horsemen had only so many advantages. Mounted armies were difficult to transport by sea; they required enormous amounts of forage and grazing land and were hard to bring over mountain passes in great numbers. When Muslims reached the valleys of Spain and eastern Europe, the landscape was not that of the steppes or desert, and so did not favor large sweeps of flanking cavalry. In addition, Middle Eastern forces were never numerous enough to create the foundations of a national army; instead, they would become dependent on slave soldiers— Mameluks in the Middle East and later Janissaries among the Ottomans. Once the Islamic tide lapped on the shore of western Europe and the Byzantine Empire, its advance began to be halted. A static line of defense was established, as civilization in the West—in Spain, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean—slowly returned to the offensive with infantry of mostly freemen.
DARK AGES?
With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the latter fifth century A.D. the rule of empire vanished in northern Europe, and with it for a time an integrated market economy in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Asia. The absence of the legions to provide security in the countryside against brigands and invaders at first led to ever greater disruption of farmland, while massive fortifications, not the courage of soldiers in open battle, were seen as the more reliable defense of the cities. The lack of central taxation meant that aqueducts, terraces, bridges, and irrigation canals were not properly maintained and often abandoned, leading not merely to the loss of potable water in the cities but also to a decline in agricultural productivity as valleys silted up and terraced land eroded.
The erosion of central imperial government and the collapse of urban culture also meant an end to large standing armies. Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Britain, in the absence of authority from Rome, were convulsed by a series of invasions and migrations by Vandals, Goths, Lombards, Huns, Franks, and Germans. Yet the victorious newcomers by the sixth and seventh centuries were no longer nomadic, but often had settled permanently in Roman territory, gradually converted to Christianity, learned some Latin, and carved out petty kingdoms guided loosely by the old Roman bureaucratic and legal tradition. If the new armies of western Europe were tiny and fragmented in comparison to Rome and often ensconced in fortified castles and towns, they nonetheless continued to rely on levies of heavy infantrymen fighting in columns, not tribal swarming, when it became necessary to engage in decisive battles.
The final collapse of Rome also brought a population decline in western Europe; and economic activity was lethargic for much of the so-called Dark Ages between 500 and 800. Christianity began to encroach on public and private lands, requiring enormous acreages to support monasteries, churches, and nunneries, whose clergy in the strict economic sense were not especially productive. If the estates of the old Roman patricians were sometimes unwisely expropriated for horse raising by the aristocracy of Franks and Lombards, then similarly the church also used the harvests from scarce and precious farmland to support a vast bureaucracy and an ambitious building program. By the end of the fifth century A.D., no single kingdom from Lombard Italy to Visigoth Spain could muster an army the size of the Roman force that had been annihilated at Cannae seven hundred years earlier.
Yet the fall of Rome often spread, rather than destroyed outright, classical civilization, as the fragments of empire slowly recovered and kept alive the cultural core of the old West. Writing continued. Even literature and scientific investigation were never completely lost. Latin remained the universal script of government, religion, and law from Italy to the North Sea. The Dark Ages (the term originally referred to the dearth of written knowledge that survived about the era) were characterized not so much by the chaos of an empire fallen as by the new diffusion of much of classical culture—language, architecture, military practices, religion, and economic expertise—into northern Europe, especially Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Scandinavia.
Islam had spread in the south and east by the creation of an entirely new theocratic state; in contrast, the remnants of classical culture, fused with Christianity, advanced throughout western and northern Europe due to the collapse of the Roman Empire. “Despite the resulting turmoil and destruction,” Henry Pirenne pointed out in regard to the supposed end of Roman civilization in northern Europe during the fifth century A.D., “no new principles made their appearance either in the economic or social order, nor in the linguistic situation, nor in the existing institutions. What civilization survived was Mediterranean” (Mohammed and Charlemagne, 284).
The sixth and seventh centuries actually saw improvements. Throughout the latter decades of the Roman Empire, there had been a gradual displacement of agrarians, concentrations of huge amounts of wealth, and constant class strife in the cities. The continuance of classical culture in ancient Gaul in the sixth through eight centuries, even under radically different and troubled material conditions, often meant that local government was more responsive to rural problems than had been Rome in its last two centuries. Under the Merovingians and Carolingians there nowhere reappeared the vast numbers of slaves that had characterized Roman civilization (by the fourth century A.D. in certain parts of the empire nearly a quarter of the population had been servile). Though Roman wealth and nationhood were gone for a time from the West, the deadly military tradition of classical antiquity was nevertheless kept alive. Most of the great military discoveries in both weaponry and tactics to come in the next millennium would originate in Europe—the continuing dividends of the Western approach to the dissemination of empirical data, the scientific method, and free inquiry.
“Greek fire” emerged at Byzantium somewhere around 675. Although the exact ingredients and their ratios of mixture remain unknown to this day, the torrent of flame that was shot out of Byzantine galleys was apparently a potent fusion of naphtha, sulfur, petroleum, and quicklime that could not be extinguished by water—a nearly unquenchable toxic spume that could incinerate enemy ships in seconds. Equally ingenious as the chemistry of Greek fire was its method of delivery, which involved a keen knowledge of pumps, pressurization, and mechanical engineering. A sealed container was heated from below with fuel and bellows and injected with forced air from a pump. Then the compressed mixture was forced out another outlet into a long bronze tube. The jellied mass was ignited at the end of the barrel, resulting in a sea of continuous flame spurting out from this ancient flamethrower. Ships with such fiery contraptions allowed the small Byzantine navy mastery of the eastern Mediterranean and saved Constantinople itself on occasion—none more dramatic than Leo III’s incineration of the Islamic armada of the caliph Sulaymān in 717 in waters surrounding the capital.
Controversy surrounds the exact origins of the stirrup—it may have been originally of Asian design—but by A.D. 1000 most Western cavalrymen were employing new saddles equipped with stirrups, even if they learned of their use via the Arabs, who had copied the original designs either from the Byzantines or by trading with the Orient in the early seventh century. Under the western European kingdoms, the stirrup was envisioned not merely as an aid to horse mastery but as integral to the emergence of a new lance-bearing knight, who could for the first time absorb the shock of spearing a fixed target on the gallop without being thrown from his mount. While such lancers could never break true infantry, small corps could easily ride down isolated groups of foot soldiers during both attack and retreat. The stirrup meant not that western European militaries were dominated by heavy lancers, but that their mostly infantry armies, at key moments in the battle—when gaps appeared in enemy lines or during the rout—could send out small corps of deadly horsemen to slaughter with impunity light infantrymen and poorly organized foot soldiers.
The crossbow—in use throughout Europe by 850—was a smaller-sized derivative of the classical “belly-bow,” through substitution of a handheld crank for large torsion cables and sprockets. Scholars cite the crossbow’s deficiencies in comparison with either the later English long-bow or the Eastern composite bow, both of which had greater range and rates of fire. The crossbow, however, required far less training to use than either, did not tire the archer to the same degree as hand-pulled bows, and its smaller all-metal bolts had greater penetrating power at short ranges. Crossbow bolts alone were able to slice through the heavy chain mail of the knight, and meant that a relatively poor man without much training could kill both an aristocratic horseman and his armored mount in seconds for the cost of a tiny metal projectile. Consequently, the church often issued edicts against its use—a doomed prospect of technological repression with no heritage in the West—and finally retreated to the position that crossbows should be outlawed in all intramural wars between Christians.
Siege engines underwent constant improvement. After 1180, vast catapults were powered by counterbalances rather than torsion alone. Such trebuchets often had ten-ton counterweights and could throw stones of three hundred pounds well over one hundred yards, exceeding the delivery weight of the old Roman traction catapults fivefold, while maintaining nearly the same range. In turn, fortifications were built entirely of stone and to heights unimagined by classical engineers, replete with intricate towers, crenellations, and interior keeps. It was not merely that European castles and walls were larger and stouter than those in Africa and the Near East, they were more numerous as well, due to improvements in the cutting, transportation, and lifting of stone. Plate armor, common by 1250, was also a European specialty, ensuring that most European knights and infantrymen were far better protected than their Islamic opponents. When gunpowder was introduced from the Chinese in the fourteenth century, Europe alone was able to craft dependable and heavy cannon—Constantinople fell in 1453 through the efforts of Western-fabricated artillery—and handheld matchlock weapons in any great number. So, too, fully rigged, multisailed ships were common in European waters by 1430, and were superior to any vessels in either the Ottoman or the Chinese navies.
Key to this continuing Western ability to craft good weapons, along with fluid and innovative tactical doctrine, was the embrace of published military research, which married theory with field experience to offer pragmatic advice to commanders in the field. The late Roman handbooks of Frontinus, and to a greater extent Vegetius, were copied even throughout the Dark Ages and became a bible of sorts to many western European warlords. Rabanus Maurus, the ninth-century archbishop of Mainz, published an annotated De re militari specifically to improve Frankish warfare. For the next four hundred years, adaptations and translations of Vegetius appeared throughout Europe by Alfonso X (1252–84), Bono Gimaboni (1250), and Jean de Meung (1284).
European siegecraft itself was unmatched, precisely because it followed in the past tradition of classical poliorkētika (the arts of “polis enclosing”). Manuals such as the Mappae Clavicula instructed besiegers in the use of engines and incendiary devices. The emperors Maurice (Ars militaris)and Leo VI (Tactica) outlined Byzantine infantry and naval tactics in preparing manuals for their generals and admirals to keep the Mediterranean Sea and its harbors free from Arab fleets. In contrast, Islamic writing on war was rarely abstract or theoretical—or even practical—but more holistic and philosophical, and largely concerned itself with the proper rules and conduct of the jihad.
Among the early Franks this need to write about war and to publish manuals about its practice were in direct emulation of Roman and Greek thinkers. Military practice did not operate in a vacuum, but was closely connected to the presence of an educated elite familiar with classical ideas of military organization and weaponry. Under the Carolingians, a systematic approach was undertaken to the preservation of classical manuscripts, along with efforts to assure education in the Greco-Roman tradition:
Though defined by religion, Europe was also a community of scholars who read and wrote the same Latin language and who rescued a great part of the legacy of antiquity from irretrievable loss. In the ninth and tenth centuries, schoolmasters devised a new curriculum of studies based in part on the classics that they had rediscovered. In doing so they laid the foundations of educational practices for centuries. (P. Riché, The Carolingians, 361)
In addition, the historiographic tradition of Greece and Rome continued in the Christian East and West, especially the Hellenic and Roman propensities of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus to see history largely as the story of war and politics. Thus, Gregory of Tours (534–94, History of the Franks), Procopius (born ca. 500, History of the Wars of Justinian), Isidore of Seville (History of the Goths, written 624), and Venerable Bede (672–735, Ecclesiastical History of England ) all provided anthropological detail about various tribes as part of larger exegeses of intercultural conquests and defeats. The works of hundreds of other lesser-known chroniclers and compilers circulated throughout Europe, the sheer number of titles unmatched by anything published elsewhere.
There were numerous early Islamic historians, many of whom were candid and remarkably critical, but few saw history as really existing before the era of the Prophet (thus the maxim “Islam cancels all that was before it”). And the parameters of inquiry were limited by the Koran, whose literary and historical primacy tolerated no competition from mere mortals. Contrary to classical historiography—there seems to be little evidence of any early Arabic translation of the major Greek historians— lapses in morality, not tactical blunders or structural flaws, were cited as reasons for Islamic defeats. After Poitiers, Arab chroniclers, as would be true of Ottoman observers in the aftermath of Lepanto, attributed the Muslim slaughter to their own wickedness and impiety that had brought on the wrath of Allah.
The horse-drawn, iron-tipped plow first emerged in Europe, allowing farmland to be broken up more quickly and deeply than with the old wooden blades drawn by oxen. The ability to farm more efficiently gave Westerners greater food and opportunity than their counterparts to the south and east. By the end of the twelfth century, windmills, which were unlike anything in the Near East or Asia, appeared in England and northern Europe. With a rotating horizontal axis and a system of gears, such machines could mill wheat at rates unimagined either in classical antiquity or the contemporary non-West. Improved water wheels—more than 5,000 in eleventh-century England alone—were used not only to grind grain but to manufacture paper, cloth, and metal. The result was that Western armies were able to campaign farther from home—both because they could take greater amounts of supplies with them and because farmers could go on campaigns for longer periods. Historians often remark on the unruliness of Crusader armies, constant bickering in command, horrendous camp conditions, and the occasional imbecility of their tactics, forgetting that the transportation and supply of thousands of soldiers to the other side of the Mediterranean was a feat of logistical genius unmatched by Islamic armies of the day.
Science and technology alone did not save the smaller and more fragmented western European armies from their adversaries. The classical traditions of infantry organization and landed musters were kept alive as well. Military command and discipline followed Roman tradition, and so naturally nomenclature remained Greek and Latin. Byzantine emperors, in the manner of Macedonian lords, addressed their soldiers as systratiōtai— “comrades-in-arms.” Generals, as in classical Greece, remained stratēgoiand soldiersstratiōtai, while in the West free soldiers were milites, bothpedites (foot soldiers) and equites (knights). Citizens continued to be recruited under legal and published codes of conduct—the so-called “capitularies”—with explicit rights and responsibilities.
Charles Martel’s army was not as disciplined or as large as a Roman consular army, but the manner in which its heavily armed spearmen and swordsmen were mustered, attacked on foot, and kept in rank was consistent with the classical tradition. Campaigns required the approval of assemblies, and rulers were subject to audit after battle.
By the end of the eighth century two seemingly insurmountable obstacles that had once weakened the old Roman imperial levies of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D.—the failure of Roman citizens to serve in their own armies, and the religious strictures against civic militarism and wars of conquest by the early Christian church—were beginning to erode. Augustine had composed his City of God after the sack of Rome in A.D. 410 to associate divine punishment with the sins of Romans. Even earlier, a few Christian emperors, like Gratian, had dismantled public statues and commemoration of military victory as somehow antithetical to Christ’s message of peace and forgiveness. Yet by early medieval times the earlier pacifism of the Roman church fathers like Tertullian (Ad martyres, De corona militis), Origen (Exhortatio ad martyrium, De Principiis), and Lactantius (De mortibus persecutorum) was often ignored, as the creed of the Old Testament and its idea of wars against the unbelievers regained primacy over the message of the Gospels. Thomas Aquinas, for example, could outline the conditions of “just” Christian wars, in which the cause of the conflict could make war a moral Christian enterprise. Christianity would never exhibit the martial fervor of Islam, but during the Dark Ages it more or less curbed its early pacifist pretenses and its distance from the affairs of worldly politicians. The military of Joshua and Samson, not the loving remonstrations of Jesus, was invoked to keep Islam at bay.
Franks, Lombards, Goths, and Vandals may have been tribal, and their armies were poorly organized; yet such “barbarians” nevertheless shared a general idea that as freemen of their community they were obligated to fight—and free to profit from the booty of their enemies. In that sense of civic militarism, they were more reminiscent of the old classical armies of a republican past than had been the hired imperial legionaries on Rome’s defensive frontier:
The massive reliance on citizen-soldiers in the West lowered the demands on the central government for expenditures to support the military. . . . Indeed, the flexibility of the West in building on developments that took place during the later Roman Empire resulted in immense military strengths, which, for example, proved their worth in the success for two centuries of the crusader states against overwhelming odds. (B. Bachrach, “Early Medieval Europe,” in K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein, eds., War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, 294)
The legions had crumbled not because of organizational weaknesses, technological backwardness, or even problems of command and discipline, but because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization. Such spirited warriors the barbarians had, and when they absorbed the blueprint of Roman militarism, a number of effective local Western armies arose—as the Muslims learned at Poitiers.
INFANTRY, PROPERTY, AND CITIZENSHIP
A Mounted Monopoly?
Charles Martel and his Carolingian successors—son Pippin III and grandson Charlemagne—would craft the foundations of the medieval feudal state, with which by A.D. 1000 we traditionally associate knights, chivalry, and huge mailed warhorses. The usual view is that between the final collapse of Rome (A.D. 500) and the widespread use of gunpowder (1400), the mounted knight came to dominate the battlefields of Europe. In fact, in most of the larger battles during this millennium, infantrymen continued to outnumber cavalry by at least five to one.
Even in the latter Middle Ages at the three greatest battles of the Hundred Years War—Crécy (1346), the second great battle at Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415)—most of the mounted combatants, who were a minority of both the English and the French armies, dismounted and fought on foot. Cortés’s fearsome knights, who tore apart the mass of swarming Aztecs, accounted for less than 10 percent of the conquistadors in Mexico. The infantry wall of Charles Martel at Poitiers was no aberration—Frankish, Swiss, and Byzantine infantrymen all made up the unheralded core of their respective medieval armies.
While it is true that medieval art glorified the horseman as an aristocratic knight, that the church sought to implant in him a sense of moral responsibility for the preservation of Christian society, and that most monarchies drew their natural support from landowning mounted elites, horsemen were never numerous, economical, or versatile enough in Europe to ensure success in major engagements—especially in battles that might involve up to 20,000 or 30,000 combatants. There is not a single major Carolingian engagement in which infantrymen were not the dominant force on the battlefield. The role of feudalism and the romance of the early mounted warrior must be put in a proper cultural perspective:
Carolingian feudalism, despite the emphasis it laid on horse-owning, should not be equated with the military system of the nomads. The cultivated lands of western Europe could support a horse population of no large size, and the feudal armies that answered the summons to arms resembled a horse people’s horde in no way at all. The difference derived in great measure from the distinctive military culture of the Teutonic tribes, which encouraged face-to-face fighting with edged weapons, a tradition reinforced by their encounters with the Roman armies before they had lost their legionary training. This culture had been preserved when the Western warriors took it horseback, and it was reinforced by the potentialities of the equipment they wore and the weapons they used from the saddle. (J. Keegan, History of Warfare, 285)
Charles Martel’s army at the battle at Poitiers was the continuation of a 1,400-year Western tradition beginning in Greece and Rome that put a premium on landed infantry. The reasons for this original Western chauvinism concerning heavily armed and well-protected foot soldiers again were unique to Europe and arose largely from Western economic, political, social, and military realities that had been established centuries earlier in Greece and survived the collapse of Rome. To field effective infantry— meaning the ability to stand in the face of mounted assaults and to charge and overrun lines of archers and missile troops—there were three prerequisites in the ancient and medieval worlds. First, landscape: the best infantrymen were rooted country folk and the product of a geography largely composed of valleys and lowlands situated between mountain ranges that favored intensive farming. In contrast, mountainous terrain is the haunt of herdsmen, who with slings, bows, and javelins master the arts of ambush and guarding routes of transit—the various hill tribes, for example, of central Asia Minor who attacked Xenophon’s Ten Thousand on their retreat to the Black Sea. On the other hand, steppes or uninterrupted plains favor nomadic and tribal horsemen, ensuring plentiful grazing lands and, more important, the room for vast cavalry sweeps that might outflank and envelop columns of foot soldiers—as the Romans, for example, learned in Parthia. Europe, however, from the Balkans to the British Isles, was largely a continent of good farmland and valleys, cut off by mountains and rivers, that was ideal for the operations of heavy infantrymen: flat ground for decisive charges of cumbersome foot soldiers, with nearby hills and mountains to prevent mounted flank attack.
Second, the best infantrymen of the preindustrial age were often a product of centralized rather than tribal government. City-states and republics had the power to muster the great majority of the population, instill some training in marching in time and staying in rank, and eliminate or at least unify private barons and elite clans. True, the end of the Roman Empire destroyed for centuries the classical idea of a vast nation-in-arms and a strong central political authority enrolling, training, paying, and retiring 250,000 uniformly armed legionaries throughout the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, on a vastly reduced scale, local communities in the West and an isolated Byzantium attempted to keep alive the old classical traditions of organizing tenants and small landowners through large-scale levies to unite in organized defense of their homeland.
Third, to produce a potent and numerous infantry arm, there also had to be the pretense of egalitarianism, if not consensual government— or at least the absence of widespread serfdom. Successful infantrymen needed enough capital to provide adequate weapons. They required some sort of political voice, or a reciprocal relationship with the more wealthy, to ensure a sense of limited autonomy. Ideally, the best foot soldiers either owned or enjoyed the use of farmland, and thus fought with a sense of territorial chauvinism—the idea that they battled shoulder-to-shoulder in protection of real property that they felt was their own.
In the Dark and Middle Ages the landscape of Europe did not change from classical times. While the central control of Rome had vanished and the population of autonomous yeomen had been largely lost as early as the third century A.D., nonetheless western Europe maintained a considerable population of viable rural folk, who found in their local lord and regional king a semblance of the old system of mustering and fighting with like kind. If they are sometimes called the “dependent free,” the foot soldiers of Europe between A.D. 600 and 1000 were not servile and were far better off in a political sense than Eastern serfs. All duties and obligations were predicated on certain rights and privileges. In contrast, the great Byzantine general Belisarius (A.D. 500–65) was not far off the mark when he described Eastern infantry in Persia as undisciplined rustics who were forced into the army solely to undermine walls, plunder corpses, and wait on real soldiers. There was nothing like either the Mameluks or Janissaries in western Europe.
The Origins of Heavy Infantry
Whence arose this Western tradition of infantry supremacy that survived even the collapse of Rome? In Greece and not earlier. As we have seen earlier in discussion of their invention of shock battle, the creation of the Hellenic polis (800–600 B.C.) came as a result of a new class of small, free property owners, who as hoplite heavily armed infantrymen formed up in the phalanx and engaged in shock battles over property disputes. Their emergence marked the decline of aristocratic knights who had enjoyed privilege for centuries. The emergence of infantrymen was a revolutionary development unseen either in the Greeks’ own Mycenaean past or in the contemporary world of the eastern Mediterranean.
As cultivated ground began to be more equitably distributed and farmed more intensively, grazing land for horses was in short supply. Even when forage was found, horses made no sense economically. Ten acres devoted to grain, trees, and vines could feed a family of five or six, rather than provide a mount for a single wealthy man. By the time of Charles Martel a horse cost as much as twenty cattle. For the amount of forage consumed, oxen were also more efficient behind the plow; and, of course, cattle provided beef. In contrast, many Europeans had cultural taboos about the eating of horseflesh. In Greek mythology horses like Arion, Pegasus, and the talking steeds in the Iliad were venerated and near human in their loyalty, courage, and intelligence. It made no farming or cultural sense to raise horses in the settled plains and small communities of early Greece.
Once citizenship was extended to middling farmers in Greece of the eighth through sixth centuries B.C., the defense of the community rested in the hands of property owners, who voted when and where to fight— usually brief, decisive battles of colliding heavy infantrymen to ensure clear results and allow the farmer combatants to return home quickly to their harvests. Among yeomen hoplites, horsemanship brought no prestige, but rather suspicion of political intrigue by wealthy rightists who might overthrow popular government. Men with horses were felt to have somehow diverted resources from the community for their own indulgence. Militarily, the spears of the serried ranks of the phalanxes made the charges of horsemen—without stirrups and on small ponies—impotent. Just as it was cheaper to “grow” a family rather than a horse on a small plot of ground, so it was more economical for a state to train a farmer with a spear to stay in rank than a mounted grandee to remain on his horse while fighting.
The result was that until Alexander the Great, four centuries of Hellenic culture pilloried cavalrymen. At Sparta Xenophon claimed that only the “weakest in strength and the least eager for glory” mounted horses (Hellenica 6.4.11). That dismissive view of cavalry was commonplace throughout classical Greece; the orator Lysias, for example, bragged to the assembly that his client, the wealthy aristocratic Mantitheos, at a battle at the Haliartos River (395 B.C.) chose to face danger as a hoplite, rather than serve “in safety” as a horseman (16.13). Alexander realized that this landed monopoly of the Greek city-states made no military sense when war evolved beyond the small valleys of the mainland and involved a variety of Asian enemies—archers, light-armed troops, and variously armed horsemen—in the large plains and hill country of the East. He also had antipathy, not allegiance, to agrarianism. His aristocratic Macedonian Companions, like the Thessalian light cavalrymen who accompanied him, were horse lords, living on vast estates on the expansive plains of northern Greece. All were the products of monarchy, not consensual government.
There is an entire corpus of passages in ancient literature that reflects this ideal that small farms grew good infantrymen, while vast estates produced only a few elite horsemen: the proper role of farmland is to nurture families of infantry, not to lie idle or to rear horses. Aristotle lamented that by his own time in the latter fourth century B.C., the territory around Sparta was no longer inhabited by male Spartiate hoplite households—although, he says, that country might have supported “thirty thousand hoplites” (Politics2.1270a31). In his own era at the end of the first century A.D., the biographer Plutarch deplored the wide-scale depopulation of the Greek countryside, noting that the entire country could scarcely field “three thousand hoplites,” roughly the size of the contingent Megara alone fielded at the battle of Plataea (Moralia 414A). Similarly, the historian Theopompus, in commenting on the elite nature of a squadron of Philip’s Companion Cavalry, remarked that although only eight hundred in number, they possessed the equivalent income of “not less than ten-thousand Greek owners of the best and most productive land” (Fragments of Greek History 115, 225). Theopompus’s point is that intensively worked farmland resulted in an abundance of hoplite infantry, and that this was a political, cultural, and military ideal—in contrast to vast estates to the north that supported horsemen, not yeomen soldiers, and so nurtured autocracy.
Despite the mastery of the mounted Companions, Philip and Alexander learned more from the Greeks than they from him, since the core of the royal army of Macedonia lay with the spears of phalangites and hypaspists—no more than 20 percent of Alexander’s military was mounted. Alexander conquered Persia through the combination of horse and pikeman; but that legacy was either quickly forgotten by the Successors or felt to be irrelevant in subsequent wars against other Macedonian dynasts. Between 323 and 31 B.C. the Hellenistic East was convulsed by near constant war, which was usually decided by the collision of professionally trained pikemen, who alone could break other infantrymen and rid the battlefield of the enemy. Alexander himself, who shredded the ranks of Persian infantry, might have had far less success charging head-on into the phalangites of his own Successor generals.
Rome for nearly a thousand years put its faith in infantry, a tradition that grew up among the Italian yeomen of the fourth and third centuries B.C. who protected republican government through their own service in the legions. Small numbers of horsemen were recruited into the Roman military as auxiliaries from northern European tribes and North African nomadic peoples. Such infantry traditions were enduring. The accompanying failure to develop a highly trained heavy cavalry contingent of the caliber of Alexander’s Companions cost Rome on a number of occasions, from Crassus’s slaughter in Parthia (53 B.C.) to the triumph of the Goths over Valerian at Adrianople (A.D. 378). Yet again the history of Greece and Rome remains the story of a millennium of military superiority over their enemies, a dominance that was the result of a primacy in landed infantry.
Classical Continuity in the Dark and Middle Ages
Did the fall of Rome mean a return to the conditions of the first European Dark Ages (1100–800 B.C.) before the polis when local barons, stock raising, and mounted warriors ruled in a larger chaotic and depopulated Greek landscape? Not entirely, for the traditions of Rome, as we have seen, were not forgotten, and the second European Dark Ages between A.D. 500 and 1000 were never so dim as after the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. In the disruption of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., infantry remained the mainstay of the Byzantines—who fought with a ratio of four men on foot to every one on horseback—even when they eventually developed shock mailed cavalrymen on larger horses with stirrups.
The Franks, Normans, and Byzantines all took pride in the fearsome charges of their elite and rather small contingents of heavy-mailed knights, which in some sense represented the Western idea of armored, pike-bearing foot soldiers transferred to horseback. Western cavalrymen, rider for rider, in general were better armed, heavier, and more deadly lancers than their more nimble and mobile Islamic counterparts, and reflected just this European preference for decisive shock battles. Yet during the larger battles in Europe and among the Crusader armies in the Holy Land, such fearsome cavalry charges spelled disaster, unless there was a much larger contingent of infantrymen to close with the enemy. Usually, infantry, not horsemen, determined the outcome of Carolingian conflict.
Even with the adoption of stirrups in western Europe sometime between A.D. 800 and 1000, most heavily armed knights could not charge well-trained infantry who stood firm with locked shields and spears. Moreover, not all knights were vastly wealthy. Often cadres of horsemen from more modest landed properties were used to dismount and fight as foot soldiers. Horses per se did not always equate to true shock cavalry, but served as taxis of sorts that transported heavy infantrymen to the fighting. The point is not that Europe fielded few good cavalrymen, but that mounted troops were always outnumbered by infantry. The glamour and mythology of the Dark and Middle Ages were with mounted knights. In small battles and raids, mailed horsemen held an enormous advantage over unprotected peasants. While Europe never possessed the requisite grazing land to produce a true horse culture—nomadic horsemen might string along five to ten ponies per mounted warrior—its rich estates were often sufficient to raise enough animals to create a small cadre of mounted knights, who as petty lords helped to create the system of vassalage and with it early medieval feudalism. The absence of a central state also meant that systematic and uniform drill and training were often difficult for foot soldiers. Contemporary folk wisdom suggested that in battle one hundred well-trained armored knights could be worth one thousand poorly organized peasant foot soldiers.
Yet around the atolls of aristocratic knights, there remained a sea of rustics who made up the majority of all European armies in times of great crisis. Most were small landholders, who either as vassals gave percentages of their harvest to wealthy lords for protection or themselves enjoyed grants of property and thus were given the use of land by aristocrats in exchange for military service. While the foot soldiers of Charles Martel’s army lacked the full concept of citizenship found in classical Greece and republican Rome, such middling farmers were nevertheless recognized as freemen, with rights and responsibilities protected by local aristocrats. They were not of the same status as the mercenaries, herdsmen, serfs, or outright slaves who constituted a great part of the later Berber, Mongol, Arab, and Ottoman armies that invaded Europe. Such men (the landwehr) were the backbone of early Carolingian armed forces, especially during the decline of cities and commerce after the disintegration of the Roman Empire:
As the economic structure became predominantly agrarian, military service tended to be closely associated with landowning. Each free household owed the service of a man with complete arms and equipment, and this military obligation became hereditary. The Frankish army thus became a levy of free men serving at the king’s will, under the command of his local representative. (J. Beeler, Warfare in Feudal Europe, 730–1200, 9)
The increasing use of the stirrup, which allowed horsemen to charge scattered and poorly trained foot soldiers, and the need to combat Islamic mobile cavalry, led to the greater role of aristocratic knights by the tenth century. Yet even then, the idea of entire armies of heavy horsemen sweeping all before them is once again largely a myth.
The Value of Infantrymen
Is it legitimate to value one branch of the military over another? Who can ascertain whether archers, cavalry, artillery, or marines are greater assets on the battlefield, given the vagaries of landscape, weather, and strategic goals? In every great army—Alexander’s, Napoleon’s, Wellington’s— horsemen, infantrymen, and missile troops acted in concert; without such symmetry in battle, all great captains would have found success illusory. Cavalry could always charge and retreat at greater speeds than infantry, and imparted an element of psychological terror lacking among even the fiercest infantrymen. Because the vast majority of Western adversaries were mounted and extremely mobile, it was critical that Europeans developed counterforces of good horse soldiers. Victories were often left incomplete without dogged pursuit by mounted warriors.
That being said, permanent victory in war, ancient and modern, is impossible without crack foot soldiers, who alone can approach the enemy face-to-face, cut him down or blast him apart, occupy the battlefield, and take physical possession of the land under dispute. Their ancient weapons—swords and spears—are cheap and more deadly than missiles. Foot soldiers, not horsemen, were critical to conducting sieges and defending walls—far more likely the locus of medieval warring than the open battlefield. Infantry, in addition, was far more versatile in difficult terrain, whether areas of dense woods or high hills, or in those areas without fertile croplands that offered little pastureland and forage.
Horsemen and archers—like modern brigades of mobile armor, artillery, and airpower—could aid, but in themselves not replace infantry troops. Ultimately, war is a question of economics, in which the options of all states are confined by their ability to produce goods and services; thus every armed force calibrates the greatest military power for the least cost. Armies in the Dark Ages and medieval era, like their classical predecessors, were not immune from such constraints, and so learned quickly that man for man, infantry could be provided for at a tenth of the expense of mounted troops.
With the onset of gunpowder and handheld firearms between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, infantry entered an especially deadly phase; shooters, not just pikemen, could decimate the ranks of mounted lancers as horses became increasingly vulnerable. Yet the spread of firearms throughout the globe did not everywhere automatically result in the creation of disciplined corps of gun-toting soldiers. The Ottomans never mastered the art of volley firing while in rank. The Janissaries shot as they stabbed—as heroic individuals in individual combat. In similar fashion, mounted warriors of North Africa shot muskets largely from horses and camels in swift raids and plundering expeditions. Natives in Africa and the New World saw firearms as improved javelins or arrows and were also ignorant of the possibility of volley firing and sequential shooting. Nor did the introduction of handheld firearms create effective armies in China and Japan.
Only in Europe was the art of loading, firing, and reloading in unison mastered; and only in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the other central states of the West was there a prior infantry tradition of the Dark and Middle Ages that had survived from classical antiquity and molded the prior shock tactics of the Germanic tribes into ordered face-to-face confrontations. The gunpowder age saw an ascendant Europe precisely because firearms—mass-produced and easy to use by individuals—were best employed by preexisting disciplined columns and lines of infantrymen. In the age before the repeating and automatic rifle, shooters with harquebuses and muskets in rank with feet on the ground offered more concentrated, accurate, and rapid fire than those who used their weapons while either mounted or acting solitarily and as skirmishers. In some sense, Renaissance guns in Europe were seen as the natural successors to medieval pikes.
POITIERS AND BEYOND
A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is no more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. (E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 7)
So wrote Edward Gibbon—perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, or at least intrigued with the possibility of a non-Christian Oxford—of the possible consequences of a Frankish defeat at Poitiers. Most of the renowned historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Gibbon, saw Poitiers as a landmark battle that marked the high tide of the Muslim advance into Europe. Leopold von Ranke felt that Poitiers was the turning point of “one of the most important epochs in the history of the world, the commencement of the eighth century, when on the one side Mohammedanism threatened to overspread Italy and Gaul” (History of the Reformation, vol. 1, 5). Edward Creasy included Poitiers in his select group of “decisive battles of the world” and likewise felt that it marked the salvation of Europe: “The progress of civilization, and the development of the nationalities and governments of modern Europe, from that time forth went forward in a not uninterrupted, but ultimately certain career” (The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, 167). Hans Delbrück, the great German military historian, said of Poitiers that there was “no more important battle in world history” (The Barbarian Invasions, 441).
More skeptical observers like Sir Charles Oman and J. F. C. Fuller were not so convinced that Western civilization had been saved outright at Poitiers, but they were impressed that the battle marked the emergence of a new consensus that would later on save Europe: spirited Frankish infantrymen of a new Carolingian culture, flanked by their mounted lords, at last might offer a bulwark in the West against both Muslim and Viking raiders. As Oman put it, “For the future we hear of Frankish invasions of Spain, not of Saracen invasions of Gaul” (The Dark Ages, 476–918,299).
Recent scholars have suggested either that Poitiers—so poorly recorded in contemporary sources—was a mere raid and thus a “construct” of Western mythmaking or that a Muslim victory might have been preferable to continued Frankish dominance. What is clear is that Poitiers marked a general continuance of the successful Western defense of Europe. Flush from the victory at Poitiers, Charles Martel went on to clear southern France from Islamic attackers for decades, unify the warring kingdoms into the foundations of the Carolingian empire, and ensure ready and reliable troops from local estates.
The spread of direct Roman political control of Asia and northern Africa (100 B.C. to A.D. 400) had been a five-hundred-year aberration— the imposition of Roman law, custom, language, and political organization of millions on conquered peoples to the south and east, while simultaneously conducting a slow assimilation of millions more barbarian peoples to the north. With the inevitable retrenchment of the empire in the fifth century A.D., it was clear that classicism was not dead after all, that it had been remarkably successful in conquering the minds of its own purported conquerors: the core of Europe would retain Roman and Christian precedents and thus once more begin to extend its influence beyond its own borders:
Not only did the conversion of Poland, Hungary and the Scandinavian kingdoms enlarge the zone of influence of Latin Christendom to the north and east, but Islam fell back in Spain, through the progress of the Reconquista, and in the Mediterranean, with the annexation of Sicily and the establishment of Latin states in the Middle East. At the same time, in the wake of a movement that was not only military but also economic and demographic, a new Germany was created beyond the Elbe. Facing their enemies, neighbours or rivals, the warriors of the West marked up a string of successes. This expansion is all the more remarkable because it occurred at a time of increasing fragmentation of power. (P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, 30)
The story of Byzantium is a thousand-year resistance to Persian and Islamic encroachment. The fall of Constantinople was seen as a horrific event in Christendom, but for centuries Byzantine ingenuity and discipline had destroyed a succession of much larger Islamic armies. The capital fell a thousand years after Rome’s collapse—and only after it was largely isolated from and abandoned by the West. The reign of Charlemagne (768–814) saw the final expulsion of most Muslims from France and Italy and the creation of a central European state that spread its influence throughout France, Germany, and Scandinavia and into northern Spain.
By 1096 a fragmented western Europe was strong enough to send thousands of soldiers across the sea to the Middle East. In a series of three great Crusades between 1096 and 1189, Europeans occupied Jerusalem and carved out Western enclaves in the heart of Islam. Throughout the Middle Ages it was Europe, not the Middle East, that was more secure from foreign assault. It was impossible for any Muslim army, unlike the Crusaders, to transport large armies by sea to storm the heartland of Europe. Arab armadas had long ago learned in the seventh and eighth centuries at the height of Islamic power that it was unfeasible to take nearby Constantinople.
Such European resiliency offers the proper explanation for the great advance of Western power in the New World, Asia, and Africa after 1500. Europe’s renewed strength against the Other in the age of gunpowder was facilitated by the gold of the New World, the mass employment of firearms, and new designs of military architecture. Yet the proper task of the historian is not simply to chart the course for this amazing upsurge in European influence, but to ask why the “Military Revolution” took place in Europe and not elsewhere. The answer is that throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, European military traditions founded in classical antiquity were kept alive and improved upon in a variety of bloody wars against Islamic armies, Viking raiders, Mongols, and northern barbarian tribes. The main components of the Western military tradition of freedom, decisive battle, civic militarism, rationalism, vibrant markets, discipline, dissent, and free critique were not wiped out by the fall of Rome. Instead, they formed the basis of a succession of Merovingian, Carolingian, French, Italian, Dutch, Swiss, German, English, and Spanish militaries that continued the military tradition of classical antiquity.
Key to this indefatigability was the ancient and medieval emphasis on foot soldiers, and especially the idea of free property owners, rather than slaves or serfs, serving as heavily armed infantrymen. Once firearms came on the scene, Europe far more easily than other cultures was able to convert ranks of spearmen and pikemen to harquebusiers, who fired as they had stabbed—in unison, on command, shoulder-to-shoulder, and in rank. Cortés in Mexico City and the Christians at Lepanto were successful largely because they were not the products of a nomadic horse people, tribal society, or even theocratic autocracy, but drew their heritage from tough foot soldiers of settled small valleys and rural communities—the type of men who formed a veritable wall of ice at Poitiers and so beat Abd ar-Rahman back.