Military equipment and tactical organization in pre-modern western civilization underwent fundamental changes between the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium bce and the revival of Europe in the seventeenth century of the Common Era. During this four and a half millennium span, the art of warfare reached a sophisticated level, with commanders fully realizing the tactical capabilities of shock and missile combat in large battlefield situations, situations where perhaps 150,000 men took the field at the same time along a narrow front. On a battlefield where the force-to-space ratio was so high, the ability to orchestrate tens of thousands of infantry and cavalry became necessary for ultimate victory. Modern principles of war, such as the primacy of the offensive, mass and economy of force, were understood by ancient, classical, medieval and early modern generals, and applied on battlefields throughout the period under study.
Warfare in the Medieval World is the second volume of a two-volume study. It covers the development of warfare from the rise of Byzantium in the early medieval period through to the Thirty Years War (c.500–1648 ce), following volume 1, Warfare in the Ancient World, which surveyed the evolution of warfare on the battlefields of the Near East and Europe between the beginning of the Bronze Age and the fall of the Western Roman Empire (c.3000 bce – c.500 ce). Through an exploration of fifty-four select battlefield engagements (thirty-three battles in volume two and twenty-one battles in volume one), it is this author’s intention to survey the changing tactical relationships between the four weapon systems – heavy and light infantry, and heavy and light cavalry – focusing on how shock and missile combat evolved on the battlefields of the Near East and Europe.
Overview of Warfare in the Medieval World
In eastern Europe the torch of Roman imperialism was passed to Constantinople for another thousand years. The Byzantine Empire (337–1453) enjoyed its greatest territorial expansion in the century after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Emperor Justinian shored up the eastern frontiers and briefly won back Italy and parts of north Africa and Spain, but, after his death in 565, later emperors would lose these lands to the expansion of Islam in the seventh century. Faced with a mounted and highly mobile foe, Byzantine emperors increased the percentage of cavalry to infantry in their armies, then fused heavy and light cavalry into one system by giving bows to some of their heavily armoured shock cavalry. In Byzantine warfare exclusive cavalry engagements often took place (Dara, Tricameron, Manzikert) while combined arms also continued at a high level, with light infantry taking an important place beside cavalry in military operations, as seen at Taginae and Casilinum.
But centuries of defensive action against assaults from the Bulgars, Muslims and western Europeans took their toll, forcing the Byzantine emperors to rely increasingly on mercenaries. By the eleventh century Byzantium faced a new and dangerous threat from the east, the Seljuk Turks, who fought from horseback as lancers and archers. The Byzantine loss at the battle of Manzikert in 1071 robbed the Eastern Roman Empire of its prime conscription lands and precipitated a call for help to the west. In 1095 the First Crusade was born.
In western Europe the fall of the Western Roman Empire ushered in the early Middle Ages (c.500–c.1000), a time when victorious Germanic successor kingdoms converted to Catholicism and consolidated politically, with the Franks in Gaul emerging as the most powerful new kingdom in western Europe. Frankish rulers faced new threats as Muslim raiders crossed the Pyrenees and pillaged France. One such Muslim expeditionary force was soundly defeated in 732 at Tours by Charles Martel, laying the foundations for the Carolingian dynasty that would produce Charlemagne, the first holy Roman emperor in the West.
But at Charlemagne’s death in 814, Europe was besieged by a new wave of invasions that lasted over 200 years. Muslim, Magyar and Viking raiders and invaders struck the whole of Christian Europe. From their bases in north Africa, the Muslims attacked the southern coastline of Europe, while Magyar horsemen swept in from the east and settled in what is now Hungary, raiding deep into central and western Europe until their defeat in 955 at the hands of the German king Otto I at Lechfeld. Of these new invasions, the Viking attacks were the most devastating and widespread. Masters of ship-to-ship battles such as the battle of Nisa, these fierce Scandinavian warriors rowed up the rivers and estuaries of Europe in their longships, raiding and then invading territories as far west as Ireland and as far east as Russia, creating cultural and martial synthesis along the way.
In response to this ‘Second Age of Invasions’, western European monarchies developed an art of war unique in world history in its reliance on heavy cavalry as the dominant weapon system. Needing the kind of strategic mobility only cavalry could provide, western European commanders initiated a gradual transformation in the composition of medieval armies. Consequently, heavy cavalry replaced infantry as the decisive arm. The mounted knight and lancer, with his stabilizing stirrup, expensive panoply and well-trained horse, gradually became the centrepiece of a combined-arms army where all other weapon systems were subordinated to heavy cavalry.
The decentralization of political authority in western Europe also had a profound effect on the character of medieval warfare. Insufficient resources meant large-scale battles such as those seen in the classical period did not take place, and when battle was joined, the participating armies rarely included more than a few thousand men. In these limited wars of attrition, battle was often avoided because the outcome was too unpredictable. Instead, medieval warfare revolved around the construction and control of castles and fortified towns or the destruction of the enemy’s economic resources. In fact, during this ‘Age of Castles’, warfare consisted of perhaps 1 per cent battles and 99 per cent sieges.
The Normans mastered this strategy of combining castle building and pitched battles in campaigns in Italy and England. In Italy, Duke Robert Guiscard of Apulia and his successors carved out a Norman state in southern Italy and Sicily, then set their sights on expanding, at the expense of Byzantium, in Albania. At Durazzo, Guiscard defeated an impressive Byzantine infantry host with his heavy cavalry supported by light infantry. In England in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson successfully defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, but proved unable to master William, duke of Normandy, at Hastings. The duke used these same sophisticated combined-arms tactics to secure the throne as William I. William’s victory initiated an Anglo-Norman dynasty and hundreds of years of soured Anglo-French relations. His successors would add to his conquests, bringing Wales under English hegemony and making war with Ireland and Scotland.
Through the high Middle Ages (c.1000–c.1300), heavy cavalry lancers ruled the battlefields of western Europe, giving rise to the ideals of chivalry and reinforcing the social position of the knightly class. Here, cavalry engagements, supported by infantry, became the norm, as illustrated by the French victory over an English-sponsored imperialist army at the battle of Bouvines in 1214. But the tactical realities faced by the mounted aristocracy in the Near East and the British Isles showed the weaknesses of heavy cavalry. In the Holy Land, Latin knights faced a sophisticated Islamic combined-arms system and learned first-hand at Dorylaeum, Hattin and Arsuf the dangers in confronting composite-bow-wielding infantry and horse archers in open terrain. Similar lessons were learned in the Reconquista in Spain at the battles of Sagrajas in 1086 and Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
As western European crusaders were learning new tactical lessons in the Levant, eastern and central Europe was brutally attacked by the most successful wave of steppe warriors, the Mongols. Under the charismatic leadership of Genghis Khan, Mongol light and heavy cavalry swept out of Central Asia and conquered northern China and the Khwarizmian Empire in Transoxiana. After Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, his successors continued his conquests westward, pushing first into Russia, destroying the Kievan kingdom, and then into Poland and Hungary. The Mongols, who relied exclusively on cavalry, perfected shock and missile combat from horseback and vanquished numerically larger Christian armies at Liegnitz and Sajo River. European heavy cavalry tactics, always confrontational, fell prey to the traditional steppe-warrior game of luring an attacker with a retreat. Islamic armies suffered similar fates. But the Mamluks in Egypt fought fire with fire, using their own heavy and light cavalry arms to finally blunt Mongol westward expansion at Ain Jalut in 1260.
In the late Middle Ages (c.1300–c.1500) the 300-year domination of the mounted knight was challenged by the return of a more balanced combined-arms tactical mix, one which featured light infantry archers and heavy infantry battle squares against heavy cavalry. The Anglo-Norman campaigns against the Welsh, and later against the Scottish, showed the potential of light infantry archers against enemy infantry formations, and, more ominously, against heavy cavalry. King Edward I’s victory at Falkirk was similar to the earlier battles of Hastings and Durazzo, where heavy cavalry and archers worked together against dense heavy-infantry positions. But the unusual aspect of the battle of Falkirk is in the steadfastness of the Scottish infantry formations, a harbinger of things to come. One example of heavy infantry’s ability to meet and defeat enemy heavy cavalry and light infantry attacks can be seen in the later campaigns of the Anglo-Scottish Wars, most notably the Scottish victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.
Nineteen years later, the roles were reversed. The victory of the English monarch Edward III against the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333 introduced the English defensive tactical system to medieval warfare, a system that relied heavily on infantry. Later English monarchs would perfect this tactical system in the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) and help break the back of the dominance of heavy cavalry. On the continent, two English kings, Edward III and Henry V, were victorious against the French during this war, utilizing light infantry archers and dismounted heavy cavalry in a defensive posture against the repeated charges of French lancers, with great success at Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415.
Meanwhile, in the Swiss Alps, farmer-militiamen were training with specially designed polearms to fight in close order against Habsburg and Burgundian heavy cavalry, winning a string of decisive victories in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries atMorgarten, Laupen, Sempach, Murten andNancy. The success of the Swiss battle square brought first employment as mercenaries in foreign armies, then emulation by enemies. By the close of the medieval period, heavy infantry battle squares and light infantry archers were common features in European armies. By the beginning of the early modern period (c.1500–c.1750), the four weapon systems were operating together again in a new combined-arms synthesis.
The addition of well-articulated heavy infantry, based on the Swiss model, to the armies of France, Germany and Italy in the sixteenth century marks the return of a balanced combined-arms tactical system to western Europe. But the integration of this superior heavy infantry into European doctrine coincided with the introduction of reliable hand-held gunpowder technologies. The sixteenth century witnessed the gradual replacement of longbows and crossbows with the muzzle-loading arquebus and musket. Although archers gave way to musketeers, pikemen persisted as a tactical entity until the invention of the ring bayonet in the eighteenth century fused heavy and light infantry together, eliminating the need for the defensive characteristics of the pike.
The interest in all things classical that was the hallmark of the Italian and northern European Renaissance spilled over to warfare as a renaissance in tactical doctrine took place. Commanders in the early modern period reread the classical texts and recognized the value of a balanced combined-arms tactical system, one that incorporated the new technology of gunpowder within a well-disciplined and professional rank and file. In the sixteenth century’s Italian Wars (1494–1559), France fought against the imperialist powers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire for mastery of the Italian peninsula, and in the process, all parties experimented with the ratio of musketeers and arquebusiers to pikemen. This experimentation led to an imperialist victory at the battle ofPavia against the French in 1525 and the gradual adoption of the Spanish tercio, which combined shock and missile units in the same formation. Tactically, Pavia showed the prowess of heavy infantry pikemen and light infantry arquebusiers working together in the open field against enemy cavalry and battle squares. In this engagement, artillery played little part. So one-sided was the battle of Pavia that the decisive engagement all but disappeared from European warfare for more than 100 years.
Wanting to maximize ‘shot over shock’, Prince Maurice of Nassau in the late sixteenth and Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the early seventeenth century explored the Roman art of war and experimented with linear formations, winning victories against the imperialists in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) at Breitenfeld and Lützen. Consequently, new model armies emerged with the position of light infantry gunners ascending as the proportion of light infantry rose at the expense of heavy infantry, anticipating the role of firearms in modern warfare. With the addition of gunners to the tactical mix, a new age of warfare was dawning, one that drew on the contributions of the forty-eight centuries of western warfare under survey in these volumes.
Relevance of the Combined-Arms Tactical System
The history of combined-arms tactical systems in the western world witnessed a watershed event in the fourth century bce. Warfare before the conquest of Persia by King Alexander III of Macedon was characterized by the limited use of combined-arms forces. Bronze Age armies in Mesopotamia and Egypt and the early Iron Age empires of Assyria and Persia did utilize limited co-operation between farmer-militia infantry forces and their chariot-borne aristocratic masters. But for the most part, Near Eastern infantry levies were not trained to fully participate in effective offensive action against enemy chariots, and later, against cavalry. Their role remained primarily defensive on the battlefield.
Across the Aegean in Greece, the invention of the heavy infantry battle square in the seventh century bce witnessed for the first time citizen-militia trained to fight collectively in an offensive manner. The Persian Wars between Persia and the Greekpoleis exposed the light infantry and light cavalry of Asia to the heavy infantry of Europe, creating a new combined-arms synthesis. The conquest of the Greek city-states by Philip II of Macedon in the fourth century bce fused the conqueror’s strong tradition of heavy cavalry with the Greek world’s new tradition of limited combined-arms co-operation. The Macedonian king Alexander the Great’s victories at Granicus River (334 bce), Issus (333 bce) and Gaugamela (331 bce) represent a high point in pre-modern western warfare with the Macedonians fielding heavy and light infantry and heavy and light cavalry in a fully integrated and balanced combined-arms army.
Tactically, utilizing a combined-arms system meant bringing to the battlefield the capabilities of both shock and missile combat. In the periods under study, this meant the ability to kill in close proximity in hand-to-hand engagements using hand-held weapons (shock) or at a distance using slings, javelins, spears, bows and, later, handguns (missile). Modern military historians describe tactical systems with shock capabilities as heavy, while tactical systems that utilize missiles are described as light. Heavy weapon systems, both infantry and cavalry, are considered heavy because of their protective factor. Because they wore more armour, heavy infantry and heavy cavalry were better able to perform their shock role as well as being better protected against lance and arrow, even though this added protection sacrificed tactical mobility. Heavy weapon systems relied on collective effort to be effective, and collective effort required discipline and training. The degree of discipline and training determined the offensive capability or articulationof the units in combat.
Articulated tactical formations such as the Greek and Macedonian phalanx were capable of some offensive tactical mobility, keeping close order during an offensive march and then striking in a frontal attack. But the classical phalanx was not capable of attacking in all directions, nor could it protect its own flank and rear. Well-articulated tactical formations such as the Roman legion, medieval heavy cavalry bataille and Swiss battle square were capable of great tactical flexibility and responsiveness, wheeling and attacking or defending in many directions. Less articulated or unarticulated formations such as the Persian sparabara, Germanic hundred or Scottish schiltron, because of their lack of drill and discipline, performed poorly in offensive shock action, preferring to remain on the defensive in static formations. Hand-to-hand shock combat rarely lasted very long because of the enormous physical and emotional strain on combatants. Most engagements lasted only a few minutes, with total exhaustion setting in after only fifteen or twenty minutes of uninterrupted combat. If a battle lasted an afternoon or longer, then multiple engagements took place, compounding the emotional and physical strain of the event on the combatants.
Light infantry and light cavalry weapon systems relied on a missile weapon system that dealt out death at a distance. These lighter units were less armoured than their heavier counterparts, and consequently had greater tactical mobility. Archers and javelineers, whether mounted or not, did not have to fight in close order to be effective: instead they usually fought in open formation where they could best use their mobility. Because of this tactical mobility, light units were often used by ancient, classical, medieval and early modern commanders in guerrilla roles and as physical probes (skirmishers) against their less mobile but better protected heavy counterparts. But this mobility did little to protect them when shock combat ensued. Unable to withstand hand-to-hand combat with enemy infantry and mounted shock troops, these light units often retired through the ranks of their heavier companions to act as flank and rear protection during the engagement.
Each weapon system had strengths and weaknesses as illustrated in the diagram explaining the tactical capabilities of the four weapon systems in ancient and medieval warfare. With some or all of the weapon systems present and co-operating in a combined-arms synthesis, a general of the calibre of Alexander the Great, Hannibal Barca, William the Bastard, Batu Khan or Gustavus Adolphus proved irresistible on the battlefield.
Still, it should be remembered that the mere presence of a combined-arms army under the command of a general who had showed brilliance on the battlefield in the past did not guarantee victory. History is replete with examples of outstanding commanders who fell victim to what the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called ‘friction’ in his seminal work On War, published in 1832. Although Clausewitz was a student of Napoleon and his campaigns, his appraisal of what has been called the ‘fog of war’ holds true in any era. Friction refers to the accidents, uncertainties, errors, technical difficulties or unknown factors on the battlefield, and to their effect on decisions, morale and actions in warfare. To Clausewitz, ‘Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult from normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.’ Friction, Clausewitz tells us, ‘is the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult’.
Figure 1. The Four Weapon Systems. (a) Ancient Weapon Systems. An illustration of general rules of dominance in conflicts between different ancient weapon systems: (1) heavy infantry is generally dominant when defending against heavy cavalry; (2) heavy cavalry is generally dominant when attacking light infantry or light cavalry; (3) light infantry is generally dominant when defending against light cavalry; and (4) light cavalry is generally dominant when attacking heavy infantry. Dominance between heavy and light infantry varies according to the period and unit type involved in the action. Based on Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), schematic 1.2. (b) Medieval Weapon Systems. An illustration of general rules of dominance in conflicts between different medieval weapon systems: (1) heavy infantry is generally dominant when defending against heavy cavalry; (2) heavy cavalry is generally dominant when attacking light infantry; (3) light infantry is generally dominant when defending against light cavalry or attacking heavy infantry; and (4) light cavalry is generally dominant when attacking heavy infantry or heavy cavalry. Based on Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), schematic 2.1.
The great commanders who fought, won and sometimes lost the battles that shaped the history of western civilization understood the repercussions of friction when making war. They understood that the best strategies, bravest soldiers, most modern equipment and ingenious tactics did not always carry the day. Ancient, classical, medieval and early modern commanders recognized that each engagement carried the possibility of victory, with all its spoils, or defeat and possible death, enslavement or the extermination of their soldiers and families, and loss of homeland. Warfare, to these men and their cultures, was more than, in the famous statement by Clausewitz, ‘the continuation of politics by other means’. Warfare in the pre-modern world was instead, in the words of the British military historian John Keegan, ‘an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, and in some societies, the culture itself’. And in the period under study here, a period without the Geneva Conventions and formal rules of war, the distinction between how ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ peoples fought was often blurred, with all sides routinely killing or maiming combatants and non-combatants alike, and enslaving or ethnically cleansing entire populations.
This monograph is by no means comprehensive. It is the second part of a two-volume introduction to the development of the art of war during western civilization’s ancient, classical, medieval and early modern periods. By pulling together both primary and secondary sources, it is my hope that this synthetic work will help my undergraduate students at the American Military University and armchair military historians alike better appreciate the sophisticated nature of pre-modern warfare and the importance of organized violence in shaping western civilization’s history and culture. The story continues with the rise of Byzantium in the early medieval period.