Western Warfare In The Age Of The Crusades, 1000-1300

John France

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000159202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1095 the First Crusade was launched, establishing a great military endeavour which was a central preoccupation of Europeans until the end of the thirteenth century. In Western warfare in the age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 John France offers a wide-ranging and challenging survey of war and warfare and its place in the development of European Society, culture and economy in the period of the Crusades. Placing the crusades in a wider context, this book brings together the wealth of recent scholarly research on such issues as knighthood, siege warfare, chivalry and fortifications into an accessible form.
Western warfare in the age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 examines the nature of war in the period 1000-1300 and argues that it was primarily shaped by the people who conducted war - the landowners. John France illuminates the role of property concerns in producing the characteristic instruments of war: the castle and the knight. This authoritative study details the way in which war was fought and the reasons for it as well as reflecting on the society which produced the crusades.

Chapter One

Proprietorial warfare

This book examines the history of war in what are usually called the “High Middle Ages”. At the beginning of the second millennium, Europe was no longer threatened by external attack and it was clearly set on a course of remarkable economic, social and political development. In 1095 the First Crusade was launched, establishing a great military endeavour that was a central preoccupation of Europeans until the end of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century ushered in great changes in war and society under the influence of economic change, the Black Death and the invention of gunpowder. This is not to say that in the period 1000-1300 warfare was unchanging. But change was subtle, and across this period armies and warfare bore a common stamp which was different from what had gone before and certainly different from what came after.

It is a truth barely worth labouring that an army will reflect closely the nature of the society that produces it. The writer of military history, therefore, is not concerned with some discrete and separate corner of history which can be written about on its own, but must consider the whole political, social and economic development of the age in order to understand the nature of war and the changes that occurred in it. In this period, warfare was shaped by four main factors:

(a) the dominance of land as a form of wealth;

(b) the limited competence of government;

(c) the state of technology which, broadly, favoured defence over attack;

(d) the geography and climate of the West.

Landownership was the distinguishing characteristic of the ruling elites of western Europe. In itself it conferred power, as it always had. Kings claimed an overarching sovereignty and proclaimed that others exercised governmental power only as their delegates. But in practice they were not sharply distinguished from other landowners, who shared their authority rather than acted as its agents. Nor was the pattern of royal ownership in any way different from that of other powerful men and women. In the nature of things, landownership was dispersed, for estates were gathered into families by random means – the accidents of birth, death, marriage and political patronage. A landholding was normally made up of packets of land, often very small individually, scattered amongst the similar holdings of others. The power of sovereign authority over these agglomerations was limited, because communications were poor, and the king could only make real his authority where he or some close delegate resided – on his own demesne. Given this weakness, war was essential to defending and expanding lands and rights because – in the absence, or at least relative weakness, of superior authority – it was, if not the only, then at least the ultimate, means of settling disputes.¹

Warfare in this period was, therefore, nearly always proprietorial, or at the very least influenced by proprietorial considerations. This is not to say that warfare was always and only about landed possession; but merely that it was a powerful influence that was always taken into account. The outstanding characteristics of medieval warfare, the castle and the armoured knight, arose from the dominance of proprietorial power. Because land transport was poor and expensive, it was cheaper for landowners to travel around their estates eating up the renders of scattered lands. This meant that they needed collecting points with comfortable accommodation, which were strong enough to resist a degree of attack – in short, castles. But, in the end, strength rests in men, so easily raised mobile local forces were needed that could gather at the lord’s command. In this sense, the armoured, mounted knight is a response to the needs of proprietors. Some were mere hirelings, sharing the lord’s table, but this proximity gave them ambitions and a commonality of interest with their masters. Knights were the most important element in the armies of the age, but everywhere they needed infantry. The knight was very mobile, but the landscape of western Europe is highly variegated and does not always favour mounted warfare. Indeed, although there was much open land, hedges, thickets and woodland were common and could shelter infantry, especially archers. Even in armies of modest size, therefore, the knight was never alone. Moreover, medieval society changed and the make-up of the people who went to war changed with it, although this was to some extent disguised by very obvious elements of continuity. In fact, so deep-seated in the minds of western Europeans were the economic, social, political and geographical forces which shaped warfare that they proved singularly reluctant to change their style of warfare when they came into contact with other civilizations.

The fact that land was the dominant form of wealth and that liquidity was very limited was a major reason why armies were small. Even kings could not afford to maintain standing armies or large arsenals. War is an expensive business: in 1091, King Philip I of France was happy to defray the costs of supporting his bodyguard by hiring them out.² As a result, soldiers were expected to equip themselves from the proceeds of their landed holdings – often provided for them by the lord for this very purpose – and from the fruits of pillage. Even so, soldiers always expected cash payments, not least if they served beyond customary limits, and commanders preferred to engage them on flexible terms. As liquidity increased in the twelfth century, the “cash nexus” became ever more important. However, because this remained a relatively poor society, dependent on exploiting the peasant surplus, armies remained ad hoc bodies, kept together only for as long as necessity demanded. Professional soldiers did emerge, but commanders dismissed them as soon as possible because of the enormous drain on resources.

This had a considerable effect on military technology. Without an infrastructure of war there could be no systematic development. The only repository of military memory, beyond that of individuals, lay in the households of major rulers, but these were very few and far between and their members never wholly military in their concerns. Therefore, it is not surprising that there was never a great leap forward. Throughout the period, the killing-ground was always very largely limited by the range of the bow and the length of sword or spear, and of the right arm that wielded it. There was change, because the general economic growth of Europe allowed a wider use of metal and individual ingenuity produced some diversification of weapons. But, in general, because provision of weapons was the obligation of the individual, the wealth and skill generated by economic expansion was diverted into the weapons and protection of the wealthy. The most obvious technical improvements were in fortifications. The wooden tower built at Montargis in 1056 by the Lord Seguin could hardly be compared with the huge stone mass of Caerphilly constructed 200 years later. But the development of military architecture and of siege-machinery, which occurred in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, depended on civilian innovation and arose from the hiring of specialists from outside the military sphere. In the earlier part of our period, the principles of siege-engines seem to have been well known, but actually building them was difficult and subject to frequent failure.³ Improvements in siege-technique seem to have sprung from better general organization rather than advances in technology.

Medieval warfare was, in some very important respects, markedly different from that of the modern era. Most fundamentally, war was not solely the prerogative of government. The notion of sovereignty survived from the Roman Empire and helped to give the royal office its special prestige. However, there was a skein of competing forces that pretended to aspects of sovereignty or rivalled and paralleled what we would recognise as its proper competence. Throughout our period the primary form of wealth was land, and everywhere its ownership on any scale gave quasi-governmental powers. Landed property was seen in a very absolute sense and its very concrete nature tended to overshadow sovereignty, for power sprang from possession of land. To be a king was of necessity to be first landlord of the realm, a position which merged into that of other landlords and blurred the distinction between the king and others, and that between sovereignty and ownership. The prestige of monarchy in medieval times was enormous and its position unique, but its uniqueness could be very narrowly interpreted and it could certainly be seen as excluding a commanding authority.⁴

“Private war” has been excoriated by modern historians and regarded as the scourge of the medieval world, but government was so limited, and its competence so narrow, that the struggle for power and influence amongst the elite could often only be conducted by war. We call the men against whom Louis VI of France fought in the early twelfth century “robber barons”, but it is a description that they would hardly recognize. It was their misfortune to be survivors of an older genre of behaviour in a new age with new ideas. At the beginning of this period, medieval states lacked any clear definition or firm structure: these emerged only in the second half of the twelfth century, but even then their position was not unchallenged. In the eleventh century the very existence of monarchy was threatened, and one writer has remarked that at that time “the age of kings seemed to have passed and that of princes to be the future”.⁵ The notion of the state and the remains of such an organization had decayed, and had largely been usurped by an aristocracy whose strength was built on its special position in the European countryside, a strength buttressed greatly by castles. Kings always had to rely on the powerful to support them and raise troops. In the monarchies of Germany and France, sheer distance, poor communications and the rivalries of royal houses enabled nobles and local authorities to take power and hold it. Even in England, which is usually regarded as a small and tightly ruled land, the North was almost another country, and the lords of the Welsh March were largely left to their own devices by the Norman kings.

In fact, there was a deep confusion of what for us are two separate concepts – sovereignty and ownership. Every kingdom was a lordship and every king had the preoccupations of a landowner: every lordship resembled a kingdom and its holders felt entitled to some of the perquisites of a king. Both can best be seen as mouvances, circles of influence based on landownership which rarely coincided with the geographical area of settlement of any nation or any particular geographical unity. Moreover, these circles of influence overlapped heavily. Otto-William, Count of Macon (982–1026), was the son of a king of Italy; he held Macon of the Duke of Burgundy who was a vassal of the Capetian king of France. He was also related to the old Carolingian ruling house, whom the Capetian kings had displaced and held land of the Empire east of the Saône. A very important group of lords, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Louvain and the Count of Hainaut, were vassals of both the Empire and the Capetian monarch. In conflicts between mouvances this gave scope for vassals to change sides: in 1185 the castellan of Péronne, a vassal of the Count of Flanders, defected from his lord and received his castle of Braine as a fief of Philip of France.⁶

Although the history of war is primarily that of war between the mouvances, it must be remembered that there was another dimension to medieval warfare. The holders of power were a tiny minority in an armed or potentially armed society. Force of arms was the final sanction of the elite, and thinkers would soon seize upon it as the justification of their power and privileges. So the apparatus of war in the widest sense was also intended to enforce the social order. The castle and the armed band were not merely a defence against other mouvances but also the means by which the lord exploited the peasantry. It is no accident, as we shall see, that military terminology and practice were deeply infused with considerations of status. Moreover, the threat of social war was present in the minds of the elite and informed the way in which they treated their necessary allies, the footsoldiers and other socially inferior troops. Kings and magnates claimed a monopoly of war and in time generated a military ethos, chivalry, which glorified their role. Because the great magnates had colonized the Church, which produced most of the written records, these focus on their role, but war was not an entirely aristocratic business and it involved very directly considerable sections of the populace. The basis of their involvement is a complicated matter. It has often been assumed that all freemen were obliged to provide military service to the Crown, and there were certainly occasions in the life of any group or nation when all able-bodied men would wish to rally to the support of the authorities, but the evidence for an actual obligation owed to a sovereign authority is vague. Only in areas under special threat – Christian Spain being an obvious example – or in moments of crisis, was the levée-en-masse a reality. Indeed, the whole notion of a “nation in arms” was inimical and dangerous to an elite that claimed a monopoly of war.⁷

Kings and great princes looked first and foremost to their own lands to raise troops. Their lands, like those of all the great men, were scattered, which made the process difficult. If they wanted to raise a large force, or even a relatively small force whose raising did not strip all their lands of troops, they had to persuade others to join them. Hence armies tended to be small and took time to gather. Hence, too, they were always ad hoc gatherings, for there were no barracks, no regulars, no infrastructure of war such as Rome had enjoyed or we have developed in the modern age; persuasion was always political in its nature, producing inconsistent results. In fact, the gathering of anything that we might call a large army was a relatively rare act, for few great lords or even kings had a single interest that compelled concentration of forces – rather, they had many local enemies and friends in the various zones of their activity, and thus many objectives, and so the raising of limited resources for limited ends was for a long time the norm.

This situation legitimized what we tend to see as private military followings: hence that special characteristic of medieval society – the lack of a distinction between public and private war. All kings, until the very end of our period and beyond, had great subjects who were capable of waging war on their own account. Therefore, they had to be satisfied by successful war, and the need to plunder was often paramount in the minds of contemporaries – even kings. The successful leader was one who rewarded his followers – in early medieval times gold rings were traditional – or who gave them an opportunity to reward themselves. Charlemagne’s great attack upon the Avar kingdom may have had other objectives, but it yielded an enormous booty of significant economic importance, while the fruits of Christian victory in Spain made possible the building of the huge abbey of Cluny in the late eleventh century. At the end of the twelfth century, it was widely believed that Richard I of England was killed in a dispute over plunder.⁸ This essentially private motive powerfully influenced decisions about war and peace, and continued even down into the early modern period, for kings were long expected to wage war for a profit.

War, therefore, was not simply a public function. Even the Church, which had inherited Roman notions of sovereignty, had ambivalent attitudes. For contemporaries, private war was not a contradiction, but simply an extension of legitimate self-interest which was not wholly differentiated from sovereign power, itself always deeply personal in nature. Indeed, it is often difficult to see much sense of public good, clear and distinct from private aggrandizement, in the decisions of monarchs about peace and war. This is hardly surprising. There was a notion of sovereignty and of the king’s duty to all his people, but until the end of our period no sense of separation between the person of the king and his office. The king was many persons and presided over a society in which some kinds of governmental power had become mere property, so his war-making was conditioned by a variety of forces, notably a deep concern for his property and that of his family.⁹

By the beginning of our period, in most parts of Europe, private arrangements between king and magnates, and magnates and their greater followers, were the main way in which kings supplemented the military resources of their own demesnes. Magnates acknowledged themselves as vassals of the king, owing him homage for their lands and in turn demanding service from those who held of them. This system was not purely military: it arose from the problem of delegation in an age of dispersed holdings and poor communications. But holding land inevitably involved protecting it, so that the system was militarized, although to an extent that varied from time to time and place to place. This military–tenurial system, which we often call “feudal”, provided the best-equipped soldier of the age, the heavily armoured cavalryman. However, what a magnate or a knight was prepared to concede to an overlord in military service depended on particular circumstances. A knight holding a single fief was not in a strong position to resist his lord, although custom and practice might limit his service to 30 or 40 days, and he might even modify this if he owed service to another lord. When the Count of Anjou wished to join with King Philip of France in attacks on Normandy in the mid-eleventh century, he raised great numbers of troops, but never acknowledged a formal obligation. Within duchies, counties and lordships, servitium debitum, the military service owed by landowners to their lords, only became fixed very slowly. These substantial men, the dukes, counts, vicecounts and domini, held castles that were the guarantors of their land; near his castle a man was strong, beyond it his power shaded away into the power of others. All of these men, from the king to the most minor castellan, employed others – soldiers who garrisoned their castles and served them in arms – some of whom held land and some of whom did not. Multiple homage was common, so there was no tidy feudal pyramid, and this increased the basic confusion created by the fragmentation of landholdings. The oath that we call feudal, essentially not to harm, but to aid and counsel one’s lord, might be taken simply as a means of making peace between men, implying no subordination; this was even the case when an act of homage for land was involved. What mattered was that the lord was the predominant power who could enforce his authority and prevent his vassals moving to somebody else. The king, the dukes and the counts of France predominated within their areas, which is not necessarily to say dominated. A magnate of forceful character with extensive lands, such as Duke William of Normandy, could dominate, but a succession problem could weaken even a strong unit – such as the county of Anjou in the 1060s. Every great magnate had to watch his mouvance lest it fray at the edges or be encroached upon by others. The result was a pattern of constant petty war, in which feuds and personal quarrels were commonplace. The weakness of sovereign authority in most of Europe meant that war was a frequent means of settling disputes between great men.

German magnates acknowledged that their offices and fiefs were held of the king and performed homage. But in practice they held autogenous jurisdiction based on huge allodial holdings. The monarch had extensive lands and, by successful war leadership in Italy and on the eastern frontier, drew others into his service. In a real sense, “Emperor” w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Plates and plans
• 1 Proprietorial warfare
• 2 The weapons of war
• 3 War, society and technology
• 4 Warfare and authority
• 5 Men of war: cavalry
• 6 Men of war: infantry
• 7 The nature of the castle
• 8 Castles and war
• 9 Fortifications and siege
• 10 Armies
• 11 Commanders
• 12 Campaign, battle and tactics
• 13 Battle and the development of war
• 14 Europe, ideology and the outsider
• 15 Crusading and warfare in the Middle East
• 16 Perspectives
• Appendix I: The Battle of Bouvines, 27 July 1214
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index