Keen Martin L - Medieval Warfare

MEDIEVAL
WARFARE
A HISTORY

Maurice Keen was a Fellow and Tutor
in Medieval History at Balliol College,
University of Oxford, from 1961 to 2000.

A HISTORY

Edited by

MAURICE KEEN

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Oxford University Press 1999

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ISBN 978-0-19-820639-2

Cover illustration: The defeat of the Turkish attack on Rhodes, from
Caoursins history of the siege of 1480, Obsidionis urbis Rhodice descripcio.
Bibl. Nat. (Paris) Ms Lat 6067

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe,
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W ARFARE was a formative influence on the civilization and the social structures of the European middle ages. Its history in that period is in consequence of high significance alike for those who are interested in the middle ages for themselves and for their legacy, and for those whose interest is in war and its place in the story of human development. The twelve of us who have collaborated in the writing of this book have sought to bear both these parties in mind. We have also borne much in mind the richness of the material that can illustrate visually the importance of warfare to lives and minds in the medieval age: castles which still stand; artefacts and archaeological remains; tombs and monumental brasses depicting warriors in their armour; vignettes of battle and campaign in illuminated manuscripts. Our book has been conceived and planned not just as a history, but as an illustrated history.

The book is divided into two parts, the first chronological, the second thematic. In the first part a series of chapters explores the impact of wars and fighting over time, from the Carolingian period down to the end of the Hundred Years War. There follow in the second part thematic discussions of specific aspects of warfare and its conduct: castles and sieges; war-horses and armour; mercenaries; war at sea; and the fortunes of the civilian in wartime.

In the process of putting the book together a great many obligations have been incurred, which must be gratefully acknowledged. We are all of us indebted to the successive editors at the Oxford University Press who watched over our work, Tony Morris, Anne Gelling, Anna Illingworth, and Dorothy McLean. We owe a major debt of gratitude to Sandra Assersohn, for her wise and patient help in the quest for apposite illustrations; and to Frank Pert who compiled the index. Each of us has besides debts of personal gratitude to friends and colleagues who read our contributions in draft and offered their advice and criticism. My own debt as editor is above all to my fellow contributors, who have worked together with such courtesy and despatch, from the books conception to its completion. We all hope the results may prove worth the generosity of those who have done so much to help us.

M AURICE K EEN

1. Introduction: Warfare and the Middle Ages
Maurice Keen

2. Carolingian and Ottoman Warfare
Timothy Reuter

3. The Vikings
H. B. Clarke

4. An Age of Expansion, c.10201204
John Gillingham

5. Warfare in the Latin East
Peter Edbury

6. European Warfare, c.12001320
Norman Housley

7. The Age of the Hundred Years War
Clifford J. Rogers

8. Fortifications and Sieges in Western Europe, c.8001450
Richard L. C. Jones

9. Arms, Armour, and Horses
Andrew Ayton

10. Mercenaries
Michael Mallett

11. Naval Warfare after the Viking Age, c.11001500
Felipe Fernndez-Armesto

12. War and the Non-Combatant in the Middle Ages
Christopher Allmand

13. The Changing Scene: Guns, Gunpowder, and Permanent Armies
Maurice Keen

T HE philosophical tradition of what we call the Western world had its origins in ancient Greece, its jurisprudential tradition in classical Rome. Christianity, the religion of the West, was nursed towards its future spiritual world status in the shelter of Roman imperial domination. Yet the political map of Europe, the heartland of Western civilization, bears little relation to that of the classical Hellenistic and Roman world. Its outlines were shaped not in classical times, but in the middle ages, largely in the course of warfare. That warfare, brutal, chaotic, and at times seemingly universal, is historically important not only for its significance in defining the boundaries and regions of the European future. Fighting in the medieval period, in the course of regional defence against incursions of non-Christian peoples with no background or connection with the former Roman world, and in the course of wars of expansion into territories occupied by other peoples, both Christian and non-Christian, and their absorption, played a vital role in the preservation for the future West of its cultural inheritance from antiquity. It also furthered the development of technologies that the antique world had never known.