Charles Oman - Routledge Revivals: A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages (1978): Volume One 378-1278

First published in 1898, this history of medieval warfare, written by one of the great medievalists of his time, Sir Charles Oman, remains for students and general readers one of the best accounts of military art in the Middle Ages. The book begins with the significant battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D. (the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman army since Cannae in 216 B.C.) and Marignano (1515 A.D.), the last of the triumphs of the medieval horseman. It was extensively revised and edited by John H. Beeler in 1953 to incorporate many new facts uncovered since the late nineteenth century. This edition is based on Methuens 1978 revised and enlarged edition, which includes new chapters and the authors original preface.

First published in 1898

This edition published in 1978

by Methuen & Co.

Published in 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1898 Sir Charles Oman

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A Library of Congress record exists under ISBN: 21012235

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-57065-8 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-203-70323-6 (ebk)

BY

CHARLES OMAN, K.B.E., M.P.

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD; M.A.(OXON.), HON. LL.D.(EDIN.); CHICHELE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY; FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME I

A.D.3781278

WITH MAPS, PLANS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

36 ESSEX STREET W.C.

LONDON

First published 1898

Second edition 1924

This edition 1978 by

Methuen & Co Ltd

11 New Fetter Lane

London EC4P 4EE

1898 and 1924 The Estate of Charles Oman

ISBN 0 416 71760 8

AS far back as the year 1898 I published a volume on the Art of War in the Middle Ages, which traced its history down to the year 1375 onlya bad and arbitrary date, as I had to acknowledge in my Preface. It took some twenty years to exhaust this edition, which finally went out of print at the end of the Great War. Since 1918 many friends have asked me from time to time to continue my narrative down to the end of the Middle Ages. I have therefore taken advantage of the long parliamentary recess of 1923, and have added six new sections to the eight which were contained in my original book. These not only continue the tale of Western warfare down to the year 1485, but deal with certain topics which I had avoided in the first edition, viz. the origin of cannon and gunpowder, the Wars of the Mongols and Ottoman Turks in Europe, and the military history of the Italian Condottieri and the Swiss. By strict logic there should have been some comment on all these subjects in the old book, as they all began to acquire importance long before 1375.

In consequence of the writing of the six new sections, this second edition has swelled to two volumes, and contains some four hundred pages of fresh matter. But I have also gone through with care the whole of the eight old sections, and have rewritten entirely some of their chapters, in particular those dealing with Anglo-Norman military institutions, with castle-building, with the Italian wars of the thirteenth century, and with the Welsh campaigns of Edward I. On all these subjects there has been much research since 1898, and what I wrote in that year required correction and revision.

I must once again warn the reader that these volumes are concerned with the history of the Art of War, and do not purport to give a complete annalistic record of all the campaigns of the Middle Ages. Each section deals with the characteristic strategy, tactics, and military organisation of a period, and illustrates them by detailed accounts of typical battles and campaigns. But there is no claim that it describes every normal military incident that occurred in the period which it covers. This is not a book of annals, but a treatise on the Art of War.

For a similar reason, while I have endeavoured to explain the importance of changes in armament and in military architecture on a reasonable scale, I do not pretend that these volumes give a detailed history of the technical development of such things as castle-building or modern artillery. Such treatment would swell this work to many volumes, and would (as I venture to think) detract from its usefulness as a summary of the Art of War and its transformations. Technical detail is more needed by the specialist than by the general student of history, for whose assistance this work is mainly intended. There are many treatises which deal with medival history from the social, economic, constitutional, artistic, literary, or religious point of view. But I believe that there is still no work in English which endeavours to give a general survey of the military characteristics of the whole period from the disruption of the Roman Empire to the sixteenth century, save this modest sketch. Monographs on special sections of the Art of War exist; but there is, I hope, room for the collator of facts who is not afraid to generalise, and to extend his view over many centuries.

There is one point on which I must make an acknowledgment of indebtedness to two writers whose works were appearing when the first edition of this book was printed. It is owing to the arguments of that veteran historian, Sir James Ramsay, and of Dr. Delbrck of Berlin, that I have been induced to abandon all confidence in the huge figures given by most medival chroniclers for the strength of medival armies and the casualties in medival battles. Both of them, I think, have pushed their arguments a little too far, and have rejected occasionally estimates which do not seem to me wholly improbable. But most undoubtedly they have shown good reasons for a summary rejection of statements which, for example, swell the armies of William and Harold at Hastings to scores of thousands, or the armies of the Crusaders and the Ottoman Sultans to hundreds of thousands. I have revised all my estimates of the first edition in deference to their demonstration of the wholly unreliable character of all medival figures which cannot be verified by contemporary documentary evidence. We in England may consider ourselves exceptionally fortunate in the possession of so many original military statistics, from the reign of Edward I. downwards, that the plague of exaggeration by chroniclers becomes comparatively innocuous in the later centuries covered by this book. The patient work in this direction of such writers as Mr. Morris in his Welsh Wars of Edward I . cannot be praised too highly: he has disproved the figures of the comparatively rational Hemingburgh, which had deceived many historians, no less than the wild imaginings of Blind Harry or Barbour.