Michael Howard - War in European History
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Sir Michael Howard is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. His publications include The Franco-Prussian War (1961) (Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, 1962), Grand Strategy, vol. 4 in the United Kingdom History of the Second World War, Military series, 1971 (Wolfson Foundation History Award, 1972), The Lessons of History (1991), and many others. He has held the Chair of War Studies at King's College, London, the Chichele Chair of History of War and the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford, and the Robert A. Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History at Yale.
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MICHAEL HOWARD
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
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Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Michael Howard 1976
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 1976 as an Oxford University Press paperback
and simultaneously in a hardback edition
Both editions reprinted with corrections 1977
Reissued in 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
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outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Howard, Michael
War in European History.
ITI
DCG 40
LCD 25
LCSH European History
ISBN 0192802089
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox and Wyman Ltd,
Reading, Berkshire
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FOR MARK AND ERIC
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| Foreword | ix | |
| Chapter 1 | The Wars of the Knights | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | The Wars of the Mercenaries | 20 |
| Chapter 3 | The Wars of the Merchants | 38 |
| Chapter 4 | The Wars of the Professionals | 54 |
| Chapter 5 | The Wars of the Revolution | 75 |
| Chapter 6 | The Wars of the Nations | 94 |
| Chapter 7 | The Wars of the Technologists | 116 |
| Epilogue | The Nuclear Ageand Beyond | 136 |
| Notes | 145 | |
| Notes on Further Reading | 149 | |
| Index | 153 |
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Until comparatively recently the study of war has been didactic and normative: that is, the wars of the past were studied in order to deduce either immutable principles or lines of devel- opment as guides to the efficient conduct of war in the future. So long as the organized use, or threatened use, of force still remains an instrument in the conduct of international relations, such analytic studies will continue to be needed. But to abstract war from the environment in which it is fought and study its techniques as one would those of a game is to ignore a dimension essential to the understanding, not simply of the wars them- selves but of the societies which fought them. The historian who studies war, not to develop norms for action but to enlarge his understanding of the past, cannot be simply a 'military histor- ian', for there is literally no branch of human activity which is not to a greater or lesser extent relevant to his subject. He has to study war not only, as Hans Delbrck put it, in the framework of political history, but in the framework of economic, social, and cultural history as well. War has been part of a totality of human experience, the parts of which can be understood only in relation to one another. One cannot adequately describe how wars were fought without giving some idea of what they were fought about.
There are now numerous books which take this philosophy as the basis for their approach to the history of war, and I have done little more than put together in a very superficial fashion some of the ideas I have gleaned from them. A list will be found in the bibliographical note at the end of this work. I have also benefited greatly from discussions with my colleagues Professors J. M. Wallace-Hadrill and Lionel Butler, who tactfully punctured
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some of my more ridiculous misconceptions about the Middle Ages, and Professor S. E. Finer, whose insights into the place of armed forces in modern societies have been most valuable. I am particularly grateful to the Vice-Chancellor, faculty and students of the University of Warwick, who not only allowed me to try out some of my ideas on them in the Radcliffe Lectures in the Spring Term of 1975, but actually paid me to do so.
All Souls College, Oxford MICHAEL HOWARD
November 1975
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The Wars of the Knights
'The origins of Europe', a historian of the Middle Ages has recently reminded us 'were hammered out on the anvil of war';1 and indeed 'war' is really too benign a term to describe the condition of the European continent once the precarious Pax Romana had disintegrated and waves of invaders swept over it; Goths and Vandals from the east, Moslems from the south and finally, most terrible of all, Vikings from the north Nearly six hundred years elapsed between the first barbarian incursions in the fourth century and the end of the tenth century, when the last of the invaders had been either assimi- lated or repulsed. Then in their turn the peoples of Europe began to expand, first eastward and then, as they learned the arts of navigation, southward and westward. So for a time- span as long as that which divides the thirteenth century from our own day, 'peace' in Europe, that peace for which the congregations in Christian churches so sincerely prayed, existed only in exceptional and precarious oases of time and place. It is hardly surprising that an entire social pattern should have come into being to enable the peoples of Europe to survive in such an environment: the pattern to be known to later generations of historians as 'feudalism'.
The successive quasi-nomadic warrior societies followed, clashed with, and absorbed one another like the waves of a turbulent sea. Following the Gothic and other invaders of the fourth century came those Frankish tribes who, loosely asso- ciated under the leadership of the Merovingian family, were to repulse the Moslems invading France from the south in the eighth century and to create, under the Carolingians at the beginning of the ninth, the short-lived unity of the west. The
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