Europe, after the collapse of Roman government in the West in the fifth century, became a mosaic of comparatively small kingdoms.

The invaders came to enjoy the benefits of the Roman world: Theodoric tried to strengthen Roman government in his Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy, even employing the distinguished Roman, Boethius (480-524).

In consequence the elaborate machinery of the tax-collecting and revenue­distributing state that had sustained Roman armies collapsed: it was simpler to establish the newcomers on the land from which they derived their income. All their freemen had some obligation to serve their ruler, but as they settled the most prominent took the military role, supported by their armed retinues of dedicated soldiers. They also incorporated the soldiers of Roman military settlements into their armies. The military obligation of free men remained in force, but as immigrants and natives mingled it may have become residual. It is therefore very difficult to gain any clear picture of early medieval armies.

The barbarians copied Roman arms and armour but without Roman arms factories they lacked uniformity. King Clovis of the Franks (481-511) appar­ently used leather armour in battle. Tactical reality is obscure. A Byzantine observer remarked that they had few horsemen, but perhaps this reflected comparison with Byzantium, whose army had a large cavalry component. It is certain that many of the elite rode to war and perhaps fought on horseback. The Lombards of north Italy were famous horsemen. The Frankish elite had horses, but at the Battle of Autun in 641/2 Berthar observed his friend Manaulf in the opposing ranks and took him under his shield for shelter (only to be stabbed by him); this clearly suggests fighting on foot, though perhaps the elite rode to battle.

King Clovis met Alaric II, King of the Goths, on the battlefield of Vouille... Some of the soldiers engaged hurled their javelins from a distance, others fought hand to hand. The Goths fled, as they were prone to do, and Clovis was the victor, for God was on his side... Clovis killed Alaric, but as the Goths fled, two of them suddenly rushed up in a scrum, one on this side and one on that, and struck at the Frankish King with their spears. It was his leather corselet which saved him and the sheer speed of his horse, but he was very near to death.^[CXXVIII]

This hints at a clash between cavalry elements. The Visigoths took refuge in their Spanish kingdom, and the Franks under their Merovingian kings became the dominant people in Gaul and the single biggest group within the old empire. Italy was fragmented and impoverished by the long wars.

The Merovingians were often divided by family conflicts, but out of these conflicts the Arnulfing clan emerged as a powerful factor in Frankish politics. After 718 their leading figure, Charles Martel, became dominant in the affairs of the Franks, acting as Mayor of the Palace down to his death in 741. His success opened the way for his son, Pepin, to depose the last Merovingian and be crowned king in 751; he in turn was followed by Charlemagne, one of the greatest figures in European history. Charles Martel is seen as having a special position in European military history. In 732 he defeated a Spanish Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers.

Armies and Bands in Medieval Europe soldiers - the knights - were financed by grants of land, later called fiefs. This explained the military supremacy of his immediate descendants, and offered an explanation of the origins of ‘feudalism' regarded as the dominant form of political organisation in European history.^[129] In fact we know very little about the battle. The best account suggests that Franks and Arabs alike were on foot: ‘The northern peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions. In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Arabs with the sword.'^[130]

The important triumphs of Charles Martel and Pepin were followed by the immense successes of Charlemagne (768-814). Under him the Franks con­quered all of western Germany and Saxony in a series of campaigns lasting over twenty years, subjugated Bavaria, destroyed the Avars of what is now Hungary, seized the Lombard Kingdom of North Italy, advancing their rule down to the Byzantine south, and created a March in northern Spain around Barcelona. On Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne became Emperor of the West. These military successes demand explanation.

Charlemagne prohibited the export of armour and weapons to preserve the technological superiority of his armies. This may have limited his enemy's access to metal, but probably only to a limited degree. There is no doubt that cavalry were becoming more important. In 782 a Frankish cavalry force was defeated in the Battle of the Suntel mountain, while in 784/5 Charlemagne's son defeated the Westphalians in an equestri proelio.

Battles were rare, but sieges were frequent and these are notoriously labour-intensive. Moreover Charlemagne sometimes raised more than one army at a time, notably in 773,775,778,787 and 791, sometimes using allies like the Lombards. This raises the question of the size of Charlemagne's forces. It

is possible that his empire could have mobilised as many as 35,000 heavily equipped soldiers as part of a total of 100,000.^[131] These are only estimates of potential numbers, but the deployment of apparently overwhelming strength on occasion suggests that Charlemagne raised his armies from the mass of freemen rather than just the elite. Capitularies, though only from after 800, assert the king's right to call all men to the host, though Charlemagne preferred the less well off to club together to provide one properly equipped soldier.

Obviously the king could insist on such service, but how could it have been implemented? Charlemagne had limited administrative organs, at most no more than 2,000 administrators. This means he depended on the goodwill of his great men, and as this was a fluctuating quality it explains why there were times when Charlemagne was desperately short of troops. Charlemagne was a skilled politician, able to manipulate the great. In 806, he wrote to Abbot Fulrad of Saint-Quentin, ordering him to prepare his troops to join the army:

You are to come with your men to the aforesaid place equipped in such a way that you can go from there with the army to whatever place we shall command - that is with arms, implements and other military material, provisions and clothing.

This is the emperor at his most imperious, but he was not always in that kind of position. Charlemagne evidently paid careful attention to logistics. In 793, in preparation for the campaign against the Avars of what is now Hungary, he ordered the construction of a Rhine-Danube canal, though this proved impossible. But the letter above all shows his dependence upon great men and this explains why he could at some times enlist them, at other times not.

Charlemagne had a composite army: he could count on the people of his own lands, but they were not a standing army. Like almost all other medieval rulers he could occasionally make great efforts, but could not sustain such forces on a regular basis. Even the right to call all freemen to arms would have been subject to the consent of his great men. Carolingian success was based on Charlemagne's careful exertion of authority over them, combined with his tactical sense. The men of his immediate entourage must have had the organising ability to use resources well when they were available. But maintaining the empire was enormously expensive and the problems it engendered emphasise how weak imperial control at the local level was:

Poor men complain... that if a man refuses to give his land to a bishop, abbot or count or any of their servants, these seek opportunities whereby they can harm that poor man and make him go on every occasion to fight in the army until he is impoverished and hands over or sells his land, like it or not.

Charlemagne's immediate successors lacked his skill in manipulating their magnates, and quarrelled amongst themselves. The new kingdom of Germany emerged as a substantial unit held together because of the threat of attack from pagan eastern Europe, and was cemented by a series of able rulers, the Ottonians (919-1024). They usually dominated the great lords, and they seem to have kept the right to call up humbler people. However, in a land dominated by great duchies their local power was limited. Further west the Carolingians were threatened by the Capetian house, creating great uncertainty about legitimacy. At the same time the area was subjected to raiding by the Vikings and the Muslims who ruled Spain and the Mediterranean islands. In these circumstances defence became the task of local lords. In 859, at a time of great Viking threat, ordinary people attempted to defend themselves:

The Danes ravaged the places beyond the Scheldt. Some of the common people living between the Seine and the Loire formed a sworn association amongst themselves and fought bravely against the Danes on the Seine. But because their association had been made without due consideration, they were easily slain by our more powerful people.^[134]

This was an assertion by the elite of their monopoly of the control of violence. As monarchy failed, local powers emerged so that by 1000 France was a mosaic of small states. The Capetian monarch held the Ile de France, but had little authority over the rest. Military forces were, therefore, what­ever such men raised. Since great lords had lands that were scattered and intermixed with those of others, they fortified the houses, which were centres of exploitation, and staffed them with knights, the military elite of the day, though most of the time they were also petty administrators and landowners. They and the men they served emerged from a long and bitterly competitive process of small-scale war. They were at their most effective as cavalry, for by now the stirrup and the high saddle, which together gave the mounted man a secure seat, were diffused throughout Europe. However, they were perfectly prepared to fight on foot. These people inherited a warrior ethic emphasising bravery and loyalty, and treated others with at best condescension and at worst brutality: the first act of Ralph of Cravent on becoming a knight was to rob a monk.

The rivalries between these mouvances caused grave disorder in the French countryside. The overarching judicial authority of the kings had fallen into the hands of the very people who most frequently disturbed the peace. The church, often the victim of this violence, attempted to persuade the elite to swear to maintain the peace, using its moral authority to substitute for the legal power of kings in the movement known as the ‘Peace of God'. Ultimately it had very limited and short-lived success, though it inspired German and French rulers to attempt peace legislation. In Germany, church and monarchy worked together to safeguard the social order. The biographer of Bruno of Cologne, brother of the emperor Otto I (936-73) and also duke of Lorraine, defended his role in war and politics:

If anyone who is ignorant of the divine dispensation objects to a bishop ruling the people and facing dangers of war and argues that he is responsible only for their souls, the answer is obvious: it is only by doing these things that the guardian and teacher of the Faithful brings to them the rare gift of peace and saves them from the darkness in which there is no light.^[135]

The German monarchy long retained its right to call up ordinary citizens for war and it mounted great expeditions to quell revolts in its Italian lands. But the ideological conflict between Henry IV (1056-1106) and the papacy from 1073 to about 1122 undermined the king's command of the militias. In Italy, which had long been annexed to the German crown, the emergence of cities during these wars broke royal power. By 1122, the king's ability to raise armies was limited to his own lands and occasions when he could persuade at least some of the greater lords to assist him.

Europe towards 1100 was dominated by great lords, ‘princes' - whose allegiance to kings was limited. Even the cities of Italy attempted to rule the land around them, the contado, in much the same way as the princes against whom they struggled. The armed men whom the great and lesser lords enlisted fought on foot or, for preference, horseback. They were socially very mixed, for though some were landed, and perhaps relatives of the lord they followed, others were paid men, though from families with the means to equip them with the expensive horse, armour and weapons which were the hallmark of such men. And they had the leisure to give themselves the athletic rather than merely muscular physiques vital in managing a horse and close-quarter fighting. But these knights were never the only men of war. Contemporaries conventionally divided armies into milites et pedites, knights and foot. From the late tenth century we hear of mercenary foot and by the late eleventh they were an important part of all major armies. The rise of the mercenary seems to reflect the decline in the power of monarchies to enlist their own humbler subjects, perhaps arising from the unwillingness of land­owning elites to allow the king to utilise the military potential of the peasants from whom they drew their incomes.

The social origins of soldiers had a major impact on war. An important leader could recruit the core of an army from his own lands and those of the men closely associated with him, and to these he could attach mercenaries. Beyond that he had to rely on others whose allegiance was more conditional. A large army was a composite of retinues, but each of these was made up of men only used to working with people from their own locality. Thus a retinue was a collection of small groups who were strangers to one another and a large army was a collection of retinues. Other foot were poorly armed, drawn from the more adventurous peasants. So armies were uneasy compo­sites. William of Normandy raised an army of 7,000 for the conquest of England. Some of these were his own, many provided by his important followers, and yet others were mercenaries or people from lands outside the duchy like Brittany or Flanders tempted by the prospects of gain. This army was stuck at Dives for a month and this gave it time to manoeuvre together. The cohesion gained by this may well have contributed to its victory. More typically, armies came together for short periods of time and therefore lacked cohesion. Because of this, even major sieges were a chal­lenge and campaigns were short and consisted largely of ravaging.

In late 1184, the count of Flanders, the archbishop of Cologne and Duke Godfrey of Brabant invaded Hainaut. Baldwin count of Hainaut scorched the countryside and retreated to his castles. After about six weeks the allies, now starving, withdrew and in revenge Baldwin unleashed his troops upon their lands. In this campaign the allies mustered about 3,200 knights and a sub­stantial number of mounted sergeants while Count Baldwin hired 300 mer­cenary knights and 3,000 mercenary sergeants, and about 300 foreign knights came to him unpaid, in the hope of loot. In addition he had native forces and those of his chief vassals. These were substantial armies, and though the numbers of foot are harder to estimate it is unlikely that there were less than three to every mounted man. Henry II of England (1154-89) usually cam­paigned with about 5,000 men. In 1214, Philip of France defeated the allied Germans, Flemings and English at Bouvines, where the armies on both sides totalled about 14,000. Battles were relatively rare and when they did occur infantry acquitted themselves well. At Hastings a wholly infantry army held the Normans at bay all day. Henry I (1100-35) won victories at Tinchebrai (1106) and Bremule (1119) with forces on foot against knightly charges, while in 1124 his men crushed a cavalry charge, also on foot, at Bourgtheroulde. At Bouvines the decisive event of the battle was a mixed cavalry and infantry charge by the allies, which the French repulsed.

Battles are spectacular, but warfare was governed by the existence of castles and fortified cities. Much warfare was petty, the squabbles of aristo­cratic neighbours. For relatively limited ends few were prepared to take the all or nothing risk of battle, particularly if a defeated enemy could fall back on his castles for refuge. And a strong castle was difficult to take. Motte and bailey castles, constructions of earthworks and timber, could be formidable, and besieging anything stronger demanded organisation and quite long-term determination. As armies turned to ravaging as the way of damaging the enemy, skirmishes were common. William of Poitiers was praising Duke William of Normandy when he wrote: ‘He sowed terror in the land by his frequent and lengthy invasions; he devastated vineyards, fields and estates; he seized neighbouring strongpoints and where advisable put garrisons in them; in short he incessantly inflicted innumerable calamities upon the land.'

By such methods the Normans conquered south Italy, and they were not shy about the fact. Roger Count of Sicily told his chronicler, Malaterra, to report his early life as a brigand. A reputation of that kind is always useful! But in major confrontations strong castles were formidable obstacles and as a result siege machinery developed. Ladders were an obvious but danger­ous method. But they could be covered by archers in strong wooden structures rolled close to the walls - sows is one name for them. Towers could be built to enable the attackers to sweep the walls, and some were moved up to the walls on wheels. Battering rams, so popular in the ancient world, seem to have largely fallen out of favour, perhaps because their crews were so vulnerable, but mining was always popular. Lever-action artillery was adopted, though for long it was an anti-personnel weapon incapable of smashing walls. During the twelfth century these perriers (stone throwers) became more sophisticated and they were capable of knocking over the merlons covering the walkways on castle walls. By about 1200 the trebuchet had arrived, a counterweight lever-action weapon which could fire heavy balls and damage even the strongest towers. Even so, the advantages of the defender were so great that major armies tried everything. In one of the greatest engagements of the age, Philip Augustus of France successfully besieged Chateau Gaillard from September 1203 to March 1204, using all these methods. Of course any fortress ultimately relied on a relieving army and Philip was fortunate that King John's attempt miscarried badly.

The knights were the best-trained, best-equipped and most adaptable soldiers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They were socially a very mixed group, ranging from great lords like William of Normandy down to relatively humble men. Many of them were not landowners, but paid table­knights. The prejudicial term mercenary was rarely applied to such people, probably because to equip themselves for war they must have come from families above the level of peasants and their services were valued. Such paid men first appear in the sources in the tenth century, and by the eleventh they were commonplace. The Anglo-Norman chroniclers complained that the weak rule in Normandy of Robert Curthose in the 1090s attracted footloose knights. These swords for hire were normal in medieval armies of the twelfth century. They lived with and shared in the lifestyle of the great men they served, but the distinction between these professionals of war and landed men had grown by 1200. By then, certainly in England and France, knights had become assimilated into the aristocracy and were quite distinct from poorer men. Aristocrats were not primarily soldiers, but they cultivated a military patina for this guaranteed their social and political ascendancy. Increasingly they drew their soldiers from the professionals of war. At Bouvines in 1214 disciplined mercenary infantry fought to the death for Renaud of Boulogne. Leaders like Mercadier under Richard and John of England and Cadoc for Philip Augustus did well. War in Europe, except at the level of command, was becoming professionalised.

Contemporaries blamed the ravages of war on mercenaries, although they were usually acting on the orders of aristocrats and kings - whom it would be dangerous to criticise. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 condemned mer­cenaries and heretics in a single decree. The church laboured hard to moderate the behaviour of soldiers. The Peace of God had failed, but was transmuted into the Truce of God, which attempted to outlaw fighting on holy days. Its success was limited but it was establishing standards of beha­viour. And convergent forces humanised warfare. By about 1000, slavery, although important on its peripheries, was dying in western Europe because lords preferred serfs tied to the land. Land ownership was vital to western aristocrats because their rulers lacked tax revenues to fund generous patron­age. Given the scale of warfare between lords and the limited objectives, wiping out serfs would have impoverished the land. Well-to-do captives were not killed but ransomed, because, given the frequency of war, there was a sense that it might be ‘my turn' next. So although ravaging was cruel and destructive, it rarely reached the heights of wholesale massacre, and at least amongst the elite the notion of honourable surrender was grafted on to the warrior ethic. In fact Christianity was deeply embedded in the western elite, and with it therefore a concern with the ethics of warfare.

The ethical basis of the aristocratic claim to power was that they were the defenders of society who bore arms to maintain the social order - an order, of course, from which they profited. Clergy defined a threefold society, those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured, and claimed that the built-in reciprocity was part of the divine economy. But killing was inevitable in war, and yet the church taught that killing was murder, a sin that attracted a heavy penance. Beyond the frontiers of Latin Western Christendom were pagans and infidels, and the idea took root that killing them was acceptable, though it was not to kill fellow Christians. Men looked back to the example of Charlemagne, who had crushed the pagans. There was a strong feeling that killing outsiders was acceptable - in Spain, for example, the Muslims were a real menace. And yet there was doubt and a lack of authoritative statements. And the doctrine and mechanisms of penance were still being debated amongst theologians. This uncertainty seems to have worried people. Even as tough a soldier as Fulk the Black of Anjou went three times to Jerusalem, and founded a great abbey for the good of his soul. It is in this religious concern for the good of their souls that we find the root of support for the crusades.

In 1095 Pope Urban II (1088-99) called for an expedition to aid the Christians of the East and to liberate Jerusalem from Islamic rule: ‘Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.'^[136] This created a new warfare, ideological in motivation and unpre­cedented in scale. Hitherto conquest and expansion had been essentially local and small scale. Lords nibbled at their neighbours and inched forward: the Normans in Wales, the Germans in central Europe and the Spanish Christians in Spain. The conquest of England in 1066 was accounted remarkable. But no one bordered Jerusalem or thought to seek land there before Urban launched the First Crusade. The response dwarfed anything that had gone before. About 100,000 people left their homes in Europe, and about 60,000 gathered in May 1097 before Nicaea. No doubt they had very mixed motives. Urban II, after all, had prohibited neither fighting for money nor fighting for reputa­tion; he offered spiritual reward to those who went for spiritual reasons. The supposed riches of the East were a powerful lure, especially for young warriors. But without Urban's lead there would have been no crusade. This was a powerful tribute to the grip of religion upon Europeans.

Astonishingly, the First Crusade fought its way across Anatolia and Syria, liberated Jerusalem and established the crusader states of Edessa, Antioch, Jerusalem and Tripoli. It was greatly assisted by the succession struggles in the Turkish Seljuq empire of Baghdad, and the tacit support of their rival, the Shi‘ite caliphate of the Egyptian Fatimids. And certainly the crusaders enjoyed good fortune. When they were at their least coherent, sheer weight of numbers enabled them to defeat the Turks of Anatolia. Thereafter they were heavily outnumbered, but adjusted to a radically different style of warfare. The Turks were a steppe people mounted on swift, light animals, whose fighting depended on manoeuvre sustained by strings of horses. They surrounded and harassed their enemies with their composite bows to the point where formations broke up and could be destroyed in close-quarter fighting. The crusaders learned to stay rigidly in their ranks, and to throw their infantry forward to protect their horses from the arrows of the Turks. These were contrasting styles of war and the rapid crusader adjustment speaks well for their leaders. But the whole agonising business of reaching Jerusalem highlights their fanatical determination in battle and siege. The settler states were never strong enough to seize Aleppo or Damascus, or Cairo, but equally they fought off all early attempts to destroy them. But they were never able to live in peace with their Islamic neighbours, amongst whom the spirit of jihad was rapidly rekindled by their very presence. This was ideological war, as William of Tyre, himself a citizen of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, remarked:

War is waged differently and less vigorously between men who hold the same law and faith. For even if no other cause for hatred exists, the fact that the combatants do not share the same articles of faith is sufficient reason for constant quarrelling and enmity.^[137]

The newcomers modified their fighting methods to suit their new situation. Like their enemies, they had to rely on cavalry, but although they made use of Turcopoles as light cavalry, they were not numerous enough to switch to light cavalry and did not control a sufficiently large friendly native population to develop in that direction. Instead they relied on a compact though relatively small mass of heavily armoured knights. In battle the key tactic was the mass charge, unknown in Europe but made possible because con­tinuous warfare meant that lords and knights were used to working together. But heavily laden horses were quickly blown, so that the timing and direc­tion, to hit the critical point of the enemy, was crucial. To make this possible they developed the fighting march. In the presence of the enemy, always more numerous than they were, the knights formed into tight squadrons surrounded at a distance by footmen and archers to fend off the horse­archers. As they moved into the enemy mass the commander could then decide the moment to launch a charge. But the greatest innovation was the military monastic orders of the Temple and the Hospital, each of which could field 300 highly disciplined knight-brothers supported by Turcopoles and foot. Effectively these were standing armies, but they were small, and divided, and often aloof from the army of the nobles.

At a time when the close-quarter battle was crucial, these heavily armoured men were very effective, and while horse-archers were good soldiers the Muslims needed to develop a more numerous corps of ghulams, heavy cavalry. By uniting Syria and Egypt and extending his authority into Iraq Saladin was able to create such a body of warriors. He posed as the champion of Islam but to strike down the settlers he needed to seize their cities. This was impossible as long as their field army was intact. At Hattin in 1187 he lured the army of Jerusalem into a waterless area and destroyed it with his huge army. Subsequently the cities and castles, stripped of their garrisons, surrendered. However, Hattin was an inconclusive victory. Saladin's army was drawn from the lands of many magnates and it tended to melt away, so that he was unable to seize all the cities, and the Third Crusade (1187-92) was able to re-establish a substantial part of the old Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Third Crusade was the last traditional ‘dash for Jerusalem' crusade. Its major leader, Richard of England, recognised that Egypt was the basis of Saladin's power and urged an attack upon it, but others were focused on Jerusalem. However, the failure to reconquer Jerusalem and the divisions amongst Saladin's descendants, the Ayyubids, which invariably divided Syria from Egypt, made the idea of an assault on Egypt attractive, especially as it capitalised on western naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean estab­lished by the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade was intended to attack Egypt but was diverted to Constantinople; the Fifth Crusade (1213-21) threatened Cairo but fell victim to Nile hydrology. Emperor Frederick II (1214-50) played off the rulers of Syria and Egypt to gain Jerusalem by a ten-year truce in 1229, and the trick was repeated by the Barons' Crusade, extending Christian control of Jerusalem to 1244. St Louis of France (1226-70) attacked Egypt in 1248-54, but he was defeated, like the Fifth Crusade, in the Nile delta. An important factor in his defeat was the Mamluks, the military slaves of the Ayyubids. These Turks recruited from the steppe were natural warriors, but by the 1240s were heavily equipped and carefully trained to form a standing army. In the wake of St Louis's crusade they overthrew the Ayyubids and established a military republic, choosing a sultan from their own leaders. They exploited Egypt to finance a standing force of 20,000 and imposed a ruthless Sunni intolerance on their people. This militarised state reconquered Syria from the Mongol invasion in 1260, kept Mongol Persia at bay for the rest of the thirteenth century and destroyed the Latin settlements, culminating in the destruction of Acre in 1291.

The thirteenth century established clearly the world supremacy of the steppe people. The Turks drove the western crusaders out of the Middle East. In 1241 the Mongols defeated the armies ofEurope first at Leignitz and then at Mohi. In a world where armies could rarely train and commanders depended on the native skills of the people who gathered to fight, those of the steppe people, brilliant horsemanship allied to discipline and the ability to man­oeuvre and strike at a distance with the composite bow, made them supreme warriors. And they were adaptable, varying tactics according to those of the enemy and using skills like siege-craft among conquered peoples. They conquered China, failing only in India and the Middle East, where they encountered Turks who were really their own kind. And these Turks in Egypt developed standing forces far ahead of their European counterparts.

No European monarch had the machinery and the resources sufficient to maintain a permanent army comparable to that of the Mamluks. But warfare was becoming more professional. The driving force was the frequency of conflict, especially in Italy where conflict between empire and papacy exa­cerbated fighting between the cities, and ultimately precipitated the long and bitter struggle for control of Sicily between the Angevins of Naples and the house of Aragon in which Byzantium and the papacy were deeply enmeshed. At first armies continued to be transient bodies, but rather notably the cavalry element was becoming more disciplined and effective in such fierce fighting as that at Benevento in 1266 and Tagliacozzo in 1268. Paid men had to be more obedient and they were becoming more numerous and important. But steady foot had always been a menace to cavalry and in 1302 the militia of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres crushed the flower of French chivalry at Courtrai. The Flemish foot, with their backs to a river, formed a line bristling with long pikes. The marshy ground in front of them hindered the French knights who could not create enough momentum to break the enemy line so a scrum ensued. Men with clubs then sallied out of the Flemish line picking off the knights, and when they tried to regroup they were pushed into the streams and wetlands and massacred. In many ways this was a very traditional victory in that the infantry were fighting behind obstacles. In August 1304, the French defeated the Flemings when they tried to manoeuvre in the open at Mons-en- Pevele.

In Italy the continuous fighting of the second half of the thirteenth century forced the cities to pass laws ensuring that their citizens served as horse or foot according to their means, but by about 1300 the burden on such militia forces was becoming intolerable. All the parties to these conflicts employed mercenaries so continuously that they coalesced into companies under famous captains. German troops became regular employees, while an Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood, was among the famous leaders. These semi-regular bands were highly effective. When the Italian wars paused in 1302, the Grand Catalan Company of 1,500 cavalry and 4,000 foot sought employment with the Byzantine empire and was highly effective against the Turks. When the Byzantines turned against it the company defeated them at the Battle of Apros in 1305 and devastated much of Greece. They then took service with the Frankish duke of Athens, and when he could not pay them, crushed his army at Halmyros in 1311, and took control of Athens until 1388. The Companies were characterised by close cooperation between cavalry and foot. The combatants were often raised as ‘lances', a small group of varying size focused on heavily equipped men-at-arms supported by two or three servants, archers and footmen.

Elsewhere in Europe continuous warfare was teaching the same lesson. The Welsh and Scottish campaigns of Edward I (1272-1307) witnessed the raising of huge infantry forces vital in difficult countrysides. After the English disaster at Bannockburn in 1214, northern England was harassed continually by Scottish raids, punctuated by major expeditions. It was by reflecting on a series of battles fought in the north of England, Boroughbridge in 1322, Duplin Moor in 1332 and Halidon Hill in 1333, that Edward III worked out a new tactical system. He strengthened the strategic offensive and the tactical defensive, forcing his enemy to battle by occupying or threatening vital targets. He deployed his men-at-arms on foot to receive the enemy, but on their wings massed bowmen eroded the enemy attack. The bow is one of mankind's oldest weapons and it is hard to imagine that men had not long understood that cutting a stave from that part of the tree where the sapwood and outer wood meet produces a superb weapon. But the longbow was very specialised, being too long and too stiff for hunting. The conditions of frequent war revealed it as a real mankiller, and at the same time provided an incentive for men to train to use it. For such a bow, with a draw of over 150 pounds, could only be successfully used by somebody long trained to it:

[My yeoman father] taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow... not to draw with strength of arms as divers other nations do... I had my bows bought me according to my age and strength, as I increased in them, so my bows were made bigger and bigger. For men shall never shoot well unless they be brought up to it.¹¹

And Edward made contracts with captains who used the efficient English administrative system to pick and recruit men to serve in their companies. This close association of men-at-arms, bowmen and foot produced an effec­tive simulacrum of a standing army. Moreover, once the ‘Hundred Years War' began in France these men could be turned loose to pillage the country­side. This new system triumphed over the French at Crecy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. By mounting the archers, the English companies gained great speed and range for their devastating chevauchees across the French ^[138] countryside. Once the French ceased to seek battle, their numbers, the sheer volume of fortified places and the wealth of their realm told. Essentially the English won enough victories to encourage the continuation of the war, but never achieved a decisive breakthrough. Even Agincourt in 1415, the supreme victory of the Edwardian system, was not in the end decisive. In medieval circumstances conquest demanded a degree of consent that the English crown never commanded.

But the sheer length and intensity of these wars promoted not merely professionalisation but the raising of standing forces. Monarchs took to retaining personal guards. The English crown kept permanent garrisons totalling several thousand men, notably at Calais. After the mid fifteenth century the English threat to France receded, but the ambitions of the dukes of Burgundy threatened the integrity of France. The result was the creation by the French monarchy of the Compagnies d'Ordonnance, a standing force of all arms, though with cavalry as an elite, which in the last quarter of the fifteenth century numbered 20,000. In Spain the long wars against Islam left the monarchy with a substantial standing force. Such units now replaced the king's personal retinue as the core of major armies. Kings did not yet have a monopoly of war, but they were achieving a major dominance which pointed in that direction. Such bodies were enormously expensive and as its efforts in France failed the English monarchy cut back on troops. As a result, in the second half of the fifteenth century aristocratic faction could muster sufficient forces to precipitate civil war.

The novelty of the warfare in the Hundred Years War commands atten­tion, but though it had much in common with fighting elsewhere, notably crude devastation of the civilian population, it was not typical. In the Baltic, the Teutonic Order pushed the frontier of Catholic Christendom forward against the pagans. This was ideological war reinforced by the determination of the papacy to hold the orthodoxy of Russia at bay and the greed of the Hanseatic merchants to monopolise the northern trade. The great Cogs brought in supplies to Livonia and shipped in crusaders from the German heartlands to fight a war of sieges and devastation so brutal that outsiders were shocked by the slaughter. Here technological advantages were impor­tant. The Germans had plenty of iron weapons, their shipping dominated the rivers, and their siege weapons and crossbows at least at first were a great advantage. In Poland, the Teutonic Order established itself in an effort to conquer Lithuania where a well-organised pagan enemy held out. It was a bitter, gruesome, grinding process of killing and devastation, given an air of glamour by the Reisen, the annual expeditions joined by wealthy lords,

Armies and Bands in Medieval Europe knights and even kings from all over Europe which earned for their partici­pants the spiritual benefits of crusading. In Poland, with its eastern borders open to the steppe, light cavalry predominated. All over Europe aristocrats attached enormous importance to control over armed force. In Hungary, the high aristocracy was inspired by suicidal self-interest inimical to the new professionalism. This was peculiarly unfortunate because they were soon confronted with the greatest military power in the Mediterranean world.

The Ottomans had begun as one of the many minor principalities or Beyliks into which Anatolia was divided. Pressed up hard against the Byzantine frontier, the Ottomans attracted steppe Turks to war against Christians, and conciliated conquered peoples by toleration and light taxa­tion. The neighbouring Beyliks were not strong, while Byzantium in the early fourteenth century feared attacks from the West and later was divided by factional conflicts. The Mamluks of Egypt were fighting Persia. Neither Christian Cyprus nor Hospitaller Rhodes could do much, while Frankish Greece was enfeebled and Venice and Genoa fought one another. The Aegean was the centre of a fragmented world, but success enabled the Ottomans to expand their armies from the steppe. These were mainly light horse-archers of a kind long familiar. They lacked infantry or experience of siege techniques. Bursa and Nicaea fell to the Ottomans only because they were isolated, without hope of relief. The Turks established themselves in Europe in 1345, seizing Adrianople in 1362. A short expedition by Amadeo VI of Savoy in 1363 with a force of some 3,000 defeated Sultan Murad I (1362-89), but this was not sustained and Philippopolis fell to the Ottomans in that year. At Kosovo in 1389 a Serb army was crushed and soon after Bulgaria capitu­lated. The Ottomans distrusted their tribal leaders, so, as their lands grew, they established provinces, sancaks, which were run by bureaucrats and the sipahis, heavy cavalrymen, who formed an elite in the army. But even more radical was recruitment of young Christians as slave-soldiers into the infantry core of the yeni ceri (janissaries). Thus the army gradually became a standing force, and developed infantry necessary for fighting in the seamed and fortified countryside of Europe.

The Hungarians were at first content to see their Balkan rivals destroyed, but finding themselves in the frontline they became alarmed. In 1396, with Sultan Bayezid besieging Constantinople itself, Sigismund king of Hungary advanced in conjunction with a crusader force. They besieged Nicopolis, drawing Bayezid away from Constantinople. The heavily armoured western knights were contemptuous of Sigismund and his Hungarians, but they had no real commander. The knights charged into the Ottoman army, but,

weakened by the effort, were isolated from their allies and annihilated by the sipahis. In 1402 Bayezid was defeated, captured and later killed by the Mongols under Timur at Ankara, but the Ottoman bureaucracy and army kept the state viable, until under Mehmed II (1451-81) the Ottomans laid siege to Constantinople, isolated but protected by its famous mighty walls - which, however, proved vulnerable to a new technology.

Technological change played little role in the history of European warfare. The diffusion of the stirrup and the high saddle gave the mounted warrior a more secure seat by the tenth century. A strong metallurgical industry provided Europeans with plenty of good weapons whose export to the Middle East was prohibited by the papacy during the crusades. The crossbow was a complex weapon that demanded little skill of its bearer, but was slow to load. It was very useful in sieges and in the thirteenth century notably helped the conquest of the peoples of northern Europe. But none of this conferred any very great advantage. The development of plate armour, strong enough to deflect blows but light enough to wear, was a remarkable tribute to western smiths. But it was so expensive that only relatively few could ever afford it. Siege-artillery was not an overwhelming threat to fortifications and never replaced older methods of mining and escalade. Gunpowder was invented in China and its first recorded military use in Europe was by the Mongols at the Battle of Liegnitz in 1241. By 1267 the friar Roger Bacon knew the approximate content of this substance. In a treatise of 1326 by Walter Milemete there is an illustration of a cannon. All previous killing methods had relied on the musclepower of men and animals, so that in principle gunpow­der introduced something quite new: chemical combustion.

But using gunpowder was problematic. Saltpeter was difficult to produce and this meant that blackpowder was expensive and inconsistent. It was susceptible to damp, raising difficulties of transport, and it aged quickly. It was not until the late fourteenth century that saltpeter production expanded and ‘corning', wet-grinding the powder, ameliorated these problems. The explosive power of gunpowder challenged contemporary metallurgy. Early guns were very heavy and when it was realised that corned powder actually increased explosive power they became even heavier. Guns, with their slow rate of fire, were chiefly valued for siege, to demolish the tall thin walls of medieval fortifications. Towards the end of the fourteenth century huge bombards, like ‘Mons Meg', cast in Flanders in 1449 with its 56 cm calibre, were produced. A gigantic version was ‘Basilica', said to have been 8.2 m long, deployed by Mehmed II against Constantinople in his victorious siege of 1453. It may be significant that this monster is said to have been cast by a European, Hungarian or German, in the sultan's pay. Certainly firearms fitted well into the slow-moving pattern of Western warfare. Cannon of some kind were used at Crecy in 1346, and in the fifteenth century smaller lighter weapons appeared on the battlefield. It came to be recognised that long narrow-bore cannon were just as effective as bombards against fortifica­tions and could be used in the field. The replacement of stone balls by iron enhanced their effect and enabled calibres to become more standardised. By the time the French invaded Italy in 1494 they had relatively mobile cannon suitable for battering walls and deployment in the field. To defend against such weapons, cities and castles under threat built boulevards, bastions, outside the walls.

The earliest handguns were miniature cannon mounted on poles - staff­guns - but in the fifteenth century the arquebus emerged, with its barrel length of about 1 metre being 40 times its bore. It was slow to load and inaccurate beyond 50 metres, but its great value was that it needed little skill to operate - it was a simple point and shoot weapon. But its limitations, and those of cannon, posed problems about tactical integration. One method was the Wagenburg: placing men and guns in carts that were chained together with cannon between them. These were very effective if the enemy obli­gingly attacked them, and enjoyed a considerable vogue in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In fact, although they were fearsome and much remarked upon by contemporaries for their novelty, the slow rate of fire, limited range and inaccuracy of gunpowder weapons meant they made only a limited impact upon warfare before 1500. Tactical integration was the work of the sixteenth century. In 1453 the cannons of Mehmed II did much to prepare the way for his successful assault on Constantinople. But ultimately it was the sultan's readiness to sacrifice his ancillary troops and the sheer discipline of the janissaries which carried the day.