Krieg im Mittelalter
At first sight it the genre to which this book belongs seems fairly clear. High production values, glossy paper, lavish illustrations, an absence of footnotes and a limited bibliography–all suggest a book designed for the coffee table rather than the study. Closer inspection, however, leads one to a reconsideration. This is not the sort of book to give to an interested novice wanting a brief overview of medieval warfare- the coverage is too idiosyncratic and the text assumes too much knowledge of the basic history of the medieval Reich. On the other hand, the absence of scholarly apparatus and the sometimes elementary nature of the text limit its utility in an academic context. In other words, it is unclear just what the assumed target audience of the book is and this blurred focus impacts on the whole publication.
Writing a general history of medieval warfare in some 190 pages is a challenge and one can hardly blame Prietzel for limiting his scope. There is nothing on warfare at sea and nothing on Byzantine, Islamic or Mongol warfare. The story starts with the Carolingians on the (debatable) argument that source materials for the earlier period are inadequate. The only crusading activity covered in any detail is that in Prussia and the Baltic. In his introduction, Prietzel states that he will be concentrating on the lands of the Holy Roman Empire and its immediate surroundings. This is a defensible approach and indeed a short overview of warfare in the medieval Reich would be a valuable addition to the literature. Unfortunately this is not what Prietzel has written.
The book starts by examining warfare in the years up to 1000, briefly examines the changes on the 11th and 12th centuries, jumps to the Baltic Crusades, then has a couple of chapters on castles, urban fortifications and siege warfare, one on the Hundred Years War and finishes with a rapid gallop though late medieval Germany (from Tannenberg/Grunwald via the Hussites to Maximilian I in a dozen pages). Warfare in Italy does not rate a mention- not even the wars of the Hohenstaufen Emperors against the Italian city communes (the sections on urban warfare are almost entirely devoted to the German experience). Indeed the years between 1150 and 1300 vanish from sight apart from the pages on the wars of the Deutsche Orden in the Baltic in those years.
This strangely broken-backed presentation poses serious problems of perspective. There is little on pre-gunpowder siege warfare. The reader is left with the misleading impression that soldiers only begin to be paid cash wages in the 14th century and that there were no worthwhile infantry forces before that date. This is all the more surprising because many of the earliest effective mercenary units operating in the 12th and 13th centuries came from such Imperial territories as Brabant and Hainault while some of the most interesting accounts of early medieval sieges relate to actions undertaken by rulers like Frederick Barbarossa in Northern Italy- all very much related to the medieval Reich. On the other hand, the key developments in medieval warfare- the changes in cavalry techniques and the creation of the knightly “order” in the 11th and 12th centuries, the growing importance of infantry and the development towards standing armies in the 14th and 15th centuries- are covered very much through a traditional account focussed on French (and to a lesser extent English) experience. There is very little examination of how these developments played out in a German context (even the appearance of the Landsknecht is dispatched in little more than a couple of sentences). This paradoxical weakness on what ought to be home ground possibly reflects a weakness in German historiography (it is notable that the German language works in the bibliography are either very dated or very detailed in their focus) but is unfortunate.
A book of this nature is obviously very dependent on previous scholarship and cannot be expected to give much detail on academic debates. Prietzel is a supporter of Bachrach’s “big armies” thesis for Carolingian warfare, follows Verbruggen’s focus on cavalry as the overwhelmingly dominant arm of warfare before about 1300 and is very much an exponent of Vegetian, battle avoiding warfare based on sieges and ravaging the enemy’s lands (not one of the illustrations is a traditional battle plan and the works of Clifford Rogers do not figure in the bibliography). No doubt this reliance helps to explain some of his more dubious assertions (e.g., that early medieval swords were as much status items as weapons or that early medieval archery was of limited effectiveness- both propositions which an examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would call into question).
Prietzel is at his best in dealing with the cultural aspects of warfare and the ways in which military events are reported in chronicle literature- matters on which he has himself published. He has some fascinating things to say about the ways in which 11th century armies demonstrated victory on the field of battle, about the development of personalised banners on the First Crusade and about the cultural uses of single combats to disguise inconvenient realities. He is particularly interesting on the ways in which warfare was memorialised in the later middle ages and beyond (even if his suggestion that the Swiss concentration on captured banners represented a specifically “communal” approach different from that of contemporary monarchs is rather contradicted by his own account of the fate of the banners captured at Tannenberg/Grunwald and does not seem to take the work of Colette Beaune on French memorialisation of the Hundred Years War into account [1]). The section on warfare in late medieval German cities is intriguing and one which would have benefited from a comparative perspective with the rather better known Italian experience.
Overall one has a sense of a book which is somewhat less than the sum of its parts; rather more than a simple picture book but rather less than a genuine overview of medieval warfare.
Notes
1. Colette Beaune Naissance de la Nation France Paris 1985, especially pages 167-187.