In Medieval
Ships and Warfare, maritime historian Susan Rose of the
United Kingdom’s Open University, has produced an extremely
useful collection that deals with both shipbuilding and naval
conflict during the Middle Ages. This hefty volume
consists of twenty-seven articles by leading authorities
that appeared in print between 1930 and 2003. Although
several authors, contribute more than one article (Professor
Rose actually has three, including a wide-ranging piece introducing
the section on Mediterranean warfare), the majority were
written by different scholars. And while almost all
of the authors are specialists in maritime history, there
is one major “crossover”—Kelly DeVries,
most of whose work has dealt with land warfare, provides
a detailed analysis of the way in which contemporary chroniclers
treated the important battle of Sluys (1340).
In
her very fine introduction to the collection, Professor Rose identifies
what she herself calls “certain constraints...observed
in choosing essays for inclusion”:
First,
all essays were originally published in English, although this
has meant the exclusion of interesting material in other major
European languages. This has produced...something of
a consequent bias in favour of events occurring in English
waters. Secondly, essays which have been published in
other collections, many easily available, have been excluded
though mention will be made of some later in this Introduction;
for example, the series of essays by James Sherborne on English
warships in the later fourteenth century [and] “The Battle
of La Rochelle and the War at Sea, (1372-75”
being of particular interest. Material from less widely
circulated journals has also been included in preference to that
found either in journals available in most libraries or those
also published in an electronic version. [1]
Arguably,
such principles of selection will gravitate against creating
a collection made up of “the very best” articles
on the topic of naval warfare. On the other hand, the
present volume sheds important light on what are the sources
for doing medieval maritime history, how ships of the period
were constructed and fitted out, how governments went about
gathering the fleets they needed for transporting troops and
fighting at sea, where such combats took place an how they
were actually conducted.
Professor
Rose has arranged her collection on the basis of geography
into two parts each of which has been further subdivided into
smaller topics as follows:
- Part
I—North-western Europe:
- Ships and Boats: Issues
of Technology and Evidence
- Piracy and Pirates
- Fleets and
Warfare
- Part
II—The Mediterranean:
- The Islamic Powers
- Iberia
- Genoa and Venice
Chronologically,
articles range from around the time of the First Crusade (c.
1100) to the end of the fifteenth century. None deal
with naval events of the early medieval period such as the
western campaigns of Justinian, the late seventh and early
eighth century Arab attacks on Constantinople, or the Viking
voyages.
While
a certain number come from journals that specialize in maritime
history such as the Mariner’s Mirror, American
Neptune, and The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology
and Underwater Exploration, many are taken from outlets
more widely-known to medieval historians, including Speculum,
the English Historical Review, the Journal of Medieval
History, and the Journal of Military History.
The
collection should prove of particular interest to two sizeable constituencies
within the medieval military fraternity. Crusade historians
will find interesting reading in the half dozen articles dealing
with Islamic sea power and why it signally failed to win the
naval war in the eastern Mediterranean, despite being much
closer to the scene of action than the Crusader fleets that
it faced. The failure was of such magnitude that it ultimately
led Islamic states to practice a “scorched earth” policy
by destroying the thriving ports of Palestine when it proved
impossible to hold them. A consensus develops among several
of the collection’s authors that a major problem lay
in the disparaging attitude of most cavalry-oriented Moslem
societies (the only noteworthy exceptions being the Ayyubids
in the time of Saladin and the later Ottoman Empire) toward
ships and those who manned them. Two authors both quote
the Mamluk conqueror, Baibars, whose words on several occasions
amply demonstrated this attitude.
The
second group to whom the collection may prove particularly interesting
consists of the many historians (including this reviewer) whose
attention centers on the Hundred Years War. Fully eight
articles either deal with or, at the very least, touch upon
the issue of sea power in the conflict that dominated northern
Europe during the later Middle Ages. Of particular note
are the three articles on piracy in the English Channel and
the North Sea—“John Crabbe: Flemish Pirate,
Merchant and Adventurer,”
“Henry IV and the English Privateers,” and “Piracy
or Policy: The Crisis in the Channel, 1400-1403”—which
together chronicle the on-going war at sea against enemy shipping,
a war that continued to rage even during periods of truce. These
articles raise important questions concerning piratical activities
in the English Channel and along the North Sea coast. Were
the “pirates” simply “freebooters” acting
on their own accord or were they following policies laid down
by the English and French governments. Concomitantly, to
what extent could the two great monarchies influence or even
control the predatory activities of their seamen?
As
in the case of other Ashgate publications (for example, the Variorum
volumes), this collection reproduces for each individual article
the formatting used by the journal where it originally appeared;
in other words, each article maintains its original typeface,
with the original pagination, and the original system of citation,
in some cases, using footnotes and in others, endnotes. Visually,
the only unifying factor is a heading at the top of each page
containing the title of the volume and its internal pagination. (As
a result, each page has two numbers: that of the original
journal and that which it occupies within the collection.) As
in similar Ashgate publications, this is obviously done to
keep down the publication costs that would be involved in resetting
the entire text. While this format gives the collection
a rather disparate look, it presents no particular problem
for the reader. The only drawback lies in the size of
the different typefaces, some of which are harder to read than
others. In fact, there is at least one advantage: the
scholar using the collection can easily cite the original article
if for any reason he or she wishes to do so. Despite
Ashgate’s economizing measures, the book still bears
a hefty pricetag of more than 100 L., though it is the least
costly of any volume in what is an expensive series.
In
the introduction, Professor Rose points out that land battles,
at least those of the Middle Ages, tend to enter into national
lore far more readily than encounters fought at sea. In
her words,
In
the British Isles, the history plays of Shakespeare especially
Henry V have given a heroic gloss to warfare against the French. The
play’s celebration of the Agincourt campaign, and, particularly,
scenes such as the breach in the walls of Harfleur, or the
visit of King Harry to his men on the night before the battle,
are embedded in English folk memory. Films and television
series have reinforced this effect. The battle-winning
skills of English archers and the rituals of jousting, in truth
training for the charge of knights in battle, are still practiced
and recreated in summer festivals….It is hard to find
similar encounters at sea which have the same place in the
collective memory of the people of Europe.[2]
Perhaps
this disparity may be in part explained, at least for Northern
Europe, by a point made in one of collection’s articles—“The
Battle of Damme-1213.” In this encounter, which
author F. W. Brooks hails as “the first great sea-fight
between England and France” (as it turns out, it was
really fought in a river estuary with the French ships at anchor),
the thirteenth century is identified as the real beginning
of fleet actions in that region.
Whilst
it is true that the naval battles of the thirteenth century
do not show any great understanding of the tactical handling
of fleets, we mark, in the various wars of the period, a developing
exhibiting “a developing conception of the use of the
fleet for something more than transport. It is gradually
beginning to be regarded as a weapon of offence and defence,
and the idea that a naval offensive is the best and surest
defence against a threat of invasion is slowing beginning to
dawn. [3]
Just
as the clash of large armies is a sine qua non for great
land battles, so too the clash of fleets is required to generate
a major encounter at sea. Hence, a relatively late development
of fleet tactics will of necessity be a limiting factor when
it comes to the number of famous medieval seaborne encounters,
especially those that taking place over the coasts of Northern
Europe.
On
the other hand, Professor Rose’s generalization holds true
even for the fourteenth century, when important sea battles
began to take place: such significant encounters as Sluys
(1340) and La Rochelle (1372) are largely lost in the shadow
of great land battles like Courtrai (1302), Bannockburn (1314),
Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Nájera (1367), Nicopolis
(1396), Tannenburg (1410), and, of course, Agincourt (1415). Not
until the modern period would clashes at sea such as Lepanto,
the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, Jutland, and Wake Island come
to rival for popular attention those fought on land.
Professor
Rose also points out a fact of medieval military historiography
that has not escaped the notice of many of its practitioners. There
exists something of a divide between the study of land warfare
and naval warfare in the Middle Ages, one without all that
much crossover between the two. In other words, most
scholars tend to specialize either in one area or the other
without venturing out onto one another’s turf. (The
aforementioned exception in this volume, Kelly DeVries, is
in fact exceptional in the breadth of his scholarship.) From
the perspective of one of those historians who has concentrated
on land warfare, this reviewer would highly recommend the book
to his fellow “land rats” (to borrow a phrase from
Otto von Bismarck). For anyone working primarily on naval
warfare, the articles would seem to be compulsory reading.
Notes
[1] Susan
Rose, Medieval Ships and Warfare, The International
Library (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), xiii.
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid., 121.