Christian Teutsch
Victory at Poitiers: The Black Prince and the Medieval Art of War
Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2010. 160 pp. £19.99. ISBN 978-1-84415-932-1.
If Christian Teutsch’s Victory at Poitiers contributes anything new to the study of this critical battle of the Hundred Years’ War, it is the insight that the author—a combat veteran, West Point graduate and instructor, and career military officer—brings to the subject from his own lived experience. Though an extremely entertaining writer with a good grasp of the subject, Teutsch is not a professional academic: A Western Civ-style introduction, including a somewhat muddled and irrelevant account of the Pirenne Thesis, forms the first few pages, and he makes use of some rather amusing nineteenth-century translations. But then, Teutsch doesn’t need to be a world-class scholar to accomplish his objective: The influence of Cliff Rogers can be clearly seen, and this volume serves not only as an in-depth treatment of the battle itself, but as a sort of textbook distillation of the most recent and best thinking on the Hundred Years War. For instance, the aim of chevauchée, for Teutsch (as for Professor Rogers) is economic warfare and to force a decisive battle, by means of which the English, with fewer strategic resources but the tactical advantage of choosing the battlefield, could triumph.
Indeed, the bulk of the book is devoted to context, exploring what Professor Rogers has called the “Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War”. After brief and rather general primers on medieval warfare and the political situation, two lengthy chapters are devoted to Crécy and Neville’s Cross, which drive home the main points on the usefulness of forcing battle, the advantage of tactical position, the skilful use of dismounted troops, and battle as the “final arbiter.” All of these would make themselves felt in the Black Prince’s strategy at Poitiers. (On the other hand, Teutsch is more sanguine about the longbow than Professor Rogers, or at least has less ground to deploy this argument: Poitiers, as the chronicles confirm, was won by the English choice of ground and bloody hand-to-hand combat.)
Teutsch covers the period between Crécy and 1355 in a chapter of some six pages, and then devotes ten to the campaign that led to the battle: In the summer of 1356, Edward the Black Prince and his Gascon allies launched a great chevauchée across southwestern France. The French king, Jean II, was shamed into pursuing him, finally catching up in mid-September near Poitiers. This seems somewhat scant in comparison to the rich detail in the chapters on Crécy and Neville’s Cross, and could have used some more fleshing out.
The seventh chapter, the longest at fifty pages, covers the battle itself. The Black Prince chose his battlefield well: His 6,000 dismounted troops, organized in two or three groups, had their back to a small forest, the Woods of Noauaille; on his left was the Maisson River and the Wood of St. Pierre, while on his right was his plunder-laden baggage train, parked on the Roman road between Bourdeaux and Poitiers. His army commanded the high ground and was hidden by hedges, concealed in the woods at his back was a reserve troop of mounted knights, and each flank was secured by a group of 500 archers armed with the deadly English longbow. The story is well familiar to students of medieval military history, but it is worth mentioning that Teutsch pays attention to the terrain and orientation of the battlefield, weighing the commanders’ preliminary actions as only a career military officer can and adding a unique perspective to what would otherwise be a forced slog through ground churned to mud under the boot prints of legions of other writers.
Teutsch also pays more attention to the role of diplomacy than most popular accounts, adding how the attempts of a papal legate to negotiate a peace on Sunday, 18 September spoke to the Black Prince’s shrewdness as a commander. Unsurprisingly, negotiations broke down and the commanders faced one another across the field on the morning of Monday the nineteenth. The first contact with the enemy was the English longbowmen on the right flank showing themselves. This drew a cavalry charge from the French commander Cleremont. Mindful of the disaster at Crécy, where the English archers carried the day, the longbowmen were the primary French target. However, Cleremont led his men into an ambush: Though invulnerable from the front, they were met by withering flanking arrow fire.
Since, dismounted, the French knights were essentially arrow-proof thanks to their armor and the English were running low on ammunition in any case, this was to be a battle of footmen. Three groups under the Duke of Orleans, the Dauphin Charles (later King Charles V), and his brothers closed with the English. King John remained in the rear with his 400 mounted knights. The English archers joined in to fight hand-to-hand.
As Teutsch points out, accounts differ on what happened next, but what seems to have occurred was a failure of morale on the part of the French: The Dauphin’s men drew back to regroup and Orleans’ men, seeing this, took flight. The remaining troops rallied around King Jean—a sizable, fresh force well able to smash the now-weary English. However, a cavalry charge from the English reserves, commanded by Jean de Grailly, a Gascon nobleman, smashed the French center. King Jean, fighting valiantly on foot, was captured, and the English won the field with minimal casualties. French casualties, however, numbered 2,500, with 2,000 taken prisoner—including, besides the king, 35 major noblemen and more than 100 knights.
The aftermath of the battle was also important, and not neglected by the author. This last chapter covers some fourteen pages. The French were disorganized, demoralized, and forced into a series of humiliating treaties. King Jean’s ransom was twice the yearly income of the entire country; he was unable to raise it, left the kingdom in the hands of the dauphin (the future Charles V), and returned to English custody to live a life of indolent captivity and finally die in 1364. The French peasantry, oppressed by the need to pay a literal king’s ransom and saddled with taxes by a nobility that had proven itself incapable of defending their lands, rose in rebellion in 1358. The French would not risk another set-piece battle for half a century.
Teutsch’s strengths are a fairly good grasp of the secondary literature and a professional understanding of military tactics, formations, and strategy, as displayed in his many diagrams and evidenced by his calm expertise in the weighing of differing historical accounts. Lest one think that this is all a kriegspiel, he also efficiently evokes the blood and mud and terror of combat. His weaknesses are in his occasional over-reliance on the secondary sources (though, alas, not Steve Muhlberger’s recent works, which do much to evoke the fourteenth-century chivalric mindset) and Victorian translations that read like Sir Walter Scott. As the Anglocentric title indicates, this is also a story very much told from the English point of view—though in a book of this sort, this is perhaps to be expected.
In all, this is a good primer of the Battle of Poitiers that I would recommend to an undergraduate or general reader interested in the subject. Teutsch understands that warfare does not take place in a political, social, economic, or logistical vacuum, and his sifting of the accounts, though hampered by the use of translations, benefits from his real-world expertise. Likewise, he brings his subject alive with prose that is by turns professional and passionate. I look forward to more, and more scholarly, titles from him.
