[1] Just some examples for the Castilian Kingdom. For the true and rightful love see Diego de San Pedro´s Carcel de Amor; for religious use of siege warfare images see Alonso de Espina´s Fortalitium Fidei.
The
Medieval City under Siege. Ed. by Ivy A. Corfis and Michael Wolfe.
The
present work is a recompilation of essays whose focus was inspired by the
conference "The Medieval city under siege" held at the University Park
Campus of the Pennsylvania State University in April, 1992. Some of them have
been amplified and recrafted, others have been solicited especially for this
publication.
This
group of essays is a good representation of some of the new perspectives on
Medieval siege warfare. Here we can find the use of different methods of
research from the archaeological ones - for example the excellent study of Denys
Pringle on "Town defences on the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem"- to
the literary approach of Michael Harney´s "Siege Warfare in Hispanic Epic
and Romance". The geographical landscape, although tends to focus on the
events in France and Italy, is also wide open; going from the Iberian lands -as
in the paper of the well known specialist James F. Powers "Life on the Cutting Edge: the Besieged Town on the Luso-Hispanic
Frontier in the Twelfth Century", passing through Germany (Michael Toch´s
"The Medieval German city under siege"), to Byzantium and the
Crusaders kingdoms. The chronological period of study goes from the XIIth to the
XVth century, although Eric McGeer´s "Byzantine Siege warfare in Theory
and Practice (X-XIth centuries)" and Paul E. Cheveden´s "Artillery in
late Antiquity: Prelude to the Middle Ages" escape from that time band. The
subjects studied here are the best example of these new tendencies on the
research on siege warfare. From the role played by the towns during long wars
and it effects on state building -as in Michael Wolfe´s "Siege Warfare and
the Bonnes Villes of France during the
Hundred Years Wars"-, to purely technological and urban fortification
aspects as in the papers of Pringle, McGeer and Cheveden. From the sieges as
literary settings for social and genre concerns ( Heather Arden´s "The
Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Love in the Roman
de la rose"), as well as a landscape for the "subversion" of
chivalric values (Winthrop Wetherbee´s "Chivalry under Siege in Ricardian
Romance"), to one of the dearest topics of this new approach, as has to be
the discussion on the real existence of the so called "Military
Revolution" of the XVIth century, the evolution of Medieval siege warfare
and the transition to a new age. These last aspects are treated in Kelly DeVries´s
"The Impact of Gunpowder Weaponry in the Hundred Years War"; Michael
Mallet´s "Siegecraft in Late Fifteenth-Century Italy", and Bert S.
Hall´s "The Changing Face of Siege Warfare: Technology and Tactics in
Transition". All of these papers are preceded by an introduction by the
editor Michael Wolfe, citing quite an interesting , although short,
bibliography.
Of
course, not all the new points or subjects are treated in this book. For
example, the well known use of siege and military images by clerics and laymen
in their sermons or books about morality and true love do not appear here[1].
Some papers about "the other side" are also missed, how the enemy of
the people described here faced the problem of
siege warfare. Very little is said about the Muslims in the Iberian
Peninsula and Palestine, and nothing is said about the Celts facing Anglo-Norman
invasion, or the pagan/Christian people of central Europe facing the German
expansion. Other side of these new approaches, not treated here, is the
topographical study and urbanistic impact of
siege warfare in the evolution of our villes.
To sum up, although none of the papers presented here offers spectacular or really new discoveries, the selection of writers in this book, specialist in their areas of research, gives us the opportunity to have an overlook of the new perspectives on the study on siege warfare.
José Maneul Rodriguez
University
of Salamanca