Caste, Skill, and Training: The Evolution of Cohesion in European Armies from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century
By Dennis E. Showalter
From: The Journal of Military History vol. 57 (1993)
The
Middle Ages were characterized by growing institutional sophistication, and
nowhere was this more apparent than the craft of war. The image made familiar by
Ferdinand Lot and Sir Charles Oman, of medieval warfare as featuring limited
discipline, simple tactics, and no strategy at all, has given way to a growing
appreciation of the complexity of military operations between the eighth and the
sixteenth centuries.1 More
and more medieval leaders are emerging from the shadows of romance as solid,
competent captains. Even Richard the Lion-Hearted is now presented as a
strategist comparable to Bernard Law Montgomery-a juxtaposition not necessarily
favoring the latter! 2 The parallel reflects the high cost of
medieval armies relative to a given political system's mobilizable resources.
Like the twentieth-century British marshal, no medieval commander could afford
to lose men heedlessly. Large-scale battles were exceptional because of their
risk-a risk enhanced by the high development of the science of fortification. An
enemy defeated in the field was likely to escape decisive consequences by
withdrawing behind defenses whose reduction involved massive expenses of time
and effort.
Medieval warfare therefore tended towards a process
of small-scale maneuvers, raids, and skirmishes based on regional networks of
forti–fications. This attritional model in turn highlighted the familiar limita–tions
of feudal levies: short service and organizational entropy. Warfare had become
too complex, too sophisticated, and too low-key to be sustained effectively by
temporarily assembled bands of agonistic heroes. High levels of patience,
cunning, and discipline were required to achieve even limited ends-not least to
prevent operations from degenerating into mutual self-destruction through mutual
plundering.3
Tactical considerations reinforced strategic factors
in making high demands on the solidarity and flexibility of field forces.
Medieval commanders were by no means indifferent to the problems and
opportunities posed by flanks. They were correspondingly concerned with being
able to move formed bodies of men from place to place in a hurry. The risks of
disorganized pursuit were also frequently demonstrated alike by Magyar and
Muslim horsemen, Welsh and Prussian peasants.4
Cohesion, in short, became an increasingly important element of medieval armed forces. Yet the techniques for achieving this cohesion have been relatively ignored by military historians more concerned with operational results. This essay proposes to examine the structure of medieval Europe's military systems - and the factors that held medieval armed forces together in battle and on campaign.
I
Medieval Europe was a society organized for war, whose focal point was the armored horseman, the knight. Expensive technical improve–ments in armor and in horse breeding, combined with the difficulty of mobilizing capital resources in a subsistence economy, set knights increasingly apart from other fighters. To the price of knightly equipment were added the costs, material and psychological, of knightly profes–sionalism. The horsemanship necessary to manage a stallion in battle; the ability to use sword, mace, or lance effectively, whether mounted or on foot - these skills reflected early training and a lifetime's practice. They were specialized enough to be essentially incompatible with the mundane concerns of earning a living.5
Caste position reflected pride of craft. If heavy
cavalry increasingly dominated the high-medieval military scene, this reflected
its flexibility and adaptability as well as its social pretensions. The knight
was not a berserker. Ideally, his belligerence was focused and controlled. He
was master of himself as well as of his horse and arms. As early as the
Carolingian era, armored horsemen could execute complex tactical maneuvers. They
could fight effectively on foot as well as on horseback.6 Their
successors demonstrated, from the marshes of Ireland to the forests of Prussia
to the deserts of Outre-Mer, a significant ability to adjust their tactics to
their opposition. This developing sophistication challenged traditional ways of
organizing Western Europe's nobility for war. The patterns of military grouping
among the German peoples, whose political organizations grew out of the Roman
Empire, had been anthropological,
based on tribal and clan affinities. Chieftains also increasingly tried to
maintain bands of pledged warriors as a personal following, maintaining them
from their own resources and the spoils of war. These Gefolgschaften increasingly
formed the core of auxiliary and federate units in the late Roman army, blending
personal oaths to their leader with institutional allegiance to the Empire.7
The concept of fealty at two levels endured long
after Western Europe's disappearance. But while bonds of blood and oath could
generate social cohesion, linkages based on personal loyalty did not always
guarantee enough solidarity and self-sacrifice to withstand the shock
of a major battle, to say nothing of the stress of long-term campaigning.8 The
situation was further complicated because an increasing number of men at arms
did not belong to the feudality at all. In Spain and Italy, "commoner
knights" were a major element of military strength by the eleventh century.
In Germany the growth of the ministeriales, a class of servile administrators,
put even unfree men into armor and on horseback. And everywhere the fully armed
horseman was increasingly supplemented by a class of mounted
"sergeants." These men, of less exalted birth and less complete
equipment than the chivalry proper, often depended for their horses and armor on
a wealthier patron or sponsor, whom they logically followed in the field.9
The noble man-at-arms, far from
being an isolated individual, increasingly became the focal point of a small
administrative unit and combat team, the lance. Beginning informally,
incorporating the knight and a few personal attendants, the lance evolved in
France by the middle of the fifteenth century into a man-at-arms, a squire, a
page, two or three mounted archers, and a servant. A Burgundian lance could
include as many as nine men, each with a specific operational function. On
campaign, lances were grouped into conroys, usually of twenty-five to eighty
men-more or less permanent bodies.
The size of these varied
considerably. They might include only the retainers of a single lord. They might
consist of several smaller groups, or even of isolated individuals assembled ad
hoc.10 Conroys most fre–quently incorporated men from the same
neighborhood, who had exercised together and tested each others' mettle for
years. Such units were perfectly capable of following their leader's standard in
coherent maneuvers-even in a maneuver as risky as pretended flight, which was an
element of Norman warfare as early as the eleventh century.11
Conroys might also be formed into
larger units several hundred strong, as in the French army that marched against
the Flemish in 1328. At this level, once the limits of personal connections were
reached, a logical and familiar next step involved groupings based on language
and place of origin. Even the religious military orders, with their direct,
principled commitment to the service of a universal God, were unable to submerge
regional identities among their members. The resulting risk of intrigue and
rivalry, particularly well illustrated in the history of the Teutonic Knights,
was considered balanced by administrative and operational considerations.12
The importance of these structures must not be
overstated. Medieval armies lacked anything like a comprehensive command
structure able to evoke general, conditioned responses. Coherence in even the
lance, to say nothing of larger formations, depended on mutual loyalties far
more than on discipline, drill, or fear of punishment. The heavy cavalry of
feudal Europe was nevertheless reasonably successful in developing functional
patterns of internal cohesion that combined personal and institutional elements.
This process was significantly influenced by a
growing awareness that armored horsemen could be vulnerable even on their home
ground: the well-watered, relatively open terrain of northwestern Europe. As
early as the twelfth century, the cities of Flanders and northern Italy were
beginning to produce foot soldiers able to defeat the best of the mounted
chivalry. In 1176, it was the infantry of the Lombard League that broke the
charge of Frederick Barbarossa's knights, then counter–attacked to drive the
Germans from the field of Legnano. Through the thirteenth century, the footmen
of the Low Countries enabled their cities to maintain and enhance their power
vis-a-vis the local nobility, a process culminating with the destruction of a
French knightly army at Courtrai in 1303.13
At their best, however, the civic militias of urban
Europe were part-time fighting men. Their tactical skills were correspondingly
limited. Their operational effectiveness depended on levels of involvement in
war that were contrary to the medieval city's purpose. Unlike the Roman
Republic or the city-states of classical Greece, the medieval city was a
commercial, not a political, institution. Civic pride and civic identity
ultimately depended on the community's successful fostering of prosperity. And
medieval wars could be ruinously expensive even for the victors. The Lombard
League virtually bankrupted itself checking the pretensions of Barbarossa. The
Fourth Crusade cost the Republic of Venice far more than any immediate gains in
loot or improved trade networks.
A related internal factor working
against the evolution of the medieval townsman into a hoplite was the growing
specialization of labor within the commune. If each task had its specific skill,
taught and supported by specific guilds and craft brotherhoods, was it not
correspondingly reasonable to divide up the labor of military service, and to
provide specialists in this craft as in all the others? From a few experienced
captains and armorers held on retainer, the permanent armed forces of Europe's
cities and city-states tended to increase during the fourteenth century to
fairly substantial sizes-and to include correspondingly fewer citizens in their
ranks.14
II
Despite their limitations, the
communal infantries achieved enough successes to highlight an increasingly
obvious fact. The armored horseman was a generalized weapons system, not a
comprehensive one. The knights in general, however, were soldiers enough to
recognize their own limitations. This self-knowledge was enhanced as medieval
warfare spread to its frontiers. Spain or Palestine, Prussia or the Scottish
Marches-each region outside the feudal heartland of northwestern Europe posed
its own set of operational challenges. Each also produced fighting men familiar
with local conditions. As guides, scouts, and auxiliaries, they were
indispensable. For three centuries the Teutonic Knights depended heavily for
success, and often for survival, on the native Prussians and Lithuanians who
knew their swamps and forests better than any alien from Swabia or Brandenburg.15
Turcopoles, native troops and Europeans using native equipment and local
tactics, were equally valuable to Crusader armies as scouts and light cavalry.
Secular states and their military commanders were no less willing to adapt to
circumstances. The Republic of Venice learned quickly from the fighting in the
Morea during the fifteenth century that indigenous light horsemen were far more
effective against the Turks than men-at-arms brought in at great effort and
expense from the Italian mainland.16
Regional
forces as a rule strongly resembled the knights, both in pride of craft and in
being brought up to that craft from childhood. In northern Wales and the border
counties of England, boys began learning to use the bow almost as soon as they
could walk. The genetours of the Iberian Peninsula and the stradiots of the
Balkans might be part-time laborers or farmers, but they drew much of their
personal identity, and an increasing amount of their civil status, from their
military proficiency. Regional notables able to accept this assertiveness could
find their own power considerably enhanced. The Stanleys of England, for
example, rose to the peerage from relative obscurity in large part because of
their enduring command of the allegiance of the longbowmen of Cheshire and
Lancashire.17
Local
military specializations also flourished because certain skills at arms proved
consistently resistant to external cultivation. The Scots arguably suffered more
than any people in Europe from the longbow, yet the Scottish crown was never
able to institutionalize the weapon north of the Tweed. The Valois monarchy
during the Hundred Years' War also periodically sought to foster skill with the
bow to the point of banning all other public games and sports. Results were soon
apparent: in a relatively brief time some French archers could outshoot some
English ones. However, fears of social subversion enhanced by the mid-century
Jacquerie kept the experiments short-lived. Without constant encouragement and
constraint, archery in France rapidly reverted to an arcane craft. When
introduced from above or from outside, the spectrum
of skills and interests required in specialized military activity commonly
failed to develop a cultural matrix strong enough to survive in the absence of a
level of social control unsustainable by any medieval state. 18
The
difficulties surrounding systematic skill transference helped generate a logical
step, from utilizing regional specialists locally and on a more or less ad hoc
basis to engaging them in organized bodies for campaigns waged outside their
homelands. The marches of north Wales provided mercenaries for the English crown
from the eleventh century. Welsh footmen were the hard core of the small
expeditionary forces that conquered Ireland. Welsh archers set the pattern for
English infantry tactics during the Scottish Wars. The spread of the longbow
into the north and west of England, which increasingly became the preferred
recruiting ground for archers, was facilitated and sustained by prospects of
employment and profit on the Celtic Fringe, in France, or increasingly, in
England itself.19 Spanish light infantry, fighting on terrain similar
to its home ground, played a major role in the Sicilian Vespers, and contributed
much to the military performance of the Catalan mercenary companies in the
Aegean basin.20
What were the internal dynamics of these regionally
recruited commoner forces? John Keegan suggests that violence in medieval life
was sufficiently familiar to make battle less of a shock than in con–temporary
western societies, which make substantial efforts to isolate their members from
physical combat and physical risk. Johann Huizinga makes a similar point,
arguing that the later Middle Ages were a period of violent contrasts, of
oscillation between extremes of despair and joy, cruelty and tenderness.
Huizinga's image of a life lived in primary colors reinforces the concept of
soldiering as essentially on a continuum with everyday experiences, as opposed
to a drastic departure from the norm.
This
approach, both provocative and debatable, is useful for explaining individual
pugnacity. Medieval society was also familiar with collective violence at
grass-roots levels. Men, both free and servile, could be summoned to war in the
feudal levy, or to defend their home areas from organized military formations,
bandits, and even marauding wolf packs. Possession of effective weapons, from
knives and daggers to bows and billhooks, was widespread even though their
primary and normal functions were those of peace, from cutting bread to reaping
grain.
Medieval Europe, in short, offered promising when not
fertile ground for military recruiters. Young men reaching maturity in
deferential, patriarchial societies could find a soldier's career attractive
simply because it promised change from the known and the familiar. Pregnant
girlfriends, legal disputes, and domestic quarrels drove young men from parental
firesides in the twelfth century just as in the twentieth.21
Ambition played a certain role as well, particularly
as the contractual element of military service increased. M. M. Poston's
conclusion that England's village land market remained uninfluenced in the
aggregate by the purchases of common soldiers returning from the Hundred Years'
War is likely to apply anywhere, and at any time, in the history of medieval and
early modern Europe. Yet men tend to think of themselves in terms of exceptions
rather than aggregates. Non-noble soldiers were hardly likely to aspire to the
wealth of which an aristocratic captain might dream, and even less likely to
collect the proceeds if they did manage to capture a rich prisoner.
Nevertheless, some commonly born fighting men did enrich themselves relative to
their station by loot or ransom. Others did manage to set themselves up as
tavern-keepers or smallholders on the proceeds of their campaigns. Such stories
lost nothing in the telling. They may have been rendered even more attractive if
Huizinga's interpretation of the late-medieval mind-set is accepted. The concept
of taking high risks for high gains would presumably appeal to
such men, as it did to the Spanish picaros who set so much of the tone in the
army of Philip II.22
To describe forces of regional
specialists as including disproportionate numbers of restless young men is not
necessarily to affirm contemporary aristocratic descriptions of these bodies as
composed of masterless social outcasts. Initially, men from the same geographic
district, often related by blood or marriage, fought for obvious reasons. The
north country archer taking the field against a Scottish invader, or the
Castilian townsman riding a raid into Moorish territory, needed little encourage–ment
to guard each others' backs. Patterns of local recruitment frequently remained
the same after the purposes changed. English archers during the Hundred Years'
War, for example, were normally enlisted and grouped by counties, and when
possible by smaller political divisions as well. Within individual companies
they were organized into twenties and hundreds, commanded by the equivalent of
Rome's centurions: senior, experienced men from their own ranks. The cohesion
generated by this process was a significant factor in the bowmen's long roll of
successes under a wide variety of circumstances.23
III
The developing coherence and
complexity of medieval armies reflected a general pattern of professionalization
in European warfare during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. More and more
armed forces were built around men with long-term commitments to military
activities, who drew increasing amounts of their identity from these
commitments. At higher social levels the process was closely involved with the
nature of knighthood. To some degree this reflected personal choice. Some
noblemen, whether from ambition, desire, or necessity, sought wider
opportunities to use their swords than the feudal system provided. Others
correspondingly preferred domesticity, spiked with occasional local
belligerence. Economics also complicated the feudal order. Subinfeudation,
dividing a knight's fee of land among three or four people, none of them
specifically obligated to perform personal service, rendered the concept of a
fief as a privilegium earned and maintained with one's own body increasingly
vestigial. At the same time, subinfeudation contributed to the creation of a
class of knights lacking the resources to maintain their status. Selling one's
sword-and one's skills-was an obvious response.24
The growing number of knights who
made war for a living developed new attitudes as well. They internalized less
and less of the chivalric code that guided their more sedentary or more
prosperous fellows. For such fortunate ones war remained a significant social
occasion, sharing many features with tournaments and jousts. Color, pageantry,
and ritual were part and parcel of the military experience for some noblemen.
For others they were becoming fringe manifestations-pleasant enough but
ultimately dispensable for the sake of victory and profit.25
Opportunities for the latter, at
least, flourished. Everywhere in Europe, rulers by the end of the twelfth
century were considering and allowing exemptions from service in lieu of cash
payments. Henry II introduced scutage to England in 1159. Philip Augustus of
France adopted similar taxes. The monarchs in turn used the money to hire
fighting men. This development was by no means unwelcome from an administrative
perspective. Mercenaries from all social levels could reasonably be trusted to
be loyal to their paymaster while funds lasted. Mercenaries could reasonably be
assumed to have some ability at their chosen craft. And mercenaries were
presumably willing to fight more or less when and where they were told-an
important point in an era when governments were ultimately incapable of applying
sanctions strong enough to compel any kind of behavior outside of very
restricted parameters.26
The paid fighting man was no new
phenomenon in Europe. William of Normandy had depended heavily for the conquest
of England on soldiers engaged for promises of rewards after victory. The
Normans initially established themselves in southern Italy as
mercenaries in the employment of local lords. Nor were Christian Spaniards
averse to enlisting under the banners of Islam. Ummayids, Almoravids, and
Almohads shared a common reputation as reliable paymasters, and a common
willingness to hire Christian warriors.27
Early mercenaries were, as a
rule, hired singly for a specific operation or campaign. This, however, posed
problems for the employer. Individual recruitment involved significant outlays
of time and money. Once in the field, moreover, individual fighters did not
automatically sort themselves into the smoothly functioning combat teams
required by medieval warfare. Mercenary footmen, as individuals, were no more
useful than the average feudal levy. Mercenary knights might be formally
integrated into the familiar structure of conroys and battles, but they were
bound to that structure by neither ties of blood nor ties of fealty. Whether an
individual's sense of honor and his interpretation of his pledge of service
would translate into effective battle discipline was correspondingly
questionable.
From the employer's perspective,
a sensible response to this situation was to hire already-formed bodies of men.
On the other side of the bargain, it was clear that groups of warriors were
often better able than isolated individuals to make more profitable arrangements
for them–selves. The typical mercenary, knight or commoner, desperately needed
employment to survive. A famous hero like England's William Marshal might be
able to fix his price, but for lesser men prosperity lay in numbers. By the
twelfth century, foot soldiers in central Europe were grouping themselves in
bands, fifty or a hundred strong, and offering their services to towns
increasingly interested in recruiting professional soldiers to supplement or
replace their militias. More significant in the long run were the knights who
signed agreements of service with a greater lord, covering fixed periods of
time. By the end of the thirteenth century, these had evolved into retainer
contracts. The party of the second part pledged not only his own presence, but
the availability of a specified number of men with specified kinds of equipment.28
Similar contractual relationships
did not necessarily produce a community of attitudes in the mercenary community.
In principle, the knightly elite still insisted on
an essential distinction between itself as a privileged warrior caste and the
rest of secular society. Legal restraints on the social rise of baseborn
soldiers existed everywhere in feudal Europe. In principle, commoners were not
supposed to fight at all. When they did, they were outside the protection of the
laws of war.29 In theory, and often in practice as well, commoners
who risked their skins on the battlefield could be slaughtered at will-a process
facilitated by the fact that no ransoms could be expected from such men.
Pragmatism led to certain
modifications of this harsh code. At no time did medieval armies become the
bands of brothers celebrated by the King's speech on the eve of Agincourt in
Shakespeare's Henry
V. Indeed, at Agincourt the English knights refused to execute their French
fellows at the battle's climax, leaving that ignoble task to the archers. Even
among crusaders or within mercenary companies, birth and social distinctions
persisted. In the military dimension, however, as the thirteenth century waxed,
the contract system flourished. The overseas campaigns of England's Angevin
monarchs depended essentially on armies raised by captains undertaking to enlist
an agreed number and mix of men for a given period. On the other side of Europe,
the Teutonic Order relied heavily on mercenary companies, both for campaigns
against the heathen and for internal security against rebellious towns and
vassals.30
The mercenary company became a
useful model operationally as well as administratively. Well before the Peace of
Bretigny, the brunt of the Hundred Years' War was being borne by small
combined-arms teams of horse and foot, archers and spearmen, tending to sustain
themselves as permanent bodies under the same leader. With the truce, these
forces assumed an independent existence as "free companions," held
together by a blend of economic and psychological factors. A free company was a
business enterprise, pooling its gains and running on shares, with the captain
responsible for feeding, arming, employing, and disciplining his subordinates.
The companies supported themselves by hiring out to feudal magnates able to
afford importing outsiders to settle local disputes. They also sold protection.
Open banditry was usually a last recourse rather than a first choice. Free
companies were led not by pirates, but by buccaneers whose most common ambition was to earn or purchase respectability. The rank and file also sought
legitimacy, if no more than a believable assertion that they were fighting in
just and lawful causes. The mercenary companies might skirt the edges of custom
and law, but were neither physically nor psychologically strong enough openly to
defy them.31
The process of relocalizing
Europe's drifting mercenaries began in Italy. A symbiotic relationship between
soldiers and employers had begun developing there even before the first northern
free companies crossed the Alps. Hiring fighters from outside the system limited
strains on local social orders already riven by class and family conflict. The
cities and city states of northern Italy found little moral or emotional
difficulty in negotiating business contracts with soldiers, as they did with so
many outsiders. The companies and their captains in turn found easy entry to
societies expecting and demanding no pretense of loyalty or allegiance beyond
the terms of the contract.
The adventurers of the fourteenth
century evolved into the generals and princes of the fifteenth century. They
remained soldiers as well. The condottieri paid much attention to technical progress and
tactical innovation. Condottieri
battles were by no means the bloodless farces described by Machiavelli.
The operational problem faced by condottieri
captains involved not mutual unwillingness to fight, but armed forces that
were essentially mirror-images of each other. Drawn from similar manpower pools,
armed, trained, and commanded in virtually identical patterns, condottieri armies resembled their
eighteenth-century successors in that their victories were likely to be either
the result of unreckonable chance factors, or the product of close-gripped
attritional fighting that could well make success meaningless in terms of both
long-term and immediate costs to the ostensibly triumphant employer.32
The military situation in late-medieval Italy
highlighted war's slow pace everywhere in Europe. Strategically, the existence
of professional soldiers fighting for pay combined with the growing financial
power of the state to foster the extension of campaigning. A government could
keep the field as long as its money and its promises held out-even longer if it
could carry the fight to its enemy's territory, as the English demonstrated
during the Hundred Years' War.33 Tactically, armies were evolving
into defensive instruments by choice and necessity. Taking the fight to the
enemy had little to recommend it in a period where armies were not only
essentially alike in structure and doctrine, but lacked a generally effective
offensive instrument.
Heavy cavalry, long the master of the battlefield,
could now be checked as a matter of course. The Hussite Wars demonstrated that
even improvised levies could stop a mounted charge in the open. Religious
enthusiasm was less a factor in the Taborites' success than their armored
wagons, which provided both an organizational framework and a tactical rallying
point. The battlefield consequences, however, were the same.34
Further west, the municipal infantry of Italy and Flanders never developed a
significant offensive capability. Caught in the open, as at Mons-en-Pevele
(1304) and Cassel (1328), Flemish infantry were cut to pieces by French
men-at-arms who had learned respect for their enemies at Courtrai. Across the
English Channel, Scottish pike masses proved consistently unable to push home a
charge against moderately well-supported longbowmen. Close ranges combined with
the valor of desperation to give English arrow flights an effect virtually
equivalent to machine-gun fire against the lowland schiltrons, setting the
vaunted furor scoticus at naught time and again.
In sum, the most potentially dangerous offensive
forces on a battlefield, massed armored horsemen and massed infantry armed with
shock weapons, had become systematically vulnerable to flexible combined-arms
tactics. These tactics were increasingly feasible for the professional soldiers
who filled the ranks of the mercenary companies. The English combination of
longbowmen and dismounted men-at–arms, which proved so formidable on the
defensive against French chivalry and Scots pikemen alike, was only a beginning.
Mounted archers, light cavalry, crossbowmen whose quarrels could smash through plate
armor, hand gunners in increasing numbers-all found their places in the order of
battle. By the middle of the fourteenth century, the up-to-date army was an
interrelated structure of different arms, each increasingly possessing its own
quirks and its own vulnerabilities. As his armor grew more complex and his horse
grew larger, the heavy cavalryman evolved from the all-purpose warrior of the
eleventh century into a rough analog of the modern battle tank: an important
element of a balanced army, but dependent on the cooperation of light horsemen
and missile-firing infantry to achieve consistent results. On all but the
roughest ground, archers needed the protection of either men at arms or heavily
armed infantry, pikemen or billmen. These in turn required support to minimize
the risks of being shot down or ridden over.
Late-medieval and early
Renaissance commanders correspondingly preferred to assemble task forces for
specific campaigns: recruiting so many archers, so many hand-gunners, so many
light and heavy cavalry. This building-block approach developed in part because
its component parts already existed. Organized bodies of men, and contractors
with contacts among temporarily unemployed soldiers, were easily found and
easily engaged even for service far afield. The ethnic composition of such a
formation became less significant than its combination of skills. In 1417, an
order of battle submitted for the approval of the Duke of Burgundy prescribed
the deployment of a sophisticated combination of dismounted men-at-arms,
archers, and crossbowmen to take the brunt of an enemy attack, with mounted
men-at-arms and archers securing the flanks and acting as a reserve. Sixty years
later, Charles the Bold's Ordinance of Lausanne prescribed an even more complex
battle plan, integrating longbowmen and crossbowmen, men-at-arms, pikemen, and
gunners into eight "battles," each with its own carefully considered
structure, and with systematic provision for liaison and cooperation among the
different arms.35
It was no coincidence that these
plans both came from Burgundy. Choice among possible combinations of weapons
systems and their users to some extent reflected personal taste and professional
judgment. It was also a matter of finance. Burgundy, more than any political
entity on the continent, depended for its ephemeral existence on an efficient
military system. Its dukes were battle captains or they were nothing. But the
wealthy communes that formed the state's economic base preferred voting taxes to
levying men. The Burgundian administration,
among the
most efficient in Europe, in turn- used the money to hire or retain military
experts from everywhere, keeping an increasing number of them permanently in
service in its compagnies d'ordonnance.36
Armies raised on this basis were
skilled, flexible, and at least as loyal as any of their successors before the
nineteenth century, when nationalism and modern administration combined to leave
deserters and runaways with no place to go. Fifteenth-century Hungary, for
example, stood off the Turks and extended its rule over Austria and Bohemia
largely because of the mercenary companies from the west who fought for Matthias
Corvinus and his successors. The France of Charles VII and his successors is
generally credited with a significant military advance in moving towards a
permanent standing army during the fifteenth century. This decision, however,
was not a response to the unreliability or inefficiency of mercenaries. It
reflected instead a need to restore order in a country racked by a century of
war, combined with a growing concern for concentrating power at state levels.37
The new French army was a
formidable force, whose heavy cavalry in particular enjoyed a high reputation.
Nevertheless, French native troops as a whole were considered a cut below units
of specialized professionals, whether hired directly or engaged as auxiliaries
furnished and financed by an ally. England's Tudor princes as well came in–creasingly
to depend on foreign contingents to sustain their abortive continental policies.
This in part reflected England's increasing failure to keep pace with military
progress. But it also reflected acceptance of conventional European wisdom on
the subject of hiring the best available men with the newest weapons and
techniques, whatever their ethnic origins.38
IV
The next development in military coherence began with the
evolution of a generally effective offensive force with a regional base. This
was the pikemen of the Swiss cantons. Paradoxically, the Swiss initially earned their military reputation in a local context, and with an entirely
different weapon. The victory of Morgarten (1315) was won when Leopold of
Austria marched into a narrow defile and saw his men mowed down like grain by
the halberdiers of the forest cantons. The next step came when the forest
cantons formed alliances with the cantons and cities of the Swiss lowlands. Like
their counterparts in Flanders and Italy, these areas furnished contingents of
spearmen. The superiority of this weapon to the halberd was demonstrated at
Laupen in 1339. Unable to keep the Burgundian heavy cavalry from coming to close
quarters, the halberdiers of Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz were saved from
destruction by the lowlanders' pikes.
Such tactical triumphs could not
overcome the essential weakness of the evolving Swiss military system. The Swiss
economy could not afford to keep masses of men under arms for any length of
time. A war of attrition meant corresponding risks of starvation as fields went
unsown and crops ungathered. The Swiss, moveover, had little hope of matching
their Burgundian rivals in operational sophistication. Swiss infantry, unable to
attack in the open field, would have to depend on archers for fire support and
heavy cavalry for shock power. These military skills were scarce in the Swiss
mountains. Nor could the cantons afford to hire specialists, as did the
Burgundians. Pressure to transform the Swiss infantrymen into an offensive
weapon was further heightened by a human factor. Unlike soldiers from the rich
cities of Lombardy and Flanders, few Swiss could afford defensive body armor. To
survive physically, the Swiss fighting man had to deliver blows.
Through the fourteenth century,
Swiss cantons and Swiss captains developed patterns of discipline and training
enabling their infantry to attack as well as counterattack. The men of a Swiss
pike column knew that life as well as victory depended on an ability to move
quickly and in good order. The Swiss soldier was both a free man and enough of a
warrior to understand his tactical system and enjoy its implications. This was
most frequently manifested in the ferocity generally char–acterizing Swiss
military behavior. Far more than their contemporaries in the mercenary
companies, the Swiss tended to see themselves as outside existing feudal and
military systems, whether challenging or serving them. Swiss out-of-battle
discipline was proverbially bad even by fifteenth-century standards, not least
because the Swiss had a tendency to run amok en masse.
At the same time, a reputation
for unbridled ferocity was no mean asset to a system depending on aggressive
assault tactics. It not only intimidated enemies; it inspired the Swiss
themselves. The Swiss first established their reputation as more than a locally
formidable force in 1444 at St. Jacob-en-Birs, where less than a thousand
pikemen attacked a
state-of-the-art French army 15,000 strong. The Swiss died to a man, but
took 2,000 foes with them. Military Europe began to take notice - and make
offers.
The Swiss responded by improving
their specialized skills. They adopted an early version of Schwerpunkt tactics, striking what seemed the most vulnerable
point in an enemy position twice, sometimes three times in succession. They
increased the length of their pikes to fifteen, then to eighteen feet. They
enhanced the fire support of their assault columns with crossbows, and
increasingly with handguns. Like the longbow in England, the handgun penetrated
Swiss civil society largely because of its perceived utility in war. Firearms,
however, remained secondary to pikes. And the pikes' effectiveness depended on
battlefield cohesion.
This cohesion survived even after
mercenary service replaced home defense as the Swiss military pattern. It
survived because the cantons and cities went into the contracting business
themselves, partly for profit and partly to keep control of young men otherwise
likely to hire out individually as free companions. Organizing what could not be
stopped indicated the continued attractiveness of military service when compared
to alternative ways of making a living in Switzerland's subsistence economy.
Martial behavior was culturally conditioned as well. The Swiss male, socialized
in a structure that enforced compulsory military service from 16 to 60, bound to
canton and captain by a network of community-sanctioned oaths, found warfare a
ready and acceptable rite of passage into adulthood.39
V
Swiss success not only inspired but demanded emulation. The
Swiss filled too large a gap in the specialized orders of battle that
characterized late-medieval armies to be shrugged off as regionally limited. Swiss pikemen were, however, expensive enough and refractory enough to
encourage governments to seek substitutes. Unlike the English longbow, moreover,
the basic Swiss weapon did not seem so complex that only conditioning from
childhood could develop efficiency in its use. The most familiar Swiss imitators
were the Landsknechts.
The Hussite Wars generated corresponding interest in new tactical
approaches among German professional soldiers. An increasing number of captains
in Burgundian or Habsburg service acquired extensive-and painful–direct
experience of Swiss methods. In recruiting infantry, they turned increasingly to
south Germany, the regions bordering the Swiss cantons from Vorarlberg to the
Sundgau.
Not every Swiss mercenary went
to war through cantonal contracts. Freelance Swiss often served in the same
companies with Germans who borrowed techniques from their neighbors. The Landsknecht,
however, was part of a drastically different social matrix.
Late-medieval Switzerland was a tightly structured society, able at local levels
to exercise a significant level of control over individuals. Southwestern
Germany in the fifteenth century was experiencing a population explosion. A
typical village with 500 inhabitants in 1490 had doubled its population by 1560.
Famine and plague provided only episodic relief. Larger families meant smaller
inheritances. Underemployment became endemic in communities already suffering
economically from the decline of the regional textile industry. Men moved from
village to town and back again, looking not only for work but for opportunity.
Their search further undermined traditional structures already weakened from
internal conflict generated by the introduction of Roman law. Peasant villages
were increasingly able to balance among conflicting claims to their labor and
their allegiance. Lords and priests, merchants and magistrates, faced consistent
challenges to their social and religious authority.
This generalized breakdown of deference created a
climate favorable to the soldiers' trade. Landsknechts
emerged from a society where possession of knives and swords was
universal, and ownership of armor and heavier weapons was common. Not every Landsknecht,
moreover, was a dispossessed craftsman or peasant. Burghers' sons and
aristocrats' sons found places in the ranks. Runaway serfs stood side by side
with freeborn men. A recruit's claims to personal status were unlikely to be
closely investigated as long as they were not patently ridiculous. As a common
denominator, Landsknechts
were men perceiving limited opportunities at home, but who felt they
were as good as anyone else with weapons in their hands. But no matter how
assembled, a Lands–knecht company of them was still no more than an
aggregation of more or less belligerent individuals-an aggregation, moreover,
too small to be tactically useful.
Medieval contractors and captains had thought in
hundreds. Landsknecht officers preparing to compete with the Swiss had to
think in thousands. Nor could these men merely be warm bodies. The Swiss
depended for their success on aggressiveness and cohesion. How could these be
introduced in a Landsknecht force whose very size meant that any pre-existing
bonds of dialect and culture would be significantly limited. How could they be
sustained among men whose choice of a military life was in large part an
affirmation of their personal freedom, their right to drink and gamble, to
defend their honor in duels, to wear outrageous clothing, and swagger at will
among the women?
One answer involved supplanting the community with
the regiment. The process began with mustering, where prospective recruits were
passed before their officers, read the articles of service and discipline, then
ceremonially sworn to their cause and their leaders. A typical Landsknecht
regiment consisted of 4,000 men divided into ten companies, each with
its own standard as rallying-point and symbol. These companies, or Fahnlein,
were in turn subdivided into platoons or Rotten,
each of forty men. Where officers of the larger formations were
appointed by the colonel-contractor, the Rotten
elected their own leaders from among the veterans in their ranks.
Other officials, the Fuhrer,
the Gemeinwaibel,
the Furiere, represented the interests of the common Landsknechts
in administrative and operational matters, frequently acting as
mediators in disputes with the command structure. Their advice and
recommendations were not lightly disregarded by any colonel hoping to exercise
effective command over what was essentially a force of free agents.
A Landsknecht
regiment was not merely a pirate band. Plunder, while still important
for the early modern soldier, was increasingly becoming a kind of incentive
bonus. Larger armies meant more competition for available loot. Fewer wealthy
noblemen now went to war; an aristocratic prisoner was likely to be relatively
as impecunious as his captor. While men continued to serve for booty only, it
was usually with the hope of being taken on the paid strength of a formation. At
least before the general European rise in prices at mid-sixteenth–century, pay
for Swiss or Landsknecht
compared favorably with craftsmen's wages, and could be over twice as
high as a laborer's pay. Collecting on time and in something like full was so
unlikely that riot and mutiny became for all practical purposes
institutionalized among the Landsknechts
early in their existence. But to claim their wages in the first
place, the Landsknechts had to fight
well. Victory might gener–ate at least partial payment of money owed, while
defeat usually meant empty pockets for everybody. Profitable employment,
moreover, depended heavily on past performances. While individual Landsknechts
could always find service, terms were likely to be better as part of
a formed body. Formations and commanders with bad reputations found it
correspondingly difficult to secure contracts.
Discipline was also for the Landsknecht an element of survival. Landsknecht formations, recruited ad
hoc, were vulnerable to the pressure of combat, when economic considerations
became vague abstractions compared with the visceral desire to survive. Panic,
however, meant higher orders of risk for the Landsknechts than almost anyone else. Tactical orders of battle
frequently placed them opposite the Swiss, who bitterly despised the imitators
of their techniques, and were even less predisposed than usual to show mercy in
victory.
Cohesion, then, was both a career
facilitator and a survival mechanism for the common Landsknecht. Contrary to later myth,
the Lands–knechts were
not a sworn egalitarian brotherhood. Their complex structure of rights and
privileges reflected a correspondingly complex internal hierarchy. Yet if Landsknecht commanders frequently dis–mounted
in battle to fight in the front ranks, this was only in part a reflection of the
growing vulnerability of the horse. It was also a significant gesture of
solidarity with the footmen, a sign of physical commitment to a common purpose.
Should positive incentives fail, Landsknecht
regiments incorporated a comprehensive disciplinary structure, including a
provost and an executioner-officials feared and detested, treated as pariahs
without honor, but regarded as necessary by even the most hardened freebooters.
Landsknecht
captains
were too wise to trust entirely the power of martial intangibles on one hand and
physical compulsion on the other. Landsknecht
rank and file might be self-selected, but integration into the
organization was reinforced by early forms of individual instruction and
collective battle drill. The Landsknechts
depended heavily on crossbowmen and arquebusiers to screen and
support their pike squares. These "shot" were drawn increasingly from
the veteran Doppelsoldner, the double-pay men who presumably knew what
they were doing. The front ranks of the pike formations were similarly drawn
from the oldest and most experienced soldiers. The Landsknecht recruit,
however, was not left entirely to his own devices. Unlike the longbow, the
handgun, or the sword, the pike was relatively simple in its technical demands.
Anyone with reasonable strength, agility, and good will could learn to use it
quickly. This did not mean that a coherent force of pikemen could be formed from
an equivalent number of apprentices and farmboys. Weapons training was a major
guarantor of morale. A man crowded into a pike square might find it harder to
run or shirk than an arquebusier or a light horseman. But even a wavering line
of pikes was an open invitation to disaster. Individual fear or even individual
clumsiness in those dense masses could generate collective panic more readily
than in, for example, a firing line of archers, where every man's attention was
absorbed by his personal weapon and where a runaway might
The Landsknechts exemplified and illustrated the patterns of cohesion
required by the rapidly expanding armies of the sixteenth century. This process
has been described as professionalization.41 It was that-and
something more. Free companions developed into contract forces, then into
standing armies. Personal honor gave way to regimental honor in justifying
tavern brawls and formal duels alike. The Spanish army of the sixteenth century,
the archetype of early modern military effectiveness, depended heavily on
discipline patterns and unit rituals established in earlier centuries to cope
with a multi-ethnic base and complex combined-arms tactics. The soldiers of the
Spanish army consistently demonstrated, moreover, a common sense of identity and
a mutual solidarity vis-a-vis both their employers and their senior officers. By
no means all of the men in the ranks were commoner outcasts with self-images as
misfits. The disrespect of superior officers could contribute as much to one of
the frequent mutinies as arrears in pay.42
The Spanish army and its
counterparts were developing along lines whose antecedents can be traced as far
back as the collapse of the western Roman Empire. For a thousand years the
general conditions of European warfare put high premiums not on heroic anarchy,
but on coherence and cooperation. Beginning at one end of the socio-military
scale with caste identity, and at the other with regional identities based on
common military abilities, armies developed integrating structures that
increasingly reflected acquired skills, and attitudes whose desirability was
defined by the institution rather than its members. From Roncesvalles to Ravenna
and beyond, the study of the internal structures of Europe's military systems
sustains the relevance of S. L. A. Marshall's often-cited dictum that a soldier
known to those around him has the best of reasons to fight well: fear of losing
the one thing that he is likely to value more highly than life-his standing as a
man among other men committed to a common enterprise.
End
Notes
1.
The best recent general treatment is Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, tr.
Michael Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
2.
John Gillingham, "Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle
Ages," in War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J. O. Prestwick,
ed. J. Gillingham and J. C. Holt (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble,
1984), 78-91; and Richard
the Lionheart_ (London: Weidenfeld, 1978), passim.
3.
Theory and practice alike counseled caution in the face of an enemy. See
particularly Walter Goffart, "The Date and Purpose of Vetegius' De
Re Militari," Traditio 33 (1977): 65-100; and John Beeler's two
volumes, Warfare in England, 1066-1189 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1966); and Warfare in Feudal Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1971).
4.
J. F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages, tr.
S. Willard, S. C. M. Southern (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1977), 82 ff.
5.
R. Allen Brown, "The Status of the Norman Knight," in War
and Government in the Middle Ages, 18-32, is at once convincing in
its arguments and comprehensive in its survey of French and British literature. A. Borst, ed., Das
Rittertum im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1976), has more of a central European focus. Bernard
S. Bachrach, "Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup, and
Feudalism," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970): 49-75,
critiques the assumption of a direct link between military technology and social
structure. Cf. also G. Duby, The
Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, tr. A. Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 293 ff.; and Claude Gaier, "La
cavalerie lourde en Europe occidentale du Xlle au XlVe siecle: un probleme de
mentalite," Revue
Internationale d'Histoire Militaire 34 (1971): 385-96.
6.
Charles R. Bowlus, "Two Carolingian Campaigns Reconsidered," Military
Affairs 48 (1984): 121-25; and Bernard S. Bachrach,
"Charlemagne's Cavalry: Myth and Reality," ibid., 47 (1983): 181-87.
7.
Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), includes an excellent general survey of
the literature on this subject. Cf. also E. A. Thompson, "Early Germanic
Warfare," Past
and Present 14 (1958): 2-29; and C. 11. Hermann, Deutsche
Militdrgeschichte. Eine Einfiihrung, 2d. rev. (Frankfurt: Bernard and
Graefe, 1968), 15 ff.
8. Verbruggen, Art of
Warfare, 72.
9. J. Bumke, Studien zum
Ritterbegriff im 12. and 13. Jahrhundert
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1964), is a literary-intellectual survey. Cf. also
Benjamin Arnold, German
Knighthood, 1050-1300 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); E. Lourie,
"Medieval Spain: A Society Organized for War," Past and Present 35 (1966): 54-76; and J.
F. Powers, "The Origins and Development of Municipal Military Service in
the Leonese and Castilian Reconquest, 800-1250," Traditio 26 (1970): 91-111.
10. Contamine, War
in the Middle Ages, 228 ff., offers an excellent overview of medieval
organization and tactics.
11. On this controversial subject, cf. Beeler, Warfare in Feudal Europe, 84,
94-95; Verbruggen, Art
of Warfare, 89-90; and as a case study, Bernard S. Bachrach, "The
Feigned Retreat at Hastings," Medieval
Studies 33 (1971): 264-67.
12.
Michael Burleigh, Prussian Society and the German Order: An Aristocratic Corporation in
Crisis c. 1410-1466 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),
111 ff.; and E. Mascheke, "Die inneren Wandlungen des Deutschen Ritter–ordens,"
in Geschichte
and Gegenwartsbewusstsein. Festschrift fur Hans Rothfels zum 70.
Geburtstag, ed. W Besson, F. Frh. Hiller von Gartringen (Gottingen:
Vandenhoek, 1963), 249-77.
13. Verbruggen, Art of Warfare, 125 passim,
is a brief comprehensive survey of the communal infantries. Detailed studies
include Claude Gaier, Art
et organisation militaires dans la principaute de Liege et dans le comte de Looz
au Moyen Age (Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1968); and O. P. Waley,
"The Army of the Florentine Republic from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth
Century," in Florentine Studies, ed. V
Rubenstein (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 70-108. Waley's
The Italian CityRepublics (London:
Weidenfeld, 1969), incorporates much general information on respective military
systems.
14.
R.-H. Bauder, The Economic Development of Medieval Europe (London: Thames,
1971), is a useful overview with an excellent bibliography. Cf. also Yves
Renouard, Les hommes d'affaires italiens du Moyen Age (Paris: Colin,
1968); and Henri Pirenne, Early
Democracies in the Low Countries: Urban Society and Political Conflict in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, tr. J. V. Saunders, Torch ed. (New
York: Harper, 1963).
15.
For the importance of local forces and local knowledge on the Baltic frontier,
see Eric Christiansen, The
Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100-1525 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1980). For Pal–estine, see Christopher Marshall,
Warfare in the Latin East, 1192-1291 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992); and R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare (1097–1193) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1956).
16.
M. E. Mallett and J. R. Hale, The
Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice, c. 1400 to 1617 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 47.
17.
See Carmela Pescador, "La caballeria popular en Leon y Castilla," Cuadernos
de Historia de Espana 23-24 (1961): 101-238; 35-36 (1962): 56-201;
37-38 (1963): 88-198; J. F. Powers, A
Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle
Ages, 1000-1284 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and
from a later period, Johann Hellwege, Zur
Geschichte der Spanischen Reitermilizen. Die Caballeria de Cuantia unter Philipp
II. and Philipp III. (1562-1619) (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972). For the
military basis of the Stanleys' power, see M. J. Bennett, "`Good Lords' and
'King-Makers': The Stanleys of Lathom in English Politics, 1385-1485," History
Today 31 (July 1981): 12-17.
18.
Robert Hardy, Longbow: A Social and Military History (Cambridge: Stephens,
1976); and Jim Bradbury, The
Medieval Archer (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 71 ff.; are useful
popular surveys with good bibliographies.
19.
Cf. John E. Morris, The
Welsh Wars of Edward I, reprint of 1901 ed. (New York: Haskell,
1969); E. Miller, War in the North: The Anglo-Scottish
Wars of the Middle Ages (Hull: University of Hull Publications,
1960); R. G. Nicholson, Edward
III and the Scots: The Formative Years of a Military Career, 1327-1335 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1968); A. D. Carr, "Welshmen and the Hundred
Years' War," Welsh
History Review 4 (1968): 21-46.
20. C. Carrere, "Aux origines des grandes
compagnies: la compagnie catalane de 1301," in Recrutement, mentalites, societes.
Colloque internationale d'histoire militaire, 1974 (Montpellier:
University Paul-Valery, 1975), 1-7; Roger Sablonier, Krieg and Kriegertum in der Croniea
des Ramn Muntaner. Eine Studie zum spatmittelalterlichen Kriegswesen auf grund
katalanischer Quellen (Bern: Lang, 1971).
21.
John Keegan, The Face of Battle, Vintage ed. (New York: Random House, 1977),
115-16, and Johann Huizinga, The
Waning of the Middle Ages, Anchor ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 9
ff. Cf. also Georges Duby, The
Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to
the Twelfth Century, tr. H. B. Clarke (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press, 1973); J. R. Hale, "Violence in the Late Middle Ages: A
Background," in Violence
and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities 1200-1500, ed. L. Martines
(Berkeley: University California Press, 1971), 19-37; and B. A. Hanawalt,
"Violent Death in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century England," Comparative
Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 297–320, for further
treatments of aggressive, violent behavior during this period at all social
levels.
22.
M. M. Poston, "The Costs of the Hundred Years' War," in Essays
in Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge:
Cam–bridge University Press, 1973), 63-80, and Geoffrey Parker, The
Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), 179 ff.
23. Morris, Welsh Wars, 92-93.
24.
J. M. W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism, 1215-1540 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1968), is an excellent case study in the competing
legalisms that denatured so many chivalric ideals. Cf. also Bryce Lyon, From
Fief to Indenture: The Transition from Feudal to Non-Feudal Contract in Western
Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).
25.
A good case study of this process in the last stages of the Hundred Years' War
is A. J. Pollard, John Talbot and the War in France, 1427-1453 (London: RHS,
1983), 18-101. Maurice Keen, Chivalry
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), argues for the
essentially secular, military character of the knight at this period. Cf. Keen,
"Brotherhood in Arms," History
57 (1962): 1-17; and M. G. A. Vale, War
and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy
at the End of the Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1981).
26.
Cf. C. Warren Hollister, The
Military Organisation of Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965); S.
Harvey, "The Knight and the Knight's Fee in England," Past and Present 49 (1970): 3-43; and John Schlight, Monarchs
and Mercenaries: A Reappraisal of the Importance of Knight Service of Norman and
Angevin England (Bridgeport, Conn.: University of Bridgeport Press,
1968).
27.
Joseph F. O'Callaghan, A
History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press,
1975), 148-49, 280-81.
28. H. Grundman, "Rotten and Brabanzonen.
Soldner-Heere im 12. Jahr–hundert," Deutsches
Archiv fur Erforschung des Mittelalters 5 (1941-42): 419-92; and J.
Boussard, "Les mercenaires au XIIe siecle. Henri II Plantagenet et les origines de 1'armee de metier,"
Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Chartes 106 (1945-46): 189-224,
remain excellent for the origins and dynamic of the early mercenaries. Useful too is Paul Schmitthenner, Das
freie Soldnertum im abendlandischen Imperium des Mittelalters (Munich:
Beck, 1934).
29.
Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the
Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1965),
19 and passim.
30.
Cf. Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwads:
War and the State in England, 1272-1377 (New York: St. Martin's, 1980); H.
J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III, 1338-62 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1966);
J. W Sherborne, "Indentured Retinues
and English Expeditions to France, 1369–1380," English Historical
Review 79 (1964): 718-46; and Burleigh, Prussian
Society, 72-73, 134 passim..
31. Philippe Contamine, "Les compagnies
d'aventure en France pendant la guerre de Cent ans," Melanges de l'Ecole fran~aise de Rome,
Moyen Age, Temps modernes 87(1975): 365-96, is a recent survey. The
companies' activities are presented in a broad context in Edouard Perroy, The
Hundred Years' War, tr. W B. Wells (London: Eyre and Spottswood,
1951), 154 passim. Anthony Mockler, The
Mercenaries (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 25 ff., is a popular
summary.
32.
The best overview in English is M. E. Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Master: Warfare
in Renaissance Italy (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman, 1974). G. Trease, The
Condottieri, Soldiers of Fortune (New York: Holt, Reinhart, 1971), is
more colorful. Cf. also D. P. Waley, "Condotte and Condottieri in the
Thirteenth Century," Proceedings
of the British Academy 61 (1976): 337-71; and the case studies by W.
M. Bowsky, "City and Contado, Military Relationships and Communal Bands in
Fourteenth-Century Siena," in Renaissance
Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. A. Molho, J. A. Tedeschi (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 75-98; and M. E. Mallett,
"Venice and Its Condottieri, 1401-54," in Renaissance Venice, ed. J.
R. Hale (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1973), 121-45. W. Block, Die
Condottiere. Studien fiber die sogennanten "unblutige Schlachten"
(Berlin, 1913) remains a useful operational study of condottieri warfare.
33.
C. T. Allmand, "War and Profit in the Late Middle Ages," History Today
15 (1965): 762-69, is a useful overview. Cf. also Richard Bean, "War and
the Birth of the Nation State," Journal of Economic History 33 (1973):
203-21.
34.
J. Duidik, Hussitisches Heerwesen (Berlin, 1961), is a detailed military
analysis. Cf. F. G. Heymann, John Ziska and the Hussite Revolution (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 57 ff.
35. Cf. J. F. Verbruggen, "Un plan de bataille
du due de Bourgogne (14 septembre 1417) et la tactique de 1'epoque," Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire 20 (1959): 443-51;
and G. Grosjean, "Die Murtenschlacht. Analyse eines Ereigenesses," in Actes
du Ve Centenaire de la bataille de Morat (Fribourg and Berne, 1976),
51 ff.
36.
Richard Vaughn, Valois Burgundy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1975), 123 ff., is a
good English survey. Cf. also C. Brusten, L'armee bourguignonne de 1465 a
1468 (Brussels,
1963); and "L'armee bourguignonne de 1465 a 1477," Revue
internationale d'histoire militaire 20 (1959): 452-66.
37. Cf in particular Philippe Contamine's massive Guerre,
etat et societe d la fin du Moyen Age. Etudes sur l'armee des rois de France,
1337-1454 (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1972); and Paul D. Solon,
"Popular Response to Standing Military Forces in Fifteenth-Century
France," Studies in the Renaissance 19 (1972): 78-111.
38.
GilbertJ. Millar, Tudor Mercenaries and Auxiliaries, 1485-1547 (Charlot–tesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1980).
39. For the Swiss, Eugen von
Frauenholz, Entwicklungsgeschichte des deutsche Heerwesens,
vol. 2, Das Heerwesen der Schweizer
Eidgenossenschaft in der Zeit des freie S6ldnertums (Munich: Beck, 1936); and Walther Schaufelberger, Der alte
Schweizer and sein Kreig. Studien zur Kreigsfuhrung vornehmlich im 15. Jahr–hundert,
2nd ed. (Zurich: Europa, 1966), remain strong
on the military side. Albert Winkler, "The Swiss and War: The Impact on
Society of the Swiss Military in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries"
(Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1982), includes an excellent
bibliography; K. W. Deutsch and H. Weillenmann, "Die militarische Bewahrung
eines sozialen Systems: Die Schweizer Eidgenossenschaft im 14. Jahrhundert,"
Beitrage zur Militdrsoziologie, Khmer Zeitschrift fdr Soziologie and
Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 12 (1968):
38-58, is more concise. Schaufel–berger, Der Wettkampf in der alten
Eidgenossenschaft. zur Kulturgeschichte des Sports von 13. his ins 18. Jahrhundert
(Bern: Haupt, 1972), establishes the
importance of military exercises at the community level as a means of developing
individual efficiency and group cohesion.
40. For the Landsknechts'
socio-economic matrix, see Reinhard Baumann, Das Soldnerwesen im 16. Jahrhundert im bayerischen and siiddeutschen Bei–spiel
(Munich: W61fle, 1978). Fritz Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Work Force, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden:
Steiner, 1964), 14 passim, is still the best English account. Eugen von Frauenholz, Entwicklungsgeschichte
des deutsche Heerwesens, vol. 3, Das
Heerwesen des Reiches in der Landsknechtzeit (Munich: Beck, 1937); Baumann, Georg
von Frundsberg. Der Vater der Landsknechte (Munich: Suddeutscher Verlag,
1984); and M. Nell, Die Landsknechte.
Entstehung der ersten deutschen Infanterie (Berlin: Ebering, 1914), provide
the operational data. G. Franz, "Von Ursprung and Brauchtum der
Landsknechte," Mitteilungen des
Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 61 (1983): 79-98, is a
useful general introduction.
41. Most familiarly in Michael Roberts, "The Military
Revolution, 1550-1660," in Essays in
Swedish History, ed M. Roberts (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1967),195-225.
42. Parker, Army of
Flanders, 185 ff.
This article was first published in The Journal of Military History vol. 57 no. 3 (1993). We thank the Society for Military History for giving us permission to republish it.