Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (21 page)

Science and technology alone did not save the smaller and more fragmented western European armies from their adversaries. The classical traditions of infantry organization and landed musters were kept alive as well. Military command and discipline followed Roman tradition, and so naturally nomenclature remained Greek and Latin. Byzantine emperors, in the manner of Macedonian lords, addressed their soldiers as
systratiōtai—
“comrades-in-arms.” Generals, as in classical Greece, remained
stratēgoi
and soldiers
stratiōtai,
while in the West free soldiers were
milites,
both
pedites
(foot soldiers) and
equites
(knights). Citizens continued to be recruited under legal and published codes of conduct—the so-called “capitularies”—with explicit rights and responsibilities.

Charles Martel’s army was not as disciplined or as large as a Roman consular army, but the manner in which its heavily armed spearmen and swordsmen were mustered, attacked on foot, and kept in rank was consistent with the classical tradition. Campaigns required the approval of assemblies, and rulers were subject to audit after battle.

By the end of the eighth century two seemingly insurmountable obstacles that had once weakened the old Roman imperial levies of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D.—the failure of Roman citizens to serve in their own armies, and the religious strictures against civic militarism and wars of conquest by the early Christian church—were beginning to erode. Augustine had composed his
City of God
after the sack of Rome in A.D. 410 to associate divine punishment with the sins of Romans. Even earlier, a few Christian emperors, like Gratian, had dismantled public statues and commemoration of military victory as somehow antithetical to Christ’s message of peace and forgiveness. Yet by early medieval times the earlier pacifism of the Roman church fathers like Tertullian
(Ad martyres, De
corona militis),
Origen
(Exhortatio ad martyrium, De Principiis),
and Lactantius
(De mortibus persecutorum)
was often ignored, as the creed of the Old Testament and its idea of wars against the unbelievers regained primacy over the message of the Gospels. Thomas Aquinas, for example, could outline the conditions of “just” Christian wars, in which the cause of the conflict could make war a moral Christian enterprise. Christianity would never exhibit the martial fervor of Islam, but during the Dark Ages it more or less curbed its early pacifist pretenses and its distance from the affairs of worldly politicians. The military of Joshua and Samson, not the loving remonstrations of Jesus, was invoked to keep Islam at bay.

Franks, Lombards, Goths, and Vandals may have been tribal, and their armies were poorly organized; yet such “barbarians” nevertheless shared a general idea that as freemen of their community they were obligated to fight—and free to profit from the booty of their enemies. In that sense of civic militarism, they were more reminiscent of the old classical armies of a republican past than had been the hired imperial legionaries on Rome’s defensive frontier:

The massive reliance on citizen-soldiers in the West lowered the demands on the central government for expenditures to support the military. . . . Indeed, the flexibility of the West in building on developments that took place during the later Roman Empire resulted in immense military strengths, which, for example, proved their worth in the success for two centuries of the crusader states against overwhelming odds. (B. Bachrach, “Early Medieval Europe,” in K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein, eds., War and
Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds,
294)

The legions had crumbled not because of organizational weaknesses, technological backwardness, or even problems of command and discipline, but because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization. Such spirited warriors the barbarians had, and when they absorbed the blueprint of Roman militarism, a number of effective local Western armies arose—as the Muslims learned at Poitiers.

INFANTRY, PROPERTY, AND CITIZENSHIP

A
Mounted
Monopoly?

Charles Martel and his Carolingian successors—son Pippin III and grandson Charlemagne—would craft the foundations of the medieval feudal state, with which by A.D. 1000 we traditionally associate knights, chivalry, and huge mailed warhorses. The usual view is that between the final collapse of Rome (A.D. 500) and the widespread use of gunpowder (1400), the mounted knight came to dominate the battlefields of Europe. In fact, in most of the larger battles during this millennium, infantrymen continued to outnumber cavalry by at least five to one.

Even in the latter Middle Ages at the three greatest battles of the Hundred Years War—Crécy (1346), the second great battle at Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415)—most of the mounted combatants, who were a minority of both the English and the French armies, dismounted and fought on foot. Cortés’s fearsome knights, who tore apart the mass of swarming Aztecs, accounted for less than 10 percent of the conquistadors in Mexico. The infantry wall of Charles Martel at Poitiers was no aberration—Frankish, Swiss, and Byzantine infantrymen all made up the unheralded core of their respective medieval armies.

While it is true that medieval art glorified the horseman as an aristocratic knight, that the church sought to implant in him a sense of moral responsibility for the preservation of Christian society, and that most monarchies drew their natural support from landowning mounted elites, horsemen were never numerous, economical, or versatile enough in Europe to ensure success in major engagements—especially in battles that might involve up to 20,000 or 30,000 combatants. There is not a single major Carolingian engagement in which infantrymen were not the dominant force on the battlefield. The role of feudalism and the romance of the early mounted warrior must be put in a proper cultural perspective:

Carolingian feudalism, despite the emphasis it laid on horse-owning, should not be equated with the military system of the nomads. The cultivated lands of western Europe could support a horse population of no large size, and the feudal armies that answered the summons to arms resembled a horse people’s horde in no way at all. The difference derived in great measure from the distinctive military culture of the Teutonic tribes, which encouraged face-to-face fighting with edged weapons, a tradition reinforced by their encounters with the Roman armies before they had lost their legionary training. This culture had been preserved when the Western warriors took it horseback, and it was reinforced by the potentialities of the equipment they wore and the weapons they used from the saddle. (J. Keegan,
History of Warfare,
285)

Charles Martel’s army at the battle at Poitiers was the continuation of a 1,400-year Western tradition beginning in Greece and Rome that put a premium on landed infantry. The reasons for this original Western chauvinism concerning heavily armed and well-protected foot soldiers again were unique to Europe and arose largely from Western economic, political, social, and military realities that had been established centuries earlier in Greece and survived the collapse of Rome. To field effective infantry— meaning the ability to stand in the face of mounted assaults and to charge and overrun lines of archers and missile troops—there were three prerequisites in the ancient and medieval worlds. First, landscape: the best infantrymen were rooted country folk and the product of a geography largely composed of valleys and lowlands situated between mountain ranges that favored intensive farming. In contrast, mountainous terrain is the haunt of herdsmen, who with slings, bows, and javelins master the arts of ambush and guarding routes of transit—the various hill tribes, for example, of central Asia Minor who attacked Xenophon’s Ten Thousand on their retreat to the Black Sea. On the other hand, steppes or uninterrupted plains favor nomadic and tribal horsemen, ensuring plentiful grazing lands and, more important, the room for vast cavalry sweeps that might outflank and envelop columns of foot soldiers—as the Romans, for example, learned in Parthia. Europe, however, from the Balkans to the British Isles, was largely a continent of good farmland and valleys, cut off by mountains and rivers, that was ideal for the operations of heavy infantrymen: flat ground for decisive charges of cumbersome foot soldiers, with nearby hills and mountains to prevent mounted flank attack.

Second, the best infantrymen of the preindustrial age were often a product of centralized rather than tribal government. City-states and republics had the power to muster the great majority of the population, instill some training in marching in time and staying in rank, and eliminate or at least unify private barons and elite clans. True, the end of the Roman Empire destroyed for centuries the classical idea of a vast nation-in-arms and a strong central political authority enrolling, training, paying, and retiring 250,000 uniformly armed legionaries throughout the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless, on a vastly reduced scale, local communities in the West and an isolated Byzantium attempted to keep alive the old classical traditions of organizing tenants and small landowners through large-scale levies to unite in organized defense of their homeland.

Third, to produce a potent and numerous infantry arm, there also had to be the pretense of egalitarianism, if not consensual government— or at least the absence of widespread serfdom. Successful infantrymen needed enough capital to provide adequate weapons. They required some sort of political voice, or a reciprocal relationship with the more wealthy, to ensure a sense of limited autonomy. Ideally, the best foot soldiers either owned or enjoyed the use of farmland, and thus fought with a sense of territorial chauvinism—the idea that they battled shoulder-to-shoulder in protection of real property that they felt was their own.

In the Dark and Middle Ages the landscape of Europe did not change from classical times. While the central control of Rome had vanished and the population of autonomous yeomen had been largely lost as early as the third century A.D., nonetheless western Europe maintained a considerable population of viable rural folk, who found in their local lord and regional king a semblance of the old system of mustering and fighting with like kind. If they are sometimes called the “dependent free,” the foot soldiers of Europe between A.D. 600 and 1000 were not servile and were far better off in a political sense than Eastern serfs. All duties and obligations were predicated on certain rights and privileges. In contrast, the great Byzantine general Belisarius (A.D. 500–65) was not far off the mark when he described Eastern infantry in Persia as undisciplined rustics who were forced into the army solely to undermine walls, plunder corpses, and wait on real soldiers. There was nothing like either the Mameluks or Janissaries in western Europe.

The
Origins
of
Heavy
Infantry

Whence arose this Western tradition of infantry supremacy that survived even the collapse of Rome? In Greece and not earlier. As we have seen earlier in discussion of their invention of shock battle, the creation of the Hellenic polis (800–600 B.C.) came as a result of a new class of small, free property owners, who as hoplite heavily armed infantrymen formed up in the phalanx and engaged in shock battles over property disputes. Their emergence marked the decline of aristocratic knights who had enjoyed privilege for centuries. The emergence of infantrymen was a revolutionary development unseen either in the Greeks’ own Mycenaean past or in the contemporary world of the eastern Mediterranean.

As cultivated ground began to be more equitably distributed and farmed more intensively, grazing land for horses was in short supply. Even when forage was found, horses made no sense economically. Ten acres devoted to grain, trees, and vines could feed a family of five or six, rather than provide a mount for a single wealthy man. By the time of Charles Martel a horse cost as much as twenty cattle. For the amount of forage consumed, oxen were also more efficient behind the plow; and, of course, cattle provided beef. In contrast, many Europeans had cultural taboos about the eating of horseflesh. In Greek mythology horses like Arion, Pegasus, and the talking steeds in the
Iliad
were venerated and near human in their loyalty, courage, and intelligence. It made no farming or cultural sense to raise horses in the settled plains and small communities of early Greece.

Once citizenship was extended to middling farmers in Greece of the eighth through sixth centuries B.C., the defense of the community rested in the hands of property owners, who voted when and where to fight— usually brief, decisive battles of colliding heavy infantrymen to ensure clear results and allow the farmer combatants to return home quickly to their harvests. Among yeomen hoplites, horsemanship brought no prestige, but rather suspicion of political intrigue by wealthy rightists who might overthrow popular government. Men with horses were felt to have somehow diverted resources from the community for their own indulgence. Militarily, the spears of the serried ranks of the phalanxes made the charges of horsemen—without stirrups and on small ponies—impotent. Just as it was cheaper to “grow” a family rather than a horse on a small plot of ground, so it was more economical for a state to train a farmer with a spear to stay in rank than a mounted grandee to remain on his horse while fighting.

The result was that until Alexander the Great, four centuries of Hellenic culture pilloried cavalrymen. At Sparta Xenophon claimed that only the “weakest in strength and the least eager for glory” mounted horses (
Hellenica
6.4.11). That dismissive view of cavalry was commonplace throughout classical Greece; the orator Lysias, for example, bragged to the assembly that his client, the wealthy aristocratic Mantitheos, at a battle at the Haliartos River (395 B.C.) chose to face danger as a hoplite, rather than serve “in safety” as a horseman (16.13). Alexander realized that this landed monopoly of the Greek city-states made no military sense when war evolved beyond the small valleys of the mainland and involved a variety of Asian enemies—archers, light-armed troops, and variously armed horsemen—in the large plains and hill country of the East. He also had antipathy, not allegiance, to agrarianism. His aristocratic Macedonian Companions, like the Thessalian light cavalrymen who accompanied him, were horse lords, living on vast estates on the expansive plains of northern Greece. All were the products of monarchy, not consensual government.

There is an entire corpus of passages in ancient literature that reflects this ideal that small farms grew good infantrymen, while vast estates produced only a few elite horsemen: the proper role of farmland is to nurture families of infantry, not to lie idle or to rear horses. Aristotle lamented that by his own time in the latter fourth century B.C., the territory around Sparta was no longer inhabited by male Spartiate hoplite households—although, he says, that country might have supported “thirty thousand hoplites” (
Politics
2.1270a31). In his own era at the end of the first century A.D., the biographer Plutarch deplored the wide-scale depopulation of the Greek countryside, noting that the entire country could scarcely field “three thousand hoplites,” roughly the size of the contingent Megara alone fielded at the battle of Plataea (
Moralia
414A). Similarly, the historian Theopompus, in commenting on the elite nature of a squadron of Philip’s Companion Cavalry, remarked that although only eight hundred in number, they possessed the equivalent income of “not less than ten-thousand Greek owners of the best and most productive land” (
Fragments
of Greek History
115, 225). Theopompus’s point is that intensively worked farmland resulted in an abundance of hoplite infantry, and that this was a political, cultural, and military ideal—in contrast to vast estates to the north that supported horsemen, not yeomen soldiers, and so nurtured autocracy.

Despite the mastery of the mounted Companions, Philip and Alexander learned more from the Greeks than they from him, since the core of the royal army of Macedonia lay with the spears of phalangites and hypaspists—no more than 20 percent of Alexander’s military was mounted. Alexander conquered Persia through the combination of horse and pikeman; but that legacy was either quickly forgotten by the Successors or felt to be irrelevant in subsequent wars against other Macedonian dynasts. Between 323 and 31 B.C. the Hellenistic East was convulsed by near constant war, which was usually decided by the collision of professionally trained pikemen, who alone could break other infantrymen and rid the battlefield of the enemy. Alexander himself, who shredded the ranks of Persian infantry, might have had far less success charging head-on into the phalangites of his own Successor generals.

Rome for nearly a thousand years put its faith in infantry, a tradition that grew up among the Italian yeomen of the fourth and third centuries B.C. who protected republican government through their own service in the legions. Small numbers of horsemen were recruited into the Roman military as auxiliaries from northern European tribes and North African nomadic peoples. Such infantry traditions were enduring. The accompanying failure to develop a highly trained heavy cavalry contingent of the caliber of Alexander’s Companions cost Rome on a number of occasions, from Crassus’s slaughter in Parthia (53 B.C.) to the triumph of the Goths over Valerian at Adrianople (A.D. 378). Yet again the history of Greece and Rome remains the story of a millennium of military superiority over their enemies, a dominance that was the result of a primacy in landed infantry.

Classical
Continuity
in
the
Dark
and
Middle
Ages

Did the fall of Rome mean a return to the conditions of the first European Dark Ages (1100–800 B.C.) before the polis when local barons, stock raising, and mounted warriors ruled in a larger chaotic and depopulated Greek landscape? Not entirely, for the traditions of Rome, as we have seen, were not forgotten, and the second European Dark Ages between A.D. 500 and 1000 were never so dim as after the collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms in Greece. In the disruption of the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., infantry remained the mainstay of the Byzantines—who fought with a ratio of four men on foot to every one on horseback—even when they eventually developed shock mailed cavalrymen on larger horses with stirrups.