Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (22 page)

The Franks, Normans, and Byzantines all took pride in the fearsome charges of their elite and rather small contingents of heavy-mailed knights, which in some sense represented the Western idea of armored, pike-bearing foot soldiers transferred to horseback. Western cavalrymen, rider for rider, in general were better armed, heavier, and more deadly lancers than their more nimble and mobile Islamic counterparts, and reflected just this European preference for decisive shock battles. Yet during the larger battles in Europe and among the Crusader armies in the Holy Land, such fearsome cavalry charges spelled disaster, unless there was a much larger contingent of infantrymen to close with the enemy. Usually, infantry, not horsemen, determined the outcome of Carolingian conflict.

Even with the adoption of stirrups in western Europe sometime between A.D. 800 and 1000, most heavily armed knights could not charge well-trained infantry who stood firm with locked shields and spears. Moreover, not all knights were vastly wealthy. Often cadres of horsemen from more modest landed properties were used to dismount and fight as foot soldiers. Horses per se did not always equate to true shock cavalry, but served as taxis of sorts that transported heavy infantrymen to the fighting. The point is not that Europe fielded few good cavalrymen, but that mounted troops were always outnumbered by infantry. The glamour and mythology of the Dark and Middle Ages were with mounted knights. In small battles and raids, mailed horsemen held an enormous advantage over unprotected peasants. While Europe never possessed the requisite grazing land to produce a true horse culture—nomadic horsemen might string along five to ten ponies per mounted warrior—its rich estates were often sufficient to raise enough animals to create a small cadre of mounted knights, who as petty lords helped to create the system of vassalage and with it early medieval feudalism. The absence of a central state also meant that systematic and uniform drill and training were often difficult for foot soldiers. Contemporary folk wisdom suggested that in battle one hundred well-trained armored knights could be worth one thousand poorly organized peasant foot soldiers.

Yet around the atolls of aristocratic knights, there remained a sea of rustics who made up the majority of all European armies in times of great crisis. Most were small landholders, who either as vassals gave percentages of their harvest to wealthy lords for protection or themselves enjoyed grants of property and thus were given the use of land by aristocrats in exchange for military service. While the foot soldiers of Charles Martel’s army lacked the full concept of citizenship found in classical Greece and republican Rome, such middling farmers were nevertheless recognized as freemen, with rights and responsibilities protected by local aristocrats. They were not of the same status as the mercenaries, herdsmen, serfs, or outright slaves who constituted a great part of the later Berber, Mongol, Arab, and Ottoman armies that invaded Europe. Such men (the
landwehr
) were the backbone of early Carolingian armed forces, especially during the decline of cities and commerce after the disintegration of the Roman Empire:

As the economic structure became predominantly agrarian, military service tended to be closely associated with landowning. Each free household owed the service of a man with complete arms and equipment, and this military obligation became hereditary. The Frankish army thus became a levy of free men serving at the king’s will, under the command of his local representative. (J. Beeler,
Warfare in Feudal Europe, 730–1200,
9)

The increasing use of the stirrup, which allowed horsemen to charge scattered and poorly trained foot soldiers, and the need to combat Islamic mobile cavalry, led to the greater role of aristocratic knights by the tenth century. Yet even then, the idea of entire armies of heavy horsemen sweeping all before them is once again largely a myth.

The
Value
of
Infantrymen

Is it legitimate to value one branch of the military over another? Who can ascertain whether archers, cavalry, artillery, or marines are greater assets on the battlefield, given the vagaries of landscape, weather, and strategic goals? In every great army—Alexander’s, Napoleon’s, Wellington’s— horsemen, infantrymen, and missile troops acted in concert; without such symmetry in battle, all great captains would have found success illusory. Cavalry could always charge and retreat at greater speeds than infantry, and imparted an element of psychological terror lacking among even the fiercest infantrymen. Because the vast majority of Western adversaries were mounted and extremely mobile, it was critical that Europeans developed counterforces of good horse soldiers. Victories were often left incomplete without dogged pursuit by mounted warriors.

That being said, permanent victory in war, ancient and modern, is impossible without crack foot soldiers, who alone can approach the enemy face-to-face, cut him down or blast him apart, occupy the battlefield, and take physical possession of the land under dispute. Their ancient weapons—swords and spears—are cheap and more deadly than missiles. Foot soldiers, not horsemen, were critical to conducting sieges and defending walls—far more likely the locus of medieval warring than the open battlefield. Infantry, in addition, was far more versatile in difficult terrain, whether areas of dense woods or high hills, or in those areas without fertile croplands that offered little pastureland and forage.

Horsemen and archers—like modern brigades of mobile armor, artillery, and airpower—could aid, but in themselves not replace infantry troops. Ultimately, war is a question of economics, in which the options of all states are confined by their ability to produce goods and services; thus every armed force calibrates the greatest military power for the least cost. Armies in the Dark Ages and medieval era, like their classical predecessors, were not immune from such constraints, and so learned quickly that man for man, infantry could be provided for at a tenth of the expense of mounted troops.

With the onset of gunpowder and handheld firearms between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, infantry entered an especially deadly phase; shooters, not just pikemen, could decimate the ranks of mounted lancers as horses became increasingly vulnerable. Yet the spread of firearms throughout the globe did not everywhere automatically result in the creation of disciplined corps of gun-toting soldiers. The Ottomans never mastered the art of volley firing while in rank. The Janissaries shot as they stabbed—as heroic individuals in individual combat. In similar fashion, mounted warriors of North Africa shot muskets largely from horses and camels in swift raids and plundering expeditions. Natives in Africa and the New World saw firearms as improved javelins or arrows and were also ignorant of the possibility of volley firing and sequential shooting. Nor did the introduction of handheld firearms create effective armies in China and Japan.

Only in Europe was the art of loading, firing, and reloading in unison mastered; and only in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the other central states of the West was there a prior infantry tradition of the Dark and Middle Ages that had survived from classical antiquity and molded the prior shock tactics of the Germanic tribes into ordered face-to-face confrontations. The gunpowder age saw an ascendant Europe precisely because firearms—mass-produced and easy to use by individuals—were best employed by preexisting disciplined columns and lines of infantrymen. In the age before the repeating and automatic rifle, shooters with harquebuses and muskets in rank with feet on the ground offered more concentrated, accurate, and rapid fire than those who used their weapons while either mounted or acting solitarily and as skirmishers. In some sense, Renaissance guns in Europe were seen as the natural successors to medieval pikes.

POITIERS AND BEYOND

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is no more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. (E. Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
vol. 7)

So wrote Edward Gibbon—perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, or at least intrigued with the possibility of a non-Christian Oxford—of the possible consequences of a Frankish defeat at Poitiers. Most of the renowned historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Gibbon, saw Poitiers as a landmark battle that marked the high tide of the Muslim advance into Europe. Leopold von Ranke felt that Poitiers was the turning point of “one of the most important epochs in the history of the world, the commencement of the eighth century, when on the one side Mohammedanism threatened to overspread Italy and Gaul” (
History
of the Reformation,
vol. 1, 5). Edward Creasy included Poitiers in his select group of “decisive battles of the world” and likewise felt that it marked the salvation of Europe: “The progress of civilization, and the development of the nationalities and governments of modern Europe, from that time forth went forward in a not uninterrupted, but ultimately certain career” (The
Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,
167). Hans Delbrück, the great German military historian, said of Poitiers that there was “no more important battle in world history” (
The Barbarian Invasions,
441).

More skeptical observers like Sir Charles Oman and J. F. C. Fuller were not so convinced that Western civilization had been saved outright at Poitiers, but they were impressed that the battle marked the emergence of a new consensus that would later on save Europe: spirited Frankish infantrymen of a new Carolingian culture, flanked by their mounted lords, at last might offer a bulwark in the West against both Muslim and Viking raiders. As Oman put it, “For the future we hear of Frankish invasions of Spain, not of Saracen invasions of Gaul” (
The Dark Ages, 476–918,
299).

Recent scholars have suggested either that Poitiers—so poorly recorded in contemporary sources—was a mere raid and thus a “construct” of Western mythmaking or that a Muslim victory might have been preferable to continued Frankish dominance. What is clear is that Poitiers marked a general continuance of the successful Western defense of Europe. Flush from the victory at Poitiers, Charles Martel went on to clear southern France from Islamic attackers for decades, unify the warring kingdoms into the foundations of the Carolingian empire, and ensure ready and reliable troops from local estates.

The spread of direct Roman political control of Asia and northern Africa (100 B.C. to A.D. 400) had been a five-hundred-year aberration— the imposition of Roman law, custom, language, and political organization of millions on conquered peoples to the south and east, while simultaneously conducting a slow assimilation of millions more barbarian peoples to the north. With the inevitable retrenchment of the empire in the fifth century A.D., it was clear that classicism was not dead after all, that it had been remarkably successful in conquering the minds of its own purported conquerors: the core of Europe would retain Roman and Christian precedents and thus once more begin to extend its influence beyond its own borders:

Not only did the conversion of Poland, Hungary and the Scandinavian kingdoms enlarge the zone of influence of Latin Christendom to the north and east, but Islam fell back in Spain, through the progress of the
Reconquista,
and in the Mediterranean, with the annexation of Sicily and the establishment of Latin states in the Middle East. At the same time, in the wake of a movement that was not only military but also economic and demographic, a new Germany was created beyond the Elbe. Facing their enemies, neighbours or rivals, the warriors of the West marked up a string of successes. This expansion is all the more remarkable because it occurred at a time of increasing fragmentation of power. (P. Contamine, War in the
Middle Ages,
30)

The story of Byzantium is a thousand-year resistance to Persian and Islamic encroachment. The fall of Constantinople was seen as a horrific event in Christendom, but for centuries Byzantine ingenuity and discipline had destroyed a succession of much larger Islamic armies. The capital fell a thousand years after Rome’s collapse—and only after it was largely isolated from and abandoned by the West. The reign of Charlemagne (768–814) saw the final expulsion of most Muslims from France and Italy and the creation of a central European state that spread its influence throughout France, Germany, and Scandinavia and into northern Spain.

By 1096 a fragmented western Europe was strong enough to send thousands of soldiers across the sea to the Middle East. In a series of three great Crusades between 1096 and 1189, Europeans occupied Jerusalem and carved out Western enclaves in the heart of Islam. Throughout the Middle Ages it was Europe, not the Middle East, that was more secure from foreign assault. It was impossible for any Muslim army, unlike the Crusaders, to transport large armies by sea to storm the heartland of Europe. Arab armadas had long ago learned in the seventh and eighth centuries at the height of Islamic power that it was unfeasible to take nearby Constantinople.

Such European resiliency offers the proper explanation for the great advance of Western power in the New World, Asia, and Africa after 1500. Europe’s renewed strength against the Other in the age of gunpowder was facilitated by the gold of the New World, the mass employment of firearms, and new designs of military architecture. Yet the proper task of the historian is not simply to chart the course for this amazing upsurge in European influence, but to ask
why
the “Military Revolution” took place in Europe and not elsewhere. The answer is that throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, European military traditions founded in classical antiquity were kept alive and improved upon in a variety of bloody wars against Islamic armies, Viking raiders, Mongols, and northern barbarian tribes. The main components of the Western military tradition of freedom, decisive battle, civic militarism, rationalism, vibrant markets, discipline, dissent, and free critique were not wiped out by the fall of Rome. Instead, they formed the basis of a succession of Merovingian, Carolingian, French, Italian, Dutch, Swiss, German, English, and Spanish militaries that continued the military tradition of classical antiquity.

Key to this indefatigability was the ancient and medieval emphasis on foot soldiers, and especially the idea of free property owners, rather than slaves or serfs, serving as heavily armed infantrymen. Once firearms came on the scene, Europe far more easily than other cultures was able to convert ranks of spearmen and pikemen to harquebusiers, who fired as they had stabbed—in unison, on command, shoulder-to-shoulder, and in rank. Cortés in Mexico City and the Christians at Lepanto were successful largely because they were not the products of a nomadic horse people, tribal society, or even theocratic autocracy, but drew their heritage from tough foot soldiers of settled small valleys and rural communities—the type of men who formed a veritable wall of ice at Poitiers and so beat Abd ar-Rahman back.