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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: War and Conflict Through the Ages
- Sprache: Englisch
In War and Conflict in the Middle Ages, Stephen Morillo offers the first global history of armed conflict between 540 and 1500 or as late as 1800 CE, an age shaped by climate change and pandemics at both ends. Examining armed conflict at all levels, and ranging across China and the central Asian steppes to southwest Asia, western Europe, and beyond, Morillo explores the technological, social, cultural, and environmental determinants of warfare and the tools and tactics used by warriors on land and at sea.
Part I explains the geographical, political, and technological rules that shaped patterns of military activity everywhere. Part II explores how these rules played out in various historical contexts. Armed conflict played a central role in the making of the medieval world, and medieval people used war and conflict to create, expand, and defend their communities and identities. But the devastating effects of climate change and epidemic disease continually reshaped these communities and the nature of their conflicts.
Broad in its scope and rich in detail, War and Conflict in the Middle Ages will be the go-to guide for students and aficionados of military history, medieval history, and global history.
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Seitenzahl: 496
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Three Battles
The Battle of al-Qādasiyyah
The Siege and Battle of Xiangyang
The Battle of Morat
Questions
2 Questions and Methods
The Making of the “Middle Ages”
Emergence?
The End of the Middle Ages?
A Climatic-Demographic Middle Ages
The Scope of this Book
Theoretical Tools
Approaches and Models
Part I: The Common Rules of Medieval Warfare
3 Geography, Politics, and War
Introduction: The Common Rules of Medieval War
Physical Realities: Where War Could Happen
Defining War
War and States: Geographic Limits
War and States: Techno-Political Contexts
The Equine Geography of Warfare
Varieties of Conflict
Geography, Politics, and Warfare
Conclusions
4 Technology and War, or The Common Rules of Combat
Introduction: The “Common Rules” of Medieval War 2
Technology and War: Theoretical Considerations
Preindustrial Technologies of Warfare
Technology and War: The Tactical Level
The Technology of Land Combat: Weapons, Combat, and Battles
The Technology of Siege Warfare
The Technology of Naval Warfare
Technology and War: Beyond Tactics
Conclusions
Part II: Three Scenarios: Medieval Warfare in Changing Conditions
5 The Early Middle Ages, 540–850: Wars of Medievalization
The Early Middle Ages, 540–850: An Introduction
Events
The Paradigm: The Islamic Explosion
The Roman World
The Steppe World
The Chinese World
The Indic World
Other Worlds
“Medievalization”: A Process
Conclusions
6 The High Middle Ages, 850–1300: Wars of Encounter and Connection
The High Middle Ages, 850–1300: An Introduction
Warfare and Culture
Events
The Paradigm: The Mongol Conquests
The Worlds of the Crusades
Islam in India
Conclusions
7 The Late Middle Ages, 1300–1500? Or 1800? Wars for New Worlds
The Late Middle Ages: An Introduction
Themes
Events
East Asian Worlds
The Ottoman World
Europe at Sea
The Americas
Conclusions
8 Conclusions
Making the Medieval World
The End of the Middle Ages?
An Extended Medieval World, to 1800?
Lessons?
Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1
Map of campaign of Qādasiyyah
Figure 2
Map of campaign of Xiangyang
Figure 3
Map of campaign and Battle of Morat
Chapter 2
Figure 4
Graph of total human population
Chapter 3
Figure 5
Map of the major grain-growing/agricultural regions of the world
Figure 6
Peasant revolt
Figure 7
Map of the Eurasian steppes
Figure 8
Tang ceramic horse
Chapter 4
Figure 9
The variety of medieval swords
Figure 10
Steppe bow
Figure 11
The Theodosian Walls of Constantinople
Figure 12
Trebuchet
Figure 13
Byzantine dromon using Greek fire
Figure 14
Medieval cog
Chapter 5
Figure 15
Moorish soldiers
Figure 16
Emperor Tang Taizong of China
Chapter 6
Figure 17
Mongol warrior
Figure 18
Crusading warfare
Chapter 7
Figure 19
The Mongols invade Japan, 1274
Figure 20
Ottoman siege cannon
Figure 21
Aztec warriors
Chapter 8
Figure 22
Graph of total human population
Figure 23
(Very) late medieval warrior
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Begin Reading
Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
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War and Conflict Through the Ages
Jeremy Black, War in the Nineteenth Century
Stephen Morillo, War and Conflict in the Middle Ages
Brian Sandberg, War and Conflict in the Early Modern World
WAR AND CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE AGES
A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
STEPHEN MORILLO
polity
Copyright © Stephen Morillo 2022
The right of Stephen Morillo to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2980-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930139
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
When my editor at Polity, Pascal Porcheron, asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about medieval warfare from a global perspective, I said “yes” because I figured I’d been researching this topic in one way or another for my whole career, so writing this book would be a simple process of mashing up some of my “greatest hits” with some standard general accounts. It was only after I signed to do the book that I took it seriously, and realized that the easy approach would not suffice.
The result is that this book represents my complete rethinking, from the ground up, of medieval warfare: how it worked, what it meant, and how to see all that from a global perspective. This turned out to be a far harder but also a far more rewarding task than I had anticipated. But I learned a great deal from the process of thinking through this topic anew, and I hope you, the reader, will also find new and valuable insights into the topic here.
Events also conspired to frame the project in a way that turned out to be more relevant to today than I could have anticipated. Having started with the discovery that I could plausibly define a “global Middle Ages” in terms of climate change and pandemics at both ends of the period, I saw our contemporary and increasingly critical problem with humandriven climate change suddenly get combined with a new global pandemic. And in addition to relevance, I also got time: much of this book was drafted under conditions of lockdown that removed many of the distractions that usually slow the writing of a book. I’m not going to “thank” COVID–19 for this, of course. No one wants “help” that deadly. Let’s just say that context helped keep me focused.
The task was always going to be challenging anyway. Viewing medieval war and conflict from the ten-thousand-foot altitude demanded by a global perspective, so that patterns and commonalities could be discerned from above, while keeping in view the details that make the topic so interesting, is as difficult as the visual metaphor makes it sound. But it proved, as I have said, very rewarding, and I hope you find it so, too.
Acknowledgments
This book arose from a suggestion by my editor, Pascal Porcheron, who has been supportive and helpful from the beginning, as has his team at Polity Press, especially his assistants Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and Stephanie Homer. Thanks also to production editor Evie Deavall and copy-editor Fiona Sewell. Polity is a great press to write for.
Once the manuscript took shape, a number of people read it in various forms and offered helpful readings and reactions. These include two anonymous reviewers for Polity Press; my friend Jeremy Black; my “MilDude” colleagues at West Point, Major Kevin Malmquist, Major Ron Braasch, and Major Steve Beckmann; and a set of friends and relatives who gave me the critical “non-specialist” view that made sure I was being at least marginally comprehensible beyond the ivory tower, including Brigid Manning-Hamilton, Cynthia Sutton, and Shane Blackman. And my smart and lovely wife Lynne was, as usual, an invaluable critic both of ideas and of my prose and its tendency to devolve into paragraph-long complex/compound sentences featuring nested lists and other horrors of the “drafting ideas into usable English” process.
But above all, this book developed through a set of seminars I taught to undergraduates at both Wabash College and West Point, and discussions with them helped me wrestle a vague outline into the book’s current form. I would like to thank those students: at Wabash, Simon Brumfield, Nick Carson (who deserves extra thanks for work as my intern one summer putting notes and references in order), Chris Dabrowski, Evan Frank, Chris Hartkemeier, Ben Klimczak, Davis Lamm, Ivan Martinez, Michael Ortiz, Wes Bedwell, Josh Blackburn, Cameron Graham, Gordon Harman-Sayre, Will Harvey, Owen Ryan-Jensen, Evan Schiefelbein, Dylan Torbush, and Luke Wallace; and at West Point, Cadets Patrick Hachmeister, Hunter Harrison, Will Hogan, James Johnson, William Mitchell, Temuulen Sodgerel, Andrew Waldrep, and Parker Woodworth. It is to them and to all students of history that I dedicate this book.
Introduction
War and conflict in the Middle Ages is a vast topic spread over a long time period. Looking at armed violence over more than a thousand years from a global perspective means that the picture is also painted across a global canvas. How can such a vast topic be analyzed within the confines of a relatively short book?
The approach taken here is to break the analysis into two parts. Part I of this book examines the “Common Rules” of medieval warfare, the limits, mostly but not exclusively physical, that shaped how conflicts were fought. Part II then turns to a chronological survey that sees medieval warfare as a response to changing “Scenarios” and analyzes warfare as a form of discourse that was central in medieval people constituting their own world.
But before moving into the details of this analysis, the first two chapters of this book make up an introductory part. Chapter 1, “Three Battles,” takes us into the topic by examining three fascinating battles from various times and places in the medieval world. The variety of combatants, locales, and fighting styles we can see in just these three battles raises a number of questions about our topic. Chapter 2, “Questions and Methods,” explores those basic questions and outlines the philosophical and methodological assumptions this study makes in answering those questions.
1Three Battles
This is a book about war and conflict in the Middle Ages from a global perspective. So let’s make an initial exploration of this topic by recounting the stories of three battles (broadly defined, as we shall see), all of which took place in the era usually designated “the Middle Ages” (one each from the early, middle, and late thirds of that era), in places that were part of our globe. The combination of these stories should raise some questions about what we mean by “war and conflict” and “the Middle Ages,” especially when viewed from a global, or world-historical, perspective. Then, after narrating the battles, we will explore some of those questions. Answering those questions and generalizing the lessons and features of our three battles will be the task of the rest of this book.
On to our three battles!
The Battle of al-Qādasiyyah
In early January 638,1 a small army of Bedouin Arabs, just recently converted to a new religion called Islam, stood at the edge of the Arabian Desert in southern Iraq, where the desert met the rich alluvial soil of the Tigris-Euphrates valleys. Facing them was a larger army of Persian soldiers from the Sassanid Empire, which ruled Iraq and Iran. Sassanid influence had long extended well into areas beyond the empire, including Arabia, the homeland of the Muslim army. But this time, the Arabs were on the offensive, striking into the realm of the sedentary, “civilized” world. In a remarkable set of ways, the resulting battle pitted a potential new world order against an established old world order. The stakes for both were existential.
Islam was the recent result of the preaching and organizing activities of the Prophet Muhammad, who after much struggle had managed to unite the mostly pagan tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Allah, the One True God. Muhammad had died in 632, but the community had settled, after not inconsiderable conflict, on the leadership of caliphs, or successors to the Prophet: Abu Bakr was caliph for the first two years, but the next four caliphs either were assassinated or abdicated. The first of these, Umar, directed campaigns of expansion against the Eastern Roman Empire (later known as the Byzantine Empire) and the Sassanid Persian Empire starting in 634. The Muslims immediately met with perhaps unexpected success, conquering the rich Roman province of Syria by 636; Umar then shifted Arab efforts against the Sassanids.2
Arab successes were in part the result of the fact that the Romans and Sassanids had just been fighting each other for several decades. This war saw initial Persian successes, including their conquest of Roman Syria and Egypt, with a Persian army approaching the Roman capital at Constantinople in 619. But the Roman emperor Heraclius led a remarkable recovery that ended with the Persian ruler Chosroes assassinated by his own followers in 628, followed by four years of political infighting before Kavadh II reestablished order. Though the extent of the damage to the two great empires can be exaggerated, the war undoubtedly left both powers somewhat war-weary, their subjects overtaxed, and morale on both sides needing to be rebuilt. The Islamic invasions came before either side had fully recovered.
The war had had other effects on the political and economic setting in which Muhammad had built up his new Muslim community. Both Persians and Romans had invested resources in Arab tribal allies, pumping unusual levels of wealth into Arabia, wealth that probably served to enhance the possibilities for community and state building in the peninsula, which was not normally rich enough to generate high levels of political organization on its own. Furthermore, the difficulty of the war had pushed both sides to intensify their cultural efforts to solidify internal support and gain allies. This meant that both sides turned to their religious traditions. Heraclius’ Christianization of the war has led some historians to refer to his campaigns against the Sassanids as the first Christian Crusade; similar and parallel efforts on the part of Chosroes might be seen as the first (and last) Zoroastrian Crusade. (It should be noted, however, that the population of the Eastern Roman Empire was far more Christian than the population of the Persian Empire was Zoroastrian – the Iraqi portion of Persia may have been majority Christian when the Muslim invasion occurred.)3 It is probably not a coincidence that Islam emerged in a time and region saturated with intense religious imagery and propaganda.4
Thus, the two armies that faced each other at Qādasiyyah represented on one side a new religion, Islam, one with a special relationship to a people, the Arabs; and on the other an old religion, Zoroastrianism, with a special relationship to a people, the Persians. Reflecting the social structures of the two peoples and their religious beliefs, the Arab Islamic army saw itself as representing an egalitarian society without hereditary rulers; the Persian army saw itself as representing a very hierarchical society ruled by the hereditary house of Sasan and its supporting aristocratic elite. The former fought to establish an identity for its newly created community. It had, naturally, almost no record of military achievement. The latter fought to preserve the long-established identity of its community, an identity (and empire) we can fairly call “classical.” Although its confidence had been shaken by the sudden and disastrous end of the war with Rome, the Persian army could look back on a tradition of military success dating back a thousand years. If regional rivalries and divisions exacerbated by the Roman war meant that the Persian force was less culturally unified than the Muslim force, the presence of Armenian princes and their followers in the Persian army spoke to the obverse of that coin: the imperial reach of the Sassanid Empire brought in subordinates and allies that reinforced its Persian core.
Figure 1 Map of campaign of Qādasiyyah.
Source: Author.
How large were the armies facing each other across an abrupt geographic divide and a chasm of cultural differences? Hard data is impossible to come by, but the best estimates are that the Muslim army was in fact rather small: perhaps 12,000 men. The original expeditionary force that had raided and then been driven back by a Persian counteroffensive had been reinforced by troops transferred from recently conquered Syria, and by a call for reinforcements that went out to most of Arabia in response to that counteroffensive (figure 1). Still, Arab resources were limited and some troops were already tied up in Syria.
On the other side, establishing numbers is even harder. The Arab sources claim that the Persians numbered as many as 210,000. This is clearly logistically impossible and, in the political circumstances, highly unlikely anyway. The Persian army, produced by an empirewide effort, probably did outnumber the Arabs – but by how much? Guesses (“estimates” would overly glorify the “calculation” process) in the range of 20,000 to 30,000 seem reasonable, though lower is possible and much higher than 30,000 less likely, though the Armenian writer Sebeos claims there were 80,000 in the Persian army.
In terms of command, equipment, and accustomed fighting style, the differences between the two forces may have been visibly dramatic but in effect were probably less so. The Arabs fielded what we might call a ragtag force; commonalities of weaponry and armor resulted from a common background rather than central control. Defensive armor was not heavy, and most of the Arab soldiers fought on foot in battle, even if some had horses or camels for long-distance mobility and raiding campaigns. They tended, however, to have good swords and good bows – Arab archery was known to be effective. The Persians fielded a mixed force: infantry whose main weapon was also the bow (spears and shields were not preferred); elite aristocratic cavalry formations wielding lances and reasonably well armored; and, at least at Qādasiyyah, a small number of elephants drawn from the empire’s Indian frontier. While the Arab army included veterans of previous campaigns who would have been accustomed to taking the initiative in battle, the Persians seem to have preferred a careful, cautious approach to combat – centrally controlled and perhaps discouraging initiative. The Persians had probably established a semi-fortified encampment on arriving at Qādasiyyah. Each side’s commanders – Sa’d ibn Abī Waqqās, an early Muslim convert from the important Quraysh tribe of Mecca who had fought alongside the Prophet, and the Persian aristocrat and chief minister Rustum – were respected, experienced, and had records of success. Rustum had in fact defeated a Muslim army months earlier at the Battle of the Bridge, one of the few major defeats early Muslim forces suffered and a key moment in the Persian counteroffensive that had driven Muslim raiders back into the desert.
And so the two armies faced off and came to blows. The Arab Muslim sources for the battle provide copious amounts of detail about the fighting, but most of it has a legendary character focused on specific actors who, because of the retrospective importance of the battle, were inserted into the stories that got attached to the legend of the battle. Overviews in the sources are few and unhelpful. 5 Indeed, the date of the battle is different in different sources (see note 1 above), in part reflecting specific deformations of the historical truths presented in the Islamic record where religious truths took precedence. And whether “the date of the battle” is the correct formulation is open to questions. Most of the sources that specify the length of the battle present it as lasting three days (and even into the morning of the fourth). On the face of it, this sounds implausible. Almost none of the open field battles we have reliable details about from the medieval world lasted more than a few hours, for reasons we will explore later in this book. Those that lasted longer were all associated with the permanent structures of fortifications and siege works: an attempt to relieve a siege might lead to a more extended conflict, as we will see, for instance, in the next section of this chapter. There was no siege at Qādasiyyah. Simple logistics – that is, the mechanics of keeping enough water and food within reach of the combatants over several days, for example – are difficult to imagine, especially with the field of conflict being at the edge of a desert. Is the commonly accepted length of the battle legendary?
Perhaps, but not necessarily. The desert was the natural operating environment for the Bedouin Arabs who had converged on the site; it is not at all impossible that they brought flocks and herd of animals with them that could have provided a mobile food supply, and the site may have been chosen (on both sides) for its access to wells and water. The Persian army had arrived gradually at the site, had chosen it deliberately, and was undoubtedly operating with a logistical tail – a supply train using carts and drawing on local resources from the irrigated, agricultural side of the geographic divide that shaped the campaign. Furthermore, the attested Persian habit of creating a hastily fortified camp (much as Roman armies on campaign had always done) when they reached the end of a march meant that while there was no permanent fortification (or dug-in siege works) for either side to use, the Persians did have a semi-secure base for their daily operations, while the Muslim commanders seem to have occupied a large building in/at the edge of the town as a headquarters, and the Muslim army as a whole, composed of nomads, would have had less need, at least psychologically, for a “structural” base of operations. The accustomed caution displayed by the Persians, especially in the face of Arab mobility, could have kept Persian offensive moves at a level that the smaller Arab force could manage, while the Persian camp would have made an all-out Arab offensive risky, at least until the enemy had been worn down physically and morally. So let us provisionally accept that the battle lasted an unusually long time, even up to three days and into a fourth.
It thus probably began with tentative attacks on both sides, with both generals probably preferring to remain in the position of maintaining a tactical defense, which for predominantly infantry forces was often the stronger stance.6 The possible tiebreaker here, so to speak, was the Persian elephant corps, which seems to have been not large (under thirty elephants, certainly – elephant logistics were even harder than human and equine logistics). Still, there were enough to offer the Persians hope of breaking Arab resistance with an early attack, especially given that elephants were particularly difficult for horses unaccustomed to their presence, potentially neutralizing the Arab cavalry. This may have further pushed the battle into an infantry-heavy encounter in which archery played a central role, to the advantage of the Arabs, who as already noted had good bows – likely better than the Persians’ – and apparently better protection against arrows. Archery probably also accounted for the ability of the Arab infantry to successfully resist the elephant-led Persian offensives.
A pattern of tentative attacks, successful defenses, periods of rest and reorganization, and breaks at night is certainly conceivable as lasting through two or three days. Gradually, however, the Arab army seems to have gained in confidence, worn down the Persians’ superior numbers, and maintained a higher level of morale. Here, the more homogenous and socially unified composition of the Arab army certainly played a part, with the sense of divine mission provided by the new faith that held them together perhaps providing the ultimate advantage. By the third day, the Arabs seems to have been moving more consistently to the attack, and by either the end of the third day or the dawn of the fourth, after a night of harassing their foes, Arab attacks began to break through and the Persian army began to fall apart. Rustum and many of the other Persian leaders were killed. In the end, the battle turned into a rout. Arab forces pursued Persian fugitives throughout the last (fourth?) day. Persian Mesopotamia lay open to the invaders, right up to and including the imperial capital at Ctesiphon. Within four years, the entire empire had been swallowed by the caliphate and a new world replaced the old.
The Siege and Battle of Xiangyang
With the armed conflict that centered on the fortified city of Xiangyang (and its twin city of Fanchen, attached by a pontoon bridge to Xiangyang across the Han, the two forming an effective whole) in the years 1268–73, which encompassed a number of battles (skirmishes, perhaps) in the field and, certainly more centrally, a long siege, we are stretching the usual concept of “a battle” well beyond its usual limits. Histories of twentieth-century military conflict might more readily accept a “battle” that took months or years to resolve – at Stalingrad in 1942, for example. But many modern battles and campaigns have tended to merge and metastasize into vast and lengthy contests because of the industrially supported growth in army sizes and logistical support systems that made everything bigger and longer, at least in “Great Power” military conflicts. And yet, the conflict at Xiangyang is not necessarily so different from “modern” battles when it is carefully examined with the factors that sometimes make modern conflicts so large kept in mind.
This is because the forces that met at Xiangyang were, especially in thirteenth-century terms, stupendous. Attacking from the northwest toward the city were the forces of the Mongol Empire, the preindustrial world’s offensive behemoth, creators of world history’s largest contiguous land empire, conquerors whose destructive (and often, constructive) footprint was large enough to have temporarily cooled the global climate7 and killed more people, as a percentage of the global population of the time, than World War II. Already masters of a huge piece of Eurasia, they aimed, starting in 1268, at their most formidable opponent, Song China, a defensive behemoth to match the Mongols’ offensive prowess. True, the Mongols already ruled the northern half of what had been, in the eleventh century, Song territory, and aimed simply to complete their conquest of the world’s largest, richest, most organized society. But the Southern Song were, in many ways, hardly diminished by the loss of the north. Probably over 80 percent of the population and perhaps as much as 90 percent of the economic production of Song China were in the south. Song China could deploy a military establishment of over a million men, supported by the world’s richest, most advanced economy, one which easily led the world in iron production, had invented paper money to lubricate the vast scale of its internal economy, maintained maritime trade connections with the world through its port cities on the southeast coast, and was the inventor, not just of paper and paper money, but of gunpowder, whose military purposes were on full display at Xiangyang. It possessed the world’s biggest, most technologically sophisticated naval forces, both oceanic and riverine: among its ships were paddle-wheel-driven river craft (albeit the paddles were human- not steam-powered) that could launch gunpowder bombs from shipboard catapults. The navy was crucial to defense of the south, divided as it was from the north by the Yangtze River and its tributaries. Xiangyang, in other words, witnessed the mother of all medieval Great Power, heavyweight battles. No wonder the battle (in the broad sense, primarily the siege) lasted five years, making it one of the longest sieges of the entire medieval period.
What is odd, however, is that, given the scale and consequences of this meeting of giants, the conflict at Xiangyang has received very little attention in military history writing, either in the Euro-American mainstream (though the Eurocentric focus of “western” military history makes this perhaps less surprising)8 or even in Mongol and Chinese military history writing.9 It appears that, despite the siege part of the conflict, in particular, displaying some significant technological developments, the conflict is seen as militarily uninteresting: its eventual outcome – victory for the Mongol forces and the subjugation of Song China – is somehow taken as inevitable, despite the length of the Song resistance, which, including the five years at Xiangyang, lasted over forty years, far longer than any other Mongol opponent managed to hold out.
This sense of inevitability probably reflects not just the widely held perception (then and now) that the Mongols were unstoppable, a perception the Mongols themselves did as much as they could to foster, but also the historiographical underrating of the Song dynasty. Viewed objectively, the Song was an era of remarkably good, effective governance of China in the face of some very tough challenges. Militarily, in particular, the Song suffer from bad historiographical framing. They succeeded the Tang, who carefully cultivated a reputation for military success and expansion from the time of the second Tang emperor (and effectively co-founder of the dynasty with his father), Li Shimin, who was and wished to be seen as a bold and successful general. The Tang dynasty as a whole are usually seen as an expansionist high point in Chinese dynastic history. The Song were, of course, followed by their conquerors, the Mongols, or in Chinese terms the Yuan dynasty, who were militarily, of course, the Mongols. The Song appear in this frame, especially militarily, as a trough between peaks.
The dynasty contributed to this reputation by emphasizing civilian virtues and civilian rule and control of the military, which is often interpreted as having reduced the effectiveness of the Song army. The dynasty is best known for economic advancements (for which the state probably receives less credit than it is due) and a “renaissance”-like flowering of Neo-Confucian philosophy and the arts. Yet the two “peaks,” Tang and Yuan, had considerably shorter periods of effective rule than the Song (arguably, 630–750 for the Tang, or barely over 100 years, and 1270–1350 for the Yuan, less than a century, as opposed to roughly 1000–1270 for the Song, nearly three times as long – even granting that the loss of northern China occurred in there, again perhaps more a matter of military image than true loss of effectiveness). And the Tang and Yuan both fell to internal divisions and rebellions, whereas it took the world’s mightiest war machine to bring down the Song after a long struggle.
In short, Xiangyang really was a meeting of giants that probably deserves more attention than it has received. It stands as our second “battle.”
Our analysis must begin with geography, and why the Mongol–Song confrontation focused on Xiangyang. Northern China was a wheat-growing region, relatively dry, flat, and centered on the Yellow River valley. It had been the cradle of Chinese civilization, but by the Song period, as we have already noted, the economic and demographic center of gravity of China had shifted to the hotter, wetter, in places more mountainous rice-growing lands focused on the Yangtze valley. Still, the north, distinct from yet open to the steppes of central Asia, remained the center of Chinese military power, including horse breeding and equine trade with the nomads of the steppes. More open to steppe influences, northern China was also open to conquest by the peoples of the steppes: the Mongols in taking northern China displaced already extant northern kingdoms and dynasties of steppe origin more than they conquered the Song themselves.
When they turned their attention to the south in 1268, the Mongols faced unusual challenges. The climate was hotter and more humid than they were comfortable with; the many rivers, lakes, and marshy areas were far less suitable for their accustomed mass cavalry campaigns than the north had been. And the Song were as prepared for the coming Mongol assault as they could be. Unlike many of the polities the Mongols had already conquered across Eurasia, which had often been centered on a single large fortified city, or perhaps a number of scattered ones, the frontier region between north and south China was heavily urbanized, full of well-fortified cities connected into mutually supporting networks to create, effectively, a defense-in-depth system well suited to frustrating the independent mobile columns the Mongols favored for strategic operations. From Sichuan in the west down the Yangtze and including its major tributaries, especially the Han River running into the Yangtze from the north, and on which Xiangyang and Fanchen sat, the frontier between north and south China formed a deep and flexible defense region where riverine naval forces could support fortified positions and the infantry units that occupied them.
By 1268, the Mongol leadership was focused in the person of Chinggis Khan’s grandson Kubilai Khan, who had solidified his position as Great Khan and thus as leader of the fractured Mongol Empire by defeating a revolt by his younger brother Arigh Böke. Böke represented the “purist,” steppe-oriented side of Mongol cultural interests, who objected to Kubilai’s Sinicizing moves, such as establishing a Chinese capital in the region of modern Beijing and emphasizing the Chinese bureaucracy, which were designed to solidify Chinese support for Mongol rule. This trend would culminate in Kubilai formally proclaiming a Chinese-style dynasty, the Yuan, during the campaign to subdue the Southern Song.
Kubilai and his key advisors had decided to focus Mongol efforts on one key target, responding to the difficulties presented by the fortified defensive zone they faced and taking a lesson from the slow progress Kubilai’s brother and predecessor Möngke had made with a traditionally organized campaign into Sichuan in the late 1250s. The Xiangyang–Fanchen fortification complex guarding the Han River, and thus access to the Yangtze valley, was that target (figure 2). They made no attempt to hide this focus from the Song government and its military leaders, as strategic maneuverability and the surprise that enhanced its effectiveness in other Mongol conquests were abandoned as useless. Instead, the Mongol leadership seems to have decided to draw the Song into an extended battle of attrition at Xiangyang where the southern resistance could be broken once and for all. What ensued might reasonably be called a medieval version of the Western Front in World War I, with Xiangyang playing the role of Verdun: Great Powers fighting toe-to-toe to the death.
The Song army was overwhelmingly infantry-based, reflecting the failure of the Song to hold onto any of the northern territories where horses could be bred and raised; furthermore, the Mongols controlled the central Asian supply of equine power. (It has been estimated that the Mongols at their height controlled well over half of the world’s supply of horses.) The infantry were usually armed with iron crossbows, and some carried spears or swords. They were centrally trained, and benefited from the experience that a long-term professional army could accumulate. But no one would claim that the Song infantry were, man for man, among the world’s best soldiers. They were decent. What made the Song a military behemoth is that, first, there were a lot of them. The entire Song military establishment was in the many hundreds of thousands (and had probably been over a million in the early decades of the dynasty). And they were well armed by the world’s largest, most productive economy that produced technologically sophisticated arms and armor. This technological expertise was deployed to best effect in the Song navy that guarded the main rivers, the Yangtze and its tributaries, that anchored the Song defensive frontier.
Figure 2 Map of campaign of Xiangyang.
Source: Author.
The potential weakness in the Song system was its leadership. In reaction to the warlordism that had fragmented and destroyed the Tang dynasty, the warlord who founded the Song instituted a system that emphasized civilian control of the military and loyalty to the dynasty as its central features, perhaps, at times, to the detriment of military efficiency. Generals were rotated through regional commands to prevent their forming local bonds with their troops; attempts were made to institute a written exam system for military promotions like that in effect for the civil service, though this never proved successful. What really held the Song system together, however, was an informal substructure of military families who held commands hereditarily, giving the system continuity, expertise, and a set of social bonds among commander families that could tie larger regions together outside the formal chains of military command. But as an informal system, it was subject to political pressures and competing demands for loyalty and official rewards. Put another way, the Song court and its army were not strongly linked politically, a serious potential weakness.10
By contrast, the Mongol (or Yuan) military system was centrally led by the khan/emperor, Kubilai, who, once he had suppressed his brother’s revolt, commanded the complete loyalty of the system politically and militarily, including not just subordinate Mongol leaders, but Chinese generals who threw their lot in with the rising power from the steppes. On the other hand, the Mongol army was more complicated than the term “Mongol” conveys. There was a core of Mongol soldiers who probably were, man for man, about the best soldiers in the world. They were mostly horse archers, with some proportion of them carrying heavier melee weapons and wearing more substantial armor. But the number of actual Mongols was limited, and those were split among the four major pieces of the empire by Kubilai’s time. Additional steppe-style horse archers were provided by the many central Asian groups, including various Turkic and related peoples, who had been incorporated into the Mongol Empire and military system. But the Mongols also folded large numbers of Chinese infantry into their armed forces, infantry who provided the necessary military labor for siege work and attritional warfare. And in preparation for a campaign into the navally defended south, they had created their own naval forces, built and manned by further Chinese specialists recruited into the new dynasty’s system. Finally, recognizing the key role siege warfare would play in the assault on the south, they recruited (or conscripted) Chinese engineers and imported specialist engineers from Persia to construct siege engines and other equipment. The vast reach of the empire and all its resources, human and material, in other words, could be focused on the targeted Song, and targeted at one key location, mitigating the Song superiority in overall resources, as the Song had to defend everywhere along the frontier, given Mongol mobility, while Kubilai could choose his point of attack.
Starting in late 1267 and then throughout 1268, the Mongols began to bring pressure on Xiangyang–Fanchen. They built forts to constrict access to the area, and began to concentrate their naval resources to contest control of the Han River. The slow buildup gradually became clear to the Song, who attempted to counter the emerging siege. It was in this stage of the campaign that some small open field battles were fought as the Song tried to prevent the Mongol army from settling in around Xiangyang. But at this point, luck and the nature of the Song leadership system coincided to deal the defenders a serious blow. Lü Wende, the leader of the defense of the Xiangyang region and head of a family network that tied the whole defensive structure together (his brother Lü Wenhuan was in charge of Xiangyang proper), died in 1270 just before he could lead an attack on the Mongol army. His replacement, Li Tingzhi, alienated the Lü family from the court (the court, in fact, already did not trust the Lü family fully) and was unable to unify the command of the defenses of the region.11 Li’s attempts to dislodge the Mongols – or even, by 1271, to relieve the tightening siege of Xiangyang and Fanchen by getting fresh supplies through to the fortifications – failed. The Mongols increased the pressure. The blockade tactics were wearing down the defenders without causing the Mongols large casualties. By the end of 1272, after five years of pressure, Kubilai and his key advisors decided it was time to force the issue. They further decided that taking Fanchen was the easier half of their goal, and that doing so would make the defense of Xiangyang itself untenable.
In early 1273, the Mongols first attacked the bridge that connected the two cities across the Han. The Mongol river fleet defeated the Song fleet while the Mongol army directly attacked the bridge, destroying the wooden piles that anchored it. With the bridge destroyed, the Mongol army attacked the city. The direct assault on strong city walls, though supported by siege engines including new “Muslim” trebuchets – counterweight trebuchets built by Persian engineers with experience of southwest Asian warfare where counterweight trebuchets, which were far more powerful than the traction trebuchets in use in east Asia at the time, had been developed – was costly in Mongol lives but ultimately successful against defenders isolated from any relief. Fanchen fell by February 2. The Mongols massacred its entire population, piling bodies up outside the walls in full view of the defenders of Xiangyang, and setting up their Muslim trebuchets to bombard Xiangyang from across the river.
At this point Kubilai paused, allowing Lü Wenhuan time to consider his position: he was in an indefensible city whose inhabitants would also be massacred if the city resisted further, and he and his family were mistrusted by the Song court. It is therefore not shocking that Lü not only surrendered the city on March 14, but went over to the Mongols.
With the defensive frontier decisively breached at Xiangyang, the following three years of campaigning by the Mongols into southern China, ending with the final surrender of the Song court to the invaders in 1276, took on the character of a mop-up campaign. When the last Song emperor died that year, all of China was under Mongol rule. This marked the high point of Mongol expansion, even if the aura of Mongol invincibility had been broken farther west by the Mamluk victory over a small Mongol army at Ayn Jalut, in Syria, in 1260. But unlike the results of the battle at Qādasiyyah, when the Arab conquest of Persia permanently and decisively altered the cultural trajectory of one of the world’s oldest imperial cultures, the Mongol conquest of China was in many ways ephemeral. The Mongols under Kubilai’s leadership, unable to impose Mongol identity on the vastly more numerous Chinese population, had already begun to adopt a Chinese imperial identity to reinforce their legitimacy. Nevertheless, by 1368, Mongol rule in China was over. Stressed by outbreaks of epidemic disease and facing growing peasant revolts, the Mongol Yuan dynasty fell to a peasant-born leader who established the Ming dynasty that year. The Ming would follow a path of conservative reaction against the period of Mongol rule, consciously looking to pre-Mongol models of Chinese identity and policy to reestablish the Middle Kingdom in its place of centrality in the medieval world.
The Battle of Morat
By 1476, when the Battle of Morat took place, western Europe was a century and a half into a period of crises that had started with the catastrophically cold, wet summers of 1316 and 1317, had been seriously compounded by the Black Death pandemic that reached Italy in 1348 and within three years had killed a third of Europe’s population, and included the self-inflicted wounds of widespread warfare, especially the Hundred Years War, religious schism, and class conflict.
One result was that the dominance of the major kingdoms of the thirteenth century (including the papacy as a major political power even if it was not technically a kingdom) over the political space of western Europe had been loosened considerably. New polities emerged into newly opened spaces. Communities seeking to find a path through the crises and claim a collective identity in troubled times launched experiments in governance that, given the nature of European societies, had to defend their claims to existence on the battlefield.
Western Europe by the thirteenth century had evolved a heavily militarized socio-military system whose three major components existed in a tense but complementary balance. At the top of the system was a class of heavily armed warrior aristocrats and their servants: the knights in shining armor whose image is central to popular western conceptions of medieval warfare. The knights exploited their social dominance to extract the economic resources necessary to support themselves in the style befitting their claimed role as the defenders of society: ownership of large, specially bred warhorses capable of carrying the knight in his full armor, which by the 1400s had shifted from mostly mail to more and more plate armor. Their possession of landed estates, often as fiefs granted to them by a higher lord in exchange for their readiness to perform military duties at the lord’s command, supported them not just in terms of buying equipment, but by letting them devote their lives to military activity as a lifestyle. The knights’ resulting skills and resources made them the dominant force in medieval European warfare. They were vital in combat; because of their equine mobility they were necessary to the prosecution of campaigning activities such as scouting and pillaging; and they acted as the armored spear tip of siege warfare.12
Siege warfare was critical and constant – sieges were far more frequent than pitched battles in Europe, the inverse of the movement-and-battle-seeking patterns of Mongol warfare on the steppes. This reflected the dynamics of the settled, sedentary worlds that surrounded the steppe world of horse warriors and was thus not unusual. But Europeans had taken this pattern to an extreme, as the knightly class that ruled the region had settled centuries earlier into a lineage-based kinship system whose family centers were small private castles very different from the vast urban fortifications of China. While urban fortifications and “public” castles – strongpoints built or at least owned by a central authority – existed all across Europe, it was the plethora of fortified positions created privately that dominated the military infrastructure of the society. And again, this was a socio-military system: castles served as military bases of operations, but thus also served as the points from which elite dominance over the countryside and its peasants emanated, a dominance exercised not just by arms but by the operations of the courts and other bureaucratic mechanisms of rule located in the castles.
But if knights and castles represented the two rurally based, elite parts of the socio-military system, its third component filled out the social spectrum and rounded out the military capabilities of the system. Bodies of infantry, drawn from largely urban communal groups who gave the infantry their cohesion and were in turn protected and defended by the infantry they nurtured, joined the knights and their castles. They filled out army numbers in a world where horses were rare and expensive, performed many of the vital tasks of siege warfare, and often supplied the missile component of arms combinations and the defensive formations in battle that the knightly horsemen could maneuver from.
This system was spawned and held together by a civilizational set of values that put notions of militarized law at the center of social organization. Such values necessitated in turn that any social group with a claim to some set of privileges or status had to be willing to defend those claims by force, and the operations of the system were characterized by many informal or ad hoc obligations and terms of service. But the operations of military activity by the fourteenth century, in the context of an expanding European economy, had become increasingly monetized. In other words, variations on paid soldiers, called by many names beyond just “mercenaries,”13 had become not just common but increasingly central to the organization of military forces by the 1400s.
Returning to the century and half of external shocks and stresses with which we started this section, however, those stresses caused the formerly complementary pieces of the socio-military system to come apart at the seams a bit, giving rise to increased levels of internal conflict and bloodshed. This conflict not only pitted unsettled or newly emergent political formations against each other, but also expressed regional and class rivalries and disagreements.
The Battle of Morat, fought on June 22, 1476, encapsulates this entire set of trends.14
The battle was brought about by the ambitions of Charles the Bold (alternatively, the Rash or the Cruel – to some contemporaries, he was “Charles the Terrible,” whose reputation for cruelty and brutality was exceptional even for the time), the ruler of the duchy of Burgundy. Charles aimed to turn the duchy into an independent polity positioned between France and the Holy Roman Empire – a late medieval successor of Lotharingia, the middle portion of the tripartite division of Charlemagne’s empire in the ninth century. Charles built his centralizing state around the army that would define and defend it, drawing first on some of the best knightly elites in Europe for a core of heavily armed and armored cavalry and a core of local rulers for his state. But as a thoroughly modern military thinker, Charles added to this offensive core of knights the best mercenary infantry units he could find, including English longbowmen and German arquebusiers, whose firepower complemented the offensive potential of the heavy cavalry. Even more, he gathered one of the largest artillery trains in Europe at the time, which he used not only as a very effective means of taking fortified towns, but on the battlefield as well, despite the cannon of the day still being relatively hard to maneuver and limited to a slow rate of fire. Charles drew on Roman models to organize his forces into permanent, numbered units, partly as a way of overcoming the difficulties of coordinating a polyglot, culturally diverse collection of units into a cohesive whole.
Standing in the way of Charles’ ambitions was the Swiss Confederation, a coalition of small polities that were, essentially, city-states. The Confederation, dominated by the eight oldest and largest cities of the region, headed by Bern, Zurich, and Lucerne, controlled much of modern-day Switzerland and both blocked and threatened the expansion of Burgundy that Charles planned. Strategically, Burgundy could be cut in half by a Swiss westward offensive.
Adding to the obvious strategic and territorial tension was an ideological component of the Burgundian–Swiss rivalry. Against Charles’ very traditional, monarchical-aristocratic duchy, the Swiss Confederation was collectively and cooperatively run – each of the major units of the Confederation was an independent player, and each was collectively run internally. “Democratic” is undoubtedly a somewhat anachronistic description for their politics, but the Swiss were certainly at the opposite end of the medieval European ideological spectrum from Charles’ Burgundy.
Like Burgundy, the Swiss Confederation’s military forces arose from and thus reflected closely their social and political structure. But unlike the elite-dominated (and thus cavalry-led) Burgundian army, the Swiss communal associations produced what such associations had always produced, dating back to the Greek city-states of classical times: masses of heavy infantry who fought as they lived, side by side. For the Swiss, this meant large squares of infantry called Haufen, or “a mass,” armed with pikes and halberds. The pikemen formed the outer four to six ranks of the formation on every side, and their 18-to-20-foot spears could repel any cavalry charge. The halberdiers filled the middle of the wide, deep blocks. The halberd, a polearm topped with a business end that combined a spearpoint, an axe-head, and a hook, was the perfect melee weapon for close combat with heavily armored knights. Though shorter than the pikes, the spear end let the halberdiers contribute to the defensive wall against cavalry attacks; the heavy axe-head, swung at the end of a 10–12-foot staff, could cleave into most armor; and the hook was designed to snag a horseman and pull him off his horse. Thus, though the Swiss Haufen bore some resemblance to Greek or Macedonian phalanxes, they were deeper and less linear, and the difference in weaponry between the two resulted from the threat to the Swiss posed by a sort of heavy cavalry the ancient infantry had never had to face.
The real similarity to their ancient forebears was that the Swiss drew on the political, social, and economic cohesion of their communities to create cohesive infantry formations just as the ancients had done, and deployed those units often enough that they gained further cohesion and skill from abundant practice. These were not infantry on the model of imperial Roman legions or the Chinese infantry of the Song, whose existence and effectiveness depended on a large, rich central state to both gather recruits together and train them. This was social infantry.
Crucially, they gained enough practice and experience, honed by the trick of (re?)learning to march in time to music, that Swiss Haufen could maneuver rapidly on the battlefield without losing their cohesion or opening gaps in their formation. They were therefore capable not just of standing on the defensive, which various infantries throughout the medieval period had managed with greater or lesser effectiveness, but of attacking, often with astonishing rapidity and terrifying effect. It was this army that faced off against Charles of Burgundy’s model of combined arms modernity.
The Swiss–Burgundian war opened formally in 1474. The Swiss Confederation formed an alliance with the Hapsburg archduke of Austria; former enemies driven together against Charles by his perceived threat to both of them. Charles’ side of the war opened with an unsuccessful siege of the city of Neuss in the summer of 1474. At the same time, under the pretext of avenging previous outrages by Charles, the Swiss invaded Burgundian territory and took a number of towns, cities, and castles, defeating a Burgundian relief army at Héricourt in November. The next year they invaded the Vaud region of Burgundy’s ally Savoy and took the fortified town of Morat. Over the following year a series of offensives and reprisals intensified the war on both sides, and acts of cruelty and slaughter of non-combatants multiplied. Charles’ first attack into Swiss territory ended in a chaotic defeat at the Battle of Grandson on March 2, 1476, where the Swiss ability to launch sudden, rapid infantry attacks caught Charles completely of guard. He lost many of his cannon, but re-gathered his army, pulling together perhaps 20,000 men, some of whom were less than fully trained militia and mercenaries, and rapidly gathered cannon from all over his realm. He invaded again, aiming to retake Morat as the first step toward attacking Bern directly. He arrived outside the town on June 9. The Swiss quickly raised a relief army and began force marching it toward Morat, some contingents covering over 80 miles in three days.
Morat was on the shore of a lake, and Charles deployed his army – unwisely, even rashly, one might say – partly facing the town to prosecute his siege, and partly facing the opposite way toward the direction the Swiss relief force would come from. He set up many of his artillery pieces to aim at a possible Swiss attack and had a defensive palisade constructed to defend his position. But this left the lake behind his forces, in their natural line of retreat.
The Swiss relief army, probably slightly larger than Charles’ force, arrived in the vicinity of Morat on June 21. They closed to attack the next day, arriving around midday. A dense wood kept their approach hidden from Charles, who furthermore, probably from aristocratic arrogance and partly just sheer stupidity, underestimated his opponents’ marching abilities. A serious thunderstorm that night made a Swiss attack seem even less likely. That some of his newer troops were, on the morning of the battle, negotiating with him to be paid before they would fight indicates the sad state of Charles’ preparations. Thus, when the Swiss emerged from the woods in the early afternoon, the Burgundian defensive line was only partially manned (figure 3).
The Swiss advance force, the first of three large Haufen
