CHAPTER I. The
Transition from Roman to Medieval forms in War (A.D. 378-582)
CHAPTER II. The
Early Middle Ages (A.D. 476-1066).
CHAPTER III.
The Byzantines and their Enemies (A.D. 582-1071).
CHAPTER IV. The
Supremacy of Feudal Cavalry (A.D. 1066-1346).
CHAPTER V. The
Swiss (A.D. 1315-1515).
CHAPTER VI. The
English and their Enemies (A.D. 1272-1485).
CHAPTER VII.
Conclusion. Zisca and the Hussites.
INTRODUCTION
The Art of War
has been very simply defined as the art which enables any commander to worst
the forces opposed to him. It is therefore conversant with an enormous variety
of subjects: Strategy and Tactics are but two of the more important of its
branches. Besides dealing with discipline, organization, and armament, it is
bound to investigate every means which can be adapted to increase the physical
or moral efficiency of an army. The author who opened his work with a
dissertation on the age which is preferable in a ‘generalissimo’, or ‘the
average height which the infantry soldier should attain’ was dealing with the
Art of War, no less than he who confined himself to purely tactical
speculations.
The complicated
nature of the subject being taken into consideration, it is evident that a
complete sketch of the social and political history of any period would be
necessary to account fully for the state of the ‘Art of War’ at the time. That
art has existed, in a rudimentary form, ever since the day on which two bodies
of men first met in anger to settle a dispute by the arbitrament of force. At
some epochs, however, military and social history have been far more closely
bound up than at others. In the present century wars are but episodes in a
people’s existence: there have, however, been times when the whole national
organization was founded on the supposition of a normal state of strife. In
such cases the history of the race and of its ‘art of war’ are one and the
same. To detail the constitution of Sparta, or of Ancient Germany, is to give
little more than a list of military institutions. Conversely, to speak of the
characteristics of their military science involves the mention of many of their
political institutions.
At no time was
this interpenetration more complete than in the age which forms the central
part of our period. Feudalism, in its origin and development, had a military as
well as a social side, and its decline is by no means unaffected by military
considerations. There is a point of view from which its history could be
described as the rise, supremacy, and decline of heavy cavalry as the chief
power in war. To a certain extent the tracing out of this thesis will form the
subject of our researches. It is here that we find the thread which links the
history of the military art in the middle ages into a connected whole. Between
Adrianople, the first, and Marignano, the last, of the triumphs of the
mediaeval horseman, lie the chapters in the scientific history of war which we
are about to investigate.
CHAPTER
I.
The
Transition from Roman to Medieval forms in War (A.D. 378-582)
From
the battle of Adrianople to the Accession of Maurice.
Between the
middle of the fourth and the end of the sixth century lies a period of
transition in military history, an epoch of transformations as strange and as
complete as those contemporary changes which turned into a new channel the
course of political history and civilisation in Europe. In war, as in all else,
the institutions of the ancient world are seen to pass away, and a new order of
things develops itself.
Numerous and
striking as are the symptoms of that period of transition, none is more
characteristic than the gradual disuse of the honoured name of 'Legion', the
title intimately bound up with all the ages of Roman greatness. Surviving in a
very limited acceptance in the time of Justinian, it had fifty years later
become obsolete. It represented a form of military efficiency which had now
completely vanished. That wonderful combination of strength and flexibility, so
solid and yet so agile and easy to handle, had ceased to correspond to the
needs of the time. The day of the sword and pilum had given place to that of
the lance and bow. The typical Roman soldier was no longer the iron legionary,
who, with shield fitted close to his left shoulder and sword-hilt sunk low, cut
his way through the thickest hedge of pikes, and stood firm before the wildest
onset of Celt or German. The organization of Augustus and Trajan was swept away
by Constantine, and the legions which for three hundred years had preserved
their identity, their proud titles of honour, and their ésprit de corps, knew themselves no longer.
Constantine,
when he cut down the numbers of the military unit to a quarter of its former
strength, and created many scores of new corps, was acting from motives of
political and not military expediency. The armament and general character of
the troops survived their organization, and the infantry, the ‘robur peditum’,
still remained the most important and numerous part of the army. At the same
time, however, a tendency to strengthen the cavalry made itself felt, and the
proportion of that arm to the whole number of the military establishment
continued steadily to increase throughout the fourth century. Constantine
himself, by depriving the legion of its complementary ‘turmae’,
and uniting the horsemen into larger independent bodies, bore witness to their
growing importance. It would seem that the Empire — having finally abandoned
the offensive in war, and having resolved to confine itself to the protection
of its own provinces — found that there was an increasing need for troops who
could transfer themselves with rapidity from one menaced point on the frontier
to another. The Germans could easily distance the legion, burdened by the care
of its military machines and impedimenta. Hence cavalry in larger numbers was
required to intercept their raids.
But it would
appear that another reason for the increase of the horsemen was even more
powerful. The ascendancy of the Roman infantry over its enemies was no longer
so marked as in earlier ages, and it therefore required to be more strongly
supported by cavalry than had been previously necessary. The Franks,
Burgundians, and Allemanni of the days of Constantine
were no longer the “half-armed savages of the first century, who, without helm
or mail, with weak shields of wicker-work, and armed only with the javelin”,
tried to face the embattled front of the cohort. They had now the iron-bound
buckler, the pike, and the short stabbing sword (‘scramasax’), as well as the
long cutting sword (‘spatha’), and the deadly ‘francisca’
or battle-axe, which, whether thrown or wielded, would penetrate Roman armour
and split the Roman shield. As weapons for hand to hand combat these so far
surpassed the old ‘framea’ that the imperial infantry
found it no light matter to defeat a German tribe. At the same time,
the morale of the Roman army was no longer what it had once been: the
corps were no longer homogeneous, and the insufficient supply of recruits was
eked out by enlisting slaves and barbarians in the legions themselves, and not
only among the auxiliary cohorts. Though seldom wanting in courage, the troops
of the fourth century had lost the self-reliance and cohesion of the old Roman
infantry, and required far more careful handling on the part of the general.
Few facts show this more forcibly than the proposal of the tactician Urbicius to furnish the legionaries with a large supply of
portable beams and stakes, to be carried by pack-mules attached to each cohort.
These were to be planted on the flanks and in the front of the legion, when
there was a probability of its being attacked by hostile cavalry: behind them
the Romans were to await the enemy's onset, without any attempt to assume the
offensive. This proposition marks a great decay in the efficiency of the
imperial foot-soldier : the troops of a previous generation would have scorned
such a device, accustomed as they were to drive back with ease the assaults of
the Parthian and Sarmatian ‘cataphracti’.
This tendency
to deterioration on the part of the Roman infantry, and the consequent neglect
of that arm by the generals of the time, were brought to a head by a disaster.
The battle of Adrianople was the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman army
since Cannae; a slaughter to which it is aptly compared by the military author
Ammianus Marcellinus. The Emperor Valens, all his chief officers, and forty
thousand men were left upon the field; indeed the army of the East was almost
annihilated, and was never reorganized upon the same lines as had previously
served for it.
The military
importance of Adrianople was unmistakable; it was a victory of cavalry over
infantry. The imperial army had developed its attack on the position of the
Goths, and the two forces were hotly engaged, when suddenly a great body of
horsemen charged in upon the Roman flank. It was the main strength of the
Gothic cavalry, which had been foraging at a distance; receiving news of the
fight it had ridden straight for the battlefield. Two of Valens' squadrons,
which covered the flank of his array, threw themselves in the way of the
oncoming mass, and were ridden down and trampled under foot.
Then the Goths swept down on the infantry of the left wing, rolled it up, and
drove it in upon the center. So tremendous was their
impact that the legions and cohorts were pushed together in helpless confusion.
Every attempt to stand firm failed, and in a few minutes left, centre, and
reserve were one undistinguishable mass. Imperial guards, light troops,
lancers, foederati and infantry of the line were wedged together in a press
that grew closer every moment. The Roman cavalry saw that the day was lost, and
rode off without another effort. Then the abandoned infantry realised the horror
of their position; equally unable to deploy or to fly, they had to stand to be
cut down. It was a sight such as had been seen once before at Cannae, and was
to be seen once after at Rosbecque. Men could not
raise their arms to strike a blow, so closely were they packed; spears snapped
right and left, their bearers being unable to lift them to a vertical position
: many soldiers were stifled in the press. Into this quivering mass the Goths
rode, plying lance and sword against the helpless enemy. It was not till
two-thirds of the Roman army had fallen that the thinning of the ranks enabled
a few thousand men to break out, and follow their right wing and cavalry in a
headlong flight.
Such was the
battle of Adrianople, the first great victory gained by that heavy cavalry
which had now shown its ability to supplant the heavy infantry of Rome as the
ruling power of war. During their sojourn in the steppes of South Russia the
Goths, first of all Teutonic races, had become a nation of horsemen. Dwelling
in the Ukraine, they had felt the influence of that land, ever the nurse of
cavalry, from the day of the Scythian to that of the Tartar and Cossack. They
had come to “consider it more honourable to fight on horse than on foot”, and
every chief was followed by his war-band of mounted men. Driven against their
will into conflict with the empire, they found themselves face to face with the
army that had so long held the world in fear. The shock came, and, probably to
his own surprise, the Goth found that his stout lance and good steed would
carry him through the serried ranks of the legion. He had become the arbiter of
war, the lineal ancestor of all the knights of the middle ages, the inaugurator
of that ascendancy of the horseman which was to endure for a thousand years.
Theodosius, on
whom devolved the task of reorganizing the troops of the Eastern empire,
appears to have appreciated to its fullest extent the military meaning of the
fight of Adrianople. Abandoning the old Roman theory of war, he decided that
the cavalry must in future compose the most important part of the imperial
army. To provide himself with a sufficient force of horsemen, he was driven to
a measure destined to sever all continuity between the military organization of
the fourth and that of the fifth century. He did not, like Constantine, raise
new corps, but began to enlist wholesale every Teutonic chief whom he could
bribe to enter his service. The war-bands which followed these princes were not
incorporated with the national troops; they obeyed their immediate commanders
alone, and were strangers to the discipline of the Roman army. Yet to them was
practically entrusted the fate of the empire; since they formed the most
efficient division of the imperial forces. From the time of Theodosius the
prince had to rely for the maintenance of order in the Roman world merely on
the amount of loyalty which a constant stream of titles and honours could win
from the commanders of the ‘Foederati’.
Only six years
after Adrianople there were already 40,000 Gothic and other German horsemen
serving under their own chiefs in the army of the East. The native troops sunk
at once to an inferior position in the eyes of Roman generals, and the justice
of their decision was verified a few years later when Theodosius' German mercenaries
won for him the two well-contested battles which crushed the usurper Magnus
Maximus and his son Victor. On both those occasions, the Roman infantry of the
West, those Gallic legions who had always been considered the best footmen in
the world, were finally ridden down by the Teutonic cavalry who followed the
standard of the legitimate emperor. (At the still fiercer fight, where the army
of the usurper Eugenius almost defeated Theodosius, we find that it was the
barbarian cavalry of Arbogast, not the native infantry, which had become -only
seven years after Maximus’ defeat- the chief force of the Western Empire).
A picture of
the state of the imperial army in the Western provinces, drawn precisely at
this period, has been preserved for us in the work of Vegetius, a writer whose
treatise would be of far greater value had he refrained from the attempt to
identify the organization of his own day with that of the first century by the
use of the same words for entirely different things. In drawing inferences from
his statements, it has also to be remembered that he frequently gives the ideal
military forms of his imagination, instead of those which really existed in his
day. For example, his legion is made to consist of 6000 men, while we know that
in the end of the fourth century its establishment did not exceed 1500. His
work is dedicated to one of the emperors who bore the name of Valentinian,
probably to the second, as (in spite of Gibbon’s arguments in favour of
Valentinian III) the relations of the various arms to each other and the
character of their organization point to a date prior to the commencement of
the fifth century.
A single fact
mentioned by Vegetius gives us the date at which the continuity of the
existence of the old Roman heavy infantry may be said to terminate. As might be
expected, this epoch exactly corresponds with that of the similar change in the
East, which followed the battle of Adrianople. “From the foundation of the city
to the reign of the sainted Gratian”, says the tactician, “the legionaries wore
helmet and cuirass. But when the practice of holding frequent reviews and
sham-fights ceased, these arms began to seem heavy, because the soldiers seldom
put them on. They therefore begged from the emperor permission to discard first
their cuirasses, and then even their helmets, and went to face the barbarians
unprotected by defensive arms. In spite of the disasters which have since
ensued, the infantry have not yet resumed the use of them ... And now, how can
the Roman soldier expect victory, when helmless and unarmoured, and even
without a shield (for the shield cannot be used in conjunction with the bow),
he goes against the enemy?”
Vegetius —
often more of a rhetorician than a soldier — has evidently misstated the reason
of this change in infantry equipment. At a time when cavalry were clothing
themselves in more complete armour, it is not likely that the infantry were
discarding it from mere sloth and feebleness. The real meaning of the change
was that, in despair of resisting horsemen any longer by the solidity of a line
of heavy infantry, the Romans had turned their attention to the use of missile
weapons, — a method of resisting cavalry even more efficacious than that which
they abandoned, as was to be shown a thousand years later at Cressy and
Agincourt. That Vegetius' account is also considerably exaggerated is shown by
his enumeration of the legionary order of his own day, where the first rank was
composed of men retaining shield, pilum, and cuirass (whom he pedantically calls
‘Principes’). The second rank was composed of
archers, but wore the cuirass and carried a lance also; only the remaining half
of the legion had entirely discarded armour, and given up all weapons but the
bow.
Vegetius makes
it evident that cavalry, though its importance was rapidly increasing, had not
yet entirely supplanted infantry to such a large extent as in the Eastern
Empire. Though no army can hope for success without them, and though they must
always be at hand to protect the flanks, they are not, in his estimation, the
most effective force. As an antiquary he feels attached to the old Roman
organization, and must indeed have been somewhat behind the military experience
of his day. It may, however, be remembered that the Franks and Allemanni, the chief foes against whom the Western legions
had to contend, were — unlike the Goths — nearly all footmen. It was not till
the time of Alaric that Rome came thoroughly to know the Gothic horsemen, whose
efficiency Constantinople had already comprehended and had contrived for the
moment to subsidize. In the days of Honorius, however, the Goth became the
terror of Italy, as he had previously been of the Balkan peninsula. His lance
and steed once more asserted their supremacy : the generalship of Stilicho, the trained bowmen and pikemen of the reorganized Roman army, the
native and foederate squadrons whose array flanked
the legions, were insufficient to arrest the Gothic charge. For years the
conquerors rode at their will through Italy : when they quitted it, it was by
their own choice, for there were no troops left in the world who could have
expelled them by force.
The day of
infantry had in fact gone by in Southern Europe : they continued to exist, not
as the core and strength of the army, but for various minor purposes, — to
garrison towns or operate in mountainous countries. Roman and barbarian alike
threw their vigour into the organization of their cavalry. Even the duty of
acting as light troops fell into the hands of the horse-men. The Roman trooper added
the bow to his equipment, and in the fifth century the native force of the
Empire had come to resemble that of its old enemy, the Parthian state of the
first century, being composed of horsemen armed with bow and lance. Mixed with
these horse-archers fought squadrons of the Foederati, armed with the lance
alone. Such were the troops of Aetius and Ricimer, the army which faced the
Huns on the plain of Châlons.
The Huns
themselves were another manifestation of the strength of cavalry; formidable by
their numbers, their rapidity of movement, and the constant rain of arrows
which they would pour in without allowing their enemy to close. In their
tactics they were the prototypes of the hordes of Alp Arslan, of Genghiz, and Tamerlane. But mixed with the Huns in the
train of Attila marched many subject German tribes, Herules and Gepidae, Scyri,
Lombards, and Rugians, akin to the Goths alike in
their race and their manner of fighting. Châlons then was fought by
horse-archer and lancer against horse-archer and lancer, a fair conflict with
equal weapons. The Frankish allies of Aetius were by far the most important
body of infantry on the field, and these were ranged, according to the
traditional tactics of Rome, in the center : —
flanked on one side by the Visigothic lances, on the other by the imperial
array of horse-archers and heavy cavalry intermixed. The victory was won, not
by superior tactics, but by sheer hard fighting, the decisive point having been
the riding down of the native Huns by Theodoric's heavier horsemen.
To trace out in
detail the military meaning of all the wars of the fifth century does not fall
within our province. As to the organization of the Roman armies a few words
will suffice. In the West the Foederati became the sole force of the empire, so
that at last one of their chiefs, breaking through the old spell of the Roman
name, could make himself, in title as well as in reality, ruler of Italy. In
the East, the decline of the native troops never reached this pitch. Leo I
(457-474 A.D.), taking warning by the fate of the Western Empire, determined on
increasing the proportion of Romans to Foederati, and carried out his purpose,
though it involved the sacrifice of the life of his benefactor, the Gothic
patrician Aspar. Zeno (474-491) continued this work, and made himself
noteworthy as the first emperor who utilised the military virtues of the
Isaurians, or semi-Romanized mountaineers of the interior of Asia Minor. Not
only did they form his imperial guard, but a considerable number of new corps
were raised among them. Zeno also enlisted Armenians and other inhabitants of
the Roman frontier of the East, and handed over to his successor Anastasius an
army in which the barbarian element was adequately counter-poised by the native
troops.
The victorious
armies of Justinian were therefore composed of two distinct elements, the
foreign auxiliaries serving under their own chiefs, and the regular imperial
troops. The pages of Procopius give us sufficient evidence that in both these
divisions the cavalry was by far the most important arm. The light horseman of
the Asiatic provinces wins his especial praise. With body and limbs clothed in
mail, his quiver at his right side and his sword at his left, the Roman trooper
would gallop along and discharge his arrows to front or flank or rear with
equal ease. To support him marched in the second line the heavier squadrons of
the subsidized Lombard, or Herule, or Gepidan princes, armed with the lance. “There are some”,
writes Procopius, “who regard antiquity with wonder and respect, and attach no
special worth to our modern military institutions : it is, however, by means of
the latter that the weightiest and most striking results have been obtained”.
The men of the sixth century were, in fact, entirely satisfied with the system
of cavalry tactics which they had adopted, and looked with certain air of
superiority on the infantry tactics of their Roman predecessors.
Justinian’s
army and its achievements were indeed worthy of all praise; its victories were
its own, while its defeats were generally due to the wretched policy of the
emperor, who persisted in dividing up the command among many hands, — a system
which secured military obedience at the expense of military efficiency.
Justinian might, however, plead in his defence that the organization of the
army had become such that it constituted a standing menace to the central
power. The system of the Teutonic ‘comitatus’, of the ‘war-band’ surrounding a
leader to whom the soldiers are bound by a personal tie, had become deeply
ingrained in the imperial forces. Always predominant among the Foederati, it
had spread from them to the native corps. In the sixth century the monarch had
always to dread that the loyalty of the troops towards their immediate
commanders might prevail over their higher duties. Belisarius, and even Narses,
were surrounded by large body-guards of chosen men, bound to them by oath. That
of the former general at the time of his Gothic triumph amounted to 7000
veteran horsemen. The existence of such corps rendered every successful
commander a possible Wallenstein, to use a name of more modern importance. Thus
the emperor, in his desire to avert the predominance of any single officer,
would join several men of discordant views in the command of an army, and
usually ensure the most disastrous consequences. This organization of the
imperial force in ‘banda’, bodies attached by
personal ties to their leaders, is the characteristic military form of the
sixth century. Its normal prevalence is shown by the contemporary custom of
speaking of each corps by the name of its commanding officer, and not by any
official title. Nothing could be more opposed than this usage to old Roman
precedent.
The efficiency
of Justinian’s army in the Vandalic, Persian, or Gothic wars, depended (as has
already been implied) almost entirely on its excellent cavalry. The troops,
whether Teutonic or Eastern, against which it was employed were also horsemen.
Engaging them the Romans prevailed, because in each case they were able to meet
their adversaries’ weapons and tactics not merely with similar methods, but
with a greater variety of resources. Against the Persian horse-archer was sent
not only the light-cavalry equipped with arms of the same description, but the
heavy foederate lancers, who could ride the Oriental
down. Against the Gothic heavy cavalry the same lancers were supported by the
mounted bowmen, to whom the Goths had nothing to oppose. If, however, the Roman
army enjoyed all the advantages of its diverse composition, it was, on the
other hand, liable to all the perils which arise from a want of homogeneity.
Its various elements were kept together only by military pride, or confidence
in some successful general. Hence, in the troublous times which commenced in the end of Justinian’s reign and continued through
those of his successors, the whole military organization of the empire began to
crumble away. A change not less sweeping than that which Theodosius had
introduced was again to be taken in hand. In 582 A.D. the reforming Emperor
Maurice came to the throne, and commenced to recast the imperial army in a new
mould.
The
Early Middle Ages (A.D. 476-1066).
From
the Fall of the Western Empire to the Battles of Hastings and Durazzo.
Franks,
Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians, etc.
In leaving the
discussion of the military art of the later Romans in order to investigate that
of the nations of Northern and Western Europe, we are stepping from a region of
comparative light into one of doubt and obscurity. The data which in the
history of the empire may occasionally seem scanty and insufficient are in the
history of the Teutonic races often entirely wanting. To draw up from our
fragmentary authorities an estimate of the military importance of the Eastern
campaigns of Heraclius is not easy : but to discover what were the particular
military causes which settled the event of the day at Vouglé or Tolbiac, at Badbury or the Heavenfield, is absolutely impossible. The state of
the Art of War in the Dark Ages has to be worked out from monkish chronicles
and national songs, from the casual references of Byzantine historians, from
the quaint drawings of the illuminated manuscript, or the mouldering fragments
found in the warrior’s barrow.
It is fortunate
that the general characteristics of the period render its military history
comparatively simple. Of strategy there could be little in an age when men
strove to win their ends by hard fighting rather than by skilful operations or
the utilizing of extraneous advantages. Tactics were stereotyped by the
national organizations of the various peoples. The true interest of the
centuries of the early Middle Ages lies in the gradual evolution of new forms
of warlike efficiency, which end in the establishment of a military class as
the chief factor in war, and the decay among most peoples of the old system
which made the tribe arrayed in arms the normal fighting force. Intimately
connected with this change was an alteration in arms and equipment, which
transformed the outward appearance of war in a manner not less complete. This
period of transition may be considered to end when, in the eleventh century,
the feudal cavalier established his superiority over all the descriptions of
troops which were pitted against him, from the Magyar horse-archers of the East
to the Anglo-Danish axe-men of the West. The fight of Hastings, the last
attempt made for three centuries by infantry to withstand cavalry, serves to
mark the termination of the epoch.
The Teutonic
nation of North-Western Europe did not — like the Goths and Lombards — owe
their victories to the strength of their mail-clad cavalry. The Franks and
Saxons of the sixth and seventh centuries were still infantry. It would appear
mat the moors of North Germany and Schleswig, and the heaths and marshes of
Belgium, were less favourable to the growth of cavalry than the steppes of the
Ukraine or the plains of the Danube valley. The Frank, as pictured to us by
Sidonius Apollinaris, Procopius, and Agathias, still
bore a considerable resemblance to his Sigambrian ancestors. Like them he was destitute of helmet and body-armour; his shield,
however, had become a much more effective defence than the wicker frame-work of
the first century : it was a solid oval with a large iron boss and rim. The ‘framea’ had now been superseded by the 'angon' — a dart
neither very long nor very short, which can be used against the enemy either by
grasping it as a pike or hurling it. The iron of its head extended far down the
shaft; at its 'neck' were two barbs, which made its extraction from a wound or
a pierced shield almost impossible. The ‘francisca’,
however, was the great weapon of the people from whom it derived its name. It
was a single-bladed battle-axe with a heavy head composed of a long blade
curved on its outer face and deeply hollowed in the interior. It was carefully
weighted, so that it could be used, like an American tomahawk, for hurting at
the enemy. The skill with which the Franks discharged this weapon, just before
closing with the hostile line, was extraordinary, and its effectiveness made it
their favourite arm. A sword and dagger (‘scramasax’) completed the normal
equipment of the warrior; the last was a broad thrusting blade, 18 inches long,
the former a two-edged cutting weapon of about 2,1/5 feet in length.
Such was the
equipment of the armies which Theodebert, Buccelin, and Lothair led down
into Italy in the middle of the sixth century. Procopius informs us that the
first-named prince brought with him some cavalry; their numbers, however, were
insignificant, a few hundreds in an army of 90,000
men. They carried the lance and a small round buckler, and served as a
body-guard round the person of the king. Their presence, though pointing to a
new military departure among the Franks, only serves to show the continued
predominance of infantry in their armies.
A problem
interesting to the historian was worked out, when in A.D. 553 the footmen of Buccelin met the Roman army of Narses at the battle of Casilinum. The superiority of the tactics and armament of
the imperial troops was made equally conspicuous. Formed in one deep column the
Franks advanced into the centre of the semicircle in which Narses had ranged
his men. The Roman infantry and the dismounted heavy cavalry of the Herule auxiliaries held them in play in front, while the
horse-archers closed in on their flanks, and inflicted on them the same fate
which had befallen the army of Crassus. Hardly a man of Buccelin’s followers escaped from the field : the day of infantry was gone, for the Franks
as much as for the rest of the world.
We are
accordingly not surprised to find that from the sixth to the ninth century a
steady increase in the proportion of cavalry in the Frank armies is to be
found; corresponding to it is an increased employment of defensive arms. A
crested helmet of classical shape becomes common among them, and shortly after
a mail-shirt reaching to the hips is introduced. The Emperor Charles the Great
himself contributed to the armament of his cavalry, by adopting defences for
the arms and thighs. This protection, however, was at first rejected by many of
the Franks, who complained that it impaired their seat on horseback.
At Tours a considerable
number of horsemen appear to have served in the army of Charles Martel : the
general tactics of the day, however, were not those of an army mainly composed
of cavalry. The Franks stood rooted to the spot and fought a waiting battle,
till the light-horse of the Saracens had exhausted their strength in countless unsuccessful
charges : then they pushed forward and routed such of the enemy as had spirit
to continue the fight. In the time of Charles the Great we are told that all
men of importance, with their immediate followers, were accustomed to serve on
horseback. The national forces, however, as opposed to the personal retinues of
the monarch and his great officials and nobles, continued to form the infantry
of the army, as can be seen from the list of the weapons which the 'Counts' are
directed to provide for them. The Capitularies are explicit in declaring that
the local commanders are to be careful that the men whom they have to lead to
battle are fully equipped : that is, that they possess spear, shield, helm,
mail-shirt (‘brunia’), a bow, two bow-strings, and
twelve arrows. The Franks had therefore become heavy infantry at the end of the
eighth century : in the ninth century they were finally to abandon their old
tactics, and to entrust all important operations to their cavalry.
This
transformation may be said to date from the law of Charles the Bald. Whether
merely ratifying an existing state of things, or instituting a new one, this
order is eminently characteristic of the period, in which the defence of the
country was falling into the hands of its cavalry force alone. Of the causes
which led to this consummation the most important was the character of the
enemies with whom the Franks had to contend in the ninth and tenth centuries.
The Northman in the Western kingdom, the Magyar in the Eastern, were marauders
bent on plunder alone, and owing their success to the rapidity of their
movements. The hosts of the Vikings were in the habit of seizing horses in the
country which they invaded, and then rode up and down the length of the land,
always distancing the slowly-moving local levies. The Hungarian horse-archers
conducted forays into the heart of Germany, yet succeeded in evading pursuit.
For the repression of such inroads infantry was absolutely useless; like the
Romans of the fourth century, the Franks, when obliged to stand upon the
defensive, had to rely upon their cavalry.
This crisis in
the military history of Europe coincided with the breaking up of all central
power in the shipwreck of the dynasty of Charles the Great. In the absence of
any organized national resistance, the defence of the empire fell into the
hands of the local counts, who now became semi-independent sovereigns. To these
petty rulers the landholders of each district were now ‘commending’ themselves,
in order to obtain protection in an age of war and anarchy. At the same time,
and for the same reason, the poorer freemen were 'commending' themselves to the
landholders. Thus the feudal hierarchy was established, and a new military
system appears, when the ‘count’ or ‘duke’ leads out to battle his vassals and
their mounted retainers.
Politically
retrogressive as was that system it had yet its day of success: the Magyar was
crushed at Merseberg and the Lechfeld,
and driven back across the Leith, soon to become Christianised and grow into an
orderly member of the European commonwealth. The Viking was checked in his
plundering forays, expelled from his strongholds at the river-mouths, and
restricted to the single possession of Normandy, where he — like the Magyar —
was assimilated to the rest of feudal society. The force which had won these
victories, and saved Europe from a relapse into the savagery and Paganism of
the North and East, was that of the mail-clad horseman. What wonder then if his
contemporaries and successors glorified him into the normal type of
warriorhood, and believed that no other form of military efficiency was worth
cultivating? The perpetuation of feudal chivalry for four hundred years was the
reward of its triumphs in the end of the Dark Ages.
Beyond the
English Channel the course of the history of war is parallel to that which it
took in the lands of the Continent, with a single exception in the form of its
final development. Like the Franks, the Angles and Saxons were at the time of
their conquest of Britain a nation of infantry soldiers, armed with the long
ashen javelin, the broadsword, the seax or broad stabbing dagger, and
occasionally the battle-axe. Their defensive weapon was almost exclusively the
shield, the ‘round war-board’, with its large iron boss. Ring-mail, though
known to them at a very early date, was, as all indications unite to show,
extremely uncommon. The ‘grey war-sark’ or ‘ring-locked byrnie’ of Beowulf was
obtainable by kings and princes alone. The helmet also, with its 'iron-wrought
boar-crest', was very restricted in its use. If the monarch and his gesiths wore such arms, the national levy, which formed the
main fighting force of a heptarchic kingdom, was entirely without them.
Unmolested for
many centuries in their island home, the English kept up the old Teutonic war
customs for a longer period than other European nations. When Mercia and Wessex
were at strife, the campaign was fought out by the hastily-raised hosts of the
various districts, headed by their aldermen and reeves. Hence war bore the
spasmodic and inconsequent character which resulted from the temporary nature
of such armies. With so weak a military organization, there was no possibility
of working out schemes of steady and progressive conquest. The frays of the
various kingdoms, bitter and unceasing though they might be, led to no decisive
results. If in the ninth century a tendency towards unification began to show
itself in England, it was caused, not by the military superiority of Wessex,
but by the dying out of royal lines and the unfortunate internal condition of
the other states.
While this
inclination towards union was developing itself, the whole island was subjected
to the stress of the same storm of foreign invasion which was shaking the
Frankish empire to its foundations. The Danes came down upon England, and
demonstrated, by the fearful success of their raids, that the old Teutonic
military system was inadequate to the needs of the day. The Vikings were in
fact superior to the forces brought against them, alike in tactics, in
armament, in training, and in mobility. Personally the Dane was the member of
an old war-band contending with a farmer fresh from the plough, a veteran
soldier pitted against a raw militiaman. As a professional warrior he had
provided himself with an equipment which only the chiefs among the English army
could rival, the mail ‘byrnie’ being a normal rather than an exceptional
defence, and the steel cap almost universal. The ‘fyrd’, on the other hand,
came out against him destitute of armour, and bearing a motley array of
weapons, wherein the spear and sword were mixed with the club and the
stone-axe. If, however, the Danes had been in the habit of waiting for the
local levies to come up with them, equal courage and superior numbers might
have prevailed over these advantages of equipment. Plunder, however, rather
than fighting, was the Viking's object : the host threw itself upon some
district of the English coast, ‘was there a-horsed’, and then rode far and wide
through the land, doing all the damage in its power. The possession of the
horses they had seized gave them a power of rapid movement which the fyrd could
not hope to equal : when the local levies arrived at the spot where the
invaders had been last seen, it was only to find smoke and ruins, not an enemy.
When driven to bay — as, in spite of their habitual retreats, was sometimes the
case — the Danes showed an instinctive tactical ability by their use of
entrenchments, with which the English were unaccustomed to deal. Behind a ditch
and palisade, in some commanding spot, the invaders would wait for months, till
the accumulated force of the fyrd had melted away to its homes.
Of assaults on
their positions they knew no fear : the line of axemen could generally contrive
to keep down the most impetuous charge of the English levies : Reading was a
more typical field than Ethandun. For one successful
storm of an intrenched camp there were two bloody repulses.
Thirty years of
disasters sealed the fate of the old national military organization : something
more than the fyrd was necessary to meet the organized war-bands of the Danes.
The social results of the invasion in England had been similar to those which,
we have observed in the Frankish empire. Everywhere the free ‘ceorls’ had been ‘commending’
themselves to the neighbouring landowners. By accepting this ‘commendation’ the
thegnhood had rendered itself responsible for the defence of the country. The
kingly power was in stronger hands in England than across the Channel, so that
the new system did not at once develope itself into
feudalism. Able to utilise, instead of bound to fear, the results of the
change, Alfred and Eadward determined to use it as
the basis for a new military organization. Accordingly all holders of five hides
of land were subjected to ‘Thegn-service’, and formed a permanent basis for the
national army. To supplement the force thus obtained, the fyrd was divided into
two halves, one of which was always to be available. These arrangements had the
happiest results: the tide of war turned, and England reasserted itself, till
the tenth century saw the culmination of her new strength at the great battle
of Brunanburh. The thegn, a soldier by position like
the Frankish noble, has now become the leading figure in war: arrayed in mail
shirt and steel cap, and armed with sword and long pointed shield, the ‘bands
of chosen ones’ were ready to face and hew down the Danish axemen. It is,
however, worth remembering that the military problem of the day had now been
much simplified for the English by the settlement of the invaders within the
Danelaw. An enemy who has towns to be burnt and homesteads to be harried can
have pressure put upon him which cannot be brought to bear on a marauder whose
basis of operations is the sea. It is noteworthy that Eadward utilised against the Danes that same system of fortified positions which they
had employed against his predecessors; the stockades of his new burghs served
to hold in check the ‘heres’ of the local jarls of
the Five Towns, while the king with his main force was busied in other
quarters.
A century later
than the military reforms of Alfred the feudal danger which had split up the
Frankish realm began to make itself felt in England. The great ealdormen of the
reign of Ethelred correspond to the counts of the time of Charles the Fat, in
their tendency to pass from the position of officials into that of petty
princes. Their rise is marked by the decay of the central military organization
for war; and during the new series of Danish invasions the forces of each aldermanry
are seen to fight and fall without any support from their neighbours. England
was in all probability only saved from the fate of France by the accession of
Canute. That monarch, besides reducing the provincial governors to their old
position of delegates of the crown, strengthened his position by the
institution of the House-Carles, a force sufficiently
numerous to be called a small standing army rather than a mere royal guard.
These troops
are not only the most characteristic token of the existence of a powerful
central government, but represent the maximum of military efficiency to be
found in the Anglo-Danish world. Their tactics and weapons differed entirely
from those of the feudal aristocracy of the continent, against whom they were
ere long to be pitted. They bore the long Danish battle-axe, a shaft five feet
long fitted with a single-bladed head of enormous size. It was far too
ponderous for use on horse-back, and being wielded with both arms precluded the
use of a shield in hand to hand combat. The blows delivered by this weapon were
tremendous : no shield or mail could resist them; they were even capable, as
was shown at Hastings, of lopping off a horse's head at a single stroke. The
house-carle in his defensive equipment did not differ
from the cavalry of the lands beyond the Channel : like them he wore a mail
shirt of a considerable length, reaching down to the lower thigh, and a pointed
steel cap fitted with a nasal.
The battle of
Hastings, the first great mediaeval fight of which we have an account clear
enough to give us an insight into the causes of its result, was the final trial
of this form of military efficiency. Backed by the disorderly masses of the
fyrd, and by the thegns of the home counties, the house-carles of King Harold stood in arms to defend the entrenchments of Senlac. Formidable
as was the English array, it was opposed precisely by those arms which, in the
hands of an able general, were competent to master it. The Norman knights, if
unsupported by their light infantry, might have surged for ever around the
impregnable palisades. The archers, if unsupported by the knights, could easily
have been driven off the field by a general charge. United, however, by the
skilful tactics of William, the two divisions of the invading army won the day.
The Saxon mass was subjected to exactly the same trial which befell the British
squares in the battle of Waterloo: incessant charges by a gallant cavalry were
alternated with a destructive fire of missiles. Nothing can be more maddening
than such an ordeal to the infantry soldier, rooted to the spot by the necessities
of his formation. After repelling charge after charge : with the greatest
steadiness, the axemen could no longer bear the rain of arrows. When at last
the horsemen drew back in apparent disorder, a great part of Harold's troops
stormed down into the valley after them, determined to finish the battle by an
advance which should not allow the enemy time to rally. This mistake was fatal:
the Norman retreat had been the result of the Duke's orders, not of a wish to
leave the field. The cavalry turned, rode down the scattered mass which had
pursued them, and broke into the gap in the English line which had been made by
the inconsiderate charge. Desperate as was their position, the English still held
out: the arrows fell thickly among them, the knights were forcing their
way among the disordered ranks of the broken army, but for three hours longer
the fight went on. This exhibition of courage only served to increase the
number of the slain : the day was hopelessly lost, and, as evening fell, the
few survivors of the English army were glad to be able to make their retreat
under cover of the darkness. The tactics of the phalanx of axemen had been
decisively beaten by William's combination of archers and cavalry.
Once more only
— on a field far away from its native land — did the weapon of the Anglo-Danes
dispute the victory with the lance and bow. Fifteen years after Harold's defeat
another body of English axe-men — some of them may well have fought at Senlac —
were advancing against the army of a Norman prince. They were the Varangian
guard of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus. That prince was engaged in an attempt to
raise the siege of Dyrrhachium, then invested by
Robert Guiscard. The Norman army was already drawn up in front of its lines,
while the troops of Alexius were only slowly arriving on the field. Among the
foremost of his corps were the Varangians, whom his care had provided with
horses, in order that they might get to the front quickly and execute a turning
movement. This they accomplished; but when they approached the enemy, they were
carried away by their eagerness to begin the fray. Without waiting for the main
attack of the Greek army ta be developed, the axemen sent their horses to the
rear, and advanced in a solid column against the Norman flank. Rushing upon the
division commanded by Count Amaury of Bari, they drove it, horse and foot, into
the sea. Their success, however, had disordered their ranks, and the Norman
prince was enabled, since Alexius' main body was still far distant, to turn all
his forces against them. A vigorous cavalry charge cut off the greater part of
the English; the remainder collected on a little mound by the sea-shore,
surmounted by a deserted chapel. Here they were surrounded by the Normans, and
a scene much like Senlac, but on a smaller scale, was enacted. After the
horsemen and the archers had destroyed the majority of the Varangians, the
remainder held out obstinately within the chapel. Sending for fascines and
timber from his camp, Robert heaped them round the building and set fire to the
mass. The English sallied out to be slain one by one, or perished in the
flames: not a man escaped; the whole corps suffered destruction, as a
consequence of their misplaced eagerness to open the fight. Such was the fate
of the last attempt made by infantry to face the feudal array of the eleventh
century. No similar experiment was now to be made for more than two hundred
years : the supremacy of cavalry was finally established.
CHAPTER III.
The
Byzantines and their Enemies. A.D. 582-1071.
From
the accession of Maurice to the battle of Manzikert.
(1) Character
of Byzantine Strategy
Alike in
composition and in organization, the army which for 500 years held back Slav
and Saracen from the frontier of the Eastern Empire, differed from the troops
whose name and traditions it inherited. To the ‘Palatine’ and ‘Limitary’ ‘numeri’
of Constantine it bore as little likeness as to the legions of Trajan. Yet in
one respect at least it resembled both those forces : it was in its day the
most efficient military body in the world. The men of the lower Empire have
received scant justice at the hands of modern historians : their manifest
faults have thrown the stronger points of their character into the shade, and
Byzantinism is accepted as a synonym for effete incapacity alike in peace and
war. Much might be written in general vindication of their age, but never is it
easier to produce a strong defence than when their military skill and prowess
are disparaged.
“The vices of
Byzantine armies”, says Gibbon, “were inherent, their victories accidental”. So
far is this sweeping condemnation from the truth, that it would be far more
correct to call their defeats accidental, their successes normal. Bad generalship, insufficient numbers, unforeseen calamities,
not the inefficiency of the troops, were the usual causes of disaster in the
campaigns of the Eastern Emperors. To the excellence of the soldiery witness,
direct or indirect, is borne in every one of those military treatises which
give us such a vivid picture of the warfare of the age. Unless the general is
incompetent or the surrounding circumstances unusually adverse, the authors
always assume that victory will follow the banner of the Empire. The troops can
be trusted, like Wellington’s Peninsular veterans, “to go anywhere and do
anything”. “The commander”, says Nicephorus Phocas, “who has 6000 of our heavy
cavalry and God's help, needs nothing more”. In a similar spirit Leo the
Philosopher declares in his Tactica that, except the
Frankish and Lombard knights, there were no horsemen in the world who could
face the Byzantine Cataphracti, when the numbers of
the combatants approached equality. Slav, Turk, or Saracen could be ridden down
by a charge fairly pressed home : only with the men of the West was the result
of the shock doubtful. The causes of the excellence and efficiency of the
Byzantine army are not hard to discover. In courage they were equal to their
enemies; in discipline, organization, and armament far superior. Above all,
they possessed not only the traditions of Roman strategy, but a complete system
of tactics, carefully elaborated to suit the requirements of the age.
For centuries
war was studied as an art in the East, while in the West it remained merely a
matter of hard fighting. The young Frankish noble deemed his military education
complete when he could sit his charger firmly, and handle lance and shield with
skill. The Byzantine patrician, while no less exercised in arms, added theory to
empiric knowledge by the study of the works of Maurice, of Leo, of Nicephorus
Phocas, and of other authors whose books survive in name alone. The results of
the opposite views taken by the two divisions of Europe are what might have
been expected. The men of the West, though they regarded war as the most
important occupation of life, invariably found themselves at a loss when
opposed by an enemy with whose tactics they were not acquainted. The generals
of the East, on the other hand, made it their boast that they knew how to face
and conquer Slav or Turk, Frank or Saracen, by employing in each case the
tactical means best adapted to meet their opponents’ method of warfare.
The directions
for the various emergencies given by the Emperor Leo impress us alike as
showing the diversity of the tasks set before the Byzantine general, and the
practical manner in which they were taken in hand. They serve indeed as a key
to the whole system of the art of war as it was understood at Constantinople.
“The Frank”,
says Leo, “believes that a retreat under any circumstances must be
dishonourable; hence he will fight whenever you choose to offer him battle.
This you must not do till you have secured all possible advantages for
yourself, as his cavalry, with their long lances and large shields, charge with
a tremendous impetus. You should deal with him by protracting the campaign, and
if possible lead him into the hills, where his cavalry are less efficient than
in the plain. After a few weeks without a great battle his troops, who are very
susceptible to fatigue and weariness, will grow tired of the war, and ride home
in great numbers. . . . You will find him utterly careless as to outposts and reconnaisances, so that you can easily cut off outlying
parties of his men, and attack his camp at advantage. As his forces have no
bonds of discipline, but only those of kindred or oath, they fall into
confusion after delivering their charge; you can therefore simulate flight, and
then turn them, when you will find them in utter disarray. On the whole,
however, it is easier and less costly to wear out a Frankish army by skirmishes
and protracted operations rather than to attempt to destroy it at a single blow”.
The chapters of
which these directions are an abstract have two distinct points of interest.
They present us with a picture of a Western army of the ninth or tenth century,
the exact period of the development of feudal cavalry, drawn by the critical
hand of an enemy. They also show the characteristic strength and weakness of Byzantine
military science. On the one hand, we note that Leo's precepts are practical
and efficacious; on the other, we see that they are based upon the supposition
that the imperial troops will normally act upon the defensive, a limitation
which must materially lessen their efficiency. These, however, were the tactics
by which the Eastern Emperors succeeded in maintaining their Italian ‘Themes’
for 400 years, against every attack of Lombard duke or Frankish emperor.
The method
which is recommended by Leo for resisting the Turks (by which name he denotes
the Magyars and the tribes dwelling north of the Euxine) is different in every
respect from that directed against the nations of the West. The Turkish army
consisted of innumerable bands of light horsemen, who carried javelin and
scimitar, but relied on their arrows for victory. Their tactics were in fact a
repetition of those of Attila, a foreshadowing of those of Alp Arslan or Batu
Khan. The Turks were “given to ambushes and stratagems of every sort”, and were
noted for the care with which they posted their vedettes, so that they could
seldom or never be attacked by surprise. On a fair open field, however, they
could be ridden down by the Byzantine heavy cavalry, who are therefore
recommended to close with them at once, and not to exchange arrows with them at
a distance. Steady infantry they could not break, and indeed they were averse
to attacking it, since the bows of the Byzantine foot-archers carried farther
than their own shorter weapon, and they were thus liable to have their horses
shot before coming within their own limit of efficacious range. Their armour
protected their own bodies, but not those of their chargers; and they might
thus find themselves dismounted, in which position they were absolutely helpless,
the nomad of the steppes having never been accustomed to fight on foot. With
the Turks, therefore, a pitched battle was desirable ; but “as they were prompt
at rallying, it was pursue them with caution, and not to allow the troops to
get out of hand during the chase”.
It is at once
apparent from these directions how utterly the efficiency of the Byzantine
infantry differed from that of the legions of an earlier day. The soldiers of
the first century, armed with sword and pilum alone, were destroyed from a
distance by the Parthian mounted bowmen. The adoption of the bow by infantry
had now changed the aspect of affairs, and it was the horse-archer who now
found himself at a disadvantage in the exchange of missiles. Nor could he hope
to retrieve the day by charging, since the ‘scutati’,
or spearmen carrying the large shield, who formed the front rank of a Byzantine
‘tagma’, could keep at bay horsemen armed, not with the heavy lance of the
West, but merely with scimitars and short javelins. Hence the Turk avoided
conflicts with the imperial infantry, and used his superior powers of
locomotion to keep out of its way. It was only the cavalry which could, as a
rule, come up with him.
The tactics
calculated for success against the Slavs call for little notice. The Servians and the Slovenes possessed hardly any cavalry, and
were chiefly formidable to the imperial troops when they kept to the mountains,
where their archers and javelin-men, posted in inaccessible positions, could
annoy the invader from a distance, or the spearmen could make sudden assaults
on the flank of his marching columns. Such attacks could be frustrated by
proper vigilance, while, if the Slavs were only surprised while engaged in
their plundering expeditions into the plains, they could be ridden down and cut
to pieces by the imperial cavalry.
To deal with
the Saracen, on the other hand, the greatest care and skill were required. “Of
all barbarous nations”, says Leo, “they are the best advised and the most
prudent in their military operations”. The commander who has to meet with them
will need all his tactical and strategical ability, the troops must be well
disciplined and confident, if the “barbarous and blaspheming Saracen” is to be
driven back in rout through the Klissuras of Taurus.
The Arabs whom
Khaled and Amrou had led in the seventh century to
the conquest of Syria and Egypt, had owed their victory neither to the
superiority of their arms nor to the excellence of their organization. The
fanatical courage of the fatalist had enabled them — as it has enabled their
co-religionists in the present spring — to face better armed and better
disciplined troops. Settled in their new homes, however, when the first
outburst of their vigour had passed away, they did not disdain to learn a lesson
from the nations they had defeated. Accordingly the Byzantine army served as a
model for the forces of the Khalifs; “they have copied the Romans in most of
their military practices”, says Leo, both in arms and in strategy. Like the
imperial generals, they placed their confidence in their mailed lancers; but
the Saracen and his charger were alike at a disadvantage in the onset. Horse
for horse and man for man, the Byzantines were heavier, and could ride the
Orientals down when the final shock came.
Two things
alone rendered the Saracens the most dangerous of foes, their numbers and their
extraordinary powers of locomotion. When an inroad into Asia Minor was
projected, the powers of greed and fanaticism limited to draw together every
unquiet spirit between Khorassan and Egypt. The wild
horse-men of the East poured out in myriads from the gates of Tarsus and Adana,
to harry the fertile uplands of the Anatolic Themes. They are no regular
troops, but a mixed multitude of volunteers : the rich man serves from pride of
race, the poor man from hope of plunder. Many of them go forth because they
believe that God delights in war, and has promised victory to them. Those who
stay at home, both men and women, aid in arming their poorer neighbours, and
think that they are performing a good work thereby. Thus there is no
homogeneity in their armies, since experienced warriors and untrained
plunderers march side by side. Once clear of the passes of Taurus, the great
horde of Saracen horsemen cut itself loose from its communications, and rode
far and wide through Phrygia and Cappadocia, burning the open towns, harrying
the country side, and lading their beasts of burden with the plunder of a
region which was in those days one of the richest in the world.
Now was the time
for the Byzantine general to show his metal: first he had to come up with his
enemies, and then to fight them. The former task was no easy matter, as the
Saracen in the first days of his inroad could cover an incredible distance. It
was not till he had loaded and clogged himself with plunder that he was usually
to be caught.
When the news
of the raid reached the general of the ‘Anatolic’ or ‘Armeniac’
theme, he had at once to collect every efficient horseman in his province, and
strike at the enemy. Untrained men and weak horses were left behind, and the
infantry could not hope to keep up with the rapid movements which had now to be
undertaken. Accordingly, Leo would send all the disposable foot to occupy the ‘Klissuras’ of the Taurus, where, even if the cavalry did
not catch the invader, his retreat might be delayed and harassed in passes
where he could not fight to advantage.
In his cavalry,
however, lay the Byzantine commander’s hope of success. To ascertain the enemy’s
position he must spare no trouble : “never turn away freeman or slave, by day
or night, though you may be sleeping or eating or bathing”, writes Nicephorus
Phocas, “if he says that he has news for you”. When once the Saracen’s track
had been discovered, he was to be pursued without ceasing, and his force and
objects discovered. If all Syria and Mesopotamia had come out for an invasion
rather than a mere foray, the general must resign himself to taking the
defensive, and only hang on the enemy’s flanks, cutting off his stragglers and
preventing any plundering by detached parties. No fighting must be taken in
hand till all the Themes of the East have been set marching; an order which
would put some 25,000 or 30,000 heavy cavalry at the disposal of the
commander-in-chief, but would cost the loss of much precious time. These
Saracen ‘Warden-raids’ (if we may borrow an expression from the similar
expeditions of our own Borderers) were of comparatively unfrequent occurrence : it was seldom that the whole Byzantine force in Asia was drawn out
to face the enemy in a great battle. The more typical Saracen inroad was made
by the inhabitants of Cilicia and Northern Syria, with the assistance of casual
adventurers from the inner Mohammedan lands.
To meet them
the Byzantine commander would probably have no more than the 4000 heavy cavalry
of his own Theme in hand; a force for whose handling Leo gives minute tactical
directions. When he had come up with the raiders they would turn and offer him
battle : nor was their onset to be despised. Though unequal, man for man, to
their adversaries, they were usually in superior numbers, and always came on
with great confidence. “They are very bold at first with expectation of
victory; nor will they turn at once, even if their line is broken through by
our impact. When they suppose that their enemy's vigour is relaxing, they all
charge together with a desperate effort”. If, however, this failed, a rout
generally ensued, “for they think that all misfortune is sent by God, and so,
if they are once beaten, they take their defeat as a sign of divine wrath, and
no longer attempt to defend themselves”. Hence the Mussulman army, when once it
turned to fly, could be pursued à l'outrance,
and the old military maxim, ‘Vince sed ne nimis vincas’, was a caution which the Byzantine officer
could disregard.
The secret of
success in an engagement with the Saracens lay in the cavalry tactics, which
had for three centuries been in process of elaboration. By the tenth century
they attained their perfection, and the experienced soldier Nicephorus Phocas
vouches for their efficacy. Their distinguishing feature was that the troops
were always placed in two lines and a reserve, with squadrons detached on the
flanks to prevent their being turned. The enemy came on in one very deep line,
and could never stand the three successive shocks as the first line, second
line, and reserve were one after another flung into the melée against
them. The Byzantines had already discovered the great precept which modern
military science has claimed as its own, that, “in a cavalry combat, the side
which holds back the last reserve must win”. The exact formation used on these
occasions, being carefully described by our authorities, is worth detailing,
and will be found in our section treating of the organization of the Byzantine
army.
There were
several other methods of dealing with the Saracen invader. It was sometimes
advisable, when his inroad was made in great force, to hang about the rear of
the retreating plunderers, and only fall upon them when they were engaged in
passing the ‘Klissuras’ of the Taurus. If infantry
was already on the spot to aid the pursuing cavalry, success was almost
certain, when the Saracens and their train of beasts, laden with spoil, were
wedged in the passes. They could then be shot down by the archers, and would
not stand for a moment when they saw their horses, the ‘Pharii’,
whom they esteem above all other things, struck by arrows from a distance; for
the Saracen, when not actually engaged in close combat, would do anything to
save his horse from harm.
Cold and rainy
weather was also distasteful to the Oriental invader : at times, when it
prevailed, he did not display his ordinary firmness and darings and could be attacked at great advantage. Much could also be done by delivering
a vigorous raid into his country, and wasting Cilicia and Northern Syria, the
moment his armies were reported to have passed north into Cappadocia. This
destructive practice was very frequently adopted, and the sight of two enemies
each ravaging the other's territory without attempting to defend his own, was
only too familiar to the inhabitants of the borderlands of Christendom and
Islam. Incursions by sea supplemented the forays by land. “When the Saracens of
Cilicia have gone off by the passes, to harry the country north of Taurus”,
says Leo, “the commander of the Cibyrrhoeot Theme
should immediately go on shipboard with all available forces, and ravage their
coast. If, on the other hand, they have sailed off to attempt the shore
districts of Pisidia, the Klissurarchs of Taurus can
lay waste the territories of Tarsus and Adana without danger”.
Nothing can
show more clearly than these directions the high average skill of the Byzantine
officer. Leo himself was not a man of any great ability, and his Tactica are intended to codify an existing military art,
rather than to construct a new one. Yet still the book is one whose equal could
not have been written in Western Europe before the sixteenth century. One of
its most striking points is the utter difference of its tone from that of
contemporary feeling in the rest of Christendom. Of chivalry there is not a
spark in the Byzantine, though professional pride is abundantly shown. Courage
is regarded as one of the requisites necessary for obtaining success, not as
the sole and paramount virtue of the warrior. Leo considers a campaign
successfully concluded without a great battle as the cheapest and most
satisfactory consummation in war. He has no respect for the warlike ardour
which makes men eager to plunge into the fray: it is to him rather a
characteristic of the brainless barbarian, and an attribute fatal to any One
who makes any pretension to generalship. He shows a
strong predilection for stratagems, ambushes, and simulated retreats. For an
officer who fights without having first secured all the advantages to his own
side, he has the greatest contempt. It is with a kind of intellectual pride
that he gives instructions how parlementaires are to
be sent to the enemy without any real object except that of spying out the
number and efficiency of his forces. He gives, as a piece of most ordinary and
moral advice, the hint that a defeated general may often find time to execute a
retreat by sending an emissary to propose a surrender (which he has no
intention of carrying out) to the hostile commander. He is not above employing
the old-world trick of addressing treasonable letters to the subordinate
officers of the enemy’s army, and contriving that they should fall into the
hands of the commander-in-chief, in order that he may be made suspicious of his
lieutenants. Schemes such as these are ‘Byzantine’ in the worst sense of the
word, but their character must not be allowed to blind us to the real and
extraordinary merits of the strategical system into which they have been
inserted. The ‘Art of War,’ as understood at Constantinople in the tenth
century, was the only scheme of true scientific merit existing in the world,
and was unrivalled till the sixteenth century.
(2) Arms,
Organization, and Tactics of the Byzantine Armies
The Byzantine
army may be said to owe its peculiar form to the Emperor Maurice, a prince
whose reign is one of the chief landmarks in the history of the lower empire.
The fortunate preservation of his ‘Strategikon’
suffices to show us that the reorganization of the troops of the East was
mainly due to him. Contemporary historians also mention his reforms, but
without descending to details, and inform us that, though destined to endure,
they won him much unpopularity among the soldiery. Later writers, however, have
erroneously attributed these changes to the more celebrated warrior Heraclius,
the prince who bore the Roman standards further than any of his predecessors
into the lands of the East. In reality, the army of Heraclius had already been
reorganized by the worthy but unfortunate Maurice.
The most
important of Maurice’s alterations was the elimination of that system somewhat
resembling the Teutonic ‘comitatus’, which had crept from among the Foederati
into the ranks of the regular Roman army. The loyalty of the soldier was
secured rather to the emperor than to his immediate superiors, by making the
appointment of all officers above the rank of centurion a care of the central
government. The commander of an army or division had thus no longer in his
hands the power and patronage which had given him the opportunity of becoming
dangerous to the state. The men found themselves under the orders of delegates
of the emperor, not of quasi-independent authorities who enlisted them as
personal followers rather than as units in the military establishment of the
empire.
This reform
Maurice succeeded in carrying out, to the great benefit of the discipline and
loyalty of his army. He next took in hand the reducing of the whole force of
the empire to a single form of organization. The rapid decrease of the revenues
of the state, which had set in towards the end of Justinian's reign, and
continued to make itself more and more felt, had apparently resulted in a great
diminution in the number of foreign mercenaries serving in the Roman army. To
the same end contributed the fact that of the Lombards, Herules,
and Gepidae, the nations who had furnished the
majority of the imperial Foederati, one race had removed to other seats, while
the others had been exterminated. At last the number of the foreign corps had
sunk to such a low ebb, that there was no military danger incurred in
assimilating their organization to that of the rest of the army.
The new system
introduced by Maurice was destined to last for nearly five hundred years. Its
unit, alike for infantry and cavalry, was a weak battalion or horse-regiment of
1400 men, commanded by an officer who usually bore the vulgarized title of ‘comes’,
but was occasionally denominated by the older name of military tribune. Three ‘bands’
formed a small brigade, called indifferently mira,
or drunges. Three drunges formed the largest military group recognised by Maurice, and the division made
by their union was the turma. Nothing can be
more characteristic of the whole Byzantine military system than the curious
juxtaposition of Latin, Greek, and German words in its terminology. Upon the
substratum of the old Roman survivals we find first a layer of Teutonic names
introduced by the Foederati of the fourth and fifth centuries, and finally
numerous Greek denominations, some of them borrowed from the old Macedonian
military system, others newly invented. The whole official language of the
Empire was in fact still in a state of flux; Maurice himself was hailed by his
subjects as Pius, Felix, Augustus, though those who used the title were,
for the most part, accustomed to speak in Greek. In the Strategikon the two tongues are inextricably mixed : “before
the battle”, says the emperor, “let the counts face their bands and raise the
war-cry : Deus nobiscum!”, and the troopers will
shout the answering cry “Kirie Eleison”.
It would appear
that Maurice had intended to break down the barrier, which had been interposed
in the fourth century, between the class which paid the taxes and that which
recruited the national army. “We wish”, he writes, “that every young Roman of
free condition should learn the use of the bow, and should be constantly
provided with that weapon and with two javelins”. If, however, this was
intended to be the first step towards the introduction of universal military
service, the design was never carried any further. Three hundred years later
Leo is found echoing the same words, as a pious wish rather than as a practical
expedient. The rank and file, however, of the imperial forces were now raised
almost entirely within the realm, and well-nigh every nation contained in its
limits, except the Greeks, furnished a considerable number of soldiers. The
Armenians and Isaurians in Asia, the Thracians and Macedonians — or more
properly the semi-Romanized Slavs — in Europe, were considered the best
material by the recruiting officer.
The
extraordinary permanence of all Byzantine institutions is illustrated by the
fact that Maurice's arrangements were found almost unchanged three hundred
years after his death. The chapters of Leo’s Tactica which
deal with the armament and organization of the troops are little more than a
rendition of the similar parts of his predecessor’s Strategikon.
The description of the heavy and light horseman, and of the infantry soldier,
are identical in the two works, except in a few points of terminology.
The Kaballapios, or heavy trooper, wore at both epochs a
steel cap surmounted by a small crest, and a long mail shirt, reaching from the
neck to the thighs. He was also protected by gauntlets and steel-shoes, and
usually wore a light surcoat over his mail. The horses of the officers, and of
the men in the front rank, were furnished with steel frontlets and poitrails. The arms of the soldier were a broad-sword, a
dagger, a horseman's bow and quiver, and a long lance, fitted with a thong
towards its butt, and ornamented with a little bannerole.
The colour of bannerole, crest, and surcoat was that
of the regimental standard, and no two bands in the same turma had standards of the same hue. Thus the line
presented an uniform and orderly appearance, every band displaying its own
regimental facings. Strapped to his saddle each horseman carried a long cloak,
which he assumed in cold and rainy weather, or when, for purposes of
concealment, he wished to avoid displaying the glitter of his armour.
The light
trooper had less complete equipment, sometimes a cuirass of mail or horn, at
others only a light mail cape covering the neck and shoulders. He carried a
large shield, a defence which the heavy horseman could not adopt, on account of
his requiring both hands to draw his bow. For arms the light cavalry carried
lance and sword.
The infantry,
which was much inferior to the horsemen in importance, was, like them, divided
into two descriptions, heavy and light. The scutati,
or troops of the former class, wore a steel helmet with a crest, and a short
mail shirt; they carried a large oblong shield, which, like their crests, was
of the same colour as the regimental banner. Their chief weapon was a short but
heavy battle-axe (securis) with a blade in
front and a spike behind : they were also provided with a dagger. The light
infantry (psiloi) wore no defensive armour;
they were provided with a powerful bow, which carried much further than the
horseman's weapon, and was therefore very formidable to hostile horse-archers.
A few corps, drawn from provinces where the bow was not well known, carried
instead two or three javelins. For hand to hand fighting the psiloi were provided with an axe similar to that of
the scutati, and a very small round target,
which hung at their waists.
An extensive
train of non-combatants was attached to the army. Among the cavalry every four
troopers had a groom; among the infantry every sixteen men were provided with
an attendant, who drove a cart containing “a hand-mill, a bill-hook, a saw, two
spades, a mallet, a large wicker basket, a scythe, and two pick-axes”, besides
several other utensils for whose identity the dictionary gives no clue. Thus
twenty spades and twenty pick-axes per century were always forthcoming
for entrenching purposes; a consummation for which the modern infantry company
would be glad if it could find a parallel. So perfect was the organization of
the Byzantine army that it contained not only a ‘military train’, but even an
ambulance-corps’ of bearers and surgeons. The value attached to the lives of
the soldiery is shown by the fact that the ‘scriboni’
received a ‘nomisma’ for every wounded man whom they
brought off when the troops were retiring. Special officers were told to
superintend the march of this mass of non-combatants and vehicles, which is
collectively styled ‘tuldum’, and forms not the least
part among the cares of the laborious author of the ‘Tactica’.
Those portions
of the works of Maurice and Leo which deal with tactics show a far greater difference
between the methods of the sixth and the ninth centuries, than is observable in
other parts of their military systems. The chapters of Leo are, as is but
natural, of a more interesting character than those of his predecessor. The
more important of his ordinances are well worthy our attention.
It is first
observable that the old Roman system of drawing , entrenchments round the army,
every time that it rested for the night, had been resumed. A corps of engineers
always marched with the van-guard, and, when the evening halt had been called,
traced out with stakes and ropes the contour of the camp. When the main body
had come up, the ‘tuldum’ was placed in the centre of
the enclosure, while the infantry 'bands' drew a ditch and bank along the lines
of the Mensores’ ropes, each corps doing a fixed
amount of the work. A thick chain of picquets was kept far out from the camp,
so that a surprise, even on the darkest of nights, was almost impossible.
The main
characteristic of the Byzantine system of tactics is the small size of the
various units employed in the operations, a sure sign of the existence of a
high degree of discipline and training. While a Western army went on its
blundering way arranged in two or three enormous battles, each mustering many
thousand men, a Byzantine army of equal strength would be divided into many scores
of fractions. Leo does not seem to contemplate the existence of any column of
greater strength than that of a single 'band'. The fact that order and cohesion
could be found in a line composed of so many separate units, is the best
testimony to the high average ability of the officers in subordinate commands.
These 'counts' and moirarchs were in the ninth
and tenth centuries drawn for the most part from the ranks of the Byzantine
aristocracy. “Nothing prevents us”, says Leo, “from finding a sufficient supply
of men of wealth, and also of courage and high birth, to officer our army.
Their nobility makes them respected by the soldiers, while their wealth enables
them to win the greatest popularity among their troops by the occasional and
judicious gift of small creature-comforts”. A true military spirit existed
among the noble families of the Eastern Empire : houses like those of Skleros and Phocas, of Bryennius, Kerkuas, and Comnenus are found furnishing generation
after generation of officers to the national army. The patrician left luxury
and intrigue behind him when he passed through the gates of Constantinople, and
became in the field a keen professional soldier.
Infantry plays
in Leo's work a very secondary part. So much is this the case, that in many of
his tactical directions he gives a sketch of the order to be observed by the
cavalry alone, without mentioning the foot. This results from the fact that
when the conflict was one with a rapidly moving foe like the Saracen or Turk,
the infantry would at the moment of battle be in all probability many marches
in the rear. It is, therefore, with the design of showing the most typical
development of Byzantine tactics that we have selected for description a turma of nine bands or 4000 men, as placed in order, before
engaging with an enemy whose force consists of horsemen.
The front line
consists of three 'banda', each drawn up in a line
seven (or occasionally five) deep. These troops are to receive the first shock.
Behind the first line is arranged a second, consisting of four half-banda, each drawn up ten (or occasionally eight) deep. They
are placed not directly behind the front bands, but in the intervals between
them, so that, if the first line is repulsed, they may fall back, not on to
their comrades, but into the spaces between them. To produce, however, an
impression of solidity in the second line, a single bandon is divided into three parts, and its men drawn up, two deep, in the spaces
between the four half-banda. These troops, on seeing
the men of the first line beaten back and falling into the intervals of the
second line, are directed to wheel to the rear, and form a support behind the
centre of the array. The main reserve, however, consists of two half-banda, posted on the flanks of the second line, but
considerably to the rear. It is in line with these that the retiring bandon, of which we have just spoken, would array itself.
To each flank of the main body was attached a half-bandon,
of 225 men; these were entrusted with the duty of resisting attempts to turn
the flanks of the turma. Still further out,
and if possible under cover, were placed two other bodies of similar strength;
it was their duty to endeavour to get into the enemy's rear, or at any rate to
disturb his wings by unexpected assaults : these troops were called “lyers-in-wait”. The commander's position was normally in
the centre of the second line, where he would be able to obtain a better
general idea of the fight, than if he at once threw himself into
the melée at the head of the foremost squadrons. This order of battle
is deserving of all praise.
It provides for
that succession of shocks which is the key to victory in a cavalry combat; as
many as five different attacks would be made on the enemy before all the
impetus of the Byzantine force had been exhausted. The arrangement of the
second line behind the intervals of the first, obviated the possibility of the
whole force being disordered by the repulse of the first squadrons. The routed
troops would have behind them a clear space in which to rally, not a close line
into which they would carry their disarray. Finally, the charge of the reserve
and the detached troops would be made not on the enemy's centre, which would be
covered by the remains of the first and second lines, but on to his flank, his
most uncovered and vulnerable point.
A further idea
of the excellent organization of the Byzantine army will be given by the fact
that in minor engagements each corps was told off into two parts, one of which,
the cursores represented the 'skirmishing
line', the other, the defensores, 'the
supports'. The former in the case of the infantry-turma would of course consist of the archers, the latter of the Scutati.
To give a
complete sketch of Leo’s Tactics would be tedious and unnecessary. Enough
indications have now been given to show their strength and completeness. It is
easy to understand, after a perusal of such directions, the permanence of the
military power of the Eastern Empire. Against the undisciplined Slav and
Saracen the Imperial troops had on all normal occasions the tremendous
advantages of science and discipline. It is their defeats rather than their
victories which need an explanation.
We have fixed,
as the termination of the period of Byzantine greatness, the battle of
Manzikert, A.D. 1071. At this fight the rashness of Romanus Diogenes led to the
annihilation of the forces of the Asiatic Themes by the horse-archers of
Alp-Arslan. The decay of the central power which is marked by the rise of Isaac
Comnenus, the nominee of the feudal party of Asiatic nobles, may have already
enfeebled the army. It was, however, the result of Manzikert which was fatal to
it; as the occupation of the themes of the interior of Asia Minor by the
Seljuks cut off from the empire its greatest recruiting-ground, the land of the
gallant Isaurians and Armenians, who had for five hundred years formed the core
of the Eastern army.
It will be
observed that we have given no long account of the famous ‘Greek-fire’, the one
point in Byzantine military affairs which most authors condescend to notice. If
we have neglected it, it is from a conviction that, although its importance in ‘poliorcetics’ and naval fighting was considerable, it was,
after all, a minor engine of war, and not comparable as a cause of Byzantine
success to the excellent strategical and tactical system on which we have
dilated. Very much the same conclusion may be drawn from a study of the other
purely mechanical devices which existed in the hands of the imperial generals.
The old skill of the Roman engineer was preserved almost in its entirety, and
the armouries of Constantinople were filled with machines, whose deadly
efficacy inspired the ruder peoples of the West and East with a mysterious
feeling of awe. The vinea and testudo, the catapult onager and balista, were as well known in the tenth century as in the
first. They were undoubtedly employed, and employed with effect, at every
siege. But no amount of technical skill in the use of military machines would
have sufficed to account for the ascendancy enjoyed by the Byzantines over
their warlike neighbours. The sources of that superiority are to be sought in
the existence of science and discipline, of strategy and tactics, of a
professional and yet national army, of an upper class at once educated and
military. When the aristocracy became mere courtiers, when foreign mercenaries
superseded the Isaurian bowman and the Anatolic cavalier, when the traditions
of old Roman organization gave place to mere centralization, then no amount of
the inherited mechanical skill of past ages could save the Byzantine empire
from its fall. The rude vigour of the Western knight accomplished the task
which Chosroes and Crumn, Moslemah and Sviatoslaf,
had found too hard for them. But it was not the empire of Heraclius or John
Zimisces, of Leo the Isaurian, or Leo the Armenian, that was subdued by the
piratical Crusaders, it was only the diminished and disorganized realm of the miserable
Alexius Angelus.
CHAPTER IV.
The
Supremacy of Feudal Cavalry. A. D. 1066 -1 346.
From
the battle of Hastings to the battles of Morgaorten and Cressy.
Between the
last struggles of the infantry of the Anglo-Dane, and the rise of the pikemen
and bowmen of the fourteenth century lies the period of the supremacy of the
mail-clad feudal horseman. The epoch is, as far as strategy and tactics are
concerned, one of almost complete stagnation : only in the single branch of ‘Poliorcetics’ does the art of war make any appreciable
progress.
The feudal
organization of society made every person of gentle blood a fighting man, but
it cannot be said that it made him a soldier. If he could sit his charger
steadily, and handle lance and sword with skill, the horseman of the twelfth or
thirteenth century imagined himself to be a model of military efficiency. That
discipline or tactical skill may be as important to an army as mere courage, he
had no conception. Assembled with difficulty, insubordinate, unabled to manoeuvre, ready to melt away from its standard
the moment that its short period of service was over, — a feudal force
presented an assemblage of unsoldierlike qualities such as has seldom been
known to coexist. Primarily intended to defend its own borders from the Magyar,
the Northman, or the Saracen, the foes who in the tenth century had been a real
danger to Christendom, the institution was utterly unadapted to take the offensive. When a number of tenants-in-chief had come together,
each blindly jealous of his fellows and recognizing no superior but the king,
it would require a leader of uncommon skill to persuade them to institute that
hierarchy of command, which must be established in every army that is to be
something more than an undisciplined mob. Monarchs might try to obviate the
danger by the creation of offices such as those of the Constable and Marshal,
but these expedients were mere palliatives. The radical vice of insubordination
continued to exist. It was always possible that at some critical moment a
battle might be precipitated, a formation broken, a plan disconcerted, by the
rashness of some petty baron or banneret, who could listen to nothing but the
promptings of his own heady valour. When the hierarchy of command was based on
social status rather than on professional experience, the noble who led the
largest contingent or held the highest rank, felt himself entitled to assume
the direction of the battle. The veteran who brought only a few lances to the
array could seldom aspire to influencing the movements of his superiors.
When mere
courage takes the place of skill and experience, tactics and strategy alike
disappear. Arrogance and stupidity combine to give a certain definite colour to
the proceedings of the average feudal host. The century and the land may
differ, but the incidents of battle are the same : Mansoura is like Aljubarotta, Nicopolis is like
Courtrai. When the enemy came in sight, nothing could restrain the Western
knights : the shield was shifted into position, the lance dropped into rest,
the spur touched the charger. and the mail-clad line thundered on regardless of
what might be before it. As often as not its career ended in being dashed
against a stone wall or tumbled into a canal, in painful flounderings in a bog, or futile surgings around a palisade. The
enemy who possessed even a rudimentary system of tactics could hardly fail to
be successful against such armies. The fight of Mansoura may be taken as a fair
specimen of the military customs of the thirteenth century. When the French
vanguard saw a fair field before them and the lances of the infidel gleaming
among the palm-groves, they could not restrain their eagerness. With the Count
of Artois at their head, they started off in a headlong charge, in spite of St.
Louis’ strict prohibition of an engagement. The Mamelukes retreated, allowed
their pursuers to entangle themselves in the streets of a town, and then turned
fiercely on them from all sides at once. In a short time the whole ‘battle’ of
the Count of Artois was dispersed and cut to pieces. Meanwhile the main-body,
hearing of the danger of their companions, had ridden off hastily to their aid.
However, as each commander took his own route and made what speed he could, the
French army arrived upon the field in dozens of small scattered bodies. These
were attacked in detail, and in many cases routed by the Mamelukes. No general
battle was fought, but a number of detached and incoherent cavalry combats had
all the results of a great defeat. A skirmish and a street fight could
overthrow the chivalry of the West, even when it went forth in great strength,
and was inspired by all the enthusiasm of a Crusade.
The array of a
feudal force was stereotyped to a single pattern. As it was impossible to
combine the movements of many small bodies, when the troops were neither
disciplined nor accustomed to act together, it was usual to form the whole of
the cavalry into three great masses, or ‘battles’, as they were
called, and
launch them at the enemy. The refinement of keeping a reserve in hand was
practised by a few commanders, but these were men distinctly in advance of
their age. Indeed it would often have been hard to persuade a feudal chief to
take a position out of the front line, and to incur the risk of losing his
share in the hard fighting. When two ‘battles’ met, a
fearful melée ensued, and would often be continued for hours. Some times, as if by agreement, the two parties wheeled to
the rear, to give their horses breath, and then rushed at each other again, to
renew the conflict till one side grew overmatched and left the field. An
engagement like Brenville or Bouvines or Benevento was nothing more than a huge scuffle and scramble of horses and
men over a convenient heath or hillside. The most ordinary precautions, such as
directing a reserve on a critical point, or detaching a corps to take the enemy
in flank, or selecting a good position in which to receive battle, were
considered instances of surpassing military skill. Charles of Anjou, for
instance, has received the name of a great commander, because at Tagliacozzo he retained a body of knights under cover, and
launched it against Conradin’s rear, when the
Ghibellines had dispersed in pursuit of the routed Angevin main-battle. Simon
de Montfort earned high repute; but if at Lewes he kept and utilized a reserve,
we must not forget that at Evesham he allowed himself to be surprised and
forced to fight with his back to a river, in a position from which no retreat
was possible. The commendation of the age was, in short, the meed of striking feats of arms rather than of real generalship. If much attention were to be paid to the
chroniclers, we should believe that commanders of merit were numerous; but, if
we examine the actions of these much-belauded individuals rather than the
opinions of their contemporaries, our belief in their ability almost invariably
receives a rude shocks.
If the minor
operations of war were badly understood, strategy — the higher branch of the
military art — was absolutely non-existent. An invading army moved into hostile
territory , not in order to strike at some great strategical point, but merely
to burn and harry the land. As no organized commissariat existed, the resources
of even the richest districts were soon exhausted, and the invader moved off in
search of subsistence, rather than for any higher aim. It is only towards the
end of the period with which we are dealing that any traces of systematic
arrangements for the provisioning of an army are found. Even these were for the
most part the results of sheer necessity: in attacking a poor and uncultivated
territory, like Wales or Scotland, the English kings found that they could not
live on the country, and were compelled to take measures to keep their troops
from starvation. But a French or German army, when it entered Flanders or
Lombardy, or an English force in France, trusted, as all facts unite to
demonstrate, for its maintenance to its power of plundering the invaded
district.
Great battles
were, on the whole, infrequent : a fact which appears strange, when the
long-continued wars of the period are taken into consideration. Whole years of
hostilities produced only a few partial skirmishes: compared with modem
campaigns, the general engagements were incredibly few. Frederick the Great or
Napoleon I fought more battles in one year than a mediaeval commander in ten.
The fact would appear to be that the opposing armies, being guided by no very
definite aims and invariably neglecting to keep touch of each other by means of
outposts and vedettes, might often miss each other altogether. When they met it
was usually from the existence of some topographical necessity, of an old Roman
road, or a ford or bridge on which all routes converged. Nothing could show the
primitive state of the military art better than the fact that generals solemnly
sent and accepted challenges to meet in battle at a given place and on a given
day. Without such precautions there was apparently a danger lest the armies
should lose sight of each other, and stray away in different directions. When
maps were non-existent, and geographical knowledge both scanty and inaccurate,
this was no inconceivable event. Even when two forces were actually in
presence, it sometimes required more skill than the commanders owned to bring
on a battle. Bela of Hungary and Ottokar of Bohemia were in arms in 1252, and
both were equally bent on fighting; but when they sighted each other it was
only to find that the River March was between them. To pass a stream in face of
an enemy was a task far beyond the ability of a thirteenth-century general — as
St. Louis had found, two years earlier, on the banks of the Achmoum Canal. Accordingly it was reckoned nothing strange when the Bohemian
courteously invited his adversary either to cross the March unhindered, and
fight in due form on the west bank, or to give him the same opportunity and
grant a free passage to the Hungarian side. Bela chose the former alternative,
forded the river without molestation, and fought on the other side the
disastrous battle of Cressenbrunn.
Infantry was in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries absolutely insignificant : foot-soldiers
accompanied the army for no better purpose than to perform the menial duties of
the camp, or to assist in the numerous sieges of the period. Occasionally they
were employed as light troops, to open the battle by their ineffective
demonstrations. There was, however, no really important part for them to play.
Indeed their lords were sometimes affronted if they presumed to delay too long
the opening of the cavalry charges, and ended the skirmishing by riding into
and over their wretched followers. At Bouvines the
Count of Boulogne could find no better use for his infantry than to form them
into a great circle, inside which he and his horsemen took shelter when their
chargers were fatigued and needed a short rest. If great bodies of foot
occasionally appeared upon the field, they came because it was the duty of
every able-bodied man to join the arrière-ban when summoned, not
because the addition of 20,000 or 100,000 half-armed peasants and burghers was
calculated to increase the real strength of the levy. The chief cause of their
military worthlessness may be said to have been the miscellaneous nature of
their armament. Troops like the Scotch Lowlanders, with their long spears, or
the Saracen auxiliaries of Frederick II, with their cross-bows, deserved and
obtained some respect on account of the uniformity of their equipment. But with
ordinary infantry the case was different; exposed, without discipline and with
a miscellaneous assortment of dissimilar weapons, to a cavalry charge, they
could not combine to withstand it, but were ridden down and crushed. A few
infantry successes which appear towards the end of the period were altogether
exceptional in character. The infantry of the Great Company in the East beat
the Duke of Athens, by inducing him to charge with all his men-at-arms into a
swamp. In a similar way the victory of Courtrai was secured, not by the mallets
and iron-shod staves of the Flemings, but by the canal, into which the headlong
onset of the French cavalry thrust rank after rank of their companions.
The attempt to
introduce some degree of efficiency into a feudal force drove monarchs to
various expedients. Frederick Barbarossa strove to enforce discipline by a
strict code of 'Camp Laws'; an undertaking in which he won no great success, if
we may judge of their observance by certain recorded incidents. In 1158, for
example, Egbert von Buten, a young Austrian noble,
left his post and started off with a thousand men to endeavour to seize one of
the gates of Milan, a presumptuous violation of orders in which he lost his
life. This was only in accordance with the spirit of the times, and by no means
exceptional. If the stern and imposing personality of the great emperor could
not win obedience, the task was hopeless for weaker rulers. Most monarchs were
driven into the use of another description of troops, inferior
in morale to the feudal force, but more amenable to discipline. The
mercenary comes to the fore in the second half of the twelfth century. A
stranger to all the nobler incentives to valour, an enemy to his God and his
neighbour, the most deservedly hated man in Europe, he was yet the instrument
which kings, even those of the better sort, were obliged to seek out and
cherish. When wars ceased to be mere frontier raids, and were carried on for
long periods at a great distance from the homes of most of the baronage, it
became impossible to rely on the services of the feudal levy. But how to
provide the large sums necessary for the payment of mercenaries was not always
obvious. Notable among the expedients employed was that of Henry II of England,
who substituted for the personal service of each knight the system of
'scutage'. By this the majority of the tenants of the crown compounded for
their personal service by paying two marks for each knight's fee. Thus the king
was enabled to pass the seas at the head of a force of mercenaries who were,
for most military purposes, infinitely preferable to the feudal array. However
objectionable the hired foreigner might be, on the score of his greed and
ferocity, he could, at least, be trusted to stand by his colours as long as he
was regularly paid. Every ruler found him a necessity in time of war, but to
the unconstitutional and oppressive ruler his existence was especially
profitable: it was solely by the lavish use of mercenaries that the warlike
nobility could be held in check. Despotism could only begin when the monarch
became able to surround himself with a strong force of men whose desires and
feelings were alien to those of the nation. The tyrant in modern Europe, as in
ancient Greece, found his natural support in foreign hired soldiery. King John,
when he drew to himself his 'Routiers', 'Brabançons', and 'Satellites', was unconsciously imitating
Pisistratus and Polycrates.
The military
efficiency of the mercenary of the thirteenth century was, however, only a
development of that of the ordinary feudal cavalier. Like the latter, he was a
heavily-armed horseman; his rise did not bring with it any radical change in
the methods of war. Though he was a more practised warrior, he still worked on
the old system — or want of system — which characterised the cavalry tactics of
the time.
The final stage
in the history of mercenary troops was reached when the bands which had served
through a long war instead of dispersing at its conclusion, held together, and
moved across the continent in search of a state which might be willing to buy
their services. But the age of the 'Great Company' and the Italian Condottieri
lies rather in the fourteenth than the thirteenth century, and its discussion
must be deferred to another chapter.
In the whole
military history of the period the most striking feature is undoubtedly the
importance of fortified places, and the ascendancy assumed by the defensive in poliorcetics. If battles were few, sieges were numerous and
abnormally lengthy. The castle was as integral a part of feudal organization as
the mailed knight, and just as the noble continued to heap defence after
defence on to the persons of himself and his charger, so he continued to
surround his dwelling with more and more fortifications. The simple Norman
castle of the eleventh century, with its great keep and plain rectangular
enclosure, developed into elaborate systems of concentric works, like those of
Caerphilly and Carnarvon. The walls of the town rivalled those of the citadel,
and every country bristled with forts and places, of strength, large and small.
The one particular in which real military capacity is displayed in the period
is the choice of commanding sites for fortresses. A single stronghold was often
so well placed that it served as the key to an entire district. The best claim
to the possession of a general's eye which can be made in behalf of Richard I
rests on the fact that he chose the position for Chateau Gaillard, the great
castle which sufficed to protect the whole of Eastern Normandy as long as it
was adequately held.
The strength of
a mediaeval fortress lay in the extraordinary solidity of its construction.
Against walls fifteen to thirty feet thick, the feeble siege-artillery of the
day, perrières, catapults, trebuchets, and so forth,
beat without perceptible effect. A Norman keep, solid and tall, with no
wood-work to be set on fire, and no openings near the ground to be battered in,
had an almost endless capacity for passive resistance. Even a weak garrison
could hold out as long as its provisions lasted. Minin was perhaps the device which had most hope of success against such a
stronghold; but if the castle was provided with a deep moat, or was built
directly on a rock, mining was of no avail. There remained the laborious
expedient of demolishing the lowest parts of the walls by approaches made under
cover of a pent-house, or 'cat,' as it was called. If the moat could be filled,
and the cat brought close to the foot of the fortifications, this method might
be of some use against a fortress of the simple Norman type. Before bastions
were invented, there was no means by which the missiles of the besieged could
adequately command the ground immediately below the ramparts. If the defenders
showed themselves over the walls — as would be necessary in order to reach men
perpendicularly below them — they were at once exposed to the archers and
cross-bowmen who under cover of mantlets, protected
the working of the besieger's pioneers. Hence something might be done by the
method of demolishing the lower parts of the walls : but the process was always
slow, laborious, and exceedingly costly in the matter of human lives. Unless
pressed for time a good commander would almost invariably prefer to starve out
a garrison.
The success —
however partial and hardly won — of this form of attack, led to several
developments on the part of the defence. The moat was sometimes strengthened
with palisading : occasionally small detached forts were constructed just
outside the walls on any favourable spot. But the most generally used
expedients were the brattice and the construction of large towers, projecting
from the wall and flanking the long sketches of 'curtain' which had been found
the weak point in the Norman system of fortification. The brattice was a wooden
gallery fitted with apertures in its floor, and running along the top of the
wall, from which it projected several feet. It was supported by beams built out
from the rampart, and commanded, by means of its apertures, the ground
immediately at the foot of the walls. Thus the besieger could no longer get out
of the range of the missiles of the besieged, and continued exposed to them,
however close he drew to the fortifications. The objection to the brattice was
that, being wooden, it could be set on fire by inflammatory substances
projected by the catapults of the besieger. It was therefore superseded ere
long by the use of machicolation, where a projecting stone gallery replaced the
woodwork. Far more important was the utilization of the flanking action of
towers, the other great improvement made by the defence. This rendered it
possible to direct a converging fire from the sides on the point selected for
attack by the besieger. The towers also served to cut off a captured stretch of
wall from any communication with the rest of the fortifications. By closing the
iron-bound doors in the two on each side of the breach, the enemy was left
isolated on the piece of wall he had won, and could not push to right or left
without storming a tower. This development of the defensive again reduced the
offensive to impotence. Starvation was the only weapon likely to reduce a
well-defended place, and fortresses were therefore blockaded rather than
attacked. The besieger, having built a line of circumvallation and an
intrenched camp, sat down to wait for hunger to do its work. It will be
observed that by fortifying his position he gave himself the advantage of the
defensive in repelling attacks of relieving armies. His other expedients, such
as endeavours to fire the internal buildings of the invested place, to cut off
its water supply, or to carry it by nocturnal escalade, were seldom of much
avail.
The number and
strength of the fortified places of Western Europe explain the apparent
futility of many campaigns of the period. A land could not be conquered with
rapidity when every district was guarded by three or four castles and walled
towns, which would each need several months' siege before they could be
reduced. Campaigns tended to become either plundering raids, which left the
strongholds alone, or to be occupied in the prolonged blockade of a single fortified
place. The invention of gunpowder was the first advantage thrown on the side of
the attack for three centuries. Even cannon, however, were at the period of
their invention, and for long years afterward, of very little practical
importance. The taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II is perhaps the first
event of European importance in which the power of artillery played the leading
part.
Before
proceeding to discuss the rise of the new forms of military efficiency which
brought about; the end of the supremacy of feudal cavalry, it may be well to
cast a glance at those curious military episodes, the Crusades. Considering
their extraordinary and abnormal nature, more results might have been expected
to follow them than can in fact be traced. When opposed by a system of tactics
to which they were unaccustomed the Western nobles were invariably
disconcerted. At fights such as Dorylaeum they were
only preserved from disaster by their indomitable energy : tactically beaten
they extricated themselves by sheer hard fighting. On fairly-disputed fields,
such as that of Antioch, they asserted the same superiority over Oriental
horsemen which the Byzantine had previously enjoyed. But after a short
experience of Western tactics the Turks and Saracens foreswore the battlefield.
They normally acted in great bodies of light cavalry, moving rapidly from point
to point, and cutting off convoys or attacking detached parties. The Crusaders
were seldom indulged in the twelfth century with those pitched battles for
which they craved. The Mahometan leaders would only fight when they had placed
all the advantages on their own side; normally they declined the contest. In
the East, just as in Europe, the war was one of sieges : armies numbered by the
hundred thousand were arrested before the walls of a second-class fortress such
as Acre, and in despair at reducing it by their operations, had to resort to
the lengthy process of starving out the garrison. On the other hand nothing but
the ascendancy enjoyed by the defensive could have protracted the existence of
the 'Kingdom of Jerusalem', when it had sunk to a chain of isolated fortresses,
dotting the shore of the Levant from Alexandretta to Acre and Jaffa. If we can
point to any modifications introduced into European warfare by the Eastern
experience of the Crusaders, they are not of any great importance. Greek fire,
if its composition was really ascertained, would seem to have had very little
use in the West : the horse-bowman, copied from the cavalry of the Turkish and
Mameluke sultans, did not prove a great military success : the adoption of the
curved sabre, the ‘Morris-pike’, the horseman's mace, and a few other weapons,
is hardly worth mentioning. On the whole, the military results of the Crusades
were curiously small. As lessons they were wholly disregarded by the European
world. When, after the interval of a hundred and fifty years, a Western army
once more faced an Oriental foe, it committed at Nicopolis exactly the same blunder which led to the loss of the day at Mansoura.
The
Swiss. A.D. 1315-1515.
From
the battle of Morgarten to the battle of Marignano.
(1) Their
Character, Arms, and Organization.
In the
fourteenth century infantry, after a thousand years of depression and neglect,
at last regained its due share of military importance. Almost simultaneously
there appeared two peoples asserting a mastery in European politics by the efficiency
of their foot-soldiery. Their manners of fighting were as different as their
national character and geographical position, but although they never met
either in peace or war, they were practically allied for the destruction of
feudal chivalry. The knight, who had for so long ridden roughshod over the
populations of Europe, was now to recognize his masters in the art of war. The
free yeomanry of England and the free herdsmen of the Alps were about to enter
on their career of conquest.
When war is
reduced to its simplest elements, we find that there are only two ways in which
an enemy can be met and defeated. Either the shock or the missile must be
employed against him. In the one case the victor achieves success by throwing
himself on his opponent, and worsting him in a hand-to-hand struggle by his
numbers, his weight, the superiority of his arms, or the greater strength and
skill with which he wields them. In the second case he wins the day by keeping
up such a constant and deadly rain of missiles, that his enemy is destroyed or
driven back before he can come to close quarters. Each of these methods can be
combined with the use of very different arms and tactics, and is susceptible of
innumerable variations. In the course of history they have alternately asserted
their preponderance : in the early middle ages shock-tactics were entirely in
the ascendant, while in our own day the use of the missile has driven the rival
system out of the field, nor does it appear possible that this final verdict
can ever be reversed.
The English
archer and the Swiss pikeman represented these two great forms of military
efficiency in their simplest and most elementary shapes. The one relied on his
power to defeat his enemy's attack by rapid and accurate shooting. The other
was capable of driving before him far superior numbers by the irresistible
impact and steady pressure of his solid column with its serried hedge of
spear-points. When tried against the mail-clad cavalry which had previously
held the ascendancy in Europe, each of these methods was found adequate to
secure the victory for those who employed it. Hence the whole military system
of the middle ages received a profound modification. To the unquestioned
predominance of a single form, that of the charge delivered by cavalry, succeeded
a rapid alternation of successful and unsuccessful experiments in the
correlation and combination of cavalry and infantry, of shock-tactics and
missile-tactics. Further complicated by the results of the introduction of
firearms, this struggle has been prolonged down to the present day. It is only
in the last few years that the military world has learnt that the attempt to
utilize the shock of the infantry column or the charging squadron must be
abandoned in face of the extraordinary development of modern firearms.
The Swiss of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have been compared with much aptness to
the Romans of the early Republic. In the Swiss, as in the Roman character, we
find the most intense patriotism combined with an utter want of moral sense and
a certain meanness and pettiness of conception, which prevent us from calling
either nation truly great. In both the steadiest courage and the fervour of the
noblest self-sacrifice were allied to an appalling ferocity and a cynical
contempt and pitiless disregard for the rights of others. Among each people the
warlike pride generated by successful wars of independence led ere long to wars
of conquest and plunder. As neighbours, both were rendered insufferable by
their haughtiness and proneness to take offence on the slightest provocation.
As enemies, both were distinguished for their deliberate and cold-blooded
cruelty. The resolution to give no quarter, which appears almost pardonable in
patriots desperately defending their native soil, becomes brutal when retained
in wars of aggression, but reaches the climax of fiendish inhumanity when the
slayer is a mere mercenary, fighting for a cause in which he has no national
interest. Repulsive as was the bloodthirstiness of the Roman, it was far from equalling
in moral guilt the needless ferocity displayed by the hired Swiss soldiery on
many a battlefield of the sixteenth century.
In no point do
we find a greater resemblance between the histories of the two peoples, than in
the causes of their success in war. Rome and Switzerland alike are examples of
the fact that a good military organization and a sound system of national
tactics are the surest basis for a sustained career of conquest. Provided with
these a vigorous state needs no unbroken series of great commanders. A
succession of respectable mediocrities suffices to guide the great engine of
war, which works almost automatically, and seldom fails to cleave its way to
success. The elected consuls of Rome, the elected or nominated 'captains' of
the Confederates, could never have led their troops to victory, had it not been
for the systems which the experience of their predecessors had brought to
perfection. The combination of pliability and solid strength in the legion, the
powers of rapid movement and irresistible impact which met in the Swiss column,
were competent to win a field without the exertion of any extraordinary ability
by the generals who set them in motion.
The
battle-array which the Confederates invariably employed, was one whose
prototype had been seen in the Macedonian phalanx. It was always in masses of
enormous depth that they presented themselves on the battlefield. Their great
national weapon in the days of their highest reputation was the pike, an ashen
shaft eighteen feet long, fitted with a head of steel which added another foot
to its length. It was grasped with two hands widely extended, and poised at the
level of the shoulder with the point slightly sunk, so as to deliver a downward
thrust. Before the line projected not only the pikes of the front rank, but
those of the second, third, and fourth, an impenetrable hedge of bristling
points. The men in the interior of the column held their weapons upright, till
called upon to step forward in order to replace those who had fallen in the
foremost ranks. Thus the pikes, rising twelve feet above the heads of the men
who bore them, gave to the charging mass the appearance of a moving wood. Above
it floated numberless flags, the pennons of districts, towns, and guilds, the
banners of the cantons, sometimes the great standard of the Ancient League of
High Germany, the white cross on the red ground.
The pike,
however, was not the only weapon of the Swiss. In the earlier days of their
independence, when the Confederacy consisted of three or four cantons, the
halberd was their favourite arm, and even in the sixteenth century a
considerable proportion of the army continued to employ it. Eight feet in
length — with a heavy head which ended in a sharp point and bore on its front a
blade like that of a hatchet, on its back a strong hook — the halberd was the
most murderous, if also the most ponderous, of weapons. Swung by the strong
arms of the Alpine herdsmen it would cleave helmet, shield, or coat-of-mail,
like pasteboard. The sight of the ghastly wounds which it inflicted might well
appal the stoutest foeman: he who had once felt its edge required no second
stroke. It was the halberd which laid Leopold of Hapsburg dead across his
fallen banner at Sempach, and struck down Charles of
Burgundy — all his face one gash from temple to teeth — in the frozen ditch by
Nancy.
The halberdiers
had their recognized station in the Confederates' battle-array. They were drawn
up in the centre of the column, around the chief banner, which was placed under
their care. If the enemy succeeded in checking the onset of the pikemen, it was
their duty to pass between the front ranks, which opened out to give them
egress, and throw themselves into the fray. They were joined in their charge by
the bearers of two-handed swords, 'Morning- Stars', and 'Lucern Hammers', all weapons of the most fearful efficiency in a hand-to-hand combat.
It was seldom that a hostile force, whether infantry or cavalry, sustained this
final attack, when the infuriated Swiss dashed in among them, slashing right
and left, sweeping off the legs of horses, and cleaving armour and flesh with
the same tremendous blow.
In repelling
cavalry charges, however, the halberd was found, owing to its shortness, a far
less useful weapon than the pike. The disastrous fight near Bellinzona in 1422, where the Swiss, having a large proportion of halberdiers in their
front rank, were broken by the Milanese gendarmes, was the final cause of its
relegation to the second epoch of the battle. From the first shock of the opposing
forces it was banished, being reserved for the melée which afterwards
ensued.
Next to its
solidity the most formidable quality of the Swiss infantry was its rapidity of
movement. No troops were ever more expeditious on a march, or in forming
themselves for battle, because they were not overloaded with armour. When
emergencies arrived a Confederate army could be raised with extraordinary
speed; a people who regarded military glory as the one thing which made life
worth living, flocked to arms without needing a second summons. The outlying
contingents marched day and night in order to reach the mustering place in good
time. There was no need to waste days in the weary work of organization, when
every man stood among his kinsmen and neighbours, beneath the pennon of his
native town or valley. The troops of the democratic cantons elected their
officers, those of the larger states received leaders appointed by their
councils, and then without further delay the army marched to meet the enemy.
Thus an invader, however unexpected his attack, might in the course of three or
four days find twenty thousand men on his hands. They would often be within a
few miles of him, before he had heard that a Swiss force was in the field.
In face of such
an army it was impossible for the slowly-moving troops of the fourteenth or
fifteenth centuries to execute manoeuvres. An attempt to alter the line of
battle, — as Charles the Rash discovered to his dismay at Granson,
— was sure to lead to disaster. When once the Confederates were in motion their
enemy had to resign himself to fighting in whatever order he found himself at
the moment. They always made it their rule to begin the fight, and never to
allow themselves to be attacked. The composition of their various columns was
settled early on the battle morning, and the men moved off to the field already
drawn up in their fighting-array. There was no pause needed to draw the army
out in line of battle; each phalanx marched on the enemy at a steady but swift
pace, which covered the ground in an incredibly short time. The solid masses
glided forward in perfect order and in deep silence, until the war-cry burst
out in one simultaneous roar and the column dashed itself against the hostile
front. The rapidity of the Swiss advance had in it something portentous: the
great wood of pikes and halberds came rolling over the brow of some
neighbouring hill; a moment later it was pursuing its even way towards the
front, and then — almost before the opponent had time to realize his position —
it was upon him, with its four rows of spear-points projecting in front and the
impetus of file upon file surging up from the rear.
This power of
swift movement was — as Macchiavelli observed — the
result of the Confederates' determination not to burden themselves with heavy
armour. Their abstention from its use was originally due to their poverty
alone, but was confirmed by the discovery that a heavy panoply would clog and
hamper the efficiency of their national tactics. The normal equipment of the
pikeman or halberdier was therefore light, consisting of a steel-cap and
breastplate alone. Even these were not in universal employment; many of the
soldiery trusted the defence of their persons to their weapons, and wore only
felt hats and leather jerkins. The use of back-plates, arm-pieces, and greaves
was by no means common; indeed the men wearing them were often not sufficient
in number to form a single rank at the head of the column, the post in which
they were always placed. The leaders alone were required to present themselves
in full armour; they were therefore obliged to ride while on the march, in
order to keep up with their lightly-armed followers. When they arrived in sight
of the enemy they dismounted and led their men to the charge on foot. A few of
the patricians and men of knightly family from Bern were found in the fifteenth
century serving as cavalry, but their numbers were absolutely insignificant, a
few scores at the most.
Although the
strength and pride of the Confederates lay in their pikemen and halberdiers,
the light troops were by no means neglected. On occasion they were known to
form as much as a fourth of the army, and they never sank below a tenth of the
whole number. They were originally armed with the cross-bow — the weapon of the
fabulous Tell — but even before the great Burgundian war the use of the clumsy
firearms of the day was general among them. It was their duty to precede the
main body, and to endeavour to draw on themselves the attention of the enemy's
artillery and light troops, so that the columns behind them might advance as
far as possible without being molested. Thus the true use of a line of
skirmishers was already appreciated among the Swiss in the fifteenth century.
When the pikemen had come up with them, they retired into the intervals between
the various masses, and took no part in the great charge, for which their
weapons were not adapted.
It is at once
evident that in the simplicity of its component elements lay one of the chief
sources of the strength of a Confederate army. Its commanders were not troubled
by any of those problems as to the correlation and subordination of the various
arms, which led to so many unhappy experiments among the generals of other
nations. Cavalry and artillery were practically non-existent; nor were the
operations hampered by the necessity of finding some employment for those
masses of troops of inferior quality who so often increased the numbers, but
not the efficiency, of a mediaeval army. A Swiss force — however hastily
gathered — was always homogeneous and coherent; there was no residuum of
untried or disloyal soldiery for whose conduct special precautions would have
to be taken. The larger proportion of the men among a nation devoted to war had
seen a considerable amount of service; while if local jealousies were ever
remembered in the field, they only served to spur the rival contingents on to a
healthy emulation in valour. However much the cantons might wrangle among
themselves, they were always found united against a foreign attack.
(2) Tactics and
Strategy
The character
and organization of the Confederate army were exceedingly unfavourable to the
rise of great generals. The soldier rested his hope of success rather on an
entire confidence in the fighting power of himself and his comrades, than on
the skill of his commander. Troops who have proved in a hundred fields their
ability to bear up against the most overwhelming odds, are comparatively
indifferent as to the personality of their leader. If he is competent they work
out his plan with success, if not, they cheerfully set themselves to repair his
faults by sheer hard fighting. Another consideration was even more important
among the Swiss; there was a universal prejudice felt against placing the
troops of one canton under the orders of the citizen of another. So strong was
this feeling that an extraordinary result ensued: the appointment of a
commander-in-chief remained, throughout the brilliant period of Swiss history,
an exception rather than a rule. Neither in the time of Sempach,
in the old war of Zurich, in the great struggle with Burgundy, nor in the
Swabian campaign against Maximilian of Austria, was any single general
entrusted with supreme authority. The conduct of affairs was in the hands of a
'council of war'; but it was a council which, contrary to the old proverb about
such bodies, was always ready and willing to fight. It was composed of the
'captains' of each cantonal contingent, and settled the questions which came
under discussion by a simple majority of voices. Before a battle it entrusted
the command of van, rear, main-body, and light troops to different officers,
but the holders of such posts enjoyed a mere delegated authority, which expired
with the cessation of the emergency.
The existence
of this curious subdivision of power, to which the nearest parallel would be
found in early Byzantine days, would suffice by itself to explain the lack of
all strategical skill and unity of purpose which was observable in Swiss
warfare. The compromise which forms the mean between several rival schemes
usually combines their faults, not their merits. But in addition to this, we
may suspect that to find any one Swiss officer capable of working out a
coherent plan of campaign would have been difficult The 'Captain' was an old
soldier who had won distinction on bygone battlefields, but except in his
experience nowise different to the men under his orders. Of elaborating the
more difficult strategical combinations a Swiss 'Council of War' was not much
more capable than an average party of veteran sergeant-majors would be in our
own day.
With tactics,
however, the case was different. The best means of adapting the attack in
column to the accidents of locality or the quality and armament of the opposing
troops were studied in the school of experience. A real tactical system was
developed, whose efficiency was proved again and again in the battles of the
fifteenth century. For dealing with the mediaeval men-at-arms and infantry
against whom it had been designed, the Swiss method was unrivalled : it was
only when a new age introduced different conditions into war that it gradually
became obsolete.
The normal
order of battle employed by the Confederates, however small or large their army
might be, was an advance in an échelon of three divisions.
The first corps ('vorhut'), that which had formed the
van while the force was on the march, made for a given point in the enemy's
line. The second corps ('gewaltshaufen'), instead of
coming up in line with the first, advanced parallel to it, but at a short
distance to its right or left rear. The third corps ('nachhut')
advanced still further back, and often halted until the effect of the first
attack was seen, in order that it might be able to act, if necessary, as a
reserve. This disposition left a clear space behind each column, so that if it
was repulsed it could retire without throwing into disorder the rest of the
army. Other nations (e. g. the French at Agincourt), who were in the habit of
placing one corps directly in front of another, had often to pay the penalty
for their tactical crime, by seeing the defeat of their first line entail the
rout of the whole army, each division being rolled back in confusion on that
immediately in its rear. The Swiss order of attack had another strong point in rendering
it almost impossible for the enemy's troops to wheel inwards and attack the
most advanced column : if they did so they at once exposed their own flank to
the second column, which was just coming up and commencing its charge.
The advance in échelon of columns was not the only form employed by the
Confederates. At Laupen the centre or 'gewaltshaufen' moved forward and opened the fight before
the wings were engaged. At the combat of Frastenz in
1499, on the other hand, the wings commenced the onset, while the centre was
refused, and only came up to complete the overthrow.
Even the
traditional array in three masses was sometimes discarded for a different
formation. At Sempach the men of the Forest Cantons
were drawn up in a single 'wedge' (Keil). This order was not, as might be
expected from its name, triangular, but merely a column of more than Ordinary
depth in proportion to its frontage. Its object was to break a hostile line of
unusual firmness by a concentrated shock delivered against its centre. In 1468,
during the fighting which preceded the siege of Waldshut,
the whole Confederate army moved out to meet the Austrian cavalry in a great
hollow square, in the midst of which were placed the banners with their escort
of halberdiers. When such a body was attacked, the men faced outwards to
receive the onset of the horsemen; this they called 'forming the hedgehog'. So
steady were they that, with very inferior numbers, they could face the most
energetic charge : in the Swabian war of 1498, six hundred men of Zurich,
caught in the open plain by a thousand imperial men-at-arms, formed a hedgehog,
and drove off the enemy with ease and much jesting. Macchiavelli speaks of another Swiss order of battle, which he calls 'the Cross' : “between
the arms of which they place their musketeers, to shelter them from the first
shock of the hostile column”. His description, however, is anything but
explicit, and we can find no trace of any formation of the kind in any recorded
engagement.
(3) Development
of Swiss Military Supremacy.
The first
victory of the Confederates was won, not by the tactics which afterwards
rendered them famous, but by a judicious choice of a battlefield. Morgarten was a fearful example of the normal uselessness
of feudal cavalry in a mountainous country. On a frosty November day, when the
roads were like ice underfoot, Leopold of Austria thrust his long narrow column
into the defiles leading to the valley of Schwytz. In
front rode the knights, who had of course claimed the honour of opening the contest,
while the 6000 infantry blocked the way behind. In the narrow pass of Morgarten, where the road passes between a precipitous
slope on the right and the waters of the Egeri lake
on the left, the 1500 Confederates awaited the Austrians. Full of the carelessness
which accompanies overweening arrogance, the duke had neglected the most
ordinary precaution of exploring his road, and only discovered the vicinity of
the enemy when a shower of boulders and tree-trunks came rolling down the slope
on his right flank, where a party of Swiss were posted in a position entirely
inaccessible to horsemen. A moment later the head of the helpless column was
charged by the main body of the mountaineers. Before the Austrians had realized
that the battle had commenced, the halberds and ‘morning-stars’ of the
Confederates were working havoc in their van. The front ranks of the knights,
wedged so tightly together by the impact of the enemy that they could not lay
their lances in rest, much less spur their horses to the charge, fought and
died. The centre and rear were compelled to halt and stand motionless, unable
to push forward on account of the narrowness of the pass, or to retreat on
account of the infantry, who choked the road behind. For a short time they
endured the deadly shower of rocks ancf logs, which
continued to bound down the slope, tear through the crowded ranks, and hurl man
and horse into the lake below. Then, by a simultaneous impulse, the greater
part of the mass turned their reins and made for the rear. In the press
hundreds were pushed over the edge of the road, to drown in the deep water on
the left. The main body burst into the column of their own infantry, and,
trampling down their unfortunate followers, fled with such speed as was
possible on the slippery path. The Swiss, having now exterminated the few
knights, in the van who had remained to fight, came down on the rear of the
panic-stricken crowd, and cut down horseman and footman alike without meeting
any resistance. “It was not a battle”, says John of Winterthur, a contemporary
chronicler, “but a mere butchery of duke Leopold’s men; for the mountain folk
slew them like sheep in the shambles : no one gave any quarter, but they cut
down all, without distinction, till there were none left to kill. So great was
the fierceness of the Confederates that scores of the Austrian footmen, when
they saw the bravest knights falling helplessly, threw themselves in panic into
the lake, preferring to sink in its depths rather than to fall under the
fearful weapons of their enemies”.
In short, the
Swiss won their freedom, because, with instinctive tactical skill, they gave
the feudal cavalry no opportunity for attacking them at advantage. They were
lords of the field, because it was they, and not their foe, who settled where
the fighting should take place. On the steep and slippery road, where they
could not win impetus for their charge, and where the narrowness of the defile
prevented them from making use of their superior numbers, the Austrians were
helpless. The crushing character of the defeat, however, was due to Leopold's
inexcusable carelessness, in leaving the way unexplored and suffering himself
to be surprised in the fatal trap of the pass.
Morgarten exhibits the
Swiss military system in a rudimentary condition. Though won, like all
Confederate victories, by the charge of a column, it was the work of the
halberd, not of the pike. The latter weapon was not yet in general use among
the mountaineers of the three cantons : it was, in fact, never adopted by them
to so great an extent as was the case among the Swiss of the lower Alpine lands
and Aar valley, the Bernese and people of Zurich and Lucern.
The halberd, murderous though it might be, was not an arm whose possession
would give an unqualified ascendancy to its wielders : it was the position, not
the weapons nor the tactics, of the Swiss which won Morgarten.
But their second great success bears a far higher military importance.
At Laupen, for the first time almost since the days of the
Romans, infantry, entirely unsupported by horsemen, ranged on a fair field in
the plains, withstood an army complete in all arms and superior in numbers. It
was twenty-four years after duke Leopold's defeat that the Confederates and
their newly-allied fellows of Bern met the forces of the Burgundian nobility of
the valleys of the Aar and Rhone, mustered by all the feudal chiefs between Elsass and Lake Leman. Count Gerard of Vallangin,
the commander of the baronial army, evidently intended to settle the day by
turning one wing of the enemy, and crushing it. With this object he drew up the
whole of his cavalry on the right of his array, his centre and left being
entirely composed of infantry. The Swiss formed the three columns which were
henceforth to be their normal order of battle. They were under a single
commander, Rudolf of Erlach, to whom the credit of
having first employed the formation apparently belongs. The Bernese, who were
mainly armed with the pike, formed the centre column, the wings were drawn
back. That on the left was composed of the men of the three old cantons, who
were still employing the halberd as their chief weapon, while the right was
made up of other allies of Bern. In this order they moved on to the attack, the
centre considerably in advance. The infantry of the Barons proved to be no
match for the Confederates : with a steady impulse the Bernese pushed it back,
trampled down the front ranks, and drove the rest off the field. A moment later the Burgundian left suffered the same fate at the
hands of the Swiss right column. Then, without wasting time in pursuit, the two
victorious masses turned to aid the men of the Forest Cantons. Surrounded by a
raging flood of horsemen on all sides, the left column was hard pressed. The
halberd, though inflicting the most ghastly wounds, could not prevent the
cavalry from occasionally closing in. Like a rock, however, the mountaineers
withstood the incessant charges, and succeeded in holding their own for the
all-important period during which the hostile infantry was being driven off the
field. Then the two successful columns came down on the left and rear of the
Baronial horse-men, and steadily met their charge. Apparently the enemy was
already exhausted by his attempt to overcome the men of the Forest Cantons,
for, after one vain attempt to ride down the Bernese pikemen, he turned and
rode off the field, not without considerable loss, as many of his rearguard were intercepted and driven into the river Sense.
Laupen was neither so
bloody nor so dramatic a field as Morgarten; but it
is one of three great battles which mark the beginning of a new period in the
history of war. Bannockburn had already sounded the same note in the distant
West, but for the Continent Laupen was the first
revelation as to the power of good infantry. The experiment which had been
tried a few years before at Cassel and Mons-en-Puelle with such ill success, was renewed with a very
different result. The Swiss had accomplished the feat which the Flemings had
undertaken with inadequate means and experience. Seven years later a yet more
striking lessen was to be administered to feudal chivalry, when the archer
faced the knight at Cressy. The mail-clad horseman was found unable to break
the phalanx of pikes, unable to approach the line from which the deadly arrow
reached him, but still the old superstition which gave the most honourable name
in war to the mounted man, was strong enough to perpetuate for another century
the cavalry whose day had really gone by. A system which was so intimately
bound up with mediaeval life and ideas could not be destroyed by one, or by
twenty disasters.
Sempach, the third
great victory won by the Confederates, shares with the less famous fight of Arbedo a peculiar interest. Both were attempts to break the
Swiss column by the adoption of a similar method of attack to that which
rendered it so formidable. Leopold the Proud, remembering no doubt the
powerlessness of the horsemen which had been shown at Laupen,
made his knights dismount, as Edward of England had done with such splendid
results thirty years earlier. Perhaps he may have borne in mind a similar order
given by his ancestor the Emperor Albert, when he fought the Bavarians at Hasenbühl in 1298. At any rate the duke awaited the enemy’s
attack with his 4000 mailed men-at-arms formed in one massive column, — their
lances levelled in front, — ready to meet the Swiss with tactics similar to
their own, and with the advantage which the superior protection of armour gave
in a contest otherwise equal. Leopold had also posted in reserve a considerable
body of foot and horse, who were to fall on the flanks and rear of the
Confederates, when they were fully engaged in front.
Arrayed in a
single deep column (Keil), the Swiss came rushing down from the hills with
their usual impetuosity, the horns of Uri and Unterwalden braying in their
midst and the banners of the four Forest Cantons waving above them. The first
shock between the two masses was tremendous, but when it was ended the
Confederates found themselves thrust back. Their whole front rank had gone
down, and the Austrian column was unshaken. In a moment they rallied; Uri
replaced Lucern as the head of the phalanx, and again
they dashed at the mail-clad line before them. But the second charge was no
more successful than the first : Schwytz had to
succeed Uri, and again Unterwalden took the place of Schwytz,
and yet nothing more was effected. The Austrians stood victorious, while in
front of them a long bank of Swiss corpses lay heaped. At the same moment the
duke's reserve began to move, with the intention of encircling the Confederate
flank. The critical moment had come; without some desperate effort the day was
lost : but while the Swiss were raging along the line of bristling points,
vainly hacking at the spears which pierced them, the necessary impulse was at
last given. To detail once more Winkelried's heroic death is unnecessary : every one knows how the Austrian column was broken, how in
the close combat which followed the lance and long horseman's sword proved no
match for the halberd, the battle-axe and the cutlass, how the duke and his
knights, weighed down by their heavy armour, neither could nor would flee, and
fell to a man around their banner.
Historians tell
us all this, but what they forget to impress upon us is that, in spite of his
failure, duke Leopold was nearer to success than any other commander, one
exception alone being made, who faced the Swiss down to the day of Marignano.
His idea of meeting the shock of the Swiss phalanx with a heavier shock of his
own was feasible. His mistakes in detail ruined a plan which in itself was
good. The first fault was that he halted to receive the enemy's charge, and did
not advance to meet it. Thus he lost most of the advantage which the superior
weight of his men would have given in the clashing of the columns. He was
equally misguided in making no attempt to press on the Confederates when their
first three charges had failed, and so allowing them time to rally. Moreover he
made no adequate use of his mounted squadron in reserve, his light troops, and
the artillery, which we know that he had with him. If these had been employed
on the Swiss flanks at the proper moment, they would have decided the day. But
Leopold only used his artillery to open the combat, and kept his crossbowmen
and slingers in the rear, probably out of that feudal superstition which
demanded that the knight should have the most important part in the battle.
Neglecting these precautions, he lost the day, but only after some of the
hardest fighting which the Swiss ever experienced.
What a better
general could do by the employment of Leopold’s tactical experiment was shown
thirty-seven years later on the field of Arbedo. On
that occasion Carmagnola the Milanese general, — who then met the Confederates
for the first time, — opened the engagement with a cavalry charge. Observing
its entire failure, the experienced condottiere at once resorted to another
form of attack. He dismounted the whole of his 6000 men-at-arms, and launched
them in a single column against the Swiss phalanx. The enemy, a body of 4000
men from Uri, Unterwalden, Zug, and Lucern, were
mainly halberdiers, the pikemen and crossbowmen forming only a third of their
force. The two masses met, and engaged in a fair duel between lance and sword
on the one hand and pike and halberd on the other. The impetus of the larger
force bore down that of the smaller, and, in spite of the desperate fighting of
their enemies, the Milanese began to gain ground. So hardly were the
Confederates now pressed that the Schultheiss of Lucern even thought of surrender, and planted his halberd
in the ground in token of submission. Carmagnola, however, heated with the
fight, cried out that men who gave no quarter should receive none, and
continued his advance. He was on the very point of victory, when a new Swiss
force suddenly appeared in his rear. Believing them to be the contingents of
Zurich, Schwytz, Glarus, and Appenzell, which he knew
to be at no great distance, Carmagnola drew off his men and began to reform.
But in reality the new-comers were only a band of 600 foragers; they made no
attack; while the Swiss main-body took advantage of the relaxation of the
pressure to retire in good order. They had lost 400 men according to their own
acknowledgment, many more if Italian accounts are to be received. Carmagnola's
loss, though numerically larger, bore no such proportion to his whole force,
and had indeed been mainly incurred in the unsuccessful cavalry charge which opened
the action.
From the
results of Sempach and Arbedo it seems natural to draw the conclusion that a judicious employment of
dismounted men-at-arms might have led to success, if properly combined with the
use of other arms. The experiment, however, was never repeated by the enemies
of the Swiss; indeed almost the only consequence which we can attribute to it
is a decree of the Council of Lucern, that since
things had not gone altogether well with the Confederates a larger proportion
of the army was in future to be furnished with the pike, a weapon which, unlike
the halberd, could contend on superior terms with the lance.
(Sismondi, who
writes entirely from Swiss sources as to this fight, gives a very different
impression from Machiavelli. The later cites Arbedo as the best known check received by the Swiss, and puts their loss down at
several thousands. Müller evidently tries to minimise the check; but we may
judge from our knowledge of Swiss character how great must have been the
pressure required to make a Confederate officer think of surrender. Forty-four
members of the Cantonal councils of Lucern fell in
the fight : The contingent of Lucern had crossed the
lake of the four Cantons in ten large barges, when setting out on this
expedition : it returned in two! These facts, acknowledged by the Swiss
themselves, seem to show that the figure of 400 men for their loss is placed
absurdly low).
Putting aside
the two battles which we have last examined, we may say that for the first 150
years of their career the Swiss were so fortunate as never to meet either with
a master of the art of war, or with any new form of tactical efficiency which
could rival their own phalanx. It was still with the mailed horsemen or the
motley and undisciplined infantry-array of the middle ages that they had to
deal. Their tactics had been framed for successful conflict with such forces,
and continued to preserve an ascendancy over them. The free lances of Enguerrand de Coucy, the burghers
and nobles of Swabia, the knights who followed Frederick or Leopold or
Sigismund of Hapsburg, were none of them exponents of a new system, and served
each in their turn to demonstrate yet more clearly the superiority of the
Confederates in military skill.
Even the most
dangerous attack ever aimed against Switzerland, the invasion by the ‘Armagnac’
mercenaries of the Dauphin Louis in 1444, was destined to result in the
increase of the warlike reputation of its soldiery. The battle of St. Jacob,
mad and unnecessary though it was, might serve as an example to deter the
boldest enemy from meddling with men who preferred annihilation to retreat.
Possessed by the single idea that their phalanx could bear down any obstacle,
the Confederates deliberately crossed the Birs in
face of an army of fifteen times their strength. They attacked it, broke its
centre, and were then surrounded by its overwhelming numbers. Compelled to form
the hedgehog in order to resist the tremendous cavalry charges directed against
them, they remained rooted to the spot for the remainder of the day. The
Dauphin launched squadron after squadron at them, but each in its turn was
hurled back in disorder. In the intervals between these onsets the French light
troops poured in their missiles, but though the clump of pikes and halberds grew
smaller it still remained impenetrable. Not until the evening was the fighting
ended, and then 6000 Armagnacs lay dead around the heap of Swiss corpses in the
centre. Louis saw that a few such victories would destroy his whole army, and
turned back into Alsace, leaving Switzerland unmolested.
From that day
the Confederates were able to reckon their reputation for obstinate and
invincible courage, as one of the chief causes which gave them political
importance. The generals and armies who afterwards faced them, went into battle
without full confidence in themselves. It was no light matter to engage with an
enemy who would not retire before any superiority in numbers, who was always
ready for the fight, who would neither give nor take quarter. The enemies of
the Swiss found these considerations the reverse of inspiriting before a combat
: it may almost be said that they came into the field expecting a defeat, and
therefore earned one. This fact is especially noticeable in the great
Burgundian war. If Charles the Rash himself was unawed by the warlike renown of
his enemies, the same cannot be said of his troops. A large portion of his
motley army could not be trusted in any dangerous crisis : the German, Italian,
and Savoyard mercenaries knew too well the horrors of Swiss warfare, and shrank
instinctively from the shock of the phalanx of pikes. The duke might range his
men in order of battle, but he could not be sure that they would fight. The old
proverb that “God was on the side of the Confederates” was ever ringing in
their ears, and so they were half beaten before a blow was struck. Charles had
endeavoured to secure the efficiency of his army, by enlisting from each
war-like nation of Europe the class of troops for which it was celebrated. The
archers of England, the arquebusiers of Germany, the light cavalry of Italy,
the pikemen of Flanders, marched side by side with the feudal chivalry of his
Burgundian vassals. But the duke had forgotten that, in assembling so many
nationalities under his banner, he had thrown away the cohesion which is
all-important in battle. Without mutual confidence or certainty that each
comrade would do his best for the common cause, the soldiery would not stand
firm. Granson was lost merely because the nerve of
the infantry failed them at the decisive moment, although they had not yet been
engaged.
In that fight
the unskilful generalship of the Swiss had placed the
tactical advantages on the side of Charles : he had both outflanked them and
attacked one division of their army before the others came up. He had, however,
to learn that an army superior in morale and homogeneity, and thoroughly
knowing its weapon, may be victorious in spite of all disadvantages. Owing to
their eagerness for battle the Confederate vanguard ('vorhut'),
composed of the troops of Bern, Freiburg, and Schwytz,
had far outstripped the remainder of the force. Coming swiftly over the hill
side in one of their usual deep columns, they found the whole Burgundian army
spread out before them in battle array on the plain of Granson.
As they reached the foot of the hill they at once saw that the duke's cavalry
was preparing to attack them. Old experience had made them callous to such
sights : facing outwards the column awaited the onset. The first charge was
made by the cavalry of Charles’ left wing: it failed, although the gallant lord
of Chateauguyon, who led it, forced his horse among
the pikes and died at the foot of the Standard of Schwytz.
Next the duke himself led on the lances of his guard, a force who had long been
esteemed the best troops in Europe : they did all that brave men could, but
were dashed back in confusion from the steady line of spear-points. The Swiss
now began to move forward into the plain, eager to try the effect of the impact
of their phalanx on the Burgundian line. To meet this advance Charles
determined to draw back his centre, and when the enemy advanced against it, to
wheel both his wings round upon their flank. The manoeuvre appeared feasible,
as the remainder of the Confederate army was not yet in sight. Orders were
accordingly sent to the infantry directing them to retire; while at the same
time the reserve was sent to strengthen the left wing, the body with which the
duke intended to deliver his most crushing stroke. The Burgundian army was in
fact engaged in repeating the movement which had given Hannibal victory at
Cannae : their fortune, however, was very different. At the moment when the
centre had begun to draw back, and when the wings were not yet engaged, the
heads of the two Swiss columns, which had not before appeared, came over the
brow of Mont Aubert; moving rapidly towards the battlefield with the usual
majestic steadiness of their formation. This of course would have frustrated
Charles’ scheme for surrounding the first phalanx; the échelon of divisions, which was the normal Swiss array, being now established. The
aspect of the fight, however, was changed even more suddenly than might have,
been expected. Connecting the retreat of their centre with the advance of the
Swiss, the whole of the infantry of the Burgundian wings broke and fled, long
before the Confederate masses had come into contact with them. It was a sheer
panic, caused by the fact that the duke's army had no cohesion or confidence in
itself; the various corps in the moment of danger could not rely on each others’ steadiness, and seeing what they imagined to
be the rout of their centre, had no further thought of endeavouring to turn the
fortune of the day. It may be said that no general could have foreseen such a
disgraceful flight; but at the same time the duke may be censured for
attempting a delicate manoeuvre with an army destitute of homogeneity, and in
face of an enterprising opponent. “Strategical movements to the rear” have
always a tendency to degenerate into undisguised retreats, unless the men are
perfectly in hand, and should therefore be avoided as much as possible. Granson was for the Swiss only one more example of the
powerlessness of the best cavalry against their columns : of infantry fighting
there was none at all.
In the second
great defeat which he suffered at the hands of the Confederates the duke was
guilty of far more flagrant faults in his generalship.
His army was divided into three parts, which in the event of a flank attack
could bring each other no succour. The position which he had chosen and
fortified for the covering of his siege-operations, only protected them against
an assault from the south-east. Still more strange was it that the Burgundian
light troops were held back so close to the main-body, that the duke had no
accurate knowledge of the movements of his enemies till they appeared in front
of his lines. It was thus possible for the Confederate army to march, under
cover of the Wood of Morat, right across the front of
the two corps which virtually composed the centre and left of Charles’ array.
As it was well known that the enemy were in the immediate vicinity, it is hard
to conceive how the duke could be content to wait in battle-order for six
hours, without sending out troops to obtain information. It is nevertheless
certain that when the Swiss did not show themselves, he sent back his main-body
to camp, and left the carefully entrenched position in the charge of a few
thousand men. Hardly had this fault been committed, when the Confederate
vanguard appeared on the outskirts of the Wood of Morat,
and marched straight on the palisade. The utterly inadequate garrison made a
bold endeavour to hold their ground, but in a few minutes were driven down the
reverse slope of the hill, into the arms of the troops who were coming up in
hot haste from the camp to their succour. The Swiss following hard in their
rear pushed the disordered mass before them, and crushed in detail each
supporting corps as it straggled up to attack them. The greater part of the
Burgundian infantry turned and fled, — with far more excuse than at Granson. Many of the cavalry corps endeavoured to change
the fortune of the day by desperate but isolated charges, in which they met the
usual fate of those who endeavoured to break a Swiss phalanx. The fighting,
however, was soon at an end, and mere slaughter took its place. While the van
and main-body of the Confederates followed the flying crowd who made off in the
direction of Avenches, the rear came down on the
Italian infantry, who had formed the besieging force south of the town of Morat. These unfortunates, whose retreat was cut off by the
direction which the flight of the main-body, had taken, were trodden under foot
or pushed into the lake by the impact of the Swiss column, and entirely
annihilated, scarcely a single man escaping out of a force of six thousand. The
Savoyard corps, under Romont, who had composed the
duke's extreme left, and were posted to the north of Morat;
escaped by a hazardous march which took them round the rear of the
Confederates.
Though Charles
had done his best to prepare a victory for his enemies by the faultiness of his
dispositions, the management of the Swiss army at Morat was the cause of the completeness of his overthrow. A successful attack on the
Burgundian right would cut off the retreat of the two isolated corps which
composed the duke’s centre and left; the Confederate leaders therefore
determined to assault this point, although to reach it they had to march
straight across their opponent's front. Favoured by his astonishing oversight
in leaving their march unobserved, they were able to surprise him, and destroy
his army in detail, before it could manage to form even a rudimentary line of
battle.
At Nancy the
Swiss commanders again displayed considerable skill in their dispositions : the
main battle and the small rear column held back and attracted the attention of
the Burgundian army, while the van executed a turning movement through the
woods, which brought it out on the enemy's flank, and made his position
perfectly untenable. The duke’s troops assailed in front and on their right at
the same moment, and having to deal with very superior numbers, were not merely
defeated but dispersed or destroyed. Charles himself refusing to fly, and fighting
desperately to cover the retreat of his scattered forces, was surrounded, and
cleft through helmet and skull by the tremendous blow of a Swiss halberd
The generalship displayed at Nancy and Morat was, however, exceptional among the Confederates. After those battles, just as
before, we find that their victories continued to be won by a headlong and
desperate onset, rather than by the display of any great strategical ability.
In the Swabian war of 1499 the credit of their successes falls to the troops rather
than to their leaders. The stormings of the fortified
camps of Hard and Malsheide were wonderful examples
of the power of unshrinking courage; but on each occasion the Swiss officers
seem to have considered that they were discharging their whole duty, when they
led their men straight against the enemy’s entrenchments. At Frastenz the day was won by a desperate charge up the face
of a cliff which the Tyrolese had left unguarded, as being inaccessible. Even
at Dornach — the last battle fought on Swiss soil
against an invader till the eighteenth century — the fortune of the fight
turned on the superiority of the Confederate to the Swabian pikemen man for
man, and on the fact that the lances of Gueldres could not break the flank column by their most determined onset. Of manoeuvring
there appears to have been little, of strategical planning none at all; it was
considered sufficient to launch the phalanx against the enemy, and trust to its
power of bearing down every obstacle that came in its way.
(4) Causes of
the Decline of Swiss Ascendency
Their disregard
for the higher and more delicate problems of military science, was destined to
enfeeble the power and destroy the reputation of the Confederates. At a time
when the great struggle in Italy was serving as a school for the soldiery of
other European nations, they alone refused to learn. Broad theories, drawn from
the newly-discovered works of the ancients, were being co-ordinated with the
modern experience of professional officers, and were developing into an art of
war far superior to anything known in mediaeval times. Scientific engineers and
artillerists had begun to modify the conditions of warfare, and feudal
tradition was everywhere discarded. New forms of military efficiency, such as
the sword-and-buckler men of Spain, the Stradiot light cavalry, the German ‘black bands’ of musketeers, were coming to the
front. The improvement of the firearms placed in the hands of infantry was only
less important than the superior mobility which was given to field artillery.
The Swiss,
however, paid no attention to these changes; the world around them might alter,
but they would hold fast to the tactics of their ancestors. At first, indeed,
their arms were still crowned with success : they were seen in Italy, as in
more northern lands, to march with ten or fifteen thousand pikemen against any
number of horse, and to win a general opinion of their excellence from the many
remarkable services they performed. They enjoyed for a time supreme importance,
and left their mark on the military history of every nation of central and
southern Europe. But it was impossible that a single stereotyped tactical
method, applied by men destitute of any broad and scientific knowledge of the
art of war, should continue to assert an undisputed ascendancy. The victories
of the Swiss set every officer of capacity and versatile talent searching for
an efficient way of dealing with the onset of the phalanx. Such a search was
rendered comparatively easy by the fact that the old feudal cavalry and the
worthless mediaeval infantry were being rapidly replaced by disciplined troops,
men capable of keeping cool and collected even before the desperate rush of the
Confederate pikemen. The standing army of Charles of Burgundy had been rendered
inefficient by its want of homogeneity and cohesion, as well as by the bad generalship of its leader. The standing armies which fought
in Italy thirty years later were very different bodies. Although still raised
from among various nations, they were united by the bonds of old comradeship,
of esprit de corps, of professional pride, or of confidence in some
favourite general. The Swiss had therefore to face troops of a far higher
military value than they had ever before encountered.
The first
experiment tried against the Confederates was that of the Emperor Maximilian,
who raised in Germany corps of pikemen and halberdiers, trained to act in a
manner exactly similar to that of their enemies. The 'Landsknechts' soon won
for themselves a reputation only second to that of the Swiss, whom they boldly
met in many a bloody field. The conflicts between them were rendered obstinate
by military as well as national rivalry: the Confederates being indignant that
any troops should dare to face them with their own peculiar tactics, while the
Germans were determined to show that they were not inferior in courage to their
Alpine kinsmen. The shock of the contending columns was therefore tremendous.
The two bristling lines of pikes crossed, and the leading files were thrust upon
each other’s weapons by the irresistible pressure from behind. Often the whole
front rank of each phalanx went down in the first onset, but their comrades
stepped forward over their bodies to continue the fight. When the masses had
been for some time pushing against each other, their order became confused and
their pikes interlocked : then was the time for the halberdiers to act. The
columns opened out to let them pass, or they rushed round from the rear, and
threw themselves into the melée. This was the most deadly epoch of the
strife : the combatants mowed each other down with fearful rapidity. Their
ponderous weapons allowed of little fencing and parrying, and inflicted wounds
which were almost invariably mortal. Everyone who missed his blow, or stumbled
over a fallen comrade, or turned to fly, was a doomed man. Quarter was neither
expected nor given. Of course these fearful hand-to-hand combats could not be
of great duration; one party had ere long to give ground, and suffer the most
fearful losses in its retreat. It was in a struggle of this kind that the
Landsknechts lost a full half of their strength, when the Swiss bore them down
at Novara. Even, however, when they were victorious, the Confederates found
that their military ascendancy was growing less : they could no longer sweep
the enemy from the field by a single unchecked onset, but were confronted by
troops who were ready to turn their own weapons against them, and who required
the hardest pressure before they would give ground. In spite of their defeats
the Landsknechts kept the field, and finally took their revenge when the Swiss
recoiled in disorder from the fatal trenches of Bicocca.
There was,
however, an enemy even more formidable than the German, who was to appear upon
the scene at a slightly later date. The Spanish infantry of Gonsalvo de Cordova displayed once more to the military world the strength of the
tactics of old Rome. They were armed, like the men of the ancient legion, with
the short thrusting sword and buckler, and wore the steel cap, breast- and
back-plates and greaves. Thus they were far stronger in their defensive armour
than the Swiss whom they were about to encounter. When the pikeman and the
swordsman first met in 1502, under the walls of Barletta, the old problem of Pydna and Cynoscephalae was once more worked out. A phalanx
as solid and efficient as that of Philip the Macedonian was met by troops whose
tactics were those of the legionaries of Emilius Paullus. Then, as in an earlier age, the wielders of the
shorter weapon prevailed. When they came to engage, the Swiss at first pressed
so hard on their enemy with the pike, that they opened out their ranks; but the
Spaniards, under the cover of their bucklers, nimbly rushed in upon them with
their swords, and laid about them so furiously, that they made a great
slaughter of the Swiss, and gained a complete victory. The vanquished, in fact,
suffered at the hands of the Spaniard the treatment which they themselves had
inflicted on the Austrians at Sempach. The bearer of
the longer weapon becomes helpless when his opponent has closed with him,
whether the arms concerned be lance and halberd or pike and sword. The moment a
breach had been made in a Macedonian or Swiss phalanx the great length, of
their spears became their ruin. There was nothing to do but to drop them, and
in the combat which then ensued troops using the sword alone, and without
defensive armour, were at a hopeless disadvantage in attacking men furnished
with the buckler as well as the sword, and protected by a more complete
panoply. Whatever may be the result of a duel between sword and spear alone, it
is certain that when a light shield is added to the swordsman’s equipment, he
at once obtains the ascendancy. The buckler serves to turn aside the spear-point,
and then the thrusting weapon is free to do its work. It was, therefore,
natural that when Spanish and Swiss infantry met, the former should in almost
every case obtain success. The powerlessness of the pike, however, was most
strikingly displayed at a battle in which the fortune of the day had not been
favourable to Spain. At the fight of Ravenna Gaston de Foix had succeeded in
driving Don Ramon de Cardona from his intrenchments, and was endeavouring to
secure the fruits of victory by a vigorous pursuit. To intercept the retreat of
the Spanish infantry, who were retiring in good order, Gaston sent forward the
pikemen of Jacob Empser, then serving as auxiliaries
beneath the French banner. These troops accordingly fell on the re- treating
column and attempted to arrest its march. The Spaniards, however, turned at
once and fell furiously on the Germans, rushing at the pikes, or throwing
themselves on the ground and slipping below the points, so that they darted in
among the legs of the pikemen, — a manoeuvre which reminds us of the conduct of
the Soudanese Arabs at El Teb. In this way they
succeeded in closing with their opponents, and made such good use of their
swords that not a German would have escaped, had not the French horse come up
to their rescue. This fight was typical of many more, in which during the first
quarter of the sixteenth century the sword and buckler were proved to be able
to master the pike. It may, therefore, be asked why, in the face of these
facts, the Swiss weapon remained in use, while the Spanish infantry finally
discarded their peculiar tactics. To this question the answer is found in the
consideration that the sword was not suited for repulsing a cavalry charge,
while the pike continued to be used for that purpose down to the invention - of
the bayonet in the end of the seventeenth century. Machiavelli was, from his
studies in Roman antiquity, the most devoted admirer of the Spanish system,
which seemed to bring back the days of the ancient legion. Yet even he conceded
that the pike, a weapon which he is on every occasion ready to disparage, must
be retained by a considerable portion of those ideal armies for whose guidance
he drew up his ‘Art of War’. He could think of no other arm which could resist
a charge of cavalry steadily pressed home, and was therefore obliged to combine
pikemen with his ‘velites’ and ‘buckler-men’.
The rapid
development of the arts of the engineer and artillerist aimed another heavy
blow at the Swiss supremacy. The many-sided energy of the Renaissance period
not unfrequently made the professional soldier a scholar, and set him to adapt
the science of the ancients to the requirements of modern warfare. The most
cursory study of Vegetius Hyginus or Vitruvius, all of them authors much
esteemed at the time, would suffice to show the strength of the Roman fortified
camp. Accordingly the art of Castramentation revived,
and corps of pioneers were attached to every army. It became common to intrench
not merely permanent positions, but camps which were to be held for a few days
only. Advantage was taken of favourable sites, and lines of greater or less
strength with emplacements for artillery were constructed for the protection of
the army which felt itself inferior in the field. Many of the greatest battles
of the Italian wars were fought in and around such positions; Ravenna, Bicocca,
and Pavia are obvious examples. Still more frequently a general threw himself
with all his forces into a fortified town and covered it with outworks and
redoubts till it resembled an intrenched camp rather than a mere fortress. Such
a phase in war was most disadvantageous to the Swiss : even the most desperate
courage cannot carry men over stone walls or through flooded ditches, if they
neglect the art which teaches them how to approach such obstacles. The
Confederates in their earlier days had never displayed much skill in attacking
places of strength; and now, when the enemy's position was as frequently behind
defences as in the open plain, they refused to adapt their tactics to the altered
circumstances. Occasionally, as for example at the storming of the outworks of
Genoa in 1507, they were still able to sweep the enemy before them by the mere
vehemence of their onset. But more frequently disaster followed the headlong
rush delivered against lines held by an adequate number of steady troops. Of
this the most striking instance was seen in 1522, when the Swiss columns
attempted to dislodge the enemy from the fortified park of Bicocca. Under a
severe fire from the Spanish hackbutmen they crossed
several hedges and flooded trenches, which covered the main position of the
imperialists. But when they came to the last ditch and bank, along which were
ranged the landsknechts of Frundsberg, they found an
obstacle which they could not pass. Leaping into the deep excavation the front
ranks endeavoured to scramble up its further slope; but every man who made the
attempt fell beneath the pike-thrusts of the Germans, who, standing on a higher
level in their serried ranks, kept back the incessant rushes with the greatest
steadiness. Three thousand corpses were left in the ditch before the Swiss
would desist from their hopeless undertaking; it was an attack which, for
misplaced daring, rivals the British assault on Ticonderoga in 1758.
The improved
artillery of the early sixteenth century worked even more havoc with the
Confederates. Of all formations the phalanx is the easiest at which to aim, and
the one which suffers most loss from each cannon ball which strikes it. A
single shot ploughing through its serried ranks might disable twenty men, yet
the Swiss persisted in rushing straight for the front of batteries and storming
them in spite of their murderous fire. Such conduct might conceivably have been
justifiable in the fifteenth century, when the clumsy guns of the day could
seldom deliver more than a single discharge between the moment at which the
enemy came within range and that at which he reached their muzzles. Scientific
artillerists, however, such as Pietro Navarro and Alphonso D'Este,
made cannon a real power in battles by increasing its mobility and the rapidity
of its fire. None the less the Confederates continued to employ the front
attack, which had become four or five times more dangerous in the space of
forty years. A fearful lesson as to the recklessness of such tactics was given
them at Marignano, where, in spite of the gallantry of the French gendarmerie,
it was the artillery which really won the day. The system which Francis’
advisers there employed was to deliver charge after charge of cavalry on the
flanks of the Swiss columns, while the artillery played upon them from the
front. The onsets of the cavalry, though they never succeeded in breaking the
phalanx, forced it to halt and form the hedgehog. The men at arms came on in
bodies of about five hundred strong, one taking up the fight when the first had
been beaten off. In this way more than thirty fine charges were delivered, and
no one will in future be able to say that cavalry are of no more use than hares
in armour, wrote the king to his mother.
Of course these
attacks would by themselves have been fruitless; it was the fact that they
checked the advance of the Swiss, and obliged them to stand halted under
artillery fire that settled the result of the battle. At last the columns had
suffered so severely that they gave up the attempt to advance, and retired in
good order, unbroken but diminished by a half in their size.
Last but not
least important among the causes of the decline of the military ascendancy of
the Confederates, was the continual deterioration of their discipline. While
among other nations the commanders were becoming more and more masters of the
art of war, among the Swiss they were growing more and more the slaves of their
own soldiery. The division of their authority had always been detrimental to
the development of strategical skill, but it now began to make even tactical
arrangements impossible. The army looked upon itself as a democracy entitled to
direct the proceedings of its ministry, rather than a body under military
discipline. Filled with a blind confidence in the invincibility of their onset,
they calmly neglected the orders which appeared to them superfluous. On several
occasions they delivered an attack on the front of a position which it had been
intended to turn; on others they began the conflict, although they had been
directed to wait for the arrival of other divisions before giving battle. If
things were not going well they threw away even the semblance of obedience to
their leaders. Before Bicocca the cry was raised, “Where are the officers, the
pensioners, the double-pay men? Let them come out and earn their money fairly
for once : they shall all fight in the front rank today”. What was even more
astonishing than the arrogance of the demand, was the fact that it was obeyed.
The commanders and captains stepped forward and formed the head of the leading
column; hardly one of them survived the fight, and Winkelried of Unterwalden,
the leader of the vanguard, was the first to fall under the lances of Frundsberg’s landsknechts. What was to be expected from an
army in which the men gave the orders and the officers executed them? Brute
strength and heedless courage were the only qualities now employed by the
Swiss, while against them were pitted the scientific generals of the new school
of war. The result was what might have been expected : the pike tactics, which
had been the admiration of Europe, were superseded, because they had become
stereotyped, and the Swiss lost their proud position as the most formidable infantry
in the world.
Chapter
VI.
The
English and their Enemies. A.D. 1272-1485.
From
the accession of Edward I to the end of the War of the Roses.
The use of the
long-bow is as much the key to the successes of the English armies in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as that of the pike is to the successes of
the Swiss. Dissimilar as were the characters of the two weapons, and the
national tactics to which their use led, they were both employed for the same
end of terminating the ascendancy in war of the mailed horseman of the feudal regime.
It is certainly not the least curious part of the military history of the
period, that the commanders who made such good use of their archery, had no
conception of the tendencies of their action. Edward the Black Prince and his
father regarded themselves as the flower of chivalry, and would have been
horrified had they realised that their own tactics were going far to make
chivalrous warfare impossible. Such, however, was the case : that unscientific
kind of combat which resembled a huge tilting match could not continue, if one
side persisted in bringing into the field auxiliaries who could prevent their
opponents from approaching near enough to break a lance. The needs of the
moment, however, prevented the English commanders being troubled by such
thoughts; they made the best use of the material at their disposal, and if they
thus found themselves able to beat the enemy, they were satisfied.
It is not till
the last quarter of the thirteenth century that we find the long-bow taking up
its position as the national weapon of England. In the armies of our Norman and
Angevin kings archers were indeed to be found, but they formed neither the most
numerous nor the most effective part of the array. On this side of the Channel,
just as beyond it, the supremacy of the mailed horseman was still unquestioned.
It is indeed noteworthy that the theory which attributes to the Normans the
introduction of the long-bow is difficult to substantiate. If we are to trust
the Bayeux Tapestry — whose accuracy is in other matters thoroughly borne out
by all contemporary evidence — the weapon of William’s archers was in no way
different to that already known in England, and used by a few of the English in
the fight of Senlac. It is the short bow, drawn to the breast and not to the
ear. The bowmen who are occasionally mentioned during the succeeding century,
as, for example, those present at the Battle of the Standard, do not appear to
form any very important part of the national force. Nothing can be more
conclusive as to the insignificance of the weapon than the fact that it is not
mentioned at all in the “Assize of Arms” of 1181. In the reign of Henry II,
therefore, we may fairly conclude that the bow did not form the proper weapon
of any class of English society. A similar deduction is suggested by Richard
Coeur de Lion’s predilection for the arbalest : it is impossible that he should
have introduced that weapon as a new and superior arm, if he had been
acquainted with the splendid long-bow of the fourteenth century. It is evident
that the bow must always preserve an advantage in rapidity of fire over the
arbalest; the latter must therefore have been considered by Richard to surpass
in range and penetrating power. But nothing is better established than the fact
that the trained archer of the Hundred Years’ War was able to beat the
cross-bowmen on both these points. It is, therefore, rational to conclude that
the weapon superseded by the arbalest was merely the old short-bow, which had
been in constant use since Saxon times.
However this
may be, the cross-bowmen continued to occupy the first place among light troops
during the reigns of Richard and John. The former monarch devised for them a
system of tactics, in which the pavise was made to
play a prominent part. The latter entertained great numbers both of horse- and
foot-arbalesters among those mercenary bands who were such a scourge to England.
It would appear that the Barons, in their contest with John, suffered greatly
from having no adequate provision of infantry armed with missiles to oppose the
cross-bowmen of Fawkes de Breauté, and his fellows.
Even in the reign of Henry III, the epoch in which the long-bow begins to come
into use, the arbalest was still reckoned the more effective arm. At the battle
of Taillebourg, in 1242, a corps of 700 men armed
with it were considered to be the flower of the English infantry.
To trace the
true origin of the long-bow is not easy : there are reasons for believing that
it may have been borrowed from the South Welsh, who were certainly provided
with it as early as AD 1150. Against this derivation, however, may be pleaded
the fact that in the first half of the thirteenth century it appears to have
been in greater vogue in the northern than in the western counties of England.
As a national weapon it is first accepted in the Assize of Arms of 1252,
wherein all holders of 40s. in land or nine marks in chattels are desired to
provide themselves with sword, dagger, bow and arrows. Con- temporary documents
often speak of the obligation of various manors to provide the king with one or
more archers when he makes an expedition against the Welsh. It is curious to observe
that even as late as 1281 the preference for the cross-bow seems to have been
kept up, the wages of its bearer being considerably more than those of the
archer.
To Edward I the
long-bow owes its original rise into favour : that monarch, like his grandson
and great-grandson, was an able soldier, and capable of devising new expedients
in war. His long experience in Welsh campaigns led him to introduce a
scientific use of archery, much like that which William the Conqueror had
employed at Hastings. We are informed that it was first put in practice in a
combat fought against Prince Llewellin at Orewin Bridge, and afterwards copied by the Earl of Warwick in another engagement
during the year 1295. The Welsh, on the earl's approach, set themselves fronting
his force with exceeding long spears, which, being suddenly turned toward the
earl and his company, with their ends placed in the earth and their points
upward, broke the force of the English cavalry. But the earl well provided
against them, by placing archers between his men-at-arms, so that by these
missive weapons those who held the lances were put to rout.
The battle of
Falkirk, however (1298), is the first engagement of real importance in which
the bowmen, properly supplemented by cavalry, played the leading part. Its
circumstances, indeed, bore such striking witness to the power of the arrow,
that it could not fail to serve as a lesson to English commanders. The Scots of
the Lowlands, who formed the army of Wallace, consisted mainly of spearmen; armed,
like the Swiss, with a pike of many feet in length. They had in their ranks a
small body of horse, a few hundred in number, and a certain proportion of
archers, mainly drawn from the Ettrick and Selkirk district. Wallace, having
selected an excellent position behind a marsh, formed his spearmen in four
great masses (or ‘schiltrons’, as the Scotch called
them) of circular form, ready to face outward in any direction. The light
troops formed a line in the intervals of these columns, while the cavalry were
placed in reserve. Edward came on with his horsemen in three divisions, and his
archers disposed between them. The foremost English ‘battle’, that of the Earl
Marshal, rode into the morass, was stopped by it, and suffered severely from
the Scotch missile weapons. The second division, commanded by the Bishop of
Durham, observing this check, rode round the flank of the marsh, in order to
turn Wallace’s position. The small body of Scotch cavalry endeavoured to stay
their advance, but were driven completely off the field by superior numbers.
Then the Bishop’s horsemen charged the hostile line from the rear. The
squadrons opposed to the light troops succeeded in riding them down, as Wallace’s
archers were only armed with the short-bow, and were not particularly skilled
in its use. Those of the English, however, who faced the masses of pikemen
received a sanguinary check, and were thrown back in disorder. The Bishop had
therefore to await the arrival of the King, who was leading the infantry and
the remainder of the cavalry round the end of the marsh. When this had been
done, Edward brought up his bowmen close to the Scotch masses, who were unable
to reply (as their own light troops had been driven away) or to charge, on
account of the nearness of the English men-at-arms. Concentrating the rain of
arrows on particular points in the columns, the king fairly riddled the Scotch
ranks, and then sent in his cavalry with a sudden impetus. The plan succeeded,
the shaken parts of the masses were pierced, and the knights, having once got
within the pikes, made a fearful slaughter of the enemy. The moral of the fight
was evident : cavalry could not beat the Scotch tactics, but archers
supplemented by horsemen could easily accomplish the required task.
Accordingly, for the next two centuries, the characteristics of the fight of
Falkirk were continually repeated whenever the English and Scotch met. Halidon
Hill, Neville's Cross, Homildon, Flodden, were all
variations on the same theme. The steady but slowly-moving masses of the
Lowland infantry fell a sacrifice to their own persistent bravery, when they
staggered on in a vain endeavour to reach the line of archers, flanked by
men-at-arms, whom the English commander opposed to them. The bowman might boast
with truth that he carried twelve Scots’ lives at his girdle; he had but to
launch his shaft into the easy target of the great surging mass of pike-men,
and it was sure to do execution.
Bannockburn,
indeed, forms a notable exception to the general rule. Its result, however, was
due not to an attempt to discard the tactics of Falkirk, but to an unskilful
application of them. The forces of Robert Bruce, much like those of Wallace in
composition, consisted of 40,000 pikemen, a certain proportion of light troops,
and less than 1000 cavalry. They were drawn up in a very compact position,
flanked by marshy ground to the right, and to the left by a quantity of small
pits destined to arrest the charge of the English cavalry. Edward II refrained
from any attempt to turn Bruce's army, and by endeavouring to make 100,000 men
cover no more space in frontage than 40,000, cramped his array, and made
manoeuvres impossible. His most fatal mistake, however, was to place all his
archers in the front line, without any protecting body of horsemen. The arrows
were already falling among the Scotch columns before the English cavalry had
fully arrived upon the field. Bruce at once saw his opportunity: his small body
of men-at-arms was promptly put in motion against the bowmen. A front attack on
them would of course have been futile, but a flank charge was rendered possible
by the absence of the English squadrons, which ought to have covered the wings.
Riding rapidly round the edge of the morass, the Scotch horse fell on the
uncovered line, rolled it up from end to end, and wrought fearful damage by
their unexpected onset. The archers were so maltreated that they took no
further effective part in the battle. Enraged at the sudden rout of his first
line, Edward flung his great masses of cavalry on the comparatively narrow
front of the Scotch army. The steady columns received them, and drove them back
again and again with ease. At last every man-at-arms had been thrown into the
melée, and the splendid force of English horsemen had become a mere mob,
surging helplessly in front of the enemy's line, and executing partial and
ineffective charges on a cramped terrain. Finally, their spirit for fighting
was exhausted, and when a body of camp-followers appeared on the hill behind
Bruce’s position, a rumour spread around that reinforcements were arriving for
the Scots. The English were already hopeless of success, and now turned their
reins to retreat. When the Scotch masses moved on in pursuit, a panic seized
the broken army, and the whole force dispersed in disorder. Many galloped into
the pits on the left; these were dismounted and slain or captured. A few stayed
behind to fight, and met a similar fate. The majority made at once for the
English border, and considered themselves fortunate if they reached Berwick or
Carlisle without being intercepted and slaughtered by the peasantry. The moral
of the day had been that the archery must be adequately supported on its flanks
by troops capable of arresting a cavalry charge. The lesson was not thrown
away, and at Crecy and Maupertuis the requisite
assistance was given, with the happiest of results.
The next series
of campaigns in which the English bowman was to take part, were directed
against an enemy different in every respect from the sturdy spearman of the
Lowlands. In France those absurd perversions of the art of war which covered
themselves under the name of Chivalry were more omnipotent than in any other
country of Europe. The strength of the armies of Philip and John of Valois was
composed of a fiery and undisciplined aristocracy, which imagined itself to be
the most efficient military force in the world, but was in reality little
removed from an armed mob. A system which reproduced on the battlefield the
distinctions of feudal society, was considered by the French noble to represent
the ideal form of warlike organization. He firmly believed that, since he was
infinitely superior to any peasant in the social scale, he must consequently
excel him to the same extent in military value. He was, therefore, prone not
only to despise all descriptions of infantry, but to regard their appearance on
the field against him as a species of insult to his class-pride. The
self-confidence of the French nobility — shaken for the moment by the result of Courtray — had re-asserted itself after the bloody
days of Mons-en-Puelle and
Cassel. The fate which had on those occasions befallen the gallant but
ill-trained burghers of Flanders, was believed to be only typical of that which
awaited any foot-soldier who dared to match himself against the chivalry of the
most warlike aristocracy in Christendom. Pride goes before a fall, and the
French noble was now to meet infantry of a quality such as he had never
supposed to exist.
Against these
presumptuous cavaliers, their mercenaries, and the wretched band of half-armed
villains whom they dragged with them to the battlefield, the English archer was
now matched. He was by this time almost a professional soldier, being usually
not a pressed man, but a volunteer, raised by one of those barons or knights with
whom the king contracted for a supply of soldiers. Led to enlist by sheer love
of fighting, desire for adventures, or national pride, he possessed a great
moral ascendancy over the spiritless hordes who followed the French nobility to
the wars. Historians, however, have laid too much stress on this superiority,
real as it was. No amount of mere readiness to fight would have accounted for
the English victories of the fourteenth century. Self-confidence and pugnacity
were not wanting in the Fleming at Rosbecque or the
Scot at Falkirk, yet they did not secure success. It was the excellent armament
and tactics of our yeomanry, even more than their courage, which made them
masters of the field at Crecy or Poitiers.
The long-bow
had as yet been employed only in offensive warfare, and against an enemy
inferior in cavalry to the English army. When, however, Edward III led his
invading force into France, the conditions of war were entirely changed. The
French were invariably superior in the numbers of their horsemen, and the
tactics of the archer had to be adapted to the defensive. He was soon to find
that the charging squadron presented as good a mark for his shaft as the
stationary column of infantry. Nothing indeed could be more discomposing to a
body of cavalry than a flight of arrows : not only did it lay low a certain
proportion of the riders, but it caused such disorder by setting the wounded
horses plunging and rearing among their fellows, that it was most effective in
checking the impetus of the onset. As the distance grew shorter and the range
more easy, the wounds to horse and man became more numerous : the disorder
increased, the pace continued to slacken, and at last a limit was reached,
beyond which the squadron could not pass. To force a line of long-bowmen by a
mere front attack was a task almost as hopeless for cavalry as the breaking of
a modern square. This, however, was a fact which the continental world had yet
to learn in the year 1346.
The scientific
method of receiving a charge of horsemen by archers flanked with supporting
troops was first practised by Edward III at Crecy. When he determined to fight,
he chose an excellent position on the gentle slope of a hill, whose flanks were
protected by woods and a little brook, which also ran along the front of the
line. Following the immemorial usage of the middle ages, the army was drawn up
in three battles, of which the foremost was commanded by the Prince of Wales,
the second by the Earl of Northampton, and the third by the King himself. In
the front battle, on which the greater part of the fighting was to fall, 2000
archers were flanked by two bodies of 800 dismounted men-at-arms, who stood in
solid phalanx with their lances before them, to receive cavalry charges
directed against the wings of the archers. The second line was formed in
similar order, while between the two were ranged 1000 Welsh and Cornish light
infantry armed with javelins and long knives. The reserve of 2000 archers and
700 mounted men occupied the summit of the hill. Nothing could be more
characteristic of the indiscipline of the French army than the fact that it
forced on the battle a day sooner than its leader had intended. On observing
the English position, Philip and his marshals had determined to defer the
conflict till the next morning, as the troops had been marching since daybreak.
When, however, the order to halt reached the vanguard, the nobles at the head
of the column believed that they were to be deprived of the honour of opening
the fight, as they could see that some of the troops in the rear were still
advancing. They therefore pushed on, and, as the main-body persisted in
following them, the whole army arrived so close to the English position that a
battle became unavoidable. The circumstances of that day have often been
described : it is unnecessary to detail the mishap of the unfortunate Genoese
cross-bowmen, who were shot down in scores while going through the cumbrous
process of winding up their arbalests. The fruitless charges of the cavalry
against the front of the line of archers led to endless slaughter, till the
ground was heaped with the bodies of men and horses, and further attempts to
advance became impossible. Only on the flanks was the charge pressed home; but
when the counts of Flanders and Alençon came on the compact masses of
dismounted cavalry who covered the wings of the archery, their progress was at
an end. They fell before the line of lances which they were unable to break,
and fared no better than their comrades in the centre. At evening the French
fell back in disorder, and their whole army dispersed. The English had won the
day without stirring a foot from their position : the enemy had come to them to
be killed. Considerably more than a third of his numbers lay dead in front of
the English line, and of these far the greater number had fallen by the arrows
of the bowmen.
Crecy had
proved that the archer, when adequately supported on his flanks, could beat off
the most-determined charges of cavalry. The moral, however, which was drawn
from it by the French was one of a different kind. Unwilling, in the bitterness
of their class-pride, to ascribe the victory to the arms of mere peasants, they
came to the conclusion that it was due to the stability of the phalanx of
dismounted knights.
Bearing this in
mind, King John, at the battle of Poitiers, resolved to imitate the successful
expedient of King Edward. He commanded the whole of his cavalry, with the
exception of two corps, to shorten their spears, take off their spurs, and send
their horses to the rear. He had failed to observe that the circumstances of
attack and defence are absolutely different. Troops who intend to root
themselves to a given spot of ground adopt tactics the very opposite of those
required for an assault on a strong position. The device which was well chosen
for the protection of Edward’s flanks at Crecy, was ludicrous when adopted as a
means for storming the hill of Maupertuis. Vigorous
impact and not stability was the quality at which the king should have aimed.
Nothing, indeed, could have been more fatal than John's conduct throughout the
day. The battle itself was most unnecessary, since the Black Prince could have
been starved into surrender in less than a week. If, however, fighting was to
take place, it was absolutely insane to form the whole French army into a
gigantic wedge — where corps after corps was massed behind the first and
narrowest line — and to dash it against the strongest point of the English
front. This, however, was the plan which the king determined to adopt. The only
access to the plateau of Maupertuis lay up a lane,
along whose banks the English archers were posted in hundreds. Through this
opening John thrust his vanguard, a chosen body of 300 horsemen, while the rest
of his forces, three great masses of dismounted cavalry, followed close behind.
It is needless to say that the archers shot down the greater part of the
advanced corps, and sent the survivors reeling back against the first 'battle'
in their rear. This at once fell into disorder, which was largely increased
when the archers proceeded to concentrate their attention on its ranks. Before
a blow had been struck at close quarters, the French were growing demoralized
under the shower of arrows. Seeing his opportunity, the Prince at once came
down from the plateau, and fell on the front of the shaken column with all his
men-at-arms. At the same moment a small ambuscade of 600 men, which he had
placed in a wood to the left, appeared on the French flank. This was too much
for King John’s men : without waiting for further attacks about two-thirds of
them left the field. A corps of Germans in the second battle and the troops
immediately around the monarch’s person were the only portions of the army
which made a creditable resistance. The English, however, were able to surround
these bodies at their leisure, and ply bow and lance alternately against them
till they broke up. Then John, his son Philip, and such of his nobles as had
remained with him, were forced to surrender.
This was a
splendid tactical triumph for the Prince, who secured the victory by the
excellence of the position he had chosen, and the judicious use made of his
archery. John’s new device for attacking an English army had failed, with far
greater ignominy than had attended the rout of his predecessor’s feudal
chivalry at Crecy. So greatly did the result of the day of Poitiers affect the
French mind, that no further attempt was made to meet the invader in a pitched
battle during the continuance of the war. Confounded at the blow which had been
delivered against their old military system, the noblesse of France foreswore
the open field, and sullenly shut themselves up in their castles, resolved to
confine their operations to petty sieges and incursions. The English might
march through the length and breadth of the land — as did the Earl of Lancaster
in 1373 — but they could no longer draw their opponents out to fight.
Intrenched behind walls which the invader had no leisure to attack, the French
allowed him to waste his strength in toilsome marches through a deserted
country. Opposed as was this form of war to all the precepts of chivalry —
which bid the good knight to accept every challenge — they were on the whole
well suited to the exigencies of the time. The tactics of Charles V and Du
Guesclin won back all that those of King John had lost. The English found that
the war was no longer a means of displaying great feats of arms, but a
monotonous and inglorious occupation, which involved a constant drain of blood
and money, and no longer maintained itself from the resources of the enemy.
Common sense,
and not aphorisms drawn from the customs of the tournament, guided the
campaigns of Du Guesclin. He took the field, not in the spirit of adventure,
but in the spirit of business. His end being to edge and worry the English out
of France, he did not care whether that consummation was accomplished by showy
exploits or by unobtrusive hard work. He would fight if necessary, but was just
as ready to reach his goal by craft as by hard blows. Night surprises,
ambuscades, and stratagems of every description were his choice, in preference
to open attacks. Provided with a continual supply of men by his 'free
companies', he was never obliged to hazard an engagement for fear that his
forces might melt away without having done any service. This relieved him from
that necessity to hurry operations, which had been fatal to so many generals
commanding the temporary hosts of feudalism. The English were better fitted for
winning great battles than for carrying on a series of harassing campaigns.
Tactics, not strategy, was their forte, and a succession of petty sieges and
inglorious retreats put an end to their ill-judged attempt to hold by force a
foreign dominion beyond the Channel.
Du Guesclin,
however, had only cleared the way for the re-appearance of the French noblesse
on the field. Shut up in their castles while the free companies were
re-conquering the country, they had apparently 'forgotten nothing and
remembered nothing'. With the fear of the English no longer before their eyes,
they at once reverted to their old chivalrous superstitions. The last years of
the century were similar to the first : if Cassel reproduced itself at Rosbecque, a nemesis awaited the revived tactics of
feudalism, and Nicopolis was a more disastrous
edition of Courtray. Thirty years of anarchy, during
the reign of an imbecile king, fostered the reactionary and unscientific
tendency of the wars of the time, and made France a fit prey to a new series of
English invasions.
If subsequent
campaigns had not proved that Henry V was a master of strategical combinations,
we should be inclined to pronounce his march to Agincourt a rash and
unjustifiable undertaking. It is, however, probable that he had taken the
measure of his enemies and gauged their imbecility, before he sacrificed his
communications and threw himself into Picardy. The rapidity of his movements
between the 6th and 24th of October shows that he had that appreciation of the
value of time which was so rare among mediaeval commanders, while the perfect
organization of his columns on the march proved that his genius could
condescend to details. Near St. Pol the French barred Henry's further progress
with a great feudal army of sixty thousand combatants, of whom full fifteen thousand
were mounted men of gentle blood. Like the two Edwards at Crecy and Maupertuis, the king resolved to fight a defensive battle,
in spite of the scantiness of his force. He had with him not more than fourteen
thousand men, of whom two-thirds were archers. The position chosen by Henry was
as excellent in its way as could be desired; it had a frontage of not more than
twelve hundred yards, and was covered by woods on either flank. The land over
which the enemy would have to advance consisted of ploughed fields, thoroughly
sodden by a week of rain. The king's archers were sufficient in number not only
to furnish a double line along the front of the army, but to occupy the woods
to right and left. Those in the plain strengthened their position by planting in
front of themselves the stakes which they habitually carried. In rear of the
archers were disposed the rest of the force, the infantry with bills and pikes
at the wings, the small force of men-at-arms in the centre.
The Constable
of France committed as many faults in drawing up his array, as could have been
expected from an average feudal nobleman. He could not resist the temptation of
following the example set him by King John at Poitiers, and therefore
dismounted three-fourths of his cavalry. These he drew up in two deep battles,
flanked by small squadrons of mounted men. Behind the first line, where it
could be of no possible use, was stationed a corps of 4000 cross-bowmen. The
reserve was formed by a great mass of 20,000 infantry, who were relegated to
the rear lest they should dispute the honour of the day with their masters. At
eleven o'clock the French began to move towards the English position :
presently they passed the village of Agincourt, and found themselves between
the woods, and in the ploughed land. Struggling on for a few hundred yards,
they began to sink in the deep clay of the fields : horsemen and dis- mounted
knight alike found their pace growing slower and slower. By this time the
English archery was commencing to play upon them, first from the front, then
from the troops concealed in the woods also. Pulling themselves together as
best they could, the French lurched heavily on, sinking to the ankle or even to
the knee in the sodden soil. Not one in ten of the horsemen ever reached the line
of stakes, and of the infantry not a man struggled on so far. Stuck fast in the
mud they stood as a target for the bow-men, at a distance of from fifty to a
hundred yards from the English front. After remaining for a short time in this
unenviable position, they broke and turned to the rear. Then the whole English
army, archers and men-at-arms alike, left their position and charged down on
the mass, as it staggered slowly back towards the second ‘battle’. Perfectly
helpless and up to their knees in mire, the exhausted knights were cast down,
or constrained to surrender to the lighter troops who poured among them, “beating
upon the armour as though they were hammering upon anvils”. The few who
contrived to escape, and the body of arbalesters who had formed the rear of the
first line, ran in upon the second battle, which was now well engaged in the
miry fields, just beyond Agincourt village, and threw it into disorder. Close
in their rear the English followed, came down upon the second mass, and
inflicted upon it the fate which had befallen the first. The infantry-reserve
very wisely resolved not to meddle with their masters' business, and quietly
withdrew from the field.
Few commanders
could have committed a more glaring series of blunders than did the Constable :
but the chief fault of his design lay in attempting to attack an English army,
established in a good position, at all. The power of the bow was such that not
even if the fields had been dry, could the French army have succeeded in
forcing the English line. The true course here, as at Poitiers, would have been
to have starved the king, who was living merely on the resources of the
neighbourhood, out of his position. If, however, an attack was projected, it
should have been accompanied by a turning movement round the woods, and
preceded by the use of all the arbalesters and archers of the army, a force
which we know to have consisted of 15,000 men.
Such a day as
Agincourt might have been expected to break the French noblesse of its love for
an obsolete system of tactics. So intimately, however, was the feudal array
bound up with the feudal scheme of society, that it yet remained the ideal
order of battle. Three bloody defeats, Crevant,
Verneuil, and the Day of the Herrings, were the consequences of a fanatical
adherence to the old method of fighting. On each of those occasions the French
columns, sometimes composed of horsemen, sometimes of dismounted knights, made
a desperate attempt to break an English line of archers by a front attack, and
on each occasion they were driven back in utter rout.
It was not till
the conduct of the war fell into the hands of professional soldiers like Xaintrailles, La Hire, and Dunois, that these insane
tactics were discarded. Their abandonment, however, was only the first step
towards success for the French. The position of the country was infinitely
worse than it had been in the days of Du Guesclin, since the greater part of
the districts north of the Loire were not only occupied by the English, but had
resigned themselves to their fate, and showed no desire to join the national
party. A petty warfare such as had won back the lands of Aquitaine from the
Black Prince, would have been totally inadequate to rescue France in 1428. It
is on this ground that we must base the importance of the influence of the Maid
of Orleans. Her successes represent, not a new tactical system, but the
awakening of a popular enthusiasm which was to make the further stay of the
English in France impossible. The smaller country could not hold down the
larger, unless the population of the latter were supine; when they ceased to be
so, the undertaking —in spite of all military superiority — became impossible.
While ascribing
the expulsion of the English from France to political rather than strategical
reasons, we must not forget that the professional officers of the fifteenth
century had at last discovered a method of minimizing the ascendancy of the
English soldiery. When they found the invaders drawn up in a good defensive
position, they invariably refrained from attacking them. There was no object in
making the troops a target to be riddled with arrows, when success was almost
impossible. Accordingly the French victories of the second quarter of the
century will be found to have resulted in most cases from attacking an English
army at a moment when it was on the march or in some other position which
rendered it impossible for an order of battle to be rapidly formed. Patay is a fair example of a conflict of this description;
the battle was lost because Talbot when attacked was not immediately ready.
Expecting to see the whole French army arrive on the field and draw itself up
in battle array, he paid no attention to the mere vanguard which was before
him, and commenced falling back on the village of Patay,
where he intended to form his line. La Hire, however, without waiting for the
main-body to come up, attacked the retreating columns, and forced his way among
them before the archers had time to fix their stakes. The superiority of the
bow to the lance depended on the ability of the bearer of the missile weapon to
keep his enemy at a distance. If once, by any accident, the cavalry got among
their opponents, a mere melée ensued, and numbers and weight carried
the day. Such was the case on this occasion : La Hire having succeeded in
closing, the battle resolved itself into a hand-to-hand struggle, and when the
main-body of the French came up, the English were overpowered by numerical
superiority. Such were the usual tactical causes of English defeats in the
fifteenth century.
The fall of the
empire which Henry V had established in France was therefore due, from the
military point of view, to the inadequacy of a purely defensive system to meet
all the vicissitudes of a series of campaigns. The commanders who had received
the tradition of Agincourt and Poitiers disliked assuming the offensive.
Accustomed to win success by receiving the enemy’s attack on a carefully chosen
ground, and after deliberate preparations, they frequently failed when opposed
to officers who refrained on principle from assailing a position, but were
continually appearing when least expected. In the open field or on the march,
in camp or the town, the English were always liable to a sudden onslaught. They
were too good soldiers to be demoralized, but lost the old confidence which had
distinguished them in the days when the French still persisted in keeping up
their ancient feudal tactics.
A fortunate
chance has preserved for us, in the pages of Blondel’s “Reductio Normanniae” a full account of the disastrous field of Formigny, the last battle but one fought by the English in
their attempt to hold down their dominion beyond the Channel. The narrative is
most instructive, as explaining the changes of fortune during the later years
of the Great War. The fight itself — though destined to decide the fate of all
Normandy — was an engagement on a very small scale. Some five thousand English,
half of them archers, the remainder billmen for the most part, with a few
hundred men-at-arms, had been collected for a desperate attempt to open the way
to Caen. In that town the Duke of Somerset, commander of all the English armies
in France, was threatened by an overwhelming host led by King Charles in
person. To draw together a force capable of taking the field all the Norman
fortresses had been stripped of their garrisons, and such reinforcements as
could be procured, some 2000 men at most, had been brought across from England.
The relieving army succeeded in taking Valognes and
forcing the dangerous fords of the Douve and Vire, but hard by the village of Formigny it was confronted by a French corps under the Count of Clermont, one of several
divisions which had been sent out to arrest the march of the English.
Clermont's troops did not greatly exceed their enemies in number : they appear,
as far as conflicting accounts allow us to judge, to have consisted of six
hundred lances garnis (i.
e. 3000 cavalry) and three thousand infantry. The obligation to take
the offensive rested with the English, who were bound to force their way to
Caen. Nevertheless Sir Thomas Kyriel and Sir Matthew
Gough, the two veterans who commanded the relieving army, refused to assume the
initiative. The old prejudice in favour of fighting defensive battles was so
strong that, forgetting the object of their expedition, they fell back and
looked for a position in which to receive the attack of Clermont's troops.
Finding a brook lined with orchards and plantations, which was well calculated
to cover their rear, they halted in front of it, and drew up their men in a
convex line, the centre projecting, the wings drawn back so as to touch the
stream. Three bodies of archers — each seven hundred strong — formed the
main-battle; on the flanks of this force were stationed two battles of billmen,
not in a line with the centre but drawn back from it, while these corps were
themselves flanked by the small force of cavalry, which was formed close in
front of the orchards and the brook. Clermont did not attack immediately, so
that the archers had ample time to fix their stakes, according to their
invariable custom, and the whole force was beginning to cover itself with a
trench when the enemy at last began to move. Through long experience the French
had grown too wary to attack an English line of archers from the front: after
feeling the position, they tried several u partial assaults on the flanks,
which were repulsed. Skirmishing had been going on for three hours without any
decisive result, when Giraud 'master of the royal ordnance' brought up two culverins,
and placed them in a spot from which they enfiladed the English line. Galled by
the fire of these pieces, part of the archers rushed out from behind their
stakes, and with the aid of one of the wings of billmen charged the French,
seized the culverins, and routed the troops which protected them. If the whole
of Kyriel’s force had advanced at this moment the
battle would have been won. But the English commander adhered rigidly to his
defensive tactics, and while he waited motionless, the fate of the battle was
changed. The troops who had charged were attacked by one of the flank ‘battles’
of French men-at-arms, who had dismounted and advanced to win back the lost
cannon : a desperate fight took place, while the English strove to drag the
pieces towards their lines, and the enemy to recapture them. At last the French
prevailed, and pushing the retreating body before them reached the English
position. The archers were unable to use their arrows, so closely were friend
and foe intermixed in the crowd of combatants which slowly rolled back towards
them. Thus the two armies met all along the line in a hand-to-hand combat, and
a sanguinary melée began. The fate of the battle was still doubtful
when a new French force arrived in the field. The Counts of Richemont and
Laval, coming up from St. Lo, appeared on the rear of the English position with
1200 men-at-arms. All Kyriel’s troops were engaged,
and he was unable to meet this new attack. His men recoiled to the brook at
their backs, and were at once broken into several isolated corps. Gough cut his
way through the French, and reached Bayeux with the cavalry. But Kyriel and the infantry were surrounded, and the whole
main-battle was annihilated. A few hundred archers escaped, and their
commander, with some scores more, was taken prisoner, but the French gave
little quarter, and their heralds counted next day three thousand seven hundred
and seventy-four English corpses lying on the field. Seldom has an army suffered
such a complete disaster : of Kyriel’s small force
not less than four-fifths was destroyed. What number of the French fell we are
unable to ascertain : their annalists speak of the death of twelve knights,
none of them men of note, but make no further mention of their losses. “They
declare what number they slew”, sarcastically observes an English chronicler,
but they write not how many of themselves were slain and destroyed. This was well-nigh
the first foughten field they got on the English, wherefore I blame them not;
though they of a little make much, and set forth all, and hide nothing that may
sound to their glory.
The moral of Formigny was evident : an unintelligent application of the
defensive tactics of Edward III and Henry V could only lead to disaster, when
the French had improved in military skill, and were no longer accustomed to
make gross blunders at every engagement. Unless some new method of dealing with
the superior numbers and cautious manoeuvres of the disciplined compagnies d'ordonnance of Charles VII could be
devised, the English were foredoomed by their numerical inferiority to defeat.
It was probably a perception of this fact which induced the great Talbot to
discard his old tactics, and employ at his last fight a method of attack
totally unlike that practised in the rest of the Hundred Years' War. The
accounts of the battle of Chatillon recall the warfare of the Swiss rather than
of the English armies. That engagement was a desperate attempt of a column of
dismounted men-at-arms and billmen, flanked by archers, to storm an intrenched
camp protected by artillery. The English — like the Swiss at Bicocca — found
the task too hard for them, and only increased the disaster by their gallant
persistence in attempting to accomplish the impossible.
The expulsion
of the English from their continental possessions had no permanent effect in
discrediting the power of the bow. The weapon still retained its supremacy as a
missile over the clumsy arbalest with its complicated array of wheels and
levers. It was hardly less superior to the newly-invented hand-guns and
arquebuses, which did not attain to any great degree of efficiency before the
end of the century. The testimony of all Europe was given in favour of the
long-bow. Charles of Burgundy considered a corps of three thousand English bowmen
the flower of his infantry. Charles of France, thirty years earlier, had made
the archer the basis of his new militia, in a vain attempt to naturalize the
weapon of his enemies beyond the Channel. James of Scotland, after a similar
endeavour, had resigned himself to ill success, and turned the archery of his
subjects to ridicule.
There are few
periods which appear more likely to present to the enquirer a series of
interesting military problems, than the years of the great struggle, in which
the national weapons and national tactics of the English were turned against
each other. The Wars of the Roses were, however, unfortunate in their
historians. The dearth of exact information concerning the various engagements
is remarkable, when we consider the ample materials which are to be found for
the history of the preceding periods. The meagre annals of William of
Worcester, Warkworth, Fabyan,
of the continuer of the Croyland Chronicle, and the
author of the “arrival of king Edward IV”, with the ignorant generalities of Whethamstede, are insufficiently supplemented by the later
works of Grafton and Hall. When all has been collated, we still fail to grasp
the details of most of the battles. Not in one single instance can we
reconstruct the exact array of a Yorkist or a Lancastrian army. Enough,
however, survives to make us regret the scantiness of the sources of our
information.
That some
considerable amount of tactical and strategical skill was employed by many of
the English commanders is evident, when we analyse the general characteristics
of their campaigns. The engagements show no stereotyped similarity of incident,
such as would have resulted from a general adherence to a single form of attack
or defence. Each combat had its own individuality, resulting from the
particular tactics employed in it. The fierce street-fight which is known as
the first battle of St. Albans, has nothing in common with the irregular skirmishing
of Hedgeley Moor. The stormings of the fortified positions of Northampton and Tewkesbury bear no resemblance to
the pitched battles of Towton and Barnet. The
superiority of tactics which won Bloreheath contrasts
with the superiority of armament which won Edgecot Field.
Prominent among
the features of the war stands out the generalship of
King Edward IV. Already a skilful commander in his nineteenth year, it was he
who at Northampton turned the Lancastrian position, by forcing the streight places which covered the flank of the 'line of
high banks and deep trenches'; behind which the army of King Henry was
sheltered. A year later he saved a cause which seemed desperate, by his rapid
march from Hereford to London; a march executed in the inclement month of
February and over the miry roads of the South-Midland counties. The decision of
mind which led him to attempt at all hazards to throw himself into the capital,
won him his crown and turned the balance at the decisive crisis of the war. If,
when settled on the throne, he imperilled his position by carelessness and
presumption, he was himself again at the first blast of the trumpet. His
vigorous struggle in the spring of 1470, when all around him were showing
themselves traitors, was a wonderful example of the success of prompt action.
Nor was his genius less marked in his last great military success, the campaign
of Barnet and Tewkesbury.
To have marched
from York to London, threading his way among the hosts of his foes without
disaster, was a skilful achievement, even if the treachery of some of the
hostile commanders be taken into consideration. At Barnet he showed that
tactics no less than strategy lay within the compass of his powers, by turning
the casual circumstance of the fog entirely to his own profit. The unforeseen
chance by which each army outflanked the other was not in itself more
favourable to one party than to the other : it merely tested the relative
ability of the two leaders. But Edward’s care in providing a reserve rendered
the defeat of his left wing unimportant, while the similar disaster on
Warwick's left was turned to such good account that it decided the day. Warwick
himself indeed, if we investigate his whole career, leaves on us the impression
rather of the political wire-puller, “le plus subtil homme de son vivant”, as Commines called him, than of the great military figure
of traditional accounts. Barnet being won, the second half of the campaign began
with Edward’s march to intercept Queen Margaret before she could open
communications with her friends in South Wales. Gloucester was held for the
king; his enemies therefore, as they marched north, were compelled to make for
Tewkesbury, the first crossing on the Severn which was passable for them. The Lacastrian feint on Chipping Sodbury was not ill-judged,
but Edward rendered its effect nugatory by his rapid movements. Both armies
gathered themselves up for a rush towards the all-important passage, but the
king — although he had the longer distance to cover, and was toiling over the
barren rolling country of the Costwold Plateaur — out-marched his opponents. Men spoke with
surprise of the thirty-two miles which his army accomplished in the day,
without halting for a meal, and in a district where water was so scarce that
the men were able to quench their thirst only once in the twelve hours. By
evening the king was within five miles of the Lancastrians, who had halted —
utterly worn out — in the town of Tewkesbury. As they had not succeeded in
crossing its ferry that night, they were compelled to fight next day, since
there was even greater danger in being attacked while their forces were half
across the Severn, and half still on the Gloucestershire side, than in turning
to meet the king. Queen Margaret’s generals therefore drew up their forces on
the rising ground to the south of the town, in a good position, where they had
the slope of the hill in their favour, and were well protected by hedges and
high banks. Edward, however, made no rash attempts to force his enemies’ line :
instead of delivering an assault he brought up cannon and concentrated their
fire on one of the hostile wings, Somerset, who commanded there, was at last so
galled that he came down from his vantage ground to drive off the gunners. His
charge was for the moment successful, but left a fatal gap in the Lancastrian
line. The centre making no attempt to close this opening, Edward was enabled to
thrust his main-battle into it, and thus forced the position, and drove his
enemies in complete disorder into the cul-de-sac of Tewkesbury town, where they
were for the most part compelled to surrender. It will at once be observed that
the king's tactics on this occasion were precisely those which had won for
William the Norman the field of Senlac. He repeated the experiment, merely
substituting artillery for archery, and put his enemy in a position where he
had either to fall back or to charge in order to escape the Yorkist missiles.
King Edward was
by no means the only commander of merit whom the war revealed. We should be
inclined to rate the Earl of Salisbury's ability high, after considering his
manoeuvre at Bloreheath. Being at the head of
inferior forces, he retired for some time before Lord Audley; till continued
retreat having made his adversary careless, he suddenly turned on him while his
forces were divided by a stream, and inflicted two crushing blows on the two
isolated halves of the Lancastrian army. The operations before Towton also seem to show the existence of considerable
enterprise and alertness on both sides. Clifford was successful in his bold
attempt to beat up the camp and rout the division of Fitzwalter;
but on the other hand Falconbridge was sufficiently prompt to fall upon the victorious
Clifford as he returned towards his main-body, and to efface the Yorkist
disaster of the early morning by a success in the afternoon. The same
Falconbridge gave in the great battle of the ensuing day an example of the kind
of tactical expedients which sufficed to decide the day, when both armies were
employing the same great weapon. A snow-storm rendered the opposing lines only
partially visible to each other : he therefore ordered his men to advance
barely within extreme range, and let fly a volley of the light and far-reaching
'flight-arrows' after which he halted. The Lancastrians, finding the shafts
falling among them, drew the natural conclusion that their enemies were well
within range, and answered with a continuous discharge of their heavier sheaf-arrows,
which fell short of the Yorkists by sixty yards. Half an hour of this work
well-nigh exhausted their store of missiles, so that the billmen and
men-of-arms of Warwick and King Edward were then able to advance without
receiving any appreciable damage from the Lancastrian archery. A stratagem like
this could only be used when the adversaries were perfectly conversant with
each other's armament and methods of war. In this respect it may remind us of
the device employed by the Romans against their former fellow-soldiers of the
Latin League, at the battle of Vesuvius.
That the
practice of dismounting large bodies of men-at-arms, which was so prevalent on
the continent in this century, was not unknown in England we have ample
evidence. The Lancastrian loss at Northampton, we are told, was excessive,
because the knights had sent their horses to the rear and could not escape.
Similarly we hear of Warwick dismounting to lead a charge at Towton, and again — but on less certain authority — at
Barnet. This custom explains the importance of the pole-axe in the knightly
equipment of the fifteenth century : it was the weapon specially used by the
horsemen who had descended to fight on foot. Instances of its use in this way
need not be multiplied; we may, however, mention the incident which of all
others seems most to have impressed the chroniclers in the fight of Edgecott-by-Banbury. Sir Richard Herbert valiantly
acquitted himself in that, on foot and with his pole-axe in his hand, he twice
by main force passed through the battle of his adversaries, and without any
mortal wound returned. The a engagement at which this feat of arms was
performed was one notable as a renewed attempt of spearmen to stand against a
mixed force of archers and cavalry. The Yorkists were utterly destitute of
light troops, their bowmen having been drawn off by their commander, Lord
Stafford, in a fit of pique, so that Pembroke and his North Welsh troops were
left unsupported. The natural result followed : in spite of the strong position
of the king's men, the rebels by force of archery caused them quickly to
descend from the hill into the valley, where they were ridden down as they
retreated in disorder by the Northern horse.
Throughout the
whole of the war artillery was in common use by both parties. Its employment
was decisive at the fights of Tewkesbury and 'Lose-coat Field'. We also hear of
it at Barnet and Northampton, as also in the sieges of the Northern fortresses
in 1462-63. Its efficiency was recognised far more than that of smaller
fire-arms, of which we find very scanty mention. The long-bow still retained
its supremacy over the arquebus, and had yet famous fields to win, notably that
of Flodden, where the old manoeuvres of Falkirk were repeated by both parties,
and the pikemen of the Lowlands were once more shot down by the archers of
Cheshire and Lancashire. As late as the reign of Edward VI we find Kett’s insurgents beating, by the rapidity of their
archery-fire, a corps of German hackbutmen whom the
government had sent against them. Nor was the bow entirely extinct as a
national weapon even in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Further, however, than the
end of the great English Civil War of the fifteenth century, it is not our task
to trace its use.
The direct
influence of English methods of warfare on the general current of European
military science ends with the final loss of dominion in France in the years
1450-53. From that period the occasions of contact which had once been so
frequent become rare and unimportant. The Wars of the Roses kept the English
soldier at home, and after their end the pacific policy of Henry VII tended to
the same result. Henry VIII exerted an influence on Continental politics by
diplomacy and subsidies rather than by his barren and infrequent expeditions,
while in the second half of the century the peculiar characteristics of the
English army of the fourteenth and fifteenth century had passed away, in the
general change and transformation of the forms of the Art of War.
We have now
discussed at length the two systems of tactics which played the chief part in
revolutionising the Art of War in Europe. The one has been traced from Morgarten to Bicocca, the other from Falkirk to Formigny, and it has been shown how the ascendancy of each
was at last checked by the development of new forms of military efficiency
among those against whom it was directed. While ascribing to the pikemen of
Switzerland and the English archery the chief part in the overthrow of feudal
cavalry — and to no small extent in that of feudalism itself — we must not
forget that the same work was simultaneously being wrought out by other methods
in other quarters of Europe.
Prominent among
the experiments directed to this end was that of Zisca and his captains, in the great Hussite wars of the first half of the fifteenth
century. In Bohemia the new military departure was the result of social and
religious convulsions. A gallant nation had risen in arms, stirred at once by
outraged patriotism and by spiritual zeal; moved by a desire to drive the
intruding German beyond the Erzgebirge, but moved even more by dreams of
universal brotherhood, and of a kingdom of righteousness to be established by
the sword. All Bohemia was ready to march, but still it was not apparent how the
overwhelming strength of Germany was to be met. If the fate of the struggle had
depended on the lances of the Tzech nobility it would
have been hopeless : they could put into the field only tens to oppose to the
thousands of German feudalism. The undisciplined masses of peasants and
burghers who accompanied them would, under the old tactical arrangements, have
fared no better than the infantry of Flanders had fared at Rosbecque.
But the problem of utilising those strong and willing arms fell into the hands
of a man of genius.
John Zisca of Trocnov had acquired
military experience and hatred of Germany while fighting in the ranks of the
Poles against the Teutonic knights. He saw clearly that to lead into the field
men wholly untrained, and rudely armed with iron-shod staves, flails, and
scythes fixed to poles, would be madness. The Bohemians had neither a uniform
equipment nor a national system of tactics: their only force lay in their
religious and national enthusiasm, which was strong enough to make all
differences vanish on the day of battle, so that the wildest fanatics were
content to combine and to obey when once the foe came in sight. It was evident
that the only chance for the Hussites was to stand upon the defensive, till
they had gauged their enemies' military efficiency and learnt to handle their
own arms. Accordingly we hear of intrenchments being everywhere thrown up, and
towns being put in a state of defence during the first months of the war. But
this was not all; in his Eastern campaigns Zisca had
seen a military device which he thought might be developed and turned to
account. There prevailed among the Russians and Lithuanians a custom of
surrounding every encampment by a portable barricade of beams and stakes, which
could be taken to pieces and transferred from position to position. The Russian
princes habitually utilised in their wars such a structure, which they called a goliaigorod or moving fortress. Zisca’s development of this system consisted in
substituting for the beams and stakes a line of waggons, at first merely such
as the countrywide supplied, but afterwards constructed specially for military
purposes, and fitted with hooks and chains by which they were fastened one to
another. It was evident that these war-waggons, when once placed in order,
would be impregnable to a cavalry charge : however vigorous the impetus of the
mail-clad knight might be, it would not carry him through oaken planks and iron
links. The onset of the German horseman being the chief thing which the Hussites
had to dread, the battle was half won when a method of resisting it had been
devised. With the German infantry they were competent to deal without any
elaborate preparation. It might be thought that Zisca’s invention would have condemned the Bohemians to adhere strictly to the
defensive in the whole campaign, as well as in each engagement in it : this,
however, was not the case. When fully worked out, the system assumed a
remarkable shape. There was organized a special corps of waggoners, on whose
efficiency everything depended : they were continually drilled, and taught to
manoeuvre their vehicles with accuracy and promptness. At the word of command,
we are told, they would form a circle, a square, or a triangle, and then
rapidly disengage their teams, thus leaving the waggons in proper position, and
only needing to be chained together. This done, they took up their position in
the centre of the enclosure. The organization of the whole army was grounded on
the waggon as a unit : to each was told off, besides the driver, a band of
about twenty men, of whom part were pike-men and flail-men, while the remainder
were armed with missile weapons. The former ranged themselves behind the chains
which joined waggon to waggon, the latter stood in the vehicles and fired down
on the enemy. From the first Zisca set himself to
introduce fire-arms among the Bohemians : at length nearly a third of them were
armed with 'hand- guns', while a strong train of artillery accompanied every
force.
A Hussite army
in movement had its regular order of march. Wherever the country was open
enough it formed five parallel columns. In the centre marched the cavalry and
artillery, to each side of them two divisions of waggons accompanied by their
complements of infantry. The two outer divisions were longer than the two which
marched next the horsemen and the guns. The latter were intended — in the case
of a sudden attack — to form the front and rear of a great oblong, of which the
longer divisions were to compose the sides. To enable the shorter columns to
wheel, one forward and the other backward, no great time would be required, and
if the few necessary minutes were obtained, the Hussite order of battle stood
complete. To such perfection and accuracy was the execution of this manoeuvre brought,
that we are assured that a Bohemian army would march right into the middle of a
German host, so as to separate division from division, and yet find time to
throw itself into its normal formation just as the critical moment arrived. The
only real danger was from artillery fire, which might shatter the line of carts
: but the Hussites were themselves so well provided with cannon that they could
usually silence the opposing batteries. Never assuredly were the tactics of the
'laager' carried to such perfection; were the records of the Hussite victories
not before us, we should have hesitated to believe that the middle ages could
have produced a system whose success depended so entirely on that power of
orderly movement which is usually claimed as the peculiar characteristic of
modern armies.
But in the
Bohemia of the fifteenth century, just as in the England of the seventeenth,
fanaticism led to rigid discipline, not to disorder. The whole country, we are
assured, was divided into two lists of parishes, which alternately put their
entire adult population in the field. While the one half fought, the other
remained at home, charged with the cultivation of their own and their
neighbours' lands. A conscription law of the most sweeping kind, which made
every man a soldier, was thus in force, and it becomes possible to understand
the large numbers of the armies put into the field by a state of no great
extent.
Zisca’s first
victories were to his enemies so unexpected and so marvellous, that they
inspired a feeling of consternation. The disproportion of numbers and the
inexperience of the Hussites being taken into consideration, they were indeed
surprising. But instead of abandoning their stereotyped feudal tactics, to
whose inability to cope with any new form of military efficiency the defeats
were really due, the Germans merely tried to raise larger armies, and sent them
to incur the same fate as the first host which Sigismund had led against
Prague. But the engagements only grew more decisive as Zisca fully developed his tactical methods. Invasion after invasion was a failure,
because, when once the Bohemians came in sight, the German leaders could not
induce their troops to stand firm. The men utterly declined to face the flails
and pikes of their enemies, even when the latter advanced far beyond their
rampart of waggons, and assumed the offensive. The Hussites were consequently
so exalted with the confidence of their own invincibility, that they undertook,
and often successfully carried out, actions of the most extraordinary temerity.
Relying on the terror which they inspired, small bodies would attack superior
numbers when every military consideration was against them, and yet would win
the day. Bands only a few thousand strong sallied forth from the natural
fortress formed by the Bohemian mountains, and wasted Bavaria, Meissen,
Thuringia, and Silesia, almost without hindrance. They returned in safety,
their war-waggons laden with the spoil of Eastern Germany, and leaving a broad
track of desolation behind them. Long after Zisca’s death the prestige of his tactics remained undiminished, and his successors
were able to accomplish feats of war which would have appeared incredible in
the first years of the war.
When at last
the defeat of the Taborites took place, it resulted from the dissensions of the
Bohemians themselves, not from the increased efficiency of their enemies. The
battle of Lipan, where Procopius fell and the extreme party were crushed, was a
victory won not by the Germans, but by the more moderate sections of the Tzech nation. The event of the fight indicates at once the
weak spot of Hussite tactics, and the tremendous self-confidence of the Taborites.
After Procopius had repelled the first assaults on his circle of waggons, his
men — forgetting that they had to do not with the panic-stricken hosts of their
old enemies, but with their own former comrades, — left their defences and
charged the retreating masses. They were accustomed to see the manoeuvre
succeed against the terrorized Germans, and forgot that it was only good when
turned against adversaries whose spirit was entirely broken. In itself an
advance meant the sacrifice of all the benefits of a system of tactics which
was essentially defensive. The weakness in fact of the device of the
waggon-fortress was that, although securing the repulse of the enemy, it gave
no opportunity for following up that success, if he was wary and retreated in
good order. This however was not a reproach to the inventor of the system, for Zisca had originally to seek not for the way to win
decisive victories, but for the way to avoid crushing defeats. At Lipan the
moderate party had been beaten back but not routed. Accordingly when the
Taborites came out into the open field, the retreating masses turned to fight,
while a cavalry reserve which far outnumbered the horse-men of Procopius, rode
in between the circle of waggons and the troops which had left it. Thus three-quarters
of the Taborite army were caught and surrounded in the plain, where they were
cut to pieces by the superior numbers of the enemy. Only the few thousands who
had remained behind within the waggon-fortress succeeded in escaping. Thus was
demonstrated the incompleteness for military purposes of a system which had
been devised as a political necessity, not as an infallible recipe for victory.
The moral of
the fight of Lipan was indeed the same as the moral of the fight of Hastings.
Purely defensive tactics are hopeless when opposed by a commander of ability
and resource, who is provided with steady troops. If the German princes had
been generals and the German troops well-disciplined, the careers of Zisca and Procopius would have been impossible. Bad strategy
and panic combined to make the Hussites seem invincible. When, however, they
were met by rational tactics they were found to be no less liable to the logic
of war than other men.
Long before the
flails and hand-guns of Zisca’s infantry had turned
to rout the chivalry of Germany, another body of foot-soldiers had won the
respect of Eastern Europe. On the battlefields of the Balkan Peninsula the Slav
and the Magyar had learned to dread the slave-soldiery of the Ottoman Sultans. Kossova had suggested and Nicopolis had proved that the day of the unquestioned supremacy of the horseman was gone
in the East as much as in the West. The Janissaries of Murad and Bayezid had
stood firm before desperate cavalry charges, and beaten them off with loss. It
is curious to recognize in the East the tactics which had won the battles of
Crecy and Agincourt. The Janissaries owed their successes to precisely the same
causes as the English archer. Their great weapon was the bow, not indeed the
long-bow of the West, but nevertheless a very efficient arm. Still more notable
is it that they carried the stakes which formed part of the equipment of the
English bowman, and planted them before their line whenever an assault by
cavalry was expected. Again and again — notably at Nicopolis and Varna — do we hear of the impetuous charge which had ridden down the rest
of the Turkish array, failing at last before the ‘palisade’ of the Janissaries,
and the deadly fire of arrows from behind it. The rest of the Janissary's
equipment was very simple : he carried no defensive arms, and wore only a
pointed felt cap and a flowing grey tunic reaching to the knees. Besides his
bow and quiver he bore a scimitar at his side and a ‘handjar’
or long knife in his waist-cloth. Though their disciplined fanaticism made them
formidable foes in close combat, it was not for that kind of fighting that the
Janissaries were designed. When we find them storming a breach or leading a
charge, they were going beyond their own province. Their entire want of armour
would alone have sufficed to show that they were not designed for hand-to-hand
contests, and it is a noteworthy fact that they could never be induced to take
to the use of the pike. Like the English archery, they were used either in
defensive positions or to supplement the employment of cavalry. Eastern hosts
ever since the days of the Parthians had consisted of great masses of horsemen,
and their weakness had always lain in the want of some steadier force to form
the nucleus of resistance and the core of the army. Cavalry can only act on the
offensive, yet every general is occasionally compelled to take the defensive.
The Ottomans, however, were enabled to solve the problem of producing an army
efficient for both alike, when once Orchan had armed
and trained the Janissaries.
The Timariot horsemen who formed the bulk of the Turkish army
differed little from the cavalry of other Oriental states. Not unfrequently
they suffered defeats; Shah Ismail's Persian cavaliers rode them down at Tchaldiran, and the Mamelukes broke them at Radama. If it had been with his feudal horse alone that the
Turkish Sultan had faced the chivalry of the West, there is little reason to
suppose that the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula would ever have been
effected. Attacked in its own home the Hungarian — perhaps even the Servian —
state could in the fourteenth century put into the field armies equal in
numbers and individually superior to the Ottoman horsemen. But the Servian and
the Hungarian, like the Persian and the Mameluke, did not possess any solid and
trustworthy body of infantry. To face the disciplined array of the Janissaries
they had only the chaotic and half-armed hordes of the national levy. To this
we must ascribe the splendid successes of the Sultans : however the tide of
battle might fluctuate, the Janissaries would stand like a rock behind their
stakes, and it was almost unknown that they should be broken. Again and again
they saved the fortune of the day : at those few fights where they could not,
they at least died in their ranks, and saved the honour of their corps. At the
disaster of Angora they continued to struggle long after the rest of the
Turkish army had dispersed, and were at last exterminated rather than beaten.
No steadier troops could have been found in any part of Europe.
Perhaps the
most interesting of Ottoman fights from the tactician’s point of view was the
second battle of Kossova (1448). This was not — like
Varna or Mohacs — an ill-advised attempt to break the Turkish line by a
headlong onset. John Huniades, whom long experience
had made familiar with the tactics of his enemy, endeavoured to turn against
Sultan Murad his own usual scheme. To face the Janissaries he drew up in his
centre a strong force of German infantry, armed with the hand-guns whose use
the Hussites had introduced. On the wings the chivalry of Hungary were destined
to cope with the masses of the Timariot cavalry. In
consequence of this arrangement, the two centres faced each other for long
hours, neither advancing, but each occupied in thinning the enemy's ranks, the
one with the arbalest-bolt, the other with the bullet. Meanwhile on the wings
desperate cavalry charges succeeded each other, till on the second day the
Wallachian allies of Huniades gave way before the
superior numbers of the Ottomans and the Christian centre had to draw off and
retire. So desperate had the fighting been, that half the Hungarian army and a
third of that of Murad was left upon the field. The tactical meaning of the
engagement was plain : good infantry could make a long resistance to the
Ottoman arms, even if they could not secure the victory. The lesson however was
not fully realized, and it was not till the military revolution of the
sixteenth century that infantry was destined to take the prominent part in withstanding
the Ottoman.
The
landsknechts and hackbut-men of Charles V and Ferdinand of Austria proved much
more formidable foes to the Sultans than the gallant but undisciplined light
cavalry of Hungary. This was to a great extent due to the perfection of
pike-tactics in the West. The Turks, whose infantry could never be induced to
adopt that weapon, relied entirely on their firearms, and were checked by the
combination of pike and hackbut. It is noticeable that the Janissaries took to
the use of the firelock at a comparatively early date. It may have been in
consequence of the effectiveness of Huniades’
hand-guns at Kossova, that we find them discarding
the arbalest in favour of the newer weapon. But at any rate the Ottoman had
fully accomplished the change long before it had been finally carried out in
Europe, and nearly a century earlier than the nations of the further East.
In recognizing
the full importance of cannon the Sultans were equally in advance of their
times. The capture of Constantinople by Mahomet II was probably the first event
of supreme importance whose result was determined by the power of artillery.
The lighter guns of previous years had never accomplished any feat comparable
in its results to that which was achieved by the siege-train of the Conqueror.
Some decades later we find the Janissaries' line of arquebuses supported by the
fire of field-pieces, often brought forward in great numbers, and chained
together so as to prevent cavalry charging down the intervals between the guns.
This device is said to have been employed with great success against an enemy
superior in the numbers of his horsemen, alike at Dolbek and Tchaldiran. The ascendency of the Turkish arms
was finally terminated by the conjunction of several causes. Of these the chief
was the rise in central Europe of standing armies composed for the most part of
disciplined infantry. But it is no less undoubted that much was due to the fact
that the Ottomans after the reign of Soliman fell behind their contemporaries
in readiness to keep up with the advance of military skill, a change which may
be connected with the gradual transformation of the Janissaries from a corps
into a caste.
It should also
be remembered that the frontier of Christendom was now covered not by one
isolated fortress of supreme importance, such as Belgrade had been, but by a
double and triple line of strong towns, whose existence made it hard for the
Turks to advance with rapidity, or to reap any such results from success in a
single battle or siege as had been possible in the previous century.
On the warfare
of the other nations of Eastern Europe it will not be necessary to dwell. The
military history of Russia, though interesting in itself, exercised no
influence on the general progress of the Art of War. With the more important
development of new tactical methods in South-eastern Europe we have already
dealt, when describing the Spanish infantry in the chapter devoted to the Swiss
and their enemies.
All the systems
of real weight and consideration have now been discussed. In the overthrow of
the supremacy of feudal cavalry the tactics of the shock and the tactics of the
missile had each played their part : which had been the more effective it would
be hard to say. Between them however the task had been successfully
accomplished. The military strength of that system which had embraced all
Europe in its cramping fetters, had been shattered to atoms. Warlike efficiency
was the attribute no longer of a class but of whole nations; and war had ceased
to be an occupation in which feudal chivalry found its pleasure, and the rest
of society its ruin. The 'Art of War' had become once more a living reality, a
matter not of tradition but of experiment, and the vigorous sixteenth century
was rapidly adding to it new forms and variations.
The middle ages were at last over, and the stirring and scientific spirit of
the modern world was working a transformation in military matters, which was to
make the methods of mediaeval war seem even further removed from the strategy of
our own century, than are the operations of the ancients in the great days of
Greece and Rome.
THE END.