Medieval Warfare

There were a lot of wars in the Middle Ages.  (The same thing of course could be said about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)  They were not nearly as destructive to infrastructure as modern warfare, and a lot of them were small and local, but they were certainly hellacious both for participants and for innocent bystanders.

One major distinction between medieval and modern warfare is that the medieval male aristocracy defined itself militarily by the twelfth century.  That is, anyone who was rich and powerful also wanted to be seen as a warrior, specifically a knight, someone who fought on horseback.  This is unlike today's wealthy men, who seek various ways to avoid having to go to war.

Gunpowder and cannons started being used in warfare in the fourteenth century, but before then the chief weapons were swords and lances.  Lances were used to knock other knights off their horses once cavalry began to dominate warfare.  Swords were used to slash and kill--the fencing you see in Three Musketeers movies is post-medieval.  You could also kill people with arrows, although armor provided a lot of protection.  Because archers killed from a distance, a bow was considered a coward's weapon.  This did not keep all medieval armies from marching with a contingent of archers.

Most battles were fought by the infantry in the early Middle Ages, and at least theoretically all free men were supposed to be ready to march off to war if needed.  The Roman army had been a foot-soldier army, and this preponderance of infantry continued until the stirrup made horseback fighting viable in the tenth and later centuries.  Major battles were won by the infantry, and in the battle of Hastings of 1066, when the Normans conquered England, the Anglo-Saxon infantry came extremely close to winning.  (They probably would have won if they hadn't just fought and won a battle in the north of England, then marched south very fast to face the Normans.)

Cavalry then dominated warfare throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with the spread of cannons in the late Middle Ages infantry again became very important.  They weren't wanted for their fighting skills so much as to be cannon fodder, to march against the cannons, get shot and die, giving the cavalry and the archers a chance to charge while the slow reloading was going on.  (There were no rifles or handguns for centuries to come.)

In extended wars (like the Hundred Years War), the armies lived off the land, burning crops and devastating the countryside.  But for smaller wars, especially in the twelfth century when the Crusades were still seen as a viable way to be a warrior without killing Christians, there was at least an intermittent effort to avoid attacking the helpless.  For the peasantry, however, war was always awful.

A lot of battles involved castles.  Castles, like knights, first appeared in the eleventh century.  They were primarily defensive, and castle architecture tended to develop just fast enough to keep ahead of advances in siege technology.  Many castles were never attacked at all, and those that fell usually fell due to betrayal or to the garrison being starved out.  Castles could also be used as staging areas for sorties and attacks.

Naval battles occurred in the Middle Ages but were rare.  The Mediterranean was notoriously unpredictable, and few other than Vikings would venture far out into the Atlantic.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval knights and warfare, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.