Warfare

CLIFFORD J. ROGERS

This chapter will be an exploration of warfare itself, not principally of how war affected either the societies of the global community or their interaction.^{^[187]} It will examine why wars were fought, by whom, and how - including questions of recruitment, equipment, and organization of armed forces as well as strategy, tactics, and logistics.

There are wide variations in the state of current scholarship and in available source material (which ranges, for broad swathes of time and geography, from very thin to virtually nonexistent). This will of necessity place the emphasis firmly on Eurasia and North Africa.

A principal Leitmotif will be the patterns of conflict between nomadic societies and agro-urban civilizations, exploring the question of how the former were so often able to defeat and overrun the latter, despite disadvantages in manpower and resources. We will begin with an early example of steppe empire building, followed by examination of three civilizations that had to address the problem of attacks from the steppe: China, Persia, and Byzantium. From there we will move through the geographic and chronological scope of the chapter by a chain of interactions. As we encounter each new society, we will stress what is most distinctive about its military, and what more general topics it best illustrates.

The steppes and the agro-urban empires

Nomadic peoples do not maintain archives, leave relatively scarce archaeological evidence, and rarely produce much by way of historical records. Because the tribes of the great Eurasian steppes often made war on the agro-urban civilizations that surrounded them, however, we have numerous descriptions of steppe nomads and their style of fighting dating from across the ancient and medieval periods. Insofar as the evidence allows us to judge, there seems to have been relatively little change in the steppe ways of life and of warfare from the start of our period to the rise of the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

Living by hunting and on the meat and milk of vast herds of horses and other livestock, the nomads had to stay constantly on the move to find good grazing for their animals. Their boys and men spent most of every day on horseback, with bows in hand to shoot small game. These bows, used also for war, were of composite recurved design, allowing for long, powerful draws from short bows suitable for use from the saddle. Steppe warriors could rapidly shoot many arrows for great distances, even while galloping, at targets in any direction, including behind them.^{^[188]} The arrows did not have great armor-penetrating ability, but they were most often used against fellow nomads, who (except for the leaders) normally had little or no metal armor, and their unprotected mounts.^{^[189]} Battles began with arrows, but were finished mainly with spears. Usually victorious leaders gained the subjection of the defeated, their “strength and labor.”^{^[190]} Sometimes the defeated fled and lost their grazing lands; sometimes the men were scattered or exterminated and the women and children became the property of the conquerors. A long sequence of victories created a large hegemony; a single defeat might break it up. It took forty-seven campaigns and twenty battles for Ilterish (r. 682-94) to build the Second Eastern Turkic Khaqanate (Qaghanate):

He made those with dominion lose their dominion He made those with a Khaghan lose their Khaghan He made the enemy a vassal

He made those with knees to kneel.^[191]

Rule tended to pass relatively easily from brother to brother, but not from generation to generation. When the naturally fissiparous character of nomadic polities created opportunities to do so, more settled states outside the steppe often intervened to encourage civil wars and prevent consolidation of power. They did so because they dreaded the military potential of the united steppe. The nomad population was small, but most men were skilled warriors, superb horsemen, inured to hunger, thirst, and bad weather, fierce, seemingly fearless, honed by frequently raiding enemies for “women with beautiful cheeks and geldings with fine rumps.”^{^[192]} (Raiding for women was so common among the Mongols in the thirteenth century that even arranged marriages were preceded by a ritual abduction “with a semblance of violence.”^{^[193]}) “They care only about raiding, hunting, horsemanship, skirmishing with rival chieftains, taking booty, and invading other countries,” wrote al-Jahiz in the mid-ninth century, “which for them take the place of craftsmanship and commerce and constitute their only pleasure, their glory, and the subject of all their conversation.” (See Figure 6.1.)^{^[194]}

With each rider using a string of four or more remounts, including mares which could sustain him as well as carry him, nomad armies could go almost anywhere and get there incredibly fast, covering as much as a hundred miles per day.

As a ninth-century Chinese policy document explains, military force could not effectively defend a long frontier against such raiders: “for us to mobilise our forces would take at least ten days or a few weeks, while for them to take our men and animals prisoner would take at most a morning or an evening. By the time an imperial army could get there, the barbarians would already have returned home.”^{^[195]} Retaliatory expeditions were possible, but were expensive to mount, had poor prospects of finding and overtaking a mobile population in a sea of grass, and risked disastrous defeat on the enemy's home turf.The best course of action was normally to pay the “barbarians” protection money (often in the form of silks, grain, or other commodities rather than gold and silver) and make flattering marriage alliances with them, rather than fight them.

Figure 6.ι Bulghar warrior on a gold jug (or pitcher) from the Treasure of Nagyszentmiklos (Erich Lessing Culture & Fine Arts Archive)

Policies of bribery could work well because settled agro-urban states had vastly greater economic resources than the nomads: agriculture allowed for the support of much larger populations and more division of labor. Skilled urban craftsmen produced fine goods that the steppe leaders valued, and the amount needed to buy safety was limited by the low numbers and material expectations of the nomads. It was not only safer to pay them off, it was also cheaper. The settled empires had to maintain large armies in any case, to defend against other peer states, to sustain the ruling political and military classes in power, and also to insure the nomads could not simply take what they wanted with impunity. Despite the nomads' advantages already noted, a Chinese, Byzantine, or even Ottonian army could, under the right circumstances, inflict a severe defeat on an invading force of horse-archers, or could be used offensively to help one group of nomads defeat another.

This was possible because civilized areas had such large populations and economies that they could usually field larger armies than their nomadic enemies even when they armed only ι or 2 per cent of their populations. They could also provide their soldiers with great capital resources, in the form of armor, weapons, supply wagons and boats, time for military training, and (in relatively small numbers) heavy grain-fed horses. But the warlike capabilities that nomads gained as a by-product of their lifestyle could only be matched by sedentary peoples with focused expense and effort. If “gifts” could keep the steppe leaders on the border happy, then smaller, less expensive imperial forces would suffice. Besides, a friendly khaghan (or would-be khaghan) across the border could not only restrain his people from raiding and act as a shield against more distant peoples, he could also provide horsemen to balance the infantry-heavy armies that agro-urban civilizations tended to produce.

Horsemen, footmen, and empires

The most effective armies comprise balanced forces of cavalry and infantry. The great mobility of horsemen allowed rapid shifting of troops from one region to another in response to developing threats, or to make lightning surprise attacks. The side with superior cavalry would have superior information about enemy movements, could usually choose when to fight and when to avoid combat, and could severely disrupt the enemy's supply arrangements while protecting its own. By pillaging and devastating the enemy countryside and seizing captives for ransom or enslavement, it could fund its own war effort while weakening the enemy leaders and pressuring them either to buy peace or to give battle. Battles were typically won when one side's cavalry defeated the other side's horse, then hit the enemy footmen from the flank or rear. After that, it usually required a vigorous cavalry pursuit to make a victory truly decisive; infantry losses were often far higher after formations were broken up than during the battle itself.

Thus, across most of Eurasia and North Africa in most of our period, cavalry was (despite the skepticism of some scholars) the most important military arm. “Riders are the pivot of an army,” wrote an Arab in the ninth century: “theirs are the glory days, the famous battles, the vast conquests.”^{^[196]} Nonetheless, infantry was important too. Footmen were much cheaper to equip, to train, and to maintain, so really large armies had to be made up mostly of infantry. Huge numbers were needed to garrison long frontiers, and sometimes to occupy and retain new conquests. Siege operations - the capture of fortified places, especially walled towns and cities - were a very large part of warfare in this period. Controlling an agricultural area required capturing and retaining the walled towns within it. The ancient techniques of siegecraft used to take an army over, under, or through urban walls remained in use: ladders, siege towers, mines, battering rams, and stone-throwing engines. But fortifications nonetheless gave defenders a huge tactical advantage. A siege-ladder might make it possible for attackers to reach a wall-top, but one man on the ramparts with a rock still had the upper hand over six men on the ladder. Mining was effective but slow. Battering engines were effective against some fortifications, but not against strongly built masonry. Strongholds were much more often taken by starvation and negotiation than by assault. That required encircling and cutting off a town, usually digging ditches and manning them strongly enough to resist sallies by the defenders, which could be concentrated against any point of the perimeter. This took large numbers of soldiers, most of whom could be infantry, though horsemen were needed to secure the besiegers' lines of supply and to defeat a relief army in battle.

Thus, one of the basic problems societies faced in constructing their military forces was how to provide adequate forces both of cavalry and infantry.

For agro-urban civilizations, it was often easier and cheaper to acquire the services of skilled but poor steppe horse-archers than to equip, train, and pay native cavalrymen, especially since the former could be hired “off the shelf’ when needed and then dismissed back to their herds and yurts in times of peace. But that ran into the second basic problem of military systems: soldiers were needed not just to defeat foreign enemies, but also to maintain domestic power structures, both social and governmental. One reason emperors liked to employ “barbarian” soldiers was that foreigners lacked the political and familial connections and cultural credibility that made native generals potential usurpers. But over time, empires tended to become increasingly dependent on the barbarians for fighters. The norm in premodern human societies is for a single group to dominate all three basic wellsprings of power and authority: armed force, wealth, and cultural legitimacy (including religion). Sometimes, however, those with wealth and authority drift away from the dangerous burdens of making war. As the sociologist Stanislav Andreski has suggested, this tends to create an unstable situation, because those with arms can rarely be satisfied for long with less than the lion's share of riches and power.¹¹ Military elites who are subordinated to separate economic and political elites are likely to attempt to seize rule for themselves. Whether they succeed, or force the “civilian” elites to remilitarize in order to defeat them, or fail but so weaken the state that a more martial external power enters as a conqueror, the separation of military and social power is likely to erode or disappear.

Empires only become empires through war, and cannot maintain themselves without using armed force to crush rebellions and defeat invasions. However, one of the main reasons empires “work” - why they appear so frequently in human society - is that their surface area generally expands more rapidly than their perimeter, so that their economic resources expand more rapidly than their defense needs. The larger the polity, the more of its population can be secure from external violence and hence more economically productive. Also, the more stable its political institutions, the less its people will suffer from internal warfare. Thus, the most successful empires are those that have effective systems for collecting wealth in the center, through the exercise of unquestioned authority more than the application of force, and directing adequate resources to the armed forces on the frontiers, while also retaining a strong central reserve to deter or defeat rebellions and to aid the border forces in responding to exceptionally strong threats from outside. When warrior-elites seize power, they create a destabilizing precedent, and also tend to over-use force rather than cheaper and less disruptive authority, both at home and abroad. In the long run, civilizations with elites that are adequately militarized but not principally military tend to be the most prosperous, most stable, and most successful. Both as a result of and as an element of their success, they develop strong intellectual and cultural emphases on the importance of legitimacy in rule, and value-sets that grant ^[197] prestige and deference to administrative skill, intelligence, and education, not just bravery, aggressiveness, and prowess.

China

Around the start of our period, civil wars and nomad migrations led to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Similarly, in northern China nomadic warriors had been widely employed during the War of the Eight Princes (291-306), and between 304 and 316 the Wu Hu “barbarian” peoples effectively seized control over the region, beginning the Sixteen Kingdoms period. By 439 the Northern Wei dynasty, descended from Xianbi nomads, had unified North China using a military structure that seems to have set the pattern for the system used by the Sui (589-618) and early Tang emperors to conquer the south. Under the early Tang, Chinese “military families” were given land to farm on the frontier, spared from most taxes, and required to provide infantry soldiers equipped with armor and crossbows or pole-arms, organized into regiments. At little cost to the treasury, this Jubing (territorial forces) system produced several hundred thousand soldiers who guarded the borders, contributed to major field armies, and, in rotation, annually served one- to two-month stints in the capital. There the Jubing soldiers gave the emperors a check on the potential power of the other main component of the regular military, the standing Palace Army. Aristocrats of mixed steppe and Han blood served as cavalry in the Imperial Guard, which also provided officers to the Jubing and the Palace Army. Extra manpower for large campaign armies was provided by short-term conscript infantry. The final main component of Sui and Tang armies was allied or subject cavalry from the steppes. Tang Taizong (599-649), a product of both cultures, took the steppe-Han fusion in a new direction when he managed to become khaghan of the eastern nomads as well as emperor of China. But in 679-82 the Turks threw off the dominance the Chinese had established more through “soft fabrics and deceiving words" - bribes and diplomacy - than through warfare. Their leader, Ilterish Khaghan, launched devastating raids into China to collect booty and slaves to reward his followers and ultimately to force the Tang to pay for peace; unlike plunder, the tribute went directly to the khaghan, who could control its distribution to ensure his own internal power. This enabled the Second Turkish Federation to last through a second generation, but it collapsed after the death of Iltcrish's last son in 741.

Meanwhile the Jubing system had gone into a steep decline, as the lands allocated for its support fell under the control of aristocrats and Buddhist monasteries, and military service became seen increasingly as a burden rather than a privilege. It was a recurring problem in China that Confucian disdain for soldiers - which was a factor in Chinese civilization, though its strength and prevalence have doubtless been exaggerated by some modern writers - weakened one of the principal social bonds that rulers used to exert authority over armed men, the conferring of honor. When soldiers were denied honor, they tended to lose material support also, and then they became open to transferring allegiance to new rulers who would reward them better. Empress Wu (690-705) tried to build up the Palace Army to offset the weakness of the Jubing, but it turned against her and participated in her deposition. Subsequent Tang rulers built up a new, smaller army of well- compensated professional soldiers (jian'er) and tribal cavalry.^{^[198]} From large new fortresses on the frontier they took the offensive against the nomads. As we will see below, this shift from quantity to quality was part of a remarkable pattern of similar developments in various regions at around the same time. For China, the change succeeded in restoring security and even hegemony in the northwest, at least for a brief time. The new-model forces were so successful that the Jubing system was formally abolished in 749, and in 751 the Tang were confident enough to launch major campaigns in three directions simultaneously, against the Khitan nomads in the northeast, against the Tibetans in the southwest, and towards Tashkent in the far west. This proved to be mere hubris: all three armies suffered severe battlefield defeats.

Persia and Byzantium

The battle of Talas River, a high-water mark for Chinese expansion to the west and for Arab expansion to the northeast, took place geographically in the very center of sub-taiga Eurasia, at the chronological midpoint of the early medieval period (751). To understand its background we must examine the history of the two great agro-urban empires of the West and the Middle East, Rome and Persia. In the West as in China, the fourth and fifth centuries were a period of invasions and civil wars. As the Chinese Empire lost its northern half to barbarian conquest dynasties, so the Roman Empire lost its western provinces to Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, and other migrating warrior-tribes. In the early sixth century, as Emperor Wu of Liang struggled first to repel and then to reverse Northern Wei advances into South China, the Roman or “Byzantine” emperors of Constantinople likewise aimed to block new aggressions and to recover lost territories. From 503-638, Byzantium fought a series of wars in Armenia and Mesopotamia against the Sasanian Persians, while simultaneously combating Slavic light infantry in the Balkans, Avar steppe cavalry in the Danube basin, and tough Goths, Vandals, and Lombards in the south and west. In the fourth and early fifth centuries Roman armies, like southern Chinese ones, had retained advantages in infantry and engineers, who were especially important for defending border forts and cities, but also put great emphasis on strengthening their cavalry. Ready forces of armored horsemen, armed with composite bows and lances and supported by drilled, hard-marching foot soldiers with strong tactical defensive capabilities, had the mobility needed to defend long frontiers and the hitting power needed to defeat invaders or rebels in battle. They could also spearhead wars of expansion. The skilled generals of Justinian I (r. 527-65) recovered Italy, North Africa, and the southeastern coast of Spain. But the vast effort and expense of these westward reconquests left the empire weak in the east, and in 540 Antioch, the capital of Syria and one of the greatest Byzantine cities, fell temporarily to Khosro I of Persia (531-79).

The Persians employed skilled engineers, foot archers who shot very rapidly though not very strongly from behind mobile walls of wicker shields, and various other less-skilled infantry, along with war-elephants, but by far the most important element of their army was their cavalry. Allies and subject peoples provided light cavalry, but the cutting edge of the Sasanian armies was the cataphract cavalry, completely encased in iron, well-drilled, and riding large, scale-armored horses. Such troops were very expensive; Khosro increasingly provided life-estates and government funds to horsemen to allow non-nobles to serve.^{^[199]}

When these two empires clashed, it was common for the aggressor's concentrated forces to gain an initial advantage, but the numerous urban fortifications in the disputed zone and the practical difficulties of supporting deep offensives (especially against an enemy well-provided with cavalry and practicing a counter-logistical “Vegetian” strategy, which aimed to defeat invaders with famine rather than the sword) meant those advantages were short-lived.^{^[200]} Khosro I took Antioch but could not hold it; he defeated a Byzantine army in 544, but failed to capture Edessa. In 573 the Romans nearly captured Nisibis, but then lost their own frontier stronghold of Dara. In his last campaign, Khosro drove into Anatolia, failed to take Caesarea in Cappadocia, then retreated in great disorder after a severe battlefield defeat. The frontier flowed back and forth; each side poured out blood and money without making lasting gains to repay the effort.

A more decisive phase of the wars began in the seventh century. Weakened by Lombard attacks in Italy, by Avar-Slav offensives in the Balkans, and by a civil war following the deposition of Emperor Maurice, the Byzantines nearly succumbed to Persian assaults. The Euphrates frontier collapsed in 609; Edessa fell in 610; Antioch, Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and even Chalcedon (across the Bosphorus from Constantinople) by 617. The Byzantine Empire seemed on the verge of extinction, but the desperate situation called forth an extraordinary effort, funded by the centuries of accumulated treasure in Constantinople and fired by religious enthusiasm for the salvation of Christendom. Between 622 and 625, Heraclius won several battles and pushed the fighting back to the Euphrates. A combined Persian and Avar counter-thrust failed to capture Constantinople in 626, and the next year, in alliance with the Khazar Turks, Heraclius turned the tide, winning another great battle at Nineveh and threatening the Persian capital. The Byzantine emperor urged the Sasanians to make peace before the war “burns up everything.”¹⁵ Peace was agreed, and Heraclius returned to Constantinople in triumph, but it was really too late. The charred remains of both empires looked weak enough to tip over easily, and assaults by a new threat soon destroyed one entirely, and cut the other in half.

The Arab explosion

Heraclius had portrayed his campaign as vengeance against the enemies of God, and promised his men the reward of heaven.1⁶ Roman and Byzantine emperors had long enjoyed near-control of the Orthodox Church,

(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984); Clifford J. Rogers, “The Vegetian ‘Science of Warfare' in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2003): 1-20; Stephen Morillo, “Battle Seeking: The Contexts and Limits of Vegetian Strategy,” ibid., 21-42; and John Gillingham, “‘Up with Orthodoxy!': In Defense of Vegetian Warfare,” Journal ofMedieval Military History 2 (2004): 149-58.

15 Walter E. Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 172.

16 Theophanes (the Confessor), Chronicle of Theophanes, ed. and trans. Harry Turtledove (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982): 16. supported it against “heretical” forms of Christianity like the Monophysit- ism prevalent in Egypt and Syria, and expected in return religious leaders' support for the state. This required some accommodation, for (like Confucianism) Christianity was the product of a relatively peaceful and stable imperial environment and (like Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) was at best ambivalent towards both the warrior ethos and the concentrated wealth elite warriors expected to enjoy. Christian soldiers did heavy penance for killing even in battle and were supposed to view war as “the worst of all evils,” necessary only because “our enemies clearly look upon the shedding of our blood as one of their basic duties and the height of virtue.”^{^[201]}

The new monotheist religion arising at this same time - Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina was the same year as Heraclius' first victory - was born in war. War is about making resistance more painful than submission, and effective conquerors work both sides of that equation in just the ways that Islam encouraged. Fighting infidels until they exhibit “willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” was not only a virtue, but a religious duty. Once battle with unbelievers was joined, hellfire awaited any Muslims who fled, heaven any who died fighting.^{^[202]} On the other hand, Islam enjoined tolerance towards Christians and Jews willing to live peacefully under Muslim dominion, and encouraged the strong to treat the weak with justice and charity. This was a belief system well designed for empire building, founded by a conqueror with unified political and religious authority.

Within a year of Muhammad's death in 632, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, had forged a united Arab state. Its armies benefitted from the toughness and mobility of camel-herding nomads; its leaders, from Medina and Mecca, included skilled generals firmly resolved to extend the boundaries of Islamic rule. Like steppe forces, Arab armies were huge in relation to the population, but not large by agro-urban standards. Cavalry was valued, but initially scarce. Iron helmets and leather shields were normal and mail armor common.^{^[203]} Enemies were defeated by hard fighting and simple infantry tactics - trench defenses and attacks first with arrows, then spears, then swords: “that's all there is to it.”^{^[204]} Like Heraclius, the early caliphs pursued battle-focused strategies. After four Muslim victories in 634-5, Palestine and Syria submitted. Crushing Byzantine and Sasanian defeats at Yarmuk in 636 and Qadisiya in 637 crippled the empires' resistance. By 642, Persia and Egypt were under Arab rule. Soldiers were paid in cash with shares of the tax revenues of conquered provinces. Tax exemptions and what seemed an obvious case of divine favor won many converts to Islam, providing manpower and energy for further expansion despite two civil wars between 657 and 684. By the 730s, the Umayyads ruled an empire stretching from southern France, through Spain, across North Africa and the Middle East, into Transoxania.

Imperial expansion can proceed by a snowball effect, where each newly conquered region gets in on the profits of war by aiding in the conquest of the next, using the prestige and a fraction of the strength of the empire to overturn old balances of power. It is relatively easy to keep control of outlying areas when they are willing springboards for further expansion. But when external conquest stalls, armies concentrated on the periphery have the means and often find motive to turn against the core (sometimes in conjunction with the external enemies whom they had until then been fighting). Tang replaced Sui after failed offensives into Korea; the Carolingian Europe later fragmented after Charlemagne's conquests reached the limits of profitable campaigning; the rebellion of An Lushan's frontier armies fractured China from 755-63. By 732 the overstretched Umayyads in the northwest faced difficult Anatolian terrain skillfully defended by a reformed, though much-reduced, Byzantine army and government.

Constantinople's massive fortifications and still-efficient navy had thrown back a great Islamic offensive in 717-18. Under the pressures of war, the Byzantine preference for civilian pre-eminence had given way to a more efficient system where each province was governed as well as defended by a general officer. The cavalry-heavy “thematic” force structure, which rather like the Tang system relied on local, part-time soldiers who received land grants and provided their own mounts, equipment, and supplies, had been reinvigorated by Leo III, who won Byzantium's first major battlefield victory over the Arabs at Akroinon in 739. Shortly thereafter, in response to a revolt by provincial troops, Constantine V further strengthened the army by the creation of professional heavy cavalry regiments (tagma) that received their equipment (as well as lands and wages) from the state. These soldiers formed a central reserve, around which local thematic troops coalesced for major operations. In the north, the Second Turk Confederacy and Tang China prevented further Islamic conquests. In the far west, Umayyad forces were checked by the rising power of the Franks. To the east, deserts and high mountains blocked access to the Rajput kingdoms of northern India. Predictably, stymied frontier troops turned back against the failing central government. The Persian-based ‘ Abbasids took power in 749/50 (except in Spain, where an Umayyad fugitive established a competing caliphate) and immediately launched the campaign that threw back the Tang in 751, without however allowing a resumption of expansion.

The “Empire of the Franks”

Umayyad forces had also been defeated in Gaul in 721 and 726, then on a larger scale by the Frankish ruler Charles Martel between Poitiers and Tours in 732. In 736, with the aid of the Lombards, Charles nearly eliminated the Islamic toehold north of the Pyrenees.

The Germanic tribes that had moved into Roman Gaul, Spain, and Italy in the fifth century had created numerous small conquest dynasties. As was also common in other areas, their freemen formed a military class supported by native farmers, typically with warriors allocated the revenues of specific estates. The Germans had a long history of interaction with Rome, including service in Roman armies. They co-opted the infrastructure and literate personnel of the Catholic Church to maintain at least rudimentary bureaucracies, with Roman law for Romans and Germanic law for Germans. Common Germans fought mainly in shield-walls with spears, but the elites (who intermarried with surviving Roman aristocrats) were skilled heavy horsemen, wielding swords and lances rather than bows. Although this is a subject of fierce scholarly debate, it seems that by the mid-eighth century, in Gaul as in Anatolia and in China, cavalry had become the principal military arm.^{^[205]}

Free Germans owed military service, with their own kit and supplies. In the eighth century, the Carolingian Franks built a large empire by the usual method: near-annual campaigns to secure the submission of neighbors or to crush rebels by inflicting devastation, conducting sieges, and, if the enemy obliged, by fighting battles. Warriors were rewarded with plunder, estates, and women (notably heiresses); subdued peoples contributed to the next round of conquest and gradually integrated into the polity. As the territory under Frankish rule grew, it became impractical for footmen to march from one frontier to another before the start of a campaign. Both this and tactical factors (including the use of the stirrup) led the Franks increasingly to concentrate resources on mounted soldiers. Kings and magnates granted estates to their men for that purpose, as free gifts or as fiefs. At the same time the Tang were diverting resources to the professional frontier armies and Leo III was building up his “cavalry armies,”^{^[206]} Charles Martel was redistributing extensive Church lands to his warriors, to support them as heavy cavalry. His grandson Charlemagne required poor freemen to pool resources, so that four men might contribute to sending a fifth, fully equipped, on campaign.^{^[207]}

Frankish expansion reached a natural apogee in the mid-ninth century, encompassing lands from the Pyrenees to the Saale, northern Italy, and loose dominion over the Slavic region to the east. External warfare became less profitable; war-leaders struggled to reward their men adequately. Civil wars ensued. The accumulated wealth and weakened condition of the Franks attracted predatory raiders from all directions - Magyars from the eastern steppes, seaborne Vikings and Muslims from the north and south. In the tenth century, local warlords became the focus of military strength and public authority. The spread of castles (strongly fortified, strategically sited lordly residences, which became far more common in Europe than elsewhere) greatly reinforced this trend.

Meanwhile, however, Europe was experiencing a period of remarkable demographic and economic growth, spurred by improved agricultural and mining techniques, which led to growing urbanization, division of labor, and long-distance trade. The European warrior-aristocracy turned the new wealth into stone castles, powerful war stallions, and increasingly heavy mail protection that seems to have been significantly stronger than Byzantine or Islamic armor. The crossbow (long used in China but previously rare in the West) was widely adopted by urban infantry and ships' crews. In a variation on the capitalist mentality of the urban elites developing at this time, the aristocrats expected and got large returns on their military investments by using them for war.

Grand conquests usually begin with internal consolidation, but the rise of the “Empire of the Franks" - the term used by the great thirteenth-century Mosul historian Ibn al-Athir for the spread of western European power from the eleventh century to his own day^{^[208]} - was not preceded by the reconstruction of Charlemagne's empire, or even the re-establishment of genuinely strong royal authority in any principal fragment of it. With little slackening of intra-European warfare, armies led by dukes and counts, rather than kings, carried Frenchmen - especially Normans - to power in the British Isles, southern Italy, Sicily, and even Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople. Small Iberian kingdoms grew rich and powerful first by using devastating slaveraids to extort tribute from neighboring Muslim states, then by occupying them outright. Despite endemic civil wars, German rulers made Bohemia into an imperial fief, and German military-religious orders conquered and Christianized the Baltic area. Even maritime city-states like Pisa and Genoa participated, seizing Corsica and Sardinia, and sacking Fatimid Mahdiya in 1087. The growth of Christian naval power led by Italian fleets was of great importance to the success of Latin expansion. From the late eighth through the tenth century, the Byzantines and the caliphate - both heirs, to some extent, of the late Roman tradition of an organized, professional navy employing specially designed warships and ship-killing tactics - had been fairly evenly matched in the eastern Mediterranean, while North Africans had held the advantage in the seas further west. Over the course of the eleventh century, however, western European sailors came to dominate the Mediterranean, both in commercial shipping and in naval warfare. The prevailing northerly winds and the relative lack of good harbors on the African coast helped the Europeans maintain this advantage until the rise of Ottoman naval power at the end of our period.

As the “Franks” conquered new territories, they typically left much of the native population on the land, as workers - effectively appropriating the income of the old elites. But some of the conquered lost their possessions - treasures, stores of food, livestock, buildings, lands, even ownership of their own bodies - both to intimidate the rest and to fuel the conquest. This helps explain how Western warriors (and also steppe nomads) could conquer regions richer and more populous than their own homelands. As Duke William of Normandy observed when his advisors warned him that King Harold of England, whom he planned to attack, disposed of far greater resources than his own: “there is no doubt that whoever is bold enough to dispose of his enemy's possessions as though they were his own will overcome his enemy.”^{^[209]} But before this dynamic could kick in, the enemy had to suffer military defeats severe enough to allow expropriations to take place, as Harold did at Hastings in 1066. Or at least, the soldiers had to expect that this would occur.

Western Europeans were competent in siege warfare, and by the eleventh century had the upper hand in naval combat, and those facts were necessary for their success, but it was on the battlefield that they proved generally superior to their neighbors. This was clearly seen in the First Crusade (1096-9), when the Westerners consistently defeated Turkish, Arab-Syrian, and Fatimid Egyptian armies alike, often against heavy numerical odds. A principal reason for this was their excellent armor, which Byzantine and Muslim sources describe as making Christian knights (though not their horses) almost invulnerable to arrows.^{^[210]} By the thirteenth century, Western knights with double mail over padded gambesons and heavy shields were probably the best-protected soldiers humanity had ever seen. Also, Western knights were the greatest masters of the couched lance technique. Used with high saddles and stirrups, this enabled them to strike with the massive momentum and kinetic energy of a charging stallion concentrated behind a sharp steel lance-head, rather than limiting the power of the blow to the strength of their arms. Generally speaking, no other cavalry could withstand a charge by these horsemen.

When fighting horse-archers, Western tactics were similar to Chinese methods. Footmen armed with powerful crossbows, and sometimes troops of light cavalry, kept the enemy at a distance, protecting the heavy horse behind them. The heavy cavalry stood ready to charge if the mounted bowmen came close enough to really threaten the infantry. Each arm protected the other. With these tactics, winning a decisive battlefield victory was very difficult unless the enemy made a grave error. Another way to defeat a Western army was to avoid general engagements, pull all food supplies into fortified positions, harass foraging detachments, and force it to retreat from frustration and hunger. This ' Vegetian" style of defense (named after the late Roman author who advocated it) was frequently used by western and eastern Europeans and by the Crusader States and was a mainstay of Byzantine strategy. A variation in which swamps, forests and mountains took the place of castles and walled cities was common in less urbanized regions.

At the end of the twelfth century, the frontiers of Latin Christendom had reached a certain equilibrium. Almost all of the Kingdom of Jerusalem was recovered by Saladin after the battle of Hattin in 1187, and in 1195 the fearsome Almohad caliph, Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub, led his North Africans to hammer the Castilians at Alarcos. On the other hand, in 1204 a Latin army captured Constantinople, and in 1212 the Spanish smashed the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa, then went on to overrun all the remaining Muslim areas of Iberia except Granada, which became a tributary state of Castile. At this point the “Frankish" surge had run its course, not to resume for two centuries.

Indeed, in the mid-thirteenth century Europeans met two strong new adversaries who proved fully a match for them: the Mongols, who won crushing victories in Hungary and Poland, and the Mamluks, who defeated Louis IX's great effort to seize Egypt, beat even the Mongols at ‘Ayn Jalut in 1260 (and again in 1281 and 1303), and finally eliminated the last remnants of the Frankish States in the Levant.

Mamluks and Mongols

The Mamluk sultanate was the culmination of a major development in Islamic warfare that began soon after the ‘Abbasid revolution of 747-50. By the end of the Umayyad period, the armies of the caliphate had become less Arab-dominated, and less infantry-focused. In the late seventh century the Arabs adopted stirrups, and improved them by making them of iron rather than wood. They were considered “among the best trappings of war both for the lancer who wields his spear and the swordsman," since without them a striking cavalryman “had no support."^{^[211]} At Zab in 750, the Syrian army charged on horseback “like a mountain of iron,” and the ‘ Abbasid decision to dismount and fight on foot was a calculated tactical decision, not a default action.^{^[212]} Starting in the 820s the future Caliph al-Mu'tasim, having observed the extraordinary loyalty and prowess of Turkic freedmen in a recent civil war, created an elite cavalry force of some 3-4,000 steppe Turks, recruited by a method that was then revolutionary, though it soon became perfectly normal: he bought them. Turkish boys old enough to have developed steppe toughness, horsemanship, and archery skills could be ensconced in an artificial military community and taught Islam, discipline, combat techniques, and absolute devotion to the patron who had rescued them from the slavemarkets - a loyalty in theory undivided by familial, factional, or sectarian allegiances. The experiment was so successful that later in the ninth century it could be said that Turkish slaves (mamluks) gave the caliph “an invulnerable armour,” and in the tenth century that they not only spearheaded but “constituted” his army.^{^[213]}

The mamluk system was designed to solve a problem common to many states in this period. When rulers are expanding their power-bases, they can reward their followers with rich gifts expropriated from the defeated. When a state is growing slowly or not at all, however, resources for the warriors have to come from the limited surpluses generated by agricultural economies. To sustain a service-reward exchange, a ruler must collect taxes from farmers and merchants and redistribute them to fighters. This is feasible but costly (especially when many soldiers are horsemen), as it requires supporting two elites, civil and military. When economic downturns or military pressures require economizing measures, a natural response is to combine the elites, so that soldiers administer lands and collect their revenues, and landholders owe cavalry service. A system which disperses soldiers to estates outside the main fighting season does slow down mobilization and limit opportunities for unit drill, but it also provides on-the-spot capability to respond to local uprisings, brigandage or raids. Moreover, it uses resources more efficiently, since it is much cheaper to move a horseman to 3,000 kg of grain and hay than to do the reverse. Variations on this system were the norm in the West, under the Sasanians, under some conquest dynasties in China, in Heian Japan, in Silla and Koryo Korea, Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt, and in Byzantium under the theme system, for example.

Hereditary landholding aristocrats, however, view wealth as their birthright, not as a gift from the ruler, and unless campaigning is profitable, military service may become a resented burden. This tendency can be counteracted to a degree by cultural norms defining masculinity and worthiness in terms of prowess and loyalty. But prowess can be demonstrated in civil wars, and in military-aristocratic hierarchies loyalties may focus more on regional magnates than on central courts. The system is more stable when the ruler can freshly endow each new generation of soldiers with his own gifts. The European fief accomplished this at least in theory, as it remained the property of the granting lord, to be recovered and re-granted at each cycle of inheritance. Various empires, including Byzantium, China, and the Delhi Sultanate, have used slave-eunuch generals and administrators to ensure that high offices would regularly revert to the emperor for re-granting. Similarly, mamluks could not pass estates or even mamluk status to their children. Each new ruler could “raise from the dust” a new set of his own warriors - youths dependent on and grateful for his favor, yet possessing martial skills and values that among agro-urban populations normally could be found only among children of aristocrats. (Prestigious standing forces with well-paid commissioned officers, like the Byzantine tagmata, some variations of Chinese Palace Armies or Imperial Guards, or the French compagnies d'ordonnance at the end of our period, worked on related principles, but did not give the ruler equal opportunities to shape the upbringing of the soldiers or to isolate them from other loyalties.)

The mamluk system consistently created excellent soldiers, and was about as good as any in keeping military power under central control. But even mamluks insulated from external loyalties still had self-interest that could conflict with the desires of their masters - or, more often, with those of their masters' heirs. And the very lack of roots in the broader community that contributed to the mamluks' reliability also ensured a generally high level of tension between the army (and its head, the caliph) and regional elites. The collapse of the ‘ Abbasid Caliphate's authority began in 86ι with a palace coup led by Turkish ex-mamluks. Nonetheless, from the ninth century on, practically every Islamic ruler employed mamluk soldiers, even when the rulers were themselves Turks, whether the leaders of conquest dynasties like the Seljuks, or descended from mamluks who seized power for themselves. A good example of the latter is the Ghaznavids, who from 963-1187 employed Turkic slave-soldiers to extend their control over much of Persia, Transoxania, and Afghanistan, and for the first time pushed Muslim rule into northern India.

In Egypt, elite mamluks played a key role in defeating the invasion of King Louis IX of France in 1249, but then staged a coup and executed the new sultan, who was promoting his own slaves over the old guard. Rather than installing a puppet sultan, the mamluk leader Qutuz took direct rule, establishing the Mamluk Sultanate which would retain control of Egypt and Syria until 1517. The core of the army continued to be mamluks purchased from the steppes, converted to Islam, and rigorously trained by eunuch drill-sergeants until manhood. They were then manumitted and allowed to rise in rank by merit. Officers were granted iqta' (rights to the government revenues from designated lands, which were returned to the government at promotion, disgrace, or death; equivalent to Byzantine pro- noia or Ottoman timar) to support themselves and their men.^{^[214]} Mamluks' sons were normal freemen, not mamluks themselves.

Mamluk cavalry were as skilled and disciplined as any soldiers in the world. The outcome in medieval battles, especially cavalry battles, was often determined by the clash not of mass against mass, but of the best troops on each side, who were normally around the army commander. If they were defeated he could be killed. When his banner fell, the army was likely to collapse. This helps explain why elite military households, guards, and mamluk units received so much attention and wealth. The tenth-century Byzantine emperor Nicephoros Phocas, for example, created a special force of a few hundred heavy-armored cataphracts with quadruple the landallocation of normal horsemen, and wrote that the first principle of tactics was to slam the wedge of cataphracts straight at the enemy commander.^{^[215]} At ‘ Ayn Jalut, after ferocious hand-to-hand fighting, the Mongol general Kitbuqa was killed, and his army defeated.

This was possible partly because the great bulk of the Mongol forces that had overrun Persia and Syria and destroyed Baghdad had already withdrawn from the region, partly because the terrain did not support huge numbers of ponies well, and partly because of internal Mongol politics following the death of the Great Khan. The same considerations had spared western Europe from a full-scale assault in 1242. It should not, however, be blithely assumed that a Mongol invasion of the West would have succeeded. The Hungarians fought hard in 1241; after the battle of Mohi the Mongols could not launch the pursuit “to the furthest limits," “to the end,” that Chinggis Khan made a distinctive characteristic of their warfare,^{^[216]} and Hungary, though devastated, did not submit. Further west the Mongols would have faced even tougher enemies, less open terrain, and stronger and more numerous castles. On the other hand, although they did not there face the combination of castles and urban fortifications that made conquest so difficult in the West, the Mongols did take many great walled cities in West Asia and China using co-opted local manpower and expertise. Perhaps they could have done the same in Europe.

Mongols in China

Like the Umayyads, after reaching an apogee of strength around 750, the Tang had faced a great rebellion led by a frontier commander.^{^[217]} Unlike Abu al-‘Abbas, who became the first caliph of the ‘ Abbasid dynasty, the Turkish- Sogdian general An Lushan ultimately failed. In both cases, the following century saw a rise in the power of provincial warlords. In the ninth century, as the Carolingian Empire in Europe fragmented (843) and the mamluk coup of 861 gravely weakened the caliphate, the Huang Chao rebellion (875-84) led to the disintegration of the Tang state by 907. Although the Song dynasty reunited almost all of China by 960, it could make no progress against the nomadic Khitan Liao dynasty ruling the north. Indeed, from 1005 the Song paid an annual tribute to the Liao, and in 1127 lost their capital at Kaifeng and all of northern China to the Jurchen, the successors of the Khitans. Nonetheless, Song advantages in logistics and in siege and riverine warfare (deriving in some small part from use of gunpowder weapons as early as 1132) kept most of China under Chinese rule.^{^[218]}

Prior to their invasions of Persia and eastern Europe, the Mongols, temporarily allied with the Song, defeated and absorbed their neighbors the Jurchen (1211-34), using a combination of devastating raids, cooption of Jurchen subjects, and eventually siege warfare. The Mongols, the Song, and the Jurchen had been in a three-way military balance, but South China was at a decisive disadvantage against Mongols controlling North China's resources. When the assault on the Song began in 1256, the lands formerly under Jurchen control contributed food, weapons, logistical administrators, riverine forces, and huge numbers of troops (especially infantry). The Mongols also brought in Arab-Persian siege specialists, unequalled in undermining walls and construction of giant stone-throwing trebuchets, when Chinese engineers proved unable to subdue the strongest Song fortifications.

By the time the Mongols completed the conquest of China in 1279, their great empire had split into four independent states, and though he claimed superiority over them all, Qubilai Khan focused his attention on China, which he was the first non-Han emperor to rule completely. The Song, originators of the proverb that good iron is not used to make nails, nor good men to make soldiers, had studiously avoided fostering a martial culture and structured their military to ensure civilian control, even at the cost of efficacy.^{^[219]} The new Yuan dynasty retained the services of the traditional Chinese bureaucracy, but imposed a superstructure of Mongol militarypolitical organization, with the warriors firmly in charge. Universal service by Mongol men continued, supported by slave labor and heavy taxation. Mongol princes received giant appanages; soldiers (and favored subjects such as cavalrymen from other steppe peoples) got small estates. North Chinese soldiers were given farms; South Chinese troops were paid from tax revenues. Vast resources went into projects like the extension of the Grand Canal to Beijing, which though extraordinarily beneficial economically, were principally intended to support military logistical requirements.

Warfare on the borders and against rebels in China, Mongolia, and Central Asia was frequent. A series of invasions of Vietnam from 1257-88 met serious military setbacks in the face of guerilla warfare and Vegetian defense, but did end with both the Viet and Champa states as Yuan tributaries. Major seaborne invasions were launched (unsuccessfully) against Java in 1293 and Japan in 1274 and 1281 (see Figure 6.2). In Java the Mongols tried the usual technique of allying with one local power against another, but in this case the beneficiary of their aid, after formally submitting to Yuan overlordship, attacked the Mongol encampment by surprise and forced the fleet to return to China. Japan's successful defense owed a great deal to luck, in the form of “divine wind” storms that wrecked the Mongol fleets both times. It also

Figure 6.2 Mongols and Japanese fight, in a scene from the Moko Shurai Ekotoba, a Japanese handscroll made between 1275 and 1293. Pictures From History / Bridgeman Images

reflected the effectiveness of bushi (aristocratic warriors), who had become the dominant force in Japanese warfare in the late eighth century, with the rise of tax-exempt noble domains, privatization of government, and the consequent decline of a more centralized fUbing-style military. Their heavy armor, mounted archery skills, and trained swordsmanship put them on a par with Mongol troops. After the Mongol defeat, with neither an external threat to impose unity nor the possibility of external conquests to fund consolidation, territorial magnates with their wooden castles and little private armies became increasingly independent, creating a military environment similar to that of High Medieval Europe.

The Ming and the Indian Ocean

Remarkable achievement though it was, the military structure of Yuan China was as artificial as the new steppe lands created in North China to support Mongol ponies and the man-made river of the Great Canal that sustained the newly built capital at Beijing. Without the profits of continued conquest, the costs of the huge military infrastructure (with over a million men under arms) had to be borne by the native population. Civil wars made the Yuan government weaker, with power shifting to regional warlords as in contemporary Japan or in the late ‘ Abbasid Caliphate, and despite resisting siniciza- tion Mongol troops lost their hard edge over time. Zhu Yuanzhang, the Han warlord who founded the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), had to reconquer China

step by step, fighting both Yuan forces and competing rebels, and his victories put great resources of land under his control. He used them to reward his generals, to create a new native martial nobility, and to distribute military lands to self-supporting farmer-soldiers along fubing lines, but not concentrated in frontier areas. To prevent the generals from becoming threats to his authority, the new emperor ensured that field armies were drawn from the regional garrisons, but led by officers from different areas. The political advantages of this system outweighed costs in cohesion and military efficacy. Although Zhu Yuanzhang's early attitudes reflected his later regnal title (“Immensely Martial”), under later Ming emperors civilian precedence over the military was restored nearly to Song levels.

Rather than using military force for real conquests, the late Ming made heavy use of an old Chinese idea: encouraging neighbors to make largely nominal submissions and to pay “tribute” by returning gifts of much greater value than the tribute received. This practice reached its high point with the great “Treasure Fleets” of the eunuch admiral Zheng He, which between 1405 and 1433 sailed as far as East Africa. “When we arrived at the foreign countries,” Zheng He's record states, “barbarian kings who resisted [submission] and were not respectful we captured alive, and [pirates]... we eliminated.” In most places in Southeast Asia force was not needed, as local rulers, awed by the strength of the fleets' size (around 300 ships, some of them gigantic, and 27,000 sailors and marines) and pleased by Chinese gifts, allowed the erection of tablets representing Ming suzerainty.^{^[220]} Wars in this region were typically fought to control and tax seaborne trade, which might be combined with the “delight in looting... by the light of destructive fires” proclaimed by Chola rulers.^{^[221]} Diplomatic treatment of the Ming fleet avoided risk of the latter and cost nothing in terms of the former.

The more powerful states the fleet encountered further west - notably the Vijayangaran empire in southern India and the Mamluk Sultanate - were presumably not asked for submission. The Vijayangaran Empire, which controlled southern India, formed in the mid-fourteenth century when the Delhi sultanate, which had briefly ruled most of the area, began to break apart. The Delhi sultanate had been founded in 1206, after a decisive victory at Tarain (1192) led to the conquest of northern India by Muslim Ghurids. The Hindu Rajput kingdoms employed elephants, large numbers of low- quality infantry, and relatively small forces of warrior-caste cavalry, limited by the unsuitability of the area for large-scale horse-breeding. Although their forces won some battles, ultimately they proved unable to cope with armies composed mainly of mamluk cavalry, provided with plenty of horses and weapons of superior quality, and supported by siege engineers employing traction trebuchets. In southern India, however, the heat and the terrain made campaigning difficult for large mounted forces, and the Vijayanagar remained strong until 1565.

Africa, the Atlantic, and the slave trade

Zheng He received tribute even from Mogadishu in East Africa. Muslim Arab-Berber conquerors and settlers had in the ninth and tenth centuries come to dominate the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, relying mainly on cavalry, against which local rulers, lacking either horsemen of their own or disciplined, armored infantry, had no effective response. Further south, climate and forests made horses almost useless, but in the border zone cavalry aristocracies engaged in frequent dry-season slave-raids, the profits of which funded their acquisition of horses and armor imported across the Sahara.^{^[222]}

The significance of slave acquisition in fueling the warfare of this period all across the world was very great, and has not been adequately appreciated. Although prices fluctuated greatly, falling dramatically when successful military campaigns flooded the markets with captives, soldiers could often get two months' wages for a typical slave, and much more for a beautiful girl. The sale of the 1,254 inhabitants of the Tunisian island Kerkennah in 1286 provided enough gold to fund a large fleet's operation for two months.^{^[223]} ^{^[224]} Contemporary sources emphasize the “joy” of the Portuguese at the discovery (in 1441) that the coast of west central Africa provided abundant opportunities for brutal and highly profitable slave-raids against near-defenseless villagers.⁴° Subsequently the level of slave-raiding warfare in the area rose dramatically, as coastal rulers seized their neighbors to trade to the Portuguese. The Ottomans, similarly, began their rise with constant slaveraiding in Anatolia, and nearly collapsed when Sultan Bayezid was beaten in 1402 by the Mongol-Turkic conqueror Timur, whose own empire building was partly funded by the profits of mass enslavements of tens of thousands of victims.

Europe's military revolutions

The Ottomans were Turks, but at the turn of the fifteenth century their capital (Adrianople/Edirne) and a large portion of their dominion was European, and their territorial heartland was formerly Byzantine Anatolia. Like most Muslim states after 900, the Ottomans employed elite slavesoldiers, but the main strength of their cavalry - the principal arm of their forces - came from free holders of timar (similar to pronoia and iqta'). These armored troopers were equipped and fought much like mamluks, using exceptionally strong composite bows with over 100-pound draw-weights.^{^[225]} The timariots were complemented by smaller standing forces of highly trained slave-soldiers (kapikulu) - including the famous standing regiments of the “Janissary” infantry, who in battle anchored the center while the cavalry enveloped the enemy flanks. Ottoman forces also included strong artillery trains and numerous irregular frontier-raiders and low-quality conscript footmen.

By the end of our period, the Ottomans possessed one of the most effective military organizations the world had ever seen. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and most of the Balkans. Between 1514 and 1529, they inflicted crushing defeats on Safavid, Mamluk, and Bohemian-Hungarian armies, conquered the Mamluk sultanate and much of Hungary, and advanced to besiege Vienna. In both West and East, the tactical flexibility, impressive logistical organization, and outstanding discipline of the Turkish forces (especially the kapikulu) contributed to success. In the East, the Ottomans' superior infantry and mastery of gunpowder weapons - both muskets and cannon - gave them a key advantage. Chinese armies had made significant military use of gunpowder, in rockets, flame-throwers, and guns, from the twelfth century onward, and the technology was widely used throughout Asia in the fourteenth century. But by the mid-fifteenth century, Europeans (including the Ottomans) had handguns and large siege guns that were strong enough to take full advantage of more powerful “corned” (granulated) gunpowder. These weapons harnessed chemical energy to revolutionize both siege warfare and battlefield tactics.

European bombards were the first weapons capable of rapidly breaching strong fortifications, greatly reducing the advantage of the defense in siege warfare which had shaped so much of the warfare of our period. When “great towns, which once could have held out for a year... now fell in a single month,” the art of war was “turned upside-down.”^{^[226]} In the fourteenth century, partly because Europe was the most heavily fortified region on earth, battle-avoiding Vegetian strategy had been the norm for states on the defensive. Since nearly all troops were by this time paid daily wages, offensive warfare had become very expensive. Sieges required large forces for long periods, and in wars between Christians it was not permitted to recoup the costs by enslaving defeated populations. In the face of a determined and well-conducted defense, invasions often collapsed for lack of money and lack of progress. Small states could resist more powerful neighbors; central governments found it difficult to bring recalcitrant provincial nobles to heel. With the new artillery, the strategic inertia favoring the defense was greatly reduced; to defeat an invader now practically required beating him in open battle. Both conquest and internal consolidation became markedly easier for states with strong artillery trains and armies spearheaded by elite standing forces, like Charles VII's France, the Ottoman Empire, or Ferdinand and Isabella's Spain.

On the battlefield, however, the advantage had already in the fourteenth century shifted from cavalry (which fights only by attacking) to tightly arrayed infantry, and hence from offense to defense. Western plate armor of the late fourteenth century was already the most completely protective ever developed, and to compete with it European infantry deployed the most powerful infantry missile weapons yet developed, steel-bowed crossbows and English longbows. In the early fifteenth century Milanese smiths developed high-carbon quenched steel armor with double the hardness of earlier models, so tough that it was extremely difficult to penetrate with muscle-powered weapons.

Figure 6.3 The Battle of Avray in 1364, Master of Mary of Burgundy (fl. 1469-83). This painting, made in 1477, shows weapons of its time, not the time of the battle. Collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, Norfolk / Bridgeman Images)

This was a principal reason for the spread of handguns, which were slow-firing and inaccurate, but by 1400 could launch a ball with ten times the kinetic energy of the strongest longbows' arrows. When protected from charging cavalry by pikemen, entrenchments, or lines of chained war-wagons, handgunners proved increasingly valuable on the battlefield, as well as in sieges (see Figure 6.3). In the fifteenth century, Czech Hussites and Ottoman Janissaries were among the first to show how effective hand-held firearms could be.^{^[227]} (Handguns had long been used in China, but they were weaker and more closely equivalent to crossbows.)

At the end of our period European states had developed fortresses, armor, and artillery that were qualitatively superior to any the world had seen before, and infantry missile weapons more powerful than any others. Their ships were also the best ever built (despite being very much smaller than the Chinese “treasure ships”), and had carried them not only to sub-Saharan Africa, but also to the New World, previously entirely isolated from the military developments of Afro-Eurasia. Spanish explorers encountered peoples whose armaments were on the opposite end of the spectrum from their own: practically the first thing Columbus recorded about the natives of the Caribbean is that they had no armor or metal weapons. The Aztecs, Inca, and Maya did make limited use of bronze, but most Native American military technology was made of stone, bone, leather, and wood. There were of course still wars, which as in Afro-Eurasia were fought largely for political-territorial dominion, acquisition of slaves, and revenge. American weapons were well-suited to disabling and capturing enemy warriors who could be enslaved, adopted, or subjected to elaborate rituals of revenge-torture. Until the fourteenth century, Europeans fighting Europeans had likewise often sought to beat down and capture enemy men-at-arms (to gain the profits of ransom rather than slaves or torture-victims) but crossbows, longbows, pikes, and especially guns were ill-suited for that purpose. By the time they reached the Americas, Europeans generally had little interest in taking captives until the fighting was finished and the enemy routed. Their more “bloody and devouring” style of war,^{^[228]} their horses and guns, and (most importantly) steel armor and weapons, gave Europeans huge military advantages over Native Americans, a fact Columbus immediately recognized. He promptly concluded that the crews of his three little ships would have sufficed to conquer an area with double the population of Portugal.^{^[229]} In the sixteenth century the Spanish would exploit their one-sided military advantages to extract massive quantities of wealth from the Americas, then pour much of that wealth into the extremely capital-intensive mode of warfare characteristic of late medieval Europe. These resources, in combination with the highly effective military technology and techniques they had already developed by 1500 and a few new innovations, such as trace italienne fortresses, would in subsequent centuries solidify and expand the qualitative military edge Europeans had gained even over other advanced Eurasian civilizations.

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