Also, 'received opinion' needs to be taken out the back and beaten with the stick of thinking. Citing someone as 'great' when they are patently wrong repeatedly is stupid. It's particularly bad when they were taken to task for their mistakes fifty years before you started to gush about how wonderful they are.
But that's not even close to the worst part of all this. Thanks to historians like Gibbon (may he rot), writing centuries ago, the idea of the 'Dark Ages' and 'primitive' Medieval period has pervaded medieval histories. No matter how many times these antiquated ideas get quashed, they rise up again from the depths. It doesn't matter that they were working based on assumptions based on their own environments, oh no. Never mind that some of them actually had agendas. ARGH.
Thanks to a number of less blinkered modern historians, these perceptions, at least at a scholarly level, do seem to be changing. Unfortunately, it still takes an unbelievable amount of effort to topple ideas that just don't correspond with our evidence and in some areas it's particularly bad. 'History from below' and similar methodologies (not the ideal term but I'm trying to get my thoughts out quickly) have helped to show that a lot of our basic assumptions (based on the works of ye olde scholars) are inaccurate or down-right wrong.
This may be because these new ways of dealing with the past are predominantly pursued by a newer generation whose opinons are less set in stone - or for some other reason, I don't know. I can't do everything around here! But the interest in 'history from below', which I see as vital to understanding history, has had a couple of unfortunate side effects. 'Boy history', as Mrs Reynald de Chattilon is fond of calling it (that is, military and political history), has been much slower to slough off the older arguments. And in nowhere is this more clear than in medieval military history.
I might be unusual in that I'm interested in both these areas, but even if that is so, it doesn't explain the things I keep reading, time and again, which are apparently based on nothing. Delbrück, the Clausewitz-ian (my term, clearly) historian, decided that medieval warfare was essentially individualist, primitive and stupid. His entire writing on the topic displays poor use of sources and a number of conclusions based on faulty assumptions. Verbruggen cut Delbrück to pieces in his work, but it's been almost ignored by modern historians. I have my own conspiracy theories about this which relate to another 'great' historian of medieval warfare, Smail. He published shortly after Verbruggen and somehow managed to completely eclipse the Belgian, who, in an edited and expanded edition of his original work, showed a number of holes in Smail's work. Almost no-one acknowledges Verbruggen, which is strange, because he makes his arguments much more incisively than Smail, particularly in his criticism of Delbrück; Verbruggen is especially sharp on Delbrück's use of sources and suggests that the German lacked familiarity with them, being over-reliant on his students.
I see Verbruggen as having been hard-done-by, but that isn't the point I'm laboriously working towards. It's more of a quick aside...
Delbrück considered that there was no idea of combined arms in the Medieval period and consequently concluded that, in essence, medieval soldiers and leaders had no genuine conception of military theory. He asserted that the pedites of the period could not be labelled as infantry because there was insufficient distinction in their roles and that until the ascension of the Swiss armies they lacked the necessary discipline.
Smail's 'fighting march', an idea that captured the imagination of a number of later historians, would suggest that this analysis is flawed at the least, but Smail declines to overtly criticise Delbrück, to my continuing frustration. His work could and should have been the one which showed Delbrück's view as lacking in understanding but he never really followed through sufficiently. Verbruggen made the important point that Smail studied individual battles in more depth than earlier writers - a laudable effort - but simply did not go far enough.
And while I like Verbruggen, his work has it's own problems. Despite his insistence on the importance of primary sources he misses a number of important ones and under-uses others, particularly when he deals with the Crusades and the Holy Land.
Making all of this so irritating is the point that all these scholars did excellent work - they get used regularly thanks in no small part to the quality of their analysis and research. But their petty biases and ideas, drawing so often more on their own times than the period they discussed, have been passed along at the same time. As they have shown in their consecutive criticisms of each other, it is more than possible to extract good information and leave behind the less useful aspects, exactly as one does with so many medieval sources; I cannot help but wonder why doing so with their work has proved to be so rare.
I am increasingly convinced that what we have in Medieval warfare is not some slide backward into simplistic, idiotic ideas of horde tactics, but a more complex system that reflected a genuine understanding of the manner in which war is carried out. Medieval leaders faced entirely different circumstances from ancient and modern leaders, socially, politically, economically, technologically...keep adding the '-ally' suffix ad nauseam. The sources just don't match the argument for primitivism. We see, for example, cases of combined arms being used effectively and even causal relations between the failure of different branches of armies to work together and their defeat. We see leaders who are consistently successful on the battlefield, regularly enough to wonder if there might be more to this than just having more men.
I don't really have more of a conclusion than that yet, which is unfortunate because I'm writing an essay on all this at the moment and I'd like to have a core idea that isn't "You're all wroooooooooong..." because while I think it's sort of true, finding a citation could be hard.
Quick! Somebody publish something! Go go gadget citations!
C'mon guys, people are staring...
(In a strange reversal, this started on my LiveJournal and has been transplanted here...)
8 comments:
Sharply observed! Sent here by the link at The Naked Philologist, I'd find myself in broad agreement, although without the advantage of having read Delbrück or Verbruggen. The only place where I have gone into military history in any depth is over the First Crusade, and there people cite Smail with cautious reverence, because I think while everyone knew he was a Great Historian, his picture of the Crusade doesn't sit easily with their own sense of the sources. There we also have John France, who is perhaps more imaginative than Smail, which gives the warriors he studies more credit but sometimes too much.
Have you come across or had time to include Guy Halsall's recent-ish book on early medieval warfare, and if so did it strike you as suffering from the same problems?
I've got France's 'Victory in the East' too but I ran out of rant rage before I got to it. France is one of the historians challenging the traditional views but it's all too slow for my liking and even he isn't really happy to challenge Smail. I'm trying to decide whether or not to look at him for this essay, because technically we're not looking at the First Crusade, but his book is interesting.
In terms of Halsall, I don't have anything of his around at the moment but I believe I've looked at it before - possibly some articles too. I'll get around to reading it and some other more contemporary work I need to look at again, then I'll hopefully post a 'second half' of this, dealing with them. There are also earlier historians I haven't touched, like Lot, because I need translations...
Thanks for suggesting Halsall...I think I'll go have a look for it this week because it's a potential honours thesis sort of topic so reading up on it seems like a good idea.
Guy's book only goes up to 900, so its source base is pretty limited, but there at least this virtue for all of Guy's work: he is not afraid to say when he thinks someone was wrong...
Ah I see. Well it would still be worth looking at - the argument that medieval warfare lacked sophistication and understanding of tactics in particular sort of relies on it all disappearing post-Rome; with that in mind, something dealing with the early period would be good.
On a side note, what sort of area does he look at? France/Germany does tend to get the main focus thanks to Charlemagne and Sons...
Don't forget the possibilities offered by the Byzantines, who did have access to what remained of Hellenistic military writing, and could have passed things along at varying stages to the Ottos, to Outremer, etc.
The Byzantine connection does get made - generally in terms of negative comparison with the West. Anna Komnena records her father giving military advice to the leaders of the First Crusade, for example. The Byzantine military, at least from Basil II through to the earlier Komnenoi emperors, is generally seen as a professional, drilled standing army. Byzantine generals used those earlier works but nonetheless had a very heavy cavalry emphasis compared to even late Roman manuals.
Whether or not this was passed on, and to what degree, is difficult to ascertain. Most Western sources are strongly anti-Byzantine and the reverse is also true. I think there would have had to be mutual learning, but as I say, there's not much evidence.
Matthew Bennett's article The Crusaders' 'Fighting March' Revisited does try to make the link, spending a good deal of time discussing comparable Byzantine methods and the possibility of the Latins learning from the Byzantines. His conclusion, though, basically acknowledges that there's not much evidence as to whether the similar tactics represent sharing of knowledge or common sense approaches to the same problem (in this case, predominantly Turkish horse archers).
If I had to guess, I'd suspect that there probably wasn't altogether much transferred in 'manual' form or any other written medium but instead that fighting with and against the Byzantines (the Normans are particularly notable for this) probably led to some of their ideas being adopted. I also wonder whether the standard down-playing of Vegetius in Western military thinking is altogether accurate, because if Latin leaders were already familiar with the basis of Byzantine military ideas, learning from experience would seem even more likely.
I haven't actually read Guy's book, which is why I was asking for impressions :-) But I believe it covers mainly Franks and Anglo-Saxons. You can probably find reviews as easily as can I. But it comes from a long interest—his very first publications were in wargaming journals (this is not widely known) so he's quite ready to entertain complex fighting set-ups I imagine.
I've got some time until my last essay this semester is due, so I'm going to see if I can grab his book and read it. In the meantime I may have a browse through those articles...I'll be interested to see how he deals with it because tactical wargaming has the downside - in terms of synthesizing battle - of the sense of dispassionate command and absolute control. Hmmm must find time to read the articles...and the book.
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